Author: Consistent Democrats

Presentation on Zionism and Gaza Situation – 12th May 2024

Zionists plan another massacre at Rafah, threatening these makeshift refugee camps with carnage seen earlier.

The presentation and discussion at our forum this afternoon can also be heard here as a podcast

We are now witnessing the brutal forced evacuation of East and Central Rafah, the Southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, adjoining Egypt, to a tiny coastal enclave.

This is going to be another, even more brutal massacre that those that have taken place previously further North. Because the population has nowhere really to flee to

So far, Israel has not been able order them to leave Gaza for Sinai/Egypt.  

That is significant and a product of their being outmaneuvered by Hamas, who jointly put together a plan to end the Israeli massacre with Qatar and Egypt.

It had implicit US support, arguably, as both Qatar and Egypt are strong US allies.

But Israel rejected the plan.

It would have been a defeat for them.

A permanent ceasefire means a defeat for Israel.

The US and Israel’s other imperialist allies know that a permanent ceasefire means Israeli defeat.

That is why the demand for it is like trying to get blood out of a stone.

But Israel is now over-extended both militarily and politically, and under enormous pressure.

Rafah is the last fig leaf to disguise Israeli defeat.

 They can again kill many civilians, but they have no chance to wipe out Hamas. They will take casualties here also.

The attempt to divert attention from this by aggression against Iran has failed.

So, we are back at the sharp edge of the genocide again.

They were resuming demands for evacuations in Gaza City yesterday, Dropping leaflets telling people to flee, so they can ‘deal with’ Hamas.

Déjà vu. They are supposed to have won that months ago. But no.

The Biden administration is desperately trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. They are desperate for this carnage to end, not because of any humanitarian motive.

But because it is radicalizing their population and upsetting Biden’s election campaign.

It should be clear now that in the seven months of wanton slaughter than have gone on since 7/10 they have no qualms about the Israelis massacring Palestinian civilians.–

As long as they thought it might win them something.

But now it is clear that Israel is not going to defeat, let alone ‘eliminate’ Hamas.

Their bloodthirsty, barbaric, racist army, the most cowardly and immoral in the world, can butcher tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of civilians, in the most rapid slaughter since Rwanda in 1994, but they cannot defeat the Palestinian resistance.

What is happening instead is that the young population of the West is being radicalized.

From being exposed to this butchery and genocide.

The US ruling class is trying to ban TikTok because it has kept US youth informed of the crimes Israel is carrying out in Gaza, and indeed the accelerating repression in the West Bank as well.

But it is too late. The cat is out of the bag already, Once people see what Israel is doing, they cannot un-see it. The Zionists complain of youth being  ‘radicalised’ by their crimes and ridiculously compare the results of their own work with 1930s anti-semitism.

Totally insulting to the most basic intelligence since Zionist barbarism is similar to Nazi barbarism.

 Student youth are organising protest camps in hundreds of Unis and Colleges in the US.

Pitched battles are taking place with violent cops, acting under orders from Zionist and White Supremacist politicians the length and breadth of imperialist North America, from Colombia University in New York to UCLA on the West Coast, from Texas to Canada.

There are Gaza protest encampments in Harvard and Yale, the US’ most elite universities. They all demand divestments of University assets from Israel and Zionist companies, and an end to the frequent military-academic collaboration that regularly goes on.

This has spread to Europe. In France and Germany, there have been pitched battles between students and the cops.

In Spain, 76 universities have acted collectively to suspend ties with ‘complicit’ Israeli universities via the Conference of University Rectors.

In Britain, student protests and encampments are likewise spreading throughout the country. Protests are underway at Oxbridge universities, among other places.

Sunak is complaining and trying to incite repression here also.

Oxford and Cambridge, Sorbonne, Harvard and Yale, as well as less salubrious universities are heavily involved. The elite – this is destabilitising the youth of the bourgeoiisie’s most treasured.

Student protests are still continuing though the imperialist world and spreading even though repressed quite savagely.

Young people are prepared to risk their futures, because they are less and less convinced that they have a future in a society dominated by genocidaires and corporate climate deniers.

This is evidently a global student movement. It has been compared to the student movements around the Vietnam war. I think it may prove even more significant than that!

 But it is misleading, and misreading, the situation to see it as simply a student protest movement.

It is a movement of the intelligentsia that prefigures what society itself is thinking, in its depths.

 This is actually confirmed by many public opinion polls in the advanced countries, Israel’s allies, sponsors, and lackeys, where clear majorities strongly disapprove of Israel’s genocidal onslaught, and consider it to be a genocide,

The decision in January of the International Court of Justice, to state publicly that there is a plausible, prima facie case to accuse Israel of genocide, was a reflection of that popular pressure, months before the student movements took off.

This is a very bourgeois institution, designed from the start as a kind of safety switch for imperialism so it can amnesty itself, indict its opponents and excuse its allies.

The ICJ’s ‘provisional measures’ were and are a joke, responding to South Africa’s indictment by calling on Israel to stop what they are doing and protect the civilian population they would like to dispose of.

Fat chance – if they were remotely inclined to any of that, this issue would not exist in the first place.

So is the International Criminal Court, for that matter, which has threatened to indict Netanyahu, Gallant and others.

Their usual activity is in trying to indict the West’s opponents, like Putin, Milosevic, and various black African leaders.

They have not (yet) actually indicted Netanyahu and may indeed back off under pressure.

But the possibility is real, as shown by the letter of 10 GOP senators threatening the ICC with military sanctions if they do.

However, the fact that the bodies feel compelled to say anything remotely in the right ball part if a reflection of the mass sentiment.

Not just the overwhelming sentiment in the global South, over which South Africa has made the running politically, and  very strongly in terms of perceived ‘morality’, which should not be dismissed.

But in terms of the knowledge that the ruling classes in general, in the imperialist West, have about the huge damage that is being done to their moral authority over the masses at home.

Mass student protest movements are often the harbinger of much more convulsive social and political movements.

I could go through a long list, from the role of ferment among students and intelligentsia in influencing the masses and leading to the growth of a mass communist movement in Russia in the late 19th/early 20th century,

There is the huge role of students in assembling the intellectual forces for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements throughout the world.

And in a more recent time frame, there is the role of the mass student movement in France in the late 1960s, the student radicals who fought the CRS in Paris and other places, in a mixture of home-grown social discontent and anti-imperialist radicalism centred again on Vietnam.

This student movement managed to coalesce with a mass movement of working-class discontent, and the working class anger in France burst out in a huge outburst, a general strike, that forced Charles De Gaulle himself to flee the country.

Until the dependable forces of the French Communist Party were able to restore order and get the working class to return to work.

This activity led to the discredit of the very reformist CP at the time and the growth of large organisations of the far left in France in the 1970s.

That is not the subject of this forum, we are in very different circumstances today. What we are faced with now is understanding where we are at now, and what to fight for.

What is possible, and likely, is major working-class movements akin to May 1968 with revolutionary implications, from this crisis.

We must be alert and participate in them to the best of our ability when that happens, as communists.

We are a very different situation now. The US achieved full world hegemony after the destruction of the USSR, and Zionist power in the world was massively enhanced through its factions within the US and European imperialist ruling classes.

As long as the USSR existed, the bipolar world, Zionist power was somewhat overshadowed by the need for the US to concentrate on its own offensive against the workers states.

When the USSR collapsed, we had the situation of the unipolar world, where the US’s world hegemony appeared unchallenged.

We had the situation beginning in the early 1990s when Israel appeared to be able to get the United States to fight its wars for it.

