The confrontation over Manchester between the Johnson Tory government and the Labour Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, has brought to the fore that the Tories are using the Covid pandemic and the results of their own deliberate negligence and duplicity, to further their class war against the working class, attacks on living standards, and ambitions to impoverish people and create a fearful, passive population who are just raw material for exploitation. Burnham’s refusal to endorse the Tories’ Tier 3 ‘very high’ partial lockdown measures and sign up for the impoverishment of the Manchester working class, while it has not defeated the Tories, has galvanised the hatred of much of the working class population in this country against Johnson’s government.

The real point of the Tory intransigence in Manchester was not so much the quarantine measures themselves, but cuts to furlough pay. It is of a piece with the Tories’ voting to deprive schoolkids of meal vouchers during the school holidays, which was a concession extracted in the early part of the pandemic because of popular outrage over the further impoverishment of poor children. This has created a wave of outrage and class sentiment that even seeped into parliament when Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner lost her temper with some particularly vile Tory specimen and called him “scum”.

Of course, she apologised for briefly speaking a fragment of that truth parliamentary procedures are expressly designed to suppress; that the interests of working class people require war to the death against the bourgeois scum whose political representatives sit in parliament. Rayner is less directly such a representative herself; but being part of Labour as a bourgeois workers party her kind come under potent pressure from below at times like this.

Andy Burnham, despite his refusal to endorse the government’s latest pretend strategy to supposedly combat Covid-19 with its illogical, half-baked and arbitrary three tier system of graduated restrictions, has no coherent demands to counterpose to the government. He was bid down from £90 million initial demands for funding a local furlough as good as the 80% original from the spring, to a mere £65 million but refused to allow himself to be bid down to the £60 million the Tories were prepared to agree to, and their much reduced furlough. So, no deal was reached by the 20 October deadline.

It has been suggested that Burnham, now dubbed “King of the North”, may be positioning himself as a future Labour Party leader, in the manner of Boris Johnson, hoping to jump from Mayor of a major city to potential PM, as Keir Starmer has been so craven and ineffectual that even in this enormous crisis the Tory government still manages to head most opinion polls. Burnham, to his credit, refused to join the 2016 ‘Chicken Coup’ against Jeremy Corbyn, which also gives him a semblance of clean hands. However, his own craven neoliberal support for austerity, reiterated when he stood for the Labour leadership in 2015, and complicity in NHS privatisation under Blair and Brown, make him not supportable by socialists.

It is notable that some of the concessions Johnson made in the early stages of the pandemic to working class people, through the furlough scheme and some increases in benefits, were a product of the fact that Jeremy Corbyn was still leader of the Labour Party until April and was in a position to make sharp criticisms of the Tory regime and act as a focus for working class discontent. Since Starmer became leader this has collapsed; he has grovelled in the most disgusting manner before the government, sacking ‘left’ shadow Education Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey because she backed the Teachers Unions’ resistance to premature reopening of schools during the pandemic, with a smear about ‘anti-Semitism’. His sackings of other mildly leftist shadow ministers for voting against government measures like legalising murder and rape by ‘Spy Cops’, show what this was really about. Starmer is Johnson’s fag, Eton style.

One result of this is that the current tiered measures are much more geared to a bailout of big business than supporting workers than even the inadequate measures for the first wave. Starmer says virtually nothing about that, even though he has belatedly, along with SAGE, started calling for a two-to-three-week firebreak lockdown to arrest the current virus spread. And Burnham does not address this either.

As a former Blairite turned ‘soft left’ Burnham is not remotely capable of leading the kind of fightback the working class needs against this hard-right Brexiteer Tory government, though his observations about what is driving the regional lockdown policy of the government have often been quite sharp:

“Today we communicated our clear and unanimous view to the Government. It is wrong to place some of the poorest parts of England in a punishing lockdown without proper support for the people and businesses affected.

“To do so will result in certain hardship, job losses, business failure. It will cause harm in a different way to people’s mental health and is not certain to control the virus. People are fed up of being treated in this way, the North is fed up of being pushed around. We aren’t going to be pushed around any more.

“”The Government is not giving city regions like ours and the Liverpool City Region the necessary financial backing for full lockdowns of that kind. That is why we have unanimously opposed the Government’s plans for Tier 3. They are flawed and unfair.

“They are asking us to gamble our residents’ jobs, homes and businesses and a large chunk of our economy on a strategy that their own experts tell them might not work. We would never sign up for that.

“While this is not necessarily Greater Manchester’s view, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer also told us last night that the only certain thing to work is a national lockdown. But the Government told us this morning it is unwilling to do that because of the damage it will do to the national economy. And yet that is what they want to impose on the North West.”

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1348229/manchester-lockdown-andy-burnham-tier-three-latest-coronavirus-boris-johnson

There is huge pressure building up on the Tory government about the likely death toll of many more tens or even hundreds of thousands from the escalating pandemic. Around 60,000 excess deaths have already resulted from the first wave, that is, on top of the 10,000 or so that generally die from ordinary flu in a ‘normal’ British winter. The campaign about free school meals is only a part of it, but celebrities such as football star Marcus Rashford, and the mass outrage behind them, have got the Tories running scared. They have good reason to be even more scared of the death toll from the pandemic that they have allowed to get out of control again.

Fighting the Working Class, Not the Virus

A comment in a recent Facebook discussion, by Martin Deane, a long-time election candidate for the Green Party, sums up where the UK under Johnson stands in the international scheme of things regarding Covid-19:

“The UK is one of 17 countries with over 10k Covid deaths. 195 are under 10k. Look it up on Worldometer. Most of the world has washed its hands of the virus! Of them 155 countries have under 1k deaths. The UK really is an outlier with its 65k spike, 50k Of which were Covid deaths. And now facing tens of thousands more…”

This is the result of a government stratagem of not fighting against the virus but fighting against the popular will and resolve to fight to eliminate the virus. The whole litany of behaviour of Johnson’s Tory regime since the pandemic emerged has been a more mendacious, camouflaged variant of Trumpism, extreme, demented neoliberal, free-market fundamentalism. This was prefigured by his bizarre speech in Greenwich in on February 2:

“…in that context, we were starting to hear some bizarre, autarchic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases like Coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation, that go beyond what is medically rational, to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment, humanity needs some government somewhere, that is willing at least to make the case, powerfully, for freedom of exchange.

Some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles, and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of populations, of the Earth, to buy and sell freely among each other. Here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you with all humility, that the UK is ready for that role.”

https://www.facebook.com/185180654855189/videos/512321552989037

At the beginning of the pandemic, the likely toll was laid out for the government through SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) by scientists and epidemiologists from Imperial College, London:

“Unmitigated, the death number was 510,000… Mitigated we were told it was going to be 250,000. Once you see a figure of take no further action and a quarter of a million people die, the question you ask is, ‘What action?’”

Sunday Times, 22 March

These figures have been ridiculed by the many ‘Covid-deniers’ in part because one of the key scientists who warned of this scenario was Neil Ferguson, who later was caught out by the tabloid press as having been visited by a woman he did not live with as part of a personal relationship, in breach of the social distancing and lockdown rules at that time.

His projections were dismissed as rubbish, on grounds that he was a ‘hypocrite’ for not adhering completely to measures that he advocated, not only by Covid-deniers but also by those close to the Johnson government that embarked on a rapid and reckless winding down of precautionary measures beginning in June, ending up in early September with their public demand for most people to ‘go back to work’, to ‘save’ the city centres from economic regression.

But this is probably the sharpest expression ever of the logical fallacy of the ad hominem denunciation. Because his personal hypocrisy and his breach of the rules mean nothing in relation to whether his projections were correct, so not. They may well turn out to be correct. In this regard, Ferguson is now warning that it will be necessary to close at least secondary schools to control the currently resurgent virus. This is being ignored – for now, as was the call by Chris Whitty and SAGE for a 2-3 week ‘circuit-breaker’ national lockdown to slow the current ‘wave’ in mid-September, rejected by the Tories because it would damage the economy. ‘Herd immunity’ is still very much alive and kicking.

Johnson raised the possibility of a policy of allowing the SARS-2 Coronavirus to “move through the population” unrestricted, so the population would have to “take it on the chin” and thus develop “herd immunity” in a TV interview on 5^th March. Having laid down this strategy as a possibility, he rowed back from openly endorsing it, saying it was necessary to “balance” this with other considerations.

In fact “herd immunity” was the government’s strategy to deal with the pandemic. Initially it was virtually open. As Dr David Halpern, a leading figure in the ‘Nudge Unit’ (‘Behavioural Insight Team’), a semi-privatised government body that looks for ways to manipulate the population to comply with Tory austerity, laid out in a BBC Interview:

“… and there’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease, and by the time that they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1238097745971421184

Johnson’s ideological guru Dominic Cummings attended meetings of SAGE right from the early days of the pandemic: he is not a scientist or an epidemiologist.  He evidently had a major influence on Sir Patrick Vallance, one of the government’s two main scientific advisers to this day (the other being Chris Whitty). Unlike policy wonks like David Halpern, Cummings was well aware it would not be possible to cocoon elderly people from an epidemic that infected the bulk of the population, and laid out what the real attitude of central figures in the government is to the Covid pandemic:

“Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s senior aide, became convinced that Britain would be better able to resist a lethal second wave of the disease next winter if Whitty’s prediction that 60% to 80% of the population became infected was right, and the UK developed ‘herd immunity’

At a private engagement at the end of February, Cummings outlined the government’s strategy. Those present said it was ‘herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”

Sunday Times, op-cit

This fits in very well with the incredible care homes scandal, with Covid patients discharged untested into care homes with the resulting carnage of many thousands, and the masks scandal, where billions were spent by privateers like Deloitte on substandard PPE, much of which went into the pockets of scammers.

And of course, Cummings’ own blatant undermining of the lockdown, driving from London to Durham, and to a local tourist spot, then back again, while he and his wife were infected in defiance of lockdown rules, getting away with it through a tissue of feeble lies, was designed to undermine popular support for public health measures by encouraging the view that they were all a racket to protect the privileged. This facet certainly was effective! In Britain, the first ‘wave’ was never defeated, because the measures taken to combat it were never remotely adequate. This was deliberate.

The battle to starve the virus of the chance to spread, driven by working class people from below from the beginning of the pandemic, was undertaken by the Johnson government only with great reluctance in late March, and by May they were already engaged in machinations to begin lifting it, even though there were still over hundreds of Covid daily deaths.

 The population refused to play ball: the attempt to reopen schools at the beginning of June was a flop, as more than half stayed away. But from then the quarantine measures were rapidly and prematurely lifted and undermined. And schools were re-opened on a compulsory basis in September even though teenagers at least are proven to spread the disease just as easily as adults.

The ‘NHS Test and Trace’ system that was put in place in June (after testing was scandalously abandoned by the Tories in March) is a privatised scam. It is nothing to do with the NHS: £12 billion was handed to Serco for not much in particular, to invest in obsolete spreadsheets for recording test results, so thousands of results were ‘mislaid’. Tests are slow and often unavailable: people are often told to travel as far as Cummings did just to get a test! And barely 60% of contacts of infected peopled are traced when to have an effective system it needs to be between 80 and 90%. Around £8 billion of the £12 billion given to Serco is unaccounted for, most likely having been set aside for dividends and/or salted away in tax havens.

Punctuated Herd Immunity

One serious attempt to deal with the effects of the government’s duplicity and the craven nature of the response to it has come from the Workers Party GB, led by George Galloway and Joti Brar. Their recent statement, published on the 17^th October, is titled “Lockdowns are neither effective nor fair, but a further proof of government failure to manage the health emergency effectively”. This has given some people the impression that the WPGB is siding with the anti-lockdown, Covid-denying idiots and dupes of the far right, but this is not true, as you can see when you read the statement. It says of the government’s Three Tier policy:

“This policy is neither fish nor fowl; it is neither effective nor fair, and, by compounding increasing levels of hardship and poverty, it is taking a heavy toll on the British working class.

