Tag: US Imperialism

Argentina: Raid on the Central Headquarters Of Partido Obrero (Workers’ Party)

Solidarity with Partido Obrero against the repressive escalation of the Milei regime!

There was a raid on Monday, June 3, by the federal police at the headquarters of Partido Obrero, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. The raid was carried out with the alleged objective of requisitioning documentation from Editorial Rumbos and work cooperatives. In the same vein as the intimidation against Partido Obrero, a series of summonses and raids had already been carried out with a view to “auditing” the social assistance against the piquetero mass organization Polo Obrero and its leader, Eduardo Belliboni.

This occurred as part of almost 30 raids last month and a massive operation of telephone taps by the repressive apparatus against piquetero organizations. Although all this is only a part of the escalation of the repressive actions of the Milei government. The piquetero organizations that were targeted are the Polo Obrero, Peronist Barrios de Pie and the Front of Organizations in Struggle (FOL).

All this as part of the persecution of leftist parties and social movements under the pretext of diverting resources linked to the Empower Work plans by the piquetero organizations themselves. In a context where the austerity of the Milei government cancels social programs including assistance to soup kitchens, this repressive policy against leftist parties and social movements aims to prevent the masses from organizing themselves in the face of the austerity policy in the social aid plans, using hunger as a form of social control.

The strategic repressive escalation has been going on since the beginning of Milei’s government. Already in December 2023, the Minister of Security Patricia Bulrrich advanced the repressive protocol in order to prevent political and social organization and seek to criminalize those who demonstrate. Today there is currently a repressive siege against the workers of the province of Misiones. As part of Milei’s policies of persecution, we must also include pressure against opposition journalism such as the censorship manoeuvres against Santiago Cuneo.

Argentine fascism is already resorting to the techniques of war against the poor that Zionist fascism is using in Gaza. While the Argentine population suffers hunger and looks for food among the garbage, it was discovered that the “Ministry of Human Capital” retained more than five thousand tons of food in its warehouses in Tucumán until it spoiled.

The regime is waging a combined campaign of extinguishing the social functions of the state, strangling mass organizations, and political repression against social movements and their left-wing political parties.

This continuous repressive escalation is the only way for Milei’s government to impose its brutal austerity against the masses. In this sense, the raid against the headquarters of Partido Obrero is part of the persecution by Milei’s fascist government against the piquetero organizations, it is part of the attempt to reinforce repressive policies in the face of the growth of popular struggles against hunger and fascism, thus making use of the repressive apparatus and judicialization.

No to the criminalization of left-wing parties and social movements!

Solidarity with the Workers’ Party in the face of Milei’s fascist government!

Defence of the right to organise of workers!

An attack on one is an attack on all!

Milei, who wants to starve the people, hands off the social fighters!

Julian Assange’s Partial Legal Victory

On 20th May, at the Court of Appeal in London, Julian Assange won a significant legal victory over the sinister forces in the United States that seek to throw him into a US torture establishment for the rest of his life. He won the right to a full appeal on the grounds that his right to a defence against the (flagrantly unconstitutional) charges under the US Espionage Act, would be denied in the US because of discrimination against him due to nationality. This would deprive him of elementary protection of his right to free speech as a journalist under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The previous court (very reluctantly) asked for assurances from the US that Julian would not be executed (which were given) and that he would be given First Amendment protection (which the US attempted to dissemble). The court rejected the latter US evasion and granted him the right to a full appeal on this point.

 Previous courts outrageously dismissed and much more substantial indictments against the US, including blatant perjury, and threats (and plots!) to have Julian murdered, but this is the issue they could not evade.  This is a significant shift, as in the upcoming appeal, his rights under the European Convention of Human Rights, which applies much more widely, come into play.

There has now been a shift against the US-instigated lynch law that the British ruling class and judiciary have engaged in for most of the last decade and a half, denying him basic rights and attempting to isolate him with a fraudulent rape allegation in Sweden, for which there was never enough evidence to bring charges. However, the smear of ‘rapist’ was successfully used to undercut the necessary solidarity movement. Not only was Julian smeared in the bourgeois, especially liberal, press and politics; much of even the  ‘far left’ originally refused to defend him because of their own pandering to identity politics. Prominent exceptions were George Galloway and Craig Murray, who deserve congratulations for their tenacity and solidarity. 

That hysteria has dissipated at it has become clear to many of those people that Julian’s real ‘crimes’ were to exposure mass murder committed by US imperialism. His campaign has gained momentum, he has gained support from the Australian government and even some of the liberal media who smeared, stabbed and trashed him have been prevailed upon to pay lip service to defending his rights. This is not the end of the persecution of Julian Assange, but it does seem like it may be the beginning of the end, and he must have a good chance of winning his appeal in the Autumn. Everyone must keep up the pressure.

