Communist Fight issue 6 is out now, in hard copy format. It features articles on Palestine, and the need for international workers action to liberate Palestine and fight the genocidal Zionist project through international workers revolutionary action. Also this issue focuses on the need to defend Cuba as a deformed workers state, in the context of the recent counterposed demonstrations. We also have coverage of the huge protest movement in Brazil against Bolsonaro driven by the suffering of the masses in the Covid-19 pandemic under his fascistic regime, which is crucifying the masses and at the same time destroying the Amazon basin as a crucial part of the global ecosystem humanity and other higher life forms depend on.
Related to this is an article on recent catastrophic climate events, which indicate that capitalism is already pushing us past tipping points that threaten disaster for human civilisation. The overthrow of capitalism by the working class is becoming more and more urgent.
Regarding British politics we have extensive coverage of the criminality of the Johnson regime over Covid, and its attacks on democratic rights. We have a major examination of the issues in the Unite General Secretary Election and how the ‘left’ bureaucracy is risking opening the way for a right-wing Murdoch stooge. And we have a historical/programmatic article on how neoliberalism, deindustrialisation and financialisation have changed the nature of the Labour bureaucracy, and hence the class makeup of the Labour Party.
This 36 page edition contains substantial material on the international and domestic class struggle, and we urge socialists and those sympathetic to revolutionary politics to take out a subscription, which costs £17 per year for 4 issues. See our Communist Fight page for details.
Palestinian family mourn the deaths of three children killed by Israeli air attack, in Northern Gaza, May 14
“The-times-they-are-a-changing”: as one well known Palestine Solidarity activist, of Jewish origin, recently said, evoking Bob Dylan in a call for the formation of a new Palestine solidarity movement in Britain. They certainly are! Criticisms of Zionism that were considered taboo just a few short years ago are now becoming so obvious that they will soon be mainstream on the left. That Political Zionism is Jewish supremacism is increasingly becoming common knowledge and entering the left mainstream, this stronger emphasis of many fighters for Palestine on this is to be welcomed. Political Zionism is indeed a Jewish supremacist movement.
The old prejudice that Zionism was simply a tool of Western colonialism, that was by that token not really Jewish at all, and had no independent agency of its own, is being dissipated by the radicalisation that has happened in Britain as a result of the experience of the orchestrated role of Zionism in undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, where Zionist smear campaigns managed to reach where ordinary British imperialist chauvinism was unable to. This radicalisation has now been deepened, and on a world-wide level, by the victory of the Palestinian people in the Saif Al-Quds (Sword of Jerusalem) war of May 2021, which for the first time for decades united the Palestinian people from the River to the Sea in a struggle against Zionism, and forced Israel to make concessions and call a face-saving ceasefire much earlier than planned in the face of such Palestine-wide resistance, which threatened the very stability of the Jewish state.
The activist referred to earlier, Tony Greenstein, gets it almost right when he writes of the comparison between Zionism and the earlier struggle against South African apartheid:
“The campaign against Israel is different in one crucial respect from that against apartheid in South Africa. Whereas the latter had no domestic support base, apart from the capitalists, right-wing Tories and fascists, the Israeli state has a lobby that is strong and powerful.
“Israel has support within the Jewish community. The last survey by Yachad of British Jews in 2015 found that 59% identify as Zionists. However 31% said that they weren’t Zionists. This was down 13% on a similar survey 5 years previously.
“Despite the attempt to label BDS as anti-Semitic, 24% of British Jews support some form of sanctions on Israel. Among secular Jews this rises to 40% and among the under-30s it is 41%. Compare this with the Board of Deputies, which purports to speak for British Jews, which never criticises Israel. Zionist organisations have hijacked the voice of “British Jews”. British Jews are in the words of Barnaby Raine the Establishment’s ‘favourite pets: heroic colonists in the Middle East and successful citizens in the West.’”
One important difference between South Africa and the Zionist state is that the latter has a powerful ethnic lobby as its base of support in the West that the Boer/Anglo regime never had, separate and distinct from the run of the mill bourgeois forces that over South Africa, as over Kenya, Malaya, Ireland, you name it, backed the West’s colonial allies in all its more conventional colonial type wars.
Biden panders to the Israel lobby
This reference to the Zionist Jewish establishment as ‘successful citizens in the West’ can only refer to the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois layers that use the power of their property and wealth to give rise to the ‘strong and powerful’ Israel lobby, which is primarily an ethnocentric lobby or faction within the bourgeoisie. Which is disproportionate in size simply because of the much higher proportion of Jews who have risen into the Western bourgeoisies over a prolonged period, a historical legacy of the social role of the Jews as a class of commodity traders under European feudalism. The younger, more secular Jewish layers who are less enamoured with Zionism’s crimes are obviously outside this bourgeois, ruling-class layer.
But the point about Zionist Jews who are ‘successful citizens’ (i.e. leading figures in the ruling class) being mere ‘pets’ is a misreading: they are much more valuable to the bourgeois establishment than that, a class-conscious reserve, previously mistakenly maligned from the standpoint of the gentile bourgeoisie, now among their most celebrated class brethren.
Israel is more than a Western pet in another sense, as typified by the Israeli arms company Elbit systems, whom Palestine Action’s activists, are organising against with great courage while being maligned by PSC. Elbit is no subsidiary of the West, it epitomises the imperialist nature of Israel and its overseas lobbies as a distinct force within the pantheon of imperialist powers. As we wrote recently:
“This is not some Western arms exporter supplying arms to a client, like Saudi Arabia in Yemen. This is an Israeli arms company that supplies high-tech weaponry to the West and its clients: to the British armed forces, those of the US, France, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines; from military drones to night-vision equipment and other military surveillance equipment. Its military hardware is marketed as tested in action, i.e., against the Palestinian people. Israel is a far tougher nut to crack than any mere colonial outpost, it is an imperialist enemy in its own right. Therefore, you get the contradictory phenomenon where, while Israel sometimes acts like a Western client state, at other times the US and other Western powers act like Israeli client states. The overlapping of the ruling classes means there is an element of truth in both.”
The current scandal involving another Israeli hi-tech company connected with the Israeli military, NSO Group, and its spyware Pegasus, being used to spy on and steal the data of human rights activists, lawyers acting for the victims of political persecution, in numerous countries around the world, including that of Israel’s kindred anti-Muslim persecutor Modi in India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia (Israel’s client), Morocco, Kazakhstan, and Hungary whose right-wing nationalist government both fulminates against alleged ‘subversion’ from prominent Jews like George Soros, and is an Israeli client state. These things might seem incidental, except that they emphasise that Israel is in the vanguard of reaction, a quartermaster to imperialism generally and its repressive clients around the globe, and a danger to democratic rights wherever its operative go.
Zionism is a genocidal project in its own right; it always has been. Right from the beginning its aims were substantially different to movements with which is it often compared, such as the movement led by Marcus Garvey that advocated that the descendants of those Africans kidnapped and used as slaves by early Western capitalism, particularly in the Americas, should return to Africa. These movements were simply both utopian and limited in their aims: basically, to ameliorate the oppression suffered by the descendants of the enslaved by creating Black African states that they could ‘return’ to. Their forcible exile was real, and ‘return’ was no answer to their oppression. The outcome of that movement was the creation of two impoverished neo colonies in Africa, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, that have proved, because of their somewhat artificial nature, more impoverished and unstable than the more traditional African semi-colonial nations that neighbour them, and completely unable to liberate any black people.
The Zionist project was very different from these. Right from the very beginning, far from expressing hostility to imperialism and colonialism in any sense, Zionism modelled itself on colonialism. The effective founder of Zionism as a movement, Theodore Herzl, praised the British arch-coloniser of Africa, Cecil Rhodes, and sought to emulate him. It is now very clear that Zionism did evolve a strategy that indeed was able to liberate the Jews from the historic oppression that began in the late feudal period in Europe and persisted through both the progressive phase of capitalism and the early period of imperialist capitalism, culminating in the obscenity of Hitler’s genocide.
That strategy involved using the social weight that Jews had achieved in the imperialist bourgeoisie despite their frequent oppression and persecution, to create by transplantation an advanced capitalist, imperialist state in the Middle East, that could create the conditions where the bulk of Jews could be liberated from oppression by joining the world’s dominant, oppressor peoples. This strategy has proven highly successful as Israel is now, despite its comparatively small size and population, an imperialist regional superpower in the Middle East, armed with hundreds of nuclear weapons and an advanced, hi-tech computer-derived armaments industry that acts as a quartermaster to many of the most powerful imperialist countries.
However, it was not a universalist strategy that aimed to liberate Jews alongside all other peoples from systematic oppression. It always aimed to liberate Jews at the expense of another people, the Palestinian Arabs, whose population was actively unwanted. Logically the project of Political Zionism could only succeed if the Palestinian Arab population were expelled or otherwise disposed of. But mere expulsion is problematic as it means a large, exiled refugee population exists as a permanent reminder to the world that Israel is built on land taken by force from them, and thus was founded through a massive crime. So, the logic of Zionism can only be genocidal, and that is now becoming widely recognised.
Only Zionist lobbying power can keep the lid on this. The Zionist lobbies are a unique formation based centrally on ethnocentric Jewish chauvinist politics within the Western imperialist ruling classes. They are an alliance of similarly minded but sometimes dissenting factions – they are not monolithic. A Jewish-born capitalist in the West is entitled by right to Israeli citizenship under Israel’s racist ‘Law of Return’, and thus to become part of Israel’s ruling class. Many though not all do. Much of Israel’s power comes from these pro-Israel ruling-class factions overseas. Israel’s ruling class overlaps with the ruling classes of the West, which is why its power is proportionately much greater than its size and population. Without this, Israel’s power would be no greater than that of, say Denmark. But Denmark’s Prime Minister cannot do things like marching into the US Congress to ovations from all sides while denouncing Obama’s Iran deal, as Netanyahu did in 2015. Denmark does not have overseas interests who can do things like sabotaging the Labour Party here, as happened to Corbyn through a torrent of smears and lies.
We must know what we are up against. Otherwise, we will be suckers for the smears about ‘anti-Semitism’ that have driven back the left repeatedly. Israel is a key element of world imperialism and will not be defeated or humanised by liberal pressure tactics or boycotts based on moral disgust. While boycott campaigns like BDS have some value, this is only as a step towards mobilising working-class actions. Mass solidarity demonstrations like the ones in Britain are crucial. But even more the labour actions boycotting Israeli ships and/or arms shipments in San Francisco, Italy and elsewhere. These point the way toward internationally based working-class revolutionary action to inflict major defeats on Zionism, and indeed given Israel’s key role as a quartermaster and a centre of neo-liberalism, on world capitalism itself.
It is crucial, but not enough, to protest and mobilise against Zionism and imperialism’s wars, their crimes against the Palestinians, their threats to Iran, to Syria, and the region. What this points to is the need for a strategy of permanent revolution, of the working class acting as the leader of all the oppressed, with the centrally Arab working class in the Middle East struggling for its own power, overthrowing class and national oppression, liberating both itself and the Jewish population from Zionism which is a key mainstay of capitalist oppression.
At the time of the Industrial Revolution Britain gained the moniker of the ‘workshop of the world’. Its industrial strength made it the first truly capitalist industrial world power. Statues of its conquering heroes litter the cities of imperial Britain: Cromwell, Wellington, Rhodes, Clive, Churchill, Montgomery, and often from a slightly earlier period, those of its slave-traders, Colston, Cass, Havelock, Drake. The anti-racist movements that have rocked the Western ‘free world’ in recent years, having their initial epicentre in the United States, in this country have hit against the ethos of Brexit and its glorification of the ‘buccaneering spirit’ of early British capitalism that was integral to imperial expansion.