We have no confidence in the leadership of this government, and no confidence in the official Labour party opposition, to protect our interests and lead us through the crisis.”

https://workerspartybritain.org/2020/10/17/statement-lockdowns-ineffective-unfair-proof-government-failure-manage-health-emergency-effectively-covid-19/

It is clear that their view of how the pandemic could be fought was broadly correct:

“The Workers Party’s call for widespread testing, tracing and social isolation and care of covid patients – the public health measures that proved successful in eradicating the virus in China and elsewhere – was ignored. Travellers from the most affected parts of the globe (principally Europe and the USA) continued to fly into British airports throughout the worst months of the crisis, despite the supposed ‘lockdown’.”

ibid

And they have even come up with a sharp and synthetic characterisation of what the government’s real strategy is:

“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.”

ibid

Fight Covid! Human Need not Profits!

Unfortunately their demands for the crisis seem to somewhat passively accept that in losing confidence in Johnson’s mendacious government and its fake protective measures and lockdown, the whole idea of quarantine measures has “lost the confidence of a large section of British workers, who are tired of the fruitless hardships they have endured.”

Thus the mistaken emphasis of the headline, that “lockdowns” (apparently in general) “are neither effective nor fair” which despite the evident intention of the authors, does cause some confusion and can mislead honest militants into embracing the idiot Covid-deniers, despite the best of intentions.

The demands of the Workers Party in this situation are too modest. They demand

“… a free and comprehensive healthcare system. We want the NHS to be able to do what is expected of it, and for it not to be attacked at every opportunity by hostile governments.

“This is also why we are calling for a corona wealth tax – a 5% one-off tax on fortunes exceeding £10 million. Because the pandemic is just the tip of the inequality iceberg – for far too long now our nation’s problems have been socialised and the profits privatised.”

ibid

Even though these demands are correct as far as they go, what is missing is any immediate demands related to what is to be done about the pandemic itself. It appears that this is the result of despair and capitulation at the mood that they have noted in part of the working class, not necessarily the most advanced part, “who are tired of the fruitless hardships they have endured.“

This is not the most advanced layer of the working class; this is the layer that is most likely to be influenced by the right-wing populism that drove support for Brexit and Johnson in the first place, and maybe even by the Covid-denying right-wing idiots and the confused part of the left that is tailing them. The most advanced sections of the working class are very well aware that the discrediting of the government’s appalling duplicity and mendacity does not mean that Covid is any less dangerous. Without serious measures to suppress it, or without a vaccine to develop real herd immunity, many tens, even hundreds of thousands will die.

Whatever the mood in the working class, whatever the ‘concern’ about the economy, we must demand that all economic resources be devoted to protecting the health and lives of the population. We demand proper measures of social distancing/isolation to crush the virus and bring it down to manageable levels that can be handled by a proper testing and tracing system, be implemented and be paid for in its entirety by the capitalists. We demand full pay during this period for all workers, whether regular, casualised or self-employed, immigrant or non-immigrant, to ensure no one falls victim to destitution or starvation. We demand an end to all evictions and the housing of the homeless, not as a temporary, reversible stopgap, but securely and permanently. We demand a rise in benefits for all claimants to at least the level of a living wage, to be decided on by workers and claimants themselves, through them becoming organised in unions and similar bodies that may come into being in the struggle.

Above all, we demand that production and the economy be remodelled and re-organised to make its overarching purpose the preservation of life and considerations of human need, not private profit. The objective situation of the pandemic demands this, and in a sense, though fear of the disease in the short term makes it difficult to organise mass actions to force it, it can also act as a learning experience for the mass of the population as to the need for socialism, whose essence is production for human need instead of profit. The programme of any putative working-class party should be formulated as to make that more and more conscious among the most advanced layers of the working class.

Communist Fight issue no 3 is now available as a PDF. It is not currently available as a hard copy due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but we do plan to print and distribute our journal as hard copy as and when circumstances allow.

This journal is a product of our commitment to maintaining a high-quality Marxist journal based on the politics of Trotskyism and the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International.

There are a number of important articles in this issue including a treatment of the Trans question, which has become a subject of some controversy in parts of the left recently due to a certain dovetailing between a backward right-wing feminist trend and the ‘working class’ pretentions of right-wing populism, which have had a perverse impact on a weakened left.

We have major articles on the Tory government’s offensive against workers exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic, and the beginnings of class sentiment reasserting itself at the base of the labour movement because of theses outrages.

Also a crucial article on the US Elections and the threat to the working class and the oppressed from the atrophying of the US bourgeoisie’s pretence of democracy. And an important statement from the LCFI issued prior to the recent election in Bolivia, which was won by the leftist-populist MAS movement, by a very clear popular majority, in the face of the coup orchestrated by US imperialism.

And there is an important statement by the LCFI on the phenomenon of ‘hybrid war’, which has recently been seen in such diverse locations as Lebanon, Belarus and Argentina, the waging of irregular campaigns to destabilise halfway non-cooperative regimes by pro-imperialist forces as a currently more successful method than overt military interventions.

In the last couple of years there has been a retreat on the question of the rights of transsexuals in the labour movement in Britain, and mockery and contempt for trans people has become a real problem even among a layer of putative left activists. Somewhat strangely, a key inspirer of this has been Joanne (“JK”) Rowling, the celebrity author of Harry Potter children’s books and sometime novelist, and an ideologue of the Labour right. Rowling, a long time Blairite, was an outspoken opponent of the left in the recent witchhunts and Blairite/Zionist destabilisation campaign that brought down Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, yet remarkably she has gained kudos among some of the left for a campaign against transsexuals that bears considerable resemblance to her pro-Zionist activities. She tends to fictionalise her obsessions: during the Corbyn period she wrote a novel called Lethal White about an imaginary anti-Semitic anti-Zionist. Her latest rendering, Troubled Blood, is about a transvestite serial killer, again crudely serving a political agenda.

She has been particularly outspoken in her attacks on the policy the Labour Party adopted under Corbyn, for extending anti-discrimination protections under Equalities legislation to change the ‘protected characteristic’ of ‘gender reassignment’ in the current legislation to ‘gender identity’. Where previously a medical ‘diagnosis’ of ‘gender dysphoria’, if not actual surgery, was required for such recognition (implying that transsexuality is some kind of sickness) now ‘self-identification’ would be all that is required. This change would remove the legal justification, which exists in current law, for the exclusion of transsexuals from some ‘single sex services’, for instance in refuges and prisons.

In the past two years there had been a ‘consultation’ on the table from the Tory government, as part of their previous efforts, begun under David Cameron, to show that they are ‘enlightened’ and ‘modern’, to amend Equalities and Gender Recognition laws in a similar way, that would allow transsexuals who have not yet gone through the protracted and often painful process of  gender-reassignment, including that involving surgery, to be recognised legally as being of their changed gender/sex on the basis of self-identification. However, under Johnson the Tories have predictably retreated from these promises and Johnson’s government now echoes the transphobes in all parties who demand the exclusion of trans women from ‘women’s spaces’ in the name of supposedly protecting women against predatory male sex offenders who decide to ‘identify’ as women.

What is more odd is that her arguments have been accepted by quite a few on the left and have become a source of significant divisions among those who are otherwise opponents of the Labour right, its pro-NATO militarism, pro-Zionism and neoliberalism. In Labour there are groups like Women’s Place, and the LGB Alliance (with the ‘T’ – for ‘Trans’ – conspicuously missing) which contain left-wing people who have historically fought hard against Blairism. It is a tragic regression that such people find common cause with the likes of Rowling.

The origins of Rowling’s school of thought are in one of the most egregious and bigoted strands of the neoliberal politics that dominated Labour during the Blair period, epitomised by Julie Bindel. Whose tirades against transsexuals accompanied her campaign, along with Harriet Harman, and the crooked neocon Denis MacShane, for the hypocritically-disguised ‘feminist’ ‘Swedish’ position on sex work. This put a ‘feminist’ gloss on the project of Moral Majority religious bigots, defining sex work as ‘violence against women’ and trying to deprive sex workers of income by criminalising their clients, pretending to be acting for the benefit of the sex workers (by trying to starve them). Bindel saw her campaigns against sex workers, and transsexuals, as complementary.

This is one of many strands of what Blair’s government stood for that has long been in deep disrepute, but this transphobic trend seems to have revived as a result of the adaptation of part of the left to right-wing populism and its ‘working class’ pretentions – to Trump and Brexit. Though the positions of individuals may vary considerably on such things, there does seem to be considerable overlap between those on the left who backed Brexit and showed softness on Trump, and those echoing JK Rowling’s bigotry today.

Popular Fronts with Trump and Farage

Thus, George Galloway and his new Workers Party of Britain boast about their backwardness on this: not only did Galloway notoriously ally himself with Nigel Farage and call for votes to the Brexit Party in the 2019 General Election. His bloc partners in founding the new ‘Workers Party’, the Mao-Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), led now by Joti Brar, with its roots in the ‘radical’ fringe of Maoism in India via the Indian Workers Association (GB), proclaimed at the time Donald Trump was elected president in 2016:

“Coming as it does on the heels of the Brexit vote in June, Trump’s victory is another blow at the imperialist system and the so-called liberal order. As such, it should be greeted with enthusiasm by the revolutionary proletariat and progressive humanity everywhere.”

https://archive.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=1247

This bizarre variant of Stalinist Popular-Front politics should cause the left to rub their eyes in disbelief. Instead of a Popular Front seeking a bloc with the liberal bourgeoisie against fascism, as was the norm in the 1930s (except for the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, to which this bears some resemblance), we now see a Popular Front with part of the ‘radical’ neoliberal right against the liberal bourgeoisie in the name of opposing neoliberalism. This phantasm has its own roots, which are not the subject of this article, but it does have relevance, as Trump’s position on transsexuals is finding an echo among some on the left. And the kind of adaptation Galloway is now known for has a broader influence also including on some who were involved with the Corbyn movement.

On August 17, a US Federal Judge temporarily stayed the Trump administration’s overturn of the Obama administration’s definition of sex/gender. Forbes (17 Aug) reported:

“The Trump administration policy rescinds the Obama administration’s 2016 gender discrimination rule which redefined sex discrimination to include termination of pregnancy and gender identity, which it defined as ‘one’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.’

Trump’s policy returns to the government’s previous interpretation of sex discrimination according to ‘the plain meaning of the word ,<<sex>> as male or female and as determined by biology.’”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/elanagross/2020/08/17/federal-judge-temporarily-blocks-trump-administrations-rollback-of-obama-era-transgender-health-care-protections/#5bb3be4f60d6

We hear similar things on some of the left, including from Galloway:

“I stand with JK Rowling. People can wear what they like – even their dead mother’s clothes – and identify as Moon-landing astronauts if they like, and I will do my best to accommodate them. But not to the extent of signing in my blood that they actually ARE what they identify as. … the ‘self-identifying woman’s’ freedoms are impinging on the freedoms of girls and women to their own spaces, privacy and self-expression.”

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/500868-galloway-psycho-jk-rowling-hitchcock/)

So here we see a rather strange confluence between the “socially conservative, but economically radical”, Galloway, and a brand of feminism in the left and labour movement, that for all the rhetoric against ‘identity politics’ that we see from some of those denouncing the ‘delusion’ of transsexuals about having changed their gender/sex, exhibit a prime characteristic of identity politics – smears that anyone who does not share their particular form of chauvinist hostility to another group, is hostile to the group they identify with.

Transphobic Identity Politics: A Threat to Gays Also

Thus Trans-Exclusionist Feminists frequently accuse those who do not share their exclusionism, whether male or female, of ‘misogyny’ (hatred of women). It only takes a moment’s thought to deduce that there is no logical reason to believe that those who defend the rights of transsexuals should have any reason whatsoever to hate women. It is just as intellectually lazy and insulting as the canard that those who are critical of the oppressive behaviour and activities of Zionist Jews towards Palestinians, hate Jewish people in general.

A classic manifestation of identity politics, apart from clear cases of outright separatism by an oppressed stratum under capitalism (which is generally mistaken and counterproductive), is when strata that are not oppressed, accuse members of a stratum that does suffer oppression, of bigotry simply for demanding basic rights. So it is when Zionist Jews smear their Palestinian victims (and their sympathisers) as ‘anti-Semites’ for demanding their rights. So it is when the small, vulnerable minority of transsexuals (and their sympathisers), demanding equal treatment to members of the sex they have transitioned to, are smeared as sexual predators and misogynists.

The counter-argument from transphobes is that transsexuality is itself a form of ‘identity politics’, that the very idea that anyone’s psyche can be at odds with their original biology is a ‘delusion’ which should not be ‘indulged’, that such people are in effect mentally ill, and should be treated as such, or as in some other way as deviant. Such people can never be fully accepted as female, or male, no matter what they do, is the logic of this argument which is heard regularly from those on the left who have capitulated in this way.

