Current paper

No 1663 27th September 2025

US monopoly capitalist drive to escape unsolvable overproduction crisis using brute force to bully the rest of the world into paying its unsustainable debts, destroys the whole bogus edifice of anti-communist “freedom, democracy and rule of law” deluding humanity for the last century. Class rule of the billionaires now shows again its barbaric teeth, commonly called “fascism” but simply the true face of bourgeois dictatorship. In history’s greatest irony the victim of capitalism’s last war horror now used in Zionist form as the main genocidal war instrument. Trump/Zionist Nazism, against the whole world, makes clear the need to end capitalism. Idiot revisionism (Stalinist and Trot) still blocks the revolutionary path as “Your Party” shows. Leninism the vital need

Trump’s ranting and aggressive speech berating the whole world, (save its rottweiler instrument “Israel”) at useless stooge United Nations; outright backing for the berserk and horrifying Zionist genocide wilfully eradicating Palestine’s people; Washington’s obvious lies over backing the missile attack on Qatar (to terrorise all Arab masses); pending war on Iran: a wave of colour revolutions in Asia (to undermine China); and massacres of innocent Caribbean fisher boats off Venezuela, – all signal another lurch in the Empire’s plunge to World War Three.

Possibly, escalated war threats against Russia behind outrageous “they attacked us” Polish “overflight” lies about drones or Estonian “fighter airspace intrusions” – all about as credible as the Gulf of Tonkin Vietnam war excuse, Tony Blair’s “WMD” fabrications against Iraq or the German Gleiwitz radio station charade for 1939’s blitzkrieg on Poland – add to the list, though the despised debt ridden European NATO powers may be on their own with that one, unless they pay up for costly US arms.

Even without Ukraine war fabrications, Trumpism increasingly resembles the deranged belligerence of Adolf Hitler with lurid threats in all directions internationally, and censorious repression at home, where McCarthyism on steroids now tramples across the “sacred” US Constitution, shuts down “liberals” and “democrats”, closes newspapers and TV shows, and whips academics into line at even the great and wealthy universities, like the cowed Harvard and colluding Columbia.

Statistics that don’t suit the agenda must be “re-calculated” or the federal collectors be fired, judges must be sacked when they make “wrong” decisions (especially against Trump) and medics and physicians must tear up their training in favour of prejudice and quackery.

Can bonfires of banned books be long behind when the Internet is blanked off by barmy “moral crusade” religious fundamentalism and federal museums and galleries must submit even their exhibit tags for vetting approval against anything deemed too “liberal” or not supportive enough for Trump?

Or the suppression of artworks deemed “decadent” (or perhaps “woke”?)

Just hyperbole? But domestic terrorising is already being enforced with a new Gestapo, the masked (!) ICE men (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) rampaging, under direct presidential order only, across the States to terrorise, torture and incarcerate hapless, mostly innocent, scapegoated minorities of all kinds with racist hatred and hostility, turkey-shooting them along the Mexico border or rounding them up into vicious “outsourced” concentration camps in Guantánamo, and El Salvador, courtesy of that country’s nasty little Nazi thug president Nayib Bukele – at least until more camps are built in the States themselves (or re-purposed perhaps from disused airbases as the British ruling class is already doing, via the disgusting stoogery of the still-Blairite Starmer Labour Party, persecuting asylum seekers).

Cities like Chicago are being occupied by federal military forces, again answerable to the dictatorial president.

And now in the Charlie Kirk shooting, the Trumpites have their very own Horst Wessel, the German martyr figure constructed from a Brownshirt stormtrooper officer who was killed during an anti-communist skirmish in 1930, with a song he wrote then used as the Nazi National Anthem.

The smug and complacent “lefts” still denying that this is fascism because it does not fit their academic undialectical wooden definitions will have a lot to answer for in the comfort(!) of their cells, from the shallow Trots like the RCP to the stale reformism of the sectarian museum-Stalinists.

As the EPSR has made clear, fascism is nothing more than a turn to increased and obvious repression and international aggression by the increasingly desperate bourgeois dictatorship (which controls everything), when the intractable economic crisis begins to shake its grip.

Certainly the bourgeoisie world wide is playing with jingoism and scapegoating through overtly fascist groups like the Tommy Robinson Unite the Kingdom and Advance UK but to declare that this should be the focus is to miss that capitalism itself is the problem as the EPSR has explained before:

A looming blind-alley disaster for the working class will be the political extension of the misdirected posturing against thug celebrities which will try to make “stopping the fascists” the main strategy for the socialist movement.

Every catastrophic historical mistake that Revisionism and Trotskyism made between them will be reimposed by such fatal shallowness.

