The biggest problem of a dumbed-down populace is their willingness to “memory-hole” the past in order to keep up with the twisted narratives our ruling class keep peddling.
The US government is run by a unaparty, so is the UK, most of Europe, but especially the EU, and the proxies and colonies of the European and American Empires. We have the illusion of democracy but in reality we have none, and no freedom, only censorship.
And why has that become ever more strident over the past 75 years? Because Russia and China are recovering from the blows the Axis powers, with the financial help of the Square Mile and Wall Street dealt them, and threaten the hegemon of the ruling class.
Why has October 7th 2023 been so pivotal in that? Because it presents us with a paradox. We blithely swallow the crap we are fed, Russia’s a dictatorship, China’s a dictatorship, in fact everyone the Empire hates is an evil dictator…. and we have to support terrorists to dislodge them because “desperate times require desperate measures”. In reality Gaza shows us that the reality of imperialism is genocide. It has been for centuries, whether it’s fast, with bombs, snipers, cutting off food, water, medical aid and energy, or slow with toxic loans, corporate looting, debt-slavery and austerity measures leading to long-term starvation, systematic impoverishment and early mortality.
And it’s all one big globalist strategy by the globalists, albeity the neo-cons and neo-libs squabble over the best strategy to win the grand chess game.
If we want to be truly free of this diabolical plan, we have to stop believing the lies, the big lies, the little lies, the “white lies” and above all the economic lies.
We are not poor because we don’t work hard enough, but because we cannot feed the greed of the ruling class. We are not unhealthy because we make “bad life choices” but because we work too long and hard for too little pay and public services. We are not stupid, ignorant or dumb because we cannot be bothered to learn but because we are force-fed propaganda, hate and lies through our media, our entertainment and our information sources, and increasingly we are censored, monitored and excluded from any independent voices and sources even when we search them out.
WW3 will destroy 90% of the population of the world, but the 1% don’t care, they have convinced themselves they will be masters of the universe. What they cannot bear is that we should choose governments without a ruling class, turn our backs on imperialism, on colonialism, on supremacists and apartheid, on ethno-fascism and privilege. And that’s what we need to focus on. We need to focus on being the grit in the cog-wheels of the machine they are building, the log-jam in their stream of misinformation, and the boy shouting loud and long that “the Emperor has no clothes”.
More importantly, that the “for profit not purpose military industrial complex is churning out weapons of mass destruction for aggression on civilians not defence. That their armies are only good for killing civilians on behalf of corporate interests, and that the legal system protects property not the people. We live in a fascist state, not a democracy, where life under military dictatorship is often only a matter of presidential decree, not existential threat of invasion.
Al Jolani’s makeover from ISIS/Al Qaeda terrorist killer to ‘moderate rebel’ by Western/Zionist media
Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 15th December 2024. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.
The fall of Syria’s government is the most important event geopolitical even since 7th October 2023- the Gaza breakout led by Hamas. It is a defeat for the Axis of Resistance, the Iranian led anti-imperialist bloc that has been the only body that has delivered real physical solidarity with the Palestinians in the past year of genocide in Gaza, and its spread by degrees to the West Bank. Three different forces have taken military action against Israel, to varying degrees, to challenge Israel’s proclaimed ‘right’ to slaughter the Palestinians. They are: the Amanullah movement in Yemen (Houthis), Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Islamic Republic in Iran.
All three of these components of the Axis of Resistance are groups of Islamist origin, based on the Shi’a, the smaller of the two major confessional groups in Islam. Obviously as Marxists and atheists, we do not endorse the ideology of these movements – they do not represent our politics. However, we do support the resistance of the Palestinian people against genocide, and any movement that resists genocide is given credit where due by Marxists. The ideologies of these movements are not ours, but if they take actions against oppression, the basis exists for communists to work alongside their supporters in struggles to resist oppression and genocide.
We do not regard such bourgeois-religious movements as monolithic – we give credit where due in terms of any progressive evolution among them. And it should be noted that they have actively opposed religious sectarianism over the past period. The breakout from the Gaza concentration camp, which is now an extermination camp that rivals Auschwitz, was led by Hamas, a Sunni Islamic movement, albeit one with a de-facto bourgeois national-liberationist programme. We do not share the politics of Hamas either, of course. But we do support the Palestinian people’s right to resist genocidal incarceration in a giant murder camp. This is a progressive struggle notwithstanding the religious illusions of the cadres and masses involved.
Not all the Palestinians fighting for their rights are Muslims. A large minority are orthodox Christians, and Zionism has massacred them also. All acts of resistance against ethnic persecution by Zionists on the part of Arab Muslims, Christians, or people of no religion, are progressive, and Marxists seek to fight alongside them against oppression by the method of the united front. So, we applaud and embrace the anti-sectarian impulse of the Axis of Resistance, where Shi’a Iranians, Lebanese and Yemenis stood up to the Zionists and championed the cause of mainly Sunni and Christian Palestinians. In that sense, Marxists regard themselves as critical supporters of this as an aspect of the anti-imperialist united front. This is support for anti-imperialism, not religious ‘radicalism’. The non-sectarianism is a progressive move away from the logic of religious ‘radicalism’ into the realm of secularism, which is a key part of the communist, genuinely anti-imperialist worldview. Other religious ‘radicals’ particularly among the Sunni confessional group appear very much into anti-Shi’a, anti-Christian sectarianism, as we can see from the actions of HTS, as supported by Türkiye, the US and Israel. More on that later.
We also note that a lesser, but still very important role, was played in this de-facto anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist united front by the Syrian government under Assad. It may not have been obvious, as there were no spectacular military actions by Syria against Israel. But the repeated armed attacks by Israel on Iranian military people and diplomatic premises in Syria indicate the role Syria was playing in helping the supply of Iranian military and other support to Hezbollah. The Assad regime was, in a low-key manner, allowing its territory to be used as a bridge between Iran and those in Lebanon who wanted to act to defend the Palestinians. This was and is very important. It is now under threat from the rise to power of sectarian, imperialist-backed jihadists in Syria.
Like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – or Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant, who have said that their only enemies are Iran and Hezbollah, not Israel. In the context of the genocide against the Palestinians, that is treasonous. Since HTS have seized power in Syria, there have been bans on the celebration of Christmas by the numerous Syrian Christians, and massacres of Alwites, the smaller Shi’a grouping that the Assad family also belonged to. Druze also are now living in fear of reprisal. And the Kurdish population in the North and East of Syria, who have often in the past sought Western support for their struggles for separation, or at least autonomy, are under attack, not from Assad, but from the sectarian Sunni elements. The Assad Ba’athist regime in the past, for all its austere repressive aspects, prided itself on its secularism and refusal to persecute communities on religious grounds. It gained popular support from this.
It did not tolerate Kurdish separatism, and Kurds were oppressed and discriminated against as in all the national states that include significant Kurdish populations in the region. But even Kurds at times regarded Assad as a lesser evil to jihadist Sunni sectarians. That is a national question, and though we are for the right to self-determination of the Kurds, that does not derogate from the right to self-determination of the Arab peoples of the Middle East, which is particularly at stake in questions related to the genocidal colonial project of Zionism.
Whose entire basis is the forcible confiscation of Palestinian land and the ethnic cleansing, and indeed destruction of the Palestinian people. And because of the similarity of the Palestinian people to the other Arab populations of the region, Israel has an intrinsic tendency to seek to destroy every strong Arab or even sympathetic Muslim country in the West Asia/Middle East region. This is because they know full well that they are guilty of genocidal crimes against Arabs, and completely naturally, Arabs and other sympathetic Muslim peoples will seek to overturn this oppression and destroy the Jewish-supremacist, Zionist project.
Zionism has a disproportionate power and influence among the imperialist countries of the West. This is simply based on the disproportionate numerical preponderance of Jews in the Western ruling classes, compared to the number of Jews in the population. This is a legacy of many centuries before capitalism when Jews played an economic role as a commodity-trading middleman class within the feudal, natural economy. This made Jews particularly suited culturally for particular roles in the capitalist ruling classes that succeeded feudalism. What it also provides is a material basis for the disproportionate role of the Israel lobby today. Israel as a state was created to benefit that very sizeable Jewish layer of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Even if they do not live there, they tend to regard it as their state. It is a transplanted imperialist enclave with its own imperialist interests. All of Israel was taken from the Arab people by genocidal means.
In a way, this sums up the main issues in the Middle East: – the film Wall Street was the epitome of neoliberalism from the 1980s, with its character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, remembered for the notorious soundbite that “Greed is Good”. When imperialist politicians, such as Starmer, Biden, Blinken, Trump, etc., say that Israel is only ‘defending itself’ when it commits some outrageous massacre or act of aggression against neighbouring Arab peoples, they are solidarising with a state founded on genocide. What they are actually saying is “Genocide is Good”.
There is a coalition of interests here. That of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie, both in Israel and the wider imperialist countries, who have a direct interest in Israel’s land theft and genocidal practices. Gaza was only the culmination of this (so far). And also, the more general colonialist interests of the imperialist powers, and their desire to possess, and where they do possess, to hang on to, the natural resources of the West Asia/Middle East region, notably oil, which in many cases they seized in the 20th or even the 19th centuries. The two cross-fertilise, so you see hybrid forms, like virulent evangelical Christian Zionists in the US, as virulent in their genocidal anti-Arab views as Netanyahu. Fellow travellers of Zionism. Or you see European imperialist Zionists such as Starmer, arising from the pro-imperialist social democracy, well-bribed by the Zionist lobby. That is the context of the wars and genocides in the Middle East, and it is also the context of what has happened in Syria.
The social basis of some forms of religious ‘radicalism’ in Muslim countries has frequently come from two sources – the older, conservative landlord type classes, often rooted in the remains of pre-capitalist modes of production. While these may be socially backward and obsolete, they still wield considerable social power, because imperialist capitalism in the West, in its colonising activities, seeks to suppress native capitalist development in the colonial and former colonial countries. They are still able to do this in many places that are formally decolonised, by their control of the mainsprings of finance, or their ownership, either direct or indirect, of important economic resources in former colonial countries.
Afghanistan was a case in point – when a reformist, pro-USSR government came to power in 1978, the West were able to initiate a jihad against it using reactionary Islamic forces that had their starting point in the pre-capitalist landlord class. The question of women’s rights, and the bride price, was basic and what started the war. This was the starting point of the Mujahedin, who waged a holy war against the PDPA and then the USSR which backed them with military force between 1979 and 1988.
