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No 1652 24th January 2025

And what happens when there is no Golden future for the American working class, duped by the racist warmongering bluster of the billionaire Trumpite Nazis??? Whatever temporary economic “upturn” can be bullied out of the rest of the terrified world bourgeoisies it will not last once the great dollar collapse implodes – if at all. And what happens to that entire “rest of the world”, the great seven billion plus declared surplus to requirement except as slave labour and cannon fodder for endless wars, ecological breakdown, and planet devastation to be imposed by the insane and demented monopoly bosses??? Capitalism has reached the end of the road with this stinking fascism but will keep dragging things down until it is stopped in the only way possible, conscious class war revolution to overthrow its deranged foulness. Zionist defeat and setback show imperialist order not infallible but treacherous “ceasefire” continued blitzing demonstrates only dogged struggle will change anything. Marxist-Leninist science must be rebuilt

If there were awards for sick cynicism and opportunism, the sudden warning from London Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan about the world facing a new fascism would lose out only to the astonishing presidential parting shot from Grandpa Joe Biden that “by the way” (!!) the world is “threatened” by “a turn to oligarchy and the end of democracy”.

So now you tell us??????

After setting the whole world up for this, by supporting lying Labourite stooging for the ruling class??

Or by actually running the crisis-shattered monopoly capitalist system’s tyrannical exploitation, and its utterly fraudulent “democracy”, fronting for the disintegrating ruling class racket now generating endless warmongering foulness (and that has already carried out most of it anyway while opening the door for even worse to come)??

By backing the genocidal horrors of the Zionist occupation in Palestine, which has taken world barbarity to new levels of depravity???

And you offer no sensible way out? (which can only be a class war revolutionary answer, to end the whole of degenerate slump capitalism by putting the working class in power, requiring rather more preparation and leadership than a few belated insincere and treacherous soundbites).

And you “peacefully” hand over power!!!!

What monstrous dissembling, hoodwinking, hypocritical treachery and deluded cretinism!

Only the fake-“lefts” of all kinds, Trotskyist and revisionist, who boast that they have the “theoretical answers” and have been reassuring the world that they “know what fascism is and it is not here yet” – and even that Trump could be “better than Biden” (!!) could outdo this for glib stupidity (or rather more sinister delusion mongering).

Such “lefts” like George Galloway’s “Workers Party of Britain” saturated in appalling British chauvinism that plays into the hands of the ruling class’s rapidly intensifying jingoism and reaction, have even ventured that Trump might be a better option than Biden to “wind up the war dangers in Ukraine”; ditto pacifist voices like ex-weapons inspector Scott Ritter and a whole assorted Internet crew of “left” and radical journalists, rightly opposed to the NATO war on Ukraine and the genocide in the Middle East perhaps but a million miles from understanding its causes or offering the only answer possible to it, the defeat of the American Empire and the battle to establish workers states, in the only way possible of taking up the fight for revolutionary ending of the entire stinking world war system.

The slick but shallow pretenders of the newly rebranded Trotskyist “Revolutionary Communist Party” – a hollow fraud in every way and viciously hostile to the communist workers states, past and present, which are the only path out of chaos for mankind – were just recently offhandedly explaining with their usual glib and philistine “theory” that things were not yet fascist (see page 7 too).

Ditto from the other end of the fake-“left” spectrum, the museum Stalinist CPGB-ML (also claiming the “Communists” title and for slightly longer), who even dedicated several articles four years ago not only to ridiculing any suggestion by other groups that the Jan 6th Capitol riots were fascist in nature but went out of its way to analyse the background of various individual participants as being “working class”.

But this was a) irrelevant since even workers can be hoodwinked or hold backward views, and certainly so in the leading imperialist power after a century of non-stop anti-communist brainwashing and chauvinist corruption (just as they did in once imperialist, now threadbare has-been superpower Britain all through the 19th and much of the 20th century and tragically still do in some better-off layers); and b) simply was not true anyway; the Lalkar/Proletarian examples chosen were ex-military, or small businessmen, petty bourgeois or de-classed elements.

“We defined what fascism is in the mid-1930s” they boasted in that piece “and will let you know”.

Except that did not work out so well then, in Germany beforehand, in France and particularly in Spain afterwards, nor in Salvador Allende’s Chile either, toppled by Pinochet’s fascist coup in 1973 or Indonesia in 1965, nor any more now.

Nor could it, with such a mechanical undialectical approach which was already covering up for theoretical conservatism and retreat from Leninist philosophy in the 1930s with the Popular Front strategy, as in the Spanish civil war, asking workers to place their trust in the petty bourgeois Republican government (in an “anti-fascist front”) – ultimately wasting the potential revolutionary lessons of huge sacrifices made by hard-pressed Soviet and international brigade volunteers (which would have still proved valuable philosophical gains for the world working class even if the Francoists and their backers had nevertheless still proved too strong at the time – see EPSR No 988 02-03-99).

And all this was anyway setting entirely the wrong kind of understanding by still suggesting that there is some kind of dividing line – and that the argument is about whether or not it has been crossed, a completely undialectical approach typical of Stalinist revisionism (and all other fake-“leftism” and its “stop the fascists” activism), with its implication that there is another kind of “democratic” capitalism within which all the old “left” pressure reformism – plus perhaps a bit of street action – can continue its step-by-step way without ever having to confront the total breakdown of society which is rapidly unfolding and which demands total overthrow of this disgusting, unequal, unjust and ever more dementedly damaging profiteering system.

Let as many street battles be fought as possible by workers against nazi thuggery but let it be done with the understanding that only the full struggle to end capitalism itself can stop nazism.

Fascism is not something other, or different to “ordinary imperialism” or “democracy”.

It may or may not use all kinds of theatricality depending on circumstance and perceived need to whip the working class into the trenches and suppress its resistance (no in 1914, yes in the 1930s).

Its full essence is simply a turn to international warmongering aggression by the major imperialist powers themselves, in a desperate attempt to escape the inexorable Catastrophic breakdown of their own monopoly capitalist system, blaming “others” for the problems caused by the inherent “over-production” contradictions of an anarchic system built on profiteering and relentless monopolisation driving it into ever greater inequality (see EPSR No 887 and No 1118 eg and also economics box on page 6).

Of course Donald Trump and his barmily bilious billionaire circus are dragging the world down the path into Nazism – whether or not it comes with jackboots, stiff armed salutes and deathshead symbolism or just with MAGA caps, the foulest of potentially murderous racist domestic “migrant” scapegoating (even giving the KluKluxKlan a shot in the arm) and a frenzy of chauvinist jingoism and belligerence towards the whole world.

One clue might be the in-your-face bullying of Trump’s presidential megabillionaire team, not just against demonised Third World countries but now even close allies, intimidating Canada with threats to force it into 51st state subjugation(!); threatening a military invasion to take over Greenland – currently part of Denmark in the EU(!!); ditto a re-invasion of Panama to (re)steal its canal, (the last such in 1989 to suppress the one-time CIA stooge turned nationalist rebel Manuel Noriega killing hundreds and brutalising thousands more); generally menacing bordering Mexico to swallow hundreds of thousands of viciously and violently scapegoated and expelled “migrants” (and their hapless children) along with tens of thousands more trekking up from the whole of Latin America; stepping up its threats to any current Latin American anti-US resistance like left-nationalist Venezuela, Nicaragua and especially the full workers state in Cuba; and even waging a social media war to topple the just “elected-by-a-landslide” Labour government in Britain or force it into grovelling compliance with US interests (not difficult, especially as it is hard to see this actually barely 17%-vote, despised bunch of mountebanks, already up to their necks in sleaze, lies and reneged-on hollow promises and delivering nothing, finding much positive support from the working class (or even petty bourgeoisie) if they were to resist).

So it is good bye for example to the finally negotiated rights of the arrogantly colonially dispossessed Chagos Islanders, whose limited return home after a handover from Britain to Mauritius rule was already a travesty since the big island of Diego Garcia was going to remain a US airbase for B52s and nuclear armed planes to threaten the whole of Africa, India and the Middle East as reported:

Donald Trump could kill off Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius over fears it will help communist China.

Allies of the new president slammed the decision last month to hand the British Indian Ocean Territory over to Mauritius, which is 1,300 miles from the archipelago.

The deal includes a 99-year-lease on the US airbase on Diego Garcia. But the Mauritian government is friendly to China and fears have been raised that Beijing operatives will able to get close to the facility.

Florida senator Marco Rubio, who campaigned alongside Trump at rallies, said it was ‘concerning as it would provide an opportunity for communist China to gain valuable intelligence on our naval support facility in Mauritius.’

That fits right in with non-stop hysterical psyops demonising of China, and the deluge of fantastical lying bogeyman stories whipped-up to blame it (and Russia) for the world’s ills (most alleging of China exactly the things that imperialism does to China and Russia – never forgetting that the world’s biggest, most widespread, expensive and extensive surveillance, listening station, satellite and observation post network, is run by the US (and Five Eye sidekicks like Britain)).

It is part of the trade war belligerence against Beijing and Europe too.

The latter has already been savaged by the Ukraine war, whose provocation and instigation by two decades and $5bn of US skulduggery to install the local Stepan Bandera nazis (ask Victoria Nuland) was always aimed first and foremost not at demonised bogeyman Russia (though Moscow is a target too) but at hamstringing lead EU power Germany (not least by America’s secret explosion sabotage of the NordStream gas pipelines), to fragment and devastate EU economic competition (Germany still runs a huge trade surplus with the States).

Even more colossal economic competition is faced from China, relentlessly expanding under workers state planned direction (albeit revisionist) and running a near $1trillion(!!) trade surplus last year against the bankrupt US’s $1trillion deficit.

Along with intensified domestic repression (the Black Lives Matter protestors are in the sights eg along with the “left” of all kinds and the pro-Palestinians) and anti-communist censorship, courtesy of the suddenly grovelling “liberal” Silicon Valley social media tech bosses and newspaper owners, these astonishingly belligerent signals were unthinkable until recently in world “diplomacy”.

They can only be compared to the aggressive bluster, invasion stunts and diversions of the German Nazis (and Mussolini’s fascisti African colonialism) in the Depression-wracked 1930s, demanding Lebensraum, return of the left bank of the Rheinland (Strasburg etc), Anschluss with Austria, occupation of the Czech Sudetenland etc.

While the usual “knowing” “left”-cynicism simply shrugs or dismisses such “Make America Greater” expansionist threats as “nothing but Trumpian bombast” and shallow populism, the world is in for a severe shock.

Not to mention outright Nazi salutes.

Like that stupid gesture from the buffoonish Elon Musk, in one sense this is a total joke, the expression of failure, weakness and humiliation for American power and influence, not least in its petulant footstomping demands to “Make America Great Again”.

