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No 1650 November 21st 2024

Ever more depraved Zionist genocide horrors, still supported and denied by the Western ruling class (and its TUC-Labour stoogery), expose the fascist reality of imperialism in crisis. So too desperate weapon escalations for the Kievite fascists and their proxy role for Western World War aggression. Biden’s token “permission” for missile attacks inside Russia will not save little green croaking-toad Nazi Zelensky but underlines the desperation of a bourgeois class facing the end of an 800 year historical run. No pretend peaceful White House handover can save “democracy” as demented Trumpism winds up the Hitler role for a belligerent bullying US versus allcomers as US $trillions debt balloons and the dollar implodes. Just the opposite – 75 years UN “international justice” hoodwinking is finished as world hostility grows against imperialist tyranny. But still the fake-“left” of all shades refuses to spell out the revolutionary implications of degenerate warmongering, tying workers to pacifist “stop war” delusions. Leninist theory and party must be built

Outgoing war president “Genocide Joe” Biden’s chummy “fireside” White House chat with Donald Trump is one of the sickest aspects (among many) of the giant fraud called the “American election”, pretending all is normal for a “peaceful” handover of power.

Coming after weeks of an astonishingly vitriolic campaign denouncing Donald Trump as the new Hitler, ready to “tear up democracy”, on top of a four year orchestrated establishment campaign to impeach, felonise, imprison and criminalise him, this “orderly transition” pantomime is far beyond hypocrisy.

It only has any traction because of the still continuing failure of the entire fake-“left” to explain the bourgeois dictatorship undemocratic reality of all imperialist capitalism to the working class; its unstoppable crisis-driven plunge into World War Three; and the urgent need to develop deep revolutionary understanding in the working class as the only possible path forwards for mankind from rapidly deepening Catastrophe and a pattern of horrifying destruction now approaching WW2 level.

The Democrats are not wrong about Trump as a total fascist and dirty dealing lying criminal – of course he is.

Any doubts on that score are quickly being removed by a stream of presidential appointments, policy announcements and international diplomatic bullying and tie-ups of breathtaking ultra-right belligerence (barmy nazi Argentine president Javier Milei top of the invites list!!) and demented domestic threats, minority scapegoating and hate-stirring.

All rationality and restraint is being abandoned in a tidal wave of vengeful, vicious and anti-science anti-environmental repression which will escalate class war inside America and tradewar (and its potential hot-war) aggression outside to levels as tyrannical and brutal as anything seen in history.

And it is all happening on the basis of “the Constitution” and bourgeois legality.

That is exactly how the Nazis came to power in the last great crisis, in Depression-hammered 1933, with Hitler “properly” elected as Chancellor by the Reichstag deputies, after the National Socialist Party had won the largest vote in the national elections (after a volatile series of parliamentary elections deludedly gone along with on Stalinist advice by the huge and powerful German Communist Party, and its parliamentary manoeuvring around idiotic sloganising about “after Hitler our turn”, a turn which never came of course).

But the Democrats’ “warnings” about Trump were nothing to do with any such understanding.

They are not any different.

Their campaign denunciations were totally cynical and shallow posturing in themselves, mere playacting and woolpulling to stampede their own petty bourgeois “liberals” and the single-issue woke posturing of the fake-“left” behind them, all far removed from any genuine working class politics and any genuine solution to the great Catastrophe now enveloping the world.

Any serious assessment that the country was plunging into a fascist future (it is), as the Democrats declared, would have had to make clear just what repressions and chaos are facing the great mass of the working population as the imperialist crisis drives ever deeper into Slump and World War, the only solution the capitalist system has ever had to its inevitable and unstoppable overproduction crises (see Marx and Lenin quotes box).

It would have had to explain how a revolutionary struggle alone is now facing the whole world.

But that was not remotely on the cards since the Democrats have been running exactly the same monopoly capitalist system and its tyrannical world exploitation, now heading into the greatest breakdown in all human history (deeper by far than the Great Depression of the 1930s and the World War Two to “cure” it).

Their warmongering on Gaza and Russia is as barbaric and deadly as anything the Trump “alternative” is likely to do – and comes on top of two decades supporting or instigating every scrap of “shock and awe” blitzing Washington has done, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and especially Yemen, subject to just as much devastation and mass slaughter over the last years as Gaza.

As the EPSR has long explained, there is no great boundary between “ordinary” bourgeois imperialist rule, and “fascist” rule anyway, the latter only the intensified domestic repression and external war aggression of monopoly capitalism-in-crisis, and mostly that of the big powers (see eg EPSR No.1105, 1118, 1133 and more).

The Zionist/Washington butchery of Palestine, and the Middle East around the disgusting and inhuman occupation is already as horrifying an imperialist genocidal slaughter as anything that has gone before in history (endless), be it by Nazi Germany or the 300+ years of colonialist butchery and slavery by all the other “great powers”, none more so than Britain and then the USA (its Vietnam war alone killing four million and Korea another 2-3 million as well, and leaving a legacy of massive chemical warfare (Agent Orange) poison birth deformities and unexploded bomb and mine maiming, that persists to this day).

The depraved and degenerate $billions finance support and arms supplies for the Kiev nazi stooges for NATO in Ukraine and the grinding butchery of the war they have provoked against Russia is just as sick and barbaric and about to get even worse.

It is also just as dangerously close to uncontrollable escalation as the beserker and ultimately doomed Zionist aggression against the entire Middle East, teetering on the edge of a far wider war across Russia and Europe, with belligerent Western “exercises” constantly on the verge of precipitating far worse destruction than already imposed.

These are both deliberately fostered and instigated wars whipped up quite calculatedly by years of subversion and skulduggery with demented big lie psyops operations and black-is-white demonising and bogeyman fabrications against whatever suitable “rogue state” victims can be made to serve.

World war is capitalism’s only answer to its intractable unstoppable collapse and it is well underway.

Ukraine and Gaza all come on top of 25 years of “shock and awe” bombing and destruction already, from the cynically choreographed NATO blitzing of tiny Serbia in 1999 to “finish off” any remnants of lingering Yugoslav workers state socialism (still not fully achieved) after the liquidationism of Moscow revisionism helped end it, and to warm up the world for bigger operations to come.

Those have seen invasions of hapless Afghanistan and demonised Iraq and subsequent devastation of country after country in the Middle East and Africa, directly or through intermediaries (like thuggish feudal Saudi Arabia’s horrific but defeated war on Yemen killing hundreds of thousands, and driving more close to famine, or provoked civil wars in Syria and Libya (the latter so risible a CIA failure it had to be supplemented with a full on NATO invasion in 2011 led by France under instruction from the US)).

All of this has been accepted by the Democrats and most of it directly carried out on their watch.

Whatever deluded liberal “celeb” sponsors might say, the difference with the Trumpites is only one of tactics, of shadings in the ruling class view on how the Empire is to push its faltering warmongering agenda to escape its plunge into the greatest Slump disaster and at what cost, as hundreds of billions of additional inflationary credit dollars are poured into the wars in Europe and the Middle East, and endless CIA subversion efforts from Georgia and Moldova to Mozambique and Bangladesh (see following article).

The vicious mudslinging, (against Trump and by Trump in return), reaches such vitriolic intensity because the ruling class is in a blind panic at the fundamental unsolvability of the great collapse it is facing.

As long suggested (on a Marxist foundation) the recriminations and panic of a ruling class staring at its own historic demise could lead to astonishingly vicious infighting with parts of the establishment in conflict with other parts:

As a fantasy example of the crucial role that defeat and splits will play in the imperialist crisis, helping to create the conditions for the system’s own revolutionary overthrow, the EPSR has frequently half-seriously speculated that part of World War III and the final confused degradation and humiliation of the ludicrous “free world” capitalist mythology might be the supposedly “all-powerful and invincible” American Empire actually falling to blows among themselves as things go wrong, — the CIA actually shooting it out with the State Department, the Pentagon taking over the White House, that sort of thing.

Once again, there are signs that real life might yet outdo the wildest fictions (EPSR 1207 04-11-03).

Not just current American supremacy but the entire 800-year-long history of capitalist profit-based class-rule “entrepreneurship” and later imperialist domination, is now imploding under the weight of its own contradictions, and inevitably so as Marxist science discovered in the 19th century, in the great works of Karl Marx himself, and his philosophical partner Frederick Engels (Capital, the Communist Manifesto etc etc) and as subsequently further elaborated, primarily by the Bolsheviks led by Lenin (multiple works but particularly Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, and State & Revolution).

Going down with it is the whole elaborated superstructure of arrogant and brutal bourgeois society with all its grotesquely hypocritical legalities, “moral codes” “principles” and culture, all built on the endless ruthless exploitation of the human labour of the great majority (at home and abroad).

Once able to drive forwards great progress for humankind out of past feudal stagnation, forceful and initially revolutionary, capitalist organisation has turned into its opposite becoming not just a brake on further advance but a potentially world destroying reversal of its own technological brilliance – it is now a “fetter” on all progress as the Communist Manifesto puts it.

Mass humanity has been transformed by the necessary constantly evolving education and technological savvy that capitalism requires for its factories, mines and farms and can no longer tolerate the humiliation, slavery, gross inequality and oppression of the past. It is no hyperbole to say that “civilisation” itself is now disintegrating into revolutionary chaos.

Ever growing explosive revolt is inevitable, attracting ever more barbaric repression, in turn intensifying the intractable contradictions, until a new rational planned way of organising society is established – possible only by a great revolutionary upheaval, a jump to a new level of human society, only possible by overthrowing the old order and establishing working class rule through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

While the multi-billionaire ruling class cannot accept, or with its bourgeois class bounded perspectives, even be capable of grasping these titanic changes, long brewing and historically vital and unstoppable (and already finding gigantic expression in the stunning triumph of the Soviet and subsequent revolutions and anti-imperialism of the 20th century) their class cunning and centuries long experience most certainly feels the rumbling beneath its feet and the existential threat to its class rule.

It will do anything, and go to any lengths and depths of ruthless depravity to hold it back as is increasingly made clear (see below).

The differences between Bidenism and Trumpism are over the best path for re-establishing and maintaining American bourgeois dominance of the planet (it deludedly imagines can be achieved).

Can the old racket of an “international order” established at the end of the Second World War based around the newly created and totally compliant “United Nations” and all the paraphernalia of a bogus democratic framework of “justice” and “principles” and Geneva Conventions, be stretched out a bit longer?

And can the endless dollar credit from the topdog US power be sustained a bit further to continue bribing and propping up a world network of stooge regimes while keeping various rival imperialist powers onside for joint suppression and blitzing of any “rogue states” and “terrorist threats” (meaning anti-imperialist movements or regimes tipping more and more towards anti-imperialist struggle).

