This issue focuses on the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the Middle East/West Asia region, which has become much more evident since the journal went to print, with the US-Israel-Turkiye- backed offensive of jihadist terrorists in North-West Syria, against Russian and Hezbollah opposition alongside Syria. However, the lead article is about the crisis precipitated by the lame-duck Biden administration after Harris was defeated by Trump in the US presidential election in October. The ‘permission’ given by the Biden administration to the Ukrainian regime to fire British Storm Shadow and US ATTACMS mid-range cruise missiles into Russia is a major escalation towards WWIII. Because these missiles cannot be fired and programmed by Ukrainians – they do not have the satellites and technical infrastructure to do this. These are Western missiles programmed and aimed by the West. Meaning that Russia is now being bombed directly by NATO imperialism.
The response by Russia in unveiling the mid-range hypersonic Oreshnik missile is analysed, which appears for now to have stymied the Biden administration. Along with Trump’s victory, which appears to be two-pronged – a degree of popular support due to his rhetorical isolationism over Ukraine, combined with the collapse of the Democratic Party vote being driven by the inflation and hardship to the working class inflicted by anti-Russian sanctions over Ukraine. The statement notes the danger of WWIII, and the difference between this confrontation and previous world cataclysms. Such a war would not be inter-imperialist, but rather a war of the imperialist US hegemon and its client imperialists against an alliance centrally of the Global South, encompassing two remaining smaller deformed workers states (Cuba and North Korea) and centrally led by two giant ex-workers states, Russia and China, whose form of restored capitalism has a massive proletarian deformation derived from their previous many decades of post-capitalist economic and military development.
The issue contains a fine article by Mark Andresen that expands on the reasons for Trump’s victory in the disillusionment of the working class, not only with liberalism, but also palpably with its right-wing opponents, and the opportunities that this gives to communists. And there is a signed article by Ian Donovan which contains a preliminary analysis of the dangers from the Assisted Dying Bill, which in our view involves a serious threat to the sick and the disabled – an even more sinister dimension to the austerity attack since 2010.
But also in this issue is part two of the LCFI’s letter to the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). This focuses on another facet of their problematic legacy from the politics of their founder James Robertson – their support for Brexit – that is, the exit of British imperialism from the European Union, and their belief that the working class has some kind of interest in this. We note that there are some positive elements to the political shift that they underwent a few years ago, before the death of Robertson. A grouping of ICL comrades centred in Quebec rose rapidly in the declining ICL though a project to address the national question regarding French-speaking Quebec in mainly English-speaking Canada, and then extending their approach to some of the smaller, multinational states in Europe – such as Spain and France regarding Catalonia and the Basque Country, Corsica, Belgium regarding the Flemish and Walloons, and also Scotland. These are all situations where there is either clear national oppression, or in Belgium a kind of forced unity of two language groups in the same imperialist state. Scotland was also a major part of imperial Britain, not a colony as was Ireland, but there is still a historically evolved national question with elements of oppression which must be addressed. But the New Spartacists mix this up with Robertson’s belief that British separatism from the EU was progressive. We cite Trotsky’s 1923 Essay on The United States of Europe and also Joseph Seymour’s 1977 article On Bourgeois Class Consciousness which both point to the reactionary and nationalist fundamental nature of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and its division of Europe in particularly, as something that Marxists are bound to oppose.
The letter deals with the New Sparts’ errors over Covid, which led to them somewhat amazingly arguing against lockdowns virtually as a principle, including in China (which they consider to be a workers’ state), even when no vaccines were available, and then for compulsory vaccinations. A strange combination, which seems to have been a by-product of severe disorientation of the tendency after the death of their historic leader and then faced with the Covid pandemic. The organisation collapsed during that period, though the Quebecois trend that shifted the ICL on the national question, took up this strange approach to Covid and became the core of the new leadership. It does appear to have been a confused bridge to a better, orthodox Marxist understanding on some other key questions though, such as the Anti-Imperialist United Front and Permanent Revolution.
We also address their failures in the Corbyn period, to fully engage and do entry work in the Labour Party during that crucial period of leftward shift in Labour. We counterpose our record of principled and somewhat high profile entry work in Socialist Fight, to the Sparts abstentionism. We are sharply critical of some of the discussions that went on and still go on today among their people, where they confuse the leftward movement represented by Corbynism in its first few years, at least up to the 2017 General Election, with their schemes about how Brexit was supposedly something that the workers movement was obliged to support. This is how, when the class struggle was being waged at a surprisingly high political level in the Labour Party during this period, the Sparts were embroiled in sterile internal debates about how it was unprincipled to support Corbyn because he didn’t support Brexit, and even ended up themselves publishing material about Brexit that they, not we, condemned as amounting to ‘political support’ to Boris Johnson’s Tories. A terrible muddle of political errors, which our letter attempts to bring some clarity to.
The next issue of Communist Fight will include the final part of this letter, which addresses the ‘Russian Question’ today – the nature of Russia and China after the 1989-91 Counterrevolutions – the reason for the continuing conflicts between these giant former workers states and world imperialism, and the contradictions and shortcomings of the New Spartacists over Ukraine today.
This issue therefore contains much of considerable importance to socialists and all class-conscious working-class people.
Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 1st December 2024. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.
Still from video of Russia’s new Orezhnik missile detroying a factory in Dnipro, Ukraine that made missiles.
US imperialism’s internal contradictions and desperation to hang onto its world hegemony has led to an immediate threat of nuclear war, as close as if not closer than anything that happened in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The NATO expansion drive through the proxy war in Ukraine now means Russia is being bombed by the United States and Britain with US and British-controlled medium range Cruise Missiles (Storm Shadow and ATACMS), and the French SCALP missile is also in play. Storm Shadow/ATACMS/Scalp are all similar ‘long range’ missiles. These are not really long range, they cannot even reach Moscow from Ukraine, but they are a political provocation.
Not so much a military danger, but the fact that Ukraine cannot possibly do this independently of the imperialists, but imperialist military forces must program them and fire them, otherwise they will not be accurate. It means that the fig leaf that some on the left have hidden behind, the idea that this is primarily a national conflict between Russia and Ukraine, has been torn away. This is an attack on Russia by the US, Britain and France, and the claim that Ukraine is doing it does not stand up. In itself, it is not much of a military threat if the payloads of these missiles are conventional; they won’t change the course of the war. But there is always the possibility of nuclear weapons being sneaked in, or a misunderstanding about that, triggering off a major exchange.
The Russian response is the new Oreshnik (Hazel Tree) missile. It can travel at Mach 10 – around 3 km per second. It is a multiple re-entry mid-range ballistic missile. It Can be conventional or nuclear. Nothing can touch it both for speed and unpredictability. It can have up to 26 different warheads. It can hit anywhere in Europe, as far away as London, which is probably the limit of its range. Maybe if it were fired from Eastern Siberia, it could possibly (just about) hit the US. But it’s really a European, mid-range missile. It’s a trump card – no pun intended – and underlines that Russia’s missile and nuclear capability is superior to the West. Will it stop the Biden administration and its cohorts, and their military provocations against Russia?
They have class-related reasons for attacking Russia – and a particular tactical take on that, so it’s less than likely. They demand obedience by those outside the imperialist club to the ‘rules-based order’, which is the Western, imperialist-dominated order. Now there is musing about ‘pre-emptive strikes’ in a conflict between Russia and a NATO state, in leading NATO circles, from one General Bauer – a Dutch military figure – the head of NATO military committee. That’s their response to Putin – obviously authorized by the US though said in Europe.
And even worse, there is now talk in Washington about giving nuclear weapons to Kiev after all. The immediate result of that will be a Russian nuclear elimination of the regime.
Marjorie Taylor-Green, the Trumpian House of Representatives member, called it an act of treason. But which nukes? Russia has all the old nukes from Ukraine. It’s hard to believe that the US would just give Ukraine nukes. US nukes in Britain are under US control, not British control. So, if they did, it would be another, even more brazen act similar to the ATACMS etc. Scott Ritter says this is a lie from the New York Times. And setting that up would take months, and likely have to get through Congress, where the GOP controls both houses. So possibly a step too far for a lame duck administration.
Any country, or group of countries, that defies them, is a target. At this point, they cannot accept defeat. This is the Cuban missile crisis plus plus, and it will last at least until Biden leaves office.
To those who lived and were active politically in the first years of Reagan, before Gorbachev came along, this is not unfamiliar. Though it may be worse. Remember Reagan’s joke: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have just signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes”? Remember the Reaganite ideologue Richard Pipes – the father of Daniel Pipes – today’s counter-jihad nut -: “The Soviet Union faces the choice of changing its Communist System in the direction of the West, or going to war”. Remember when Soviet vessels were rammed by US military ships on the high seas? These are very similar times. They are driven by a ruling-class ideology, and quite hysterical.
