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No 1674 8th June 2026

Tehran truce shows imperialist bully bluster will back off (temporarily) when confronted, unlike Venezuela capitulation. The fightback is a lesson in revolutionary determination and a blow against imperialist arrogance, splitting the degenerate ruling class wide open. Iran’s mullahs are not an answer to mass discontent but the blows they have struck open a path for wider Marxist debate and theoretical struggle to lead the fight for communism that is the world’s necessary future. But imperialist crisis driving Middle East horrors, Ukraine’s nazi nastiness and chaos and war everywhere still rages on dragging the world to disaster. Leninist struggle exposing “left” frauds even more crucial

Iran’s continued resistance to Washington and Zionist aggression is having a shattering impact on imperialist plans to escape its Catastrophic economic breakdown by worldwide warmongering destruction, international blitz bullying and domestic fascist repression, scapegoating and censorship.

Tehran’s defiance, giving temporary pause to the genocidal wamongering is obviously a long way yet from the conscious communist struggle vitally needed everywhere as the worldwide capitalist order further breaks down into chaos and might-is-right bullying desperation; in many ways its religious notions have long been hostile to basic working class struggles.

Like many others in the region from Saddam Hussein in Iraq to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, its petty bourgeois nationalism has not even been consistently anti-imperialist.

But on top of three years’ staggering self-sacrificial struggle by the Palestinian people against the sadistic and barbaric Zionist-imperialist occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and in fact all of “Israel” (and 70 years before that); on top of the continued Hezbollah-led resistance in blitzkrieged Lebanon to the current monstrous massacring Zionist “ceasefire” busting invasion (and decades before that); and aided by the Ansar Allah (Houthi) rebellion in Yemen (itself a years long victim of imperialist near-genocide by blitz and deliberate famine), its dogged refusal to back down is shaking not just the Middle East but the whole of crisis-wracked imperialism to the foundations.

Despite depraved ceasefire-busting blitzings by the Zionists in Gaza and Lebanon, it so far remains a huge inspiration for the rest of the Third World and downtrodden proletariat everywhere.

And that is in stark contrast to the uselessness and craven confusion of the fake-“left” of all shades who refuse to build the crucial revolutionary understanding the world is crying out for, that only overturn of this whole disgusting and tyrannical bourgeois system can save mankind from ever increasing humiliation, unbearable inequality, grinding exploitation, murderous repression, ever wider war destruction and planet threatening ecocide.

Iran’s revolutionary spirit, albeit forced out from the mullahs for the moment by concrete necessity and popular hostility against the degenerate barbarities of collapsing imperialism, is the complete opposite to revisionist-lauded compromise, useless pacifism, and even class collaborating cooperation like that seen in Venezuela, selling out its own “Bolivarian revolution” and thereby additionally undermining the desperately besieged Cuban workers state, hated by failing capitalism because of its stunning communist inspiration to workers for nearly 70 years.

In fact it delivers a sharp rebuke to the whole slew of fake-“left”ism which still remains a thousand miles from any perspective of the total world disintegration underway as capitalism hits a concrete wall of intractable overproduction crisis (see economics page), and the need it imposes for class war struggle to end the whole stinking and outmoded monopoly capitalist system and build socialism under workers control.

All the “left” is stuck in an irrelevant and always misleading past of continuing disarming reformism, “democratic” struggle, revisionist permanent peaceful coexistence (and its extension into a “balanced multipolar world” fantasy), or Trotskyist petty bourgeois hatred for the class organisation and discipline of workers states.

All dishonestly and falsely parade and declare themselves to be the “leftism” needed by workers, and some even as “Marxist” and revolutionary to boot, but all peddle only treacherous delusion and fraudulence which does not see real revolutionary movement where it is erupting (notably the Arab Spring for example, the Sahel etc), does not want to see it and defeatistly denies it.

Their footling academicism, organisational squabbling and sectarian infighting comes nowhere near setting out the crisis perspective the world need to explain the intractable and unstoppable nature of the slide into world war three, already in train for the last three decades from the 1999 NATO blitzing of little Serbia (following a decade of inter-imperialist skirmishing in the break up of former socialist Yugoslavia, and the simultaneously the siege strangling of Iraq with inhuman murderous “sanctions”) and continued ever since with invasions, war, and proxy wars tearing half a dozen countries apart from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, the Sudan and more.

Least of all do any of them make clear that this will not stop and cannot stop for as long as the capitalist system remains in charge or in fact is in existence at all, whatever “restraints” or “multipolar balance” might ostensibly have been achieved or “recognised” (with particularly China for example).

As Lenin repeatedly warned, imperialism is a system which cannot be prevented from plunging into incurable Catastrophic trade war and the inter-imperialist world war that it unstoppably turns into.

That does not mean all kinds of settlements, treaties, ceasefires and even retreats might be forced onto the imperialist godfathers, as in fact they have been over the last decades through rebellion, insurgency and armed struggle of various kinds, pushing back the 2003 invasion in Iraq for example, or seeing the humiliating withdrawal of United States and allied stooge troops from backward and benighted Afghanistan, or driving out the years-long murderous US/UK backed and guided Saudi blitzing onslaught on Yemen.

But they need to be recognised as partial setbacks, while at the same time grasping that degenerating and declining imperialism cannot call a halt to its war drive, nor be made to through “militant action to stop arms deliveries” etc, whatever temporary truces it might have to make, or pretend to make with Iran in this case, or elsewhere.

Until toppled completely any halts will just buy it time for yet more aggression and barbarity (as the constant escalation of the NATO proxy war against Russia is demonstrating).

War and its associated destruction of “surplus capital” is the only answer the bourgeoisie has to its paralysing crisis as its monopoly combines become clogged with the ever accumulating and ever more concentrated capital, which must find new outlets on a vast scale for profitable investment but cannot because there is no more room for yet more production (and then sales) in a world already saturated with far too much stuff for the ever-diminishing purchasing power of the ever more exploited masses (see economics box).

Deepening of the crisis cannot stop and there is no “balance” possible with supposed “anti-imperialism” (which raises multiple questions in itself about Putinism or BRICS etc), which would be a pretty sick business anyway, for the hundreds of millions left in the imperialist areas, just as exploited as ever and probably even more so as the corporations stepped up their slave driving to compensate.

Such constrictions would only add to the contradictions driving the whole system into conflict (though that might well be primarily within the imperialist space between the monopoly powers, at least initially, as it was in the early stages of World War Two, with some help from the clever diplomatic manoeuvring of the USSR and its 1939 pact with Germany, turning Hitlerism westwards).

But for all that, these rebellions do still weaken imperialism’s grip, as expressed by ruling class splits, recriminations and disputes in all directions, as all the bourgeois press accounts demonstrate.

None are potentially more significant than the conflicts being driven out between Washington and the fanatical Zionist henchmen occupying Palestine, the US imperialists’ most important “shock and awe” instrument for maintaining its domination over the whole region and intimidating the whole world but potentially running amok:

Summarizing Trump’s words to Netanyahu, the US official said Trump said: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in jail if it wasn’t for me. I’m saving you. Everyone hates you now. Everyone hates Israel because of this.”

US President Donald Trump was furious because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to escalate the conflict in Lebanon and thereby threatened to destroy US negotiations with Iran.

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President Trump attacked the Israeli prime minister in a telephone conversation on Monday due to the escalation of the situation in Lebanon.

