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No 1656 8th May 2025

World understanding sleepwalks into greatest ever economic Catastrophe. Trump’s turn to belligerent trade war and domestic scapegoating hatred against all comers is fascism, the next step up to World War Three. Destruction and devastation all the Empire offers to deal with the “surplus” capital clogging its system and rising rivals’ challenges. Ukraine “peace” reflects the weakness and bankruptcy of defeated imperialism & the splits tearing it apart. Gaza genocide is the full horrifying intent of counter-revolution but needs demented Zionist fanaticism to do it. Unbroken Arab resistance after 18 months of depraved inhumanity shows world masses cannot tolerate this stinking system any more. Trot & Stalinist “leftism” still mislead workers like duplicitous CPGB-ML. Leninist revolution vital

No amount of spin about “clever bluffing and the art of the deal” can conceal the about-turn humiliations for Donald Trump’s belligerent new isolationist tariff war to “Make America Great Again” (at the world’s expense).

But this floundering and vacillation will not stop the US Empire’s billionaire boss class from plunging further into Mccarthyite repression and sick “migrant” scapegoating and deportations at home, and diversionary world war abroad, as its monopoly capitalist system spirals ever deeper into Catastrophic breakdown.

Just the opposite: The Empire’s turn to outright openly vicious bourgeois dictatorship at home and aggressive threats in all directions internationally is the only option the bourgeoisie can find to “solve” the historic failure of its system, plunging into the greatest Slump ever.

And this crisis weakness, with all its implications of rapidly rising rebellious turmoil, at home and abroad, can only drive it into ever greater fascist frenzy.

It can and will only be stopped by revolution to finally put an end to this stinking, irrational, unequal, inhuman and planet-threatening profit system.

Certainly, for the moment, the multiple retreats from trade strangling super-penalties on the ever rising China “threat”, the about turn on bullying the US Federal Reserve chief to make him drop interest rates, the reduction of just-imposed car tariffs etc, are forced retreats as the “markets take fright” threatening complete economic implosion, far from any boasted “Golden Uplands” MAGA bluster as downturning US first quarter economic figures confirm.

But deluded notions that the “first 100 days disasters” will be making the Republicans so nervous “about mid-term elections”, it might force a change, as some of the bourgeois press commentaries are saying, just miss the point.

Nervous they may be – but if necessary there will be no “mid-term” elections.

The world needs to wake up to how serious this great Catastrophe is for everyone.

This is fascism – or to be more accurate, just the real face of the ruthless bourgeois dictatorship which always calls the shots behind the lying and manipulated bourgeois democracy mask – now slipping into power “correctly” via the same bamboozling voting racket as Hitler did in Weimar Germany, while the “liberals” and “social democrats”, bemused by their “proper procedures”, parliamentary protocol and hostility to communism, let themselves be rounded up.

And so tragically, did the working class, misled by Stalinist (and Trotskyist) revisionist obsessions with voting tactics for the Reichstag instead of clear revolutionary perspectives, and trapped with such nonsenses as “after Hitler our turn”.

As if the Nazis would just stand down.

The “rational” technocrats of the bourgeois system’s finance agencies, economists and commentators are dismayedly protesting, and that without their narrow undialectical philosophy grasping even a fraction of coming Catastrophe turmoil.

But they too want to watch out – Trumpism is tearing up all the established federal bureaucracies; the IMF and World Bank etc are not sacrosanct either:

Donald Trump’s tariffs will send international trade into reverse this year, depressing global economic growth, the World Trade Organization has warned.

In its latest snapshot of the global trading system, the Geneva-based institution says it had previously expected goods trade to expand by a healthy 2.7% this year. As a result of Washington’s trade policy, it is now forecasting a 0.2% decline.

Presenting the forecasts, the WTO’s director general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said she was particularly concerned about the “decoupling” of the US and China, calling it “a phenomenon that is really worrying to me”.

She said trade between the two geopolitical rivals was expected to plunge by 81-91% without exemptions for tech products such as smartphones – saying this was “tantamount to a decoupling of the two economies” and would have, “far-reaching consequences”.

Okonjo-Iweala said the WTO was canvassing its member countries about whether to convene an emergency meeting to discuss the situation.

In its report, the organisation says: “The outlook for global trade has deteriorated sharply due to a surge in tariffs and trade policy uncertainty.”

It had previously forecast global GDP growth of 2.8% for 2025, but now expects a weaker 2.2%.

The US has imposed tariffs of 10% on all imports, with much higher rates for China totalling 145%, and on specific sectors including cars and steel. The WTO expects the biggest impact of the policy to be a sharp decline in trade with the US – with other regions still expected to experience growth.

Trump’s far larger “reciprocal” tariffs were paused last week for 90 days after a violent reaction in financial markets. The WTO warns that if these are reimposed after the hiatus, it would have a much greater impact, causing a 0.8% decline in global goods trade.

If this was followed by a surge in “trade policy uncertainty” worldwide, as other countries readjust their policies in response, the WTO suggests the effects would be an even greater 1.5% fall in trade. And in this worst-case scenario, the WTO predicts even weaker global GDP growth, of just 1.7%.

After Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement on 2 April was followed by a string of sometimes apparently contradictory statements from Washington, the WTO warns that uncertainty in itself is an important contributor to the risks of a slowdown.

“Uncertainty fosters an increased prudence in decision-making,” the WTO says, pointing to evidence that “trade policy uncertainty can, among other things, dampen business confidence, reducing business investment and thereby impairing economic growth.”

It adds: “Ultimately, the degree to which uncertainty can be managed by firms will be a key determinant of whether the positive macroeconomic momentum observed in 2024 translates into sustained global trade growth in the coming years.”

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have also warned about the potential shock to trade from a tariff war.

Ajay Banga, head of the World Bank, said growing uncertainty would lead to slower global growth than expected.

Of course it is not “Donald Trump’s tariffs” which are “leading to slower growth”, (a ludicrous understatement in itself, capturing nothing about a whole system which is facing a “financial nuclear winter”, as other bourgeois economists have been warning recently, echoing the description of the 2008-2009 global bank failures by then Chancellor Alistair Darling), – it is the result of an already spiralling crisis implosion of the whole monopoly capitalist system, underway sporadically and partially for decades and in full since the credit meltdown, which has led to Trump’s desperate fascist bullying against the whole world (which does then make everything even worse).

Bullying belligerence, turned on everybody, is the last card being played by a US ruling class (and its craven stooge sidekicks like Britain) that has been steadily losing all competitiveness and authority, a process beginning virtually from the moment it fought its way to be the world “topdog” imperialist power at the end of World War Two, the last great crisis shakedown.

Even as it was entering the longest, biggest credit-fueled boomtime supremacy ever seen, its main imperialist rivals like Germany and Japan, were beginning their rise again from the ashes, turning into the growing competitive challenge that, along with other newer capitalisms (India, Brazil etc), has been undermining everything for decades (including, incidentally, the revisionist bureaucratic complacency in Soviet Moscow, whose 1991 Gorbachev liquidationism was a direct result of imperialist crisis conflict (not a “failure of communism” – see EPSR Book 20 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism).

Trumpism, in other words is not the cause of the crisis – the crisis is the cause of Trumpism, fronting a ruling class that is tearing up every past pretence of fairness, justice and world “democracy” and imposing directly the always underlying dictatorship rule of the bourgeoisie against all comers.

And it is a crisis collapse unravelling fast, not least because it has been deferred for decades with seemingly endless inflationary dollar printing and credit creation, beginning far back with Richard Nixon’s 1971 detachment of the dollar from the Bretton Woods “good as gold” pledge post-war, and most of all after the dot.com crash and then the global bank failures in 2008-9.