There was an element about that in the 1991 Iraq war; Israel had a definite interest in cutting Iraq down to size and given the US’ own recent alliance with Iraq, the manner in which Hussein was lured into Iraq by the US ambassador April Glaspie was suspicious, to say the least.

The second Iraq war, however, in 2003, the successful US/UK invasion and then failed occupation  of Iraq, has Zionism and necons written all over it.

It was always Israeli policy to find ways to prevent any successful regional power from emerging that could challenge their ‘right’ to dispossess the Palestinians.

This drove all their wars, but finding a sympathetic hegemon to wage them was not so simple.

It proved not so simple in 1956, when the US and USSR united against Britain and France to put them back in their box.

They had more luck in 1967, still with tactic French support, but seemingly acting alone to defeat Nasser, Assad and the King of Jordan.

But the ambiguity of the relationship with the US was shown by the USS Liberty

In 1973 they were threatened with reversal of 1967 by forces that were still seen as Soviet allied: Nixon saw Israel for the first time as a strategic ally and put US forces on alert to stop them being defeated.

But the 1990s until the mid-20-teens were the heyday of Zionism, coinciding with the ‘unipolar world’, when the world appeared to be Israel’s oyster and the US would fight its wars for them.

Those days are over. Because the unipolar world is ending. The ‘Arab Spring’, that inchoate upsurge of mass ‘democratic’ struggle in the Arab world, exploited by imperialism, also showed the beginning of the end for this hegemony.

The destruction of Libya followed the pattern of Iraq.

But the failure in Syria was because Russia reasserted its power, against the US, the neocons and the Zionists, and refused to allow them to destroy Syria, which would have been a major triumph for the Zionists.

We do know the evidence that Israel gave material help, and medical help, to the mercenary jihadists in this war. The destruction of the Assads was always a key priority of Zionism. No Sinai type deal was possible over Golan for this reason.

This is a key reason why the struggle against Zionism, and the struggle against the NATO war in Ukraine, have proved interdependent.

It is the demise of US Hegemony which is leading to the decline of Zionism also.

There is the ideological overlap between the Ukrainian proxy of the US, and Israel.

Zelensky is a Zionist who was carefully groomed to camouflage the Nazi character of the Maidan regime in Ukraine after 2014.

Zelensky expressed his solidarity with Israel after 7 Oct.

Ihor Kolmoisky, the Israeli-Ukrainian oligarch who stumped up the funds to found the notorious Nazi Avov Brigade.

Whose original symbol was the Wolfsangel, which was the symbol of the Das Reich division of the SS that committed atrocities in occupied France, among other places.

This confluence between Nazism and Zionism has a long history, and goes back to the 1930s and then WWII, with Zionists collaboration with the Nazis in order gain approval for their state project in Palestine.

Tony Greenstein, who I have had many disagreements with on Zionism and Anti-Semitism, wrote a worthwhile and serious book on this, Zionism and the Holocaust. It is reviewed on our website, I recommend the book and the review.

So, what is behind Zionism’s apparent strength?

The secret of its power is that part of the Israeli ruling class lives outside its borders, in the US, in West Europe, and is organised as an imperialist faction primarily loyal to Israel.

Israel effectively has an extra-territorial citizenship law which makes that possible.

It’s an imperialist formation, and its presence makes Israel an imperialist power of medium strength.

If this external faction did not exist it would be a minor imperialist power like Denmark. But it’s more powerful than that.

The power of this formation came from the top-heavy social structure of the mainly Askenazi Jewish population in Europe, as a medieval trading class.

See Abram Leon, The Jewish Question – a Marxist Interpretation.

This trading class became obsolete under late feudalism. The Jewish population was marked by it, an obsolete class whose remnants were subjected to religious persecution.

But they were emancipated by the bourgeois revolutions.

Under capitalism this population was naturally more intellectual and bourgeois than the mainstream populations that did not have that class legacy.

So, Jews were disproportionately intellectuals, who having experience of persecution, played an important progressive role in democratic, socialist and working-class movements.

But another layer of Jews was disproportionately successful in business.

And disproportionate capitalist property gives disproportionate social power in a capitalist society where the chief social power is the bourgeoisie.

In my view the Jewish Question is a legacy of a European pre-capitalist phenomenon involving this trading/middleman class, that spilled over into the epoch of progressive capitalism.

When capitalism ceased to be progressive and became imperialist, its interaction with imperialism gave rise to two complementary imperialist movements.

Racial anti-Semitism and Zionism, both of which proved ultimately genocidal. 

Both logically sought to dispose of whole populations that were unwanted in their respective imperialist projects.

We saw the genocidal proclivities of racial anti-semitism against the Jews themselves, played out in the Second World War. as Gemany lost its own bid for world imperialist hegemony.

Now, as US imperialism, Zionism’s ‘host’ so-to-speak, is in the process of losing its world hegemony, we are seeing Zionism’s genocidal proclivities played out.

The Palestinian Arab population of what claims to be ‘Israel’ is equally unwanted. They are still the majority in historic Palestine.

If the right to return of those driven out since 1948 were won, they would be the substantial majority. The Israeli rulers wants this demographic threat eliminated.

Fortunately, they are losing. But it is not clear just how destructive they are prepared to be as they face defeat.

Will they commit suicide, as per Masada? Or will they try to destroy humanity as they fall – Samson option. It’s an open question.

Celebrate Victory Day, May 9th

To celebrate the anniversary of Victory Day, May 9th 1945 we publish these images. The first depicts the Soviet Red Flag being raised over the Reichstag by Soviet troops defending the USSR workers state against Hilter’s barbaric counterrevolutionary attack through the crushing of the Nazi regime.

Today, Russia is again winning victories against predatory Western attacks. The USSR workers state is no more, though the form of capitalism restored there is fragile; its productive forces and strength owe virtually everything to the legacy of many decades of non-capitalist social and economic development. The imperialist West fears that in Russia and China, for all the inroads that capitalism has made there, their system is not copper-fastened and the masses have too much power for their liking. To them, these states can easily revert and are thus adversaries to wage Cold and hot Wars against once again.

The other images show tropies of the victories of Russia in Ukraine, and the capture of Western tanks, that were recently put on display in Moscow. The hundreds of billions that have been funnelled to the Urainian Nazis have led to this Western humilation, which again is something to celebrate this Victory Day,

79 years of Victory Day!

Yesterday it was Hitler – Today it is Zelensky/NATO;

Tomorrow it will be Israel/US!

For an Anti-Imperialist and Socialist May Day!

DECLARATION OF MARXIST ORGANIZATIONS FROM THE USA, GREAT BRITAIN, AUSTRALIA, ARGENTINA AND BRAZIL

On this May Day, 2024, imperialism seems like a beast kicking around trying to avoid the march of history. It tries at any cost to avoid its historic defeat in the face of the increasingly broad arc of resistance from the oppressed countries against it and also the massive demonstrations of the oppressed within its own borders, its streets and universities. In decline, imperialism becomes increasingly dangerous, tears up the international conventions it has signed, despises the forums in which it finds itself in the minority, appeals to modern forms of Nazi-fascism, mercenaries, terrorism, the slaughter of entire peoples and threaten the Third World War.

The military forces commanded by the US have been defeated militarily and morally in each and every military battle since Syria (Aleppo, 2016), Afghanistan (2021) and currently in Ukraine and Gaza, by the rebel provinces of Donbass and the Houthi guerrilla government in Yemen.

But, the last and most powerful counterattacks by oppressed peoples and countries, were delivered by Hamas on 10/8/2023 and by Iran on 04/13/2024. They demonstrated the deep vulnerability of imperialism and its “aircraft carrier” in the form of a Zionist entity in Southwest Asia.

