This issue of Communist Fight is the first of a new series.

In a recent discussion, the Consistent Democrats, who publish Communist Fight, decided on a change in our press policy and format. Previously we had regarded our website as important, but subordinate to the publication of a printed journal, and we have operated on that basis for three-and-a-half years. But experience has taught us that this press paradigm is obsolete: the fact is that our website now has a substantial readership, whereas the printed journal is limited by our physical capacity to distribute it, which is small at the moment. The pro-imperialist, repressive capitulation of much of the left to Russophobia and Zionism has made it difficult to distribute a substantial and quite expensive publication like the first series of Communist Fight by the legacy route of failing left bookshops run by fakers who are subservient to right-wing forces.

We have therefore decided to make a change: to produce a much cheaper and slimmer publication more often – we hope to produce a 16-page journal 8 times a year, reflecting the material on the website. It will cost £1.20, with a 70p concession, instead of £2.50/£1. The journal will be a supplement of our website, instead of the other way round. That way we hope to be able to intervene in political events offline more effectively, and continue to grow our movement, which has already significantly grown from its very small beginning in 2020, but we want to be considerably more effective. We think this change of policy will assist in this.

The new issue focuses heavily on the genocide of the Palestinians, which is among the most crucial and immediate questions facing movements of workers and the oppressed right now. Genocidal Zionist racism against the Palestinian people has become a political cult and a cause celebre among the decaying ruling classes of the imperialist West. In Britain it was used to defeat the Corbyn movement that attempted to reassert some basic elements of class politics in the second half of the last decade. But now Zionism’s genocide has ignited a world-wide movement of workers and the oppressed that is mobilising worldwide to defend their Palestinian victims.

The lead article contains an analysis of the Zionist cult in Western bourgeois politics and a materialist explanation of how it came into being. It ends in a call for the defence of the democratic rights of workers and the oppressed through the formation of a workers’ militia based on the mass organisations of the working class, based on the need to counter the ruling classes’ modern, barbaric techniques of warfare against insubordinate parts of the population. It contains a warning: it is quite possible that in the future the methods that are being to drown Gaza in the blood of its civilian population – drones, carpet-bombing, mass murder by AI, could be used by the bourgeoisie in the West to destroy mass movements of our class. The working class needs to arm itself politically and physically against this likely form of counterrevolutionary violence.

Regarding attacks on democratic rights, we have an article from our Brazilian comrades about the new forms that fascism is taking in this period of US imperialist decay and disaster. We have an article denouncing the outrageous arrests of Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier and other left-wing opponents of genocidal Zionism, with smears ranging from ‘anti-Semitism’ to supposed support for ‘terrorism’. All totally fraudulent, formulated by racist cops acting in cahoots with far right Tory politicians, encouraged by Zionist New Labour.

A particularly well-read article by Davey Heller of the Australia/United States ClassConscious group is reproduced in this issue. It analyses the nature and social composition of the huge protest movement that has errupted over Gaza, not only in Australia but around the world, its character as a movement predominantly of the working class and oppressed, and how the influence of the bourgeois liberal element that played a major role in previous anti-war movements has declined.

We also reproduce a draft ‘Open Letter’ to George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain, regarding his announced intention to stand against Labour’s Sadiq Khan for Mayor of London. There was a time when such a challenge would have been an inspiring call to arms. But in the past decade Galloway has attempted to mix militant anti-imperialism over Ukraine and the Middle East with an adaptation to the populist right. These do not mix, to put it mildly, and our letter, which has been sent to larger organisations with a proposal for endorsement, places demands on Galloway to break with such reactionary allies and stand as a champion of the victims of capitalism and imperialism at home and abroad.

The back page of the new journal reproduces a joint statement of the LCFI and ClassConscious defending the Houthi, of Yemen, against imperialist threats for their bold actions in seeking an armed blockade of the Red Sea against Israel-bound shipping, which is particularly important now the US, with Britain in tow, has attacked Yemen in solidarity with Zionism’s mass slaughter of Palestinians.

Demonstrate for political prisoners and against child murderers in Palestine and Ukraine!

We Need a Unified Struggle Against Imperialism!

Genocide is in full swing in Gaza. Israel is shooting civilians in homes and the streets, destroying and bulldozing hospitals, schools, UN refuge facilities, and more. Killing medical staff, patients, children, even babies, stopping incubators causing death and/or bulldozing them under the ruins. More than 22,000 are confirmed dead already, with many thousands more under rubble. Half are children; half Gaza’s population are under 18. Israel’s carpet-bombing, stopping essential supplies including fuel, medicine, drinking water, is driven by Nazi-like racism. They force people to flee from North to South to further South. More than three quarters of the population of Gaza are homeless and starving, with catastrophic epidemics taking hold.

Netanyahu openly stated they want Gazans to flee to Egypt. Failing that they want to slaughter them. Similar crimes are happening now in the West Bank: hundreds have been killed by bloodthirsty settlers and troops. They are attempting another Nakba, showing the kinship between Zionism and Nazism. The 1948 Nakba was a similar crime.

A huge protest movement traverses the globe. Earlier, Russian President Putin, fighting a war against US-backed Nazis in Ukraine, compared the siege of Gaza with Hitler’s siege of Leningrad. The Houthi movement of Yemen declared war on Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians and blockaded Israel-bound shipping from the Red Sea. This has hurt Israel and its backers financially. Governments including Jordan, Turkey, Chile, Venezuela, Honduras, Spain, Iran, Iraq and Colombia condemned the genocide, and several countries have broken diplomatic relations with Israel.

The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemns Israel, whilst the US repeatedly vetoes ceasefire resolutions in the Security Council. The Russian amendment for ‘immediate ceasefire” would have passed had it not been for the US veto. At the November BRICS summit in Durban, China called for a ceasefire and an end to ‘collective punishment’ of the people of Gaza.

Biden has moved a ‘multinational’ force of stooges towards Yemen to threaten the Houthis, and US warships in the Eastern Mediterranean threaten Hezbollah, Syria and Iran – protecting Israel as it threatens Lebanon with a Gaza-like genocide. The United States and its allies own this holocaust.

Sunak’s government instructs cops to arrest Palestine solidarity activists, supposedly for ‘supporting’ Hamas. Activists such as Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier, Craig Murray, Ranjeet Brar, Yael Khan, have been arrested on false accusations of ‘anti-semitism’ or supporting ‘terrorism’. Hamas are popular among Palestinians because they are seen as incorruptible and militant fighters, but they are just one, militantly Islamic ideological trend – many others, some secular and leftist, are involved in the struggle. Evidence has emerged that many if not most of the civilian October 7 victims were slaughtered by Israel, under the ‘Hannibal Directive’ – slaughtering their own troops and civilians to prevent capture.

We must support the Palestinians whoever leads them. The pro-Zionists in government, neoliberal mercenaries all, have genocidal views. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was destroyed by Zionist destabilisation, much of it run by the Israeli Embassy. The neoliberal Starmer wing works closely with Zionism. All these parties are dominated by ‘Friends of Israel’ anti-Palestinian racists.

Their problem is many millions of people here, and billions worldwide, are familiar with the genocidal oppression of Palestinians. Racist, anti-working-class bigotry which drags official politics here to the far-right is bound up with vile attitudes to Palestinians and Muslims, just as before WWII Hitlerian Jew-hate poisoned political life.

Similar politics are behind the war in Ukraine, where the West has peddled similar lies as about Palestinians, about Russians supposedly raping women, killing babies and engaging in ‘genocide’. The imperialists project their own barbarism onto their intended victims. In fact, the number of civilians killed by both sides since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, over 600 days ago, are far less than the more than the 28,000 deaths Israel inflicted on Gaza in three months. But this is not from want of trying. The Ukrainian Nazis have used petal mines, cluster bombs and depleted Uranium, supplied by the West, all of which particularly kill children and the elderly, or cause birth defects in future generations. There have been considerable deaths, but the Russian Army have prevented many more.

There are great similarities between what Western imperialism is trying to do in Ukraine and what the Zionists are doing in Palestine. In 2014, the US spent $10 billion organising the Maidan coup that brought Nazi Banderaists to power as part of NATO expansion, aiming to threaten Russia with US strategic weapons from Ukraine. The Nazi regime abolished the previous legal equality between languages, and began persecuting Russian speakers, close to half the population, particularly centred in the Donbass (South Eastern) region. Crimea, where the majority is Russian, voted to join Russia then.

When in 2014 the population of Donbass rose up and demanded autonomy and language rights, the regime declared an ‘anti-terrorist operation’. For eight years before Russia’s SMO, this terrorist war against Donbass people and the People’s Republics they set up, cost 14,000 lives. Preparing for a much bigger conflict with Russia, the US groomed Zelensky, his Jewish origin being ideal camouflage for Nazi forces to ethnically cleanse and slaughter this population.

At the beginning of 2022 the Zelensky/Nazi regime, with its backers led by Biden, planned a much bigger offensive to re-conquer the Donbass. Russia intervened to stop this ethnic cleansing and genocide. Given the chance, this oppressed population voted to join Russia. Russia is not denying the right of Ukrainians to their own state, and there are no Russian troops in the Ukrainian-speaking West of Ukraine. US-UK-EU Imperialism falsely accuse Russia of annexation of Ukraine while providing cover for annexation through genocide in Palestine.

This was exposed in Canada last Autumn when the Canadian neo-liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau together with Zelensky (a Zionist who vows to make Ukraine a ‘big Israel’ through ethnic cleansing of Russian-speaking people), publicly applauded a 98-year-old veteran of Hitler’s SS. When even Macron says ‘stop killing women and babies’ in Gaza, it is because he wants Israel’s brutality better hidden!  This understanding, about the lies of imperialism about Ukraine, needs to become as widely known as the facts about Palestine and Gaza: we need a unified struggle against the global war of imperialism on humanity and its children. Solidarity with the Palestinians! Solidarity with the children of humanity!

Free all Ukrainian Political Prisoners!

