General strikes to bring down neoliberal regimes!

Vengeance against the killers!

There’s no getting away from it. The runaway rise in fuel costs will drive working class people to their deaths. Within the framework of the current neoliberal regime in Britain and pretty much all the imperialist countries, as well as many of the oppressed dependent and semi-colonial countries under the imperialist thumb, it determines everything else. The characteristic lie of the ruling classes is that in some way Russia and Vladimir Putin are responsible for fuel prices going through the roof. But this is an absurd lie: for a start Britain gets less than 8% of its total oil and gas from Russia, and less than 3% of its natural gas. Furthermore, the rise in energy prices is not caused by any price rise from the Russians – if it did it would be marginal here as any numerate person can calculate. In any case, in Britain in 2020 43% of Britain’s electricity was generated from renewable sources (wind, solar and biomass), and since then it this has fluctuated, but is gradually continuing to grow. These ought rationally to be completely separate in price from fossil fuel sources such as oil and gas wherever it comes from.

But in fact, it is nothing Russia has done, but rather the sanctions against Russia that have escalated energy prices upwards, prices that were already on a sharp upward trend before the conflict in Ukraine started. What is actually happening is massive profiteering by Western oil and gas monopolies are driving up prices. This is seen by looking at the profits of the leading companies involved. A series of major oil and gas companies either have, or are credibly forecast to have, massively increased their profits in 2022 over the same period in 2021. This includes Shell, rising from $12.8 Billion in the period Jan-September 2021 to $30.1 Billion in the same period in 2022 (actual, not estimate); BP rising from $8.2 Billion to $20.7 Billion over the same period (estimate); ExxonMobil from $14.3 Billion to $42.7 Billion (estimate); Chevron from $10.7 Billion to $27.3 Billion (estimate), TotalEnergies from $11.3 to $28.7 Billion (actual, not estimate); Eni from $2.6 Billion to $10.3 Billion (estimate) and ConocoPhillips from $5 Billiion to $13.8 Billion (estimate). (source, Guardian, 27 October 2022, https://tinyurl.com/2ttv9dj5).  These are staggering increases in profit, and completely debunk the bizarre propaganda that Russia somehow to blame for the fuel price catastrophe for defending its co-nationals in the Donbass from Nazi terror. What is actually happening is concerted operation to fleece the population of the Western countries, and the wider world, using the Ukraine conflict and the mendacious information war being waged as a cover for doing so.

The sanctions against Russia are driven by predatory political objectives – the expansion of NATO, which has been underway since 1997, even when the West’s favourite lackey, Boris Yelstin, was in power. Even under Yeltsin, the arch privatiser and agent of the West, who starved his own people for the Western privateers and banks, Russia was cast as the ultimate enemy of the West. This is because of what is called the Brezhinsky plan, after former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezhinsky, to split Russia into at least three effective US colonies, promoted by such imperialist predators as Dick Cheney, architect of the WMD lie and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2014 the United States, acting through the so-called National Endowment for Democracy, the outsourced ‘soft power’ wing of the CIA, organised a coup that overthrew the elected Ukrainian President Yanukovitch and placed a puppet regime dominated by Nazis in power.

This regime abolished the equal status of the Russian language, the main language of almost half the population, and began persecuting and killing Russian speakers and waging war against the South and East of Ukraine and its mainly Russian-speaking population. The two Minsk agreements that were supposed to guarantee rights and autonomy for the Russophone population were repeatedly broken leading to civil war. Thousands of civilians from the Donbass region were killed as the Ukrainian Nazi regime waged war against them over the past 8 years. Despite the phoney refugee crisis in the West involving usually quite wealthy Ukranians pretending to flee from Western Ukraine, which is not occupied, more refugees – over 3 million – have fled to Russia, from the Nazi bombardment

 Finally, Russia undertook a limited Special Military Operation in February to protect the Russian-speaking population. The sanctions are aimed at punishing Russia for protecting its people from Ukrainian Nazis. Zelensky is just a puppet and a front man for these types. We are in an economic mess because the West is funding bloodthirsty Nazis not to defend the Ukrainian-speaking people who mainly live in Galicia – the West of Ukraine – there are ZERO Russian troops deployed there. They are supplying arms to the Ukrainian Nazis to massacre and ethnically cleanse the population of the Donbass and Crimea. British intelligence has been involved in terrorism against the people of the Donbass provinces and Crimea who overwhelmingly voted to leave Nazi Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. The West regards such self-determination of peoples as a threat to imperialist interests, as shown also by the banning of an independence referendum in Scotland, and the persecution and imprisonment of elected Catalan leaders by Spain for calling such a referendum

Billions are being spent on weapons to murder Russo-Ukrainians for their vote, swelling the profits of military profiteers also, which should be spent on supporting the living standards of working-class people at home facing an economic cliff-edge, hunger, cold and homelessness. Or at least that is what would be done if we lived in a society not ruled by a predatory imperialist ruling class. Instead, they are using this war, as they used the Covid 19 pandemic, as a means to engineer a massive shift of money and wealth from the poor to the super-rich, leaving a huge pile of corpses in their wake.

Austerity Means Mass Murder

Cameron’s austerity killed 330,000 mainly disabled and elderly according to a recent study. Johnson in the Covid pandemic killed at least 150,000. The discharge of infected elderly into care homes was mass murder in plain sight. Poorer countries with larger populations protected people and had a quarter of our 200,000 deaths. Now another massacre, likely even bigger, is being engineered by Sunak and Hunt. That’s half a million murdered in a decade, with many more coming.

