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.

Defend Russia and the Donbass People!

By Liz Hoskings

Anyone who states that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are defending themselves against a Russsian ‘invasion’ is either misinformed or a racist liar.

Despite the silence of the Western media, the Russian-speaking Donbass region has been subject to a programme of ethnic cleansing by Ukraine since 2014, since they first voted for autonomous status and when that was rejected declared themselves independent republics.

This began with the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014, which overthrew the elected government of Victor Yanokovich and replaced it with a client regime. Having been funded and encouraged by the United States and NATO in its hope of expanding Eastwards and bringing its forces closer to Russia’s borders, neo-Nazi forces, mostly from the Western region of Galicia, whipped the masses into a nationalist frenzy.

The first act of the newly installed government of Petro Poroshenko was to drop the official status of the Russian language, despite the fact it is the mother tongue of a third of Ukraine’s population. Despite his official banning of the Russian language, the current president of Ukraine was born in Russia and struggles to speak some Ukrainian words himself. In fact, considering the interspersed nature of central Ukraine and the fact it grew up there (it appears to be mostly influenced by old Russian, Turkic languages and Polish) it would be more accurate to call it Galician. It was likely adopted as the official language in 1991 to signify independence, as much as it being the mother tongue of a questionable majority, which it would not have if Galicia had broken away.

Alarm bells rang in Crimea, which was historically part of Russia and only gifted to Ukraine in the 1950s by Nikita Khrushchev, without consulting the population. It held a referendum and re-joined the Russian Federation.

Protests then rang out in the eastern Donbass region, who voted for regional autonomy. This result was not respected by Poroshenko, who sent in troops to reassert dominance over the region. This led to declarations of independence by the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

Around the same time, a group of peaceful protesters in the Russian-speaking city of Odessa were burned alive in a Trade Union headquarters by Nazi death squads, and those who managed to escape were clubbed to death.

Contrary to the impression given by the Western media, the war in Donbass did not begin with Russia’s intervention in February 2022 following its recognition of the breakaway republics but had been raging for eight years. Residents had suffered shelling daily on the pretence of ‘rooting out separatists’, when in reality civilian infrastructure was being targeted, along with civilians who were not part of the defence militias. The Nazi Azov Battalion was let loose on the region and allowed to loot stores and attack civilians.

Meanwhile, in Central and Western Ukraine, those speaking Russian in public risked being attacked by menacing groups of Nazi thugs. The Russian language was no longer taught in schools, to the further alienation of Donbass civilians and no doubt fearful residents of Odessa, who had been shown the price of resistance.

Streets were renamed after Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who was responsible for the murders of Jews, Poles, and Russians, despite the recent attempt of the Western media to rehabilitate him. Statues have been built of him, and Poroshenko gave him the title of ‘Hero of Ukraine’, despite the fact he and his thugs had little to no support east of Galicia. He was instrumental in the formation of the Galician Waffen SS Division, the logo of which is used by the aforementioned Azov Battalion.

A Ukrainian nationalism stripped of the history and close lingual and cultural ties with its neighbour (differences indistinguishable by foreigners) is bound to be false. And false it is.  Schoolchildren are taught that Ukrainians existed as long ago as 1000 BC (!) and were responsible for building the Black Sea. From a young age they are given cartoon books glorifying Bandera and demonising the Soviet Union that their not-so-distant ancestors fought and often died to defend from Nazi Invasion. They are also sent to Nazi Summer camps where this malignant nationalism is drilled into them as they learn fighting techniques. The despised Russians are referred to as Orcs, a word which as most people familiar with Lord of the Rings would be familiar with. They were in Tolkien’s world a sub-species, fought against by the good and pure blonde-haired, blue-eyed elves.

Yet this is not Lord of the Rings, with its simplistic world view of good vs evil, a dualism echoed in Christianity as much as it is in racist mythology. Israel views the Palestinians in the same light, an inferior race that must be destroyed by the chosen people (Israel).

The truth of the matter is that as a nation, Ukraine is a young one. Ethnically they are Slavs, and as they are so close together linguistically and culturally as well as geographically they are believed to be one people in pan-Slavic ideology. They were referred to in the West as Great Russians, White Russians (Belarusians) and Little Russians (Ukrainians) Contrary to the claims of the current regime, echoed by the West, that it was a demeaning term, all it truly meant was that it was a smaller country, and especially with cultural and linguistic differences overlapping so as to be indistinguishable to a foreigner, it did appear as a smaller Russia. Prior to the 19^th century there was little in the way of a Ukrainian national consciousness. As remains the case even today, the land was rich in agriculture, and was one of the main sources of grain and livestock for the vast empire. The flag in use today represents the yellow of a cornfield and the blue of the sky.

The name appears to derive from an expression used in Russia around the 18^th century. ‘I’m going to cross the border’ was crossing the Y’Kraine, and Russian troops on the outskirts of the empire were said to be stationed on the Y’Kraine, pronounced ‘Ooh-kraine’. But this term meant borderlands in general. There was little to speak of in the way of a Ukrainian national consciousness. The language spoken in Galicia and by some communities to the east of it, was dismissed by the ruling classes as a ‘peasant’s dialect’ almost until the revolutions of 1917. In the late 18^th century, the term ‘Ukrainian Cossacks’ started to be used.

The emerging Ukrainian nationalism was treated as harshly by the Tsars in the 19^th century as the others emerging, and the language was repressed until the revolutions of the 20^th century. The land that was then commonly known as the Ukraine declared independence in 1917 along with many other nations in the area. It became part of the Soviet Union partly down to the civil war spreading to the region, and the Whites using it to group. Along with most newly declared republics it was encouraged, albeit not forced, to join the Union.

The idea of Ukraine, its name literally stemming from a word meaning Russia’s border, joining NATO is bound to be seen by Russia as a provocation as it breaks the promise made by George Bush Senior that NATO would not expand beyond its then present borders. Since then, it has been swallowing most countries in Eastern Europe, right to the Baltic States right on Russia’s border. This gives them the right to put American bases with military hardware there. The idea that it is a defensive alliance is put to rest by Putin being rebuffed by Bill Clinton when he asked if Russia could join. It is an aggressive tool which is aimed against Russia and should have been dismantled with the Warsaw Pact.

