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No 1671 8th April 2026

White House ceasefire climbdown after Trump’s “destroy their civilisation” warcrime military threats and lurid fascist abuse, and the plane-wreck chaos of his covered-up Isfahan nuclear raid debacle are massive humiliations for Washington that will be cheered and celebrated throughout the tyrannised and persecuted Third World. Both are debilitating blows that puncture the fascist braggadacio of slump ridden Western world domination and demonstrate the crucial impact of DEFEATS for imperialism as the path forwards, not pacifist protest and pleas. The mullahs in Iran are no answer to the world crisis either – only communist overthrow can be – but their astonishing resistance to horrific inhuman US/Zionist blitzkrieg shows the revolutionary pot is heating up. So do splits in the shaken US chauvinist Maga movement and even more the inter-imperialist hostility already brewing for decades and at the core of the crisis collapse, as it heads deeper into Third World War. But even as post-war “freedom and democracy” implodes fake-“leftism” still refuses to spell out the urgent need for Leninism as Your Party posturing demonstrates

Donald Trump’s poisonous tirade of blustering insults, crude and vicious expletives and sneers against “useless” European “allies” as the monstrous Middle East war disaster deepens, and his “find your own oil” belligerence, confirms Marxist understanding of capitalism’s deadly crisis breakdown.

Two different aspects are more sharply revealed than ever; first the underlying inter-imperialist conflict content of the unstoppable drive to world war destruction (not just of Iran).

Second is the debilitating, splitting impact of defeat, any defeat, on imperialism as the world struggle mounts, however “asymmetrically” and however “backward” is its leadership.

Simultaneously exposed is the real “uselessness” in the world, that of the fake-“left”, still utterly complacently, defeatistly in denial about the history-shattering extent and depth of the imperialist Catastrophe.

All of them still fail to develop, even deliberately block, building of the scientific Leninist leadership party to translate ever growing spontaneous mass revolt and resistance to capitalism’s genocidal horrors into the conscious revolutionary struggle needed to end this foul system.

None of these hopeless and play-acting pacifists, “international law” reformists, feminists (and other single-issue anti-racist, ecological, trans-rights etc PC warriors), or shallow wooden revisionists, come close to explaining that warmongering is not only inherent in the 800 year old capitalist order but completely unstoppable for as long as the profit system continues, heading relentlessly into the greatest conflagration in history.

Instead they disarm and mislead workers by continuing their endless futile “Stop the War” and “Don’t send bombs” “Bring out the troops” protest politics, fatuous vicar-pieties about “hope and peace” and/or idiot talk of “multipolarity”, “stability” and “peaceful development” while ignoring the unsolvable Catastrophic breakdown which is plunging the whole world into World War Three.

Least of all do they put revolution to the forefront (despite much lip service posturing about it) explaining that only war on the warmongers, class war for their total overturn, can stop the deadly armageddon plunge, and rescue mankind from oncoming cataclysm.

Far more deadly turmoil is contained in the Iran turmoil and Zionist genocide in Palestine and Lebanon than mere (!!) barbarically genocidal, attempted imperialist suppression of “upstart” revolts and demonised rebel regimes, blamed for the problems, gross murderous chaos and collapse for which capitalism itself alone is responsible.

And far more is involved than just a “war for oil” or even war for the much wider range of associated resources and industrial output (currently blocked into the Persian Gulf).

The brutal destruction in the Middle East (including hundreds of sadistically and deliberately targeted hospitals, homes, bridges, schools, universities – and the lives of thousands) is not primarily in pursuit of “plunder” at all as some shallow one-sided schoolboy “Marxism” tries to explain it.

As Trump’s sneering fascist contempt makes clear, declaring that as far as Washington is concerned the Strait of Hormuz could even stay closed because “we have our own oil”, the Empire is not interested in simply seizing more of such resources to help “pay for” its historic bankruptcy as a solution to its economic collapse.

Imperialism’s greed ridden piratical nature will never rule out taking all it can, of course, stealing Venezuela’s oil for example and threatening to take Iran’s as it did Iraq’s “because it can”.

And appropriation – stealing effectively – of the “surplus” value produced by the working class (whose labour is the sole source of value) is the very foundation of capitalist production as Marx uncovered and set out in Capital.

But as the Leninist perspective alone has been insisting the really deep contradiction unfolding is one of the “over production” inherent in capitalism and imperialist monopoly capitalism (see Marx & Lenin quotes box), and the great antagonistic, inter-imperialist cutthroat battle for (finite) markets it generates.

World tradewar has been intensifying for decades in ever more ruthless competition, which must run all the way to destruction and elimination of rival powers as markets become clogged with unsaleable and uninvestable “surplus” product and great lakes of redundant financial capital seeking desperately for profitable openings.

Stopping others from getting access to resources is the real game being played, along with simply destroying as much of the world’s “excess” capital as possible.

That must all reach a point where it explodes into world war, inter-imperialist conflict, just as it did in embryo in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war and twice in full in the early twentieth century (1914 and 1939) with horrific and devastating effect (and its ultimate revolutionary consequences).

That is far bigger than the “routine” barbarity of imperialist tyranny and its hundreds of invasions, vicious coups, torture tyrannies, assassinations and blitzings, killing millions, not least in the carnage of the Vietnam and Korean wars or the Latin American massacres and seven decades of Palestine genocide etc etc.

No amount of blitzkrieg reversion to colonialist bullying and intimidation (hypocritically and lyingly presented as “restoring order against the rising ‘terrorist threat’” as any and all resistance is labelled) can solve the economic and political problems of this out-of-time bankrupt profit-and-greed system.

Warmongering, already underway for the last thirty years, starting with the NATO destruction of tiny Serbia, certainly aims to terrorise and suppress the rising rebelliousness that this disgusting, unequal, arrogant and degenerate system has more and more been forcing the oppressed and exploited billions into – taking various forms from anti-yankee movements, “youth” protests, and mass Arab street revolt to jihadist terror or uprisings, as well as strikes, demonstrations and riots domestically (like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives etc).

To that extent it is accepted, even approved of and participated in, by all the major powers, out of common monopoly imperialist class interest, lined up behind the biggest power.

And all the crisis-pressed and panicking ruling classes are turning to war hysteria and hyped-up finger-pointing at others as a diversion from the implosion and incompetence of their own economic system as well as a scapegoat excuse for slump-“austerity”, blaming internal “aliens” (migrants, muslims, communists etc) and external bogeymen like Russia, Iraq, Iran or China for the problems (which emerged long before from the internal collapse of the profit system, especially in the 2008 bank meltdown, now made worse by the warmongering chaos).

But increasingly there are conflicts and differences over how it is done, and to whom and where it is done, with disagreements over the best methods and over the different specific trading and/or exploitation relations to be maintained by different bourgeoisie’s national interests (trade with Iran, China or blockade them etc).

And these backbiting differences and splits generated by the crisis and expressing its contradictions, are hugely magnified by the utter failure so far of any of the colossally expensive world gendarme blitz-discipline actions, for all their brutality and inhuman barbarity, to cow the world back into the one time docile “stability” of non-stop labour exploitation and resource extraction by the multinationals and corporations.

Serbia failed; Iraq was pulled out of; Afghanistan was a humiliation by the backward Taliban; Libya left a warlordist mess and Syria a civil war chaos and now cynical balkanised chaos.

And now Iran too.

All that is only the prelude to what must relentlessly become a worldwide conflict between the really great beasts of the imperialist world, led by the Empire superpower, if it is to “sort out” the colossal and paralysing effects of “too much” ever-expanding, wasteful and increasingly pointless, philistine consumerist production.

Underlying inter-imperialist tension has been apparent for decades as the EPSR’s Marxist-Leninist science has always sought to explain (in hundreds of papers and dozens of books), such as throughout the ten year long Balkanising breakup of once-communist Yugoslavia before its final NATO blitzing, with a seething mess of rival powers, especially Germany and the US, jostling for influence in the space opened up by the stupid Gorbachevite liquidation of the Soviet camp and its revisionist echo in Belgrade); as was made even clearer in the US Empire’s post-9/11 blitzing of Iraq and Afghanistan (also after ten years of vicious strangulation sanctions and repeated bombing runs, starving and killing over three million including 500,000 children deprived even of basic medicines), when the European “cheese eating surrender monkeys” initially held back; and has been particularly obvious in the Ukraine war which even before it was provoked in 2022, saw dirty-dealing and insulting jostling over the subversion of Kiev (witness the infamous 2014 “fuck the EU” leaked phone call comments by America’s (“liberal” Obama appointed) diplomat Victoria Nuland) around the $5bn “investment” made by the US “democracy” subversion agencies (NED, CIA etc plus Britain’s MI6) to create the colour-revolution Maidan coup for the reactionary Ukrainian nationalists and their WW2 Nazi pogromist hero/icon Stepan Bandera.

Once the installed fascist stooges in Kiev had been given their head for violent and murderous suppression of the 40% Russian speaking minority (and others also racistly persecuted like the Roma and trade unionists), and once eight years of war to impose Ukrainian nationalist domination on the eastern provinces had finally provoked Moscow’s 2022 intervention (after thousands of innocent deaths), the major inter-imperialist contradictions came explosively to the fore with the sabotage of the NordStream pipelines.

Since these were carrying cheap Siberian gas from Russia to power the more efficient German industry which has been undermining American commercial and financial dominance for decades, (along with Japan) their sophisticated deep underwater destruction (by the US and its British stooges) struck a major blow to EU competition.

It simultaneously put the Europeans, blinded by their own historical and regional hatred and hostility against Russia and need for scapegoats, more in thrall to the US Empire, now selling them gas and oil at greater expense and with the power to turn off the tap as needed.

But Europe’s monopolies still outsell America in its trading relations.

