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No 1667 10th January 2026

Monstrous US war-kidnap of Venezuela Maduro, bullyboy demands to "handover Greenland", and domestic migrant-scapegoat repression and outright murder blamed on "the Left" are all symptoms of out-of-time imperialist capitalism facing total Catastrophic collapse and deadly inter-imperialist trade war & hot war. Outright Nazism is its only answer, the true WW3 face of bourgeois dictatorship, the reality always behind "democracy & freedom" the fraud still deludedly swallowed by fake-"left" protest and pacifism. All the "left" still fatally MISlead the working class with "international law and multipolarity" revisionist retreat and Trot hatred of proletarian dictatorship, lining up with petty bourgeois public opinion against Russia, China and "terrorism" bogeys. Leninism vital need.

America’s murderous blitzing kidnap of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is not “strength” but the weakness and desperation of a crisis-paralysed failing system.

Along with ever more genocidal mass depravity by Zionist occupation, non-stop war in Ukraine, arming Taiwan against China and missiles on Africa, it signals not triumph but the coming end of the corrupt monopoly capitalist epoch.

But it will not fall apart on its own.

Just the opposite. This US Empire ruling class, lashing out in a fascist frenzy is using every dirty and brutal means it can to stay in the saddle despite the economic, environmental and social disaster its profit making system has created for the world.

So it is tearing up every last pretence of "fairness" "justice" "truth" and reason in a welter of Goebbels lies and psyops fabrications, brute force, terrorising violence, piracy, strangling blockades and deliberate barbarity.

Alongside, every last illusion from the fake-"left" for pressure, protest & pacifism is torn up too.

And just as well. Only revolution will suffice to end the chaos, overturning the whole stinking corrupt and arrogant private ownership system to build a completely new society of rational socialism, taking over all society's resources under firm workers control.

For all the posturing and "marxist" pretending from a whole slew of "left" groups, the last thing any of them want is the class war to establish the discipline and authority of proletarian dictatorship.

But revolution has to come.

However vicious, degenerate and intimidating these ruling class barbarities are, worsening by the day, they can do nothing to solve the Catastrophic breakdown of the historically outmoded capitalist system.

It is irredeemably doomed by its own contradictions of “over-production” and ever more deadly trade-war and inter-imperialist rivalry, now reaching gobsmacking levels over issues like Greenland annexation and the Ukraine war (which is as much US conflict with European rivals as it is a war on Russia as the EPSR alone has analysed).

New Nazism is the only answer the capitalists have to their crisis but it makes things a hundred times worse as billions are stirred in hatred and disbelief towards the struggle to end this debauched, villainous class rule.

Unstoppable endless monopoly concentration of ever accumulating capital is the basic problem.

After centuries dragging mankind forwards from feudal stagnation its very “success” can only concentrate its plunge into disastrous breakdown, unable any more to make enough profits to feed its insatiable greed and need to expand on the backs of the mass of exploited downtrodden humanity while driving the trade war to a cutthroat frenzy (see economics box).

Three times in history that has collapsed into the inhuman butchery and destruction of inter-imperialist war; in the early, limited, 1870s Franco-Prussian conflict; the all-out blood, mud and gas, trench horrors of 1914-18 “Great War”; and its 1930s extension to World War Two on a far wider, more deadly, more depraved and devastating scale still.

Each time its disgusting carnage and pointless wasteful destruction (to remove "surplus" capital) has been followed by the eruption of mass revolutionary struggle, from the 1871 Paris Commune to the Soviet revolution in 1917 and the great wave of communist and anti-imperialist revolt post-1945, wider and more powerful than ever despite falling back eventually under imperialist physical, financial and ideological pressure and the revisionist retreat that followed after Lenin, eventually stupidly liquidating the titanic Soviet camp.

Now imperialism is plunging into WW3, the greatest world conflict ever, consciously whipping the world into threatening planet-wide (potentially nuclear) conflagration and existential ecological destruction.

Already, deliberate, exultantly bragged-about sadistic barbarities like the Gaza people’s extermination and Venezuela's blockade must tear up every lingering illusion in bourgeois nonsense about world prosperity, “peace and stability” “international justice”, “rule of law”, “freedom” and “democracy”.

And however long the imperialist atrocities continue, it will not stop the great mass of the planet finally rising up to stop them, this time forever.

Spontaneous revolt is erupting everywhere as the crisis bites, taking multiple forms from street turmoil to jihadism.

But it remains confused and (sometimes) manipulable, as in Iran, without conscious revolutionary understanding to guide the mass upheavals towards the defeat and then overthrow of the whole stinking foetid mess of continuing capitalist rule.

Blocking the way is the whole spectrum of petty bourgeois reformism and anti-revolutionary revisionism still holding back necessary class war politics with moralising condemnations of "terrorism", and “democracy” delusions about continuing step-by-step “improvements pressure” “multipolarity”, and “peace struggle”.

Shallow complacency runs through all of them, blind to the real depth and extent of capitalism's epochal crisis Catastrophe and the unstoppable social and economic disintegration it is leading to.

And larded on that are the distracting PC idiocies of feminism, gay rights, animal rights, eco-warring and other single issues – mostly worthy as such, but all filled with self-righteous moralising ("wokery") that heads attention away from capitalist alienation as the ever-regenerating cause of all society's injustice and antagonisms, and therefore from revolution as the only way to permanently remove them (by creating an utterly different non-exploiting socialist world).

All of it is philistinely hostile to the profound study and philosophical struggle needed to build Marxist-Leninist scientific grasp of revolutionary breakdown and disintegration and the leadership for the class war which alone can take humanity forwards.

Supposed “democratic advance” doesn’t exist, cannot exist and never has done under capitalism, except as the most elaborate confidence trick ever pulled on mankind by its privileged and domineering ruling class.

That hollow promise has only ever served to prop up imperialism’s planetary domination and ruthless exploitation, heading off revolt behind a lying façade of Parliament and stitched-up manipulated and twisted “electoral choice” (in the richer countries only).

The reality has always been barbaric repression and tyranny for the great majority in the colonial and neo-colonial Third World, kept under control by a network of fascist stooges for the imperialist system. Their near or actual slave exploitation pays for the “crumbs from the table” in the imperialist world, reformist bribes for the petty bourgeoisie and bought-off better off layers of workers.

But that has been over for decades, and especially since the (re)turn to World War Three warmongering in 1999 against Serbia’s nationalist Yugoslav remnant to start with, then Afghanistan and Iraq soon after, as the US Empire made a sickening turn to fascist invasion and blitzing intimidation.

Its hoodwinking lies could have been clear to all then, as the Bush presidency put the whole world on notice of America's intent to smash down everything and everyone that challenged its "right" to dominate.

But the confusions and treacheries continued from the liberals and the fake-“left”, revisionist, reformist and Trotskyist alike, still pumping out the same prevarications, evasions, excuses, sophistries and reformist delusions which have held back the working class for a century, even as the world has imploded in a mælstrom of banking failures, credit collapse and austerity.

They all need to be challenged all down the line on every question, and especially their confusions and cover-ups around the great gains of the twentieth century communist revolutionary struggles and the workers states they created in the first great leaps to a new world.

Either they have “justified” the theoretical nonsense of the Stalinist retreats from Leninism which ended up liquidating the Soviet achievements, or even worse, like the Trots, simply rubbish the entire history with poisonous “political revolution” counter-revolutionary petty bourgeois hatred (see eg last issue).

They will be swept aside as the great Catastrophe unstoppably unfolds, and the working class and proletarian masses are forced more and more into the desperate struggle to survive, necessarily confronting the horrors imposed by a desperate ruling class which can no longer rule in the old way.

Now it is ever clearer for all to see.

The slide into collapse is so severe that ruling class no longer pretends to uphold the principles of legality and “democracy” and sneers at “international justice” and the “United Nations”.

Trumpism shamelessly declares its American billionaire class dictatorship alone is the arbiter; the might of the US bourgeoisie and its big, and ever bigger, monopoly corporate power interests are the only “right” as the bourgeois press reports:

Stephen Miller has spent the bulk of his White House career furthering hard-right domestic policies that have resulted in mass deportations, family separations and the testing of the constitutional tenets that grant American citizenship.

Now, Mr. Miller, President Trump’s 40-year-old deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is casting his hard-right gaze further abroad: toward Venezuela and the Danish territory of Greenland, specifically.

Mr. Miller is doing so, the president’s advisers say, in service of advancing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, which so far resemble imperialistic designs to exploit less powerful, resource-rich countries and territories the world over and use those resources for America’s gain. According to Mr. Miller, using brute force is not only on the table but also the Trump administration’s preferred way to conduct itself on the world stage.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.