Basically this ‘buccaneering’ spirit they are trying to invoke is the 17th century one of plundering and exploiting other nations and peoples. Buccaneering is often a euphemism for piracy, though outright pirates were deemed so because they plundered and killed purely on their own account. Those plunderers whom the British term ‘buccaneers’ were acting at least partially on behalf of Britain, had official approval, with a kind of British letter to prove it. But to all intents and purposes they were indistinguishable from pirates. In those days the British in the Caribbean were trying to drive out the Spanish and Portuguese as much as possible, their ‘buccaneering’ largely took place a long way from home and was at the expense of colonisers mainly from the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the French.
Today, British imperialism is no longer the workshop of the world, but a third-rate military power with precious little industry left. It depends instead for its wealth on its financial services industry, whose material basis is rooted with Britain’s so-called ‘invisible earnings’, which amount to the economic interests remaining around the world from its former Empire that do not depend on formal political control, also bound up with tax havens, which the British ruling class closely guard, and which have a tendency to draw in financial resources from around the world. Protected of course, now that political control has gone, by the world power of US imperialism, as part of the quid-pro-quo whereby in return for such protection Britain becomes one of the most slavish supporters of US imperialism in the world (a.k.a. the ‘special relationship). Britain’s financial industry is crucial to the survival of British capitalism and such activities as tax dodging and money laundering have become much more central to this than it was in the days when Britain had substantial manufacturing industry. Indeed, it is those sections of the bourgeoisie most bound up with such activities, as opposed to Britain’s residual industries, that drove Brexit. The ‘buccaneering’ that the Brexiters seek to promote is the plundering of as much as they can from the world’s poor and oppressed by Britain’s financial capitalists.
British Capitalism: from Finance Capital to Financial Capital
Financial capital (as opposed to old fashioned finance capital: the union of industrial and banking capital) is what drives British capitalism today. That was what the ‘Thatcher revolution’ consisted of, basically. The eclipse of industrial capital, of the old banking-industry relationship by a financialised model of capitalism in the 1986 ‘Big Bang’ of financial and stock market deregulation was the whole point of Thatcher’s anti-union attacks of the 1980s. Indeed the ‘Big Bang’ would not have been considered possible until the vital, strategic defeat had been administered to the social-democratic-led British labour movement with the defeat of the 1984-5 miners’ strike.
The British ruling class had been trying to defeat the unions for quite a while previously – both the 1964-70 Labour government’s White Paper In Place of Strife and the Heath government’s Industrial Relations Act were obviously aimed at decisively weakening the unions with the aim of restoring the profitability of British manufacturing and finance capital. But with that economic model, they could not really succeed, as with an intact manufacturing base, the working class was simply too strong. But the evolving strategy of neoliberalism, which crystallised in the late 1970s, and not just in Britain, encompassed the need to substantially, and (they hoped) decisively weaken the proletariat in the advanced countries, though the export of large number of manufacturing jobs to lower waged semi-colonial countries, in effect inflicting a major defeat on the organised proletariat by moving large chunks of it lock, stock and barrel to places where its historical struggles would have to start virtually from scratch.
This major restructuring of British capitalism also meant a major restructuring of the British labour movement. The apotheosis of Britain as the ‘workshop of the world’ in the 19th Century had led to the growth of a mass working class and trade union movement, which initially the British ruling class tried to crush both in terms of its agitation for political freedom and democratic rights (Peterloo), and later repression against the Chartists, and in terms of trade union struggles (Tolpuddle). But despite such setbacks, trade unions did grow to substantial strength in the 19th Century. They became quite respectable and bourgeois during the period of Britain’s world hegemony and monopoly in the mid to late 19th Century, generally giving their support to the Liberals.
The dawning of the epoch of imperialism towards the end of the 19th Century, i.e., monopoly capitalism whose expansionist essence was expressed in a massive expansion of colonialism, led to Britain’s world dominance being broken by other emerging imperialist powers, including France, the US and most notably Germany. The economic convulsions of this change, by degrees, broke the British labour movement from its allegiance to the Liberals. In parallel with a new and more militant growth of trade unionism. This gave birth to a class collaborationist, but independently organised, Labour Party, dominated by a political and trade union bureaucracy who saw its function as negotiating with the bosses of industrial/finance capital over the price of labour power and social benefits derived from that, within the framework that their pro-capitalist politics considered that British capitalism could afford. These limitations were at times contested by Communists of varying types, but never overcome. Within this framework, the class struggle and the political fortunes of the Labour Party ebbed and flowed through the 1926 General Strike, two world wars, culminating in the scare that British workers gave to the ruling class in the early-mid 1970s, when for the first time in British history a Tory government – Edward Heath’s – was brought down essentially by workers’ own class struggle actions and the political effects of that.
Ramsay MacDonald
The defeat of the miners a decade later represented a qualitative break from that. The jobs massacre that both preceded and followed that shifted the axis of British capitalism and also its relationship with the political labour bureaucracy. There had been anticipations of outright treachery from this quarter earlier, most notably in 1931 when in a major unemployment crisis triggered off by the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that followed it, the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his Chancellor Phillip Snowden, in order to launch a major attack on the already meagre benefits available to the unemployed, was forced to break with the Labour Party completely and go into coalition with the Tories. In those days, despite the depression over the British working class caused by the defeat in 1926, there was no way that bulk of Labour’s political bureaucracy, linked to finance capital and industry by the substantially developed ‘common interest’ of class collaboration with large scale employers of the working class, could accept such an attack. MacDonald and Snowden signed their own political death certificates with this action and were forever excoriated as traitors, though the labour bureaucracy under their successors in that decade were incapable of fighting back against the attacks the MacDonaldites had perpetrated.
Ramsay MacDonaldism now Dominates Labour
Today there are forces in the political Labour bureaucracy that have repeatedly done similar things and are not so isolated. In fact, the bulk of today’s political Labour Party bureaucracy has a very different relationship with British capitalism to those in the earlier period, which in large measure can be explained by the shift in the makeup of British capitalism itself and the rise of financial capital at the expense of the older model. From the mid-1980s we had the rise of what was called Ramsay MacKinnockism, with the flagrant stabbing of workers struggles by the Labour leadership under Neil Kinnock without any attempt to disguise it. Kinnock’s leadership first saw the rise to prominence of Peter Mandelson, who became even more of a central ideological figure in the Blairite period and as is well known, is the mastermind behind Starmer’s massive purges of the Labour left today. Mandelson summed up the entire changed relationship to capital of the Blairised, that is, financialised, Labour right-wing leadership when he said that Labour was “‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, as part of the Blair government of New Labour that was praised by Margaret Thatcher as “my greatest achievement” and which made clear before it was elected that it intended to keep the vast majority of Thatcher and Major’s anti-union laws and privatisations. Not to mention that under Blair’s leadership, Labour became the pro-US war party, the initiator of the Iraq war, unlike the days when Harold Wilson carefully avoided direct involvement in Vietnam.
Thus, a major shift in the makeup of British capitalism has catalysed a major shift in the relationship of the bureaucracy of the Labour Party with this reconfiguring British capitalism. The position of the Labour left is key in the Party is key to this. The archetype of the Labour right from the earlier period, Denis Healey, once remarked that Labour was like a bird: it needed two wings to fly, its left wing and its right wing. This summed up the attitude to the reformist left of the mainstream of the labour bureaucracy under the old regime of collaboration with finance capital. It was one of co-optation and a degree of compromise.
That is no longer possible. The whole point of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, of which Kinnockism/Blairism and that wing of the Labour bureaucracy have become an integral part, is that it is quite right that the social power, collectivity and living standards of the proletariat, should be qualitatively, substantially reduced. Therefore, there can be no compromise between the Blairised right and even mild-mannered left reformists like Jeremy Corbyn, who do not seek at all to overthrow British capitalism but would like to reverse at least the worst aspects of the ‘Thatcher revolution’ and deliver some basic social reforms. The problem is that Thatcherised ‘Labourism’ does not inspire mass support from the working class, and in the mid 20-teens New Labour faced a sustained loss of support, as expressed in losing elections.
Their desperate attempts to overcome this produced an opportunity for mass support for basic social-democratic reforms to be expressed, through Corbyn’s being elected leader. But the Blairised, financialised political Labour bureaucracy and parliamentary contingent could not tolerate this for a moment, and their tactical response was simple sabotage and deliberate attempts to undermine Corbyn, sabotage and engineer the loss of elections, and even boasting publicly about an attempt to destroy Corbyn “as a man” in the manner of some nutcase cult psychological gangbang. The financialisaton of British capitalism and its loyal servants in the Labour bureaucracy has led, also, to a growth in influence of Zionism among such layers, for reasons that are quite explicable historically. Thus, the war of these Zionised Blairites against Corbyn and Corbynism, which is still accelerating, signifies the opposite policy to that of Denis Healey. Far from needing two wings to fly, their concept after Corbynism is that the British Labour Party should be purged of social-democratic reformism altogether.
Reformist Utopianism Needs to be Overcome. Fight for Communism!
The underlying reason is that the decline of British imperialism, and its industrial base, has rendered the core programme of social-democratic reformism unrealisable within the framework of the British capitalism we have today. Past gains won by the mass pressure of the workers and implemented by social democratic governments, archetypally the NHS, are under massive attack from the Tories and the ruling class, and the Blairites fully support this, even if at times their representatives have to dissemble and try to hide this to avoid giving ammunition to the left. The only way that substantial, sustainable social gains can be achieved today is through the establishment of a workers’ state, and the forcible suppression of the political power of the capitalists.
Blair, Kinnock and Mandelson
As Marxists today, we do not seek to put into power the neoliberal crypto-Tory right-wing leaders of the Labour Party. The Ramsay Kneel MacKinnockites, the Blairites, the Mandelsons, the Starmers, the Jess Philipps and Stephen Kinnocks who visibly celebrated in the mass media when the Corbyn-led Labour Party lost the 2019 Election, and were visibly shocked and horrified when Corbyn destroyed Theresa May’s majority and came close to winning outright in the election in 2017. The mass of the working class does not have any illusions that these types represent a class alternative to the Tories and other bourgeois parties.
We seek to help the subjectively socialist, left social democratic elements to fracture Labour decisively and create a new working-class party. There is an historic opportunity, right now to do this, to create a genuine working-class party with a mass base – the mass base of the Corbynite movement – that would not, at least at the beginning, have a privileged bureaucracy ruling the roost over it. Thus, the possibility exists of replacing Labour, as a bourgeois workers party with a hardened bureaucratic and now neoliberal caste on top of it, with a genuine workers party, completely devoid of such a caste, which would be capable of political development beyond left-reformist utopianism toward revolutionary Marxism. Indeed, the very impetus of such a split might very well propel many of its followers further left.
Of course, Labour and its mass membership do not exist in a vacuum. The trade unions are a key part of the broader labour movement, were marginalised by the Blairites in their ascendancy, and are under attack from Starmer once again. Such a party would have to confront the right-wing in the unions and move beyond the left bureaucracy and its limitations and potential for treachery also. As part of fighting for a transitional programme to point toward the need for revolution, Marxists must raise demands to end the privileged salaries of union officials and subordinate their activities to workers democracy.
In any case, this analysis must underpin the political activities of revolutionary Marxists in this period and we in the Consistent Democrats will do all we can to popularise it and build a movement around it.
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society [1] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains … ”
The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch07.htm
It is not new to speak of social murder, indeed the then-Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, spoke of in the sense that Engels used it, regarding the deaths caused by unsafe building materials in the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. However, the deaths referred to in this way in Grenfell ‘only’ amounted to 72. When we talk about the Covid-19 pandemic we are talking about 129,130 deaths as of now, and still counting (the ONS says 150,000).
