Category: Uncategorized

Marxism, Imperialism and Populism

This is the presentation that was given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at our educational on 21st July. The recording of the meeting is also available as a podcast, and can be found here.

The essay that this educational is about was a seemingly abstract commentary made by Joseph Seymour, key intellectual figure of the Spartacist League of the United States in the mid-1970s. The old Spartacists were a contradictory political trend with roots in both of the two major trends in the US that emerged from the Trotskyist movement in Trotsky’s day.

Max Shachtman (left) with James P Cannon

The US Trotskyist movement had been founded in the late 1920s by three prominent members of the US Communist Party: James P Cannon, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman. The US Left Opposition and its successors – most notably the US SWP – always worked very closely with Trotsky and carried out many of the tactics of the Trotskyist movement in the years before the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. It did serious work in the trade unions. In 1934, its trade union militants led the Teamsters’ (truckers) strike in Minneapolis, one of three major strikes that year led by Communist groups in the period of revival of the workers movement after the worst of the Great Depression. And it carried out a short-term entry into the Socialist Party in 1936-7, which enabled it to fuse with a layer of younger militants.

In some ways, the SWP – a thousand or so people – became the leading party of the Fourth International when it was founded in 1938. Their geographical closeness to Mexico was an advantage in collaborating with Trotsky in his final exile. They were also subjected to the pressures which the whole of the movement was subjected. Because of the relatively open situation they lived in, the issues were fought out in the open.

The Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 caused splits in the Trotskyist movement. A wave of hysterical Stalinophobia, that equated Stalin’s regime with Hitler’s, swept the labour movement in the imperialist countries.  In the US, a faction led by Shachtman, Abern and James Burnham (an academic figure) was formed, which abandoned defence of the Soviet Union against imperialism.  By the end of the dispute in 1940 Shachtman had developed the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, the USSR as a new class society, neither capitalist nor socialist, but worse than capitalism.

Cannon, and the core trade union cadre of the SWP, joined with Trotsky to defend the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state. These issues were fought out comprehensively. Two important books are availble on this: Trotsky’s In Defence of Marxism, and Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.

In 1940 Trotsky was assassinated. The Trotskyist movement faced WWII without his insights. The complex sequence of events in WWII led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies, Italy and Japan, primarily by the USSR in alliance with the US, with Britain and France in tow. The situation after the war was a mess. The Stalinists defeated Nazi Germany, but also made sure that the working class as an independent class did not come to power anywhere. Wherever the working class threatened to come to power directly, the Stalinists united with imperialism to crush it. Most notably in Europe, in France, Italy and Greece in Europe, and in Vietnam with the Saigon workers insurrection in 1945.

But there was also the unstable phenomenon of the creation of deformed workers states, in East Europe, China, and elsewhere. The Trotskyist movement was disoriented by the creation of these states without the conscious action of the working class. The imperialists were implacably hostile to the USSR’s victory and the new deformed workers’ states and set up NATO as an aggressive instrument to fight them. The Cold War ensued.

After the war, without Trotsky’s guidance, the Trotskyist movement partly capitulated to Stalinism, and many began to hail bureaucratic Stalinist leaders as revolutionaries who would lead the world revolution. Others followed in the footsteps of Shachtman and capitulated to imperialism. There was little coherent understanding of what had happened. There were a lot of very complex and confused debates. The Sparts represent one fragment of these debates. They got possibly the trickiest problem right, that of Cuba. Which ought to have laid the basis for resolving all these problems. But it was not to be.

Fidel Castro and his guerrilla movement came to power in 1959 and overthrew a classic US-backed neocolonial tyranny. Then they proceeded to nationalise virtually the entire Cuban economy to preserve themselves from being overthrown by the Cuban bourgeoisie who simply worked with US imperialism. Some Trotskyists, including the ageing US SWP cadre, hailed Castro as an unconscious Marxist and world revolutionary. Others denied that there had been a revolution in Cuba at all.

The Spartacists got this right and understood that while Cuba was a workers’ state and had expropriated capital, it was a deformed workers state that needed a supplementary political revolution to bring the working class to genuine political power. Castro had come to power at the head of a movement that was not initially communist even in name. He was a liberal, who emerged from the Orthodoxo Party. Yet in power, his July 26 movement changed its ideology to match what it had done and joined the Soviet bloc. Their understanding of Cuba clarified what a deformed workers state was.

Such states had been generally created by communist movements that had abandoned the working class, based instead on an oppressed peasantry, and that these parties had become petty-bourgeois nationalist parties. When the working class was politically paralysed and under extreme conditions of imperialist oppression, such movements proved capable of overthrowing capitalism and creating such workers’ states, but with a fundamental weakness, that was later to destroy most of them. I.e, an anti-working class, bureaucratic regime, committed to socialism in one country, similar to the USSR under Stalin and since. In Cuba, however, unlike all the other examples where such states were created independently of simple conquest by the USSR, the movement that carried this out was not even formally communist before the revolution. This was clarifying as to what was really involved in the others, such as China, Yugoslavia, etc. This was a very perceptive and thoughtful analysis. No one else developed it at the time.

The Spartacists in the decades to come used this to argue that they were the continuity of Cannon’s SWP in its best period, created under Trotsky’s guidance, and therefore the only real Trotskyists in the world. This had some apparently credibility in their earlier period, but this was incorrect, a conceit based on a partial understanding, that slowly drove them mad. It was wrong, because they were rooted in both strands of the pre-war movement. The founders of the Sparts, particularly Roberston and also Wolhforth, who played the key role in the creation of this trend, came from Shachtman’s anti-Soviet Workers Party, not the SWP.

They joined the ageing, rightward-moving SWP in the mid-1950s, on the basis of being won to orthodox Trotskyism on the Russian question, and later were thrown out for being right about Cuba. But Roberston, who became the leading figure, though he had broken from Shachtman over the Russian question, had not questioned another aspect of Shachtman’s politics: his left-Zionism. As part of their right-wing evolution at the beginning of the Cold war, the Shactmanites had supported the creation of Israel. That was another political strand.

In the coming decades the Sparts produced orthodox material on the Russian question, given weight by their correct understanding of Cuba, for instance their opposition to Solidarnosc in the 1980s. But this correct politics was mixed with material on Israel/Palestine that in the earlier period sided with Israel. They also copied that approach and tried to apply it to the Irish question from the late 1960s. Originally, they were pro-Unionist in Ireland. In 1969 they called for a Socialist Independent Ulster! Later they modified their positions to be effectively neutral in these national struggles.  Calling on Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine, or Nationalist and Unionist workers in the North of Ireland, to abandon their national struggles and unite. Not much of an improvement. They were a perplexing phenomenon, because they were partly right, and partly severely wrong. Which is very damaging, as an old saying has it, a half-truth is more damaging than an outright lie. This contradiction gave rise to an organisation with a strange and damaging way of working, a reflection of their political contradictions.

But they were sometimes capable of great insight. Seymour’s article is a startling example. Seymour’s article steers completely clear of any superficially complex colonial questions. It leaves that aspect of Spartacist politics completely alone. That is its strength. Instead, it deals with the problem of how the class consciousness of the imperialist bourgeoisie works and attacks some misconceptions of this that are common on the left. He contrasts different concepts of left reformism about how capitalist society works. The structural concept and the conspiracy concept.

For some reformists capitalism is purely a matter of a structure. All you have to do is change the structure and society will improve incrementally. There is no sense in this that there are real material interests that dictate these structures, i.e. property relations that reflect the interests of a specific layer – the capitalist ruling class.

And there is the view that capitalism itself works through a series of conspiracies. The job of socialists is therefore to combat and expose the conspiracies. This may seem very radical, but it is flawed, and can also lead to a pessimistic view. There are a lot of those concepts around now, both on the right and on the left, in different forms.

You hear those who attach great importance to the World Economic Forum, who are seen as so advanced and the real rulers of the planet, somewhat different to the ruling class itself. An earlier example is the whole series of similar theories about the Bilderberg group. The ‘Great Reset’ theory is linked to the theories about the WEF and presupposes some demonic scheme – the leftist variant being to destroy all previous gains of the working-class movement. The right-wing variant of this has theories of the ‘replacement’ of the population of the imperialist countries with immigrants. Both of these found common ground in various theories about the Covid pandemic, that this was part of some sinister scheme to do one or the other of these things, according to the particular leaning of the theorists. This blurred the difference between left and right. It has to be said that as their organisation collapsed around 2020, and then created a new leadership, the Spartacists seemed to go through some strange political-psychological process where they seemed lost in paranoia about the Covid pandemic.