Restore full political and media freedoms!

End the fascist reign of terror in Ukraine!

End the British government’s support for Israeli genocide in Gaza!

Journalists, bloggers, politicians, elected representatives, activists, priests, sportspeople,

even Ukrainian negotiators and military officers…

Arrested, beaten, tortured and murdered

Protest in Whitehall, opposite Downing Street

Thursday 18 January, 6.30-8.00pm

This protest is being held because we believe that the British people should know about crimes being committed on an enormous scale by the Zelensky regime in Ukraine, for which our government has spent billions on training and arms supplies.

The truth about what is happening in this so-called “democracy” has been carefully concealed by our government and mass media. Since February 2022 alone Thousands of Journalists, bloggers, politicians, elected representatives, activists, priests and sportspeople, have been arrested, and some tortured or murdered. Many simply disappeared after being arrested with no charges or trial after many months.

People have been arrested for opposing the war, organising WW2 commemorations, allegedly working with Russian forces by organising humanitarian supplies or corridors, or simply for posts on social media.

In March 2022 the famous peace blogger Gleb Lyashenko was jailed pending trial for treason, for claiming on his blog that Ukraine’s policies had led to the Russian military intervention. In a new item entitled “Fake: Ukraine fully supports freedom of speech”, the pro-Kiev War on Fakes website said this was “because of his pro-Russian statements… (and saying) that Ukraine is the one to blame”. So Lyashenko was arrested simply “because of his pro-Russian statements”, but for the Kiev regime that is not an attack on freedom of speech!

Alexander Matyuschenko, a left-wing campaigner, was arrested in Dnipro, central Ukraine, SBU (Ukrainian intelligence service) and Azov (the largest armed fascist battalion in Ukraine (members). He was tortured and forced to shout the far right salute, “Slava Ukraini!”, and his wife’s hair “was cut off with a knife”.

One of Ukraine’s most prominent human rights activists, Elena Berezhnaya, Director of the Institute of Legal Policy and Social Protection, who has spoken before the UN Security Council, was arrested in March 2022 in Kiev.

One of Ukraine’s leading politicians, Viktor Medvedchuk of the Opposition Platform – For Life party was arrested in April 2022, and photos released by the SBU clearly indicate that he was beaten. He was released in prisoner swap in September 2022.

According to the head of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, Eduard Dolinsky, 70 year old Yuri Pokrass from Kiev, was sentenced to one and a half years in prison with all of his property confiscated, after sending greetings for on Komsomol Day and the anniversary of the USSR on Facebook. Hundreds if not thousands have received similar sentences for similar “crimes”.

For most of those arrested there has been no news whatsoever, and no announcement of a trial. This is in line with the corrupt and lawless nature of Ukraine since 2014, including the failure to hold any investigation into the killing of over 40 peaceful anti-fascist protesters when the Trade Unions House in Odessa was surrounded and petrol bombed by a fascist and nationalist mob on May 2 2014.

But these arrests are only one part of the picture. After the Russian intervention in February 2022, areas recaptured by Ukrainian forces were “cleansed” by Kiev’s forces and armed far right units, and many local officials and ordinary citizens were brutally murdered.

On 3 March 2022 the Daily Mail reported that “The pro-Russian mayor of a city in eastern Ukraine who welcomed President Vladimir Putin’s invasion was ‘shot dead’ after being kidnapped from his home. Several mayors and other Ukrainian officials have been killed since the outbreak of war, many reportedly by Ukrainian state agents after engaging in de-escalation talks with Russia”.

Interior Minister adviser Anton Gerashchenko claimed on Facebook that Struk was had “actively pursued a ‘pro-Russian position’ “.

Four days later the mayor of Gostomel, Yuri Prylipko, was found murdered after negotiating with Russian forces for a civilian evacuation corridor, and in April 2022 investigative website The Grayzone claimed that “eleven mayors from various towns in Ukraine are missing”.

Mainstream media reports reveal that many people in eastern and southern Ukraine welcomed the Russian troops and their Donbas militia allies. As Russian speakers, with widespread positive views of Russian and Soviet history, they had experienced eight years of abuse from organisations from Kiev and Western Ukraine: the SBU, Azov Battalion and the Hitler-admiring Right Sector.

An ITV News report from Mariupol during fighting in 2014, after the uprising against the coup in Kiev in east Ukraine shows one man saying “Our government is killing us, it’s very scary”, while a woman tells the ITV reporter: “We won’t ever be under this fascist government”.

ITV reporter James Mates reported: “We found Ukrainian forces at the central police station being jeered and abused by crowds of furious locals. When the crowd got too close, the soldiers opened fire above their heads”. After the fighting, “the city was seething with anger, barricades going up. It is a curious way to persuade ordinary people that they have a future in Ukraine.”

Similar views were described by BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale, reporting from the Donbas near Mariupol on Radio 4’s Today programme on 6 April 2022:

“The extraordinary thing was that most people did not blame president Putin for the bombs… they thought it was as much Ukraine’s fault… this is very different from Kiev, there’s lots of people here who are pro-Russian, who have a very different viewpoint”.

The whole world knows that after the 2014 Western-backed “Maidan” coup the new regime in Kiev embarked on a campaign to push Russian out of all areas of life. In March 2022 a poll by Sociological Group Rating said that around 20% of Ukrainians considered Russian to be their native language, although perhaps 60% also speak and read Russian. The reality is that when Ukraine was first defined as a republic in 1921, it included large areas of the south and east which were completely Russian.

Last year Ukraine’s State Language Protection Commissioner Taras Kremin said that Ukrainians who speak Russian should not be called “Russian-speaking,” claiming that this term was simply “Russian propaganda”. He also insisted there were only Ukrainians in Ukraine, some of whom had been “Russianised.”

International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) has been campaigning for six years in solidarity with anti-fascists in Ukraine, thousands of whom have paid with their lives, torture or prison for resisting the regime installed in 2014 with the support of Britain, the US and EU.

IUAFS members have participated in every protest since October 7 in solidarity with the people of Palestine and the Gaza Strip. In our view the same Western governments who have supported the Ukraine regime with billions in weapons and money, including Britain, have done nothing to stop Israel committing open genocide in Gaza, with hospitals and civilians deliberately targeted and so far 9,000 children killed.

In fact Britain and the US are continuing to send weapons to Israel, and after they and the EU condemned recent Russian missile strikes in Ukraine, they have failed to declare that Israel is committing genocide or to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

The entire world is witness to Israel’s war crimes, and to the hypocrisy of the Western governments who support, arm and finance both Ukraine and Israel.

(For more details and sources for the cases described above please email: uk****************@***il.com).

Organised by International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity

https://www.facebook.com/groups/304424404302437

https://iuafs.blogspot.com/

Solidarity with Palestine’s Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Genocide Struggle! Smash Zionism! Defeat US/NATO imperialism!

Workers Militias to Defend Democratic Rights!

By Ian Donovan

The US ruling class and its lackeys in the British ruling class clearly are giving both military support, and as much open political support as they dare, to Israel in its genocidal campaign to wipe out, or otherwise dispose of, the Palestinian people.  This is not just in Gaza; the West Bank is lined up next, along with the so-called Israeli Arabs further down the line. Israel has become the symbol of the vile racism and colonialism of the West, and its racism is politically hegemonic, the most openly expressed form of racism in the early 21st Century. Old style, overt white supremacism is regarded with contempt by a bourgeois consensus. Even more so the legacy racism of Hitler-style anti-Semitism.

This extends even to the right-wing populists who have emerged out of the decay of neoliberalism in the last decade – even they have to pay lip-service to being in some way opposed to open racism. The defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII by the USSR (which did most of the fighting and took most of the casualties) had a huge ideological effect in discrediting open, overt racism. It has been on the defensive ever since. But paradoxically, there was and is one exception to this. Zionist racism, which justifies itself by invoking the crimes of Nazi Germany against the Jews to justify the genocidal ethnic cleansing, and often mass murder, of the Palestinian Arab population. At one level this is an ideological paradox. A form of racism apparently able to survive, and prosper, because the people in whose name it is practiced were previous victims of genocide.

But such ideological paradoxes have little power in themselves. They can only become powerful where there is a material basis for them. The material basis for the apparent ideological power of Zionist racism did not, and does not arise in a vacuum. What actually happened since WWII was that Zionism, as a political strategy, succeeded in transforming the mainly European-derived Jewish population of West Europe and North America from a significantly oppressed population before WWII, through a sui generis form of social mobility, into one of the world’s oppressor peoples, alongside white West Europeans and North American Anglos. This Jewish population is the only one that has made such a transformation, from victims of imperialist capitalism, into a population privileged by imperialist capitalism, in the imperialist epoch.

The reason this was even possible was because of the atypical social structure of the Jews in feudal Europe. Under the feudal mode of production, their pre-capitalist existence as a trading people-class (as analysed by the Belgian-Jewish Marxist theorist of the Jewish Question, Abram Leon) led them to become an oppressed population in the late-feudal era, from an often-privileged middleman class early in the same era. They were emancipated by the bourgeois revolutions, particularly in England and France when capitalism was in its vigorous youth, and began to be assimilated. But because of their preceding history as a (former) class, they were predisposed and particularly prone to absorption into the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie, which often led them to play leading roles in the working-class movement as an entirely natural response to their history of oppression and persecution. Where Jews were part of the working class, they tended to be in specialist artisan sections such as jewellery and clothing, which were closer socially to the petty-bourgeoisie. And they also were disproportionately absorbed, by virtue of their long experience of commodity exchange, into the more mercantile parts of the bourgeoisie itself. In the mid-feudal period those layers had regarded the pre-capitalist Jewish traders as an obsolete and harmful layer of competitors. But under generalised capitalism there was much more room for them.