In terms of per million/per capita death rates (it’s the same thing!), the UK is in 20th place in the entire world, out of 222 countries registered on the Worldometer as of 25th July. But the UK is the fifth wealthiest country in the world. Not only that, it has no land borders, only air or seaports, so it is obvious that the UK, as well as having advantages in terms of wealth in keeping the spread of Covid under control, also has natural advantages in terms of geography. The only advanced capitalist/imperialist countries that are ahead of the UK in per-capita infections, Belgium and Italy, both have extensive land borders with several states.
Furthermore, the statistics produced by the British government are considered too low by the Organisation for National Statistics, which is independent of the government. They announced in May that the real total of Covid deaths was more than 150,000.
Why this is becomes obvious when you examine the pronouncements and actions of the Johnson government in dealing with Covid, and the sporadically implemented, manoeuvrist, but discernible and clear strategy that has been implemented by Johnson over the entire pandemic.
The latest manifestation of this was laid out by Professor Robert West, an adviser for the Government’s own SAGE body (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) who have worked for the government for the entire pandemic, as reported in the Guardian. Regarding the July 19thFreedom Day, he wrote:
“What we are seeing is a decision by the government to get as many people infected as possible, as quickly as possible, while using rhetoric about caution as a way of putting the blame on the public for the consequences” .
23 July
The article continues:
“’It looks like the government judges that the damage to health and healthcare services will be worth the political capital it will gain from this approach,’ West said, adding that ministers appear to believe the strategy is now sustainable – unlike last year – because of the vaccine rollout.
“A large wave of infections, coupled with mass vaccination, would push the UK closer to ‘herd immunity’, where enough people in the population are resistant to the virus that it no longer spreads. The threshold for herd immunity with the Delta variant is unclear, but scientists estimate that transmission would need to be blocked in about 85% of the population. Ministers have repeatedly denied that achieving herd immunity by letting cases rise is the government’s goal.”
Its perfectly obvious to everyone what the purpose of this gamble is. Johnson hopes to use herd immunity through infection as a lever to re-open the country ahead (he hopes) of Britain’s economic competitors. To try to achieve such an advantage, he is prepared to risk the death or serious, crippling injury through ‘Long Covid’, of a part of the population considered expendable, or even the possibility of the emergence of a new Covid variant that evades the vaccines in use at the moment, which would likely result in a lot more deaths. In the face of a partially, but insufficiently vaccinated population, this is not a fanciful threat, as many have pointed out.
It is possible that this tactic may succeed, but even if it does, it involves risking the lives of mass of the population and holding them hostage to the unpredictable genetic variations that can occur in a virus population allowed to circulate widely before genuine herd immunity is achieved by vaccinating in excess of 80% of the population, an optimum derived from scientific experience of previous vaccination campaigns to deal with endemic disease. This is the ‘buccaneering spirit’ of Brexit that Johnson, Cummings and co frequently spoke of over the past several years. Even if it works, there is a criminal intent behind the strategy.
Herd Immunity
Government strategy now is a modified version of its original strategy of herd immunity through mass infection without a vaccine. They had to abandon that in the face of a huge outcry, the forecast likelihood that it would result in half-a-million dead, and they would be strung up from the nearest lamppost. Now, instead, they are using herd immunity through mass infection to as a risky shortcut to speed up the development of herd immunity through vaccines, and they are prepared to risk a disaster that if it occurs would have world-wide implications, to steal a march on the competition.
The government can deny until it is blue in the face, but the evidence corroborates that its initial strategy at the beginning of the pandemic was “herd immunity” without vaccines. Not only did Johnson talk openly of it on Breakfast TV, but it was also promoted by Sir Patrick Vallance, who told Sky News:
“Communities will become immune to it and that’s going to be an important part of controlling this longer term … About 60 per cent is the sort of figure you need to get herd immunity.
[…]
“Our aim is to try to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it.”
This was in early March 2020, long before any vaccines existed.
The policy since has been, as was noted in a prescient article by George Galloway’s ‘Workers Party’, that of “punctuated herd immunity”. Even though, bizarrely, Galloway has been prepared for his own opportunist ‘tactical’ reasons to advocate votes for Scottish Tories during the pandemic, he managed to an astute and sharp characterisation of this:
“It is increasingly clear that these lockdown measures simply represent a kind of ‘punctuated’ herd immunity, and that the government has no intention of taking the measures necessary really to safeguard the wellbeing of those unemployed, elderly or impoverished workers from whom it makes little money, and therefore sees only as a burden.
“For effective protective measures – including the reversal of NHS privatisation, investment in public services, the creation of decent jobs and livelihoods for working people – undermine the very essence of the government’s goal, which is to safeguard the interest of the billionaire class at all costs, and at workers’ expense.”
Johnson has been joined throughout the pandemic in this perfidy by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which had condoned or turned a blind eye to virtually every dirty deal or outrageous taking of risks with the lives of workers and minorities Johnson has done. The benchmark was set for his treachery when he said, in September 2020, the immortal words “Whatever measure the government takes, we will support it.” (https://labourlist.org/2020/09/sunday-shows-labour-will-back-whatever-measures-the-government-takes-on-covid-says-starmer/)
He was not talking of public health measures here, not about measures to limit or suppress the disease. He was also talking of measures to ‘revive’ the economy, even at risk of greater Covid infection. Indeed, at times he attacked Johnson from the right, for being too hesitant to send working class children into schools, before any section of the population was vaccinated because no vaccines were yet available:
“So, let me send a very clear message to the Prime Minister: I don’t just want all children back at school next month, I expect them back at school. No ifs, no buts, no equivocation,”
The schools were not only re-opened; parents were forced under threat of fines and criminal penalties to send their kids to school, which was the first time the government had tried to enforce this on families that feared Covid infection since the beginning of the pandemic.
Starmer is on the warpath against the left. A direct expression of this was his sacking of the sometime leftist Rebecca Long-Bailey as Shadow Education Secretary as the result of an ‘anti-Semitism’ smear. But as Skwawkbox revealed at the time, the real reason was her support for the teachers’ unions’ opposition to unsafe reopening of schools:
“Rebecca Long-Bailey has been sacked after a massive internal row over the Labour leadership’s support for Boris Johnson’s back-to-school push – after a doubling of school infections followed even Johnson’s abortive plan to push children and teachers back into the classroom”
This rushed and unsafe reopening of schools was the starting point of large-scale Covid infections in the Autumn of 2020, the emergence of the Kent variant, and the enormous second wave that followed from that, effectively tripling the number of deaths from the first wave over the winter. Not only that, but the Kent variant made Britain into ‘Plague Island’ because of inadequate testing and tracing, siphoned off to mates for a fast billon or forty, and was allowed to spread from here around the world because of inadequate emergency health-related border restrictions (by people who pride themselves on demanding border restrictions for racist and xenophobic reasons). Dominic Cummings has exposed some of the outrageous sayings and doings of Johnson over this whole period. But on the core issue, Johnson had Starmer’s support.
Not only Johnson, but also Starmer, have a mountain of corpses on their hands. They represent together a kind of brotherhood of social murder. They are both killers.
Break with Re-Blairised Labour
Starmer is on a rampage against the Labour left and those who ever supported Jeremy Corbyn. His vendetta against those on the left who have in any way objected to previous Zionist-led purges within Labour, is characteristic. He inspires no one at all -certainly not working-class traditional Labour voters, who stay at home. He has been losing by-elections to the most corrupt, decrepit government imaginable. He only survived by the skin of his teeth in Batley and Spen because of Matt Hancock’s exposure and fall. His task as a mercenary for the bourgeoisie is to destroy the political element of the labour movement and politically erase all class-conscious elements.
But he can only succeed if the left accepts Labour Party fetishism and refuses to break with the organisational framework of the Labour Party. These circumstances have created a historic opportunity, and necessity for class conscious elements in Labour to defy its rigged structures and found something new. We have the opportunity to build a mass, subjectively socialist party based on the hundreds of thousands of left activists who joined Labour to support Corbyn’s challenge, and who have nothing in common with the Starmer Blairites. It is desperately necessary to begin this in the coming months. The October conference of Resist – Movement for a People’s Party (https://resistfest.co.uk/) looks like a starting point for this and we urge all socialists to join and participate in this.
While 2020 was seen as the year that unleased COVID into the world, which in many ways was a product of exploitation of the natural world,
The planet is accelerating towards the point of no return with extreme weather events which have also taken place in the heart of industrialised wealthy Europe. The political response to this is woeful, despite offering mealy mouthed words to placate the masses, action speaks louder. The G20 meeting in Italy, which was attended by energy and environmental ministers from the world’s richest nations concluded on Friday 23rd July, with a statement issued on the Sunday. The conference failed to produce agreement on the phasing out of coal. Objections were voiced by China, Russia, India, Turkey and the Saudis who were among those defending the use of the fossil fuel. Indonesia, which is one of the world’s biggest coal producer has announced that it continues to extract and burn this fossil fuel well into 2050.
The British minister, Alok Sharma, who will chair COP 26 in Glasgow in October afterwards claimed:
“It is frustrating that despite the progress made by some countries, there was no consensus in Naples to confine coal to history.”
But this statement belies the fact that permission was granted in October last year to open a new deep coal mine in Cumbria, The British government washed its hands of this decision before taking a U-turn and suggesting it will now look at the decision after suffering a huge backlash. The British Home Secretary described Extinction Rebellion as “so called eco-crusader turned criminals” who threaten the UK’s way of national life with the British government introducing the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, in a sordid attempt to remove the right to protest on the streets. Despite climate change being the biggest threat, Johnson and his criminal government seem to be putting all of their efforts in stifling debate and civil liberties. The G20 nations during the period of 2015-2019 provided $3.3 trillion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, the same cabal of wealthiest nations account for 74% of all global carbon emissions that drive global warming.
The biggest culprits providing subsidies are China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia, all countries that opposed any agreement in Naples. However, this doesn’t let countries like Australia, Canada or the US off the hook, all countries that increased their subsidies. The UK meanwhile provides the biggest subsidies out of any European country on top of which it is the third biggest global villain responsible for airline emissions with most of the Tories supporting Heathrow’s expansion plans. If the government, who act for the interests of the ruling class, were so concerned with climate change they wouldn’t have withdrawn subsidies for solar panels or campaigned so hard for fracking before it was ceased due to environmental damage and seismic activity.
This reliance on fossil fuels and the extraction and environmental degradation that surrounds their use is responsible for the immense suffering of many around the globe, it is generally the poor that bear the greatest burden and suffering from the effects of climate change. Since 1970, 60 % of all invertebrate animals; mammals, birds, fish and reptiles have all been wiped out by human activity. Rapid soil erosion has led to a catastrophic decline in pollinating insects and is creating barren landscapes hostile to holding life. Capitalism with its insatiable hunger for infinite profit cannot cure its greed in a world with finite resources as it attempts to funnel wealth into the hands of a decreasing minority, while most of the world’s population live below the poverty line. The ruling class obsession with GDP, which is used as a barometer for how well they are profiteering from on the backs of the working class, doubles approximately every 24 years. This is unsustainable and is leading to biological annihilation.
In June and July of this year just as the uber wealthy capitalists Branson and Bezos used their ill-gotten gains to show off in space, burning huge amounts of fuel in the process in their attempt to commodify space, the world witnessed natural devastation across the globe on an unprecedented scale that now has scientists worried that we are indeed approaching the apocalyptic abyss. The climatic disruptions included:
The Amazon – Long considered the lungs of the world, the Amazon rainforest was seen as a carbon sink. Satellite studies taken over a decade now shows that the Amazon is now a net contributor for CO2 into the atmosphere, it emits more than it takes in for the first time ever, emitting a billion tonnes, an increase of 20% released more than it absorbed. This is mostly due to increased temperatures, droughts, and deforestation through timber, beef and soy production, which Bolsonaro has doubled down on and promised to continue.