This argument is bigoted and inhuman, and in its logic threatens homosexuals as well as transsexuals. For if biology is paramount, if the psyche counts for nothing and no one can ever have a sex-related psychological makeup that is at odds with their strict biology, then how can homosexuality be a sexual orientation at all? The biological function of sex, by the same logic (applied consistently) as the transphobes use, is reproduction, and therefore ‘sexual’ activities between those of the same sex are not really sexual. By this reasoning they can only be acts that signify a mental delusion, as with the ‘delusions’ of transsexuals, that need ‘treatment’, that even should be ‘cured’. Medical orthodoxy used to say this about gays, as recently as the 1980s. When this is said about transsexuals it can just as easily be said about homosexuals. And it will: if the left retreats on trans rights in this manner it will open the way for further retreats on gay rights.

The current anti-trans regression on the left needs to be rejected, on the grounds Lenin laid out in What Is To Be Done, as early as 1903, that the job of would-be socialists and communists is to act as the “tribune of the oppressed, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression … no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects”. That unifying of the oppressed behind the banner of the working class as the universal emancipator, is the real negation of identity politics.

US ELECTION: THE THREAT OF DICTATORSHIP

Declaration of the Liaison Committee of the Fourth International

The 2020 US Presidential Elections is going to be the most dangerous and incendiary in many years, as the US ‘democracy’ and its aspirations for social and political stability are acutely threatened by the prospect that, even if defeated, Donald Trump will not accept that and will fight to hang onto power come what may. Trump appears to have got past Covid-19 and aspires to be a US reprise of someone like Louis Bonaparte, able to subvert and manipulate a highly undemocratic ‘democratic’ system to obtain and maintain power without obtaining a majority, or even a plurality, of the popular vote.

If Trump attempts to put his coup threats into practice, it is possible that there could be a major confrontation between different bourgeois factions in the election aftermath, and given the different social and electoral bases of these factions, this could produce major polarisations and even conflict between different layers of the working class population in the US, as well as posing a major threat to democratic rights and social gains.

From the point of view of a rational policy for US imperialism, Trump’s administration is dysfunctional. But then again, even from the standpoint of formal democracy, the US Constitution itself is dysfunctional. This is not something to celebrate for the working class, however, whose interests are fundamentally at odds with those of US capitalism. For the irrationalities of the US constitution and political setup do not in any way benefit the working class and the overlapping doubly oppressed sections of our class that are particular targets of some of the political system’s worst features.

The United States is not a ‘normal’ bourgeois national state as can be seen most classically in Europe and Japan. It is a colonial settler state, founded through genocide of the native peoples of the various ‘Indian’ nations, which marks it as a society founded on racist barbarism at its very roots. The other foundation of US ‘democracy’ is the abduction and enslavement of its black population from Africa. Its entire history has been particularly marked by the struggles of the black population for basic rights and equality.

Initially against slavery in the 19^th Century, then against the Jim Crow forcible segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror that succeeded it, a struggle that culminated with the achievement of formal legal equality as a result of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Civil Rights movement stopped at that point, failing to go further and touch the huge economic inequality and impoverishment of the black population that centuries of racial oppression under capitalism have given rise to.

The end of the Civil Rights movement saw the black population of Northern ghettos rise up and fight racist cops alongside their brethren in the South, partly under the banner of Black Power, and the Rev. Martin Luther King’s liberal-pacifism challenged by the rise of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and other quasi-revolutionary movements such as SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), DRUM (Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to mention only a few. But this radicalisation failed to crystallise an authoritative, working class and revolutionary party and over time, this led to these movements falling prey to repression from the state, disillusionment, and demoralisation.

Neoliberal attacks and racist offensive hand-in-hand

The failure of the Civil Rights movement and its semi-nationalist ‘radical’ sequel to lead to a struggle against the capitalist double exploitation and oppression of the black masses led from the late 1970s to neo-liberalism taking the offensive against the black population through cuts in poverty programmes, crackdowns on so-called ‘law and order’, restoration of the death penalty in 1976, which particularly targeted blacks who were disproportionately driven into a life of poverty and degradation. Such intensified oppression breeds a degree of crime that can then be exploited by racists to further impoverish the black masses, while at the same time promoting a middle-class black layer of collaborators with the system.

This carried on through the Reagan and elder Bush administrations with the ‘War on Drugs’ which was actually a war on the black masses, then intensified under Clinton with the passage of various ‘omnibus’ anti-crime bills and ‘effective death penalty’ acts, continuing under the succeeding GW Bush administration. This gave rise to the situation today, where the United States has 2.3 million people in jail, around 40 per cent of whom are black. The imprisonment rate of blacks to whites in the US in 2018 was 1501 per 100,000, as opposed to 268 per 100,000 for whites – a rate nearly 6 times greater.

Over the period mainly covered by the Obama administration, and the conditions that gave rise to it, it appears that there was a certain decline in the degree of disproportionality of Black imprisonment, from over ninefold in 2006 to ‘only’ close to sixfold in 2018 ( see here ). But the response to such a relative lessening of the worst outrages under the first black President was determined effort by the neoliberal right to raise up Trump, an overt racist, to succeed Obama.

The campaign of gerrymandering and voter suppression that drove the white supremacist backlash against the Obama presidency was considerable, and led to Trump being able to win the Electoral College in 2016 despite in the national popular vote losing to the Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton, by nearly three million votes. Even though Hillary Clinton was an integral part of the Bill Clinton administration responsible for earlier appalling legal attacks, she paid the price for her party bringing forth a black President. This underlines why the obviously undemocratic Electoral College system, the legacy of incremental white settler expansion and many racist wars, has been preserved – as a firebreak against the multi-racial big city populations where the working class can be most potent and political.

This is the nature of the class struggle in the United States. The struggle against the double oppression of the black working class and poor suffuses the entire class struggle of the US working class and gives it a special character, in which race and class are closely linked and class questions are modified by considerations of racial oppression. It also is at the root of the ‘gun culture’ in the US: the Second Amendment – the Right to Bear Arms – always was about arming the white settler population to massacre the native nations of this part of North America, and to keep the Black population enslaved and segregated.

The epidemic of ‘mass shootings’ in the US is linked to the pathology of a society poisoned by lynch law and the suppression of social issues by violence. It is not the mere presence of arms that determines the killings: in other societies where arms are widespread, from rich countries like Switzerland to poor ones like the Philippines, such mass shootings are rare, as the deeply embedded racist pathology that pollutes this racist settler society is absent.

There are other questions that modify the US class struggle. The question of immigration is of considerable significance in US racism, as the entire white Anglo-derived population stands on the shoulders of violent white settlers who slaughtered the native tribes to the brink of non-existence; hence the complaints of white ‘nativists’ about Spanish-speaking immigrants from poorer semi-colonial countries to the South have an overtly racist and hypocritical character. This also overlaps with the US imperialist brutalisation of the peoples of the entire territory of the Americas.

The United States is the most dangerous imperialist power in history, with a truly global reach and the weaponry to destroy humanity many times over. Therefore, its defeat and disintegration are in the interests of the world proletariat and that of the great mass of humanity.

Trumpian reaction and imperialist decline

The Trump administration and its irrationalities are a product of US imperialism’s decline and the ebbing of its power, getting involved in numerous wars that it has struggled with, most notably in the Middle East: Iraq, Afghanistan, and more covertly Syria. Two issues brought Trump to power: one being domestic racism, anti-immigration sentiment and support for white supremacy among parts of the former industrial, mainly white working class of the ‘rust belt’ states in the US interior, whose jobs have often been exported to lower wage developing countries by the US bourgeoisie, desperately seeking additional profits to offset the continuing decline of profit rates that are a crippling, fundamental contradiction of capitalism and endemic in this period of advanced capitalist decline and decay.

The other, linked element of Trumpism is a degree of reactionary, right-wing isolationism. This sentiment among ultra-reactionary sections of American business is not against imperialist militarism as such, but rather about their desire to ‘sort out’ uppity blacks, women and other oppressed groups who need to be ‘put in their place’ to re-establish unquestioned white, male supremacy at home. ‘Make America Great Again’ is about reimposing white supremacy as a path to a future imperialist offensive.

The abstract model of capitalism is that anyone’s money is as good as anyone else’s, the ethnic origin of those being exploited by capital being theoretically irrelevant.  ‘Actually existing’ capitalism, however, does not work like that, and the United States is a particularly extreme example. Its very foundation was bound up with racial supremacism, slavery, and genocide, whereas in Europe these things are often seen as external products of ‘empire’. So much of its ruling class, and much of the majority Anglo-European population, are deeply embedded in supremacism.

So you see major social tensions between different sections of the ruling class, one of which is ‘rolling with’ the demographic shifts and even basing itself to a degree on the black population and other oppressed populations, the other of which is either fighting against it, or at least seeking to exploit discontent among ‘left behind’ sections of the rust-belt lumpen semi-proletariat to promote a thinly-veiled white-male supremacist agenda.

The widespread involvement of Republicans in voter suppression is an indication of this, as is the overt support of Trump for paramilitary fascist/white supremacist groups like the ‘Proud Boys’, and the drive to appoint an ultra-reactionary anti-abortion Catholic fanatic,  Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court, obviously aiming at overturning the 1973 Roe v Wade judgement that prevented states from banning abortion, as well as possibly intervening on the side of Trump in any legal battle over a contested election defeat. Trump’s support for armed militia racist terrorists against the Black Lives Matter movement that has emerged over the past several years as a result of the unremitting terrorisation and promiscuous murdering of black people by the cops, is particularly ominous and indicates that he is quite prepared to support and incite fascist massacres to try to hold onto power. As indeed is his use of federal forces for similar purposes, particularly in Portland, Oregon over the last months.

No political support to Democrats!

The political conclusions that we draw from this analysis is that we can politically support neither side in this election. Both wings in terms of their programme and leadership are thoroughly bourgeois. Both parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are in no sense creations of the working class. They are ruling class parties that it is a matter of principle for those who stand for the class independence of the workers to refuse to advocate votes for or politically support in any way.

However, that is not the end of it. The social bases of the two parties are different even if the class nature of them are both bourgeois. The social base of the Democrats is in the big city, genuinely multi-racial elements of the working class where there is an element of anti-racist, working class radicalisation that ought to be the seedbed of a genuine workers movement. This was illustrated in the last presidential election campaign, as well as this one, by the two bids for the Democratic Party presidential nomination by the social democrat Bernie Sanders, who ran on a programme particularly focussed on the demand for free healthcare, or ‘Medicare for All’.

Sanders was bidding for the nomination for President on the ticket of a bourgeois party. Yet in a sense he was propelled toward that by a class-conscious element within the base of that party. To say that is not to politically support the Democratic Party or anyone within it, including Sanders. It would be unprincipled to support Sanders’ battle for the nomination of the ‘liberal’ magnates’ party but it would be correct to demand that his supporters break from the Democrats and fight openly for the creation of an independent working class party in the US. If they could have been pushed into that, then revolutionaries could have given Sanders, or someone like him, very critical support.

Counterposed to that is Trump’s base in the rust belt ex-working class, who were won to his right-wing populist programme of banning Muslims from the US, bashing ‘foreigners’ and oppressed groups, protectionism against China, and supposedly keeping the US out of aggressive wars in the Middle East particularly, partly out of impotent disillusion with the 40 years of neoliberal attacks, givebacks to the bosses, and the prolonged decline of living standards since the days of Ronald Reagan.

Class-based disillusionment with Obama drove some parts of the working class towards Trump in 2016. It was mainly a reactionary vote but not exclusively so. Sanders might have won over a layer, though not the bulk, of Trump’s support if he had been able to run, some Trumpers who had previously supported Obama. Obama won a landslide victory in 2008 driven by sentiment particularly regarding his promises regarding healthcare and to get the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan, to close Guantanamo, etc. But while he delivered a healthcare reform that falls a long way short of universal free public healthcare, and while he signed a Deal with Iran that made a US attack on Iran less likely in the short term, he also launched new wars in Libya and Syria, that Trump was able to gain some support by criticising.

