This Red Partisan supplement was distributed at a Spartacist League public forum in London on 17th October, where they discussed the new issue of Spartacist, concerning their own recent 9th International Conference.

The new issue of the English Language international organ of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), Spartacist issue 71, September 2026, has an innovative article by Vincent David titled “Fourth International After World War 2 – How Trotskyism Fractured”. The thesis he puts forward is an important corrective to the conceits of many ‘Trotskyists’ today; he points out that a fundamental disorientation overcame pretty much the entire Fourth International by the end of WWII. So fundamental was this that it is questionable whether the movement could be regarded as a revolutionary force.

His thesis is that the FI completely failed to understand that the post-war situation was fundamentally different to the sketchy predictions of Trotsky and the FI leadership before the war. Instead of a social crisis and economic collapse of European and US capitalism, the conquest of imperialist hegemony by the United States enabled it to both save European capitalism economically, and reduce the European imperialist powers to its vassals. Instead of the disintegration and collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, the titanic struggle against the 1941 Nazi invasion drove the Nazis back to Berlin and their doom. This ended with the  bureaucratic overthrow of capitalism from the Baltic to the Adriatic, giving the impetus and broader context for the overthrow of capitalism in China, Korea, Vietnam, later Cuba and a huge political accelerant for the destruction of the European colonial empires by mass-based nationalist movements after WWII.

He points to the failure of any section of the FI to fully grasp what happened, and put forward a concrete revolutionary perspective at the time. He  characterised thus the reactions of the main leaders of the FI, who were to become leaders of different factions, and then separate, counterposed organisations:

“The leaders of the movement—from Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, who emerged from the underground in Europe, to James P. Cannon in the U.S.—proved incapable of squaring this new reality with the literal text of the 1938 Transitional Program. Rather than responding to new problems with new answers, they clung to outdated predictions and retreated into a defensive, rigid orthodoxy. Year after year, official documents and resolutions stubbornly predicted an imminent economic meltdown, the rise of bonapartism in Europe and the coming World War III, completely blind to the capitalist stabilization occurring in Europe.”

[…]

“Stuck in sterile orthodoxy, the Fourth International was incapable of understanding how the Cold War was forcing Stalinist and nationalist leaders into confrontation with the American empire and its imperial partners. Because they could not grasp these living dynamics, they dismissed mass support for these leaderships as mere subjective and temporary confusion. Unable to engage the real contradictions within these movements, the International retreated into an abstract, Europe-centric framework—paying lip service to the colonial revolution while remaining politically blind to its true significance and specific tasks.”

Such documents as the US SWP’s Theses on the American Revolution predicted imminent economic collapse and the eruption of major struggles, and were completely at odds with the way post-war development was actually progressing.

He then quotes Trotsky from Lessons of October that ““The party which does not keep step with the historical tasks of its own class becomes, or runs the risk of becoming, the indirect tool of other classes” and goes on to demonstrate that the FI leaders embraced a Stalinophobic position, calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe in 1946. In 1948 the Second World Congress of the FI’s main document was titled “Against Wall St and the Kremlin” – a third-campist thrust. The FI rejected the idea that Stalinists could lead any overturn of capitalism, which disarmed them before first the Yugoslav revolution, then the Chinese revolution. This generated a confused mixture of illusions in Tito particular, and a belief that his regime was no longer Stalinist. The US SWP failed to defend North Korea for several months at the start of the Korean war. Comrade David sums up the events that the FI was failing to analyse correctly by saying:

“…the International spent the years leading up to 1948 claiming it was impossible for movements under Stalinist leadership to carry out any social overturn. In China, as Communist forces led by Mao were inflicting one defeat after another on the nationalist Guomindang, the Fourth International insisted that the CP was capable only of betrayal. Worse even, Chinese Trotskyists advocated a ceasefire in the civil war and actually opposed the victory of the Communist forces! In East Europe, as the ruling classes were systematically liquidated by the Red Army, the Fourth International doubled down on denying reality, insisting at the 1948 Congress that these states remained fully capitalist. The fear that accepting reality would lead to conciliating Stalinism was paralyzing the comrades.”

Pabloism emerges

Subsequently, the head of the FI International Secretariat, Michel Pablo, reacted with his (in)famous 1951 document Where Are We Going?, which advocated deep entryism into particularly Stalinist, but also social democratic parties, believing that a ‘new world reality” had rendered Stalinist parties centrist, capable of “roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation” and that the job of Trotskyists was to push these parties to the left.  This split the FI in 1953 with an international faction led by the US SWP denouncing Pablo as ‘liquidationist’.

Comradely David’s talk is ground-breaking when he says:

“I am going to do something quite dangerous and unprecedented here. I am going to defend Pablo on a number of points. It is essential to cut through the rigid dogmas of the traditional anti-Pablo camp, which our own tendency has, in some cases, repeated. Pablo was trying to grapple with real life; his fatal error was drawing non-revolutionary conclusions from it.”

He goes on to partially defend Pablo without endorsing his overall scheme, which he does regard as liquidationist:

“The anti-Pabloites raised a hue and cry, denouncing Pablo for viewing the world through the prism of two camps—the imperialist camp led by the U.S. on the one hand, and the camp of the USSR and the colonial revolution. The anti-Pabloites claimed Pablo was erasing the fundamental class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class. This was a rigid, undialectical critique. During the Cold War, the global class struggle was objectively refracted through the concrete antagonism between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet bloc—just as today, it is refracted through the antagonism between the U.S. and China. This does not mean class struggle ceases to exist within these blocs. Social reality is made of multiple layers. But to deny that the world consisted of a struggle between the imperialist and Soviet camps in the name of a ‘pure’ bourgeois-versus-worker line of battle leads immediately to ‘Third Campism,’ which always ends up capitulating to imperialism.”

He also defended aspects of Pablo’s entryism perspective, without endorsing Pablo’s non-revolutionary conclusion about its purpose:

“…it was entirely correct for small propaganda groups to seek entry into mass Stalinist or nationalist organizations, even with a long-term perspective. Whether this is possible or how to do it depends on the concrete. … If the raw material of the vanguard was to be found inside the CPs or colonial liberation movements, while the Fourth International had only small forces, then it was vital to have a perspective to enter. The problem was not the tactic; it was the political justification for it….”

And he points out that the criticism of Pablo’s opponents was generally Stalinophobic:

“Many accused Pablo of revising the nature of Stalinism. He definitely did—but not always in the way the anti-Pabloites claimed. The SWP majority’s main line of attack against Pabloites was the mantra: Stalinism is counterrevolutionary through and through. … Such formulations are not only disorienting. They are false”.

[…]

“The smashing of a capitalist state, the destruction of landlordism, the expulsion of imperialism—even if carried out under bureaucratic control—is the opposite of counterrevolutionary! It is highly progressive. Furthermore, in China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam and elsewhere, social revolutions were the product of powerful revolutionary upsurges of the masses, pushing Stalinist leaders to go way beyond what they wanted. While Pablo did prettify those forces, his opponents simply wrote off the deep, living contradictions within those movements. The labelling of social revolutions as ‘counterrevolutionary’ was just a lazy way to sweep a problem away rather than solving it. It was also the surest way to guarantee the isolation and discrediting of Trotskyists.”

And he explains precisely what is wrong with Pabloism:

“The problem is the following: the seizure of power in one country does not complete the revolution, but only initiates it. As long as imperialism remains, the conquests of a single country continue to be subject to imperialist asphyxiation and the threat of reversal. Therefore, a revolutionary orientation can be nothing but a conscious strategy for world revolution. This is what the early Comintern was built for.

And this is not the path the Chinese, Yugoslav or Korean Communist Parties were following. They did not ‘cease to be Stalinist Parties.’ Pablo reduced Stalinism to the following of orders from Moscow. This is not what Stalinism is fundamentally. Stalinism is the subordination of the world revolution to the building of socialism in one country, which leads to seeking an illusory peaceful coexistence with imperialism. It arises from the interests of a privileged layer, separated from the masses and caught between them and world imperialism.

Tito leaned on U.S. imperialism against the USSR, leading to his total capitulation in the face of the Korean War. The CPC’s foreign policy was geared toward preserving the People’s Republic of China at the expense of the world revolution, as seen with the huge pressure it put on the Vietnamese CP to accept partition in 1954 or its later betrayal of the Indonesian CP.

Of course, Pablo was correct to argue to support these revolutions. He was correct to argue that Trotskyists had to link themselves to the masses under Stalinist leadership, including through entry tactics. What was fatal in his tactics was that they were all motivated not by the need to build a revolutionary current within them, but by the illusion that the ‘objective process’ would push Communist parties to become revolutionary. This notion was then quickly extended to all sorts of forces, from the MNR in Bolivia, to Ben Bella in Algeria and even to the left wing of the Labour Party!”

