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No 1661 15th August 2025

Discussion: Mass arrests of elderly pro-Palestine civil-liberty protesters and pacifists for silently holding placards exposes the fascist reality of imperialism in crisis, and a ruling class so desperate that even such polite middle-class dissent is stamped on. This no aberration. Far worse is to come as Trump’s Washington militarisation moves, brutal suppression of opposition in Bangladesh, and escalating Gaza horrors shows, - all the way to World War Three. Alienating capitalist society makes working class socialist revolution inevitable but Leninist theory needed.

The astonishing act of pacifist defiance at Parliament Square of hundreds of middle-aged and elderly civil liberty campaigners and pro-Palestine activists silently holding placards with proscribed slogans in the knowledge that they would be arrested on “terrorism” charges is a healthy sign that ruling-class is losing its grip.

The fact that such ‘pillars of the community’ as retired GPs and surgeons, former magistrates and government lawyers, elderly vicars, and Telegraph readers feel compelled to participate in Defend Our Juries protests at the outrageous banning of a pro-Palestine civil disobedience group, knowing that they potentially face up to 14 years in prison, reflects huge shifts in mass sentiment against the Slump-ridden breakdown of capitalist society and its (re)turn to direct fascism and intensified warmongering.

Even scummy opportunists from warmonger Tony Blair’s sleazy “new” Labour cabinet of fatcat toadies are unnerved:

A former cabinet minister has said the UK government is “digging itself into a hole” over Palestine Action and fellow Labour peers and MPs were regretting voting to ban the group.

The warning by Peter Hain, who opposed proscription, came as a Labour backbencher who supported it said the issue would arise again when parliament returned in September.

The momentum driving this is revolutionary, notwithstanding the futile reformist aspirations of “restoring the principles of natural justice” and “defending the right to freedom of expression”.

The capitalist system can offer no lasting solutions to escalating societal problems its own intractable crisis has inevitably created, and even the pathetic sticking-plaster “reforms” Labourism has long made a pretence of as a “solution” are torn up (winter fuel allowances, disability benefits, aid budgets etc.) as bankrupt British capitalism hurtles towards collapse alongside the rest of the world monopoly-imperialist system, and drives the proletarian masses to revolution.

Fascist suppression of all dissent is all that the ruling bourgeois class has left if it is to remain in power as a class.

Such censorship measures are now so all-encompassing that simply objecting to, or even just pointing out the hypocrisy in particular bans without implying any support or justification for any proscribed group can now lead to arrests on “suspicion” grounds as the retired Leeds headteacher holding a Private Eye cartoon at a recent Palestine protest found out.

Mass sentiment will inevitably shift towards a socialist-revolutionary orientation as the crisis continues to deepen, and as it starts to dawn on people that capitalism has hit a brick wall of economic Slump and endless war and needs ending if there is to be any meaningful future for humanity.

Crucial to achieving this is the struggle for revolutionary theory and the building of a proletarian party capable of providing revolutionary leadership based on a correct understanding of world developments (i.e. Leninism).

Signs that once comfortable layers of the middle class are now being driven to semi-martyrdom acts of protest are significant. But the revolutionary perspective needed is a million miles away from the pacifist single-issue demands of the Parliament Square protesters despite their individual acts of bravery.

The Defend Our Juries campaigners also rightly condemn the steady erosion of the principle of ‘jury equity’ established in the 1670 Bushell’s Case after the bourgeois-revolutionary English Civil War. This established that jurors could independently arrive at a verdict that opposed the direction of a judge without fear of judicial reprisal, which enables jurors to acquit a defendant ‘as a matter of conscience’ if the law applied is felt to be unjust.

The ruling class has long had great difficulties in persuading juries to convict middle-class anti-nuclear, environmental and other single-issue defendants for their direct-action ‘acts of conscience’, but now it is driven to tear up such all bourgeois-democratic “rights” in desperation as the deepening crisis stirs up greater levels of hostility.

Recent incidences of bullying and intimidation by judges include the jailing of a group of climate-change activists for contempt of court after they defied judicial instructions to not mention what motivated them; threatening a jury with criminal charges if they applied their conscience when coming to a decision; and pursuing a pensioner for holding a placard outside a climate-change trial reminding jurors of their “right” to acquit based on their conscience.

All such “rule-of-law” niceties are routinely torn up when the bourgeoisie feels threatened by working-class unrest, as the miners experienced during their Great Strike of 1984-85 (Orgreave, for example); or as experienced by Irish nationalists in mass-arrest internment, H-Block torture and non-jury Diplock court injustices; or the rushed harsh sentences imposed on disaffected and alienated youths involved in the 2011 riots that followed the “austerity” measures imposed after the 2008-09 Great Financial Crash (as instructed by Keir Starmer when he was the attorney general); or even the equally rushed and harsh sentencing of last summer’s reactionary anti-asylum-seeker riots, which were provoked and led by fascists but also drew in misguided workers lashing out against broader harsh realities of capitalist society but deceived into blaming migrants by a racist scapegoating atmosphere deliberately whipped up by the bourgeoisie and the Labour Party (e.g. former miners).

Bourgeois law, and the police and prison system that enforces it, is first and foremost an instrument of the bourgeois dictatorship operating against the interests of working class, and its brutal inequities are felt not just in response to worker unrest, but in day-to-day policing and legal court proceedings.

The ruling class wants to abandon the right to a jury trial altogether (except for the bourgeois crimes of fraud and bribery as proposed), ostensibly to “save the criminal justice system from collapse” (but not asked is why capitalist society is so sick that it needs to incarcerated so many people in the first place). It is part of a large swathe of fascistisation measures steadily put in place over the last three decades as pre-emptive class-war moves against the coming revolutionary struggle of the working class, and for the suppression of genuinely left thought (i.e. Marxism-Leninism) when necessary.

But the current suppression of non-violent middle-class dissent is a double-edged sword.

The ruling class has tolerated similar pacifist anti-nuclear or environmentalist activism in the past because it gives “democratic” cover to its actual bourgeois dictatorship and, whilst being disruptive, is not a threat in and of itself. It is even encouraged when it can be used as a means of heading workers away from revolutionary theory (“action speaks louder than words”, e.g.).

Suffragette votes-for-women civil disobedience continues to be taught in schools and colleges as a demonstration of alleged “democratic values” today. And 267 female MPs hypocritically wore Suffragette sashes to mark 97 years since winning the right to vote on the same day most of them voted to shut down similar ‘acts of conscience’ for Palestine.

The elderly Parliamentary Square protesters have held onto such non-revolutionary illusions their entire lives despite the fact that they have witnessed British imperialism become militarily involved in at least 83 overt and covert wars and colonial policing operations to impose order under the auspices of “defending freedom and democracy” since WW2 (according to a 2023 article by the bourgeois journalist Mark Curtis for the Declassified UK online journal); and this figure does not including British-linked mercenary operations, and intelligence operations to overthrow anti-imperialist governments (e.g.. Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965, including the role British intelligence played in the massacre of up to 2 million communists in the PKI and their sympathisers via its embassy in Singapore).

This does include playing a supporting role to US imperialism’s genocidal anti-communist slaughter of the Vietnamese from the 1960s, and the forcible depopulation of the Chagos Islands from 1968-73 to make way for a US military base in Diego Garcia (to which they still cannot return despite the recent shoddy deal with Mauritius to cede the Archipelago to them).

Capitalism’s Slump crisis is hurtling towards a collapse into all-out inter-imperialist war destruction again. This plunge into World War 3 has been under way for nearly three decades with direct British-imperialist involvement throughout,- starting with the nazi-NATO blitzkrieg of revisionist-nationalist Serbia in 1999, and deepening further in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, etc, etc, etc; as well as NATO’s proxy Ukraine war against Russia, and the non-stop 70+ year genocidal onslaught (and now outright holocaust) against the Palestinian people.