So this inter-imperialist contradiction and antagonism has been ratcheted up far more sharply by the Trumpites’ even more overt turn to might-is-right belligerence and trade tariff bullying in all directions, with demands for kowtowing tribute and political capitulation, as the bourgeois press reports:

As tensions with President Trump peaked in recent weeks, the Danish military developed detailed plans to blow up airfields in Greenland in the event of an American invasion, two European officials said on Friday.

Danish soldiers were sent to Greenland equipped with explosives and blood supplies, underscoring the seriousness of the contingency plans, according to the officials, who had knowledge of the plans but said they could not be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The soldiers never actually did anything to the airfields. But Denmark’s consideration of such a scenario shows just how unnerved the Scandinavian country was in January as President Trump escalated threats to take over Greenland, a gigantic Arctic island that has been part of the Danish kingdom for more than 300 years.

Mr. Trump later softened his tone, signaling that he was willing to compromise over Greenland’s future relationship with the United States and subsequently turned his attention elsewhere, initiating a war with Iran alongside Israel.

DR, Denmark’s public broadcaster, first published information about these plans on Thursday, as Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen campaigns for re-election. Her tough stance against Mr. Trump has become one of her top-selling points in the election, which is set for next week.

According to DR’s report, when Danish soldiers were deployed to Greenland in January, they carried explosives to disable the runways in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, and in Kangerlussuaq, a small town in the Arctic Circle.

The report said that this would “prevent U.S. military aircraft from landing soldiers on the island if President Donald Trump ultimately chose to take Greenland by force.”

(The report did not mention that the United States military maintains its own airfield on the Northwest corner of the island, part of a defense agreement that the United States has had with Denmark for decades.)

Security analysts said Denmark’s detailed planning was unsurprising.

According to the DR report, the Danish soldiers also had live ammunition.

And the inter-imperialist antagonism has escalated around the war on Iran:

After absorbing a steady drip of anger, contempt and mockery from President Trump over Iran, Europe’s leaders have begun to snap back — and President Emmanuel Macron of France has emerged as the most vocal.

On Thursday, Mr. Macron lashed out at Mr. Trump for what he said was an unserious approach to the war and unhelpful attacks on NATO. “When we’re serious, we don’t say the opposite of what we said the day before,” Mr. Macron said during a visit to South Korea.

“We are talking about war, we are talking today about women and men who are in combat, about women, men and civilians who are being killed,” Mr. Macron said. “We’re also talking about the impact of this war on our economies.”

It was striking display of exasperation with Mr. Trump, coming from a leader who has long prided himself on dealing tactfully with the American president and his mercurial ways. But it reflected a growing defiance on the part of Europeans, who had previously tried to balance their deep reservations about the military campaign with a desire not to antagonize Mr. Trump.

Tensions are flaring over the use of Europe’s airspace and military bases, as countries have refused access to American or Israeli warplanes on offensive military missions. Leaders, even from pro-American countries like Britain, speak openly about the need for Europe to provide for its own security, apart from the United States.

Even Europe’s effort to marshal a coalition to secure the key trade routes through the Strait of Hormuz, which began as a response to Mr. Trump’s demands for greater European support, has come to reflect how Europe is going its own way. Its leaders, who met on Thursday in a call organized by the British government, have rejected his call to forcibly seize the strait, which Iran has effectively closed, or to act before the conflict has ended.

“That has never been the option we have chosen, and we consider it unrealistic,” Mr. Macron said. Seizing the strait, he said, would take “an infinite amount of time” and would expose ships passing through the strait to Iranian attacks.

For all the insults flung at Europe by Mr. Trump, European leaders have tried not to make it personal with the president. Even Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, who has expressed more public criticism of the Iran war than any other major European leader, rarely cites Mr. Trump by name in his statements.

But Mr. Macron’s falling out with Mr. Trump appeared to carry an extra tinge of bitterness because it is personal and involves the French president’s wife, Brigitte Macron. He was responding in part to remarks made by Mr. Trump during an Easter lunch on Wednesday, which included a derogatory reference to an incident in which Ms. Macron was caught on video appearing to shove her husband.

Mr. Trump’s mocking remarks “were neither elegant nor befitting,” a clearly bristling Mr. Macron said to reporters in Seoul, the South Korean capital. “So I’m not going to respond to them; they don’t deserve a response,” he added.

In this, he adhered to the turn-the-other-cheek policy of other European leaders, like Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, who has stoically deflected Mr. Trump’s jibes that he is “no Winston Churchill.” But that didn’t stop Mr. Macron from unloading on Mr. Trump’s wartime leadership or his treatment of NATO.

He brushed aside Mr. Trump’s latest threat to carry out devastating airstrikes against Iran, delivered in a nationally televised speech on Wednesday.

“I’m not here to comment on an operation that the Americans decided on with the Israelis, on their own,” Mr. Macron said. “They can later complain that they aren’t being supported in this operation that they decided on alone. It’s not our operation.”

But Mr. Macron did weigh in on Mr. Trump’s mounting attacks on NATO, which the president has accused of not helping the United States, and which Mr. Trump has threatened, in an interview with The Telegraph newspaper published on Wednesday, to withdraw from.

Mr. Macron said the president’s criticisms were weakening the alliance.

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

Keir Starmer has been warned his relationship with Donald Trump may be beyond repair after the US president derided the prime minister for consulting his team about military decisions, in a mocking impersonation.

In a new low for UK-US relations, Trump appeared to imitate Starmer in a weak voice during an Easter lunch speech at the White House, and said the UK was “not our best” ally.

The episode is Trump’s latest broadside at Starmer and the UK’s “old” aircraft carriers after the prime minister declined to let the US use British military bases for its initial strikes on Iran.

Following the latest attack on Starmer, diplomatic and political figures said he was right to brush off the criticism but added that the relationship was very damaged and he would need to redouble efforts to built international relations elsewhere.

The US president said the UK “should be our best” ally but had not been during the Iran war, accusing Starmer of prevaricating over sending aircraft carriers.

Keir Starmer’s disgusting and grovelling Labourites have in fact been bending over backwards (metaphorically speaking?) to comply with US demands, providing significant military and intelligence aid and facilities to the Empire.

That has been not only for the Iran onslaught but throughout the two-and-half years of still continuing barbaric genocide perpetrated on the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, by the Empire’s Zionist allies/stooges, who stole the entire country by terrorising ethnic cleansing and non-stop butchery over the last 100 years, and who are in train to steal half of Lebanon (for a second time), some if not all of Syria and potentially Jordan too as part of their fanatical Eretz (Greater) Israel plans.

The Akrotiri military base in Cyprus (itself an arrogant in-your-face colonial hangover of violently asserted “British sovereign” territory in the middle of another people’s country) has seen endless activity in supply runs to the Jewish occupation and intelligence gathering overflights of Gaza for them, (ignored or suppressed by the compliant and complicit bourgeois mainstream media) as well as virtually open door access to US planes and its arms and matériel supply runs to keep the Zionists tooled up for their master-race butchering and torture oppression.

And now it provides a key access from Cyprus for the inhumanly destructive and barbaric bombing runs tearing Iran to pieces with outright indiscriminate fascist pounding by both the US and Zionism (trampling deliberately across all ‘international law’ and “warcrime conventions”) as well as from multiple permanent US facilities in Britain where B1 bombers load up their deadly 2000lb body-shattering bombs and take off, as well as the F15s such as the one shot down in Iran, a plane which is permanently based at Lakenheath.

And most egregious of all, these vile Labourite worms have granted take-off rights for the huge B2 and B52 bombers to operate out of Diego Garcia, the main atoll in the Chagos Islands which were stolen by British imperialism from their people, with an indigenous population arbitrarily forced into desperate homeless poverty exile so their paradise could be concreted over into a giant runway in the Indian Ocean “leased” (!!!) to America.

But the slimy servile Labourites cover up their bootlicking duties on behalf of the has-been British bourgeoisie with a pretence of “principled distance” from a “war of choice” and its obvious warcrimes with the risible “justification” that the bombers are just on “defensive” runs (for the gross feudal statelets artificially created in the Gulf, also by British imperialist rule).

These shallow double-dealing rule-by-PR-manipulation Mandelsonite/Blairite shysters would not recognise a principle if it Tango-slapped them of course but they are panicked by the contempt from Washington and its very concrete implications for the British economy, now virtually the weakest in the imperialist chain.

Back to the surface comes the terrible decades long indecision of the ailing British ruling class (and its Labourite glove-puppets) about where to stand as the great imperialist blocs square up – remain with the “traditional allies” of the Anglo-Saxon imperialist wing, or perhaps veer back into the “European camp”.

Neither is very palatable, not least after arrogant “British Empire” nostalgia stiffed the EU with Brexit chauvinist contempt a decade ago (which will add a high price from the rival bourgeoisies there to current attempts to move back that way).

But the US option is also looking distinctly unworkable, and also increasingly pricey. As a few more thoughtful petty bourgeois commentaries have noticed Washington’s belligerence is about much more than Iran:

What if Trump’s apparently chaotic thought processes and intuitive decision making are all a blind, a charade? What if we are really witnessing, in the Middle East and more widely, a carefully constructed plan with very definite objectives? [behind] the chaff of apparent chaos? I realise that this is not intuitive, but bear with me…

What kicked off my thinking was the revelation by Lockheed Martin that they had been instructed by Trump, months in advance of the attack on Iran, to massively increase production of interceptor missiles, with a short term goal of quadrupling capacity of THAAD. In January, before the start of the current conflict, Fox News was already reporting on various deals, including a trebling of PAC3 MSE interceptor deliveries, having been finalised between Lockheed and the Department of War.

