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

We are living through the biggest split in the Labour Party’s history, though it is happening in a long-drawn-out and novel manner.  This is the continuation of a struggle that has been going on for many years, a continuation of the conflicts in the Labour Party and the labour movement more broadly since Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015, the tumultuous years of Corbynism, the witchhunts, the near victory in the general election in 2017, the sabotaged election campaign of 2019, and then the forcing out of Corbyn. And in turn, these have continuity with the conflict over the Cold War in the 1980s, the miners’ strike of 1984-5, and the defeats of the unions under Thatcher and since with support from traitorous neoliberal Labour leaders like Kinnock, Blair, Brown and now Starmer. 

The artificial, engineered defeat of Corbyn meant that the mass base that it had generated never dissipated – rather it went into abeyance in a state of seething resentment at the Zionist-led wrecking operation. So around a million have now signed up for the project, through the Your Party website, and an earlier one set up by Zarah Sultana in July – Team Zarah.  Branches are beginning to hold their first events, at least public meetings, though it has been very uneven in the way things have worked. There are public meetings going on around the country in various places, but the creation of working branches has so far been more sluggish.

There is the problem of what is to be done about the huge dataset from the websites, and who is going to collate, distribute, and organise it given the signing up of many hundreds of thousands of people on a website by its very nature, contains a contradiction. Such an enormous dataset representing individual socialists or aspiring socialists obviously represents a collective endeavour, as they all signed on to create a mass party opposing this govt from the left. But filling in a form on a website is an atomised, individual act. As opposed to joining an already existing local organisation. Someone among the many who signed up must have the time and energy to create such local organisations. But sorting out who is who is a very sizeable task indeed. We should not underestimate the complexity of it.  Thus, the new party needs an apparatus of some sort to begin doing that work. At the same time the political character of that apparatus is a highly sensitive issue.

There are a bunch of people around Corbyn in particular, who are probably the only group likely to get a handle on such a task in the immediate period. Some of these are not popular. Because the later Corbyn leadership was dysfunctional for the left and ran for cover in the face of the Zionist offensive that was aimed at driving out many of Corbyn’s most outspoken supporters, as a means to an end of destroying Corbyn’s leadership. The problem is that the Corbyn leadership was not up to this confrontation this at the time. The political reason was liberal guilt on the Jewish question. That’s where the throwing in the towel came from. The belief that past persecution, and the Nazi genocide in the 20^th Century, ennobled Jews as a whole, and made it mandatory for the most racist Jewish trends to be treated as legitimate parts of a supposedly progressive, working-class party.

Corbyn laid out the terms of his capitulation in a video and article in July 2019, which put forward some concepts that are simply indefensible, particularly in the light of today’s genocide. He said:

“…opposition to the Israeli government must never use antisemitic ideas, such as attributing its injustices to Jewish identity, demanding that Jews in Britain or elsewhere answer for its conduct, or comparing Israel to the Nazis. Many Jews view calls for Israel to cease to exist as calls for expulsion or genocide. Arguing for one state with rights for all Israelis and Palestinians is not antisemitic, but calling for the removal of Jews from the region is. Anti-Zionism is not in itself antisemitic and some Jews are not Zionists. Labour is a political home for Zionists and anti-Zionists. Neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism is in itself racism.

(https://labourheartlands.com/jeremy-corbyn-unequivocally-condemns-any-form-of-antisemitism/)

The idea that Israel is capable of a genocide, of course, necessarily involves ‘comparing Israel to the Nazis’. The Nazis are known above all for their genocide. This is clear evidence of guilty liberalism, not really socialism, being the driving force of Corbyn’s errors in 2019 and earlier. And denial that Zionism is racism, is terrible. The equation of Zionism with anti-Zionism amounts to equating the ideology of the oppressor with the opposition to it of the oppressed.  Recall we are talking about political Zionism, whose foundation was always the creation of a Jewish state through the dispossession of the Arab people. And the operative bit is where he says that “Labour is a political home for Zionists and anti-Zionists”.

That is totally untenable today. It led straight to the massive witchhunt of anti-Zionists in the Labour Party, which Corbyn capitulated to, and logically could not oppose. Because the most basic tenet of any analysis of reality with any grip on the real world, had to be that Zionism was not just any old form of racism, but a form that achieved its aims through brutal ethnic cleansing and genocide. It cannot be tolerated in any genuine working-class party, on pain of extinction. Zarah Sultana’s criticism of the record of Corbyn’s leadership on this is therefore quite appropriate and correct. At a festival in Devon on 17^th August, Zarah made her views very clear when she said:

“I am an anti-Zionist, I always have been… Anyone who visits the occupied West Bank, anyone who sees the genocide happening in Gaza, anyone who understands what settler-colonialism is will find themselves also identifying as an anti-Zionist.”

And when asked about the Corbyn period, she replied:

“One of the things that we have to be honest about is some of the mistakes that were made under the Corbyn period. And adopting the IHRA [definition] was a mistake. Conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism was a mistake.”

Speaking to Matt Kennard, she later said:

“It shouldn’t have happened this way …. There should have been robust challenge when the political establishment, the media establishment … attacked the Corbyn project, there should have been a more robust challenge to that.”

In another earlier interview, she said:

“We have to build on the strengths of Corbynism – its energy, mass appeal and bold policy platform – and we also have to recognize its limitations. It capitulated to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism…”

“When it came under attack from the state and the media, [Corbynism] should have fought back, recognising that these are our class enemies. But instead it was frightened and far too conciliatory. This was a serious mistake … You cannot give these people an inch”

(Citations from Asa Winstantley’s article,  Will Corbyn allow Zionists to sabotage him again?, https://electronicintifada.net/content/will-corbyn-allow-zionists-sabotage-him-again/50914)

Later, the same article quotes Corbyn’s eventual response to Zarah’s criticisms, in an interview with Middle East Eye:

“’I think it wasn’t really necessary for her to bring all that up in the interview, but that’s what she decided to do …’

“He explained that he had been ‘under a great deal of pressure to adopt the IHRA’ by some of his closest supporters, ‘and that was duly done.’

He was indeed put under such pressure, particularly by the UNITE bureaucracy under Len McCluskey’s leadership.  A number of his leading entourage today, including James Schneider and Karie Murphy, are part of a group of Corbyn supporters from the same UNITE bureaucracy who are known to have briefed against Zarah Sultana, and others close to her, to the right-wing media. It appears also true, as the account in the Electronic Intifada makes clear, that Corbyn was not initially supportive of Zarah Sultana’s call for a new party, and her proposal that they co-lead it. But he was eventually forced to capitulate to her initiative and give it his support, setting up the ‘Your Party’ website as a vehicle to garner the mass support that was becoming irresistible.

This is often how organisations and parties in the real world come into existence, through contradictions and the antagonistic collaboration/interaction of differing trends. There is nothing surprising about this.

Zahra Sultana has her contradictions. As a strong anti-Zionist, and logically anti-imperialist, she has so far nevertheless accepted much of the imperialist position on the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. She was one of 11 Labour MP’s who signed, and then under threat from Starmer, withdrew their names from a 2022 Stop the War statement criticising some aspects of NATO’s activities in Ukraine. She was also falsely accused of being pro-Russia and pro-Putin by Tory jingoes in the aftermath of the beginning of the Special Military operation a year or so later. And she put out a statement then, which there is no reason to believe that she does not still stand on, that said:

“I deplore Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has unleashed horrific death and destruction across the country.”  (https://coventrycityofpeace.uk/statement-on-war-in-ukraine-by-zarah-sultana-mp-for-coventry-south/)

Which is completely devoid of any understanding of the “horrific death and destruction” that had been “unleashed” across the Donbass and other Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine since the US-backed far right Maidan coup in 2014, which resulted in a genocidal war against Russian speakers ever since. The 2022 SMO was a defensive move in the face of the attempt by the NATO powers to instigate the ethnic cleansing or even genocide of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass and Crimea, which inevitably led to armed conflict, as part of a stratagem to defeat and partition Russia itself. Which is really a continuation of the imperialist bourgeoisie’s crusade ever since 1917 to tear down all remaining gains of the Russian revolution. So, though ZS evidently moved strongly to the left under the impact of the Zionist genocide, she reflects the lack of understanding of the Ukraine war that is characteristic of social democracy in the West.

Some figures whose roots are in British Labourism have moved beyond that anti-Soviet and anti-Russian prejudice. Examples being George Galloway and Chris Williamson of the Workers Party of Britain, which also seeks affiliation to the larger Zahra Sultana/Jeremy Corbyn led initiative. Here we have another example of the dialectic of working-class politics in Britain – and not just here – One step forward is often accompanied by two steps back. Meaning that the Galloway-Williamson party has, at the same time as adopting something close to a correct anti-imperialist position on the Ukraine war as well as on Zionism, has at the same time dabbled in reactionary chauvinism over immigration, has at times implied climate scepticism, and has joined in the bourgeoisie’s reactionary offensive under populist banners against transsexuals, and to a degree gays.

To their credit, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana have been outspoken against the ruling class anti-trans bigotry and have spoken out strongly against the recent evidently Trump-influenced UK Supreme Court Judgement that effectively abolished many basic rights of trans people. Indeed, Zarah has been particularly outspoken over this issue, and recently made a very confrontational speech saying that there is “no place” for transphobia and bigotry in the new party. She has been somewhat contradicted by the independent MP for Blackburn, who is also in practice effectively a Your Party MP, Adnan Hussein, who made clear his disagreement with the right of transexuals not to be legally treated as being of their birth sex. So there is what could be said to be a healthy debate on some of these vital programmatic questions. As Marxists, consistent anti-imperialists, and those who aim to lead the workers movement to become a tribune of the oppressed, we welcome that some vital programmatic questions are getting an airing.

We certainly give a degree of critical support to Zarah Sultana over the question of Zionism against Corbyn and his liberal softness of Zionism. We refute and combat the criticism, coming from some ‘blue Labour’ elements influenced by GG and CW, that her outspoken hostility to transphobia is in some way liberal. On this question, she is criticising the transphobes from the left. At the same time, some of those same transphobes are correct against her and Corbyn over Ukraine. These complementary errors are the product at bottom of the differential, complementary problems bequeathed to the working-class movement by Stalinism and left-social democracy, which have all sort of complementary interactions. As revolutionary Marxists of the Bolshevik tradition, we seek to inject correct positions into these debates and transcend both in favour of a genuinely revolutionary programme.  

On 31st August 2025 we held a discussion/educational meeting on Centrism. The recording of the full discussion is here.

