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.

by Humberto Rodrigues

After 200 days, the war in Ukraine is an expression of the return of major wars of indirect confrontation between major military powers in the Cold War; the growing decline of American imperialism and the worldwide wave of popular protests against inflation, united by the repercussions of Western sanctions on Russia, but above all, inflation fueled by the incessant drive of capital (which uses war as an alibi) to increase the rate of exploitation on labour, increasing the price of goods and devaluing wages. In some countries, the fight against inflationary extortion, that is, the economic struggle of popular resistance against capitalists, combines objectively and already subjectively with the anti-imperialist and internationalist struggle against NATO.

The character of the war

In Ukraine we do not support ‘peace’ imposed by the terror of Kiev’s bombs on the oppressed peoples of the Donbass. We do not advocate an end to hostilities without the Denazification and Demilitarization of Ukraine, full of fascist mercenaries, criminal biological weapons laboratories, and NATO weapons. We defend the defensive war of Russia and the workers and soldiers of the Donbass people’s republics against NATO expansion and NATO-Nazi puppets. For us Russia’s is a military and energy power but not an imperialist country. For Marxists, imperialism is the expansionist policy of financial capital, a policy that is not preponderant in Russia’s relationship with other peoples. Russia was the victim of this policy, especially in the 1990s, during the “shock therapy” of privatizations and dilapidation of the material bases of the former USSR. After then, under Putin’s rule, Moscow has been trying to break from being the victim of imperialist economic and military expansionism, as expressed in the current conflict, in the military field and also in the war against sanctions.

For the last six months Russia has been carrying out a war to free the Russian and Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine, who are oppressed by Nazis armed by imperialism. This initiative by Moscow came after three decades of NATO’s expansion to its borders. In this expansion, imperialism incorporated into its control the government of Europe’s largest country, Ukraine, which has a huge border with Russia. For the Russians of Ukraine, the delay of this initiative from Moscow cost the lives of almost 15,000 people.

The return of the great symmetrical wars

The beginning of such a war was due to at least two factors: the failure of the instruments of “economic dissuasion” by the US and the EU (which is another sign of the decline of the power of imperialism, from an economic point of view) and the emergence of a military force capable, albeit indirectly, of facing the entire Western world. As Russian military doctor and analyst Vasily Kashin reports, the sum of the various Ukrainian military formations reaches 700,000 people, while, according to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, he estimated the Russian force in Ukraine at 167,000 people.

The West has turbocharged Ukraine and in fact treating the country as an effective member of NATO. Western imperialism recreated Nazism, previously against the USSR and now against Russia, in its mercenary form. The Pentagon directly sponsored the dirty war with 46 biological weapons labs against Russia. In addition to resorting to all this, after eight years of state terrorism against the oppressed populations of the people’s republics of Donbass and in cities like Odessa, the Ukrainian military aircraft reequipped by NATO has been using terrorist attacks that threaten to blow up Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and have already murdered Dugin’s daughter. Despite all this and the superiority of Ukraine’s troops, Russia has conquered 25% of Ukraine’s territory. Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, after Russia. It had a total area of 603,000 square kilometers. The region liberated by Russia from Ukro-Nazi rule that will probably give way to a union of popular republics, a new country that will have a larger area than England, or Greece or Bulgaria. The best farmland in Europe is in Ukraine, and the most industrialized region with important reserves of coal and iron from Ukraine is eastern Ukraine, the Donbass. Notwithstanding as well that the western part of Ukraine was integrated into NATO, in these six months the Donbass was integrated into the Russian Federation and established trade relations with several countries of the Eurasian bloc.

Imperialist decay and strengthening of the Eurasian neo-mercantilist bloc

But this war of restraint on the part of Russia is also possible currently thanks to the decline of American imperialism and its deep internal political crisis. The U.S. has failed to do in Syria what it did in Libya and Iraq, thanks to anti-imperialist intervention by a coalition of forces from oppressed countries such as Iran, through its Revolutionary Guard, and the Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas supported by Tehran, Russia, and Syria itself. After 20 years of occupation, the U.S. had to withdraw from Afghanistan defeated socially and politically. In what it considers their own backyard, Latin America, Washington and the CIA have lost five consecutive elections. In the last two years, in Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, Peru and even Colombia, a ‘partner’ of NATO where the Pentagon has military bases, Washington’s candidates have lost to left-wing candidates without the U.S. being able to avoid such results through coups such as the lawfare that arrested Lula to bring victory to Bolsonaro in 2018 and overruled the victory of Evo Morales, in 2019. By the way, the most recent attempts at coups d’état through hybrid warfare maneuvers made in CIA, like that of Bolivia, have come to be short-lived, or have been rapidly aborted by Russian intervention, as in Belarus (2020) and Kazakhstan (2022).