But until this ever more degenerate and wilfully destructive planet-threatening ruling class is actually overthrown and its out-of-time foetid profit production system is replaced by rational planned socialism – by the only instrument that can do it, a Leninist-led determined working class – it will be a deadly threat to humanity.

The Hitler crew were equally written off, and even laughed at, in the 1920s and early 1930s as just street thuggery and “bluster” but soon gathered momentum, especially with calculated Western imperialist support egging on the Nazis throughout the decade’s runup to the Second World War.

Their ascension to power by “democratic means” (an illusion tragically fed by the early 1930s German Communist Party’s revisionist complacency in parliamentary manoeuvres) with Hitler made Chancellor by “constitutional vote”, soon suppressed the working class struggle, with communists, trade unionists and others sent to the new concentration camps, if not butchered outright (even before the horror of anti-Jewish and other minorities – Gypsies, disabled, etc – scapegoating really got going).

All the imperialist powers turned a blind eye to this and to their belligerence, including their blitzing support for Franco’s 1936-9 fascist war in Spain as a practice run for the WW2 horrors to come (while simultaneously blockading aid to the Republicans under a pretence of “neutrality”, most of what got through heroically supplied from an itself hard-pressed and threatened Soviet Union).

Then they threw in Austria and then Sudetenland, and even Poland, all with the aim of turning Germany eastwards onto the USSR when inexorably approaching allout world war was unleashed, the inevitable end point of capitalist economic breakdown as Marxism-Leninism alone explains.

They fostered Nazism precisely because they needed warmongering to get them out of intractable crisis (as they had used war in 1914-18, albeit ultimately at the gigantic cost of triggering the Bolshevik Revolution) but did not want to abandon the great hoodwinking illusion of bourgeois “democracy” themselves (their most potent weapon to cover-up the reality of outright capitalist dictatorship) and because this time they wanted to turn the aggression first onto the Soviet Union.

Those WW2 fascist plans ultimately failed because USSR communism stopped them, despite the growing philosophical weakness of Moscow revisionism, fighting virtually a re-run of Lenin’s 1917-21 revolution on an even larger scale and with gigantic sacrifice, going on to inspire a wave of anti-imperialist and communist struggle in Europe and the colonialist world (long after Stalin incidentally).

But Stalinist conservatism and retreat then declined further into “permanent peaceful coexistence” bureaucratic complacency and the revisionist delusions of a Cold War “balance” (being revived still by revisionist brainmush as disarming “multipolarity” nonsense) eventually tipping into Gorbachevite counter-revolutionary liquidation of the even then still viable and successful Soviet workers state (see EPSR Books Vol21 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism).

World degeneration into imperialist slump and warmongering has been underway since the ludicrously heralded “end of history” with multiple partial crises shaking the world system.

And while Trumpism is a lurch to a new level of open inter-imperialist belligerence and menace, this slide has been essentially fascist from the start.

World war degeneration (beyond hundreds of non-stop “routine” imperialist domination-coups, wars and invasions throughout the 20th century) has been underway for well over two decades, starting with NATO blitzing of the Serbian nationalist remnants of socialist Yugoslavia in 1999, around the lying fraud of a “Recak massacre” and then war on the Middle East in Afghanistan, Iraq (long planned) and the escalations into Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, culminating in the monstrous genocidal butchery of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, and the now 3-year war in Ukraine (all done by “anti-Trumpites”).

As Marxist science was warning early on – against all fake-“leftism” and “democratic” reformism, – once the great spiralling implosion of the monopoly capitalist system inevitably became the dominant tendency over its inflationary credit fuelled boom, then:

The only way forward Washington [could] see is to put the whole world onto an “anti-terror” militarised footing, whereby all financial-legality and trade considerations go out of the window completely, leaving all nations just represented by their military power and their fascistic determination, and nothing else.

“Shock and awe” is the new world religion. “Smash the rogue states and all evil influences on Earth”, and “pre-emptively strike at any who dare to try to catch up with USA weapons superiority”.

That is the new world rule. And Saddam’s Iraq was the next victim.

And the “Opposition” bourgeoisie know not to make a fuss or be drummed out of the imperialist circles for good by objecting too loudly to how badly the war has been handled, or how badly the international propaganda “justifying” the Western imperialist action has come across to the world, leaving the world more at risk of inevitable terrorist outrages from angry or frustrated people than ever before. [EPSR 1252 12-10-04]

So it has proved (with complications).

But far from resolving anything, the Iraq war and (eventually) Afghanistan have been disasters, not only doing nothing in their sick torturing and massacring brutality to stop the relentless crisis collapse of the whole system but generating a giant upsurge of “terrorism” – as counter-revolutionary imperialism falsely designates any and all anti-invasion insurgency and resistance – in first Iraq and then the whole Middle East and beyond and then general anti-imperialist rebellion.

And for all its often confused, even reactionary, and multiple sectarian backwardnesses, and weird idealist notions, this movement expresses how materially the masses are being driven onto a revolutionary path by crisis, which must eventually find its way to the fight for communism once it is consciously fought for.

Developments have gone from bad to worse for imperialism, most of all in the explosive Middle East core of Palestine, where the staggeringly heroic intifadas and subsequent uprising against the brutal and always genocidal Zionist occupation (from 1948) has shown the entire world the degenerate existential threat posed by the continuation of imperialism (see below).

Anti-imperialist hostility already drove tens of thousands into the ranks of the “jihadists” after the Iraq invasion (the religio-militant ideology filling the vacuum temporarily left in world revolutionary understanding by revisionist retreats and mistakes), all “condemned” by the endless variants of the fake-“left” but actually the crude, confused initial stirring of renewed anti-imperialist revolt.

That was enough to keep the rest of imperialism rowed in behind the incontestable dominance of the USA, its ever more overwhelming monopolising world power seen as able to act as the world policeman as the threat of upheaval and incipient revolution has grown.

But that could only ever be an uneasy unstable “alliance” between gangster powers, as Marxist science alone was able to foresee and forewarn 20 years ago (in its general shape):

imperialist economic “overproduction” crisis will NOT be “resolved” just by the American Empire beating up a few fringe players in the world economy which supply valuable raw materials or who are a source of cheeky and dangerous anti-Great Satan propaganda, or the possible vehicles of rogue “weapons of mass destruction” in time to come, following on the scare to America of 9/11, a complete one-off chance event of no long-term significance whatever, OTHER THAN its significance to tell the Empire that the world no longer will tolerate its domination and will no longer kow-tow to its cultural domination.

It will not even find a war “solution” when it reaches its REAL targets which are Japan, Germany, France and Britain plus all the smaller European monopolies, (blamed) for having made it impossible for the American Empire to carry on ruling the world easily and smoothly as before when it was the world’s immediate postwar top economic dog by an enormous distance, and unquestionable political supremo too(ibid).

It has reached those imperialist targets now in the shape of Trumpism, (adding China’s state-directed capitalist sector as an economic target too, grown enormous since 2004 (as well as politically as a workers state)).

America needs to lash out by brute force because it has not remotely solved the unsolvable crisis (Marx) – instead the 2008-9 Global Credit meltdown showed exactly the opposite, the deepest and most intractable breakdown in all history.

It is almost certainly the terminal crisis for the now world spanning monopoly system, and urgently demanding the only possible solution, the great class war overthrow to establish socialism under proletarian dictatorship (the only possible alternative to bourgeois power).

But insane credit “printing” has helped defer the moment when the shape of the giant capitalist Catastrophe could be seen in its full devastation, blocking the arguments for such Leninist understanding against continuing reformist and “left pressure” sectarian opportunism (all varieties).

Domino collapse of the world bank and trade system into a “financial nuclear winter” as then Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling described it, was held off using every modern credit creation trick on steroids, spinning out austerity and economic disaster over 15 years, but hiding its full extent and nature while buying time to lull consumerism-dulled philistine mass consciousness and build up chauvinist momentum.

But endless inflationary dollar issue could never last.

The great collapse of the dollar is likely any moment, not least because of the huge additional debts ramped up to pay for trade war and for the non-stop warmongering in Ukraine and the horrors of the Zionist genocide in Gaza.

In fact Trumpite ascendancy is a major symptom of just that.

America is more bankrupt than ever before, multiple trillions of dollars in debt and sustained only by the gigantic surpluses from the rest of the world invested there.

So the full on bourgeois dictatorship reality is now made clearer with vicious chauvinism, jingoist nastiness, foul scapegoating and inter-imperialist belligerence. Dirty dealing is ramped up to hysterical levels, with the US bourgeoisie now demanding everyone else pay for its own great Catastrophe.

Everyone is to kowtow to American interests, or get it in the neck, made to open up their own economies even more to American monopoly plundering, (so much for clean rivers, unchlorinated chickens, the NHS and fire-free housing or any housing at all) and told to move their own capital investments there in an astounding protectionism-by-force (so much for Volkswagen workers etc).

The entire world working class can go hang as jobs and industry are stripped away even in the “rich” countries – and even US workers face “deregulation” and removal of social and work protections (whatever Trump “promised”) as rich man Musk is about to make sure.

But this “America First” bullying pays a huge price as it demolishes all the remaining illusions in the old elaborate and fraudulent framework of alleged “freedom and rule of law” set up after WW1 and mostly in the wake of the Second World War to keep the “free world” in line against the bogeyman “communist threat” (that never was).

It underlines the raw class war nature of imperialism and exposes “left” politics which has evaded the revolutionary perspective with every kind of revisionist flannelling about “peaceful roads” and “defending living standards” or has poisoned working class minds with outright anti-Sovietism as Trotskyism has done.

For decades the US dominated “world order” has relied on continuing delusions about “democracy” and “international justice” and “freedom”, and the “approval”, or at least the bought, bribed or armed-twisted “neutrality” of the stooge United Nations, to sustain its dominance, facilitated by the treachery and opportunism of class-collaborating reformist (TUC-Labour) anti-communism, brain-numbed Revisionism and all shades of poisonous petty bourgeois Trotskyist opposition, (all still demanding “free speech” and the “right to protest for peace” even as the fascist reality is being ramped up with police arrests and street intimidation, throughout imperialism).

The sudden discovery it “might be fascism” is a little belated to say the least, in a rash of warnings and panic by “left” figures like Sadiq Khan.

Berating “financial backers who selfishly choose to put the profits of their companies over the interests of our democracies” is hardly going to cut it. What else is a system based on “selfishly” making profit going to do and one facilitated and encouraged by the fatcat grovelling Labourites?

His response, calling for a “century defining struggle” – to be “unflinching in defence of democracy and our values“ is the most disarming opportunism possible, and especially when it is to be carried out by “stricter laws on harmful content...to stem the tide”.

