Current Paper

No 1657 12th June 2025

World imperialism heads deeper into total depravity and horrifying genocidal butchery to suppress the Middle East anti-imperialist revolt courtesy of the disgusting Zionist occupation of Palestine now imposing its own “final solution”. Trump backing for this demented savagery is supplemented with domestic class war/civil war against the useless liberalism of the “Democrats”. It is the next step into outright fascism as a bankrupt US ruling class abandons all pretence of fairness and justice. Splits with Musk and splits with Europe signal the weakness of this barbarism, but the path into World War will continue until the system is stopped, by defeat and then conscious revolutionary struggle for communism. Leninism is vital

Donald Trump’s gobsmacking civil-war deployment of marines against “liberal” Democrat California; escalation of already unspeakable human butchery by the Nazi Zionists’ deliberate genocide in Gaza, backed by America and the rest of imperialism; and Europe’s ludicrous whipped-up “Russian bogeyman” psyops lie-hysteria for vastly increased military spending, all speak to one thing, a bourgeoisie driven to near insanity by its system’s Catastrophic breakdown.

These are all symptoms of an utterly depraved ruling class in frenzied fear that its entire 800 year old exploitation system is imploding and lashing out in all directions to stop it with barbaric wars, jingoism and vicious racist scapegoating crackdowns.

Not since the Nazi 1930s has the deadly, deranged fascist reality of the bourgeois dictatorship behind the parliamentary “democracy” veil been more obviously exposed and more barbarically nasty (and therefore ultimately weaker).

Yet even as the imperialist system sinks daily into ever greater terrorising depravity, cynical hypocrisy and non-stop Goebbels warmongering lies, the fake-“left” still will not spell out the need to end it.

Class war to overturn this bankrupt bourgeoisie and establish working class rule to build socialism is still barely mentioned and never except as more than an afterthought.

Pacifist demands for “ceasefires”, demands to “stop arms supply” and for “welfare not warfare”, and calls for “international legal action” pour out, all a hollow useless reformist joke, as nineteen months of relentless calculated Gaza and West Bank terror-extermination of an entire people testifies.

No amount of mixed in trendy Trot street rhyming rap about “revolution”, or pious Stalinist platitudes about building an (impossible) “multipolar world” gets close to the profound revolutionary perspectives that urgently need building and the giant transformation of human society required.

The need for the deepest study and polemically fought for development of revolutionary science by a purpose built party is ignored.

The entire 50 shades of fake-“leftism” posture and preen but their marches and meetings serve only to head off and confuse genuine public dismay, unease and discontent.

Disquiet and protest there is in plenty, but it remains directionless, without any explanation or leadership by the “left”s who are instead poisoning it with petty bourgeois hostility to workers state discipline and Soviet history; with writing off rising world revolt as “just terrorism” (to be “condemned” in line with bourgeois propaganda); and with constant revival of illusions in discredited bourgeois “democracy”.

All is mingled with the defeatism/complacency which either puts revolution off into an “eventually” distant future while “we do what is possible now” pursuing “step by step” progress (reformism) – or does not mention it at all.

What none of them come near to doing is to spell out to the working class the staggering scale and scope of the gigantic crisis breakdown of the monopoly capitalist system and the impossibility of stopping its plunge into World War and fascist barbarism without the most titanic class war struggle, just as three times before in history (Franco-Prussian war, World War One and World War Two) each triggering huge revolutionary advances and waves of equally titanic war revolutionary struggle, in China, Vietnam, Korea and Cuba among others.

They might allude to “crisis” but only in the sense of “bad weather” economically making things worse – but without conveying at all the intractable nature of the system’s breakdown into chaos, instability and terrifying turmoil, clogged to the point of total paralysis by “surplus” capital and the mountains of credit it has created over decades to try and escape the inevitable crash.

But the contradictions of the capitalist profit-hunting system are inescapable as Marx discovered 150 years ago (see the Communist Manifesto) and Lenin’s Bolsheviks explained further for the epoch of imperialist monopolisation (see economics box).

That is why the world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk – the apotheosis of monopoly capitalist wealth concentration – has suddenly seemingly gone off the rails in a dramatic and unprecedented public “spat” (!!!) with Trump, as the bourgeois press accounts put it.

Blaming this unprecedented ruling class split on “mavericks” or “clashes of ego” is missing the point in a big way – even if it is true that the ruthless individualist subjectivism of capitalism makes every bourgeois tycoon think he (or she) is the only one who can solve the world’s problems (for the ruling class).

The real story is the incredible vitriol immediately spewed out between various wings of the ruling class, reflecting the desperation caused by the crisis.

Musk is driven frantic by Trump’s plans for $2 trillion plus more dollar credit to feed the US rich with tax cuts when the US is already $36 trillion - trillion(!!) – in unbelievable, incredible, incomprehensible and above all unrepayable debt.

That is not out of fairness or lack of greed – he has been presiding over the ruthless DOGE (department of government efficiency) to savage “wasteful” federal cultural, health and welfare provision for the poor and desperate.

It is from panic over dollar collapse – which the EPSR’s Marxist science has long indicated would likely be at the core of the great cataclysm – and which is now hoving into sight again as it did in 2008-9 when the US dominated world credit and bank system virtually collapsed.

A “financial nuclear winter” was hours away for the interlocked international economy, staved off only with even more credit (which has only piled up even bigger contradictions), and with the imposition of ever more grinding “austerity” on even the richest countries’ poorer sections, and ruthless escalated exploitation of the Third World, much of it now on the edge of debt implosion and bankruptcy – and without the former sticking plaster of “international aid” itself being ruthlessly cut.

Musk’s bourgeois mindset obviously still tries to impose some accounting “logic” to “reduce debt” (at the expense of the domestic and overseas working class), but it is far too late.

Harder edged bourgeois minds around Trump know nothing can “solve” the US’ debt problem and logic is out the window; the only path it can take is sheer bullying force to impose its demands on the rest of the world, abandoning all pretence at “fair trade” with its tariff war belligerence, all argument suppressed with “shock and awe” blitzkrieg threats, while whipping up raw repressive hatred domestically to ensure similar ruthless suppression of protest and inevitable turmoil.

Trump’s immediate turn to state troop and marines confrontations in California against the limp "Democrat" petty bourgeois liberalism, is a calculated and pre-planned escalation to cover up the confusion revealed by Musk.

It is a pre-emptive class war, civil war move exactly along the lines used by the German Nazis in the 1930s to intimidate and terrify.

Its inflammatory claims of “threats to state security” around lurid lying accusations against the protestors who came out against the vicious scapegoating persecution of migrant and foreign labour echo exactly the “democratic” justifications used by Hitler – to tear up democracy.

Trumpism is taking to a new level the pattern off and on for 25 years since the Empire turned to war blitzing and torture terror to re-impose its lost pre-eminence (on top of the “routine” coups, invasions, wars and massacres used to “police” the world during the Cold War) and to warn off all its rivals and challengers among the rest of the imperialist “community” of both older imperialist powers and new rising competition like Brazil or India.

But it has gone disastrously badly, solving nothing.

The 1999 warm-up in Serbia, to get the world used to the new warmongering pattern, already reflected and stirred tensions as the Empire muscled in on European skulduggery to plunder the once-socialist remnants of Yugoslavia, even though the NATO alliance held together in the common anti-communist interest when the last Yugoslav fragments in revisionist/nationalist Serbia were pulverised by bombs and missiles.

The 9/11 shock attack on the US from the growing “jihadist” revolt mobilised some imperialist “unity” to support the ruthless blitzing “punishment” of this rising Third World hatred and resistance, destroying what was left of already ripped apart Afghanistan in the ridiculously labelled “war on terror” (gone along with by virtually every shade of craven fake-“leftism”).

But splits, hesitations and emerging political conflicts between the imperialist powers quickly resurfaced over the neocons’ long-planned Iraq invasion in 2003 (to begin re-imposing US dominance for a “New American Century”) with the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and German objections reflecting the underlying crisis, and the growing cutthroat trade war splits at the heart of it, long festering and already forcing stagnation onto Japan with currency bullying and tariff impositions in the 1990s.

Far from solving the Empire’s economic problems (already manifest in the dotcom collapse) the Iraq invasion and its warcrime civilian blitzing triggered a huge wave of insurgent recruitment, driving out the direct occupation (though replaced with corrupt stooge Shia and US bases), and spreading widely.

There was no new stability and deferential return to a post-WW2 world of American supremacy.

Instead the capitalist crisis broke in full with the 2009 economic meltdown, which in turn drove seething insurgent revolt to a qualitatively new level in the form of mass street rebellion of the Arab Spring, spreading from Egypt and Tunisia into Bahrain, even parts of Saudi Arabia and especially Yemen, and then through Africa’s Sahel.

A further terrified world bourgeoisie was forced into the premature invasion of Libya and to provoking civil war in Syria (but see following article), to try and head off the revolts with bogus extensions of the Arab Spring, and then finally the 2013 CIA/Zionist colour revolution coup in Egypt to install the brutal Sisi military dictatorship and violently suppress the new “democracy” (despite its successful manipulation the year before to install the “moderate” Morsi as president).

But that has failed to transform imperialism’s prospects too. The Syrian regime hung on and worse still, even the brutal warcrime barbarities imposed on backward Afghanistan (including multiple crude civilian killings by Australian, British and other Western deathsquads) could not pacify even this backwater – another humiliation for Western “control” diktat and a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars poured in over 20 years to prop up the unworkable “democracy and freedom” lie.

But even worse than that is the complete disaster for the West of the war on Russia, set up and provoked by post-Soviet infiltration and brainwashing in Ukraine by Western intelligence and its lying “democracy” NGOs, tapping the century old anti-communist hatreds of the west Ukraine petty bourgeoisie, and its pre-WW2 Hitler-nazi sympathies.

The twisting of this backwardness into the fascist Kiev regime installed by the violent Maidan coup in 2014 and its manipulation as a proxy for NATO onslaught was intended as a great diversion from the ever increasing slump conditions imposed on poorer workers in Europe and America, by a ruling class that knows how precarious is the economic “stability” re-established by the post-2009 QE credit creation.

And it might have proved a “shock and awe” example to the world, helping cow it back into subservience to the great Empire and its stooges.

But Moscow has proven a much less digestible target than expected with all the imperialist posturing about strangling it with sanctions and early mockery of its military competence (including by much fake-“left” posturing such as the CPGB Weekly Worker).

For all the psyops hype and non-stop ludicrous lies about supposedly huge numbers of Russian front line casualties – it is NATO-run Ukraine which is being driven back and on the brink of collapse, its morale shattered, population rebellious against further press gang conscription and economy devastated.

And its imperialist backers have taken huge blows as their supposed “killer” sanctions have backfired, damaging their own economies (with ludicrously wasteful shutdowns of energy supply etc piling huge costs onto their own working classes) and as vast sums have been poured into military aid.