“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.

Such bully-bragging disguises the failure of the US ruling class order, which cannot rule on in the old way – the 200 year democracy racket is torn up because it can no longer be afforded.

The American Empire (and arse-licking stoogery like the British ruling class and its Starmer Labourites) has no choice but to try imposing its will by sheer fascist terror, censorship and repression.

It is now so bankrupt and mired in debt it has to demand tribute at gunpoint from the whole world to continue its sweet life, a magnified version of the thug-mafia culture running through American (and all capitalist) society.

Some not-quite-so-craven or kowtowing bourgeois commentary further makes the point:

In 2025, [...] the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.

During such eras, Antonio Gramsci more famously wrote, “morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass”. And at present there is no more morbid phenomenon than the crisis of legitimacy for the networks of rules and laws on which the international order was based – the world that the US was central in creating in 1945.

No one can say they were not warned about the wrecking ball that was about to be inflicted on the global order by Donald Trump.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spelled out with admirable clarity in his Senate confirmation hearing in February how Trump disowned the world his predecessors had made. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,” he said. “And all this has led us to a moment in which we must now confront the single greatest risk of geopolitical instability and generational global crisis in the lifetime of anyone alive here today.”

The rules-based international order had to be jettisoned, Rubio said, because it had been built on a false assumption that a foreign policy serving core national interests could be replaced by one that served the “liberal world order, that all the nations of earth would become members of the democratic western-led community”, with humankind now destined to abandon national identity and become “one human family and citizens of the world. This was not just a fantasy. We now know it was a dangerous delusion”.

Rubio’s assessment was echoed in the recent US national security strategy, with its warnings of European cultural erasure and determination to back nationalist parties that believe in “strategic stability with Russia”. The US would no longer seek to “prop up the entire world order like Atlas”, the document said.

On paper these sound like relatively coherent statements of “America first”, but in practice Trump’s foreign policy is a mass of confusion in which this formal non-interventionist ideology has clashed with sporadic interventions that uneasily blend notions of global order with the US national interest. [...]As Donald Trump Jr asserts, as if it were a virtue, his father is the most unpredictable man in politics.

Amid this chaos there has been one consistent target for Trump’s contempt: the constraints imposed by international law, and its value system built around national sovereignty, including the prohibition of the use of force to change external borders. In its place Trump pursues “sheer coercive power” – or what has been described as mobster diplomacy, in which shakedowns, blackmail and deal-making are the agents of change.

Faced with the choice, for example, between expelling Russia from Ukraine – something the US undoubtedly has the military means to do by arming Kyiv sufficiently – or forging a profitable relationship with Vladimir Putin in which both sides plunder Ukraine’s considerable material resources, Trump unmistakably wants to choose the latter. Ukraine, it emerges, shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, in order to assure the survival and the success of the Trumpian economy. For the EU and Nato this is indeed the moment when every act has the potential to be decisive for the future sovereignty of Europe and the UN charter.

Similarly the sovereignty of Venezuela, sitting on 303bn barrels of crude oil – about a fifth of the world’s reserves – becomes, like that of Greenland, Canada and Mexico, the subject of Trump’s marauding eye. Warned on social media that killing Venezuelan civilians without any due process – as the US has done by bombing numerous boats in the Caribbean and Pacific – would be described a war crime, the US vice-president, JD Vance, was brazen enough to reply “I don’t give a shit what you call it”. The Pentagon has subsequently claimed implausibly that it was permissible in US law to blow up shipwrecked sailors stranded in the water because they were combatants representing a threat to US security.

Meanwhile, the rules of free trade are shredded as Trump deploys the sheer size of the US market to extort not just money from allies, but changes in their domestic policy. A country’s standing in the White House is not judged by any rational criteria, let alone its democratic status, but on a leader’s personal relationship to Trump and his ruling clique – a blatantly monarchical order.

Finally, Israel’s occupation and bombardment of Gaza, with European powers often complicit bystanders, is brutal in itself but also strips bare the supposed universality of international norms. In the words of Majed al-Ansari, the foreign policy adviser to Qatar’s prime minister and a man who has had more dealings with Israel than most in 2025: “We are living in an age of disgusting impunity that is taking us back hundreds of years. We are reduced to giving concession after concession not to stop acts of aggression, but to ask those responsible to kill fewer people, destroy fewer neighbourhoods. We do not even ask them to have respect for international law, but ask to take a step back from going 100 miles away from international law.”

All this has been accompanied by an open assault on the institutions of international law that stand in the way of coercive power. Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the international criminal court, recently gave an interview to Le Monde in which he spelled out the impact of US sanctions imposed on him in August as a result of the ICC’s issuing an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity.

The sanctions have changed every aspect of his daily life. Guillou explained: “All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed. For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent me an email cancelling the reservation, citing the sanctions.”

For having the temerity to uphold the basics of international humanitarian law and the value of the lives of Palestinian civilians at the international court, which deals with issues such as war crimes and genocide, Guillou said he had in effect been sent back to live in the 1990s. European banks, cowed by the threats of US Treasury officials in Washington, rushed to close his accounts. The compliance departments of European companies, acting as the valets of the US authorities, refused to provide him services.

Meanwhile, European institutions – even signatories to the Rome statute that established the international court in 2002 – look the other way. Major Palestinian human rights groups such as Al-Haq also find their bank accounts closed as they face sanctions for cooperating with the ICC. The judges at the international court of justice, the UN body that deals with intergovernmental disputes, have had to take evasive action to prevent their assets being seized.

The US has left or sought to undermine several other UN bodies, such as the Human Rights Council and Unesco. In total it is estimated to have cut $1bn (£750m) in funding for organisations linked to the UN and fired 1,000 US government staff whose portfolios reinforced major UN functions.

At the UN general assembly, the key site of this year’s disputes between the US and the rest of the world, the US almost relishes its isolation. Other multilateral institutions – the World Trade Organization, the Paris climate agreement structure, the G20 – have become zones of conflict, places where the US can assert its dominance or indifference, either by absenting itself or demanding humiliating fealty from its one-time allies. John Kerry, a former US vice-president, said that under Trump the US was turning “from leader to denier, delayer and divider”.

[...]The paradox is revealed in its starkest form when rulings of the UN security council or the international courts are invoked by western leaders who, in the next breath, prostrate themselves in front of Trump, caving in to his demands, calling him “daddy”, as Nato’s Mark Rutte did, and sending more lavish gifts to the Sun King and his family.

[..] Another cry of pain came from Oman’s foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi. Speaking to the Muscat retreat of the Oslo Forum, an international mediators’ discussion group, he explained: “We are worryingly close to a world in which certain kinds of foreign intervention – if not outright invasion and annexation of territory – are accepted as a normal part of international relations, rather than as illegal violations of our shared international order. How did this happen?”

Al Busaidi claims the problem predated Trump. “Restraint and respect for international law was abandoned in the aftermath of 9/11, with the launch of not one but two foreign interventions, in Iraq and Afghanistan, ostensibly aimed at the elimination of a terrorist threat, but in reality, functioning as explicit projects of regime change.”

[..]But Ansari, despondent after a year of often fruitless Middle East diplomacy, predicts we are “moving from a world order to disorder”.

“I don’t think we are moving towards a multipolar system. I don’t think we are even moving to a power-based international order. I don’t think we are moving towards any kind of system.

“We are moving into a system where anybody can do whatever they like, regardless if they are big or small. As long as you have the ability to wreak havoc, you can do it because no one will hold you accountable.”

Invoking the anti-Leninist Antonio Gramsci rather than Lenin is to head in the wrong idealist direction, but even such references reflect how events are stirring political discussion. So too in the US:

When President Trump hosted the crown prince of Saudi Arabia last month, he pulled out all the stops. To the traditional pomp of a formal White House visit, he added a few even fancier touches: a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and long, regal tables for the lavish dinner in the East Room instead of the typical round tables.

[...]In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.

He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term. Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court.

Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch. Mr. Trump takes it upon himself to reinterpret a constitutional amendment and to eviscerate agencies and departments created by Congress. He dictates to private institutions how to run their affairs. He sends troops into American streets and wages an unauthorized war against non-military boats in the Caribbean. He openly uses law enforcement for what his own chief of staff calls “score settling” against his enemies, he dispenses pardons to favored allies and he equates criticism to sedition punishable by death.