The War in Ukraine marks the return to the era of “great” wars that use the entire arsenal developed by major military powers, and the return of the nuclear threat, as has not occurred since Gorbachev’s rise to the Kremlin, while the USSR was consumed in Afghanistan. The return of this mode of war is another sign of the end of the thirty-year era of the world order of dominance of American imperialism after the end of the USSR.  After 1991 and until now, the inter-state conflicts were characterized by a sharp imbalance of power, technologically asymmetric wars carried out by military interventions of imperialism against semicolonial peoples at extreme military disadvantage in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Haiti, Libya…

Among the main differences between the current War in Ukraine and the wars of the last 80 years, and the post-WWII asymmetric wars, is that the current war takes place while Imperialism, that is, the expansionist policy of financial capital, is losing control of the world market to Eurasian mercantilism. The main characteristics of mercantilism were: accumulation of precious metals, incentive to manufacture, state intervention in the economy, favorable trade balance and protectionism. The types of mercantilism are commercial and industrial. The new mercantilism use globalization to transport commodities across the earth like never before. International interdependencies have increased greatly in the last 40 years. And almost no people can dispense today with exchanges with China, in the export of Chinese manufacturing, converted into a world manufacturing plant by the imperialist financialization itself. Without understanding this, is it not possible to understand the contradiction that there is a Western Boycott of Western sanctions (RCIT).? Contrary to what the West and its right-wing and left-wing spokesmen think, who thought Russian military superiority would be offset by economic sanctions, Russia proved stronger, and the dialectics of the new Cold War strengthened economic ties with China and the entire Eurasian bloc. And in addition, much of Western capital was forced to sabotage the sanctions policy. Since April,

“exports to Russia have steadily increased. In June, the last month for which we have comprehensive data, the dollar value of exports to Russia across the broad sample was 47% higher than the April low, with most of that increase attributable to the EU27, Switzerland, Korea, and Japan – all of which are ostensibly participating in the sanctions. Last week, China’s General Administration of Customs (GACC) revealed that the dollar value of the country’s exports to Russia in July had risen 35% compared to June. For the first time since the invasion began, Chinese exports to Russia were worth more than the monthly average from September 2021 to February 2022. Taiwan’s customs services report that exports to Russia in July were 36% higher than in June, while Korean data shows that exports to Russia increased by 61%. For the three countries, the value of exports in July was about 80% higher in July than the March-April average. The exception so far is Turkey, where exports in July fell slightly compared to June, although Turkish exports to Russia remain about 40% above the pre-invasion average.”

The Squeeze on Russia Is Loosening, https://theovershoot.co/p/the-squeeze-on-russia-is-loosening

All this shows that world capitalism cannot not only dispense with China, but cannot dispense with Russia. And overall, it is not possible to block the Russia-China hub and its allies for the human and natural resources that the Eurasian bloc concentrates, and that explains the fear of the boomerang effect that sanctions have caused in Western economies. The sabotage of sanctions is being carried out by imperialist allies such as Japan and South Korea, who are true U.S. military colonies, and by regional powers that usually play double games like India, Turkey, or even loyal Saudi Arabia.

By maintaining the sanctions, even partially, the German government has been reversing its effects with the highest energy inflation of all time, of 35% between August 2021 and August 2022 , forcing the Germans to suffer economic shortages only comparable to the payment of war debts imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. (https://br.investing.com/news/economic-indicators/inflacao-na-alemanha-atinge-maxima-de-quase-50-anos-em-agosto-1031579?utm_source=responsys&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily_Digest&utm_term=Editorial_DailyDigest_V3_BR_783988&utm_content=subnews_headline)

In other words, because of its vassaldom to the US, far more than that of Merkel herself, the current German social democratic government imposed on the German population a humiliation only comparable to that which imperialist revenge forced Germany to suffer after the first world war. US imperialism is exporting the immediate payment of its decay to its European allies. Boris Johnson predicted Putin’s fall on March 1. Where’s Johnson today? In addition to this British prime minister, due to his position in the face of the war fell also Mario Draghi of Italy, Marija Golubeva of Latvia and Kiril Petkov of Bulgaria.

Russia is generating a trade surplus of $1 billion a day from the sale of oil and gas. In 2022, so far, Russia has already achieved a record surplus of nearly $300 billion, more than double the year before the war. The international stock market is convulsed, devaluing nervously and bitcoins have plummeted. Despite the sanctions Russia has strengthened its trade ties with China, India, South Africa, Iran, Brazil, Saudi Arabia. Putin’s popularity reached 83%, higher than that of any of his opponents.

The second question that those who believe Russia is an imperialist country cannot answer is: are the NATO bloc and the Eurasian bloc equally imperialist, because the NATO bloc (the members of the G-7, supposedly the seven richest countries on the planet), cannot maintain anti-Russia sanctions and sabotage them, instead of expanding negotiations among themselves if they are economically powerful countries for it? Why doesn’t the West have the autonomy to mutually agree? I suspect that the limitations of the RCIT lie in some factors: they do not understand the character of imperialism today, do not recognize the global arbitrage of labor and capital of the time of Western financialization combined with Eastern industrialization, nor do they know how to use the law of unequal and combined development to make a concrete analysis of the concrete situation.

The consequences of these first six months of war are:

1. The liberation of the Russian people from NATO’s Ukronazis

2. The conquest by the Eurasian bloc of a territory larger than that of England outside NATO’s area of control;

3. The dialectics of the Cold War to further solidify the single anti-imperialist front on all terrains;

4. Anti-Russian sanctions failed, in 2022 it was the Russian currency that was most valued and a year in which several transactions began to replace the dollar. Inflation reached 15% in Russia and then began to ebb while in the US and EU it skyrocketed. Germany that would cheapen its energy supply with the Nordstream 2 pipeline is being the victim of the highest inflation since the 1920s, energy inflation only from July to August reached 35% compared to the month of August 2021.

5. Putin did not fall, he increased his popularity as never before and several rulers who cheered for his downfall, such as that of England, Italy and Lithuania were down;

6. outside the European theater of operations there was retreat of imperialist oppression on countries such as Iran and Venezuela;

7. As decaying imperialism cannot control several parts of the world simultaneously and is focused on the race for Europe, it has abandoned its Latin American backyard and its preferred right-wing candidates lost the elections to leftist governments in Chile, Honduras, Peru, Colombia and should lose in Brazil.