This was confirmed for the American portal Axios by two American officials and a third source familiar with the conversation.

Two sources said Trump claimed he helped keep Netanyahu free, referring to his support during Netanyahu’s corruption trial.

Another source familiar with the call said Trump was “angry” and at one point yelled at Netanyahu, “What the hell are you doing?”

An unnamed Syrian official said that Trump knew that Hezbollah had fired at Israel and that Israel had to defend itself, but that in recent days he felt that Netanyahu was retaliating in a disproportionate way.

In addition to threats to Beirut, Israel has expanded its ground operation in southern Lebanon.

Another US official said Trump was concerned about the fact that Israel had killed a large number of civilians in Lebanon and was opposed to the Israelis demolishing buildings to take out a Hezbollah commander.

Trump and Netanyahu have had several tense calls in the past, but have continued to coordinate closely on Iran and other issues. One official said it was one of Trump’s worst conversations with Netanyahu since he returned to office.

Trump’s anger appears to have been sparked by Netanyahu’s decision to escalate the conflict in Lebanon threatening to destroy his negotiations with Iran.

After the call, Trump announced on Truth Social that negotiations on Iran were “continuing, at a rapid pace.”

Netanyahu released a statement after the talks in which he said he told Trump that Israel would attack targets in Beirut if Hezbollah did not stop attacking Israel and that in the meantime Israel would continue its operations in southern Lebanon.

“Our position remains the same,” Netanyahu wrote.

Another US official claimed that, in reality, Trump “ran over” Netanyahu during the call.

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

Recent U.S. intelligence reports have raised concerns about Israeli spy agencies eavesdropping on American negotiators working on a peace deal with Iran, amid rising concern over a more general counter-intelligence threat by Israel.

Israel and the United States have long known, and tolerated, that each was spying on the other. But an intensified Israeli effort to learn about U.S. positions in talks with Iran has crossed a line, according to some American officials.

The reports include concerns that Israel has stepped up its efforts to eavesdrop on senior American officials.

Another report, written by the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military intelligence offices and focused on earlier events going back several years, said that the counter-intelligence threat level posed by Israel had been increased in recent weeks to the top level, from high to critical. The report, to which the Defense Counter-intelligence and Security Agency contributed, outlines various efforts by Israel to spy on American military personnel and government officials.

The reports and the intensified concern about Israeli spying come at an especially sensitive time. Israel and the U.S. have been fighting the war against Iran together, and have never had such close military coordination as they do now, with Israeli military officers working side-by-side with their American counterparts at U.S. Central Command.

The U.S. military is sharing huge amounts of tactical and operational information with its Israeli counterparts. But senior American officials said that Israel is looking for insights into Mr. Trump’s strategy and shifting stances on the peace talks.

The new warning could potentially complicate efforts to further integrate military war planning between U.S. Central Command and Israel, especially if the Pentagon makes a decision to place new restrictions on information shared with Israeli officers.

There has already been tension between the two nations as Mr. Trump pursues a peace deal even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel seeks to further degrade Iran’s capabilities, weaken or topple its theocratic government and assault Tehran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

[..]A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington also disputed claims that Israel poses a counterintelligence threat, saying that Israel does not spy on American officials or entities.

The Jewish-Zionist occupation, installed in just “mandated” (i.e. colonially occupied) Palestine by British imperialism from the 1920s onwards and then “officially” declared a “country” by the US-dominated stooge United Nations in 1948 (immediately and illegally then expanded by terrorising ethnic cleansing and outright war against its indigenous Palestinian population ever since) has always served imperialist interests in suppressing region’s Arab peoples.

It has been protected by the West in return with tens of $billions of military, political and financial aid, without which the artificially implanted “state” of “Israel” would never have survived, however much it “greened the desert”.

But its own fanatical religio/colonialist agenda of taking ever more land for itself from its rightful inhabitants, has not always coincided with Western needs.

Nor has its insatiable expansionist ambition to achieve a “Greater Israel” (to fulfil the alleged “chosen people” master-race proscriptions of a mythical “God” derived from primitive superstition) and which more and more comes into conflict with the US strategy which has bigger fish to fry.

Washington needs to balance a whole network of stooge “allies” and particularly the assorted thug monarchies and finance parasite sheikhdoms around the Gulf region, as well as further afield, (eg South Korea, India, Indonesia, Philippines), and even more lately as other rival “protectors” - especially China – gain influence.

As long explained by the EPSR:

US imperialism is well versed in the general colonial strategy of dominating and intimidating subject peoples, and is the world’s leading exponent of military terror to put down revolts.

But Middle Eastern policy has always required the use of much more subtle methods of control as well, – mainly bribery, and the propping up of degenerate reactionary regimes by allowing them sufficient nationalist posturing to just about keep revolution at bay from the continually frustrated masses.

And Washington’s humiliation at being unable to control or justify the mad-dog actions of its Zionist mailed-fist henchmen sends shudders throughout the whole creaking edifice of imperialist market control of the Middle East (EPSR No850 23-04-96).

The Iran war pushed on Washington by Tel Aviv has not gone well and the Arab and other Muslim stooges are breaking away, unconvinced that the US “Godfather” is giving them the protection they require. All kinds of re-arrangements are in train according to some of the more thoughtful bourgeois press which could be bad news for US interests:

[...]The diplomatic efforts come as the region is reshaping to adapt to diminished US power after Washington’s inability to land a knockout blow on Iran, force the opening of the strait of Hormuz or safeguard its Gulf allies. Tehran has few friends in the region, but the regime’s survival has meant that its neighbours have had to find an accommodation.

Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at Kings College London, said the Gulf was shocked at the degree to which Washington protected Israel first against Iranian drones and missiles, despite the trillions of dollars of Gulf investment pouring into the US.

“We’re probably seeing the final days of American empire in the Middle East,” he said. “Across the Gulf, there is complete disillusionment with American influence and the ability of America to lead.”

The provisional deal was agreed at the end of last week after Pakistani and Qatari officials travelled to Iran in a final push for an outline agreement between Tehran and Washington. In a call with Trump on Saturday, leaders from a group of eight Muslim-majority nations urged him to accept a deal that would end the war, reopen the strait of Hormuz, and relaunch negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The same countries lost the argument in Washington to the Benjamin Netanyahu before the war, but now they have managed to outweigh the Israeli prime minister – who spoke to Trump on the same day – with the US president declaring that the deal was “largely negotiated”.

Trump said last week that Netanyahu “will do whatever I tell him to do” on Iran. An analysis piece published on Monday in the Times of Israel was headlined: “Israel began the Iran war as a partner of the US — and is ending it on the sidelines”.

The United Arab Emirates, which had reportedly urged fellow Gulf countries to join the war against Iran and carried out its own airstrikes, swung behind the peace deal alongside Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt. The regional consensus-building process appeared to repair some of the bitter rivalry for influence between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with several phone calls between their rulers taking place in recent weeks.

The fallout from the war leaves little prospect of more countries joining Trump’s signature Abraham accords to establish better relations between Israel and several Arab states, despite his demand on Monday that all the countries involved in the peace negotiations should do so. When Trump used the conference call on Saturday to urge more countries to sign up, he was reportedly met with silence. Islamabad, which led the mediation efforts, has said that disunity in the Muslim world only plays into the hands of Israel.

Masood Khan, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US, said Islamabad’s success had been bringing other countries into the peace process. Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar worked their own channels in support of the effort.