Trumpism says the game is up; the pumping up of the credit balloon to keep the imperialist stooge plates spinning on their poles has reached the limit, the colossal US economic deficit cannot expand further and the dollar is about to collapse.

Time to rein in the most extravagant aspects of this “world policeman” role and turn to isolationism and crude belligerent threats against the rest of the world to keep it in line, insisting by financial and military force on American “rights” for its monopolies to keep on plundering (nowhere more than Britain) while blocking access to its own markets.

Any rivals who want “what is theirs” after decades of investing trade surpluses in the United States can go whistle – or accept payment in already devalued dollars (and about to plunge far further).

But outright protectionist hostility and tariff aggression comes at a huge cost in lost international standing and status and the loss of ability given to local stooge bourgeoisies to fob off their own rebellious masses with “international rule of law” promises.

The great network of control for the whole imperialist system, extending the bourgeois democracy racket worldwide after the US victories in 1945, is breaking down.

But a nervous world imperialist ruling class wants to hang on a long as possible to its greatest weapon – this hoodwinking nonsense of “elections”, “freedom” & “free speech”, “international justice”, and eventually “harmonious world progress” from an evolving “United Nations”.

All of that garbage is still befuddling liberal and revisionist fake-“left” minds across the world (Stalinist and poisonous Trotskyist) and, through their ineffectual pacifism and “protest”, holding back and disarming the working class and proletarian masses everywhere.

Hence Biden, his hopeless puppet substitute Kamala Harris and the ruling class corporate cabal behind the Democrats have done an astonishing “reverse ferret” on their “Trump is Hitler” denunciations.

The great ranks of the middle class are left to believe that the accusations were all a “bit of electioneering hyperbole”.

Crap. The sudden show of politeness and “reasonable democratic” handover is to sustain a more general class interest than the bitter infighting between the two almost identical wings of the ruling class.

So Trump plays along with it too, sitting politely by the fireside.

Why? Because the long retreat from Leninist revolutionary understanding, seeded almost as soon as Lenin died, has still not been halted, and delusions about “containing war” and “democratic paths” still saturate the information and “leadership” offered the working class by every flavour of fake-“leftism”.

Even after 14 months of the most depraved genocide by the Zionist occupation, given free rein by Washington, has demolished every lying nonsense of world legality, “free speech” and “justice” ever to bemuse and hoodwink the world’s masses, the bourgeois can still herd petty bourgeois opinion behind its psyops lies and provocations about “defending democracy” and against something called “authoritarianism” or “totalitarianism” as elaborated by endless reactionary “philosophers” and pundits.

That is code language for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or at least the firmness of those “rogue regimes” perceived to be standing up to imperialism and refusing to allow themselves to be toppled by the skulduggery, manipulation and financial swamping which is non-stop poured into every bourgeois-style “election” held worldwide, such as Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua and multiple others.

And that is followed up with automatically triggered worldwide campaigns alleging “corruption” and “vote fixing” if they fail to install the chosen Western stooge figure or party, trying to whip up “colour revolutions” or assassinations, as attempted against the pro-Russian Georgia government, or Slovakia, or Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, or if necessary and possible, justifying military or fascist coups (like that imprisoning Imran Khan in Pakistan and “banning” his PTI party).

Currently the Chinese workers state is getting it in the neck because it has been rightfully firm with the Western organised “democracy” campaigners in Hong Kong who whipped up a stream of violent “protest” campaigns over years, to try and topple the government there, funded and goaded by an imperialism still smarting at having to hand back this strategically important, exploited colony to Beijing.

Beijing rightfully deploys the “authoritarianism” of a workers state against this sabotaging anti-communist “colour revolution” disruption and the utter hypocrisy of rapidly declining British imperialism which only discovered the need for “democracy” after it was forced to handover its tyrannically ruled colonial outpost in 1997.

And it rightfully ignores the petty bourgeois whingeing of Western anti-communist pressure groups like Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists, (among many such) loudly posturing for those like publisher Jimmy Lai who worked closely with Washington to provoke and coordinate the violent Hong Kong havoc, but who do nothing effective to stop the real repression of journalism in the world, increasingly obviously the non-stop deliberate targeting of Palestinian and Arab journalists in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon where at least 200 reporters and writers have now been killed outright by Zionist forces.

Nor do they do much about gross repression of journalists speaking out against Zionist genocide in the heart of its “democracies” with arrests and police intimidation and ever more draconian Internet policing (under the lying guise of “protecting youth”).

There is “authoritarianism” in the world. It is that of the bourgeoisie which hides its dictatorial control behind the façade of the great “parliamentary democracy” lie and its post-WW2 extension into the great “world order” of the United Nations, treaties and “war crime” principles etc etc – and it will continue until Leninist scientific consciousness is re-established that there is no path forwards for humanity except to end for good this stinking capitalism.

That demands the building of a Leninist party of deep study and open but disciplined polemical battling for understanding.

And it requires an enormous battle against the whole slew of fake-“leftism” which still refuses to make any such understanding clear, even as horrifying unfolding events cut the ground from underneath all of them.

They are all still fooling the masses with anti-revolutionary pacifist nostrums (Stop the War, CND etc), making impossible calls for “ceasefires” and class-collaborating revisionist peaceful coexistence nonsense about a “multipolar world” (sadly promulgated even by Beijing and Havana).

Complacency rules along with opportunist posturing and at best philistine anti-theory shallowness, at worst poisonous petty bourgeois individualist idealist hatred of the disciplined workers state future.

The Zionist butchery of an entire people, trampling across all supposed international “law” and court decisions, United Nations resolutions and assembly votes, and even Geneva conventions is beginning to shift things. Only the most reactionary class elements – and particularly within the imperialist powers – still fly in the face of reason, refusing to declare this genocidal.

But the rest of the world knows it, as the daily horrors mount up despite their relentless downplaying by the bourgeoisie and its compliant mainstream Western media and their reactionary managements, working hand-in-hand with intelligence agency instructions, formal and informal.

Staggeringly, as the US blocked the latest unanimous ceasefire call this week the BBC Today programme had nothing about Palestine at all, filling the airwaves with fatuously drawn out “memories of John Prescott”.

But still much leaks through via appalled petty bourgeois voices and the “independent media”, like this from the Canary:

CONTENT WARNING: this article includes accounts of torture and sexual violence that readers may find distressing

Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was among the best-trained medical professionals in occupied Gaza. He was well-known and well-loved. But Israel’s occupation forces (IOF) detained him, without charging him for any crimes. And within months, they had tortured him to death.

A new Sky News report has shared accounts revealing details of his brutal murder. But the BBC (along with other mainstream media outlets) seems to think they are not worth sharing.

As Israel was destroying Gaza in December 2023, Adnan Al-Bursh was working in Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza. As fellow doctor Mohammad Obeid recounted to Sky, the hospital’s director informed “all males aged between 14 and 65” that they would have to leave. The IOF had “told him that if all men do not come down… they will destroy the Awda Hospital with all the women and children in it”. They duly left the building.

Without any charges, the IOF abducted him. They took him to the notorious Sde Teiman military base in Israel, where video footage of IOF soldiers gang-raping a prisoner caused uproar in August 2024. A fellow inmate at Sde Teiman, Dr Khalid Hamouda, told Sky News that “at least a quarter” of the people in the torture camp at the time were probably medical professionals. The IOF had already beaten Al-Bursh badly by the time he arrived, Hamouda said. “He was unable to even go to the toilet alone.”

The IOF claims to have passed “responsibility” for Adnan Al-Bursh over to the Israeli Prison Service just a week later. His captors would take him to Ofer Prison near Jerusalem in April. And that’s where he died.

In a deposition, a fellow prisoner explained:

In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body…

The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up.

Israel has systematically attacked Gaza’s healthcare system, and systematically tortured prisoners

In October, the BBC reported on a UN ‘commission of inquiry’ that had criticised Israel for its “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system”. The IOF had “deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel”, according to the report. And it was children who had “borne the brunt” of this callous campaign. Human Rights Watch has also documented the arbitrary detention of healthcare workers from Gaza, having interviewed eight professionals whom the IOF had abducted without charge. Allegations of mistreatment in captivity include “rape and sexual abuse“.

In August, meanwhile, Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem had released a report documenting systematic “sexual abuse, starvation and assault” at prisons across Israel. It had interviewed 55 Palestinian prisoners whom Israel had held since 7 October. B’Tselem spokesperson Shai Parnes explained:

As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.

Almost all of those B’Tselem interviewed were released without charges.

The report reveals:

a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy. Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.

And it seems that Adnan Al-Bursh was one of the people who lost his life as a result of this systematic torture machine.

After 7 October 2023, Israeli propaganda highlighted allegations of sexual violence on that day (by Hamas). But as numerous sources have highlighted since, there is little to no evidence of such violence, any such actions were unlikely to have been ‘part of the plan’, and we can’t justify calling any such actions ‘widespread’ or ‘systematic’.

Sky News has faced criticism recently for its pro-Israel editorial decisions, along with other corporate media outlets. There is clearly a lot of pressure on journalists to minimise, underplay, or ignore the brutality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, it often seems like mainstream outlets are competing among themselves to be the least worst. And with its important report about Adnan Al-Bursh, Sky News showed that it probably isn’t the worst right now.

The BBC, meanwhile, often shows its priorities via omission. Because it shared the initial news in May about Al-Bursh’s death in captivity.

And to maintain any credibility at all even the anti-communist “liberal” press like the Guardian is forced to say something, now and then:

After they burned down his family home in northern Gaza, Israeli troops separated Ramez al-Skafi from his family and detained him. They had a particular job in mind for him, he said.

For the next 11 days in early July, the 30-year-old Palestinian said he was sent into one house after another in his home district, Shuja’iya, watched by his Israeli military minders. According to the account he gave the Guardian, they turned him into a human shield against booby-traps and Hamas gunmen.

“I tried to resist their proposal, but they started beating me and the officer told me it was not my choice to make and that I have to do whatever they want,” Skafi said. “He told me that my work would be searching the houses and telling them information about the homeowners. After some extreme pressure, I was left no choice.

“The next day I was told to go out on patrol with the Israeli soldiers, and I was very scared because of the tanks in front of me and the planes in the sky above me,” he continued. “When [his minders] noticed my fear, they assured me: ‘They know you are with us.’”

Skafi was one of three Palestinians interviewed by the Guardian who said they had been used by units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), sent far ahead of Israeli soldiers into unexplored houses and tunnels in Gaza. According to whistleblowers who spoke to the dissident veterans’ group Breaking The Silence (BTS), the practice is widespread.