And we also see the deliberate endangerment of the lives of migrant workers and asylum seekers. The illegal orders to the Navy to ‘push back’ desperate people in small boats, who have NO legal way to seek asylum in the UK. The failed attempts to deport refugees to Rwanda, which has been carefully chosen for its brutal abuses even of the imperialist concept of ‘human rights’ (as opposed to the universal rights of the working class and oppressed) and for its subliminal association with genocide. And there is the Manston scandal, where refugees were deliberately put into desperately overcrowded conditions in the hope that disease would kill them off. As a result, we have an outbreak of diphtheria, a barbaric throwback to the days of typhus in Nazi concentration camps. The populist neoliberals would like to divide workers by portraying these people as undeserving of any rights, on a nationalist/racist basis. But how they treat refugees is an index of how they would like to treat us all. The ‘hostile environment’, which began under New Labour’s Alan Johnson, and all these murderous actions directed against the poor majority of workers show the need to unite with immigrant workers to do away with the neoliberal vermin completely.

We should fight for full restitution and vengeance for all this as a means to mobilise the mass of working-class people to conquer their own emancipation from this predatory class rule. Madame Guillotine is an excellent leveller and a life for a life is the correct solution to these killings. The entire capitalist/neoliberal elite – Tory, Blairite and ‘Populist’ – needs to be disposed of in the vintage French manner and their property – stolen from working-class people – collectivised.

The rise in food prices is being driven by the voracious profiteering of neoliberal parasites. The creeping rise in housing costs and interest rates was also underway in parallel to that, but In Britain the moronic Voodoo economics of Truss gave a new boost to inflation and provided the ruling austerity mongers with the wafer-thin ‘justification’ for a new round of austerity. We, the working class, are supposed to pay for the lunacies of the Tory membership in imposing the monstrous imbecile Truss with new cuts to the NHS, with tax increases in coming years, and declining real pay in the face of relentless fuel-fuelled inflation. That was the message of Hunt and Sunak’s mini-Budget on 17^th November. While they hope their fiscal measures will blunt the rise in interest rates and protect homeowners – the wealthier portion of whom make up much of the Tories’ electoral base – the pay off for this will be the expiry next April of Truss’ totally inadequate average £2500 limit on annual fuel bills – which is itself over double the cap at the end of 2021 – and its likely to rise as high as £4000 pa in April 2020. After that there will be means-tested aid to the poorest, those on benefits etc, who will still be crucified by the doubling before the limit was created, and the rest will have to pay the profiteers in full.

Develop the strike wave towards a General Strike. No support to Starmer!

None of this should be tolerated. It is good that there is a fightback developing in the working class, and one-day strikes have been bubbling away for a few months now. Rail workers, Royal Mail workers, dockers have set some sort of pace for others to follow.  Now we see nurses having voted to strike: their pay has effectively been cut by at least 20% in real terms by the refusal of pay rises to keep up with inflation since the beginning of the original Tory austerity programme in 2010. The NHS has been hammered by the same austerity, and by the rampant corruption, malign neglect and profiteering of Boris Johnson and his cronies since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Everyone knows the difficulty now in getting to see a GP. Everyone doubly fears being taken ill today, not only because of the illness itself, but the fact that the Ambulance Service and A&E and Hospital Admissions have been wrecked and plundered by the profiteers, so that Ambulances are forced to queue for hours outside A&E’s before discharging their patients into understaffed hospital facilities, instead of being available to often desperately ill patients within a reasonable time.

But the revival of trade union struggle is still at a relatively early stage. A crucial obstacle to the movement is forty years of anti-trade union laws, which impose a very restrictive legal framework on strikes. And they have a bureaucracy that is long used to manoeuvring around these laws, and often squashing struggles that objectively need to go beyond the repressive legal framework to have a chance of winning. Such struggles are routinely betrayed by the bureaucracy, and have been for decades, particularly since the 1984-5 Miners strike. We need a series of strategic demands and aims centring on further deepening of collaboration and coordination of union actions between different unions, aimed at what is objectively necessary – a General Strike to defeat these attacks and defend the WHOLE working class.

At the same time, we should be wary of such bodies as the TUC, which have the authority to call a General Strike, and given a huge increase in pressure from below, could at some point be forced to comply. History says that the TUC is likely to betray such a strike, as it did in 1926, calling off the strike after 10 days. The only antidote is to build a political class movement at the grass roots that can take the strike out of the hands of such misleaders.  Such a movement could strike a severe blow against repressive anti-union laws and force their abolition. We must demand workers control of all prices; a sliding scale of incomes and benefits, and of course the establishment of a workers’ government to put the workers collectively in command of the whole economy so we can expropriate capital and plan the economy in working-class interests.

A crucial obstacle to this is any continued loyalty of the trade unions to the Labour Party. Today the Labour leadership is openly hostile to unions and strikers, and the leadership in one case even sacked an MP from a shadow ministerial position and orchestrated their de-selection as and MP, for refusing to obey an edict not to show support for picket lines. This is entirely consistent with the whole war Starmer has waged against the left since he was elected as Labour leader on a slew of brazen lies in 2020, promising to be a ‘unity’ candidate maintaining many of the mildly left-social-democratic politics of Jeremy Corbyn.