But as Seymour points out, the bourgeoisie does not have the level of coherence that such theories imply. These various think-tanks are partial. They are the brainchild of various bourgeois milieux who are fallible and capable of misunderstanding reality as much as any other group of bourgeois. If your world view is that the class struggle depends on who can organise the most effective conspiracies, it is not a huge step from this to the view that the bourgeoisie is too clever and capable of organising conspiracies to be overthrown. That leads by another route to submission to bourgeois authority, and instead attempts to convince the bourgeoisie to mend their ways. To another form of reformism, in other words.

Monopoly capitalism is getting more and more concentrated. And firms connected by neoliberalism, venture capital and banking are getting more and more powerful.  Examples do exist of a worldview where capitalist society can jump over the law of value. Modern Monetary Theory is such a position. The idea that ‘fiat’ currencies are almost infinitely expandable, provided they can be kept essentially separate from other currencies.

The bourgeoisie are not conspiratorialists who run the world according to a plan. They are not Marxists in reverse, and Seymour is at pains to emphasise this. Their real aim is to realise surplus value, or to put it more simply, to make profits. They are quite capable of forming factions on a large or small scale to do each other down, or to crush or even in extremis to slaughter each other, via ‘their’ workers, in inter-imperialist wars, if they feel it necessary from their own particularist standpoint. Their ideology is not Marxism looked at from the other end of the telescope. They do not apply reverse class struggle concepts in any scientific manner to the class struggle from their side. Individuals may boast of doing such things, but bourgeois class-war tactics are empirical, and may undermine their own interests in the future.

For instance, Thatcher’s destruction of heavy industry in Britain was straightforwardly done to undermine what was in the 1970s the strongest trade union movement in Europe. It succeeded. But in doing so, it accelerated Britain’s decline as an imperialist power enormously.  Something similar happened in the US. Much productive capacity was outsourced to China and other low wage countries to cut down on labour costs. China gained a lot from that. Now all factions of the US bourgeoisie regard China as a major threat. This is not smart.

James Burnham, ex-Marxist, attacks liberals for surrendering to Communism

The bourgeoisie persists in this behaviour, it cannot do otherwise, it is how it thinks. Social being determines social consciousness. Various ex-Marxist ideologues have chided the bourgeoisie with such short-sightedness. James Burnham, after he broke from the US SWP and moved rapidly to the right from Marxism to right-wing cold war militarism, wrote a book called The Suicide of the West which as Seymour said was:

“…designed to prove that the dominant political attitudes of the American ruling class were optimistically false.”

He was ignored, and in part ridiculed. The bourgeoisie is episodically capable of class unity when confronted with a potent threat from the working class, but that rarely lasts long and even within such circumstances they try to do each other down. Seymour gives the example of imperialist intervention in Russia after 1917, when they could agree on the need to intervene, but not to collaborate fully, for fear than one or the other imperialist would gain an advantage. Eventually the most reactionary wing of the German bourgeoisie armed the early Soviet state to gain a hoped-for advantage.

The ultimate example was in WWII and its leadup, when both imperialist axes tried to gain advantages over each other – and did so – by collaborating with their class enemy – the USSR – to defeat the other faction. As is well known, the US-led allies came out on top of the Third Reich by those means. Seymour cites the meeting between Hitler and French Ambassador Coulandre at the beginning of WWII, when both agreed that the war would likely lead to workers revolution (this was quoted by Trotsky in In Defence of Marxism). He quoted other examples, such as parts of the US bourgeoisie undermining sanctions against Cuba in the early Castro period because they could make profits from sugar.

Seymour generalises it thus, and his argument is completely orthodox Marxism:

“The issue was first posed sharply in the Marxist movement by Kautsky’s theory of ultra-imperialism, which held that competition between imperialist nations could be peacefully mediated in the same manner as competition between domestic monopolies. Lenin countered that the bourgeoisie cannot transcend national interests and that inter-imperialist agreements can only be based on the existing balance of strength which all parties are desperately seeking to change to their advantage.”

We can see this incapacity to overcome imperialist capitalism’s national basis today. The nearest thing to capital transcending national boundaries that has ever existed is the globalisation of the world economy since the collapse of Stalinism. Seymour had no knowledge of this when he wrote this essay in 1977.

US hegemony, which suffered some decline in the 1970s over Vietnam, massively expanded after 1991 to produce this phenomenon. But now it is being torn to shreds, by right-wing populist movements that reject most of its nostrums. Migration is one key cutting edge. The populists, where they are not fascists themselves, will ally with fascists on this. But there are other such cutting edges.

Trump and Farage

The collaboration of imperialist states in wars that many of the nationalist-minded factions regard as being of dubious value to them, has become a target. Nationalist opposition to the Ukraine war, which the populist factions see as a project of the ‘globalists’, is an example. If this is not correctly understood by the left, we risk being disarmed in the face of this.

The right-wing forces that are opposing the Ukraine proxy war are not progressive. They are not our allies, as some on the left think. They are simply re-asserting the indissoluble connection of imperialist capitalism with the imperialist nation-state and rejecting globalisation as in effect a deviation from that.

The likes of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, the German AfD, Salvini in Italy, are our strategic imperialist enemies. Any resemblance of what we say to what they say is entirely superficial. Our job is to provide an internationalist alternative to them in opposing the wars of the other faction, not to conciliate them. Our job is not to unite with them, but to independently fight against the imperialist wars and proxy wars that we face, in order to tear the masses away from these nationalist factions and win them to an internationalist position. That is crucial.

Communist Fight series 2, issue 5 is out now!

This issue centres on the outcome of the General Election in Britain, and the complete hollowness of Starmer’s Labour Party victory. The lead article analyses this. Far from having brought about any recovery in the Labour Party’s electoral support, Starmer’s Labour got around half-a-million fewer votes than Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn in the ‘disaster’ of 2019.  Yet Labour achieved the biggest majority, 174, since Blair in 1997. The reason for the change is not any surge to Labour, but the collapse of the Conservative Party under the weight of its own contradictions, and the undemocratic nature of the first-past-the-post electoral system in Britain. So Starmer’s ‘mandate’ is shallow indeed, and he has no mandate for more neoliberal attacks, support for Zionist genocide or warmaking against Russia.

Starmer’s Labour is up to its neck in support for genocide in Gaza, though as the General Election campaign began it started talking about of the other side of its mouth. It feared the campaigns of numerous left-wing independents, often Muslim or Palestinian anti-war activists, and left-wing anti-Zionist currents like the Workers Party led by George Galloway and Chris Williamson. The victory of five independents, including Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North, and four others who challenged Labour MPs over Gaza, including ejecting Starmer-crony Jonathan Ashworth from his previously safe Leicester South parliamentary seat, was accompanied by near-misses in several other constituencies, including the near-defeat of Zionist agent Wes Streeting in Ilford North.

The article also pays attention to right-wing populism. It locates an underlying reason for the rise in right-wing populism in a number of imperialist countries in the clash between two sets of related bourgeois factions in those countries: one of which has as its centre of gravity in the ‘globalisation’ of capital that became dominant in the period of enhanced US world hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91. In explaining the rise of the other, we republish an old theoretical piece from 1997 by Joseph Seymour of the Spartacist League, which bluntly points out that the imperialist bourgeoisie is a nationally-limited class, incapable of transcending adherence to the nation-state.

It is arguable that the right-wing populism of today is the result of this bourgeois inability to escape the nation-state, and a backlash within the imperialist bourgeoisies against the trend to imperialist globalisation under US ultra-hegemony – which is now coming to an end with the rise of Russia and China back to world-prominence. One symptom of this division in the ruling class is populist dissent over the Ukraine war, in which the liberals make extensive use of Ukrainian Nazis and is seen particularly a project of ‘globalisers’ in the US Democratic Party. This has enhanced the popular support of some on the populist right where anti-migrant sentiment has not always been enough; pro-imperialist Russophobia of many on the left has helped the far right exploit this issue.

