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No 1678 26th August 2026

Even “newer” Labourite shysters instantly show their crisis war form with missiles for Kiev and billions pledged to corrupt nazi Zelenskyism, while workers at home cannot make ends meet. “Self-determination” for Ukraine a sick joke as Diego Garcians remain exiled for more US B51 bombers to continue slaughter and butchery in the Middle East. Farage election joke exposes hopeless defeatism & retreat of fake- “left” while Latin America turns back to armed revolution. Build Leninism

Trivial social tinkering over fly-tipping or beds for the homeless by the fraudulent “new” Burnham government, is the most calculated lying Labour confidence trick yet.

In a world now near its fourth decade plunging into non-stop war blitzing, torture and eco-devastation, driven by the insane pursuit of monopoly profit into total Catastrophic trade war collapse, it is the sickest of diversionary irrelevance.

The real policies these repeat-Blair spin mountebanks are about is non-stop NATO armsrace warmongering against Russia; Britain’s continuing all-out support for the horrifying and inhuman three-year genocide by the Zionists in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon (on top of 90 years’ endless butchery before that); and grovelling to US warmongering operations against Iran using planes from British bases (including dispossessed Diego Garcia), and against anywhere else that suits Washington’s trillionaire-run Empire crisis-bullying needs.

All their “something new” “gravy and chips” populism, with its “more local decisions” mayoral devolution gimmickry and more useless council house posturing, is nothing but the hollowest playacting nonsense yet, a crude quick lick-of-paint job over the rotting – in fact rotten – timber of British and world imperialism and its sick plunge into World War Three.

The pretence of normality and steady improvement reformism, is a foul and entirely conscious cover-up for “continuity Labourism”, i.e. just outright stooging for the bankrupt bourgeoisie and indistinguishable from the Tories.

As “Andy” (so chummy!!) Burnham’s immediate flight to Kiev demonstrates, these sick cynics are just a front for the West’s panicky slump aggression, escalating the already dirty anti-Russian barbarities of the last five years by supplying the nazi-infested and massively corrupt Zelensky mafia running the Ukraine government with “better” long-range missiles and drones, to be targeted knowingly on terrorising the Russian civilian population, while the MI6/CIA lies pour out against Moscow just as Blair’s did over Afghanistan and the non-existent WMD “threat” and “mass graves” in Iraq in 2003.

Blanket censorship by these ratbags and allied bourgeois media stooges, covers up just how degenerate is this warmongering with its “plucky little Ukraine” bullshit but the details sneak through:

The commander of the notorious Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov unit, Andrey ‘White Leader’ Biletsky, struggled to explain its SS-style insignia in an interview with American influencer Laura Loomer, eventually resorting to a comparison between Adolf Hitler and eating with a fork.

This week, Loomer, who has cultivated close ties to US President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, was on a PR tour of Ukraine, which she insists doesn’t have a neo-Nazi problem.

However, she confronted Biletsky about his unit members “wearing a swastika, carrying swastika flags, doing Hitler salutes” in what she described as a “bizarre” practice. She also pointed to Azov’s insignia, describing it as “identical to the Nazi Germany logos worn by SS agents.” The emblem is the exact copy of the Wolfsangel rune used by several Nazi military formations, including the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich.

Biletsky acknowledged that the insignia was “rather controversial” because of its resemblance to Nazi symbols, but insisted it was a historical “monogram” representing the “idea of the nation” and claimed it had been used by some aristocratic and Cossack families “since the 16th century.” He maintained that Azov had adopted the symbol because of that tradition rather than a desire to imitate the SS.

No known evidence confirms this claim. Banners and standards used by the Cossacks were traditionally adorned with Orthodox crosses, depictions of Christ and saints, and had Cyrillic not Latin letters.

Biletsky then tried to downplay the issue by comparing the use of SS-style symbols to eating with a fork. “Should we see nothing but offensive triggers in everything…? Hitler ate with a fork and was a vegetarian. That doesn’t make forks or vegetarianism bad things,” he said, adding that his unit’s “symbolism” should be “approached… more cautiously.”

He also claimed that Azov “did not commit a single hate crime” and that Ukraine had “a super low level of xenophobic manifestations” in general.

Founded in 2014 amid Kiev’s crackdown on the people of Donbass opposing the Maidan coup, the Azov unit was a key participant in the fighting in Donbass prior to the outbreak of full-blown hostilities in 2022. During that time, it was repeatedly accused of war crimes by the UN and international NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The organizations documented reports of torture, rape, and looting by its fighters.

Canada and the US barred support for the unit in 2015 over its ideology and alleged abuses, with restrictions being only lifted years later under political pressure. The unit was eventually integrated into Ukraine’s National Guard, and in 2023 was expanded to a brigade.

By 2026, the 3rd Army Corps emerged from the wider Azov movement, with Biletsky – a prominent Ukrainian far-right figure, who founded the original Azov Battalion – still in command in the rank of brigadier general. Prior to founding Azov, the man known as the ‘White Leader’ also helped establish the ultranationalist Social-National Assembly, which has widely been described as a neo-Nazi, white supremacist organization.

Neo-Nazis are reportedly still prevalent within the Azov ranks. A Dutch mercenary who fought for Kiev told De Telegraaf newspaper in January that he saw Nazi symbols, swastikas, and flags at one of the Azov HQs. He said other foreign fighters told him they had seen the unit’s soldiers “giving the Nazi salute every morning.”

 

At least six drones hit a hotel in the town of Kirilovka on the Azov Sea at around 1:30 AM on Saturday while dozens of vacationers were asleep. In addition to the deceased, nineteen people were injured, including several children.

Footage from the scene shows shattered rooms, burned buildings, a large impact crater and drone debris. Investigators identified the wreckage as belonging to FP-2 heavy drones produced by the Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point.

At least 53 people were staying at the resort when it was struck. Rescue crews worked throughout the day, pulling survivors from the burning ruins and recovering victims.

Witnesses and rescuers described scenes of devastation, with families killed in their rooms, people trapped beneath collapsed concrete and bodies thrown across the site by the force of the blasts. One rescuer said the remains of a six-year-old girl were found scattered dozens of meters apart, while a father and son who had been sleeping there were discovered beneath the rubble.

Russian officials have described the strike as a deliberate attack on civilians. Zaporozhye Governor Evgeny Balitsky said Kiev’s forces knew they were targeting families at a popular resort, while Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called it a blatant act of terrorism.

Moscow has argued that Kiev has increasingly turned to attacks on civilians as its forces suffer continued setbacks on the battlefield.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired a senior aide amid a fresh corruption investigation – one day after a former defence minister warned the country was facing “a crisis of governance” and needed to hold a wartime presidential election.

 

Iryna Mudra, a presidential deputy chief of staff, was dismissed by decree after multiple reports in Ukrainian media that her house was being searched by officials investigating an alleged money-laundering scheme.

No official reason was given for Mudra’s sacking as Zelenskyy sought to carry on as normal, despite Mykhailo Fedorov’s surprise call for an early presidential election in a video address released late on Tuesday.

The president did not directly address the ousted minister’s accusations or his election demand in his initial public statements, though he did thank Ukraine’s parliament for voting to confirm Fedorov’s replacement, Yevhen Khmara, in the post.

At the heart of Fedorov’s argument were accusations that corruption remained widespread under Zelenskyy and that the president had failed to get a grip. “Corruption is only a symptom. The main problem runs much deeper. We have a systemic crisis of governance,” Fedorov had said.

The removal of Fedorov from his post in July triggered the most significant street protests in Ukraine since the war began.

Fedorov is now considering visiting the US, possibly as soon as next week, in an apparent effort to win over American support. In the past, the US president, Donald Trump, has called for Ukraine to hold elections, though his comments were made at a time when his relationship with Zelenskyy was strained.

Elections have been suspended in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Fedorov became the first major public figure to call for a presidential poll, effectively posing a direct challenge to the sitting president.

“Can Russia effectively be given the right to dictate when Ukrainians can choose their government again? I am convinced that the answer is no,” Fedorov said in a nine-minute video address released on social media late on Tuesday.

The Nabu anti-corruption agency said it was conducting a special operation to expose what it said was a criminal conspiracy that involved “the participation of high-ranking officials from the office of the president” and several others.

It released a video saying those involved included a deputy head of the president’s office, a serving MP and a former MP, as well as the CEO and supervisory board head at a state-owned bank, though none were named.

Nabu added that the group was accused of laundering 150m hryvinas (£2.5m) through the state-owned bank in order to post bail in June for the former energy minister Herman Haluschenko, himself facing anti-corruption charges.

Haluschenko is a defendant in the high-profile Midas corruption case, alongside the businessman Timur Mindich, who has fled the country. Mindich is a former associate of the president and former co-owner of the TV production company Kvartal 95, co-founded by Zelenskyy in the years before he went into politics.

The Nabu agency is strongly tied to the American FBI which is another reason – as well as the street discontent – why its probing has not been shut down despite the Kievites trying hard to do so.

Those items are just a sample and those from the Western press highly biased. Further stories demonstrate the propaganda by blanket censorship (note the BBC and CNN refusals) like the May butchery at a Russian school (and shortly afterwards a sports team coach in Belarus):

Ukraine targeted a teacher training college dormitory in the town of Starobelsk with several waves of UAVs on Friday, killing 21 people, mostly teenage girls, and injuring 60 others.

Russian Foreign Ministry arranged a trip to Starobelsk on Sunday for more than 50 foreign journalists from 19 countries: Austria, Brazil, UK, Hungary, Venezuela, Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, Qatar, China, Cuba, Lebanon, UAE, Pakistan, the US, Turkey, Finland, and France, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

BBC and CNN rejected an invitation to visit the site of the attack, while Japan’s government explicitly banned Japanese reporters from making the trip, she added.

Russia’s newly appointed human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, who also arrived in Starobelsk, said that Western mainstream media outlets “are simply afraid to see the truth. They just don’t want to see or hear it.”

Those of their colleagues who accepted the offer to visit the site of the terrorist attack will see for themselves that there are no military facilities nearby, she said.

The foreign journalists will also realize that claims of the drones hitting the dorm after being shot down by Russian air defenses are false, the commissioner insisted. It’s “absolutely impossible” for 16 UAVs to hit the same building after being intercepted, she explained.

What happened in Starobelsk was a “deliberate killing of children” by Ukraine, Lantratova stressed.

A correspondent for China’s Phoenix Television, Lu Yuguang, told RT that he hasn’t seen even a hint of any military facilities in the vicinity of the dorm.

Giovanni Pigni, from Italian newspaper La Stampa, told TASS that what he saw in Starobelsk is “horrible.”

“The destruction is so immense… I just see that there was a college here and that people have died,” he said.