The conclusion he draws is:

“The task of the era was to defeat the American empire. The only coherent way the Fourth International could challenge Tito, Mao, all the CPs and the nationalist leaders was on the terrain of the world revolution. This isn’t an abstraction. It meant developing a serious strategy that sought to defend the workers states based on the intensification of the class struggle abroad against imperialism. And from this standpoint denounce the CPs’ accommodation to imperialism as well as their narrow and nationalist strategies to defend the revolutions at the expense of workers, national minorities and the international proletariat.”

His criticism of the ‘Anti-Pabloites” is damning:

“While Pablo openly tailed Stalinist and nationalist movements, the International Committee retreated into a thoroughly sectarian, sterile, and reality-denying approach to those same movements. … And one of the most damning indictments of this split was its geography. By 1953, the majority of the Fourth International’s membership was likely located in the colonial and semicolonial world—across Latin America and Asia. However, at its creation, the bulk of the International Committee was based in imperialist countries, with the majority of members from the colonial and semi-colonial world staying with Pablo.

And this is the tragedy of the 1953 fracture. The Trotskyist movement split into two broken halves, neither of which could offer a coherent, revolutionary answer to Stalinist and nationalist forces in the fight to defeat the American empire.”

And in the introduction, he puts forward the following critique of contemporary Trotskyism, which certainly strikes home in its description of what has happened to the Trotskyist movement:

“By 1953, the Fourth International had fractured in a fatal split. And those splinters would themselves split again, and again, most often in confused and obscure disputes. Fast forward to today, there have been at least 71 different rival international tendencies claiming the mantle of Trotskyism, with at least 35 still in existence (according to comrade Markov’s research). And each of these currents would proclaim themselves to be the real continuity of Trotskyism, against all other ‘revisionists.’ These are the symptoms of a movement in crisis, which we must understand if we are to claim to unite revolutionary forces today.”

At one level this is a perfectly reasonable point: the notion that any literal continuity of ‘pure’ Trotskyism exists today, or could exist, by some process of laying on of hands from generation to generation, is an idealist fantasy given that even the best of these political forces represented a complex political admixture derived from different trends. Every real movement has that character. The question is not of one of literal continuity, but rather of what should be the correct attitude of Marxists to any given political question that occurs, and also, since no question occurs in isolation, to a variety of questions both in their contemporary interaction as well as their successive sequential interactions. In that sense, everything is up for discussion, but this is not an idle matter of abstract debate, but a matter of theory and history as a guide to action. The only purpose of such debates can be to strengthen our political understanding of the questions we have to deal with today, to formulate a correct revolutionary practice going forward. He/she who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it, as comrade David in his own way points out. He makes a very good case that the ICFI was as egregiously Stalinophobic – itself a form of capitulation to imperialism –  as the Pabloites were liquidationist toward Stalinism, and the combination of the two was the germ of the extreme fragmentation of the Trotskyist left. One key lesson of this is that at any point in time, getting things right is crucial not just for now but for the future, and conversely getting things wrong can have adverse effects long into the future.

“Campism” vs Third Campism

To extend this discussion to Ukraine, comrade David writes, in a section subtitled “The ‘Theory of Blocs’”:

“…During the Cold War, the global class struggle was objectively refracted through the concrete antagonism between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet bloc—just as today, it is refracted through the antagonism between the U.S. and China. This does not mean class struggle ceases to exist within these blocs. Social reality is made of multiple layers. But to deny that the world consisted of a struggle between the imperialist and Soviet camps in the name of a ‘pure’ bourgeois-versus-worker line of battle leads immediately to ‘Third Campism,’ which always ends up capitulating to imperialism.”

The formulation about China is one-sided, and too hasty to shuffle away the USSR (or what remains of it, which is mainly Russia and Belarus) from this antagonism. Though it is correct to say that China, as a giant deformed workers’ state, is the West’s primary antagonist, it is not their exclusive antagonist. The antagonism of the Western bourgeoisie, on both sides of the Atlantic, for Russia is if anything now more vehement than when the USSR was still a workers’ state, i.e., before 1991. This is because they perceive that the counterrevolution is incomplete, the neoliberal shock that was supposed to bury the workers state once-and-for-all, has been rolled back, that Putin is a creature of the old USSR apparatus in spite of his non-communist formal beliefs, and that Russia’s mixed economy (over 50% state owned) is a travesty of what they would expect from capitalist restoration (a ‘socialist’ deformation, so to speak).

Above all, for all the Western fulminations about Putin being allegedly a ‘dictator’, he does allow various Western pollsters and the like to survey the Russian population, and those agencies tell them that Putin does have massive support among the Russian population, for his rollback of the murderous neoliberal shock treatment that Yeltsin and the neoliberal West imposed on Russia in the 1990s. They see Belarus as an even more horrible example of a stalled counterrevolution – ‘capitalism’ with huge ‘socialist’ deformations, in a sense the dialectical mirror image of a deformed workers state, with a new form of combined and uneven development involving the intertwining of capitalist and post-capitalist modes of production.

Western bourgeois hatred of Russia has transformed from old-style Cold War anti-communism, which professed to be ‘democratic’ and ethnically neutral, to a virulent Russophobia today, where Russian people and culture are simply demonised. This actually bears resemblance to Hitler’s hatred of Jews. It is worth remembering that Hitler’s Jew-hatred was predicated on the delusion that Jews were intrinsically, organically inclined to ‘subversion’, and were the source of Marxism and Bolshevism. Zionism has cured that delusion among the bourgeoisie. Instead, we have the belief that Russians are intrinsically inclined to disobedience to neoliberalism’s categorical imperatives – ‘subversive’ and communist in effect –  and that Hitler was right to hate and massacre Russians (though not Jews). That is the belief system that is behind Western imperialist anti-Russian hatred and their arming of open Nazis in Ukraine who glory in Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, to kill Russians and Russian-speakers. Much mainstream Western anti-Russian propaganda today resembles Nazi Anti-Jewish hatred, and it has infected part of the left.

The different attitude of Trump to Russia is a product of his own position as a de-facto hireling of Israel and Likud in particular, whose billionaire Adelson dynasty paid for his three election campaigns so that he could wage war against Iran on their behalf, which Biden, Obama and earlier GW Bush and the Clintons refused to do. The Zionists are well aware that the declining US does not have the resources to do both. The “Russiagate” conspiracy theory that Trump is somehow a Kremlin agent was (and is) a cowardly means of the US bourgeois mainstream to try to combat this Israeli interference in US politics without naming who is actually responsible, which would cause a huge crisis in intra-imperialist politics, which is on the verge of happening anyhow because of Trump’s defeat at the hands of Iran.

There is a major contradiction between comrade David’s partial defence of the ‘Theory of Blocs’ as put forward by Pablo, and this passage about Ukraine in the document from the ICL’s 9^th International Conference:

“This is the central flaw of ‘campism.’ It rejects proletarian independence as the guiding thread of the anti-imperialist struggle and supports any force opposed to the U.S. and its allies, regardless of its class character or policies. Under this logic, states such as Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, or alliances like BRICS+ are treated as progressive poles of resistance simply because they present a challenge to U.S. dominance. This logic of lesser-evilism ends up excusing the crimes and oppression carried out by such forces on the grounds that they weaken a rival.

“The implications of this approach are disastrous. Siding with Russia in the Ukraine war, for example, on the basis that it is fighting a NATO proxy accepts and legitimizes the national oppression of Ukrainians as a lesser evil in the struggle against U.S. imperialism. This further divides the working class in Eastern Europe, binding it to its respective rulers, thus obstructing its revolutionary unity against the dominant forces responsible for the current status quo in the region: the U.S., EU and NATO.” (https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/71/unite)

Regarding Russia, this is actually a wobble away from the correct points comrade David made about the ‘theory of blocs’, cited earlier. It could be updated thus:

“ … the anti-imperialist struggle, which the proletariat must champion for its own class reasons, is objectively refracted through the concrete antagonism between imperialism and Russia (and ultimately China). This does not mean class struggle ceases to exist within these blocs. Social reality is made of multiple layers. But to deny that the world consists of a struggle between the imperialist and anti-imperialist camps in the name of a ‘pure’ bourgeois-versus-worker line of battle leads immediately to ‘Third Campism,’ which always ends up capitulating to imperialism.”

There is no evidence that Russia is fighting today for the national oppression of Ukraine. It is fighting against the national and language-based oppression of the Russian-speaking people of the South-Eastern half of what was Ukraine, centred on the Donbass. That oppression began with the far-right Maidan coup, instituted by the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy in 2014, with a bloody ‘anti-terrorist operation’ against Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbass who did not consent to be governed by a Neo-Nazi regime bent on stamping out their language. This was accompanied by massacres by Ukrainian Nazis of Russian-speakers in places like Odessa, outside the Donbass. Russian troops have fought in the mainly Russian speaking areas of Ukraine, and have not sought to conquer the Ukrainian-speaking West. 

