The notes for this presentation (9th February) are now available to read, and the presentation and discussion are also available to listen to as a podcast.

Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 25th January 2025. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.

The elevation of Donald Trump to the White House, again, only four years after the failure of his Beer Hall Putsch, is an index of how destabilised US imperialism has become as it declines from its position of world hegemony. The analogy with Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch in 1923 is relevant, though the circumstances are not identical. Maybe we can discuss some of the similarities and differences later. But it was clear in January 2021 that Trump had both massively lost the popular vote in the US to Biden and had lost the electoral college. Yet he tried to mobilise a mob of fascists and irregulars to keep him in power by force. He did not have the support of the US state machine – that was soon clear. And so, the putsch was doomed to fail. 

He had no legitimacy in what he tried to do on Jan 6^th 2021. By rights, he should have been locked up for that, and his followers likewise could legitimately have been shot. If they were black militants, for instance, they would have been shot. And yet four years later, he is in office again – this time he did win the popular vote, and the electoral college, and that is undisputed. This is not at all a democratic achievement by Trump, but an index of the sickness and decay of US society, its bankruptcy, and its multiple senile political diseases. It reflects the fact that ‘democracy’ has fallen into massive dispute, and because of that, many of the losers in the capitalist ‘game’ are inclined to give ‘democracy’ a kick by voting for an openly anti-democratic figure.

But that as it may, not only was Trump elected in a classic, clear manner, though his margin of victory was not huge – he won as a convicted criminal, which was the first time anyone had ever done that in US history. The crime he was convicted of was a token one, if salacious – lying about an affair with a porn star and paying her off to keep quiet to not allow the publicity to stop him being elected President in 2016. Salacious, and petty. It would not even have been a felony if not linked to trying to fool the electorate. Much more serious charges, including armed insurrection and treason, could have been and should have been laid – he was clearly guilty – but were not, or at least the paler version was stalled and then ruled out of order by the judges.

And the reason why not is that he had appointed enough Supreme Court judges during his first term, to stop himself being held to account in the four years of Biden’s term. And Biden, and the US mainstream, were too cowardly to do anything about it. The congressional arithmetic in Biden’s first two years would have allowed him to expand the court with judges who were not right-wing extremists. But Biden’s people were gutless and complicit, by their failure. Which is the nature of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Even when the judges ruled that Trump, in ordering extra-legal violence “in his official capacity” as president in Jan 2021, was immune from prosecution, there was a simple way to counter that. Biden could have declared a state of emergency, rounded up Trump’s judges, and Trump himself, and had them jailed, or even shot, “in his official capacity”. The judges had just ruled that a sitting president was immune from prosecution for such extra-legal acts. A gift! Then he could have had the remaining judges countermand that judgement, henceforth, but not retrospectively. There is always a solution, if the political will exists. But the political will did not exist. Because Biden was just as reactionary as Trump, though with important differences in how that was expressed. So, what undermined Biden’s presidency, and what propelled Trump back into office?

One word: Ukraine. It wasn’t even Gaza. Everyone knows that, for all the complaints about Biden being ‘genocide Joe’ during the Gaza extermination, Trump would be worse. Trump is worse. The recent ceasefire does not contradict that. Trump pulled that manoeuvre because Netanyahu had clearly lost in Gaza and had made Israel the most hated entity on earth. It was damage limitation. The deal was a major hostage exchange, which was Hamas’ objective all along. Israel and the US could have had that in October 2023. The IDF’s Gaza campaign was collapsing because too many troops were refusing to fight, and many more suffering from mental illness because of the terrible crimes they had been ordered to commit, which they did. The Nazis knew about that problem, which is why they tried to get other fascists, when possible, to carry out their most brutal massacres. The SS Einsatzkommandos in various occupied countries.  But Israel had no one to outsource the massacres to. So, they lost to Hamas and have had to at least take a breather in their barbarity. Biden was too subservient to tell Netanyahu he had lost. But Trump has nothing to prove – everyone knows he is a Likudnik in reality. There is no contradiction between Trump brokering a ceasefire in Gaza, and his funding and encouraging the escalation and annexation of the West Bank, which is happening now. In the West Bank Hamas do not run things.

Trump also talked about Gaza as ‘real estate’, in a way similar to his son-in-law Kushner, who wants Gaza settled and the population gone. There is talk of shipping the Gaza population to Indonesia. But that is even less likely than driving them into Sinai. Hamas will defeat that. They would need a massive army and huge numbers of aircraft to do that. Plus, the co-operation of Indonesia. No chance. Indonesia has just joined BRICS, and its population mobilised to support Palestine on the scale of Yemen. Never in a million years!

Back to the West Bank. Though Hamas are there as an opposition to the stooge Palestinian Authority, it’s a different battle. And a lot of the atrocities can be carried out by armed settlers who were not in the West Bank, i.e. not by the actual IDF, who can act as backup. So, the situation in the West Bank is very dangerous. But the eruption of the West Bank will result in more wars with Yemen, Hezbollah and Iran. Syria is a problem, but it may be overcome, possibly even by Iranian/Iraqi use of force in Syria. The border between them has partially broken down, in large measure the result of ISIS. A regional war could still defeat Israel, despite Syria. And it could completely derail Trump’s administration economically. There might be closure of Straits of Hormuz to oil. Spending for arms, and arms exports for such a war, combined such an oil shock, would mean more inflation in the US.