That reckoning for an already massively overblown, philistinely indulgent consumerism, teetering on the brink of world financial cataclysm, was staved off by insane new Quantitative Easing credit (and massive demand-stimulating market interventions by the revisionist leadership of the fast-growing Chinese workers state economy).

But these great mountains of extra “printed” and essentially valueless dollars are now an additional inflationary load on an already failing system which only adds momentum to the ever-steeper downward slide into Depression.

Within days of the WTO report above, “uncertainty” was increasing:

Donald Trump’s tariffs have unleashed a “major negative shock” into the world economy, the International Monetary Fund has said, as it cut its forecasts for US, UK and global growth.

In a stark assessment of the impact of the US president’s policies, as global finance ministers prepare to meet in Washington, the IMF said: “We expect that the sharp increase on 2 April in both tariffs and uncertainty will lead to a significant slowdown in global growth in the near term.”

Publishing the latest edition of its World Economic Outlook, the Washington-based lender cut its forecast for global GDP growth to 2.8% for this year – 0.5% weaker than it was expecting as recently as January.

The IMF said that while its forecasts had been prepared on the basis of current trade policy, “intensifying downside risks dominate the outlook”.

Its forecasts show every major economy being hit, with the UK expected to grow by 1.1% this year, down from 1.6% predicted in January. The IMF expects a sharper deterioration for the US, from 2.7% to 1.8%.

Responding to the UK downgrade the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, highlighted the fact that the IMF still expected it to be the “fastest-growing European G7 economy” in 2025.

But she added: “The report also clearly shows that the world has changed, which is why I will be in Washington this week defending British interests and making the case for free and fair trade.”

As its spring meetings kick off, the IMF said that even after Trump’s “pause”, which suspended punitive “reciprocal tariffs” on a string of countries, trade barriers were at the highest level in a century.

Given the lack of clarity about the future direction of the policy, it predicted that companies throughout the global economy were likely to respond by cutting spending.

“Faced with increased uncertainty about access to markets – their own but also those of their suppliers and customers – many firms’ initial reaction will be to pause, reduce investment, and cut purchases. Likewise, financial institutions will re-evaluate their credit supply to businesses,” it said.

“The combined increased uncertainty and resulting tightening of financial conditions are a global negative demand shock and will weigh on activity.”

The IMF added that emerging economies may be hit especially hard, as “unfavourable global financial conditions” make it harder for them to service their debts – a situation that could be exacerbated by overseas aid cuts.

The UK recently announced a historic cut to its aid budget, to fund defence spending, and Trump is battling court action as he attempts to dismantle USAID.

“More limited international development assistance may increase the pressure on low-income countries, pushing them deeper into debt or necessitating significant fiscal adjustments, with immediate consequences for growth and living standards,” the IMF said.

As finance ministers prepare to meet, the IMF called for coordinated action to reduce trade tensions, restructure low-income countries’ debts, and “address shared challenges”. It is unclear what role the US could take in any such discussion, however, given its commitment to an “America first” approach.

With stock markets on Wall Street resuming their slide on Monday, the IMF expressed concern in the report about the shock waves unleashed in financial markets by Trump’s trade policies – and said worse may be to come.

In particular, it points to the risk of “strong volatility” in currency markets, which “may be difficult to navigate, especially for emerging market economies”.

The dollar has hit a three-year low, as Trump issued further criticism of Jay Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, calling him “Mr Too Late” for failing to cut interest rates.

Further retreats have followed:

After weeks of bluster and escalation, President Trump blinked. Then he blinked again. And again.

He backed off his threat to fire the Federal Reserve chairman. His Treasury secretary, acutely aware that the S&P 500 was down 10 percent since Mr. Trump was inaugurated, signaled he was looking for an offramp to avoid an intensifying trade war with China.

And now Mr. Trump has acknowledged that the 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods that he announced just two weeks ago are not sustainable. He was prompted in part by the warnings of senior executives from Target and Walmart and other large American retailers that consumers would see price surges and empty shelves for some imported goods within a few weeks.

Mr. Trump’s encounter with reality amounted to a vivid case study in the political and economic costs of striking the hardest of hard lines. He entered this trade war imagining a simpler era in which imposing punishing tariffs would force companies around the world to build factories in the United States.

He ends the month discovering that the world of modern supply chains is far more complex than he bargained for, and that it is far from clear his “beautiful” tariffs will have the effects he predicted.

This is not, of course, the explanation of the events of the past few days that the White House is putting out. Mr. Trump’s aides insist that his maximalist demands have been an act of strategic brilliance, forcing 90 countries to line up to deal with the president. It may take months, they acknowledge, to see the concessions that will result. But bending the global trade system to American will, they say, takes time.

“Have some patience and you will see,” the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump himself insisted to reporters at the White House that everything was going according to plan.

“We have a lot of action going on,” he said, repeating his now-familiar line that “we’re not going to be a laughingstock that got taken advantage of by virtually every country in the world.” He suggested again that the United States needed to return to the halcyon era from 1870 to 1913 — the year the country began to impose income taxes — when tariffs funded the government and “we had more money than anybody.”

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Stock markets stalled on Thursday, after officials in China said they were not holding talks with the United States about easing trade tensions between the superpowers. That paused a two-day rally, as indexes continued to swing on comments and scraps of information about tariffs in the absence of concrete developments about the escalating global trade war.

The S&P 500 inched up at the start of trading, but the moves were muted. The index has seesawed this week as investors reacted to remarks by President Trump, who said this week that he was prepared to be “very nice” in trade negotiations with China. A sharp sell-off in stocks on Monday was followed by two days of sizable gains.

He Yadong, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Commerce, said on Thursday that “there are currently no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States, and any claims about progress in China-U.S. economic and trade negotiations are baseless rumors without factual evidence.”

A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Guo Jiakun, reiterated China’s stance, which is that the tariff war was started by the United States and that China would only engage in talks under certain conditions. “China’s attitude is consistent and clear: If you want to fight, we will fight to the end; if you want to talk, the door is open,” he said.

The day before, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed speculation that Mr. Trump was considering unilaterally lowering tariffs on China and emphasized that any moves to de-escalate trade tensions would need to be mutual. “I don’t think either side believes that the current tariff levels are sustainable,” he said.

Whatever eventual temporary “success” tariff bullying might bring for Trumpism’s “might is right” supremacy – and some international bourgeois capitulation is not ruled out from elements who see appeasement as their best survival option, such as the pledge by Switzerland’s Roche pharmaceuticals group to invest $50bn in America; from other corporate interests like car firms to re-direct investment; by the reputed 25% of Canadians willing to succumb to the “51st state” annexation White House bluster or the bumlicking grovels of Britain’s disgusting and desperate fatcat-serving Labourites; – the impact world wide on trade and “harmonious relations” can only be a disastrous escalation of the incipient slump conditions which have been hammering lives and livelihoods with “austerity” ever since the global meltdown and even before.

As many bourgeois reports have said, the American Smoot-Hawley protectionist tariffs of the 1930s were devastating in their impact, multiplying the already deepening impact of the capitalist created Depression which followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Credit Anstalt triggered wave of bank collapses a year or two later, – all the way into the Nazi-led (with all-sides imperialist support) World War Two crisis “solution”.

Trumpism personifies the desperation of a ruling class driven to a frenzy of viciousness and potential destruction far beyond the gross warmongering and blitzing then, and now imposed for World War Three’s opening stages through 25 years of butchering and bombing by the US and its stooges.