He immediately declared war on everything remotely working class or socialist within Labour. Any support for workers in struggle is proscribed. Any support for Palestinian rights draws the Goebbellsian lie about ‘anti-Semitism’ and the chop from Labour, propelled by the powerful faction of fascistic Zionists of which Starmer is part. Jewish-Zionist racists are indulged in Labour; non-whites, Muslims or other representatives of the genuinely oppressed, even anti-Zionist Jews, are sent to the back of the bus. And any opposition to NATO’s war in Ukraine on behalf of its Hitlerite puppets likewise attracts being purged. Starmer, who says that he supports Zionism “without qualification” at the same time defends the Hitlerite scum like Azov, and Ukraine’s US-quisling Zionist President Zelensky who posts approving pictures of his troops wearing SS Insignia on his Instagram account.

The Tories have reached the end of their line as a currently viable ruling party. It is clear that the ruling class want them out, not least so that they can resolve their huge problems with erratic right-wing populism that were summed up in the bizarre and dysfunctional regime of Johnson and Brexit, and the even more bizarre short-lived Truss regime.  The ruling class is actively pushing for Starmer to take their place, as a surrogate, substitute Tory who will maintain austerity and their repressive anti-union laws, their hostile environment for migrants, their racist persecution of minorities, their privatisations and above all their absolute fealty to neoliberalism and the defence of the interests of the super-rich ruling class core against the working class and the oppressed on all questions of any significance.

There should be no indulgence, no support, for Starmer’s New Labour by trade unions. There should be no voting or campaigning for New Labour by socialists, trade unionists and anti-racicsts. Starmer follows in the footsteps of Blair, who kept 95% of Thatcher’s anti-union laws, engaged in its own privatisations including in housing and the health service, and was the chief promoter of the predatory war in Iraq. Trade unionists should involve themselves in the struggle to create a genuine working-class party open to programmatic development towards revolutionary solutions.

Such things are needed across the imperialist countries, and indeed among all those victimised by the current crisis around the world. Neoliberal capitalism needs to be destroyed by the international working class!

The anti-lockdown protests in China are another piece of hybrid warfare aimed at fomenting a colour revolution and overthrowing the Chinese government. The involvement of overseas journalists in fomenting these events is clear, and what is particularly notable is the virulent support of the liberal media in Britain in supporting them. A BBC operative has been thrown out of China for an evident role in, not merely reporting on these events, but inciting them. The support of the Guardian for these protests recalls their recent applause for the truck-bombing of the Kerch Bridge in Crimea. Formally these shitlibs oppose lockdown-breaking and covid denialism, as well as terrorist attacks on civilian targets. Except when it suits them part of an imperialist campaign or potential right-wing coup.

They are a reminder that the Covid movement in the West is a two-edged sword and that the imperialists will use anything at all to try to gain an advantage. What is outrageous is that many of those liberals in the Western media and ruling classes who accurately scored the likes of Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro for criminal neglect of the welfare of the population in the worst period of the pandemic, not least by sabotaging quarantine measures and allowing the virus to run riot, are opportunistically trying to make use of social discontent in China at lockdown measures as a political weapon. They denounced anti-lockdown protests in the West but are opportunistically making use of them here.

They are just as cynical as Trump was in playing with the lives of the US population, with this playing with the lives of the Chinese people. No one likes lockdowns, as they interfere with normal life and cause major problems for everyone subjected to them. But in circumstances of a dangerous illness running amok, as happened in the last three years with Covid, they are by far the lesser evil. This is shown by a comparison of the death rates of those countries where it was allowed free rein, with China. China, remember, is where the Covid pandemic was first discovered and may well be the place where it started. China has something of a problem as the virus being allowed to run riot externally has led to over 6 million deaths, of whom China’s share has been minuscule, but has also eventually led to the emergence of milder variants. As a reflection of this change there has been some relaxation in China, more reliance on vaccination. But this is incomplete, and something that has to be handled with great care, and those who are trying to exploit this dilemma certainly do not have the welfare of the Chinese population at heart.

The United States had the worst aggregate death rate from Covid-19 in the whole world. Its total deaths from Covid to date is 1,104,879, according to the Worldometer (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries), and it has had over 100,000,000 recorded cases. China, which has over four times the population of the US, has had only 5,233 deaths, and 315,248 cases overall. That is a remarkable record considering that China is relatively far less wealthy than the US, and indicative of a ruling layer that at least can be said to have some real social responsibility in dealing with this problem. If China had been criminally negligent in the manner of the US in dealing with the pandemic, it is obvious that the result would have been over 4 million deaths!

The imperialist attempt at exploiting this issue is deadly in its implications and should be regarded with contempt. The BBC is complaining that their operative who was apprehended by the Chinese government was not treated well. But given the sinister import of playing with people’s lives by this cynical exploitation of the Covid issue in China, he should think himself lucky he was not put in front of a firing squad.

(Article produced by LCFI comrades in Brazil)

Lula obtained more than 60 million votes. The largest vote by a president in the entire history of Brazil. His highest vote was among the most exploited and oppressed sectors of the country. The North-East region, with high levels of misery and unemployment, guaranteed this historic victory, as well as the industrial centers of the country. The elections distortedly expressed the class struggle in the country, with the proletariat supporting Lula, despite the broad front, and the urban and agrarian bourgeoisie supporting Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro obtained almost 8 million more votes than in 2018, demonstrating a nationalisation and growth of the political forces of the extreme right. However, in 2022 Bolsonaro lost votes in the three richest and most industrialized states, São Paulo (-12.7%), Rio Janeiro (-11.5%) and Minas Gerais (-8.4%). Noting that Bolsonaro lost the election in Minas Gerais. This means a shift to the left of working class battalions.

