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No 1675 30th June 2026

Sleight-of-hand Burnham by-election a manipulated coup to keep politically bankrupt and detested pro-Zionist Labour stooges in place and British warmonger plans with them. Tinkering devolution games just re-arrange Titanic deckchairs for ruling class as monopoly plundered Britain faces ever deeper cutthroat trade war from a position of weakness. Economic breakdown can only continue, magnified now for the whole crisis-wracked capitalist system, hit with disastrous setbacks and defeats in the Middle East, from ever rising Third World hostility and hatred, and its fight against genocidal tyranny and devastation from topdog power the US Empire and its berserker Zionist stooges in occupied Palestine. Imperialist WW3 to “solve” its overproduction crisis failing in all directions, splitting the ruling class wide open as the contradictions inexorably intensify. Fake-“left”, still ignoring revolutionary import of unstoppable Catastrophe, now exposed by Washington plans to stifle the heroic Cuban revolution and drown it in blood. Spart Trots revive anti-communist “political revolution” bullshit as sabotage. Leninism needed

Iran’s fightback humbling of imperialist warmongering; Trump’s consequent splits with genocidal Zionism (for the moment); implosion of the hated (pro-Zionist) Starmer government; growing rows inside Europe with degenerate Ukrainian Nazis, and tiny communist Cuba’s dogged siege resistance are all setbacks for imperialism as its system sinks ever further into crisis collapse.

Despite significant differences, all are facets of the same phenomenon – the floundering of tyrannical and dominating world capitalism plunging the world into ever greater devastating war destruction and ecological disaster but failing to solve any of its economic problems.

But while all these are variously setbacks for stinking imperialist torture and blitz bullying of the planet, and useful defeats for its ever more dementedly sadistic genocidal war plans (to escape its crisis, suppress rival powers and growing revolt), they all underline the absence of any Marxist revolutionary understanding, vital to end ever-deepening capitalist slump war depravity.

Ever more blatant abandoning of all “democratic” and “free society” pretences by the panicked imperialist system still leaves a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for “left” opportunism, stupidity and outright anti-communism to avoid the now glaring need for class war revolution, burying itself in useless pacifist platitudes, and delusions of “multipolar” stability.

But the world is on an inexorable path into World War Three for as long as the profit system continues, driven by unstoppable overproduction crisis (see page 6). It cannot stop.

Only a Marxist-Leninist perspective of Catastrophic disintegration of the world wide imperialist order, on a scale never seen before, (including in the two 20th century inter-imperialist world wars) can begin to give the working class the understanding that can really change things.

That is through the revolutionary mass movement to completely overturn this entire sadistic, barbaric and degenerate system, setting the world on a socialist path of rational planned peaceful development in harmony with nature.

Resistance to imperialist war provocations and instigations (in Ukraine against Russia and between the US and Europe; in the Middle East, in African rebellions, and against specific workers states like Cuba, North Korea and China), continues and grows but needs deeper grasp.

Without a party-led battle for the deepest theoretical understanding (Marxism-Leninism), the masses can only get so far despite stunning blows against imperialist tyranny and its stoogery, and ever better organisation and fighting skills.

Worse still they can be fooled, diverted and misled, by every kind of illusion in “democracy”, “peaceful roads”, revisionist “multilateralism” nonsense and hopeless “stop the war” pacifism – however “activist” it might be (and sometimes heroically self-sacrificingly so) – as well as being held back by the anti-communism that it covers up (or does not deal with).

For all their posturing and lip-service to “Marxism”, every part of the great fake-“left” swamp is hostile to the revolutionary answer, the building of workers states.

They rubbish the 70+ years of the Soviet Union and its giant achievements, and those still being made in China, North Korea and Vietnam (and would be in Cuba too save for the utterly demented sadistic blockade strangulation being imposed by Washington, fearful of its communist example).

In truth they are opposed to the proletarian dictatorship core of all these great developments (albeit with revisionist leadership flaws), hating to the bottom of their petty bourgeois souls the firm discipline needed to overcome and suppress counter-revolution.

But that is the only path towards any real democracy for the downtrodden and exploited throughout this sick, collapsing and criminally exploitative capitalist system and its necessity will have to be relearned in the course of the unavoidable struggles worldwide against imperialist world war degeneracy.

The slick operation to suddenly replace Keir Starmer as prime minister, possible only because of “labour movement” collusion and opportunism, demonstrates “left’s” disarming uselessness.

The carefully choreographed “coronation” of the reactionary Andy Burnham has been rushed through with as little open debate as possible by the ruling class and its rightwing stooge parliamentary Labour mafia as a fait accompli, but with just enough feints and pretences of “possible challenges” deliberately trailed for the bourgeois press to speculate about in endlessly diversionary “analyses” and pretence of “democracy”.

Just a few commentators at least make the point that Starmer deserves every scrap of his humiliation but still leave open the question about whether the “succession” will be any better, which of course it will not.

Its prime purpose is to prop up the hollow shell of “democracy” just a little bit longer while the ruling class further extends its warmongering support for Ukrainian fascism, and for the Zionist barbarity in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, along with repression of any “dissent” at home, all to keep its system going.

So “left” reformist Corbynite Owen Jones for example:

Good riddance, Keir Starmer. No sooner had the toppled prime minister wiped away his tears than the solemn guff began. The Labour leader is “principled” and “driven by a deep sense of public service and duty to this country”, said deputy prime minister David Lammy. He showed “the great dignity and integrity that is the mark of the man”, said energy secretary Ed Miliband. “A devoted and dedicated public servant” said home secretary Shabana Mahmood.

No. This was not a decent man defeated by circumstance, a man of duty and integrity who was simply in the wrong job, a principled leader undone by events. This was an unprincipled politician who abandoned promises with as much enthusiasm as he trousered freebies from rich donors.

Labour was “politically and morally bankrupt” when he took over, Starmer declared in his resignation speech. Yet here was a man who not only served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, but declared himself “100% behind” him. When Starmer stood for leader, he praised his predecessor for bringing “radicalism” to Labour, declared we are not “going to trash the last four years”, repeatedly called Corbyn a “friend”, and denounced the “terrible” media attacks on him.

But Starmer was a frontman for a Labour-right operation whose purpose was clear: persuade a leftwing membership to hand the party back to those who despised everything it had just stood for. At the centre of that plot was Morgan McSweeney, career fixer for the Labour right, and his Labour Together thinktank. It was generously funded by the undeclared donations of wealthy donors, leading to an eventual fine from the Electoral Commission. When journalists investigated those donations, McSweeney’s successor, Josh Simons, commissioned a PR firm to smear them. Simons, of course, later became an MP, before surrendering his seat to make way for Andy Burnham.

To win over the membership, Starmer’s campaign promised tax hikes for the top 5%, public ownership of utilities, abolition of tuition fees, “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity”, human rights “at the heart of foreign policy”, and the abolition of the House of Lords. In power, Starmer has either failed to deliver on these promises or done the opposite.