Communist Fight Series 2, issue 3 is Out Now!

This issue is heavily focussed on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which are the two immediately active issues that are threatening to escalate towards WWIII at this juncture.

The lead article is a joint statement of two closely aligned Marxist groups on  the implications of Israel’s attempts to provoke a major regional war with Iran, to somewhat distract from its failure, despite murdering around 40,000 Palestinian civilians, to subdue Hamas in Gaza.

Iran’s reprisal on 14th April was only parried by Israel with the help of its traditional imperialist allies: the US, France and Britain, as enough drone and missiles were fired at Israel to overwhelm its Iron Dome defence system had it been forced to defend itself alone. But Iran still managed to damage several Israeli military facilities, including those where the forces that carried out its initial murderous attack on the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus on 1st April.

Since this statement was written, Israel has made a murky response apparently through Iranian proxies, that appear to have led to some completely failed drone attacks around the Iranian city of Isfahan, home of much of Iran’s civil nuclear infrastructure. Though other material has emerged, that at this point appears speculative, that suggests that Israel may have tried and failed to use a high-altitude nuclear weapon to knock out Iranian electronics. A frightening development if true, however the information at this point is open to question.

Which brings us onto the second major article on Zionism, an abridged and updated study of the roots of the danger that Zionism poses, titled “Political Zionism And its Genocidal Hegemony in the Imperialist World”. In its original form, this was published by our predecessor Socialist Fight in 2016, when perhaps it was ahead of its time. It contains an extensive analysis of how Zionism came to play such an important and powerful role in the world of Western imperialism, and updates the Marxist, materialist analysis of the Belgian Trotskyist Abram Leon of the roots of the oppression of Jews in the early 20th Century, in his work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation.

Leon, who was murdered by the Nazis during WWII, did not live to see the foundation of the Zionist state. Let alone how Zionism inverted that oppression and created the situation we see today where a state whose official mythology claims it was founded to atone for the Nazi genocide, is carrying out its own genocide of the Palestinian people. However, as the article points out, there are enough pointers in Leon’s own analysis to explain what happened within his orthodox Marxist framework, extended in a manner verifiably faithful to its own Marxist, materialist method.

Regarding the Ukraine proxy war of imperialism, which Russia now seems to be on the verge of defeating, we publish the statement of our closely allied groups, and also of like-minded comrades in India, condemning and analysing the imperialist inspired terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall venue in Moscow, by terrorist mercenaries who it is now pretty much proven were acting as part of the Ukrainian proxy war. Terrorism of this type, purely directed at civilians, is hardly a sign of strength. It is directed at the Russian civilian population who overwhelmingly re-elected Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president recently, and basically expresses imperialist bloodlust against that population, just as has previously been seen in attacks on the population of Crimea and the Donbass republics, who likewise voted to join Russia.

Finally, we have a historical article on the Irish Question, written by a leading Brazilian comrade of the LCFI, which should be of interest to readers in Britain both for the different perspective such a view offers of the Irish question, and also for the historical material on the creditable activity of our predecessors in Socialist Fight on the Irish Question, which we obviously seek to continue when the chance arises to do so, as the Irish Question is still crucial for Marxists in Britain to address.

Condemn the Crocus Hall Terror attack on Russia!

Statement by LCFI, ClassConscious.Org, and National Democratic People’s Front (India)

The attack on the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, on the outskirts of Moscow, on 22nd May was clearly a Western-inspired murder attack on the population of Russia, even though it appears to have been carried out by jihadists associated with the Islamic State movement. It appeared to involve four gunmen, who opened fire on civilians attending a concert in the public concert hall, shooting dead 138 people and wounding many more, and set the building on fire with incendiaries.  Those who carried out the attack fled the scene and were picked up by the Russian state authorities in a car driving south through the Bryansk district, over 200 miles from Moscow and close to the Ukrainian border, within easy distance of Kyiv, around 14 hours afterwards. The Russian security forces have since picked up another 14 suspected of involvement in the crime.

The claim of responsibility for the attack by the ‘Khorasan’ chapter of Islamic State – which has been involved in armed conflict against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and which is supposed to be trying to create a ‘caliphate’ in Central Asia, likely overlapping Russian territory even, is highly suspicious, as Putin made clear. The captured gunmen, from Tajikistan, were very keen to get away and not become martyrs, apparently because there was payment waiting for them if they managed to escape to Ukraine. Hardly a fortune though – a mere million roubles (about £8000). They appear more like pro-imperialist mercenary-terrorists than self-sacrificing fighters against any kind of oppression. The US clearly knew what was being attempted in Russia, as they advised their own nationals and friends in Moscow to avoid large public events such as … concerts. But the Russian authorities say they received no warning from the US or other Western sources. Which is no surprise.

