On January 8, after the first week of the Lula government, there was a rehearsal of a Bolsonarist coup d’état.

The coup has the connivance not only of the government of the Federal District and its police, but also had the complicity of the Ministry of Defense of the Lula government. Minister José Mucio, was in the camps with the coup leaders on Sunday morning and had presented an Army report to Lula concluding that there was a great demobilization of the Bolsonarist camps, that is, he advised them to let their guard down, which ended up favoring the coup action.

The apparatus of the Armed Forces, the intelligence sector (ABIN), the Federal Police (PF) and the Federal Highway Police (PRF) also continue to be a transmission belt of fascism. For this reason, they did not denounce the coup widely announced by all Bolsonarist circles. Worse, they did not anticipate any preventive measures or contain the caravans. On the contrary, members of the Armed Forces participated directly and even took selfies, posing in the middle of the attack on Congress.

These facts indicate that Lula does not control the federal repressive apparatus or the national intelligence agencies. The fact that these security organizations do not intervene, in fact, is a way of intervening, giving carte blanche to fascist groups.

Behind this coup rehearsal are not only those who paid for the caravans, buses, logistics, cost allowance and accommodation, but also financial capital, the big merchants, owners of food networks, the landowners, in short, the bourgeoisie and imperialism, the banks and the media, which have been trying to sabotage the Lula government since its early days with economic measures such as increasing fuel prices.

This siege pushes the Lula government to become hostage to the repressive apparatus still under Bolsonarist control.

There is only one way to defeat the coup: a broad popular mobilization. This is the only way we can guarantee workers’ rights, including a real increase in the minimum wage.

No conciliation! No tolerance! No amnesty for coup!

The Bolsonarist coup d’état rehearsal carried out now in 2023 in Brazil is much more serious and stronger than the 2021 assault of the Trumpists on the Capitol. Trump did not have the support of the Pentagon and most of the CIA. Bolsonaristas have the support of a large Brazilian repressive arc to overthrow the Lula government and attack the people..

Democracy is health, education, land, work, real wages, transportation for the working population and not the continuation of robbery and the constant threat of coup d’état and Bolsonarist fascism.

Consistent Democrats’ statement (8 Jan 2023)

Tony Greenstein, the long-time Jewish leftist with left-Bundist¹ politics and author of the encyclopaedic work Zionism During the Holocaust, has issued a denunciation of Peter Gregson, the initiator of Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism (LAZIR), the Campaign Against Bogus Anti-Semitism (CABA), and now One Democratic Palestine.  His denunciation is a sectarian tirade based on logic-chopping and a flinch from drawing the hard conclusions of his own thinking, something that Tony does repeatedly, not just over Zionism and bogus anti-Semitism accusations, but also Ukraine.

It appears that one important reason for this is Peter’s initiation of One Democratic Palestine, which aims to fight for solidarity with Palestinians based on the demand for a single democratic, multi-ethnic Palestinian state to replace Israel. An objective which Tony correctly supports, but evidently also considers it outrageous that an ‘interloper’ like Peter Gregson should try to create such a campaign.

The tirade claims to represent “A Political Health Warning – Why Palestine Solidarity Activists Should Have Nothing to do with Peter Gregson” and goes on to assert that “Whilst there are very few anti-Semites who support the Palestinians – Gregson is the exception that proves the rule”. Yet when he attempts to prove any of this, he entangles himself in an awful mess of self-contradiction.

For a start, he accurately enough notes that Peter Gregson was expelled, at his instigation, from Labour Against the Witchhunt (in May 2019). However, this statement contains a blatant falsehood:

“…he put up a petition on his website linking to an article by Holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom who had written a ‘literature review’ on ‘The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion’.

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2023/01/whilst-there-are-very-few-anti.html

There was no link to Kollerstrom’s article in Peter Gregson’s 22 March 2019 Petition update. As the screenshots below show, there was a link to another article, by Ian Fantom, titled UK’s Labour Antisemitism Split, which contained a long section of quotes from Theodore Herzl’s diaries and a brief mention of Kollerstrom’s article (with link). Peter also mentions the link in Fantom’s article and clearly condemned the Kollerstrom article as ‘toxic’ in the same paragraph. There was neither a link to, nor an endorsement of, Kollerstrom’s article in Peter’s update. On the basis of that fabrication and falsehood, Tony initiated the expulsion of Peter from Labour Against the Witchhunt. And a bunch of foolish, gullible people pretended it was true and voted for his expulsion on that basis!

Tony’s falsehood about Peter’s fictitious link to Kollerstrom’s article becomes completely ridiculous since in his current article there is a REAL, DIRECT link to the same Kollerstrom article. So, if LAW still existed, and both Tony and Peter were members of it, on the same basis as before, Peter would have every right to move Tony’s expulsion on a charge of linking to Kollerstrom’s toxic ‘holocaust-sceptic’ article. And unlike in 2019, the accusation would be true! Tony’s motto is clearly “Do as I say, not do as I do!” Well, what’s sauce for the goose …. (of course, we are not for Tony’s expulsion from anything, just for an end to this hypocritical, sectarian smearing rubbish!)

The whole allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ against Peter is a load of nonsense. Previously, Tony has said that several people, including Ian Donovan of the Consistent Democrats, Peter Gregson, and the Israeli Jazz musician/political writer Gilad Atzmon are “politically, but not personally anti-Semitic”. Yet all three of these have no antipathy for Jews whatsoever, as Tony himself has noted, and frequently work with Jewish people, positively cite Jewish people on politics, etc. An anti-Semite is someone who exhibits “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group” (Mirriam-Webster dictionary). Just by saying these people are “politically, but not personally anti-Semitic” Tony contradicts this, as to be anti-Semitic such hostility and discrimination must be demonstrated. He evidently does not believe what he says.

What is more, Tony actually denies that Anti-Semitism today is even a form of racism. Indeed he has written articles headlined: “Why Anti-Semitism is no longer a form of racism –it’s a Marginal Prejudice confined to the fascist fringe” in which he writes:

“It’s true that Jews are a minority but they are not an oppressed minority. Millionaires are also a minority but they are not oppressed. Racists are also a minority which is why the far-Right identitarian movement uses the language of identity politics.”

[…]

“There is no offence of driving whilst Jewish but driving whilst Black is a crime. Jews are not victims of police violence, imprisoned or found dead in police custody because they are Jewish. There is no discernible discrimination against Jews.

“Of course there is individual prejudice, a legacy of the past.“

https://tonygreenstein.com/2021/06/why-anti-semitism-is-no-longer-a-form-of-racism-its-a-marginal-prejudice-confined-to-the-fascist-fringe/

In recent work on Zionism and the Holocaust, he repeats this point, while the bit about it being confined to the ‘fascist fringe’ appears absent. In his tirade, he denounces Peter for a passage where Peter says:

“To say Jews in the UK have great leverage is not anti-Semitic, it is just a statement of fact. Like saying an Eton education gets you into Parliament. Or Muslims don’t like alcohol and fear speaking out about Islamophobia. Or Scots are ‘good with money’, i.e. not profligate. Or Germany has an enormous collective guilt over the holocaust, while Austria, its partner in crime, has not. Or London has many rich Russian oligarchs…”

Apparently, this is terrible racism, and the person who believes it should be shunned. Bizarre, since Tony himself said that “Jews are a minority … but … not an oppressed minority”. He may just as well denounce Peter for his facetious remarks about Scots (Peter is Scottish). Its trivia, Tony himself does not believe there is anything wrong with it, just as he does not believe there is anything wrong with linking to Kollerstrom’s article on the CODOH website. The evidence of that is that Tony did it himself, in this very article!

The Nazi genocide in Hungary

He also denounces Peter for making the following allegation about Zionist involvement in shepherding Jews to the gas chambers in Hungary:

“These were the people that Hitler gassed. With Zionist support. Proof? Over the period 1942-44, Rabbi Weissmandl of Hungary made a deal with Adolf Eichmann…”

But Peter was not accusing this (non-Zionist) Rabbi of being involved in the extermination. Very much the opposite … he is saying that this Rabbi tried to put together a scheme to buy the freedom of Hungarian and Slovakian Jews from the Nazis. There were over 720,000 Jews in Hungary at that time, including tens of thousands who had fled from Slovakia, and another 100,000 or more Christian ex-Jewish converts. He became an impassioned anti-Zionist because Zionists refused to help with the scheme. This Slovakian Rabbi apparently tried to do this and was rebuffed by Zionist leaders in Hungary. This is undoubtedly a source of pride for Naturei Karta, itself a dissident strand of Judaism. Quite how it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to mention it defies belief. It seems that Tony is upset at Peter’s association with NK and seeking to smear him in a crude manner.