The idea that the war was ‘unprovoked’ is a blatant lie used by the Kiev regime and the US to garner sympathy from the West. One of the main criticisms by the Russian Communist Party of Putin was that he was betraying the people of Donbass by allowing them to be slaughtered by neo Nazis. They were in full support of the operation, especially with the constant provocative assertions that Ukraine would join NATO at a later date. When Russia finally recognised the breakaway republics in February 2020 and declared the operation, Ukraine’s military forces were very close to Russia’s borders in the Donbass in their non ending war against its people.

This is now a full-scale proxy war between the United States and Russia. Despite their own people facing shortages and rising costs, the Biden regime and its allies keep flooding Ukraine with arms and billions of dollars in ‘aid’. Prior to the war Ukraine was named ‘the most corrupt country in Europe’, and its neo-Nazi problem well documented by mainstream media. Likely because they know the war is unwinnable and the corruption problem not having disappeared since the war broke out, a lot of the military hardware sent by the United States and its EU/UK allies is not reaching its target but being sold on the black market, while US dollars end in the hands of oligarchs.

The social media campaign to garnish support for the war, with propaganda pieces and the sudden appearance of blue and yellow flags, was not spontaneous but was carefully orchestrated by a troll farm, which has now been exposed by the alternative US commentator Jackson Hinkle and others as operating from Discord. Along with posting on alleged Russian war crimes , such as the ludicrous idea put out by Kiev that Russia killed its own POWs in a false flag operation, destroying their own evidence. The only evidence they had for Russia doing such a crazy thing was that the attack was not made by a US HIMAR rocket launcher as originally thought. Common sense tells that it was more than likely ordered by Zelensky as he was worried about what the captives would say to incriminate him and the regime during their conduct of the war.

The Western media was silent when Ukrainian forces shelled a maternity hospital in Donetsk and is silent as it strikes civilian targets there daily. Yet any time civilians are killed in strikes on military targets in Ukraine, the West is mendaciously up in arms. Video footage showing Bucha to have been an obviously staged massacre by the Nazi who was stupid enough to film it on his social media is ignored. And we already know about the Kiev regime’s use of civilians as human shields.

If war crimes by Ukraine since the 2014 coup were gathered in a file, it would be enormous. Yet Russia is not supposed to even defend itself.

Russophobia in the West has become a ‘woke’, socially acceptable form of racism. To show solidarity with Zelensky’s book burning crusade and banning of any Russian art or culture in Ukraine, Italian universities have gone as far as banning Dostoyevsky, and other Russian authors and composers have been belittled, while some of the country’s rich contribution to human culture have been attributed to Ukraine. Orchestras ban Russian composers from being played all over Europe, and a top-class conductor was not allowed to conduct a piece he had previously been invited to do. Racist attacks on ethnic Russians have been reported all over Europe, with truckers being forced to transport goods in fear their vehicles will be attacked. Meanwhile, Zelensky calls for Russians to be banned from entering the countries of his allies. Taken to its logical conclusion this would include himself, as he was born in Russia and still struggles to remember some Ukrainian words.

We support Russia’s military operation in Ukraine out of solidarity with the Donbass people, and the knowledge that they cannot defend themselves without the Russian troops there, who they have welcomed as liberators. Often, they raise the Soviet flag used by their forefathers to defeat the Nazi menace. Now it is back in Europe with full support of the West. The coverage by the Western media, which has long ceased to be objective, is totally one dimensional. French reporters live from the not long liberated town of Lisichansk were surprised to find the people they interviewed supporting the Russians, and had it been recorded it most likely wouldn’t have been shown. Why they would support a regime which now bans their language and where Nazis seek to murder Russian speakers who fail to pronounce Ukrainian test words correctly is anyone’s guess.

Support for the military does not mean solidarity with the right-wing populist Putin regime, but we will defend it against US/NATO aggression. It is not an imperialist power but a semi-dependent regional capitalist power, and though it has built itself up from the poverty of the Yeltsin era its military and other technology have been inherited from the Soviet Era.

Any ‘anti-war movement’ that calls for Russian troop withdrawal is useless, as it is merely echoing the demands of imperialism. It would be abandoning the people of the Donbass to genocide, and Ukrainian forces would easily retake the recently liberated Lugansk Republic, as well as Donetsk and other threatened Russophone/Russian centres like Mariupol if this was to happen.

On 29^th July a substantial motion on Ukraine, taking a firmly defencist position on the Donbass struggle against the far-right Ukrainian regime’s 8 year attempt at suppression of the Russian and Russian-speaking population there, was put to a national members meeting of the Socialist Labour Network. On the face of it, it was defeated by 25 votes to 13, a nearly 2-1 margin. That would seem to be overwhelming. Except that in addition, 10 members abstained.

Ordinarily, one can only speculate over why a layer of members abstain in a meeting. But what it indicative is that the SLN already have a policy on the Ukraine war, which was passed rather hurriedly and at short notice in April, in the circumstances of war hysteria the like of which has probably not been seen since 1914.

Hysteria over Russia’s intervention in a civil war that had in reality been going on since 2014, and the Maidan coup that placed in power a far-right nationalist regime whose key objectives were to parlay Ukraine into NATO. This regime passed a monolingual law that stated that Ukrainian was to be the sole ‘national language’ (even though around 46% of the population speaks Russian as their main language). Evidently its aim was to suppress and/or ethnically cleanse the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking population of the Donbass. This aspect of the conflict is so flagrantly undemocratic that it is akin to trying to ban either French or Dutch in Belgium.

In the face of this, the SLN passed a motion on 8^th April that stated “The Socialist Labour Network condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We call for an immediate ceasefire and for all Russian armed forces to immediately withdraw.” (https://www.labour-in-exile.org/uncategorized/the-amm-8-april-passed-the-following-statement-on-ukraine/)

And yet it also said: “We support the right of secession of the 2 breakaway republics, Donetsk and Luhansk in the face of attacks on ethnic Russians and Russian speaking Ukranians” and paid lip service to “Self-determination for the peoples of Donbass and Crimea on the basis of a genuinely democratic referendum.”

The phrase about the “genuinely democratic referendum” is weasel words, as the peoples of these regions have already held referenda, which in the case of Crimea was overwhelmingly for separation from Ukraine and unification with Russia – hardly surprising as the majority of Crimea’s population not only speaks Russian but is Russian.