It’s not anti-Communism in the pure, old form. But it’s rooted in that anti-Communism, morphed into an ethnic hatred of Russians. It’s similar to Hitler’s hatred of Jews which was driven by the obsessive belief that Bolshevism was a Jewish creed, and that Jews generally were organically subversive. Russians are seen as organically communist inclined, subversive and disobedient to the world order. That hatred is what drives Western Russophobia ideologically. They cannot easily back down, because far from inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia, NATO is staring a strategic defeat in the face. Why?
The de-industrialisation of the West is what at bottom has led to the atrophy of US power, economic and military. Whereas Russia has to a real extent re-industrialised. or arguably refused the ‘medicine’ of deindustrialisation that imperialism sought to force on it through Yelstin. Putin reversed much of Yeltsin’s shock treatment from the 1990s and thankfully, he began doing so when there was still the capacity to reverse it. This may perversely be why Trump appears to admire Putin – he was able to do what Trump would like to do, but the class realities in the US prevent: reindustrialisation. He made no progress in this in his first term, and no doubt will be equally frustrated now. But this is also underlines what Biden – or rather most likely Blinken and Sullivan – are doing with this. Trying to pre-empt Trump on Russia-Ukraine. They are trying to stitch things up to the point that Trump cannot negotiate his way out of Ukraine.
Trump is a fascist domestically, as we point out in our statement. But there is at least rhetorical isolationism in his international policy. Trump’s election is extremely ominous, and the responsibility for it lies with the Democratic Party under Biden (and Harris). Trump represents extreme right-wing reaction. Though Ukraine played a huge role in propelling Trump to the White House because of the surge of inflation that coursed through the Western economies, including the US, as a result of sanctions, and particularly oil sanctions, against Russia. He intends mass deportations of millions of so-called ‘illegal migrants’, possibly up to 13 million, using the military.
He plans nationalist economic policies such as imposing 25 % tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and 10% on China. Now he is threatening all the BRICS nations: half of humanity with a 100% tariff, to try to stop a BRICS trading currency being created.
He intends a further stamping out of abortion rights, possibly a federal ban, not on abortion itself, but the posting of abortion-related medication to make abortion qualitatively more difficult to obtain even in states where it is legal. He proposes to weaponize the US military for domestic attacks on his political opponents, including the Democratic Party. He is likely to use a “terrorism” law – based on abuse of the term – to be used to drive non-profit publishers who dissent on Zionism, or other issues, out of business. The law to permit this is already in train. And of course, the left and any movements against police violence and killings will come under heavy repression of some sort. The same is likely true of any determined labour struggles. Though the benefit of this is that it will tear to pieces the false ‘working-class’ appeal of Trump. The first amendment of the US constitution is likely to be gutted in some such cases where people try to evoke it against Trump, as are labour gains. Trump’s crony Musk, who boasted of his involvement in a coup in Bolivia, is also seeking to get Trump’s judges to declare the National Labour Relations Board to be ‘unconstitutional’. That is, the NLRB that was set up by Roosevelt under the pressure of the historic labour upsurges in the United States in the 1930s.
All these things are on the immediate agenda because Trump stacked the Supreme Court with his far-right appointees in his first term. For the past four years of the Biden administration, he retained his far-right supermajority on the supreme court. That’s how Roe-vs-Wade – the de facto federal right to abortion – was overturned even though Trump was not in office. Biden did nothing about it. But because of this supermajority, when push came to shove, the Biden administration failed in its bid to hold Trump minimally accountable for the attempted putsch of Jan 6th, 2021. The Trumpian Supreme Court conveniently ruled that Trump, as president, was immune from prosecution for that as these were ‘official acts.’ And the Democrats did nothing to deal with that, like expanding the court, even in the first half of Biden’s term when they could have tried.
This is fundamentally because doing so would require mobilizing a mass movement of the working class to crush Trump’s far right movement. The US ruling class, Democrat and Republican, fears that more than they do fascism and a likely Trump dictatorship or semi-dictatorship. So that is the political reality in the US. It is obscured by the fact that the still (in domestic terms) bourgeois-democratic Democratic Party – is cowardly and subservient before the Republican Party – whose majority is now fascist, or proto-fascist, in their political programme.
This is somewhat obscured by the backing of the Democratic Party Biden administration for fascists in Ukraine, its funding of Azov, of Banderists and their front man, Zelensky, who applauded a Ukrainian SS-veteran in the Canadian parliament last autumn. But this kind of separation is not new. If is only a modern manifestation of something that Karl Marx observed in the Middle of the 19th Century, about British imperialism and its supposedly ‘civilised’ norms:
“The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked” (Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, January 22, 1853).
Those who entertain illusions in Trump because of his oppositional posture over Ukraine should remember that it was under his presidency, as Scott Ritter noted, that Zelensky was groomed for the role he was to play, as Jewish camouflage for the Maidan regime whose Nazi proclivities had become too obvious and well-publicised since Maidan in 2014. And Trump tore up the INF treaty between Reagan and Gorbachev, which was an obstacle to the use of the missiles that the West are now firing at Russia from Ukraine (as well as Russia’s response). Trump’s differences on international policy with the likes of Biden, where there is any substance to them, are tactical, not ones of principle or strategy.
Their aim is to preserve US Hegemony just as much as Biden’s. As in “Make America Great Again.” A key element of these differences is visceral pro-Zionism – Israel is more important than Ukraine for Trump and others. Part of it is a dispute over whether Russia or China are the most important adversary for US imperialism. And some of Trump’s picks for his posts are ultra-warmongers against Russia. Like Sebastian Gorka and Marco Rubio. Others, like Mike Waltz, National Security Adviser profess to be concerned about ‘escalation’ and to want a deal with Putin. But Waltz says he is “working closely” with Jake Sullivan on the transition. Including this escalation? We will see.
But what Sullivan – and the bourgeois ‘deep state’ – military etc., are up to – seems designed to frustrate this element of Trump’s policy. Scott Ritter describes it as a kind of coup. It is certainly unprecedented for a lame-duck president to behave like this, aiming to screw up his successor. Only Trump did it before – Jan 6 for a start. But that went outside the constitution and was also mainly domestic in its motivation – anti-migrant. This does not break with the US constitution as such. It remains to be seen what effect this will have. They could at the outside start a nuclear war, but short of that, I don’t see what they can do to Trump. Short of a nuclear exchange, any policies can be modified or scrapped.
Moving on to the International Criminal Court’s indictments against Netanyahu, Gallant, and the Hamas leader Mohammad Deif. Deif is likely dead. But that is minor, an index of the cowardice of the ICC. More to the point is the political impact. Netanyahu and Gallant are indicted for murder, persecution and using starvation as a weapon to commit “crimes against humanity”. The US condemned the ICC, and some Trumpian threatened to invoke the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ if Netanyahu and Gallant were arrested.
Whereas most European counties, Canada, and much of the world has signed it, or if not, it is not for pro-US reasons. Will cause problems for all of these. This has not quite matured yet – the separate International Court of Justice judgement on genocide from January is not complete. But they will find it very difficult in the light of the ICC warrant, to acquit Israel of genocide. Germany say they won’t implement the warrant, supposedly because of their history of persecuting Jews, but they signed up to the ICC, so this is a legal minefield. Macron has said something similar. In Britain Starmer and Cooper have tried evasion, but the legal position is clear. The government is in the High Court right now. Activists are looking for a judgement to force an arms embargo. They may get it. That’s not the half of it -there could be big problems to come for politicians who backed Israel.
These differences within US imperialism involve issues that are intertwined, and rapidly becoming more so. For instance, it is known that the reason Israel has just signed up for the ceasefire in Lebanon, and vice versa, is because both sides have taken major casualties in the last 14 month of war. Hezbollah has neither endorsed nor rejected the ceasefire. But Israel has been fought to a standstill in Southern Lebanon, despite the loss of Nasrallah, the pager attacks, and the terrible Gaza-like destruction Israel has inflicted.
So now the Israelis and Americans have re-activated their terrorist networks of pro-US, pro-Zionist Al Qaeda/ISIS jihadists in Syria. The purpose is obvious – to try to sabotage Hezbollah’s supply lines though Syria, which make it impossible for Israel to besiege Hezbollah the way they are able to do to Hamas in Gaza. They try to restart the jihadists’ war against Assad. Though it appears the Syrian army is already making short work of them. But to attack Assad brings Russia and Iranian forces into play. Both played a major role in preventing a repeat of the imperialist criminal destruction of Libya, being repeated in Syria, over a decade ago. And Iran is also an ally of Russia now and has rendered it some technological help in Ukraine. So, the logic of Zionist militarism in this situation can point to a clash with Russia. Even though it may be that Trump is seeking to avoid that. All these contradictions point to the strategic defeat of US Hegemony.
Communists need to be providing revolutionary leadership in this situation, advocating anti-imperialist united fronts to deal with these barbarities. The problem of Zionism and its genocidal aggression against the Arab peoples needs to be resolved by an anti-imperialist united front. We must demand that Russia and China throw their full economic and military resources into fighting the Zionist genocide and defeating Israel in this life-and-death struggle for the Arab peoples.