So to defend free speech the capitalist state should have even more powers to shut down and suppress..er...“free speech”.

It is obvious whose free expression is the main target, that of the “left” and the working class, such as it is – not that the working class has ever had much of such privilege in the first place nor ever will in a world dominated by big capital and its boss-owners who control all the media and meeting halls either directly or through the capitalist state and its thousands of connections and links to the ruling class (made more obviously clear than ever in Trump’s White House but just as much the case in every bourgeois dominated regime).

In fact massive state censorship has already been imposed with Labour agreement or directly, over and above the normal (gross) levels of bias, manipulation, distortion and fascist lies which pass for news and information in the capitalist media, including the laughably alleged “impartial BBC” and “liberal papers” like the Guardian.

All information about Russia and Ukraine for example is not only “controlled for disinformation”, (i.e censored, blocked and replaced with imperialist disinformation) but ruthlessly shut down with outright closure of such stations as Russia Today from the beginning of the war in Europe and vicious harassment of any few independent journalists attempting to make objective reports of the front line on the Russian side, sometimes stripped of citizenship, finding bank accounts closed and similar measures.

But not one word has Khan ever spoken on this. In fact as a senior part of Labour, he supports the monstrous Nazi-NATO establishment which is running the war in Ukraine, and the funding of the Kiev Swastika-toting Stepan Bandera worshipping stoogery which was installed by CIA/MI6 skulduggery in the Maidan coup in 2014 and trained ever since for the anti-Russian wamongering in conjunction with US and British forces (covertly operating since 2014).

Worse still he has remained on board throughout the monstrous Labour-Zionist conspiracy to sabotage the “left” surge around the Corbynite movement with its poisonous and distorted alleged “anti-semitic racism” class war witchhunting, shutting down and silencing even this very tepid “left” posturing, once a useful means of keeping the working class tied to the parliamentary racket, but even its timidity deemed too likely to open the door to “socialism” (!!) in the modern conditions of severe crisis.

It is the whole racket of democracy and “our values” (like not wiping out, maiming or expelling an entire people??) which is now irrevocably broken as the imperialist order has blitzed and bullied the planet to continue its dominance and tyrannical exploitation, and ever more desperately so as the crisis driven cutthroat inter-imperialist trade war has forced each bourgeoisie to ramp up its naked exploitation.

The stooge UN and the great network of “human rights” institutions has even helped bring the new crisis warmongering to red heat through swallowing the demented (and meaningless) “war on terror” since 2001, with the ruling class initially using the excuse of the Third World 9/11 terrorist attack to set going the new colonialist onslaughts that had long been plotted (in the neocons’ Project for a New American Century for example).

But that whole framework has been breaking down anyway as the imperialist order has blitzed and bullied the planet to continue its dominance and tyrannical exploitation.

Far from suppressing rising revolt, the international blitzing has seen the nationalist/terrorist resistance increase exponentially especially as the crisis has deepened its impact on the Third World, and notably on the never-quite-quiescent or fully pacified Middle East (which is the major reason the imperialist powers allowed the Zionist/Jewish occupation to be implanted there by genocidal terror in 1948, keeping it in place and heavily supported ever since).

With the great bank crash the growing revolt took a giant leap to a new level of mass spontaneous rebellion when millions poured onto the streets in Egypt and Tunisia in the gigantic Arab Spring uprising in early 2011, (far beyond anything the CIA could have organised as the more idiot conspiracy theories still present it, along with all the other theoretical excuses for avoiding seeing the revolutionary content in these titanic upheavals).

That development shook imperialist confidence to the core, still reeling as it was from trying to contain the world banking collapse, and now seeing not just French controlled Tunisia but gargantuan Egypt exploding.

Cairo is the very heart of Arab nationalism, in its biggest country with a long history of post-war inspirational anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism under Gamal Abdel Nasser, and demonstrating its socially explosive potential subsequently when Western-bought dictator Sadat was assassinated, requiring further subsequent brutal suppression under Hosni Mubarak.

His 2011 overthrow unleashed the giant wave of spontaneous mass anti-imperialist revolt which sent shock waves everywhere through the region and the Third World, and triggered a ferment of discussion and turmoil, threatening rebellion into the Gulf States (Bahrain particularly), the backward feudalism of Saudi Arabia, and on into Yemen, stirring the anti-Western Houthi movement in its fight to take power.

And most of all it connected with the Palestinian people whose own Hamas leadership in the already long-persecuted and deliberately isolated and penned in Gaza Strip (effectively an open-air concentration camp) was an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

It was the MB which took the leadership in Egypt in the absence of any coherent secular leadership, where dozens of “liberal”, “democracy” and fake-“left” PCist contenders in the mass demonstrations caused maximum confusion but where no Marxist-Leninist scientific revolutionary voice could be heard to give a clear scientific view of the crisis and need for proletarian revolutionary takeover.

The MB was initially tolerated by Western intervention, in the same way the Ayatollahs had been covertly assisted in the 1979 Iranian revolution, to head off any danger of deeper eventually communist upheaval, and much play made about a new “democratic path” accepted by moderates like Mohamed Morsi, eased into the presidency in 2012 by Western influence on the MB.

But that was only to play for time because even the religious confusion of the MB, sitting on the public ferment, had to reckon with too much national liberation anti-Western anti-Zionist sentiment and active sympathy for the militancy of the oppressed Palestinians, (obviously politically but materially too, not least in keeping the Gaza/Egypt border porous).

Harder elements in Washington and most of all next door Zionism feared this great upheaval could seriously unravel imperialism’s grip in the Middle East and eventually world wide (notably in Latin America where left nationalism was on the move) and open the door ultimately to Marxist revolution.

Virtually every regional development since has reflected desperate efforts to stifle this revolutionary eruption.

So major efforts to head that off were already underway in 2011 with the civil wars set going in Libya and Syria, activating long-plotted “dissident” forces to provoke demonstrations, presented to the world as “further spread” of the Arab Spring but completely bogus (and obviously so when directed against such anti-imperialist mavericks as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and the flaky Assad Baathists, with the tiny numbers of these paid for demonstrators and their childish “freedom” banners hyped up by the Western press).

Especially in Libya these panicky and premature moves quickly faltered requiring a full-on NATO invasion to be hastily assembled (with a cosmetic “European lead” to hide US involvement) in order to topple Gaddafi; in Syria deeper sectarian hostilities dating back to the arbitrary colonial line-in-the-sand divisions of the region were inflamed, spilling over from the Iraq war and added to by secret sniper subversion shooting down demonstrators, and Assad state forces, to cause maximum chaos.

That was combined with major plotting in Egypt with the corrupt armed forces, still intact despite the downfall of Mubarak, who were able to use significant state commercial holdings (like the major utilities) to sabotage the economy and foment middle class discontent sufficiently to pull off a “popular rebellion” against the new Morsi presidency, a by-now routine example of a CIA/Zionist “colour revolution”, laced with subsequent military violence shooting hundreds of government supporters who protested this coup in 2013.

But “left” confusion, stupidity and PC single-issue-ism played into the hands of this bourgeois counter-revolution, effectively supporting this toppling of Morsi and the installation of the General Sisi regime, because the MB was not a “perfect” socialist revolution – the usual petty bourgeois idealist nonsense which failed to grasp or understand the significance of the great defeat for imperialism represented by the Arab Spring.

Some like the Lalkar/Proletarian-ites have very belatedly – 10 years later(!) – recognised the reactionary nature of the now entrenched Sisi “presidency” put in place by re-run elections after the Morsi-ites were toppled, a “democratic” nonsense in the light of the suppression, imprisonment and torture of anybody even faintly suspected of supporting any government opposition at all in Egypt, let alone speaking out for the MB (including current notable examples of British citizens held without charge still despite their anyway-outrageous sentences having expired).

But as always the Stalinists say nothing about their cheering on the (middle class) pro-Sisi “masses” which backed up this vicious coup at the time – yet another of the gross errors and mistakes these mountebanks continually cover-up.

Nor do they explain how this would fit with their non-stop denunciations of assorted resistance groups in the Middle East labelled “terrorists” by Western imperialism, and their near hysterical condemnations of all “Sunni sectarianism”. That would include obviously the Sinai rebels who emerged in the wake of the Sisi coup in the region alongside the Zionist border, opposed to the Egyptian regime and particularly its craven “peace-deal” cooperation with the Zionists (as initially established by Sadat).

And it would include the ISIS military assault on Iraq in 2016 which reached almost as far as Baghdad and almost toppled the pro-American stooge Iraqi government (which took over after the utterly corrupt Maliki stoogery had proved totally intolerable) - the subsequent brutal onslaught on this attack by government organised Shia militias in cooperation with American and other Western military aid, blitzing and brutally destroying city after city with indiscriminate massacre of thousands of civilians, demonstrating most clearly the nonsense that the ISIS was “a CIA construct serving the interests of Washington” (as maintained then and still by much of the “left”).

The confused and religious anarchic ideology of these groups is not shared by Marxism and it is important to keep a clear separation when there are revolutionary differences with tactics and understanding, particularly some of the more off-the-wall incidents.

And there are huge complications with Western manipulation of some of these various groupings (which emerged from the anti-US invasion resistance in the Iraqi prisons in the first place and then spread across the region), which need much deeper analysis, most especially in the subsequent 10 year civil war to hamper and eventually bring down the Syrian Assad regime, disliked by imperialism and hated by the Zionists because of its continued (if erratic) backing for the Arab/Palestinian cause and alliances with Iran, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Hamas resistance itself in Palestine.

Clearly over the decade there was endless murky interference – including outright formation or buying off of some anti-Assad groups along the lines of the US manipulation of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s against communist Kabul – but some of the multiple jihadist groups which emerged did so precisely because US/Zionist attempts to recruit and use the islamists repeatedly “blew back”, most obviously so the ISIS group but others too like al-Qaeda.

Pointing to some groups as “offshoots of al-Qaeda” begs all kinds of questions too, since the very fact they were breaks with other groups indicates that they are not the same.

The current “rebel” movement of HTS which finally toppled Assadism is glaringly in the pocket of imperialism and Zionism (see last issue) and helped open up the country for the subsequent blitzing from Tel Aviv which has destroyed all the country’s military capacity, but even there its “reliability” for imperialism is being doubted in various press reports.

Simplistic condemnations of all as “set up by the CIA” or just “throat cutting headbangers” gets the entire fake-“left” trapped in a tangle of contradictions – why are they all supporting the Hamas revolt in Gaza since that is led by a Sunni islamic movement too, is the obvious question?

Or why do those like the Lalkarites effectively support Shia Islamism, the dominant form in the so-called Axis of Resistance?