There are also layers of the educated middle class who can be drawn to such ‘radicalism’ as for all their education, there are few outlets for their employment. So, jihadism has become a movement of an ostensibly modernist middle class, who seek to update these religious concepts and make a modern movement out of them. Such movements can veer to the left, often in contradictory ways, such as the Mujahedin E-Khalq in Iran, who defined themselves as ‘Islamic Marxists’ in the period of the 1978-9 Iranian Revolution. But they subsequently sold themselves to just about any enemy of Khomeini’s regime, first to Saddam Hussein, and later to the CIA. It is arguable that there have been elements of left populism, mixed with conservative Islamic sentiment, in the Iranian regime as well as Hezbollah and the Houthi. Others, particularly among the Sunni radicals, have tended to be more uniformly right-wing and sectarian, starting with Al Qaeda, which grew out of the Afghan jihad against the USSR, and had a peculiar love-hate relationship with both US imperialism and the Zionists. Bin Laden and his followers were trained by the CIA particularly for war against the USSR. But they turned against the US, seemingly in the most dramatic ways. They also sometimes expressed antipathy for Israel, yet they were evidently, and knowingly, used by Zionists.
With the bombings of US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in the late 1990s, bloody attacks that mainly killed black Africans. And then 9-11, the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon in 2001. And yet there was the cover-up of US foreknowledge of these attacks. And valid grounds to suspect Israeli foreknowledge and involvement. The political, Islamophobic hysteria in the imperialist countries was self-evidently manipulated by imperialism, and gave the opportunity for the US to use this to not only invade Afghanistan (where Al Qaeda and Bin Laden were based) but also to invade Iraq. Afghanistan did not really matter to Zionists. But Iraq certainly did. The 9-11 attacks provided the opportunity for pro-Israel US neocons to enlist US imperialism more generally to destroy Iraq.
And out of the destruction of Iraq, and particularly the US destruction of Fallujah with chemical and radiological weapons, you saw the further mutation of an Al Qaeda movement that had emerged after the invasion and killing of Saddam, into something even worse. Islamic State is an Islamic version of the Khmer Rouge, a product of collective psychological derangement, which was prepared to slaughter anyone and anything that got in their way. But like the original Khmer Rouge, they were still capable and willing to be bribed by imperialism. All these forces were mobilised by imperialism in Syria since the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2011.
The Arab Spring was a spontaneous, many-country upsurge of democratic protest at the repressive and anti-democratic nature of most of the bourgeois regimes in the Arab world. It briefly convulsed many countries, with ‘radical’ and conservative Arab regimes. It was a naïve upheaval, and easy for the imperialists to co-opt. In countries with pro-Western regimes, such as Egypt, it was indulged for a while, and then crushed. The Egyptian masses were allowed to elect as President Mohammad Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, who then as soon as the movement had been demobilised, was overthrown and executed in a bloody coup led by General Sisi. In Libya, the movement was rapidly co-opted into an imperialist intervention that destroyed the most prosperous country in Africa, murdered its ‘radical’ bourgeois leader Qaddafi – who the Zionists hated for his support for Palestinian causes — and collapsed the society, which ended up ridden with slave markets. They attempted to do the same to Syria, but failed, because of the intervention of Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, who put a stop to these attacks.
So that is what the Syrian civil war that has raged since 2011, was about. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which had engaged in bloody armed conflict with the Assads earlier, under Bashir Assad’s father Hafez, was co-opted by the pro-Turkish, pro-Western campaign that included Al Qaeda. The Erdogan government’s antipathy to Assad was in part because of their rejection of the project of an oil pipeline from Qatar, through Türkiye into Europe, which would enrich Türkiye. The demonisation of Assad is bullshit. Assad’s regime was no worse than most other bourgeois nationalist governments in the Global South. Why don’t the Zionists and neocons who rant on about the supposed evil of Assad have anything to say about the monstrous terror of the Sisi regime in Egypt, which executed the only elected president in Egyptian history, Morsi? Because Sisi is an ally of Israel. The Assad regime rejected such alliances with Israel. The war against it was not waged because of its alleged barbaric, repressive features, but because it resisted cooperation with imperialism and Zionism. When these people start talking about morality and freedom, look at their bottom line – profit from imperialism.
So, what is the outcome of this? Syria has collapsed into chaos. Sectarian murder stalks the land. The Assad regime eventually succumbed to sanctions, which since Syria had no significant oil reserves of its own, it was not able to counter indefinitely. Eventually it could not pay its troops, so its army would not fight. Its defenders, such as Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, were tied up in military conflicts, in Ukraine and with Israel, and were unable to do much to aid it. So, it collapsed in the face of the HTS offensive from its enclave in Idlib. And Israel has launched the most incredible, piratical armed campaign to wipe out Syria’s armed capacity, its weaponry, its military bases, its navy, etc. Suddenly, the HTS, led by Al-Jolani, (who actually wears clothes branded as ‘made in Israel’, which is why in his rebranded attire he appears to resemble Zelensky, another imperialist stooge) is complaining to the UN that Israel’s attacks are against ‘international law’. No shit, Sherlock!
The HTS is said to be a split from Al Nusra, the Syrian Al Qaeda group, but in fact is really a reshuffle of names and a re-branding. Just a few days earlier, they proclaimed that their only enemies were Iran and Hezbollah, and Israel was no problem for them – they sought friendly relations with it. They also talked about democracy and a new constitution. Cynical talk, when they are slaughtering adherents of the ‘wrong’ religion. They announced that Syria would henceforth be run on free market principles, as opposed to the (at least) nominal adherence to planning by the Syrian Ba’athists. They then decreed that no woman can be a judge, which was commonplace under the supposedly evil Assad regime. Any court case with a women judge would have to change to a male judge. They decreed that 400,000 Shi’a, who gained Syrian citizenship under the last 50 years under the rule of the Ba’ath Socialist Party, would be deprived of citizenship and expelled. Thousands of such people are fleeing Syria as we speak. Meanwhile the West has begun sending back Syrian refugees, as Syria is supposedly ‘safe’ now it is ruled by ISIS types. The persecuted of today, victims of Western proxies, will be refused asylum in the West, whereas those who supported the proxies were given asylum. HTS also decree that journalists who reported for the Assad regime will be punished – i.e. slaughtered. So, this is democracy: economics for the wealthy, legally mandated oppression of women, persecution of minorities, murder of press people.
Calling this ‘democracy’ is complete nonsense. But the Syrian population may well have other ideas. A fight around democracy against the CIA/Zionist jihadi stooges is quite likely in due course. And if there is one thing that Zionism fears above all in the Arab world it is democracy. They fear it because the Arab peoples of the region regard the Zionist regime as their most dangerous enemy. All their allies in the region are the most brutal dictatorships, with Sisi’s Egypt, and the Royal dictatorships in Jordan and Saudi Arabia in pride of place. In places where there is even a modicum of democratic space, such as Lebanon, militant opponents of Zionism, such as Hezbollah, rapidly become dominant. In an environment where dictatorships are dominant, Assad as one of these who was hostile to Zionism was an anomaly. And the Sunni Islamists with their sectarian brutality and their aspiration to be clients of imperialism, are likely the source of another brutal dictatorship. In the post-Assad context, opposing these dictatorial trends and demanding the popular election of a government to stand up to Zionism and its genocidal Greater Israel aspirations, are crucial. We need the further elaboration of democratic demands, such as for a constituent assembly, not least to bury such pro-Zionist, dictatorial trends. The revolution against Zionism is inseparable from a permanent revolution of the Arab masses against their ruling classes, that has the potential to crack the Zionist fortress itself.
Uniting the oppressed and overcoming the limits of the Axis of Resistance
Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org
(Left) US Ukrainian Stooge Zelensky, (right) US Syrian stooge Al-Jolani, still a wanted Al Qaeda/ISIS terrorist (by the US) with a $10 million price on his head. Identikit makeovers.
The fall of the Syrian government is the most important geopolitical event since the Palestinian resistance attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. In the immediate term, it is a tactical victory for imperialism, and above all for Israel, for weakening the routes of weapons and financial resources destined for the guerrillas in Lebanon and Palestine and allowing the destruction of a political force that, after Iran, had the best arsenal to confront the Zionist entity.
Israel has effectively removed a potential entire front in the ongoing war against the resistance. Iran has already demonstrated its capacity to hit Israel powerfully and directly but it has temporarily lost the ability to threaten Israel on its borders via its allies. Whilst Assad was not actively opening up the Golan Heights front in the last 14 months, the complete destruction of the Syrian Army, navy and air-force removes this potential for the for-seeable future.
It has greatly strengthened the government of Netanyahu and the “Greater Israel” fanatics in his government., who will be currently drunk with power and their hubristic supremacist ambitions will also become more emboldened with the coming to power to power of Trump. This could hasten the long term imperialist plans for war with Iran to “finish” their goals of “reshaping” West Asia.
However a dialectal examination of this immediate victory for imperialism reveals that it could be more fragile and temporary than first appears. The competing interests of regional powers such as Turkey, the forces of chaos unleashed and the unreliable nature of the jihadhist HTS forces might sow the seeds of blowback against imperialism in the long run. Facing mounting contradictions, every victory of imperialism in the current context creates potentially more contradictions and problems in the long term.
Which side do Erdogan and HTS play on?
But this victory seems likely to be short-lived. One of the players most benefited by the fall of Assad in the region is Turkey. Turkey, ruled by Tayyip Recep Erdogan, is part of NATO, but does not enjoy the confidence of the imperialist federation, which attempted a military coup to overthrow it in 2016. Having survived the coup attempt, Erdogan has sought to carve out an autonomous space since the beginning of this cold war and even more so now in the first conflicts of World War III, to regain the influence he had until World War I, when the country ruled the Ottoman Empire.
Erdogan and Assad
Turkey knows that it can only play this autonomous role through winning mass support in the region by opposing the other players, especially the hated State of Israel. Not by chance, on the same day December 7, when Damascus fell, Iran, Russia and Turkey held a trilateral forum in Doha, when:
“Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that he and the foreign ministers of Turkey and Iran agreed at a meeting in Doha that there should be an immediate end to “hostilities” in Syria, Reuters reports. Lavrov said Moscow wanted to see a dialogue between the Syrian government and what he called the “legitimate opposition” in Syria.” (https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241207-russias-lavrov-says-moscow-tehran-and-ankara-want-immediate-end-to-fighting-in-syria/)
The legitimate opposition to which the Russian minister refers is the one influenced by Turkey, which already after the fall of Assad clashed with the Syrian Democratic Forces, linked to the Kurds and supported by the US.
It would be a mistake to believe that the process is controlled by the US and Israel. It is the decadence of the imperialist system that feeds antagonistic aspirations in the bourgeoisie and governments of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which find themselves with the status of aspirants of the BRICS plus.