Canada and the US – Extreme temperatures along the Western seaboard of Canada and the US have seen the thermometer rise to 121 degrees Fahrenheit. This has led to the deaths of 500 people and wildfires. Marine biologists estimate that more than a billion marine animals perished as the ocean waters overheated along the coastline. Reports of dead and dying rock fish, oysters, mussels, clams, sea stars, etc. will have an inevitable effect on the water quality. Invertebrates and molluscs are water filters, which in turn will impact upon the plant life supporting the ecosystem below the surface. At the time of writing this article, 86 large wildfires are burning throughout the US, collectively burning 1.5 million acres of land.
China – Record breaking rainfall has been reported in central China leaving 51 dead and 1000s trapped as cascading water flooded cities and outlining areas. Reservoirs and dams reached breaking point with 11cm of rain falling in just 2 hours. There were reports of 25 people dead in Hanan Province and 500 people had to be rescued from the underground system in Hanan when the railway tunnels flooded.
Europe – Even the wealthiest nations in Europe have not been spared from the effects of climate change. London experienced flooding throughout large parts of the capital as one month’s worth of rain fell in a few hours. Flash flooding in Germany and Belgium resulted in the deaths of 196 people as rivers burst creating landslides as buildings and vehicles were washed away.
Greenland and Antarctica – In March of this year, a study undertaken by an international team of 89 polar scientists was published in the journal ‘Nature’. The publication was a culmination of a study that used data taken from 11 satellite missions between 1992 and 2018 and showed that the ice sheets are losing ice 6 times faster than they were in the 1990s. Greenland and Antarctica have lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice since the 1990s and if this continues at the same projected rate, will result in a rise of sea level of 17 cm by 2100. This will be catastrophic for many people living on coastlines and will inevitably lead to mass migrations and the need for more cities to be built, which potentially would require adding to our already overspent carbon budget.
Socialism or Barbarism
The effects of climate change are undeniable, the science is well documented and is no longer disputable, despite the attempts of rogue demagogues like Trump or Farage who want to lead us all to hell in a handcart. The ruling class, who only have a short term narcistic view of life, are playing Russian roulette with the rest of us. We are at the tipping point of an ecological crisis of our own making, which is responsible for seeing numerous species become or in danger of becoming extinct. Since 1900 climate change and environmental damage caused by human activity has led to the increased loss of different species outside of what would be considered as natural extinctions. This has resulted in 69 different species of mammals, 158 species of fish, 146 species of amphibians and 24 species of reptiles being lost forever. These are only the species that we know about.
We are witnessing the height of what many scientists now call the Anthropocene, and under capitalism it is endangering many other lifeforms that humanity relies upon, and human civilisation itself. As Rosa Luxemburg once declared, we are faced with ‘Socialism or Barbarism’. No longer can humankind rely on Capitalism, which has accelerated us towards this extinction, it is folly to rely on the greed of the free market to lead us away from falling into oblivion. Global climate catastrophe requires an international response, and this can only be achieved through the masses of the working-class taking control of their own destiny and having a planned economy specifically geared to need and not profit. This economy would need to consider sustainability and reliance on new greener technologies, organised and dedicated towards the preservation of humanity and other life forms that we share the planet with.
We need a programme of transitional demands to build a bridge between the struggle for reforms in the here and now, and the socialist programme of the revolution, as Trotsky pointed out. But actually the environment makes this more urgent because only global economic planning can actually carry out the necessary technological and civilisation-reorganising changes necessary to fend off disaster. So in a sense, the demand for such planned changes, to abolish and replace fossil fuels and other harmful things, like non-degradable plastics production and mass production of ruminant meat (another potent source of greenhouse gases) is such economic planning. So in a sense, the demand for such planning for this practical purpose, of saving the natural world and human civilisation, itself becomes both a transitional demand and a key part of the ‘maximum’ part of the revolutionary programme itself.
This article is in the new issue of Communist Fight. However since it went to press the UK Supreme Court refused to hear Craig’s appeal and he has already outrageously been jailed.
Craig Murray, journalist-blogger, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan 2002-2004, and anti-war activist, has outrageously been sentenced to 8 months in jail for his blogs in defence of the former Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, who was acquitted by a jury of 13 sexual assault charges in March 2020. Craig is planning to appeal this to the Supreme Court in London.
The Salmond case looks like a political frame-up related to differences within the Scottish National Party, with the current SNP First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, Salmond’s successor. We do not give any political support to either side, though Salmond has a degree of support among more left-wing Scottish Nationalists who are critical of Sturgeon’s leadership for being too conciliatory to Westminster and NATO. These are illusions: in his later years Salmond capitulated over NATO membership for a putative independent Scotland. He is an untrustworthy left nationalist and former Labour left, not some kind of revolutionary figure.
However, the jury in his case were clearly convinced that the case was a frameup and threw it out. That has upset some people in the current Scottish establishment. The case against Murray for ‘jigsaw’ identification of some of Salmond’s alleged victims seems bizarre. He never named them. He did in an anonymous way give his views of the motives and factional relationships of those he considered were behind the prosecution. The Scottish judges say that was enough to identify them to a knowledgeable person, or researcher.
Even if this were true, however, similar details appeared in other publications that covered this controversial trial, and Murray contends that his coverage, though politically no doubt sharper, contained no more circumstantial information than these. It may be correct to forbid the identification of accusers in sexual assault cases but that cannot mean, in a highly political case like this, supressing from public view the likelihood, which appears to have convinced the jury, that this case may be politically motivated, and in what way. That goes beyond protecting putative victims into an attack on the right of the public to know about important political matters.
Murray is not popular with the ruling class, a thorn in their side since his refusal to go along with imperialist-backed torture while he was ambassador, for which he was hounded out, and the prominent role he has played campaigning against the Iraq War, now for Julian Assange. As revolutionaries, opponents of imperialist war, and defenders of basic civil and democratic rights, we say: Hands off Craig Murray! Drop the charges and quash the sentence!
Statement of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International
Cuban Demonstrations: (left) Gusano-led “Patria y Vida” rally with US flag; (right) Mass pro-socialist counter demonstration lauds Castro’s July 26th Movement
1. The Geopolitical US counter-offensive
In the same week, two unprecedented events took place in the Caribbean. Firstly, there was the murder of the Haitian President, Moïse, which created social chaos in the country. Then there were synchronized protests in multiple cities in Cuba and the United States against the Cuban government.
In both cases, the much of international capitalist media is invoking humanitarian intervention. This happened a few days after the visit of the “number 1” of the CIA, William Burns, to the governments of Ivan Duque and Jair Bolsonaro, agents of imperialism that have been confronted by massive popular struggles. The US policy of continental domination is facing other serious challenges from the pro-Eurasian turn of the Bukele government in El Salvador, and the electoral victory of the left under Pedro Castillo in Peru.
After the Bahamas, 21 km from Cuba, Haiti has the closest territory to Cuba at just 77 km. Of course, therefore, without forgetting Haiti’s resources, such as its bauxite and gold reserves. It is possible US imperialism, in its ‘progressive’ phase under Biden/Harris is seeking to open an outpost for threatening Cuba via Haiti with the well-worn justification of humanitarian intervention. Though the actual operation to murder a US-backed president looks like an operation by an exiled domestic rival of Moïse, using wayward Colombian mercenary forces that were available on the market, nevertheless the US is not inclined to miss an opportunity to exploit such an event for its own geo-strategic advantage:
“Amidst the social and political crisis that Haiti is currently facing, following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, that country’s interim government asked President Joe Biden to send a commission of US officials to support the transition.
The Pentagon itself acknowledges that the mercenary agents who murdered Moise were Colombians trained by the US military, direct informants for the DEA and the FBI. The operation is very similar to what was carried out by mercenaries who in May 2020 also left Colombia to try to invade Venezuela by boats. At the time, the invaders were arrested and disarmed by Venezuelan fishermen. It is no secret that Colombia is the most important US military platform in South America, especially against Venezuela and Cuba.
The US Head of State has indicated that he will send the delegation to the Caribbean country, which will also include US troops, investigators and security personnel, to ensure public order, which has been shaken for several months, first by protests against Moise himself and then for everything that resulted from his death. “
In other words, taking advantage of the political crisis caused by the assassination of Jovenel Moïse. The provisional government that succeeds him requests the intervention of US imperialism, to which it responds in the affirmative and includes sending troops and investigators. Therefore, it is clear that a new imperialist intervention in Haiti is being prepared by its local agents.
Captured suspects in killing of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse (right)
This is happening in Haiti at the same time as the gusano mobilizations are taking place in Cuba to start a hybrid war against the Cuban workers’ state. This is fortuitous, to say the least, and may not be coincidental. Certainly, the effect is the same. The Cuban issue, and the exploitation of the Haitian crisis must therefore be seen as parts of an attempt by US imperialism under Biden-Harris to seize control over its immediate geostrategic area of influence: the Caribbean and Central America.
It should be noted that the gusano mobilizations in Cuba are based on a hybrid war operation launched through social networks. One key figure is an Argentinian, Agustín Antonetti, who is part of the right-wing Libertad Foundation, which has already participated in previous operations that fuelled the right-wing coup in Bolivia against the left populist Evo Morales, and operations against the liberal-populist government of López Obrador in Mexico. (see: http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2021/07/12/investigacion-confirma-la-perversa-operacion-de-redes-sociales-contra-cuba-lanzada-desde-el-exterior/)
It is the duty of all those who claim to be popular and working-class fighters to mobilize against the imperialist manoeuvres in the Caribbean that today target Cuba and Haiti.
As part of its continental offensive, the CIA met earlier this month with Bolsonaro, the high command of the Brazilian armed forces and the Brazilian Intelligence Agency to provide guidance. William Burns had paid a visit with a similar purpose to Colombia, which, like Brazil, has been shaken by mass working class opposition demonstrations.
It must be said that this represents a change in the attitude of the Biden-Harris government. In the immediate aftermath of their first coming to power in January during a deep conflict that culminated in the Trumpists’ invasion of Capitol Hill, the Biden-Harris government sought to displace leaders in Latin America who had been Trump’s puppets. However, the White House had to revise that policy after it backfired in El Salvador. Under threat of being overthrown by US pressure, Salvadoran President Bukele immediately allied with China and Russia on the international stage. (see http://tmb1917.blogspot.com/2021/05/el-salvador.html)
It is in this context, after the turn of Bukele, that the Biden-Harris government turned about after its failed manoeuvre in El Salvador, and sought to deepen relations with former Trump puppets, such as Duque and Bolsonaro, and use them in its current continental offensive.
The electoral defeat of the right in Peru was the qualitative leap in this regard after the setback in El Salvador, forcing the White House to no longer want to get rid of the Trumpists, but to guide them, to preserve them from popular fury, and through them, contest and defend their Latin American semi-colonies against the influence of China, Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba. It is worth remembering that the setbacks of imperialism began with the failure of the coup attempts in Venezuela and the reversal of the coup in Bolivia in 2020.
As part of this offensive is the manipulation of the gusano opposition inside Cuba, the feeding of interventionism in Haiti, the deepening of relations between US imperialism and its semi-colonial collaborators in Brazil. Also part of this offensive is the policy of pressure and attrition against Pedro Castillo’s electoral victory in Peru, to prevent the Pacific becoming the South American silk route, enabling a transoceanic route between Argentina and Peru, passing through Bolivia, three countries that distanced themselves from the influence of the US and approached China and Russia in their trade and diplomatic relations.
2. Defend the Cuban Revolution!
Particularly important in this situation is the defence of the Cuban Revolution. The upheaval in Cuba is a result of gusano pro-US forces exploiting a degree of social discontent flowing from the decades of US blockade against Cuba, social discontent that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Cuba has some of the best medical facilities in the world, because of the complete socialisation of its healthcare system. Its record on infant mortality, a key index of social progress, has often been better than that of the United States, which is incredible given that the US is the wealthiest country in the world and Cuba is just a fairly poor, offshore island nation with comparatively meagre resources.