Millions of victims have already been blasted apart, maimed and tortured, and towns, villages, railways, dams and bridges destroyed, in country after country, from NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 (the opening shot to warm-up things up) to Afghanistan, Iraq and most of the Middle East, Libya, Syria, Sudan, the Congo and other parts of Africa, and in Ukraine through the deliberately Western-provoked war with Russia by the coup-installed Kiev Nazis and their NATO string pullers.

And that without mentioning the most grotesque barbarity of all, of outright cruel genocide savagery against the people of occupied Palestine by demented Zionism, non-stop throughout the last 75 years but now ready to deliberately bomb, drone and starve nearly two million men, women and above all, children, to death, because they dared to resist their colonial landtheft suppression.

The horrifying attempted elimination of an entire people in the long besieged Gaza Strip, and the endlessly settler-terrorised West Bank of Palestine, which has left the whole world reeling in disbelief at its cynically gleeful inhuman cruelty and Nazi-lie excuses (regurgitated neat by the BBC, Channel 4 and other bourgeois media with forelock-tugging deference - so much for “press freedom”), demonstrates just how the crisis is driving destruction and barbarity to the next level.

The fanaticism of the Jewish-Zionist colonialist occupation, and the worldwide Jewish freemasonry which supports it, has been further unleashed (if that were possible), on top of decades of non-stop massacres and repression because desperate Western imperialism itself has failed to suppress rising world revolt.

Tens of $billions in US arms, plus secret British, US and European “special-forces” military interventions, logistics backup and intelligence aid, has poured in from the Western governments, all politically egging-on this utterly inhuman repression and calculated population eradication, behind the lying excuse of “fighting terrorism”.

Imperialism is fighting terrorism in fact.

But what it designates as “terror” is no more than the rising tide of often self-sacrificing insurgency, “jihadist” revolt, and street rebellion against its centuries long world domination, not some “evil force” abstraction threatening “our values” (values like genocide??); it is the early inchoate stirring of renewed anti-imperialist revolt however crude and confused, and even sometimes negatively expressed, that now refuses to lie down and accept the tyranny and barbarism of the West’s exploitation system and no more so than among the most benightedly persecuted people of all in modern times, the Palestinians at the heart of the Arab nation and the wider Middle East (Turks, Iranians etc).

Suppressing that with an insane “war on terror” is a meaningless nonsense cover for the international blitzkrieg that imperialism alone is generating in order to shift its problems onto the rest of the world.

And it has solved nothing for the American ruling class’s (and all imperialism’s) underlying economic breakdown.

All two decades-plus of war frenzy has achieved is simply to magnify the waves of hatred, hostility and resistance which have been stirred as imperialist butchery and barbarous slaughter has rained down – a world ferment of revolt in multiple forms from the 9/11 anarcho-terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon in 2001, anti-invasion suicide-bomb and insurgency in Iraq and mass street revolt in the 2011 Arab Spring, to the intifada revolts in Palestine and the state coordinated military force fightback in Eastern Europe.

Imperialism’s problems are now made even worse by failure of the NATO backed proxy war against Russia, deliberately triggered ten years ago in CIA-subverted Ukraine (via the fascists installed in the violent 2014 Maidan “colour revolution” coup).

Yet another attempt to intimidate and bully the world, after Washington had been driven back from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and more by the anti-imperialist rebellion, is a disaster.

Imperialism needs wars to divert attention from the great slump its own system has produced, to blame bogeymen “others”, and to destroy the “surplus capital” clogging its system, but one after the other they have failed.

And the Russian scapegoat bogeyman foe has proven indigestible too.

However much Trump now pretends to be “sorting out” a solution to “achieve peace” (even while stepping up the bombing on Yemen and threatening Iran!), his pullout from the Ukraine debacle is just a cover-up for yet another defeat for the imperialist system overall and its plans to stay on top by inflicting “shock and awe” intimidation to cow an increasingly rebellious world.

The bluster simply masks the bankruptcy of American imperialism which cannot afford the tens of $billions needed to pursue the fight any further (and truth to tell could not afford what has already been spent – one of the points made by the Trumpite campaign).

In part that is for exactly the reasons Trump states – that there are much bigger fish to fry in the form of the ever expanding financial and industrial competition from China and elsewhere too.

In part it also suits Washington to end the war and avoid further expense, because its own main purpose has been achieved, that of cutting Europe down to size.

As the EPSR has said from the beginning, it is economic competition from the German dominated EU which has been a major aspect, if not the primary rationale, of the war for Washington.

European exports to America are second only to China’s in scale, and have been relentlessly making inroads for decades against US industry and commerce, outcompeting it in cars, pharmaceuticals, some electronics, and especially aerospace with Airbus now wiping the floor with Boeing for example; shutting them down is ever more crucial as the cutthroat trade wars, endemic to the imperialist system (see box), intensify to life-and-death levels in deepening slump.

With that at least temporarily contained, it is China which is by far the bigger threat for US imperialism, not Russia where Putin’s Bonapartist backwardness and Greater Russian nationalist conceit can be placated, if not manipulated, with flattery and diplomatic “recognition” of its world status.

Recognising Moscow as a significant power and “letting it back” into bodies like the G7 would satisfy the same futile craving for “status” that was an increasingly significant weakness in the revisionist Soviet bureaucracy (which trained Putin), and its philistine matching of living standards between communism and the metropolitan West.

That deluded notion, born of Stalin’s post-war notions of “outcompeting” an allegedly hamstrung West that could “no longer expand” (Economic Problems of Socialism 1952 – see EPSR Book Vol 20 Unanswered Polemics), was always impossible until the long boom imploded; imperialism would always win the shallow consumerism and glitz race because of its worldwide near-slave exploitation, feeding low cost goods into the market in the few metropolitan countries, whereas equal pay and decent conditions throughout the huge Soviet Union would never be able to tap cheap labour – nor even want to.

Even though the Soviet Union produced a reasonable life for the working class with low cost or free housing (fully heated), universal health provision, education to university level, no unemployment, brilliant cultural provision with achievements including some of the best ballet, classical composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovitch, and film, and world beating civilian and military science and technology (the first man in space for example), it could only be in the further off future of world socialism that the epoch of fully satisfied needs for all be achievable.

China meanwhile has become just as a gigantic a problem for imperialism using its workers state overall political control to direct the use of capitalist methods in some parts of the economy with such astonishing success that on some measures it already outpaces the imperialist world, including in high technology and innovation, whatever sanctions try to hold it back.

Compared to this competitive threat which is both rapidly outgrowing the West, and yet remains seemingly oriented towards a rational socialist future (despite all kinds of worrying uncertainties caused by the nationalist-revisionist confusion in Beijing and its lack of visible Leninist perspective), the Russian resistance to NATO makes the Ukraine war not worth the candle for the US.

For the European bourgeoisie things are different because it still needs a bogeyman threat to keep its own warmongering diversions going, and at the same time has much more dependency on China trade and production, especially as the US now turns against all its rivals.

Direct antagonism and brute force now supplants the more subtle “alliance” pecking order of the past which is breaking down.

Trump himself complains, with the whining tone of a spoilt and entitled child, that the EU is a deliberate creation set up to protect European monopolies and give them a chance to grow big enough to compete with the giant US corporations or “to screw America” as he phrases it.

Only the staggering arrogance of a ruling class which believes it has the eternal “right” to plunder and slave-exploit the rest of humanity could complain in this way (just as the “free trade” British Empire ruling class did in the nineteenth century when America, Germany and others took protective trade measures to nurture their own embryonic industries against then world monopoly power in Britain).

But the Biden billionaires’ wing was no different.