8. Ms Pelosi’s provocation in Taiwan accelerated the pace of China’s reaction to preparation for the third war, technological autonomy in the semiconductor war, reduction of US treasury bonds in Chinese hands. China is no longer the largest Holder of U.S. debt after its total fell below $1 trillion for the first time in 12 years Japan became the largest holder of U.S. debt securities, even reducing its stock: “Japan, which reduced its U.S. debt stock to $1.212 trillion in May, from $1.218 trillion in April, is now the largest holder abroad.”; abortion of chinese industrial plant construction projects in the USA.

The spring of inflation rebellions

During the current war was born another conflict of world and proletarian proportions, broader and growing, the spring of the population of various nations of the earth against inflation arising from the sanctions imposed on Russia and its allies by Western imperialism, which immediately caused the price of gas, oil and food to rise across the globe. 26 countries have at least 50% of their wheat exports from Ukraine or Russia. But as Michel Fakhiri’s recent report presented to the UN (recorded by Bert Schouwenburg of the Morning Star), the current global food shortage crisis was born in 2015, and therefore before the war and the pandemic, it is caused by the accumulation and financial speculation practiced by capital in the food business, where “the gains were in the order of 1 billion dollars every two days. In 2021, multinational Cargill made nearly $4 billion in net income, its largest surplus in its 156-year history.” (The UN recognizes the depth of the food crisis, and capitalism is to blame, https://revistaopera.com.br/2022/09/02/a-onu-reconhece-a-profundidade-da-crise-alimentar-e-o-capitalismo-e-o-culpado/). The current extraordinary cycle of capital accumulation is based on an extraordinary growth of world hunger.

Against this inflation, in various parts of the world mass protests shake regimes that have transferred to their peoples the inflationary costs of imperialist sanctions against Russia.  Germany, Bangladesh, France, Indonesia, England, Italy, Moldova, the Czech Republic, Serbia, in many countries spontaneous demonstrations against inflation and many of them against NATO erupt.

The need of the world party of revolution at this time

We need to build an international party defending oppressed peoples against imperialism and defending all workers against the inflationary crisis manipulated by capitalists around the world.

All the major wars of the last two centuries have untied revolutionary waves from the breaking of the capitalist balance in the relationship between states. The Prussian Franco war provoked the Commune of Paris; the first world war provoked the Bolshevik revolution and the creation of the USSR; World War II provoked the revolutionary wave that overthrew capital in 1/3 of the planet.

In 1945, the capitalist balance was restored only between the imperialist states under American hegemony as a need for “antagonisti’c cooperation” (to use an expression of August Thalheimer) against the USSR, the new workers states and the bourgeois nationalism of semicolonial countries. In 1975, with the fall of Saigon and the American withdrawal from Vietnam, a cycle of territorial reduction of capitalism ended, as witnessed by the revolutionary situations of Iran, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, whose revolutionary processes did not give rise to new workers states. In the last 50 years imperialist financialization has restabilized the balance between states under US hegemony, which was strengthened after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

With the social counterrevolution in the workers states between 1989 and 1991 the tendency to capitalist territorial reduction was reversed, leaving the United States as the only global power. The situation of imperialist-capitalist equilibrium has never been stronger than in this period, especially in the 1990s. In 2008, with the global economic crisis, which was centered first on the U.S. and then the European Union, which are in reflux within the world market, a new phase of imperialist imbalance began, which at first was artificially contained by a wave of coups promoted by the CIA.  Neo-mercantilist, constituted from the inheritance of the most extensive and populated workers states of the past. It is at this stage that the current war in Ukraine takes place and the prospect of a third world war opens up.

Revolutionaries must prepare for the trend of a new war that has indeed begun, by taking sides with the nations oppressed and attacked by imperialism and the unconditional defense of existing workers states such as Cuba and North Korea, which translates politically at this time into supporting Russia’s defensive war in Eastern Europe and rejecting imperialist provocations against China. Therefore, we are not pacifists in front of the warring blocks.

It is possible that the current situation evolves, matures for the third world war in current, chronological times, or in historical times in the medium term.

As Nancy Pelosi’s provocation against China has shown, the internal contradictions of American imperialism, threatened by civil war, can accelerate the chronological times of the historical trend to the third world war.

However, we are not impressionists like the Posadists who fell into an immediate view of the war, who renounced the construction of proletarian internationalism in favor of bourgeois nationalism and Stalinism, we know that only an eruption of the proletariat can prevent a new world war. However, if this war is not avoided, we must be prepared to take advantage of the fall of the interspersed capitalist equilibrium to advance beyond the neomercantilist capitalist bloc that today is driven by the creation of a single anti-imperialist front of oppressed bourgeois states and workers states. We believe that the world proletariat and oppressed peoples of all the world should take advantage of the Intra-bourgeois fissures to impose their own program to change reality.

If we can better understand this reality, establish the necessary tasks in the face of the demands of class struggle for the end of NATO and against inflation, imperialism, and capitalism we can overcome the current stage of an embryo of “international propaganda society” (Leon Trotsky) in the process of regrouping and establishing a program to build the world party of the socialist revolution that the current stage of class struggle requires.