The huge American empire has pulled back from this staggeringly costly mess, to cut its huge military spend losses (blamed on Bidenism by Trump as part of his populist agenda) and to swing its attention to the enormous challenge of Chinese competition, where the overall planning advantage of workers state control (despite revisionist weakness) has allowed the capitalist sector of Beijing’s now giant economy to rapidly rise and, combined with state economic forces, to outcompete America in every way.

Washington takes the Ukraine hit partly because the war has served its crucial purpose anyway, of reining in European trade competition, which for decades has been a growing problem (car sales, Airbus versus Boeing, pharmaceuticals etc), indirectly by miring Europe in conflict and directly through the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines to cut off crucial cheaper energy.

Escalation of this trade hostility by Trump’s tariff wars now makes explicit this underlying American agenda (which the EPSR’s Marxism alone identified from the beginning as just as significant as “breaking up Russia”).

Trump’s moves come at the cost of breaking-up the post-war imperialist alliance and its post-WW2 global “democracy and freedom” fraud, used for decades because of revisionist stupidity, to maintain first the anti-Soviet Cold War “balance” and subsequently, after Gorbachev’s liquidation of the USSR, to back the tyrannical US policing of ever rising Third World rebelliousness, to keep it safe for the Western monopoly corporate exploitation and plundering which maintains the complacency of “our way of life” consumerist philistinism.

The floundering European powers cannot pull out however; they need the warmongering as a diversion from their Catastrophe driven collapse and failure.

Hence the increasingly demented and nonsensical declarations by the European Union that it is facing the “threat of invasion” to hype up massive military spending, echoed by the ever more ridiculous statements from the London ruling class that “Britain is already at war” (!!!) dutifully promulgated by the cynical, lying, class collaborating grovel of the contemptible Starmerites (even more fascistically Blairite than the lying Iraq warmongering of New Labour).

Hence too the endless stream of utterly fantastical, idiotic and evidence-free psyops-planted media stories about supposed “Russian arson and sabotage across Europe” and “threats to our undersea cables” to stampede war hysteria in petty bourgeois public opinion – and the real hair-raising sabotage provocations inside Russia organised by covert British “advisers” and British intelligence support in Kiev.

Even sicker than all this however is the outright backing and support by all the imperialist countries for the monstrous Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people, and especially the heavily Jewish lobby-influenced US, UK and reactionary Germany where still lingering Nazi influence in the mainstream bourgeoisie (left in place by the victorious WW2 powers for anti-communist purposes) has twisted the “national guilt” of its petty bourgeois liberalism into unquestioning support for the Zionist occupation and its now overtly inhuman “kill them all” fanaticism.

The world is poleaxed by the horror as this agonised bourgeois press piece spells out:

Now, when Israel is executing a “final solution” in Gaza, when it is far too late for dissent to make any difference, the tide is slowly starting to turn. Now that Gaza is flattened, turned into mass graves and rubble, people who have kept quiet for the past 19 months are slowly starting to speak up. Now that Israel and the US are not even trying to pretend that they aren’t intent on emptying Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians, of “taking control” of all of the land, some criticism has started to trickle in.

Over in the UK, they’ve pulled out the “e” word. After 19 months of genocidal violence and almost three months of a starvation campaign the UK has decided to describe the situation as egregious. The UK, along with France and Canada, has threatened – and I’m sure Israel’s leaders are quaking in their boots over this – that there might be a “concrete” response if the mass killing and starvation continues.

Meanwhile, there’s been a slight shift in the media coverage. Instead of just parroting the Israeli government’s talking points, major media figures such as Piers Morgan are starting to challenge Israeli spokespeople about why the international media has not been freely allowed into Gaza to see what is happening for themselves.

All of this is too little, too late. It will not bring back little Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl who was killed when 335 bullets were fired by Israeli soldiers into the car the terrified child was trapped in. Or the aid workers executed by Israel and buried in shallow graves.

It will not rebuild the hospitals, kindergartens, IVF centers and universities that have been systematically levelled by Israel. It will not give kids in Gaza – the largest cohort of child amputees in the world – their limbs back. It will not fix the long-term damage that malnutrition and almost two years of no schooling has done to a generation.

The criticism we are seeing now is simply an exercise in ass-covering. Performative opposition, so that in the future, when the true scale of the slaughter in Gaza is clear, the politicians and media figures responsible for enabling and justifying this horror for 19 months can say: “Look! I said something! I didn’t just stand by!”

And what will you say? When future generations read about Gaza with horror and wonder how the western world, with all its moral superiority, its rule-based order and its focus on international human rights law, allowed a livestreamed genocide to happen, what will you say? When future generations learn that, for 19 months, we woke up every morning to videos of children being burned alive – bombed with weapons that the US taxpayer helped pay for and the western world helped justify?

A lot of ordinary people will be able to hold their head up high and say they were not silent; that they use whatever platforms or privilege they had. Logan Rozos, an NYU student who had his diploma withheld because he used his commencement speech to recognize “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine”, will be able to say he wasn’t quiet. The students expelled from Columbia University for protesting will be able to say they put their futures on the line in the name of justice. Actors like Melissa Barrera, who was fired from Scream 7 over her pro-Palestine posts, will be able to say that she prioritized integrity over her career.

The people with real power, however, will not be able to say the same; they will not be able to wash the blood from their hands. It seems likely that all this horror will eventually be pinned on Benjamin Netanyahu while others try to absolve themselves of blame. But this isn’t just Netanyahu’s genocide. This is the Biden-Harris genocide; the Trump-Vance genocide; the Keir Starmer and David Lammy genocide. It is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s genocide. [...]

We would not be where we are today were it not for the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians by the western media and the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech. We would not be here if western reporters and Joe Biden hadn’t manufactured consent for the genocide by repeating the incendiary lie that Hamas had beheaded babies. We would not be here if the Biden administration had actually worked towards a ceasefire instead of lying about their efforts and giving Israel carte blanche to do whatever it liked. Eventually history will judge all these people.

But perhaps that is wishful thinking. Perhaps I am being naïve in thinking that, even if all the Palestinians are sent off to exile in Libya and Gaza is turned into a Trump-branded resort, there will ever be a reckoning. After all, how many Americans or Europeans really know about the Nakba? How many people know about Israel’s “Cast Thy Bread” operation in 1948 where the drinking water in Palestinian villages was poisoned? How many Americans know about Rachel Corrie, the young non-violent activist from Washington who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while she tried to save Palestinian homes in Gaza from destruction in 2003?

Ever since the Nakba, Palestinian voices have been actively suppressed and Israeli atrocities have been minimized. (One Palestinian writer I know had a piece about mapping in Palestine pulled from a very prestigious US magazine several years ago after they refused to remove discussion of the Nakba.) You will have heard of every atrocity committed by a Palestinian, however. You will have been told over and over again that all this started on 7 October 2023.

It is too late for real justice in Gaza now. We can never bring back the dead children. We can’t erase what has happened. But it is not too late for accountability. The atrocities must be documented. The dead in Gaza must be properly counted so we know how many people have been murdered. The media must stop parroting the official death figure of more than 55,000 people being dead without putting this into context and noting that when you account for indirect deaths from starvation, disease, or cold, the real number of deaths is probably enormously higher.

If you have stayed quiet until now, telling yourself that all this is just far too complicated for you to speak up about, it is not too late to raise your voice. What is happening in Gaza is different from the horrors happening in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo because, if you are in the west, it is happening in your name. It is happening with your tax money and with the help of your leaders. If you are in the US, your elected representatives have delivered a standing ovation for this genocide. We are all complicit. Although some of us are far more complicit than others.

[...]Silence is not neutrality. And your silence will not be forgotten.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist

One among many ironies (i.e. gross imperialist cynical lies) is that the “liberal” Guardian has been at the forefront of the stinking Zionist/Labourite “anti-semitism” demonisation of even the tepid “left” over the past ten years, to suppress, eliminate and even criminalise all criticism of the Zionist occupation. And it still continues its support even in the teeth of grotesque lies:

As Keir Starmer finally took a stand last week on the “intolerable” and “horrific” human suffering” being inflicted in Gaza, newly published figures revealed that his government ramped up military supplies to Israel at breakneck speed towards the end of last year.

Even as the PM stood shoulder to shoulder with the French and Canadian leaders threatening “concrete actions” unless Israel ends its “egregious” campaign of humanitarian violence, freshly shipped British supplies were being used in Israel’s continuing military offensive and blockade of food and medicine.

Latest government figures show exports of controlled military goods to Israel increased from less than £30,000 in the first quarter of 2024 to £ 127.6m in the final quarter - more than the Conservatives signed off in their last three years in power.

Just over half were intended for Israel’s defence industry and half for the military. The Department for Business and Trade, which is responsible for issuing licences, claims they are not for use in the Gaza offensive. However, campaigners say the lack of transparency over what shipments contain and how they are used make it impossible for campaigners to monitor them. Emily Apple of Campaign Against the Arms Trade said: “We know just how much political influence the defence industry has within Labour ranks, but even we were shocked by this massive escalation of exports.”

What the first piece does not grasp of course is that this cynicism is far greater than simple hypocrisy.

Speaking out is good but the illusions in some eventual “accountability” is part of the problem, as other bourgeois press accounts show:

Former British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to defund the International Criminal Court (ICC) and withdraw the UK from its founding treaty if Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan sought arrest warrants for Israeli leaders last year, the Middle East Eye (MEE) has reported.

The ICC issued warrants last November for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders, for alleged war crimes committed in the Gaza conflict. Washington has since imposed sanctions on Khan, accusing him of abuse of power by going after US allies.

The prosecutor first reached out to inform London of his intentions last April, the MEE wrote on Monday, citing anonymous staffers familiar with the conversation.

Cameron, who was then Foreign Secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government, reportedly telephoned Khan and warned him that seeking the warrants would be “like dropping a hydrogen bomb.” He reportedly promised that London would “defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute,” if the ICC issued the arrest warrants.

Allegedly, Cameron grew increasingly aggressive as the conversation went on, repeatedly shouting over Khan, who had to ask to finish his points, according to the MEE.

The top prosecutor reportedly argued that if the UK withdrew over the matter, “then we would have to accept that the rules-based system would be dead,” stressing that there was a “serious risk” that people would view the standard as “not being applied equally.”

That is not all; The US has put sanctions onto the ICC and just by coincidence (!!!) Khan is suddenly “under investigation” for alleged “sexual harassment”.

Reactionary feminism is once more providing a cover for anti-communism.

