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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Antifascist – Brazil Chapter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukraine

We are not actually in World War III, yet, but with the serious and convulsive nature of the crises the world is facing today, anyone could be excused from wondering if a world conflict was imminent. We have a major proxy war in Ukraine where NATO military personnel, working nominally for the Ukrainian government, have fired US ballistic missiles such as ATACMS and the Anglo-French cruise missile Storm Shadow, into Russia. Trump was recently threatening to allow Ukraine to fire the even more threatening US Tomahawk cruise missile into Russia. In response, a year ago, Russia tested the super-hypersonic multi-warheaded Oreshnik (Hazel) missile on a huge Ukrainian arms complex near Dnipro, comprehensively wiping it out with purely conventional explosives that Ukraine had zero chance of stopping.

In response to Trump’s bragging threats to hand over Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, Russia then announced that it had tested Burevestnik or Storm Petrel (a kind of seabird), a low flying, nuclear powered cruise missile with virtually unlimited range, capable of carrying nuclear or conventional warheads. Soon after this announcement, Trump announce that he would not be giving Tomahawks to Ukraine, supposedly because of a limited supply of these weapons. Instead, Trump announced that the US would be resuming nuclear testing, in effect junking the Test Ban Treaty, which has never formally come into force, but had generally been observed since the 1990s. However, it was not clarified if the testing envisaged was actual nuclear explosions, or something less, and Russia and other countries also made it clear that such an action would have consequences. While the direction of motion is clear, exactly what may take place is not.

The whole reason why such fulminations and risk-taking are going on over Ukraine is because the US and its proxies are clearly losing. More strategic towns are being taken in the areas of the semi-liberated oblasts in South-East Ukraine, particularly Donetsk and Zaporozhe. And Odessa was recently convulsed with rioting as the Russian-speaking population rebelled against conscription. One of the key differences between Trump and his predecessor Biden is that Trump recognises that the US is failing in its proxy war in Ukraine. Various figures in the West whom it is quite appropriate to call “Azov liberals” fulminate against Trump supposedly for being some sort of supporter or tool of Vladimir Putin for his preference for sporadic peace summits with Russian leaders, and his refusal to commit to virtually unlimited funds and arms to Zelensky’s far right Ukrainian regime.

But the real explanation for Trump’s (relative) rationality over Ukraine is that it is the flipside of his activities as a tool of the Israel lobby. Trump’s three Presidential election campaigns, as is well documented, were paid for by the Likudnik Adelson dynasty, the last in 2024 to the tune of $100 million from Mirian Adelson. It is a well-known fact that the most vehemently pro-Zionist regime in Europe, East or West, is that of Victor Orban in Hungary, which openly defied the arrest warrant against Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court recently – and yet is hostile to the war drive against Ukraine. One key reason for this hostility is that there is a strong school of thought among Zionists that the financial and military aid that the Western powers are spending trying to vainly defeat Russia, would be better spent on Israel itself. That is one expression of a latent contradiction between the interests of the Zionist lobby, and US imperialism, where as is well known, the Biden administration was gung-ho about war in Ukraine to the point of pushing the conflict to the brink in the ‘lame duck’ last weeks of his presidency, something that Putin was able to deter by the demonstrative use of the devastating non-nuclear Oreshnik, undoubtedly the most dangerous and dramatic point in the Ukraine conflict.

China

Which brings us briefly to China. The US’s crusade against China has largely run into the ground. Their strategy of provoking China into taking control of Taiwan as a trigger for a Ukraine-style war, by using Taiwan’s advanced NVIDIA chip manufacturing facilities, and embargoes and/or sanctions to starve China of access to such technology, has run into the ground. The unveiling of DeepSeek, the Chinese open source AI feature, in 2024, was a huge blow to this, as it appears that despite such embargoes, China is close to drawing ahead of the West, including Taiwan (as in reality a US/Japanese proxy) in developing advanced chips for use in AI and other advanced applications. Not only that, but it appears that China’s new chips are less prone to gobble up enormous amounts of energy at those the West are using. Which is something of a blow, as it is now possible to envisage that China will in the next decade or so completely surpass the West in terms of high technology without needing Taiwan’s vaunted advanced semiconductor facilities. So, Trump has been blowing hot and cold with sanctions, tariffs and threats against China and yet looking increasingly impotent and ineffective.

Gaza and Zionist Crisis

Then we have Gaza. The conflict supposedly over the Israeli hostages taken on 7^th October was a feeble alibi indeed for the genocide, and the fake ceasefire brokered by Trump shows that quite clearly. The genocide continues, albeit at a slightly slower pace in Gaza, but an accelerating rate of killing and repression in the West Bank more than makes up for that. Gaza is still being starved, very little aid is getting though compared to what was mooted by Trump and so, and preparations are being made to split Gaza into two zones, partly administered by Gaza’s projected new overlord, the Iraq war criminal Tony Blair. And yet there is no agreement with the Palestine resistance forces who reluctantly refused to outright oppose Trump’s fake ceasefire, which was a way of saving Netanyahu’s neck more than anything, as at the end of the more than two years of genocidal bombing and starving, its forces were still undefeated and had steadily recruited and maintained their popular support.

They took the risk of going along with the fake ceasefire to try to get the Palestinian population some relief from the slaughter, not to save their own forces.  Israel still bombs daily, the situation is grim indeed, but Israel is also exposed and in Europe and the US popular hatred for the genocidal regime is becoming an avalanche, causing a major crisis in the US, with the fragmentation of Trump’s MAGA base over their attitude to Zionism, which many say is ‘Israel first’, not ‘America First’. The issue of Jeffrey Epstein, and his relationship with Trump, is crucial, and it is not just a squalid child-sex scandal but is increasingly widely suspected to be something connected to outsized Israeli influence over US politics, which is clearly true. Which puts Trump in a very precarious position.

It has had its impact in Europe too, and sharply in Britain, both with the stripping of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor of his former princely royal titles because of his deep involvement, documented in Virginia Guiffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, with Epstein and sex-trafficking of underage girls. A major blow to the diminishing prestige of the British Monarchy. This is, as indicated, linked intimately to the Israel lobby and its influence over Western politics. Labour’s Zionist monster Peter Mandelson was earlier forced out as British Ambassador to the US over this; the fact that he was ever appointed at all is startling, given his long-known close relations with Epstein. But Starmer, as he noted when becoming Labour leader, supports Zionism “without qualification”. The British body politic is in deep crisis because of the Israel lobby and its hold over politicians, as shown by the crisis over the proscription for supposed ‘terrorism’ of Palestine Action, which Britain’s own intelligence services have said quite clearly (though known intermediaries) that they find counter-productive and impossible to justify. The judicial review of this ban is due in the courts in late November.

And then there is the ludicrous affair of the Europa League football match between Aston Villa and Macabee Tel Aviv on 6^th November. West Midlands Police were denounced as anti-Semitic by all four major Zionist-influenced parties: Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Reform, because they acted to ban Macabees away supporters from attending the Villa match, citing their earlier outrageous rioting in Amsterdam as justification. Then after the pro-Zionist parties had so denounced the police, and the local Independent MP, Ayoub Khan, for initiating the ban, another major riot of these ‘fans’ forced a local ‘derby’ in Tel Aviv itself to be called off. Making the leaders of all four of these parties look like idiots. All of these, combined with the impact of the livestreamed genocide itself, have plunged the Zionist lobby, and those political forces in hock to it, into deep crisis here also.

Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere

One way or another, the US has been forced to somewhat retreat from some overt interventions in the Middle East and Ukraine. Its involvement in the 12-day war against Iran in June 2025 only delivered a severe blow to Israel. The US had to desperately broker a ceasefire for Israel because the Zionists were taking a hammering from Iran’s formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles. A repeat of that attack looks even less promising, as Iran is both better armed and better prepared than in June. So, as Trump mooted with earlier ‘ambitious’ demands for Anschluss with Canada, or to annex Greenland, the US under his command is now seeking to retrench in the Western Hemisphere. Hence the outrageous threats to Venezuela, the murder-attacks on fishing boats pretending they are narcotics smugglers, the $50 million price on President Maduro’s head, and the Nobel Peace Prize for the fascist US puppet María Corina Machado, who wants the US to invade Venezuela so she can hand over literally trillions of dollars of its oil reserves to the US.

The US belligerence against Venezuela is part of Trump’s reconsolidation of the US in the Western Hemisphere, with a view to later expansion. It involves the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, that the whole of the Americas belongs to the US. An invasion of Venezuela is entirely possible, the threats against Colombia’s leftist president Gustavo Petro show it goes further than that. Cuba is also under threat, as still the only workers state in the Americas – Venezuela for all its deep-going social reforms and collectivism is still in terms of many of its economic resources privately owned, and the bourgeois class has not been expropriated. Maybe an all-out conflict with US imperialism would bring a tipping point where the Bolivarian Revolution night further radicalise and the working masses move to expropriate the bourgeoisie. A Yankee invasion of Venezuela, a huge country, would enrage the masses in all Latin America and would generate huge resistance and likely a revolutionary wave. So, to conclude this survey of the state of the world at this point, the braggadocio of Trump in the Western Hemisphere could easily be a trap for US imperialism, and could turn the apparent pre-war situation right now, which at times looks very threatening indeed, into a pre-revolutionary situation.

Your Party is a fragile creation right now.  The infant party founded by Zarah Sultana when she resigned from Labour in July and effectively demanded that Jeremy Corbyn act to do what he had been hinting and threatening to do for over a year – create such a party – has both shown signs of some real development, and at the same time been rent by proto-factional divisions. Corbyn is acting as de-facto leader right now, of what both he and Zarah Sultana say will be a member-led socialist party animated by ‘grassroots democracy’.

Corbyn was the left social-democratic leader of Labour from 2015 to 2020 when he was forced out with systematic sabotage of his leadership by a bloc of the Labour Party’s Blairite neoliberal mainstream bureaucracy and its powerful Israel lobby. Corbyn’s leadership was the product of resistance from the base of the working-class movement, or at least its class-conscious section, that had been almost completely excluded for 30 years from any say over the political direction of Labour, the bourgeois workers party that had been the partial political expression of organised labour in Britain since the early 20^th Century.