The mercenary group that took over Damascus, for example, the Sunni jihadist and Salafist Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS or Levant Liberation Organization), led by the Saudi national Abu Mohammed al-Jolani (who has returned to using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa), is in dispute. HTS continues to be designated by the U.N., U.S., U.K., and other countries as a terrorist organization, and the U.S. has retained a $10 million bounty for information on Jolani’s whereabouts.
The British government exhibits tensions about the HTS, and also reveals the hesitation of imperialism:
“Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said no decision had yet been made on whether the UK government could remove Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from a list of banned terrorist groups after rebels led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
‘We’ve all seen in other parts of history where we think there was a turning point, but that didn’t necessarily become the better future we hoped for,’ Sir Keir added.
(Too early to remove Syrian rebels from terror list – Starmer, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7qenxy8r2o)
For this reason, Iran and Hamas itself nurture expectations that the process as a whole may favor the Axis of Resistance in the medium term.
By the same expectation, even after the surrender without combat by the Syrian army, the Zionist IDF has bombed almost 500 times against strategic military positions in Syria under the justification of “preventing weapons from falling into the hands of terrorist elements”. Compared to Hezbollah, for example, the military apparatus of the Syrian army is far superior. Therefore, Israel, which has no reason to feel secure about the future of Syria, has been bombing fighter jets, helicopters, surface-to-air missile launchers and weapons manufacturing sites in Syria.
According to the US and Israeli agenda, the fall of the Syrian regime would allow the suppression of the presence of Russia, where it maintains two naval bases (Tartus and Latakia), cut off the arms and financial routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, contain the advance of China’s New Silk Road, isolate Iran, abort the growth of the BRICS in the region, while favoring Israel’s “new Middle East” plan and the oil and trade routes controlled by the imperialist system.
This is not the same agenda as Turkey, which took advantage of the disintegration of Syria to project its autonomous power in the midst of the crisis of the imperialist system and the new cold war to reestablish Turkish influence in the region, lost since the first world war. Ankara’s second objective is to suffocate the Kurdish communities, which are strongly opposed to it within Turkey and which have in the north and northeast of Syria a fertile ground to found Kurdistan. For this reason, pro-Turkish mercenaries are driving the Kurds out of the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor. At the same time, Russian military bases have not been attacked so far by what Lavrov called the Syrian “legitimate opposition.”
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), feared by Israel as “the largest terrorist organization in the world,” has launched an appeal to the future Syrian government:
“There are some fundamental basic points on which any possible Iranian cooperation with the new Syrian government must be based:
– Agree on the prohibition of normalization between Syria and the Israeli enemy.
– Reject the Israeli incursion into Syrian territory and confront it by all means, including military means.
– Protect Syria’s religious minorities, not attack neighboring countries, prohibit terrorist activities, and cancel support for such activities.
Iran and the Axis of Resistance will support any non-sectarian Syrian government that rejects the Zionist regime, stands with the Palestinian people, and puts the issue of Palestine and its people among its priorities.’
Blowback is an expression of the lexicon of international intelligence since the beginning of the first Cold War (1949-1991) that refers to collateral effects that turn against secret operations of imperialism, such as, for example, the Iranian revolution (1979) resulting from a process of maturation of the struggle against the coup d’état promoted by the CIA in Iran, in 1953.
The attack by fundamentalist guerrillas, used by the US against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s, against the WTC in 2001 and the emergence of Al Qaeda would be another example of blowback. The current operation to overthrow the Assad regime, although quick and successful, also seems to be rapidly generating its blowback, due to the fact that immediately after the fall of Damascus, the same forces that united in the uprising, already began to fight each other for the booty.
Osama Bin Laden lauded by Western media for his anti-Soviet jihad
The internal contradictions of the collapse of the government favored a broad united front of antagonistic interests and this anti-Assad unity took a leap in quality when it concentrated a great tension against which there was no resistance. With the disappearance of the antagonist Assad, new contradictions are created within the ultra-heterogeneous front, disputing the booty.
The IDF, HTS, Free Syrian Army, Kurds, have already started to clash with each other. The first victors repressed have been the Kurds. Pro-Turkish mercenaries are driving the Kurds out of Deir ez-Zor through the ‘Syrian National Army’, aiming for control of Syrian oil. This process will directly or contradictorily feed the resurgence of the axis of resistance in Syria.
The Turkish and Saudi governments, as well as the militias they support in Syria, do not deserve the slightest trust on the part of the oppressed. But neither are they reliable agents for imperialism itself. The greatest proof of this is Israel’s intention to annihilate all the repressive apparatus that would be inherited from the Assad government by a future government of militias supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia. These contradictions can and should be taken advantage of by the Axis of Resistance as part of the policy of weakening imperialist control over the region. At the same time, the basic points presented by the IRGC to politically dispute the new Syrian government are reasonable.
How can a country that bravely resisted the onslaught of imperialism for 50 years fall like a house of cards in 10 days?
Neither the US, nor Israeli, nor Turkish armies, nor any guerrilla militia defeated the Syrian army; it was the economic war of imperialism that strangled the Arab state of Syria and its backbone, the army.
There was no defence. Damascus surrendered. Assad fled to Russia. Hundreds of military and leaders of the former government who were unable to flee to Iraq have been massacred. Now, the Syrian Arab State is being torn apart.
Syria is a West Asian country whose main natural resource is its own geostrategic location. Compared to its neighbors, Syria has almost no oil. The country’s location is essential for all geopolitical movements between the three continents of the old world, especially between Europe and the Arabian Peninsula, bordering both Turkey and Iraq. Syria was the main supply route for the Axis of Resistance that connects Iran to Lebanon.
Syria has been an oppressed and rebellious country for more than half a century, when Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar al-Assad, of the Ba’ath party, representative of Arab nationalism and ally of the USSR, opposed the integration of the country into the imperialist system led by the US, as happened to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.
Syria and the Soviet Union established a mutual protection agreement in 1971 that resulted in the installation of a Soviet naval base at Tartus during the Cold War, with the aim of supporting the Soviet Navy‘s 5th Operational Squadron in the Mediterranean, which the Soviets saw as a counterweight to the U.S. Sixth Fleet based in Italy.
Since then, imperialism has been trying to subjugate the country with sanctions. Syria was weakened in the 1990s with the end of the USSR and the imperialist offensive was increased during the “war on terror” (from 2001) of the USA, with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. This pressure has forced the political regime to become increasingly repressive against the insurgency sponsored by the US, Israel and Turkey, which culminated in the constitution of an opposition front, supported by the West, the Syrian National Council and the Syrian National Army (formerly known as the Free Syrian Army), which feeds on disaffection with, and defectors from, the Assad regime itself.
The Pentagon has established a strategic military base since 2016 in the country, the Al Tanf base, which today can count on a thousand soldiers. This insurgent movement will be boosted by bombings and military interventions camouflaged as a “civil war” that lasts from 2011 to 2018.
Unlike other oppressed countries that suffer from imperialism’s economic wars, Syria has suffered, cumulatively, sanctions, military intervention and more sanctions, such as the Caesar Law, imposed in 2020 by the US. Unlike other sanctioned countries, Syria, which was the third most sanctioned country in the world until 2022, does not have energy reserves like Venezuela, Russia or Iran that could remedy the expensive economic, social and human price of the blockade imposed by the imperialist system. Syria has an estimated reserve of approximately 2.4 billion barrels of oil. Saudi Arabia has about 297 billion, Iran 157 billion and Iraq 145 billion. And even with small energy reserves, these were already controlled by the enemy, directly by occupation troops of the US army or mercenary organizations that associated with the US, such as Kurds, the Islamic State, which in 2014 had managed to dominate most of the camps in eastern Syria, including the largest, Al Omar, also in Deir ez Zor. Oil sales have become one of the biggest sources of income for the Islamic State, generating about $40 million a month in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2017, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, also funded and armed by the U.S., took control of major oil fields in northeastern Syria and along the Euphrates River. In 2019, Donald Trump, then in his first presidential term, said that the United States expects to obtain millions in revenue from Syrian oil, at least $45 million per month. (https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-50514276).
Syria’s GDP fell from $68 billion in 2011 to $8 billion in 2020 (World Bank). 90% of the Syrian population is below the poverty line (UN). The average salary of Syrian soldiers was $7 a month and commanders were no more than $40 a month. And these were the best average salaries in the country. This misery was the result of a devastating economic war of sanctions that imposed the Cesar Law in 2020, against the country and third-party companies that traded with Syria. Until March 2022, Syria was the third most sanctioned country in the world (Statista). All of this has engendered the bankruptcy of the Syrian Arab state:
“According to the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC headquarters ‘Khatam al-Anbiyaa’: ‘Bashar al-Assad did not request Iranian help – in fact, he actively prevented us from going and helping’
“Bashar al-Assad said to one of our (Iranian) officials at a meeting: ‘My soldiers have become real smugglers or thieves, they only defend those who offer them bribes and privileges. They couldn’t defend me, and when I wanted to protect Damascus at least, I realized that they weren’t capable of protecting Damascus either.’
“Bashar al-Assad did not allow us (the IRGC) to go to help the Syrian Arab Army, although he had asked us for help in the past, but this time he not only did not ask, but was worried about our arrival, and said that ‘if you come, Israel will probably attack us’. (Middle East Spectator).
The demoralization and political backlash of the Assad government itself paved the way for the unhindered triumphal march of the pack of hostile forces to seize the Syrian state.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei
Syria’s victory against imperialism in 2018 was a victory for the world working class
The imperialist international and national military offensive has been contained by the military support of Iran and Russia. This containment of imperialism’s expansionist policy in Syria in 2018 was a milestone of the current Cold War, revealing the decline of the imperialist system’s military hegemony over the globe. It was a progressive process for the oppressed peoples and therefore should have been supported by all genuine communists and anti-imperialists. Syria’s victory against the “Arab Spring” and the “civil war” manipulated by imperialism between 2011 and 2018 was a victory for the world working class.
Between 2011 and 2024, Russia and Iran shielded the Assad government. In 2015, Russia made a new deal with Syria and built the Khmeimim airbase in Latakia to serve as “the strategic center of Russian military intervention on behalf of the Syrian government.” Russian military advisors, as well as those of Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah were essential in defeating the NATO forces’ plan to overthrow the “dictator Assad”, as they had done with Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi.
But, as of 2022, Assad’s two allied countries have been deeply involved in the two arenas where the cold war between NATO and the Eurasian bloc has already become hot and where the first outbreaks of a third world war have already broken out.
In this process, the weakened Assad government itself began to pursue a policy of reconciliation with the US, Israel and Turkey, taking a certain distance from Russia and Iran, reducing cooperation with the latter two.