They are making steady but excellent progress in painstakingly defeating the fascist occupiers of the Donbass, and rebuilding towns and cities that were hugely damaged by the Nazis – Mariupol being a prime example. The real logic of this war is a comprehensive partition of Ukraine along language lines, possibly with some special arrangement for Kiev, which is more mixed. This is the consequence of trying to supress the native language of around half the population. There is no evidence that Russia aims to conquer and rule Western Ukraine. There is a possibility that Poland and perhaps Romania/Moldova may step in when Ukraine loses the war and take back territory that is historically Polish or Romanian-speaking, but that is nothing to do with Russia. Denazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine clearly means an Austria-like status for a rump, neutral Ukraine. That is just as reasonable for Russia as the expulsion of US bases from the Persian Gulf is for Iran.

The Russian People and Oppression

Many Russian nationalists, including Putin, are critical of the early Bolsheviks for including overwhelmingly Russian and Russian-speaking areas like the Donbass and Odessa in the early Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the light of today, they have a point, as with the counterrevolution, those populations became oppressed. It is clear that other means would have been better . Putin’s other criticisms seem doubtful. Such as if matters had been addressed differently, Ukrainian might have been seen as merely a dialect and absorbed into Russian the way such dialects as Provençal or Picard were into French. That is far less convincing.

There is no evidence, contrary to Western propaganda, that Putin aims to reconquer a Great Russian empire. In fact, Putin appears to be a lesser-Russian nationalist, akin to Atatürk. The stereotype of Russians as arch-imperialists is reactionary and should not be indulged, even when it appears on the left, as from the social-imperialist contemporary United Secretariat, who just echo NATO and Western imperialism. Russian imperialism ceased in 1917, and was problematic even then in some ways as Trotsky pointed out in his History of the Russian Revolution:

“India participated in the war both essentially and formally as a colony of England. The participation of China, though in a formal sense ‘voluntary,’ was in reality the interference of a slave in the fight of his masters. The participation of Russia falls somewhere halfway between the participation of France and that of China. Russia paid in this way for her right to be an ally of advanced countries, to import capital and pay interest on it – that is, essentially, for her right to be a privileged colony of her allies – but at the same time for her right to oppress and rob Turkey, Persia, Galicia, and in general the countries weaker and more backward than herself. The twofold imperialism of the Russian bourgeoisie had basically the character of an agency for other mightier world powers.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch02.htm)

This was the feeblest manifestation of imperialism, the weak link that did not survive the first imperialist war before being torn out by the roots by the victorious proletariat – mainly that of Russia. In the aftermath of the revolution, Soviet Russia was invaded by 13 different imperialist armies. That invasion was followed 22 years later by Hitler’s bloody counterrevolutionary assault. All these events make it entirely reasonable to regard Russians as a population (indirectly) oppressed by Western imperialism, not an incorrigible oppressor people, despite all the crimes of Stalinism. That is the purpose of the plan behind the West’s anti-Russian drive, as laid out in Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard design – the breakup of Russia and its subordination to Western imperialism.

The image of Russia and the Russian people as habitual Great Russian imperialists, striving to conquer Europe, is a reactionary myth. Oppressive Russian nationalism was indeed a problem to be dealt with by the Bolsheviks, and there was a revival of that with the degeneration of the revolution under Stalinism, but administrative attempts to dilute the influence of the Russian population by placing portions of that population in new non-Russian republics, in the light of hindsight, might not have been the best way to deal with this national question. Nothing is above questioning or reconsideration in the light of historical experience. And Trotskyists should have no truck with third campism today any more than in 1953, as comrade David rightly pointed out about the earlier case. We cannot rearm the proletariat, either in the West, or Russia and Ukraine for that matter, for proletarian revolution without confronting the reactionary role of Russophobia and third-campism today.

The extensive discussions at tonight’s forum are available here. The presentations are loosely based on this article of the same title, so this can be used for reference.

In the Holborn and St Pancras (HSP) By-Election, there is currently no Labour or left-wing candidate that is sufficiently on the side of the working class and the oppressed to merit electoral support from those communists who are concerned, as Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party says, to “represent the interests of the [working class] movement as a whole”.

In order to merit critical support, a non-communist candidate has to have something that they stand for that is unambiguously positive from the standpoint of the working class, even though the communist minority may very well suspect that they will betray such policies or promises if elected. The point of the tactic of critical support is to exploit some kind of contradiction between a claim to stand for the working class and the oppressed, and their real politics and deeds.

There are three contenders for such critical support in HSP. They are – Sagal Abdi-Wali, the Labour Party candidate, George Galloway, the Workers Party (WP) candidate and indeed WP leader, and Zack Polanski, the Green Party (GP) candidate and also GP leader.

There are fundamental problems with all three, not abstractly but concretely, in the current context. Abdi-Wali is the leader of Camden Council and, though she is of Somali origin, is an unrepentant supporter of Keir Starmer. Notwithstanding the traitorous Zionist and arch enemy of the Corbynite left being driven out of Downing Street and replaced by Andy Burnham, Burnham’s words about how Labour “got it wrong” after October 7^th 2023, and even Ed Miliband’s supposed sanctions against Zionist settlers in the West Bank, Labour at its conference is still arresting people for protesting against genocide, using the fraudulent proscription of Palestine Action for ‘terrorism’ as a fig-leaf. Meanwhile, the real neo-Nazi terrorist movement Patriot Platform, whose masked thugs have been terrorising the streets of cities like Dover and Portsmouth, are not proscribed, but their thugs are free to threaten all opponents of the far right. Opposition to electoral support to Burnham’s Labour is a no-brainer.

Then there is George Galloway, and his Workers Party. He has some very good positions, on opposing Zionism and opposing NATO’s proxy war against Russia over Ukraine. If these were only what he was known for, it would be correct not just to just advocate a vote for him, but to actively get involved in the campaign. But he also stands for ‘Stop the Boats’. In the Runcorn and Helsby by-election of May 2025, WP candidate and Deputy Leader Peter Ford stood on the slogans “Stop the Boats” and “Tough on Immigration, Tough on the Causes of Immigration”. This by-election was won by Reform at the most dangerous point (so far) of the far-right wave assisted by this very right-wing ‘Labour government’. Instead of fighting against the reactionary tide, Galloway’s party tried to swim with it. With miserable results – Ford got only 0.5% of the vote in a by-election where Reform defeated Starmer’s Labour by just 6 votes.

Galloway’s own statement for the HSP by election states, in attacking the Greens, says “Instead of addressing poverty, immigration, energy prices, they were voting together last week to introduce legislation to make killing people legal. We believe voters will welcome the chance to reject this madness.” We don’t share the Green Party’s support for the (defeated) Assisted Dying Bill, but we do not consider “addressing” “immigration” – that is, targeting migrant workers for repression and exclusion, to be the job of a working-class party. Our job, on the contrary, is to defend the rights of, and promote solidarity with, migrant workers and refugees. This is criticism of this foul government from the right, and makes a mockery of the correct criticisms the WP makes of the NATO/Zionist atrocities in the Donbass and Gaza. And with the masked fascist attacks on migrant workers, this issue is centre-stage, and has been ever since Labour was elected. We cannot give any support to a party that stands on such an anti-immigrant platform.

Then there is the Green Party. This is not even a working-class party – it is a party of the radical middle class; it does not orient to the labour movement. It doesn’t have a solid base of outright bourgeois support either; it represents a social layer that is capable either of following the working class or the bourgeoisie. It is a party of protest against the environmental destruction that capitalism brings. Whether it attributes this to capitalism is thus pretty important as to whether it has any potential to be won to the side of the working class. Recently the Greens in England and Wales have acquired a more left-wing reputation because of Polanski’s outspoken attacks on Israeli crimes. He actually publicly apologized to Corbyn for reactionary positions he took regarding the witchhunt in the Labour Party prior to the genocide, which is significant.  The failure of Your Party to organize the 800,000 who signed up a year ago as potential supporters of a new working-class socialist party allowed Polanski’s party to win over around 200,000 of those people with his leftist rhetoric particularly over Zionism. It also led the former independent candidate Andrew Feinstein, who stood against Starmer in this seat in the General Election, to call for votes to Polanski in this by-election, and then Chris Williamson, until recently a deputy leader of the Workers Party, to resign from that party in disagreement with Galloway’s decision to stand, and call for votes for Polanski also.

