The undersigned revolutionary Marxist tendencies and groups extend May Day Greetings to all communists, socialists, class conscious workers, anti-imperialists and partisans of the oppressed around the world.
Protesters demand freedom for Mahmoud Khalil, Algerian student at Columbia University, New York, with Green Card (Permanent Residency) seized for deportation by Trump regime for protesting Gaza genocide.
This May Day the world faces the accelerated decline of US imperialism under the Trump administration. The change in US strategy with the end of the Biden administration has caused a significant rift with the US’s European NATO allies, centrally Britain, France and Germany, who have threatened, very unconvincingly, to continue arming Zelensky’s regime in place of the US and even sending troops into Ukraine themselves, trying feebly to pressure the Trump administration, which is not remotely interested, to agree to this. The European Union and Britain is in considerable crisis and turmoil over Ukraine. The EU powers-that-be regard Trump’s strategic shift over Ukraine as the most disastrous change since WWII.
At the same time, Trump is stepping up US support for Israel’s genocide and escalation in West Asia/the Middle East. Trump was helped to take office again by the Zionists, and in return they expect help to exterminate the Palestinians, advance into the West Bank, destroy those who try to stop them, such as Iran, Yemen and Hezbollah, and even continue with the Greater Israel project, with expansion into post-Assad Syria, ruled by ISIS.
Nearby, between Iran and China, Trump is provoking the appetites of the Indian bourgeoisie, encouraging the rekindling of the conflict with Pakistan, in addition to transferring some US multinational factories from China to India.
The overall situation is accelerating the decline of the US. In this context, we see the vacillating tariff war, which supposedly aims to pave the way for the reindustrialization of the United States, but has already caused losses of several trillion dollars to US capital. The withdrawal from Ukraine has been offset by threats to extend US power in the Western Hemisphere/Americas and things like the annexation of Greenland and Canada.
But beyond the oppressed countries and allies, arguably the main target is China, the giant deformed workers state whose growth in productive capacity is now outpacing the West. This has already created a situation where there is a degree of economic dependence of the West on the advanced productive capacities of China for much in the sphere of electronics, among other things. Even though China is not led by anything like an internationalist, communist leadership, its planned and regimented form of capitalisation contradicts capitalist logic and means that it is at least incipiently stronger economically than the West.
We now go to the national groups for analysis of the situations of those countries on their domestic terrain:
Argentina
Milei’s neo-fascist government is increasingly unleashing an attack on workers. The government justifies the policy of low wages to “contain” inflation, and unemployment is growing month by month. In the context of the exhaustion of the economic cycle of the Milei government, the IMF and other multilateral organizations came to the aid of the neo-fascist government. The debt contracted represents 61% of the loans granted by the international financial organization with all its creditors. The IMF and other multilateral organizations came to the aid of Milei’s government in the face of the exhaustion of the economic cycle of empowerment of the role of financial-speculative capital that originated it. In this context, Trumpism expressed support for Milei’s government, which has not (yet) disassociated itself from China. In essence, there were no new advances by China in Argentina. But there is the latent danger for imperialism that in a Post-Milei the government will be advanced by tendencies more inclined towards China. Behind the IMF loan to Argentina was pressure from Wall Street. The speculative capitals that will enter Argentina to do short-term financial business seek to withdraw before the economic situation becomes more unstable. Then the cost of that debt must be paid by the workers. In the immediate term, the Miel government begins to program the adjustments demanded by the IMF. To guarantee the payment of the debt in the coming months, the following are pointed out: the increase in electricity and gas rates, the pension adjustment that is coming, labour flexibility. In this he also attacks if he includes the so-called “tax reform”, that is, the unloading of the burden of taxes, even more, on popular consumption. Whatever the pace of the economic and political exhaustion of Milei’s government, whatever its duration, we cannot foresee. Workers must prepare to face the attacks that will come from a neo-fascist government that is eroding its base of support. They must take advantage of the difficulties and struggles with all sectors of capital that the crisis of that exhaustion itself will generate. This must be done with the orientation of building an independent tool of the working class so that the contexts of exhaustion and political and economic crises, of tendencies that are based on attacks on workers, can provide a way out that means an advance for the working class.
Australia
Australia will hold a Federal election only two days after May Day. The party of government, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is a hollowed out social democratic party. The Liberal Party opposition is a conservative right-wing party that openly flirts with far-right politics. Both parties are united in their defence of imperialism and profits.
Trump’s return to power and the shift of the US to “America First” fascism is creating problems for Australia as a junior imperialist power. Its desire to continue profiting from economic ties with China but its reliance on the US to maintain imperialist control of the region are threatened. Such tensions can only deepen as the war drive against the rising Chinese workers state quickens.
Regardless of who wins the election the period ahead will be turbulent. The Australian ruling class anticipating deepening working class resistance to its agenda of war and austerity has utilised the massive Palestinian solidarity mobilisations to further its police state powers. The ruling class in its attack on the militant construction union (CFMEU) is signalling it expects industrial struggles to also deepen. The time ahead must be used urgently to build and bring closer together the small anti-imperialist communist forces that do exist to influence the struggles ahead.
Britain
British imperialism plays a parasitic role, largely as a lackey of US imperialism. The Starmer Labour government was not created by any class polarisation but openly touted by the ruling class as a failsafe given the dysfunction of the Conservative Party, which came close to disintegration after Brexit. Both this and the previous government have been defined by NATO’s Ukraine proxy war, the Gaza genocide, and continued austerity. It is the antithesis of the left social democratic leadership of Jeremy Corbyn from 2015-2020, the product of a determined effort at destabilisation waged by the social-liberal (“Blairite”) wing and the powerful Zionist component, that destroyed Corbyn’s leadership. They engineered a severe election defeat in 2019. Starmer the remainer became a flag-waving Brexiter. He supported Zionism “without qualification”. In October 2023 he stated Israel had every right to starve Gazans of all fuel, power, food and water. Statmer won in July 2024 with a majority of 171. He made Labour ‘fit to govern’ for the ruling class but got fewer votes than Corbyn (33.8%), compared to 2019 (32.1%), and fewer actual votes, on a much lower turnout, only 60%, the lowest since 2001. A contingent of left-wing independents won seats – Jeremy Corbyn, and four independent Muslims critical over Gaza.
This hated government kept the Tories two-child benefit cap, attacked pensioners and the disabled with large-scale austerity attacks. It cut the Tories’ neoliberal bureaucracy in the National Health Service, but Labour’s privatisers are heavily invested in private healthcare themselves. Almost the first crisis it faced was a wave of far-right near-pogroms when a terrible murder of children was misrepresented as the work of a refugee. The regime supressed them using police, but it was the anti-racist left who mobilised a protest response that undercut the attempted pogroms. Since then, they waged further attacks on refugees and migrants. There has been an avalanche of attacks on democratic rights – on the Palestine Solidarity movement, and other causes, such as environmentalists, and arrests of those protesting disability cuts. There is the beginning of opposition in the labour movement, with threats of rebellion by MPs, and agitation in some trade unions. Conscription of young workers to fight in Ukraine is a possibility, though problematic due to the decrepit state of the British armed forces. The British section of the LCFI participates in initiatives, such as the Socialist Labour Network, aiming to crystallise a genuine working-class party.
Brazil
Brazil is the largest and most populous country in Latin America. It is a semi-colony associated with the BRICS, under permanent political siege by US imperialism, through the national financial oligarchy, as demonstrated by the coup d’état of 2016. Lula’s victory over Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential elections was a great demonstration of the class consciousness of Brazilian workers and anti-fascist mobilization. It was a great surprise for those who no longer believed in the strength of the working class. But the conscious policy of the leadership of the PT and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores of depolarization and the non-mobilization of workers in the streets to crush and annul the Bolsonarist forces favors the return of the extreme right to government. Meanwhile, the Lula government, hated by imperialism and financial capital, continues to maintain policies of capital accumulation against the working class: privatizations, high interest rates, fiscal framework and indebtedness. In addition to the belief in the strategic alliance with the sectors of the dominant classes (broad front) for the achievement of some superficial reforms. This policy is isolating the Lula government, and disorganizing the workers, and strengthening it from the extreme right and capital.
Pressured by the fall in popularity, the government has been making important gestures such as the exemption from income tax for those who receive up to five thousand reais, a range in which 95% of the Brazilian working population is found. Also important was the massive demonstration of March 30, in São Paulo, against the amnesty for the coup plotters in order to reconquer the streets. But so far, they are only progressive spasmodic gestures that have not been reversed into a consistent policy and a new course for the government or the party. Bolsonaro and the military coup plotters have been made defendants in the Supreme Court and part of the financial capital is betting on the Governor of São Paulo, Tarcisio, or others to replace him more effectively against the workers. We defend the arrest and expropriation of all the coup plotters, of yesterday (1964-1985) and today (2016-2023) and, above all, of their bourgeois sponsors. If we do not continue with larger mobilizations against amnesty for the coup plotters
United States
Trump is leading a government of the most parasitic layers of American finance capital. The circle of billionaires tapped for the Trump administration is worth four thousand times more than the previous Biden cabinet. At $383 billion this club holds more wealth than the combined gross product of 172 countries. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is overseeing the slashing of $1 trillion from the state budget by mass firing of federal workers, outlawing their collective bargaining rights, gutting essential social insurance benefits, and destroying entire government departments. The Trump regime is a billionaire oligarchy masquerading as a government.
Two things stand out:
1. The American political superstructure has been brought into alignment with the real social relations of property in the United States
2. This concentration of power within the state apparatus facilitates mobilization for a world war of imperialist aggression
Trump is in the process of overturning the basic norms of parliamentary democracy in order to concentrate all authority of the state in the executive branch. He is using the Enemy Aliens Act (1798) to construct a wartime presidential dictatorship during peacetime. By inventing an invasion at the Mexican border and signing a flood of ultra reactionary decrees he hopes to create enough fear and chaos to overwhelm and paralyze potential resistance before it can coalesce. Just three months after the inauguration the Trump regime has:
—kidnapped and deported to the CECOT terrorist confinement centre in San Salvador hundreds of undocumented immigrants
—Revoked the visas of over 300 Foreign students and abducted pro- Palestine campus activists and sent them into the dungeons of the US prison system
—Arrested judges in their own courtrooms for aiding illegals
— Defunded universities for failure to suspend pro-Palestine students
The US has not witnessed such targeted state repression since the days of the FBI Cointelpro covert operation against the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. And that was done under the cover of darkness!
By refusing to obey the orders issued by the courts, including by the conservative Supreme Court, Trump has deliberately provoked a constitutional crisis. Scores of court orders remain unfulfilled as the executive branch is openly challenging the judiciary.
Despite the rampage of police state repression, outright gangsterism, and Trump’s challenge to judicial authority, the campaign to solidify dictatorial rule has not yet succeeded. The US is neither a fascist society, nor has Trump succeeded in imposing his personal dictatorship.
Despite appearances of unity there are sharp internal conflicts and divisions within the administration. There is a major conflict between the Wall Street faction and the tariff/MAGA faction. To prevent a sell off of US Treasury notes, hedge fund billionaire Scott Bessent, prevailed on Trump to rescind the tariffs. Similarly, when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell refused to lower interest rates as Trump demanded, Wall Street made Trump back down, acting again through Treasury Secretary Bessent.
There has been no political opposition from the Democrats as a party. Although they lost the election to Trump by a margin of less than 2% the Democratic Party is playing the role of loyal opposition party. Even as Trump‘s approval ratings plunge the Democrats are accepting the conventional status of bipartisanship, passively waiting for the 2026 congressional elections. While its liberal and reformist base has shown itself ready and willing to fight, the party fears mobilizing its own activist supporters much more than it fears Trump.
The absence of official opposition from the liberals reflects the underlying unity of the two political parties of capitalism around the fundamental issue of war with China. The real division within the ruling class is over the best strategy to defeat China and regain the lost hegemony of American imperialism. One faction wants to tie Russia down by continuing the proxy war in Ukraine; the other wants to disengage from Ukraine to better attack China by both economic and military means. And they remain solidly united on unconditional support to the genocidal Zionist entity, and for increased aggression against Iran.
Since Trump’s return to the White House public support for the Dems has dropped to a record low, with only 29% of Americans viewing the party favorably. Yet millions of people, previously considered Democrats, have turned out for mass demonstrations in early April. Outraged that their party has mounted no opposition to Trump’s agenda they’ve taken to the streets across the country. Reformist senator, Bernie Sanders, has drawn large crowds to his Fight the Oligarchy rallies, including over 30,000 last week in Denver, which he said is the largest turnout he has ever had. Sanders himself, In contrast to those at his rallies, will not tolerate any show of support for the deportees, foreign students, or Palestinian solidarity. The contradiction between Sanders and his supporters came to a head at Coachella when a Palestinian flag was unfurled and he allowed police to remove the protestors. The crowd then erupted in chants of “Free, Free Palestine!” Now the Sanders tour is facing criticism from major Democratic Party politicians.
Another key sign of the pent up anger and outrage seeking expression appeared this week at the Coachella music festival when the hip-hop band, Knee Cap, brought thousands to their feet when they projected three screens:
“Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people”
“It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes”
“Fuck Israel. Free Palestine.”
During the performance, band member Mo Chara said: “The Irish not so long ago were persecuted at the hands of the Brits, but we were never bombed from the… skies with nowhere to go. The Palestinians have nowhere to go.”
The band led the audience in chants of: “Free, free Palestine”.
The Knee Cap video has since gone viral
The working class is not yet playing an independent role and remains tied to the trade union bureaucracy which has loudly supported Trump‘s protectionist tariffs. But as the tariffs spark layoffs in auto and steel, empty shelves and soaring prices appear at the grocery store, and fears of recession grow, pressure will mount on the trade union bureaucrats.
The expressions of opposition to the fascist agenda we have seen so far are of critical importance for showing that a collective will to resist is seeking an outlet. In the face of a Trump lead drive to fascism and war there can be neither room for reformist illusions, nor longing for a liberal saviour like Sanders. Resistance to the fascist danger requires the organized power of the working class acting in its own name.
The above is signed by the following tendences and groups.
Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, consisting of:
“The relations between different nations depend on the extent to which each of them has developed its productive forces, the division of labor and internal exchange. This principle is generally recognized. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of that same nation depends on the level of development of its production and its internal exchange. The extent to which the productive forces of a nation are developed is most clearly shown by the degree of development of the division of labour.”
(Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1846).
Summary
Introduction
Overcoming the historical issue of productive backwardness
The question of prices: overtaking in the international class struggle
A workers’ state, on which the capitalist mode of production has become dependent
A powerful combo for the transition: Developing forces and conquering the world market
The national and international class struggle for prices, de-dollarization and tariff war
The inequality that grows in the capitalist world, decreases in China
“New imperialism”, “Weberian developmental state” and “State capitalism”
A system in transition threatened by dangerous structural and geopolitical contradictions
In defense of socialist internationalism!
1. Introduction
China is the world’s factory, it hegemonizes the world capitalist market, but, exceptionally, it is not controlled by the imperialist financial system, nor by the international monopolies, nor by the richest Chinese billionaires.
China is controlled by its state, which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This second exceptionality ensures the existence of the first. Capital does not command the state or guide the economy because the state controlled by the communist party is the one that controls everything, to the detriment of and against capital. The state controls most companies, the financial system is dominated by state-owned banks, the land ownership system is largely dominated by local and municipal governments.
The following document will point out how the China of the 21st century has overcome several limitations of China, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the smaller transitional states created in the 20th century. in the production of commodities, in internal exchange, with wage increases, the reduction of inequalities and misery, in the external exchange of these commodities, produced at a lower price and with greater technology than in competitors, achieving hegemony in the world market. However, this process occurred at the expense of a relative setback in the division of labor and privatizations that have been mediated and reversed in recent years by the incorporation of technologies in production, but still in coexistence with strenuous working hours.
On the geopolitical level, apart from a few diplomatic and formal protests, China does not show any trace of proletarian internationalism against the aggressions, sanctions and blockades carried out by the imperialist powers against oppressed nations and peoples.
This working day and this geopolitics, as well as a billionaire, growing and powerful bourgeois class, despite the flight of capital and capitalists in recent years, weaken China in the medium and long term in the confrontation with capitalism internally and extremely, and can compromise its evolution towards socialism.
2. Overcoming the historical issue of productive backwardness
China has been solving, on the basis of planned state control, the historical problem of the development of the productive forces. Contradictorily, the beginning of the resolution of this historical problem was given by the combination of two opposing global forces: on the one hand, world monopoly capital, through productive investments (industrial and technological) from the setting up of the Special Economic Zones, in 1979-80; on the other hand, the greatest planetary productive force united in a single nation, the Chinese proletariat, composed of one billion workers.
