A Vote for Starmer’s Labour is a vote for Zionist Genocide and Nazism in Ukraine!

Vote for independent socialists/Workers Party/Transform/TUSC/RCP!

For a Unified Democratic Anti-Imperialist Working-Class Party – No Zionists Allowed!

Rafah: Zionist massacre of refugees in tents with deadly airstrikes, May 26. This resulted in Palestinian newborns being decapitated, highlighting the barbarism of the Zionists, who lied about Hamas doing that on 7th Oct, precisely to incite this genocide.

In this general election, there is no major party deserving of the support, even critically, of class-conscious workers, socialists, anti-racists and fighters against oppression. The Tories and Liberal Democrats are the open parties of the ruling class, and it is elementary that no class-conscious element could even consider supporting them for a moment. In the last decade and a half working class people have had all out war conducted against them and their living standards by these parties – first in coalition, and then since 2015 the Tories alone. But today’s Labour Party, led by Kier Starmer, was forged through a massive, reactionary hammering of the left that led the Labour Party from 2015-20 under Jeremy Corbyn, that Labour Party itself is standing in this election as the continuity of the Tories, and garnering support from dissident Tories even as it continues to crush the Labour left.Not only that, but on the overarching, litmus test issue of elementary political decency and even basic humanity, it has been clear for several years that the Starmer leadership supports genocidal Israel, root and branch, and is dominated by genocidal Zionists. The bloody massacre in Rafah, the culmination of more than seven months of genocidal slaughter in Gaza, only underlines what Starmer stands for. The entire scam ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign that was waged by the neoliberal right wing against the left during the Corbyn period, was driven by the palpable realisation by those forces that a genocide of the Palestinian people was in the offing, and politics had to purged as much as possible of any reservoirs of support and sympathy for Palestinian rights. The Corbyn movement was seen as a huge threat and reservoir of such sympathy, dangerous to the Zionist project. It was always genocidal in its ultimate logic.

The Starmer leadership is a reversion, and then more, to the politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and the 1997-2010 neoliberal New Labour governments, which followed in the footsteps of Thatcher/Major’s earlier Tory governments and engaged in massive privatisation and repression of trade unions, supposedly to revive British capitalism’s economic fortunes after the major crisis of the 1970s. That government, like the Tories, demanded austerity to make the working class pay for the world financial crisis of the late noughties, a crisis of speculation, massive financial corruption and forms of profit that amounted to extortion and theft. Austerity was a device to make the working class pay for the bailout of the banks that prevented the collapse of the system that this crisis threatened.

New Labour and Austerity vs Corbynism

In the past decade and a half, we have seen major austerity attacks on workers’ living standards, on the NHS and other public services that constitute a key part of the ‘social wage’ of the working class. Social security benefits have been massively reduced and restricted, and disabled workers demonised by the profiteering billionaire media. The NHS has been plundered and massively slimmed down. This process began under the Tory-Liberal coalition of the early 2010s and has further considerably increased under the increasingly squalid and openly corrupt Tory-populist regimes in Britain since 2019. Under their tutelage, the NHS is now in a deliberately-engineered major crisis, and is visibly failing most of those who need it in some way. This is the logic of neoliberalism, and the Labour right will not tolerate any serious opposition to it – they agree with the Tories on the fundamentals and are viscerally hostile to the aims of the labour movement.

Though the Tories actually implemented austerity since 2010, as the New Labour government had run out of steam through its own attacks on the working class at home and its imperialist wars abroad, notably in Iraq, the Labour Party throughout this period, except under Corbyn, accepted austerity and the Tory cuts, merely whinging under Ed Miliband’s soft left leadership that the Tories were going “too far, too fast” with such attacks. The neoliberal right-wing fought back by all means at their disposal against the break with austerity, imperialist wars abroad, and support for Zionism, that Corbyn’s leadership represented, from the moment it became clear in mid-2015 that Corbyn had the mass support to win the Labour leadership.

That was what drove the demolition job on Corbyn’s leadership though the ‘anti-Semitism’ scam. The entire neoliberal right in Labour was horrified by the near victory of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 General Election, when Theresa May’s majority was destroyed. It appears that only the sabotage of the Labour right – in particularly the funnelling of campaign funds away from key marginals to safe Labour seats inhabited by Labour Zionists – deprived Labour of being the largest party in that election. But the televised, visible shock on the faces of neoliberal Labour ‘friends of Israel’ like Jess Phillips and Stephen Kinnock when May was predicted, by “Exit Polls”, to lose her majority, was a widely remarked upon public spectacle.

In the two years between the 2017 and 2019 elections, Starmer’s cynical manipulation of the issue of a second Brexit referendum aimed at securing a victory for the corrupt Trumpian thug Boris Johnson in 2019, which it duly did. This was another key element of their counter-attack, in addition to the ‘anti-Semitism’ scam, which did not work particularly well in 2017, and needed reinforcement. Starmer never cared particularly about Brexit either way, as revealed by his flag-shagging and pandering to Brexit voting xenophobes ever since. But he revealed his key motivation clearly when standing for Labour leader in 2020 after the destruction of Corbyn’s leadership, when he said that he supported Zionism ‘without qualification’.