In its first direct attack on Israel in history, Iran demonstrated that the impenetrable Iron Dome, Arrow-3 and David’s Sling are nothing more than a sieve in the face of an obsolete part of its weapons. Iran saturated Israel’s defences with 350 cheap drones over Israeli cities. The defence forces of Israel, the USA, Great Britain and Jordan combined did not prevent the  Iranian rain from reaching Zionist soil and at least 9 Iranian ballistic missiles penetrated the Israeli defence network and hit the military bases of Nevatim and Ramon. With cruise missiles, Iran pulverized the Golan Heights Mossad intelligence facility.

May Day demonstration, Moscow, 01 May 2016.

NATO’s defeats by Russia in Ukraine, of Israel by the Axis of Resistance in Southwest Asia, followed by the triumphant anti-France struggles in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, exemplary for the rest of the African continent, combined with the unstoppable expansion of China’s new silk route on the world market, force imperialism to retreat to maintain greater control in the Pacific Ocean, Western Europe and, above all, the American continent. Losing ground on the three continents of the old world, the imperialist system led by the USA creates a “western zone” on the so-called continents of the new and brand new world, with its military (NATO, AUKUS), financial and ideological apparatuses, where they are deepening political oppression and the state terror of workers to accentuate their class exploitation, through fascist governments. The organizations that sign this declaration are part of the Marxist resistance to this fascist tendency in this part of the planet.

United States, Imperialist Decay, Fascist Perspectives and Popular Resistance

In the United States, the heart of the Empire, the decay and crisis of western imperialism is at its most obvious and acute. This decrepitude is represented by its decaying President. Whilst Obama may have been able to save the US ruling class after the crash of 2008 “Genocide Joe” has been far less successful. The ruling class itself is deeply split between continuing to support the failing Democrats or break once and for all with bourgeois democracy and back the open fascist and seditionist Donald Trump.

The consequences for both the US and international working class of the most powerful global empire in history embracing Christian fascism are highly unpredictable. However, the actions of the US working class in the period ahead could have just as much impact. The rapid spread of Palestine Solidarity encampments on US university campuses and the overall militancy of the mostly spontaneous upsurge re Gaza genocide is a direct echo of the George Floyd monster mobilizations against police killings in the summer 2020 against which Trump wanted to use the army. The “no preference” vote in Democratic Party primaries so far relates directly to the genocide in Gaza and overlaps with the street marches and famous encampments which recall Occupy Wall Street in 2011. So, the election year circus will intersect directly with the youth resistance to Genocide Joe. When Trump is elected (by fair means or foul) the likelihood of mass resistance to his attacks Is prefigured by today’s movement which builds on the others like 2020 and 2011.

Great Britain, Advanced State of Decay and Collapse of Conservatives

British imperialism is today a moth-eaten outpost and vassal of US imperialism, which has been accentuated since it left the European Union in 2021. However, it is conjuncturally slightly out of step with much of the rest of the imperialist world, as the bourgeois imperialist right has been continually in power for 14 years and is in a state of decay and near collapse.

We are likely to see the Zionist, overtly pro-imperialist Labour Party come to power in the next few months. There could be even be a Labour landslide electoral victory, on the scale of 1997, purely by default, because of the advanced state of decay and collapse of the Tories under Sunak. The Tories are desperately trying to use the issue of immigration and asylum to try to generate some element of popular support, with their brutal scheme to deport migrants to Rwanda as a gamble, but this looks to have massively failed. They are hated by most of the population.

Labour’s membership has been massively purged of almost all the left-social-democratic and better elements that joined en masse in a working-class revolt against austerity behind Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership bid in 2015. His leadership was deliberately sabotaged by the neoliberal right wing and their Zionist allies in the period between 2015 and late 2019.  A concentrated campaign of fake accusations of anti-Semitism against the left and manipulation of Brexit – and the tactically malevolent demand for a second referendum – were designed to bring about a large-scale Labour electoral defeat, which they duly did.

However, such was the weak politics of the Corbynites that they cooperated with their own demise. Corbyn repeatedly apologised for virtually non-existent anti-Semitism in the Labour left and threw his own supporters under the bus, and he also allowed Starmer control of Brexit policy giving him free rein to antagonise that layer of the working class that supported Brexit as a misdirected protest against austerity, driving them into the arms of the populist Tory right led by Boris Johnson.

As a result of all this, there is a sizeable leftist layer of ex-Labour people whose antipathy to the overtly Zionist, neoliberal Labour leadership is such that they correctly oppose giving electoral support to the Starmer-dominated Labour Party. The Gaza conflict has exposed the nature of the Zionists who purged Corbyn, as genocidal, murderous racists, and as a result advocating a vote for Labour has become unthinkable among much of the Palestine solidarity movement’s rapidly growing mass base.

The victory of George Galloway in the recent Rochdale by-election was a sign of things to come; there is a mushrooming movement of independent leftist challenges to Labour, so far on a fragmented, local level, that is likely to be an important player in the coming general election. There is even a potentially potent challenge to Starmer himself in his own seat. After the election this is likely to multiply, as the level of leftist antipathy to Starmer is already on a very high level. There is also a strong likelihood that the lackeyism of Labour will give renewed strength to the far right under a Labour government, so struggles against a neoliberal Labour government will go hand in hand with struggles against the far right.

At the time, the trade union bureaucracy is doubling down in its support for Starmer, such as the leader of Britain’s biggest union UNITE, Sharon Graham, who was elected in 2021 with the support of much of the reformist and centrist left despite openly pledging not to oppose Starmer politically. Now she, as the leader of the biggest union in Britain, is openly pro-Starmer and pro-genocide over Gaza, and is actively trying to ban UNITE members from opposing Zionism and exposing the lies directed against the Corbyn movement. Mick Lynch of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, previously Britain’s most militant and radical union, who put himself at the head of the strike movement against inflation in 2022, has now come out strongly for a vote to Starmer. And the TUC and Labour bureaucracy have shown their cretinous fealty to imperialism by voting at their 2023 Congress to demand increased military spending by Britain as part of the war drive of Britain against Russia and China.

The trade unions, despite a considerable outburst of militancy triggered by high inflation in 2022, have not recovered from the strategic defeat inflicted on them by Thatcher in the 1980s above all with the defeat of the miners. They will continue to fail to do so until the current bureaucracy is replaced by a leadership committed to class struggle and a complete break with support for all neoliberal politicians in Labour. 

The massive growth of the Palestine movement is a sign of things to come. Huge numbers are seeing the barbaric nature of imperialism for the first time because of this genocide. The mass revolt of students in the US is beginning to spread to Britain, Ireland and France. It should be recalled that mass student radicalisation has often been a precursor of mass working class radicalisation further down the line. May 1968 is the best-known example. It looks likely that the pro-imperialist labour bureaucracy will face serious challenges in the next period.

Australia, the Labor Government is a Faithful Servant of Financial Capital

In Australia, the increasingly unpopular Albanese Labor Government is massively increasing military spending which it is financing through ongoing austerity and cuts to social services. Its continued failure to demand the release of Julian Assange, signing of AUKUS & its steadfast support for the imperialists proxy wars in West Asia & Ukraine, Labor has sided with the most vicious policies of US imperialism. Its open militarism is fuelling the deepest anti-war movement since the 1970’s, which are taking the form of Pro-Palestinian solidarity protests. Labor has proven itself once again to be a faithful servant of finance capital not just on militarism but through ever expanding fossil fuel projects, doing nothing to address the cost-of-living crisis and allowing Covid19 to spread unchecked in the working class.