While obviously there are supply chain and production line constraints on the ability to ramp up production within months, the urgency of this activity – almost entirely focused on interceptor missiles – that started in 2025 is in hindsight a clear indication that early war with Iran was expected. It is plain evidence of premeditation.

The second thing [...], is the nature of the breakdown of the nuclear deal talks. It appears there was a broad consensus that Iran offered concessions which made a deal very practical, in particular giving up its stocks of enriched uranium into trust (a proposal Iran had historically rejected when Putin offered to hold the material). Both the hosts, Oman and the British thought a deal was there.

The failure of the talks is being spun as due to the incompetence and lack of technical knowledge of Witkoff and Kushner. But I just don’t buy this. The sending of unqualified negotiators was part of a ploy to use the negotiations as cover for an attack – the second time in a year that the US had pulled the same trick.[..]

The attack on Iran was always planned by Trump. He was not “bounced into it” by Israel. It had been in gestation for months. That fact had been held within a very tight circle to avoid both political opposition and institutional opposition from the US military and intelligence community.

January’s protests in Iran found ordinary people genuinely ready to protest, motivated by economic hardship caused by sanctions. But they were guided and abused by Mossad and CIA agents among the Iranian people, who committed and encouraged violence and initiated pro-Shah chanting.

There was never the slightest possibility the protests would bring regime change, but that was not the intention. The purpose was to incite an over-reaction by the Iranian government that could “justify” the planned attack on Iran. The dead protestors have been great martyrs for Trump’s – and Israel’s – wider cause.

The planting by Western state-sponsored individuals and organisations of ludicrous claims throughout Western state and corporate media of thirty to forty thousand killed, was a deliberate and considered plan to reduce domestic opposition in the West to the forthcoming war against Iran.

Now factor in another apparently random act by Trump – the astonishing kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela on 3 January, a month before the attack on Iran.

Trump’s naval blockade of Venezuela’s oil has secured a US monopoly of its sale and distribution. As with Iraq, only US-approved contractors can buy the oil and payments are made to a Trump-controlled account in Qatar, from which revenue is given to the Venezuelan government entirely at Trump’s discretion.

This audacious imperialist grab of the world’s largest oil reserve further insulated the USA against the effects of the forthcoming closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Again, the narrative is being spun that Trump did not foresee the closure of the Strait by Iran. That is plainly a nonsense – every commentary on [..] Iran for half a century has focused on the Strait of Hormuz. The only explanation is that Trump does not mind the closure.

While, as Trump says, the United States does not need the oil that comes through the Strait, the apparent weakness in his case is that higher oil prices are universal and hit Trump’s support, particularly as Americans fill their gas tanks. But to concentrate on this is to make the fundamental error of imagining that Trump cares about what is good for the American people. He does not. He cares about what is good for Donald J. Trump and his immediate circle.[..]

Not to mention, of course, that big fortunes will have been made in oil and derivative commodity futures by those who knew this war was coming (acting through proxies).

The $200 billion Trump is requesting from Congress to continue the war is going to make an awful lot of well-connected people even richer.

So the plan is the making of fortunes, the strengthening of the military-industrial complex and the ratcheting up under cover of national cohesion in war of the authoritarianism that has reduced freedom of speech and outlawed dissent against Israel across the Western world.

To benefit Israel is the other predominant motive.

Trump’s thrashing about to articulate objectives for the war in Iran is performative, a blind to cover his true and steadfast objective – simply the annihilation of Iran as a functioning state, the infliction of the maximum amount of death and infrastructural damage, the reduction of Iran to the condition of Libya.

It goes without saying that the seizure of control of Iran’s hydrocarbons by the US is the ultimate endgame of this destruction, exactly as in Libya and in Iraq. But a linked and crucial objective is the elimination of the source of the only physical resistance to the expansion of Israel. Iran and its allies in Yemen and Lebanon have been the sole support of the Palestinians for years.

The colonial settler state of Israel is central to the projection of imperialist power in the Middle East. Expansion is essential [in] the plan.

Destruction of Iran on the scale envisaged will take years of hard pounding. Again, it is planned – you don’t ask Congress for an instalment of $200 billion for a war you plan to wrap up in a month. Again, Trump’s taunts about having already won, objectives being achieved and about possibly finishing soon, are all just smoke and mirrors. The scale and horror of what is planned for Iran has to be obfuscated to limit a public revulsion that would be echoed in parts of the state apparatus.

Netanyahu yesterday revealed an interesting part of the endgame – construction of an oil pipeline that brings Iran’s oil out to ship from a Mediterranean terminal in Israel. That [..] absolutely aligns with Netanyahu’s and Trump’s actions.

The cunning and arrogant hypocrisy of the US Empire (not simply Trump) and the intertwined Jewish-Zionist lobby is nicely conveyed by the one-time British diplomat turned anti-war blogger Craig Murray.

But without shred of understanding of capitalist crisis, and the material realities of the balance of class forces, he is forced somewhat limply to fall back on personal enrichment as the driving force for the mafia-like Trumpites and the sick disgusting barbarous destruction and killing imposed on the world.

Increasingly shameless insider-dealing corruption there is aplenty, as various bourgeois press accounts have shown and not unexpected as an expression of capitalist degeneracy in its downhill plunge into historic oblivion (once the world class struggle pushes it there).

Some of the war bluster might even be timed to shift the market responses, but it remains a side aspect of the far greater historic collapse.

The limitation in such moralising is that it gives a completely idealist (and defeatist) view of history being driven along by subjective wishes and greed rather than the concrete realities of the balance of class power.

As mentioned before, the seizure of hydrocarbons does not “go without saying” (even if Trump does make a point of saying it).

And while Trump et al may well “not care” about ordinary people the bourgeoisie has to pay attention to them, if only because they will be driven down the revolutionary path as much as any, as the capitalist crisis bites, and with an astonishing historic impact once this most advanced of all nation’s workers are forced into action, and past the debilitating consumerism, great nation chauvinism, three-way racist divisions, and fake-“left” confusions which hold them back.

Similar idealist notions are emerging in some of the uncertainty around the MAGA populist movement with major splits and breakaways caused by the objective reality of dramatic resistance by the Iranians (not part of the Trump plan):

Some US politicians have reacted with alarm and questioned the US president’s mental state after Donald Trump issued an abusive, expletive-laden threat to Iran in which he called on the regime to “open the fuckin’ strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards”, as he threatened to further attack the country’s energy and transport infrastructure.

The US president wrote on his Truth Social platform: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

It comes as the Trump administration hurtles towards another self-imposed deadline – this time, Tuesday evening – for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz. One of the world’s most critical shipping lanes for oil and gas, the strait has been effectively shut since the US and Israel launched war on Iran at the end of February.

Trump has threatened Tehran with several deadlines in a bid to reopen the key maritime corridor, and has fixated his frustration on European and Nato allies who have rejected the legality of the US-Israeli war on Iran and refused to intervene in the strait of Hormuz crisis – prompting Trump to threaten to withdraw the US from Nato.

Mehdi Tabatabaei, deputy for communications at the Iranian president’s office, said on Sunday that Iran would only open the strait only after receiving compensation for war damages, paid via a “new legal regime” based on transit fees.

He added that Trump, with his threats to attack Iran’s civil infrastructure over the strait’s closure, had “resorted to obscenities and nonsense out of sheer desperation and anger”.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former staunch ally turned Trump critic, said everyone in the Trump administration who claims to be a Christian needs to “beg forgiveness from God” and intervene in the president’s “madness”.

In a lengthy post on X, the former Republican congresswoman wrote: “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this.”

She went on: “The Strait is closed because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon.

“You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it. Trump threatening to bomb power plants and bridges hurts the Iranian people, the very people Trump claimed he was freeing.”

After years of loyalty, Greene broke from Trump last year as she criticized his strikes on Iran last June as backtracking on his campaign promise to put “America first” and avoid expensive foreign wars.

“This NOT what we promised the American people when they overwhelmingly voted in 2024, I know, I was there more than most,” Greene wrote on Sunday. “This is not making America great again, this is evil.”

Meanwhile, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said Trump’s rant resembled that of “an unhinged madman”. He wrote on X: “Happy Easter, America. As you head off to church and celebrate with friends and family, the President of the United States is ranting like an unhinged madman on social media.

“He’s threatening possible war crimes and alienating allies. This is who he is, but this is not who we are. Our country deserves so much better.”

Bernie Sanders, an independent US senator, called it “dangerous and mentally unbalanced”. He said on X: “One month after starting the war in Iran, this is the statement of the President of the United States on Easter Sunday. These are the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual. Congress has got to act NOW. End this war.”

But all this, liberal dismay and Trumpite disappointment reflects a petty bourgeois view that the imperialist system is always in control and that its aims and wishes are what counts rather than ultimately reflecting objective crisis developments.

It is typical also of the defeatism that saturates petty bourgeois “leftism” and particularly the Trotskyists.

Certainly the ever growing monopoly concentration of US financial and military power is unprecedented in history.

But that does not take into account the desperation and fear of the Empire’s ruling class confronted with the objective material reality of its system imploding, along with the “stability” of its world exploitation and topdog position in the imperialist pecking order.

No particular criticism in that for Murray or Maga who are not Marxists but total contempt for the likes of Schumer and Sanders, who uphold the capitalist system, and the legions of fake-“left” all failing to spell out the complete breakdown underway and attempting variously to repair or prop up imperialism with their notions of a “saner” or “fairer” way to do things, or “measures to stop war”, or “better democracy” (!!!!), or step by step reforms supposedly towards revolution “ultimately” (i.e. never).

Nothing will stop the imperialist war drive except defeat as Leninism has always argued (see EPSR Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism).