Tony makes the same accusation as the one Peter cites, against the leading Zionist in Hungary, Rudolph Kasztner, who knowing full well that Jews who were deported to Auschwitz were being gassed, systematically hid this from the bulk of Hungarian Jews, and indeed made deals with the Nazis, with Adolf Eichmann as his chief interlocutor, to allow a small minority of wealthy Zionist Jews to emigrate to Palestine in exchange for offering no resistance to the deportation (to gas chambers) of the majority. He clearly worked with the Zionist leadership in Palestine and its agents in doing this.

Tony himself, in his major work, relates that Kasztner “received a copy of the [Auschwitz] Protocols [a detailed account of the Auschwitz extermination process by two escapees] at the end of April [1944]. The Protocols were also sent to the Zionist liaison office in Istanbul, as well as to Nathan Shwalb [a leading Zionist in Switzerland]”. Tony then notes that “Schwalb was ‘reluctant to publicise the news about Auschwitz’” and concludes “This reluctance probably stemmed from his desire not to upset Kasztner’s negotiations with the SS.” (Greenstein, Zionism During the Holocaust, pp199-200).

Then Tony writes about the involvement of the Zionist top layers both in this, and in covering it up, in connection with the Kasztner libel trial in Israel in 1954, where some truth about this criminality was aired for the first time:

“Why did the Israeli state insist on a libel action on behalf of Kasztner? Clearly it believed that it could bury the rumours of collaboration between the JA [Jewish Agency] and the Nazis….

“Instead of exonerating Kasztner the trial achieved the exact opposite. Kastner effectively became the defendant. Kastner’s boasting of a special relationship with the SS and his stay as a guest of the Gestapo in Vienna was seen as particularly ‘repulsive’.

“Hungarian holocaust survivors testified that if they had known the truth about the Holocaust then they would have tried to escape… It was estimated that 4000-5000 Jews escaped across the Romanian border in any event.”

“Kasztner and his associates actively dissuaded the Jews of Kolozsvar from escaping. Joseph Katz, a lawyer from Nodvarod, four miles from the Romanian border, testified that its Jews knew nothing of Auschwitz.”

(p206-7)

Tony then speaks of the verdict against Kasztner in the trial and quotes the judge that Kasztner had “sold his soul to the devil”. “It was a damning verdict, not just on Kasztner but the Jewish Agency” said Tony, noting that the decision of the Israeli state to appeal caused the fall of Moshe Shertok’s government in 1955. Kasztner was then murdered, in circumstances that do suggest a state attempt to erase the question, given that Shin Bet withdrew his personal protection even though a government-funded appeal was in train. When the appeal came to court, in 1957, Tony noted that:

“If Kasztner were convicted, then the Zionist leadership itself stood condemned.”

p213

And when the court overturned the charge of collaboration, he noted that the “judgement was overturned on legal and political grounds”, and then cited the wife of one of the Auschwitz escapers and author of the Auschwitz Protocols, Rudolf Vrba:

“What Kasztner did was unbelievable because people had the right to have this information… Rudolph was very bitter about the fact than Kasztner was regarded as a hero in Israel while he and Wetzler [the other escaper and co-author of the Protocols] went unrecognised”.

p214

All this is sufficient to more than substantiate Peter Gregson’s statement that Jews from Hungary were gassed “with Zionist support”. That’s what the collaboration of Kasztner, and the Zionist Agency, implicating the leadership of the Yishuv [the proto-Zionist state in colonised Palestine before 1948], amounted to. That’s what Tony’s evidence in his book points to. It seems that Tony is flinching from the logic of his own argumentation and throwing abuse at Peter, who is more consistent. This is yet another example of his centrist tendency to contradict himself and backtrack from drawing the obvious conclusions from correct analysis.

“Outsize Jewish Political Power”

His other point against Peter is also ridiculous:

“Gregson goes on to say, on the basis that Jews are eight times over-represented in the UK Parliament that

‘they are powerful, in proportion to their share of the population (300,000 out of 66 million), comprising 0.4 per cent of us.’

“The fact that the Zionists encourage such conspiracy theories by claiming to speak on behalf of all Jews, doesn’t make what Gregson says any the less anti-Semitic. Gregson’s assertion that

‘It is because of these wealthy Zionist Jews, steered from the British Board of Deputies of British Jews and the like, that nobody in this country, including our media, dare point out the blindingly obvious: that we have utterly lost our freedom of speech on Israel because everybody is frightened of what Zionist Jews will do to them.

“One wonders why, if Jews are only 0.4% where they get all this power.”

The key phrase is of course “in proportion to”. As atomised individuals, the 0.4% of the population who are Jewish ought to hold no more than 0.4% of the power in British, or Western society in general. But Tony himself knows full well that this is not true. The basic facts as to why were most comprehensively laid out in Norman Finkelstein’s celebrated 2018 essay Corbyn Mania:

“The three richest Brits are Jewish. Jews comprise only .5 percent of the population but fully 20 percent of the 100 richest Brits. Relative both to the general population and to other ethno-religious groups, British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful. These data track closely with the picture elsewhere. Jews comprise only 2 percent of the US population but fully 30 percent of the 100 richest Americans, while Jews enjoy the highest household income among religious groups. Jews comprise less than .2 percent of the world’s population but, of the world’s 200 richest people, fully 20 percent are Jewish. Jews are incomparably organized as they have created a plethora of interlocking, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing communal and defense organizations that operate in both the domestic and international arenas.

“In many countries, not least the US and the UK, Jews occupy strategic positions in the entertainment industry, the arts, publishing, journals of opinion, the academy, the legal profession, and government. “Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population,” British-Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer notes, “in both Houses of Parliament, on the Sunday Times Rich List, in media, academia, professions, and just about every walk of public life.”  The wonder would be if these raw data didn’t translate into outsized Jewish political power. The Israel-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute rhapsodizes that “The Jewish People today is at a historical zenith of wealth creation” and “has never been as powerful as now.” It is certainly legitimate to query the amplitude of this political power and whether it has been exaggerated, but it cannot be right to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts. (Full text, with references, available at https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/finkelstein-on-corbyn-mania/)

Hypocrisy of Bundist Politics

If Peter is ‘anti-Semitic’ for alluding to these “critical socio-economic facts”, why is not Norman Finkelstein not denounced by Tony and others for laying them out in full? The reason is related to Tony’s semi-Bundist politics. Norman Finkelstein is probably the world’s best known Jewish critic of Israeli crimes. Tony himself paraphrases Finkelstein’s earlier insights from The Holocaust Industry in his Zionism During the Holocaust. And Tony himself has no trouble sharing platforms with Norman Finkelstein.

Whereas Peter is not Jewish. The only Jewish ideologues who have the brass-neck to accuse Finkelstein of ‘anti-Semitism’ are Zionists, including fellow-travelling gentile pseudo-left sleaze merchants like Jim Denham and Andrew Coates, and Tony is not keen on being associated with them. But for a non-Jew to cite, or even allude to, the very same “crucial socio-economic facts” is for Tony “anti-Semitic”. Apparently, you must be ethnically qualified to have an opinion on such things. This also manifested itself earlier when Ian Donovan produced a set of theses on the Jewish Question in 2014 that cited the same facts. Because he is not Jewish, this is anathema. Norman Finkelstein, who is not a Bundist, evidently did not think so. He clearly defended the right of these views to be heard at a public event in London in 2016 and was influenced sufficiently to produce an essay two years later that evidently accepted the same concept.

At an even cruder level, it means that a non-Jewish leftist such as Peter Gregson can be expelled for linking an internet discussion piece to another article that in turn links to an article that contains a link to the Holocaust Denial CODOH site, to illustrate a point unrelated to the Nazi holocaust (i.e., no actual link!) while Tony thinks he can link his website directly to the CODOH site with impunity. This is because he is ‘pure’, i.e., because he is Jewish. And to cap this, Tony with his Bundist politics feels entitled to smear someone as sympathetic to Nazi holocaust denial in one paragraph of an article, and then to accuse the same person of ‘anti-Semitism’ for pointing to Zionist support for the very same genocide he is supposedly ‘denying’, in another paragraph of the same article. Even though the two smears are completely at odds with each other!