On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry reported carrying out a large-scale strike against military targets in Ukraine in response to the terrorist attacks by Kiev.

The Russian response, which involved the intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik system and other types of missiles and drones, targeted command centers of the Ukrainian ground forces and military intelligence, air bases, and defense industry enterprises, the ministry said

None of which will stop the endless Goebbels lies in the Western media about Russia “aiming at civilians” and the risible propaganda about untraceable “cyber attacks” or “low level Russian warfare” every time a building catches fire anywhere in Europe, and non-stop accusations about “Russian drone or missile incursions”, the only evidence for which is British, Polish or European intelligence “assessments” because they “looked like” Russian attacks (which were themselves only deemed Russian on the same specious basis in an endless spiral of hysteria-inducing Goebbels assertions).

But civilian deaths in Ukraine – if the fascist Ukrainian agencies can be trusted to report these things at all (with every incident strangely and emotively involving a hospital or kindergarten allegedly) – are very limited and obviously so, when compared to the daily horrors imposed by the ceasefire-ignoring Zionists in Gaza, where thousands are killed and many more maimed and traumatised by deliberate sadistic sniping, blitzing and missiling, ignored or downplayed by the West.

Hearsay acceptance of these Ukraine incidents never examines the locations, circumstances and forensics, or whether air-defence hits had diverted incoming missiles (or caused the damage themselves), or puts two and two together with other gushing “morale boost” stories such as on Ukraine’s burgeoning drone building capacity and its “network of small workshops and suppliers cleverly dispersed and hidden across the country in basements etc”. Just might those be the actual targets??

Meanwhile, the only rubbish these despicable Labour degenerates are trying to clear-up at home is the disastrous contempt they are all rightly held in (not just Starmer) by just about everyone, as is the rest of parliament and the whole bourgeois “democracy” racket in fact.

If it were not for the treachery and retreats of the fake-”left” of all shades, revisionists and poisonous Trots, (and a host of single-issue PC and sometimes contradictory causes from feminism to trans-rights – “wokeism”, to use the crude shorthand) all still refusing to call for revolutionary understanding of the need for working class dictatorship and development of leadership for class war overthrow of this stinking system, the Labour confidence tricksters would be out on their ear tomorrow, along with the whole world-threatening ruling class and its collapsing monopoly capitalist system.

But the “left” offers no such perspective, leaving a giant vacuum.

The farcical Clacton by-election stunt by the loathsome fascist-minded Nigel Farage and his bigoted racist Reform Party, to try and pretend some kind of plebiscite support (an old Hitler-nazi trick) would have fallen even flatter on its face than it did if anything at all resembling a serious perspective had been put in front of workers during the three week campaign.

As it was the results made it clear just what a sick nonsense the whole game has become with over 14,000 voters, some 25% of those who bothered to participate at all (a minority – turnout was just 44%), showing their utter contempt for the whole racket by voting for a comedian who wears a bin on his head.

The other 56% stayed at home and did not play at all in this ridiculous pantomime and even more if the unregistered population is taken into account.

It means the result for Farage, was still no more than 30% even in this benighted east coast area, notoriously backward anyway, in an uncontested election and saturated in the reactionary hype of the tabloid and rightwing media and with a significant proportion simply expressing disgust for everything else.

Given a clear lead about bourgeois dictatorship and its Catastrophic crisis, dragging society into destruction, with horrifying imperialist generated genocidal war raging in Ukraine, the Zionist blasted Middle East, Yemen, Sudan, the Sahel, Myanmar, the Congo, and more, those “bin voters” and even many of the dismayed and soured Reform voters might well have been turned away from the narrow and blinkered scapegoating of migrants etc.

That would not be achieved by the useless “left” and its fatuous and absurd “welcome all migrants” shallowness which solves nothing in a still capitalist economy and will only alienate workers who have not got any wider perspective than seeing jobs and resources being lost or small communities being “swamped” when hundreds are accommodated nearby (as the establishment deliberately fixes things, precisely to whip up maximum distrust and fear).

Of course migrants should be defended from abuse and persecution; but –

The leftist “no barriers to immigration anywhere in the world” stance in order to ostentatiously adopt a totally heroic ‘anti-racist’ pose, – is just avoidance of the real issue.

In a fully planned rational and stable world, it will no doubt eventually be possible for everyone to live just about where they want to (assuming reasonable coordination to avoid 5 billion people turning up with their suitcases on Bali).

But just posturing in this ‘principled’ way is hardly even a ‘transitional’ demand (supposedly demanding reasonable reforms which really require a revolution to make possible).

Full ‘freedom’ for the entire planet to settle just where they want to in the immediate future is both economically and politically unrealistic even with the most far-reaching revolutionary perspectives in mind, and is also a potentially contradictory minefield when the case, say, of Occupied Palestine is considered where the native Arab population is only just clinging onto life as it is, overwhelmed by Zionist colonisation.

The real issue is being avoided. Not ‘full immigration rights everywhere now’ which is a diversion, but ‘the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist market-forces system everywhere now, and its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat everywhere, now’.(EPSR No718 21-09-93)

But properly and vigorously argued for (in unity and conflict with the masses brought up soaked in capitalist lies and propaganda) correct understanding can soon make headway against the hopeless Reform or Restore scapegoating nastiness offered as both “explanation” and “solution” to head off a public which is alienated and demoralised by the ratrace antagonisms and extreme and mostly insurmountable inequalities of capitalism at the best of times and now increasingly despairing and fearful at the disastrous and terrifying breakdown of society underway in crisis.

And the potential is completely clear. Far from there being a “stranglehold by Labour on the working class” as the defeatist “left” of all shades continues to gibber, there is nothing but contempt and disgust for all bourgeois politics and especially the treachery of the pocket-lining class-collaborating union leaders and Labour Party careerists, who would sell their own grandmothers for personal advancement as they have just demonstrated, tearing their own vaunted leader – (lauded just weeks ago for a “landslide general election” – itself a 13% vote (!!) joke) – into shreds like sharks sniffing blood in the water (an undoubted insult to sharks in fact).

Even greater contempt should be deluged onto the fake “left” of all shades however for its failure to give a lead to the working class (and disillusioned petty bourgeoisie) leaving them prey to backwardness or simply confused.

As Clacton demonstrates the whole swamp of alleged lefts have completely abandoned any effort to expose this foul collapsing system or to advance the only understanding that can change it, polemically fought for scientific revolutionary theory constantly tested in practice to lead the mass struggle, winning over the working class with a correct understanding of the need to end capitalism and build a planned socialist world – communism in a word.

The whole slew of them, from Trots to the revisionists had an open goal to explain the crisis to the working class, using the election as a platform to denounce this entire discredited bourgeois “democracy” racket.

That strategy is not just possible but, as Lenin explained, in most circumstances an obligatory part of building understanding and consciousness (see Left Wing Communism - an infantile disorder).

The point is to use parliamentarianism to build the revolutionary leadership needed for the inevitable explosive turmoil the crisis is ripening into daily.

The contradiction of participating in the great “voting for change” confidence-trick of bourgeois elections, is understood dialectically, using the publicity/campaigning solely in order to expose all bourgeois “democracy” as the bamboozling cover it is for big money corporations and the toffs who really call the shots, i.e. the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

There has rarely been more a clearly useful moment, given the absence of the “mainstream” parties (for their own opportunist purposes), and with full national attention on the campaign.

But the puddled brains of the “left” across the board all refused to stand, including the supposed working class socialist alternative “Your Party” just set up by the deliberately ineffectual Corbynite ex-Labour “left”, which has consistently failed to give any kind of a lead since it was founded other than feeble and useless social-pacifism (and not least by failing to properly politically expose the petty bourgeois Trot parasites who immediately jumped in to sabotage the whole thing with their idealist individualism, anti-leadership “collective decision” confusion and drama-queen demands for factional “opposition rights” (presenting themselves as “martyrs” even before anyone had any clear idea of what the whole exercise stood for or could presage)). They all held back because of their still continuing delusions in electoral politics and the hopeless “left pressure” pacifism/reformism that they subscribe to; because of their failure to grasp the depth and seriousness of the great unfolding incurable capitalist crisis; their defeatism (and perhaps petty bourgeois PC diversionary arrogance and contempt for workers) and because of the underlying cause of all that – their fear and reluctance to advocate the only possible future, the class war overturn of the whole system establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Petty bourgeois individualism drives their consequent hatred all the great collective achievements of the working class, and most of all the titanic Soviet Union, denouncing it from the beginning (Trotskyism) or refusing to examine clearly the reasons for its “failure” so-called.

That was not a failure of communism itself but only of the slow but increasingly revisionist leadership retreat from Leninist revolutionism into class collaborationism, bureaucratic conservatism and complacency, which despite the staggering achievements of the USSR, bringing it from Tsarist backwardness to superpower parity in just half a century (including the incredible victory over Nazi Germany’s Second World War onslaught) eventually degenerated into Gorbachevite liquidation.

Until the last few years of the 1980s it was still viable and making stunning achievements in every kind of field of civilisation from science, medicine and technology to education, society, music, literature, film, and every other facet of high culture, as well as aiding and inspiring world anti-imperialist struggle (albeit often too cautiously, holding it back).

But the revisionist (Stalinist) wing of the fake-“left” cannot give workers a clear assessment of those triumphs and fatal flaws because it would mean indicting their politics too, founded on guru worship of Stalin himself and incapable of making a dialectical assessment of the great advances made by the USSR under his and later leadership, even as its philosophical development (and world revolution perspectives) began to fall short from the 1920s onwards.

Summed up all of this represents a total failure to grasp the significance of correct revolutionary theory as the great transforming ingredient for the masses as the world heads into increasingly explosive crisis collapse, whatever loud noises are made about being “Marxists” or self-declarations about being “revolutionaries”.

And that would obviously mean exposing firstly the reality of this Labour government as the most sinister reaction, installed by complete behind-the-scenes intelligence agency, establishment, military and Zionist manipulation.

It goes far beyond just past opportunist class collaboration and amounts an establishment coup as the EPSR said at the Makerfield by-election and other voices have speculated, pointing to the extraordinarily convenient “pattern of events” in finding a seat for Burnham and then his slick unchallenged sliding into place over an increasingly disastrous Starmer (EPSR No1675) without any great contest and therefore debate.

These “left” voices, (such as a useful blog by Steve Howell) are still only tentative, reluctant to be too definite and suggesting it “doesn’t matter whether there was a ‘concert party’ in the establishment” (i.e. conspiracy) because the result is still a compliant new prime minister who will override Starmer’s obstinate refusal to agree the huge increase in military spending demanded by the military establishment and his sacking of a top civil servant over the Epstein scandal.