Corbyn showed chronic weakness in confronting the ‘anti-Semitism’ scam/witchhunt, repeatedly throwing his most outspoken supporters to the Zionist wolves, and also suicidally allowed Starmer control of Brexit policy after 2017. The actions of Starmer as the standard-bearer of the neoliberal/Zionist thugs ever since, show the character of Starmer’s regime very clearly. He has massively purged the Labour Party of anyone showing any sympathy for Palestine. And within the workers movement, basic decency for Palestine generally coincides with basic socialist views on many other things, like opposition to privatisation, attacks on the NHS, anti-union repression, racism more generally.

Starmer and Israel’s Genocide

Whereas support for Zionism reflects socially and politically reactionary views more generally – Israel is now the cause celebre of the bulk of the far right, with very few dissenters. What Starmer has been doing, systematically for the entire period of his leadership, is using phoney allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ to purge socialist-inclined people generally from Labour. His whole strategy in this election is not to appeal to the working class on any kind of class basis whatsoever, but to prove that Labour has ‘changed’ from the days of Corbyn’s leadership when it did push basic working class demands, that it is in no way habitable for socialists, but very habitable for Tories alienated by the open corruption of Sunak, Truss, Johnson et all, but still hostile to the working class movement.

Starmer welcomes into Labour’s ranks right-wing Tory defectors – overtly xenophobic, racist types like Natalie Elphicke, while at the same time Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot were deprived of the Labour whip for years based on phoney accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. Where he is coming from on this is shown by his attitude when the genocidal Zionist assault on Gaza began after the October 7^th Hamas-led Gaza prison break and raid on the IDF nearby. On October 8^th the racist monster Israeli ‘defence’ minister Yoav Gallant, now facing indictment from the International Criminal Court for, among other things, ‘extermination’ of the Palestinian people, made his Hitlerian speech saying that the inhabitants of Gaza are “human animals” who should be allowed “no electricity, no food, no water, no gas”. For the Zionists, Palestinian civilians of all ages should be starved to death and die of dehydration, even babies in incubators should be left to die, as well as being bombed to death. All these things have happened many times over. Yet when Starmer the genocidaire (a.k.a. “Der Stűrmer”) was interviewed shortly after Gallant’s speech by Nick Ferrari on LBC, he defended Israel’s “right” to carry out these genocidal measures against the Palestinian people.

This openly genocidal affirmation by Starmer detonated a major explosion in Labour’s base and ranks and led to a major exodus of outraged members, particularly from Muslim-derived working-class communities, and numerous defections of councillors from Labour all over the country. There is already a substantial layer of independent socialist councillors around the country, many of whom successfully defended their seats in the council elections on May 4^th. Starmer has the party’s internal life sewn up, dissent is ruthlessly punished, and internal party elections are shamelessly rigged by the central apparatus overseen by the ultra-corrupt and anti-democratic General Secretary David Evans, who long held that there was too much democracy in Labour, which is why Starmer appointed him in the first place. So, there is no reason for Labour dissenters not to go public, attack the corrupt Zionist vermin, and seek to punish them electorally.

This was further exacerbated by a major parliamentary scandal in February when the Scottish National Party put a parliamentary motion demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the ‘collective punishment’ of the Palestinian people. A permanent ceasefire in Gaza would signify an Israeli defeat, which is why the Starmer leadership is utterly opposed to it, no matter what ‘adjustments’ it makes to its rhetoric for cosmetic purposes. So Starmer colluded with the speaker of the House of Commons, Hoyle, who like Starmer is a “Labour Friend of Israel” to allow, contrary to elementary parliamentary procedure, a Labour amendment to gut the SNP motion of its most important demands.

This is contrary to democracy and parliamentary procedure; only the government is traditionally allowed to try to amend opposition parties’ motions like this. The purpose being to ensure that larger opposition parties cannot squash smaller ones, and that the motions of all opposition parties are allowed to be voted for and against in contention with the views of the government. It was a major scandal and an abuse of democracy comparable to Boris Johnson’s unlawful proroguing of parliament in August 2019, and showed that Starmer the Zionist was quite prepared to abuse basic democratic norms not only within the Labour Party, but also in wider politics, in a manner usually associated with the far right. It is another reason why it is not in the interest of the working-class movement to allow the genocidaire Starmer to become Prime Minister. We should not be in the business of electing ‘Labour’ leaders who are so zealous about attacking our own democratic rights that even some Tories complain that they have gone too far!

Starmer the Red, or Pink Tory

All of these are clear indications that it is not in the interests of the working class to elect Starmer’s Labour Party. Labour has backpeddled on virtually every residual policy that temporarily survived from the Corbyn period, or which the Starmerites introduced as temporary sops to trade unions, environmental protesters, etc. Starmer stood for Labour leader in 2020 on a programme that superficially appeared to be ‘Corbynism without Corbyn’ but it was clear to many on the left that he was simply lying to get power. Once he gained it these promises were renounced one-by-one and critics were at risk of being purged, as many were. Even the far right Tory Suella Braverman has been able to criticise Labour from the left, after belatedly coming out against the government’s barbaric two-child cap on Child Benefit, which Starmer is now in favour of keeping. Starmer’s Labour has recently had conflicts about its junking of promises to spend £28 billion per year on green investments, and now about its supposed ‘New Deal for Workers’ – all of these things derived from the Corbyn period and are being junked and/or watered down.

Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of UNITE, who is a fake ‘left’ talking character as cynical as Starmer, has been complaining about this backtracking, on questions like abolition of zero-hours contracts, and then has been claiming to have secured some concessions. But the cynical instrumentalisation of such promises and eagerness to junk them to please right-wing voters is what Starmer is all about. Starmer has even attacked successful Labour figures marginally to his left over such things, criticising the Major of London, Sadiq Khan, for not retreating on the ULEZ clean air measures because right-wing London Tories objected. Khan, who is a feeble soft left and usually servile to the right wing and Zionists, in this case ignored Starmer and won a substantially increased majority in the May 4^th Mayoral Election in London.

It looks likely that Labour will win the general election, not because of any appeal it is putting forward to workers as a class – it is shunning that as detailed above – but simply because of the advanced state of decay and near-collapse of the Tories. It is not in the interests of the labour movement to have this anti-democratic, second-string Tory leadership gain a substantial overall majority in the General Election. Ideally, what we want is a hung parliament with no overall Zionist-Labour or Tory majority and a significant number of left-wing independents and left-wing socialists to get elected and lay the basis for the emergence of a new, genuine working-class party.

As detailed, there are numerous independents around the country standing against Labour, as well as several left-of-labour political organisations standing. The most prominent is Jeremy Corbyn himself, the former Labour leader, who has been Labour MP for Islington North since 1983. His exclusion from Labour, when he was the leader of a massive popular movement against austerity, racism and imperialist war, symbolises why Marxists should not be supporting the Starmerites in the election. There are hundreds of thousands of people loyal to Corbyn’s leadership who have been impatiently waiting for Corbyn to take the final step and defy Starmer in the election. Diane Abbot, the first black woman MP to be elected, who has represented Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987, is in a similar position, deprived of the Labour whip on the basis of phoney allegations of anti-Semitism, made by genocidaires. She is very unlikely to get the whip back, and hopefully will feel compelled to follow Corbyn on this, though this is not completely clear.

Huge numbers of former Corbyn supporters, likely hundreds of thousands, are so angered by the cynicism of these exclusions that they would not countenance a vote for the ‘Red Tory’ Starmer. That is the stance, and it is thoroughly justified, of the most advanced and class-conscious layer of the British working- class movement. The layer that is dedicated to Labour irrespective of whether it stands for full-blooded leftist social democracy or warmed-over Toryism is not the advanced layer of the working class, not its vanguard, but its rearguard. Those who vote Labour knowing that its prospective Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is not only an arch-Zionist but also an evangel of private healthcare companies, can hardly be said to be sterling defenders of the NHS, for instance. The job of Marxists is to keep step with the most advanced layers of the working class, not to tail after the consciousness of the most backward types, who Starmer is actively seeking to win with his flag-shagging and pandering to Tories.

One important flaw that exists among some ex-Corbynites is a softness on the Green Party as a potential repository of socialist possibilities, or at least a potential protest vote. But the Greens are not a working-class party and are not to be trusted. In Germany, where their Green Party is part of a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) they are deeply implicated in support for both Israel and Nazi Ukraine. In this country, the sole Green MP up to now, Caroline Lucas, has actually been involved with New Labour and Zionists from other parties in witchhunting critics of Zionism in academia. Lucas signed a cross-party letter calling on Bristol University to discipline David Miller for criticising Jewish student organisation for supressing free speech on Palestine. He was duly sacked, and Miller took the University to an industrial tribunal earlier this year and won his case. It set an important legal precedent, as the judgement stated that Miller’s anti-Zionist views were a protected philosophical belief. No thanks to the Greens and Caroline Lucas! They cannot be trusted, their environmentalism is bourgeois and depends on ‘Green’ capitalism, not socialist planning, which is the only thing that can potentially solve the problem of human-induced climate change. We need a working-class alternative, not an alternative petty bourgeois party that joins in with capitalist reaction at the first opportunity.

Challenges to Zionist New Labour: Critical support.

It is therefore good that Wes Streeting is being challenged in Ilford North, both for his Zionism – more than almost anyone else in Labour, he can be considered virtually an Israeli agent – and for his private healthcare evangelising. His challenger is Leanne Mohammad, a British-Palestinian Palestine solidarity activist, who has the support of a broader network of former Labour activists in the North/East London environs, such as Redbridge Community Action Group and Newham Independents, who are also intending to stand candidates against Labour in Stratford, and East Ham, against well-known Blairites. Former Labour whistleblower about Zionist lobbying and witchhunts, Halima Khan, is planning to stand in Stratford and Bow, which also sounds supportable.

But possibly the most prominent independent socialist campaign, apart from Corbyn’s, in London is that of Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras constituency, where the sitting MP is Keir Starmer himself. Feinstein is a Jewish former member of the South African Parliament for the African National Congress, who resigned decades ago in a conflict with former South African President Thabo Mbeki about shady arms deals. He is an outspoken defender of the Palestinians, a supporter of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ, a critic of Starmer’s right wing politics and was a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. He was selected by OCISA (Organise Corbyn-Inspired Socialist Alliance), a left-Corbynite campaign group set up a couple of years ago with the aim of standing a socialist candidate against Keir Starmer in the General Election. He has lived in that constituency for over 20 years. Informally he was the favourite for much of that period, though he was always vague about whether he would actually stand, as he retained Labour membership. But now that the election is upon us, he has publicly resigned from Labour and taken up his position. His candidacy is certainly supportable, but critically, as like so many of the prominent lefts, when questioned about October 7^th, he echoes an element of imperialist propaganda, and condemns the ‘atrocities’ committed by Hamas as a preamble to a fierce attack on Israel for genocide.