Mr. Trump’s reinvention of the presidency has altered the balance of power in Washington in profound ways that may endure long after he departs the scene. Authority once seized by one branch of government is rarely given back willingly. Actions that once shocked the system can eventually become seen as normal. While other presidents pushed the limits, Mr. Trump has blown right through them and dared anyone to stop him.

[...]“The president knew exactly what he wanted to do coming into office this time,” said Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser. “Now the president had four years under his belt. He knows exactly how everything works. He knows all the international players. He knows all the national players. He knew what strategies and tactics worked the first go around and what strategies didn’t work.”

[..]Power is the leitmotif of his second term. For the record, he disclaims royal aspirations. “I’m not a king,” he said after millions of Americans took to the streets in “No Kings” demonstrations in October. But at the same time, he embraces the comparison, at least in part to troll his critics but also, it seems, because he enjoys the notion.

[...]In the modern era, the notion of an imperial presidency was made prominent[...]under Richard Nixon, who refused to spend certain money appropriated by Congress, secretly bombed Cambodia, wiretapped opponents and used government to pursue his enemies.

The system of checks and balances eventually did reassert itself during Watergate. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered Mr. Nixon to release incriminating tapes and a bipartisan coalition in Congress moved to impeach the president, prompting him to resign. Starting late in Mr. Nixon’s tenure, Congress passed new laws meant to restrain the executive on war powers, impoundment, eavesdropping and government ethics.

[...]“Some of the stuff that people were upset at Nixon for doing was kind of quaint compared to just the totally out-of-control stuff” that Mr. Trump has been doing,

“Even Nixon was a guy who got that there were limits that he had to tread carefully around even as he was trying to push them,” said Robert Schlesinger, longtime journalist and historian of the White House.

Mr. Schlesinger added. “Whereas Trump, he’s not interested in limits.

That may stem from Mr. Trump’s distinctive ability to overcome obstacles and scandals that would hobble any other politician. He was impeached twice, indicted four times, convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual abuse and found liable for business fraud while his firm was convicted of criminal tax evasion. Yet he won a stunning, against-the-odds comeback election victory. The Supreme Court even granted him and his successors broad immunity that it had never bestowed on any previous president.

And so Mr. Trump evidently sees little reason to restrain himself. He has pursued an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy of pushing policies, even knowing that some of them may be rejected — a gamble that paid off, from his vantage point. As it turned out, not only has Congress acquiesced to vast intrusions on its traditional spheres of authority, most notably spending, but even the courts have been more of a speed bump than a stop sign.

[...]The lack of checks on Mr. Trump has given him latitude that his predecessors did not enjoy, not just in policymaking but also in profit-making. While other presidential families have cashed in on the White House, none has been as successful or brazen as Mr. Trump and his clan. In the 11 months since he reclaimed the White House, the president’s family has made billions of dollars, at least on paper, through business deals around the world and cryptocurrency investments from people with a vested interest in American policy.

At the same time, Mr. Trump has systematically dismantled many instruments of accountability. He installed loyal partisans at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, fired inspectors general and the special counsel, purged prosecutors and agents who participated in past investigations into his dealings and gutted the public integrity section that probes political corruption. Congressional Republicans who eagerly looked into Hunter Biden’s business ties have no interest in scrutinizing

As the year ends, there have been signs of resistance to unchecked power. A judge threw out the Trump administration’s indictments against two of the president’s adversaries, Letitia James and James B. Comey, and two grand juries refused to re-indict Ms. James. In addition to legislating release of the Epstein files, Congress passed a measure slashing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget by 25 percent if he does not turn over video of a second strike on a boat of supposed drug traffickers.

If Democrats win the midterm elections next year, they will surely use their newfound power to push back further against Mr. Trump. Some, like Mr. Flake, predict that even some Republicans will begin to speak out after filing deadlines for possible primary challengers have passed. And legal analysts expect the Supreme Court to clip Mr. Trump’s wings on tariffs, and possibly on birthright citizenship.

These last comments are pure wishful thinking, trapped in the delusions of the “democratic” past and some supposed “checks and balances” it imposes.

They are same kind of bourgeois “democracy” brainlessness which facilitated the rise of Adolf Hitler, legally elected Chancellor in 1932 and sustained by the German Reichstag.

The same complacency (revisionist backed) said “after Hitler our turn” in the deranged belief that Nazism could be removed again once it was “tried out and found wanting” (exactly as the soft-brained liberals and “lefts” are saying in Britain about the racist reactionary Reform party).

The concentration camp round-ups put an end to that stupidity.

But the same complacency exists now, not least from the fake-"left" still academically fussing about "definitions" of fascism, blind to what is in front of them, the dictatorship reality of capitalism itself.

Everything screams out the same kind of deadly dangers now in the US, not least the increasing domestic civil war repression manifested by the "ICE" "migrant" racist scapegoating, and its use to build essentially an enormous SS-type militarised force, recruited from reactionary former military and outright lumpen elements, and all controlled by the White House without any "checks and balances" (including even the usual identification badges, and with covered faces).

As just seen in the Minneapolis murder of a protester, and the deluge of outright deliberate "big lie" hate-mongering against alleged "left-wingers" (a ludicrous fabrication about perfectly normal mass dismay and protest) this has a civil war anti-working class terrorising function far beyond its ostensible "migrant hunting" (a sick scapegoating hate-campaign in itself):

Federal agents shot and killed a woman during a large-scale immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis on Wednesday.

Ilhan Omar, the Democratic Minnesota congresswoman, said the victim was “a legal observer” of action by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which had sent a surge of agents into the city in recent days tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.

A witness, Emily Heller, told local media that the victim was shot in the face multiple times. Heller said she saw a car blocking traffic that appeared to be part of a protest against the ICE operation, and heard an agent telling the driver, a woman, to “get out of here”.

“She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in – like his midriff was on her bumper – and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” Heller told MPR News, a Minneapolis public radio station.

The woman has been identified as 37-year old Renee Nicole Good, the Minnesota Star Tribune reports.

Speaking to the outlet, Good’s mother Donna Ganger said that her daughter had been living in the Twin Cities with her partner. She said that her daughter was “not part of anything like that at all”, referring to protestors who have challenged ICE’s presence in Minnesota.

A video posted online by the Minnesota Reformer and another video obtained by the Guardian appeared to capture the moment of the shooting as a dark red SUV drove away from agents moving toward it, although the front of the vehicle is obscured.

In a post to X, the homeland security department (DHS) insisted the person was a “domestic terrorist” who “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted “to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them”.

The department claimed several ICE officers were hurt, but said that they were expected to make “full recoveries”.

“An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers,” the DHS post said.

The videos mentioned above appear to contradict that statement.

Of course, because they are outright, outrageous, deliberate lies.

Supposed reining-in of Nixon’s lurch towards overt dictatorship – which included the infamous Kent State killing of four anti-Vietnam students – is no guide.

That was not re-asserted “democracy” but a reflection of the retreats forced on imperialism by international class war and anti-colonialism, and especially the shattering defeat imposed by the communist-led national-liberation war in Vietnam and the wave of international and US domestic turmoil it led to.

Conditions are now very different. Then imperialism could still pull back and survive the shaking the Viet Cong gave it.

The Cold War “balance” with Soviet revisionism’s dire permanent peaceful coexistence retreat from “unnecessarily adventurous” revolutionary perspectives, along with continuing capitalist “boom” conditions overall, did not threaten the Empire’s very existence in the way the crisis does now.

It was able to ride out the huge costs of the war which emerged in an inflationary surge in the dollar and the subsequent 1974 “oil price shock” from the Arab regimes’ response (emboldened by Third World struggle despite their own feudal degeneracy).

Weaker sections of the imperialist order were pushed close to the edge, notably moribund British imperialism, but were rescued from near bankruptcy by the IMF after grovelling Callaghan/Healey Labour Party opportunism agreed to huge welfare and wage cuts (triggering mass class struggle like the Ford, fireman and municipal workers strikes and ultimately Thatcherite class aggression and privatisation, and the first austerity measures and the civil-war miners' strike).

Now economically all capital teeters on the edge of the abyss, as the dotcom collapse in 2000 and the 2009 international bank meltdown demonstrated, a near “financial nuclear winter” avoided only by the endless dollar “printing” which has fed an astonishing bubble of speculation around the “tech companies”, universally expected to burst any minute (see last EPSR).

