While Russia has not been a workers’ state since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, it is not imperialist and has no imperialist bourgeoisie. Its weak, oligarchic proto-bourgeoisie has no real tradition or stability except a sometime aspiration to be an imperialist client, and a parvenu gangster ethos and practise. The full-blooded neoliberal shock treatment that the counterrevolution of these lackey privateers imposed on Russia after 1991 caused massive suffering, starvation and countless despairing suicides. The fall in life expectancy of 5 years in the 1990s can only be explained by millions of early deaths. This fuelled a huge backlash from below, refracted through the productive and administrative apparatus left over from the workers state, which the counterrevolution was unable to rapidly destroy. That backlash elevated Putin, representing a remnant of the workers state that still had organic connections to the masses, to power, imposing a massive post-capitalist deformation on the weak capitalism that was all the counterrevolution was able to create. Although Putin is a representative of the old apparatus, this partial rollback of the counterrevolution does not define him and his faction as any longer ‘communist’. In formal ideological terms, Putin is a centre-right lesser-Russian nationalist, but sui generis, given his very contradictory social and political role.

The USSR prior to 1991 was a degenerated workers state. This was a correct designation because immediately after 1917 for several years under the revolutionary leadership personified by Lenin and Trotsky, the working class held direct political power, albeit in very difficult conditions. Only in the mid-1920s was workers democracy extinguished, by degrees, with the death of Lenin and the brutal factional war to defeat Trotsky and his supporters. The degenerated USSR was characterised by massive, qualitative deformations derived from the necessary imposition of bourgeois norms of distribution on its embryonic socialist construction. It struggled to create the beginning of a higher mode of production in conditions of involuntary national isolation and insufficient technological and material development and succumbed to the rule of a regime that resembled that of a labour bureaucracy, albeit one with state power. This bureaucratism eventually led the USSR, several decades later, to collapse. Post-Soviet Russia, under Putin today, is a deformed capitalist state, that is, a capitalist state with massive ‘socialist’ deformations, a dialectical complement of the bureaucratised workers state that was the USSR.

This is a unique form of combined and uneven development, with elements of the capitalist mode of production intertwined with embryonic elements of a higher, socialist mode. The Putinist deformation of the counterrevolution put the weak oligarchy in a subordinate position, including the West’s favourites, the likes of Khodorkovsky and Gusinsky, who were effectively socially and politically neutralised as part of (re)creating a much more statified, mixed economy heavily based on the state apparatus and industrial productive forces inherited from the workers’ state.

The principle of combined and uneven development is well known from Trotsky’s understanding of Permanent Revolution. It involves the interpenetration of capitalist development in backward countries with feudal and other pre-capitalist modes of production, to produce complex social forms where the working-class movement has to incorporate the demands of those whose oppression is rooted in earlier modes of production in its programme for power. But the (partially failed) counterrevolution in Russia, the central part of the USSR, has led to a new form of interpenetration of capitalism with an embryonic socialist mode of production, which ‘invades’ Russian capitalism, to paraphrase Engels’ concept of the ‘invading socialist society’ in Anti-Dühring.

The imperialist bourgeoisie understood that the accession of Yeltsin’s counterrevolution in 1991 did not mean the outright end of ‘socialism’ in Russia, which is why they began NATO Eastward expansion even under Yeltsin. Gradually with the rise of Putin, Cold War hysteria and anti-Russian warmongering re-emerged, despite the claim that the Cold War was over. In fact, it never ended. Only now it takes an uglier form – rather than old style anti-communism which could be conceived of as ethnically neutral, today’s racist demonisation of Russians, or Russophobia, resembles Hitler’s racist demonisation of Jews, who he considered organically ‘Bolshevik’. Today’s bourgeoisie considers Russians to be organically proto-communist and disobedient to neoliberalism and its ‘rules-based order’, noting the very high popularity of Putin in Russia. The reason for this high popularity is simply the popular memory of the horrors of Yeltsin’s counterrevolutionary economic shock, and how Putin’s change of course rolled much of it back. So, now we see open imperialist hatred of the Russian people themselves, which is why you get glaringly racist bans on references to or works by even long dead Russians like Gagarin, Dosteyevsky and Pushkin, from Western cultural events. And the supposedly liberal imperialist bourgeoisie, figures like Biden, Starmer and Macron, vehemently but covertly support outright Nazis in Ukraine, while at the same persecuting anyone who exposes this for supposedly peddling ‘disinformation’.

Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is thus a defensive one against an imperialist war drive that is aimed at breaking up Russia into several semi-colonies as the final act of destroying the entire legacy of the October Revolution. Socialists should defend Russia, and especially the peoples of the Donbass and Crimea, who are targets in a Western-inspired racist proxy war that blatantly uses outright Nazis, with genocidal aims. Not today against Jews, but against Russians, in the spirit of Hitler’s war on the Eastern Front, participated in eagerly by Ukrainian collaborators like Bandera and Shukhevych, where the Nazis exterminated 20 million Russians in that barbaric racist rampage. Somewhat unexpectedly for the imperialists, given their contempt for Russia, the Ukraine proxy war has gone badly for NATO and its Nazi dogs of war, and the post-capitalist elements of Russia’s productive apparatus are the main reason for that. Economic sanctions have backfired and considering the strain the country is under, Russia‘s economy has flourished during this difficult period, and it has moved ahead of the United States in some aspects of military technology, notably hypersonic missiles, which the West has no answer to. The dramatic use of Oreshnik to destroy a major covert NATO military installation at Dnipro, Ukraine, in November 2024 was a major manifestation of this. There are some resemblances and commonality between Russia’s technological advances and those of China, but also major differences between them.

China: A Deformed Workers’ State

China poses the question of Cold War and socialism even more sharply. Because China is still a deformed workers state. It was never ruled according to the basic norms of Soviet democracy, unlike early Soviet Russia/USSR. It was deformed from birth. Its Communist Party abandoned the proletariat in the cities after the defeated workers revolution of 1925-7 and transformed itself into a peasant-guerilla, petit-bourgeois formation. Its peasant-based armies defeated the Kuomintang and in part Japan. Despite its petit-bourgeois bureaucratic nature, formed up in the prolonged guerilla struggle including the famous Long March, it could develop no independent class basis separate from the main classes of capitalist society – the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. Simply to defend itself against imperialist attempts to destroy it, it was forced to adopt the property forms of the proletarian revolution, but crucially without Soviet democracy, after 1949. This was a flawed, but still historically progressive, social revolution. The Stalin-like bureaucratic regime of Mao Zedong made considerable progress in a primitive modernisation of the country but also engaged in dangerous and wrong-headed intra-bureaucratic feuds with the leadership of the USSR.

 After Mao’s death in 1976 his followers were defeated by those of Deng Xiaoping and his programme of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, a form of market ‘socialism’. Under both Mao and Deng China even allied with US imperialism against the USSR. That alliance helped the West to cause the collapse of the USSR through an enormous imperialist war drive and neoliberal political offensive. Since Deng’s rise, and up to today, China’s social and political regime resembles more the economic programme of Bukharin than that of Stalin. Despite the upheaval of Tien-An-Mien Square in 1989, when student demonstrations that evidenced pathetic faith in Western ‘democracy’ triggered off a naïve working-class upheaval (which was soon crushed), the central planning apparatus remained intact through all Deng’s market ‘reforms’.

A key part of the neoliberal ‘Thatcher/Reagan revolution’ in the West, which was continued under more ‘liberal’ administrations such as those of Clinton and Blair, eventually spreading also to the main EU countries, was the outsourcing of heavy industry to low wage countries such as those on the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia and the Far East … and China. China, as a workers’ state, slipped under the Western ‘radar’ in that period and managed to take advantage of this to massively expand its industrial productive forces. The result was a kind of mixed economy, still mainly statified, with industrialisation utilising a partially capitalist market, controlled by the bureaucracy of a deformed workers state. The outsourcing of heavy industry was a major, strategic change in the social structure of the imperialist countries, driven by the contradictions and decay of capitalism, and particularly the historical tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Falling profit rates were the root cause of the major economic crisis that manifested as ‘stagflation’ in the Western countries in the 1970s. As soon as the technological means came into existence – though widespread computer technology – to allow such outsourcing on a mass scale, the imperialists took advantage of this, deindustrialising their own economies in pursuit of higher profits among capable, but lower paid, workforces.

But this manoeuvre, driven by profit-hunger, backfired spectacularly as the Chinese deformed workers state, still intact, massively expanded its productive capacity. China is now a major non-imperialist world power because of this. Unlike Russia, where planning is somewhat limited in scope and a residue of a social system that has been overthrown, in China the economy is driven by a form of planning, with capital not in the driving seat. The Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy has permitted wide latitude to private capital – to the point that it had for a brief period in the 20-teens and early 2020s more billionaires in absolute terms than the United States. However, in terms of population, China is four times larger than the US, and its billionaires are much less wealthy than those in the US. They are also subordinate to the state – those who step out of line are likely to end up having wealth confiscated through massive fines, serving long prison sentences, or even being shot, for corruption and various related financial crimes that in the capitalist world might not even register.

In October 2024 the Asian news website Firstpost noted that:

“This year, the Hurun China Rich List counted 743 billionaires in US dollars, marking a 36 per cent drop from the 1,185 billionaires in 2021 — a peak year for China’s super-rich.” (https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/china-billionaires-declining-rich-list-13830670.html)

Over the past four decades, as China has risen to be a world power, 700 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. And now China’s economic advance means it has effectively caught up with the United States as the world’s leader in production of hi-tech, computer-related goods. The advent of Deepseek, its open-source flagship AI system, shows it pulling ahead of the US, particularly as the energy needed to run Deepseek is less than half of that consumed by the energy-guzzling US AI systems.

It ought to be clear that such a powerful capitalist force within a workers’ state is potentially a danger to the existence of that state, as a bourgeois class, driven by the imperative of capitalism, to realise surplus value and convert that into profit, will necessarily seek political conditions that maximise its ability to do that. This is what led Trotsky to conclude in the late 1920s that Bukharin’s programme of marketisation, which was mainly in the Russian countryside, allowing the Russian Kulaks (richer peasants) to “enrich themselves”, posed an immediate danger of counterrevolution. This he gave a degree of critical support, at least initially, to Stalin’s programme of collectivisation, before the brutal dimensions of that course became brutally apparent, when he denounced its irrationality.  But in China, up to now, the bureaucracy has managed to avoid the danger of a counterrevolution.

It is possible now, with a considerable degree of hindsight, to say that one thing Trotsky was not able to fully anticipate with his analysis of the degeneration of the USSR, and such potential counterrevolutionary threats, is that post-capitalist relations of production could interpenetrate with capitalist relations for a extended period, and that two variants of such combined and uneven development are possible. One where a workers’ state continues to exist and defend proletarian property relations and the beginnings of the communist mode of production, dubbed ‘socialist’ in its less developed form, and at the same time considerable elements of capitalism continue to exist and even grow for a while. The other variant is where the workers state is overthrown, and an embryonic new bourgeois state attempts to impose a social counterrevolution, and yet proletarian property relations are sufficiently embedded in society and its production relations are already somewhat superior to capitalist relations, to the extent they are able to subvert the new bourgeois state and fundamentally deform it in a post-capitalist direction. It is arguable that these two variants of combined and uneven development are both unstable and ultimately fleeting phenomena and can exist side by side. China today is an example of the first variant; Russia is an example of the second.

Defend Russia and China against imperialism and ‘regime change’

Thanks to a strategic miscalculation by neoliberal imperialism, we now have a new, and unexpected international situation, as Russia and China are very different to the backward, impoverished countries that they were in 1917 and 1949. One of the preconditions for socialism is a development of the productive forces, and paradoxically the Western neoliberal outsourcing project has allowed a development of the productive forces in China to the point that China has become what Britain was in the 19^th Century, but on a massively bigger scale: “the workshop of the world”. This has brought China to the brink of overturning the world hegemony of US imperialism, established after WWII. Russia, thanks to the partially defeated counterrevolution and its own targeting for attempted ‘regime change’ by US imperialism, has forged an alliance with China on an economic, diplomatic and partially military level that eluded the USSR Stalinist regime due to intra-Stalinist rivalry. The different social regimes in Russia and China seem to have eliminated that as a factor. But both Russia and China have elements of a higher mode of production within them that have made them natural allies in the present world situation. And the combined military and economic weights of Russia and China are clearly at least the equal of the Western powers in geopolitical terms. This is shown by Russia in its successful resistance to the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine; meanwhile the attempt of the West to foment a similar conflict with China over Taiwan looks less likely as China looks technologically and militarily too strong for this to be a viable proposition anymore.

Russia and China are not ‘imperialist rivals’ of the United States and the West, as various left capitulators to the ideological terror of imperialism say. They are natural allies of smaller non-imperialist countries that conflict with predatory imperialism. This includes smaller deformed workers states such as Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, as well as semi-colonial countries struggling against imperialism such as Venezuela, Iran, Yemen and the insurgent countries of the Sahel such as Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. The conflict between Russia/China and the West, in geopolitical terms, is not about who can get the most military bases, and who can send gunboats to repress the masses in their respective empires. Instead, they behave in a manner that focuses mainly on achieving diplomatic solutions to crises, not fighting to defeat imperialism through revolutionary struggle.

Russia and China: Unite and fight for World Socialism!

Thus, the Russia-China bloc behaves similarly to the way the USSR behaved in the Cold War, giving aid to those countries in conflict with imperialism, or who seek to find leverage to gain more independence from imperialism. They talk, which is to be expected given the bureaucratic, modified-Stalinoid and similar politics that dominates the bloc, of a ‘multipolar world’, which amounts to a modified version of the ‘peaceful coexistence’ with imperialism that drove the politics of the degenerated USSR.  China’s most spectacular international initiative, the “One Belt, One Road”  infrastructure-building project, is not a means of exploiting those countries involved, though China does derive economic benefits from it. It has a similar character to Russian and Chinese aid to Venezuela, Iran or Cuba – helping them to maintain independence against imperialist terrorism.

Thanks to the crisis of neoliberalism, we now have one giant workers state with advanced productive forces that are the equal of imperialism, which has another giant ally whose capitalism is marked by sufficient proto-socialist deformations to the point that it could relatively painlessly ‘revert’ to developing that higher mode of production. And yet these relatively far more advanced productive forces, and the proto-socialist elements that drive them, are still constrained by a labour bureaucracy in China, and an anomalous and contradictory formation in Russia, neither of which are remotely in tune with the demands of socialism. These productive forces, were they put consciously in the service of world revolution, of the fight to mobilise the world working class to take power in its own name, are enough to bury the capitalist system once and for all. To bring that about, we need the creation of a conscious international socialist/communist movement. Wherever it originates, it must spread around the world and create conditions allowing the existing administrations in Russia and China to be overcome by a rebirth of soviet democracy, as in early Soviet workers’ state under Lenin and Trotsky, to put these huge resources fully in the service of world socialism. That would bring about a rapid end to capitalism internationally.

The founding conference of what is now, on a semi-permanent basis, known as Your Party, was a contradictory affair, but the outcome was no split, but the creation of the beginnings of what looks to be becoming a sizeable, working-class left-wing party with potential for growth.  This is despite the serious divisions between its two main founders, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, who represent as a starting point at least, different strands of left social democracy. Comrade Corbyn is closely tied to a layer of volunteers, notably around Karie Murphy, whose whole outlook is saturated with the outlook of the ‘left’ trade union bureaucracy, and have brought with them considerable elements of bureaucratic practice, which means that there is still a danger that Your Party could be consumed with witchhunting against the ‘far left’. Zarah Sultana, who is 40 years younger than Corbyn and Labour’s newest and most militant and dynamic left-wing dissident before her exit from Labour in July 2025, to her great credit, firmly denounced and tried to head off this possibility, and had some serious success in this regard at the conference in November.