This nonsense is symptomatic of Greenstein’s politics. In his book he rightly praises the resistance to Nazism of the Jewish Bund particularly in Poland during the Second World War. The problem is that he also shares some of the prejudices of the Bund, the conceptions that Lenin, among others, attacked them for, the conception that only Jewish Socialists have the right to lead the Jewish working class. Today, it seems to mean (for Tony) that only Jewish socialists have the right to even notice the disproportionate representation of Jews in the bourgeois establishment, a legacy of the Jews’ pre-bourgeois role as a commodity-trading class, which evidently later gave rise (under capitalism) to a different class composition from many other national-ethnic groups that they lived alongside. That different composition and its origin is something that Abram Leon wrote about at length in his work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, even if he did not live to see the creation of the Zionist state (he was murdered in Auschwitz). As indeed was prefigured by Karl Marx in his 19^th Century essay The Jewish Question, which capitulators to Zionism to this day shudder at for its uncompromising materialist insights.

Tony’s Bundist anathemas are an attack on Marxism itself, and an attack on working class democracy. In his Zionism During the Holocaust, he claims that “Today there is no specific socio-economic function that is specific to Jews. That is why there is no ‘Jewish Question’” (p47). But that was also true when Abram Leon wrote his seminal work. However, the pre-capitalist class role of the Jews was supremely relevant in explaining the specific class composition that made them vulnerable to genocide in the early period of imperialist capitalism, and it is relevant today, in changed circumstances today, after the radicalised, leftist Jewish lower classes were largely destroyed by genocide and the remnants absorbed though ‘upward mobility’ by neoliberal capitalism, to the point that Tony can point out that the Jewish proletariat no longer exists. If that is true, then obviously Jews must be overrepresented in qualitatively wealthier classes – by simple arithmetic, and so we come down to the same point again – “outsized Jewish political power” as Finkelstein puts it. This question is the property of the entire working-class movement, irrespective of origin, to discuss according to the norms of workers democracy. Attempts to stop them being debated are simply reactionary and should be condemned.

Centrism and Crystallised Confusion over Ukraine

Tony’s evasions and self-contradictions on this are an expression of his centrist politics: “crystallised confusion”, as Trotsky put it, or in a slightly different sense “revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds”. Tony’s continual contradictions are a classic symptom of this. If he were not tied to Bundism, he might be in a more mainstream centrist left-wing group. Instead, he plays an important role as an influential individual on a fragmented left where the larger sects – the SWP, Socialist Party, etc have little authority. So, he is more much more important than any isolated individual. He not only is the seemingly most radical critic of Zionism on the British left, but he also addresses other questions (badly), such as Ukraine, where he played a key role in stopping the Socialist Labour Network (SLN) taking a principled, anti-imperialist position of defence of Russia and the people of the Donbass.

When he has bothered to put some semblance of a Marxist analysis together, he has come up with material that ought logically, for a Marxist, lead to a position of defence of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine to defend the Donbass. In two articles in the Weekly Worker last spring, he polemicised against the notion, widespread on the phoney ‘far left’, that this is an inter-imperialist war. He wrote:

“Economically Russia ranks 11th in the world, with a gross domestic product of $1.65 trillion (less than South Korea). Meanwhile the United States has a GDP of $23 trillion. Put bluntly, because of the disastrous privatisation of its nationalised industries and Putin’s support for the oligarchs, Russia does not have the economic capacity to maintain a war machine like the United States.”

https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1388/key-issue-is-not-russia/, 24 March

Aside from the facile point about Putin’s support for ‘oligarchs’ (in fact he sent several of the worst of them, including Khodorovsky and Guzinsky, the West’s darling privatisers, into exile in fear of their lives), the logical conclusion of this must be that Russia is not an imperialist country. He strongly implies this, without quite saying so, when he wrote, in the following issue of WW:

“In my last Weekly Worker article I explained the background to the present conflict. I argued that this is not an inter-imperialist war, but a defensive war by Russia against the threat posed to it – not only by Ukraine’s potential accession to Nato, but its de facto status as a Nato member today.”

[…]

“…one does not characterise the political nature of a war by who struck the first blow.”

“Lenin had quite a bit to say about this. In ‘The difference between aggressive and defensive war’ he posed the question as to what would happen ‘if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia’. According to the formulations of the United Secretariat and Achcar, socialists would be bound to support England, France and Russia! Lenin disagreed, arguing:

those would be ‘just’, ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory ‘great’ powers.

In other words, the fact that technically Russia landed the first blow in the present conflict is irrelevant. That tells us nothing about the political or class nature of the conflict.”

https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1392/pro-war-socialists/, 1^st April

“In other words”, for Tony, you might logically think, “any socialist” would sympathise with the victory of Russia against NATO imperialism and its Ukrainian proxies. You would think this was doubly obligatory when Tony wrote of the situation in Donbass since the Maidan coup in 2014:

“The advent of a new regime in Ukraine under the corrupt Petro Poroshenko saw the abolition of Russian language rights affecting nearly half Ukraine’s population. It also saw attacks by fascist militias on Russians in the Donbas. It was therefore no surprise that parts of eastern Ukraine broke away to form the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, with the aid of the Russian military. For the last eight years there has been an undeclared war against these republics by the fascist Azov battalion, during which 14,000 people have been killed”

ibid

This is the reason why Putin had no choice but to intervene militarily, as every genuine anti-imperialist knows, and underlines why, as Lenin wrote of earlier such conflicts, “every socialist” must sympathise with the “victory” of the forces fighting imperialism.

But Tony does not. Instead, he writes:

“It goes without saying that socialists unreservedly condemn Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, with the terrible devastation and suffering that they have inflicted. We should have no hesitation in calling for the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops. The regimes in both Moscow and Kyiv are rotten and anti-working class, so we are in favour of unity between the working classes of both countries, not a war which lines up workers behind these leaders.”

https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1388/key-issue-is-not-russia/

So, in one and the same polemic, spread over 2 weeks in WW, he quotes Lenin saying that ‘every socialist’ should be in favour of the victory of the non-imperialist side in such conflicts, (which in this one means Russia and the Donbass population), against NATO and its proxies. Yet at the same time he “unreservedly condemns” Russia in what he agrees is exactly the kind of conflict Lenin was talking about (otherwise why quote Lenin at all?). A more priceless example of centrist politics, of “crystallised confusion”, of being “revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds”, or simply trying to ‘have your cake and eat it’, would be difficult to find.

Likewise, when supporters of the Consistent Democrats put a motion to a meeting of the Socialist Labour Network on 29^th July, seeking to change the policy of that movement to a principled one of defending Russia’s forces, and the people of the Donbass, against what Tony Greenstein himself says is a NATO proxy war, Tony Greenstein actively opposed it, and was instrumental in ensuring that it failed to pass (though the number of abstentions on the vote made it very clear that nearly half of those present did not support the craven, third-campist existing policy of the SLN).

His opportunism on this was even more manifest, as he openly expressed the fear that if the SLN adopted a Russia-defencist position on this, more right-wing members of the SLN would walk away. To hell with the Donbass people then, who need solidarity from socialists in the West more than anything else. A terrible position – if someone had made a similar point about Palestinians, Tony would likely have gone apoplectic (or would he? – this even logically casts some doubt on that!)

There is a common method here, between Ukraine and the Jewish Question/Zionism. Liberal politics trumps Marxism. What this means is crystal clear over Ukraine, but it is also true in terms of his violations of working-class democracy, attacking those who oppose his Bundist conceptions (which are also a form of liberalism) from the left. Tony is just one, currently prominent, expression of centrism as a political phenomenon which needs to be overcome if principled anti-imperialist, communist politics are to make progress in the current situation.

Notes

1. The politics of the Jewish Bund, which demanded a separate Jewish socialist party in the Russian empire. The Bund continued for a considerable time after the Russian revolution, in Poland particularly. Its concept was that the Bund would have a kind of exclusive mandate to organise Jewish workers. The whole idea of this was strongly opposed by Lenin. 

By Ian Donovan

I have been penalised for 29 days by Facebook for sharing images of Ukrainian Nazis as part of a discussion on the “Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn” Discussion group on Facebook. Here is the kind of evidence we are talking about:

Photographic evidence of widespread Nazism among young people in Ukraine, promoted by the far right US puppet regime. For Facebook’s ‘moderators’, posting such EVIDENCE amounts to support for ‘Dangerous organisations’. A slur worthy of Goebbells himself.

This is my appeal to the Facebook Oversight Board.