The forcible use of Palestinian detainees to enter houses and tunnels in Gaza first came into public view in footage broadcast by Al Jazeera television in June and July. An investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in August gathered testimony from Israeli soldiers who said the Palestinians used as shields were known as “shawish”, a word of Turkish origin meaning “sergeant”. The soldiers suggested that it was an institutionalised tactic approved by senior officers.

The use of prisoners as human shields is a clear violation of the Geneva conventions and is expressly prohibited under Israeli law. The IDF has denied it employs the “shawish” tactic.

“The orders and directives of the IDF prohibit the use of Gazan civilians captured in the field for military missions that endanger them. The protocols and orders have been clarified to the troops on the ground,” the IDF said in a statement.

The testimony gathered by the Guardian from former Palestinian detainees is largely consistent with the reporting by Al Jazeera and Haaretz.

On several occasions in the course of his detention, Skafi said he was made to hand-carry small quadcopter drones into the houses being searched so that the Israelis could see what was inside through the drones’ built-in cameras.

“After I had finished filming the houses from the inside and left, they entered and they started destroying it,” Skafi said.

“Every day, after they’d finished with me, they used to tie my hands and cover my eyes. They only took the chains off when they were giving me food or when I was allowed to go to the bathroom.”

Skafi said that on the sixth day of being used to clear houses in Shuja’iya, his IDF captors came under fire from a Hamas gunman, leading to a gunfight and a standoff that lasted from noon until that evening.

“During that period they used me as a human shield. I was in the middle. They said to the resistance fighter: “Give yourself up, or we’ll kill this civilian,” Skafi alleged. The IDF eventually succeeded in killing the lone Hamas fighter, he said, and forced Skafi to enter the house the militant had been using as a sniper position and photograph the body with a mobile phone.

Skafi was accused of helping conceal the gunman’s presence.

Skafi swore the man had not been there when he had searched the house, but he said his protestations did not spare him from prolonged beatings, which continued until the unit’s senior officer came to him after four days of interrogation with a plate of rice, and told Skafi his account had indeed been found to be true.

...Sawalhi was detained near the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south in July and made to work as a human shield for an IDF unit for 12 days of clearing operations in Rafah.

“The soldiers protected themselves with us all the time so that they would not be attacked by the resistance,” he said. “We were like toys in their hands.”

A 35-year-old from Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, who identified himself only as Abu Said for fear of reprisals but whose identity was verified by the Guardian, said he was detained in February and used as a human shield over a period of four hours.

“The Israeli soldiers put a GPS tracker on my hand and told me: ‘If you try to run away, we will shoot you. We will know where you are,’” he said. “I was asked to go to knock on the doors of four houses and two schools and ask people to leave – women and children first and then the men.

“At one of the schools, the situation was very dangerous,” he said. “I shouted to everyone in the school to leave quietly, but at that moment there was heavy shooting by the Israeli army and I thought I was going to die.”

The use of prisoners as human shields is prohibited under article 28 of the fourth Geneva conventions, which states: “The presence of a protected person [for example a prisoner] may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”

Even the anti-communist Owen Jones is forced into appalled denunciation:

No matter how depraved the atrocity, or overwhelming the evidence, or confessed-to the crime, the fortress (of propaganda) will not crumble. In fact, even when Israel flagrantly insults its main sponsor, the US, as it did this week, nothing changes.

The case in point here starts with a letter that the US sent to Israel last month, which set out in detail how life-saving aid was being systematically blocked from entering Gaza and threatened undefined action if demands to reverse the siege were not taken within 30 days. As the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen suggested, the letter was a ruse to woo voters in the (US) election (most Democratic voters correctly believe Israel is committing genocide).

And what happened? Despite a coalition of aid agencies concluding Israel “failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the US letter”, and indeed “took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground”, offering a score card that detailed Israel’s overwhelming non-compliance with supposed US demands, the deadline passed on 12 November and the US did nothing. “US says no policy consequences for Israel despite lack of Gaza aid”, as a headline in the Washington Post succinctly put it.

An official narrative isn’t a conspiracy put together in smoke-filled rooms. It is a form of groupthink, forged in elite political, policymaking and media circles, cementing clear parameters on what is deemed respectable, mainstream and credible, and what is not. The narrative that prevails today in countries such as the US, Germany and Britain is that Israel is a western-style democracy that has a “right to defend itself” from terror, with a permissible side discussion about whether the response is “proportionate”. Politicians will indulge in some platitudinous handwringing about civilian suffering, and make abstract references to the need to abide by international law, without ever identifying any of the rampant, egregious violations.

This narrative bears no relation to the facts, which have pointed to one of the great crimes of our age ever since Israeli leaders and officials variously promised to deprive “human animals” of the necessities of life, impose collective punishment, remove “all the restraints” on soldiers and cause “maximum damage” to Gaza. Two months ago, it was revealed that both the US Agency for International Development and the state department’s refugee bureau had concluded by April that Israel was deliberately blocking aid to Gaza. According to US law, this necessitated an arms embargo on Israel, but the Biden administration simply ignored their assessment.

Israel appears to be able to do anything. It could safely ignore the tears of British doctor Nizam Mamode yesterday as he told MPs that Palestinian children were deliberately being shot in the head “day after day” by Israeli snipers and drones, a testimony effectively corroborated by dozens of US-based medical professionals who served in Gaza. Mamode had worked in Rwanda during the genocide, but had never witnessed any horror on the scale of Gaza.

The narrative withstands the UN’s most senior humanitarian official, Joyce Msuya, declaring, “The entire population of northern Gaza is at risk of dying.” It endures without a scratch when an IDF spokesman declares that violently displaced survivors will not be allowed to return there. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in an editorial, even stated that the “Israeli military is conducting an ethnic cleansing operation in the northern Gaza Strip”, but the de facto cartel of western media outlets and politicians keeps the hideous truth at bay.

Nothing leaves a dent. Not UN analysis finding that 70% of verified violent deaths in Gaza are women and children, with the age most represented between five and nine. Not 710 babies killed by Israel’s military in Gaza by this September. Not Israel wiping out a minimum of 902 entire families by last month, with whole lifelines, from days’ old infants to great-grandmothers, permanently erased from the civil registry.

Starvation, butchering children, ethnic cleansing, violently erasing a healthcare system: all done deliberately by a state whose leaders have not even pretended not to believe in the collective guilt of a civilian population. If the official narrative lined up with reality, it would go like this. Israel is a state perpetrating a genocidal bloodbath involving not just bombs and bullets but alleged torture and sexual violence. Those who defended or belittled this abomination would be publicly disgraced, those who facilitated it would face arrest. There would have been a deafening chorus from our politicians, media and public figures many months ago, demanding something, anything, to make this end.

But no matter what the people of Gaza endure, the narrative prevails.

But the pro-“democracy” anti-revolutionary Owen’s defeatism misses the point.

Far from “enduring”, everything is changing as his own dismay reflects.

The titanic struggle of the Palestinian masses, led for the moment by a still undefeated Hamas, inasmuch as it continues its astoundingly dogged fight 14 months into the most devastating unequal onslaught by imperialism, is forcing it to change.

At huge and staggering cost and sacrifice this people has demonstrated to the entire world exactly what imperialist “democracy and freedom” is worth and it is a lesson that will not be forgotten by the billions strong masses, particularly in the Arab world and the Middle Eastern region.

Hamas’s leadership has demonstrated how those masses have learned to fight and is still holding the Gazan and West Bank people together despite non-stop psyops provocations and lies by the Zionists and imperialist disinformation teams trying to find or create local discontent or denunciation.

It is driving the Zionists and their to even greater horrors according to US maverick journalist Seymour Hersh:

Control over all of Gaza and the West Bank is the core demand of the religious right in Israel that now dominates the government. I was told this week by a well-informed Washington official that the Israeli leadership will formally annex the West Bank in the very near future—perhaps in two weeks—in the hope that the decisive step will end, once and for all, any talk of a two-state solution and will convince some in the skeptical Arab world to reconsider financing the planned reconstruction of Gaza. Arab communities in the West Bank have been under increasingly violent pressure from Israeli police and armed settler attacks have become a sad staple of life.

Meanwhile, life for the two million Palestinians in Gaza grows dimmer by the day as food and fresh water are harder to find and more costly as United Nations relief truck convoys have increasingly become targets of attacks in areas presumably under the control of the Israeli Defense Force. The cargo ends up in the hands of criminal gangs that are rarely challenged by the IDF or local Palestinian police, who only act when confronted by public pressure.

I spoke recently with someone who has a sophisticated on the ground knowledge of life in Gaza today, both the north and south. This is a current report that goes beyond what even the best foreign correspondent would be able to access. Getting in and out of Gaza is extremely difficult for journalists, academics and other outsiders these days, involving coordination with the Qatari or the Emirates governments. The vast majority of Gazans are unable to get out.

Below is the report, condensed and edited. It’s not pleasant reading.

“The conditions in the north of Gaza are holocaust conditions. We don’t use the word because it has a special place in the Western imagination and heart, but this is a holocaust in terms of collective punishment and dehumanization and the technical tools. But is it a holocaust eighty years later being done remotely and on people’s bodies. . . . A missile is dropped in a densely populated civilian area, tents mostly, and then you have drones coming in afterward to pick off people one by one. We didn’t have drones during World War II, but we do now, and the logic is pretty much the same.

“What we’re seeing happening in north Gaza is what I told you months ago the Israelis were going to do, and this what they did. They will annex the north and they will annex the West Bank. Soon you will see all in the press turn to the West Bank. The Israeli settlers have been more armed since October 7. The government and the Supreme Court in Israel support the settlers, and there are right-wing organizers and community representatives who themselves live in settlements and they are ready.

“They feel there is no leadership in the United States at this moment to stop them. ...suddenly the world’s attention will go away from Gaza and Lebanon. And everybody will be talking about the annexation of the West Bank in a month or two.

“The Israelis have built roads and bypass roads and corridors in the north of Gaza, and they are now starting to nicely connect all with each other as you can see if you look at satellite images. The Israelis always said they were going to do this....And those Palestinians living in north Gaza will either be exterminated en masse, as they are now, or they will be pushed south where they are humiliated and stripped and tortured and have to endure unbearable conditions. Anyone I speak to who recently came from the north to the south describes the horrid condition of having their children taken away from them....Children are being lined up on one side, and the Gazans are told to pick up a random child and go with that child to the south even if it’s not their child...and not knowing if your child made it. These kinds of horrific tearing of the social fabric are happening.

“Meanwhile in the south, where there once was food but no cleaning materials, there is now no food. The Israelis are likely preparing to gather everybody into specific pockets in the south. So it is not only about annexing the north but it’s also about concentrating the population in specific pockets in the south. This is what they will do: they are budgeting for it and making plans for it now. If you see it, you see it, and if you do not, then you will be surprised in a few months when the Israelis declare it themselves.”

