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No 1659 19th July 2025

Finally breaking from disgusting reactionary Labour is a useful step for the working class and a further blow against the corrupt parliamentary “democracy” racket sliding ever further into warmongering fascist depravity, capitalism’s only answer to its onrushing Catastrophe. But far more is needed than the feeble hesitancy of the Corbyn-Sultana announcement which so far offers only more useless reformism and not even a hint of centrist “anti-capitalist” posturing, let alone any serious rejection of the whole imperialist system. That must come; monopoly capitalism has hit the buffers and only class war revolution everywhere can save mankind from imperialist armageddon

So long overdue is the just announced “left” Labour MPs’ split with degenerate and bourgeois-grovelling near-fascist Labourism that it peters into virtual uselessness before it gets going.

Signs are not encouraging that the new party will ever become more than a feeble “left” reformist movement to “replace” Labour, let alone the vigorous centrism that crisis collapse implies must emerge at some stage.

That at least would make a gesture in words towards an anti-capitalist world view, although still not coming anywhere near the real necessity of the working class for a scientific, Marxist, perspective on outmoded capitalist imperialism’s unsolvable overproduction Catastrophe as the cause of Slump, trade war, repression and hot war, and the need that imposes for revolutionary overturn of the whole moribund humanity-threatening system.

Already decades of stirring struggles throughout the world in multiple forms (many yet designated as “terrorism” but many as mass street revolts and “riots”) are the signs of spontaneous revolution that will ultimately change history – but all still wanting the conscious scientific clarity of Marxist-Leninism to carry it through, avoiding confusion, blind alleys and diversionary manipulation.

It is not going to emerge from this development.

What kind of political “opposition” waits 22 months before breaking with the fascist Starmerite depravity which has backed, aided and sustained the grotesque, horrifying and cynical Zionist/imperialist genocide of the Palestinian people, by bombs, starvation, sniping and torture; says nothing about the just as depraved NATO warmongering behind the Maidan-coup installed Kiev Nazis in Ukraine against Moscow, deliberately kept on the boil for eleven years by non-stop Western Goebbels “Russian bogeyman” lies; and stays supine over domestic thought-police repression which defines even tame and limited pacifist protest as “terrorism”?

Or which says little even when the Western armed and funded Zionist occupation openly announces plans to put 600,000 of the persecuted and terrorised Gaza population into an enclosure in the south, followed by the remaining 1.4 million, where they cannot leave and face death by shooting, shelling or bombs if they do so – with the entire stinking world bourgeoisie and its media avoiding the obvious name for this – a concentration camp, in which the already deliberately starved and water deprived Palestinians will die like flies before ethnic cleansing deportation of survivors??

In an even sicker inversion of history than 70 years of continuing genocidal Palestinian oppression already, (with the former Jewish Zionist victims of imperialist horror now its main perpetrators) this move is resonant with parallels to the camps used by the German Nazis for the scapegoating of Jews, Gypsies, gays and disabled and its eventual sickly-named Final Solution in the 1940s.

In backing this horror, the bourgeois system has sunk to a new level of public depravity that damns its system and its ruling class perpetrators – all of them – as the vilest specimens in human history – including the rancid opportunist Labour pustules and the establishment backing it, the media “justifying” it, and the state police, intelligence and military enforcing it.

All deserve eternal contempt.

So what kind of opposition would have continued to back the Labourites anyway, and most particularly since the advent of Blairism made it clear that not even the pretence of standing for reformist socialism was to be pursued any more by these fatcat-serving mountebanks, the already oncoming capitalist crisis leaving no room anymore for Clause 4 and all the other “fighting for the working class” Old Labour humbug, with capitalist war to be pursued in its stead from Serbia and Iraq onwards.

But, it could be argued, there can be Pauline conversions, and slow awakenings, so that this latest shift may not be quite useless.

Despite its delay and hesitancy the new party around Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana might yet carry some temporary historic significance????

That is what some of the fake-“left” circus is saying but more out of relief it will be no more than the same old reformist pacifist racket in new clothes, than because of steps towards necessary revolutionary leadership.

Despite much hollow phrasemaking about “revolution” from all of them, not a word emerges of any serious analysis or explanation of what that means or involves – starting obviously with the profound unsolvability of capitalism’s Catastrophic breakdown.

What little advice/criticism they do advance simply repeats the same tired “left” reformist demands as always about “stopping war” “opposing capitalism” and “fighting austerity” (and giving pigs wings?).

Others also dismiss the whole exercise as just a Labour Party Mark 2, in order to continue their own path but coming no closer to tackling the need for the profoundest debate and discussion of the class war raging world wide, the history of the workers movement and especially the titanic 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the huge success of the workers states and their impact as well as the reasons for the “failure” of the Soviet Union (not a failure of communism but of its revisionist leadership) and dozens of other issues.

But they too advance nothing better than the same social-pacifist notions of “stopping war” and “winning better pay” – ignoring the paralysing reality of intractable capitalist crisis.

And they miss something about this shift; that it is at least a formal break with the stifling 130 year Labour tradition that until now has kept workers still hampered by the fraud of bourgeois “democracy”, despite it being shot through by repeated betrayals and treated with ever more “they’re all the same” contempt after a dozen treacherous Labour governments, the last few openly indistinguishable from Toryism.

Even now the working class to some extent remains trapped by the lingering, if weak, petty bourgeois belief in some kind of abstract democracy (as opposed to abstract class-free alleged “totalitarianism” notions from reactionaries like Anne Applebaum and Ayn Rand before her) which ignores the reality of the actual capitalist class dictatorship ruling society.

That keeps workers away from grasping the need for proletarian class dictatorship, the only real democracy there can be, giving the majority a full say in building a planned socialist society by the revolutionary suppression of the minority bourgeoisie (until it no longer exists, once self-disciplined communism has matured and drawn in all society to rationality).

The emergence of this putative party is at least movement.

True it shows few signs of being the centrist movement, – reformist in nature but forced to posture as revolutionary – that Marxist understanding has anticipated as virtually inevitable.

But material conditions suggest something must fill the vacuum in the class war left by the crisis collapse of the imperialist system into Slump austerity and endless warmaking and by Labourism increasingly showing its cynical careerist face and contempt for workers, more nastily than the ruling class itself and increasingly fascist-mindedly abroad and at home (on the same path as 1930s Oswald Moseley).

