The notes for today’s presentation (21st Jan) are now available to read, and the presentation and discussion are also available to listen to as a podcast.
Daniel Noboa, the President of Ecuador, established a state of emergency with a curfew against the entire population of the country, decreeing that Ecuador is in a state of ” internal armed conflict” and ordered the Armed Forces to “execute military operations to neutralize” criminal gangs.
Noboa’s move came after armed men took over the facilities of the Guayaquil state channel TC Televisión and the university. On Sunday, under strange conditions, it was found that the head of the largest drug gang had escaped from a prison in Guayaquil. This was Adolfo Macías, alias Fito, drug lord of the Los Choneros gang.
These criminal acts are used by the Noboa government to change the political regime under cover of an emergency, reinforce the repressive apparatus and extend control over the entire exploited and oppressed population. Noboa is an Ecuadorian with ideas close to the dominant ideas in the US bourgeoisie, born in Florida, right-wing and with dictatorial aspirations, and recently elected as a continuator of the previous president, involved in a deep political crisis. Now, conveniently, he carries out a kind of ‘self-coup’ within his government to centralize political power and carry out radical measures against Ecuadorian workers. The war that originally was said only to be against drugs and drug traffickers, becomes a “state of war” that turns against the entire population.
A “Drug war led by the United States transformed Ecuador into a new crack for cocaine distribution”
(UOL: Drug war, high poverty and political chaos: understand the crisis in Ecuador).
After almost half a century of ‘war against drugs’ policy, in the international division of the market, Ecuador has become one of the main centres in the world for the distribution of this merchandise, especially since the betrayal of President Rafael Correa by his vice-president Lenin Moreno, orchestrated by imperialism.
The so-called “illegal” drugs, as merchandise, are a fundamental component of the accumulation of imperialism worldwide. It also feeds financial capital through laundering routes. All of this occurs in the context of the “war on drugs” promoted by imperialism, which in reality protects the drug business and the control that the imperialist system exercises over them.
In the past, even in the era of liberal capitalism, drugs were a central factor of imperialist accumulation and the dominant colonial powers such as England sought to dump the cost of it on oppressed countries such as China during the Opium Wars, such as Marx himself analysed in the 19th century:
“The harmful consequences for China were economic, political and social, one of the main ones being the destabilization of the Chinese government. The resistance and non-compliance with the emperor’s decrees and restrictions by the Chinese authorities to prevent the growth of imports of opium generated even more restrictive and punitive measures, which continued to be breached. All this culminated in a scenario of greater corruption [demoralization] of the imperial authorities, customs officials and mandarins in general, by the English. This corruption, which infiltrated the heart of the celestial bureaucracy and destroyed the foundations of the patriarchal order, was smuggled into China along with the opium boxes from the British transporters anchored in Whampoa
(Marx, 2016g, p. 113)
As occurred in the First Opium War, and Marx noted in In the Revolution in China and Europe, of June 14, 1853, “factors of dissolution were forged [that] simultaneously influenced finance, traditional customs, morality, industry and the political structure of China, reaching its apogee under the fire of English cannons.” (Marx, 2016j, p. 34). Both the first and second wars contributed to overthrowing the authority of the emperor and imperial power, while increasing the authority of opium, especially trafficking and smuggling, as manifestations of British imperial authority.” (Pedro Henrique Antunes da Costa, and Kíssila Teixeira Mendes, Anti-prohibitionism, Marx and The Drug Wars: Anticolonialism, Anti-imperialism and Anti-prohibitionism).
Big capital has never opposed drugs; On the contrary, they are in the DNA of capital accumulation in a broad sense, not just an economic one. Historically, capitalism transformed drugs into a commodity for global trade. In 19th century China, British colonialist policy destroyed Chinese society to subject it to its interests. In China, the effect of opium on society, the economy and politics was operated from without and was combined with a war from without, under the cannons of Great Britain and for the confiscation of a part of Chinese territory by the occupation of Hong Kong, for the crown and British capital.
In the epoch of imperialism, that is, in the highest phase of capitalism, already in the 20th century, drug policy became infinitely more complex and profitable. Through a double standard, drug trafficking is used and supposedly combated.
The “war on drugs” serves as an instrument to increase the social control of the United States over oppressed peoples in general and within nations whose governments are puppets of imperialism, as a form of social control of the working population and its youth by part of repressive military and police apparatuses.
American imperialism is based on dependent semi-colonialism, on the control already exercised over oppressed countries through their puppet governments, through which policies of military, legal and police indoctrination, arms trade and private training services are applied, deepening economic and social dependence, the co-optation of fractions of delinquent youth and, finally, the tasks of subjugation of the people that the colonial cannons carried out through war between nations, such as between Great Britain and China, were replaced by political fascists and the civil war of the state against the population. Like what is happening now in Ecuador in an acute way, but which is also repeated in almost all oppressed countries.
Although the escalation of violence is not new in the Ecuadorian political and social situation, it is very strange how systematic violence and the drug crisis broke out in the country with spectacular and literally media events: the occupation of television stations and universities, to create a chaos that would justify, in the eyes of common sense and the international media, a simplified and repressive solution to the crisis.
Today in Latin America, under the control of various imperialist factions, the drug trafficking business grows, leading to the mafia-like decomposition of the state machinery of Latin American countries. Imperialism also uses drug trafficking politically by extending controls from the capitalist mafia states in the so-called “war on drugs” or by promoting and taking advantage of drug crises to give itself political cover that allows it to deepen control over the Latin American capitalist states. All of the above gives a leap in quality in the need that US imperialism has to shield Latin America from the influence of the BRICS.
The drug crisis is taking a leap in quality in Ecuador and the right is taking advantage of it to bring fascist-like norms to the capitalist state. The growth of drug trafficking is linked to the economic liquidation of the entire Ecuadorian economy (and in several other parts of the West) under the policy of neoliberalism/ultraliberalism, fully impacting the social and political level in Ecuador.
“Ecuador became a sanctuary for organized crime. It has been mutating from a transit country to an international narcotics distribution platform. In that sense, it is considered one of the processing countries in Latin America, located in second place below Brazil in the export of cocaine to Africa, the Middle East and Asia.”
https://www.lapoliticaonline.com/internacionales/la-fuga-de-un-capo-narco-genera-la-primera-crisis-de-daniel-noboa-en-ecuador/
We must measure the weight that this factor of the criminal economy has as a whole in a country on the scale of Ecuador.
This economic trend is now concentrating to become political, pointing to the growing weight of drug trafficking in Ecuador’s own political life.
The narcotics crisis, an event provoked to justify the closure of the regime that the previous banker president failed to achieve?
This chaotic situation was created by the policies of the IMF and the War on Drugs, defended and executed by neoliberal governments from Lenin Moreno to the banker Guillermo Lasso.
Now, continuing this Noboa aims to make a leap in quality from previous attacks against the population through a series of repressive instruments declaring a state of exception, which includes the possibility of the military entering prisons and the mobilization of the army to control the streets, including a curfew from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. It is obvious that drug trafficking would never have had the development it has in Ecuador if there had not been for the complicity of the organs of the state, the same ones that are now called to combat drug trafficking itself. Noboa came to government with the support of right-wing forces in Ecuador (see https://www.milenio.com/internacional/daniel-noboa-es-de-izquierda-o-derecha-esta-es-su-ideologia).