Both of them did so on the understanding that Polanski was supporting the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion at the coming Green Party conference. And in the case of Andrew Feinstein, he did so on the basis that Polanski endorsed the demands of the Camden People’s Alliance, the left-wing local independent umbrella group that Feinstein would have stood for before Polanski standing became a live issue.  But these were hardly challenging – mainly about local issues. After these endorsements, Polanski backed away from supporting the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion demanding extensive amendments to dilute it. Which led to criticism of Polanski, including from Chris Williamson. But there is an inherent problem in such support, in that it does nothing to address the question of the non-working-class nature of the Green Party, vague ‘left’ verbiage notwithstanding. The record of the Greens in local councils, in coalitions often with Liberal Democrats where they have regularly carried out austerity, is appalling.  However, because of the mass influx of erstwhile YP supporters, which quadrupled its membership, there is a potential class-based division in the Greens. A coherent working-class party could, if it were not simply able to stand itself, place some much more stringent demands on the Greens, as a possible lever to split them. This is what one of our comrades proposed in a motion in Croydon Your Party: three demands, on top of a decent position on “Zionism is racism”:

“(a) a clear statement from the GP that the root cause of the environmental crisis their party was set up to address, is capitalism, which therefore needs to be abolished.

“(b) That Zack Polanski and Your Party should issue a statement jointly defending Diane Abbot against the renewed witchhunting of her in the Labour Party, for her justified attack on NATO aggression as the cause of the war in Ukraine.

“(c) That the Greens should jointly with us and others in the labour movement, launch a trade union and community-centred campaign against the environmentally ruinous plans for AI Data Centres in numerous parts  of this country. And to encourage similar activities internationally.”

This was topped off with “This motion should be sent to the [Your Party] CEC for their attention.” Given the appalling disaster that the Corbyn leadership have made of the Party’s evident potential a year ago, placing these demands could have had a political impact. If they were to be accepted, it would have meant that the pro-socialist elements would be in the ascendancy in the Greens. Point 2 goes some way to counter the Greens’ reactionary position on the Ukraine War, and the others would mean a pro-working class, anti-capitalist agenda instead of illusions in ‘Green’ capitalism. This might be a long shot, but it could have been a way to try to pull away the numerous supporters lost to the Greens by YP back to a working-class project.

Without this being a realistic possibility, as is now clear, socialists and class-conscious workers in Holborn and St Pancras should spoil their ballots in this election.

Three steps back, when the moment of geopolitical conflict requires forward steps

Érico Cardoso

https://emancipacaodotrabalho.org/Publicacao.aspx?id=700480

 BRICS held its 18th Summit in New Delhi between 12 and 13 September 2026, under the presidency of India, with the participation of 10 of its 11 members. For a number of reasons, including the heterogeneous and unequal intertwining of the economies of its participating members with the economies of the imperialist system, the bloc, composed of dependent and semi-colonial capitalist states and China (a workers’ state), has set aside confrontational geopolitical narratives, believing that it will be able to focus on concrete deliveries and internal institutional strengthening.

The central theme was “Building Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”. One cannot blame only the host nation and the political alignment of its right-wing, pro-US government for the disarming character of the Summit, this is also a reason, but not the only one. The bloc decided to take steps back, avoiding, as it has done in these 20 years of existence, forming itself into an instrument of organized resistance to the imperialist offensive, while the G-7 and company carry out a new arms race in Europe against Russia; the US and in the midst of the Zionist war against Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen; expansionism in Latin America; escalations that have as a strategy the defeat of the most powerful and developed adversary, China. Despite these “Western” offensives, the New Delhi summit retreated three crucial steps: 1. it began to bet on the recovery of multilateral organizations from the imperialist system to build its multilateralism; 2. If postponed again the creation of a common currency and 3. it barred the entry of new nations.

 Would it be possible to build a new multilateralism based on the reform of the multilateral organizations of the imperialist system?

 The New Delhi Declaration (with 140 points) reinforced the need to reform institutions such as the UN, WTO and IMF to reflect the multipolar reality. There was explicit condemnation of unilateral sanctions and coercive measures contrary to international law.

After World War II, the main imperialist nations were indebted or occupied by US bases. The main losers in the war, Germany, Italy and Japan became military colonies. This hegemony established the dollar as the standard currency of world market exchanges and a set of multilateral financial, commercial, civil and military organizations (WB, IMF, WTO, UN, NATO). This imperialist system entered into crisis during the financialization of the economy and the crisis of 2008. BRICS believes that an opportunity is opening up to promote a kind of democratic revitalization of the organisms that served the hegemony of the United States for 70 years and are now being abandoned by it.

The government representing the interests of US imperialism today despises the multilateral organizations of the imperialist system, which suffer economic disinvestment by the US that acts with ultrapotitism, punctual military alliances, reconcentration of forces in the Western Hemisphere (Donroe Doctrine) to prioritize the “America First” policy, seeking maximum freedom to override the entire international legal system and reduce US financial spending abroad and replace collective alliances with bilateral direct transaction agreements. In January 2026, Trump signed a proclamation determining the immediate withdrawal from the country of 66 international organizations, 31 of which are linked to the UN and 35 independent entities. According to the White House, these bodies act against American national interests.

No one can complain that Trump has not helped the BRICS, accentuating the isolation of the US and pushing other nations into the arms of China. This is the case of India itself, whose government prefers to be a vassal of the US, thinks it is an ally of Washington and feeds historical, economic and border rivalries with China, but has been pushed by Trumpist protectionism to ally itself with its Asian neighbour. A rapprochement that has strengthened in New Delhi, between Modi and Xi Jinping, thanks to the fact that India has been surprised and frustrated by the various tariff attacks and threats by the Trump administration since 2025, dispelling illusions about a supposed special partnership relationship with the US.

Postponing De-Dollarization and New Mechanisms Again

The summit abandoned the idea of a common BRICS currency, which was considered unfeasible. The strategy adopted is intended to be pragmatic. Payment interconnection – it seeks to connect systems such as UPI (India), Pix (Brazil), MIR (Russia) and CIPS (China) to make cross-border transactions cheaper. Settlement of bilateral transactions in local currencies: Stimulation of trade without going through the dollar, with possible savings of 2-3% in conversion costs. In addition to these mechanisms, they are betting on the BRICS Multilateral Guarantees, a pilot initiative of the New Development Bank (NDB) to attract private capital and reduce financing costs for infrastructure. The bloc’s countries have also adopted a multifaceted strategy to reduce dependence on SWIFT. The main collective mechanism used and in an advanced stage of implementation is BRICS Pay. BRICS Pay works as a decentralized digital infrastructure that connects the domestic payment systems already existing in the member countries. Instead of recreating a global network from scratch, it promotes the direct bridge between successful local platforms such as mo PIX, UPI, MIR and CIPS. These are all lateral measures, relatively timid, as long as an anti-dollar global currency could favor the breakdown of the financing of imperialism at this time of crisis of the petrodollar system due to the defeats of imperialism and Zionism in Southeast Asia.

The control of money and the banking system is not only a measure of monetary policy, but a fundamental political weapon and strategy for the anti-imperialist struggle. Despite copying or re-editing initiatives of the post-war imperialist system, such as industrialization, multilateral organizations, and the expansion of the global market, BRICS has not been consistent in the establishment of a new standard currency that serves to supplant the dollar, a very important mechanism of imperialism’s exchange hegemony over the world economy. The main accelerating motivation for de-dollarization is the need for geopolitical security. When the United States and its allies froze about $300 billion in Russia’s foreign exchange reserves in 2022 due to the war in Ukraine, it became clear to BRICS members that dependence on the dollar represents a sovereignty risk. Countries fear that, in any future diplomatic conflicts, they may also be cut off from the Western financial system (such as the SWIFT payment mechanism). Currently, if Brazil sells products to China, the transaction often needs to convert Reais to Dollars and then Dollars to Yuan. This process involves duplicate bank fees and risks of currency fluctuation. By establishing local currencies or a common unit of account for international trade, countries reduce costs and increase the efficiency of trade exchanges within the bloc.

With the Anglo-Saxon tech giants (Bigtech) that control much of the world’s communications and information traffic on the other side, the summit made the debate around technology a central pillar, focusing on digital sovereignty and the right to development of the countries of the Global South. The declaration on Global Governance of AI was the bloc’s first consensus document on the subject, expressing the intention to reduce technological dependence on Bigtech and supporting the creation of the Digital Public Infrastructure Library (DPI), for sharing good practices and interoperability between members’ digital systems. Getting lost in reunionism without the necessary steps that the geopolitical dispute requires at the moment, they settle for administrative measures that fall short of what is needed, creating, for example, in the midst of the annual rotation of the presidency, a Continuity and Implementation mechanism to monitor initiatives via the Troika (previous, current and next presidency), with a digital repository to monitor deadlines and status and an Emergency Support Network for Seafarers to coordinate assistance (medical, evacuation, communication with family members) to seafarers in crisis situations.