Your Party Has also been enriched by a significant presence of ostensibly revolutionary trends, some of which have diluted their revolutionary aspirations with elements of reformist politics (those in the tradition of the old Militant tendency), or with capitulation to Cold War Stalinophobia and sometimes even Zionism (the SWP, Counterfire, smaller SWP fragments such as RS21, ex-Trotskyists such as Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and the ex-Stalinist, third campist Weekly Worker/CPGB). Then there are more serious communist/Trotskyist inclined trends, including, as well as ourselves, Workers Power, the Spartacist League, the Bolshevik Tendency, the International Bolshevik Tendency, and several prominent individuals with political histories in these tendencies. No doubt this list is incomplete. The barriers between these broad trends are somewhat permeable – while the latter trends may be closer to real communism, the former group are often subjectively very leftist also and if Your Party really does develop into a fully-fledged workers party, this will have the progressive effect of breaking down the barriers between sects and allowing a free-flow of political debate and engagement, from which the most consistently communist and revolutionary trends can only gain.

The conference itself had some ominous omens beforehand, over the preceding five months since the impending creation of the party was announced in July, after Zarah Sultana, who had been suspended from the Labour whip for many months, resigned from Labour in early July and announced her intention to co-lead a new party along with Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn, Labour’s left social-democratic leader from 2015 to 2020, though remaining a critic of neoliberalism and imperialism at many levels, had failed to properly stand up to the ferocious witchhunt and wrecking operation against himself and his supporters during this period. Instead, he tried to appease the Zionists and Blairites, throwing many of his most outspoken supporters to the wolves in the process. That was while he was leader. After being ousted after the sabotaged 2019 General Election failure, he was suspended from Labour by Starmer and deprived of the whip. The lack of the whip forced him to stand against Labour in the 2024 General Election to keep his Islington North seat (which he duly did and won).  

Four other independent MP’s won seats in the General Election, all of them Muslims who ran on the issue of the support of both main parties for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. It was clear that they were part of a diffuse social democratic/radical liberal opposition to both bourgeois parties that had enough ties to the labour movement and the organised left through the Palestine movement, to make them critically supportable by communists in the General Election. There were several other independent left/working class candidates in a similar mould around the country. Leanne Mohammad came very close to defeating Wes Streeting in Ilford North, and Andrew Feinstein did respectably well in challenging Starmer himself in Holborn and St Pancras. Though this movement had many weaknesses.

After the General Election, when Starmer’s Labour Party won a substantial majority despite only getting just under 34% of the vote (dependent on the collapse of the Conservative vote to only 24%), it became clear that the new government was the most unpopular since universal suffrage began. It had no ‘honeymoon’; within weeks of its election, it was staggering under the blows of a wave of far-right agitation and rioting. In 2025 that intensified with attacks on refugee hostels all over the country, and the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party to first place in the opinion polls. Starmer’s government was up to its neck in support for genocide in Gaza, and the West’s proxy Nazi war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians and actual Russians in Ukraine; its response to the rise of Reform was to try to outdo Farage in racist rhetoric and to crack down on migrants still more.

Splitting from Labour “At a Snail’s Pace”

It was clear that there was a desperate need for a new working-class party. Indeed, it had been clear for several years, since the demise of Corbyn’s Labour. Yet he was extremely reluctant to burn his bridges with Labour by founding a new party. He literally left it to the last possible moment to announce his independent candidacy in the General Election. And he stonewalled on the creation of an independent party for around a year afterwards. Though it was known that semi-secret, invitation-only meetings of a body called ‘Collective’ were taking place during this period, it was not clear that the talks were getting anywhere. Until Zarah Sultana MP ignited the issue in July 2025 by resigning from Labour and declaring the intention to found and co-lead a new party to oppose Labour from the left. After this announcement, it took Corbyn three weeks to overcome his own hesitation and confirm Sultana’s announcement.

This split should have come seriously on the agenda as soon as Corbyn was suspended from Labour in late 2020. When it finally was announced in 2025, 800,000 people expressed interest in joining via the new Your Party website, on top of the 72,000 who did the same for Zarah Sultana’s ‘Team Zarah’ website earlier in July 2025 after she announced the beginning of the project. This base existed in 2020 – Starmer was in the process of driving them – hundreds of thousands of socialist-minded people – out of Labour then. It remained intact but in a kind of ‘limbo’ over this period while the Labour Party went down from over 600,000 members under Corbyn to around 200,000 today. If Corbyn had bit the bullet in 2020 and initiated a new party then it is virtually certain that it would have outgrown the Starmer-led Labour Party, which would simply have haemorrhaged members directly to a new party. Such is how historic opportunities for working class politics are allowed to slip – or at least be interminably delayed.

The mass base of Corbynism never dispersed and never ceased to oppose neoliberal attacks on the working class. That is why hundreds of thousands rallied to give support to Your Party when it was announced.  The basic problem has been the glacial pace (and paranoia about those to their left) of Corbyn and the legacy left bureaucrats around him, which clashed with the entirely progressive desire for a working-class political party of his mass base. This conservative element in Corbyn’s politics has now rightly been challenged by the youthful left-wing former Labour MP Zarah Sultana.

Zarah Sultana’s Left-Wing Trajectory

Zarah Sultana has positioned herself considerably to the left of Corbyn on some of the most important political questions. Notably Zionism, where she has criticised Corbyn’s Labour leadership for appeasing the Zionists and capitulating to the witchhunt. Since the conference her strong anti-Zionism has manifested itself in her excellent work leading protests outside Bronzefield Prison in Surrey, demanding medical care for Palestine Action hunger strikers among the Filton 21, who face two years remand on phoney charges they are likely to, eventually, be acquitted of. Her actions on this alone have boosted Your Party’s standing as a principle left-wing force.

She has insisted that Your Party must come out strongly for the rights of Trans people; she has strongly opposed exclusions and witchhunts against Marxist and revolutionary-inclined left-wing groups. In public speeches she has laid down what appears to be the beginning of an extensive programme of statification of industry that appears to point more to a full-blooded anti-capitalist position than mere social democratic nationalisations; she has forthrightly emphasised the importance of mass anti-fascist mobilisations particularly in the context of the debacle of left’s failure to effectively counter the openly racist “raise the colours” movement that erupted over the summer of 2025, and Yaxley-Lennon’s mass rally in London on 13^th September. She has called for the politics of ‘class war’, and opened a real possibility of the party, or a large section of it, evolving politically beyond social democracy altogether.

Though she has not, so far, evolved beyond social democracy on questions involving conflicts with imperialism that are a legacy of the Russian Revolution – when put on the spot about the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, she denounced Putin as a ‘dictator’ and called Russia’s 2022 Special Military Operation an “illegal invasion”, while also saying that Zelensky is an enemy of the working class of Ukraine. She has also said nothing on China yet. This is not a consistently anti-imperialist approach, and it is crucial that Your Party, or its serious anti-capitalist wing, move beyond Labourite politics and seriously address the legacy of the 1917 workers revolution in Russia, and the role its by-products, including non-imperialist Russia, the roles that various remaining workers’ states such as China, Cuba and North Korea, play in the world and their place in the worldwide struggle for socialism. Rather than go into all these arguments in detail here, we have written a companion piece to this article (“Russia, China and Socialism”) which addresses these questions in depth.

Trump’s drive to war against Venezuela also puts a number of these questions on the agenda. Both Russia and China are allies of Venezuela and yet the Labourite programme that sees them as ‘imperialist’ enemies of ‘Western democracy’ logically leads would be socialists to line up behind NATO. It is very clear that comrade Sultana does not want that – she has been outspoken in advocating that Your Party should break with NATO because of its imperialist nature. But the more left-sounding capitulation to imperialism is from those tendencies who effectively bury the legacy of the Russian revolution and the attempt at world revolution in the 20^th Century, and equate Russia and China with US imperialism, as another supposed set of imperialist powers.

The logic of that position is terrible in the context of US imperialism’s attacks on Venezuela, as that country has backing from both Russia and China, and according to a worldview that sees Russia and China as another imperialist ‘camp’, to consistently carry out this logic would mean supporting neither side. The same when the US threatens Cuba, still a deformed workers state, which is clearly also an ally of the Russia-China bloc. The US bullying of states involved in BRICS, headed by Russia and China, which includes Brazil, India, Indonesia and Iran – all to varying degrees victims and targets of US and indirectly NATO imperialism, is logically a matter of indifference if Russia and China are cast as rival imperialists. Iran in particularly is also a major target of the US/Israel Zionist bloc in West Asia. The core of BRICS consists of countries that US and NATO imperialism would like to defeat and subordinate as part of maintaining the ‘rules-based order’, which really means US imperialist hegemony. Though Comrade Sultana’s evolution to the left is notable, and her desire to build a genuine working class socialist party that is not a Labour 2.0 is commendable, key strategic questions fundamental to socialism need to be addressed before Your Party can really break with Labourism.

Contradictions of Creating Your Party

Getting hundreds of thousands to express their support in an elementary way for the idea of a new party is one thing – creating that party was never going to be simple. And another complication has been the presence of the four Muslim Independent MP’s, who were elected mainly on the question of Gaza, without much of a broader socialist outlook at all. On other questions they were often socially conservative. Since the Independent Group was given considerable power over the process of setting up the party, there have been clashes between the most conservative of them, and Comrade Sultana over the pace of the party’s formation and its political direction.

 It repeatedly became clear that Jeremy Corbyn, his entourage and the Independent Group of MPs were resisting Zarah Sultana’s initiatives to push the party forward. The three-week silence of Corbyn after Sultana announced their joint endeavour at the beginning of July was unnerving and signified that he was having to be pushed faster than he wanted to get the party off the ground. It is also evident that there was resistance to launching a portal to allow people to join the new party, as opposed to just register interest in it. Frustration with this led to the dispute over the membership portal launched by Zarah Sultana on 18^th September when an earlier, agreed timetable appeared to be slipping because of obstruction by the more conservative elements in the Independent Group. This portal was falsely denounced by the Independent MP’s group as fraudulent, though it was launched as result of a dispute about timing, creating a legal standoff that briefly threatened to tear the party apart.

Once the immediate issue was overcome there followed a technical-legal problem about how to deal with membership and the funds collected on the earlier portal, when another ‘agreed’ portal was created. Like with the announcement of the party, the root cause of this appeared to be the glacial, ultra-cautious methods of Corbyn and those around him. The sporadic issuance of public denunciations of Sultana by the Independent Group continued until an incident in October, when, as she appeared on BBC Question Time, another missive signed by all the Independent MPs, including Corbyn, was issued, denouncing her over the funds from the earlier membership portal. Corbyn immediately denied signing it, and dissociated himself, and straight away Adnan Hussain resigned from the body that was setting up Your Party, followed later by Iqbal Mohammad. They cited disagreements over issues like Trans rights and other matters and accused Your Party of being ‘intolerant’.  Even after this, anonymous briefings appeared in the media denouncing Zarah Sultana, with the result that she and Corbyn held separate eve-of-conference rallies on November 28^th.

The conference itself was wracked by political tensions and conflicts. The leadup to the conference had some elements of democracy, but with a considerable degree of arbitrary diktat on some key questions. The use of sortition – a random method of selection by demography to try to achieve gender, age and geographical balance of attendees at the conference, akin to that used by the state to select people for jury service, was an unusual feature of the conference. It can hardly be called democratic, but neither could be called bureaucratic and anti-democratic, because of the strong element of randomness in the selection. But the sortitioned attendees were not the sole people allowed to vote – in fact the entire confirmed membership online was able to vote on a whole range of contested issues and amendments at the conference, and the leadership layer around Corbyn lost several important votes. Though largely because of difficulties in signing up members online and ‘confirming’ them, there number voting was much less than it could have been.

The real democratic defect was arguably in the process whereby the four documents to be dealt with at the conference, and the various amendments, were prepared. The four documents were: the proposed Constitution; the Standing Orders, the Operational Plan for the First Year, and the Political Statement. Of course, each of these documents had to be drafted by someone – that is not at all undemocratic. They were then opened to the membership online through the members area to propose edits and amendments. It does appear that many such proposals were made. The documents were also examined by a series of local/regional assemblies, where members from proto-branches grouped into impromptu ‘regions’, in groups of around 10, got to discuss them and propose possible changes to ‘facilitators’, that is, volunteers who had been trained to lead such discussions and note down feedback and proposed changes from the members. It then appears that all these amendments, both those submitted online and through the regional assemblies, were processed by Artificial Intelligence to distil them into a coherent set of alternative choices for the members, both present and remote, to vote on. That was the most questionable part of the procedure, as it produced a set of contested options that many considered to be inadequate and not reflecting the full range of issues in dispute among the members.

“Dual Membership” and Witchhunts

The most contentious issue in the draft constitution was the question of dual membership of other political parties. This is a can of worms, as the question of how such ‘parties’ are defined massively affects the democratic or otherwise functioning of the party. The proposal that appeared to carry most wait, that ‘party’ for this purpose means a fully-fledged national political party that stands in elections and is registered with the Electoral Commission to do so, was not explicitly up for debate. Though it does appear, from some discussions on this question, that this was the definition of ‘party’ held to by Jeremy Corbyn himself. One of our comrades had moved an amendment to explicitly define a ‘party’ in this way, but this did not make its way through the collating/compositing process.

Unclarity on this question produced a mutually reinforcing paranoia between the leadership group centred on Corbyn, and members of several far-left organisations, some of whom had thrown themselves enthusiastically into building Your Party. At a meeting of an inclusive bloc of far-leftists, which our comrades attended, the Socialist Unity Platform (SUP), a couple of evenings before the conference itself, a proposal was aired, to be moved by the Socialist Workers Party and supported by Counterfire, to move an emergency motion at the beginning of the conference to replace the existing group of conference organisers with a committee elected from the floor of the conference. This did not go down well with many at the SUP event, including us, as it would inevitably be seen as by many members whose main inspiration was Jeremy Corbyn, as an arrogant sectarian stunt, aimed to unseat the organisers of a founding conference of a new party even before it got underway. Indeed, it got such a negative response at the SUP meeting that the SWP decided not to go through with it.

Unfortunately a draft of the proposed motion had been circulated, which inevitably was leaked to the leadership, and as a result on the opening morning of the conference, a number of prominent SWP members, including its National Secretary, Lewis Neilsen, were bureaucratically expelled for supposedly breaking a rule against dual membership which had never been voted on by the membership. Others, including leading members of Counterfire, such as John Rees and Independent socialist councillor Michael Lavalette – who is associated with Counterfire – were also excluded from the first day of the Conference. Also excluded was ex-Labour member and present councillor James Giles from Kingston, a close ally of Zarah Sultana, who appears to have been targeted because of his support for comrade Sultana over the September attempt to set up a membership portal. This latter, and the more general exclusions, prompted a protest boycott by comrade Sultana on the first day of the conference – when she got to speak on the second day, she sharply denounced the exclusions.

The exclusions of Counterfire people and comrade Giles, though not those of leading SWP comrades, were rescinded on the second day. Regarding Counterfire this appears to be because Counterfire is not particularly large, does not stand as a supposed party in elections, and is not registered with the Electoral Commission. Indeed, Jeremy Corbyn himself admitted this was correct, and that Counterfire did not therefore count as a ‘National Political Party’ in a published WhatsApp exchange with John Rees. But though the SWP is larger, it also does not stand in elections and is not registered. So, confusion and ambiguity reigns on this key question and would continue to do so whichever of the two ‘dual membership’ options were passed by the members.

These exclusions produced a backlash from the members. There were two counterposed proposals on ‘dual membership’ to be voted on at the conference. One called for dual membership to be completely forbidden, the other called for it to be permitted, but under the control of the incoming Central Executive Committee of the party, which is due to be elected in February. The second proposal passed overwhelmingly – the total ban was defeated by nearly 70% to 30%. However, as noted, what was missing was a clear definition of what a competing ‘party’ is for this purpose – this clarification was not included by the compositing process.

In our view it is perfectly reasonable to have a clause to exclude dual membership of registered parties such as the Labour Party or the Greens, as some safeguard against right-wing infiltration. We did not support its complete removal, as did many on the left. Nor do we support indiscriminate ‘inclusion’ of every single group that claims to be ‘left’. ‘Left’ Zionist groups, such as the Alliance for Workers Liberty, do represent a concrete danger of Zionist infiltration, and should be proscribed as Zionists to protect Your Party. Any potential ‘Friends of Israel’ grouping should be anathema.