But Khan’s hypocritical liberalism and participation in the obscene anti-communist racket of supposed “world justice” and “warcrime” tribunals is not supportable in any way either; this is all part of the disgusting cover-up and pretence that there ever was any kind of justice by an imperialist system which has imposed nothing but the most brutal tyranny and colonialist slaughter on the planet since its rise eight centuries ago – none more so than the European powers which between them have not only massacred, tortured and enslaved hundreds and hundreds of millions, but have wiped out entire nations (Aztecs, Incas, dozens of native American tribes, Aborigines, etc etc etc), on the way inventing and applying the most horrible tortures, hostage taking, concentration camp butchery and starvation, biological warfare – all long before the German Nazis got round to their particularly “efficient” atrocities.

And all that before the American empire perfected its own Napalm, Agent Orange, B52 carpet bombing, nuclear war, and Guantánamo torture camp additions (among much else) adding tens of millions more to the world death toll.

And their stinking inhuman alienation and socially antagonistic competitive system is responsible daily for the slow death and humiliation of hundreds of millions; not least the Gazans and the Palestinians who had their land taken from them in 1948 and are to be totally eliminated for daring to fight back.

Meanwhile the small flurry of Labourite pretend “outrage” has vanished, along with much of the anyway sporadic media coverage, (the reactionary BBC often saying nothing at all) even as the Zionist occupation has escalated its starvation and shooting policy to even more cynical levels – using the monstrous American mercenary organisation now distributing food to manipulate and coral the desperate starved population in preparation for its expulsion:

This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse.

Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land that borders Egypt. Israel and its cynically named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), allegedly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Mossad, is weaponizing starvation. It is enticing Palestinians to southern Gaza the way the Nazis enticed starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains to the death camps. The goal is not to feed the Palestinians. No one seriously argues there is enough food or aid hubs. The goal is to cram Palestinians into heavily guarded compounds and deport them.

What comes next? I long ago stopped trying to predict the future. Fate has a way of surprising us. But there will be a final humanitarian explosion in Gaza’s human slaughterhouse. We see it with the surging crowds of Palestinians fighting to get a food parcel, which has resulted in Israeli and U.S. private contractors shooting dead at least 130 and wounding over seven hundred others in the first eight days of aid distribution. We see it with Benjamin Netanyahu’s arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza that loot food supplies. Israel, which has eliminated hundreds of employees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), doctors, journalists, civil servants and police in targeted assassinations, has orchestrated the implosion of civil society.

I suspect Israel will facilitate a breach in the fence along the Egyptian border. Desperate Palestinians will stampede into the Egyptian Sinai. Maybe it will end some other way. But it will end soon. Palestinians cannot take much more.

[..]The mantra of never again is a joke. Genocide is public policy. Endorsed and sustained by our two ruling parties.

There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.

I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.

This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami.

Still the bourgeois press pretends objectivity:

Israeli forces killed at least 60 Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday, most of them as they were seeking food from a US-Israeli distribution scheme, according to local health authorities.

Medical officials said at least 25 people were killed and dozens wounded as they approached a food distribution centre run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), near Netzarim in central Gaza.

Later in the day, at least 14 people were killed by Israeli gunfire as they were moving towards another GHF distribution site, in Rafah, at Gaza’s southern border. On Tuesday Israeli troops killed 17 Palestinians around GHF sites.

The bodies of two Israeli hostages were recovered from Gaza by the army and the internal security service, Shin Bet. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement naming one of the dead hostages as Yair Yaakov, a 59-year-old father of three who was abducted and killed by Hamas in its 7 October 2023 attack in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and triggered the conflict. Netanyahu said the second hostage whose remains were recovered, could not yet be named.

There are thought to be 53 Israelis hostages still in Gaza, but most are believed to be dead.

The Gaza health authorities said on Wednesday the Palestinian death toll over the 20 months of conflict had passed 55,000. The health ministry was part of the Hamas government but is staffed by medical professionals and its statistics are regarded as reliable by the UN and other global organisations.

In recent days, more and more of the fatalities have been associated with GHF food distribution. On Wednesday, a New York-based law group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, warned the GHF of its “potential legal liability for complicity in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Palestinians”.

“As Palestinians now face mass starvation, Israel has teamed up with GHF to make accessing food not only dangerous and potentially deadly but also a tool of forced displacement,” its senior staff attorney, Katherine Gallagher, said. “If GHF continues its militarised aid operations, it must be prepared to face the legal consequences, whether in the United States or beyond.”

The Israeli government and armed forces are now under scrutiny by the international court of justice on allegations of genocide, in part because of the alleged use of food as a weapon against the occupied territory’s 2.2 million people.

Humanitarian experts had previously warned that the GHF scheme or distributing food from a restricted number of heavily militarised sites would be highly dangerous for people seeking food, forcing them to cross combat zones.

The organisation’s first executive director, Jake Wood, resigned last month, saying its plan ran counter to “humanitarian principles”.

Last week, a US consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group which had helped set up the GHF, severed ties with the organisation. Johnnie Moore, an evangelical leader and religious adviser to Donald Trump, with a record of outspoken support for Israel and minimal experience of humanitarian work, was appointed the new chair of the GHF.

The Israel Defense Forces said troops had fired “warning shots” overnight towards a group it said posed a threat to them. “This is despite warnings that the area is an active combat zone. The IDF is aware of reports regarding individuals injured; the details are under review,” it said.

The GHF late on Wednesday accused Hamas of killing at least five people in an attack on a bus carrying two dozen Palestinians working with the aid organization to one of its distribution sites.

“We will continue our mission to provide critical aid to the people of Gaza,” it said in a statement.

Also on Wednesday, an Israeli civil rights group, Adalah, said that one of an international group of activists detained by Israel on a ship in the eastern Mediterranean, was being held in solitary confinement.

What does not emerge from any of this “impartial” bourgeois coverage is that the national liberation forces in Gaza, – designated “terrorist” by imperialism – are still there, have not been defeated despite the huge cost, and in their resistance have forced the world to confront the real nature of imperialism.

But the preceding petty bourgeois agony can only despair in paralysis because it does not draw the full lesson; that the stinking capitalist “democratic” world has to go and only revolution can do it.

Build Leninism

Alan Moss

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Discussion: Lalkar/Proletarian revisionist focus on the fight for “sovereignty” as synonymous with anti-imperialism is a misleading distortion of Leninist understanding that pushes the real problem – capitalism itself and its crisis collapse – into the background. It turns Stalinist retreat from revolutionary perspectives into complete evasion. Worse, to make the world fit the theory, concrete analysis is bent and twisted, most notably to declare Russia’s Putin Bonapartism as “not imperialist”, to justify misleading support for the gangster oligarch state rather than correctly calling only for defeat of Western aggression

Further exposure of Lalkar/Proletarian’s revisionist idealism by the recent real world collapse of a major component in its vaunted “axis of resistance” in the Middle East anti-Zionist struggle (examined in part last issue), seems to have had zero impact on their long retreat from revolutionary understanding (begun by their “guru” hero Joseph Stalin).

Correct as their anti-imperialist intention might be, implosion of the flaky Bashir Assad regime in Syria should have given pause to one-sided revisionist notions that such bourgeois nationalism must be defended in itself, or can be an answer as such to the Catastrophic breakdown of the world capitalist system into slump and World War Three, rather than simply clearing the road for the main, conscious revolutionary struggle to end capitalism completely.

In fact they double-down on their errors, blaming other “lefts” for the outcome, and returning to sectarian suppression of any polemic and discussion which tries to examine the obvious difficulties in such perspectives (such debate the only way to clarify matters).

Instead of examining the obvious problems with their understanding the museum-Stalinists go even further, bending facts to make the world fit their “theory” such as declaring Putin’s Russia to be “bourgeois nationalist” too, and therefore to be supported outright, creating further confusion around the imperialist Ukraine war provoked as a diversion from Western economic crisis.

As analysed from the beginning (and detailed below) the Leninist position on the Ukraine war is solely to see the significant imperialist power (US dominated NATO) defeated but without creating any illusions in the backwardness of Putin’s Bonapartist support for the oligarch restoration, and its third rank imperialist ambitions.

All-out support for this Great Russian nationalism simply causes confusion, its lack of class criticism helping leave popular opinion corralled behind the grotesque bogeyman demonisations pumped out in a stream of outright lies about the war by the Western psyops propaganda machine and its compliant (and even eagerly complicit) bourgeois media.

Defeat for Western skulduggery and war tyranny is the need in all these situations, and by whatever forces stand against them, but without trusting them one iota save where they are consciously fighting for communism.

That was the case for Syria. Certainly working class interest was that the filthy imperialist-backed HTS “terrorist” subversion led by al-Jalani (now renamed President Ahmad al-Sharaa), Western/Zionist intelligence trained over several years in Idlib and secretly armed with wealthy feudal stooge Arab money, should have come a cropper in its vicious counter-revolutionary uprising which finally toppled the sanctions-weakened Baathist regime in December after 15 years of civil war.

Correctly enough the CPGB-ML berates the Trots, trade union bureaucrats and some of the more craven revisionist groups, for cheering on the Damascus overturn, all weighing in behind the imperialist skulduggery with their monstrous fake-“left” justifications.

The lying pretence that this Assad fall is any kind of progress, and that the new stooge rebel “jihadists” are a “revolutionary advance against totalitarianism” for the interests of alleged world “democracy”, (still being advocated or left unchallenged by the fake-“left” despite its complete discrediting as the giant hoodwinking fraud it has always been) is just stinking treachery.

The Syrian overturn obviously does hamper locally allied hostility to the imperialist backed Zionist genocide in the form of Hezbollah insurgency in Lebanon, the Iranian Ayatollahs, and the Ansar Allah anti-imperialist resistance (Houthis) in Yemen, all of which have coordinated with Syria and had been able to use it for transit and logistics.

Western recognition of the new Damascus regime, including a handshake meeting just held in Saudi Arabia between Jalani and lead imperialist Donald Trump; HTS cooperation and compromising with the Zionist genocidists across the border (which since the “uprising” has both blitzed the Syrians’ military capacity and advanced its own military/colonialist occupation further into the country from the already annexed (stolen) Golan Heights); and HTS’s own vicious massacre sectarianism against militant Allawite remnants of the Assad regime, all confirm the opportunism of the anti-Assad fake-“left” groups.

It demonstrates the poisonous depths to which much petty bourgeois class-collaborating “leftism”, and especially its Trotskyist variants, is sinking as the crisis deepens, just as slippery Second International reformism had done previously in 1914, capitulating entirely to bourgeois interests country by country, each backing their own ruling class’s inter-imperialist war agendas as “defence of the Fatherland”.

But as discussed last issue (EPSR No 1656) it was never a sound understanding that urging total defeat for the disgusting and horrifying US/Zionist conspiracy against the Arab and Middle East revolt and the world revolution it is merging into, needed to support outright unstable and erratic bourgeois nationalism.