 In the case of the two Donbass People’s Republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, they voted equally overwhelmingly for autonomy within the framework of the two Minsk agreements, which were supposed to guarantee such autonomy, not least on questions related to language rights. Even though it was supposed to be guaranteed by the OSCE, which includes both Russia and Ukraine, and the bulk of the so-called ‘democratic’ imperialist powers, the far-right regime in Kiev has waged bloody war against the people of the Donbass for 8 years, in which over 14,000 have died. Apparently, those referenda are not good enough to satisfy the drawers up of the April motion.

The SLN’s original policy completely contradicts itself about the self-determination of the Russian and Russian speaking population when it writes “Russia, hands off Ukraine. Immediate withdrawal of occupation forces”. The problem is that there are no Russian “occupation forces”. The only parts of Ukraine where Russian forces are based are areas where the population is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking, and they are in fact in the process of liberating them from 8 years of hostile, far right, often outright Nazi, occupation and oppression.

There are ZERO Russian ‘occupation forces’ in the parts of Ukraine where monolingualist Ukrainian nationalists can realistically pretend, even formally, to rule democratically. So, in fact this call for the withdrawal of non-existent ‘occupation forces’ amounts for the call for the withdrawal of those forces protecting the people of the Donbass from the murderous proclivities of the NATO-backed Maidan regime and the likes of the Azov regiment. The same Azov regiment that the April policy says of which: “In particular we condemn the supply of weapons and training to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion by the United States, Britain and Israel. The Azov battalion has been integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces and is part of the Ukrainian state. Ukraine is the only state in the world to hold a national holiday in memory of a Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera, whose forces were responsible for the deaths of at least 200,000 Jews, Gypsies and Poles during the war.”

But the SLN is calling for the withdrawal of the so-called occupation forces that are preventing the likes of Azov from conquering the Donbass and reducing its population to a similar condition to that of the Palestinians at Israel’s hands. How is that compatible with ‘self-determination’ for the Donbass?

Evidently it is not. Which is why there was such disquiet among the SLN’s members about this that nearly half of the membership at a meeting failed to support this existing, self-contradictory and in fact reactionary, policy of demanding the withdrawal of the forces of Russia’s ‘special operation’, putting the SLN clearly on the side of the NATO-Nazi oppressor against the oppressed people of the Donbass. What is not surprising, but a little disappointing, is that the often personally courageous but politically vacillating left-centrist Tony Greenstein opposed the motion and led the charge against it, even though he has recently written things that pretty much match the main points in the motion.

His reasons for doing this are simply opportunist. He spuriously claimed that the motion was ‘uncritical’ of Putin. In fact, Putin’s name does not occur in the motion, nor that of any other politician except for James Baker, the US Secretary of State at the time of German reunification, who gave undertakings that NATO would not expand to the East, since massively broken. Putin’s name does not occur because this is not about individual politicians but the social nature of a conflict, in terms that correspond with things that Greenstein has written about in virtually identical terms.

The real reason for this is Greenstein’s fear, as he let slip in the meeting, that some of the more right-wing elements in the SLN would walk away if the SLN adopted a principled, anti-imperialist position on the war in Ukraine. That is simply opportunism and reflects passive acceptance of a situation where there is in fact NO ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT in the main Western countries, as groups like ‘Stop the War’ simply echo the demands of the imperialists for a Russian defeat (while engaging in cheap posturing about ‘a plague on both your houses’ in the worst traditions of traitorous and hypocritical reformism).

The SLN, like much of the rest of the ex-Corbynite left, is politically heterogenous and confused on questions of principle such as Ukraine. Not far off half of that meeting was sympathetic to a principled position, if not yet politically hard enough to vote to overturn the rotten policy and risk a walkout by the confusionist third camp (and worse) types. But it is also clear that there is still much to play for, and as anti-imperialists, we supporters of the Consistent Democrats will not be walking away from the SLN and the ex-Corbynite left more generally.

Motion on the Russia-Ukraine-NATO military conflict

1. The root cause of the current military conflict is the 30-year drive to expand NATO in breach of public undertakings, by such politicians as then US Secretary of State James Baker, at the time of the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, that NATO would not expand ‘one inch’ eastwards from the Elbe. Since then, NATO has expanded to include 10 former Eastern Bloc countries, and the threat to include Ukraine and Georgia, along with hoped-for nuclear weapons and actual bioweapon sites in Ukraine, is regarded as an existential threat by the Russian government and most Russians.

• The 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine led by violent far rightists on the ground, guided and funded with billions of dollars by US politicians and intelligence agencies, installed an effective US puppet government in Kiev. Since the coup this government has not only been a proxy of the US, as the US now openly admits, but has violently suppressed leftists, ethnic Russians, and other minorities. It has introduced a draconian language law that mandates the use of Ukrainian in all official and public contexts, including in the large areas of Eastern Ukraine where Russian is the main language used by the population. This is clear national-linguistic oppression.

• The repression provoked a bloody civil war in Ukraine as residents of the Donbass established the Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk to defend themselves from the violently Russophobic Kiev regime and its fascist military forces. Other sections of the Russian and Russian-speaking population of Ukraine outside the Donbass such as Odessa and Mariupol, who also resisted this, were subjected to massacres and atrocities.

• Russia’s military action in the current war amounted to an intervention in the pre-existing Ukrainian civil war to prevent the destruction and elimination of the Russian and Russophone Ukrainian population by the far-right Ukrainian regime. As this civil war has proceeded there have been numerous organised beatings and murders by Ukrainian far right nationalists of civilians for not speaking ‘proper’ Russian.

• Although Russia has been a capitalist state since 1991 it is not an imperialist power. Imperialism is more than when one state employs military force against another. Imperialism is a stage of capitalism represented by the dominance of finance capital. Russia is not part of the ‘imperialist club’ but a relatively backward, dependent capitalist economy. Its exceptional powerful military was inherited from the non-capitalist USSR, including nuclear forces that were developed for defence against the US. In 1945 the US used nuclear weapons against Japan, which was already seeking to surrender, to intimidate the USSR as the opening shot of the Cold War.

• NATO and the US deliberately provoked this conflict over decades. Russia intervened on 24 February to defend the population of Eastern Ukraine from a massive offensive by Kiev that began on 16 Feb. Both in the run up to the Russian action, and especially afterward, the entire population of the West have been subjected to a racist, anti-Russian hate campaign and militaristic propaganda that has not been seen since 1914. Lies about Russian ‘atrocities’ have been brazenly fabricated when in fact evidence points to systematic atrocities against Russo-Ukrainian civilians being committed by NATO-funded Ukrainian Nazis.