But that hesitancy reveals a reluctance to see just how much the bourgeoisie makes sure it fixes the whole racket, and always has done (with a fallback to outright military coups etc when its brainwashing media control, gerrymandering, advertising deluges, money-swamping and ballot-rigging occasionally slip up).

Some point additionally to funding and backing by the Zionist lobby of nearly every member of the new cabinet as the Lalkar/Proletarian usefully lists for example.

That is no different to Starmer’s cabinet however, just as in thrall to the establishment intertwined Jewish freemasonry, which is almost entirely Zionist (bar a very tiny minority), siding with the colonialist occupation and its trampling “right to exist” and “right to self-defence” which can only ultimately mean the necessity “not to exist” of the people whose land has been stolen from them i.e. their genocidal eradication.

Former British diplomat and maverick liberal Craig Murray put this well:

Zionism has long poisoned the central nervous system of the UK body politic. For many years, due to their media control, this system worked seamlessly. The media portrayed a benign image of Israel as a bastion of liberal democratic values under siege from corrupt and barbaric Arab peoples. The Genocide of Palestinians, which has been in progress almost 80 years, proceeded at a pace and by methods which rigorous media control made it possible to convince Western audiences was not really happening at all.

When a kickback against Genocide came on October 7th 2023, media gatekeeping made the declaration of condemnation of Hamas a ritual which had to be observed to ensure purity before you were permitted to express anything else at all. The media united around false atrocity stories of the events of October 7th. Then they united around false Israeli narratives in which every Gazan hospital, clinic, school, public utility and eventually home was a secret Hamas missile base.

At this point, something broke. There was a spectacular burst in public opinion. From being a lulling, soothing narrative of European civilisational superiority, the zionist propaganda was revealed as obvious lies in the service of the very worst atrocities man could do to man (and child).

The media covered up the horrors and the Israeli government raced to stem the flow of images out of Gaza by murdering every journalist there, but public belief in the zionist narrative was fatally damaged.

The result of that was western zionist governments became scared of their own populations. In virtually every western state, extreme authoritarian measures were adopted to limit free speech and punish pro-Palestinian protest. This was followed by attempts to reinforce the exclusion from public life of non-zionists by a new wave of accusations of anti-semitism, reinforced by waves of false flag or agent provocateur organised “anti-semitic incidents”.

Incidentally the Hasbara invented “Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya” so-called terrorist group – actually an Israeli-operated Telegram account – was first “revealed” to the Western public by Joe Truzman of Israeli Washington front organisation the Foundation for Defending Democracy (FDD). Nick Stewart of FDD has subsequently been added to the Witkoff-Kushner negotiating team with Iran and flew to Islamabad with them.

The Iranians have entirely sensibly refused to engage with this group as simply representing Israel.

That is where we are now, with extraordinary developments like the effort to jail and debar Rajiv Menon KC for contempt of court for what I had called the greatest legal speech I ever read, and the charging of thousands of peaceful citizens under terrorism laws for supporting Palestine Action.

Those are but horrible symptoms of a wider malaise – and the fundamental shift is that the majority of the population, and above all of younger people, now realise that they are governed by a political and media class which acts in service of a zionist project which is truly evil.

The billionaire class was already allied with the far right. As the appalling fall in living standards of ordinary people since the 2008 banking crisis has been caused by the massive and artificially wrought concentration of wealth which followed, the efforts to divert attention from the hoarders of wealth instead to scapegoat immigrants have entailed massive financial and corporate media backing for racist politicians.

These points are still not quite Marxist despite Murray’s excellent follow on (better than much of the fake-“left”) that

the disconnect between the revulsion of the large majority of people of the western world at the Genocide in Gaza, and the people’s complete lack of political power to stop their uniparty political leaderships from supporting Genocide, has fundamentally changed my view of politics. I now fully accept that the change the western world needs is revolutionary, not incremental.

So for example, the fall in living standards was coming anyway caused by the ever-deepening inevitable and incurable crisis of the whole capitalist system, though clearly the contradictions have intensified with the 2008 collapse; and that is just the start of the great breakdown as multiple bourgeois commentaries are panicking:

America’s gross national debt topped $40 trillion for the first time on Wednesday, an ominous milestone for an economy that sits on a shaky fiscal foundation after decades of borrowing to pay for the rising costs of the military, social safety net programs and President Trump’s tax cuts.

This year alone, the United States is on track to borrow more than $2 trillion to help pay for its obligations, including spending on the war in Iran and the sweeping tax cuts that Republicans enacted in 2025. Soaring interest payments to investors who have purchased America’s debt now make up about half of that red ink, pushing the United States into a deeper financial hole.[..]

“The scariest thing about this is how we’re starting to see the debt spiral begin,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which supports deficit reduction, referring to interest on the debt.

The inability of lawmakers to confront the debt comes with long-term risks. While the United States remains the world’s largest economy, its mounting debt load could lead investors to demand higher interest rates for U.S. bonds or raise questions about the nation’s creditworthiness, which could erode confidence in the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for America’s borrowing burden. The United States has had to sell an increasing amount of debt to cover the costs of health programs, stimulus benefits, disaster relief and daily government operations.

[..]In an interview with Newsmax, Mr. Bessent offered several reasons to explain why deficits are growing. He said that spending associated with the war with Iran had forced the country to spend more on the military, and that tariff refunds had undercut the Trump administration’s progress toward reducing the deficit as a share of gross domestic product in 2025. The war in Iran, which has caused energy prices to rise in the United States, has also been a drag on economic growth and diminished the expansion that Trump administration officials had hoped would increase tax revenue.

[...]Despite his confidence that the fiscal trajectory will stabilize, investors have been demonstrating their anxiety over U.S. deficits by demanding greater compensation for holding American bonds. The yield on 30-year U.S. Treasuries hit its highest level in nearly two decades this week, meaning higher borrowing costs for inflation-weary consumers and businesses.

A degree of concern within the Trump administration was evident when Mr. Bessent made a rare intervention in currency markets to prop up the weakening Japanese yen. The move was intended, in part, to prevent Japan from selling its holdings of U.S. Treasuries to prop up its currency.

And while the Western ruling class has been “in service” to Zionism as the previous quote says, with all the non-stop media collusion, vicious police-raid and courtroom censorship that has been imposed and heavily financed electoral manipulation, seen ever more openly in the last three years, particularly in the US and Britain, it also uses the Israeli occupation as a weapon.

That has been the imperialist aim to help control the Middle East since the 1917 Balfour Declaration “gave” Palestine to the Zionist project of course, when Jewish settlers first began smiting all signs of revolt, but especially since the United Nations sanctified the dispossession of its people in a so-called Partition, giving away more than half the territory, (quickly becoming more, by war and terror, in 1948 and 1967).

But the Zionists’ inhuman and sadistic fanaticism has also been used to gee up imperialism’s own increasing need to impose crude and brutal class domination, as its bankruptcy and debt collapse has reached insane proportions.

The Zionists have been relied on not least because the Empire’s own blitzing barbarities and mass terrorising have failed in country after country, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Russia and now Iran, surviving the monstrous war onslaught begun in February and still keeping a strangling grip on the Strait of Hormuz, humiliating US bully-bluster blitzing.

And while these revolts and resistances are a long way from coherent Marxist revolution - and often even ideologically reactionary – the anti-imperialist blows they have been forced into making, for their own survival, have been further shattering ruling class confidence.

Most obviously so that is in the Middle East where the splits and divisions within the former network of stooge regimes and above all between Washington and the Zionists themselves are proliferating so fast it is difficult to keep track.

The latest new “Mecca” alliance between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan may be one between three reactionary powers, but it also is a breakaway from one-time US universal oversight and military dominance in the Gulf as Washington’s grip unravels.

And it has shattered confidence domestically too, symbolised by the collapse of the once overwhelming influence of the imperialist/Zionist axis inside the US.

But that has been shaken badly and is beginning to lose ground despite the vast sums of money poured into elections by much of the Israel-backing billionaire class and extremely well-funded lobby groups like the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - once able to destroy the election prospects for virtually any candidate speaking for Palestine or against Israel by swamping their campaigns with hugely disproportionate spending and now seeing defeat after defeat.

The “left” wing making headway on the Democrat side - like the now famous New York mayor Zohran Mamdani - or the win for Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary are no more than safety valve tokens themselves.

Their “no to war” pacifist support for Palestine is never going to challenge the existence of the whole capitalist system any more than such left frauds as Jeremy Corbyn, nor even call for its defeat in its brutal rampaging.

But they are major symptoms of how the ground is shifting inside the Empire and just as much in the rest of imperialism.

Which is possibly one explanation for the weird Clacton nonsense by the Farage gang, seemingly stitched up by the establishment and its recent exposés of major donations from rich backers.

Quite obviously the bourgeois establishment has not suddenly developed a deep sense of moral principle (as any amount of sleaze and brown envelope scandal testifies over decades not counting the nine-tenths of under the surface influence peddling, old-school tie connections, freemasonry, dirty dealing and nudge-nudge backscratching which never gets exposed).

And it has spent some years now building up Farage from nothing with endless media “interest”, placements in the public eye, funding and a relatively soft ride taking this reactionary nastiness seriously (which would never be done for genuine anti-imperialist, working class or especially communist “outsiders” (unless they were anti-Soviet Trots of course)).

What it amounts to, surely, is parking the Faragites to one side with a populist boost colluded in by all the mainstream parties as they stood back.

Almost certainly the nervous bourgeoisie feels Reform is yet premature.

Fears are that its crude chauvinism, racist scapegoating and the associated promises of slashed local authority provision, welfare cuts savagery, including floated-out notions recently of ending the National Health Service completely from a new Farage protégé, are too likely to cause a major backlash.

Savage cuts will be needed (far exceeding the austerity so far), the bourgeoisie is clear, knowing its shot-to-pieces economy is likely to go under in the ever intensifying trade war, one of the least able to survive.

The end point to this rapidly intensifying belligerent crisis is full on hot war, which is exactly what has been unfolding for nearly three decades - beginning with the 1999 NATO blitzing of tiny Serbia and then destruction of country after country.

That means war between the great powers (just ask the Canadians now facing a sudden 50% tariff regime from the US) - which will make even the mud-and-blood industrial slaughter and horrors of World War One, and the fifty times greater destruction and death in 1939-45, look like a teaparty, and not least because of the ever more deadly technology which will be deployed, all the way up to nuclear devastation.

Under those conditions the most savage cuts and repression must be imposed in order to fund the “war effort” as the compliant media has been helping set the scene for.

But a desperate ruling class does not want to provoke the mass turmoil like the 1980s Toxteth and Brixton riots, the violent Poll Tax revolts, and the 2012 city centre riots, any sooner than it has too, while the dollar has not fully collapsed and there is still room to print a little more credit.