At the time of writing this article, people in Britain are waking up to the reality that the energy cap is being increased by 80%, raising an average energy bill from to £1,971.00 to £3,549.00, with worse yet to come with energy caps being raised in January and April of next year. National Energy Action have projected that 8.9 million people in the UK will be in fuel poverty by October of this year.[1] While the zombie led government has gone AWOL, the Tory hopefuls Sunak and Truss continue to take lumps out of each other in an attempt to woo their rabid UKIP reactionary base. Part of this courtship display entails blaming everyone else, which includes Russia for a crisis that was already developing last year, before any military interventions into Ukraine were on the horizon. While wholesale sanctions by the West have exacerbated the problem, the crisis was already developing. France was freezing its gas and oil prices last September, allowing electricity to rise by no more than 4%, with this continuing until the end of 2022.

The world was coming out a global pandemic with issues around the supply chain and opening up an economy that had effectively been shut down. This opening up increased demand causing economic stress, in Britain this has been exaggerated with the disastrous isolationist decision-making around leaving the EU. Britain’s economic shock is set to cause a deep recession more than other developed nations, it is projected to be the worst performing out of the G20 [2], apart from Russia which is the midst of fighting against a proxy war financed overwhelmingly by the US and saddled by the heaviest sanctions placed upon any state by the West. UK exports dropped £20 billion for 2021 as it decided to put in place trade barriers with its biggest trading partner 21 miles across the Channel.

COP26 held in Glasgow last autumn seems an eternity ago when Johnson announced in his ‘James Bond’ speech/address at the COP26 opening ceremony to world leaders, the urgency of embracing newer ‘green’ technologies and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. However, these platitudes from disaster capitalist politicians are just noise with no real intent. Ashok Sharma, who hosted COP26, had previously received donations from the business tycoon, Ravi Kumar Mehrotra, the executive chairman of Foresight Group International [3]. Foresight Group is a multi-billion dollar, UK based global conglomerate, which has interests in offshore and onshore oil drilling, port and gas infrastructure, and shipping. The company has close business relationships with partners involved in climate science denial and pro-carbon lobbying, such as ExxonMobil.  Putting wolves into a sheep pen is what these companies do best.

Corporate Climate Change Denial

During the 1980s ExxonMobil employed climate scientists in a research programme to understand the changes in the earth’s climate, which it would inform the company and enable it to make future business decisions based on ethical responsibility. The scientists involved believed that Exxon’s objective was to be at the forefront of solving the problem and offering alternatives. However, the company had a deeper programme of understanding the science to form a strategy of forming arguments against climate change, employing climate deniers to enable the company to continue business as usual [4]. Ensuring that profits could remain unabated by becoming one of the biggest climate deniers by providing counter arguments to seed doubt not only with politicians but also the public. Climate scientists were deliberately targeted by the heavy weight of these conglomerates in attempt to discredit, often with terrible consequences.

When this argument eventually became unviable due to the overwhelming scientific evidence available, and the environmental impacts being played out in real life, the defence of their continuance of murdering the planet, has now become one of economic scale and necessity, playing on people’s fears of poverty and disruption of their way of life. Through creating fog, the argument of job losses and the impacts upon the economy have enabled them to get away literally with murder and enable their lackeys in government to not take correct decisions in serving the public that they supposedly represent.  

This is the dilemma that the British government now finds itself in as the UK economy crashes. Its short termism can only look at the here and now as it desperately attempts to seek out growth and profit. Concessions will be made to ensure that the dangers of civil unrest and the development of revolutionary consciousness associated around that unrest, is curtailed. These often come in the form of hand outs, such as the energy payments being paid out to families. These are basically a subsidy passed onto businesses who are already profiteering, and on the other hand the introduction of legislation ensuring that the state has the necessary ‘legal’ apparatus to stamp on any potential protests. These concessions are being swallowed up and will not solve the crisis that the government finds itself in, and does not address how companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and Total are able to report profits of $51 billion in the second quarter of this year and get away with it while others struggle [5]. These profits are without BP, who were set to report later.

The Labour opposition are just as woeful as not only do they refuse to endorse striking workers who are demanding a pay to combat rising inflation predominately fuelled by energy costs, but have rowed back on nationalisation of utilities, something that Starmer supported during his own leadership election campaign. He wants to bail out energy companies by providing a package to ‘protect’ consumers by handing over anything between £29-£60 billion back to the energy providers after taking a windfall tax of £8.1 billion from them. In stark contrast it is estimated that it would cost only £2.8 billion to take these same companies back into public ownership. But it is not only energy that is pushing up inflation. The increase in food prices increased by 2.3% between June and July this year, immigration controls post-Brexit according to the NFU has resulted in £60 million in UK crops rotting in farmers’ fields [6]. As a country that is not food secure, the UK imports around 50% of its food needs, this is suicidal. Climate change is already having huge impacts on crop yields with drought and soil erosion and having a policy that seeks to increase its air miles disguised as ‘global Britain’, is flawed as other countries experience climate breakdown.

Contrary to what the British government announced at COP26, Johnson and both the contenders to his crown have signalled in their husting debates what their dystopian future for Britain lies ahead. This includes the approval and opening up of new oil and gas fields in the North Sea [7], removal of the green levy on energy [8], encouraging more investment into new fossil fuel extraction and pressing for fast-track applications for this to take place [9]. This is hand in hand with looking at new legislation to outlaw ‘militant’ trade unions, ‘eco-extremists’ and to place anyone ‘expressing a hatred’ of Britain into the Prevent programme as radicalised political extremists [10][11].

It looks increasingly likely that Truss will be the winner of the Tories toxic leadership contest and while some of the comments on the environment coming out of the mouths of both leadership contenders have been warm, in practice they are meaningless without any detail offered and a record of inaction. During Truss’ tenure as Environment Secretary in 2014 she was responsible for cutting £235 million from the Environment Agency budget, which has now resulted in the huge increase of river and sea pollution [12]. The UK is facing a serious crisis in water supply with water infrastructure at bursting point. Billions of litres of water are being wasted every day and raw sewage dumped into rivers, lakes and beaches with huge impacts on biodiversity and the destruction of wildlife and water quality. To put our faith into the hands of the very people who are blatantly responsible for where we find ourselves is criminally negligent.

