Tag: Russia

The Trump Attack and “Civil War”

Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

Trump’s ‘assassination’ photo-opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain joining the War in Ukraine

By Kalliste Hill

British troops (with faces pixillated) photographed in Ukraine

While the US has brought about regime change in Ukraine with the Maidan coup in 2014, installing a thinly disguised Neo-Nazi government of Banderaites and corrupt politicians to loot its resources, sell its land and saddle it with massive debts thanks to dodgy IMF loans, the UK has been heavily involved in the training of their military, building up their army to become the 2nd largest in would-be NATO Europe (after Turkey).

The UK involvement has involved everything from bringing Ukrainian commanders for “special training” in the UK, Nazi tattoos on show much to the embarrassment of the British media, to the existence of special advisors, in reality SAS and SBS groups to supervise “on the ground” the attacks on first Snake Island and then the Kerch Bridge.

This is the real reason our British press has been so obsessed with these two “targets” over the past 2 years, despite their lack of strategic importance, because they are great PR and distract the British public from the grim reality of millions of dead and wounded Ukrainians.

 This is a war Ukraine can’t win, never could win, but that the UK along with the US persuaded it would be worth it because if they “weakened Russia”, then they would be rewarded with EU and NATO membership, despite the fact that they didn’t qualify, and never would. Now the EU and NATO are so weak, they’ll probably become members at some point simply because both are on their last legs, completely ruined by this unwinnable war along with the rest of Europe and the UK.

Even when offered more than reasonable terms of peace by Russia, the US sent UK PM Johnson to persuade Zelensky to continue the war, while the US funded more billions of dollars of “loans” Ukraine can never repay to stay in the war, knowing they would be defeated, but determined they should keep on fighting until Biden is re-elected.

The tragedy is that Ukraine could never win “the war” and the US knew that. Russia has more and better weapons than NATO, can produce more and better weapons than NATO in the future, even if Europe and the UK move to a “war economy”, and now has bigger, better trained armed forces than NATO, although it didn’t before the US provoked this war in 2014. In fact Russia was reducing its armed forces in order to focus more on rebuilding its economy after US sanctions and building up international relationships with other victims of US hegemonic imperialism.

Sanctions have now bankrupted the West, and BRICS will make US hegemony irrelevant, but the UK’s real humiliation has come with Sunak’s admission that the UK won’t “directly fight Russia”, because it exposes the fact that we already have been secretly fighting Russia for a decade, in an unwinnable war that has exposed our complete inability to do anything but start what we cannot finish.

Celebrate Victory Day, May 9th

To celebrate the anniversary of Victory Day, May 9th 1945 we publish these images. The first depicts the Soviet Red Flag being raised over the Reichstag by Soviet troops defending the USSR workers state against Hilter’s barbaric counterrevolutionary attack through the crushing of the Nazi regime.

Today, Russia is again winning victories against predatory Western attacks. The USSR workers state is no more, though the form of capitalism restored there is fragile; its productive forces and strength owe virtually everything to the legacy of many decades of non-capitalist social and economic development. The imperialist West fears that in Russia and China, for all the inroads that capitalism has made there, their system is not copper-fastened and the masses have too much power for their liking. To them, these states can easily revert and are thus adversaries to wage Cold and hot Wars against once again.

The other images show tropies of the victories of Russia in Ukraine, and the capture of Western tanks, that were recently put on display in Moscow. The hundreds of billions that have been funnelled to the Urainian Nazis have led to this Western humilation, which again is something to celebrate this Victory Day,

79 years of Victory Day!

Yesterday it was Hitler – Today it is Zelensky/NATO;

Tomorrow it will be Israel/US!

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.

Condemn the Crocus Hall Terror attack on Russia!

Statement by LCFI, ClassConscious.Org, and National Democratic People’s Front (India)

The attack on the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, on the outskirts of Moscow, on 22nd May was clearly a Western-inspired murder attack on the population of Russia, even though it appears to have been carried out by jihadists associated with the Islamic State movement. It appeared to involve four gunmen, who opened fire on civilians attending a concert in the public concert hall, shooting dead 138 people and wounding many more, and set the building on fire with incendiaries.  Those who carried out the attack fled the scene and were picked up by the Russian state authorities in a car driving south through the Bryansk district, over 200 miles from Moscow and close to the Ukrainian border, within easy distance of Kyiv, around 14 hours afterwards. The Russian security forces have since picked up another 14 suspected of involvement in the crime.

The claim of responsibility for the attack by the ‘Khorasan’ chapter of Islamic State – which has been involved in armed conflict against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and which is supposed to be trying to create a ‘caliphate’ in Central Asia, likely overlapping Russian territory even, is highly suspicious, as Putin made clear. The captured gunmen, from Tajikistan, were very keen to get away and not become martyrs, apparently because there was payment waiting for them if they managed to escape to Ukraine. Hardly a fortune though – a mere million roubles (about £8000). They appear more like pro-imperialist mercenary-terrorists than self-sacrificing fighters against any kind of oppression. The US clearly knew what was being attempted in Russia, as they advised their own nationals and friends in Moscow to avoid large public events such as … concerts. But the Russian authorities say they received no warning from the US or other Western sources. Which is no surprise.