Now Noboa is joined by the support of Correismo in his campaign for the fascistisation of the state in Ecuador. In turn, the Puebla group made up of leaders of “progressivism” including the current governments of Bolivia and Brazil, says it supports Correa ‘s message.
The policy of imperialism, especially that of the United States, of protecting and promoting drug trafficking through its “war on drugs” policy leads to a mafia-like decomposition of the Latin American capitalist states, which makes them more manipulable for imperialism itself, just as at the time, the opium wars favoured the social disintegration of China in the face of British colonial expansion.
Through the policy of war on drugs and the manipulation of drug trafficking, an arm of big capital, what Great Britain developed during the opium wars to dominate politically and socially, reverse the trade deficit and colonize China has evolved, specialized and professionalized in unprecedented proportions.
If in China, one of the political functions of encouraging opium drug trafficking by British imperialism was to demoralize and weaken the Chinese imperial government in the 19th century, now, in Ecuador, imperialism’s encouragement of the country to become a source of narcotics is followed by encouraging the conversion of Ecuador’s right-wing government into a fascist government.
The farce of the “war on drugs”, converted into US state policy, which turns drug trafficking into one of the main sources of global income for imperialism, has already been widely debunked in works such as “The Big White Lie” by Michael Levine, linked the DEA’s action in the region; “The politics of heroin: CIA complicity in the global drug trade” by Alfred McCoy, on Southwest Asia and “The CIA as organized crime: how Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World,” by Douglas Valentine.
In turn, the mass organizations of Ecuadorian workers react as they can:
“Faced with the outbreak of violence in Ecuador, CONAIE [Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, the largest indigenous organization in Ecuador] called on indigenous communities and nationalities to keep community guards active, controlling access to their territories. The organization needs to build national unity, with all sectors of society, to overcome the current crisis.”
“These governments prioritized their particular agendas to favour large economic groups, at the expense of the poverty and suffering of the majority of the population.”
In 2019, CONAIE led a series of protests against the then president, Lenín Moreno. Elected in 2017 with the support of former progressive president Rafael Correa, Moreno broke with his predecessor and moved closer to the Ecuadorian bourgeoisie. Thus, he attempted to impose the measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which included cuts in government subsidies, the dismantling of labour laws and the privatisation of public services.
Since then, the neoliberal agenda has been maintained by successive governments in Ecuador. Former banker Guillermo Lasso won the 2021 elections. Just over a year later, he too faced a series of protests, again led by CONAIE. This time, they were pressing for a reduction in fuel prices, among other social demands. The crisis worsened again last year, when Lasso dissolved the National Assembly (parliament) and called new elections in a climate of imminent social upheaval in the country, with the right-wing Daniel Noboa, born in Florida (USA), winning the presidential elections in November 2023. He defeated the progressive candidate Luisa González. The electoral dispute took place under a climate of violence. In August, gangs shot and killed presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
Noboa’s current self-coup is also the favourable outcome of the political crisis that broke out in the country as soon as it was revealed that the banker president Guillermo Lasso was at the centre of the international corruption plot that was called the Pandora Papers (El País: The offshore network of Guillermo Lasso, the banker who became president of Ecuador, Mandatário got rid of most of his companies in tax havens before becoming president).
To escape political pressure, Lasso dissolved the Ecuadorian parliament and called elections that were won by the candidate indicated by him, Noboa.
It is the task of the exploited and oppressed of the countryside and the city in Ecuador to prepare to defend themselves more without putting trust in bourgeois leaderships, to make a united front with everyone against the escalation of state and parastatal repression with the CONAIE and Correismo but criticize him for supporting Noboa’s self-coup. Correismo’s “progressive” force seems to express a combination of political imbecility and cowardice that gives in to Noba’s pro-fascist politics.
It is therefore the task of the exploited and oppressed of Ecuador not to give any confidence to the repressive policies of the capitalist state, surpassing its reformist leaderships such as Correismo while preparing to provide an independent solution to the crisis that the growth of drug trafficking is coming from, and their accomplices from the whole of imperialism and the bourgeoisie of Ecuador.
This letter was sent to organisations that have had members arrested for their views on the genocide of the Palestinians. It is imperative that this be challenged by the organised labour movement.
To: Revolutionary Communist Group, Socialist Labour Network, Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and to the wider labour movement.
Dear Comrades,
We note the criminal, racist arrests of members of the RCG on various fake accusations, of a leading member of the CPGB-ML, comrade Ranjit Brar on absurd accusations that selling a book explicitly indicting Zionism for racism and anti-Semitism, is a “hate-crime”, and the outrageous arrest of Tony Greenstein (and Mick Napier in Glasgow) on fantastic lies that they are in some way ‘supporters’ of Hamas. These are the tip of an iceberg of police attacks on Palestine solidarity activists and ordinary demonstrators, orchestrated by Tory politicians with Braverman’s ravings as the starting point, whose anti-democratic essence continues to this day. None of these attacks will be opposed by the Labour Party under Starmer. They clearly support this genocide, and the attacks against Yemen whose purpose is to protect Israel’s mass murder.
We propose that a united front should be created to confront this policy publicly and point out its purpose – police-state methods to repress opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Such fraudulent arrests and harassment, and punitive bail conditions in some cases to forbid political activism, as well as the draconian ‘conditions’ imposed on completely peaceful mass demonstrations in support of the Palestinians by the police, amount to political support for Israel’s genocide by the Metropolitan police, the Glasgow police, and no doubt police forces around the country.
We think it would be worthwhile to take an initiative to confront the police politically over this, by initiating a protest at Scotland Yard and seeking broader labour movement support, against this political persecution of left-wing activists for opposing an obvious genocide. It fits in with the admission by the head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Gavin Stephens, that the UK police are “institutionally racist” based on too many terrible cases to list, and other appalling actions of the cops, like their arrests of women demonstrators protesting the murder and rape of Sarah Everard by a serving cop.
We should note that the large-scale murder of unarmed civilians in Gaza, including women, children and even premature babies, and the brazen support for it by ruling-class politicians here, indicates what these politicians are quite prepared to do to ordinary people here if they feel threatened by resistance to their own crimes. The labour movement therefore has an overwhelming class interest in defeating these attacks on democratic rights and defending free speech on this question above all. This needs to be confronted head-on.
Comradely
Ian Donovan,
The 11 January attacks on Yemen by US and UK forces are the military expression of their defence of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The motive for the bombing is pure-unadulterated race-hate and imperialist arrogance. How dare these Yemeni Arabs take military action to defend the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza! These untermenschen [a term from Nazi ideology used to describe “inferior peoples”] must be taught a lesson. That’s the thinking of Zionist racists in high places like Anthony Blinken and Grant Schapps – bringing a certain frisson of racialised solidarity into the equation of imperialist terror. The outsourcing of the most barbarous tasks to those with an ethnocentric motive for so accentuating ‘normal’ militarism is a feature of the advanced decay of British imperialism, and the US is going the same way. Bizarrely, Sunak claims that the assault on Yemen is ‘self-defence’ – just like the Israeli genocidaires say that cutting off power to premature babies in hospital incubators is ‘self-defence’, and attempt to argue that at The Hague. For such people, Yemenis, who have demonstrated in their millions in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and evidently support the actions of the Houthi. must be given a taste of what the population of Gaza are getting, for daring to challenge Israel’s genocide.