But by the late 19^th Century, around the 1880s, the vigorous youth of the capitalist system was over, and was replaced by a predatory form of capitalist imperialism, based on monopoly capitalism, and a drive to divide up the world between a few large West and Central European powers – joined by the United States and Japan. A feverish oppressor-people nationalism was the ideological expression of this imperialism, and that made Jews a target for considerable antipathy from imperialist nationalists. The role of Jews in the workers movement meant that imperialist nationalists came to regard even the large layer of bourgeois Jews with suspicion, with a paranoid racist ideology that posited a conspiracy between the leftist Jews and bourgeois Jews, supposedly to establish a ‘Jewish’ racial tyranny over gentiles. When imperialist capitalism came close to collapse in the Great Depression of the 1930s, this scapegoating of the Jews led to genocide.

And characteristically, it was the leftist-inclined petty-bourgeois and artisan Jews who were overwhelmingly wiped out. Though some bourgeois Jews in the epicentre of the genocide, Germany, also became victims, in general these escaped, and the result was that the class composition of Jews after the genocide tended more to reflect the influence of more bourgeois and privileged layers. Zionist was a bourgeois trend/strategy that realised that, even though bourgeois Jews had been scapegoated in the early period of imperialism, nevertheless they were objectively part of the imperialist bourgeoisie and a situation could be brought about, through creating a transplanted imperialist state of their ‘own’, whereby that imperialist layer could be enabled to lead ‘their’ formerly oppressed population to join the world’s imperialist oppressor peoples. That was the (thoroughly reactionary) ‘success’ of Zionism in ‘liberating’ the European Jews from their former oppression, transforming them into an oppressor population, objectively, with the Arab people of Palestine and adjoining countries as their main victims. That is the objective situation of North American, most European, and of course Israeli Jewry today, notwithstanding some acute subjective contradictions derived from their history. 

Israel has a unique bourgeoisie, much of which lives in other imperialist countries, and has been cohered into, and acts as, an organised faction/caste (made up of an array of associated factions) within bourgeois politics within those countries. Simply because, while the number and proportion of the Jewish population may be small, the proportion of Jews within the imperialist bourgeoisie is much bigger, dozens of times larger proportionately. This is particularly strong in the US, and somewhat weaker but still highly important in West Europe. And the hegemonic ideological trend among bourgeois Jews today is Zionism, overwhelmingly. The hegemony of Zionist racism has been bolstered and given credence for decades by the fact that the Zionists and their bourgeois social base, were clever opportunists, who instead of fighting the Nazis and similar oppressors of their own people, actually substantially collaborated with them, sacrificing the artisan-proletariat and radicalised petty-bourgeois layers of their own people, in the cause of creating their own imperialist state. But the narrative promoted among the masses by this layer is that their people are the victims of the Nazi holocaust, and meaningful criticism of their racist hegemony is effectively the same as the genocidal hatred of Jews by the Nazis, etc. Not only that, but the fact that Zionist ideologues personified by Milton Friedman played a major role in creating the neoliberal economic/political trend in the 1970s, when the capitalist system again faced a seemingly systemic crisis, means that sections of the bourgeoisie now credit them with saving the capitalist system itself. This has created an irrational cult within imperialist bourgeois politics, which may actually prove as harmful as the cult of anti-Semitism and Hitler prior to the Second World War.

The genocide in Gaza has now generated an historical crisis of Zionist hegemony. It is perfectly obvious that the objective of the Israeli actions in Gaza is the elimination of the Palestinian Arab population of Gaza. This has been a Zionist objective for many years, and the advent of Netanyahu’s Likud/Kahanist/Ultra-Orthodox Settler coalition indicated even before the Hamas-led Oct 7^th Palestinian revolt, which merely served as a pretext, that such a genocide was on the immediate agenda. The accelerating rise of Zionist terror on the West Bank shows that this is not merely about Gaza. It is a long-planned genocide, which will inevitably extend to the West Bank and even to the ‘Israeli Arab’ population within the Green Line if the Gaza carnage is not stopped. Whether Israel has the armed capacity to carry out such a greater genocide is not clear, however – this transplanted imperialist formation is itself fragile – the indigenous Arab population of the region is far more deeply rooted and may be able to topple the Zionist entity if it takes them on all at once. However, the fragile, but imperialist nature of Israel, plus its possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons, and the fanaticism of its far-right leaders, mean that it can be a threat to human existence itself, if it manages to provoke an all-out regional war.

The mass of the population worldwide sees right through Zionism today, and understands its imperialist nature. This is particularly true in the Global South, whose populations have terrible experience of colonialism and recognise Israel’s nature very easily. Billions see through Israel, and many millions march against its crimes. But even in the imperialist countries, the population is now, in its mass, deep-learning the fascistic, Nazi-like, genocidal and inhuman nature of Zionism. The Zionist lobby has been unable to prevent the terrible news of its massive crimes from seeping even into the mainstream Western media, even if the influence of the Jewish-Zionist caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie has limited this. The legal action launched in the International Court of Justice by South Africa, accusing Israel coherently of multiple breaches of the Genocide Convention, cannot and will not be able to be suppressed. Because the mass of the population around the globe already know the truth of it. This is a huge blow to Zionist hegemony, from which it will never fully recover.

The hysterical attacks on democratic rights by pro-Zionist politicians and cops under orders from them (see this article) should not be tolerated. The fact that they are losing the masses makes them more, not less hysterical, and fuels likely all-out attacks on what democratic rights the masses have achieved under capitalism. The bourgeois cult of Zionism is potentially as dangerous as the cult of Adolf Hitler – maybe more so since Hitler never had nuclear weapons, nor today’s technology of surveillance and repression. The only way to fully safeguard democratic rights is the independent activity and politics of the working class. In circumstances like today, when reactionary, imperialist forces are flirting with all-out attacks on the democratic rights of the masses, it is necessary for socialists and communist to raise among the masses the need for mass-based organs of self-defence. What Leon Trotsky wrote in the period of the rise of Hitlerism has relevance today when pro-Zionist forces are attacking the rights of the masses:

“In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defence. It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible…to organize groups for self-defence, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.”

“It is necessary to give organized expression to the valid hatred of the workers toward scabs and bands of gangsters and fascists. It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press.”

Obviously, the technological basis of this has changed since the 1930s. Today’s media that needs defending is as likely to be online as in printed form. We could be faced with attacks with drones and electronic hacking, as well as imprisonment and torture of militants. We should also be aware that the techniques being used in Gaza will not inevitably be confined to there. It is entirely conceivable that mass murder by artificial intelligence could be in the arsenal of the ruling class faced with a revolutionary movement elsewhere. A ‘militia’ today would therefore not be simply a mechanical copy of Trotsky’s observations about “drilling” and “the use of arms”, though there would likely be elements of that.

The principle is the same. The working class once again faces potent threats to its democratic rights. We need militant mass-based organisation of the masses to defend these rights, if necessary, by physical force, and then to go over to the offensive against the class enemy in the concrete form that confronts us today. And just as in the 1930s, we need a class-conscious Marxist vanguard to provide the political impetus and leadership for that.

We reproduce below a draft Open Letter to George Galloway, regarding his declared intention to stand in the election for the Mayor of London this coming spring. It is likely he will be standing for the Workers Party, of which he is the best known member.

We think this is potentially important, and cannot be ignored by the left and the labour movement. At the same time, there are both progressive and problematic elements in it, as explained in the draft itself.

We therefore want to see credible left-wing forces place demands on Galloway to break with the problematic elements surrounding his campaign, thus rendering it supportable by the left. Otherwise it is likely to be a source of confusion and problems for the labour movement. It is not out of the question that his campaign could gain mass resonance in the minority communities in London who Labour now treats like dirt, so it cannot be ignored in our view.

Anyway, we have sent it both to Transform and to the Socialist Labour Network, with the proposal that the letter be endorsed by their respective leading bodies.  We also propose that other organisations and individuals in the labour, anti-war and anti-racist movements endorse it, so that Galloway can be put on the spot about his flagrantly contradictory political activities and clarify whether he is a spokesperson for left-wing, anti-capitalist forces or for the alt-right. Those who want to endorse it should email co*****************@***il.com.

Dear George Galloway,

We, the undersigned socialists and communists, anti-imperialists, anti-racists and anti-Zionists, are writing this open letter to you, given your stated intention to stand for election as Mayor of London in 2024, as the Workers Party candidate.

We would very much like to see someone like yourself who is seen as a fighter for working class interests and a strong opponent of the Imperialist wars in Ukraine, and against the Palestinian people, stand and provide an alternative to the crimes and betrayals of Labour under Starmer. It is good that you have stood up for the people of the Donbass and sharply denounced the genocide of Israel in Gaza and Palestine more generally, and the support for that crime by Britain and the United States.

However, there are serious problems with your candidacy. London is a city with a large working-class, and it is a multi-ethnic working class. London has the biggest immigrant-derived working-class communities in Britain. They are disproportionately low-paid, often treated like dirt, the victims of police racism and all kinds of disadvantage driven by racism. You know all about this, as you represented Bethnal Green & Bow between 2005 and 2010, as a RESPECT MP elected in to a large extent by the votes of the mainly South Asian Muslim community in that crucial East End constituency, in the context of the Iraq War. As well as being elected on a similar basis in Bradford West in 2012. At the time of these election victories in the 2000s and 2010s you frequently referred to yourself as the most pro-immigrant politician in Britain. And at that time, there was much truth in that.

Those communities are under attack from a vicious Tory government with a strong far right element in it. The outrageous attempt to deport refugees, many from imperialist crimes in the Middle East and Africa, to the former genocide site in Rwanda, is one manifestation.  The government also has launched a frontal attack on the right of UK citizens to marry non-citizens, aiming to more-than double the qualifying income for sponsoring a spouse for a visa, to an amount that excludes 70% of the working-class population. It has also made similar changes to the minimum salary for migrant workers in health and social care, which concretely amounts to a huge purge of the NHS and other health-related services. In the real world, this these are massive attacks on London’s multi-ethnic working class, and in fact the entire working class, driven by far-right racism.