So while a section of Trump’s base were  driven to support him by his isolationist attacks on some recent US wars including Obama’s, and Trump has not been able to launch much in the way of any new wars in this presidency, the view of Trump as some sort of peacemaker are absurd. In recent decades more traditional US militarism has interlaced with the projects of the neoconservatives, a political trend in ruling class politics who regard support for Israel and Zionism as a sacred cause.

There has been a faction based on Jewish ethnic politics within the US ruling class for over a century, but it has become qualitatively more powerful with the rises of the neoliberal offensive and this kind of reaction has increasingly interlaced with more traditional US right wing racism. It has devoted a great deal of effort to promoting its agenda in both parties, but its affinity for Trump has been particularly marked – for good reason. So we see leading ideologues around the Trump administration, alt-right figures like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller – who are both Zionist and white supremacist –  and Richard Spencer proclaim their loud support for the most outrageous Israeli atrocities, and even calling themselves ‘white Zionists’.

Trump destroyed Obama’s Iran Deal, which originally had bipartisan support in the US, at the behest of Israel.  He made the Israel lobby rapture by implementing the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, (which Clinton, Bush and Obama had paid lip service to but never implemented), moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and promoted his ‘deal of the Century’ which openly repudiates the very idea of a Palestinian state and tells Palestinians to accept and live with Israeli overlordship in perpetuity, encouraging Israeli plans to annex the West Bank.

Apart from that he has blown hot and cold in variety of conflicts, using his Twitter account to threaten North Korea and Iran with what sounded very much like nuclear war.  And then not doing much else. But he is also ratcheting up agitation against China, with threats, expansion of the military, trade war measures such as tariffs and abuse of China as supposedly responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Trump made many threats in Latin America, spurring moves to overthrow Chavez’s successor, Maduro in Venezuela, openly supporting the puppet ‘President’ Guaidó. Trump took advantage of the coup against the Workers’ Party in Brazil (orchestrated by the Obama administration) to project the rise to power of his Nazi puppet Bolsonaro.

We do not know in depth the secret coup plots of imperialism. The 2019 coup in Bolivia may have been the only coup articulated directly under Trump’s mandate. That may have been so, if that action was Trump’s favor with Elon Musk, owner of the Tesla electric car multinational. The White House may have done this to bring the owner of the $ 100 billion fortune closer, who has always been ambiguous to receive favors from both imperialist sides. However, our suspicions prevail that even the coup d’état in Bolivia, which occurred during Trump’s term, may also be the work of the Deep State, linked to the historic establishment and the Military Industrial Complex, most influenced by Democrats. Musk has much more political, ideological and strategic affinities with Democrats,

 However, in many of these theatres the US is no longer in quite such a strong position, and Trump’s bluster, and often his excessive preoccupation with far right agitation and causes at home, have meant that he has been a somewhat dysfunctional and ineffective President abroad. Imperialism is the expansionist compulsion of finance capital. Trump has not been very effective in expanding imperialist dominions in the 21st century, nor has he been able to contain the expansion of opponents of that imperialist dominance, especially from China, Russia and Iran. That is why he is dysfunctional. Theodore Roosevelt’s motto was that US imperialism should ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. You could say that Trump’s practice has sometimes been ‘shout loudly and be seen as a bag of wind’. 

To this all must be added the characteristics of candidates for president and vice president. Trump already knows who he is. His deputy, Michael Pence, has been described as the most powerful fundamentalist Christian supremacist in history. These being the beliefs of the members of the Republican ticket, the credentials of the Democratic ticket’s acts are no better. Biden is domestically associated with the Maidan coup and the imperialist parasitism of Ukraine, having profited from the coup orchestrated by the Obama administration, of which Biden was vice president, control of the main Ukrainian Gas company, Burisma, which after Maidan became administered directly by the hands of his son, Hunter Biden. In other words, Biden is a candidate for president who directly benefits from imperialism’s coup foreign policy. 

Fight Fascist Dangers through Independent Workers’ Actions!

If Trump were to consolidate his position as Bush did by winning a clear second term on his overtly white supremacist programme, flirting with fascism as he does, it is quite conceivable that in his second term he could become a very dangerous militarist, particularly in an overtly racist war drive against China. The fictional events in the 2019 BBC/HBO drama Years and Years, set in the near future, that had a second-term Donald Trump launching a nuclear attack against an offshore Chinese island, are not at all far-fetched.

Though the twin bourgeois parties in US politics are both bourgeois, and in no sense politically or electorally supportable, there is a real difference in their social base at this point that does raise the question of which side the left should take in the event that Trump loses the election, but refuses to cede power and tries to hold onto it by force. With his overt support and incitement of white supremacist militias to attack anti-fascists, black militants and the left, such an event would constitute a fascistic danger to the black population and other minorities, and to the American working class movement in general. Trump’s armed supporters do not have the organisation and bourgeois support that was ranged behind Hitler and Mussolini, but they are not harmless either.

If Trump tries to maintain power against his electoral defeat, the left and the labor movement must fight for street mobilizations equal to or greater than the current ones to defeat the coup and fight for a workers’ own solution in the midst of civil war, for a workers’ government. Workers must take part in the front ranks of any struggle to defeat such a Trumpian coup, up to and including the use of large-scale armed actions and civil war, though a full-scale civil war seems unlikely. In immediate terms that would signify the tactical defeat of a reactionary, anti-democratic coup by a bourgeois figure whose views and actions are fascistic and pose a serious threat to our class. Participation by the left and organised labour in such a battle, while refusing any political support to the Democrats, has the potential to strengthen us considerably.

This will not solve the problem of the decline of US imperialism and the rise of barbaric forces out of that decline. Trump is not the cause, but a symptom of that and there will be worse to come if the US working class does not politically arm itself to struggle. The left needs to find ways to approach the large part of the US working class and oppressed populations that still look to the Democrats, to expose that bourgeois party to the vanguard, in order to make headway in rooting a revolutionary programme and party in the working class in the United States, in which black working class people, male and female, must play a crucial, leading role in the struggle for a workers’ government in the US through the socialist revolution, which builds a Soviet Republic of North America.

Statement of Liaison Committee For the Fourth International

Coupists unite around the right wing against the MAS

In 2019 Bolivia suffered the most violent coup d’état in Latin America in the new era of coups initiated by the Obama-Hillary Clinton administration (2009-2017), with the coups in Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012) and Brazil (2016).

The Morales government nationalized the country’s oil, gas, and mineral resources, enabling unprecedented economic growth and the reduction of extreme poverty by nearly 20 percentage points.

In Bolivia, Evo Morales emerged victorious in his campaign for re-election, but was pressured to resign by a civic-police-military coup on a broad political front.

Fascist militiamen and police coupists, backed by the Bolivian Armed Forces (FFAA) threatened to go north, stoned houses and made political arrests against the Morales-led Movement for Socialism (MAS) and its allies. The city hall of Vinto was burned and its MAS mayor, Patricia Arce, was beaten and dragged through the streets, forced to walk barefoot, having her hair cut. Another fascist gang broke into and robbed Evo Morales’ own home. The fascists burned several flags of Whipala, of Andean origin, one of the symbols of the Plurinational State of Bolivia which represents recognition of the diversity of the indigenous peoples that inhabit that territory. 24 people were killed in the clashes, 715 were injured and 50 were arrested. In Cochabamba, police murdered nine Morales supporters during a protest organized by cocaleiros’ (coca-growers) leaders on the president’s return. The new coup government of Jeanine Añez issued a decree to exempt the FFAA and the Bolivian National Police from criminal responsibility in the repression against demonstrations and allow the use of firearms.

Leading the coup against Morales were right-wing anti-communist lackeys, military, police militias, evangelical sects, driven by their own interests and those of billionaires such as Elon Musk, the South African-Canadian-American owner of the multinational corporation Tesla, interested in appropriating the country’s lithium reserves. Lithium is an alkaline metal used in the manufacture of batteries, including for electric cars. Most of the world’s lithium reserves are in Bolivia, which concentrates about a third of the entire world’s supply.

In September 2019, Evo Morales drove the first electric car manufactured 100% in Bolivia, by the Quantum plant in Llajta, Cochabamba, which launched its first cars. The government and the Chinese Embassy in Bolivia have signed a nearly RMB13 billion ($2.3 billion) deal for industrialization of Bolivian lithium and announced that the country would become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. Negotiations between TBEA Group and China Machinery Engineering were cursed by industry competitors in the United States, including Tesla, who were left out of that partnership.

Bringing up the rear, justifying the coup as being part of a supposed popular mobilization and not of the right and imperialism was the Bolivian Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Partido Obrero Revolucionario or POR – Bolivia’s original mass ‘Trotskyist’ party that capitulated to radical-talking bourgeois nationalism in the 1950s). As defender of the doctrine of an Anti-Imperialist United Front, the POR became a make-up artist of a Pro-Imperialist United Front.

Threatened, Evo Morales and his deputy, Álvaro Garcia Linera, were forced to resign and went into exile in the Argentina of Fernandez. Evo was prevented by the coupist judiciary from standing in the elections and even running for Senator, with his candidacy challenged on grounds of not residing in Bolivia.

The coup regime faces the contradictions of needing to restrict representative democracy in the country, prevent the return of popular former rulers and at the same time legitimize itself through new elections so as not to seem what it is, a dictatorship of capital and imperialism that seeks to monopolise/steal water, gas, lithium and the labour of the Bolivian proletariat. It does not even tolerate coexistence with sectors that seek to reform the extreme inequality created by the semicolonial condition of the Bolivian proletariat, and the country itself.

After months trying to ‘wait out’ the call for new elections, relying on the pandemic, the coup government is struggling to censor and manipulate polls that do not favour it. Worse, after the September polls, which indicated a possible victory, already in the first round, of Luis Arce, the presidential candidate of the MAS and former economics minister under Morales, the right urgently tried gathering the coup forces behind the traditional right-wing candidate, Carlos Mesa. Arce appeared to have 40 % of intending voters; Mesa 26 %, the far-right candidate Luis Camacho, 14 % and Jeanine Áñez, fourth, with 10 %. This picture forced Añez, the original coupist president of the country with Evo Morales’ resignation, to resign her candidacy. To avoid a runoff, the winner of the election must obtain at least 40% of the votes in the first, and a lead of at least 10% over the runner-up. Other polls since then indicate a growth of growth of support for Mesa, and a second round.

The coup government of Áñez suspended operations and negotiations initiated by Evo on the exploitation of Lithium. The programmes for presidential government of Mesa, Camacho and Áñez (when she was a candidate) advocated the privatization of lithium, its subordination to prices in the international market as traded on the Stock Exchanges and, as if trying to take the exploitation of the ore out of focus, minimized its importance to Bolivia.

Arce, the MAS candidate declared:

“Companies that want to extract our lithium will be welcome as long as they provide employment and produce in Bolivia. We want to produce our Bolivian batteries so that we can export them, obtaining another source of income for the Bolivian economy.”

He intends to keep the additional 32% tax on hydrocarbons. In Arce’s assessment, foreign interest in Bolivian minerals is so great that any exemption would be unnecessary and would represent an affront to national sovereignty.

Most Latin American left-wing bourgeois governments believed that they would be allowed to govern quietly as long as they did not break international economic dependency agreements with imperialism or threaten private ownership of the means of production. Bad mistake. After the 2008 Financial Crisis and China’s expanding influence in the world market, becoming the main trading partner, buyer and exporter to Latin American countries, the U.S. countered by overthrowing governments on the continent that operated this approach to China.

What is MAS?

The MAS, or MAS-ISPS (Movimiento Al Socialismo – Political Instrument por la Soberanía de los Pueblos) defines itself as a “political instrument”, because it acts simultaneously as a political party and a federation of social movements. THE MAS-ISPS presents itself as different from traditional parties, including the left, such as the Workers’ Party of Brazil. Article 42 of its Statutes provided that candidates in national and local elections should be chosen by direct vote in assemblies. From 1999 to 2002 most MAS-IPSP candidates were chosen by this method. From the 2002 elections some candidates were nominated by Evo Morales. As a party of social movements and trade union confederations, THE MAS-IPSP aggregates CSUTCB (United Confederation of Unions of Worker Peasants of Bolivia), CSCB (Syndicalist Confederation of Bolivian Colonisers) and the Bartolina Sisa Federation, the National Confederation of Rural Teachers, the National Confederation of Rivers and Pensioners, the National Confederation of Micro and Small Enterprise (Conamype), the National Federation of Mining Cooperatives (Fencomin, which claims to have about 40,000 members) and the combative Regional Workers Center (COR) of El Alto. The Bolivian Center of The Work Unit (COB) and the National Council of Ayllus and Markas de Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) are not part of the MAS-IPSP but have critically supported the government.

