This issue focuses on the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the Middle East/West Asia region, which has become much more evident since the journal went to print, with the US-Israel-Turkiye- backed offensive of jihadist terrorists in North-West Syria, against Russian and Hezbollah opposition alongside Syria. However, the lead article is about the crisis precipitated by the lame-duck Biden administration after Harris was defeated by Trump in the US presidential election in October. The ‘permission’ given by the Biden administration to the Ukrainian regime to fire British Storm Shadow and US ATTACMS mid-range cruise missiles into Russia is a major escalation towards WWIII. Because these missiles cannot be fired and programmed by Ukrainians – they do not have the satellites and technical infrastructure to do this. These are Western missiles programmed and aimed by the West. Meaning that Russia is now being bombed directly by NATO imperialism.
The response by Russia in unveiling the mid-range hypersonic Oreshnik missile is analysed, which appears for now to have stymied the Biden administration. Along with Trump’s victory, which appears to be two-pronged – a degree of popular support due to his rhetorical isolationism over Ukraine, combined with the collapse of the Democratic Party vote being driven by the inflation and hardship to the working class inflicted by anti-Russian sanctions over Ukraine. The statement notes the danger of WWIII, and the difference between this confrontation and previous world cataclysms. Such a war would not be inter-imperialist, but rather a war of the imperialist US hegemon and its client imperialists against an alliance centrally of the Global South, encompassing two remaining smaller deformed workers states (Cuba and North Korea) and centrally led by two giant ex-workers states, Russia and China, whose form of restored capitalism has a massive proletarian deformation derived from their previous many decades of post-capitalist economic and military development.
The issue contains a fine article by Mark Andresen that expands on the reasons for Trump’s victory in the disillusionment of the working class, not only with liberalism, but also palpably with its right-wing opponents, and the opportunities that this gives to communists. And there is a signed article by Ian Donovan which contains a preliminary analysis of the dangers from the Assisted Dying Bill, which in our view involves a serious threat to the sick and the disabled – an even more sinister dimension to the austerity attack since 2010.
But also in this issue is part two of the LCFI’s letter to the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). This focuses on another facet of their problematic legacy from the politics of their founder James Robertson – their support for Brexit – that is, the exit of British imperialism from the European Union, and their belief that the working class has some kind of interest in this. We note that there are some positive elements to the political shift that they underwent a few years ago, before the death of Robertson. A grouping of ICL comrades centred in Quebec rose rapidly in the declining ICL though a project to address the national question regarding French-speaking Quebec in mainly English-speaking Canada, and then extending their approach to some of the smaller, multinational states in Europe – such as Spain and France regarding Catalonia and the Basque Country, Corsica, Belgium regarding the Flemish and Walloons, and also Scotland. These are all situations where there is either clear national oppression, or in Belgium a kind of forced unity of two language groups in the same imperialist state. Scotland was also a major part of imperial Britain, not a colony as was Ireland, but there is still a historically evolved national question with elements of oppression which must be addressed. But the New Spartacists mix this up with Robertson’s belief that British separatism from the EU was progressive. We cite Trotsky’s 1923 Essay on The United States of Europe and also Joseph Seymour’s 1977 article On Bourgeois Class Consciousness which both point to the reactionary and nationalist fundamental nature of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and its division of Europe in particularly, as something that Marxists are bound to oppose.
The letter deals with the New Sparts’ errors over Covid, which led to them somewhat amazingly arguing against lockdowns virtually as a principle, including in China (which they consider to be a workers’ state), even when no vaccines were available, and then for compulsory vaccinations. A strange combination, which seems to have been a by-product of severe disorientation of the tendency after the death of their historic leader and then faced with the Covid pandemic. The organisation collapsed during that period, though the Quebecois trend that shifted the ICL on the national question, took up this strange approach to Covid and became the core of the new leadership. It does appear to have been a confused bridge to a better, orthodox Marxist understanding on some other key questions though, such as the Anti-Imperialist United Front and Permanent Revolution.