Never in history has the problem been fascism as such, and neither is it now.

The problem is always the social and economic conditions of crisis being sown by the capitalist system as a whole which the fascists take political advantage of, just one of a variety of negative political and social symptoms which the crisis creates.

Just “stopping” one symptom by “halting fascism’s march” is a) utterly pointless; and b) almost certainly futile anyway.

The essence of all ‘fascist’ repressive reaction in a crisis is to cow the working class to make it bear (in unemployment and poverty, etc) the burdens of the economic crisis; to divide the working class tribally to make them more easily pacified and less capable of organising a revolution; and to divert the working class and petty bourgeoisie into ‘patriotic’ war-chauvinist channels by playing on the ‘national interest’ in xenophobic conflict with ‘foreign’ enemies of one kind or another.

In every international economic crisis in history, every single capitalist state has always gone down this repressive reactionary route.

Only in very rare special circumstances has a named specific fascist party had to be put into office in order to achieve the basic task in every crisis-situation, namely, the survival of the capitalist-bourgeois system despite the cataclysmic horrors of slump, reaction, war, and destruction it has led a country into.

In other words, ‘fascist’ parties as such are a purely incidental phenomenon of capitalist warmongering crisis, — a symptom, not the cause.

For a workers movement ever to declare “Halt the slide into fascist reaction” to be either a sensible or an achievable aim is to make a declaration of total reformist confusion, bankruptcy, and futility.

Currently, this anti-revolutionary anti-Marxist muddle-headedness finds its spontaneous expressions in “Stop the BNP” and “Punish Bowyer and Woodgate”, etc, etc. (Or the EDL now etc - ed).

It is the wrong political education for the working class entirely, hopelessly misleading it that all that is going wrong with capitalism is a temporary reactionary hiccup which can quickly be sorted out with some energetic anti-fascist protest marches and some stiffer punishments all round for racist hooliganism. Not so.

The international imperialist-system crisis the world is approaching is total and deadly. (EPSR Perspectives 2002)

This much was clear 23 years ago, and the world has seen relentless decline into war and breakdown ever since, its worst effects only held off by insane dollar printing (storing up even bigger crisis disaster).

And now Trumpism makes the point even more glaringly, after two decades of barbaric but failed partial warmongering (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Gaza and Ukraine and more) has shown that massacre and torture world bullying has not begun to solve imperialism’s Catastrophic economic implosion.

It cannot – it can only make things ever worse, stirring hatred and hostility across the planet as it has done everywhere.

To maintain its rule the bankrupt Empire now has only brute force, terror-threatening the whole world to keep paying up or face “the consequences”, with tariff punishment or outright blitzing for those who challenge Washington’s rule, financially, economically, commercially or by revolutionary turmoil.

It is Mafia protectionism writ large by the ever more concentrated power of the monopolies.

All logic and reason is now being torn up for good by the collapsing capitalist order, riven by the paralysing contradictions built into this outdated and degenerate system which has no way out of its crisis breakdown except total war destruction and conflict (see box, the Communist Manifesto, Capital and especially Lenin’s Collected Works explaining the unstoppability of world war, as well as multiple past issues of the EPSR and its books).

It is not being torn up because of “more aggressive” elements of the ruling class are in power, but totally abandoned because the crisis is now so great it can no longer be afforded, forcing the hand of all the bourgeois ruling class everywhere (and its willing middle class stoogery like Blairism/Starmerism).

The bribery which paid for a worldwide network of local fascist satraps from Haïti to the Arab Gulf states to Indonesia, along with a modicum of “charity” bandaging for consequent Third World poverty, like USAID, can no longer be afforded either.

As Marxist science alone has been warning for decades but especially since the 2008 global economic meltdown, no room at all remains for the hoodwinking fraud of an international order of “freedom, democracy, international justice, fair dealing and rising prosperity”, as even more and more nervous petty bourgeois commentators are fearfully declaring.

The whole wobbling paper maché façade has always been a giant lying racket like all bourgeois “democracy” – a giant confidence trick built up over centuries to keep the masses compliant and docile (in the richer centres), which it did well, and extended as a New World Order after 1945, hiding the brute rule of the dictatorship of big monopoly capital which actually runs things and always has done.

The only exceptions have been the USSR for 70 years, the wider post-WW2 Soviet camp, and to some extent the rationality lingering on in the workers states like China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea despite revisionist delusions, complacency and retreat from revolutionary grasp, and to some extent in anti-imperialist nationalism like Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua etc.

There, where the grip of the bourgeoisie was broken by revolution, and eliminated, and common ownership established over all society’s resources, the only real democracy possible was established, that of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the majority, heading in long term development for a completely rational self-disciplined society where no coercive state would be required at all (see Lenin State and Revolution).