The whole world knows that the population of Gaza, including countless women and children are being exterminated by Israeli AI-guided carpet-bombing and white phosphorus burns (barbaric chemical warfare). It is clear that the current British government supports that extermination, arms in hand. No matter what double-talk we hear from Biden, Sunak and David Cameron about trying to nudge Israel into easing up on the civilian killings, that is the reality. If anyone anywhere, tries to stop Israel’s massacre, they are to be bombed by the US/UK and their civilians murdered likewise. They have the backing of Labour leader Starmer, who supports Zionist genocide against Palestinians ‘without qualification’ – another racist murderer who needs to be tried for complicity in this mass extermination. Both parties earlier made it clear that they defended Israel depriving the Gaza population of fuel, power, food and water – which makes them as guilty of being part of this holocaust as the worst Auschwitz prison guards were in the Nazi holocaust.
The Houthis are now being attacked by these gentlemen, representatives of the imperialist system hegemonized by Anglo-Saxon-Zionist capital, because they are the ones who are really trying to slow down the killing of civilians and the greatest crime against children ever committed in the history of humanity.
We applaud the principled actions of the Houthi in seeking to impose a blockade on Israel to try to force it to desist from its genocide in Gaza. The people of Yemen, under their leadership, were themselves subject to a genocidal war for decades waged by Saudi Arabia, acting as a US/Israeli client. It is an example of how the imperialists use divide and rule methods, mobilising sectarian Sunni antagonism to the various unorthodox, Shia-influenced and -derived populations in West Asia to bolster their domination. Imperialist covert support for ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria, despite their ‘terrorist’ actions at times against the West, are characteristic – indeed this goes back to Western backing for the Afghan Mujahedin in the 1970s and 1980s against the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the USSR.
But the Houthi managed to defeat Saudi Arabia, despite the terrible atrocities against them and their people, and made it clear in some exemplary attacks that they have the armed capacity to destroy the oil-producing facilities of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil monarchies if sufficiently provoked. Out of this bloody stalemate came the opportunity for China to broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the end of the Saudi war against the Houthi. So now Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who (along with Egypt and Ethiopia) joined BRICS on New Years Day, are not keen on this US-Zionist war against the Houthi. The UAE, with conspicuous support from Russia and China, moved the ceasefire resolution in the UN Security Council on 8 December, which was pointedly vetoed by the US.
Trump’s Abraham Accords, which aimed to tie together the Gulf States and Israel and decisively consign the Palestinian question to history and terminal betrayal, have blown up the US’s face. Though Biden is desperate to revive them. Saudi Arabia and the UAE refused to be part of Biden’s ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’ in the Bab-el-Mandeb straight, and Djibouti, on the other side of the straight, condemned the US/UK attack outright and solidarised with Yemen.
The tension over the Palestinian question, at this moment, raised to the highest level since the founding of Israel, is accelerating the erosion and isolation of the whole of imperialist domination in the region. It does not seem to the least attentive observers, but, politically and diplomatically, this genocide is costing their strategic interests dearly and is jeopardizing the very existence of their “aircraft carrier in the Middle East”:
“Israel is our fortress. It’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. (…) If Israel disappears, the BRICS will control 90 percent of the world’s oil and that would be a catastrophe for U.S. interests.” Robert Kennedy Jr., an “independent” (sic) candidate in the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, explains Israel’s strategic importance and identifies who are the enemies of Washington’s foreign policy (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=870155398093784).
The Houthi have one of the most battle-hardened armies in the world. Unlike the Zionist scum in the IDF, who are only capable of murdering women and children, and even cutting off power to the incubators of premature babies and leaving them to starve and decompose, the Houthi fought the much more powerful, US-supplied army of Saudi Arabia and its allies to a standstill. The very mountainous terrain of Yemen is similar to Afghanistan in many ways: it is easy to hide the sophisticated weaponry the Houthi have developed in places where the imperialists would not have a clue about. They will no doubt still be able to menace Israel-bound shipping no matter what the US/UK try to do about it.
The Houthi may at some point be able to sink the aggressors’ ships, or one of them, which would cause immense problems for Biden/Sunak at home. They won’t be able to stop the Houthi, and it would take a ground invasion of Yemen for them to even seriously try. Which is a huge trap for them. Some say that the reason Russia and China failed to veto the resolution condemning the Houthi actions in the UN Security Council is that it would facilitate US imperialism blundering into such a trap. Be that as it may, the US often does what it pleases and Israel certainly does irrespective of what the UN says. It would still have been better to deprive them of any UN cover and veto the condemnation – this would have increased their diplomatic isolation. Such a trap in Yemen for US forces would be just what the US deserves – a quagmire to end all quagmires, one might say. But for us, the mistake of Russia and China in not vetoing action against the Houthis at this time may be as serious as the historic mistake they both made in not vetoing imperialist intervention in Libya, when the UN Security Council approved the so-called “no-fly zone” over Tripoli. Once again, the limitation of the governments of Russia and China in the struggle against imperialism is wide open.
As revolutionary Marxists, we seek the defeat of US/UK/Israeli imperialism and a regime-change in Occupied Palestine (‘Israel’) to destroy the Zionist regime, enforce the full right of return of all Palestinians!
If Gazans are to leave the Gaza prison it must be to reclaim the lands in Israel stolen from all Palestinians in 1948 and since! No ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Hands off the population of the West Bank! Hands off Israeli Palestinians!
Defend Yemen. Defeat the US/UK aggressors! Try the genocidaire leaders in Washington and London, and their accomplices at home and abroad!
This issue of Communist Fight is the first of a new series.
In a recent discussion, the Consistent Democrats, who publish Communist Fight, decided on a change in our press policy and format. Previously we had regarded our website as important, but subordinate to the publication of a printed journal, and we have operated on that basis for three-and-a-half years. But experience has taught us that this press paradigm is obsolete: the fact is that our website now has a substantial readership, whereas the printed journal is limited by our physical capacity to distribute it, which is small at the moment. The pro-imperialist, repressive capitulation of much of the left to Russophobia and Zionism has made it difficult to distribute a substantial and quite expensive publication like the first series of Communist Fight by the legacy route of failing left bookshops run by fakers who are subservient to right-wing forces.
We have therefore decided to make a change: to produce a much cheaper and slimmer publication more often – we hope to produce a 16-page journal 8 times a year, reflecting the material on the website. It will cost £1.20, with a 70p concession, instead of £2.50/£1. The journal will be a supplement of our website, instead of the other way round. That way we hope to be able to intervene in political events offline more effectively, and continue to grow our movement, which has already significantly grown from its very small beginning in 2020, but we want to be considerably more effective. We think this change of policy will assist in this.
The new issue focuses heavily on the genocide of the Palestinians, which is among the most crucial and immediate questions facing movements of workers and the oppressed right now. Genocidal Zionist racism against the Palestinian people has become a political cult and a cause celebre among the decaying ruling classes of the imperialist West. In Britain it was used to defeat the Corbyn movement that attempted to reassert some basic elements of class politics in the second half of the last decade. But now Zionism’s genocide has ignited a world-wide movement of workers and the oppressed that is mobilising worldwide to defend their Palestinian victims.
