Tag: Communist Fight

Communist Fight series 2, issue 5 is out now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communist Fight Series 2, issue 4 is Out Now!

This issue centres on the General Election, and the Gaza genocide, and also refers to the Ukraine war.

The lead article is an extensive and detailed analysis of the various parties and trends standing in the General Election. It concretely makes it clear why the Labour Party is not supportable – the current leadership is one that has waged a class war against all elements within it who aspire to stand up for workers and the oppressed. The Zionism of this leadership was always genocidal, and it is pretty clear in hindsight that there was plenty of conscious understanding of this among the various ‘Friends of Israel’ and ‘Jewish Labour Movement’ witchhunters who targeted the Corbyn movement.

Starmer’s clear endorsement of the use of starvation/dehydration and deprivation of power as a weapon of genocide after the break out from the Gaza concentration camp on 7th October, caused a major crisis in the Labour Party, with many defections, including of sitting councillors, who often retained their seats in the local elections in May. Now there is a layer of socialist-inclined independents standing all over the country against Labour – the most prominent being Jeremy Corbyn himself, as well as at least four national left-wing organisations, most prominently the Workers Party of George Galloway. The main article gives life to the concept of critical support, elaborating in some depth the strengths and weaknesses of the various trends and putting forward a perspective of what is necessary to create a cohesive and democratic socialist alternative to bankrupt neoliberal social democracy.

The article on the back cover also contains useful material on the election, in the form of an account of a public debate between two left-wing trends, with the CPGB-Weekly Worker advocating votes for Starmer’s genocidal leadership in the election, and the Spartacist League opposing it. The rightward motion of the CPGB-WW is evident here; during the whole Blairite period they were opponents of the left hustling votes for the pro-privatisation, warmongering Blairites. But now that Starmer has taken that a stage further and publicly endorsed openly genocidal actions, they suddenly click their heels and denounce those hundreds of thousands of class-conscious militants who abhor voting for Starmer as ‘third period’-ists, “Ohlerites” and similar nonsense. “Left” Islamophobia and softness on Zionism are what is driving their drift into the Starmer camp. Their opponents in the debate, the Spartacists, have ironically some similar flaws, but on the issue being debated: for or against voting for Starmers openly righwing Labour, they are correct.

Another article, an edited transcript of the presentation at the forum we held on the genocide at the beginning of May, gives a lot more historical and contemporary detail about the roots of the genocide, as well as its relationship with the decline of US hegemony and the rise of resistance to that hegemony from a block of the global South with the ex-workers states of Russia and China.

As well as these substantial articles, we have a number of short pieces on the war in Ukraine, the arrest warrants that are in train from the ICC against Israeli leaders, and also an update on the recent partial legal victory of Julian Assange at the Court of Appeal on May 20. And we have a brief piece by our Argentinian comrades on the 9 May General Strike against the fascist-inclined President of Argentina, Javier Milei, and the ferocious attacks he is carrying out against the working class of that country as part of a US-funded counteroffensive of recolonisation in Latin America.

Communist Fight Series 2, issue 3 is Out Now!

This issue is heavily focussed on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which are the two immediately active issues that are threatening to escalate towards WWIII at this juncture.

The lead article is a joint statement of two closely aligned Marxist groups on  the implications of Israel’s attempts to provoke a major regional war with Iran, to somewhat distract from its failure, despite murdering around 40,000 Palestinian civilians, to subdue Hamas in Gaza.

Iran’s reprisal on 14th April was only parried by Israel with the help of its traditional imperialist allies: the US, France and Britain, as enough drone and missiles were fired at Israel to overwhelm its Iron Dome defence system had it been forced to defend itself alone. But Iran still managed to damage several Israeli military facilities, including those where the forces that carried out its initial murderous attack on the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus on 1st April.

Since this statement was written, Israel has made a murky response apparently through Iranian proxies, that appear to have led to some completely failed drone attacks around the Iranian city of Isfahan, home of much of Iran’s civil nuclear infrastructure. Though other material has emerged, that at this point appears speculative, that suggests that Israel may have tried and failed to use a high-altitude nuclear weapon to knock out Iranian electronics. A frightening development if true, however the information at this point is open to question.

Which brings us onto the second major article on Zionism, an abridged and updated study of the roots of the danger that Zionism poses, titled “Political Zionism And its Genocidal Hegemony in the Imperialist World”. In its original form, this was published by our predecessor Socialist Fight in 2016, when perhaps it was ahead of its time. It contains an extensive analysis of how Zionism came to play such an important and powerful role in the world of Western imperialism, and updates the Marxist, materialist analysis of the Belgian Trotskyist Abram Leon of the roots of the oppression of Jews in the early 20th Century, in his work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation.

Leon, who was murdered by the Nazis during WWII, did not live to see the foundation of the Zionist state. Let alone how Zionism inverted that oppression and created the situation we see today where a state whose official mythology claims it was founded to atone for the Nazi genocide, is carrying out its own genocide of the Palestinian people. However, as the article points out, there are enough pointers in Leon’s own analysis to explain what happened within his orthodox Marxist framework, extended in a manner verifiably faithful to its own Marxist, materialist method.

Regarding the Ukraine proxy war of imperialism, which Russia now seems to be on the verge of defeating, we publish the statement of our closely allied groups, and also of like-minded comrades in India, condemning and analysing the imperialist inspired terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall venue in Moscow, by terrorist mercenaries who it is now pretty much proven were acting as part of the Ukrainian proxy war. Terrorism of this type, purely directed at civilians, is hardly a sign of strength. It is directed at the Russian civilian population who overwhelmingly re-elected Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president recently, and basically expresses imperialist bloodlust against that population, just as has previously been seen in attacks on the population of Crimea and the Donbass republics, who likewise voted to join Russia.

Finally, we have a historical article on the Irish Question, written by a leading Brazilian comrade of the LCFI, which should be of interest to readers in Britain both for the different perspective such a view offers of the Irish question, and also for the historical material on the creditable activity of our predecessors in Socialist Fight on the Irish Question, which we obviously seek to continue when the chance arises to do so, as the Irish Question is still crucial for Marxists in Britain to address.