It faltered only because that Leninist scientific path and its constant development, was not held to firmly by Stalinist revisionism, eventually capitulating to petty bourgeois idealist liquidationism and deluded “democracy and the free market” imbecility under Gorbachev.

But that was not before even the flawed revisionist leadership in Moscow was able to demonstrate the colossal potential of scientifically guided socialist society, making staggering and titanic technological, social, scientific and cultural achievements for 70+ years in the teeth of relentless subversion, disruption, sabotage, encircling nuclear intimidation and sometimes outright invasion (not least Hitler’s).

But there is little rationality in monopoly capitalism other than the inhuman pursuit of profit and the mechanistic philosophy and science of the bourgeoisie which arose to serve its needs.

It was an advance on the superstition and mysticism of the feudal epoch, enabling great technological advance, but one-sided and off-balance and incapable of seeing or coping with the system’s fatal contradictions always leading to crisis disaster and destruction.

Most of even that critical realism is abandoned now in imperialist collapse – just the raw class interests remaining of the tiny group of monopoly finance and corporate titans and smaller fry billionaires, who all serve the great accumulations of capital that just relentless increase – and become ever less able to make any profit as a result (see box).

They are heading for the greatest bursting of the most insanely overblown credit bubble in all history (like the frenzied cryptocurrency and AI “boom” currently, which make the Roaring Twenties prelude to the 1929 Wall Street Crash look like a tea party – and not in the Boston revolutionary sense).

As the EPSR said when the great world war slide was becoming obvious at the turn of the century (following its beginnings in the blitzing of Serbia and Afghanistan and readying Iraq for destruction):

The point is that an imperialist warmongering holocaust on the planet in the pattern of World War I and its World War II spin-off is NOT remotely a matter of following the rules of evidence, or doing objective scientific tests, or establishing any sound logic or philosophy whatsoever. It never has been and it never will be. Imperialist warmongering crisis is a matter of brute force and tyranny applied utterly arbitrarily and scarcely rationally in the interests of class and national dictatorship.

Surely the question suffering-humanity needs answering under the outrage of escalating imperialist warmongering is HOW WILL IT STOP?? WHERE WILL IT END?? WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT?????? (EPSR No1168 21-01-03)?

What can be done – and what alone can now be done – is revolution; class and national-liberation war to overthrow the stinkingly depraved ruling class and its ever more destructive and planet threatening exploitation, crisis implosion and ever worsening splits and antagonisms as unwinnable trade war reaches cutthroat levels,combined with barely comprehensible genocidally brutal suppression of rebelliousness and revolt.

“Your party”

The working class (and elements of the petty bourgeoisie) is so clearly crying out for such revolutionary understanding that in Britain nearly a million have signed up for the Your Party initiative floated in August (after years of hesitation and retreat in the face of intimidatory campaigns and dirty dealing by the Labourites).

But far from giving a firm clear lead this hodge-podge of “left” Labourism and fake-“left” pretend-Marxism has immediately floundered and almost disappeared up its own evasive “woke” fundament.

Disruptive squabbling and careerist jostling in and around the potential new Corbyn Party, – virtually torpedoing things before they get going – has one useful consequence at least; it speeds up the necessary exposure of the useless fudging and factionalism that characterises all sides in this so-far hopeless coalition of fake-“lefts” – no different to the whole long history of Revisionist confusion and outright Trotskyist anti-communism which has already betrayed and misled the working class over and over.

But now it is speeded up, like some stop-motion nature film as the suffocating tendrils of fake-“left” philistinism and Trot hostility to theory cling to the mass anti-capitalist sentiment, in preparatory meetings smothering all the questioning and political and historical debate that needs opening up, both from inside and with sneering cynicism but no answers, from those “purists” remaining outside.

Far from advancing the working class interest, the shallow “rank-and-fileism” and lowest common denominator “democratic agreement” philistinism and fetishism completely destroys all prospect of unifying and taking forwards the necessary class war to end this festering and gangrenous warmongering bourgeois order.

That can only be done by establishing a clear, agreed and above all correct perspective about the real world, the enormous complexities of the unfolding capitalist crisis and the balance of class forces with constant updating of the understanding as objective events unfold and the latest phenomena emerge.

But the party developments so far reinforce the lack of perspectives and a leadership that has so far dithered and prevaricated, even as the Catastrophic failure of capitalism and its collapse into horrifying genocide, world war and deranged Trumpite fascist rampaging makes clarity for the working class movement, and international proletarian struggle, ever more urgent.