Neoliberalism on the attack

From the mid-1970s the ruling classes of the US and Britain prepared the so-called “Reagan/Thatcher revolutions”, a war that was not merely against trade unions in terms of repressive laws. It aimed to seriously weaken the traditional working class of the advanced capitalist-imperialist countries through the destruction of strategic extractive and manufacturing industries such as mining and steel, with the jobs exported to lower wage countries such as India and China. They did this in Britain with the cooperation of the core of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy, who as an index of their own servility to imperialism, perversely saw Thatcher’s attacks on the core of the working class as a way for sections of the class to enrich themselves at others’ expense. That was totally delusional, in fact they laid the basis for the current impoverishment and lumpenisation of large sections of the population in key parts of the UK, which is currently fuelling far right despair.

The international counterpart of Reagan and Thatcher’s pioneering neoliberal crusade to weaken the industrial proletariat in these imperialist countries was the war drive against the USSR in the 1980s, which led the USSR’s Stalinist regime to a capitulationist ‘liberalisation’ under Gorbachev and then allowed outright counterrevolution to emerge and take power under Yelstin in the 1990s. Thatcher’s anti-Soviet drive also had the support of the pro-imperialist labour bureaucracy in Britain, with only sporadic resistance from the Bennite left.

Imperialist rampage, the working class on the retreat

Today that seems almost like a different world. Imperialism consolidated itself after the collapse of the USSR around the project of the neocons and the cult of Jewish-Zionism. Such were the ideologues – the likes of Friedman, Joseph, Sherman, Kissinger, etc – of neoliberalism’s attack on the proletariat beginning in the US and Britain. This later spread to the European Union imperialist countries while it produced catastrophic mayhem in the East. This was also true in Britain as the Labour Party bureaucracy consolidated itself about the projects of the neocons. 

Kinnock gave way to Blair, and then you had the central involvement of the Blair government in Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. This was one of a series of imperialist invasions and regime-change operations in the Middle East region since the 1990s that not coincidentally removed every nearby Arab regime that was not servile to Israel as a regional imperialist would-be hegemon. Iraq, Libya, Syria all fell to either outright invasions or proxy wars waged either by the imperialists themselves, as with Bush/Blair’s 2003 Iraq invasion or Obama/Cameron/ Sarkozy’s 2011 Libya invasion, or the Syrian proxy war – with sporadic imperialist bombing – from 2011 onwards — using Western funded ISIS/Al Qaeda jihadists.  This was like the imperialist-inspired jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s, where Al Qaeda was created by the CIA. The Syrian jihad was thwarted by Russian military support for Assad and then armed intervention from 2015.

This thwarted imperialist regime-change in Syria for around a decade, but it finally succeeded in overthrowing Assad in 2024, during the Gaza genocide. It does even appear that the imperialist drive to provoke a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine at that time was initially intended to put pressure on Russia’s operation in Syria and thereby help the pro-Israel regime-change operation there.  But it acquired a life of its own, and became a major conflict, in which the US and Europe are close to outright defeat by a Russia under Putin that has partially retreated from/negated the counterrevolution that occurred under Yelstin. The attacks on Iran and Lebanon, and now the war in Sudan, were all part of the neocon regime- change agenda revealed by former NATO head General Wesley Clark in 2007, as the Bush era ended – the hit list for regime-change has continued since unabated.

 The Zionist-led witchhunts in Labour under Corbyn, with the IHRA pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism playing a pivotal role, forced out Corbyn and led to a massive purge of the Corbynite left, hundreds of thousands of militants, from Labour membership. This prepared the Labour Party to support the outright Zionist genocide in Gaza, with Starmer publicly supporting (on LBC) the deprivation of food, water and fuel from the Gaza population as Israel’s genocidal Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant announced it. The Starmer government, elected in 2024, has a politically far-right character in that it openly supported the genocide in Gaza and both continued and intensified the previous Tory government’s supply of arms and intelligence to Israel’s genocidal armed forces, including British air-reconnaissance aircraft directly aiding the Israelis in looking for targets for carpet bombing of the Gaza strip.

In fact, the crypto far-right politics of Starmer had found expression on other issues. Such as when Starmer notoriously pronounced that Britain was becoming an ‘Island of Strangers’ echoing the rhetoric of racist arch-Tory Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech about immigration, which inspired the fascist National Front in the 1970s and 1980s. The genocidal, pro-Israeli nature of Starmer’s leadership of Labour was evident from the very beginning and totally precluded any support for pro-Starmer Labour candidates in the General Election. Only his outright opponents on the Labour left merited any support, and even that with considerable caution.

Your Party: A project of resistance

This crypto far-right government has attacked the Palestine anti-genocide movement to an extent that Sunak’s previous reactionary government never dared. Bans on demonstrations and the proscription of Palestine Action show this clearly. They also attacked the working class, particularly pensioners – attacking winter fuel payments, and the disabled, and have ostentatiously kept the two-child benefit cap of David Cameron’s Tories. These attacks led to Zarah Sultana not only leaving Labour but effectively becoming the left-wing leading force in what has become Your Party, as yet officially unnamed, with Jeremy Corbyn in the centre, and on the right flank four independent Muslim MPs, who creditably defeated the Labour Party over the single issue of the Gaza genocide in the General Election, but unlike Corbyn, don’t know the basics of working class politics.

Like Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, who made clear in a debate on tenants’ rights that he is a landlord and considers excessive demands for security of tenure and freedom from arbitrary rent rises etc create a “risk of polarising every landlord as ‘evil’ – we must make sure we don’t fall into that trap”. (New Statesman, 8^th September). He also denounced both sides – the fascists and their opponents – in confrontations outside asylum seekers’ accommodation – as “equally absurd”.  Ayoub Khan, the Independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, meanwhile, demanded that troops be used to break the Birmingham Refuse Collector’s (Dustmen) strike against massive pay cuts. A distinct lack of working-class solidarity is in evidenced by both. This is not surprising, it is a product of the uneven nature of building a left-wing challenge to Labour in a period like this when some of those who were prepared to stand up to New Labour over Gaza – it was obviously obligatory to support them – are not workers and/or leave a lot to be desired in terms of class consciousness.

Hussain appears to have been a right-wing infiltrator who caused the early Your Party a lot of problems, trying to witchhunt Zarah Sultana for her leftist views. Just before she appeared on Question Time on 13 November a statement appeared, signed by five Independent MP’s including Corbyn, denouncing Zarah for supposedly delaying the transfer of money collected for membership dues from the portal she initiated in mid-September. But she only took over the sole directorship of MOU Operations, the temporary repository of those funds, a couple of weeks before that statement, and such legal transfers take time to comply with complex data protection and financial guidelines. Corbyn then let it be known that he did not sign or endorse this statement, despite his name being on it, and Hussain, apparently having been caught red-handed, suddenly resigned from the body overseeing the setting up of Your Party. This throws considerable light on the earlier smear against Zarah Sultana over that portal, which she set up on 19^th September because the likes of Hussain were blocking what had already been agreed in principle. This was in effect an anti-left witchhunt against Zarah, who is the real driving force and founder of YP, by Hussein, who has close family and social ties to the Labour Party right-wing and used dishonest tactics to stymie the excellent socialist candidacy of Craig Murray, then in the Workers Party and now in Your Party, in Blackburn in the General Election. It appears he has acted as a crypto New Labour ‘cuckoo in the nest’ and that is the reason for the whole furore around the September membership drive initiated by Zarah, which some on the left just denounced as a shitshow. It was an anti-left witchhunting tactic which principled socialists should have backed up Zarah over. We are proud that we did so and attacked opportunists such as the CPGB/WW and Spartacists for denouncing all involved (including Zarah, the intended victim) as involved in a ‘shitshow’.

The founding conference of Your Party is due to be held on 29^th-30^th November in Liverpool. There a proper name will be voted on, with People’s Party or The Left most likely to be chosen, it seems. The party has as this article is written, around 72,000 members as the most recent estimate – a couple of weeks earlier there was an official announcement that the membership had reached 50,000. In July when the party was first mooted by Zarah Sultana, again 72,000 signed up for a website, TeamZarah, in three days, and when the Your Party website was publicly announced and endorsed by both Zarah and Jeremy Corbyn in August, over 800,000 expressed and interest and in many cases donated money. There were all kind of reports and controversy about the influence of figures such as the ex-Momentum activist James Scheider and the sometime UNITE official Karie Murphy, around Corbyn, as inimical bureaucratic elements who were resisting any real democratic internal life of the party. This was a product of the secretive operation of the ‘Collective’ organisation that existed on a very hush-hush basis for around a year after Corbyn defeated Labour as an Independent candidate in the 2024 General Election, along with the other Muslim independents.

But this now appears to have been partially transcended and the real factional conflict is between the group of Muslim independents, and Zarah Sultana and others on the left of the proto-party, with Corbyn both planting at least one of his feet in the camp of the Muslim independents, and at the same time trying to keep them away from all out factional conflict. That is how things appear from the outside at least. It appears that the bulk of the independent group was not keen on the rapid development of the party, and this led Zarah Sultana to launch the first membership portal in September, in frustration at a membership sign-up that had been agreed but was not implemented. This led to public allegations of a fake portal, and then threats of legal action from both sides, either for having supposedly broken data protection rules, or for defamation (from Zarah Sultana).

This has moved, painfully towards being resolved, but at a snail’s pace with kicking and screaming from the independent MPs, as before the party could be founded as a legal entity, a temporary holding company, MOU Operations, was set up with three prominent left-wingers as directors to get the project off the ground. When the first membership portal was set up and then denounced by the independent MPs in September, legal threats were made and reports under data protection law. This behaviour was counterproductive, as it led to legal difficulties in transferring membership money to the similar precursor body, Project Peace and Justice, on the other side. In October the three directors of MOU Operations resigned and made way for Zarah Sultana to act as sole director in a bid to speed up the legal difficulties, but some remained and have slowed things down. So, we still see regrettable and foolish Open Letters being issued by the all-male independent MP’s group criticising Zarah Sultana, who appears to be trying hard but struggling to resolve a problem that is in large measure a product of the small-c conservative politics and attitudes of this ‘Independent’ group in the first place. This is an unseemly own goal and looks bad, giving ammunition to the bourgeois media.