“Pakistan could not have taken a solo flight,” he said. “It needed to cover its flanks to make its mediation much more credible.”

The US presence in the Middle East, spread across more than a dozen bases, is expected to remain. But countries are reaching out to additional security partners in the region and beyond, with Europe set to take a bigger role. During the war, Pakistan sent troops and fighter jets to defend Saudi Arabia, while Egyptian soldiers and planes were stationed in the UAE, Cairo’s biggest financial backer. There is also talk of striking non-aggression agreements with Iran.

Abdul Khaleq Abdullah, a political science professor in the UAE, said his country had wanted to see Iran with no missiles and drones, no proxies and no nuclear activity, but that ultimately proved unattainable.

“The UAE is a very pragmatic country,” he said. “Iran remains a big menace, but it is no longer the imperial Iran that we’ve seen over the last 20 years.”

He said a new Middle East was emerging with Turkey, Israel and the Gulf states competing to fill the vacuum left by a weakened Tehran.

One emerging axis centres on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which signed a mutual defence pact last year. There have been talks to bring Turkey, Qatar and Egypt into that arrangement, which has been called a “Muslim Nato”. On the other side is an alliance between the UAE, India, Israel and the US, known as the I2U2 group.

HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in London, said the region had calculated that regime change in Tehran was too risky because it could bring a collapse of the state and chaos, something that only Israel wanted. It had also become clear to Trump that the war would not deliver what he wanted, so the region did not so much persuade him to accept a deal as allowed him to say that he had overwhelming regional support, he said.

“This is no longer a defence architecture built solely around the United States. Gulf states are increasingly preparing for the possibility that Washington may not be there when they need it most,” Hellyer said.

Of course none of these cowardly and repressive regimes act in any way in the interests of the masses or mostly offer even a pretence of “democracy” (or trample right across it as in Pakistan, effectively once more a military dictatorship for capital, with the hugely popular Imran Khan held in prison for two years now on trumped up charges, suffering ill-health because of the conditions and with no prospect of release while is his party is simply banned), despite which regional breakdown still reflects a blow to imperialism of historic import.

Significantly even the UAE seems to be pitching in, after its vicious feudal family mafia sheikhs (where is all the West’s posturing about “totalitarianism” now??) took a wild gamble urging on the Zionist/American attack, having already abandoned any residue of pretend Arab nationalist solidarity with the butchered Palestinians by signing the Abraham Accords collaboration with Zionism, along with equally reactionary Moroccan monarchists.

Actually they also joined in the blitzing militarily it now seems, which has blown up in their smug arrogant faces as the war has revealed all kinds of vulnerabilities, and the “invincibility aura” of imperialism has collapsed, as US bases have been smashed and Zionland has been hammered.

Their philistine consumer “paradise” and parasitical finance-and-gangsterism desert cities now face more than just sandstorms:

The United Arab Emirates carried out dozens of air strikes against Iran during the Israeli-US war on the Islamic Republic, according to a report on Friday by The Wall Street Journal, revealing a far deeper and earlier role in the conflict than previously acknowledged.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the newspaper said the UAE launched attacks from the opening days of the conflict and continued operations even after a ceasefire was announced in April.

The report suggests Abu Dhabi effectively operated alongside the US and Israel as a third participant in the military campaign.

The strikes were reportedly coordinated with Washington and Israel, which provided intelligence support. Targets included locations on Qeshm and Abu Musa Islands in the Strait of Hormuz, Bandar Abbas, the Lavan Island oil refinery, and Asaluyeh petrochemical complex.

Several of the attacks hit Iranian energy infrastructure. One strike on the Asaluyeh complex, reportedly carried out in coordination with Israel, triggered international outcry and prompted Washington to urge Israel to halt attacks on energy facilities.

Before the conflict, Gulf states publicly insisted they would not allow their territory or airspace to be used for military action against Iran.

Iran responded by targeting Gulf cities, airports and energy infrastructure with missiles and drones in an attempt to raise the cost of the campaign. The UAE absorbed the bulk of those attacks, with more than 2,800 missiles and drones directed at the country.

The UAE’s involvement also appears to have deepened divisions among Gulf states. According to the report, Saudi Arabia privately complained to the US in early April that Emirati attacks risked drawing Iranian retaliation against regional energy facilities, potentially disrupting oil markets and threatening the global economy.

The scale of retaliation has shaken the UAE’s economy, disrupting air traffic, hitting tourism revenues, and rattling its property market. Companies have announced furloughs and layoffs as the fallout spreads across key sectors.

More than $120bn has been wiped from market capitalisation on the Dubai and Abu Dhabi stock exchanges up to the end of April, while over 18,400 flights have been cancelled.

So all the crap about unprovoked Iranian “attacks” are so much further psyops bullshit justification then - just like the same non-stop intelligence agency finger-pointing at Russia over its “aggression” on Ukraine or “overflights of British airspace” and the equally barmy non-stop hysteria about alleged Chinese “spies” and “cyber-attacks” whipped up by the MI6 Gestapo bosses and plummy voiced generals given free rein on the increasingly reactionary BBC (“state owned” as they always sneer against anti-imperialist media).

The Saudi ruling class – just as thuggish as the UAE (blitzing Yemen, literally butchering dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, beheading or amputating usually poor mostly migrant “criminals” (more “democracy”??)) – has already been in military conflict with the expansionist emirs, recently driving them out of an attempt to fund a mercenary takeover in Yemen, (after both spent years massacring the locals) and in dispute over the UAE’s backing for the RSF faction in Sudan’s horrific civil war, and over its Somaliland occupation in conjunction with the Zionists – all further signs of the intractable war antagonisms erupting everywhere at all levels as a result of the crisis.

But there is a much bigger and more disparate population in Saudi Arabia (not least the massive south Asian migrant labour force kept in near-slave conditions), and greater growing pan-Arabic anti-imperialist hostility which has made itself felt increasingly ever since the first 1990 Gulf War, and is a potential volcano underneath the Riyadh feudal gangsters if they go too far into collusion with Washington.

Mass popular anti-imperialist sentiment already erupted with the Saudi-origin Bin Laden attack on the USA on 9/11 in 2001, and exploded in a much broader form during the Arab Spring street eruptions in Egypt and Tunisia, which also saw significant turmoil in Bahrain, Yemen and inside Saudi Arabia itself (but not in anti-Western Syria and Libya where seemingly similar movements, falsely painted by the West as all part of a common “anti-totalitarian” upheaval, were much smaller, artificially stampeded CIA/Zionist “colour revolution” provocations clearly against anti-imperialist regimes – trying to head off the whole thing).

All this is impacting on the US itself, shaking world affairs, again as the bourgeois commentators declare, though still obviously without the overall perspective of world historic crisis for the monopoly capitalist system that must be the basis of any Marxist explanation of these dire consequences.

Revisionist-influenced billionaire commentator Arnaud Bertrand, based in China, is impressed that even the ultra-right in the US is now reeling, as spelled out in a neocon article, earlier in May – “Checkmate in Iran: America cannot reverse or control the consequences of losing this war”.

There’s no overstating how extraordinary this Atlantic article is, given the author and the outlet.

As a reminder (author) Bob Kagan is:

- The co-founder of Project for the New American Century, probably the single most imperialist Think Tank in Washington (which is quite a feat)

- A man who spent his entire life advocating for American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, and a vocal advocate of the Iraq war. He started advocating for intervention in Iraq before 9/11, which speaks for itself...