And it brings to the fore the damaging and disruptive role of single-issue PCism, such as feminism, anti-racism, gay rights and “trans rights”, all helping sabotage in advance a potentially significant centrist movement (as far as numbers go) where the great and necessary debate could be opened up which will allow the vital revolutionary understanding of the need to overthrow this deadly system to be fought for.

The playing of the “feminist” card by co-founder MP and ex-Labourite Zarah Sultana against the alleged “sexist boys club” of other independent MPs and labour movement worthies around Jeremy Corbyn is one such move so damaging that it smacks almost of deliberate sabotage.

It certainly reinforces the EPSR’s long fought for contention that all such single-issue reformism, but especially feminism, constitutes a last line of defence for capitalist ideology against the ever more glaring need for communist overthrow.

PCism, the desperate evasion of revolutionary theory with “super-reformist” special interests, has been more and more siding with complete reaction as the notable “gay rights” campaigner Peter Tatchell has done for example over Gaza, so lost in single minded subjective individualism that he ignores the much greater issues to the extent that he ends up joining Zionist demonstrations and leafleting against Palestine supporters on peace marches.

And while there is plenty wrong with the Palestine march organisers (a coalition of fake-“leftism”) blocking off deeper understanding for well-meaning demonstrators, by limiting them to mere social-pacifist “ceasefire” and reformist “No more arms” demands (which cannot, and so far obviously have not, stopped the vilest and most depraved barbarities of the genocidal Jewish occupation of Palestine), any such political exposures remain a million miles from overtly joining with the other side as those like Tatchell have done now and in the past (see EPSR No 1242 20-07-04).

Petty bourgeois disruption is reinforced by the even cruder undermining of the new venture by some of the Trot groups, such as the SWP split-off, RS21, whose proselytising for “trans rights” reaches such obsessive levels, that it virtually turns this diversionary subjective idealist demand into a block on all other issues by adopting aggressive PCist “no platforming” censorship of any who contest the outright subjectivism of “sexual gender is what you declare it to be”.

Of course persecution of, or indifference to, the problems of those whose personalities have not followed the majority “straight” path in sexual development, needs challenging.

But that is not dealt with by ignoring differences or declaring that they are just “normal” variations in a “spectrum” and aggressively opposing calls for greater psychological and sociological understanding of both the trans phenomena and gayness, a position which a large proportion of a sceptical population does not easily accept.

Belligerent “wokeism” achieves the very opposite, driving many workers away and potentially into the arms of incipient or actual fascist movements, being hyped up and backed by the powerful multibillionaire ruling class.

So too does the extreme equivalent anti-racist argument to “welcome all migrants” push away workers, leaving them prey to seeming “common sense” of the Reform and other reactionaries.

Defending and standing against the vicious and backward scapegoating and persecution of migrants already here, Trump-style deportations and racist attacks is crucial and backward attitudes in the working class need to be fought as hard as possible:

All immigration controls are obviously racist by their very definition; but educating the world out of those prejudices by trying to treat the immigration-control symptom, is as futile as trying to cure bubonic plague by offering someone a box of tissues to help with their sneezing. Far from achieving anti-racist re-education, the reformist pipe-dream of ‘no immigration controls at all’, while the capitalist free-market and national economic rivalry remains the way of the world, will simply add fuel to the fire of this deliberate imperialist diversion.

Getting rid of capitalism is the only serious and practicable anti-racist policy. It is the same paradox as with revolution. It might seem simpler to just try to reform capitalism. In practice, that will prove impossible, and it will be easier, in fact, to overthrow it

(EPSR No.1040)

There are arguments to believe that such politically-correct-tinged striving might be counter-productive, even. If it is only the National Front (Reform etc - ed) that is ever prepared to argue out loud that waves of economic-opportunist migrants coming into the country and taking up scarce welfare resources, housing, good jobs and good education opportunities, etc, is not necessarily to the immediate practical advantage of already-resident proletarians struggling to get the same scarce things for themselves, and that the unfair ‘foreign monopolist’ system was to blame for all this enforced (and condoned) migratory nonsense, – then would not such ludicrous diversions be as likely to attract proletarian support as the PC anti-racist ‘left reformists’ with their “end all immigration controls” and “welcome to all asylum-seekers, the more the better” slogans, which take politically-correct subjective-idealist philosophy to new heights of absurdity???

Hammer people too ridiculously and too relentlessly for being ‘politically incorrect’ and it is as likely to create a nationalist backlash as anything else.(EPSR No1085)

The “men are to blame” distortions of extreme feminism equally lose sight of the overriding problem in the world of ruling class domination and suppression, and the need to focus world struggle on the defeat and overthrow of this main enemy.