MAS-ISPS has its origins in the organization of coca-growing workers in the Chapare region, under the leadership of Evo Morales in 1987 as Movimiento al Socialismo-Unzaguista. Evo’s election victory and nearly 14 years in office were based on the struggle of poor workers and Bolivian indigenous populations. THE MAS claims to be heir to the Bolivian Socialist Phalanx (FSB) a party founded in 1937 by Oscar Unzaga, who proposed a Bolivian nationalism in opposition to foreign currents such as capitalism, Marxism, and fascism. By this trend, the MAS government promoted several nationalizations of hydrocarbons, especially gas, the country’s main source of foreign exchange.

Subsidiaries of Hispana YPF-Repsol, British Ashmore and British Petroleum and the Peruvian-German consortium CLBH were nationalised; the state-owned YPFB Petroleum company transformed into a corporation to direct the nationalization of oil and the Bolivian Hydrocarbon Industrialization Company (EBIH) created. The Bolivian state acquired 100% of Compañía Logística de Hidrocarburos (in Peruvian and German hands) and the telephone company Entel, a subsidiary of Italian Telecom. It recovered the majority stake (50% + 1 stake) in Chaco oil companies, Panamerican Energy (British Petroleum group); It nationalized the Andean company, a subsidiary of Repsol YPF; and Transredes, a hydrocarbon carrier owned by British company Ahsmore and Anglo-Dutch Shell.

Evo Morales nationalized the Huanuni tin mine; the oil company Chaco, owned by British Petroleum (BP) and Argentina’s Bridas, whom it accused of taking $277 million out of the country in 2008. The Bolivian government expropriated 36,000 hectares of land from landowners (15,000 of the American larsen metenbrink family), accusing them of subjecting the Guarani Indians to servitude. It promoted the expropriation of the shares of four subsidiaries of the Spanish energy company Iberdrola; Air BP, a subsidiary of British Petroleum and dedicated to fuel distribution at Bolivian airports. Morales nationalized four electricity companies: Corani, 50% owned by Ecoenergy International, a subsidiary of France’s GDF Suez; Guaracachi, whose main shareholder (with 50%) was the British Rurelec PLC; Valle Hermoso, whose 50% of the capital was in the hands of the Bolivian Generator Group of the Pan American of Bolivia; and the distribution cooperative Empresa de Luis e Ferza Eléctrica de Cochabamba. Evo Morales has privately held the shares of Red Eléctrica Española (REEE) in the company Transportadora de Electricidad (TDE). [1]

Despite all these and other progressive measures, the MAS government is part of those governments that are not prepared to stand up to the reaction and resentment of imperialism, the bourgeoisie, and the local middle classes. The whole process has its particularities and singularities, in the Bolivian case, there is the historical racism of the bourgeoisie against the various indigenous ethnic groups, which turned against Morales and the majority of the population. THE MAS fell easily under pressure from the coup movement, after making concessions to pressure from the pro-imperialist right as in the surrender of the political refugee Cesare Batistte, former activist of the group Proletarians Armed by Communism, to life imprisonment by Italian imperialism.

The rejection of Marxism by MAS, its non-identification of imperialism and capitalism as enemies and its misunderstanding of class struggle took its toll. When the coup appeared, the resistance aimed at crushing coupists that had not been prepared for a decade and a half of government, favored the enemy.

Things happened differently in Maduro’s Venezuela, which prudently nullified the powers of the coup-majority Congress with a Constituent Assembly and armed part of the working population to defend the popular government in a political and military way, even though the conciliatory illusions of chavismo in Venezuela still keep it vulnerable by not advancing the social and economic expropriation of the coupist bourgeoisie.

By the time Morales and MAS recognized their mistake it was too late. In January 2020, a Bolivian radio station released a recording in which Morales reiterated that he had been the victim of a “coup d’état” during a meeting with supporters in Argentina. And ensuring that:

“I want you to know that in a short time, if I come back or anyone comes back, we have to organize the armed militias of the people like in Venezuela.”

However, under pressure from the coup government and bourgeois public opinion, Morales recanted in a letter saying:

A few days ago, my words were made public about the formation of militias. I retract them. My deepest conviction has always been the defense of life and peace. [2]

The workers, who are the biggest losers of the coup process, should have as a tactic an anti-imperialist united front in these elections, with a vote for the candidacy of MAS, but without feeding illusion that this victory will be respected by the coupists, and simultaneously must go beyond the limited program of MAS through strikes and battles in the streets, for the disarmament and expropriation of the coupists.

Notes

1.  https://www.lainformacion.com/economia-negocios-y-finanzas/empresas-nacionalizadas-durante-los-mandatos-de-evo-morales_MZ2g1pEpcncA9nan9xzzM7/

2. https://www.dw.com/pt-br/evo-recua-e-diz-que-n%C3%A3o-pretende-mais-criar-mil%C3%ADcias/a-52035045

Break with the Democrats! No Political Support to Biden!

The upcoming US Presidential Election is going to be the most dangerous and incendiary in many years, as US ‘democracy’ and its aspirations for social and political stability are acutely threatened by the prospect that even if defeated, Donald Trump will not accept that and will fight to hang onto power come what may. Trump’s infection with Covid-19 may have thrown a spanner in the works of his aspirations to be an US reprise of someone like Louis Bonaparte, able to subvert and manipulate a highly undemocratic ‘democratic’ system to obtain and maintain power without obtaining a majority, or even a plurality, of the popular vote.

Many of Trump’s supporters regarded it as a badge of honour to sneer at the pandemic and to refuse to carry out basic public health measures such as wearing masks: now a considerable and growing list of White House staff, Republican officials and even senior military officers have been infected, which promises to play havoc with his election effort and other Republican projects like packing the Supreme Court with anti-abortion fanatics.

But it is still possible that there could be a major confrontation between different bourgeois factions in the election aftermath, and given the different social and electoral bases of these factions, this could produce major polarisations and even conflict between different layers of the working class population in the US, as well as posing a major threat to democratic rights and social gains.

From the point of view of a rational policy for US imperialism, Trump’s administration is dysfunctional. But then again, even from the standpoint of formal democracy, the US Constitution itself is dysfunctional. This is not something to celebrate for the working class, however, whose interests are fundamentally at odds with those of US capitalism. For the irrationalities of the US constitution and political setup do not in any way benefit the working class and the overlapping doubly oppressed sections of our class that are particular targets of some of the political system’s worst features.

The United States is not a ‘normal’ bourgeois national state as can be seen most classically in Europe and Japan. It is a colonial settler state, founded through genocide of the native peoples of the various ‘Indian’ nations, which marks it as a society founded on racist barbarism at its very roots. The other foundation of US ‘democracy’ is the abduction and enslavement of its black population from Africa. Its entire history has been particularly marked by the struggles of the black population for basic rights and equality.

Initially against slavery in the 19^th Century, then against the Jim Crow forcible segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror that succeeded it, a struggle that culminated with the achievement of formal legal equality as a result of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Civil Rights movement stopped at that point, failing to go further and touch the huge economic inequality and impoverishment of the black population that centuries of racial oppression under capitalism have given rise to.

The end of the Civil Rights movement saw the black population of Northern ghettos rise up and fight racist cops alongside their brethren in the South, partly under the banner of Black Power, and the Rev. Martin Luther King’s liberal-pacifism challenged by the rise of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and other quasi-revolutionary movements such as SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), DRUM (Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to mention only a few. But this radicalisation failed to crystallise an authoritative, working class and revolutionary party and over time, this led to these movements falling prey to repression from the state, disillusionment, and demoralisation.

Neoliberal attacks and racist offensive hand-in-hand

The failure of the Civil Rights movement and its semi-nationalist ‘radical’ sequel to lead to a struggle against the capitalist double exploitation and oppression of the black masses led from the late 1970s to neo-liberalism taking the offensive against the black population through cuts in poverty programmes, crackdowns on so-called ‘law and order’, restoration of the death penalty in 1976, which particularly targeted blacks who were disproportionately driven into a life of poverty and degradation. Such intensified oppression breeds a degree of crime that can then be exploited by racists to further impoverish the black masses, while at the same time promoting a middle-class black layer of collaborators with the system.

This carried on through the Reagan and elder Bush administrations with the ‘War on Drugs’ which was actually a war on the black masses, then intensified under Clinton with the passage of various ‘omnibus’ anti-crime bills and ‘effective death penalty’ acts, continuing under the succeeding GW Bush administration. This gave rise to the situation today, where the United States has 2.3 million people in jail, around 40 per cent of whom are black. The imprisonment rate of blacks to whites in the US in 2018 was 1501 per 100,000, as opposed to 268 per 100,000 for whites – a rate nearly 6 times greater.

Over the period mainly covered by the Obama administration, and the conditions that gave rise to it, it appears that there was a certain decline in the degree of disproportionality of Black imprisonment, from over ninefold in 2006 to ‘only’ close to sixfold in 2018 (see https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-hispanic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/). But the response to such a relative lessening of the worst outrages under the first black President was determined effort by the neoliberal right to raise up Trump, an overt racist, to succeed Obama.

The campaign of gerrymandering and voter suppression that drove the white supremacist backlash against the Obama presidency was considerable, and led to Trump being able to win the Electoral College in 2016 despite in the national popular vote losing to the Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton, by nearly three million votes. Even though Hillary Clinton was an integral part of the Bill Clinton administration responsible for earlier appalling legal attacks, she paid the price for her party bringing forth a black President. This underlines why the obviously undemocratic Electoral College system, the legacy of incremental white settler expansion and many racist wars, has been preserved – as a firebreak against the multi-racial big city populations where the working class can be most potent and political.

This is the nature of the class struggle in the United States. The struggle against the double oppression of the black working class and poor suffuses the entire class struggle of the US working class and gives it a special character, in which race and class are closely linked and class questions are modified by considerations of racial oppression. It also is at the root of the ‘gun culture’ in the US: the Second Amendment – the Right to Bear Arms – always was about arming the white settler population to massacre the native nations of this part of North America, and to keep the Black population enslaved and segregated.

The epidemic of ‘mass shootings’ in the US is linked to the pathology of a society poisoned by lynch law and the suppression of social issues by violence. It is not the mere presence of arms that determines the killings: in other societies where arms are widespread, from rich countries like Switzerland to poor ones like the Philippines, such mass shootings are rare, as the deeply embedded racist pathology that pollutes this racist settler society is absent.

There are other questions that modify the US class struggle. The question of immigration is of considerable significance in US racism, as the entire white Anglo-derived population stands on the shoulders of violent white settlers who slaughtered the native tribes to the brink of non-existence; hence the complaints of white ‘nativists’ about Spanish-speaking immigrants from poorer semi-colonial countries to the South have an overtly racist and hypocritical character. This also overlaps with the US imperialist brutalisation of the peoples of the entire territory of the Americas.

The United States is the most dangerous imperialist power in history, with a truly global reach and the weaponry to destroy humanity many times over. Therefore, its defeat and disintegration are in the interests of the world proletariat and that of the great mass of humanity.

Trumpian Reaction and Imperialist Decline

The Trump administration and its irrationalities are a product of US imperialism’s decline and the ebbing of its power, getting involved in numerous wars that it has struggled with, most notably in the Middle East: Iraq, Afghanistan, and more covertly Syria. Two issues brought Trump to power: one being domestic racism, anti-immigration sentiment and support for white supremacy among parts of the former industrial, mainly white working class of the ‘rust belt’ states in the US interior, whose jobs have often been exported to lower wage developing countries by the US bourgeoisie, desperately seeking additional profits to offset the continuing decline of profit rates that are a crippling, fundamental contradiction of capitalism and endemic in this period of advanced capitalist decline and decay.

The other, linked element of Trumpism is a degree of reactionary, right-wing isolationism. This sentiment among ultra-reactionary sections of American business is not against imperialist militarism as such, but rather about their desire to ‘sort out’ uppity blacks, women and other oppressed groups who need to be ‘put in their place’ to re-establish unquestioned white, male supremacy at home. ‘Make America Great Again’ is about reimposing white supremacy as a path to a future imperialist offensive.