Sabotage destruction of the NordStream Baltic Sea gas pipelines (by American and possibly British naval forces, as everyone knows), to block off cheap Russian gas was the key evidence, hammering German industry so much that economic growth has been reduced to zero at present.

So why would the European powers go along with the war in the first place?

Because there is common imperialist interest in sustained warmongering – any warmongering virtually – as a crisis diversion.

That, along with the possibility of dismantling Russia and stifling any remaining communist influence under Putin’s Bonapartism (see past EPSRs) was also a factor.

The Bidenites kept their anti-European agenda to themselves because they still cleave to the overall NATO propaganda framework established at the end of the Second World War, which placed US bases throughout Europe, ostensibly as “defence against the Soviet invasion”.

It was always a nonsense; the “communist threat” was non-existent, nothing but an anti-communist bogeyman to scare the population.

NATO’s real purpose, along with the clandestine Gladio network of sleeper agents throughout the continent, was US occupation against revolt and rebellion within these countries themselves, for fear they would be stirred by the proximity of the triumphant Soviet camp, ready to intervene against any really socialist movement or government and even proactively fostering anti-left sentiment, as in Italy in the 1980s when a wave of terror, blamed on “left anarchists” and Red Brigades, was actually carried out by Gladio and the sinister P2-Lodge Freemasonry forces (EPSR No653 16-06-92 eg).

But it all worked as part of the great hoodwinking international “democracy and freedom” and the “rule of law” framework set up by the imperialist powers in the wake of the Second World War, the Cold War extension of the long-established bourgeois democracy fraud at home, trying to counter the huge attractions to the working class of the Soviet Union and the massive social, intellectual, military, scientific and cultural advances it was making, by pretending that capitalism could be just as fair and “peace-loving” but “more prosperous”.

That went hand in hand with a supposed new “financial” framework of international bailout banks and development stimuli like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

It was hugely expensive but effective, with the US getting the lion’s share of still continuing neo-colonial monopoly exploitation in return for “defending the world against the Red hordes”.

Pax Americana was always a giant fraud and nothing like the “40-years of peace” lyingly pretended by the bourgeoisie (including Labourite stooge in chief Keir Starmer repeating the same just recently).

Coups, massacres, terror-attacks, invasions, stitched up elections, assassinations and full scale wars have been the reality everywhere except smug Europe and America – just ask the Vietnamese, the Koreans, and the Indonesians, suffering millions of deaths in wars or coup massacres, the millions killed throughout Africa (or simply starved and sweat-shopped or polluted to death) or the tens of hundreds of thousands massacred in Latin America from El Salvador and Guatemala all the way down to Augosto Pinochet’s violent CIA-backed 1973 torture coup in Chile and military junta Argentina with its “disappeareds” (etc etc etc).

However the lie was sold to the working class in the advanced countries through the non-stop anti-communist brainwashing pumped out morning noon and night by capitalism’s media, culture, and education, and swallowed courtesy of the brainrot retreats from Leninism by Moscow dominated revisionism, especially post-war when Stalin declared that the imperialist system could no longer expand, and that only peace struggle was required to contain its warmongering tendencies.

But the reactionary wing of the ruling class, staring into the historical abyss of system failure and crisis collapse, knows this cannot continue (against the other “liberal” wing and its petty bourgeois support, trying to spin out the post-war “free world” fantasy a bit longer).

They see that the horrific “necessities” of brute force must prevail – and know the use of the Zionist fanaticism to do that in Gaza, has already fatally compromised the whole “international justice” game for good.

So every supposed certainty and stable reference point of post-WW2 assumed “freedom” and “democracy” is undermined, the long post-war “rules based system”, long swallowed by hoodwinked “popular opinion”, torn apart and all the assumptions of domestic fairness ripped up.

The slide into ever greater destruction, massacre, torture and death, on a polluted and plundered, ecologically damaged planet is now the only outcome for all mankind as long as this foetid, outmoded, disgusting and threatening imperialist exploitation order remains in place.

But without starting with the widest perspective of systemic breakdown and capitalist catastrophe, popular opinion will be dragged ever further into the mælstrom, stampeded behind grotesque hate lies, hate-fostering psyops and chauvinist demonisation (against Russia, China, Iran, and other bogeymen) the ruling class needs for its warmongering agenda.

There is no rational and reasonable solution to the belligerent fascist insanity now expressed by the White House incumbents because the whole of monopoly capitalism has hit the buffers, trapped by the great overproduction crisis inherent in the private profit chasing system (see box, Marx’s Capital, and Lenin’s Imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism).

Aggression is the inevitable path for the bourgeoisie faced with the cutthroat realities of trade war as the “free market” system pumps out ever more goods into a world where the overwhelming (99%) majority (whose labour produces all this output) simply cannot afford to buy it all - at least at the prices which have to be paid to realise any profit – because they have only received a tiny proportion of the value their labour creates (the essence of the capitalist system as Marx brilliantly discovered - see Capital).

And it can only get worse until mankind starts to rebuild the Leninist scientific understanding of intractable capitalist crisis, and the only real path out – revolutionary class-war anti-imperialist struggle to completely overturn this once dazzling and inspirational but now historically defunct and deadly degenerate tyrannical system, replacing it with planned socialist economies under the firm control of the working class.

Only planning production to balance real human needs and ecological constraints (as opposed to the nonsensically massive and wasteful overconsumption “needs” of empty fashion and celebrity chasing consumerism) using controlled output can solve these contradictions and all the human agony and pain of alienation, social antagonism, and ratrace jostling for survival they produce at every level from the individual to whole blocs of countries.

It is all easily achievable on a world scale as most of the colossal corporations created by the relentless monopolisation process of capitalism already show; their massively coordinated and slickly organised and integrated social production across continents plays all the right notes but not in the right order at all because of still serving the venality and greed of a tiny minority of private owners.

Profit motivation hugely distorts everything they do, leading to disastrous consequences as the poisoned rivers, polluted seas and relentlessly squeezed bills make clear under private equity and hedge fund ownership of the water industry; or the dysfunctional NHS, with its collapsing mortgaged PFI hospitals and profiteering pharmaceutical suppliers; obesity-causing ultra-processed food industry; life-wrecking gambling and drugs; grossly expensive but useless railways; expensive, mould-ridden, verminous, and fire-risk housing (or none at all); or elitist education but second-class and even dangerous state schools, and above all the great corrupt plundering banking and finance sector creaming off great layers of the social wealth, to name just a few others).

That means dispossessing the rotten, cynical and plundering ruling class, ending its “ownership” and control for good and establishing common ownership of the whole economy (or the great monopoly sections at the very least - perhaps absorbing the smaller business sector in good time later on).

That is only possible under the firmest control of the working class, necessarily establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, guided by revolutionary science constantly fought for by a Leninist party leadership, serving and developing the interests of the overwhelming majority and contradictorily providing the path towards the only true democracy for the first time.

How so? By ending the actual existing dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, turned over by class war revolution and rigorously policed to suppress all inklings of inevitable non-stop counter revolution, which all history demonstrates from the 1848 revolution and 1871 Paris Commune onwards, to the Chilean coup in 1973, Indonesia in 1965, and Korea Vietnamese wars etc etc etc, will be itching to drown working class rule or anti-imperialism in an ocean of blood and vicious and barbaric vengeance, along with wiping out all revolutionary knowledge and rationality (burning books, decrying science, shutting universities and swamping minds with stupidity, superstition and philistinism).

That will not happen through the fake-“left” of all kinds, still clinging to the disastrous perspectives of “democratic paths”, “peace struggle” and protest “pressure”, “multipolarity” and “make the bosses pay” reformism, for all their boasting about factory and foundry occupations, street action, “being revolutionaries” and even Marxist theory.