We advocate the independent mass mobilisation of workers wherever it is feasible. Previously we have advocated a ‘coalition of the willing’ to intervene militarily to stop the Zionist slaughter wherever it is happening – the recent Iranian retaliatory actions against Israel also underline that this is feasible. But in the end, even an anti-imperialist united front is not completely adequate. Every such united front needs a consciously revolutionary, working-class component to make it effective and viable.
The only permanent road to peace, the only solution to all the deadly problems that beset humanity in this situation, from the threat of nuclear annihilation to disaster through the capitalist-induced destruction of the biosphere, is through the creation of a mass Communist movement internationally. We need a new world party of socialist revolution to unite all subjective communists, all consistent anti-imperialists, under one banner based on free discussion of differences, but unity in action, in pursuit of international socialism. For workers revolution is the only road to real peace!
Storm Bert laid bare the cruel reality that Kid Starver’s government has ushered in. A massive increase in the money for the “civil list”, as we euphemistically call the annual royal handout to the spongers in the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha “firm”, was coupled with yet money for Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe;but none for the majority of people in the UK.
Exactly why the new “slimmed down” family should need an increase when the vast majority of the people, and specifically those on fixed pensions and benefits get nothing is not even mentioned in our lame-stream media. What benefit yet more money for Ukraine does for the people of Britain is even less obvious. Ukraine has been a US proxy for the past decade, locking up trade unionists, outlawing political parties, and committing human rights abuses by banning both the majority religion (the Ukrainian Orthodox church) and the Russian language (spoken by over a third of the population)
Chris Bryant lays claim to having solved the devastating flooding crisis for his constituents, not by doing his duty as their MP and a cabinet minister, and lobbying for a share of the government money set aside for flood victims but instead a “go fund me page” (started by someone else, to which he donated £100, yet asking others for thousands). We’ll wait to see if he claims that on “expenses”, as so many MPs have claimed their showy wreaths on Armistice Day.
Similarly the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall charge our public services for parking while expecting us taxpayers to additionally stump up for the armed forces to put on courtesy flights and other transport for “security reasons”. There’s nothing quite like taking with both hands to build up a family fortune of £80 billion and then setting up a new charity to show the incompetent poor how to solve their financial problems. The latest scam to reassure the public that the royal family is still relevant has been unveiled, setting up a charity to address homelessness, a situation made infinitely worse by the 2012 legislation to criminalise squatting.
There are 350 000 homeless people in England and Wales, and over 650 000 empty and abandoned homes. We don’t need another charity to decide who are the “deserving poor” are, we need to stop criminalising need, and an end to the system of quangos that allow the ruling class to control our own natural generosity, guilt tripping us with endless appeals for yet more “funds” from the little we have, and force the government to comprehensively provide for the needs of the people who cannot provide for themselves.
It is as insulting as the previous ones to address “early years child development” and breakfast clubs as injuring when the 2 child benefit cap remains, treating almost every 3rd and successive child born since 2017 as unworthy of the support their older siblings receive. Over a million children grow up in poverty thanks to this iniquity, but successive governments prefer the band aid of charity to social justice and equality.
It should not be a crime to be poor. It should not be a crime to be born into a larger family. It should be a crime for the government to spend money on aggressive wars and regime change, tax breaks and self-aggrandisement, and ignore their responsibilities to provide services for our people. And when the government cannot or deliberately will not do its duty, the ministers who fail should be locked up for a period of time commensurate with the lives they have taken through their deliberate negligence or ideological malice.
In times of austerity the wealthy should shoulder the load, not the poor, and the royals should set the example they claim they are there to represent, and give up their civil list, their “income” from the duchies, and live on their own “savings”.
The notes for this presentation (17th November) are now available to read, and the presentation and discussion are also available to listen to as a podcast.
Dignity in Dying lavishly funded advertising on the London tube
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, introduced into Parliament by the Labour MP Kim Leadbetter, is widely touted as a humanitarian measure which will allegedly help those who are dying from painful terminal illnesses avoid the appalling suffering that frequently accompanies such deaths. Many regard it as a humanitarian measure, and it is being presented as a progressive reform. Those opposing it are being portrayed by supporters of the bill as religious fundamentalists. It has divided the establishment in Britain: former Tory Prime Ministers: May, Truss and Johnson oppose it, as does former Labour PM Gordon Brown. In the current Labour Party, Starmer supports it, but Wes Streeting opposes it.
A parliamentary grouping of Labour’s Anna Spicer, Lib-Dem Munira Wilson and Tory Ben Spicer, has put an amendment proposing that it should not be given a second reading until there is a law commission or royal commission into all scenarios and safeguards, which would torpedo the bill. The bill would make eligible adults with under six months to live, “mental capacity” and “a settled wish to die”. They would have to make two declarations, each approved by different doctors, seven days apart, and then a high court judge would question them, followed by a 14 day wait. The fatal drug would have to be self-administered; doctors would prepare the dose. There is an attempt to include other ‘safeguards’ in the bill, including making it illegal for anyone to “pressure, coerce or use dishonesty” to procure such a declaration or induce self-administering of such a dose, with a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
There are elements within this that socialists should sympathise with. No one should be forced to suffer agonising death, which is all too common today, particularly as the National Health Service has come under vicious attack by neoliberal politicians. Particularly from some Tory and New Labour politicians who are making sonorous and hypocritical declarations about morality. Tories, Lib Dems and New Labour have all undermined the NHS through various forms of privatisation. The Tories in the last 14 years have done massive damage to the NHS, but New Labour provided them with the means to do so. Private Finance Initiatives, saddling hospitals with massive debt, and foundation trusts, providing the Tories with the means to stick the knife in even more, which they did with austerity attacks. On all these sides, protestations of humanitarian motivations do not ring true.
The principle of allowing all to end their lives in dignity is correct but under capitalism this is highly problematic. Today austerity attacks on the sick, the disabled, benefit claimants, etc. are endemic. This is why virtually the entire medical profession, and disabled organisations, oppose this. ‘Safeguards’ cannot overcome private property, both at a domestic level, where the interests of relatives, e.g. in inheritance, and the material cost of caring, pressure the sick to avoid being a “burden”. Leadbetter’s bill is backed by the Dignity in Dying campaign, which received £700,000 from the Bernard Lewis Trust, which has connections to offshore tax havens, funding Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism – a smear machine against the pro-Palestinian left. Hardly humanitarian causes! Dignity in Dying have the money to buy saturation advertising on the London tube, like at Westminster station foot tunnel where anyone walking through it is assailed by dozens of their electronic advertisements.
This would not be a humanitarian advance, but an accelerating neoliberal ethos of euthanasia, resembling Nazism. As shown in Canada and the Netherlands, where similar laws have been passed and euthanasia amounts to 5% of all deaths. Leadbetter estimates this bill would allow less than 1,000 assisted suicides per year. But the ‘safeguards’ in the bill can easily be amended by a future government. In Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) which passed in 2016, was extended beyond terminal cases in 2021. It is planned to extend it further in 2027 to include people suffering from a solely mental illness. With such extensions, likely at the hands of a future government and secondary legislation, it is entirely feasible that around 30,000 people a year could be subject to state-sponsored euthanasia in Britain in a few years’ time.
Socialists should oppose this bill tooth and nail. Even if it falls this time, they will try again. Far from promoting euthanasia, we should be insisting on a massive improvement in palliative care. The NHS should run hospices and similar institutions to allow all to end their lives without pain and suffering. We should not be supporting a law that clearly presages a cull of ‘costly’ people with health problems, funded lavishly by people who are up to their necks in the barbarism in Gaza. What’s ‘humanitarian’ about that?
We need a new Communist International! For Russian Victory in Ukraine!
For an armed anti-imperialist united front to stop the Zionist genocide!
International Workers Revolution is the Only Road to Peace!
Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious
Capitalist-imperialist barbarism is staring humanity in the face. US imperialism’s internal contradictions and desperation to hang onto its world hegemony has led to an immediate threat of nuclear war, as close as if not closer than anything that happened in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The NATO expansion drive through the proxy war in Ukraine now means Russia is being bombed by the United States and Britain with US and British-controlled medium range Cruise Missiles (Storm Shadow and ATACMS). These missiles are being controlled directly by the imperialists, and their use constitutes direct acts of war by the US and Britain, since Ukraine does not have the personnel or the technological means to operate them autonomously. This has been engineered by the lame-duck Biden administration since they lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Biden is too mentally feeble to be in control – it is functionaries of the liberal-militarist US establishment and likely the military themselves who are calling the shots here, trying by means of escalation to pre-empt what Trump might be inclined to do about Ukraine from 21st January when he takes office.