The abstract model of capitalism is that anyone’s money is as good as anyone else’s, the ethnic origin of those being exploited by capital being theoretically irrelevant.  ‘Actually existing’ capitalism, however, does not work like that, and the United States is a particularly extreme example. Its very foundation was bound up with racial supremacism, slavery, and genocide, whereas in Europe these things are often seen as external products of ‘empire’.  So much of its ruling class, and much of the majority Anglo-European population, are deeply embedded in supremacism. But demographic change, the decline of the industrial ‘aristocratic’ industrial working class in the rustbelt, and the continued expansion of the coastal cities through immigration have changed the demographic balance so that US residents of white European settler origin will cease to be a majority in the next two or three decades.

So you see major social tensions between different sections of the ruling class, one of which is ‘rolling with’ the demographic shifts and even basing itself to a degree on the black population and other oppressed populations, the other of which is either fighting against it, or at least seeking to exploit discontent among ‘left behind’ sections of the rust-belt lumpen semi-proletariat to promote a thinly-veiled white-male supremacist agenda.

The widespread involvement of Republicans in voter suppression is an indication of this, as is the overt support of Trump for paramilitary fascist/white supremacist groups like the ‘Proud Boys’, and the drive to appoint an ultra-reactionary anti-abortion Catholic fanatic,  Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court, obviously aiming at overturning the 1973 Roe v Wade judgement that prevented states from banning abortion, as well as possibly intervening on the side of Trump in any legal battle over a contested election defeat. Trump’s support for armed militia racist terrorists against the Black Lives Matter movement that has emerged over the past several years as a result of the unremitting terrorisation and promiscuous murdering of black people by the cops, is particularly ominous and indicates that he is quite prepared to support and incite fascist massacres to try to hold onto power. As indeed is his use of federal forces for similar purposes, particularly in Portland, Oregon over the last months.

No Political Support to Democrats!

The political conclusions that we draw from this analysis is that we can politically support neither side in this election. Both wings in terms of their programme and leadership are thoroughly bourgeois. Both parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are in no sense creations of the working class. They are ruling class parties that it is a matter of principle for those who stand for the class independence of the workers to refuse to advocate votes for or politically support in any way.

However, that is not the end of it. The social bases of the two parties are different even if the class nature of them are both bourgeois. The social base of the Democrats is in the big city, genuinely multi-racial elements of the working class where there is an element of anti-racist, working class radicalisation that ought to be the seedbed of a genuine workers movement. This was illustrated in the last presidential election campaign, as well as this one, by the two bids for the Democratic Party presidential nomination by the social democrat Bernie Sanders, who ran on a programme particularly focussed on the demand for free healthcare, or ‘Medicare for All’.

Sanders was bidding for the nomination for President on the ticket of a bourgeois party. Yet in a sense he was propelled toward that by a class-conscious element within the base of that party. To say that is not to politically support the Democratic Party or anyone within it, including Sanders. It would be unprincipled to support Sanders’ battle for the nomination of the ‘liberal’ magnates’ party but it would be correct to demand that his supporters break from the Democrats and fight openly for the creation of an independent working class party in the US. If they could have been pushed into that, then revolutionaries could have given Sanders, or someone like him, very critical support.

Counterposed to that is Trump’s base in the rust belt ex-working class, who were won to his right-wing populist programme of banning Muslims from the US, bashing ‘foreigners’ and oppressed groups, protectionism against China, and supposedly keeping the US out of aggressive wars in the Middle East particularly, partly out of impotent disillusion with the 40 years of neoliberal attacks, givebacks to the bosses, and the prolonged decline of living standards since the days of Ronald Reagan.

Class-based disillusionment with Obama drove some parts of the working class towards Trump in 2016. It was mainly a reactionary vote but not exclusively so. Sanders might have won over a layer, though not the bulk, of Trump’s support if he had been able to run, some Trumpers who had previously supported Obama. Obama won a landslide victory in 2008 driven by sentiment particularly regarding his promises regarding healthcare and to get the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan, to close Guantanamo, etc. But while he delivered a healthcare reform that falls a long way short of universal free public healthcare, and while he signed a Deal with Iran that made a US attack on Iran less likely in the short term, he also launched new wars in Libya and Syria, that Trump was able to gain some support by criticising.

So while a section of Trump’s base were  driven to support him by his isolationist attacks on some recent US wars including Obama’s, and Trump has not been able to launch much in the way of any new wars in this presidency, the view of Trump as some sort of peacemaker are absurd. In recent decades more traditional US militarism has interlaced with the projects of the neoconservatives, a political trend in ruling class politics who regard support for Israel and Zionism as a sacred cause.

 There has been a faction based on Jewish ethnic politics within the US ruling class for over a century, but it has become qualitatively more powerful with the rises of the neoliberal offensive and this kind of reaction has increasingly interlaced with more traditional US right wing racism. It has devoted a great deal of effort to promoting its agenda in both parties, but its affinity for Trump has been particularly marked – for good reason. So we see leading ideologues around the Trump administration, alt-right figures like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller – who is both Jewish and a white supremacist –  and Richard Spencer proclaim their loud support for the most outrageous Israeli atrocities, and even calling themselves ‘white Zionists’.

Trump destroyed Obama’s Iran Deal, which originally had bipartisan support in the US, at the behest of Israel.  He made the Israel lobby rapture by implementing the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, (which Clinton, Bush and Obama had paid lip service to but never implemented), moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and promoted his ‘deal of the Century’ which openly repudiates the very idea of a Palestinian state and tells Palestinians to accept and live with Israeli overlordship in perpetuity, encouraging Israeli plans to annex the West Bank.

Apart from that he has blown hot and cold in variety of conflicts, using his Twitter account to threaten North Korea and Iran with what sounded very much like nuclear war.  And then not doing much else. But he is also ratcheting up agitation against China, with threats, expansion of the military, trade war measures such as tariffs and abuse of China as supposedly responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. He has launched coups in Latin America, attempting to overthrow Chavez’ successor Maduro in Venezuela by overtly backing a stooge ‘President’ Guaido, inspiring and assisting the coup against the Workers Party in Brazil and rise of power of the Nazi Bolsonaro, and more recently the coup in Bolivia that overthrew Evo Morales.

 However, in many of these theatres the US is no longer in quite such a strong position, and Trump’s bluster, and often his excessive preoccupation with far right agitation and causes at home, have meant that he has been a somewhat dysfunctional and ineffective President abroad. Theodore Roosevelt’s motto was that US imperialism should ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. You could say that Trump’s practice has sometimes been ‘shout loudly and be seen as a bag of wind’. It may well be that a Democratic party president such as Biden or Kamala Harris, repudiating Trump’s overtly racist and misogynistic preoccupations at home, could be more effective at defending the interests of US imperialism in the wider world. 

Fight Fascist Dangers through Independent Workers’ Actions!

But this is not clear: though at this point it appears remote, if Trump were to consolidate his position as Bush did by winning a clear second term on his overtly white supremacist programme, flirting with fascism as he does, it is quite conceivable that in his second term he could become a very dangerous militarist, particularly in an overtly racist war drive against China. The fictional events in the 2019 BBC/HBO drama Years and Years, set in the near future, that had a second-term Donald Trump launching a nuclear attack against an offshore Chinese island, are not at all far-fetched.

Though the twin bourgeois parties in US politics are both bourgeois, and in no sense politically or electorally supportable, there is a real difference in their social base at this point that does raise the question of which side the left should take in the event that Trump loses the election, but refuses to cede power and tries to hold onto it by force. With his overt support and incitement of white supremacist militias to attack anti-fascists, black militants and the left, such an event would constitute a fascistic danger to the black population and other minorities, and to the American working class movement in general. Trump’s armed supporters do not have the organisation and bourgeois support that was ranged behind Hitler and Mussolini, but they are not harmless either.

If Trump attempts to hold power against his election defeat the left and labour movement should demand the seating of the legitimately election winner, likely Biden, as President. They should take part in the front ranks of any struggle to defeat such a Trumpian coup, up to and including the use of large-scale armed actions and civil war, though a full-scale civil war seems unlikely. In immediate terms that would signify the tactical defeat of a reactionary, anti-democratic coup by a bourgeois figure whose views and actions are fascistic and pose a serious threat to our class. Participation by the left and organised labour in such a battle, while refusing any political support to the Democrats, has the potential to strengthen us considerably.

This will not solve the problem of the decline of US imperialism and the rise of barbaric forces out of that decline. Trump is not the cause, but a symptom of that and there will be worse to come if the US working class does not politically arm itself to struggle. The left needs to find ways to approach the large part of the US working class and oppressed populations that still look to the Democrats, to expose that bourgeois party to the vanguard, in order to make headway in rooting a revolutionary programme and party in the working class in the United States, in which black working class people, male and female, must play a crucial, leading role.

Exposing the operations of the new hybrid war “spring” of American, European and Zionist imperialism!

Statement of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International

The economic crisis, aggravated by the recession derived from the coronavirus pandemic, produced a new intercontinental “spring” of colour Revolutions in the second half of 2020. This process is most advanced in three countries: Lebanon, Belarus and Argentina.

Class war does not cease during tragedies. On the contrary, when the living conditions of their victims worsen, the predators of big capital take advantage to deal heavier blows. Reduced wages and mass layoffs are almost a worldwide practice of companies during the pandemic.

Large corporations in high technology, online retail and the pharmaceutical industry have seen their sales and share-prices skyrocket: this is the case for Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Tencent, Facebook, Nvidia, Alphabet (Google), Paypal, and TMobile, to list the top ten with the highest profitability. In the midst of a pandemic, the U.S. government orchestrated an attempted maritime invasion of Venezuela by mercenaries, accused Maduro of drug trafficking, and offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Also, during this period, the Trump administration maintained or escalated sanctions against Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Russia and China. Israel attacked the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip mercilessly with air strikes and artillery fire. Domestically, bourgeois governments take advantage of the situation to remove democratic rights, carry out counter-reforms, reduce public investments.

In 2019, Evo Morales was re-elected with a large margin of votes. The pro-imperialist right’s candidacy did not admit the result and began a coup process with large demonstrations, fascist attacks, military-police blackmail until the coup d’état was consummated with the resignation of Evo Morales, who did not even finish his current term. On July 24, 2020, in response to a social media post that mentioned Elon Musk’s interests in preventing Morales from remaining in power, the billionaire, owner of the high-tech multinational carmaker, Tesla, and equipment supplier to the U.S. Air Force, wrote on his Twitter account: ” We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it. ” The largest lithium reserve in the world is in Bolivia. Lithium ion is the main component of Tesla electric vehicle batteries.

Lebanon

On August 4, a massive explosion occurred in the Port of Beirut. The attack destroyed much of the East of the Lebanese capital, killed approximately two hundred people, injured more than 6,000, and rendered 300,000 homeless. A large “mushroom” cloud was formed, very different from what can be seen in conventional explosions.

Among the hypotheses raised for the explosion is that it was an attack of imperialist sabotage with a new weapon, similar to the explosion that was recorded in Syria in January 2020. It is no secret to anyone that Israel’s two main military defeats in the 21st century were directly influenced by the Lebanese guerrilla group and political party Hezbollah. In 2006, the Israeli infantry was humiliatingly defeated in their invasion of southern Lebanon to disarm and crush Hezbollah.

Since 2011, a hybrid war against Syria has been unleashed by the US and Israel as part of the “Arab Spring.” In this last war, Hezbollah was one of the main forces of the resistance, along with the Syrian Army itself, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Russian military. The hybrid war against Syria was defeated. Those allied with imperialism included the bloodthirsty ISIS, the so-called Islamic State. This was a great victory for the world proletariat against the expansionism of imperialist financial capital in the Middle East.

The Israeli right has long identified the Port of Beirut as an area controlled by Hezbollah. Benjamin Netanyahu had pointed to exactly the same location, and denounced it as Hezbollah’s weapons depot, at the UN Assembly on September 27, 2018. If Israel was behind the attack, it is very likely that Zionist military intelligence planned that a large-scale explosion in this port region depot, dumped in the Lebanese government’s lap could, with a single blow, impose political and military losses on Hezbollah.