• Foul racism against Russians has become Western state policy. Bans on sporting and cultural figures, the works of long-dead Russian figures like Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky, and even deceased Cosmonauts, are examples of the most disgusting racism, comparable to the Nazis’ bans against Jewish artistic and cultural figures in the lead up to the Nazi holocaust. This has been accompanied by fantasising in the Western media about the possibility of the US ‘winning’ a nuclear war.

• In the face of this we as socialists must declare our solidarity with the oppressed Russo-Ukrainian population of the Donbass and defend their right to defend themselves against NATO’s far right, racist, warmongering campaign by whatever means are at hand, including by working with the Russian armed forces. Russia also has the right to defend itself against the Western project of dismembering it and plundering it for its natural resources.

• We should oppose the demand for the withdrawal of Russian troops without securing full national inviolability of Russian/Russophone East Ukraine as a deceitful ‘anti-war’ demand that does not actually oppose war but lays the basis for a slaughter and/or mass expulsion of Russo-Ukrainians, which may resemble that of the Palestinians. We also note that anyone who seeks a genuinely independent existence for Ukraine proper will not achieve this as a puppet of NATO and the US.

Proposed: Ian Donovan

Seconded: Mick Arter/James Hall

By Mark Andresen

This summer’s plethora of industrial action across the UK has reminded us of the mainstream media’s historic disconnect between the priorities of the middle and working classes.

  Sky reporter Kay Burley’s comedically out-of-touch questions to the RMT’s Mick Lynch in June was one of the more bizarre examples. ITV’s Richard Madeley’s baiting of Lynch was no more successful. Meanwhile, to Government ministers and MPs’, such an obvious question as, how do you justify prioritising additional billions of military expenditure in overseas wars over social policy back home? never passes either’s lips. Their woeful omissions of knowledge at least appeared genuinely incompetent; the BBC’s own omissions are long-observed editorial choices, which date from their founding as a private company one-hundred years ago.

  Four years later, the General Strike represented the first test of allegiance for a national media outlet. From the outset, it fell in with the Establishment line. This was the result of a combination of factors: John Reith – the 6′ 6” tall, craggy son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister and first Director-General, respected and feared in equal measure – was a committed Unionist who saw his role as supporting, not challenging, the status quo. His refusal to broadcast a message with undertones mildly sympathetic to the Strike, from the Archbishop of Canterbury, has to be considered in the light of another, accusatory, against the strikers by the Archbishop of Canterbury. While this was a personal decision of Reith’s, the Company’s now compromised status ensured any such future executive decision would be partial. At the time, this could be construed as more structural than intentional.

  Trevor Harris notes: ‘Reith’s main difficulty was that as Managing-Director of the British Broadcasting Company he was head of a private enterprise. Yet, as Chief Executive of a company, which was financed by a fee payable annually by each listener, a fee collected by the Government which, further, licenced all broadcasting, Reith was also head of a publicly controlled company.’

  It is therefore ironic that the supposed ‘independence’ the company advertised as a positive selling point, in  terms of accountability, is also that which has consistently compromised its raison d’etre.

  Harris adds: ‘Throughout the brief Strike, Reith saw himself as guardian of the Company and the Company as the guardian of public order. Reith himself announced both the beginning and the end of the conflict, even inviting (Prime Minister) Baldwin – in order to avoid an inquisitve crowd at the BBC’s premises at Savoy Hill – into his own home to make a crucial broadcast . . . Reith’s (view) was that a Government-controlled broadcasting service could only support a viewpoint clearly opposed to the Government on that Government’s sufferance. And going against a proclaimed state of emergency could well have been treasonable.’

  Tom Mills confirmed: ‘It was left officially “independent” on the understanding that it would continue to broadly serve the political objectives of the Government and the interests it represented.’

   Scannel & Cardiff meanwhile argued that, with its reconstitution into a public corporation after the General Strike, the BBC “crossed the political threshold” by becoming a “governing institution” with aims and functions delegated to it by Parliament, committed to co-operation with Government, and sharing its assumptions about what constituted “the national interest.”

  Therefore, despite its international growth as a Corporation, the only major structural change through subsequent decades (particularly since the founding of the BBC News channel twenty-five years ago) has been technical; i.e. the efficiency in making those same contacts via speed-dial. This has only served to further embed, broaden and make more casual the web of mutual co-operation.

  Yet, an individual representative voice of the people, once given the chance, can still circumvent such expansion. Fast-forward to 2022 and the RMT’s Eddie Dempsey has shown himself as adept, succinct and influential on the mainstream media as Lynch. This two-pronged attacking defence of their position has proven key in the visual, dominant, rolling news media of today and produced (albeit briefly) an advantageous circumvention of state media beyond anything imaginable by the BBC’s first Director-General in 1926.

  What remains is lip-service from the BBC hierarchy to the term ‘balance’; one rarely anticipating compromise from the middle-class boss, but too often from anticipated capitulation of the worker. 

  Harris stated: ‘the customary rejoinder to the horns of the dilemma on which the BBC seems caught, is to assert that since people on both sides of the political spectrum are grumbling, then the balance must be about right. But, for some, “balance” seems a disengaged, passive substitute for a more forensic approach. Applying “balance,” in the words of one observer, merely means that the BBC’s news coverage becomes “increasingly cautious and constipated.” Impartiality, in this reading, seems to have become equivalent to making only a series of negative choices . . .’

  Such negative choices today as presenting authority figures from thinktanks, with no experience as workers in the current environment, as arbiters of fact. ‘Balance’ is, to some extent, achievable where politics isn’t the subject under discussion; where it is – when the Overton Window of ‘centrism’ has shifted so far to the Right – ‘balance’ favours those who oversee where it resides.