These organisational issues are manifestations of political problems, which must be resolved in their own terms. What really does not help is denunciations of Your Party as an undemocratic ‘shitshow’ from far-left groupings like the CPGB/Weekly Worker and the Spartacist League, who pose as the embodiment of democratic and/or programmatic virtue, but have terrible histories of heresy-hunting and anti-democratic means of dealing with political differences themselves. The various democratic devices in use in YP so far – the circulation of the four documents: Constitution, Standing Orders, Political Statement and Year 1 Organisational Plan – with their online editing by members and Regional Assemblies to discuss them, are not perfect examples of developed party democracy, but nor are they a sign of a developing totalitarian-bureaucratic regime. The rhetoric from some on the left is sectarian overkill.

Social Democracy and Sect Politics

The attitude of serious revolutionaries to Your Party must be one of sober engagement, not petty denunciation and point scoring. It is necessary to recognise that many of the political problems of Your Party, as well as those of many of its left oppositional forces, flow from left social-democratic politics. That is not just true of the historic political followers of Jeremy Corbyn but is also true of many of the large sects, such the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party, and the relatively new Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly known as Socialist Appeal).

Both of the latter two currents, as well as Socialist Alternative, have their origins in the Militant Tendency of Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe from the 1950s to the late 1980s. This spent decades in a kind of strategic entryism in the Labour Party, adopting the parliamentary road to socialism as a kind of parody of a ‘Trotskyist’ credo in terms of an Enabling Act, that would supposedly allow capitalism to be abolished through mass pressure on a left Labour government and the nationalisation of the top 100 or so monopolies. The Militant group became quite clearly social chauvinist over the Irish war and then the Malvinas war in 1982, posing the idea that a ‘socialist’ Labour government would also fight to defeat Argentina for Britain and some kind of liberation of the 1,800 or so Falklanders (who are British colons). They also were historically soft on Zionism and often echoed imperialist anti-Sovietism in the 1980s Cold war.

As did the SWP, who in their early incarnation in the 1950s broke away from the Trotskyist movement’s Soviet defencism over the Korean War. To the point that when the USSR collapsed in 1991, they proclaimed that the “collapse of communism” was something that should have “every socialist rejoicing”. But in fact, the counterrevolution was a disaster, that resulted in the death of several million former Soviet workers from starvation and suicidal despair, which is the only way the five-year (!) fall in life-expectancy in the 1990s can be explained. So much so that it provoked parallel revolts both from below and in elements of the state and productive apparatus of the Russian Federation. This leading to the rise of Putin with a high-level of popularity, because he reversed many of Yeltsin’s attacks, giving rise to a new kind of mixed economy, whose capitalist element can be said to be severely ‘deformed’ by elements of the planned economy and apparatus. That being bound up with the beginnings of a superior, socialist mode of production, which the counterrevolution was unable to simply destroy. Which is why this complex “bourgeois state with socialist deformations”, i.e., Russia, is once again hated by the imperialists. It has nothing to do with any alleged despotic tendencies of Putin, a fairly mild and rational centre-right leader of a non-imperialist country.

Against the Stream – fight for Communism

Today we see divisions on crucial international questions among both the ex-Labour left, and the so-called ‘far left’, many of whom are getting on their high-horses and denouncing various elements of Your Party in a one-sided manner for supposed conspiracies against ‘grassroots democracy’. As communists, we take full part in the political struggles of this party, we do not abstain or set ourselves up as a sect opposed to it, but nor do we go along with the illusions that prevail both among the ex-Labour people and the far left. Some ex-Corbynites, for instance, have better positions on the Ukraine war that many on the ‘far left’. Some recognise that the Western imperialist proxy war against Russia and the people of the Donbass/Crimea is a continuation of the old imperialist crusade against the USSR, in changed conditions. Many on the ‘far left’ are on the wrong side in Ukraine, and were on the wrong side in Syria, and even over the imperialist invasion of Libya. On the question of Zionism, getting Corbyn to denounce it in full was like pulling teeth, but recently he did so at a Your Party meeting in Putney. Softness on Zionism is not entirely unknown on the far left, of course, the overtly Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty hangs around some Your Party events, but softness on Zionism is not confined to them.

There are those on the far left, from parts of the Jewish left to the SWP and CPGB who smear as ‘anti-Semitic’ those Marxists who point out basic material facts about the social base of Zionism as a racist current centred in the Jewish part of the imperialist bourgeoisie. These trends cross class lines in seeking to ‘cancel’ such criticisms of a key part of the ruling class itself, including from us and previously Socialist Fight. The case of David Miller, the sacked anti-Zionist Professor formerly at Bristol University who now co-presents Palestine Declassified with Chris Wiliamson on Press TV, has become a barometer of capitulation to Zionism on the ‘far left’.  Some line up to call him ‘anti-Semitic’ even when he is in battle with Zionists over crucial class and democratic questions. This is somewhat reminiscent of the way some on the far left – such as the SWP – bought into the imperialist campaign against Julian Assange earlier. Others on the Corbynite left frequently have better positions, notwithstanding the weakness of Corbyn himself on Zionism. On other ‘controversial’ questions such as trans rights, there is great confusion and diversity among the ex-Corbynite, ex-Labour membership, among newer layers of younger militants, as well as some on the ‘far left’.

Your Party is of great importance. We must fight for a revolutionary programme within it. We must fight against reformist parliamentarism and the belief that the existing state can be captured for the working class and somehow turned into a weapon against oppression. We must popularise the Marxist understanding that the existing state cannot be the means of liberation of the working class, but that instead it must be smashed and replaced with a state where the working class, with its own independent armed forces, is the master of society and the repository of all of society’s productive resources. Instead of elected representatives and state officials being bribed by capitalists who thereby become the masters of society, all such elective positions administering the planned economy we need must be paid the average wage of a skilled worker, and subject to recall from below.

That is a different conception of socialism to the social-democratic left, not only the Corbynites, but also the politics in practice of many of the various large social democratic sects. The dissolution of sects and political development along those lines is the real logic of the creation of a genuine mass party of the socialist-minded working class. We must bear in mind that Your Party exists because social-democratic politics failed and dissolved into neoliberalism. That is itself a product of the dying state of capitalism today. We need workers democracy at the deepest level within Your Party precisely to allow the development of class consciousness to undertake this necessary qualitative leap. That is the real purpose of the struggle for democracy in YP. All else is subordinate to that.

This issue is obviously centred on Your Party, which is the most important development in the British working-class movement for many years, and despite numerous problems, appears to be taking root around the country in a manner that is very encouraging. It was not a surprise to us however, as we were well aware that the mass base of the Corbyn movement had not disappeared despite the Zionist/Neoliberal sabotage that drove that mass base out of the Labour Party, it never dissipated, but went into a kind of abeyance/exile, and reconstituted itself dramatically when Your Party was announced in August, when 800,000 expressed interest. Anyway, the progress of the party has since been interrupted by interference by outside forces, which have caused setbacks, but it is still developing. The lead article contains our extensive analysis of that development.

We also have a short programmatic document titled “A Revolutionary Platform for Your Party” which contains an amended version of a platform originally proposed by the Spartacist League/Britain, to which they invited amendments. The original platform contained in our view some serious omissions, most notably in our view an adaptation to right-wing populist anti-immigration sentiment, and not coincidentally, the lack of any demands for how to fight fascism. They invited amendments and discussions about their original platform; we consider our version a considerable improvement, so we too invite similar engagement from revolutionary-minded individuals and groups.

There is an extensive political reply to a former leading member of our tendency who broke with us recently after several years involvement. While we regret his leaving, which we do consider to be a result of some kind of social pressure regarding our strong anti-Zionist politics, we do consider his criticisms to be worthy of a full response, and indeed ironically an opportunity to further develop our understanding of part of the Jewish left who adapt to liberal Zionism and are inclined to try to ‘cancel’ Marxist analysis of the ethnocentric social base of the Zionist movement internationally, an attitude we consider to be social-imperialist and therefore anti-communist in its thrust. This aspect is elaborated at some length in the article.

We have a commentary on the current crisis of Western imperialism, which is convulsing the world and sometimes at least giving at least the impression that World War 3 is breaking out. We deal with the war in Ukraine, with China, with the Gaza genocide, and lastly with Trump’s threats to invade Venezuela, which have already resulted in brutal murders of many fishermen from that country while US imperialism pretends to be killing drug traffickers. An outrage, that could portend a new Vietnam-style war in South America.

And we have a statement from our Brazilian comrades, jointly with other leftists including some from East Timor, to the COP30 environmental summit, which is being held in Brazil, that links the need for resistance to  the capitalist despoilation of the Amazon rainforest with the struggle against imperialism more generally, particularly against Trump’s threat against Venezuela.

The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 23rd November on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

Lenin’s work that we are using here is a major primer on the Marxist theory of the state and goes through the various stages of the development of that theory pretty comprehensively.

In hindsight, it probably would have been better to have studied this before taking on Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, as this gives a grounding in some very basic Marxist concepts that are invaluable to understanding that later work.

But this chapter makes a very clear start on what we are addressing here.

In part 1, Lenin talks of Marx and Engels’s views on the state on the eve of the continent-wide revolutionary crisis of 1848.

In particular, he homes in on Marx’s formulations in The Poverty of Philosophy, his initial polemic against Proudhon, the proto-anarchist thinker. Here he wrote about the destiny of class society to disappear:

“”The working class, in the course of development, will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power groups, since the political power is precisely the official expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society.”

So, the idea that the state will disappear as a consequence of proletarian revolution is to be found in the earliest works of mature Marxism.