The back page article is about the apparent victory of the New Popular Front (NPF) in France over Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR) in the National Assembly elections that were called by President Macron after the NR won the European Parliament election. It points out that while the NPF had managed by tactical voting and class-collaboration to thwart the NR in this election, the class-collaboration, and the fact that key elements of the NPF are ardent supporters of the Ukraine war, actually boosted the popular vote of the NR on the second round even as they lost out in terms of seats. This the NPF victory is far from decisive, it has merely postponed the decisive conflict with the NR. Le Pen will be a potent danger in the 2027 Presidential election.

This issue highlights our united front work over Ukraine, in International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), which was a bloc of ourselves (and our earlier organisation Socialist Fight), the New Communist Party, the British Posadists, and a number of non-aligned anti-imperialist activists. We reprint three leaflets produced by IUAFS that have been distributed to address broader layers of anti-imperialists in the Gaza movement.

This issue also has an article dealing with the despoliation of nature and the capitalist expropriation of food sources, and some of the historical aspects of this, and an article celebrating the release of Julian Asssange from his persecution over the last decade and a half for exposing the crimes of US imperialism, a struggle we have supported all along.

The Trump Attack and “Civil War”

Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

Trump’s ‘assassination’ photo-opportunity

The seeming assassination attempt on former President and almost dead-cert Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania is one more bizarre episode as the US appears to be staggering towards the possibility of civil war. Trump gives the appearance of having been grazed on the left ear by a bullet. If that were true, he would have survived by pure luck – a couple of inches away from a likely fatal or at least incapacitating head shot. A 20-year-old shooter was killed by security.  

There are other interpretations. Serious questions remain about this so-called “security lapse”.  It is possible that this was an elaborate false flag stunt to help Trump’s election campaign, perhaps with a patsy who was sacrificed. False flags are frequently used by all wings of US imperialism. It will be recalled that Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right ex-president of Brazil, used a dubious stabbing incident in 2014 for dramatic effect to boost his drive to power. Regardless of the truth of this incident, the scenes of Trump’s bloodied face with fist in the air will be powerful material to promote his fascistic presidential bid.

Meanwhile the Democrats are in deep crisis, as the fact that Joe Biden is dementia-ridden, and incapable of functioning is now centre-stage. Behind the scenes, there are considerable efforts underway in the Democratic Party to replace him, to pressure him to stand down from the Democratic presidential nomination in favour of an alternative. In the frame is Vice-President Kamala Harris, but she is an unpopular figure – a right-wing prosecutor in California who was vehemently hostile to campaigns against murderous police shootings of minority youth, which are endemic in the US. Other possibilities include the Governor of California, Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan, or even former first lady Michelle Obama. 

Trump, on the other hand, is a convicted felon, having been found guilty of 34 charges associated with his payoff to a porn star to hide his sexual adventures. These would be of little legitimate interest were he not a on a crusade to destroy women’s right to abortion, and the rights of trans people, in the name of Christian ‘morality’. He was evidently guilty of the crimes he was convicted of and many more besides. He attempted a ‘beer-hall putsch’ on 6th January 2021 to stop the transfer of power to his successor Biden when he lost the 2020 Presidential election.

But the Democrats never dared to go after him for that until it was too late. And when they belatedly did so, the Supreme Court far-right majority which he put in place declared that he, and presidents generally, have virtual immunity from prosecution for acts committed in office. Which as many pointed out, in effect makes a president akin to a king or establishes a US version of the “Fuhrer principle”. Richard Nixon would certainly have made good use of that ruling.  It would be interesting, perhaps, to speculate that if Biden were to ‘officially’ order the summary killing of Trump and his cohort judges, in the name of defending the US constitution against subversion from the far right, he could plausibly declare that he was immune from prosecution according to the ruling of those very same judges. He could then appoint new judges and force congress to endorse them at gunpoint, to overturn the previous ruling going forward, but not retrospectively.

But Biden is evidently mentally unfit to do that. And even if he were not, the bourgeoisie is politically incapable of such resolute action in defence of the democratic rights that the Democratic Party sometimes claims to stand for. Biden is more interested in sending hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to Nazi Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia and defend US world hegemony, than in defending democratic rights at home. Likewise, Biden sends many billions in military aid to the Zionist state to carry on with its genocide of the Palestinian people. Trump today as in the past is funded by Likudniks like Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson’s widow. She plans to spend $100 million dollars to elect Trump; her late husband, the Likudnik gambling billionaire, bankrolled his presidential campaign in 2016.

The payoff for that was the US moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, US recognition of the Israeli annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, seized in 1967, and the annexation of the Jordan Valley area on the West Bank. As well as the end of Obama’s JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran.  It was Trump’s brazen support for this intensification of the oppression of the Palestinians, and his attempt through the ‘Abraham Accords’ with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to liquidate the Palestinian question entirely, that created the conditions where the breakout of October 7th from Gaza became inevitable, and the genocidal response from Israel also.

Trump promises to openly and brazen support Netanyahu to ‘finish the job’ of exterminating the Palestinian people in Gaza. The Democrats say nothing about this, as for all Biden’s occasional double talk about a ceasefire, everyone knows that his administration has backed the genocide to the hilt with arms and for months raised its bloody arm in the UN Security Council to defend Israel against overwhelming condemnation from the majority of humanity. Both parties are brazenly up to their necks in the Zionist holocaust.

That is the position of the ‘liberal’ bourgeoisie in general. The ruling class, with all its terrible contradictions, unites as a class to limit and destroy the democratic rights of the masses. That is the ABC of Marxism, though charting what could and ought to be done about the kind of fascistic threat that Trump represents has agitational usefulness for Marxists.

But what is important is understanding the class-based reasons that are driving the United States towards a potential armed conflict between its two main parties. It does appear that the potential geographic lines of a civil conflict are not dissimilar to the fault lines of the secessionist civil war of the slavocracy in the middle of the 19th Century. With less developed and ethnically diverse states such as Texas and Florida at the centre of the Trump-led GOP block. The opposite, Democratic Party trend being centred in California, the Great Lakes area (Illinois in particular) and New England/New York with their ethnically mixed population, stronger trade unions and minority organisations, and comparatively liberal politics. 

There appears to be no solid class basis for such a Civil War. It was clear in the 19th Century that that conflict was between two mutually antagonistic ruling class layers that had their material roots in different forms of labour exploitation. The Northern bourgeoisie was solidly based on wage labour and classical bourgeois extraction of surplus value for its material basis. The Southern slavocracy gained its considerable wealth from the production of commodities, such as cotton, tobacco and sugar, by means of slave labour, where the worker himself was the property of the slave owner. This was obviously a clear class difference, and the US civil war had the character of a social revolution – the destruction of one archaic form of labour and hence mode of production (slavery, albeit slavery that had an early-capitalist origin as a tool of so-called primitive accumulation) by a social formation based on the capitalist mode of production in a classic sense.

The Civil War that is brewing now appears not to have any such class basis. It would be based on two camps both fully rooted in the capitalist mode of production, and to be thus incomprehensible in class terms. But there is an explanation. An important clue as to why this is happening is the disputes in Europe involving far right trends such as Nigel Farage and his Reform Party in Britain, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN) in France, the Alternative fűr Deutschland (Alternative for Germany – AfD) in Germany, the followers of the far-right politician Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the bourgeois mainstream. These right-wing populist trends, which overlap considerably with fascism even if they are not all actually fascist, are strongly at odds with their respective bourgeois mainstreams over the proxy war in Ukraine. They regard it as a provocation that threatens ‘their’ nation-states with severe damage or destruction for no good reason. Trump’s followers in the US have similar views.

The basis for this antagonism is capitalist globalisation. In the period since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91, the US achieved unparalleled global dominance, far beyond even that which it exercised in the three ‘golden decades’ after WWII, when the USSR was a potent barrier to its domination. With the USSR dissolved, for the entire decade of the 1990s US domination was far more grandiose and all-encompassing, despite such defeats as Vietnam which it suffered in the 1970s. But this has been accompanied by the deindustrialisation of the major imperialist countries, including Britain and the United States, the relocation of much industrial production to places like China and India, and the increasing financialisation of capitalism in the imperialist countries of North America and Western Europe. In contrast to the hollowed out West, China’s economy, trade links and productive capacities continue to increase apace. ClassConscious attribute China’s success to the CCP’s as a workers’ state with continued control over the “commanding heights of the economy” whilst the LCFI think China is more similar to ex-Soviet Russia. a powerful bourgeois state where capitalism is still restricted by its inability to overcome deformations and restrictions to capital bequeathed by several decades of productive growth where a higher, socialist mode of production was in preparation. Regardless, the economic and military rise of China is fuelling the sense of crisis in the US ruling class.

