Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£40 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 76261, London SW17 iGW [Post Office Registered.]  www.epsr.org.uk   Contact@epsr.org.uk
No 1666 December 12th  2025                                                                       40p 

“Your Party” launch reflects growing dismay at imperialist crisis war depravity and deepening Labour reaction. But YP not yet even clearly centrist let alone offering true revolutionary perspectives workers need. Trot swamp already an obstacle with fatuous identity politics and “joint leadership” idiocy, threatening coherence in a chaos of conflicting opinions, and all wrong anyway, hostile to firm theoretical lead and propping up delusions in bourgeois election fraud. Workers will not respond if anti-communist parasitism prevails. US imperialism meanwhile ploughs on to more open racist war bullying, desperate to force the whole world pay tribute to solve its Catastrophic bankruptcy. US-backed Zionist genocide continues and Venezuela lined up. Ukraine defeat splits Europe from US. Leninism needed urgently   

The “nationalise-everything, end-capitalism” call from Zarah Sultana usefully suggests the newly founded “Your Party” as potentially an expected centrist movement.
But that depends on multiple developments, not least in winning the leadership, over the hopeless compromising and pieties of Corbynist “left” parliamentarianism and its dire revisionist and opportunist allies. 
And without serious revolutionary perspectives her shallow grandstanding speech is just demagoguery anyway. 
That is not overcome by a couple of past allusions to Lenin’s famous aphorism that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolution”, true though that is.
Unelaborated, such quotation serves only for the halfway-house posing of centrism.
Centrism trumpets alleged revolutionism, to fill the growing demand in the working class, but in words only, never going any further than “left pressure” and always falling far short of the real picture of a system in historic and cataclysmic collapse, needing complete class war overturn and the establishment of workers states, eventually on a world scale.
Nor is it enough to call for a “transformation of society” if not a word spells out what that really means and how it will be achieved in the teeth of brutal capitalist dictatorship, resistance and counter-revolutionary violence (as increasingly visible with Trumpite fascism eg).
Declaring that “workers can run things better than billionaires” is meaningless if the need to end the whole degenerate class rule system of capitalism is not spelt out – meaning the need to end the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the reality of all hoodwinking bourgeois “democracy” and “freedom”.
That is not conveyed even by “nationalising everything” which still leaves capitalist profit aims in place. And “better than” still implies run along similar lines.
The bosses are hardly going to just sit back and let it happen, least of all by voting, as endlessly demonstrated from Salvador Allende in Chile to Morsi in Egypt.
Class war is needed.
Only by replacing the ruling class’s system with the dictatorship of the proletariat, taking all major enterprises, finance, farms, mines and industry into its common ownership without compensation, can there be the development of planned socialist production and science and with it the steady progress of human society into a world wide community of self-disciplined rationality. 
That dictatorship for the majority, serving the interests of ordinary people, leading, educating and drawing them more and more into running society is the only path to true democracy (which itself will only be required until the whole of humanity has reached communism).
And that requires far more than shallow platitudes about workers’ spontaneous capabilities.
Proletarian fighting spirit and determination is undoubted and unstoppable in the long run, and driven further by the crisis, but it needs the constantly developing leadership that only the deepest grasp of  historical, political and economic science can provide, studying and drawing on the vast literature of Marxist-Leninism and its daily development and improvement (as the EPSR has striven to do) and testing it in practice.  
Without that revolutionary theory the working class is forever hamstrung, and vulnerable to misleadership, diversion and fragmentation, the ruling class’s greatest weapons, which is why it devotes so many resources to pumping out its brainwashing “democracy” anti-communist lies morning, noon and night.
Sultana’s collaboration with the swarm of Trotskyist parasites who filled the Liverpool party inauguration does nothing to lift workers’ understanding to these urgently needed levels as the imperialist system plunges into the greatest economic, political and ecological meltdown ever, existentially threatening mankind.
Just the opposite. Any credence given to these shallow fake-“revolutionaries” and their poisonous hostility to the entire history of real communist struggle and its Soviet and other workers state achievements, is entirely negative.
Their philistinism and subjective idealist playacting is a total joke, keeping well away from all the really serious issues facing humanity as much as possible and getting them completely wrong whenever they veer closer.
Months of academic disputes around the Your Party structures, and procedures – (attempting to dictate them even before the launch of what is someone else’s party!) – have demonstrated the point with reams of argument about party setups and “democratic rights” for these poseurs, mainly looking to secure places for themselves, with an opportunist eye on future political careers.
But not a serious mention has been made of the gigantic Catastrophe of the imperialist system itself and the continuing plunge into World War Three, underway since the blitz on Serbia in 1999 and especially the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, and escalating ever since (despite setbacks and failures for imperialism), which is driving this movement and must be central to its development if it is to serve workers’ interests at all.  
It might be argued that Sultana has simply rowed in with the posturing sectarian “left” for the moment out of necessity because of the total failure of the Corbynite wing of the new party to offer any coherent leadership at all, other than the limpest of social-pacifist platitudes and a retread of the already failed “left Labour” reformism which was reluctantly pushed upwards ten years ago from underneath by growing public dismay and hostility to slump-imposed austerity, and cynical Blairite and Tory warmongering (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc).
The longtime Labourite reformist Jeremy Corbyn’s predictable capitulation then to rightwing pressures, including overt threats of military coups by gold-braided generals on TV, a non-stop rubbishing campaign by the establishment media (and the intelligence services which direct their output) over questions like support for the Irish nationalist movement, and especially the sick and sinister reactionary campaign of nonsensically alleged “left anti-semitic racism” coordinated by the opportunist Labourite wing with the reactionary Jewish/Zionist freemasonry (intertwined with the ruling class finance capitalist establishment), has not been overcome. 
Nor would it be; such “radical” figures have only ever played the role of “left” cover, keeping workers tied to the whole lying pretence of “socialist democratic change eventually.” 
Time-wasting years of reluctance and hesitation to realise (in the implementation sense) the need for a working class party to be launched, is part of that pattern as the  treachery and bankruptcy of Labour itself has become more and more glaring (always the real character of this bourgeois party but ever more obvious, and despised by the working class which began turning away from it after the treacheries of the post-WW2 Attlee government (supporting imperialist war and anti-communist repression worldwide) and especially as Blairism took hold).
Corbyn’s prevarication lasted so long in fact it looks more like deliberate stalling than progressive initiative.
It certainly baulks at the inevitable upsurge in political questioning and challenging debate that this move obviously unleashes, there beneath the surface anyway because of the crisis collapse of capitalism but given space and articulation potentially.
Sultana’s “jumping the gun” to push the process at least kick-started things but without delivering much more in the way of real clarity – and it is still trapped by all the usual bureaucratic manoeuvrings and stifling pretences that have straitjacketed the labour movement throughout its history.
And the feebleness of Corbyn’s nostrums are not countered by her acquiescence in the Trotskyist nonsense of “collective leadership”.
That is disastrous; such “joint decision making” and the whole panoply of “factional rights”, “dual memberships” and “autonomous branches” which the Trots have filled their pages of “demands” with for weeks on end can only lead to a complete cacophony of competing, differing opinions and often contradictory lines which are a recipe for utter confusion in the working class.
Branch debates and motions are fine, and even to be encouraged as the mechanism for party polemics, discussion and education; permanent contradictory positions to the central party, less so. 
Far from achieving “unity” these mechanisms are a sure-fire guarantee of splits and division because of the unresolved and unsorted issues that real-life and the real world class struggle raise.
And the point has been made repeatedly over decades of failed parties and alliances attempting to paper over differences or “just get on with the 80% that we at least agree on.” But as said before:

Until international agreement is reached about all the ‘mistakes’, ‘betrayals’, ‘retreats’ & ‘wrong turnings’, etc’, which have subsequently still left monopoly imperialist warmongering crisis the controlling power on Earth, allied to new experience of further successful revolutionary practice, - then this now hopelessly reactionary and out-of-date capitalist system will continue its course of civilisation’s degeneration and conflict ruin unchallenged.
But every ‘left’ grouping, large and small, continues insisting on maintaining its sectarian corner.
The hallmark of this stupidity was the Socialist Alliance launch of an electoral party (via which workers could ‘achieve socialism’) that from the start deliberately RULED OUT all polemical conflict “on contentious matters about which there’s no historical agreement”.
Thus the ONLY process which led from the original individual philosophical efforts of Marx and Engels to the colossal Leninist world communist movement following the Bolshevik Revolution, – the relentless process of polemical clarification of all historical developments, – is abandoned before it even begins.
As [..]firmly explained from the very start, the Alliance was being built on the silliest anti-Marxist sand and was doomed before it had begun as far as even the remotest “achieving of socialism” was concerned (EPSR No1220 17-02-04).