Registered parties who want to participate in Your Party could reasonably be expected to de-register with the Electoral Commission to show they had no ill-intent. Transform has done just this. It is arguable that the SWP would be well advised to do something similar. They are not registered with the Electoral Commission and do not stand in elections. But calling themselves a ‘Party’ is thus a conceit. They could substantially disarm this issue by reverting to their old name of International Socialists, and even make the SWP name available to Your Party – that would actually gain them kudos on the left of the party.  Also not included for a vote was an amendment from comrades in Sheffield YP that explicitly recognised the right of YP members to form tendencies and platforms. The absence of such clarifications means that the democratic rights of YP members are still unclear. But it is also clear that the defeat of the total ban on ‘dual membership’, however defined, was a victory for the membership over the more conservative, bureaucratic elements in YP and for a more democratic, open and left-wing party.

Qualified Victories for the Left

There were several other important votes that went the way of the left. Clearly the overwhelming sentiment is that Your Party should be an explicitly socialist party, centred on the working class, that fights for all the oppressed. The vote in favour of YP explicitly signalling “that it is a socialist party” in its political statement passed by over 80% to 20%. The proposition that YP should explicitly signal “that the working class is at the heart of the social alliance that it seeks to build” passed by nearly 78% to 22%. The vote to include a commitment to “socialist, anti-imperialist and anti-oppression principles” passed by 89% to 11%. Two votes were held on Trans rights, the one to “commit to the fight for trans liberation” passed by 72% to 28%, another to “explicitly mention trans liberation” in the political statement by 68% to 32%. An amendment to ban second jobs and limit donations and gifts for £250 (a tiny amount) for elected representatives passed by nearly 95%. The proposal that there should be default two-term limits for internal party officials and publicly elected representatives passed by 59% to 41%. The proposal that members should be able to recall their local party officers by a simple majority, passed by 92% to 8%. All these show the overwhelming socialist and democratic sentiment that drives the membership of your party and really underlies that it is by far the most left-wing incipient major force in British politics.

The results were not uniformly victories for the left, however. A couple of votes were not quite so good, though not necessarily disastrous. The first being on “How do we choose members to go to conferences”, in which they were two options: Elected Branch delegates, together with those from organised sections, party branches, etc. And another proposal which supplemented those with “a portion of delegates selected by sortition”, which tends to dilute the elected nature of future conferences with an element of random selection. This is not necessarily disastrous but does dilute the element of direct democracy somewhat. The proposal with sortition won by 67% to 33%. The other less than perfect result was on the election of the Central Executive Committee, the 16-strong body that will be the central leadership of the party. By a 58.6% to 41.4% majority, it was decided that the CEC membership in England should be elected on a regional basis, not nationwide. Which might not be so bad if the CEC were larger, but for one of only 16 members is restrictive and may be open to undemocratic manipulation of various kinds.

Two votes were less decisive. The first being the party name, where nothing explicitly socialist was on the ballot, the nearest being the vague “For the many” but even that was far too cryptic. This led to the anodyne ‘status quo’ name Your Party winning with 37% of the vote, which is hardly overwhelming. From the above votes, if something explicitly socialist/working class had been on the ballot, it likely it would have won. But the biggest loss for the bureaucratic right-wing around Karie Murphy was the vote on collective leadership vs. individual leadership. This was close: by 51.6% to 48.4% the party voted not to have a single leader, but a party “collectively led by ordinary members elected to the Central Executive Committee, with the Chair, Vice Chair, and Spokesperson in particular serving as the public political leadership”. Albeit this is temporary: it will be reviewed by the CEC “in the party’s second year” to be voted for by membership vote in late 2027, before that year’s conference. The last decision was a significant, but narrow, victory for the left of the party grouped generally around Zarah Sultana, as were the more decisive votes on questions to do with socialism, the working class.

Post Conference Developments

Since the conference there have been some significant events. In London, there has been an unofficial assembly that had delegates and representatives from many active London borough branches, that had lively debates on both domestic and international questions, from people from a range of left-wing trends within Your Party. There will be another such assembly in early February, with branches encourages to submit policy motions for debate. Meanwhile the interim leadership of Your Party is trying to modify the decisions made by the conference already, trying to get membership support to change the number of seats on the CEC from 16 to 18 to allow a regional setup similar to the US senate, where each of 9 regions gets two CEC members irrespective of how many members are in each region. This would have the strange impact of lessening representation of those areas with the most members, which is very inequitable, and would resemble the undemocratic representation involved in the US Senate.

They are also trying to enforce a ban on so-called ‘dual members’, e.g. those in the SWP, standing for the CEC, saying that only the CEC (which has not been elected yet) can legitimate so-called ‘dual membership’ of ‘National Political Parties’ (whose definition is in any case unclear, contested and a major source of potential conflict – see earlier). This despite the conference voting against a ban on dual membership. This is something of an outrage, as the membership have never had a straightforward vote on any of these bureaucratic measures, which therefore have no legitimacy. There is nothing in the constitution as adopted at the conference that gives any legitimation to what could easily appear to be an attempt to effectively gerrymander the election of the CEC against the left.

The worst-case scenario is if YP members who have Marxist views and are in groups like Counterfire which are not registered with the electoral commission, do not stand in elections, and in most cases have never even claimed to be parties, are banned from standing on such a false pretext. Jeremy Corbyn has already conceded in writing that that would be wrong. But suspicions remain that some of those around him want such exclusions, that they want a CEC shorn of those tending towards Marxism and adherence to workers/party democracy by the back door, so that the decision of the Conference to allow ‘dual membership’, in spite of the ambiguity in the text of the Constitution adopted, can be overruled in practice by a CEC elected under such restrictions.

If they try such a stunt, they will likely run afoul of the obvious fact that the overwhelming majority of YP members agree with Zarah Sultana’s criticisms of manifestations of Labour style witchhunting, which was shown very clearly by some of the very high percentages rejecting the politics of YP’s embryonic right wing, as shown in the votes above. Starting such a witchhunt in YP would brand those responsible with something akin to the mark of Cain, or at least of Kinnock, and would show exactly who is really trying to build something akin to a Labour Party 2.0, that is, another bourgeois workers’ party, instead of a genuine workers’ party open to full-blooded anti-capitalist evolution.

It is not pre-determined that any existing trend, no matter how fervent and correct its cadre believe they are politically, really represents the historic interests of the working class. This includes us. Though we do pride ourselves on our serious development of theory in addressing the crucial issues of today, our experience is still likely one-sided and needs much more development. We are all products of a political environment, of attenuated politics of the working-class movement caused by an accumulation of defeats going back to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s. The degeneration of the Communist movement for a whole period strengthened social democracy and put the genuine communist minority trends in a difficult position. That over time led to the dominance of sectarian moods on the left and undercut real political development of the socialist and communist movement. That is what Your Party opens the opportunity for correcting, and that is why genuine Marxists must engage with it seriously in the spirit of Marx and Engels’ words in the Communist Manifesto:

“The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

“They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

“They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”

The new issue of Communist Fight journal is out now!

Its lead article is an extensive report on Your Party – the new party initiated by Zahra Sultana with Jeremy Corbyn – which held its founding conference at the end of November. As is well known by now, there was considerable factional turmoil and division even as the party was beginning to form up. The most crucial difference was Zarah Sultana’s public dissent from the record of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership in capitulating to the Zionist witchhunt against supporters of Palestinian struggle. Corbyn on the other hand appeared unenthused about creating a new party at all – and certainly less than enthused about the kind of politics ZS advocated, which brought her support from many whose aspirations are to build something qualitatively to the left of Labour.  The various conflicts and even sporadic witchhunting that have accompanied the birth of your party are analysed in some depth here.

There is also an important article on “Russia, China and Socialism” which explains why, for different reasons, both Russia and China should be defended against imperialism. This article is in part a spin off from the Your Party report, dealing with some complex political questions that need separating for explanatory reasons, on why socialists need to defend those states that, in complex ways, are the legacy of the Russian revolution. It also explains our positions on Russia and China in one article, and addresses the relationship between them, so we hope it will be a positive contribution towards educating wider layers.

There is also a substantial article on the multifaceted crisis in the US, triggered by the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, the kidnap raid on Venezuela, when they abducted President Maduro and his wife, the threat of another US-Israeli war on Iran, the threats to Cuba, Colombia and Mexico. It also addresses the possibility of US-Europe inter-imperialist conflict over Greenland.  

Finally, there is also a leaflet that the Consistent Democrats issued on the day of Maduro’s abduction by US imperialism, that was distributed on protests in London.

This is the prepared presentation at today’s forum (11th January 2026). A recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

US Imperialism has gone into what looks like a huge crisis in the 10 days or so since the New Year. First, we had the outrageous military attack on Venezuela on 3^rd January, the kidnapping of President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, followed by Trump’s claim that he was going to ‘run’ Venezuela. Prior to the kidnap-invasion we had weeks of Yankee murders of Venezuelan fishermen by so-called US ‘Coastguards’, claiming that they were intercepting ‘drug smugglers’ who are supposedly smuggling fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, into the US. These fishermen were murdered, some with ‘double tap’ killings that were boasted about by War Secretary Pete Hesgeth, when the survivors of the primary attack, clinging to wreckage, were then killed by a second attack with no other purpose than brazen murder.

In the US attack that kidnapped Maduro, the US brutally killed both Cuban and Panamanian guards that were helping Venezuela with security. There was evidently treachery from some in Maduro’s guard, and there is reason to suspect that not only the CIA, but also Mossad, were involved in preparing the way for the abduction, which had been planned for several months. His kidnapping causes political problems for Trump and the US. Because the charges are all lies. Maduro simply says he is innocent of all this crap, he was kidnapped and is a prisoner of war. Which he obviously is. He cannot be legitimately tried as a POW. He has very good lawyers already – the guy who was ready to defend Assange. And the government have been forced to admit that the supposed ‘Cartel of the Suns’ drug cartel that they accused Maduro of being the boss of, doesn’t actually exist. And they’ve changed the drug they now say he was involved in importing to the US, from fentanyl – a kind of super-heroin – to cocaine. They are desperately making it up as they go along. And Trump has not overthrown the US legal system as yet, although he wants to. It is not yet clear that he is strong enough to do that.

This is all not new. The Yankees have been seeking to overthrow the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ ever since General Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. His programme involved use of the country’s oil reserves to benefit the working class and the poor. It was a social democratic, welfare state policy funded by taxation of oil revenues, which then led to re-asserting state control over the Venezuelan oil industry in 2007. It had earlier been nationalised by a previous social democratic party in power, Democratic Action, in 1976, but that had effectively been undermined though the neoliberal period by a system of joint ventures with mainly US imperialist oil companies

When Chavez came to power in 1999, he gave expression to an enormous wave of popular discontent against the attacks and impoverishment the country suffered in the intervening decades. A veritable social explosion, which Chavez named the ‘Bolivarian revolution’, named after the early 19^th Century Venezuelan military officer and revolutionary nationalist leader who led struggles against Spanish rule that led to the creation of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru as well as Venezuela as independent states from 1817 to 1830. Obviously, evocation of his name is a powerful weapon feeding off the nationalist and anti-colonialist sentiments of the Venezuelan and other South American masses. Even though Spain has long gone as an early colonial master, now the struggle is against US imperialism, as it has been for the whole of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries so far.

Chavez’ left populist government was enormously popular, and its actions triggered enormous imperialist hostility. The CIA attempted to garner a military coup against him in 2002, and he was seized by the coup plotters, but mass action by the workers and peasants forced his release and reinstatement as president. Notably, new Labour under Blair, in the person of Denis McShane at the Foreign Office (Latin American department), supported the coup of 2002, and bitterly regretted its defeat. So Starmer’s refusal to condemn the kidnap of Maduro is not new.

Chavez allied with Cuba diplomatically and was seen as a major ally. He renationalised oil in 2007, and his populist example spread in the late 2000s, with the governments of Evo Morles in Bolivia and then Rafael Correa in Ecuador being of a similar disposition and inspired by Venezuela. But it should be noted that none of these populist governments broke with capitalism. Unlike in Cuba, where in the autumn of 1960 under Yankee pressure Castro and Guevara liquidated the bourgeoisie and effectively nationalized the whole economy, in these countries, capitalism remained intact, though supposedly under control.

Later, Morales and Correa were overthrown and/or manoeuvred out of power by forces allied with US imperialism. Whereas in Venezuela, the huge popular movement inspired by the Bolivarian revolution meant that Chavez was harder to eliminate. Chavez himself died of cancer in 2013, and it has long been suspected, but not proven, that his cancer was the result of some sort of US poisoning. Maduro was his successor and carried on with Chavez’ policies. Less charismatic, he still proved competent and a thorn in the US’s side. There have been long standing attempts to get rid of him, including phoney allegations of election fraud when he won elections. So called ‘legitimate’ presidents such as Juan Guaido, Edmundo Gonzalez, and now Maria Corazon Machado, all imperialist puppets were touted by US imperialism. Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025. She is a far-right Zionist who wants to essentially give Venezuelan natural resources to the US. Trump was forced to admit she has no popular support and cannot lead Venezuela even as a US puppet.

Trump seems to be delusional. He thinks that Delcy Rodrigues will help him to rule Venezuela. Maduro’s vice president, now acting president. He threatens her with death if she does not cooperate, a fat worse than Maduro, he says. The US wants Delcy Rodriguez and the current Venezuelan regime to act as his agent. But there is no chance of that. The anger of the masses, still within the framework of the Bolivarian revolution, is enormous and she could not do that even if she wanted to. There is no sign that she does, despite Tariq Ali et al.

To get what he wants, Trump would have to occupy the country. Which would immediately lead to a war of liberation which the US cannot win. Venezuela has 28 million people, bigger than Iraq. But South America is a huge, fertile continent and huge numbers of people hate US imperialism and would come to fight it in event of an invasion. And not only from South America. It’s just about the worst terrain they can think of. Far more difficult than Iraq. And there is a very high level of class consciousness in South America as compared to the Middle East.  It would be a huge graveyard for US imperialism Some parts of the US bourgeoisie are worried, that they are walking into a huge disaster, a super-Vietnam, or something like the Spanish Civil War. Hence the War Powers resolution passing in the senate.

But nevertheless, this event has set off a frenzy of openly expressed imperialist and militarist sentiment from some US imperialist politicians, raving about how they are going to attack Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, and any other country that asserts its sovereignty and defiance of US imperialism. Trump calls it the ‘Donroe Doctrine’, after the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ concept put forward by US President James Monroe in 1823. Which states that no outside power should be allowed have any influence or presence in the Americas. In its original form, this was in part an anti-colonial doctrine, that the US as a newly independent colony from Britain would help to drive other colonial powers out of the Americas. That was in the epoch of progressive capitalism. But from the 20^th Century a modified version of it became the doctrine of US imperialism, when that was born, that the whole of the Americas belongs to the US. No one has ever stated this so openly as Trump, that the natural resources of Venezuela belong to the US, not to the people of Venezuela.

We have also had threats from Trump to take Greenland from Denmark since the Venezuela attack. And even some references and rumblings about annexing Canada. Such things would cause chaos in inter-imperialist relations. An attack on Greenland would destroy NATO and would signify a reemergence of inter-imperialist conflict for the first time since WWII. Which side the UK would fall in this is anyone’s guess. It could also tear the British ruling class apart. And that abstracts from the complex questions involved in the activities of the Israel lobby, which is a factor, but not primary, in all this. Whether any of that will materialise is not clear, there are obviously conflicting forces in the US ruling class.