On a global level it goes beyond this, the technology for greener energy requires critical minerals, minerals that require an increase in mining. This requires opening up of mines in pristine environments, which in turn requires increasing our carbon footprint in the initial stages to open up mines and develop the infrastructure around that extraction. It also includes the pollution associated with mining and the runoff into watercourses. Australia has some of the world’s largest recoverable resources of several critical minerals, including cobalt, lithium, manganese, tungsten and vanadium. The country is the world’s top producer of lithium, rutile and the second largest producer of zircon and rare earth elements and has potential for more undiscovered minerals with 80 % of Australia remaining largely under-explored [13].

Climate Militarism

The US has taken a keen interest in Australia and for good reason [14]. The rhetoric coming out of both Canberra and Washington takes aim at China with both governments seeing China as an economic threat. They counter that by threatening China military via AUKUS. Securing the world’s resources, which includes critical minerals, is part of the imperialist strategy of ensuring US hegemony, either directly or indirectly through its Anglo-Saxon partnership including Britain. The problem with this is that not only does climate breakdown require a global response but it also increases the likelihood of conflict and societal breakdown, which potentially could lead to nuclear exchange with isolationist geopolitics. The Australian government already sees this as potential for a new economic ‘gold rush’ and to secure its own future, when the future of the whole of humanity is at stake. Seeking economic leverage over others is what has led us down this nihilistic path to self-destruction. The irony is that new data has shown that Australian wildfires have destroyed part of the protective ozone layer above [15]. A study led by Lilly Damany-Pearce, a researcher at the University of Exeter in England, suggests that a sudden and unexpected warming of the global stratosphere was detected in early 2020; reaching up to 3 degrees Celsius around Australia and about 0.7 degrees Celsius globally. Adding to this without addressing the overriding environmental concerns does nothing to alleviate climate breakdown.

Since the early 80s the evidence has been clear on the trajectory that governments were taking us to, each time they have clearly failed us, instead relying on ‘the market’ to save us from certain extinction.  Each year we see records broken, 2022 being no different. Last year saw extreme floods hit China severely, this year drought with the Yangste river and its tributaries drying. China is experiencing the hottest summer on record with a heat wave that has so far lasted 70 days [16]. This has resulted in a drought in half of the country resulting in hydro power shortages, electricity rationing and a drop in crop yields as much as 50%. China with a population of 1.4 billion is not only the factory of the world but also is one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters, this will inevitably have an effect not only on food supply but also price increases in an already fragile global economic outlook.

The effects of climate degradation have now come to the people of Europe, which has seen its worst drought in 500 years, leaving some of the most famous rivers on the continent almost dry [17]. This has also led to a sharp decrease in crop yields and electricity shortages. EDF had to reduce its nuclear energy output after the water temperature, which is used to cool the reactors, increased. This also shows the complexity of looking for other alternative forms of energy provision, particularly as nuclear reactors require huge amounts of water, something that needs to be taken into account with drought and rising sea levels. Wind farms have also seen a drop in energy production as the increase in warm air results in prolonged periods of high pressure leading to ‘wind drought’ [18]. The increased temperatures result in increased energy needs to keep cool and is no consolation from the energy crisis we now find ourselves in. Europe has also seen its share of wildfires with loss of life and property, even here in the UK where temperatures have reached 40 degrees Celsius. The increase in wildfires, apart from devastating people, wildlife and the environment on the ground, releases smoke particles into the stratosphere. Once there these particles cause continued heating and changes to the ozone through changes in atmospheric circulation and chemical reactions.

We have had four decades of watching politicians and big corporations lie and absolve themselves from any responsibility of their contribution to this global catastrophe, which is only going to worsen. The Met Office’s Hadley Centre, has forecast that an average summer in central Europe will be more than 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the year 2100 [19].  The Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG), which commissioned the research, are confident in their analysis because it aligns between recorded average temperatures since 1850 and the figures that were predicted by computer models. Even if governments were to substantially cut emissions with immediate effect this will not have any impact until decades down the line. This is criminal and must be treated as such, this is deliberate class warfare on a much serious scale than what the ruling class have subjected workers to previously. This has the potential to end all life on earth and as such as far worse than the crimes of Hitler himself. We must take action now for every year is another year wasted, we have already wasted the last 25-40 years while the ruling class deliberate on how to get out of the mess of their own making. We should be demanding action and if they are incapable of making that change, pushing them out of the way and subjecting them to revolutionary justice. This crisis will only be resolved through global socialist planning and co-operation and not any form of national isolationism.