The Union bureaucracies are doing their best to keep a lid on the growth of both anti-war and workers struggles to increase their wages. However, as the crisis on all fronts deepens their grip on the working class is weakening. As elsewhere, the class war is heating up. The ruling class knows that both the weak ALP and the far-right Liberal Party will be unable to win the support of the majority and therefore as elsewhere they are preparing in advance through building up the repressive powers of the state to attempt to suppress the working class with an iron fist.

Argentina, Fascism Supported by US Imperialism

In Argentina, the Milei government promotes a brutal adjustment against the working masses and deepening the country’s dependence on imperialism, especially the United States in its different wings, including both Democrats and Republicans. This trend is part of imperialism’s offensive to reinforce its geostrategic control in South America by carrying out a fascist recolonization of the continent in a dynamic where the retreat of imperialism in Asia and Africa forces it to ensure more firmly its control in South America itself. In this context, popular struggles are growing, such as the march in defence of the public university on April 23 and the labour conflicts that are taking place, such as the recent passenger transport strikes and where the CGTI itself calls for a general strike for May 9. Even so, Milei for now is supported by the support of imperialism and the national High Bourgeoisie. It is also sustained by the lack of articulation of the bourgeois opposition, especially Peronist, and its weakness in building a valid alternative and because the workers’ struggles have not yet taken a leap in quality to push back Milei’s offensive. To this we must add the sectarianism of the left, especially the pseudo-Trotskyists, which are not capable of forming consistent political struggles against the offensive of Milei’s own government.

Brazil, To Defeat the Fascist Threat, Lula Needs to Break with the Centre and the Bourgeoisie

In Brazil, the largest working population in Latin America achieved a great victory over fascism, avoiding Bolsonaro’s re-election and electing Lula in 2022. But the “centre-right” Lula government, as the former president of the Workers’ Party, José Dirceu, maintains the economic policy of the coup governments (2016-2022), their neoliberal counter-reforms (labour and social security), privatizations, wage cuts for the poorest sectors of the working class, maintains the tax regime imposed by the 2016 coup, which strangles the State’s public investments with the working population. Under this cursed coup legacy, no social, development or industrializing policy can advance.

In this way, the government strengthens the enemy’s bases and undermines its own social and political base. The government empties demonstrations in protest of the 60th anniversary of the 1964 coup d’état and the CUT empties the May Day events, while Bolsonarism holds demonstrations with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fanatics in the country’s main capitals.

The Lula government and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores seem to adopt the same “tactic” against Bolsonarism that the Italian reformists adopted against the fascists, which favoured their “march on Rome”, a tactic harshly criticized by Gramsci, using the metaphor of the “beaver that, followed by hunters who want to tear the testicles from which the medicines are extracted, to save his life, he rips them off himself.” Trying to gain trust from its enemies, the Lula government demobilises the working population, the only instrument capable of avoiding a new coup offensive by imperialism and big capital in Brazil.

Federal public servants in Education staged one of the biggest strikes in recent years (in the strike commands, our party activists also participated in the construction of this movement) because the Lula government insists on not giving adjustments this year. Recently the government negotiated adjustments salaries for all fractions of the federal public service linked to the repressive and fiscal apparatus, but for education workers it maintains a 0% adjustment rate. With this 0% rate, Lula strains the relationship with federal education employees and obliges them. to strike against the government.

Class Conscious – US and Australia

Consistent democrats / LCFI – Great Britain

Bolshevik Militant Tendency (TMB / LCFI – Argentina)

Communist Party (pc / LCFI – Brazil)

Communist Fight Series 2, issue 3 is Out Now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Israel trying to provoke WWIII to stave off Gaza genocide defeat?

Support Iran’s right to self-defence!

Defend the Axis of Resistance, against Zionist/US/NATO bloc!

Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org   

In the early hours of Sunday, 14th April, Iran fired, in three waves, more than 300 drones, missiles and finally more sophisticated, possibly hypersonic ballistic missiles at Israel. Most of them appear to have been intercepted by Israel’s air defences or those of its imperialist allies, the US, France and Britain, except for the third wave, which significantly damaged Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev area, and an intelligence centre in the Golan Heights area, all of which were instrumental in Israel’s earlier act of aggression against Iran’s mission in Syria.

This retaliation was for the Israeli air attack on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus, Syria on 1st April, an annex of the Iranian Embassy itself. By the Vienna Convention, embassy buildings are regarded throughout the world as being part of the territory of the state the embassy serves. Israel’s attack on the Damascus building was thus regarded by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran as an attack on Iranian territory itself. It was an overt act of war and bound at some point to provoke some kind of Iranian military attack on Israeli territory.

The building Israel destroyed contained seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), including the commander of its Quds force, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy, Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi. All-in-all 16 were killed by Israel. The presence of the senior IRCG figures was part of Iran’s military-political relationship with the Lebanese government, which includes the Shi’a resistance organisation Hizbullah, which has twice defeated near-genocidal Israeli invasions of Lebanon which massacred Palestinians and Lebanese Shia, going back as far as 1978. The Israelis scream that the presence of the highly efficient IRCG meant that the building was “not an embassy”, but every significant power in the world that has allies that it seeks to defend from third party attack uses diplomatic premises to further military collaboration with such allies.

Everyone knows that the CIA and Mossad habitually use US and Israeli Embassy buildings around the world to further their aims in terms of both military objectives and espionage. The criteria Israel tries to use to excuse attacking the Damascus Iranian Embassy could be used equally well to justify attacking every single US and Israeli Embassy on the planet. The Iranian military presence was part of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ to Israeli activities in West Asia, activities in pursuit of its aim of a Greater Israel though conquest and genocide of the Palestinian people and more besides, with some renderings of Greater Israel encompassing the whole of Jordan, most of Syria, Iraq up to the River Euphrates and Egypt up to the Nile.

In the case of Syria, everyone knows that Iran and Hizbullah not only defend Syria against direct US and Israeli aggression, but also have played a major role over more than a decade, along with Russia, in thwarting attempts by pro-imperialist jihadist proxies trying to reproduce the destruction of Libya by such proxies, and actual US, British and French intervention forces, in 2011 and after. It is now quite well known that Al Qaeda and ISIS reactionary jihadists have when wounded been given medical treatment by Israel.  The Israeli Islamophobic propaganda offensive against Hamas, accusing them of being akin to Daesh/IS, that they have waged since Oct 7th at the very least, can be defined according to the traditional Jewish term chutzpah, a classic rendering of which is the story of the man who murdered both his parents and then attempted to plead for mercy because he was now an orphan.

The Israeli attack was part not only of its current genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza, but also of this attempt to destabilise and destroy Syria. Iran is now de-facto an ally of Russia and China, both implicitly through its membership of the BRICS bloc, which it joined in January, but also though its membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Council. In that sense, this in turn carries echoes of not merely an anti-Iran agenda from the Zionist genocidaire regime, but also of an anti-Russian, anti-Chinese agenda that merges with the Zionist regime’s more traditional hatreds and obsessions, of Palestinians – of Muslim, Christian and other creeds — other local Arab peoples, and Arabs and other Muslim peoples more generally. Attacks on both Mosques and Churches during the genocide in Gaza, most notably the Al Aqsa Mosque itself, certainly indicate that. All these reactionary missions merge into one in terms of Israel’s attacks on Iran’s presence in Syria. And these occurrences, though they have some autonomy, fit in with the wider drive towards generalised conflict between the forces loyal to the US, seeking to preserve its worldwide imperialist hegemony, and those forces led by Russia and China seeking to reduce the US to just one part of a ‘multipolar world’.