We also address their failures in the Corbyn period, to fully engage and do entry work in the Labour Party during that crucial period of leftward shift in Labour. We counterpose our record of principled and somewhat high profile entry work in Socialist Fight, to the Sparts abstentionism. We are sharply critical of some of the discussions that went on and still go on today among their people, where they confuse the leftward movement represented by Corbynism in its first few years, at least up to the 2017 General Election, with their schemes about how Brexit was supposedly something that the workers movement was obliged to support. This is how, when the class struggle was being waged at a surprisingly high political level in the Labour Party during this period, the Sparts were embroiled in sterile internal debates about how it was unprincipled to support Corbyn because he didn’t support Brexit, and even ended up themselves publishing material about Brexit that they, not we, condemned as amounting to ‘political support’ to Boris Johnson’s Tories. A terrible muddle of political errors, which our letter attempts to bring some clarity to.
The next issue of Communist Fight will include the final part of this letter, which addresses the ‘Russian Question’ today – the nature of Russia and China after the 1989-91 Counterrevolutions – the reason for the continuing conflicts between these giant former workers states and world imperialism, and the contradictions and shortcomings of the New Spartacists over Ukraine today.
This issue therefore contains much of considerable importance to socialists and all class-conscious working-class people.
We need a new Communist International! For Russian Victory in Ukraine!
For an armed anti-imperialist united front to stop the Zionist genocide!
International Workers Revolution is the Only Road to Peace!
Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious
Capitalist-imperialist barbarism is staring humanity in the face. US imperialism’s internal contradictions and desperation to hang onto its world hegemony has led to an immediate threat of nuclear war, as close as if not closer than anything that happened in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The NATO expansion drive through the proxy war in Ukraine now means Russia is being bombed by the United States and Britain with US and British-controlled medium range Cruise Missiles (Storm Shadow and ATACMS). These missiles are being controlled directly by the imperialists, and their use constitutes direct acts of war by the US and Britain, since Ukraine does not have the personnel or the technological means to operate them autonomously. This has been engineered by the lame-duck Biden administration since they lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Biden is too mentally feeble to be in control – it is functionaries of the liberal-militarist US establishment and likely the military themselves who are calling the shots here, trying by means of escalation to pre-empt what Trump might be inclined to do about Ukraine from 21st January when he takes office.
In response, on 21st November, Russia battle-tested a new ‘game changing’ weapon against a Ukrainian missile and armaments facility near Dnipro, a mid-range hypersonic, multi-warheaded missile. Its speed, Mach 10 (10 times the speed of sound) means it travels at 3 kilometres per second, considerably faster than the interception capacity of all the missile defence facilities of Europe‘s imperialist nations and the various East European US clients, which are simply defenceless before it. The new missile, Oreshnik (Hazel Tree) can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, and if the imperialists were rational, ought to be sufficient several times over to make them back off from attacking Russia. Whether they are rational enough to take note of the lesson remains to be seen.
The genocide in Gaza, livestreamed on social media even in the imperialist countries (though suppressed insofar as is possible by the pro-Zionist bourgeois mainstream media), has found a judicial expression with the indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant by the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity” and “using starvation as a weapon of war”. Which barely scratches the surface of Zionism’s crimes. The ICC is a phoney court that was originally set up by the imperialists to arraign the leaders of disobedient countries outside the Western imperialist club. One of its first actions was to condemn Serbia in the NATO war against Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of the Balkan country, was arbitrarily convicted and imprisoned by the imperialist tribunal, despite Yugoslavia not recognizing the jurisdiction of this tribunal over the country. Transferred to The Hague, without even having his extradition approved, as required by Yugoslav criminal law, Milosevic was unjustly tried and convicted of genocide. He was found dead in his cell under suspicion of a heart attack deliberately induced by the tribunal. Numerous African leaders have been charged by the ICC, but their most prominent targets include Vladmir Putin, as part of the West’s fraudulent casting of resistance to NATO expansion in Ukraine as somehow criminal.
