Tag: Trotskyism

Marxism, Imperialism and Populism

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

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

Max Shachtman (left) with James P Cannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump and Farage

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

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

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

Communist Fight Series 2, issue 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.

For an Anti-Imperialist and Socialist May Day!

DECLARATION OF MARXIST ORGANIZATIONS FROM THE USA, GREAT BRITAIN, AUSTRALIA, ARGENTINA AND BRAZIL

On this May Day, 2024, imperialism seems like a beast kicking around trying to avoid the march of history. It tries at any cost to avoid its historic defeat in the face of the increasingly broad arc of resistance from the oppressed countries against it and also the massive demonstrations of the oppressed within its own borders, its streets and universities. In decline, imperialism becomes increasingly dangerous, tears up the international conventions it has signed, despises the forums in which it finds itself in the minority, appeals to modern forms of Nazi-fascism, mercenaries, terrorism, the slaughter of entire peoples and threaten the Third World War.

The military forces commanded by the US have been defeated militarily and morally in each and every military battle since Syria (Aleppo, 2016), Afghanistan (2021) and currently in Ukraine and Gaza, by the rebel provinces of Donbass and the Houthi guerrilla government in Yemen.

But, the last and most powerful counterattacks by oppressed peoples and countries, were delivered by Hamas on 10/8/2023 and by Iran on 04/13/2024. They demonstrated the deep vulnerability of imperialism and its “aircraft carrier” in the form of a Zionist entity in Southwest Asia.

In its first direct attack on Israel in history, Iran demonstrated that the impenetrable Iron Dome, Arrow-3 and David’s Sling are nothing more than a sieve in the face of an obsolete part of its weapons. Iran saturated Israel’s defences with 350 cheap drones over Israeli cities. The defence forces of Israel, the USA, Great Britain and Jordan combined did not prevent the  Iranian rain from reaching Zionist soil and at least 9 Iranian ballistic missiles penetrated the Israeli defence network and hit the military bases of Nevatim and Ramon. With cruise missiles, Iran pulverized the Golan Heights Mossad intelligence facility.

May Day demonstration, Moscow, 01 May 2016.

NATO’s defeats by Russia in Ukraine, of Israel by the Axis of Resistance in Southwest Asia, followed by the triumphant anti-France struggles in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, exemplary for the rest of the African continent, combined with the unstoppable expansion of China’s new silk route on the world market, force imperialism to retreat to maintain greater control in the Pacific Ocean, Western Europe and, above all, the American continent. Losing ground on the three continents of the old world, the imperialist system led by the USA creates a “western zone” on the so-called continents of the new and brand new world, with its military (NATO, AUKUS), financial and ideological apparatuses, where they are deepening political oppression and the state terror of workers to accentuate their class exploitation, through fascist governments. The organizations that sign this declaration are part of the Marxist resistance to this fascist tendency in this part of the planet.

United States, Imperialist Decay, Fascist Perspectives and Popular Resistance

In the United States, the heart of the Empire, the decay and crisis of western imperialism is at its most obvious and acute. This decrepitude is represented by its decaying President. Whilst Obama may have been able to save the US ruling class after the crash of 2008 “Genocide Joe” has been far less successful. The ruling class itself is deeply split between continuing to support the failing Democrats or break once and for all with bourgeois democracy and back the open fascist and seditionist Donald Trump.

The consequences for both the US and international working class of the most powerful global empire in history embracing Christian fascism are highly unpredictable. However, the actions of the US working class in the period ahead could have just as much impact. The rapid spread of Palestine Solidarity encampments on US university campuses and the overall militancy of the mostly spontaneous upsurge re Gaza genocide is a direct echo of the George Floyd monster mobilizations against police killings in the summer 2020 against which Trump wanted to use the army. The “no preference” vote in Democratic Party primaries so far relates directly to the genocide in Gaza and overlaps with the street marches and famous encampments which recall Occupy Wall Street in 2011. So, the election year circus will intersect directly with the youth resistance to Genocide Joe. When Trump is elected (by fair means or foul) the likelihood of mass resistance to his attacks Is prefigured by today’s movement which builds on the others like 2020 and 2011.