Approximately 14.5 million people are currently displaced in Yemen, with tens of thousands already living in famine-like conditions and a further 5 million food insecure (according to the United Nations) following a decade of ongoing conflict initiated (largely) against the Houthi rebellion by Saudi Arabia on behalf of imperialism, and backed up by British /US military intelligence, arms sales and bombings. In Sudan, tens of thousands of have already been slaughtered in the brutal civil war there. 14 million have been displaced and 25 million are facing acute hunger.

Neither war disaster has had the 24/7 visibility of the Gaza genocide but are in many ways on a greater scale, and yet barely a word of protest has been raised.

Such is the level of lying anti-communist brainwashing propaganda that has been endlessly pumped out in schools and universities, and through mass media from day one of the 1917 Russian Revolution, that the petty-bourgeoisie is still able to support the Palestinians by exposing British imperialist complicity and lies, whilst still believing what the ruling class says when it comes to supporting the Ukraine nazis, the Hong Kong “umbrella-movement” anti-communists in China, the pro-West “Free Burma” reactionaries in Myanmar, etc; celebrating the toppling of Assad’s flaky anti-imperialism in Syria; and supporting “our boys” in the military generally.

Petty-bourgeois class instinct is to take their lead from the big bourgeoisie against the revolutionary working class, and so the ruling class’ turn to overt bourgeois-dictatorship fascism (combined with the severe impact the crisis is now having on their once comfortable jobs and expected lifestyles) is bad news for imperialism as it starts to disabuse all but the most wilfully blinkered or anti-communist bitten of all the class-collaborating reformist illusions built up over the last 150 years. Imperialist defeats, as now openly admitted to by the West in Ukraine and demonstrated by the Alaska summit between Putin and Trump, will also help shatter such illusions.

A key part of maintaining the such capitalist “freedom and democracy” pretences (whilst preparing to suppress working class revolt) is the introduction of the Prevent duty into the public sector (including schools and colleges) from 2015, aimed at “stopping people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”. This had been sold to teachers as a means of countering “right-wing ideologies” and “Islamic extremism”, but as the recent Palestine ban shows, the focus is starting to shift onto “left-wing ideologies” as it was always set up to do but was never openly expressed - which in itself exposes ruling class weaknesses, and is futile in “stopping radicalisation” anyway because capitalism has no future to offer the youth now but Slump, fascism and war.

Running alongside this is a legal obligation to teach “British values”, fraudulently declared to be that of “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, respect and tolerance”, which has bought the approval of teachers as a means of “safeguarding students”, instilling good citizenship and “stopping the right-wing”.

Effective teachers do impact positively on children’s social, behavioural, cultural and educational development within the limits and distortions of capitalism, and they do strive to ensure that those in need are supported, but they all face an impossible challenge in squaring classroom notions of “tolerance”, “respect” and “rule of law” with the harsh daily reality of life in capitalist society for working class youths and young migrants.

Whilst acquiring a sense of community and the skills needed to navigate through life is an important part of the development of young minds, it is pure utopianism and an avoidance of reality to think that capitalist society will ever give space or opportunity for all children grow into idealised respectful, tolerant, law-abiding citizens. Capitalism by its very nature as a system of exploitation breeds alienation as Karl Marx explained over 180 years ago [see, for example, Estranged Labour in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844].

And all the Third World has ever experienced from British-imperialism’s exercises in exporting “British values” is the sheer brutality of the British ruling class, alongside that of its imperialist rivals who have learnt much of their barbaric counter-insurgency war methods from the British, including the Zionists’ current monstrous use of starvation as a method of war by herding Gazans into centralised “aid centres” and then shooting hundreds of them dead, as this piece from Private Eye shows:

In the 1950s, Britain faced of a communist-led rebellion in the key rubber-producing colony of Malaysia. The so-called Briggs Plan used “food denial measures” - destroying crops in the countryside - to force 500,000 Malayan Chinese into “new villages” with strict security, under surveillance by auxiliary police.

In these compounds surrounded by barbed wire, “food was rationed to restrict the amount that could possibly be passed on to the guerillas”. Rebel activity led to collective punishment of villagers, such as reducing rations and other “harsh but helpful example[s] of the new countermeasures”.

Declassified 1960s CIA manuals admiringly call the Briggs Plan a “novel and highly successful resettlement programme”. The US unsuccessfully copied the plan in Vietnam, where “food denial” involved spraying Agent Orange herbicide over the countryside, causing hunger and later widespread birth defects, while villagers were herded into “strategic hamlets”. In 2006, with the US struggling with Afghan and Iraqi insurgents, future CIA director General David Patraeus wrote a new official counter-insurgency field manual which repeatedly cites British “success” fighting the Malaya insurgency.

Israeli counter-intelligence experts will know the Malaya model as well as the CIA does.

The competitive dog-eat-dog reality of life in capitalist society, combined with the commodification of all humankind’s natural instincts and urges, is incompatible with any idealised “British values” community-building at the best of times.

Now that the capitalist system is collapsing into the greatest, most Catastrophic crisis in history, and all already underfunded legal, social and welfare services established to contain and discipline estranged and angry youths are cut to the bone or abandoned altogether as a “luxury” the ruling class can no longer afford, long pent-up frustrations have the potential to become explosive, - revolutionary, in fact.

The key lesson from the much-watched Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’ was not that “violent misogynist incel culture” needed to be urgently addressed as MPs, Prevent officials and Guardianista feminists demanded, but that everyone is alienated in some way, – the bullies as well as the bullied, girls and boys, the parents, the teachers, the psychologists, the police officers, etc, etc. The final scenes are bleak not because the situation is hopeless, but because the writers do not look beyond the limits of a capitalist system that inherently creates and reproduces all this psychologically damaging alienation.

Such contradictions can only be resolved through socialist revolution, - the necessity of which is now ripe throughout society.

Societies can only begin the process of building harmonious communities (where everyone respects each other and tolerates any private religious beliefs people may still hold on to) once competitive capitalist market exploitation has been abolished by revolution, and a cooperative socialist society is build under the dictatorship of the proletariat, - only through which can genuine democracy for the majority finally be established.

Only then can any youth “citizenship programmes” have any lasting, meaningful impact (as the Soviet Union was establishing with the Young Pioneers, or the GDR with its Free German Youth movement, – but lacking crucial education in Leninist revolutionary perspectives).

Developments in Bangladesh gives some sense of the scale of fascist barbarity the working class (and Parliament Square protesters) are up against.

A full year after the Washington orchestrated the military coup that toppled Sheikh Hasina’s bourgeois nationalism and installed the capitalist banker and family friend of the Clinton mafia Mohammad Yunus as “interim” leader, the fake-”lefts” have yet to explain how they got it all hopelessly wrong.

As the EPSR has demonstrated [see EPSR Nos 1647, 1649, 1650 & 1654] the bogus “pro-democracy” student protests barmily cheered on by ‘gullible’ Trots such as the RCP was in fact a cover for a long prepared campaign (“meticulously planned” in Yunus’ own words) to bring Hasina’s Awami League down following her increasingly anti-US imperialist statements and moves towards China.

Others such as the Lalkar/Proletarian Stalinists managed to come down on the right side in denouncing the coup but then undermined this by falling for Yunus’ carefully manufactured “progressive” façade and falsely declaring that Hasina “brought the trouble on herself”.