Trump would get the blame, just as Biden got the blame for the Ukraine-linked inflation. His popularity is not great. He did not win by a landslide: Biden – or rather Harris as his stand-in – lost by a landslide because of that administration’s own failings. The same could happen to Trump. War with Iran might be a logical extension of his Zionism, but Iran can really hit back if it is hit and do very severe damage to the US economy. That fragility, despite Trump’s ultra-Zionism, is something of a deterrent to Trump carrying out that logic and involving himself in an all-out war in Iran. In its last exchange of missiles with Israel, on October 1, Iran did some very serious damage to some of Israel’s strategic air bases and intelligence bases, with ballistic missiles. Some of these are essential to an Israeli attack on Iran of the type often mooted.  Israel’s response to True Promise 2 was a fairly token one, which Iran did not bother to respond to. And the Houthi in Yemen have not only been very effective and persistent in blockading sea traffic to Israel in the Red Sea; they have also received hypersonic technology, which can only really have come from Russia, giving them extremely fast missiles that they have done considerable damage to Israel’s military with also. Hezbollah in Lebanon have suffered greatly from Israeli subterfuge – such as the pager attacks – terrorism and assassinations – but still were able to cause Israeli settlers to flee from much of Galilee because of the potent danger of their rockets. So, despite his ultra-Zionist politics, and loyalty to Likud, West Asia could be just as problematic to Trump as Ukraine for Biden.

Regarding Ukraine itself, Trump’s latest threat and ultimatum are feeble. Sensibly he rejects the firing of missiles into Russia, the hallmark of Biden and his liberal imperialist cohorts reckless risking of WWIII over the last 3 years, and particularly the months since Biden lost the election. Such sanctions have no leverage – US/Russia trade is only around $2 and half billion. A tiny amount by today’s standards. His new taxes and tariffs would make no difference. The Russians are laughing at this, the European and British imperialists are fuming, but that doesn’t count for much. Zelensky is now asking for 200,000 European troops to come to Ukraine to help, but there is no chance of that.

Regarding China, the threats do not seem to be materialising, yet. And the same contradictions at this point attend war threats against China than to Ukraine and the Middle East. They appear at odds with Trump’s America First policy, which is really epitomised by his idea of a unification with Canada and annexing Greenland to the United States, in the manner of Alaska previously, probably by purchase. The aggression symbolised by Trump’s threats to ‘take back’ the Panama Canal is only the start. One of Trump’s first acts in office this time round was to put Cuba back on the US ‘State sponsors of Terrorism’ list. He did the same to the Houthi in Yemen. As the Houthi say, it is safer to be on this list than to be regarded as a friend by the US. At least you know for certain they want to get you. Then there are potential threats to Venezuela. And any other ‘disobedient’ country in South America, even Brazil. Trump has threatened BRICS itself with sanctions/tariffs to try to sabotage the creation of a BRICS settlement currency or basket of currencies. Milei, the far-right president of Argentina, who has subjected that country to a massive neoliberal shock treatment, was an honoured guest at Trump’s inauguration. A classic privatisation neoliberal scam, at the expense of workers and the poor. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The classic neoliberal prescription.

But all in in all, this imperialist MAGA project internationally appears to involve a temporary retreat from much intervention in Eurasia, in favour of a massive expansion of Yankee power in the Americas. That reconsolidation – including an Anschluss with Canada etc, is unlikely to be achieved in Trump’s current term. That will likely be carried on by a future successor, given his age and also term limits, if some war does not blow his presidency way off course. Then, if that succeeds, the expanded, strengthened US imperialism would be ready to take on Russia, China et al, in order to seize back its world imperialist hegemony, which is currently atrophying. That appears to be what MAGA – “Make America Great Again” means, on a geopolitical level. In terms of domestic politics, it means extreme social and political reaction.

There is Project 2025, which Trump denied was his programme, but what we have seen resembles this anyhow. The examples are manifold, and we undoubtedly will not capture all of them here. All we can do is point to a selection and hope we have nailed down the most important. Still on the international level for the moment, but with massive domestic implications, there is the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organisation. Witch doctor, anti-scientific politics in both cases, irrespective of the bourgeois and treacherous nature of those bodies. This endangers the US population, who will become aware of this. This will lead to a big backlash at some point.

There are the mass deportations, including of migrants who came to the US legally under Obama. That will end up in court. But you know …. The Supreme Court is a Trump-dominated body. The attempt to abolish birthright citizenship. That is explicitly at odds with the 14^th Amendment of the US constitution. Will the Supreme Court side with Trump against the letter of the US Constitution? Who knows, it’s possible, likely even. There are US states declaring that foetuses are people. Women who seek abortions can be literally treated as murderers. That is the result of the abolition of Roe vs Wade, a previous action of Trump’s court, which happened when Trump was not in power. The possible criminalisation of the use of the postal service to convey abortion-related medication. In effect making it practically impossible to distribute the medical basis of abortion rights, even in states where abortion is legal. This has not yet happened, but it is on the cards. The US population does not want these things – about 60% support abortion rights, polls show.

The abolition of executive orders (!!) going back to Lyndon Johnson, direct from the civil rights movement, that forbid discrimination on grounds of race, sex etc. Why were they never made actual laws? Because the Democrats are cowardly and treacherous. Musk wants the Supreme Court to declare the National Labour Relations Board, which was created in the 1930s by Franklin D Roosevelt to enforce basic regulation of working conditions, unconstitutional. Laying the basis for huge attacks on a whole body of labour rights that goes back to the working-class upsurge of the Great Depression, and the organisation of the CIO, etc. There is no doubt much more. It all needs to be studied and analysed in depth, to prepare a detailed indictment of Trump’s administration.