All subsidiary issues need putting to one side because they are distractions and sources of fragmentation, and while some advances have been made, the problems they raise mostly cannot be sorted out in the alienated and antagonistically individualist capitalist society anyway (which is almost certainly the cause of a large percentage of many problems, such as “toxic masculinity”, and less emphasised toxic femininity if it comes to it, or the inward turning of such poverty-linked alienation into depression, gambling addiction, violence, alcoholism, psychosis and their consequences in crime and social breakdown, all of which ills its contradictions will constantly regenerate).

In the balanced rationality of a future cooperative, socialist society, communal solutions to all kinds of human foibles and developmental problems should be easily sorted out, if they occur at all once the great majority currently-oppressed humans are free of exploitation and humiliating inequality, and everyone without exception is able to develop fully and roundly.

The RS21 “rank and fileism” however has gone a disruptive one better, quickly spotting an opportunity for the extreme of calling for a breakaway from the not-even-yet-founded Your Party, to be called Our Party, playing on the usual Trotskyist defeatist cynicism against leadership:

We hoped that Corbyn, Sultana, the IA and its supporters could be trusted to undertake this precious chance of founding a new political party. We had hoped that they would lead with the best politics of our tradition at the forefront: solidarity and unity in action. But our admiration for both Corbyn and Sultana notwithstanding, we were wrong. There is a crisis of leadership gripping our movement: power now needs to be put in the hands of the grassroots. A new campaign, entitled Our Party, seeks to do exactly that.

Made up of around two dozen organisers drawn from the trade union movement, tenants’ unions and the Palestine movement, Our Party demands that the MPs involved in Your Party step aside from leading the founding of the party, and allow members to take over. Control over the process of founding the party, along with all money, data, digital systems and companies should be given to a handover committee with a clear and focused brief. This committee would facilitate the election of a founding stewards’ committee that can – with complete transparency – facilitate a member-led, democratic pathway to conference, the conclusions of which will be driven, shaped and decided entirely by the membership.

This novel pre-emptive approach is certainly bold in its highwayman-like demand for the still-in-train founding members to “hand over” the financial and membership list resources to this small group, (an alternative leadership masquerading as the masses under the cover of “rank-and-file” democracy).

That is going one “better” even than the Trot entryists who early on tried to commandeer Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party breakaway from Labour in the mid-1990s, (see EPSR book on Party Building & Theory Part 2) and is even more damaging than the Sultana squabble itself, by fomenting an actual split-off before any issues have been gone through (since there is yet no party and no debate).

Leninism is all for the political theoretical split when and if clear differences have emerged between trends following comprehensive party polemics and testing of positions against the real world developments, understanding that there can only be one correct view of the international class struggle (and all phenomena in fact), or at least one understanding that comes closest to reflecting the infinite complexity of the ever changing real world, while the rest will be incorrect and therefore against the interest of the working class.

But splitting before any theoretical battle has commenced, let alone the issues have become clear enough for vital lessons to be drawn, is ludicrous and can only serve the interests of the ruling class (which is endlessly seeking to split the working class).

No better however is the just-as-Trotskyist opposite plea for the parties to “make up” from virulently anti-communist ex-WRP film director Ken Loach (auteur of the poisonous anti-Soviet Land & Freedom fantasy about the Spanish Civil War) and the opportunist “left” Euro-celebrity figure Yanis Varoufakis.

Both have already proven their uselessness with failed ventures, Loach’s Left Unity nonsense which proved to be nothing of the kind and Varoufakis who was actually a minister in the “failed” Syriza party in Athens (backed by most revisionists and Trots across the board) which strung the Greek working class along for years with “militant” reformist promises of “resisting” capitalist austerity in the period after the great banking credit meltdown in 2008-9, only to capitulate completely to the European bankers and the IMF, imposing draconian cuts to wages and conditions and leaving the working class still in austerity to this day.

These two mountebanks use the same rank-and-fileist “philosophy” about the party “belonging to the hundreds and thousands”, as the other Trots, only this time to demand that differences be buried:

The prospect of a new party lit up this darkness with new hope. It inspired hundreds of thousands to sign up. It ignited real hope, for the first time in decades, that a party based on socialist principles, and committed to grassroots democracy, could present a serious challenge to Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that there was no alternative.

Expectations were high, the hope was exhilarating. Communication from the centre was sporadic and increasingly unsatisfactory, but still the enthusiasm remained.

Now the last few days have caused anxiety, confusion, despair and not a little anger. Many are at a loss to understand it, but the effect is devastating. One thing is clear: this public row must stop, and stop now.

This project now belongs to the hundreds of thousands, potentially to the millions, who need it desperately. You can weaken it by persisting with this dispute, or you can work together in good faith.