The question of the backwardness of the productive forces was a historical, chronic problem common to all workers’ states that emerged from socialist revolutions in the twentieth century, which occurred in backward, semi-colonial capitalist states or weaker links in the chain of capitalist-imperialist states, such as Russia. For this reason, the epigraph that opens this document, written by Marx, highlights: “The relations between different nations depend on the extent to which each of them has developed its productive forces, the division of labor and internal exchange” (Marx, German Ideology, 2007, p.89).
The Paris Commune, the first workers’ government in history during capitalism, which took place in 1871, was established for only two months, although in an advanced capitalist nation, which could therefore have the best possible conditions at the time for the development of the productive forces, did not constitute a workers’ state or seize economic power. the Bank of France.
All human evolution is based on the development of the relations of production, of social life among men and of the evolution of the productive forces.
Relations of production are the social relations that are established in the process of production and in the distribution of that production, including the way in which the means of production are owned and how the labor force is organized and exploited. The evolution of relations lies in the overcoming or attenuation of the exploitation of man by man, which exists, for example, in the passage from slavery to capitalism in Brazil with the abolitionist revolution of 1888.
Productive forces in general are the means of production, they refer to the development of science, technological inventions, the division and combination of labor, the improvement of the means of communication, the creation of the world market, machinery, etc. However, from its gestation in the Paleolithic period to the agricultural revolution and all subsequent historical development, the productive forces in general depend on the productive force of human labor (the labor capacity of individuals). Therefore, “the main productive force [is] the human being himself” (Marx, Grundisse, 2011, p. 346). The evolution of the productive forces can be measured by the improvement of the living conditions of the human being.
The evolutionary dialectic between these two elements, relations of production of social life and productive forces, is what determines the mode of production. In other words: The combination of material production with the corresponding form of exchange constitutes the mode of production. And what is fundamental for us to understand at what moment in the historical process towards a developed communism we find ourselves.
For thousands of years, the primitive communist form of the relations of production, based on social labor, mediated man’s relationship with nature and transformed nature in general and human nature in particular. The genus Homo has existed for at least 1.5 million years. Class society, less than 10 thousand years ago. It was primitive communism that was responsible for the appearance of homo sapiens in the terrestrial fauna, approximately 300 thousand years ago, separating it from the other wild higher primates. Man is man only because of primitive communism, because of the relations of production developed by men among themselves in community to survive in nature.
It was very recently in the course of this evolution, with the evolution of the productive forces, that contradictorily the relations of production retreated from primitive communism to class society. This step backwards promoted other steps forward in the evolution of the productive forces and in the relations of production, from the original slave society to the current capitalism.
Trying to solve the problem of the backwardness of the productive forces, in 1917, Russia made a socialist revolution, made a huge leap in the evolution of the relations of production, but 4 years later, it had to take a step back in these relations of production to develop the productive forces, creating the New Economic Policy. Russian backwardness, attacked and sabotaged on all sides by world imperialism and Nazism, created by imperialism against communism and the USSR, prevented a further development of the productive forces. Be that as it may, the Russian experience was advanced for its time, or perhaps precocious.
In 1949, a powerful social revolution took place in China when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s guerrilla armies took power and established a workers state, defeating the Kuomintang, the party of the national bourgeoisie, which was backed by US imperialism and its allies such as Britain. This took place in the broader context of the defeat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in the Second World War, which was both a war of self-defence by the USSR workers state agaisnt Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, and an inter-imperialist war between Germany/Italy/Japan and the US and its West European allies. At the end of the war, Soviet troops fought Japanese imperialism in Mongolia and Manchuria, and that helped create the context for the later victory of the CCP forces.
The politics of the CCP were very much in the same mould as that of Stalin’s leadership of the USSR, which represented a conservative workers bureaucracy that had abandoned the goal of world revolution, and sought ‘peaceful coexistence’ with imperialism to stave off dangers to the workers state. The CCP based itself not on the proletariat in China’s cities, but on China’s enormous, impoverished and oppressed peasantry, and its struggle, initially aimed at national liberation and a bloc with the national bourgeoisie, with ‘socialism’ postponed until a later stage, was still a mighty struggle of the peasant masses. The bureaucratic regime in the CCP and its armies resembled Stalin’s regime in the USSR. On taking power it was confronted with the reality that the national bourgeoisie preferred the support of imperialism, and such a multi-class regime was impossible. This was demonstrated particularly in the counterrevolutionary war imperialism waged in neighbouring Korea, where the imperialists at one point threatened China itself. So the Chinese Communist Party’s bureuacratic regime, for its own self-preservation, was driven to unleash a fully-fledged social revolution, establishing a deformed workers state with a bureaucratic regime similar in many ways to that in the USSR under Stalin and his successors.
This social revolution made a huge leap in quality in relation to the evolution of production relations and for 40 years it struggled to develop the productive forces, in this period it had to drain enormous resources from the peasantry to industrialize, it did not succeed, until the 1980s China’s GDP was lower than Brazil’s. Then, it was only from the 1980s onwards that China began to be crossed by capitalist-imperialist investments, because China’s break with the Soviet Union made the Chinese Communist Party relatively reliable for imperialism so that it invested huge masses of capital to transplant the global production of commodities to China and make the country the “workshop of the world” as Lenin called England at the beginning of the twentieth century. in his book “Imperialism,…” of 1916.
The development of the Chinese productive forces, with imperialism blowing in favor and no Nazi threat as the USSR saw in the superpowerful imperialist Germany in the hands of Hitler, and the flexibilization of the relations of production created in China ideal conditions for a new attempt at socialism, counting in its favor an incomparable abundance of the greatest productive force on the planet. the factor of greatest creation of social wealth, the human labor force, which copied, studied and catapulted another productive force, technology. In these respects, China resumes the course and prospects of the socialist evolution of mankind towards a developed communism. Financialized and deindustrialized imperialism realized the danger only after three decades of investments and the 2008 crisis itself, which weakened it even more. Regardless of the singular characteristics or the comings and goings that world politics has had in the last 17 years, imperialism has recreated the Nazi monster to recover the lost hegemony in the market, in technology, in world politics and in the development of the productive forces, which the American neo-Nazi movement translates into Make American Great Again (MAGA).
But this attempt to stop the course of history came late and even if it came early, it is not possible to establish an end to history without liquidating the human species and also planetary nature.
This tariff war, a harbinger of military war, is only succeeding in isolating the United States of America (USA) from an economic point of view, which could weaken the United States at the beginning of a third world war. And this may even abort the third war, so damaging is the Trumpist tactic of making America great again. He will not reindustrialize the country, and in these almost 100 days in office, he is also ruining financial capitalism itself. Big Techs and Wall Street have lost 10 trillion dollars since February, between the bursting of the speculative bomb of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the threats of tariffs, and have recovered by a merely speculative movement, four of these 10 trillion dollars with the suspension of tariffs for three months. But this is just another demonstration of the unstoppable condition of Chinese development, as Haway, BYD, DeepSeek, etc. have been.
The positive resolution of the problem of the development of the productive forces is only possible through the conscious mediation of the state’s planned control of this development, through reinvestment in research, the improvement of the living conditions of the working class, through the urbanization of society, the reduction of poverty and the increase of wages (in spite of the still strenuous working day), of measures against arrests to reduce the costs of constant capital that in every capitalist environment generates the reduction of profit rates.
We suppose that, while the capitalist West becomes even more bizarre and bestial, persecuting and combating the materialist and historical methods of understanding life in society and the capitalist economy, as has been happening in the witch hunt promoted by the Trump administration to American universities, the economic planning controlled by the Chinese Communist Party is based on the critique of Marxist political economy and tries to mitigate the consequences of the market and capitalism in the economy Chinese.
In this way, by making constant capital cheaper, China has taken the lead in the technological revolution of AI, as occurred with the recent case of the extraordinary overcoming in costs, energy expenditures, yields, and the release of the use of DeepSeek in relation to the AI applications developed and monopolized until then by the USA. Despite any criticism of AI, the powerful Chinese counterpunch, using a weapon that was developed immanently in the sanctions policy, is an anti-imperialist and anti-monopoly counterattack on technology by imperialism. In reducing the constant capital costs of their companies, China’s technocrats employ measures they learned from Marx’s study. In Book III of Capital, Marx enumerates six causes against arrests for the law of the tendency of the interest rate to fall. One of them, the third, is the cheapening of the elements of constant capital. (see also Emancipation of Labor: Humberto Rodrigues, DeepSeek – the missile that pierced the speculative bubble of big techs, https://emancipacaodotrabalho.org/Publicacao.aspx?id=566942)
3. The question of prices: overtaking in the international class struggle
The Lenin Question “Who Will Win?” is Decided in Favour of Socialism Against Capitalist Elements in Town and Country. Poster created by the Artists’ Brigade in Moscow and used in a traveling exhibition entitled “The Results of the First Five-Year Plan and the Objectives of the Second Five-Year Plan”. 1933.
At the beginning of the Bolshevik government, despite all the determination of the proletariat and its leadership in the USSR, there was doubt as to who would win the international class struggle, the proletariat of the USSR or imperialism. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Departments of Political Education, on October 17, 1921, Lenin updated his “What is to be done?” by asking the audience with the concrete questions of the time:
What do you want to do?
The whole question is: who will overtake whom?
— Lenin
Trotsky in 1925 and Stalin in 1929 took up Lenin’s question again under different tactics. The question came to be used as a formula that describes the inevitability of the class struggle, that is, who (which of the two antagonists) will dominate the other. In this view, all compromises and promises between enemies are just expedients—tactical maneuvers in the struggle for supremacy.
Trotsky resumes the debate in 1936, in Revolution Betrayed:
“The question posed by Lenin – Who will prevail? – is a question of the correlation of forces between the Soviet Union and the world revolutionary proletariat, on the one hand, and, on the other, international capital and the hostile forces within the Union. The economic successes of the Soviet Union enable it to strengthen, advance, arm itself, and, when necessary, retreat and wait—in a word, resist. But at its core, the question of Who will prevail – not only as a military question, but even more so as an economic question – confronts the Soviet Union on a world scale. Military intervention is a danger. The intervention of cheap goods in the luggage trains of a capitalist army would be incomparably greater. The victory of the proletariat in one of the Western countries would, of course, immediately and radically alter the correlation of forces. But as long as the Soviet Union remains isolated and, worse than that, as long as the European proletariat suffers setbacks and continues to retreat, the strength of the Soviet structure will ultimately be measured by the productivity of labor. And this, in a market economy, is expressed in the costs and prices of production. The difference between domestic prices and prices on the world market is one of the main means of measuring this correlation of forces. Soviet statisticians, however, are forbidden even to address this issue. The reason is that, despite its condition of stagnation and decomposition, capitalism is still far ahead in terms of technique, organization and qualification of the workforce.“
(Trotsky, 1936, Revolution Betrayed, 2. Comparative estimates of these achievements; emphases in bold ours,
None of this, which haunted the Bolshevik leaders in the first decades of Soviet power, worries China today! Not only does China not run the risk of being invaded by low-priced Western goods, but it has been promoting the opposite movement on the world market for decades. Moreover, it is the richest capitalist power in the entire history of the world that feels threatened by Chinese goods and resorts to a violent and desperate tariff policy to “defend itself”. China celebrates victories upon victories “in the costs and prices of production”, the “difference between domestic prices and prices in the world market” has demonstrated, “one of the main means of measuring this correlation of forces”, has been shown the superiority of China in the correlation of forces; and increasingly, as recent disputes with Haway, BYD and DeepSeek have revealed, China “is far ahead in terms of technique, organization and qualification of the workforce”. All this indicates that, in response to this subtitle and Lenin’s question, China is overtaking imperialism.
4. A workers’ state, on which the capitalist mode of production has become dependent
China is the largest contemporary “manufacturing power”. This condition, achieved by the country only in the twenty-first century, makes China the largest producer of the “immense collection of goods” used and exchanged all over the planet. This set of commodities is the form in which the wealth of bourgeois society in the capitalist mode of production is presented at first sight. Beyond appearance, China is effectively responsible for the production of the commodity in its dual nature, that of use value and that of exchange value, which supplies the world population [1].
In 2023, China’s industrial production was US$ 4.659 trillion and China accounted for 29% of global industrial production, surpassing the next four largest economies combined (USA, Japan, Germany and South Korea). That put the country nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the second-placed United States, which used to have the world’s largest manufacturing sector until China overtook it in 2010.
In 2024, China became responsible for 32% of global industrial production.
In the first quarter of 2025, industrial production by large Chinese companies rose 7.7%, compared to the same period in 2024, the country’s statistics office, the NBS, reported.
“In March, the value added of industrial enterprises above the designated size increased by 7.7% […] are enterprises with annual revenue of the main business exceeding 20 million yuan […] The total value of exports was 2,251.5 billion yuan, an increase of 13.5 percent.”
(NBS: The national economy got off to a good start in the first quarter, 16/04/2025,
Exchanges between human beings evolved from local trade – after the enormous initial leap for the development of the productive forces made by the agricultural revolution that created the surplus of production – to trade between city-states, between neighboring regions, continents and passed to the world market. All of this was enhanced by the so-called globalization of trade, a growing process between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries of integration and interdependence between nations, encompassing the circulation of goods, services, information, capital and people on a global scale.
China was the nation that benefited the most productively and technologically from the globalization of the neoliberal stage of the imperialist phase, due to the liberalization of the transfer of industrial plants and production technologies to the Asian country by imperialist monopolies. The capitalist metropolises chose to deindustrialize and benefit from the capitalist world circuit, keeping the financial and speculative dividends of the global market.
In the last 15 years, between 2010 and 2025, after the economic crisis of 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic, which potentiated financial decay, deindustrialization and virtualization of the world imperialist system, China first achieved quantitative hegemony in the world market and then made a qualitative leap in this hegemony. The country started from exporting low value-added manufactures to achieve its technological sovereignty and scale in the export of high value-added manufactures.
The growth process has taken a leap in quality in recent years. China has climbed the value chain and has become the largest producer of low- and high-value-added goods. Although part of the production of lower value-added goods has been dispersed to neighboring Asian nations, such as Vietnam and India, China continues to dominate the world export of manufactured goods such as clothing, appliances, footwear, but also goods with the highest technology incorporated, such as smartphones, lithium-ion batteries, electric cars and Artificial Intelligence. automated machine tools and robotics; aerospace and aeronautical equipment; marine equipment and high-tech transportation; modern rail transport equipment; energy equipment; agricultural equipment; new materials; and biopharmaceuticals and advanced medical products. Between 1995 and 2020, the quality of goods for export changed and reversed:
“In 1995, clothing and other textiles accounted for 20% of total Chinese exports, while electronics accounted for less than 9%. In 2020, this scenario was reversed: electronics accounted for 24% of Chinese exports and textiles, only 10%.
“This process, often referred to as moving up the value chain, requires capital investment and technical expertise to build and operate modernized manufacturing facilities. In previous generations of industrial planning, Chinese manufacturers absorbed these factors of production from foreign companies, generating frustrations with technology transfer that fueled trade tensions in the 2010s. In some areas, however, Chinese technology leaders have caught up with—or surpassed—their international competitors, requiring greater reliance on domestic innovation”
China has become hegemonic over the world market because this whole process described above has led China to the condition of the largest exporting economy in the world and the second largest importer, second only to the US until 2024. However, it is very likely that, after the unprecedented import tariffs announced by Donald Trump’s government on practically all its trading partners, the greater protectionism of the US will reduce the amount of goods exported from other countries, isolating it commercially from the rest of the planet, and result in the loss of the title of the world’s largest importer and China will consolidate its trajectory as the largest exporter and importer in the world market.
The dependence that the capitalist mode of production has on China has become even more evident, explicit and shameful for the US, after Trump raised his package of tariffs on imports from China to 245% and then had to exempt from them a list of 20 categories of products, such as cell phones, computers, semiconductors, etc. memory chips and flat-panel displays.
The U.S. government’s tariff war against China demonstrates that world imperialism does not rule China. The military and financial leadership of world capitalism does not govern the core of the production of world commodities – although most of the imperialist monopolies continue to have gains in profitability with their plants installed in China since the implementation of the Special Economic Zones – an unprecedented situation in the history of the capitalist mode of production.
5. A powerful combo for the transition: developing forces and conquering the world market
In The German Ideology (1845-6), written after the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), historical materialism will incorporate the concepts of labor and alienation and will gain an improved format that will outline the rest of Marx and Engels’ work.