As happened the previous year, August, traditionally the ‘silly season’, was anything but frivolous this year also. It was the opportunity for a wave of far-right terrorism. Last year it was triggered off by a terrible stabbing of young girls at the end of July in Southport, Lancashire, by a disturbed young man of Rwandan descent who was born in in Wales to parents who were evangelical Christians. It was a terrible incident; the perpetrator was clearly in some sense deranged. But the false story was spread through social media by the far right, that he was a Muslim immigrant or asylum seeker, and that caused an eruption of white lumpen rage in many parts of the country – that developed into attempted pogroms against non-white people and particularly those of Asian/Muslim origin.

The cops had great difficult in dealing with them- they were thwarted by popular anti-fascist mobilisations by the left. The British left outside Labour did creditably last year in bringing out tens of thousands of demonstrators to swamp and marginalise virtually every demonstration the far right was able to mobilise. However, there were still brutal acts of attempted murder and pogroms against refugees – particularly attempts to burn down refugee accommodation. In some economically depressed cities, roadblocks were set up by racist vigilantes specifically to attack non-white motorists. People were attacked in the street for having dark skin. This petered out with the popular counter-mobilisations but then took electoral form with the growth in support for Farage’s Reform Party this year as the government exposed itself as viciously anti-working class and having nothing to offer except more austerity and imperialist wars.

Starmer – Patsy for the Fascists

 At the time this happened last year, Starmer’s Labour government had just been elected, and though there was already rhetoric against the government in some far-right agitation, it was not the major issue that it is now, after a year of Starmer being in office. This year the situation is far worse – the issue triggering it off is not some anomalous crime, but simply a far-right offensive against refugees which the government is tacitly encouraging. The fascist mobilisations have mostly taken the form of aggressive, violent demonstrations outside hotels that are being used for accommodation for so called ‘boat people’ – that is, refugees who, refused asylum by EU countries, come to Britain from the French coast in rubber dinghies. These events were often organised by Homeland, which is a neo-Nazi splinter group from Patriotic Alternative, which has outgrown its parent organisation and is now supposedly organising ‘local’ people in several areas around the country, while attempting to hide their Neo-Nazi politics.

In many ways the phenomenon of refugees coming to Britain in rubber dinghies is a result of Brexit, as the EU had agreements for sharing out the refugees, and in the EU Britain could legally demand refugees above a certain quota be returned to France on the way to other places in the EU. Now there is no agreement and very little cooperation. The xenophobes’ own xenophobia has undercut their own power and given rise to another wave of hysterical racism and xenophobia. But this is far from a disaster for the likes of Farage, it is a means of exploiting the disaster caused by Brexit to try to propel a far-right populist party into power.

Some of this new wave of horrors have been beaten back: particularly in Liverpool and Bristol, large, powerful anti-fascist movements massively outnumbered the fascist mobilisation and basically ran them out of town. It is notable that the fascist mobilisation in Liverpool was led by Ukip, the remnant of Farage’s original party that he junked to form the Brexit Party, now known as Reform. UKIP’s new leader Nick Tenconi is a comic opera composite of Trump, Musk and Mussolini, who was seen in public doing a composite of Trump’s fist-bobbing jig and Musk’s version of the Nazi-fascist salute. Whether this he was celebrating Hitler or Mussolini is not clear given his Italian origin – likely both. This maniac is calling for the hanging of ‘communists’ and ‘traitorous’ politicians like … Labour ministers. Seeing his people driven out of town was excellent. But in other places, including Epping and Cheshunt on the fringes of London, and in the East End/Docklands, the resistance has not been so successful, and fascists have made the running.

White Lumpen Rage

We have seen the ‘Raise the Colours’ movement – a mass movement of racist and nationalist semi-working class semi-lumpens which, beginning in Birmingham with the raising of the St George’s England flag on numerous lampposts, has spread around the country. Along with flag hysteria, we see a wave of vandalism, daubing the St George’s Cross in red paint on anything white in terms of road markings, from painted mini roundabouts at road junctions to Zebra crossings. This wave of ‘popular’ nationalism is not comical at all, though some have mocked it and tried to satirise it. It is aimed to threaten and intimidate oppressed groups within the working class. According to the Zionist-influenced supposedly anti-racist campaign ‘Hope not Hate’, it was co-initiated by a collaborator of Stephen Yaxley Lennon, one Andrew Currien, formerly EDL, now in Britain First, who served time in prison because of involvement in a racist killing.  It has been accompanied by racist vandalism of such places as Chinese takeaways, racist daubing on bus shelters, and a wave of arson attacks.  As well as creating the climate for overt racist attacks such as the attack on a Filipina nurse and her family in a park in Halifax, Yorkshire, recently.

Starmer is clearly a placeman put in place by the billionaire corporate ruling class in Britain, to pave the way for some kind far right regime. Founded on the political assassination of the left-wing social-democracy led by Jeremy Corbyn, which earlier aroused fervent hopes of a fightback of the working class against 40 years of neoliberalism and austerity, Starmer, heading up the hardened neoliberal bureaucratic layer that came to dominate Labour since the days of Kinnock and Blair, executed a series of brutal political manoeuvres to suppress that and drive both Corbyn and his mass base out of the party. Starmer and his people, in that sense, as a bourgeois-repressive force, reached parts that other bourgeois-reactionary forces couldn’t reach.

But now he is office he is carrying out a far-right enabling agenda. It is perfectly obvious what the purpose of Starmer’s regime is for the ruling class. He is a patsy, a transitional figure put in power to smooth the way to a regime of the extreme right, centred on Farage, because that is what the billionaire class in Britain want right now. Far from denouncing the attacks on refugee accommodation, Starmer and his government are helping the racists by pretending that they have legitimate ‘concerns’. Far from combatting the threatening use of English nationalist symbols by the lumpen fascist elements vandalising public infrastructure, he and his pathetic cohort Yvette Cooper, made statements to the media claiming that they had Union Jack tablecloths, flags all over the place, and red-white-and-blue bunting festooning their homes. Which is such a pathetic piece of grovelling servility to a concocted political hate campaign as to be simply comical. It’s just obvious that they are lying, as no politician with an ounce of culture and learning could possibly be that crass. No one believes a word of it.

The servility of the government to the far-right contrasts with their hatred of any anti-racist movement, not to mention the repression they have undertaken against the Palestinian Solidarity movement. Numerous activists and anti-racist, anti-Zionist journalists have been harassed by the state, arrested, had their homes raided, and much more. And then there is the fraudulent ban on Palestine Action as supposed ‘terrorists’, engineered by changing the definition of ‘terrorism’ to include non-violent direct action that causes damage to property, something that was done by the previous New Labour regime of Tony Blair.

Fascism, Populism and the Class Struggle

Clearly Starmer’s regime is feeding the growth of fascism, and this is a conscious policy of the capitalist class at this point. This is not new, capitalism in deep crisis always does things like this, it always tries to create a despair among the working class and to set them at each other’s throats through scapegoating. As Leon Trotsky noted many years ago in the context of the 1930s:

“The gigantic growth of National Socialism is an expression of two factors: a deep social crisis, throwing the petty bourgeois masses off balance, and the lack of a revolutionary party that would be regarded by the masses of the people as an acknowledged revolutionary leader. If the communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Precisely in this sphere the election revealed the opposite picture: counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat …”

(The Fascist Danger Looms in Germany, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p3)

This is not exactly the same as the situation now. The main driving force of this today is the despair of considerable sections of what was the working class in many places, who deindustrialisation and prolonged unemployment has left in a state of semi-lumpenisation. This is the legacy of the jobs massacre of neoliberalism, which began in Britain in the 1980s under Thatcher and continued in the 1990s and 2000s under Blair. The emasculation of the trade unions after major betrayals such as that of the 1984-5 miners’ strike went in parallel with similar deindustrialisation in the US, which produced what in the US is known as the Rust Belt.

These jobs did not simply disappear; rather the bourgeoisie exported them, particularly as the advance of computer technology made it possible to make capital itself much more mobile internationally. The decay of capitalism means over decades a gradual, almost imperceptible fall in the rate of profit – the rate of return on capital. This export of jobs meant simply moving production to places where the price of labour was cheaper, places like India, China, and other parts of Asia particularly. The rise of neoliberalism, with the privatisation of everything that could possibly yield a short-term profit even at the overall cost to the efficiency of the capitalist society they exist in, is also a sign of extreme social decay.

The petit bourgeoisie under neoliberalism in Britain, the United States, followed later by other imperialist countries that adopted this model later, has prospered much of the time, but an important part of the former proletariat has been driven into lumpen despair. This creates a different situation, not of an overtly fascist movement driven by massive hatred for the working-class movement by an enraged petit bourgeoisie seeking to crush the labour movement in a bloodbath, as Trotsky described in Germany. Instead, a somewhat less cohesive, right-wing populist movement where demoralised sections of the working class lose their real sense of acting independently as a class, but instead follow maverick wealthy demagogues like Trump and Farage. Who may even posture as championing the semi-lumpenised sections of the working class over the ‘elite’, meaning the petit bourgeoisie, not the ruling bourgeoisie who they are an integral part, and who they act for with their populist divide and rule campaigns. Such leaders as Farage and Trump may well have dictatorial ambitions, but their social base is somewhat different to those of Hitler and Mussolini before WWII, whose target was strong labour movements, often communist-led, in imperialist countries, which do not exist today.

There is still a substantial working class in imperialist countries like Britain and the US, capable of mobilising against capitalism but it is based in the major cities, not the many small and medium sized towns and villages in the deindustrialised rust belts that are often hellholes of despair. In fact, the working class in major cities is usually multi-ethnic due to previous waves of migration initially in the post-WWII Keynesian boom period when labour shortages were common. This continued in the later neoliberal boom of the 1990s and 2000s when the internationalisation of capital was accompanied by migration of both skilled and unskilled labour. The former was also a response to labour shortages; the latter was often about undercutting the declining rustbelt working class and increasing the rate of profit.

These events have changed the social and class composition of the leading imperialist countries quite considerably. A relatively large white lumpen layer has grown up outside the major cities, with a multi-ethnic working class in the cities, often with a large component of workers of Muslim origin who face considerable oppression from the far right, who are influenced and funded by Zionists as their contribution to political reaction in the current situation.

Labour movements have been significantly weakened, but up to now, the petit bourgeoisie, the middle classes, have not been impoverished in the way they were in the 1930s Depression. The main reason for this is that those middle classes have changed. Recall Napoleon’s famous remark that the English were “a nation of shopkeepers”. At that time, Britain was an advanced early capitalist power, and its petty bourgeoisie was large and mainly consisted of petty traders. That prefigured a phase of capitalism that became the norm but ultimately came to disaster in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when huge numbers of such petty bourgeois traders were driven to the wall. Today’s petit bourgeoisie is different; it is largely a managerial and technical layer that in some ways overlaps with the working class.