We implore you, the organisers of Your Party, to choose the latter so that the hope and ambition you have inspired will not be wasted. We demand of you that you work diligently so that a new voice is given to those who have none.

We entreat you to do whatever it takes so that we will have a conference, and it will be organised democratically, and we will have a party where power is with its members.

We urge you to grasp that this is not about you or anyone in particular, that it is for the many, that the political necessity of the new party transcends personal grievances.

Without you all working together, this historic opportunity will be lost. With you all working together, we can change history.

And in reply comes just as dire a response:

Announcing the conference in a video for supporters, Corbyn said he was “sorry for the confusion in getting to this point” – a reference to the tensions over a membership portal launched by Sultana, which Corbyn then disavowed.

Threats have been exchanged between the two factions, including reporting Sultana to the information commissioner. Sultana accused the group of independent MPs of running a “sexist boys club” and said she would take legal action for defamation – which she later said she would drop and attempt to repair relations.

In an email to the 750,000 people who expressed an interest in supporting the new organisation when it launched in the summer, Your party said: “Today, we’re delighted to announce the next steps in this process, starting with the opening of our official membership portal.”

It said the conference would encompass “a total of 13,000 members” and they would “debate and amend the party’s founding documents in person across two days”. Attenders would be chosen by lottery, it said, “ensuring a fair balance of gender, region and background”, and a final decision would be taken by a digital vote involving all members.

Corbyn did not mention Sultana in the video but twice expressed regret for the row, which threatened to blow up the party.

He said: “We’ve had some fraught days in the last week, as you will no doubt be very aware. And to be honest, we haven’t covered ourselves in glory. But what is most important is this: We all agree about the plans for the conference and the road map to get to it.

“Once the party is established at the conference, the role that I and other Independent Alliance MPs have been playing to get it off the ground will end.

“Our role is not to run the party, not to control it, not to direct it. It is merely to steward the founding of the party that will belong to the grassroots, to the members, who will make the key decisions and elect a leadership through one member, one vote.”

There could not be a more abject abandoning of leadership, and guidance for the great debate and discussion that is needed if the working class is going to be brought together into a coherent class force capable of waging the great revolutionary war that is necessary to defeat and then overturn imperialism.

The warring sides in this venture remain at loggerheads with no attempt to draw any positive lessons from the differences, or battle out the issues to any kind of conclusion, thereby just leaving a festering mess which can go nowhere.

While a broad centrist party (which it is by no means certain this can become anyway) is not going to be the revolutionary party, and therefore the best that can be achieved within it is to find (or create) a broader forum for making the Leninist arguments, that does not at all imply simply ignoring major differences, or “smoothing them over” by some allegedly “democratic grassroots” procedure to produce an overall “averaged out and agreed” view as has repeatedly been argued for in the past, for example by the Open Polemic, as challenged here:

The philistine agnosticism of middle-class ‘democracy’ could not be clearer. A party programme is not “right” because it correctly analyses the objective world and correctly proposes realistic strategy and tactics for reaching the revolutionary goal - according to OP. A party programme is only “right” if a congress majority has voted for it, and if an elected Central Committee has been prevented from making any changes to the party line by “the collective elaboration of views by like-minded forums which do not have delegate or vote at congress” OP implies.

The great turning point in civilisation’s history, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, would simply never have happened on such a basis. The most crucial volumes ever written on the science of human society, volumes 24, 25, and 26 of Lenin’s Collected Works, - more than 1,600 pages of analysis and policies for dealing with dramatic movements of class and international forces(of an intensity and complexity from April 1917 to March 1918 which has never been equalled in all human history), which had instant epoch making effect from being the respected advice from a tried and tested leadership, - contain just 3 pages (The Political Situation Aug 2 1917) which had any connection at all with any Congress decisions or deliberations, and then only an indirect instruction for Lenin’s supporters among the leadership at the 6th Congress which Lenin could not attend. The richest science of class struggle ever written was simply ‘the most sectarian factional dominance and a disgrace to communism’, as far as these fake-‘left’ academic dilettantes are concerned.

This bourgeois democracy fetishism indignantly dismisses the charge of “favouring no leadership at all”, but how could Leninism have become the most influential force in the whole record of human society if “the collective elaboration of views by like-minded forums which do not have delegates or vote at congress” had in fact been able to “deny any faction any such influential, authoritative and organisational advantage”, especially “the dominant faction in the leadership” such as the Leninists were??

This is pure anti-leadership phobia based on the most gauche middle-class subjectivism. (EPSR No1052 18-07-00)

The Loach-Varoufakis notion that “this public row must stop, and stop now” is likewise the exact opposite of what is needed – a crass rejection of the great polemical battles that alone can forge revolutionary understanding, exactly as Lenin argued for in building the Bolshevik party, from the late 19th century onwards and notably in the crucial work “What is to be done?”