If centrism is what unfolds it would be explosive; ready to carry the pent up frustration, anger, hostility and contempt of a working class that has begun to see disintegration, greedy incompetence – (Grenfell, shit-filled rivers, Post Office scandal, contaminated blood scandal, mouldy housing, mass child poverty and even destitution for nearly one million, useless rail links, disintegrating and privatised NHS, Tory sleaze, Labour sleaze, and bankrupted local government etc etc etc), – hatred, war degeneracy and unspeakable genocide horrors, slump poverty and fascist nastiness, as the permanent reality of capitalism beneath its artificial consumerist “boomtime” gloss (a reality which is endless anyway for most of the exploited Third World at all times).

Such a shift has been pending for at least three decades since the first big break was made with Labour by Arthur Scargill’s miners, forming the initially anti-capitalist pro-Soviet Socialist Labour Party in 1995, as the long-brewing world capitalist crisis began to gather momentum (visible then in Latin American economic turmoil in Mexico, Argentina etc; Boris Yeltsin’s disastrous mafia-thug oligarch “new” restorationist Russia heading for bankruptcy; the beginning of the long Japanese stagnation; and the currency collapses throughout the previously booming “Asian Tiger” economies in Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, South Korea and Malaysia and the incipient revolutionary “terrorist” and mass revolt turmoil it was stirring).

The SLP eventually proved unable to shake off the small-minded Little Englander chauvinism and philistine bureaucratism of the deeply embedded, opportunist trade union tradition in imperialist-corrupted Britain.

So the centrist character of Scargillism succumbed to non-stop Trotskyist sabotage and secret manoeuvring to suppress the growing influence of revolutionary theory that early-on open discussion had allowed members from a Leninist background to fight for, as they enthusiastically helped build the party, and which saw a Marxist-Leninist perspective win the vice-chairmanship election two years into the SLP’s existence (see detailed experiences in EPSR Books Vol 31-32 Party Building & Theory Part Two and Part Three).

British working class hostility to theory, revisionist opportunism and the bilious hatred of the Trots for all working class discipline, and especially that of the dictatorship of the proletariat (workers states), further combined to effectively expel the EPSR from the party at that time; subsequently a neutered bureaucratic SLP staggered on for some years propped up by a museum-Stalinist “left theoretical” cover provided by the revisionist Brarite Lalkar group (since reborn as the Proletarian, CPGB-ML aka “The Communists”) which was itself eventually pushed out as the EPSR reported:

(Having) provided the SLP with a bogus “Marxist” cover since 1996 by swallowing in silence every scrap of rotten opportunism and reactionary nonsense that NUM bossism could serve up in eight years of bureaucratic-reformist farce, the Brar mafia has even finally sensed the folly and loathsomeness of being a doormat.

Their “excuse” for refusing to ever utter one word of political challenge to the entire constant counter-revolutionary swamp of demagogic platitudes from Scargill and his Trot/TUC stooges, “keep your head down and take the SLP by stealth”, — is apparently being abandoned without another word.

The Stalinists’ grotesque collaborationism with the SLP petty tyranny to silence the EPSR for insisting on open discussion of ALL political questions from Day One of its support for Scargill’s signal break from Labour, refusing to keep quiet about the rotten defeatist line on the Good Friday Agreement by Heron, Sikorski and Scargill in the Socialist News; or about the reformist nonsense of all single-issue politics; or about the bankrupt uselessness of hiding the international revolutionary perspective from the working class; etc, etc, etc, has now come back to haunt them.

They are being shown the door on grounds of such ludicrous bureaucratic “constitutional” crassness as would reduce even a paperclip to total, tearful, rage-filled frustration, — but having helped set this disgusting pantomime up, these Lalkar “Marxists” now find themselves its hurt and bewildered victims, — still nauseatingly pleading with Scargill to “return to the path of respect for proletarian principles”, etc, etc, — grovelling to the degeneracy of petty bourgeois TUC bossism to the last. (EPSR No1236 08-06-04 or EPSR Books Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism).

The crucial lesson from that time remains the need for revolutionary theory to be fought for in any working class party, and only with that possibility will any Leninist movement be able to judge the full significance of this new breakaway and the usefulness it might have for the working class – the open struggle for theory being the critical element needed for the working class as it confronts greatest crisis in history, almost certainly the final collapse of the eight centuries old capitalist system and beyond that, of thousands of years of class exploitation.

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolution and without class war revolution to defeat and then overturn this entire moribund, degenerate, vicious and destructive system there can be no end to the accelerating decline and barbarous disintegration threatening all humanity with potentially nuclear World War and planet threatening ecological cataclysm.

There is an exponentially greater need to change things than was apparent even at the turn of the century.

Breakdown of the international monopoly capitalist system has erupted in full since the SLP days, with the great global credit implosion of 2008-9 bringing the whole world to the edge of the Catastrophic failure long predicted by Marxist economic theory and practical observation, (alone against all fake-“left” dismissals or even ridicule – see economics box).

The financial nuclear winter, as then British Chancellor Alistair Darling called it, was fended off only by printing insane quantities of Quantitative Easing credit dollars (bailing out the banks at workers’ expense).

But that has only piled more problems onto the ever intensifying contradictions in the system which had already been drawn to breaking point by insane dollar credit printing since the 1970s when Richard Nixon was forced to abandon the Bretton Woods dollar-gold parity as the Vietnam war disaster sucked in US resources.

Extra QE dollars have not stopped either the imposition of savage austerity for the working class everywhere and the now almost surreal levels of inequality in the world, both between the rich imperialist nations and the plundered and exploited Third World, and between the classes in even the “best off” monopoly capitalist powers, (and especially in those which are least able to compete in the brutal cutthroat trade wars the monopoly capitalist system engenders where near bankrupt and bought-out Britain is among the weakest).

A deluge of worker demands for an end to this stinking system and for a socialist future has been building up which could “burst the banks of Labourite politics” as one of the multiple Trots groups immediately declared, while sneering at the careful trade union/revisionist grouping around Corbyn as “trying to stop the flood”.

They may be right but they are missing the point; there is no more stopping this great buildup than there is holding back a global warming flash flood.

Corbyn, Sultana and which ever other figures starting this off will be swept along if not away altogether – and their hesitations reflect their pathetic fear of just that, most of all Corbyn who was already pushed to the surface ten years ago by already growing discontent and crisis dismay, and quickly out of his depth after he was unexpectedly elected Labour leader and forced to do more than his usual routine “left Labour” safety-valve work, – decades spent touring the fake-“left” fringe meetings and internationalist solidarity groups to keep “democratic path” pacifist delusions intact and revolutionary politics gagged or sidelined.

It required the most sickening ruling class conspiracy, mobilising the influence of the ruthless middle-class Jewish freemasonry, to torpedo even that very tame and inadequate Corbynite reformist movement (which the crisis made no longer tolerable).