“It is now widely known that Iran, Hezbollah and other Shi’ite factions asked Assad for permission to open a front in the Golan Heights after October 7 to support resistance in Gaza and Lebanon. However, Assad refused, reportedly saying that he did not want to drag Syria into a possible open confrontation with Israel and that he did not want to risk jeopardizing his normalization progress with the Gulf states. (Middle East Spectator).
In the past two years, Assad has come to believe that he can pacify his relations with the West, to take an increasingly neutral stance as the third world war escalates. This left the country more vulnerable to the action of all anti-Assad forces operating in Syrian territory and led to the demoralization of part of the armed forces themselves. Several commanders were bribed and co-opted by the West. State institutions were dissolving while the pro-imperialist opposition, defeated in 2018, was regaining strength.
Even so, both Russia and Iran have offered to support a Syrian counteroffensive. Assad was in Russia on November 29 to talk to Putin in person. But Assad and his government seemed to no longer want to play a leading role in defending the state against the pack of opponents.
Who is to blame for the fall of Damascus?
There are several disputes about who to blame for the fall of Syria: Russia, Iran or China, why did they not help the Assad government economically and militarily, or Assad, because it was not more democratic with the people or did not accept help from a foreign intervention to save it? We believe that the answer is none of the previous alternatives. Looking for culprits is a symptom of crisis on the losing side.
Many question whether wealthy China could not have prevented Syria’s economic collapse and prevented the situation from reaching this point.
In 2022, Syria joined China’s Belt and Silk Road project. In September 2023, Assad made his first official visit to China. At that time, the two countries announced a policy of strategic cooperation.
In 2024, China donated the equivalent of $10 million in communications equipment to Syria, as well as medical aid and assistance to Damascus. However, the strengthening of these relations seems not to have been enough to save the Syrian economy and state from multiple bankruptcy and the siege that resulted in its destruction.
Now China tends to lose a lot because with the end of the state of Syria as we know it, the US is getting closer to the realization of its strategic objective in the region, gaining a breathing space and delaying its decline by containing its loss of control in the Middle East, the core of the disputes for oil, the main energy matrix on the planet.
For months, Iran had been offering to bolster the Syrian defence forces. According to journalist Pepe Escobar, Iran said: we have two brigades. if you give the okay, it will take two weeks, for them to position themselves in Syrian territory, but they are available.
Another Iranian source presents the following picture of defection:
“Iran expected Assad to ask for military assistance, and we were prepared to respond…But such a request did not come. It became clear after Aleppo fell that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power.”
The fall of Aleppo marked a turning point. Iranian officials claim that Assad’s reluctance to act signalled his willingness to step down, a decision influenced by diplomatic efforts led by Russia and the United Arab Emirates. This development has left Iran with limited options, leading to a strategic pivot. (Iranian officials reveal Assad ignored warnings, https://slguardian.org/iranian-officials-reveal-assad-ignored-warnings/)
Apparently, the exhaustion of the country, its state, its armed forces and its social fabric was already too deep to resist a new military intervention like the one we are seeing now and Assad renounced the defense of the country, clearing the way for an easy conquest of Aleppo, Homes and Damascus for the dissolution of the state.
Demonstrating that if the Syrians were not in a position to defend themselves, nor did they demand external aid, offered until the eve of the fall by the Russians and Iran, he did not want to pass himself off as an “armed missionary”.
Russian bases in Syria
Discussing the occupation of eastern Poland by the Red Army at Stalin’s behest, Trotsky makes the following observation:
“Robespierre once said that the people do not like missionaries with bayonets. By this, I meant that it is impossible to impose revolutionary ideas and institutions on other peoples by means of military violence. Logically, this idea, which is correct, does not mean that military intervention in other countries is inadmissible for the purpose of cooperating with a revolution.
“But such an intervention – as part of a revolutionary international policy – must be understood by the international proletariat, it must correspond to the wishes of the revolutionary masses into whose territory the revolutionary troops will enter. The theory of socialism in one country cannot, of course, create this active international solidarity, which alone is capable of preparing and justifying armed intervention. The Kremlin poses and solves the problem of military intervention, like all other questions of its policy, i.e., absolutely independently of the ideas and sentiments of the international working class. That is why the Kremlin’s recent diplomatic “successes” are monstrously compromising the USSR and introducing great confusion into the ranks of the world proletariat.” (L. Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, p. 43)
A military intervention in other countries by a workers’ state with the aim of cooperating with a revolution must correspond to the wishes of the revolutionary masses into whose territory the revolutionary troops are to enter. Even more confusion can be created by the intervention of a well-armed capitalist state, as part of a conflict with imperialism, on the territory of another oppressed capitalist country in the process of a pro-imperialist counter-revolution based on the deep erosion of the ruling capitalist dynasty, incapable of defending itself even militarily.
It is a good thing that Putin has no illusions in himself for being an armed missionary. Otherwise, it would favor imperialist war propaganda against Russia and the Axis of Resistance much more. Putin can offer resistance to the advance of imperialism on his borders, as he has been doing in Ukraine. It can, very progressively, help in the struggle against imperialist intervention as it did in Syria or in the new national liberation struggles agaisnt imperialist finance capital, as it did in Central Africa, but, by the bourgeois determinations of its own government, it does not go beyond that.
China seems to be waging an economic struggle with imperialism at the same time as it is arming itself for an eventual attack, defensively, against itself or for a final assault by imperialism on Taiwan. It merely develops its productive capacities as quickly as possible in order not only to meet the needs of its people, but also so that it can compete militarily but defensively with the West. China wants to win as well. It is interested in avoiding open confrontation with the West for as long as possible (perhaps they are under the illusion that they can avoid such confrontation indefinitely). While building up its armed forces, it wants to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union, which was partially exhausted from the incessant arms race with the West.
This means that it conducts its foreign policy in a very conservative way, pursuing its own national interest and trying not to antagonize the US. Of course, it does not want to develop an internationalist communist foreign policy, but through the BRICS and the belt and road, it is promoting an illusion of “multipolar” coexistence.
We can see that this plan has worked to help China achieve huge gains in recent decades, however, as the US and its allies become increasingly desperate in the face of China’s growing economic and military power, contradictions are coming to light. The U.S. will stop at nothing to prevent the emergence of this multipolar world that China is trying to build. We can see the existence of the brutality they are using to “reshape” West Asia to maintain their rule at the expense of China, where they are crushing states and committing genocide. What response does China have to this? Obviously, they stayed away from Syria and Libya to avoid antagonizing the West, but for how long can they continue the policy of avoiding conflict as the U.S. uses all its tools to maintain control of key regions and resources.
Iran is responsible for articulating a powerful international defensive system of resistance, but not of offensive to definitively defeat imperialism in the region and its Zionist puppet.
But the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves. This is the limit of the Anti-Imperialist United Front and the most formidable of the Axes of Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Zionist Resistance. The events in Syria are a warning to that Marxists cannot rely on the rise of “multi-polar” world organically to occur. The imperialists will stop at nothing in their “crash or crash through” approach and their “old” weapons of military violence and sanctions still have the potential to deliver gains even if they are contradictory and fluid. The economic powerhouse of China and BRICS and the Belt and Road initiative and the ongoing military power of Russia are significant boosts to the power of the international working class but the desperate dragon of imperialism is far from slain.
No capitalist government in the world can meet the need for the construction of a New Communist International with sections in every country of the globe, to orchestrate from the inside out and from the outside the permanent socialist revolution, beyond the limitations established by each oppressed and cowardly bourgeoisie, to convert the defensive anti-imperialist struggle into an offensive socialist struggle that liberates the oppressed peoples and the working population of the planet from tragedies such as the that is taking place in Syria and that will be repeated in less or more tragic ways in the midst of the entry of the geopolitical situation into World War III.
More than anything, the public response to the result of the US Presidential Election has exposed how the Democrat-supporting wing of its media has learnt nothing from Trump’s first term. Many among their blue-collar audience, however, have finally begun to realise how they were being played; and, this time, they aren’t MAGA.
Kamala Harris’s godawful campaign highlighted her middle-class roots, thus overlooking that very audience. Too often she reverted to it as if, somehow, it might be a vote winner, assuming her party already had all of it on-side. Consequently, the justifiable contempt of the majority of the electorate – of both main parties – was assured; appointed by her party as sole candidate with no challenger; actually boasting about gaining the support of fellow warmonger (and Bush Republican) Dick Cheney; talking down to the black male community, (horribly doubled-down on by Obama, on camera, visiting a white collar office); the horrific Imperialist / anti-Gaza speech by Bill Clinton, again, speaking only to their middle-class; the parade of Hollywood elite supporters; Harris’s endless word salad answers to interviewers; the refusal to discuss policy; still live memories of Harris as a State Prosecutor who had no problem jailing working-class mothers, whatever the consequences to the children; the inappropriate, humourless cackling; all left the field open for Trump. In fact, all this would’ve left the field open for any political challenger. Meanwhile, television pundits made claims on inflated voting projection, which markedly contrasted with the results of the more (comparatively) independent pollsters. With no subtlety whatsoever, the electorate were being told what to think; only this time around, a much larger number realised it.
Last month, post-result, Brianna-Joy Gray of the Bad Faith podcast, pointed out that the Democratic Party ‘never call out Donald Trump’s inconsistencies that would actually matter to his base. Liberals consistently criticise Trump for things that Liberals care about. (e.g.) “Oh, he’s so orange . . . oh, he’s a racist . . . oh, he’s impolitic.” Guest Katie Halper added; “the way he treats the working-class, is the way they should be going.” Correct, but that would entail saying the quiet part out loud, so exposing the true aligned interests of both main parties. Something liberals, here in the UK, also conveniently avoid. Anya Parampil of The Grayzone neatly summed-up why the Dems lost: “They crafted a lie that no-one else believed. They mistook the reality they’d created for the actual reality Americans are living in.”
Why should this matter to Communists? Because unless this cross-party voter disenfranchisement with the status quo can be encouraged and somehow harnessed, a crucial opportunity for class politics and consequent radical change will have been missed. For it is the case that sections of the working-class American public have finally been waking-up. Identity Politics has become widely discredited (thanks, most recently, to the Kamala Harris campaign relying upon it), while, inevitably, the right has taken advantage; however, the disenchanted non-party aligned who weren’t already in Trump’s MAGA fan club, prior to 2020, will, I suspect, ultimately be reminded, during his second term, why he was never the antidote.
Independent US journalists have pointed out that, aside from the activists, Socialism – let alone Communism – is dead in America. As here in the UK, capitulating unions have ensured that. The state brainwashing has certainly done its job when Republicans can call fellow corporate imperialist Harris “Far” and “Hard Left” and have their voters parroting this. Reactionary authoritarianism is the new go-to as opposition. This might be funny if the implications weren’t so sinister. Yet, the conditions in which Communism can thrive is now revealed before their eyes, even if – so far – it daren’t be articulated. With a discredited, gloves-off Imperialism, so goes fake centrism and liberalism, once citizens start to make the connections; ones that may, finally, discredit the MSM and so enable a strong third-party, bottom-up movement to thrive.