The same with Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party which after initial encouragement of different positions being presented and argued for, finally declared the polemical debate to sort issues out to a commonly agreed conclusion to be unnecessary “internecine warfare”, reverting to syndicalist bureaucratic suppression.
Tellingly those valuable early SLP experiences, which could inform much of the current developments (see EPSR Books Party Building Part 2 and 3), are slipped over by most of the fake-“left”, ignored completely in their long turgid organisational debates. 
The slightly more fly Spartacists have at least made the correct point that obsessive concentration on forms of organisation is the wrong approach and that the issue for the YP is to work out its political line. 
Unfortunately, the line the Sparts want is as anti-communist as they come, still advocating Trot  “political revolution” against existing workers states like Cuba and China (see next story). 
Stung perhaps by a Spart letter in its eclectic letters column, the Weekly Worker, tries to belittle the point, ostentatiously not naming the EPSR as its tries to slip past the question in a single paragraph reference in another dense two page academic screed just before the Liverpool YP launch: 

The same happened on a vastly smaller scale with Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party in the late 1990s. CPGB comrades were targeted from day one by the Fourth International Supporters Caucus, which acted as Scargill’s enforcers. While communists were the first to be purged they were far from being the last. Again there were those who joined in the witch-hunting, or turned a blind eye, in the name of putting politics first and not getting diverted by organisational questions (as if organisational questions are not political).

Sneering at the need for “putting politics first” must be the ultimate in philistinism (and hardly “Leninist” as these mountebanks used to call themselves when they were piggy backing on the original CPGB before they appropriated the Eurocommunists’ abandoned name – Lenin always insisting on clarifying differences as the priority and splitting with wrong trends) and the need is obviously evaded because they do not want the exposure of their anti-communist subjective idealism that the EPSR pursued them with in the SLP. 
And declaring organisation to be “political” is pure petulance; possibly it is but only as one small aspect and very much secondary, flowing almost automatically from correct understanding, or to cite Lenin, without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary practice (including organisation).
If there is a need for polemical debate and argument fought out to an agreed position as the basis for party building, the organisational necessities to achieve that will become obvious such as the regularly issued paper that Lenin argued for in What is to be done?. 
Sultana meanwhile has not remotely come close to explaining her own previous careerist path and the nature of Labourism itself as a central part of imperialist rule and control – not simply “gone wrong because of Starmer reaction”, grotesque though that is, but utterly opportunist and class-collaboratingly part of the bourgeois system from its very foundation. 
It was “supported” only in the very early 1920s days by communists because of workers’ illusions at that time that its untested promises  might go somewhere.
Therefore it needed exposure by seeing it operate in power – so it was supported, in other words, only as a “rope supports a hanging man” in Lenin’s words and certainly not by any merging or joining.
But the world imperialist crisis is now so deep that Sultana’s necessary “left” tone has already exposed some of the grosser fake-“left”s such as the arch opportunist parliamentarian George Galloway and “celebrity Trotskyist” Tariq Ali who have both come out to denounce her, as the just-as-dire Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party reports:

Guardian columnist Owen Jones, a vapid pseudo-left commentator regarded fondly in upper-middle-class circles, was visibly agitated by her proposals. He interviewed Sultana on Saturday, “You were asked yesterday about policies for the country, and you said, ‘nationalise the entire economy’. So, I mean, what does that look like?”
Sultana replied, “That looks like a socialist transformation of the country where we nationalise utilities, we nationalise energy, we nationalise transport, we nationalise communications, including the internet. But we also have to broaden our horizons—” Jones interrupted, countering, “But not the entire economy.”
Sultana continued, “We have to have a socialist economy. That includes workers running their workplace through cooperatives.”
Asked if that meant democratic ownership, she replied, “It means the whole economy run by workers, not the billionaires and the corporations that run it today.”
Jones could barely conceal his hostility[..]
The next morning, Jones posted a follow-up interview with Corbyn, who ridiculed Sultana’s statements. Jones tweeted, “It’s fair to say that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t agree with a policy of nationalising the entire economy.”
[..]Corbyn said “I would want to see public ownership of major industries like energy, and public services like mail, rail and water. And I would want to see the sort of stuff that John McDonnell and I worked on before the 2017 and 19 elections, on the Investment Bank.” He concluded, “We’ve got to be clear, the priority is poverty and inequality in this country”—as if these were not the direct outcome of private ownership of wealth by the capitalist oligarchy!
[..]Despite a toothless call for renationalisation of rail, water and energy (after their private contracts expire, naturally!) Corbyn’s manifestos pledged to “make Britain a better place to do business”, invoked immigration quotas, and committed to NATO spending targets and retention of the Trident nuclear weapons programme.
Accompanied by a pre-election “tea and biscuits charm offensive” among City of London executives, Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell had boasted during the 2017 election campaign, “They are coming to us for reassurance against a government that is falling apart. So, Jeremy Corbyn and I are the stabilisers of capitalism.”
[..]On Monday night, ageing political bankrupt Tariq Ali joined the attack on Sultana. Responding to her call for public ownership against the billionaires, he tweeted:

 Well-meaning but pure rhetoric. Both [Tony] Benn and [Ken] Livingstone had some very good socialist economist [sic] working for them who came up with credible plans. The entirely nationalised economies in the former Soviet Union and China (Cuba too) simply did not work[..]. WE had huge debates on this within the global left. Zarah has to get some help on this one. What she’s saying will be laughed at and understandably. Given the experiences of the 20th century we know this type of maximalism destroys economies. It should be debated in open and comradely fashion. I groaned when I first heard her saying this.

The “huge debates” in “the global left” Ali mentions were led by Pabloite and state-capitalist parties and pseudo-left academics who supported the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. Ali dedicated his 1988 book Revolution from Above to Boris Yeltsin, claiming that, “Gorbachev represents a progressive, reformist current within the Soviet elite. ”
[..]Gorbachev’s Perestroika, culminating in the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, eradicated the remaining social gains of the 1917 October Revolution. Yeltsin’s appointee as Finance Minister, Yegor Gaidar, oversaw pro-market “shock therapy”, privatising state assets, abolishing price controls, and collapsing working-class living standards, giving rise to a regime of capitalist oligarchs.
According to Ali, the main lesson of the 20th century is that “maximalism” (i.e., the overthrow of private ownership of the means of production) destroys economies. He is a garden-variety anti-communist. For Marxists, the real lesson of the 20th century is that imperialism, based on the capitalist nation-state system, plunged mankind into fascism and two world wars, killing an estimated 85 million people, and must be overthrown and replaced by socialism.
[..]On Tuesday morning, George Galloway joined the pile-on, tweeting in reply to Jones’ interview with Sultana:
We don’t want to “nationalise the whole economy” or as she earlier put it “take the fucking lot.” When we ceased to be children we put away childish things. We want an economy like China. Where the state has a decisive role in the mixed economy and where the people come first.

The chauvinist Workers Party of Britain leader Galloway’s anti-communism is clearly exposed but the SEP “explanation” of his opportunism is even more poisonous: 

Galloway is a defender of Chinese capitalism and its exploitation of the working class, administered by the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on behalf of global corporations and investors. The “mixed economy” he holds up as a model boasts 450 billionaires, the second highest globally, whose interests are defended ruthlessly by the CCP, suppressing the social and democratic rights of the working class.

Galloway at least grasps that the state has a decisive role. What he misses out, consciously so, is that it is a workers state, established by the revolutionary armed overthrow of imperialism in 1949 and remaining so ever since.
It uses capitalist methods, not as a “mixed economy” but as a means for the development of the communist economy, by attracting investment, as Lenin set out in the Soviet New Economic Policy (as dealt with p10).
While this has gone a long way, and sometimes worryingly so, to describe this as the CPC “working on behalf of global corporations” and the “Stalinist restoration of capitalism” is the vilest petty bourgeois distortion, filled with typical Trot hatred.  
And it does not begin to account for the relentless hostility to China from American imperialism, which is being outcompeted all down the line by China.
It is the enormous growth of  these controlled and planned uses of outside capitalist investment alongside state industry and under overall strategic direction of the workers state, which has allowed Beijing to rapidly develop the enormous economic clout it has in standing up to US imperialism’s world bullying tariff wars, forcing a climb down by Donald Trump at the recent meeting in South-East Asia for example.
In retaliation for punitive US import levies for example, China instigated a block on US soybean purchases which has brought the US mid-West pro-MAGA farm regions to near paralysis, with Trump obliged to deliver a huge cash handout to farmers this month to prop them up. China switched its purchases to Brazil and Argentina which has further implications. 
And the long-developed near monopoly on crucial rare-earth production (calculatedly planned over decades) is another significant weapon China is now able to wield, and is, blocking exports, with Trump’s belligerence forced into retreat (for the while). 
Beijing’s weakness is its revisionist worldview – as far as it can be determined from its lack of Marxist commentary for the world working class (a silence which is part of revisionism in itself), just as Moscow’s philosophical retreats accumulated so much they tipped into Gorbachevite liquidationism, (but only after 70 years of Soviet achievements) and the actual restoration of capitalism it allowed.
So far China seems determined to defend its workers state vigorously.
Trot shallowness however is not the way to tackle its shortcomings, nor to give the working class here or anywhere elsewhere the perspective it needs.
Just the opposite - like all the other fake-“left” its crude slander reflects counter-revolution, nothing else.
And its swamping of the Your Party opening can only spell long-term failure for the whole pantomime if it goes unchallenged.
That does not rule out Leninism from participating in what remains temporarily a potential mass movement, but only in as much as it remains open to the fight for revolutionary politics.
There is virtually zero prospect of YP itself becoming “the revolutionary party” as some of the “lefts” argue (echoing the same misanalysis made about Scargill’s) but it may be obliged to give space to the arguments for a while - and that can be tested.
But developing revolutionary perspectives remains the crucial challenge and there was not much sign of that from the inaugural YP meeting.
The obsessions with single-issue identity politics and “anti-racist” reformism displaced any serious view of the disastrous collapse of the entire monopoly capitalist system and the understanding of its great Catastrophe without which no sense can begin to be made of the devastating and genocidal warmongering and fascist racist bullying being inflicted on the world.
Only a grasp of monopoly capitalism itself as the generator of all the horrifying butchery, torture, slaughter and invasion blitzing, as it desperately flounders in its effort to escape inescapable economic breakdown and collapse, can begin to make sense of the Ukraine warmongering and the European splits with the American empire; of the dementedly sadistic genocide by the Jewish occupation of Palestine; of the piratical war buildup killings and hijackings of Venezuelan boats and now oil tankers, to threaten the anti-imperialist mass sentiment in Latin America; and of the non-stop hate campaigning against China (while forced to do deals for the moment because of its strength).
All this fascist belligerence by the American empire (and via various stooges like Zionism) can only increase as its  capitalism’s relentless monopolisation creates ever more grotesque inequalities driving more and more hatred by the world’s masses, and the upheaval which will eventually lead to its defeat and overthrow:

Fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity, according to a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential.
The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings.
Wealth – the value of people’s assets – was even more concentrated than income, or earnings from work and investments, the report found, with the richest 10% of the world’s population owning 75% of wealth and the bottom half just 2%.
In almost every region, the top 1% was wealthier than the bottom 90% combined, the report found, with wealth inequality increasing rapidly around the world.
“The result is a world in which a tiny minority commands unprecedented financial power, while billions remain excluded from even basic economic stability,” the authors, led by Ricardo Gómez-Carrera of the Paris School of Economics, wrote.
The share of global wealth held by the top 0.001% has grown from almost 4% in 1995 to more than 6%, the report said, while the wealth of multimillionaires had increased by about 8% annually since the 1990s – nearly twice the rate of the bottom 50%.
The authors, one of whom is the influential French economist Thomas Piketty, said that while inequality had “long been a defining feature of the global economy”, by 2025 it had “reached levels that demand urgent attention”.
Reducing inequality was “not only about fairness, but essential for the resilience of economies, the stability of democracies, and the viability of our planet”. They said such extreme divides are no longer sustainable for societies or ecosystems.
Produced every four years in conjunction with the United Nations Development Programme, the report draws on the biggest open-access database on global economic inequality and is widely considered to shape international public debate on the issue.
In a preface, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz repeated a call for an international panel comparable to the UN’s IPCC on climate change, to “track inequality worldwide and provide objective, evidence-based recommendations”.
Looking beyond strict economic inequality, it found that inequality of opportunity fuels inequality of outcomes, with education spending per child in Europe and North America, for example, more than 40 times that in sub-Saharan Africa – a gap roughly three times greater than GDP per capita.

Pious hopes about “economic resilience” and “stability of democracy” are a beyond a joke and especially obviously so following the Zionist onslaught to eradicate the entire population of stolen Palestine and the ever-more overt fascism and war belligerence of Trumpite America. 
But total confusion is all that any of the “left” are capable of, and a fearful backing away from revolutionary conclusions.
The Ukraine war highlights the cravenness of every one of the 57 varieties from the “pro-Russian” revisionists to the social-pacifist Trots.
It has been driven from the beginning by Western intrigue  both in the subversion to install outright Nazi nationalism in Kiev (with the 2014 Maidan coup)and then egging on its aggression against the Russian sectors of the country (the Donbass), along with NATO buildup in all of eastern Europe, all with the deliberate intent of provoking a Russian response. Its purpose has been war itself, to divert attention and “excuse” the economic collapse caused by capitalism’s own contradictions, (and erupting clearly in the 2009 bank meltdown) with Russia the suitable blame-target scapegoat.
Obviously the war aim included breaking up the rival capitalism of the Russian Federation and demolishing any residue of past Soviet sentiment inevitably still lingering after 70 years (which Putin’s bonapartism balances with).  
But an equally important contradiction has been the inter-imperialist rivalry at the heart of imperialist crisis, and notably between the US bloc and the ever more threatening European monopoly bloc.
American imperialism has been hammered by decades of rising competition from powers like German-dominated Europe and Japan (and increasingly, smaller fry like Brazil and India).
From the beginning its aim has been to embroil Europe in the useful turmoil and hamstring its economies (including with outright sabotage, like blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines and cutting off the huge industrial advantage of cheap Siberian gas).
That anti-European conflict is the reason for Trump’s “treachery” as the European bourgeoisies, and their corrupt and reactionary nationalist Ukrainian puppets, see it, making deals with the bogeyman Moscow regime to end the war by “sacrificing” territory.
In the face of the determined Russian resistance, America’s interest is mainly to cut its own losses, having achieved the main purpose of knocking Europe down to size.
All this becomes very much clearer now with the new Trumpite 2026 “Security Document” and its savage condemnation of European regimes as facing “civilisational erasure” – a racist fascist nonsense but making very clear the bullying hostility of the American Empire and its assertion of the “right” to intervene in other countries by backing outright racist Nazis, like the AfD and Nigel Farage’s racist scapegoating Reform, all willing stooges for America interests.
None of these complexities have been even hinted at by the “lefts” nor the Marxist conclusions that follow; the majority Trots variously taking a useless “No to War” condemn both sides line; the revisionists and mavericks like George Galloway declaring outright support for Putin’s Russia.
But the pacifist line is both useless and effectively siding with Western imperialism by swallowing the “Russia started it” Goebbels lie (pumped out by the aggressive yapping from the EU’s nastiest elements like anti-communist Estonia’s Kaja Kallis) with “condemning NATO too” a mere cover.
The pro-Russians cause just as many problems backing the oligarch-supporting Great Russian reactionary nationalism in Moscow and going through sophistic hoops trying to pretend this restored capitalism is somehow progressive because “not imperialist” (dishonestly bending Lenin’s Imperialism understanding out of all recognition to do so).
  The EPSR has only ever said that defeat for the Western imperialist (NATO) cause should be called for, but without any illusions in Putinism; Russia is as imperialist as any and needs a return to Bolshevik relations. 
Only because of the vast disparity between Moscow’s capacity and the giant monopoly forces of the West does the one sided “defeat” call make sense, as opposed to the “defeat for both sides” formal sloganeering of some remaining “left” groups.
But these groups (like the CPGB eg) only use the First World War Bolshevik line as an excuse to evade the question under the “our fight is at home” – never anything Lenin said. 
Certainly the revolutionary fight is primarily against our own ruling class; but our own ruling class is up to its neck in Ukraine via covert and overt interventions.
Defeat for NATO is a call for defeat for the British ruling class and its European alliances.  
And it has clearly had an impact, humiliating the European ruling class. Fears abound about its capacity to intervene with “boots on the ground” and economic bankruptcy.
Contempt grows too for the monstrous support they have given the fascist Zionist onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank. Sultana’s call for YP party to be overtly anti-Zionist is correct as far as it goes but raises huge further questions, not least about maintaining the fudged alliance with the Corbyn wing and its nonsense about “fighting anti-semitism”.
Again the issue needs to be one of defeat for imperialism which uses the Zionist “master-race” tyranny to help impose its world bullying (revealing its own weakness thereby in having to rely on the fanaticism of the Jewish occupiers, with nervousness about its own military resolve increasing after defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan and potentially now in Venezuela).  
 Build Leninism  Alan Moss

Trotskyist revival of “political revolution” anti-communist garbage is taken further by the duplicitous Spartacists, using it for a convoluted attack on the rising power of China’s workers state. Still lying about their support for the CIA/Vatican backed Solidarnosc they now pretend to “defend” the People’s Republic – by rubbishing its leadership and spreading demoralising poison about supposed “economic failures”,   bureaucratic “castes” and “inability to develop technology – even as Chinese science outpaces the West

