This issue centres on the racist riots that convulsed Britain in early August, and the creditable response by the left in Britain. Both lead articles analyse the events from different angles, with the back-page lead focusing in more detail on the events themselves and the government’s attitude. It notes the racism and anti-migrant chauvinism which successive British governments, Labour and Tory, have promoted for many years, which provided the background to the eruption of violent racism, and the economic decline and decay which provides its economic basis. It touches upon the question of who funds the far right in Britain today, noting the Zionist interest and influence in promoting Islamophobia and targeting the Muslim population.
The other lead article goes into this more, noting the lack of any real political distance between the government and the far-right rioters, that both support the genocidal war being waged by Israel in Gaza, though in the case of the government they are now trying to cover their tracks with fake ‘peace’ gestures. It notes that both the government and the far right have a common interest in punishing the Muslim population for their role in the mass movement against the genocide, which is now spreading to the West Bank. Starmer may may punish rioters and jail the most ardent and violent, but at the same time they agree in targeting and persecuting the left and oppressed minorities. It was not the Labour government and the cops that defeated the planned and announced mass pogrom on August 9th – it was the left and anti-racist activists acting completely independently who out-mobilised the fascists by a ratio of sometimes hundreds to one and stopped this horror from materialising. This inflicted a serious tactical defeat on the fascists, for now at least.
Though the left, the trade unions and the labour movement need to create our own military organisations – we cannot trust the police and the racist Starmer government to deal with far-right thugs.
Other articles in this issue include a detailed programmatic analysis of the political roots of right-wing populism in the current state of decline of US hegemony and the inability of the imperialist bourgeoisie to break with the nation-state, an institution that is palpably obsolete. However, the bourgeoisie is bound to it, and when capitalist logic appears to point beyond it, we see the eruption of major factional wars within the ruling class between right-wing populists, on the one hand, and supposed ‘globalists’ on the other.
We also have a statement that was earlier agreed by our international organisation, the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and the ClassConscious trend in the US and Australia, on the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July. This deals with the palpable threat of Civil War in the US. It is accompanied by an introduction by the Consistent Democrats noting what has happened since – the enforced retirement of Joe Biden from the Presidential election and the seeming rise of Vice President Kamala Harris to a stronger position in the contest with Trump.
It notes that even a Harris victory would not necessarily remove the threat of civil war, for what is driving much of it is the fear and hatred of ruling class white supremacists of the prospect of whites no longer being the majority population in the US, a change that is approaching. Egged on by Zionists who see Trump as their most fervent supporter. An entirely legitimate victory of the non-white Harris could easy precipitate an attempted overthrow. And though we abhor the Democratic Party and would not consider voting for this arch-imperialist party or especially this administration with its support for genocide in Gaza, we would advocate that the labour movement mobilise form a united front mobilisation, and in fact a military united front, to defeat any such attempt to impose Trump by such a coup.
Finally, we have a short piece noting the need for a new working-class party, addressing some of the problems involved in seeing George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain as qualified to take on that role. It is nowhere near as clear cut as that, as the article argues.
This article is being written on the 23rd August, which coincides with the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. It was on the 23rd August 1791, that enslaved people on the island of Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) rose up against French colonial rule. The uprising played a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. A slave trade that ravaged the continent of Africa with around 15 million Africans of their sons and daughters enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic to the colonised ‘new world’. Around 2 million died in the middle passage, finding themselves thrown overboard to feed fish. Between 1640 and 1807, British ships transported about 3.4 million Africans across the Atlantic to create wealth for British capitalists.
Toussaint Louverture, leaader of the Haitian Revoluton and Great Slave Revolt of 1791
Capitalism and its evil twin imperialism is responsible for war, oppression, and environmental destruction on a huge scale, holding the world to ransom and the potential collapse of the biosphere. European nations and their bastard children, the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the US, Canada, and Australia preach their advanced civilised enlightened state with claims of moral superiority, their shouts of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” as they act as the world’s police forces. In reality their colonisation and slavery have not ended but taken on a new respectful phase in oppressing the Global South with ‘trade and funding deals’, allowing corporate exploitation of the extraction of resources, leaving a wake of pollution and poverty behind, and when that fails should the natives resist, regime change, or the raining down of bombs.
Nothing epitomises this more of the value of white corporate individuals over their less worthy poor brown counterparts than the recent sinking of the luxury super yacht, Bayesian, when it capsized off the coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean. The Morgan Stanley International chair, Jonathan Bloomer, and UK tech entrepreneur, Mike Lynch, were among six people unaccounted for, with wall-to-wall coverage in the media and a well organised search and rescue attempt provided. Contrast this with around the deaths of 25,000 refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to safety. The reality is that European lives matter, others less so. Not all lives are equal. Europe is more than willing to accept this as it pays Turkey to act as its gatekeeper. Where is the outcry in the press or on the TV channels? Where is the public outcry? Where are the protests? The only guaranteed response from governments is to administer further restrictions on those seeking asylum – even making it a criminal offence to assist refugees, even saving lives at sea, which is a legal obligation under international law.
The recent riots in Britain were attributed to an explosion of racism directed towards refugees and migrants. Responsibility for this is due to the demonisation of Muslims, refugees, and migrants, carried out by successive governments. As the embers from the flames of unrest still smoulder, instead of reflection Starmer’s response has been to act tough on asylum, the victims themselves of the recent riots. His attack dog, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, has just announced a new ‘major surge’ in deportations of asylum seekers with the re-opening of two more detention centres and a promise to achieve the highest rate of removals since 2018. Detention centres are another name for prisons to place those already fleeing persecution, all designed to deter those seeking asylum. Being held in these places impacts on an individual’s mental health, sometimes leading to suicide. The UK has one of the biggest detention centres in Europe, near Heathrow airport. It is also the only European country without a maximum limit on the length of time an individual can be detained. Research has shown that asylum seekers are five times more likely to have mental health needs than the general population with 61% experiencing severe mental distress.
So much for our civilised nature and tolerant nation. But this should come as no surprise, Labour has declared its neoliberal intent and drawn its line in the sand. Its removal of the winter fuel allowance for over 10 million pensioners, while at the same time allowing energy companies who are making record breaking profits to raise energy prices by 10% later this year shows the utter contempt it has for its own citizens. Why should it care about anyone else? This is how capitalism views human beings, nothing more than a commodity whose labour is to be exploited while also being encouraged to consume and feed the system. When that productive cycle comes to an end, the parasitic nature of the capitalist system is to spit the person out onto the scrapheap to fend for themselves.
The othering and demonisation of refugees, migrants, and especially Muslims, is designed to distract attention from domestic policies but it also importantly feeds into Britain’s war narrative as well as. They are entwined. A clear example of this is how white refugees from Ukraine were immediately given sanctuary against the racist back drop of Russophobia and how these refugees were ‘just like us’, Europeans with descriptions of ‘blond hair and blue eyes’. This allowed the clamour for war against Russia in Ukraine. Contrast that with the Palestinians now facing slaughter with an ongoing genocide sanctioned by Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin. Where are the safe routes for brown Muslims trapped in Gaza being bombed with our bombs? Why? Because they are our bombs raining down. Where is the outrage against this other than through the sanitised demonstrations taking place on the streets in London. Demonstrations organised by Stop the War and the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign with the full co-operation with the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police to ensure that it doesn’t impact upon anyone. Permission granted by the authorities to object against our imperialist war with set times and set routes on set dates, anything outside of this is open to arrest.
Palestine Solidarity march in London agasint Gaza genocide, April 2024
The truth is that now not only is colonisation taking place elsewhere but that we ourselves are also being colonised. As individuals we are being stripped of our humanity, we are allowing ourselves to be conditioned to accept anything and everything being put before us as ‘truth’. We allow ourselves to yield, to become hypnotised, and act robotically to seamlessly slide into the capitalist system, to become validated by being told of our productiveness as if there is no other system to satisfy our needs. In this we have become desensitised to the suffering of others or to the complete destruction of our environment, which not only sustains us but also alongside all other life on this planet. We conveniently divert our gaze from uncomfortable truths; we see the footage coming out of Gaza of children torn limb from limb, mothers wailing that their children are buried underneath collapsed buildings. But these atrocities do nothing to wake us from our slumber. Anyone not having their conscience pricked and feeling anything but rage is just as complicit as those that drop the bombs killing children. We are complicit with our tax dollars going towards this murder. War and environmental destruction are signs that the system is broken, a system that places profit over people with profit central to imperialist greed. We as individuals are broken.
Israel’s ongoing destruction of the Palestinian population did not start on October the 7th 2023, it started in 1947-48 and has been ongoing in our name ever since. Israel is nothing but a settler colonial state, while not in the classic sense of having a mother country, it has several mother countries; those predominately being Europe and the US, particularly the former who not only saw a way out of their ‘Jewish problem’ but through collective guilt at their own appalling history of ‘Jewish hate’. Those that were going to pay for European antisemitism and the Holocaust were to be the brown Palestinians. It didn’t matter, it created opportunities, namely a European state planted right in the middle of a ‘barbaric Muslim’ Middle East, providing the colonisers and their backers a strategic foothold and undue influence in an area in abundance with black gold.
October 7th and ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ is described as another Jewish Holocaust to justify the massacre of Gaza. It plays on the European psyche and how Europe facilitated the Nazis leading to the murder of 6 million Jews. It uses the memory of those massacred to facilitate its own massacre. Those colonised have had to face atrocity after atrocity directed towards them in the name of Jewish supremacy for decades. The massacres of civilians, the incarceration of adults and children without charge or trial, often with torture, the deliberate targeting of children by snipers, and expulsion from and the demolition of homes, are everyday occurrences for Palestinians. The brutality meted out towards the Palestinians from the pariah Zionist state’s occupation forces and its backers in the US and Europe have stripped the Palestinians of their humanity. Trying to reason with colonists on a humane political level has never worked, it just returns with more violence from an occupier that sees it as a sign of weakness. Stripped naked with constant violence the oppressed eventually come to a realisation of their own power and what it is to be human by uprising. This is what happened on October 7th. They have nothing left but to rise faced with almost certain death and the death of their children.
How dare these oppressor nations talk of being civilised when using bombs dropped from advanced jets to silence the oppressed, or talk of the crime of rape when Palestinian detainees are being filmed by their captors as they are raped, or talk of children being beheaded when decapitated babies are being brought out from underneath rubble as occupation forces blow up buildings and laugh about their exploits on social media. All this under the watchful eye of the West with full material and political support. The Palestinians and Muslims in general have been reduced to zoological terms, described as ‘animals’ or ‘swarm’, even ‘cockroaches’ by those justifying this murder. How do we expect those being oppressed to find themselves and react? The only option open is to meet violent colonisation with violent resistance. Those that advocate non-violence are just as bad as those that avert their gaze. There is no option for non-violence, it has been removed as any option by their captors. The truth is that as Israel looks into the mirror it sees its own reflection. The occupation has made this resistance and its turn towards violence. When their colonial masters elevate violence as being necessary to keep order, provide safety, or economic and national stability, then it’s obvious that the Palestinians will view the same to be necessary.