In response, on 21st November, Russia battle-tested a new ‘game changing’ weapon against a Ukrainian missile and armaments facility near Dnipro, a mid-range hypersonic, multi-warheaded missile. Its speed, Mach 10 (10 times the speed of sound) means it travels at 3 kilometres per second, considerably faster than the interception capacity of all the missile defence facilities of Europe‘s imperialist nations and the various East European US clients, which are simply defenceless before it. The new missile, Oreshnik (Hazel Tree) can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, and if the imperialists were rational, ought to be sufficient several times over to make them back off from attacking Russia. Whether they are rational enough to take note of the lesson remains to be seen.
The genocide in Gaza, livestreamed on social media even in the imperialist countries (though suppressed insofar as is possible by the pro-Zionist bourgeois mainstream media), has found a judicial expression with the indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant by the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity” and “using starvation as a weapon of war”. Which barely scratches the surface of Zionism’s crimes. The ICC is a phoney court that was originally set up by the imperialists to arraign the leaders of disobedient countries outside the Western imperialist club. One of its first actions was to condemn Serbia in the NATO war against Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of the Balkan country, was arbitrarily convicted and imprisoned by the imperialist tribunal, despite Yugoslavia not recognizing the jurisdiction of this tribunal over the country. Transferred to The Hague, without even having his extradition approved, as required by Yugoslav criminal law, Milosevic was unjustly tried and convicted of genocide. He was found dead in his cell under suspicion of a heart attack deliberately induced by the tribunal. Numerous African leaders have been charged by the ICC, but their most prominent targets include Vladmir Putin, as part of the West’s fraudulent casting of resistance to NATO expansion in Ukraine as somehow criminal.
But the exposure of Israel’s depraved extermination of helpless Palestinian civilians, including women and children, medical staff, journalists, aid workers, even hospital patients, produced mass pressure on this stooge body to act and indict Israeli leaders. Even then, the cowards had to indict a Hamas leader for ‘balance’, even though the individual they indicted has almost certainly himself been murdered by Israel. The Zionists objected and delayed the indictment for months. They appear to have been instrumental in injecting sexual allegations against the ICC prosecutor to try to sabotage the indictment. But the pressure from below was too much, and now the indictments are issued. It puts European politicians, whose countries for the most part endorse the court, in legal jeopardy for their arming Israel to carry out these crimes.
The United States does not endorse the court – despite its stooge nature, they understand that US forces routinely commit terrible crimes around the globe and even a formal affiliation can put its forces at risk if the ICC comes under sustained mass pressure over some US atrocity, as has happened to Israel over the Zionist holocaust. The US has a law, known popularly as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, which mandates that US governments should use military force against the ICC should it arrest any US politicians or operatives.
Trump’s New Rise to Power
Trump’s election on November 5th, the defeat of Harris acting as second string for the incapacitated, senile Biden, has brought to the fore the contradictions within the US as its world imperialist hegemony slips away. Trump is basically a fascist in the US context, but there sometimes appears to be an element of rhetorical US isolationism in his attitude to the Ukrainian war. His wing of the US ruling class sees China, not Russia, as the main challenger to US imperialism because of its greater productive capacity and economic power.
Their likely objective is to do a deal with Russia and back off from the Ukraine conflict, hoping to drive a wedge between Russia and China. In fact, so single-mindedly are they focussed on China that at least some of them are inclined to dump NATO and Europe as a waste of resources that the US is far too ‘generous’ to. They demand that European capitalism, not the US, pays for NATO. Though going by some of Trump’s picks for his incoming administration, some of this may be more rhetoric than reality. Trump has appointed Sebastian Gorka, a hawk who has attacked ‘isolationism’ over Ukraine, as his chief of ‘Counterterrorism’ and ‘Special Assistant’. Also among his picks for his new administration are the most virulent Zionists imaginable. Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, who will be US Ambassador to Israel, says there are no such things as Palestinians, no West Bank, and no occupation.
Trump’s people are even more single-mindedly focussed on support for Israel than the Biden administration was, as Huckabee’s appointment shows. Trump criticised ‘Genocide Joe’ for being insufficiently supportive of Netanyahu’s attempted extermination of Gazans – he said directly that Israel should be supported to “finish the job” of extermination. Republican senators such as Lindsay Graham call for ‘sanctions’ against the ICC, and even against other nations who cooperate with the ICC over Netanyahu and Gallant – this could easily include Britain, France and Germany, who have placed themselves under its jurisdiction years ago. Though Germany says that it would not arrest Israeli leaders supposedly because of its own history of Nazism, that stance could cause them legal problems.
These tactical differences are sharply expressed now, as the large, putatively ‘liberal’ wing of the US ruling class that still gravitates around Biden and Harris sees Ukraine as just as paramount as support for Israel if not more so. This nuance implicitly is about whether the Israel lobby calls the shots in US politics, or the presumed interests of the US itself, as well as whether China is more important as an enemy than Russia in global geopolitics. With the rise of BRICS, and the consolidation of Russia-China cooperation, they appear much too late with this. The US is far weaker, and Russia/China/BRICS are far stronger, than in Trump’s first presidency.
Trump is a pro-Zionist fascist, who denounces his liberal-imperialist opponents such as Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party as ‘communists’ and ‘Marxists’. He promises massive deportations of undocumented workers, up to 13 million by some counts, as well as to use the US military to ‘deal with’ his political opponents among the bourgeois establishment, Democratic and Republican, and to crush left-wing and pro-Palestine demonstrations and mobilisations more generally.
Trump has been one of the key authors of a years-long, accelerating coup in US bourgeois politics. It had its precursors with the end of all restrictions on corporate funding in politics in 2010 (Citizens United). But having come to power in 2016 with massive funding from Sheldon Adelson of Likud, despite not even winning the popular vote (and in fact losing by 3 million votes), Trump proceeded to replace enough Supreme Court judges during his first term of office (2017-2021) to create a far-right supermajority on the Supreme Court. While he was out of office, during Biden’s presidency, this supermajority declared that a President in office had virtually unlimited power to carry out acts ‘in his/her official capacity’ that for anyone else would mean prosecution and jail. So, the feeble attempts by elements of the US state to hold him criminally responsible for his attempted putsch on January 6, 2021, were ruled out by ‘his’ Supreme Court supermajority.
Trump and his wing of the ruling class now have control over all branches of the US executive. In addition, Trump has been cultivating an extra-parliamentary wing to his fascist movement based like all fascist movements on animating the most reactionary layers of the petty bourgeoisie. We saw the utilisation of these heavily armed layers both to help confront the Black Lives Matter protests and most obviously in the attempted putsch of January the 6th. These layers which are animated by white supremacy and Christian nationalism are an extra resource for advancing fascism in the US if Trump finds the methods of the state insufficient in the face of mass working class resistance.
Ukraine War Crushed Biden/Harris
The loss of US hegemony is accelerating and what politically crushed the Biden-Harris regime was mainly the inflationary wave that the Ukraine war sanctions against Russian oil sent through the West, and the enormous amounts the US and NATO countries vainly spent trying to defeat Russia in Ukraine. They have not succeeded in inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia; but NATO is now close to defeat itself in Ukraine. They are desperate to stave this off and have been resorting to increasingly desperate means as defeat got closer and closer over the last few months. The threat to target Russia with Western guided missiles from Ukraine was one such tactic – Putin warned on September 10th that such actions could produce a Russian nuclear response, which caused Biden to back off from the idea at that time. And the failing attempt to create another Maidan-style ‘colour revolution’ in Georgia, and similar activities in Moldova, represent attempts to open up yet another front to attack Russia, in Moldova particularly through a potential attack on the mainly Russian-speaking region of Transnistria, which is close to mainly Russian-speaking Odessa within Ukraine, another disputed territory that no doubt would join Russia if it got the chance in the context of a Russian victory in Ukraine.
The economic strains on the US population from the US bourgeoisie’s Ukraine war caused the collapse of the Biden administration’s electoral base, with Harris getting seven million less votes than Biden managed in 2020, whereas Trump won the popular vote this time with around two and a half million more votes than he did in 2020. This time, Trump won the popular vote by around that margin, two and a half million votes. The complaints that he was the victim of a fraudulent election system in 2020 stand discredited by this, but he managed to gain power anyway. Mainly because the Ukraine war and its economic consequences caused large amounts of suffering to working-class people in the US, and his promises to end the war resonated with that population. And Harris’s clear endorsement of all the actions of Biden’s administration in funding, arming and politically supporting Israel’s year-long genocide in Gaza and now its bloody rampage against the population of Lebanon also discredited the Democrats among their base among class conscious workers, particularly those from oppressed minorities.