Attempted revival of the long-disproven “political revolution” theory by petty bourgeois Trotskyism has been trying to confuse growing discontent in the working class and particularly hard-pressed youthful elements as imperialist crisis more and more reveals its destructive, genocidal Slump and war reality.
Far from the professed aim of building a favourable understanding of communism, these mountebanks are doing the very opposite, spreading confusion about, and hostility for, the only possible way out of the crisis, the class war to establish disciplined workers states like the Soviet Union. 
As explored in the last issue of EPSR the spiralling collapse of the imperialist order is increasingly pushing attention and debate about socialism and communism back to the surface.
Inevitably at the heart of it, there has to be discussion and re-examination of the history of the 20th century and its great working class revolutionary advances, long rubbished by bourgeois ideological brainwashing as “failures” but far from it, and looking increasingly attractive to ordinary people as capitalism implodes.
Flawed as they might have been by revisionist theoretical errors, these states were, and in some cases remain (China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam), giant stunning examples for the working class of the only possible way forwards as the centuries long capitalist period of human society’s development becomes embroiled in ever deeper unsolvable contradictions and fascist degeneracy, – i.e. the mass class struggle to overturn it and build a new socialist society.
And while much of their revolutionary ideological influence on world working class understanding has gone, stifled by continuing revisionist leadership delusions about permanent “peaceful coexistence” (multilateralism)  their dogged resistance and defensive challenge to imperialism remains, demonstrating the staggering advantages and necessity of planned economic development under the overall strategic control of the workers state (meaning the dictatorship of the proletariat). 
It become ever more crucial for the bourgeoisie to keep the working class away from any positive understanding of this past and continuing history as its system unravels in Catastrophic trade war and slump breakdown.
And helping them do it is this idealist farrago of the “political revolution”, invented by sour-minded Trotsky himself early on after Lenin’s death (see EPSR Books Vol 5, 29 and 30) as part of his attempts to discredit the colossal achievements of the Soviet workers state and the whole subsequent socialist camp (and wider anti-imperialist struggle) it inspired, by playing on the weaknesses, failures and complacencies of the revisionist bureaucracies running them.
By dressing up often valid criticism of the undoubted philosophical flaws and retreats by dunderheaded revisionism in Moscow and later leaderships in Beijing, Havana etc, as supposed “real” revolutionism, the clever (cunning) Trotsky and his duller inheritors have long smuggled completely counter-revolutionary ideas into the workers movement under the guise of “defending” the workers states and being “for” revolution. 
And the central element was the “political revolution” – itself predicated on the notion that the real-enough bureaucracies (unavoidable elements in running workers states until the advent of mature communist self-disciplined society, generations hence) and their revisionist ideas (not unavoidable at all) had become alienated from the workers states they were heading.
Supposedly they were taking “unfair advantage” of their administrative position exclusively to line their own pockets at the expense of socialist development, and to such an extent that they became a new “caste” (an utterly unMarxist invention) allegedly exploiting the working class just as ruthlessly as any capitalists, though without any capitalist property relations being restored (a fantastical notion).
The necessary new kind of property relations to sustain this idealist-invented “caste” (a word chosen by Trotsky as an evasion from declaring a new “class” – because he knew it had no scientific basis) was never spelt out and nor could it be. 
Nor could there be any pinning down of when the supposed “hijacking” of the revolution had taken place, a small flaw in the “theory” which has caused endless squabbling and argument in the fake-“left” ever since Trotsky’s first moves to disrupt and undermine the new Soviet state in his “New Course” pamphlet of 1923 (EPSR Books Vol 3,4,5, and later Vol 29,30 on Trotskyism).
Precisely when and how it was supposed to have happened is endlessly academically disputed and even in one case, the Weekly Worker CPGB-PCC pretenders, leads to astounding pseudo-intellectual rigmaroles about some convoluted “counter-revolution within the revolution” to explain away its non-visibility (because non-existent) in a workers state that continued developing as a workers state. Even phlogiston was more coherent.
That all such “hijackings” had never actually happened, and for all its leadership errors and weaknesses the USSR (and others) remained a workers state, became very apparent in 1989-91 when the Gorbachev liquidation took place.
Then, a real counter-revolutionary change did actually happen accompanied by very noticeable historic events, sending shockwaves across the planet.
But these fantastical notions had persisted until then in order to justify Trotsky’s advocacy of a revolution against the new Soviet state, driven by his bilious petty bourgeois individualist hatred of the proletarian dictatorship which was correctly maintained and determinedly fought for by both Lenin’s Soviet leadership and then its inheritors – including Stalin – after Lenin’s death, despite their many philosophical shortfalls and later cover-ups.
It is the core question – either the bourgeoisie rules with its dictatorship or the proletarian dictatorship does so and no other possibility exists. 
The Trots declared that somehow their “political” overturn would be different to a usually understood “social”, i.e. class, revolution.
Ostensibly it would be a special kind of revolution which would displace only the “Stalinist” leadership, now declared to be “parasitical”, but leave the working class in power, just revitalising the new communism without its bureaucracy.
Such utter garbage led to them eagerly backing up every carefully organised counter-revolutionary stunt against the USSR provoked by Western ideological anti-communist influence saturating the world, and (usually) by much hidden skulduggery and intelligence intervention.
Anti-communist stunts like the fascist “Hungarian uprising” in 1956 or the 1968 Prague Spring movement for “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia (i.e. without the class discipline of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its concrete forms like the KGB and central organisation) were declared “progressive”.
Such CIA “colour revolution” is now so commonplace it has become a cliché. 
As mentioned, the world shaking liquidation of the USSR workers state by Gorbachevism between 1989 and 1991 – and disbanding of its crucial dictatorship of the proletariat core – demonstrated definitively what a cruel hoax the “political revolution” was on the working class, which when it finally went all the way proved to be only counter-revolution and the restoration of capitalism (in as crude and brutally mafia-like form as any, sharply contrasting to the benefits of the Soviet Union and East European socialist camp previously). 
But the lessons that delivered the world, in just what a giant achievement the workers state had been and what a nonsense is their “political revolution”, are not to the taste of the Trots.
Of course the disastrous revisionist philosophical retreats that finally proved the point, need examining as the EPSR has argued for decades:

The tedious revisionist bureaucracies running the workers states obviously failed to turn their countries into environmentally-sound social and educational showpieces with which to counter-attack the West’s relentless political anti-communism.
This was certainly economically difficult largely because of the enormous defence-burden and state-security-burden costs which the proletarian dictatorships were forced to bear by unremitting ‘free world’ military encirclement, nuclear threats, political subversion, and economic sabotage.
It was put politically out of reach by the hopeless revisionist subservience to imperialism, begging the West for permanent peaceful coexistence and class collaboration. 
But despite these cowardly delusions, and until they reached total liquidationist betrayal under Gorbachev, the USSR was a history-making triumph.
For all its weaknesses, the first 70 years of anti-imperialist achievement by the Soviet workers state must sooner or later begin to be seen again as an immense beacon lighting the way for the world’s proletarian masses, once more reeling under the burdens of monopoly-capitalist crisis. ILWP Bulletin (EPSR No649 19-05-92) 

But not for the Trots.
Just the opposite.
They have been doubling down on their hostile hatreds even as the rapidly degenerating imperialist crisis forces them to posture ever more stridently about standing “for communism” and with the anti-imperialist struggle.
As explored last EPSR some of these 50-shades-of-fake-“revolutionism” are even attempting to rehabilitate Poland’s bogus “trade union” Solidarnosc, the pre-eminent example of “uprising” declared to be a living example of the “political revolution” after the failures of Hungary 1956 etc. and the Prague Spring.
One recent example is the RCP (the latest incarnation, previously Socialist Appeal) which recently produced a twisted and long-winded “history” of Solidarnosc declaring it to have been a salt-of-the-earth grassroots working class movement initially, which only “became” counter-revolutionary because it was “sold out” later.
But its anti-communist character was actually glaringly clear from day one as the EPSR set out at the time (see last issue and issues like No724 02-11-93).
Revival now of this fraudulent and knowing effort to pass off that counterfeit “trade union” upheaval as “for real socialism” trades on a lack of theory and Marxist historical understanding in the younger generation, and naïve “workerist” enthusiasm, the Trots hoping that enough time has passed to get away with it, relying on already near-universal hostility to theory in the working class not yet having been overcome and on the non-stop anti-communist brainwashing  which has saturated all capitalist culture and education since 1917’s Bolshevik revolution. 
Alongside the general purpose among the Trot swamp to undermine, confuse and head off any incipient Leninist leadership of growing spontaneous revolt, there is  a more obvious specific target too, namely the huge and rapidly growing Chinese workers state which has become the number one problem and competitor – increasingly the most serious one – for American imperialism and its ever more concentrated world monopoly dominance.
Among the Trots the Spartacist group has directed its attention most of all on Beijing – focusing its particular revived call for a “political revolution” on the Chinese leadership.
As always this is done with the grossly hypocritical insistence that it is all for the good of the workers state. So in the May issue of its lavishly produced glossy Spartacist colour magazine this year these mountebanks took it on themselves to write an “open letter” to the Chinese Communist Party declaring themselves “firmly in defense of the Peoples Republic of China” while high-handedly telling them they are doing everything wrong.
It plays on the dangers of the mistakes made by the Soviet Union which the Sparts allegedly understood, and which in typical high-handed style they “warn” the Chinese CP to avoid.
But this is a complete nonsense; the mistakes which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union were those of abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat and its firm discipline in favour of Western “democratic values” and the “free market”.
But that was only the Gorbachevite ultimate end-point; while there were decades of accumulating revisionist retreats by Moscow’s leadership, until the late 1980s the Soviet state made huge advances for the working class including massive worldwide support for anti-imperialist and socialist struggles.
It was only then that the Moscow leadership tipped into outright counter-revolutionary betrayal.
Whatever else might be “advised” for Beijing, maintaining and in fact strengthening the workers state authority has to be at the heart of it.
But it is hostility to the firmness of the workers state and its leadership which is now being presented by the Sparts as the supposed answer to China’s alleged “problems” (which, as set out by the Sparts, are themselves a ludicrous distortion and misrepresentation of China’s development and economy).
Hoary old notions of “workers democracy” and “rank-and-file” decision making are revived as the alleged way forwards, counterposed to the centralised authority and organisation of the Beijing leadership.
This is all the same old anti-communist individualism that has always characterised Trotsky, rejecting Lenin’s Bolshevik disciplined party principles and leadership from the very start (in 1903’s Second RSDLP Congress) and all the way to the 1917 events, then again from 1923 after Trotsky had briefly ridden the Bolshevik’s successful revolution, joining them just three months before the October insurrection and serving administratively and militarily for a few years, (with much disruptive factionalising) until Lenin’s decline from heart problems when Trotsky’s conceited “I should  be leader” resurfaced.
It is this petty bourgeois individualism that runs through all the  Trot groups and which saw them pile in behind Solidarnosc when that CIA-Vatican stunt erupted in 1980. The Sparts were right there among them hailing the Lech Walesa led movement.
But more “sophisticated” than most of the Trots, they soon saw that the Western support (including from Thatcher, Reagan and the ultra-reactionary Pope), obvious anti-Sovietism on the ground and reactionary Catholic backing for this racket was all smelling too strongly for smarter workers to stomach.
After the first year or so, the Sparts changed their line 180 degrees from cheering on the “workers revolt” to (reluctantly) backing its suppression if necessary by the Polish state or by Soviet intervention if Warsaw was too feeble.
But not only did they never explain to the working class their Pauline conversion, they have lied about it ever since (see last issue and EPSR No1206 28-10-03).
These mountebanks still shamelessly avoid admitting their mistake. 
But the only approach possible for genuine revolutionary leadership is to openly admit to errors, correcting them as best as they can and looking for the cause of their wrong analysis – all in order to reach the best possible scientific objective grasp of the world which is vital for the constantly updated and improved guiding line for unfolding class struggle.
Not the Sparts. They want to continue feeding their subjective idealist poison into the working class, causing maximum confusion and dangerously misleading them.
The Sparts have done just this over Cuba for example in the mid-1990s, using the “political revolution” formula to denounce Fidel Castro and the subsequent Cuban leadership as “lacking in Leninism” – and therefore to be “overthrown” (see EPSR No 725 09-11-93).
This is the same “baby out with the bathwater” extreme as Trotsky himself adopted against the USSR, using criticism of actual mistakes and retreats as the basis for declaring everything to be rotten – and ending up on the same side as imperialism, even dementedly denouncing the Soviet Union just before the Second World War as being little different to fascism (in Stalin-Hitler’s Quartermaster and Stalin-Hitler Twin Stars eg) and thereby undermining world working class support for the Soviet Union at exactly the critical moment when it was most heavily threatened.
Now they turn their lies onto Beijing, not out of any great hope that they will actually fool the Chinese masses perhaps (though undoubtedly always ready to take a long shot) but to confuse and bamboozle the masses in the West itself, as the rapidly unfolding Catastrophic breakdown stirs massive questions for all, and not least of the now constant warmongering horror from Serbia and Afghanistan onwards, unfolding into the bourgeoisie’s World War Three “solution” to its collapse (including war against China). 
In their posturing open letter the sick pretence is maintained that the Sparts are only seeking the best interests of the working class. It begins:
The following letter was delivered to the Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN.   