Bolsonaro’s defeat was a victory for the working classes. Even under threats of dismissal by the bosses, with vote buying, with the Federal Highway Police (PRF) blockades and pressure from religious leaders, the masses elected Lula to defend their rights.

Now, Bolsonarism is not accepting defeat. Bolsonaro  remains silent for the press, but frantically coordindating with the military and other reactionary segments that are carrying out actions to refuse to accept the electoral result as a ban on federal highways.

On Monday, October 31, the National Confederation of Transport and Logistics Workers (CNTTL) published a note of repudiation of the protests, classifying them as “undemocratic”:

“We are experiencing an anti-democratic action by some segments that do not represent the category of autonomous truck drivers of non-acceptance of the results of the polls. We need to respect what the people decided at the polls: the victory of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva”.On the 31st, there were 338 obstruction points in 23 states and the nation’s capital. It is mainly about two segments: a group directly mobilized by the owners of the transport companies (employer lockout) and, another group, a fascist current among the truck drivers. In addition to these sectors, some police officers and farmers joined the blockades, which, despite this, ebbed in the last few hours, mainly due to the action of the population .

In fact, the coup blockades started on the voting day of the second round of elections, November 30th. They were initiated by the Federal Highway Police (PRF), which mobilized 5,000 agents to block passenger traffic in regions where Lula won in the first round with more than 70% of the votes. The graph shows that places where the PRF made it difficult for voters to access the polls coincide with regions where the former president had more votes.

The coup blockades of the bosses, farmers and police were a continuation of those of the police of the previous day. However, on Monday itself, the working population, especially the proletariat of poor neighborhoods and workers leaving the workplace, began to sweep the coup plotters off the roads. In São Mateus (Espirito Santo), the  population threw stones at trucks so an ambulance could pass  , and shipbuilding workers in Angra dos Reis (Rio de Janeiro) armed with clubs drove the coup plotters off the highway.

During the elections, Minister Alexandre de Moraes, president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), assured in a press interview that the PRF’s action was legitimate and necessary. The roadblocks by the coup plotters in almost every state in the country lasted more than 24 hours without the Supreme Electoral Court (STE) taking a stand against them. It was only after the working population itself began to clear the roads through their direct action that the Supreme Court (STF) took a formal position.

In view of this, trade union centrals, left-wing parties, popular leaders and progressive politicians must go beyond the policy of simply despising the coup action, believing that it unravels itself. Also, they cannot trust the judiciary to ensure legality. These leaders must join, summon and help organize the initiatives of the working population to sweep the Bolsonarist gangs from the streets.

As the workers of the Global South understand deeply, it is the region that suffers the most from US-led imperialism, it is where it obtains the greatest profits and prosecutes its most vicious wars and coups. 

The Global South, for centuries, has been the centre of bloody exploitation of its people and its lands by the imperialist powers. It is, however, an arena not just of exploitation and oppression, but also of resistance and revolt against western colonialism and imperialism.

The Global South’s popular leaders who resisted or crossed imperialism, such as Allende, Lumumba, Ghadaffy, Hussein, Arbenz, Najibullah and Mosaddegh have been assassinated, to name just a few.

Cuba has suffered more than 60 years of economic blockade.

Vietnam and Korea were devastated, with millions murdered by the US military, in bloody wars.

Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded, with millions killed and millions more made into refugees.

Indonesia saw the greatest mass slaughter, of over one million communists, in 1965, in a US sponsored coup that installed the Suharto military dictatorship.

US-led imperialism economically supported and supplied military aid to the Expansionist Indonesian ruling class’s massacre of 200,000 Timorese people, one of the greatest genocides of the 20th century!

Argentina’s Malvinas Islands are still occupied by the US imperialist subordinate ally, the UK. 

Venezuela continues to be sanctioned by US-led imperialism, and its gold reserves were stolen, while a US puppet, Juan Guido, is purported to be its ‘Real President’!

Haiti is currently occupied by US sponsored “UN Troops”, after the US military kidnapped its elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristede.

The Dominican Republic, in 1965, after the people overthrew its US supported dictator, the revolution was bloodily crushed by the invasion of 50,000 US marines.

Syria is still suffering under US occupation of its oil producing areas, after suffering huge US sponsored terrorism, resulting in massive death and destruction and millions of refugees.

The Palestinian people have suffered 74 years of oppression at the hands of the US imperialist backed Israeli Apartheid Zionist state. Israel’s role in the Middle East, is to punish all enemies of US-led imperialism in that critical oil-producing area.

The countries of Central America have suffered, repeatedly, from coup after coup, that were sponsored by the ‘Monster’ from the North’.

Half of Mexico was seized and colonized, by the US.

Somalia has been made a bloody victim of the bombs of US imperialism.

The Congo has suffered millions of dead, in civil wars, as a result of the US sponsored coup that overthrew Patrice Lumumba.

Libya has been reduced from the richest country in Africa, under Ghadaffy, to a crushed, blood-soaked area of civil war, in an utterly destroyed country, by US-led imperialism.

US imperialism is threatening global war, over the issue of Taiwan, which virtually every country, including the USA, recognizes as part of China.

Pakistan has suffered coup after coup, sponsored by US-led imperialism, including one just a few months ago, along with numerous drone strikes from the US military, against its own population.. 

The list of US imperialist crimes against the Global South goes on and on! The Global South has been victimized by their colonialist master for too long!

The Global South is, now, gravitating towards the China-Russia alliance, for obvious reasons! The Global South, if anything, has a greater stake in the outcome of the Ukraine War, than does the people of the Global North! 