- The husband of Victoria Nuland, an extremely hawkish former senior U.S. official (a key architect of U.S. policy in Ukraine, with the consequences we all witness today).

[She was behind the $5bn CIA/NED “democracy” campaign which culminated in the multiple fatality Kiev Maidan coup in 2014 - ed].

- The brother of Frederick Kagan, one key architect of the Iraq surge.

In other words, we ain’t exactly looking at some sort of anti-imperialist peacenik. This is quite literally the guy Dick Cheney called when he needed a pep talk.

And the man is writing in The Atlantic, the most reliably pro-war mainstream media outlet in the U.S. (also quite a feat).

So when he writes that the U.S. “suffered a total defeat” in Iran that has no precedent in U.S. history and can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” it’s the functional equivalent of Ronald McDonald telling you the burgers aren’t great.

Extraordinarily (and somewhat worryingly, for me), his arguments for why this is such a defeat are virtually the same as those I laid out in my article “The First Multipolar War”.

1) He agrees that this war - and the US defeat - is fundamentally different to previous U.S. interventions.

Where I wrote that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan didn’t change the equation much in terms of power dynamics (“in the grand scheme of things, the giant walked away with little more than a bruised ego”), Kagan writes that “the defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world.”

And when I wrote “it’s painfully obvious that the Iran war is of a qualitatively different nature” from these, he writes “defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character.”

2) Iran will never relinquish Hormuz and uses it as selective leverage

When I wrote that Iran has turned “freedom of navigation” on its head by establishing “a permission-based regime” through the Strait of Hormuz, Kagan arrives at the same conclusion: “Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations.”

He also agrees that “Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante,” when I myself cited Iran’s parliament speaker Ghalibaf in my article, saying: “The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status.”

3) [..]He agrees most Gulf states will have no choice but to accommodate Iran, effectively making Iran into a, if not the, dominant regional power.

Kagan writes “the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran.”

On my end, I wrote that “the Gulf monarchies will eventually have to choose between two security propositions. One where they stay aligned with a distant superpower that [can’t protect them]. The other proposition being: make peace with the regional power that just proved it can hit [them] whenever it wants.” Which is not much of a choice…

4) Military impossibility to reopen Hormuz.

Kagan writes that “if the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either.”

On my end, in my article I cited Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius: “What does Trump expect a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot?”

5) Global chain reaction

Kagan agrees that this is a global strategic failure that fundamentally changes the U.S.’s position in the world. As he puts it: “America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties… America’s allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”

I wrote essentially the same thing: “Think about what it says if you’re Saudi Arabia, quietly watching your American-built defenses fail to protect your own refineries. Or any European country now facing the worst energy shock since 1973, caused not by your enemy but by your ally, and realizing that said ‘ally,’ supposedly in charge of ‘protecting’ you, couldn’t even protect Israel’s most strategic sites - when it’s the country with which it’s joined at the hip. I’m not even speaking about China or Russia who are seeing their worldview being validated on almost every axis simultaneously.”

6) Weapons stocks depleted, credibility shattered.

Kagan: “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.”

Me: “America’s most advanced weapons systems are much more vulnerable than previously thought - not theoretically, but in actual combat.”

Kagan: “America’s allies… must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”

Me: “The U.S. security guarantee has been empirically falsified in real time.”

Reassuringly though, we still differ on a few fundamental aspects.

First of all, arguably the most important one, the moral aspect. In typical neocon fashion, his article contains not a word about the human cost of this war - not the 165 schoolgirls, not the devastation inflicted on Iranians during 37 days of bombing, not the toll this war is taking on the entire world through its devastating economic consequences (the economic devastation on ordinary people worldwide is referenced only as a political problem for Trump). For him, this is purely a strategic chess problem, morality and people don’t figure.

For me, the moral bankruptcy of this war isn’t separate from strategic failure - it is the strategic failure. Much like Gaza can only be a failure because of its sheer abjectness.

Secondly, there is not an instant of reflection in the article on how we got there. Which is unsurprising because he personally, alongside his wife, his brother, and every co-signatory of every PNAC letter, spent a generation pushing for exactly this kind of confrontation. The man spend 30 years advocating for military dominance in the Middle East and hostility towards Iran, thereby forging them as an adversary and facilitating this very war that he now says has “checkmated” America.

Last but not least, we differ on what should be done. This is the funniest part of Kagan’s article - showing that the man is decidedly beyond salvation. On one hand he calls this a “checkmate” by Iran, and a U.S. defeat that can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” yet an the other hand his solution for it is… surprise, surprise… a bigger war still!

He writes that what’s to be done is “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.”

[...]For my end, this was the conclusion of my previous article:

“There is almost a Greek tragedy quality to U.S. actions lately where every move taken to escape one’s fate becomes the mechanism that delivers it. The U.S. went to war to reassert dominance - and proved it could no longer dominate. It demanded allies send warships - and revealed it had no real allies. It waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran before this moment came - and instead forged the very adversary now capable of meeting it. It started the war in part to have additional leverage over China - and handed the world the spectacle of begging China for help. The prophecy was multipolarity. Every American action to prevent it reveals it instead.” I wouldn’t change a word.

Exposure of ruling class despair is useful but the complacent revisionist “multipolar” perspective set out here does not take things further, either in explaining “how we got here” nor where things will go.

Just the opposite, it muddies the water and diverts attention from the gigantic hole that capitalism has dug for mankind and the profound scientific analysis needed to lead the revolutionary struggle to establish workers states that alone can get humanity out of it, to build a rational society in harmony and balance with nature.

Just declaring that this imperialist war path followed from decades of neocon advocacy finally being taken up, as if arbitrarily, and then failing, may be a great irony historically but it is no different to the “great man” or “evil Hitler” view, of history being driven by the ideas in people’s head, a million miles from any scientific explanation of the intractable crisis driving the ruling class into a frenzy of war and hatred.

Ideas in heads there are but they reflect specific historic concrete conditions - which no amount of morals will change.

The world moves forwards because of the relentless unstoppable movements of objectively observable contradictions following specific patterns of development, summarised as “laws” of motion by human science, be it for quantum or macro-level physics, for less precise biological science or for the admittedly much more complex and hard to pin down social movements of class-divided human society and its historical development.

All are far from random and can be studied and analysed and made conscious, just as Marx did in untangling the nature of movement of capitalist commodity production in three volumes of Capital, and Lenin’s Bolsheviks did in taking that forwards into the science of party building and leadership for the inevitable spontaneous revolutionary struggles that capitalist crisis and class domination cannot help but generate, particularly as is unable to stop itself sliding into more war.

But spontaneous revolt, can only get so far without the conscious understanding of all these law-governed class movements.

Human consciousness, crucially based on a correct understanding of objective material reality and its dialectical movements in constant polemical development, tested in struggle, is a vital component for the completion of the world revolutionary transformation.

And it has to be fought for in unity and conflict with the working class by a party trained to do so, against the great weight of bourgeois ideology which while an advance on the mysticism-based “understanding” of feudal religion can never climb beyond one-sided metaphysical materialist science (critical realism) at best and has an interest for class reasons in going no further anyway.

In fact it deliberately maintains unclarity and confusion in class struggle matters which becomes outright brainwashing psyops LIES (coyly called “disinformation”) deluged out morning, noon and night, from delivery room to the morgue, against communism and all the great achievements made by the hesitant advance and retreat, rethink and advance again, struggle of the world proletariat.