And it is coming, especially from the enormous widespread and sometimes staggeringly heroic ground level upheavals already widespread throughout the Third World and particularly in the Middle East, even when led for the moment by such barmy, backward, even reactionary, ideologies as the Ayatollahocracy.

While that is hardly the necessary Marxist future for mankind and is often brutally hostile to communism and even basic trade union reformism as the mullahs have been (the reason they were tolerated as a “better option” than potential communist takeover, and in fact sometimes even aided by imperialism during and since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979) it has been driven by the contradictions of the intensifying crisis into taking an anti-imperialist stand, like a slew of bourgeois opportunist regimes before it, from the revisionist-nationalist Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, to Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad dynasty among others.

And it is proving a stand of considerable indigestibility for the imperialist order and its stinking hypocrisies and arrogant high handedness, declaring that Iran should “never be allowed a nuclear weapon” or even missile technology.

(And, incidentally, why should Iran not have both? - just like multiple other states do including both US-stooging Pakistan, where its chief general has recently “democratically” granted himself unlimited i.e. autocratic powers (after the opposition was banned and mostly incarcerated to this day, including its popular leader Imran Khan), or like Hindu fascist-nationalist India also to the east and most of all the Zionist occupation itself?

Why are they all not being blitzed and bombed into the floor as supposed “unacceptable threats to the world order” unless they immediately hand over all their already developed nuclear weaponry, materials and missiles, and dismantle all associated facilities, laboratories, factories and test sites etc etc??)

The heralded “4-day war” on Iran and the quick overthrow of the mullahs by a fantasised mass “opposition” is proving disastrous at nearly 40 days; in general as assorted Western stooge feudal-thug sheikhdoms take a hammering all around the Gulf and the world economic collapse is put in a choke hold at the Hormuz Strait, and in specifics, like the latest bungled US raid, lyingly presented by Washington as a “heroic rescue” when wreckage of several planes and four helicopters tells a different story.

Some Internet speculations have credibly queried the idiot macho triumphalism on this from Trump and his demented Christian fundamentalist sidekick War Secretary Pete Hegseth:

Armchair Warlord: 6 Apr 2026

My theory is we just saw an attempt to seize Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium unravel.[...]

The evening of April 2nd, the Iranian military released a video of them shooting down a USAF aircraft. This was initially claimed as having occurred over the Persian Gulf, but apparently occurred near Isfahan. Wreckage corresponding to an F-15E of the 494th Tactical Fighter Squadron was recovered from a site south of [the city].

The afternoon of April 3rd, a number of USAF HH-60s and an HC-130 fueler (!) were spotted operating further south and west in Iran, over Kogiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, as well as at least one A-10, an MQ-9 Reaper, and apparently an F-35. An anti-aircraft battle developed and the Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) HH-60s nd an A-10 were damaged, with the A-10’s pilot ejecting over the Persian Gulf. The HH-60s were reported as “damaged” and one was photographed trailing smoke. Reports emerged at that time that the pilot of the F-15E (which had crashed near Isfahan, although this was then-unclear!) had been rescued, while the WSO (weapons operator) remained at large[...]numerous photos of militia searching for him emerged.

The evening of April 4th, however, there was a report of more helicopter activity slightly further north, in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province, accompanied by a washed-out photograph of an unknown helicopter flying very low on a very dark night (fig. 3). Later that night news emerged that the F-15Es WSO had been rescued... and that C-130s had been abandoned and scuttled at a forward base in the Isfahan area during the withdrawal of a company-size SOF force that had landed in the area, over 100 operators ostensibly having been sent to rescue one aviator.

[dawn]..showed two burned-out C-130s and several destroyed MH-6 Little Bird SOF assault helicopters, in a scene reminiscent of the aftermath of Operation Eagle Claw (1979 failed Iran hostage rescue mission- ed). A USAF C-295 tactical transport was caught on video around that time flying in Iran - presumably outbound - at extremely low altitude.

First the official story - that a huge direct-action SOF force landed near Isfahan with assault helicopters and heavy transport aircraft to rescue one fugitive airman - is nonsense. Not because the USAF won’t go to extreme lengths to recover isolated personnel - it can, will, and did in this case - but because that’s an absolutely nonsensical way to accomplish that mission. It’s a totally inappropriate force package for a mission to go in, extract a single person from a remote area, and leave. Ergo this SOF task force was there on other business.

So how were the pilots actually recovered? In all likelihood, exactly the way you would expect them to be recovered - by USAF PJs in long-range helicopters, under cover of darkness. The rescue force probably recovered the pilot from the Isfahan area late at night on April 2-3 and were caught in daylight as they exfiltrated, leading to the aforementioned anti-aircraft battle the morning of April 3rd and a high-risk refueling over Iranian territory that was filmed by many Iranians on the ground, as well as a shot-down A-10 trying to clear a path for the helicopters to exfiltrate. The WSO was likely recovered from his hide site near Isfahan by HH-60 in a quiet and deliberate operation the night of April 4-5. One or two birds, in and out under cover of darkness - a far cry from the spun gung-ho stories.

So what about the [rest]? Why was an F-15 flying downtown to Isfahan the evening of April 2nd to begin with? Probably because there was a huge direct-action raid planned in the Isfahan area for the night of April 4-5, likely going after enriched uranium at an underground facility in the region, and the Iranian air defenses around Isfahan weren’t going to suppress themselves. The plan was likely to fly several MH-6 assault birds and a sizable force of operators via C-130 and C-295 to a forward staging area near Isfahan the evening of April 4th, hit a reported cache site or sites for enriched uranium, and try to make it out with the magic dust by daybreak on April 5th.

In any event the USAF wasn’t going to send transports somewhere it wouldn’t send strike aircraft. [..] - and lo and behold one of the F-15Es went down because reports of the demise of the Iranian air defense network had been greatly exaggerated. Any rational planner would have scrubbed the SOF operation at this point.

[...]We went ahead anyway..April 4th. I strongly suspect that this force was immediately discovered by Iranian drones (searching for the WSO), because five transport aircraft including at least two C-130s (required for a bunch of Little Birds and a company[..]of operators with equipment) landing at a desert airstrip 50km from Isfahan [..]would be pretty God-damn obvious to anything with thermals. Iranian troops immediately deployed and began converging, the task force probably took indirect fire, and the operational commander immediately aborted mission and retreated in the three remaining operational aircraft. Scuttling charges on delayed fuzes burned 2 C-130s and an unknown number of MH-6s around dawn.

The story that they were there to rescue the WSO was concocted at that time to cover the disastrously failed raid, as were logistically implausible claims that the task force had been rescued by three additional aircraft after the two C-130s got stuck and were scuttled - perhaps to minimize the scale of the effort. Claims that a large battle took place appear to be similarly exaggerated.

I remind the reader that the events of the last few days have proven quite conclusively that Iranians seem to have plenty of internet access to post photos and video when they actually have something worthwhile to film. Also note that Hegseth fired General George - US Army Chief of Staff - on April 2nd, apparently because he just wasn’t a good fit for the job and definitely not because he’d told him that this whole scheme was insane.

Or as a slight variant says:

As the IRGC spokesman himself claimed in his report from earlier today, the US used jet aircraft to bomb to smithereens the stranded HC-130Js and the off-loaded MH-6 helicopters.

After absorbing the shocking results of the failed mission, the US triumphantly claimed the pilot was rescued, the operation was a brilliant success, and the US has the greatest military in human history.

The dutiful Western media, under instruction from the intelligence agencies as always, have not raised any of these points, so obvious that even a rooky journalist would query them.

But the bourgeoisie understands just how crucial it is to keep public opinion fooled and hyped-up against the “terrorists” as it designates the resistance movements.

And part of that propaganda picture is to suppress all news of defeats and setbacks.

So they have also allowed little to emerge about the hammering being taken by the population inside “Israel” from missiles penetrating the vaunted “Iron Dome” – with severe prison penalties for any publication of images or information (so much for the “freedom and democracy” which is supposedly such an exception in the Middle East.)

Nor has the world heard anything about the blows rained on the Zionist military raiding into southern Lebanon behind the grotesque terror-expulsion orders imposed on one million of the population including the entire city of Tyre, ostensibly to create a “buffer zone” but in fact to further the monstrous violent ethnic cleansing agenda that has been at the heart of the whole “Israel” project from the beginning.

For all the caution needed in the fog of war and around the social media, it is clear that the Zionists are sustaining morale sapping troop losses and injury in Lebanon, including destruction of tanks and other equipment by the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance, who have already defeated them before, in 2000 and 2006 and whose resilience has thrown imperialism back on its complacent heels.

Missiles from Lebanon and Iran have caused major damage in Haifa and much else of the occupied north of Palestine and the very presence of these fighters, after their seeming eradication and the foul terror attack last year through booby trapped phone and pager communicators indicates just what a problem imperialism now faces everywhere.

Far from establishing imperialist control the non-stop massacres, torture and butchery, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, which have reached grotesquely inhuman levels of deliberate and wilfully racist sadism and vengeful fascist persecution, have only magnified the Middle Eastern rebellion and anti-imperialist hatred and hostility.

So little has the region been “pacified” that even in the heavily controlled bourgeois press an odd minimal comment does appear (very) occasionally from one or two less compromised journalists, as in this (partial) quote:

On 28 February, the first day of the war, unnamed Israeli officials briefed the Haaretz newspaper that the Iranian threat would taper off in a handful of days as Iran’s last missile launchers were eliminated.

[They] said Israel’s military planners had stockpiled missile interceptors for a war they assumed would last three weeks at most.

When viewed as a discrete conflict, [Iran] is as much owned by the US as Israel, but it is part of Israel’s war; the latest front in Netanyahu’s state of permanent conflict that has raged since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

That attack altered the country’s strategic calculations. And in the expanding regional conflicts that have followed in Gaza, Lebanon and now Iran, with the Houthis in Yemen and in the Syrian hinterland, a common theme has emerged: Netanyahu[‘s] promised victories [..] are always ephemeral and hubristic.