But the exposure of Israel’s depraved extermination of helpless Palestinian civilians, including women and children, medical staff, journalists, aid workers, even hospital patients, produced mass pressure on this stooge body to act and indict Israeli leaders. Even then, the cowards had to indict a Hamas leader for ‘balance’, even though the individual they indicted has almost certainly himself been murdered by Israel. The Zionists objected and delayed the indictment for months. They appear to have been instrumental in injecting sexual allegations against the ICC prosecutor to try to sabotage the indictment. But the pressure from below was too much, and now the indictments are issued. It puts European politicians, whose countries for the most part endorse the court, in legal jeopardy for their arming Israel to carry out these crimes.
The United States does not endorse the court – despite its stooge nature, they understand that US forces routinely commit terrible crimes around the globe and even a formal affiliation can put its forces at risk if the ICC comes under sustained mass pressure over some US atrocity, as has happened to Israel over the Zionist holocaust. The US has a law, known popularly as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, which mandates that US governments should use military force against the ICC should it arrest any US politicians or operatives.
Trump’s New Rise to Power
Trump’s election on November 5th, the defeat of Harris acting as second string for the incapacitated, senile Biden, has brought to the fore the contradictions within the US as its world imperialist hegemony slips away. Trump is basically a fascist in the US context, but there sometimes appears to be an element of rhetorical US isolationism in his attitude to the Ukrainian war. His wing of the US ruling class sees China, not Russia, as the main challenger to US imperialism because of its greater productive capacity and economic power.
Their likely objective is to do a deal with Russia and back off from the Ukraine conflict, hoping to drive a wedge between Russia and China. In fact, so single-mindedly are they focussed on China that at least some of them are inclined to dump NATO and Europe as a waste of resources that the US is far too ‘generous’ to. They demand that European capitalism, not the US, pays for NATO. Though going by some of Trump’s picks for his incoming administration, some of this may be more rhetoric than reality. Trump has appointed Sebastian Gorka, a hawk who has attacked ‘isolationism’ over Ukraine, as his chief of ‘Counterterrorism’ and ‘Special Assistant’. Also among his picks for his new administration are the most virulent Zionists imaginable. Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, who will be US Ambassador to Israel, says there are no such things as Palestinians, no West Bank, and no occupation.
Trump’s people are even more single-mindedly focussed on support for Israel than the Biden administration was, as Huckabee’s appointment shows. Trump criticised ‘Genocide Joe’ for being insufficiently supportive of Netanyahu’s attempted extermination of Gazans – he said directly that Israel should be supported to “finish the job” of extermination. Republican senators such as Lindsay Graham call for ‘sanctions’ against the ICC, and even against other nations who cooperate with the ICC over Netanyahu and Gallant – this could easily include Britain, France and Germany, who have placed themselves under its jurisdiction years ago. Though Germany says that it would not arrest Israeli leaders supposedly because of its own history of Nazism, that stance could cause them legal problems.
These tactical differences are sharply expressed now, as the large, putatively ‘liberal’ wing of the US ruling class that still gravitates around Biden and Harris sees Ukraine as just as paramount as support for Israel if not more so. This nuance implicitly is about whether the Israel lobby calls the shots in US politics, or the presumed interests of the US itself, as well as whether China is more important as an enemy than Russia in global geopolitics. With the rise of BRICS, and the consolidation of Russia-China cooperation, they appear much too late with this. The US is far weaker, and Russia/China/BRICS are far stronger, than in Trump’s first presidency.
Trump is a pro-Zionist fascist, who denounces his liberal-imperialist opponents such as Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party as ‘communists’ and ‘Marxists’. He promises massive deportations of undocumented workers, up to 13 million by some counts, as well as to use the US military to ‘deal with’ his political opponents among the bourgeois establishment, Democratic and Republican, and to crush left-wing and pro-Palestine demonstrations and mobilisations more generally.
Trump has been one of the key authors of a years-long, accelerating coup in US bourgeois politics. It had its precursors with the end of all restrictions on corporate funding in politics in 2010 (Citizens United). But having come to power in 2016 with massive funding from Sheldon Adelson of Likud, despite not even winning the popular vote (and in fact losing by 3 million votes), Trump proceeded to replace enough Supreme Court judges during his first term of office (2017-2021) to create a far-right supermajority on the Supreme Court. While he was out of office, during Biden’s presidency, this supermajority declared that a President in office had virtually unlimited power to carry out acts ‘in his/her official capacity’ that for anyone else would mean prosecution and jail. So, the feeble attempts by elements of the US state to hold him criminally responsible for his attempted putsch on January 6, 2021, were ruled out by ‘his’ Supreme Court supermajority.
