These are the prepared notes for the presentation at today’s forum (14th December 2025). A recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

The Ukraine proxy war looks like it is coming to an end. Not through some kind of ‘peace’ agreement, though Trump’s sometime attempts to procure one have put the possibility on the agenda. But through a Russian victory. This is the product of a very determined war of attrition by Russia, which has resisted the temptation to use its obviously superior firepower to fight the way the United States is renowned for fighting wars against smaller countries. There has been no Russian use of ‘shock and awe’ tactics in Ukraine, no use of carpet bombing or mass terror tactics against the population of the Donbass. That’s not because the Russians are militarily unequipped for such a war, but because they are not fighting a war of conquest against the people of the areas they are seeking to deliver from Nazi rule.

Towns and Cities in the Donetsk oblast, otherwise known as the Donetsk People’s Republic, currently the main theatre of the Special Military Operation, have been massively fortified by the Ukrainian Nazis, much of the Russian-speaking population being reduced to hostages by a hostile occupying force. That was the result of the duplicity of Maidan Ukraine and its Western backers over the two Minsk agreements.  These were signed supposedly to settle the conflict that broke out between the regime that was created by the US funded Maidan coup in 2014, and the Russian-speaking population of the Southeastern part of Ukraine. This coup, or colour revolution, brought to power a far-right regime that virtually worshipped the Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, which immediately started persecuting the Russian-speaking part of the population

The US spent $6 billion funding the overthrow of the elected President, Yanukovych, who was politically closer to Russia than to the EU and US. A previous ‘colour revolution’ in 2004 had brought to power a pro-Western president, Yushchenko. Initially, Yanukovych was elected then, but there was a strange incident where Yushchenko was apparently poisoned, supposedly by Yanukovitch’s supporters. Because of that allegation, then were able to force a re-run, which Yushchenko narrowly won. But his presidency afterwards was disastrous, with the rapid impoverishment of the country and the government under him splintering under pressure. By the time the next Presidential election happened, in 2010, Yushchenko was so unpopular he ended up in fifth place. Yanokovitch came back to power, again quite narrowly.

It is very clear in that context why the US sought a far-right coup and a war against the population in the East. The Russophone population in the East was the base for pro-Russian political trends in Ukraine, and it was finely balanced. To get a sustainable pro-Western regime in Ukraine that population had to be crushed. So that was the project that the US initiated with far-right allies – chiefly Svoboda and Right Sector (Pravi Sektor), at the end of 2013, which fully unfolded in the spring of 2014. Large demonstrations were initiated according to a well-established pattern by forces guided according to a well-worn formula. A shooting incident, a massacre of protesters from their own side, was carried out by the fascist militias of the Banderaite parties, Svoboda and Pravi Sektor, and then blamed on the police. On the back of that, the presidential palace was attacked and Yanukovych fled in fear of his life. Ensuring a regime where a Russia-friendly and Donbass-friendly president could never again come to power by democratic means.

That was the whole point of the US funded coup. It was in effect a fascist coup, and it meant that, no matter how little electoral support they really had in Ukraine, the decisive power behind the scenes was the far right and their militias. It is true today. Yanukovych was replaced by a puppet regime. One embarrassing episode in this coup was when the US Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, was recorded talking to Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine, discussing who should head up the new US puppet government. They chose Yatsenyuk. He chosen by the US, not any kind of purported democratic process. Characteristically, the coup was funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, created by the Reagan administration to carry on as a separate specialism the CIA’s old function of organising coups and creating puppet regimes. The CIA had become tarnished.

This coup immediately led to a popular uprising in the major Russian speaking areas of Ukraine. In Lugansk and Donetsk, the angry populations set up two ‘People’s Republics’, of Donetsk and Lugansk, which the Maidan coup regime immediately declared war on. They claimed that the rebellious populations were ‘terrorists’, and Kiev’s war, with clear genocidal aspects, was dubbed right from the start an ‘anti-terrorist operation’. At the same time Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and voted in a referendum to join Russia. Since the population was overwhelmingly Russian, this was a foregone conclusion. Crimea had been placed in Ukraine by an arbitrary decision of the Soviet leadership of Khrushchev in 1954. The population rebelled against a fascist regime that declared open war on Russian-speakers and actual Russians within Ukraine. Far from being some Putin plot, as the West alleged, all these movements were driven by mass anger from below. There really was not much Kiev could do about Crimea, which is separated from the main body of Ukraine by both the Donbass and also water contiguous to the Black Sea/Sea of Azov, but the so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’ was a declaration of war against the Donbass people.

The Nazi war against the Donbass claimed 14,000 lives in the eight years between 2014 and 2022. And in 2014, there was also mass unrest in Odessa, an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking city on the Western end of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The regime sent in violent football ‘fans’, armed Nazis basically, who proceeded to attack demonstrators in the centre of Odessa and chased many who took refuge in the central trade union building, which they then torched. At least 50, likely more, burned to death. The war Maidan Ukraine waged against its own Russian speaking population was hardly a success, however. So, they had to manoeuvre. This gave birth to the various Minsk agreements. These agreements of 2014 and 2015, and the various supplementary protocols to them, allowed the far-right Maidan regime to play for time, confronted with the popular uprisings to give themselves breathing space to begin preparing for future conflict, including the fortification of cities and towns against their own inhabitants. Hollande and Merkel later revealed that they were fully aware at the time that the Minsk processes were aimed at playing for time, allowing the West to arm Ukraine to continue the war a later date.

This began under the Obama administration. But in 2016, Trump was able to defeat Obama’s successor as the Democratic nominee for President, Hillary Clinton, which gave birth to a slightly different situation regarding Ukraine. There is an important nuance of difference between Trump, and the mainstream of US politics, over Ukraine. It relates to their relations with Zionism. The mainstream of the Democrats and Republicans are virulently pro-Zionist, but there are some important differences with Trump and what he represents. Trump, unlike the normal run of presidential candidates from both parties, was a direct agent of Israel’s main ruling party, Likud. His three election campaigns, in 2016, 2020 and 2024, were all directly paid for by the Likudnik billionaire Sheldon Adelson, and then in 2024 by his widow Miriam Adelson. There are grounds to suspect that at least some of these ultra-Zionists are ambivalent about the volume of US aid to Maidan Ukraine, seeing it as a waste – that these resources ‘should’ be going to Israel.

 It should be noted that the Zionists gained major political benefits from Trump’s election in 2016, as Trump implemented the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 2005, which mandated that the US embassy be moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. This measure was forced through congress by the Zionists, but then three Presidents; Clinton, Bush and Obama, failed to implement it. Trump also formally recognised Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, previously a no-no, and he tore up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Earlier, while Obama was still in office, in 2015, Netanyahu visited the US, and at a joint session of the Senate and the House, had vehemently denounced the deal, to numerous standing ovations from the assembled lackeys, who behaved like, in the words of Norman Finkelstein, “demented jack-in-the-boxes”. So, Trump had misgivings about blank cheques for Ukraine, and that seems to be associated with his direct Likud agentry. A clue about this is that Victor Orban of Hungary, another virulent Zionist who is against the Ukraine campaign, is also a clear Zionist agent, and defied the International Criminal Court to host Netanyahu earlier this year.

This was the basis of the Democrats’ “Russiagate” Hoax, claiming that Trump was an agent of the Kremlin. The truth is that he is an agent of Likud, and has some contradictions flowing from that. But the Democrats are too subservient to Zionism to make an issue of that, and too cowardly – afraid of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. So, they tried to use Putin as a proxy for their evasion of the real issue. Trump played a less strident role but still escalated the Ukraine proxy war. He was the first to send Javelin missiles to Ukraine. He played a major role in grooming Zelensky, as camouflage for the Nazi regime, given his Jewish origin. Zelensky won the Ukraine election in 2019 based on promises to implement the Minsk agreements, which meant he won with the massive support of people in the Donbass. But as soon as he won, he became a puppet of the Nazis, and there began a slide to escalation and war against those who voted for him. Trump bore huge responsibility for that.

This intensified under Biden, as Zelenksy’s regime, at the start of 2022, as documented by the Swiss former OECD inspector, Jacques Baud, embarked on a massive escalation and preparation for an invasion of those sections of the DPR and LPR that remained in the hands of the people. Putin tried by diplomacy, and warnings of the consequences, to get the US and its proxies to back off, but to no avail, so in February 2022, he initiated the SMO, a limited, defensive war to stop the crushing of the people of the Donbass. From our point of view, this is a progressive war. Russia is not an imperialist power – far from it. The Russian imperialist bourgeoisie was torn out by the roots by the workers revolution in 1917-18. We totally reject the allegation that the USSR was in some sense an imperialist force. Under Stalinism, it remained a degenerated form of the dictatorship of the proletariat until 1991, when it succumbed to a counterrevolution as the bureaucracy capitulated to an enormous imperialist war drive and neoliberal political offensive.

The massive economic shock treatment, which imperialism and the counterrevolution imposed on Russia, caused millions of deaths in the 1990s – a fall in live expectancy of 5 years can only be explained that way.  This caused a huge popular backlash, that was expressed through the state apparatus itself, which was not fully consolidated against the working class, and caused a partial retreat of the counterrevolution. The decrepit character of the counterrevolution was symbolised by the drunk Yelstin. He was ousted by Putin, from the depths of the apparatus, who however no longer even claimed to be a communist. He took the only course open to him to regenerate Russia as a viable state, building a unique kind of mixed economy out of the productive, economic and military apparatus bequeathed to him from the workers’ state.