Then he highlights the way this is dealt with by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:

“… In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat….

“… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” 

And it is that formulation, that the state after the revolution will be “the proletariat organised as the ruling class” that had been, not accidentally, omitted in the various treatises on the state and socialism in the Second International:

“This definition of the state has never been explained in the prevailing propaganda and agitation literature of the official Social-Democratic parties. More than that, it has been deliberately ignored, for it is absolutely irreconcilable with reformism, and is a slap in the face for the common opportunist prejudices and philistine illusions about the ‘peaceful development of democracy’.

“The proletariat needs the state — this is repeated by all the opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure us that this is what Marx taught…. “

But then he clarifies:

“But they ‘forget’ to add that, in the first place, according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away. And, secondly, the working people need a ‘state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class’”.

So, what is this about? The state, as we touched on in chapter 1, is a special organisation of force for the suppression of one class by another. What class must the proletariat, in power, supress? Obviously, the bourgeoisie. But in what way?

“The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners — the landowners and capitalists.”

And Lenin points out that the social democrats did away with this with dreams of class harmony, pictured their version of ‘socialism’ as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority.

Lenin called this a “petty bourgeois utopia” and pointed out that it led to ‘socialist’ participation in bourgeois cabinets in Britain, France, Italy at the turn of the century.

He also speaks of the role of the working class in leading intermediate layers:

“Only the proletariat — by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production — is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.”

So, he summaries that:

“Marx’s theory of ‘the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class’, is inseparably bound up with the whole of his doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The culmination of this rule is the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat.”

And then he asks the question:

“…is it conceivable that such an organization can be created without first abolishing, destroying the state machine created by the bourgeoisie for themselves?”

Which leads straight to the conclusions Marx drew from 1848-51. Lenin cites Marx’s later work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Noting Napoleon III’s coup of December 1851, Marx wrote:

“’This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, … this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten.’ The first French Revolution developed centralization, ‘but at the same time’ it increased ‘the extent, the attributes and the number of agents of governmental power. Napoleon [I] completed this state machinery’ … the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with repressive measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power “

And he quoted the conclusion:

“All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”

Lenin noted that here:

“Marxism takes a tremendous step forward compared with the Communist Manifesto… all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.”

And:

 “This is the question Marx raises and answers in 1852. True to his philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx takes as his basis the historical experience of the great years of revolution, 1848 to 1851. Here, as everywhere else, his theory is a summing up of experience, illuminated by a profound philosophical conception of the world and a rich knowledge of history.”

And this brings us to the beginning of the three-cornered polemic against reformism (and centrism) on the one hand, and anarchism, which recurs in this work. Lenin writes:

“The bureaucracy and the standing army are a “parasite” on the body of bourgeois society–a parasite created by the internal antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which “chokes” all its vital pores. The Kautskyite opportunism now prevailing in official Social-Democracy considers the view that the state is a parasitic organism to be the peculiar and exclusive attribute of anarchism. It goes without saying that this distortion of Marxism is of vast advantage to those philistines who have reduced socialism to the unheard-of disgrace of justifying and prettifying the imperialist war by applying to it the concept of “defence of the fatherland…”

And he notes what happened after the Russian Revolution of February 1917 in that regard:

“Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following February 27, 1917. The official posts which formerly were given by preference to the Black Hundreds have now become the spoils of the Cadets, Mensheviks, and Social-Revolutionaries. Nobody has really thought of introducing any serious reforms. Every effort has been made to put them off “until the Constituent Assembly meets”, and to steadily put off its convocation until after the war! But there has been no delay, no waiting for the Constituent Assembly, in the matter of dividing the spoils of getting the lucrative jobs of ministers, deputy ministers, governors-general, etc., etc.!”

Leading to the conclusion, similar but on a much higher historical place, to what Marx and Engels had discovered in 1948:

“But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is “redistributed” among the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties (among the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the case of Russia), the more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at their head, become of their irreconcilable hostility to the whole of bourgeois society. … This course of events compels the revolution “to concentrate all its forces of destruction” against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.”

And on the question of what the working class will put in its place, Lenin touches on that, but it will be explored more in later chapters:

“What the proletariat will put in its place is suggested by the highly instructive material furnished by the Paris Commune.”

One final point regarding this is Lenin’s emphasis and expansion of a point Marx himself made, about his own distinctive contribution to politics. He quotes Marx:

“And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

And Lenin expands on that in a devastating criticism of opportunism, both reformist and centrist:

“It is often said and written that the main point in Marx’s theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie…. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

And finally, to emphasise matters:

“Further. The essence of Marx’s theory of the state has been mastered only by those who realize that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from “classless society”, from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Introduction

The following programme for a platform was, in its original form, put forward by the Spartacist League, under the title: A call to socialists: Lets build a revolutionary caucus in Your Party. They invited others to join them with the following call:

“First and foremost, we are interested in opening a debate on the policies needed to get Your Party off the ground and win mass support in the working class.

“Below we propose a set of principles which we think could serve as a basis to regroup revolutionary elements in Your Party. Get in touch with us to debate these and to work with us in building a revolutionary caucus.”

So, we in the Consistent Democrats did get in touch. Their original suggested programme is to be found at https://iclfi.org/pubs/wh/2025-yp-rev-caucus. Seeing a number of flaws in their suggested programme, we proposed a number of amendments. The amendments can be found on our site at https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/revolutionary-caucuses-the-spartacists-and-platforms-in-your-party, with full tracking.

One key difference with the Spartacists is with their contention that with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, liberalism became the dominant ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and that this has ensnared the working-class movement and the left and effectively caused them to capitulate wholesale to liberalism, if not become liberals outright. We differ somewhat – we consider it was neoliberalism and neoconservatism  – both closely linked to Zionism – that filled much of the vacuum in imperialist post-Soviet bourgeois ideology and thought, and this has indeed infected the working-class movement with free market ideology, support for imperialist militarism, and some forms of identity politics – with Zionism in pole position. So you find in their material denunciation of liberal trends on the left, but not  so much those trends that have adapted to right-wing populism, with its anti-migrant agitation and its flipflops between isolationist opposition to neocon militarism, and glorying in it, as personified by Trump.

As a result, you find material opposing ‘mass immigration’ in the Spart draft, but nothing about fighting fascism. They – in part correctly – denounce the Greens as a petit-bourgeois party, but at the same time say nothing about capitalist destruction of the environment. And their point about opposing NATO and militarism says nothing about defence of any workers’ states or other targets of imperialism. We consider our version of this programme makes it substantially better, and like them, we invite discussion and amendments. Such a programme would be the basis for a real revolutionary left wing of Your Party.

For a planned economy run by workers, for workers!

Financial capital, the final product of decay of imperialist finance capital, centred in The City of London is destroying the lives of the working class in this country. Deindustrialisation, privatisation, falling living standards, stagnant productivity, the North-South divide; all this and more has been caused by the fact that the economy revolves around this cancer destroying everything that is good for workers. The only road to regenerate Britain is through the expropriation of the City, and the establishment of a plan for re-industrialisation designed by the working class, for the working class.

A working-class position on immigration.

Farage and Tommy Robinson scapegoat immigrants and foster racist divisions. Starmer and the City compete with their scapegoating but also use migrant workers to prop up a rotting economy. Neither of these benefit working-class people whatever their origin or status. As socialists, we oppose closing the border, and all attacks on the rights of migrants and refugees, but we also oppose the capitalists’ cynical use of desperate migrants to drive down wages. We demand an end to anti-union laws and the revival of the compulsory closed shop for all industries where wages are under such pressure, with union membership and decent wages for all.

For the unity of workers, Muslims and trans people!

There can be no place for bigotry in Your Party. But to have any hope of winning the working class we must win the argument, not simply moralise at those with different views on social questions. One does not need to be a Muslim to oppose the attacks on the Muslim community. And one does not need to agree with gender theory to defend the rights of trans people to live their lives how they wish. We do not need to agree with all the ideas in each other’s heads – merely that we are all part of the working class and must act as a class, who agree to fight for each other’s rights against the ongoing reactionary backlash.

Fight fascism – a working-class militia to defend organised workers and oppressed groups

We are amid the most threatening rise of fascism since the 1930s. Neoliberalism has meant decades-long declines in employment and living standards and Starmer’s neoliberal viciousness in power in the name of ‘Labour’ has led to a vacuum that Robinson, Farage and worse are attempting to fill, with the help of Trump, Musk, etc. This involves a terrorist threat against workers, particularly Muslims and other minorities, from organised fascists. Police arrest pensioners and the disabled for imaginary ‘terrorism’, while turning a blind eye to fascist mobs outside asylum seekers’ quarters demanding ‘kill them all’. We need organised groups of stewards and defenders able to fight off fascist violence. And beyond that, we need a militia to defend the population against a far right that is now fixated on Israel and aspires to inflict Gaza-style bloodshed on populations it hates here. Your Party should popularise and seek to create the conditions where such a mass-based anti-fascist militia can be created.

No to Zionism!

Zionism is a nationalist project based on the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. It is the ideology behind Israel’s genocide and has no place in the labour movement. Peace in the Middle East and the unity of Arabs and Jews can only be achieved through opposition to Zionism, support to the liberation of the Palestinians and respect for the democratic rights of all peoples.

Down with US & British imperialism!

British foreign policy is designed to serve the interests of the City of London, itself a vassal of the American Empire. Wars and interventions by Britain and the US abroad have brought disaster around the globe, while bringing only misery and crisis at home. Now, the US is pressuring its allies to re-arm for more wars, which will mean further squeezing working-class people. We say: No arms to Ukraine and Israel! No to NATO! Down with the war drives against Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela – and all non-imperialist or oppressed countries and workers states targeted by imperialism!

No popular front with the Greens – we need to split them!