Containing Its Own Expansion

Today, the real weight of the BRICS stems more from its existence itself than from its willingness to be an alternative to the imperialist bloc, an aspiration that its members who adhere to a worsened version of the policy of “peaceful coexistence” of the twentieth century do not have.

The weight of BRICS stems from the size of its members. It includes the two most populous countries on the planet (India and China); three of the five largest countries in territorial extension (Russia, China and Brazil); and five of the largest economies in the world (China, India, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil). Another striking feature – the group includes the three countries that are in confrontation with the collective West – China, Russia and Iran. The activity of BRICS is followed with concern in Washington and in European capitals. Donald Trump has threatened BRICS several times, trying to scare the most fearful or most vulnerable members of the group. (DCM, The BRICS summit in India: political and financial results).

After the wave of new members, which brought the institution to 11 members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) the Indian summit chose to pause the formal expansion to consolidate internal mechanisms. More than 20 countries that have already expressed interest in joining the bloc are thus vetoed, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Vietnam, Bolivia, Venezuela, Algeria, Cuba, Nigeria and Uganda.

The focus has shifted to strengthening the network of partner countries (such as Vietnam) and practical cooperation in areas such as food security, energy, and health. The bloc has temporarily pulled the handbrake instead of expanding its cooperation to the areas of defense and security. As a historical leader of the Brazilian PT, Markus Sokol, aptly summarized, “there is a search among the peoples for a global alternative to the system in crisis, but this alternative is not BRICS, which does not want more than that, to accompany the world order in crisis” (OT Newspaper, 970).

 For a consistent anti-imperialist struggle

 In short, the New Delhi summit consolidated the BRICS as a bloc that, instead of seeking confrontation or even organized common resistance, believes it is prioritizing the construction of its own technical and financial infrastructure to increase the resilience and autonomy of the Global South. Capitalist aspirations that decadent imperialism sabotages and literally bombs, nothing preventing the system from dragging humanity into a new world war and a barbarism with no return, in full flight, slaughtering multilateralist illusions in full flight.

The resolutions of the New Delhi summit fall short of the recent victories of the oppressed nations over imperialism in the wars won in Afghanistan or still in progress: Ukraine and Iran. Victories that were only feared possible thanks to the bilateral and trilateral articulations between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, in military coalitions formed more by a kind of antagonistic cooperation against an aggressive common enemy than by a common strategy for the defeat of imperialism by nations that are victims of it.

Although the official list of full members of the group has 11 countries, Saudi Arabia was on the official agendas of the New Delhi Summit, but did not confirm the sending of a presidential delegation to the main debates. In addition to these full members, the meeting in India brought together 10 other countries as new official “partner countries” of the bloc. It is worth noting that Saudi Arabia is being defeated once again by the Yemeni Houthi guerrillas, supported by Iran. The US could have been left with only the defeat in the Persian Gulf to Iran, but it decided to push Saudi Arabia to the precipice and now it screwed with the defences of the Arabian Peninsula, the traffic of the Red Sea, the passage through the Bab al Mandab, the petrodollar system, they screwed everything.

Despite the recent victories of some of its members over imperialism, the BRICS have proved incapable of defending key nations from the geopolitical dispute such as Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile. For this reason, we believe that the tactic of taking steps backwards is a strategic mistake. It means abandoning all of Latin America to its fate, letting imperialism continue to advance in its backyard, appropriating inputs that today are vital for China itself and that once in the hands of imperialism will grant it a life, not to mention the cost of this offensive for Latin American workers.

Finally, it is important to understand that the tariff, military and technological victories obtained by the “Global South” have recently been possible thanks to the crisis of the imperialist Military-Industrial Complex, with overpriced weapons and in loss of power of domination given the deindustrialization that the imperialist system is going through. Private capital in the era of financialization is more parasitic and rentier than ever. Therefore, in order to develop their national economies, oppressed peoples and countries need to decouple their economies from the imperialist system, and bet on the industrialization and nationalization of their economies, not feeding illusions in Public-Private Partnerships or in the illusion that the G20 is “the main global forum for international economic cooperation to provide a platform for dialogue between emerging and developed economies in conditions of equality and mutual benefit”.

Imperialism attacks but loses ground in the three continents of the old world, while maintaining a consistent advance by recolonizing the American continent under the Donroe doctrine. A situation that proves that the consequent anti-imperialist struggle depends on the responsibility placed on the shoulders of the working class and the proletarian internationalism of the oppressed peoples.

The lead article in this issue focusses on the environmental crisis that became glaringly obvious this summer, with the repeated heatwaves that undoubtedly were the cause of much loss of life, record-breaking overall temperature globally and the unmistakeable fact that this is the product of anthropogenic climate change, which is above all the product of the capitalist mode of production. This ought to be, if the world was rational, the most pressing and urgent issue of all for humanity to deal with. But the cause of it is, as mentioned, the capitalist mode of production, and the struggle against other concrete manifestations of that, from imperialist war to the class struggle within the imperialist countries, also holds centre stage. What we as revolutionary Marxist have to do is to find a way to integrate this understanding of the existential nature of the environmental struggle into the class consciousness we are seeking to promote as the antithesis of capitalism in movements of workers and the oppressed more generally.

The other lead article in this issue is an analysis of the rise to the premiership of Andy Burnham, and why he in particular was chosen to replace Starmer when the reactionary and Zionist forces that promoted Starmer to destroy the Corbyn project, concluded that Starmer’s many vices were leading the Labour Party to destruction. There is also an article on the prominent role of Burnham and Starmer in the accelerating, and quite demented, drive of the West European imperialist bourgeoisies in seeking some kind of existential confrontation with Russia now that it is increasingly clear that Nazi-Maidan Ukraine is on the verge of collapse despite all the many billions that its imperialist sponsors have expended on it. And there is a brief commentary on the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, where the Green Party’s Zack Polanski is fighting to win Starmer’s former seat against Labour, but George Galloway has decided to stand also for the Workers Party (WP). This prompted the resignation of WP Deputy Leader Chris Williamson from the WP in disagreement with Galloway’s action.

The article proposed a possible way to place demands on Polanski, as the leader of a non-working class, petty-bourgeois radical party, to embrace key elements of working-class politics as a precondition for any kind of electoral support, as a possible tactic to bring to the fore the tens of thousands of socialist-minded militants who have joined the Greens because of the dramatic failure of the Corbyn-misled Your Party to give expression to their aspirations. Since this was written, Polanski has backed away from supporting the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion that the left-wing of the Greens were trying to get passed, aiming to make the Greens the only overtly anti-Zionist party contending in mainstream British politics (Your Party is hardly ‘contending’ at the moment). Polanski’s retreat on this has prompted criticism from Chris Williamson, among others, and may come to be seen as a significant moment among those seeking a new working class, socialist party.

Other significant material in this issue includes an account of the political degeneration of the Socialist Federation. This was originally conceived as the Members’ Charter, an initiative to try to force democratisation in Your Party, but has now, thanks to the influence of pro-NATO, Ziophile social imperialists like ‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’, turned it into a strange heresy-hunting project. It had to postpone its own Founding Conference because its fratricidal warfare made such an event unfeasible. That takes some doing! Many of the remaining socialist activists in Your Party treat it with deep suspicion therefore.

There is also an account of the Founding Conference of the British Chapter of the Anti-Fascist International; the Consistent Democrats are one of its supporting groups. It is a campaigning anti-imperialist, anti-fascist body that was originally an initiative of the Maduro government in Venezuela, prior to his outrageous abduction by Trump. Included is the text of a speech by one of our comrades to this conference, on Zionism and the sinister, genocidal nature and purpose of the so-called “IHRA definition” of Anti-Semitism. And there is a brief statement of our position on the recent UNITE General Secretary election.

All in all, this issue has material that should be of interest to a wide range of socialists and working-class activists.

(by Ian Donovan for Consistent Democrats)

I want to raise the subject of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of Anti-Semitism as a matter for comrades to think about at this conference. This became a prominent issue in this country in the period when the Labour Party was led by Jeremy Corbyn. It was used as a weapon to undermine him, because of his reputation as a defender of Palestinians. It deliberately re-writes the definition of anti-semitism from racial hatred, to a mixture of what could be called ‘political crimes.’ First of all, in the bare-bones definition it broadens the supposed target of anti-Semitism from just Jews as individuals of a supposed ‘race’, to “Jewish community institutions and religious facilities”

There then follow a series of eleven ‘illustrations’ of what that might mean. Some are largely consistent with racial hostility – such as denying the holocaust, or suggesting it was not intentional, or was exaggerated. Or suggesting that “the Jews killed Jesus”. But most of these ‘illustrations’ refer in some way to Israel. Indeed, of the eleven, only the first four do not refer to Israel. The rest, even ones that refer obliquely to genocide denial, bring Israel into the argument. But at the time that the genocide of Jews took place, Israel did not exist. And it is a fact that at least some Zionists can be validly accused of collaborating with the Nazis. So, what it this document about? It is not about defining racism against Jews as people. It is about organisations. And it’s clear that the organisation it is concerned with protecting most of all, is the Israeli state. After the first four, which are indeed arguably about racism against Jews, all the remaining seven drag in the question of Israel. It’s a form of ‘gaslighting’. Another word for that is an amalgam. Mixing two completely different things up and claiming they are the same thing. A dreadful technique whenever it occurs.