We know full well these will not be effectively opposed by Labour; they may well come out in support of the attacks. We demand a champion against these attacks, and a champion of London’s diverse working-class communities more generally. The working class in this city need a mayor who will use the resources of his office to fight against the government’s anti-migrant attacks, tooth and nail. In so many ways, linked to his own subservience to Starmer and Zionism, Sadiq Khan is not remotely any sort of answer.

But there are enormous problems with your candidacy. You have gone along and joined in with anti-immigrant British nationalism in the past decade or so, and tried to mix them with left-wing and anti-imperialist politics. These do not mix. There are different views on the left about the Brexit referendum itself, but your position involved joining with Farage’s hegemonic campaign whose anti-immigrant thrust was just obvious.  In 2021 you also denounced anti-racist activists in Scotland who mobilised en masse to stop draconian anti-refugee deportations by Priti Patel. And you have conspicuously acted to put the far-right activist David Clews. publisher of the Unity News Network website, a sympathiser and regular attender at conferences of the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative, on platforms of No2NATONo2War. Patriotic Alternative has organised vicious harassment against refugees around the country, in tune with the far-right Tory agenda.

Unity News Network agrees with Suella Braverman, and also the racist Britain First fascist group, in the racist lie that ‘grooming gangs’ are generally the work of South Asian Muslim men, when in fact such criminality exists among all communities. This is a far right, racist slur intended to lead to violent racist attacks. Unity News Network has a plethora of articles on its website containing such innuendos about South Asian Muslims, which are a common element of the far right in and out of the Tory Party.

It seems to us that there is a huge contradiction between your earlier positions and the dubious alliances you seem to have drifted into today. We would like to be able to support your candidacy on a similar basis to those in 2005 and 2012, as a defender of the working class and its most abused and oppressed sections.

Therefore, we appeal to you to reassert your earlier anti-racist position and denounce the likes of Clews, Patriotic Alternative, and all the rest of these far-right elements, stand up for the oppressed Muslim communities and Asylum Seekers and refugees, and denounce the government’s anti-immigrant measures tooth and nail, as well as Starmer’s Labour Party that goes along with so much of that as it goes along with support for genocide in Gaza and anti-Russian Nazis in Ukraine.

In the absence of such a break with such far-right allies, and in the absence of a championing of the Immigrant-derived working-class communities in London and the country in general, we could only regard your candidacy as tainted and not supportable.

Yours sincerely

By Davey Heller (classconscious.org, Australia)

It is likely unclear to many of the millions marching, week after week, against Israel’s murderous rampage of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, that they are part of an unprecedented movement. The only remotely comparable global protests occurred in February 2003, when up to 15 million people marched against the imminent US led imperialist invasion of Iraq. A comparison of the two protest movements shows however that we are currently witnessing a far more anti-imperialist and working class orientated protest movement than in 2003. This article will focus on the Australian context but as Australia is a key imperialist power and member of the “Five eyes” network there will be many parallels to other imperialist centres.

The makeup of the 2003 protest leadership and perspective of many participants, in the imperialist centres, was overwhelmingly liberal. Whilst there was genuine anti-imperialist sentiment amongst the protests the leadership included much of the liberal or “progressive” civil society including unions, churches, and social democratic forces. The war was being prosecuted by a Republican President which gave space for these liberal forces to move in opportunistically. In Australia there was a right-wing Howard led Government. Simon Crean, the then Australian Labor Party opposition leader, even spoke at the rally in Brisbane, although he was booed by the crowd when declared he would support an attack on Iraq if it had UN approval! This liberal framework of the war being “illegal” as it had not been sanctioned by the “thieves’ kitchen” of the UN Security Council was typical of much liberal “anti-war” discourse of the time.

This liberal orientation contributed to the fact the protests simply evaporated after the war started in 2003. They were built on pacifist and liberal illusions and had no perspective to continue fighting once the “shock and awe” campaign started. They were built on a healthy hatred of the horrors of war in the masses but lacked political depth.

The Palestinian solidarity protests in comparison are not being led by any such mainstream liberal/progressive forces. They are also being launched in opposition to a war being endorsed by a Democrat President and supported in Australia by State and Federal Labor governments. Most of formal civil society is too cowed or compromised to formally endorse and promote the mass protests the ruling class has slandered as “divisive” or even antisemitic. The Churches and the NGO’s who only a few months ago marched and hung banners promoting the Federal Labor Governments “YES” referendum for an at best tokenistic indigenous consultative body are conspicuously silent on Palestine.

Whilst rank and file unionists are vigorously organising in opposition to the war through the Trade Unionists for Palestine network in contrast the trade union bureaucrats in Australia are no-where to be seen or only offering token support. They do not want to expose their political patrons in the Labor Party Government.

I have attended all the marches so far in Melbourne and observed that the leadership of the protests is much more grass roots and rank and file. Significantly the Australian Palestinian community and the long-time solidarity networks are playing a massive role in organising the street protests. There was not anything equivalent in 2003 eg a diaspora Iraqi community in the west. Arab Australians and the Muslim community more generally are also playing a leadership role. The 2003 Iraq war occurred in the immediate aftermath of the declaration of the bogus “War on Terror” and it was a very difficult time for West Asian descended populations in the imperialist centres to organise politically in a visible way.

The leadership of the Palestinian community and their long-time solidarity networks has given these protests a much more left wing and anti-imperialist underpinning based on their decades long struggle and perspective.

One of the very notable elements in the imperialist centres of the US, Cananda and Australia is the linking of the struggle for Palestinian rights with the framework not just of anti-imperialism but settler colonialism. This has allowed links to be made with the struggles of indigenous peoples and First Nations of these countries who are also victims of ongoing dispossession and genocidal violence. This has manifested with activists from the “Black Sovereignty” movement, such as Senator Lydia Thorpe,  speaking at all Melbourne rallies as well as groups such as the Black Peoples Union co-organising and leading several direct actions.

The leadership and political sophistication of the Palestinian diaspora and the connections being made between the Palestinian struggle and other struggles against settler colonial violence has exploded on social media with a tsunami of pro-Palestine content. Tik Tok has been turned into a virtual “peoples university” giving a whole new generation a crash course in the history of Zionist and imperialist oppression of Palestine. Tik Tok under pressure was forced to issue a press release protesting that it was not their algorithm’s fault their platform was full of pro-Palestine content, its just that young people by and large support Palestine!

The online outpouring of support for Palestine is linked also to the Black Lives Matter Protests of 2020. Many of the content creators are US leftwing people of colour radicalised at that time who are now directly linking their own struggles against the police and US ruling class with the struggle against Zionist genocide of Palestine. This framework of fighting racialized state oppression has also influenced many young people in Australia of all backgrounds.  

The current protests are therefore grounded for many in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and often anti-capitalist if not yet Communist perspectives. This means many of the ordinary working class people involved in the protest are much more realistic than in 2003 about the king of struggle they are waging. They are aware that the protests will not be enough to end the genocide and free Palestine. They are aware the struggle will need to be broadened and deepened. They are aware that workers will need to use their collective power.  They are aware that the struggle is being waged in opposition to all factions of the ruling classes of their countries. This helps explain why the protests are growing each week rather than dissipating. It means that even if when the protests inevitably drop away in the short term, they are laying the groundwork for an ongoing anti-imperialist war struggle in a way that the 2003 protests just failed to do.

They are aware they are dealing with a Zionist government that is backed by the US and all Western imperialist powers. They are also aware of the deep hypocrisy and sickening immorality of these powers “standing with Israel” supposedly in the name of human rights and democracy whilst a genocide is committed in front of them in real time! This is obviously what educators call a “teachable” moment for the worlds working classes!

Twenty years after the 2003 anti-war protests, the capitalist crisis has deepened. Hard lessons have been learned by the working class on many fronts. The betrayal and true nature of social democratic, liberal and progressive forces has deepened and the entire ruling class has moved to the right. The ruling class is revealing its true nature as authoritarian or outright fascist war mongers and the pretence of humanitarian imperialism is dropping away under the class pressures of the moment. I truly believe that these protests are part of a process which is making it clearer to the masses of the world whose side of the barricades they must be on. It’s a dangerous moment and the Communist left is not nearly as organised as it needs to be internationally but nevertheless the age of war and revolution is arriving whether the Left is ready or not!

Joint statement of classconscious.org and the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI)

The US is trying to protect the genocide carried out by Israel against the Palestinians by threatening to include Yemen in the massacre through Operation Prosperity Guardian. And what is the crime of the Yemenis? Standing up actively, courageously and militarily in defence of the Palestinians, which is what all lovers of humanity and defenders of innocent lives should do at this moment. Since the beginning of the massacre in Gaza, the largest and fastest extermination of civilians and children since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yemeni guerrillas have been attacking ships serving Israel in the Red Sea, an operation that, however heroic it may be, is nowhere near as effective as the criminal blockade imposed by Israel against the Palestinian population.

As Communists and proletarian internationalists, we salute the armed action of the Ansarallah (supporters of God) movement, better known as the Houthi, which holds power in much of Yemen, for instituting an armed blockade of Israel by seizing and attacking Israeli-owned shipping, and now threatening the same against all Israel-bound maritime traffic. The motive for this is completely straightforward and laudable, as they told Al Jazeera:

“If Gaza does not receive the food and medicines it needs, all ships in the Red Sea bound for Israeli ports, regardless of their nationality, will become a target for our armed forces.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/9/yemens-houthis-warn-they-will-target-all-israel-bound-ships-in-red-sea

This has already been delivered to a considerable extent. It has caused big problems for major shipping lines, many of whom use the Red Sea, where 10% of world trade (https://www.infomoney.com.br/mundo/risco-de-ataques-faz-bp-redirecionar-transporte-maritimo-e-evitar-o-mar-vermelho/) is carried out,  to supply Israel, and to and pass through the Suez Canal to other destinations. Up to 11 of them have suspended their use of the Red Sea route. According to the International Business Times:

“Shipping firms MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM and Haag-Lloyd and have all suspended operations, already diverting over $35 billion in Red Sea cargo. At least 103 ships have been redirected from the Red Sea this week, adding thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope to voyages and complicating last-minute holiday shipments between Asia and Europe.