Any blows or resistance to imperialism they can make should be welcomed where concrete conditions and the crisis-driven pressure of the masses force them to take a stand (as Saddam Hussein was forced in Iraq for example, despite his earlier CIA stoogery and thuggish self-interest).

And some of these can be of world shaking progressive significance such as the SACP/ANC civil war struggle against imperialist-backed near-feudal apartheid in South Africa, a permanent advance which clears away one obstacle to the necessary class war to take power completely for the working class and rightly backed by Cuban proletarian revolutionary forces at the time, inflicting historic military blows such as at Cuito Carnavale in Angola against the racist South African invasion.

Just as much has been the impact of the successful, determined and heroic Irish republican armed fight against declining British colonialist dominance, both in the original 1916 Easter Uprising (cheered on by Lenin) and subsequent revolutionary war achieving independence for the 26 counties, and in the staggering liberation war to complete the task in the brutally ripped-out six counties of the north created by the Black & Tan bayonet-enforced 1921 colonialist Partition, now steadily heading for full re-merger with the south, albeit at the deliberate snail’s pace imposed by declining Westminster to try and obscure the reality of its humiliation in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and subsequently (see EPSR Books on Ireland Parts 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8).

But even these often stunningly brave struggles need to move on to completely overturn the bourgeoisie and establish proletarian rule to build socialism; having got so far they are now held back by limited class-collaborating capitalist perspectives and the absence of any Leninist understanding and leadership to challenge their narrowness and even reactionary mistakes.

Sinn Féin’s unfortunate siding with the Ukrainians in Kiev makes the point, its own bourgeois nationalist world view bamboozled by a superficial “national liberation” cause for the Ukrainians. But like the Albanian-Kosovans against Serbia, this Kiev nationalism is wholly and completely corrupted in the service of imperialism and its crisis warmongering.

And even worse, it has itself imposed reactionary oppression on a large minority population of its own, the Russian speakers, with often outright Nazi brutality and intimidation, since it usurped power in the 2014 Maidan coup.

Plenty of other existing and oncoming national struggles, genuinely trying to get out from under world monopoly capitalist domination, are erupting or will erupt, from Haïti’s continuing “gang” rebellion (as usual painted as “just criminality” by imperialist propaganda), and Nicaragua and Venezuela’s continuing proletarian-orientated anti-yankee defiance, to Ethiopia’s independence striving, the anti-Western military control government in Myanmar against fraudulent “democracy” subversion (also provoked, armed and organised by Western agencies) and assorted eruptions in Latin America, Africa’s Sahel, in the Philippines, in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and more, many condemned as “terrorist” by imperialism (and the fake-“left”).

But while these are all significant and potentially important contributions to pushing back imperialism’s ever more barbaric overall domination, the real significance is in the impact such blows against world monopoly capital imperialist tyranny have in opening the way for much greater and necessary struggle, the conscious class war to end capitalism itself, overthrowing the whole stinking system.

Without internationalist class war to bring the whole foetid and degenerate imperialist order to an end, there can be no advance for the mass of humanity from ever more crudely repressive monopoly capitalist tyranny.

Anti-imperialist struggles must move on towards establishing workers states, completely suppressing the old bourgeoisie, if they and mankind are to have a future, and that means the battle to develop socialist revolutionary consciousness needs to be fought for by building a revolutionary party, keeping itself ideologically separate, even when it is necessary to stand alongside other forces fighting imperialism.

Only a firm grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory can show the proletarian dictatorship path (the only possible permanent path) out of the devastating degeneracy and war/genocide horrors increasingly gripping the Middle East (Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan), fostered against Myanmar and Bangladesh and threatening to erupt far and wide, like the festering tensions between reactionary Pakistan and just as near-fascist nationalist India, teetering on the edge of potential nuclear holocaust.

Whatever solidarity sentiment might be aroused, the focus in assessing all these struggles must be solely on the setbacks created for imperialism, without any necessity to call for “victory” for potentially erratic bourgeois nationalist anti-imperialism (the exception being where communists have established the leadership, as was the case in Vietnam for example).

Core of the fight for theory is the understanding of the gigantic, overwhelming and mind-crunchingly paralysing impact of the world monopoly capitalist crisis, its “austerity” and trade war now rapidly accelerating into World War Three, and the need it imposes on the great proletarian majority of humanity to finish it off forever, taking possession of the world’s resources and means of production into common ownership to establish planned socialism under firm workers control.

Absence of such leadership is reflected by this CPGB-ML refusal to draw any lessons about the uselessness of its continued adherence to blinkered and shabby revisionism.

And its failing is not limited to this disastrous implosion in the cauldron of the Middle East and the fascist genocidal onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank by the Zionists.

To the contrary it raises a host of associated questions and philosophical implications that are far more wide ranging and potentially even more disastrous for working class understanding as crisis rapidly deepens.

That includes everything from deadly and misleading notions still pumped out about “Popular Fronts” and “anti-fascist alliances” with petty bourgeois “democratic” forces; the associated idea that fascism is a qualitatively different “more aggressive form” of imperialism (as expressed in imbecilic post-war Soviet revisionist notions of “good and bad imperialism” from Stalin); the follow-on delusion that there can be such a thing as “denazification” with the dangerous implication that there is some presumably “democratic” “nicer” capitalist alternative to take its place in, say, Kiev; the equally dangerously disarming notion that imperialist belligerence and repression such as Trumpism is “not yet fascist” until it has crossed some rigid academically defined boundary (like wearing jackboots etc); the equally mechanical notion which equates the “fight for sovereignty” in isolation with the world “anti-imperialist struggle”, and its implications about local “patriotism”, leading straight into backward and reactionary chauvinism (such as Brexit); and the class-disarming pacifist fantasy of it being possible to build a “multipolar world” from a disparate clutch of mostly capitalist and minor imperialist powers, some already of an obviously extremely reactionary nature like India (or indeed rival, military-rule Pakistan).

Along the way there is a complete mis-characterisation of such powers, in which their class aspect virtually disappears or is pushed into the background, most notably that of two of the most significant in current world conflicts, Russia and China.

Both are always spoken of in the same breath by the revisionists and treated as if virtually equal anti-imperialist powers, whereas they are very different phenomena. (So too by the Trots but with the opposite reason, their anti-communism sneering, biliously and wrongly, at both as just “capitalist”).

Russia, is a capitalist restorationist power with many characteristics of imperialism or ambitions to be so, but controlled by a Bonapartist state balancing its thug-oligarch expansionist capitalism uneasily with its overturned titanic and brilliant past communist legacy, still finding strong “nostalgic” support in the working class 35 years after the idiot Gorbachevite liquidation of the colossal achievements of the USSR.

The other, China, is a workers state, and seemingly intent on staying so, despite making extensive but planned use of capitalist methods economically and being itself hampered by revisionist illusions (as are other remaining workers states like North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba).

All these complex issues and more are of crucial significance to sort out for the world working class and humanity, increasingly threatened by the deadly crisis Catastrophe of the whole capitalist system and its now non-stop warmongering turmoil and the horrific and barbaric genocidal reality of its desperate continued domination, exemplified by the unspeakable Zionist destruction and inhuman carnage in Palestine but clear too in the continuing NATO war in Ukraine both against Russia and to undermine Europe (in US trade war interests); in the deadly civil war chaos and carnage in Sudan fostered by Gulf and US interests; in the decade long butchery and famine-inducing destruction of Yemen; in the continuing blitzed balkanised mess made of Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan; in the Rwanda/M23 slaughter in Congo; in the Western provoked and armed civil war fragmentation in Myanmar and decades of coups, massacres and death squad rampaging in Latin America.

Until this whole system is overthrown by class war revolution this degeneration will continue worsening, affecting far more of the world than seen so far, in sickening war destruction, ecological devastation, pollution and chaos.

And all this is on a planet threatening scale as is now made glaringly clear by the increasingly obvious fascist bluster and reactionary primitivism of the Trump White House, deliberately trampling over all reason, science, rationality, equality, justice and humanity at home (with its censorship bullying of Harvard and other universities, defunding of NASA and other scientific exploration, school repression and media strangling), its fascist escalation of hate-filled scapegoating of “foreigners” and its trade-war aggression spewed abroad in all directions as well as military blitzing and threats.

Failure to draw and spell out the Syrian lesson by the Brarite CPGB-ML dynasty (and assorted groups in its latest “front” project, the World Anti-imperialist Platform), is made worse by similar past errors.

First, this is only the latest in many previous let downs by such supposed champions, from the collapse of the dire revisionist-nationalist Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic capitulating to the monstrous NATO blitz onslaught in 1999, to the deflating of blustering nationalist “hardman” Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and the confused resistance of anti-monarchist nationalist Muammar Gaddafi to the NATO attack on Libya in 2011 (and further back, the 1973 coup-deposed Salvador Allende regime in Chile or the 1965 butchery of Sukarno nationalism in Indonesia, both drowned in blood).

It should surely lead to a rethink about the disastrous perspective which equates this bourgeois nationalism with the necessary world revolutionary struggle which alone can bring to an end the increasingly horrific plunge into war chaos of the imperialist system.

That derived from Stalin’s “permanent peaceful coexistence” retreat from a revolutionary world view which became the postwar “peace struggle” perspective.

All that was necessary, it said, was to “contain” the belligerence and war tendencies of a supposedly ever more moribund imperialism, wrongly assessed to be incapable of any significant growth or expansion (Economic Problems of Socialism 1952).

The unstated assumption followed that the steady growth of the socialist camp and more general anti-imperialism would more or less automatically lead on to the eventual toppling or superseding of imperialism – the view commonly expressed in the “multipolar world” notion current with revisionism worldwide including all the way through to the workers state leaderships in Beijing and Havana.

As the EPSR Book Unanswered Polemics put it:

'The SLP Youth delusions about Saddam Hussein’s “anti-imperialist” credentials flow directly out of this paralysed inability to discuss Stalinism’s ultimate bankruptcy.

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

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

The obvious total collapse of this Revisionist nonsense post-1990 still cannot register with Stalin worship sectarianism. [...]

Leninist science, freed from Revisionist blinkers, would surely have reached the completely different conclusion that the opportunist tyrant Saddam (admitted by SLP Youth) was first and foremost never to be identified as anything but TOTALLY UNRELIABLE, – a petty bourgeois class-treachery, anti-theory disaster just waiting to happen, – going completely rotten just like so many other Moscow Revisionism protégés of the treacherous “peaceful road/peacefulcoexistence” era'.

Ditto for the Syrians despite their slightly different flavour Baathism, often hostile to the Iraqi version. Ditto for the gruesomely murdered Gaddafi sodomised with a knife by NATO backed counter-revolution (to the ghoulish laughing delight of Hilary Clinton).