---

This is EVIDENCE of Ukrainian Nazism, not support for Nazism. The penalty is an OUTRAGEOUS SLUR

I am being penalised for providing EVIDENCE of the dominance of Nazism in Ukraine. The photos I posted are obviously intended to PROVE that the Ukrainian regime supports Nazism, and brainwashes its own young people into Hitler worship.

These images are genuine and accurate and FB does not dispute their authenticity. Some of the images I posted were posted approvingly by the Ukrainian President, Zelensky, of his own troops wearing Nazi insignia, on his official Instagram account. He has done this three times and I have posted these images many times in discussions. No one has ever disputed their authenticity, no fact checker, as they are provenly authentic.

This is not the first time I have been penalised in this manner. I was previously penalised for providing evidence that a thug who attacked several Roma women in a notorious video is a member of the Azov Battalion.

Facebook Hitler-lovers ban anti-fascist to protect Azov thug. Facebook defends public beating of Roma women.

It is totally mendacious to accuse anyone of posting EVIDENCE of fascist activity of supporting fascism themselves. This obviously implicitly bans all and any evidence of fascist activity from being posted. I shall be circulating evidence of this therefore to all anti-fascist organisations. I will seek MAXIMUM PUBLICITY of this. It will soon be all over Twitter and other media.

This implicates Facebook in support for Nazism, not me, and if not overturned will implicate the Oversight Board as well.

Pedro Castillo proposed a referendum in January this year in Peru to give Bolivia access to the  sea  through Peruvian territory. From Bolivia, the president of the Chamber of Deputies of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Freddy Mamani, welcomed the Pedro Castillo’s initiative, considering that such a gesture by the president reflects his “democratic spirit” and his desire to strengthen brotherhood  between the two nations.

From then on,  Peru’s Congress began to plot a parliamentary coup against Pedro Castillo, accusing him of “treason against the homeland”  for his proposed referendum to give Bolivia access to the sea  through Peruvian territory.

To avoid a parliamentary coup, Castillo raised the possibility of dissolving Congress, a power that on certain occasions the Peruvian Constitution reserves to the presidents of the country.  In this sense, before facing a new motion of censure, Castillo sought the dissolution of parliament and a call for new parliamentary elections.

Congress, where the Fujimorist right has a majority, voted through a motion to unseat Castillo for “permanent moral disability.”  Castillo was then detained  by the National Police. Dina Boluarte, vice president until Castillo’s fall, was proclaimed president of Peru on Wednesday, December 7, by Congress.

In addition to the facts that make up the chronicle of the fall of Pedro Castillo, it is necessary to point out the profound reasons for the coup orchestrated by the Peruvian right-wing opposition, which accuses Castillo of treason to the homeland for solidarity with a secular demand of a sister nation of Peru. This fascist opposition is the true traitor to the peoples of Peru and of all Latin America and loyal to USA imperialism. Pedro Castillo’s attempt to give Bolivia an exit to the sea was very much in the sense of forming a Peru-Bolivia axis that, if formed, would change the equilibrium system in Andean America.

Thus, for example, in a possible Peru-Bolivia axis, Bolivia itself could negotiate the issue of lithium on better terms with multinationals. Castillo’s downfall also closes, for now, the possibility of direct access, across the Pacific to the heart of Latin America, of the Silk Road, promoted by China.

Therefore, the parliamentary coup against Castillo is part of an imperialist offensive in Latin America,  as is also seen in the case against Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina.

As we said in June 2021 when Pedro Castillo’s election victory took place.

“The intention to reconile the demands of the exploiters and the exploited never ends well. Peru Libre and Castillo will be no exception.  Nor does it seem that by capitulating to the coupists’ appetites will a coup be stopped.  After the 2014 elections, when the same blackmail was made against Dilma, the re-elected PT president of Brazil did not call on the masses to fight against the hybrid war of imperialism and the bourgeois coupists.  On the contrary, she incorporated into her programme the programme of the defeated neoliberal candidate.  Result: she was discredited     before her constituents, the working masses, became weakened politically and socially and this eased the way for the coup without the coupists needing to use force, and the coup was successful in 2016.

At the same time that workers in Peru must advance in their political  independence through the construction of the party constituted by  its vanguard. Having as its guide the path of permanent revolution, the only way to materialize the historical interests of the exploited and oppressed. That is why we do not call for support for any bourgeois government, we at TMB-FCT fight against right-wing candidacy, imperialism and electoral fraud, and call for a vote to Pedro Castillo as an instrument of this struggle in the electoral field, but we do not support bourgeois governments. Castillo was elected by the National Free Peru Party (PNPL), which defines himself as “Marxist-Leninist-Mariateguista”.

As Mariategui pointed out in a document called “Anti-Imperialist View” in which he polemicises against the “anti-imperialism” of the III International, he says that while they disparage indigenous identity and identify with the  imperialist colonizers: “the national bourgeoisie see cooperation with imperialism as the best source of profit, feel sufficiently owners of political power so as not to seriously worry about national sovereignty.” 

TMB – Peru: The victory of Pedro Castillo and the tasks of workers.

Therefore, it is the task of the workers vanguard in Peru to promote the independent grouping of the working class with the aim of building a party that defends the historical interests of the class and leads all the exploited in the city and country. This is the only guarantee of effective resolution of democratic and anti-imperialist demands.

This issue focuses on the struggle against imperialist war in the wider world, and on the struggles of the working class at home against the massive attack being perpetrated by the ruling class against us today.

The front-page lead article focuses on the murderous fuel price attack on the working class and calls for a general strike and vengeance against the profiteers. It is obvious that if this is not defeated it will lead to many deaths, probably many more than Cameron’s earlier austerity attacks and Johnson’s malicious use of the Covid pandemic for a cull. It also tears into the outrageous attempts to blame Russia for a massive gouging of profits out of the population by oil and gas profiteers. This is a catastrophic attack on the population and needs to be defeated and crushed by organised labour.  

In the back page lead article, there is extensive coverage of the war in Ukraine, the recent pause and partial Russian defeats, and an analysis of the reasons for this. Notwithstanding the imperialist media, the Special Military Operation that began in February was a defensive act, done on a shoestring with a limited number of troops mobilised on a temporary basis. That proved insufficient and Russia has been compelled to do the job properly with a proper mobilisation and a determined commander put in place. Our article analyses the acts of US inspired terrorism, involving the British, and behind it imperialist desperation that their puppets
are still heading for defeat in this war. We obviously motivate that the working class has a side in this war – with the people of the Donbass who are targets for imperialist/Nazi terrorism/genocide, and their Russian defenders.

There is material on the anti-imperialist united front on an international level in the current context from our Brazilian comrades in the Liga Comunista,  and their article on the recent electoral victory of Lula Da Silva of the Workers Party over the fascistic populist Bolsonaro,
and the collective actions of workers that put paid to the threat of his trying to stay in power after losing the election, Trump style.

Regarding the struggle against imperialism, there is a sharp attack on the imperialist media trying to use discontent in China at lockdown measures to protect against Covid, to incite ‘colour revolution’ Noting that the liberal media in particularly often correctly condemned those who defied public health measures in the West, and yet are inciting such things in China.

One Ukraine again, there is a piece on Germany’s adoption of the Nazi concept of ‘Holodomor’ as a smear of the USSR as supposedly guilty of a 1930s ‘genocide’ in Ukraine, to excuse German imperialism’s backing Ukrainian Nazis that were Hitler’s supporters. There is a solidarity statement with the people of the Donbass republics and oblasts regarding the recent referenda for unification with Russia, and a leaflet issued by International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity to a recent meeting of Stop the War in London. And there is a short piece noting the threat
from US funded bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

Regarding politics in Britain, there is a review of Chris Williamson’s new book on his struggles in the Labour Party as the most principled figure among Labour parliamentary figures in the Corbyn period, in standing up to the witchhunt. And a more extensive article on the prospects of a unification of comrade Williamson’s Resist movement with the Socialist Labour Party of Arthur
Scargill, as a potential step forward to creating a genuine workers party here. There in an article addressing the need to abolish the Monarchy in the context of the death of the monarch this summer.

In all this issue is, as is right, very much centred on the struggle against imperialism and war.

The projected merger between the Resistance Movement (Resist) and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) is an intriguing but possibly fruitful endeavour. Resist was founded in 2020 in the aftermath of the defeat of the Corbyn movement and the rise to the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer. Its most prominent founder is Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP for Derby North, and for a while Shadow Minister for Local Government under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Chris W was the most outspoken and principled left-wing former MP by far to emerge from the Labour Party in the Corbyn period, the only one to sharply criticise the conciliation toward the Blairite right wing that doomed Corbyn to defeat by his extremely ruthless and utterly unscrupulous Blairite and Zionist opponents. 