The virtually open shift to the US and NATO powers firing longer-range missiles into Russia and Ukraine makes it very clear that Ukraine has all along been simply a Western puppet – this is not a war for ‘national liberation’ or against ‘Russian imperialism’ as social-imperialists putatively on the left like the majority of the so-called United Secretariat of the Fourth International, or the Revolutionary Communist Internationalist Tendency, like to pretend. This is a Western-initiated proxy war, barely hidden behind clouds of imperialist camouflage rhetoric, aimed at defeating and dismembering Russia, and nothing whatsoever to do with any putative rights of Ukrainians. The Russian Federation does not have any project of oppressing Ukrainians – that is why their war over the past two-and-a-half years had been so painstaking – a war of attrition with high Ukrainian military casualties but kept minimal for civilians. Russia clearly has the armed capacity to wage a blitzkrieg-type war, bomb the hell out of Ukraine and take territory rapidly, if it wanted to. But that kind of war would cause massive civilian casualties, and today’s Russian politicians do not seek such bloodshed. Ukrainians are regarded as a fraternal people, not targets for indiscriminate terror. It is the West that is inflicting civilian casualties in this war by using petal mines, depleted Uranium weapons and now openly supplying anti-personnel landmines to attack civilians in the newly Russian territories.
Zionist barbarism. Hospital patients in Gaza forced onto death march by Israeli troop captors.
The Need for a New Communist International
Those on the Trotskyist left who claim to be consistent defencists of struggles against imperialism but have not yet unequivocally taken a side with Russia against imperialism, instead engaging in third-campist rhetoric about how Russian and Ukrainian workers should unite against Putin and NATO, ought to be forced to re-assess their wrong position by recent events involving Storm Shadow and ATACMS. The new Spartacists have been the prime example of supposedly orthodox Communists/Trotskyists who have been promoting these erroneous views recently. But the idea that this is in any way a national war between Ukraine and Russia ought to be completely blown away by these events. Even the most dull-witted should be able to discern that the Ukraine conflict is now, and always was, fundamentally a defensive and progressive war by Russia aimed at defending this non-imperialist, ex-workers’ state against imperialist-planned dismemberment.
World War III is very much on the horizon. Some may even argue that it is already underway. That is a matter of interpretation at this point. Trotsky’s remarks about the leadup to World War II make sobering reading today:
“Under the increasing tension of capitalist disintegration, imperialist antagonisms reach an impasse at the height of which separate clashes and bloody local disturbances (Ethiopia, Spain, the Far East, Central Europe) must inevitably coalesce into a conflagration of world dimensions. The bourgeoisie, of course, is aware of the mortal danger to its domination represented by a new war. But that class is now immeasurably less capable of averting war than on the eve of 1914.” (Transitional Programme, 1938)
Though today we are in a different situation, as we are not facing an inter-imperialist conflict, but the threat of a war by NATO imperialism to maintain US/Western hegemony against a loose alliance of remaining workers states, non-imperialist ex-workers states (retaining significant elements of previous post-capitalist productive and state apparatus as major deformations on a weak restored capitalism), and more classically semi-colonial countries seeking to escape imperialist domination and dictat. But the West does not tolerate this kind of insubordination, and the threat of a world war to restore US hegemony and imperialist domination is very real. All these insurgent countries must be defended against imperialism as a matter of principle by the workers’ movements of the world.
Communists need to be providing revolutionary leadership in this situation, advocating anti-imperialist united fronts to deal with these barbarities. The problem of Zionism and its genocidal aggression against the Arab peoples needs to be resolved by an anti-imperialist united front. We must demand that Russia and China throw their full economic and military resources into fighting the Zionist genocide and defeating Israel in this life-and-death struggle for the Arab peoples. We advocate the independent mass mobilisation of workers wherever it is feasible. Previously we have advocated a ‘coalition of the willing’ to intervene militarily to stop the Zionist slaughter wherever it is happening – the recent Iranian retaliatory actions against Israel also underline that this is feasible.
But in the end, even an anti-imperialist united front is not completely adequate. Every such united front needs a consciously revolutionary, working-class component to make it effective and viable. The only permanent road to peace, the only solution to all the deadly problems that beset humanity in this situation, from the threat of nuclear annihilation to disaster through the capitalist-induced destruction of the biosphere, is through the creation of a mass Communist Movement internationally. We need a new world party of socialist revolution to unite all subjective communists, all consistent anti-imperialists, under one banner based on free discussion of differences, but unity in action, in pursuit of international socialism. For workers revolution is the only road to real peace!
Here is an interesting commentary on the election of the fascist demagogue Donald Trump from the Facebook page of Mike Gimbel, a lifelong Communist from the United States.
Many good people are, for good reasons, horrified by the election, yesterday, in the US, of Donald Trump as President.
Donald Trump is just as arrogant, racist and Misogynist today, as when he was elected US President, in 2016.
However, there is a huge difference economically, politically and militarily for US imperialism, in 2024, from 2016.
The world has changed!
That is why we need to be confident that our working class and oppressed comrades should be optimistic!
In 2016 the US was able to intimidate and threaten every nation on the globe, with economic sanctions and military threats.
In 2016, every nation on the globe, even including China and Russia, had to measure very carefully, their actions and their words, in terms of how US-led imperialism would react.
US-led imperialism acted with confidence and arrogance, as WORLD HEGEMON, in 2016.
Today, in 2024, US-led imperialism is in the process of seeing its hegemony evaporate before the eyes of the people of the entire world and has become the object of hatred over its leading role in the genocide in Gaza.
When Donald Trump takes the oath of office, as US President, on January 20, 2025, he will face the world with his usual arrogance limited greatly, because he will be the leader of a hugely weakened world power.
Donald Trump’s arrogance and anger, therefore, can logically only be utilized WITHIN the USA, not externally against Russia and China, no matter how much he may wish to.
However, Logic is not Donald Trump’s greatest asset! We will have to wait and see whether the neocons around him will lead Trump into a stupid military misadventure, which will only ACCELERATE US-led imperialism’s collapse!
For now, it appears that Trump is determined to avoid such a war and, instead, to try to fight an economic trade war, not only with China, but with much of the nations of the globe! Not a wise move!
This economic trade war will further destroy the economic well-being of the US population, as an inflationary spiral would result from that trade war.
The Tariffs imposed on foreign goods, by Trump’s proposed economic policies, would have to be paid for by the working class at the checkout counters in the retail establishments, because most of the goods purchased in the US, will be of foreign production.
How will that strengthen US imperialism? It cannot and will not! It will just further weaken the economy as the purchasing power of the US population will decline drastically, forcing thousands of US businesses into bankruptcy, for lack of customers!
Trump’s election triumph will, at first, make his fascist followers ‘heady’ with hopes that CANNOT BE FULFILLED!
Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again” cannot be made a reality. That ‘ship’ has sailed!
US imperialism faces a hard reality:
IT IS $36 TRILLION IN DEBT!
US imperialism’s economy is being strangled by those 850 foreign military bases, which serve only TODAY, as ‘easy targets’, no longer as a projection of actual military power!
The monstrous cost to the US budget and the US economy, for maintenance of those foreign bases, will quickly become a dividing issue withing the capitalist ruling classes, within the USA, once the realization of the loss of effectiveness of those military bases, for demonstrating US imperialism’s military power, becomes apparent.
The US military Industrial Complex (MIC) is not the center of control of US capitalist rule, no matter how much some on the left may believe it.
What is a MIC used for?
It is the “WORLD POLICE FORCE” to protect US imperialist profits and the US capitalist ruling classes!
The MIC is just like your local police force, which is designed to intimidate the internal class enemy, whereas the MIC is the US POLICE FORCE for intimidating the EXTERNAL class enemy.
The Middle East Oil and Gas is the greatest source of profit for US-led imperialism and its capitalist ruling classes.
In the Middle East, the MIC is the imperialist protection force for that oil and gas predation of the Middle East.
The Zionist entity was set up as an imperialist MILITARY OUTPOST, for the MIC, to protect US-led imperialism’s predatory profits, against any attempt by nations in the region’s attempts to nationalize their oil and gas production facilities.
Donald Trump, in other words, is taking control of the leadership of US imperialism, with few, if any, ‘cards’ to play because the MIC, after losing wars in the Ukraine and in Palestine, is now draining the power of US imperialism, not the other way around!
In other words, Donald Trump cannot “Make America Great Again”!
His followers will be quickly disappointed!
Yes, the maniacal fascist ‘core’ of Trump’s supporters will ignore reality and are likely to try to smash everything and everyone to their left, when Trump is unable to fulfill their furtive dreams, but the mass of the population will move strongly to the left, in order to defend their standard of living, under the coming harsh economic austerity that Trump will be forced to implement.
AGAIN, I REPEAT:
DONALD TRUMP HAS NO ANSWERS FOR WHAT IS COMING!
THIS IS NOT THE GERMANY OF WWI AND WWII.
In WWI and WWII, Germany was a rising imperialist power, with a huge industrial base. In both wars, Germany could hope to challenge US imperialism for world dominance, if it was able to place the entire European industrial base under its military control. (see my linked video, below, for historical background)
The US is not the Germany of those two wars!
Germany was an industrial power! The US de-industrialized!
The New York Stock Exchange cannot fight a war! It produces nothing!
