This issue focuses on a number of international issues of world-historic importance: Donald Trump’s rise to power in the US and the implications of that for world politics and the threat of World War. Also, the ceasefire in the genocidal attack on the people of Gaza. And the attempted martial law coup in South Korea in December, and its implications.
We have several important articles – the most immediate being the one on the back page denouncing the anti-democratic and fraudulent restrictions on the national Palestine Solidarity March in London on 18 January, This was done by the Starmer government at the behest of the Zionist lobby personified by the extremist Rabbi of the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street, which provided a mendacious pretext to prevent national Palestine marches from assembling outside the BBC, the state broadcaster and mouthpiece for Zionist propaganda. The arrest of Chris Nineham, the chief steward of the march was done on provably false charges of leading an illegal march to supposedly break through police lines. Ben Jamal, the National Secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was subsequently served with the same charge. Filmed evidence shows police officers encouraging marchers to filter through their lines into Trafalgar Square. It was obviously a pre-arranged deception involving senior cops and Starmer’s Zionist clique in government, which has now shown itself to be more mendacious than Sunak’s government regarding the Palestine marches. Recall that Braverman was forced out as Home Secretary partly because of similar attempt at openly undemocratic attacks on Palestine protesters that went further than Sunak was prepared to go.
Then there is our article on Trump’s ascent to the White House, and his apparent attempt to re-orient US imperialism to expansionism in the Western Hemisphere, with an apparent retreat from the kind of global confrontation, particularly with Russia, engaged in by the liberal-imperialist Biden administration. Trump’s demand for annexation of Canada as the 51st state of the Union is a grotesque, comic book policy that certainly resembles some aspects of Hitlerism – like the 1938 Anschluss with Austria. The demands for Greenland have a similar connation to the purchase of Alaska from Russia in the 19th Century. And the threats to simply seize the Panama Canal are just a reprise of classic US aggression in the Western Hemisphere. But if it does turn out to be the case that the US under Trump retreats from military interference in places like Ukraine, this could be a coherent programme of imperial retrenchment, also foreshadowing large-scale US aggression in Latin America.
A key exception to such a possible retreat concerns Zionism. The joint statement of the LCFI and ClassConscious on the Gaza ceasefire, which was rapidly put into force as Trump prepared to take office, is the second major article in this issue. We point out that Trump’s evident involvement is designed to save Netanyahu from the consequences of a rapidly approaching defeat in Gaza, as Hamas remains intact, is politically stronger than it was before the attempted genocide and has obviously not been defeated. The IDF in Gaza was suffering large scale refusals to fight and mental illness among its troops, the product of the savage and inhuman atrocities it has committed against hundreds of thousands of Gaza civilians, more than half of who are children. We point out that the only positive news that the West and the Zionists have is the collapse of Assad in Syria, which gave them a breathing space, but still both the Lebanon and Gaza ceasefires derive from Israeli weakness, not strength. The fact that Hamas has forced Israel to agree to a large-scale prisoner exchange is proof of that. Undoubtedly Zionist aggression continues, they are trying it on in the West Bank and may well return to their genocide in Gaza, but the Israeli state itself shows signs of weakness and instability because of the genocidal onslaught on Gaza.
The other major article on current events in this issue is an article by the Bolshevik Group of Korea about the attempted martial law coup of Yoon Seok-yeol, the right-wing President of South Korea, in December, and the heroic movement that fought it and forced the parliament to reject the action, causing its collapse. It goes into considerable detail about the movement, and the background of South Korea as a neo-colonial client of US imperialism, and the counterrevolutionary front line against North Korea. Which is still a deformed workers’ state, the defence of whose revolutionary gains is still top of the agenda in that region. We have important differences with the Bolshevik Group on the wider question of the nature of China, though for somewhat different reasons we both defend China against imperialist attacks from without as well as imperialist proxy attacks from within. But notwithstanding that, the article is informative and interventionist towards the movement resisting the coup, which is evidently a by-product of US aggression in the region aimed to maintain US hegemony.