It is by no means clear that Hamas did commit atrocities. The stories of ’40 beheaded babies’ and mass rape have been shown to be fabrications by the Zionists to justify their genocidal programme. Out of the 1,143 who Israel say were killed on October 7^th, a breakout from the world’s biggest concentration camp, over 371 of them were state and military personnel and thereby legitimate targets of military resistance. It is well known by now that many of the civilian deaths were killed by Israel’s own armed forces, because of the Hannibal Directive, a standard Israeli practice where they kill their own side rather than allow them to be taken prisoner by an enemy. There is also the fact that once Hamas had broken through the Gaza fence, numerous other angry prisoners (all Gaza inhabitants are prisoners and have been since Israel began its siege in 2007) broke through and some vented their undisciplined rage on Israelis indiscriminately. They were not Hamas people. Hamas’ objective was to seize hostages to be traded for the many Palestinians Israel has been arbitrarily holding, torturing and abusing for many years. As Scott Ritter pointed out, the most that Hamas can be accused of is failing to leave a rear-guard to protect their operation, and the gaps in the fence, from angry, riotous elements not under their discipline. But large-scale killings by Hamas make no sense if the objective was to take prisoners for later exchange. The ‘atrocity’ stories against Hamas make no sense and are just pro-genocide propaganda.

Of course, moralists can condemn the taking of hostages itself as an ‘atrocity’. But in the context of decades of Israeli racist ‘administrative detention’ of many thousands of Palestinians without charges, who are often subjected to torture and murder, hostage exchange is a rational policy from the point of view of the workers movement. We can point out that the 1871 Paris Commune, the first workers government in history, took hostages when its people were seized by reaction and threatened with death. As Wikipedia points out:

“In April, the Commune had arrested some 200 clergy to serve as hostages against reprisals from the Versailles government, and to use in possible prisoner exchanges. In particular, leaders of the Commune hoped to be able to exchange the archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, for Louis Auguste Blanqui, but this offer was rebuffed by Adolphe Thiers, president of the Third Republic. Versailles troops entered the city on 21 May, and by 24 May had retaken much of the city. Théophile Ferré signed an order of execution for six of the hostages at la Roquette Prison, specifically including the archbishop; they were executed by firing squad.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_in_the_Rue_Haxo

To try to save the lives of fighters against oppression, in circumstances of civil war and conflict, taking hostages is a valid tactic of those fighting against oppression.

Andrew Feinstein is part of a bloc of left candidates called ‘Collective’ which also includes Corbyn. The bloc seems to be an outgrowth of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice project, which is a Corbyn-centred protest movement that overlaps Labour, which eschewed the idea of founding a new party. One of the two directors of this bloc, Justin Schlosberg, describes himself as a ‘progressive Zionist’. His wife, Chloe Schlosberg, is the director of Peace and Justice. There is a distinct element of déjà vu over this, as Momentum, the ‘grass-roots’ ginger-group that was founded to support Corbyn during his period as leader, was also led by a ‘progressive Zionist’ -so-called, Jon Lansman, who was involved in throwing many anti-Zionist activists under the bus and out of the party during Corbyn’s leadership. True to form, Justin Schlosberg recently denounced anti-Zionist stalwart David Miller as a “psyop” against the left. The root causes of this phenomenon are in the politics of Corbyn, who at the height of the witchhunt explicitly spelled out his conception that both Zionists and anti-Zionists should be regarded as legitimate trends within Labour. This was pathetic then, as political Zionism in its logic was always a genocidal movement, with ethnic cleansing, the ante-chamber of genocide, build into its very foundation. In today’s circumstances, right in the middle of the Zionist holocaust in Gaza, it is incredibly dangerous and simply grotesque.

This does go a long way to explaining why Corbyn has taken so long to finally declare his independent candidacy and has been so insipid in his opposition to Starmer. He needs to be challenged on this, to break with these apologists for a genocidal movement. Schlosberg’s activities, just as were Lansman’s, are a trap for the left, and need to be expunged. In this regard, Corbyn’s campaign does include elements of working class politics, and should be given critical support against Starmer, with the criticism sharply directed against this political idiocy. Leftist elements like Andrew Feinstein should be on guard against the likes of Schlosberg trying to exploit their campaign and undermine its opposition to Zionism. We need no Zionists or ‘friends of Israel’ in any new left party.

Such an approach should also be applied to other left social-democratic candidates, from TUSC, Transform, the newly formed Revolutionary Communist Party led by Alan Woods (formerly the Labour deep entrist Socialist Appeal), and other working-class candidates who are standing against Labour and opposing their ‘own’ imperialism’s support for genocidal Israel. Similar critical support is principled.

There are left-wing candidates across the North of England as well, notably Workers Party MP George Galloway in Rochdale, who is seeking re-election after his recent by-election victory, former UK Ambassador and strong Julian Assange defender Craig Murray in Blackburn (who may well win also), Chris Williamson, the former very left-wing Labour MP and Deputy Leader of the Workers Party, who is standing in Derby South, adjacent to his previous Derby North Seat when he was a Labour MP. There are also the celebrated Liverpool Community Independents, who are standing Sam Gorst against arch-witchhunter Maria Eagle in the new Liverpool Garston constituency.