The lead article contains an analysis of the Zionist cult in Western bourgeois politics and a materialist explanation of how it came into being. It ends in a call for the defence of the democratic rights of workers and the oppressed through the formation of a workers’ militia based on the mass organisations of the working class, based on the need to counter the ruling classes’ modern, barbaric techniques of warfare against insubordinate parts of the population. It contains a warning: it is quite possible that in the future the methods that are being to drown Gaza in the blood of its civilian population – drones, carpet-bombing, mass murder by AI, could be used by the bourgeoisie in the West to destroy mass movements of our class. The working class needs to arm itself politically and physically against this likely form of counterrevolutionary violence.
Regarding attacks on democratic rights, we have an article from our Brazilian comrades about the new forms that fascism is taking in this period of US imperialist decay and disaster. We have an article denouncing the outrageous arrests of Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier and other left-wing opponents of genocidal Zionism, with smears ranging from ‘anti-Semitism’ to supposed support for ‘terrorism’. All totally fraudulent, formulated by racist cops acting in cahoots with far right Tory politicians, encouraged by Zionist New Labour.
A particularly well-read article by Davey Heller of the Australia/United States ClassConscious group is reproduced in this issue. It analyses the nature and social composition of the huge protest movement that has errupted over Gaza, not only in Australia but around the world, its character as a movement predominantly of the working class and oppressed, and how the influence of the bourgeois liberal element that played a major role in previous anti-war movements has declined.
We also reproduce a draft ‘Open Letter’ to George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain, regarding his announced intention to stand against Labour’s Sadiq Khan for Mayor of London. There was a time when such a challenge would have been an inspiring call to arms. But in the past decade Galloway has attempted to mix militant anti-imperialism over Ukraine and the Middle East with an adaptation to the populist right. These do not mix, to put it mildly, and our letter, which has been sent to larger organisations with a proposal for endorsement, places demands on Galloway to break with such reactionary allies and stand as a champion of the victims of capitalism and imperialism at home and abroad.
The back page of the new journal reproduces a joint statement of the LCFI and ClassConscious defending the Houthi, of Yemen, against imperialist threats for their bold actions in seeking an armed blockade of the Red Sea against Israel-bound shipping, which is particularly important now the US, with Britain in tow, has attacked Yemen in solidarity with Zionism’s mass slaughter of Palestinians.
Genocide is in full swing in Gaza. Israel is shooting civilians in homes and the streets, destroying and bulldozing hospitals, schools, UN refuge facilities, and more. Killing medical staff, patients, children, even babies, stopping incubators causing death and/or bulldozing them under the ruins. More than 22,000 are confirmed dead already, with many thousands more under rubble. Half are children; half Gaza’s population are under 18. Israel’s carpet-bombing, stopping essential supplies including fuel, medicine, drinking water, is driven by Nazi-like racism. They force people to flee from North to South to further South. More than three quarters of the population of Gaza are homeless and starving, with catastrophic epidemics taking hold.
Netanyahu openly stated they want Gazans to flee to Egypt. Failing that they want to slaughter them. Similar crimes are happening now in the West Bank: hundreds have been killed by bloodthirsty settlers and troops. They are attempting another Nakba, showing the kinship between Zionism and Nazism. The 1948 Nakba was a similar crime.
A huge protest movement traverses the globe. Earlier, Russian President Putin, fighting a war against US-backed Nazis in Ukraine, compared the siege of Gaza with Hitler’s siege of Leningrad. The Houthi movement of Yemen declared war on Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians and blockaded Israel-bound shipping from the Red Sea. This has hurt Israel and its backers financially. Governments including Jordan, Turkey, Chile, Venezuela, Honduras, Spain, Iran, Iraq and Colombia condemned the genocide, and several countries have broken diplomatic relations with Israel.
The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemns Israel, whilst the US repeatedly vetoes ceasefire resolutions in the Security Council. The Russian amendment for ‘immediate ceasefire” would have passed had it not been for the US veto. At the November BRICS summit in Durban, China called for a ceasefire and an end to ‘collective punishment’ of the people of Gaza.
Biden has moved a ‘multinational’ force of stooges towards Yemen to threaten the Houthis, and US warships in the Eastern Mediterranean threaten Hezbollah, Syria and Iran – protecting Israel as it threatens Lebanon with a Gaza-like genocide. The United States and its allies own this holocaust.
Sunak’s government instructs cops to arrest Palestine solidarity activists, supposedly for ‘supporting’ Hamas. Activists such as Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier, Craig Murray, Ranjeet Brar, Yael Khan, have been arrested on false accusations of ‘anti-semitism’ or supporting ‘terrorism’. Hamas are popular among Palestinians because they are seen as incorruptible and militant fighters, but they are just one, militantly Islamic ideological trend – many others, some secular and leftist, are involved in the struggle. Evidence has emerged that many if not most of the civilian October 7 victims were slaughtered by Israel, under the ‘Hannibal Directive’ – slaughtering their own troops and civilians to prevent capture.
We must support the Palestinians whoever leads them. The pro-Zionists in government, neoliberal mercenaries all, have genocidal views. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was destroyed by Zionist destabilisation, much of it run by the Israeli Embassy. The neoliberal Starmer wing works closely with Zionism. All these parties are dominated by ‘Friends of Israel’ anti-Palestinian racists.
Their problem is many millions of people here, and billions worldwide, are familiar with the genocidal oppression of Palestinians. Racist, anti-working-class bigotry which drags official politics here to the far-right is bound up with vile attitudes to Palestinians and Muslims, just as before WWII Hitlerian Jew-hate poisoned political life.
Similar politics are behind the war in Ukraine, where the West has peddled similar lies as about Palestinians, about Russians supposedly raping women, killing babies and engaging in ‘genocide’. The imperialists project their own barbarism onto their intended victims. In fact, the number of civilians killed by both sides since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, over 600 days ago, are far less than the more than the 28,000 deaths Israel inflicted on Gaza in three months. But this is not from want of trying. The Ukrainian Nazis have used petal mines, cluster bombs and depleted Uranium, supplied by the West, all of which particularly kill children and the elderly, or cause birth defects in future generations. There have been considerable deaths, but the Russian Army have prevented many more.
There are great similarities between what Western imperialism is trying to do in Ukraine and what the Zionists are doing in Palestine. In 2014, the US spent $10 billion organising the Maidan coup that brought Nazi Banderaists to power as part of NATO expansion, aiming to threaten Russia with US strategic weapons from Ukraine. The Nazi regime abolished the previous legal equality between languages, and began persecuting Russian speakers, close to half the population, particularly centred in the Donbass (South Eastern) region. Crimea, where the majority is Russian, voted to join Russia then.
When in 2014 the population of Donbass rose up and demanded autonomy and language rights, the regime declared an ‘anti-terrorist operation’. For eight years before Russia’s SMO, this terrorist war against Donbass people and the People’s Republics they set up, cost 14,000 lives. Preparing for a much bigger conflict with Russia, the US groomed Zelensky, his Jewish origin being ideal camouflage for Nazi forces to ethnically cleanse and slaughter this population.