“If you are looking for hope, it is in the fact that people in Gaza haven’t become zombies and are not eating each other or ripping each other apart. That is not what’s happening, but the social fabric is being sundered. There are kids coming into hospitals from stab wounds from uncles and fathers because they ate too much. And there are cases of rape coming in. I mean there is a breaking of the social fabric after a year of hellish nightmares... after a year of all international order and systems collapsing and failing to treat Palestinians as humans. There is absolutely a breaking, but there is still hope that I see in that people are not ripping each other apart. There is still production of art. And people are still growing foods and crops in the camps.

“And this is what Israel is now targeting: the vigor of the refugees and the camps. These are the enemies of Israel. The Israelis thought by turning people into refugees they would break them. But they actually are empowering them. So this is why they are going after the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and targeting the right of return, targeting the refugees. And why the Israelis are constantly bombing, bombing, and smashing things...the tents and refugee camps that are built all over Gaza now, in addition to what already existed. Israel is going after the refugees and the camps because they see after eight decades of doing what they did that these are places of memory and history and organizing and identity, and that is what they are trying to smash.

“So the Israelis are not following the logic of war; they are following the logic of genocide.

Hamas’ religious ideology is not Marxism and as such will not make conscious the full import of its own titanic struggle, and the need to defeat and overturn all capitalism and imperialist domination, but its revolutionary significance remains for all that.

And various (reluctant) voices are being heard which begin to make things clearer – including inadvertently even the reactionary imperialist journal the Economist whose spokeswoman said on the Today programme recently that the world was witnessing the “end of the post-1945 era”.

Other more liberal opinion says so too, but as yet no more willing than her to spell out its revolutionary significance, pleading instead to save the alleged “rule of law”:

A prominent Palestinian human rights lawyer whose Gaza home was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in the early weeks of the war has called on western powers and global institutions to do more to prevent the territory becoming “the graveyard of international law”.

Raji Sourani, who founded the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in 1995 and was a key member of the South African legal team that took Israel to the international court of justice on a charge of genocide, met the UK attorney general last week to urge him to assume a leadership role in defending humanitarian law.

At the age of 70, Sourani has spent more time battling Israel in the domestic and international courts than probably any other Palestinian lawyer. He believes the world is at a turning point.

In October 2023 his two-storey home in Gaza was blown up with a 900kg bomb shortly after he gave an interview to Amy Goodman, the founder of the leftwing independent broadcaster Democracy Now. Sourani escaped with his wife and son and returned to inspect the ruins the following day. He is sure that his house was deliberately targeted. Like many, he had vowed never to leave Gaza, but he was persuaded that if he stayed he would be killed, and now lives in exile in Cairo.

Imprisoned six times, he has been accused by Israel of being a terrorist in a suit and tie. Sourani argues that if his faith in the power of law to bring accountability had been better rewarded in the Israeli and international courts, the violence of the last year might not have happened.

Last week, delivering the Edward Said lecture in London, Sourani shifted from quietly spoken wonder at the double standards of the west over Ukraine and Gaza to an angry prediction that Israel still intended to expel all Palestinians into the Sinai.

Speaking to the Guardian, he said he was not sure of the extent to which the west was aware it was jeopardising something precious by shielding Israel from the legal consequences of its actions.

“The situation is bleak, black and bloody,” he said. “There are people who want Gaza to be the graveyard of international law. In whose interest is that? Either you have the rule of law or you have the rule of the jungle. There is no in-between. At present it is the powerful and mighty that are winning.”

Sourani reserves some of his strongest criticism for the international criminal court (ICC), with which his centre has been formally engaging about the occupation since January 2015, long before the Israeli response to Hamas’s 7 October attack led the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, to accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of collective starvation and crimes against humanity.

Sourani said he was aghast when the first ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, told him he could not act against Israel without US permission. “He said ‘I am a polite man’ but I said to him you are meant to be the global guardian of international law, you are the legal conscience of victims across the globe, and you are telling me if the Americans do not give you the green light then you’re not going to move anywhere? I mean, I am shocked, and shame on you.”

He fears Khan is being too cautious and continues to criticise him, even though Khan has sought arrest warrants for Netanyahu on the basis of imposing collective punishment and starvation.

“He [Khan] did not meet us for two years, even though we are a treasure trove of evidence. I have told him in person that if the ICC had moved earlier, in 2015, 2020, 21 or 22, perhaps this would not have happened. The message Israel heard all along is that [it is] untouchable and above accountability. That has encouraged them to continue,” Sourani said.

He finds it ironic that Israeli lawyers now oppose Khan’s request for arrest warrants on the grounds of complementarity – the principle that the ICC cannot take up a case until credible domestic legal avenues to redress have been exhausted.

He said: “I know the Israeli courts. Everyone used to say to me the Israel legal system, it’s sophisticated, it’s nice, it’s independent. Try it. Yes, and we tried, thousands of cases – for instance against Israel’s killing of 228 Palestinians during the Great March of Return in March 2018. It was then that we realised the limits of the Israeli legal system. Not just us, everyone concluded the Israeli system is genuinely unwilling and genuinely unable to deliver justice to Palestinians. Israel will never hold anyone accountable. It’s mission impossible.”

On his own future, he said he had “no right to surrender”. He said: “They want us to give up. We do not have the luxury of choice. We have to call for the upholding of international law. It is the west’s invention. But are we going to liberate Palestine with a court judgment? Never. We know our weight and volume. We are not replacing political parties. We are not replacing their role, but we are asking them to think what it means if Gaza becomes the graveyard of the law.”

Gaza is already the “graveyard of the law” and deservedly so; there has never been any justice under the hollow “law” and international “justice” system for the people of Palestine (or anyone else in the Global South in fact) because the whole lying United Nations framework is a gigantic cynical lie and was from the moment it was created.

As soon as British imperialism arrogantly assigned this land to the Zionist project during the First W0rld War, deliberately allowing a cuckoo to be implanted in the Arab nest, (to act as a Middle Eastern equivalent of the “Northern Ireland” colonist enclave, policing the Arab region), there has never been a scrap of justice for the people whose entire country, is being stolen away by the “might is right” decrees of imperialist power.

And after the US controlled United Nations stooge made this official with the 1948 Partition, handing over Palestinian land to the Zionist usurpers (tragically with deluded approval by miscalculating Stalinism, hampered by its revisionist retreat from revolutionary grasp) it grew into a total monster.

The artificially declared “state” of Israel (a colonial implant in reality) immediately accelerated the terror-theft of the Arab land with massacring ethnic cleansing to force out the people who had lived there for over 1500 years.

Its aim to illegally take even more land, set a path which was always intended by the Zionists and their American imperialist collaborators and is now made manifest, of total death or expulsion of the whole Palestinian nation.

Keir Starmer’s monstrous genocide justification in Parliament declaring that all questions must begin with the Flood on October 7th is a gigantic lie – all questions must begin with the origins outlined above, which imperialist society bans from discussion under the Goebbels pretence it is “racist anti-semitism”, an even bigger topsy-turvy lie.

But it is that out-of-time colonialist occupation which will always generate justified rebellion by this dispossessed people.

That is a non-stop conflict unsolvable except by the horrifying logic of complete eradication now playing out, or the ending of the Jewish occupation and the return of all Palestinian land and property (after which only, a discussion about a future unified Palestinian state can begin to make sense and a possible place within it for those Jews who wish to stay on (with Palestinian permission)).

Beyond all that however is the use made of this berserker Zionism by faltering imperialism to push forwards the World War “solution” to its crisis, the most fundamental issue of all.

And it is this perspective which is not only ignored but essentially suppressed by the entire slew of the fake-“left” who continue to pump out their social-pacifist activism, while poisoning minds with anti-Soviet Trotskyist lies or revisionist evasions.

There is nothing wrong with mass public sentiment wanting to express its dismay and opposition to the depraved torturing butchery and bombing in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and all around on Syria, Iraq and Iran (with much more threatened), nor with the organisation of marches to do it.

But the lead being given by the whole slew of the fake-“left” is a not only million miles from the revolutionary understanding needed by the working class but is disarming them with its protest calls for “ceasefires” and its overt or tacit recognition of the “right to exist” of the Zionland apartheid occupation called “Israel”.

Whatever boasting is done about sustaining 14 months of protest, the marches for Palestine have done nothing to stop chaos and destruction. Only the fight for revolutionary consciousness among those driven to participate can make any difference.

Marxist-Leninism has always been completely hostile to pacifism as an answer, not out of some intransigence but because there is no possibility of avoiding world war under capitalism, no matter what militant actions or strikes might be organised to “stop war”.

And that needs to be explained from the start at the highest level as Lenin declared, not by tailending allegedly “limited” public and working class consciousness, as the opportunists excuse themselves, high-handedly arguing for “step-by-step” explanations which are always just an excuse for avoiding revolutionary perspectives.

This opportunism is even more apparent in the fake-“left” response to the Ukraine war.

This second front of imperialism’s current warmongering drive has seen the great majority of the fake-“left” capitulate completely to the Western NATO imperialist aggression and its outrageous psyops propaganda onslaught “justifying” the Kiev fascist attacks on the east of the country and the Russia support.

As exposed by the EPSR from the beginning (eg No 1606 16-03-22, 1607 06-04-22) every kind of specious and distorted application of alleged “Marxist principle” has been used to cover up this deadly treachery which aids the ruling class in its confusion mongering helping drag petty bourgeois and some worker opinion behind supposed “war threats to our way of life” by bogeymen figures like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, absurdly hyped into “new Hitlers” by non-stop deluges of lies and fabrications from the swastika toting Zelensky-ites and the huge Western psyops fabrication teams standing behind them.

Even many of those on the Palestine marches are dragged behind this chauvinism and war scapegating, still swallowing the “freedom” lies from the bourgeoisie (including those like Boris Johnson!!).

Some of the crudest “lefts” have adopted outright social imperialist positions, using the gross sophistry of “self-determination” rights for the Ukrainians, a mechanical application of Lenin’s complex understanding of anti-imperialist nationalism, which is completely invalidated by the outright stooge cooperation of the Kievites with the West’s NATO forces and funding by the West.

The majority have come up with slightly more devious “analysis” to justify what amounts to the same thing, still condemning Russia as an alleged aggressor but covering their backs with a notional “equal” denunciation of the West and NATO,as most of the groups making up the “Stop the War” and CND do (not by chance the main organisers along with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for the Gaza marches).

Others use a slightly more nuanced version of the same thing by declaring this to be “not our fight” as all sides are allegedly “imperialist” and “our fight is at home” thereby deviously washing their hands of the issue (while pretending they are for “converting war into civil war”.