Soon after being elected leader, Starmer suspended his predecessor from the party before finally expelling him in 2023, claiming that he and Corbyn had never been friends and distancing himself from his previous leadership pledges. This was deceit, not pragmatism. When he stood for leader, Starmer told the BBC that nationalisation of utilities was a pledge that would be in the next Labour manifesto. The following year, he denied ever saying this, and told the BBC: “I never made a commitment to nationalisation, I made a commitment to common ownership.”

The party would be a “broad church”, Starmer had promised. Instead, he suspended Labour MPs or prevented candidates from running for making comments critical of the state of Israel, and opposing the two-child benefit cap. His machine blocked leftwingers from standing, such as Faiza Shaheen and Lauren Townsend.

As for his claim that he took over a Labour party that was “morally bankrupt”, he was the human rights lawyer who said that Israel had a right to cut off power and water to Gaza. For nearly 20 weeks, as Israel reduced Gaza to rubble and killed tens of thousands of people while its leaders issued genocidal statements, Labour refused to back a ceasefire. Israel’s “right to self-defence” filled the void where Palestinians’ right to live should have been. As predominantly Muslim councillors resigned in disgust, one Labour official bragged that the party was “shaking off the fleas”. It took Labour six months to officially back a ceasefire.

Starmer was handed an election victory thanks to the total self-immolation of the Tories, yet triumphed on just a third of the vote, securing a landslide only because of Britain’s absurd electoral system. He soon proved that junking a political vision is easier than offering an alternative. Last year, when his government scrapped the universal winter fuel payment, Starmer calculated that the electorate would respect his willingness to make “tough choices”. Instead, voters were repulsed by an attack on pensioners, eventually forcing a partial U-turn. A Labour government then placed disability benefits in its sights, before mass opposition forced another partial retreat.

Competence was supposed to be Starmer’s one defining trait, but he always found scapegoats for his shambolic administration. Like Sue Gray, the former senior civil servant tasked with preparing for government, who suffered a barrage of negative briefings before being thrown under the bus, like so many others.

This “principled” leader once campaigned for free movement and reprimanded Labour for being “a bit scared of making the positive case for immigration”. As prime minister, he sounded like Enoch Powell, declaring immigration had done “incalculable damage” and risked turning Britain into an “island of strangers”, while building one of the harshest asylum systems in Europe. And that was not the only hostile environment built for a marginalised minority: ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Index now rates Britain as having one of the worst records on trans rights in Europe, only narrowly above Russia.

His government broke promise after promise. Its housebuilding revolution failed to materialise. “No return to austerity” gave way to departmental squeezes. International aid was gutted. Meanwhile, Labour’s internal authoritarianism was exported to the country. Thousands were arrested for holding placards after anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action were proscribed as terrorists on the same legal footing as Islamic State.

Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US because he was a hero of the Labour right, despite his publicly recorded links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This was faction before country. This time, McSweeney was forced to carry the can, and there was no one left to throw under a bus.

The only defence is that Starmer’s failure does not belong to him alone. His faction and its cheerleaders in the media believed this brand of politics was an electoral elixir that would thrive in government. The truth is that they have no answers for the crisis-stricken Britain of the 2020s and its failed economic model.

Starmer believed in little other than his own advancement, a trait hardly uncommon among Labour MPs. The danger is that his dismal, disreputable premiership laid the foundations for the hard-right agenda of Nigel Farage. We will soon discover whether the next occupant of No 10, Andy Burnham, believes the answer is simply to paint a northern, charismatic gloss over a failed agenda. If he fails to offer a decisive break from this useless travesty of a government then he, too, will sink.

What Jones will not and cannot say like many other dismayed petty bourgeois scribblers (and nor do the revisionists and posturing Trots) – is that the entire racket of bourgeois parliament is a lying racket from top to bottom, there solely to hoodwink and bemuse the working class.

That includes all the “left” poseurs like Jeremy Corbyn, whose role has only ever been to head off any rising revolutionary sentiment with pacifist reformist platitudes, (currently from outside following his scapegoating by a desperate establishment).

Nor does Jones say this bourgeois “democracy” has been seriously failing for decades with a relentless decline in all voting, especially by the working class which has learned complete contempt for self-serving politicians (i.e. parliamentary representatives) from the betrayals of the post-war Attlee government onwards (and even before in Ramsay MacDonald’s time). As one letter, even in the tightly censored Guardian columns responded:

The Starmer landslide was based on just a third of the vote. Starmer actually won the support of merely 20% of registered voters.

If government is theoretically based on consent, then 80% of the electorate was unconvinced and perhaps alienated from the start. Starmer’s huge unpopularity was incubated by the madness of our electoral system, which strands four-fifths of the population with representatives they did not vote for.

Our political system was designed for different times, and appears incapable of the modernisation which would make voting more meaningful to more voters. Until that changes there will inevitably be more Starmers and more voter disillusion.

Dave Hepworth

Rowland, Derbyshire

In fact he “won” on far less – about 13% – if “unregistereds” are counted of course, which underlines far deeper changes needed than this “left liberal” blame on an “outdated” polling system, still trying to rescue parliament when the whole “democracy” racket is exposed as bankrupt.

And even that minimalist “landslide” was mainly out of hatred for Tory lies, sleaze, and austerity impositions, not any positive support for the twisted manipulations of the pro-Israeli pro-war sub-Blairite Starmer gang.

Parliament hangs on only because there is no conscious articulation of the real bourgeois class dictatorship it covers up and has always covered up, nor of the conclusion that demands, of the need for a revolutionary workers dictatorship.

Of course we will not “soon discover” whether Burnham will be any different as the weaselly Jones poses things and assorted other petty bourgeois commentators. It is guaranteed from a bunch of stooges fronting (with ever more cynical contempt verging on fascism) for an increasingly desperate British capitalist ruling class which faces total economic collapse as the brutal and cutthroat international trade war constantly intensifies.

Burnham, or any replacement, can only be even worse than dire Starmerism (itself worse than warcrime Blairism) because the British imperialist ability to hold its own in trade war – itself hugely intensifying as crisis deepens – is shot to pieces.

Has-been Britain has long been the least well placed of all major imperialist powers for this greatest slump disaster in history, brewing for decades within the rotten ripe world imperialist order.

Already in decline after WW1 Britain’s weakness has been obvious from the advent of Thatcherism and the great sell-off of the entire inventory of the British economy (so-called privatisation etc) to international monopoly corporations and piratical financiers, bloodsucking private equity, government bond holders, unregulated “private” bankers, and rapacious hedge funds etc etc. all further facilitated by the “Brexit” vote to allow in even more asset-stripping monopolies, particularly from the US.

Nor did Burnham see any “surprising” enthusiasm in his vote, winning the Makerfield by-election with 55% on a 59% turnout (32% - registereds only), and that elevated because of almost unlimited publicity by a basically supportive reactionary media (far different in tone to the anti-Corbyn hatred and the astonishing lies, distortions and misrepresentation of the “left anti-semitism” campaign against the left surge driven up by working class discontent in the 2010s).