The Green Party is a middle-class radical party. We cannot merge with it; we cannot treat it as a partner. There are some seriously socialist-minded people in it, mixed with Malthusians and other reactionaries. This party supports NATO and is not anti-imperialist. Greens are correct that climate change threatens the future of working-class people around the world. But this is caused by capitalism and can only be solved by economic planning on both the national and international scale. The Greens though accept capitalism, promote ‘Green’ capitalism, and thus New Labour schemes like ULEZ that punish workers for owning old, polluting vehicles. We support cleaner air, which helps protects working class people and particularly children from dangerous illnesses, but we demand the bosses pay for it, and particularly for new, low-emission vehicles for all who need them.

We need to split away pro-socialist elements attracted to the Greens, to our genuine socialist party, not endorse left talking but untrustworthy figures like Polanski. We reject the Greens’ self-righteous, middle-class politics that put abstract ideals above real living conditions. An alliance with them will only repel workers.

For Irish unity! Self-determination for Scotland and Cymru!

The “United Kingdom” is oppressive to Irish Catholics, Scots and Welsh. British imperialism subjugated Ireland for centuries; it must finally be thrown out of the whole island. As for the Scottish and Welsh nations, their fate should be determined by the democratic will of their people, not by the parasites in Westminster.

Yes to trade unions! No to pro-capitalist union leaders!

The trade unions are the mass organisations for the defence of the working class. At least that’s what they should be! For decades the trade unions have been run into the ground by leaders who stand closer to the bosses than their own members. We cannot let these people take control of Your Party. Whether to rebuild the unions or found a new left party, we need leaders who stand on clear socialist principles and are ready to take the fight to the bosses.

Down with the monarchy! For a workers’ republic!

Workers finally need a government and state which serves their interests, not those of a handful of capitalists and aristocrats. 

Anti-imperialist declaration distributed at COP 30 in Belém by the following organizations: Brazil: Emancipation of Labor Group; General Abreu e Lima Anti-imperialist Committee; East Timor: Maubere Resurrection Front – FRM; Hope Committee; National Agro-Ecological Rehabilitation Movement; Rosas Mean Movement; Maubere Socialist Youth.

COP30 is taking place amidst a boycott and denialist opposition from the world’s biggest polluter, the USA. Furthermore, Trump is threatening a new military intervention in Latin America.

This war operation has already begun. Nearly a hundred fishermen were murdered, summarily executed and accused without evidence of being drug traffickers and terrorists. Killed against all rules of international law.

Lula, president of Brazil, the largest, richest, and most populous Latin American country, should have adopted a sovereign stance at CELAC and COP30. Lula should have called for continental unity against these crimes and these new threats. Speeches that don’t match actions are not enough.

But, since there is no resistance of sufficient magnitude, Trump continues to escalate, now positioning the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford, in military formation in the Caribbean in a clear campaign of war against our continent.

Those who defend nature, life, and the Amazon cannot look the other way in the face of this threat. The planet’s main enemy must be defeated in order to save it. The capitalist mode of production is the fundamental cause of socio-environmental injustices. Destroying it and building a socialist society is the only way to overcome the risk that all forms of life and the planet face.

The Emancipation of Labor Group believes that defending the Amazon means urgently and immediately calling for the unity of peoples oppressed for centuries against Trump, capitalism, and the imperialist system. It is necessary to explicitly defend Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba, which are threatened and sanctioned. Likewise, it is necessary to combat Zionism, which is carrying out ecocide in Gaza.

The oil, rare earth minerals, fauna, flora, soil, and subsoil belong to the people of the region, against the pirates and invaders of all time.

We must unite in defense of national, popular, and state sovereignty over our natural resources, which should be exploited in a community-based and cooperative manner with the Brazilian government, serving development and preservation under the control of the working and indigenous population and the proletariat. International partnerships with China, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela are necessary. We must guarantee the sharing of technology for the national development of refineries and processing without harming nature or indigenous communities.

No to false, hypocritical, imperialist, and capitalist sustainability. For planned social and state control of all natural resources. First and foremost must be development with social control of living conditions, guaranteeing the right to land for those who work or live on it, and fighting against capital and its predatory mode of production. Without this, the preservation of the Amazon, for example, is merely preservation for imperialism to exploit the Amazon.

Finally, and geostrategically related to the climate issue, there is the international struggle of oppressed countries allied with the Chinese workers’ state for energy transition, reinforcing the commitment to restricting the burning of fossil fuels. This dispute is part of the struggle to bury the decadent imperialist system and fight for socialism across the planet.

The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 9th November on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

Studying this work is of crucial important for a Marxist tendency.  We are now entering a period of political activity in a party that offers great promise for the creation, once again, of a mass working class political movement, a party of the working class. That is what Your Party signifies. We have to understand what the Corbyn-Sultana party could mean. It is a result of the failure of Labourism in the face of the ruling class’s neoliberal offensive against the working class in the advanced capitalist – that is, imperialist countries, since the mid-1970s. This had many different manifestations and timings around the world. But the whole point of the neoliberal project was always that the working class in the advanced countries was too powerful for the well-being of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

Well-being in two senses. One in that the bourgeoisie feared the social power of the working class in the advanced countries. The second being that that classic phenomenon of capitalist decay, the gradually falling rate of profit, had reached a point that the bourgeoisie was desperately looking for some way to increase its profit rates at the expense of the masses. In Britain, in the early 1970s, the ruling class tried frontal industrial confrontation with the labour movement to try to fundamentally weaken the mass organisations of the working class. Heath’s Industrial Relations Act was partly prefigured by the White Paper In Place of Strife that was floated by the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1969, supported by some who were then supposed to be on the Labour left, such as Barbara Castle and Tony Benn.  What this shows is that even some thought on the left were attuned more to ruling class opinion than the interests of the working class, even then.

In reality, this was a product of reformism’s attitude to the state, which Lenin, quoting extensively from Engels, touches upon in this chapter. But the expiring Wilson government of 1969 was hardly suited for a major confrontation with the working class. Though such proposals were the logic of a class collaborationist programme. It was the Heath government who tried to confront the trade unions head on, with their Industrial Relations Act, with its compulsory ballots in strikes, its attempt to ban solidarity action and various forms of picketing, its compulsory ‘cooling off’ periods, etc. And the government took on a powerful trade union movement and lost – to cut a long story short. Heath called a General Election in February 1974 on the slogan “Who rules the country, the government or the unions?” And lost. The Labour Party ended up with more seats than the Tories in the 1974 Election, though the result was very close, and in terms of the popular vote, Heath was very slightly ahead. But its seats that count.

Labour called another election in October 1974, and this time improved its performance, though it only gained an overall majority of 3 seats. It was during the 1974-1979 Labour government that the neoliberal project first, very tentatively, began to be tried out in Britain. Labour’s majority did not last long, and before that issue came centre stage, Harold Wilson resigned as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by James Callaghan. So, from 1976 you had the Liberal-Labour pact, and a series of more insidious attacks on the working class, through cuts in public spending, including in healthcare, and incomes policy where the union bureaucracies held back working-class discontent in the face of high inflation. You had such devices as the incentive scheme in the mining industry, which laid the basis for the divisions among miners that played a major role in dividing the miners later when Thatcher attacked them. So, the Labour government, by then in a semi-coalition with the Liberal Party, came into conflict with the working class, which exploded towards the end of its term in the winter of 1978-9 with the Winter of Discontent’, when all kinds of mainly public sector workers went on strike.

Thatcher won in May 1979, and set about full-throated neoliberalism, attacks on strategic sections of the proletariat through mass redundancies. Steel, docks, miners were the strategic sectors of the working class that had to be defeated. Mass privatisation and the export of jobs to low wage countries is the core of the project. The aim being to seriously weaken the organised working class, not on a temporary basis, as was done in 1926 with pay cuts for the miners provoking a General Strike which the union bureaucracy betrayed, laying the basis for a reign of terror in industry. This was a more serious project of weakening the power of the working class through removing whole strategic sectors from the advanced countries. And since the days of Thatcher, and her ten-year implementation of this reactionary ‘revolution’ in Britain, and a similar strategy implemented in the ‘Reagan Revolution’ in the US, neoliberalism gradually became hegemonic in the imperialist world.

It went hand in hand with the imperialist offensive Thatcher and Reagan symbolised internationally, above all confrontation with the stagnating degenerated workers state of the USSR in the 1980s, which brought it to its knees,  It brought about the pro-capitalist liberalisation of the Stalinist regime under Gorbachev, and then the seizure of power by the outright counterrevolutionary leader, Boris Yeltin, who also sprang from the bureaucracy, being originally the chief of the Moscow Communist Party. So that was almost like a different world.

So, what about today? Since those days, social democracy and the old bourgeois liberalism exposed their bankruptcy by becoming thoroughly neoliberal. The British Labour Party is thoroughly neoliberal. In a period where the bosses, driven by the imperative to increase their rate of profit, declares war on every gain of the working class, and seeks to abolish it by privatisation, outsourcing, and the rest, reformism does not work. So, we have had social neoliberalism instead of reformist social democracy for many decades. Going back to the Wilson-Callaghan government. Arguably it even had its prehistory with In Place of Strife.

But of course, the working class had not always taken kindly to being shafted. We have had left movements within the Labour Party. The paler one being Bennism in the 1980s. We have had attempts by fragments of Labour to resist this politically, sometimes with the aid of parts of the far left. The SLP of Arthur Scargill in 1996-8. Respect in 2004 – 2009. And other smaller projects like the Socialist Alliance, and Left Unity. But the big one was Corbyn in 2015. That was when popular anger at neoliberalism briefly took control of the Labour Party through a mass influx of new and many former members. And the neoliberal right, imbued with Zionist politics, weaponising pro-Zionist ‘anti-semitism’ scares and right-wing nationalism over Brexit, manoeuvred furiously to defeat Corbyn’s leadership and drive this massive left constituency out of the Labour Party.

But they won a pyrrhic victory. They got rid of the left, drove them into exile, and even managed to create the most openly reactionary, bordering on far right, ‘Labour’ government in history, a recruiting sergeant for the real far right. The mass base of the Corbyn-led revolt against neoliberalism merely went into exile and bided its time until the opportunity emerged to create a new party. Your Party. Created in a sense by the bold initiative of Zarah Sultana in resigning from Labour and pushing Corbyn to get a move on in creating the new party. The problem is that the revolt against the neoliberalism of Labour is being waged under the banner of left social democracy. But the cause of the crisis that gave birth to this is the bankruptcy of social democracy. That is a fertile contradiction for communists to engage with.