None pointed to the Catastrophic capitalist breakdown driving developments, nor the momentum towards revolutionary socialism pushing Hasina’s compromised nationalism to make a stand.

Monopoly-imperialist crisis is also driving war hostilities across the Indian sub-continent and South Asia, including small-scale (so far) conflicts breaking out between the reactionary capitalist ruling classes of India and Pakistan over the control of Kashmir, border clashes over temples between the US-stooge Thai military junta and China-allied Cambodia, and Indian border provocations against the Chinese workers state.

The same crisis pressures are fuelling US-provoked separatist turmoil aimed at destabilising Myanmar’s anti-Western military-nationalist leadership (the Tatmadaw), and potentially drawing in its neighbours in Bangladeshi, India and Thailand; encircling China with military bases: and further undermining China’s regional interests - which includes its strategic partnership with Myanmar.

Last May, Sheikh Hasina repeated claims that she was ousted for refusing to allow the US to establish a military base on St.Martin’s Island, and accused Yunus of “selling the country” to the US “to stay in power”. Located just off the coast of Myanmar in the Bay of Bengal and in close proximity to sea lanes vital for global trade, control of of the island would not only increase US imperialist pressure on the Tatmadaw, but would also be an aggressive move against China - its primary target.

Prior to Hasina’s comments, Yunus’ administration announced that it had agreed “in principle” to a US proposal via the United Nations to establish an alleged “humanitarian corridor” through Bangladesh into Myanmar’s Rakhine State to aid Rohynga communities living there. Such a route could conveniently be used by the CIA to smuggle arms and supplies to separatist forces within Myanmar, and be a means of legitimising the sectarian Buddhist Arakan Army, which controls large swathes of territory along the border.

Furthermore, the toppling of the Awami League’s secular left-nationalist regime has placed power in the hands of the reactionary pro-Pakistan wing of the bourgeoisie, who never fully accepted Bangladesh’s independence and are now moving Bangladesh closer to Pakistan.

Independence war collaborators in Pakistan’s 1971 genocide of up to 3 million Bengalis, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami, have had Hasina-era bans against them lifted by Yunus and have recently mooted the idea of carving a Rohynga Muslim state out of Myanmar, which would imply a ‘Greater Bangladesh’ annexation.

All these moves have fuelled rifts between Yunus and sections of the military, including the army chief General Wakar-Uz-Zaman, who rejected the Rakhine corridor proposal out of fear that the army would get drawn into the conflict and demanded national elections by December.

Indian capitalism also opposes the corridor proposal as it would undermine its ongoing development of a trading route into Myanmar via a seaport in northern Rakhine. After losing influence in Bangladesh following the fall of Hasina, and because of rifts with the US, it may look to develop closer ties with Myanmar.

Yunus is also “selling the country” to the US economically. Bangladesh’s economy is in dire straits with rising inflation, a devaluing currency, plunging imports, a slowdown in GDP growth, falls in credit, investments and business confidence and factory closures. Dangerously high levels of loans defaults have also put the banking sector at risk of collapse. All of this was exacerbated by Trump’s ending of USAID support and his bullying threat to impose a 35.5% increase in tariffs.

Capitulating to Trump’s mafia-like tariff shakedown, Yunus has agreed to open Bangladesh’s economy up to increased US monopoly-capitalist super-exploitation and closer military co-operation in return for a mere 14.5% tariff reduction, - and he idiotically declared this humiliation for the Bangladeshi nation to be a “diplomatic victory for the negotiators”:

It’s unclear how the Chief Adviser’s declared “path to greater potential, faster growth, and lasting prosperity” has been unlocked through this agreement. There’s little reason for such jubilation. The tariff has not been removed—only reduced from 50% to 35.5%. This increase from the original 15% rate will likely make Bangladeshi goods, especially garments, more expensive in the US market, potentially reducing demand. Even so, had Bangladesh secured a better rate than other countries, the negotiators would have deserved praise. But the 20% rate agreed upon applies not only to Bangladesh but also to Sri Lanka, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Meanwhile, the UK and Falkland Islands got a 10% rate, and about 40 countries, including Afghanistan, received a 15% rate. Countries like Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the Philippines got 19%.

The variation in tariff rates among countries suggests that the negotiations weren’t driven by the merits of the discussions themselves but by geopolitical and commercial considerations, including promises to increase imports from the US and adhere to confidential terms.

The US imposed higher tariffs mainly on countries with whom it has a trade deficit to reduce their exports. Simultaneously, it encouraged these countries to balance the deficit by purchasing more US goods. Bangladesh, for example, was pressured into agreeing to purchase 25 passenger Boeing aircraft and 3.5 million tons of wheat from the US. As a result, buying these products competitively from other countries is no longer an option. There’s also ongoing pressure to import US soybeans and cotton, and discussions are underway about importing LNG and military equipment. In addition to increasing imports, Bangladesh also had to promise to reduce tariffs on US goods. [...]

The US decision wasn’t based purely on economic interests either. Countries willing to strengthen economic and security ties with the US were given tariff concessions. According to Dr. Yunus, Bangladesh’s negotiators navigated complex national security issues during the talks—but what those were has not been disclosed. The fact that the National Security Adviser was also part of the delegation strongly indicates the discussions extended beyond trade. It’s likely that Bangladesh had to promise a gradual reduction in trade and economic ties with Russia and China. Bangladesh signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with the US during these tariff discussions. Because the terms remain confidential, we cannot accurately assess what Bangladesh may have had to concede in exchange for reduced tariffs.

In reality, the key determinant for tariff reductions was not the negotiating skill of any country’s delegation but how much each country offered to the US in return. Do we assume that countries granted a 10% or 15% tariff rate had more skilled negotiators than us? Are Chinese and Indian negotiators less competent? Clearly not. But both countries were unwilling to compromise on US interests in trade or security. India not only buys Russian oil but refines and resells it to other countries. Had India agreed to stop trading with Russia, its tariff rate might have been reduced to 10–15%. After all, for the U.S., keeping India close is essential in its strategy to contain China. [...]

Donald Trump made it clear during his campaign that “America First” would be his governing principle—US interests come above all else. He governed with that principle during his previous term and continues to do so. The US wants to maintain its dominance in global trade and military power. Thus, tariff reductions were not based on any delegation’s negotiation skills but on how much a country conceded in favor of US interests.

In the end, recognition wasn’t given to any country’s negotiating ability but to the trade and security concessions laid out on the table to favor US priorities.

Ziauddin Ahmed is a former Executive Director of Bangladesh Bank.

Any secret NDA agreements will also be aimed at reducing military as well as trade and economic ties with China. Myanmar, which has had a punishing 40% tariff increase imposed on it, was most likely on the agenda too. It is no coincidence that Bangladesh and the US held joint military exercises alongside the negotiations. The US also announced that it will be helping Bangladesh develop an unmanned aerial system for maritime and border surveillance.

Bangladesh relies heavily on China for its military equipment, including fighter jets, attack helicopters and is one of the largest importers of Chinese arms after Pakistan. In May 2024, under Hasina, Bangladesh and China held their first ever joint military exercises.

Hasina was toppled in part because she was developing closer diplomatic, trade and military relationships with China. Despite being installed as a pliant imperialist stooge, Bangladesh under Yunus has continued to be pushed towards China as a result of the deepening world capitalist crisis, - exacerbated by Trump’s “America First” isolationist response (USAID abandonment, tariff bullying, etc) and India’s strategic support for Hasina.

The US tariff reduction agreements and secret military arrangements help to strengthen Yunus’ position within Bangladesh, hence his jubilation at the outcome.