“This ‘alienation’ [Entfremdung], to use a term comprehensible to philosophers, can only be overcome, of course, under two practical presuppositions. In order for it to become an “unbearable” power, i.e., a power against which a revolution is made, it must have produced the mass of humanity as absolutely “propertyless” and at the same time in contradiction to a world of existing wealth and culture, conditions which presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development – and, on the other hand, this development of the productive forces (in which at the same time human empirical existence is contained, given not on the local plane, but on the world-historical plane) is a practical presupposition, absolutely necessary, because without it scarcity is only generalized, and therefore, with the famine, the struggles for the necessary foodstuffs would begin again and all the old filth would eventually be re-established; Moreover, only with this universal development of the productive forces is a universal exchange of men established , and thereby the phenomenon of the ‘propertyless’ mass (universal competition) is produced simultaneously in all peoples, making each of them dependent on the revolutions of the other; and, finally, empirically universal, world-historical individuals are put in the place of local individuals. Without this, 1) communism could exist only as a local phenomenon; 2) the forces of exchange themselves could not have developed as universal forces, and therefore as unbearable forces; they would have remained as domestic-superstitious “circumstances”; and 3) any extension of exchange would have surpassed local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as a ‘sudden’ and simultaneous action of the dominant peoples, which presupposes the universal development of the productive force and the world exchange associated with this development.
(Marx’s notes, written in the margin of the manuscript that were published as footnotes to the book German Ideology, 2007, p. 38).
With the transition to the urban life of the majority of humanity (in which China is a central player) and with the industrialization of agriculture, the conditions for the abolition of class society and the transition to the future communist society are increasingly being created. It should be noted that information technology and telecommunications create the conditions for the central planning of production and change at the international level in an integrated manner and without any type of bureaucratization; cybernetics, including artificial intelligence, make it possible to pave the way for the abolition of the difference between manual and intellectual work, etc.
By promoting a great increase in the productive forces (general and labor) – “a practical assumption, absolutely necessary, because without it scarcity is only generalized and, therefore, with the famine, the struggles for the necessary foodstuffs would begin again and all the old filth would eventually be reestablished” – simultaneously with the conquest of hegemony over the world market, in the (capitalist) condition of the largest exporting economy and the second largest importer of goods on the planet, by developing universal and unbearable forces for the hegemony of imperialism, China shows that it is situated in the transition between capitalism and socialism, whose advance to communism, empirically, is only possible as a “sudden” and simultaneous action of the dominant peoples, which presupposes the universal development of the productive force and the world exchange associated with this development.”
In this last sentence may lie where the peaceful and defensive nature of Confucian thought (from 551 and 479 B.C.), a system of social and political ethics that emphasizes harmony, order and morality identified with the old Asian mode of production, inherited by the ruling layer of the CPC resists the dynamic of revolutionary proletarian Marxism to act as a decisive subject for the “sudden action” that turns the Chinese proletariat from the “dominant people” into a class” leader”, as Gramsci would say, in addition to exercising dominion over the means of production, also exercises political, cultural and ideological leadership over the process of universal historical evolution in opposition to decadent imperialism and in favor of all peoples oppressed by it.
6. The national and international class struggle for prices, de-dollarization and tariff war
China, in its “thousand-year NEP”, escaped the “Scissors Crisis”, a contradiction generated by the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the USSR in 1923, which promoted the gap between the prices of agricultural and manufactured products. China has recently escaped the “Shock Therapy” imposed by imperialism on the workers’ states of the USSR and Eastern Europe in the processes of capitalist restoration, which radically liberalized prices and trade, simultaneously privatizing the state, leading the economies of these countries to collapse in the 1990s.
China has been winning not only the internal price war, but the global price war, which is why it has become the world’s largest producer and exporter of goods.
It is necessary to establish here the differences between the dual nature of commodities, use value, exchange value, and the categories of value, price and money, which are distinct but related concepts, as Marx himself elucidates in Chapter I of Capital. Every commodity is the product of human labor. Use value consists of the individual function of the object useful to human beings. The other forms of value are created from the relation of the commodity to the other commodities, both by the use of human labour (a special commodity which creates the others) in the manufacture of the commodity, that is, by the relation between labour-power and the commodity; and by the relation which this commodity acquires to the other individual commodities; as well as by the domestic or foreign market value that this commodity will assume. Value is the objective expression of human labor in the commodity.
It is human labor that gives the social unit of measurement for the comparison of different commodities, this social unit is determined by the labor time socially necessary for the production of the commodity. Exchange value is the relation of the commodity to other commodities, a comparison that can only exist by the existence of value. Exchange value is the form of value, though not its content. But just as value is not equal to exchange value, exchange value is not automatically the price of commodities.
The price of commodities is the monetary manifestation of the exchange value of a commodity. The price is influenced by factors such as supply and demand, and may diverge from the value in certain cases. Money is a commodity that functions as a measure of value, a means of circulation, its use value is to be a universal equivalent value for the exchange between commodities within a local, regional or world market. “When commodity production has reached a certain degree of development (…) It (money) becomes the universal commodity of contracts” (Marx, 2013, p. 213). However, when commodity production overflowed the national markets, so did money. “Only in the world market does money function fully as the commodity whose natural form is, at the same time, the immediately social form of realization of human labor in abstracto” (Marx, 2013, p. 213). In China, with an employed labor force of one billion people, humanity has concentrated in a single country the largest productive force in history.
In 1944, the dominant capitalist nations, the USA and Britain; then the world’s largest producers of goods, established in Bretton Woods that the dollar will be “THE” standard currency for world transactions. The USA assumed this hegemony at a time when Great Britain, violently demolished in World War II by Germany, had lost its status as the “factory of the world”.
Now, China, being the current factory of the world, is impelled to question the hegemony of the dollar, even if it does not propose that its currency is automatically the substitute for the dollar, but that it claims not to pay the “use tax” to the US, in exchanges in which the latter is not involved. De-dollarization is a trend in the world economy in a process in which the US is no longer the largest producer of goods and its dollar commodity already becomes dysfunctional, inflationary for global trade. But, above all, this impasse in the dispute for the world currency was generated because, since China is the current factory of the world, it is in China that “the immediately social form of the realization of human labor in abstracto” is more produced than in any other part of the globe. Trump’s tariff war against the world is a desperate reaction in fulfillment of the threat he made shortly after being elected in November 2024 that he would overtax the BRICS if they advanced the project of de-dollarization of trade transactions.
7. Inequality that grows in the capitalist world, decreases in China
In most capitalist countries, as the research of Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, attests, inequality has increased. One of the main findings of the study is that there has been an increase in wealth inequalities after 30 years and the fact that wealth inequalities are more pronounced in the US. The growing social barbarism, resulting from the deindustrialization and financialization of the Western world (including Japan and Australia) produces the formation of immense pockets of misery and populations living on the streets as “homeless”, despite the growth of empty properties.
In any capitalist state, the accumulation of capital catapults growing misery. On the law of increasing misery, for Marx and for Marxists,
“Within the capitalist system, all methods of raising the productivity of capitalist labor, as capital accumulates, must worsen the condition of the worker, whether his remuneration rises or falls. an accumulation of misery corresponding to the accumulation of capital. Therefore, the accumulation of wealth at one pole is, at the same time, the accumulation of misery, the torture of work, slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation at the opposite pole.”
(MARX, 2013, p.721).
Conversely, China has lifted more than 700 million people out of extreme poverty (defined by the World Bank as an income of less than US$ 2.15 per day or R$ 209 per month), representing one of humanity’s greatest and fastest advances in poverty reduction in history. This process occurred simultaneously with the last four decades that projected China as a world power.
The reduction of extreme poverty was in the wake of the doubling of the consuming middle class and associated with the increase in wages.
“In January 2025, millions of civil servants in China received a significant pay raise, the first in a decade. The average increase was about 500 yuan ($68.50) per month. This January wage adjustment aims to stimulate domestic consumption and boost the economy amid persistent economic challenges. Comparing data from the ILO (International Labor Organization) while average wages in China grew 564% between 2000 and 2015, countries such as Australia, Germany, South Korea, the United States and Chile recorded increases of 17%, 10%, 24%, 15% and 35%, respectively.”
(Abert: China’s Average Wage is the fastest growing in the world and boosts the domestic market, 03/02/2025,
In all capitalist societies, the accumulation of capital, that is, the existence of billionaires, generates increasing misery. However, in China today, with an overaccumulation of capital, that is, with the construction of the largest multinational companies in history and billionaires, the rural population has risen from the misery they lived, wage earners are earning more and the so-called Chinese middle class, which was already 400 million people, is doubling in size (ADB: The Rise of the Middle Class in the People’s Republic of China, February 2011, https://www.adb.org/publications/rise-middle-class-peoples-republic-china).
Wages have been raised, reducing China’s dependence on the oscillations and crises of the world capitalist market, while increasing the dependence of the world market on China.
8. “New imperialism”, “Weberian developmental state” and “State capitalism”
China’s empowerment in the capitalist world market, confronting US imperialism in the economic and diplomatic field, instead of attracting, frightens many leftists who have come to characterize the Asian country as a new imperialist nation. For these leftists, the message that Lenin sent to the leftists of the time (Mensheviks, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and anarchists) when he defended the NEP in his famous document “On the Tax in Kind, the Meaning of the New Economic Policy and Its Conditions” is valid:
“Socialism is inconceivable without the great capitalist technique, based on the last word of modern science, without a harmonious state organization which subjects tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a single norm in the production and distribution of products. We Marxists always talk about it and it is not worth spending even two seconds to talk about it with people who do not understand at least this (anarchists are a good part of the left-wing esserists).
At the same time, socialism is inconceivable without the domination of the state by the proletariat: this is also elementary. And history (from which no one, except the obtuse first-class Mensheviks, expected ‘integral’ socialism to take place in a smooth, quiet, easy, simple way) followed such an original path that it generated, until 1918, two separate halves of socialism; one next to the other, just like two chicks under the same wing of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia most clearly embodied the material realisation of the social, productive and economic economic conditions of socialism on the one hand and its political conditions on the other.” (Lenin, On the Tax in Kind, 1922, p. 148).
Lenin’s words fit like a glove for us to understand that: 1) the present conditions in China express the domination of great capitalist technique, based on the last word of modern science, under a harmonious state organization that subjects tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a single norm in the production and distribution of products; 2) and the relationship between China and its partners such as Russia, Iran and, to a certain extent, the BRICS, which embodied, in 2025, “in the most obvious way, the material realization of the economic-social, productive and economic conditions of socialism” in a higher stage of productive and economic conditions, but hesitate to geopolitically challenge the hegemony of the imperialist system.
The characterization that China embodies a new type of imperialism has no adherence to reality. From this characterization that China is imperialist, the situation worsens, because the Mensheviks, Esserists and anarchists of the 21st century, whether they come from Stalinist, Maoist or Trotskyist shades, who immediately expected the realization of an “integral socialism” and, as reality did not immediately meet their idealizations, took the opportunity to adhere to the ideological propaganda of the imperialist enemy, claiming a policy of double defeatism in the face of conflicts between China and the USA, just as they do in the war between NATO and Russia, which takes place in Ukraine. We understand that this is a tacit, shameful and cowardly way of allying with imperialism against Russia and China in the escalation of the world conflict.
Marxists take sides in all conflicts involving imperialism and nations oppressed by it (even if this oppression is tariff or in the form of sanctions), they are unconditionally on the opposite side of imperialism.
Part of the centrist leftists, who claim to be Marxists, characterize China as a kind of “state capitalism”, and not a few among them have been advancing from this centrist position to state that China represents the evolution of state capitalism to a new type of imperialism, after all, it cannot be said that the Chinese government is a mere management committee of the affairs of the internal or external bourgeoisie, no matter how much exceptionalities are recognized in the supposed Chinese version of state capitalism.
Many scholars characterize China as a “Weberian developmental state” (So, 2003; Dickson, 2008; McNally and Wright, 2010; van der Pijl, 2012, 2016; Yao, 2010, 2011), therefore, a capitalist technocratic state. The problem with this reasoning lies in believing that the State would have full capacity to maintain control over the national bourgeoisie, disregarding the class struggle.
These two characterizations consider a relatively cooperative and harmonious coexistence between the state and the Chinese bourgeoisie and minimize the existence of a class struggle between capital and labor in China and on the planet involving the global role occupied by China in the class struggle, regardless of whether or not its ruling political layer wants to occupy this role.
Both have an increasingly weak argumentative and political support, especially after the pandemic and the fact that relations between the State and Chinese billionaires have soured, due to the flight of capital promoted by the latter and the repression of the former.
Since 2023, the “tense alliance” between the national bourgeoisie and the state, which marked the 2009-2022 period, has been broken by the Xi Jimping government.
“The pressure on business elites has not eased, and now that the borders are open, many are considering exit plans. Last month, Hui Ka Yan, founder of ailing Evergrande and Asia’s former richest man, was arrested for unspecified crimes. Bao Fan, a renowned investment banker once seen as a kingmaker in the tech business world, was detained in February and has not been seen since. Other executives were banned from leaving.
“The current scenario is a marked change from the 1990s and early 2000s, when China was preparing to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and implementing a series of market reforms that allowed Chinese entrepreneurs to amass enormous wealth. That was an era when making money came before anything else. But under Mr. Xi, who has consolidated his personal power more than any other leader since Mao, the emphasis has shifted back to political control rather than economic freedom.
“’The arbitrary punishment imposed on the wealthy class is unlike anything we’ve seen since the 1990s,’ says Victor Shih, a professor of political economy in China at the University of California, San Diego. ‘This has led many of this class to think about diversifying their businesses out of China […]Wealthy Chinese are also looking for ways to move, and also to take their money, out of China. About 13,500 high-net-worth individuals are expected to leave China this year, up from 10,800 last year, according to Henley & Partners, an immigration consultancy.
“’The Chinese government plays for keeps, as Jack Ma and many others have discovered,’ says David Lesperance, an independent consultant who helps high-net-worth people move. ‘So we need to look at how to protect their assets and their well-being.’’”
This movement is real, apparently consistent and scandalizes the British imperialist press which increases the demonization of China. The participation of private capital has been reduced and the influence of the State in the economy of companies has been expanded in the last five years. This trend is evident in the growing number of state-owned enterprises and mixed-ownership enterprises whose majority stake belongs to the Chinese party-state.
“Panel ‘a’ of the chart shows the aggregate market capitalization share of the top 100 listed companies in China, by company ownership, while panel ‘b’ shows the aggregate revenue share of all Chinese companies included in the Fortune Global 500, also by company ownership.
“This tracker is based on the methodology set out in our 2022 Working Paper. The private sector is narrowly defined as companies with less than 10% state participation. The state-owned sector includes both mixed-ownership enterprises (SMEs), in which the state owns between 10% and 50%, and majority-owned state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
“Private companies’ share of market capitalization among China’s 100 largest listed companies has fallen from a peak of around 55% in mid-2021 to just 33% at the end of June this year, a decline of more than 40% in just three years (see panel ‘a’). At the same time, the share of state-owned enterprises, i.e. those majority-owned by the Chinese party-state, has risen steadily from less than a third to around 54% […]
“These developments look increasingly structural. The authorities’ stance since 2020, including regulatory tightening and COVID-free lockdowns, appears to have done lasting damage to China’s private economy, whose dynamism has been a defining feature of its economic miracle over the past four decades. Nearly 20 months after China’s reopening due to COVID, the private sector has yet to recover, despite many pro-private statements and gestures from the Chinese leadership. In short, the findings corroborate the view that China continues to suffer from “prolonged economic COVID.”
Everything indicates that after the Covid-19 epidemic, the Xi Jimping government took the opportunity to deepen and consolidate a structural statist trend, increasing the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the state.
Former Chinese President Hu Jintao (2003 and 2013) is removed from his seat, during the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on October 22, 2022 — Photo: REUTERS/Tingshu Wang. Xi Jimping succeeded Hu, the gesture of forced withdrawal seems to want to mark a break with a period that imperialism identified as “one of openness to the outside world and greater tolerance to new ideas”.
It seems, which may not be a consolidated trend, that the forms of property and capitalist relations of production that have developed since the end of the 1970s continue to evolve as in the last four decades and the struggle between socialist and capitalist relations of production in the national and international context is intensifying. ultimately, between world monopoly capital and the Chinese proletariat. This progressive conjuncture gives rise to the negation of the negation in favor of the continuity of the revolution that began in 1949.
Debating the terminology of “state capitalism”, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), highlights the revolutionary perspectives of the structural nationalization of the economy:
“Under an integral ‘state capitalism’, this law of the equal rate of profit would be realized not by tortuous ways – that is, by competition between different capitals – but immediately and directly by state accounting. Such a regime, however, has never existed, and because of profound contradictions among the owners themselves, it never will, all the more so since, in its capacity as the universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object for social revolution.
(Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed; Chapter 9 – Social Relations in the Soviet Union: State Capitalism, 1936,
According to the thinking of the Ukrainian revolutionary, the state monopoly of the rate of profit, eliminating competition between different capitals, makes accounting and state control even more favorable, and therefore favors economic planning in the short, medium and long term.
He considered that such a regime never existed and could never exist. In fact, the present Chinese regime, as well as the Soviet political regime in its early years, has come closest to this hypothetical regime in which the “profound contradictions between the owners” are subject to state intervention that tends to overcome with socialist measures the quality of the sole representative of the monopoly of ownership of the means of production.