The EPSR has fought throughout its entire existence against the philistine notion of restraining the debate and just “agreeing on what we can”, as it did against the Scargillite decree that there was no place for “internecine strife” in the Socialist Labour Party (see EPSR Books Party Building and Theory Parts 1-4), a philistine reversion to bureaucratic syndicalism and traditional British labour movement distrust and hostility for theory.

That is nothing to do with declaring all views to be just as valid or with allowing permanent factions to endlessly go round in circles without ever coming to a conclusion as groups like the CPGB-PCC do in their eclectic allcomers letters pages and sometimes articles in the Weekly Worker.

The purpose of inner party struggle is to reach the best scientific assessment possible of the real world, working to a conclusion.

But as far as the whole fake-‘left’ is concerned –

the whole point of Bolshevism is misunderstood, which was to establish which line was the right one and to then move on, freely admitting one’s own mistakes and learning the lessons from them, but insisting that others’ mistakes be driven out by the correct line as well, allowing factional differences to be kept incubating only in the event of new developments occurring which warranted reopening of old issues, and only to the extent that the incubated differences were not totally incompatible with the correct line of the party anyway, making sure the party was not held back by divisive factionalising or unnecessary picking at old wounds. Lenin was for unity, but believed that the split was the only way to get there, - unity needing to be based solely on fundamental agreement about the world. He wanted to drive out Menshevik nonsense, not embrace it to death (EPSR No 876 22-10-96).

For the proletariat, socialism is not the same thing as it is for middle-class academic dilettantes who can possibly afford to spend their whole lives gibbering pointlessly into their glass: “No one has a monopoly of the truth”. For the proletariat, socialism is eventually a necessity requiring REVOLUTIONARY ACTION. The types who stand around at such crucial historical junctures muttering “no one has a monopoly of the truth” will be plainly identified at that moment as counter-revolutionaries.

The Trot pretence that the 1917 socialist revolution was carried out by a party permanently riddled with oppositional factions is just total lying nonsense. At any one time, the Leninist party had as many differences of opinion as there were members of the leadership. But what even the flimsiest knowledge of 1917 history demonstrates is that once a firm party line was established, the Leninist party was utterly ruthless in its hostility to indisciplined behaviour by any section of the party.

So far was Lenin from any notion that “no one has the monopoly of the truth” that at one stage, when the party leadership delayed a decision about whether the time was ripe to seize power, Lenin threatened to quit and form a new party rather than remain in a minority position.

And immediately power had been seized, ALL the history books in the world confirm that an international propaganda blitzkrieg was launched at once denouncing Lenin the bloody dictator, and Bolshevik Red Terror as the greatest threat to civilisation ever. Stalin had never been heard of at this stage in history.

[...]EPSR recently quoted at length from the 10th Bolshevik Congress which in 1921 imposed a massive purge of factional groups and platforms which had wormed their way into the revolutionary party from the vast ranks of the petty bourgeoisie in Russia. Such factional oppositionism, proposing rival platforms to the agreed party policy, would unfailingly lead to the triumph of the counter-revolution if not purged immediately, the Congress agreed, at Lenin’s insistence. This reinforced discipline alone saved the planned Soviet system from being overthrown there and then. The Soviet workers state went on to transform 20th century history, although sadly stopping short of going all the way, - ultimately being undermined by revisionist retreats from strict Leninist party and state discipline. (EPSR No 942 17-03-98)

The wave of pre-party meetings, and much of the fake-“left” argument in its publications, which the Corbyn announcements set going countrywide, have been dominated by virtually nothing but sterile and academic discussions about “procedure” and “mechanisms”, virtually crowding out any attempts to raise the crucial question of where the party will stand on real world events and class conflicts.

With this swamping of fake-“left”ism so far the answer can only be on the wrong side, lined up with the ruling class against the growing ferment of anti-imperialist struggle in the world, largely labelled “terrorism” or “jihadism”, or demonised as “dictatorships” where whole countries continue to resist imperialist domination – even as the West’s actual dictatorship of capital is more and more brutally exposed and the sick fraud of “democracy and freedom” is demolished by the grotesque bullying by the American empire.

Confusion and critical questions abound from the latest events in the Ukraine war, and the humiliation of Europe and especially Britain, the ever more deadly and depraved rampaging of Washington’s Zionist instrument Israel, the growing world hostility to it, including near general strike in Italy, to the attacks on Latin America and the spontaneous turmoil erupting across Asia and its nature.