They are now standing under the banner of Transform, another new leftist party that is partly the product of ex-Corbynites, notably the very youthful Breakthrough Party, which merged with the remnants of Left Unity as well as the Liverpool Independents last year. That party is very heterogenous and contains some elements who are unfortunately backward and profoundly wrong on Ukraine, supporting the wrong side, implicitly supporting the imperialists’ proxy war in the name of fighting a (non-existent) ‘Russian imperialism’. Support for Ukraine is a far right, imperialist project, whatever some muddleheaded liberal lefts might delude themselves. So, it would be wise to keep a careful eye on who local candidates are regarding Transform and judge each one carefully before deciding whether to vote for them.

George Galloway’s Workers Party is very heterogeneous and though GG has huge authority within it, it cannot be taken to be simply a reflection of his views. Galloway is a contradictory figure whose political views on the Middle East and also Ukraine have put him firmly on the right side of the class line on some major issues. He is a sterling supporter of the Palestinians who has led major initiatives to oppose imperialist crimes, such as the Mariam Appeal for aid to Iraq under genocidal imperialist sanctions, and Viva Palestina aid convoys after Israel’s first major Gaza bombing massacre, Operation Cast Lead in 2009. His detractors on these questions are generally Zionist scumbags.

But, particularly since he was brutally beaten by a Zionist thug for his views in August 2014, and was then betrayed by the bulk of the ‘democratic’ body politic and the social-democratic left, who refused to publicly condemn the attack in deference to the Zionist lobby, he has become partially demoralised and alienated from the left, expressing contradictory softness and sympathy with aspects of right-wing populism, Trumpism, Brexit and the like. Some of those he has associated himself with have been very right-wing indeed. His attempt to launch a Russia-defencist anti-war movement over Ukraine, No2NATONo2War, was crippled by his major mistake in trying to draw in the slippery crypto-fascist David Clews of Unity News Network as a public spokesman, which completely undercut its potential to make inroads into the labour movement. It was a gift to the social-imperialist supporters of Nazi Ukraine. The Workers Policy has a self-image as being partly nationalist (its cog-wheel roundel emblem in red, white and blue echoes the insignia of the Royal Air Force in WWII).

As well as good positions on many things involving opposing imperialist war, the WP is not necessarily so good on matters concerning immigration. Galloway is personally socially conservative on questions regarding abortion, and though his record on defending gay rights is historically very good, recently he has become more conservative at least in some of his personal musings. And on climate change, some of the WP’s criticisms of Net Zero appear to dovetail with climate change denial. It is a good idea to consider a vote for the Workers Party in this context – they are intending to stand in many constituencies around the country, but such a vote should be extremely critical as it is quite a contradictory and heterogenous organisation. Some right-wing anti-immigrant types have reportedly crept in in some places, so like with Transform, it is wise to examine such candidates carefully to see what their real politics are before blithely putting a cross on a ballot paper.

For a Genuine Workers Party!

All these initiatives are very partial, and some of them are very seriously flawed. But they are where the working class movement is at after several decades of defeats, and what ultimately proved to be a false dawn under Corbyn’s Labour leadership, although a fruitful one that has radicalised a considerable layer of left social democratic militants, who are capable of providing the forces to create a new, genuine workers party in Britain, if a correct tactical approach can be made to them.

What is necessary above all is a perspective that seeks to unite all of these fragmented initiatives in a new, democratically-organised party, where proper political debates are possible, and thereby unity in action, so that political and programmatic development in a revolutionary direction comes onto the agenda. Of course, such a party will have no room for ‘Friends of Israel’ and the like. Our work in the Socialist Labour Network is aimed at making that relatively small but influential organisation into a vehicle to promote such democratic unification of the anti-neoliberal, anti-Starmer left. We need an organisation that can act as a principled unifying force, and the Consistent Democrats themselves are too small, too weak and too new to become such a body on our own. We hope that the SLN can play an important role as a ‘cog’ in bringing such a party into being. It is unlikely to just happen ‘like that’ during the General Election, but in the aftermath, when we are likely faced with a weak, but very right-wing pink-Tory government, but with a working-class base that is likely to be at odds with it from the start, the opportunities to make progress in that direction should be considerably greater.

The Irish Easter Rising

The History of the Class Struggle in the oldest colony on the planet

Humberto Rodrigues

This article is an updated and improved version of a 2011 article on class struggle in Ireland. It was taken from the original version of the Communist League blog: IRISH REPUBLICAN PRISONERS: For recognition of the status of political prisoners and for freedom for Irish republican prisoners from the clutches of British imperialism!, From Bolshevik #5.

2024 marks 108 years since the Easter Rising and 43 years since the hunger strike of Irish political prisoners, two of the most important conflicts in the Irish national liberation struggle. That last event, the 1981 hunger strike, was led by Bobby Sands and was one of the most heroic events in world history.

Ireland was for centuries the oldest of the colonies, it was stunted from the 12th century until today in its development by the invasion of England, which made the neighbouring island its first colony, subjugated “through the most abominable reign of terror and the most reprehensible corruption” (Letter from Marx to Kugelmann, 29/11/1869).

The struggle of these people has always been passionately followed by socialists since Marx and Engels, who uncompromisingly defended Irish national liberation and the Fenian political prisoners (an Irish revolutionary guerrilla organization). For Marx, the liberation of Ireland was “The” preliminary condition of the socialist revolution in England, the main capitalist nation of his time.

“It is therefore the task of the International, everywhere, to bring to the fore the conflict between England and Ireland, by openly siding with Ireland. And it is the task of the Central Committee in London to awaken the consciousness of the English workers to the fact that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiments, but the first condition of their own social emancipation.”
Letter from Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt, London, 04/09/1870, emphasis in the original.