Managerial and technical staff are formally employed for a wage or salary, even if many of those higher up supplement their incomes through ownership of shares and the like. They are not in the same precarious position as the pre-war small trader petit bourgeoisie, and to a considerable extent, they still support liberal politics. However, technological developments such as the rise of Artificial Intelligence may well put many of these salaried workers, for this is what many of them are, in a similar position as the semi-lumpenised working class of the rust belts. This situation has not arrived yet, but that is what capitalist development offers for the future. The redundancy of major sections of the working class in imperialist countries occasioned by the system’s voracious attempts to shore up the rate of profit, is likely to be extended to major sections of salaried workers through a mechanism driven by the same source – the profit hunger of the bourgeoisie in a system in severe decline through obsolescence. This points to an accelerating social crisis and even the collapse of the system itself.

Break with Social Democracy!

These changes underline the bankruptcy of social democratic/Labourite politics today. The 30-year boom after the end of WWII is enormously distant from the changes that neoliberalism has made to imperialist countries like Britain. Many even now see it a class-collaborationist utopia – but many of its features were forced on the bourgeoisie by the massive failure of Hitlerite fascism, mainly at the hands of the USSR. Even though the leadership of the USSR was conservative and did not seek world revolution, in the context of its conventional, non-revolutionary victory, a series of social revolutions, often in the form of peasant guerilla movements seeking to create states like the USSR, shook he colonial world. The ruling classes feared that ‘communism’, in some form or another, would spread to the imperialist heartlands, so they made major social concessions, while fighting back with McCarthy style witchhunting of communists, or those who they considered so. In Britain, the anti-union repressive laws passed after the General Strike of 1926, were abolished, unions became much stronger, and the National Health Service, and a ‘welfare state’ with a significant degree of social protection was created in this period.

It was fear of revolution, and not the political potency and leadership of social democracy, that led to these concessions. Labourism was just the party that was most suited to implement concessions that the ruling class considered to be required to save the situation. Today’s huge split in the Labour Party, with the emergence of ‘Your Party’ as the crystallisation of a split away from the Labour Party’s neoliberal political bureaucracy, is based on the idea that a revived Labour-like left party can rollback 40 years of attacks. But the bourgeoisie only conceded such gains due to the threat of revolution. It will be necessary to once again raise the credible threat of working-class revolution to even extract concessions from the bosses. If the project fails to break with social democracy and embrace a revolutionary programme and outlook, it will ultimately fail.

A crucial issue in making clear the intent of the new party will be its stance on the violence of the lumpen fascist elements currently attacking oppressed layers of the working class. We must offer a positive alternative to those impoverished by neoliberalism – a major reorganisation of work and the social wage is essential to provide useful, sustainable work and income to those who capitalism has thrown on the scrap heap. But the new party must use its mass base to organise defence formations, including military ones, to protect those under attack from fascist lumpens, and indeed to defend the inviolability of working-class organisations from state persecution. Such a programme of collective working-class defence, independent of the bosses’ state, must be at the top of the agenda of Your Party.

Note: this article is based on the presentation at a public forum we held on Capitalism and the Environment on August 17th. The presentation and discussion at that event is available to listen to here.

Anthropogenic climate change

The Earth’s climate was changing for millennia before humans evolved as a species. Historically, changes in the Earth’s temperature and the composition of its atmosphere in response to the evolution of primitive life forms have enabled the evolution of life as we know it on the planet.

We will attempt to cover the following here: first of all, the Earth’s climate has always been changing, and there is a considerable complexity of climate system & modelling to be addressed. Changing weather patterns are not clearly conclusive, there tends to be a lack of direct experience in prominent locations, and hence it is often alleged  that there is a lack of evidence. In addition, corporations profiting from green-washing scams are frequently used as a justification for anthropogenic climate change denial

Climate breakdown

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is at risk of breakdown – this includes the Gulf Stream which keeps the climate of the British Isles, Ireland, and North Western Europe warmer than regions at a comparable latitude, that is, warmer than north western Europe would be without the Gulf Stream. AMOC funnels heat northwards through the Atlantic Ocean, it is crucial for controlling climate and  marine ecosystems. It is currently weaker than at any time in the past  1000 years. Modelling suggests that recent weakening can be explained by taking into account melt water from Greenland ice sheet and Canadian glaciers

If the Gulf Stream collapses as a result of global warming, our climate will become life-threateningly colder. Global warming is projected as greater than 1.5ºC within a few years, putting humanity in danger, bringing multiple climate tipping points causing catastrophic risk to billions of people. Tropical coral reefs have crossed tipping points with unprecedented die back. The Amazon rainforest also risks widespread die back from climate change and deforestation.

Evidence for anthropogenic climate change

2024 was the hottest year to date, and first year over 1.5ºC  (see chart above)

That is, global temperatures are increasing exponentially in response to the exponential increase in green house gas emissions into the atmosphere, leading to polar ice melt/retreat and glacial melting/glacier retreats. Examples include parts of the Indian subcontinent and its river systems dependent on seasonal glacial melting/retreat and refreezing for a water source. Long-established human settlements depend on this water source. A massive increase in glacial melting/retreat is causing flooding and devastating landslides, and devastation/destruction of village settlements. People in those settlements (e.g. in Pakistan) are directly experiencing the devastation of climate change, they know climate change is real

The fastest melting glaciers include those in Alaska, Iceland, the Alps; there is a profound effect on glaciers in the Pamir mountains, the Hindu Kush and Himalayas.

Corporate green-washing scams

In November 2023, prior to the COP28 summit in Dubai, the UAE firm Blue Carbon, owned by Sheikh Ahmed al-Maktoum, set up a carbon offsets Ponzi scheme using control of vast tracts of African land. The carbon offsetting green-washing scam is a Ponzi scheme for buying and selling carbon credits enabling corporate fossil fuel producers and users to buy carbon credits instead of reducing their greenhouse gas emitting activities. Buying carbon credits pays for forested land while the buyer continues their commercial activities generating greenhouse gases. But the forests cannot absorb the greenhouse gases in a time scale that off-sets them, while some of the forests used are actually lost to forest fires, often caused by global warming.

The forests used this way are commonly taken from indigenous populations, whose governments are coerced into selling the land as a way of paying off debts that they should never have been conned into taking on in the first place. Carbon credits and offsetting is a scam which entrenches and enables the increase in global green house gas emissions.

War, weapons manufacture, weapons trade

War and its profits are an essential part of maintaining the contradictory, unstable capitalist system. War and weapons are the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The West’s militaries and arms makers are growing each year producing massive profits for the corporate arms manufacturers, their CEOs and shareholders. Military emissions are at an all time high. The COP UN conferences repeatedly fail to hold the military industrial complex accountable for its emissions. The military needs to be held accountable for radioactive contamination from nuclear energy. At COP28, no documents mentioned military and war contribution to climate crisis.

Then there is the environmental impact of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. Blowing up the Nordstream pipeline released a massive amount of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, into the atmosphere. There is the use of depleted uranium, supplied by Britain, in munitions. The land littered with landmines, the disruption and pollution of water supplies, land polluted by collapse of the hydro dam system on the Dnieper River. In wars generally, land is contaminated by chemical weapons and defoliants. For example, the use of Agent Orange as a defoliant in Vietnam, which, decades later, has left land contaminated, people still being poisoned including babies being born with defects.

Environmental cost of super-rich

Capitalism relentlessly concentrates disproportionate levels of wealth into the hands of a minority, creating a global class of super-wealthy individuals detached from an appreciation of the real world. An Oxfam report in October 2024 reveals: in 1 year, 1 ultra-rich European takes an average of 140 flights, spends 267 hours in the air, emits as a much carbon as an average European in 112 years. in 1 year, a superyacht user emits as much carbon as an ordinary European would in 585 years. Less than a week of emissions from the superyachts and jets of one of the 31 of the richest people in the EU  exceeded the entire lifetime emissions of a person in the world’s poorest 1%. Fifty of the world’s richest billionaires on average emit more carbon through their investments, private jets and yachts in just over 1.5 hours than an average person in a lifetime.

Nearly 40 percent of billionaire investments are in highly polluting industries: oil, mining, shipping and cement. The total investment emissions of 36 of the EU’s richest billionaires are equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4.5 million Europeans.

See

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/10/28/the-deadly-environmental-toll-of-superyachts-and-private-jets/

And

https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/carbon-inequality-kills-why-curbing-the-excessive-emissions-of-an-elite-few-can-621656

Environmental cost of Gaza genocide

The UN Environmental Program (UNEP) assesses the unprecedented environmental impact of war in Gaza: Rapidly growing soil, water and air pollution risks irreversible damage to Gaza’s natural ecosystems. In the first two months of the Gaza genocide, carbon emissions from the Israeli assault were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. Any Gaza reconstruction is estimated to generate approximately 60m tonnes of CO2, more than the annual emissions of more than 135 countries.

See https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/09/17/the-environmental-cost-of-israels-genocide-in-gaza/

Health effects of air pollution

Exposure to fossil fuel air pollution increases the risks of strokes, heart and lung disease, cancer, etc, causing 8.7m premature deaths per year, equivalent to nearly 1/5 of deaths world wide. Exposure to fine particulate matter, PM2.5, from burning fossil fuels led to 8.7m deaths in 2018. Air pollution is an invisible killer, a particular risk to children, elderly, people on low incomes. People in urban areas suffer worst impacts. PM2.5 is equivalent to airborne particles of less than or equal to 2.5 microns in diameter, which are especially dangerous to young children whose organs and immune response are developing.

Food systems and agribusiness

Much of our food system is increasingly global and industrialised. This includes industrialised fishing in the form of large trawlers scraping the sea bed leading to over-fishing for profit, depleting fish stocks. There is the indiscriminate catching of non-target species, and damage to marine ecosystems. Industrially farmed fish, unsafe to eat, such as salmon, are bred for maximum profit, and are fed unbalanced diets including sea food. Such dense populations lead to disease, infecting the marine environment and are in turn treated with toxic chemicals. Farmed fish are a hazard to local wild fish and the marine environment.

Industrial farming produces monocrops using chemical inputs in the form of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, leading to depleted soils, soil erosion, contamination and damage to ecosystems.  Also the loss of biodiversity, including pollinators and natural predators to pests that damage crops, and the loss of soil structure and micro-organisms plants need for healthy growth and nutrition. The run-off of excess fertilisers and slurry from intensively farmed animals pollutes rivers and water sources.