1 May 2025  Dear Comrades,
In the context of the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign of economic, political and military aggression, the International Communist League firmly stands in defense of the People’s Republic of China. U.S. imperialist aggression against China is not only a dagger pointed at the Chinese people but a threat to the economic and social conditions of the entire international proletariat.
As genuine Trotskyists, we believe it is the duty of all communists to oppose U.S. attacks on China and to unconditionally defend the gains of the 1949 Revolution. Although our forces are small, they are steadfast in their determination to fight for this cause from the imperialist heartlands to the countries of the Global South.
We stand with China today just as we fought with all our might against the counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is of the  utmost importance that the catastrophe which befell the Soviet Union is not repeated in the PRC. It is from this vantage point, and drawing the lessons from our own experience, that we write this letter. First and foremost, we are concerned that the current policy followed by the Communist Party of China repeats mistakes made by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Notice the sly “late 1980s” caveat, to exclude Hungary and Czechoslovakia for example; anyone who believes the Sparts’  were “fighting with all their might” non-stop against anti-Sovietism needs their head examined. 
What follows this new “best of intentions advice” pretence is not a clear explanation of Gorbachevism and the philosophical retreats over decades of revisionism which led up to it.
Instead there is a string of misrepresentations and shallow provocations on the Middle East, on China’s NEP use of capitalist methods in the economy and on support for the Western-organised “democracy and freedom” “self-determination” stunts in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
Missed out entirely is any deep grasp of the nature of the Chinese workers state and especially of the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and any deep grasp of the world crisis context of imperialism and its hurtling plunge into World War Three.
But the real vitriol emerges in an accompanying “memorandum” which repeats all the Trotskyist nonsenses of a “new caste”, supposedly looking out “parasitically” solely for its own interests and deliberately conflating revisionist “peaceful coexistence” philosophical failings, with an alleged antagonistic class relationship with the working class.
All the lessons from the Gorbachev experience are ignored. 
The subtle slyness of these duplicitous Sparts is characterised by their scorn for the rest of the fake-“left” which either writes off China as having “reverted to capitalism”,  or which uncritically sees Beijing as an anti-capitalist force which will lead on to world socialism, “the tip of the anti-imperialist spear” as they mockingly declare.
Both are of course wrong. Obviously there has been no counter-revolution over the decades since the hard-fought Mao-led revolution took power after three decades of struggle, in 1949, and the Sparts know it will not wash with any thinking workers to say otherwise.
They are also clever enough to play on the revisionist weaknesses in Beijing and its lack of public international backing for outright revolutionary positions or attempts to guide the international proletariat on those questions.
But they point them out only to sneer at mechanical museum Stalinism and all those falling in behind it with their “multipolar” BRICS fantasies of steadily containing rabid imperialism with a “permanent peaceful coexistence” strategy, as put forwards by Stalin in 1952 and hampering understanding ever since.
Of course that is a deadly disarming of the working class in the teeth of a system which will not, and cannot, stop its plunge towards war.
But there is no interest here by the Sparts in comradely criticism, that which starts with a firm declaration of unconditional support for the Chinese workers state, the only Leninist position  (and different to the also sly Spart “support for the gains of 1949”). 
The critical comments they make are wielded Trotsky style to deliver a completely poisonous characterisation of the state authority, declared to be self-interested, engaging only in 

“bureaucratic infighting for petty privileges”.

And they come with the full panoply of Trotsky’s sour defeatist speculations and subjective idealism, from the tired old mantra that it is impossible to build socialism in one country to the supposed inability of the “bureaucracy” to handle technology and innovation, and all saturated in a overridingly gloomy view that it is American imperialism which is on top and continues to call the shots.
Imperialism’s Catastrophe, the Empire’s panic at its intractable contradictions and its manifestation in the desperate fascist-Trumpite lashing out in all directions to bully the whole world into paying continued tribute to the now utterly bankrupt superpower, at the historically disastrous cost of tearing up every aspect of the United Nations international “democracy and freedom” racket (which has been the ruling class’s greatest weapon of all, hoodwinking the whole planet into reformist and liberal compliance) is nowhere to be seen:

After so-called Liberation Day, the fantasy land that the CPC lives in was on full display: Trump’s chaos is supposedly going to gradually and peacefully push other countries into China’s arms. Temporarily there will be diplomatic noise and perhaps some countries may come closer to China’s orbit. But Trump’s imperialist clampdown will force the vast majority of U.S.-dominated states to kowtow to his demands for an anti-China alliance.
The left believes either that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a rising imperialist power or that it is the tip of the anti-imperialist spear. Both characterizations are fundamentally mistaken in assuming that the CPC is looking to upend the American order. At heart, what characterizes the rulers of China is their conservative bureaucratism. Pressure from the imperialists pushes the CPC to defend the workers state in its own, disfigured way. Yet its overarching goal is not to break up and replace the American world order but to stay number two.
To paraphrase Gramsci, as the old world dies and a new one struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters. Today this applies precisely because the unravelling of the American world order is creating a power vacuum that the septuagenarian Stalinist bureaucrats of the CPC are unwilling to fill. Their refusal to fight for a global socialist order exacerbates the conditions for crisis in China and the whole Global South. No country today apart from China can supplant the U.S. empire. This is why, despite the rotting out of American industry, the rest of the world continues to bow to Washington and Wall Street’s dictates.
For China, the old model of integration into U.S.-led globalization cannot continue when Trump & Co. are blowing it apart. No matter how many billionaires Xi Jinping summons to Beijing, the imperialists are now determined to strangle the People’s Republic, even if this means they cannot take advantage of cheap Chinese labor anymore. But what is the CPC doing? Continuing on the same old model of exports, which has led to workers and youth facing wage cuts and ballooning unemployment. The PRC continues to depend primarily on the dollar to trade, keeping the economy hostage to Wall Street and the Fed. As a result of bureaucratic infighting for petty privileges, huge imbalances in the economy are left unresolved, leaving factory workers unpaid for months. To satisfy the imperialists, domestic capitalists are allowed to make gigantic profits in necessities such as healthcare, education and housing.
Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, recently restated the CPC’s dictum that “economic globalization is irreversible”  (Xinhua, 24 February). This is an objectivist [???-ed] view of history, one in which the global division of labor and production will simply grow with the passage of time. Prosperity and peace are supposed to follow from this rational configuration. What the CPC denies is that U.S. hegemony was the essential condition for the expanding global economy, with American ships commanding the world’s oceans. The CPC’s view covers up the decay of imperialism as an obstacle to the internationalization of the productive forces and thus rejects the struggle against imperialism.
This refusal to recognize the reality of globalization as U.S.-led has serious strategic consequences for China. For example, the CPC clings to the illusion that the EU can become a geopolitically autonomous pole. China’s economic woes from U.S. tariff pressure are supposed to be resolved by trade with the European continent—as if Europe were not dependent on and aligned with the U.S. The continent’s “great” powers depend on the U.S. for bailouts when recessions hit, and their armies cannot fight for more than a couple of weeks without American aid. Furthermore, the European imperialists don’t want to see a workers state become the architect of an alternative order (nor do the national capitalists of the Global South, for that matter).
The CPC’s pacifist illusions in the world order stem directly from its nature as a bureaucratic caste. Xi Jinping and his gang aim to protect their parasitic rule on top of the People’s Republic and its state-controlled economy. Without class struggle as the compass guiding their actions, and espousing “socialism in one country,” the bureaucracy can only seek accommodation with world imperialism. Even when the bureaucracy is pushed into confrontation, its narrow national outlook leads toward seeking deals with the imperialists at the expense of the global anti-imperialist struggle. Ultimately, with international socialism not in their sights, they can only hold on to the illusion of “peaceful coexistence.” The crux of the problem is that the capitalists do not see peaceful coexistence as possible with a workers state.
There is no doubt that the Chinese Stalinists are being pushed into a more confrontational stance against the U.S. imperialists. But what drives them is the defense of their own privileges. A swing to the left will be conducted in a repressive, bureaucratic manner that undermines the defense of the workers state. Rather than seeing the workers and peasants of China as potential enemies to be surveilled and controlled, genuine communists would aim to unleash the potential of the masses in the struggle against imperialism.
Without a perspective of global socialism, China can be isolated. The nationalistic Maoists argue that this would not be a problem because China today is not the technologically backward China of the Great Leap Forward. But even the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, which was on a par with the U.S. militarily, couldn’t break the imperialist encirclement. From Brezhnev’s USSR to Xi’s China, without a plan elaborated by soviet democracy, bureaucratic command stifles advancements in technology and in the masses living standards. Even now the CPC’s plans to automate production are putting millions of manufacturing jobs on the line.