These shysters cannot see the wood for the trees (apart from using this as an excuse to evade the issue anyway).

Declaring both sides to be imperialist would not invalidate the need to call for defeat for your own ruling class, in this case NATO & Britain’s forces within it.

But it is also a lying misrepresentation since there is no comparison between the sides, whether or not they are both notionally imperialist (they are).

So far has world monopolisation gone that the US (and therefore NATO) is magnitudes greater in power, capacity, finance and world political influence than Moscow (notwithstanding the Empire’s crisis crumbling).

Calling for defeat for both sides (by condemning Russia) is tantamount to siding with NATO.

It is defeat for the main imperialist influence which is critical and in the current conditions that will only happen through the Russian side pushing back the fascist forces, as it seems to be (though this itself a question needing far greater analysis as the Empire steps up its weapons backing).

But this does not imply remotely any support for Moscow as asserted by the few “left” groups who have avoided outright capitulation to the Western warmongering.

Their error, founded in Stalinist notions that anti-imperialist nationalism is “good enough” avoids the need for a revolutionary perspective,(as will be further analysed next issue). It also requires bending “Marxism” as much as the Trots do, denying the imperialist aspects of Putin’s bonapartist anti-communist balancing act, between the restorationist oligarch billionaires and the lingering Soviet nostalgia in the working class.

Much more needs to be teased out but the key issue remains – the fight for Leninist theory.

Alan Moss

Back to the top

The CPGB-ML's denunciation of the Washington-backed right-wing military coup in Bangladesh that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s bourgeois-nationalism may have fallen on the right side, but its account of the events is a confused mess that gives no clue as to what the working class should do next. Worse, it gives ground to the US-manufactured lie that new military-appointed leader, Mohammad Yunus, and his capitalist “pro-poor” banking system is in some way “progressive” and worthy of awards. The opposite is true. Socialist revolution is the only way out, but this is left unmentioned.

Part Two

The ‘unity’ and ‘independence’ flag-waving of India’s own liberation-struggle nationalists had managed to keep India’s sick political system afloat during the postwar world-imperialist inflationary boom period, but it was facing disaster by 1991 as the boom threatened to turn to bust; with the reactionary Indian communalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) potentially gaining enough support to take power in elections.

Lurches in the capitalist crisis, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2001 dotcom implosion, the Great Crash of 2007-8, and India’s 2013 currency crisis sped up this process of nationalist degeneration, and led to the ascension of the BJP and Nerenda Modi’s diversionary Hindu fundamentalism; as well as the development of an Indian capitalist system that is more strongly imperialist in its relations with its neighbours, including Bangladesh.

Such imperialist relations, alongside waves of violent anti-Muslim pogroms from the early 1990s onwards, has given (one-sided) material weight to current allegations from reactionary circles in Bangladesh (and Pakistan) that India’s BJP government is today conspiring to destabilise it in order to return Hasina to power.

Currently doing the rounds in Bangladesh is a theory that Modi’s government was responsible for recent devastating floods in south-east Bangladesh by deliberately opening the floodgates of the up-river Dumbur dam in order to cause chaos for the Bangladeshi military’s newly installed “interim” government.

Whilst such fascist actions by the BJP’s Hindu supremacists are not beyond the bounds of possibility, Bangladesh is situated on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, the largest delta in the world, which makes periodic floods a feature of life for a large percentage of Bangladesh’s population anyway. The surprise nature of the recent floods is just as likely to be due to capitalist-crisis-made climate change as any Indian plotting.

India did concede that a power outage and communications breakdown meant that it was unable to issue the usual warning to those living downstream, which is a credible contributing factor in an Indian bourgeois-capitalist society where ruling-class neglect, incompetence and greed rules.

Although it is quite possible that Modi’s BJP government is intent on destabilising Bangladesh, the notion encouraged by smaller-state Bangladeshi chauvinists that Hasina is merely an “Indian proxy” who has “sold Bangladesh to India” is completely barmy given that Bangladesh was “sold to” Western multinational corporations long before she became prime minister.

The greatest beneficiaries of Bangladesh’s export-led capitalist economy are American and other monopoly-imperialist interests, particularly through the super-exploitation of its miserable sweatshop-labour-driven textile and garment industry, which makes up 80% of Bangladesh’s total export earnings.

In this context, closer economic ties with India’s regional imperialism would in fact be preferable, but only as far is it represents a setback for US imperialism, which, being the most dominant imperialist power on the planet, is the international proletariat’s main enemy.

This “Indian-stooge” smear therefore exposes Hasina’s accusers as being reactionary stooges for Washington.

Despite this, it needs also to be pointed out that the nationalist opportunism of Hasina’s Awami League (AL) has long been as hypnotised by the glitz and glamour of Western consumerist culture, and as captured by the corrupting influences of Western imperialism as the rest of Bangladesh’s bourgeoisie (and in the Third World generally).

However, it has since been driven by the capitalist crisis to take a stand against imperialism’s moves to push the burdens of the crisis onto Bangladesh alongside the rest of the Third World, which is why Hasina was brought down.

Any defeats and setbacks for imperialism are to be welcomed, including Hasina’s increasingly anti-imperialist intransigence – and any opposition the AL is now able to muster to bring down Yunus’s new stooge administration. However, there should be no illusion that the AL’s compromised nationalism can provide a lasting sustainable solution to capitalist-imperialist degeneracy.

Such defeats would begin to create conditions in which workers, in alliance with anti-imperialist nationalism, can best resist the overwhelming weight of US monopoly-imperialism’s financial dominance and super-exploitation. Crucially though, it would also create an environment in which Leninist revolutionary-socialist perspectives can best be argued for and won as the proletariat’s guiding influence.

The only means of developing such revolutionary Leninist leadership is through a polemical struggle and debate against all comers, including Bangladesh’s nationalist anti-imperialism, to arrive at a correct understanding of world events. This can only be achieved if all analyses pivot around capitalism’s disintegration into the Slump and world-war catastrophe that will drive the understanding of the need for world socialist revolution to establish workers states of proletarian dictatorship to the fore; and seeks seek to identify how each class responds as capitalist societies are hammered by the impact of this imperialism’s devastating revolutionary crisis.

But this Leninist perspective is a million miles from the Awami League’s limited nationalist aspirations for a “unitary, independent, sovereign” Bangladesh; and it is also a million miles away from anything Lalkar (or its new Trotskyist bête noire in the RCP) has to say.

Growing regional economic crisis pressures from 2022 compelled Sri Lanka and Pakistan to “request” loans from the IMF (with all the austerity-creating privatisation and deregulation strings that come attached to such crooked impositions), and similar capitalist-crisis-driven instabilities arising from Western imperialist trade war against Third World capitalist economies are shaking Bangladesh’s capitalist political system to the core (which is why the military has stepped in to take control on behalf of the local ruling class and world imperialism).

Hasina was forced to follow suit, and turned to the IMF in November 2022 to “request” a bailout package. This was after Imran Khan’s anti-imperialist nationalist government in Pakistan was toppled by that country’s stooge military earlier in March for moving closer to Russia; and after the financial meltdown that brought down the degenerate right-wing capitalist Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka following mass unrest in July.

US imperialist pressure on Hasina had been building up since 2021, with a sudden shift from Bangladesh being an alleged “most trusted development partner” to the imposition of sanctions on its notorious Rapid Action Battalion in December for spurious “human rights concerns” (see below).

Bangladesh was vulnerable to external pressure from Washington because, alongside its dependency on export markets, it was reportedly the third largest recipient of US assistance in South Asia, and because up to that point it had been a major strategic military ally of the US.

Such a sudden shift in relations would have compounded the economic pressures that led to Hasina’s agreement with the IMF.

An IMF loan of $3.3 billion over the next three years was signed off early in 2023, and raised to £4.7 billion in December as the cost of living rose sharply, and as Bangladesh struggled to pay for expensive energy imports due to shrinking dollar reserves and a weakening of its currency.

This amendment to the loan coincided with the Western-inspired “democracy” protests that preceded the January 2024 elections (backed by further diplomatic coercion from the US via visa restrictions on individuals and threats of further sanctions), adding to the pressure on Hasina’s government.

The crisis deepened further in the first half of 2024.

Headline inflation reached a decade-high peak of 9.7% by April; Bangladesh’s foreign exchange reserves, which had been falling since 2021, declined sharply; its GDP had slowed unexpectedly by June; interest costs on borrowing increased; and there was a fall in export demand, driving many companies into default. As the inflationary crisis deepened, food insecurity increased – as government figures published in March showed.

These factors are most likely to have led to Hasina’s visit to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping and discuss trading arrangements, and also drove the petty-bourgoeis street unrest that led to her overthrow.

This visit to China, and fears of the revolutionary turmoil that would arise from an economic collapse would give reasons for Washington to seek to bring Hasina down and install a stooge regime to “restore law and order” and “take policy decisions to empower Bangladesh’s economy amid the ongoing crisis” (ie – an outright bourgeois dictatorship that would attempt to force the burdens of the crisis further onto the working class – which is what is happening now).

Bangladesh’s economy has continued its crisis slide since the imposition of the right-wing pro-capitalist “interim” government after the 5th August coup.

This has led the military-appointed new “chief adviser”, the Washington-connected capitalist banker Mohammed Yunus, to call for a further $5 billion dollars in financial assistance from the IMF, the World Bank and Japan’s JICA to rescue Bangladesh’s capitalist system from collapse.

This was followed up by a visit by a high level US Treasury delegation to discuss “economic reform”, with promises of $202 million dollars in aid to top up previous USAID grants (bribes).

Lalkar’s article says nothing about this capitalist-crisis background to the Washington-backed military coup; nor does it place it in its historical context; and so it cannot not even begin to provide the revolutionary-Leninist perspective the working class needs to be convinced of the necessity of socialist revolution to end the crisis.

Because of this, Lalkar creates confusion instead of clarity, as in this passage:

There is almost universal agreement that Hasina brought the trouble on herself by passing a law that proposed to give priority in employment to the descendants of those who had fought for secession at the time of Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan in 1971-72. Such a law would have adversely affected hardline Islamists, already disgusted with the Awami League’s secularist approach, since it is they who were most inclined to side with West Pakistan at the time of the civil war, and they who have been giving Awami League government a hard time ever since. But if one looks more closely at the history of this legislation, it will readily be seen that Hasina was not supporting it: “The scheme, which had been discarded by Hasina in 2018, was reinstated by a court in June [2024]. The court’s decision was appealed, and the Supreme Court scrapped it a month later. But in between the protests intensified” (Kapil Komireddi, op.cit.). The flames were arduously being fanned by Islamists fortified by US imperialist backing and anti-Hindu rhetoric. They clearly understood that they would be supported to the hilt to keep going until the government fell, so that is what they did.