But even this is enough to be able to see that this is no ordinary administration, Republican or Democratic. This involves in an all-out assault on labour rights and democratic rights that exceeds anything in the previous history of the United States, since the Civil War at least. It far exceeds the Reagan administration’s attacks, which were bad enough, but did not really seek all out, open war on things like the NLRB and the basic gains of the Civil Rights movement in terms of legal equality.

The real meaning of the ‘war against woke’ is revealed in Musk’s Hitler salute at Trump’s inauguration. Not only did he give the Hitler salute, but he also recited a paraphrase of a key neo- Nazi motto immediately afterwards.

“It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured”.

Which as one sharp-eyed commentator noted, is a cut-down reference to the famous 14 words of neo-Nazis associated with that salute:

“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

The was put together by the US Nazi movement known as “the Order”. It was described by the Anti Defamtion League (ADL)  as “the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world” – ironic, because the ADL, which characteristically smears all defenders of the Palestinians as anti-Semitic, has excused Musk and tried to deny that he performed a Nazi salute. This is somewhat different to the Biden administration’s involvement in promoting Nazism in Ukraine, which is in tune with what every administration, Dem or GOP, has done since WWII. As Karl Marx once put it:

“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).

With Musk, they are now going semi-naked at home also. That is new(-ish).

At this point, Trump has come to power by constitutional means, and there are likely to be limits on what he can do, to some extent. But the Supreme Court, which he appointed in his first term, has given him wide latitude for extra-constitutional actions. And he pardoned the Jan 6, 2021 insurgents. He has the beginnings of a private army, though not really the developed cadre that Hitler had in 1933. Though that is likely to grow and consolidate. There are resemblances. Though many who voted for him are not fascists, some are very misguided workers with a degree of class consciousness, there is a very strong whiff of fascism running through his administration. And the workers movement and the left needs to err on the side of caution and realise that they are now operating in a quasi-fascist environment under this administration. There is a need for anti-fascist united front tactics in dealing with this administration. There is a need for mass struggles against it. The US left has to prepare itself to lead them.

This issue focuses on a number of international issues of world-historic importance: Donald Trump’s rise to power in the US and the implications of that for world politics and the threat of World War. Also, the ceasefire in the genocidal attack on the people of Gaza. And the attempted martial law coup in South Korea in December, and its implications.

We have several important articles –  the most immediate being the one on the back page denouncing the anti-democratic and fraudulent restrictions on the national Palestine Solidarity March in London on 18 January, This was done by the Starmer government at the behest of the Zionist lobby personified by  the extremist Rabbi of the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street, which provided a mendacious pretext to prevent national Palestine marches from assembling outside the BBC, the state broadcaster and mouthpiece for Zionist propaganda. The arrest of Chris Nineham, the chief steward of the march was done on provably false charges of leading an illegal march to supposedly break through police lines. Ben Jamal, the National Secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was subsequently served with the same charge. Filmed evidence shows police officers encouraging marchers to filter through their lines into Trafalgar Square. It was obviously a pre-arranged deception involving senior cops and Starmer’s Zionist clique in government, which has now shown itself to be more mendacious than Sunak’s government regarding the Palestine marches. Recall that Braverman was forced out as Home Secretary partly because of similar attempt at openly undemocratic attacks on Palestine protesters that went further than Sunak was prepared to go.

Then there is our article on Trump’s ascent to the White House, and his apparent attempt to re-orient US imperialism to expansionism in the Western Hemisphere, with an apparent retreat from the kind of global confrontation, particularly with Russia, engaged in by the liberal-imperialist Biden administration. Trump’s demand for annexation of Canada as the 51^st state of the Union is a grotesque, comic book policy that certainly resembles some aspects of Hitlerism – like the 1938 Anschluss with Austria. The demands for Greenland have a similar connation to the purchase of Alaska from Russia in the 19^th Century. And the threats to simply seize the Panama Canal are just a reprise of classic US aggression in the Western Hemisphere. But if it does turn out to be the case that the US under Trump retreats from military interference in places like Ukraine, this could be a coherent programme of imperial retrenchment, also foreshadowing large-scale US aggression in Latin America.

A key exception to such a possible retreat concerns Zionism. The joint statement of the LCFI and ClassConscious on the Gaza ceasefire, which was rapidly put into force as Trump prepared to take office, is the second major article in this issue. We point out that Trump’s evident involvement is designed to save Netanyahu from the consequences of a rapidly approaching defeat in Gaza, as Hamas remains intact, is politically stronger than it was before the attempted genocide and has obviously not been defeated. The IDF in Gaza was suffering large scale refusals to fight and mental illness among its troops, the product of the savage and inhuman atrocities it has committed against hundreds of thousands of Gaza civilians, more than half of who are children. We point out that the only positive news that the West and the Zionists have is the collapse of Assad in Syria, which gave them a breathing space, but still both the Lebanon and Gaza ceasefires derive from Israeli weakness, not strength. The fact that Hamas has forced Israel to agree to a large-scale prisoner exchange is proof of that. Undoubtedly Zionist aggression continues, they are trying it on in the West Bank and may well return to their genocide in Gaza, but the Israeli state itself shows signs of weakness and instability because of the genocidal onslaught on Gaza.

The other major article on current events in this issue is an article by the Bolshevik Group of Korea about the attempted martial law coup of Yoon Seok-yeol, the right-wing President of South Korea, in December, and the heroic movement that fought it and forced the parliament to reject the action, causing its collapse. It goes into considerable detail about the movement, and the background of South Korea as a neo-colonial client of US imperialism, and the counterrevolutionary front line against North Korea. Which is still a deformed workers’ state, the defence of whose revolutionary gains is still top of the agenda in that region. We have important differences with the Bolshevik Group on the wider question of the nature of China, though for somewhat different reasons we both defend China against imperialist attacks from without as well as imperialist proxy attacks from within. But notwithstanding that, the article is informative and interventionist towards the movement resisting the coup, which is evidently a by-product of US aggression in the region aimed to maintain US hegemony.