Industrial livestock farming uses imported animal feed, industrially grown as large mono-crops, mainly genetically modified (GM) soya and GM maize, which is mostly grown in Brazil and Argentina, largely on deforested land contaminated with pesticides. GM soya is engineered to be herbicide resistant. It poisons vast tracts of agricultural land and surrounding areas with herbicides such as glyphosate, poisons the environment, is ecocidal and poisonous to local residents, and particularly damaging in large parts of Argentina

Land is expropriated from indigenous populations in low income countries (e.g. parts of Africa such as Kenya) for growing food in the form of cash crops for export to richer countries such as Britain. International food systems produce trade via polluting shipping, emitting green house gases, endangering marine life from noise pollution and collisions. Globally, and in the UK, land and food production is increasingly taken over by trans-national corporate agribusiness.

Land mis-use in Britain

Wealthy British landowners, especially the royal family and aristocracy, use vast tracts of land to profit from shooting game birds such as grouse and partridge. Much of this land is moorland, including peat lands, mismanaged with breeding unnaturally large numbers of birds and destroying the natural ecosystems, native wild life and biodiversity by seasonally burning natural vegetation to accommodate bred birds and the ability to kill them easily in large numbers. The peat lands are natural carbon stores—burning them emits large amount of carbon dioxide.  in 2024, 150 grouse moor estates covered 550,000 acres in England; 300 grouse estates covered 2.5m acres in Scottish Highlands.

More of Surrey is now under golf courses – about 2.65% – than has houses on it (see https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/uncategorized/more-of-surrey-is-now-under-golf-courses-about-2-65-than-has-houses-on-it). Golf courses use more land than UK homes  (see https://www.cityam.com/golf-courses-use-more-land-uk-homes/) Twice as much is land used for golf courses than for housing in England (see https://londonlovesproperty.com/2x-more-land-used-for-golf-courses-than-for-housing-in-england/). Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire destroyed a site of special scientific interest on the coast.

The Environment and Communism

All these examples, on the local, the national and the world wide scale, simply epitomise the results of the organisation of the world’s productive forces by capitalism, and for the most part imperialist capitalism at that. Thus we have not only the profit motive in a mundane sense, but a form of capitalism that is desperately seeking to hang on to its domination of the world economically and politically, to safeguard its sources of profit not only domestically, but from its plundering and despoiling of weaker capitalist societies. This is what has given birth to the combination of working class revolutions and anti-imperialist struggles of oppressed capitalist countries over the past century and more.  Now we see alliances of deformed workers states like China, Cuba and North Korea, with oppressed bourgeois countries like Russia (once the centre of world socialist revolution), Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, as the most powerful imperialism, the US, spirals into decline along with its European imperialist allies, whose imperialist heyday was over decades earlier.

This is producing chaos for imperialism, and opening up the possibility of world revolution. Indeed, the despoilation of the biosphere by (mainly) imperialist capitalism is what makes world revolution imperative. Environmental collapse will not be staved of by greenwashing schemes like those discussed  above. Nor will imperialist-dominated bodies like the United Nations remotely be capable of doing anything about it.  Tackling capitalist-generated climate disaster requires an international planning mechanism, through socialism on an international , not national scale, and not even as the sum of various different national scales, because this problem is universal— it affects the whole of humanity. Therefore there has to be a body, which we have to advocate, even if it currently seems like pie-in-the-sky, that plans the allocation and use of natural resources in a rational and sustainable manner for the future, that has a mandate to carry out this on a socialist basis, to plan things for human need, not for the profit of a few. There has to be a worldwide programme to advocate this.

Web Sources:

‘Toxic, high-sulfur fuel sent to Africa cheaply’ — David Hundeyin

GMOs and climate change: How 21st-century colonialists offload their burdens to Africa

https://swentr.site/africa/593490-climate-change-governance-africa

African countries should be aware and act in their own interests, not Western ones, when facing global challenges

For an ‘ecommunist’ alternative to degrowth and luxury communism

For an ‘ecommunist’ alternative to degrowth and luxury communism

Stockholm Resilience Centre

https://www.stockholmresilience.org

Planetary boundaries

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

To Halt Climate Change, We Need an Ecological Leninism

https://jacobin.com/2020/06/andreas-malm-coronavirus-covid-climate-change

Bayer’s glyphosate successor – icafolin – coming to the EU?

https://www.gmwatch.org/en/106-news/latest-news/20578-bayer-s-glyphosate-successor-icafolin-coming-to-the-eu-2

Articles on Climate & Capitalism:

The environmental cost of Israel’s genocide in Gaza

50 updated replies to climate science deniers

Fossil fuel air pollution causes 20% of all deaths

2024: Hottest year to date, and first year over 1.5ºC

contains useful graph:

Annual global temperature anomalies relative to 1850-1900. Provisional estimate for 2024 based on 10 months (- best found yet).

2024: Hottest year to date, and first year over 1.5ºC

Atlantic circulation weakening much faster than predicted

The deadly environmental toll of superyachts and private jets

Climate crisis enters ‘critical and unpredictable new phase’

Maasai people protest forced evictions and loss of rights

Laundering Carbon and the New Scramble for Africa

An Emirati sheikh and an Italian fugitive are hoovering up land for an ambitious project that critics say will make the climate crisis worse

https://www.source-material.org/dubai-uae-cop28-blue-carbon-offsetting-forest-liberia/

Crude Capitalism

War and Climate

Websites

Pentagon Pollution, 7: The military assault on global climate

Pentagon Pollution, 7: The military assault on global climate

From the article:

“By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy … Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements … Any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air, according to Sara Flounders.”

Excellent must read article

Military pollution is the skeleton in the West’s climate closet

Leaders at the COP26 summit have no intention of tackling the growing environmental impacts caused by their ‘defence’ spending

by Jonathan Cook / November 9th, 2021

https://dissidentvoice.org/2021/11/military-pollution-is-the-skeleton-in-the-wests-climate-closet

From the article:

“US expenditure on its military far outstrips that of any other country – except for Israel, when measured relative to population size. Although the UK trails behind, it still has the fifth largest military budget in the world, while its arms manufacturers busily supply weapons to countries others have shunned.”

and:

“And emissions from the West’s militaries and arms makers appear to be growing each year rather than shrinking – though no one can be certain because they are being actively hidden from view.

“Washington insisted on an exemption from reporting on, and reducing, its military emissions at the Kyoto summit, 24 years ago. Unsurprisingly, everyone else jumped on that bandwagon.”

and:

“According to research by Scientists for Global Responsibility, the UK’s military emissions were three times larger than those it reported – even after supply chains, as well as weapons and equipment production, were excluded. The military was responsible for the overwhelming majority of British government emissions.”

The US Military is Driving Environmental Collapse Across the Planet

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/24/the-us-military-is-driving-environmental-collapse-across-the-planet

The US military is a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined

https://qz.com/1655268/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-140-countries-combined

Videos

Making A Killing: The Weapons Trade

Rod Driver is a semi-retired academic who specialises in explaining how the world works, with a special emphasis on modern-day US and British propaganda. This relates to many topics, including war, economics, finance, corporate crime, the failings of the media, the failings of democracy, and the failings of academia.

Land abuse

More of Surrey is now under golf courses – about 2.65% – than has houses on it

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/uncategorized/more-of-surrey-is-now-under-golf-courses-about-2-65-than-has-houses-on-it

Golf courses use more land than UK homes

https://www.cityam.com/golf-courses-use-more-land-uk-homes/

2x more land used for golf courses than for housing in England

https://londonlovesproperty.com/2x-more-land-used-for-golf-courses-than-for-housing-in-england

The Lie of the Land

how a tiny group of landowners wrecked the countryside

by Guy Shrubsole

published by William Collins, 2025

ISBN  978-0-00-865181-7

– includes info about the environmental devastation of grouse moors

Monarchy, privilege & the environment

The King, The Prince & Their Secret Millions: Revealed | Dispatches | Channel 4 Documentaries

How the monarchy cashes in on our seabed

The royal family has made millions from the exploitation of the seabed—a resource that belongs to us all. Is it time for people and planet to be put ahead of profit?

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/monarchy/62141/how-the-monarchy-cashes-in-on-our-seabed

Songs for WW3

Tom Lehrer – Wernher von Braun – with intro

So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)

We Will All Go Together When We Go

Tom Lehrer: New Math https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4

By Kalliste Hill

The UK justice system has always been an unhappy mixture of oil and water, dedicated to protecting the property of the rich and powerful, their reputations and privacy while parading itself as a bastion of “equality before the law”, blind to station and acting on behalf of the Crown and constitution. The reality is very different, as those who fall foul of the Crown Prosecution Service increasingly find.

Article 7 of the Human Rights Act states that there shall be no punishment without law.

“1. No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not con-stitute a criminal offence under national law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier pen-alty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal offence was committed.
“2. This Article shall not prejudice the trial and pun-ishment of any person for any act or omission which, at the time when it was committed, was criminal ac-cording to the general principles of law recognised by civilised nations.”

The excuse by successive governments of “austerity” to underfund our legal system, shut down courts making the ones remaining more distant for the accused to attend, restricting their right to a jury trial or a judge and replacing it with a magistrate only, along with a ludicrously unfair payment system to legal representation puts “defence” beyond the means of the majority of the population. It also leaves many people at risk, including our own politicians and public figures vulnerable to litigations, and threats of litigations dropped just before the deadline designed to bankrupt the defendant, using smears and unfounded allegations by small ideological groups as well as oppressive misapplication of badly framed laws by the government for their own political ends.

The right to protest, the right to a jury trial and the right to free speech have all been exposed as hollow by recent events where despite complaints from all sections of society including lawyers and judges that the police continue to act without clear test cases being brought to court and shown by our legal system as reasonable and proportionate in their application.

Three examples demonstrate just how serious the actions of the government against the people have become in recent years as the popularity of both government and institutions fall.
First, the rising number of cases of people threatened with arrest for holding pieces of “blank paper” as signs, on the basis that they might use it to offend someone have increased since 2022 to suppress republican sentiment and legitimate action against oppression and occupation. Few know enough of the law to refuse to provide their name, address and other details before they are explained their right to know what powers they are being held under to arrest them, let alone set bail conditions, many are manhandled violently or removed physically with overwhelming force despite being peaceful or pos-ing no threat to the public or police.