Most of all it rubbishes the titanic 73 year achievements of the working class from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution onwards and the Soviet Union it built from primitive Tsarist backwardness to world power in just 30 years, able to destroy Hitlerism almost single-handed, and then holding its own for another 40 years, demonstrating huge social, scientific, cultural, educational and military capacities on a par with the West, despite relentless sabotage, subversion and undermining, and while inspiring (and aiding) a colossal wave of anti-imperialist and communist liberation.

The great prop for this bourgeois framework is the entire swamp of fake-“leftism” which keeps the working class tied to the whole bamboozling edifice of “freedom and democracy” and steady change by left pressure leaving it wide open to endless counter-revolution.

It was only the slow trickle of Stalinist retreat from revolutionary philosophy and leadership which prevented the Soviet success from sweeping on to embrace the whole of mankind, stupidly liquidating its own advances - and the dictatorship of the proletariat which established and defended them – in the philistine embrace of the Western “free market” under Gorbachev and the delusions of bourgeois “democracy”.

The relentless movement of history will eventually push history forwards again and in some ways already visibly so, especially in the incredible advances in China (and Cuba too, which is why America wants to strangle its brilliant society).

But while the dialectical trap is well alluded to above, whereby every move to climb out of the pit of Catastrophic collapse itself becomes a further difficulty compounding the problem, (demonstrating the stinking lie that is the laughable reality of bourgeois “democracy, freedom and justice” and thereby stirring ever more mass hatred and hostility) it is completely misleading to declare the West’s problem is China and its rise.

The Chinese ascendancy is merely one aspect or symptom of a much greater historic transformation resulting from disintegration of an entire world system, namely 800 years of capitalism itself in its basic and now monopoly imperialist phases, and beyond that, the end point of all class-divided civilisation through its various phases of slavery, feudal serfdom and wage slavery, over 10,000 years, each giving way to the next through the revolutionary transformation of humanity and its social structures.

The enormous complexity of this epochal change, as the great contradictions of the profit making commodity-producing society intensify their antagonisms to the point of paralysis and slump collapse and the great class war pressures inexorably build up to the necessary overthrow of the system, are in no part captured by notions of China as a mere “rising competitor” to existing imperialist economic and political domination.

Inevitable developing world class struggle constantly generates the mass resistance to its exploitation, which continue despite a slew of mistakes and reverses, caused by philosophical leadership errors.

But continuing revisionist notion that such remaining struggles are merely aiming for a “balance” with imperialism (sadly apparently held by Beijing too) is disastrous, being both impossible and also disarming the working class everywhere.

Simply “maintaining peace” through “pacifist struggles” however vigorously pursued while some steady displacement of capitalism takes place through the “power of example” winning the masses over – is exactly the disastrous perspective advanced by Stalin in his Economic Problems of Socialism book of 1952 which led to the dire parliamentary road perspectives and the toppling of “democratically voted for” socialism and anti-imperialism across the world.

The contrast is clear between Iran’s defiance and the collaboration with imperialism by Venezuela following the huge US military build up last year and then January’s murderous special forces raid, to kidnap the elected president Nicolás Maduro on outrageous trumped-up “drug running” charges.

Trumpite fascism is stunned by Iranian resistance, because of its revolutionary content despite the reactionary ideas of its leadership, but was boosted by the seemingly surprising willingness of the Venezuelan “left nationalists” to cooperate with Washington in the wake of its utterly illegal nazi attack, despite years of “anti-Yankee” rhetoric, and two decades of dogged refusal to submit to sanctions pressure against the country’s left reforms.

So much was this so that most bourgeois commentary points to this shallow and nasty Trumpite “success” as tipping it into the disastrous Iran war.

Capitulation of the anti-capitalist commune-building regime encapsulated by the mushy “Bolivarian revolution” concepts developed by former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has shaken the fake-“left” and fed every kind of conspiracy theory about “treachery and sellout” by the new Caracas leadership under Maduro deputy Delcy Rodríguez, (as well as bolstering reactionary Trot poison about “Stalinist betrayal”).

But while all kinds of dirty dealing is not ruled out especially from sections of the “trusted” state military (which in past counter-revolution has been very much to the fore, most notably in the CIA-guided Augusto Pinochet coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973), such speculation simply distracts from the crucial issue, which is that the Chávistas’ “new kind of 21st century socialism” proved to be lacking the critical fundamental, the very 20th century socialist (Leninist) notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

However much the Caracas government has built up mass participation and networks of local agricultural and industrial production communes, and has built workers militias and defence organisations as well as state security forces, – all sound and important developments for drawing in the masses and protecting their hard-won achievements, - they all implode without the central concept of state control by the working class and its party.

Venezuela has never seen complete revolutionary takeover by the proletariat and the firm imposition of workers state discipline to suppress the bourgeoisie – just the opposite, the ruling class has remained in place, retaining much of its property along with all the panoply of fraudulent bourgeois “democracy” with its twisted elections always subject to the overwhelming financial and media manipulation in a thousand different ways to eventually ensure bourgeois “wins” (or to feed non-stop subversion to allegedly discredit the results when occasionally it fails – as Maduro discovered both in the last and previous elections, when a cunning CIA plot went to extraordinary lengths to offer an utterly bogus alleged “alternative count”).

But faith in elections (revisionism of all kinds), or at least faith in the idea they can be made to go the working class way if only the rules are shown to be “scrupulously followed” or “extreme democracy” is applied (eg Weekly Worker anti-Leninist garbage) is a deadly disarming nonsense as proven by history over and over again, leaving the working class wide open to the bourgeoisie stepping in (subtly if it can but crudely if necessary as January’s raid shows or the toppling of Morsi in Egypt in 2013), to stop any real advances.

Exactly the same kind of delusions are all that it needed for the dire collaboration now seen with the Rodríguez government and its complete sellout of the working class, a total betrayal not in the limited sense of personal treachery and bribed corruption (who knows??) but in the much more serious political sense of ignoring all historical experience and deep Marxist theoretical understanding on the question of class dictatorship.

That weakness was not helped in the slightest by the fake-“left” swamp which always fails to put this question to the fore in its “solidarity” work, either in such countries or in “support groups” at home and in general in their hostility to the disciplined struggle for revolutionary theory.

Right at the forefront on Venezuela are the shallow Fight Racism Fight Imperialism posturers of the one-time Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Group who make a fetish of uncritical “solidarity” with Cuba and Venezuela, with frequent visits to gush over the “grassroots authenticity” of the commune movement, and its rank-and-file achievements.

Only in November were they in full flood at a London rally at the Venezuelan embassy extolling the alleged superiority of “socialism from the bottom up” and the advantages of local councils and mass participation, with the usual gestures towards women’s involvement and contributions, all producing a “people centred society” which develops a truly popular momentum moulding the army into a “genuine patriotic force” along with the militias as the real way to fight imperialism.

All of which is fine and with huge potential, but looking pretty sick at present because it completely misses out the need for class dictatorship, the core of Marxist Leninist understanding, which was not only not put forwards but implicitly decried with a call for “respect for the Venezuelan democratisation process”.

Without that understanding being fought for, – and the RCG has always backed off from firm support as far back as its fence-sitting on Poland’s Solidarnosc counter-revolution and its sabotage of the South African anti-apartheid struggle’s SACP/ANC leadership – all ground level advances are vulnerable to counter-revolution, just as in Chile and throughout Latin America.