The entire ISIS-K project dovetails very well with imperialist aspirations, as expressed in the Brzezinski plan – the imperialist objective for its proxy wars against Russia, to find ways to break Russia up into ‘manageable’ chunks that can be subordinated and conquered by imperialism. It is therefore in the interest of the world working class that the West are on their way to defeat in Ukraine. The hysterical response to this looming defeat by some in Europe – from Macron’s threats of direct armed intervention of French troops against Russia in Ukraine, to such flagrant terrorist attacks in Russia itself, are a product of Western desperation.

But they still threaten escalation into outright military conflict between Russia/China and imperialism, as do the various provocations in the Far East against China, particularly around Taiwan. There have been numerous attacks on civilian and political targets in Russia – and not only in Russia – by pro-Ukraine Western forces during the Ukraine proxy war. The biggest such act was the destruction of NordStream, which the US senior journalist/whistleblower Seymour Hersh publicly identified as the doing of the US. This amounted to the US engaging in economic coercion and impoverishment of its ‘allied’ populations in Western Europe in pursuit of its vendetta against Russia.

There have also been assassinations and acts of terror sponsored by Ukraine, such as the murder of Dariya Dugina, daughter of prominent rightist philosopher Alexander Dugin, and that of military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, clearly by Ukrainian-guided assassins. As well as the repeated Ukrainian attacks on the city of Belgorod, with Western weapons, repeated attempts to inflict civilian casualties on the population of Crimea, and the use of cluster munitions and depleted uranium shells in the Donbass, also aimed to kill and poison civilians, basically for the ‘crime’ of being Russian and exercising their right to self-determination by voting to join Russia.

The evident motive for extending this to Moscow and Crocus Hall was the imperialist lust to ‘punish’ the Russian population for the overwhelming re-election of Vladimir Putin in the recent presidential election. Their pretence that there was something untoward about that election result is belied by the opinion poll results of Western-approved polling organisations in Russia, such as the Levada Centre, which reported an 86% approval rating for Putin shortly before he gained 87% of the vote in the Presidential Election – hardly a great surprise! (see https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-is-master-all-he-surveys-russians-head-polls-2024-03-15/).

Likewise, there has been hysteria in the imperialist media over Putin’s refusal to accept the Western cock-and-bull story that IS alone was responsible for the Crocus City Hall atrocity.  In the early days of the Special Military Operation in the Donbass there was some serious concern by the West to avoid being seen as responsible for reckless Ukrainian Nazi attacks on Russia itself, but now they don’t bother anymore. There is a continuum of this terrorism against Russia, and the Western denials are so weak and unconvincing that they clearly are no longer very concerned to hide it.

It is already known that various groups of pro-imperialist jihadists are fighting in Ukraine alongside the Nazi forces that dominate the Ukrainian state. This is a continuation of the use of similar jihadists to overthrow Colonel Qadhafi in Libya, and to attempt to bring down Assad in Syria, the second of which Putin’s Russia put a stop to by force in alliance with Muslim forces such as Hizbullah and Iran. Russia has also been supporting the liberation struggles in the Sahel region of West-Central Africa (Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and others) where French and US imperialism have also been using Islamic State’s mercenary forces against the masses and as a pretext to excuse the presence of colonial troops. And all these things stand on the shoulders of the pro-imperialist jihad against the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan in the 1980s, which played a major role in the destruction of the USSR and made the world qualitatively worse for the population of the Global South at the hands of US imperialism and its allies. Many of the most politically conscious, mainly Muslim peoples who have been attacked by the US in its period of ‘unipolar’ supremacy are now joining with the former workers states of Russia and China, still targeted by imperialism for outright conquest, to drive back the arrogant US in their attempt to maintain ‘full spectrum domination’ of the planet.

The fact that pro-imperialist Jihadist/mercenaries are prepared to attack Russia on the US’ s behalf while mainly Muslim Palestinians are facing the most ferociously genocidal assault and mass extermination with US and other Western weapons by the West’s key ally Israel, underlines the treachery of such forces against their own people. Some Western and Israeli politicians have taken to equating Russia with Hamas, and Israel has just given Ukraine a new anti-missile system, which is an attempt at a serious proxy-military escalation against Russia by Israel.

From Moscow to Donbass, from Crimea to Gaza, from Palestine to Lebanon, from the Sahel to Yemen – smash imperialist-Zionist terrorism!

Defeat NATO’s genocidal Nazi war in Donbass! Defeat Israeli genocidal war against the Palestinians! Defend Russia and China against imperialism!

Turn the anti-imperialist struggles into a struggle against neoliberalism and capitalism itself!