But the Lalkarite museum Stalinists continue to insist that such regimes are the solid path forwards for world struggle, to be supported outright.

And they are doubling down on this line insisting that the “main contradiction” in the world is the anti-imperialist struggle in itself, as declared by a WAP youth section in a polemic against the Greek KKE in an anti-imperialist forum recently in Moscow.

Now, this is not entirely wrong, inasmuch as defeat for stifling monopoly capitalist oppression, keeping the world under its thumb with brainwashing lies and as much violence as “necessary”, can open the way for Marxist revolution, to tackle the really critical contradiction, between the crippling private ownership of the means of production and the necessary socialised and communal organisation of all human life and production.

But the Brarite line does not say this: it suggests that attaining “national sovereignty” is an end in itself.

The class war to end the monopoly capitalist economic system – revolution – virtually disappears from view these days apart from some occasional token paragraphs tacked on at the end of their articles.

Attaining the “independence” of nation states is the whole aim, implying they will be able to flourish once the burdens of imperialist diktat are lifted or fought off.

The fact they remain capitalist, and unavoidably interpenetrated with and therefore dominated by bourgeois finance networks and trade necessities, is ignored, as is the obvious fact that monopoly capitalism neither can nor will just stand back from such “independence”.

Constant subversion and sabotage is inevitable as the Venezuelan working class has discovered for example over two decades of struggling against imperialist hostility, facing waves of whipped-up counter-revolutionary murder-violence and repeated coup attempts organised both externally by imperialist subversion and internally from the still existing local bourgeoisie, as well as strangling economic sanctions.

Latest was a “parallel vote counting” scam organised by the CIA trying to discredit re-election of Nicolás Maduro as president last year, lyingly purporting to show there has been a “fixed result” – the only “fixing” in reality being that of the imperialist skulduggery (which fixes virtually all bourgeois elections, its own and elsewhere, – as Elon Musk declares, it is his money that was critical behind Trump. Fixing is the very essence of bourgeois “democracy” and its hidden bourgeois dictatorship, and a major reason why the working class must establish it own rule by proletarian dictatorship).

Even more, despite some formal references to the crisis of overproduction, nothing is spelled out about the staggering scale and intensity of the onrushing slump disaster.

Until the overturn of Assad, the Brarites had been declaring that Syria, having “seen off” the decade-long Western instigated civil war by various corrupted stooge “jihadist” forces (though far from all of those were a “CIA plot”), now had a chance to “rebuild the country”, a risible perspective that simply ignores the tidal wave of difficulties caused by the raging world crisis.

But this is not just so for the Middle East. For example, a similarly limited national conclusion is tacked onto a recent article correctly denouncing last December’s reactionary coup attempt by the now impeached and replaced South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, the Western stooge who was trying to use martial law powers to head off rising anti-imperialist pro-socialist popular sentiment and hostility to the decades-long US military occupation of the country, long brewing and once more finding a voice in the parliamentary opposition, despite years of stitched-up elections (not least Yoon’s in the first place, trying to counter softening relations with the communist North).

The move stirred up such protest by a population becoming more and more discontent with subservience to Washington, and crisis austerity, that some elements in the bourgeoisie feared it could tip “too far” and backed legal moves to depose this reactionary-wing figurehead, trying to contain aroused mass sentiment and keep it channelled by the pretences of “democracy” and “rule of law” (never very strong in South Korea where the first few decades post-war were run by an outright US imposed dictatorship); thus a new election has just installed a reformist to fool the masses yet again as the bourgeois press reports:

He has survived criminal charges, a near-fatal stabbing attack and the martial law enacted by his fiercest enemy, former President Yoon Suk Yeol. Now he is taking on what may be his toughest test yet.

Lee Jae-myung, who won South Korea’s presidential election after his opponent conceded early Wednesday, takes office as one of the most powerful presidents that South Korea has elected in recent decades. Much of South Korea’s political power is concentrated in the presidency, and Mr. Lee will also wield considerable control over the National Assembly, where his Democratic Party holds a large majority of seats.

The political turmoil set off by Mr. Yoon’s short-lived declaration of martial law and his subsequent impeachment and removal has exposed a country deeply fractured between the left and right, between generations and between genders. South Korea is facing mounting pressure from its sole military ally, the United States, even as the nuclear threat from North Korea grows. President Trump has not only slapped South Korea’s export-driven economy with heavy tariffs but also demanded that it pay more to keep American troops on its soil.

Mr. Lee warned that the second Trump administration was bringing “the law of the jungle” into international relations. But Mr. Lee, 61, who rose to become a charismatic leader of South Korea’s biggest political party after working in a sweatshop in his teens, said he would also rise to this challenge, with “pragmatic diplomacy centered on the national interest.”

“I will crawl between his legs if necessary, if that’s what I have to do for my people,” Mr. Lee said this week about Mr. Trump. “But I am not a pushover, either. South Korea also has quite a few cards to play in give-and-take negotiations.”

For Washington, Mr. Lee could represent a sharp departure from Mr. Yoon, who antagonized China and North Korea and aligned his country more firmly with the United States in the strategic competition between Washington and Beijing. Mr. Yoon also won plaudits from Washington for leaving behind his country’s historical grievances to improve ties with Japan, Korea’s former colonial master.

Mr. Lee and other leaders of his Democratic Party are not as enthusiastic about warming up to Japan, which they accused of failing to come clean on the brutalities it inflicted during its colonial rule. Mr. Lee has said he will also seek to mend ties with North Korea and China, South Korea’s largest trading partner, while maintaining a strong military alliance with the United States.

Such a stance could set off alarms in Washington.

“We know that many countries are tempted by the idea of seeking both economic cooperation with China and defense cooperation with the United States,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Saturday. But “economic dependence on China,” he warned, “only deepens their malign influence and complicates our defense decision space during times of tension.”

Mr. Lee has spurned his conservative enemies’ accusation that he was “pro-China” and “anti-U.S.” by repeatedly stressing the importance of the alliance with Washington and trilateral cooperation with the United States and Japan for regional security.

But instead of spelling out the underlying revolutionary nature of these stirrings, like much other turmoil being driven by the contradictions of the accelerating world capitalist crisis, the Brarites have only platitudes:

At last the Korean people, forcibly separated by US armed might for 76 years will be able to exercise their rights as a truly sovereign, independent people and take their place in the comity of nations. Hasten the day. We wish the Korean people success.

Long live independent and sovereign Korea! Death to imperialism!

South Korea, even united with the dogged, determined and spikily defended workers state in the North, can no more fulfil such pious hopes than any other “independent” nation in the howling hurricane winds of economic Catastrophe.

That is, if it remains capitalist.

But not a mention here of the revolutionary path needed to fuse with the north.

Possibly the next door Chinese workers state is now of such size and with such economic and political momentum, not to mention military and technological power, that it could survive or even stand to one side of the coming full-on inter-imperialist World War, and might be shelter for geographically and politically adjacent Korea.

But the Stalinists analyse each of these nationalist anti-imperialist struggles virtually as separate phenomena, rather than as intertwined parts of the imperialist exploited world, and the growing class war against its domination.

Thus in all seriousness the Brarites can conclude the latest assessment of the Ukraine war – declared to be “approaching the end game” which is by no means yet established despite the shattering blows inflicted on the NATO organised and backed Kiev Nazis by Russia – with this astonishing muddle:

Whilst Starmer and Macron run about trying to lash together a coalition of the willing, willing that is to send thousands of young men to a certain death in the Ukraine, others may look to the future in a multipolar world in which the likes of Hungary, Russia, China, Iran and BRICS are recognised, not a public enemies, but as brother nations, trading partners and peaceful cohabitants of a common earth.

A good sneer at Britain and France is fine but surely the most callow of trainee vicars, practicing their first sermons, could not come out with such fatuous, pious, platitudinous, not to say outright cretinous vacuities, let alone pack so much idiocy, ignorance and petty bourgeois idealist garbage into the second clause of a single sentence?????.

And this from an alleged Marxist party that posts on its paper’s masthead Lenin’s succinct and correct aphorism that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolution”.

“God help us”, would be the phrase, were we to share the religious delusions of a superstitious young wannabee parish priest.

In what scientific world view (ie Marxism, the only complete all-sided dialectical and materialist philosophy there is,) can Hungary’s currently reactionary nationalist (fascist) Orban government, Russia’s Bonarpartist Great Russian nationalism, Iran’s Islamic Republic with its anti-communist, anti-trade-union feudal fanaticism, India’s reactionary sectarian Hindu muslim-butchering near-fascism, Brazil’s rising capitalism, teetering on the edge of its own fascist coup beneath the treacherous reformist left-fakery of Lula da Silva (recently lining up with CIA “democracy” provocations against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro), and the huge Chinese workers state, be listed together, let alone be expected to live in harmony as “cohabitants” of a common earth (what little will be left of it shortly if the imperialist plundering, wastefulness, ecological contempt and nuclear war-making continues and deepens – as it must in a profit driven world)???

These will still all be capitalist countries driven by the relentless pressures of capitalist accumulation needs and monopolisation, generating endless contradictions driving it into the greatest cataclysmic mælstrom of trade war and conflict in all history.

And they are run by bourgeois ruling classes, who may be thrown into conflict with other major monopoly capitalist powers on the planet, in their own fight for survival as they continue to exploit and suppress their own working class.

Is a “multipolar” India, run by the monstrous tyrant Narendra Modi a great advance for its hundreds of millions of exploited?

And is the terrifying prospect of a nuclear war with equally backward and reactionary Pakistan made any less likely??

China of course is the exception, steadily building a planned and progressive society under workers control, (which the Lalkar/Proletarian never quite says either) but even there its current revisionist “don’t rock the boat” pursuit of “market stability” is a million miles from any revolutionary perspectives, at least as far as can be divined from its pubic pronouncements (and the mere fact that workers everywhere should have to “divine” anything, instead of hearing a world internationalist Marxist perspective from Beijing – however cautiously expressed – is a symptom of that very lack of Leninist leadership).

Meanwhile what is the rest of the world’s population, falling in under the other, continuing imperialist, section of this “multipolar” world, supposed to do – carry on suffering humiliation and relentless near or total slavery with genocidal butchery threatened for any who step out of line (while the multipolar world looks on without comment)?

The unbalanced emphasis on the “fight for sovereignty” in itself, is an evasion of revolutionary understanding which leads on not only to “multipolar” absurdities but complete reaction.

It definitely was not what Lenin had in mind in his understanding of imperialism and the struggle against it, which makes it clear Marxism does not pursue bourgeois nationalism as such but only where it fits with the struggle against imperialism:

“We as Communists should and will support bourgeois-liberation movements in the colonies only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and when their exponents do not hinder our work of educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit the peasantry and the masses of the exploited. If these conditions do not exist, the Communists in these countries must combat the reformist bourgeoisie.