The war in Ukraine is a pivotal moment in the global struggle against imperialism. It’s outcome will help determine the global balance of class forces. 

The war in Ukraine, under the leadership of US imperialism, is now a grand imperialist alliance of imperialism that seeks to return Russia to the status of a semi-colony. They will then turn their attention to crushing China.

The Kiev regime, established in 2014 by the Euro-Maidan coup, is fascist. It is racist, and it destroys even basic bourgeois democracy. Moreover, the US imperialism is using that fascist and racist in order to expand its terriotry for exploitation. The essence of the Kiev regime is that it is an imperialist subordinate regime.

However, Putin regime is not a revolutionary regime of the working class. The difference is that the Kiev regime in western Ukraine is a subordinate of the imperialists, and Russia, on the other hand, has been treated as prey by imperialists. The Putin government is a bourgeois Bonapartist formation that oppresses the working class at home, that is compelled to fight the pro-imperialist Maidan Nazi project to defend itself. The working class has a common interest with that government in that, but must maintain its own class independence and support Putin militarily but not politically. 

The US is the dominant colonial power controlling the world, but it is being threatened and weakened by the economic challenge of a rising China and its alliance with Russia.

The defeat of US-led colonialism will be an historic victory for the Global south!

Now is the time for the Global South to move to action! Your future depends on a Russian victory.

Now is the time to take to the streets to:

Support the victory of Russia against Imperialism!

To support the struggle of the Donbass people against NATO imperialism and Nazism

To oppose all sanctions against Russia!

To fight to close all US foreign military bases, north and south! 

Whilst the workers of the Global North must fight to overthrow imperialism in its centres of power, a victory over imperialism must be waged globally.

Comrades of the Global South will you take up this banner and carry it proudly forward? We have a world to win! Now is the time to act!

Organizations:

Anti-War West Sydney (Australia)

Brazlian People’s Communist Party (Brazil)

Bolshevik Group (South Korea)

Classconscious.org (Australia/USA) 

Communist Revolutionary Action (Greece)

Consistent Democrats (LCFI-Great Britain)

Communist League (LCFI – Brazil)

Hawaii Friends of the Soviet People (Hawaii – US)

Militant Trend Bolshevik (LCFI-Argentina) 

Socialist Workers League (LCFI- USA

Red Line (Greece)

US Friends of the Soviet People (USA)

Individuals:

Nick Clinker (Greece)

Karin Hilpisch (Germany)

Alex Jordan Dillard (USA)

Mohammad Basir Ul-Haq Sinha (Bangladesh)

By Humberto Rodrigues and Christian Romero

Popular fronts are fronts between workers’ parties and parties of capital. They can be divided into 3 categories and even more than 3 as we will see later. Lula’s Broad Front with Alckmin is a more bourgeois expression of the traditional popular front.

The Communist League supports Lula’s candidacy as the only instrument to defeat the fascist Bolsonaro at this time and on the ground of bourgeois elections but criticizes the broad front as a trap of class reconciliation with the bourgeoisie and the golpismo that can cause us serious future problems.

The popular fronts were born as a theoretical formulation after a 180° turn in the tactics of the 3^rd International, then under the control of Stalinism. Until the adoption of this tactic, almost in the mid-1930s, the political orientation for CPs was to avoid alliances with social democracy against fascism.

Despite the strength of the USSR and the size and influence of the mass support for communist parties and social democracy, such a sectarian tactic allowed the conversion of Nazism from marginal force to mass party and Hitler’s rise in Germany in 1933.

Georgi Dimitrov, then secretary general of the Communist International, communicates the new policy in a May 1934 Pravda article, which went on to comment favorably on socialist-communist collaboration. The reorientation was formalized at the VII Congress of the Communist International in July 1935 and reached its apotheosis with the proclamation of a new policy: “Popular Front Against Fascism and War”.

Since then, Communist Parties have been instructed to form broad alliances with all “anti-fascist parties”, not only parties of working-class origin, such as social democrats and labour, but also bourgeois parties, with the aim of ensuring social advancement in the conjunctural internal struggle of countries.

Less than a decade later, Stalinism was forced to do the same zig-zag, to extend this nationally waged politics, also to the military and international level against Nazism.

A Worldwide Popular Front

At the international level, the change in orientation of Stalinism also underwent a 180° turn, only later. Although since 1934 there has been official guidance for CPs to build the “Popular Front Against Fascism and War”, on August 23, 1939, the governments of Stalin and Hitler signed the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), known mainly as the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact,  due to the names of the German and Soviet Foreign Ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Viatcheslav Molotov, respectively. This pact was followed by the German-Soviet Trade Agreement in February 1940. The pact lasted until June 22, 1941, when Germany, without notice, began the invasion of Soviet territory in Operation Barbarossa.

Just as after Hitler’s rise in Germany, after the massive invasion of the USSR by the Nazi army, surprising Stalin, who had believed in the treaty of non-aggression, Stalinism also performed a turn in its international front policy and created an alliance with the Anglo-Saxon imperialist countries against the former Nazi ally. At that time, the USSR’s alliance with the Anglo-Saxon imperialist countries, which in the previous decade set up Nazism against the USSR, may have been the first worldwide popular front.