Oil major British Petroleum (BP) announced Monday that it has paused all shipments through the Suez Canal due to ‘deteriorating security’; Equinor told CNBC on Monday that it had rerouted a number of oil and gas shipments but had yet to take a decision on pausing future ones.”

https://www.ibtimes.com/oil-prices-rebound-after-houthi-attacks-red-sea-bp-equinor-pause-shipping-through-suez-3721010

This has cost Israel billions of dollars already, and is both a military and a financial pressure. It has also raised the price of oil internationally, and could conceivably result in a new burst of global inflation. Yet this is not the Houthi’s doing – they are simply fighting for basic humanity, as they see it, in part driven by humane motives derived from their form of Shi’a Islam. The Houthi have made clear that they are not targeting shipping generally, but only Israeli shipping in response to the genocidal mass murder currently going on in Gaza and Palestine. They have explicitly stated that their particular aim is “complete closure of the shipping route for any vessels destined to dock at the port of Eilat” (https://swentr.site/news/589534-us-israel-gaza-houthis/).

Outside of that context, they have been conciliatory. They told Al Jazeera that they would halt their attacks if Israel’s “crimes in Gaza stop and food, medicines and fuel are allowed to reach its besieged population.” (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/19/yemens-houthis-will-not-stop-red-sea-attacks-until-israel-stops-gaza-war) They are pointedly not targeting non-Israeli shipping, and have made that particularly clear regarding Russian maritime traffic. As with Gaza, it is the US that is insisting on escalating this situation.

The Biden administration has put together a supposed ‘international coalition’ of ‘partners’ who are supposed to send naval forces to threaten the Houthi and ostensibly safeguard maritime traffic. Its title, Operation Prosperity Guardian, actually indicates the callous and genocidal nature of the threats against Yemen in support of the holocaust of Palestinians in Gaza. For the Biden administration, like the Zionists, the Palestinian victims of genocide are untermenschen. (subhuman). What counts is ‘prosperity’, i.e., the profits of imperialist capital. Rarely has the ideological link between profits and genocide been laid out so baldly by a US imperialist administration which has claimed in the past to be motivated by ‘liberal’ and ‘humanitarian’ motives in its armed actions. That pretence is now utterly destroyed by the US’ open support for the genocide in Gaza.

The supposed ‘coalition of the willing’ that the US has put together to face down the Houthi, has not proved very willing at all. The US hoped that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt would join with them in this, but all three have refused to get involved. That is a major blow to its credibility. Spain’s government has said it is thinking with the “utmost prudence” before deciding whether to join the coalition. Australia opted to send a small number of troops to support the operation, rather than send a warship, as initially requested by the US.

The only Gulf State that is part of it is Bahrain, whose population is mainly Shi’a but whose sectarian royal elite are Sunni – and extremely repressive to, and at war with, Bahrain’s 70% Shi’a majority. Saudi Arabia, as a close US and Israeli ally over the last decades, itself fought a near-genocidal war, supplied by both the US and Israel – and failed to dislodge the Houthi, whose base of support in Yemen is deep-going and proved unbreakable. It became clear in that conflict, that if it had gone on, the Houthi had the armed capacity to destroy Saudi Arabia’s oil production facilities. So, the Houthi are not exactly scared of US imperialism, and are confident that if attacked they will inflict similar defeats on them.

The refusal of Saudi/UAE/Egypt to get involved is a serious blow to the US, they were all were formerly staunch client states. The failure of the US-led proxy war to defeat Russia in Ukraine has produced a major shift in geopolitics. One manifestation of that is the Saudi-Iran rapprochement in early 2023, brokered by China, which seems to have begun a chain of events leading to Saudi, the UAE and Egypt (along with Iran itself) agreeing to join BRICS, which will formally take place on Jan 1^st 2024. Fear of the Houthi, as well as this shift against the US internationally seem to have combined with the extremely negative impact of the US support for genocide in Gaza and the huge wave of rage in the Global South at this, causing the US-led anti-Houthi coalition to substantially collapse pretty much before it has got off the ground. As Sputnik reported:

“…apart from the ships of US Task Force 153, which includes between three and five US destroyers, the British HMS Diamond missile destroyer and a Greek Navy frigate, the coalition is shaping up to include only a handful of troops from US-allied countries, including the Netherlands (which is sending two officers), Norway (10 officers), Australia (11 troops), Canada (three officers), and Denmark (one officer). France and Italy have each indicated that any naval forces they have in the region will remain under national command, while Spain said it will not take part in any military operation unless it is under the direction of NATO or the EU.”

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231223/houthis-brush-off-us-threats-vow-to-intensify-anti-israeli-ops-if-gaza-conflict-not-halted-1115767590.html

This is not a formidable force, and will not have the Houthi quaking in their boots at the power of the US-led coalition. In any case, as internationalist communists and defenders of the very lives, as well as the elementary rights of Palestinians, Yemenis, and all the peoples of the Middle East, the defeat of Israel and the US, and the victory of the Palestinian and Yemeni forces fighting against them, is very much in the interest of the world working class. It is that which we as communists stand for, as part of our fight for world socialist revolution.

For an immediate and unconditional ceasefire!

For the release of all Palestinian and Arab prisoners from Israel’s dungeons!

For the right of return of all refugees from Nabka!

For the end of the Nazi-Zionist State!

For a socialist and multi-ethnic Palestinian State!

For the victory of the Resistance axis over imperialism!

For the socialist federation of the peoples of West Asia!

Fake ‘Anti-Terrorism’ Arrests and Charges Against Opponents of Gaza Holocaust!

The recent arrests on fake ‘anti-terrorism’ charges of Tony Greenstein, who is a long-time defender of Palestinian rights, was one of the founders of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), and is a leading member of the Socialist Labour Network (SLN), and of Mick Napier, a leading figure of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) are transparently fraudulent. They are a deliberate, premeditated attack on democratic rights of opponents of the rampant Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

The accusations against them, of giving support to a ‘proscribed organisation’ (Mick Napier has actually been charged with this) are in both cases insulting to anyone of normal intelligence. Both of these individuals are long-time labour movement and socialist activists and the supposition that either of them is in some way a supporter of either the political or military wing of Hamas (a nationalist organisation with a dominant Islamic religious ideology), both of which are proscribed by the British government, is obviously a complete fabrication.

Both have had imposed on them outrageous bail conditions aimed at stopping them from campaigning for the Palestinians, from using the internet and social media and even mobile phones (without police surveillance), and in Tony’s case from staying overnight away from his home, which affects personal arrangements for the care of his disabled child. In Mick’s case, he has been banned from the centre of his native Glasgow, and from all protests. Tony has similar bans from protests, even though he has not actually been charged. Furthermore, since recently he was given a suspended sentence after being convicted in an earlier rigged trial for ‘criminal damage’ against the criminal armourer of Israeli genocide, Elbit Systems (an Israeli arms company which operates in Britain), as part of Palestine Action, this fraudulent potential charge puts his freedom at risk.

The attempt at suppressing public political protest and dissent is transparent here. This has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘terrorism’ and makes a complete mockery of the concept even in bourgeois terms.

What they are actually being attacked for is expressing support to the Palestinian people in their just struggle against Zionist oppression, ethnic cleansing and mass extermination. This struggle is under the leadership, in part, of Hamas as well as other trends within the Palestinian body politic, from secular nationalists such as the principled wing of Fatah, bourgeois democrats like the Palestinian National Initiative, to communist-inclined trends such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as other religious trends like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Its laughable that Mick Napier and Tony Greenstein are being associated with supporting Hamas as a political trend; such allegations could only be made by conscious liars and wannabe perjurers. There are plenty of such people in the Friends of Israel factions of all the major bourgeois parties, and no doubt senior police officers who inhabit the same ruling class milieux. The fact that such crooked cops and the politicians giving them their marching orders cannot escape from, is that under bourgeois ‘international law’ even, the right of an oppressed and occupied people to resist their oppressors is explicitly legal and indeed sanctified – provided it can be enforced against big money, and the power of capital, Zionism and imperialism to subvert even elementary formal democratic rights under (bourgeois) democracy.

Obviously, where the Western ruling classes are using a law against a particular organisation (characterised as ‘terrorist’) to try to justify the mass terrorism and murder of their own ally, the Israeli racist ethnocracy, statements made in support of the Palestinian people which proceed under the leadership of trends like Hamas, can be mendaciously distorted and taken out of context in order falsely accuse activists of giving support to a particular trend. The ruling class resorts to such mendacity because it does not (yet) dare to proscribe support for the Palestinian people tout court, renouncing bourgeois international law, and thereby openly embrace Nazi-like genocide. Though it is doing this by stealth on behalf of the current Israeli regime, which includes open fascists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who outflank the prolific mass murderer Netanyahu from the far right, that is really what they are trying to do.

The other thing these lowlifes are doing is falsely accusing Palestine solidarity activists of ‘anti-Semitism’, for noting the similarity of Israel’s genocidal slaughter with Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. But the problem is that the resemblance is strictly factual, so they end up arresting people for saying things that anyone with any basic humanity who is not blinded by bigoted pro-Zionist racist prejudice should say. Thus Ranjeet Brar, a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist) was arrested a few weeks ago for selling a clearly anti-racist, anti-Zionist pamphlet whose cover equates the Zionist use of the Star of David with the Nazi use of the Swastika.

Of course, both were originally pure religious symbols, the Swastika for Hinduism and some forms of Buddhism, the Star of David for Judaism, but their dominant contemporary meaning is genocidal. The police have put out ‘wanted’ posters for other protesters making similar points about Israel’s Nazi-like practice. The earlier police arrest of Yael Khan, a Jewish woman many of whose family were murdered in the Nazi holocaust, for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ for talking about the ‘Gaza Holocaust’, completely backfired – charging such a person with racism against themselves was a complete non-starter legally – she was released without charge or any bail conditions.