 For instance, it says that this is anti-Semitism: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” There a little diversion in this. They say “a state of Israel” and not “the State of Israel”. As if some other state of Israel existed somewhere in a parallel universe that did not expel three quarters of the Palestinian Arab people in 1948. Of course, they mean the real Israel, not a fictional one! Then there is “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” But how can a country that expels the majority of its indigenous population, be called a ‘democratic nation’? Obviously, it cannot! And then there is “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” But what are Nazis known for? Genocide!

So, this says it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to accuse Israel of intending to commit genocide against the Palestinians. That is clearly a pro-genocide scam. This fake ‘definition’ was first published, as a ‘working definition’ in 2005, as the European Union Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC)’s definition. That was in the context of growing anti-Zionist sentiment largely because of the very visible role of Zionist neocons in pushing for the attack on Iraq. The EUMC abandoned it in 2016 after a considerable outcry. And so, the IHRA took it up. A bloc of Israel and a whole bunch of its allies. But its purpose has always been to excuse Israel’s genocidal tendencies. They wouldn’t need to smear people who pointed out the similarity of Israel’s behaviour to the Nazis, if Israel didn’t behave like — the Nazis.

In other words, both those who formulated this fake definition, and those who it was aimed at persecuting, knew that Israel had genocidal tendencies. The aim of the gaslighting, of the amalgam that is built into this, was always to suppress criticism of Israel’s genocidal nature, and therefore to prepare the political conditions where Israel could commit genocide of the Palestinians, with impunity. So, this document, the IHRA definition, can be called a ‘warrant for genocide’ of the Palestinians. Just as the Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was a warrant for genocide of the Jews by Hitler. It was used to purge the Labour Party of opponents of such a crime, so that Labour could support the genocide, which Starmer did. Trump is using it to persecute opponents of Israel’s genocide, trying to deport non-citizen students for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. And in terms of the response of the Western countries, Israel is  getting away with the genocide. So far Holland, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Belgium and Turkey, of Western countries, have accused Israel of genocide.  But none of the major countries in West Europe and North America have done so.

The IHRA definition is being used here to persecute opponents of Israel’s genocide, in the NHS, in universities, and anywhere else they can get away with it. There is now considerable pushback against it. The BMA is opposing it. As are some universities. This fake definition, used for this purpose, is a threat to us all. It needs to be consigned to the same pit of infamy as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Starmer’s regime, and now Burnham’s, has carried on and intensified the actions of the previous Sunak/Truss/ Johnson regime in sending Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine, for the Zelensky-Nazi regime to fire into Russia with obvious British technical and intelligence data to guide them. This could not be done without the active involvement of British military personnel, as the Russian government was always well aware. Far from being the military adventurist that Western imperialist propaganda claims, Putin has been extremely cautious and restrained in confronting this kind of provocative activity. By sticking rigidly to the strict territorial objectives of the campaign of attrition Russia has waged against the occupation of Donbass territory, Russia is on the brink of victory. The Maidan regime staggers on the brink of collapse, having coerced millions of its own citizens into unwillingly marching into a meat grinder, which may have killed millions of such forced conscripts in a dirty war to hang onto territory whose population does not want to be ruled by Kiev.

The standard tactic of the Ukrainian Nazi regime when being forced to surrender a town or village is to demand that the population leave with them, or be murdered. Many have in fact been  murdered trying to hide in basements from the killer battalions, with the Russian army often making grisly discoveries when they take control. This is how the Russophone Ukrainian population of East Ukraine is treated by the Nazi regime, for whom speaking Russian is a crime worthy of death. It’s also why the mere liberation of the four provinces currently being fought over is not going to be sufficient to end the war. A realistic objective is the liberation of more than a third of present-day Ukraine, roughly on a diagonal line between just to the West of Odessa, linking up with Transnistria, the Russian-speaking rebel enclave of Moldova that is close to Odessa, skirting Kyiv and extending to the Kharkov oblast. This partition is the logic of the abolition of constitutional language equality by the Kyiv regime after Maidan in 2024.

As Russia has got closer and closer to outright victory in the Donbass , the level of hysterical Russophobia from the British bourgeoisie, as well as the other main West European imperialists, France and Germany, and the weak, vassal ruling classes in several of the weak bourgeois states in East Europe that have been absorbed into the European Union and become vassals of the main EU states, has risen to a crescendo of hatred and warmongering frenzy. The West-European bourgeoisies are actively seeking ways to wage war against Russia. They continually claim that they expect Russia to attack Western Europe by around 2030 or 2035, depending on which war narrative you read, and demand draconian cuts in social spending throughout Europe to pay for rearmament to confront and fight a war with Russia. The demand is for arms spending to rapidly rise to at least 5% of GBP over the next several years, but at the same time some of their most virulent elements keep raising demands for action now, for greater use of Western weapons and more drone terrorism by Ukraine against Russian civilians in towns and cities, or attacks on strategic economic or military assets, to provoke Russia into an armed response. This has a crazed aspect, that is causing alarm across the continent, and is provoking political dissent from some on both the left and the right.

The West European bourgeoisies are hysterical about Russia under Putin having refused to simply knuckle under to the Western diktat to privatise and subordinate its economy to the neoliberal ethos, which was proceeding apace under Yeltsin in the 1990s, an epoch which impoverished the Russian population and reduced Russia to 14th economic ranking in terms of GPD PPP. Today in the same terms, Russia’s economy is ranked 4^th, and it has achieved this by not being an appendage of the West, but by de-facto, an evolving alliance with the giant deformed workers state of China, as well as Iran, in BRICS. Iran being the central nation involved in resisting the Greater Israel project in West Asia – Israel being a key, discrete imperialist power within the Western alliance of imperialist states with its own interests, which uses its independent ‘lobbying’ power among the bourgeoisies of the West to push hard for those interests within those imperialist alliances. Under Biden and Obama’s presidencies, a very similar strategy was pursed by the United States – the Maidan coup was pushed through in Ukraine by the Obama administration, and Biden as President was as provocatively anti-Russian as any of the Europeans, provoking the Special Military Operation in 2022 by pushing the Maidan regime into a major attack on the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as the current Donetsk and Lugansk provinces of the Russian Federation were then called after rebelling against the Western sponsored Nazi-Maidan coup in 2014. This was extensively reported on at the time by the courageous Swiss former OSCE Official Jacques Baud, who is now being ‘sanctioned’ by the Western powers for his dissent in a similar manner to the equally courageous and outspoken opponent of Israel’s genocide and UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese. Biden initiated the supply of US ATACMS missiles to Ukraine for firing into Russia itself, which, like Storm Shadow, needed US personnel to target and operate them, which the Russians were and are fully aware of.

The main reason why the Trump administration has demurred from this approach somewhat, both in his first (2017 to 2021) term and this one from 2025 onwards, has been because of Trump being qualitatively more subservient to Israel than previous presidents. For him, full commitment to the proxy war in Ukraine was counterposed to his project of deepening US collaboration with Israel in order to attack Iran, which no previous US President was prepared to go through with, and it was clear that the US in decline was no longer able to supply two such major wars at the same time. Now that the attack on Iran has come unstuck, and the US has suffered a major, strategic defeat in West Asia over this attack, there has been something of a swing back to at least a posture by the Trump administration of more aggression against Russia, more in tune with the Europeans. But it is somewhat hollow, as the depletion of US stocks of important missiles and other munitions, and its more general failures, have also affected its ability to be effective in the Ukraine proxy war as this failure has done elsewhere. Like the US taking THAAD missile defence systems from South Korea, where they were aimed at China and North Korea, and sending them to West Asia where a number of such facilities have been destroyed by Iran, has adversely affected the US’s ability to confront China. Which in a way is all to the good, but it does underline the contradictions of Washington’s aggression on behalf of Israel, and how it has accelerated the US decline.