This worldwide popular front with the Western big capital resulted in the extinction of the 3^rd International (which was created by Lenin in 1919) in the middle of World War II! The Communist International was extinguished on May 15, 1943. In 1949, imperialism created its international anti-USSR, NATO. With this front with the USSR, imperialism also managed to establish a policy of containment of the European revolution, at a very favorable time due to the almost lack of regimes and bourgeois states after the war and when anti-fascist resistance sprees animated by the Communists defeated the Nazi-fascist occupation in several nations. Imperialism has fueled this restraint with the counterrevolutionary agreements of Yalta and Potsdan, of dividing the area of influence with imperialism, which smothered revolutions such as in Greece, Italy, etc.

From the historical experience of the development of popular fronts at the national level, we evaluate three perspectives for the development of the popular front tactic:

1) FASCISM: The popular front in its most classical conception can give way to fascism as it did in France, Spain in the 1930s, or chile in the 1970s.  After frustrating the expectations of its social bases, aborting the possibilities of social revolution, disarming political and militarily the organizations of the proletariat, the popular front leaves the way clear for the triumph of fascism.

2) BROAD LIQUIDATION FRONT: The popular fronts can constitute broad fronts where they progressively dissolve in the capitalist state machine until they completely disintegrate. An example of this we have in the Italian Communist Party, the largest communist party in the entire West.

In the process of this liquidating degeneration of the broad front, the PCI justified its strategy with so-called Eurocommunism. Under the guidance of Togliatti, with the fall of Mussolini in Italy, already in April 1944 was proclaimed the “turning point of Salerno”, a commitment to the traditional bourgeois parties giving rise to a government of national-bourgeois unity.

From that immense communist movement, very little is left and after decades of liquidationism, neofascism emerged with force in Italy in 2022. This broad-fronted policy has been responsible for the demoralization and dissolution of left-wing organizations in all the countries in which it is applied, as in Chile after the Pinochet dictatorship and in Uruguay, with the Broad Front.

It should not be ruled out that in the short or medium term, this second demoralizing variable of alliances with the class enemy does not result in the triumphant return of fascism or neofascism, which in Brazil is represented today by Bolsonarism.

3) SINGLE ANTI-IMPERIALIST FRONT (FUA): Uniquely popular fronts can evolve into Anti-Imperialist Fronts. As considered in the Fourth International’s Transitional Programme:

It is, however, impossible to categorically and in advance deny the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of a combination of exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial breakdown, revolutionary offensive of the masses, etc.), the small-bourgeois parties, including stalinists there, can go further than they wanted on the road to rupture with the bourgeoisie.

Transitional Programme

This possibility is not ruled out and under exceptional historical determinations the popular front was broken by capitalist or imperialist allies, advanced the expropriation of imperialism and permanently from capital as in the Yugoslav, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. However, these experiences did not create Soviet-type governments, supported by popular councils, as in the early years of the Bolshevik government.

In these circumstances, deformed workers states were created, most often the anti-imperialist fronts develop as political revolutions not advancing in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a class, not advancing in the social dimension, or at most advancing partially and with time receding in the face of the reaction that is strengthened and returns.

Examples of this latter variant can be noted with different singularities in Iran and Nicaragua in 1979, Burkina Faso in the 1980s, especially after the beginning of the imperialist offensive of financialization, dismantling western industrialization processes. Perhaps you can also put in this category Angola, Mozambique and South Yemen. The set of these revolutionary processes and their lessons need to be studied on a case-by-case basis.

A Single Anti-Imperialist Front Worldwide

At the international level, imperialist decay in its financialisation phase (1970-2022), marked by deindustrialisation, trade war and sanctions against oppressed peoples and workers’ states, caused, after the financial crisis of 2008-2010, the breakdown of the capitalist balance in the struggle between nations.

China, industrialized through global labor arbitrage (John Smith) by imperialism itself, has made the capitalist world dependent on its production chain, both in the import and export of goods, designed to become the nation holding the largest Gross Domestic Product since the 2008 crisis.

To try to contain Chinese influence derived from China’s conquest of world markets, the U.S. sought to strike through mechanisms of hybrid warfare, lawfare, parliamentary and military coups with governments that have approached China politically. This is what happened with Honduras, Libya, Paraguay, Ecuador, Ukraine, Brazil, Bolivia…

Russia, after suffering a decade of Pinochetist shock doctrine, a speculative attack in 1998 and NATO’s military expansion to the East after the end of the USSR (1991), seeks to defend itself by renationalizing part of the economy and disputing political, military and indirectly the former areas of influence of the USSR with imperialism.

From then on, China and Russia were forced to establish a defensive alliance against the onslaught of the U.S. and its NATO allies, and AUKUS in the Pacific, a strategic alliance supported by the dialectics of a new Cold War, stronger than the political ties that Stalinist bureaucracies possessed and which were easily disrupted by the imperialist harassment that threw China against Russia in the 1970s.

This alliance, also made up of other oppressed nations such as Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Syria, and the workers’ states of Cuba and North Korea, is a single anti-imperialist front. The most advanced, proletarian and open-war fraction against imperialism of this AUF is in the People’s republics in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. As NATO recreated Nazism in Ukraine for its Russophobe offensive, the anti-imperialist struggle in Ukraine was forced to turn into an anti-fascist struggle, so the current AUF  is anti-imperialist and anti-fascist.

The hostility and pressure of imperialism are, by denial, a driving force of the anti-imperialist and socialist struggle, forging the “antagonistic cooperation” of the oppressed, historically forced non-revolutionary leaderships to lead revolutions, to go beyond where they desired in the line of rupture with the world system dominated by the US. If as Moniz Bandeira said, “empires are more dangerous when they decline”, at this time of decline of imperialism then this driving force is greater and more tensioning in favor of an opposing resistance.