There is also the likelihood of US participation in another Israeli war against Iran. There are signs that both Iran, and Russia, expect an Israel-Iran war very soon. Russia has pulled most of its diplomats out of Israel, as Iran has the armed capacity to devastate Israel with hypersonic missiles, as it did in the 12-day war last June. It is better armed now than it was then, having been reinforced by both Russia and China. Which means it depends on the US to defeat Iran.  But the US may well be overstretched. These are all additional reasons why cracks are appearing in the unity of the US bourgeoisie. Trump’s strategy, as we have noted before, is to reconsolidate US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere now, to reconquer US world hegemony later. This is what is behind Rubio’s remarks about accepting multipolarity, to a degree. But Venezuelan oil, and conflicts over it, mean conflict with Russia and China sooner rather than later. China is a big customer of Venezuelan oil on a trade, not enforced, basis.

Trump’s regime is outside the ‘normal’ framework of US ‘democracy’ in that ICE is now effectively his private version of the Sturmabteilung, the SA in pre- and early- Nazi Germany.  Though Trump has not yet fully overthrown the Constitutional order in the US and may not actually be strong enough to do so. ICE was initially set up by GW Bush as a centralised, bureaucratic continuation of earlier US immigration forces, with a remit for the ‘war on terror’ that fed into Guantanamo Bay etc. Very bad. But Trump has re-officered it with actual fascists, Proud Boys and the like, who he pardoned from the Beer Hall putsch of Jan 6, 2021, when he resumed power in 2025. So now they are on the rampage, and not just against immigrants.  The killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis shows that.

ICE has no legal authority to lay a finger on any US citizen unless it has evidence they are hiding undocumented workers. It also has no authority to stop traffic, to interfere with it in any way. They are not police. They are not even like the French CRS in their formal legal powers. But in practice, as opposed to theory, they are a terrorist gangster force rampaging around the US. It’s very clear that that Jonanthan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. And he is an archetype. Video from his phone showed she was conciliatory to him and moved away. He murdered her with three bullets in the face in the most disgusting manner.  Then he called her a ‘fucking bitch’. That is premediated murder, murder 1, a capital crime in many US states (but not in Minnesota, where Minneapolis is).

This is even more explosive than the murder of George Floyd during the first Trump administration. Because of the race question and racial divisions in the US. It’s regrettable and appalling, but racial divisions mean black suffering does not necessarily find a big enough echo in the US. But this produced a rather large movement that the first Trump administration struggled to deal with. Trump could not stop Derek Chauvin, Floyd’s police murderer, from getting 22 years in prison for George Floyd’s murder.  It was a big factor in destroying what little popular legitimacy he had in his first term. Given that he had lost the popular vote in 2016. The only reason he won the popular vote in 2024 was that the Biden-Harris administration discredited itself with Ukraine, which most in the US did not understand but which crucified the US economy. And then tried to compete with Trump as to who could be the most loyal lackey of Israel and its genocide. A contest Trump was always going to win, as he is a paid agent.

No one, until recently Mamdani, has even postured against Israel, and Mamdani has severe limitations to put it mildly. But this killing going to be a huge radicalising issue. We are already seeing mass demonstrations against ICE right across the US. Trump did not dare to openly defend Derek Chauvin, who incidentally murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis. And though he pardoned the 6 Jan 2021 criminals who acted for him, he did not dare pardon Chauvin. Though his scumbag arch-Zionist supporter Ben Shapiro tried to get this with a petition.

What conclusion do we draw? We want the defeat of US imperialism in Venezuela, in Iran, and in in any other conflict they get in with workers’ states, ex-workers’ states, or the global South. We want an anti-imperialist united front of Russia, China, and all the workers’ states and oppressed countries to defend Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and any non-imperialist country or workers’ state that comes under attack. On the other hand, a conflict with Europe over Greenland would be an inter-imperialist conflict. We have no side between the EU and the US. Regarding ICE, it is essential for communists to make use of the 2^nd Amendment to agitate for a ‘well-regulated militia’ to crush ICE. There need to be political strikes against this murder and other crimes of ICE and the Trumpists. Its early days, but you can see this taking a revolutionary turn in the US. Trump is basically a fascist, but he is not running a consolidated fascist regime. There is still a real chance to defeat that.

By Ian Donovan

We need CONSISTENT anti-Zionism, not a halfway house!

Trump’s phoney 20 point ‘deal’ in Gaza was always simply a Zionist stratagem to retrench and continue the genocide by slightly different means. Trump’s sponsorship and superintendence of it from September was simply a means to try to take the heat off Israel for the genocide. It aimed to allow the pathological Israeli Defence Force, ridden with mental illness, sexualised addiction to infanticide, and similar bizarre pathologies, to avoid disintegration. Another crucial objective was to find ways to defuse the anti-Zionist radicalisation of the world’s population, by a combination of repression, manipulation, and flagrant attempts to hide the truth.

The toll of the Zionist war of extermination on Gaza’s civilian population of the two years of open genocide was horrendous – an essay by two doctors associated with the Lancet (journal of the British Medical Association) and drawing on material from that journal, postulated in September 2025 that the death toll from Israel’s Gaza slaughter was 680,000, more than two thirds of whom were children under 18. The latter is hardly surprising as over half of Gaza’s population are under 18, and young people are particularly vulnerable. (see https://eirigi.org/latestnews/2025/9/14/report-death-toll-in-the-gaza-reaches-680000-yet-apartheid-israel-tries-to-tell-us-there-is-no-genocide). This is the most horrendous crime of the 21st century, and it continues under the so-called Gaza Deal. Throughout the so-called ceasefire Israel has been killing at least 15 Palestinians on average every day.

Israel needed some sort of breather because it had been fought to a standstill by Hamas. Despite the elimination of leading many leading cadres and numerous fighters, the organisation gained popular support during the worst two years of Israel’s mass extermination– as shown by the flow of younger recruits into its ranks. Hamas more than made up for its losses at the hands of Israel by such recruitment. Hamas was not blamed for the slaughter Israel perpetrated simply because the vast majority of Palestinian knew that genocide has always been on Israel’s agenda regarding them, and any act of resistance could be a pretext. They also know, however, that failing to resist only emboldens the killers, and the catch-22 that any movement of Palestinians who resist the Zionist genocide project face. Palestinian organisations, from Hamas to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) refused the demands from Trump and the Zionists that they disarm, and refused foreign overlordship, while they also supported partial cooperation with the ‘deal’ – the hostage exchange – hoping that it would allow the masses a breather from Israel’s programme of mass extermination. They were not naïve in doing this, but considered they had no choice in the circumstances.

Israel has just underlined its real genocidal interest in this deal. They were supposed to have been allowing copious amounts of aid into Gaza as there was now supposedly a ‘peace deal’ but instead, as well as banning the long-established UN Palestine aid agency UNRWA, they have now banned more than two dozen international aid agencies, including Medecins Sans Frontieres and Oxfam, from operating in Gaza. The US, UK and others who support this ‘deal’ will do nothing about that. The kind of ‘aid’ operation Israel and its imperialist allies support is the so called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ that earlier this year would pretend to offer food aid to starving Gaza people, only to shoot them as they queued up to receive it. The so called GHF is an arm of the genocide, and that is the kind of ‘humanitarian aid’ the Zionist state and its allies support.

Fraud, Genocide and Mass Repression

Repression of the masses, particularly in the older imperialist countries, the US, Britain, West Europe and Australia is now centre stage. In Britain, we have the fraudulent proscription for “terrorism” of the obviously non-terrorist Palestine Action direct action group, and mass arrests of those civilians who publicly express opposition to genocide and support for the group. Fraud was built into Starmer’s government right from the start, as shown by Paul Holden’s expose (in The Fraud) of the prolonged, covert deception that played a major role in destroying Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and installing Starmer as a Zionist stooge, which was mainly the doing of the non-Jewish Israeli asset and covert manipulator Morgan McSweeney, who not coincidentally lived on an Israeli kibbutz in his youth. The fact that juries repeatedly acquitted Palestine Action activists of such charges as criminal damage, usually to Elbit arms factories and the like, accepting their defence that they acted to prevent a much greater crime (genocide!), was the motive for this fraudulent proscription.

Now, instead of putting PA people in front of juries for such charges, they just charge them with ‘terrorism’ instead. The people who have been on hunger strike over the last period, four of whom are still doing so and are at great risk, were arrested for participation in direct action for Palestine Action before the fraudulent proscription was enacted. Starmer’s Zionist government treated them as ‘terrorists’ anyway. It interfered with ordinary bail conditions to impose extraordinarily long remands in custody on people who would normally be bailed, precisely because they are unable to avoid jury trials in these cases, and there is a high probability that juries will acquit them. Now the manipulated two-year wait for a trial, and remand in custody, amount to a two-year prison sentence without trial without any jury getting a look-in. That’s clearly why there is a hunger strike.

The Zionist government and media reacted to this by an effective D-notice/press blackout, until in December this was challenged first when Starmer’s corrupted ‘Justice’ Secretary Lammy was confronted by relatives of the hunger strikers, where he pretended not to know about this. Then there were the actions of Your Party MP Zarah Sultana at Bronzefield Prison in Surrey, leading protests against the lack of medical care for one of the hunger strikers. These finally forced the media to cover the hunger strike. Though several have now abandoned their hunger strike, four remain on the protest, with severe health risks.

The hunger strike is currently the sharp end of this government’s repression, but it has had many other manifestations. They have used the cops to issue bans, of doubtful legality, on national Palestine solidarity demonstrations from assembling near the BBC in Portland Place on Saturdays, using the smear that the demonstration is in some way threatening to Jews, and the presence of a synagogue within half a mile of the BBC Centre. The fact that the marches always march South from Portland Place, in the opposite direction to this building and have never shown any interest in it, is immaterial for these liars. It is another anti-democratic fraud, and excuse for repression, not a reason. Indeed, it is utterly dubious as to whether these police actions, ordered by the Starmer government, are even legal, so just to make sure they are trying to ram through a new law to explicitly allow them to ban any demonstration in the vicinity of a religious building on grounds that it might be “intimidating”, which applies “regardless of whether the protest organisers intended to have that effect”. A license for fraud, basically. The same is true of their proposals to allow police to limit repeated demonstrations supposedly because of their ‘cumulative’ impact. In 2025 the Court of Appeal declared such decisions unlawful, so this fraudulent government is using its large, but illegitimate majority, to write such powers into the same Crime and Policing Bill.  

Organisers of a Palestine solidarity demonstration in December 2004, including Ben Jamal of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Chris Nineham of the Stop the War coalition, are up in court on 23 February for supposedly breaching police instructions under the Public Order Act. The whole thing is fraudulent as evidence exists on film of the Police ushering and encouraging demonstrators into Trafalgar Square – after which Chris Nineham was violently arrested … supposedly for breaching police instructions and demonstrating in Trafalgar Square! Ben Jamal was arrested later for the same spurious offence. The whole thing is fraudulent from start to finish.

Then there are the several raids on pro-Palestine journalists and activists by the cops, which have resulted in spurious charges of supporting ‘terrorism’ against such leftists. Such as Sarah Wilkinson, accused in various ways of “encouraging terrorism” for expressing solidarity with Palestinian resistance to Israel – not any kind of military or terrorist activity or anything remotely like it. For thought crimes, in other words. Her trial has been set for January 2027. In Jersey, Natalie Strecker was acquitted of similar charges in November. And on Monday, January 5^th this year, well-known Jewish left activist Tony Greenstein faces charges at Kingston Upon Thames for supposedly expressing support for Hamas in a tweet that compared what was going on in Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Again, there is no suggestion of any military involvement in any concrete act of supposed “terrorism”. These spurious thought-crimes based on distortions of people’s support for the Palestinians into support for specific organisations that that British state and government, acting for Israel, has decided to use as a lever to supress dissent.

When the British state decided to extend its proscription of support for the military wings of Hamas and Hizbullah, to the political parties that these military wings are attached to, which have been elected by the masses in Palestine and Gaza, it crossed the line to supporting a genocide. These laws against defence of elected parties amount to pro-genocide laws, that say that Israel is entitled to treat the mass of the populations who vote for these parties as ‘terrorists’, and therefore to exterminate them, and their families including children and babies. That is what is going on in Gaza, and similar atrocities on a smaller scale (so far) have been committed by Israel in Lebanon. 

The “logic” of these charges — that these accused socialists agree politically with conservative Muslim parties like Hamas and Hezbollah, is ridiculous. The real intention of this abuse of the law is to criminalise opposition to mass murder – what they are saying is that Israel is fully entitled to murder wholesale civilians who support these parties, and anyone who supports resisting that is in some way supporting ‘terrorism’. This is the logic of Starmer’s government, and its Tory predecessor that was similarly dominated by Zionists, and it is a Nazi-like, genocidal logic. They cannot openly say these things in a court of law, so they attempt to lie about the political allegiances of such leftist activists to cast them as supporting political parties that are clearly light-years from their own views.

There have been some recent setbacks for Starmer’s government regarding some of its persecutions, such as the police investigation against the punk artist Bob Vylan, for leading large crowds at the Glastonbury rock festival chanting “Death, Death to the IDF”. They concluded that there was no evidence of wrongdoing – “insufficient evidence” and therefore there was no case to answer. A magistrate in the 6 Counties also threw out charges against Mo Chara, of the Irish punk band Kneecap, for supposedly displaying a Hezbollah flag, as the charges were filed incorrectly, without proper permission from the Attorney General, and missed a crucial six-month deadline in the North of Ireland for filing such charges. The government is now trying to appeal from this verdict, which is apparently the result of its own incompetence.

IHRA Misdefinition of ‘Anti-Semitism’ – Today’s Protocols

And another strand of Zionist and government mendacity and persecution of Palestine activists is the use of the IHRA misdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’ to make false allegations of … anti-Semitism. The IHRA misdefinition has played a role akin to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with the Nazi holocaust, preparing Western countries to support the genocide of Palestinians. Its whole purpose is to act as a complex of phoney amalgams that exploit the issue of the Nazi genocide to try to equate opposition to Zionist ethnic cleansing/genocide with denial of the Nazi genocide, and similar things. It was used as a bludgeon during the Labour leadership of Corbyn to destroy his leadership, and to politically prepare the Labour Party under Starmer to support the genocide. And now it has been passed into law by Trump in the US – in a manner that is certainly in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution – as a crude weapon to attempt to deport non-citizen critics of Israel’s Gaza holocaust.

But Trump is on weak legal ground. On September 30^th Federal District Judge William Young in Boston ruled that Trump and his minions had violated the First Amendment constitutional rights of non-citizens with their attempt to deport legal US residents since Trump gained office in Jan 2025. The best known were Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tuft University’s Rumeysa Ozturk, attacked for their public opposition to Israeli’s genocide. Ibrahim Khalil was thus released on bail. This has starkly demonstrated that even the Trump administration is not all powerful in violating the democratic rights of non-citizens using the IHRA misdefinition as its basis – it comes up flatly against the basics of freedom of speech. There will be a remedy hearing for those vindicated sometime in 2026. There may also be appeals. But the Trump administration has not dared to try legal sanctions against actual US citizens over this.

In this country, the Starmer government, and its Tory predecessor have been attempting to use the IHRA misdefinition to persecute vulnerable professionals at work because of their political views. This predates the genocide itself but has carried on since. This has particularly been done by the arch Zionist Wes Streeting, who has been bolstering attempts by Israel lobbyists to victimise NHS staff who speak out on Palestine. There is also the celebrated case of David Miller, who In February 2024, won a landmark unfair dismissal case at an Employment Tribunal against Bristol University, who employed him until 2021 as a Professor of Political Sociology. His case has some aspects that are related to another important case, that of the comedian Reginald D. Hunter.

Regarding the NHS, three prominent cases involve Dr Ellen Kriesels, Dr Rehiana Ali and Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, who in the course of 2025, have been targeted by Zionists because of their strong, publicly expressed pro-Palestine views. As Crispin Flintoff, who conducted an extensive interview with them on his show on 28^th December, reported:

“They have been doxxed and had their livelihoods put at risk while facing disciplinary hearings with their professional bodies. And when those bodies found they had done nothing wrong, Health Secretary Wes Streeting intervened, applying political pressure to decisions that should be independent.