His refusal to bow the knee to the witchhunt led to his being suspended three times on trumped-up and mendacious charges in 2019 by the Labour Party. When he defeated the second of these suspensions, in the High Court where it was declared unlawful, he was then suspended for a third time in a blatant manoeuvre to evade the court judgement. He was blocked from standing for the Labour Party in the December 2019 General Election and stood as an independent, losing his seat (which of course was the whole purpose of the corrupt suspensions in the first place).

 The charges involved innuendos of ‘anti-Semitism’ by the Labour Party’s powerful Zionist wing, who defend the mass ethnic cleaning of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948, and the Israeli state ever since, against the supposed ‘terrorism’ of its victims, and systematically smear anyone who stands up for Palestinians as in some way motivated by hatred of Jewish people. These lies do not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny by any objective person, but objectivity in the Labour Party is in very short supply.

The Tory/Blairite-infested Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the quango which in 2021 produced a fraudulent report on ‘anti-Semitism’ aiming to smear the Corbynite left, originally also aimed to smear Chris Williamson by denouncing him as some kind of perpetrator in their report. But unlike others in Labour, who were sluggish to react to this in fear of the malign influence of Starmer and the Zionists, Chris made it very clear to the EHRC that any such smears would result in an all-out political and legal war with himself. The witchhunting quango, which has itself been credibly accused of gaslighting and playing down institutional racism on behalf of Boris Johnson’s government, backed off and removed their draft nonsense about Chris from their report before it was published.

There is a long tradition of pro-imperialist and racist politics in Labour, including support for Zionism and various other forms of colonialism, originally rooted in the pro-imperialist labour bureaucracy, and even more among the overtly bourgeois, neo-liberal and corporate-funded elite layer of political mercenaries that were assembled and empowered by Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair. The later layer came to dominate Labour in the period between the defeat of the 1984-5 miners’ strike and the leftist, working class political revolt against austerity that put Jeremy Corbyn into the Labour leadership in 2015. This revolt was at bottom a ferocious clash between a regenerating mass base for this bourgeois workers party, and the reinforced neoliberal political bureaucracy of the Blairites, a clash that was always likely to be bloody. As it proved, and Corbyn proved utterly inadequate to fight back against the neoliberal counterattack.

Chris Williamson is virtually the only Labour parliamentarian who has come out of the Corbyn period with his integrity as a socialist intact. In fact, he has been obviously radicalised by the experience and has even taking to explaining why the Labour Party is not a vehicle for socialism by citing the famous remark of Lenin that the Labour Party, “though composed of workers”, is a “thoroughly bourgeois party” led by “reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that”. This should not be taken to imply that Chris has embraced revolutionary Marxism tout court, but certainly indicates a strong trajectory away from Labourism in a more left-wing direction that is likely to become expressed in mass politics in the next period. As expressed in his condemnation of Zionism, which is getting stronger and clearer as time goes on, and his principled and courageous speaking out in defence of the population of the Donbass, under attack from Ukrainian Nazis since 2014, and defence of the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine to stop the genocidal NATO-inspired and -funded Maidan genocidal ethnic war against the Russian-speaking Donbass people.

Can Resist revive the SLP?

What is clear from Chris’s recent autobiographical work, Ten Years Hard Labour, is that he is one of the most principled and radical figures that have ever broken to the left from Labour and is determined to play a unifying role in trying to put together a new working-class party initiative. Which brings us onto the proposed unification of the Resistance Movement with the Socialist Labour Party, which was founded on the initiative of Arthur Scargill, then the President of the National Union of Mineworkers, on May Day 1996.

The SLP was founded as a belated response to the takeover of the Labour Party by the supporters of Neil Kinnock and then his protégé and continuator, Tony Blair. Kinnock was the traitorous neoliberal ex-‘left’ MP and loudmouth from the 1970s, who when elevated to leader in the mid-1980s, spent an enormous amount of effort stabbing the NUM in the back in their great 1984-5 strike, which was against Thatcher’s massive pit closure programme which destroyed the British coal mining industry, the employer of around 190,000 miners, who were a key strategic backbone of the labour movement in Britain. The SLP showed much promise in the immediate aftermath of its formation, attracting many serious left-wing and class struggle inclined militants, with a variety of leftist political views. Unfortunately, it rapidly became clear that Arthur Scargill and the layer around them did not have the political capacity to lead the membership they had attracted. For all their history of exemplary trade union militancy, and their socialist aspirations, their education in the left wing of the bureaucracy and their background in official communism led them to see many of those who joined the SLP as simply a threat.

So right from the beginning, the SLP was saddled with a bureaucratic constitutional clause that banned any kind of dual affiliation by members with any other trend on the very fragmented left, or even implicitly any kind of factional alignment within the SLP. The latter was very selectively enforced: those in clearly factional groupings close to the leadership got away with blatant breaches of the same principles. The outcome was a series of tragi-comic purges of much of the membership, which gutted the SLP of much of its potential to offer an alternative to the Blairised Labour Party, and meant that as the 2000’s wore on, the SLP’s challenge to Blairism was overshadowed by those of other forces, such as the Socialist Alliance and RESPECT, which actually inflicted some defeats on the Blairities.

The big problem of those other forces was that those large sects on the ‘far left’ who played a major role in building them saw then as temporary coalitions and arenas to build their own projects, not the progenitors of a new working-class party. So, they managed to mislead and disappoint a generation of left militants whom the SLP was simply unable to reach because of its bureaucratic sterility. George Galloway personified the ‘what might have been’ of the SLP in the 2000s, when he led a section of the Labour Party’s mass base among the oppressed Muslim immigrant population into confrontation with Blair over Iraq, and won some victories and near victories, it was the SWP who were able to benefit from it and ultimately mislead and shipwreck it, while the SLP were nowhere near being able to address this layer. The SLP thus remained marginal all through not only the resistance to Blair, but also the Corbyn period, which also might have been expressed differently if the SLP had done what it originally aspired to do.

The attempt to revive the SLP for a new generation as a unifying force for the ex-Corbynite layers who are looking for a focus of resistance to build a new party around is a positive and worthwhile endeavour, which we hope is able to succeed. The ethos that Chris Williamson has been fighting for since he left the Labour Party has been an attempt to play a unifying role among the existing fragments of the working class left outside the Labour Party. He has worked alongside TUSC, and with the Workers Party of George Galloway and Joti Brar, in election campaigns that have attempted to confront the Starmerites, trying to overcome the obvious flaws of those initiatives and play a unifying role. The attempt to unify with the SLP and revive this flawed but originally excellently driven initiative is in the same mould and has a good chance of success. Though Chris’s thrust in seeking wider democracy and inclusiveness of the left and the working-class grassroots (his Democracy Roadshow in Labour; his activity since) appears at odds with the practice of the SLP, his project really is in tune with what the SLP should have and could have been, and obviously such a figure from today’s Labour left seeking to join and revive it is something that the SLP leadership ought to regard as a big compliment.

The Miners’ Unions and Class Struggle in Britain

The Mineworkers Union, from which the SLP emerged, had been the strongest union in Britain through most of British capitalism’s history, in various stages of their evolution, and reactionary bourgeois governments throughout British history have sought to defeat the working class by defeating the miners. This happened in 1926, when a General Strike to defend the miners against savage pay cuts was betrayed by the leaders of the TUC after 10 days, just as it was becoming insurrectionary.

In the early 1970s, as the post- WWII economic boom came to an end and the era of neoliberal attacks on the working class was just beginning, the response of the British working class was to fight back through its then-very strong trade union movement. The miners’ union played a central role in this fightback, as symbolised by the victory of a determined mass picket of a huge coke depot in Saltley, Birmingham, where the then Yorkshire NUM President, Arthur Scargill, led his men in facing down the cops and closing the gates of the depot, when they were joined by enormous numbers of workers particularly from motor and engineering factories in Birmingham (most of which were also later destroyed by Thatcher). Saltley Gates became a symbol of working-class courage, militancy and solidarity. Thanks to such militant methods, the 1972 strike against inflation and erosion of miners pay ended in substantial victory.

This whole affair was part of a huge, wider wave of working-class militancy that at its peak led to the TUC being forced to call a general strike to free five dock workers who the Tory government and Judges tried to jail for defying them. The government belatedly discovered an obscure official, the ‘Official Solicitor’ who had the power to release them. And he did!