Better a last go with the “trusted” stooging of the Labourites relying on the long legacy of class collaboration and two centuries of reformism shunted into place by stitched-up sleight-of-hand trickery to keep the working class lulled.

They may not trust politicians but have yet to overcome grudging acceptance of the existing “order” and its “legality” enough to have reached full rejection of the bourgeois democracy delusion.

That does not mean Farage is “finished” as some “lefts” speculate though it might be that a different figurehead like the priggishly nasty little reactionary squirt Robert Jenrick is preferred, or full on violent nazi-nationalism like the Tommy Robinson movement.

But his last effort to wave the Union Jacks in a London rally fell flat with tiny numbers, even as yet another pro-Palestine march went by ten times bigger.

But their numbers are massively reduced too as social-pacifist politics have demonstrated their ineffectuality and that of the whole fake-“left” swamp who back them (whatever squabbles they have about how “militantly pacifist” it should be).

Most of those have anyway demonstrated their capitulation to imperialism on the Ukraine question where they have besmirched themselves by “condemning the Russian invasion” - either directly or notionally even handedly by “also condemning NATO”. Either way petty bourgeois public opinion stays confused over “plucky Ukrainians”.

But the Kievites are completely part of the imperialist crisis war front as the Zelenskyites just made very clear by attacking an Iranian freight vessel:

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky stated earlier that the vessel struck on Saturday was transporting military cargo. Iran, which has denied involvement in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, said the attack killed one sailor.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reiterated his country’s position during separate calls with the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

“Zelensky has attacked an Iranian commercial vessel, killing a sailor. A blatant UN Charter violation done at Israel’s behest to drag Europe into its war,” Araghchi wrote on X on Sunday.

“In calls with EU High Rep Kallas and FM Lavrov, [I] made clear that what the freeloader in Kiev did CANNOT GO UNANSWERED,” he added.

During his conversation with Lavrov, Araghchi said Iran “will resolutely defend its security and national interests,” according to Press TV. Lavrov expressed condolences over the sailor’s death and identified the struck vessel as the cargo ship Ana.

Speaking to Israel’s N12 television channel, Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevgeny Korniychuk claimed that the Iranian ship was carrying components for drones and missiles. Tehran, however, insisted that the cargo was entirely civilian.

Iran confirmed in 2022 that it had delivered a “small number” of Shahed-136 kamikaze drones to Russia months before the Ukraine conflict began in February of that year. Moscow has maintained that all Geran-2 drones, believed to be based on the Shahed-136 design, are produced domestically.

The “pro-Russian” fake-“left” does not help untangle the confusion either with its all out support for capitalist-imperialist Moscow and its Putin bonapartism – forced into an anti-Empire imperialist position at present but still eventually an obstacle to the return of communist relations in Russia.

As with the Iranians, the Marxist call is for defeat of the main imperialist-fascist onslaught and its stoogery, but without support for the anti-Marxist regimes which are pushed into fight by the growing hatred of imperialism beneath them, or illusions in them.

Meanwhile Latin America is clearly (re)learning the lessons about the fraud of bourgeois “democracy”:

Nicaragua’s long-serving president, Daniel Ortega, has said the country will hold no further elections to prevent the opposition from coming to power.

The 80-year-old authoritarian leader, who has been in office since 2007, also said he would work with the congress he controls to pass new laws that would “build a wall” against the opposition.

Ortega made the announcement on Sunday during the official ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, in which he helped overthrow the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.

[...]“With this decision, Ortega and Murillo have sealed the country’s transition to a full-fledged family dictatorship,” said Tiziano Breda, Latin America senior analyst at the NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data.

During a speech in front of thousands of state employees who, according to local media, had been coerced into attending, Ortega said: “There will be no more elections here so that they [the opposition parties] can try to seize the government, seize power.”

The president, who had not appeared in public for 61 days, added: “We will work with the National Assembly and the relevant institutions on laws, because we need laws that build a wall, a barrier, against the coup plotters and the traitors who sell out their country.”

The elections were due to take place next year, but Ortega gave no details on whether they would be cancelled or whether the opposition would be barred from taking part – something that has already happened in practice. During the 2021 campaign, his regime outlawed parties and jailed all opposition presidential hopefuls.

[...]Last year, Ortega pushed through a series of constitutional reforms that included extending the presidential term from five to six years and promoting his wife, then vice-president, to the position of “co-president”. The US refers to their administration as the “Murillo-Ortega dictatorship”.

During his speech, the Nicaraguan president criticised the US over the January operation that abducted the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro: “With all their power, they stormed the presidential palace, where Nicolás and his wife, Cilia [Flores], were. They killed the entire security detail there – most of them were Cubans – and took them away to imprison them in the US. It is monstrous.”

The president said preventing the opposition from returning to power was necessary to protect the country from the “coup plotters” who, he claimed, had been behind the nationwide protests of 2018.

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

Colombia’s 62-year old armed conflict is on the brink of a new chapter, with the country’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, who takes office on Friday, vowing an end to peace talks and launch a new military offensive. Colombia’s last guerrilla group says it is ready for whatever might come.

“Where we can go on the offensive, we will,” said the commander of the group’s Western War Front, who goes by the moniker Yerson. “And if the ELN leadership says we have to carry out a military offensive at the national level, we will. Attacks in cities, in the countryside, wherever.”

[...]Colombia’s conflict began in the 1960s, rooted in extreme land inequality and exclusionary politics.[...]

Along with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the ELN was the most important of the guerrilla groups. Founded in 1964, it fused Marxism-Leninism with Che Guevara’s foco theory — the idea that a small armed band in a remote rural area can eventually topple the state — and Liberation theology, which framed the struggle against poverty and oppression as an expression of Christian faith.

[..]The Farc demobilised in 2016 after striking a peace deal with the Colombian state, but the ELN says its members will only lay down arms after the country’s political and economic system has been transformed.

“The Farc surrendered in exchange for nothing,” said Yerson, adding that subsequent presidents have failed to fully implement the peace deal, while former Farc combatants have been killed.

Gustavo Petro, a leftist who was a guerrilla with the defunct M-19 in the 1980s, was elected president in 2022 on a promise of “total peace”, vowing to make good on the Farc deal and negotiate with all of Colombia’s remaining armed groups on the left and right.

But after a few years, almost all the talks – including those with the largest groups — the ELN, the Gulf Clan and Farc dissidents who refused to demobilise in 2016 — either stalled or collapsed.

Yerson rejected the idea that the election of Colombia’s first leftist president meant that the ELN’s goals could be achieved through the current political system.

“They handed out lands [to the poor]. They did a kind of pension reform. They were looking for ways to improve healthcare,” he said. “But in the end these are small things. They don’t help with the popular awakening.”

In Yerson’s telling, Petro was allowed to take power by the “Colombian oligarchy”, which needed to pacify the people after an explosion of inequality protests in 2019 and 2021, but knew he “was never going to undertake fundamental reforms, that he could be controlled”.

Colombia’s political system “is not the democracy it claims to be”, he said. “That is where the trap is.”

Build Leninism Alan Moss

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Discussion: A revolutionary socialist perspective on the raging imperialist crisis is required to mobilise workers in their class-war fight to bring down the capitalist system and establish communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat central to this continues to be evaded by the latest “International” posturing from Workers Power’s wing of Trotskyist subjectivism. Their rehash of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme treachery, full of hostility towards the anti-imperialist struggle (Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc.) and the workers’ states (Cuba, China, North Korea etc.), and supporting Ukraine, is a farce. Serious Leninist debate to a correct understanding on the historical triumphs and mistakes of the Soviet Union, including its heroic 1936 Spanish Civil War intervention, and current world developments is crucial.

The only worthwhile programme for socialism is one that makes the vital long historical role of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the epoch of imperialist crisis, the central issue.

However, without the broadest possible up-to-date grasp of the full complexities of the imperialist world economic crisis as it unravels into a Catastrophe of endless Slump and World War, it is unlikely that any “programme” will amount to anything other than a forum for endless tedious fake-“left” “debates” and “controversies” about abstractions and petty obsessions, to be torn apart and made useless almost as soon as it is written (if not before) by the latest ever-moving developments in material reality.

Most crucial is the battle to win the working class over to a clear world-historical revolutionary perspective on all developments through open polemic and debate to achieve as correct an understanding as possible of the imperialist crisis. Only through this, can a correct, historical-materialist, Leninist programme emerge.

The international proletariat can only begin to make sense of the world today if it has a clear understanding of the former USSR’s heroic 73-year-long history of successful socialist construction without a capitalist boss in sight (its triumphs and errors) – which amounted to the greatest leap in human development to date; alongside that of the wider international anti-imperialist struggles subsquently that, after much heroism and sacrifice, successfully defeated world imperialist onslaught at times, with some then going on to begin the reconstruction of their own societies on socialist lines, and others failing in their attempts due to terrible mistakes or imperialist subversion and invasion.

Without the necessity of the proletarian dictatorship at the heart to understand these questions scientifically and pave a path forwards towards socialist revolution once again, any alleged “revolutionary programmes” the alphabet soup of Trotskyists, revisionists and other assorted fake-“lefts” manage to cobble together are not worth the paper they are written on. They are only “worth” reading (if at all) to see what petty-bourgeois obsessions and anti-communist distortions and lies they are currently pumping out to distract, confuse and demoralise the working class, so they can be exposed.

Criticism has been made of the EPSR’s insistence on the need for this battle for a correct revolutionary theory on world events from activists of the Trotskyist Workers Power group participating in meetings of Your Party members, supporters and assorted entryist Trots in Leeds (alleged “proto-branches” – potential forums for discussion, but used by the Trotskyists for take-over, disruption and recruitment purposes).

They allege that such arguments for revolutionary theory do not connect with workers because they are “not at that level of consciousness”. A programme of demands should be presented instead, they say, one that

“links present struggles with the fight for power”.

A programmatic inclusion of a demand for “free travel” is given as an example of how this is supposed to work. It is claimed this would meet workers where they are and could be used to argue for “the expropriation of the bus firms” and “placing them under workers control”, which then opens up “questions of power”.

In a proposed manifesto for last May’s local elections presented at such meetings, they also argued that this and other demands

“cannot be delivered through council elections alone”

and so the working class will need to be

“[mobilised] to fight for these changes with protests, direct action, occupations and strikes”,

which are apparently achievable because

“Britain is rich, but wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority”,

and so that wealth can be taken from them “to end poverty”, – just like that!