It is from this struggle that Marx deduced that “a people that subjugates another, forges its own chains.”

From the fusion of the workers’ struggle for Irish national liberation with Marxism, a brave workers’ leader called James Connolly was born, who warned his brothers about the inability of the Irish bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie to lead the country’s emancipation from colonialism. In one of his earliest writings, a pamphlet entitled Erin’s Hope – the End and the Means (1897), he concluded that the Irish working class was “the only sure basis on which a free nation can be built.”

Thirteen years later, in his main work Labour in Irish History (1910) he states that the middle and propertied classes “have a thousand economic ties in the form of investments that link them to English capitalism […] Only the Irish working-class remains the incorruptible heir of the struggle for freedom in Ireland.”

It is impossible not to notice that, in an embryonic form, Connolly had ideas similar to those that were fully developed by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky at the same time, and which came to be known as the theory of permanent revolution. Despite being embryonic, these ideas were visionary for the future of the class struggle in their country. He said: “If they withdraw the British army tomorrow and raise the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless they organize a socialist republic, all their efforts will have been in vain and England will still govern them through the landowners. , capitalists and commercial institutions”.

At the end of 1911, Connolly, in the leadership of the General Transport Union (ITGWU), the country’s main union, faced off politically and militarily against the employer lockouts and the police controlled by the British army. In this dispute, workers formed a defence organization, a “Irish Citizen Army”, to protect themselves from the police and armed strikebreakers. This “Irish Citizen Army” was a precursor of what would become the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, a guerrilla organization founded in 1919, as a military arm of Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone), the bourgeois republican nationalist political party.

The Irish revolutionary was prophetic in fearing the harm of a division of the island for the future of the struggle for its liberation. He had predicted that the partition that would take place between Ireland and Northern Ireland a few years after its execution by British troops “would mean a carnival of reaction in North and South, set back the Irish labour movement, and paralyze all progressive movements for as long as it lasted.”

Regarding this, Connolly is increasingly correct not only about his country, where the “divide and rule” rule was valid as a prototype at the beginning of the 20th century, but also about all other counter-revolutionary secessions of colonies, manipulated by imperialism (Korea, Vietnam, Sudan… with Libya now being the hot topic). However, in 1916, the carnage of World War I and a series of defeats and betrayals confused the Irish revolutionary, who came to put aside a series of conceptions he had defended throughout his life, to lead a premature uprising without the essential independent political and organizational action of the working class in the form of a revolutionary party. The betrayal of the insurrection led by Connolly by bourgeois nationalism cost him his life. The military uprising known as the “Easter Rising” was cruelly crushed. Connolly was seriously injured and arrested. Soon afterwards, he was court-martialled at the army hospital and transferred to a prison where, upon arrival, he was shot by occupation troops.

After the massacre of the “Easter Rising”, in the revolutionary wave opened by the Russian revolution of 1917 and the German revolution (massacred in 1919), Irish Republican fighters returned to fight bravely, causing a civil war that ended in 1921 with a relative retreat for British colonialism. Representatives of the Irish bourgeoisie established a Treaty with England that recognized the “Irish Free State” on the condition that the “Free State” remained part of the British Commonwealth, that members of the Irish parliament swore loyalty to the English King George V and that six of the 32 Irish counties, with a Protestant majority located in the north, remained under British occupation and under the control of the Irish Unionists, defenders of unity with England. The IRA was then divided between the defenders of the Treaty, or treatyists, led by Michael Collins, today represented by the Fine Gael party, and the anti-treatyists, led by Éamon de Valera, who years later broke with Sinn Fein and the IRA and founded Fianna Fail. There is a film that romanticizes these events called “Michel Collins, the price of freedom” (1996), and justifies Collins’ betrayal. Filmmaker Ken Loach in “Winds of Freedom” (2006) portrayed this period better, more truthfully.

Throughout the 20th century, republican nationalists capitulated to several peace agreements or were crushed several times and new fighters raised the anti-colonialist flag again, reorganising dissent from the IRA to fight by all means against the separation imposed on the country by the agreements between imperialism and the corrupt Irish bourgeoisie.

In 1939, the Marxist magazine “The New International”, published by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America, noted:

“Bombs are exploding again in Ireland and England. Under the very nose of the Home Office in London, beneath the monument to English kings in Belfast, beneath the walls of the prisons where thousands of Irish patriots served their sentences, and beneath the customs offices along the Ulster border, loud and sudden explosions mark the 23rd anniversary of Easter Week. And these explosions are not merely celebratory. They serve to remind the world of the struggle for national independence of a people who have fought tirelessly for seven hundred years against the most powerful and merciless oppressor of all colonial peoples: the ruling class of the British Empire. (…) Understanding that without the combined forces of the Irish working class and English workers and the revolutionary forces in the colonies, national independence cannot be completely won, we cannot simply dismiss the current bombings as futile or reactionary. They are not merely isolated acts of violence committed by dismayed and frustrated individuals. They are, on the contrary, carefully planned and conducted according to a plan organized and drawn up by revolutionaries who, themselves, admit that the bombs are only the first step in the renewal of the struggle. These men know and are planning the necessary steps to unite the opposition forces. The bombs are serving to draw attention to the Army of Occupation now in Ireland and the return of the repression that preceded the last war. Revolutionaries everywhere must mobilize to support the movement to wrest freedom and independence from ‘Europe’s greatest landlord’ and thus, by striking a blow to the heart of the world’s greatest imperialist power, unleash the forces of revolution in all colonial countries before war engulfs humanity in a struggle to destroy itself for the profits and power of capitalism” .
New International #4, 04/1939

Television mini-series called Rebellion that narrates the Irish Easter Rising from the point of view of three women who have different life stories, motivations and participation within the rebellion.