The whole junket was choreographed behind the scenes by the ruling class and not least with major input from the powerful British and Israeli Zionist lobbies, particularly through the “Labour Friends of Israel” group, nearly all of which are recipients of “donations” and “help” by big money figures, many of those part of, or sympathetic to, the Israeli lobby, and many are now in senior cabinet and other roles.

The slightly more vociferous “left” opportunist, George Galloway, points out that Burnham joined that group in 2015; that Josh Simons, already mentioned above for the extraordinary “sacrifice” of his parliamentary seat was a leading element in the Labour Together conspiracy and in the “Friends”, and that Burnham has made clear his Zionist credentials, in past leadership bids, declaring the first country he would visit, would be Israel.

“Simons will doubtless be well rewarded” Galloway speculated, already seemingly born out, by a place on the “transition team”.

Galloway also pointed out that the rest of the campaign was equally tailored to ensure a win for Burnham with the Farage-ite Reform reactionaries picking a far-from first class candidate “virtually throwing the election and with a mysterious new rightwing party suddenly appearing, funded by Elon Musk (Restore UK) to split the vote in case Reform got somewhere.”

Clearly having just won virtually the entire Makerfield council bar one seat in May, Reform should have had the momentum.

The Greens and the LibDems equally threw the vote by limp campaigning in Galloway’s opinion and as a seasoned parliamentary opportunist himself, who better to judge. The new Your Party made no effort at all.

Subsequent “withdrawals” of half-challenges for a “leadership competition”, all testify to a wish to slide the whole thing into place with minimal debate – as did the call from reactionary Blairite feminist Harriet Harman (in the unelected House of Lords) to keep any election that might happen, to MPs only (rather than the mass Labour Party, let alone a General Election).

Discussion is the last thing the ruling class wants, fearing the explosive and febrile nature of the working class as world crisis deepens, already manifest in a decade of riots, assorted strikes (Birmingham binmen, container dockers, junior doctors, railmen) and the mass support for Palestine, in the teeth of “lawfare” repression of demonstrators and protestors, and grotesque censorship across the bourgeois media against Palestine and virtual pro-Israel propaganda.

Far from most of the working class “moving to the right” as the defeatist gloom of the fake-“left” keeps declaring (reflecting their own petty bourgeois despair) the proletarian mass is wide open to revolutionary politics, or would be if it ever got to hear any being fought for, (as opposed to the still dire influence of museum Stalinism or 101 variants of Trotskyism, all hostile to the workers states in various ways, (like Cuba - see below) and to the eruptions of worldwide anti-imperialist militancy, labelled “terrorism” by the ruling class, which for all its sometime backwardness philosophically, is now stirring minds and shaking ruling class domination on a wide scale).

The Burnham by-election also demonstrated that, despite the non-stop efforts of the bourgeoisie to tap an historic legacy of British imperialist jingoism (aided by the opportunist “British jobs” chauvinism of much of the “traditional labour movement” union leadership and the fake-“left” from the SWP Trots to the Scargill Socialist Labour Party remnants, the Lalkar/Proletarian Stalinists and Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain - the clue is in the name) – and thereby to foment racist scapegoating with parties like Reform, any mass movement that way could quickly dissolve if workers got sound leadership.

If even a bamboozling stunt like this proved enough for the Reform and Restore leaders to have to excuse them themselves by complaining their “anti-Starmer” vote had been “stolen”(!!) it surely demonstrates that much of their momentum is not hard-bitten fascist populism so much as vacuum-filling protest with only a relatively small, backward core of real nationalist nastiness, tapping the worst side of petty bourgeois class interest (like small traders and self-employed tradesmen) as opposed to employed (or unemployed) workers.

The relatively low turnout for the attempted repeat of the Tommy Robinson rally in London recently would also indicate the same, failing to achieve anything like the numbers at the first much-hyped “patriotic” demonstration, despite more bolstering by billionaires and trillionaires.

Similarly the riot turmoil which has erupted briefly in the wake of tragic incidents like the Southport child killings, the recent street violence in Southampton over the naïve police error ignoring a stab victim and the turmoil in the north of Ireland.

None of these can be glibly dismissed clearly, and the bourgeoisie will not let up on deliberately fostering the most backward of primitive racist reaction to spread confusion about what are extremely complex incidents by apparently part-deranged isolated individuals.

Much more detailed analysis is needed, and remains to be done to grasp the significance of these events, each examined carefully in its concrete details.

But a major point to make is that they all reflect the much deeper general alienation and discontent that is a constant part of sick, unequal, unfair and exploitative capitalist society even in the “best of times”, creating frustration, antagonism, and social conflict at all levels but particularly among the lowest (majority), impacting on individuals and then triggering mass anger and dismay.

Capitalism, faced with growing turmoil is keen to create maximum division in the working class and particularly through racist backwardness where it can.

The sick inflammatory comments by the Tommy Robinsons and Nigel Farage to whip this into a hot rage (with such twisted phraseology as Farage’s “cold rage”) of degenerate scapegoating, has some impact obviously, fed by the input of some rightwing agitators.

But as with the Southport riots, the street impression from Southampton and then Belfast is one of inchoate erupting anger at everything and at the authorities and their incompetence, and at bureaucratic political correctness too, imposed by “left” reformism.

The PCism only muddies the water, and is no answer whatsoever to the class realities of state violence and repression by the police, secret service and courts etc, which is there to protect the property rights of the ruling class not impose racism as such.

Many of those in court after Southport – and again after their release from sometimes relatively draconian prison sentences, – declared themselves to have simply been swept along by an anti-authority mood on the street rather than by racism, even specifically declaring themselves not to be racist.

In Ireland the recent riots had the added ingredient of sour dismay and resentment at the fall from the one-time supremacism of the colonist population, still lingering after nearly three decades of the Good Friday Agreement, which put the ripped out “Six counties” of Partition on a path towards eventual Irish unification after 30 years of determined nationalist revolutionary struggle and ended their automatic strutting privilege.

Their past sense of entitlement and remaining chauvinism added to the general discontent as ever-increasing austerity continues. But despite deliberate racist hate stirring and some vicious incidents the turmoil was relatively limited:

In the streets off east Belfast’s Newtownards Road, houses are blackened and boarded up.

Cars sit burned to their shells. Ash is in the air. You can still smell the burning.

The riots last week in Northern Ireland’s capital took place almost entirely in loyalist Protestant areas like this, triggered by the stabbing of a Belfast man, Stephen Ogilvie. Hadi Alodid, who is Sudanese, has been charged with attempted murder.

[...]Residents didn’t want to be named. One of them, a Protestant woman from the area, in which loyalist paramilitary groups remain active, described having her back door kicked in.

She was terrified and upset. She felt sad for her neighbours. A Ukrainian woman, a Polish family, and a Romanian family had all been burned out of their homes.

Addresses of migrants and immigrants had been shared on social media and in WhatsApp groups. Muslim children were left with white neighbours because their parents thought it would be safer than for them to stay at home.