For too long this oppression has been camouflaged with talk of ‘Jewish safety’ and a ‘Jewish home’, terrorism, and a two-state solution. Many on the left have facilitated this crime by raising similar concerns while ignoring a simple fact, a brutal planted coloniser and those being colonised and removed from their land. These same leftists have become nothing but mouthpieces for imperialism. Why should a ‘diaspora’ who have had no connection to a land for 2,000 years, except through religious scripture, have precedence over an indigenous population who have land titles and ties to the land running through generations? Why do modern-day Jews have a manufactured ‘right of return’ when those being dispossessed do not? How can Jews that now identify with their state of Israel claim to be unsafe when safe with dual nationality in nations that manufacture an antisemitism crisis to create a hierarchy of racism to afford privilege? How can one right of ‘self-determination’ and removal from ‘oppression’ be granted while removing others from theirs. This is the hypocrisy of the West.
Mass grave of genocide victims in Gaza
The reality is that the conditions on the ground in Palestine with Gaza destroyed and the Gazan population with nowhere to go, alongside with the annexation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank, it no longer allows for a viable Palestinian state alongside their murderous neighbour. Particularly one that has no intention of allowing it. The only option is a one-state solution. This presents problems for the coloniser, it undermines the demographic superiority of their state. Ultimately, it is for those that are occupied to decide what this one state looks like, not the occupiers. Where has history allowed the occupier to decide the terms of independence of the occupied and what sort of anti-imperialists are we should we argue against this? In the meantime, the Palestinians get to decide what their resistance looks like and what form it takes to shake off their chains. The West have no authority to moralise given their own bankruptcy.
This conflict and the bravery and resilience of the Palestinians, alongside the slide into fascism of the Israeli state will be Israel’s own undoing. It is eating itself from within as it becomes clear that oppression of the indigenous population is not leading towards ‘Jewish safety’ or solving its Palestinian problem. The drive religiously rightwards in Israel is creating political divisions, domestic unrest on the streets, increasing international ostracization, and its economic destruction. Only its Western backers are keeping Israel afloat, a West that that requires its own culture wars targeting refugees and Muslims as part of the wider ‘clash of civilisations’ pantomime to enable support for genocide.
It was no coincidence that Netanyahu said in address to the US Congress “We meet today at a crossroads of history. Our world is in upheaval. In the Middle East, Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together. Because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win. They lose.” This is a call for a wider imperialist war in the region, divide the Muslim world, and justify more aid to its chronically and psychologically ill colonial partner. They talk of barbarism. This is the language of racism. Victory to the resistance and the Palestinian struggle.
This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on August’s Attempted Fascist Pogrom, and the Left’s Successful Resistance.
The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.
Genocidaire Starmer (above) endorsed Israeli blockade of Gaza for food, water and fuel. (below) Palestinian child dying of starvation in Gaza.
Even from afar, it was obvious that the recent wave of anti-immigrant race-riots, which were in fact an attempted nationwide pogrom, was not beaten-back by Starmer and his pro-Zionist, genocide-supporting/genocide-denying government. The problem is that however many police they sent out to supposedly ‘deal with’ those who were trying to burn down Mosques in early August, they were bound to be ineffective. Why? Because the government fundamentally agreed with the rioters. As David Miller has pointed out, the leading figures who incited the riots are in effect Israeli agents. Particularly Yaxley-Lennon, the most prominent British fascist, whose political projects have been funded by Israel, through various covert channels for many years, and who has been proudly photographed with the Israeli army, riding on tanks, etc. The motive for the attacks on Muslims is retribution and intimidation of a community that has been pivotal in building the mass movement in solidarity with the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
However much the government tries to evade the point, Starmer clearly supported the genocidal actions of Israel when in an interview with Nick Ferrari of LBC on 11th October 2023, he justified Yoav Gallant’s stated intention to deprive Gaza’s “human animals” (Gallant’s words) of food, water and power. That was Starmer’s real position. Everything he says now is evasion dictated by fear of political discredit or even possible prosecution for providing political support for the crime of genocide that the International Court of Justice, considered ‘plausible’ in January. The atrocities since make it a lot more than merely ‘plausible’. As he stood to be Labour leader in 2020, Starmer made a point of stating that he supported Zionism “without qualification”. And the Labour Zionists who funded him abhor the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine just as much as the far-right thugs like Yaxley do. Though they prefer state repression, Prevent and lies about ‘anti-Semitism’ to burning down Mosques. Not a good look.
And there is the smear campaign against the grouping of independent Muslim left-wing MPs who defeated New Labour in the General Election, bizarrely accusing them of ‘intimidation’ when in fact they clearly won the popular vote. The implication being that the population don’t have the right to vote out Zionist thugs and liars. That is a clear coincidence of interest between the Starmer government and the Zio-fascists.
Another manifestation of the Starmer regime’s affinity with the far right is its support for Maidan Ukraine, which is basically run by Nazis for the benefit of US imperialism. It also has a genocidal policy, of seeking to eliminate the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, the South-Eastern part of Ukraine, and the overwhelmingly Russian population of Crimea. The evidence of Nazi domination in Ukraine is overwhelming. Even the Jewish president of Ukraine, Zelensky, who was groomed by US imperialism precisely to try to camouflage the Nazi domination of Ukraine, was filmed leading a standing ovation in the Canadian parliament for a 98-year old veteran of Hitler’s SS. Zelensky is a Zionist: part of an increasingly common phenomena of Zionist Jews willing to forgive the Nazi holocaust of Jews as long as Nazis direct their genocidal proclivities against their enemies today – Arabs, Muslims and Russians. Support for Nazi Ukraine and its supposed fight for ‘freedom’ against the Russian population native to its own country – it literally is the case that they want rid of that ‘unwanted’ population – is a point of honour for Starmer and New Labour.
Not that the Starmerites won’t throw a certain number of fascist lumpens into jail for fighting the cops. Not that some of them won’t get severe sentences and lose a lot. That’s a given. That’s what happens to overtly criminal elements who brazenly defy the police when they involve themselves in behaviour that the ruling class finds inconvenient. They get more than just a slap on the wrist. A certain number will get 10-year sentences for riot. Quite a few already have. The rise of this racist lumpenism is a product of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation and the shrinkage of the working class resulting from that. New Labour offers no relief from that economic suffering, no strategy, just more of the same. The bourgeois media works overtime to incite such lumpen layers against ‘foreigners’ to make sure they don’t revolt against capitalism itself.
This government shares many of the hatreds and bigotries of the rioters. They too want to punish refugees and migrants. They too think that Muslims should be forced to shut up about the oppression and persecution they are suffering from so often, in Britain, today. In particular, the government want to silence blacks, Muslims, and other oppressed groups who are inclined to show solidarity with the Palestinians and have been marching for 10 months against the brutal Zionist mass murder of the people of Gaza. Along with the left, who they have wilfully driven out of the Labour Party by the hundreds of thousands to prove their ‘fitness to rule’ to the billionaire capitalist class and the Zionists. In that, they agree with the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, with the provocateur Andrew Tate, with Laurence Fox, with Trump and Farage, and all the other criminal far right elements who incited these racist riots.
On 29th July a terrible triple murder of three young girls in Southport, and wounding of several other small children, apparently by a deranged, British-born teenager, was extensively lied about on social media by this fascist scum and attributed to a completely fictional Muslim refugee. Over the following week or more there were terrible attacks on migrants all over the country, mosques were attacked in attempted arson attacks. Hotels, reputed to be accommodating refugees, were also subject to arson attacks. Non-whites were physically attacked in the street by groups of racists. In Manchester a black man was challenged whether had a “problem” with “us English” – before being violently attacked. An Asian man was brutally attacked in Hartlepool simply for walking down a street that had been taken over by a mob of racist thugs. In Middlesborough, fascist ‘rioters’ set up ‘checkpoints’ on some streets to make sure that drivers were ‘white and English’ – with the threat of violence and even murder against anyone who is not. In many places these thugs fought pitched battles with the police, who in some situations were the only thing standing in the way of members of racial minorities being brutally attacked and even murdered.
On 7th August there was a call to attack Mosques, hotels being used to house refugees, lawyers who defend migrants, and other targets related to Muslims and various migrant communities. Right across the country. A British version of Kristallnacht, the massive Nazi pogrom in 1938 that laid the basis for the Nazi holocaust. The likes of Yaxley and Farage would love such a pogrom in Britain. But it never happened. And it is no thanks to Starmer that it did not happen.
What stopped it was mass demonstrations across Britain organised at short notice by the anti-racist left. The SWP’s ‘Stand Up to Racism’ front was one major locus of this organisation, but far from the only one. The many left independent campaigns that fought so valiantly in the General Election, returning five independent MP’s, along with several more near misses where the vilest Zionist racists in New Labour were challenged and came close to defeat, also threw their mass base in into the effort. From Walthamstow in East London, to Brighton, to Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and more, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, turned out to demonstrate against the fascists, to defend the Muslim communities and in support of migrants. They massively outnumbered the miserable groups of neo-Nazis who turned out. In several places small groups of fascists were massively outnumbered by anti-fascist, anti-racist demonstrators. These thugs, who were previously in fights with the cops over their supposed ‘right’ to attack minorities, suddenly had to be rescued by the same cops from huge crowds of angry anti-fascists who would have made mincemeat out of them.
This was a major tactical defeat for the fascists. And neither the government, nor the police, had anything to do with it. In fact, Keir Starmer, our non-esteemed Prime Minister, attempted to ban Labour MP’s from taking part in anti-fascist demonstrations. One prominent black Labour MP who refused to abide by this and spoke publicly at an anti-fascist demonstration in Norwich, is Clive Lewis. Unlike in the case of the 7 MP’s who had the Labour whip removed for defying him over the two-child benefit cap, Starmer has not dared to do the same to him. Which mirrors what happened with Diane Abbott in the General Election, where Starmer was forced to reinstate the whip to her after attempting to purge her for the sacrilege of publicly doubting if Jews today suffer from systematic racist oppression, as is true for non-whites. Starmer fears taking on the black community at the same time as he is waging war against Muslims.
The forces of the state did not drive back the fascists, nor did the government. Stiff sentences for some of these far-right rioters are just a fig leaf to hide the government’s inaction and refusal to mobilise politically against the far right. Because the Starmer government agrees with the far right on so many things. That is why it ran in the General Election, and for the last few years, as a flag-shagging, Union Jack-laden party advertising its ‘patriotism’ in a manner strongly reminiscent of the way Donald Trump in the US wraps his campaigns with the bloody Stars and Stripes. This symbolises its adherence to the anti-migrant creed of the Tory and Reform Brexiters.