This has created a situation where the obsolesce of the capitalist-imperialist nation state, which revolutionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky remarked upon in connection with the two world wars in the 20th Century, has become a live issue causing divisions in the bourgeoisie. Financialisation and the migration of production out of the imperialist countries appears to threaten the imperialist nation-state itself and has produced a backlash among part of the imperialist bourgeoisie itself.

In the 1977 essay “On Bourgeois Class Consciousness” (see page 4) the leading Marxist intellectual of the Spartacists, Joseph Seymour noted that:

“While capable of certain acts and attitudes of internationalist solidarity, the bourgeoisie is a nationally limited class. It is capable neither of abolishing national states nor, often, even of subordinating immediate national interests to the historic defence of the bourgeois order.” (Spartacist 24, 1977, at https://www.consistent-democrats.org/on-bourgeois-class-consciousness/)

Today, in the context of the aftermath of the ‘New American Century’ that was fleetingly born in the aftermath of the end of Stalinist rule in the East, there is a backlash underway among part of the imperialist bourgeoisie against this financialisation and ‘globalisation’. This is what led to Brexit in Britain. It is why Trumpism is a potent movement in the US, which threatens the US with civil war. It is also highly threatening to the coherence of the European Union itself; just how threatening remains to be seen. These wings of the various imperialist bourgeoisies are quite prepared to make use of fascists and quasi-fascists as a weapon against their bourgeois opponents.

They are not, for the most part, today confronting mobilised workers movements that are a threat to capitalist rule and aiming to crush such movements. Thanks to the decline of social democracy and the collapse of Stalinism, such movements are generally far weaker. However, under conditions of crisis, even the possibility of workers organising in the most limited or even spontaneous ways is deeply threatening and is also driving all factions of the ruling class towards authoritarianism. There is a fear that even mild social democratic reforms, let alone a revolutionary movement may develop. That is why the ruling class for example of the US and UK responded so viciously to the possibility of reformists like Sanders or Corbyn taking power. It also explains their hostility to social media and the bipartisan support to ban Tik Tok in the US.

But a key element of globalisation is the presence of migrant workers, and these fascists are a potent threat to them, which is why the workers movement must steadfastly stand against these movements. Of course, targeting migrants is also a key way to channel working class discontent into reactionary ends.

A turn towards fascism by a section of the ruling class is therefore seen as the answer to domestic and international problems but these bourgeois movements are ultimately doomed to defeat; they will not be able to reverse the deindustrialisation and financialisation of the imperialist countries. Trump’s sponsorship by the Israel lobby gives that away. Even the Zionists, who have a major bourgeois international dimension, are divided about this. The United States particularly is vulnerable to a collapse and a division that could conceivably bury it as a world power. Because, after its 19th Century Civil War, the knitting back together of the US as a nation was shaky and incomplete. As part of this contradictory process, it’s major parties even appeared to change places with regard to the continuity of the Civil War – the Republicans are now the party of the reactionary South, the Democrats the party of the liberal North. It is therefore entirely feasible that the US could be torn apart by this antagonism, and come to an end as a world power, with a whimper more than a bang. The other dangerous possibility is that the self-destructive path the US ruling class is embarked upon will drag the world into a Third World War. It is the job of Communists to intervene wherever possible to build a movement that can end the threat of fascism and world war by removing its source – the decayed capitalist system. Regardless, the apparent attempted assassination of Trump demonstrates that the pace of events towards one conclusion or another are accelerating at the heart of world imperialism.

French Election: Popular Frontists Outmanoeuvred Le Pen for Now. But the Danger Remains!

Lefitst social democrat Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Centrist bourgeois Emmanuel Macron, Far-Rightist Marine Le Pen

Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

President Emmanuel Macron’s gamble in calling new elections to the French National Assembly as an attempted means to counter the victory of the far right Rassemblement National – (RN) or National Rally, formerly the Front Nationale (National Front) of Marine Le Pen in the June European Election, has opened a new political situation. It was an act of desperation by Macron whose ‘centrist’ base of support has ebbed away due to his own vicious attacks on the working class over the last period, outrageously raising the pension age from 60 to 64 and ramming it through using emergency clauses in the constitution without a parliamentary vote. His warmongering in Ukraine, even earlier proposing to openly send French troops into battle against Russia, was almost designed to provoke war with Russia. Then there are his vain attempts to supress protests against the genocide in Gaza and his pandering to Zionist and French nativist Islamophobia and anti-migrant agitation. These things have completely discredited his regime and fuelled the growth of the far right in the seeming absence of a potent left movement.

So, after the shock of the Euro-Election, he dissolved the National Assembly. The first-round victory of Le Pen’s Party meant that the gamble appeared to have failed big time. But the New Popular Front (NPF), launched by the La France Insoumise (France Unbowed – LFI) party led by the left-wing social-democratic politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which included the Socialist Party, Communist Party and Greens, was galvanised by the rise of Le Pen’s party. It launched a campaign of tactical voting to keep Le Pen’s Party from getting a parliamentary majority. Supporters of the NPF and Macron’s Party systematically withdrew their candidates in constituencies where they came third in the first round with their bloc partner having gained second place. This class-collaborationist tactic by the half-formed NPF, itself a class collaborationist alliance, achieved a short-term tactical victory, which in some ways appeared superficially to vindicate Macron’s calling of a snap election. In terms of seats, the NPF came first, Macron’s Renaissance Party came second, with the far right in third place. In terms of seats, that is, though with nowhere near a parliamentary majority for any of them.

But in terms of votes, the RN came first more decisively in the second round than in the first. It increased its vote from 33.21% in the first round to 37.06% in the second round. Quite a considerable increase.  Which means that while the Popular Frontism of the left and Macron may by tactical voting have thwarted the RN in parliamentary terms, they strengthened Le Pen in terms of popular support. Which has not solved the problem therefore, it just postponed the decisive conflict until later. Indeed, far from being a great victory for Mélenchon either, the NPF’s vote fell from 28.21% in the first round to 25.80% in the second round. Whereas Macron’s Party gained marginally, going from 21.28% in the first round to 24.53% in the second round. 

In parliamentary terms, the result for now is deadlock. No bloc has anything like a majority. Macron, as president, is likely to be desperately trying to fit together a coalition for months. He may well not succeed, as despite the parliamentary arithmetic, actual popular votes and the social forces behind them put enormous pressure on members of the National Assembly. And if they don’t succeed, there could even be another election at some point. Le Pen could still benefit from this.

One of the main reasons for Marine Le Pen’s rise is her opposition to France’s support for NATO’s lost war against Russia in Ukraine. The French proletariat simply opposes being dragged like cannon fodder by imperialism into war. A minority of the ruling class sees the far right as a battering ram to push a more nationalist agenda at odds with the mainstream pro-EU ‘globalist’ trend that is deeply involved in the US-led proxy war in Ukraine. That wing is using verbal opposition to French involvement in Ukraine as a means to garner support from part of the working class, particularly in more provincial towns that are more conservative and less ethnically diverse than the biggest cities. As well as mobilising racist anti-migrant sentiment, which Macron had already adapted to to try to ‘disarm’ his far-right opponents by stealing their clothes.

Macron introduced new legislation limiting access to citizenship, rights to social benefits, and family reunification for migrants, as well as deportation for ‘immigrants’ if they commit crimes…. even if being convicted as an adult, they’ve been living in the country from childhood. The issue of work visas for irregular migrants has been curtailed. Overseas study visas are also restricted. It all sounds very much like the kind of laws introduced in Britain by the Tories and Brexiteers over the past decade, except that Macron is as pro-EU as any politician can be. It shows how the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie, using the fascists as a battering ram, can induce its critics to pander to its racist-nationalist agenda. Migrants are attacked, Muslims are vilified, with the niqab banned in public spaces. In France, 50% of the prison population is Muslim, which is disproportionate as the Muslim population in France is approximately 10%..