Rioters, who conducted what has been described as a “pogrom”, were told to wear black, to mask up, to disable doorbell cameras, to take no photos and to use no phones.[...]

Loyalist paramilitary groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) emerged after Northern Ireland’s 30-year war began in the 1960s. [.]

Across Belfast, locals spoke of a paramilitary presence in last week’s riots. But they also pointed to something now familiar in mainland Britain, seen in racist riots from Southampton to Southport: far-right online influencers and mainstream political figures that enable and embolden unrest.

Shortly after meeting with Elon Musk’s father in a luxury Moscow hotel, far-right agitator Tommy Robinson - whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon - responded to the Belfast stabbing by sharing details of planned demonstrations in response to “yet another invader attack on our people”.

Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, is paying Robinson’s legal fees. He shared details of the protests on his social media platform, X, along with the caption: “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!”

Jim Allister, a loyalist Northern Irish MP from the Traditional Unionist Voice party, referred to an “importation of an alien culture that thinks it is appropriate to behead someone within the United Kingdom”.

This week, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has written that “if there is no urgent action taken to remove discriminatory and dangerous anti-White policies, we will see another Belfast”.

To many in Belfast, this is the language of collective punishment.

In October 2024, the BBC reported that over the course of four years, 30 women had been violently killed in Northern Ireland. The vast majority of the attackers were white. Robinson, Musk and others had said nothing.

[Nor have they spoken up to denounce “protestants” (foreign plantation immigrants too, four centuries back) in the wake of former DUP leader and ultra-diehard colonist Sir Jeffrey Donaldson’s conviction for sexual child abuse last week! - ed]

Campaigners, academics and locals across Belfast told Middle East Eye that a third summer of racist violence had been expected and that this incident was just the trigger. They spoke of an old hatred once aimed at Catholics, now redirected at foreigners.

And they said that Britain’s shift to the right, the weaponisation of racist disinformation and the failure of mainstream politicians and media to stand up to these things had fuelled the hatred.

[...]At the UK’s 2010 general election, one party had a policy of mass deportations: the far-right British National Party. Now it is championed by Reform, which tops most opinion polls. And while the victim of a stabbing was supposedly being honoured by the riots, he had in fact already been a victim - of loyalist gangs.

Over the weekend, a Belfast Telegraph investigation revealed that Stephen Ogilvie had been forced out of Northern Ireland and tortured multiple times by a group linked to the UVF and the Shankill Butchers, a unit of the UVF, which has been responsible for hundreds of murders.

Paramilitary members who took part in last week’s riots have been branded hypocrites for using the attack on Ogilvie as an excuse for race riots. His family expressed their “disgust” that his stabbing was being used as a reason for the violence.

On Sandy Row, in the heart of a loyalist area of south Belfast, punters at the Rangers Supporters Club told MEE that paramilitaries and organised crime groups connected to them were “profiting” from the riots.

“History is repeating itself,” said one former British army soldier, referring to the riots.

Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty’s head of nations and regions, told MEE at his office in Belfast: “It is quite clear where the violence is happening and where it isn’t.

[..]In December, the Independent Reporting Commission (IRC), a joint body set up by the UK and Irish governments, found that “the intimidation, coercive control, and threats linked to paramilitary groups persist, and the structures of paramilitary groups that continue intact can be used to facilitate organised crime and other forms of violence”.

[...]Mervyn Gibson, a local Presbyterian minister and grand secretary of the Orange Order, a Protestant organisation founded in 1795, told MEE that he had decades of meeting with paramilitary groups, and did not believe that they had organised or controlled the riots.

While individual members were certainly involved in the riots, the riots were “not controlled by them”, he said.

“There were a lot of young lads and a couple of older ones directing them,” Gibson said, adding that the older men were just as likely to be members of fringe fascist groups as they were to be paramilitary members.

Just as Corrigan said that the riots included “teenagers attracted onto the streets for the adrenaline rush”, so Gibson said that some of the violence could be described as “recreational rioting”, or “something to do of a night”.

The minister also said that 15 or 20 years ago, when paramilitary groups had a “big influence”, they would “boot out” any local person or family causing trouble. “They don’t anymore, and neither does the police.”

In working-class loyalist areas, he said, foreign families are being moved in and the state is simply letting them - and their new neighbours - get on with it.

“No one has explained why people are here,” said Gibson, whose parish is in a working-class area affected by the violence.

“They are dumped in an area by the government. People appear in the street and no one knows their background.”

More crucially, the lack of education about why families from overseas have arrived - what their actual conditions are, where they might have come from, what they might be doing - creates a vacuum into which hatred sometimes moves.

A perennial flashpoint in working-class Belfast has been a lack of housing.

While Land Registry data shows that there are at least 20,000 homes lying vacant across Northern Ireland, the social housing waiting list here exceeds 50,000.

Across the UK, council homes have not been built and predatory landlords are profiting. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government of Northern Ireland utilised empty buildings and hotels to house the homeless. But homelessness has soared since the end of the pandemic.

Off the Newtownards Road, residents said that landlords rented out homes to migrant and asylum seeker families because the government paid them more to do so.

Added to that, he said, is the response to the riots and their coverage in the media. “People feel as though they are being denigrated as racist, and while of course there is racism in the loyalist community, no single community has a monopoly on it.”

The Orangeman is concerned for many of the younger people caught up in the attack, who he doesn’t believe are really racist. “We have to work with these young people,” he said. “They are getting criminal records and ruining their lives… It’s my community, and it’s being damaged.”

Conol Matthews, a community housing organiser, told MEE at a refuge for women affected by the violence that in his day-to-day work he often encounters people who are looking for housing and harbouring racist feelings that are in part fuelled by this.

His tactic is to try to focus people’s attention on their real enemy - “the boys in suits”, as he calls them.

Or the capitalist class it would be more accurately put.

Feeding all this discontent is the growing collapse of the monopoly capitalist system, forcing the hard pressed bourgeoisie to try imposing ever more draconian “austerity” measures on the working class (and much of the petty bourgeoisie) as well as tearing up all costly reforms, and “welfare” bandages, regulations and controls on outright profiteering and limits on monopoly corporate plundering and eco-damage.

That is not helped by even greater pressure from the humiliating defeats facing the whole imperialist system, but particularly its US lead power, which has failed yet again to demonstrate to the world its supposedly incontestable “shock and awe” ruthless power over the planet and particularly the strategically critical Middle East.

Britain’s nervous and vacillating establishment finally chose to pitch-in behind the US for the already unfolding inter-imperialist world war dénouement with 2016’s Brexit vote (after decades of agonised humming-and-hawing about joining the European bloc instead – playing thereby a secondary role to now ascendant Germany, which the red-faced British generals wing of the ruling class cannot swallow).

But the US “alliance” choice has not been so good, particularly as Washington has turned increasingly to lashing out in all directions, demanding tribute by sheer empire force and brute bully threats in order to survive its own agonised bankruptcy.