Prior to the 2019 General Election Starmer cynically manipulated the sentiments of many in the Labour Party – including most Corbynites – who opposed Brexit, not out of any faith in the capitalist-neoliberal bloc that the EU represents, but simply because of its anti-migrant thrust. He put forward a proposal for a second referendum with ‘remain’ on the ballot paper in 2019, and called for the reversal of Brexit, simply to sabotage Labour’s election prospects under Corbyn. It is worth noting that in 2017, Corbyn tactically accepted the narrow result of the Brexit referendum and campaigned for a soft Brexit maintaining the rights of EU workers, coming close to winning the General Election, robbing the Tories of their majority. Starmer’s policy destroyed that, by a brazen demand to overrule a previous popular vote before it had been implemented. It acted as rocket fuel to propel Boris Johnson into Downing Street. But the real motive was to destroy the leadership of Corbyn, because of its modest programme of social democratic reforms, which the boss-class will not tolerate, and his relatively weak, but real, criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinians.
Hence, we have a neoliberal, Zionist government that is carrying on with the austerity that characterised the Tories. It is determined to keep the two-child benefit cap which is a major driver of terrible child poverty. It has now removed the winter fuel payment for all but the poorest pensioners, those on pension credit. This while the supposed fuel-price cap goes up. This will cause thousands of pensioners to die because of the cold in the coming winter, even Labour MPs are warning. This is taking money straight out of the mouths of pensioners in the UK, who have the worst pensions in Europe, and sending the savings to fund Zionism and Ukrainian Nazism. Like Boris Johnson, they want the bodies of pensioners to ‘pile high’ so they can fund their far-right cohorts in Israel and Ukraine.
Expecting this anti-working class, racist government to do anything to deal with the threat of racist violence is a forlorn hope. Their ‘law and order’ will inevitably be used to attack those resisting far right violence. Like the scandalous arrest, and suspension from Labour, of black councillor Ricky Jones from Walthamstow, who called for the Nazi terrorists then rampaging and terrorising minorities across the country, to be executed by throat cutting. However crudely expressed, this is a completely understandable, emotional response to large-scale racist terrorism. The fear that this attempted pogrom caused among minority communities is enormous. Such responses are natural. It would be perfectly reasonable for a left-wing government, for instance, faced with such attempted mass pogroms, to resort to summary execution of the worst participants. The idea that minorities can rely on the police to defend them against such a systematic attack is a joke. Everyone knows that the police themselves persecute and abuse ethnic minorities, and often turn a blind eye to racist crimes. The list of scandals goes back many decades, in fact centuries. In fact, if the mass demonstrations that Ricky Jones participated in had not happened, the far right would have won.
This needs to be systematised, with the creation of independent working-class militias, centred on the trade unions, with the social muscle of organised workers behind them and their capacity to cripple the capitalist economy if the state tries to crush and outlaw such defence. The pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracy that blocks such things needs to be politically defeated. That is the way to defeat fascist terrorism. This would have the effect of breaking the bourgeois state’s monopoly of organised violence. Revolutionaries in Russia used these tactics to deal with the fascist Black Hundreds.
In tandem with independent working-class action against the fascists, we need working class resistance against austerity. We need political strikes against the attacks on pensioners. We need a general strike against renewed austerity. This has the potential to unite the whole working class, as in the end, we are all destined to be pensioners. Uniting all such battles and struggles, we need to crystallise a real mass party of the working class. Such a party would not see its role as passively standing in elections, but rather using elections as a platform to garner and mobilise resistance in struggle.
Ultimately, we need to unite the many left-wing trends that have emerged from the Corbyn movement over the last several years in a project to create a broad, genuinely working-class party that can develop politically beyond social democracy, and fight for these things. This is the purpose of our involvement in the Socialist Labour Network, to try to create the conditions for such unity and political development. Our perspective should not be one of fighting for a reformist, parliamentary government that can fill in gaps while the Tories recover from their crisis. Let alone a Red Tory regime like Starmer’s. Our perspective should be to fight for a workers’ government, based on mass organisations of the working class.
5000-strong anti-fascist demonstration in Brighton,7th August, part of a nationwide wave of anti-fascist demonstrations that pushed back the far right race-rioters in early August.
Starmer and Labour swept into power in July having won a General Election by default and not merit, despite Labour’s claims of a sweeping majority on the scale of Tony Blair in 1997. It was nothing of the sort with their success being solely due to the collapse of the Conservative vote, who haemorrhaged votes to Farage and Reform. Many on the left predicted a short honeymoon period but none of us could predict that within the space of a few weeks that this honeymoon would have come to an abrupt halt. Politicians in Britain have been fanning the flames of hatred towards refugees and minorities with increasing hostile rhetoric for over a decade. This exploded when on the 29th July, the teenager Axel Rudakubana, went into a dance studio in Southport and attacked children, killing three and wounding ten other people – eight of whom were children. Despite him being born in Britain and one of the victims being the child of migrants, many accused him of being a Muslim immigrant known to the authorities. This ignited the touchpaper and provided just the excuse for racist mobs to take to the streets under the banner of protecting British children from foreign attackers.
With the new government feeling the strain of civil unrest unleashed onto the streets of Britain, community tensions, and struggling to maintain order, it is facing a threat from the far right who are claiming to speak for the British working class in the absence of a unified left. This appalling attack came only two days after the convicted criminal and neo-Nazi, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, held a ‘patriotic’ rally called “Uniting the Kingdom” in Trafalgar Square, London on 27th July. This event attracted around 20,000 ‘patriots’ to hear an array of speakers preaching nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment from their pulpit. The event also included a screening of Yaxley’s film, Silenced, which repeated false claims that he had previously made about a Syrian refugee that led to him to losing a libel case in 2021. Yaxley was due to appear at a high court hearing 48 hours after this event, accused of contempt of court for making the documentary, and in his blatant show of defiance airing this against court orders, he potentially faced prison.
After this flagrant breach, he then fled Britain and according to the Daily Mail he is now holed up in Cyprus, sunning himself where he is inciting his racist mobs on social media, attempting to portray himself as a victim for being a messenger of the ‘truth’. But he is not alone in spreading this racist poison. Others have been dog whistling and dragging British politics to the right. We have had a racist narrative coming out of Farage for years, aimed at taking Britain out of the EU, blaming migrants, refugees, and Muslims for Britain’s decline domestically and globally. Both Cameron and successive Tory leaders, and now Starmer, have sought to take him on by simply adopting the same racist rhetoric and amplifying it, albeit in more nuanced ways. The ‘hostile environment’ towards minorities and asylum seekers did not start under Therea May but farther back under Blair’s Labour.
The Labour Party have always been a party with racist tendencies and outright racist policies towards ethnic minorities, despite many members being active in anti-racist movements and attracting minorities under the pretence that it supports the working class and minorities. Blair’s neoliberal Labour was hostile to Muslims and Roma. Jack Straw the then Labour MP for Blackburn in 2006, claimed that he asked Muslim women to remove their veil when visiting his surgery. David Blunkett, the Labour government Home Secretary was even more forceful in ramming home institutional racism. On 11th November 2013, he gave an interview to Radio Sheffield when he spoke of reported tensions in Sheffield where Roma workers mainly from Slovakia had settled. His incendiary comments included “We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming community, the Roma community, because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise. We all know that”.
This was not attributed to a lone lapse of self-awareness. In 2001 after the disturbances in Burnley, Bradford and Oldham, which started with white youths attacking Asian youths, Blunkett went on to suggest that the polarisation and segregation of Asian communities was their own fault when he stated: “We need to say we will not tolerate what we would not accept ourselves under the guise of accepting a different culture.” One needs to be reminded that these comments came three months after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York by and one month after the invasion of Afghanistan with the new ‘War on Terror’ against Muslims. Labour’s imperialist mindset, which has supported wars not only in Afghanistan but also Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the ongoing slaughter in Palestine, automatically requires dehumanisation of Muslims to justify Western barbarism and the argument of a ‘clash of cultures’ to save ‘Western democracy’. This is not unique just to its ‘right wing’ but is fully ingrained within a party that supports imperialism.
Neoliberalism and the atomisation of communities
The UK has been in serious economic decline, the 2007 financial crisis and the subsequent disastrous austerity programme laying waste to public services, then through the COVID pandemic, which resulted in the ruling class overseeing one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the poor into the hands of the rich. The Tories’ taking the reins of government in 2010 led to deliberate racist dog- whistling, demonisation of refugees, and othering of communities, designed to scapegoat and hide criminal negligence and their ideologically driven programme. This appealed to the backward elements of the working class, who bought into this narrative and who then voted for a Brexit with the return of British ‘sovereignty’ with a referendum to keep them onboard. While Cameron made it clear he wanted Britain to remain in the EU, his miscalculation and poorly thought through referendum designed to stave off UKIP and in-party fighting blew up in his face. The Tories with no means to solve the underlying economic problems have had to resort to ‘culture wars’, underpinned with Britain’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, which was eventually passed onto Priti Patel, who was sacked for trying to divert money to Israel before being brought in as Home Secretary by Boris Johnson. Tory politicians like Michael Gove and Suella Braverman have consistently attacked Muslims, refugees, and the Palestinian movement with Johnson degrading Muslim women by comparing them to letterboxes.
Jonathan Ashworth, Labour Party Shadow Minister on 24th June 2024 said in an interview:
“At the moment, people coming here from the Indian subcontinent do not get retuned, they get put up in hotels and they can stay in these hotels for the rest of their lives.”
Sarah Edwards, Labour MP for Tamworth on 30th July 2024 tweeted on X a clip of her speech in Parliament:
“This is not the first time I have raised in the chamber that residents of Tamworth want their hotel back. I will work closely with the new Government and Home Secretary to end the use of the Holiday Inn for asylum purposes.”
Just five days later, on 4th August 2024 a baying mob assembled outside the Holiday Inn and started a fire in an attempt to burn refugee families alive.
While Brexit under the Tories allowed racist discourse to become normalised, Labour have been no better with racist tropes and demonisation becoming accepted within the landscape of British politics. Starmer was instrumental in Labour’s mixed messaging and ‘confusion’ in having an incoherent Brexit position, which contributed to the failure of Corbyn in the 2019 general election. This must be seen as a deliberate tactic given the wider context of inside plotting and party machinations to deliberately undermine Corbyn and Labour’s shift to the left. While the consequences leading to this current situation has returned to haunt Labour, it is becoming blatantly clear that under Starmer, the government means to continue as it began with him at the helm. They have no intention of placing the genie back into bottle. In many respects it has opened a new opportunity to introduce wider attacks on civil liberties and the right to assemble and protest. The immediate reaction was to meet police chiefs and set up a ‘standing army’ of police officers with the formation of new Violent Crime Units to support individual forces. The last person to do similarly was Maragret Thatcher, to smash striking workers. Labour have labelled these protests as ‘far right’ and seem to have a cognitive impairment when it comes to calling these rioters racists who tried to carry out a racist pogrom towards people based on skin colour, religion, and cultural differences.
Riot in Southport, where three young girls were stabbed by a teenager. False information on social media that he was a Muslim asylum-seeker led to race riots that spread across Britain in early August.