(From the Commission on National and Colonial Questions, July 26, 1920).

In his Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for the same Congress, Lenin wrote:

“Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Negroes, etc) and in the colonies. Without the latter condition which is particularly important, the struggle against the oppression of dependent nations and colonies, as well as recognition of their right to secede, are but a false signboard as is evidenced by the parties of the Second International.....

“The Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e. those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations.”

The whole Congress was saturated in exposures of the falseness of the Western imperialist democracies in promising national-democratic rights to small nations, covering up the reality of insatiable exploitation and plunder:

“The Treaty of Versailles is an even more brutal and foul act of violence against weak nations than was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk....They are hastening the collapse of the petty-bourgeois nationalist illusions that nations can live together in peace and equality under capitalism.”

So much for multipolarity then!!!

The associated concept of “patriotism”, just about acceptable as a shorthand in the context of bravely fighting imperialist tyranny, is also problematical, quickly becoming deadly chauvinism, now rampant in dozens of movements across Europe heading for outright fascism, from the Alternative fur Deutschland to France’s Front Nationale and Britain’s very own Reform Party.

Like the 1920s Hitlerites, these parties all mingle rabid jingoism with ostensible hostility to the “old order” and “international finance” – just as Trumpism did in America, ranting at the “Washington establishment swamp” or Le Pen-ism in France – presenting themselves as ready to carry out pro-worker policies.

Not by coincidence Nigel Farage’s Reform has just lyingly claimed to be ready to carry through reformist measures which “go further than the Labourites” (not difficult) in restoring pension fuel payments and “cutting taxes” etc, playing the same game.

Such cynically fraudulent “national socialism”, in shortened form, was known as Nazism.

And the Brarites fall right into its trap when they apply their “sovereignty” notions across the board ending up backing every kind of chauvinist reformist backwardness about “fighting for British jobs”, “defending the Grangemouth refinery in the interests of Britain” etc. and being strident supporters of Brexit.

In fact this goes right back to their eight years slotted in behind Arthur Scargill in the Socialist Labour Party and the narrow trade-unionist “import controls” social-chauvinism which emerged as a dominating trend within the initially promising open centrist SLP experiment (see EPSR Books on Party Building Part 3 or EPSR No994 14-04-99) and which made impossible any further Leninist participation.

It has continued ever since, including for an extended period of the Brarites joining forces with “maverick” former Labourite George Galloway in jointly founding the Workers Party of Britain, replete with British patriotic Spitfire red-white-and-blue roundels as its symbol and strict adherence to “parliamentary democracy” as its philosophy, as class-collaboratingly opportunist as Galloway has always ever been.

Its “British jobs” chauvinism, and full on declarations for Brexit as a way of fighting for the interests of the working class against the “Brussels monopolies” etc is sheer poison for workers’ understanding, and a million miles from the perspective of a world imperialist system in crisis which is inexorably heading into slump-war disaster whether Britain is within Europe or outside it, and which will rapaciously plunder the British economy whether the monopolies that do it are headquartered in New York, Berlin or in fact Tokyo, Dehli or Sydney (as the Thames Water scandal illustrates for example).

But the WPB not only says nothing about overturning capitalism, it is hostile to revolutionary philosophy (and even lauds the imperialist monster Winston Churchill for “defending parliamentary democracy”!!!).

Lalkar/Proletarian’s split with Galloway in 2022 may have something to do with that, though who knows, since like much else in the group’s history this yet further exercise in disastrous Popular Frontism has been swept under the carpet, barely acknowledged and certainly not analysed in any way to draw out any lessons for the working class about what was supposed to have been achieved, what was achieved, or not, and what lessons can be drawn from whatever outcome there was (or not).

Even more muddle is caused by this “sovereignty” notion in the context of the war in Ukraine, where it becomes the rationale for the CPGB-ML’s all-out support for Vladimir Putin’s bonapartist Kremlin along the same lines as for Milosevic, Saddam, Assad and Gaddafi etc. and just as mistaken.

Worse still, even to adopt this wrong-headed defencist position for Russia has required severe bending of any Marxist understanding of the actual material conditions.

Soundly enough the Lalkar/Proletarian understood that the progenitor of the war is Western imperialism via the Ukrainian regime, which is not only backed and funded but essentially controlled by the NATO anti-communist conspiracy and intelligence agencies, most notably Britain’s MI6 secret police.

These stooges in Kiev, – heavily intermixed with outright fascist worshippers of the World War Two anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist “hero”, Stepan Bandera, who was both a Hitler collaborator and pogromist of the Jews and other scapegoat victims (Roma, and Poles especially), – were installed by Western intelligence in the long-prepared 2014 “colour revolution” Maidan coup violence.

It is they, egged on by the CIA/MI6 stringpullers, who immediately imposed vicious repression on the large but minority Russian population – denied language rights, education rights, publication and political rights etc – whose objections to this, and subsequent demands for autonomy, were brutally suppressed.

The reactionary nationalist dictat quickly became a war against the eastern provinces where the Russian, mostly working-class, population took up an armed militia stand against Kiev.

Some 14,000 were killed, including by much deliberate civilian targeting, before a mass buildup of, by now, NATO-trained, armed and organised Ukrainian troops in late 2021 forced Russia’s hand both to defend those populations and to resist the obvious aggression that such a large force comprised on its own borders.

So far so good and the Brarites, having established this much in various useful reports, correctly also take some justified swipes at others on the fake-“left” who have either wholly pitched in behind the imperialist lies about Russian aggression and “protecting Western values and democracy”, (with nauseating social-chauvinist capitulation from the likes of John McDonnell, Paul Mason or the AWL), or who denounce both sides equally.

The latter include “No to War” pacifists declaring NATO as warmongers but Russia also “to blame” for being the “invader”, and calling for its “withdrawal”, swallowing completely the upside-down bogeyman fabrications of the Western propaganda machine that the war was an “unprovoked attack”.

These social-pacifists essentially capitulate to the imperialist psyops bullshit as much as the social-imperialists but just hide it behind a supposed “even-handedness”.

A variant is the supposed “Marxist analysis” declaring all sides to be “imperialist” and therefore that neither side should be supported.

This is combined with the mantra, “our fight is at home” which is declared to be the Bolshevik policy in World War One calling for the working class to wage civil war on its own ruling class.

But combined with the reformist “left pressure” politics of the fake-“left” it becomes no more than an excuse to stand back from the conflict, as for example the CPGB(PCC) Weekly Workerites do.

The core of Lenin’s 1914 understanding was to call actively for defeat of workers’ own ruling class in each country, explaining and making conscious that this weakening of the bourgeois state would open up the possibility for civil-war class-war overturn of the ruling class.

But this revolutionary aspect is not remotely conveyed by the WW type abstentionism or a similar analysis from the Greek Communist party, the KKE, which the Brarites choose to focus their ire on.

Though their account of the Greeks’ position is a little muddled it seemingly amounts to the revisionist KKE refusing to support Russia “because it is an imperialist power too”.

Here the Lalkar/Proletarian run into a real difficulty; they sense something deeply wrong; standing back in this abstentionist way plays into the hands of barbaric NATO imperialism (especially if taking the pacifist line above of calling on Russia to withdraw).

It certainly leaves the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine open to the complete butchery that would undoubtedly follow if the Kiev nazis were to overrun the eastern Ukraine provinces and the Crimea, as their 2022 buildup was threatening.

The problem the Lalkar/Proletarian faces is that Russia is now essentially imperialist, its proletarian dictatorship liquidated by the idiot Gorbachev in 1991 and with a restorationist oligarch billionaire bourgeoisie as the ruling class instead.

And despite Putin’s reining in of the wilder excesses of the gangster oligarchs at the turn of the century, using the remnants of the old soviet state apparatus in Bonapartist fashion, it continues to be so.

At this point the Brarites’ one-sided version of bourgeois nationalism comes galloping to the rescue.

“Aha” say the Brarites, “Russia may not be a communist state any more but neither is it imperialist – it is just a hapless little ‘ordinary’ capitalist country, put upon by bullying imperialism and trying to rescue its compatriots. It is therefore to be supported.”

But this is total garbage.

Firstly, outright “support” would no more be valid for Moscow than for Saddam Hussein or Bashir Assad etc even if it were “not imperialist”.

Secondly it requires some devious bending of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism to make this assertion about Russia – as the CPGB-MLers have done in fact and continue to repeat via such associates as the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

It is done by reducing Lenin’s rich and profound understanding of Imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism to little more than a list of features to be ticked off in a mechanical fashion – a grasp of his theory which would not even cut it in a GCSE bourgeois logic class.

Checking off fixed categories is philosophically cretinous, and a million miles from Marxist all-sided dialectical grasp of a living, moving reality dominating the whole interlocking world economy, a grasp which is constantly in need of elaboration as new aspects emerge, (such as the ending of the old physical colonies after World War Two, supplanted by Cold War world financial neo-colonialism mostly under the umbrella of the American Empire policing – and now the attempted re-imposition of colonialism in Iraq etc).

Russia is part of the world imperialist economy and behaves as such, including exploiting many of the dozens of nations that made up the former Soviet Union, with massive billion dollar investments in mining and mineral extraction in Siberia etc, suppressing former nationalities and notably the Chechens, brutally put down in at least two horrific wars (see EPSR No1158 20-20-02 and No1247 07-09-04).

And the ticked off points on the checklist are wrong anyway, especially the singled out “key indicator” namely the alleged absence any “export of capital”; the inconvenient fact that hundreds of billions of dollars have been moved abroad by Moscow’s oligarchs is declared “irrelevant” because that is just for “buying expensive toys like yachts or football clubs”.

But even a dozen football clubs would not soak up the vast sums deposited abroad (and anyway the big clubs tend to be run more and more for profit, not as playthings).

And no deposits entering the world banking networks are going to simply sit there (except inasmuch as the great crisis of overproduction “surplus” capital forces idleness on them) but will merge into the great mass of world capital hunting for profitable investment as occasional capitalist press stories have shown:

The UK government faces an “extraordinary” $1bn damages claim, a court has been told, in a lawsuit brought by a mining company that has been bankrolled by Russian banks targeted by sanctions.

ENRC, the UK-based arm of a global mining conglomerate belonging to oligarchs, is seeking compensation for losses it claims it suffered as a result of a decade-long Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation that was dropped last year, according to court documents.

A judge ruled in December that the fraud and corruption investigation was launched as a result of “the SFO’s wrongdoing” and that this resulted in unnecessary costs for the mining company.

The SFO is seeking permission to appeal against that judgment. In a filing to the high court on Monday, the anti-corruption agency said “it appears ENRC will contend that losses” were in the region of $1bn, an amount the agency describes as “extraordinary”.

The $1bn figure is more than 10 times the SFO’s annual budget, and would dwarf the total compensation paid out to post office operators.