The other major article in this journal is the third part of the LCFI’s letter to the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). This focuses on what could be loosely called the ‘Russian Question’: the nature of the two giant former workers states, Russia and China, and the reasons for imperialism’s new Cold War against both states today. It addresses the new Spartacists’ changing positions on Poland in 1980-81, where in our view they are showing some signs of political softness on pro-imperialist nationalism in East Europe and elsewhere. We are also critical of much of the old Spartacists’ propaganda in defence of the Polish deformed workers state at that time as marred by Stalinophile and even anti-Polish and anti-union sentiment. But we insist on the correctness of the understanding that by late 1981 Solidarność had embraced capitalist restoration as its real programme and needed to be opposed included by support for actions by the Stalinist regime to stop that formation taking power. The new Spartacists’ material has some important ambiguities on this, which we challenge. We also address their correct re-embrace of Trotsky’s historic position from the late 1930s of calling for an Independent Soviet Ukraine, as a revolutionary political weapon both against the Stalin regime and against the Polish rulers of Western Ukraine before WWII. On this latter question we appear to have substantial agreement – we consider the Robertson-led Spartacist tendency’s renouncing of Trotsky’s position to be a serious Stalinophile error.

We then address some of the contradictions in their attitude to Post-Soviet Russia, and today’s China of the billionaire capitalist-led bureaucratic ‘Communist’ regime which we note, has an ideology that is a bastardised parody even of Mao’s form of ‘Communism’. We first take up at some length their self-contradictory material on the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s Special Military Operation since 2022.  Their refusal to take a side in the conflict that really began in 2014, with the far-right, US funded Maidan coup, that led directly to Russia’s Special Military Operation in February 2022, is at odds with their declared understanding that Russia is not an imperialist power. That being the case, and given the fact that the imperialist intervention since 2014 was self-confessedly aimed at using Ukraine as a proxy weapon aimed at dismembering Russia for the benefit of imperialism, it is obligatory for Marxists to seek to mobilise the working class in the West to defend the Russian and Russian-speaking people of the Donbass/Novorossiya, and Crimea, against this genocidal threat, which means giving support to the victory of the Russian army.  We note that they themselves admit that this is a proxy war with NATO yet use rhetoric about the working class having no side, calling for simultaneously overthrowing both imperialism and the Putin government of Russia. This is a third-campist type error, in our view.

We then counterpose our understanding of Russia and China to theirs, as both representing distinctive variations of a new, problematic form of capitalism massively deformed by decades of social and economic development under a degenerated form of proletarian dictatorship. That is, under a partial, damaged, but real transition towards a higher mode of production – socialism. That these states are not imperialist, and in fact act as a force able to resist imperialist hegemony within a bourgeois framework in alliance with the bourgeoisie of semi-colonial nations, which is taking shape with formations like BRICS. We consider that today’s threat of WWIII is predominantly not an inter-imperialist war, nor a classic situation of imperialist antagonism to the proletariat in power – there are only two deformed workers state left (Cuba and North Korea). But rather a war of imperialism against Russia and China to re-establish the domination of declining imperialism over this bloc of bourgeois states with ‘socialist’ deformations, and much of the Global South.

The idea that China, after decades of ultra-Bukharinite marketising policies that have engendered a situation where China has more billionaires than the US itself (albeit much less wealthy ones), is still a workers’ state, contradicts Trotsky’s condemnation of Bukharin’s marketising policies of the late 1920s in the USSR as constituting an immediate danger of capitalist restoration.  We consider both Russia and China to be deviant forms of capitalism, though with considerable secondary differences between them. Their capitalisms are both massively deformed by their post-capitalist ‘socialist’ heritage, and are new, problematic products of combined and uneven development. Both in that sense deserve defence against imperialist attack and imperialist sponsored ‘regime change’ attacks, but not on grounds that either of them remain as workers states.

However, within that framework, even though the new Spartacists consider China still to be a workers’ state, we are critical of some of their attitudes to concrete issues involving defence of China. Including seemingly uncritically taking up the cause of the Uighurs, which have become an imperialist cause celebre with false allegations of genocide.  Also, the new Spartacists’ condemnation of China’s highly effective efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, despite its likely origin in China. Despite not agreeing with their mechanical and wrong attitude to China we consider their attitude in these cases is not truly defencist of China.

This concludes the serialisation of the LCFI’s substantial letter to the new ICL, and we look forward to future engagement and debate between our tendency and theirs, which notwithstanding some very important differences, appears to be refreshingly open to both political debate and some constructive political activity that is a break from the sectarian, cultist practices of the Spartacists under the very flawed leadership of James Robertson. In this sense, we hope our engagement with them can be a contribution to re-arming the Trotskyist movement to meet today’s challenges.

We Need a Union-Centred Militia to Defend the Workers Movement and Democratic Rights!
 

On 18^th January, Keir Starmer’s Zionist ‘Labour’ government launched an all-out attack on the right to protest the genocide of the Palestinian people. Two days previously, the agreed route of the national Palestine Demonstration, which was scheduled to begin at the BBC Headquarters at Portland Place, Central London, which has been a regular starting point for the dozens of marches against the genocide that have taken place over the last 15 months, was declared a forbidden zone. On the day, protesters were instead directed to gather in Whitehall. They were in fact blocked in Whitehall and prevented from marching anywhere else by police lines and a large cohort of police vans. Paramilitary cops were mobilised from around Britain – some were spotted from as far away as Wales.