In mid-November, Jon Stewart sat down with Biden’s Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco. It may be a surprise to Ms. Monaco that it shed light, to everyone else who watched the interview, on her department’s $850 billion budget and how Government funds are so casually mismanaged. In response to Stewart’s question on accountability, she asked for clarity. He added; “there’s a lot of waste, fraud and abuse within a system . . .
MONACO: “Audits and waste, fraud and abuse are not the same things. So let’s decompose (sic) these pieces.”
STEWART: “So, please educate me on what the differences are.”
MONACO: “Sure, so an audit is exactly what you just described, which is, ‘do I know what was delivered to each place?’ The fact that the GOP has not passed an audit is not suggestive of waste, fraud and abuse. That is completely false.”
STEWART: “So, what is it suggestive of?”
MONACO: “It’s suggestive that we don’t have an accurate inventory that we can pull up of what we have, where. That’s not the same as saying that we cannot do that because waste, fraud and abuse has occurred.”
STEWART: (Ironically). “So,…in my world, that’s waste.”
MONACO: “How is that waste?”
STEWART: “If I give you a billion dollars, and you can’t tell me what happened to it, that to me is wasteful and that means that you are not responsible . . . If you can’t tell me where it went, then what am I supposed to think?”
Stewart then contrasted her the dismissive view to those being given so little for basic services, when the State Department seems so lax with such a large military budget. Remember Monaco’s admission. “It’s suggestive we don’t have an accurate inventory that we can pull up of what we have, where.” I re-quote the above not because the content will be any surprise, but, the casual Governmental attitude accompanying it.
Subsequently, Max Blumenthal, during a debate with fiscal conservative Republican and former Trump speech-writer Darren Beattie of Revolver News, commented: “The Pentagon has failed its seventh audit in a row. One-trillion dollars is missing. Everything else pails in comparison to that. So, if you’re not going to go in there and force an audit of the Pentagon and then cut all of the waste, and all of the money going to the ‘beltway bandits’ – that are just corporate welfare for the upper-class in Northern Virginia – all of these corrupt programmes that do nothing (then what’s the point?) It’s all there. If Pete Hegseth (Trump’s proposed pick for United States Secretary of Defence) is actually willing to take that on, then I will cheer. Everybody supports that – except for Congress.”
I’d like to believe that the funding of the Gaza genocide had a major bearing on the anti-Harris vote, but, there was so much else out-of-touch in the Democratic Party’s re-election campaign, the extent of its effect is somewhat buried. The Democratic Party’s silence on it, however, only emphasised the working-class’s correct perception of their irrelevance.
Many of us have, like myself, been ‘friend requested’ by US Trump supporters simply because of our critiques of Biden and the Dems. Where once I may have mocked such requesters, today, I realise it is also a symptom of something far wider than racism alone, since an additional number of posters encompass all shades of US ethnicity, equally powerless from decades of neoliberalism and the lack of leverage to replace it. The next step must be to remorselessly discredit the demonising of the solution – in public – by articulating it in a way that links to those problems they recognise and experience on a daily basis.
This issue focuses on the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the Middle East/West Asia region, which has become much more evident since the journal went to print, with the US-Israel-Turkiye- backed offensive of jihadist terrorists in North-West Syria, against Russian and Hezbollah opposition alongside Syria. However, the lead article is about the crisis precipitated by the lame-duck Biden administration after Harris was defeated by Trump in the US presidential election in October. The ‘permission’ given by the Biden administration to the Ukrainian regime to fire British Storm Shadow and US ATTACMS mid-range cruise missiles into Russia is a major escalation towards WWIII. Because these missiles cannot be fired and programmed by Ukrainians – they do not have the satellites and technical infrastructure to do this. These are Western missiles programmed and aimed by the West. Meaning that Russia is now being bombed directly by NATO imperialism.
The response by Russia in unveiling the mid-range hypersonic Oreshnik missile is analysed, which appears for now to have stymied the Biden administration. Along with Trump’s victory, which appears to be two-pronged – a degree of popular support due to his rhetorical isolationism over Ukraine, combined with the collapse of the Democratic Party vote being driven by the inflation and hardship to the working class inflicted by anti-Russian sanctions over Ukraine. The statement notes the danger of WWIII, and the difference between this confrontation and previous world cataclysms. Such a war would not be inter-imperialist, but rather a war of the imperialist US hegemon and its client imperialists against an alliance centrally of the Global South, encompassing two remaining smaller deformed workers states (Cuba and North Korea) and centrally led by two giant ex-workers states, Russia and China, whose form of restored capitalism has a massive proletarian deformation derived from their previous many decades of post-capitalist economic and military development.
The issue contains a fine article by Mark Andresen that expands on the reasons for Trump’s victory in the disillusionment of the working class, not only with liberalism, but also palpably with its right-wing opponents, and the opportunities that this gives to communists. And there is a signed article by Ian Donovan which contains a preliminary analysis of the dangers from the Assisted Dying Bill, which in our view involves a serious threat to the sick and the disabled – an even more sinister dimension to the austerity attack since 2010.
But also in this issue is part two of the LCFI’s letter to the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). This focuses on another facet of their problematic legacy from the politics of their founder James Robertson – their support for Brexit – that is, the exit of British imperialism from the European Union, and their belief that the working class has some kind of interest in this. We note that there are some positive elements to the political shift that they underwent a few years ago, before the death of Robertson. A grouping of ICL comrades centred in Quebec rose rapidly in the declining ICL though a project to address the national question regarding French-speaking Quebec in mainly English-speaking Canada, and then extending their approach to some of the smaller, multinational states in Europe – such as Spain and France regarding Catalonia and the Basque Country, Corsica, Belgium regarding the Flemish and Walloons, and also Scotland. These are all situations where there is either clear national oppression, or in Belgium a kind of forced unity of two language groups in the same imperialist state. Scotland was also a major part of imperial Britain, not a colony as was Ireland, but there is still a historically evolved national question with elements of oppression which must be addressed. But the New Spartacists mix this up with Robertson’s belief that British separatism from the EU was progressive. We cite Trotsky’s 1923 Essay on The United States of Europe and also Joseph Seymour’s 1977 article On Bourgeois Class Consciousness which both point to the reactionary and nationalist fundamental nature of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and its division of Europe in particularly, as something that Marxists are bound to oppose.
The letter deals with the New Sparts’ errors over Covid, which led to them somewhat amazingly arguing against lockdowns virtually as a principle, including in China (which they consider to be a workers’ state), even when no vaccines were available, and then for compulsory vaccinations. A strange combination, which seems to have been a by-product of severe disorientation of the tendency after the death of their historic leader and then faced with the Covid pandemic. The organisation collapsed during that period, though the Quebecois trend that shifted the ICL on the national question, took up this strange approach to Covid and became the core of the new leadership. It does appear to have been a confused bridge to a better, orthodox Marxist understanding on some other key questions though, such as the Anti-Imperialist United Front and Permanent Revolution.
We also address their failures in the Corbyn period, to fully engage and do entry work in the Labour Party during that crucial period of leftward shift in Labour. We counterpose our record of principled and somewhat high profile entry work in Socialist Fight, to the Sparts abstentionism. We are sharply critical of some of the discussions that went on and still go on today among their people, where they confuse the leftward movement represented by Corbynism in its first few years, at least up to the 2017 General Election, with their schemes about how Brexit was supposedly something that the workers movement was obliged to support. This is how, when the class struggle was being waged at a surprisingly high political level in the Labour Party during this period, the Sparts were embroiled in sterile internal debates about how it was unprincipled to support Corbyn because he didn’t support Brexit, and even ended up themselves publishing material about Brexit that they, not we, condemned as amounting to ‘political support’ to Boris Johnson’s Tories. A terrible muddle of political errors, which our letter attempts to bring some clarity to.
The next issue of Communist Fight will include the final part of this letter, which addresses the ‘Russian Question’ today – the nature of Russia and China after the 1989-91 Counterrevolutions – the reason for the continuing conflicts between these giant former workers states and world imperialism, and the contradictions and shortcomings of the New Spartacists over Ukraine today.
This issue therefore contains much of considerable importance to socialists and all class-conscious working-class people.
Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 1st December 2024. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.
Still from video of Russia’s new Orezhnik missile detroying a factory in Dnipro, Ukraine that made missiles.
US imperialism’s internal contradictions and desperation to hang onto its world hegemony has led to an immediate threat of nuclear war, as close as if not closer than anything that happened in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The NATO expansion drive through the proxy war in Ukraine now means Russia is being bombed by the United States and Britain with US and British-controlled medium range Cruise Missiles (Storm Shadow and ATACMS), and the French SCALP missile is also in play. Storm Shadow/ATACMS/Scalp are all similar ‘long range’ missiles. These are not really long range, they cannot even reach Moscow from Ukraine, but they are a political provocation.
Not so much a military danger, but the fact that Ukraine cannot possibly do this independently of the imperialists, but imperialist military forces must program them and fire them, otherwise they will not be accurate. It means that the fig leaf that some on the left have hidden behind, the idea that this is primarily a national conflict between Russia and Ukraine, has been torn away. This is an attack on Russia by the US, Britain and France, and the claim that Ukraine is doing it does not stand up. In itself, it is not much of a military threat if the payloads of these missiles are conventional; they won’t change the course of the war. But there is always the possibility of nuclear weapons being sneaked in, or a misunderstanding about that, triggering off a major exchange.
The Russian response is the new Oreshnik (Hazel Tree) missile. It can travel at Mach 10 – around 3 km per second. It is a multiple re-entry mid-range ballistic missile. It Can be conventional or nuclear. Nothing can touch it both for speed and unpredictability. It can have up to 26 different warheads. It can hit anywhere in Europe, as far away as London, which is probably the limit of its range. Maybe if it were fired from Eastern Siberia, it could possibly (just about) hit the US. But it’s really a European, mid-range missile. It’s a trump card – no pun intended – and underlines that Russia’s missile and nuclear capability is superior to the West. Will it stop the Biden administration and its cohorts, and their military provocations against Russia?
They have class-related reasons for attacking Russia – and a particular tactical take on that, so it’s less than likely. They demand obedience by those outside the imperialist club to the ‘rules-based order’, which is the Western, imperialist-dominated order. Now there is musing about ‘pre-emptive strikes’ in a conflict between Russia and a NATO state, in leading NATO circles, from one General Bauer – a Dutch military figure – the head of NATO military committee. That’s their response to Putin – obviously authorized by the US though said in Europe.