Fidel Castro (left), current Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel (centre), Raul Castro (right)
This is because, unlike every other leftist and left-talking government in Latin America, in 1960-61 Cuba expropriated its bourgeoisie and consolidated an elementary degree of economic planning as the basis of its economy, creating a deformed workers state by doing so. It was created by an alliance of the left-liberal nationalist July 26th Movement (M-26) guerrilla movement and sympathetic working-class elements of the Popular Socialist Party, the pro-Moscow CP in Cuba at the time, in struggle against the venal pro-US Batista dictatorship. The general strike that finally toppled Batista at the end of 1958 caused virtually his entire army to flee, destroying the capitalist state itself and giving the July 26th Movement guerrillas a monopoly of armed power, which in an accelerating conflict with US imperialism and its supporters in the Cuban bourgeoisie over the next two years, gave them unprecedented freedom to make inroads into capitalist property, which over those two years they were driven, purely to defend themselves, to abolish.
We regard that expropriation as the greatest gain that the working class has so far achieved in the Western Hemisphere, and its defence the highest duty of class-conscious workers around the world.
It has survived great difficulties. For more than 30 years Cuba’s alliance with the USSR provided it with a means to counteract imperialism’s blockade against it. But with the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet bloc in 1991 it was deprived of that aid. It went through a ‘special period’ in the 1990s as a result, of great hardship and suffering, but escaped some of its isolation with the rise of left populism in other parts of Latin America, Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador. At the same time, under unremitting economic pressure from imperialism, the Cuban government has made concessions to capitalism at home, legalising the use of US dollars as currency by those who can afford it, which has in turn deepened class polarisation and the social base for counterrevolutionary movements. The latest difficulty that has caused it problems is the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though Cuba’s advanced healthcare system has led it to develop its own vaccines, and to give help to other countries struggling with the pandemic in the earlier phases (even imperialist Italy had Cuban help!) nevertheless lack of resources have caused problems, and newer, more infectious variants coming in from abroad have made things worse. Social discontent at the slow pace of vaccination has been exploited politically by the gusanos in this crisis.
Cuba is a deformed workers state. Its leadership is consciously not internationalist and does not see the salvation of the Cuban revolution in the extension of socialist revolution worldwide. Even though it has a somewhat different political origin to the more mainstream Stalinist regimes, and far greater popular support and legitimacy than many such regimes, nevertheless the Cuban regime is fundamentally like the Stalinist regimes. It is nationalist, not internationalist, and seeks to find ways to coexist with imperialism. Concessions to capitalism are built into the logic of this kind of politics. It also suppresses workers democracy, not least for fear that the mass based leftist sentiment that exists at its base will give rise to ‘ultraleftist’ trends that seek international revolution.
Thus, for all its leftism, personified by Guevara’s heroic guerrillaist attempts to liberate other parts of Latin America from US domination (which cost him his life), nevertheless in the early 1960s Guevara had the printing plates for a Cuban edition of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution destroyed, precisely because this consciously elaborates a programme of world revolution. We therefore seek a proletarian political revolution in Cuba, to replace the often left-talking bureaucratic leadership of the Castro brothers, and now Miguel Díaz-Canel, with a government of workers councils (soviets) and a leadership committed to workers democracy and world revolution. But the precondition for such a further advance in Cuba is the defence of the gains of the Cuban revolution against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, which work hand in hand, as experience shows.
One grouping to the left of the Cuban government made a striking and true characterisation of the divisions in Cuba that have emerged in this crisis:
“Those who came out to protest against the State and socialism in Cuba were the people. We can even assure that many belong to that part of the people that has suffered the most from the effects of the crisis than the pandemic, the blockade, the new North American sanctions and the desperate and insufficient management of what we can achieve, in the midst of so much scarcity and problems. accumulated, they have provoked. They are also that part of the people that has been most disadvantaged by the inevitable increase in social inequality with which the advance of market reforms has lacerated and segmented our society. We even dare to assure that these multiple inequalities, sometimes invisible, but always felt and so damaging to social justice, have produced a disconnect. A disconnection between those who shouted “Homeland and Life” in the streets, and the revolutionary project. And that disconnection, which always leaves behind a certain feeling of abandonment, of political and economic orphanhood, sooner or later has turned into rancor and even hatred.
“If we ignore this complexity, if we simply think that they are “criminals” or “marginal”, if we resist understanding the processes of marginalization and if we do not recognize the debts with the most humble in the interior of our society, we will never understand what happened that Sunday.
[…]
“On Sunday there was no confrontation between the people and the State as basic forces – although more than one theorist spends ink trying to prove it. On Sunday there was a confrontation between two parts of the people, between two projects: a part that has succumbed, that has surrendered, to the agenda of those who have always tried precisely to surrender them out of hunger and need, and who are willing to renounce the sovereignty and socialism because they understand, or perceive, not only that they no longer have anything to lose but that they have nothing left to gain, and on the other hand, the part of the people that is not willing to renounce or the revolutionary project they have built for generations or to the legality of the socialist Constitution for which they democratically voted, nor of the emancipated society that they imagine in their future beyond the current State heir to the Revolution, and its shortcomings. Those who believe that only the military, the leaders and the holders of the MLC have reasons to defend socialism, are very wrong. Millions of people in Cuba today are not willing to lose a peaceful society, a project of social justice, and a national dignity that has only given this people, all of them, a Revolution that is not exhausted in what has been achieved, but must open new paths.”
That should be the basic orientation of revolutionary internationalists, of Trotskyists, in the current Cuban situation – to the advanced sections of the masses, who also mobilised, in even greater masses than those mobilised by gusanos, to defend the revolution. A proletarian political revolution in Cuba has to come from the advanced sections of the masses, not the backward elements who are open to being led by the gusanos. A proletarian political revolution in Cuba would be demanding more socialism, not less!
July 26th Movement takes power in Cuba, January 1959
The International Marxist Tendency, the tendency historically led by Ted Grant, today by Alan Woods and Rob Sewell, say some similar things from a more formally Trotskyist-sounding standpoint:
“Clearly, there was a genuine component to the protest in San Antonio (something that President Díaz-Canel himself later recognised) that grew out of the real hardship facing the people. The slogans that brought hundreds of people out to the streets in San Antonio were ‘we want vaccines’ and the demand for a solution to their immediate problems, which was put to the local authorities.
“But we would be blind if we did not see that there was also another factor. For days there has been an intense campaign orchestrated by counter-revolutionary elements on social networks under the slogan #SOSCuba. The campaign has two aims. One, try to create a social uprising, protests in the streets, through the dissemination of exaggerated, biased or directly false information (for example about the health situation in Matanzas, the area most affected by the pandemic) and the abstract call to protest in the streets. Two, with the excuse of the health emergency situation (partly real, partly exaggerated) to promote the idea of the need for a ‘humanitarian intervention’ by foreign powers to ‘help Cuba’.
The hypocrisy of the personalities (artists, musicians, etc.) who have promoted the campaign is incredible. Where was the campaign in favour of an ‘international intervention’ in Brazil, or Peru, or Ecuador – all countries that have suffered Covid-19 mortality rates 10, 20 or 50 times higher than those of Cuba?
This hypocritical campaign is a clear attempt to justify a foreign imperialist intervention against the revolution, under the cover of humanitarian aid. We have seen this before, in Libya, in Venezuela, in Iraq. We know what is really behind these so-called ‘humanitarian interventions’: imperialism. We could not imagine a greater degree of cynicism. The same powers that apply a blockade against Cuba, which prevent it from trading on the world market, from purchasing medicines and supplies to manufacture them, are now demanding that the Cuban government open a ‘humanitarian corridor’!”
It should be remembered that IMT supported the “Libyan Revolution”, an imperialist intervention similar to that which it now criticizes (see The Libyan Issue and IMT Revisionism). They draw some necessary conclusions, with which we wholeheartedly concur:
“Faced with this situation, what position should we as revolutionaries take? In the first place, it must be clearly explained that the protests called by Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and other related elements are openly counter-revolutionary, although they try to capitalise on a sense of malaise that emanates from the very difficult objective conditions. The problems and hardships are real and genuine. But the protests, under the slogan “Homeland and Life” and “Down with the dictatorship”, are counter-revolutionary. There are confused elements participating, to be sure. But in the midst of the confusion, it is inevitable that those who dominate these protests are, from a political point of view, counter-revolutionary. They are organised, motivated and have clear objectives. It is therefore necessary to oppose them and to defend the revolution. If those who promote these protests (and their mentors in Washington) achieve their goal – the overthrow of the revolution – the economic and health problems suffered by the Cuban working class will not be solved, but on the contrary, will be aggravated. You only have to look at Bolsonaro’s Brazil or neighboring Haiti to convince yourself of this.”
ibid
Their article concludes with these slogans, that are excellent as far as they go:
“Defend the Cuban revolution!
Down with the imperialist blockade – hands off Cuba!
No to capitalist restoration – for more socialism!
Against the bureaucracy – for workers’ democracy and workers’ control!”
ibid
The main disagreement we have with this is that it does not explicitly call for a proletarian political revolution and a regime of soviets. Though such demands do point in that direction.
This article has rightly been praised on the international left as embodying a socialist perspective. Including by leftists who have not been willing to draw a clear line against the counterrevolution. It’s a pity that the IMT comrades have not so far taken up the polemical cudgels against such people on the left. Indeed, they might tend to regard such a polemic as ‘sectarian’. But it is necessary because those who blur the class line on these questions also have influence, can mislead workers in Cuba and outside and thereby pose dangers to the working class and the revolution, and must therefore be challenged. However, we could not expect a very principled position from the IMT, which supported the same type of hybrid war that imperialism has now waged against Cuba, when the CIA launched protests against imperialist opponent governments in Libya, Syria, Hong Kong, Belarus.
Frank García Hernández
For instance, there is a petition with many signatures being circulated by the supporters of the Cliffite International Socialist Tendency titled “Release Frank García Hernández and His Comrades” that says that the signatories are:
“… very concerned to learn of the arrest during a march of protest in Havana on 11 July of Frank García Hernández, Cuban historian and Marxist, Leonardo Romero Negrín, young socialist studying physics at the University of Havana, Maykel González Vivero, director of Tremenda Nota and Marcos Antonio Pérez Fernández, pre-university student. Frank García Hernández is an important scholar has achieved a worldwide reputation for his work on reevaluating the history of the Cuban left and organising an international congress on Trotsky in Havana in 2019.
We call for the unconditional release of Frank and all his comrades and for respect for the democratic rights of all the Cuban people.”
The petition does not elaborate on which demonstration García Hernández and his comrades were marching on. But a clue is to be found in a statement of the US SEP (World Socialist Web Site) that also demands that García Hernández be released:
“The Socialist Equality Party (US) demands the immediate release of Frank García Hernández from house arrest by the Cuban government. García Hernández, a self-avowed Marxist associated with the Comunistas Blog collective, was arrested Sunday during historic protests against the economic crisis and the worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
From this, it becomes clear that the demonstration they were arrested on was the one organised by the pro-gusano forces under the slogan “Homeland and Life” calling for ‘humanitarian intervention”, who the La Tiza group accurately said are
“a part that has succumbed, that has surrendered to the agenda of those who have always tried precisely to surrender them out of hunger and need, and who are willing to renounce … sovereignty and socialism.”
op-cit, see earlier
This is a serious, strategic error by these leftists, in keeping with the politics of the Cliff tendency, who they are obviously allied with, which surrendered to anti-Communism as long ago as the Korean war in 1950. While we are for upholding the norms of workers democracy and are not in favour of suppressing their views through imprisonment or worse, nevertheless in marching with those mobilised by the gusanos against the Cuban government they are committing a serious, strategic error, and their activities should be condemned.