Trotsky did not envision, nor could he at the time, that the hypothetical country to install “integral state capitalism” would have a political regime established by a social revolution that remained in power for 76 long years. The rupture and overcoming of the stage of the “tense alliance” (2009-2020) between the Chinese state and the fleeing Chinese bourgeoisie, points to the deepening of a revolutionary tendency that was too tempting for the political regime established by the Chinese revolution of 1949.
If China were capitalist or imperialist, it must be agreed that it would be a very rare model, not because we believe that there is an ideal classical model to which China should be compared, but because, in fact, despite the wage-earning of labor power and capitalist exchange and accumulation relations existing in China, it is very necessary to define it as a capitalist state because several tendential laws of the capitalist economy, postulated by Marx; and imperialist economy, postulated by Lenin, do not apply in the Asian country.
For example, the law of increasing misery, resulting from the accumulation of capital; the modification of the technical composition of capital, with the variable part becoming smaller and smaller in relation to the constant part of capital, also resulting from capitalist accumulation; from the foregoing process would also derive the tendency of the rate of profit; the formation of an industrial reserve army. But none of this is proven. Perhaps, as Lenin supposes in his “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916), what can be inferred from Lenin’s prognostications lies in the fact that certain advanced elements of the Chinese economy may be gestating the opposite of imperialism, perceived by imperialism more than by many leftists. For example: when he supposes that the monopoly economy
It has reached a certain very high stage of its development, when certain fundamental features of capitalism begin to become its antithesis, when traces of the epoch of capitalism’s transition to a higher economic and social structure take shape and manifest themselves in every line. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher regime (Lenin, 2002, p. 67)
If some fundamental features of capitalism begin to become its antithesis, and if monopoly is an indication of the transition from capitalism to a higher system, the more advanced will be the process in which monopoly is under the tutelage of socialist state planning.
9. A system in transition threatened by growing structural and geopolitical contradictions
There is one constant in all capitalist countries: the state is the political representative of the interests of the capitalists. Bourgeois or bourgeois workers’ parties, such as the Labour Party in Great Britain or the Workers’ Party in Brazil, exercise temporary government, but not absolute power over the political regime, which is the set of political institutions through which a state organizes itself in order to exercise its power over society. But, even in the cases of the LP and the PT, the State is not an instrument of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, at most, at most, there are governments to contain the most voracious appetites of the bourgeoisie, making increasing concessions to neoliberal policies.
In all the workers’ states that were thus constituted after the social revolutions of the twentieth century, communist parties were the main or only governing parties and leaders of the established regimes. This is maintained in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and China.
The current Chinese state is a creation of the 1949 revolution and all the changes, contradictions, and internal struggles carried out by the Chinese Communist Party since then. Never has any capitalist state in history been ruled by a communist party, not even for 5 years, let alone for 76 years. In China, as much as there have been palace infighting between factions of the CCP, the political regime is the same as that which was instituted in 1949.
Today, the CCP controls 96 state-owned business conglomerates, almost all of which are global monopolies, and party members are stationed in all executive bodies of all companies with more than 100 employees. The CCP controls the four largest banks on the planet (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China). It is this control that prevents the imperialist system and its “multilateral” organizations, created and developed after the Second World War, as well as the all-powerful world finance capital from controlling China. At the same time, this economic power has favored the creation of a new system of multilateral organizations of oppressed peoples, such as the BRICS, the New Development Bank (NDB), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Eurasian multilateral political, economic, international security and mutual defense organization established by China and Russia in 2001.
The Communist Party organizes and expresses the interests of the proletariat, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie in a contradictory way, as the four stars of the Chinese flag express the four factions into which the Chinese people are divided. The organized numerical strength of the working class, of one billion people, as an active labor force, is what presses the orientation of defensive actions to contain the appetites of Chinese billionaires and the private monopolies of imperialism. These are the aspects that make China a workers’ state and not a capitalist state or a capitalist power like the components of the G-7.
It has been said that great power generates great responsibilities (Stan Lee). This same powerful nation, which cannot be treated only as a mere nation-state of the modern capitalist era, but already as a nucleus of an international system that is the productive engine of the planet that supplies the world market of goods, has been relieving itself of responsibility for the defense of the oppressed peoples of the globe.
China does not go beyond a few timid diplomatic demonstrations, in defense of the other peoples and nations oppressed by imperialism and the workers of the rest of the world under the worst attacks of the states and armies of international capital throughout the oppressed world, as in Palestine, for example. Even compared to institutional programs, such as the Export of Health Services from Cuba, which began in the 1960s, the state of China does not offer anything similar to the workers of the world that are brothers of the Chinese. China does not even move to help countries in economic difficulties aggravated by imperialist oppression and sanctions such as Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen or Iran. A Chinese task force in support of Cuba or Venezuela would break all the ties of sanctions and blockades imposed on the two countries and enable extraordinary growth of their economies and societies.
On the international level, in geopolitics, China limits itself to timid manifestations of protests and diplomatic votes in the multilateral bodies of the imperialist system, but it does not carry out any proletarian internationalism against the exploitation and oppression exercised by big international capital against the proletariat and oppressed peoples, in the form of aggressions, sanctions and blockades.
The Chinese workers’ state is now at a crossroads between capitalism and socialism. Imperialism discovered late the danger it helped to create when it boosted China’s productive development by transferring its larger factories to the Asian country. The prospects of this crossroads will be decided by the revolutionary anti-imperialist and communist struggle both on the world arena as well as by the power struggle between the four classes in China.
The policies of the CCP bureaucracy of staying quiet in world geopolitics, moving only slowly in the dispute for markets, hoping to gain time in the face of the decay of the imperialist system and hoping to be spared a more fulminating attack now, weaken China in the confrontation with capitalism internally and extremely, and may not only compromise its evolution towards socialism, but its existence as an independent nation. A Chinese intervention in the Palestinian question, with all the productive capacity and the high development of the country’s geoengineering, would rebuild Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Yemen, devastated by the genocidal Zionist-imperialist escalation, in less than a year. Such an intervention can certainly lead to a military confrontation with Israel and the US, but it can also contain the escalation of recolonization of West Asia carried out by Washington and Tel Aviv, a vital space that cannot be completely replaced by the Arctic route, for the development of the New Silk Road (BRI). a Chinese initiative exponentially superior to the US Marshall Plan.
China’s New Silk Road project reaches 60 more countries, a population 12 times larger, and has received 10 times more investment than the Marshall Plan, the largest U.S. foreign investment project.
Imperialism intends to close the siege of world maritime trade – crucial to the global economy, responsible for 80% of the volume of world trade – against China in the Panama Canals, Suez, and the Straits of Bab El Mandab and Malacca.
Nationalism in this respect is the antithesis of proletarian and socialist internationalism, and therefore weighs on China’s retreat towards capitalism. Technocratic and capitalist deformations are to the post-capitalism of the 21st century, what the bureaucratization of the USSR was to the post-capitalism of the 20th century.
The current trade war between China and imperialism, like all other conflicts between China and imperialism, were all on the initiative of imperialism and not of the Chinese non-internationalist communists.
The CPC seeks a peaceful coexistence with imperialism. It is imperialism that, for its part, does not tolerate Chinese growth. It is then thanks to enemy pressure that this illusory policy of peaceful coexistence becomes impossible and the leadership of the party is pushed into the anti-imperialist struggle.
The accumulation of capital and the specifically capitalist mode of production develop as two factors which, in the combined production of reciprocally giving impulses, modify the technical composition of capital, increasing the costs of constant capital. But, as we have seen and proven in the fight for AI between China and US big techs, China has been reducing the costs of constant capital.
Our program allowed itself to be contaminated by the anti-defencist influence of pseudo-Trotskyism and by impressionism with the imperialist ideological offensive, generalizing and equating the Asian workers’ states with the defeats we suffered in Eastern Europe and the USSR, without making a concrete analysis of the concrete situation not only in China, but also in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, maintaining the status of workers’ state only for North Korea and Cuba. We had a centrist characterization that has been defeated by the evolution of the concrete relationship between China and imperialism in recent years. Although we made several correct characterizations of the decay of the financialized imperialist system and also correctly defended China and Russia against all the onslaughts of imperialism, we believed that China and Russia were at a similar stage and were new social formations, which were “capitalist, non-imperialist states, positively deformed by decades of non-capitalist development” (LCFI Statement: Marxism and the Post-Counterrevolution Cold War: The Diminution of Imperialism and the Rise of Non-Imperialist Capitalism, Deformed by Decades of Non-Capitalist Development, in Russia and China,
Neither the Tianamen Square conflict (1989) in Beijing nor China’s entry into the WTO (1992) changed the political regime or the mode of production of the 1949 revolution. Tianamen was the failure of a liberal-anti-bureaucratic colour counterrevolution, one of the many promoted by the CIA between 1989 and 1991. China’s entry into the WTO was only a formality to try to adapt the country to the rules of international trade, however, despite the privatisation reforms, China was far from adopting shock therapy, whose original laboratory was Pinochet’s Chile, which completely deregulated prices, trade and privatized the economy, as happened in Yeltsin’s Russia.
The proof that Russia and China followed qualitatively different restorationist patterns is also proven by the consequences for Russia of the application of shock therapy, the difference in the two-way price system policy:
“The macroeconomic outcome of China’s market reform policies was the opposite of Russia’s: inflation was low or moderate, but output growth was extremely rapid (see figures below). Rather than destroying the existing system of prices and planning, with the hope that a market economy would somehow emerge ‘from the ruins’, China adopted an experimentalist approach, which used the given institutional realities to construct a new economic system. The state gradually recreated markets from the margins of the old system. […] reforms in China were gradual—not only in terms of pace, but also in terms of movement from the margins of the old industrial system toward its core. Triggering a dynamic of growth and reindustrialization, the gradual entry into the market ended up changing the entire economic policy, at the same time that the State maintained control over the strategic sectors of the economy. The most prominent manifestation of China’s approach is the two-way pricing system, which is the opposite of shock therapy. Instead of releasing all prices in one big bang, the state continued to plan the industrial core of the economy and fix the prices of essential goods, while the prices of surplus products and non-essential goods were successively released. As a result, prices began to be gradually determined by the market. The two-way street system is not simply a pricing policy, but also a process of creating and regulating the market through the participation of the State”. (Weber, 2023, p. 29)
Share of China and Russia in world GDP (1990-2017). “Shock Therapy” has crashed the Russian economy.Consumer Price Index (CPI) in real GDP 1980-2016) in the USSR and Russia (from 1990 onwards). After the “Shock Therapy” domestic prices skyrocketed in Russia.
Evidently, the difference was due to the control of the state over the economy and the control of the state by a centralized Party, vindicating the revolutionary and communist traditions of the social revolution of 1949.
Another element that needs to be overcome in our previous elaboration, and the present document points in this direction, is the need to radically break with the nihilistic influences of the triumphalist ideology of imperialism on the international communist movement, with the implicit influence of the imperialist theses of the end of history (F. Fukuyama). We believed that the struggle for socialism suffered a long-term, almost strategic, defeat after the defeats of the 89-91 process.
Despite our mistakes, we continue to join the progressive sectors of Trotskyism and Stalinist centrism that defend China and the oppressed countries (including Russia and Iran) against imperialism.
We have not been consistent in separating to the necessary extent the critique of politics from the critique of economics. According to the history of political science, a social and political revolution is possible in backward, very backward countries such as Cambodia or even in half a country such as the Korean peninsula. But the development of the social bases for socialism is not possible without a development of the productive forces.
In Capital, in fact, Marx stated that “the capitalist mode of production presents itself […] as a historical necessity for the transformation of the work process into a social process”. For him, the social productive power of labor develops gratuitously whenever workers are under certain conditions, and it is capital that places them under these conditions.” Marx understood that the most favorable circumstances for communism could only have been realized with the expansion of capital. The development of the social bases for socialism is not possible without the development of the productive forces,” which seems to be the case with China’s economy.
That is why the most revolutionary party in the world, the Bolsheviks, was forced to take “a step back” with the NEP. Our criticism of the Chinese process lies in the fact that the Chinese NEP was operated, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jimping, passing through all the others, in a process of class conciliation with the main enemy of humanity, US imperialism.
Another argument against the working-class character of the Chinese state lies in the existence of billionaires, being the country with the second most billionaires in the world economy. The existence of billionaires does not represent a capitalist state if the state is not controlled by these billionaires. The existence of billionaires only attests to the fact that under the workers’ state contradictions of bourgeois norms of distribution coexist and that the bureaucracy itself has a bourgeois character, as Trotsky attested in the USSR, in spite of the fact that, unlike contemporary China, the bourgeoisie has been eliminated as a social class in the USSR:
“The assertion that the bureaucracy of a workers’ state has a bourgeois character must seem not only unintelligible, but completely meaningless to people with a formal mentality. However, chemically pure types of state have never existed and do not exist in general. The semi-feudal Prussian monarchy carried out the most important tasks of the bourgeoisie, but it carried them out in its own way, i.e. in a feudal, not a Jacobin, style. In Japan we still observe an analogous correlation between the bourgeois character of the state and the semi-feudal character of the ruling caste. But all this does not prevent us from clearly differentiating between a feudal and a bourgeois society. It is true that it may be objected that collaboration between feudal and bourgeois forces is immeasurably easier to achieve than collaboration between bourgeois and proletarian forces, since the former case presents a case of two forms of class exploitation. This is completely correct. But a workers’ state does not create a new society in a day. Marx wrote that in the first period of a workers’ state, the bourgeois norms of distribution are still preserved. (On this, see The Revolution Betrayed, section Socialism and the State, p. 53.) It is necessary to ponder well and reflect on this until the end. The workers’ state itself, as a state, is necessary precisely because the bourgeois norms of distribution still remain in force.
“This means that even the most revolutionary bureaucracy is to a certain degree a bourgeois organ in the workers’ state. It is clear that the degree of this bureaucratization and the general trend of development are of decisive importance. If the workers’ state loses its bureaucratization and gradually disintegrates, it means that its development moves in the direction of socialism. On the contrary, if the bureaucracy becomes more and more powerful, authoritarian, privileged and conservative, this means that, in the workers’ state, bourgeois tendencies grow at the expense of socialist ones; in other words, that internal contradiction which, to a certain degree, has lodged itself in the workers’ state since the first days of its rise, does not diminish, as the “norm” demands, but increases. However, as long as this contradiction has not passed from the sphere of distribution to the sphere of production and has not destroyed nationalized property and the planned economy, the state remains a workers’ state. (Trotsky, Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?, 1937).
In a transitional state between capitalism and socialism, there continues to be class struggle and bourgeois norms of distribution, which agitate the struggles of the working class. From the empirical data that we present throughout this document, it can be seen that the ownership of the means of production has become increasingly nationalized in recent years, especially after the pandemic, and that at no time in the last four decades has the economy ceased to be planned.
If, as Marxists, we understand that the state is ultimately the special detachment of armed men, we must ask ourselves whether the Chinese armed forces today intervene in favor of or against the interests of the billionaires, in the consolidation of their power over the state conglomerates in China. In Russia, between 1985 and 1991, a hegemonic fraction of the bureaucracy modified the country’s political, social and economic regime and operated capitalist restoration. This did not occur in China.
The current economic war between the US and the Chinese workers’ state emerges as a prelude to a third world war, between the imperialist system and the bloc of oppressed nations led by China, Russia and Iran. But other issues of the internal class struggle are even more dangerous because they could jeopardize the future of the core of power in the Chinese economy: structural problems with the proletariat.
The comparative advantages achieved by China in the development of the productive forces have come at the expense of the relations of production. At first, the formation of the Chinese urban proletariat in the last decade of the twentieth century resembled the process of original accumulation of British capital in the sixteenth century, when the capitalist era began (Marx, 2017, p. 787). The pressures of exhausting working hours, on the one hand, and petty-bourgeois pressures, on the other, can lead China to a social crisis that aborts the course of the transition to socialism.
The Chinese working day is one of the most strenuous. If, in various parts of the world, there are struggles for the reduction of the 6×1 workday, that is, for the end of work on six of the 7 days a week, in China, contrary to the labor legislation itself, the workday is 6 or 7 days a week, from 9 am to 9 pm, resulting in a 72-hour workweek.
The “996” culture has been associated with physical and mental health problems, stress, burnout, and difficulties in reconciling work and personal life. The pressure to work excessively can also lead to a lack of creativity, innovation, and job satisfaction. This practice, while not officially mandatory in all companies, is common in sectors such as technology and Chinese startups.
Many young people of the new generations carry out an individual movement of resistance to these working days, opposing work or claiming free time. The term “involution” (or neijuan in Chinese, literally translated as “screw”) has come to be widely used to express a sense of exhaustion derived from work and to criticize the process in which population growth does not result in productivity improvements or innovation. Billionaire Jack Ma (owner of the Alibaba conglomerate, a kind of Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, Chinese), is one of the defenders of the Culture of 996, which he calls a “blessing”.