Second the increasing disparity between proscribed organisations, in particular the designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation because of a minute number of occasions when they are committed damage that can be described as “criminal” to subject its supporters as well as its members to excessive punishment, i.e. up to 14 years in prison, on Counter Terrorism charges, and oppressive enforcement by arresting people for flags, banners, chants and other badges, t-shirts etc that could be construed as support, even tweets, social media posts on Facebook or misspellings like “Plasticine Action” etc,

Thirdly, the increasing use of oppressive bail conditions for those arrested who have given their details, often because they are too vulnerable or infirm or ignorant of their rights. Who are then confined to their homes for extended periods of time, often months but sometimes even years, without being able to carry out their normal lives, using public and health services, or socialising with friends and family. They can be restricted in their use of internet, sometimes all forms of communication, including the use of emergency services, even when they are at risk of extreme medical emergencies, and then subjected to delays and deliberate insecurity about their charges and preparations for their own defence by the failure to be informed as to where, when and what the charges they will face will be. The threat of excessive jail sentences if found guilty only increases the actual punishment “without law” since there is little chance of the individual to control this process, only endure the prospect of this future with uncontrollable anxiety. This “cat and mouse” game is one that is designed to intimidate the public generally as well as isolate those exercising their rights to public protest, the right to a proper defence before a jury, and freedom under Article 7.

These oppressive bail conditions along with the rise of use by government of metadata and our surveillance society are creating a modern “cyber-panopticon”, a prison of the mind by which ordinary people are intimidated in their thoughts, speech and actions from questioning government and establishment authority in its foreign and domestic policies, even when they commit crimes against humanity and institute ever more oppressive laws.

Your Party is a positive initiative, there is no doubt about that, but it reflects the problems of the organisation it came out of: the Labour Party. Particularly in the Corbyn period. The announcement of a new party was evidently driven by Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South, when she resigned from Labour at the beginning of July after having been deprived of the Labour whip last year for voting against the two-child benefit cap, introduced by the Tories, which Starmer was determined to keep. Jeremy Corbyn, having defeated the Starmer Labour Party in his own seat of Islington North in the July 2024 General Election, joined up with four other independent MPs who won seats last July: left-wing Muslims who campaigned particularly over the Gaza genocide: Shockat Adam (Leicester South), Adnan Hussain (Blackburn), Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) and Iqbal Mohammad (Dewsbury and Batley). They formed the Independent Alliance after the election. When Zarah Sultana resigned from Labour, she joined the independent Alliance, more of less concurrently with announcing the creation of a new party.

Effectively, though not formally since it is not properly founded yet, and the name is to be voted on at a proper conference towards the end of 2025, the new party already has six MPs, and it is most fitting that it should be heavily Muslim, as reflecting particularly the oppression of, and the anger of, that section of the working class of Muslim immigrant origin, mostly in this country with their origins on the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who have become targets both from nativist islamophobes and Zionists active in British politics. This leads to an implicit division and even factional situation in Your Party even as it is forming up, as Zarah Sultana has openly and prominently declared herself an anti-Zionist since she joined the Independent Alliance. Whereas Corbyn is much shakier, and his record as leader of Labour is in stark contradiction to that.  When leader he endorsed a terrible position that Zionists and anti-Zionists could, and should, coexist in the same party. Of course, neither Zionists nor anti-Zionists could possibly accept this and given the relationship of forces within the Labour political bureaucracy at the time, the Zionists were emboldened to ram through the IHRA fake definition of anti-Semitism. Corbyn vainly attempted to dilute it but then acquiesced.  The witchhunt simply intensified overseen by Corbyn’s nominated Labour General Secretary, Jenny Formby – the expulsions of anti-Zionists on her watch accelerated compared to that of her right-wing predecessor, Iain McNichol. Zarah Sultana has criticised the record of Corbynism on this, rightly saying that Corbynism ‘capitulated’ to Zionism. On this she clearly merits critical support, whatever problems with her wrong positions on Syria previously, or her hostility to the progressive Russian intervention in the Donbass.

When challenged recently (by a left-wing, anti-Zionist activist) about whether he agreed with Zarah Sultana’s anti-Zionism, he looked acutely embarrassed and refused to answer. Corbyn had been earlier better politically when he stood on the platforms of Deir Yassin Remembered with Paul Eisen over several years before 2015. Eisen is a British Jew who out of disgust with the exploitation by Zionists of the past suffering of Jews to justify genocidal treatment of Palestinians, mistakenly concluded that the Nazi genocide was a hoax (though he conceded he may have been mistaken about that). Even though Eisen was wrong about this, his mistaken motives were honourable, and he should have been defended despite this mistake, as a sincere defender of Palestine. Corbyn’s later position, that Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together, in the context of today’s Gaza holocaust, is a far worse mistake than standing on platforms with Paul Eisen. Given the current context, this mistake is worse than Eisen’s – confusion about a genocide that happened before Eisen was born because of Zionist exploitation of that terrible event, is not equivalent to refusing to declare oneself an anti-Zionist today, in the context of the Zionist holocaust in Gaza which is visible to the whole world!

So, there are major political tensions within the project and at least rumours of a degree of factional warfare behind the scenes. This is obviously the result of the above contradictions. Corbyn is still a two-statist over Palestine, but that position is completely unviable today. There needs to be thoroughgoing debate and post-mortem of the previous failures within Labour in the lead up to the founding conference of the party later in the year, so these questions can be fully and openly aired and a balance-sheet drawn. The IHRA should be branded as what it clearly is: a truly sinister document that prepared the Labour Party under Starmer to support Israel’s genocide. The last thing the new party needs is subterranean factional warfare – far better an open discussion, if necessary, with the creation of separate platforms on this question, with the different trends visible to all. This is the only way to neutralise the potential for destructive attacks from the Zionists and other enemies aimed at the shipwreck of the entire project.

On the other hand, Your Party have instigated a consultation on the name for the new party, which all who have signed up have been given the opportunity to both suggest a name and submit a substantial motivation for it. Also positive is that both Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn have come out firmly in support of the rights of transexuals. There are some questions where the more ‘labourite’ trends within this are right. It is not all a one-way street. We need militant anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism in defence of Russia, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Venezuela etc. against imperialism, defence of women’s rights, particularly abortion rights, and defence of oppressed minorities, LGBT etc, under the banner of a revived workers movement fighting for unity of the working class and the oppressed against capitalism. No capitulation to Zionism, imperialism or the social backwardness of some of imperialism’s opponents.

Communist Fight Issue 2:13 is out now. This is the first we have put out in around 3 months, due to some recent logistical difficulties, but the contents of this issue are certainly appropriate. The front- page lead is about the new party initiated by Zahra Sultana, and centrally involving Jeremy Corbyn, at the beginning of July. The massive outpouring of support and interest in this – it rapidly signed up hundreds of thousands on putative supporters in a matter of weeks via website signups – now up to a million – is a seminal event in British politics. Through the new party is still in the process of formation, it has mobilised the mass base that gathered together in support of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in 2015 and then expanded it further. The expectations this has aroused among millions are massive – as the article makes clear, this is the culmination of four decades of class polarisation around divisions that have ebbed and flowed over that time, but have always been centrally about the role of pro-NATO, pro-Zionist, neoliberal ideologues in the apparatus of the Labour Party, that has finally pushed it to this split.

The issue contains also a brief analysis of the divisions in ‘Your Party’ over Zionism and the legacy of the witchhunt and election defeat, both engineered by deeply embedded Zionists in Labour, and the neoliberal right generally.

There is a short article on the Starmer regime’s attacks on democratic rights and civil liberties, crucial questions to be dealt with today.

There is an extensive treatment of some of the scientific aspects of capitalist-induced climate change and the seriousness of it for the future of humanity –  an existential problem that the world working class must take power to deal with. This can only be resolved by rational socialist planning of the world’s resources for use, not for profit, under the democratic control of the victorious world proletariat.

And there is an article on the wave of fascist activity and violence against refugees, and oppressed minorities generally, that swept Britain this August, following on last years horrors. It puts this in the context of social decline, and the changes in the class composition of Britain occasioned by neoliberal and its jobs massacres in the past few decades, and the political demoralisation and lumpenisation of key parts of the working class. It puts this, again in the context of the creation of ‘Your Party’; which can offer solutions for this if it adopts a programme that really attacks the root cause – capitalism. The article overall makes the case for the new party to organise its own militia to guarantee the inviolability of workers’ organisations and the defence of oppressed sections of society.

We are living through the biggest split in the Labour Party’s history, though it is happening in a long-drawn-out and novel manner. This is the continuation of a struggle that has been going on for many years, a continuation of the conflicts in the Labour Party and the labour movement more broadly since Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015, the tumultuous years of Corbynism, the witchhunts, the near victory in the general election in 2017, the sabotaged election campaign of 2019, and then the forcing out of Corbyn. And turn, these have continuity with the conflict over the Cold War in the 1980s, the miners’ strike of 1984-5, and the defeats of the unions under Thatcher and since with support from traitorous neoliberal Labour leaders like Kinnock, Blair, Brown and now Starmer.  The artificial, engineered defeat of Corbyn meant that the mass base that it had generated never dissipated – rather it went into abeyance in a state of seething resentment at the Zionist-led wrecking operation.

When the Zionists and Blairites could not get their way by the ‘anti-semitism’ smear alone, they changed tactics and cynically exploited the Brexit issue to mobilise the most backward and demoralised, semi-lumpenised, nationalist elements of the working class against the left. Starmer’s strident demand for a second Brexit referendum exploited justifiable hostility to Farage’s anti-immigrant, imperial-nostalgic ‘Make Britain Great Again’ movement but the second referendum demand was a tactical error for those who sincerely backed it – it gave Farage and Johnson the weapon of a hypocritical concern for ‘democracy’ to use against Labour. For Starmer, it was just a means to an end – the defeat of Corbyn’s Labour. In 2017 Corbyn did not make this error – he accepted the Brexit referendum outcome but actively sought a soft Brexit. Once Starmer had helped Johnson to defeat Corbyn in 2019, he became one of the worst Brexiters and flag-shaggers – everything he does is wrapped with the Union Flag to this day. Today his regime tries to compete with Farage as to who is most brutal to migrants.

The defeat of Corbyn in 2019 led to the election of Starmer as leader of Labour in 2020. That too was engineered. A situation was created where everyone knew that any halfway credible leadership candidate who did not in some way swear loyalty to Zionism would be smeared as ‘anti-Semitic’ and suspended from the party to rig the election. It would have required a massive offensive of a confident and clarified anti-Zionist left to overcome that. Cravenly, all the leadership candidates who succeeded in getting nominated, either declared themselves to be Zionists themselves, or in the case of Starmer, declared that he supported Zionism “without qualification”.