And even worse, there is now talk in Washington about giving nuclear weapons to Kiev after all. The immediate result of that will be a Russian nuclear elimination of the regime.
Marjorie Taylor-Green, the Trumpian House of Representatives member, called it an act of treason. But which nukes? Russia has all the old nukes from Ukraine. It’s hard to believe that the US would just give Ukraine nukes. US nukes in Britain are under US control, not British control. So, if they did, it would be another, even more brazen act similar to the ATACMS etc. Scott Ritter says this is a lie from the New York Times. And setting that up would take months, and likely have to get through Congress, where the GOP controls both houses. So possibly a step too far for a lame duck administration.
Any country, or group of countries, that defies them, is a target. At this point, they cannot accept defeat. This is the Cuban missile crisis plus plus, and it will last at least until Biden leaves office.
To those who lived and were active politically in the first years of Reagan, before Gorbachev came along, this is not unfamiliar. Though it may be worse. Remember Reagan’s joke: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have just signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes”? Remember the Reaganite ideologue Richard Pipes – the father of Daniel Pipes – today’s counter-jihad nut -: “The Soviet Union faces the choice of changing its Communist System in the direction of the West, or going to war”. Remember when Soviet vessels were rammed by US military ships on the high seas? These are very similar times. They are driven by a ruling-class ideology, and quite hysterical.
It’s not anti-Communism in the pure, old form. But it’s rooted in that anti-Communism, morphed into an ethnic hatred of Russians. It’s similar to Hitler’s hatred of Jews which was driven by the obsessive belief that Bolshevism was a Jewish creed, and that Jews generally were organically subversive. Russians are seen as organically communist inclined, subversive and disobedient to the world order. That hatred is what drives Western Russophobia ideologically. They cannot easily back down, because far from inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia, NATO is staring a strategic defeat in the face. Why?
The de-industrialisation of the West is what at bottom has led to the atrophy of US power, economic and military. Whereas Russia has to a real extent re-industrialised. or arguably refused the ‘medicine’ of deindustrialisation that imperialism sought to force on it through Yelstin. Putin reversed much of Yeltsin’s shock treatment from the 1990s and thankfully, he began doing so when there was still the capacity to reverse it. This may perversely be why Trump appears to admire Putin – he was able to do what Trump would like to do, but the class realities in the US prevent: reindustrialisation. He made no progress in this in his first term, and no doubt will be equally frustrated now. But this is also underlines what Biden – or rather most likely Blinken and Sullivan – are doing with this. Trying to pre-empt Trump on Russia-Ukraine. They are trying to stitch things up to the point that Trump cannot negotiate his way out of Ukraine.
Trump is a fascist domestically, as we point out in our statement. But there is at least rhetorical isolationism in his international policy. Trump’s election is extremely ominous, and the responsibility for it lies with the Democratic Party under Biden (and Harris). Trump represents extreme right-wing reaction. Though Ukraine played a huge role in propelling Trump to the White House because of the surge of inflation that coursed through the Western economies, including the US, as a result of sanctions, and particularly oil sanctions, against Russia. He intends mass deportations of millions of so-called ‘illegal migrants’, possibly up to 13 million, using the military.
He plans nationalist economic policies such as imposing 25 % tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and 10% on China. Now he is threatening all the BRICS nations: half of humanity with a 100% tariff, to try to stop a BRICS trading currency being created.
He intends a further stamping out of abortion rights, possibly a federal ban, not on abortion itself, but the posting of abortion-related medication to make abortion qualitatively more difficult to obtain even in states where it is legal. He proposes to weaponize the US military for domestic attacks on his political opponents, including the Democratic Party. He is likely to use a “terrorism” law – based on abuse of the term – to be used to drive non-profit publishers who dissent on Zionism, or other issues, out of business. The law to permit this is already in train. And of course, the left and any movements against police violence and killings will come under heavy repression of some sort. The same is likely true of any determined labour struggles. Though the benefit of this is that it will tear to pieces the false ‘working-class’ appeal of Trump. The first amendment of the US constitution is likely to be gutted in some such cases where people try to evoke it against Trump, as are labour gains. Trump’s crony Musk, who boasted of his involvement in a coup in Bolivia, is also seeking to get Trump’s judges to declare the National Labour Relations Board to be ‘unconstitutional’. That is, the NLRB that was set up by Roosevelt under the pressure of the historic labour upsurges in the United States in the 1930s.
All these things are on the immediate agenda because Trump stacked the Supreme Court with his far-right appointees in his first term. For the past four years of the Biden administration, he retained his far-right supermajority on the supreme court. That’s how Roe-vs-Wade – the de facto federal right to abortion – was overturned even though Trump was not in office. Biden did nothing about it. But because of this supermajority, when push came to shove, the Biden administration failed in its bid to hold Trump minimally accountable for the attempted putsch of Jan 6th, 2021. The Trumpian Supreme Court conveniently ruled that Trump, as president, was immune from prosecution for that as these were ‘official acts.’ And the Democrats did nothing to deal with that, like expanding the court, even in the first half of Biden’s term when they could have tried.
This is fundamentally because doing so would require mobilizing a mass movement of the working class to crush Trump’s far right movement. The US ruling class, Democrat and Republican, fears that more than they do fascism and a likely Trump dictatorship or semi-dictatorship. So that is the political reality in the US. It is obscured by the fact that the still (in domestic terms) bourgeois-democratic Democratic Party – is cowardly and subservient before the Republican Party – whose majority is now fascist, or proto-fascist, in their political programme.
This is somewhat obscured by the backing of the Democratic Party Biden administration for fascists in Ukraine, its funding of Azov, of Banderists and their front man, Zelensky, who applauded a Ukrainian SS-veteran in the Canadian parliament last autumn. But this kind of separation is not new. If is only a modern manifestation of something that Karl Marx observed in the Middle of the 19th Century, about British imperialism and its supposedly ‘civilised’ norms:
“The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked” (Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, January 22, 1853).
Those who entertain illusions in Trump because of his oppositional posture over Ukraine should remember that it was under his presidency, as Scott Ritter noted, that Zelensky was groomed for the role he was to play, as Jewish camouflage for the Maidan regime whose Nazi proclivities had become too obvious and well-publicised since Maidan in 2014. And Trump tore up the INF treaty between Reagan and Gorbachev, which was an obstacle to the use of the missiles that the West are now firing at Russia from Ukraine (as well as Russia’s response). Trump’s differences on international policy with the likes of Biden, where there is any substance to them, are tactical, not ones of principle or strategy.
Their aim is to preserve US Hegemony just as much as Biden’s. As in “Make America Great Again.” A key element of these differences is visceral pro-Zionism – Israel is more important than Ukraine for Trump and others. Part of it is a dispute over whether Russia or China are the most important adversary for US imperialism. And some of Trump’s picks for his posts are ultra-warmongers against Russia. Like Sebastian Gorka and Marco Rubio. Others, like Mike Waltz, National Security Adviser profess to be concerned about ‘escalation’ and to want a deal with Putin. But Waltz says he is “working closely” with Jake Sullivan on the transition. Including this escalation? We will see.
But what Sullivan – and the bourgeois ‘deep state’ – military etc., are up to – seems designed to frustrate this element of Trump’s policy. Scott Ritter describes it as a kind of coup. It is certainly unprecedented for a lame-duck president to behave like this, aiming to screw up his successor. Only Trump did it before – Jan 6 for a start. But that went outside the constitution and was also mainly domestic in its motivation – anti-migrant. This does not break with the US constitution as such. It remains to be seen what effect this will have. They could at the outside start a nuclear war, but short of that, I don’t see what they can do to Trump. Short of a nuclear exchange, any policies can be modified or scrapped.
Moving on to the International Criminal Court’s indictments against Netanyahu, Gallant, and the Hamas leader Mohammad Deif. Deif is likely dead. But that is minor, an index of the cowardice of the ICC. More to the point is the political impact. Netanyahu and Gallant are indicted for murder, persecution and using starvation as a weapon to commit “crimes against humanity”. The US condemned the ICC, and some Trumpian threatened to invoke the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ if Netanyahu and Gallant were arrested.
Whereas most European counties, Canada, and much of the world has signed it, or if not, it is not for pro-US reasons. Will cause problems for all of these. This has not quite matured yet – the separate International Court of Justice judgement on genocide from January is not complete. But they will find it very difficult in the light of the ICC warrant, to acquit Israel of genocide. Germany say they won’t implement the warrant, supposedly because of their history of persecuting Jews, but they signed up to the ICC, so this is a legal minefield. Macron has said something similar. In Britain Starmer and Cooper have tried evasion, but the legal position is clear. The government is in the High Court right now. Activists are looking for a judgement to force an arms embargo. They may get it. That’s not the half of it -there could be big problems to come for politicians who backed Israel.
These differences within US imperialism involve issues that are intertwined, and rapidly becoming more so. For instance, it is known that the reason Israel has just signed up for the ceasefire in Lebanon, and vice versa, is because both sides have taken major casualties in the last 14 month of war. Hezbollah has neither endorsed nor rejected the ceasefire. But Israel has been fought to a standstill in Southern Lebanon, despite the loss of Nasrallah, the pager attacks, and the terrible Gaza-like destruction Israel has inflicted.
So now the Israelis and Americans have re-activated their terrorist networks of pro-US, pro-Zionist Al Qaeda/ISIS jihadists in Syria. The purpose is obvious – to try to sabotage Hezbollah’s supply lines though Syria, which make it impossible for Israel to besiege Hezbollah the way they are able to do to Hamas in Gaza. They try to restart the jihadists’ war against Assad. Though it appears the Syrian army is already making short work of them. But to attack Assad brings Russia and Iranian forces into play. Both played a major role in preventing a repeat of the imperialist criminal destruction of Libya, being repeated in Syria, over a decade ago. And Iran is also an ally of Russia now and has rendered it some technological help in Ukraine. So, the logic of Zionist militarism in this situation can point to a clash with Russia. Even though it may be that Trump is seeking to avoid that. All these contradictions point to the strategic defeat of US Hegemony.
Communists need to be providing revolutionary leadership in this situation, advocating anti-imperialist united fronts to deal with these barbarities. The problem of Zionism and its genocidal aggression against the Arab peoples needs to be resolved by an anti-imperialist united front. We must demand that Russia and China throw their full economic and military resources into fighting the Zionist genocide and defeating Israel in this life-and-death struggle for the Arab peoples.
We advocate the independent mass mobilisation of workers wherever it is feasible. Previously we have advocated a ‘coalition of the willing’ to intervene militarily to stop the Zionist slaughter wherever it is happening – the recent Iranian retaliatory actions against Israel also underline that this is feasible. But in the end, even an anti-imperialist united front is not completely adequate. Every such united front needs a consciously revolutionary, working-class component to make it effective and viable.