[1] https://www.nea.org.uk/energy-crisis/

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/oecd-economy-zero-growth-forecast-g20-b2096438.html

[3] https://bylinetimes.com/2021/10/28/cop26-president-received-funding-from-billionaire-fossil-fuel-investor-tied-to-exxonmobil/

[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

[5] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/big-oils-q2-profits-hit-record-50-bln-with-bp-yet-come-2022-07-29/

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/15/pounds-60m-in-uk-crops-left-to-rot-lack-of-workers-nfu-farming

[7] https://www.thenational.scot/news/19908141.cop26-posturing-ends-tories-set-green-light-six-oil-gas-fields/

[8] https://www.energymonitor.ai/policy/opinion-truss-and-sunak-promise-climate-regression

[9] https://www.agcc.co.uk/news-article/six-new-oil-and-gas-fields-to-be-fired-up-as-sunak-takes-action

[10] https://inews.co.uk/news/liz-truss-heckled-by-environmental-protestors-during-tory-leadership-hustings-1782589

[11] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rishi-sunak-extremism-terrorism-prevent-b2137158.html

[12] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/22/liz-truss-environment-agency-cuts-sewage-water-pollution

[13] https://www.globalaustralia.gov.au/industries/critical-minerals

[14] https://www.mining-technology.com/analysis/the-pentagon-sets-it-sights-on-australias-critical-minerals/

[15] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm5611

[16] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/08/23/china-hit-by-longest-and-strongest-heatwave-on-record/

[17] https://www.carbonbrief.org/daily-brief/europes-drought-the-worst-in-500-years-report/

[18] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2174262-weird-wind-drought-means-britains-turbines-are-at-a-standstill/

[19] https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/uk-news/met-office-uk-heatwave-summer-record-b2155043.html

Fuel Price Attack on Workers: Far Bigger Than the Poll Tax!

Britain is heading for an explosive decompression of neoliberal imperialism and Toryism, including the pink Toryism of the Blairites currently as manifested by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party leadership. Everything is coming together in a perfect storm so that the pressure of the huge capitalist crisis is bearing down on the political regime.

The factors bearing down on them are both international and domestic, a confluence of various damaging factors resulting from the breakdown of the neoliberal capitalist project both on the domestic and international level. The international factors are severalfold: the Ukraine war has given a major boost to the inflation that was already embedded within the system from the pent-up demand that resulted from the Covid-19 lockdowns, which a planned economy could have carried out rationally by simple adjustments of planning. A capitalist economy, however, cannot, as has been proven as inflation was already beginning to soar at the end of 2021, long before the imperialists provoked Russia to defend itself by sending troops into the Donbass to defend its people from NATO-funded Ukrainian nationalist-fascist attacks.

The result in Britain is the biggest attack on working class and lower middle class living standards ever attempted by the ruling class, at least since the 19^th Century. Perhaps Hitler’s bombing of London and other cities was comparable. The threatened quadrupling of the fuel bills paid by ordinary people, including pensioners, is a total disaster and will lead to large scale malnutrition and freezing to death among ordinary workers and the poor, particularly old age pensioners, if not stopped.

This is a far bigger attack on the working class than Thatcher’s Poll Tax, which was mainly an attack on the poorest sections of the working class, the unemployed, etc. (it could be called the Ukraine Poll Tax plus). The latest estimate is that the price cap will rise to a staggering £6,000 pa by April 2023, more than quadrupling the price. This attack, from privatised energy resellers in turn in hock to the large oil and gas extractors and international conveyors, is a frontal attack on the living standards of the entire working class and a good chunk of the lower section of the middle class as well. As an illustration of the latter, 500,000 small businesses face being driven to the wall by energy price hikes, and the price of beer in pubs is reckoned likely to soar to £14 per pint by the end of 2023 if inflation is not curbed immediately.

The huge rise in inflation is entirely price driven. The practiced propaganda liars in the media are attempting to try to blame workers going on strike to preserve their living standards for the fact that inflation in August was found to have risen to 10.1% according even to the Tories’ fraudulent CPI measure of inflation. In terms of the correct RPI measure, which takes full account of housing and energy costs and is weighted towards the staple purchases of ordinary people and families, the figure is 12.3%. But they are failing to demonise rail strikers and other strikers, because everyone knows the impact that this inflation is having on their own standard of living: a massive, often unmanageable attack. The result is that despite Truss and Sunak both ranting against trade unions, and Truss in particular promising the Tory rabble whose votes she seeks that she will further ban strikes and attempt to criminalise trade unionism, a clear and growing majority of the public supports the strike wave.

Mick Lynch, the General Secretary of the RMT, has stated that it might be necessary to call a general strike to beat off these attacks on working class people, which is the first time this has been seriously raised as a possibility since the pit closures crisis of 1992. The strike wave is not confined to the railways: a ballot of workers at Royal Mail in a dispute over working conditions, separate from the pay issue, produced a 98.7 vote in favour of strikes out on a 72% turn out. Unite members at the containerised docks at Felixstowe, voted by 92% in favour of strikes, and began an 8-day strike at the port, which handles around half of the UK’s containerised traffic, on 20 August. The strike wave crosses all kinds of barriers – barristers have already engaged in sporadic strikes and are now seriously looking to organise an all-out strike.

The labour bureaucracy and imperialism

The huge problem is that the British trade union movement is heavily bureaucratised, and the bureaucracy centred on the TUC has since the 19^th century been a force acting against struggle, reflecting the interests of the labour aristocracy that long considered that it benefitted from Britain’s imperialist position in the world. This attack, together with the preceding four decades of neoliberalism, culminating in the fusillade of attacks in the past decade, have undercut the advantage that the working class itself perceived it had in the preceding century or more. It was a pathetic piece of collective working-class chauvinism that drove part of the working class to back the Brexiteers, hoping vainly to retrieve that former privileged position by supporting the fantasies of Farage, Johnson etc. But what they have gained instead is a likely attempt by Truss to wield the jackboot against them when she takes office in early September. That upcoming struggle, which is now visible and not far away, should provide the British workers movement with a priceless lesson in the need for all-out struggle and solidarity against decrepit British capitalism, in a situation where objective developments now act to undermine such fatuous illusions.