Can the world proletariat triumph without taking advantage of the contradictions of the class enemy, the decay of imperialism, the breaking of the inter-State capitalist balance? With the Single Anti-Imperialist Front as a tactic, as a starting point, it must have the Permanent Revolution as a strategy, as a point of arrival. It cannot  triumph without taking advantage of the dispute between financial capital and productive capital, to fight for reindustrialization, to expand the number of our class, which embodied by its greatest advantage, its number, to advance towards its own class strategy that goes far beyond the strategy of the governments of the nations that make up the AUF, to convert the fight against imperialism into an internationalist struggle,  proletarian, revolutionary and permanent, for socialism.

Workers Control of Price and Income Rises—Sliding Scale Now!

No Cuts, Job Losses or Austerity! Workers tribunals and capital justice for neoliberalism’s mass killers!

This is the Consistent Democrats’ leaflet for the Day of Action over the Cost of Living on 1 Oct

Working-class people are being robbed blind with parasites pocketing the loot. Truss is on the rampage, handing out tax cuts like confetti to the rich while the poor, workers and even the middle class are being crucified by inflation engineered by the ruling class to grab what loot they can while the sun shines

The energy price ’freeze’ is theft. Truss wants us to pay later with massive austerity for the privatised energy parasites not being able to double prices yet again for two years. And the government will borrow money to compensate them for freezing business tariffs also. Later they will rob us pay this debt to their mates.

This won’t stop many starving and/or freezing this winter. Prices have still more than doubled. Many thousands of sick and elderly will die. This is premeditated.

The obvious solution is nationalisation of all energy supply. Without compensation as everyone knows the parasites enriched their shareholders ten times over, converting profits into dividends instead of investing. Starmer opposes this as he is as much a servant of capital as Truss and Johnson.

Cameron’s austerity killed around 150,000 mainly disabled and elderly. Johnson’s conduct of the Covid pandemic, which was hardly better than Trump’s, killed a similar number. The discharge of infected elderly into care homes was mass murder in plain sight. Poorer countries with larger populations protected their people and had a quarter of our death toll. That’s about another 150,000 murdered by Johnson. And there’s Truss’s latest massacre – visible already. Close to half a million murdered in a decade. A hidden Hitlerian slaughter!

Less than 200,000 mostly wealthy Tory Party members got to choose Truss. No democracy for the victims of this murder! The entire mass media in this country is controlled by billionaire parasites. They lie like Josef Goebbels when it suits their interests. Corbyn, a lifelong anti-racist and socialist, was smeared in the entire capitalist media, including the BBC, Mirror and the Guardian as akin to a Nazi. Yet these liars support actual Nazis fighting Russia in Ukraine.

This is nothing to do with ‘democracy’. The decay of capitalism means that capitalist ‘democracy’ more resembles fascism. These killings need to be avenged, and we need the workers movement collectively to seek to enact revolutionary justice against the parasitic neoliberal capitalist class that rules us.

Truss aims to effectively abolish rights to strike. Unions need defence forces against bosses’ attempts to crush them. This points to workers state power.  

Sanctions against Russia, part of the proxy war Biden initiated, with support from the Tories and New Labour, have impoverished us. These same neoliberal plunderers engineered a coup in Ukraine in 2014 to bring to power Ukrainian Nazis and their servants, who for eight years massacred and brutalised the nearly half of Ukrainians who speak Russian. Eventually Russia sent troops into the South and East of Ukraine to protect its people. That deserves solidarity also.

We must fight for indexation of wages, pensions and benefits, which should rise directly in line with RPI, under control of committees of trade unionists and other workers, claimants, pensioners, etc. It likely needs a general strike to get that. Enough is Enough and similar bodies must merge with the unions in struggle, and all must use militant methods – strikes, disruption of roads and transport until they pay up, mass-based defence guards to resist disconnections, brutal police and fascists, our own tradespeople to reconnect people who have been cut off from energy supplies, etc. All union leaders and politicians who claim to speak for us should be put on the spot and challenged to lead mass actions to stop these attacks: or make way for others that will. We need a real working-class party to destroy capitalism.

Changing of the guard at Britain’s Medieval-Capitalist Totem

From the point of view of the independent interests of the working class, the death of Elizabeth Windsor is a non-event. There is nothing to mourn, men and women die of old age every day, its simply a natural process and only of interest to their family and friends. However, for the ruling class of Britain, forcing and brainwashing the bulk of the population to pretend to mourn someone they never met or were never likely to meet, let alone know, is a vital class interest today. Hence the long, orchestrated orgy of propaganda, obsequious grovelling, etc. in the media, together with the whole huge logistics of ‘lying in state’, monotonous repeated street advertising bought up in advance with a level of universal uniformity usually only seen under Stalinist regimes like North Korea, who consciously mimic the trappings of monarchy.

The queues are a bizarre spectacle of superstition and masses of the population acting against their own objective interests in pursuit of a fantasy. Reported at over 13.5 hours long towards the end of the week, it is likely that three or four million out of a population of around 67 million are taking part in this orgy of fantasy nationalism, pageantry and medievalism. Benedict Anderson defined nationalism as akin to religious belief in an “imagined community” comprising of individuals who will never meet, and the imaginary nature of nationalism is certainly on show here. This worship of a billionaire aristocrat is certainly bizarre, and its active encouragement is a long-planned logistical exercise by the British state, codenamed ‘London Bridge’, as is widely known.