“After Dr Ellen Kriesels and Dr Rahmeh Aladwan were suspended from practice, you might have expected the campaign against them to end. Instead, both were arrested just before Christmas and held in custody for several hours. Dr Aladwan was arrested three times.” (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWd4wReY2QI for the citation, as well as the accompanying video)

Their cases are still ongoing, and there is a strong need for broader labour movement solidarity than they have received so far. They are very outspoken anti-Zionists and not shy of criticising the racism of dominant layers of the Jewish population and its organised political expression in ways that some sections of the ‘anti-Zionist’ Jewish left find challenging. This reflects their own oppression by Jewish-Zionists. There is some serious political learning and clarification to be done by the existing left, Jewish and non-Jewish, about liberal responses to the militant anti-Zionism of these comrades, who are decidedly not infected with the vices of liberal residual softness on Zionism (particularly among non-Jews) and Bundist prejudices among the Jewish left. There is an important discussion to be had about the politics of all this, which we will make a start in addressing presently.

But first there is the case of David Miller. He was dismissed from his academic post at Bristol after sustained pressure from Zionist lobby groups and over 100 pro-Zionist politicians – from the Commons and Lords – of several political parties – Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, Greens and SNP. Those politicians addressed a March 2021 open letter, from the ‘All Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism’ to the University demanding ‘action’ against him for ‘Bringing the University into Disrepute’ with his research and criticism of Zionism and its operations.

Zionist CAA Caught Red-Handed Abusing the Justice System

His victory in 2024 established in British law for the first time that anti-Zionist views constitute a protected philosophical belief under anti-discrimination laws, and that discrimination against an employee for holding and expressing this belief constituted unlawful discrimination. The victory was lessened because the Tribunal held that some of comrade Miller’s behaviour, derived from those protected beliefs, was impermissible and contributed to his dismissal, which means that though the basic principle was established, it was not comprehensive enough a victory to be ideal. But nevertheless, it established a principle that Zionists are desperate to overthrow. The University, backed by Israel lobby organisations, appealed this decision at a three-day hearing of the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) in November. Comrade Miller opposed their appeal and cross-appealed the Tribunal’s lesser findings that potentially reduced the victory. At this point, the EAT is still considering its judgement, which is likely to come by February.

However, seemingly as an attempt to interfere with this case, in June 2025 the Zionist fake-charity, the so-called ‘Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’ (CAA) filed a private prosecution against him for supposedly issuing ‘menacing’ tweets on X, basically calling for Zionists to be held accountable for their crimes. There is a more general Zionist campaign against him also, which is why when he attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon earlier this year as a journalist, he was ‘questioned’ by ‘anti-terrorist’ police when he returned to the UK. Quite a few others have been subjected to such intimidatory, mendacious questioning, which is not a proper arrest but rather a form of (usually) short-lived detention without trial, including recently Craig Murray, George and Gayatri Galloway, Richard Medhust. It’s a form of threatening, hostile abuse by the British state, and nothing to do with any valid ‘investigation’ of anything.

At the same time as the CAA began its action against David Miller, it issued another private prosecution, against the Black American comedian Reginald D Hunter, who lives in Scotland, for supposedly sending ‘offensive’ messages on X. On 17th October, in the CAA vs David Miller case, a magistrate ruled that the CAA had withheld significant information from the court that should have been disclosed when they filed the case. They were given 28 days to comply with an order to disclose all relevant communications between their directors, trustees and staff on whether they were seeking to silence David Miller or to undermine his Employment Appeal Tribunal. They did eventually disclose some more material which is now in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service.

This is significant given what happened in the Reginald D Hunter case. On 23rd December a court quashed the CAA’s private prosecution against Hunter, saying the CAA was using the criminal justice system for “improper reasons.” Judge Michael Snow said

“The CAA have demonstrated by the misleading and partial way in which it summarised its application and its wilful, repeated, failure to meet its disclosure obligations, that its true and sole motive in seeking to prosecute Reginald Hunter is to have him cancelled” (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8d9lp5y9jo)

and concluded “I have no doubt that the prosecution is abusive.” Apparently, one important fact that the CAA had also failed to disclose to the court is that it is under investigation by the Charity Commission for allegedly abusing its charitable status for political purposes.

This would appear to put the CAA’s case against David Miller also in deep trouble. But the point of these phoney prosecutions and lawfare is not necessarily to get results in terms of convictions. They are “lawfare” – an abuse of law so that the time, expense and stress undergone by those compelled to face such vexatious cases is the ‘punishment’ decreed by such abusers of legal action.

Fake Lefts and Zionist Tropes

Returning to the question of the NHS Doctors, there is a fascinating interview with Dr Aladwan on the YouTube channel of Attrition, a new show “analysing war, imperialism and Zionism.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wX3u0MRi3s). This goes into considerable detail about the political views and racist persecution of this excellent and heroic Palestinian-Jordanian NHS Doctor.

She is clearly exemplary in her medical work but is being repeatedly dragged to spurious disciplinary hearings on Streeting’s orders for her expressed political views and her resistance to Jewish supremacist racism. It is a matter of principle for the working-class movement to defend her and her other two colleagues. Dr Aladwan was arrested just a couple of days before her recent hearing, and a list of allegations were presented to her that looked suspiciously like they were formulated by someone in the Israeli state.

Her prolific use of the phrase ‘Jewish lobby’ to describe her tormentors is completely understandable, but it is more accurate to call it a Jewish-Zionist lobby. Zionism is certainly the dominant form of Jewish thought today, but there is a large layer of Jews who abhor it, and don’t really deserve to be simply bracketed with their supremacist brethren. She is right though that Zionism, or more accurately Political Zionism, is about Jewish supremacism over the Palestinians, and aspires to supremacy over and suppression of all those who speak out against the dispossession, persecution and genocide of the Palestinians.

The ‘Lobby’, however it is formulated, is in fact a euphemism. It would have no power at all if it were not for the disproportionate representation of (mainly) Zionist Jews in the capitalist ruling classes particularly of the advanced capitalist, imperialist countries. It is simply a fact that Jews as an ethnicity make up 10% of the population of billionaires worldwide, but only 0.2% of the world’s population are Jewish. That is 50 times overrepresentation. The reason for this is a complex product of Jewish history going back to early medieval times – it has a materialist explanation – but its factual basis today is indisputable.  

The “state capture” that she talks about certainly indicates the power of Jewish-Zionism in the main imperialist countries, but it would not give out that appearance if it were not for the material power of that layer of the Jewish super-rich, who are mainly concentrated in the advanced capitalist countries in West Europe, North America and Australasia (as well as Israel, if course). It is that layer of privileged Jewish-Zionists who provide the material basis for what gives the appearance of ‘state capture’ of say, Britain and the United States by Israel and its agents. They do not really have the material power to ‘capture’ these states – they are a minority, even though a large one, within the ruling classes of these countries. But they are allowed to act like they do rule these countries, certainly when it comes to anything that touches the Palestinian Question, because of the cult-like worship of most of the gentile bourgeoisie for this layer, who they credit with being the ideological inspirers and popularisers of neoliberalism and the Thatcher/Reagan revolution, which the bourgeoisie credit with saving the capitalist system from a major, systemic crisis in the 1970s.

Her criticism of many supposedly anti-Zionist Jews for trying to get her to shut up about Jewish supremacism is excellent. The contradiction of many such ‘anti-Zionist’ leftists who adhere to forms of Jewish identity politics that mimic some aspects of Zionism and thereby take offence at many sharp criticisms of Zionism, is excruciating.

If you accuse them of Zionism, they rightly take offence. But there are common tropes, as it were, between Zionism and leftist, ‘anti-Zionist’ forms of Jewish identity politics – notably the idea that to single out the outsize Jewish bourgeoisie as the prime mover of Israeli crimes is supposedly anti-Semitic. In fact, when analysed in materialist terms, this conclusion is obvious. Likewise, when anyone talks of the causes of Zionism’s extraordinary power in the Western countries, as being down to the outsize Jewish-Zionist bourgeois layer – whose correct designation is the “Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste” – this brings forth phoney allegations that this contention, solidly based on fact, is somehow anti-Semitic. This canard is a manifestation of cross-class Jewish chauvinism.

As a result of this oppression, Dr Aladwan almost seems to have a rose-tinted view of an ‘independent’ British imperialism at times later in this interview. The interviewer, Ammar Kazmi, supplies a useful corrective to that at the end. Her view of the remedy for Zionist colonisation is understandable but may not really be practical. Though many descendants of Jewish colonists may well flee from the Zionist state when it finally collapses, that cannot be taken as read and without at least part of that population being induced to tolerate its destruction, that defeat of the Zionist entity may not be possible.

Greenstein’s About-Face to Ally with Zionists Against David Miller

Which brings us to the subject of Tony Greenstein’s recent attack on David Miller in the Weekly Worker and elsewhere, smearing him as ‘anti-Semitic’ even as he battles the Zionist CAA and other Zionists that stand behind Bristol University as they try to overturn his Employment Tribunal victory. In which he won a victory for all anti-Zionists, as the Tribunal ruled that he was unlawfully discriminated against for his anti-Zionist beliefs. This is the first time that such a victory has been won in the courts, and if Bristol University loses its appeal on the principle of this, it will become a potent legal precedent that potentially protects anti-racist opponents of Zionism in Britain generally from victimisation for their views in the workplace.

But for Tony Greenstein, what matters is not the rights of opponents of Zionism but protecting the Jewish-Zionist part of the bourgeoisie from left-wing criticism because of its role, in class terms, of being the core socio-economic formation whose interests are embodied in the project of Political Zionism. He considers that David Miller:

“…has begun propagating conspiracy theories about Zionism taking over the world and engaging in ‘state capture’. No longer is Zionism the adopted policy of western states, which support Israel because, in the words of Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig, it is an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ situated in a strategically important, energy rich region.

“Zionism is instead a monster that is engaged in a project involving the take-over and control of the world powers, including its former imperialist sponsors. Indeed it is on its way to having gained control of all of them.

“Not surprisingly it is attracting support from fascists, racists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and other assorted fruitcakes and loony tunes.  Zionism according to Miller is really no different from the Elders in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion who planned and plotted to take over the world and subvert the existing order. Miller is one in a long line of cranks.”

(https://tonygreenstein.com/david-millers-crazy-fantasy-of-a-global-jewish-empire-gives-imperialism-a-clean-bill-of-health/)

This is typical of Tony Greenstein. He claims to oppose the IHRA misdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’. But in the passage quoted above, he creates his own version of the same thing. The IHRA definition, through a convoluted set of ‘examples’, is really a Zionist version of the method of amalgam that is perhaps best known from Stalin’s Moscow Trials in the late 1930s. The main amalgam that came out of that event was the assertion that one of the two main co-leaders of the Russian revolution, Trotsky, was a Nazi. The reasoning was along the lines of ‘Trotsky is against Stalin. Hitler is also against Stalin. Therefore, Trotsky must be a supporter of Hitler’.

The IHRA misdefinition uses a virtually identical form of warped logic to Stalin’s Moscow trials. With its 11 “examples” of “contemporary anti-semitism”, it basically asserts that to say that Israel is a “racist endeavour”, or to make “comparisons” of Israel’s behaviour “with the Nazis” is politically similar to denying the Nazi holocaust and is hence “anti-Semitic”. Hence, logically, to accuse Israel of genocide, i.e. of behaving like the Nazis, is “anti-Semitic”. But Israel clearly is attempting the extermination of the Gaza Palestinian population, as the whole world knows… so logically, everyone who sees this is ‘anti-Semitic’.

This is a key component of the warped politics that primed the Labour Party under Keir Starmer to support the current genocide. In that sense, the IHRA definition itself is akin to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, acting as a ‘warrant for genocide’, a distortion of reality that is used to motivate support for a genocidal programme, and to demonise anyone who defends the targets of such a programme. This is the underlying rationale as to why the Starmer regime, which is part of the political cult that leads the bulk of bourgeois politicians in the West to defer to the Zionist project on virtually everything to do with Palestine, is persecuting those who denounce the genocide in Gaza, as extensively spelt out above.

You would expect, as a basic principle, that those on the left, who claim to be anti-Zionists would defend each other against such politically motivated Zionist smears. But not Tony Greenstein. Even though he is facing persecution and a state frameup himself, he declares that others – and David Miller in particular – are guilty of the kind of thing he is falsely accused of … by a similar piece of logic to kind of falsehood that is being used to persecute many others, including him.

So, we have yet another amalgam, this time from Tony Greenstein, against anyone who refuses to discount certain specific material facts when addressing the crimes of Political Zionism. Two propositions are given the same treatment as in the IHRA ‘examples.’ The first is this alleged proposition:

“… Miller’s focus on the Zionist lobby has resulted in him beginning to be unable to see the wood for the trees. He is unable to put the power and influence of the Zionist lobby in perspective. No longer is Israel the attack dog of US imperialism: rather it is Israel which is in control of imperialism. Indeed it has become the major imperialist power!” (ibid)

Israel – an Imperialist Force in its Own Right

But what Greenstein really rejects is the notion that Israel is an imperialist power at all. However, there is a problem there – if it is not imperialist, since we actually live in a world when those capitalist countries that are not imperialist powers are invariably victims of imperialism, you arrive at the proposition that Israel is in some way a victim of imperialism. For Marxists, the imperialist world is fundamentally divided into oppressor and oppressed nations, as Lenin explained:

“That is why the focal point in the Social-Democratic programme must be that division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the essence of imperialism, and is deceitfully evaded by the social-chauvinists and Kautsky. This division is not significant from the angle of bourgeois pacifism or the philistine Utopia of peaceful competition among independent nations under capitalism, but it is most significant from the angle of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/oct/16.htm)

If Israel is not imperialist, then logically it must either be included among the ranks of colonies and or semi-colonies – oppressed countries, or at a pinch, among the ranks of what Lenin called ‘dependant countries’, that is, countries like Argentina, which are still oppressed by imperialism. The only other types of states that exist in an imperialist-derived world are workers states (either revolutionary, or degenerated/deformed), and the anomaly that is Russia, a new kind of non-imperialist bourgeois state that is itself deformed by the material heritage of the first and longest-lasting workers’ state that it has been unable to abolish. Since obviously none of the latter are remotely relevant to Israel, denying that Israel is imperialist implies that it is some kind of oppressed nation. So, something remarkably similar to the Zionist claim of eternal victimhood is smuggled in by the back door.

This is a question that the Trotskyist left has never really addressed. Calling Israel a ‘colonial settler state’ does not really address whether it is imperialist or a semi-colony. It should be noted that the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are in their origin colonial-settler states. The first is the world imperialist hegemon; the last three are (relatively minor) imperialist countries, clearly, oppressor nations. They are not oppressed in any way; the idea is absurd. But these were all created and except for the US (which separated completely from Britain much earlier) became British ‘Dominions’ long before the dawning of the 20^th Century, and there is no mystery about what their ‘mother country’ is. They were proto-imperialist oppressor nations when they were created in the 19^th Century and moved seamlessly into the imperialist epoch as minor imperialist offspring of British colonialism. This is not particularly controversial on the Trotskyist left.

But Israel has proven difficult for the Trotskyist left to address. The statement that Israel is a ‘colonial settler state’ is utterly nebulous about whether it is imperialist, or some kind of semi-colony. The only ostensibly Trotskyist group prior to this that took a coherent (but wrong) position on this was the (now defunct) Communist Workers Group of New Zealand (led by David Bedggood), which argued that Israel is a semi-colony, albeit of a ‘special kind’. But if Israel is a semi-colony, then it is qualitatively co-equal to the Arab semi-colonial states that neighbour it, and there is no basis to take a side in conflicts between Israel and those states. This provides some theoretical backing for the position of the old international Spartacist tendency of taking no sides in the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars between the Arab states and Israel, an appalling position which they never theorised in terms of taking a position on the nature of Israel.