The Cliff tendency always denied that there had been any kind of social revolution in Cuba, defining Cuba as ‘state capitalist’, and therefore refused to defend it against imperialism. Indeed, they celebrated the 1991 counterrevolutionary collapse of Stalinism in the USSR with the headline “Communism has collapsed. It should have every socialist rejoicing.” It would probably be wishful thinking for them to improve on this appalling position over a reactionary movement in Cuba.
Flowing from this, we get the absurdity of the Cliffite petition citing remarks by Rosa Luxemburg from the early years of the Russian Revolution:
“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party — however numerous they may be — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”
op-cit, https://socialistworkersleague.org/
Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken when she wrote these remarks upbraiding the Bolsheviks for allegedly violating workers democracy in 1918. Even though she was a conscious Marxist and internationalist, she appeared not to understand the murderous nature of the opposition that the Bolsheviks were facing and the treachery of even their social-democratic opponents within the workers movement who were prepared to ally with such murderous forces. Tragically, Rosa herself fell victim to equivalent murderous forces in Germany in January 1919, which puts a somewhat different perspective on her criticism.
But how much more bizarre to say this in Cuba today. Who is it aimed at? The Cuban government? That would seem to imply that the Cuban regime can be in some way equated with Lenin’s consciously revolutionary and internationalist Soviet government in 1918. But of course, they do not believe that. They are using Rosa Luxemburg’s error to curry favour with any social democratic elements in the gusano-led movement for their vision of ‘socialism’ without any nasty repression of bourgeois forces that claim to be ‘democratic’. But they are likely to be onto a loser there, as the gusano movement will obviously be dominated by forces far to the right of that kind of social-democratic utopianism. It is not only opportunism: it is suicidal opportunism for any left-wing, pro-socialist types to engage in blocs with the gusanos.
The same is true of David North’s tendency, who despite their sometime pretentions of orthodox Trotskyism, always denied that the Cuban revolution created any kind of workers’ state. They follow in the footsteps of Gerry Healy who in the 1960s asserted that the Cuban bourgeoisie was still in power but was somehow ‘weak’. At the Healyites 1966 London Conference of the “International Committee of the Fourth International” the founder of the Spartacists, James Robertson, was unceremoniously thrown out after mocking Healy’s position on Cuba, for quipping that “If the Cuban bourgeoisie is indeed ‘weak,’ as the I.C. affirms, one can only observe that it must be tired from its long swim to Miami, FLA [Florida]”. It is clear from more recent writing that the WSWS still rejects the idea that Cuba is any kind of workers state, and therefore deny that there is any revolution to defend. Therefore, it is completely logical that their propaganda around this should resemble that of the Cliffites, who they otherwise denounce as the worst renegades from Trotskyism.
Defence of Cuba, as one of only two surviving deformed workers’ states (the other being North Korea) is still a central responsibility of genuine Trotskyists, fighting to re-create the Fourth International as a mass revolutionary force. We in the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International seek political debate and regroupment with revolutionary-inclined forces around these basic revolutionary positions as the key means of advancing the worldwide struggle for socialism.
(This is a translation of a leaflet by the Emancipação do Trabalho (Emancipation of Labour) movement that the LCFI’s in Brazil supports and is involved with. #3J refers to the mass demonstrations against Bolsonaro on the 3rd July, the latest in a series of mass demonstrations against the regime.)
Why do we have to overthrow the entire Bolsonaro government?
For taking the death of more than 520,000 of our relatives and dear friends and still making a joke of it; for trying to make money from corrupt schemes for overpriced vaccine purchases; for the privatization of Eletrobrás, when energy that is already expensive will become more expensive and inaccessible to the poor; for reducing emergency aid to a miserable amount when we need help the most, while increasing the price of everything else; for stealing the forest and indigenous lands; for taking away our right to retirement. The generals of the Bolsonaro government, like Pazuello, are accomplices to all this, as are Paulo Guedes.
Should we trust impeachment and Congress?
Many brothers and sisters, out of desperation at the situation, support the impeachment of Bolsonaro. This would be a progressive step to destabilize the coup-dictatorship project in Brazil. But who would take over? Of course, General Mourão, who said that the Brazilian workers Christmas bonus (13th salary) is a jabuticaba, an indulgence that Brazilian workers should not be entitled to and does not like indigenous people or blacks. Therefore, with or without impeachment we cannot let up until we overthrow the Bolsonaro government and the coup regime. Without going beyond impeachment, what we will have is a Mourão government. We do not need another Bolsonaro, his supporters and accomplices or other scammers, we need a workers alternative to the misfortunes of Bolsonaro and his gang.
Workers’ Left Front
Our front is the men and women workers. There is no place for scammers in our midst. Who are the scammers? Who helped overthrow Dilma, who campaigned for Bolsonaro, who is voting for privatizations, for the destruction of social security, against women, indigenous people. This group is the MBL, PSDB, DEM, Doria, Witzel. It is the “repentant ones” who want to harm our unity. Our fight is for a Unified Day of Struggles and Popular Assemblies across the country! To achieve:
1. Vaccination for the whole population!
2. Assistance at the level of a minimum wage for all underemployed and unemployed!
3. Freezing of the basic basket of goods, and of gas, fuel and rent products;
4. Exemption from bills with continuity of provision of water, energy, internet services!
5. No layoffs or evictions in the city and in the countryside!
6. Nationalization without compensation of the big companies that lay off workers!
7. Nationalization and control by the workers’ organizations of pharmaceutical companies, medical supplies, and the private health system!
8. General amnesty of workers’ debts with the loan sharks, banks, and credit cards! Credit to associations and production cooperatives without interest!
9. Do not return to face-to-face classes until vaccination of the entire population!
10. Repeal of labour, social security, and all coup measures.
11. Full rights of Brazilian citizenship for all immigrants.
12. Let millionaires, bankers and foreign companies pay for the crisis!
13. Against oppression of women, blacks and lgbtqa+ of the working class, the indigenous and quilombolas (those descended from rebel former slaves)!
14. For the end of repression of the working class!
Below this introduction is an abridged version of the article that we wrote advocating critical support for Howard Beckett’s campaign for the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union, before he stood down on 18th June. His candidacy was withdrawn as part of a promise he made that if Gerard Coyne, the hard right-wing candidate for the GS position, managed to get enough nominations to get on the ballot, he would do everything to ensure that only a single left-wing candidate stood.
Beckett stood by this promise, which no doubt gives him a degree of kudos for honesty. However, since his campaign was politically superior to those of his two ostensibly left-wing rivals, Steve Turner and Sharon Graham, this honesty has not done the Unite membership and the labour movement any favours in terms of the political choices open to it. It should be noted that all of the ostensibly left candidates (as well as Coyne) are part of the Unite bureaucracy, which is in an integral part of the British trade union bureaucracy in general, and none of them represent a working-class challenge to that bureaucracy in principle. It is not normal practice for revolutionaries to routinely support trade union bureaucrats in internal union elections, but the political character of what Beckett stood when his candidacy was operative was not that of a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat. The political break he made with Starmer, having effectively declared war on the leader of the Labour Party and his anti-left project, made Beckett qualitatively superior to Turner and Graham.
Turner made his desire for collaboration with Starmer pretty clear in an interview with the Huffington Post (27 April) that set the tone for his campaign:
“I’ve always felt we could get a solution to this [Corbyn getting the whip back]. But the longer it goes on, the more entrenched it becomes on both sides. It’s like a war of attrition going on, and it’s going on in public. That’s not helpful to the party, it’s not helpful to Keir, it’s not helpful to Jeremy and it’s not helpful to me as a trade union leader or our members.
“People don’t vote for a divided party. Or a party that’s contemplating his own navel. Sometimes it’s right to shout. But on some occasions diplomacy is best done privately. Look, Keir wasn’t my preferred candidate …. But I’m a socialist, I’m a democrat, and the reality of it is he was elected by the vast majority of our members that voted.
“We didn’t even convince our own members to come on a journey with us, in terms of the political program that was being laid out by Jeremy, Becky and that entire team. We didn’t win the argument inside our own union. We won it amongst the politicos and that group that loves to talk to themselves.”
“Trying to get this purist Left, I find incredibly dangerous. We’re fighting the rise of the far right and that narrative of hate and division in society more generally. We are trying to pull the Left together to create a vision of a better Britain and we’ve got this purist debate that’s taken place, pitting good Left comrades against good Left comrades, because they don’t sign up to a particular way of thinking on a particular issue.
“That purist argument, you’re a class traitor if you don’t sign up to something is just beyond belief, that’s not my Left. I’m an inclusive, tolerant, Left.”
ibid
But what is bizarre about this plea for ‘tolerance’ is that it is done in defence of ‘tolerance’ of the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer, which has engaged in the one of the biggest purges in history of the Labour Party membership, targeting leftist supporters and former supporters of Corbyn, anyone who opposes the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians, and has created a situation where anyone in the party who speaks out in defence of those purged risks being purged themselves. For Turner to speak out against the ‘purist’ and supposedly intolerant left in this context is simply grotesque. It marks him out as an apologist for Starmer’s witchhunt and as someone who could possibly even be a threat to the left within UNITE if elected, alongside the openly pro-Starmer, right-wing candidate Gerard Coyne. Such positions and attitudes have their own logic.
Since Beckett withdrew, Turner has made some very tepid criticisms of Starmer’s purges and called for the reinstatement of those thrown out. But though he mused that eventually Starmer might not prove to be a leader that unions could work with, he still refrained from attacking Starmer directly and calling for his ousting, or for unions to refuse to support Labour under his leadership. He has made a slight verbal adjustment in his campaign rhetoric, perhaps to accommodate Beckett’s supporters given the claims made when Beckett withdrew that Beckett and Turner would be running a joint campaign. But Turner, not Beckett, is the candidate, which is the reality, and it would be naïve to take such diplomatic formulations at face value and trust Turner.
Then there is Sharon Graham, who is standing on a very leftist programme of rebuilding the strength of the union, rebuilding industrial militancy, and fighting for workers gains in this way. This positive element of her campaign is spelled out:
“We must rebuild our industrial base and bring workers from outside our traditional industries into our union. We can’t afford years of drift facing a Tory government and sustained only by short-term tactical manoeuvres. We can’t fiddle while Rome burns. We have to start doing it ourselves: this is not ‘workerism’ – this is the reality of our moment.
“We need an industrial programme that moves decisively beyond the empty rhetoric of ‘partnership’ and which is also supported by our industrial activists; the vast majority of whom agree on the need for power in the workplace and strong organisation, with the ability to take strike action if and when required.
[…]
“Of course, we still need to seek influence in parliament – laws matter. They can dictate our lives. But we must now reform the way we influence legislation. If anything, I will push hard for policy, but I will base this on a workers’ manifesto that is decided by our reps and activists.
“I will pursue its priorities by actively campaigning, as well taking our priorities into the structures of Labour. I will also refuse to support future candidates for parliament that have not represented working people. We need more working-class voices in Westminster and I will turn this soundbite into reality.”
That is positive, the trade unions should not be giving any support to election candidates who support or refuse to oppose attacks on working class people, who refuse to oppose austerity, or who refuse to oppose the government. However, there is also this:
“Already, only a small minority of members are engaged in this debate. Make no mistake, we are moving in ever decreasing circles and we need fundamental change.