Russia today is a kind of dialectical inversion of the USSR. The USSR was a weak workers state with massive bureaucratic deformations that came from the pressure of the imperialist environment. Russia today is a weak bourgeois state, but weak not in the face of the external world, but of massive post-capitalist, ‘socialist’ deformations on itself, elements of a higher mode of production that persist in ‘invading’ this form of capitalism, to paraphrase Engels. That class analysis of Russia illustrates the nature of the war, and why it has gone so badly for US and NATO imperialism. This is somewhat unexpected, given the counterrevolution in the 1990s, but this resurgence of Russia has coincided with an accelerating decline of the US. Russia, no longer a workers’ state, has paradoxically been able to forge a degree of unity with the Chinese workers state, in terms of diplomacy and basic military cooperation, that eluded the leadership of the USSR, due to intra-Stalinist rivalry. The accelerating cold war against Russia and China echoes the imperialist war drives of NATO against the USSR. Anti-Sovietism has morphed into outright racist Russophobia.

We see a Western politically-based hatred of Russians for being organically ‘disobedient’ to imperialist neoliberalism, similar in some ways to Hitler’s belief that Jews were organically prone to Bolshevism. Even the liberal bourgeoisie in the West is prepared to arm and fund outright Nazis to kill Russians. Though they try to hide it – hence the hysteria against ‘disinformation’. Under Biden, they were prepared to risk nuclear war by firing missiles such as ATACMS and the European Storm Shadow directly into Russia. Only the cool head of Putin and co averted that.  The only ones half-hearted about this are ultra-Zionists who consider Ukraine is taking resources that ought to go to support Israeli genocide of Palestinians. What an appalling counterposition!

It is the combination of this new, implicit alliance of non-imperialist deformed capitalism in Russia, with the deformed workers state in China, that has brought the imperialist world to the brink of a major defeat in Ukraine. We can see the technological superiority of Russia and China in things like the Oreshnik and Burevestinik missiles, which the US has no answer to, and China’s Deepseek AI technology, which is also more advanced than the West’s, and uses much less energy. This is the product of elements of a higher mode of production, in Russia, as a unique kind of non-imperialist bourgeois state with massive post-capitalist, ‘socialist’ deformations – derived from elements of a higher mode of production. And China, a deformed workers state, albeit on where a large capitalist sector exists and is currently controlled and subordinated to state planning. We see NATO in disarray, and on the verge of collapse.

This is not the expectation Marxists had for how the world socialist revolution would materialise. We are a considerable distance from that at this point. But the multipolar world that is becoming visible from this prospect of strategic imperialist defeat will also open up new political space in which massive new opportunities for such a world revolution can arise.

The following is an address that a Consistent Democrats spokesperson delivered on 8th November. to an event hosted by the New Communist Party to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian October Revolution of 1917.

I bring greetings on behalf of the Consistent Democrats to this reception organised by the New Communist Party, which celebrates what is still (so far) the greatest event in world history, the Russian October revolution of 1917. We in the Consistent Democrats stand in the tradition of the Bolshevik Party, and of the Communist International it created, with other revolutionary forces, after the Revolution. The revolution grew from mass working-class discontent with the imperialist world war, not just in Russia, but throughout Europe, the main war theatre.  Which then spread worldwide.

In Russia the backwardness of the Tsarist regime, and its terrible fortunes in war, the privations of the mass of the people, especially women, caused an explosion first.  And there was a party, the Bolshevik Party, with the programme and will to seize the revolutionary situation that resulted, that was able in the nick of time to correct its course. As immediately after the February Revolution, before Lenin was able to return to Russia, the party had settled on a perspective of supporting the bourgeois coalition “Insofar as” it supposedly supported the revolution. But Lenin, armed with his new understanding of the imperialist war, understood that the Provisional Government was a disguised imperialist government, and would seek to crush the revolution to maintain Russia’s role in the war. So Lenin presented his April Theses on his return to Russia, which put forward a perspective of no support to the bourgeois Provisional Government. It started with the perspective that the party should ‘patiently explain” to the masses the imperialist nature of the Provisional Government and the need to replace it with a workers’ and peasants’ government.

As the inevitable conflict between the masses and the government developed, the Bolsheviks raised slogans such as “down with the ten capitalist ministers” aiming to force the Mensheviks and other ‘lefts’ to break with the imperialists…  And later “All power to the Soviets’ as is became clear that the masses’ conflict with the bourgeoisie was headed for civil war. Even though they had to briefly draw back in July, as the danger of a premature confrontation loomed, and Lenin had to go into hiding. When the situation calmed down, and the revolutionary situation further matured, Lenin was able to work with others, notably Trotsky, in pushing forward the organisation of the masses to actually overturn the imperialist government in real life. I will pause the narrative there, as that is a brief, perhaps too brief, description of what we are celebrating. I did say that the October revolution was the greatest event in human history “so far”. We have not quite reached those heights since. Because even though there have been crucial revolutions since, and huge wars of liberation and defeats of imperialism, the 1917 revolution was unique because of the internationalist vision of its leading party.

The Bolshevik Party saw themselves, and the international movement they founded, the Third or Communist International, as a political army fighting for the world socialist revolution in an immediate sense. Whereas later, by the late 1920s, after Lenin had died and Trotsky, among others, had been driven away from the leadership, the international became quite conservative, and retreated from fighting for international revolution. It was would up in 1942. And nothing has been created to replace it since. Trotsky in exile tried hard to create a replacement, the Fourth International, but simply did not have the forces to do so at the time. That is not to speak of the fact that many who should have known better, were hostile to the idea at the time.

Today, we need an international like the Communist International. We face capitalism in decay, with is nuclear destructive capacity, and its irrationality threatening humanity with destruction, either nuclear holocaust, or an environmental holocaust that is on the horizon. We also have several partial gains of the world revolution, direct and indirect, which must be defended at all costs against imperialist attack, and attempts by imperialism to make use of capitalist forces within them. We still have workers states in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and the DPRK. Some of them are severely deformed, and/or have strong and dangerous capitalist forces within them but must still be defended.

Then there is Russia, where the counterrevolution didn’t really succeed, and there has been a partial return to a new kind of mixed economy, where the state component is not capitalist at all, unlike with nationalisation under capitalism. That must also be defended. In all these places, and the world generally, we need to see the rebirth of something like the Third International, a genuine world party of socialist revolution. Whatever number you put on the International, whether Fourth, Fifth or whatever, it has to be like the early Third.

It needs to fight to complete what Lenin and his comrades – the world socialist-communist revolution, with the party at the head of a class-conscious proletariat. That is what the Consistent Democrats want, and we will work side-by-side with any Communists, from whatever background and tradition, who seek the same thing. That is why we are here today. Thank you, comrades.

This is from the website of the Brazilian section of the LCFI

US imperialism is reviving the Monroe Doctrine in its pursuit of regional hegemony. Attacks on the Bolivarian Revolution have been ongoing since Chávez Frías came to power, including his kidnapping, the guarimbas (violent protests), currency seizures, attempted invasions, and the offer of US$50 million to assassinate Maduro. There have been 930 sanctions against the Venezuelan people, who resist with unity, organization, and constant mobilization. It is necessary to defend all the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.

International Antifascist – Brazil Chapter

In 2025, the Trump administration intensified the decades-long siege against Venezuela and Cuba and extended its sanctions policy to several other Latin American countries, such as Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. However, the tactic of sanctions and tariffs further amplifies and deepens contradictions, strengthening movements fighting for sovereignty and the unity of oppressed peoples, in opposition to the interests of imperialism and fascism.

Similarly, Trump’s internal war, resorting to ICE, his Gestapo, to persecute immigrants, especially Latin Americans, and the elimination of social programs for the most needy sectors of the US working population, has been strengthening social mobilizations, the left, and the opposition to Trumpism, imposing important political defeats on the White House in the October elections.

Shortly after the 2008 crisis, an economic transition towards commercial independence from the US began in Latin America. The financialization of the imperialist economy, and the inability of the parasitic US and European economies to counter the development of the productive forces and commodity production of the BRICS countries, especially China, makes this transition an unstoppable movement. Even under Milei’s government, the Chinese economy continues to expand its influence in Argentina, contradicting the interests of imperialism.

Defeated both domestically and externally in the economy and in politics, unable to achieve his goal of the surrender and capitulation of the oppressed, Trump resorts to military blackmail and coups in Venezuela and Mexico, that is, carrying out the policy of recolonization by other means, the military, that of civil war.

The most powerful naval fleet on the planet, armed with the largest aircraft carrier ever built, has been summarily executing, in violation of international law, small boats carrying fishermen in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, accused without any proof of being drug traffickers.

Faced with this desperate situation for the US, the Trump administration took on the mission of recolonizing Latin America. The modus operandi of this tactic depends on the weaknesses of each country.