This is a head-bending mess of confusion for a number of reasons.

Firstly, what is this “almost universal agreement” that Hasina “brought the trouble on herself”? – All the accusations amplified in the bourgeois media have come from Western imperialist institutions and “aid” agencies, their local bourgeois stooges, right-wing bourgeois parties such as the military-created Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami, the protesting petty-bourgeois students (including those affiliated to the BNP and JeI), and anti-communist Trotskyists like the RCP (and even the Stalinist Indian revisionists in the CPI(M) who went as far as to treacherously declare that “it is imperative that an interim government be put in place immediately” to provide “law and order” after Hasina’s ouster!!). Why not spell this out clearly to working class?

Secondly, how is it possible to pass a law that “proposed to” do something, which “would have” had some consequence or other??? Either the legislation was passed into law, in which case it would be in existence and its consequences would now have quantifiable results, or it was proposed legislation, which would then have only potential consequences. Is Lalkar saying a law was passed or not?

In fact, no law was passed or proposed by Hasina to “give priority in employment” to the descendants of liberation-war fighters as such anyway. There was a quota system in place until Hasina abolished it 2018, but that this was specifically aimed at giving priority to specific groups for civil service jobs, not employment in general.

If Lalkar really did “look more closely at the history of this legislation” it would have found out that the quota system was, in fact, passed in 1972 by her father, Sheikh Mujib’s nationalist government as a move to redress economic imbalances in newly liberated Bangladesh by reserving a percentage of civil service jobs to war veterans, women affected by the war, and people of various districts. Hasina extended this in 1997 (during her first term as prime minister) to include the children of liberation-war fighters, and extended it further 2010 to include their grandchildren.

Lalkar’s claim that “Hasina was not supporting” this quota system is also false. She did not simply “discard” it as the bourgeois commentator quoted suggests; she capitulated to student demands for abolition in 2018 to quell protests, after first offering to reform the system as a conciliatory gesture.

As Hasina explains, eligible liberation-war fighters were too terrified to apply for jobs through the quota system following the brutal assassination of Mujib in 1975 and the imposition of Washington-supported right-wing military regimes under Ziaur Rahman and then General Ershad; and they only gained the confidence to apply openly for positions as freedom fighters once the Awami League returned to power in 1996 – thereby demonstrating the counter-revolutionary legacy now carried by the anti-quota students:

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday said she accepted the demand for reformation to the quota system in government jobs as it was what the students wanted and she did not do anything out of anger. “There was nothing to get angry about… The boys and girls placed the demand and I accepted it. Now what else is there to raise questions about?” she said.

Her remarks came as a response to a question during a press conference at Ganabhaban in Dhaka, which was organized to brief the media about her recent visits to Saudi Arabia, the UK and Australia. Hasina, however, said the way the freedom fighters were humiliated during the movement by relating them with the quota system was very much disgraceful for them.

“The way they were ridiculed and various derogatory remarks were made about them dishonoured the freedom fighters. I will not tolerate disrespecting them,” she said.

The prime minister said Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had engaged himself in rebuilding the war-ravaged country after the independence in 1971. “For that, he provided special facilities to those lagging behind as well as the freedom fighters through this quota system. That was very much realistic.”

Mentioning that some students started the movement against the quota system out of nothing, she said: “They put up barricades on roads and prevented patients from going to hospitals. We tried to convince them and let them know the real scenario of the quota system. “But the agitating students said they do not want any quota system and I accepted their demand. There was nothing to get angry.”

In 1972, Bangabandhu kept aside 30% quota for the freedom fighters, Hasina said. “But after 1975, there was no one to apply for government jobs under that quota. At that time, jobseekers were afraid of disclosing their freedom fighter identities as they knew they would not be eligible for jobs if they disclose this.”

She alleged that although Ziaur Rahman was a freedom fighter, he had formed his government illegally taking the war criminals under trial with him. The prime minister further alleged that Zia had stopped the war crimes trials, took Bangabandhu’s killers with him, and awarded them indemnity and posts in various foreign missions.

“At that time, the 30% freedom fighter quota had remained vacant.” She asked the agitating students whether they know these things.

Hasina said the Awami League government started filling the 30% quota after coming to power. “But by the time, the freedom fighters had crossed their age limit for applying for government job. Then I made that quota available for the family members of the freedom fighters,” she said, adding that the family members mean their children and grandchildren.

Lalkar’s claim that “the flames were arduously being fanned by Islamists fortified by US imperialist backing” also requires further clarification as it gives the impression that the protest movement was led by Islamists who were “supported to the hilt to keep going” by US imperialism.

The origins of the protest movement are more likely to be found amongst middle-class students from university campuses influenced by Western bourgeois “values” (and funded in part by US institutions) than in the Islamic madrassas providing education to impoverished rural communities, despite the opportunist participation of affiliated student groups from the Islamist JeI and the Muslim-orientated BNP, and regardless of the personal background of individual student leaders.

A later oblique reference from Lalkar to “educated youth furious at having been unable to find employment commensurate with their skills”, implies the petty-bourgeois character of the protesters (and even suggests some conflicted sympathies on Lalkar’s part). However Lalkar makes no direct mention of the students anywhere in the piece for some inexplicable reason.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that far from being completely spontaneous, this capitalist-crisis driven student discontent was manipulated by Washington from the start, as hinted at by Yunus at the recent annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, where he was welcomed and praised by the former US president Bill Clinton (with whom he has had a close friendship for around 40 years – from the time Clinton, as the then governor of Arkansas, brought Yunus in to advise on the development of “community banks” in the state).

Speaking from the podium alongside Clinton, Yunus brazenly boasted of a “meticulously designed” conspiracy behind the protests involving shadowy “student leaders” after declaring his happiness over “the support from the people of the United States for making this happen”.

(This speech preceded Yunus’s meeting with Joe Biden at the United Nations General Assembly, after which he was paternalistically hugged by Biden. He was also welcomed as “a new page” in Bangladeshi-Italian relations by the out-and-out fascist, Giorgi Meloni.)

Unsubstantiated accusations that a hitherto unknown “student” brought onto the stage by Yunus and introduced as the “brains behind the whole revolution” was affiliated to radical Islamic groups emerged in sections of the Indian media to support claims that Hasina was brought down by a US-Islamist plot. This was supposedly reinforced by the fact that he was introduced alongside a female “student” wearing a Muslim hijab instead of traditional Bengali dress. Some barmier sections even claimed that this “proved” that Yunus himself was an Islamist.

Bangladesh’s bourgeois state’s relationship with Muslim fundamentalism is complex and does need untangling, but Lalkar’s description of an Islamism backed to the hilt by US imperialism is a gross simplification as well.

As Marx and Engels established over 170 years ago, a correct understanding of all developments (which would include the nature of Islamism in Bangladesh) can only come from taking a long-term historical view of events from a revolutionary perspective in order to identify the developing relations between classes nationally and internationally, and the dialectical shifts they go through as the capitalist system lurches from crisis to crisis towards total catastrophic Slump and (in the age of imperialism) world-war collapse, driving the working class towards socialist revolution as the only rational future possible for humanity.

Although JeI has long been used to stir up communalist reaction against Hasina’s AL by the pro-imperialist military, it is not necessarily in US imperialist interests to “support [Islamists] to the hilt” now, when it is financing, arming and encouraging Zionism’s genocidal “war” of decimation against the Palestinians and blitzing of Lebanon; and it has not necessarily been so since the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks and the launch of its brutal “global war on terror” suppression of anti-Western Islamic dissent.

The complications go much further back. Despite the pro-Western sympathies of Bangladesh’s ruling class since the overthrow of Mujib’s national-liberation government in 1975, the hostility Bangladesh’s predominantly Muslim masses feel towards Zionism meant that diplomatic relations were never established with “Israel”.

This anti-Zionist sentiment will have intensified over the last year of massacring outrages against the Palestinian people (and now Lebanon), and so Western imperialism will be very nervous about any increased support for JeI, despite some pandering to Muslim sentiment by coup leaders now to head off the potential emergence of more genuinely revolutionary developments against the Yunus’s new stooge regime (perhaps including the symbolism of having a woman in a hijab declared to be a “student leader” by Yunus at the Clinton conference).

An example of this pandering was a post-coup celebration in Dhaka (for the first time in the Bangladesh’s 53-year history) of the death of the reactionary Muslim communalist Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Pakistani leader who had colluded with British colonialism in the murderous 1947 Partition of India to create an Islamic state that included Pakistani dominance over East Bengal.

This commemoration provocatively included Urdu-language poetry – Bangladeshi nationalism had developed from the brutally suppressed 1952 Bengali language movement campaign against the enforced adoption of Urdu as the national language. This was the first pushback against Muslim communalism in what became Bangladesh (the 1971 independence victory being the second).

Despite this, neither the JeI nor the Muslim-orientated BNP have any overt representation in the new coup government, which would be expected if they were “backed to the hilt” by Washington.

Because of this, JeI was banned from post-independence Bangladesh by Mujib and the Awami League’s “socialist”-orientated nationalist independence leadership, but it was later rehabilitated, along with the Pakistan-origin Muslim League and other Islamic groups, by Ziaur Rahman’s Washington-backed military dictatorship, which had seized power in 1975 after the brutal assassination of Mujib and his family.

The steady Islamisation of Bangladesh took place over a 15-year period of US-sponsored pro-capitalist military dictatorships, and was aimed at countering sympathies for the then banned Awami League’s secular nationalism (and for the Soviet workers’ state which had supported Bangladesh in the independence war), with an Islamic-orientated nationalism.

The BNP was formed by Zia as part of this process, as an alternative pro-Western nationalist party, which included non-Muslims, but also declared “full faith and trust in Allah” to draw in Muslim sentiment – alongside nods to “democracy” and “socialism” to confuse some naïve petty bourgeois.

Zia’s replacement (after he too was assassinated in a murky “palace coup” in 1981) stepped up this Islamisation under General Ershad, which included amending the state constitution by replacing a commitment to secularism with Islam – now elevated to the position of being the state religion.

This came alongside the opening of Bangladesh’s economy to monopoly-imperialist super-exploitation. This involved agreeing to the IMF’s structural adjustment programme of market liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation; allowing a plethora of imperialist-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) take the over role of the state in many impoverished areas and provide essential services – in preparation for the privatisation of those services; opening up Bangladesh’s large energy sector to multinational corporations; and, formalising Yunus’s capitalist, anti-state-intervention Grameen Bank as a bank (see later – part 3).

Ershad also demonstrated his pro-imperialist credentials (and his cynical use of Islamism) by sending two brigades to fight for US imperialism in its first blitzing onslaught on Muslim-majority Iraq in 1990.