Zionism Facing Defeat

The real nature of Israel is eminently visible in the genocidal murder of over 40,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the prison breakout of 7th October, the deliberate creation of a deadly famine through the blocking of food, water and fuel to Gaza, publicly announced in advance by the Israeli regime, by the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, healthcare, education facilities, etc., and the deliberate displacement through mass terrorisation of the overwhelming majority of its 2.3 million people. As well as the creeping extension of the methods Israel is using in Gaza to the West Bank and the massive wave of arrests, detentions, settler and state killings and ethnic cleansing that is escalating there also.

But the problem is that for all the genocidal slaughter it has carried out over the last six months, Israel is not winning in Gaza. It has failed to eliminate and defeat Hamas, instead its cowardly army has contented itself with massacring defenceless civilians, while absurdly claiming that it has no choice because Hamas supposedly hides among them as ‘human shields’. This has been the most reported and documented genocidal slaughter in history, even though Israel has murdered many journalists to try to suppress the news coming out. They have been unable to do so because of the ubiquity of social media and camera/mobile phone technology. Israel itself is not stable: there have been huge protests against Netanyahu’s overt corruption, his handling of the ‘hostage’ crisis, and the far-right nature of his regime over the last few months, even though much of it is on a chauvinist basis and does not touch the oppression of the Palestinian people. But the genocidal outrages in Gaza have given rise to the biggest worldwide protest movement in history, with many millions on the streets in countries worldwide, and billions behind them, in the Muslim world from the Maghreb to Indonesia, wider in East Asia, in Latin America, and in the imperialist countries of Western Europe and North America.

Huge Palestine Solidarity march to Israeli Embassy in London, February 2024

In some places these have led to workers’ solidarity actions, in other places, such as Yemen and now Iran, the mass solidarity of millions has had a military counterpart as armed actions have been taken against Israel by governments driven by solidarity with the Palestinians. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea has cost Israel, and Western companies and governments who trade with Israel, many billions of dollars in lost revenue.  The prison breakout on October 7th forced Israel to evacuate many of its civilians from a wide area near Gaza. So-far sporadic hostilities with Hizbullah forces in the North have also forced large-scale evacuation of the Northern strip of Israel, near the Lebanese border. Netanyahu gambled on the attack on the Damascus Iranian consulate to escalate the war in order to hide the failures of the IDF forces in Gaza, but the result of this action appears to have forced the withdrawal of most of the IDF forces from the Gaza strip, apart from a smaller contingent that splits the strip in two and prevents those driven into the South of Gaza by the earlier bombardment and mass slaughter returning to the North.

The attack on the Damascus Embassy caused a major problem for both US imperialism, and its Biden administration on the one hand, and Israel and the Netanyahu fragile war coalition on the other. The US ruling class is divided about how to handle Iran, and that division has been evident for several years. Obama’s Iran deal, which placed limitations on Iran’s development of nuclear power technology, supposedly to stop its development of nuclear weapons, in exchange for a lifting of long-standing US sanctions, is one manifestation of this. Netanyahu and the Israel lobby played a major role in agitating in US bourgeois politics against this deal: recall Netanyahu’s address attacking Obama’s deal to a joint session of Congress in 2015 where the conduct of US politicians was described by the eminent anti-Zionist US Jewish commentator Norman Finkelstein as like “demented Jack-in-the-Boxes”.  They gave Netanyahu something like 26 standing ovations!

Trump’s far-right election campaign in 2016 was bankrolled by Likud through the gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, who was Trump’s biggest funder. As Likud wanted, Trump tore up Obama’s Iran deal and implemented the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act. This had been pushed through by the Israel lobby more than 20 years earlier but kicked into the long grass by Clinton, Bush and Obama because it was irrational from the standpoint of US imperialism. He also formally recognised Israel’s annexation of Golan, the Jordan Valley, and East Jerusalem, which again previous US administrations had refrained from because they had no particular interest in doing so. The Trump administration thus gave a major boost to the power of the already-very-powerful Zionist lobby in the US. Though Trump was defeated by Biden’s Democrats in 2020, the cowardly and reactionary nature of the Democrats mean that they hardly dared challenge what Trump had done.

Though there has been a half-hearted attempt to revive Obama’s Iran deal, nothing else has changed in that regard, and Biden is still trying to shaft the Palestinians by completing Trump’s ‘Abraham Accords’ to supposedly ‘normalise’ Israeli relations with conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It is the massive exposure of the Gaza genocide and the mass rage this has generated in the whole Arab world, and wider developments such as the growth of BRICS, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined this year, which have made this problematic, not anything Biden has done to break with Trump’s far-right Zionism.

US Imperialism Wavers

However, the Gaza genocide and its massive exposure has caused massive political damage to the US, and the Biden administration is facing elections in the Autumn. As things stand, Biden is massively losing support from liberal and labor-inclined elements who traditionally support the Democrats, even though the way the deeply undemocratic US electoral system is designed makes it extremely difficult, in fact at present impossible, for a new political force to get on ballots to oppose both foul parties. Nevertheless, this makes the Democrats likely to lose to Trump, a mess of their own making, and that of the US ruling class, whose world imperialist hegemony is collapsing.

It is not clear whether the pullout of the bulk of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip is the result of US pressure on Israel, or of Israeli fears of facing Iran with most of its military bogged down in a quagmire. But it is clear that this diversionary escalation tactic in fact is bringing Israeli defeat in Gaza closer because Israel does not have the resources to carry on in Gaza and take on Iran, Hizbullah, etc. Palestinians have been quoted as saying that the night Israel had to deal with Iran’s retaliatory strikes was the first night since October 7th when they have not had to contend with massive Israeli air attacks on them. It has also been reported that the single night of Iranian retaliatory strike not only was the largest drone strike in history (so far), but also cost Israel over $1 billion dollars to deal with.

 In a statement issued on the day, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in welcoming the Iranian action, wrote that:

“…the legitimate Iranian response broke the prestige of the Zionist entity, revealing its fragility and inability to defend itself or restore its deterrence power. At the same time, it confirmed the ability of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the resistance factions to deliver painful strikes to the Zionist entity, deepening its internal crisis due to its inability to achieve any of its goals in eliminating the resistance in the Gaza Strip or stopping the strikes directed at it by the resistance in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq.

“…the rush of the American administration and its partners in Britain, France, Germany, and some of their Arab tails in the region to use all their defensive weapons to try to protect the Zionist entity from the Iranian missiles and drones confirms the involvement of these parties in the Zionist crimes in the region, especially in Gaza. It also reveals that this Zionist entity has suffered a strategic defeat, has become humiliated and weak, and is unable to protect itself, now imploring its allies to take on this role.

“… the unprecedented Iranian strikes, the first of their kind in history against the Zionist entity, represent an important turning point in the battle of the Al-Aqsa Flood and in favour of the resistance factions. The repercussions of this strike will have pressing effects on the Zionist entity to stop its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip after the American administration and its allies realized that any escalation in the region would lead to a regional war where their bases and interests will not be safe, nor will the Zionist entity be able to defend itself after the collapse of its deterrence power and its humiliating defeat in front of the resistance in Gaza and other fronts.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/04/14/pflp-unprecedented-iranian-strikes-on-israel-signal-turning-point-in-al-aqsa-battle/

The Israeli gamble on trying to provoke a regional, or world war, to negate its defeat in Gaza, may well be forlorn. The US is losing its world hegemony, and that is clear in other conflicts apart from those in West Asia. Particularly in Ukraine, where their proxy Ukrainian client is facing imminent collapse, and the strains on NATO resulting from this are such that European imperialist powers, fearing a collapse in US commitment to NATO under a Trump presidency due to isolationism, are fantasising about intervening in Ukraine on a bilateral basis, effectively outside the NATO framework. The Zionist lobby have in the past congratulated themselves in getting the US to fight its wars for it, but at this point the US seems to be somewhat paralysed. It was prepared to use its technological resources to prevent Israel’s own Iron Dome defence system being overwhelmed by a combined assault from the Axis of Resistance, but hesitates to participate in an actual Israeli attack on Iran.