The other major article in this journal is the third part of the LCFI’s letter to the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). This focuses on what could be loosely called the ‘Russian Question’: the nature of the two giant former workers states, Russia and China, and the reasons for imperialism’s new Cold War against both states today. It addresses the new Spartacists’ changing positions on Poland in 1980-81, where in our view they are showing some signs of political softness on pro-imperialist nationalism in East Europe and elsewhere. We are also critical of much of the old Spartacists’ propaganda in defence of the Polish deformed workers state at that time as marred by Stalinophile and even anti-Polish and anti-union sentiment. But we insist on the correctness of the understanding that by late 1981 Solidarność had embraced capitalist restoration as its real programme and needed to be opposed included by support for actions by the Stalinist regime to stop that formation taking power. The new Spartacists’ material has some important ambiguities on this, which we challenge. We also address their correct re-embrace of Trotsky’s historic position from the late 1930s of calling for an Independent Soviet Ukraine, as a revolutionary political weapon both against the Stalin regime and against the Polish rulers of Western Ukraine before WWII. On this latter question we appear to have substantial agreement – we consider the Robertson-led Spartacist tendency’s renouncing of Trotsky’s position to be a serious Stalinophile error.
We then address some of the contradictions in their attitude to Post-Soviet Russia, and today’s China of the billionaire capitalist-led bureaucratic ‘Communist’ regime which we note, has an ideology that is a bastardised parody even of Mao’s form of ‘Communism’. We first take up at some length their self-contradictory material on the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s Special Military Operation since 2022. Their refusal to take a side in the conflict that really began in 2014, with the far-right, US funded Maidan coup, that led directly to Russia’s Special Military Operation in February 2022, is at odds with their declared understanding that Russia is not an imperialist power. That being the case, and given the fact that the imperialist intervention since 2014 was self-confessedly aimed at using Ukraine as a proxy weapon aimed at dismembering Russia for the benefit of imperialism, it is obligatory for Marxists to seek to mobilise the working class in the West to defend the Russian and Russian-speaking people of the Donbass/Novorossiya, and Crimea, against this genocidal threat, which means giving support to the victory of the Russian army. We note that they themselves admit that this is a proxy war with NATO yet use rhetoric about the working class having no side, calling for simultaneously overthrowing both imperialism and the Putin government of Russia. This is a third-campist type error, in our view.
We then counterpose our understanding of Russia and China to theirs, as both representing distinctive variations of a new, problematic form of capitalism massively deformed by decades of social and economic development under a degenerated form of proletarian dictatorship. That is, under a partial, damaged, but real transition towards a higher mode of production – socialism. That these states are not imperialist, and in fact act as a force able to resist imperialist hegemony within a bourgeois framework in alliance with the bourgeoisie of semi-colonial nations, which is taking shape with formations like BRICS. We consider that today’s threat of WWIII is predominantly not an inter-imperialist war, nor a classic situation of imperialist antagonism to the proletariat in power – there are only two deformed workers state left (Cuba and North Korea). But rather a war of imperialism against Russia and China to re-establish the domination of declining imperialism over this bloc of bourgeois states with ‘socialist’ deformations, and much of the Global South.
The idea that China, after decades of ultra-Bukharinite marketising policies that have engendered a situation where China has more billionaires than the US itself (albeit much less wealthy ones), is still a workers’ state, contradicts Trotsky’s condemnation of Bukharin’s marketising policies of the late 1920s in the USSR as constituting an immediate danger of capitalist restoration. We consider both Russia and China to be deviant forms of capitalism, though with considerable secondary differences between them. Their capitalisms are both massively deformed by their post-capitalist ‘socialist’ heritage, and are new, problematic products of combined and uneven development. Both in that sense deserve defence against imperialist attack and imperialist sponsored ‘regime change’ attacks, but not on grounds that either of them remain as workers states.
However, within that framework, even though the new Spartacists consider China still to be a workers’ state, we are critical of some of their attitudes to concrete issues involving defence of China. Including seemingly uncritically taking up the cause of the Uighurs, which have become an imperialist cause celebre with false allegations of genocide. Also, the new Spartacists’ condemnation of China’s highly effective efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, despite its likely origin in China. Despite not agreeing with their mechanical and wrong attitude to China we consider their attitude in these cases is not truly defencist of China.
This concludes the serialisation of the LCFI’s substantial letter to the new ICL, and we look forward to future engagement and debate between our tendency and theirs, which notwithstanding some very important differences, appears to be refreshingly open to both political debate and some constructive political activity that is a break from the sectarian, cultist practices of the Spartacists under the very flawed leadership of James Robertson. In this sense, we hope our engagement with them can be a contribution to re-arming the Trotskyist movement to meet today’s challenges.