The only permanent road to peace, the only solution to all the deadly problems that beset humanity in this situation, from the threat of nuclear annihilation to disaster through the capitalist-induced destruction of the biosphere, is through the creation of a mass Communist movement internationally. We need a new world party of socialist revolution to unite all subjective communists, all consistent anti-imperialists, under one banner based on free discussion of differences, but unity in action, in pursuit of international socialism. For workers revolution is the only road to real peace!
Storm Bert laid bare the cruel reality that Kid Starver’s government has ushered in. A massive increase in the money for the “civil list”, as we euphemistically call the annual royal handout to the spongers in the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha “firm”, was coupled with yet money for Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe;but none for the majority of people in the UK.
Exactly why the new “slimmed down” family should need an increase when the vast majority of the people, and specifically those on fixed pensions and benefits get nothing is not even mentioned in our lame-stream media. What benefit yet more money for Ukraine does for the people of Britain is even less obvious. Ukraine has been a US proxy for the past decade, locking up trade unionists, outlawing political parties, and committing human rights abuses by banning both the majority religion (the Ukrainian Orthodox church) and the Russian language (spoken by over a third of the population)
Chris Bryant lays claim to having solved the devastating flooding crisis for his constituents, not by doing his duty as their MP and a cabinet minister, and lobbying for a share of the government money set aside for flood victims but instead a “go fund me page” (started by someone else, to which he donated £100, yet asking others for thousands). We’ll wait to see if he claims that on “expenses”, as so many MPs have claimed their showy wreaths on Armistice Day.
Similarly the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall charge our public services for parking while expecting us taxpayers to additionally stump up for the armed forces to put on courtesy flights and other transport for “security reasons”. There’s nothing quite like taking with both hands to build up a family fortune of £80 billion and then setting up a new charity to show the incompetent poor how to solve their financial problems. The latest scam to reassure the public that the royal family is still relevant has been unveiled, setting up a charity to address homelessness, a situation made infinitely worse by the 2012 legislation to criminalise squatting.
There are 350 000 homeless people in England and Wales, and over 650 000 empty and abandoned homes. We don’t need another charity to decide who are the “deserving poor” are, we need to stop criminalising need, and an end to the system of quangos that allow the ruling class to control our own natural generosity, guilt tripping us with endless appeals for yet more “funds” from the little we have, and force the government to comprehensively provide for the needs of the people who cannot provide for themselves.
It is as insulting as the previous ones to address “early years child development” and breakfast clubs as injuring when the 2 child benefit cap remains, treating almost every 3rd and successive child born since 2017 as unworthy of the support their older siblings receive. Over a million children grow up in poverty thanks to this iniquity, but successive governments prefer the band aid of charity to social justice and equality.
It should not be a crime to be poor. It should not be a crime to be born into a larger family. It should be a crime for the government to spend money on aggressive wars and regime change, tax breaks and self-aggrandisement, and ignore their responsibilities to provide services for our people. And when the government cannot or deliberately will not do its duty, the ministers who fail should be locked up for a period of time commensurate with the lives they have taken through their deliberate negligence or ideological malice.
In times of austerity the wealthy should shoulder the load, not the poor, and the royals should set the example they claim they are there to represent, and give up their civil list, their “income” from the duchies, and live on their own “savings”.
The notes for this presentation (17th November) are now available to read, and the presentation and discussion are also available to listen to as a podcast.
Dignity in Dying lavishly funded advertising on the London tube
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, introduced into Parliament by the Labour MP Kim Leadbetter, is widely touted as a humanitarian measure which will allegedly help those who are dying from painful terminal illnesses avoid the appalling suffering that frequently accompanies such deaths. Many regard it as a humanitarian measure, and it is being presented as a progressive reform. Those opposing it are being portrayed by supporters of the bill as religious fundamentalists. It has divided the establishment in Britain: former Tory Prime Ministers: May, Truss and Johnson oppose it, as does former Labour PM Gordon Brown. In the current Labour Party, Starmer supports it, but Wes Streeting opposes it.
A parliamentary grouping of Labour’s Anna Spicer, Lib-Dem Munira Wilson and Tory Ben Spicer, has put an amendment proposing that it should not be given a second reading until there is a law commission or royal commission into all scenarios and safeguards, which would torpedo the bill. The bill would make eligible adults with under six months to live, “mental capacity” and “a settled wish to die”. They would have to make two declarations, each approved by different doctors, seven days apart, and then a high court judge would question them, followed by a 14 day wait. The fatal drug would have to be self-administered; doctors would prepare the dose. There is an attempt to include other ‘safeguards’ in the bill, including making it illegal for anyone to “pressure, coerce or use dishonesty” to procure such a declaration or induce self-administering of such a dose, with a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
There are elements within this that socialists should sympathise with. No one should be forced to suffer agonising death, which is all too common today, particularly as the National Health Service has come under vicious attack by neoliberal politicians. Particularly from some Tory and New Labour politicians who are making sonorous and hypocritical declarations about morality. Tories, Lib Dems and New Labour have all undermined the NHS through various forms of privatisation. The Tories in the last 14 years have done massive damage to the NHS, but New Labour provided them with the means to do so. Private Finance Initiatives, saddling hospitals with massive debt, and foundation trusts, providing the Tories with the means to stick the knife in even more, which they did with austerity attacks. On all these sides, protestations of humanitarian motivations do not ring true.
The principle of allowing all to end their lives in dignity is correct but under capitalism this is highly problematic. Today austerity attacks on the sick, the disabled, benefit claimants, etc. are endemic. This is why virtually the entire medical profession, and disabled organisations, oppose this. ‘Safeguards’ cannot overcome private property, both at a domestic level, where the interests of relatives, e.g. in inheritance, and the material cost of caring, pressure the sick to avoid being a “burden”. Leadbetter’s bill is backed by the Dignity in Dying campaign, which received £700,000 from the Bernard Lewis Trust, which has connections to offshore tax havens, funding Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism – a smear machine against the pro-Palestinian left. Hardly humanitarian causes! Dignity in Dying have the money to buy saturation advertising on the London tube, like at Westminster station foot tunnel where anyone walking through it is assailed by dozens of their electronic advertisements.
This would not be a humanitarian advance, but an accelerating neoliberal ethos of euthanasia, resembling Nazism. As shown in Canada and the Netherlands, where similar laws have been passed and euthanasia amounts to 5% of all deaths. Leadbetter estimates this bill would allow less than 1,000 assisted suicides per year. But the ‘safeguards’ in the bill can easily be amended by a future government. In Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) which passed in 2016, was extended beyond terminal cases in 2021. It is planned to extend it further in 2027 to include people suffering from a solely mental illness. With such extensions, likely at the hands of a future government and secondary legislation, it is entirely feasible that around 30,000 people a year could be subject to state-sponsored euthanasia in Britain in a few years’ time.
Socialists should oppose this bill tooth and nail. Even if it falls this time, they will try again. Far from promoting euthanasia, we should be insisting on a massive improvement in palliative care. The NHS should run hospices and similar institutions to allow all to end their lives without pain and suffering. We should not be supporting a law that clearly presages a cull of ‘costly’ people with health problems, funded lavishly by people who are up to their necks in the barbarism in Gaza. What’s ‘humanitarian’ about that?
We need a new Communist International! For Russian Victory in Ukraine!
For an armed anti-imperialist united front to stop the Zionist genocide!
International Workers Revolution is the Only Road to Peace!
Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious
Capitalist-imperialist barbarism is staring humanity in the face. US imperialism’s internal contradictions and desperation to hang onto its world hegemony has led to an immediate threat of nuclear war, as close as if not closer than anything that happened in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The NATO expansion drive through the proxy war in Ukraine now means Russia is being bombed by the United States and Britain with US and British-controlled medium range Cruise Missiles (Storm Shadow and ATACMS). These missiles are being controlled directly by the imperialists, and their use constitutes direct acts of war by the US and Britain, since Ukraine does not have the personnel or the technological means to operate them autonomously. This has been engineered by the lame-duck Biden administration since they lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Biden is too mentally feeble to be in control – it is functionaries of the liberal-militarist US establishment and likely the military themselves who are calling the shots here, trying by means of escalation to pre-empt what Trump might be inclined to do about Ukraine from 21st January when he takes office.
In response, on 21st November, Russia battle-tested a new ‘game changing’ weapon against a Ukrainian missile and armaments facility near Dnipro, a mid-range hypersonic, multi-warheaded missile. Its speed, Mach 10 (10 times the speed of sound) means it travels at 3 kilometres per second, considerably faster than the interception capacity of all the missile defence facilities of Europe‘s imperialist nations and the various East European US clients, which are simply defenceless before it. The new missile, Oreshnik (Hazel Tree) can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, and if the imperialists were rational, ought to be sufficient several times over to make them back off from attacking Russia. Whether they are rational enough to take note of the lesson remains to be seen.
The genocide in Gaza, livestreamed on social media even in the imperialist countries (though suppressed insofar as is possible by the pro-Zionist bourgeois mainstream media), has found a judicial expression with the indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant by the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity” and “using starvation as a weapon of war”. Which barely scratches the surface of Zionism’s crimes. The ICC is a phoney court that was originally set up by the imperialists to arraign the leaders of disobedient countries outside the Western imperialist club. One of its first actions was to condemn Serbia in the NATO war against Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of the Balkan country, was arbitrarily convicted and imprisoned by the imperialist tribunal, despite Yugoslavia not recognizing the jurisdiction of this tribunal over the country. Transferred to The Hague, without even having his extradition approved, as required by Yugoslav criminal law, Milosevic was unjustly tried and convicted of genocide. He was found dead in his cell under suspicion of a heart attack deliberately induced by the tribunal. Numerous African leaders have been charged by the ICC, but their most prominent targets include Vladmir Putin, as part of the West’s fraudulent casting of resistance to NATO expansion in Ukraine as somehow criminal.
But the exposure of Israel’s depraved extermination of helpless Palestinian civilians, including women and children, medical staff, journalists, aid workers, even hospital patients, produced mass pressure on this stooge body to act and indict Israeli leaders. Even then, the cowards had to indict a Hamas leader for ‘balance’, even though the individual they indicted has almost certainly himself been murdered by Israel. The Zionists objected and delayed the indictment for months. They appear to have been instrumental in injecting sexual allegations against the ICC prosecutor to try to sabotage the indictment. But the pressure from below was too much, and now the indictments are issued. It puts European politicians, whose countries for the most part endorse the court, in legal jeopardy for their arming Israel to carry out these crimes.