While many of these protesters have been stirred up to come out onto the streets by fascists and neo-Nazis online, many of them have no alignment with any defined right-wing political groups other than to target migrants and refugees who they see as the source of their downtrodden position. Donna Jones, the Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners went one stage further in her statement on 3rd August 2024 where she said: “I’ve spoken to people from both sides of the spectrum and the only way to stem the tide of violent disorder, is to acknowledge what is causing it.” No controversy there, however, she then went on to say “…. the commonality amongst the protest groups appears to be focused on three key areas: the desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty; the need to uphold British values and in order to do this, stop illegal immigration.” And further on she says “The government must acknowledge what is causing this civil unrest in order to prevent it. Arresting people, or creating violent disorder units, is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering; what is the government’s solution to mass uncontrolled immigration? How are the new Labour government going to uphold and build on British values?”
Many years of hollowing out manufacturing and public services and the neglect of investment of infrastructure has led to growing inequality and the atomisation of communities, which has created fertile ground for the far right to resonate with their blame game. It is no coincidence that 7 out of 10 of the areas affected by these race riots have been in poverty-stricken areas. The statement by Donna Jones makes no mention of the deliberate economic programme that created this community destruction, other than to blame the victims themselves for this racist pogrom. This is a sordid attempt to downplay racism and rehabilitate racists. The government and media propagandists have also attempted to deflect blame in fuelling of these race riots by claiming that ‘Russian disinformation’ created the spark to inflame the streets. The truth is that the radicalisation of these people in creating a potential domestic terror problem lies squarely on the shoulders of British politicians, the British press acting as an arm of imperialism, British political commentators, and other foreign actors aligned closely to Britain, such as US and Israeli politicians and political commentators.
Hananya Naftali, Netanyahu’s deputy social media adviser, tweeted on X on 27th May 2018, after Robinson was arrested:
“Free Tommy Robinson!….. He has done nothing wrong, and it’s his right to express his freedom of speech”
Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on 29th April 2024:
“We’ve seen what happened when Europe opened their doors to jihad…..Look at Paris, look at London. They’re no longer recognizable.”
In 2011 riots gripped Britain, which were an eruption of anger against poverty and targeting those with money. There was no call for any understanding, the rioters were immediately condemned with calls for heavy sentences. Despite the arrests of ‘far right protesters’ during the recent events, many of whom were responsible for violent disorder that included rioting, targeting mosques, attacking minorities and their businesses, arson with the burning of vehicles, two hotels with refugee families inside, and a library, the sentencing so far has been far more lenient than the sentences handed out to climate activists for simply holding a Zoom meeting to discuss tactics. There is also a class element to this. Many of the protesters were from a working-class background, some who have been arrested and convicted for inciting unrest or racism by their social media activity. No politician has currently been arrested or stripped of Parliamentary privileges due to incitement on social media and other platforms that contributed to this social unrest because most politicians agree with the underlying sentiment shown by these protesters.
Immediately after the riots a We Think survey showed that 39% of people surveyed agreed that violence towards refugees was the only means to get the attention of British politicians with 36% of people agreeing that xenophobic acts of violence are defensible if it means fewer refugees settling in their towns. The acceptance of these views has not appeared in a vacuum. This is the result of years of racial stereotyping and othering. These race riots are the most serious since the 1958 Notting Hill riots when the West Indian community were targeted in a racially motivated attack. This hatred towards refugees is entwined with rampant prejudice against Muslims, Islamic culture and religion in the West, which is not only designed to avert the gaze from domestic policy but also to support the West’s imperialist foreign policy towards the Middle East and sanitise Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians. This manufactured ‘clash of civilisations’ is nothing but pure racism directed towards Arabs and Muslims. The colonisation of the Palestinians and the unfolding genocide is steeped in white supremacy.
Laurence Fox, Twitter on 29th July 2024, reacting to the news of the Southport stabbings:
“Enough of this madness now. We need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain.”
And further on the 30th July 2024 as the riot was unfolding:
“We are about to witness the long overdue correction to the approved narrative.”
Nigel Farage, Reform MP for Clacton, interview on LBC Radio on 9th August 2024 with Tom Swarbrick in answer to his line of questioning that contradicted the official accounts:
“I would argue that what happened in Southport would not have been in the same magnitude had the truth been told.”
After he implied that reports suggested that the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings had crossed the English Channel in a boat in October 2023, or was an ‘active Muslim’, amplifying anger towards refugees and Muslims.
Islamophobia and Al-Aqsa Flood
Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which took place on 7th October 2023, when Palestinian freedom fighters broke out of Gaza, Labour has fully supported Israel’s genocide toward the Palestinians. Starmer made this clear beforehand with his “I support Zionism without qualification” statement in February 2020 during the leadership election. This was a deliberate manoeuvre to distance himself and the party from the previous Corbyn years and pander to the bogus anti-semitism charges levelled against many socialists within the party, disproportionally affecting Jewish socialists who found themselves expelled. This was to ensure the continued protection of Israel and Britain’s imperialist interests in the region. It was a Labour government that handed over Palestine to Zionists at the end of the British Mandate in 1948 and has continued to support Israel unconditionally with its oppression of the Palestinians ever since, which was brought into question under Corbyn who declared that a Palestinian state would be recognised. Immediately after 7th October, Starmer defended the withholding of food, water, and fuel, despite it being a war crime as Israel laid siege, which he would have been fully aware considering previously being a human rights lawyer.
It was no coincidence that Hamas codenamed their breakout ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, it was a deliberate attempt to send out a message and remind particularly the world’s Muslims of the attacks on Al-Aqsa, the third holiest site in Islam, which is under direct threat from Israel with regular incursions from settlers. It is also no coincidence that the West refuses to even acknowledge this making no reference to it, while showing their complete contempt for Muslim suffering in Gaza by supplying material support and political cover for a genocide. The West has its sirens with an audience ready and willing to receive their songs of anti-Muslim hate. Figures like Yaxley-Lennon, Farage, and Fox constantly preach their poison from their pulpits. There are others across Europe such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the AfD in Germany, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and individuals like Trump, Pamela Geller, Robert B. Spencer, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali across the Atlantic in the US. Not only do they all have a rabid hatred for Muslims, but also a common like for Israel. Much of the intensification of recent anti-Muslim rhetoric is to counter the pro-Palestine movement and demonstrations in support for the Gazans facing up to systematic murder. This is evidenced with constant accusations of anti-semitic ‘hate marches’ and the ‘two tier’ policing of demonstrations despite the Stop the War demonstrations being totally peaceful.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, tweeted on X on 27th July, posting an interview that took place in London:
“The line in the sand has been drawn. Patriots of Europe. Unify your countries. Enough is Enough. We’re being replaced no longer!”
And a further tweet on the 30th July shortly after the riot in Southport:
“Before anyone starts condemning the angry English men up in Southport, ask yourselves this, what do you fucking expect them to do? Don’t call them hooligans – they’re justified in their anger.”
Who funds Robinson and the far right?
Funding for these individuals has been well documented by Professor David Miller and the British rapper and activist Lowkey, with connections documented between Zionism and the far right made by the Jewish anti-Zionist and a founding member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Tony Greenstein. There is a flow of money across the Atlantic from wealthy Zionists to amplify Israel’s policy objectives towards the Palestinians wrapping it up with immigration and Islamophobia. Wealthy benefactors such as Robert Shillman, Robert Mercer, and Nina Rosenwald, fund various projects such as the Shillman Foundation, the David Horowitz Freedom Centre, The Rebel Media, Stop Islamization of America, and Project Veritas. The now-bankrupt ‘Tommy Robinson’ had received funding from the Rebel Media, where Robert Shillman reportedly financed a fellowship that paid for a position for him in 2017. Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum bankrolled a demonstration to ‘Free Tommy’ in London in 2018 as well as provide funding for his legal defence after being sentenced to 13 months in jail when he was found guilty of being in contempt of court. Evidence to support these claims and how the Zionist lobby operate are here:
Racism is tied up in capitalism, an integral part of dividing of the working class to undermine solidarity in the workplace. Ultimately to justify the expansion of capital, the seeking of profits, and its imperialist forays abroad. It is capitalist competition that is the cause of the decay in living standards and the attacks on the workplace, filtering down into competition between workers, creating racialised competition. Therefore, to be a true anti-racist or anti-fascist one has to be a revolutionary anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X all understood this. The problem with anti-racist or ‘race awareness’ programmes within the workplace or bourgeois parliamentary politics is that they attempt to channel this ‘anti-racism’ into support for capitalist ‘parliamentary democracy’ – capitalism being the cause of racism in the first place. It is another tactic of reformism. Starmer has attempted to take the credit for the fizzling out of the race riots by way of arrests. Thatcher also attempted to take credit for defeating the National Front after adopting racist rhetoric when in January 1978, as leader of the then Tory opposition, she gave a television interview on the World in Action programme when she said “People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.” Farage when defending himself against accusations of inflaming tensions ahead of the riots, claimed to be attacking the far right. Jason Cowley, the editor in chief of the New Statesman, claims that Farage said to him “No one did more to beat the far right in this country than me. If I wasn’t here, somebody with a bit more brain than Nick Griffin would emerge.”
This adoption of right-wing politics and rhetoric when moments of crisis rear their ugly head is exactly why no one should be under any illusion in liberal politicians, parliamentary democracy, and the police to tackle fascism. The defeat of fascists and racists has always come from counter movements organising and directly confronting them on the street. This is borne out in practice; Cable Street in 1936, Lewisham 1977, and Southall in 1979, when fascist marches were met with organised counter protests consisting of large numbers of counter-demonstrators to protect the communities being targeted. After the initial riot in Southport and the following few days, racists organised the targeting of refugee support services, charities, and immigration solicitors. Lists were published online. Large numbers of anti-racist counter demonstrators and anti-fascists organised themselves to protect those communities. Brighton, Bristol, and Walthamstow in East London had turnouts of 10,000 or more, which demoralised the rioters, who in the end were being protected by the police. The police have historically protected far right marches on the street and given that the UK police have been found to be institutionally racist as outlined in the Macpherson Inquiry, it is hardly surprising that the Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities have a deep distrust of the police, who have often been on the receiving end of ‘over-policing’ and ‘under-protection’. The only defence that communities have from the far right is through establishing workers’ defence guards and protecting themselves. Ultimately it will be the dismantling of capitalism through socialist revolution that completely removes the scourge of racism.
This is the presentation (with some edits and corrections) that was given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at our educational on 21st July. The recording of the meeting is also available as a podcast, and can be found here.
The essay that this educational is about was a seemingly abstract commentary made by Joseph Seymour, key intellectual figure of the Spartacist League of the United States in the mid-1970s. The old Spartacists were a contradictory political trend with roots in both of the two major trends in the US that emerged from the Trotskyist movement in Trotsky’s day.
Max Shachtman (left) with James P Cannon
The US Trotskyist movement had been founded in the late 1920s by three prominent members of the US Communist Party: James P Cannon, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman. The US Left Opposition and its successors – most notably the US SWP – always worked very closely with Trotsky and carried out many of the tactics of the Trotskyist movement in the years before the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. It did serious work in the trade unions. In 1934, its trade union militants led the Teamsters’ (truckers) strike in Minneapolis, one of three major strikes that year led by Communist groups in the period of revival of the workers movement after the worst of the Great Depression. And it carried out a short-term entry into the Socialist Party in 1936-7, which enabled it to fuse with a layer of younger militants.