Donald Trump’s confusion also comes from the fact that his wealth comes from completely outside of the industrial and manufacturing and mining sectors.
Trump is a ‘Real Estate Baron’.
Trump is just a BIG LANDLORD, the very epitome of a ‘rentier’ capitalist!
Capitalism is based upon production of goods, whereas a LANDLORD is a relic of FEUDALISM.
LANDLORD’s serve no purpose in capitalist production! They are the ultimate ‘bloodsuckers’.
In every revolution, the first target of the outraged masses, is the LANDLORD!
Donald Trump knows how to ‘Buy and Sell’, which is a relic of a long bygone era, but has little knowledge of CAPITALIST PRODUCTION! That is why Trump focuses on TRADE, not PRODUCTION, as the solution to the US imperialist economic problems!
Putting tariffs on goods entering the country, trying to force foreign capitalist to relocate their factories to the USA, in order to sell into the massive US market, is folly.
The massive rise in inflation, due to the cost created by those very tariffs, will be a huge disincentive to that investment, as it will cause the US market to shrink, simply because the US masses will not have the money to buy those goods!
As such, Donald Trump can be, and likely will remain, the ‘bull in the China shop’, breaking all the dishes. He can’t help himself. He doesn’t understand the economic system that he is the leader of. He has no vital connection, in his experience, to its CAPITALIST economic base.
The Democratic Party, representing the core of the US capitalist ruling classes, has decades of experience leading US CAPITALISM.
Donald Trump, however, is likely to make US-led imperialism go even quicker into decline simply because he has far less experience and far less necessary connections to experienced ruling class leaders needed to do the job. US imperialism has hired a veritable “Mob Boss” as its leader! A “Mob Boss” only knows how to run a ‘protection racket’, not an economy!
Yes, the near future, for the US working classes and oppressed peoples, may likely be made difficult, perhaps even in bloody confrontations, but that difficulty comes with an optimistic outcome a little farther ‘down the road’.
This presentation, by a Consistent Democrats speaker, and the discussion that followed it, is available as a podcast also.
This talk focuses on the nature of Russia and China today. It is based on the LCFI’s statement “Marxism and the Post-Counterrevolution Cold War” from just over a year ago. This is the beginning of the subject. We undoubtedly need more discussions to deal with the world situation today, and the road to world revolution. These are huge issues. We are living through a new historical period
The imperialist powers of European origin (with the sole exception of Japan), the monopoly capitalist powers that have enriched themselves and dominated the greater part of the globe, for approximately 150 years, have gone into the greatest crisis in their history. And what is remarkable is that this crisis is manifesting itself only 30 years or so after imperialist capitalism had achieved what seemed to be its greatest triumph. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, and the former multinational degenerated workers state fragmented along national lines.
In Russia, its central component, a government came to power led by Boris Yeltsin, the former chief of the Moscow Communist Party, who had metamorphosed into first a populist demagogue, and then an advocate of the restoration of capitalist through a massive, rapid economic shock. The marketising regime of Mikhail Gorbachev, which whittled away at central planning in the name of perestroika (reconstruction) and which did away with the repression of the Stalinist regime in the name of glasnost (openness), acted a transitional ‘bridge’ to the rise of Yeltsin and the counterrevolution. This Yeltsin catastrophe happened less than two years after Gorbachev opened the Berlin wall, which resulted in the coming to power of capitalist restorationist regimes, liquidating the deformed workers states of Eastern Europe, with Poland under the pro-capitalist trade union, Solidarność, as the vanguard.
Parallel with this we had the rise of capitalism in China. Even though the Communist Party remained in power, since 1979 and the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping as leader of the party, a kind of pro-capitalist ideologue as well as being a ‘Communist’ bureaucrat. His regime broke the ‘iron rice bowl’, the system of collective welfare that was the foundation of the Chinese deformed workers state under Mao since the 1949 revolution. The watchword of Deng was ‘to get rich is glorious’: marketisation in China accelerated more quickly in China than in the USSR throughout the 1980s. Though the final breakthrough for capitalist restoration was controlled by the bureaucracy from above, not through a shock treatment directed at the bureaucracy externally, as in Russia. But through a massive intensification of marketisation/privatisation promoted by Deng on his Southern Tour in late 1992, which beat back the backlash within the bureaucracy against marketisation that occurred after Tien-An-Mien Square in 1989, and represented a qualitative turning point. So that is the initial background of the counterrevolutions in the main deformed workers states.
So, this educational is about the character of Russia and China today. Everyone above a certain age remembers the Cold War, most likely Cold War II, the warmongering crusade against Communism and the USSR led by Ronald Reagan. The hysterical, warmongering response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979 is part of what won me to Trotskyism. The West provoked the Soviet intervention by funding and arming counterrevolutionary forces against a reforming government, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The warmongering hysteria today over Russia’s SMO in Ukraine is certainly reminiscent of the Carter-Reagan warmongering over Afghanistan, as is their support of far-right extremist forces.
Similarly, what in the Ukraine, Georgia, or Hong Kong context are today called ‘colour revolutions’ – orchestrated and well-funded mass coup movements that are intended to overthrow governments – even elected ones – that the west disapproves of. These are somewhat familiar from the 1980s when the West funded counterrevolutionary movements in Eastern Europe – Polish Solidarność was the best-known example. A movement of workers, to be sure. But unlike the situation in the 1950s, when Hungarian and Polish workers rose up and demanded democratised workers states and workers control, in 1980 onwards Solidarność rapidly consolidated around a pro-capitalist, neoliberal programme. Such movements are familiar today, as are what they lead to.
What needs explaining is that capitalism, of a sort, is now dominant in the main former workers states, i.e. Russia, which does not claim to be socialist. And China, (whose Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, is actually a dollar billionaire, with $1.2 billion according to Forbes). That is the legacy of the counterrevolutions of 1989-92. And yet the warmongering, crusade in Western countries against Russia and China is just as intense as it was in the Cold War of the 1980s, and for those old enough to remember, the Cold War of the 1950s also. Why is this?
It is because capitalist restoration has not proved as straightforward as the ideologues of Western imperialism made out in 1989, as exemplified by Francis Fukuyama and his essay “the End of History”. Marx’s vision was that human society would end its series of social transformations and revolutions, from primitive communism, which fell when humanity divided into classes, through slave- based production, then feudalism, through capitalism, to the final abolition of classes and the creation of developed communism. Fukuyama’s fatuous version had liberal imperialist capitalism in that role. A monstrous form of exploitation, not only of the working class in the advanced countries, but robbery of the bulk of humanity in the oppressed Global South, to extract the wealth that fuels the privileged position of the imperialist countries. Fukuyama’s vision was a complete insult to the bulk of humanity.
And to the population of the former USSR, particularly the population of Russia, who as part of this ‘end of history’ nonsense, were subject to a Pinochet-like neoliberal economic shock under Yeltsin that caused deaths by starvation, and suicide in the face of starvation, to Russian workers. This caused a fall in life expectancy of over 5 years in the early-mid 1990s, which can only be explained by millions of premature deaths. This resulted in a massive popular backlash from below. Which the Russian state responded to, giving rise to Putin’s who has become hated by imperialism because of his reversal of many of Yeltsin’ attacks. He is hated for this, not for ‘authoritarianism’. Similar things happened in China also, which also managed to make use of Western outsourcing to build itself industrially, using its state apparatus – derived from decades when it was a workers’ state. And has become the world’s industrial powerhouse.
We have been studying Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. We will not repeat here Trotsky’s analysis of the reasons for the rise of the bureaucratic caste in the USSR in in 1920s and 30s. Neither will we analyse the Chinese revolution of 1949, except to note that the workers state it created was not in the image of the early Soviet state of Lenin and Trotsky, literally a state of democratic workers councils, but rather one like Stalin’s USSR where the working class was deprived of power by kind of labour bureaucracy, right from the start. It was a sort of clone of Stalin’s USSR, not Lenin and Trotsky’s.
Trotsky foresaw that the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union would lead to capitalist restoration. He was proved right, though not in his own lifetime. His warnings only came to pass decades after his death. Nevertheless, he was compelled to sketch out some basic features of such a counterrevolution. He wrote an important essay in 1937 titled: Not a workers’ and not a bourgeois state. I will quote some passages which shed light on what he considered likely:
“The proletariat of the USSR is the ruling class in a backward country where there is still a lack of the most vital necessities of life. The proletariat of the USSR rules in a land consisting of only one-twelfth part of humanity; imperialism rules over the remaining eleven-twelfths. The rule of the proletariat, already maimed by the backwardness and poverty of the country, is doubly and triply deformed under the pressure of world imperialism. The organ of the rule of the proletariat – the state – becomes an organ for pressure from imperialism (diplomacy, army, foreign trade, ideas, and customs). The struggle for domination, considered on a historical scale, is not between the proletariat and the bureaucracy, but between the proletariat and the world bourgeoisie… For the bourgeoisie – fascist as well as democratic – isolated counter-revolutionary exploits … do not suffice; it needs a complete counter-revolution in the relations of property and the opening of the Russian market. So long as this is not the case, the bourgeoisie considers the Soviet state hostile to it. And it is right.