With the election of Starmer, the split began. Many who had eagerly supported Corbyn, despite all his flaws and capitulations, refused to support Starmer, because they knew full well that he was a placeman whose election had been orchestrated by the same people who had conspired to defeat Corbyn. A sizeable layer knew full well that Starmer’s claim to stand for many of the same things that Corbyn stood for was simply cynical eyewash to get votes from the unwary and the naïve. Then came the huge purges of just about anyone who stood for anything connected with Corbyn in any serious sense. So, Labour’s membership is 309,000 currently, as compared to 532,000 in 2019 under Corbyn, a loss of around 220,000 or so. This loss of hundreds of thousands of members was the tip of an iceberg in terms of support more generally and what could have been potential members. It was clearly a powder keg waiting to go off. This huge layer had already been seriously radicalised against Zionism as a key agent of capitalist reaction by the experience of the witchhunt in the Labour Party, and then were part of the much broader radicalisation of British society by the genocide in Gaza, which exposed what the Corbyn witchhunt was obviously about – clearing the way for Labour to support a genocide.

Which Starmer clearly did right from the moment the genocide began. Interviewed by Nick Ferrari on LBC on 8^th October 2023, he clearly defended Yoav Gallant’s order for Gazans to be starved of fuel, food and water. Starmer’s regime has persecuted Palestine solidarity activists in ways that the previous Tory government never dared, getting the cops to effectively ban Palestine marches and having leading Palestine and anti-war activists like Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal arrested and prosecuted on trumped-up charges of breaking ‘public order’. They have instituted outrageous raids on the homes of Palestine activists and journalists like Asa Winstanley and Sarah Wilkinson, effectively using the state to wage a campaign in wider society that is an extension of the witchhunt Zionists waged in the Labour Party against the pro-Palestinian left. The IHRA pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism was always about trying to coerce the Labour Party membership to not oppose genocide, as its key tenet was that equating Israeli policy with that of the Nazis – i.e., genocide, was “anti-Semitic”. The clear logic of this was always that it would therefore be “anti-Semitic” to accuse the Israeli state of behaving like Nazis even when they began outright genocide, meaning that the IHRA pseudo-definition should itself be regarded as a Nazi-like document, playing a role in some ways similar to that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the proto-Nazi movement – as an ideological cover and warrant for genocide.

This was tried out on the membership of the Labour Party in the Corbyn witchhunt period, and now it is being used in wider British society, as with the bans on Palestine marches, supposedly for disturbing synagogues simply by being nearby, and now, desperately in the proscription of Palestine Action for supposed “terrorism”, in cahoots with the Israeli government and the far right Israeli Ambassador, Tzipi Hotlevy. But this has triggered off huge popular discontent, as the Labour government has been seen to ban and arrest critics of the most documented and publicised genocide in history, while visibly hob-nobbing with the perpetrators. All these conditions led to explosive mass growth of the Corbyn-Sultana party project, once it was kicked off by Zarah Sultana when she announced her resignation from Labour in early July. In less than a month, after she announced that she and Jeremy Corbyn intended to found a new political party to challenge Starmer’s Labour, it attracted explosive mass support, first through the Team Zarah website, and later through http://yourparty.uk, it signed up around 700, 000 people by the end of July.  Which even allowing for the logistical problems of creating an organisation out of that, is a phenomenal response.

It would be formalistic in the extreme to characterise this as a new party arising from social contradictions to challenge the Labour Party from the left, as if this could be abstracted from the previous struggles within Labour not only over the last decade, but in previous decades also. In terms of mechanics, this is a slow-motion split of the mass Corbynite base that more than doubled Labour’s mass membership and support after Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. That layer haemorrhaged away when Corbyn was brought down by the neoliberals and Zionists. But it never disbanded, never disappeared, it just went into a state of external flux and sporadic mobilisation. Corbyn’s own exclusion from Labour by the deprivation of the whip, and the obvious intention of Starmer to steal Corbyn’s long-held Islington North constituency meant that the previous leader, the one with the genuine mass working-class base, was being hounded out of the party. He defeated Labour in the General Election and retained his seat, as did four Muslim left independents opposing Labour over Gaza. So there is already a group attacking Starmer from the left in parliament before the foundation of the new party.

Corbyn has been extremely slow in drawing the conclusions from this and has created various ‘halfway house’ formations to keep the base together without drawing the full conclusions of it, from Peace and Justice, to ‘Collective’, the latter being somewhat secretive. But the bold actions of the much younger, charismatic Labour leftist MP Zarah Sultana forced his hand, and detonated the outright split.

Decades of Preparation for Split

Which is a profoundly progressive development of a world-historic nature, the biggest split in the history of the mass bourgeois workers party in the oldest imperialist country. With regard to the class nature of the Labour Party itself, this split is the product of the basic contradiction within the party itself, between its nature as the creation of a mass labour movement seeking its own political expression, and the pro-capitalist nature of the politics involved, flowing from the bureaucratic caste within the trade unions which reproduced itself in the political bureaucracy that grew up to lead and administer the party itself, with reformist politics that are ultimately bourgeois. In 1982, the Spartacist League, which was then possibly the closest thing to genuine Trotskyism around at that time, wrote about the Benn-Healey contest for the Deputy Leadership of Labour:

“The deep schism in today’s Labour Party is not simply another, typical, case of the party in opposition striving to refurbish its ‘socialist’ credentials among working people alienated by years of betrayal from the Westminster benches. Thus it will not lightly be healed; thus the palpable sense on all sides that the Labour Party cannot go on in the same old way. There is normally a symbiotic relationship between left and right in the party. Together they make a fine team for attacking the working class: while one lulls the workers with airy talk of socialism the other does (or both do) the bosses’ dirty work. This was certainly true in the last Labour government, when Benn played a major role in giving a left cover to anti-working-class betrayal. Today, however, this symbiosis has lapsed.

A distorted and uneven class line is being cleaved in the Labour Party under the impact of renewed anti-Soviet Cold War; between Little England reformists and NATO/CIA-loving ‘internationalists’, lacking in sharp programmatic counterposition but necessarily reflected in and inseparable from domestic class questions…

Reduced in status from its hegemonic position to simply the most powerful of’ several imperialist powers (marked and in part exacerbated by its humiliating defeat in Vietnam), American imperialism prepared itself, with Carter’s anti-Soviet ‘human rights’ campaign, for a course of open military confrontation with the Soviet Union — aiming at a favourable redivision of world markets over the corpse of the Soviet workers state. The international economic crisis which fuels this anti-Soviet war drive intersects in Britain a deep, long-term structural decline. To retain their standing as any sort of imperialist power, the dominant sections of the British bourgeoisie see no course other than an emasculation of the trade unions at home coupled with slavish allegiance to the Atlantic alliance. In this context the contradictions of the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers party have been brought sharply to the fore. In its role as a defender of British capitalist interests, the central core of the postwar Labour bureaucracy has been a staunch advocate of the ‘American connection’, while policing the unions when in office with a combination of reformist carrot and repressive stick.

The politics of the Bennite left –primarily a repudiation of the dismal record of the last Labour government and a utopian unilateralist attempt to pull Britain out of the Cold War vortex –are a reformist dead end from the point of view of the immediate and historic interests of the working class. But they threaten to make Labour an aberrant party in today’s conditions, a party unfit, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, for ‘responsible’ government. Unable to control the rise of Bennism, much of the historical right wing leadership of the party.is actively rethinking its need for the trade union movement as a political base of operations, and has undertaken or is considering an open break with the labour movement. A correct understanding of’ and tactical stance towards the political realignments in and around the Labour Party … is crucial for Marxists striving to break the stranglehold of Labourite reformism over the working class and forge a revolutionary vanguard to lead the proletariat to power. (Spartacist Britain #41, April 1982, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/spartacist-uk/041_1982_04_Bristish-spart.pdf)

Notwithstanding the glib formulation at the end about “forging a revolutionary vanguard” (which is easier said than done and can only really be a product of serious programmatic development involving a sizeable movement of class-conscious workers), nevertheless this analysis is broadly correct and relevant to this day. That ‘distorted and uneven class line’ has been a common thread of the anti-working-class development of Labour’s political bureaucracy since the early days of Cold War 2 in the 1980s, i.e. the Reagan/Thatcher ‘revolutions.’ It is a key part of the political context for major developments since, along with the rise of Zionism to the position of the hegemonic form of racism in bourgeois politics largely flowing from the role of Jewish-Zionist ideologues as the chief ideologues and popularisers of neoliberalism

Under Kinnock, then Blair and Brown, Labour had become outright reactionary-neoliberal and openly anti-working class, as epitomised by its junking in 1995 of the formal aspiration of the aim of a society built on “common ownership” – the old Clause 4, part 4 of the Fabian reformists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who co-founded Labour as a mass membership party in 1918 on this basis (though the early foundational work as a federal trade-union-led party was led by Keir Hardie). The aspiration of “common ownership” was replaced by a new, basically Thatcherite Clause 4, which includes in part 2, a commitment to “the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition” (http://www.labourcounts.com/Clause_four_comparisons.htm) This excrescence has dominated Labour since the strategic defeat of the trade unions under the rule of arch-Tory Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, above all with the defeat of the year-long miners’ strike in 1984-5, a defensive struggle that, because of the betrayals of the rest of the labour movement and the sheer brutality of the state, at times took almost insurrectionary forms. This outcome conditioned the rise of Blairism in the 1990s,

Under Blair and later Brown’s New Labour, which ruled Britain from 1997 to 2010, a widening chasm emerged between what was in effect a neoliberal political “class” dominating Labour, and much of the working-class movement. A major part of New Labour’s project was imperialist militarism, much of it linked to support for Zionism, as with the Iraq war carried out with Bush’s US administration. Domestically, Blair’s regime, though it did liberalise some elements of labour laws, also kept the overwhelming majority of the anti-union laws that the Tories had nailed in place since the miners’ defeat, and not only did not reverse any of the Thatcher/Major government’s privatisations, it engaged in privatisations of its own, from air-traffic control, partial privatisation of council housing administration, and partial privatisation of the London Underground. It continued the Tories ban on new council housing, while at the same time, as did the Tories, letting monetary policy rip in such a way as to create massive house-price bubbles that really rigged the housing market to enrich the wealthy and landlords, following in Thatcher’s footsteps. So much so, that new Labour was deemed by Thatcher in a later speech, as “my Greatest Achievement.”