In some ways, the SWP – a thousand or so people – became the leading party of the Fourth International when it was founded in 1938. Their geographical closeness to Mexico was an advantage in collaborating with Trotsky in his final exile. They were also subjected to the pressures which the whole of the movement was subjected. Because of the relatively open situation they lived in, the issues were fought out in the open.
The Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 caused splits in the Trotskyist movement. A wave of hysterical Stalinophobia, that equated Stalin’s regime with Hitler’s, swept the labour movement in the imperialist countries. In the US, a faction led by Shachtman, Abern and James Burnham (an academic figure) was formed, which abandoned defence of the Soviet Union against imperialism. By the end of the dispute in 1940 Shachtman had developed the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, the USSR as a new class society, neither capitalist nor socialist, but worse than capitalism.
Cannon, and the core trade union cadre of the SWP, joined with Trotsky to defend the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state. These issues were fought out comprehensively. Two important books are availble on this: Trotsky’s In Defence of Marxism, and Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.
In 1940 Trotsky was assassinated. The Trotskyist movement faced WWII without his insights. The complex sequence of events in WWII led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies, Italy and Japan, primarily by the USSR in alliance with the US, with Britain and France in tow. The situation after the war was a mess. The Stalinists defeated Nazi Germany, but also made sure that the working class as an independent class did not come to power anywhere. Wherever the working class threatened to come to power directly, the Stalinists united with imperialism to crush it. Most notably in Europe, in France, Italy and Greece in Europe, and in Vietnam with the Saigon workers insurrection in 1945.
But there was also the unstable phenomenon of the creation of deformed workers states, in East Europe, China, and elsewhere. The Trotskyist movement was disoriented by the creation of these states without the conscious action of the working class. The imperialists were implacably hostile to the USSR’s victory and the new deformed workers’ states and set up NATO as an aggressive instrument to fight them. The Cold War ensued.
After the war, without Trotsky’s guidance, the Trotskyist movement partly capitulated to Stalinism, and many began to hail bureaucratic Stalinist leaders as revolutionaries who would lead the world revolution. Others followed in the footsteps of Shachtman and capitulated to imperialism. There was little coherent understanding of what had happened. There were a lot of very complex and confused debates. The Sparts represent one fragment of these debates. They got possibly the trickiest problem right, that of Cuba. Which ought to have laid the basis for resolving all these problems. But it was not to be.
Fidel Castro and his guerrilla movement came to power in 1959 and overthrew a classic US-backed neocolonial tyranny. Then they proceeded to nationalise virtually the entire Cuban economy to preserve themselves from being overthrown by the Cuban bourgeoisie who simply worked with US imperialism. Some Trotskyists, including the ageing US SWP cadre, hailed Castro as an unconscious Marxist and world revolutionary. Others denied that there had been a revolution in Cuba at all.
The Spartacists got this right and understood that while Cuba was a workers’ state and had expropriated capital, it was a deformed workers state that needed a supplementary political revolution to bring the working class to genuine political power. Castro had come to power at the head of a movement that was not initially communist even in name. He was a liberal, who emerged from the Orthodoxo Party. Yet in power, his July 26 movement changed its ideology to match what it had done and joined the Soviet bloc. Their understanding of Cuba clarified what a deformed workers state was.
Such states had been generally created by communist movements that had abandoned the working class, based instead on an oppressed peasantry, and that these parties had become petty-bourgeois nationalist parties. When the working class was politically paralysed and under extreme conditions of imperialist oppression, such movements proved capable of overthrowing capitalism and creating such workers’ states, but with a fundamental weakness, that was later to destroy most of them. I.e, an anti-working class, bureaucratic regime, committed to socialism in one country, similar to the USSR under Stalin and since. In Cuba, however, unlike all the other examples where such states were created independently of simple conquest by the USSR, the movement that carried this out was not even formally communist before the revolution. This was clarifying as to what was really involved in the others, such as China, Yugoslavia, etc. This was a very perceptive and thoughtful analysis. No one else developed it at the time.
The Spartacists in the decades to come used this to argue that they were the continuity of Cannon’s SWP in its best period, created under Trotsky’s guidance, and therefore the only real Trotskyists in the world. This had some apparently credibility in their earlier period, but this was incorrect, a conceit based on a partial understanding, that slowly drove them mad. It was wrong, because they were rooted in both strands of the pre-war movement. The founders of the Sparts, particularly Roberston and also Wolhforth, who played the key role in the creation of this trend, came from Shachtman’s anti-Soviet Workers Party, not the SWP.
They joined the ageing, rightward-moving SWP in the mid-1950s, on the basis of being won to orthodox Trotskyism on the Russian question, and later were thrown out for being right about Cuba. But Roberston, who became the leading figure, though he had broken from Shachtman over the Russian question, had not questioned another aspect of Shachtman’s politics: his left-Zionism. As part of their right-wing evolution at the beginning of the Cold war, the Shactmanites had supported the creation of Israel. That was another political strand.
In the coming decades the Sparts produced orthodox material on the Russian question, given weight by their correct understanding of Cuba, for instance their opposition to Solidarnosc in the 1980s. But this correct politics was mixed with material on Israel/Palestine that in the earlier period sided with Israel. They also copied that approach and tried to apply it to the Irish question from the late 1960s. Originally, they were (in a strange way) pro-Unionist in Ireland. In 1973, trying to address the Irish struggle that had raged since 1968, they called for a independent Ulster, supposedly as part of a ‘socialist’ programme to unite Ireland! Later they modified their positions to be effectively neutral in these national struggles. Calling on Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine, or Nationalist and Unionist workers in the North of Ireland, to abandon their national struggles and unite. Not much of an improvement. They were a perplexing phenomenon, because they were partly right, and partly severely wrong. Which is very damaging, as an old saying has it, a half-truth is more damaging than an outright lie. This contradiction gave rise to an organisation with a strange and damaging way of working, a reflection of their political contradictions.
But they were sometimes capable of great insight. Seymour’s article is a startling example. Seymour’s article steers completely clear of any superficially complex colonial questions. It leaves that aspect of Spartacist politics completely alone. That is its strength. Instead, it deals with the problem of how the class consciousness of the imperialist bourgeoisie works and attacks some misconceptions of this that are common on the left. He contrasts different concepts of left reformism about how capitalist society works. The structural concept and the conspiracy concept.
For some reformists capitalism is purely a matter of a structure. All you have to do is change the structure and society will improve incrementally. There is no sense in this that there are real material interests that dictate these structures, i.e. property relations that reflect the interests of a specific layer – the capitalist ruling class.
And there is the view that capitalism itself works through a series of conspiracies. The job of socialists is therefore to combat and expose the conspiracies. This may seem very radical, but it is flawed, and can also lead to a pessimistic view. There are a lot of those concepts around now, both on the right and on the left, in different forms.
You hear those who attach great importance to the World Economic Forum, who are seen as so advanced and the real rulers of the planet, somewhat different to the ruling class itself. An earlier example is the whole series of similar theories about the Bilderberg group. The ‘Great Reset’ theory is linked to the theories about the WEF and presupposes some demonic scheme – the leftist variant being to destroy all previous gains of the working-class movement. The right-wing variant of this has theories of the ‘replacement’ of the population of the imperialist countries with immigrants. Both of these found common ground in various theories about the Covid pandemic, that this was part of some sinister scheme to do one or the other of these things, according to the particular leaning of the theorists. This blurred the difference between left and right. It has to be said that as their organisation collapsed around 2020, and then created a new leadership, the Spartacists seemed to go through some strange political-psychological process where they seemed lost in paranoia about the Covid pandemic.
But as Seymour points out, the bourgeoisie does not have the level of coherence that such theories imply. These various think-tanks are partial. They are the brainchild of various bourgeois milieux who are fallible and capable of misunderstanding reality as much as any other group of bourgeois. If your world view is that the class struggle depends on who can organise the most effective conspiracies, it is not a huge step from this to the view that the bourgeoisie is too clever and capable of organising conspiracies to be overthrown. That leads by another route to submission to bourgeois authority, and instead attempts to convince the bourgeoisie to mend their ways. To another form of reformism, in other words.
Monopoly capitalism is getting more and more concentrated. And firms connected by neoliberalism, venture capital and banking are getting more and more powerful. Examples do exist of a worldview where capitalist society can jump over the law of value. Modern Monetary Theory is such a position. The idea that ‘fiat’ currencies are almost infinitely expandable, provided they can be kept essentially separate from other currencies.
The bourgeoisie are not conspiratorialists who run the world according to a plan. They are not Marxists in reverse, and Seymour is at pains to emphasise this. Their real aim is to realise surplus value, or to put it more simply, to make profits. They are quite capable of forming factions on a large or small scale to do each other down, or to crush or even in extremis to slaughter each other, via ‘their’ workers, in inter-imperialist wars, if they feel it necessary from their own particularist standpoint. Their ideology is not Marxism looked at from the other end of the telescope. They do not apply reverse class struggle concepts in any scientific manner to the class struggle from their side. Individuals may boast of doing such things, but bourgeois class-war tactics are empirical, and may undermine their own interests in the future.
For instance, Thatcher’s destruction of heavy industry in Britain was straightforwardly done to undermine what was in the 1970s the strongest trade union movement in Europe. It succeeded. But in doing so, it accelerated Britain’s decline as an imperialist power enormously. Something similar happened in the US. Much productive capacity was outsourced to China and other low wage countries to cut down on labour costs. China gained a lot from that. Now all factions of the US bourgeoisie regard China as a major threat. This is not smart.
James Burnham, ex-Marxist, attacks liberals for surrendering to Communism
The bourgeoisie persists in this behaviour, it cannot do otherwise, it is how it thinks. Social being determines social consciousness. Various ex-Marxist ideologues have chided the bourgeoisie with such short-sightedness. James Burnham, after he broke from the US SWP and moved rapidly to the right from Marxism to right-wing cold war militarism, wrote a book called The Suicide of the West which as Seymour said was:
“…designed to prove that the dominant political attitudes of the American ruling class were optimistically false.”
He was ignored, and in part ridiculed. The bourgeoisie is episodically capable of class unity when confronted with a potent threat from the working class, but that rarely lasts long and even within such circumstances they try to do each other down. Seymour gives the example of imperialist intervention in Russia after 1917, when they could agree on the need to intervene, but not to collaborate fully, for fear than one or the other imperialist would gain an advantage. Eventually the most reactionary wing of the German bourgeoisie armed the early Soviet state to gain a hoped-for advantage.
The ultimate example was in WWII and its leadup, when both imperialist axes tried to gain advantages over each other – and did so – by collaborating with their class enemy – the USSR – to defeat the other faction. As is well known, the US-led allies came out on top of the Third Reich by those means. Seymour cites the meeting between Hitler and French Ambassador Coulandre at the beginning of WWII, when both agreed that the war would likely lead to workers revolution (this was quoted by Trotsky in In Defence of Marxism). He quoted other examples, such as parts of the US bourgeoisie undermining sanctions against Cuba in the early Castro period because they could make profits from sugar.