“If you are not with us you are against” as George W Bush already said in 2004.

One direction for its belligerence has been particularly against its European rivals accused of “freeloading and ingratitude” and “unfair trade practices” (just as monopoly capitalism has always done in fact but now magnified 1000 times by the desperate collapse it faces).

The US already made good use of the deliberately CIA/MI6 stirred-up Ukrainian war (instigated by years of Western post-Soviet counter-revolutionary skulduggery and then NATO provocations and aggression against Putin’s Russia as part of imperialism’s general crisis turn to warmongering) to sabotage its European rivals.

German-led Europe’s commercial and industrial export competition has been ever more impacting the US economy for decades (see EPSR accounts all the way back to the 1980s).

Blowing up the NordStream gas pipeline (which everyone knows was an American action despite ludicrous psyops lies about “patriotic amateurs from Ukraine”) was the obvious early manifestation of this festering inter-imperialist contradiction.

On top has come the sheer expense, disruption and now divisions forced onto the European countries, (Poland’s break with Kiev especially) as Washington has pulled back, seeing no chance of toppling Russia and having achieved as much as it can against its main rivals outside of rising China.

The war continues because the European powers need it to, as a diversion and distraction for their own masses, to excuse and explain away the unstoppable Slump conditions as the crisis deepens (which another 100 newly installed Prime Ministers and any amount of “extra devolution” cannot change, even if Parliament was moved to the Shetland Isles).

And there is a definite revanchist Nazi flavour to Germany’s vengeful hostility to Moscow.

But the Empire top dog in Washington has the biggest problems, demanding submission and tribute from the whole world to compensate for its utter bankruptcy and ever declining ability to control and dominate through technological, cultural, commercial and financial firepower, all achieved by the ever more unequal development of monopoly capitalist concentrations, and the ability to develop or buy up the world’s best brains etc, including most of Germany and Japan’s wartime fascists post-1945.

That was always backed by imperialist military supremacy and non-stop subversion and skulduggery of course, in endless coups, invasions, assassinations, stooge fascist installation (Duvaliers, Marcos, Suharto Singham Rhee, the Shah etc etc ) and outright war where necessary (laughably justified as “preserving democracy”!!).

But inevitable “overproduction” crises (see box for Marxist science) have repeatedly shaken the whole edifice and most of all in the eventual “global credit collapse” of 2008.

Raw brute force is now all that remains, demanding the grovelling and kowtowing of everyone from “terrorist” movements to the biggest of rival powers – which means they should be if not in awe, then, to quote Machiavelli, in fear, with the whole post-war “democracy, justice and freedom” United Nations bamboozling superstructure (deluding the world courtesy of idiot Stalinist revisionist retreat (see EPSR Book 21 Unanswered Polemics)) now torn up.

It is the imposition of fascism effectively, which has only ever been the cruder, open end of bourgeois dictatorship in its desperation, using street violence and hype perhaps if it has to, but just as much imposed through the state itself as Trumpism is doing (and denied year after year by assorted “lefts”).

Fascism is not something “different” with obvious boundaries as fake-“left” academicism presents it, with its endless angels-on-pinheads “definitions”, debates about “are we there yet” and denials, disarming workers as the bourgeoisie (including Starmerism) imposes ever more draconian repression step-by-step all the way to the concentration camps (like the new asylum seeker “facilities”).

But barbaric fascism, ever more inhuman is also weakness as clear from every blitzing intimidation, under cover of pursuing the meaningless “war on terror”, going disastrously wrong, from the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (and Somalia before that) failing to establish compliance to Western rule, to the chaos and civil war disruption left in Libya and Syria after the Arab Spring.

Far from imposing imperialist diktat,the warmongering has only stirred far greater, more widespread and coherent revolt, generating massive anti-occupation resistance, in the great eruptions of “jihadism” and suicide attacks on the US/allies’ forces and eventually the enormous mass street demonstrations of the 2011 Arab Spring, shaking the West to its core.

Despite the CIA/Zionist backed Egyptian military coup, eventually regaining control with its 2013 Cairo massacres (approved by Obama), two decades of blitzings have shown the weakness of US efforts to re-impose its will.

Subsequently Somalia remains in turmoil with jihadism still controlling half the country and the whole Sahel is in permanent uproar all the way to Nigeria.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah forced back the Saudi Arabians’ near decade of brutal massacre repression and horrific imposed famine (aided and “advised” by British and US military and technicians).

Now comes the humiliation of the standoff with Iran after the great eruption of the Palestinian Gaza rebellion - still lyingly presented as the cause of the Zionism’s degenerate, horrifying and sadistic genocidal war on the Palestinian people rather than an inevitable rebellious response by a people kept in concentration camp isolation and siege for the last 20 years, (the reality of Gaza) and persecuted, butchered, tortured and repressed for now nearly 80 years after being driven from their own land (the reality of all Palestine).

The 2023 Gaza Flood was far from out-of-the-blue as already clear 22 years ago (and in the EPSR 25 years before that):

The Zionist NAZI massacres continue BECAUSE THEY HAVE T0, out of the entire, sick, doomed “logic” of the Western imperialist system, post-1945, stealing the land of the Palestinian nation away from them to give it to the Jewish monopoly-capitalists (as compensation and a silencer for the filthy treachery to the Jews of the 1930s when the build-up of NAZI Germany was deliberately encouraged by the West (Munich appeasement, etc) as a barrier to growing Soviet socialist influence during the Depression’s devastating and incurable capitalist trade slump and mass unemployment.)

The WHOLE land of Palestine (now “Israel”) was ENTIRELY populated by the Palestinian people, — WHO ARE STILL ALIVE, but festering in refugee camps or in the Zionist-controlled barbed-wire reservations called Gaza and the West Bank.

The notion of “a Palestinian state, side by side with the Jewish state of Israel” has ALWAYS been a complete joke, even when first pronounced by the “United Nations” stooges for US imperialism.

The very nature of the ethnic-cleansing expulsions of the Palestinians by UN decree to clear 60% of the land for Jewish occupation and colonisation, initially, made it absolutely certain that there could NEVER be “peace” thereafter.{..}

And as the same paper insisted against non-Marxist doubts:

The only logic of this genocidal wiping out of the land of Palestine, effectively, is that the brutal Zionist colonising repression will have to go on UNTIL EVERY LAST PALESTINIAN HAS BEEN KILLED.

[...] the phenomenon will be observed of rightwing Zionist terror going on, and on, and on to ever-more-unbelievable NAZI tyranny of assassinations, torture, collective punishments, mass killings, total humiliation of Palestinians, etc, etc, etc, — in a word to the GENOCIDE which is the only “logic” of the original infamous imperialist-”UN” atrocity of giving armed Zionist colonisation the go-ahead in the first place. (EPSR No 1229 20-04-04)

The “logic” remains as ever more grotesque revelations appear of the outright terrorising, sadistic torture and endless killing and maiming of men (particularly doctors and journalists), women and above all children, and wilful destruction of health and subsistence facilities (water eg) but now extending to the entire region which the Jewish occupation covets, for both its own “protection” and to fulfil the Greater Israel master race fantasy/superstition of a “chosen people granted the land by God”.