Taking the position that Israel is imperialist has immediate effects – it immediately raises the question of the nature of the large Jewish-Zionist ethnic factions within the imperialist bourgeoisie that are loyal to Israel as ‘their’ state, and who have ‘birthright’ citizenship rights in that state by virtue of Israel’s racist Law of Return. If Israel is imperialist, then that array of factions is imperialist also and their loyalty to Israel becomes a prime political issue. That is simply the logic of characterising Israel as imperialist. But obviously Israel is not an oppressed nation – it is one of the world’s most obvious, blatant oppressors and undoubtedly the most openly racist state in the world. It is an advanced capitalist country with a major array of cross-border factions in the wider imperialist bourgeoise supporting its activities as an oppressor. The idea that it is not imperialist is completely at odds with reality.

It is the only new imperialist country created in the 20th Century and a transplanted entity, like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, created by genocide. But it was transplanted as imperialist from the very beginning. Unlike the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand which were products of early British colonialism created while capitalism was still a progressive development out of feudalism. These became imperialist toward the end of the 19th Century when progressive capitalism itself developed into imperialist capitalism, characterised by “reaction all the way down the line” as Lenin put it. Israel was created as a transplanted imperialist state from its inception in 1948.

So here comes Greenstein’s version of the IHRA version of anti-Semitism. Greenstein complains that:

“Miller has begun propagating conspiracy theories about Zionism taking over the world and engaging in ‘state capture’. No longer is Zionism the adopted policy of western states, which support Israel because, in the words of Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig, it is an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ situated in a strategically important, energy rich region.

“Zionism is instead a monster that is engaged in a project involving the take-over and control of the world powers, including its former imperialist sponsors. Indeed it is on its way to having gained control of all of them.

“Not surprisingly it is attracting support from fascists, racists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and other assorted fruitcakes and loony tunes.  Zionism according to Miller is really no different from the Elders in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion who planned and plotted to take over the world and subvert the existing order. Miller is one in a long line of cranks.” (https://tonygreenstein.com/david-millers-crazy-fantasy-of-a-global-jewish-empire-gives-imperialism-a-clean-bill-of-health/)

The core of this argument in the sentence that argues that Western states “…support Israel because, in the words of Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig, it is an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ situated in a strategically important, energy rich region.”

Note that in this sentence, Greenstein, who sometimes aspires to Marxism, does not clarify if Israel, this supposed “unsinkable aircraft carrier” is imperialist, or some kind of vassal state of imperialism, i.e. a semi-colony. The whole sophistry about an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” implies that Israel is some kind of colonial or semi-colonial possession of the United States, as does the phrase about “its former imperialist sponsors” which also implies that Israel is not itself imperialist. It obviously is not a colony; it does not have a US Governor and colonial administration. That leaves Israel as a semi-colony. But he doesn’t say that either. He leaves it hanging in the air.

This position is a classic evasion of the pseudo-Trotskyist left. Apparently, Israel is different to every other state in the world, as it not considered appropriate to clarify whether it is imperialist, or not. If it were defined as non-imperialist, some kind of semi-colony in fact, then it would be the duty of Marxists in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky to treat it as an oppressed country and defend it against imperialism. But if a tendency defines it as imperialist, then it’s actual material attributes, including its international dimension, lead immediately to Zionists, and their capitulators on the Jewish left such as Tony Greenstein, accusing any such tendency or individual of ‘anti-Semitism’.

This word “crank” directed against David Miller is in this context an anti-communist, anti-Marxist, anti-left slur. He’s not the first person to be smeared in this manner. Recall that Jackie Walker was called a “crank” by Owen Jones when Jones went into full cowardly retreat in the face of the ‘anti-Semitism” witchhunt when Corbyn led the Labour Party. Greenstein was himself called a ‘crank’ by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for speaking at a rally against the witchhunt on 20th July 2021 – along with every single person who attended the rally. (https://antisemitism.org/tony-greenstein-and-piers-corbyn-make-nazi-comparisons-in-speeches-at-far-left-demonstration-outside-labour-party-hq-in-anticipation-of-significant-nec-meeting)

Then again, arch-Zionist and warmongering hack Nick Cohen said the whole movement behind Corbyn were “cranks” when writing in the Spectator in May 2018 (https://spectator.com/article/corbyn-s-cranks-aren-t-interested-in-power/). He also had his anti-socialist demonology up to scratch about the Corbynites, but (unfortunately) it was massively exaggerated. He began his screed:

“It ought to be a statement of the obvious that Labour is fighting a civil war between revolutionary socialists and social democrats, which goes back to the Russian revolution 100 years ago. The armies may have changed, but the battle line remains as static as ever.” (https://spectator.com/article/corbyn-s-cranks-aren-t-interested-in-power/)

In Cohen’s paranoid, neoliberal mind, left reformists like Corbyn and those who followed him were fantasised as being “revolutionary socialists” inspired by the Russian Revolution. Unfortunately, this was not true – if it were true then Corbyn, with his hundred of thousands of supporters would be able to build a mass communist party in Britain. Your Party is not that, though it could evolve in a genuine working-class party where such a programme would get a hearing.  

There is something of the Nick Cohen in Tony Greenstein’s denunciation of David Miller as a “crank” for addressing a crucial issue that genuine revolutionary Marxists are duty-bound to address, if they are to fully understand Zionism. That is Tony Greenstein’s version of the IHRA version of anti-Semitism – to address a key question – that he now admits is based on fact – is a sign of “anti-Semitism”. What is really is a sign of is the antipathy of Tony Greenstein and others who adhere to his kind of Jewish identity politics, to Marxism when it uses the same, historical materialist method in examining the Jewish Question as it uses when examining any other political question.

When David Miller talks about “state capture”, a “Jewish Empire” or “Pax Judaica” he is addressing phenomena that at least empirically, appear to many people to be a reality. Whatever your analysis of the causes of these phenomena, the view that Israel has enormous power in Western counties is increasingly common and grounded in political reality. Abuse of people who attempt to address this fact as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘cranks’ is little different from Zionist abuse against the Palestine Solidarity movement generally. As an example of this,  it is worth listening to the interview given by the Jordanian-Palestinian Doctor, Rahmeh Aladwan with Ammar Kamzi of Attrition, referred to above, where she explores this question in depth from the point of view of her own oppression as a target of Zionist witchhunting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wX3u0MRi3s).

Greenstein’s Anti-Communist Snake-Oil

Even more to the point is to analyse the causes of this phenomenon. This Tony Greenstein manifestly fails to do. He shown this when he berates David Miller for a Tweet he sent out in August 2023, which made three points:

“1. Jews are not discriminated against.

2. They are over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power.

3. They are therefore, in a position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.”

His response was as follows:

“Miller was correct to say that Jews are not discriminated against or experiencing racism. There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain or Europe. Anti-Semitism is a marginal prejudice. I could even accept his observations on Jewish ‘overrepresentation’ in positions of power, because statistically and sociologically it is undoubtedly true, though how relevant it is debateable.

However Miller’s third point that this enabled Jews to discriminate against those who were oppressed was wrong. If Jews in powerful positions discriminate against others they do it as part of the organisations they are a part of, not as collective Jews.”

Later on, he says of point 2 that:

“It is … entirely legitimate to ask why Jews are represented in the numbers Miller suggests. I have no doubt that there are historical-materialist reasons. However it is the conclusions and the use to which Miller puts these which I am questioning.”

So, let’s get this straight – Greenstein says that the statistics that David Miller puts forward on “Jewish ‘overrepresentation’ in positions of power” are “undoubtedly true” and that “entirely legitimate to ask why Jews are represented in the numbers” that David Miller (and others) suggests, and he even concedes “. I have no doubt that there are historical-materialist reasons” for these things. But nevertheless, he says that “how relevant” these things are is “debateable” (!!). This is flat denial of reality – and shows Greenstein systematically, and quite cynically, confusing class/national consciousness and collectivity with ‘conspiracy theories.” He writes:

“Now it may well be true that Jews are statistically over-represented in certain sections in proportion to their numbers in society but it is quite another thing to suggest that they act collectively.”

And then:

“The whole concept of ‘Jewish Power’ is an updated version of historic Jewish conspiracy theories.”

This is a sleight-of-hand worthy of any Zionist. Because it deliberately attempts to equate the collectivity of a class, or rather of a faction (or array of factions) of a class united by a political programme, i.e., a quasi-nationalist programme, with the notion of Jewish conspiracy or Jewish “collectivity”. This is an attack on Marxism, and an attempt to equate any attempt to apply the same basic historically materialist tenets as can be legitimately applied to any other bourgeois faction, to those sections (the majority) of the Jewish bourgeoisie who support Zionism, just because they are Jewish.

It is Jewish exceptionalism, in other words. Greenstein says it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to say that Jewish-Zionist bourgeois organise ‘collectively’. But they don’t organise “as Jews” but as Jewish-Zionist bourgeois to fight for Zionist political objectives, which are ethnocentric, that centre on creating and defending a racist Jewish state. They organise politically along these class-programmatic lines, just as sections of the British bourgeoisie who supported Brexit, did and do still organise along these class-programmatic lines in such parties as UKIP and the Brexit Party (now Reform). To equate that concept with a cross-class “conspiracy” of Jews as laid out in Jewish conspiracy theories, such as those between capitalists and communists beloved by the Nazis, is just as outrageous a slur as that in the Moscow Trials that accused Trotsky of being a Nazi because he fought against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution under Stalin. This is Greenstein’s version of the IHRA.

It is complete and utter political and intellectual dishonesty and proof of a complete lack of political integrity. It is anti-communist snake oil. It is racist, because it really implies that Jews, unlike every other human group, are not subject to the basic tenets of historical materialism, and in some way exist outside those tenets, which are universal. It is anti-communist, racist gibberish, in other words, and a serious sign of political and moral decay.

The apparent phenomenon of ‘state capture’ showed itself most dramatically in Britain in October and November with the affair of the Tel Aviv Macabees Europa League soccer match against Aston Villa in Birmingham. Macabees fans earlier rampaged around Amsterdam, pulling down Palestinian flags wherever they were to be found, physically attacking many people in Amsterdam who showed visible signs of sympathy for Palestinians, and singing racist songs that glorified the genocide, such as “there are no schools in Gaza, because the children are all dead”. When the West Midlands Police imposed a ban on these extremely violent racists attending the match at Villa Park, knowing full well they would initiate extreme violence in Birmingham, they were denounced as ‘anti-Semitic’ by all four major bourgeois parties in Britain: Labour, Tory, Lib Dems and Reform.  Macabees fans then rioted in Tel Aviv and a local Tel Aviv ‘derby’ match had to be cancelled. This made it politically impossible for Macabees fans to go to Villa Park despite the Zionist parties’ views. But after the match, still an ‘investigation’ is going ahead into supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ in the WMP, and their alleged ‘influence’ by the local MP, the Independent Ayub Khan, who is close to Your Party.

This is just one example. Many others are well known. The numerous attacks on democratic rights of opponents of the Gaza genocide detailed in this article are all other examples of the same thing. The explanation of this is twofold – one is the massive overrepresentation of Jewish-Zionists in the ruling classes of West Europe and North America compared to the weight of the Jewish population among the population as a whole. Forbes notes that 10% of billionaires worldwide are of Jewish origin, whereas only 0.2% of the world’s population are of Jewish origin, which is 50 times overrepresentation. Within the major imperialist countries, this translates into overrepresentation of dozens of times over, so that Norman Finkelstein commented about this that:

“In many countries, not least the US and the UK, Jews occupy strategic positions in the entertainment industry, the arts, publishing, journals of opinion, the academy, the legal profession, and government. Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population,

“…. if these raw data didn’t translate into outsized Jewish political power. … It is certainly legitimate to query the amplitude of this political power and whether it has been exaggerated, but it cannot be right to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts.” (https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/finkelstein-on-corbyn-mania/)

As an example of incredible dishonesty in his writings, Greenstein attributes these words to David Miller, when they came from a famous 2018 Essay by Norman Finkelstein, Corbyn Mania, which was written as commentary on the witchhunt in the Labour Party.

The explanation for these phenomena, and the outsize influence that they give in Western politics, is that this ‘outsize’ layer of Jews, almost all of whom are Zionists, in strategic positions, above all in the ruling class, constitute a Jewish-Zionist caste in the ruling class, which organises on the basis of Zionist politics, is ethnocentric, and based on loyalty to Israel, a state of which they are entitled to citizenship of by birth. They are a caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie with a special material interest in Israel as an ethnic state.

A caste is a layer within a class that has a special interest in something that sets them apart from the bulk of the class. The trade union bureaucracy is a special layer within the working class that makes its living from bargaining over the price of labour power with the employing class and gains significant material privileges in doing so. As Trotsky first noted in the 1930s, the Stalinist bureaucracy in a degenerated/deformed workers state is a layer within the proletariat of that state that has a special interest in administering what Marx called ‘bourgeois right’, that is inequalities within the working class that, at a still-low level of the social productivity of labour, that are necessary for the economy to function. Like the trade union bureaucracy but even more so, they acquire a privileged social position from this function, that in Russia in the 1920s allowed them to politically expropriate the bulk of the proletariat and monopolise power.

The J-Z caste within the bourgeoisie does not really have a materially privileged position within the imperialist bourgeoisie, as that class is enormously privileged anyway, but is has acquired an enormous political authority within the imperialist bourgeoisie. That is, it has a politically privileged status, because to the bulk of the same class it is the layer than won hegemony for the programme of neoliberalism within the bourgeoisie in the 1970s and is credited with saving the system of capitalism itself from what appeared to be a very dangerous, potentially terminal crisis. The fact that Jews were the embodiment of commercial capital in medieval times, and therefore in some ways are seen as having a ‘capitalist’ culture linked to finance, that is older than the capitalist system itself, has given them a kind of cult status among a class that is unsure of its permanence and thereby on the lookout for saviours. That is the basis of a cult of ‘Jewishness’ among the imperialist bourgeoisie. It is a cult status that regards the J-Z caste as the most class-conscious layer of the bourgeois class. It is this that explains the phenomenon that Norman Finkelstein spells out in, again, in his Corbyn Mania essay:

“…Not only is it no longer a social liability to be Jewish, it even carries social cachet. Whereas it once was a step up for a Jew to marry into a ruling elite family, it now appears to be a step up for the ruling elite to marry into a Jewish family. Isn’t it a straw in the wind that both President Bill Clinton’s pride and joy Chelsea and President Donald Trump’s pride and joy Ivanka married Jews?” (ibid)

That is the explanation for what Tony Greenstein calls ‘Jewish power’ and attempts to attribute to David Miller, though there does not seem to be any evidence that he has ever used that term. The J-Z caste is the source of what Norman Finkelstein calls “outsized Jewish political power”. But Greenstein misattributes the Finkelstein quote, which is not the same in any case, to David Miller, in a pathetic attempt to smear him as having a concept of “Jewish Power” in classless terms.

With that understanding, that the J-Z caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie is the source of such apparent phenomena as ‘state capture’, when David Miller talks about a “Jewish Empire” and “Pax-Judaica” as explanations for those phenomena, he is talking about the power of the J-Z caste. Understanding that, such terms are probably a bit prosaic, grandiose and unnecessary to explain what is at bottom a simple phenomenon, though an analysis that generates acute hostility from Jewish chauvinists, both Zionist and ‘anti-Zionist’, no matter how it is described. The most you can say about them is that their grandiosity is perhaps counterproductive.

“State capture” is really a bit of smoke and mirrors, because the J-Z caste does not have the social weight to enforce such a ‘capture’ against the gentile majority of the bourgeoisie if they were not inclined to go along with it. But it appears that way because the gentile imperialist bourgeoisie defer to the J-Z caste, because of the cult of the J-Z caste as the most class-conscious section induces that behaviour from so many of them. That is the explanation for the otherwise perplexing and counter-intuitive phenomenon of apparent ‘state capture’. It’s not a static phenomenon, and the more it comes under pressure, as it has during the current genocide, the more startling some of its manifestations become.