Let’s be clear: in the face of this massive neoliberal crime in the making, and the immiseration of the British working class and even middle class that it threatens, we certainly need a general strike. We need union leaders that raise the necessity for such a mass action in front of the masses. But a general strike needs political leadership and a determined cadre to organise it. We do not have anything like that at the moment. It will have to be created in the struggle itself.

The defeat of Corbynism by the Blairised right wing of the Labour Party has radicalised many ten of thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands, against the Blairised neoliberal bureaucracy in Labour. It has also led to an estrangement of some of the more militant inclined unions from Labour. The various would-be party type formations that have come into being as a result of the defeat of Corbynism, such as the Resistance Movement/System Change, the Galloway-led Workers Party, Breakthrough, and other fragments, including the SLN, need to find a way to work together to build something substantial that can overcome Labour. We welcome the initiative of the CWU, Mick Lynch and Zahra Sultana MP in initiating ‘Enough is Enough’ as a mass campaign to defeat the energy and cost of living attack and note the mass resonance it has immediately gained. It is possible that this also could provide a focus in struggle for the development of a mass political movement to mobilise the working class as a class in itself and for itself, as well as becoming the champion of all oppressed layers, as is necessary in this situation where a general strike is a real possibility and a burning necessity.

Thanks to the Tory crisis, in the face of this burgeoning economic disaster, which is crucifying ordinary people, there is no effective government. The disgraced, pathological liar Johnson is AWOL for most things, having fled to Chequers to enjoy state largesse while Sunak and Truss slug it out in front of the Tory Party membership, swelled by defectors from UKIP as Johnson appropriated both their programme and their people in 2016-19. The contest has become a hate fest against organised labour, and oppressed minorities and their supporters (the ‘woke’) as Truss is predictably making the running even though even senior cabinet colleagues like Michael Gove freely admit she is on a ‘holiday from reality’ in refusing to even attempt to address the crisis caused by mushrooming energy prices.

In other European countries, particularly France, state ownership of the energy industry has led to the state effectively freezing energy prices for the whole of 2022, or at least limiting the rise to 10%. But in Thatcherite neoliberal Britain, privatisation rules: the energy industry (gas and electric) was privatised decades ago by Thatcher, and Blair/Brown’s so-called Labour government, which ruled for 13 years during the 40 years of neoliberalism we have suffered since, didn’t lift a finger to reverse any of it. Blair/Brown’s was a neoliberal government just as much as Thatcher’s.

Neoliberalism and engineered mass slaughter of the poor

The austerity Tory-LibDem coalition we had 2010-2015, with its benefit cuts and hounding particularly of the disabled as ‘scroungers’ caused the deaths of around 150,000. As well the numerous criminal acts of racial persecution under the “hostile envinronment” overseen by Home Secretary and later Prime Minister Theresa May, also meant a considerable number of migrants had their lives ruined, or were deported to their deaths, often through being denied NHS care. The Windrush scandal brought some of this to public view. All these go into the necessary accounting.

Then since 2015 when the Tories gained their short-lived overall majority under Cameron, we have had Brexit, which has obviously crippled the British capitalist economy, hidden somewhat by the Covid pandemic which coincided almost exactly with the actual exit of Britain from the EU. The pandemic provided the opportunity for Johnson to exhibit his own pathological hatred and bloodlust against the working class. Initially the government endorsed a policy of ‘herd immunity’, which involved deliberately allowing this new disease to spread virtually unchecked through the population.

In particular, the policy of discharging suspected Covid patients from hospitals into care homes for the elderly caused carnage, which was the intention, reducing the pension bill of the government. In its initial strains, and prior to any vaccine being developed, Covid was frequently deadly to people who were not young and/or with existing health conditions, which affect a large proportion of the population. Johnson was not able to get away with this ‘herd immunity’ barbarism at the beginning of the pandemic, and was forced by strong criticism from Jeremy Corbyn, who was still Opposition Leader until April 2020, to introduce measures to halt the uncontrolled spread of the disease.

But Corbyn then made way for Starmer who was simply supine: his watchword was: “whatever the government decides to do, we support them”. When Johnson sabotaged the first lockdown in the summer of 2020, and decreed that children had to return to school even though severe forms of the disease were still running rampant, Starmer backed Johnson against the teaching unions, which raised objections and tried to protect their members, and indeed schoolkids and their families, from a still-potent threat to public health. Starmer sacked his shadow Education Secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, because she supported the teaching unions’ position. But instead of openly admitting this he concocted a smear that RLB was guilty of ‘anti-Semitism’ to hide the real reason for the sacking. Given such latitude by Labour, Johnson deliberately sabotaged the first set of quarantine measures before they had time to be effective. The result was the Kent, or Alpha variant of the disease, four times more infectious and just as dangerous as the original, which also rapidly spread around the world.

There then followed an appalling cycle of ‘mockdowns’ – quarantine measures that were for camouflage and clearly too lax to be effective, prematurely lifted in any case, until Johnson grabbed hold of the vaccine programme once it became operative in 2021 in a desperate bid to give himself an alibi, and to distract attention from the enormous death toll of the pandemic: in excess of 200, 000. Fortuitously the virus evolved into Omicron, a somewhat milder form, in 2022. At the same time the liars were organising parties for the privileged parasites that made up and hung around Johnson’s government, the exposure of which finally destroyed the ability of this ‘teflon’ suited pathological liar to keep on lying with impunity, providing the excuse, if not the reason, for his terrified cronies to bring him down this summer.