Some movements in favor of free time and for the reduction of working hours and rhythms have been exploited by the imperialist press.
“The anthropological term “involution” (or neijuan in Chinese, literally translated as “screw”) refers to a social concept according to which population growth does not result in productivity improvements or innovation. Today, the term is widely used to express a sense of exhaustion. The trend began on the campuses of the country’s elite universities with the publication of images of students hard at work on the internet. These images went viral last year. In one of the photos, a student at Tsinghua University used his laptop while riding his bike. The student was christened the “‘involuted’ king of Tsinghua”. The idea of devolution began to permeate the entire young generation in China, with a special echo among millennials and the so-called generation Z. On Weibo, the country’s largest social network, keywords related to devolution were viewed more than 1 billion times. The term was also included in a popular ranking of last year’s top 10 buzzwords.
The idea behind tang ping — not working too hard, being satisfied with achievable goals, and allowing yourself time to relax — has been praised by many and inspired countless memes. This became a kind of spiritual movement.” (Fan Wang and Yitsing Wang, BBC, 29 June 2021 ‘Neijuan’: the new generation rebelling against excessive work for success in China, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-57609077).
Despite the development of the productive forces, the policies of wage increases, triggered by many workers’ strikes – which favors the domestic consumer market, reducing China’s dependence on the international market – despite the reduction of misery to 700 million people, Culture 996 is a component of the setback in the relations of production, of exploitation of absolute surplus value and discourages the young proletarian generations in the generational reproduction of the power of work.
The struggle of the working class for free time, simultaneous with the increase in productivity, development of the productive forces and technology, must be one of the priorities for the workers and for the future of China. An aggressive campaign for the reduction of the working day with the maintenance of the policy of wage appreciation would also reduce the focus of imperialist propaganda for “democracy” and “freedom”, against the alleged Chinese slavery, propaganda that seeks to rely on real contradictions in society in favor of pro-imperialist color revolutions.
10. For socialist internationalism!
In short, we come to characterize China as a deformed workers’ state, which can become an advanced nucleus of the international system in transition to socialism. It must lead a coalition of the oppressed with nuclear weapons to defend peoples who are under an open policy of extermination, such as the Palestinians. But this will only be possible if its leading Communist Party transforms its nationalism, progressive in relation to imperialism, into socialist internationalism.
This requires a major political change, and it unlikely to just happen spontaneously out of the existing political framework of the CCP. Genuine, internationalist communist currents must crystallise among China’s communists, based on a programme that consciously seeks to put the resources of the very advanced, but still deformed, Chinese workers state consccioiusly and consistently at the disposal of the world revolution and the struggle agaisnt imperialism. This must particularly base itself on the strategic necessity for the Anti-Imperialist United Front, as formulated by the Communist International in the period when it was still animated by the Bolshevik programme of international revolution. We need a new World Party of Socialist Revolution, and Chinese communists must play a crucial role in creating that. Whether under the CCP banner or a new one is an open question. The class conscious working class needs to be fully in power within the Chinese workers state, to put its mighty resources fully at the disposal of the world revolution – this would be a revolutionary change from the politics of peaceful coexistence and avoiding conflicts with capitalism.
Be that as it may, we continue to unconditionally defend China against any and all military, diplomatic, political and tariff attacks by imperialism.
We believe that imperialism’s economic or nuclear war against China threatens to abort the current course of the country’s transition, but, paraphrasing Trotsky, we consider infinitely even more dangerous 1) the unovercome consequences of the process of implementing market measures, such as Culture 996, which sickens and depresses the Chinese proletariat; 2) the non-expropriation and nationalization without compensation of all the bourgeois monopolies; 3) the renunciation of the government of China to defend economically, geopolitically and militarily the other oppressed peoples.
We advocate the overcoming of bureaucratic obstacles through the defencist and revolutionary struggle towards a genuine proletarian democracy of people’s communes, based on socialist internationalism between the powerful Chinese working class and its working and oppressed brothers all over the world.
Notes:
“The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, appears as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a double aspect: use value and exchange value.” Marx first formulated this sentence in his “Critique of Political Economy” (1859) and later developed it in Capital (1867), inspired by a passage from Aristotle’s Republic. For Marx, this discovery was so important that it is the opening sentence of two of his most important works on the critique of bourgeois political economy. The passage from Aristotle that inspired Marx is as follows:“Aristotle, De Republica, LI, C. “Of everything we possess there are two uses:… one is one’s own, and the other is improper or secondary use. For example, a shoe is used for wear and is used for changing; Both are uses of the shoe. The one who gives a shoe in exchange for money or food to whoever wants it, does indeed use the shoe as a shoe, but this is not his proper or primary purpose, for a shoe is not meant to be an object of exchange. The same can be said of all possessions…” (Aristotle, 380 B.C., apud in Karl Marx: Critique of Political Economy. 1859, Part I – THE COMMODITY) -. In Capital, published 18 years after the “Critique” of 1859, Marx makes small changes to the original text: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” (Karl Marx. Capital Volume One; Part I: Commodities and Money; Chapter One: The Commodity). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm
References
LENIN, V.I. On the Tax in Kind, 1922, Global Editora. 1987.
MARX, Karl. Capital, critique of political economy, Book I, the process of production of capital, Editora Boitempo, 2017.
MARX, Karl. Grundrisse, Editora Boitempo, 2011.
MARX, Karl. The German Ideology, Editora Boitempo, 2007.
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC), a vast array of American companies dominated by Lockhead Martin, RTX (Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Boeing, but with dozens of other research and development companies who work with governments, to shape weapons procurement and foreign policies to ensure that NATO, AUKUS, AESEAN can continue to project US power across the world.
The US spends about $1 trillion a year on ‘defence’-related purposes, including personnel and weapons, about 50% of the world’s total defence spending, in order to make war on dozens of countries that resist US hegemony, or are simply in the way of their “grand chess game”. They bomb from a safe distance, killing more civilians than enemy soldiers, and destroy infrastructure from dams to hospitals, bridges to schools, all in the name of “world peace”.
Before they bomb however, they sanction. The US uses its petro-dollar hegemony to prevent countries from freely trading their own resources on the world market, stop them from buying the resources they need, often restricting medical equipment, vaccines, food and energy, fertilizers and building equipment, in order to punish the people for the refusal of their governments to enter into unfair and unequal contracts with US and Western companies. These actions, like the sieges of old, strangle economies, cause untold misery and suffering and increase poverty and ill-health. Many more die of starvation, dehydration and easily treatable disease than the bombs, mines and bullets.
Alongside that, the CIA, in collaboration with other secret services, especially MI6 and Mossad, sponsor terrorist groups, use the SBU and other agencies to carry out assassinations of officials, scientists and popular generals, diplomats and religious leaders to disrupt any resistance to regime change. They also stage “false flag” events, crimes against humanity that are blamed on other countries, or their own government, in order to manipulate public opinion at home or abroad, from ‘Russiagate’, to use of chemical weapons attacks, while quietly cyber-hacking nuclear power stations and using depleted uranium weapons themselves, as NATO does, while claiming they don’t cause ecocide and birth defects, as has been found from Serbia to Iraq.
Hand in hand with the NED and NGOs, Foreign Aid and certain “charities in name only” comes the World Bank and International Money Fund, who loan countries money at exorbitant rate to rebuild their countries, or persuade corrupt and ‘regime changed’ political leaders to build vanity projects (because those loans allow money to be diverted into personal pockets), choose the most expensive contracts and leave the people saddled with massive debts that continue long after the projects have been finished (if they are not abandoned because they are unfit for purpose).
Wall Street and the City of London control both the banking and financial industries, from setting the price of metals to the cost of insurance of shipping, from mortgages and bank rates to credit ratings, dictating who can borrow money and how much, to what prices they will buy and sell, controlling where money is invested or withdrawn. They manipulate the cost of those loans to impose austerity measures that leave the people destitute, but increase profits for those financial institutions.
The sanctions now cover more than 60 countries, from Cuba to Syria, the wars are endless, with the US/NATO bombing at least one country and its civilians every year since WW2 despite claiming to “keep the world safe”, and overall poverty increases as wealth is funnelled upwards to an increasingly small number of people; now 1% of the world population control 50% of the world’s total wealth.
Just as all this inequality and social injustice has happened through deliberate organisation, none of this has happened without resistance. When the UN recognised the inception of Israel and White South Africa in 1948 they didn’t necessarily recognise that “righting some wrong” by one ideology would result in the atrocious imposition of another, i.e. apartheid and the construction of ethno-fascist states would ensue. Resistance to occupation and injustice is a human right, but increasingly it has been weaponised against us by labelling it “terrorism” while real terrorists are used for ‘regime change’ and to suppress genuine resistance. South Africa was freed of political apartheid in 1994, but Israel has continued its policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide protected by the US and Western governments, despite universal condemnation of its crimes against humanity in the rest of the world. However, Gaza is not the only place where genocide is used by the West to further its political agenda. It has been used by Imperialist and Colonial powers for centuries, then whitewashed from our history.
The West is an Empire of Lies, where we are lied to about what is really happening to us, and to the rest of the world, and why. Its media is controlled centrally by monopoly companies to promote propaganda and dumb-down the population, distracting them with trivia and sports/betting. The entertainment industry promotes violence and dehumanisation of minorities and decadence. While Western countries have been de-industrialised as multinational corporations out-sourced industry to other parts of the world, so the workers in the west are relegated to low-paying service and caring jobs and reliance on imports while being manipulated into hating those who continue to be self-sufficient or produce the necessities that so many can no longer afford.
Ordinary people are encouraged to identify with the ruling class and believe the fantasy that their obscene wealth is all because of superiority or “manifest destiny” – that they are deserving of their success, rewarded for their greater “work ethic”. Their media encourages us to ignore the grim realities of inequality and injustice inflicted on the majority. Instead, we are supposed to believe that when austerity measures are imposed to maintain exorbitant profits it is because we are the “victims” of other countries’ over-production or trade restrictions, not the sanctions and tariffs of our own governments pursuing profits for the few at the expense of the many.
The media – their media, the bosses’ media, is censored and misinforms us about the activities, agenda and true goals of military and financial institutions, imperialist governments, UK, EU, NATO and the US. This is why the Empire of the West has earned the disgust of the rest of the world for the crimes these governments commit in our name.
When we protest about the genocide in Gaza we must also protest about the genocide in Yemen, the genocide in Syria, and the genocide in Donbas, and who is funding it, facilitating it, and doing it – using the proxies of the West, Israel and Ukraine.
It is not enough to call for a ceasefire, or a just peace. That is just kicking the can down the road. We must dismantle imperialist capitalism itself, including its military industrial complex which is only good for endless war, genocide and ecocide, and the financial institutions that serve the ruling class against the workers. We need the working class to rule society.
The notes for this presentation (13th April) are now available to read, and the presentation and discussion are also available to listen to as a podcast.
We appeal to the socialist, anti-imperialist and working class public to endorse this statement. Email us at co*****************@***il.com if you wish to sign this (if the email appears blurred – click on it and it should clear. This is spam protection in many devices).
We, the undersigned, condemn the denunciation of David Miller as “Anti-Semitic’ by Tony Greenstein in his recent diatribe, titled “David Miller has gone from Asset to Liability for the Palestine Solidarity Movement” (https://tonygreenstein.com/david-miller-has-gone-from-asset-to-liability-for-the-palestine-solidarity-movement/) This claims that David Miller is “Targeting Jews and Jewish anti-Zionists” and this is supposedly explained by “David Miller’s Failure to Understand Why Imperialism Supports Zionism and Genocide in Gaza” and is therefore “Anti-Semitic”.
No evidence of anti-Semitism by David Miller, is presented in this denunciation (defined as to hostility to Jews as Jews). The core of the denunciation is of David Miller for supposedly not accepting a particular thesis of Tony’s on the origin of Zionism as a movement. This claims that historical figures such as Lords Shaftesbury and Salisbury were responsible for its creation in the 1840s, and that they were somehow responsible for the existence of the Zionist movement, not prominent Jewish figures like Herzl and Weizmann several decades later, who played the major role in creating a viable movement for a Jewish colonisation of Palestine near the turn of the century.
There is much room for historical debate about these things. Many would consider the claim that these earlier figures were somehow responsible for the creation of the Zionism movement, as unproven if not unlikely. It is not even clear what David Miller’s views on this are, or whether he has considered this issue, but he is still being condemned as ‘anti-Semitic’ supposedly because of this. It certainly does not follow in any case that non-acceptance of such a thesis is ‘anti-Semitic’.
Given the volume and frequency of false and pernicious allegations of anti-Semitism originating from individuals and groups claiming to be on the left, both Jewish and non-Jewish, discussion of the magnitude of opposition to Zionism among Jews and non-Jews is a matter on which free debate is a matter of great importance, for those on the receiving end of Israeli crimes, centrally Palestinians. Attempts to stifle free discussion on this by starting another witchhunt should be condemned.
Nothing in this statement involves endorsing in detail anything David Miller has said or done regarding how to address these issues, who to debate or discuss with, etc. We do however note that David Miller has won a considerable victory for all anti-Zionists with his victory over Bristol University, which unlawfully sacked him for his anti-Zionist views. For this he deserves solidarity and support, not an attempt to start a new witchhunt.
Name
Location
Status/Organisation
Lowkey
London
Rapper
George Galloway
Former MP 1987-2024
Chris Williamson
Derby
Former Labour MP
Vanessa Beeley
Beirut
Journalist
Kit Klarenburg
Serbia
Grayzone UK
Sean Murray
Belfast
Filmmaker
Laith Marouf
Beirut
Free Palestine TV
Piers Robinson
Berlin
Organisation for Propaganda Studies.
Ammar Kazmi
London
Activist
Phil Bevin
Birmingham
Independent Writer and Researcher
Ian Donovan
London
Marxist activist
Consistent Democrats
Great Britain
Marxist political organisation
Mark Andresen
Torquay
Marxist activist
Paul Collins
Oxfordshire
Marxist activist
Mark Rozanov
Ex-USSR
Worker
Peter Gregson
Edinburgh
Palestine activist
Nasir Khan
Oslo
Marxist, antifascist and anti-imperialist activist
Marit Parker
South Wales
Jon De Rennes
Thailand
Faraz Khan
Hillingdon
activist, former Labour member
Gareth Murphy
London
Marxist activist
Dan Kovalik
United States
Lawyer and activist
Matthew Burrows
Liverpool
Daniel Waterman
Netherlands
Former Labour activist
Shameen Suleman
Denbigh
Philip Adams
Valencia, Spain
Lina Abu Baker
Journalist
Kay Lawrence
Torfaen
Palestine activist
Trish O’ Hara
Newham
Left activist
Barbara Sturrock
Eleanor McNamara
Liverpool
Aine Kenny
Ireland
Journalist
Christopher Crookes
India
William Battersby
John Howley
Diana Isserlis
Bristol
Marxist activist
Krysten Bignand
France
Jason O’Connell
Anwar Sabar
Southall, Middlesex
M. Moyna
Diab Issa El-Ali
Richard Comaish
Dr Kat Pijetlovic
Lisbon, Portugal
Assistant Professor of Law
Shakil Hussain
West Midlands
Asif Kamal
Maha Hasan
Marie Lynam
London
Posadists Today
International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS)
Components in England, Scotland and Ireland
Campaigning body against imperialism’s anti-Russian Proxy War.
Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 30th March. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.
15 Emergency workers murdered and thrown into mass grave by Israel, 23rd March. Murders greenlighted by Trump
The ceasefire agreed by Israel and touted by Trump in January as his work was openly blown away on 17th March by Israel with Trump’s full support. The mass terror bombings resumed with the bloodiest day of the genocide so far, with over 400 butchered in one night, many burned alive in their tents. Since then, this has carried on. This after a fortnight of Gaza being deprived of food, water and fuel. Israel making no bones about openly embarking on mass starvation, freezing and dehydration of Palestinians. The lesson for Russia over Ukraine is clear – Trump’s word is worthless.
This ceasefire never got beyond the first phase of exchanges of batches of 3-6 Israeli hostages for hundreds of Palestinians from Israel’s torture and rape camps. The total blockade of all aid, food and water with the open support of Trump made a sick joke or any second phase. Trump gave Israel the green light for this latest genocide and has hinted that he intends to do the same with the West Bank. Israeli repression has mushroomed in the West Bank. The stooge Palestinian Authority has taken it in turns with the Israelis to attack particularly Jenin. Hospitals and infrastructure are now under similar attacks in the West Bank as in Gaza.
The Palestinians are again receiving the solidarity of Yemen. Amanullah (“Houthi”) leaders have had the courage to stand up for the Palestinians with military action against Israel, against its shipping, and that of its quartermasters in the US and elsewhere. This is not some elite “terrorist” movement, as the imperialists would have it. It has the support of millions of Yemenis who regularly turn out on the streets in their millions to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinian people faced with genocide. Now that Trump, an open genocidaire on the Palestinian question, is in the White House, the whole game of seeking to pressure the US to pressure Israel, which persisted when “Genocide Joe” Biden was in White House, has come to an end.