The bright-eyed enthusiasm of the RCG is a hollow petty bourgeois joke, hostile to the struggle for theory, however many long-winded pages it produces in its paper none of which will explain why its declaration that the Venezuelan communalist example “shows the whole world the path to follow” is now proven a disaster for workers everywhere.

Just as exposed is the museum Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian CPGB-ML, another platform speaker at the November rally, where it made no challenge at all to the preceding RCG shallowness nor raised the question of proletarian dictatorship.

Its subsequent answer to being caught out by events? – simply deny that anything has happened! Anyone who says different gets an earful of righteous polemic in a March article.

To be precise they declare that the Rodriguez cooperation with Washington is jut a “clever move” to make the best of a bad job by handing something over to the big Washington bully but thereby retaining enough self-sufficiency to continue the socialist developments:

Rather than sinking beneath the chaos and disorientation which imperialism had anticipated would follow the kidnapping, the government led by acting-president Delcy Rodriguez called on the masses to go on the streets to defend the nation’s sovereignty, to step up the joint mobilisation of army, police and people’s militias, and to give the revolutionary government the trust and support which it needs to navigate the perilous waters ahead.

Venezuelan citizens in their hundred of thousands responded with a massive show of continued support for their chosen leaders – and a massive slap in the face for imperialism, which has failed to find a crack in the communal solidarity of a risen people.

The bought-and-paid-for Guaidós and Machados have all failed to win the hearts and minds of the people, no matter how much largesse has been squandered in the vain pursuit of that outcome. Physically removing Comrade Maduro from his presidential chair amounted to an admission of failure on the part of Washington, thwarted in its search for a viable stooge by the more usual ‘parliamentary’ methods.

The experience of 25 years of Chavista leadership, first behind Comandante Hugo Chávez and then behind Nicolás Maduro, has developed in the masses the revolutionary maturity to roll with the punches and not to panic when faced with setbacks.

When it comes to your president being snatched away from you and your homeland shaking beneath your feet, the acquired habit of reading the situation dialectically comes into its own, making it possible to distinguish for example between a necessary tactical retreat under pressure and a headlong flight from the field. Delcy Rodriguez is not flying blind in her negotiations with the White House thugs.

Self-identifying ‘friends’ of Venezuela in the west, lacking this political maturity, have had a field day muddying the waters by indulging in endless gloomy speculations about a palace coup in Caracas, a supposed ‘sell-out’ by Ms Rodriguez, secret plans to renege on the Bolivarian process etc etc – helping to spread alarm and despondency, rumours and panic for of MI6 and the CIA.

Anti-defeatist morale boosting is the right spirit but needs to be founded in reality and no amount of dialectics can get round that.

Firstly, while there is a precedent in Leninist understanding for just such a tactic of defending a revolutionary core by making painful sacrifices, the difference is that the Brest-Litovsk treaty, giving up all the Ukraine to Germany in 1918, was safeguarding the new Soviet workers state and its capacity to continue the revolutionary fight.

No such workers state exists here – and the claim that at least the country maintains its bourgeois “sovereignty” (a Lalkar/Proletarian obsession reflecting underlying chauvinism) is simply false. Venezuela’s crucial commanding heights of the economy are all under US control.

Sell oil to ally Cuba and break the siege? Not allowed. Sell oil to China to relieve the pressure from the Iran war Hormuz closure? No allowed. Keep the Cuban doctors? Not allowed.

And the carpetbaggers are moving in, as a poisonous bourgeois press reports:

Over breakfast in one of the swankiest hotels in Caracas, you can hear them mulling Venezuela’s past, present and future in sporadically hushed tones. As diners tuck in, snatched fragments of conversation speak of election roadmaps, political fragmentation and oil-fuelled economic growth.

But the murmured discussions are not being conducted in Caribbean Spanish by Venezuelan officials pondering their country’s direction after the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro. The accents are North American and belong to the US officials, diplomats and spies now calling many of the shots here after Donald Trump’s controversial military intervention on 3 January. Neighbouring tables are occupied by huddles of musclebound US marines, tattoos covering their bulging calves, baseball caps covering their heads, and walkie-talkies strapped to their hips.

“How long will you be staying, sir?” a receptionist asks one of countless US government guests as they check in downstairs.

“Oh, 26 or 27 days,” the man replies in thickly accented Spanish.

Since Trump’s decision to snatch Maduro in January and reboot relations with his successors, the five-star hotel has become the nerve centre of Washington’s efforts to steer a country some now call a US protectorate – and which Trump has even said he hopes to turn into the 51st state.

“It’s [effectively] the US embassy. I don’t think anybody’s going to work at the actual embassy,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based political analyst for Crisis Group.

The conversations that can be overheard in the JW Marriott’s restaurant offer a fascinating insight into Venezuela’s plight as it emerges from nearly 13 years of economic mayhem and authoritarian rule under Maduro.

One sunny afternoon a North American energy specialist sat on the veranda, holding a conference call with colleagues back home about the dire state of Venezuela’s electrical grid – the cause of frequent blackouts, even here in the capital.

“The distribution is a mess – that’s the biggest issue right now … the wiring, the transformers – and the software is a mess,” he said, before grumbling: “The Chinese came in and did their little Chinese thing, which did not work.”

Another morning, diplomats debated the likelihood of fresh elections, which opposition leaders hope will soon be called but which Maduro’s heir and former vice-president, the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, seems in no rush to hold.

Throughout the day, English-speaking officials and fortune hunters can be seen roaming the 17-floor redbrick building, which has nearly 300 rooms, a gym and a palm-flanked pool. Bullet-proof SUVs wait outside to ferry guests, who include Trump’s top diplomat to Venezuela, John Barrett, around town. [...]In the hotel’s restaurant, corridors and meeting rooms, patrons and visitors plot what some locals call “the corporate takeover” of Venezuela to the sound of Brazilian bossa nova.

If the $250-300-a-night JW Marriott – or “the spooks hotel” as some journalists call it – is the HQ of the US presence in Venezuela, at another luxury hotel a few miles away many big-money deals are being done.

Since Maduro’s downfall, foreign tycoons have been flocking to the Cayena, where rooms cost about $600 a night, wagering that even if Rodríguez stays in power and there is no transition to democracy, Venezuela’s economic future looks bright.

One deal-maker who has spent time there recalled encountering at least four foreign billionaires they could identify – but believed there were others whose names they did not know. “They never give you a card. They don’t give you their last names … and what is very interesting to me is that they are all asking about the same things: mining and privatizations,” they said.

The Trumpian takeover has generated widespread discomfort, even among patriotic members of Venezuela’s elites who were glad to see the back of Maduro but privately bristle at the suggestion that their country is being turned into a US colony. After giving Rodríguez his blessing in January, Trump warned she would face an even worse fate than Maduro if she failed to toe the US line.

On the streets there is anger too. During a Workers’ Day rally on 1 May, a socialist economist called Oswaldo Pacheco marched towards a line of riot police wielding a white banner denouncing the government’s “neocolonial collaboration” with Trump. “It’s a complete capitulation,” complained Pacheco, 53, accusing Venezuela’s new rulers of following US orders “to the letter”. “Clearly these [US] demands are not about democracy but about plundering our resources and increasing worker exploitation,” he said.

Certainly the US is not immediately dismantling the whole of the Chavista structure in one go.