They are nothing of the kind, but anti-communists and opportunists, all shades, from slithery careerist trade union leaders and slick forked-tongue spin doctor Labourites, consciously “media-trained” in obfuscation (i.e. to lie through their teeth) as they run the capitalist order for the fatcat capitalists, to the “eco-warrior greens”, to “left” chauvinist “militants” like Scargillism (a justifiably admired leader of the miners strikes but permanently crippled politically with trade union bureaucratic blinkers, hostility to theory and saturated with deadly “British jobs” jingoism currently playing into the hands of the outright fascism of the Farage Reform party being built up by the media machine).

George Galloway’s chauvinist left opportunism around the Workers Party of Britain with its ridiculous Spitfire “patriotic” roundels, is no better and nor his one-time Stalinist allies in the CPGB-ML – still saying nothing about either their alliance, or the reasons for its split, in typical cover-up fashion – and assorted even worse revisionist muddleheads.

Nor are the middle class Trotskyists any improvement, filled with hatred and hostility for the workers states, past and present, which they smuggle into the rising youth and worker militancy behind much loud and shallow ultra-left posturing about “revolution” which is nothing but hollow phrasemaking and shallow reformism.

All their calls for “revolution” or occupations at closure-facing industry like Port Talbot, Scunthorpe, or Grangemouth etc are useless or even dangerous.

Obviously workers must fight against slump and closures using all such means but what they need is not glib and shallow posturing, laced with anti-Sovietism, but the deepest possible understanding and education in the full extent of the crisis they are facing and its class war solution – a profound task needing the building of a party of Leninist revolutionary science.

Deep study and the broadest wide-ranging open polemical debate on every kind of question from the economy, war, and environment to the drug devastation and social breakdown, and the alienation which produces “Adolescent”-type street crime, murder and rioting is required.

A crucial part of the work is constant exposure of the 50 shades of fake-“leftism” that saturate the working class, keeping up always with the details of ever new variants of the same old opportunism, revisionist retreats and Trot defeatism and anti-communism.

The EPSR has made good headway with the task over the last 40 years (see multiple past EPSRs and 30 books) but much more needs doing.

One group that constantly fails to learn any lessons, ignores polemics against its mistakes, and instead slyly covers them up, refusing any debate to clarify them, is the museum Stalinist CPGB-ML, producer of sister papers Lalkar and the Proletarian (the latter specifically its party organ).

The latest example is “fiery” denunciation of the Trot and “soft revisionist” fake-“left” over the downfall of the Bashir al-Assad in Syria and the ascendancy of the treacherous al-Jalani led “rebel” movement which violently overthrew the government last November.

These Western stooges, capitulating to the Zionists next door, were evolved from the al-Nusra Sunni jihadist group and others which were trapped in the north-eastern Idlib enclave by the Assad Syrian forces for some years after their expulsion from Aleppo during a decade of civil war.

Western and reactionary Gulf Arab money and covert Western military advice and arms, paid for their transformation into a well-armed organised force to storm Damascus, toppling the regime, weakened by vicious civil war and the partial occupation of the country with American troops working with Kurdish bourgeois nationalists and regionally ambitious Turkish bourgeois nationalism.

Correctly enough the CPGB-ML, now run by the Brarite family following the recent death of founder Harpal Brar, denounces the various Trot and other groups who have all lined up with the Western demonisation and hate campaigning against the Syrian regime, – supporting reactionary “rebels” as “the revolution”.

As the Proletarian says, the West and its Zionist stoogery in “Israel” has long hated Syria for refusing to kowtow completely to imperialist interests (unlike the Gulf States and Cairo) and certainly have plotted its downfall.

And disruption and sabotage were stepped up in 2011 because of the crisis driven Arab Spring revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, artificially whipping up a petty bourgeois revolt bogus extension to Arab Spring, trying to contain the street eruptions in Cairo, as they did also in Libya.

But the Brarites, get everything else wrong and all the worse for repeating the same mistakes they have made before, namely by advocating all out support for the flaky and dubious bourgeois nationalist regimes that imperialism has targeted.

That was wrong over Serbia, where they told workers to back completely the disastrous opportunism of Slobodan Milosevic as a path forwards, rather than simply to make the Leninist call for defeat of the barbaric and fraudulent NATO onslaught (trying to eliminate every last shred of the socialist Yugoslav legacy) while warning workers not to trust the post-socialist revisionist-nationalism Belgrade had degenerated into under revisionist influences even during the Tito period (who reflected an overall retreat from Lenin, rather than being some particular renegade as Moscow wanted to say).

The Marxist analysis of Serbia’s almost inevitable failure under Milosevic’s misleadership because of its hopelessly dogmatic and nationalist post-Revisionist character, proved to be correct (EPSR No1080)

– as shown by his capitulation to the Western onslaught without a fight.

Similar insistence on the need to cheer on a “victory” followed with the invasion of Iraq, again telling workers to trust in an even flakier leadership, this time calling for all-out support for the pseudo-socialist Ba’athism of the thuggish Saddam Hussein, rather than solely calling for the Western imperialist onslaught to be defeated (however that might happen).

Again the “anti-imperialist” posturing in Baghdad capitulated with little fight.

But the Brarites continue with the same erroneous line into the further escalated Western warmongering as the crisis has intensified, again calling for all out support for the unreliable and dubious bourgeois nationalisms of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Bashir al-Assad in Syria, both picked on as victims by imperialism because of their relative intransigence against the West, and occasional anti-imperialist form but both with dubious records in past erratic and downright opportunist actions.

Despite some progressive moves in Africa, Gaddafi had a long and confused history, variously consorting with and even funding assorted Trotskyists such as Gerry Healy’s WRP (ignored by the anti-Trot CPGB-ML); agreeing to suspect deals with imperialists like Tony Blair (not ruled out diplomatically but needing Leninist grasp); supplying troops to the monstrous British stooge Idi Amin in Uganda at one point; and even denouncing the Arab Spring as “invalid” for overturning the vicious Zionist-collaborating US-funded dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

The Assads let themselves be bought off by imperialism to stand back from the 1990 Gulf War attack on Iraq, and joined in with the imperialist “war on terror”, condemning all the complex anti-Western stirrings of “jihadism” and revolt as just “terrorism” (as the Lalkarites also do now all the way back to the 9/11 attacks, all declared, ridiculously and defeatistly, to be “mercenary forces organised by the West”).

The tangle of contradictions the Proletarianites get into with this sly sophistry, which sees them line up with the rest of the fake-“left” to “condemn terrorism”, includes such simple points as to why islamist “headbangers” are decried as reactionary in Syria, and particularly the Sunni sects, yet are declared to be anti-imperialist fighters in Gaza (Hamas is a Sunni group) and why religious backwardness is decried for some groups but others are upheld as not only progressive but the path forwards, not least the entire reactionary Islamic regime in Iran (complete with anti-communist repression and executions).

The Hezbollah in Lebanon is deemed part of anti-imperialist resistance, correctly enough, but the Sinai anti-Zionist and anti-Cairo-dictatorship rebel “terrorist” group is declared beyond the pale.

These Assad confusions tie in with the Stalin originated post-war notion of “peace struggle” supplanting the revolutionary struggle as the overall priority. As the EPSR said just before its polemical meeting with Lalkar in 2003 (when the group at least agreed to a public debate, unlike its behaviour currently in refusing entry to its public meetings in best, fearful, sectarian style):

Moscow’s weak-minded determination to discourage “revolutionary provocations”, which led the mighty German CP to sleepwalk into total annihilation in 1933 and the Indonesian CP (even bigger and even more impressive) to do the same in 1965, - never stopped pretending that anti-imperialist nationalism (e.g. the Sukarno regime pre-1965 in Indonesia) was just as good for the eventual triumph of world socialism (via the Soviet camp winning the peaceful competition with the imperialist camp) as all-the-way revolutionary socialist regimes.