Whether the explosion was the product of political irresponsibility or intentional sabotage of some secret service, is not yet known. That’s in the field of speculation. But it is a proven fact that the tragedy has provided supporters of Lebanon’s imperialist political agents, socially supported by fractions of the bourgeoisie and middle-class sectors, to reactivate protests against Hezbollah and the ruling coalition that houses it. The American and Zionist imperialisms set in motion their fake news machine to plant their versions of what happened.

Al-Arabiya TV news channel said the explosion occurred at an arms depot belonging to the ‘terrorist group’ Hezbollah. Fox News reported that many of the port’s operations are unofficially controlled by Hezbollah. Demonstrators took to the streets of Beirut with Lebanese flags and posters in English that said,

“Help! We are hostages to a corrupt government and an Iranian religious militia” (Lebanon, the Orange Counter-Revolution after the tragedy. https://frentecomunistatrabalhadores.blogspot.com/2020/08/libano-contra-revolucao-laranja-apos.html).

Under intense pressure, the entire government of the Prime Minister, Hassan Diab, was forced to resign. The first political battle of this hybrid war, initiated by means of this explosion, was won by imperialism.

Belarus

On August 9, an election took place in Belarus (formerly Byelorussia or White Russia). The results gave victory to former Stalinist bureaucrat Alexander Lukashenko against his rival, the “independent” candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, representative of a neoliberal and pro-NATO program. The result gave an overwhelming majority, 80% of the votes, to Lukashenko. It was probably tampered with and gave rise to a new protest movement in the country.

The Belarusian regime is an anomaly. Lukashenko’s local bureaucratic government came to power after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, but managed to avoid, through its declaration of independence, the massive neoliberal shock treatment and economic destruction that afflicted Russia under the Yeltin regime.

Belarus can perhaps be described as the only place in the former USSR where the old Stalinist oligarchy managed to cling to power after the August 1991 coup. Lukashenko came to personify this local bureaucratic faction. It cannot be argued that Belarus managed to remain a deformed workers’ state,but , as a local bureaucratic fiefdom, it slowed the process of capitalist restoration, more or less in the same way that ‘Gang of Eight’ directed by Yanayev wanted in August 1991 in the former USSR, keeping it under the control of sectors of bureaucracy. The Yanayev project was similar to that of Chinese bureaucracy, capitalist restoration, but in an organic way, planned and controlled by a state party whose origins were those of a degenerate/deformed workers state.

As Wikipedia noted:

“After the election of Alexander Lukashenko in 1994 as the first president of Belarus, he launched the country on the path of ‘market socialism’ (as opposed to what Lukashenko regarded as ‘savage capitalism’, chosen by Russia at the time). In line with this policy, administrative controls on prices and exchange rates have been introduced. In addition, the state’s right to intervene in the management of the private company was expanded, but on March 4, 2008, the president issued a decree abolishing the golden share rule in a clear move to improve Belarus’s international classification in relation to foreign investment. ” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Belarus)

We have no illusions in the Lukashenko regime, but the protest movement follows the modus operandi of all recent coups: it was orchestrated after the contestation of the election results, right-wing protesters, against corruption, national and Nazi flags, predominance of the middle class and a few disorganized workers. Something that is somewhat worrisome is the presence of red and white “Belarusian” flags, used by pro-Nazi elements in World War II, demonstrations, leaders’ links with Ukraine and the Baltic States, and the evocation of the Maidan movement in Ukraine as an example to be imitated.

Unlike in Ukraine, under both Tsarism and Stalinism, a real national oppression in Belarus has not been historically true, as the national sentiment of Belarus was generally pro-Russian and emphasized Belarus’s affinity with Russia, even under Tsarism. Importantly, the use of symbols used by a fringe of Nazi collaborators in these demonstrations today has far less history behind it than Ukraine, and actually indicates that the inspiration of this movement comes from outside, from neoliberal tendencies, and not from something deeply rooted among the masses, despite Lukashenko’s despotism.

Behind the Nazi-neoliberal shock squad it is clear what the imperialists want. The World Bank’s prescription for the country is as follows:

“More urgently, Belarus’s state-owned business sector needs comprehensive restructuring. And what would that entail?

• First, keep for-profit state enterprises public or privatize them transparently at fair market prices.

• Second, keep public service providers and public regulators, but clearly define what they should provide in exchange for public funds.

• Third, restructure the loss-making state-owned companies that could quickly become profitable, providing a good return on any extra investment.

• And for everything else: closure or privatization.

The classification of companies in these categories should be made by independent experts in order to obtain objective assessments of which businesses are viable or not. “

(Why economic reforms in Belarus are now more urgent than ever, https://blogs.worldbank.org/europeandcentralasia/why-economic-reforms-belarus-are-now-more-urgent-ever-0)

Despite all Lukashenko’s corruption and undemocratic despotism, his government is the lesser evil. We saw the massive decline in life expectancy in Russia caused by Yeltsin’s economic shock in that country. The same will happen in Belarus if the neoliberals take power. We do not give him political support; in fact, the class-conscious proletariat in the former USSR needs to be rearmed politically through the creation of a new Bolshevik-Leninist Party in the region, but we defend the fragmentary social gains that have still been maintained in Belarus since the Soviet period, even if by bureaucratic inertia. We defend Belarus and Russia as relatively backward and non-imperialist capitalist countries. We consider Belarus as a semi-colonial country and Russia as a dependent country. We defend these two countries against imperialist representatives seeking “regime change” and “colour revolutions” like those now taking place in Belarus.

Against this offensive of our worst enemies, we call for a single anti-fascist and anti-imperialist front, with Lukashenko and Putin, against this revolution made by the CIA, to defend the social achievements still existing in Belarus, the nationalized property, against neoliberal privatization. This is one side of the objectives of our anti-fascist and anti-imperialist united front tactics. The other objective of this tactic is to struggle to overcome the illusions of the masses in Lukashenko and Putin. As in Ukraine, because of his bourgeois nature, Putin is not consistent in the anti-imperialist struggle or in supporting the fight against the fascist uprising inspired by NATO.

Argentina

Amid the decline of US hegemony, and divisions within US imperialism, sectors of the Republican political establishment itself are abandoning Trump.

Kichnerism and its allies take advantage of the crisis of US domination to deepen negotiations between the Peronist Justicalista Party and the Chinese Communst Party, boosting Argentina’s access to the ‘Silk Road’ and obtaining Chinese financing for infrastructure works in Argentina. In 2019, China became Argentina’s main buyer.

On August 6, 2020, 43% of the Argentine central bank’s reserves consisted of a swap in Yuan traded with China. In this swap financial operation, the Central Bank of China stepped in to pledge that it will invest billions of dollars to cover the devaluation of the Argentine currency, which may occur over the next three years.

Today, after Venezuela, Argentina is the closest country to the Russian/Chinese bloc in South America. That is why American imperialism uses hybrid warfare methods as embryonicly seen in the mobilization of August 17, to pressure and destabilize the government of Alberto Fernández.

Alberto Fernández also advanced measures such as freezing internet, mobile and cable television tariffs, declaring them public services. These measures harm the multimedia group Clarín, the main media consortium of Argentina.

Finally, since the formation of the official Frente De Todos (Front of Everyone) coalition, a judicial reform was instituted as a preventive measure against legal war, or  lawfare, which has been used in different countries by imperialism, such as the so-called Operation Lava Jato that began the coup process in Brazil in 2016.

In this context, the trends that have manifested since the mobilizations against the expropriation of Vicentin have taken a qualitative leap forward and demonstrate that in Argentina an incipient hybrid war driven by imperialism and its local agents is underway. Opposition sectors, mainly linked to former President Macri and his right-wing coalition Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change) with an important element of the upper middle class that were supporters of the government, demonstrated against the Fernandez government. Macri supported the demonstration and his former Security Minister Patricia Bulrrich was one of the main drivers and participants in it.

Until the August 17 demonstration, the axis of the mobilisation was opposition to Fernandez’s judicial reform. In this war it is evident that the manipulation of online social networks, encouraged by all the opposition media, through disinformation: “news” that overestimates, nationally and internationally, the true magnitude of the opposition. In addition to this central political axis, the August 17 demonstration also incorporated the reactionary discontent of the merchant sectors, the small, medium and large bourgeoisie, against Covid-19 quarantine measures.

Under this same dynamic a new mobilization was called for August 26, when the Senate will vote on judicial reform.

Hybrid warfare is a weapon of imperialism that, ultimately, aims to consolidate parasitism on exploitation for surplus value suffered by workers. It aims to bring to power those who want political changes that represent their class interests, such as the end of social distancing.

Tactically, the working class require an anti-imperialist united front against the U.S. and its local Macrista agents because they oppose the rise of this parasitism. But it is necessary to organize in a politically independent way, criticizing the bourgeois limits of the Fernandez government in the struggle for national liberation against international big capital, including the social, economic and political costs of the Argentine debt to China.

The fight against the hybrid wars of imperialism, the national question and the Permanent Revolution

Imperialism lost almost all its colonial wars of military occupation. The US’s greatest trauma was Vietnam in 1975. So, it modified its methods of war against the oppressed, making use of internal agents, developing hybrid wars, false flag operations, lawfare, counterrevolutionary “popular uprisings”, etc.  So, the CIA and its arms around the world stimulate “revolutions” with anti-corruption programs, democracy and even trade-unionist programmes, like to some extent in Belarus now. These wars of position serve to divide oppressed nations, prevent unified national resistance of oppressed peoples, as has occurred with the heroic Palestinian resistance for more than seventy years.

Imperialism embarks on hybrid warfare campaigns with media and legal offensives to demonize its opponents for “corruption”, “electoral fraud”, “coups d’état” and “dictatorships”. But it is imperialism itself that exercises the dictatorship of capital on a planetary scale and is the greatest corruptor on the planet.  Strategically, imperialism seeks to privatize, loot, expand its parasitism when it is limited in some way by these immediate obstacles.

In the end, it is a struggle between imperialism and the proletariat of oppressed countries. In the fight against imperialism, the revolutionaries seek to overcome the limitations imposed on the struggle by bourgeois nationalist leaders, by Stalinist Parties, etc.

Revolutionaries fight for the strategy of the permanent revolution. Through the common struggle against imperialism, workers are helped to recognise, through experience, that the bourgeois or bourgeois-nationalist leaderships of oppressed peoples are incapable of consistently taking the necessary measures against imperialism. These traditional leaderships always seek agreements to coexist with the international big capital. Such agreements imply negotiations about the redivision of the surplus value created by the proletariat of oppressed nations between the bourgeoisie of the oppressed country and the oppressive monopolies of the imperialist metropolises. For this reason, Marxist revolutionaries maintain their complete political and organizational independence from the bourgeois and nationalist leaderships of oppressed countries, unmasking patriotism when it is used to conceal class exploitation by national exploiters

“The only ‘condition’ for any agreement with the bourgeoisie, because each separate, practical and convenient agreement must be adapted to each specific case, is not to allow both organizations and flags to mix directly or indirectly for a single day or even an hour; it consists in distinguishing between red and blue, and not believing for a moment in the capacity or will of the bourgeoisie to carry out a genuine struggle against imperialism or not to put obstacles to the political organization of workers and peasants.” (Leon Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin, Balance Sheet and Perspectives of the Chinese Revolution, his lessons for the countries of the East and for the whole of the Comintern, September 1928).

Today, organizations of the left globally, including many claiming to be revolutionaries and Trotskyists, give political support to the hybrid war maneuvers of imperialism, the colour revolutions, as if they did not know their results in Lebanon, Ukraine, Brazil, Bolivia. By this traitorous policy, such left-wing organizations help the war campaign of imperialism. These organizations, in addition to acting as a transmission belt of imperialism, renounce, within the semi-colonial or dependent nations, the struggle to bring consciousness to the oppressed peoples against the influence of the neo-Stalinist, bourgeois nationalists and theocrats.

As Lenin said, referring to the nationalist, chauvinistic, opportunistic leaderships of the labor movement within imperialist nations, “the fight against imperialism is a hollow and false phrase if it is not inextricably linked to the struggle against opportunism.” (V.I. Lenin. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916).