At the beginning of 2022 the Zelensky/Nazi regime, with its backers led by Biden, planned a much bigger offensive to re-conquer the Donbass. Russia intervened to stop this ethnic cleansing and genocide. Given the chance, this oppressed population voted to join Russia. Russia is not denying the right of Ukrainians to their own state, and there are no Russian troops in the Ukrainian-speaking West of Ukraine. US-UK-EU Imperialism falsely accuse Russia of annexation of Ukraine while providing cover for annexation through genocide in Palestine.
This was exposed in Canada last Autumn when the Canadian neo-liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau together with Zelensky (a Zionist who vows to make Ukraine a ‘big Israel’ through ethnic cleansing of Russian-speaking people), publicly applauded a 98-year-old veteran of Hitler’s SS. When even Macron says ‘stop killing women and babies’ in Gaza, it is because he wants Israel’s brutality better hidden! This understanding, about the lies of imperialism about Ukraine, needs to become as widely known as the facts about Palestine and Gaza: we need a unified struggle against the global war of imperialism on humanity and its children. Solidarity with the Palestinians! Solidarity with the children of humanity!
This protest is being held because we believe that the British people should know about crimes being committed on an enormous scale by the Zelensky regime in Ukraine, for which our government has spent billions on training and arms supplies.
The truth about what is happening in this so-called “democracy” has been carefully concealed by our government and mass media. Since February 2022 alone Thousands of Journalists, bloggers, politicians, elected representatives, activists, priests and sportspeople, have been arrested, and some tortured or murdered. Many simply disappeared after being arrested with no charges or trial after many months.
People have been arrested for opposing the war, organising WW2 commemorations, allegedly working with Russian forces by organising humanitarian supplies or corridors, or simply for posts on social media.
In March 2022 the famous peace blogger Gleb Lyashenko was jailed pending trial for treason, for claiming on his blog that Ukraine’s policies had led to the Russian military intervention. In a new item entitled “Fake: Ukraine fully supports freedom of speech”, the pro-Kiev War on Fakes website said this was “because of his pro-Russian statements… (and saying) that Ukraine is the one to blame”. So Lyashenko was arrested simply “because of his pro-Russian statements”, but for the Kiev regime that is not an attack on freedom of speech!
Alexander Matyuschenko, a left-wing campaigner, was arrested in Dnipro, central Ukraine, SBU (Ukrainian intelligence service) and Azov (the largest armed fascist battalion in Ukraine (members). He was tortured and forced to shout the far right salute, “Slava Ukraini!”, and his wife’s hair “was cut off with a knife”.
One of Ukraine’s most prominent human rights activists, Elena Berezhnaya, Director of the Institute of Legal Policy and Social Protection, who has spoken before the UN Security Council, was arrested in March 2022 in Kiev.
One of Ukraine’s leading politicians, Viktor Medvedchuk of the Opposition Platform – For Life party was arrested in April 2022, and photos released by the SBU clearly indicate that he was beaten. He was released in prisoner swap in September 2022.
According to the head of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, Eduard Dolinsky, 70 year old Yuri Pokrass from Kiev, was sentenced to one and a half years in prison with all of his property confiscated, after sending greetings for on Komsomol Day and the anniversary of the USSR on Facebook. Hundreds if not thousands have received similar sentences for similar “crimes”.
For most of those arrested there has been no news whatsoever, and no announcement of a trial. This is in line with the corrupt and lawless nature of Ukraine since 2014, including the failure to hold any investigation into the killing of over 40 peaceful anti-fascist protesters when the Trade Unions House in Odessa was surrounded and petrol bombed by a fascist and nationalist mob on May 2 2014.
But these arrests are only one part of the picture. After the Russian intervention in February 2022, areas recaptured by Ukrainian forces were “cleansed” by Kiev’s forces and armed far right units, and many local officials and ordinary citizens were brutally murdered.
On 3 March 2022 the Daily Mail reported that “The pro-Russian mayor of a city in eastern Ukraine who welcomed President Vladimir Putin’s invasion was ‘shot dead’ after being kidnapped from his home. Several mayors and other Ukrainian officials have been killed since the outbreak of war, many reportedly by Ukrainian state agents after engaging in de-escalation talks with Russia”.
Interior Minister adviser Anton Gerashchenko claimed on Facebook that Struk was had “actively pursued a ‘pro-Russian position’ “.
Four days later the mayor of Gostomel, Yuri Prylipko, was found murdered after negotiating with Russian forces for a civilian evacuation corridor, and in April 2022 investigative website The Grayzone claimed that “eleven mayors from various towns in Ukraine are missing”.
Mainstream media reports reveal that many people in eastern and southern Ukraine welcomed the Russian troops and their Donbas militia allies. As Russian speakers, with widespread positive views of Russian and Soviet history, they had experienced eight years of abuse from organisations from Kiev and Western Ukraine: the SBU, Azov Battalion and the Hitler-admiring Right Sector.
An ITV News report from Mariupol during fighting in 2014, after the uprising against the coup in Kiev in east Ukraine shows one man saying “Our government is killing us, it’s very scary”, while a woman tells the ITV reporter: “We won’t ever be under this fascist government”.
ITV reporter James Mates reported: “We found Ukrainian forces at the central police station being jeered and abused by crowds of furious locals. When the crowd got too close, the soldiers opened fire above their heads”. After the fighting, “the city was seething with anger, barricades going up. It is a curious way to persuade ordinary people that they have a future in Ukraine.”
Similar views were described by BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale, reporting from the Donbas near Mariupol on Radio 4’s Today programme on 6 April 2022:
“The extraordinary thing was that most people did not blame president Putin for the bombs… they thought it was as much Ukraine’s fault… this is very different from Kiev, there’s lots of people here who are pro-Russian, who have a very different viewpoint”.
The whole world knows that after the 2014 Western-backed “Maidan” coup the new regime in Kiev embarked on a campaign to push Russian out of all areas of life. In March 2022 a poll by Sociological Group Rating said that around 20% of Ukrainians considered Russian to be their native language, although perhaps 60% also speak and read Russian. The reality is that when Ukraine was first defined as a republic in 1921, it included large areas of the south and east which were completely Russian.
Last year Ukraine’s State Language Protection Commissioner Taras Kremin said that Ukrainians who speak Russian should not be called “Russian-speaking,” claiming that this term was simply “Russian propaganda”. He also insisted there were only Ukrainians in Ukraine, some of whom had been “Russianised.”
International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) has been campaigning for six years in solidarity with anti-fascists in Ukraine, thousands of whom have paid with their lives, torture or prison for resisting the regime installed in 2014 with the support of Britain, the US and EU.
IUAFS members have participated in every protest since October 7 in solidarity with the people of Palestine and the Gaza Strip. In our view the same Western governments who have supported the Ukraine regime with billions in weapons and money, including Britain, have done nothing to stop Israel committing open genocide in Gaza, with hospitals and civilians deliberately targeted and so far 9,000 children killed.