Another miners strike, in early 1974, against the erosion of miners (and railworkers) pay forced the anti-union Heath Tory government out of office. Two general elections took place in 1974, resulting in first a minority Labour government in February, and then one with a small parliamentary majority in October 1974. This unprecedented period of working class victory was followed by the interregnum of the Wilson-Callaghan Labour governments of 1974-79, where the working class upsurge was first headed off with a series of reforms, including the repeal of Heath’s Industrial Relations Act, and then regimented into the straightjacket of the ‘social contract’ – wages held down by ‘agreement’ with the trade union bureaucracy while another bout of inflation, triggered off by the Vietnam and Middle East wars – coursed through the system. Neoliberalism made its first tentative beginning in this period with chancellor Denis Healey’s wave of cuts to public services to procure a loan from the IMF. These attacks gradually built up an enormous sense of rage in the working class, as well as leading to the growth of the far-right racist National Front party. Finally, this exploded in a leaderless strike wave, the Winter of Discontent, in 1978-9, which sank the weak Callaghan Labour government and laid the basis for the election of an even more vicious Tory government under Margaret Thatcher, who really did impose neoliberalism in Britain.

The Tories prepared their revenge for 1974 very carefully: they picked off less powerful sections of the working class in piecemeal fashion throughout Thatcher’s first term, and only after she was re-elected in a wave of imperial chauvinism over the 1982 Malvinas war, did they dare take on the miners. With a massive pit closures programme, imposed at the end of winter in early March after they had stockpiled huge amounts of often imported coal. A militarised police force was used for strikebreaking on a massive scale. And Kinnock, the new leader of Labour after the 1983 election defeat, fought long and hard to isolate the miners and ensure that resistance to Thatcher would not become generalised. When other sections of workers, such as dockers in two strikes in the Summer of 1984, came out effectively in support of the miners, Kinnock worked overtime to ensure they were sent back to work, and to thwart the possibility of a general strike. And he never held back from criticising the so-called ‘violence’ of the striking miners, in conflicts with the police and scab miners, who were a significant, treacherous minority of the workforce, and whose scab neoliberal ‘trade union’, the “Union of Democratic Mineworkers”, played a major role in ultimately defeating the strike.

Political repercussions of the 1984-5 Miners’ Great Strike

The biggest political problem facing the miners and their supporters was the Labour Party and their ‘broad church’ concept, which tied the left to the strikebreaking right wing and rendered them politically impotent to combat Kinnock, the strikebreakers in the TUC, and the UDM, who all backed up the government and the state. To lead a generalised fightback against the neoliberal assault, given the fact that a major chunk of the labour bureaucracy and its growing yuppie-corporate layer supported that programme, it was necessary to have a political alternative that separated from the neoliberals. But the left wing of the Labour Party, the Benns, Skinners, Heffers and Corbyns, were and are bound to the concept of the ‘broad church’ and regarded the idea of splitting Labour with horror. That is still a huge problem today.

The Socialist Labour Party was founded only when Tony Blair abolished the Labour Party’s formal commitment to something resembling socialism, its old Clause 4. Its verbal commitment to a society based on “common ownership” was replaced by a largely anodyne set of platitudes whose real essence was in its praise for “the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition”. However, the formal abolition, though significant, was less so than the connivance of the Labour Party leadership under Kinnock in strategic defeats of the working class, which made such a change of ideology and class outlook possible in the first place. The change was the work of a neoliberal trojan horse within Labour, a new development beyond the traditional politics of the right-wing labour bureaucracy.

The old Labour right wing had been simply an organic product of the trade union bureaucracy’s relationship with large scale industrial employers — the ‘captains of industry’ of British imperialism — in the period when a mass industrial working class was granted concessions of higher living standards from the crumbs of Imperialist plunder more than ever in the days of the British Empire. They therefore had to maintain some relationship with their working-class base, and to be seen to champion them to some extent. The newer, neoliberal right wing does not have such an attachment – they are propelled more by corporate donations in a period when the industrial working class has been massively slimmed down in imperialist countries like Britain by the outsourcing of industrial jobs to lower wage economies in the Global South, and especially East Asia.

Their collaboration is not so much with industrial magnates but rather with financiers and those running service industries, and the volume of donations from financial sharks and services has massively enhanced the power of the Blairites, who really care nothing for industrial workers, as epitomised by Peter Mandelson’s remark that the working class can be safely ignored as it has ‘nowhere to go’ except Labour.

This proved to be untrue, as many such abandoned workers, angry at loss of status as industrial workers who had subliminally understood that they had benefited in part from Britain’s imperial role in the world, went with the imperial nostalgia project of Brexit, UKIP and Boris Johnson, whose real content was “Make Britain Great Again”. An analogue of the slogan of Donald Trump, which much more clearly expressed the mentality of those workers – in Britain, the US, and parts of Western Europe – who bitterly resent their loss of status at the hands of financial capital and the outsourcing of their jobs, and directed that rage in an anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner direction. But ultimately, this consciousness is a desperate and doomed cry of despair. Support for the right-wing populists, who are just as neoliberal and out to enrich the billionaire class as their liberal opponents, is just another way for workers to cut their own throats. Brexit has proven to be a disaster for the workers attracted to it, who have predictably only been shat upon.

We Need a Genuine Working Class Party

Ultimately these are signs that the Labour Party has outlived its function as a party of imperial class compromise, as the working class is losing its imperial privilege, and screaming with pain at the loss. This process is irreversible – Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again.

So, we are entering a new period of catastrophic change and turmoil in which the need for a new mass party of the working class, capable of programmatic development beyond reformism, to take on the challenges of a working class that has been robbed of its flawed, social-patriotic form of class organisation and consciousness by the decline of imperialism itself, is a burning necessity. The job of Marxists is to point the way forward to the crystallisation of such a party, and Chris Williamson’s initiative with the SLP seems to have the potential to be a major, progressive step in the right direction. This is something that all serious socialists and Marxists must engage with.

  ‘Most political memoirs are written by people who are beguiled by Westminster, but I was never so enamoured.’ .

(Chris Williamson)

by Mark Andresen

    This line from the preface of this political memoir highlights the author’s perspective as a skeptical working-class MP, already usefully embedded by its opening in 2010.

Over the last three months, a much needed two-pronged fightback against the Labour Right’s fake, racist ‘anti-semitism’ smear campaign has been launched; most recently, in September, ‘The Labour Files ‘ –  Al-Jazeera’s very welcome 4-part documentary mini-series expose of the Right’s nefarious campaign against its innocent Jewish and non-Jewish members – premiered. A few weeks prior to this had already seen publication of Chris Williamson’s memoir of the growing, intentionally fractious, insurgency conducted by Labour’s Right between 2010 to 2020. (And still ongoing). That both testimonies were roundly ignored by the complicit mainstream media should have come as no surprise. That the smear campaign was roundly destroyed – thanks, especially, to Al-Jazeera’s access to primary evidence – was as inevitable. What matters is that each are now matters of public record, difficult to casually dismiss.

Unwittingly, former Labour MP for Derby North, Chris Williamson has – over the last few years – been perceived as the figurehead victim of the ‘anti-semitism’ smear campaign from Labour’s Right; second only to Corbyn himself. Then again, such a default role has proven vital in the initial pushback against both the Right in the party and neo-liberals in the media generally. Bizarrely, there remain some among the disenfranchised and suspended who still voice doubts about Williamson on social media, as if he somehow deserved even a modicum of the Right’s fake ire; then, this says rather more about their own true allegiances than his. Requests for evidence to justify that ire are rarely, if ever, forthcoming.

Throughout his memoir, Williamson correctly highlights ‘optics’ as the scourge of political principle; how hard policy choices were avoided simply because of how they could be framed by the media, ensuring those cowed and in a position of influence prioritised a gatekeeping career over public service. (Surely, the reason the MPs’ were voted in, in the first place). Meat and drink to hungry neo-liberals. Recall the ghastly sight of Angela Eagle MP, in 2015, wearing too much make-up and pining for the whereabouts of Robert Peston before the cameras like some breathless fan of the latest boy-band; a small, but key, reflection of the Right’s new priorities. Even outside ‘the Westminster bubble,’ professed Socialists who apparently owed nothing to either the NEC, nor the Israeli Government, fell in with the narrative of the Right’s fake anti-semitism smear campaign like good boys and girls. Did they assume – without question – that the Jewish Labour Movement represented all Jews? And who defined this to be the case? Questions which, to this day, remain unanswered.

Williamson recalls when his suspicions were first raised.