In Gaza, despite a horrific campaign of death and destruction, a diminished Hamas still persists among the ruins. In Lebanon, where Hezbollah was declared defeated, the organisation retains its capacity to fire rockets across the border, with Israel plunging once again into the same policy of occupying southern Lebanon that failed once before – and led to the emergence of Hezbollah in the first place.

In Iran, despite the killing of the supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials, a “decapitation” strategy has not led to promised quick regime change but, for now at least, apparent consolidation of the regime around the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Even if the precise dynamic of influence and persuasion remains murky, it is clear that even among senior Trump administration officials, the perception exists that Netanyahu overpromised, not least amid challenged accounts of a testy conversation between the vice-president, JD Vance, and Netanyahu to that effect.[...]

As the security experts Richard K Betts and Stephen Biddle wrote in Foreign Affairs last week: “In just its first weeks, the war has cost many billions of dollars in direct expenditure, reduced support for Ukraine, put dangerous strains on inventories of the most advanced US weapons, and shocked the global economy.”

The conflict has also undermined Nato while potentially emboldening China, Russia and North Korea. And while Netanyahu has boasted in biblical terms of hitting Iran with ‘‘10 plagues”, it has not been lost on some that the Iranian and Hezbollah missiles still landing on Israel mean Passover will be spent with one eye on the bomb shelter.

But even this does not really spell out a full picture: October 7th did not so much “alter” Zionism’s strategic calculations as send it reeling from the staggering advances revealed in the capacities and capabilities of the Palestinian resistance (and by implication the growing Arab and Third World resistance to imperialism which the Palestinian struggle encapsulates and is at the forefront of).

That staggering eruption has forced the Zionist occupation to go ahead in full with the endless genocide against the Palestinian people making even more explicit that barbarism which has been implicit in the very nature of the so-called “state of Israel” since its foundation in early settlements in the 1920s and particularly once the imperialist-stooge United Nations sanctioned the occupation and dispossession of the land in the euphemistically named “Partition”, giving over more than half the country to the Zionist settlers, who promptly took much more with the terror-massacre expulsion of 700,000 from their land in the Nakba and eradication of their towns and villages.

Nor has it stopped since, astonishingly escalating its ethnic cleansing terror even now in the West Bank and openly demonstrating its supremacist fascist nature with the latest law to re-introduce the death penalty – for Palestinians only.

But in confirming its barbaric “master-race” reality (as if it were not already clear from the start save for the lies of post-war bourgeois “democracy” reinforced by the stupidities of Stalin’s “permanent peaceful coexistence” revisionism and the unworkable “two-state” solution it spawned) the Zionist occupation has simultaneously forced the whole of imperialism to reveal its own universal and truly barbaric dictatorship nature, as always hidden behind the “democracy” veil.

Reliance on the Jewish occupation’s fanaticism to give some backbone to its own faltering will to impose renewed domination on the planet – (after failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and the Ukraine, how many US soldiers could be found to throw themselves into a war against Canada, or Europe or China, Nazi stormtrooper style??) – has necessarily meant the bourgeois world tearing up every alleged principle of “international justice” “democracy” and “freedom of speech” in order to keep “Israel” in place, including abandoning the whole United Nations racket, international courts and all pretence of Geneva conventions etc.

The US Empire has desperately tried to whip up its own mystical fanaticism too:

US military commanders have been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify involvement in the Iran war to troops, according to complaints made to a watchdog group.

[And] Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, is known for his embrace of Christian nationalism. He previously endorsed the doctrine of “sphere sovereignty”, a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR). The philosophy calls for capital punishment for homosexuality and strictly patriarchal families and churches.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) says it has received more than 200 complaints from service members across all branches of the armed forces, including the marines, air force and space force.

One complainant, identified as a non-commissioned officer (NCO) in a unit that could be deployed “at any moment to join” operations against Iran, told MRFF in a complaint viewed by the Guardian that their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ”.

“He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”, the NCO added.

The NCO’s complaint was filed on behalf of 15 troops, including 11 Christians, one Muslim person and one Jewish person. The complaint was first shared by MRFF with Jonathan Larsen, an independent journalist.

“Anytime Israel or the US is involved in the Middle East, we get this stuff about Christian nationalists who’ve taken over our government, and certainly our US military,” Mikey Weinstein, MRFF’s president, who is an air force veteran, told the Guardian.

“Military members are not really able to stand up for themselves, because your military superior is not your shift manager at Starbucks,” he added.

In a statement, Weinstein suggested the reports indicate an increase in Christian extremism in the military, noting that the complainants “report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders” who perceive a “‘biblically-sanctioned’ war that is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘End Times’.”

Such deranged mysticism - further echoed by likening the Easter weekend airman rescue to “the resurrection of Jesus” is characteristic of fascism, which is only the extreme face of capitalist dictatorship (which may or may not use some specific theatricality or specific forms of scapegoating).

Denying the now grossly obvious fascist nature of imperialism, as just about all fake-“left” does because of some academic rigmaroles about “exact definitions” and whether or not “certain boundaries have been crossed” is to evade the real issue, that open bourgeois dictatorship is now the reality as Catastrophic collapse unfolds and that there is no path forwards against it except revolutionary class war struggle (and the nitpicking argument itself becomes part of the evasion).

Worse still they do not even grasp or advance the principle of defeat for this monstrous warmongering system as the first call to make without suggesting any faith to be placed in mullahs or other non-Marxists by unnecessarily calling for their victory.

But none of them want to say any of that.

And they go to extreme lengths of dissembling, posturing and pretence in order not to say it, even as the world is crying out for revolutionary clarity.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the all the trivial backbiting, infighting and fake-“left” flouncing around the new “socialist” group, the Your Party movement founded by former “left” Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and MP Zarah Sultana, and the disruptive ultra-left posturing of the Grassroots Left factionalising which has done its best to derail it.

The party launch is a response the giant vacuum left in Britain by the total implosion of the risibly named Labour Party into outright servility to the bourgeoisie and its draconian suppression of workers interests.

Starmerism is a parody of even the hollow and shallow PR “New” Labourism under Tony Blair, and even more reactionary.

It laughably claims an overwhelming “mandate” on the back of minimal “support” (little more than 15% of the whole population and most of that mainly petty bourgeois distrustful votes or cynically only trying to “stop the others”) in the utterly discredited parliamentary system, (rightly held with utter contempt by the working class) as it pursues vicious police-state repression of (left) protest, imperialist warmongering, grovelling to the fascist Trump-led US and complete support of the reactionary Zionist freemasonry and its Middle East genocide.

If it is not fascist itself (and by some measures could be described so, as past Labourites have become, most notably Oswald Moseley who founded the British blackshirts), it is paving the way.

Corbyn’s pious “peace and love” alternative is by no means the revolutionary answer the working class needs nor even much of the “centrism” that the degeneration of the world capitalist system and its crisis has been expected to throw up, for at least 30 years i.e. a potentially “revolutionary” movement in rhetoric while strictly reformist-opportunist in practice).

It does not even come that close to the two false starts already seen, in Arthur Scargill’s initially promising, overtly anti-capitalist Socialist Labour Party in the mid-1990s and the popular left surge with threw Corbyn to the surface, initially within Labour itself, until Mandelson-style dirty dealing and internal sabotage carried out a parliamentary coup in cahoots with the Zionist lobby, around the entirely made-up notion of institutionally racist “left anti-semitism”.

But it has been forced into existence precisely because there is a screaming void in leadership for a working class desperate for answers to the agonising Catastrophic breakdown of capitalist society into slump and war as the EPSR said when the SLP first emerged:

Never has there been such a time of overwhelming insistent demand, from every social factor and indicator going, for a socialist solution to capitalism’s problems, coupled with such utter bankruptcy and confusion in socialist understanding and preparation for what needs to be done. (EPSR No875 15-10-96)

Corbyn of course will not provide-

All the Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding from analysing all previous experiences in the class-war conflicts of the capitalist system [..] indispensable as a training for how to struggle now.

His lifetime role has been that of “left” reformism precisely to head off and block the way to Marxist understanding with fainthearted compromise, bolstering up the capitalist system and hostile to revolution.

But willy-nilly Your Party has coalesced, precisely because nature abhors a vacuum and however inadequate, it represents objective movement in the working class – even now, despite major efforts to undermine and disrupt it – and for the moment there is still the chance to make the argument for revolutionary understanding within it (if or until it shuts down all debate – and that would be its death-knell since the need for debate is what has generated it).

That does not remotely mean that Your Party will or can become “the revolutionary party”, the nonsensical line pursued by the assorted fake-“left” elements who swarmed around YP from the beginning, trying to take it over.

Just the opposite. Their posturing and ultra-left pretences have almost destroyed the possibilities offered just as they tried to do with Scargill – and failed.

Interestingly (and not surprisingly) none of Trot “left” make any allusions to that experience despite the richness of lessons it generated in its first two years and even subsequently (see EPSR Books Vol 31&32 Party Building & Theory Parts 2&3) – nor do they reference the disastrous Socialist Alliance attempts to divert from the SLP, hodge-podges of lowest common denominator attempts to unify mostly Trots on the basis of “the 80% we all agree on”.

They inevitably fell apart over the unresolved issues, which turned out to be much more than just “20%” and especially over the crucial questions of the Soviet Union, its giant achievements and its disastrous revisionist retreats and eventual Gorbachevite liquidation.