This is good reason why communists should join the new party and encourage both our comrades, and Your Party’s militants, to study Lenin, and other Marxist material. So, moving on to this introductory chapter, what are its central points? State and Revolution was written for a socialist movement in flux, after the betrayal of all the anti-war and socialist promises of the Socialist Parties, including the British, the French and the most developed politically, the German, into chauvinism. The whole point of the work is to delve into how Social Democracy, particularly in Germany, had mangled the approach of Marxism to questions involving the State, and to correct those problems. This was written in 1917, in the face of the developing workers’ revolution. Though we are in not in a developing revolution, many of the issues dealt with are not that different from the problems that militants in Your Party face. We need programmatic answers on the question of the state, which is central.

“What is the state?”, asks Lenin, and draws upon Engels in such works as Anti-Duhring, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The state is an expression of the fact that society has split into irreconcilably warring classes. It is a weapon of the economically dominant class to keep in check the struggles of the subordinate, oppressed classes, and prevent the society from being overwhelmed by the struggles between classes. The state, then, is a weapon of the economically dominant, that is, the ruling, class in any given society. In succeeding societies, as Engels says:

“The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both…. Such were the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in Germany.” (Origin…)

Under primitive communism, before human society split into contending classes, there was no special armed repressive organisation separate from the population, only the population itself as a “self-acting armed organisation” able to defend itself collectively as and when the need arose. The state is a special armed organisation, separate from society, and closed off from the mass of the population. Lenin quotes Engels:

““The … distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes…. This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing….” (ibid)

And he continues to concretise this, as the state arose from the split of society into irreconcilable classes, so as such class rule becomes obsolete:

“The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.” (ibid)

And then Lenin goes on to talk about this question, of the “withering away of the state”, and the necessity for a violent revolution to overthrow the rule of the possessing classes, i.e., the bourgeoisie:

“Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labour).…

“When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ’abolished’. It withers away.” (Anti-Duhring)

The crucial point in this, is the question of the “withering away” of the state. Lenin is quoting this for a highly specific purpose, to combat the distortion of this concept by reformists and centrists such as Karl Kautsky, in the camp of Germany Social Democracy. The crucial point is that the reformists had long mystified and elided this question with their activities in the existing state. They propagated the myth that, superintended by reformists like themselves, the repressive forms of the bourgeois state, would “wither away”.

But that is not what Engels, or Marx for that matter, had projected at all. It is the opposite. For these revolutionary leaders, the precondition for the state, that is, a workers’ state, to “wither away”, was the prior, violent overthrow and destruction, disbanding and dispersal of the bourgeois existing state, its special bodies of armed men, its prisons, etc. Only after such a revolutionary overturn could a new state be created, a state where instead of the mass of the exploited and oppressed population being forcibly kept in their place by the state of their class enemies, you would have the exploiting minority losing their power and being kept in their place, that is suppressed, by the population armed and organised against them. The workers state, would only then be in a position to “wither away”.

That polemic was therefore directed not only against the anarchists, who believed it was simply possible to abolish the state straight away, but more so against the reformists, who believed that under their superintendence, the existing, bourgeois state could somehow “wither away”, without a violent social overturn of the existing order. We will continue to study this as we go through the book.

By Ian Donovan

Turan B’s ‘apology’ to Socialist Fight regarding the late 2019/early 2020 faction fight that resulted in the foundation of the Consistent Democrats is rather strange, once you know a couple of basic facts. One is that Socialist Fight barely exists today. It is a website that is very infrequently updated, and a journal that is the sole product of Gerry Downing, that appears occasionally. The site hasn’t been updated since March 2025. Not only that, but Turan had been a member of the Consistent Democrats group from early 2020 up to late 2025 – for more than 5 years. He was a member of Socialist Fight for no more than three years before that, from 2017 at the earliest. It is rather strange, and a product of desperation, to apologise to an (effectively defunct) organisation one was in for a (relatively) short time for one’s much longer membership in a successor organisation that is still regularly politically active. Most people, in leaving any organisation with political differences, would simply move on and do what they want to do, not look back and weep in such a maudlin manner.

The real reason Turan is doing this, and suddenly feels an affinity to Gerry Downing, is because of what they both have in common. They have both capitulated to social pressure from elements on the Jewish left who are implacably hostile to the consistently anti-capitalist, anti-ethnocentric criticism of Zionism represented by Socialist Fight in the earlier period, which endorsed the ‘Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism’ (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-sept-2014/) that I authored in September 2014, which has been since 2020 one of the basic documents of the Consistent Democrats, British Section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and continues to be so going forward.

This document is not popular with the Jewish left, where softness on liberal Zionism is still quite endemic even among a great many (not all) professed anti-Zionists because of social pressure of the many Jews who support Zionism. The Jewish-Zionist caste within the imperialist bourgeoisie, described in those Theses (though that term was formulated later), is defined by a material interest in the state of Israel, which is the purpose of its racist Law of Return citizenship law, giving citizenship rights in Israel to any Jewish person born anywhere in the world, while denying them to Palestinians native to that territory, which was seized in 1948.

This created a material bond between overseas Jewish bourgeois, particularly in the older imperialist countries, and the Israeli bourgeois state, and gave them a common national/class interest with the bourgeoise of Israel. Taken by pure size alone, Israel would be a minor imperialist power comparable to Denmark, but in fact with the imperialist caste described above, the Israeli imperialist bourgeoisie overlaps with the imperialist bourgeoisies of North America and West Europe (the only imperialist power unaffected by this phenomenon is Japan). So, with this specific international extension to its bourgeoisie, Israel acts like a superpower in the Middle East, because it has the unflinching support of the bulk of the older imperialist powers, particularly the US but only slightly lesser in Western Europe. The social weight of Jews in the imperialist ruling classes of the West is one of two more crucial factors that give this caste its remarkable power in Western politics. I cited in my 2014 Theses an article in Jewish World Review, from 2007, that in the United States, put the representation of Jews among billionaires, the most powerful elements of the capitalist elite, at between 40 and 48% – nearly half. Norman Finkelstein, in his 2018 essay Corbyn Mania, noted the following:

“The three richest Brits are Jewish. Jews comprise only .5 percent of the population but fully 20 percent of the 100 richest Brits. Relative both to the general population and to other ethno-religious groups, British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful. These data track closely with the picture elsewhere. Jews comprise only 2 percent of the US population but fully 30 percent of the 100 richest Americans, while Jews enjoy the highest household income among religious groups. Jews comprise less than .2 percent of the world’s population but, of the world’s 200 richest people, fully 20 percent are Jewish. Jews are incomparably organized as they have created a plethora of interlocking, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing communal and defence organizations that operate in both the domestic and international arenas. In many countries, not least the US and the UK, Jews occupy strategic positions in the entertainment industry, the arts, publishing, journals of opinion, the academy, the legal profession, and government. “Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population,” British-Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer notes, “in both Houses of Parliament, on the Sunday Times Rich List, in media, academia, professions, and just about every walk of public life.  The wonder would be if these raw data didn’t translate into outsized Jewish political power.” (https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/finkelstein-on-corbyn-mania/)

David Miller has cited Forbes statistics that say that on a world scale, 10% of billionaires are of Jewish origin, while only 0.2% of the world’s population is of Jewish origin (these Jewish elements of the super-rich are unsurprisingly concentrated in North America and West Europe). That is 50 times overrepresentation. But though this might seem a bit counter-intuitive, it is a product of the fact that in much of the semi-colonial world, even the bourgeoisie is so relatively poor that billionaires are much rarer. In the imperialist world, where billionaires, and the Jewish population are more concentrated, the proportion of both among the general population is relatively higher. So, in Britain, where around 0.5% of the population is of Jewish origin, and the US, where approximately 2% of the population is of Jewish origin – 20 times overrepresentation appears to be the approximate ballpark figure. Billionaires are not the be-all and end-all – other bourgeois layers fall short of the magic billion. However, there is no particular reason why their composition should be massively different. Be that as it may, overrepresentation among the very wealthy in a capitalist society does not guarantee overwhelming power, – it can help, or hinder, depending on conditions. At some times in history, aspects of this have led to persecution, with this Jewish layer of the bourgeoisie being regarded with suspicion or hatred by the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, as frequently before WW2.

The opposite is true today. They are regarded with reverence. The reason why is explained quite simply in my 2014 Theses:

“It [i.e., the Jewish-Zionist caste] is therefore both a powerful imperialist formation, and deeply unstable. In this epoch of declining capitalism, it plays the role of a kind of ‘vanguard of the bourgeoisie’ – not quite the mirror-image of Marxism but with aspirations along those lines. It has been instrumental in pushing the nationally limited imperialist bourgeoisies to partially transcend their own national particularisms. Hence the ‘traditional’ imperialist bourgeoisie, based on the nation-state, having overcome their previous fear of the supposedly proletarian-internationalist role of the Jews as a result of the outcome of WWII, now regards Jewish ‘cosmopolitanism’ and bourgeois semi-internationalism as a good thing, and to a considerable degree defers and follows the leadership of the Jewish/Zionist bourgeoisie.”