But it is compounded and now subverted by imperialism’s own extended use of this Jewish occupation for its increasingly desperate crisis/war needs, on top of the “routine” stooge role the Zionists have played in suppressing and disciplining the Middle East, and for which Britain in 1917 and then the US deliberately installed them.

Washington (and its stooges) has fed arms and supplies to this fanaticism nonstop to bolster its own belligerence, hammered by uncertainty and faltering will, and demoralised by the body bags coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and by still painful memories of defeat in Vietnam as well as ever rising Third World rebelliousness (however confused and backward), and the enormous impact of rising China.

But 2026 is not 1948 and anti-imperialist resistance in the Middle East has hugely intensified, with groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah learning painful lessons and reorganising so well that it has thrown Zionism back on its heels despite the utter fascist barbarism of its invasion into Lebanon, vowing the same total destruction horrors there as imposed on Gaza.

Letting the rightwing Zionists persuade it to attack Iran has consequently worsened the US position so significantly that there is now open conflict with Tel Aviv, again as predicted:

[..]more speculative EPSR projections [suggest] it might still be Big Power imperialist warmongering itself which is forced to impose the first curbing military restraint upon the barking-mad Zionists as the warmongering chaos slips more-and-more completely out of Washington’s control (op cit).

Trump’s “shock” at the Zionist blitzing of a “whole building to get one person” will not convince a Gaza sandfly, given US approval for the devastation inflicted there for three years, but his angry tirades at Benjamin Netanyahu over the Zionists’ continuing blitzing in south Lebanon and Beirut are still extraordinary.

They may go no further but for the moment have shown the quagmire that the US is now in as anti-imperialist resistance has been inflamed by the Zionists’ atrocities.

Tehran’s grip on the Straits of Hormuz has not caused world economic crisis – merely magnifying its impact in all kinds of ways but has impacted enough on the US and its allies to cause major upheavals, domestically in splitting the Trumpite MAGA movement wide open, and internationally shaking US alliances, particularly in South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as with Gulf locals like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.

Stopping the war to “settle the markets” is crucial.

The Empire has also been shaken by the apparent nationalist unity fostered within Iran by the sense of a common enemy and some loosening of rigid Islamic backwardness. From the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 imperialism has tolerated the Ayatollahs in preference to seeing communist influences emerge from the ferment of spontaneous anti-imperialism. But push things too far it will be thought and who knows where hardline militancy might be pushed.

None of which means the Iranians should trust the US one inch as many commentators have said, particularly as the wars (one-sided attacks!) in June last year and February were launched in the middle of international negotiations and to repeat the point, in the middle of the greatest ever monopoly capitalist crisis, which can only continue pushing into World War Three.

Even less of course should the Havana comrades, already subject to lurid and hair-raising threats and now devastating strangling siege (medieval in its inhuman impact, already killing the vulnerable) as communist Cuba becomes an obvious possible “compensation” target for the frustrated Trumpite nazis, trying to score at least some kind of “triumph”, particularly for Cuba heritage Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Cuba is in one sense easy meat sitting just 90km off the coast of Florida and hamstrung by non-stop US vilification, hostility, and hatred for almost 70 years since Fidel Castro’s stunning armed revolution victory in 1959, all made concrete with military and terrorist attacks (see last paper), constant subversion and provocations, deadly sabotage including biological and chemical war on both people and agriculture, hundreds of assassination attempts on leaders like Fidel Castro and - above all – the endless siege of the economy blockaded from much world trade from the beginning, with measures steadily escalated over decades, and added to by the US bullying with sanctions of firms in those countries (like Europe) which did trade.

With its major trade lifeline, the Soviet Union, cut off by the Gobachevite reactionary revisionist liquidation in 1991 Cuba suffered egregiously (but doggedly) with some relief coming only after some years from the ascent of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (and other “left nationalists” in the Latin American "pink tide”) giving political support as well as trade deals and subsidised oil assistance (with Cuba providing massive medical and educational aid in return - such as a crash literacy programme and free eye surgery for cataracts).

But that has gone too following the class-collaborating capitulation of Venezuela in the wake of the supposedly “bold” US capture of Chávez’ successor president Nicolás Maduro (actually a highly unequal kidnap “operation” which saw more than 30 Cuban bodyguards slaughtered).

Nevertheless Cuba is a far more difficult nut to crack than the flaky “leftism” in Venezuela which for all its bottom-up commune programme, and elements of people’s militias, never completed the overturn of the bourgeois class to establish a full workers state, and has been subject to non-stop subversion, electoral manipulation and coup attempts as a result.

Fidel Castro established the firm dictatorship of the proletariat and despite many revisionist flaws and theoretical weaknesses – long raised by the EPSR as offers for polemics (see eg the whole question of the Reagan invasion of Grenada in EPSR Book 12) if without direct response – it remains so.

The core of the people of the island will resist any invasion, not least as the country has long armed its population not just with guns but a philosophy of anti-imperialism, which while worryingly flawed with revisionist notions, such as the “multicultural world perspective advanced by Díaz-Canel in his recent speech opening, is still a different level of collective inspiration.

The obvious issue for revolutionary Marxism is to stand four square in unconditional solidarity with Havana and its resistance to imperialism.

But that is the exact opposite offered by the worldwide swamp of fake-“left”ism which in its poisonous Trotskyist form has always sniped at Havana as it does against all workers states – for years not daring to stand fully against Cuba in front of the international working class when it has so obviously been a beacon and revolutionary example for decades in both its domestic socialist achievements and internationalist support for worldwide anti-imperialism.

But it has always sneered at its leadership as “Stalinist dictators” supposedly “ready to sell out” the working class and “preventing the flourishing of workers democracy”, in the interests of an alleged “caste” of bureaucrats, the poisonous garbage theory that the conceited Trotsky himself devised after being rejected by the Bolshevik party in the wake of Lenin’s death.

They have jumped in now on the decisions just announced by the Cuban leadership to open up the economy in a variety of ways to limited and partial capitalist interventions and possibilities for outside investment, as well as relaxations of the monopoly on foreign trade, allowing enterprises to buy their materials etc in direct trade and to sell their output, much along the lines adopted by the workers states in China and Vietnam, allowing a capitalist sector of the economy to develop.

Both have been studied by the Cubans in preparation.

Thereby it is hoped, says Cuban president Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel, to improve the economy, shake-out elements of bureaucracy and create greater flexibility.

Clearly this has been done under bullying heavy pressure from imperialism which has obviously every intention of using the openings to try and leverage its influence and “free market” ideology into the economy, and with it obviously all the antagonism, corruption, alienation, envy and inequality of capitalism, and all the philistinism, idealist individualism and shallow consumerism that dulls and bends minds throughout the whole bourgeois world (including much of the Trotskyist and revisionist fake-“left” spectrum it should be added).