Certainly the Labour-style bureaucratism of the Corbynites and the assortment of dire revisionists assembled around him in the “The Many” group for the recent YP executive committee election, such as the appalling idiot CPB and other remnants, (all calling for Labour votes until very recently) is an obstacle to revolutionary understanding, particularly in the continuing espousal of the deadly “parliamentary road” (setting workers up for yet more horrific Chile Allende-ism). As said before:

The biggest laugh capitalism has ever had at the expense of the working class is how gullible people have remained about ‘democracy’ in spite of the endless mountains of evidence available that everywhere it is nothing but a prop behind the non-stop propaganda rackets with which big business and the bourgeois state establishment perpetually fool the proletariat (EPSR No 852 07-05-96).

But the Grassroots Left factionalising which tried to challenge it (gaining around one third of the committee seats) has been even more disastrous, saturated in Trotskyist or allied petty bourgeois “left” arrogance and high-handed sectarianism, just as the “left opposition” in the SLP proved to be and equally avoiding the battle for revolutionary understanding which alone can take workers forwards.

As the EPSR made clear about the SLP early on, while it was not the revolutionary party, as a centrist development it was a potential popular forum in the working class in which such perspectives could be discussed.

That is still possible in YP (and remains untested, not least because it has not yet formalised its structure).

But the Trots have not made any attempt to raise the major questions of the crisis and capitalism’s drive to war.

Instead they have swamped the discussion with endless tedious and academic disputes about rules and party structures. But even in the SLP–

revolutionary understanding itself has partially possibly moved on a bit to grasping that constitutions, rule-books, and party cards are not remotely the essential attributes of building a consistent Marxist-Leninist influence on the working class. It is winning the battle of ideas itself which is 99.99% of the successful struggle. All organisational questions will then tend to resolve themselves quite easily, - as should tactics and strategy if the historical and dialectical-materialist science has been learned thoroughly enough(EPSR No875 15-10-96).

But far from the vital polemical battles to develop correct understanding, encouraging the open expression of differing subjective views of the world but then fighting them out to a conclusion to establish the best possible grasp of the objective reality of the balance of class forces, as the established party line, they have deliberately tried to do the exact opposite by insisting on permanent “factional rights”.

But these “rights” and their formalised form in the “collective leadership” principle voted for at the party’s inaugural meeting only institutionalise a complete cacophony of opinion, once again pandering to a lowest common denominator principle, with all views deemed valid, failing completely to establish a clear line in front of the working class.

The Trots who have dominated many of the alleged proto-branches for YP are not interested in finding ways to pursue the demanding task of studying and developing Leninist theory and the essential practice needed to test it.

Just as in the SLP their interest has been in piggy-backing on the new party, parasitically riding the popularity and influence that Corbyinism achieved, with non-stop carping but no solutions.

Only the Sparts, possibly the most fly of the Trot groups, have tried to make a point about looking to political perspectives rather than solely focussing on organisational matters.

But since their perspectives are as biliously hostile to the workers states and the dictatorship of the proletariat as any, despite their pretences of upholding the “defence of the Soviet Union”, - even still calling for the “political revolution” to overthrow workers states like China, (see EPSR No1666 12-12-25) – that is hardly an advance.

To this day the Sparts lie about their support for the Solidarnosc bogus trade union in Poland, and their fifteen months backing it as a “working class movement” instead of the CIA/Vatican counter-revolutionary movement it was, and denouncing any moves to suppress it by the then Soviet Union or the Polish workers state. Only after its obvious anti-communist nature had become so smellily clear did they suddenly switch to calls to suppress it (see EPSR No1204 and No1206).

The whole Grassroots approach is saturated in petty bourgeois subjective individualism, insisting on its “rights” and creating hostility and distrust of the leadership because of some supposed “oppressive dictatorial line” which comes nowhere near taking up the real problems with Corbyn’s useless feeble pacifism.

It echoes Trotsky’s own original carping “left opposition” in the new Soviet state and its hard-done-by self-regard.

It is completely defeatist, typical of the petty bourgeoisie looking for a target to blame for its own failure and not even succeeding in that as the latest sour commentaries about the YP in the “left” press indicate as they despair at the mess their carping and shallowness has created.

And it has succeeded in driving away much of the vast tide of support for the newly launched party which emerged in the first weeks from a working class hungry for understanding.

Build Leninism Alan Moss

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Recent stitched-up elections in Bangladesh further expose the “perfect-revolution” utopian make-believe from the Trotskyist RCP (Socialist Appeal). Coming on top of 18 months of violent persecution of Sheikh Hasina’s bourgeois-nationalist Awami League and its Hindu-minority support base the “student revolt” now degenerates into an outright apologia for fascist intimidation, violence and killings to cover up the treacherous class-collaborating role it played on behalf of Western imperialism when Hasina was toppled. Part 1

So gross were levels of ballot-rigging, violence and other “electoral irregularities” needed to install the US-stooge Bangladesh National Party in power last February and legitimise the reactionary pro-Pakistan Muslim-fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami alongside its allies in the joke new “student” National Citizen Party, that the one-time Labour-Party entryists in the Trotskyist RCP have been obliged to echo (but play-down) the Awami League’s own detailed exposures [see EPSR No1669, 24-02-26]:

In the end, the ‘free and fair’ elections – which featured the bombing of a polling centre, and attempts to stuff ballots and buy votes – were won by Tarique Rahman of the BNP. Playing on legitimate fears that the JI [Jamaat-e-Islami] would roll back women’s rights, it won by a landslide, taking 212 seats, compared to the JI’s 77 and the NCP’s… six.

However, they gave 100% approval to the real “vote-rigging” scandal, – the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of AL voters (the largest and oldest party in Bangladesh), whose party activities were “suspended” soon after Hasina was toppled, and then violently suppressed in an 18-month campaign of fascist intimidation and killings of its members, supporters and allies (see below).

In a February post-election article written by these ex-Militant entryist worms (of ‘Socialist Appeal’, now rebranded again as the RCP) for their (also rebranded) RCI international-wing journal, they fraudulently declared the monstrous proscription of the AL to be a consequence of “revolutionary mass pressure” as they continue to gloss over the dirty propaganda role they played in helping topple Sheikh Hasina and re-install the direct rule of the imperialist-stooge wing of the bourgeoisie.

Back in August 2024, following a violent, “meticulously-designed”, Western-inspired coup which overthrew Hasina under the cover of a student movement against jobs quotas, RCP fiction insanely declared that “a system somewhat like dual power” existed in which alleged “committees of the students and of the revolutionary masses” had supposedly “displaced the functions of the state in many areas” as a power separate from the capitalist state. To give this wild fantasy posturing a “revolutionary” gloss they dementedly demanded “All power to the students’ and workers’ committees!” and called for the transfer of power to the working class.

By creating this “perfect-revolution” scenario which only ever existed in their subjective-idealist heads, they attempted to distance themselves from any awkward real-world developments that could potentially lead workers to question why they happened to come down on the same side as Western imperialism.

The capitalist-crisis-driven discontent of middle-class university students had been consciously manipulated to stir up violence and chaos. Far from it being a “student-led revolution” as these deluded Trot daydreamers insisted against reality was the case, much of the chaos was inflicted by mobs influenced by the right-wing BNP and JeI and their student wings. It was this violent terror (including the killing of 44 police officers and burning down of more than 450 police buildings, mob beatings and lynchings, and attacks on government buildings and media offices), and then military pressure, that forced Hasina into exile in India.

Far from being any solution to Bangladesh’s capitalist crisis, as the RCP implied it could have been by declaring it to be a stalled “revolution” against “the bureaucratic capitalist state”, the “July-Revolution” counter-revolution led to economic chaos under the interim-government dictatorship of the military-installed, neo-liberal capitalist banker and friend of the Clinton family mafia, Yunus Mohammed, as the RCP now concede in its twisted account:

The July Revolution was sparked by revulsion towards the corruption of the Awami League. But the inrush of gangsters trying to fill the space occupied by the Awami League proves precisely that the capitalists in Bangladesh only exist through corruption, robbery and looting.

The capitalist state exists only as a tool to enable the criminal enrichment of this class and to protect their ill-gotten gains. There is no other type of ‘nicer’ capitalism or more ‘democratic’ politics possible.

More than anything, Bangladeshi politics resembles a struggle between rival mafias seeking to fill the place of the old mob of gangsters. All the parties have been involved in this shameful feeding frenzy.

As a result of all of this, the economic situation has grown worse. The flight of Awami League businessmen from the revolution led to hundreds of garment factories collapsing. 130,000 garment workers were made redundant, adding to the 2.6 million already unemployed. Those jobs have not returned, as capitalists refuse to invest amid such instability.

Inflation is rising, and the economy is staggering under massive debts. 22 percent of government revenue goes simply to pay interest on loans. In response, the unelected Yunus government has not only implemented austerity, but shrank the annual budget for the first time in the country’s history, signalling that the days of the Bangladeshi Tiger – which buoyed Hasina’s rule for 15 years – are at an end.

On top of that, Bangladesh’s golden goose – the textile industry – is under threat. It is increasingly coming to depend on cheap yarn from India. This is firstly putting Bangladesh’s own yarn industry under threat, and secondly is leaving the textile industry exposed should India cut off this trade – and Bangladeshi-Indian relations are at an all time low.

Faced with all these compounding crises, the Yunus government has been totally paralysed and unable to carry out any of its promised ‘reforms’. At one stage, Yunus is even reported to have considered resigning, saying he felt he was being “held hostage” by the political chaos. Evidently, no one else could be found to do any better.

This crisis is set to get much worse as the latest warmongering escalation in monopoly-imperialism’s intractable world economic crisis, now against Iran, sends Bangladesh’s energy and fertiliser import-dependent economy reeling and dries up vital remittances from millions of Bangladeshis working in the Gulf states, forcing its new BNP government to desperately seek billions of dollars in additional external funding from the World Bank, the IMF and other imperialist “development” agencies.