Ershad was eventually toppled by mass protests and strikes in 1990 following a brutal two-year state of emergency which saw the detention of Hasina and the BNP’s Khaleda Zia. The fact that this movement involved JeI, alongside the BNP and the AL, demonstrates the instability of Bangladesh’s capitalist society even then.

It also indicates the unreliability of such Islamism. Based as it is in poor, isolated rural peasant communities, the JeI reflects the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie, which may naturally lean towards the big bourgeoisie when it provides a seemingly stable, functioning capitalist society, but can potentially turn against it in times of crisis.

Despite this, the JeI’s backward religious sectarianism played into the hands of the stooge bourgeoisie in the early 1990s (now with the BNP in power) by stirring up Muslim communalist and anti-“left” violence (including brutal anti-Hindu pogroms in 1990 and 1992) to confuse and intimidate the working class and poor peasantry.

By the time the AL finally came to power under Hasina in 1996, its nationalist opportunism had become so compromised with futile, non-class notions of “maintaining communal peace and the unity of the nation” that it even entered into a governmental alliance with Ershad’s Jatiya Party (and even after the 2014 general election, Ershad was appointed as Hasina’s special envoy despite having persecuted the AL throughout his presidency!).

This class-compromising corruption of AL’s revolutionary national-liberation-struggle history greatly complicates attempts to correctly understand the nature of developments today.

(Similar confusion arises from South Africa’s ANC’s shady opportunist governmental alliance with the stooge white Afrikaner Democratic Alliance and the Apartheid-era collaborators in the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party today, and despite the victory of its own heroic revolutionary national-liberation victory against Nazi white-minority Apartheid rule – which interestingly coincided with the toppling of Ershad in 1990.)

The reimposition of military rule from 2007 to 2008 following a further period of BNP rule in a reactionary alliance with the JeI and a Jatiya Party splinter group indicates how desperately on the edge Bangladesh’s capitalist system had become, particularly as it coincided with the near collapse of the world financial system in the Great Crash of 2007-09.

This coup was necessary despite the repressive measures Khaleda’s government had imposed to suppress growing unrest, particularly from 2004 when it created the notorious police-military “anti-terror” death-squad force, the Rapid Action Battalion, which was ostensibly set up by Khaleda to “fight crime”, but targeted AL activists and Islamic militants with torture, disappearances and extra-judicial killings. It received training by British officials in 2007 when Bangladesh was under military rule, under Tony Blair’s pro-imperialist British Labour government.

This was in the wake of the shattering blow the 9/11 attacks had inflicted on US imperialist prestige, the follow-on blitzing onslaughts against Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growth of the Third World anti-Western Islamist militancy.

Imperialist nervousness over the impact of all this having on Muslim sentiment in Bangladesh was evident in the close relations developed between Britain’s intelligence agencies, Bangladesh’s secret services and the RAB.

In 2008 the then Labour Party Home Secretary (and now a Keir Starmer minister of state) “Baroness” Jackie Smith was alleged to have asked (though she denies it) Bangladeshi intelligence to “investigate” a number of individuals, a dozen of whom were then rounded up and detained. At least one of them, a Muslim who had been tried and acquitted of terrorism offences twice in British courts, was brutally tortured with a drill during interrogations (see Ian Cobain’s Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture, 2012).

All of this is Western-inspired and trained brutality pre-dated Hasina’s return to office in 2009.

This inconvenient fact is ignored in a sick and twisted anti-Hasina piece suspiciously published simultaneously in the New York Times and various English-language Indian papers the day after an arrest warrant was issued against Hasina (on trumped up charges) on 17th October, poisonously implying that a disturbed genetic psychological imbalance in Hasina’s family tree led her and her father before her to go off the rails whilst quoting some shadowy “human rights” outfit:

Ms Hasina, who was abroad at the time [of her father’s assassination – ed], went into exile. When she returned years later, she was a breath of fresh air, eventually helping to end military rule and becoming prime minister for the first time in 1996.

Her defeat in the next election sent her to the sidelines for eight years. In 2004, she survived an assassination attempt in which grenade-hurling assailants killed two dozen people. When she returned to office in 2009, she was a changed leader, paranoid and heavy handed like her father.

Ms. Hasina employed a range of security forces in the campaign of repression that followed. For the work of killing and disposing of opponents, she turned to elite police and paramilitary units. One of them, the Rapid Action Batallion, had started as a counter-terrorism squadron with U.S. and British training, but was transformed by Ms. Hasina into what Human Rights Watch an “in-house death squad.”

If such a “transformation” did take place then, why did Washington wait thirteen years before placing sanctions on the RAB on “human rights” grounds (see part 1 last issue)???

And if Washington really was concerned about extra-judicial killings, why were sanctions not put on Khaleda who set the squadron up in the first place, or the military leaders who used it to enforce the brutal 2007-08 “state of emergency”???

There would be rational reasons for Hasina to be “paranoid” anyway, given the assassination of her father and family, the numerous assassination attempts against her, her periods in and out of detention and exile, and the extra-judicial killings and disappearances of her party members.

But none of this has anything to do what is going on in Hasina’s head.

The social-materialist conditions of the 1971 civil war/national liberation war continue to this day, and are intensifying as the capitalist crisis deepens. The genocidal slaughter of 3 million Bengalis is still in living memory, as is the brutal suppression of Mujib’s 1971-75 revolutionary nationalist government by the US-backed military.

It is for this reason that the student anti-quota system demands were highly sensitive and polarising. Further evidence of a continuing civil-war atmosphere can also be seen in this year’s pro-Pakistan Jinnah commemoration, as well as in recent counter-revolutionary attempts by Yunus’s caretaker government and leaders of the student movement to airbrush Sheikh Mujib and the 1971 Liberation War from history:

A huge controversy has erupted in Bangladesh after the interim government announced the cancellation of eight national holidays on Wednesday. Among the abolished holidays is March 7, which commemorates the historic speech by Mujibur Rahman on the same day in 1971 where he informally declared Bangladesh’s independence against Pakistan.

The Awami League has strongly condemned the elimination of the eight holidays, accusing the Mohammed Yunus-led administration of conspiring to erase the legacy of Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Liberation War and all memories of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the nation.

A March 17 holiday celebrating the birth anniversary of the first president of independent Bangladesh has been cancelled. The August 15 holiday, known as National Mourning Day, which marks the assassination of Mujibur Rahman and most of his family, including his wife and sons, in 1975, has also been done away with.

Furthermore, the November 4 holiday, previously celebrated as National Constitution Day, has been taken down. Other cancelled holidays include the birth anniversaries of Mujibur Rahman’s wife, Begum Sheikh Fazilatunnesa Mujib, and their sons, Captain Sheikh Kamal and Sheikh Russel.

The Awami League, under the leadership of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, whose government was overthrown after a nationwide student movement, issued a statement saying, “The significance of these days in our national history is undeniable. You cannot silence us by simply pressing a reset button.”

Since Hasina’s departure from Bangladesh, the interim government has shown clear signs of attempting to erase Mujibur Rahman from public memory. There have been visuals of mobs destroying his statues, pictures, and memorabilia associated with Bangladesh’s Liberation War.

The interim government in Bangladesh has denied to identify Mujibur Rahman as the father of the nation. Nahid Islam, the adviser for Posts, Telecommunication and Information Technology and Information and Broadcasting ministries, told the Bangladeshi media on Wednesday that the country has “many founding fathers”.

He said, “Many people have contributed to the history of our land’s struggles. Our history didn’t begin in 1952 [when the Bengali language movement was launched – ed] . It includes the anti-British resistance and the struggles of 1947, 1971, 1990, and 2024. We have many founding fathers, and it is through their efforts that we achieved freedom.”

Islam, who was one of the leading faces of the anti-discrimination students’ movement against the Hasina regime earlier this year, stated that the holidays removed were originally imposed by the “fascist” Awami League and are now deemed “unimportant”.

The interim government, however, asserts that it does not aim to completely erase Mujibur Rahman or his family from public memory. Instead, it seeks to honour other figures whom it believes were overlooked by the Awami League, which the current administration considers a party of one family.

Some heavy-handedness and crudeness in how Hasina responded to Western-inspired provocations is not ruled out, but any genuine cases of disappearances and killings under Hasina need to be seen within the context of an unresolved civil war.

One possible reason why US imperialism did not make a pretend fuss about “human rights” after Hasina first returned to power in 2009 was that her opposition to Muslim fundamentalism was potentially useful as a means of suppressing growing anti-Western Islamic militancy.

Despite promising to end extrajudicial disappearances during the election campaign, the anti-terror RAB was not disbanded; and Hasina also established a specialised counter-terrorism branch of the Bangladeshi police force to suppress growing jihadist militancy.

However, this also has to be seen in the context of ongoing civil war, as such Islamism had played a reactionary role during the Liberation War and afterwards by participating in the genocide, as well as in post-Mujib attacks on nationalist “secularism” and AL-supporting Hindus.

Further polarisation followed the trial and eventual execution in 2013 of a number of JeI, and two BNP, leaders for war crimes committed during the Liberation War, and led to increased Islamic militancy, including attacks on “secular bloggers” and “atheists.” The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory that caused the tragic deaths of over 1,100 super-exploited factory workers ratcheted up the tensions further.

All this turmoil coincided with the continuing financial-crisis aftershocks of the 2008-09 crash, which was also rocking its neighbours. India, with large trade and budget deficits, saw its foreign exchange reserves collapse and currency plummet in 2013; and Pakistan was on the brink of default following a foreign exchange reserve slump. There were also currency pressures further afield, including Indonesia and South Africa.

Far from Lalkar’s claims of a fully-supported Islamism in Bangladesh, all of this demonstrates its growing unreliability for imperialism as the capitalist crisis develops, and that it is not something the Western powers necessarily feel inclined to encourage now.

It also demonstrates that Lalkar’s counter-positioning of Hasina’s “nationalist bourgeois government” against a bourgeois government “beholden to imperialism” in the concluding paragraph is also wooden because her counter-terrorism measures had reinforced Washington’s “war on terror” campaigns to some extent. The US only started to move against her in 2021 and so there are complexities:

Under Yunus’ ‘benevolent dictatorship’ they will undoubtedly be taught the lesson that changing a nationalist bourgeois government for one beholden to imperialism is not going to bring about any overall improvement in their situation, which is only too likely to get worse rather than better.

This is also misleading as the article fails to clarify that nationalist bourgeois governments are limited in the extent to which they are able to “bring about any overall improvement” as well, as demonstrated in part 1. This confusion arises because there is no mention of the capitalist crisis anywhere in the piece, let alone its unstoppable plunge towards total slump and war catastrophe.