  Earlier this year, both the BBC and ITV featured unintentionally amusing commercials highlighting their ‘independence’ and presenting their news with ‘absolutely no spin.’ If the definition of omission is “the action of excluding or leaving out,” then, in that, they certainly succeeded. A small development in recent years is how thinktank representatives have been introduced, as both ‘right-leaning’ and ‘left-leaning’; a differential that, at one level, may appear trivial, but may also be a result of viewer pressure rather than decided in isolation by a Tim Davie dictat. Such an incremental change is no solution in itself, yet as a regular inclusion in one of the most respected of mainstream media outlets may represent the first dent in its subjective presentation of ‘facts.’ Best case scenario, (if only unintentionally), this admission may be the first small foot-in-the-door of shifting the perception of the uncommitted viewer to self-question what they are being fed and from where it is being sourced.

Communist Fight issue #10 is now available

This issue has two overriding and interlinked themes: the fight against imperialist war, and against the ruinous attacks on the working class and oppressed masses occasioned by the interlinked capitalist economic and environmental crises that are intertwined with imperialism’s wars.

The lead articles on the front and back pages take up all these questions in some depth. The front page lead on Ukraine, by Liz Hoskings, is an all-out attack on Russophobia, imperialist militarism and its overt support for Nazism as a means to wage this NATO proxy war on Russia. It also includes a historical treatment of the national question, which is a different angle to previous articles, and should provoke some debate and hopefully increased understanding. Sharing the front page is an analysis of the fuel price attack on the working class, which is a much more serious attack on the entire working-class population (as well as much of the middle class) than the Poll Tax ever was. It is notable that working-class resistance to the Poll Tax played a major role in bringing down the arch-neoliberal regime of Thatcher in 1990. This crisis is much bigger, the attack more ferocious and entrenched, and intertwined with the effects of 40 years of privatisation and plunder by the bourgeoisie against those gains of the working class that were the product of its most historic struggles, not just in Britain but internationally. The potential for mass action is much greater, but the crisis of leadership of the working class is even more stark. This article addresses the many factors that go to make up this crisis and attempts to point a political way forward.

The back page article, on the other hand, addresses the severity of the environmental crisis we now face, in the context of his summer’s massive and deadly heatwaves in Europe, as well as the complete dereliction of the bourgeoisie on this question, which is driving human existence into great peril. All these questions are intertwined, as capitalist collapse and rampant environmental degradation are driving potent threats to our civilisation all over the planet.

A major component of this journal is transcripts of an international discussion that took place online in May to address the Ukraine conflict and the war drive against Russia and China in the context of Victory Day, the celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany by the USSR in 1945. The effective rehabilitation of Hitlerism by the ruling classes of the West in the current proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, exposes the real nature of the war on the Eastern Front: basically, a class war against a naked imperialist attack. The destruction of the USSR has now led to an imperialist drive to colonise Russia and China in which the temptation to make use of ‘captive nations’ fascists has proved irresistible to the bourgeoisie, especially given the decline of the imperialist hegemon, the US, which has introduced a degree of desperation into their conduct where any means will do to try to reassert US domination. All these questions and much more are discussed in the transcripts.

Other items included are: an account of our intervention in the Socialist Labour Network to try to get that organisation to adopt a principled, anti-imperialist position on Ukraine, which showed evidence of a gradual opening of sentiments on the left to such a position, even if we did not achieve instant success. We have material on the French legislative elections in June, which were an opportunity to put forward our independent class position on opposition to popular frontism in a situation where a popular new left party, La France Insoumise led by Mélenchon, engaged in a coalition that has at least an element of popular frontism about it. Another article in this issue denounces the obscene attempts by the Tories to deport refugees to Rwanda, a statement of genocidal intent if there ever was one. We have an historical analysis of political bias and the BBC by Mark Andresen, an article by our Brazilian comrades about the potential for a coup in the upcoming elections as Lula and the Brazilian workers movement try to throw out the Nazi-populist sociapathic president, Bolsonaro. And we have a commentary on the recent assassination attempt against Salman Rushdie, that is sharply critical of this author and scores the West’s hypocrisy about ‘free speech’ for Rushdie when it is suppressing the Russian media for fear of the truth being disseminating about their involvement with Hitlerites in Ukraine.

This issue is, as usual, very much focused on the struggle against imperialism and war, as a communist journal should be.

Mikhail Gorbachev died on 30^th August aged 91. The architect of glasnost (openness)  and perestroika (reconstruction), his ‘reforms’ to the regime created by the political counterrevolution in Soviet Russia/USSR in the early 1920s, finally brought about the downfall of the first workers state after more than six decades of the political monopoly of a privileged, new kind of labour bureaucracy. This bureaucracy had stymied the world revolution and decades later led to the growth of a layer of youthful middle class and aspiring bourgeois from in and around the bureaucracy. This provided the social base for the political liberalisation of glasnost, seemingly in tune with working class interests in freedom of political debate within the workers’ state. But this was part of a programme of ‘market socialism’ that undermined economic planning, leading a rapid decline in living standards of the working class.

This demoralised the pro-socialist elements that initially rallied to Gorbachev, and instead led to the increasing ascendancy of neoliberal ideologues and frankly agents of Western imperialism, who consolidated around Boris Yeltsin as the more consistent expression of what was implicit in perestroika –  the return to capitalism. Gorbachev’s conciliation of Western imperialism led to agreements with the US that proved to be chimerical – from the 1987 INF Treaty to limit short-range nuclear missiles in the European theatre, which was torn up by the supposedly Russia-friendly Trump in 2018, to the verbal agreement with James Baker, US Secretary of State, that NATO would not extend ‘one inch’ to the East in response to Gorbachev not vetoing German reunification. Which was torn up by the Clinton administration in 1997, which in turn laid the basis for the aggressive expansion of NATO and the current NATO-provoked conflict in Ukraine.

There is little doubt that Gorbachev started out as a genuine liberal Stalinist, motivated to a considerable degree by disgust at the stifling of political and intellectual life at the hands of the bureaucratic regime that he had been trained by, and inherited. But he had no political answer, as did the bureaucracy generally. His complete failure to embrace anything other than illusory capitalist forms of so-called ‘democracy’ led to disasters and impoverishment of many in Eastern Europe and the USSR, particularly in the early to mid-1990s, when Russia suffered what can only have been millions of deaths from malnutrition and suicidal economic-induced despair, the human counterpart of an collapse of living standards that led to a 5 year fall in life expectancy in what was the USSR. Only under Stalin’s forced collectivisation disaster had there been a comparably large fall in life expectancy in peacetime.  This was under Yeltsin, who seized power in Russia after the August 1991 coup attempt finally gave him the opportunity to dismantle the USSR. Yeltsin expressed Gorbachev’s marketisation programme more consistently that Gorbachev himself, which ironically led to a similar disaster for Russian workers than happened to sections of the population under Stalin. Reflecting the fact that counterrevolution was and is a barbaric programme. The greatest indictment of Gorbachev was that he became that midwife of that barbaric programme, and indeed of some of the greatest defeats for the working class in the 20^th Century, whose consequences could prove to be grave to humanity. We Marxists are fighting against those consequences today. 