The SFO assertion is based on ENRC saying in legal correspondence that it incurred higher borrowing costs of more than $90m annually as a result of the 10-year investigation. ENRC has not yet formally said how much it is seeking in damages.

A forthcoming further trial will decide the scale of damages and who is liable to pay them. The SFO argues that ENRC’s former lawyers should make a contribution towards the damages bill it ends up with. But even the prospect of such a huge claim is a significant blow for the agency.

ENRC’s latest accounts, filed last September, name the state-owned Russian banks Sberbank and VTB as “major lenders” to ENRC’s Luxembourg-based parent company. Both banks are controlled by Vladimir Putin’s regime. They were placed under UK and other sanctions after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The accounts said ENRC’s parent company “envisages payments to Sberbank and VTB in 2024 … in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations”. A representative of ENRC said it had no debts to these banks and that “to the best of our knowledge” neither did its parent company.[..]

Founded by three oligarchs from the former Soviet Union known as “the Trio”, ENRC floated in London in 2007 and was worth £20bn at its peak, gaining a place on the FTSE-100 list of the UK’s most valuable companies.

The fight with the SFO stems from a dispute between ENRC and its own former lawyers. In 2010, ENRC hired a City lawyer, Neil Gerrard, to conduct an internal investigation into allegations of fraud and corruption in Kazakhstan and Africa.[..]

After the SFO launched its criminal investigation, the Trio bought back the ENRC shares they had sold on the London Stock Exchange, taking the company private. They shifted the corporate headquarters to Luxembourg, folding ENRC into their new Eurasian Resources Group.

*************

March 2022: A minute’s walk from Mayfair’s Berkeley Square lies Novikov, a restaurant that could make a fair claim to be the beating heart of Londongrad. Step downstairs and you enter an oligarch’s playground, where a 37-page wine list offers rare Californian reds at £8,600 a bottle.

Its proprietor, Arkady Novikov, has been described as the “blini baron” and “Putin’s favourite restaurateur”. His relationship with the president dates back to when Putin ran the FSB, Russia’s intelligence agency.

After the former spymaster rose to the presidency, Novikov provided catering for Kremlin parties. His Mayfair restaurant opened in 2011, with financial backing from another former spy, Alexey Chepa, a Russian MP and media mogul.

Novikov’s London venue was quickly turning over £100,000 a day, attracting celebrities such as Rita Ora, Rihanna and Prince Harry as well as the capital’s burgeoning community of affluent Russians with a hunger for the Asian-Italian themed cuisine.

Novikov set up home in nearby Chelsea. His daughter attended the prestigious King’s College School, Wimbledon.

When Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and the West imposed limited sanctions, Novikov was unafraid to talk tough. “I do not think much about these sanctions — I am not a little girl to feel offended by them,” he said dismissively.

Novikov’s little-known story epitomises how wealthy Russians connected to Putin have savoured London’s delights and exploited its wealth.

The former chef is relatively small fry in the “Moscow-on-Thames” ecosystem, perhaps worth a mere £200 million. He is certainly not someone with the 10 or 11-figure fortunes of Roman Abramovich, Alisher Usmanov or Oleg Deripaska — all fellow Russians better known for snapping up mansions, country estates or our sports clubs.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has also made many observers look back in disbelief at why Britain opened its doors to so much Russian money and belatedly worry over what chance underpowered law enforcement agencies have of imposing sanctions with real bite. The Sunday Times Rich List, the annual UK wealth rankings published since 1989, has featured a growing number of Russians in recent years. Last year’s top 250 included 13 Russian individuals, with a combined wealth of £69.5 billion.

Abramovich, now selling Chelsea FC, has been a Rich List fixture for years on the strength of his football ownership, his portfolio of properties and his stake in Evraz, the steel company he floated in London in 2011.

Usmanov, a former Arsenal shareholder, makes the Rich List even though his business empire is largely based overseas. In 2008, the metals baron bought Beechwood House, a grade II-listed property in Highgate, north London, for £48 million. He also has Sutton Place, a Surrey-based Tudor mansion once owned by a courtier of Henry VIII.

Fellow Russians to make the Rich List include Denis Sverdlov, an electric vehicle entrepreneur who served as a telecoms minister in Putin’s government as recently as 2013, and Nikolay Storonsky, the co-founder of the London-based bank Revolut. Storonsky, whose father worked in a senior role at the Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom, has said: “The war is wrong and totally abhorrent ... I am horrified and appalled at its impact.”

But those who make it on to the Rich List account for only a small percentage of the wealthy Russians who have either moved to the UK or bought assets here since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Take Andrey Guryev, for example. Since the Ukraine invasion, the fertiliser billionaire has been pictured at the Kremlin for a meeting with Putin. Guryev owns Witanhurst, a 65-room mansion thought to be the second biggest home in London after Buckingham Palace. But because the property’s £300 million value is only a fraction of his estimated £4.5 billion wealth, Guryev does not appear in the Rich List.

[...] Many oligarchs — and other wealthy individuals — deliberately hide their wealth by exploiting weak UK financial reporting standards or by shifting cash offshore.

But it’s not simply individuals. Analysis of nearly 7,000 UK companies owned by Russian nationals identifies many that are either owned or controlled by the Russian state.

Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy colossus, has six companies operating in London. The latest accounts of the largest of these entities show assets of £628 million.

VTB, Russia’s second largest bank, is majority owned by the Russian government. Its investment bank, VTB Capital, has a large London presence, with assets of more than £1.2 billion sitting on the balance sheet of its main company.

Then there’s Rosneft. The energy giant is 40 per cent owned by the Russian government and chaired by the oligarch Igor Sechin. A close ally of Putin who served as the country’s deputy prime minister, Sechin’s demeanour has earned him the moniker of “Darth Vader” in Moscow’s political circles. Rosneft Marine (UK) Limited, a fuel trading subsidiary registered at a service address in a mews house in Bermondsey, southeast London, shows £40.7 million of net assets.

So how and why did London become Londongrad, a playground-cum-piggy-bank for Kremlin-linked Russians?

“There were push and pull factors,” explains Ben Cowdock, lead investigator at Transparency International, an organisation set up by ex-employees of the World Bank to investigate corruption nearly 30 years ago. “Oligarchs who grew hugely wealthy from privatisation of old state-owned assets wanted to get their money away from the instability of Russia and into a safer environment.”

London offered a network of accountants, wealth managers and other advisers adept at moving money on to the British Virgin Islands, Jersey, the Isle of Man and other low-tax and covert destinations.

[..]The UK became an attractive place to own property — to live in and or as an investment. Cowdock and his colleagues have found £1.5 billion of UK property now owned either by Russians accused of financial crime or with links to the Kremlin. The majority of this is owned through offshore companies.

In addition, private schools, top universities, Harley Street medicine, the West End, Premier League football and other leading sporting venues all had their draw as did the capital’s booming public relations firms and its cash-hungry political parties.

“There wasn’t just the opportunity to launder dirty money,” Cowdock said. “Reputations could be laundered too. Philanthropy and gifts to political parties that could buy influence and respectability. After a while this influx developed a momentum of its own.”

It began in 1994 with John Major’s “investor” visa scheme. This allowed wealthy individuals to buy UK residency for £1 million. The scheme grew more generous under Tony Blair and in 2008 New Labour’s arch enforcer Lord Mandelson, George Osborne — then shadow chancellor — and Deripaska were caught hobnobbing together on board the oligarch’s superyacht off Corfu.

Even the left-wing firebrand Ken Livingstone, who served as London mayor between 2000 and 2008, implored that he wanted “Russian companies to regard London as their natural base in Europe”.

[...]During Gordon Brown’s time in Downing Street the UK introduced its “Tier 1 visa programme”. The “golden visa” system allowed those with £2 million of investment funds and UK bank accounts to live here and apply to become permanently resident after five years. The wait was cut to two years for those prepared to bring in £10 million to the UK.

[...]Some politicians claim that Britain always benefits from attracting billionaires, arguing that these people create businesses, jobs and in doing so generate large sums of tax revenue.

This is certainly not always the case. Often these people keep their businesses offshore.

“Public bodies obviously do not have those kinds of resources. It’s not simply that they don’t have enough people — they don’t have the right people. If you’re digging into a billionaire you can be talking about examining hundreds or even thousands of bank accounts across many jurisdictions. The FBI does pay more for good investigators.”

Over the past 20 years thousands of British lawyers, bankers, wealth managers, estate agents, accountants and PR consultants have filled their boots helping some kleptocrats launder their money and reputations.

Robert Watts is the compiler of The Sunday Times Rich List

*************

March 2022: Yesterday, the White House announced it would expand the list of Russian oligarchs subject to full blocking sanctions – the highest level of restrictions – as it ramps up punishment against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Some of the newly named oligarchs overlapped with a list of Russian elites on whom the European Union imposed sanctions earlier this week, although there were some notable differences.[..]

In charge of appropriating these assets will be KleptoCapture, a newly announced justice department taskforce, with support from the treasury department, FBI, IRS and other federal agencies.

[...]The Feds may have their work cut out. US regulations are lax when it comes to requiring disclosures of real estate transactions by foreign individuals, making the country a prime destination for Russian’s uber-rich looking to snap up prime properties without scrutiny.

[...]Russians know Alisher Usmanov as one of Vladimir Putin’s “favorite” oligarchs. The country’s richest man until 2015, Usmanov owns a majority stake in Russia’s second-largest phone network, MegFon, and a large stake in the iron and steel giant Metalloinvest.

But few Americans know that Usmanov also helped give us Facebook. The billionaire began investing in the social network in 2009, when Zuckerberg’s firm was having trouble accessing funding in the wake of the financial crisis. Usmanov ultimately poured over $900m into the firm, owning as much as 10% of the company before selling his stake in 2014 and netting himself billions. He was also a major investor in Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga.

[...]Long before brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg became two of Russia’s wealthiest tycoons, they were teenage Vladimir Putin’s judo training buddies, a role they continued into adulthood. Clearly they were good at it, because after Putin became president he rewarded the brothers with the control of large state-owned enterprises and lucrative contracts, netting them a massive fortune.

The Rotenbergs have since built a huge family empire of international investments under a web of shell companies, which has made Arkady’s son Igor a billionaire in his own right.

Russia’s deputy prime minister from 2008 to 2018, Igor Shuvalov is now the chairman of VEB, the Russian development bank that finances major infrastructure projects, including the Sochi Olympics. He has claimed to be one of Russia’s cleanest officials, telling media he transferred all his wealth to Russia in 2013, and only kept it offshore before that to avoid spoiling his kids. But an investigation by the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny found that Shuvalov, through a shell company, bought two London luxury apartments in 2014 for $11.4m and has used a secret private jet to fly his wife’s corgis around the world because, as one of his staffers explained, “it’s not that comfortable in business class”.