The coup within Labour between the disastrous May Labour Party Council Election results and July, when Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, was carefully choreographed. Burnham’s seat in Makerfield was ‘kindly’ donated by Josh Simons, a stalwart of Labour Together and the operation against Corbyn, which shows who is really behind Burnham’s ascent to office. It was clearly arranged and planned by the same Labour Together outfit (now renamed ThinkLabour), largely Zionist funded, that worked extensively behind the scenes to foment witchhunts against the left for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ during the Corbyn period, to destabilise Corbyn’s leadership, and to engineer a major election defeat by manipulating the issue of Brexit. This produced the Starmer regime, with its war against the mass left-wing movement that formed behind Corbyn in the mid-2010s ,and especially the half-million or so socialists who joined Labour when Corbyn became leader, making it (then) the largest political party in West Europe. Hundreds of thousands of members were driven out by Starmer’s bloodletting of the left between 2020 and 2025. Labour under Starmer, supposedly the party of the broadly working-class, left-wing of British politics, in government acquired a terrible reputation for hypocrisy.  It engaged in a whole array of attacks that even the Tories had not dared, Including vicious attacks on Winter Fuel payments for pensioners,  attacks on the disabled, further privatisation of the NHS. They also insisted on keeping to hated Tory policies such as the two-child benefit-cap. Starmer pushed far right anti-immigration politics himself with his ‘island of strangers’ speech in May 2025, echoing the racism of Enoch Powell. 

Andy Burnham’s Labour leadership and premiership is an attempt to give the failing Labour government a facelift, to boost its pathetic popularity, and avoid what appeared to be an inevitable future collapse, given Starmer’s complete political failure to generate any popular resonance or sympathy whatsoever. Burnham was Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 to his recent return to parliament in June. He has some real charisma and popularity, and is attempting something that resembles the early years of Tony Blair’s premiership, when Blair combined neoliberal politics with liberal populism, and maintained a strong degree of popular support for several years. Blair’s political ‘honeymoon’ as Prime Minister extended for the whole of his first term from 1997-2001, and did not definitively end until he joined with George W Bush in 2002 in the campaign to attack Iraq. The recreation of that kind of ‘honeymoon’ appears to be the strategy of those behind Burnham’s rise, to salvage Starmer’s government from the odium of Starmer himself. And so far, it seems to be working, as Nigel Farage’s Reform, who before Burnham’s ascent had been leading in opinion polls, is now reckoned to be in either second or third place.

This has been aided by the systematic exposure of Farage’s own corruption with the receipt of first £5 million from Thailand-based tax exile and crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, and then £36 million from Bel Delo, who had previously been pardoned by Trump after being convicted of money laundering. This amount was then matched again by Harborne,  giving Farage a cool £72 million. These sums dwarf the hundreds of thousands that were unlawfully funnelled to Labour Together for the war against Corbyn. Burnham is now planning retrospective laws to ban such donations. But this has discredited Farage massively by associating him with big money corruption. In response to this fall in popular support, the far right, this time led by Daniel Thomas (“Danny Thommo”), an associate of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) launched mobs of balaclava-masked ‘protesters’, first to block the port of Dover in a 5 September ‘protest’ against small boats and asylum seekers. Then on 11 Sept,  there was another masked action in Portsmouth, this time directed against the RNLI lifeboat service, for rescuing asylum seekers in small boats, as well as against a Pakistan Cricket Team they accused of being asylum seekers. Burnham’s government is moving to ban such balaclava masks, popularly lampooned as ‘nonce masks’ in response. All this is a legacy of the Starmer regime’s appeasement of the far right.   

The Starmer’s government’s odious authoritarianism made it acutely unpopular on the left wing of British politics, and it would never, no matter how much it grovelled and dressed up in far-right clothes, be able to satisfy the far right who were emboldened by it. Burnham is a rhetorical critic of neoliberalism who says that British politics has been on the ‘wrong track’ since Thatcher and claims to want to return to the 1970s before Thatcher’s neoliberal offensive. As Manchester Mayor he implemented municipal ‘control’ (not ownership) of bus services and he claims that this is a start of his return to the 1970s. He is a political chameleon – he was broadly speaking a Blairite/Brownite as a previous minister, but during the Corbyn period, he conspicuously refused to resign from Corbyn’s Shadow ministerial team when all the Blairite politicos did so as a unified tactic to try to bring down Corbyn in the 2016 ‘Chicken Coup’. He thus has a different reputation, which is captured in a popular joke about him: “A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar, and the barman says: ‘What would you like to drink, Mr Burnham?’”.

Starmer: Labour’s Foulest Premier by a Country Mile

Starmer became certainly the most hated Labour Prime Minister in history within weeks of being elected with a massive majority in July 2024 – rightly seen as arrogant, ultra-reactionary and completely lacking any charisma and empathy by the population of left and right. His massive parliamentary majority was a freak, caused by the collapse of the Tory vote with a substantial chunk of their voters going to the hard-right Reform party of Nigel Farage. The Tories’ percentage of the popular vote fell from 43.6% in 2019 to 23.7% in 2024 – a huge collapse. But Labour’s only rose slightly, from 32.1% in 2019 (when they lost heavily) to only 33.7% in 2024. Starmer won a massive majority with fewer votes than Corbyn lost with previously. Corbyn lost with 10,269,051 in 2019; Starmer won with 9,708,716 in 2024 – more than half a million less. This was not a popular victory at all, but a quirk of the First Past the Post electoral system: in 2024 Reform got 14.3% of the vote, coming third. Which means that Starmer’s massive majority was built on sand – his popular base was minimal, and he was challenged from the get-go, within a matter of a few short weeks of being elected, by a broad far right movement centred on Reform. This went into overdrive with aggressive, threatening demonstrations outside hotels housing asylum seekers in the summer of 2024, repeated even more menacingly in 2005 with the nationwide fascist campaign of putting Union Flags on lampposts and painting roundabouts with the Cross of St George, aimed at threatening and intimidating ethnic minorities. Then followed by a half-million strong London ‘Unite the Kingdom’ fascist march in September 2025. This was countered and fought against by the left outside Labour. Starmer had no discernible political ‘honeymoon’ after he was elected, simply because his leadership was overtly reactionary and pusillanimous before big capital right from the very start.

The reactionary character of Starmer’s government is shown by its attitude to two crucial war questions: Gaza and Ukraine. Nine months before Starmer’s government was elected, in the days after the Al Aqsa Flood Hamas-led breakout on October 7^th, 2023, Starmer made it quite clear that he supported the genocidal response of the Israeli government as laid down by defence minister Yoav Gallant’s statement that Israel were fighting ‘human animals’ who would be deprived of food, water and fuel therefore. When challenged by LBC’s Nick Ferrari in an infamous interview on 11^th October 2023, about whether Israel had the right to withhold food and water from the Gaza population, Starmer clearly said that they “have that right”. Which put him clearly in the genocidaire camp. The draconian repression Starmer’s government has carried out against the movement against this genocide has far exceeded that of the Tories, from restrictions on marches and frameups of Palestine Solidarity activists and the fraudulent proscription of Palestine Action, attempts to abolish jury trials and interference with existing jury trials by pro-genocide Judges clearly acting on government instructions.  Much more so than Sunak’s earlier government, Starmer’s was a repressive pro-genocide regime, and many of its measures the kind of thing that Suella Braverman, the proto-fascist chief Zionist in the previous Tory government , was forced from office for trying to enact. Braverman then defected to Reform.

 On Ukraine, likewise Starmer had always been one of the most fervent Russophobes and militarists in the Labour Party political class going back to the early days of the Maidan regime, when he first became a Labour MP in 2015. The Stop the War Coalition, after the beginning of the Russian Special Military Operation in the Eastern half of Ukraine in February 2022, produced a statement whose essential thrust was “Britain needs to change its policy, and start working for peace, not confrontation”, calling for a “diplomatic settlement” on the basis of Minsk-2, while opposing eastward expansion of NATO. It was signed by then Independent MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Claudia Webbe, and a list of trade unionists and anti-war activists. 11 Labour MPs originally signed it. They were ordered by Starmer to withdraw their names, under penalty of the withdrawal of the whip. At that point, all did so, though some like Zarah Sultana were subsequently deprived of the whip for voting against Starmer’s cuts to pensioners’ winter fuel payments.

Burnham: Hypocrisy over Palestine, Virulent Russophobia

Burnham has paid lip service to some criticisms of Starmer’s regime on Gaza, saying they ‘got it wrong’. But he has conspicuously not used the word ‘genocide’. The new Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, has announced sanctions against goods produced in the occupied West Bank, which it is not difficult to discern, are calculated to be fairly token and to have very limited impact.  But the Israeli regime has reacted virulently to them, with Netanyahu denouncing the Burnham government as the ‘Islamic Republic of Britain’, and far right Israeli defence minister Itamar Ben Gvir denouncing the British presence in the Falklands/Malvinas Islands and calling for ‘sanctions’ against Britain to force Britain to hand them over to Argentina, led by the Jewish convert, Zionist extremist and alleged relative of Netanyahu, Milei.  Miliband’s sanctions are a very limited and cosmetic change. Burnham has kept in place the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who succeeded Yvette Cooper and if anything intensified the persecution of Palestine activists including the fraudulent proscription of Palestine Action, which is now being appealed to the Supreme Court, as well as repressive measures against legal migrants such as the attempt to abolish the status of indefinite leave to remain. Fresh persecutions of Palestine activists are still going ahead. Burnham’s government has continued in practice to back Trump/Israel’s war against Iran, by continuing to allow the use of British bases by US forces for supposedly ‘defensive’ operations – in an unprovoked war of aggression. However, the limited shift in policy over the West Bank has had an impact on the British labour movement, as for the first time in its history, on 16^th September the TUC passed a motion endorsing the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel. There is this some level of contradiction in the Burnham government’s stance over Palestine and Gaza, which appears to be a product of the mass pressure of the Palestine movement and the extreme discredit that the overt support for genocide brought upon Starmer. It appears extremely grudging, but it may open up possibilities for forcing more concessions.