 The capitalist financial crisis of 2007-9, the near collapse of the banking system under neoliberal deregulation, was so severe that it brought down incumbent neoliberal governments in the US and Europe, including New Labour in 2010. In the US it brought to power the seemingly liberal black Democrat Barack Obama on a wave of social-democratic rhetoric, which proved in office to be largely cynical. In Britain, a hung parliament brought to power a coalition of Tories and Liberals that blamed excessive indulgence of the working class, poor and disabled for the financial crisis, and severely cut social benefits. After the defeat of new Labour in 2010, the overt Blairites suffered a partial defeat when the soft-left Ed Miliband won the leadership, talking of a ‘crisis of working-class representation’, and traded on his claim to have opposed the Iraq war (which was not completely clear, as at that time nobody had heard of him!) He was ineffectual in the face of austerity, and his leadership coincided with a major strengthening of an anti-immigrant, reactionary movement, that sought a British exit from the European Union to get rid of East European immigrants, whose cheaper labour had played a large role in the boom under New Labour prior to the financial crisis, and then were made scapegoats. Miliband’s ineffectual leadership, and the collapse of the Lib Dems’ popular support because of their role in austerity attacks gave the Tories an unexpected majority at the 2015 General election, and allowed the anti-EU, anti-migrant right-wing UKIP to put enough pressure on the Tories to call a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

Massive political insurgency – 2015: repeated in 2025

It was unprecedented for a leader of the outright ‘socialist’ left social-democratic left-wing of the party, sometimes known as the ‘hard left’, to be elected leader of the Labour Party, as Jeremy Corbyn was in 2015. This was actually a massive insurgency of the socialist-minded working-class base of Labour against the neo-liberal political bureaucracy, whose hatred of organised labour already had few boundaries. This was driven back in a brutal manner by the Zionists and neoliberals, as detailed above. But the Sultana/Corbyn Party has simply given an embryonic organisational expression to this political split, which is along the distorted and uneven class line referred to above. This has the potential to resolve the class contradiction of Labour as a bourgeois workers party, in favour of creating a genuine mass party of the proletariat in Britain. Which to realise its potential, must be communist and internationalist in its politics.

This split is along a distorted, perhaps deformed, and uneven class line – the split is not pure. This is because the leftist, pacifist politics of Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing leader of the Labour Party since George Lansbury in the 1930s, are not free of bourgeois prejudices themselves. They dream of the peaceful overcoming of capitalist contradictions, or barbarities, through electoral means, but with the re-creation of a ‘proper’ welfare system and rolling back privatisation – supportable demands of course, but not revolutionary. However, the ruling class will not entertain this for a moment. This itself is dangerous to the new party and its potential to lead. The ruling class has shown by its brutal support for genocide in Gaza, and its unsubtle support for outright Nazis in Ukraine, the depths of barbarism to which it will sink when its prerogatives are challenged by the oppressed.

Yet this is also a new start, and many tens or even hundreds of thousands of subjective socialists will join the new party eager to fight for political answers to these things. In this situation, all socialists and communists should join the new party and be prepared to fight for socialism in a non-reformist, class struggle sense. This includes the militants of large social-democratic sects with ‘revolutionary’ pretentions like the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, many of whom have, mixed with their revolutionary aspirations, elements of capitulation to imperialism such as Russophobia and Sinophobia, some softness on Zionism, etc. On the other hand, such movements as George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, with better politics on such questions, but that have also adapted to backward sections of the working class over questions like immigration and the defence of oppressed groups like transsexuals and even gays, should likewise be drawn into the movement so these problems can also be more effectively overcome. We hear that the Workers Party wants to affiliate to the new party – we would support that.

We could see serious elements, or even sizeable currents, within the new party develop beyond reformism in an incomplete way, embracing incoherent forms of what Marxists have traditionally called ‘centrist’ politics. This has nothing to do with the fashionable usage today to describe Blairite type disguised right-wing politics. Rather it refers to forms of politics that vacillate between reformism and revolution. Currently mainly the preserve of small sects, there is a precedent in British labour history for such a development on a larger scale with the Independent Labour Party, which split from Labour in 1931, opposed social democracy from the left, but never developed a coherent alternative. The healthy development of a genuine working-class party could certainly encourage leftward development but hopefully avoid such flaws emerging.

Communists and Workers Parties

A genuine workers party, which the British left has no real experience of, would tend to dissolve sectarian cliques and draw everyone into programmatic development. This situation puts us back at the situation of flux and possibility that existed when the Labour Party was founded. We should look to what Marx and Engels wrote to introduce part two of the 1847 Manifesto of the Communist Party for inspiration in dealing with this development:

“II. Proletarians and Communists

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

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

 They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.  They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. 

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

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.  The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. “ (www.marxists.org/admin/books/manifesto/Manifesto.pdf)

In this regard, we in the Consistent Democrats have been working with other like-minded socialists in the Socialist Labour Network since that body emerged from Labour, the product of the merger of two important groups of the Corbynite left – Labour Against the Witchhunt and the Labour in Exile Network, both of which were important enough to be proscribed by Starmer, as was the SLN immediately the merger took place. We are now working along with other groupings of independent socialists, such as the Network of Independent Socialists (NOIS) in seeking to join and engage in the formation of the new party, at the same time advocating that it functions according to party and working-class democracy. Though such groupings may have a limited life given the horizons of such a new party, their role at this point could be quite important.

To conclude, we reproduce a motion that was proposed by the Consistent Democrats, and passed, at a meeting of the Socialist Labour Network on 8^th August. It captures quite well the opportunities, and dangers, posed by the new party, and some of what socialists should be fighting for in working for it:

“The Socialist Labour Network welcomes Zahra Sultana MP’s resignation from the Labour Party and initiative to co-found a new left-wing party along with Jeremy Corbyn, to challenge Starmer’s brutal, anti-democratic, pro-genocide, warmongering, anti-working-class austerity regime. The New Party has already signed up 750,000 members- compared with the current Labour Party diminishing membership of around 300,000

“Since Thatcher’s strategic defeat of the miners in the mid-1980s, most Labour leaderships have been openly Thatcherite and neo-liberal, the exception being Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership from 2015-2020, which did promise to begin rolling back the decades of austerity. Labour under Corbyn, which the bourgeois media slated as being ‘unelectable’, gained over 12 million votes in 2017 – more than any Labour campaign this century.  Even in 2019 when it was defeated, Labour achieved more votes than in Starmer’s election victory in 2024. It was the internal collapse of the Tory party that gifted Starmer that election. 

“The real problem with Corbyn was that his left social democracy and ‘broad church’ Labour politics meant appeasing the neoliberal Right to keep them on board. In the face of ferocious attacks from Zionists and their supporters in the media, Corbyn ran up the white flag and actively expelled many good socialists on trumped-up ‘anti-Semitism’ charges. The adoption of the fake IHRA-definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ primed Labour under Starmer to support the current Zionist genocide. 

“Starmer, other Labour Zionists and treacherous neoliberals were put in pole position by the weakness of Corbyn and the left, to sabotage Labour and destroy Corbyn’s leadership. This was done with the avid cooperation of the BBC and the entire Zionist-supporting, neoliberal legacy media. The Starmer regime that came out of this is genocidal and anti-democratic. Its outrageous proscription of Palestine Action demonstrates that corporate Labour is now rolling out to the whole population its treatment of its own members. 

“Labour’s brutal attacks on the working class, migrants, pensioners, the disabled and sick, benefit claimants etc, flow really from the ruling class’s current aims. Starmer was put in place to deliver on the ongoing aims of the neoliberal regime- the concentration of power and resources in the hands of the few. Its current trajectory will place power in the hands of the openly far-right in the guise of the Reform Party.  

“The Zahra Sultana-Jeremy Corbyn party has great potential to squash the ruling class’s far right project. But we must learn the lessons of the previous Corbyn leadership. Left social democratic politics are fundamentally inadequate today, more than ever. We need a genuinely working-class party with a democratic internal structure and culture where strategic, programmatic questions can be fully debated and resolved. We need to move beyond reformism to allow for the development of revolutionary alternatives. We cannot allow the workers movement to be defeated by Zionists, fascists or the subversion of even bourgeois democracy by the bourgeois state, its armed forces and intelligence services. We need a party that has a consistently anti-imperialist policy, which opposes Western imperialism and all its proxy forces around the globe.

“There can be no ‘friends of Israel’ in such a party – Zionism is a ferocious class enemy of the workers. We must be on our guard against other forms of right-wing infiltration. But we must be aware that if the ruling class is denied the chance to wreck the new party by subversion internally, they will seek other means – including military rebellion, fascism and potential coups. It is not accidental that during Jeremy’s leadership senior military officers openly threatened rebellion were he to be elected, and soldiers used his image as target practice on shooting ranges. The new party needs to take this on board – the working class cannot be merely pacifist in the face of ruling class violence. The labour movement needs its own means of resistance. We need a party that points the way to working class rule, and a break with notions of class collaboration and co-existence with a capitalism that threatens humanity with world war and environmental collapse.

“The SLN stands with the new party, provisionally known as ‘Your Party’. It exhorts the party to be bold in its vision for progressive and revolutionary change, and develop beyond social democracy and its tradition of betrayal.“

(https://socialist-labour-network.org.uk/motions-from-amm-on-8th-august-your-party-and-palestine-action/)

Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 22nd June. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here

Let us make very clear the position of the Consistent Democrats and the Liaison Committee of the Fourth International generally on this war, started by Israel with clear support and assistance from the Trump administration in the US, including by diplomatic duplicity and a pretence of involving Iran in ‘negotiations., and then openly joined by the US last night with the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites.

We utterly condemn the attack on Iran, an oppressed semi-colonial country, by these two imperialist states acting in concert, with the tacit and indeed material support of other imperialist states from West Europe such as Britain, France and Germany. We are for the defeat of Israel and its US quartermasters and lackeys, and the victory of Iran. We defend Iran’s military actions against Israel, we defend the richly deserved devastation of those cities in what is now called Israel, cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa, which have now had their military and intelligence buildings, and infrastructure destroyed by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. We are also for Iran’s right to retaliate against those who attacked it. ALL of those who attacked it – not just Israel, but also the United States. We note that Iran has sympathising, militant groups all over the Middle East and beyond.