Trump says that that US would ‘buy’ and forcibly deport the Palestinian population that lives there somewhere else! So that they can have a ‘Riviera’ for the wealthy. This plan was mooted by Trump’s Jewish-Zionist son-in-law, Kushner, last year. Trump’s real aim in saying this is to steal, either for the US, or Israel – or both – the oil and gas reserves that have been found off the Gaza coast in the past decade or so. They are openly saying that “Genocide is good”, not even bothering to deny it. Trump has made clear that he considers Palestinians subhuman – he even uses the word “Palestinian” as a racial epithet akin to “n****r” or “n****r-lover”. His rise to power was funded by Netanyahu’s party, Likud, to the tune of $100 million through Miriam Adelson, of one of the most influential Israeli-US oligarchical dynasties. With Trump in office, both Israel and the US will have to be defeated militarily in some way, by the masses and/or a superior military force to have a hope of stopping the genocide.
It is hardly surprising that Trump’s attitude to the Yemeni masses is genocidal also. This was shown by the US bombing of the Oncology and Cancer treatment centre in Sanaa, Yemen, on 27th March. This is exactly what the IDF have been doing in Gaza and now the West Bank. They can’t even lie that this facility is somehow occupied by ‘terrorists’. They just bombed it because they want to stop Yemenis accessing medicine. However, their bombings of Yemen have had zero effect on the military capacity of the Amanullah movement to hit Israel, or to blockade shipping in the Red Sea. Despite the American air strikes, Yemen has a vast array of hidden missile sites buried deep underground that the US has not the means, even with their supposed ‘bunker buster’ bombs, to find and destroy. It also has hypersonic missile technology, which it gained from Iran, and which also has its origins in Russia. Serious military analysts note that the US simply does not remotely have the capacity to defeat Amanullah with aerial bombardment. Given the size of the country, the roughness of the terrain, and the armed capacity of Amanullah, it would take hundreds of thousands of US troops, maybe a million even, to subdue Yemen. They do not remotely have such troops at their disposal. The US has less than half-a-million troops available for such an endeavor now. As well as a population that is wary of such wars, particularly since Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon (1983) and Vietnam.
As well as the Amanullah movement confronting Zionism, In the background is Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraqi radicals such as Kataib Hezbollah, and Iran itself. All of these are targets of Zionism, and its enforcers. The fact that Iran is four times the size of Iraq, with a much larger population to subdue, and is far more heavily armed than Iraq was, with similar technique to Yemen but in far greater quantity, puts US/Israeli threats against Iran in perspective. All these forces, of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ are steadfast in their defiance of Zionism and imperialism. Though they suffered a serious blow, at least in the short-term, with the overthrow of Assad in Syria at the end of 2024. Syria is now under the rule of Western-backed Al Qaeda/ISIS genocidaires, now known as HTS. The collapse of the Assad regime in December, means the route of communication between Iran and its allies in Lebanon has now been replaced by a genocidal regime of Sunni-sectarian killers. HTS has launched a massive slaughter of tens of thousands from Syria’s Alawite Shi’a and Christian minorities, also killing Sunnis who refuse to cooperate with the slaughter. Up to 30,000, according to some sources.
The reactionary social forces in West Asia/Middle East are shaken but are digging in very hard. It will take deep-going political and social struggles, mobilizing the masses against these forces independently, to really transform this situation. What is needed is both the emergence of a new communist leadership among the Arab and Muslim masses, and the creation of an anti-imperialist united front of all those in conflict with the Zionists, the US and their agents.
For Trump Israel expelling the Gaza population, and the US doing so, are pretty much the same thing. It is piracy, and a motive for genocide. Trump is open about his intentions to steal natural resources of territories he covets. During his first term he openly boasted that US troops in Syria, sent in by Obama in 2014 supposedly to fight ISIS – were there to steal Syria’s oil for the United States. His policies in Ukraine have a similar motive. Like his demand that Ukraine sign over ownership of $500 billion worth of rare earth metals as ‘reparation’ is just naked theft. Though much of this resource is apparently in the Donbass, which is part of Russia now.
The explosion of the Ukraine issue, particularly with Zelensky’s confrontation with Trump and his Vice-President Vance on 28th February in the Oval Office, has come close to tearing NATO apart. NATO has teetered on the brink of collapse over the past few weeks, as Trump’s changed priorities, have sent the West European bourgeoisie, particularly the British and the French, into paroxysms of rage and warmongering. Trump and Zelensky came up with a variant of the previous Minsk agreement deceptions. This was hardly hidden – the truce being commenced; the US would restore military and economic aid to Ukraine that Trump had suspended in the aftermath of the confrontation with Zelensky in the Oval Office. Russia has virtually driven Ukraine out from its diversionary incursion into Kursk, in undisputed Russian territory, and has been rapidly advancing in the Donbass.
Putin made a perfunctory show of welcoming the idea of a ceasefire but made it clear that Russia would expect such a pause to mean a route to a permanent solution, not a revamped Minsk. Such a solution would mean the recognition of Crimea as Russian, and likewise recognition of the four provinces that have already voted in referenda to join Russia – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. And likely similar proper referenda of the populations of Kharkov and Odessa. The eviction from power of the Nazified elements, the acceptance of Ukrainian neutrality and non-NATO status, and a dramatic curtailment of the Ukrainian armed forces, appears to be the Russian objective in negotiations. These have a clear democratic content and should be at least critically supported by genuine socialists. Because of that, these demands are anathema to the West European ruling classes.
The position of the Trump administration over Ukraine is only half-a-break from Biden’s. Instead of simply arming Ukraine, they now threaten to continue Biden’s policy if Putin does not agree to their proposals. But this is not convincing, as they do not have the resources to continue that indefinitely. Trump regards China, not Russia, as the US’s strategic adversary, as it is on course to surpass the US in economic power in the immediate future. Much of its economic power derives from capitalism overlaid by economic planning, whose origin was in the Chinese revolution – i.e. beyond capitalism. Unlike in Russia, planning in China has continuity and has never been even temporarily broken – China’s powerful billionaire bourgeois class notwithstanding. That is a crucial difference between China and Russia. So, while we see a tactical softening of US treatment of Russia from the Trump administration, this is not true of China. Instead, we see open hatred of “Communist China”. The Cold War rhetoric the Trump administration also uses against its domestic opponents, including the imperialist democrats who it incredibly refers to as “far left Marxists”.
Much of Trump’s seeming sympathy for Russia is driven by the aim of setting Russia against China. Though this is unlikely, as there is also much imperialist hostility to Russia that, though Trump may have set it to one side for tactical reasons, still runs deep among the capitalists. The Russian state is bound up with a stunted kind of capitalism that is very deformed by many decades of post-capitalist development, which Russia’s weak capitalists cannot conjure away. They are aware of the enmity of the West and Trump’s motives. His threats of tariffs against BRICS have a similar basis. The differences in NATO are severe. We have never witnessed such a falling out of Europe with the United States. The ruling classes of West Europe are accustomed to being Washington’s clients, since World War II. They are not used to being treated with contempt. Washington has woken up to the fact that it is no longer hegemonic. That does not mean that it has lost all its power. But it has lost in Ukraine. Trump’s policy is a temporary retreat to reconsolidate US rule in the Western hemisphere in the short term, with the aim of a later reconquest of hegemony. Hysteria about this change engulfs the ruling classes in Britain, outside the EU, and France and Germany, and smaller powers like Holland, within the EU.
It is resulting in anti-democratic actions that overlap with the Cold War with Russia, but which also encompass bourgeois forces located in other former workers states. Such as Eastern Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania, which are either annexed components of the imperialist state of Germany, ex-workers states and members of the EU, or clients outside, such as Serbia. Attempts to organize Maidan-style ‘colour revolutions’ appear to be in preparation in Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia. An attempt was made last May, to murder Robert Fico, the leftist Prime Minister of Slovakia, who is critical of the Ukraine war. The government of Serbia, politically alike to that of Slovakia in some ways, is also threatened with an EU-incited ‘colour revolution’ (a coup with ‘popular’ trimmings).
We don’t have any regard for the pro-Zionist, anti-migrant government of Victor Orban in Hungary, and even less for the very right-wing popular presidential candidate in Romania, Călin Georgescu, who approves of the pro-Nazi wartime ruler of Romania, General Antonescu. We certainly don’t have any sympathy for the Alternative für Deutschland in (mainly) Eastern Germany, either – it is very right wing, implicitly Nazi, and yet hostile to the Ukraine proxy war. The AfD however also has a left-wing complement/ counterpart in the ASW of Sahra Wagenknecht, who also opposes the proxy war from more of a leftist standpoint and appears to have been deprived of a presence in the Bundestag by electoral machinations from the ruling class parties.
However, all these are hostile to the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Irrespective of whether these political forces are to the right or left in formal terms, what is happening is that a degree of popular resistance to the NATO proxy war is being expressed through them.All express popular unease in former workers states at being drawn into an imperialist war, which could become a European or world-wide nuclear conflict, against Russia. So, we condemn all these attempted coups, assassinations and other atrocities aimed at dragooning these populations into war with Russia. While these forces represent spontaneous left and right populism, and some have grotesque and unsavoury politics, they are at their very worst not to be equated with the Ukrainian Nazis who under NATO command, are simply continuing what their forebears did on the Eastern front, then under the command of imperialism itself.
Starmer and Macron want to send troops to Ukraine as so-called ‘peacekeepers’. Macron is bigging-up France’s status as a power with a nuclear arsenal, the “Force de Frappe” (“strike force”) independent of United States control, unlike with Britain. Saying it could put Western and Central Europe under its nuclear umbrella against Russia. Germany, personified by Chancellor-in-Waiting Friedrich Merz, though, ruled out any German participation without Russian consent. Trump has refused to back any West European or NATO armed intervention in Ukraine, ruling out US assistance under NATO’s Article 5 mutual assistance clause. Without that, NATO ceases to be an effective alliance at all.
The hysteria in the ruling class over this has led to various military officers and politicians to raise conscripting the population against Russia. It is not Russia that is threatening to send its troops to menace Britain, France or Germany. It is Britain and France who want to menace Russia at its South-Western border. Now they are planning to send a small but symbolic Anglo-French ‘Reassurance Force’ to Ukraine. Which amounts to a declaration of war against Russia, if Russia chooses to take it that way. All this could mean an aggressive European war in Eastern Europe waged by Britain and France, overseen by the European Union under the President of the European Commission, the right-wing German politician Ursula von der Leyen.
A wave of pathetic military jingoism is coming from the decrepit British ruling class, which under Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer, has been the most virulently militaristic over Ukraine. This leads straight to a threat of conscription here for Ukraine. The top brass of the British army let it be known, through the Daily Telegraph, that the consider this idea absurd. But it continues anyway. The renewed austerity is being driven by the Starmer regime’s commitment to the crusade against Russia over Ukraine. Starmer recently signed a ‘partnership’ to aid Ukraine for 100 years! To finance this, and billions of pounds worth of other promises to Ukraine in terms of military and other expenditure, he has cut ‘foreign aid’ to numerous places. Reeves’ attack on the disabled through cuts in the Personal Independence Payment is also driven by its military aid to Ukraine against its Russian-speaking population, as well to Israel for its genocide. It is more brutal than George Osbourne’s Tory attacks a decade ago. It looks like it has begun to catalyse a revolt at the base of the Labour Party, putting Starmer in political trouble.
Politics is now extremely fluid, and the ruling classes are targeting repression against this potential for political resistance to cohere. The blatant attacks on Palestine protesters in the US is one face of that – the Mahmoud Khailil case, a Green Card holder being detained and threatened with deportation for protesting against genocide, is outrageous and obscene. But it is also sign of weakness and fear from the Zionists, as are the acts of repression in Britain. There is huge political anger over the Zionist genocide, which has been true for the entire period of Israel’s slaughter, beginning in October 2023. Up to now, there has been a division of consciousness between a widespread understanding of the barbarity of Zionism, and a lack of understanding and/or a nervousness of many politicised people concerning the proxy war in Ukraine.
But a division of the ruling class, as the Trump-induced crisis in NATO, appears to have broken the log-jam. This is reflected among some activists on the left. A whole layer of bureaucratic forces who were pro-Zelensky liberals in socialist garb, centering around the former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, have become much more virulent. Some were already known to be hysterical Russophobes and backers of NATO’’s warmongering, but others preferred to stay in the closet. They have suddenly become much more jingoistic, as NATO came under threat of split and disintegration. But they have also met much stronger and numerous opposition. Many were previously reticent in speaking out in defence of Russia, given the hysteria. But not so much now! Defence of Russia in this war is a key principled position of communists. Coupled with militant support for the Palestinian struggle against genocide, against oppression, and for national liberation and full equality, these are key elements of the communist programme today.
We need a broader layer of the left to campaign for the working class to combat these wars and genocides, including though political strikes and similar mass actions. We have been defenders of Russia since the early days of Maidan. We have noticed a gradual drift leftwards among the more serious left on this question, and there are grounds for optimism that this is deepening. We seek the regroupment of subjectively revolutionary aspiring communists and revolutionary socialists in a new international communist movement, a new Communist International, and there are reasons to be more optimistic about this. We need to create an expanded communist movement, and a force that can intervene in electoral terms, and give leadership in anti-war actions, strikes and other class struggles, to give revolutionary leadership in the struggles to come.
Personally, though I disagree with David Miller on speaking about his own views on Zionism and Islamophobia to a a meeting hosted by far right elements (who I would not touch with a 10-foot pole), it’s rather hypocritical for Tony Greenstein to denounce David Miller for that.
Recall that when Socialist Fight was purged from Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) in 2018, Tony did that as a joint action with the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker (CPGB/WW), who have a theoretised position in favour of debating with fascists, and who also periodically publish letters from fascists in their letters page. The CPGB/WW also have an explicit policy that they have every right to debate with fascists, and they denounce as undemocratic anyone on the left who condemns them for that.
Yet Tony not only applauded my being purged from the Communist Platform of Left Unity in 2014 by the CPGB/WW for arguing views on Zionism of which he disapproved, he repeated this in Jan 2018 by purging Gerry Downing and me, then the main leaders of Socialist Fight, from LAW for defending those correct, undiluted Marxist positions.
All this time the CPGB/WW were in favour of debates with fascists. Neither I nor Gerry Downing ever supported this anti-Marxist view. But Tony still supported us being purged because suppressing Marxist criticism of Jewish identity politics was more important to him than criticising those on the left who advocate, or practice, debating with fascists.
Which had the consequence on more than one occasion when sharp criticism was expressed of their softness on Zionism, they would refuse to print my letters, but print letters by supporters of ‘Tommy Robinson’ (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. For instance, they refused to print a letter by me about their refusal to condemn the violent assault on George Galloway by a Zionist-fascist, Neil Masterson, in August 2014. While in this period they were, as they periodically do still, printing material from Yaxley’s defenders. Tony knew of their position on these things, but it never stopped his blocs with them against SF and me.
Because they supported his heresy hunts against those whose application of Marxist principles to Zionism as an international phenomenon clashed with his identity politics, part of which is about protecting the external Jewish bourgeoisie from the accusation that it plays a primary and independent role in Israel’s imperialist oppression/dispossession of the Palestinians.
That’s what Tony is doing with this polemic. It is clear that citizenship of a bourgeois state gives capitalists membership of the ruling class of that state, particularly when that citizenship is extended on an ethno-centric, i.e. racist, basis as Israel does.
And when that birthright citizenship is extended on an extra-territorial basis, it creates a layer of bourgeois particularly in the imperialist countries who have a direct material interest in the Israeli bourgeois state, because it is their state both in a class and ethnocentric sense. Thus by a simple, undiluted application of the Marxist theory of the state, this layer becomes an extension of the ruling class of Israel into the core ruling classes of the US and West Europe. Therefore we have an unusual caste or faction within the ruling classes of several imperialist powers, by virtue of the also unusual top-heavy social structure of the Jewish population, which is overrepresented often by dozens of times over in the bourgeoisie of these states compared with the percentage of the overall representation of Jews in the population of these countries. That is why and how the ruling classes overlap.
Tony pretends that this is some sort of esoteric theory. It’s not. It’s simply the application of the Marxist understanding of the state to the phenomenon of Zionism, whose extra-territorial, ethnic-based hereditary citizenship law is designed to create a phenomenon like the Israel lobby. This has acquired many ‘hypenated-Zionist’ fellow travellers among both Christian and even irreligious bourgeois in the US and elsewhere who venerate this layer because of the role of some of its most famous figures in popularising and promoting neoliberalism in the crisis of the 1970s. These bourgeois credit these largely Jewish ideologues with saving capitalism from a major crisis, possibly terminal. Thus a kind of cult has grown up among the wider bourgeoisie around this Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste.