(https://www.consistent-democrats.org/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-sept-2014/)

This is expanded on in another article on Political Zionism and its Genocidal Hegemony in the Imperialist World (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/political-zionism-and-its-genocidal-hegemony-in-the-imperialist-world/), whose original version was published by Socialist Fight in January 2016 (https://socialistfight.com/2016/01/07/political-zionism-the-hegemonic-racism-of-the-early-21st-century-by-ian-donovan/), before Turan joined SF. It wrote about the change of attitude of the bulk of the imperialist bourgeoisie, after WWII and with the rise of Zionism, to this Jewish-Zionist layer:

“Whereas previously they had often looked at the Jewish bourgeoisie with suspicion, as a potential danger to them, now with the defeat of the Jewish left, they began to develop the opposite conception, which is the case today. As part of the outcome of these events, the non-Jewish bourgeoisie has come to regard its Jewish compatriots as a priceless resource of the capitalist system itself, a kind of vanguard, class conscious layer, the bearer of a culture whose connection with commodity exchange is older than capitalism itself, as a system based on the generalisation of commodity production and exchange. This became clear in the post WWII period, particularly after the rise of Israel and the 1967 war. It was manifested in the rise of neo-liberalism, with ideologues like Milton Friedman, and then neo-conservatism in Cold War II and later the neo-colonial wars against the Muslim world, with the very prominent role of Zionist ideologues, often Jewish, in these bourgeois political movements and trends which have become pretty well hegemonic in bourgeois politics.”

“And that is the take-off point for the situation we have today. Zionism has become the vanguard of racism in the main, traditional imperialist countries. Zionists are the vanguard of anti-Muslim agitation, they have been the core of the neo-conservative movement that has been, and still is, the vanguard of imperialist militarism in the Middle East. To a real extent, they are seen as a vanguard by the imperialist ruling classes in the most advanced countries. This has a material basis; for the historical reasons mentioned earlier, Jews have always been over-represented in the bourgeoisie of the advanced Western capitalist countries. In the earlier period of Jewish involvement in genuine revolutionary anti-capitalism, this was seen as threatening by many non-Jewish bourgeois in the imperialist countries.

“But with the revolutionary change of consciousness referred to earlier among both Jews and the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, this has been transformed into its opposite. Jews are now seen as almost the Holy of Holies by the Western imperialist bourgeoisie. This process was inseparable from the rise of the state of Israel with its peculiar citizenship law, the Law of Return, which gives everyone regarded as Jewish in the conventional sense the right to Israeli citizenship. Thus the overrepresentation of Jews in the ruling classes of the imperialist countries added an additional element; that overrepresented layer acquired a material stake in another state, one they had already been considerably involved in funding and bringing into existence in the earlier period on the basis of a Zionist-nationalist vision. What in effect happened is that part of the ruling classes of the Western countries came to overlap with the ruling class of Israel, the most recently and artificially created of the advanced-capitalist, imperialist states.  That is the material basis of Zionist power in the advanced capitalist countries; the ‘moral’ authority of Zionism and Israel has had its own autonomous elements, but materially it is based on that.”

These views were accepted by Gerry Downing in 2016. He even went on the Daily Politics TV show in March 2016 to defend them. These were the politics of Socialist Fight. Turan was recruited to them around 2017 and agreed with them until very recently. But over the past two years he has become socially distanced from the group for what seemed like personal reasons and no longer participated, except occasionally, in its frequent political events. It appears he has gained new social and political connections that have put him under social pressure to renounce his previous political history. But his efforts to minimise his own role are disingenuous, to say the least.

He writes:

“At the time, I gave my full support to an individual opposing Socialist Fight’s decision to expel him. My objection was not entirely rooted in political alignment, but in my discomfort with how quickly and in an opaque manner the process was handled. With hindsight, and knowing what I know now, I realise I would have voted differently if the process had been more balanced and transparent. That episode culminated in a rupture, leading those who left to form a new group, the Consistent Democrats.”

What he does not say is that there was no ‘decision’ by ‘Socialist Fight’ to expel anyone. Turan was a member of the Trotskyist Faction, the precursor of the CD group, there were three of us: Turan, comrade D (who is no longer involved), and me. We were half of the membership of SF. The others were Gerry Downing, and two other comrades who were effectively neutral, and both of whom subsequently joined the Consistent Democrats (one remained nominally in both groups).

In fact, Downing did not just claim to have expelled me as an individual, he actually said, under the headline “Socialist Fight has expelled Ian Donovan” the following:

“Socialist Fight has expelled Ian Donovan and his ‘Trotskyist Faction’ from the group at its meeting of 19 February by a unanimous vote. They were expelled for antisemitism and support for the racist, antisemitic and left Mussolini-Strasserite fascist Gilad Atzmon.” (https://socialistfight.com/2020/02/20/socialist-fight-has-expelled-ian-donovan/)

Since Turan and D were members of the Trotskyist Faction at the time – there were three of us – this passage claims that all three of us were expelled. Turan is clearly, knowingly trying to falsify his own political history here, and degrading himself. For what reasons? Who knows? During that period, he was even racially abused by some hysterical ’unaligned’ backers of Gerry Downing. In any case, the claim that there was some kind of meeting of ‘Socialist Fight’ at that time that ‘unanimously’ expelled the Trotskyist Faction is preposterous. The TF was half of the membership. And two others were neutral. So how is that numerically even possible? What actually happened is that Gerry Downing expropriated the website from the group and decided in the manner of a pint-sized version of his original mentor Healy, to publish any old abusive rubbish about those he disapproved of, even stuff that was obviously not true and not possible.

In fact, Gerry was so desperate to somehow get a majority in the group, which he didn’t have, that he tried to pay subscriptions for several semi-sympathisers so he could eventually get them a vote (for him). This is a practice so immoral that if anyone tried it in the Labour Party (before Starmer), they would likely be expelled for corruption. Gerry bitterly complained in another article that:

“We have been now forced to set up a new bank account because Ian and Turan have control of the Socialist Fight bank account and this, they believe, should give them control of the group. Ian has refused to accept the votes of the majority of the group. He has decided that John Carty is not a member and his membership subscriptions are ‘donations’ and not subscriptions. My daughter, Ella, Gareth Martin, and Charlie Walsh cannot join as candidate members for six months because he disagrees with them over what Gilad Atzmon’s politics are. He has refused to bank their subscriptions that I sent to him, said I was buying their membership and he was keeping the cheques as evidence of my ‘corruption’.” (https://socialistfight.com/2020/02/24/socialist-fight-ian-donovan-and-the-trotskyist-faction/)

When Gerry published this, he simply made himself a joke. It is obvious he was trying to rustle up a majority which he didn’t have by dubious means. Why should a faction that is marked for a purge cooperate with such a corrupt procedure directed against itself? Turan, with myself, was central in spiking this corruption, which ensured there was no ‘expulsion’ of anyone. Gerry did not expel us, he just took his ball home, and destroyed SF. The CD group took its place over time as the British Section of the LCFI. We do not engage in this kind of irrationality and are not going to disappear anytime soon.

Turan claims that: “Let me be clear: my politics are not “soft” on Zionism. I advocate for one secular state with equal rights for all. I have no interest in reinventing myself for any political gain”. Likewise, he states that “I also want to make it clear that my aim here is not to distract from, or in any way compromise, solidarity with the Palestinian people, who are enduring a genocide carried out by Israel with the full participation and support of Western imperialism.” But he protests too much, he obviously is trying to ‘reinvent’ his own political history by not mentioning the Trotskyist Faction, the precursor of CD, which he was one of the central figures in.

And while it is true that he acknowledges that the genocide is being carried out “by Israel” he is allying with people like Downing and others who effectively deny that the primary role is played by Israel and pretend that Israel is just a puppet carrying out the wishes of other imperialist powers. When in fact, in this genocide, it has been the other way around. It is true that this genocide has taken place with the “full participation and support of Western imperialism” who have armed imperialist Israel, but it is obvious that the prime driving force of this genocide is the drive for Greater Israel, which comes from within the Zionist entity itself and its international extensions in the JZ caste. It is Western politicians who are cult followers of the JZ caste that have driven attacks on democratic rights in the major Western powers, from Trump’s attacks on dissent over Palestine around the US to the attempt to proscribe Palestine Action here.

This is now facing a major crisis here as much even of the ruling class is uneasy at such irrationalities as the Palestine Action ban, and other idiocies such as the attempt to force violent Tel Aviv Macabees football thugs on the Birmingham police, with leaders of all four major parties accusing the Birmingham police and local Independent Muslim MP, Ayoub Khan, of ‘anti-Semitism’ for banning the Macabees thugs, and looking utterly ridiculous when the same thugs rioted in Tel Aviv itself. It is also in crisis in the US, as important figures in Trump’s MAGA base are splintering away because of his obvious role as a lackey of Israel, around such important figures as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and the late Charlie Kirk, who it appears likely was assassinated by Mossad for what they consider very dangerous dissent from subservience to the Israel lobby.

Turan says that Gerry Downing has been ‘vindicated’ and yet denies that there is any softness on Zionism in his political volte-face. One wonders what he thinks of a grossly pro-Zionist passage penned by Gerry Downing when he broke from the LCFI later in 2020, in the light of the current genocide. Gerry Dowing denounced me for writing the following:

“But Zionism can quite conceivably exterminate the Palestinians because the Zionist colonisation is that of the exclusion type, not the exploitation type, as Machover put it. Ronnie Kasrils, of the SACP and ANC in South Africa, was making the same point when he said that Zionism is worse than South African apartheid. It is also worse than Jim Crow. It is closer to Hitlerism for the genocidal threat it poses to the Palestinian people.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/gerry-downing-political-decline-and-centrist-capitulation/)

And Gerry responded thus:

“What Zionism might potentially do in the future is certainly not worse than what the KKK might do if afforded the opportunity. Zionism is not fascism. There are Zionists who are fascists, and we will no-platform them like we will attempt to do to all fascists. But we will never equate racists in general with fascist racists. We distinguish between the racism of the oppressor and the racism of the oppressed, we distinguish between the fascist Zionism of the oppressor and the racist, apartheid or liberal Zionism of the oppressed, many of whom genuinely fear the return of the Holocaust and so support the state of Israel.” (https://socialistfight.com/2021/02/15/socialist-fight-breaks-with-the-lcfi/)

Gerry thus said that Zionists generally, except for those who openly declare themselves to be fascists (such as the Kahanist Ben Gvir and the clerical-fascist Smotrich), represent “the racist, apartheid or liberal Zionism of the oppressed, many of whom genuinely fear the return of the Holocaust and so support the state of Israel.” He thus said that the mainstream of Zionism, from Netanyahu leftward, represents the “racism of the oppressed”. In the light of the current genocide in Gaza, this ought to be extremely offensive to any opponent of the genocide.  It is very clear that the CD group were correct in their prognosis in 2020, and that Zionism was destined to become genocidal in ways that South African apartheid, and Jim Crow, were never able. Turan both claims that Gerry Downing was “vindicated” in his political attack over me on Zionism and yet that his own politics are “not ‘soft’ on Zionism”. It is clear when he wrote this recantation of a principled political position he was not thinking of the Palestinian victims of Zionism, but his own growing comfort with semi-chauvinist elements on the Jewish left, who he seems to have got closer to in his activities as a roving photographer. There is nothing wrong with what he was doing regarding this, so long as you keep your political wits about you. But he seems to have failed to do so.