As political pressure built up against this abuse of those who had travelled from around Britain to demonstrate against the genocide, the cops actively allowed marchers to allow a contingent to pass through police lines to march northward to place flowers and children’s clothes at the BBC. Having left Whitehall, that contingent was stopped again in the North-West corner of Trafalgar Square, which is only yards away from the top of Whitehall. They agreed to lay their flowers at that point in Trafalgar Square, but were then attacked by the police, and the chief steward of the march, Chris Nineham, vice-chair of the Stop the War Coalition, was arrested in a outrageously physical manner by these thugs. He was kept in Walworth Police Station overnight and eventually charged under ‘Public Order’ legislation with leading an illegal march.

He has been given outrageous bail conditions that amount to a apartheid South African style ‘banning order’ in effect – he is not allowed to attend any kind of protest whatsoever.  Now it appears that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Labour left MP’s, are to be ‘interviewed under caution’ by the police for their participation in the march out of Whitehall, which the cops agreed to. It appears that orders then came from above, perhaps from Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, or Starmer himself, to set this trap with the police lines and then smash the march up. This after the cops tore up the route of the march from Portland Place, which was agreed with them by the organisers weeks ago, on the obviously politically motivated say-so of Zionist politicians, and their far-right Rabbi friend. What Corbyn and McDonnell may or may not be charged with is anyone’s guess, but this is clearly an attempted extension of the Zionist witchhunt in the Labour Party to the sphere of the state and so-called ‘law and order’. Its completely fraudulent, desperate stuff, necessarily so because in the face of a holocaust committed by Zionists, the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear has little traction outside the circles of true believers in the Zionist cult within the ruling class. So they resort to crude lying, thuggery and frame ups instead

Their fraudulent story is that supposedly a synagogue in Great Portland Street, which is not even on the route of the banned march, would allegedly be ‘disrupted’ on a Saturday afternoon (the Jewish Sabbath) by a Palestinian event in the vicinity. This is clearly a politically motivated fraud, as apart from the Synagogue being a third of a mile away from the BBC HQ, on a different road entirely, the Rabbi in charge, Barry Lerer, is a far-right extremist who travels to Jerusalem for the annual ‘March of Flags’ though the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in East Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia:

“The event, which passes through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter in East Jerusalem, is regularly attended by far-right Jewish Israelis, including the far-right Lehava organisation, and is often accompanied by violence, especially against the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Attendees have been regularly seen chanting racist and anti-Arab slogans such as “death to Arabs,” “A Jew is a soul, an Arab is the son of a whore,” and “may your villages burn”…. Palestinian residents frequently shutter their businesses and homes on the day of the march for fear of being subjected to violence from Israeli marchers, or after being ordered to do so by the Israel Police, who also institute closures and checkpoints in and around the Old City.” ?(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Day_march)

Under the incitement of Keir Starmer, whose support for Zionism “without qualification” is a matter of public record, the Metropolitan Police behaved toward Palestine Solidarity Protesters rather like the Zionist cops described above.

The ceasefire in Gaza marks a serious political defeat for the Zionists, and that has driven some of these people into a frenzy. The attacks on democratic rights come from a position of weakness, not strength. The Zionist cult, which appears to have Western politics sewn up, is in deep trouble and could implode. Knowledge of Israel’s holocaust has not been possible to suppress – it is the best known genocide in history thanks to social media.

Crude police thuggery and racism, 1970s style, has made an overt comeback in Britain over the Gaza protests. Video went viral of the cops brutally and repeatedly punching an Asian man, Waseem Yusuf, who was carrying a Palestinian flag at a protest event in Tower Hamlets in July. He was released without charge at the time, though he was injured and subject to medical treatment ever since. Now he has been charged with resisting arrest and ‘assaulting’ the thugs who are clearly visible brutally beating him.

Zionism is as potently anti-democratic and genocidal as Nazism, as millions are learning. And the working class movement does have the means to defend itself against such threats. It comes from the tradition of the Bolsheviks, not British social-democracy. As Leon Trotsky noted in the 1938 Transitional Programme, which crystallised that experience:

 “In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defence. It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organize groups for self-defence, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.

“It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press.”

The fascistic nature of Zionism, and the permeation of bourgeois politics by the cult of Zionism, means that the working-class movement must re-discover the revolutionary tradition of Bolshevism in combatting fascism. The future depends on it.

Donald Trump is ensconced in the White House, and it is an open question what will be the impact of this in several major conflicts around the world. Regarding the second Trump presidency and Ukraine:  it is an open question what will happen now. Despite some challenges from leftists alleging that he has said nothing about this, he has attacked the firing of US ATACMS missiles into Russia, nominally under the aegis of Ukraine, but really fired by US military staff and using targeting data from US satellites and called it very dangerous – embodying the potential to trigger WWIII. He has also stated, since the election, that the expansion of NATO to Ukraine was what caused the Ukraine war. A justified response to this might be “No Shit, Sherlock”, but this has been unsayable in bourgeois politics for years. But not anymore.

What will happen now is anyone’s guess. Trump wants to negotiate a deal to ‘freeze’ the Ukraine conflict. That would be a Minsk III, in effect, or perhaps another Astana  – the 2020 deal that supposedly ‘froze’ the Syrian conflict and allowed the jihadist enclave of Idlib to remain untouched so it could later run amok. There is no chance Russia will go for that, and nor should it. Russia is winning, and from the point of view of the international working class, is fighting a progressive war against imperialist-backed genocidal Nazi attacks on the Russian/Russophone people of Donbass and Crimea. Just recently in Ukraine, Russian forces have liberated Kurahkovo, a major fortified stronghold in what was the Donetsk Peoples Republic (now acceded to Russia), comparable to Artyomovsk, which gives Russia a virtual open door to liberate larger spaces in the North West of the DPR, and further protects Donetsk city which has been a major target of Nazi attacks on DPR civilians using petal mines, cluster bombs and depleted uranium.