In such Revisionist thinking, once Saddam had stopped being a totally tame stooge of US imperialist policy in the 1970s and had started doing arms deals with the Soviet Union, - then nothing further should be anticipated than the continued onward triumphal march of Moscow’s international “anti-imperialist” coalition of the Socialist Camp, the Non-Aligned states of national-liberation, and the world communist movement.

The obvious total collapse of this Revisionist nonsense post-1990 still cannot register with Stalin worship sectarianism. Naturally, in the world of such long-standing gradualist delusions, such spontaneous “anti-imperialism” resistance (as Saddamism had evolved into under decaying monopoly capitalist pressure would “inevitably go the whole hog one day into total socialist defiance and independence”; – just like it was supposed to happen the whole world over in the good old days of Stalinism. What sad rot. (EPSR Books Vol 20 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism).

Much more needs untangling about the “jihadism” question but for the moment the salient point is that once again the insistence on outright support for a dubious regime has been shown as more “sad rot”, yet the Proletarian-ites still will not accept the lesson even though they themselves have declared what a rotten edifice they were propping up:

While Israel and Turkey had clear and deep involvement in the operation that broke the back of a Syrian regime that proved to have been slowly rotting from within, the ultimate architects of the siege, terrorise, divide and occupy strategy were the US imperialists, enthusiastically assisted by their British counterparts for nearly 14 years of dirty warfare. [emphasis added].

The dissembling notion that “noone could have known” implied by the “proved to be” is made even more dishonest, in the usual cover-up style, by the latest justification from Proletarian lashing out at “our working class movements” - trade union and “lefts” – for their betrayal of Syria as

the Middle East’s longest surviving sovereign territory.

All true enough and deserving of utter contempt for craven class collaboration and opportunism.

But the Brarites’ “fiery” polemic delivered at a meeting in Tunis of the Alba Granada North Africa organisation, whatever that is, deliberately ignores their own paper’s own assessment, to revert to the nonsense that

the Syrian Arab Republic refused to normalise with the zionist Israel and remained a steadfast friend to the cause of Palestinian liberation and a reliable base for Palestinian resistance movements.

Making matters even worse, the treacherous “lefts” are berated not for their dire and hopeless social-pacifism and failure to call for defeat for imperialism – the Leninist policy, which alone can open up possibilities for anti-imperialist and socialist revolution – but by declaring that they were not pacifist enough!

At enormous length the CPGB-MLers recap their battles in the Stop the War movement for greater activism:

Back in 2009, my party took a motion to Stop the War’s national conference. In those days, the antiwar movement was still large and vibrant, with many active local branches. The assembled delegates overwhelmingly endorsed the motion that we presented, which called for the instigation of a campaign of mass non-cooperation with the British war machine – which at that time was focusing its efforts on Iraq and Afghanistan.

That resolution required Stop the War to “do all in its power to promote a movement of industrial, political and military non-cooperation with all of imperialism’s aggressive war preparations and activities among British working people”. The steering committee was instructed “to campaign vigorously among trade unions to encourage them to adopt a practical policy … [of refusing] to support illegal wars or occupations directly or indirectly”.

On the day that their members voted that motion through, Stop the War’s leaders raised no objections. They did not dare to openly express their hostility to such a line at a time when antiwar sentiment was running so high. This was, after all, a time when many workers were realising just how badly they had been lied to when the war in Iraq was being launched. They wanted to do something to end the bloodshed, and they approved the proposals our party put forward.

So in classic bureaucratic, social-democratic fashion, the leadership allowed the resolution to be passed and then quietly shelved it. [..]

In 2010, our party reminded the organisation that it had taken this position, and that it must be implemented. Again, the conference overwhelmingly endorsed a motion that instructed Stop the War’s leaders to launch “a full campaign inside the unions to draw attention to British, US and Israeli war crimes, with the aim of passing in each of them, and then at the TUC, motions condemning those crimes and calling on workers to refuse to cooperate in their commission, whether it be by making or moving munitions or other equipment, writing or broadcasting propaganda, or helping in any other way to smooth the path of the war machine”.

This second resolution was also shelved and ignored.

Instead says the Proletarian, it was essentially expelled by a cabal of Trotskyist groups who capitulated to demonising of the Syrian and Libyan regimes

the Trotskyites and ‘official’ working-class and antiwar leaders play their part in reinforcing this hysteria by claiming to have knowledge of an allegedly ‘mass’, ‘working-class’ opposition to the targeted government. Very often, they are more hysterical even than the rabid warmongers in denouncing the supposed ‘crimes’ of the governments (always referred to as ‘dictatorships’) being targeted (as, for example, in the cases of Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe, Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi or Russia’s President Putin). The result is that whatever ‘antiwar’ slogans they later produce are purely tokenistic: a bit of pacifist handwringing about the ‘nasty violence’ that is being used to achieve an aim that they have fundamentally endorsed.

In the case of Syria, Stop the War’s leaders left it to their allied Trotskyites to dominate the floor of meetings and tell lies about what was happening in the country. In the case of Libya, they were much more blatant. Just when the British people were being inundated with lies about Libya and Colonel Gaddafi by politicians and media, the StW leadership responded not by exposing these lies but by organising a picket outside the Libyan embassy to protest Gaddafi’s supposed “crimes against his people”!

And when my party criticised and exposed this war-enabling activity by our supposedly antiwar leaders, which was carried out just as Nato’s blitzkrieg was being prepared and the imperialist propaganda campaign was reaching fever pitch, we were promptly expelled from the organisation (by a leadership that had never been elected and according to no official rulebook).

All this Trot poison should certainly be thoroughly denounced but what does the CPGB-ML think it is doing in StW in the first place however “large and vibrant” – and much worse, pretending that it would be possible to halt the imperialist warmongering by “non-cooperation and strikes”???

That is a million miles from anything Lenin ever said:

We accomplished the task of getting out of the most reactionary imperialist war in a revolutionary way. That, too, is a gain no power on earth can deprive us of; it is a gain which is all the more valuable for the reason that reactionary imperialist massacres are inevitable in the not distant future if capitalism continues to exist; and the people of the twentieth century will not be so easily satisfied with a second edition of the “Basle Manifesto”, with which the renegades, the heroes of the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals, fooled themselves and the workers in 1912 and 1914-18.

Notes of a publicist (Feb 1922)

 

“We shall retaliate to war by a strike or a revolution” that is what all the prominent reformist leaders usually say to the working class. And very often the seeming radicalness of the measures proposed satisfies and appeases the workers, co-operators and peasants.

Perhaps the most correct method would be to start with the sharpest refutation of this opinion; to declare that particularly now, after the recent war, only the most foolish or utterly dishonest people can assert that such an answer to the question of combating war is of any use; to declare that it is impossible to “retaliate” to war by a strike, just as it is impossible to “retaliate” to war by revolution in the simple and literal sense of these terms.

We must explain the real situation to the people, show them that war is hatched in the greatest secrecy, and that the ordinary workers’ organisations, even if they call themselves revolutionary organisations, are utterly helpless in face of a really impending war.

We must explain to the people again and again in the most concrete manner possible how matters stood in the last war, and why they could not have been otherwise.

We must take special pains to explain that the question of “defence of the fatherland” will inevitably arise, and that the overwhelming majority of the working people will inevitably decide it in favour of their bourgeoisie.