US imperialism is reviving the Monroe Doctrine in its pursuit of regional hegemony. Attacks on the Bolivarian Revolution have been ongoing since Commander Hugo Chávez Frías came to power, including his kidnapping, the guarimbas (violent protests), currency seizures, attempted invasion, and the offer of $50 million to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro Moros. The US has imposed 930 sanctions against the Venezuelan people, who resist with unity, organization, and constant mobilization. Defending Venezuelan sovereignty in all areas means defending all the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Given the cohesion of Venezuelan society against imperialism, recolonization there currently takes the form of the threat of direct external military intervention by the Pentagon and the US Department of Justice to divide the Bolivarian Armed Forces and overthrow the popular Maduro government.

In Mexico, the CIA fabricated yet another colorful rebellion, using as its pretext the supposed dissatisfaction of Generation Z with the government of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, which was easily quelled due to the artificiality of the regime change process that had been created.

In Brazil, the right wing was defeated at the polls (2022), in the streets (2025), and in the National Congress itself, where it holds a numerical majority, in important votes such as the “PEC da Bandidagem” (Amendment to the Constitution regarding criminal activity) and the income tax exemption for workers earning up to 5,000 reais. These anti-patriots and Trump agents, after losing in politics and the economy, also escalated their power in Brazil, playing the security card, executing 121 people in a massacre in Rio de Janeiro, also in defiance of the law, and attempting to create a legal situation to justify a US military intervention in Brazil, classifying organized crime as a terrorist organization. But they were defeated in this attempt as well, and Bolsonaro was arrested after an attempted escape.

We, the peoples of Latin America, including the workers of the USA itself, must mobilize, hold demonstrations in defense of our sovereignty and against all interference by imperialism in any of our nations, demand a complete end to tariffs, sanctions and blockades against Cuba or Venezuela, repel this threat and strengthen solidarity and our unity in favor of the great and socialist homeland.

Ukraine

We are not actually in World War III, yet, but with the serious and convulsive nature of the crises the world is facing today, anyone could be excused from wondering if a world conflict was imminent. We have a major proxy war in Ukraine where NATO military personnel, working nominally for the Ukrainian government, have fired US ballistic missiles such as ATACMS and the Anglo-French cruise missile Storm Shadow, into Russia. Trump was recently threatening to allow Ukraine to fire the even more threatening US Tomahawk cruise missile into Russia. In response, a year ago, Russia tested the super-hypersonic multi-warheaded Oreshnik (Hazel) missile on a huge Ukrainian arms complex near Dnipro, comprehensively wiping it out with purely conventional explosives that Ukraine had zero chance of stopping.

In response to Trump’s bragging threats to hand over Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, Russia then announced that it had tested Burevestnik or Storm Petrel (a kind of seabird), a low flying, nuclear powered cruise missile with virtually unlimited range, capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads. Soon after this announcement, Trump announce that he would not be giving Tomahawks to Ukraine, supposedly because of a limited supply of these weapons. Instead, Trump announced that the US would be resuming nuclear testing, in effect junking the Test Ban Treaty, which has never formally come into force, but had generally been observed since the 1990s. However, it was not clarified if the testing envisaged was actual nuclear explosions, or something less, and Russia and other countries also made it clear that such an action would have consequences. While the direction of motion is clear, exactly what may take place is not.

The whole reason why such fulminations and risk-taking are going on over Ukraine is because the US and its proxies are clearly losing. More strategic towns are being taken in the areas of the semi-liberated oblasts in South-East Ukraine, particularly Donetsk and Zaporozhe. And Odessa was recently convulsed with rioting as the Russian-speaking population rebelled against conscription. One of the key differences between Trump and his predecessor Biden is that Trump recognises that the US is failing in its proxy war in Ukraine. Various figures in the West whom it is quite appropriate to call “Azov liberals” fulminate against Trump supposedly for being some sort of supporter or tool of Vladimir Putin for his preference for sporadic peace summits with Russian leaders, and his refusal to commit to virtually unlimited funds and arms to Zelensky’s far right Ukrainian regime.

But the real explanation for Trump’s (relative) rationality over Ukraine is that it is the flipside of his activities as a tool of the Israel lobby. Trump’s three Presidential election campaigns, as is well documented, were paid for by the Likudnik Adelson dynasty, the last in 2024 to the tune of $100 million from Mirian Adelson. It is a well-known fact that the most vehemently pro-Zionist regime in Europe, East or West, is that of Victor Orban in Hungary, which openly defied the arrest warrant against Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court recently – and yet is hostile to the war drive against Ukraine. One key reason for this hostility is that there is a strong school of thought among Zionists that the financial and military aid that the Western powers are spending trying to vainly defeat Russia, would be better spent on Israel itself. That is one expression of a latent contradiction between the interests of the Zionist lobby, and US imperialism, where as is well known, the Biden administration was gung-ho about war in Ukraine to the point of pushing the conflict to the brink in the ‘lame duck’ last weeks of his presidency, something that Putin was able to deter by the demonstrative use of the devastating non-nuclear Oreshnik, undoubtedly the most dangerous and dramatic point in the Ukraine conflict.

China

Which brings us briefly to China. The US’s crusade against China has largely run into the ground. Their strategy of provoking China into taking control of Taiwan as a trigger for a Ukraine-style war, by using Taiwan’s advanced NVIDIA chip manufacturing facilities, and embargoes and/or sanctions to starve China of access to such technology, has run into the ground. The unveiling of DeepSeek, the Chinese open source AI feature, in 2024, was a huge blow to this, as it appears that despite such embargoes, China is close to drawing ahead of the West, including Taiwan (as in reality a US/Japanese proxy) in developing advanced chips for use in AI and other advanced applications. Not only that, but it appears that China’s new chips are less prone to gobble up enormous amounts of energy at those the West are using. Which is something of a blow, as it is now possible to envisage that China will in the next decade or so completely surpass the West in terms of high technology without needing Taiwan’s vaunted advanced semiconductor facilities. So, Trump has been blowing hot and cold with sanctions, tariffs and threats against China and yet looking increasingly impotent and ineffective.

Gaza and Zionist Crisis

Then we have Gaza. The conflict supposedly over the Israeli hostages taken on 7^th October was a feeble alibi indeed for the genocide, and the fake ceasefire brokered by Trump shows that quite clearly. The genocide continues, albeit at a slightly slower pace in Gaza, but an accelerating rate of killing and repression in the West Bank more than makes up for that. Gaza is still being starved, very little aid is getting though compared to what was mooted by Trump and so, and preparations are being made to split Gaza into two zones, partly administered by Gaza’s projected new overlord, the Iraq war criminal Tony Blair. And yet there is no agreement with the Palestine resistance forces who reluctantly refused to outright oppose Trump’s fake ceasefire, which was a way of saving Netanyahu’s neck more than anything, as at the end of the more than two years of genocidal bombing and starving, its forces were still undefeated and had steadily recruited and maintained their popular support.

They took the risk of going along with the fake ceasefire to try to get the Palestinian population some relief from the slaughter, not to save their own forces.  Israel still bombs daily, the situation is grim indeed, but Israel is also exposed and in Europe and the US popular hatred for the genocidal regime is becoming an avalanche, causing a major crisis in the US, with the fragmentation of Trump’s MAGA base over their attitude to Zionism, which many say is ‘Israel first’, not ‘America First’. The issue of Jeffrey Epstein, and his relationship with Trump, is crucial, and it is not just a squalid child-sex scandal but is increasingly widely suspected to be something connected to outsized Israeli influence over US politics, which is clearly true. Which puts Trump in a very precarious position.

It has had its impact in Europe too, and sharply in Britain, both with the stripping of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor of his former princely royal titles because of his deep involvement, documented in Virginia Guiffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, with Epstein and sex-trafficking of underage girls. A major blow to the diminishing prestige of the British Monarchy. This is, as indicated, linked intimately to the Israel lobby and its influence over Western politics. Labour’s Zionist monster Peter Mandelson was earlier forced out as British Ambassador to the US over this; the fact that he was ever appointed at all is startling, given his long-known close relations with Epstein. But Starmer, as he noted when becoming Labour leader, supports Zionism “without qualification”. The British body politic is in deep crisis because of the Israel lobby and its hold over politicians, as shown by the crisis over the proscription for supposed ‘terrorism’ of Palestine Action, which Britain’s own intelligence services have said quite clearly (though known intermediaries) that they find counter-productive and impossible to justify. The judicial review of this ban is due in the courts in late November.

And then there is the ludicrous affair of the Europa League football match between Aston Villa and Macabee Tel Aviv on 6^th November. West Midlands Police were denounced as anti-Semitic by all four major Zionist-influenced parties: Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Reform, because they acted to ban Macabees away supporters from attending the Villa match, citing their earlier outrageous rioting in Amsterdam as justification. Then after the pro-Zionist parties had so denounced the police, and the local Independent MP, Ayoub Khan, for initiating the ban, another major riot of these ‘fans’ forced a local ‘derby’ in Tel Aviv itself to be called off. Making the leaders of all four of these parties look like idiots. All of these, combined with the impact of the livestreamed genocide itself, have plunged the Zionist lobby, and those political forces in hock to it, into deep crisis here also.

Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere

One way or another, the US has been forced to somewhat retreat from some overt interventions in the Middle East and Ukraine. Its involvement in the 12-day war against Iran in June 2025 only delivered a severe blow to Israel. The US had to desperately broker a ceasefire for Israel because the Zionists were taking a hammering from Iran’s formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles. A repeat of that attack looks even less promising, as Iran is both better armed and better prepared than in June. So, as Trump mooted with earlier ‘ambitious’ demands for Anschluss with Canada, or to annex Greenland, the US under his command is now seeking to retrench in the Western Hemisphere. Hence the outrageous threats to Venezuela, the murder-attacks on fishing boats pretending they are narcotics smugglers, the $50 million price on President Maduro’s head, and the Nobel Peace Prize for the fascist US puppet María Corina Machado, who wants the US to invade Venezuela so she can hand over literally trillions of dollars of its oil reserves to the US.

The US belligerence against Venezuela is part of Trump’s reconsolidation of the US in the Western Hemisphere, with a view to later expansion. It involves the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, that the whole of the Americas belongs to the US. An invasion of Venezuela is entirely possible, the threats against Colombia’s leftist president Gustavo Petro show it goes further than that. Cuba is also under threat, as still the only workers state in the Americas – Venezuela for all its deep-going social reforms and collectivism is still in terms of many of its economic resources privately owned, and the bourgeois class has not been expropriated. Maybe an all-out conflict with US imperialism would bring a tipping point where the Bolivarian Revolution night further radicalise and the working masses move to expropriate the bourgeoisie. A Yankee invasion of Venezuela, a huge country, would enrage the masses in all Latin America and would generate huge resistance and likely a revolutionary wave. So, to conclude this survey of the state of the world at this point, the braggadocio of Trump in the Western Hemisphere could easily be a trap for US imperialism, and could turn the apparent pre-war situation right now, which at times looks very threatening indeed, into a pre-revolutionary situation.

Your Party is a fragile creation right now.  The infant party founded by Zarah Sultana when she resigned from Labour in July and effectively demanded that Jeremy Corbyn act to do what he had been hinting and threatening to do for over a year – create such a party – has both shown signs of some real development, and at the same time been rent by proto-factional divisions. Corbyn is acting as de-facto leader right now, of what both he and Zarah Sultana say will be a member-led socialist party animated by ‘grassroots democracy’.

Corbyn was the left social-democratic leader of Labour from 2015 to 2020 when he was forced out with systematic sabotage of his leadership by a bloc of the Labour Party’s Blairite neoliberal mainstream bureaucracy and its powerful Israel lobby. Corbyn’s leadership was the product of resistance from the base of the working-class movement, or at least its class-conscious section, that had been almost completely excluded for 30 years from any say over the political direction of Labour, the bourgeois workers party that had been the partial political expression of organised labour in Britain since the early 20^th Century.

Neoliberalism on the attack

From the mid-1970s the ruling classes of the US and Britain prepared the so-called “Reagan/Thatcher revolutions”, a war that was not merely against trade unions in terms of repressive laws. It aimed to seriously weaken the traditional working class of the advanced capitalist-imperialist countries through the destruction of strategic extractive and manufacturing industries such as mining and steel, with the jobs exported to lower wage countries such as India and China. They did this in Britain with the cooperation of the core of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy, who as an index of their own servility to imperialism, perversely saw Thatcher’s attacks on the core of the working class as a way for sections of the class to enrich themselves at others’ expense. That was totally delusional, in fact they laid the basis for the current impoverishment and lumpenisation of large sections of the population in key parts of the UK, which is currently fuelling far right despair.

The international counterpart of Reagan and Thatcher’s pioneering neoliberal crusade to weaken the industrial proletariat in these imperialist countries was the war drive against the USSR in the 1980s, which led the USSR’s Stalinist regime to a capitulationist ‘liberalisation’ under Gorbachev and then allowed outright counterrevolution to emerge and take power under Yelstin in the 1990s. Thatcher’s anti-Soviet drive also had the support of the pro-imperialist labour bureaucracy in Britain, with only sporadic resistance from the Bennite left.

Imperialist rampage, the working class on the retreat

Today that seems almost like a different world. Imperialism consolidated itself after the collapse of the USSR around the project of the neocons and the cult of Jewish-Zionism. Such were the ideologues – the likes of Friedman, Joseph, Sherman, Kissinger, etc – of neoliberalism’s attack on the proletariat beginning in the US and Britain. This later spread to the European Union imperialist countries while it produced catastrophic mayhem in the East. This was also true in Britain as the Labour Party bureaucracy consolidated itself about the projects of the neocons. 

Kinnock gave way to Blair, and then you had the central involvement of the Blair government in Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. This was one of a series of imperialist invasions and regime-change operations in the Middle East region since the 1990s that not coincidentally removed every nearby Arab regime that was not servile to Israel as a regional imperialist would-be hegemon. Iraq, Libya, Syria all fell to either outright invasions or proxy wars waged either by the imperialists themselves, as with Bush/Blair’s 2003 Iraq invasion or Obama/Cameron/ Sarkozy’s 2011 Libya invasion, or the Syrian proxy war – with sporadic imperialist bombing – from 2011 onwards — using Western funded ISIS/Al Qaeda jihadists.  This was like the imperialist-inspired jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s, where Al Qaeda was created by the CIA. The Syrian jihad was thwarted by Russian military support for Assad and then armed intervention from 2015.

This thwarted imperialist regime-change in Syria for around a decade, but it finally succeeded in overthrowing Assad in 2024, during the Gaza genocide. It does even appear that the imperialist drive to provoke a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine at that time was initially intended to put pressure on Russia’s operation in Syria and thereby help the pro-Israel regime-change operation there.  But it acquired a life of its own, and became a major conflict, in which the US and Europe are close to outright defeat by a Russia under Putin that has partially retreated from/negated the counterrevolution that occurred under Yelstin. The attacks on Iran and Lebanon, and now the war in Sudan, were all part of the neocon regime- change agenda revealed by former NATO head General Wesley Clark in 2007, as the Bush era ended – the hit list for regime-change has continued since unabated.

 The Zionist-led witchhunts in Labour under Corbyn, with the IHRA pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism playing a pivotal role, forced out Corbyn and led to a massive purge of the Corbynite left, hundreds of thousands of militants, from Labour membership. This prepared the Labour Party to support the outright Zionist genocide in Gaza, with Starmer publicly supporting (on LBC) the deprivation of food, water and fuel from the Gaza population as Israel’s genocidal Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant announced it. The Starmer government, elected in 2024, has a politically far-right character in that it openly supported the genocide in Gaza and both continued and intensified the previous Tory government’s supply of arms and intelligence to Israel’s genocidal armed forces, including British air-reconnaissance aircraft directly aiding the Israelis in looking for targets for carpet bombing of the Gaza strip.

In fact, the crypto far-right politics of Starmer had found expression on other issues. Such as when Starmer notoriously pronounced that Britain was becoming an ‘Island of Strangers’ echoing the rhetoric of racist arch-Tory Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech about immigration, which inspired the fascist National Front in the 1970s and 1980s. The genocidal, pro-Israeli nature of Starmer’s leadership of Labour was evident from the very beginning and totally precluded any support for pro-Starmer Labour candidates in the General Election. Only his outright opponents on the Labour left merited any support, and even that with considerable caution.

Your Party: A project of resistance

This crypto far-right government has attacked the Palestine anti-genocide movement to an extent that Sunak’s previous reactionary government never dared. Bans on demonstrations and the proscription of Palestine Action show this clearly. They also attacked the working class, particularly pensioners – attacking winter fuel payments, and the disabled, and have ostentatiously kept the two-child benefit cap of David Cameron’s Tories. These attacks led to Zarah Sultana not only leaving Labour but effectively becoming the left-wing leading force in what has become Your Party, as yet officially unnamed, with Jeremy Corbyn in the centre, and on the right flank four independent Muslim MPs, who creditably defeated the Labour Party over the single issue of the Gaza genocide in the General Election, but unlike Corbyn, don’t know the basics of working class politics.

Like Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, who made clear in a debate on tenants’ rights that he is a landlord and considers excessive demands for security of tenure and freedom from arbitrary rent rises etc create a “risk of polarising every landlord as ‘evil’ – we must make sure we don’t fall into that trap”. (New Statesman, 8^th September). He also denounced both sides – the fascists and their opponents – in confrontations outside asylum seekers’ accommodation – as “equally absurd”.  Ayoub Khan, the Independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, meanwhile, demanded that troops be used to break the Birmingham Refuse Collector’s (Dustmen) strike against massive pay cuts. A distinct lack of working-class solidarity is in evidenced by both. This is not surprising, it is a product of the uneven nature of building a left-wing challenge to Labour in a period like this when some of those who were prepared to stand up to New Labour over Gaza – it was obviously obligatory to support them – are not workers and/or leave a lot to be desired in terms of class consciousness.