After much prevarication and delay, and to prevent the collapse of his government, now paralysed and split by its inability to respond to Bangladesh’s deepening capitalist crisis and the turmoil it has already engendered, Yunus recently announced a national election for February 2026, – but this is already stitched up.

In May, using Bangladesh's Anti-Terrorism Act, his coup regime banned the Awami League from participating in elections, and put in place restrictions on all its activities until the conclusion of equally stitched-up criminal trials against its leaders, including Sheikh Hasina. Much of its leadership are either in hiding or in exile in India, or have been butchered in extrajudicial mob killings or locked up; and its activist and supporter base has been brutally persecuted too, with tens of thousands of party activists and supporters, journalists and minorities arbitrarily detained in the last year (between 12,000 and 20,000 were rounded up in last February’s sinisterly-named Operation Devil Hunt pogroms). Five Hasina supporters Hasina were shot dead by security forces and scores more injured at a protest in Gopalganj just last month.

That this vengeful political show trial in absentia against Hasina for lying “crimes against humanity” is a sham was clear from the start. The initial state-appointed defence lawyer had called for her to be lynched:

Bangladesh’s international crimes tribunal has removed a state-appointed lawyer for ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina for allegedly demanding her execution. [...]

The tribunal said Mr Titu had been removed to “avoid conflict of interest” and to “ensure justice”, New Age reported.

He was replaced with Amir Hossain to represent Ms Hasina and her federal home minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal.

The decision came after Ms Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, pointed out that Mr Titu in a Facebook post last year had demanded a death sentence for the former leader.

The interim administration headed by Muhammad Yunus “has appointed a lawyer on my mother’s behalf” who “himself has demanded the death penalty for my mother on social media”, Mr Wazed Joy said on Facebook last week.

“This is not a trial. It is a cold-blooded preparation for a farce called a trial where the judicial system is being used as a weapon. I condemn this ridiculous farce of judicial activities.”

During Wednesday’s proceedings in the contempt case, the tribunal asked Mr Titu whether he had sought the former leader’s execution.

The lawyer admitted to making the Facebook post last August when the protests against Ms Hasina were raging in the country. The post called for Ms Hasina to be hanged.

Mr Titu reportedly told the tribunal the post only reflected his personal opinion and that it would not influence his job.

Yeah, right!

The International Crimes Tribunal was set up by Hasina’s father and independence war leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to prosecute former Pakistani generals involved in the 1971 genocide. The trials never took place as his revolutionary-nationalist regime was overthrown in 1975 in a US-backed military coup that slaughtered Mujib and most of his family in the process.

Hasina resurrected the Tribunal to try leaders of the collaborationist Jamaat-e-Islami for 1971 war crimes. The current “tribunal” against Hasina is led by those who defended convicted J-e-I leaders, including the Chief Prosecutor and Attorney General, Mohammad Tajul Islam, which is a gross conflict of interest. He had resigned as convenor for the Amar Bangladesh Party, a breakaway from J-e-I and backer of Yunus, to take up the post.

All this exposes the “tribunal” stunt for what it is: an act of political vengeance by the reactionary pro-Pakistan bourgeoisie aimed at crushing the legacy of Bangladesh’s national-liberation movement, and follows a year-long systematic destruction of statues and symbols celebrating that struggle.

As a prelude, to set a lynch mob atmosphere going, the ICT slapped a six-month “contempt of court” prison sentence on Hasina in absentia and without legal defence last month. This was based on lying assertions from a partisan “government forensic report” about an unverifiable audio recording that she had “threatened” the tribunal.

Also aimed at totally discrediting Bangladesh’s national-liberation history, are the corruption trials against 20 individuals, including Hasina and members of her family, running alongside the ICT farce. This includes Hasina’s niece and Starmerite Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, despite her not receiving an official summons, or being told what the charges are.

The long postwar inflationary boom will inevitably have had a corrupting influence on the national-liberation aspirations that dominated much the postwar anti-imperialist struggles, and so the possibility that dirty bourgeois-opportunist business dealings did take place are not ruled out, but it will not be proven in these politically motivated “trials”. Yunus himself had numerous corruption charges against him conveniently dropped within days of taking office.

And British imperialism’s attempts to buy off and bribe immigrant populations at home to head them away from any revolutionary-socialist aspirations will also by their nature have had a corrupting influence regardless of the merits or otherwise of individual cases (see, for example, the scandal of the minister for homelessness (!!!), Rushanara Ali, resigning after ending the leases of her own tenants so she can hike rents.).

But the real question for Siddiq is why she is still in the Labour Party, a party in which sleaze and cronyism is endemic, from local government level up to high office, as it crawls up to the City of London fatcats and international finance;- and whose history is one of nonstop imperialist warmongering on behalf of the ruling class from “progressive” Atlee’s defence of Empire on (including the murderous Partition of India from which all the national-rivalry turmoil in the Indian subcontinent today originates) to its full support for the Palestinian genocide and the Ukrainian nazis today.

Underscoring the current witch-hunting atmosphere in is a government order issued last October granting immunity from prosecution to anti-Hasina protesters who violently attacked and killed state officials, security forces, supporters of the Awami League and religious minorities, and who released violent prisoners from jails, between 15th July and 8th August last year. None of this is in the ICT’s remit.

Neither is the year-long record of violent persecution of the Awami League, journalists and minorities as outlined in this AL dossier (with sections on the persecution of minorities and sexual violence edited out due to lack of space):

Bangladesh is currently undergoing a period of severe political turbulence following the formation of an interim government in August 2024, led by Muhammad Yunus. Although initially presented as a neutral, transitional authority aimed at restoring democratic order, the interim regime has instead presided over a systematic erosion of fundamental rights and civil liberties throughout the country. What began as a political transition has devolved into institutionalized repression.

The absence of democratic legitimacy and judicial oversight has enabled a climate where the rule of law is routinely disregarded. Security forces operate with near-total impunity, resulting in arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, custodial deaths, and the widespread use of torture and intimidation. The judiciary, rather than acting as a safeguard, has become an instrument of political coercion, further eroding public trust in the legal system.

The current administration has adopted authoritarian methods to silence dissent, suppress political opposition, and dismantle freedom of the press. Peaceful assembly is criminalized, and journalists, lawyers, students, and human rights defenders are subjected to harassment, surveillance, and detention.

At the same time, religious minorities, particularly Hindus, have reported escalating violence, discrimination, and intimidation, often carried out with impunity or the tacit complicity of state actors. Gender-based violence, including attacks on women in custody, has also increased under this regime.[...]

Extrajudicial Killings and Deaths in Custody

Following the collapse of democratic safeguards under the interim government, extrajudicial killings and custodial deaths have emerged as defining features of the current regime’s crackdown on dissent. These deaths, often unexplained or hastily declared as “suicides” or “natural causes,” reveal a pattern of state-sanctioned violence that operates outside the boundaries of legal accountability.

Since August 2024, there has been a notable spike in suspicious deaths involving members of the political opposition, primarily the Awami League, as well as professionals and minority community members serving in state institutions. In numerous instances:

* Detainees have died within days of arrest, often in police or prison custody.

* Authorities routinely attribute deaths to heart attacks, suicide, or pre-existing conditions, claims which are frequently contested by family members citing signs of torture or trauma.

* In Bogura prison alone, four opposition leaders died within a span of 29 days, all officially recorded as heart attacks, yet multiple reports noted visible bruises and injuries on the bodies.

* Family members have been denied the right to file cases, and no independent post-mortems have been permitted in many cases.

Indigenous leaders and minority figures, including several Hindu personnel in law enforcement, have also died under suspicious circumstances inside government compounds and barracks. Though these deaths are almost universally declared “suicides,” the absence of credible investigations, suicide notes, or independent oversight undermines such claims.