‘I can recollect being on a conference call (with Chuka Umunna) in 2013 to discuss tactics with the other MPs’. I urged Umunna to give an unambiguous commitment to renationalising Royal Mail when Labour gets into office. His retort was illuminating; “We can’t do that; the city wouldn’t wear it.”.

(p. 26)

Sometime after:

 ‘At the fireside chat with Ed Balls, where I brought up where I brought up the question of public ownership of the railways again, his rejoinder was to ask what the limits of my nationalisation ambitions were. “Would you nationalise BT?” he asked sarcastically. “Yes,” was my reply . . . Balls wasn’t interested. He had no appetite to anything vaguely Socialist, even though the 2008 financial crisis had demonstrated the case for bringing the commanding heights of the economy into democratic public ownership.’.

(p. 28-29)

Williamson reflects upon his own naivete at the time; at the concerted bad faith campaign such early glimpses foretold. The swiftly growing number of those turncoating with whom he’d formerly had good relations, however, exposed the awful truth. Following this, the failed appeasement of the Milliband campaign, to appeal to middle-class voters, ahead of the 2015 General Election, emboldened the Left into voting in Jeremy Corbyn as leader. This, in turn, emboldened the insurmountable egos of the Right’s established careerists, knowing they had most of the media and Israeli Government on side. Enter the concerted anti-semitism smear campaign as the intended coup de grace.

The appendix over the last forty pages features the Q & As’ Williamson was subject to from Labour’s NEC, upon his suspension on the 27^th February 2019. Reading not unlike a McCarthyite commission or scene from Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ it proves a drain upon one’s anger, considering the wealth of fake accusation described up to this point.

This memoir is no egocentric tract of self-justification, but merely a much needed work of correction; illuminating inconvenient truths purposely hidden, misinterpreted or misframed by those of bad faith. Just recently, in mid-October, after the book’s release, news broke that the BBC itself was being targeted by The Jewish Chronicle, Jewish Leadership Council, Community Security Trust, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, and a group of MPs’ and celebrities for alleged ‘anti-semitism.’ Poetic justice for their silence? There’s certainly a clear and present irony. It would be good if Director-General Tim Davie and the corporation’s Board of Governors might self-reflect on the point of their obedient neoliberal code of omission up to this point; but I doubt it will happen.

In the final analysis, does any of this matter to those of us who have either left, or never been in, the Labour Party? I would argue that it does; as an object lesson in the real danger and consequent effectiveness of corporate-sponsored insurgency. If this can be successfully achieved in a neoliberal party no longer giving even lip-service to ‘leftism,’ then what will they try with more activist Socialists and Revolutionary Communists, in obedient media-silent plain sight? To take nothing away whatsoever from this affair, for ourselves, would be a huge mistake.

The war in Ukraine is reaching a crucial point. Western sanctions against Russia, aimed at defeating their defensive Special Military Operation (SMO) to protect and liberate the Russian and Russian-speaking people of South and East Ukraine, are clearly failing. They are inflicting far more hardship on the people of Western Europe than on Russia, including a prolonged stagflation recession in Britain triggered by high energy prices which these sanctions are contributing to, as well as a similar, wider recession in the EU which appears also to be imminent. Germany, the economic powerhouse of the EU, is being crucified by gas shortages and energy prices because of its own sanctions in defence of Nazi Ukraine. This was put on a more permanent basis by the evident US/British act of terrorism against the two Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic in September, which can also be considered an act of war against Germany as well as Russia. The moronic British ex- PM Liz Truss is personally implicated in this as Russian intelligence made public the results of their hacking of her phone. She texted “its done” to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken only a couple of minutes after the Nord Stream bombing took place, before the press got hold of it, which speaks volumes about who was involved in the plot to blow it up and who actually did it.

Terrorism has become a modus operandi of the Western military operation in Ukraine particularly over the last few months, as they have got more desperate, knowing full well that Ukraine is going to lose this conflict despite all the NATO weaponry shipped in. This has not been particularly effective in doing damage to the Russian military but has caused a steady stream of civilian deaths and horrendous injuries particularly in the liberated and semi-liberated areas. Donetsk city has been a particular target for NATO civilian murder and maiming. The desperation has been evident in such actions as the 8October bombing of the Kerch Bridge (road and rail) to Crimea with a truck bomb apparently driven by a duped driver who was unaware he was carrying a bomb. The Russian response to this was a massive counterattack right across Ukraine, which did not kill civilians but attacked the power infrastructure – substations and distribution points were destroyed by Russian missiles right across Ukraine, affecting both the ability of Ukraine to continue waging war and causing considerable problems to the civilian population with a lack of power and warmth for the coming winter.

Both the Kerch Bridge bombing and a 29 October drone attack on the Russian Navy in the City of Sevastopol, again in Crimea, used the concessions made by Russia earlier in the conflict to allow grain exports from Ukrainian Black Sea ports and relieve an international grain and hunger crisis, as means to mount terrorist attacks. Russia responded to the second attack by suspending the agreement earlier made with Ukraine, only for it to be un-suspended in days when NATO member Turkey insisted that Ukraine give additional guarantees that the agreement not be so abused again. The escalation of terrorism by Ukraine has been met by repeated waves of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electricity system, so much so that Ukraine’s whole energy system is close to collapse as we go to press at the end of November.

After one particularly effective wave of such strikes, on November 15^th, a missile was fired from Zelensky-ruled Western Ukraine over the border into Poland, which hit a farm and killed two people. Zelensky immediately accused Russia of being responsible, trying to manoeuvre NATO into intervening directly in the war, which would signify the actual outbreak of World War 3. Zelensky is desperate to provoke such a war if he can. He was repudiated by Biden, by the Polish President Duda, and then by an anonymous NATO official who told the Financial Times (16 Nov) that the Ukraine regime is “destroying our confidence” and “openly lying”. This was so brazen, and its possible consequences so serious, that the imperialists were forced to repudiate their protégé on this occasion. This has certainly opened many eyes in the West as to the real nature of the conflict.

But usually they lie, as other examples clearly show, such as the very dangerous and persistent shelling by Ukraine of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which has been under Russian control since March, being routinely and absurdly blamed by Western media and politicians on Russia. And another very dangerous example of this that appears (so far) to have been foiled by Russian intelligence and diplomacy was the threat to set off a Dirty Bomb (an ordinary explosive bomb laced with nuclear waste material) as a false flag to try to accuse Russia. Such an action would contaminate surrounding countries and cause similar or worse effects to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Similar false flags about chemical weapons have been mooted and ascribed to Russia in the media as part of the information war; these have also been exposed at the UN, among other international forums. Such false flags were used on more than one occasion to justify US bombing attacks in Syria. And there is the notorious presence of dozens of US funded biological laboratories in Ukraine, whose sinister nature was let out of the bag by US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in April, who said that the US was working with Ukraine to stop their work falling into the hands of “Russian forces”, indicating clearly that these biolabs have a military purpose. They flinched from Zelenksy’s open attempt to initiate WW3 over his missile attack on Poland, but they have been flirting with such things for years.

Chinks of Light in Western Media

As the fortunes of the Nazi Maidan regime are going down, some of their habitual war crimes have recently been getting some coverage in the Western media. Such as the recent film of captured Russian soldiers being summarily executed, shot in the head at point-blank range by their Nazi captors. This was authenticated by the New York Times, while it continued to promote all other kinds of ridiculous allegations against ordinary Russian soldiers as a matter of course. But the declining fortune of the Ukrainian Nazi puppet regime has its own political impact, as its crimes cannot be indefinitely covered up and those who try worry that they might one day be held accountable. They need some wriggle room. Not only that, but there have been some cryptic indications in some media that there is pressure from the US on Zelensky to agree to negotiate with the Russians at some level, and even speculation in some quarters that he might be replaced, though nothing very tangible to substantiate such speculation. But perhaps these are straws in the wind.

Murders committed in Kherson after the recent Russian retreat from there were covered in the Daily Mail (16 November) as various civilians were shown lined up against a fence, blindfolded, with ‘bloody’ faces. No doubt in preparation for being murdered. The Daily Mail has a long history of supporting and applauding fascism, but such boasting of attacks on civilians has generally been kept out of the Western media in favour of phoney nonsense about Russian soldiers raping babies and attempts to attribute similar murders of ‘collaborators’ to the Russians, with the pretence that the victims of such Nazi executions are Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian troops. At Bucha, at the end of March, the giveaway was that the corpses of the killed were wearing white arm bands that were given them by Russian troops precisely to identify them as civilians to avoid them being misidentified as enemies by the Russians. This naïve tactic led to them becoming targets for Avov Nazis when the Russians left, and they were simply butchered.