Israel by size ought to be a minor imperialist power like Denmark. But because of this wider Jewish-Zionist caste, and the cult worship of it, it punches far above its weight.
There is nothing anti-Jewish at all about this understanding. It simply, logically results from the application of the Marxist theory of the state to facts that are widely available. But in Tony’s form of identity politics it is forbidden to ascribe any independent predatory role to any Jewish bourgeois layer. They must be deemed as lackeys and ciphers of the ‘real’ imperialists, to protect them from this characterisation which in the eyes of Tony appears to imply that Jews have some kind of collective guilt for those activities.
But Marxists reject such notions of collective guilt. We need to analyse these things in materialist terms to overcome such notions. David Miller’s real crime is mentioning and repeating these facts and thus clashing with Tony’s personal prejudices and those of his co-thinkers. For Tony, to reject his schema of the way the US -Israel relationship works is ‘anti-Semitic’.
In the real world, an antisemite is someone who hates Jews in general: Jews as Jews. These allegations – that simply mentioning well-known and facts to analyse social and economic reality, is supposedly ‘anti-Semitism’, is anti-Marxist and irrational.
This issue again focuses on international issues connected with the major changes that are underway in the world at the moment- the changing relations of US imperialism with the former ‘Communist’ bloc and the oppressed peoples of the Global South. This finds primary expression in both the resurgent genocide in the Gaza Strip and Palestine generally, and with the crisis of NATO as revealed by Trump’s election and the falling out between the US and Europe over Ukraine. The lead article addresses the genocide in Palestine and the genocidal attacks in Syria by Western/Zionist-armed and -funded jihadists against ethnic/religious groups considered to be supportive of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ that defends the Palestinians. We note that with Trump’s presidency, even the credible pretence that US imperialism can be pressured to rein in Israel has come to an end – it is now clear to all that to defeat the genocide it will be necessary for Israel and US imperialism to be defeated by the masses and/or armed anti-imperialist opponents. That is now posed point blank.
At the same time, the Ukraine issue has led to be most overt clash between European and US imperialism in history, with the Trump administration visibly backing away from NATO, and the British, French and German bourgeoisie’s posturing ferociously about how they will supposedly fill the gap and continue the war in Ukraine. Their attempt at rearmament – with conscription mooted – for war with Russia is irrational, preposterous and economically ruinous for the European working class, who are likely to revolt against a new wave to severe austerity which we are already seeing in Britain with numerous benefit cuts that are literally being undertaken to fund Ukrainian Nazis, as well as military aid to Zionism. The lead article addresses all this and more.
The back page article is about the attacks on democratic rights from the Starmer regime that is simply the result of its criminal support for the genocide in Palestine. It cannot reply to the facts about the slaughter of the Palestinian population that are widely known and despised, despite the severe self-censorship of the Zionised British media. So it is persecuting journalists and activists – there is a long list. This article addresses this at length.
We have several other important articles in this issue, including articles translated from our Latin American co-thinkers, on the recent German Elections, which saw the collapse of the ‘Traffic Light’ coalition of the Social-Democrats, Liberals and Greens, mainly the result of Germany’s major economic decline caused by the fervent support of this bourgeois coalition for the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine.
We have also a thoughtful article on Deepseek, the Chinese AI bot, and its advanced nature which was a major shock to US imperialism’s complacent assumption that it was ahead of China in hi-tech development. This has been falsified by events and constitutes yet another major blow to US hegemony.
We have an article from our co-thinkers in Argentina on the attacks on pensioners, and the repression against them, by the reactionary government of Javier Milei, a confrontation that looks like the harbinger of much larger struggles erupting against this far right regime.
And finally, we republish the Open Letter of the Partisan Defence Committee (PDC) in defence of Lucy Letby, the Cheshire nurse who was jailed for many alleged murders of newborn, premature babies at a hospital in Cheshire. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the evidence against her does not stand up, and that she was herself a scapegoat for numerous failings of the underfunded, grossly neglected NHS, which neoliberal governments, Tory and Labour, have been involved in stealth wrecking operations against for decades. We commend the PDC, which is a class-struggle defence organisation initiated by the Spartacist League, for raising this issue and campaigning about it.
Starmer steals from disabled for Nazi Ukraine and Israel!
Trump burns Gazans in their tents in cahoots with Netanyahu, yet concedes that Russia is defeating West’s Ukraine proxy war.
Trump’s sickening proposal last month for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza to make way for a ‘Riviera’ owned by the United States, set the scene. Then for over a fortnight Netanyahu with Trump’s backing jointly deprived Gaza of food, water and fuel and making no bones about openly embarking on mass starvation, freezing and dehydration of Palestinians. This was obviously setting the scene for the resumption of the mass extermination bombings that wiped out up to a half-a-million Gazans earlier. On 17th March the mass terror bombings resumed with the bloodiest day of the genocide so far, with over 400 butchered in one night, many burned alive in their tents.
The ceasefire agreed by Israel and touted by Trump was openly blown away by Israel with Trump’s full support. The lesson for Russia over Ukraine is clear – Trump’s word is worthless. This ceasefire never got beyond the first phase of exchanges of batches of 3-6 Israeli hostages for hundreds of Palestinians from Israel’s torture and rape camps. Predictably, it was massively broken by Israel, as 60,000 mobile homes were supposed to be supplied to the demolished, wrecked Gaza strip along with 200,000 tents. The actual implementation of this was negligible except with tents – now being burned.
The total blockade of all aid, food and water with the open support of Trump made a sick joke of any second phase. The crime underway now is identical to that announced by former Israeli ‘defence’ minister Yoav Gallant on 8th October 2023: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Trump gave Israel the green light for this latest genocide and has hinted that he intends to do the same with the West Bank. Israeli repression has mushroomed in the West Bank. The stooge Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has taken it in turns with the Israelis to attack particularly Jenin, a prime target for the Gaza-fication of the West Bank. Hospitals and infrastructure are now under similar attacks in the West Bank as in Gaza.
This was always the objective of the Zionists, of course. And now Trump, an open genocidaire on the Palestinian question, is in the White House, the whole game of seeking to pressure the US to pressure Israel, which persisted when “Genocide Joe” Biden was in White House, has come to an end. Trump has made clear that he considers Palestinians subhuman – he even uses the word “Palestinian” as a racial epithet akin to “n****r” or “n****r-lover” as he did against the Jewish-Zionist Democratic Party politician Chuck Schumer recently for not being prepared to openly support his genocidal agenda. With Trump in office, both Israel and the US will have to be defeated militarily in some way, by the masses and/or a superior military force to have a hope of stopping the genocide.
Trump says that that US would ‘buy’ Gaza – from who?! – and forcibly deport the Palestinian population that lives there somewhere else! So that they can have a ‘Riviera’ for the wealthy. This plan was mooted by Trump’s Jewish-Zionist son-in-law, Kushner, last year. Trump’s real aim in saying this is transparently to steal, either for the US, or Israel – or both – the oil and gas reserves that have been found off the Gaza coast in the past decade or so.
There’s nothing novel about “hell” in Gaza – all that has happened now is that both Trump and Netanyahu are openly saying that “Genocide is good”, not even bothering to deny it. The total exposure of US imperialism and Israel will detonate some kind of explosion in the surrounding countries, but it is difficult to be sure what that will be. There is even talk of war against Israel by all surrounding states including Egypt and Jordan, but don’t hold your breath about that – they could be pushed into it by mass rage but there are all kind of variants possible.
So far, the only force confronting Israel and the US once again on the Palestinians’ behalf is Ansarallah in Yemen. In the background is Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraqi radicals such as Kataib Hezbollah, and Iran itself. They are at least steadfast in their defiance of Zionism and imperialism, but they suffered a severe blow, at least in the short-term, with the overthrow of Assad in Syria at the end of 2024. The route of communication between Iran and its allies in Lebanon, as well as the erstwhile if shaky support of the Assad regime itself, have now been replaced by a genocidal regime of Sunni-sectarian killers directing their rage against non-Sunnis and non-sectarian, secular or leftist/working class Arab and Muslim forces, while also groveling to the genocidal Zionists themselves. The US is already hitting Yemen in response to their solidarity with the Palestinians – Iran is also a target for the imperialists as previously. It will take deep-going political and social struggles, mobilizing the masses against the reactionary social forces that are shaken but are digging in very hard, to transform this situation. What is needed is both the emergence of a new communist leadership among the Arab and Muslim masses, and the creation of an anti-imperialist united front of all those in conflict with the Zionists, the US and their agents.
Syria is now under the rule of Western-backed Al Qaeda/ISIS genocidaires, thinly disguised as so called HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham – Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant) who have characteristically, since the Assad regime collapsed before it and its Turkish and Zionist backers in December, launched a massive slaughter of thousands from Syria’s Alawite Shi’a and Christian minorities, also killing Sunnis who refuse to cooperate with the slaughter. Resistance is building up in the West of Syria against the pro-Zionist stooge Jolani/Al Shara’a regime. Israel is protecting the HTS from this insurgency, which appears to be initially based on former Assad forces and others seeking to stop a sectarian genocide. So, there is a potential giant Lebanon-type quagmire building up there for Israel, a much bigger one.
Funeral after slaughter of Syrian Alwaities and Aleivites by sectarian HTS jihadist regime and its followers.
In the mind of Trump, who regarding Middle Eastern questions is basically a political agent of Likud, Israel’s main ruling party, Israel expelling the Gaza population, and the US doing so, are pretty much the same thing. It is piracy, and a motive for genocide. Trump is open about his intentions to steal natural resources of territories he covets and makes no bones about it. During his first term he openly boasted that US troops in Syria, who were sent in by Obama in 2014 supposedly to fight ISIS – were there to steal Syria’s oil for the United States.
His policies in Ukraine appear superficially different, but the underlying motive is similar. His demand that Ukraine sign over ownership of their natural resource of $500 billion worth of rare earth metals as ‘reparation’ for the aid that Biden gave to Ukraine is just naked theft. Except the problem is that most of this resource is apparently in the Donbass, which is part of Russia now. In part, he is upset at Biden’s policy in Ukraine because Biden gave away aid to Ukraine gratis. He says that US aid should have been a loan, as most of the EU’s aid was and is.
NATO in Chaos
The explosion of the Ukraine issue, particularly with Zelensky’s confrontation with Trump and his Vice-President Vance on 28th February in the Oval Office, has come close to tearing NATO apart. Trump’s changed strategic priorities have caused chaotic and unexpected developments within NATO. It has teetered on the brink of collapse over the past few weeks, as Trump’s changed priorities, his refusal to unconditionally support Zelensky, and his dialogue with Putin and Russia, have sent the West European bourgeoisie, particularly the British and the French, into paroxysms of rage and warmongering. Trump’s proposed 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine was in part a product of the maneuvering around his coercion of Zelensky to sign away mineral rights.
What Trump and Zelensky came up with was a variant of the previous Minsk agreement deceptions Russia had previously been burned by. It was hardly hidden – the truce being commenced; the US would restore military and economic aid to Ukraine that Trump had suspended in the aftermath of the confrontation in the Oval Office. This in the context where Russia has virtually driven Ukraine out from its diversionary incursion into Kursk, in undisputed Russian territory, and has been rapidly advancing in the Donbass.
Putin made a perfunctory show of welcoming the idea of a ceasefire but made it clear that Russia would expect such a pause to mean a route to a permanent solution, not a revamped Minsk, a pretext for the West to rearm the far-right Maidan regime for more atrocities. Such a solution would mean the recognition of Crimea as Russian, and likewise recognition of the four oblasts that have already voted in referenda to join Russia – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. And likely similar proper referenda of the populations of Kharkov and Odessa, where atrocities against the Russian and Russophone populations have also been committed by the Maidan regime and its far- right militias. The eviction from power of the Nazified elements, the acceptance of Ukrainian neutrality and non-NATO status, and a dramatic curtailment of the Ukrainian armed forces, that have been built up by NATO to pose a potent threat to the population of the Russians-speaking oblasts – this appears to be the Russian objective in negotiations. These have a clear democratic content and should be at least critically supported by genuine socialists. Because of that, they are anathema to the West European bourgeoisies, and they are the main reason why there is such a hysterical, barely hidden hostility to Trump’s position on Ukraine from the ruling classes of those countries.
The position that the Trump administration has de-facto adopted over Ukraine is only half-a-break from the policy of the Biden administration. Instead of simply arming Ukraine to wage the proxy war, they now threaten to continue Biden’s policy if Putin does not agree to their proposal for a settlement. But this is not convincing, as they do not have the resources to continue such a proxy war against Russia indefinitely. Trump regards China, not Russia, as the US’s most strategic adversary, as it is on course to surpass the US in economic power in the immediate future. Much of its economic power derives from capitalism overlaid by economic planning, whose origin was in the Chinese revolution – i.e. beyond capitalism. Unlike in Russia, planning in China has continuity and has never been even temporarily broken – China’s powerful billionaire bourgeois class notwithstanding. That is a crucial difference between China and Russia.
So, while we see a tactical softening of US treatment of Russia from the Trump administration, this is not true of China. Instead, we see open hatred of “Communist China” – using the kind of Cold War rhetoric the Trump administration also uses against its domestic opponents, including the imperialist Democrats who it incredibly refers to as “far left Marxists” and the like. Much of Trump’s seeming sympathy for Russia, which causes apoplexy to the liberal imperialists, is driven by the aim of setting Russia against China. Though this is an unlikely scenario, as there is also a visceral imperialist hostility to Russia that, though Trump may have set it to one side for tactical reasons, still runs deep among the imperialist bourgeoisie. At the summits of the Russian state, which is bound up with a stunted variation of capitalism that is heavily deformed by many decades of post-capitalist economic development, which Russia’s weak bourgeoisie cannot conjure away, they have had their fingers badly burned by this issue already, via imperialist duplicity concerning NATO expansion. They are aware of the enmity of the West enough to understand Trump’s motives. His enmity to BRICS and threats of tariffs against it have a similar basis.
The strategic/tactical differences in NATO are severe. The European imperialist powers are spitting rage against Trump for ‘betraying’ Ukraine and whipping up hysteria. We have never witnessed such a falling out of Europe with the United States before. The ruling classes of West Europe have become used to being Washington’s clients, over all the decades since World War II. And suddenly Washington has woken up the fact that it is no longer hegemonic. That does not mean that it has lost all its power. But it has lost in Ukraine. Trump’s policy is a response to this – a temporary retreat to reconsolidate US rule in the Western hemisphere in the short term. With the aim of a later reconquest of that hegemony in the medium term. The European powers are not used to being treated with such contempt. When not publicly raging, they are dealing with it through gritted teeth.
European Imperialist rage and hysteria
This hysteria engulfs both Britain, outside the EU, and France and Germany, and smaller powers like Holland, within the EU. The hostility is resulting in anti-democratic actions that overlap with the Cold War with Russia, but which also encompass bourgeois forces located in former workers states such as Eastern Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania, which are either annexed components of the imperialist state of Germany, ex-workers state members of the EU, or clients outside it seeking to join it, such as Serbia. Attempts to organize Maidan-style ‘colour revolutions’ appear to be underway in Hungary and Serbia, and to be in preparation in Slovakia. We don’t have any regard for the pro-Zionist right-wing, anti-migrant government of Victor Orban in Hungary, and even less for the very right-wing popular presidential candidate in Romania, Călin Georgescu, who approves of the pro-Nazi wartime ruler of Romania, General Antonescu. We certainly don’t have any sympathy for the Alternative für Deutschland in (mainly) Eastern Germany, either – it is very right wing, implicitly Nazi, and yet hostile to the Ukraine proxy war. The AfD however also has a left-wing complement/ counterpart in the ASW of Sara Wagenknecht, who also opposes the proxy war from more of a leftist standpoint and appears to have been deprived of a presence in the Bundestag by electoral machinations from the ruling class parties.
What is significant though is that all these are hostile to the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. In Hungary a ‘colour revolution’ is being whipped up by the EU, as is also true in Serbia. An attempt was made, undoubtedly by the same forces, last May, to murder Robert Fico, the leftist Prime Minister of Slovakia, who is also critical of the Ukraine proxy war. The government of Serbia, politically alike to that of Slovakia in some ways, is also threatened with an EU-incited colour revolution. Irrespective of whether these political forces are to the right or left in formal terms, what is happening is that a degree of popular resistance to the NATO proxy war is being expressed through them. These forces are diffuse, some rightist, some leftist, but all express popular unease in former workers states at being drawn into an imperialist war, which could become a European or world-wide nuclear conflict, against Russia. So, we condemn all these attempted coups, assassinations and other atrocities in all these countries which are aimed at dragooning these populations into war with Russia. While some of these forces represent various forms of spontaneous left and right populism, and some have grotesque and unsavoury politics, they are at their very worst not to be equated with the Ukrainian Nazis who under NATO command, are simply continuing what their forebears did on the Eastern front, then under the command of imperialism itself.