The monstrous “anti-semitism” campaign, playing on decades of diversionary fake-“left” PC politics and single-issue moralising and petty bourgeois guilt tripping, had already been used for 30+ years to head off any criticism of the Jewish-Zionist occupation in “Israel” and its routine genocidal brutalities (escalated occasionally with the sickly-named “haircuts” of weeks-long terror bombing runs on Gaza and the Palestinian resistance centres like Jenin in the occupied West Bank, killing and maiming thousands), all backed up and maintained by imperialism for its wider usefulness in keeping the Middle East in line as well as suppressing rising Third World revolt.

All anti-Zionist denunciations and critical political analysis were painted as “racist anti-semitism” with an entire specialist subsection of the laughable and fraudulent “international justice system” subverted to ever more broaden alleged anti-semitism as a catch-all for anyone or any movement that came near any criticism of the Zionist occupation and its politics, let alone exposed it for the colonial landtheft oppression it is (see eg EPSR No1209 18-11-03, No1221 24-02-094 and Book Vol 20 on Occupied Palestine and Zionism).

The ever-widened “definitions” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Society have been embodied into multiple bourgeois legal systems to justify censorship and criminalisation of almost anyone who makes valid points about the Zionist occupation’s displacement of the Palestinian people (whose now roughly 8 million strong population are the effectively imprisoned or expelled refugee descendants from those who have lived in and on the land of Palestine for the last 1500-2000 years, far longer than the populations of nearly all modern nation states have been in theirs) and their brutal suppression by the specious justifications of the usurping Jewish population based on wholly fanciful religious mythological claims dating back three thousand years and the alleged say-so of a non-existent “God”.

So tangled has the fake-“left” become in reactionary PCism and “identity politics” as single-issue extensions of long discredited reformism, to provide a diversionary cover-up for its avoidance of revolution, that it had no philosophical resistance to this outrageous reactionary nonsense, even among those who protested about the “witchhunts” that the halfway compliant left-posturing Corbyn movement allowed to happen, and in fact went along with in moralising self-policing instead of defying this ridiculous mass scapegoating.

Most of the accusations should have been thrown back in the faces of the Zionists as the lies they were, deliberately and wrongly conflating valid criticism and exposures of the worldwide Zionist/imperialist influence through its finance, corporate and social networks (substantial) with primitive racism.

And the point needed making that where confusion might had led a few to over generalise about Jews per se, it was mostly political naïvety, not “racist hatred” which underlay their positions (unlike the still extant rightwing racism which does remain sometimes in anti-Semitic form, and which has been deliberately re-ignited by rightwing bourgeois propaganda to muddy the waters and revive crude Nazi notions as grist to the mill of crisis fascist repression and divisiveness).

Even if such backward confusion by a few goes “too far” it is not a symptom of some “secret underlying anti-Jew agenda” to be generalised about the whole anti-Zionist movement allegedly just “using political opposition as an excuse” as the more extreme versions of Jewish self-righteousness declare.

That canard is most absurdly typified by the recent declarations by Binjamin Netanyahu himself that accusations of warcrimes against Israel, however grotesque its monstrous tyranny becomes, are just “blood libel”.

As if the world does not see day by day the barbaric killing, bombing, maiming, deliberate sniper shooting, drone terrorising, and tank-shelling of desperate civilians, decapitation of small babies, de-limbing of hundreds of children and butchering of teenagers, women and men, all disorientated by viciously imposed siege hunger and thirst, trying to get scraps of food from the deliberately militarised food “aid” distribution points which destroy their dignity and humanity by herding them into barbed wire pens and runs, in scenes reminiscent of nothing so much as the transit points set up by the German Nazis in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Or does not hear how doctors in Gaza (themselves deliberately targeted), are seeing patterns of shooting injury that vary day by day, heads on one, abdomens the next, testicles the next, which can only indicate targeting “challenges” for fun, by the “security” firing into the terrified crowds, as reported even on the Zionist biased BBC Today programme.

The chance to debate these and multiple other issues must be there if this new party is to be considered any kind of centrism at all (meaning therefore of potential interest as a forum in which the vital revolutionary perspectives can be argued).

The responses of the fake-“lefts”, ranging from ecstatic welcoming gush from the likes of the barely even revisionist and long reformist Communist Party of Britain, the Trot RCP and the (formerly Militant) Socialist Party to the sour sneering of the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party and the arbitrary and misplaced disdain of the Lalkar/Proletarian Stalinists are not encouraging.

Few are trapped by the hoary old nonsense that a new party like this would “split the vote” and “allow in the Tories”, as some of these parties dismissed Scargill’s previous breakaway.

Only the disgusting “left” mountebank “Lord” Neil Kinnock hypocritically and half-heartedly advanced a case for “not undermining” the Labour vote.

It takes a figure as compromised and degenerate as this reactionary throwback to days of “old Labour” whose arrogant anti-communist posturing and hostility to the workers states as Labour leader in the 1990s helped lay the ground for the Blairite abandonment of socialism altogether, to try defending the “Labour vote”.

What Labour vote is the first question?

The less than 30% of the popular vote at the last general election was an expression of complete contempt by the working class for the whole process, and actually far more so when calculated properly on the basis of a very low turnout, dropping to just 17% “support”, and even less when allowing for the considerable part of the population who do not register or cannot.

And most of that 17% was purely negative, “not the other lot” voting; i.e. there is no mandate whatever for the alleged “landslide” government – one reason why it is already falling apart with “rebellions” (opportunist as even these objectors are, fearing for their cosy positions).

The bourgeois media can still pretend this empty “democracy” ship with its engines long burnt out is still underway only because revolutionary understanding is not fought for.

That starts not simply by letting the Labourites sink but actively pushing their reaction under the surface. Their degeneracy, indistinguishable from the Tories, (and in fact even worse historically in the warmongering defence it has always put up for British imperialist world plundering and anti-communism since destroying the Greek and Malayan revolutions in 1945-9 etc) deserves only a philosophical drowning.

Assorted fake-“left” groups who argued this Kinnock-level reformist cravenness in the past, like the useless CPB calling for a vote for Blair in the 1990s, and the SWP Trots and others always returning to “vote Labour” calls at election times despite their professed “revolutionary” opposition during the intervals, all steered clear of the trap this time.

Instead they are gung-ho for pressing ahead.

But that is hardly out of some great return to Marxist revolutionary principles so much as the cynical calculation that they can no longer pretend there is any advantage to the working class in “keeping the Tories out”, the rationale previously for climbing in behind Labour and “left” pressuring it for step-by-step advances that it was allegedly capable of bringing.

If they now enthusiastically back the formation of a breakaway party under Corbyn, that is not because they see a centrist shift towards at least lip-service to revolutionary politics but precisely the opposite; more reformist compliance with imperialism, as far as they are concerned.