But possibly it calculates a slow demolition is less likely to stir “unnecessary” turmoil here and in the whole of a still potentially explosive Latin America. Meanwhile the CIA is setting up an HQ in Caracas, undoubtedly ready for all the dirtiest of deeds – watch out all “left” and militant forces!

Leninism is needed more than ever. Don Hoskins

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Economic Slump and world war Catastrophe the crucial revolutionary perspective to end out-of-time capitalism. That includes why the USSR needlessly liquidated itself. But Trot “political revolution” fantasies no answer to Stalinist revisionist retreat & only aid imperialist counter-revolution. No conciliation with Trot OR revisionist trends. Correct class-war understanding alone can win workers to socialist revolution. (Part Two)

The comrade expressed doubts in the EPSR’s understanding that there was not a mass movement of workers supporting Solidarity as implied in the “Polish Works Move” headline because workers “moving” is a key feature of Trotskyism’s “theory” of “political revolution”, and so it must be true.

But this just bends reality to suit whatever deluded subjective-idealist notions of “workers democracy” or “rank-and-file socialism” the Trots hold in their heads. The entire “theory” (Spart or otherwise) is a fantastical “perfect revolution” fraud that has given these petty bourgeois anti-communist individualists licence to go along with each and every imperialist anti-workers-state provocation going, whilst superficially presenting their counter-revolutionary class-collaborationist gibberish as “Marxist” “theory” “in action”, and carry gullible workers and petty bourgeois along with them.

But the shipyard strike did only have minority support, as the EPSR (when it was the Workers Party) demonstrated with a close analysis of “Strike”, a Granada TV broadcast:

Only a tiny minority of the 17,000 who worked at Lenin’s shipyard in Gdansk in fact supported the strike-occupation, less than 1 in 10 by Granada’s most optimistic guesswork (1,500), and reality probably less than 1 in 20 – i.e. under 800. The other 16,200 didn’t want to know and had nothing to do with the occupation.

The hard-core of already-organised anti-communist dissidents manipulated by KOR and Catholic intellectual reactionary groups, – openly shown in the Granada ‘documentary’ although their counter-revolutionary significance and their long-standing links to the Vatican foreign office and other Western subversion centres was deliberately ignored,- managed to get other similar hard-core anti-Soviet minorities pushing themselves forwards as ‘representative’ of a large number of other factories and services and other workplace in the Gdansk area. Then anti-communist dissident ‘representatives’ from even further afield as well began to swell the Solidarity inter-factory strike organisation.

Very skilfully, the counter-revolution had organised a large enough gathering of dissident ‘workers representatives’, dubiously claiming to speak in the name of millions of Poles (undecided or unenthusiastic about the socialist regime), - that breaking up the dispute would probably have led to large scale confrontations and prolonged fighting given the demoralised and leaderless condition at that time of the communist party and government.

The fact of the actual SMALL MINORITY support for the Solidarity counter-revolution (when it was finally put down with little or no fuss or trouble 18 months later) shows in retrospect how badly and demoralised and disorganised was the communist party at the time of KOR’s original Gdansk coup (a crucial factor too in the appearance initially that Solidarity would sweep all before it), – likewise ignored totally by the capitalist TV ‘‘documentary’ – and by the petty bourgeois ‘revolutionary’ groups alike.

All these middle class anti-communists still won’t face up to, or even acknowledge the FACT that the Polish workers state has now with ease reasserted its authority in Poland, got the planned socialist state going again, and put the Solidarity counter-revolutionary minority to rout. (EPSR Books No3 Anti-Solidarity [Bulletin No140, 20-05-82]

And as this piece then explains, this eventual defeat of the ‘workers representatives’ (CIA claimed) “10 million strong” “free trade union” was carried out with barely any resistance, thus underscoring the minority support this counter-revolutionary provocation had amongst Polish workers, – most of whom overwhelmingly backed, or acquiesced in, measures taken by the state leadership to shut it down.

Cited as evidence by the comrade that the Sparts were correct from the start of the CIA’s campaign of counter-revolution is this quote from SB30. It refers to a compromise agreement the demoralised and disorganised revisionist leadership of the Polish CP acquiesced in with the anti-communist KOR in August 1980 that allowed for “self-governing trade unions” (as long as the leading role of the CP was recognised and that they did not engage in political agitation):

These questions are in a way more sharply posed in Poland today than in Hungary in 1956. Unlike the Hungarian working class in 1956, which expressed a partial and confused socialist consciousness, the Polish strikers and their main leaders clearly identify with the powerful Catholic church opposition and also exhibit pro-Western sentiments. The liberal West German newsweekly Der Spiegel (8 September) described the premier strike leader Lech Walesa as a “committed Catholic and nationalist” who “has not the least in common with communism.” Thus, while Trotskyists could and did wholeheartedly support the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, in Poland today we must warn that the workers movement – especially the new “self-governing trade unions”- could become subordinated to the reactionary Catholic church and its imperialist backers.

But this was a delusion. The KOR, which transformed into the bogus “new self-governing trade union” Solidarnosc after the agreement, was a creation of the Catholic Church and the CIA, founded by dissident anti-communist Catholic intellectuals and Pilsudski-ites in 1976, such as Antoni Macierewicz. There was never any suggestion of it becoming “subordinated” to the Catholic Church and the imperialists as they set it up!!!

And what a revealing display of the Sparts’ class instincts was it to line up behind the deposed Hungarian bourgeoisie! Far from proving the correctness of their initial stance in Poland, it leaves any thoughtful worker wondering why anyone listens to such subjective-idealist petty bourgeoisie dolts. Genuine Hungarian socialists sided with the Soviet intervention.

By “wholeheartedly supporting” the alleged “Hungarian Revolution” with their insane “political revolution” gimmick, these idiots backed an armed attempt to restore capitalist relations by some of the most odious reactionaries in eastern Europe:

There is a much simpler explanation to be investigated, which fits all the facts once Trotsky’s anti-materialist notions of a ‘bureaucratic caste’ not resting on any exploiting-class production and property relations, is put aside for a moment: – That the 1956 events in Hungary were a last-ditch counter-revolutionary stand by all the backward Catholic workers and peasantry, by the lumpen-proletarian hordes of the Arrow Cross who had supported the fascist regime which had ruled Hungary under Horthy in tandem with Hitler’s Germany and by all the ousted capitalists, landowners, idealist intelligentsia and academics, capitalist state bureaucrats and military/police establishment, etc, etc, etc, who had not fled to the West and who were rallied behind Cardinal Mindszenty and other anti-Soviet opportunists by the CIA’s offers of limitless power and wealth.

Their sudden last-ditch stand, carefully orchestrated by Radio Free Europe and Western intelligence, was in effect Hungary’s belated revolutionary confrontation which had not been fully exhausted due to the distorting dominating influence of the Red Army occupation in 1945.

The Hungarian workers state was certainly short of Leninist leadership to quickly cope with that counter-revolutionary flare up in 1956. But the Soviet help Kardar needed to quell it only mirrored the lavish CIA subversion which cranked the counter-revolution into life in the first place. [Bulletin (EPSR)No332, 28-10-1986]

Unfortunately, the comrade does not see much value in studying these events because he claims not to see its relevance to today, even though the Sparts still punt their sad “political revolution” idiocies to any willing listener who has the misfortune to come across them. These events are highly relevant to understanding Trot positions on today’s remaining workers states, which they also despise. See, for example, the EPSR’s polemic against the Sparts’ recent attempt to revive the long discredited theory and direct it against the Chinese workers’ state (EPSRs no.1665 & 1666 – which also exposes the ex-Militant “Socialist Appeal”/RCP’s try at gulling youth recruits into believing their own “political revolution” rot over Poland).

