Communist Fight issue #10 is now available
This issue has two overriding and interlinked themes: the fight against imperialist war, and against the ruinous attacks on the working class and oppressed masses occasioned by the interlinked capitalist economic and environmental crises that are intertwined with imperialism’s wars.
The lead articles on the front and back pages take up all these questions in some depth. The front page lead on Ukraine, by Liz Hoskings, is an all-out attack on Russophobia, imperialist militarism and its overt support for Nazism as a means to wage this NATO proxy war on Russia. It also includes a historical treatment of the national question, which is a different angle to previous articles, and should provoke some debate and hopefully increased understanding. Sharing the front page is an analysis of the fuel price attack on the working class, which is a much more serious attack on the entire working-class population (as well as much of the middle class) than the Poll Tax ever was. It is notable that working-class resistance to the Poll Tax played a major role in bringing down the arch-neoliberal regime of Thatcher in 1990. This crisis is much bigger, the attack more ferocious and entrenched, and intertwined with the effects of 40 years of privatisation and plunder by the bourgeoisie against those gains of the working class that were the product of its most historic struggles, not just in Britain but internationally. The potential for mass action is much greater, but the crisis of leadership of the working class is even more stark. This article addresses the many factors that go to make up this crisis and attempts to point a political way forward.
The back page article, on the other hand, addresses the severity of the environmental crisis we now face, in the context of his summer’s massive and deadly heatwaves in Europe, as well as the complete dereliction of the bourgeoisie on this question, which is driving human existence into great peril. All these questions are intertwined, as capitalist collapse and rampant environmental degradation are driving potent threats to our civilisation all over the planet.
A major component of this journal is transcripts of an international discussion that took place online in May to address the Ukraine conflict and the war drive against Russia and China in the context of Victory Day, the celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany by the USSR in 1945. The effective rehabilitation of Hitlerism by the ruling classes of the West in the current proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, exposes the real nature of the war on the Eastern Front: basically, a class war against a naked imperialist attack. The destruction of the USSR has now led to an imperialist drive to colonise Russia and China in which the temptation to make use of ‘captive nations’ fascists has proved irresistible to the bourgeoisie, especially given the decline of the imperialist hegemon, the US, which has introduced a degree of desperation into their conduct where any means will do to try to reassert US domination. All these questions and much more are discussed in the transcripts.
Other items included are: an account of our intervention in the Socialist Labour Network to try to get that organisation to adopt a principled, anti-imperialist position on Ukraine, which showed evidence of a gradual opening of sentiments on the left to such a position, even if we did not achieve instant success. We have material on the French legislative elections in June, which were an opportunity to put forward our independent class position on opposition to popular frontism in a situation where a popular new left party, La France Insoumise led by Mélenchon, engaged in a coalition that has at least an element of popular frontism about it. Another article in this issue denounces the obscene attempts by the Tories to deport refugees to Rwanda, a statement of genocidal intent if there ever was one. We have an historical analysis of political bias and the BBC by Mark Andresen, an article by our Brazilian comrades about the potential for a coup in the upcoming elections as Lula and the Brazilian workers movement try to throw out the Nazi-populist sociapathic president, Bolsonaro. And we have a commentary on the recent assassination attempt against Salman Rushdie, that is sharply critical of this author and scores the West’s hypocrisy about ‘free speech’ for Rushdie when it is suppressing the Russian media for fear of the truth being disseminating about their involvement with Hitlerites in Ukraine.
This issue is, as usual, very much focused on the struggle against imperialism and war, as a communist journal should be.