Free the Kononovych Brothers! 

Free all Ukrainian Political Prisoners! 

Restore political and media freedoms in Ukraine!

7pm British Summer Time, Thursday 25 August. Access details will be circulated closer to the date.

Speakers from the UK, US and Ukraine.

Mikhail and Alexander Kononovych, members of of the youth wing of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), were arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on 7th March 2022, and tortured in a Kiev detention centre. The SBU, Ukraine’s intelligence agency, has charged them with being “propagandists” and aiming to “destabilise” the internal situation in Ukraine. 

Their trial began in Kiev on 1 July via teleconference. In their first speech to the courtroom, the brothers said their charges had been fabricated, and appealed to the European left: 

“Comrades, we appeal to you and we want the deputies of the European Parliament to visit Ukraine and be present at our court session so that they see with their own eyes and tell the whole world how the court is arranged.”

The Kononovich Brothers have become symbolic of the thousands of victims of a brutal reign of terror, arrests, torture and murders unleashed in Ukraine since February 24 by the SBU, which is known to collaborate closely with neo-Nazi groups including the Azov Battalion and Sich-C-14 (well known for violent attacks on Roma settlements).

This includes the killing of at least 11 town mayors accused of collaborating with Russian or Donbas forces, the banning of all opposition parties, and the closure of all TV stations except one government controlled . 

Ukrainian president Zelensky himself issued an ominous warning that “there would be consequences for collaborators,” and an advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Anton Gerashchenko, commented on social media about one mayor’s murder: “There is one less traitor in Ukraine.”

This reign of terror is detailed in these articles, with extensive photo and media evidence:

“One less traitor”: Zelensky oversees campaign of assassination, kidnapping and torture of political opposition

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10571663/Pro-Russian-mayor-city-eastern-Ukraine-shot-dead-kidnapped-home.html?ito=email_share_article-top

Confirmed speakers: 

Chris Williamson, former Labour Party MP

Alexey Albu, Borotba (Struggle), survivor of the May 2 2014 Odessa Trade Union House Fire massacre

Steve Sweeney, former International Editor, The Morning Star, investigative journalist

Leonid Ildukhin, Union of Ukrainian Political Emigrants and Refugees (depending on communication availability with eastern Ukraine)

Phil Wilayto, Odessa Solidarity Campaign (USA)

(Additional speakers to be confirmed)

We also urge recipients to sign the international petition to Free the Kononovych Brothers:

https://www.change.org/p/freedom-to-mikhail-and-alexander-kononovich

Please share the petition and this message

Organised by: International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity

NO PASARAN!

НЕТ ФАШИЗМУ!

IUAFS Blog:         https://iuafs.blogspot.com/?m=1

Facebook groups:

“International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity”

“Free the Kononovich Brothers” 

The plan to deport refugees to Rwanda conceived by Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel is an initiative worthy of Jack the Ripper. It’s the next best thing to Auschwitz in the eyes of Patel and their fellow sickos. But Auschwitz is in Poland and for its own racist and xenophobic reasons, Poland will not consent to being a deportation destination for the British. Rwanda was chosen as a symbolic destination because of its history of genocide. The perfect dog whistle that says: “we think that refugees should be murdered with machetes, or in gas chambers, but we don’t have the guts to openly say so”. It’s designed as a form of subliminal terrorism against those seeking asylum in Britain, that if they do, they will be sent to somewhere where they are likely to be brutally murdered. This is irrespective of conditions in Rwanda today, they are not the point here.

This is the shock-jock tactics of the far right today, which got a toehold in government through Johnson’s Brexit Tory government. Patel is a fanatical cheerleader for Zionist terrorism against the Palestinian people, who had to be sacked by Theresa May for secret meetings with Israeli politicians and officialdom aimed at promoting an agenda of bringing Zionist style repression against those considered untermenchen right into the centre of British politics. Not that British politics under previous Tory (and Labour) administrations was not usually uncritically pro-Zionist in any case, but this goes somewhat further and involves the importation of Zionist repressive techniques into British politics. Indeed, Israel tried the same ‘solution’ to African refugees seeking refuge there but had to abandon the idea.

Patel is also a firm supporter of the rapidly Islamophobic and fascist BJP Prime Minister Modi in India. After his election victory in 2019, she tweeted “Congratulations to our dear friend Prime Minister @narendramodi on your victory in the elections. Wishing you & the people of India every success under your dynamic leadership.” This for someone who is trying to deprive millions of Muslims born in India of their Indian citizenship, by means of discriminatory religious tests of ancestry to ostensibly determine citizenship. Just the sort of scheme Patel would approve of, as she has pushed through laws that give her similar powers to arbitrarily remove citizenship here.

As Marxists we advocate complete opposition to all immigration restrictions by imperialist states. These systematically destroy the lives of hundreds of millions in the Global South, through deadly, predatory wars for raw materials and ‘regime change’ against anyone who defies their economic diktats. Through the imposition of economic disasters, impoverishing privatisation, and attacks on the living standards of the poor, enforced by imperialist organisations such as the World Bank and IMF. The underlying purpose of these outfits is to maintain and expand the subordination of the bulk of humanity by the imperialist club of oppressor states – North America, Western Europe, and Japan, whose wealth is massively enhanced by economic and military plundering of lesser developed countries as prey.  