None can begin to be assessed without starting with an overarching historical and philosophical perspective of the 800 year capitalist and then imperialist system and its movement, and of the long class divided society before it, all riven with contradictions that have driven finally into the great “overproduction” Catastrophe now paralysing all humanity in a welter of depraved and planet threatening destruction (see box).

It starts with the titanic achievements of Karl Marx’s devastating analysis of the whole system in Capital and its inevitable unstoppable movement into crisis and Lenin’s Bolshevik movement’s further extension of the understanding of the revolutionary struggle as the only answer to its crisis descent into murdering destruction.

But theory must develop.

Particularly that means taking up the battle against every kind of opportunist and lying misrepresentation of the great historic struggles fought so far by the world’s masses and the huge achievements as well the eventual failure, not because of communism failing, but because of revisionist leadership retreats.

Especially to be challenged are the 57 varieties, or more, of posturing pretend “Marxism” generated by petty bourgeois idealism shallowness and coloured by class fear of proletarian discipline, by opportunist careerism, and more sinisterly, by deliberate bourgeois “left” counterfeiting playing very effectively with all the confusions and delusions established by more than a century of relentless anti-communist bogeyman brainwashing.

The “Ukraine war” is a case in point.

The whole world sees the glaring disparity between the massive Western financial, military and intelligence support for the alleged “victims of a murderous aggression” in Ukraine – larded with endless carefully crafted, personalised, heart-wrenching propaganda stories of bereavement and luridly exaggerated and mostly completely fabricated “atrocities against civilians” or “torture” etc (from one side only) and the exact opposite support for the perpetrators of the monstrously inhuman Zionist genocide onslaught in Gaza and the “occupied” West Bank (as if the rest of stolen Palestine was not occupied too), its gross torture and incarceration, and for Zionism’s terrorism, assassinations and blitzing in all directions regionally.

But such is the confusion caused by the “left” that much public opinion in the West still supports the Ukrainians and gets no further than puzzlement about “why ‘we’ are not doing the same for the Palestinians?” where the full horror of imperialism’s World War Three barbarity is made clear “in real time” as tens of millions of ordinary people have pointed out (save when wilful petty bourgeois and bourgeois “blindness” simply looks away out of class interest, swallowing the “not even happening” gaslighting fascist lies from Tel Aviv and Washington).

The contradiction is resolved when seen in the context of a nearly three decades long collapse of the imperialist system and its descent into war as a diversion and a “solution”, in which Ukraine is obviously a major component for stampeding public opinion behind the “need for war” after provoking Russia with the endless build up of nuclear armed NATO forces on its border and two decades of dirty skulduggery and brainwashing inside Ukraine.

That was made easy by the disastrous revisionist liquidation of the Soviet Union, which had left the former Soviet population open to infiltration and manipulation by every counter-revolutionary agency on the planet, saturating it with enough anti-communist lies to eventually install the nazi-infested Ukrainian reactionaries in 2014, whose Banderite antics murderously persecuting the large Russian minority forced Moscow’s hand to protect them.

But the superficial impression that Russia is the “aggressor” has been got away with, despite all the evidence of Kiev’s outright Nazism, not least because Western inculcated anti-communism, and a relentless decades-long psyops campaign plotted against Moscow (making a meal out of specious and isolated incidents to inflate Vladimir Putin into a demon hate figure).

These have been reaching near demented levels recently from assorted European bourgeoisies, with the most ludicrous hype about “drone attacks” on Poland or “on airports in Denmark” (instantly fingering Russia on no evidence at all) when the likelihood is of desperate Ukrainian false flag operations building on the non-stop psyops lies that have bucketed out of the Western agencies since the war began, and none more so than Britain’s MI6, up to its neck in dirty provocations and Goebbels propaganda.

But the key aspect of the hysteria now is that the West has been losing and most of all the Europeans.

The “left” has mostly played right into this - the Trots so filled with a legacy of hatred for the USSR that they immediately condemned “Putin’s invasion” – thus lining up with NATO in practice, despite notionally calling for “NATO withdrawal”. But the crucial question of defeat for Western imperialism and its forces is cravenly avoided.

The few “lefts” correctly against NATO still muddy the water by making the issue one of “victory” for Russia, wrongly creating illusions in Putin’s dire oligarch-leaning bonapartism.

A call for defeat is enough.

All of them miss the biggest contradiction driving this conflict - the inter-imperialist trade war between the US and the European economic block, because they do not see the scale and extent of the crisis, nor want to because of its revolutionary implications.

America is happy to see their deadly trade competition wallowing in expense and chaos.

That’s why they blew up the Nordstream pipeline and now are washing their hands of the whole thing.

Alan Moss

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