In fact Britain and the US are continuing to send weapons to Israel, and after they and the EU condemned recent Russian missile strikes in Ukraine, they have failed to declare that Israel is committing genocide or to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
The entire world is witness to Israel’s war crimes, and to the hypocrisy of the Western governments who support, arm and finance both Ukraine and Israel.
(For more details and sources for the cases described above please email: uk****************@gm***.com).
Organised by International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity
https://www.facebook.com/groups/304424404302437
The US ruling class and its lackeys in the British ruling class clearly are giving both military support, and as much open political support as they dare, to Israel in its genocidal campaign to wipe out, or otherwise dispose of, the Palestinian people. This is not just in Gaza; the West Bank is lined up next, along with the so-called Israeli Arabs further down the line. Israel has become the symbol of the vile racism and colonialism of the West, and its racism is politically hegemonic, the most openly expressed form of racism in the early 21st Century. Old style, overt white supremacism is regarded with contempt by a bourgeois consensus. Even more so the legacy racism of Hitler-style anti-Semitism.
This extends even to the right-wing populists who have emerged out of the decay of neoliberalism in the last decade – even they have to pay lip-service to being in some way opposed to open racism. The defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII by the USSR (which did most of the fighting and took most of the casualties) had a huge ideological effect in discrediting open, overt racism. It has been on the defensive ever since. But paradoxically, there was and is one exception to this. Zionist racism, which justifies itself by invoking the crimes of Nazi Germany against the Jews to justify the genocidal ethnic cleansing, and often mass murder, of the Palestinian Arab population. At one level this is an ideological paradox. A form of racism apparently able to survive, and prosper, because the people in whose name it is practiced were previous victims of genocide.
But such ideological paradoxes have little power in themselves. They can only become powerful where there is a material basis for them. The material basis for the apparent ideological power of Zionist racism did not, and does not arise in a vacuum. What actually happened since WWII was that Zionism, as a political strategy, succeeded in transforming the mainly European-derived Jewish population of West Europe and North America from a significantly oppressed population before WWII, through a sui generis form of social mobility, into one of the world’s oppressor peoples, alongside white West Europeans and North American Anglos. This Jewish population is the only one that has made such a transformation, from victims of imperialist capitalism, into a population privileged by imperialist capitalism, in the imperialist epoch.
The reason this was even possible was because of the atypical social structure of the Jews in feudal Europe. Under the feudal mode of production, their pre-capitalist existence as a trading people-class (as analysed by the Belgian-Jewish Marxist theorist of the Jewish Question, Abram Leon) led them to become an oppressed population in the late-feudal era, from an often-privileged middleman class early in the same era. They were emancipated by the bourgeois revolutions, particularly in England and France when capitalism was in its vigorous youth, and began to be assimilated. But because of their preceding history as a (former) class, they were predisposed and particularly prone to absorption into the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie, which often led them to play leading roles in the working-class movement as an entirely natural response to their history of oppression and persecution. Where Jews were part of the working class, they tended to be in specialist artisan sections such as jewellery and clothing, which were closer socially to the petty-bourgeoisie. And they also were disproportionately absorbed, by virtue of their long experience of commodity exchange, into the more mercantile parts of the bourgeoisie itself. In the mid-feudal period those layers had regarded the pre-capitalist Jewish traders as an obsolete and harmful layer of competitors. But under generalised capitalism there was much more room for them.
But by the late 19th Century, around the 1880s, the vigorous youth of the capitalist system was over, and was replaced by a predatory form of capitalist imperialism, based on monopoly capitalism, and a drive to divide up the world between a few large West and Central European powers – joined by the United States and Japan. A feverish oppressor-people nationalism was the ideological expression of this imperialism, and that made Jews a target for considerable antipathy from imperialist nationalists. The role of Jews in the workers movement meant that imperialist nationalists came to regard even the large layer of bourgeois Jews with suspicion, with a paranoid racist ideology that posited a conspiracy between the leftist Jews and bourgeois Jews, supposedly to establish a ‘Jewish’ racial tyranny over gentiles. When imperialist capitalism came close to collapse in the Great Depression of the 1930s, this scapegoating of the Jews led to genocide.
And characteristically, it was the leftist-inclined petty-bourgeois and artisan Jews who were overwhelmingly wiped out. Though some bourgeois Jews in the epicentre of the genocide, Germany, also became victims, in general these escaped, and the result was that the class composition of Jews after the genocide tended more to reflect the influence of more bourgeois and privileged layers. Zionist was a bourgeois trend/strategy that realised that, even though bourgeois Jews had been scapegoated in the early period of imperialism, nevertheless they were objectively part of the imperialist bourgeoisie and a situation could be brought about, through creating a transplanted imperialist state of their ‘own’, whereby that imperialist layer could be enabled to lead ‘their’ formerly oppressed population to join the world’s imperialist oppressor peoples. That was the (thoroughly reactionary) ‘success’ of Zionism in ‘liberating’ the European Jews from their former oppression, transforming them into an oppressor population, objectively, with the Arab people of Palestine and adjoining countries as their main victims. That is the objective situation of North American, most European, and of course Israeli Jewry today, notwithstanding some acute subjective contradictions derived from their history.
Israel has a unique bourgeoisie, much of which lives in other imperialist countries, and has been cohered into, and acts as, an organised faction/caste (made up of an array of associated factions) within bourgeois politics within those countries. Simply because, while the number and proportion of the Jewish population may be small, the proportion of Jews within the imperialist bourgeoisie is much bigger, dozens of times larger proportionately. This is particularly strong in the US, and somewhat weaker but still highly important in West Europe. And the hegemonic ideological trend among bourgeois Jews today is Zionism, overwhelmingly. The hegemony of Zionist racism has been bolstered and given credence for decades by the fact that the Zionists and their bourgeois social base, were clever opportunists, who instead of fighting the Nazis and similar oppressors of their own people, actually substantially collaborated with them, sacrificing the artisan-proletariat and radicalised petty-bourgeois layers of their own people, in the cause of creating their own imperialist state. But the narrative promoted among the masses by this layer is that their people are the victims of the Nazi holocaust, and meaningful criticism of their racist hegemony is effectively the same as the genocidal hatred of Jews by the Nazis, etc. Not only that, but the fact that Zionist ideologues personified by Milton Friedman played a major role in creating the neoliberal economic/political trend in the 1970s, when the capitalist system again faced a seemingly systemic crisis, means that sections of the bourgeoisie now credit them with saving the capitalist system itself. This has created an irrational cult within imperialist bourgeois politics, which may actually prove as harmful as the cult of anti-Semitism and Hitler prior to the Second World War.
The genocide in Gaza has now generated an historical crisis of Zionist hegemony. It is perfectly obvious that the objective of the Israeli actions in Gaza is the elimination of the Palestinian Arab population of Gaza. This has been a Zionist objective for many years, and the advent of Netanyahu’s Likud/Kahanist/Ultra-Orthodox Settler coalition indicated even before the Hamas-led Oct 7th Palestinian revolt, which merely served as a pretext, that such a genocide was on the immediate agenda. The accelerating rise of Zionist terror on the West Bank shows that this is not merely about Gaza. It is a long-planned genocide, which will inevitably extend to the West Bank and even to the ‘Israeli Arab’ population within the Green Line if the Gaza carnage is not stopped. Whether Israel has the armed capacity to carry out such a greater genocide is not clear, however – this transplanted imperialist formation is itself fragile – the indigenous Arab population of the region is far more deeply rooted and may be able to topple the Zionist entity if it takes them on all at once. However, the fragile, but imperialist nature of Israel, plus its possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons, and the fanaticism of its far-right leaders, mean that it can be a threat to human existence itself, if it manages to provoke an all-out regional war.