The NPF’s circumstantial victory only postpones Le Pen’s victory because the NPF’s positions on the war in Ukraine are very close to Macron’s unpopular positions of increasing French support for Ukraine, sending more French weapons and military instructors to the war. By associating itself with imperialism in the Ukrainian War, the NPF plays the same geopolitical game as Macron, the game of pushing the proletariat politically into the arms of the “fascist-pacifist” extreme right. This is the NPF’s biggest crime at the moment. This crime, if not renounced and the opposite policy adopted and fought for by the workers parties involved, will pave the way for Le Pen’s rise to the French government. A disaster particularly for the sections of the working class with an immigrant origin.

This is at most a tactical defeat for Le Pen, but not a strategic one. The short-term tactic may even strengthen Le Pen strategically. She will be very dangerous in the 2027 Presidential Election, which may well be between her and Mélenchon, as Macron no longer inspires popular support. Mélenchon’s LFI party proposes some reasonable reforms, to restore pensions, raise wages and benefits, radically reverse austerity. It is also in theory hostile to NATO. On international questions Mélenchon is a mixed bag. On Ukraine, Mélenchon party condemned the Special Military Operation (SMO) that began in February 2022 as a so-called ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, echoing imperialist propaganda. Though he opposes the warmongering on a pacifist basis, in effect:

“’We stand for Ukraine’s restoring its territorial integrity. But it should be done politically, but not by means of military force,’ he said, adding that the idea of delivering strikes inside Russia is ‘absurd.’

https://tass.com/world/1814251?

There is no mention of the rights of the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass in this. They voted against Ukraine’s ‘territorial integrity’ against a far-right regime in Kiev that began to supress their language rights in 2014. In this concept, territorial integrity overrides the democratic rights of the people who live in a state – hardly a socialist position. Though he did have a more sympathetic response to the separation of Crimea to join Russia in 2014, and he has called the Kiev regime ‘neo-Nazis’.

But at least on Syria he was quite supportive of the Russian intervention and hostile to Turkey’s intervention of the side of pro-imperialist mercenary jihadists. This may reflect an older pro-Russian position that is part of French bourgeois politics. He is rather like Jeremy Corbyn over Zionism and promises to recognize Palestine if LFI gains power. However, he is hostile to Iran – on the supposed grounds that Iran is seeking to destroy Israel in some bad way. A soft pro-Zionist position, it seems.

The Communist Party in France echo Macron’s denunciation of Russia, saying the intervention was a “criminal decision…” involving  “…aggression against the sovereignty of the people of Ukraine.” Though they make the usual calls for peace, negotiations, etc, they blame Russia for NATO’s aggressive expansion in the East. The Socialist Party is for the war drive. Its leader Faure was quoted as saying: “If we let Russia win, the risk we all run is to find ourselves in a situation where Russia will not stop.”

A joint statement of the Socialist Party and Greens is quoted by the Spectator as saying:

“‘Our line is clear: we support Ukraine, we support the delivery of arms, we support Ukraine’s membership of the European Union.”

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/frances-political-upheaval-is-bad-news-for-ukraine/

The ‘centre-left’ Place Publique, which is also part if the NPF, campaigns for ‘aid’ to Ukraine. The predominant policy in the NPF bloc is support for the same warmongering as Macron. And by his bloc with them, Mélenchon associates his party with this. While it has to be acknowledged that many in this bloc are driven by justified anti-fascist sentiment against the RN, at the same time the warmongering policy of most in the NPF over Ukraine is fuelling the growth in popular support of the same RN.

If is highly doubtful that Mélenchon will be able to keep together his NPF for the 2027 presidential election, and that he would be able to generate the popular support to seriously thwart Le Pen even if he did. That will also be a two-round election, and it’s not clear who would be able to combat Le Pen. What is clear is that class collaboration, though it practically blocked the RN from gaining a majority and the premiership now, also caused a decline in support for itself vis-à-vis Macron in the second round. Popular fronts historically were an obstacle to revolution including in French history, and elsewhere like Chile, and the precondition for Macron leading a real struggle against Le Pen for the popular vote is a break with class collaboration, with the petit bourgeois Greens, let alone Macron’s bourgeois neoliberal party who he effectively endorsed on the second round by using tactical voting in this manner.

The precondition for serious struggle against Le Pen’s party is a break with popular frontism. In the second round of a presidential election, there is no way to evade the popular vote. But a break with popular frontism in France means a break with reformism, as within a reformist framework, the French electoral system makes popular frontism a practical temptation whenever the question of power arises. It may be that there is some kind of surge toward LFI before 2027, but if it does not break decisively with Macron’s warmongering and this strongly pro-war popular front, Mélenchon would be at best a candidate for the role of Salvador Allende.

Popular fronts, whether with the Greens or Macron’s Renaissance, are a trap for the working class. We demand that Mélenchon, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, break with Greens, refuse any political bloc with non-working-class forces, and fight too and nail against the war in Ukraine.  The key indicator of the deceptive nature of this popular front is its support for Biden/Macron’s proxy war in Ukraine. In breaking with popular frontism, and this filthy war, they would actually undermine some of the support for the RN.

We need a party that opposes the threat of imperialist war against Russia and China, that defends migrant workers tooth and nail against the far right and Macron alike, and which fights against all the neoliberal attacks on the working class. For workers defence guards to defend victims of fascist terrorism! Down with Macron’s war in Ukraine – defend Russia, the Donbass and Crimea against Macron and his Nazi friends! Down with Le Pen, break with the bourgeoisie, no Popular Fronts – for a government of all the workers parties, LFI, SP, CP, on an anti-capitalist programme!   

Where now for the Left after the General Election?

Jeremy Corbyn, newly elected Independent MP for Islington North, lambasts Starmer at Palestine Solidarity demo on 6 July

This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on the result of the General Election on July 4th.

The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.

The headlines of our leaflet read:

“Starmer’s Regime has NO MANDATE for its Genocidal Neoliberalism!  Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour.”

This talk is based on that but expanded.

Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 174, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.

But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes absolutely than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%).

This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 59.9%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any ‘achievements’ of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.

In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.

But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide.

Since the election Sunak announced his resignation. A leadership election process for the Tories has begun. Farage’s Reform Party is hopeful of either replacing, or taking over the Tories for a more consistent, xenophobic far right type of politics. More on this later.

Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%.    Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all. Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.

Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.

The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society.

Iqbal Mohammed, Newly Elected Independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, West Yorkshire

Iqbal Mohammad, is a former Labour member who quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.

Then there is the victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was just about defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.

Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. Jody McIntyre, Muslim and disabled activist and supporter of the Workers Party, almost unseated Jess Phillips, friend of Israel, in Birmingham Yardley, by only 693 votes. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes.  He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council.

Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them. Andrew Feinstein came a very good second with over 7,000 votes after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Stamer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.

Halima Khan in Stratford and Bow for the Workers Party – former Labour whistleblower about corruption and the activities of the Zionist lobby in Newham – came a very good third, behind Labour and the Greens. She gained ten times the vote of prominent RMT activist Steve Hedley, who mistakenly stood without any real base. Faiza Shaheen, a respected economist and the overwhelming popular choice of Labour members in Chingford and Woodford Green was banned from standing for Labour, because she criticised Islamophobia in the Labour Party. She was set to defeat Iain Duncan Smith. She rightly refused to accept this, Labour imposed a stooge candidate, and a split vote ensued that allowed IDS to retain his seat. This is entirely caused by Labour Zionism and Islamophobia.

We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.

The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular.  

The struggle against the far right and Farage’s semi-far-right movement, which aims to parallel the rise of Marine Le Pen, Meloni etc., is going to be a key struggle in the next period. But it is going to be inseparable from the struggle to build a new party of the working class left. Trotsky wrote in a different situation, about the counterposition of the fascists, and what the party of the working class left, the communist party, should stand for. He said that the fascists were the party of counterrevolutionary despair, whereas the communist party was the party of revolutionary hope.

We are in a somewhat different situation today. In the 1930s, there were strong, highly political working-class movements all over Europe, and fascism was a petty bourgeois and lumpen movement directly aimed at crushing them. This time round there is not a strong, highly political working-class movement. Far from it. The parallel rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the collapse of Stalinism caused a massive weakening of the working-class movement in the imperialist countries. A qualitative weakening, which has not yet been overcome.