“For many years, conversations within the left have often been reduced to considering the merits – or otherwise – of the existing leadership of the Labour Party. But decades on from Thatcher, this discussion is increasingly detached from the concerns of working people. Instead of putting forward concrete plans to build working-class power, general secretary elections are being fought as proxy wars, far removed from workers.”
ibid
This is not so good. Because the supposed ‘small minority’ of members who are ‘engaged’ in the debate about the merits of the existing leadership of the Labour Party … are the highly political layer who provided the mass base for Corbynism, and their right-wing opponents of course, who are as noted earlier, engaged in the most massive purge in the history of the Labour Party and the labour movement in Britain, precisely in order to try to render impossible any future challenge to neo-liberal domination of the political wing of the labour movement. To dismiss this whole conflict as ‘ever decreasing circles’ and ‘detached from the concerns of working people’ is a false, narrowly trade unionist view that abstains from the struggles that are most crucial for the interests of working people, and actually a retreat from the best aspects of the Corbyn movement.
Gerard Coyne
In essence, despite different methods of reasoning, both Turner and Graham arrive at the same conclusion: to abstain from challenging the neoliberal attacks on the Labour left and the left generally that Starmer personified, either on the grounds that to do so would mean the left becoming intolerant (Turner) or getting involved in matters that are supposedly of no interest to workers (Graham). Neither represent any challenge to the labour movement being dominated by forces loyal to neoliberalism. And both campaigns, as indeed was Beckett’s, are waged by long-time full-time officials who partake of the privileged status of the top reaches of the union bureaucracy with salaries many times above those of the members they are supposed to lead and represent.
None of the three left candidates’ platforms even pay lip service to the basic socialist view that union officials should be paid no more than a good skilled worker’s salary. The right-wing media regularly runs muck-raking articles on the sizeable salaries of union officials, who generally earn several times the salary of the members they represent. Such criticisms are hypocritical as the bourgeoisie rely on this bureaucratic layer and its conservatising influence to control the labour movement, as a firebreak against revolution. But as we explain below, sometimes despite that, trends can emerge from the bureaucracy that reflect a class-struggle impetus from below, as with Beckett’s declaration of war against Starmer which became quite sensational in the weeks before he withdrew.
It is the limitations of the ‘left’ bureaucracy, not least in forcing Beckett into line and into withdrawing his candidacy, that have now put militants on the left in Unite and in the broader labour movement influenced by Unite, into an invidious situation where the left is divided and maybe paralysed in a way that can benefit the hard, neoliberal right-wing agent, Coyne. Both Turner and Graham should have stood down in favour of Beckett’s campaign not because Beckett is a fancy lawyer, or any such rubbish of the kind some reactionary populist/workerist types have been peddling, but because his campaign, in declaring war on Starmer from a leftist standpoint, was politically superior to both. Beckett is also culpable for capitulating to them over this, out of misguided ‘anti-sectarianism’ which quailed in the face of denunciation by treacherous fakers like Owen Jones.
Now we have two nondescript ‘left’ campaigns, both of which have something fundamentally lacking about them, in that both, for different reasons refuse to take on the neoliberal parasites that are wrecking and crippling the labour movement. The two campaigns are sterile and are in danger of cancelling each other out and allowing the right-wing to sail through the middle. There is nothing we can currently do to rectify that. No doubt our own supporters in Unite, along with all other militants, will not simply abstain in the election but give their vote to whoever out of Turner and Graham are in their judgement are likely to do the least possible damage to the union, in the hope of staving off Coyne. But neither of the two ‘left’ candidates merit a political endorsement, even a critical one, unless one of them unexpectedly does something that steps beyond the fundamental flaws we point to here. The left bureaucracy in Unite have between them engineered a disappointing and risky situation in this election and will have only themselves to blame if a disaster happens.
Unite General Secretary Election
A Critical Vote for Howard Beckett! (Abridged)
Re-arm the left and the Unions to take on this Criminal Government!
Howard Beckett
The candidacy of Howard Beckett, who has strongly criticised the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer with its witchhunts against the left, its antipathy to trade unionists and organised workers, and its re-Blairisation of the Labour Party under the guidance of Peter Mandelson, who also advises Boris Johnson, has been like a breath of fresh air after the previous capitulations of the Labour left.
Beckett has taken on the Labour right wing in a manner that no prominent figure in the Labour Party or labour movement did in the entire Corbyn era from 2015-2020, including of course Corbyn himself. He has taken on Labour’s Blairite/Zionist stooge leader head on and that is the centrepiece of his campaign. In some ways the things that he has said are exceptional for a candidate in an internal union election. On 14th June he Tweeted simply: “Starmer must go” following earlier Tweets where he said: “If Labour HQ continues down its path and no longer speaks for working people, it will not be getting Unite money if I am general secretary.” These are not exceptional; he has said many similar things over the past several weeks. But his onslaught against the treacherous Starmer leadership of Labour is escalating and is becoming utterly counterposed to the other two ostensibly ‘left-wing’ candidates, Steve Turner and Sharon Graham.
Beckett went into more depth in his forthright attack on Labour’s right-wing leadership in an interview on 8th May with Revolutionary Socialism in the 21 Century, where he elaborated:
“He’s not a success as a leader. What’s going on now is a dereliction of duty with his failure to offer a narrative on zero Covid, or a narrative on nationalisation when it’s most needed, or resistance to fire and rehire. If he continues on the course he’s on he’ll become irrelevant, and Labour is quickly becoming a party of the establishment.
“It is for the Labour Party to prove its relationship with unions, and if it doesn’t speak on a daily, weekly, monthly basis on behalf of working people then it will become irrelevant to working people. But if that does happen, the union movement will not be found wanting. If I am general secretary, the union movement will step into that vacuum and talk with and for our communities, educate our communities and talk about socialism.
“Unite has already reduced our affiliation and we’re on record as saying we will have to take great care that any further money is given to those who share our values. If they continue on this path there will be debates not just about regular funding and funding around elections but also about affiliation, and I will happily facilitate those debates. The only language the leadership understand at the moment is the language you would be giving to a bad employer.”
However, he is not confining himself to politicking within the Labour Party milieu. He is, as least verbally, putting forward an agenda of class struggle which is somewhat unusual to hear from an aspiring leader of a trade union in this period, and appears to be pitching to lead a left-wing political movement, not just a campaign for a leading trade union position:
“Steve Turner is running on the idea of partnership with employers. I reject that. When you talk in that language it diminishes the fact that we are in a class struggle.”
“I am banging the drum for Unite to have its own TV channel, with regular interviews with high-profile politicians and activists, constant news and evaluation of industrial and political landscape. It could be used for advice, distilling information for our reps, and even cookery shows. If we start talking to wider society the next generation will see exactly what a union does, understand the importance of collectivism and want to be part of this.”
“If the laws are trying to restrict liberties then they should be defied. As soon as we start accepting them as valid then our liberties are lost, and it becomes only a matter of time before our entire movement is lost. Unite’s rule book has been changed to make a statement about Unite stepping outside of the law. It is becoming a reality for us now.”
“Strikes. Strikes! Targeted strike action. Simple as that. The idea that protecting the NHS is done by making speeches? Nonsense. People should be in Unite because they need to be in a union that will take the fight to the government. If we can’t make the argument for reversing privatisation now after Covid then frankly we all deserve what we get. If we can’t make an argument about care homes coming into public ownership under the NHS then we deserve what we get, and if we can’t defend the argument for a 15% pay rise then we deserve what we get. Here and now the reality for all of us there needs to be strategic, targeted industrial action.”
ibid
One negative point about Beckett, where he displayed weakness, albeit in November 2020 before the Unite leadership issue became central, was when under pressure from the right and the Zionists, he pulled out of an event calling for Jeremy Corbyn’s reinstatement because expelled Labour member and Jewish anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein was also a speaker. Greenstein is a hate figure of the Zionists and those who share platform with expelled anti-Zionists are immediately added to the list of targets. However, a few weeks later in December, at a NEC meeting discussing the Tory-stooge Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report smearing sections of the Labour left as anti-Semitic, he challenged aspects of the process, tweeting “My NEC report for Unite will record being denied access to submissions to the EHRC, denied a debate on suspensions; denied debate on the importance of protecting lawful speech.” (https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/unite-union-official-beckett-criticised-over-his-response-to-labour-antisemitism-meeting-1.509469). Beckett is a union official, not a Palestine solidarity activist, but his statements on the recent Zionist atrocities make clear that he is an outspoken opponent of these crimes which have had such a major impact on the labour movement in Britain these last few years.
Smears and Witchhunting of Beckett
He has more recently himself had a taste of the cynicism of the fake ‘racism’ allegations of the right and the fake-left, when he was himself suspended from Labour for a tweet in solidarity with a large, militant crowd of anti-racists in Glasgow who physically prevented immigration officials from seizing two Indian Muslims who were under threat of deportation. Beckett, clearly enraged by the racism of the Home Office led by Priti Patel, the far-right Tory capo, Modi-supporting anti-Muslim fascistic Hindutva bigot and Israeli stooge, who clearly ordered the action, tweeted on 13 May: “Priti Patel should be deported, not refugees. She can go along with anyone else who supports institutional racism.”.
Labour doublethink says this tweet is racist
He quickly apologised and said his tweet was not meant to be taken literally. Various liberals who claim to be on the left, and the Labour leadership, howled with outrage at Beckett’s supposed ‘racism’ for forgetting that the Home Secretary who ordered a racist atrocity, one of many, is also not white. But this is drivel, as usual his accusers for the most part have no problems with deporting ethnic minority people, or even if they have in theory, would not dream of refusing to support Labour’s own racist and sociopathic levy of deporters seeking government office. Anyone with half-a-brain and an ounce of honesty can see that Beckett was expressing outrage at state racism, not supporting it. He really has nothing to apologise for, and his suspension is just another piece of scandalous Starmerite dishonesty.
Apparently as part of the bilious campaign against him the Starmerites are now moving toward his expulsion from the Labour Party, supposedly for ‘racism’ against Johnson’s deporter-in-chief. Which just underlines the nature of the Zionist-led Labour Party where people are expelled with smears of ‘racism’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ for opposing the organised racist and Zionist trends that dominate Labour. Including several former Blairite Home Secretaries who could give Theresa May or Priti Patel a run for their money in the migrant-bashing stakes – Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Jacqui Smith, Alan Johnson, all anti-migrant xenophobic lowlife in the same mould as Patel. Labour has never expelled such vile people, but they now propose to expel a leading union left-winger for supporting direct action against racist deportations. That is a sign of ‘racism’ in their racist fantasy world.
All this has the effect of exposing more and more the mendacity, racist and chauvinist politics behind the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaigns and the like that simply lie about the left in the service of the foulest bigotry.
Unite Election: Political Struggle not Stitch-Ups
Since then, he has been the target of similar hysteria from the soft left. In the hustings/vote for the support of the political machine known as the United Left (UL) within Unite, which is dominated by trade unionist cadre of the Communist Party of Britain, Beckett only narrowly failed to get nominated as the UL candidate, by three votes. However there seems to be evidence that dozens of paid-up UL supporters who wanted to vote for Beckett were not allowed to vote, due to ‘technical’ problems involving an email address/server, and the legitimacy of this vote is hotly disputed by not only Beckett, but many on the wider left. This brought the machinery of the CP/B into play to get numerous nominations from branches for Turner; by the time the deadline was up he had 525, with Graham beating Beckett by 349 to 328. The openly right-wing candidate, Gerard Coyne, came last with 196 candidates.
However, nominations through formal union bodies do not necessarily equate to votes in a union election, as these bodies tend to be dominated by the bureaucracy, activists, and those closest to the formal structures of the union. The strategy of Coyne will be to rely on the influence of the right-wing gutter press to appeal over the heads of the union structure to the atomised members. However, the strategy of Beckett also seems to be based on an attempt at an aggressive political appeal to class sentiment, also over the heads of the officialdom, based on a left-wing hostility to Starmer and his supporters, something that Turner and his CPB supporters are actively hostile to from a Labour-loyal perspective, and which Graham flinches from in the name of ‘non-political’ trade unionism.