The obvious mendacity and indeed rampant stupidity of these arrests are really manifestations of gutter-level anti-Arab racism by the cops and the far-right politicians, like Sunak, Cleverly, Braverman (who went too far in trying to ban mass pro-Palestine demonstrations and had to be sacked) as well as similar genocidal racists like Starmer in the Labour Party who back them up.

The racist Zionists in the government and its lackeys in the Starmer leadership of the Labour Party are hysterical about the popular antipathy for their support for genocide in Gaza. Both the government and Starmer publicly supported the ‘right’ of Israel to wage war on the population of Gaza using starvation as a weapon of war, as Human Rights Watch belated said about Israel’s blitzkrieg. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant publicly announced Israel’s intention to deprive the population of Gaza, who he described as ‘human animals’, of food, fuel and even drinking water.

This is as clearly exterminationist as the Nazi use of gas chambers in Auschwitz and similar places, and the pathetic apologias put forward by mendacious apologists in the media, like Julia Hartley-Brewer and similar genocidaire hacks, that Gallant was talking about Hamas and not the population of Gaza, do not hold water at all. Hamas evidently have their own military supplies as any minimally efficient military force would.  He was clearly talking about the population of Gaza itself.

Many Zionist political monsters have corroborated this including Netanyahu himself, who in a nationwide address cited the Biblical ‘Amalek’ tale where the ancient Israelites are supposed to have slaughtered the entire ‘enemy’ population, including women, children, babies and even owned animals, to motivate what Israel is doing in Gaza. Other leading politicians, such as Israel President Herzog and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett have mocked the idea that there are any ‘innocent’ civilians in Gaza, even babies. As is well known, over 10,000 children, including numerous babies, have been brutally slaughtered in less than three months of this demented genocidal massacre. The rate of child murder in what has now become the Gaza extermination camp has actually outpaced the average rate of child murder in Auschwitz in the four years of its operation from 1941-5.

But that didn’t stop the Sunak government, Cleverly, etc ad nauseum, from backing Gallant, Netanyahu, etc to the hilt, using grossly exaggerated claims of Hamas atrocities and brutality on 7^th October as an alibi for supporting this genocide. Keir Starmer, questioned by Nick Ferrari at the beginning of Israel’s onslaught, clearly stated that Israel “has that right”, i.e., the right to deprive Palestinian civilians of food, fuel and drinking water – as noted, a clear act of genocidal intent. Fabricated blood libels about supposed mass rape, beheading and cooking babies, etc, were levelled against Hamas by these genocidaires to justify Israel’s slaughter.

The falsity of these claims has increasingly been exposed: many of the claims of rape and baby murder were fabricated by a racist outfit, ZAKA, founded by a notorious, convicted serial rapist (of victims of both sexes), and extremist Orthodox Jewish/Zionist fanatic, Yehuda Meshi Zahav. As the falsity of these claims was exposed, their current leader, Yossi Laudau, stated that anyone who questions ZAKA’s version of these events ‘should be killed’. The claims that Hamas massacred over a thousand civilians (in fact a third of the deaths on Oct 7^th were from the Israeli military) have been exposed as fake given the now-proven mass application of Israel’s Hannibal Directive, the deliberate killing of their own troops and even civilians to prevent them being captured by an enemy. A number of accounts by Israeli survivors of the Oct 7^th action have exposed how many of the civilians who died were killed by Israeli tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Much of the extensive damage done to cars and buildings around the kibbutzim and the music festival from which hostages were taken by Hamas show that heavy weapons were responsible which Hamas simply don’t have, but the IDF are armed to the teeth with. The most that can be said about the Hamas operation is that some non-Hamas elements followed them through the demolished Gaza fence and sought their own revenge on ordinary Israelis for previous barbarities committed against Gaza people. But compared to the mass Hannibal perpetrated by the IDF, this was a small proportion of what happened. This is what the evidence points to, and is becoming clearer as more evidence emerges as to what happened.

Not only should all charges be dropped against Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier, Ranjeet Brar et al, but those politicians from the Tory government, the bourgeois parties including Labour, who support repression against Palestine defenders, are complicit and guilty of aiding and abetting this genocide. We need an organised workers’ militia, millions strong, based on mass trade unions, to combat the bourgeois police, give them a “bloody good hiding”, in the words of Bernie Grant, and replace their socially useful functions. We need a workers’ government counterposed to all these despicable, racist, murderous parties which, far from criminalising opponents of genocide, will criminalise its supporters and subject them to revolutionary workers’ justice. These far right, murderous genocidal scum need to get what the fascist Russian Black Hundreds got from the revolutionary Cheka after 1917, or what Nazi human garbage (who failed to commit suicide) like Streicher and Frick got from the Nuremburg Trials.

In the camp of Venezuela, against Exxon Mobil and Anglo-Yankee imperialism!

Communist Party (Brazil)

Bolshevik Militant Tendency (Argentina)

Essequiba Guyana, also known as Essequibo territory, historically belongs to Venezuela. It has an area of ​​159,542 km² that the Cooperative Republic of Guyana administers as its own, but whose sovereignty is claimed by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela based on the Geneva Agreement of February 17, 1966.

Guyana Essequiba has been part of Venezuelan territory since the time of the Captaincy General of Venezuela. It was seized in 1899, through a fraudulent arbitration award established between the United States and Great Britain, which also took over a large part of the territory of Venezuela (it also took even a part of the territory of Brazil) which ceded the territory of Venezuela to Great Britain.

“The Venezuelan position was based on the fact that the border should be the midline of the Essequibo River, by virtue of the principle Uti possidetis iure (as you possessed, you will continue to possess) by which it corresponded to the territories of the former Captaincy General of Venezuela at the time of its independence in 1810, which, it is alleged, had the Essequibo River as its eastern boundary…” the United Kingdom’s position had “as its greatest aspiration to reach as far as the mouth of the Orinoco River and control its navigation”.

Wikipedia: Arbitration Report of Paris, report on the Guayana Esequiba in the XIX century

The territory of Guyana Essequiba was part of a territorial dispute that Venezuela historically had with the United Kingdom at the time when Guyana was formally part of the British colonial empire. Today, behind the siege on Guyana are American and British interests.

“Venezuela’s claim has intensified since the discovery of oil in the Essequibo by ExxonMobil in 2015. Guyana last month announced another major discovery that adds at least 10 billion barrels to the country’s reserves, making them larger than those of Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates. Guyana, therefore, has the largest per capita oil reserves in the world and Venezuela, the largest proven reserves on the planet.”

Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis, Esequibo: sovereignty, petroleum… and Exxon Mobil, 12/02/2023

In 2011, Guyana unilaterally decided to make modifications to its maritime continental shelf for oil exploration, affecting Venezuela’s territorial sea, without prior notice from Guyana to the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In March 2015, tension rose again between Guyana  and Venezuela , following Guyana’s announcement that it would sanction oil exploration in the waters of the Stabroek Block by the North American company Exxon Mobil.  This company is a corporation resulting from the process of maxi-concentration of imperialist capital, from the merger of the companies Exxon, Mobil and Esso, all from the USA. It is one of the “four sisters” global cartel of multinational oil companies, formerly known as the criminal “seven sisters” of the 1960s. The other three are Chevron-Texaco, Shell and BP. The concern arises because the Stabroek Block is located in disputed waters with Venezuela.

Therefore, we are more than anything else in a dispute between Venezuela and the imperialist oil corporations, in this case Exxon Mobil.

According to the Association of Petrobrás Engineers, AEPET,

“The small South American state, Guyana, has recently emerged as what is being described as the world’s hottest offshore oil frontier. A consortium led by ExxonMobil controls the prolific 6.6 million-acre Stabroek block offshore Guyana, where more than 30 world-class oil discoveries have been made and is at the centre of the former British colony’s burgeoning oil boom. Exxon, the operator of Stabroek, which holds a 45% stake, with 30% held by partner Hess and the remaining 25% by Beijing-based CNOOC, is ideally positioned to be the biggest beneficiary of Guyana’s oil boom. The consortium guaranteed especially favourable conditions for the Stabroek Block, making it an especially profitable venture, particularly for Exxon, becoming a key driver of production and profit growth.”

AEPET: Exxon is the biggest winner of the epic oil boom in Guyana, Success in Guyana shows the importance of researching the Brazilian Equatorial Margin, 09/19/2023

On December 1, the international court of justice, like all so-called multilateral organizations, dominated by imperialism, asked Venezuela not to take decisions that would alter control over the territory in dispute with Guyana, in clear reference to the referendum in Venezuela on the topic in question.

(See https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/en-espanol/noticias/story/2023-12-01/cij-emitira-fallo-sobre-referendo-de-venezuela-respecto-a-disputa-con-guyana)

Maduro’s government won the non-binding referendum on the annexation of Essequibo, in dispute with Guyana, this Sunday, 3, with more than 90% of the votes and a participation of almost 50%, according to the National Electoral Center (CNE).

(See https://elpais.com/america/2023-12-04/el-chavismo-gana-el-referendum-para-la-anexion-del-esequibo-y-eleva-la-tension-con-guyana.html)

“The five questions that would be asked to the citizens, the people’s response being as follows:

1) Do you agree to reject, by all means, in accordance with the law, the line fraudulently imposed by the Paris arbitration award of 1899 which seeks to deprive us of our Essequiba Guyana? 97.83% of people answered “Yes” and 2.17% answered “No”.

2) Do you support the 1966 Geneva Agreement as the only valid legal instrument to reach a practical and satisfactory solution for Venezuela and Guyana with regard to the dispute over the territory of Guyana Essequiba? 98.11% responded “Yes” and 1.8% responded “No”.

3) Do you agree with Venezuela’s historical position of not recognizing the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice to resolve the territorial dispute over Guiana Essequiba? 95.40% responded “Yes” and 4.10% responded “No”.

4) Do you agree to oppose, by all means, in accordance with the law, Guyana’s claim to unilaterally dispose of a pending sea to be delimited, illegally and in violation of international law? 95.94% responded “Yes” and 4.06% responded “No”.