Corbyn’s personal record is obvious, desperately clinging on to Labour membership for as long as possible until forced out, and still not remotely coming close to exposing the whole fraudulent parliamentary racket or even Labour’s degenerate role within it.

And Zarah Sultana’s “leftism” is riddled with pro-imperialist populism every bit as cynical and misleading as other mountebanks like Ken Livingstone, infamous for his gung-ho support for the NATO blitzing of Serbia, the revisionist-nationalist remnant of the former Yugoslavian workers state, and grovelling to the City fatcats when made mayor of London.

In fact she has just made a great show of attending the 30th anniversary commemoration of the alleged “Srebrenica massacre”, one of the most egregious atrocity fabrications in a decade-long war built on lies and outrageous psyops about the Serbians, in which the real story of vicious nazi ethnic cleansing and massacres was of those carried out by Western backed reactionaries in the breakaway fragments of the Yugoslavian federation, most notably the restored Ustashe (WW2 nazi) domination of Croatia, pro-Austrian Slovenia and the backward reactionary Muslims in Bosnia fed with covert arms and aid by secret CIA arms flights.

In 30 years, much of it under Western “peacekeeping” supervision (occupation), forensic investigations have never come up with any evidence to support the notion of a deliberate “genocidal” slaughter of “more than 8500” Muslims by the Serbs allegedly taken by bus and killed, least of all any “mass graves” testifying to such atrocities.

For years the propaganda alone was the only basis for the claim of any such numbers, often reported with the extraordinary caveat that “many of the bodies were still to be found” (i.e. existed purely as propaganda figments); they have only been brought closer to that figure now because bodies have been found in various graves scattered far and wide which are then declared to be part of a “massacre”.

In other words the findings are entirely compatible with a vicious civil war which raged in Bosnia for years (sustained and fed by covert CIA supplied arms) and while there may have been all kinds of wartime atrocities (on all sides), nothing backs up the “genocide” assertion other than Western intelligence-created demonisation – the same basis for the later lies about a Serbian “massacre” of Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army “freedom fighter” gangsters in Reçak in 1999 when 30 bodies from a day long firefight with the Serbian police were deliberately re-clothed and re-arranged in a ditch to suggest a “massacre”, then used as an excuse for the 78-day long NATO blitzkrieg on Serbia, along with the accumulated pattern of lies about non-existent “rape-camps”, prisoner starvation and other atrocity allegations built up over years of Western psyops operations.

The same long-term pattern of big lies and fabricated atrocities has been built up on an even greater scale now over Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine, turning reality on its head with a never ending stream of twisted, grossly exaggerated and mainly completely made-up allegations about Russian monstrousness and alleged inhumanity, complete with all the most hysteria-inducing accusation of “cold-blooded prisoner killing, child-kidnaps, mass rape and deliberate targeting of civilians with ‘genocidal’ intent” all largely evidence-free save for carefully coached “witness statements” and the biased assertions of the Ukrainian propaganda units (trained by the West’s MI6 and CIA etc).

So it is in a recent “investigation” published by the European Court of Human Rights, demonstrating the real fraudulent purpose of such bodies which serve at best to cover up the non-stop reality of imperialist tyranny throughout the world which is one of never ending atrocities and barbarity on a daily basis and, as in this case, to provide “justification” for the West’s desperate crisis-diversion warmongering and brutal bullying.

The ECHR and other non-stop reports fed by intelligence into the Western media (and reproduced by willing stooge reporters and editors) are the classic “accuse the enemy of your own crimes” methods, covering up gross racism and nazi intimidation by the Stepan Bandera worshipping Kievite Nazis who have been quite deliberately targeting civilians in eastern Ukraine for eleven years, scapegoating Roma and other minorities and deathsquad hunting Russia “sympathisers”.

Sultana’s unquestioning acceptance of the Srebrenica lie demonising Serbia goes hand in hand with leaving this tide of propaganda poison unchallenged too (a class collaborating stance which has roots all the way back in Labour’s history, willingly cooperating with the British MI6 Gestapo’s anti-communist propaganda from at least the Attlee government (EPSR No816 21-08-95).

Not content with this poison she has also celebrated the downfall of the erratic Bashir Assad regime in Syria last year, regurgitating every unproven Western accusation to self-righteously denounce it as “one of history’s most brutal regimes – responsible for gassing, torture & mass displacement”, which effectively plays into the hands of the Zionist/imperialist organised counter-revolution leaving the country in a Balkanised mess under the new al-Sharaa “jihadist” sectarian regime, kept permanently weak by yet more Zionist bombardments just this week.

Once more there are entirely unsubstantiated accounts of “mass graves” the latest in the New York Times using elaborate time lines and computer generated images based on “satellite pictures” of alleged sites, but without any serious evidence of the alleged huge number of actual bodies there.

Now, noone has to defend or support the Assad Baathists as the path to progress in Syria or the Middle East any more than supporting Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic but anyone swallowing this demonisation is on the wrong side, when the only call for the working class would be to see imperialism defeated.

Sultana has also demonstrated her impeccable pro-imperialism by grandstanding against the Chinese workers state, taking up Western propaganda lies about “human rights violations” against the minority Uighurs in XinJiang province, while carefully avoiding the more obviously extreme “genocide” fabrications pumped out by the CIA and trumpeted by reactionary ruling class backwoodsmen like former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith.

So, neither potential leader for this “new party” has shown the tiniest hint of having “seen the light” and nor will they ever on their own.

Which only underlines the shallowness of all the “left” groups who gathered around this new enterprise like vultures round a newly fallen antelope, jostling for the opportunity to piggy-back on it like they have done on so many different groups, all offering “advice” on how it should be set up and organised, comprising mainly the same old demands for “democratic procedures”, federal structures and factional “rights” that they have always used to disrupt and sabotage previous groups, and whose main purpose is to give them the opportunity to either take over and dominate, or to disrupt if they cannot, recruiting what they can for their own groups exactly as the Trots tried in Scargill’s SLP (see above).

And common among them in this is their hostility to any kind of centralised party – like the unitary SLP, – this blamed by many of them for alleged “failures” in the past (including of course the “failure” of the Soviet Union because supposedly there was “not enough democracy” under “Stalinist dictatorship”).

But it was not “democracy” or absence of factions that were to blame for the liquidation; it was the failure to battle out and clarify a correct Marxist-Leninist revolutionary political perspective that is the only basis on which a leadership party, and then the working class which will come to support it, can establish the unity needed for the working class to take power and maintain it.