The weaponization of custody, whether through physical abuse, psychological coercion, or outright murder, has become a routine means of controlling perceived enemies of the state. Those taken into custody are often:

* Denied legal representation

*Subjected to physical and mental abuse

* Held without formal charges under pretexts such as “national security” or “investigative necessity”

Despite credible documentation by human rights organizations, there has been no meaningful inquiry or accountability into these deaths. This climate of impunity, reinforced by state silence and judicial inaction, only emboldens further abuses.

The cumulative effect is chilling: detention itself has become a death sentence for many, and the absence of justice sends a clear signal to the public: no one is safe, and no recourse exists.

Arbitrary Arrests and Detentions

Following the wave of extrajudicial killings and custodial deaths, the interim government has relied heavily on arbitrary arrests and prolonged detentions as a key mechanism of political control. These actions, frequently executed without warrants, evidence, or due process, have contributed to an environment of pervasive fear and legal uncertainty.

Since the installation of the Yunus-led interim regime in August 2024, there has been a massive surge in arrests, with thousands detained across the country in connection with peaceful protests, political organizing, or simply for being affiliated, real or perceived, with the Awami League or critical civil society organizations.

The patterns are deeply troubling:

* Blanket First Information Reports (FIRs) are filed, often naming 200–600 “unknown” accused persons, providing wide latitude for indiscriminate arrests.

* Police routinely pick up individuals without warrants, later justifying their detention under Section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which allows arrest on “reasonable suspicion” without formal charges.

* Detainees are often denied bail, access to legal counsel, or even notification to family members, in direct violation of both domestic law and international human rights standards.

* Night raids have become commonplace, with plainclothes officers or paramilitary units detaining individuals from their homes without explanation.

Among those most affected:

* Opposition leaders, many of whom are imprisoned on charges that lack any substantiated evidence.

* Student activists who face swift detention for organizing or participating in peaceful demonstrations.

* Journalists and lawyers, who are increasingly viewed as adversaries by the state, simply for defending basic rights.

* Women and minors, many of whom report verbal abuse, intimidation, or degrading treatment during arrest and custody.

The arbitrary nature of these arrests is compounded by the lack of judicial independence. Courts have been observed issuing remand orders without a proper hearing, often in alignment with political directives. In many cases, bail petitions are delayed, dismissed, or obstructed, prolonging detention unnecessarily and increasing vulnerability to torture or ill-treatment.

The purpose of these detentions is clear: to neutralize dissent, disrupt organizational capacity within the opposition, and create an atmosphere in which public criticism of the government is equated with criminal behavior. The interim government is not enforcing law and order; it is weaponizing it.

This growing culture of impunity, where anyone can be arrested at any time, without cause or remedy, constitutes a grave violation of Bangladesh’s constitutional protections, as well as its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which it is a party.

As this report will demonstrate in the sections that follow, arbitrary detention is not an exception, but a deliberate state strategy, working in tandem with other forms of repression such as violence, intimidation, and judicial manipulation.

State-Backed Vandalism and Property Destruction

Closely linked to the surge in arbitrary arrests is the alarming rise in state-sanctioned vandalism and property destruction, particularly targeting individuals affiliated with the political opposition, civil society, and minority communities. In many cases, destruction of property has been carried out concurrently with arrests or as a form of collective punishment, with law enforcement agencies either complicit or directly involved.

Since August 2024, reports from across the country have documented a systematic pattern:

* Police and paramilitary forces have raided homes, especially those of opposition supporters, destroying furniture, electronics, legal documents, and religious items under the guise of “search operations.”

* During or after political demonstrations, security forces have entered neighborhoods known to support the Awami League, vandalizing shops, houses, and vehicles without any legal warrant or justification.

* In rural areas, entire villages have been subjected to retaliatory attacks following anti-government rallies or political meetings. Homes have been set ablaze, livestock killed, and crops destroyed, often in the presence of local law enforcement.

* Educational institutions known to be aligned with or sympathetic to opposition voices have faced break-ins, looting, and intimidation of staff. In one instance, a school run by a former female member of parliament was vandalized under police escort.

In many incidents, masked youth groups associated with ruling party affiliates, such as certain student fronts and local political thugs, have operated in tandem with the police. These groups often arrive on motorbikes, cause deliberate destruction, and leave before any formal complaints can be filed. When victims attempt to report these crimes, police stations routinely refuse to register FIRs, or worse, threaten the complainants with legal consequences.

The destruction is not random; it is calculated and punitive. Victims are often forced to abandon their homes and livelihoods. In some districts, entire families have fled to neighboring villages or towns, fearing further reprisals after their properties were marked or looted.

Critically, this wave of vandalism has been accompanied by zero accountability:

* No official investigations have been launched into any of the major incidents.

* CCTV footage from public institutions is routinely ignored, even when it captures clear evidence of perpetrators.

* Judicial remedies are practically inaccessible for the poor and politically persecuted, who risk further harassment for seeking redress.

What distinguishes this phase of repression is the blurring of lines between law enforcement and politically motivated street violence. When the institutions meant to protect citizens become active participants in their degradation, it signals not only a collapse of rule of law but also the normalization of state brutality.

This pattern of collective punishment through property destruction serves two strategic purposes: it breaks the spirit of resistance among the political opposition and sends a clear message to others: association with dissent may cost you your home, your business, or your safety.

The continued use of state-backed vandalism as a political tool reinforces the broader conclusion of this dossier: the interim government is engaged in a coordinated campaign to dismantle all forms of opposition, not only by targeting individuals but by destabilizing their communities and erasing their physical presence.[...[

Arrest and Harassment of Journalists

The crackdown on journalists in Bangladesh under the interim government has reached an alarming level, raising serious concerns about the erosion of press freedom, freedom of expression, and the right to information. The regime’s approach to media has been characterized by surveillance, intimidation, arbitrary detention, and violence, with a clear intention to silence critical voices and suppress independent journalism.

Over the past several months, multiple journalists, both from print and electronic media, have been subjected to arrest, physical assault, legal harassment, and online smear campaigns. Many of these incidents occurred shortly after the publication of content critical of the interim government or its affiliated power structures. In some cases, journalists were detained without a warrant; in others, they were charged under vague and sweeping laws such as the Digital Security Act (DSA) or its successor, which continues to be used as a tool for censorship.

Documented incidents include:

* Faruk Hossain, a journalist for Daily Manab Zamin, was arrested after reporting on the death of a schoolgirl in Magura. His article raised questions about police negligence in a rape and murder case involving an eight-year-old girl. He was picked up without a warrant, allegedly interrogated for hours, and accused of spreading “false information,” despite no factual errors being identified in his report.

* On April 2, 2025, a female journalist in Dhaka’s Banashree area was physically assaulted by a group of men while returning from an assignment. After filing a complaint, she faced a wave of online harassment, including doxxing and targeted misogynistic abuse. Law enforcement took no action against the attackers.

* Veteran journalist Shahriar Kabir faced legal threats and surveillance after publicly criticizing the rise of religious extremism and state indifference under the interim government. His phone was reportedly tapped, and his residence was monitored by plainclothes personnel.

* A senior editor at a major Bengali daily was summoned by intelligence officials for a “courtesy meeting” shortly after publishing an editorial critical of human rights abuses. The editor was warned against publishing any further “anti-state rhetoric.”

* Several regional correspondents reported being threatened by local administration officials after covering violence against religious minorities and unlawful demolitions in Hindu-majority villages. In many of these cases, their press credentials were suspended or withheld.