Latest Stock Exchange rises indicate not “Trump”eted success but the disastrous plunge; a boasted “revival” of the London market for example is built on the AI bubble frenzy and dramatic rises for arms companies (war), precious metal mining companies (escape from the collapsing dollar into rising gold and silver) and banking (fishing in the inflationary credit surge). All are harbingers of collapse, not success:

The precious metal producer Fresnillo was the top performer – its shares have soared by 450% in 2025, boosted by record prices for gold and silver. Its rival, Endeavour Mining, gained 170%. The telecommunications company Airtel Africa was the second-fastest riser, up 210%.

Defence company stocks also surged as Europe boosted its spending on weapons amid the Russia-Ukraine war and pressure from Donald Trump on Nato allies to spend more on defence.

Babcock International, the defence contractor which kits out the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet, jumped by almost 150% this year. Rolls-Royce, which supplies engines for fighter jets, turbines and propulsion systems for warships and power systems for the British army, doubled in value.

More than a fifth of the stocks on the FTSE 100 went down. The biggest fallers were the distribution company Bunzl and drinks maker Diageo. Both lost a third of their value.

It was a turbulent year for global markets, however. In January, the launch of the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek wiped $1tn from US technology stocks in a “Sputnik moment” for the world’s AI superpowers.

The bigger shock came on 2 April, when Trump announced sweeping tariffs on trading partners. The ensuing market panic knocked 10% off the FTSE 100 by mid-April, but there was a recovery rally when the US president decided to pause the new levies.

Toward the end of the year, hopes for US interest rate cuts in 2026 pushed shares higher, with Trump signalling that he would appoint a new head of the Federal Reserve.

Despite the lingering fears of an AI bubble, Wall Street’s S&P 500 was on track to record a 17% rise for 2025, while the Nasdaq was about 21% up. Among tech stocks, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has gained 65% in 2025 as its Gemini artificial intelligence product gained market share.

Meta, which owns Facebook, lagged behind with a 13% rise, while retailer Amazon gained only 6%.

Anxiety over the US economy, and three interest rate cuts since September, pushed the US dollar down by 9% in 2025, its worst year since 2017. Wall Street analysts expect further losses over the next 12 months.

Fears of currency debasement drove a sharp rally in precious metals this year. Gold has gained 65%, its best showing since 1979, as investors sought out protection from inflation and geopolitical tensions.

The Venezuela piracy, kidnap and blockade by the US has to be seen within the whole spectrum of this pending crisis implosion, fascist barbarity, revisionist hobbling of revolutionary understanding and fake-"left" defeatism.

Despite the overwhelming US naval firepower still massed off the Caribbean coast and “heroic” (!!!) blitzing of tiny speedboats by the “world’s biggest aircraft carrier”, the defiance and hostility of the Venezuelan poor to this monstrous act has been immediately clear in their pro-Maduro street demonstrations (played down or even covered up by the compliant and grovelling bourgeois media, trying to hype up much smaller “anti-” responses - mostly outside the country in the pro-Western bourgeois and petty bourgeois diaspora who hate the masses).

It is obviously a fascist gangster war operation "justified" by an hate-filled pysops campaign of degenerate lies and demonisation built up over a decade and a half against the left nationalist socialist-leaning revolution begun by Hugo Chávez and continued by Maduro.

An egregious long-term big-lie exercise has been used to stampede international public opinion with the ludicrous premise of a "war on drugs" first used against the Marxist revolutionary movements like FARC and the ELN in Colombia. As the EPSR declared:

The CIA's fairy-story has now been eagerly taken up, of course, by the B1air regime, and Mo Mowlam is just completing her third tour of Colombia in the last 10 months as New Labour's stooge seal-of-approval for these monstrous American fascist preparations to blitzkrieg rural Colombia to halt the peasant-supported revolution (in the way that the whole of Indo-China was napalmed, blown to pieces by B52s saturation bombing, and then defoliated just for good measure, by illegal Agent Orange chemical warfare which is still deforming new-born babies in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia thirty years later from the residues in the soil).

It is plainly total nonsense that Western society's drug-taking degeneracy is the fault of dirt-poor peasants harvesting cocaplant leaves in Colombia, or equally-poor peasants in Asia harvesting the opium poppy. If it was not this junk the West was getting high on, it would be on LSD or Ecstasy or other products of the West's own laboratories. The imperialist countries' drug bingeing is an incurable feature of capitalism's unalterably-decadent cultural decline which would continue to sink down unstoppably even if the whole of Colombia was to be nuked off the face of the earth. An alternative trade-chain of cocaine supplies would quickly be found, and if all the coca plants in the world were eradicated, then alternatives would quickly fill the new market niche in the West (EPSR No1086 24-04-01).

Just as risible are the accusations of "totalitarianism" and "dictatorship", playing to petty bourgeois popular prejudices about parliament, with outright lies about the supposedly absent "democratic credentials" of Chávez and Maduro.

But both were/are hugely popular with the proletarian masses who have seen major improvements in their desperate lives despite economic siege on the country and recognise they are going in the right direction, and making the right alliances, particularly communist Cuba, China and Russia, hated by Washington and all the bourgeois world.

So imperialism has been trying to subvert and topple this anti-imperialist regime for two decades with a non-stop stream of coup attempts and lie-filled populist revolts by the CIA and the local bourgeoisie, from the 2002 military coup attempt on Chávez to the 2014's extreme violence (involving the foulest of atrocities by the bourgeois-coordinated minority "demonstrators" from wire stringing against motor bikes to burning alive pro-regime victims), while constantly pouring out a stream of utter bullshit about "lost elections".

In 2019 the "international community" (i.e. imperialism) even "recognised" a complete nonentity Quisling figure, Juan Guaido, as the "real president", maintaining that hopeless charade for several years.

At the same time it has strangled the country's economy with a ferocious sanctions regime, escalated under the first Trump presidency, and hitting its vital oil industry hard – and even stealing its gold reserves, aided by the British government which holds around $2bn worth in the Bank of England vaults (where multiple countries store their reserves too), refusing to release (i.e. stealing) them even during the Covid pandemic when Caracas wanted to pay for supplies and vaccines.

For what it is worth, the Venezuelan elections have been declared some of the most open, validated by international observers, despite a deluge of hostile Western propaganda each time, with only the last, early 2024, vote thrown into "doubt".

But that was by an astonishingly elaborate CIA scam, involving a psyops deluge of hatred, subversion of the electronic vote system with cyberwar, and an alleged "popular vote-station tally" by the local bourgeoisie, speciously declared "the true result" with no possible validation other than the say-so of the Western intelligence agencies who ran it, to feed a worldwide ruling class hate-campaign declaring Maduro to be "illegitimate".

As if legitimacy lay with any of the imperialist world's "regimes" like the thuggish, journalist-murdering and beheading Arab-Gulf feudal sheikhs (given White House banquets(!!!)); the 98% (!!) electoral vote for the brutal murderer Paul Kagame in Rwanda (and next door's similar equally "overwhelming" stitch-up for Museveni in Uganda); the murderous torture coup-installed Sisi regime in Egypt; the reactionary monarchy in Morocco; the non-stop military coup regimes in Pakistan (where popular leader Imran Khan is in lifetime prison); the grossly corrupt, croaking little green Banderite fascist Zelensky in Ukraine (two years overdue on an anyway laughable election programme); the fascist clown Javier Milei in bankrupt Argentina kept in power by a $40bn Trumpite bribe (or threatened punishment if he lost); the grotesquely brutal gangster populist Bukele in El Salvador, torture concentration camp gaoler for the US Empire; and the whole crew of bourgeois warmonger minority governments in Europe all levered into power on tiny votes like the Starmerites less than 15% population share in the UK (deemed a "landslide"(!!!!)) and all instigating ever more draconian Gestapo fascist repression behind cynical "anti-terror" laws.

Or how about this:

About 700 people have been killed during three days of election protests in Tanzania, the main opposition party has said.

Protests erupted over what demonstrators said was the stifling of the opposition after the exclusion of key candidates from the presidential ballot.

John Kitoka, a spokesperson for the Chadema opposition party, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) [...]“As we speak, the figure for deaths in Dar [es Salaam] is around 350 and for Mwanza it is 200-plus. Added to figures from other places around the country, the overall figure is around 700,” he said.

He added that the toll could be much higher because killings could be happening during a night-time curfew that was imposed from Wednesday.

A security source told AFP there had been reports of more than 500 dead, “maybe 700-800 in the whole country”.

Amnesty International said it had received information that at least 100 people had been killed.

Tanzanians went to the polls on Wednesday in an election in which President Samia Suluhu Hassan was expected to strengthen her grip on the country amid rapidly intensifying repression and the exclusion of key opponents from the presidential contest.

What (bourgeois) elections are worth is very little, being nearly always subject to imperialist trickery and overwhelming financial influence.