Since a good portion of the UK Covid death toll was as deliberate and engineered as the death toll from the austerity programme of Cameron-Clegg. it is reasonable to double the death toll of Cameron-Clegg-May’s austerity and deportations and attribute around three quarters of the death toll that Johnson was responsible for as part of a neoliberal cull of the population. This fits in with Johnson’s affinity with other arch-neoliberal, right-wing pseudo-populists such as Trump and Bolsonaro, who did nothing to protect their people from Covid, but rather used it as a weapon to attempt to wipe out sections of the population they saw as surplus to requirements, those that do not make a profit for predatory big capital.

Which makes as least 300,000 victims of neoliberal terrorism in Britain since the Cameron-Clegg austerity programme began in 2010 (not counting the victims of the ‘hostile environment’, who are less easy to quantify, but certainly run into many hundreds). Cameron-Clegg began their attacks with the support of Gordon Brown and his ministers who also stood in the 2010 election promising a more severe attack on public spending than anything that happened under Margaret Thatcher. Cameron won, since he represented this programme more consistently, and delivered a deadly series of attacks on workers.

And his neoliberal successors since have presided over a mushrooming mass slaughter of the working class in Britain, or rather those sections of it – the retired, the disabled, those lacking the relevant skills to survive the huge deindustrialisation that neoliberalism engineered from the 1980 onwards. They did this to drive up their own unproductive renumeration through property bubbles and scams, and appropriating surplus value from overseas through the export of industrial jobs to low wage economies mainly in the Far East to provide cheaper inputs to the imperialist countries.

Populism and imperialism

This is another aspect of neoliberalism that bears some commentary. ‘Populism’, particularly in the US, once meant a political trend within bourgeois politics that stood with the people in some underdeveloped, not-really-class sense, and sought to limit the power of big capital over the people. But in the main imperialist countries today, we have pseudo-populists whose purpose is to harness racist and demagogic sentiments to strengthen big capital over the working class, and to crush movements of workers and the oppressed. That is what right-wing populism means today in the conditions of imperialist decay. It has even spilled over in some cases into dependent countries like Brazil, where the butcher Bolsonaro was put in power by a coup process organised by US capital. Trump in the US made hypocritical capital out of the resentment of workers at the export of industrial jobs overseas under neoliberalism. So did the Brexiteers. And it is Britain that this has been played out to its conclusion economically as the delusion that Britain could regain its former glory by turning away from the EU, has simply led to another massive attack on the workers. One that threatens another carnage, the deaths of hundreds of thousands from malnutrition or freezing to death.

The anomalous thing about this populism is that in some parts of the world where the imperialist bourgeoisie does not call the shots, populism appears to have provided some means for the masses to fight back against neoliberal attacks. The most obvious example is in Russia, where the imperialist-derived shock treatment of Yeltsin, with the carnage that this inflicted upon the working class of Russia and the former USSR, has been to a considerable extent rolled back by Putin’s populist, bourgeois, but non-imperialist government. This however depends on the absence of the imperialist bourgeoisie as the decisive force at the top of society. Forms of left populism have also played an important role in giving expression to mass anti-imperialist sentiments in Latin America, but they have proven less effective than in Russia, because of the deeper roots of a long-standing comprador bourgeoisie whose political and economic links to imperialism are considerable. That class cannot be worked around by ‘left’ populist governments. It must be torn out by the roots.

In Britain and the US, right-wing forms of populism, that is, populism on the basis of the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie, have proved a genocidal force against the working class, that is, a brutal enhancement and intensification of neoliberalism. Something that has evolved quite close to fascism, in fact. Trump’s Xenophobic, anti-public health populism led to the death of over a million Americans from Covid. The characteristic of this kind of right-wing imperialist ‘populism’ is the mobilisation of the chauvinistic sentiments of sections of the majority ethnic working class against minorities on the basis of a pathetic nostalgia for past imperial glory that is in fact impossible to resurrect. The section of the working class that was always subliminally aware that some of its social gains were paradoxically able to be won because its ruling class had plundered resources from other people, expressed its impotent rage at imperial decline with such constructs as ‘Make America Great Again’ and of course Brexit. The hated ‘elite’ in the lingo of the imperial populists was any section of the ruling class that, for its own reasons, paid lip-service to racial equality, or had links with the labour movement, however tenuous, things like that.

But in fact, the Trumps, Johnsons, Farages, Le Pens, Salvinis, Trusses, even Bolsonaros are part of the imperialist neoliberal elite, or in the latter’s case, a Yankified puppet comprador elite. They are not saviours of the workers, but their bloody assassins. It is in the interest of the working class, not to realign with bankrupt neoliberal imperialist social democracy, the Blair’s and Starmers, but rather to rediscover the use of revolutionary methods in dealing with the neoliberal elite – all of it. To the genocidal butchery of the working class by the neoliberal terrorists, whether Trump with his fondness for open white supremacists, or Biden, Johnson, Blair and Starmer with their increasingly open support for Nazism in Ukraine, we note that the class interests of the workers are objectively for the extermination of the entire genocidal, fascist-implicated neoliberal capitalist elite, whether populist-imperialist like Trump, or shitlib imperialist, like Biden and Starmer. The Ukraine war has revealed they are all supporters of Nazism, and genocide against the working class and oppressed, and willing to lie shamelessly to cover that up, lies that come from the shameless lying liberal media, such as the Guardian in Britain, as well as the more traditional right wing press. They all need to be wiped off the face of the earth by the methods of Robespierre and Dzerzhinsky, a renewed, cleansing elimination of a deadly threat that otherwise threatens humanity with extinction through nuclear war or environmental holocaust.