The nationalism of oppressor nations is reactionary, it is the “mask of world banditship”, as Trotsky said, referring to Japanese patriotism in the war against China,

“Chinese patriotism is legitimate and progressive. Whoever puts the two patriotisms on the same plane has not read anything of Lenin, who did not understand the attitude of the Bolsheviks during the imperialist war and who does nothing but compromise and prostitute the teachings of Marxism… Efeilists and Oehlerists oppose the ‘national and social-patriotic’ politics of class struggle. All his life, Lenin fought this abstract, sterile policy. The interest of the world proletariat dictates the duty to help the oppressed people against their oppressors in their national and patriotic struggle against imperialism. He who has not understood this to this day, almost a quarter of a century since the World War and twenty years after the October revolution, must be relentlessly departed from the revolutionary vanguard as his worst inner enemy.” (Ultraleftism on the national question, September 23, 1937).

Those leftists who in the name of “class struggle” support the colour revolutions made by the CIA are unconscious or conscious agents of imperialism. They are traitors and internal enemies of the struggle for the national liberation of oppressed peoples. After recent experience in Libya,  Syria, Ukraine, Brazil, Bolivia, such ultra-leftist “revolutionaries” are enemies who act within the workers’ organizations, which need to be treated by the current generation of fighters as they in fact are: part of the  coup offensive, in the service of imperialism and reaction.

A series of seemingly mysterious explosions and ‘accidents’ have rocked Iran in the last few weeks, including attacks on power supplies in Tehran. As Russia Today reported:

“Friday morning’s explosions are the latest in a string of mysterious incidents at industrial facilities, research laboratories, ammunition depots and even the Natanz nuclear research facility. While there has been rampant speculation that these might have resulted from Israeli sabotage or cyberattacks, Tehran has not openly assigned blame, while Tel Aviv has issued carefully worded statements neither confirming nor denying involvement.”

https://www.rt.com/news/494324-iran-explosions-power-outage/

The attack on the Natanz nuclear plant, in Isfahan Province, appears to have done significant damage to Iran’s nuclear programme.  The Financial Times commented on its significance that:

“In recent days, speculation has flourished about what exactly happened at Natanz, an assembly plant for centrifuges used to enrich uranium, and other facilities around Iran.

“Satellite images of Natanz show a 10-metre crater and destroyed roofing material, according to the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington DC. The explosion delivered ‘a major setback to Iran’s abilities to deploy advanced centrifuges on a mass scale for years to come,’ the institute said.

“Iran’s atomic energy organisation has confirmed that the level of damage was ‘considerable’.”

The FT themselves then speculate about the likely authorship of the attacks:

“The explosion definitely seems like an attack by the US or Israel or both like a warning that ‘we are too close to you,’ said an analyst close to reformist circles. ‘The act was big and caused significant [ financial] damage, making Iran’s tensions with the US even more complicated than before.’

“A group called the ‘Cheetahs of the Homeland’ has claimed responsibility. The group’s statement, sent by the Telegram messaging app, said they were former Iranian intelligence and security agents who want to overthrow the Islamic republic. It said more attacks similar to the one at Natanz were planned.”

https://www.ft.com/content/03f29421-cab2-4baf-a5c3-be7e5893b90e

Middle Eastern Eye noted that:

“A Middle Eastern intelligence official with knowledge of the incident told The New York Times that contrary to the Iranian government’s initial statement that it was an accident, a ‘powerful bomb’ caused Thursday’s fire.”

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-nuclear-israel-fire-tehran-uranium-site

And Russia Today, again, has Israel not exactly straining to deny all involvement, undoubtedly as part of the psychological component of the Zionists’ ongoing war drive against Iran:

“’Not every incident that transpires in Iran necessarily has something to do with us,’ Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said on Sunday. Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi went even further, saying that in seeking to block Iran from developing nuclear capability, ‘we take actions that are better left unsaid.’”

ibid

So it looks highly likely that this is a terrorist campaign waged by Israel, which has not so far managed, despite its frequent threats to attack Iran, to get the US support, green light and likely military assistance it needs to wage an all-out attack on Iran. A joint US/Israeli military attack on Iran, which Netanyahu has long touted for in Washington, would be considerably more dangerous than the Iraq War of 2003, since Iran is much more powerful nation, more than twice as populous as Iraq, with armed forces undefeated in any recent conflict, and it seems, at the very least, the backing of Russia and China against attempts by Israel’s quartermasters and bloc partners in the United States to extend UN sanctions. As the Eurasian Times reported (4 July):

“The US’s demand to extend the arms embargo against Iran, due to expire in four months, has been rejected by the members of the United Nation Security Council (UNSC) including China and Russia.

“China and Russia are the permanent members of the UNSC who rejected the motion. The other permanent members of the UNSC – the UK and France – also failed to support the extension of the embargo against Iran.

“US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that lifting the ban on the trade of conventional weapons would turn Iran into a ‘rogue weapons dealer,’ supplying advanced weapons to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and fueling conflicts in Venezuela, Syria and Afghanistan.”

In this context, the seeming instigation of a terrorist campaign in Iran, probably by Mossad with the likely help of some element of US intelligence, seems a bit like desperation. Although Netanyahu appears to be trying to use the international distraction occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic as a cover to try to push through the annexation of most of the West Bank, getting US support for his longed-for joint attack on Iran seems to be proving rather difficult. Not only that, but Israel seems to be being plunged back into its own crisis with a second wave of Covid-19 building.

Any US intelligence involvement in this is likely to be particularly covert and factional; the CIA is probably not keen to get directly involved with what could be very risky indeed and potentially disastrous. Many remember Carter’s humiliating debacle in April 1980 when helicopters sent to rescue US prisoners held by student Islamic ‘radicals’ from the US Embassy in Tehran, instead collided with each other in the Iranian desert, collapsing the entire mission. That is an experience they have not been keen to repeat since. Indeed since then, the US has sponsored ‘home grown’ stooge movements like the Mujahedin-e-Khalq as its preferred method of seeking ‘regime change’ in Iran; there may well be an element of this with this ‘cheetahs’ movement, assuming it is not simply a Mossad pseudonym.

US covert activities carried our against Iran with Israel today are more likely to be on the model of the Iran-Contra affair in the late-1980s, when a separate, covert operation was run out of the White House, bypassing the normal  channels of Congress and the CIA, who can then deny all knowledge.

In any case, as Marxists and anti-imperialists, we condemn this terror campaign against Iran by Zionist imperialism and likely its US ally. UK complicity is undoubtedly not far behind. We call for the defence of Iran, an oppressed semi-colonial nation, and the defeat of imperialism and all its proxies.

The undersigned organizations condemn the threatened annexation of wide swathes of West Bank territory which was due to begin on July 1^st, and to be finally announced on July 4^th, but has now been delayed seemingly because of contradictions within the Netanyahu/Gantz unstable, uneasy coalition in power in Israel, and also apparently with their external partners-in-crime in the United States government. The various genocidal nationalist factions in power in the Zionist state, and the Trump administration are all in favour of this annexation as part of the so-called ‘Deal of the Century’. But they are still wrangling about the details behind closed doors, trying to produce some formula for the annexation that will not blow up in their faces in a new round of struggles waged by the masses of oppressed Palestinians.

The annexation project has continuity with the ‘peace process’ put together at Oslo under Clinton and the Labour Zionists Rabin and Peres in the early 1990s. The division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C with the latter fully under control of the Israelis, with only ‘area A’ under the control of the stooge ‘Palestinian Authority’ under Arafat and now Abbas, and ‘area B’ as a buffer between them, was itself a salami-slicing of the West Bank and a preparation for future annexation. So far from the ‘Peace Process’ of the liberal Zionists and their helpmates in the West, the Clintons etc, being an alternative to the annexations and advocates of ‘transfer’ on the Zionist right, in reality the plans dovetailed with each other and Oslo paved the way for annexation. As was seen clearly by some of the most far-sighted Palestinian thinkers like the late Edward W. Said, who condemned the collaboration of Arafat with the Oslo process as comparable to the collaboration of the Vichy regime with the Nazi occupation of France in WWII.

The comparison is quite valid. Political Zionism always was a genocidal project, which modelled itself on the colonial-settler projects spawned by British expansionism in the early capitalist era, where the settlers took the country off the indigenous population of the territories they colonised, and subjected them to enslavement and extermination. The Zionist apologists who claim that the persecution and discrimination against Jews in the late Medieval period and the beginnings of anti-Semitism in the modern era somehow excuse that, overlook this affinity with the other colonial movements that drove that. This was always a movement, right from the start, that aspired to oppress and eliminate the Arab inhabitants of the territory it coveted.

They overlook the specifically Jewish chauvinism that drove the Zionist movement from its beginnings in the later 19^th Century, when it went about seeking sponsors among archaic great powers and modern imperialists alike, finally managing to get the support of the British Empire. The 1917 Balfour Declaration; the handing over of Palestine to a third-party colonial movement ultimately to expel its native population was among British imperialism’s most insidious crimes.  Thus when we talk about the genocidal character of Zionism, we are talking about it in the same breath not only as National Socialism and the Hitler movement in Germany, of which it is like a mirror image, but also as the genocidal creation of the United States through the destruction of native Americans, of Australia through the destruction of black native Australians, and other such acts of barbarism.

In that regard, for us all of Israel is occupied territory; we, like the Palestinian people themselves, affirm that the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians in exile elsewhere, and the so-called Israeli Arabs, are all Palestinians, they are the majority native population and they unconditionally have the right to self-determination over the whole territory of historical Palestine. The Jewish settler population have no choice but to accept this basic democratic principle and learn to coexist on the basis of complete equality. In democratic terms, this logic is inescapable.

In a way the creeping annexation of more Palestinian territory involved here recognises the objective unity of Palestine and creates a situation where the Jewish majority in cleansed Israel becomes more and more tenuous. With that, the genocidal rage of much of the settler population becomes more and more severe.

This could erupt in monstrous atrocities against the Arab population and a renewal of the Nakba, the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people. Or conversely, it could result in renewed mass struggle for equality by the unified Palestinian people, across the 1967 Green Line and the various lines drawn by the Israelis and their collaborators across the occupied territories. In all these cases, what is needed is active solidarity from the working class in the Western countries, and throughout the Middle East, in that mainly Arab region also who will have a special role to play in uniting with the Palestinian working class.

The objective need is for a programme of permanent revolution across the Middle East, taking in hand the numerous democratic questions that are unresolved in that region, of which the question of Zionism, Israeli colonialism and the dispossession of the Palestinian people is obviously the most pressing. For it obvious that in its oppressed and dispossessed situation, the Palestinian working class and poor do not have the power to deal with the Zionist state on their own: they need the militant aid of the regional, centrally Arab, proletariat of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and also the Persian proletariat of Iran, among other oppressed peoples in the region. The question of democracy in general, over the whole region with its underdevelopment and long history of despotism can only be fully resolved with the proletariat in power on a regional, federal level, through a federation of revolutionary workers states, and the end of the Nazi-Zionist state through the struggle for a multi-ethnic Palestinian popular council of Arab and Hebrew workers.

The other crucial strand of this is the need for active solidarity from the workers movement in the West, in countries like the United States and Britain that arm Israel to the teeth against the Palestinians and against other forces in the region seeking liberation from Zionist aggression. This is an extremely difficult task right now because of the very powerful position of the Israel lobby in most of these countries. This was shown graphically by the massive Zionist-led campaign to destabilise and destroy the very moderately pro-Palestinian leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labour Party over the last several years.

There is an additional level of complexity and difficulty for socialists and revolutionaries in many advanced countries, particularly in Europe and North America, in delivering solidarity with the Palestinians. Not only do they have to deal with the ‘normal’ attitude of ‘their’ bourgeoisies to a liberation struggle against one of its allies, but they also have to deal with a specific faction within the ruling class, which based on its Jewish origin and an ethnocentric Zionist variant of bourgeois politics, regards Israel as ‘its’ state and fights just as hard for the interest of Israel as it does for the interests of the imperialists country in which it resides.

This unique overlap of the ruling class of Israel with that of other imperialist countries creates a situation where it is doubly difficult, in current conditions, to deliver real, meaningful solidarity with the Palestinians in those countries as distinct from those engaged in ‘simpler’, more conventional struggles against one’s own ruling class, such as in Ireland or Vietnam in the past. Nevertheless, there is no evading this question, and the international movement has the right to insist that its sections in Israel’s imperialist allied countries address this difficult problem in their political material and agitational work.

Frente Comunista dos Trabalhadores – Brazil

Socialist Equality Council – Bangladesh

Socialist Worker League – United States

Tendencia Militante Bolchevique – Argentina

Trotskyist Faction of Socialist Fight – Great Britain