The mass of the population worldwide sees right through Zionism today, and understands its imperialist nature. This is particularly true in the Global South, whose populations have terrible experience of colonialism and recognise Israel’s nature very easily. Billions see through Israel, and many millions march against its crimes. But even in the imperialist countries, the population is now, in its mass, deep-learning the fascistic, Nazi-like, genocidal and inhuman nature of Zionism. The Zionist lobby has been unable to prevent the terrible news of its massive crimes from seeping even into the mainstream Western media, even if the influence of the Jewish-Zionist caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie has limited this. The legal action launched in the International Court of Justice by South Africa, accusing Israel coherently of multiple breaches of the Genocide Convention, cannot and will not be able to be suppressed. Because the mass of the population around the globe already know the truth of it. This is a huge blow to Zionist hegemony, from which it will never fully recover.
The hysterical attacks on democratic rights by pro-Zionist politicians and cops under orders from them (see this article) should not be tolerated. The fact that they are losing the masses makes them more, not less hysterical, and fuels likely all-out attacks on what democratic rights the masses have achieved under capitalism. The bourgeois cult of Zionism is potentially as dangerous as the cult of Adolf Hitler – maybe more so since Hitler never had nuclear weapons, nor today’s technology of surveillance and repression. The only way to fully safeguard democratic rights is the independent activity and politics of the working class. In circumstances like today, when reactionary, imperialist forces are flirting with all-out attacks on the democratic rights of the masses, it is necessary for socialists and communist to raise among the masses the need for mass-based organs of self-defence. What Leon Trotsky wrote in the period of the rise of Hitlerism has relevance today when pro-Zionist forces are attacking the rights of the masses:
“In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defence. It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative wherever possible…to organize groups for self-defence, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.”
“It is necessary to give organized expression to the valid hatred of the workers toward scabs and bands of gangsters and fascists. It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press.”
Obviously, the technological basis of this has changed since the 1930s. Today’s media that needs defending is as likely to be online as in printed form. We could be faced with attacks with drones and electronic hacking, as well as imprisonment and torture of militants. We should also be aware that the techniques being used in Gaza will not inevitably be confined to there. It is entirely conceivable that mass murder by artificial intelligence could be in the arsenal of the ruling class faced with a revolutionary movement elsewhere. A ‘militia’ today would therefore not be simply a mechanical copy of Trotsky’s observations about “drilling” and “the use of arms”, though there would likely be elements of that.
The principle is the same. The working class once again faces potent threats to its democratic rights. We need militant mass-based organisation of the masses to defend these rights, if necessary, by physical force, and then to go over to the offensive against the class enemy in the concrete form that confronts us today. And just as in the 1930s, we need a class-conscious Marxist vanguard to provide the political impetus and leadership for that.
We reproduce below a draft Open Letter to George Galloway, regarding his declared intention to stand in the election for the Mayor of London this coming spring. It is likely he will be standing for the Workers Party, of which he is the best known member.
We think this is potentially important, and cannot be ignored by the left and the labour movement. At the same time, there are both progressive and problematic elements in it, as explained in the draft itself.
We therefore want to see credible left-wing forces place demands on Galloway to break with the problematic elements surrounding his campaign, thus rendering it supportable by the left. Otherwise it is likely to be a source of confusion and problems for the labour movement. It is not out of the question that his campaign could gain mass resonance in the minority communities in London who Labour now treats like dirt, so it cannot be ignored in our view.
Anyway, we have sent it both to Transform and to the Socialist Labour Network, with the proposal that the letter be endorsed by their respective leading bodies. We also propose that other organisations and individuals in the labour, anti-war and anti-racist movements endorse it, so that Galloway can be put on the spot about his flagrantly contradictory political activities and clarify whether he is a spokesperson for left-wing, anti-capitalist forces or for the alt-right. Those who want to endorse it should email co*****************@gm***.com.
We, the undersigned socialists and communists, anti-imperialists, anti-racists and anti-Zionists, are writing this open letter to you, given your stated intention to stand for election as Mayor of London in 2024, as the Workers Party candidate.
We would very much like to see someone like yourself who is seen as a fighter for working class interests and a strong opponent of the Imperialist wars in Ukraine, and against the Palestinian people, stand and provide an alternative to the crimes and betrayals of Labour under Starmer. It is good that you have stood up for the people of the Donbass and sharply denounced the genocide of Israel in Gaza and Palestine more generally, and the support for that crime by Britain and the United States.
However, there are serious problems with your candidacy. London is a city with a large working-class, and it is a multi-ethnic working class. London has the biggest immigrant-derived working-class communities in Britain. They are disproportionately low-paid, often treated like dirt, the victims of police racism and all kinds of disadvantage driven by racism. You know all about this, as you represented Bethnal Green & Bow between 2005 and 2010, as a RESPECT MP elected in to a large extent by the votes of the mainly South Asian Muslim community in that crucial East End constituency, in the context of the Iraq War. As well as being elected on a similar basis in Bradford West in 2012. At the time of these election victories in the 2000s and 2010s you frequently referred to yourself as the most pro-immigrant politician in Britain. And at that time, there was much truth in that.
Those communities are under attack from a vicious Tory government with a strong far right element in it. The outrageous attempt to deport refugees, many from imperialist crimes in the Middle East and Africa, to the former genocide site in Rwanda, is one manifestation. The government also has launched a frontal attack on the right of UK citizens to marry non-citizens, aiming to more-than double the qualifying income for sponsoring a spouse for a visa, to an amount that excludes 70% of the working-class population. It has also made similar changes to the minimum salary for migrant workers in health and social care, which concretely amounts to a huge purge of the NHS and other health-related services. In the real world, this these are massive attacks on London’s multi-ethnic working class, and in fact the entire working class, driven by far-right racism.
We know full well these will not be effectively opposed by Labour; they may well come out in support of the attacks. We demand a champion against these attacks, and a champion of London’s diverse working-class communities more generally. The working class in this city need a mayor who will use the resources of his office to fight against the government’s anti-migrant attacks, tooth and nail. In so many ways, linked to his own subservience to Starmer and Zionism, Sadiq Khan is not remotely any sort of answer.
But there are enormous problems with your candidacy. You have gone along and joined in with anti-immigrant British nationalism in the past decade or so, and tried to mix them with left-wing and anti-imperialist politics. These do not mix. There are different views on the left about the Brexit referendum itself, but your position involved joining with Farage’s hegemonic campaign whose anti-immigrant thrust was just obvious. In 2021 you also denounced anti-racist activists in Scotland who mobilised en masse to stop draconian anti-refugee deportations by Priti Patel. And you have conspicuously acted to put the far-right activist David Clews. publisher of the Unity News Network website, a sympathiser and regular attender at conferences of the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative, on platforms of No2NATONo2War. Patriotic Alternative has organised vicious harassment against refugees around the country, in tune with the far-right Tory agenda.