The relentless depressive “can’t win” droning from these Trots is astounding. China is forced to confront imperialism, it is conceded – (what happened to wanting to “stay number two”) -  but even if it does so will “undermine” its own efforts.
The failure to confront imperialism was the mistake made by the Soviet Union surely, which the Sparts’ advice is supposed to be “arming China against”?? They did, after all, (eventually) call for the suppression of Solidarnosc by Moscow despite its alleged “bureaucracy”.
In fact it was Beijing, at the same time as Gorbachevism liquidated the Soviet workers state, which did assert the authority of the Chinese workers state in 1989 (albeit after some central committee wobbles and prevarication – see EPSR Book Vol 16 China) to deal firmly with the violent provocations in Tiananmen, a counter-revolutionary uprising by a privileged petty bourgeois pro-Western student minority seduced by capitalist consumerist ideology, and reactionary Taiwanese and Hong Kong pop singers and infiltrators, and the worship of the ultimate symbol of American imperialist “democracy” (anti-communism) in the plastic Statue of Liberty replica at the centre.
Bourgeois ideology has lied through its teeth non-stop ever since about the “barbarous brutality” of a “10,000 strong massacre” in the square even though only a very few hundred were killed during the violence, which was only in the streets outside the square (itself emptied firmly and peacefully) and that deliberately instigated by the provocateurs and most of that carried out by the counter-revolutionaries themselves, lynching and killing state soldiers and police victims.
Imperialism hates the continuing firmness of the workers state which then saw off reactionary British colonialism from Hong Kong in 1997 and which has kept a lid on the CIA/MI6 organised pro-West “democracy” provocations ever since despite the massive efforts by imperialism to whip up counter-revolution with outright violence and destructive anarchy there too, and around other reactionary causes, like the deposed Tibetan priesthood’s attempts to reestablish its primitive feudal semi-slave society and the misguided and misdirected Uighur jihadist terror campaign out of Xinjiang province. 
Beijing has treated the wild fabrications about “concentration camps” and “slave labour” with the contempt they deserve and the same for the ludicrous and lurid anti-Chinese disinformation campaign of hysterical “spy” stories and fantastical fictional fearmongering about surveillance embedded in just about every Chinese good, from mobile phones to toasters.
That does not mean there are no criticisms to be made of the “don’t rock the boat” revisionist approach from Beijing (which the sly Sparts are able to trade on). 
But its defensiveness, rooted in a theoretical perspective which does not spell out the complete disintegration now underway in the imperialist world as its crisis bites deeper, is not going to be countered by the Trotskyist defeatism – such as the Spart comments about soviet leader Brezhnev “unable to break out from imperialist encirclement”.
It was not a failure of technology or military capacity which held back the Soviets but a failure in revolutionary perspectives, not least from a lack of understanding of just how deep and unsolvable a crisis the monopoly capitalist system would eventually crash into, despite its seeming unending capacity to spin out the “boom” conditions post-WW2 with ever more printed dollar credit (and even now still partially kept aloft even as the insane AI-led shares frenzy screams out an imminent 1929 implosion). 
Even more calculatedly defeatist in this Brezhnev swipe is the absurd repetition of Trotsky’s gibberish about the bureaucratic command system being too rigid to develop technology and even “stifling advances”.
It was never true about the Soviet Union which made titanic advances in multiple fields of technology, military arms, pure science, education, culture and medicine, independently developing a nuclear deterrent counter to the West’s Bomb and notably being the first to put a man in space without all the assistance provided to NASA by recruited Nazi rocket expertise – all while providing massive support for housing, social advancement and full employment for an educated and cultured working class.
And China has taken that much further to the extent that in just a few decades it has not only caught up with the West in many of the most advanced technological fields but is surpassing even the US, which with its gigantic advantages of wealth and domination has always sucked in all the best brains and talent from the whole world (and is now hoovering up all available recorded human knowledge without payment through its AI search engines).
Reports even in the bourgeois press cannot help their amazement at developments in fields like nuclear power where China has build 40 new generating stations in the last decade for example, quickly and without delays, and is pushing forwards the safer thorium reactor technology; in space exploration where it has landed an unmanned explorer on the far side of the moon and is currently outpacing America in plans for a manned landing; in sustainable energy where it outright dominates in 90%+ wind and solar technology manufacture as well as in installed capacity, now on the edge of turning the corner for reduction of CO2 emissions to ameliorate global warming; where electric car production is outpacing everyone including Elon Musk’s Tesla; where in just 30 years a major network of ultra-high speed trains has been installed across a far flung nation; where every kind of infrastructure has been built on an unprecedented scale (even as the US suffers relentless decay and deterioration to its highways, bridges, airports, water and power); and where electronic and computer technology is either already on a par with the West (China is ahead in the next generation 6G mobile phone systems eg and reputedly in quantum computing) or is rapidly catching up – it is likely that it is working on its own fabrication system for the latest ultra-microscopic computer chips that up until now have only been produced in Taiwan for the US giant corporation Nvidia, using staggeringly complex machines produced by only one company in the world out of the Netherlands, ASML.
And Beijing’s leadership has proved itself to be extremely nimble in multiple other ways, not least in its international trading relations, circumventing the sanctions and export controls which the US, using its massive monopoly economic and political power to lean on all and sundry has tried to isolate it with (including the said ASML “forbidden” by US bullying to sell to China).
It still has been able to demonstrate leapfrogging progress in AI, with China this year jumping to the front with a shock announcement of a more advanced tool and at half the price. 
Even the Sparts themselves, just a few paragraphs on from these doomy nonsenses are obliged to declare:

Today, China is the world’s pre-eminent industrial power. Its shipbuilding capacity is 232 times that of the U.S.

or as it says in the “open letter”

The PRC has made giant strides in its technological industrial and military prowess. 

Some stifling!!
And, it could be added, further strides in both arms capacity and military organisation as was stunningly apparent from the recent Beijing victory parade for the 80th anniversary of the Second World War (Putin, Modi, Kim Jong Un and other guests) and the heroic sacrifices which defeated Japanese imperialism, where a huge array of cutting edge missiles and drones, small and large, sent Western commentary reeling:

Ten years ago, the military technology tended to be “rudimentary copies” of far more advanced equipment invented by the US [...] But this parade revealed more innovative and diverse weapons. 
China’s top-down structure and significant resources enable it to churn out new weapons faster than many other countries, points out Alexander Neill, an adjunct fellow with the Pacific Forum.
It can also produce them in huge quantities.
[..]There were several hypersonic anti-ship missiles such as the YJ-17 and YJ-19, which can fly very fast and manoeuvre unpredictably to evade anti-missile systems. 
Beijing is not only strengthening deterrence, but is also creating a “second strike capability,” -..retaliation if attacked.
Other notable weapons included the much-talked about LY-1, which is basically a giant laser that could burn or disable electronics or even blind pilots; and an assortment of fifth-generation stealth fighter jets including the J-20 and J-35 planes.
There were a wide range of drones, some of them AI-powered, but the one that grabbed eyeballs was the AJX-002 giant submarine drone [...]measuring up to 20m (65ft) in length, it could possibly do surveillance and reconnaissance missions.    

As always the intelligence agency instructions to the Western media were to downplay and undermine, so the compliant rightwing BBC – more grovelling than ever before as the ruling class grows ever more nervous about maintaining even a pretence of “impartiality” and sacks one not-reactionary-enough not pro-Zionist-enough director after another – added to its report some childish sneers:

The parade clearly shows that China is catching up quickly with the US in its military technology, and has the resources to build up a huge arsenal of weapons.
But the US still maintains an edge in terms of operations, experts say.
The US military “excels” because there is a “bottom-up” culture where units on the ground can make decisions as the situation evolves and alter their fighting strategies, Dr Raska notes. This makes them more agile in a battle.
China, on the other hand, is “top-down” where “they can have flashy platforms and systems but they will not move a finger until they receive an order from the top”, he adds.
“The Chinese think its technology that creates deterrence. They believe that will deter the US... but at the operational level, there have been instances which show they may not be as good as they say they are.”  