Given the recent history of Unite, this is not a forlorn strategy. Beckett could succeed, and in the process push the politics of the union much further to the left. Capitulators to Blairism and softer elements on the left, personified by Owen Jones, contend that three putative left-wing candidates standing are likely to divide the ‘left’ vote and hand the union over to the right winger Coyne. But that is not necessarily true, looking at the history of recent General Secretary elections in Unite. Apart from the fact that given his conciliation of Starmer, Turner’s designation as a left candidate is something of an exaggeration. Much depends on the quality of the campaigns waged by the candidates.
In 2010, there were four candidates: Len McCluskey (ex-Militant left-wing bureaucrat and the current retiring GS), Jerry Hicks (widely renowned victimised rank-and-file militant from Bristol Rolls Royce), Gail Cartmail (soft left ‘socialist-feminist’ and current assistant GS of Unite) and Les Bayliss, a right-winger similar to Coyne today. Bayliss came third; this was a highly political contest between McCluskey with bureaucratic ‘left’ politics and the revolutionary-minded militant Hicks, who put up a hell of a fight. Both of the top two left candidates beat Bayliss. In a repeat election in 2013 where the only two candidates were Hicks, the polarisation was stronger, and a similar result obtained where McCluskey beat Hicks by 2 to 1. Hicks improved vote of 79,819 showed there was a substantial base for political militancy in Unite. Only in 2017 was the result close, where McCluskey, in what was widely seen as an unnecessary and cynical election aimed at prolonging his own term in office, only narrowly beat Coyne. Another rank-and-file trade union militant, Ian Allinson, who appeared much less well-known than Jerry Hicks, failed to make major inroads and only gained 13% of the vote.
But that election appears very different to this one. McCluskey by then was a busted flush, and barely clung on by his fingernails, and the election itself a demoralising exercise. This is shaping up to be a highly political election fight, a real battle for the ‘soul’ of Unite, the biggest union in Britain, by forces around Beckett who hope to drive a campaign to re-arm the kind of leftist sentiment that drove support for Corbyn, and to drive the labour movement itself back to the left. That is the danger that the right-wing see from Beckett’s campaign, and why there has been a hysterical response from Starmer’s supporters.
Bureaucratic splintering and militant trade unionism
As his detractors have been keen to point out, he is not a rank-and-file worker. He is of Irish Catholic working-class background, born in Belfast, and someone who went to university and became a solicitor. He worked for the Union for a long period and is undoubtedly simply by virtue of his occupation wealthier than many union members.
His background is hardly the stuff of trade union militancy at a rank-and-file level as in the heyday of union militancy that existing in Britain prior to the victories of Thatcher over the trade unions, most crucially in the miners’ strike of 1984-5. It is the stuff of a trade union movement that has been beaten and betrayed for decades. Betrayed particularly by the political class that has developed centrally in the political bureaucracy of the Labour Party, which has over several decades become something more than what it was at the time of the party’s emergence: an extension of the pro-capitalist bureaucracy of the trade unions. This bureaucratic layer in Britain historically had their own organic relationship to British industrial capital from the massive industrialisation that began in the late 18th Century, that continued at breakneck speed in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century, that marked time in much of the 20th before undergoing major decline as a result of a conscious ruling class strategy of exporting jobs and deindustrialisation, aimed at crippling the labour movement, in the last quarter of the 20th Century.
However, this has itself led to new polarisations, part of which were responsible for the rise of Corbynism as a reaction to Blairism. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a pioneer of dialectical logic, once remarked that “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. This is a key insight, regarding the inevitability of continuous change and flux in all phenomena, which found its way into Hegel’s much more elaborated, but idealistic dialectic, which was inverted and given a consistently materialist foundation by Marx. In analysing the course of the class struggle such understanding is crucial.
This finds concrete expression when you look at Blairism, and the changes in the right-wing of political labour bureaucracies, which have not occurred only in Britain, but Britain has become an archetype. The deindustrialisation of Britain, and the rise of financial capital which has replaced its former industrial power to a considerable degree as the index of Britain’s remaining power in the world as an imperialist nation, has modified the relationship between the labour bureaucracy and British capitalism and produced new polarisations.
As was noted in an article 23 published just over a year ago:
“… there has been a further development of imperialist capital …. catalysed by the further decay of capitalism as classically expressed in Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The fall in the rate of profit meant that the classical unity of industrial and banking capital exploiting a large scale industrial proletariat in the advanced countries became less and less profitable, and so industrial capital increasingly sought to do away with the proletariat, or as much of it as possible, in the classical imperialist countries, and migrated to underdeveloped countries in search of cheap labour to manufacture goods, the bulk of which at least initially were still for realisation in the advanced countries, thus raising the rate of profit. At the same time, the further decline in profit rates gave rise to drives in the imperialist centres to privatise everything that moved. Everything from prisons to public housing, from air traffic control to schools to hospital cleaning to probation officers, everything that could possibly if privatised be squeezed to obtain a morsel of profit and hence raise the overall rate of profit, was so privatised.
“This also modified the phenomenon of finance capital as a fusion of banking and industrial capital. The migration of important sections of industrial capital from the main imperialist countries, even though the funding, as before, came from the imperialist banking arm, produced a geographical separation between industrial and banking capital even though they remained a unity under the system of finance capital. This produced an emanation of finance capital which some Marxists, entirely reasonably, call financial capital, to distinguish it from finance capital in its classical form. Its function is not the methodical exploitation of the proletariat to generate surplus value, but tricks and novel methods of seemingly extracting value from nothing, by such means as the creation of asset price inflation (closely linked to the concept of ‘fictitious capital’), ‘futures’, or other innovative ‘financial products’ which also have the effect of seemingly conjuring up new value from nothing. Such as credit-default-swaps, which played a major role in the late-2000s financial crisis. Of course, speculation is not new under imperialism, but there are also questions of degree.”
[…]
“In any case, this is what has undermined the Labour Party, and produced a new breed of ‘labour’ politician who is not a mere servant of finance capital in a political sense, like the old labour bureaucrats who fought for national welfare states and supported their ‘own’ imperialist countries’ struggles to maintain imperial influence, while trying to ‘humanise’ this imperialism. The old Labour bureaucracy was personified by Attlee, who while conceding independence to India (he really had no choice) nevertheless fought brutal colonial wars in Malaysia (including Singapore) and Indonesia, also helping the French back into Indo-China, and crushed the nascent Kenyan independence movement and workers movement. This kind of social chauvinism linked ‘welfare’ to support for colonial oppression.
“But it is somewhat different to the ‘labourism’ of Blair and Peter Mandelson, with his infamous statement as to how Labour is ‘intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich’. The former was subordination to finance capital, the latter is subordination to financial capital. This is not, by the way, a moral difference. Both of these things are deeply reactionary and the social-imperialism of old-Labour was itself mortally antagonistic to socialism. It is however a sociological difference – the old social imperialist bureaucracy still had a material connection to organised labour, if only as a parasite upon it. Whereas New Labour has no such necessary connection at all.”
But this can, indeed must, lead to heightened contradictions between the Labour Party and the labour movement which was its seedbed. Today a key part of what was once the Labour Party bureaucracy is not connected by a class collaborationist relationship with industrial capital, and thereby finance capital, interested in preserving class peace by managing large, often militant, organised workforces with a great deal of social rhetoric and some reforms.
The traditional well organised industrial workforces have been considerably weakened, and the workforce that unions represent is much more fragmented and multi-sectored. Unions themselves have been weakened, by the strategic defeats inflicted on them in battle decades ago, by the passage of anti-union laws that the bosses have made stick for decades, by the export of heavy industrial jobs and hence the loss of industrial muscle, and by the fragmentation mentioned. But that never meant that class anger had died down. Just that the bosses had found ways to frustrate it and stop it being expressed. Or so they thought….
The ascent of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership in 2015 was a big shock to the ruling class. It became possible because under first Kinnock, and then with a vengeance under Blair and Brown, key parts of Labour’s traditional right-wing bureaucracy had become agents of financial capital instead of the older relationship described above.
The difference is crucial as these new leaders resembled the Tories they were supposed to be opposed to much more closely. They became privatisers; during the Blair-Brown period in office they introduced private sector neoliberal practice into public services with a fervour; they fomented a capitalist boom in tandem with other neoliberal forces abroad that ended in 2007 with a major financial crisis.
Corbynism in Relation to the Class Struggle
Corbyn rose to the Labour leadership paradoxically because under Blairism many of Labour’s most class-conscious followers had ceased to recognise it as Labour and ceased to vote for it. This loss of support so worried the Labour bureaucracy that they designed a novel scheme to try to entice support back: they allowed Labour supporters (not members) to vote for the leader for a nominal one-off sub payment of £3. In 2015 they lost the second General Election in a row, in large measure because of working class abstention. Even the soft-left Ed Miliband, who talked about a ‘crisis of working-class representation’ to get elected leader but did nothing to actually represent workers – could not entice support back that the Blairites had lost.
So, in the first leadership election under the new system, they also felt compelled to allow Corbyn on the ballot, for fear that the election for leader would appear fake if they did not. The rest is history. The presence of a genuine left social democrat on the ballot, with the newly opened-up election system, and a threatening, very right-wing purely Tory government under Cameron in the saddle, led to a massive influx of hundreds of thousands of new members and supporters, and an historic victory for Corbyn.
The right-wing counterattacks began at once, with the ‘Chicken Coup’ in 2016, the brazen sabotage of Labour’s highly successful election campaign in 2017, where Corbyn stripped Theresa May, the new Tory leader who had succeeded Cameron when he lost the Brexit referendum, of her majority, and then the developing ‘anti-Semitism’ Zionist propaganda lie and the cynical posturing of the right around supposedly being diehard opponents of Brexit, only to become rampant flag-shaggers and nationalists as soon as Corbyn had been forced out of the leadership. Everyone knows that the right-wing used every method they could think of to lose both the 2017 and 2019 General Elections and were utterly mortified when Corbyn came close to victory in 2017.
Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn
But the hundreds of thousands of Labour supporters who voted for Corbyn in 2017 have not gone away, nor the millions of additional Labour voters who voted for Labour in 2017 when Labour’s share of the national vote rose from 30.4%, just over 9 and a quarter million votes in 2015, to 40.0%, over 12 and three-quarter million votes in 2017. In 2019 Labour lost only around half a million of those increased votes, but a surge of UKIP voters to the Tories put the Tories in pole position and Labour, weakened by witchhunts and right-wing sabotage, was unable to counter that.
But that still leaves several hundreds of thousands of left-wing activists pulled towards Labour in the Corbyn period, and over three million voters who would not vote for Blairites, or even soft lefts like Ed Miliband who never fully renounced Blairism, who were radicalised and mobilised by the Corbynite surge. Those people have not gone away. And a considerable number of them are in Unite.
The Beckett campaign seems to have inspired something of a reprise of the enthusiasm among left-wing Labour supporters, viscerally hostile to Blairism, that was originally given to Corbyn. Beckett was closely associated with Corbyn right through his leadership, though in the background. He led the legal team that successfully defended Jeremy Corbyn’s right to be on the ballot in 2016, during the ‘chicken coup’ leadership contest that was forced on the party by a PLP vote of no-confidence, where the plan was to exclude Corbyn from the ballot by a legal/constitutional manoeuvre, carried out by the Blairite/Zionist Lord Foster. However, since Corbyn allowed his leadership to be sabotaged and ousted, Beckett has gone well beyond that.
As well as the possibility of rank-and-file militants becoming prominent in class struggle responses, there can also be splits and fragmentation of the bureaucracy, itself resulting from rank-and-file pressure. So, while Beckett may not conform to the ideal of a left-wing trade union campaign, demanding that the officialdom be paid no more than the workforce they represent, his campaign still reflects a class struggle impulse from below. Beckett thus should be put to the test of office.
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