Which is where David Miller comes in. It should be noted that defence of David Miller in his current legal battles with Zionists is a question of class principle. Much of the left is flinching on this – from the SWP to the CPGB/Weekly Worker to Jewish Voice for Liberation (formerly Jewish Voice for Labour) to Gerry Downing. And now Turan has split from the CD group because we refuse to capitulate to the reactionary outcry against Miller. Of course, David’s original victimisation by Bristol University, fuelled by an open letter demanding his sacking from MPs of all major parties, and some minor ones, even the Green Party, was a Zionist campaign against him for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’.

We have some differences with David Miller, but mainly where we consider that sometimes his approach is a bit too rigid. Like where he recently said Jeremy Corbyn is a Zionist because he supports a two-state solution in the Middle East. We certainly concur with Zarah Sultana’s criticism that Corbyn’s leadership capitulated to Zionism and the Zionist witchhunt against him, but that begs the question of, if Corbyn were simply a Zionist, why there should be a witchhunt against him in the first place! This in our view is an example of over-rigid thinking by David Miller. But despite such rigidity, unlike for instance Gerry Downing, his heart is clearly in the right place, and he is clearly driven by righteous anger at those who are in any way politically soft on Zionism in the context of this genocide.

Likewise for the supposed ‘rabbit holes’ Turan complains about. He apparently says that “Jewish anti-Zionists are compromised by ‘residual Zionism.’”. Which is apparently terrible, because:

“This logic is nothing less than condemning Jews for being Jews; damned if they support Zionism and damned if they don’t. Jewish anti-Zionists have long been among the Palestinian movement’s strongest allies, precisely because their existence disproves the false claim that Israel represents all Jews.”

While genuinely anti-Zionist Jews are indeed important allies of the struggle against Zionism, this is overstated. To understand it properly, you must understand that what we call the JZ caste is an imperialist formation that operates in the major North American and West European imperialist countries as a social and political agency of imperialist Israel. As previously noted, the racist Israeli Law of Return gives the Jewish imperialist bourgeoisie in those countries, where they mainly live, a direct material stake in the Israeli imperialist-bourgeois state, as their state in class/communal terms.  But of course, the same racist law also covers all Jews – and creates a form of ‘national’-imperialist identification among non-bourgeois Jews, those without proletarian class consciousness at least – and this in a population that (as Tony Greenstein, no less, pointed out) no longer really has a proletariat.

In this context, saying that “Jewish anti-Zionists have long been among the Palestinian movement’s strongest allies” is akin to saying that the British working-class movement is one of the “strongest” allies of the Irish people against British imperialism. It simply is untrue. The British labour movement to this day is riddled with support for anti-Irish, pro-imperialist sentiment over Ireland. It may be dormant as currently there is not a mass struggle against British rule in the six counties, but as was shown in the period of the previous Irish war, the British labour movement was anything but “one of the strongest allies” of the Irish people. Unfortunately. And Jewish anti-Zionists, while we welcome their political activism and seek to radicalise it more, are anything but the “strongest allies” of the Palestinian movement.

If you want a barometer of that, look who among Jewish anti-Zionists is prepared to tolerate and solidarise with those who criticise the activities of the JZ bourgeois-imperialist caste in the West. Anyone who attempts to ‘cancel’ or ban criticism of the JZ caste by Marxists is a social-imperialist – a political agent of the imperialist bourgeoisie in the workers movement. But the political layer of the bourgeoisie they are acting for is not the British or US bourgeoisie in the traditional sense; they are acting as political agents of the Jewish-Zionist imperialist-bourgeois caste itself, which is the prime mover in today’s genocide. Such social- imperialists encompass all those on the Jewish left who have denounced David Miller for supposed anti-Semitism, and all those who denounced Socialist Fight between 2015 and 2020, and since then the Consistent Democrats since for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ for pointing out the existence of, and producing a Marxist analysis of, the Jewish-Zionist caste among the imperialist bourgeoisie. Those, like Tony Greestein and Jewish Voice for Liberation (formerly Jewish Voice for Labour), in seeking to ban criticisms of the JZ caste in the workers movement, no matter how much anti-Zionist rhetoric they use, and no matter even if they take part in supportable actions and are victimised for them (in which case, like Tony Greenstein, they should be defended tooth and nail), nevertheless in doing this are acting for what is objectively their ‘own’ ruling class, acting as enemies of workers democracy and political agents of the JZ caste, part of the imperialist bourgeoisie, in the working class movement.

So, when Turan complains “Miller has gone so far as to claim that the UK is now an Israeli colony run from Tel Aviv”, Turan is answering, assuming DM did say literally that, an empirical observation with a flat denial of reality. The explanation for the subservience of the bulk of British bourgeois politicians to Zionism, grotesquely demonstrated recently over Aston Villa/Tel Aviv Macabees recently, is not that Britain is literally a colony, but rather that there is bizarre political cult of Zionism among the imperialist bourgeoisie in the West, the mirror image of the old bourgeois anti-Semitism. Which leads them to behave so that it superficially appears that way. But if Turan wishes to say that there is nothing out of the ordinary about such incidents as the Macabees affair, that it is normal functioning of British capitalism, then it is he who is at odds with reality, not David Miller.

Then there is the crescendo of Turan’s attack on Miller, that he has discussed the question of supposed Jewish ‘super intelligence’ with some elements of the far right, among the few that have not simply declared their loyalty to Israel as the most successful (so far) example of a racist ethnic state that ever existed. But this question arises from time to time among those attempting to get to grips with the Jewish question – the reason for the apparent domination of Jews in some spheres of intellectual life. Those who are trying to understand Jewish history properly are well advised to read a wide variety of views on the subject, to try to understand it comprehensively. At the same time some discretion is advised, as we do not seek to platform such people.

The actual explanation for such phenomena is in the sphere of class – the role of Jews as the embodiment of commercial capital under pre-capitalist natural economy, in Europe and indeed in some other places, did tend, because of the international connections of such traders, to broaden their understanding the outside world and give them an intellectual advantage over those not involved in what Abram Leon called the “people-class”. Some who have investigated aspects of Jewish history say that some Jews actually at least dabbled in eugenics to try to enhance this phenomenon. This is possible, as there appears to be evidence that Brahmins in India, for instance, at the summit of the caste system, did similar things. These are entirely valid subjects to study, even if it is a mistake to engage in public exchanges with elements of the far right about it.

This is what Gilad Atzmon called the ‘cognitive elite’. It is a product of class, not ‘race’, and is in some way like what the European aristocracies call ‘blue blood’. Symmetrically opposite phenomena can exist among those who were enslaved; degraded cultures as noted by G.E.M. De Ste Croix in his enormous work The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981).

In any case, it is grossly hypocritical for Gerry Downing to denounce David Miller for such a mistake and demand his ostracism, along with Turan, who now says that Downing is ‘vindicated’. Gerry Downing regularly writes for the Weekly Worker, he does not ‘ostracise’ them. Even though, as is their policy, they periodically publish material from people on the far right in their letters page, and even sometimes allow debates to develop with such people on that page. I have long held this to be wrong; at times in the past, I have found my sharply critical letters refused publication while some Yaxley-Lennon supporter gets their letter published. But I would not smear the Weekly Worker as pro-fascist because of this error, even though they have sometimes tried to smear me like this. In joining this campaign against David Miller, the fake-left, the SWP, WW, Gerry D and now Turan, are capitulating to a reactionary outcry in some ways like that against Julian Assange in the past.

David Miller, in spite of being sacked for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ by Bristol University after a virulent Zionist campaign including the all-party letter by MPs demanding his sacking, won his industrial tribunal case against the University, and this set a legal precedent that anti-Zionist views are a protected characteristic, a valid philosophical belief, under the Equality Act, making it unlawful for someone to be victimised because of their anti-Zionist views. That was an important victory for all anti-Zionist militants over the Israel lobby, really over the J-Z caste, and a real gain for the working-class movement. There is a hysterical campaign by Zionists to reverse that gain, through their sponsorship of an appeal by Bristol University to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, to be heard this month (November).

David Miller was also outrageously held and questioned under the Terrorism Act when he returned from covering Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Lebanon as a journalist several months ago. The police had no valid reason for doing so; it was done for the Zionists. And the Zionist fake-charity the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAAS) have tried to instigate a private prosecution against him for some tweets that they alleged were in some way hateful; just a couple of weeks ago the CAAS suffered a major setback as the judge in that trial noted that they had unlawfully withheld crucial evidence regarding context in this case, and gave them 28 days to hand it over to the court. It looks likely their case could collapse because of this. But the whole thing is obviously part of a Zionist campaign to overturn the ET ruling in his favour, and thus also overturn the gain made for all anti-Zionists that his original victory represented. This is why the ‘left’ campaign against David Miller crosses class lines.

As I said, the Zionist campaign against David Miller resembles in some ways the campaign against Julian Assange. And like in that case, much of the left is crap on this question. Those echoing the Zionists campaign against his supposed ‘anti-semitism’ in these circumstances are doing the Zionists work for them and trying to undermine solidarity in a struggle that is in the interests of all opponents of Zionist terrorism. We in the Consistent Democrats utterly reject this betrayal of basic class principles and express our full solidarity with David Miller against the witchhunters.