As the EPSR alone has battled to understand, the Soviet Union’s eventual implosion was a result of revisionist errors and mistakes, accumulating over decades from the late 1920s (even while the Soviet state made staggering and heroic advances overall – including defeating the world’s most barbaric onslaught by Nazi Germany and giant advances post-WW2) until they became counter-revolutionary liquidation under Mikhail Gorbachev, abandoning the authority of the workers state and its planned economy in favour of the deluded notion that the “free market” would work better (See EPSR Perspectives 2001).

And the absence of polemical struggle in the Soviet Party was partly to blame for that philosophical retreat (see Unanswered Polemics as above).

Philosophical and political struggle inside the party needs not just to be allowed but encouraged.

But that is not the same as an endless soup of never-resolved positions, or permanent conflicting factional lines á la Trotskyism, which will only lead to confusion in the working class.

While all kinds of “democratic” mechanisms might be considered (Congresses, branch discussions etc etc) the issue at stake is working through argument to establish an agreed position, to which the party sticks (until new information or class balance developments might possibly demand further discussion).

Such struggle has to begin at the highest theoretical level of a correct world perspective without which all programmes, strategy, party activity etc cannot begin.

But the dilettantes and fake-“lefts” hate such unified party operations from deep within their petty bourgeois idealist and totally individualist souls – a hostility that finds its fullest expression in their detestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its disciplined unity which alone allowed the Soviet Union to survive the non-stop attempts by imperialism to destroy it, from the major military interventions after 1917 by more than a dozen Western powers, trying to drown the new Bolshevism in blood and then more or less non-stop for 70 years.

Put another way, they hate leadership.

One grouping, the ex-Militant Socialist Party goes so far as to blame the collapse of “left” parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain upon their efforts to centralise and carry through unified joint action after previously going from

being a minor party to winning 26% of the vote in 2012 [...]as a loose federal coalition. After that it was centralised with a top-down structure which meant the President only faced election every three years...a desperate attempt by the capitalist class to ensure it would not challenge their interests.

But both “left” parties did not fail because they centralised; they failed because they did not come anywhere near a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, nor even the building of such understanding and training for the members – and that not least was because they were thoroughly entangled with Trotskyist play acting and posturing “support”.

These were “left” class collaborating reformist frauds who offered no revolutionary leadership at all.

Astonishingly these ex-Militantites even try to justify this anti-leadership diffuseness by calling on their record in Liverpool council

“playing a leading role in the fight against Thatcher in the 1980s [via] a District Labour party with some 400 delegates making up a kind of ‘workers parliament’.

But that was a disaster, which far from producing a socialist paradise on the Mersey cost the working class hugely and gave “socialism” a bad name:

It was the Militant who ran Liverpool and did nothing to solve the city’s massive problems of unemployment, poverty, poor housing conditions, etc., but spent years posturing around the town hall proclaiming their right to raise extortionate rates, which helped towards paying for their fat attendance allowances.

It was the Militant who tried to issue their entire workforce with redundancy notices, something which even the Tories have not yet tried to do with an entire council.

And whatever happened to Derek ‘Degsy’ Hatton, the great ‘militant socialist leader’ of Liverpool city council? He became a capitalist. (EPSR No694 06-04-93)

The other wing of these Trot Militant entrists, who split under the Socialist Appeal label to stay on in Labour until finally expelled fairly recently, and rebranded now as the Revolutionary Communist Party to fool naïve youth and students, are even worse, jumping straight in with a set of empty platitudes about how “we” must

clarify our political programme.. to arm the working class with a clear revolutionary programme

which is apparently the

beating heart of a party.

Leaving aside the proprietorial “we” from an RCP which has only just proclaimed itself the new communist movement – (so why the advice for others who therefore will not be?) – what is the actual content of this “clear programme”?

Somewhat tautologically it is to

build on class politics around a “clear” anti-capitalist programme

in which even the call for revolution has disappeared.

Certainly not the remotest indication is put forwards about how the working class is to tackle all this, what a revolutionary path means and most of all why – which is to say giving them a warning of the monopoly capitalist Catastrophe unstoppably dragging the world to destruction.

The enormous complexity of understanding the degenerating capitalist world, the crisis, and the constantly shifting international balance of class forces, built on the vast experience of past communist struggle (particularly in 100 volumes of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and without overstating it, the further development of Leninism by the EPSR) and on the most up to date possible analysis of daily movements in the light of that past science, does not feature.

Nor could it since almost its first task would be to expose the petty bourgeois idealist dilettantism expressed here which is simply not serious.

A few of the “left” groups guard themselves by being more cynically circumspect about the (possible) breakaway, notably the even more reactionary Trot Socialist Equality Party, from the World Socialist Website, defeatistly declaring that Corbyn’s only interest is to head off any emerging struggle with “tame parliamentarianism” and sneeringly also suggesting that it would be as doomed as left-posing parliamentary groups like Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain.

And

with the explosion of militarism and “looming” (!!!) economic crisis there would be even less room to manoeuvre. They will be rapidly whipped into line ..and refuse to mobilise the working class

But this is a perspective as bound by petty bourgeois “democracy” illusions and defeatism as all the other fake-“left”.

Why could it not be with the vastly deepened crisis the sharpened contradictions would force out much greater movement by a working class necessarily being pushed into struggle. As they say

however (this party) comes together it will rapidly find itself in conflict with the leftward movement it currently speaks to.

But the thought is left hanging in the air – so where is this “left movement” going to go?

They do not say, nor do they offer any possible guidance on what it is, and what leadership it needs, save the obligatory tail-end paragraph about building a “new revolutionary leadership” as part of the “World Trotskyist movement” – a slogan as devoid of content as the RCP they swipe at for its enthusiasm, and worse, still laden with all the petty bourgeois hostility to workers states that formed the main content of Trotsky’s sour philosophy from the early 1920s.

Like all Trots these are bitten with petty bourgeois subjective idealist conceit, and as biliously hostile to any hint of mass movement by workers as the bourgeoisie itself.

Hence a bucket of cold water even before anything has coalesced.

Certainly, as already discussed, Corbyn and Sultana are as opportunist as any Labourite ever and not going to give even as much leadership as Scargill’s sporadic anti-capitalism initially promised for the SLP.

If that is as far as things go then whatever “new party” emerges will be still-born.

But the crisis is pushing hard.

Another group writing off this movement in advance is the Stalinist CPGB-ML (Lalkar-Proletarian), on the grounds it does not have a programme at all and that its potential leaders spent years inside Labour.

True enough so far.

But this was no obstacle for the Lalkarites in the past when they joined with Scargill, who, after all, had equally “been in the party of forever wars” for years – until he wasn’t.

And they stayed in his SLP for eight years despite suppression of revolutionary politics (see above).