Regarding Ukraine, however, Burnham has doubled down on Starmer’s whole policy, and his visit to Ukraine in late August, with the symbolic handing over of the blueprints of Storm Shadow to Zelensky signified that nothing has changed.  See separate article. The only slight nuance of difference is that now Burnham claims that the rearmament demanded by Trump and the European bourgeoisies against the phantom threat of attack by Russia must not be paid for by the working class. Which is simply financially not feasible. What this all really means is that Burnham’s new government is a concession to left-wing popular opposition to Starmer’s regime, which was the most openly reactionary leadership and government in the whole history of the Labour Party. These concessions have had to be made to preserve Labour as a bourgeois workers party from destruction. But the concessions are very limited. Burnham keeps contradicting himself on such matters as possible water company nationalisation, to give one example. The political vacuum of working-class political leadership, which could have been filled by Your Party, still exists, and it is likely that the breathing space that Burnham’s rise has given to Labour as a party will not last a historically enormous amount of time.

Which also might, at least on the domestic terrain, give the left a slight breathing space to revive the project of a new working-class party, as the Corbyn-led Your Party is in deep trouble because of Corbyn’s own misleadership. It will have to be salvaged, and pretty soon, or else something else built to organise the working class politically for socialist politics in its place. But the threat of world war, with Russia or arising from US/Zionist defeats in the Middle East, and economic depression arising from the latter, will not give much space – we need working class political organisation as a matter of urgency.

Around two hundred socialists and anti-imperialists attended the founding meeting/conference of the British Capitulo (Chapter) of the Anti-Fascist International (AFI) on Saturday, 5^th September, at Bolivar Hall, a public conference hall that is part of the Venezuelan Consulate in London. The AFI is an international anti-imperialist/anti-fascist international campaigning body initiated by the government of the rightful President of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, in late 2024. One crucial topic of discussion at the conference was the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife Celia Flores on 3^rd January by the Trump administration, as part of its drive for recolonisation of Latin America. It is clear, and becoming increasingly clearer to many of the AFI participants that the government of Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s Vice President and now acting President, has capitulated to Trump’s piratical seizure, and is now openly collaborating. The collaborationist regime, as well as having earlier deported anti-imperialist fighter Alex Saab into Trump’s clutches, has now signed a deal with Trump granting the US majority control of roughly 20% of Venezuela’s oil reserves for 100 years, amounting to 65 billon barrels of proven reserves. There are also indications of treachery in the Venezuelan administration against Maduro prior to the abduction.

The political default of Rodriguez was at least partly discussed at the conference, and we were well aware that it was an anomaly that we were still able to use Venezuelan facilities despite the political collaboration of Rodriguez with Trump. This is because the new regime has not yet got round yet to purging the diplomatic corps, or much of the machinery of government in Venezuela itself, of anti-imperialists and leftists. They have to tread carefully as the Chavez and Maduro governments had an organic relationship with a formidable movement of the Venezuelan worker and peasant masses, known as the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’. That mass base still exists, and there is the potential for major resistance breaking out if the masses acquire new leadership. Much of this, as well as the state of play with Trump’s deadly dangerous attacks on Cuba, were extensively discussed in the first session, on Latin America: Resisting Recolonisation – solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle across the region.

Speakers generally were from those communist and anti-imperialist tendencies that have been involved in founding the AFI in Britain, including the Communist Party of Great Britain – Marxist-Leninist (CPGB-ML), the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG), the Platform of 12^th October (P-12O), the Posadists in Britain, the Consistent Democrats (CD), British Section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and from the New Communist Party (NCP). Miriam Palacios, of the P-12O spoke extensively about the situation in Cuba, which Trump is trying to strangle in an unprecedented manner, accompanied by Charley Taylor of the RCG and Daniel Obrien of the CPGB-ML

We also had some distinguished guest speakers: David Miller, the anti-Zionist academic who recently won a famous victory against Bristol University, which sacked him for his outspoken anti-Zionist views in 2021 after a ferocious campaign backed by Zionist supporters in all the major parties. Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP and a Deputy Leader of the Workers Party, founded by George Galloway, spoke later in the day in the last session. We should have had former British Ambassador  and distinguished anti-war/anti-imperialist activist Craig Murray in the first session, but he was unable to attend due to illness.

Regarding David Miller, an Employment Tribunal in 2024 found that he had been unlawfully sacked because of his anti-Zionist views, which constituted a “philosophical belief” “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. Zionists pushed hard for the University to appeal against this, which they did at a hearing last autumn. They were finally revealed to have lost this in early August, which set a legal precedent that anti-Zionist views are a protected characteristic under British law. A major victory. David Miller’s views on Zionism’s international activities are not popular on much of the far left in this country.  Some echo the Zionist allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ about his criticisms of Israel’s international activities, such as his formulation about ‘Pax Judaica’ regarding Zionism’s capability to influence politics in the major Western counties and also most recently in the toppling of left-wing and left-populist governments in Latin America with Israeli involvement. We in the Consistent Democrats have always rejected these attacks, and have initiated petitions in his defence against the witchhunting that some on the ‘far left’ have engaged. We have a similar, but not necessarily identical understanding of Zionism’s international influence. 

The second session, on Political Freedom Under Attack – resisting state repression and defending free speech focussed very much on the Palestine genocide and war against Iran in West Asia. The session was kicked off by Ian Donovan of the Consistent Democrats, who sharply attacked and deconstructed the IHRA fake ‘definition’ of Anti-Semitism. He pointed out that it acted both as an ideological support for the Zionist genocide in Palestine, and a means of suppressing criticism of Israel’s genocidal tendencies, right from the start. It attempted to systematise an equation of criticism of Zionist racism with anti-Jewish racism, a system of gaslighting using such an amalgam as a weapon. It acted therefore as a kind of ‘warrant for genocide’ of the Palestinians, in an analogous manner to the way the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,  the forged Tsarist document, acted as a ‘warrant’ for Hitler’s genocide against the Jews in the period of the Third Reich. Other speakers included Ranjeet Brar of the CPGB-ML, who spoke about his own arrests and victimisation for opposing Zionism including as a senior Doctor in the NHS, and about an important lawsuit against the IHRA definition. Dr Masoud Shajereh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, spoke extensively about repression and violations of basic rights by Zionists and their allies. He was followed by David Miller and Kotsai Sigurake of the RCG. The latter criticised David Miller’s points on Israel’s ‘Jewish imperialism’ but did not really manage to refute him about Israeli involvement in Latin America which comrade Miller discussed.

The final session was titled Imperialism Means War – Understanding Imperialism and the Constant Drive to War. This featured Andy Higginbottom, of the Platform of 12 October, Joti Brar of the CPGB-ML, Theo Russell of the New Communist Party, representing International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), and Chris Williamson of the Workers Party, as previously mentioned. The war in Ukraine was obviously a major feature of the discussion. The Workers Party, and the CPGB-ML are all outspoken against the NATO proxy war being waged against Russia. The Consistent Democrats, Posadists and NCP are all active in IUAFS and so Theo Russell spoke for all of us in condemning the proxy war and NATO, and defending the Donbass/Crimean people and Russia itself against imperialism, while maintaining a critical distance from the bourgeois/bureaucratic layer that rules Russia. Chris Williamson also defended some more Labourite positions in the final session including touching on Modern Monetary Theory, a novel form of left-reformism many would say, and calling for the working class to seize hold of the existing state for our own purposes, a position that we certainly oppose (in our view the working class needs to smash the existing bourgeois state).

All-in-all this conference, as a one-day event with a profusion of speakers, was an excellent, but preliminary event, aiming to drive recruitment to the AFI so we can build a more substantial organisation for activism, and for a future Congress that will be able to engage in must more wide-ranging open discussion. The broad nature of the subjects addressed open up the possibility that the AFI could serve the purposes of at least a strand of regroupment of the best militants into what is necessary – a real, political movement that can lay the basis for the emergence of a revolutionary party. If that is the result, it will need to engage with other strands who are trying to create a real working-class party in the wider workers movement. Last weekend’s conference was a very useful start.