This is a deception. It hints at socialist revolution and proletarian dictatorship (“expropriation”, “workers control”), but refuses to spell this out to workers under the patronising excuse that “they are not ready” and that the use of such Marxist terminology would “put them off at this stage”. This “municipal socialism” revivalism is a cowardly evasion of use of the local-election platform to denounce the entire bourgeois “democracy” racket as a fraud that needs be brought down by revolution along with the rest of the capitalist system if any such demands are to be achieved. It just drags workers back behind the same old Labour-reformist “parliamentary democracy” crap they started to see through decades ago and now treat with total cynicism and contempt.

This Trot evasion, of the need to educate workers in the class-war reality of the imperialist system in insoluble crisis and spell out what is necessary to overcome it, gets worse. In a December 2005 “world congress” in Istanbul that preceded the local elections, Workers Power’s League for a Fifth International liquidated itself into the Trotskyist International Socialist League (LIS) (formed in 2019) after agreeing to a new Programme and manifesto for socialist revolution. In it, they argued that demands for “free transport systems” amongst other environmental demands

can only be implemented within the framework of an international movement against the commodification of nature and extractivism which implements the previously described form of democratically legitimised social control.

So not only can free bus rides not be won through council elections alone, mass strikes to expropriate capital held in the hands of the wealthy in Britain won’t do the trick either. The working class needs first to wait for

“a framework of an international movement” (???)

to be set up, which then has to somehow implement a prescribed

“form of democratically legitimised social control” (???).

Only then can workers start to think about getting their free bus passes, but without ever hearing a word about the need for socialist revolution. What a fraud!!!

Despite much ultra-revolutionary posturing, WP/LIS get no further than the 130-year-long left-pressure reformist campaigning of reactionary Labour/TUC traditions. This includes the late Tony Benn’s life-long left-opportunist campaign to present an alternative “democratic” route to socialism via parliament and the imperialist Labour Party to counter the brilliant example of the Soviet Union and the titanic developmental advances the Soviet people made during its 70-year long history under proletarian-dictatorship “social control”, the only “framework” through which any sustainable advances for humanity can be made in the epoch of imperialist crisis.

Benn’s 1991 “Charter of Rights” also made a big fuss about free transport for workers, and was also to be backed up by protests, direct action, strikes, etc. The only difference is that Benn’s “people’s-democracy” futile reformism (and Jeremy Corbyn’s feeble “peace-and-justice” grassroots pacifism today) was more comprehensible, whilst being equally delusional about the prospects for such “democratic-rights” campaigning (as reality has proven over the subsequent 35 years of further left-reformist failure), because at least he wasn’t making a pretence at being a “revolutionary socialist”.

Campaign for free bus fares or other such single-issue demands that impact on the daily lives of workers by all means, the more agitation the better, but what workers need most of all is to be able to place all such demands within a full revolutionary communist perspective so they know what they are up against. They won’t get this from this latest Trot “International” gimmick.

WP/LIS’s new “International” response to the imperialist war drive is a vile deception on the working class, which makes a big deal about

[carrying] forwards the gains of the First, Second, Third and Fourth Internationals before their degeneration and is grounded in their programs and practises.

Trotsky’s own Fourth International posturing was a treacherous disaster for mankind that did nothing to correct the theoretical catastrophes the first three (genuine) Internationals ended up being, and ended in abysmal failure. This new LIS racket merely repeats the farce, but on a more ludicrous scale. Why would anyone seriously advocate “grounding programmes and practices” in institutions that had “degenerated”??!!

The only serious intent these middle class frauds have is to spread maximum distrust and hostility towards any attempts to revive Lenin’s proletarian-dictatorship science, and to avoid “communist tyranny” smears whilst passing themselves off as “revolutionaries”. Their nearly 24,000 word parody of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme inanities (double the size of the original Communist Manifesto) is dripping in hatred of the workers’ states and the anti-imperialist struggle generally, and is saturated in “democratic” demands and “Marxist”-sounding phraseology to cover up this up and brainwash any workers within their orbit.

This “revolutionary-democracy” posturing gets to ludicrous extremes in such demands as

Military training for all under the control of the workers’ movement.

Which “workers’ movement”? Would that be the reactionary TUC and anti-communist class-collaborating trade union leaders who are saturated with “defend-British-jobs” trade-war chauvinism and call for increases in military spending to “support the defence industry”, as well as arms for Ukraine???

Well, WP would not object much to those calls for British imperialism to arm NATO’s nazi Ukrainian quislings, even though they once declared Kiev to be a “nationalist-fascist regime” after the 2014 Maidan coup. They now want to see these fascists armed too. Now that NATO has succeeded in provoking war against Russia via its Ukrainian stooges, the very same nazi-Banderite Zelensky regime is relabelled simply as a “reactionary, pro-Western bourgeois government” (in the LIS programme) without any explanation for this mysterious transformation.

Their twisted understanding of Lenin’s “revolutionary defeatism” then serves Western imperialist interests as its promotes the West’s war aims for the defeat of Russia and the overthrow of Putin. They demand that the working class recognises

the right of Ukrainians to resist the Russian invasion and equip themselves with the necessary means to do so

whilst throwing in some pacifist sops about

“opposing Western intervention and the war goals of NATO”

(note: not “defeat for NATO”) to give this class treachery a “left” cover.

They tag on some token “support” for

“the right to self-determination for Crimea and Donbas”.

without explanation. This is contradicts their also stated support for Ukraine’s alleged

“self-determination struggle for self-defence”

against Russia, which lines them up behind Zelensky’s fascist revanchists. It was the Kievites nazi suppression of Ukrainian ethnic Russians’ language, culture and identity after the Maidan coup that drove those regions to break away, as stated here: ?

One of the first moves after the February 2014 coup was an attempt to repeal the 2012 language law protecting Russian as a regional language. While vetoed at the time, this was followed by progressively restrictive measures culminating in the 2019 state language law, which mandated Ukrainian in nearly all public spheres and restricted Russian in education, media, and government services. These measures were accompanied by “decommunisation” laws, which in practice meant the destruction of Soviet memorials, the banning of the St. George ribbon, and the removal of Russian cultural symbols from public life. This legal scaffolding criminalised expressions of Russian identity, setting the stage for broader repression. [AvantGarde1917:Substack]

This should not in any way give credence to Putin’s barmy Bonapartist ‘Great Russia’ perspective, a reactionary echo of the Tsarist Empire, nor his anti-communist denunciations of Lenin’s Bolsheviks’ correct concession of self-determination to Ukraine after the Great October Revolution of 1917. The heavily industrialised Donbass region was incorporated into the new Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1919, both to support its development economically and to balance the overwhelming petty-bourgeois peasant sentiment prevalent in Ukraine then with a more proletarian socialist outlook. Further developments were made under Stalin in 1939, when the western Ukrainian territories, seized by Poland after WW1, were liberated.

Kruschev’s transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 was (rightly or wrongly) largely a flexible administrative measure to rebuild the infrastructure and economy of a region of the USSR devastated by war during its brutal occupation by Nazi Germany. It only started to become a reactionary national question during Gorbachev’s idiot liquidation of the USSR in 1989-1991 and the restoration of capitalism when its alienations caused nationalist antagonisms to re-emerge, further stirred up by imperialism to prevent a return to communism.

Obviously, WP/LIS could be implying that the Donbass and Crimea have the right to secede from Russia, which might have some limited abstract validity arising out of the above described period of combined development within the USSR, but would be insane in practice given their long-term national-historical ties with Russia combined with the Ukrainian nazis’ devastating twelve-year war (to date) to force them to return, or to annihilate them and to provoke a full-scale imperialist confrontation with Russia.

Putin’s restricted “special-military-operation” intervention is aimed at preventing NATO expansion into Ukraine and defending the Russian-speaking Donbass region. This contrasts starkly with his brutal decade-long imperialist war from 1999 to suppress Chechnya’s self-determination struggle, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and reducing the capital city, Grozny, to rubble alongside the rest of the Chechens’ lands. This mass slaughter was a continuation of the anti-communist oaf, Boris Yeltsin’s, 1994-96 war savagery to suppress the Chechens’ desire break away from the Russian Federation once the USSR had been liquidated.

The interest of the international proletariat in all of this is to see NATO as the greater imperialist power defeated in Ukraine, but no illusions should be placed in Putin’s monstrous oligarch-capitalist state (which is also imperialist but on a lesser scale) as any way forwards. This does need to be toppled too, but fake-“left” demands that this happens before Nato’s defeat only serves the interests of greater Western imperialism as it reinforces the lying anti-Russian mass-media propaganda onslaughts manufactured to justify their warmongering and indoctrinate their populations into backing the “plucky Ukrainians”.

In fact, Western imperialist setbacks and defeat in Ukraine are already causing huge splits between the imperialist powers, and are bringing the real competitive trade-war relations between the NATO powers out into the open, as seen in Trump’s tariff wars against US imperialism’s European rivals; his pressure on them to increase arms spending (to drain their economies); and his outrageous demand for the annexation of Greenland. The main contradiction of the Ukraine conflict is inter-imperialist trade war. US imperialism benefits from seeing Europe’s economy being dragged down by endless conflict, and the blowing up of Nord Stream 2 by the US (and Britain) was a part of this. Having got the warmongering going, the US can now step back a bit and watch Europe suffer the consequences.

Far from exposing the CIA’s psyops propaganda blitzes against any state that gets in Western imperialism’s way, the Trots eagerly push and amplify their fabrications, adding some “Marxist”-sounding phraseology for good measure to fool the working class into thinking that they are arguing “from the left”.

See, for example, this reactionary anti-Maduro assertion in the WP/LIS “programme”. It was sinisterly written just a few days before Maduro was snatched from Venezuela and dragged into a cell in a harsh New York prison by Trump’s stormtroopers last January (but set aside the weird personal metamorphosis Maduro is described here as having undertaken, unknown in human history outside of Greek mythology!). They repeat the gross accusations made by US imperialism to set the scene for the air invasion, but use “left” sounding distancing phrases to cover themselves:

In Latin America, the governments and movements invoking 21st Century Socialism suffered an involution process and gradually shifted to the right. The most striking shift came from Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, who degenerated into a repressive, authoritarian Bonapartist regime [sic].

Striking indeed! Tellingly, no attempt is made to explain their (intelligence agency) assertion of “authoritarianism”. This is just petty bourgeois hostility and outrage against Maduro’s attempts to correctly suppress local capitalist-class disruption and imperialist subterfuge (regardless of how clumsily or crudely this may have been carried out at times).

They also fail to explain the difficulties Venezuela’s left-nationalist Bolivarian Revolution got itself into, or indicate why they think Hugo Chávez was any better. Venezuela had been attempting to carry out the sort of the “bottom-up socialism” measures WP/LIS’s instructionalist programme advocates and demands the proletariat implements (“the working class must…”, “working-class organisations must..”, “working-class neighbourhoods must…”, “workers’ representatives must…”, etc.) - What happens if workers don’t do as instructed by these Trotskyist overlords??? So much for the working-class democracy they claim to advocate as an alternative to so-called “Stalinist dictatorship”!!!.