Legend has it Yevgeniy Prigozhin began his rise to power selling hot dogs, shortly after getting released from prison for robbery. The wiener venture was apparently a smash hit, and within years he had opened high-end restaurants that counted Russia’s leader among their clientele, earning him the nickname of “Putin’s chef” and catapulting him into the inner circles of Russia’s elite.

Americans might be more familiar with another one of Prigozhin’s businesses: the Internet Research Agency, which employed a troll army that began by supporting Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, before turning its efforts to influencing the 2016 US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency were indicted by a US grand jury in 2018 for interfering with the election, and he was added to an FBI wanted list in 2021.

A former KGB officer who befriended Vladimir Putin in the 1980s while living in the same apartment building, Sergey Chemezov rose through Russia’s public and private sector in Putin’s wake, and in 2007 was appointed as CEO of Russia’s state-owned defense giant Rostec, a position he still holds today. Chemezov was sanctioned by the US in 2014 amid Rostec’s role as a supplier for Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and Washington is targeting him again, now with his family members.

Reportedly the second richest man in Russia, the banker, metals mining tycoon and former deputy prime minister Vladimir Potanin was among a small circle of oligarchs who met with Putin last week as the invasion of Ukraine began.

Potanin has played a big role in American arts: he has been a board member of New York’s Guggenheim Museum for two decades, until he stepped down on Wednesday. He has also given millions to the Kennedy Center in Washington, which carved his name into a wall. He is also known to have owned property in New York City, which came to light during a divorce fight that could cost him $7bn.

Russia’s richest man in 2016, Leonid Mikhelson is the founder and chairman of natural gas producer Novatek, a close friend of Putin’s, and a business partner of Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire who has been under US sanctions since 2014.

Mikhelson loves art: along with his $200m art collection, he was on the board of trustees at New York’s New Museum from 2013 to 2017, and has sponsored exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and London’s Tate Modern. His ostentatious superyacht, the Pacific, can reportedly accommodate two helicopters.

Petr Aven is the head of Alfa Group, a commercial bank subject to US sanctions that helped him amass an estimated $5.5bn fortune. A well-known collector of classical Russian paintings, Aven has lent works from his collection – reportedly worth $200m – to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Neue Galerie. Aven reportedly has never bought a plane or yacht, and told the FT “all my money goes in to art.” That is, of course, if you don’t count the millions he spent transforming an 8.5-acre plot in England into a “KGB-proof” mansion, complete with a bomb-proof panic room.

Petr Aven’s business partner, Mikhail Fridman, is Alfa Group’s founder and a Ukrainian-born Russian oligarch. Fridman has made substantial investments in the United States, which include spending a reported $1bn in 2011 to buy up distressed properties across the east coast, telling the Wall Street Journal at the time, “The American market is the most well-regulated and liquid market in the world. It has the best protection for investor rights.”

Through Fridman’s investment group, LetterOne, the billionaire also sank $200m into Uber, and $50m into the telecom startup FreedomPop. Fridman also caused a stir in 2018 when he spoke alongside Aven at a closed-door dinner hosted by the Atlantic Council, a major US foreign policy thinktank, in what critics saw as an unofficial Kremlin mission to protest against US sanctions.

Currently Russia’s richest man, Alexei Mordashov owns a third of Tui, Europe’s biggest tourism firm, and gained his billions as the chief executive of Russia’s largest steel and mining firm, Severstal. He is also a large shareholder of the Bank of Rossiya, which has opened up branches across Russia-occupied Ukrainian territory in recent years.

Over the last two decades, the billionaire has also poured money into the United States, investing heavily through Severstal in steel companies in the midwest before selling them for $2.3bn in 2014.

Mordashov has been hit with sanctions by the EU, but the US hasn’t taken action yet. They would be interested in his Bombardier Global 6000 private jet and multiple superyachts, including the $500m Nord, which Senator Bernie Sanders noted on Tuesday had been “sailing in the Seychelles region for more than 10 days” in a Twitter thread about Russian offshore wealth.

Roman Abramovich, the longtime owner of Chelsea FC, has been described by a member of the UK parliament as a “key enabler” of Putin’s regime, which Abramovich has long denied. An orphan raised by his grandparents in Siberia, Abramovich pulled himself up by his bootstraps the old-fashioned way: wriggling into the inner circles of government and then profiting hugely by selling previously state-owned assets that he acquired after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The billionaire owns one of the world’s most outlandish yachts, complete with an onboard submarine and three helicopters. He has also owned a number of ultra-expensive properties in the United States, including a trio of buildings in New York City’s Upper East Side worth more than $90m combined, which he transferred to his third wife, Darya Zhukova, in 2018.

What all this makes clear is that vast sums of the capital stolen from the working class during the post-1991 Soviet liquidation by the pirates, gangsters, shysters, carpet-baggers and fraudulent operators who became the new bourgeoisie in the Yelstin years, have not simply been passively stashed but invested abroad.

It is naïvety of the first water, or outright dissembling, to pretend that these many hundreds of billions, intertwined with Putin’s state-controlled banks and corporations in many cases, are not used, like virtually all capital, for investment.

In other words the bizarre notion that “Russia is not imperialist” and its oligarchs are just some weird species of amateurish big spenders, falls flat on its face on this count.

So too it does on other counts.

The behaviour of Russia towards other anti-imperialist upheavals, including various eruptions of “terrorism” is as brutal and reactionary as anything the West has done.

The vicious war against the self-determination struggle in Chechnya has already been mentioned.

Other aspects of Putinite Russian policy have also echoed the West’s demented war-justifying line that the ever increasing rebelliousness across the world, and particularly in the “global south” is simply some new “evil” to be condemned as “terrorism” instead of reflecting growing anti-imperialist hatred and revolt, caused by the deepening world crisis.

The bourgeoisie responds by effectively declaring (metaphorically) that inexplicably greater and greater numbers of the downtrodden are bitten with some alien disease which makes them turn into “fanatical jihadists” etc who are threatening “our values and our way of life” and have to be hunted down with maximum force to “maintain stability”.

This demented nonsense, declaring there to be another reactionary force in the world, is pumped out to confuse minds and head off the reality that capitalism’s spiralling Catastrophe and economic implosion is the sole cause of all the “instability” in the world, and to justify its warmongering “solution”, to smash down everything and everyone in all directions that can be blamed instead.

At the same time it must escalate the destruction of the great “surplus” of capital which is clogging the markets, (surplus only in capitalist terms that is, because it can no longer make profits - see box as a result of the great contradictions inherent in a system of production for private profit).

And while the “terrorist” turmoil everywhere is a long way from a coherent conscious communist struggle – and sometimes counter-productively so in its philosophy and sectarianism – it is nevertheless in general the early stirring of revolution hostile to imperialist domination that will ultimately find its way to such an understanding and sweep away imperialist domination and capitalist chaos.

There is inevitably much more yet to come, as life for billions becomes not just ever more intolerable but completely impossible (as the Yemenis, Sudanese, Congolese, Argentinians, and many others can already testify, most desperately and horrifically the Palestinian people).

And if such struggles are inadequate or even wrong-headed, that is not a basis to “condemn” them, but as Lenin said, to blame the revolutionary movement for failing to get a grip on this spontaneous ferment and give it the education and leadership which can direct it into the mass struggle to bring down the capitalist order.

Putinism has repeatedly lined Moscow up with this condemnation and repressive policing not least in sending troops to help put down the crisis-caused oilfield workers revolt in Kazakhstan in 2022 on behalf of that country’s kleptocratic oligarch dictatorship, with the strike and subsequent popular uprising blamed on outside “jihadists” (a sick demonisation gone along with by the Brarites too).

And more recently last year the world witnessed barbaric torture treatment of the alleged perpetrators of the Moscow Crocus Theatre attacks reflecting appalling racist backwardness and arrogance (EPSR No1641 14-04-24) which this Putinite Great Russian backwardness has helped cultivate, as thuggish and incoherent as the Beslan school butchery 20 years back and the gassing of the Chechen hostage takers and victims in a previous Moscow theatre incident.

Blaming a “Ukrainian plot” for the Crocus attack, as the Brarites did immediately without a scrap of evidence, to first avoid the more difficult issue of explaining rising “terrorist” hatred from the Third World as incoherent anti-imperialism, and secondly to excuse yet more “condemnation of terror” (just as blaming the 9/11 attacks on a “CIA plot” also gives licence to join the rest of disturbed and appalled petty bourgeois public opinion in “condemning terror”) only compounds the sophistry already manifest in the “Russia is not imperialist” confusion-mongering.

Putin’s Great Russian nationalist ambition is not merely some sub-grade version of past Soviet relations.

His Orthodox Church piety and frequently spoken hostility to communism and Leninism, (particularly contemptuous of Lenin’s careful nationalities understanding and self-determination tolerance which he blames for “encouraging disruption”) make it impermissible to simply support Moscow in the war.

It remains crucial for the working class to rebuild a Marxist understanding in Russia as much as everywhere else, and that will not be done by bending facts to ignore its class nature.

It will demand the deepest revolutionary understanding and the struggle to take back the country’s resources into working class hands, whether that be by overturning its Bonapartist oligarch pandering or forcing it towards re-establishing Soviet relations by revolutionary pressure.

The dumbest part of this frozen-in-time Stalinism is that it is entirely unnecessary anyway to deny Russia’s real nature in order to expose the Greek KKE and its ilk (trying to wash their hands of the revolutionary implications of the Ukraine conflict by declaring all sides to be imperialist “while our fight is at home”).

The point is to focus clearly on the imperialist domination of the world which is driving all unfolding chaos and horrors dragging the whole world into war destruction and environmental disaster. And so far has the monopolisation process now concentrated power, that means the power and influence of the US Empire and its stooges overrides all else.

While post-1991 Russia has many imperialist aspects, and whatever Putin’s pathetic revisionist influenced ambitions to “have a seat at the top table” and be “treated with respect”, it is not on a par at all with NATO and Western imperialism.

In the modern balance of class forces, defeat must mean primarily defeat for the US Empire and stooges.

In that sense only there is a parallel with other anti-imperialist struggles.

But just as with the Saddams, Assads and Milosevics, it is completely misleading to equate imperialist defeat with a call for their victory.

They needed bringing down to establish workers rule, but not by imperialism; the local class war should be suspended and all forces focus on defeating imperialism only for as long as they are under attack (paralleling the Bolshevik stand alongside the treacherous bourgeois Kerensky government against the monarchist counter-revolution attack of General Kornilov in August 1917, while making clear that Kerensky could not be trusted, and using the unfolding events to prove it so).

But what cannot be suspended is the continuing struggle to develop and maintain continuing independent scientific Marxist understanding.

Build Leninism Don Hoskins

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