It is only a different thread of Islam itself, not materialist Marxism, and as prone to “headbanging reactionary” notions and damaging sectarianism – eg the Tehran Islamic Republic pushing through a death sentence just this month for “blasphemy”.

These complex contradictions require further analysis, but the simplistic condemnation of all this “jihadist” upheaval as being the “enemy of mankind”, as the Brarites astoundingly declare in their tirades about the downfall of the Assad regimes and the collapse of the “Axis of Resistance” is the most disgusting capitulation to imperialist ideology (is not capitalist class domination the sole and only enemy ???).

Declaring the Assad regime and its allies in Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and even the persistent Houthi resistance in Yemen, to be the answer to imperialist tyranny and its most brutal manifestation in the Zionist occupation, offering Damascus allout support, was always both deluded and misleading just as previously with Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Gaddafi in Libya.

Every defeat inflicted by any forces against imperialism is crucial, but that implies not one jot of confidence to be given to any of these flaky and unreliable bourgeois nationalisms by the working class which needs to keep its understanding completely separate even when facing the same barbaric enemy.

Part of this disastrous revisionism reflects the deep down class-collaborating belief in the whole post-war order and its pretence to be upholding a “rational world" with a path to a better future through “democracy” and the “international rule of law” through a “United Nations”.

But the Zionist genocide on Gaza (and continuing against the West Bank despite the “ceasefire”) and even more so the non-stop backing of US imperialism (and allies like stooge Britain) indicate the abandonment of the entire “democracy racket”.

Every pretence that this elaborate framework would rein things in (or even present any kind of truth about it) has been torn to shreds.

It is not the Zionists themselves making this clear; the entire “logic” of the Jewish master-race occupation of another people’s land has never had any other possible outcome except total genocidal suppression and/or expulsion, as was manifest from the very beginning in the Stern Gang (etc) massacre-terror forced expulsions of the 1948 Nakba, and non-stop barbarity and butchery ever since, repeatedly killing thousands and thousands of men-women and children along with daily low level violence, torture, kidnap and humiliation.

And its historically inevitable brutal character is brutally spelt out in a recent piece by US writer Seymour Hersh albeit offered with a distracting idealist “psychological cause” explanation “excusing” more “liberal” Israeli jews:

Gaza has become a killing field—that is the view of a well-informed Israeli veteran who was an enthusiastic supporter of the initial Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. He believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the mastermind of the all-out retaliatory bombing and ground attack there, is now a contemporary Colonel Kurtz, the psychotic killer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the famed Vietnam War movie of 1979 based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness.

What began as a retaliatory war by the internationally revered Israel Defense Forces against a disciplined Hamas guerilla force turned into the systematic starvation of a society whose civilian survivors—men, women, and children—are the victims of an Israeli military whose combat units are often led by the second generation of Israeli settlers. These officers, increasingly prominent as the war in Gaza goes on, are religious zealot majors and lieutenant colonels who believe it is their calling to shoot and kill any Palestinian who moves, whether combatant or civilian.

There are more than 120 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including fifteen in East Jerusalem. There are also more than two hundred illegal outposts that are supplied with weapons by the increasingly radical Israeli government while not officially sanctioned by that government. Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has grown steadily, including Israeli Air Force bombing missions.

The IDF recruiting pattern explains the growing violence against Palestinian men, women, and children in the war. I was told that 40 to 45 percent of today’s higher officers in the IDF come from settler families in the West Bank who combine “deep religiosity with Netanyahu’s political fervor.’’ The Israeli veteran told me of watching in horror, with colleagues, as Israeli bombings and earth-moving machinery were continuing to, as he put it, “level” north Gaza and turn it into a dead zone. He said that there “have been more and more reports of colonels and even generals issuing orders to kill every Palestinian you see and destroy every building still standing. Israel’s war in Gaza has become fanatical. It’s apocalypse now. Killing for killing’s sake. It is corruption like never before.”

He was referring to a devastating article published in December by Haaretz, the liberal Israeli daily that is under increasing attack by the Netanyahu administration. The article focused on the Netzarim Corridor, once a narrow partially paved road separating north and south Gaza that has since the 10/7 attack been expanded by the IDF into a two-and-a-half-mile wide safe zone that runs the entire four-mile width of the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of nearby buildings, including a hospital, were bulldozed to clear space for the IDF. The zone is commanded by more than a few officers who, Haaretz reported, routinely order IDF soldiers to execute Gazans, including those who come with children in tow, seeking food and safety.

Many have been summarily executed on the order of senior officers who deemed them to be terrorists. IDF soldiers on duty at the corridor told Haaretz that, at best, one in every twenty of those Gazans looking for any kind of help was a “terrorist” but all were routinely gunned down. One commander at the corridor called it “the line of dead bodies,” where, because bodies were not collected, there are “packs of wild dogs who come to eat them.”

It was explained that the area was a “kill zone,” and anyone who entered without permission was to be shot. There was inevitable competition among the various units assigned to guard the corridor, a recently discharged IDF officer told Haaretz. He also said that the kill zone extended as far as a sniper could see. “We’re killing civilians who are then counted as terrorists.” If one perimeter defense unit has 150 kills, “the next unit aims for 200.”

The competition was very familiar to this reporter. I reported often and mercilessly about the competition for body counts among companies in combat during the Vietnam War. There were benefits for killing the most Vietnamese: a weekend far away from the war with an all-you-can-eat barbeque for the winning unit, complete with a constant flow of beer and, on special occasions, a busload of Vietnamese prostitutes brought by bus from a local city. Once grand but decaying armies, whether in Gaza or Vietnam, fall into the same patterns.

But beyond this is the question of Washington which has kept all this within bounds before, despite condoning multiple and every worsening blitzings every few years to “haircut” the Palestinian resistance. Why not now?

And the answer has to be surely the incredible Catastrophe now about to tip into the abyss, while the Middle East resistance simply keeps on growing.

Imperialism has been losing its warmongering everywhere and is more fearful than ever about the future so it has let the most berserk elements of the Zionist attack dog off the leash completely.

The terrible price is losing the whole postwar “freedom” game and with it the great liberal racket.

And even the terrible ruthlessness of the Zionists has been hammered.

Of course the overwhelming firepower of the world’s most fanatical military plus a vital never-slowing supply of sophisticated weapons, funds, global intelligence resource and international political backing by the Western powers, has eventually prevailed over dogged Palestinian resistance – the “war” as the poodle-stoogery of the Western media laughably refers to possibly the most unequal fight in all history.

And the unspeakable agony imposed by the butchery and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza, reaches unplumbable depths.

But this is to some extent a Pyrrhic victory for the Zionist occupation, still facing an intact Hamas rebellion after 15 months, much diminished for the moment but already recruiting on a massive scale as even Washington has warned.

As one Zionist “professor of counter-terrorism” despaired on Channel Four News, “every youth in Gaza and even the Middle East is now carrying a picture of Yahya Sinwar” (the former head of Hamas, seen defiantly throwing a stick at a hovering drone after being mortally wounded in conflict with Zionist forces in October).

And Zionism’s weaknesses have been exposed in its own terrible costs, with its propaganda casualty figure set at 400 dead (and certainly much more), the economy shot and its inability to invade Lebanon exposed with only a American imposed ceasefire forcing it back.

The treachery of Zionism/imperialism is now further exposed with dirty war on the West Bank as the bourgeois press reports:

Hundreds of people have fled the Jenin refugee camp and surrounding areas as an Israeli assault on the West Bank city enters its third day, amid a deepening crackdown across the occupied Palestinian territory.

“Most of the camp’s residents were forced out, and I was made to leave my neighbourhood,” said 65-year-old Saleh Ammar, who fled the Jouret al-Dhahab neighbourhood inside the camp. “I saw with my own eyes the 12 large bulldozers they brought in: if they wanted to destroy an entire city, they could have done so.”

Israeli officials have labelled the latest escalation in the West Bank, codenamed Iron Wall, which began just days after a ceasefire in Gaza came into effect, as part of a shift in the aims of the war that began in October 2023, after an attack by Palestinian militants on Israeli towns and kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military said it was operating in Jenin to target Palestinian militants in the refugee camp, with the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson, Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, telling reporters in a briefing that the operation was intended to prevent militants “from regrouping” and attacking Israeli civilians.

Ammar accused forces affiliated to the Palestinian Authority of shooting at residents of the refugee camp before Israeli forces entered, to assist their assault. The PA launched its own assault on the camp in December.

“I am so upset by the Palestinian Authority invasion – they burned the houses, installed snipers on the rooftops and opened fire randomly.” Ammar said: “The Israeli army wants to destroy the camp and make it like Jabaliya,” he said, in reference to a refugee camp in Gaza that has been the target of Israeli bombardments until the recent ceasefire. “They want to destroy the houses, bulldoze the streets and remove residents from the camp. They told us to get out before they start bombing.”

He added: “I expected that things would calm down after the ceasefire but I did not expect that the Palestinian Authority would partner with the Israelis in killing its own people.”

The Jenin governor, Kamal Abu al-Rub, told Agence France-Presse that hundreds of people who lived in the camp “have begun leaving after the Israeli army, using loudspeakers on drones and military vehicles, ordered them to evacuate the camp”.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa said Israeli forces further tightened their grip across the West Bank, erecting more checkpoints outside big cities from Jericho to Ramallah, causing long tailbacks of traffic and preventing movement across the territory.

Danny Yatom, a former head of the Mossad who is now a member of the policy group Commanders for Israel’s Security, told reporters: “We need to carry out pre-emptive attacks. We will not wait for a squad from Jenin to come and enter Tel Aviv, but we will do our utmost in order to gather the information needed about this squad, and we will kill them.”

Angelita Caredda, the Middle East and north Africa director for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), pointed to the 12 people who had been killed and 40 injured in the Israeli assault on Jenin, in which drones, aircraft and other heavy weaponry have been used. Several medics at the public hospital close to the camp said they were injured after being targeted by snipers.

She said: “We are seeing disturbing patterns of unlawful use of force in the West Bank that is unnecessary, indiscriminate and disproportionate. This echoes the tactics Israeli forces have employed in Gaza.”

Trump’s lifting of sanctions on West Bank settler thugs underlines the world reality, one of non-stop fascist destruction until capitalism unreason is ended.

Build Leninism. Don Hoskins

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Covering up for Trotsky’s initial 14-year-long hostility to Leninism before October 1917 and total failure in later “Opposition” – all under a guise of “defending Lenin” by the “new” RCP.

Review: In Defence of Lenin – Volume 1 by Rob Sewell and Alan Woods

For all their posturing about “defending the ‘real Lenin’ and the ideas he stood for against the vilification and slanders of bourgeois historians”, it is the authors’ pathetic attempts in to defend Trotsky from reality that makes the real impression in the first part of this two volume biography, launched with much fanfare in January 2024 on the centenary of Lenin’s premature death.