And it certainly does not appear keen on the wilder ambitions for world war and the ‘Masada Complex’ that may well be harboured by Netanyahu and his even more far-right cohorts, like Smotrich or Ben Gvir, to use nuclear weapons against its opponents in West Asia, with Iran a particularly hated potential target.  It is worth noting that Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who is now a particularly enlightened commentator on geopolitics and the Russia question, has surmised that even though Iran does not possess nuclear weapons (by religious conviction, according to Ayatollah Khamenei), it nevertheless is now able to shelter under the Russian/Chinese nuclear umbrella by virtue of its membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Council, and equally importantly, its provision of drone technology to Russia for use in defending the Donbass.  This may well blunt the temptation for the US to act on Israel’s behalf against Iran even more. It is still possible that Israel’s nuclear arsenal may be used in such a conflict, but if so, they really could not expect impunity either.

There appears to have been a considerable exodus from Israel by parts of the Jewish population who have lost confidence in the stability and ability to prevail of Israel against the native people of the Levant. The October 7th action by Hamas was a huge defeat for Israel, not in strictly military terms, as they regained control of ‘their’ territory within a few days and forced the insurgents to flee back to the Gaza Strip. But it was a political defeat, as the division between Gaza and the adjacent areas of Israel is artificial and purely a product of ethnic cleaning and previous atrocities and massacres of the Arab civilian population. The vaunted stability of the Zionist colonisation was exposed as being built on sand. The only solution that the Zionists could envisage for that political problem was a genocidal one – the extermination of the ‘uppity’ population that had dared to defy the place allocated to it by the colonisers.

But that in turn has exposed the nature of Zionism to the whole world, and irrevocably destroyed its political reputation. The only justification that the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie and its camp followers were able to propagate for the increasingly visible crimes of their state was that Israel was in some way an atonement for the Nazi genocide of Jews. The element of racist injustice that Arabs, entirely outside the European continent where the genocide took place, should have to supposedly pay for the crimes of Europeans against the mainly Ashkenazi European Jewish population, was passed over in silence by the same Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie and its European and North American camp followers and cult worshippers, in the last three quarters of a century or so. But the decisive exposure of the genocidal nature of the Zionist project by the Gaza genocide witnessed by the world over the last 6th months is an irrevocable defeat. Never again, as the perpetrator of genocide itself, will it be able to trade on the bastardisastion of the Nazi genocide to excuse its crimes. That ship has sailed. The developing exodus of Jewish colonists from Israel could well, as Ritter has pointed out, point to a coming collapse of the settler entity as to make the democratic demand for a single polity based on full political equality, a democratic demand capable of being implemented in practice.

A major defeat for Zionism and Western imperialism, particularly US imperialism, is taking shape. However, the strategic goals of these forces have not changed, and the working class needs to be on its guard for further reckless and destructive actions from these forces, and above all to struggle for the full liberation of the Palestinian people from Zionist genocidal oppression.

Defeat Zionism. Defend Iran and the Axis of Resistance from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen. Destroy the Zionist State – for full equality and democratic rights for all in a workers Palestine. For permanent revolution across West Asia – for working class power!

US/British/French/EU imperialists – out of West Asia!

Solidarity with Michael Pröbsting

Michael Pröbsting is a writer and International Secretary of the CCRI/RCIT group and has been prosecuted by the Austrian State for defending the Palestinian cause.

According to the website of the Pröbsting group, the Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office launched a criminal investigation and initiated legal proceedings.  Michael will be tried on May 2 at the Vienna Regional Court.

Pröbsting is accused of “incitement to commit terrorist crimes and approval of terrorist crimes pursuant to § 282a, section 2, in conjunction with article 1 of the Criminal Code”.  The accusation is based on Pröbsting’s statements in which he expressed his support for the CCRI/RCIT in the fight for the freedom of two Palestinians.  If he is convicted, the activist could face a prison sentence of up to two years.

Many bourgeoisies in the world have Zionist factions within them, especially the imperialist bourgeoisies, such as the USA, Great Britain, France and Austria.  Also in Brazil, the Zionist fraction of capital controls the media and seeks to silence those who denounce the genocide with legal proceedings, in addition to being associated with Bolsonarist fascism throughout the coup process.

The LCFI stands in solidarity with Michael Pröbsting against the Austrian capitalist state, Zionism and imperialism, in the fight in defense of the Palestinian people.

Condemn the Crocus Hall Terror attack on Russia!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Irish Easter Rising

The History of the Class Struggle in the oldest colony on the planet

Humberto Rodrigues

This article is an updated and improved version of a 2011 article on class struggle in Ireland. It was taken from the original version of the Communist League blog:  IRISH REPUBLICAN PRISONERS: For recognition of the status of political prisoners and for freedom for Irish republican prisoners from the clutches of British imperialism!, From Bolshevik #5.

2024 marks 108 years since the Easter Rising and 43 years since the hunger strike of Irish political prisoners, two of the most important conflicts in the Irish national liberation struggle. That last event, the 1981 hunger strike, was led by Bobby Sands and was one of the most heroic events in world history.

Ireland was for centuries the oldest of the colonies, it was stunted from the 12th century until today in its development by the invasion of England, which made the neighbouring island its first colony, subjugated “through the most abominable reign of terror and the most reprehensible corruption” (Letter from Marx to Kugelmann, 29/11/1869).

The struggle of these people has always been passionately followed by socialists since Marx and Engels, who uncompromisingly defended Irish national liberation and the Fenian political prisoners (an Irish revolutionary guerrilla organization). For Marx, the liberation of Ireland was “The” preliminary condition of the socialist revolution in England, the main capitalist nation of his time.

 “It is therefore the task of the International, everywhere, to bring to the fore the conflict between England and Ireland, by openly siding with Ireland. And it is the task of the Central Committee in London to awaken the consciousness of the English workers to the fact that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiments, but the first condition of their own social emancipation.”

 Letter from Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt, London, 04/09/1870, emphasis in the original.

 It is from this struggle that Marx deduced that “a people that subjugates another, forges its own chains.”

From the fusion of the workers’ struggle for Irish national liberation with Marxism, a brave workers’ leader called James Connolly was born, who warned his brothers about the inability of the Irish bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie to lead the country’s emancipation from colonialism. In one of his earliest writings, a pamphlet entitled Erin’s Hope – the End and the Means (1897), he concluded that the Irish working class was “the only sure basis on which a free nation can be built.” 

Thirteen years later, in his main work Labour in Irish History (1910) he states that the middle and propertied classes “have a thousand economic ties in the form of investments that link them to English capitalism […] Only the Irish working-class remains the incorruptible heir of the struggle for freedom in Ireland.”

It is impossible not to notice that, in an embryonic form, Connolly had ideas similar to those that were fully developed by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky at the same time, and which came to be known as the theory of permanent revolution. Despite being embryonic, these ideas were visionary for the future of the class struggle in their country. He said: “If they withdraw the British army tomorrow and raise the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless they organize a socialist republic, all their efforts will have been in vain and England will still govern them through the landowners. , capitalists and commercial institutions”.