Some Russian commentators, for instance those who are vocal on the Russia Today TV channel, think that when such initiatives fail, Trump will re-escalate the war, to give himself cover so he doesn’t get accused to handing Ukraine to Putin. But that may also be difficult for him, as the US has limited means these days, and he evidently has other things in mind in his US-nationalist project. Such as stealing the Panama Canal for the US, potentially forcing Denmark to sell Greenland, and even a proposal for unification of the US with Canada. He refuses to rule out force regarding Panama and Greenland.

What he is looking for regarding Canada is Hitler-like and recalls the creation of the Greater German Reich in 1938 through unification or Anschluss with Austria. That might appear at first glance to be an absurd, comic-book policy, but it could have coherence as the expression of Trump’s programme of MAGA (Make America Great Again) in the context of his mooted US retreat from NATO and interfering in Europe. His calls for European NATO countries to spend more on ‘defence’ to make up for a US defeat make logical sense as part of this programme.  This could be a coherent, Hitler-like programme to rearm the US for a future assertion of US power – at first locally in the Americas.

Is Trump really going to coerce Denmark to cede – or sell – Greenland to the US? Greenland is a Danish colony, albeit with ‘home-rule’. It is a large expanse of snow and ice and has a very small population, partly of indigenous Inuits (Eskimos), partly of long-time inhabitants of Scandinavian ancestry, when Norse voyagers settled there over the last 1100 years or so. This relationship therefore long predates capitalism and Greenland stayed with Denmark when it separated from Norway in the early 19^th Century. Its total population is small, only around 52,000 people.

Greenland is wealthy in minerals. And the seas around it that might become important sea routes as the Arctic unfreezes because of global heating. Trump of course is totally hostile to any programme of preserving the natural environment from global heating, and his programme of capitalist expansion banks on such warming preceding apace. This is an insane policy from the point of view of medium-term human survival, but that is what his MAGA project is all about – grabbing what the US oligarchs can today to fortify them against the working masses who will inevitably revolt against the destruction of their habitat. Trump says obtaining Greenland, and even Canada is a ‘national security issue’. And some elements of this claim to Greenland have even seeped into popular consciousness in the US.  The 2020 Hollywood sci-fi movie Greenland, where Greenland is used as a shelter for part of the US population in the face of human extinction from a collision of Earth with a comet, shows how the Trumpian demand for Greenland has entered popular consciousness and culture. Anschluss with Canada and buying Greenland the way the US bought Alaska from Russia in the 19^th Century might be feasible as a policy of US retrenchment. This has echoes of the way Hitler rearmed Germany in the 1930s, though it may not be identical in the sense of actual terrorist dictatorship. Whether the US bourgeois will allow Trump to go as far as that is not clear yet. And how the US working class will respond either way is not clear either.

Trump alleges that the Panama Canal is now controlled by the Chinese Army and supposedly rips off the US. This is self-pitying nonsense in factual terms, and the way that the US has often justified its aggression, echoing Zionism with a fake ‘victim’ narrative. But aggression in Central America and the Caribbean has been normal behaviour for US presidents since the 19^th Century at least. There is also the potential threat to Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, which could be a major issue if Trump’s policy really is an Anschluss with Canada and regional retrenchment of the US in the Americas as a preparation for more expansion later. Trump is 78 years old and may not achieve such an imperialist retrenchment during this presidency. He may want a legacy that points this way though, for his upcoming Vice-President James. D. Vance to continue with in the future. 

In terms of the conflicts and genocide in the West Asia/Middle East region, this also interacts with Trump coming to power. Netanyahu is keen on Israel being provided with enhanced opportunities to attack Iran now that Syria has fallen to the pro-Israel/Türkiye jihadists. But some in Israel are even talking of war with Türkiye and predicting that the rise to power of the ISIS/Al Qaeda-derived Hay’at al-Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadists led by Ahmad Al-Sharaa (Julani) in Syria will not end well for Israel. This may be just paranoia and Islamophobia, as HTS are ferocious in their sectarian terror against non-Sunni Syrians, but servile to Israel. But Israel has already taken unprecedented, drastic military action against the ‘new’ Syria, while its government was in collapse and flux, including destroying much of its army, navy and air force, occupying an expanded chunk of the South Syrian Golan Heights, Mount Hermon, and even Syria’s most important dam, the Al Mantara – amounting to 40% of Syria’s water facilities. This potential collapse of Syria into a failed state for a period makes Türkiye, a powerful and mainly Muslim country, appear nearer to Israel in geopolitical terms, and the Zionists regard any such coherent state as a threat to them. The complication is that unlike Syria, Iraq and Libya, Türkiye is a NATO member.

Meanwhile, among the sectarian brutality and massacres in Syria carried out by HTS and co, a resistance movement operating has emerged in Syria, which is secular. It is operating and may gain traction. ISIS, and the Syrian and Iraq conflicts, have effectively demolished the Sykes Picot line between Syria and Iraq, drawn by British and French imperialism in WWI. This could lead to a broadening of conflict across the Sykes-Picot line and potentially redraw the map. If there is an insurgency by secular/Shia/Alawite/Christian forces they could get help from Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon. These are possibilities. And Trump was earlier threatening not only Iran, but possible military intervention in support of Israel against the genocide victims in Gaza. The current ceasefire, however, looks suspiciously like a recognition of Israel’s parlous state and an attempt by Trump to save Netanyahu from defeat and oblivion. And Trump is also threatening US sanctions a against the International Criminal Court because of its arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.