Faced with the impossible task of describing Lenin’s brilliant leadership of the Bolsheviks from the 1903 split with the Menshevik group in the Russian SDLP to the April Theses polemical struggle for a correct appraisal of the dual-power outcome of the February Revolution in 1917, whilst maintaining the fiction that “Lenin and Trotsky were on the same side really”, Woods and Sewell resort to all manner subterfuge and trickery in volume 1 to cover up Trotsky’s outright opposition to Lenin and Bolshevism throughout this period.

This 391-page volume of anti-Leninist distortion also implicitly aims at giving ‘revolutionary’ credence to the rebranding of the expelled long-term Labour party entryist Trotskyists of the Socialist Appeal sect the authors lead, – now incredibly calling themselves the ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’.

This ‘communist’ rebranding is a fraud that conceals over six decades of treacherous ‘parliamentary’ class-collaborationist reformism and anti-Sovietism within the bourgeois-imperialist Labour Party, first as Ted Grant’s Revolutionary Socialist League, then as Militant, and finally, after a split in 1992, as Socialist Appeal.

By calling on “Votes for Labour” these entryist worms had reinforced pro-Empire chauvinism and anti-communism within the working class throughout that time; – by giving a ‘left’ cover to the grossest acts of warmongering tyranny committed by Labour on behalf of British (and US) imperialism, including the imperialist slaughter of communist revolutions in Greece and Malaya and direct collaboration in the 1965 Indonesian anti-communist massacres; the establishment of colonial military-police dictatorship and reign of terror in the north of Ireland; escalated warmongering in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan under Blair; complicity in the non-stop genocide of the Palestinians, starting with the 1948 Nakba horrors; etc, etc, etc.

As part of this rebranding stunt, these twisted Trots have bizarrely revived Stalin-era iconography to emphasise their ‘communist’ credentials. However, they have still yet to explain why their back-stabbing predictions of a fantasy ‘political revolution’ to “kick out the Stalinist bureaucrats” in the USSR and “introduce genuine workers’ control” proved to be hopelessly wrong once Gorbachev’s liquidationist idiocies led to mafia-capitalist chaos in the 1990s in Russia, and the re-emergence of fascism and national chauvinism across East Europe, – not least in Poland, where these Trot losers, along with the rest of Trotskyism, joined arms with Lech Walesa’s fascist Pilsudski-ite stooges for the CIA, the Vatican, Reagan and Thatcher in their ‘rank-and-file socialism’ Solidarnosc fraud.

After finally noticing that there is a raging capitalist crisis now creating the conditions in which a perspective of revolutionary socialist theory can be fought for amongst the working class and won, the new ‘RCP’ brand was launched and promoted by various bourgeois media outlets; – to divert workers away from Leninism. The crisis gets a very brief mention in the introduction to the book:

This [bourgeois anti-Leninist] campaign has intensified in recent times and the howls have grown louder. There is a very good reason for this. At the present time, as is abundantly clear, the capitalist system is in a deep crisis. The growth of anti-capitalist feeling means that the ruling class will again be haunted by the threat of revolution. (p14-15)

But this is a deception as it presents capitalism’s crisis as episodic (“at the present time”; “a deep crisis”). It carries with it the incorrect and misleading implication that the crisis could be ‘solved’ by implementing ‘socialist reforms’, despite the authors’ centrist bombast about “threats of revolution”.

Marxism-Leninism is built on the materialist understanding that capitalism’s unstoppable crisis is leading the world towards a return (for the third time) to slump and inter-imperialist world-war catastrophe, – which can only be ended by a world socialist revolution to build workers states of proletarian dictatorship.

Whilst continuing to downplay the catastrophic nature of the crisis (“in these turbulent times”), Woods and Sewell do provide interesting polling data that demonstrate growing openness to revolutionary perspectives amongst the youth (but concerning Britain only):

In these turbulent times, Lenin’s ideas of world revolution are becoming more attractive to those seeking a way out of this world of war and suffering. Events are transforming consciousness everywhere. According to a YouGov poll about the popularity of Lenin, only 4 per cent of baby boomers have a positive view of Lenin, but amongst millennials, this figure is 40 per cent. Unfortunately, it did not give the figure for the Generation Z youth, but this would certainly have been much higher, as all they have ever experienced is life under capitalist crisis.

A YouGov poll from 2019, before the pandemic, found that a third of US millennials approved of communism, while the popularity of capitalism has slumped. A year later, it was reported that the number of young Americans who have a favourable view of Marxism had increased five-fold in just one year. Bloomberg is describing it as a “youth quake”.

A spectre is once again haunting the world, that of Leninism, to paraphrase The Communist Manifesto. And on the centenary of Lenin’s death, we believe it is time to publish a book about this extraordinary man, his ideas and his lifelong fight for communism. It is the task of the new generation to absorb the lessons provided by Lenin as they fight for a new world free of misery, tyranny and hunger. (p15)

The last posturing paragraph is just camouflage for Trotskyism’s track-record of endless hostility to Soviet communism. Lenin’s “lifelong fight for communism” necessitated a lifelong fight against Trotsky’s anti-Bolshevism, – the first part of which is both covered up or distorted in volume 1 of the authors’ claimed “Defence”.

It was the political leadership given by Lenin and his lifelong Bolshevik colleagues in the party-led polemical battles for a correct understanding of events as they emerged from 1903 to 1917, against the subjective idealism of the numerous backstabbing and hostile opposition groups and figures, not least including Trotsky, that made the 1917 October Revolution possible.

Trotsky’s “Everything is rotten” perspective, from his 1923 New Course campaign onwards against any revisionist bureaucratic mistake and misanalysis made, and his endless prognoses of ‘disintegration’ and ‘collapse’ for the USSR, could only ever have had the effect of undermining confidence in the new workers state.

His doomy predictions of defeat for a ‘demoralised’ and ‘discontented’ Soviet state at the hands of Nazi invaders from 1939 (e.g. in The Twin Stars: Hitler-Stalin) proved to be hopelessly out of tune with reality in 1945 when the Red Army smashed Hitler’s war machine after four years of heroic self-sacrifice; – inspiring communist and national-liberation revolutions throughout the world; – and then going on to make stunning achievements in the fields of science, technology, health, education, culture, sport, etc, etc, etc.

The Stalinist-revisionist leadership of the Soviet workers state needed continuous criticism for its mistakes, retreats and lapses (such as its Popular Front retreats – e.g. China in 1927, Spain in 1936), but only whilst unconditionally supporting its advances against every single piece of imperialist subterfuge, disinformation and provocation.

The ‘political revolution’ fraud was declared by some of the slimiest of Trot groups (including the RCP’s forerunners) to insist that they did give ‘unconditional support’ to the Soviet Union, whilst in reality running with and amplifying every single piece of hate-filled, demonising bourgeois mass media and anti-communist propaganda going, – particularly when it proved necessary to use the full force of its proletarian dictatorship to reimpose centralised discipline in response to counter-revolutionary capitalist provocations (e.g. Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) [EPSR Book Vol. 29 on Trotkyism].

If “only 4 per cent of baby boomers [in Britain] have a positive view of Lenin” as the quoted YouGov poll suggests, then the responsibility lies with the undermining impact of class-collaborating Trotskyism’s constant defeatist sniping at the USSR’s tremendous achievements, and not because they have not “spent their entire lives under capitalist crisis”, – which is a complete distortion of Marxist-Leninist science anyway.

In reality, all anyone has ever known is capitalist crisis.

The current conditions of inflation and ‘austerity’ following the Great Crash of 2008-9 are simply the latest manifestations of the same capitalist crisis that first became visible in the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange system after 1971 when mounting economic pressures forced Richard Nixon to suspend dollar-gold convertibility.

This shift to floating exchange rates, combined with an expansionary monetary policy, contributed to significant inflation in the 1970s alongside other factors, like the 1973-4 oil shocks. It also bankrupted Britain in 1976, with a combination of high inflation and a weak pound forcing James Callaghan’s stooge Labour government to go cap in hand to the IMF for loans, – and treacherously agree to public spending cuts and monetary ‘reforms’ aimed at rescuing British capitalism from collapse by pushing the burdens of the crisis onto the working class.

British capitalism was (temporarily) rescued by the fluke discovery of North Sea oil, combined with Thatcher’s aggressive anti-working class extension of the IMF’s cost-cutting, privatising measures and financial deregulation, – despite the continued decline of manufacturing that saw the closures of steel works, coal mines, textile factories, etc. (some of it deliberately so to break up militant trade unionism) and record levels of long-term unemployment. Entire working class communities have been blighted ever since.

Other devastating symptoms of unravelling general worldwide capitalist crisis include the 1982 Latin American Debt Crisis, the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash, Japan’s ‘Lost Decade’ 1990s stagflation (and since too), the 1994 Mexican Peso Crisis, the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the 1998 Russian Financial Crisis, and the 2000 Dot-com bubble burst.

These shocks led up to the 2008-9 Great Financial Crash (and the follow-on 2010-12 Eurozone Crisis), which nearly collapsed the entire capitalist system before it was temporarily ‘rescued’ by the inflationary pumping of trillions of dollars into the world economy (‘quantitative easing’; ‘fiat money’), which first pushed the burdens of the crisis onto the Third World, but is now rebounding back onto the heartlands of Western imperialism.

Woods and Sewell must be looking at the world economy through a very middle class lens if they only see the start of this crisis as being from the mid-to-late 1990s at the earliest (when the ‘Generation Z’ demographic cohort is said to begin). That the crisis has now begun to have a devastating impact on the lifestyles and expectations of the middle classes is an interesting development that proves the truth of Marx’s once derided prediction of the “proletarianisation of the middle classes”, as can even be seen in this cutting from the bourgeois Guardian in its description of the impact of the 2008-9 crash on the labour market:

In his 2023 book End Times, the US academic Peter Turchin identifies “elite overproduction” – essentially an economy creating far more educated, ambitious potential elite members than it has prestigious jobs to offer them – as a key trigger for revolutions and civil wars, especially when combined with deep economic inequality and high public debt. Though from the outside these thwarted alphas still look relatively privileged compared with their peers, it’s the gap between what they think they were promised and what they actually got that breeds explosive levels of resentment. Frustrated wannabe elites can morph into angry counter-elites, turning on the establishment they had originally dreamed of joining when they realise it isn’t actually going to let them in after all. Though populist parties traditionally do best among working-class voters who never went to college, Turchin argues that it’s when these frustrated elites make common political cause with the more genuinely impoverished masses that they are most likely to combine and crush the centre. If Reform UK succeeds in its dream of overtaking the Tories as the main challenger to Labour – the threat increasingly preoccupying Keir Starmer’s government as it heads into what will undoubtedly be a difficult year – then it might be by bringing together such an unlikely coalition of the aggrieved.