But while these measures are obviously a retreat from the complete socialist planned economy – “we have to face reality” says Díaz-Canel, – they are by no means the deliberate abandonment of socialism and the reversion to capitalism immediately trumpeted by the Trots like the RCP.

To put forwards this undermining bullshit just at the moment when Washington is turning up the heat on Cuba with ever more sabre rattling “military exercises”, bullying threats against other nations all around the Caribbean to cut off links and trade relations (such as vital medical contract exports) and particularly to prevent any deliveries of oil, near strangling its entire economy, is beyond irresponsible.

In fact it is sinister counter-revolution, the vilest attack on the leadership, larded with the heavy defeatism that is their anti-communist hallmark, listing out almost gleefully the staggering difficulties facing the Cuban people and then declaring that the leadership is simply “using” the situation to “restore capitalism”.

The EPSR has no idea of the full impact of the announced measures which run to several hundred in detail, nor how they will unfold and their overall impact but it is very clear from the announcement that Cuba is by no means abandoning its overall authority, its setting of strategic planning and certainly not its workers state ownership of land and property.

Very specifically in talking about usufruct rights, for example, Diaz says that ownership of the land is not relinquished (usufruct means a controlled period, defined in advance, in which a land or property holder can use the land as they determine, but even then it must be done productively he says or will be passed to someone else).

Screaming hysterically about the “end of state planning” (as if the Trots’ shallow “workers and factory democracy” schemes ever approved of disciplined state level overall control anyway) is just petty bourgeois shallowness, and misrepresentation. The new scheme does not privatise state enterprises by giving them management autonomy (again is that not a Trot aim??).

Of course these things are fraught with risk but they are not deliberate sneaky steps into capitalism “which the Stalinists have always wanted” as this petty bourgeois anti-communist sneakiness is trying to imply, trying to re-raise all the hoary old crap theories about the Soviet Union.

Those were definitively shot down by the appalling Gorbachevite liquidation of 1991 which far from seeing most of the tens of millions strong communist party slyly and successfully converting themselves into prosperous "suits", saw them hit the dole queues, and quite frequently the despairing bottle or worse.

It was the uncontrolled spivvery and outsiders who “did alright” in the gangster period of capitalist restoration as the economy slid into bankruptcy, rescued by Putin’s more disciplined bonapartist state capitalism and its whipping of the oligarchs into line.

Gorbachevism was the final tipping into counter-revolutionary “free market” delusion of accumulating revisionist retreat (from Lenin’s revolutionary understanding), which developed in the USSR’s leadership philosophy over a long period from the 1920s even as it successfully built and developed the Soviet economy and proletarian state, (so well it was able to destroy the German Nazi threat built up with the approval of all the imperialist powers) (see EPSR Book 21 Unanswered Polemics and Perspectives 2001).

The RCP assertion that these measures are “capitalist restoration”, use the same kind of verbal trickery the capitalist press does such as

“regardless of the words (of those) who took these decisions, in practice...” “private profit will become the dominant motor force...”.”One possible explanation ...”

(followed by an unsubstantiated accusation of intents, etc etc.)

Wild notions follow that

“with the destruction of the planned economy, all the gains of the revolution will be lost.

So they would but that would mean dismantling the state and no idiot Gorbachevite notions along those lines have been voiced – it would have to be by brute force, which is not ruled out but raises major questions about whose troops will do it.

No Gorbachevite liquidation has happened in China or Vietnam which the RCP uses to “back up” its wild garbage with the supposed “proof” of how measures like these are “capitalist restoration”.

Just the opposite, Beijing has firmly suppressed counter-revolutionary dissidents and disruption, from the Tiananmen upheaval of 1989 (but with none of lurid “massacres” repeatedly and lyingly alleged (EPSR Book 16 China) to the violent petty bourgeois anti-communist "umbrella" riots in Hong Kong and much in between.

It does use capitalist methods in a broad section of the economy (and with worrying levels of uncontested bourgeois consumerist garbage filling the culture), but so far, under the firm control of party-led state direction.

That is not at all out of line with Lenin, who introduced the New Economic Policy in the early 1920s, once the impossibility of moving straight to a pure communist economy had become clear. It was a retreat from the ideal, he said, but necessary; giving major concessions to attract foreign investors and allowing controlled capitalist development for a period meant techniques and skills could be learned and the economy built up. Key was that the state of the proletarian dictatorship had the power, and high level political control.

The RCP is obliged to cover up the obvious reality that China remains a workers state by some utterly childish rigmarole about it transitioning “very slowly” (which somewhat ignores the obvious (counter) revolution necesarily involved with this class transition, a gigantic and turmoil ridden upheaval which somehow the 1.3 billion people in this “large country” also missed (along with the rest of the world):

The difference is that in China, capitalist restoration in a large country, with a huge reserve of cheap labour and a strong state, eventually led to sovereign development that has turned the country into a world power capable of challenging US dominance. China is a capitalist country, and the interests of a handful of billionaires, with close ties to the state apparatus and the misnamed Communist Party, dominate the economy and benefit from the exploitation of the labour of millions. But at least it is a capitalist country that determines its own policy and competes on the world market on equal terms with US imperialism.

And what is this “state apparatus” which continues apparently untouched (including the enormous Red Army and its rapidly advancing weaponry presumably)? Where is the restored parliament? Why does capitalism hate it so much and constantly demonise it?

Beijing’s revisionist perspectives remain disastrous, and not least in its collusion with imperialism to “condemn and suppress terrorism” and its relative silence on where the world is going, for the benefit of the world working class – and the disastrous “multipolar” world pacifist fantasy it helps sustain, ignoring the capitalist crisis and unstoppable war until capitalism is ended.

And a bit more on defending Cuba would be welcome as well as perhaps polemical challenges with Havana’s own theoretical weaknesses.

Meanwhile, the more sophisticated Spartacist Trots avoid the crude “China is capitalist” shallow impressionism – but only by continuing to revive the utter fraud that they are “deeply concerned to see that the workers state and its gains survives” in Beijing, in Havana and doubtless Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City too.

To this end they revert once more to the traditional “political revolution” fantasy of basic Trotskyism, declaring the changes “could well lead to” (more slippery unscientific phrasing!!)

destruction of the gains of the revolution.

and denouncing leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba, for

“dismantling the remains of the planned economy.

Rather than suggest the Chinese and Vietnam path is being followed (as a means to denounce the moves) they realise that there obviously is state control in both and so just baldly declare for Cuba:

That is not what is happening. (!!!)

The measures are being dictated by the US rulers [...] the PCC leaders have relied on the fools’ gold of negotiations with Washington. The result has been ever-escalating attacks by Trump and Rubio. With the economy in shambles thanks to the U.S. blockade, compounded by bureaucratic mismanagement, the PCC leaders are now moving to sell out the revolution.