The privileged longevity of Elizabeth Windsor, monarch since 1953, is seen as an ideological weapon by the British ruling class who long since abandoned any but the most formal pretence that their class rule is in any sense ‘democratic’. The idea that one elite family, and one individual within it, can epitomise the essence of a supposedly great tradition and nation, is drummed into schoolchildren for instance, with propaganda texts, assemblies and instructions to mourn Windsor and flowers being handed out to pupils across the country. 

Earlier this year a ‘Platinum Jubilee’ textbook was handed out to every primary schoolchild in the country at government expense, costing £12 million. This is an outrageous example of indoctrination into an anti-democratic creed whose whole purpose is to inculcate deference and subservience to inherited wealth into the younger generation of those working-class and even middle-class youth who have no real interest at all in maintaining such a medieval institution. This was done by a government that cracks down ruthlessly on any sign of political dissent in schools, with any set of ideas that oppose capitalism equated with terrorism, racism and anti-Semitism. Fortunately, it does not seem be working, as opinion polls show many more young people under 25 want to abolish the monarchy than to keep it.

This totalitarian brainwashing in favour of private property and deference to hereditary billionaires also has, as is well known, the support of the Starmer-led Labour Party, whose ideologues have also equated anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism, not to mention engaging in mass expulsions of leftists for supporting Palestinians, or opposing expulsions of those who do support Palestine. Now the racist scab leadership of Starmer is banning Labour MPs from commenting about the monarchy during the period of the funeral, and in fact about anything. This in the middle of a strike wave, that, in a serious capitulation, the leaders of militant trade unionists like Mick Lynch have postponed for the duration of the mourning of the monarch.

However, inflation has not been postponed, attacks on the working class have not been postponed at all. The new Tory Prime Minister, the execrable and feeble-minded Truss, has continued to work during the period of supposed mourning, preparing further attacks on trade unions, tax cuts for the wealthier parts of society, and a con-trick scheme to try to defuse the issue that threatens the future of the Tory government: fuel price rises. She aims to do these things at the expense of the working class, both by nailing down most of the existing scandalous profiteering price hikes so far in 2022, effectively at least doubling fuel prices for this year, while using government borrowing, not expropriation, nationalisation or even taxation of fuel profiteers, to offset the next predicited rises, simply stuffing the face of the profiteers with government money to compensate them for the freeze(!!), and laying the basis for future austerity attacks to recoup that from the population and its public services and living standards at a later date.

The Labour Party, for its part, clearly opposes nationalisation of the energy privateers, many of whom are blatantly selling ‘renewable’ energy at the same market price as gas-fuelled energy, which is much more expensive, and thus making huge profits from doing so. Instead, Starmer’s Labour published a ‘God Save the King’ meme on social media, and has said nothing at all to condemn the arrests of individuals who have protested Charles Windsor’s accession as King by dynastic succession, or such provocations as the re-emergence in public of Andrew Windsor, whose involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and child sex-trafficking is a major scandal that also threatens the monarchy.

After the cretinous funeral period, comes the coronation of Charles Windsor and his consort, Camilla Parker-Bowles, as the monarch, probably next spring. It is always, by the very nature of the event, difficult to protest a funeral, but a coronation is something else. The coronation of this couple is going to severely test the stability of the British monarchy, as Charles is discredited among many for his previous adultery and the death of his former wife, Diana Spencer. There is something slightly surreal for an adulterous couple like those two to ascend to a monarchical power that makes the monarch head of the Church of England, which is supposed to oppose the ‘sin’ of adultery (though its founder, Henry VIII, created it in the 16^th Century so he could do just that!). It was something along similar lines that was responsible for the abdication crisis of 1936. The monarchy hangs by a thread with his accession to the throne. More intelligent monarchists want to see Charles Windsor refuse the crown in favour of his son, William, who is young and untainted enough (they hope) to give the monarchy a whole new lease of life. But he shows no sign of doing so.

Some naïve liberals believe that the monarchy is purely a medieval institution, an excrescence and anachronism, that British capitalism can overcome and become somehow more democratic.  This is a fantasy however: the British bourgeoisie is terrified of any mass expression even of reformist class consciousness because it fears that such things will start a chain of events that leads inexorably to revolution. Monarchist-nationalism, spread as widely as possible, is the most potent weapon that they have against the emergence of any such class consciousness.

Not only that, but the anti-democratic features of the British constitution, including the power of the Head of State to dismiss governments, are bound up explicitly with the monarchy. They have been used twice in living memory, though not so far within Britain itself: in 1975 for the monarch’s representative to dismiss the Australian Labour Government of Gough Whitlam, on behalf of US imperialism, and similarly in 1983 in the Caribbean island nation of Grenada in the context of a US coup and invasion of that country to destroy and remove its leftist government, led (until his murder in the coup) by Prime Minister Maurice Bishop of the leftist New Jewel Movement. The British monarchy is not a bug, but a feature of British imperialism as it has concretely evolved. Other imperialist states, including those such as the United States that do not have monarchies, nevertheless have other anti-democratic features that allow the bourgeoisie to override the popular will when it suits them to do so. The monarchy is just the form that this takes in Britain.

The monarchy may well be medievalist, but it is no mere feudal relic that can be easily disposed of. It is deeply embedded in the structure of British capitalism. The fight for its abolition is a key democratic demand, to be sure, but such is the nature of capitalism that a real struggle for its abolition will destabilise British capitalism itself. All the more reason why Marxists should demand its abolition as a key part of our programme to overthrow capitalism itself.