And nor was it an obstacle some years ago when they joined with George Galloway to form the new Workers Party of Britain, despite having for years denounced his long record of slippery opportunism and hostility to Leninism.

But not only did the Lalkar/Proletarian swing round to backing Galloway, they formed a joint leadership, with Joti Brar the designated deputy chair, once more burying away their professed “revolutionary” politics in Popular Front confusion mongering, for some supposed “tactical advantage” in riding along with a “bigger grouping”.

So they swallowed just as much garbage from Galloway as they ever had from Scargill, not least his pro-parliamentarianism, lauding of the British Empire’s arch anti-communist reactionary Winston Churchill and a “patriotism” that astoundingly saw a Spitfire roundel chosen as the party symbol (hastily modified with some “cog” serrations to give it a workerish feel after its gross jingoism was pointed out by the EPSR).

Galloway can make some brilliantly sharp exposures of imperialist barbarity on occasion, not least on its Middle East savagery, but his WPB then and now is firmly entrenched in the British class-collaboration reformist tradition as any other, harking back to a mythical age of “British industrial and technological achievement” and oblivious to the world capitalist crisis which makes any such revival impossible (and always did).

But the Brarites had no problem with all this because their politics is as saturated in chauvinist “British workerism” as any other part of the class collaboration “left” spectrum, as they had already shown with Scargill, going along with his disastrous demands for “import controls”.

They had already pitched in four square behind Galloway’s support for the Brexit diversion which fooled workers into thinking they could make some headway by breaking with “European bosses” (ie the monopoly corporations and banks of the German dominated EU) instead of warning them that it is capitalism as a whole that is heading for Catastrophe, and that their lives would be plundered just as much by international monopolies as by those in Brussels, exactly as Trumpism is insisting be allowed.

No one knows why this lashup fell apart as it did because in typical cover-up style the Brarites have never explained why they withdrew (or were pushed out), yet another of the multiple mistakes and errors which this ossified museum Stalinism has swept under the carpet, leaving themselves and all around (and most crucially the working class) unable to draw any lessons.

All of which undermines their high-handed dismissal of the Sultana/Corbyn announcement for its duplicity and hypocrisy in them “having served Labour for so many years”.

If crisis circumstances do push this development further it might well need exposing, in which case some tactical support could be in order, but only to expose it for the fraud it will be as explained when Galloway formed his first “Respect” party:

One very CORRECT tactic Marxist-Leninist science indicates in this area of work is the occasional need to support some prominent ‘left’ pretensions as a rope supports a hanged man, - the Bolshevik attitude briefly towards the initial 1920s rise of the Labour Party in Britain.

It is a tactic that might have been appropriate for a Bennite breakaway from Labour, or was needed for Scargill’s ‘Clause IV’ revolt to form the SLP.

But Galloway’s odd record and resisted expulsion is hardly in that league of needing to test-to-destruction the “genuine socialist alternative” claims of a Benn or a Scargill to make a deliberate break in order to build a completely new party.

And even if it were, all past experience shows that the fake-’left’ mentality (anti-communism) will ALWAYS get its tactics wrong in such situations anyway.

The ‘new party’ posture can only be engaged in by revolutionaries if they SERIOUSLY intend to test it to destruction (EPSR No1217 27-01-04).

Such “testing” means keeping revolutionary understanding constantly honed, tackling and analysing all mistakes and errors (exactly as Lenin explains is crucial and even Lalkarite guru hero Stalin, declared was necessary).

But the CPGB-ML buries everything and is increasingly resistant to any polemics or discussion which might advance understanding, to the extent lately of reverting to the long sectarian tradition of the British labour movement of barring entry to their public meetings to those who might expose their mistakes, using shallow excuses about “taking offence” no different to the PC “no platforming” of the Trot fake-“left” they decry.

They now even go so far as to physically step in to prevent their own cadres from swapping and reading polemical material, so much have they lost confidence, unable to get to grips with even basic revolutionary theory and fearful of the flaws being exposed.

And these are multiple as the EPSR will keep pointing to.

The most glaring right now lies in the imperialist genocide in the Middle East waged by the Zionist monsters, serving their own colonialist interests and those of the imperialism which funds, arms and aids them.

Denouncing the latest war extension to the 12 day blitzing on Iran the Lalkar/Proletarian describes Israel as

not the ‘plucky little David’ the media portrays, but a settler-colony acting on behalf of Anglo-American imperialism. Like the Banderite forces in Ukraine, the zionist thugs in Israel are a proxy army whose role is to fight imperialism’s targeted countries.

Leaving aside the absence of quotation marks around “Israel” – making clear that this “country” is and has always been an artificial construct formed by imperialist occupation, – this sounds revolutionary enough perhaps.

But it leaves one giant question hanging – where has Stalin gone?

It was after all, the positive vote given by Stalin’s USSR in the United Nations in 1947 which pushed through the egregious Partition of Palestine, handing more than over 50% of the country to the Zionist settlers (who promptly waged a terrorising war to seize even more, some 78%).

In current history this among the many retreats and errors of the Stalinist revisionist leadership is at the forefront in allowing what was obviously even then a “settler-colony” being installed just when colonialism was coming to an end.

For a group which builds its entire philosophy on a foundation of Stalin worship and his “genius leadership”, this is a rather large hole.

Which of course is why the Lalkarites never mention it – pull on this string and the entire fabric of their posturing politics falls apart.

The disastrous consequences are apparent in everything they say about the Middle East struggle and imperialist warmongering across the board – in for example still declaring Iran’s Ayatollahs to be part of an “axis of resistance” taking mankind forwards.

As must be further explored, Leninism says let imperialist attacks on Iran and everywhere else be defeated – but not by supporting such backwardness.

Only a totally truthful Marxist perspective will do. Build Leninism. Don Hoskins

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

Review: In Defence of Lenin – Volume 2* by Rob Sewall and Alan Woods – Part 1 (*see also Vol 1 review EPSR No 1652)

Woods and Sewell’s second volume of their twisted, lying two-volume attempt to rehabilitate Trotsky under the specious pretext of “defending” Lenin covers the 1917-1924 period.

The concealed aim of this reactionary Trotskyist bilge is to bamboozle a new generation of young people, drawn by the slump and warmongering chaos unleashed by capitalism’s intractable crisis towards communist ideology, into supporting the idea that there is a ‘perfect’ path towards socialism that avoids the bitter struggles required to build the dictatorship of the proletariat and establish the sort of all-powerful state structure the USSR achieved under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party.

The subjective-idealist frauds leading the RCP (a joke “revolutionary” re-branding of the Socialist Appeal sect of Trotsky guru-worshippers and deranged individualists) pretend, when challenged, that proletarian dictatorship is synonymous with their utopian “workers democracy” delusions, – but this is a hoax.