Seymour generalises it thus, and his argument is completely orthodox Marxism:
“The issue was first posed sharply in the Marxist movement by Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism, which held that competition between imperialist nations could be peacefully mediated in the same manner as competition between domestic monopolies. Lenin countered that the bourgeoisie cannot transcend national interests and that inter-imperialist agreements can only be based on the existing balance of strength which all parties are desperately seeking to change to their advantage.”
We can see this incapacity to overcome imperialist capitalism’s national basis today. The nearest thing to capital transcending national boundaries that has ever existed is the globalisation of the world economy since the collapse of Stalinism. Seymour had no knowledge of this when he wrote this essay in 1977.
US hegemony, which suffered some decline in the 1970s over Vietnam, massively expanded after 1991 to produce this phenomenon. But now it is being torn to shreds, by right-wing populist movements that reject most of its nostrums. Migration is one key cutting edge. The populists, where they are not fascists themselves, will ally with fascists on this. But there are other such cutting edges.
Trump and Farage
The collaboration of imperialist states in wars that many of the nationalist-minded factions regard as being of dubious value to them, has become a target. Nationalist opposition to the Ukraine war, which the populist factions see as a project of the ‘globalists’, is an example. If this is not correctly understood by the left, we risk being disarmed in the face of this.
The right-wing forces that are opposing the Ukraine proxy war are not progressive. They are not our allies, as some on the left think. They are simply re-asserting the indissoluble connection of imperialist capitalism with the imperialist nation-state and rejecting globalisation as in effect a deviation from that.
The likes of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, the German AfD, Salvini in Italy, are our strategic imperialist enemies. Any resemblance of what we say to what they say is entirely superficial. Our job is to provide an internationalist alternative to them in opposing the wars of the other faction, not to conciliate them. Our job is not to unite with them, but to independently fight against the imperialist wars and proxy wars that we face, in order to tear the masses away from these nationalist factions and win them to an internationalist position. That is crucial.
This issue centres on the outcome of the General Election in Britain, and the complete hollowness of Starmer’s Labour Party victory. The lead article analyses this. Far from having brought about any recovery in the Labour Party’s electoral support, Starmer’s Labour got around half-a-million fewer votes than Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn in the ‘disaster’ of 2019. Yet Labour achieved the biggest majority, 174, since Blair in 1997. The reason for the change is not any surge to Labour, but the collapse of the Conservative Party under the weight of its own contradictions, and the undemocratic nature of the first-past-the-post electoral system in Britain. So Starmer’s ‘mandate’ is shallow indeed, and he has no mandate for more neoliberal attacks, support for Zionist genocide or warmaking against Russia.
Starmer’s Labour is up to its neck in support for genocide in Gaza, though as the General Election campaign began it started talking about of the other side of its mouth. It feared the campaigns of numerous left-wing independents, often Muslim or Palestinian anti-war activists, and left-wing anti-Zionist currents like the Workers Party led by George Galloway and Chris Williamson. The victory of five independents, including Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North, and four others who challenged Labour MPs over Gaza, including ejecting Starmer-crony Jonathan Ashworth from his previously safe Leicester South parliamentary seat, was accompanied by near-misses in several other constituencies, including the near-defeat of Zionist agent Wes Streeting in Ilford North.
The article also pays attention to right-wing populism. It locates an underlying reason for the rise in right-wing populism in a number of imperialist countries in the clash between two sets of related bourgeois factions in those countries: one of which has as its centre of gravity in the ‘globalisation’ of capital that became dominant in the period of enhanced US world hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91. In explaining the rise of the other, we republish an old theoretical piece from 1997 by Joseph Seymour of the Spartacist League, which bluntly points out that the imperialist bourgeoisie is a nationally-limited class, incapable of transcending adherence to the nation-state.
It is arguable that the right-wing populism of today is the result of this bourgeois inability to escape the nation-state, and a backlash within the imperialist bourgeoisies against the trend to imperialist globalisation under US ultra-hegemony – which is now coming to an end with the rise of Russia and China back to world-prominence. One symptom of this division in the ruling class is populist dissent over the Ukraine war, in which the liberals make extensive use of Ukrainian Nazis and is seen particularly a project of ‘globalisers’ in the US Democratic Party. This has enhanced the popular support of some on the populist right where anti-migrant sentiment has not always been enough; pro-imperialist Russophobia of many on the left has helped the far right exploit this issue.
The back page article is about the apparent victory of the New Popular Front (NPF) in France over Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR) in the National Assembly elections that were called by President Macron after the NR won the European Parliament election. It points out that while the NPF had managed by tactical voting and class-collaboration to thwart the NR in this election, the class-collaboration, and the fact that key elements of the NPF are ardent supporters of the Ukraine war, actually boosted the popular vote of the NR on the second round even as they lost out in terms of seats. This the NPF victory is far from decisive, it has merely postponed the decisive conflict with the NR. Le Pen will be a potent danger in the 2027 Presidential election.
This issue highlights our united front work over Ukraine, in International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), which was a bloc of ourselves (and our earlier organisation Socialist Fight), the New Communist Party, the British Posadists, and a number of non-aligned anti-imperialist activists. We reprint three leaflets produced by IUAFS that have been distributed to address broader layers of anti-imperialists in the Gaza movement.
This issue also has an article dealing with the despoliation of nature and the capitalist expropriation of food sources, and some of the historical aspects of this, and an article celebrating the release of Julian Asssange from his persecution over the last decade and a half for exposing the crimes of US imperialism, a struggle we have supported all along.
The seeming assassination attempt on former President and almost dead-cert Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania is one more bizarre episode as the US appears to be staggering towards the possibility of civil war. Trump gives the appearance of having been grazed on the left ear by a bullet. If that were true, he would have survived by pure luck – a couple of inches away from a likely fatal or at least incapacitating head shot. A 20-year-old shooter was killed by security.
There are other interpretations. Serious questions remain about this so-called “security lapse”. It is possible that this was an elaborate false flag stunt to help Trump’s election campaign, perhaps with a patsy who was sacrificed. False flags are frequently used by all wings of US imperialism. It will be recalled that Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right ex-president of Brazil, used a dubious stabbing incident in 2014 for dramatic effect to boost his drive to power. Regardless of the truth of this incident, the scenes of Trump’s bloodied face with fist in the air will be powerful material to promote his fascistic presidential bid.
Meanwhile the Democrats are in deep crisis, as the fact that Joe Biden is dementia-ridden, and incapable of functioning is now centre-stage. Behind the scenes, there are considerable efforts underway in the Democratic Party to replace him, to pressure him to stand down from the Democratic presidential nomination in favour of an alternative. In the frame is Vice-President Kamala Harris, but she is an unpopular figure – a right-wing prosecutor in California who was vehemently hostile to campaigns against murderous police shootings of minority youth, which are endemic in the US. Other possibilities include the Governor of California, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan, or even former first lady Michelle Obama.
Trump, on the other hand, is a convicted felon, having been found guilty of 34 charges associated with his payoff to a porn star to hide his sexual adventures. These would be of little legitimate interest were he not a on a crusade to destroy women’s right to abortion, and the rights of trans people, in the name of Christian ‘morality’. He was evidently guilty of the crimes he was convicted of and many more besides. He attempted a ‘beer-hall putsch’ on 6th January 2021 to stop the transfer of power to his successor Biden when he lost the 2020 Presidential election.
But the Democrats never dared to go after him for that until it was too late. And when they belatedly did so, the Supreme Court far-right majority which he put in place declared that he, and presidents generally, have virtual immunity from prosecution for acts committed in office. Which as many pointed out, in effect makes a president akin to a king or establishes a US version of the “Fuhrer principle”. Richard Nixon would certainly have made good use of that ruling. It would be interesting, perhaps, to speculate that if Biden were to ‘officially’ order the summary killing of Trump and his cohort judges, in the name of defending the US constitution against subversion from the far right, he could plausibly declare that he was immune from prosecution according to the ruling of those very same judges. He could then appoint new judges and force congress to endorse them at gunpoint, to overturn the previous ruling going forward, but not retrospectively.
But Biden is evidently mentally unfit to do that. And even if he were not, the bourgeoisie is politically incapable of such resolute action in defence of the democratic rights that the Democratic Party sometimes claims to stand for. Biden is more interested in sending hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to Nazi Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia and defend US world hegemony, than in defending democratic rights at home. Likewise, Biden sends many billions in military aid to the Zionist state to carry on with its genocide of the Palestinian people. Trump today as in the past is funded by Likudniks like Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson’s widow. She plans to spend $100 million dollars to elect Trump; her late husband, the Likudnik gambling billionaire, bankrolled his presidential campaign in 2016.
The payoff for that was the US moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, US recognition of the Israeli annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, seized in 1967, and the annexation of the Jordan Valley area on the West Bank. As well as the end of Obama’s JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran. It was Trump’s brazen support for this intensification of the oppression of the Palestinians, and his attempt through the ‘Abraham Accords’ with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to liquidate the Palestinian question entirely, that created the conditions where the breakout of October 7th from Gaza became inevitable, and the genocidal response from Israel also.
Trump promises to openly and brazen support Netanyahu to ‘finish the job’ of exterminating the Palestinian people in Gaza. The Democrats say nothing about this, as for all Biden’s occasional double talk about a ceasefire, everyone knows that his administration has backed the genocide to the hilt with arms and for months raised its bloody arm in the UN Security Council to defend Israel against overwhelming condemnation from the majority of humanity. Both parties are brazenly up to their necks in the Zionist holocaust.
That is the position of the ‘liberal’ bourgeoisie in general. The ruling class, with all its terrible contradictions, unites as a class to limit and destroy the democratic rights of the masses. That is the ABC of Marxism, though charting what could and ought to be done about the kind of fascistic threat that Trump represents has agitational usefulness for Marxists.
But what is important is understanding the class-based reasons that are driving the United States towards a potential armed conflict between its two main parties. It does appear that the potential geographic lines of a civil conflict are not dissimilar to the fault lines of the secessionist civil war of the slavocracy in the middle of the 19th Century. With less developed and ethnically diverse states such as Texas and Florida at the centre of the Trump-led GOP block. The opposite, Democratic Party trend being centred in California, the Great Lakes area (Illinois in particular) and New England/New York with their ethnically mixed population, stronger trade unions and minority organisations, and comparatively liberal politics.
There appears to be no solid class basis for such a Civil War. It was clear in the 19th Century that that conflict was between two mutually antagonistic ruling class layers that had their material roots in different forms of labour exploitation. The Northern bourgeoisie was solidly based on wage labour and classical bourgeois extraction of surplus value for its material basis. The Southern slavocracy gained its considerable wealth from the production of commodities, such as cotton, tobacco and sugar, by means of slave labour, where the worker himself was the property of the slave owner. This was obviously a clear class difference, and the US civil war had the character of a social revolution – the destruction of one archaic form of labour and hence mode of production (slavery, albeit slavery that had an early-capitalist origin as a tool of so-called primitive accumulation) by a social formation based on the capitalist mode of production in a classic sense.