Starmer’s British government is threatening to send troops to Ukraine as so-called ‘peacekeepers’, and the French government is bigging-up its status as a power with a nuclear arsenal, the “Force de Frappe” (“strike force”) independent of United States control, unlike the British Trident-based system. This because Trump has refused to back any West European armed intervention in Ukraine, or consequences of such in terms of blowback against any NATO member involving itself in such armed action, ruling out US assistance under NATO’s Article 5 mutual assistance clause. Without that NATO ceases to be an effective alliance at all. The contradiction is that, for Starmer at least, a British intervention is not feasible without US backing, a so-called ‘backstop’. Though the hysteria in the ruling class over this has led to various bourgeois figures – military officers and politicians of various stripes, to raise the idea of conscripting the population to wage a war against Russia.
Also in this context, French President Macron rushed to promote France’s supposed capacity to take the place of the US in putting Western and Central Europe under its nuclear umbrella for supposed ‘defence’ against Russia. Germany under its new Christian Democratic Chancellor Merz, though, ruled out any German participation in any such Ukraine expedition without Russian consent, probably more out of fear of the AfD than for any other reason. But other virulent NATO imperialist lackey states such as Poland immediately piped up and said that they would like French nuclear weapons hosted on their soil, and Lithuania, whose body politic is even more polluted with Nazi sympathies than Ukraine, expressed the hope that NATO nuclear weapons would be hosted on its soil.
It is very clear that it is not Russia that is remotely threatening to send its troops to menace Britain, France or Germany. It is Britain and France who are, so far verbally, screaming against Russia and openly proposing to send troops to menace Russia in Ukraine, just off its South-Western border. Which opens the vista of an aggressive European war in Eastern Europe waged by Britain and France, overseen by the European Union under the tutelage of the President of the European Commission, the right-wing German politician Ursula von der Leyen, who has been a major driver of anti-Russian hysteria, warmongering and attacks on democratic rights in the EU for several years now.
Labour mimics Trump’s murderous attacks on disabled to fund Nazi Ukraine war even as Starmer attacks Trump’s diplomacy from the right. Yet ‘lefts’ like Abbott wont break with the genocidal neoliberals in front of the working class.
There is a wave of pathetic military jingoism coming from the decrepit British ruling class, which under Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer, has been the most virulently militaristic over Ukraine. Which leads straight to a threat of conscription here, to send troops to Ukraine. The renewed austerity is in good measure being driven by the Starmer regime’s commitment to the crusade against Russia for the Nazis in Ukraine. Starmer recently signed a ‘partnership’ to aid Ukraine for 100 years! To finance this, and billions of pounds worth of other promises to Ukraine in terms of military and other expenditure, he has cut ‘foreign aid’ to numerous places. The fiscally driven attack on the disabled through cuts in the Personal Independence Payment that the Starmer government has proposed, is also transparently driven by its military aid to Ukraine against its own Russian-speaking population, as well as its continuing military aid to Israel for its genocide. It is, in terms of what has been projected in the media, more brutal than George Osbourne’s Tory attacks of more than a decade ago. It also looks like it has begun to catalyse the beginning of a revolt at the base of the Labour Party, which has put Starmer in political trouble.
Political fluidity and Opportunities for Left Advance
We are now in a remarkable situation where politics is extremely fluid, and the ruling classes are targeting repression against the potential that palpably exists for political resistance to cohere. The blatant attacks on Palestine protesters in the United States is one facet of that – the Mahmoud Khailil case, of a Green Card holder being detained and threatened with deportation for protesting against a genocide, is the ultimate outrage and obscenity. But it is also sign of weakness and fear from the Zionists, as are the acts of repression in Britain (see our article on page 16). There is huge political anger over the Zionist genocide, which has been true for the entire period of Israel’s slaughter, beginning in October 2023. Up to now, there has been a division of consciousness between a widespread understanding of the barbarity of Zionism, and a lack of understanding and/or a nervousness of many politicised people concerning the proxy war in Ukraine. But a division of the ruling class, as the Trump-induced crisis in NATO, appears to have broken the log-jam. This is reflected among some activists on the left. A whole layer of bureaucratic forces who were pro-Zelensky liberals in socialist garb, centering around the former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, have with the Trump crisis in NATO, become much more virulent. Some were already known to be hysterical Russophobes and backers of NATO’’s warmongering, but others were much cagier and preferred to stay in the closet.
They have suddenly become much more outspoken and jingoistic, as NATO itself came under threat of a split and disintegration. But they have also met much stronger and numerous opposition to them, many of whom had in previous political debates been reticent in speaking out in defence of Russia, given the demonization and hysteria against Putin, etc. But not so much now! Defence of Russia in this war is a key principled position of authentic communists. When coupled with militant support for the Palestinian struggle against genocide, against oppression, and for national liberation and full equality, these are key elements of the communist programme today. We need for a broader layer of the left to campaign for actions of the working class to combat these manifold wars and genocides, including political strikes and similar mass actions.
We, who have been outspoken defenders of Russia in this proxy war since the early days of Maidan, have noticed a gradual drift leftwards among the more serious left on this question, and there are grounds for optimism that this process is deepening. We seek the regroupment of subjectively revolutionary aspiring communists and revolutionary socialists in a new international communist movement, a new Communist International, and there are reasons to be optimistic that more opportunities are opening up for such a regroupment to make progress. We need both to create an expanded communist movement, and a force that can intervene both in electoral terms in front of the working class, and give leadership in anti-war actions, strikes and other class struggles, to give our class revolutionary leadership in the struggles to come.
Starmer grovels to Trump—united in their Zionism and hatred of Palestinians, but attacks him from the right over Ukraine — wants to send British troops to defend Ukra-Nazis.
The genocide in Palestine is fuelling a major attack on democratic rights and civil liberties in the Western countries, including Britain. Here, the Starmer government is involved in up to its neck, sending weapons all the way through the 16 months of slaughter in Gaza, and sharing ‘intelligence’ with the genocidal Israeli forces that have undoubtedly killed hundreds of thousands of Gaza people, mainly women and children. Trump himself gave it away when he talked, during his tirade calling for Palestinians to leave Gaza so that it can be turned into a ‘Riviera’, of 1.8 million people supposedly having to leave Gaza. Gaza’s population before the current genocide was 2.3 million. That means that the new US administration considers that Israel has already killed half a million Palestinians over the period since 7th October 2023. That is the biggest genocidal slaughter since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. And it clearly has not finished yet.
Starmer endorsed that slaughter from the beginning. He defended the speech of Yoav Gallant, then Israeli defence minister, who said on 8th October 2023 that Israel was fighting ‘human animals” in Gaza, would “act accordingly” and allow them “no electricity, no food, no water, no gas”. Some pointed out that the Nazis, in their death camps, did not generally seek to deprive victims of water since it led to such a rapid death by dehydration. Gallant, along with Netanyahu has as is well known, has been issued with an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity because of these very actions. But as is also well known, when Starmer the genocidaire (a.k.a. “Der Stűrmer”) was interviewed shortly after Gallant’s speech by Nick Ferrari on LBC, he defended Israel’s “right” to carry out these genocidal measures against the Palestinian people. So Starmer, and his cohorts, are deeply complicit in the crimes against humanity that Netanyahu and Gallant have already been indicted for.
Of course, we as Marxists have no confidence in hypocritical bourgeois institutions like the International Criminal Court, and the UN’s judicial arm, the International Court of Justice. We know full well that they are usually used to indict those who the imperialists want to dispose of in the Global South, or the leaders of workers states etc. The latest victim being former president Dutuerte of the Philippines, whose crimes are a small fraction of those of the Zionists – his real crime is not being a Western puppet. But with the genocide in Gaza, the first live-streamed genocide in history, the mass popular reaction worldwide was of such magnitude that it could not be ignored. The indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant were the product of such enormous worldwide mass pressure and all those involved are terrified of the mass movement. That is the overriding reason for the attacks on democratic rights here – the pro-Zionist political class here, reflecting the politics of the ruling class, is terrified of this mass movement and looking for ways to limit it and defeat it.
On top of the usual divide and rule tactics of the ruling class, over whose rights are being promoted over those of others in their hierarchy of bigotry, we get the constant erosion of civil liberties, a great danger to the left, the working-class movement and all victims of capitalism.
“Freedom of speech” is supposed to be an important indicator of any democratic system of government, but laws against “hate speech”, originally sold as protecting the oppressed and victims of racism, are turned into the opposite. Suppressing freedom of expression by modifying ‘permissible’ language and vocabulary – like the BBC hacks who object to ‘genocide’ being used because it is ‘emotive’. The regime of Zionist supporters and lackeys we live under is systematically cracking down, with fraudulent charges, against those who denounce the genocide they are participants in. So, in the name of supposedly defending the rights of Jews to freedom of worship, demonstrations outside the state broadcaster, which actively promotes propaganda that excuses and hides the genocide, are being banned by the state. Thus, we had the arrest of Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal, leading activists of the Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign, in an obvious piece of police malfeasance, lying and duplicity on 18th January in Trafalgar Square. This after the National Palestine Solidarity march had been banned from assembling in Portland Place, near the BBC Headquarters, on the transparent pretext that in a backstreet half-a-kilometre away there is a synagogue that none of the marchers have the slightest interest in and most were unaware of even. Its perfectly obvious that the order for this act of police fraud so blatant that, if it is repeated in court, would amount to flagrant perjury, came from the pro-genocide racist gangsters at the top of the government, Starmer, and his Home Secretary Cooper.
Cowardly Zionists and their Racist Fantasies.
These far-right fraudsters are typical of cowardly Zionists. They don’t dare to openly admit the racist hatred of Palestinians that drives them. They pretend that they are ‘concerned’ because Jewish people are supposedly worried and threatened by large groups of supporters of Palestinian rights assembling in London. But they are simply lying. Jewish left-wingers are being arrested and abused by cops acting on the orders of genocidal criminal politicians, alongside non-Jewish socialists and anti-racists. All kind of activists are being picked up. The Zionist zealots in the government and the police force are equal opportunity thugs and terrorists – they abuse people of any background who oppose their genocide. The list of Palestine supporters who have been abused and arrested on the orders of these racist scum is long and illustrious, and worth spelling out.
Absurdly also, the proscription of the political wings of Hamas and Hezbollah, both of whose radicalism is rooted in different trends within Islam, Sunni and Shia, have resulted in many unlikely people being accused of being supportive of these movements. Of course, you don’t need to be sympathetic to such religious views to understand the issue. You just need to share the understanding of Karl Marx, that in such terrible situations, religion becomes “the sigh of the oppressed creature” and “the heart of a heartless world”, to understand why so many of the world’s most oppressed people, targeted by genocide for three quarters of a century, embrace religious radicalism.
The phoney smears of anti-Semitism are becoming a laughing-stock. How can they not be when an 80-year-old survivor of the Nazi holocaust, Stephen Kapos, is interviewed by the police for a supposed breach of a directive under the Public Order Act that claims to have been motivated by some desire to protect Jewish people at synagogues from non-existent anti-Semitic harassment? The allegations of Islamist ‘terrorism’ are equally surreal. There are the ridiculous allegations that a Jewish leftist, with decades of political activity like Tony Greenstein is supposedly a supporter of Hamas, which he is to face trial for in January 2026. This is about as likely as the Pope converting to Zen Buddhism, or Charles III announcing that he is seeking a sex-change.
It is right to mock the morons responsible for such rubbish, but the attacks on democratic rights that flow from these scams are deadly serious. There is a long list. Aside from those already mentioned, a wide range of leading activists have been preposterously accused of giving support to ‘terrorism’ by these racist degenerates. Or supposedly being a danger to ‘public order’ and a threat to Jews. The former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, and his one-time Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, were questioned by the police under caution after the Met Police’s perjurious stunt in Trafalgar Square, which was captured on film several times – the cops waved through marchers who wanted to lay wreaths to murdered Gazan children in Trafalgar Square, only to arrest leaders like Chris Nineham of those who did so.
As well as Tony Greenstein, a whole range of people have been arrested, in some cases charged, had their phones and electronic devices confiscated on the basis of mendacious smears of either anti-Semitism, support for terrorism, or similar outlandish nonsense. These include Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada, whose electronics were stolen by the police last October in a ridiculous 5am fishing expedition that seems to have resulted in no charges. This is transparently because he writes about Palestine and Zionist crimes and hence has the enmity of Zionist gangsters.
The same thing happened to prolific pro-Palestinian writer Sarah Wilkinson a few weeks earlier, when 12 anti-terrorism cops raided her home, stole her electronics, her passport and even her mother’s ashes. They seized her and took her on a frightening journey when at one point she even suspected she had been kidnapped by criminals posing as police – deliberate, sadistic terror tactics. She was bailed to be supposedly ‘investigated’ later, but it’s clear that whatever the cops have in mind, it is thought and opinion that is being persecuted and has nothing to do with any terrorism.
A Lengthening List of the Framed and Abused by Der Stűrmer
The list of those either detained under so-called ‘anti-terrorism’ laws for activities that have nothing to do with terrorism is getting longer and longer. Other victims include well-known activists such anti-Zionist academic David Miller, detained as he returned from covering Nasrallah’s funeral in Lebanon as a journalist. As months earlier was journalist Richard Medhurst, initially detained at a British airport, and later accused by Austrian police of being a Hamas member, which ought to give rise to suspicion of drug use by the cops, so ridiculous is the supposition. Natalie Strecker, an activist in Jersey, was likewise arrested in Jersey, where the local press gave her sympathetic coverage – almost unknown elsewhere in the UK.
Richard Barnard, a leading figure in the direct-action group Palestine Action, also faces three fanciful charges of supporting Hamas. At least Palestine Action, whose tactics of mobilising direct action against companies, some Israeli, involved in producing weapons for Israel have resulted in defeats for the Zionist killer machine in Britain. The Filton 18 are political prisoners in that cause today. But those politicians responsible are hard put to equate destroying weaponry used to kill children with ‘terrorism’. Juries have on a number of occasions acquitted those accused of such direct actions, which is what has led corrupt politicians on both sides of the Tory-Labour divide to interfere with jury trials, trying to nobble juries with restrictions on what those accused are allowed to say in their defence.
Gaza genocide denial spells big trouble for these criminals as its knowledge becomes hegemonic . The motive for their anti-democratic attacks is no mystery.
The current obsession, using online AI and metadata tools to pursue vendettas against individuals, groups, professions and even whole nationalities using the weaponisation of spurious ‘hate speech’, resulted in the expulsion of many thousands from the Labour Party, during the Corbyn period and afterwards. But Starmer as PM is seeking to enforce the same scam on society as a whole.
We see independent journalists arrested at airports (thereby losing their individual rights as journalists to refuse to answer questions as well as to protect their sources) to identify their contacts on all their electronic devices. High profile people are targeted by the authorities, and their freedom to associate with causes they freely support threatened to browbeat the masses into complying with the state’s determination to outlaw solidarity itself. The criminalisation of effective protest movements, from climate change to antiwar movements is more and more exposing that the state is there to defend profit.
The increasing use of police powers to hold without charge, to impose onerous bail conditions to amount to a sentence before trial – the right to a speedy trial being denied. Delaying tactics in bringing people to trial, and the substitution of magistrate courts instead of trial by jury by the shutting of courts. Ever-expanding delays of trial dates have meant that people who are summoned for interviews, allowed to go without charge only to be later arrested for crimes which bear little or no resemblance to the circumstances and events that happened, have results in severe health and financial outcomes, even when the victims have been completely exonerated. Like the lawfare carried out against Jeremy Corbyn, only to drop the case at the last minute knowing that it would result in unequal financial costs to the defendant relative to the litigant.
The Zionisation of the police is turning the clock back to the 1970s and 1980s in terms of open police racism. One recalls the days when the cops rampaged through Broadwater Farm beating truncheons on their riot shields chanting “come on n****rs” (though they came up one short). Zionist thuggery is bringing those days back. The recent charges against Waseem Yusuf in Tower Hamlets on charges of ‘assault’ is a case in point. The cops were filmed repeatedly last year repeatedly punching him in the face for carrying a Palestinian flag. Independent film evidence showed this was clearly unprovoked police brutality, and there was a major public scandal. MP’s demanded explanations; the IOPC was called in. But now the story has fallen out of the media, the victim of assault is turned into an alleged assailant of the police by lying, racist prosecutors and corrupt cops. These are increasingly common actions of the police, the judicial system and the ruling class, a serious attack on basic democratic norms, replacing them with unlawful imprisonment and attempts to nobble the jury system by far-right bigots in high office. Democratic rights are under concerted attack, and Zionism and Zionists should be considered a dangerous threat to our democratic rights. And not just in the United States – Starmer’s government shares all the anti-democratic, racist politics of Donald Trump in its hatred of Palestinian people and anyone who champions them against the monsters who are trying to wipe them out.
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