These measures include nationalisations, workers’ control of factories, communal committees, urban land committees, volunteer militias, etc., and Chávez even lauded Trotsky’s ludicrous Transitional Programme at one point.

The problem was that, like the Trots, Chávezism explicitly rejected the necessity of establishing the proletarian dictatorship to effectively suppress the bourgeoisie and imperialist subversion. Chávez claimed to have discovered a new 21st Century way of doing things. This has proved to be a catastrophic delusion. The bourgeois parliament and bourgeois institutions needed to have been shut down, and the banks and corporations taken over, from day one, or as soon as practically possible.

Elsewhere in their “programme”, WP/LIS claim to “value [!!!] and support” “resistance” to the blockade of Venezuela (and that of Cuba, North Korea and Iran), – but presumably not resistance led by Maduro (or Cuba’s Díaz-Canel, Kim Jong-un or the mullahs) as it has to be “legitimate”, i.e., approved by the purists in the LIS. In the real world, Maduro had prevented the appalling class collaboration currently underway in Caracas under Delcy Rodriguez’s leadership since his kidnap, with Venezuela now swamped with US intelligence agencies, re-establishing diplomatic relations with Zionism, and opening its economy up to Western corporations.

It is not a matter of providing “support” to Venezuela’s (or Iran’s) resistance anyway, as this would reinforce illusions in their bourgeois-nationalism as the way forwards. “Defeat for imperialism” should be the call.

Cuba has a proletarian dictatorship (and so is also accused of being a “highly repressive, authoritarian regime” by these Trot anti-communists), and this has enabled the heroic Cuban masses to resist imperialist sabotage, blockade and attempted invasions and assassinations for 70 years. This needs to be endlessly strengthened to defeat US imperialist moves to destroy their state and the historic achievements they have made against all the odds. As the EPSR explained in a 1996 article (when Cuba was in the midst of the last “special period” of economic crisis that arose from its isolation following the liquidation of the USSR and continued genocidal US-imperialist blockade):

Does not the phenomenal US imperialist pressure to bring down the Cuban Revolution – and the astonishing brilliant planned economic achievements of Cuba in transforming the lives of the masses and winning such enormous support that it can withstand this unprecedented imperialist embargo, invasion, sabotage, and political onslaught, – seem like an obvious case to study if one is serious about the actual real-life conditions in which a ‘world proletarian’ revolutionary struggle is likely to have to develop against demented US imperialist reaction?

And what is absolutely essential to understand about Cuba which causes the greatest power in world history to hate it and vilify it so? The fact that it replaced the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of the proletariat, something which Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, and the former CIA stooge turned ‘nationalist patriot’, Noriega (obviously), all failed to do. All perished.

And when did the world’s first workers state perish, – the USSR? Not until its complacent bureaucratic leaders, in their philosophical revisionist degeneracy, decided to abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of the glasnost/perestroika of free market forces and parliamentary (bourgeois) democracy. Then they were quickly sunk without trace (Gorbachev) whatever their ‘socialist’ pretensions or ambitions.

The argument about a ‘programme’ for communism begins with the most basic scientific concept of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, – one often repeated but one which is in fact never really accepted by opportunists of all generations and of all kinds, – the notion that modern society can only be either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, nothing else. Only one class really holds the power.

Opportunists of all descriptions say they agree with this, – but then demonstrate in practice that this Marxist understanding means nothing to them in reality. Hence all the varieties of ‘socialist’ who have failed to fight tooth and nail in support of Cuba’s revolution against Batista’s bourgeois dictatorship and its US imperialist patrons, – but who also hesitate to describe Cuba as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or call for the overthrow of its ‘ruling class’, which would be the logic of their stand.

The Cuban Revolution clearly does rest on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and could obviously rest on nothing else. The real position of these ‘socialists’ is that the regime on Cuba is “not to their liking”, and so they simply renege on the question of international class solidarity completely, – and refuse, really, to say which class rules in Cuba, or that any class does at all, – thus totally abandoning the most basic scientific concept of Marxism, – while still proclaiming loudly, of course, what great ‘Marxists’ they themselves are.

Such was the whole history of all anti-communist stooges in the West, all the groups and sects of ‘socialists’ who in practice always refused to fight in real solidarity with the Soviet Union against all the sick propaganda distortions of the West, regardless of any formally correct positions they professed of ‘unconditional if critical support’, etc.

What undermined all these fairweather ‘socialists’?

A profound basic ignorance of all that Marxist science had taught about the dictatorship of the proletariat, plus the most appallingly naïve dilettantism about what the real conditions of the fight for socialism were like, and will be like next time, – puffed out with the silliest daydreams about ‘perfect revolutions’ and such stuff, where all workers march forward together singing, hand-in-hand, bursting to make ‘pure’ and ‘full’ democracy work splendidly first time, on every social question, etc.

Petty bourgeois armchair socialism in the West quickly tired of the actual world developments on the revolutionary socialist front from 1917 to 1990 because they were “not quite right” according to some ivory-tower dreams of never-never land. They quickly grew tired of the vast titanic struggles of thousands of millions of people in that time, on four continents, to defeat imperialist domination and sabotage and intervention and political and ideological subversion to try to build a completely new kind of society, – the major part of the population of those countries still fully involved in the effort to develop without a capitalist ruling class lording it over them.(EPSR No867 20-08-96)

Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega’s recent announcement that the reactionary bourgeois parties will be prevented from using elections to drag Nicaragua (also sneered at in LIS’s programme) back to the days of the Somoza family’s anti-communist tyranny until they were toppled by the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 indicates that the Sandinistas may being learning from Venezuela’s experience (long overdue). Ortega (back in power since 2007) has past Marxist form, but more detail is needed, including the theoretical understanding underpinning this development and its class nature, before it can be seen as a positive move towards the necessary proletarian dictatorship.

WP/LIS also stabs the Chinese workers’ state in the back (no surprises there). They do this by bogusly declaring it to be “imperialist” so that they can condemn it without tarnishing their “left” pretensions, citing

China’s willingness to ascend into the exclusive club of imperialist powers became evident after 2008, when it played an essential role in pulling the global economy out of the Great Recession and investing in different regions [sic].

The assertion that China is “imperialist” is just Trotsykist nonsense.

There has never been a counter-revolution in China. The nearest was the CIA-inspired lynch-mob violence stirred up against workers state around Tiananmen Square in 1989, (to try and extend the Gorbachevite liquidation) but that was rightly, if tardily, suppressed.

And there are endless provocations in Hong Kong mobilising the heavily pro-Western petty bourgeois elements there (including exile remnants from Tiananmen) with violent demonstrations like the 2019 “Umbrella” demonstrations.

And far from the endless Western lies about Tiananmen, it was the petty bourgeois “democracy” movement there which deliberately started the violence outside the square which saw scores of state officials butchered – (see EPSR Books Vol 16 China) with an overall death count limited to the low hundreds, (not the multiple thousands of Western intelligence psyops mythology) and none in the square itself.

(Elsewhere in their programme WP/LIS treacherously imply that the petty-bourgeois anarchist mobs should have had their own armed militia, which would have resulted in a greater bloodbath).

Now, there can be all sorts of questions asked about what China thought it was doing when it helped to rescue the world capitalist system from a total meltdown during the Great Crash of 2008 by agreeing to continue to hold US debt.

And despite its correct defence of the workers state China’s assessment of the international balance of class forces and its own strengths and capabilities to take on nuclear-armed imperialism still appear to be influenced by revisionist notions of “prioritising stability” and not wanting to “provoke” imperialism.

This led to an overly cautious response when healthy revolutionary (non-Trotskyist) instincts saw no reason to stop capitalism from collapsing (inevitable anyway) as the best environment in which to fight for socialism worldwide.

But all this has nothing to do with “being imperialist”. China has since made huge leaps in its economic, technical, and military capabilities whilst making serious preparations for potential all-out military conflict with imperialism.

Besides, what is wrong with a workers’ state “investing in different regions”? China has been obliged to use capitalist NEP measures, including foreign trade and investments, to build its planned workers’ state in isolation since the liquidation of the USSR, and may need to continue doing so until revolutionary socialism begins to triumph across the planet once again.

There is always some nervousness about the extent to which its bureaucratic revisionist leadership has allowed capitalism to develop in China (allowing billionaires, for example), and the degree of proletarian-dictatorship control it imposes on the capitalist sector. However, the Chinese workers state’s stunning development in the midst the unfolding imperialist crisis has been made possible because it is a proletarian dictatorship despite its flaws, something which Trotskyist “perfect-revolution” subjectivism prevents WP/LIS from understanding. Trotskyism is the extreme wing of petty bourgeois individualism. Because it is so full of virulent hatred for the discipline required to build and defend a workers state, and so fearful of being smeared by accusations of supporting “communist tyranny” and tainted by any mistakes such states will inevitably make (including the most theoretically astute), it is blocked from learning the lessons Marxist science has taught about the dictatorship of the proletariat.

WP/LIS’s programmatic “perfect-revolution” grandstanding attempts to evade this question too. For this branch of Trotskyist idealism, “proletarian dictatorship” (first mentioned 19,500 words in!!) amounts to little more than another form of parliament, – with competing political parties, but without a centralised leadership structure. This is a disaster which would lead workers into the same ‘democracy’ trap the Bolivarians have found themselves in:

As long as the old ruling class remains capable of regaining power, the working class must do everything necessary to prevent it. While a workers’ state is the highest expression of democracy for the formerly exploited classes, it will at the same time be a dictatorship against those who seek to restore capitalism. This is what the dictatorship of the proletariat truly means. It cannot be dispensed with until the most powerful ruling classes on our planet have been disarmed and dispossessed.

However, a workers’ state must not allow a bureaucratic caste to impose a dictatorship over the workers, nor can it be a one-party state. Workers must be able to express differing viewpoints through different parties, which must compete democratically to win and retain majorities in the workers’ councils. Nor should our socialism be one in which a president, strongman, or supreme leader concentrates all initiative in their hands and surrounds themselves with a cult of personality, like Stalin, Mao, or Castro.

Lenin wrote the final fourteen volumes of his Collected Works in vain as far as these “left” poseurs are concerned. These volumes, written after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, outline in real time the revolutionary party’s leading role in building and managing the proletarian dictatorship. But these Trot dilettantes want to replace this clear-sighted Leninist science with a mish-mash of competing parties who never come to a conclusion about anything. It is yet another a recipe for disaster.