The United States does not endorse the court – despite its stooge nature, they understand that US forces routinely commit terrible crimes around the globe and even a formal affiliation can put its forces at risk if the ICC comes under sustained mass pressure over some US atrocity, as has happened to Israel over the Zionist holocaust. The US has a law, known popularly as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, which mandates that US governments should use military force against the ICC should it arrest any US politicians or operatives.
Trump’s New Rise to Power
Trump’s election on November 5th, the defeat of Harris acting as second string for the incapacitated, senile Biden, has brought to the fore the contradictions within the US as its world imperialist hegemony slips away. Trump is basically a fascist in the US context, but there sometimes appears to be an element of rhetorical US isolationism in his attitude to the Ukrainian war. His wing of the US ruling class sees China, not Russia, as the main challenger to US imperialism because of its greater productive capacity and economic power.
Their likely objective is to do a deal with Russia and back off from the Ukraine conflict, hoping to drive a wedge between Russia and China. In fact, so single-mindedly are they focussed on China that at least some of them are inclined to dump NATO and Europe as a waste of resources that the US is far too ‘generous’ to. They demand that European capitalism, not the US, pays for NATO. Though going by some of Trump’s picks for his incoming administration, some of this may be more rhetoric than reality. Trump has appointed Sebastian Gorka, a hawk who has attacked ‘isolationism’ over Ukraine, as his chief of ‘Counterterrorism’ and ‘Special Assistant’. Also among his picks for his new administration are the most virulent Zionists imaginable. Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, who will be US Ambassador to Israel, says there are no such things as Palestinians, no West Bank, and no occupation.
Trump’s people are even more single-mindedly focussed on support for Israel than the Biden administration was, as Huckabee’s appointment shows. Trump criticised ‘Genocide Joe’ for being insufficiently supportive of Netanyahu’s attempted extermination of Gazans – he said directly that Israel should be supported to “finish the job” of extermination. Republican senators such as Lindsay Graham call for ‘sanctions’ against the ICC, and even against other nations who cooperate with the ICC over Netanyahu and Gallant – this could easily include Britain, France and Germany, who have placed themselves under its jurisdiction years ago. Though Germany says that it would not arrest Israeli leaders supposedly because of its own history of Nazism, that stance could cause them legal problems.
These tactical differences are sharply expressed now, as the large, putatively ‘liberal’ wing of the US ruling class that still gravitates around Biden and Harris sees Ukraine as just as paramount as support for Israel if not more so. This nuance implicitly is about whether the Israel lobby calls the shots in US politics, or the presumed interests of the US itself, as well as whether China is more important as an enemy than Russia in global geopolitics. With the rise of BRICS, and the consolidation of Russia-China cooperation, they appear much too late with this. The US is far weaker, and Russia/China/BRICS are far stronger, than in Trump’s first presidency.
Trump is a pro-Zionist fascist, who denounces his liberal-imperialist opponents such as Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party as ‘communists’ and ‘Marxists’. He promises massive deportations of undocumented workers, up to 13 million by some counts, as well as to use the US military to ‘deal with’ his political opponents among the bourgeois establishment, Democratic and Republican, and to crush left-wing and pro-Palestine demonstrations and mobilisations more generally.
Trump has been one of the key authors of a years-long, accelerating coup in US bourgeois politics. It had its precursors with the end of all restrictions on corporate funding in politics in 2010 (Citizens United). But having come to power in 2016 with massive funding from Sheldon Adelson of Likud, despite not even winning the popular vote (and in fact losing by 3 million votes), Trump proceeded to replace enough Supreme Court judges during his first term of office (2017-2021) to create a far-right supermajority on the Supreme Court. While he was out of office, during Biden’s presidency, this supermajority declared that a President in office had virtually unlimited power to carry out acts ‘in his/her official capacity’ that for anyone else would mean prosecution and jail. So, the feeble attempts by elements of the US state to hold him criminally responsible for his attempted putsch on January 6, 2021, were ruled out by ‘his’ Supreme Court supermajority.
Trump and his wing of the ruling class now have control over all branches of the US executive. In addition, Trump has been cultivating an extra-parliamentary wing to his fascist movement based like all fascist movements on animating the most reactionary layers of the petty bourgeoisie. We saw the utilisation of these heavily armed layers both to help confront the Black Lives Matter protests and most obviously in the attempted putsch of January the 6th. These layers which are animated by white supremacy and Christian nationalism are an extra resource for advancing fascism in the US if Trump finds the methods of the state insufficient in the face of mass working class resistance.
Ukraine War Crushed Biden/Harris
The loss of US hegemony is accelerating and what politically crushed the Biden-Harris regime was mainly the inflationary wave that the Ukraine war sanctions against Russian oil sent through the West, and the enormous amounts the US and NATO countries vainly spent trying to defeat Russia in Ukraine. They have not succeeded in inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia; but NATO is now close to defeat itself in Ukraine. They are desperate to stave this off and have been resorting to increasingly desperate means as defeat got closer and closer over the last few months. The threat to target Russia with Western guided missiles from Ukraine was one such tactic – Putin warned on September 10th that such actions could produce a Russian nuclear response, which caused Biden to back off from the idea at that time. And the failing attempt to create another Maidan-style ‘colour revolution’ in Georgia, and similar activities in Moldova, represent attempts to open up yet another front to attack Russia, in Moldova particularly through a potential attack on the mainly Russian-speaking region of Transnistria, which is close to mainly Russian-speaking Odessa within Ukraine, another disputed territory that no doubt would join Russia if it got the chance in the context of a Russian victory in Ukraine.
The economic strains on the US population from the US bourgeoisie’s Ukraine war caused the collapse of the Biden administration’s electoral base, with Harris getting seven million less votes than Biden managed in 2020, whereas Trump won the popular vote this time with around two and a half million more votes than he did in 2020. This time, Trump won the popular vote by around that margin, two and a half million votes. The complaints that he was the victim of a fraudulent election system in 2020 stand discredited by this, but he managed to gain power anyway. Mainly because the Ukraine war and its economic consequences caused large amounts of suffering to working-class people in the US, and his promises to end the war resonated with that population. And Harris’s clear endorsement of all the actions of Biden’s administration in funding, arming and politically supporting Israel’s year-long genocide in Gaza and now its bloody rampage against the population of Lebanon also discredited the Democrats among their base among class conscious workers, particularly those from oppressed minorities.
The virtually open shift to the US and NATO powers firing longer-range missiles into Russia and Ukraine makes it very clear that Ukraine has all along been simply a Western puppet – this is not a war for ‘national liberation’ or against ‘Russian imperialism’ as social-imperialists putatively on the left like the majority of the so-called United Secretariat of the Fourth International, or the Revolutionary Communist Internationalist Tendency, like to pretend. This is a Western-initiated proxy war, barely hidden behind clouds of imperialist camouflage rhetoric, aimed at defeating and dismembering Russia, and nothing whatsoever to do with any putative rights of Ukrainians. The Russian Federation does not have any project of oppressing Ukrainians – that is why their war over the past two-and-a-half years had been so painstaking – a war of attrition with high Ukrainian military casualties but kept minimal for civilians. Russia clearly has the armed capacity to wage a blitzkrieg-type war, bomb the hell out of Ukraine and take territory rapidly, if it wanted to. But that kind of war would cause massive civilian casualties, and today’s Russian politicians do not seek such bloodshed. Ukrainians are regarded as a fraternal people, not targets for indiscriminate terror. It is the West that is inflicting civilian casualties in this war by using petal mines, depleted Uranium weapons and now openly supplying anti-personnel landmines to attack civilians in the newly Russian territories.
Zionist barbarism. Hospital patients in Gaza forced onto death march by Israeli troop captors.
The Need for a New Communist International
Those on the Trotskyist left who claim to be consistent defencists of struggles against imperialism but have not yet unequivocally taken a side with Russia against imperialism, instead engaging in third-campist rhetoric about how Russian and Ukrainian workers should unite against Putin and NATO, ought to be forced to re-assess their wrong position by recent events involving Storm Shadow and ATACMS. The new Spartacists have been the prime example of supposedly orthodox Communists/Trotskyists who have been promoting these erroneous views recently. But the idea that this is in any way a national war between Ukraine and Russia ought to be completely blown away by these events. Even the most dull-witted should be able to discern that the Ukraine conflict is now, and always was, fundamentally a defensive and progressive war by Russia aimed at defending this non-imperialist, ex-workers’ state against imperialist-planned dismemberment.
World War III is very much on the horizon. Some may even argue that it is already underway. That is a matter of interpretation at this point. Trotsky’s remarks about the leadup to World War II make sobering reading today:
“Under the increasing tension of capitalist disintegration, imperialist antagonisms reach an impasse at the height of which separate clashes and bloody local disturbances (Ethiopia, Spain, the Far East, Central Europe) must inevitably coalesce into a conflagration of world dimensions. The bourgeoisie, of course, is aware of the mortal danger to its domination represented by a new war. But that class is now immeasurably less capable of averting war than on the eve of 1914.” (Transitional Programme, 1938)
Though today we are in a different situation, as we are not facing an inter-imperialist conflict, but the threat of a war by NATO imperialism to maintain US/Western hegemony against a loose alliance of remaining workers states, non-imperialist ex-workers states (retaining significant elements of previous post-capitalist productive and state apparatus as major deformations on a weak restored capitalism), and more classically semi-colonial countries seeking to escape imperialist domination and dictat. But the West does not tolerate this kind of insubordination, and the threat of a world war to restore US hegemony and imperialist domination is very real. All these insurgent countries must be defended against imperialism as a matter of principle by the workers’ movements of the world.
Communists need to be providing revolutionary leadership in this situation, advocating anti-imperialist united fronts to deal with these barbarities. The problem of Zionism and its genocidal aggression against the Arab peoples needs to be resolved by an anti-imperialist united front. We must demand that Russia and China throw their full economic and military resources into fighting the Zionist genocide and defeating Israel in this life-and-death struggle for the Arab peoples. We advocate the independent mass mobilisation of workers wherever it is feasible. Previously we have advocated a ‘coalition of the willing’ to intervene militarily to stop the Zionist slaughter wherever it is happening – the recent Iranian retaliatory actions against Israel also underline that this is feasible.
But in the end, even an anti-imperialist united front is not completely adequate. Every such united front needs a consciously revolutionary, working-class component to make it effective and viable. The only permanent road to peace, the only solution to all the deadly problems that beset humanity in this situation, from the threat of nuclear annihilation to disaster through the capitalist-induced destruction of the biosphere, is through the creation of a mass Communist Movement internationally. We need a new world party of socialist revolution to unite all subjective communists, all consistent anti-imperialists, under one banner based on free discussion of differences, but unity in action, in pursuit of international socialism. For workers revolution is the only road to real peace!
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