Just how thin the Venezuela outcome was, is tacitly admitted by Trump himself with his offhand dismissal of the loathsome ultra-reactionary "opposition" leader Mariá Machado, stating that she "did not have the support" in his astoundingly high-handed declarations about a "replacement for Maduro" (despite her years of collusion with the CIA and visits to Washington to plot with reactionary US politicians like the anti-communist Cuban Marco Rubio himself).

But it does suggest confusion of Chávismo's "21st century socialism" and its over-reliance on bourgeois elections in the first place, which revolutionaries should use only as a platform from which to show the working class what a massive fraud is all bourgeois democracy or (very exceptionally) to win against the ruling class in circumstances where the overall struggle has made sure of the result – as for example in the 1998 Irish unity referendums, which were actually a means to formally consolidate the already established result of the Good Friday Agreement, achieved through the British government's negotiated acceptance of the aims of the IRA/Sinn Féin revolutionary armed struggle for Irish national independence).

That reliance throws up further questions too.

Despite correctly building up working class militias and defence squads, – the colectivos and millions of armed workers – the Bolivarian revolution has never pushed forwards with the most important weaponry of all, namely Leninist perspectives and the core understanding of the need to overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat either inside Venezuela where the wealthy still maintain their property or as an international call on all workers states and working class movements for ending capitalism.

One good moment to have made that question conscious would surely have been the January 2024 election when the Bolivarians were forced to assert their authority in practice anyway against the outrageous CIA voting sabotage by the Machado-ites, declaring outright for proletarian dictatorship as the only true path to democracy (against just such skulduggery).

A dozen crucial historical lessons could have been drawn on, especially in Latin America, where repeated bitter counter-revolutionary experiences have been made, like the imperialist overthrow of Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala and most infamously the 1973 massacre and torture coup by General Pinochet of the socialism-by-democratic-means elected government of disastrous Salvador Allende, drowning its revisionist strategy in blood.

Or the invasion of little Grenada in 1983 to topple its Leninist party after petty bourgeois indiscipline by the popular leader Maurice Bishop opened the door to a US fleet. Or the brutal US invasion of Panama in 1989. Or the non-stop barbarous coups and repression in benighted Haïti...

At the same time the revisionist/reformist treachery of the unreliable left nationalism in Brazil under reformist Lula da Silva and equally from Colombia's "left" opportunist president Gustavo Petro could have been challenged – both of them lining up with the imperialist stitch-up to denounce Maduro last year.

Because there continues to be a bourgeoisie in Venezuela the Bolivarian revolution has suffered endless disruptive trouble, coordinated with the Empire and its dirty ops.

And while the Bolivarian communes have developed all kinds useful interactions, they are completely vulnerable without a higher level lead on the nature of the Crisis and class power, as the EPSR said years back (No1184 13-05-03) after a gushing report by the oh-so-right-on Zionist-sympathising Naomi Klein advocating "ground up" socialism but...

...deliberately failing to deal with the question of dictatorial state power, the oldest in the book.

Either the working class has it, or the bourgeois capitalist establishment retains it, – one or the other.

By all means let people push participatory democracy as far and fast as they wish inside a workers state, but state power has to be captured FIRST, or remain the IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVE, - otherwise the whole business of "cooperative control of their own lives", etc, etc, etc, is rapidly rendered TOTALLY MEANINGLESS.

Without a detailed grasp of the difficulties of the struggle it is impossible to say whether the bourgeoisie could have been overturned previously, but certainly there are no signs of the need for such Leninist understanding even being raised nor deep grasp of the scale and depth of the imperialist crisis and its unstoppable collapse into WW3.

Nor has the issue been raised by the "left" groups and "solidarity movements" who love to visit and patronise such struggles and draw "left" kudos from them; an entire rally in London just weeks ago saw not a mention from such ostensibly Marxist groups as the Trot origin Fight Racism/Fight Imperialism RCG nor the Stalin-rooted Lalkar/Proletarian, both giving major top-table presentations.

Both are utterly hostile to real Marxist science and go out of their way to suppress and block revolutionary polemic by sectarian bans and meeting blocks.

The absence of Leninism leaves all sorts of unanswered questions about the cooperation now seen in Caracas from the deputy president Delcia Rodriguez with the bullying demands of US imperialism and (possibly CIA disinformation) rumours about prior collusion on the kidnap.

Some comments have declared this to be a Lenin-like Brest-Litovsk strategy, the sacrifice of major concessions to hold off the gangster thuggery and at least keep the revolution intact. But Venezuela has no Leninist proletarian dictatorship state to keep intact. It is clear that the US bully has no appetite for an on the ground struggle against the mass militias – but they need Leninist inspiration. Much more needs to be grasped.

Meanwhile the mass street turmoil in Iran backed by the lurid Nazi bombing threats from Trump is an obvious Western counter-revolutionary stunt, riding real crisis discontent with laughably shallow "freedom and democracy" slogans which Zionism even boasts are fed in by hundreds of its agents.

The Ayatollahs have no answer to the crisis either.

Only Leninism does. It needs to be built. Don Hoskins

Back to the top

Workers will only begin to the grasp the necessity of socialist revolution once they see capitalism’s devastating crisis-breakdown as the driving force behind all world upheavals as it pushes the planet towards devastating Slump catastrophe and total war. The CPGB-ML’s wooden non-dialectical logic which views developments such as Nepal’s Gen-Z unrest in isolation, focuses on slow, gradual change and ignores the contradictions inherent within the capitalist system leading to collapse misleads because it blocks off such a revolutionary perspective. Polemical conflict is required to build unity and leadership around a correct understanding

Lalkar/Proletarian’s attempted “analysis” on the violent turmoil that led to the downfall of Nepal’s governing bourgeois alliance between the pretend “communist” CPN(UML) and the bourgeois Nepali Congress Party last September is hopeless.

They make no attempt to describe the crisis breakdown of the capitalist system driving all the turmoil in Nepal and across the region (and throughout the Third World generally, – and increasingly in the imperialist heartlands), pushing imperialism ever closer towards catastrophic collapse and renewed world war, let alone to use this revolutionary perspective as a starting point.

Instead, they passively describe some vague “external geopolitical factors” as a “highly likely” “backdrop” to “Nepal’s highly complex position within the region”, and blithely refer to some “deep-seated economic challenges” without any reference at all to the intractable capitalist crisis tearing the world apart.

This failure to achieve anything like a world revolutionary perspective on the international monopoly-capitalist crisis prevents them from distinguishing between popular spontaneous movements and imperialist provocations, or seeing elements of both in such upheavals as Nepal.

On Nepal, they one-sidedly focus on the deposed prime minister KP Sharma Oli’s alleged “China tilt”, which they declare to be a “clear motivation” for the US to

“leverage the Gen Z protests towards imperialist ambitions”

(without explaining what those ambitions are).

They state that

the nature of the Gen Z uprising has been hotly debated

but they do not spell out what the different sides of the debate are saying let alone come to any clear conclusions. By only presenting one side of the argument, they imply that it was simply a US-orchestrated colour revolution.

It may the case that US imperialism provoked this unrest (possibly in collaboration with monarchist elements) for economic advantage (if that is what is implied by “imperialist ambitions”). It would, for example, want to prevent Chinese access to as yet unexploited uranium deposits on Nepal’s side of the border with China, or to install a more reliable government to curb growing Chinese influence generally.

Far more to the point (given the capitalist-crisis context Lalkar fails to grasp) would be that Washington would also simply want to restore military-royalist reaction to repress Nepal’s 19-year-long bourgeois-democratic revolution against monarchist rule, particularly as the deepening capitalist crisis begins to push arguments for socialist revolution to the fore.

Despite this, there are strong indications that the latest upheavals may equally have been manipulated by India, who have their own imperialist reasons for wanting to destabilise Nepal, including similar fears of socialist revolution at some point in the near future.

India has also long sought to influence Nepal to counter growing Chinese diplomatic and trading influence, and so any tilt towards revisionist China (strengthening since 2008 when China provided military aid to the then Maoist government after the Maoists overthrew the monarchy in a People’s-War revolution) also implies a tilt away from India. This would be seen as a trade and security threat by the India’s emerging imperialist ruling class. However, this clear motivation for possible Indian interference is left unmentioned (remarkably so given Lalkar’s origins in the Indian Workers’ Association).

As reported in EPSR No1664 (16-10-25), the left historian Vijay Prashad points to the reactionary role played in Nepali affairs by a network of highly organised fascist Hindutva groups from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Nepal’s southern border who are aligned with Nepali royalists determined to topple the Nepal’s new bourgeois-democratic republic established following the overthrow of the monarchy, and reinstate the hated Hindu monarchy.