Key to the Trots’ repudiation of the party’s leading role in the proletarian dictatorship is the ludicrous notion of a “bureaucratic caste” taking over and ruining everything. This is a made up non-Marxist concept used to avoid declaring a new “class”. There is no class basis for such a phenomenon as there are no property relations or exploiting-class production to sustain it. There is only the proletarian dictatorship or the capitalist dictatorship.

See how Lenin explained the need for party leadership in Left-wing communism, in which he called for “the strictest centralisation and discipline” within the revolutionary party in order that “the organisational role of the proletariat … may be exercised correctly”, and accused the anti-party-leadership “lefts” of his day of “completely disarming the proletariat in the interests of the bourgeoisie”:

The mere presentation of the question—“dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the class; dictatorship (party) of the leaders, or dictatorship (party) of the masses?”—testifies to most incredibly and hopelessly muddled thinking. These people want to invent something quite out of the ordinary, and, in their effort to be clever, make themselves ridiculous. It is common knowledge that the masses are divided into classes, that the masses can be contrasted with classes only by contrasting the vast majority in general, regardless of division according to status in the social system of production, with categories holding a definite status in the social system of production; that as a rule and in most cases—at least in present-day civilised countries—classes are led by political parties; that political parties, as a general rule, are run by more or less stable groups composed of the most authoritative, influential and experienced members, who are elected to the most responsible positions, and are called leaders. All this is elementary. All this is clear and simple. Why replace this with some kind of rigmarole, some new Volapük? On the one hand, these people seem to have got muddled when they found themselves in a predicament, when the party’s abrupt transition from legality to illegality upset the customary, normal and simple relations between leaders, parties and classes. In Germany, as in other European countries, people had become too accustomed to legality, to the free and proper election of “leaders” at regular party congresses, to the convenient method of testing the class composition of parties through parliamentary elections, mass meetings the press, the sentiments of the trade unions and other associations, etc. When, instead of this customary procedure, it became necessary, because of the stormy development of the revolution and the development of the civil war, to go over rapidly from legality to illegality, to combine the two, and to adopt the “inconvenient” and “undemocratic” methods of selecting, or forming, or preserving “groups of leaders”—people lost their bearings and began to think up some unmitigated nonsense. Certain members of the Communist Party of Holland, who were unlucky enough to be born in a small country with traditions and conditions of highly privileged and highly stable legality, and who had never seen a transition from legality to illegality, probably fell into confusion, lost their heads, and helped create these absurd inventions.

On the other hand, one can see simply a thoughtless and incoherent use of the now “fashionable” terms: “masses” and “leaders”. These people have heard and memorised a great many attacks on “leaders”, in which the latter have been contrasted with the “masses”; however, they have proved unable to think matters out and gain a clear understanding of what it was all about. [..]

Repudiation of the Party principle and of Party discipline—that is what the opposition has arrived at. And this is tantamount to completely disarming the proletariat in the interests of the bourgeoisie. It all adds up to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness and instability, that incapacity for sustained effort, unity and organised action, which, if encouraged, must inevitably destroy any proletarian revolutionary movement. From the standpoint of communism, repudiation of the Party principle means attempting to leap from the eve of capitalism’s collapse (in Germany), not to the lower or the intermediate phase of communism, but to the higher. We in Russia (in the third year since the overthrow of the bourgeoisie) are making the first steps in the transition from capitalism to socialism or the lower stage of communism. Classes still remain, and will remain everywhere for years after the proletariat’s conquest of power. Perhaps in Britain, where there is no peasantry (but where petty proprietors exist), this period may be shorter. The abolition of classes means, not merely ousting the landowners and the capitalists—that is something we accomplished with comparative ease; it also means abolishing the small commodity producers, and they cannot be ousted, or crushed; we must learn to live with them. They can (and must) be transformed and re-educated only by means of very prolonged, slow, and cautious organisational work. They surround the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, which permeates and corrupts the proletariat, and constantly causes among the proletariat relapses into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternating moods of exaltation and dejection. The strictest centralisation and discipline are required within the political party of the proletariat in order to counteract this, in order that the organisational role of the proletariat (and that is its principal role) may be exercised correctly, successfully and victoriously. The dictatorship of the proletariat means a persistent struggle—bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative—against the forces and traditions of the old society. The force of habit in millions and tens of millions is a most formidable force. Without a party of iron that has been tempered in the struggle, a party enjoying the confidence of all honest people in the class in question, a party capable of watching and influencing the mood of the masses, such a struggle cannot be waged successfully. It is a thousand times easier to vanquish the centralised big bourgeoisie than to “vanquish” the millions upon millions of petty proprietors; however, through their ordinary, everyday, imperceptible, elusive and demoralising activities, they produce the very results which the bourgeoisie need and which tend to restore the bourgeoisie. Whoever brings about even the slightest weakening of the iron discipline of the party of the proletariat (especially during its dictatorship), is actually aiding the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

“Left-wing” communism: an infantile disorder April to May 1920

 

Alongside this, WP/LIS’s “programme” demonstrates a distinct lack of confidence in how they describe the world imperialist crisis and where the crisis is heading. Their nervousness is reflected in such phrases as

“witnessing profound changes”; “heightened tensions and a great global disorder”; “this new context of strong inter-imperialist dispute”; “strong pressures of social polarisation”; a global economic crisis manifesting itself in “new forms and acute contradictions”; “the current world situation features a scenario of increasing critical regional wars, which, though not amounting to a third world war, at least leaves that possibility open in the perspective of the world to come”; etc. etc. etc.

This is hopeless when it comes to applying Marxist-Leninist science to the Catastrophic conditions of endless Slump and World War crisis-wracked capitalism is now inflicting on the planet. It reflects a petty-bourgeois fear that the ruling class will always manage to come out on top in the end, and it leaves the working class without any explanation as to why socialist revolution is necessary.

Compare this academic feebleness to the EPSR’s own scientific application of Leninism back in 1996 (when the international proletariat was still reeling from the demoralising impact of the needless and tragic liquidation of the Soviet Union, and when anyone talking about reviving communism was considered to be certifiably insane) against the pseuds in the crypto-Trotskyist Weekly Worker’s own programmatic dilettantism, and consider the extent to which it describes conditions today.

The EPSR’s understanding then (and developed much further since as material conditions have unfolded) demonstrates the crucial role the application of Marxist-Leninist science to the real world plays in building an understanding amongst the proletariat of where historical development has lead human society to, and where things are heading next (though much more needs to be understood):

Unbelievably savage inter-imperialist trade war and political conflict lie ahead, followed by all-out preparations for the most murderous atavistic conflagration in all history, outdoing even the unprecedented barbarism of imperialism’s World War I and World War II. The brutalising conditions for part III of that World War are undoubtedly being set up right now in the uncontrollable anarchic economic turmoil which laughably passes for the ‘new world order’, - and only revolution will be able to stop them being translated into a real war reality again.

Far from undermining the daily class-war fight to better the working class’s position and push back the ruling class, such an understanding of the hopelessly crisis-ridden and fundamentally flawed nature of the hated capitalist system cannot fail to give workers enormous additional confidence in their struggles. How can workers fail to be better armed politically, as well as boundlessly optimistic if they not only merely know from daily experience what a swindling, exploitative, corrupt, and inefficient system capitalism really is, but also grasp that shortly, on the stage of history, capitalism will also once again be being seen as a fatally flawed and intolerably destructive system which must eventually sink and be swept away under incurable crisis.

And this is no pie-in-the-sky baseless comforting at all, but the actual science of Marxism-Leninism, which the petty-bourgeois ‘left’ opportunist sects of all descriptions have abandoned just as they abandoned (or never grasped in the first place) the Marxist-Leninist science of proletarian dictatorship.[EPSR op cit]

This plunge into renewed inter-imperialist World War to sort out the inter-imperialist trade war conflict already raging across the planet, and head off the revolutionary turmoil this implies, is inevitably accompanied by the tearing up of all ruling-class pretences that capitalism is essentially a system of “freedom and democracy”. Racist, anti-migrant, anti-foreigner scapegoating, flag-waving national chauvinism and McCarthyite anti-left witch-hunting is inevitably stirred up to desensitise the masses and prepare them the conflicts to come. This reveals the true fascist face of the ruling class.

These ruling class shifts towards overt nazism exposes all wooden fake-“left” notions of fascism being some sort of “third way” arising out of middle class discontent in times of capitalist crisis, or a response to growing working class militancy, “stoppable” by militant anti-fascist action and/or votes for “lesser-evil” mainstream bourgeois capitalists (who are leading the warmongering) such as for Chirac against Le Pen, Merz against the AfD, Burnham against Reform, etc., or for “left” alternatives like Syriza, the Greens, or even Your Party.

WP/LIS may not go along with the “vote-to-stop-the-fascists” line, but in the absence of any revolutionary perspectives, their posturing calls their calls for “anti-fascist militias”, “organised self-defence”, “unity of action in the streets” etc., caveated with some fluff about “uprooting capitalism”, are just as diversionary.

Self-defence squads, etc. will rightly emerge spontaneously from within threatened communities. Leninism welcomes and strives to give leadership to such developments. However, it is totally misleading to separate “the fascist threat” from its world imperialist crisis context. “Fascism” is an integral feature of capitalism’s slide into Slump and inter-imperialist world-war. This terrifying capitalist-degeneracy symptom of the crisis can only be “stopped” by the revolutionary overturn of capitalism itself and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship. Without this perspective, militant “Stop fascism” sloganeering, even if accompanied by some superficial “capitalism breeds fascism” commentary, is likely to lead workers into a reformist dead end as it implies that “fascism” can be “contained” within capitalism.

It also ignores the fact that the Third World has suffered nonstop from racist-fascist horrors since 1945 at the hands of Western “democracy”, with tens of millions already slaughtered by imperialist warmongering, including Greece, Palestine, Algeria, North Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and much, much more besides; millions more butchered by imperialist-backed right-wing thugs like Suharto, Marcos, Pinochet, Mubarak, Idi Amin, Batista, Park, Stroessner, “Papa” and “Baby” Doc, etc.; and not to forget the murderous war brutalities committed by the British, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and Belgian colonies in “retreat”. Such routine imperialist nazism has only ever been “stopped” (temporarily) by defeat at the hands of revolutionary anti-imperialist national-liberation struggle, with some pressing on to build socialism.

The LIS opportunists have got themselves into a bizarre tangle as they try to wriggle around this obvious lurch into fascism now (to step up intimidation and repression at home and war savagery abroad) whilst trying to maintain their “third-way” nonsense. They even go as far as to imply that white supremacism is somehow different from (and so not as bad as) fascism!!!:

With the support of the Republican Party, a considerable bourgeois sector, and another part of the economic-financial power that allows him to act that way Trump’s white supremacist MAGA movement, penetrated by outright fascists is a threat to all the exploited and socially oppressed [sic].