“The internal regime in the colonial and semicolonial countries has a predominantly bourgeois character. But the pressure of foreign imperialism so alters and distorts the economic and political structure of these countries that the national bourgeoisie (even in the politically independent countries of South America) only partly reaches the height of a ruling class. The pressure of imperialism on backward countries does not, it is true, change their basic social character since the oppressor and oppressed represent only different levels of development in one and the same bourgeois society. Nevertheless the difference between England and India, Japan and China, the United States and Mexico is so big that we strictly differentiate between oppressor and oppressed bourgeois countries and we consider it our duty to support the latter against the former. The bourgeoisie of colonial and semi-colonial countries is a semi-ruling, semi-oppressed class.
“The pressure of imperialism on the Soviet Union has as its aim the alteration of the very nature of Soviet society… By this token the rule of the proletariat assumes an abridged, curbed, distorted character. One can with full justification say that the proletariat, ruling in one backward and isolated country, still remains an oppressed class. The source of oppression is world imperialism; the mechanism of transmission of the oppression – the bureaucracy. If in the words ‘a ruling and at the same time an oppressed class’ there is a contradiction, then it flows not from the mistakes of thought but from the contradiction in the very situation in the USSR. It is precisely because of this that we reject the theory of socialism in one country.”
This juxtaposition of the situation of the semi-colonial capitalist ruling classes, with that of the proletariat in power in a backward and isolated workers state, is highly suggestive of what Trotsky considered likely to happen in a counterrevolution. In a situation where the proletariat in power was oppressed by imperialist encirclement and backwardness, any bourgeois regime that were to replace it would face the same material conditions, and would likewise be a “semi-ruling, semi-oppressed class”, subject to imperialism.
Trotsky also had some useful observations about the course of counterrevolution, actual and likely, in the context of both the French (bourgeois) and Russian (proletarian) revolutions in an earlier (1935) piece, The Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism. Talking directly about the French revolution, he wrote:
“After the profound democratic revolution, which liberates the peasants from serfdom and gives them land, the feudal counterrevolution is generally impossible. The overthrown monarchy may reestablish itself in power and surround itself with medieval phantoms. But it is already powerless to reestablish the economy of feudalism. Once liberated from the fetters of feudalism, bourgeois relations develop automatically. They can be checked by no external force; they must themselves dig their own grave, having previously created their own gravedigger.”
He contrasted that with what would be likely in the event of the collapse of the Stalinist regime and the Russian revolution with it:
“It is altogether otherwise with the development of socialist relations. The proletarian revolution not only frees the productive forces from the fetters of private ownership but also transfers them to the direct disposal of the state that it itself creates. While the bourgeois state, after the revolution, confines itself to a police role, leaving the market to its own laws, the workers’ state assumes the direct role of economist and organizer. The replacement of one political regime by another exerts only an indirect and superficial influence upon market economy. On the contrary, the replacement of a workers’ government by a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government would inevitably lead to the liquidation of the planned beginnings and, subsequently, to the restoration of private property. In contradistinction to capitalism, socialism is built not automatically but consciously…”
“October 1917 completed the democratic revolution and initiated the socialist revolution. No force in the world can turn back the agrarian-democratic overturn in Russia; in this we have a complete analogy with the Jacobin revolution. But a kolkhoz overturn is a threat that retains its full force, and with it is threatened the nationalization of the means of production. Political counterrevolution, even were it to recede back to the Romanov dynasty, could not reestablish feudal ownership of land. But the restoration to power of a Menshevik and Social Revolutionary bloc would suffice to obliterate the socialist construction.”
But what happened is more complex. We have had something like “the replacement of a workers’ government by a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government … ” and “….the restoration of private property” in Russia since the 1991 collapse of the USSR. In China, we have had policies carried out for decades that Trotsky considered would lead to the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union into a kulak-led counterrevolution in the late 1920s. By the standards of the struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalin-Bukharin bloc and its Neo-NEP – it is inconceivable that the regime of the Chinese Communist Party, with its numerous billionaire capitalists whose influence penetrates to the very top of the CCP regime, could be described today as a workers’ state.
And yet far from stabilising world capitalism under the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie, we now have a considerable level of unity in defensive struggle of the two giant former workers states of Russia and China, against US/led NATO imperialism, which grows more and more hysterical every day. Why is this? We would reply that as with anticipations and theorisations by Marxists of what might happen if a workers revolution triumphed in a backward country, the theorisations of what would happen if such revolutions were subsequently defeated, by even the best Marxist theoreticians including Trotsky, have proven inadequate.
Trotsky was correct to say, of the bourgeois revolution, that “once liberated from the fetters of feudalism, bourgeois relations develop automatically”. However, that does not transfer to a situation where it is not feudalism that is overthrown by capitalism, but a workers’ state based on socialised property. When degenerated and deformed workers states have been overthrown by pro-capitalist forces, it has not been the case, unlike with feudalism, that “bourgeois relations develop automatically”. What we have seen is that these “bourgeois relations” have been problematic and given rise to forms of society that the imperialist bourgeoisie does not trust. States have emerged that contain enough modifications of those features of capitalism as a system that the imperialists consider vital and non-negotiable, that the same imperialists fear that these societies could flip back to some sort of socialist construction.
Perhaps like 19th Century France did to bourgeois-revolutionary upheavals after the defeat of Napoleon, with its supplementary revolutions in 1830, 1848 – which convulsed the whole of Europe – and 1871 – which gave rise to the Paris Commune, the first attempt in history to create a workers’ state.
What has come into existence in those workers states where indigenous social revolutions were once victorious and defeated many decades later, are capitalist states, but ones where capitalist relations are modified and ‘deformed’ in significant ways, and those states do not function either as imperialist states, or as semi-colonial vassal states. Neither Russia nor China fit into either category. Nor do they occupy any intermediate category between the two – they are qualitatively different from both. This is very different to passively produced ‘satellite states’ like most in East Europe, which have generally become satellites/vassals of Western imperialism.
What is at the root of this? One hint of an answer can be found in a formulation in Engels’ 1880 work Socialism Utopian and Scientific, where he makes the following point about the tendency of capitalism towards the generation of trusts and monopolies:
“In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite — into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the benefit and advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation is so palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers.”
This formulation, about the ‘invading socialistic society”, stems from the basic idea of Marxism, held in common by Marx and Engels, that “socialism” or “communism” which they considered as two manifestations of the same thing (‘lower’ and ‘higher’) represented a superior mode of production to capitalism. As Marx wrote in Capital:
“Development of the productive forces of social labour is the historic task and justification of capital. This is just the way in which it unconsciously creates the material requirements of a higher mode of production.”
Much of Trotsky’s polemic against the Stalinists in the 20s and 30s was against the theory of socialism in one country, the notion that it was possible to build a complete socialist mode of production in a society qualitatively more backward than the far stronger capitalist-imperialist powers that encircled it. That critique retains its full relevance and potency. But then again, Trotsky also noted that despite this, the reactionary course of the Stalinist regime “… has not yet touched the economic foundations of the state created by the revolution which, despite all the deformation and distortion, assure an unprecedented development of the productive forces.” (Once Again: The USSR and Its Defence)
Engels considered that the socialist mode of production, which was completely in the future in 1880 when he wrote Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, had the ability to ‘invade’ contemporary capitalism, and as a kind of unconscious expression of the historical process, affect the development of the same capitalism to (in some ways) anticipate future developments that would come to fruition under a higher mode of production. This is only an expression of the basic Marxist concept that Socialism: Utopian and Scientific expresses — the objective tendency of social development toward socialism. The point being that the process of capitalist restoration, the destruction of a long-established workers state, cannot be ‘automatic’ in the manner in which capitalism is able to do away with feudalism.
The existence of a workers’ state, however deformed or degenerated, means that that state has already begun the transition to a higher mode of production, communism. Even if the transition is blocked by social backwardness, imperialist encirclement and the monopoly of power of a bureaucracy that opposes and attempts to sabotage the world revolution and thereby the completion of the transition, the transition has begun. The train has left the station, even if it is stalled only a few hundred yards down a track that is many miles long. It is extremely heavy, and still very difficult to simply drag back to its starting point and beyond.
Therefore, what we have in both Russia and China are new social formations where the capitalist mode of production managed to defeat the social formation of the previous transition process, but, however, is forced to coexist in this phase with elements of an “invading socialistic society” that profoundly change those societies. Previous revolutionary processes initiated some kind of transition to the communist mode of production. These processes did not develop in the form of a linear evolution, they were interrupted and sabotaged by the siege of capitalism, imperialism and the internal contradictions originating from this siege.