Hussain appears to have been a right-wing infiltrator who caused the early Your Party a lot of problems, trying to witchhunt Zarah Sultana for her leftist views. Just before she appeared on Question Time on 13 November a statement appeared, signed by five Independent MP’s including Corbyn, denouncing Zarah for supposedly delaying the transfer of money collected for membership dues from the portal she initiated in mid-September. But she only took over the sole directorship of MOU Operations, the temporary repository of those funds, a couple of weeks before that statement, and such legal transfers take time to comply with complex data protection and financial guidelines. Corbyn then let it be known that he did not sign or endorse this statement, despite his name being on it, and Hussain, apparently having been caught red-handed, suddenly resigned from the body overseeing the setting up of Your Party. This throws considerable light on the earlier smear against Zarah Sultana over that portal, which she set up on 19^th September because the likes of Hussain were blocking what had already been agreed in principle. This was in effect an anti-left witchhunt against Zarah, who is the real driving force and founder of YP, by Hussein, who has close family and social ties to the Labour Party right-wing and used dishonest tactics to stymie the excellent socialist candidacy of Craig Murray, then in the Workers Party and now in Your Party, in Blackburn in the General Election. It appears he has acted as a crypto New Labour ‘cuckoo in the nest’ and that is the reason for the whole furore around the September membership drive initiated by Zarah, which some on the left just denounced as a shitshow. It was an anti-left witchhunting tactic which principled socialists should have backed up Zarah over. We are proud that we did so and attacked opportunists such as the CPGB/WW and Spartacists for denouncing all involved (including Zarah, the intended victim) as involved in a ‘shitshow’.

The founding conference of Your Party is due to be held on 29^th-30^th November in Liverpool. There a proper name will be voted on, with People’s Party or The Left most likely to be chosen, it seems. The party has as this article is written, around 72,000 members as the most recent estimate – a couple of weeks earlier there was an official announcement that the membership had reached 50,000. In July when the party was first mooted by Zarah Sultana, again 72,000 signed up for a website, TeamZarah, in three days, and when the Your Party website was publicly announced and endorsed by both Zarah and Jeremy Corbyn in August, over 800,000 expressed and interest and in many cases donated money. There were all kind of reports and controversy about the influence of figures such as the ex-Momentum activist James Scheider and the sometime UNITE official Karie Murphy, around Corbyn, as inimical bureaucratic elements who were resisting any real democratic internal life of the party. This was a product of the secretive operation of the ‘Collective’ organisation that existed on a very hush-hush basis for around a year after Corbyn defeated Labour as an Independent candidate in the 2024 General Election, along with the other Muslim independents.

But this now appears to have been partially transcended and the real factional conflict is between the group of Muslim independents, and Zarah Sultana and others on the left of the proto-party, with Corbyn both planting at least one of his feet in the camp of the Muslim independents, and at the same time trying to keep them away from all out factional conflict. That is how things appear from the outside at least. It appears that the bulk of the independent group was not keen on the rapid development of the party, and this led Zarah Sultana to launch the first membership portal in September, in frustration at a membership sign-up that had been agreed but was not implemented. This led to public allegations of a fake portal, and then threats of legal action from both sides, either for having supposedly broken data protection rules, or for defamation (from Zarah Sultana).

This has moved, painfully towards being resolved, but at a snail’s pace with kicking and screaming from the independent MPs, as before the party could be founded as a legal entity, a temporary holding company, MOU Operations, was set up with three prominent left-wingers as directors to get the project off the ground. When the first membership portal was set up and then denounced by the independent MPs in September, legal threats were made and reports under data protection law. This behaviour was counterproductive, as it led to legal difficulties in transferring membership money to the similar precursor body, Project Peace and Justice, on the other side. In October the three directors of MOU Operations resigned and made way for Zarah Sultana to act as sole director in a bid to speed up the legal difficulties, but some remained and have slowed things down. So, we still see regrettable and foolish Open Letters being issued by the all-male independent MP’s group criticising Zarah Sultana, who appears to be trying hard but struggling to resolve a problem that is in large measure a product of the small-c conservative politics and attitudes of this ‘Independent’ group in the first place. This is an unseemly own goal and looks bad, giving ammunition to the bourgeois media.

These organisational issues are manifestations of political problems, which must be resolved in their own terms. What really does not help is denunciations of Your Party as an undemocratic ‘shitshow’ from far-left groupings like the CPGB/Weekly Worker and the Spartacist League, who pose as the embodiment of democratic and/or programmatic virtue, but have terrible histories of heresy-hunting and anti-democratic means of dealing with political differences themselves. The various democratic devices in use in YP so far – the circulation of the four documents: Constitution, Standing Orders, Political Statement and Year 1 Organisational Plan – with their online editing by members and Regional Assemblies to discuss them, are not perfect examples of developed party democracy, but nor are they a sign of a developing totalitarian-bureaucratic regime. The rhetoric from some on the left is sectarian overkill.

Social Democracy and Sect Politics

The attitude of serious revolutionaries to Your Party must be one of sober engagement, not petty denunciation and point scoring. It is necessary to recognise that many of the political problems of Your Party, as well as those of many of its left oppositional forces, flow from left social-democratic politics. That is not just true of the historic political followers of Jeremy Corbyn but is also true of many of the large sects, such the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party, and the relatively new Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly known as Socialist Appeal).

Both of the latter two currents, as well as Socialist Alternative, have their origins in the Militant Tendency of Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe from the 1950s to the late 1980s. This spent decades in a kind of strategic entryism in the Labour Party, adopting the parliamentary road to socialism as a kind of parody of a ‘Trotskyist’ credo in terms of an Enabling Act, that would supposedly allow capitalism to be abolished through mass pressure on a left Labour government and the nationalisation of the top 100 or so monopolies. The Militant group became quite clearly social chauvinist over the Irish war and then the Malvinas war in 1982, posing the idea that a ‘socialist’ Labour government would also fight to defeat Argentina for Britain and some kind of liberation of the 1,800 or so Falklanders (who are British colons). They also were historically soft on Zionism and often echoed imperialist anti-Sovietism in the 1980s Cold war.

As did the SWP, who in their early incarnation in the 1950s broke away from the Trotskyist movement’s Soviet defencism over the Korean War. To the point that when the USSR collapsed in 1991, they proclaimed that the “collapse of communism” was something that should have “every socialist rejoicing”. But in fact, the counterrevolution was a disaster, that resulted in the death of several million former Soviet workers from starvation and suicidal despair, which is the only way the five-year (!) fall in life-expectancy in the 1990s can be explained. So much so that it provoked parallel revolts both from below and in elements of the state and productive apparatus of the Russian Federation. This leading to the rise of Putin with a high-level of popularity, because he reversed many of Yeltsin’s attacks, giving rise to a new kind of mixed economy, whose capitalist element can be said to be severely ‘deformed’ by elements of the planned economy and apparatus. That being bound up with the beginnings of a superior, socialist mode of production, which the counterrevolution was unable to simply destroy. Which is why this complex “bourgeois state with socialist deformations”, i.e., Russia, is once again hated by the imperialists. It has nothing to do with any alleged despotic tendencies of Putin, a fairly mild and rational centre-right leader of a non-imperialist country.

Against the Stream – fight for Communism

Today we see divisions on crucial international questions among both the ex-Labour left, and the so-called ‘far left’, many of whom are getting on their high-horses and denouncing various elements of Your Party in a one-sided manner for supposed conspiracies against ‘grassroots democracy’. As communists, we take full part in the political struggles of this party, we do not abstain or set ourselves up as a sect opposed to it, but nor do we go along with the illusions that prevail both among the ex-Labour people and the far left. Some ex-Corbynites, for instance, have better positions on the Ukraine war that many on the ‘far left’. Some recognise that the Western imperialist proxy war against Russia and the people of the Donbass/Crimea is a continuation of the old imperialist crusade against the USSR, in changed conditions. Many on the ‘far left’ are on the wrong side in Ukraine, and were on the wrong side in Syria, and even over the imperialist invasion of Libya. On the question of Zionism, getting Corbyn to denounce it in full was like pulling teeth, but recently he did so at a Your Party meeting in Putney. Softness on Zionism is not entirely unknown on the far left, of course, the overtly Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty hangs around some Your Party events, but softness on Zionism is not confined to them.

There are those on the far left, from parts of the Jewish left to the SWP and CPGB who smear as ‘anti-Semitic’ those Marxists who point out basic material facts about the social base of Zionism as a racist current centred in the Jewish part of the imperialist bourgeoisie. These trends cross class lines in seeking to ‘cancel’ such criticisms of a key part of the ruling class itself, including from us and previously Socialist Fight. The case of David Miller, the sacked anti-Zionist Professor formerly at Bristol University who now co-presents Palestine Declassified with Chris Wiliamson on Press TV, has become a barometer of capitulation to Zionism on the ‘far left’.  Some line up to call him ‘anti-Semitic’ even when he is in battle with Zionists over crucial class and democratic questions. This is somewhat reminiscent of the way some on the far left – such as the SWP – bought into the imperialist campaign against Julian Assange earlier. Others on the Corbynite left frequently have better positions, notwithstanding the weakness of Corbyn himself on Zionism. On other ‘controversial’ questions such as trans rights, there is great confusion and diversity among the ex-Corbynite, ex-Labour membership, among newer layers of younger militants, as well as some on the ‘far left’.