This pattern of state-directed or state-condoned suppression has created a chilling effect throughout the media landscape. Reporters now operate in an environment where self-censorship is the norm, and the cost of honest journalism may include arrest, torture, or exile.

The Digital Security Act (DSA) and its revised iterations have become key instruments of repression. Journalists have been charged for vague offenses such as:

* “Tarnishing the image of the state,”

* “Spreading rumors,” and

* “Inciting discontent.”

Most arrests under these laws are made without proper judicial oversight, and in many cases, pre-trial detentions are prolonged, effectively punishing the accused before any conviction. [...]

Proliferation of Fabricated Cases (Fake Charges)

The ongoing campaign of repression under the interim government has been further entrenched through the widespread use of fabricated cases and politically motivated charges. These tactics serve as a calculated tool to intimidate dissidents, criminalize peaceful activism, and weaken any form of opposition or independent thought. In many instances, individuals have been implicated in multiple cases simultaneously, often without evidence, legal merit, or due process.

This weaponization of the legal system has created a chilling effect across civil society. Opposition party members, student activists, journalists, human rights defenders, and even ordinary citizens have found themselves arbitrarily named in First Information Reports (FIRs) for alleged involvement in incidents they were nowhere near. These charges typically range from “sabotage” and “subversive activities” to violations under the Digital Security Act, all deliberately vague and broadly defined to enable prosecutorial discretion and abuse.

Several victims have been named in dozens of cases filed across multiple jurisdictions, making it logistically and financially impossible to defend themselves. In some cases, individuals who were already in police custody or in prison at the time of the alleged offense were still shown as active participants in new crimes, demonstrating a complete disregard for factual consistency. Such procedural misconduct points to a system where the accusation itself becomes a punishment, eroding the fundamental principle of the presumption of innocence.

Legal experts and rights organizations have documented how police officers, acting under administrative and political pressure, prepare template-style complaints with blank fields for names and dates, which are later filled in based on directives from ruling authorities. This practice not only undermines the credibility of the legal process but also fosters a culture of arbitrary detention, prolonged pre-trial incarceration, and judicial backlog. In many cases, bail is systematically denied, and even where courts grant bail, individuals are re-arrested under new charges moments after release.

The use of fabricated charges extends beyond political figures. There are documented instances of land activists, minority community leaders, and trade union organizers being arrested on spurious allegations after raising legitimate concerns regarding state or corporate misconduct. This suggests an expansion of state repression from traditional opposition to all forms of grassroots dissent.

Peaceful activism is being criminalised in Britain too. Journalists are facing harassment and detention on “terrorism” charges (e.g. Sara Wilkinson, Craig Murray). In Gaza, they are they are hunted down like wild animals.

This is fascism. Socialist revolution is the only way out.

Phil Waincliffe

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The “new” RCP’s bogus “Defence of Lenin” is in reality an attempt to breath new life into tired old Lenin-Trotsky “joint-leadership” fictions and instant “workers’ democracy” fantasies to hide their petty-bourgeois class hatred for Lenin’s proletarian-dictatorship science.

Review: In Defence of Lenin – Volume 2* by Rob Sewall and Alan Woods – Part 3

(*Part two last issues and also Vol1 review EPSR No 1652)

[Continuing from the Trots’ misrepresentation of the vital trade union discussion and the Bolsheviks’ Tenth Congress]

Far from dismissing the dispute itself as an “irresponsible ‘discussion’”, Lenin saw the discussion as a necessary response to Trotsky’s irresponsible diversion. He continued his exposure of Trotsky’s factionalism in his Report to the Second All-Russia Congress of Miners at the end of January and again in pamphlet form in Once Again on the Trade Unions, – in the course of which, he further exposed Trotsky’s bureaucratic approach to the problem:

The Danger Of Factional Pronouncements To The Party

Is Comrade Trotsky’s pamphlet The Role and Tasks of the Trade Unions a factional pronouncement? Irrespective of its content, is there any danger to the Party in a pronouncement of this kind? Attempts to hush up this question are a particularly favourite exercise with the members of the Moscow Committee (with the exception of Comrade Trotsky, of course), who see the factionalism of the Petrograd comrades, and with Comrade Bukharin, who, however, felt obliged, on December 30, 1920, to make the following statement on behalf of the “buffer group”:

“. . . when a train seems to be heading for a crash, a buffer is not a bad thing at all” (report of the December 30,1920 discussion, p. 45).

So there is some danger of a crash. Can we conceive of intelligent members of the Party being indifferent to the question of how, where and when this danger arose?

Trotsky’s pamphlet opens with the statement that “it is the fruit of collective work”, that “a number of responsible workers, particularly trade unionists (members of the Presidium of the All-Russia Central Council of Trade Unions, the Central Committee of the Metalworkers’ Union, Tsektran and others)” took part in compiling it, and that it is a “platform pamphlet”. At the end of thesis 4 we read that “the forthcoming Party Congress will have to choose [Trotsky’s italics] between the two trends within the trade union movement”.

If this is not the formation of a faction by a member of the Central Committee, if this does not mean “heading for a crash”, then let Comrade Bukharin, or anyone of his fellow-thinkers, explain to the Party any other possible meaning of the words “factionalism “, and the Party “seems to be heading for a crash”. Who can be more purblind than men wishing to play the “buffer” and closing their eyes to such a “danger of a crash”?

Just imagine: after the Central Committee had spent two plenary meetings (November 9 and December 7) in an unprecedentedly long, detailed and heated discussion of Comrade Trotsky’s original draft theses and of the entire trade union policy that he advocates for the Party, one member of the Central Committee, one out of nineteen, forms a group outside the Central Committee and presents its “collective work” as a “platform”, inviting the Party Congress “to choose between two trends”! This, incidentally, quite apart from the fact that Comrade Trotsky’s announcement of two and only two trends on December 25, 1920, despite Bukharin’s coming out as a “buffer” on November 9, is a glaring exposure of the Bukharin group’s true role as abettors of the worst and most harmful sort of factionalism. But I ask any Party member: Don’t you find this attack and insistence upon “choosing” between two trends in the trade union movement rather sudden? What is there for us to do but stare in astonishment at the fact that after three years of the proletarian dictatorship even one Party member can be found to “attack” the two trends issue in this way?

Nor is that all. Look at the factional attacks in which this pamphlet abounds. In the very first thesis we find a threatening “gesture” at “certain workers in the trade union movement” who are thrown “back to trade-unionism, pure and simple, which the Party repudiated in principle long ago” (evidently the Party is represented by only one member of the Central Committee’s nineteen). Thesis 8 grandiloquently condemns “the craft conservatism prevalent among the top trade union functionaries” (note the truly bureaucratic concentration of attention on the “top”!). Thesis 11 opens with the astonishingly tactful, conclusive and business-like (what is the most polite word for it?) “hint” that the “majority of the trade unionists . . . give only formal, that is, verbal, recognition” to the resolutions of the Party’s Ninth Congress.

We find that we have some very authoritative judges before us who say the majority (!) of the trade unionists give only verbal recognition to the Party’s decisions.

Thesis 12 reads:

“. . . many trade unionists take an ever more aggressive and uncompromising stand against the prospect of ‘coalescence’. . . . Among them we find Comrades Tomsky and Lozovsky.

“What is more, many trade unionists, balking at the new tasks, and methods, tend to cultivate in their midst a spirit of corporative exclusiveness and hostility for the new men who are being drawn into the given branch of the economy, thereby actually fostering the survivals of craft-unionism among the organised workers.”