The real parallel to what is happening today is not China or Vietnam, but the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Widespread privatizations and concessions to imperialism under Mikhail Gorbachev paved the way for the destruction of the world’s first workers state, a disaster for the workers of the world. Through their lies, corruption and economic mismanagement, the Soviet rulers of that country drove huge layers of the population to the right, massively aiding the drive to counter-revolution.

It was not economic mismanagement etc which temporarily disorientated the Soviet masses but the complete lack of Leninism which the revisionist bureaucracy had long abandoned.

Inspired by Leninist enthusiasm for pursuing and aiding the world revolutionary movement (as the Soviet Union had done to an enormous extent despite its revisionist flaws - but done much better), the huge sophisticated Soviet people could have turned things round dramatically.

Nor was the liquidation so simple but reflected major differences (see EPSR Perspectives 2001 op cit).

The only fools around this are the ones the Sparts take the working class to be. The situation in the 1980s was utterly different with decades of Cold War pressure on the USSR relaxing (to some extent) because Reagan/Thatcherism had other issues to contend with, namely the growing competition from Japanese and German imperialism wiping out US commerce.

The temporary diversion of some resources to inter-imperialist trade war fooled (that word again) an already willing puddle brained revisionist bureaucracy deluded with the nonsense of re-introducing the market and dismantling the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Now, the Cubans have said nothing of the kind and while Havana suffers all kinds of theoretical weaknesses, that is not one of them.

And if it were, that answer would not be to attack the PCC as proposed but to stand four square with the workers state unconditionally against the lies and fabrications of the imperialists while explaining the real weaknesses.

To attack the leadership at this moment is total treachery, calling for chaos and upheaval, and the fragmentation of all unity on the island - which has not only survived with this leadership for nearly 70 years but has inspired most of Latin America and further afield with its titanic struggles, sacrifices and selfless efforts, in both military and well as medical and educational aid to anti-imperialism as well as massive social, sporting and cultural achievements, staggering for such a constantly undermined country.

And there is no point in the Sparts trying it on with a notion that the leadership has declined since Fidel’s time. Firstly his brother is still present. Secondly the Sparts have tried this whole line once before, at the beginning of the 1990s when Cuba was also hard-pressed economically. It is uncannily reminiscent firstly, and secondly major proof of the slick cover-ups these frauds indulge in:

At long last, one group of middle-class Trotskyite ‘revolutionaries’ has felt obliged to pursue the logic of ultra-leftism to the bitter end, and to continue demanding the ‘revolutionary’ overthrow of the Castro regime in the name of ‘more workers democracy’, and therefore ‘better socialism’ and ‘better anti-imperialism’.

Simultaneously, the Sparts have once again also felt obliged to return to their old anti-communist vomit over Poland and the Solidarnosc counter-revolution that all these petty-bourgeois fake ‘revolutionaries’ were so energetically cheering on because it allegedly promised more ‘rank-and-file socialism’.

Last week saw the SWP lying through its teeth that Solidarnosc was fine until winning the 1989 elections and that it was only “since then its leaders have embraced all the Thatcherite rubbish coming from the West”.

Only total morons or the most depraved reactionaries could try to put across such a deception in order to continue trying to bamboozle the working class.

Now the Sparts, who were cannier than the rest of the swamp in getting off the Solidarnosc bandwagon in late 1981 when they felt that the stench of the CIA/Vatican counter-revolution was getting too strong for intelligent workers to no longer notice, are trying to pretend that it was only “in late 1981 when Walesa & Co first made their bid to restore capitalism in Poland”. Crap.

By late 1981, the Bulletin [EPSR]had already published more than a whole year’s weekly issues attacking Solidarnosc for the counter-revolutionary fraud that it was, most of those Bulletins containing easily intelligible evidence from the ‘free’ world bourgeoisie’s own media admissions proving what complete stooges for Western imperialist values Walesa & Co were.

Only the cretinous middle-class subjectivism of the swamp, so determined to hate the dictatorship of the proletariat and so determined to prove that ‘nice’ and ‘real’ so-called ‘workers democracy’ building ‘genuine socialism’ was so easily available, prevailed however.

That same petty-bourgeois subjective idealism is prevailing now with the Sparts.

These people know that they are lying about their coverage of Solidarnosc in that early period. They know that all the evidence was available long before the “end of 1981” to prove that Solidarnosc was nothing but a CIA/Vatican counter-revolutionary racket.

But the last thing these posturers are interested in is setting the scientific historical record straight so that the working class should for all time have the full benefit of the better lessons to be learned about Solidarnosc anti-communist hysteria, and the devastating effect of bourgeois counter-revolutionary culture.

The only thing this phony Spart ‘revolutionary’ pose is interested in is how it can continue to hoodwink workers into not rejecting the poisonous subjective-idealism of Trotskyism.

The Sparts’ new contribution on Cuba is a massive 6-page ultra-left propaganda undertaking, oozing with ‘anti-imperialist’ sympathy and ‘solidarity’ with Cuba suffering under the murderous US-imperialist blockade, and correctly explaining the damage to the Revolution that the lack of Leninist world-proletarian-dictatorship perspectives (although not quite termed as such by the Sparts, of course, - significantly) has done in the past and will continue to do.

But its philosophy, unstated, is pure garbage. This claims that because the Cuban revolutionary leadership lacks a Leninist perspective for completing the international socialist revolution as the only ultimate guarantee of survival of workers states anywhere, - therefore this present Castro regime should be overthrown.

Thus the old Trotskyist incantation of the ‘political revolution’ is religiously resurrected, - the totally bogus ‘extension of Marxism’ which Trotsky invented just to cater for his personal ambition to seize the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet workers state after Lenin’s death but without wishing to be too clearly seen to be a counter-revolutionary, once the party had decisively rejected him.

This fiction claims that such a ‘political’ revolution would in no way challenge the socialist gains of the proletarian state or its class-dictatorship composition, but merely overthrow the political bureaucracy.

In practice, of course, such a distinction is farcically speculative, to say the least, if not a grotesque provocation.

As Lenin explained in a famous passage from Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder when analysing the discomfort of petty-bourgeois fake-’Marxist’ ‘revolutionaries’ over the dictatorship of the proletariat:

“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 the most incredible and hopeless confusion of mind....Classes are led by political parties....directed 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....Why replace this by some rigmarole?”

Elsewhere, Lenin also explains bluntly that the historical form which Marxism’s long-awaited proletarian dictatorship had finally taken in practice, - was a party dictatorship.

And the main theme of the more than one dozen volumes of works written by Lenin from the October Revolution to his death is the defence of this dictatorship against every kind of crank utopia which wanted to see a babel of conflicting workers parties all squabbling in the soviets to supposedly achieve ‘real workers democracy’, which as Lenin explained a thousand times would have meant the certain immediate overthrow of the whole revolution by imperialist reaction. (EPSR No 725 09-11-93)

The Trots of all kinds are now calling for total disruption demonstrating their counter-revolutionary nature definitively.

But other “supporters” of the Cubans like the appalling FRFI Revolutionary Communist Group mountebanks are no better as will be analysed next issue.

Build Leninism

Alan Scott

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