Presumably that would be the US’ “agility” shown in pulling out of Afghanistan in an almighty rush, leaving the Bagram airbase full of abandoned equipment for the Taliban to take over, or the similar exodus from Iraq before that, or the even the chaos of the “Black Hawk down” drubbing in Somalia???  Vietnam anyone??
Undeterred by these obvious real world refutations, the Sparts continue with their own subjective gloominess, asserting once more another Trotsky cliché that “socialism cannot be built in one country”; which makes the 75 year continuing PRC existence and staggering growth a little awkward to account for.
It was always a nonsense and nothing to do with Lenin’s views as multiple EPSRs have said:

So what was the Soviet Union building until 1990? What is Cuba building at the moment? What is the basis of the hostility for 50 years between North and South Korea? Why does the anti-communist vilification of China continue throughout so many ‘freeworld’ agencies, splitting the US imperialist ruling class over tactics, etc? The statement: ‘Socialism cannot be built in one country’ has been a specious cover-up for much of the most opportunist anti-communist treachery in the whole history of working-class struggle for proletarian dictatorship science.
Socialism was being built in only one country under the leadership of Lenin himself until his death in 1924, as the slightest acquaintance with the 20 volumes of his writings after 1917 will confirm, and would have gone on being built in only one country under Lenin’s leadership, had he lived, for an unknown number of years after that too. The world revolution was slow to spread because of the inherited backwardness and destruction of Russia, and the continued phenomenal expansion of world imperialist economic strength. Trotsky’s sneer against ‘socialism in one country’ was a piece of monstrous anti-Soviet opportunism based on his ‘permanent revolution’ ultra-leftism which Lenin comprehensively rubbished under his general dismissal of Trotsky as a Menshevik windbag from 1905 onwards when this bureaucratic schematic posturing first appeared, (see ILWP Books vol 5 for excerpts and a summary of the more than 600 pages of Lenin’s writings against Trotsky).
Of course Stalinist revisionism eventually betrayed the completion of the world socialist revolution and the completion of building socialism in the USSR, but categorising this theoretical degeneration in the 1990s with some spurious posturing phrase that was immediately nonsense in the 1920s is just gibberish, especially after the massive expansion of the socialist camp after 1945, – and it just lets Stalinism off the hook, blocking the path to the important scholarship that needs doing on revisionist self-liquidation.
Such unthinking shallowness just plays into the hands of anti-communism and state-capitalism which are desperate to play down ‘free-world’ embarrassment at the astonishing economic and social deterioration in the former Soviet Union and East Europe since capitalism replaced what was being built there before without a capitalist class and a free market, and in Cold War hostility to imperialism, – that strange 73-years-long historical vacuum which apparently can be called anything but planned socialist construction (EPSR No853 14-05-96).

The Sparts get into further tangles trying to extricate themselves – having already conceded that China remains a workers state their poisonous petty bourgeois sensibility tries to declare that it is nevertheless a hellhole for ordinary workers (as in the “wage cuts” comments above).
But it is universally acknowledged – and is glaringly visible – that life has been transformed over the last 40 years with at least 900 million of the colossal 1.3 billion population lifted out of poverty so far.
It is a strange way to “exploit” the masses, and it reduces the Sparts to some extraordinary carping – at one point sneering that despite producing millions of electric cars (how is the stifling bureaucracy managing that??) “the average worker can barely afford one”, a comment on a par with the infamous Weekly Worker petty bourgeois lifestyle lament in the early days of Scargill’s SLP that workers would be left without their “brie and Bordeaux” if anti-European monopoly moves were to be put through (EPSR No891 19-02-97).
The alleged soviet-era “joke” about “pretending to work” is revived again, but as the EPSR has before pointed out, that even if it were true, being paid at all is in sharp contrast to the savagery of Western slump shutdowns and unemployment and the starvation, outright destitution and persecution imposed throughout the Third World (and increasingly even in the imperialist countries) – and the eventual capitalist slump/war solution of driving workers into the trenches where the “surplus” is dealt with in the most brutal way possible - mass slaughter (as the Ukrainians are being forced into by Western warmaking).
By the end of its “analysis” the relentless despair in the Sparts’ anti-China perspective has reached quite bizarre levels of contradictoriness:

A major slowdown for the world economy would mean a huge economic shock to China. But the bureaucracy cannot afford millions of unemployed workers, who could threaten another 1989 Tiananmen. The economy would likely be left in a zombie-like condition, with nonproductive factories kept running for the sake of keeping people employed. As the old Soviet joke goes, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” (although in China this is for 72 hours a week). Even now, state industries producing low-quality steel have been kept running despite the construction slump. Such a Brezhnev-like stagnation would push China far back in the technological race against the West. Already this is the case in the sluggish property sector, where prices are stabilized by state-owned real estate companies buying up land from...’ state-sponsored land auctions. Young people already speak of the regime as having entered “garbage time.”
More and more of the economy is reliant on the state sector. Foreign investment has dropped sharply while gigantic amounts of state credit are directed toward solar panel and electric vehicle factories. Obviously, this has a hugely progressive element. Mass electrification and automation living standards in China. Economic Stagnation could mean a significant rise in living standards and a rapid reduction in working hours. Resources could be poured into social needs to conquer the “mountains” of healthcare, education and, increasingly, elderly care.
But the rule of the CPC parasites distorts economic planning and prevents workers from enjoying the fruits of their labor. Solar farms were left disconnected from the electricity grid for years while petty provincial bureaucrats preferred to build plants burning local coal. Twenty million electric cars can be produced each year, yet the average worker can barely afford one. The state economy must be put under the control of workers rule, acting in the interests of the masses and not those of the Bureaucrats.
The bureaucratic caste cripples its own ability to plan by eliminating or obscuring economic data. This pogrom against statistics is committed so that careerists can fake figures, get promoted and hide how much production is being siphoned off for their private interest. 

Quite how the bureaucrats cleverly “siphon off” output without any idea of what output there is, having deliberately “eliminated” the data is not explained  – not least because it is pure gibberish, as are the wild exaggerations generalising from one or two incidents of local corruption (assuming even those can be believed).
And the Tiananmen “threat” is laughable – the whole provocation was never supported by the working class. And it failed.
Even more idiotic is the complaint (!) that China is increasingly “reliant on the state sector” especially in the light of dire warnings earlier on against the use of capitalism and capitalist methods.
It is the ability to use a state sector to regulate economic perturbations without the need to destroy capital that is one differentiation of a workers state, and its ultimately common ownership, from profit-orientated privately-owned capitalism. 
The Sparts want to imply that Beijing’s use of a capitalist sector in the economy is further “evidence” its “reactionariness” against the interests of the working class and make one of their key points in the “open letter” that 

Today the capitalist class in China holds great economic and political influence. The growth of this class poses a direct threat to the continued existence of the People’s Republic. Their words of “loyalty” must not make us lose sight of the fact that they will try to stage a comeback. Moreover, capitalist economic relations have exacerbated the injustice, exploitation and corruption in China. This has alienated the proletariat, the backbone of the PRC.

But this is a completely one-sided understanding which has zero grasp of a tactical method going all the way back to Lenin and the instigation of the New Economic Policy in 1921. 
Recognising that the backwardness of the still largely peasant economy with its feudal serfdom hangovers not long abolished, and smallscale petty bourgeois commerce, made it impossible to jump immediately to large-scale planned state production, the Bolsheviks allowed some capitalist enterprise within the workers state as a means of forcing economic development, particularly in the countryside, though with firm state monitoring to keep a watchful eye on it all the time and especially any counter-revolutionary political stirrings (which did erupt into near civil war in the 1930s).
The biggest industries remained in state hands and just as importantly the state monopoly control of international trade, finance and overall strategic planning.
China has gone much further of course, producing its own billionaires, and that is certainly a potential risk, though arguably a necessary one in the context of the enormous intensification of capitalist monopoly world control post-WW2.
To push forwards the new Chinese communist state, also with a largely rural economy after 1949, it had to find capital for investment and access to advanced technology transfer – (obtaining such necessary skills, Lenin also emphasised, was a vital tactic for the early Soviet Union which granted major capitalist investment concessions to US oil companies in the early 1920s for example – on highly unequal profit sharing terms to boot) – and it has done so with stunning success.
And while the revisionist limitations of Beijing’s leadership are a constant concern, and the corrupting influence of capitalist idealist attitudes a major problem (both in dirty dealing and in the philistine backwardness of the consumerism it encourages at a mass level – in the absence of better Leninist anti-imperialist perspectives, constantly promulgated) the indications so far are that China has kept its capitalists in check.
Overall national development strategy is by the workers state, directing investment geographically and economically.
Regular arrests and prosecutions of big billionaires and senior figures in the army and state for bribery and influence peddling are obviously worrying signs but at the same time an encouraging indication that the workers state maintains its oversight – and imposes severe penalties including the death sentence for extreme cases.
Certainly the Revisionist leadership  has not overtly set out what its long term perspective will be, and a necessary indication that such capitalist mechanisms can only be a temporary tactic needs to be understood.   
But to jump from watching out for the constant dangers inherent in allowing capitalist enterprise, to a demand for immediate “expropriation” is however not just disingenuous but an ultra-left provocation.
It also adds to the Trot tangle; why single out these capitalists as a threat if the problem is that the whole “bureaucratic caste” is exploiting the workers anyway??  
Their subsequent “advice” amounts to tearing up the NEP  (having instigated it) and is simply a provocation, an unserious showboating fraud by a bunch of dilettantes :    

Against this growing cancer of internal division, we advocate the following measures:
• The domestic capitalists should be expropriated and all industry brought under state control.
• Party officials should not receive compensation exceeding that of the average worker.
 * Workers must be given democratic control over industry and the state, with full liberty to express their views and  differences. 