Let the reader go over these arguments carefully and ponder them. They simply abound in “gems”. Firstly, the pronouncement must be assessed from the standpoint of factionalism! Imagine what Trotsky would have said, and how he would have said it, if Tomsky had published a platform accusing Trotsky and “many” military workers of cultivating the spirit of bureaucracy, fostering the survivals of savagery, etc. What is the “role” of Bukharin, Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov and the others who fail to see—positively fail to note, utterly fail to note—the aggressiveness and factionalism of all this, and refuse to see how much more factional it is than the pronouncement of the Petrograd comrades?

Secondly, take a closer look at the approach to the subject: many trade unionists “tend to cultivate in their midst a spirit”. . . . This is an out-and-out bureaucratic approach. The whole point, you see, is not the level of development and living conditions of the masses in their millions, but the “spirit” which Tomsky and Lozovsky tend to cultivate “in their midst”.

Thirdly, Comrade Trotsky has unwittingly revealed the essence of the whole controversy which he and the Bukharin and Co. “buffer” have been evading and camouflaging with such care.

What is the point at issue? Is it the fact that many trade unionists are balking at the new tasks and methods and tend to cultivate in their midst a spirit of hostility for the new officials?

Or is it that the masses of organised workers are legitimately protesting and inevitably showing readiness to throw out the new officials who refuse to rectify the useless and harmful excesses of bureaucracy?

Is it that someone has refused to understand the “new tasks and methods”?

Or is it that someone is making a clumsy attempt to cover up his defence of certain useless and harmful excesses of bureaucracy with a lot of talk about new tasks and methods?

It is this essence of the dispute that the reader should bear in mind.

Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin January 1921, vol. 32

As mentioned above, the authors dishonestly misrepresent Lenin’s Report on the Political Work of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) by taking a quote out of context to pretend that Lenin thought there was nothing to be gained from the dispute. They moan that

Lenin saw the affair as an enormous waste of time and energy, generating a colossal amount of heat and little light, when far more important things were at stake. ?

Well, yes and no. Using a more positive metaphor (“every cloud has a silver lining”), Lenin in fact explained that the dispute demonstrated the growing maturity of the Party in its ability to correct such dangerous factionalism, but that it was also necessary to add legal measures to its arsenal, – a ban on factions and expulsion powers for the CC. Here is the pertinent part of the Lenin’s report quoted in full:

I shall now deal with another point from a totally different sphere—the trade union discussion, which has taken up so much of the Party’s time. I mentioned it earlier on today, and could naturally only venture the cautious remark that I thought many of you would consider this discussion as being too great a luxury. I must add, for my part, that I think it was quite an impermissible luxury, and we certainly made a mistake when we allowed it, for we had failed to realise that we were pushing into the forefront a question which for objective reasons cannot be there.

[Woods and Sewall only quote the latter sentence. But they even distort this. The “impermissible luxury” was in allowing Trotsky to launch his petty-bourgeois campaign of anti-proletarian-dictatorship sabotage in the first place given the severe crisis the Soviet state was going through. But having allowed it to go ahead, the polemical response by Lenin and the Party was necessary to combat and expose his (as well as Bukharin’s, etc.) theoretical deviations, as Lenin goes on to explain]:

We allowed ourselves to indulge in this luxury, failing to realise how much attention we distracted from the vital and threatening question before us, namely, this question of the crisis. What are the actual results of this discussion, which has been going on for so many months and which must have bored most of you? You will hear special reports on it, but I should like to draw your attention to one aspect of the matter. It is that in this case the saying, “Every cloud has a silver lining”, has been undoubtedly justified.

Unfortunately, there was rather a lot of cloud, and very little silver lining. (Laughter.) Still, the silver lining was there, for although we lost a great deal of time and diverted the attention of our Party comrades from the urgent tasks of the struggle against the petty-bourgeois elements surrounding us, we did learn to discern certain relationships which we had not seen before. The good thing was that the Party was bound to learn something from this struggle. Although we all knew that, being the ruling party, we had inevitably to merge the Party and government leadership— they are merged and will remain so—the Party nevertheless learned a certain lesson in this discussion which cannot be ignored. Some platforms mostly got the votes of the “top” section of the Party. Some platforms which were sometimes called “the platforms of the Workers’ Opposition”, and sometimes by other names, clearly proved to be an expression of a syndicalist deviation. That is not just my personal opinion, but that of the vast majority of those present. (Voices: “That’s right.”)

In this discussion, the Party proved itself to have matured to such an extent that, aware of a certain wavering of the “top” section and hearing the leadership say: “We cannot agree—sort us out,” it mobilised rapidly for this task and the vast majority of the more important Party organisations quickly responded: “We do have an opinion, and we shall let you know it.”

During the discussion we got a number of platforms. There were so many of them that, although in view of my position I should have read them all, I confess I had not. (Laughter.) I do not know whether all those present had found the time to read them, but, in any case, I must say that this syndicalist, and to a certain degree even semi-anarchist, deviation, which has crystallised, gives food for thought. For several months we allowed ourselves to wallow in the luxury of studying shades of opinion. Meanwhile, the demobilisation of the army was producing banditry and aggravating the economic crisis. The discussion should have helped us to understand that our Party, with at least half a million members and possibly even more, has become, first, a mass party, and, second, the government party, and that as a mass party it reflects something of what is taking place outside its ranks. It is extremely important to understand this.

There would be nothing to fear from a slight syndicalist or semi-anarchist deviation; the Party would have swiftly and decisively become aware of it, and would have set about correcting it. But it is no time to argue about theoretical deviations when one of them is bound up with the tremendous preponderance of peasants in the country, when their dissatisfaction with the proletarian dictatorship is mounting, when the crisis in peasant farming is coming to a head, and when the demobilisation of the peasant army is setting loose hundreds and thousands of broken men who have nothing to do, whose only accustomed occupation is war and who breed banditry. At the Congress, we must make it quite clear that we cannot have arguments about deviations and that we must put a stop to that. The Party Congress can and must do this; it must draw the appropriate lesson, and add it to the Central Committee’s political report, consolidate and confirm it, and make it a Party law and duty. The atmosphere of the controversy is becoming extremely dangerous and constitutes a direct threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

[And regarding Woods and Sewall’s “Lenin exaggerated” fraud…]

A few months ago, when I had occasion to meet and argue with some comrades in a discussion and said, “Beware, this constitutes a threat to working-class rule and the dictatorship of the proletariat,” they replied, “This is intimidation, you are terrorising us.” On several occasions I have had to hear my remarks being labelled in this manner, and accusations of intimidation thrown about, and I replied that it would be absurd for me to try to intimidate old revolutionaries who had gone through all sorts of ordeals. But when you see the difficulties the demobilisation is producing you can no longer say it was an attempt at intimidation, or even an unavoidable exaggeration in the heat of the controversy; it was, in fact, an absolutely exact indication of what we now have, and of our need for unity, discipline and restraint. We need all this not only because otherwise a proletarian party cannot work harmoniously, but because the spring has brought and will bring even more difficult conditions in which we cannot function without maximum unity. These two main lessons, I think, we shall still be able to learn from the discussion. I think it necessary to say, therefore, that whilst we did indulge in luxury and presented the world with a remarkable example of a party, engaged in a most desperate struggle, permitting itself the luxury of devoting unprecedented attention to the detailed elucidation of separate points of platforms—all this in face of a crop failure, a crisis, ruin and demobilisation—we shall now draw from these lessons a political conclusion—not just a conclusion pointing to some mistake, but a political conclusion—concerning the relations between classes, between the working class and the peasants. These relations are not what we had believed them to be. They demand much greater unity and concentration of forces on the part of the proletariat, and under the dictatorship of the proletariat they are a far greater danger than all the Denikins, Kolchaks and Yudeniches put together. It would be fatal to be deluded on this score! The difficulties stemming from the petty-bourgeois element are enormous, and if they are to be overcome, we must have great unity, and I don’t mean just a semblance of unity. We must all pull together with a single will, for in a peasant country only the will of the mass of proletarians will enable the proletariat to accomplish the great tasks of its leadership and dictatorship.