Britain is not unique, unfortunately in its appalling bigotry against refugees. Terrible crimes are being committed by ‘democratic’ governments around the imperialist world and elsewhere driven by racism seeking to keep out ‘alien’ refugees– while those considered ‘deserving’ and ‘desirable’ in a racialised sense – for instance Ukrainians supposedly fleeing ‘Russian aggression’ – get preferential treatment. Others – mainly non-whites – get treated with incredible brutality. Recent instances include the massacre of at least 37 Black African migrants who were trying to enter Melilla, a Spanish colony/territory, and hence the EU, on the coast of North Africa, from Morocco on 24 June. They appear to have been massacred by Moroccan and Spanish border guards.  Earlier, there was the suffocation of 51 Central Americans who crossed the US-Mexican border in a truck at San Antonio, California. Such smuggling and the dangers accompanying it are the product of imperialism which destroys whole countries and robs them of their wealth, and then expects populations to eat it and not try to move to where their filched wealth and living conditions have been taken. This is the ‘normal’ operation of today’s imperialism, under the warrior ‘liberal’ Biden, or the ‘socialist’ coalition of the Socialist Party and Podemos in Spain.

But even within this framework, some recent developments have a peculiar pathology, as epitomised by the Johnson regime in Britain, and recently Trumpism in the US. Priti Patel is one of the dregs of the Johnson Brexit regime, the kind of warped, fringe element that the British bourgeoisie would not in decades past have countenanced in government for a moment. This is an expression of the decay of bourgeois politics and the discrediting and exhaustion of the neoliberal paradigm. Unlike in the early years of the Thatcher and Reagan ‘revolutions’ large numbers of people cannot be mobilised by the imagined joys of privatisation and free market economics. The project is to a considerable extent discredited; it has led to the decline of the proletariat though large-scale outsourcing of industrial jobs, and a growth of lumpen demoralization in parts of the ‘traditional’ working class in Western countries, particularly the predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries of Britain and the US, but not confined to them.  It has led to a major decline in the standard of living of the proletariat, and a great deal of demoralization in the core, often previously best organised sectors.

This has resulted in fertile grounds for the kind of demagogy often in the past associated with fascism, which is where politicians like Trump, Johnson and Priti Patel come in. Both Brexit, and the rise of Trumpism, were signs of despair at neoliberal attacks, and a casting round for a culprit for decaying conditions other than the ruling class at home. This really involved foreigners, migrants, or other ruling classes than our own, and the reassertion of privileges that workers in imperialist countries had been conditioned to believe were theirs by right, belonging to a master nation, that were recently snatched away by neoliberalism. Workers with this privileged aristocratic consciousness, in fact a kind of reformist consciousness, when these were taken away, naturally evidenced a nationalist response which such bourgeois dregs were able to exploit. Later they will certainly sober up and draw opposite conclusions, but that is for the future.

Organisations to the far right of the mainstream have never been that successful in Britain, but the Tories have at times discreetly co-opted such trends. As did Margaret Thatcher with her ‘concerns’ that the ‘native’ British feared being ‘swamped’ by those with an ‘alien culture’, which allowed her to absorb much of the base of the National Front of the 1970s. But there is little that is discreet about Johnson’s regime today, or Patel’s role within it. The fact that she comes from an immigrant family, and has even acknowledged that her own actions, if done in the past, would have excluded her own family, is just one more perverse provocation and indicative of the nature of Johnson’s cabinet, with a high percentage of freaks and perverts.

This obscenity was a means for Johnson’s regime to try to stave off collapse: the Rwanda issue was part of its desperate fightback against the Tory coup that just consumed him, pushed by the popular opprobrium his pathological lying gave rise to. But now the various Tory contenders, from Hunt to Javid, are falling over themselves to justify the policy and pledge to continue it. The reason is clear: they need the support of the same Tory membership that elected Johnson in 2019, which has basically absorbed much of the ultra-reactionary mass base of UKIP.

The Johnson regime’s attack, in progress when he quit, on the European Convention of Human Rights, whose court issued an injunction to stop the Rwanda deportations (and which the government is preparing to defy), will likely be continued his successor. It could however envelop them in contradictions as Johnson achieved his election in 2019 with not only a hint, to say the least, of electoral fraud in some places, but also by lying about the Brexit agreement itself, as a supposedly ‘oven ready deal’. The Rwanda attack on migrants goes hand in hand with his attack on the ‘Northern Ireland Protocol’ in the Brexit deal.

But the Brexit deal was formulated to be compatible with the Good Friday Agreement signed by the Blair government in the 1990s. The contradiction is that is Johnson’s central lie in the General Election in 2019, and would be successors, if they continue with this policy of unilaterally abolishing the customs checks between the island of Great Britain and the 6 County statelet that are central to that agreement, will be breaking that agreement, endorsing Johnson’s biggest lie, and breaking with the legal element of the Good Friday Agreement which includes the European Convention of Human Rights as a central element. It is not clear that the current gaggle of Tory MP’s will be capable of doing that, given that the new PM will have no popular mandate at all, and will be seen to be breaking a legally binding international agreement that Johnson freely signed. They will be in conflict also with the largest party in the 6 County statelet, Sinn Fein, which recently overtook the Democratic Unionists in that regard, and which also give popular expression to the rejection of Brexit by the 6 County electorate. A very tangled web indeed, and a powder keg.

And unless they break with the ECHR, the Rwanda policy looks untenable, as the European Court has already ruled it effectively unlawful. The Tory leadership election is already shaping up as ‘Wacky Races’ with a drive to convince the 100,000 Tory members, not the MPs, that they are in tune with the beliefs of many of these reactionary scum. But the Tory MPs, unlike the leadership contenders, fear the wider electorate within a short period, and being seen to be a continuation of Johnson’s lying pathology is not likely to endear them in that sense.

Outrage against this barbarism is natural and healthy, as is a desire for vengeance for all the crimes of Johnson, and the Tories from the last 12 years of mass murder through austerity under Cameron and May, mass murder though barbaric malign neglect and profiteering in the Covii-19 pandemic under Johnson, the years and years of ‘hostile environment’ abuses and persecution of migrant communities such as Windrush, and many more unspeakable abuses. Vengeance, and given their disdain for ‘human rights’, complete deprivation of such rights for the scum involved, is a completely laudable idea. But we should not be diverted into support for New Labour in doing so. A new Tory leadership could conceivably stymie Starmer’s pathetic attempts to ride into government on the back of Johnson’s collapse in popular esteem. A hung parliament seems a likely result.