Unity News Network agrees with Suella Braverman, and also the racist Britain First fascist group, in the racist lie that ‘grooming gangs’ are generally the work of South Asian Muslim men, when in fact such criminality exists among all communities. This is a far right, racist slur intended to lead to violent racist attacks. Unity News Network has a plethora of articles on its website containing such innuendos about South Asian Muslims, which are a common element of the far right in and out of the Tory Party.
It seems to us that there is a huge contradiction between your earlier positions and the dubious alliances you seem to have drifted into today. We would like to be able to support your candidacy on a similar basis to those in 2005 and 2012, as a defender of the working class and its most abused and oppressed sections.
Therefore, we appeal to you to reassert your earlier anti-racist position and denounce the likes of Clews, Patriotic Alternative, and all the rest of these far-right elements, stand up for the oppressed Muslim communities and Asylum Seekers and refugees, and denounce the government’s anti-immigrant measures tooth and nail, as well as Starmer’s Labour Party that goes along with so much of that as it goes along with support for genocide in Gaza and anti-Russian Nazis in Ukraine.
In the absence of such a break with such far-right allies, and in the absence of a championing of the Immigrant-derived working-class communities in London and the country in general, we could only regard your candidacy as tainted and not supportable.
It is likely unclear to many of the millions marching, week after week, against Israel’s murderous rampage of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, that they are part of an unprecedented movement. The only remotely comparable global protests occurred in February 2003, when up to 15 million people marched against the imminent US led imperialist invasion of Iraq. A comparison of the two protest movements shows however that we are currently witnessing a far more anti-imperialist and working class orientated protest movement than in 2003. This article will focus on the Australian context but as Australia is a key imperialist power and member of the “Five eyes” network there will be many parallels to other imperialist centres.
The makeup of the 2003 protest leadership and perspective of many participants, in the imperialist centres, was overwhelmingly liberal. Whilst there was genuine anti-imperialist sentiment amongst the protests the leadership included much of the liberal or “progressive” civil society including unions, churches, and social democratic forces. The war was being prosecuted by a Republican President which gave space for these liberal forces to move in opportunistically. In Australia there was a right-wing Howard led Government. Simon Crean, the then Australian Labor Party opposition leader, even spoke at the rally in Brisbane, although he was booed by the crowd when declared he would support an attack on Iraq if it had UN approval! This liberal framework of the war being “illegal” as it had not been sanctioned by the “thieves’ kitchen” of the UN Security Council was typical of much liberal “anti-war” discourse of the time.
This liberal orientation contributed to the fact the protests simply evaporated after the war started in 2003. They were built on pacifist and liberal illusions and had no perspective to continue fighting once the “shock and awe” campaign started. They were built on a healthy hatred of the horrors of war in the masses but lacked political depth.
The Palestinian solidarity protests in comparison are not being led by any such mainstream liberal/progressive forces. They are also being launched in opposition to a war being endorsed by a Democrat President and supported in Australia by State and Federal Labor governments. Most of formal civil society is too cowed or compromised to formally endorse and promote the mass protests the ruling class has slandered as “divisive” or even antisemitic. The Churches and the NGO’s who only a few months ago marched and hung banners promoting the Federal Labor Governments “YES” referendum for an at best tokenistic indigenous consultative body are conspicuously silent on Palestine.
Whilst rank and file unionists are vigorously organising in opposition to the war through the Trade Unionists for Palestine network in contrast the trade union bureaucrats in Australia are no-where to be seen or only offering token support. They do not want to expose their political patrons in the Labor Party Government.
I have attended all the marches so far in Melbourne and observed that the leadership of the protests is much more grass roots and rank and file. Significantly the Australian Palestinian community and the long-time solidarity networks are playing a massive role in organising the street protests. There was not anything equivalent in 2003 eg a diaspora Iraqi community in the west. Arab Australians and the Muslim community more generally are also playing a leadership role. The 2003 Iraq war occurred in the immediate aftermath of the declaration of the bogus “War on Terror” and it was a very difficult time for West Asian descended populations in the imperialist centres to organise politically in a visible way.
The leadership of the Palestinian community and their long-time solidarity networks has given these protests a much more left wing and anti-imperialist underpinning based on their decades long struggle and perspective.
One of the very notable elements in the imperialist centres of the US, Cananda and Australia is the linking of the struggle for Palestinian rights with the framework not just of anti-imperialism but settler colonialism. This has allowed links to be made with the struggles of indigenous peoples and First Nations of these countries who are also victims of ongoing dispossession and genocidal violence. This has manifested with activists from the “Black Sovereignty” movement, such as Senator Lydia Thorpe, speaking at all Melbourne rallies as well as groups such as the Black Peoples Union co-organising and leading several direct actions.
The leadership and political sophistication of the Palestinian diaspora and the connections being made between the Palestinian struggle and other struggles against settler colonial violence has exploded on social media with a tsunami of pro-Palestine content. Tik Tok has been turned into a virtual “peoples university” giving a whole new generation a crash course in the history of Zionist and imperialist oppression of Palestine. Tik Tok under pressure was forced to issue a press release protesting that it was not their algorithm’s fault their platform was full of pro-Palestine content, its just that young people by and large support Palestine!
The online outpouring of support for Palestine is linked also to the Black Lives Matter Protests of 2020. Many of the content creators are US leftwing people of colour radicalised at that time who are now directly linking their own struggles against the police and US ruling class with the struggle against Zionist genocide of Palestine. This framework of fighting racialized state oppression has also influenced many young people in Australia of all backgrounds.
The current protests are therefore grounded for many in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and often anti-capitalist if not yet Communist perspectives. This means many of the ordinary working class people involved in the protest are much more realistic than in 2003 about the king of struggle they are waging. They are aware that the protests will not be enough to end the genocide and free Palestine. They are aware the struggle will need to be broadened and deepened. They are aware that workers will need to use their collective power. They are aware that the struggle is being waged in opposition to all factions of the ruling classes of their countries. This helps explain why the protests are growing each week rather than dissipating. It means that even if when the protests inevitably drop away in the short term, they are laying the groundwork for an ongoing anti-imperialist war struggle in a way that the 2003 protests just failed to do.
They are aware they are dealing with a Zionist government that is backed by the US and all Western imperialist powers. They are also aware of the deep hypocrisy and sickening immorality of these powers “standing with Israel” supposedly in the name of human rights and democracy whilst a genocide is committed in front of them in real time! This is obviously what educators call a “teachable” moment for the worlds working classes!
Twenty years after the 2003 anti-war protests, the capitalist crisis has deepened. Hard lessons have been learned by the working class on many fronts. The betrayal and true nature of social democratic, liberal and progressive forces has deepened and the entire ruling class has moved to the right. The ruling class is revealing its true nature as authoritarian or outright fascist war mongers and the pretence of humanitarian imperialism is dropping away under the class pressures of the moment. I truly believe that these protests are part of a process which is making it clearer to the masses of the world whose side of the barricades they must be on. It’s a dangerous moment and the Communist left is not nearly as organised as it needs to be internationally but nevertheless the age of war and revolution is arriving whether the Left is ready or not!