There is also no discussion of the limitations of such bourgeois nationalist perspectives, which include those of such unreliable nationalist opportunists as Hasina, as well as those of opportunist tyrants like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and much firmer “left”-nationalist anti-imperialists like Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

All bourgeois Third World societies are dependent on the world capitalist markets to varying degrees; and are relatively weak in the face of the overwhelming financial and military might of US imperialism, in particular. And all nationalist bourgeois governments have kept capitalism in place regardless of any measures they may have taken to reign in the most treacherous elements of their local ruling classes, or of any “left” reforms they have been able to implement.

However, the increasing class-war pressures arising from the intensification of the capitalist crisis (which is now threatening to plunge the entire world-capitalist economy into total chaos at any time) is forcing even such highly compromised nationalist opportunists as Hasina to take a stand against imperialist diktat and the devastation capitalism’s crisis collapse has already inflicted on their home nations.

But opposition from even the most militantly anti-imperialist of nationalisms will not be enough to defend workers from the coming economic Catastrophe.

Only the Leninist perspective of the need to overthrow the world monopoly-imperialist system by revolution to establish socialist workers states under proletarian-dictatorship control points the way forwards for humanity. Phil Waincliffe

[Continued next issue]

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Clean water march leaflet – 3rd November

Effluent filled rivers, poisoned lakes and befouled beaches are inevitable in a capitalist system concerned only to strip all value from enterprises – and most of all in Catastrophic crisis, as plunging profit rates force ever more rapacious capitalist plundering. No reformist “regulation” or control will stop it nor pro-capitalist Labourism pledged to “cutting red tape” for their fatcat investor friends. Only overturning the bloodsucking profiteering “free market” will do the job. Build Leninism

There is far more to the stinking water and sewage scandal than just the incompetence, eco-trampling and profiteering of the water companies.

They are part of, and an egregious expression of, the great collapse in monopoly capitalism driving the whole world to Slump disaster, war, genocides, and ecological breakdown.

Their poisoning and polluting of the rivers and seas is inevitable in a system of private profit, which is interested only in stripping out all their value for the fatcats in the world monopoly capitalist system whatever the consequences.

That has meant cynically running down the assets to the point of collapse and knowingly “solving” the resulting problems by breaking the law and reneging on their basic duties.

All that matters is sucking all the value from these companies.

Until the entire class based ownership system is overturned they will continue their dirty business.

No “regulations” “controls” or “better monitoring” etc will stop them, only taking the entire profiteering system and its resources into a new socialist planned economy, serving ordinary communities, will suffice.

That means the revolutionary ending of the whole iniquitous class-based system and establishment of a workers state.

Nothing else will stop the plundering because it is the very essence of the whole capitalist system, both in its “privatisation” piracy and its overall exploitation.

And it will get worse.

The monopoly capitalist system is spiralling into total slump Catastrophe, and war destruction, the inevitable result of the boom-and-bust nature of this contradiction ridden system (as Marx demonstrated in Capital- see box).

The water companies are part and parcel of the same collapse of the entire profit based economy.

Their industry has long been a disaster, even in ‘boom times’.

Like all the “privatised” sectors the water sector’s outrageous rip-offs, inflated charges, exploitation, cosy backscratching bonuses and huge benefits for the bosses, have always been grotesque extortion.

Even more so are the huge rake-offs for the “owners and investors” that these bribed and bought executives and managers are paid ever more to guarantee, sucking dry the resources and assets of companies, industry and communities, plus vast taxpayer subsidies, to feed the insatiable profit greed of the rich ruling class freemasonries who run society.

Such relentless wealth extraction is bad enough at the “best” of times during “boom” upswings.

Far from the vaunted “efficiency” these “private enterprises” are supposed to demonstrate, they produce only speed-up and cuts for their workforces, reduced services and endless consumer dissatisfaction.

The very system of relentless concentration on squeezing out more value for less expenditure creates alienation, stifles initiative and poisons relations all round.

Hospitals fail and the NHS collapses, railways and bus services are a disaster, education is a mess and schools collapse, housing is a festering chaos of near slums and homelessness and local authorities are driven to bankruptcy, slashing every type of community provision.

And the water companies fail their basic remits, increasingly filling the rivers with effluent and seas with sewage, and creating the massive environmental damage and pollution they are supposed to prevent.

It could not be otherwise when the “free market system” always demands a huge slice of the pie in profits, inevitably reducing the resources and assets available to actually carry out any of the tasks needed, along with creating an atmosphere of unrelenting stifling pressure.

“Efficiency” means only parsimony, for the public and for the workforces.

But far worse is stepping up of the plunder as the world economic crisis bites ever harder and the international trade war pressures deepen in a system based on antagonistic “competition”.

They have been reaching cutthroat levels for decades and have lurched to a new to-the-death intensity since the great Global Credit Meltdown of 2008-9 (not least in world warmongering like the deliberately created Nato- nazi-Kiev war on Russia and the Middle East Zionists’ horrors).

All the great international monopolies and finance houses are under the cosh from “market pressure” demanding that they keep up their “returns” or go under to even more ruthless and desperate hedge funds, pension schemes and banking networks.

These financial manipulators have long become totally parasitic as they buy and sell their way through the productive sectors of the capitalist economy manipulating shares, loans and other investments

As recently spelt out in a detailed Guardian article for example, they can buy up and strip the value from even quite viable enterprises, using arcane and sophisticated finance and banking mechanisms:

A private equity firm pools cash from investors, then uses those funds, along with an extraordinary amount of money borrowed from other sources (the “leverage”), to take over a target company. Having acquired its target, a private equity firm may fire the management team, install new executives and decimate the workforce, or move it offshore. It can also liquidate the company’s own assets to pay back investors and line the pockets of the firm’s partners before selling the company to a new set of investors, a tactic sometimes known as a “buy, strip and flip”.

Even when a private equity takeover tries to turn a target company into a more valuable enterprise, the logic is still viral: private equity exists to replicate and enlarge itself, not to build anything in particular. “Attention is not directed towards the common wealth, but enriching the management, buyout partners and their institutional backers,” Luke Johnson, the cofounder of British private equity firm Risk Capital Partners, wrote in 2012. “That is the nature of the game. To argue otherwise is bogus.”

These groups are the most extreme – “purest” – version of finance capital, the merging of banking and industrial capital identified by Lenin’s “Imperialism: the Highest stage of capitalism”, and the strongest expression yet of the monopolisation process.

They also express the conclusion reached by Marx and Engels in the famous Communist Manifesto that the way in which capitalist society organises production, driven by its initially inspirational entrepreneurial drive for profit, is riven with contradictions that must eventually turn into its opposite, a “fetter” on further development.

At that point history must take a giant leap, a revolutionary transformation, to establish a new way of doing things, planned and rational under common ownership of production.

The deleterious impact of parasitical profit demands is no better illustrated than in the water industry.

As the slump has deepened the private capital fatcats have moved in not only strip out all the value they can, by sweating the assets to the point of collapse, and covering it up by cynical abuse of discharges and sewage releases.

They have also borrowed even greater sums, ostensibly for re-investment, but actually solely to pay out even greater amounts in dividends and bonuses.

The logic of capitalism says this is what must happen; reason, science, rationality and ecological necessity says it is insane.

But the bourgeoisie dominates society and serves only its own class interests.

It has no interest in reining in the devastating effects where they do not affect its own, ever more indulgent, degenerate, ultra-excessive and wasteful lifestyle.

Just the opposite. It will impose increasingly draconian repression on society and the great masses who produce all the value.

And to keep the system alive it will drive the world to war in order to “shock and awe” all rebellion and to destroy the “surplus” capital that its system accumulates, forcing the destruction onto its rivals.

World War Three is the result, now well underway.

Serbia was a warmup, Iraq and Afghanistan the opening chapters and destruction of Libya, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon etc by various means the continuation.

Now Germany, a great economic rival to America is getting it in the neck via the Ukraine war, started by US controlled Nato and its British sidekicks as a diversion from societal collapse and crisis, and a “solution” to “overproduction”.

China’s workers state is the next target for dying American imperialism and sidekick Britain.

And most horrifying of all, is the very public genocidal horror of the Zionist rampaging in the Middle East, for itself and on behalf of Western imperialism.

Calling on parliament to change things or rein in the worst behaviour is useless; the whole “democracy” racket is part of the system itself, its “reforms” designed to hold back understanding of the need for revolution.

All experience so far proves it. “Control and regulation” of the excesses of capitalism, the essence of reformist “improvement”, has failed completely.

At best it smooths the rough edges of capitalism for a while to make it “nicer”, lulling mass consciousness but leaving the planet threatening system intact.

And it is a cynical fraud anyway even in the richest countries.

The Grenfell fire disaster showed the reality; the entire culture and organisation of capitalism conspired to bypass every kind of control from national and local government, monitoring bodies, safety organisations, bent and twisted supply chains and companies & designers. In fact the privatised regulators themselves were infected by the need to stay afloat in a profit controlled world, failing to put a check on it all.

The ineffectual “control” of the water industry is just as bent by the demands of capital, with its Ofwat regulators limp and feeble, not only doing nothing to rein in the rapacity of the “investors” but actually making the arguments to “justify” their further plundering.

And despite its bankruptcy the water industry remains attractive to the profiteers – as a monopoly service it has a captive constituency obliged to pay ever more outrageous charges for their “utilities”.

As Marx explained, the public debt is one of the great instruments of bourgeois exploitation, fed as it is by the taxation and tariff imposing powers of the bourgeois state.

And the state will push those powers to the limit as the crisis deepens whatever party is in power as the new Labour Government is proving.

Only overturning that whole system can change things.

So no calls to rein in the water industry this way will change anything; the Labourites long ago abandoned even the pretence of fighting for the interests of the working class and supposed “socialism”.

These mountebanks and frauds have always run capitalism and by Blairism, were openly cosying up to the fatcats and profiteers.

Small wonder they are deeply unpopular, winning a ludicrously hailed “landslide” election only by the devious manipulations and distortions of “bourgeois democracy” with less than one in five of the voters (and most of those only voting against the even more despised Tories).

The Starmerites are in power only through a “soft coup” by media manipulation, bent practices and some continuing delusions of mass opinion that parliament means anything.

Their job is solely to carry through the interests of the bosses and financiers.

Starmerism has made this explicit with his symbolic “cutting of the red tape” speech at the gross and grovelling “investment conference” recently, reflecting deep failures of British imperialism, dependent on the “goodwill” of the great international monopoly finance combines, mostly US.

Opening up the British economy to their plundering was what Brexit was all about and is what the Starmerites are about too.

So much then for any hopes of reining in the water industry.

Until capitalism is ended the pollution will go on destroying the landscape, nature and humanity.

Build Leninism DH

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