 At the end of 1911, Connolly, in the leadership of the General Transport Union (ITGWU), the country’s main union, faced off politically and militarily against the employer lockouts and the police controlled by the British army. In this dispute, workers formed a defence organization, a “Irish Citizen Army”, to protect themselves from the police and armed strikebreakers. This “Irish Citizen Army” was a precursor of what would become the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, a guerrilla organization founded in 1919, as a military arm of Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone), the bourgeois republican nationalist political party.

Proclamation of the Irish Republic

The Irish revolutionary was prophetic in fearing the harm of a division of the island for the future of the struggle for its liberation. He had predicted that the partition that would take place between Ireland and Northern Ireland a few years after its execution by British troops “would mean a carnival of reaction in North and South, set back the Irish labour movement, and paralyze all progressive movements for as long as it lasted.”

Regarding this, Connolly is increasingly correct not only about his country, where the “divide and rule” rule was valid as a prototype at the beginning of the 20th century, but also about all other counter-revolutionary secessions of colonies, manipulated by imperialism (Korea, Vietnam, Sudan… with Libya now being the hot topic). However, in 1916, the carnage of World War I and a series of defeats and betrayals confused the Irish revolutionary, who came to put aside a series of conceptions he had defended throughout his life, to lead a premature uprising without the essential independent political and organizational action of the working class in the form of a revolutionary party. The betrayal of the insurrection led by Connolly by bourgeois nationalism cost him his life. The military uprising known as the “Easter Rising” was cruelly crushed. Connolly was seriously injured and arrested. Soon afterwards, he was court-martialled at the army hospital and transferred to a prison where, upon arrival, he was shot by occupation troops.

 After the massacre of the “Easter Rising”, in the revolutionary wave opened by the Russian revolution of 1917 and the German revolution (massacred in 1919), Irish Republican fighters returned to fight bravely, causing a civil war that ended in 1921 with a relative retreat for British colonialism. Representatives of the Irish bourgeoisie established a Treaty with England that recognized the “Irish Free State” on the condition that the “Free State” remained part of the British Commonwealth, that members of the Irish parliament swore loyalty to the English King George V and that six of the 32 Irish counties, with a Protestant majority located in the north, remained under British occupation and under the control of the Irish Unionists, defenders of unity with England. The IRA was then divided between the defenders of the Treaty, or treatyists, led by Michael Collins, today represented by the Fine Gael party, and the anti-treatyists, led by Éamon de Valera, who years later broke with Sinn Fein and the IRA and founded Fianna Fail. There is a film that romanticizes these events called “Michel Collins, the price of freedom” (1996), and justifies Collins’ betrayal. Filmmaker Ken Loach in “Winds of Freedom” (2006) portrayed this period better, more truthfully.

Throughout the 20th century, republican nationalists capitulated to several peace agreements or were crushed several times and new fighters raised the anti-colonialist flag again, reorganising dissent from the IRA to fight by all means against the separation imposed on the country by the agreements between imperialism and the corrupt Irish bourgeoisie.

 In 1939, the Marxist magazine “The New International”, published by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America, noted:

“Bombs are exploding again in Ireland and England. Under the very nose of the Home Office in London, beneath the monument to English kings in Belfast, beneath the walls of the prisons where thousands of Irish patriots served their sentences, and beneath the customs offices along the Ulster border, loud and sudden explosions mark the 23rd anniversary of Easter Week. And these explosions are not merely celebratory. They serve to remind the world of the struggle for national independence of a people who have fought tirelessly for seven hundred years against the most powerful and merciless oppressor of all colonial peoples: the ruling class of the British Empire. (…) Understanding that without the combined forces of the Irish working class and English workers and the revolutionary forces in the colonies, national independence cannot be completely won, we cannot simply dismiss the current bombings as futile or reactionary. They are not merely isolated acts of violence committed by dismayed and frustrated individuals. They are, on the contrary, carefully planned and conducted according to a plan organized and drawn up by revolutionaries who, themselves, admit that the bombs are only the first step in the renewal of the struggle. These men know and are planning the necessary steps to unite the opposition forces. The bombs are serving to draw attention to the Army of Occupation now in Ireland and the return of the repression that preceded the last war. Revolutionaries everywhere must mobilize to support the movement to wrest freedom and independence from ‘Europe’s greatest landlord’ and thus, by striking a blow to the heart of the world’s greatest imperialist power, unleash the forces of revolution in all colonial countries before war engulfs humanity in a struggle to destroy itself for the profits and power of capitalism” .

New International #4, 04/1939
Television mini-series called Rebellion that narrates the Irish Easter Rising from the point of view of three women who have different life stories, motivations and participation within the rebellion.

In 1972, British occupation troops fired on a peaceful demonstration in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing fourteen people, seven of whom were minors. All the victims were unarmed and five of them were shot in the back. The protesters were protesting the Northern Ireland statelet government’s policy of summarily arresting people suspected of terrorist acts. This policy was directed against the IRA. After “Bloody Sunday”, the IRA gained a huge number of young volunteers, giving the guerrilla group even greater strength. In 1973, Marian Price, who had just qualified as a nurse, was recruited by the IRA. She and nine other militants were arrested, accused of planting bombs in London in order to blow up the Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court), Hillgate House (a government building) and the Whitehall army recruitment centre. Two hundred people were injured, one man died of a heart attack and his death was attributed to the bombings. Marian Price was sentenced to life in prison.

 In 1981, several IRA militants imprisoned by Britain, led by Bobby Sands, an IRA leader, went on hunger strike to demand that the Crown recognise their status as political prisoners. After 66 days, the inflexibility of the Britain government led to their death. But the strike demoralised the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, founder together with the Yankee Ronald Reagan of the anti-worker offensive called neoliberalism. Thatcher increased the presence of British troops in the six counties of Northern Ireland and attempted to criminalise Irish Republicanism in the eyes of public opinion, suppressing any difference between the treatment meted out in prisons to the IRA and ordinary prisoners.

In response, Irish Republican inmates launched a hunger strike. Their demands: not to wear prison uniforms; not perform forced labour; freedom of association and organization of cultural and educational activities; right to one letter, one visit and one package per week; and that the days of protest were not deducted when calculating the sentence served. Refusing to be treated as criminals, they simultaneously defended their personal dignity and the legitimacy of the struggle for the liberation of their country.

Sands, the first of the strikers to refuse food and the first to die after 66 days, led a tenacious political struggle that was portrayed in the film “Hunger” (2008). Even in prison, his companions inside and outside prisons managed to elect him to the British Parliament as a representative of Northern Ireland. The objective was, obviously, not the parliamentary mandate, but to prove the support of the Irish population and the political recognition of the Republican prisoners and their struggle. It was only after this that British legislation began to prohibit prisoners from running for office. From then on, the Northern Irish population elected, every year, in elections held by imperialism, candidates who refused to swear loyalty to the Queen in support of the struggle for independence.

Poster for the film Hunger

The second setback imposed by the hunger strike lies in the very way in which it was organised. Against the intransigence of their enemies, they were, in an intelligent way, even more intransigent, converting an announced defeat into a political victory, turning time, an extremely unfavourable element in a hunger strike, into a political weapon for the strikers. They established intervals of days between them for the beginning of the refusal to eat, in order to increase the political weariness of the British government with the extension of the durability of the strike movement as a whole. This is how a movement that could last at most two months (the maximum limit that someone can fast without dying of hunger) if everyone started the strike at the same time, dragged on for a long seven months. The international impact of each prisoner death from starvation was repeated ten times over, claiming the lives of Bobby Sands (died at age 27), Francis Hughes (25), Ray McCreesh (24), Patsy O’Hara (23), Joe McDonnell (29), Martin Hurson (24), Kevin Lynch (25), Kieran Doherty (25), Thomas McIlwee (23) and Mickey Devine (27). The strike began on March 1st and only ended on October 3rd, 1981, when, under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church, the families of the strikers broke their commitment to disallow tube feeding when they fell into a coma, making it impossible to continue.