But this last point – back to the Solidarnosc fraud – is part of the problem, not a solution as was spelt out at the time of Bill Clinton’s visit to China in 1998:

Degenerate revisionist political courses would be better exposed and abandoned BEFORE a workers state is liquidated or crashes into counter-revolutionary paralysis.
And the great ENEMY of this happening, past or present, is illusions in so-called ‘democracy’.
The last-thing that all varieties of so-called ‘democracy’ are is democratic. As Marxist-Leninist science alone explains, democracy is the final form of state repression. 
Democracy is a form of state rule. Real ‘freedom’ cannot be said to be obviously seen to be happening until the democratic state is able to wither away, leaving vastly changed fully-socially-conscious people to always automatically ensure that CORRECT decisions are taken on everything, based on full knowledge and understanding, – everyone agreeing because the decisions are the right ones equally obvious to everyone because of their, by then, vastly advanced (compared to today’s even HIGHEST standards) scientific and social understanding and experience.
The problem that all present-day forms of ‘democracy’ suffer from, – all equally crude, – is their participants’ inevitably SERIOUS deficiencies in knowledge, understanding, and experience, – whoever they are. 
That is why Marxism-Leninism is first and foremost a question of revolutionary LEADERSHIP and not a question of revolutionary ‘democracy’. It is why the actual record of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary achievement is basically one of non-stop correct leadership decisions rather than endless concentration on mere FORMS of ‘democratic’ decision-taking.
[...] And every ‘dissident’ that has come out against the Chinese revolution has either been hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat, or naïvely ignorant about the world imperialist crisis, or completely confused about ‘democracy’ as explained by Marxist-Leninist science above.
Genuine communist opposition to revisionist leadership-decay has needed to accept the structure of a party-led proletarian dictatorship, to accept the authority of the existing party leaders and their leadership line, and concentrate on demonstrating how the policies have proved inadequate or demonstrated they are out of touch with actual world developments. Such a difficult and rarely-accomplished course could almost certainly only be envisaged as being conducted from within the ruling party, and from well within it. It is hard to see how sniping from the outside (against a party which has successfully-carried out the revolutionary overthrow of a capitalist regime in the camp of world imperialism) could fail to be counter-revolutionary nonsense.
Nowhere do the Trotskyite denigrators of the Chinese workers state (in line with the ignorant reactionary anti-communist clamour from the hysterical bourgeois media), ever remotely approach such a genuine communist way of challenging revisionist leadership mistakes and mis-analysis of the international balance of class forces and its immediate and longterm perspectives.
The cheapest and nastiest propaganda-lies and cynical point-scoring are all that the fake-‘lefts’ are interested in, from positions of bourgeois philosophical confusion as crude as anything ever spewed up by anti-communism. (EPSR No956 30-06-98).

These last points take on additional significance at present in the light of the Your Party “collective leadership” pantomime  in Liverpool (see main story) but apply across the board and especially to China where all the Trots (and most revisionists) supported the Tiananmen upheaval, and its fraudulent “democracy” demands which Western influence and subversion put to the forefront, knowing it to be the best way to subvert popular opinion and undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat.
And the Sparts go on to confirm their ultra-left posturing with further provocative “criticism” over Beijing’s passive class-collaborating position on international  struggle.
Not least it takes a major swipe over Beijing’s standing back from genocidal horrors deluged onto the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people in Gaza, across the West Bank of  Palestine and the struggle in fact throughout the whole Middle Eastern region, blitzed and terrorised by the Zionist occupation of another people’s land (stealing territory from half a dozen countries for the last 100 years for its Eretz “Greater” Israel Jewish colonial occupation project). 
Of course Leninism would want to see far greater clarity from Beijing on this issue and many others as well as much firmer action diplomatically and politically in support of emerging anti-imperialism wherever possible. 
Its mediating of a truce between Saudi Arabia and Iran might be useful temporary diplomacy for example, (and serve Chinese trade interests perhaps) but set up all kinds of confusions about the gangster feudalism in the Arab world and indeed about the religious backwardness of the Ayatollahocracy.
Such retreats as China’s recent abstention in the United Nations vote on a US-sponsored vote over the Western Sahara, which “recognised” its continuing colonialist domination by Morocco, at the expense of the dogged, long-running national liberation struggle of its desert Saharwi people through the Polisario movement, cause head clutching frustration along with dozens of other compromises and “peaceful coexistence”.
 And Beijing’s relative silence on the monstrous Gaza genocide, directly and in terms of spelling out  the imperialist crisis cause of this escalation in world terrorising by the international bourgeoisie via its Zionist instrument  is equally frustrating.   
But to jump from that to a demand for Beijing to arm and assist the Palestinians directly is pure idealist grandstanding, and with a potentially provocative significance that could play into imperialist warmongering hands:

In the Middle East, we believe that rather than invoking “international law”—which has always been the law of brigands— the PRC should play a proactive role in assisting the peoples’ struggles to throw off imperialist domination. The PRC should urgently provide wide-ranging and comprehensive material support to the Palestinian struggle. Such concrete acts of international solidarity are sure to win millions of supporters across the Muslim world. Moreover, a blow to U.S. designs in West Asia would fundamentally undermine a U.S. pivot to East Asia.
In formulating the above recommendations, “we claim no independent discovery. Rather, we simply seek to apply to today’s conditions the policies followed by Lenin after the 1917 Revolution. His response to imperialist encirclement and counterrevolutionary threats was to found the Comintern and rally the workers of the world around the great cause of international proletarian emancipation.

 Apart from paying no attention to any kind of full analysis of all the factors in the Middle East, this is pure posturing by the Sparts, which has the aim not of strengthening the anti-imperialist struggle but solely to further discredit Beijing, which can only undermine the world struggle. 
It is redolent of the gung-ho demand for the Soviet Afghan intervention which proved to be an imperialist laid trap:

The Sparts came up with a similarly catastrophic opportunist stunt when they took up Trotsky’s In Defence of Marxism line (which gave sneering faint approval to the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland and Finland) to go right over the top to bellow “HAIL RED ARMY” to the 1979 Soviet intervention into Afghanistan, – Brezhnev’s last fatal stab at gesture-politics in his rare moments of sober coherence, and a disastrous mistake. 
[..] The Spart individuals sneered with prime counter-revolutionary biliousness at the proper (if too tardy) Soviet interventions to stop anti-communist putsches in 1956 (Hungary) and 1968 (Prague) and at the contingency plan for Poland in 1980, - all examples of correct Soviet understanding of its duty to put down REAL counter-revolution’s preparations to restore capitalism (i.e. “free-market democracy”).
How interesting that the one misjudged adventurism by the usually ultra-conservative Moscow, - the unwise expedition into totally unstable Afghanistan with no established workers state and where massive lavishly-funded CIA-organised sabotage and counter-revolution was ready and waiting to suck the Red Army into an endless bloodbath mounted from surrounding hostile territory, - the Sparts jumped up and sinisterly shouted “Excellent: Hail Red Army”. Curious??? (EPSR No1206 28-20-03)     

Even more duplicitously, the Sparts take a different line on the much stronger case for Chinese intervention, over correctly reclaiming the island of Taiwan, stolen by the anti-communist Kuomintang civil war retreat in 1949 and run for decades as a fascist dictatorship and Western stooge. Here they do “warn” of the possibility it is a “trap”, grossly overstating the imperialists’ strength.
Incidentally the alleged line taken by Lenin is completely distorted by these Trots; certainly the Third International was founded with world revolutionary perspectives but Lenin was completely opposed to premature adventurism in Soviet international policy; notably in the 1918 Brest-Litovsk negotiations  his line was for the nascent and weak USSR to bide its time, and agree to even severe demands by (German) imperialism in order to avoid unnecessary provocations and excuses for invasion. 
Keeping the Soviet state intact was Lenin’s policy whatever the cost, against the over-the-top “revolutionary war” demands of others on the central committee which would have been “glorious but doomed” and therefore a pointless romantic gesture.
Far better for the new workers state to at least survive and build up its capacities (“in one country”) for the time being. 
Trotsky, as always, was on the wrong side, against Lenin, covering his backside with a “neither war nor peace” evasion but essentially for the revolutionary war line.
While there is plenty to take up with Beijing and its continuing illusions in revisionist peaceful coexistence multipolarity, these Trot “criticisms” are dangerous provocations.
And it would be disastrous for China to succumb to them. Fortunately, so far, Beijing seems determined to vigorously defend its workers state.
Build Leninism
   Don Hoskins

E P S R BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution. (Lenin Dec 1916: Principles involved in the war issue.)

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