 

 

Reactionary monarchist bikers carrying banners of Indian Hindu mystic Adityanath and deposed Nepali king Gyanendra at a rally in Kathmandu on March 9th.

Prashad cites as evidence the presence of posters on the protests depicting the reactionary Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath, a leader of Narenda Modi’s Indian-fascist BJP and the Uttar Pradesh government, alongside those of the deposed Nepali king Gyanendra Shah. This has been disputed, but this objection only adds to the picture of a developing Indian-backed royalist agenda to overthrow Nepal’s new bourgeois republic because the fact of the presence of such posters on demonstrations is not disputed, just the timing.

A widely shared photo depicting images of Adityanath and Gyanendra carried on the back of motorbikes reported to be from the September unrest was in fact from a previous rally on 9th March when royalists gathered to welcome the deposed king at Kathmandu’s airport. He was met with slogans such “Abolish Federal Republican System, Reinstate Monarchy” and “Come Back King, Save Nepal”. Pro-monarchist hacker groups also attacked official state websites with royalist images and slogans. This follows a declaration Gyanendra made in February provocatively stating his intention to “play an active role in politics”.

On 28th March, monarchist thugs went on a violent rampage in Kathmandu, vandalising and destroying homes, shops and buildings, including news media offices and party political headquarters, – mob violence that was repeated on at a far more destructive scale in September. Smaller royalist demonstrations continued in the months up to June. Adityanath has hosted many visits by Gyanendra to the Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow, and he once addressed a public meeting in Kathmandu promoting Nepal’s “Hindu identity”.

The EPSR argued that the September demonstrations, although valid, had been infiltrated by well-organised monarchists who led the orgy of destruction that toppled Oli, possibly with support from sympathetic elements within the military, after numerous protestors were shot dead by security forces. Later revelations from a bourgeois press account add weight to the argument that this violence was orchestrated by sinister, well-organised groups with the collusion of sections of the armed forces who failed to intervene:

On Sept. 9, coordinated arson attacks across the Himalayan nation destroyed hundreds of government buildings, from a storied palace and top courts to grand ministries and humble ward offices. Hundreds of other properties were targeted, too, including businesses and schools connected to the political elite, as well as homes of current and retired politicians.

The widespread arson followed the fatal shootings the day before of 19 anti-corruption protesters by security forces in Kathmandu, the capital. The prevailing narrative is that mobs of young protesters sought retribution, setting fires as their outrage over the killings flared.

But a New York Times investigation — based on dozens of interviews with witnesses, participants and arson experts; a review of photos and videos from the havoc; and visits by The Times to the wreckage sites — reveals new details that cast doubt on the idea that such a tightly coordinated nationwide campaign of destruction could have been an entirely spontaneous response to the deaths the day before.

A few hours after the shootings on Sept. 8, “ready-to-use lists” began surfacing online with the private details of members of society accused of being part of Nepal’s graft and patronage network.

The next afternoon, most of these people’s residences began to burn. Nepal’s executive, legislative and judicial branches were also consumed by fire. The scale of the devastation was catastrophic, akin to hundreds of airstrikes in a handful of hours.

“You don’t get so many buildings on fire in a short time frame without a good deal of organizational prowess,” said Richard Hagger, a senior fire investigator at Andrew Moore & Associates. “Something like that takes weeks, if not months, of planning.”

The crowds that attacked the heart of the Nepali government marauded largely unimpeded other than around the Parliament complex, which was guarded by a contingent of riot police. Nepali troops, who were barely seen on the streets that day, had been told not to intervene, four people with direct knowledge of the matter said. They, as well as other witnesses and officials interviewed for this article, talked to The Times on condition of anonymity because they had not been approved to brief the public or were worried about retaliation.

The bedlam on Sept. 9 was punctuated by the resignation of Nepal’s prime minister. Soon, the government fell. Nepal’s bureaucracy was charred. In Kathmandu and its suburbs, more than 110 police stations were set on fire, according to a police spokesman. The damage and lost business is still being tallied, but initial estimates put it at more than a third of Nepal’s gross domestic product, one cabinet minister said.

Fire investigators caution that it is impossible to reconstruct what happened on Sept. 9 without testing debris samples, interviewing witnesses and examining the buildings. Yet none of this vital analysis has been conducted by the police lab that normally handles such cases. It is unclear whether the official inaction is the result of any specific orders. But with each day, it is less likely that science can determine who burned down Nepal’s government, how it was done and why.

Pawan Dhungana, a section chief of the Nepali police’s central forensic science lab, confirmed that no one in his team has been called to investigate since the fires blazed last month. His lab has received nothing to test. Any fire debris has probably degraded to the point of irrelevance, he said.

“Seeing all these conflagrations, not just in Kathmandu but all around the country, one can suspect it was preplanned,” Mr. Dhungana said. “Of course, we don’t have any evidence of anything.”

The interim government of Prime Minister Sushila Karki has formed a commission to investigate the mass fires and the excessive use of force against the protesters. But another Nepali forensic police officer said that Nepal’s judicial backlog means that it could take up to seven years for any investigation to be completed. Nepali business associations have urged far faster action to restore investor confidence. No one has claimed responsibility for the fires, although theories have spread as fast as the blazes did.

On Sept. 9, the throngs moved within two hours from Parliament to the Supreme Court to the Singha Durbar complex, with its former palace and about 20 government ministries. The main building began smoking within half an hour of the crowd’s arrival, witnesses said. Such a rapid ignition, followed by flames that seemed more intense than those fed simply by interior furnishings, suggests trails of specialized accelerants were laid beforehand to create a so-called fire path, arson experts said.

“Looking at photographs, I suspect that sodium or magnesium or other chemicals were used because of the size of the conflagrations,” Mr. Dhungana said. “But without analyzing, we cannot say anything for sure.”

These chemicals are controlled substances and require expertise to deploy. They cannot be purchased easily like more common accelerants, such as kerosene. But many gallons of liquid fuel would still be needed to ensure that big buildings burn.

Notably, some of the building’s upper windows were open when the mobs arrived, which they usually were not, according to workers there.

This ventilation likely helped the fire to spread, arson experts said. But whether this was done deliberately cannot be determined without on-the-ground detective work.

“The factors to say more likely than not that it was some sort of organized conspiracy are the size of the building, the devastation of the building, the ferocity of the fire,” said Kenneth Kee, a principal consultant at Fire Science Forensics in Singapore. “Then you have to ask: ‘How did the accelerants get in the building? Was it an inside job? Did security abandon their posts?’”

Elsewhere in Kathmandu and in towns all across Nepal, the mobs worked more openly. They followed the lists that had circulated the night before. The targets included the homes of Nepal’s political grandees, including the top ranks of the three big political parties — the Nepali Congress, the Maoists and the Communists. (Cases of mistaken identity were mixed in, too.) These arsonists were armed with containers of fuel and bottles capped with cloth wicks, witnesses and participants in the violence said. Some carried sticks, rifles and kukris, a local curved dagger.

Three young men who took part in the arson said that they worked in shifts that day and that older men they did not know handed out petrol bombs filled with motorcycle fuel. Two of them shared videos of the attacks. Neighbors living next to one of the targeted homes said they saw a group of men in their mid-30s disgorging the contents of gas canisters. Seeing the flames shoot up, one perpetrator remarked that this meant they would be getting paid, the neighbors said.

Arson has been a fixture of Nepali political culture. During their decade-long insurgency against the now-abolished monarchy, Maoists set fires and rigged explosives, targeting symbols of the state or powerful businesses. Deliberate fires continued after the civil war ended in 2006. In 2019, for instance, the Communists, who splintered from the Maoists, admitted to setting on fire more than a dozen cellular towers across the nation to protest supposed corruption by the telecom operator.

None of the big three political parties was spared this time around. Those who escaped the destruction included the fourth- and fifth-largest parties, one headed by a politician who was part of a mass jailbreak on Sept. 9 and the other a pro-royalist bloc. About 60,000 case files at the Supreme Court burned, even those supposedly protected by fire-resistant boxes, a court employee said. At the anti-corruption court, members of the mob yelled out, looking for rooms holding specific documents, two lawyers said.

Business owners in several cities said that the arsonists set fires on alternate floors, a tactic to link blazes, which could point to systematic attacks, fire experts said.

Even the central police forensic lab was besieged by men throwing petrol bombs. The fire did not catch, and the lab was unscathed.