In 1972, British occupation troops fired on a peaceful demonstration in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing fourteen people, seven of whom were minors. All the victims were unarmed and five of them were shot in the back. The protesters were protesting the Northern Ireland statelet government’s policy of summarily arresting people suspected of terrorist acts. This policy was directed against the IRA. After “Bloody Sunday”, the IRA gained a huge number of young volunteers, giving the guerrilla group even greater strength. In 1973, Marian Price, who had just qualified as a nurse, was recruited by the IRA. She and nine other militants were arrested, accused of planting bombs in London in order to blow up the Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court), Hillgate House (a government building) and the Whitehall army recruitment centre. Two hundred people were injured, one man died of a heart attack and his death was attributed to the bombings. Marian Price was sentenced to life in prison.

In 1981, several IRA militants imprisoned by Britain, led by Bobby Sands, an IRA leader, went on hunger strike to demand that the Crown recognise their status as political prisoners. After 66 days, the inflexibility of the Britain government led to their death. But the strike demoralised the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, founder together with the Yankee Ronald Reagan of the anti-worker offensive called neoliberalism. Thatcher increased the presence of British troops in the six counties of Northern Ireland and attempted to criminalise Irish Republicanism in the eyes of public opinion, suppressing any difference between the treatment meted out in prisons to the IRA and ordinary prisoners.

In response, Irish Republican inmates launched a hunger strike. Their demands: not to wear prison uniforms; not perform forced labour; freedom of association and organization of cultural and educational activities; right to one letter, one visit and one package per week; and that the days of protest were not deducted when calculating the sentence served. Refusing to be treated as criminals, they simultaneously defended their personal dignity and the legitimacy of the struggle for the liberation of their country.

Sands, the first of the strikers to refuse food and the first to die after 66 days, led a tenacious political struggle that was portrayed in the film “Hunger” (2008). Even in prison, his companions inside and outside prisons managed to elect him to the British Parliament as a representative of Northern Ireland. The objective was, obviously, not the parliamentary mandate, but to prove the support of the Irish population and the political recognition of the Republican prisoners and their struggle. It was only after this that British legislation began to prohibit prisoners from running for office. From then on, the Northern Irish population elected, every year, in elections held by imperialism, candidates who refused to swear loyalty to the Queen in support of the struggle for independence.

The second setback imposed by the hunger strike lies in the very way in which it was organised. Against the intransigence of their enemies, they were, in an intelligent way, even more intransigent, converting an announced defeat into a political victory, turning time, an extremely unfavourable element in a hunger strike, into a political weapon for the strikers. They established intervals of days between them for the beginning of the refusal to eat, in order to increase the political weariness of the British government with the extension of the durability of the strike movement as a whole. This is how a movement that could last at most two months (the maximum limit that someone can fast without dying of hunger) if everyone started the strike at the same time, dragged on for a long seven months. The international impact of each prisoner death from starvation was repeated ten times over, claiming the lives of Bobby Sands (died at age 27), Francis Hughes (25), Ray McCreesh (24), Patsy O’Hara (23), Joe McDonnell (29), Martin Hurson (24), Kevin Lynch (25), Kieran Doherty (25), Thomas McIlwee (23) and Mickey Devine (27). The strike began on March 1st and only ended on October 3rd, 1981, when, under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church, the families of the strikers broke their commitment to disallow tube feeding when they fell into a coma, making it impossible to continue.

The Irish musicians of the trio the Wolfe Tones, exponents of the so-called Irish rebel music, banned from playing in England, made a song for the Irish heroes “Joe McDonnell Live” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrqjAQVLzzE) . In a performance by the Tones in 2008, when the names of the ten martyrs are mentioned and their images displayed during the song, one can see, through the audience’s reactions, the place they occupy in the hearts of the Irish people. In 1982, during the Falklands War, the Wolfe Tones composed another song in support of Argentina in the war.

At the cost of 10 deaths, the strikers achieved two victories: a moral one, by making the British, even without officially granting them the status of political prisoners, ease the prison repression a few months after the end of the movement; and a political victory, by frustrating plans to criminalise the struggle for Irish national liberation in the eyes of the world, which was truly a great feat, taking into account that in her eleven years of government, Thatcher crushed everyone who crossed her path, from the Argentine military dictatorship (in the Falklands war) to the English trade union movement. Convicted until the end of his days, Bobby Sands stated: “They have nothing in their imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of an Irishman who does not want to be broken.”

Inside Kilmainham, the jail where the leaders of the rebellion were imprisoned and executed. Today the space has been converted into a museum in the city of Dublin.