Imperialist Russophobia: Nazi-like Racism and Counterrevolutionary Demonology

The mendacious Western media just parrots the propaganda of Ukrainian Nazis and attributes all such killings to the supposed barbarity of Russians in racial terms. The Ukrainian Nazis are less sanguine about this, as they call the Russian-speaking people and Russian soldiers in Ukraine ‘orcs’, which really has a similar connotation to ‘n****rs’ or ‘y*ds’. But the racist nature of this imperialist proxy war is also starkly visible in the West, not only in terms of boycotts of Russian state institutions, but also the bans against Russian sporting stars, cultural figures, and even long dead Russian authors such as Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, composers such as Tchaikovsky, and celebrated Cosmonauts such as Gagarin. The Western racist Russophobes in NATO claim to be objecting to Putin’s supposedly terrible regime, but that is evidently nonsense as such long dead figures never knew of Putin.

This kind of disgusting bigotry has reared its head throughout the imperialist world and reflects a racialised hatred of Russians that is actually similar to the racialised hatred of Jews that drove Hitler, among others. Recall that the Nazis hated Jews fundamentally because they considered them a kind of bacillus bring ‘communism’ to supposedly civilised imperial Germany. The contemporary hatred of Russians is driven by a similar antipathy: they are seen as the nation who above all embodied ‘Communism’ and whose workers’ state endured for three quarters of a century, far longer than any other. And now, even after the counterrevolution, they have rejected and retreated from the neoliberalism the Western powers prescribed for them and are among the most active opponents of Western imperialist world domination.

For all Putin’s social conservatism, the assertiveness he personifies is seen as crypto-communist by many imperialist ideologues, and despite all the mendacity in the Western media about Putin’s supposed weakness, he has a huge approval rating among Russians. That is how Russians are seen as a people by the Western imperialists, and the antipathy towards them is like that about Jews in the ideology of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a mixture of ethnic animosity and counterrevolutionary demonology.

The response of the Western powers to the recent referendum votes in the four Donbass provinces to join Russia is indicative of the same hatred. The Western media mocks them as supposedly fraudulent, as it did over Crimea earlier. But where such issues arise at home, as over Scotland and Catalonia, it seeks actively to prohibit such exercise of the right to self-determination. What it is really saying with these hysterical slurs is not that the mass sentiments of those that voted in these referenda are inaccurately represented in the results, but these populations are Untermensch who have no right to vote to separate in the first place. So that ‘justifies’ the Western supply of HIMARS to them to destroy their apartment blocks and petal mines to kill and maim their children and elderly as punishment for the whole population. This is an index of how the Hitlerite mentality has undergone a renaissance among the Western imperialist bourgeoisie.

Sanctions Backfire: Imperialist Decline

The West’s punitive measures have failed to hurt Russia very much economically – the Rouble has been the best performing currency in 2022, despite sanctions. This has its swings and roundabouts, as with all currency swings, but it is hardly a sign of weakness – since Russia’s main business worldwide is energy sales. These have been maintained despite imperialist sanctions as there are plenty of other customers outside the imperialist world. Russia’s clout in energy markets was demonstrated recently when the Biden administration demanded that the OPEC+ countries agree to a substantial increase in oil production to send prices downwards and ease the US ability to cope with the results of its own sanctions regime. They refused, with the West’s traditional allies like Saudi Arabia deferring to Russian, not US, sensibilities. Which caused a near-apoplectic response from Biden.

Western attempts to isolate Russia diplomatically have failed: the alternative bloc of non-imperialist nations, BRICS, has grown considerably stronger. Even without any new accessions, it represents 43% of humanity, and such countries as Argentina, Algeria, Iran, Turkey (also a NATO member), Egypt and Saudi Arabia have applied to join it, with Indonesia also a strong possibility.  Part of its aim is to create a new ‘basket’ currency comprised of several important currencies from the non-imperialist world, to counter the decades-long domination of the world economy by the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This looks set to eclipse the G20, the bloc the imperialists try to use to control the stronger non-imperialist powers.

This is itself a strong symptom of the decline of the United States as the world imperialist hegemon, and arguably a symptom of the decline of imperialist capitalism itself. NATO’s decades-long anti-Russian campaign which has culminated with this war has backfired enormously and threatens imperialist stability itself. Which is why this situation is generating such a hysterical response from the imperialist bourgeoisie and underlines the severe danger that imperialist capitalism represents to human existence, as it provides a motive for a potential fight-back against such decline by the methods of world war.

A Winter of Anti-Imperialist Victory?

The war has proved more protracted for the Russian forces than might have been hoped. When the SMO began on February 24^th, eight days after the Maidan regime began a major bombardment of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, far from being a long-planned ‘invasion’, as per the Russophobic propaganda bombardment the jingo media in the West has long been emitting, it was done as a stopgap. 200,000 troops were sent in, but apparently on short-term, six-month contracts. Heavy reliance was placed on the volunteer militiamen from the Donetsk and Lugansk republics. Ukraine has suffered enormous casualties and losses in its various conflicts with the Russian Army in the last 9 months but has also been given by NATO massive numbers of the kind of weapons that are designed to kill and maim civilians. It is likely that the contradictory outcome of the US mid-term elections will have little impact on this. This includes such weapons as petal mines – supposedly outlawed small, disguised bombs that look innocuous and kill and maim the unwary – particularly children and the elderly.  Along with the kind of rocketry – HIMARS etc — that such a murderous regime has no problem firing at civilian buildings. They had been doing it for 8 years previously, since the Maidan Nazi coup of 2014, and killed many thousands of civilians.

The stalling of the SMO over the last three months or so and the retreats of Russian forces first in the area around Kharkov in the North-East, and more recently to just outside the city of Kherson in the South, were caused by the makeshift and unprepared nature of the original SMO. In Kherson Russian forces decided to evacuate as many civilians as possible from the Right Bank of the Dneiper, where the bulk of the city is situated, retreating to the Left Bank, a more defensible position. This was dictated by a dangerous situation where undermanned Russian troops faced the possibility of an important dam being destroyed by the Nazis, and thousands of troops and many more civilians being trapped in a flooded city with their escape route cut off, because of the Dneiper, with its vulnerable bridges, being in the way.

However, both the Russian forces and the Donbass populations have been fighting back against the imperialist inspired Maidan counter-offensive. There is considerable evidence that, given the massive casualties sustained by the Ukrainian troops in the earlier part of the SMO, that the forces involved now are being commanded covertly by Western, including British, intelligence officers, and that many of those fighting, aside from the ideological Nazi elite forces like Azov, Aidar etc, are foreign fighters and mercenaries.

So, in September Putin announced a new mobilisation of 300,000 troops, mainly reservists who would be called up for as long as it takes. A new commander was also appointed over the SMO: General Sergei Surovikin, with a strong reputation from the victories he was able to win in Syria against the imperialist ‘regime change’ attempts and proxy war there. He is nicknamed “General Armageddon” by his own troops for his military unorthodoxy and determination in that conflict particularly. It is also worth noting that he was one of those in the old Soviet military who supported the August 1991 coup that was the last attempt by elements in the state apparatus to preserve the workers’ state. As opposed to Putin who resigned from the KGB at the time in protest at the August Coup. An interesting political distinction. He took the decision to withdraw to the Left Bank at Kherson in the interest of preserving both military and civilian lives in a dangerous situation which he lacked enough troops to deal with.

While Russia was withdrawing from Kherson, military activity has resumed in the Donetsk republic where slow advances were being made until the effective pause in Russian military activity after the earlier retreat from the Kharkov area, which prompted the September levy. Out of the 300,000 additional troops mobilised in late September, around 80,000 are now trained and operational, and are mainly being deployed in the heavily fortified Western Donetsk area. Bakhmut is once again being fought over. It seems likely that as the remaining 220,000 or so troops become fully operational, likely in December, there will be considerable Russian offensives, which will once again change the course of the war and see a Russian victory, the re-liberation of Kharkov and Kherson, the liberation of Odessa and the Russian-speaking part of former Ukraine up to the border with Transnistria, and the possibility of a democratic outcome of the war through the partition of Ukraine. It is not easy to predict outcomes of such a war, but that seems like a just and democratic outcome that could be negotiated, incorporating the denazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine and a rolling back of NATO’s aggression against Russia, which overtly began in Ukraine in 2014.