Therefore, first, it is necessary to explain what “defence of the fatherland” means. Second, in connection with this, it is necessary to explain what “defeatism” means. Lastly, we must explain that the only possible method of combating war is to preserve existing, and to form new, illegal organisations in which all revolutionaries taking part in a war carry on prolonged anti-war activities - all this must be brought into the forefront.

Boycott war - that is a silly catch-phrase. Communists must take part in every war, even the most reactionary.

Examples from, say, pre-war German literature, and in particular, the example of the Basle Congress of 1912, should be used as especially concrete proof that the theoretical admission that war is criminal, that socialists cannot condone war, etc., turn out to be empty phrases, because there is nothing concrete in them. The masses are not given a really vivid idea of how war may and will creep up on them. On the contrary, every day the dominant press, in an infinite number of copies, obscures this question and weaves such lies around it that the feeble socialist press is absolutely impotent against it, the more so that even in time of peace it propounds fundamentally erroneous views on this point. In all probability, the communist press in most countries will also disgrace itself.

I think that our delegates at the International Congress of Co-operators and Trade Unionists should distribute their functions among themselves and expose all the sophistries that are being advanced at the present time in justification of war.

These sophistries are, perhaps, the principal means by which the bourgeois press rallies the masses in support of war; and the main reason why we are so impotent in face of war is either that we do not expose these sophistries beforehand, or still more that we, in the spirit of the Basle Manifesto of 1912, waive them aside with the cheap, boastful and utterly empty phrase that we shall not allow war to break out, that we fully understand that war is a crime, etc.

I think that if we have several people at The Hague Conference who are capable of delivering speeches against war in various languages, the most important thing would be to refute the opinion that the delegates at the Conference are opponents of war, that they understand how war may and will come upon them at the most unexpected moment, that they to any extent understand what methods should be adopted to combat war, that they are to any extent in a position to adopt reasonable and effective measures to combat war.

Using the experience of the recent war to illustrate the point, we must explain what a host of both theoretical and practical questions will arise on the morrow of the declaration of war, and that the vast majority of the men called up for military service will have no opportunity to examine these questions with anything like clear heads, or in a conscientious and unprejudiced manner.

I think that this question must be explained in extraordinary detail, and in two ways:

First, by relating and analysing what happened during the last war and telling all those present that they are ignorant of this, or pretend that they know about it, but actually shut their eyes to what is the very pivot of the question which must be understood if any real efforts are to be made to combat war.

Secondly, we must take the present conflicts, even the most insignificant, to illustrate the fact that war may break out any day as a consequence of a dispute between Great Britain and France over some point of their treaty with Turkey, or between the U.S.A. and Japan over some trivial disagreement on any Pacific question, or between any of the big powers over colonies, tariffs, or general commercial policy, etc., etc.

Perhaps on a number of questions the mere quoting of facts of the last war will be sufficient to produce serious effect. Perhaps on a number of other questions serious effect can be produced only by explaining the conflicts that exist today between the various countries and how likely they are to develop into armed collisions.

Apropos of the question of combating war, I remember that a number of declarations have been made by our Communist deputies, in parliament and outside parliament, which contain monstrously incorrect and monstrously thoughtless statements on this subject. I think these declarations, particularly if they have been made since the war, must be subjected to determined and ruthless criticism, and the name of each person who made them should be mentioned. Opinion concerning these speakers may be expressed in the mildest terms, particularly if circumstances require it, but not a single case of this kind should be passed over in silence, for thoughtlessness on this question is an evil that outweighs all others and cannot be treated lightly.

Dec 1922 Notes on tasks of our delegation at the Hague

The Brarites like to cite the Hands off Russia movement as evidence “workers can stop war” but it only makes matters worse, proving the exact opposite:

To our great shame, the last time the working class successfully organised against a British war intervention was over a century ago. On 10 May 1920, inspired by communist leader Harry Pollitt and the communist-led ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, the dockers and stevedores of London refused to load arms and ammunition onto a ship called the Jolly George, giving such a lead to the whole working class that it went on to defeat the British bourgeoisie’s planned invasion of revolutionary Russia.

The working-class campaign against the invasion included mass protests in Trafalgar Square, but it achieved victory because workers collectively refused to participate in the invasion – not just as soldiers but also as facilitators, as aiders and abettors. Not only did a very shaken British government back down, but it was quick to also grant some pension and unemployment concessions to a working class whose militance was posing a direct threat to the stability of British capitalist rule.

It is not a question of moral “shame” but concrete realities; that movement had an impact (to some extent) because it was an offshoot expression of the revolutionary ferment throughout Europe in the exhausted wake of the horrifying Great War, inflamed by and supporting the staggering and historic Bolshevik Revolution, the most important event in history to that moment.

It thereby makes the point that revolution stops war and not peace protest – and while the Bolshevik slogan in 1917 was “Peace, Bread and Land” that was a revolutionary demand, not a pacifist programme, – a point reinforced by the subsequent absence of any repeat “stop war” success, even in the run up to WW2.

For the Brarites to eulogise Pollitt again only adds to the “shame” of this revisionist gobshyte as the EPSR has said before:

‘So what is it but a total Revision of Marxism-Leninism for Harry Pollitt, Moscow-approved boss of the Soviet subsidised communist party in Britain, to be writing in 1947 in his book Looking Ahead the following rotten deception of the working class, already relentlessly leading towards the complete collapse of the communist movement eventually:

The progress of democratic and Socialist forces throughout the world has opened out new possibilities of transition to Socialism by other paths than those followed by the Russian Revolution.... It is possible to see how the people will move towards Socialism without further revolution, without the dictatorship of the proletariat... Thus there exists today new possibilities of advance to Socialism in Britain also, new ways in which power can be removed from the hands of the capitalist class . . . (Looking Ahead, pp. 88-89 emphasis added).

It is farcical to pretend that the subsidised British CP was pursuing this class collaborative reformist line without Moscow’s knowledge and approval; and years later, as a result of communist movement fall-outs over rival Revisionist retreats into stupidity and decay, Stalinist Moscow’s involvement in this retreat from a Marxist understanding of the world was spelled out in a report to the British CP’s executive committee, on Sept 14, 1963, as reported in the Daily Worker four days later:

General Secretary John Gollan

We saw Long live Leninism [the book published by the Chinese Communist on the 90th anniversary of Lenin’s birth - it was an attack on reformism and revisionism as personified by the Tito leadership of the Yugoslav CP] and the general Chinese Party approach not only as a dispute with the CPSU but also a challenge to the general line of our Party embodied in our programme The British Road to Socialism... We should note that the British Road was published in 1951 – before the 20th Congress and while Stalin was still alive. The Chinese comrades by implication suggest that Stalin was against the concept of the possible peaceful transition to Socialism.

The British Road to Socialism was published in full in Pravda with Stalin’s full approval.

(Daily Worker, September 18, 1963 - emphasis added).

Establishing these matters would be of little value now in itself if it were not for this peculiar blockage (in the aftermath of the communist movement’s disintegration in Revisionist confusion) whereby “left pressure” reformist democracy is still being peddled to workers as the “path to socialism” (SLP, etc);

More useful in the course of this rehash is the clarification once again of the ESSENTIAL problem which eventually undermined the Soviet workers state and disintegrated the world communist movement, – the stifling by Stalinism of the polemical mechanism by which alone a world party of revolutionary theory can survive and flourish; and the steady adoption thereby of a perspective for world struggle which, under Stalinism from early on, started to become a travesty of Leninism, and had become a mixture of anti-revolutionary and counter-revolution rot by the end of Stalinism’s influence, (taking sides with US imperialism to denounce “terrorism”, – a stinking, Moscow, class collaboration line still continued by the SLP Stalinists, e.g.).