In 1998, Sinn Féin signed the Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), to dismantle the guerrillas. The agreement, articulated by Great Britain, Ireland and the USA, put an end to the armed conflict in the North, establishing power sharing in Northern Ireland between the Unionists and Sinn Fein. The main objective was to guarantee bilateral relations between Northern Ireland and Ireland, through the good development of investments and trade. This agreement is an expression of the strengthening of imperialism, after the capitalist restoration in the USSR, over that national liberation struggle. The most industrialized part of the island has become an important base for the financial parasitism of multinationals seeking to enter the European Union. As a consequence, Ireland was the first country in the European Union to officially enter into recession in the 2008 crisis. The austerity policy is violently employed by the government with the complicity of Sinn Fein through a brutal cut in public spending and the increase in the reserve army of the unemployed, forcing a fall in wages in the North, the South and also in Great Britain. This growth in misery affected Catholic and Protestant workers equally, but the English and Irish imperialist bourgeoisies stimulate inter-worker sectarian tensions through paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force, to divide the proletariat and manipulate their class dissatisfaction against their own brothers. In this package, the repression against Irish Republican political prisoners increases, mainly among activists who disagreed with the capitulation of the IRA, such as Marian Price, a dissident who became leader of the 32 Counties Sovereignty Movement (32CSM).

Like Sands, Price and other prisoners went on a hunger strike to be transferred from English prisons to a prison in Northern Ireland. But they were force-fed for 200 days as she recounts:

“Four male prison officers tie me tightly to a chair. You clench your teeth to try to keep your mouth closed, but they push a metal spring device around your jaw to open it. They force a wooden tong with a hole in the middle into your mouth. Then, they insert a big rubber tube and you can’t move and through this tube they punch you with everything they put in a blender: orange juice, soup, or cartons of cream if they want to top up the calories. They take jugs of this liquidized porridge and pour it into a funnel attached to the tube. Force-feeding takes 15 minutes, but it seems like it will never end. You have no control over anything. You are terrified that the food will go the wrong way and choke you, you cannot speak or move. You are afraid that you will suffocate to death.” .
The Guardian, 03/13/2003

Price was in the 1990s one of the main voices opposing Sinn Féin’s “peace strategy”, the GFA, as she said: “It certainly wasn’t this sort of thing that I came to prison for.” see more sense for the national liberation struggle today, Marian Price argues: “as long as the British presence in Ireland remains, there will always be justification, republicanism will never go out. My principles and ideals will never be crushed. I did not make the choices I did for individuals within the republican movement or Sinn Fein. The fact that they sold out in no way detracts from my cause” (ibid).

Republican political prisoners have been attacked in a cowardly and savage manner in their own cells by prison guards, with the aim of breaking their political resistance through systematic physical violence. As highlighted in the Bulletin of the Irish Political Prisoners Support Group (IRPSG, facsimile on page 29 of the newspaper O Bolshevique #5), one of the attacks suffered by political prisoner Harry Fitzsimmons:

“…in Maghaberry prison on 29/05/2011, Harry’s cell was invaded by riot police, without there having previously been any confrontation or exchange of words, just brutality. His glasses were broken with such force that glass entered his eyes. He has multiple lacerations on his face. The uniformed bandits held him down, while others punched, kicked and tore his clothes.”

According to Gerry Downing, leader of the British Socialist Fight and Secretary of the IRPSG, “there are Irish prisoners of war today fighting as they were in 1981. Resistance is inevitable. Republican ‘dissenters’ denounce that British imperialism continues to divide the Irish people by force and that is why they continue the fight for the expulsion of the crown forces. The fight for recognition of the status of political prisoners, which was abandoned 13 years ago with the signing of the GFA, is intensifying inside prisons, in the same way that the 10 on hunger strike died 30 years ago. The GFA made it difficult to unify Ireland. At the Sinn Féin Conference on the 30th anniversary of the hunger strike on 18/06/2011 in London, we demanded that participants in this meeting take seriously their responsibilities towards today’s prisoners by fighting for their political prisoner status and that the Sinn Féin breaks with the policy of economic austerity on the working class and the poor.” This austerity policy, where Irish workers are forced to pay for the imperialist crisis, expresses how England continues to govern Ireland, now through Sinn Féin.

In June 2012, Sinn Féin leader Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland fraternized with Queen Elizabeth. McGuinness’ symbolic gesture did not surprise the fighters for the Irish national cause nor the workers of that country, which has suffered for years from the perverse austerity plans imposed by the coalition government made up of the political wing of the IRA in the service of its majesty and imperialism. Meanwhile, as part of this colonialist policy, the best Irish republican fighters, known as POWs (prisoners of war), as well as thousands of other martyrs in the struggle for Irish self-determination against British imperialism, endure brutal oppression in the prisons of the British Crown, as the Communist League denounced at http://lcligacomunista.blogspot.com.br/2011/07/prisioneiros-republicanos-irlandeses.html . Here , we reproduce an article by Charlie Walsh, from the editorial board of Socialist Fight, British member of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International. Socialist Fight comrades also drive the Irish Republican Prisoner Support Group (IRPSG).

THE GAMBLER AND THE SCOUNDREL: Demonstrating that the foci of anti-imperialist resistance remain, Ronan O’Gara, rugby player for the Irish national Rugby Union team refuses to shake Betty Windsor’s hand claiming Ireland’s right to self-determination during the team’s reception as Grand Slam rugby winner in 2009. In the photo below, Martin McGuinness has the pleasure of shaking the same blood-stained hand, symbolizing their abandonment of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The socialist revolution in England continues to depend on the resolution of the Irish question and, as Connolly concluded, the resolution of the Irish question remains in the hands of the Irish proletariat, which in turn will only emancipate itself when it arms itself with the program of permanent revolution, fights for Irish unity and together with their British and European brothers build their own revolutionary, socialist and internationalist party, for a federation of European socialist republics to bury the old capitalist world.