This rise of fascism intersects a conflict within the imperialist bourgeoisie, because in the period since the collapse of Stalinism under the unprecedented US domination, the globalising factions of the bourgeois gained unprecedented dominance. The problem is that the imperialist bourgeoisie is a national class. Although, as Lenin pointed out, the nation-state is obsolete, and the proof of that is the world war that broke out in 1914. But the war in 1914 showed that, not only is the nation-state obsolete, but the imperialist bourgeoisie cannot abolish it. Rather, it will try to ‘abolish’ it by imperialist powers attempting to conquer each other, and the rest of the globe also. And tearing apart human civilisation in the process and threatening human existence today as today’s technology is quite capable, from climate pollution to the threat of nuclear war.

Today’s right-wing populist and fascist movements derive from a backlash within the various imperialist bourgeoisies against the ‘globalising’ liberal factions of the bourgeoisie. They are not particularly aimed at the workers movement, which is qualitatively weaker, both organisationally and politically, than it was in the 1930s. However, they are aimed at migrant workers, and the workers movement has to act as the tribune of the oppressed, and therefore has a duty to defend such workers tooth and nail. There is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about this reassertion of the ‘national’ prerogative of the various imperialist ruling classes.

Unfortunately, the populist factions have managed to convince some sections of the working-class movement that there is something positive about them. Even some left-wing sections of the workers movement have been drawn into the orbit of the populists, at least partly. Thus, we see working class support for Brexit, so-called ‘Lexit’, the most extreme example of which is George Galloway, who openly allied with Farage during the period of the Brexit referendum.

Even now, as he advocates the most courageous defiance and attacks on the imperialist bourgeoisie over its criminal support for genocide in Palestine, and its criminal, equally genocidal (in intent) proxy war in the Donbass, he still echoes the demands of the populists over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. He embodies a contradiction. He should be both hailed and congratulated for his courage over Ukraine and Gaza and taken to task for his chauvinist politics over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. For the working-class movement, no-one is illegal. Migrants, legal and ‘illegal’, are part of the working-class and oppressed.

Galloway became particularly vulnerable to such deviations when, as Britain’s most radical MP, he was brutally beaten by a Zionist in 2014, and betrayed by every member of the House of Commons bar one (including the Labour left) who failed to publicly condemn this fascist attack. He appeared to become partially disillusioned with the left after that. But this is not a mere personal foible. There are other examples.

Similar such contradictory phenomena are so-called ’MAGA-Communism’ in the United States (would be communists who support, or at least are in the political orbit of, Donald Trump). Or the left-wing politics (over Ukraine and Gaza) of Sahra Wagenknecht – very courageous in today’s Germany, and yet similar chauvinism to Galloway – her chauvinistic politics over migration. Wagenknecht has formed her own party over this, and appears to have the same mixture of courageous anti-imperialism and chauvinism as Galloway. This has partly come about as the Ukraine war has been seen particularly as a project of the ‘globalising’ faction of the bourgeoisie, with their populist opponents (Trump, Farage, the AfD, being seen to be more dubious about it).

This needs to be properly understood by the workers movement. A key text in understanding it is a 1977 essay “On Bourgeois Class-Consciousness” the then-leading Marxist intellectual figure of the Spartacist League/US, Joseph Seymour.

I would like to see us do a public forum/discussion on that soon. It would be very useful for enhancing a Marxist understanding of populism and the roots of the current growth of the far right. And re-arming the workers movement and the left, to understand this phenomenon, to gain a sense of perspective and discover how to combat it.

For this we need to advocate a unification of the anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist left including its sizeable ex-Labour, ex-Corbynite component. Programmatic development can only come through full debate and wide-ranging education. We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

Starmer’s Regime has NO MANDATE for its Genocidal Neoliberalism

Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour

Top: Jeremy Corbyn, witchhunted and expelled from Labour by Starmer for belatedly defending his leadership against ‘anti-Semitism’ scam, defeated the Starmerites in his long-held Islington North seat.
Bottom: Ayoub Khan, former Labour councillor and now independent MP defeated neocon Zionist Blairite Khalid Mahmood in Birmingham Perry Barr.
 

Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 171, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.

But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%). This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 60%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. Around 80% of the eligible electorate did not vote for this government.

It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any achievements of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.

In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.

But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide. Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%.    Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all.

Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.

Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.

The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society. Iqbal Mohammad, a former Labour member quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.

Then there is the substantial victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was overwhelmingly defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.

Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes.  He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council. Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them to Andrew Feinstein, who came a very good second after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Starmer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.

We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.

The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular.  We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

Argentina: Raid on the Central Headquarters Of Partido Obrero (Workers’ Party)

Solidarity with Partido Obrero against the repressive escalation of the Milei regime!

There was a raid on Monday, June 3, by the federal police at the headquarters of Partido Obrero, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. The raid was carried out with the alleged objective of requisitioning documentation from Editorial Rumbos and work cooperatives. In the same vein as the intimidation against Partido Obrero, a series of summonses and raids had already been carried out with a view to “auditing” the social assistance against the piquetero mass organization Polo Obrero and its leader, Eduardo Belliboni.

This occurred as part of almost 30 raids last month and a massive operation of telephone taps by the repressive apparatus against piquetero organizations. Although all this is only a part of the escalation of the repressive actions of the Milei government. The piquetero organizations that were targeted are the Polo Obrero, Peronist Barrios de Pie and the Front of Organizations in Struggle (FOL).

All this as part of the persecution of leftist parties and social movements under the pretext of diverting resources linked to the Empower Work plans by the piquetero organizations themselves. In a context where the austerity of the Milei government cancels social programs including assistance to soup kitchens, this repressive policy against leftist parties and social movements aims to prevent the masses from organizing themselves in the face of the austerity policy in the social aid plans, using hunger as a form of social control.

The strategic repressive escalation has been going on since the beginning of Milei’s government. Already in December 2023, the Minister of Security Patricia Bulrrich advanced the repressive protocol in order to prevent political and social organization and seek to criminalize those who demonstrate. Today there is currently a repressive siege against the workers of the province of Misiones. As part of Milei’s policies of persecution, we must also include pressure against opposition journalism such as the censorship manoeuvres against Santiago Cuneo.

Argentine fascism is already resorting to the techniques of war against the poor that Zionist fascism is using in Gaza. While the Argentine population suffers hunger and looks for food among the garbage, it was discovered that the “Ministry of Human Capital” retained more than five thousand tons of food in its warehouses in Tucumán until it spoiled.

The regime is waging a combined campaign of extinguishing the social functions of the state, strangling mass organizations, and political repression against social movements and their left-wing political parties.

This continuous repressive escalation is the only way for Milei’s government to impose its brutal austerity against the masses. In this sense, the raid against the headquarters of Partido Obrero is part of the persecution by Milei’s fascist government against the piquetero organizations, it is part of the attempt to reinforce repressive policies in the face of the growth of popular struggles against hunger and fascism, thus making use of the repressive apparatus and judicialization.

No to the criminalization of left-wing parties and social movements!

Solidarity with the Workers’ Party in the face of Milei’s fascist government!

Defence of the right to organise of workers!

An attack on one is an attack on all!

Milei, who wants to starve the people, hands off the social fighters!

Presentation and discussion: General Election: No Vote to Zionist New Labour – Support Left Independents/Anti-Zionists

(Top) Jeremy Corbyn,  Leanne Mohammad, (Below) George Galloway,  Andrew  Feinstein
 

The presentation and discussion at our forum this afternoon can also be heard here as a podcast

There is no major party standing in this General Election deserving of the support of class-conscious workers, socialists, anti-racists and fighters against oppression.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats are the open parties of the ruling class, speaking abstractly.

Being more concrete, we have all experienced the brutal austerity and increasingly decrepit corruption of this gang of looters of our social gains, public services, the Health service, the rivers polluted with raw sewage, the racist thuggery and sadism … I could go on.

First the Tory-Liberal coalition for 5 years, then the Tories alone. The rise of Jeremy Corbyn was a reaction from the workers movement to Tory-Lib Dem austerity attacks.