5) You agree to the creation of the state of Guayana Esequiba and the development of an accelerated plan for the comprehensive care of the current and future population of that territory, which includes, among others, the granting of Venezuelan citizenship and identity cards, in accordance with the Geneva Agreement and International Law, consequently incorporating the State on the map of Venezuelan territory? 95.93% responded “Yes” and 4.07% responded “No”.

The Anglo-Saxon imperialist media, replicated by its parrot agencies in Latin America, tries to sell the version that Venezuela wants to invade poor Guyana to take its recently discovered oil, but the historical reality is the opposite.

The reconquest of this territory, or at least the demand for it, corresponds not only to a brake on the historically oppressed country, Venezuela, in the face of imperialism’s rapacious expansionist aspirations, but it is also another symptom of the decline of imperialism in its courtyard. back, which allows the oppressed Venezuelan nation to dispute what was stolen from it at the birth of the imperialist era of capitalism.

Who is interested in a conflict in this region?

This region, like all of Latin America, is of interest to imperialism. Therefore, it is not something as simple as “returning to Venezuela what rightfully belongs to it”. A conflict in the region could lead to yet another proxy war that will serve imperialist interests in the sale of weapons and ammunition and also a possible intervention by US imperialism in the region.

The threat of a war in Latin America is an integral part of the wars between Anglo-Saxon-EU imperialism and the oppressed peoples ongoing in Ukraine and Palestine. Also, in these other hot conflicts of the current cold war between NATO and the BRICS, there are disputes for control of the main energy matrix of the imperialist era, oil. In Ukraine, the war, intentionally provoked by the USA, was to abort the process of supplying Russian gas to Europe. In Palestine, the Zionist enclave of Israel seeks not only to evacuate Palestinians from their land but also to seize rich Palestinian gas and oil reserves. And, strategically, there is the geopolitics of an imperialism that has been trying to carry out a successful coup d’état in Venezuela for 20 years, losing space in global control.

For some time now, the presence of US troops carrying out training in the Amazon has been reported in the alternative media. This catches our attention even more. It may be that they are not just in training, but preparing for the moment of attack. “Troops with more than 60 United States military personnel arrived at Belém Air Base to participate, for the first time, in special training with the Brazilian Army in the Amazon.” (G1 – For the first time, US troops arrive in the Amazon for training with the Brazilian Army; VIDEO).

If they are preparing for an invasion, they are probably doing all the necessary research to organize it.

Venezuela’s mobilization, both political and military, is defensive and fair from a historical point of view and even more so from the point of view of Latin America’s sovereignty in relation to imperialism and its multinationals. Maduro is reacting, carrying out a counter-offensive, as Hamas and other Palestinian organizations have also done, as Russia did against NATO’s expansionism towards Eastern Europe. All these counter-offensives are symptoms of a historical moment of external and internal weakening of US imperialism and its system of global geopolitical domination. It is imperialism that is pursuing the war, because it wants both the natural and energy riches of the region as a reason to militarily attack Venezuela, and as a way to win the commercial-diplomatic dispute with China over Guyana.

Diálogo Chino: China extends its reach Guyana, 28/01/2019

The conflict, still political and diplomatic for now, is a time bomb. The following factors conspire for the explosion to occur: the recent discoveries of a lot of oil in an area historically in dispute, the concern of imperialism with the region where the Cuban workers’ state is located, the greatest enemy of the USA since 1961, aggravated by the rise of nationalism of the Chavista left in Venezuela in the 21st century, the internal ethno-political differences not resolved in Guyana itself, which in turn also did not complete its political independence in relation to imperialism, that is, the country cannot even be classified as a semi-colony. (International Context, CINT: Guyana: Oil, Internal Disputes, the USA and Venezuela, Jan/April 2023).

We defend the political, social and military mobilization of Venezuela. We fight for “Out with Exxon-Mobil!, Out with Anglo-Saxon imperialism!”, for the joint exploitation of the wealth of Essequiba for the benefit of the people of Venezuela and Guyana, like the Itaipu and Yacireta Hydroelectric Power Plants, binational plants. The first belongs to Brazil and Paraguay. The second, respectively, to Paraguay and Argentina. When it was completed, Itaipu was the largest dam in the world, a title it held for 21 years until the construction of the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Plant in China in 2003. The Itaipu Binacional plant continues to be the world leader in clean and renewable energy production. An anti-imperialist unity between Venezuela and Guyana against imperialism and its parasitic monopolies would benefit both nations and could result in a binational enterprise superior to that of Itaipu, based on more fraternal ties of wealth distribution.

This does not seem to be the interest of the government of Irfaan Ali, president of Guyana of the   People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), a party that was born in 1950 as a labour-type party but today is a vassal of the USA, an agent of Exxon-Mobil, against Venezuela, economically and militarily, and for the exploitation of energy resources in lands and waters stolen from Venezuela. “Exxon “captured” Guyana “without firing a shot”. It is increasingly difficult to determine where the company ends and the government of the South American country begins.” (Intercept, How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot, 06/18/2023).

Intercept reporter Amy Westervelt  draws attention to a decision by a Guyanese court against the country’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Exxon – strangely, co-defendants in the case:

“Two Guyanese citizens have accused the EPA of never demanding a guarantee from Exxon that the company would cover all costs related to a possible oil spill. The oil company’s assessments indicate that such a disaster could send oil to the beaches of 14 different islands in Guyana. Caribbean – and all could hold Guyana liable for damages. The costs would be astronomical, which is why licenses for  offshore drilling  require not only a liability insurance policy independent of Exxon, but also an unlimited financial guarantee to cover costs in excess of those covered for insurance. What the oil company didn’t do and continues to not do. Exxon executives join the president of Guyana in his suite at cricket matches, and the vice president regularly holds press conferences to defend the company. Vincent Adams , a petroleum engineer from Guyana and former head of the country’s EPA, said he planned to have monitors on board Exxon platforms. “All of that has been cancelled. Even Exxon’s files and authorizations, which used to be in the document center with everyone else, are under lock and key in the director’s office,” he said. “There is no oversight going on because Exxon doesn’t want oversight…”

idem

In addition to all this, controlling the country, its resources and its governments, Exxon-Mobil, which also controls an important fraction of imperialism, intends to drag Venezuela into a war and perhaps realize the dream that British imperialism had, to conquer all the Orinoco basin, today predominantly Venezuelan. If this requires using the Guyanese people as cannon fodder, imperialism and its multinational will not hesitate, after all:

“Guyana needs money to lift its people out of poverty,  [but is now] going through another cycle of what development economists call ‘the resource curse’ – the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of natural resources ending up with less growth economy, democracy or development – ​​go do it. ‘Where is the gold money?  Where is the bauxite money?  Where is the diamond money?  Where is the sugar money?  Where is the agriculture money?  Where is the money of fishing, etc.?  The list is almost endless because we are full of wealth,’ she said.  ‘And yet the people in this country are poor.’

idem

During the Trump period, when new oil reserves were discovered in the region, the colonization of Guyana by the USA was accentuated. Using, once again, the lame justification of the “War on Drugs”, imperialism expanded the tentacles of its repressive apparatus on the continent and the siege on Venezuela and Cuba.

Irfaan Ali with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, September 2020:

“In September 2020, in a joint statement with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, President Irfaan Ali said the two countries would begin joint maritime patrols aimed at drug interdiction near Guyana’s disputed border with Venezuela, plagued by crisis. The deal came as US oil major Exxon Mobil Corp, as part of a consortium with Hess Corp, increased crude oil production from Guyana’s massive Stabroek offshore block , a large portion of which is in waters claimed by Venezuela. Pompeo and Ali added that ‘greater security, greater ability to understand its border space, what is happening within its Exclusive Economic Zone – these are all things that give Guyana sovereignty.’ “

Wikipedia: Guyana–United States relations

The Guyanese president who preceded Irfaan Ali, David A. Granger, advocated the establishment of organic US ties with Guyana, which should become a US territory or enter its Commonwealth similar to Puerto Rico. In other words, Guyana would go back from being an almost semi-colony to openly assuming the status of a US colony, like Puerto Rico. The unity of the Latin American peoples presupposes their independence from imperialism, in this case, from the government of Guyana, today, the new battering ram of imperialism against Caracas, after the failure of coups d’état, blockades, military invasions, Guidós, etc.

And the working class?

Workers are not interested in the conflict, much less the interference of US imperialism. Workers know that the existing wealth in the region, regardless of the state flag, must be used to provide better living conditions for everyone.

The unity of workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, including Venezuelans and Guyanese, is necessary against the offensive of imperialism, in this case by the Anglo-Saxon bloc, against the oppressed peoples of the region.

At this moment, we communists defend the unity of workers in the region, in defence of the great local wealth and that the interests of the respective states are never above the interests of the workers.

We must take advantage of the moment to debate the real way out for the working class in Latin America, that is, to create new, larger Cubas, without imperialist blockades, from the perspective of creating the Federation of Socialist States of Latin America.

• The case of Israeli Nazi-Zionism
• A fascist government is not yet a fascist state
• What about Russia, China and Belarus?
• Statist fascism, ultraliberal neo-fascism
• Opportunism frustrates and sectarianism divides the working class, favouring the path of reaction

By Humberto Rodrigues

Milei (Argentina), Wilders (Netherlands), Abascal (Spain), Zelensky (Ukraine), Meloni (Italy), Bolsonaro and Trump and the brutality of the Nazi-Zionist genocide are complementary manifestations of the same trend that has been infecting the bloc of nations that make up the imperialist system in the West. To a lesser or greater degree, everyone defends a policy of radicalization of neoliberalism, or ultraliberalism, a policy of complete work at the service of finance capital and imperialism.

Despite the differences between Nazism and fascism, such as the fact that Nazism involves the racist component in a more blatant way, for example, now we will not deal with the disputes between these two phenomena, but rather the similarities and differences between Nazi-fascism of the first generation, manifested between the years 1920 and 1945, and of the current one, relating to movements and governments identified with Nazi-fascist traits in the 21st century.