Their “anti-totalitarian”, “perfect revolution” pipe-dreams, in practice, keep their largely middle-class membership, and any hapless workers who have the tragic misfortune of thinking they have anything to do with revolution, tied to capitalism’s warmongering crusade against communism (e.g. China and Cuba) and anti-imperialism (i.e. any bourgeois-nationalist leadership driven by capitalist-crisis breakdown and warmongering chaos to make a stand).

Tellingly, the book never gets to explain what Lenin’s scientific-materialist concept of proletarian dictatorship is and why it is necessary. It only ever appears in quotes despite the fact that Lenin made its recognition the touchstone of Marxism, as he famously wrote in State and Revolution:

Only he is a Marxist who extend the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.

Because of this, the two authors never get beyond the recognition of the class struggle; and so, enthusiastic new party cadres, naïvely believing the book-cover claims that the two volumes are a “defence” of Lenin, are conned into forking out £35 for a copy and attending party “educationals” where the two heavy (in weight, but feather-light in sound theoretical content) volumes of anti-Leninist distortion are treated as text books by pseudo-intellectual party hacks.

Any new recruits reading this door-stopper would also get the impression that there had never been any real differences of substance between Lenin and Trotsky, and that they had jointly led the Bolshevik Party at crucial points, arm-in-arm, from 1917 until Lenin’s death. The fact that, apart from a brief period after he belatedly joined the Bolshevik Party at the last minute before the Great October Revolution and then kept his head down (and despite some chance perceptive insight), Trotsky’s entire political career was one of hostile and increasingly counter-revolutionary opposition to Leninism and the Bolshevik party discipline needed to organise the proletarian dictatorship. These volumes are aimed at covering all this up.

On his return from exile in May 1917, for example, Trotsky joined the Mezhrayontsy Party, a factional group from within the Bolshevik Party that had previously argued for “unity” between the Bolsheviks and various petty-bourgeois groups but broke away in 1913. In his Letter to AG Shlyapnikov (Oct. 1916), Lenin described such conciliationism and unificationism (including that of Trotsky), as

“the most harmful thing for the workers’ party in Russia – not just idiocy, but the destruction of the Party” because it amounts to “playing the lackey to the social-chauvinists”;

and he added that

“if Trotsky and Co. have not understood this, so much worse for them.”

Lenin’s insistence during World War 1 on a clear line for the civil-war defeat of Russia’s own ruling class against Trotsky’s and the Mezhrayontsy’s conciliatory and opportunistic calls for an alliance between his position and those who merely refused to support the war (a line that could only confuse and alienate the revolutionary masses) was decisive in providing the correct perspective that led to the October triumph of revolutionary Bolshevism following the defeat of the February 1917 bourgeois Provisional Government (and its continuation of Tsarism’s imperialist war policy).

In Volume One, the two authors quote Trotsky’s boastful claim (made in the midst of his factionalising against the Bolshevik leadership after Lenin’s death) that he actually joined the Mezhrayontsy in May “in complete agreement” with Lenin as a clever tactic to bring into the Bolshevik Party “the best of the ‘Unionists’”, which even Trotsky couches in woolly terms as merely meeting Lenin’s “tacit and general approval” in the quote they provide (pp 390-391). However, this contradicts notes written by Lenin during a Mezhrayontsy meeting he had attended as a guest in the same month and quoted by the anti-Marxist EH Carr in volume 1 of his History of the Bolshevik Revolution, who Woods and Sewall like to reference when it suits them (see below).

At the meeting, Lenin offered the Mezhrayontsy a seat on the editorial board of Pravda and of the organising committee of a Bolshevik party congress. By then, the Mezhrayontsy (alongside other groups and trends) had adopted

“a real internationalist stand […] on the basis of a definite break with the policy of petty-bourgeois betrayal of socialism”

as Lenin wrote elsewhere [The Question of Uniting with the Internationalists, May 1917].

However, his fragmentary notes indicate that Trotsky continued to hold out for conciliation. Whilst taking an internationalist stand and working for a merger, the notes suggest that Trotsky had effectively pushed back on Lenin’s proposal by saying, “I cannot call myself a Bolshevik”, and calling for an amalgamation of groups on equal terms, under a new name:

(Extract):

II

Amalgamation is desirable without delay.

It will be proposed to the C[entral] C[ommittee] of the RSDLP to include forthwith a Mezhrayontsi representative on the board of each of the two newspapers (the present Pravda, which is to be turned into an all-Russ[ia] popular newspaper, and the CO, which is to be organised in the immediate future).

It will be suggested that the C[entral] C[ommittee] set up a special organising committee to convene a Party congress (in one and a half months). The inter-regional con[ference] will get the right to have two delegates included in that committee. If the M[enshe]viks, supporters of Martov, break with the “defencists”, the inclusion of their delegates in that committee is both desirable and necessary.

Freedom of discussion of outstanding issues is ensured by the publication of discussion leaflets in [Pravda] Priboi and by the free discussion in the journal Prosveshcheniye (Kommunist), which is being revived.

The draft has been read by N. Lenin on his own behalf and on behalf of several members of the CC

(May 10, 1917)** Lenin in his own hand.—Ed.

III

Trotsky: (who took the floor out of turn immediately after me. . . . )

I agree with the resolution as a whole—but only insofar as Russian B[olshev]ism has become international.

The Bolsheviks have been debolshevised—and I cannot call myself a B[olsh]e[vi]k. Their resolution can (and must) be used as the basis for the qualifcation.

But we cannot be asked to recognise B[olshev]ism.

The Bureau—(C[entral] C[ommittee] + . . . .) is acceptable. Participation in the newspaper—this proposal is “less convincing”. “From that angle it will not stand.” Agreement of individual writers “from a different angle, from the angle of setting up your own newspaper”. . . .

Co-operation (from both sides) is very desirable. . . .

(Discus[sion] organs are unessential). . . . The old factional name is undesirable. . . .

They want the nationals to be also included in the “Org[ani]s[ing] Bureau”.

Lenin’s notes at the Mezhraiontsi Conference, Lenin Miscellany IV, Russ. ed., pp. 302-03

Trotsky only overcame his reluctance to join the Bolsheviks when the Mezhrayontsy finally merged with it during the Sixth Party Congress at the end of July. By then, following the July Days unrest and the defeat of the Kornilov coup attempt, it had become clear that the mood amongst the mass of proletarians and poor peasantry had shifted conclusively towards Bolshevism. Volume two starts from the events leading up to this.