The Civil War that is brewing now appears not to have any such class basis. It would be based on two camps both fully rooted in the capitalist mode of production, and to be thus incomprehensible in class terms. But there is an explanation. An important clue as to why this is happening is the disputes in Europe involving far right trends such as Nigel Farage and his Reform Party in Britain, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN) in France, the Alternative fűr Deutschland (Alternative for Germany – AfD) in Germany, the followers of the far-right politician Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the bourgeois mainstream. These right-wing populist trends, which overlap considerably with fascism even if they are not all actually fascist, are strongly at odds with their respective bourgeois mainstreams over the proxy war in Ukraine. They regard it as a provocation that threatens ‘their’ nation-states with severe damage or destruction for no good reason. Trump’s followers in the US have similar views.
The basis for this antagonism is capitalist globalisation. In the period since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91, the US achieved unparalleled global dominance, far beyond even that which it exercised in the three ‘golden decades’ after WWII, when the USSR was a potent barrier to its domination. With the USSR dissolved, for the entire decade of the 1990s US domination was far more grandiose and all-encompassing, despite such defeats as Vietnam which it suffered in the 1970s. But this has been accompanied by the deindustrialisation of the major imperialist countries, including Britain and the United States, the relocation of much industrial production to places like China and India, and the increasing financialisation of capitalism in the imperialist countries of North America and Western Europe. In contrast to the hollowed out West, China’s economy, trade links and productive capacities continue to increase apace. ClassConscious attribute China’s success to the CCP’s as a workers’ state with continued control over the “commanding heights of the economy” whilst the LCFI think China is more similar to ex-Soviet Russia. a powerful bourgeois state where capitalism is still restricted by its inability to overcome deformations and restrictions to capital bequeathed by several decades of productive growth where a higher, socialist mode of production was in preparation. Regardless, the economic and military rise of China is fuelling the sense of crisis in the US ruling class.
This has created a situation where the obsolesce of the capitalist-imperialist nation state, which revolutionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky remarked upon in connection with the two world wars in the 20th Century, has become a live issue causing divisions in the bourgeoisie. Financialisation and the migration of production out of the imperialist countries appears to threaten the imperialist nation-state itself and has produced a backlash among part of the imperialist bourgeoisie itself.
In the 1977 essay “On Bourgeois Class Consciousness” (see page 4) the leading Marxist intellectual of the Spartacists, Joseph Seymour noted that:
“While capable of certain acts and attitudes of internationalist solidarity, the bourgeoisie is a nationally limited class. It is capable neither of abolishing national states nor, often, even of subordinating immediate national interests to the historic defence of the bourgeois order.” (Spartacist 24, 1977, at https://www.consistent-democrats.org/on-bourgeois-class-consciousness/)
Today, in the context of the aftermath of the ‘New American Century’ that was fleetingly born in the aftermath of the end of Stalinist rule in the East, there is a backlash underway among part of the imperialist bourgeoisie against this financialisation and ‘globalisation’. This is what led to Brexit in Britain. It is why Trumpism is a potent movement in the US, which threatens the US with civil war. It is also highly threatening to the coherence of the European Union itself; just how threatening remains to be seen. These wings of the various imperialist bourgeoisies are quite prepared to make use of fascists and quasi-fascists as a weapon against their bourgeois opponents.
They are not, for the most part, today confronting mobilised workers movements that are a threat to capitalist rule and aiming to crush such movements. Thanks to the decline of social democracy and the collapse of Stalinism, such movements are generally far weaker. However, under conditions of crisis, even the possibility of workers organising in the most limited or even spontaneous ways is deeply threatening and is also driving all factions of the ruling class towards authoritarianism. There is a fear that even mild social democratic reforms, let alone a revolutionary movement may develop. That is why the ruling class for example of the US and UK responded so viciously to the possibility of reformists like Sanders or Corbyn taking power. It also explains their hostility to social media and the bipartisan support to ban Tik Tok in the US.
But a key element of globalisation is the presence of migrant workers, and these fascists are a potent threat to them, which is why the workers movement must steadfastly stand against these movements. Of course, targeting migrants is also a key way to channel working class discontent into reactionary ends.
A turn towards fascism by a section of the ruling class is therefore seen as the answer to domestic and international problems but these bourgeois movements are ultimately doomed to defeat; they will not be able to reverse the deindustrialisation and financialisation of the imperialist countries. Trump’s sponsorship by the Israel lobby gives that away. Even the Zionists, who have a major bourgeois international dimension, are divided about this. The United States particularly is vulnerable to a collapse and a division that could conceivably bury it as a world power. Because, after its 19th Century Civil War, the knitting back together of the US as a nation was shaky and incomplete. As part of this contradictory process, it’s major parties even appeared to change places with regard to the continuity of the Civil War – the Republicans are now the party of the reactionary South, the Democrats the party of the liberal North. It is therefore entirely feasible that the US could be torn apart by this antagonism, and come to an end as a world power, with a whimper more than a bang. The other dangerous possibility is that the self-destructive path the US ruling class is embarked upon will drag the world into a Third World War. It is the job of Communists to intervene wherever possible to build a movement that can end the threat of fascism and world war by removing its source – the decayed capitalist system. Regardless, the apparent attempted assassination of Trump demonstrates that the pace of events towards one conclusion or another are accelerating at the heart of world imperialism.
Lefitst social democrat Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Centrist bourgeois Emmanuel Macron, Far-Rightist Marine Le Pen
Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org
President Emmanuel Macron’s gamble in calling new elections to the French National Assembly as an attempted means to counter the victory of the far right Rassemblement National – (RN) or National Rally, formerly the Front Nationale (National Front) of Marine Le Pen in the June European Election, has opened a new political situation. It was an act of desperation by Macron whose ‘centrist’ base of support has ebbed away due to his own vicious attacks on the working class over the last period, outrageously raising the pension age from 60 to 64 and ramming it through using emergency clauses in the constitution without a parliamentary vote. His warmongering in Ukraine, even earlier proposing to openly send French troops into battle against Russia, was almost designed to provoke war with Russia. Then there are his vain attempts to supress protests against the genocide in Gaza and his pandering to Zionist and French nativist Islamophobia and anti-migrant agitation. These things have completely discredited his regime and fuelled the growth of the far right in the seeming absence of a potent left movement.
So, after the shock of the Euro-Election, he dissolved the National Assembly. The first-round victory of Le Pen’s Party meant that the gamble appeared to have failed big time. But the New Popular Front (NPF), launched by the La France Insoumise (France Unbowed – LFI) party led by the left-wing social-democratic politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which included the Socialist Party, Communist Party and Greens, was galvanised by the rise of Le Pen’s party. It launched a campaign of tactical voting to keep Le Pen’s Party from getting a parliamentary majority. Supporters of the NPF and Macron’s Party systematically withdrew their candidates in constituencies where they came third in the first round with their bloc partner having gained second place. This class-collaborationist tactic by the half-formed NPF, itself a class collaborationist alliance, achieved a short-term tactical victory, which in some ways appeared superficially to vindicate Macron’s calling of a snap election. In terms of seats, the NPF came first, Macron’s Renaissance Party came second, with the far right in third place. In terms of seats, that is, though with nowhere near a parliamentary majority for any of them.
But in terms of votes, the RN came first more decisively in the second round than in the first. It increased its vote from 33.21% in the first round to 37.06% in the second round. Quite a considerable increase. Which means that while the Popular Frontism of the left and Macron may by tactical voting have thwarted the RN in parliamentary terms, they strengthened Le Pen in terms of popular support. Which has not solved the problem therefore, it just postponed the decisive conflict until later. Indeed, far from being a great victory for Mélenchon either, the NPF’s vote fell from 28.21% in the first round to 25.80% in the second round. Whereas Macron’s Party gained marginally, going from 21.28% in the first round to 24.53% in the second round.
In parliamentary terms, the result for now is deadlock. No bloc has anything like a majority. Macron, as president, is likely to be desperately trying to fit together a coalition for months. He may well not succeed, as despite the parliamentary arithmetic, actual popular votes and the social forces behind them put enormous pressure on members of the National Assembly. And if they don’t succeed, there could even be another election at some point. Le Pen could still benefit from this.
One of the main reasons for Marine Le Pen’s rise is her opposition to France’s support for NATO’s lost war against Russia in Ukraine. The French proletariat simply opposes being dragged like cannon fodder by imperialism into war. A minority of the ruling class sees the far right as a battering ram to push a more nationalist agenda at odds with the mainstream pro-EU ‘globalist’ trend that is deeply involved in the US-led proxy war in Ukraine. That wing is using verbal opposition to French involvement in Ukraine as a means to garner support from part of the working class, particularly in more provincial towns that are more conservative and less ethnically diverse than the biggest cities. As well as mobilising racist anti-migrant sentiment, which Macron had already adapted to to try to ‘disarm’ his far-right opponents by stealing their clothes.
Macron introduced new legislation limiting access to citizenship, rights to social benefits, and family reunification for migrants, as well as deportation for ‘immigrants’ if they commit crimes…. even if being convicted as an adult, they’ve been living in the country from childhood. The issue of work visas for irregular migrants has been curtailed. Overseas study visas are also restricted. It all sounds very much like the kind of laws introduced in Britain by the Tories and Brexiteers over the past decade, except that Macron is as pro-EU as any politician can be. It shows how the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie, using the fascists as a battering ram, can induce its critics to pander to its racist-nationalist agenda. Migrants are attacked, Muslims are vilified, with the niqab banned in public spaces. In France, 50% of the prison population is Muslim, which is disproportionate as the Muslim population in France is approximately 10%..
The NPF’s circumstantial victory only postpones Le Pen’s victory because the NPF’s positions on the war in Ukraine are very close to Macron’s unpopular positions of increasing French support for Ukraine, sending more French weapons and military instructors to the war. By associating itself with imperialism in the Ukrainian War, the NPF plays the same geopolitical game as Macron, the game of pushing the proletariat politically into the arms of the “fascist-pacifist” extreme right. This is the NPF’s biggest crime at the moment. This crime, if not renounced and the opposite policy adopted and fought for by the workers parties involved, will pave the way for Le Pen’s rise to the French government. A disaster particularly for the sections of the working class with an immigrant origin.
This is at most a tactical defeat for Le Pen, but not a strategic one. The short-term tactic may even strengthen Le Pen strategically. She will be very dangerous in the 2027 Presidential Election, which may well be between her and Mélenchon, as Macron no longer inspires popular support. Mélenchon’s LFI party proposes some reasonable reforms, to restore pensions, raise wages and benefits, radically reverse austerity. It is also in theory hostile to NATO. On international questions Mélenchon is a mixed bag. On Ukraine, Mélenchon party condemned the Special Military Operation (SMO) that began in February 2022 as a so-called ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, echoing imperialist propaganda. Though he opposes the warmongering on a pacifist basis, in effect:
“’We stand for Ukraine’s restoring its territorial integrity. But it should be done politically, but not by means of military force,’ he said, adding that the idea of delivering strikes inside Russia is ‘absurd.’