Your Party is of great importance. We must fight for a revolutionary programme within it. We must fight against reformist parliamentarism and the belief that the existing state can be captured for the working class and somehow turned into a weapon against oppression. We must popularise the Marxist understanding that the existing state cannot be the means of liberation of the working class, but that instead it must be smashed and replaced with a state where the working class, with its own independent armed forces, is the master of society and the repository of all of society’s productive resources. Instead of elected representatives and state officials being bribed by capitalists who thereby become the masters of society, all such elective positions administering the planned economy we need must be paid the average wage of a skilled worker, and subject to recall from below.

That is a different conception of socialism to the social-democratic left, not only the Corbynites, but also the politics in practice of many of the various large social democratic sects. The dissolution of sects and political development along those lines is the real logic of the creation of a genuine mass party of the socialist-minded working class. We must bear in mind that Your Party exists because social-democratic politics failed and dissolved into neoliberalism. That is itself a product of the dying state of capitalism today. We need workers democracy at the deepest level within Your Party precisely to allow the development of class consciousness to undertake this necessary qualitative leap. That is the real purpose of the struggle for democracy in YP. All else is subordinate to that.

This issue is obviously centred on Your Party, which is the most important development in the British working-class movement for many years, and despite numerous problems, appears to be taking root around the country in a manner that is very encouraging. It was not a surprise to us however, as we were well aware that the mass base of the Corbyn movement had not disappeared despite the Zionist/Neoliberal sabotage that drove that mass base out of the Labour Party, it never dissipated, but went into a kind of abeyance/exile, and reconstituted itself dramatically when Your Party was announced in August, when 800,000 expressed interest. Anyway, the progress of the party has since been interrupted by interference by outside forces, which have caused setbacks, but it is still developing. The lead article contains our extensive analysis of that development.

We also have a short programmatic document titled “A Revolutionary Platform for Your Party” which contains an amended version of a platform originally proposed by the Spartacist League/Britain, to which they invited amendments. The original platform contained in our view some serious omissions, most notably in our view an adaptation to right-wing populist anti-immigration sentiment, and not coincidentally, the lack of any demands for how to fight fascism. They invited amendments and discussions about their original platform; we consider our version a considerable improvement, so we too invite similar engagement from revolutionary-minded individuals and groups.

There is an extensive political reply to a former leading member of our tendency who broke with us recently after several years involvement. While we regret his leaving, which we do consider to be a result of some kind of social pressure regarding our strong anti-Zionist politics, we do consider his criticisms to be worthy of a full response, and indeed ironically an opportunity to further develop our understanding of part of the Jewish left who adapt to liberal Zionism and are inclined to try to ‘cancel’ Marxist analysis of the ethnocentric social base of the Zionist movement internationally, an attitude we consider to be social-imperialist and therefore anti-communist in its thrust. This aspect is elaborated at some length in the article.

We have a commentary on the current crisis of Western imperialism, which is convulsing the world and sometimes at least giving at least the impression that World War 3 is breaking out. We deal with the war in Ukraine, with China, with the Gaza genocide, and lastly with Trump’s threats to invade Venezuela, which have already resulted in brutal murders of many fishermen from that country while US imperialism pretends to be killing drug traffickers. An outrage, that could portend a new Vietnam-style war in South America.

And we have a statement from our Brazilian comrades, jointly with other leftists including some from East Timor, to the COP30 environmental summit, which is being held in Brazil, that links the need for resistance to  the capitalist despoilation of the Amazon rainforest with the struggle against imperialism more generally, particularly against Trump’s threat against Venezuela.

The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 23rd November on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

Lenin’s work that we are using here is a major primer on the Marxist theory of the state and goes through the various stages of the development of that theory pretty comprehensively.

In hindsight, it probably would have been better to have studied this before taking on Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, as this gives a grounding in some very basic Marxist concepts that are invaluable to understanding that later work.

But this chapter makes a very clear start on what we are addressing here.

In part 1, Lenin talks of Marx and Engels’s views on the state on the eve of the continent-wide revolutionary crisis of 1848.

In particular, he homes in on Marx’s formulations in The Poverty of Philosophy, his initial polemic against Proudhon, the proto-anarchist thinker. Here he wrote about the destiny of class society to disappear:

“”The working class, in the course of development, will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power groups, since the political power is precisely the official expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society.”

So, the idea that the state will disappear as a consequence of proletarian revolution is to be found in the earliest works of mature Marxism.

Then he highlights the way this is dealt with by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:

“… In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat….

“… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” 

And it is that formulation, that the state after the revolution will be “the proletariat organised as the ruling class” that had been, not accidentally, omitted in the various treatises on the state and socialism in the Second International:

“This definition of the state has never been explained in the prevailing propaganda and agitation literature of the official Social-Democratic parties. More than that, it has been deliberately ignored, for it is absolutely irreconcilable with reformism, and is a slap in the face for the common opportunist prejudices and philistine illusions about the ‘peaceful development of democracy’.

“The proletariat needs the state — this is repeated by all the opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure us that this is what Marx taught…. “

But then he clarifies:

“But they ‘forget’ to add that, in the first place, according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away. And, secondly, the working people need a ‘state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class’”.

So, what is this about? The state, as we touched on in chapter 1, is a special organisation of force for the suppression of one class by another. What class must the proletariat, in power, supress? Obviously, the bourgeoisie. But in what way?

“The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners — the landowners and capitalists.”

And Lenin points out that the social democrats did away with this with dreams of class harmony, pictured their version of ‘socialism’ as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority.

Lenin called this a “petty bourgeois utopia” and pointed out that it led to ‘socialist’ participation in bourgeois cabinets in Britain, France, Italy at the turn of the century.

He also speaks of the role of the working class in leading intermediate layers:

“Only the proletariat — by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production — is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.”

So, he summaries that:

“Marx’s theory of ‘the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class’, is inseparably bound up with the whole of his doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The culmination of this rule is the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat.”

And then he asks the question:

“…is it conceivable that such an organization can be created without first abolishing, destroying the state machine created by the bourgeoisie for themselves?”

Which leads straight to the conclusions Marx drew from 1848-51. Lenin cites Marx’s later work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Noting Napoleon III’s coup of December 1851, Marx wrote:

“’This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, … this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten.’ The first French Revolution developed centralization, ‘but at the same time’ it increased ‘the extent, the attributes and the number of agents of governmental power. Napoleon [I] completed this state machinery’ … the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with repressive measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power “

And he quoted the conclusion:

“All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”

Lenin noted that here:

“Marxism takes a tremendous step forward compared with the Communist Manifesto… all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.”

And:

 “This is the question Marx raises and answers in 1852. True to his philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx takes as his basis the historical experience of the great years of revolution, 1848 to 1851. Here, as everywhere else, his theory is a summing up of experience, illuminated by a profound philosophical conception of the world and a rich knowledge of history.”

And this brings us to the beginning of the three-cornered polemic against reformism (and centrism) on the one hand, and anarchism, which recurs in this work. Lenin writes:

“The bureaucracy and the standing army are a “parasite” on the body of bourgeois society–a parasite created by the internal antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which “chokes” all its vital pores. The Kautskyite opportunism now prevailing in official Social-Democracy considers the view that the state is a parasitic organism to be the peculiar and exclusive attribute of anarchism. It goes without saying that this distortion of Marxism is of vast advantage to those philistines who have reduced socialism to the unheard-of disgrace of justifying and prettifying the imperialist war by applying to it the concept of “defence of the fatherland…”

And he notes what happened after the Russian Revolution of February 1917 in that regard:

“Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following February 27, 1917. The official posts which formerly were given by preference to the Black Hundreds have now become the spoils of the Cadets, Mensheviks, and Social-Revolutionaries. Nobody has really thought of introducing any serious reforms. Every effort has been made to put them off “until the Constituent Assembly meets”, and to steadily put off its convocation until after the war! But there has been no delay, no waiting for the Constituent Assembly, in the matter of dividing the spoils of getting the lucrative jobs of ministers, deputy ministers, governors-general, etc., etc.!”

Leading to the conclusion, similar but on a much higher historical place, to what Marx and Engels had discovered in 1948:

“But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is “redistributed” among the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties (among the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the case of Russia), the more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at their head, become of their irreconcilable hostility to the whole of bourgeois society. … This course of events compels the revolution “to concentrate all its forces of destruction” against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.”

And on the question of what the working class will put in its place, Lenin touches on that, but it will be explored more in later chapters:

“What the proletariat will put in its place is suggested by the highly instructive material furnished by the Paris Commune.”

One final point regarding this is Lenin’s emphasis and expansion of a point Marx himself made, about his own distinctive contribution to politics. He quotes Marx:

“And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

And Lenin expands on that in a devastating criticism of opportunism, both reformist and centrist:

“It is often said and written that the main point in Marx’s theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie…. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

And finally, to emphasise matters:

“Further. The essence of Marx’s theory of the state has been mastered only by those who realize that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from “classless society”, from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Introduction

The following programme for a platform was, in its original form, put forward by the Spartacist League, under the title: A call to socialists: Lets build a revolutionary caucus in Your Party. They invited others to join them with the following call:

“First and foremost, we are interested in opening a debate on the policies needed to get Your Party off the ground and win mass support in the working class.

“Below we propose a set of principles which we think could serve as a basis to regroup revolutionary elements in Your Party. Get in touch with us to debate these and to work with us in building a revolutionary caucus.”