Within a social formation, more than one mode of production can coexist, in an unequal and combined way. In this case, the post-capitalist mode of production coexists with ‘elements’ (of a “invading socialistic society”) of deformed proletarian dictatorships, which are, at the same time, the germ of a future socialist mode of production. It is important to remember, that in much of the semi-colonial world, capitalism coexists with a pre-capitalist heritage. That is the basis of the whole rich programmatic heritage of Permanent Revolution. Now in China and Russia various forms of capitalism coexist with a post-capitalist heritage.
There is a classic, dialectical quality in the reality that the outcome of the counterrevolution that destroyed deformed workers’ states, is a form of capitalist state that itself embodies major deformations and modifications that stem from their decades without capitalism, to the extent that imperialism perceives them as a major threat to their rule and their hegemony.
As Marxists, we can never give support to outright bourgeois, imperialist parties like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. This is certainly true in the current US election to take place on November 5th, when the fascist-Republican Donald Trump squares off against the Democratic Party nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Both parties represent different factions of the bourgeoisie, both pitch for support from different sections of the working class. The purpose being to chain those sections of the masses to thoroughly bourgeois politics, and in Trump’s case, to try to mobilise the most backward elements to try to bludgeon his way back to power irrespective of the popular vote of the US American people.
We seek to find a way to draw a class line in this election against the imperialist parties, who are up to their necks in support to Israel’s genocidal campaign to destroy the Palestinian people, which is now spreading genocidal Zionist terrorism and massacres of civilians throughout the West Asia/Middle East region. The Biden administration is also up to its neck in the US proxy war in Ukraine, as part of a new Cold War against Russia and China, non-imperialist adversaries that have put themselves at the head of a bloc of ex-colonial countries, workers states and former workers states resisting imperialist hegemony.
We call upon all socialists, anti-racists and class-conscious workers to vote for the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and its Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. Though there is much in the campaign of the PSL that represents left-liberal sentiment – in particular their material on Ukraine is weak – nevertheless by counterposing a socialist campaign to the two main bourgeois parties, they are drawing a class line in this election in an elemental manner. In quite a few places, the bourgeois parties, particularly the Democrats, are trying hard to marginalise them by keeping them off the ballot.
PSL Candiates Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, and a guide to how to vote for them for US readers. See https://votesocialist2024.com/ for more information.
Such basic class politics is particularly crucial today, as US bourgeois politics has reached a stage of decay so deep that it seems likely that the outcome of this election could bring about something close to civil war, and the Trump/Republican side openly threatens both bourgeois and left-wing political opponents with imprisonment, violence, and the use of the US military to crush the so-called ‘enemy within’.
Trump can only move forward with this threat of a coup d’état and second American civil war, and this time go beyond his 2021 Beer Hall Putsch if Trumpism manages to divide the national repressive apparatus and the ‘deep state’: Pentagon, National Guard, CIA, FBI, making them bear the cost of war. Without this, Trump does not have the military strength and intelligence to even start a civil war or consistently blackmail the Democrats.
Trump’s rise to office for his first term from 2016 to 2020 was fuelled in large measure by popular disillusionment with neoliberal politics and economics, privatisation, deregulation and attacks on the living standards of the working class. The decline of US manufacturing industry, parallelling what happened in Britain and other places, was part of the neoliberal strategy of engineering the decline of the working class at home through the export of unionised, decent-paying jobs to lower wage countries in the Global Rest, including China. Over time, this undermined support from such unionised workers for the Democrats and produced Trumpism, which mobilised angry sections of increasingly impoverished, under-employed workers behind Trump’s call to ‘Make America Great Again’.
Many of Trump’s working-class supporters in 2016 were under the illusion that he was on their side against such things. His racism and anti-Muslim vitriol and abuses, and rampant support for Zionists (who provided him with many millions of dollars of funding), was used to fuel a nationalist protectionism and the illusion that his anti-immigration brutality and chauvinist hostility to China, his racist contempt for blacks and his hatred of the Black Lives Matter movement went hand-in-hand with a programme to revive US manufacturing, that this was the real concept behind ‘MAGA’ (“Make America Great Again”).
There is also the illusion that Trump was in some way anti-war, even that he was supported by Putin’s Russia, which has fuelled illusions among some anti-imperialist activists. The liberals “Russiagate” delusion was an effort to use the factional split in the US ruling class to further whip up war hysteria against Russia by casting Trump as a tool of the “all powerful Putin”. The Democrats represent the faction of the US ruling class who wanted to crush Russia first before moving onto war with China. It was also an act of projection to divert attention from Trump being fully backed by Zionist forces rather than Russia.
Trump was far from pro-worker: virtually the first thing he did when he took office in January 2017 was to institute a massive tax-cut, mainly for the very rich. His far-right appointments to the Supreme Court did what they were meant to do – they abolished a woman’s right to abortion on a federal level, giving every backward state the right to deny basic rights to women.
And far from being a peacemaker in power, one of his most virulent, warmongering actions was that in 2019 he tore up the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty of 1987, that resulted in the removal of Cruise and Pershing Missiles from Europe, that in the1980s were a potent threat of nuclear first-strike against the USSR. His anti-Russian warmongering was of such intensity that his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was so outraged and frightened by his intensity, that he notoriously lost his temper and called Trump a ‘fucking moron’. Trump also personally ordered the murder of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, a notorious act of war against Iran. The went together with Trump’s tearing up of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which is what he was paid to do by the Likudnik casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. He did much else for the Zionists – he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights from Syria. This laid the basis for overt US support to the current genocide – all such capitulations and favours to Israel then put the lobby in a stronger position over the next President to continue them, which Biden duly did.
And while there may be illusions about Trump supposedly being set to stop US support for Ukraine, it should be recalled that it was under Trump’s presidency that Zelensky was groomed as Jewish camouflage for the Nazi-dominated US puppet regime that has waged a proxy war against the people of the Donbass and Crimea on behalf of the US and NATO. In February 2022 this became a proxy war against Russia itself, as Russia intervened in the East of Ukraine to protect the people of the Donbass from a massive US-funded offensive that began 10 days before Putin finally kicked off the Special Military Operation.
Harris appears like a younger copy of Biden. Her early history as a reactionary District Attorney and then Attorney General in California put her on the same wing of the Democratic Party as Bill Clinton and Biden, with their ‘Effective Death Penalty’ Act that tried to out-Reagan the Republican Party themselves. In California she could not be as virulent as that, but she both professed to oppose, and enforced, the Death Penalty as Attorney General. She was notorious for seeking to keep imprisoned men, many of whom were black, in jail even beyond nominal release dates, to engage in prison work, which caused her to be strongly disliked among many black people, even now as she poses a champion of the rights of minorities against Trump’s overt racism. She has slightly distanced herself from Netanyahu’s most bloodthirsty actions during the current genocidal rampage against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, calling sporadically for ceasefires etc, but the murder of Hassan Nasrallah, the Israeli attempt to invade Lebanon, the recent Israeli attack on Iran, etc have had her leaping to attention, seeking the approval of the Lobby.
Harris is not a lesser evil in electoral terms. Judging by the opinion polls, she still has the edge in terms of the likely popular vote, but that is not always what decides US presidential elections. Rather, it is the fate of around 7 swing states that often decide, and if those go the opposite way to the popular vote, they can still provide the second placed candidate overall with enough votes in the state-by-state Electoral College to win the presidency, even against the popular vote. Both Trump in 2016, and George W Bush in 2000, won the presidency against the popular vote.
This is what Trump is hoping will happen again. It happened in 2016, and when it failed to happen again in 2020, he launched his ‘Beer Halll Putsch’ – the 6 Jan attack on the Capitol. It is highly likely that something similar will happen if Harris manages to win the popular vote, and some of the swing states become violently contested – there will likely be an attempt by Trump and his supporters to seize the presidency by forcibly seizing control of the Electoral College, hoping no doubt that his appointed Supreme Court judges will back him up. One factor against that is that the same judges have ruled that the President is effectively above the law, immune from prosecution “In his/Her official capacity”, and being as Trump is not the incumbent, the Biden-Harris administration could use that as a license to act ruthlessly in putting down a renewed Trump putsch. But that could in turn trigger the outbreak of civil war.
Though the workers movement has no interest in supporting either bourgeois candidate in this election, but rather an interest in supporting the independent PSL, nevertheless if there is an attempt to negate formal democracy, we do have a class interest in defeating that. So, there would be a principled ground, and class imperative, for a united front with Harris and the Democrats against such a Trump putsch. A defence of the right of the elected president to take office is in the interest of the working class as a matter of elementary self-defence, particularly as Trump has openly stated his intention to use the US military to suppress and take revenge against liberal and left-wing political opponents.
This is not a minor question – it may loom very large after 5th November. But at the same time, our interest is in the maximum class-based vote for the PSL.
The notes for this presentation (20th October) are now available to read, and the presentation and discussion are also available to listen to as a podcast.
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