Indonesia joining BRICS as a full member is a significant step forward. BRICS is a very limited anti-imperialist economic bloc and has proven open to infiltration. Saudi Arabia, around the edges of BRICS played an important role in undermining Syria. Idlib should have been crushed, but instead by Russian, Chinese and Syrian agreement an illusory deal, at Astana, was done in 2020 to ‘freeze’ the Syrian conflict, allowing the imperialist-backed jihadists to rearm. And Syria compromised with Saudi and the UAE for re-admission to the Arab League. That did not stop Assad being overthrown by forces allied to those countries. This was a similar mistake to the Minsk agreements earlier in the Ukraine conflict, but much more costly.

But the function of BRICS is to negate US-Western sanctions against ‘disobedient’ global South countries. ‘No sanctions’ against members is a basic rule of BRICS. This is its progressive aspect. Cuba and Bolivia are now associate members of BRICS, Brazil BRICS chair this year, as Russia was last year. But Brazil vetoed the admission of Venezuela: a capitulation to the current Yankee campaign of threats and aggression against BRICS. Though they didn’t veto Cuba, which is still a workers’ state, and still more hated by the US. This shows inconsistency and an empirical, cowardly response to US bullying and threats. Such things won’t endear Lula and co to Trump.

Then we have the various travails of Elon Musk, the far-right oligarch and world’s richest man, and Trump. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook, Instagram and Threads are abandoning fact checkers and Facebook is supposedly opening to political postings again. Facebook will apparently recommend political posts again, which is contrary to its practice in the past few years. This appears like grovelling to Trump and his ally Musk, who owns X/Twitter, though the left may benefit from it for a while. What happens in the US on social media is likely to spread here. For now, these right-wing populists feel secure and that they have popular backing.

However, with the discredit of liberalism, when the right-wing screw up – they will – they are likely to face class-anger, not liberalism. Luigi Mangione’s shooting dead of the grotesque, profiteering CEO of United Healthcare in the US, and the popular Robin Hood type celebration of him are a sign that class sentiment is building. Quite a few of those who sympathized with that attack are Trump supporters. Though obviously Trump is not too keen, and neither is Musk. Such sentiment is an implicit threat to the entire elite of neoliberal oligarchs.

Musk conflicts with many in the Trump camp over immigration policy. Musk wants skilled IT workers to get visas and be able to work for employers such as himself. Trump’s other far-right ideologue/bedfellow, Steve Bannon, denounced him in bilious terms as a ‘racist’ for mooting that idea. Musk’s activities abroad are those of a dangerous far right provocateur. That is also true of his attacks on political figures in the UK, including Starmer and Jess Philips, over so called ‘grooming gangs’. Not that we sympathise with them, but we denounce Musk’s filth about grooming gangs, as he is trying to incite the far right against the Muslim communities in the UK of South Asian descent. He is even intervening to promote the imprisoned fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) against Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform. In Germany, Musk is promoting the AfD (Alternative for Germany) far right party – and not primarily because of its widely known and popular hostility to German support for Zelensky in Ukraine. This is just as much about the AfD’s general reaction and Islamophobia. The AfD is similar to Trump and Victor Orban in Hungary:  hostile to the Ukraine war, but very pro-Zionist. That’s why Musk likes them, evidently. Musk is a dangerous fascist oligarch. We live in interesting times, to put it mildly.

The ceasefire in Gaza, after 15 months of Zionist genocide, was forced on Israel by the resistance of the Palestinians. However, the form it is taking, with the very-Zionist incoming Trump administration apparently dictating events to Netanyahu and his cabinet, is choreographed to try to save Netanyahu’s regime and limit the damage to the Zionist settler project overall. Trump wants to use this situation, as well as the very convenient, orchestrated overthrow of the Assad government in Syria, overrun by US/Israeli/Turkish backed jihadists, to try to salvage the so-called Abraham Accords – the ‘normalisation’ of Israeli rule over the Palestinians with the US’s historical Arab collaborators: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. The Syrian collapse is being used to counterbalance Israel’s failures in Gaza and Lebanon and try to get the Zionist show back on the road. But that would not even be necessary if Israel had not visibly failed in Gaza.

All of Israel’s objectives in Gaza – the defeat and destruction of Hamas, the depopulation of Gaza, or the extermination of its population, and the settlement of the enclave, have not happened – so far at least. Many have been killed, but the population refused to flee – and forced Israel to take responsibility and be seen to murder them. This has demoralised and discredited Zionism worldwide. 

Hamas’s objective on October 7^th, 2023, was the seizure of many Israeli captives to exchange for Palestinian hostages, and to survive Israel’s brutal onslaught, which they knew would come on the heels of any serious revolt against the Zionist occupation. On the table now is a major hostage exchange, with many Palestinians exchanged for each Israeli, and a complete, though phased, Israeli withdrawal. Though Israel routinely breaks ceasefires and will break this one, it is the Israelis who were desperate for it, as was the case in Lebanon.

Ther appears to be a collapse of IDF morale, refusals to fight by, to the Zionist ruling class, a worrying number of troops. The Israeli army is said to be collapsing, with mental breakdowns widespread. Hamas’ tunnel network still works well despite the massacres. Israeli troops are ambushed, booby trapped, and taking multiple causalities. But what that is really driving the problems with the IDF is something the Nazis were aware of, tried hard to avoid, and found partial ways round.