The Irish musicians of the trio the Wolfe Tones, exponents of the so-called Irish rebel music, banned from playing in England, made a song for the Irish heroes “Joe McDonnell Live” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrqjAQVLzzE)  . In a performance by the Tones in 2008, when the names of the ten martyrs are mentioned and their images displayed during the song, one can see, through the audience’s reactions, the place they occupy in the hearts of the Irish people. In 1982, during the Falklands War, the Wolfe Tones composed another song in support of Argentina in the war.

At the cost of 10 deaths, the strikers achieved two victories: a moral one, by making the British, even without officially granting them the status of political prisoners, ease the prison repression a few months after the end of the movement; and a political victory, by frustrating plans to criminalise the struggle for Irish national liberation in the eyes of the world, which was truly a great feat, taking into account that in her eleven years of government, Thatcher crushed everyone who crossed her path, from the Argentine military dictatorship (in the Falklands war) to the English trade union movement. Convicted until the end of his days, Bobby Sands stated: “They have nothing in their imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of an Irishman who does not want to be broken.”

Inside Kilmainham, the jail where the leaders of the rebellion were imprisoned and executed. Today the space has been converted into a museum in the city of Dublin.

In 1998, Sinn Féin signed the Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), to dismantle the guerrillas. The agreement, articulated by Great Britain, Ireland and the USA, put an end to the armed conflict in the North, establishing power sharing in Northern Ireland between the Unionists and Sinn Fein. The main objective was to guarantee bilateral relations between Northern Ireland and Ireland, through the good development of investments and trade. This agreement is an expression of the strengthening of imperialism, after the capitalist restoration in the USSR, over that national liberation struggle. The most industrialized part of the island has become an important base for the financial parasitism of multinationals seeking to enter the European Union. As a consequence, Ireland was the first country in the European Union to officially enter into recession in the 2008 crisis. The austerity policy is violently employed by the government with the complicity of Sinn Fein through a brutal cut in public spending and the increase in the reserve army of the unemployed, forcing a fall in wages in the North, the South and also in Great Britain. This growth in misery affected Catholic and Protestant workers equally, but the English and Irish imperialist bourgeoisies stimulate inter-worker sectarian tensions through paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force, to divide the proletariat and manipulate their class dissatisfaction against their own brothers. In this package, the repression against Irish Republican political prisoners increases, mainly among activists who disagreed with the capitulation of the IRA, such as Marian Price, a dissident who became leader of the 32 Counties Sovereignty Movement (32CSM).

Like Sands, Price and other prisoners went on a hunger strike to be transferred from English prisons to a prison in Northern Ireland. But they were force-fed for 200 days as she recounts:

“Four male prison officers tie me tightly to a chair. You clench your teeth to try to keep your mouth closed, but they push a metal spring device around your jaw to open it. They force a wooden tong with a hole in the middle into your mouth. Then, they insert a big rubber tube and you can’t move and through this tube they punch you with everything they put in a blender: orange juice, soup, or cartons of cream if they want to top up the calories. They take jugs of this liquidized porridge and pour it into a funnel attached to the tube. Force-feeding takes 15 minutes, but it seems like it will never end. You have no control over anything. You are terrified that the food will go the wrong way and choke you, you cannot speak or move. You are afraid that you will suffocate to death.” .

The Guardian, 03/13/2003

Price was in the 1990s one of the main voices opposing Sinn Féin’s “peace strategy”, the GFA, as she said: “It certainly wasn’t this sort of thing that I came to prison for.” see more sense for the national liberation struggle today, Marian Price argues: “as long as the British presence in Ireland remains, there will always be justification, republicanism will never go out. My principles and ideals will never be crushed. I did not make the choices I did for individuals within the republican movement or Sinn Fein. The fact that they sold out in no way detracts from my cause” (ibid).

Republican political prisoners have been attacked in a cowardly and savage manner in their own cells by prison guards, with the aim of breaking their political resistance through systematic physical violence. As highlighted in the Bulletin of the Irish Political Prisoners Support Group (IRPSG, facsimile on page 29 of the newspaper O Bolshevique #5), one of the attacks suffered by political prisoner Harry Fitzsimmons:

 “…in Maghaberry prison on 29/05/2011, Harry’s cell was invaded by riot police, without there having previously been any confrontation or exchange of words, just brutality. His glasses were broken with such force that glass entered his eyes. He has multiple lacerations on his face. The uniformed bandits held him down, while others punched, kicked and tore his clothes.”

According to Gerry Downing, leader of the British Socialist Fight and Secretary of the IRPSG, “there are Irish prisoners of war today fighting as they were in 1981. Resistance is inevitable. Republican ‘dissenters’ denounce that British imperialism continues to divide the Irish people by force and that is why they continue the fight for the expulsion of the crown forces. The fight for recognition of the status of political prisoners, which was abandoned 13 years ago with the signing of the GFA, is intensifying inside prisons, in the same way that the 10 on hunger strike died 30 years ago. The GFA made it difficult to unify Ireland. At the Sinn Féin Conference on the 30th anniversary of the hunger strike on 18/06/2011 in London, we demanded that participants in this meeting take seriously their responsibilities towards today’s prisoners by fighting for their political prisoner status and that the Sinn Féin breaks with the policy of economic austerity on the working class and the poor.” This austerity policy, where Irish workers are forced to pay for the imperialist crisis, expresses how England continues to govern Ireland, now through Sinn Féin.

In June 2012, Sinn Féin leader Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland fraternized with Queen Elizabeth. McGuinness’ symbolic gesture did not surprise the fighters for the Irish national cause nor the workers of that country, which has suffered for years from the perverse austerity plans imposed by the coalition government made up of the political wing of the IRA in the service of its majesty and imperialism. Meanwhile, as part of this colonialist policy, the best Irish republican fighters, known as POWs (prisoners of war), as well as thousands of other martyrs in the struggle for Irish self-determination against British imperialism, endure brutal oppression in the prisons of the British Crown, as the Communist League denounced at  http://lcligacomunista.blogspot.com.br/2011/07/prisioneiros-republicanos-irlandeses.html . Here , we reproduce an article by Charlie Walsh, from the editorial board of Socialist Fight, British member of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International. Socialist Fight comrades also drive the Irish Republican Prisoner Support Group (IRPSG).

THE GAMBLER AND THE SCOUNDREL: Demonstrating that the foci of anti-imperialist resistance remain, Ronan O’Gara, rugby player for the Irish national Rugby Union team refuses to shake Betty Windsor’s hand claiming Ireland’s right to self-determination during the team’s reception as Grand Slam rugby winner in 2009. In the photo below, Martin McGuinness has the pleasure of shaking the same blood-stained hand, symbolizing their abandonment of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The socialist revolution in England continues to depend on the resolution of the Irish question and, as Connolly concluded, the resolution of the Irish question remains in the hands of the Irish proletariat, which in turn will only emancipate itself when it arms itself with the program of permanent revolution, fights for Irish unity and together with their British and European brothers build their own revolutionary, socialist and internationalist party, for a federation of European socialist republics to bury the old capitalist world.