There is no mention of the rights of the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass in this. They voted against Ukraine’s ‘territorial integrity’ against a far-right regime in Kiev that began to supress their language rights in 2014. In this concept, territorial integrity overrides the democratic rights of the people who live in a state – hardly a socialist position. Though he did have a more sympathetic response to the separation of Crimea to join Russia in 2014, and he has called the Kiev regime ‘neo-Nazis’.
But at least on Syria he was quite supportive of the Russian intervention and hostile to Turkey’s intervention of the side of pro-imperialist mercenary jihadists. This may reflect an older pro-Russian position that is part of French bourgeois politics. He is rather like Jeremy Corbyn over Zionism and promises to recognize Palestine if LFI gains power. However, he is hostile to Iran – on the supposed grounds that Iran is seeking to destroy Israel in some bad way. A soft pro-Zionist position, it seems.
The Communist Party in France echo Macron’s denunciation of Russia, saying the intervention was a “criminal decision…” involving “…aggression against the sovereignty of the people of Ukraine.” Though they make the usual calls for peace, negotiations, etc, they blame Russia for NATO’s aggressive expansion in the East. The Socialist Party is for the war drive. Its leader Faure was quoted as saying: “If we let Russia win, the risk we all run is to find ourselves in a situation where Russia will not stop.”
A joint statement of the Socialist Party and Greens is quoted by the Spectator as saying:
“‘Our line is clear: we support Ukraine, we support the delivery of arms, we support Ukraine’s membership of the European Union.”
The ‘centre-left’ Place Publique, which is also part if the NPF, campaigns for ‘aid’ to Ukraine. The predominant policy in the NPF bloc is support for the same warmongering as Macron. And by his bloc with them, Mélenchon associates his party with this. While it has to be acknowledged that many in this bloc are driven by justified anti-fascist sentiment against the RN, at the same time the warmongering policy of most in the NPF over Ukraine is fuelling the growth in popular support of the same RN.
If is highly doubtful that Mélenchon will be able to keep together his NPF for the 2027 presidential election, and that he would be able to generate the popular support to seriously thwart Le Pen even if he did. That will also be a two-round election, and it’s not clear who would be able to combat Le Pen. What is clear is that class collaboration, though it practically blocked the RN from gaining a majority and the premiership now, also caused a decline in support for itself vis-à-vis Macron in the second round. Popular fronts historically were an obstacle to revolution including in French history, and elsewhere like Chile, and the precondition for Macron leading a real struggle against Le Pen for the popular vote is a break with class collaboration, with the petit bourgeois Greens, let alone Macron’s bourgeois neoliberal party who he effectively endorsed on the second round by using tactical voting in this manner.
The precondition for serious struggle against Le Pen’s party is a break with popular frontism. In the second round of a presidential election, there is no way to evade the popular vote. But a break with popular frontism in France means a break with reformism, as within a reformist framework, the French electoral system makes popular frontism a practical temptation whenever the question of power arises. It may be that there is some kind of surge toward LFI before 2027, but if it does not break decisively with Macron’s warmongering and this strongly pro-war popular front, Mélenchon would be at best a candidate for the role of Salvador Allende.
Popular fronts, whether with the Greens or Macron’s Renaissance, are a trap for the working class. We demand that Mélenchon, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, break with Greens, refuse any political bloc with non-working-class forces, and fight too and nail against the war in Ukraine. The key indicator of the deceptive nature of this popular front is its support for Biden/Macron’s proxy war in Ukraine. In breaking with popular frontism, and this filthy war, they would actually undermine some of the support for the RN.
We need a party that opposes the threat of imperialist war against Russia and China, that defends migrant workers tooth and nail against the far right and Macron alike, and which fights against all the neoliberal attacks on the working class. For workers defence guards to defend victims of fascist terrorism! Down with Macron’s war in Ukraine – defend Russia, the Donbass and Crimea against Macron and his Nazi friends! Down with Le Pen, break with the bourgeoisie, no Popular Fronts – for a government of all the workers parties, LFI, SP, CP, on an anti-capitalist programme!
Jeremy Corbyn, newly elected Independent MP for Islington North, lambasts Starmer at Palestine Solidarity demo on 6 July
This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on the result of the General Election on July 4th.
The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.
The headlines of our leaflet read:
“Starmer’s Regime has NO MANDATE for its Genocidal Neoliberalism! Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour.”
This talk is based on that but expanded.
Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 174, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.
But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes absolutely than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%).
This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 59.9%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any ‘achievements’ of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.
In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.
But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide.
Since the election Sunak announced his resignation. A leadership election process for the Tories has begun. Farage’s Reform Party is hopeful of either replacing, or taking over the Tories for a more consistent, xenophobic far right type of politics. More on this later.
Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%. Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all. Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.
Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.
The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society.
Iqbal Mohammed, Newly Elected Independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, West Yorkshire
Iqbal Mohammad, is a former Labour member who quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.
Then there is the victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was just about defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.
Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. Jody McIntyre, Muslim and disabled activist and supporter of the Workers Party, almost unseated Jess Phillips, friend of Israel, in Birmingham Yardley, by only 693 votes. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes. He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council.
Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them. Andrew Feinstein came a very good second with over 7,000 votes after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Stamer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.
Halima Khan in Stratford and Bow for the Workers Party – former Labour whistleblower about corruption and the activities of the Zionist lobby in Newham – came a very good third, behind Labour and the Greens. She gained ten times the vote of prominent RMT activist Steve Hedley, who mistakenly stood without any real base. Faiza Shaheen, a respected economist and the overwhelming popular choice of Labour members in Chingford and Woodford Green was banned from standing for Labour, because she criticised Islamophobia in the Labour Party. She was set to defeat Iain Duncan Smith. She rightly refused to accept this, Labour imposed a stooge candidate, and a split vote ensued that allowed IDS to retain his seat. This is entirely caused by Labour Zionism and Islamophobia.
We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.
The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular.
The struggle against the far right and Farage’s semi-far-right movement, which aims to parallel the rise of Marine Le Pen, Meloni etc., is going to be a key struggle in the next period. But it is going to be inseparable from the struggle to build a new party of the working class left. Trotsky wrote in a different situation, about the counterposition of the fascists, and what the party of the working class left, the communist party, should stand for. He said that the fascists were the party of counterrevolutionary despair, whereas the communist party was the party of revolutionary hope.
We are in a somewhat different situation today. In the 1930s, there were strong, highly political working-class movements all over Europe, and fascism was a petty bourgeois and lumpen movement directly aimed at crushing them. This time round there is not a strong, highly political working-class movement. Far from it. The parallel rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the collapse of Stalinism caused a massive weakening of the working-class movement in the imperialist countries. A qualitative weakening, which has not yet been overcome.
This rise of fascism intersects a conflict within the imperialist bourgeoisie, because in the period since the collapse of Stalinism under the unprecedented US domination, the globalising factions of the bourgeois gained unprecedented dominance. The problem is that the imperialist bourgeoisie is a national class. Although, as Lenin pointed out, the nation-state is obsolete, and the proof of that is the world war that broke out in 1914. But the war in 1914 showed that, not only is the nation-state obsolete, but the imperialist bourgeoisie cannot abolish it. Rather, it will try to ‘abolish’ it by imperialist powers attempting to conquer each other, and the rest of the globe also. And tearing apart human civilisation in the process and threatening human existence today as today’s technology is quite capable, from climate pollution to the threat of nuclear war.
Today’s right-wing populist and fascist movements derive from a backlash within the various imperialist bourgeoisies against the ‘globalising’ liberal factions of the bourgeoisie. They are not particularly aimed at the workers movement, which is qualitatively weaker, both organisationally and politically, than it was in the 1930s. However, they are aimed at migrant workers, and the workers movement has to act as the tribune of the oppressed, and therefore has a duty to defend such workers tooth and nail. There is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about this reassertion of the ‘national’ prerogative of the various imperialist ruling classes.
Unfortunately, the populist factions have managed to convince some sections of the working-class movement that there is something positive about them. Even some left-wing sections of the workers movement have been drawn into the orbit of the populists, at least partly. Thus, we see working class support for Brexit, so-called ‘Lexit’, the most extreme example of which is George Galloway, who openly allied with Farage during the period of the Brexit referendum.
Even now, as he advocates the most courageous defiance and attacks on the imperialist bourgeoisie over its criminal support for genocide in Palestine, and its criminal, equally genocidal (in intent) proxy war in the Donbass, he still echoes the demands of the populists over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. He embodies a contradiction. He should be both hailed and congratulated for his courage over Ukraine and Gaza and taken to task for his chauvinist politics over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. For the working-class movement, no-one is illegal. Migrants, legal and ‘illegal’, are part of the working-class and oppressed.
Galloway became particularly vulnerable to such deviations when, as Britain’s most radical MP, he was brutally beaten by a Zionist in 2014, and betrayed by every member of the House of Commons bar one (including the Labour left) who failed to publicly condemn this fascist attack. He appeared to become partially disillusioned with the left after that. But this is not a mere personal foible. There are other examples.
Similar such contradictory phenomena are so-called ’MAGA-Communism’ in the United States (would be communists who support, or at least are in the political orbit of, Donald Trump). Or the left-wing politics (over Ukraine and Gaza) of Sahra Wagenknecht – very courageous in today’s Germany, and yet similar chauvinism to Galloway – her chauvinistic politics over migration. Wagenknecht has formed her own party over this, and appears to have the same mixture of courageous anti-imperialism and chauvinism as Galloway. This has partly come about as the Ukraine war has been seen particularly as a project of the ‘globalising’ faction of the bourgeoisie, with their populist opponents (Trump, Farage, the AfD, being seen to be more dubious about it).
This needs to be properly understood by the workers movement. A key text in understanding it is a 1977 essay “On Bourgeois Class-Consciousness” the then-leading Marxist intellectual figure of the Spartacist League/US, Joseph Seymour.
I would like to see us do a public forum/discussion on that soon. It would be very useful for enhancing a Marxist understanding of populism and the roots of the current growth of the far right. And re-arming the workers movement and the left, to understand this phenomenon, to gain a sense of perspective and discover how to combat it.
For this we need to advocate a unification of the anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist left including its sizeable ex-Labour, ex-Corbynite component. Programmatic development can only come through full debate and wide-ranging education. We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour
Top: Jeremy Corbyn, witchhunted and expelled from Labour by Starmer for belatedly defending his leadership against ‘anti-Semitism’ scam, defeated the Starmerites in his long-held Islington North seat. Bottom: Ayoub Khan, former Labour councillor and now independent MP defeated neocon Zionist Blairite Khalid Mahmood in Birmingham Perry Barr.
Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 171, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.
But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%). This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 60%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. Around 80% of the eligible electorate did not vote for this government.
It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any achievements of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.
In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.
But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide. Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%. Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all.
Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.
Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.
The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society. Iqbal Mohammad, a former Labour member quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.
Then there is the substantial victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was overwhelmingly defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.
Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes. He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council. Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them to Andrew Feinstein, who came a very good second after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Starmer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.
We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.
The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular. We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
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