For a start, Lebanon with Hezbollah, and in Iraq, with well equipped Shia militia groups such as Kataib Hezbollah and others, who have already been firing drones and missiles at the Zionist state during Iran’s justified counterattack against Israel over the past week or so. Then there is Yemen – which earlier fought the United States to a standstill over their blockade of Israel in the Red Sea, and their attacks on Western, including US, shipping that was giving either economic or military support to Israel. The US was so devastated by Amanullah’s attacks, with their ultra-fast modern missiles, of Iranian and ultimately Russia hypersonic type, that they were compelled to break Trump’s solidarity with Israel, and make a separate agreement with the Amanullah movement/government in Yemen, basically that if the US left the Houthi alone, the Houthi would leave alone non-Israel-related US shipping travelling through the Mandab straights and through the Red Sea. Now, with the US joining in the attack on Iran, Amanullah have threatened to resume attacking Western shipping, from a position of strength, since Trump was forced to abandon attacks on Yemen earlier because of the US weakness particularly against the threat that Yemen could use its missile capacity to destroy Saudi and other Gulf oil production, which is vital to the US economy.

Even more startling in that regard is the threat from Iran to close the Straights of Hormuz, through which the products of over 50%, some say 70%, of the world’s oil production flows. The whole area bristles with US bases, not just in the Gulf itself, such as in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but also US installations left over from the occupation of Iraq, an earlier war of conquest that the US waged on Israel’s behalf, and also in Syria, sent in by Obama and Trump earlier in their crusade against Assad, also for his refusal to accept Israeli domination, in reality. It is now well known that the US used Al Qaeda and ISIS as dogs of war against Assad in a similar way that they used the Mujahedin and Taliban against the pro-Soviet, left nationalist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

It does appear that this attack on Iran in some ways follows the pattern of what Trump did with Yemen, in one important sense. Trump’s nickname is TACO – which stands for ‘Trump Always Cops Out’. It appears that Trump did this to try to please the Israel lobby that clearly put him in power but attempted at the same time to minimise the damage by informing the Iranian government through some kind of back-channel what was going to happen. Which gave them easily sufficient time to remove their nuclear facilities to other locations, so in effect the US action was a piece of theatre, performative, and has only caused relatively minor damage to some facilities that were already empty. It was a ‘nothing burger’ as Scott Ritter said.

It is very unlikely that these installations will be used again, as the main reason that the US knew about their precise location was because of spying by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) people, who gave detailed information to the US and Zionists. The IAEA, it has been clear since the Israeli intelligence treasure trove that Iran got hold of and published on the eve of the Israeli attack on 12 June, had also supplied Mossad with the identities and locations of prominent Iranian nuclear scientists, setting them up for assassination either by Mossad or by some of their pet terrorist proxies that operate in Iran. Such as the once-leftist Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which for decades has been a tool of Mossad, the CIA, and even Saddam’s Iraq when it was a Western ally, and which helped and still are helping the Israeli attack on Iran with smuggled lorryloads of short-range drones, and planting car bombs in the street to enhance the Israeli attack, and make it appear bigger than it actually was. So Iran’s counter-attack against all these forces is obviously legitimate, even under the concepts of ‘international law’ that the US under both Biden and Trump, have openly ditched.

Iran now has very good reason to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it adhered to for decades, while Israel developed an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons. The squealing about Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions by nuclear armed Israel was always a hoax, similar to the hoax about Iraq and ‘WMD’ that was used to justify invading Iraq in 2003. Iran has no nukes, mainly because of the pacific religious opposition to them from its Supreme Leader. Iran clearly needs nuclear weapons to render it invulnerable to such crimes, and it could ‘borrow’ some from several sources while under that umbrella it develops the means to make its own. Now it may do so.

The world has moved on. Iran is much stronger than Iraq was in 2003 – it is a far larger country, with 90 million population, a territory the size of Western Europe, and modern weaponry some of which is well in advance of that of Israel and the US. Iran is not alone or isolated – the clear statement from neighbouring nuclear-armed Pakistan that a nuclear attack on Iran by Israel would bring forth a Pakistan nuclear attack on Israel, was crucial in this war. Which is a good thing. At the beginning of the Israeli attack, Iran’s air-defences were hacked by a Zionist cyber-attack. But they were brought back online in a few hours with Russian, and maybe Pakistani assistance. It does appear that Iran is getting discreet economic and military assistance, in terms of supplies, from both Russia and China. Which is what you would expect considering Iran’s crucial role in BRICS.

So, Iran is winning the missile and drone war, increasingly using its more modern hypersonic missiles in the latest counter-attack attacks, which Israel cannot defeat. Its Iron Dome has effectively collapsed.  And the civilian population of Israel is also suffering from these Iranian attacks. Parts of Tel Aviv and Haifa now bear some superficial resemblance to what Israel has done to Gaza. Though it’s not remotely the same in terms of wanton death and any deliberate destruction of the population. Nevertheless, there should be no squeamishness about Iran’s right to strike back against Israel as a state. Any civilian deaths are simply collateral damage of Iran’s right to defend itself against an unprovoked attack on Iran by Israel.

Israel is not a normal state. Many of its towns and cities are built on the ruins of Arab towns and villages. 400 such Arab towns and villages were destroyed, obliterated, in the 1948 war. In many other places, Israeli citizens live in homes that were directly stolen from Palestinian Arabs, who sometimes even still have the keys to their former homes. Israeli civilians are not like ordinary citizens of any of the European imperialist countries, or even those countries such as the US, Canada and Australia who had their origins in colonial settler projects of centuries past. Israel is a settler state today. Its crimes are ongoing. And it is somewhat different to these previous settler states in that the population is a very narrow layer of Zionist Jews that have an ideology that they are supposedly re-founding an ancient state that existed thousands of years ago.

This whole ideology is a grotesque myth, but it has been deferred to for the whole period of Israel’s existence in the popular consciousness in the West, for two reasons. One is bourgeois class interest, the other is a guilt reaction over the genocide of the Jews in Europe under Hitler in the mid-20^th century. The second is a temporary phase that is being overcome to a certain extent because of the obscenity and brutality of this live-streamed genocide. The idea that Jews are somehow morally superior and eternal victims has become discredited to a real extent by the obvious Hitler-like racism of the Zionists, such as the speaking of their victims as ‘human animals’, by the former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant immediately after the Hamas led breakout from the Gaza death camp on 7 October 2023. We heard biblical talk by Netanyahu of Palestinians as ‘Amalek’ – a biblical enemy who the Jews are supposedly commanded by their God to exterminate men, women, children and even kill animals belonging to this declared biblical enemy people of the ‘chosen’ Jews.

This genocidal agitation is clearly similar to the Nazis, and this understanding has seeped into popular consciousness including in the Western countries, with the vivid exposure of the population to a livestreamed genocide. It is the political basis for the indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant by the ICC for crimes against Humanity. This happened because of pressure from below. And for the Genocide case against Israel in the ICJ, which still exists though has become a byword for sloth and complacency, and the failure to do anything or even confirm their own provisional conclusions from January 2024 that Israel was ‘plausibly’ committing a genocide. The ICJ’s call for Israel to take immediate measures to prevent a genocide was completely ignored, treated as a joke by Israel. The whole concept of international law, international justice, the Genocide Convention, all that, has been openly mocked and junked by all the major Western powers since the Hamas breakout on 7^th October 2023.

What we really have to examine is why. What is decisive is not, as yet, the complete popular discredit of Israel and Zionism in the popular consciousness, including in the West. Massively in contradiction to that is the cult of Zionism among the ruling classes of the imperialist countries of the West. There is a material basis for the strong influence of Zionism in the Western countries. This was exemplified recently by the revelation that 10% of billionaires worldwide are of Jewish origin, courtesy of the finance source Forbes. This compared to a world population where only 0.2% is of Jewish origin. That is 50 times overrepresentation and massively enhances the political influence of Jewish bourgeois within the ruling class. Who in turn are overwhelmingly Zionist, since this is currently the hegemonic ideology among bourgeois Jews.

This is not some kind of moral attack on Jews as a population for being disproportionately rich. There are historic reasons for that, which derive from the social role of Jews as a trading class under European feudalism, the repository of commercial capital, a primitive, pre-capitalist people-class of merchant traders. This was analysed in its essentials by Abram Leon, whose work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation was seminal, building on earlier material by Karl Marx himself. It is simply a historical fact that when capitalism replaced feudalism, elements of this pre-capitalist trading class were particularly suited to fit into niche elements of the emerging bourgeois society, particularly those involving finance and some kinds of trade.

In an earlier period, the non-Jewish bourgeoisie was distrustful of this layer of their own class, in large measure because the oppression of Jews under late feudalism had also created a situation where radical Jews played a very prominent role in democratic movements at the time of the bourgeois revolutions, and then in the socialist and communist movements. The bulk of the bourgeoisie earlier mistrusted their Jewish brethren because of this radical association, and it provided the soil for genocidal anti-Jewish (antisemitic) agitation to achieve a temporary hegemony among the bourgeoise, culminating in the Nazi holocaust in the 1940s.

But the Jews Hitler murdered were mainly the leftist and socialist Jews, and this changed the balance of forces within the Jewish people – to the advantage of this outsized bourgeois layer. This was today’s Jewish-Zionist caste in embryo. The Zionist movement conquered hegemony among Jews partly because of the Nazi persecution, though it was always a genocidal project, aimed at taking land by force from the indigenous people of the Levant and Middle East to create an ethnic dystopia. Like the proto-Hitlerite anti-Semites, pioneer Zionists such as Herzl admired early imperialist monsters like Cecil Rhodes, the plunderer of Africa, and sought to emulate them.

After WWII, with the defeat, exposure and discredit of Nazi anti-Jewish racism, the Zionist state was born. And a complementary hegemony was established over time in bourgeois politics. In the 1970s, as capitalism faced a major political and economic crisis, neoliberalism was like manna from heaven for the imperialist bourgeoisie as a strategic way out of the crisis. Many of its most prominent ideologues, such as Friedman, Joseph, Sherman, even Kissinger were Jewish and supportive of Zionism. This is somewhat mythologised, as an earlier pioneer of neoliberalism, Hayek, was not Jewish, but he lived at the wrong time and was regarded as a crank. But the upshot of this was the growth of a kind of cult of Zionism and Jewishness among the bourgeoisie, as the saviours of their system. The inverse of the earlier cult of antisemitism that drove bourgeois support for Hitler.

And the growth of this newer cult gave a massive boost to the power of that already outsize Jewish section of the bourgeoisie, and created the situation we live under today, where Zionism has ironically become a threat to the lives and liberties of ordinary people across the globe, in a similar manner as Nazism once was. So today, the Jewish-Zionist caste can order Donald Trump to attack Iran, and it can instruct Kier Stamer, another of its devotees, to attempt to proscribe Palestine Action. This is the nature of the bourgeois politics we face today. To fight capitalism, not just abstractly, but concretely, we must expose and defeat this odd Zionist excrescence, to open a real way politically to the abolition of capitalism itself.