You could argue that a young professional uprising seems a remote prospect in a country such as Britain, where frustrated elites are more likely to vent their anger by just going on strike – as junior doctors did last year, protesting that they could be getting a better hourly rate at Pret a Manger – or kicking out a Tory government than anything more revolutionary.

But the idea that political instability often follows when governments make promises they can’t keep is a sound one, and your heart doesn’t have to bleed for disillusioned graduates to worry that something is broken here. Gen Z voting patterns around the world now suggest at the very least a backlash against mainstream parties and craving for more radical ones. Across Europe and the US, young voters are turning to the far right in worrying numbers; in Britain, the Greens on the left and Nigel Farage’s Reform party on the right experienced surging support among the under-30s last summer. This may be the year we find out whether that was in retrospect the high-water mark of the gen Z revolt, or merely the beginning.

Gaby Hinsliff associates ‘Generation Z’ with middle class “young professionals” and “frustrated elites”, not the working class youth who have always felt the negative consequences of capitalist crisis to varying degrees. And, as she argues, their anger and discontent can lash out in all directions, including via Farage’s poundshop fascism.

The RCP never describe their ‘youth’ in class terms, though they claim that ‘the youth’ in general have a semi-mystical “gut instinct” for ‘communism’ coming not from a scientific understanding of material conditions, but from some voodoo fiction called “the soul”, as Woods preached in February 2024 in this astonishing outburst of anti-theory philistinism:

In every single country, conditions can change, and consciousness can change in 24 hours.

We must be prepared. And how do we prepare? Well, it’s very simple. In the past, you had to struggle to persuade people as to the correctness of communist ideas and Marxist ideas.

Not anymore. In all countries it’s a fact, an empirically verifiable fact. I’ve not invented it: thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of young people are already drawing the correct conclusions.

They’ve already accepted the idea of communism. They desire communism. To these people, even ‘socialism’ doesn’t sound right. Somehow, it sounds weak. It sounds related to reformism. It doesn’t fit the bill. It doesn’t answer what they feel in their guts, in their hearts, in their souls.

You say to me, “well, these young kids are very green. They haven’t studied. They don’t know. They’re not proper Marxists.” That’s not correct. They are very proper Marxists. They are real communists. You know, I’ve been a communist since I was a kid, and Rob also, we are from a communist, working-class family.

I was a communist before I read any books. The books are important. They’re fundamental. Without that knowledge we’re nothing. We’re unskilled labourers. That’s no good at all.

However, real communism doesn’t come from the books. It comes from the soul. It comes from your gut instinct and the need to fight, to change things. These young kids, they call themselves communists. They may have never read the Communist Manifesto. But they are communists. You don’t need to convince these kids. They are looking for us. We have to find them. We have to establish contacts wherever they are.

Whilst it is interesting that large numbers of people appear spontaneously to be sympathising with Lenin and communism, which is a superficial indication of the extent that the capitalist crisis is pushing large sections of the population towards socialism, this is not the same as saying that working class youths have already developed a revolutionary consciousness, or are capable of doing so independently – as Woods implies in his fit of self-aggrandising histrionics.

(As an aside, Woods needs to read what he and his co-author wrote in the introduction to his book and look in the mirror!!:

Lenin venerated the truth and had a healthy contempt for ‘prestige politics’, of false boasting, chest-beating and hollow exaggeration, which serves to pull the wool over other people’s eyes. (p.12)

– notwithstanding the inept semi-religious notion of “venerating truth” – which is a piece of posturing in itself.)

As Hinsliff indicates, many under-30s are currently expressing their anger and frustrations by spontaneously turning to the far right, and so a have not yet been “convinced” by communism.

There are all manner of fake-‘lefts’ causing maximum confusion amongst the working class by professing to be ‘communists’ but having nothing to do with Leninism, and it all looks extremely unconvincing; – anarcho-communists, ‘degrowth ecological communists’, ‘libertarian communists’, black-nationalist ‘hood communists’, Trotskyists like the RCP, Stalin guru-worshippers, and other assorted revisionists and Eurocommunist remnants, etc. (there is even a bunch of right-wing Trump supporting loonies calling themselves ‘MAGA-communists’!!); – and it is not at all clear what those surveyed (for or against) think communism is, or what Lenin stood for.

It would be interesting to see how those surveyed would respond to a follow-up question that asked “Do you have a favourable view of the need to establish a firm proletarian dictatorship to defend a communist workers state?” – given the non-stop ‘freedom and democracy’, ‘anti-totalitarianism’ brainwashing Western bourgeois education systems and academia are saturated in alongside individualism-promoting youth-orientated consumer culture.

The working class is fatally reluctant to embrace revolutionary political perspectives. This distrust needs to be fought against from the outside by a vanguard party of revolutionary theory battling to win workers over to a correct scientific understanding of warmongering imperialist slump and the need for workers states of proletarian dictatorships as the only possible replacement (i.e. Leninism).

Revolutionary consciousness will only come through this battle for understanding; and without it, whatever embryonic (revolutionary) consciousness workers have developed spontaneously will be subsumed by the dominant bourgeois ideology emanating from the misanalysis of their trade union leaders and the flotsam-and-jetsam of anti-proletarian-dictatorship fake-‘lefts’ of all shades, as Lenin argued in What Is To Be Done?.

Woods and Sewell seek to undermine confidence in Lenin’s profound scientific understanding of the development of consciousness as expressed in this pamphlet by slyly using an apparently Trotskyist translation of the minutes of a speech given to the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 to imply that it was all just an ‘ultra-left’ exaggeration used to win an argument:

In his attack on the Economists and their worship of spontaneity, Lenin, as he himself put it “bent the stick” in the other direction. In his argument, he uses the words of Kautsky to say that consciousness can only be brought to the workers from the outside by the intelligentsia and that the working class was only capable of a “trade union” consciousness.

This idea [... ] is clearly wrong. Whilst it is true that the highest expression of socialist consciousness, namely the theory of Marxism, was not thrown up by the working class, but arose from the most advanced ideas of the time – German philosophy, English classical political economy and French socialism – workers were nevertheless capable of drawing political and revolutionary conclusions. The history of ‘physical force’ Chartism in England is one example where the workers themselves threw up their own socialist theoreticians, such as Bronterre O’Brien, and drew very revolutionary conclusions.

Lenin soon realised his mistake and a year later, during the Second Congress of the RSDLP, he explained:

“We all know that the ‘Economists’ bent the stick on one direction. In order to straighten the stick it was necessary to bend it in the other direction, and that is what I did.”

In other words, Lenin’s error was a political exaggeration against spontaneity, nothing more, which he never repeated. On the contrary, throughout his life, Lenin displayed nothing but enormous confidence in the independent initiative of the masses and their ability to draw revolutionary conclusions. (pp.106-107)

This confused rigmarole is all just a smokescreen to divert attention from the need to build revolutionary party of leadership theory.

Lenin did not suggest that “the working class was only capable of a ‘trade union’ consciousness”. If that was the case, there would never be a revolution because workers would never achieve a socialist (revolutionary, communist) consciousness. Rather, he described how socialist ideology could only have been developed by the bourgeois intelligentsia, who had access to all the philosophical and scientific theories of the time. From its own independent, spontaneous effort, the working class was only capable of developing a ‘trade union’ consciousness.

The history of Chartism in England, starting from 1838, proves the opposite of the authors’ claims. It was revolutionary, but its practical proletarian struggle for parliamentary reforms went into decline following the defeat of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. This was same year that the bourgeois intellectuals Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, which popularised dialectical-materialist science and was the culmination of a decade of struggle for revolutionary theory. The Chartists could not have developed this despite moves the most advanced of them made towards socialism (including those Marx and Engels corresponded with in the 1850s).

However, Lenin explicitly agreed that the working class can throw up socialist theoreticians. The two authors’ bogus refutation of this is contradicted immediately after the Kautsky quote they refer to, in a footnote written by Lenin, which expanded on Kautsky’s (relatively ‘one-sided’, but still profound) argument:

Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement*, the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.

[*This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge. But in order that working men may succeed in this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.]

From V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (Autumn 1901 - February 1902))

Woods and Sewell conflate this self-evident history of the development of communist ideology with Lenin’s fight against the “Economists’” worship of spontaneity to suggest that Lenin was exaggerating the crucial role theory plays in developing consciousness.

This twisted claim is based on some obscure translation (possibly by a Trotskyist publishing house) that suggests that he used the term “bending the stick”, which the two authors interpret as “exaggerating”; – the reactionary bourgeois anti-communist Robert Service also uses this version in his scurrilous “biography” of Lenin to suggest a similar thing. Lenin’s Collected Works has a different translation:

To conclude. We all now know that the “economists” have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out somebody had to pull in the other direction—and that is what I have done. I am convinced that Russian Social-Democracy will always vigorously straighten out whatever has been twisted by opportunism of any kind, and that therefore our line of action will always be the straightest and the fittest for action.

From Speech on the Party Programme (July 1903), V.I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 6 (pp.488-489)

Regardless of the translation, this was not some artificial and mistaken “exaggeration”. Lenin was describing the need to for a vigorous polemical fight from the outside against the influence of bourgeois ideology on the proletarian movement in conditions in which a Bolshevik-style party of revolutionary theory had yet to be established, as he had already had pointed out in the spontaneity and consciousness section of What Is To Be Done?:

But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination. And the younger the socialist movement in any given country, the more vigorously it must struggle against all attempts to entrench non-socialist ideology, and the more resolutely the workers must be warned against the bad counsellors who shout against “overrating the conscious element”, etc. The authors of the Economist letter, in unison with Rabocheye Dyelo, inveigh against the intolerance that is characteristic of the infancy of the movement. To this we reply: Yes, our movement is indeed in its infancy, and in order that it may grow up faster, it must become imbued with intolerance against those who retard its growth by their subservience to spontaneity. Nothing is so ridiculous and harmful as pretending that we are “old hands” who have long ago experienced all the decisive stages of the struggle.

The situation had changed in Russia by 1905, the year of revolution. The Bolshevik “trend” had by then been firmly established, and, through its polemical battle for correct revolutionary theory, had made great strides in transforming the working class’s spontaneous instincts for revolutionary socialism into consciousness. Lenin now called for “the bow to be bent ever so slightly” away from theory and towards practical work:

Let us not exaggerate this danger, comrades. Social-Democracy has established a name for itself, has created a trend and has built up cadres of Social-Democratic workers. And now that the heroic proletariat has proved by deeds its readiness to fight, and its ability to fight consistently and in a body for clearly-understood aims, to fight in a purely Social-Democratic spirit, it would be simply ridiculous to doubt that the workers who belong to our Party, or who will join it tomorrow at the invitation of the Central Committee, will be Social-Democrats in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social-Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by Social-Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness. Don’t invent bugaboos, comrades! Don’t forget that in every live and growing party there will always be elements of instability, vacillation, wavering. But these elements can be influenced, and they will submit to the influence of the steadfast and solid core of Social-Democrats.