If troops are ordered to commit terrible atrocities, they will fall victim to mental illness. The Nazis’ way of avoiding this was SS Einsatzkommandos – getting other forces in occupied countries to carry out the worst crimes.  Israel tried this in the 1980s in Lebanon with the Falange, and the so-called South Lebanon Army, but it didn’t work very well. Partly because, though the Israelis were brutal, they had not then reached the threshold of genocide – and their clients not trustworthy. In Gaza they have no such clients. They were not able to get anyone to fight for them, except for some help with arial reconnaissance from Western countries. They had all the arms they needed from external imperialist backers, courtesy of the Zionist lobby. But that’s no shield. They failed to defeat Hamas.

Israel could not recapture those taken. And now they are going to exchange them. That was Hamas’ aim all along. Netanyahu knew retrieving them without a deal was not possible, but it was an opportunity for genocide, for massively reducing if not eliminating the Gaza population. The regime may have killed half a million Gaza Palestinians. The Lancet, last summer, estimated at least 186,000 dead: Susan Abulhawa, the Palestinian scientist who debated Gaza for the Palestinians at the Oxford Union, estimates up to 500,000. No one believes the figures of approaching 50,000 from the civilian Gaza health ministry. They had no chance of keeping count of those buried under rubble, starved to death, or died of thirst, or of injuries that could not be treated because the medical systems were destroyed, or from diseases that were likewise untreatable.

Why now? Trump’s coming has made it possible, but not in the sense that Trump would have it, that his threats of ‘hell’ if the hostages were not released caused Hamas to capitulate. Hamas have not capitulated. They held out for a hostage exchange and got one. That is the achievement of their main war aim. It appears the advent of Trump has given Netanyahu the chance to finally to capitulate. With the Democrats in power, even though they did not dare to cross Netanyahu and the lobby during an armed conflict, part of them might go after Netanyahu in the aftermath. The Democrats have a wing that does not like Zionism very much, though they are too cowardly to do anything about it during armed conflict. If the Israeli genocidal ‘war’ had ended with the Democrats still in power, they might have found their voice and stuck the knife in. The deal now is unchanged from one that was on offer from Hamas since May 2024, but was rejected by Israel as Netanyahu feared being ousted in the aftermath. But things had reached the point where the Israeli assault on Gaza had to end one way or another, because the IDF faced disintegration otherwise.

But the US Republicans led by Trump are as close to Likud as you can get. They will try to protect Netanyahu, and to protect Israel from genocide charges, which for all the Zionist hysteria and witch hunting in bourgeois politics, are an explosive question. It is precisely because the Zionists are so morally tarnished that the Zionist hysteria has risen to a crescendo. The GOP have already driven sanctions against the ICC. So, Netanyahu waiting until Trump was about to take power to do the necessary deal has a certain logic, in terms of attempted damage limitation. Though it is likely to put Netanyahu into deep trouble now from the corruption charges he faces in Israeli bourgeois politics. The far-right Jewish Power party minister Ben Gvir walked out of the government as the ceasefire came into force. The clerical-fascist Smotrich is likely to do the same. Both are hoping for an opportunity to rejoin and restart the assault on Gaza. Netanyahu tried to spin Lebanon as some kind of victory. He was only able to do that because of Syria and the confusion that the collapse of Assad caused.

But he won’t easily be able to spin this as victory, as there is going to be a hostage exchange, which presupposes that Hamas will still be the decisive power in Gaza. Israel’s US cohorts have had to admit that Hamas has gained many more recruits than it has lost volunteers fighting the genocidal attacks. That also makes the two-state sop, the extension of the collaborationist Palestinian Authority to Gaza an incredibly difficult objective. Hamas has undoubtedly far greater authority than Abbas’s collaborators. Victory in formal terms for Israel would be the crushing of Hamas and the recapture of the captives without an exchange. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza of its population and the murder of as many as possible was its key war aim, as it realised it had no chance of victory over Hamas. But it has had to concede that Northern Gaza, which it tried to empty with the exterminationist “General’s Plan” in the later part of 2024, will be repopulated. It has also agreed to vacate the Philadelphi Corridor between Southern Gaza and Sinai, which it took from Egypt by force when the genocide was in full swing. It has had to agree to fully withdraw from Gaza.

There are perhaps other domestic benefits for Trump to have the ceasefire declared literally the day before he assumes the Presidency again. By being able to claim credit for the Gaza ceasefire, no matter how temporary, and by planning to negotiate an end to the Ukraine War, Trump aims to wrap up these “forever wars” and under the false banner of being a “peacemaker”, Trump aims to actually prepare for world war.  Trump and his faction are seeking to resolve the crisis of US hegemony by re orientating US imperialist strategy to refocus on pressurizing China economically and militarily in the most aggressive way possible. This requires full mobilization of resources for a world war. It requires fascist repression at home to regiment the public to accept a manifestly crazy orientation.

Israel, built on land entirely taken by forced from the Palestinian people, is now the ultimate pariah state in the world. That cannot be sustained for long, even though a Jewish-Zionist caste loyal to Israel exists within the bourgeoisie in the West and is an object of cult-like veneration from the imperialist ruling classes. Cults can face a shock that causes them to internally disintegrate.  Zionism is in deep crisis and undermining of its authority provides potential conditions for Israel’s collapse though emigration of many settlers and demoralization of those remaining. The demand for the Palestinian right to return and the creation of a multi-ethnic workers state of Palestine becomes feasible. Documentation of this livestreamed genocide only just began. It has exposed the barbaric nature of capitalist imperialism to billions around the world, and we communists must ram home the lessons of that to build a new, worldwide revolutionary movement.