“We all want to know who did this,” Mr. Dhungana said. “But it’s almost like we cannot find out.”

It is telling that the homes and offices of a pro-royalist bloc were spared whilst that of the pro-republic parties were attacked, a point that Prashad had also made.

Closer relations with China notwithstanding, Sharma Oli has held back Nepal’s revolutionary process from the start having repudiated armed struggle from as long back as 1972. He has played a Menshevik-like role ever since the 1990 People’s Movement revolt against monarchic rule forced the king to grant limited constitutional concessions.

He played along with King Gyanendra’s bourgeois-democracy charade even as workers’ revolts were brutally suppressed in 1992 and as peasant discontent grew over the king’s failure to grant promised land reform, and opposed the Maoist-led decade-long revolutionary struggle in the countryside from 1996 to bring the monarchy down and install a people’s republic.

He continues to agitate against Maoist moves to further advance revolutionary consciousness by denouncing their annual People’s War Day celebrations as “violence day”, as this local bourgeois press piece from 2023 shows (when the two parties were in a government alliance together):

Kathmandu: Amid the speculations that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Center) may take a decision to sever ties with UML to revive the previous alliance with Nepali Congress and other parties, CPN-UML chair KP Sharma Oli has fiercely lashed out at the Maoist party.

On Thursday, chair Oli dubbed the first of Falgun [the last month of the Hindu calendar – ed] a ‘violence day’. Maoist chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal government had decided to celebrate the day as the People’s War Day. To that effect the government had declared Falgun 1 as People’s War Day, and announced to perpetuate it for the years to come.

(The) UML leadership had not vigorously opposed the decision at that time, though it was fiercely criticized at people’s level.

Twelve days later, KP Sharma Oli, chair of CPN (UML), came heavily against the CPN (Maoist Center) as the former publicly denounced the government’s decision to declare Falgun 1 as “People’s War Day,” calling it a day of violence and terrorism.

And yet Lalkar approvingly characterise this class-collaborating Menshevik fraud as “a veteran communist”!!

Lalkar cites as evidence of “external factors playing a role in Oli’s downfall” his attendance at China’s 80th anniversary victory parade on September 2025 against Japanese occupation and fascist aggression, as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit a few days earlier in Tianjin, which followed on from the signing of a framework agreement under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) last December.

These are all interesting signs of growing Chinese influence, and will, as Lalkar argues, have “provoked unease in both Washington and New Delhi” (though they do not explain the Indian connection). Set against this as a motivating factor in and of itself, however, is the fact that Indonesia’s anti-communist president Prabowo Subianto also attended the Victory Day parade, and would have attended the earlier SCO summit had Indonesia not also been engulfed in widespread youth unrest then.

The fact that an obviously reactionary thug like Prabowo was invited to the SCO makes it clear the main question is not about whether or not a particular bourgeois nation is pivoting towards China. Indonesia’s Gen-Z youth have good, clear reasons for wanting to see Prabowo brought down. The real question is the extent to which the material conditions of a world imperialist system in terminal crisis is driving revolution to the surface, and the class antagonisms that arise from this.

Attempts to label Indonesia’s Gen-Z revolt as a colour revolution because these protests coincided with the SCO summit and parade, (as the Workers’ Party of Britain’s leader George Galloway does, for example) slyly ignore Prabowo’s sick campaign to rehabilitate the murderous US-stooge par excellence, former president, Suharto and turn the clock back to his nazi New Order dictatorship era by expanding the military and its role in civil life, as well as his collusion with the US and Zionism at the United Nations in September over potentially recognising so-called “Israel” diplomatically in a speech lauded by both Donald Trump (as previously quoted in the EPSR) and Benjamin Netanyahu:

Netanyahu, speaking earlier that day on the final session of the UNGA General Debate, claimed that he and other leaders had taken note of President Prabowo’s “passionate words.”

“I took note of the encouraging words spoken here by the president of Indonesia. This is the country with the largest Muslim population of all nations. It’s also a sign of what could come,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu asserted that progressive Arab and Muslim leaders recognize the benefits of working with Israel, pointing to its technological expertise in medicine, science, agriculture, water, defense, and artificial intelligence.

“In the coming years, the Middle East will look very different. Those fighting Israel today will disappear. Brave peacemakers will take their place,” he said.

And playing one of the sickest jokes in history, Prabowo has just bestowed ‘Hero of the Nation’ status to Suharto (!!!) alongside a female trade-union activist who had been abducted, tortured and murdered by Suharto’s fascist goons in May 1993.

To make this “joke” even sicker, he also honoured Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, the army general who organised the massacres in Java and Bali in Suharto’s anti-communist bloodbaths of 1965-66. The most commonly quoted estimate of those slaughtered then is from 500,000 to 1 million, but some argue that it could plausibly be as high as 2 million. Sarwo Edhie once boasted to the Indonesian House of Representatives (the DPR) that over 3 million were killed as this bourgeois academic piece reports:

This announcement was not a surprise. Soeharto had been proposed for the honour multiple times, including during the presidencies of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Joko Widodo. But Soeharto’s successful nomination comes under the leadership of Prabowo, who has long praised Soeharto and his authoritarian New Order (1967-1998) regime, and was once Soeharto’s son-in-law.

The government has stated that the decision to name Soeharto a national hero was primarily based on his military service during Indonesia’s Independence War (1945-1949). Rights groups, however, have earlier expressed strong criticism of the nomination, and now the award, pointing to the systematic human rights violations of the Soeharto regime.

The New Order’s human rights crimes are well-documented. Soeharto rose to power following mass killings (1965-1966) in which the Indonesian army – under his leadership – was responsible for the killing of at least half a million men, women and children associated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). In addition, over a million people were arrested and detained, often for lengthy periods of time, without trial.

The patterns of that violence were replicated by the Indonesian military in other repressions – one example being Indonesia’s invasion and occupation of Timor Leste.

In addition to human rights abuses, Soeharto’s regime was characterised by rampant corruption, nepotism and censorship, as well as severe repression of dissent. Soeharto – who was forced to step down in 1998 because of economic collapse and mass protests – was never held to account for these crimes. […]

Appointing Soeharto a national hero is yet another part in Prabowo’s efforts to cleanse his own past. This is also evident in the appointment of another national hero, Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, who as a military commander in 1965 was heavily involved in the mass killings and once stated that over 3 million people were killed.

Meanwhile, the appointment of former president Abdurrahman Wahid as national hero seems to suggest that bestowing the title onto former leaders is simply a normal process, while the appointment of slain labour activist Marsinah – murdered by Soeharto’s army – serves to give the impression that the state supports workers.

Why would Washington want to destabilise such an obvious fascist monster as Prabowo???

This also begs the question what China’s revisionist leadership’s motivation is in forming the SCO and inviting reactionary stooges like Prabowo and class-collaborating Mensheviks like Oli to it. Without a world revolutionary perspective on the international capitalist crisis, the implication is that all China needs to do to counter US imperialist aggression and achieve socialism is to gradually out-compete the US by trading its way to “peace and prosperity”, and through this, drawing “sovereign” bourgeois-nationalist states diplomatically towards it.

Such a Stalinist-deluded retreat from a revolutionary perspective would also imply that the class struggle in those countries currently pivoting towards China should be suspended in the name of “stability”, when what the international proletariat really needs is the clear understanding that the imperialism’s plunge towards slump and world-war devastation is unstoppable without socialist revolution everywhere.

The spontaneous Indonesian unrest had a revolutionary spirit to it, regardless of what the protestors were consciously hoping to achieve, or who initiated the protests. Prabowo’s attempts to revive Suharto hero worship and his populist “cuddly grandpa” rebranding and “pro-worker” national-socialist posturing are all about heading this off and preventing the re-emergence of communism, and so serves US imperialist interests.

A similar spirit was present in the initial Nepali protests, regardless of the counter-revolutionary outcome.

Vijay Prashad cites reasons why US imperialism may also prefer to leave Oli in place. This includes his role in arguing for Nepal to join its free-market Millennium Challenge Corporation (chaired by the anti-Cuba anti-communist fanatic Marco Rubio) last February despite much opposition, including from the Maoists. The MCC was set up to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. He also met the MCC’s deputy vice-president in Kathmandu in August to discuss the resumption of US aid, since this was cut off when USAID was closed down, and the continuation of infrastructural projects. This was just a month the before his ouster.