To deflect naïve and impressionable RCP supporters (as against its cynical, anti-Soviet hardcore) from such exposures of Trotsky, the authors have the effrontery to declare that the sole sentence they (actually do) quote from Lenin’s Congress report, and other unspecified “sharp words exchanged on all sides” were

..later torn out of context and used by the Stalinists in a dishonest attempt to create an artificial wedge between Lenin and Trotsky.

In the full context given above, their “sharp words” reveal a huge chasm between Lenin’s sound dialectal-materialist grasp of the matter and Trotsky’s egocentric idealism.

*********

Far from being suppressed, the party under Stalin’s leadership tolerated another four years of even more violent factionalism from Trotsky, whose Left Opposition platform articles were published in Pravda, starting with The New Course pamphlet (1923) – as the authors begrudgingly concede in part (p. 846) whilst pretending that Trotsky’s instant (bureaucratic) solutions to the long-term problem of bureaucratic practices had widespread support within the Party.

In fact, only forty-six “prominent Party members” backed Trotsky (out of “a few thousand...leading cadres” in Trotsky’s words, see below).

As the EPSR’s forerunner, the ILWP Bulletin explained when the Soviet workers’ state was still in existence:

In summing up [his] speech on these questions, Lenin justified this extension of expulsion powers. “It is an extreme measure. I hope we shall never have to apply it. It merely shows that the Party will resort to what you have heard about in the event of disagreements which in one aspect verge a split. We are not children. We have gone through some hard times. We have seen splits and have survived them. We know what a trial they are, and are not afraid of giving the danger its proper name….”

The 10th Congress precautions were well advised for no sooner had Lenin become totally incapacitated two years later than Trotsky launched a factional attack of such bureaucratic viciousness on the Party and State leaders as to be virtually a counter-revolutionary onslaught itself.

For Trotsky’s demagogy about the problems of bureaucracy and for just one arrogant insult to two leading comrades, Lenin had read the riot act against Trotsky’s factionalism over the trade union question, banning all factions and threatening expulsion, and tolerating only three months debate.

What would Lenin, had he lived, have made of ‘The New Course’ – and the FOUR YEARS factional struggle the Party leaders allowed Trotsky to spread his new demagogy?

Bearing in mind Lenin’s furious denunciations above of Trotsky’s ‘shake up’ strategy which could destroy the proletarian dictatorship and bring down Soviet power, of Trotsky’s quackery in pretending there could be instant solutions for the obvious very long-term problem of bureaucratism, and of Trotsky’s ‘monstrous lunacy’ for wrecking Party unity with this relatively mild derogative comments on other leading comrades’ work, consider the following typical example from the opening of Chapter 1 of ‘The New Course’.

Trotsky characterised the entire Party and State leadership in the following way.

“It is precisely during these last months that the ‘old course’ revealed the most negative and most insufferable traits: apparatus cliquism, bureaucratic smugness, and complete disdain for the mood, the thoughts, and the needs of the party. Out of bureaucratic inertia it rejected from the very beginning, and with an antagonistic violence, the initial attempts to put on the order of the day the question of the critical revision of the internal party regime.”

Never mind a ‘shake up’ in trade union work and a couple of mild insults to Tomsky creating the impression that ‘everything is rotten’ in Lenin’s words, what would the enemies of the Bolshevik dictatorship be able to do with this mouthful, - and have done ever since. No less than a complete revolt against the whole Party is being proposed, - EXACTLY the aim of the entire counter-revolutionary clamour against the Soviet workers state right from the start, particularly as led by the non-Bolshevik ‘socialist revolutionaries’ such as the Mensheviks were, - (along with Trotsky until just before the Great October Revolution.)

Instead of quiet practical struggle within the Party and State regime for improvements, slow step by step, in the work of building socialism in the USSR, - as demanded by the 10th Congress resolution against factionalism and the dangers of a split, Trotsky publishes a pamphlet of nothing but the most destructive general vilification of the entire leadership.

“...a growing tendency to counterpose a few thousand comrades who form the leading cadres, to the rest of the mass who they look upon only as an object of action. If this regime should persist….the regime that has lasted too long and become synonymous with the party and bureaucratism...is not a question of isolated deviations….but precisely of the general policy of the apparatus….weakening their revolutionary spirit...” […]

But the rampant subjective factionalism of Trotsky’s ‘New Course’ which later degenerated even further into an open call for a counter-revolutionary putsch against the Soviet workers state, - dressed up as a so-called ‘political revolution’, and into demoralising predictions that the fascist NAZI wehrmacht of German imperialism would finish off ‘Stalinist Bonapartism’,- none of this petty-bourgeois revisionism known as Trotskyism was of any use whatsoever to the actual problems and course of development of the world socialist revolution once Trotsky had in practice severed all relations and influence with the Soviet workers State by the attitude he adopted with the 'New Course' […]

The essential question was to maintain the correct OVERALL GRASP of the nature of the Soviet workers state, together with the requirements of the world socialist revolution. Once Trotskyism had immediately fallen down at the first hurdle in the hopelessly subjective and factional petty-bourgeois sectarian attitude to the Party and State leadership of the Bolshevik revolution, its practical influence was nil, and deservedly so, regardless of any chance insights into later problems of the international class struggle which were denied to the Soviet workers state and its supporters by the misleadership of Stalinism.

Whatever occasional isolated perceptive analysis came later to Trotsky (along with a lot more subjective dross), his reactionary counter-revolutionary attempt to wipe out the Party and State leadership in the Soviet Union in 1923 with his ‘New Course’ made nonsense of all subsequent, vain, exhibitionist swank about extending the socialist revolution in this way or that.

[ILWP/EPSR Book 5, Lenin’s arguments for a strong socialist state against Trotsky’s ‘permanent’ counter-revolution]

In their butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-Trotsky’s-mouth account, Woods and Sewall further cover up Trotsky’s vicious New Course anti-Party leadership disruption (as they do his entire career of anti-Bolshevik hostility from 1903 onwards) by presenting it a part of a fantasy “last struggle” by Lenin in a “bloc” with Trotsky “against bureaucracy” and Stalin, - based on Trotsky’s say-so in his self-justifying writings in exile; Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya’s emotional recollections of Lenin’s final days; a one-sided interpretation of the notes that formed Lenin’s final Letter to the Congress, his so-called ‘testament’ (in which Lenin referred to Trotsky’s bureaucratic approach); and an exaggeration of the resolved 1923 ‘Georgian Affair’ disagreement between Lenin and Stalin. They even throw in some vicious Stalin-poisoned-Lenin slanders for good measure in a way that would make all but the most cynical tabloid hack blush.

In the authors’ warped imagination, Lenin secretly wanted Trotsky to be his successor but did not come out openly for him for fear of causing a split in the Party. But the opposite was true. Lenin did make a stern warning against any split. However, in the course of appraising the strengths and weaknesses of the five leading figures in his final Letter, he noted Trotsky’s relentless hostility towards Stalin’s leadership of the Central Committee. The Letter was read by the delegates to the Thirteenth Party Congress on Lenin’s death with this in mind.

Recognising the need to avoid a split, and seeing this danger in the context of Trotsky’s vicious factionalism, the delegates overwhelmingly decided to keep Stalin as General Secretary.

To be concluded

Phil Waincliffe

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