So, we in the Consistent Democrats did get in touch. Their original suggested programme is to be found at https://iclfi.org/pubs/wh/2025-yp-rev-caucus. Seeing a number of flaws in their suggested programme, we proposed a number of amendments. The amendments can be found on our site at https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/revolutionary-caucuses-the-spartacists-and-platforms-in-your-party, with full tracking.

One key difference with the Spartacists is with their contention that with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, liberalism became the dominant ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and that this has ensnared the working-class movement and the left and effectively caused them to capitulate wholesale to liberalism, if not become liberals outright. We differ somewhat – we consider it was neoliberalism and neoconservatism  – both closely linked to Zionism – that filled much of the vacuum in imperialist post-Soviet bourgeois ideology and thought, and this has indeed infected the working-class movement with free market ideology, support for imperialist militarism, and some forms of identity politics – with Zionism in pole position. So you find in their material denunciation of liberal trends on the left, but not  so much those trends that have adapted to right-wing populism, with its anti-migrant agitation and its flipflops between isolationist opposition to neocon militarism, and glorying in it, as personified by Trump.

As a result, you find material opposing ‘mass immigration’ in the Spart draft, but nothing about fighting fascism. They – in part correctly – denounce the Greens as a petit-bourgeois party, but at the same time say nothing about capitalist destruction of the environment. And their point about opposing NATO and militarism says nothing about defence of any workers’ states or other targets of imperialism. We consider our version of this programme makes it substantially better, and like them, we invite discussion and amendments. Such a programme would be the basis for a real revolutionary left wing of Your Party.

For a planned economy run by workers, for workers!

Financial capital, the final product of decay of imperialist finance capital, centred in The City of London is destroying the lives of the working class in this country. Deindustrialisation, privatisation, falling living standards, stagnant productivity, the North-South divide; all this and more has been caused by the fact that the economy revolves around this cancer destroying everything that is good for workers. The only road to regenerate Britain is through the expropriation of the City, and the establishment of a plan for re-industrialisation designed by the working class, for the working class.

A working-class position on immigration.

Farage and Tommy Robinson scapegoat immigrants and foster racist divisions. Starmer and the City compete with their scapegoating but also use migrant workers to prop up a rotting economy. Neither of these benefit working-class people whatever their origin or status. As socialists, we oppose closing the border, and all attacks on the rights of migrants and refugees, but we also oppose the capitalists’ cynical use of desperate migrants to drive down wages. We demand an end to anti-union laws and the revival of the compulsory closed shop for all industries where wages are under such pressure, with union membership and decent wages for all.

For the unity of workers, Muslims and trans people!

There can be no place for bigotry in Your Party. But to have any hope of winning the working class we must win the argument, not simply moralise at those with different views on social questions. One does not need to be a Muslim to oppose the attacks on the Muslim community. And one does not need to agree with gender theory to defend the rights of trans people to live their lives how they wish. We do not need to agree with all the ideas in each other’s heads – merely that we are all part of the working class and must act as a class, who agree to fight for each other’s rights against the ongoing reactionary backlash.

Fight fascism – a working-class militia to defend organised workers and oppressed groups

We are amid the most threatening rise of fascism since the 1930s. Neoliberalism has meant decades-long declines in employment and living standards and Starmer’s neoliberal viciousness in power in the name of ‘Labour’ has led to a vacuum that Robinson, Farage and worse are attempting to fill, with the help of Trump, Musk, etc. This involves a terrorist threat against workers, particularly Muslims and other minorities, from organised fascists. Police arrest pensioners and the disabled for imaginary ‘terrorism’, while turning a blind eye to fascist mobs outside asylum seekers’ quarters demanding ‘kill them all’. We need organised groups of stewards and defenders able to fight off fascist violence. And beyond that, we need a militia to defend the population against a far right that is now fixated on Israel and aspires to inflict Gaza-style bloodshed on populations it hates here. Your Party should popularise and seek to create the conditions where such a mass-based anti-fascist militia can be created.

No to Zionism!

Zionism is a nationalist project based on the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. It is the ideology behind Israel’s genocide and has no place in the labour movement. Peace in the Middle East and the unity of Arabs and Jews can only be achieved through opposition to Zionism, support to the liberation of the Palestinians and respect for the democratic rights of all peoples.

Down with US & British imperialism!

British foreign policy is designed to serve the interests of the City of London, itself a vassal of the American Empire. Wars and interventions by Britain and the US abroad have brought disaster around the globe, while bringing only misery and crisis at home. Now, the US is pressuring its allies to re-arm for more wars, which will mean further squeezing working-class people. We say: No arms to Ukraine and Israel! No to NATO! Down with the war drives against Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela – and all non-imperialist or oppressed countries and workers states targeted by imperialism!

No popular front with the Greens – we need to split them!

The Green Party is a middle-class radical party. We cannot merge with it; we cannot treat it as a partner. There are some seriously socialist-minded people in it, mixed with Malthusians and other reactionaries. This party supports NATO and is not anti-imperialist. Greens are correct that climate change threatens the future of working-class people around the world. But this is caused by capitalism and can only be solved by economic planning on both the national and international scale. The Greens though accept capitalism, promote ‘Green’ capitalism, and thus New Labour schemes like ULEZ that punish workers for owning old, polluting vehicles. We support cleaner air, which helps protects working class people and particularly children from dangerous illnesses, but we demand the bosses pay for it, and particularly for new, low-emission vehicles for all who need them.

We need to split away pro-socialist elements attracted to the Greens, to our genuine socialist party, not endorse left talking but untrustworthy figures like Polanski. We reject the Greens’ self-righteous, middle-class politics that put abstract ideals above real living conditions. An alliance with them will only repel workers.

For Irish unity! Self-determination for Scotland and Cymru!

The “United Kingdom” is oppressive to Irish Catholics, Scots and Welsh. British imperialism subjugated Ireland for centuries; it must finally be thrown out of the whole island. As for the Scottish and Welsh nations, their fate should be determined by the democratic will of their people, not by the parasites in Westminster.

Yes to trade unions! No to pro-capitalist union leaders!

The trade unions are the mass organisations for the defence of the working class. At least that’s what they should be! For decades the trade unions have been run into the ground by leaders who stand closer to the bosses than their own members. We cannot let these people take control of Your Party. Whether to rebuild the unions or found a new left party, we need leaders who stand on clear socialist principles and are ready to take the fight to the bosses.

Down with the monarchy! For a workers’ republic!

Workers finally need a government and state which serves their interests, not those of a handful of capitalists and aristocrats. 

Anti-imperialist declaration distributed at COP 30 in Belém by the following organizations: Brazil: Emancipation of Labor Group; General Abreu e Lima Anti-imperialist Committee; East Timor: Maubere Resurrection Front – FRM; Hope Committee; National Agro-Ecological Rehabilitation Movement; Rosas Mean Movement; Maubere Socialist Youth.

COP30 is taking place amidst a boycott and denialist opposition from the world’s biggest polluter, the USA. Furthermore, Trump is threatening a new military intervention in Latin America.

This war operation has already begun. Nearly a hundred fishermen were murdered, summarily executed and accused without evidence of being drug traffickers and terrorists. Killed against all rules of international law.

Lula, president of Brazil, the largest, richest, and most populous Latin American country, should have adopted a sovereign stance at CELAC and COP30. Lula should have called for continental unity against these crimes and these new threats. Speeches that don’t match actions are not enough.

But, since there is no resistance of sufficient magnitude, Trump continues to escalate, now positioning the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford, in military formation in the Caribbean in a clear campaign of war against our continent.

Those who defend nature, life, and the Amazon cannot look the other way in the face of this threat. The planet’s main enemy must be defeated in order to save it. The capitalist mode of production is the fundamental cause of socio-environmental injustices. Destroying it and building a socialist society is the only way to overcome the risk that all forms of life and the planet face.

The Emancipation of Labor Group believes that defending the Amazon means urgently and immediately calling for the unity of peoples oppressed for centuries against Trump, capitalism, and the imperialist system. It is necessary to explicitly defend Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba, which are threatened and sanctioned. Likewise, it is necessary to combat Zionism, which is carrying out ecocide in Gaza.

The oil, rare earth minerals, fauna, flora, soil, and subsoil belong to the people of the region, against the pirates and invaders of all time.

We must unite in defense of national, popular, and state sovereignty over our natural resources, which should be exploited in a community-based and cooperative manner with the Brazilian government, serving development and preservation under the control of the working and indigenous population and the proletariat. International partnerships with China, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela are necessary. We must guarantee the sharing of technology for the national development of refineries and processing without harming nature or indigenous communities.

No to false, hypocritical, imperialist, and capitalist sustainability. For planned social and state control of all natural resources. First and foremost must be development with social control of living conditions, guaranteeing the right to land for those who work or live on it, and fighting against capital and its predatory mode of production. Without this, the preservation of the Amazon, for example, is merely preservation for imperialism to exploit the Amazon.

Finally, and geostrategically related to the climate issue, there is the international struggle of oppressed countries allied with the Chinese workers’ state for energy transition, reinforcing the commitment to restricting the burning of fossil fuels. This dispute is part of the struggle to bury the decadent imperialist system and fight for socialism across the planet.