Great Britain, Advanced State of Decay and Collapse of Conservatives

British imperialism is today a moth-eaten outpost and vassal of US imperialism, which has been accentuated since it left the European Union in 2021. However, it is conjuncturally slightly out of step with much of the rest of the imperialist world, as the bourgeois imperialist right has been continually in power for 14 years and is in a state of decay and near collapse.

We are likely to see the Zionist, overtly pro-imperialist Labour Party come to power in the next few months. There could be even be a Labour landslide electoral victory, on the scale of 1997, purely by default, because of the advanced state of decay and collapse of the Tories under Sunak. The Tories are desperately trying to use the issue of immigration and asylum to try to generate some element of popular support, with their brutal scheme to deport migrants to Rwanda as a gamble, but this looks to have massively failed. They are hated by most of the population.

Labour’s membership has been massively purged of almost all the left-social-democratic and better elements that joined en masse in a working-class revolt against austerity behind Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership bid in 2015. His leadership was deliberately sabotaged by the neoliberal right wing and their Zionist allies in the period between 2015 and late 2019.  A concentrated campaign of fake accusations of anti-Semitism against the left and manipulation of Brexit – and the tactically malevolent demand for a second referendum – were designed to bring about a large-scale Labour electoral defeat, which they duly did.

However, such was the weak politics of the Corbynites that they cooperated with their own demise. Corbyn repeatedly apologised for virtually non-existent anti-Semitism in the Labour left and threw his own supporters under the bus, and he also allowed Starmer control of Brexit policy giving him free rein to antagonise that layer of the working class that supported Brexit as a misdirected protest against austerity, driving them into the arms of the populist Tory right led by Boris Johnson.

As a result of all this, there is a sizeable leftist layer of ex-Labour people whose antipathy to the overtly Zionist, neoliberal Labour leadership is such that they correctly oppose giving electoral support to the Starmer-dominated Labour Party. The Gaza conflict has exposed the nature of the Zionists who purged Corbyn, as genocidal, murderous racists, and as a result advocating a vote for Labour has become unthinkable among much of the Palestine solidarity movement’s rapidly growing mass base.

The victory of George Galloway in the recent Rochdale by-election was a sign of things to come; there is a mushrooming movement of independent leftist challenges to Labour, so far on a fragmented, local level, that is likely to be an important player in the coming general election. There is even a potentially potent challenge to Starmer himself in his own seat. After the election this is likely to multiply, as the level of leftist antipathy to Starmer is already on a very high level. There is also a strong likelihood that the lackeyism of Labour will give renewed strength to the far right under a Labour government, so struggles against a neoliberal Labour government will go hand in hand with struggles against the far right.

At the time, the trade union bureaucracy is doubling down in its support for Starmer, such as the leader of Britain’s biggest union UNITE, Sharon Graham, who was elected in 2021 with the support of much of the reformist and centrist left despite openly pledging not to oppose Starmer politically. Now she, as the leader of the biggest union in Britain, is openly pro-Starmer and pro-genocide over Gaza, and is actively trying to ban UNITE members from opposing Zionism and exposing the lies directed against the Corbyn movement. Mick Lynch of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, previously Britain’s most militant and radical union, who put himself at the head of the strike movement against inflation in 2022, has now come out strongly for a vote to Starmer. And the TUC and Labour bureaucracy have shown their cretinous fealty to imperialism by voting at their 2023 Congress to demand increased military spending by Britain as part of the war drive of Britain against Russia and China.

The trade unions, despite a considerable outburst of militancy triggered by high inflation in 2022, have not recovered from the strategic defeat inflicted on them by Thatcher in the 1980s above all with the defeat of the miners. They will continue to fail to do so until the current bureaucracy is replaced by a leadership committed to class struggle and a complete break with support for all neoliberal politicians in Labour. 

The massive growth of the Palestine movement is a sign of things to come. Huge numbers are seeing the barbaric nature of imperialism for the first time because of this genocide. The mass revolt of students in the US is beginning to spread to Britain, Ireland and France. It should be recalled that mass student radicalisation has often been a precursor of mass working class radicalisation further down the line. May 1968 is the best-known example. It looks likely that the pro-imperialist labour bureaucracy will face serious challenges in the next period.