The entire ISIS-K project dovetails very well with imperialist aspirations, as expressed in the Brzezinski plan – the imperialist objective for its proxy wars against Russia, to find ways to break Russia up into ‘manageable’ chunks that can be subordinated and conquered by imperialism. It is therefore in the interest of the world working class that the West are on their way to defeat in Ukraine. The hysterical response to this looming defeat by some in Europe – from Macron’s threats of direct armed intervention of French troops against Russia in Ukraine, to such flagrant terrorist attacks in Russia itself, are a product of Western desperation.

But they still threaten escalation into outright military conflict between Russia/China and imperialism, as do the various provocations in the Far East against China, particularly around Taiwan. There have been numerous attacks on civilian and political targets in Russia – and not only in Russia – by pro-Ukraine Western forces during the Ukraine proxy war. The biggest such act was the destruction of NordStream, which the US senior journalist/whistleblower Seymour Hersh publicly identified as the doing of the US. This amounted to the US engaging in economic coercion and impoverishment of its ‘allied’ populations in Western Europe in pursuit of its vendetta against Russia.

There have also been assassinations and acts of terror sponsored by Ukraine, such as the murder of Dariya Dugina, daughter of prominent rightist philosopher Alexander Dugin, and that of military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, clearly by Ukrainian-guided assassins. As well as the repeated Ukrainian attacks on the city of Belgorod, with Western weapons, repeated attempts to inflict civilian casualties on the population of Crimea, and the use of cluster munitions and depleted uranium shells in the Donbass, also aimed to kill and poison civilians, basically for the ‘crime’ of being Russian and exercising their right to self-determination by voting to join Russia.

The evident motive for extending this to Moscow and Crocus Hall was the imperialist lust to ‘punish’ the Russian population for the overwhelming re-election of Vladimir Putin in the recent presidential election. Their pretence that there was something untoward about that election result is belied by the opinion poll results of Western-approved polling organisations in Russia, such as the Levada Centre, which reported an 86% approval rating for Putin shortly before he gained 87% of the vote in the Presidential Election – hardly a great surprise! (see https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-is-master-all-he-surveys-russians-head-polls-2024-03-15/).

Likewise, there has been hysteria in the imperialist media over Putin’s refusal to accept the Western cock-and-bull story that IS alone was responsible for the Crocus City Hall atrocity.  In the early days of the Special Military Operation in the Donbass there was some serious concern by the West to avoid being seen as responsible for reckless Ukrainian Nazi attacks on Russia itself, but now they don’t bother anymore. There is a continuum of this terrorism against Russia, and the Western denials are so weak and unconvincing that they clearly are no longer very concerned to hide it.

It is already known that various groups of pro-imperialist jihadists are fighting in Ukraine alongside the Nazi forces that dominate the Ukrainian state. This is a continuation of the use of similar jihadists to overthrow Colonel Qadhafi in Libya, and to attempt to bring down Assad in Syria, the second of which Putin’s Russia put a stop to by force in alliance with Muslim forces such as Hizbullah and Iran. Russia has also been supporting the liberation struggles in the Sahel region of West-Central Africa (Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and others) where French and US imperialism have also been using Islamic State’s mercenary forces against the masses and as a pretext to excuse the presence of colonial troops. And all these things stand on the shoulders of the pro-imperialist jihad against the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan in the 1980s, which played a major role in the destruction of the USSR and made the world qualitatively worse for the population of the Global South at the hands of US imperialism and its allies. Many of the most politically conscious, mainly Muslim peoples who have been attacked by the US in its period of ‘unipolar’ supremacy are now joining with the former workers states of Russia and China, still targeted by imperialism for outright conquest, to drive back the arrogant US in their attempt to maintain ‘full spectrum domination’ of the planet.

The fact that pro-imperialist Jihadist/mercenaries are prepared to attack Russia on the US’ s behalf while mainly Muslim Palestinians are facing the most ferociously genocidal assault and mass extermination with US and other Western weapons by the West’s key ally Israel, underlines the treachery of such forces against their own people. Some Western and Israeli politicians have taken to equating Russia with Hamas, and Israel has just given Ukraine a new anti-missile system, which is an attempt at a serious proxy-military escalation against Russia by Israel.

From Moscow to Donbass, from Crimea to Gaza, from Palestine to Lebanon, from the Sahel to Yemen – smash imperialist-Zionist terrorism!

Defeat NATO’s genocidal Nazi war in Donbass! Defeat Israeli genocidal war against the Palestinians! Defend Russia and China against imperialism!

Turn the anti-imperialist struggles into a struggle against neoliberalism and capitalism itself!