The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 9th November on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

Studying this work is of crucial important for a Marxist tendency.  We are now entering a period of political activity in a party that offers great promise for the creation, once again, of a mass working class political movement, a party of the working class. That is what Your Party signifies. We have to understand what the Corbyn-Sultana party could mean. It is a result of the failure of Labourism in the face of the ruling class’s neoliberal offensive against the working class in the advanced capitalist – that is, imperialist countries, since the mid-1970s. This had many different manifestations and timings around the world. But the whole point of the neoliberal project was always that the working class in the advanced countries was too powerful for the well-being of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

Well-being in two senses. One in that the bourgeoisie feared the social power of the working class in the advanced countries. The second being that that classic phenomenon of capitalist decay, the gradually falling rate of profit, had reached a point that the bourgeoisie was desperately looking for some way to increase its profit rates at the expense of the masses. In Britain, in the early 1970s, the ruling class tried frontal industrial confrontation with the labour movement to try to fundamentally weaken the mass organisations of the working class. Heath’s Industrial Relations Act was partly prefigured by the White Paper In Place of Strife that was floated by the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1969, supported by some who were then supposed to be on the Labour left, such as Barbara Castle and Tony Benn.  What this shows is that even some thought on the left were attuned more to ruling class opinion than the interests of the working class, even then.

In reality, this was a product of reformism’s attitude to the state, which Lenin, quoting extensively from Engels, touches upon in this chapter. But the expiring Wilson government of 1969 was hardly suited for a major confrontation with the working class. Though such proposals were the logic of a class collaborationist programme. It was the Heath government who tried to confront the trade unions head on, with their Industrial Relations Act, with its compulsory ballots in strikes, its attempt to ban solidarity action and various forms of picketing, its compulsory ‘cooling off’ periods, etc. And the government took on a powerful trade union movement and lost – to cut a long story short. Heath called a General Election in February 1974 on the slogan “Who rules the country, the government or the unions?” And lost. The Labour Party ended up with more seats than the Tories in the 1974 Election, though the result was very close, and in terms of the popular vote, Heath was very slightly ahead. But its seats that count.

Labour called another election in October 1974, and this time improved its performance, though it only gained an overall majority of 3 seats. It was during the 1974-1979 Labour government that the neoliberal project first, very tentatively, began to be tried out in Britain. Labour’s majority did not last long, and before that issue came centre stage, Harold Wilson resigned as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by James Callaghan. So, from 1976 you had the Liberal-Labour pact, and a series of more insidious attacks on the working class, through cuts in public spending, including in healthcare, and incomes policy where the union bureaucracies held back working-class discontent in the face of high inflation. You had such devices as the incentive scheme in the mining industry, which laid the basis for the divisions among miners that played a major role in dividing the miners later when Thatcher attacked them. So, the Labour government, by then in a semi-coalition with the Liberal Party, came into conflict with the working class, which exploded towards the end of its term in the winter of 1978-9 with the Winter of Discontent’, when all kinds of mainly public sector workers went on strike.

Thatcher won in May 1979, and set about full-throated neoliberalism, attacks on strategic sections of the proletariat through mass redundancies. Steel, docks, miners were the strategic sectors of the working class that had to be defeated. Mass privatisation and the export of jobs to low wage countries is the core of the project. The aim being to seriously weaken the organised working class, not on a temporary basis, as was done in 1926 with pay cuts for the miners provoking a General Strike which the union bureaucracy betrayed, laying the basis for a reign of terror in industry. This was a more serious project of weakening the power of the working class through removing whole strategic sectors from the advanced countries. And since the days of Thatcher, and her ten-year implementation of this reactionary ‘revolution’ in Britain, and a similar strategy implemented in the ‘Reagan Revolution’ in the US, neoliberalism gradually became hegemonic in the imperialist world.

It went hand in hand with the imperialist offensive Thatcher and Reagan symbolised internationally, above all confrontation with the stagnating degenerated workers state of the USSR in the 1980s, which brought it to its knees,  It brought about the pro-capitalist liberalisation of the Stalinist regime under Gorbachev, and then the seizure of power by the outright counterrevolutionary leader, Boris Yeltin, who also sprang from the bureaucracy, being originally the chief of the Moscow Communist Party. So that was almost like a different world.

So, what about today? Since those days, social democracy and the old bourgeois liberalism exposed their bankruptcy by becoming thoroughly neoliberal. The British Labour Party is thoroughly neoliberal. In a period where the bosses, driven by the imperative to increase their rate of profit, declares war on every gain of the working class, and seeks to abolish it by privatisation, outsourcing, and the rest, reformism does not work. So, we have had social neoliberalism instead of reformist social democracy for many decades. Going back to the Wilson-Callaghan government. Arguably it even had its prehistory with In Place of Strife.

But of course, the working class had not always taken kindly to being shafted. We have had left movements within the Labour Party. The paler one being Bennism in the 1980s. We have had attempts by fragments of Labour to resist this politically, sometimes with the aid of parts of the far left. The SLP of Arthur Scargill in 1996-8. Respect in 2004 – 2009. And other smaller projects like the Socialist Alliance, and Left Unity. But the big one was Corbyn in 2015. That was when popular anger at neoliberalism briefly took control of the Labour Party through a mass influx of new and many former members. And the neoliberal right, imbued with Zionist politics, weaponising pro-Zionist ‘anti-semitism’ scares and right-wing nationalism over Brexit, manoeuvred furiously to defeat Corbyn’s leadership and drive this massive left constituency out of the Labour Party.

But they won a pyrrhic victory. They got rid of the left, drove them into exile, and even managed to create the most openly reactionary, bordering on far right, ‘Labour’ government in history, a recruiting sergeant for the real far right. The mass base of the Corbyn-led revolt against neoliberalism merely went into exile and bided its time until the opportunity emerged to create a new party. Your Party. Created in a sense by the bold initiative of Zarah Sultana in resigning from Labour and pushing Corbyn to get a move on in creating the new party. The problem is that the revolt against the neoliberalism of Labour is being waged under the banner of left social democracy. But the cause of the crisis that gave birth to this is the bankruptcy of social democracy. That is a fertile contradiction for communists to engage with.

This is good reason why communists should join the new party and encourage both our comrades, and Your Party’s militants, to study Lenin, and other Marxist material. So, moving on to this introductory chapter, what are its central points? State and Revolution was written for a socialist movement in flux, after the betrayal of all the anti-war and socialist promises of the Socialist Parties, including the British, the French and the most developed politically, the German, into chauvinism. The whole point of the work is to delve into how Social Democracy, particularly in Germany, had mangled the approach of Marxism to questions involving the State, and to correct those problems. This was written in 1917, in the face of the developing workers’ revolution. Though we are in not in a developing revolution, many of the issues dealt with are not that different from the problems that militants in Your Party face. We need programmatic answers on the question of the state, which is central.

“What is the state?”, asks Lenin, and draws upon Engels in such works as Anti-Duhring, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The state is an expression of the fact that society has split into irreconcilably warring classes. It is a weapon of the economically dominant class to keep in check the struggles of the subordinate, oppressed classes, and prevent the society from being overwhelmed by the struggles between classes. The state, then, is a weapon of the economically dominant, that is, the ruling, class in any given society. In succeeding societies, as Engels says:

“The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both…. Such were the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in Germany.” (Origin…)

Under primitive communism, before human society split into contending classes, there was no special armed repressive organisation separate from the population, only the population itself as a “self-acting armed organisation” able to defend itself collectively as and when the need arose. The state is a special armed organisation, separate from society, and closed off from the mass of the population. Lenin quotes Engels:

““The … distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes…. This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing….” (ibid)

And he continues to concretise this, as the state arose from the split of society into irreconcilable classes, so as such class rule becomes obsolete:

“The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.” (ibid)

And then Lenin goes on to talk about this question, of the “withering away of the state”, and the necessity for a violent revolution to overthrow the rule of the possessing classes, i.e., the bourgeoisie:

“Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labour).…

“When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ’abolished’. It withers away.” (Anti-Duhring)

The crucial point in this, is the question of the “withering away” of the state. Lenin is quoting this for a highly specific purpose, to combat the distortion of this concept by reformists and centrists such as Karl Kautsky, in the camp of Germany Social Democracy. The crucial point is that the reformists had long mystified and elided this question with their activities in the existing state. They propagated the myth that, superintended by reformists like themselves, the repressive forms of the bourgeois state, would “wither away”.

But that is not what Engels, or Marx for that matter, had projected at all. It is the opposite. For these revolutionary leaders, the precondition for the state, that is, a workers’ state, to “wither away”, was the prior, violent overthrow and destruction, disbanding and dispersal of the bourgeois existing state, its special bodies of armed men, its prisons, etc. Only after such a revolutionary overturn could a new state be created, a state where instead of the mass of the exploited and oppressed population being forcibly kept in their place by the state of their class enemies, you would have the exploiting minority losing their power and being kept in their place, that is suppressed, by the population armed and organised against them. The workers state, would only then be in a position to “wither away”.

That polemic was therefore directed not only against the anarchists, who believed it was simply possible to abolish the state straight away, but more so against the reformists, who believed that under their superintendence, the existing, bourgeois state could somehow “wither away”, without a violent social overturn of the existing order. We will continue to study this as we go through the book.