………………….

The relation between the functions of the intellectuals and of the proletariat (workers) in the Social-Democratic working-class movement can probably be expressed, with a fair degree of accuracy, by the following general formula: the intelligentsia is good at solving problems “in principle”, good at drawing up plans, good at reasoning about the need for action—while the workers act, and transform drab theory into living reality.

And I shall not in the slightest degree slip into demagogy, nor in the least belittle the great role played by consciousness in the working-class movement, nor shall I in any way detract from the tremendous importance of Marxist theory and Marxist principles, if I say now: both at the Congress and at the Conference we created the “drab theory” of Party unity. Comrade workers, help us to transform this drab theory into living reality! Join the Party organisations in huge numbers! Turn our Fourth Congress and the Second Menshevik Conference into a grand and imposing Congress of Social-Democratic workers. Join with us in settling this practical question of fusion; let this question be the exception (it is an exception that proves the opposite rule!) in which we shall have one-tenth theory and nine-tenths practice. Such a wish is surely legitimate, historically necessary, and psychologically comprehensible. We have “theorised” for so long (sometimes—why not admit it?— to no use) in the unhealthy atmosphere of political exile, that it will really not be amiss if we now “bend the bow” slightly, a little, just a little, “the other way” and put practice a little more in the forefront. This would certainly be appropriate in regard to the question of unity, about which, owing to the causes of the split, we have used up such an awful lot of ink and no end of paper. We exiles in particular are longing for practical work. Besides, we have already written a very good and comprehensive programme of the whole democratic revolution. Let us, then, unite also to make this revolution!

From: V.I. Lenin The Reorganisation of the Party, (Nov 1905), Collected Works, Vol 10. (pp. 31-32)

Far from admitting a “mistake”, Lenin took the (belated) “exaggeration” smears of the Menshevik-minded Woods and Sewells of his day head on in 1907, by putting the polemical tone used against the Economists in its context, and explaining that all he was doing was correcting their distortions:

The basic mistake made by those who now criticise What Is To Be Done? is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our Party. This mistake was strikingly demonstrated, for instance, by Parvus (not to mention numerous Mensheviks), who, many years after the pamphlet appeared, wrote about its incorrect or exaggerated ideas on the subject of an organisation of professional revolutionaries.

Today these statements look ridiculous, as if their authors want to dismiss a whole period in the development of our Party, to dismiss gains which, in their time, had to be fought for, but which have long ago been consolidated and have served their purpose.

To maintain today that Iskra exaggerated (in 1901 and 1902) the idea of an organisation of professional revolutionaries, is like reproaching the Japanese, after the Russo-Japanese War, for having exaggerated the strength of Russia’s armed forces, for having prior to the war exaggerated the need to prepare for fighting these forces. To win victory the Japanese had to marshal all their forces against the probable maximum of Russian forces. Unfortunately, many of those who judge our Party are outsiders, who do not know the subject, who do not realise that today the idea of an organisation of professional revolutionaries has already scored a complete victory. That victory would have been impossible if this idea had not been pushed to the forefront at the time, if we had not “exaggerated” so as to drive it home to people who were trying to prevent it from being realised.

What Is To Be Done? is a summary of Iskra tactics and Iskra organisational policy in 1901 and 1902. Precisely a “summary”, no more and no less. That will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to go through the file of Iskra for 1901 and 1902. But to pass judgement on that summary without knowing Iskra’s struggle against the then dominant trend of Economism, without understanding that struggle, is sheer idle talk. Iskra fought for an organisation of professional revolutionaries. It fought with especial vigour in 1901 and 1902, vanquished Economism, the then dominant trend, and finally created this organisation in 1903. It preserved it in face of the subsequent split in the Iskrist ranks and all the convulsions of the period of storm and stress; it preserved it throughout the Russian revolution; it preserved it intact from 1901-02 to 1907.

And now, when the fight for this organisation has long been won, when the seed has ripened, and the harvest gathered, people come along and tell us: “You exaggerated the idea of an organisation of professional revolutionaries!” Is this not ridiculous?

[...]Nor at the Second Congress did I have any intention of elevating my own formulations, as given in What Is To Be Done?, to “programmatic” level, constituting special principles. On the contrary, the expression I used— and it has since been frequently quoted—was that the Economists had gone to one extreme. What Is To Be Done?, I said, straightens out what had been twisted by the Economists (cf. minutes of the Second R.S.D.L.P. Congress in 1903, Geneva, 1904). I emphasised that just because we were so vigorously straightening out whatever had been twisted our line of action would always be the straightest.[10] The meaning of these words is clear enough: What Is To Be Done? is a controversial correction of Economist distortions and it would be wrong to regard the pamphlet in any other light.

Lenin was crystal clear from What Is To Be Done? onwards that a disciplined, centralised vanguard party of revolutionary theory, operating in conflict and unity with the working class, was necessary to develop revolutionary socialist consciousness. That is the essence of Leninism!!! There was no ‘error’.

He spent the next 14 years battling against Trotsky and all the other ill-disciplined, hostile petty-bourgeois vacillators, Mensheviks, liquidationists, and other assorted mavericks and place-seekers precisely to build the party of revolutionary theory and leadership the Bolsheviks came to be, and to expose, from the outside, the misanalyses and misleadership all of them provided. Without it, October 1917 would not have happened.

The two authors’ petty-bourgeois hostility to such a disciplined approach to developing correct party theory and battling for it within the working class leads them to want to cast doubt on this crucial piece of Leninist understanding.

They want to rehash these dusty old out-of-context arguments as part of the RCP rebranding stunt in order to divert attention away from the need for a polemical fight for Leninist philosophical leadership within the working class today.

Take the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 as an example. It was clear to Marxist-Leninism then that capitalism was already on a long-term course to slump catastrophe, and that this could not be reversed; – not by the NUM leadership’s Plan for Coal demands, nor by any other ‘socialist’ reforms by a capitalist Labour government.

Although miners’ consciousness did show signs of having spontaneously gone further than Arthur Scargill’s futile ‘left’ reformism, it was unable to develop spontaneously into the revolutionary consciousness needed to identify the roots of the dispute in the contradictions inherent within the capitalist system itself, and to be convinced that the only way to resolve this is to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a socialist workers state.

This was despite the fact that they were up against the full might of the capitalist police state and the near civil-war conditions of life in their communities.

This socialist consciousness needed to have been brought in from the outside, from a revolutionary party that had already gone through huge polemical struggles to develop a correct scientific analysis of the imperialism’s warmongering slump crisis, and was continually battling to develop and adapt the theory as new developments emerge in the real world – as the EPSR’s forerunner, the ILWP Bulletin attempted to do then.

The material conditions at the time of this strike upheaval may still have prevented such a revolutionary outcome, but at least the heroic striking miners would have had a scientific grasp of why the strike was defeated. If a revolutionary socialist consciousness had developed, they would have avoided much of the demoralisation and defeatism that still lingers on in former mining communities today as a consequence of Scargillism’s unfulfilled promises; and they would have been more prepared to give a lead in today’s struggles. [See EPSR Book Vol 14: Party leadership & theory – including substantial quotes from Lenin’s ‘What Is To Be Done?’; and EPSR No. 677]

Given Woods’ philistine dismissal of the need of theory to develop the revolutionary consciousness of the working class (“real communism doesn’t come from books”) because the “young kids” are already fully-formed conscious communists, it would be logical to assume that these tricksters would take the Mensheviks’ side in the 1903 Party Congress dispute between those who wanted a narrow, centralised party structure (Lenin and the Bolshevik majority), and those in favour of a loose structure open as widely as practically possible to all sympathisers (Trotsky and the Menshevik minority).

However, they say nothing about Trotsky’s opposition to Lenin on this point, and suggest that he only broke with him at a later point. They attempt to back this up with a quote from Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya (“At the beginning of the conference, Trotsky spoke competently”; and “he was regarded by everyone as an ardent supporter of Lenin”), – but this quote comes prior to the debate on the party statutes in her impressionistic Memories of Lenin.

This is how Trotsky set out his position immediately after the Congress:

The first point of the statutes – the definition of the concept of “party member” – served as the basis of the first open clash. This conflict in fact emerged on a point having nothing to do directly with the questions which divided us. In spite of all that, the conflict was of a fateful nature.

[...] We should stress one characteristic feature: the totally abstract nature of Comrade Lenin’s position. Control over the members of the Party is necessary. This control can only be assured if it is possible to reach each member. Now, this can only be done if all the members of the Party are formally fixed, that is, registered in the appropriate manner with one of the Party organizations. Then the Central Committee, present everywhere, penetrating into everything and considering everything, can reach each Party member on the scene of the crime. In reality, this is a fairly innocent bureaucratic dream; if the question had remained at that level one could light-heartedly have left the partisans of Lenin’s formula with the platonic satisfaction of feeling that the Second Congress of the RSDLP had discovered the surest statutory remedy for opportunism and intellectual individualism. But, if one moves on from this sterile formalism to the real questions before the Party, Comrade Lenin’s formula then has certain drawbacks. (L. Trotsky, Report of the Siberian Delegation (1903))

So, Lenin was apparently indulging in “innocent bureaucratic dreams” and “sterile formalism” (and elsewhere in the report Trotsky describes Lenin as “a caricature of Robespierre” wanting to establish “a system of Terror”). These are all embryonic forms of the sneers later endlessly targeted at ‘Stalinism’ by Trotsky from 1923, and later by the Trotskyists; but in reality, aimed at Lenin’s centralised, disciplined party structure, – which from 1912 became the Bolshevik party, and which then went on to lead the earth-shattering October Revolution in 1917 and the new Soviet Union’s proletarian dictatorship.

No wonder Woods and Sewell want to cover this up!!!

They do concede that Trotsky (“later”!!) broke with Lenin during the Congress (how could they not???), but just look at how they word it:

But the twenty-four-year-old Trotsky would later break with Lenin during the Congress and side with Martov. Trotsky, who was still very inexperienced and impulsive, did not grasp the substance of what was happening. He was influenced by the indignant appeals of the old editors, who he had thought were being unfairly treated and took their side [in the subsequent dispute on the membership of the editorial board of Iskra – ed]. He later admitted unreservedly that Lenin had been right and he had been wrong. ‘My attitude towards the editors of the Iskra was still touched with the sentimentality of youth’, he later explained. (pp.138-139)

So, it turns out the ‘youth’, who, have spontaneously become “proper Marxists; real communists” according to Woods & Sewell, are in reality vulnerable to impulsiveness, inexperience and sentimentality, and are easily influenced by the appeals of others (or is that just Trotsky???), – and so are not that conscious after all!!!