And the migrant/refugee issue is one of many reasons why no socialist or anti-racist should be trying to elect New Labour, either under Starmer or some Blairite successor. Recall that like the austerity attacks on the disabled, the hostile environment for migrants did not begin under the Tories but was carried on from the Thatcher years by New Labour, who forbade refugees from working and issued vouchers for food etc. so they would be marked out for reactionary attack. New Labour in power was as vile in its chauvinism as Priti Patel: one grotesque chauvinist after another instituted deportations under Blair and Brown: Straw, Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Jacquie Smith, Alan Johnson, as vile a crew of abusers as you would find anywhere. Under Corbyn, Diane Abbot was mercilessly attacked by racists outside and within Labour simply for proposing to stop some of the worst abuses that were common to Tories and New Labour, but as part of Corbyn’s inner circle, which proved weak and incapable of waging war against the chauvinists in their own party.

 We need an independent working-class party with a programme that opposes all imperialist measures against refugees and migrants more generally. Smash imperialism’s apparatus of repression and xenophobia! Solidarity with those fleeing imperialism’s crimes and those of its proxies!

The Decline of the American Empire

The 21st century has been marked by the decline of US imperialism. The US has been racking up military defeats and retreating in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Ukraine. The hybrid wars it orchestrated in Hong Kong, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Belarus and Kazakhstan have been defeated. And what worries imperialism is the unstoppable process of expanding the trade blocs led by China and Russia.

Imperialism, increasingly desperate to maintain its dominance at any cost, resorts to hybrid wars, parliamentary, electoral, Nazi-led coups d’état, lawfares, massacres, bacteriological/chemical weapons and may even call for a world nuclear war.

In Brazil, imperialism prefers Bolsonaro to avoid strengthening the BRICS with Lula and will support the 3rd coup since 2016.

The Military Party

The Armed Forces are the armed wing of the imperialist control of Brazil, they are part of the US global repression through the Southern Command. The generals act as a military party, in a centralized way, with a program independent of the Executive and international orientation. The military supported the impeachment and the coup that took Lula out of the elections in 2018, they have already announced their strategic plan to continue controlling the country, in the executive positions, in the maintenance and expansion of the measures taken by the coup governments, in the privatization of SUS and of public universities. 

The Nature of Bolsonarismo

Bolsonarismo is a political movement designed to deepen the new cycle of capital accumulation against the working population and natural wealth. The current semi-fascist government is the most radical political-police faction of finance capital’s offensive against the proletariat. It is composed of military, militia, bullet, bible and ox benches. It emerged with the coup within the coup in the 2018 elections and was supported by Trump. It used the lawfare promoted by the Lava Jato operation supported by the STF, the Legislature and the media, to project itself politically.

But Bolsonarismo is different from the previous ruling bourgeois parties, such as the Tucanos and the PMDB that supported its rise. This difference lies in the influence of the masses, permanently regimented and not just in electoral campaigns. Therefore, it is not enough to defeat Bolsonarism electorally, it is necessary to crush it politically, not defend its representatives under any circumstances, not make a united front with it, expel it from the streets.

The Judiciary Party

The STF (Supreme Court) is the Central Committee of the Judiciary Party, the most autocratic power in the Republic. When the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie are in a crisis of hegemony, other powers assume the role of “organization of society” and of “political/ideological leadership”. The STF is a co-optative bureaucracy, whose “bionic” appointment by the executive is approved by the legislature and today is the main “guarantor” of the coup process. The STF and Globo’s media power represent the two main fractions of the bourgeois opposition to contain the particular excesses of Bolsonarism for the general good of the coup regime.

The broad front of the PT with the coup plotters

Instead of betting on the political organization of the great mass exploited and oppressed by the coup plotters, building Popular Committees and strengthening the street, union and popular struggle, PT (Workers Party), PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) and PCdoB (Communist Party) chose to expand the popular front with historical enemies of workers such as Alkmin and the PSDB (Socialist Democracy Party), and the Network. This tactic paves the way for new defeats, new blows.

The popular front would have much greater power of social mobilization than Bolsonarism, with the CUT, MST, CEBs, hundreds of mass union and popular organizations, but it renounces this power in favour of conciliation with fractions of the bourgeoisie that supported the entire coup process. against the left itself and the people. Therefore, the coup process was reversed in Bolivia, by popular pressure in the streets, in one year, and in Brazil we are threatened with a new coup within the coup. 

The upsurge of the regime against the people, the social fighters, and their parties

Having conquered the neutralization of the power of popular mobilization of the liberal-reformist left, the coup process starts, at that moment, to suffocate the rebels, from the virtual resistance (in the case of the PCO) to the parliamentary resistance (Renato Freitas/PT; Glauber Braga/PSOL) of opposition to the coup/privatist/racist process. They persecute the PCO (Workers Cause Party) because that party’s audience has become the virtual extreme left of Lulismo. They hunted Renato for fighting racism. They persecute Braga for questioning the privatization of Petrobras. At the same time, repression against the exploited and oppressed population with fascist methods increases. This was the case of the summary execution of Genivaldo de Jesus Santos in Sergipe in the “Gas Chamber” of the federal highway police, in a clear state terror operation, when Genivaldo committed the same traffic violation that Bolsonaro commits on his motorcycles. They executed the indigenist Bruno Pereira and the journalist Dom Philips in Amazonas for being obstacles to the policy of violent expropriation of indigenous lands and natural resources promoted by the Bolsonarist bourgeois regime.

Is it possible to defeat the new coup

As in Bolivia, it is possible to defeat the coup, arrest Bolsonaro, continue the struggle to break the cycle of accumulation supported by the super-exploitation of workers and by socialism. The central task of the working class at this moment is to defeat the Bolsonarista movement. It is necessary to avoid his re-election/coup, defeat the strategy of the military party, and that of the judiciary and media parties (which aim to discipline Lulismo), and nationalize all strategic companies, including the media and the Central Bank to liquidate the cycle of coup accumulation.

For a National Meeting of Popular Committees of Struggle

In the war against fascism/imperialism we critically support Lula’s candidacy. The popular force of this candidacy must be grouped and organized for the struggle in committees in each place of work, residence and study. We need to hold a National Meeting of these Popular Committees of Struggle to prepare resistance to the ongoing coup, defend the right of the proletariat to elect Lula and ensure that his mandate meets the demands for which the working population votes for the PT candidate.

It’s needed:

Revoke the entire political legal legacy of attacks on the rights and living conditions of the working class (counter-reforms and privatizations).

Freeze commodity prices and tariffs/taxes. 

Make up for all salary losses for the period. 

To defeat Bolsonarism and coupism at the polls, it is necessary to mobilize the population on the streets.