But today’s Labour Party was forged through a massive, reactionary driving out of the left that led the party from 2015-20 under Jeremy Corbyn.

This was the one period since the miners strike when millions of working-class people thought they had a chance of winning something back, through the election of a left-wing politician with a record of fighting for workers, of opposing privatisation and attacks on the poor, of standing up to bigoty and racism, and mobilisation against imperialist wars.

The current Labour leadership, as the whole country knows, buried that. They preferred the Tories. They engineered Johnson’s victory in 2019. Labour is standing in this election as a Tory second XI as they continue to stamp on the Labour left.

Some see the Greens as a potential repository of socialist possibilities. In Germany, the Greens are part of a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD); they are deeply implicated in support for both Israel and Nazi Ukraine.

In this country sole Green MP Caroline Lucas, has been involved in ‘cross-party’ witchhunting critics of Zionism in academia, as shown in the case of David Miller.

They cannot be trusted, their environmentalism is bourgeois and depends on ‘Green’ capitalism, not socialist planning, which is the only thing that can solve the problem of human-induced climate change. We need a working-class alternative, not a petty bourgeois party that joins in with capitalist reaction.

But the main topic of this forum is Labour.

On October 8th Israeli ‘defence’ minister Yoav Gallant made his Hitlerian speech saying that the inhabitants of Gaza are “human animals” who should be allowed “no electricity, no food, no water, no gas”.

When Starmer was interviewed shortly after, he defended Israel’s “right” to carry out these genocidal measures.

This led to a major exodus of outraged members, particularly from Muslim working-class communities, and numerous defections of councillors.

The Labour leadership is dominated by genocidal Zionists.

The scam ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the left during the Corbyn period, was driven by the realisation by those forces that a genocide of the Palestinian people was in the offing, and politics had to be purged of sympathy for Palestinian rights.

But they have a huge problem now. This election takes place in the middle of that very genocide, that Starmer gave his support to

However much he tries to wriggle and evade now, he, and his supporters, are on the rack.

The Starmer leadership is a reversion to the politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their neoliberal New Labour governments, which followed in the footsteps of Thatcher and Major.

That government, like the Tories, demanded austerity to make the working class pay for the world financial crisis of the late noughties.

The neoliberal right, which is interpenetrated with the Zionists as a matter both of history and current political reality, was horrified by the near victory of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election.

It appears that only the sabotage of the Labour right –the funnelling of campaign funds to safe Labour seats inhabited by neoliberals and Zionists – deprived Corbyn’s Labour of being the largest party.

The shocked expressions of ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ like Jess Phillips and Stephen Kinnock when May lost her majority, said it all.

They worked overtime to sabotage Corbyn’s leadership and bring Boris Johnson to power in the 2019 election. For the bourgeois/Zionist right-wing, Johnson was the lesser evil to Corbyn.

When the anti-Semitism scam was ineffective (as was shown in 2017), Starmer manipulated the issue of Brexit to sabotage Labour.

So, the idea that Starmer and his followers are somehow a lesser evil to the Tories today is at odds with reality. They have more in common with the Tories than they do with the labour movement.

This election gives the opportunity to the left to begin to clarify that and split this bourgeois workers party along class lines. We are seeing the small beginnings of that.

There is already a substantial layer of independent socialist councillors around the country, many of whom successfully defended their seats in the council elections on May 4th.

Starmer has the party’s internal life sewn up, dissent is ruthlessly punished, and internal party elections are shamelessly rigged.

Then in February Starmer colluded with Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, another “Labour Friend of Israel”.

Hoyle broke with an element of parliamentary procedure that has a democratic content. The rule being that on a party’s “Opposition Day”, that party is allowed to put a motion, and only the government is allowed to put amendments to it.

The purpose of this is to ensure that all opposition parties get to have their say; they have the right to have their motions voted on by the house, yes or no.

Hoyle allowed Labour to put an amendment to the SNP’s motion calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Predictably, the Labour Party was able to outvote the SNP.  So, the SNP motion was amended to remove its most important demands, for a ceasefire and condemnation of “collective punishment” of Palestinian civilians in this genocide.

Which were never voted on in counter-position to the government,

Labour was afraid that if they were forced to vote on a ceasefire, they would split. But voting for something with ambiguous wording that was deliberately unclear, would not cause a problem.

So, the SNP’s right to a yes-no vote/confrontation against the government on Gaza was buried.

If the Labour Party had been forced to vote on the SNP motion versus the government, the whips would have demanded that Labour either vote with the government or abstain. Many would have rebelled.

This manoeuvre was to stop that happening.

This showed that Starmer is not just a threat to Labour members’ democratic rights, but of all who criticise Zionism.

It is comparable, in some ways, to Boris Johnson’s illegal manoeuvre to prorogue parliament in the Summer of 2019. This was a kind of coup.

And Starmer/Hoyle carried out their own mini-parliamentary coup against the SNP and any MP in their own party or any other who wanted to vote to demand a permanent ceasefire.

This is an attack on an element of parliamentarism that actually has a democratic content.

Numerous independent socialists around the country are standing against Labour, as well as several left-of-labour political organisations.

The most prominent individual is Jeremy Corbyn himself.

His exclusion from Labour, when only a few years earlier he was the leader of a massive movement against austerity, racism and imperialist war, symbolises why socialists should not be supporting the Starmer-led Labour Party.

Hundreds of thousands of people loyal to Corbyn’s leadership have been impatiently waiting for him to defy Starmer in the election.

Now he has done so, he deserves the support of all in society who have a basic working-class consciousness, along with those fighting oppression and imperialist war, crucially the attempted genocide in Gaza.

But it should be a critical support, as many of Corbyn’s own actions when he was leader, did not help to resist the reactionaries who sought to overthrow him.

Corbyn showed chronic weakness in Labour with the position that he explicitly formulated later in the witchhunt period, that both Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together in Labour.

Jon Lansman of Momentum, who admitted to being a left Zionist, was among his most influential supporters. He played a key role in undermining his leadership.

Even more to the point, Corbyn’s adherence to the view that Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together, meant that when the Zionists came after outspoken opponents of Zionist racism in the party, Corbyn turned the other cheek, which meant throwing them under the bus.

Corbyn’s appointee Jenny Formby, as General Secretary, proved more efficient at purging the pro-Palestinian left in the guise of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’, than her right-wing predecessor McNicol.

So that was disastrous weakness.

He is still at it – in the ‘Collective’ Umbrella he has initiated for this election, and his ‘Peace and Justice’ initiative, ‘left’ Zionists: Justin and Clare Schlosberg, are active.

Justin Schlossberg denounced David Miller, the militant, victimised anti-Zionist professor formerly of Bristol University, as a ‘psyop’.

David Miller who defeated Bristol University at an industrial tribunal, establishing for the first time that anti-Zionist views are a protected belief under British law.

The types are a danger to the left and Palestine supporters. It is terrible to be allying oneself with such people, particularly in these terrible circumstances. It is wrong in principle in any case.

Zionism is a key driver of racism in the Labour Party.

Diane Abbot, the first black woman MP, was deprived of the Labour whip based on phoney allegations of anti-Semitism, driven by Zionists.  Par for the course.

Abbott and her supporters appear to have forced Starmer to reinstate her as a Labour candidate. It is clear that Starmer wanted rid of her, and that she refused to go, and had the clout to insist, and defeat him.

This is because the Labour Party feared to take on black working-class communities in London, and in Britain generally, who still have considerable regard for Diane Abbott.

She is one of the few Labour candidates who deserve a vote in this election. For defying and defeating Starmer.

What happened to Faiza Shaheen is the converse of this. She was outrageously dropped as a candidate in Chingford/Woodford Green on the basis of feeble Zionist smears only a few days before the national candidate selection deadline

A highly regarded left-wing economist of Muslim family background, she was supposed to be crushed by this.

But not so, she denounced the ‘hierarchy of racism’ in Labour.

What this actually means is that Labour has a racial hierarchy, that privileges Jewish and white supremacists over the black and Asian communities.

She is now standing as an independent against the Tory Iain Duncan Smith and the Starmer stooge.

The quintessence of this racial hierarchy is Labour’s parachuting of Luke Akehurst into a safe Labour seat in North Durham.

He is a white supremacist, who as Diane Abbott has noted, had tried repeatedly to get rid of her from her Hackney seat.