Australia, the Labor Government is a Faithful Servant of Financial Capital

In Australia, the increasingly unpopular Albanese Labor Government is massively increasing military spending which it is financing through ongoing austerity and cuts to social services. Its continued failure to demand the release of Julian Assange, signing of AUKUS & its steadfast support for the imperialists proxy wars in West Asia & Ukraine, Labor has sided with the most vicious policies of US imperialism. Its open militarism is fuelling the deepest anti-war movement since the 1970’s, which are taking the form of Pro-Palestinian solidarity protests. Labor has proven itself once again to be a faithful servant of finance capital not just on militarism but through ever expanding fossil fuel projects, doing nothing to address the cost-of-living crisis and allowing Covid19 to spread unchecked in the working class.

The Union bureaucracies are doing their best to keep a lid on the growth of both anti-war and workers struggles to increase their wages. However, as the crisis on all fronts deepens their grip on the working class is weakening. As elsewhere, the class war is heating up. The ruling class knows that both the weak ALP and the far-right Liberal Party will be unable to win the support of the majority and therefore as elsewhere they are preparing in advance through building up the repressive powers of the state to attempt to suppress the working class with an iron fist.

Argentina, Fascism Supported by US Imperialism

In Argentina, the Milei government promotes a brutal adjustment against the working masses and deepening the country’s dependence on imperialism, especially the United States in its different wings, including both Democrats and Republicans. This trend is part of imperialism’s offensive to reinforce its geostrategic control in South America by carrying out a fascist recolonization of the continent in a dynamic where the retreat of imperialism in Asia and Africa forces it to ensure more firmly its control in South America itself. In this context, popular struggles are growing, such as the march in defence of the public university on April 23 and the labour conflicts that are taking place, such as the recent passenger transport strikes and where the CGTI itself calls for a general strike for May 9. Even so, Milei for now is supported by the support of imperialism and the national High Bourgeoisie. It is also sustained by the lack of articulation of the bourgeois opposition, especially Peronist, and its weakness in building a valid alternative and because the workers’ struggles have not yet taken a leap in quality to push back Milei’s offensive. To this we must add the sectarianism of the left, especially the pseudo-Trotskyists, which are not capable of forming consistent political struggles against the offensive of Milei’s own government.

Brazil, To Defeat the Fascist Threat, Lula Needs to Break with the Centre and the Bourgeoisie

In Brazil, the largest working population in Latin America achieved a great victory over fascism, avoiding Bolsonaro’s re-election and electing Lula in 2022. But the “centre-right” Lula government, as the former president of the Workers’ Party, José Dirceu, maintains the economic policy of the coup governments (2016-2022), their neoliberal counter-reforms (labour and social security), privatizations, wage cuts for the poorest sectors of the working class, maintains the tax regime imposed by the 2016 coup, which strangles the State’s public investments with the working population. Under this cursed coup legacy, no social, development or industrializing policy can advance.

In this way, the government strengthens the enemy’s bases and undermines its own social and political base. The government empties demonstrations in protest of the 60th anniversary of the 1964 coup d’état and the CUT empties the May Day events, while Bolsonarism holds demonstrations with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fanatics in the country’s main capitals.

The Lula government and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores seem to adopt the same “tactic” against Bolsonarism that the Italian reformists adopted against the fascists, which favoured their “march on Rome”, a tactic harshly criticized by Gramsci, using the metaphor of the “beaver that, followed by hunters who want to tear the testicles from which the medicines are extracted, to save his life, he rips them off himself.” Trying to gain trust from its enemies, the Lula government demobilises the working population, the only instrument capable of avoiding a new coup offensive by imperialism and big capital in Brazil.

Federal public servants in Education staged one of the biggest strikes in recent years (in the strike commands, our party activists also participated in the construction of this movement) because the Lula government insists on not giving adjustments this year. Recently the government negotiated adjustments salaries for all fractions of the federal public service linked to the repressive and fiscal apparatus, but for education workers it maintains a 0% adjustment rate. With this 0% rate, Lula strains the relationship with federal education employees and obliges them. to strike against the government.

Class Conscious – US and Australia

Consistent democrats / LCFI – Great Britain

Bolshevik Militant Tendency (TMB / LCFI – Argentina)

Communist Party (pc / LCFI – Brazil)