Additionally US trade negotiations with Nepal prior to unrest do not suggest a plan to destabilise it was in train. China’s granting of zero-tariff access to 100 percent of Nepali goods on December 2004 in a deal with Oli’s government, will, as Lalkar rightly says, have caused unease in Washington and New Delhi. However, the 10% tariff rate imposed on Nepal by Donald Trump in the following April is far lower than the tariffs imposed on other nations in the region (Bangladesh 26%, Sri Lanka 20%, Pakistan & Thailand 19%). It also compares much favourably to the punishing 40% rate imposed on anti-imperialist Myanmar (which US imperialism really is trying to destabilise, – through nonstop armed separatist provocations and monstrously hypocritical and violent “democracy” protests, as well as tariff wars) and similarly on the Laotian workers’ state, or the increase to a 50% rate on India to pressure it to cut crude oil purchases from Russia. China-friendly Cambodia only saw its staggering tariff rate of 49% drop to 19% after it made huge trade and military concessions to the US.

Despite calling their article The geopolitics of Nepal’s 2025 Gen Z uprising and all their talk in it about “geographical backdrops”, Lalkar makes no mention of the other Gen-Z branded youth upheavals that have erupted across the region and internationally in the last year or so, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Timor-Leste, the Maldives, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, Serbia, Georgia, Bulgaria and even as part of last September’s pro-Palestine protests and general strikes in Italy.

All are confused and easily manipulated, because they lack a clear revolutionary perspective and leadership, and in some cases are obviously deliberate CIA-inspired provocations (e.g. Bangladesh, Mexico, Serbia and Georgia). But they are also all signs of a world in revolutionary ferment. But Lalkar fails to grasp this crucial context.

No mention either is made of hair-raising warmongering convulsions pushing long-simmering national rivalries towards all out war to distract from internal difficulties caused by the capitalist crisis, - including the ongoing border conflicts between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Thailand and Cambodia, and earlier this year between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India over occupied Kashmir. India’s reopening of a trading route to China last August on territory it controls but Nepal claims ownership of is also a source of tension (and potentially another Indian motivation for replacing Oli).

There is also renewed conflict between the UAE and Saudi Arabia over the contested Yemen.

Bangladesh’s strengthening of relations with Pakistan, and current stirring up of violent anti-Indian sentiment, following the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina’s nationalist government by reactionary Washington-backed pro-Pakistan forces under the cover of “Gen-Z revolution”, and subsequent “Greater Bangladesh” claims made by some on Indian territory and threats to close off India’s isolated northeastern ‘Seven Sisters’ states, are also potentially sources for future regional conflict (and a further motivation for India to establish a reliable stooge in nearby Nepal, particularly as the only route into those states would be though Nepal if they are closed off).

Getting caught up in the details of how much trading or diplomatic influence US imperialism or China’s workers’ state has or does not have on either side of these conflicts (where there is no clear anti-imperialist sentiment emerging) misses out the main point. Imperialism is heading towards total war in all directions as the only “solution” to its over-production crisis, and to divert the masses away from socialist revolution.

Whilst Lalkar does point to the organising role played by sinister Western-affiliated NGOs and “advocacy groups” such as Hami Nepal in the initial protests against Oli’s attempts to enforce foreign tech company compliance with regulations and tax rules, it is misleading to suggest that the protestors were motivated to “defend free speech” and only later expressed “deeper frustrations over unemployment, corruption and elite privilege”. This suggests that the protesting youth were driven by idealism, when in fact, it was the devastating material impact the capitalist crisis already is having on their lives, and that of their families, that drove them to the streets.

This anger may have been channelled into futile reformist slogans for the defence of free speech and against corruption by Western-influenced NGOs, but it erupted because the ban on social media platforms threatened the livelihoods of Nepal’s youth, many of whom are dependant on online work, or work overseas and rely on the internet for communication,- in a nation suffering from 20% youth unemployment. It also would have had a direct negative impact on Nepal’s economy as 33% of its GDP comes from remittances, which can only be transferred using online platforms.

Because of this, and in the context of raging capitalist crisis generally, any notions Oli may have held in his head about an

assertion of Nepalese sovereignty through the social media regulations

(as Lalkar gushes) were asking for trouble.

The abolition of the monarchy in 2008 following the People’s War struggle represented a revolutionary leap from a long-out-time feudal order to a bourgeois-democratic republic. The initial Gen-Z protests were not aimed at rolling the clock back to feudal times, as cuttings quoted by the EPSR in October show. The Maoist leader of that revolutionary struggle Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ has even gone as far as to argue that the agenda of the protestors (including the free speech demands) would have strengthened the revolutionary process towards socialism by pushing for governance reforms and opposing “corruption-fueled misrule”.

Unfortunately, accounts of the Nepali armed forces standing aside whilst counter-revolutionary violence erupted, and then only intervening afterwards to impose a curfew, also adds weight to concerns expressed by the EPSR that Prachanda may be leading working class and peasantry into an Allende-style trap when he praises the Nepali Army’s for “maintaining peace and security” and “appealing for broad national unity in defence of the constitution and republican democracy.”

All the signs are that Nepal’s armed forces are still riddled with pro-royalist sympathies, including the army chief who was televised making an appeal for peace and national unity in front of an image of a feudal Hindu king, and later invited monarchists to talks with Gen-Z leaders after Oli’s ouster (which the youth leaders rightly rejected). Far from warning the masses of the dangers of Allendeism, Lalkar echoed such praise by one-sidedly approving of the military’s efforts to “restore order” and “capture escaped prisoners”.

The Lalkar piece ends with a few banal platitudes about “left unity” without explaining how this could be achieved:

It is to be hoped (!!!!)

that all leftist forces in Nepal can unite to resist ongoing external interference, defend the country’s hard-won sovereignty, and build a path towards development and prosperity.

But such Stalinist-influenced Popular-Front retreats have held back Nepal’s revolutionary development since the People’s War victory. As Lalkar writes further up, there have been 14 governments since the monarchy was abolished in 2008 made up of shifting alliances between Prachanda’s CPN(M-C) and Oli’s CPN(UML) as well as the bourgeois National Congress, and they have all failed to achieve “lasting unity”. Why is that??

In fact, the Maoists, under Prachanda’s guidance, have started a process of re-evaluating past mistakes, and have united sections of the left sympathetic to Nepal’s People’s War in a new Nepal Communist Party established on 5th November. Its stated goal is to prepare the workers and peasants for a socialist revolution, whilst defending the bourgeois-democratic gains achieved since 2008. This process was sped up by the Gen-Z revolt, which Prachanda interpreted as a sign that the masses were becoming alienated because they had not seen any fundamental change since the establishment of the republic.

This reaffirmation of the fight for socialist revolution at the very least spells out to the youth what is necessary. Despite this, there are fears amongst some leaders and cadres of the CPN(M-C) (including a former liberation army leader, Janardan Sharma, who has since split from them and formed a new group) that a rushed merger without long-term debate to provide “ideological clarity, historical review, and organisational preparation” could lead to “right-wing opportunism” and the abandonment of the revolutionary (Maoist) ideology and legacy carried during the decade-long insurgency.

This remains to be seen, but it does appear that the popular frustrations expressed in the Gen-Z revolts have exposed Maoist weaknesses, particularly around past electoral alliances (and even a short-lived merger with the NCP(UML) from 2018 to 2021), and triggered a live debate about what has gone wrong and how to progress forwards to socialism.

It is hard to come to a conclusion on this from afar without further details, but it is certainly the case that the Stalin-led Third International’s Popular-Front retreat of the 1930s (e.g. Spain in 1936) suspended the polemical struggle for a revolutionary socialist perspective when entering into alliances with bourgeois-democratic forces to fight fascism then (see eg EPSR No 988 02-03-99). This eventually led to the abandonment of Leninist revolutionary polemics internationally, and led the CPs to Britain and elsewhere ever closer towards outright class-collaborating reformism and liquidationism.

As Lenin understood, genuine unity can only come through an all-out party-led polemical conflict aimed building a revolutionary leadership that has established a convincing explanation of all aspects of world developments by testing theory in practise, exposing past and current errors, and driving out false notions and bourgeois lies. This includes battling for clarity over the triumphs of the Soviet Union as well as the mistakes and retreats that began with Stalin and led directly Gorbachev’s idiot liquidation of its proletarian dictatorship in 1989-91, and over Maoism’s failure to grasp and correct those mistakes because of Mao’s own involvement in sustaining them.

If the CPGB-ML really does want to see unity of “leftist forces”, why not start in Britain? Why not, for example, abandon its sectarian blocking of the EPSR’s struggle to raise the polemical debate in meetings, and start polemicising with the EPSR in writing if they think the analysis is wrong???

Build Leninism.

Phil Waincliffe

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