Two other points Greenstein makes against David Miller are the product of some political weaknesses of David Miller. They are not central to this issue, but incidental. The first concerns retweeting a couple of posts on X by some ‘paleo-Nazis’, far rightists who are in the minority who have not gone over to worship of Israel, and saying they make some ‘interesting’ points, e.g. about Jewish so-called ‘super-intelligence’. Greenstein screams that these far rightists are talking about so-called ‘race science’, and indeed they no doubt are. They are extremely wrong about that, though there are undoubtedly quite a few fields of intellectual endeavour where Jews are very prominent, and even dominant. This is not a product of some mystical essence of ‘race’, however, but of the Jews’ class history.

In their role as the repository of commercial capital, which they were in medieval times centuries before capitalism proper emerged, they were the only part of a society based on natural economy that developed serious international connections and thereby, developed something of an international culture. This exposed them to all kinds of intellectual trends in various countries that others in medieval society were completely sheltered from and knew nothing about. This had recurring consequences as a cultural acquisition that, like all cultures, cascades down through generations, centuries, and even millennia. There is nothing particularly mysterious about it, properly understood.

This may appear mysterious to someone looking into the history, and some academics, even very right-wing academics, and people who follow them, are also fascinated by them, for their own reasons. They might even discover something of interest, among their usual dross. The fact that Jews have recently been elevated from a population that suffered considerable oppression to one that (in its Zionist mainstream) is the perpetrator of oppression undoubtedly means that some elements of truth may be discovered by some otherwise deluded and reactionary people. There is nothing inherently wrong with investigating or researching such things, but it is best to be very discriminating about who you engage in public exchanges with. But academics sometimes make errors of this sort. It is, however, a smear to try to make out that David Miller is in some way in tune with the overall ideas of these reprobates because he briefly engaged with them. That is unscrupulous, as unscrupulous as attributing the formulations of Norman Finkelstein to David Miller as shown above.

In any case, there is nothing wrong with leftists doing academic research that involves deep- going research into fascist sources. How else could such useful works as Ian Kershaw’s biographical volumes on Hitler have been written? No doubt in doing so, he had to engage with some dubious people on some level. The question of how to do so is a matter of judgement, but the idea that in doing so, one is tainted in some way, is an absurd and unscrupulous thing to propagate without actual evidence.

The other point he quotes is some derogatory remarks about the politics of Zarah Sultana by David Miller that have little connection with his views on the complex question of the nature of Zionism. He also attacks David, in the manner of the AWL, for working with Chris Williamson on Palestine Declassified, which is ‘funded by the Iranian state’. That is a reactionary criticism, as that programme reaches many with some very salient points about the current genocide, among other things. As Marxist and anti-imperialists, we are glad that the Iranian state gave Israel a bloody nose in the 12-day war last June.

He quotes David Miller as saying that Zarah Sultana’s:

“…commitment to the sort of muscular liberalism which was produced by the War on Terror — weaponising feminism, sexuality and gender against Muslims — has done enormous damage to Your Party’s prospects to alliance-building.”

This is a wrong-headed criticism that reflects David Miller’s association with Chris Williamson, a deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain, who in term is evidently influenced by the social conservatism of George Galloway. But it has little bearing anyone’s understanding of Zionism and the class nature of its international dimension, and its pretty bizarre for Greenstein to suggest that it does. There are people active on the left who have been attacked by Tony for holding similar views to David Miller on Zionism for far longer, well over a decade, who have very different views to David Miller on trans rights, which is actually mainly what David Miller is referring to – as Greenstein is well aware.

The statement that “Miller Has Abandoned Anti-Zionism in Favour of Conspiracy Theories” in Greenstein’s article is a feeble lie, as is his attempt to attribute the views of Norman Finkelstein to Miller in a blatant falsification of quotes. But that is the product of the political weakness of Greenstein who wants to police the left against Marxist criticism of the JZ caste, wherever it comes from, and is totally unscrupulous about how he does it.

The Consistent Democrats are critically supporting this slate in the CEC Elections for Your Party. The slate embodies a basic set of democratic and socialist principles, if only in outline. Obviously there is much missing in terms of policies, which is why our support has to be critical. We are not endorsing the politics of the various diverse trends that produced this, but in a crucial sense, until this election is over, it is not clear that Your Party will be viable.

The progressive voting decisions which embodied basic democratic and socialist elements that the membership voted for on 29-30th November are embodied in this slate. They really they represent the difference between the bureaucratic group around Jeremy Corbyn and Karie Murphy, and those who support Zarah Sultana’s pro-party, socialist, democratic, class struggle and anti-Zionist criticism of their positions and methods. We support that critique, albeit critically, and this slate embodies it. So we critically support this slate also. If this slate makes a good showing in the coming CEC elections, we will have a party to fight for. If it does not, the party may be severely damaged. Vote for the Grassroots Slate for the Your Party CEC!

Agreed on January 2 2026 by representatives from the Democratic Socialists, Democratic Bloc, Platform for a Democratic Party, Trans Liberation Group, Greater Manchester Left Caucus, Eco-Socialist Horizon, Socialist Unity Platform, SWP, Counterfire, Socialist Alternative, and Zarah Sultana

1. For a Central Executive Committee dedicated to building a mass, democratic, socialist, working-class party, rooted in independent community-based branch organisations that can fight fascism and the far right. Our goal is to bring an end to capitalism, a socially and ecologically destructive system driven by the profit motive and private ownership of the means of production,       and replace it with a socialist society organised to meet people’s needs, not generate profit.

2. For a Party that will  empower members to create grassroots structures in every town, city, region and nation providing data, finance and technical support to get them established. Members and thus branches must be well funded, receiving at least 50% of all membership fees, with autonomy over branch spending and political activity. Elected branch committees will have access to full membership data for their area. We must execute a mass recruitment drive to become a mass socialist party of the left this country so desperately needs.

3. For a Party open to all who share our socialist goals – an equal, fair, just and ecologically sustainable society organised around the needs of the majority, not for the profit of the few; key sections of the economy owned and democratically controlled by the people who work in them and depend upon them; a society in which everyone, regardless of race, faith, ethnicity, family background, gender, sexual orientation or disability, can lead healthy lives of dignity and fulfilment.

4. For a clear programme of anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism and pro peace. We oppose militarism and stand with the oppressed against the oppressors. We support the Palestinian people and reject successive British governments’ collusion with Israel. We support immediate withdrawal from NATO that only offers profits to the merchants of death and makes the world less safe, when this money should be spent on schools, hospitals and wider society.

5. For a Party that opposes the far-right and exposes every attempt by the ruling class to divide and rule the working class against itself. We stand with all communities and liberation for all people: Muslims, migrants, refugees, trans and queer people, women, disabled people. We stand against all forms of oppression and attacks on marginalised communities by political elites.

6. For defence of freedom of speech and freedom of expression; opposition to laws restricting protest and trade union activity; opposition to state censorship and surveillance; support for pro-Palestine political prisoners that are on hunger strike.

7. For a democratic party that will fight in the May 2026 elections but is not defined by electoralism; all elected representatives and party officials to be accountable to the membership, subject to mandatory re-selection and open to recall at any time. We must support candidates that don’t vote for cuts but fight them.

8. For a Party that only participates in national government alone or in coalition on the basis of a socialist programme actively supported by a majority of the population. The Monarchy, House of Lords and first past the post voting system must be abolished.

9. For a truly democratic socialist party a democracy commission and democratic sovereign Conference will take place: Over the first six months after their election, the CEC will appoint a Democracy Commission, to review the founding process and suggest improvements to the party structures. The First Annual Conference will be held within six months with structures to enable it to be sovereign over the Party’s future direction.

10. For a Member-led CEC: All Members of the CEC shall operate as political equals. This slate commits to not permit any councillors or MPs to hold positions in the elected Officers Group. The CEC will elect a Parliamentary Convenor to be the public spokesperson and whip of the Parliamentary Group of MPs, intending to formalise this role by amendment in the 2026 Conference. The CEC must commit to meet at least monthly, to ensure the body remains able to provide effective political leadership.

11. For Bottom-Up Organised Sections and rank and file movement that is the engine of the Party. Grassroots members will be supported to build oppression-based organised sections from the bottom-up. This includes facilitating a youth and student conference to establish meaningfully democratic and autonomous structures for a youth and student section and make constitutional recommendations (e.g. youth place on the CEC) and appoint a Rank-and-File Workers’ Movement Commission to develop the party’s relationship with the trade union movement. All elected members of this slate will sit on an Advisory Committee with representatives of all the grassroots factions supporting this platform. The committee will meet monthly to hold elected members to account.

12. For a Party of the Whole Left: We stand for a party of the whole left with freedom for members to organise into factions, tendencies and platforms. This means opposing any ban on dual memberships or proscriptions against members based on political views or affiliations.

13. For a Party that doesn’t see Scotland and Wales as afterthoughts but respects their autonomy to self-organise: The CEC will rebuild broken relationships with members in Wales and Scotland, giving them access to funding, data, and resources, to enable them to choose how they want to engage in the 2026 Elections. They will have sufficient resources and access to data to hold democratic conferences to decide their local structures and level of autonomy from the party.

14. For an open and transparent party. Decisions of all party bodies, from local branch to national executive, to be open to scrutiny by the members; for an independent audit of Party finances; for a disciplinary process based on natural justice, with an appeals procedure agreed by the membership.

15. For a Party that is led by its members not MPs and to deliver the next stage of maximum member democracy.

Candidates of the Grassroots Slate, or supported by them (in the case of Public Office Holders)

London
Anahita Zardoshti (DSYP, chair Islington YP branch) and Mel Mullings (RMT activist)

South East
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi (Platform for Democratic Party) and Max Shanly (DSYP)

North West 
Haifa Ali (PSC activist) and Chloe Braddock (DSYP)

South West
Mark Cage (PSC activist) and Candi Williams (chair Bristol YP)

Yorkshire
Sophie Wilson (Sheffield Left) and Chris Saltmarsh (Eco-Socialist Horizon)

West Midlands
Shabia Malik-Johnson (PCS and disability activist) Graham Jones (DSYP)

East of England
Ricardo de la Torre (FBU) and Solma Ahmed (YP North Essex, formerly Transform)

East Midlands
Anwarul Khan (YP Connections, formerly Transform)

North East
Ian Spencer (Socialist Unity Platform) and Myra Shoko (Trans Liberation Group)

Public office holders
Jeremy Corbyn MP, Zarah Sultana MP, Cllr Grace Lewis, Cllr Michael Lavalette

Defeat the US Aggression against Venezuela!

Free the Maduros!

Imperialist Monster and Rapist Trump to the Chair!

Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the claimed abduction of President Maduro and his wife are outrageous acts of imperialist aggression that must be defeated by all means. Trump baldly says what the Yankee ruling class have always believed and acted upon but hardly ever said openly: that Venezuela’s natural resources, and by extension all those in the Americas, belong to the United States. That’s what this criminal aggression is all about. That’s what all Yankee aggression in the Americas has always been about! The workers and campesinos of Latin America will not tolerate this; they should and no doubt will mobilise to fight against any Yankees invasion. Hopefully Venezuela will mobilise backup structures and command centres to resist this aggression.

This is part of Trump’s retrenchment of US imperialism in the Western hemisphere to prepare for future worldwide aggression to try to restore US hegemony, which can only come from defeats of Russia and China. But in the very short term, the aggression is also a diversion from the exposure of Trump’s sexual activities with underage girls in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and the splintering of his MAGA base derived from his activities as a de-facto Israeli agent, which together threaten to bury his presidency. Abducting Maduro adds kidnap, criminal aggression and piracy to his precious record as a handmaiden of genocide in Gaza. So, this aggression also has the character of a diversion from the Trump administration’s deep crisis. This was preceded by the outrageous attacks on Venezuelan fishing boats, the US blatantly murdering them on the high seas while accusing their crews of being involved in smuggling drugs to the US without a solitary shred of evidence.

We need an anti-imperialist united front to defend Venezuela. From the working class of the United States, Britain and Europe to the global South and the BRICS countries, to the Chinese deformed workers state, Cuba, North Korea, their ally Russia, and all opponents of imperialist aggression. Defend Venezuela – Free the Maduros. Genocidal aggressor and kiddie-fiddler Trump to the Chair! Defeat US imperialism!

Consistent Democrats 3 January 2026

These are the prepared notes for the presentation at today’s forum (14th December 2025). A recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

The Ukraine proxy war looks like it is coming to an end. Not through some kind of ‘peace’ agreement, though Trump’s sometime attempts to procure one have put the possibility on the agenda. But through a Russian victory. This is the product of a very determined war of attrition by Russia, which has resisted the temptation to use its obviously superior firepower to fight the way the United States is renowned for fighting wars against smaller countries. There has been no Russian use of ‘shock and awe’ tactics in Ukraine, no use of carpet bombing or mass terror tactics against the population of the Donbass. That’s not because the Russians are militarily unequipped for such a war, but because they are not fighting a war of conquest against the people of the areas they are seeking to deliver from Nazi rule.

Towns and Cities in the Donetsk oblast, otherwise known as the Donetsk People’s Republic, currently the main theatre of the Special Military Operation, have been massively fortified by the Ukrainian Nazis, much of the Russian-speaking population being reduced to hostages by a hostile occupying force. That was the result of the duplicity of Maidan Ukraine and its Western backers over the two Minsk agreements.  These were signed supposedly to settle the conflict that broke out between the regime that was created by the US funded Maidan coup in 2014, and the Russian-speaking population of the Southeastern part of Ukraine. This coup, or colour revolution, brought to power a far-right regime that virtually worshipped the Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, which immediately started persecuting the Russian-speaking part of the population

The US spent $6 billion funding the overthrow of the elected President, Yanukovych, who was politically closer to Russia than to the EU and US. A previous ‘colour revolution’ in 2004 had brought to power a pro-Western president, Yushchenko. Initially, Yanukovych was elected then, but there was a strange incident where Yushchenko was apparently poisoned, supposedly by Yanukovitch’s supporters. Because of that allegation, then were able to force a re-run, which Yushchenko narrowly won. But his presidency afterwards was disastrous, with the rapid impoverishment of the country and the government under him splintering under pressure. By the time the next Presidential election happened, in 2010, Yushchenko was so unpopular he ended up in fifth place. Yanokovitch came back to power, again quite narrowly.

It is very clear in that context why the US sought a far-right coup and a war against the population in the East. The Russophone population in the East was the base for pro-Russian political trends in Ukraine, and it was finely balanced. To get a sustainable pro-Western regime in Ukraine that population had to be crushed. So that was the project that the US initiated with far-right allies – chiefly Svoboda and Right Sector (Pravi Sektor), at the end of 2013, which fully unfolded in the spring of 2014. Large demonstrations were initiated according to a well-established pattern by forces guided according to a well-worn formula. A shooting incident, a massacre of protesters from their own side, was carried out by the fascist militias of the Banderaite parties, Svoboda and Pravi Sektor, and then blamed on the police. On the back of that, the presidential palace was attacked and Yanukovych fled in fear of his life. Ensuring a regime where a Russia-friendly and Donbass-friendly president could never again come to power by democratic means.

That was the whole point of the US funded coup. It was in effect a fascist coup, and it meant that, no matter how little electoral support they really had in Ukraine, the decisive power behind the scenes was the far right and their militias. It is true today. Yanukovych was replaced by a puppet regime. One embarrassing episode in this coup was when the US Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, was recorded talking to Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine, discussing who should head up the new US puppet government. They chose Yatsenyuk. He chosen by the US, not any kind of purported democratic process. Characteristically, the coup was funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, created by the Reagan administration to carry on as a separate specialism the CIA’s old function of organising coups and creating puppet regimes. The CIA had become tarnished.

This coup immediately led to a popular uprising in the major Russian speaking areas of Ukraine. In Lugansk and Donetsk, the angry populations set up two ‘People’s Republics’, of Donetsk and Lugansk, which the Maidan coup regime immediately declared war on. They claimed that the rebellious populations were ‘terrorists’, and Kiev’s war, with clear genocidal aspects, was dubbed right from the start an ‘anti-terrorist operation’. At the same time Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and voted in a referendum to join Russia. Since the population was overwhelmingly Russian, this was a foregone conclusion. Crimea had been placed in Ukraine by an arbitrary decision of the Soviet leadership of Khrushchev in 1954. The population rebelled against a fascist regime that declared open war on Russian-speakers and actual Russians within Ukraine. Far from being some Putin plot, as the West alleged, all these movements were driven by mass anger from below. There really was not much Kiev could do about Crimea, which is separated from the main body of Ukraine by both the Donbass and also water contiguous to the Black Sea/Sea of Azov, but the so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’ was a declaration of war against the Donbass people.