Trotsky’s later act of ‘contrition’ came in 1930 in his self-aggrandising biography My Life, by which time reality had proven his 14-year-long opposition to Lenin and the Bolsheviks hopelessly wrong.

The two authors continue along this line of excuse-making for Trotsky’s attempts to break up at birth the party structure that came to be known as Bolshevism, as when describing his follow-on attacks in his 1904, – in which he also came out against What Is To Be Done? (though they fail to mention this):

A year after the Second Congress, Trotsky wrote a pamphlet, Our Political Tasks, which was a litany of attacks on Lenin and his supporters. In its pages Trotsky tried to answer Lenin’s book, One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back. Trotsky accused Lenin of creating a bureaucratic dictatorship and creating a “barracks discipline” within the Party. Many of the allegations – and much of the language – contained within the pamphlet were a reflections of the antagonisms produced by the split. The pamphlet, he wrote later, contained ‘not a little that is immature and erroneous in my criticisms of Lenin”, although their were certainly pages that were criticisms of Bolshevik ‘committee-men’, who Lenin also clashed with.

[...] Trotsky later categorically repudiated the mistakes he had made on this question in his youth, which were typical of polemical exaggerations. (p.153)

So it was Trotsky who was “bending the stick” (in the sense that the two authors present it) all this time!!!

But even this is total misrepresentation of what Trotsky was doing. He was not “exaggerating”; he was organising outright opposition to Bolshevism, – an opposition that he persisted with in various guises for the next 13 years, until finally slinking his way into the Bolshevik party in May 1917 in total failure.

(It should also be pointed out that the allegations and nasty language he levelled at Lenin were not “reflections of the antagonisms produced by the split” but reflections of the conceited, individualistic petty-bourgeois class position of someone who always thought that he should have been in charge.)

Given all this, why should workers give any credence to the hoary old (undoubtedly untrue) Trotskyist trope that Lenin moved over to Trotsky’s position on his fantasy permanent revolution ‘theory’.

According to the two authors, Trotsky had “worked out its essentials as early as 1904”, which they had already admitted was a time of youthful immaturity, inexperience and impulsivity.

Lenin’s profound grasp of the dual power political situation following the February 1917, bore no relation to Trotsky’s empty “No Tsar, but a workers’ government” sloganeering, and he made a point of distanced himself from this in Letters on Tactics (which the authors leave out despite using long quotes from this document (pp.384-386)).

Lenin was acutely aware of the inexperience of youth and their vulnerability towards the influence of such clever and eloquent petty-bourgeois opportunists. In May 1914, he gave this warning to young workers about Trotsky:

The old participants in the Marxist movement in Russia know Trotsky very well, and there is no need to discuss him for their benefit. But the younger generation of workers do not know him, and it is therefore necessary to discuss him, for he is typical of all the five groups abroad, which, in fact, are also vacillating between the liquidators and the Party.

In the days of the old Iskra (1901-03), these waverers, who flitted from the Economists to the Iskrists and back again, were dubbed “Tushino turncoats” (the name given in the Troublous Times in Rus to fighting men who went over from one camp to another).

When we speak of liquidationism we speak of a definite ideological trend, which grew up in the course of many years, stems from Menshevism and Economism in the twenty years’ history of Marxism, and is connected with the policy and ideology of a definite class—the liberal bourgeoisie.

The only ground the “Tushino turncoats” have for claiming that they stand above groups is that they “borrow” their ideas from one group one day and from another the next day. Trotsky was an ardent Iskrist in 1901-03, and Ryazanov described his role at the Congress of 1903 as “Lenin’s cudgel”. At the end of 1903, Trotsky was an ardent Menshevik, i. e., he deserted from the Iskrists to the Economists. He said that “between the old Iskra and the new lies a gulf”. In 1904-05, he deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the Economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left “permanent revolution” theory. In 1906-07, he approached the Bolsheviks, and in the spring of 1907 he declared that he was in agreement with Rosa Luxemburg.

In the period of disintegration, after long “non-factional” vacillation, he again went to the right, and in August 1912, he entered into a bloc with the liquidators. He has now deserted them again, although in substance he reiterates their shoddy ideas.

Such types are characteristic of the flotsam of past historical formations, of the time when the mass, working-class movement in Russia was still dormant, and when every group had “ample room” in which to pose as a trend, group or faction, in short, as a “power”, negotiating amalgamation with others.

The younger generation of workers should know exactly whom they are dealing with, when individuals come before them with incredibly pretentious claims, unwilling absolutely to reckon with either the Party decisions, which since 1908 have defined and established our attitude towards liquidationism, or with the experience of the present-day working-class movement in Russia, which has actually brought about the unity of the majority on the basis of full recognition of the aforesaid decisions.

From Disruption of Unity Under Cover of Outcries for Unity, V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 20, pp.346-347

The same needs to be warned of similar swindlers who have managed to smuggle their way into the workers movement today by pretending to defend Lenin whilst in reality striving to revive Trotskyist hatred of Bolshevism.

In June-August 2024, the RCP made a great noise about their support for middle-class student protestors in Bangladesh, and celebrated the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s nationalist government as a “revolutionary victory for the students of Bangladesh”. In reality, they had fallen on the same side as US imperialism and its local Pakistani and Bangladeshi capitalist stooges in what now appears to have been a long-planned intelligence-agency backed campaign to orchestrate a counter-revolutionary military coup to install the pro-Western neoliberal, capitalist banker Muhammed Yunus (see EPSR No. 1647).

These barmy Trots had even declared that “a kind of dual power exists” – a ludicrous assessment they have never returned to, either to retract or explain (which a genuinely Leninist organisation would do for the invaluable learning experience they would obtain).

In fact, the students had taken over policing and other civil administration duties in the vacuum that followed Hasina’s fall, to rescue capitalism.

Since her fall, Bangladesh has seen an upsurge in reactionary muslim fundamentalist violence against hindus and other minorities; brutal killings, torture and persecution of individuals associated with Hasina’s Awami League, and the airbrushing of its leadership of Bangladesh’s national-liberation struggle from the history books; and a rise in CIA-inspired separatist tensions on the border with Myanmar.

Bangladesh has also become increasingly indebted and beholden to the US-imperialist IMF as the stooge bourgeoisie struggle to respond to growing economic turmoil and social unrest.

Information leaked to online publication Grayzone last September point to imperialism’s deliberate CIA targeting of students and the youth (including by establishing a youth-orientated regime-change network) with the aim of destabilising Bangladesh when Hasina was in power, from at least 2019. Although the paper not Marxist, its investigative journalism does frequently uncover useful details as below:

[…] leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone confirm the State Department was informed of efforts by the International Republican Institute (IRI) to advance an explicitly stated mission to “destabilize Bangladesh’s politics.” The documents are marked as “confidential and/or privileged.”

IRI is a Republican Party-run subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy, which has fueled an array of regime change operations across the globe since it was conceived in the office of CIA Director William Casey over forty years ago.

The newly-uncovered files reveal how IRI spent millions in the lead-up to Hasina’s overthrow covertly coaching opposition parties and establishing a regime change network concentrated among the country’s urban youth. Among the GOP-run Institute’s front line foot soldiers were rappers, ethnic minority leaders, LGBT activists hosting “transgender dance performances” in the presence of US embassy officials – all groomed to facilitate what the US intelligence cutout called a “power shift” in Bangladesh.

[..] In reality, as the documents make abundantly clear, IRI has funded and trained a wide-ranging shadow political structure, comprising NGOs, activist groups, politicians, and even musical and visual artists, which can be deployed to stir up unrest if Bangladesh’s government refuses to act as required.

The student protests of 2018, and the overwhelming electoral victory by Hasina’s Awami League in December of that same year, appear to have inspired the IRI’s regime change aspirations. In 2019, the Institute began conducting research to inform its “baseline assessment” of the country, which consisted of “48 group interviews and 13 individual interviews with 304 key informants.” In the end, “IRI staff… identified over 170 democratic activists who would cooperate with IRI to destabilize Bangladesh’s politics,” according to an IRI report which was submitted to the State Department.

The document explains that Bangladeshi protesters successfully used social media to promote videos and “short documentaries” of their actions, and compel local and international media to cover the upheaval. For example, Facebook-streamed live videos of police breaking up protests “went viral and helped spread knowledge of the protests across the country.”

One of the most powerful viral moments arrived in the form of a protest anthem by Kureghor, which the IRI called “the biggest internet-based Bangladeshi music band.” IRI staff noted they actively worked “to ensure Bangladesh’s young people have the knowledge and skills to wield online and off-line tools for change,” which helped them “to extract concessions” from elected officials.

[..] This July, Bangladeshi media celebrated a barrister and Bangla rap artist named Toufique Ahmed as an influential face and voice of the protest movement to topple Hasina, touting his offer of free legal support to protesters arrested during the demonstrations.

IRI documents reveal that Ahmed’s music has been directly subsidized by the US government. According to the Institute’s files, Ahmed “released the first of two music videos under IRI’s small grants program, “Tui Parish” (You Can Do It),” in 2020.

The song explicitly targeted “youth with a message of perseverance in difficult times,” while encouraging “those who are committed to strengthen democracy in Bangladesh in every possible way, including protests and street movements.” The lyrics of his second IRI-funded music video addressed “a variety of social issues in Bangladesh including rape, poverty and workers’ rights.” It was explicitly “designed to reveal social issues in Bangladesh and build up disappointment and even dissent to [the] government so as to call for social and political reforms.”

The RCP’s “Gen Z revolution” posturing slots nicely into this intelligence-agency manipulation of the inexperience and immaturity of youth, by giving it an image of radical ‘revolutionary’ chicness.

However, the best way to counter such petty-bourgeois Trotskyist confusion-mongering is not to focus on exposing easily deniable claims that “they are all paid assets of imperialism” as the museum-Stalinist CPGB-ML’s Lalkar/Proletarian does, but to expose it at the level of theory as this review attempts to do.

This approach to Trotskyism (and all other revisionist deviations from Leninism) is key to developing a revolutionary consciousness within the working class and build the confidence needed to take on all deviations from Leninism independently.

This polemical approach to developing a correct appraisal of world events as they emerge was how the Bolsheviks defeated Trotsky and the fake-‘lefts’ of their day, and subsequently won the working class and poor peasantry over to communist revolution.

It requires a lifetime of study, and there are no short-cuts.

Study to defend Leninism.

Phil Waincliffe

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