It is a gross lie, however, to suggest that the July 2024 upheavals amounted to a

“revolution … sparked by revulsion towards the corruption of the Awami League”.

In Yunus’ own words, it was the outcome of a “well-organised”, “meticulously-designed” Washington-backed campaign to topple Hasina’s increasingly anti-imperialist intransigence, – particularly over her refusal to allow the US to set up a military base on St. Martin’s Island, which overlooks anti-imperialist Myanmar; her warnings of US imperialist plans to stir up separatist unrest within Bangladesh along the border with Myanmar; and the closer economic and diplomatic ties she was establishing with the revisionist-led Chinese workers state.

Yunus had been in contact with the US Embassy as far back as 2007, approving of the military coup then and plotting to prevent Hasina from gaining power by forming a new party, and again in 2009 once she had been elected, as leaked Wikileaks cables show [see EPSR No1651 20-12-24]. The RCP ignore all of this.

Just three days before the recent national elections, as a final act of stoogery in office, Yunus announced the signing of a capitulatory trade deal with the US which opened Bangladesh’s economy up to further US monopoly-imperialist super-exploitation in return for a measly 1% reduction in tariffs on garments. This was clearly done to tie the hands of the incoming government.

Against constitutional procedures (for what those are worth), the deal was announced without first briefing the incumbent AL-appointed president, Mohammed Shahabuddin (who had recently disclosed that he had been kept under virtual house arrest throughout the Yunus period, even for health matters).

The fence-sitting trick these sectarian Trots play is to suggest that there is no difference between the national-liberationist Awami-League wing of the bourgeoisie and the pro-Pakistan BNP/JeI/Yunus wing because they are all “capitalist gangsters”. This allows them to blow hard about their moralising “revolutionary purity” so as to avoid being labelled as imperialist stooges, whilst in practice spreading maximum suspicion, hostility and hatred towards the AL just at the point when it is beginning to take an anti-imperialist stance (even if limited).

Whilst the AL is a bourgeois-capitalist party (albeit with a formal “socialist”-reformist orientation), the crucial historically significant difference between it and the BNP is that it continues to carry the legacy of the national-revolutionary struggle it led against US-backed Pakistan’s suppression of the Bengali people’s national aspirations after the British Labour Party’s murderous partition of India in 1947 had left them divided, without statehood, between India and Pakistan.

The BNP was created by a Western-backed military-coup regime that took power in 1975 after brutally massacring the national-liberation leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Hasina’s father) and his family. The aim then was to intimidate and suppress the national-revolutionary sentiments of Bangladesh’s masses on behalf of imperialism, to prevent a more pro-Soviet, revolutionary-socialist outlook from emerging [at a time well before the Gorbachevite revisionist USSR liquidation - ed] .

The national-liberation aspirations that carried the AL forwards during Bangladesh’s independence struggle may have stagnated, and become corrupted and frustrated under the influence of the decades-long imperialist economic boom of the late 20th century, but the potential for mass-movement nationalist-revolutionary sentiment to now re-emerge under the impact of monopoly-capitalism’s latest lurch into inevitable warmongering Slump crisis should not be ruled out.

The capitalist-crisis conditions were already ripening under Hasina imperialist-compromised leadership, despite the above mentioned period of Bengal-Tiger economic growth, and drove her increasingly anti-imperialist position forwards, whilst simultaneously stirring up general mass discontent, particularly amongst the youth.

Her Awami League was brought down to intimidate and suppress any potential shifts towards a more socialist-revolutionary orientation amongst the working class and poor peasantry as the capitalist crisis deepens further.

No illusions should be sown in the AL’s philosophically-corrupted bourgeois-opportunist nationalism by giving it any “support” as such because it is not the answer, but the RCP’s Trot biliousness and “ultra-revolutionary” posturing against it, heads workers in the wrong direction completely. Defeat for US imperialist intrigue by whoever is doing the fighting should be the call.

These Trots just about rescue themselves from exposing a Western-chauvinist line in their above quoted fence-sitting assertion that “the capitalists in Bangladesh only exist through corruption, robbery and looting” (as if this is exceptional to Bangladesh and not an inherent feature of capitalism’s super-exploitative, dog-eat-dog profit-seeking system) in their follow-on comment that “there is no other type of ‘nicer’ capitalism or more ‘democratic’ politics”. However, this is contradicted further down where they argue that student leaders should have

called for the formation of a revolutionary party based around a programme of democratic and social demands to lift the masses out of poverty.

Reformism, in other words, as there is nothing in the article about calling for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment a workers state under a firm and disciplined party-led proletarian dictatorship to suppress the capitalist class, which is the only means through which genuine “workers democracy” and “social change” can be achieved.

They do not even use the word “revolution” to describe the inevitable collapse and overthrow an entire out-of-time historical epoch and the establishment of a new, higher-level, stage of human development as Marxist-Leninist dialectical-materialist science understands it. Instead, they use it as if it is a separate phenomenon from the abolition of capitalism, – idiotically treating it as if its just an extreme form of protest:

But the lesson of this whole, tragic process is that protest and revolution in themselves are not enough. Capitalism and its state must be abolished.

So much for being “in defence of Marxism”, as their RCI publication pompously calls itself!!

The “revolutionary tide” was only in the heads of these certifiable petty-bourgeois-individualist lunatics. In the real world, a monstrous regime of arbitrary arrests, street beatings, lynchings, pogroms and extra-judicial killings against the Awami League and minority groups was unleashed by Yunus and the military following Hasina’s downfall.

The fact that they are now obliged to describe some of the chaos and gangsterism that was set going shows that reality can filter through even their blinkered petty-bourgeois world-view at times, but only as a pretence at objective material analysis:

With the police paralysed – and with a thousand guns looted during the revolution remaining unrecovered – Bangladesh has been plagued by a huge crime wave. Robberies, muggings, kidnappings, rapes and murders have spiked. Criminal gangs have re-emerged, as many of their leaders were able to simply waltz out of jail during the police strike. There have been over 150 incidents of mob beatings and killings: in some cases, crowds have armed themselves to fend off muggers; in others, religious minorities have been lynched.

Throughout the last year, there have been numerous cases of mobs storming police stations to free prisoners or beating up police who were trying to arrest them. In many cases, the cops have been forced to stand by and watch powerlessly as the crowds have their way. [...]

Now everything is up for grabs. A chaotic turf war has been taking place over the control of everything from bus routes to brick kilns, fish markets and student accommodation, all of which can be used to extort a fee.

Such matters are resolved with cash and guns. Bribery is rife, and there have been hundreds of cases of political violence: people have been killed over internet cables, scrap yards, and unpaid protection fees.

So much for their “July Revolution”!!!

Instead of reassessing their July 2024 position to identify how they had got it all so horribly wrong, they then proceed to apologise for the violent fascist suppression of the AL.

They justify the book-burning demolition of the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum (the former residence of Sheikh Mujib Rahman) and other properties related to the Awami League in the so-called “bulldozer-march” of violent “student” mobs; the banning of the mass-supported AL, and its monstrous suppression through “hunt-the-devils” pogroms; and the stitched-up in-absentia trials of its exiled leaders, in the name of “forcing the will of the students”:

The student leaders, while they still enjoyed support, were able to organise protests to force their will. Right after the revolution, a protest was organised to throw the chief justice of Bangladesh out of office. Later, in February 2025, students led a ‘bulldozer march’ to demolish the house of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father. Finally, national protests in May 2025 forced Yunus into the only consequential decision of his tenure: the banning of the Awami League.

As we predicted immediately after the revolution:

“Whatever liberal, democratic reforms they pass will come from the pressure of the masses on the streets, reflecting not their ‘clever’ negotiating, but the fact that the army feels itself under duress from the revolutionary masses.”

In consequence, thousands of the Awami League’s lowest-level thugs were arrested in Operation Devil Hunt, along with a handful of high-profile ministers. As for the tops, most had already fled into exile and could only be tried in absentia.

Their gross labelling of local AL organisers and supporters arbitrarily detained under the sinisterly-named Operation Devil Hunt as the “lowest-level thugs” is a sick apologia for state terror. If this was the “will of the students”, then it is a damning exposure of a counter-revolutionary middle-class movement.

The “devil-hunt” operation was launched in February 2025, using violent clashes between bulldozer-march “student” provocateurs and locals defending a former AL minister’s home as a pretext for state forces, specialised “anti-terrorist” units and vigilante mobs to hunt down AL members, supporters and allies. It was still ongoing up to the election with many thousands labelled as “fascist terrorists”, “thugs” and “criminals” rounded up and detained without trial in mass arrests. Many have been tortured, killed in custody or butchered on the streets [see EPSR No1654 08-05-25].

Their “thug” slander is no different to the gross smears routinely used by fascist-imperialism to justify some of the most grotesque anti-communist slaughters throughout history, and against every eruption of street rebelliousness today (unless it can be manipulated to serve imperialism’s interests, as in Bangladesh, and nearby Nepal).

Donald Trump today stirs up anti-left police-state and racist vigilante violence, and justifies the incarceration of left-wing activists for the rest of their lives (or worse), under the cover of combating “antifa thugs”, – see for example, the recent vengeful convictions against anti-ICE activists in Texas (last issue).

Imperialism’s psyops propaganda justifies foreign military intervention against Haïti’s ghetto rebelliousness in the name of fighting “criminal gangs”, and this was also the pretext for Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-working-class “drugs-war” death-squad killings of thousands in the Philippines, and now for presidential usurper Daniel Noboa’s flooding of Ecuador’s impoverished favelas with over 75,000 cops and soldiers, part of US imperialism’s organised counter-revolution (alongside the criminal kidnap of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela):

The Ecuadorean government has deployed more than 75,000 police officers and soldiers to four of the country’s most violence-wracked provinces, the interior minister says.