The Nazi war against the Donbass claimed 14,000 lives in the eight years between 2014 and 2022. And in 2014, there was also mass unrest in Odessa, an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking city on the Western end of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The regime sent in violent football ‘fans’, armed Nazis basically, who proceeded to attack demonstrators in the centre of Odessa and chased many who took refuge in the central trade union building, which they then torched. At least 50, likely more, burned to death. The war Maidan Ukraine waged against its own Russian speaking population was hardly a success, however. So, they had to manoeuvre. This gave birth to the various Minsk agreements. These agreements of 2014 and 2015, and the various supplementary protocols to them, allowed the far-right Maidan regime to play for time, confronted with the popular uprisings to give themselves breathing space to begin preparing for future conflict, including the fortification of cities and towns against their own inhabitants. Hollande and Merkel later revealed that they were fully aware at the time that the Minsk processes were aimed at playing for time, allowing the West to arm Ukraine to continue the war a later date.

This began under the Obama administration. But in 2016, Trump was able to defeat Obama’s successor as the Democratic nominee for President, Hillary Clinton, which gave birth to a slightly different situation regarding Ukraine. There is an important nuance of difference between Trump, and the mainstream of US politics, over Ukraine. It relates to their relations with Zionism. The mainstream of the Democrats and Republicans are virulently pro-Zionist, but there are some important differences with Trump and what he represents. Trump, unlike the normal run of presidential candidates from both parties, was a direct agent of Israel’s main ruling party, Likud. His three election campaigns, in 2016, 2020 and 2024, were all directly paid for by the Likudnik billionaire Sheldon Adelson, and then in 2024 by his widow Miriam Adelson. There are grounds to suspect that at least some of these ultra-Zionists are ambivalent about the volume of US aid to Maidan Ukraine, seeing it as a waste – that these resources ‘should’ be going to Israel.

 It should be noted that the Zionists gained major political benefits from Trump’s election in 2016, as Trump implemented the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 2005, which mandated that the US embassy be moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. This measure was forced through congress by the Zionists, but then three Presidents; Clinton, Bush and Obama, failed to implement it. Trump also formally recognised Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, previously a no-no, and he tore up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Earlier, while Obama was still in office, in 2015, Netanyahu visited the US, and at a joint session of the Senate and the House, had vehemently denounced the deal, to numerous standing ovations from the assembled lackeys, who behaved like, in the words of Norman Finkelstein, “demented jack-in-the-boxes”. So, Trump had misgivings about blank cheques for Ukraine, and that seems to be associated with his direct Likud agentry. A clue about this is that Victor Orban of Hungary, another virulent Zionist who is against the Ukraine campaign, is also a clear Zionist agent, and defied the International Criminal Court to host Netanyahu earlier this year.

This was the basis of the Democrats’ “Russiagate” Hoax, claiming that Trump was an agent of the Kremlin. The truth is that he is an agent of Likud, and has some contradictions flowing from that. But the Democrats are too subservient to Zionism to make an issue of that, and too cowardly – afraid of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. So, they tried to use Putin as a proxy for their evasion of the real issue. Trump played a less strident role but still escalated the Ukraine proxy war. He was the first to send Javelin missiles to Ukraine. He played a major role in grooming Zelensky, as camouflage for the Nazi regime, given his Jewish origin. Zelensky won the Ukraine election in 2019 based on promises to implement the Minsk agreements, which meant he won with the massive support of people in the Donbass. But as soon as he won, he became a puppet of the Nazis, and there began a slide to escalation and war against those who voted for him. Trump bore huge responsibility for that.

This intensified under Biden, as Zelenksy’s regime, at the start of 2022, as documented by the Swiss former OECD inspector, Jacques Baud, embarked on a massive escalation and preparation for an invasion of those sections of the DPR and LPR that remained in the hands of the people. Putin tried by diplomacy, and warnings of the consequences, to get the US and its proxies to back off, but to no avail, so in February 2022, he initiated the SMO, a limited, defensive war to stop the crushing of the people of the Donbass. From our point of view, this is a progressive war. Russia is not an imperialist power – far from it. The Russian imperialist bourgeoisie was torn out by the roots by the workers revolution in 1917-18. We totally reject the allegation that the USSR was in some sense an imperialist force. Under Stalinism, it remained a degenerated form of the dictatorship of the proletariat until 1991, when it succumbed to a counterrevolution as the bureaucracy capitulated to an enormous imperialist war drive and neoliberal political offensive.

The massive economic shock treatment, which imperialism and the counterrevolution imposed on Russia, caused millions of deaths in the 1990s – a fall in live expectancy of 5 years can only be explained that way.  This caused a huge popular backlash, that was expressed through the state apparatus itself, which was not fully consolidated against the working class, and caused a partial retreat of the counterrevolution. The decrepit character of the counterrevolution was symbolised by the drunk Yelstin. He was ousted by Putin, from the depths of the apparatus, who however no longer even claimed to be a communist. He took the only course open to him to regenerate Russia as a viable state, building a unique kind of mixed economy out of the productive, economic and military apparatus bequeathed to him from the workers’ state.

Russia today is a kind of dialectical inversion of the USSR. The USSR was a weak workers state with massive bureaucratic deformations that came from the pressure of the imperialist environment. Russia today is a weak bourgeois state, but weak not in the face of the external world, but of massive post-capitalist, ‘socialist’ deformations on itself, elements of a higher mode of production that persist in ‘invading’ this form of capitalism, to paraphrase Engels. That class analysis of Russia illustrates the nature of the war, and why it has gone so badly for US and NATO imperialism. This is somewhat unexpected, given the counterrevolution in the 1990s, but this resurgence of Russia has coincided with an accelerating decline of the US. Russia, no longer a workers’ state, has paradoxically been able to forge a degree of unity with the Chinese workers state, in terms of diplomacy and basic military cooperation, that eluded the leadership of the USSR, due to intra-Stalinist rivalry. The accelerating cold war against Russia and China echoes the imperialist war drives of NATO against the USSR. Anti-Sovietism has morphed into outright racist Russophobia.

We see a Western politically-based hatred of Russians for being organically ‘disobedient’ to imperialist neoliberalism, similar in some ways to Hitler’s belief that Jews were organically prone to Bolshevism. Even the liberal bourgeoisie in the West is prepared to arm and fund outright Nazis to kill Russians. Though they try to hide it – hence the hysteria against ‘disinformation’. Under Biden, they were prepared to risk nuclear war by firing missiles such as ATACMS and the European Storm Shadow directly into Russia. Only the cool head of Putin and co averted that.  The only ones half-hearted about this are ultra-Zionists who consider Ukraine is taking resources that ought to go to support Israeli genocide of Palestinians. What an appalling counterposition!

It is the combination of this new, implicit alliance of non-imperialist deformed capitalism in Russia, with the deformed workers state in China, that has brought the imperialist world to the brink of a major defeat in Ukraine. We can see the technological superiority of Russia and China in things like the Oreshnik and Burevestinik missiles, which the US has no answer to, and China’s Deepseek AI technology, which is also more advanced than the West’s, and uses much less energy. This is the product of elements of a higher mode of production, in Russia, as a unique kind of non-imperialist bourgeois state with massive post-capitalist, ‘socialist’ deformations – derived from elements of a higher mode of production. And China, a deformed workers state, albeit on where a large capitalist sector exists and is currently controlled and subordinated to state planning. We see NATO in disarray, and on the verge of collapse.

This is not the expectation Marxists had for how the world socialist revolution would materialise. We are a considerable distance from that at this point. But the multipolar world that is becoming visible from this prospect of strategic imperialist defeat will also open up new political space in which massive new opportunities for such a world revolution can arise.

The following is an address that a Consistent Democrats spokesperson delivered on 8th November. to an event hosted by the New Communist Party to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian October Revolution of 1917.

I bring greetings on behalf of the Consistent Democrats to this reception organised by the New Communist Party, which celebrates what is still (so far) the greatest event in world history, the Russian October revolution of 1917. We in the Consistent Democrats stand in the tradition of the Bolshevik Party, and of the Communist International it created, with other revolutionary forces, after the Revolution. The revolution grew from mass working-class discontent with the imperialist world war, not just in Russia, but throughout Europe, the main war theatre.  Which then spread worldwide.

In Russia the backwardness of the Tsarist regime, and its terrible fortunes in war, the privations of the mass of the people, especially women, caused an explosion first.  And there was a party, the Bolshevik Party, with the programme and will to seize the revolutionary situation that resulted, that was able in the nick of time to correct its course. As immediately after the February Revolution, before Lenin was able to return to Russia, the party had settled on a perspective of supporting the bourgeois coalition “Insofar as” it supposedly supported the revolution. But Lenin, armed with his new understanding of the imperialist war, understood that the Provisional Government was a disguised imperialist government, and would seek to crush the revolution to maintain Russia’s role in the war. So Lenin presented his April Theses on his return to Russia, which put forward a perspective of no support to the bourgeois Provisional Government. It started with the perspective that the party should ‘patiently explain” to the masses the imperialist nature of the Provisional Government and the need to replace it with a workers’ and peasants’ government.

As the inevitable conflict between the masses and the government developed, the Bolsheviks raised slogans such as “down with the ten capitalist ministers” aiming to force the Mensheviks and other ‘lefts’ to break with the imperialists…  And later “All power to the Soviets’ as is became clear that the masses’ conflict with the bourgeoisie was headed for civil war. Even though they had to briefly draw back in July, as the danger of a premature confrontation loomed, and Lenin had to go into hiding. When the situation calmed down, and the revolutionary situation further matured, Lenin was able to work with others, notably Trotsky, in pushing forward the organisation of the masses to actually overturn the imperialist government in real life. I will pause the narrative there, as that is a brief, perhaps too brief, description of what we are celebrating. I did say that the October revolution was the greatest event in human history “so far”. We have not quite reached those heights since. Because even though there have been crucial revolutions since, and huge wars of liberation and defeats of imperialism, the 1917 revolution was unique because of the internationalist vision of its leading party.

The Bolshevik Party saw themselves, and the international movement they founded, the Third or Communist International, as a political army fighting for the world socialist revolution in an immediate sense. Whereas later, by the late 1920s, after Lenin had died and Trotsky, among others, had been driven away from the leadership, the international became quite conservative, and retreated from fighting for international revolution. It was would up in 1942. And nothing has been created to replace it since. Trotsky in exile tried hard to create a replacement, the Fourth International, but simply did not have the forces to do so at the time. That is not to speak of the fact that many who should have known better, were hostile to the idea at the time.

Today, we need an international like the Communist International. We face capitalism in decay, with is nuclear destructive capacity, and its irrationality threatening humanity with destruction, either nuclear holocaust, or an environmental holocaust that is on the horizon. We also have several partial gains of the world revolution, direct and indirect, which must be defended at all costs against imperialist attack, and attempts by imperialism to make use of capitalist forces within them. We still have workers states in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and the DPRK. Some of them are severely deformed, and/or have strong and dangerous capitalist forces within them but must still be defended.

Then there is Russia, where the counterrevolution didn’t really succeed, and there has been a partial return to a new kind of mixed economy, where the state component is not capitalist at all, unlike with nationalisation under capitalism. That must also be defended. In all these places, and the world generally, we need to see the rebirth of something like the Third International, a genuine world party of socialist revolution. Whatever number you put on the International, whether Fourth, Fifth or whatever, it has to be like the early Third.

It needs to fight to complete what Lenin and his comrades – the world socialist-communist revolution, with the party at the head of a class-conscious proletariat. That is what the Consistent Democrats want, and we will work side-by-side with any Communists, from whatever background and tradition, who seek the same thing. That is why we are here today. Thank you, comrades.

This is from the website of the Brazilian section of the LCFI

US imperialism is reviving the Monroe Doctrine in its pursuit of regional hegemony. Attacks on the Bolivarian Revolution have been ongoing since Chávez Frías came to power, including his kidnapping, the guarimbas (violent protests), currency seizures, attempted invasions, and the offer of US$50 million to assassinate Maduro. There have been 930 sanctions against the Venezuelan people, who resist with unity, organization, and constant mobilization. It is necessary to defend all the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.

International Antifascist – Brazil Chapter

In 2025, the Trump administration intensified the decades-long siege against Venezuela and Cuba and extended its sanctions policy to several other Latin American countries, such as Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. However, the tactic of sanctions and tariffs further amplifies and deepens contradictions, strengthening movements fighting for sovereignty and the unity of oppressed peoples, in opposition to the interests of imperialism and fascism.

Similarly, Trump’s internal war, resorting to ICE, his Gestapo, to persecute immigrants, especially Latin Americans, and the elimination of social programs for the most needy sectors of the US working population, has been strengthening social mobilizations, the left, and the opposition to Trumpism, imposing important political defeats on the White House in the October elections.

Shortly after the 2008 crisis, an economic transition towards commercial independence from the US began in Latin America. The financialization of the imperialist economy, and the inability of the parasitic US and European economies to counter the development of the productive forces and commodity production of the BRICS countries, especially China, makes this transition an unstoppable movement. Even under Milei’s government, the Chinese economy continues to expand its influence in Argentina, contradicting the interests of imperialism.

Defeated both domestically and externally in the economy and in politics, unable to achieve his goal of the surrender and capitulation of the oppressed, Trump resorts to military blackmail and coups in Venezuela and Mexico, that is, carrying out the policy of recolonization by other means, the military, that of civil war.

The most powerful naval fleet on the planet, armed with the largest aircraft carrier ever built, has been summarily executing, in violation of international law, small boats carrying fishermen in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, accused without any proof of being drug traffickers.

Faced with this desperate situation for the US, the Trump administration took on the mission of recolonizing Latin America. The modus operandi of this tactic depends on the weaknesses of each country.

US imperialism is reviving the Monroe Doctrine in its pursuit of regional hegemony. Attacks on the Bolivarian Revolution have been ongoing since Commander Hugo Chávez Frías came to power, including his kidnapping, the guarimbas (violent protests), currency seizures, attempted invasion, and the offer of $50 million to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro Moros. The US has imposed 930 sanctions against the Venezuelan people, who resist with unity, organization, and constant mobilization. Defending Venezuelan sovereignty in all areas means defending all the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Given the cohesion of Venezuelan society against imperialism, recolonization there currently takes the form of the threat of direct external military intervention by the Pentagon and the US Department of Justice to divide the Bolivarian Armed Forces and overthrow the popular Maduro government.

In Mexico, the CIA fabricated yet another colorful rebellion, using as its pretext the supposed dissatisfaction of Generation Z with the government of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, which was easily quelled due to the artificiality of the regime change process that had been created.

In Brazil, the right wing was defeated at the polls (2022), in the streets (2025), and in the National Congress itself, where it holds a numerical majority, in important votes such as the “PEC da Bandidagem” (Amendment to the Constitution regarding criminal activity) and the income tax exemption for workers earning up to 5,000 reais. These anti-patriots and Trump agents, after losing in politics and the economy, also escalated their power in Brazil, playing the security card, executing 121 people in a massacre in Rio de Janeiro, also in defiance of the law, and attempting to create a legal situation to justify a US military intervention in Brazil, classifying organized crime as a terrorist organization. But they were defeated in this attempt as well, and Bolsonaro was arrested after an attempted escape.

We, the peoples of Latin America, including the workers of the USA itself, must mobilize, hold demonstrations in defense of our sovereignty and against all interference by imperialism in any of our nations, demand a complete end to tariffs, sanctions and blockades against Cuba or Venezuela, repel this threat and strengthen solidarity and our unity in favor of the great and socialist homeland.