Specific anti-Stalinist arguments such as the issues which the EPSR has been pursuing, might be fruitful for getting serious polemics going again, at last, within the totally constipated British labour movement (where even the notion of the role of a party of revolutionary theory gets only a blank response from the entire fake-’left’ swamp), – such polemics at some stage likely to become the starting off point for the rebirth of a serious Marxist-Leninist party again in due course.’ (EPSR Book Vol 20 Unanswered Polemics - ibid)

But another aspect of all this posturing is that the Brarites make little connection between the Western onslaughts on Libya and Syria , and the overall imperialist Catastrophe.

And while they make token allusions to the crisis – it could hardly be ignored over the last decades as austerity has bitten deeply, normalising a world of foodbanks, hidden and not-so-hidden child poverty, rundown or completely shutdown and sold off local council provision (including the notorious road maintenance failures producing potholes by the million) – they still do not give a perspective that really grasps it as a world shattering and disrupting impasse, paralysing minds everywhere.

Both these Western scapegoating wars are inextricably linked with the crisis as part of the plunge towards World War Three but each is treated separately as being essentially about one-off victim countries simply because of their sometime anti-imperialism drawing the ire of routine imperialist expansionism.

And this emerges from the same revisionist perspective equating anti-imperialist bourgeois nationalism with steady progress transforming them into a socialist future, an utterly disarming and false notion.

So much is this disconnection informing the CPGB-ML that when the Syrian civil war seemed to be over a couple of years ago it gushed on about the country now having the chance to rebuild – ignoring completely the hurricane of world crisis that offers no-one any future until the entire monopoly capitalist system is overturned.

Nor has it ever placed both Libya and Syria into the world revolutionary upheaval which saw a gigantic leap forwards in the wake of the global credit meltdown, finding its expression in the eruptions first in Tunisia and then giant Egypt, biggest and most significant of all the countries in the Arab world and with its most significant anti-imperialist history, particularly in the post-WW2 period and Nasser government, and much Soviet influence (including building the Aswan Dam and the Soviet threats to intervene in the 1956 Franco-British-Zionist Suez invasion, (forcing US imperialism to intervene, slapping down the older “has-been” imperialists – a debacle for Europe which demonstrated sharply the shifted world balance of the imperialist pecking order).

The assassination of Zionist collaborating Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in the early 1980s showed that turmoil remained just beneath the surface.

Then it was the spontaneous 2011 street revolts in Tunis and Cairo, and spreading influence in the Arab world, into Bahrain and Yemen and even Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coast which led the West to trigger its CIA-Zionist “sleeper” counter-revolutionaries in Libya and Syria, to try and produce a bogus extension of the Arab Spring among petty bourgeois elements to contain Egypt’s turmoil, so unsuccessfully that the situation had to be rescued with direct NATO intervention against Gaddafi, and the artificial Syrian “uprising” needed 15 years to work through.

In one of two confusing pieces earlier this year, the Proletarian does finally make a passing reference to the Arab Spring (after the EPSR had repeatedly made the point) but only to get things upside down, declaring that the US “took advantage” of the Arab Spring to “mount a regime change in Syria”.

But this is a complete inversion, coloured heavily by the relentless defeatism of petty bourgeois subjectivism, implying that the US bourgeoisie was in charge of the situation, and that the whole Arab Spring was a side issue, merely “giving cover” to the imperialist machinations, with the main focus on Syria (and to some extent Libya).

A second CPGB-ML piece confusingly elaborates a bit further, correctly declaring the falsity of any notion that uprisings in these two countries were genuinely the Arab Spring, but still managing to suggest imperialism was in overall charge “using” the events, instead of them demonstrating the blind panic that this colossal Middle Eastern turmoil created in the Western capitals and intelligence circles:

It must be mentioned at this stage that the period known as the ‘Arab Spring’ is one that is often mischaracterised and manipulated by imperialism. The grinding poverty of the masses in countries like Tunisia and Egypt produced movements that were strongly backed by the working class of these countries against Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, both of whom were long term stooges of imperialism, the tragedy in both cases being that the workers and peasants of both countries found power snatched away from them after these regimes fell. When power falls into the street the question becomes one of who can pick it up. After the elections in Egypt delivered the Muslim Brotherhood into power and Mohammed Morsi became President, a military coup swiftly followed at the behest of imperialism, and Morsi went from President to prisoner very quickly as the stooge regime of General Sisi was imposed.

Notice how the advent of the MB and subsequent military coup events, not “swift” but stretched over more than two years of dramatic event-filled mass movement, needing massive analysis and theoretical guidance, are quickly slid past, with the implication that the Mohamed Morsi election was just a defeat for the working class with “power snatched away”.

What slippery dissembling!!

Lalkar/Proletarian does not want spell anything out because their wooden undialectical notions, founded in their fixed view of “sovereignty” and delusions in “democratic paths” missed the significance of the Arab Spring completely, and particularly the giant blow it struck to Western confidence, just when it was reeling from cataclysmic bank disasters (the street revolt triggered by that economic crisis hitting Egypt in the concrete form of massively increased bread prices but also much more generally).

They sneer at the Muslim Brotherhood as “backward religious reactionaries” but fail to see that the toppling of Mubarak’s military dictatorship was a jump to a new mass participation level in the already seething “terrorist” resistance in Iraq particularly – and while the MB was a stopgap measure for the West (just as the Ayatollahs were in Iran after the 1979 revolution – tolerated by Washington because better than the communism that would fill the vacuum otherwise) it was also opening up the mass movement. It also tapped into huge sympathy for the Palestinian struggle next door, where Hamas is after all an offshoot of the MB, with a surge of aid and support crossing from Egypt into Gaza.

No wonder a military coup was stitched together (almost certainly under Zionist pressure) brutally deposing the MB in summer 2013 with bloody street violence cold-bloodedly killing hundreds of protestors.

And what did the CPGB-MLers say???

They effectively cheered the toppling of the MB with obscene gush about the “cheering crowds” and colourful green lasers and fireworks, welcoming the takeover.

Like everything else these mountebanks do, that has all been covered up since, even as the General Sisi “presidency” has been revealed as one of the nastiest torture and murder regimes yet in Egypt or the Middle East, which they now sometimes decry but without a word of their former misleading nonsense.

Such is the disastrous outcome of abandoning any living open Marxist p0lemical development in favour of revisionist dogma and instructionalist “party building” covering up mistake after mistake.

The most egregious of all their cover ups currently is the continued hero-worship for Stalin with yet another eulogising article published just recently, without a mention of the multiple philosophical and political mistakes which began to be made from the 1920s onwards, despite the giant achievements made in building and maintaining the Soviet workers state under his leadership.

And most glaring of all is the absence of any reference to Stalin’s disastrous post-war recognition of the “official” founding of the Zionist state, by the US controlled and imperialist dominated United Nations, not only being one of the first to vote for the gross “partition” which sanctified the handing over of much of the Palestinians’ land to the colonialist usurpers, but even initially supplied arms to them.

This was in 1948, long before Stalin’s death and therefore not blameable as the Lalkar/Proletarian likes to do, on his follow on Soviet leader Kruschev.

As the EPSR has long demonstrated, the “Kruschev to blame” excuse is nonsensical as the following polemic demonstrated against the CPI-M from which Lalkar’s politics emerged

The fraud of this politics is underlined the recent posted resolution from the CPGB-ML’s congress declaring that “workers are looking for answers about the roots of the Palestinian struggle”.

They will not get them through this kind of dishonesty.

Build Leninism Don Hoskins

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