Deindustrialization and imperialist decay

Despite the various local particularities and differences between them, common aspects, all these contemporary phenomena are associated with the deindustrialization of the West, with the migration of industries to the East, observed in the last 50 years and, therefore, with the disarticulation of the industrial proletariat in the western countries. It should be noted that the phenomenon occurs with much less intensity in Asia, which is going through an uneven process of industrialization, and where the extreme right is only growing marginally.

The exception would be in India. Modi, leader of the most populous country in the world, is far right and India is one of the most industrializing countries. But Modi does not have enough strength to make the Indian state more fascist than it already is. Fascists aspire to stifle unions and the right to strike. The largest general strikes in history were carried out against the Modi government in 2016 (180 million workers stopped) and 2020 (250 million).

So far, fascist governments have failed to transform states into fascist states. Most of them do not last more than one term nor do they elect a successor, a phenomenon that could gain greater solidity in the coming generations if the trend is not contained and defeated.

It is quite true that for the most exploited and oppressed fractions of the proletariat, especially for blacks and Latinos in the USA, for blacks in Brazil and immigrants in almost all countries, notably in Europe, the terror of the capitalist State imposes itself in a brutal, fascist-like and independent of governments, as it has become a permanent state policy of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat in the 21st century.

The case of Israeli Nazi-Zionism

Israel did not become a Nazi State with the coming to power of an extreme right-wing government, it was already created as a Nazi State against the Palestinian population. Regardless of whether Tel Aviv is governed by Labor or Likud, Nazi-Zionist brutality has been the same for 76 years. The State of Israel was born as an artificial creature of imperialism, deforming the Jewish question in favour of big capital, representing an enclave of this system in Western Asia.

40 years ago, US Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, appointed by then President Ronald Reagan, coined the following definition about the Middle Eastern ally: “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier, it is unsinkable, it carries no soldiers American and is located in a region critical to US national security.” (BBC: Why does the US support Israel?).

The function of the Zionist entity created in 1948 is to be an extension of Anglo-Saxon imperialist policy in the region that concentrates most of the planet’s oil. So, Israel did not become fascist with the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, it was born as a Nazi state, given its racist component, segregation, apartheid and maintenance of refugee concentration camps for many decades longer than the experiences of Hitler (12 years old) and Mussolini (21 years old).

The Zionist entity is the longest-lasting expression of imperialist Nazism. Israel became what it is, under the same magic that made Nazism rise imposingly in Germany, after the humiliating German defeat in the first war and the even more humiliating Treaty of Versailles, thanks to the heavy investments of Western imperialism as a whole. At that time, to suffocate the Russian revolution and the European revolutionary processes, today, it stops to expel the Palestinians and steal their lands, rich in gas, oil and geopolitically strategic.

A fascist government is not yet a fascist state

In 1932, when theorizing about the elements indicative of the fascistisation of a State, the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote:

” From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vice of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini – the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role – but it means first of all for the most part that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism …”

How Mussolini Triumphed. From What Next? Vital Question for the German Proletariat, 1932

This formulation by Trotsky referred to the reality of Mussolini’s Italy, in a process of recent and late unification and industrialization, when the imperialist bourgeoisie needed to contain the powerful force of the proletariat and its organizations through annihilation, in order to reduce it to a state amorphous in order to then create a system of administration and social control that would curtail all proletarian opposition to the fascist regime.

The governments of the political leaders mentioned in the opening paragraph of this text have clear fascist aspirations, but the conversion of their states into complete fascist states, along the lines of Mussolini, is something that we have not seen even in the mercenary and fascist Ukraine of Poroshenko and Zelensky, where unions were physically crushed and political opposition and communism were banned. However, it may be that in the future, a new generation of rulers representing an even more decayed and desperate imperialist system will convert the States into fascist States. The most grotesque manifestations of imperialism are not things of the distant past. In the last 20 years, imperialism has gathered dozens of old, rehashed and new atrocities in its toolbox, just to list the most popular: torture in Iraq and the concentration camp in Guantánamo; armed and sponsored DAESH terrorism against Syria; bloodthirsty military occupations such as in Libya and Afghanistan; murder of hundreds of civilians with drones in various parts of the world; dozens of bacteriological weapons laboratories, explosions of gas pipelines, bridges and Nazi mercenaries in Ukraine; kidnapping, torture and murder of women and children, bombing with white phosphorus, ethnic cleansing and hospital explosions in the Gaza Strip and many coups d’état against the governments of oppressed countries. As the great geopolitical scientist Moniz Bandeira warned us: ” Empires are more dangerous when they decline “.

What about Russia, China and Belarus?

Wouldn’t the governments of China, Russia and Belarus, which also curb internal opposition and where there are almost no independent unions, also be fascist? We believe that the rise of these governments is also part of the phenomenon of the decline of the imperialist system, but as its contradiction, its antagonistic complement within the capitalist world market, expressing the resistance of oppressed and oppressing national bourgeoisies, as seen in the new cold war. Identifying the phenomenon merely by its form, divorcing it from its structural content, artificially separating it from the fact that they are instruments of imperialism is the liberal method, of capital theorists like Hannah Arendt, the theory of the two demons, etc.

Fascism is a form of government by finance capital and the imperialist system against oppressed countries and workers. Currently, the hegemonic policy of all countries subordinate to the imperialist world system is neoliberal or ultraliberal policy. These economic policies predominate in Ukraine, Italy, the USA and during Bolsonaro’s Brazil, but not in Russia, China and Belarus.

We must update concepts and enrich them with the new determinations of reality in motion. An equal sign should not be placed between the phenomena that are instruments of imperialism and those that oppose imperialism. Workers’ organizations and the political opposition also suffered persecution under Stalinism and no one thought of calling the USSR a fascist state. Russia, China and Belarus are not capitalist countries like the others, they have the historical intersection of having gone through proletarian dictatorships, they do not have anti-communist regimes nor have they deindustrialized like the West, where Nazi tendencies have grown again. We characterize that the contradictions of capitalist restoration in countries that had expropriated the bourgeoisie as a class, combined with the decline of imperialism, promoted the rise in Russia and China of a non-imperialist capitalism, deformed by decades of non-capitalist development. (Communist Party – LCFI: Marxism and the Post-Counterrevolution Cold War).

Statist fascism, ultraliberal neo-fascism

Another difference between current Nazi-fascists and those of the first generation is the relationship between nationalization and privatization of the national economy. Although Mussolini’s “corporate state” was nothing more than a thuggish agent of big capital and did not own companies, in the spirit of that time, the USSR and Keynesianism, Mussolini took advantage of the fact that “three quarters of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, are in the hands of the State” (Popollo d’Italia, May 26, 1934).

In a phase of deindustrialization also called post-Fordist, the factory proletariat, strictly speaking, and the unions, in general, weakened, the bourgeoisie does not see it necessary to pay the political cost of crushing them in order to contain the organized resistance of the proletariat.

Therefore, the new Nazi fascisms are incomplete movements, but relatively effective in terrorizing and removing historical rights from the proletariat, thus allowing the advancement of so-called ultraliberalism. And this advance on the rights of the proletariat, the expansion of exploitation, the over-spoliation, are what interests big capital most, hence the usefulness of neo-fascists.

But this new wave is also an expression of the decay of the imperialist world system, which increasingly needs to replace soft-power with far-right governments in order to maintain social control with repressive policies and co-opt a discontented fraction of the population into a kind of reactionary rebellion against traditional politicians.

Opportunism frustrates and sectarianism divides the working class, favouring the path of reaction

This political form is not only a product of imperialist decay, but also of the decay of opportunist reformism, incapable of meeting the minimum demands for survival of the working population in the midst of imperialist decay, favouring the creation of resentment within the proletariat, feeding counter-revolutionary prejudices and anti-communism. Social democracy paves the way for Nazism.

Also dogmatism, sectarianism of Trotskyist or Stalinist origin, failed to present alternatives in the face of imperialist decay. Both fractions of the communist movement that did not derail towards opportunism, fell into the opposite vice, sectarianism, the belief that capitalism is going through its terminal crisis, that we live in a pre-revolutionary situation, that it is not necessary to build united fronts against imperialism and against fascism, that the dispute between NATO and BRICS, being capitalist blocs, is a matter of indifferent to the working class. Sectarianism fragments and weakens the fight against reaction.

Add to this deindustrialization, the lack of life prospects for young people and the political apathy of new generations of the working class (which means that activists over 50 years old predominate in left-wing meetings) after almost half a century of the last proletarian revolutionary victory (Vietnam, 1975), and three decades of historic defeats such as the end of the USSR (1991), and we are faced with a situation that is conjuncturally unfavourable to the left and favourable to the political organization of the right.

All these movements are temporary and even the current revolutionary ebb that favours the rise of new Nazi-fascisms is momentary. Our time, the time of this revolutionary reflux, is also the time of the greatest social mobilizations in history, the biggest general strike in the history of Brazil (2017), the biggest general strike of the working class (India, 2020); the largest wave of anti-racist protests in the USA (2020); the largest global mobilization for the Palestinian cause in Israel’s 76 years of existence (2023).

All these great movements achieve important partial achievements, they are colossal and unprecedented demonstrations of the history of the class struggle, but they do not solve the problem that generated them because, to achieve this, it is necessary, in addition to these struggles, the conquest of power by the working class, organized into communist parties.

The demand for the Nazi way of doing politics in favour of the accumulation of capital also generates, contradictorily, for the sake of survival, the need to overcome class collaboration, quietism, anti-communism within the left, sectarianism against front-line tactics only. All this must be combined with the fight against neoliberal deindustrialization, against imperialism and for the construction of new communist and revolutionary parties that unify and organize resistance to the rise of the right, but also that penetrate the mass movement with a program to mobilize the working class against immediate barbarism and also for its strategic interests.