Hungary, for example, is of direct significance today to the roughly 400 ex-miners and trade unionists who filed into the NUM’s historic Miners’ Hall in Barnsley for May Day celebrations of the centenary of the 1926 General Strike because as they walked into the hall, and in their direct line of sight at the main entrance, was a sinisterly placed blue plaque, installed in October 2024 (with the collaboration of the current right-wing NUM leadership and the Labour council), that “honours” 200 dissident Hungarian anti-communists from that armed provocation who fled the Soviet’s correct intervention to reassert proletarian-dictatorship authority.

The guest speaker at the unveiling of the plaque, Dr Andrew Zsigmond, was one such “former refugee”, and a quick glance at this odious reactionary’s online CV shows what a gross insult this installation is to the memories of generations of miners and their heroic battles for socialism, including the revolutionary General Strike and the miners’ heroic Great Strike of 1984/85:

Born on 17th November 1935 in Transylvania (Romania) of ethnic Hungarian Sekler parentage, ennobled in 1604 King Steven Bocskai: (“Gregory Zsigmond de Lemheny”). Accepted into the Hungarian Federation of Nobilities 1989 and title confirmed by the Duke of Norfolk in 1992 through the IHGS. Made Chivalric Baron (2 sources) in 2000. Parents moved to Hungary in 1944. Matriculated 1954 (with distinction) in Gyönk, entered the Faculty of Medicine University of Pécs and started singing opera as a hobby. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 became politically active. Edited the Extraordinary Edition of the “University Weekly” and subsequently took up arms as member of the National Guard 1956, to arrest Communist Party and Secret Police officials and against the invading Red Army. After the brutal crushing of the Uprising escaped to Austria in January 1957, arriving in the United Kingdom later in the sam e month.

What a chivalric baron of the Imperial and Royal Dragon Court and Order, the Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem and other ludicrously named honorific titles (including “Honorary Scouser”!!!) who took up arms against the Hungarian workers state in 1956 has to do with socialism is left to the Sparts to explain.

Also with questions to answer are the derivatives of Militant who, like the rest of Trotskyism, were prepared to sacrifice the workers’ state the Hungarian working class had struggled with much sacrifice to build at the alter of their deluded “political revolution” fantasies. Even their obviously fake “revolutionary” pretences were too much for this patrician anti-communist Tory:

Entered UK politics in the Committee of Liverpool Against the Militants in 1985, elected Chairman of Liverpool Aigburth Conservative Association, became member of the Foreign Affairs Forum and fought the General Election of 1992 for the Conservative Party for the Liverpool Riverside Constituency. […] An ardent conservative European.

According to his CV, Zsigmond was helped with in his “integration into British life” by the equally repellent anti-Irish Labour stooge for British imperialism, Roy Mason, who, as Secretary of State for “Northern Ireland” from 1976-79 escalated British military-police state terror in the occupied six counties with extreme vengefulness to suppress the Sinn Féin/IRA nationalist rebellion, including intensifying SAS operations in south Armagh and increasing their covert operations across the occupied zone, and overseeing the development of an horrific regime of beatings and torture of Irish republicans at Castlereagh interrogation centre (see Ian Cobain, Cruel Britannia). The heroic 1979 hunger strike defiance was a direct response to Mason’s vindictive refusal to give detained republicans political status, and set off the snail-pace process towards Irish unity (still progressing).

The Sparts would possibly not be too discomforted by this as they also hate the Irish national-liberation movement. Their deluded fantasies of a proletarian revolution supported by "British and Irish workers" as the only way out led them join in with the British imperialist propaganda offensive against Sinn Féin as a movement of “sectarian terror” with near genocidal intent against the British colonialist “loyalists”, – whose defeat of British imperialism would lead to an even worse domination over the colonial-worker remnants according to these barmy turncoats. (EPSR Books vol 29, Against Trotskyism, part 1; EPSRs Nos 775 & 855).

Despite attempting to defend the Sparts and Trotskyism generally from such exposures by arguing that “left” groups should not be defined by “past” political positions, and that such historical differences are of little relevance today, the comrade draws on history to argue for a “progressive” role for both Trotskyism and Stalinism in today’s socialist movement.

He argues that Stalinism can play such a role because it has, for example, defended China since 1976, and “arguably” since 1949. However, if this is “arguable”, then there are differences that still needs to be resolved if the nature of the Chinese workers’ state is to be fully understood.

In fact, the Chinese Revolution was fought and won in opposition to Stalin’s position in favour of a pragmatic alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang nationalists. This nascent Popular-Front line had proven disastrous for the Chinese CP in 1927 when the KMT slaughtered them in Shanghai. Mao led China’s workers and peasants to victory despite such advice from Stalin, but he was unable to resolve Stalin’s theoretical mistakes and so the confused Chinese workers state plunged into worse revisionist weaknesses and retreats, and this still hampers its understanding today.

China did, however, have good enough Leninist sense to impose workers-state authority on the violent pro-Western Tienanmen Square provocation in 1989 and suppress it, after weeks of hesitation, (EPSR Books vol 16 China) - and it continues to take a firm stand against similar pro-“democracy” stunts today, such as in Hong Kong.

No thanks to the Sparts, however. They welcomed the reactionary petty bourgeois student occupation as a chance to smuggle in yet more anti-communist “political revolution” poison to weaken confidence in the workers’ state under the cover of “defending China” just at the point where it was most vulnerable to imperialist propaganda onslaught; and they continue to welcome every pro-capitalist “democracy” stunt today under similar pretences.

In the USSR, Stalinist revisionist retreats from revolutionary perspectives had become so entrenched by the late 1980s that Gorbachev idiotically liquidated its worker-state dictatorship. Despite China’s own relative firmness against imperialist provocations, there is always nervousness about similar threats taking hold there, not least because its bureaucratic revisionist leadership does not say what it thinks about world developments, let alone try to give a lead in developing a revolutionary understanding about capitalism’s plunge into economic Slump and world-war Catastrophe amongst the international proletariat.

The best way for Leninists to respond is to call for China’s unconditional defence against all imperialist provocations, alongside comradely criticism aimed at strengthening its proletarian dictatorship, – conducted in a way that does not give further ammunition to imperialism.

However, the conciliation of Leninism with the Trotskyist and Stalinist wings of revisionism at home in the name of “unity” would be a disaster for the working class.

This would cause maximum confusion amongst the workers about the true nature of world developments, and on the class positions expressed; and, worse, it would potentially to lead to the liquidation of the Leninist struggle to give a lead on all questions because it would mean blunting polemics when positions need to be sharply expressed and delineated to be clear. Lenin ruthlessly savaged all Trotsky’s attempts to conciliate Bolshevism with the fake-“lefts” of his time, the Mensheviks and liquidationists, for similar reasons.

Real “unity” can only be achieved once the working class rallies around the paper that gets the understanding consistently right on all issues. Exposing the Trot and Stalinist misanalysis and misleadership are key to this because they are major obstacles to the building of socialism. They need to be rejected.

Study & learn from history to build Leninism. Phil Waincliffe

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