The American ruling class are not simply “allowing” Trump to “act in that way” (as if he is a petulant child needing to be controlled), they want and need fascism and war out of desperation, – for their own class survival against spreading revolutionary-crisis chaos and inter-imperialist conflict. They are desperately mobilising Trump and MAGA (at least those that haven’t broken away after feeling betrayed by Trump’s warmongering), the state forces, including ICE, the FBI and the CIA, the mass media, and the outright fascists to achieve this.

This fascistisation process had been steadily building up for decades, including under the previous Obama and Biden administrations (and so not just in Trump’s second term, as the LIS complacently state elsewhere in their programme). The entire bourgeoisie want and need this, for all intents and purposes, - regardless of any individual misgivings, or fears that too much tearing up of the “democracy” fraud could trigger a revolutionary backlash anyway. The quantitative accumulation of repressive measures over time has led the capitalist ruling class itself to make a qualitative leap into the outright fascism.

Can Trump’s disgusting war-kidnap of Nicolás Maduro and slaughter of 32 Cuban body-guards last January, following on from his order to blow up Venezuelan fishing boats in the high seas under the lying pretext of “combatting drugs gangs”, be seen as anything other than nazi? And what about the threats to annihilate Iran, the intensification of the genocidal blockade of Cuba, and the non-stop military and financial support for the Zionist settler colony’s genocidal war against the Palestinians?????

The LIS “programme” ends by covering up the reactionary historic role Trotsky’s Fourth International played in the interests of imperialism’s post-1945 anti-communist crusade to wipe Soviet communism off the map.

Western intelligence agency thinking concluded very early on that, in the post-WW2 atmosphere of mass world socialist sympathy for the USSR following the heroic Red-Army defeat of the Nazi menace in Europe, direct anti-communist propaganda would not fly. It was far better to promote “Third Force” propaganda campaigns that would attack both capitalism and Soviet-camp communism whilst promoting Labour-party type social-democratic reformism. Over the next four decades, tens of billions of dollars were pumped into universities, art and cultural institutions, and anti-communist international trade union organisations world-wide to promote “new-left”, “free-trade-union”, “democratic-rights” and avant-garde “alternatives” to the new workers states (see, e.g., revisionist-influenced academic Gabriel Rockhill’s Who paid the piper of Western Marxism?, 2025)

Trotsky’s “International” network of bilious anti-communist hatred for the Soviet Union (and its later fragmented, squabbling Trotskyist antecedents) played right in the hands of this by also pumping out and promoting its own versions of anti-communist (“anti-Stalinist”) “leftism”, east European “rank-and-file” “free-trade-unionism” (e.g. the Vatican/CIA’s Solidarnosc stunt in Poland) and “transitional-programme” reformist evasions.

Trotskyism’s purist “political-revolution” oppositionism never was an answer to Stalinist revisionism’s theoretical retreats and bureaucratic errors, as the EPSR has repeatedly explained over the last four decades (including in EPSR Books Against Trotskyism, Vols 5, 29 & 30), and will continue doing so. See this on the Spanish Civil War, for example:

Not the slightest understanding do these Alliance ‘communist’ posturers have of the plainly obvious real historical crime of Trotsky’s Fourth International middle-class ‘revolutionary’ opportunism, – namely in trying to undermine international working class support for the real anti-imperialist perspective of 1938 that despite its handicaps from Stalinist Revisionist stupidity, the Soviet workers state could nevertheless still rout the world’s greatest imperialist warmongering conspiracy ever, and, on the strength of exposing this further degenerate rottenness of the imperialist system and the virtues of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, could in turn encourage and help further anti-imperialist revolutionary advances in the world (which is exactly what happened after the war in the overthrow of Europe’s physical colonial empires, the Chinese Revolution, etc, etc, etc).

That would have been the realistic perspective to encourage international working class revolutionism with, and to it could and should have been added some constructive criticism of Stalinist revisionism’s already glaring failings in THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING which was the Comintern’s real crime in the Spanish Civil War, deluding the working class that a coalition of ‘anti-fascist’ forces around Republican petty-bourgeois parliamentarianism could save Spain from bestial reactionary dictatorship.

The ‘Popular Front’ was crap theory and a wrong perspective then, and it remains so today where it still rules anti-Marxist and anti-communist circles such as the Socialist Alliance with its class-collaborative attitude towards the Labour Party (see below).

But the petty-bourgeois emotional anti-proletarian dictatorship hysteria of the Trotskyites at that time obliterated with anti-communism any hope of a constructive exposure of Stalinism’s weaknesses and mistakes, as it still does today.

All the propaganda had to be about the Soviet workers state deliberately “strangling the Spanish Revolution”, which was a completely idiotic description of Revisionist stupidity in Spain. But it is this irrational middle-class recoil from possible mistakes which a proletarian dictatorship might make which still rules to this day in all sections of the Socialist Alliance (and even wider throughout the 57 varieties of Trotskyism, anarchism, and Revisionism), thus leaving the Stalinist disaster still not properly analysed and overcome in the international workers movement, a rational Marxist explanation still unable to make progress against all manner of anti-communist hysterics. Trot paranoia was worse than Stalinism’s. The CPGB itself cannot begin to grasp the real fault in the Transitional Programme perspectives because of its own anti-communist bile befogging the brain. Thus what actually happened to Trotsky’s perspective, completely missing what was going to be the main framework of anti-imperialist struggle for the next 50 years and the main arena for trying to constructively improve upon the truly flawed Stalinist Revisionist view of the world’s long-term future (the anti-revolutionary idiocy of ‘peaceful roads to socialism’ and ‘imperialism no longer able to economically re-expand’ etc, etc, (see EPSR 2001 Perspectives document)), simply does not register with the Weekly Worker middle class mentality which wishes to know nothing about any workers-state successes in the 20th century but knows only about some “slave states” which existed then but “now fortunately no more”, etc, etc.

The crippling problem of having a wrong perspective on the next possibilities for anti-imperialist struggle in the world is not remotely addressed by the CPGB pompously issuing sterile academic lectures about the formal ‘need’ for both a maximum and a minimum programme. [EPSR No1094 19-06-2001]

Spain’s civil war is particularly emotionally-charged for some in Workers Power. Attempts to explain the EPSR’s position on the disastrous adventurism of the centrist, Trotskyist-influenced, POUM in the May 1937 putsch to a leading cadre after a WP meeting in Leeds broke up earlier this year was met with a sinisterly threatening response on the lines of, “You wouldn’t want the comrades hear you say that”.

For the record (so that “the comrades” do “hear”), the following account taken from an EPSR review of Trotskyist fellow traveller Ken Loach’s subjective-idealist fantasy account of the Civil War in his 1995 film Land and Freedom, sets out the reasons for the POUM’s disastrous failure:

The POUM and the break-away anarchists were not capable of any revolutionary leadership, as even Trotsky on his writings on Spain admitted.

The POUM had influence only in Catalonia, principally in Barcelona and Lerida, and had no mass base elsewhere in Civil War Spain.

The anarchists were hostile to party leadership, a unified revolutionary army, and the creation of a workers state.

Both organisations had no clear policy to win over the majority peasant population of the country, and invited the hostility of the sizable regular army units loyal to the Republic.

In short the conditions that convinced Lenin for revolution in Russia in October 1917, – support for the Bolsheviks from the overwhelming majority of the advanced working class; backing from a sizable section of the peasantry with the promise of land (not collectivisation of agriculture, advanced, by the film as a key unifying demand in Spain); and, crucially, support from a significant section of the disaffected Tzarist armed forces, – were totally absent in the Barcelona putsch days in May 1937.

Furthermore, the doomed adventure punched a 20 mile hole in the Aragon front as militias abandoned their lines for Barcelona allowing Franco to halve his forces there and send 20,000 men to the Madrid front where the bloody battle of Jarama was taking place in defence of Madrid.

Not surprisingly the putsch failed, with the mass of the Barcelona workers in the CNT at best neutral. [EPSR No 828 14-11-95; EPSR Books Vol 29 Against Trotskyism, part 1]

The real obstacle to Franco’s fascist-imperialist coup against the Spanish Republic were the anti-Franco forces on the frontline who were armed and trained by the Soviet Union and the 99% “Stalinist” CP-originated International Brigades, which does not fit into the Trots’ subjective “Stalin crushed the Spanish Revolution” hysteria, as the piece goes on to explain:

And in what strange ways did this ‘monster’ Stalin go about his treachery. He and the Soviet leadership started by publicly denouncing the cynical ‘Non-Interventionist’ policy of Britain and France which became a cover for massive German and Italian Fascist support for the Franco forces.

While the two Axis powers flooded Franco Spain with 200,000 troops, thousand of planes, and tanks, – the ‘sinister’ Soviet Union defied ‘Non-Intervention’ and sent 2,000 of its own soldiers, 500,000 rifles, 15,000 machine guns and, in the closing stages of the conflict, $100M in economic aid.

The ONLY official support for the Republican side came from the Soviet leadership.

Of the 2,000 British Communist Party members who volunteered for the International Brigades (no doubt to do their ‘counter-revolutionary’ best), – one quarter died on Spanish soil. The head of the Republican Air Force General Cisneros maintains in his own memoirs that far from stabbing the struggle in the back, Soviet aid could have turned the tide against Franco, but for the sabotage of the Western powers who refused to allow arms, ammunition, troops and food across their own territories, forcing the Soviet Union to send the essential supplies by the dangerous Mediterranean route with great loss of shipping.

Trot emotionalism will go to great lengths to prevent reality from getting in the way of a good anti-communist fantasy.

This latest programmatic posturing from this latest variant of the endless splintering Trotskyist Internationals is just one more elaborate fantasy. Any real-world workers state developments will be immediately shot down as “deformed” or “degenerated” for not meeting up to their exacting idealised perfect-revolution standards of what a “pure” workers state should look like.

Much more could be said about WP/LIS’s “programme”, including their craven support for various imperialist-hyped “self-determination” provocations against the anti-imperialist struggle (any abstract validity or otherwise in each case notwithstanding), including the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, and the Tamils; their super-reformist long lists of demanded LGBT+, youth, women’s and anti-racist “rights”; and much else besides, but it would start to get tedious.

The best programme to guide the working class towards socialist revolution at this stage of the crisis is a revolutionary theoretical perspective that provides a correct and constantly up-dated analysis of the world imperialist crisis and its historical development, alongside that of the history of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its further development as an answer to that crisis.

This can only be achieved through nonstop party-led polemics and debate against all-comers (Trotskyist, revisionist and anarchist) and on all world developments, towards a conclusion that is true about the world, just like as Lenin’s Bolsheviks endlessly encouraged throughout the years leading up to October 1917.

Build Leninism.

Phil Waincliffe

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