He is also an ardent Zionist, but he is not actually Jewish. There is a famous photo of him wearing a T-Shirt bearing the caption “Zionist Shitlord”.

 It appears that his Zionist fervour is driven by his hatred of non-whites – he has deleted thousands of his tweets and social media posts recently to hide this.

One reportedly referred to Palestinians as ‘rats’.  Akehurst is basically a Zionist-Nazi and should be treated as one.

There is a proud working-class history in Durham, as symbolised by the Durham Miners’ Gala. They should ensure his type are better acquainted with the pavement.

George Galloway of the Workers Party is seeking re-election in Rochdale after his recent by-election victory.

There are also some independent candidates standing in Birmingham who are closely associated with GG and the Workers Party.

Jody McIntyre in Yardley against Jess Philipps, and Ahmed Yakoob in Ladywood against Shabana Mahmood.

They are making Gaza a big issue, but not just Gaza. Labour’s more general racism, neoliberalism and contempt for the working class, and particularly the British Asian working class, is crucial here.

Former UK Ambassador and Julian Assange defender Craig Murray is standing for the Workers Party in Blackburn (he may win also).

Chris Williamson, the former very left-wing Labour MP and Deputy Leader of the Workers Party is standing in Derby South, adjacent to his previous Derby North seat.

Former Labour whistleblower (about Zionist lobbying and witchhunts), Halima Khan, is planning to stand in Stratford and Bow, East London, also under the banner of the Workers Party.

George Galloway is excellent on Palestine and Ukraine and has a long and creditable anti-imperialist record.

But in the past decade he has shown softness on right-populism, and some of his followers follow in the same vein and to be treated with caution.

There are political debates to be had with the Workers Party about social conservatism and backwardness on questions involving immigration and oppression, including sexual oppression of various types.

However, Galloway’s views cannot be taken to represent the final word about the Workers Party and its politics. There are signs of it being a more inclusive project than that. 

Galloway himself has appeared to welcome the idea of prominent figures with different views joining with him. If that were to happen, then it could become a real vehicle for political advance.

Williamson, Craig Murray and Halima Khan appear to give substance to that.

Possibly the most prominent independent socialist campaign in London, barring Corbyn, is Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras constituency, against Starmer himself.

He is a Jewish former member of the South African Parliament for the African National Congress. He is an outspoken defender of the Palestinians and supporter of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.

He was selected by OCISA (Organise Corbyn-Inspired Socialist Alliance), a left-Corbynite campaign group set up a couple of years ago with the aim of standing a socialist candidate against Keir Starmer.

Labour sees that as threatening politically, which is perhaps why a ‘left’-talking independent candidate, who appears to have family connections with the Labour right wing, is running in that constituency seemingly to split the left-wing opposition to Starmer.

Leanne Mohammad, a British-Palestinian Palestine solidarity activist, is challenging Wes Streeting is in Ilford North. Streeting can be considered an Israeli agent – and he evangelises for private healthcare. His defeat would be a major blow to the Zionists and neoliberals.

There are also the celebrated Liverpool Community Independents, who are standing Sam Gorst against arch-witchhunter Maria Eagle in Liverpool Garston.

They are now standing under the banner of Transform, another new leftist party that is partly the product of ex-Corbynites, notably the very youthful Breakthrough Party, which merged with the remnants of Left Unity as well as the Liverpool Independents last year.

Transform appears heterogenous; it has ‘socialist’ elements who are flatly on the wrong side in Ukraine, mixed with others with better views.

TUSC, which is basically a front for the Socialist Party, is standing in this election.

Its left-reformist sectarian caricature of Marxism makes it appear bureaucratic and sterile, but it does stand for some basic working class demands for trade unions, against privatisation, imperialist wars etc., so it is worthy of critical support in principle.

Though its habit of standing against other leftists gratuitously is part of what renders it sterile.

It does appear they might have a candidate standing under their ticket from the Spartacist League. That is an interesting anomaly. And also critically supportable.

The new Revolutionary Communist Party, formerly the labour entrist Socialist Appeal, that also has its origins in Militant is also standing on politics that appear critically supportable. It appears more political and open to debate.

What is necessary above all is a perspective that seeks to unite all of these fragmented initiatives in a new, democratically organised party, where proper political debates are possible, and thereby unity in action, so that political and programmatic development in a revolutionary direction comes onto the agenda.

Julian Assange’s Partial Legal Victory

On 20th May, at the Court of Appeal in London, Julian Assange won a significant legal victory over the sinister forces in the United States that seek to throw him into a US torture establishment for the rest of his life. He won the right to a full appeal on the grounds that his right to a defence against the (flagrantly unconstitutional) charges under the US Espionage Act, would be denied in the US because of discrimination against him due to nationality. This would deprive him of elementary protection of his right to free speech as a journalist under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The previous court (very reluctantly) asked for assurances from the US that Julian would not be executed (which were given) and that he would be given First Amendment protection (which the US attempted to dissemble). The court rejected the latter US evasion and granted him the right to a full appeal on this point.

 Previous courts outrageously dismissed and much more substantial indictments against the US, including blatant perjury, and threats (and plots!) to have Julian murdered, but this is the issue they could not evade.  This is a significant shift, as in the upcoming appeal, his rights under the European Convention of Human Rights, which applies much more widely, come into play.

There has now been a shift against the US-instigated lynch law that the British ruling class and judiciary have engaged in for most of the last decade and a half, denying him basic rights and attempting to isolate him with a fraudulent rape allegation in Sweden, for which there was never enough evidence to bring charges. However, the smear of ‘rapist’ was successfully used to undercut the necessary solidarity movement. Not only was Julian smeared in the bourgeois, especially liberal, press and politics; much of even the  ‘far left’ originally refused to defend him because of their own pandering to identity politics. Prominent exceptions were George Galloway and Craig Murray, who deserve congratulations for their tenacity and solidarity. 

That hysteria has dissipated at it has become clear to many of those people that Julian’s real ‘crimes’ were to exposure mass murder committed by US imperialism. His campaign has gained momentum, he has gained support from the Australian government and even some of the liberal media who smeared, stabbed and trashed him have been prevailed upon to pay lip service to defending his rights. This is not the end of the persecution of Julian Assange, but it does seem like it may be the beginning of the end, and he must have a good chance of winning his appeal in the Autumn. Everyone must keep up the pressure.

The ICC, Western Imperialism and hypocritical double standards

By Kalliste Hill

The ICC, in the person of Karim Khan, finally announced after 7 months they will ask for the arrest of 2 Israeli ministers, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Galant and 3 Hamas leaders, Sinwar, Al-Masri and Hanayeh, after the conspicuous leaks and hysterical outbursts of the Zionist lobby in the US, UK and Israel at the very thought that they might be treated like “African leaders and thugs like Putin”.

However, underneath the hysteria, the mafia-like threats from US congressmen against the ICC prosecutor to sanction not only him, his family and the members of the entire ICC office, including the Judges, lies yet another unbalanced, disingenuous litany of false allegations against the real targets of this action, the Palestinian leadership, while reserving the spotlight of public opinion and victim-waving for the Israelis.

The long list of “crimes” against the Palestinian targets include the chief negotiator as well as the prime Palestinian target marked out assassination by Netanyahu and the Israeli UN ambassador in public and on the floor of the UN.

It’s almost as if the ICC, far from any real intention to actually drag Netanyahu into the dock, is actually reinforcing the ludicrous and demonstrably false allegations made by Israel against Hamas, which excuses they’ve used to commit genocide against the Palestinian people for the past 76 years. They are reciting yet again the reasons why Israel will continue to pursue its policy of political assassinations and fomenting regime change for those who already support the Zionist cause while creating more panic and fear amongst those who see the existence of the state of Israel, even anapartheid, ethno-fascist state, as it is at the moment, as existential, when the reality is that it should go the way of White South Africa, to be replaced by a secular state based on equality and social justice.

After all, the US has already passed laws that ensure no US citizen, or now any proxy under their protection, will be protected from prosecution by the ICC in perpetuity. What do Netanyahu and Galant really have to fear? Whereas all Palestinians, and especially their political leaders have every reason to know that they, their family members and all who work with them, are under sentence of death at the hands of the Zionists who rule Israel, and control our Empire of Lies.