The authorities have also declared a night-time curfew in these areas as part of a “new phase” in their “war” on criminal gangs.

Since coming to office in November 2023, President Daniel Noboa has tried to quell drug-related violence but nevertheless Ecuador registered a record murder rate in 2025.

Noboa has also joined a US-led alliance of 17 countries aimed at fighting criminal cartels in the Western Hemisphere.

“We’re at war,” Ecuadorean Interior Minister John Reimberg told residents of the provinces of El Oro, Guayas, Los Ríos and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas.

“Don’t take any risks, don’t go out, stay at home,” he added.

Ecuador’s geographical location - sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest producers of cocaine - has turned it into a key transit country for the illicit drug.

Around 70% of the cocaine produced in Colombia and Peru is estimated to be shipped through Ecuador.

Noboa’s government has been working with the administration of US President Donald Trump to quell the flow of cocaine from Ecuador to the US.

Last week, the FBI opened its first office in the Andean country, a move which came shortly after the two countries launched joint counter-narcotic operations.

Noboa was one of the Latin American leaders to attend an international meeting hosted by Trump in Mar-a-Lago, which the US authorities dubbed the “Shield of the Americas” summit.

The RCP’s sick excuse-making for vigilante and police-state violence against the AL degenerates in its apologia for fascism in their grotesque justification of an orgy of Islamist and anti-Indian arson, violence and lynchings following the assassination of the right-wing “student leader” Osman Hadi last December:

A year and a half later, Hasina is gone, but conditions have worsened. There is no clarity as to where to go next. The desperate and embattled demonstrators could only strike out blindly at what they saw as the symbolic remnants of the secular, Indian-backed old regime.

In the December protests, the Indian consulate was besieged. The houses of ex-Awami leaders were burned down, as was the house of a BNP leader. A Hindu man was lynched and set on fire by a mob. Secular cultural institutions were firebombed. The offices of the main Bangladeshi newspapers were torched.

This “lack of clarity” assertion is a tricky piece of deception. Only after the fall of Hasina did these sly (RCP) poseurs start to slip comments into their articles about “lack of clarity” from student leaders to insinuate that they were about to betray the supposedly pure “democratic” instincts of “rank-and-file” students.

There was no lack of clarity in Hadi’s position and those around him, no matter how “desperate and embattled” they were. After the July unrest, he founded the national chauvinist anti-India, Inqilab Moncho “cultural centre” which called for the interim government to be transformed into a right-wing Yunus-led national-government coalition of the BNP, JeI, NCP and other reactionary pro-Pakistan parties, and the permanent banning of the AL.

They also circulated a “Greater Bangladesh” map that incorporated India’s West Bengal and Seven Sisters territories; stirred up backwards Muslim nationalism to counter the secular nationalism of the AL; and demanded the arrest of Lucky Akter, a member of the Stalinist-revisionist Communist Party of Bangladesh, for her role in organising the 2013 Shahbag student protests that called for the execution of JeI leaders convicted of war crimes during the 1971 liberation struggle.

(The CPB revisionists also need to re-evaluate the part they played in destabilising Bangladesh as they now attempt to distance themselves from attacks on symbols of the national-liberation struggle.)

The RCP write about Hadi in almost admiring terms, with his (Trump-like) “plebeian style of agitation”, and play down his reactionary bourgeois class position as “extremely contradictory”:

The only visible exception to the shameful careerism and co-option of the student leaders was Osman Hadi. Hadi was a founder of Inqilab Moncho (Revolutionary Platform), a student party born out of the revolution, who had stood at the forefront of demonstrations, like the campaign to ban the Awami League.

Hadi’s politics were extremely contradictory: he mixed populism with Islamism and called for a national unity government against India. But he also criticised the corruption of the BNP and the NCP. His plebeian style of agitation and his distance from the other student leaders turned him into a viral figure, a seemingly untainted fighter for the ideals of the July Revolution.

They also declare it “ironic” that the JeI fought against the 1971 independence war but supported the alleged “second independence” against Hasina’s AL when the obvious conclusion to be drawn from this is that the movement that brought the AL down was also counter-revolutionary, regardless of what the student protestors may have subjectively thought they were doing.

In their attempts to distance themselves from the “meticulously-designed” counter-revolutionary stunt the toppling of Hasina proved to be, the RCP now denounce “the student leaders’ fatal decision to shake hands with Hasina’s generals,” – that would be the same generals who installed the student-backed Yunus and sent Hasina into exile in India, presumably!!!

Back in August 2024, they had disingenuously applauded the students for “forcing the military to the negotiating table” (with all the hand-shaking that would involve) – as if the generals were somehow on the back foot. So what has changed???

They now admit that the middle-class students were led by groups of opportunist chancers and crooks, having made no warning at the time:

In the immediate aftermath of the July Revolution, every careerist immediately turned up at government offices demanding jobs, brandishing real or fictional credentials as ‘student coordinators’ of the movement. But the tone was set by the most prominent student leaders themselves. Student leaders have been seen returning to their hometowns flanked by hundred-car convoys. Others have used their positions to engage in extortion and corruption. An NCP coordinator was caught on camera, for instance, demanding money to call off a protest that he had called.

But this was not simply a “betrayal by student leaders” as they pretend, to cover their tracks.

These hustlers and spivs were the leadership, because they were seen to best articulate the demands and aspirations of a right-wing influenced student movement, whose non-socialist petty-bourgeois class position made them vulnerable to manipulation by such reactionary swindlers.

(Continues next issue)

Phil Waincliffe

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Text of a leaflet for the “Together” anti-fascist march on March 28 2026

Neither Tommy Robinson’s movement nor the Reform Party are the real fascist threat – that is the capitalist system itself.

Their racist backwardness and threatening reaction is generated from catastrophic failure of capitalist exploitation which is long out of time.

They are just one foetid and foul ASPECT of the epochal crisis collapse of ALL bourgeois society into World War destruction and chaos.

And they are inseparable from it – fascism is not something different to “normal” capitalism which has brutalised the world for centuries with genocidal colonialism, slave tyranny and brutal exploitation, – just a cruder more open version in crisis and collapse.

Revulsion against this deliberately stirred racist hatred, ignorance and violence is obviously of good intent.

But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Marches and demonstrations alone will do nothing to stop vicious war abroad, genocide in the Middle East nor slump repression at home.

Nor will pacifist pleading to “Stop war” or “respect international law”.

Just the opposite. Such delusions about “freedom and democracy” are part of the problem, holding back the revolutionary understanding which is vital to change the world and end its plunge into destruction and genocidal chaos.

Only the DEFEAT of imperialism by national-liberation movements and subsequent (or, better, concurrent) communist revolt, can stop this imperialist mayhem and barbaric destruction.

Only the complete OVERTURN of bourgeois rule will take the world forwards into peaceful rational planned socialism via proletarian dictatorship.

Until then its degeneration into planet threatening destruction will continue, whether under parliament’s rule (Labour, Green etc) or more overt “fascism”.

Monopoly capitalism, the high point of the greed-ridden profit-centred order has served its historic purpose dragging mankind forwards from feudalism to the epoch of science and high technology.

But the contradictions in its exploitation of the world’s billions, and wasteful plunder of world resources, have hit a brick wall, dragging mankind down.

Inevitable “over-production” crisis (see Marx’s Capital) has wrecked profitability.

The cutthroat trade war inherent in monopoly capitalism has been deepening for decades.

Now its unsolvability has become paralysis.

Catastrophic economic and political failure is unfolding and driving a demented ruling class into hatred, chauvinism and hot war (on top of its “normal” arms race war domination).

That is the only “way out” for the bourgeoisie (it hopes) just as in two previous world wars and the Franco-Prussian war before that.

All those destroyed the “surplus” capital clogging the markets, leaving space for renewed investment (for a while).

World War Three began with NATO’s Serbia blitzing in 1998, followed by Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria & Yemen.

But none went well, or solved the crisis which broke in full in the 2008 global banking meltdown – still reverberating.

So NATO’s war on Russia (and between Europe and the US) was manoeuvred using fascist stooges installed in Ukraine by the CIA/MI6 Maidan coup of 2014.

That has not gone well either, facing humiliating stalemate defeat.

War must reach full inter-imperialist conflict as twice before to wipe out market rivals “causing the trouble”.

Those are Japan and German-led Europe, revived post-1945 to stop communism and outcompeting the “topdog” US Empire for decades, and growing powers like India and Brazil.

And now comes the Chinese workers state whose rational planned economy runs its controlled capitalist sector better than any – outcompeting chaotic capitalist anarchy all down the line.

Hence escalated aggression in all directions by the “topdog” US Empire.

Bankrupt, it is tearing up all “rules” and “democracy” pretences disguising bourgeois dictatorship for two centuries.

Raw dictatorship is the order of the day, always the reality in fact but now in the open, deliberately and murderously intimidating – fascism in all but name.

If financial and market dominance cannot win it will coerce the world to pay tribute by brute force, while suppressing the working class at home with ICE intimidation and crude censorship.

But the Empire has lost all confidence, facing ever growing resistance across the Middle East and the Third World.

Bolstering its belligerence by letting fanatical Zionism off the leash to slaughter the Palestinians whose land they have stolen, then Lebanon, Syria and now Iran, only makes world hatred grow.

But to change things needs a clear perspective of these hugely complex fast changing class war struggles, to guide the fight to finish capitalism completely. That can only be through Marxist-Leninist theory constantly developed by a revolutionary cadre party, challenging and exposing all reformism and fake- “left”ism – reformist TUC, revisionist and Trotskyist. Build Leninism. Tony Lee

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