Woods and Sewell deploy all manner of trickery to resurrect the old Trotskyist trope that Trotsky was the “joint leader” with Lenin of the October Revolution. One way they do this is by inflating Trotsky’s own contributions as President of the Petrograd Soviet and its Military Revolutionary Committee to the detriment of everyone else’s, including Lenin’s. On the MRC, they write:

With the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee under the control of the Bolsheviks, and Trotsky at its head, the pieces were in place for a successful insurrection. (p. 511)

The key point here is that the Petrograd Soviet’s MRC was under the control of the Bolsheviks, not that Trotsky was “at its head”.

Given Trotsky’s last-minute entry into the Bolshevik Party and his 14-year history of opposition to Lenin and Bolshevism up to that point, it is inconceivable that the Bolsheviks would have allowed him to take the lead.

This is even reinforced by Trotsky himself in chapters 40 and 43 of his own vainglorious History of the Russian Revolution (1932) in which he explained that Yakov Sverdlov as Chairman of the Bolsheviks’ Central Committee ensured that MRC followed the Party line (or was “brought in upon all important matters” as he states it in a section paraphrased by the two authors but omitting Sverdlov’s own crucial contributions – p.505); and stated that Bolshevik’s own Military Organisation had “chiefly” worked out the tactical plans for the conquest of Petrograd (see also EPSR No.1533).

Success was only made possible by the strategic direction for the revolution insisted on by Lenin and battled for, single-handedly at times, against Bolshevik leadership hesitancies in the period leading up to the October Revolution, and Lenin’s leadership of the Bolsheviks’ twenty-year long struggle in theory and practice to build a disciplined, highly organised and centralised party structure.

They also slide over Trotsky’s hesitant wishes alongside others for the insurrection to be delayed so that it coincided with the Second Congress of Soviets planned for 25th October by claiming that this gave the revolution

greater legitimacy in the eyes of the masses, a ‘legality’, than if the Party did it alone.

Opposing such positions, Lenin argued for the

“immediate seizure of power” in “the defence of the people (not of the congress…) from the Kornilovite government”

by whichever proletarian organisation is in the best position to do so; and that

“it would be a disaster, or sheer formality to await the wavering vote of October 25”

[Letter to Central Committee Members, Oct. 24th (Nov. 6th) 1917].

Woods and Sewall assertion that “Trotsky was proved to be correct” (p.514) is deluded. The Bolshevik party launched the insurrection before the wavering Congress convened, as Lenin insisted. The Congress was presented with a fait accompli. Aside from any possible minor tactical considerations of exposing the petty-bourgeois oppositionists within the Soviet by having a vote, no “legality” was necessary. Bourgeois class rule had already been toppled and power seized by the proletariat and poor peasantry under the auspices of the Bolshevik Party-led Petrograd MRC regardless of which way any formal voting went.

Persisting with their subjective-idealist Trotsky-Lenin “joint leadership” daydreams, the two authors also fraudulently present Trotsky’s disastrous “Neither-war-nor-peace” posturing showmanship during the 1918 Brest-Litovsk negotiations with German imperialism as being essentially on the same side as Lenin’s insistence in Central Committee meetings on signing a “shameful” robber’s peace to provide breathing space for the exhausted Soviet armies of proletarians and poor peasants and ensure they were able to fight another day.

The authors first declare that both Lenin and Trotsky were against the ultra-left “revolutionary war” adventurism of the CC’s “Left Communists” and in favour of dragging out the negotiations for as long as possible, but then deceptively present Trotsky’s own ultra-left policy of “sticking the bayonets in the ground” as a clever tactic that provided “a bridge” between the two positions. In fact, Trotsky’s fatal refusal to sign the Brest-Litovsk peace in opposition to Lenin lost the new Soviet state a desperately needed month’s respite and endangered its very survival as civil war pressures grew, and by the time peace was finally signed in March, it was on more onerous terms as a consequence of a renewed German offensive.

Even Trotsky’s cowardly abstentionism in the 23 Feb. CC meeting that followed the renewed German onslaught is presented positively as being “decisive in allowing Lenin’s proposal to pass”. But this would be a mathematical impossibility given the results as presented in the CC minutes (7 for an immediate peace, 4 abstentions and 4 against) unless Trotsky and the other abstentionists were considering a vote against Lenin.

They also indulge in a bit of desperate quote-chopping to support their deceitful claim that “Trotsky fully coincided with Lenin” by using this two-sentence Trotsky quote from a translation of the CC minutes (by a Trotskyist-influenced “left” publishing house) from the same meeting in a way that suggests they were by then holding the same position:

We cannot fight a revolutionary war when the Party is split. It is not only international relations that have to be taken into account but, with conditions as they are, our Party is in no position to lead a war, especially as some of the supporters of war do not want the material means to wage it with. (p.570)

However, in the very next sentence that immediately follows this artificially isolated quote, Trotsky declares:

The arguments of V.I. [Lenin] are far from convincing; if we had been of the same mind we could have tackled the organisation of defence and we could have managed it.

Some agreement!!! He went on to argue:

Our role would not have been a bad one even if we had been forced to surrender Peter[sburg] and Moscow. We would have held the whole world in tension. If we sign the German ultimatum today, we may have new ultimatum tomorrow. Everything is formulated in such a way as to leave opportunities for ultimatums. We may sign a peace; and lose support amongst the advanced elements of the proletariat, in any case demoralise them. Where internal policy is concerned, the dilemma Lenin describes does not exist but from an international point of view, much could have been gained. But maximum unanimity would have been needed; as it is not there, I for one will not take responsibility in voting for a war.

So, it seems that Trotsky would have moved over to the Left Communists’ “revolutionary-war” adventurism had there been “maximum unanimity” in the CC. In effect, this would mean that his alleged “bridge” was built to carry Lenin over to their side!!!

Not only that, according to the minutes, Trotsky also stated that he would “perhaps have voted differently” (ie. against Lenin) had he known that his abstention was going to lead to resignations from all Party and Soviet posts of the Left Communists.

In the subsequent CC meeting minutes (24th Feb.) he announced his own resignation as Commissar for Foreign Affairs despite attempts to persuade him not to, including by Stalin. His declaration that “he can no longer speak in the CC’s name in the future because he cannot defend its positions” does not indicate a resignation in the Leninist sense of resigning to be free to argue for a correct scientific understanding as an ordinary party member as Lenin famously threatened to do over Brest-Litovsk and the timing of the October Revolution.

Trotsky was proven wrong, and so his unwillingness to defend party positions once the CC had arrived at a correct majority view suggests more of a sullen resistance to submitting to party discipline. The authors slyly refer to the decision provoking “a number of resignations” without mentioning Trotsky’s.

This is how Trotsky “fully coincided with Lenin” on Brest-Litovsk!

[To be continued.] Phil W

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