Trump and his wing of the ruling class now have control over all branches of the US executive. In addition, Trump has been cultivating an extra-parliamentary wing to his fascist movement based like all fascist movements on animating the most reactionary layers of the petty bourgeoisie. We saw the utilisation of these heavily armed layers both to help confront the Black Lives Matter protests and most obviously in the attempted putsch of January the 6th. These layers which are animated by white supremacy and Christian nationalism are an extra resource for advancing fascism in the US if Trump finds the methods of the state insufficient in the face of mass working class resistance.
Ukraine War Crushed Biden/Harris
The loss of US hegemony is accelerating and what politically crushed the Biden-Harris regime was mainly the inflationary wave that the Ukraine war sanctions against Russian oil sent through the West, and the enormous amounts the US and NATO countries vainly spent trying to defeat Russia in Ukraine. They have not succeeded in inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia; but NATO is now close to defeat itself in Ukraine. They are desperate to stave this off and have been resorting to increasingly desperate means as defeat got closer and closer over the last few months. The threat to target Russia with Western guided missiles from Ukraine was one such tactic – Putin warned on September 10th that such actions could produce a Russian nuclear response, which caused Biden to back off from the idea at that time. And the failing attempt to create another Maidan-style ‘colour revolution’ in Georgia, and similar activities in Moldova, represent attempts to open up yet another front to attack Russia, in Moldova particularly through a potential attack on the mainly Russian-speaking region of Transnistria, which is close to mainly Russian-speaking Odessa within Ukraine, another disputed territory that no doubt would join Russia if it got the chance in the context of a Russian victory in Ukraine.
The economic strains on the US population from the US bourgeoisie’s Ukraine war caused the collapse of the Biden administration’s electoral base, with Harris getting seven million less votes than Biden managed in 2020, whereas Trump won the popular vote this time with around two and a half million more votes than he did in 2020. This time, Trump won the popular vote by around that margin, two and a half million votes. The complaints that he was the victim of a fraudulent election system in 2020 stand discredited by this, but he managed to gain power anyway. Mainly because the Ukraine war and its economic consequences caused large amounts of suffering to working-class people in the US, and his promises to end the war resonated with that population. And Harris’s clear endorsement of all the actions of Biden’s administration in funding, arming and politically supporting Israel’s year-long genocide in Gaza and now its bloody rampage against the population of Lebanon also discredited the Democrats among their base among class conscious workers, particularly those from oppressed minorities.
The virtually open shift to the US and NATO powers firing longer-range missiles into Russia and Ukraine makes it very clear that Ukraine has all along been simply a Western puppet – this is not a war for ‘national liberation’ or against ‘Russian imperialism’ as social-imperialists putatively on the left like the majority of the so-called United Secretariat of the Fourth International, or the Revolutionary Communist Internationalist Tendency, like to pretend. This is a Western-initiated proxy war, barely hidden behind clouds of imperialist camouflage rhetoric, aimed at defeating and dismembering Russia, and nothing whatsoever to do with any putative rights of Ukrainians. The Russian Federation does not have any project of oppressing Ukrainians – that is why their war over the past two-and-a-half years had been so painstaking – a war of attrition with high Ukrainian military casualties but kept minimal for civilians. Russia clearly has the armed capacity to wage a blitzkrieg-type war, bomb the hell out of Ukraine and take territory rapidly, if it wanted to. But that kind of war would cause massive civilian casualties, and today’s Russian politicians do not seek such bloodshed. Ukrainians are regarded as a fraternal people, not targets for indiscriminate terror. It is the West that is inflicting civilian casualties in this war by using petal mines, depleted Uranium weapons and now openly supplying anti-personnel landmines to attack civilians in the newly Russian territories.
Zionist barbarism. Hospital patients in Gaza forced onto death march by Israeli troop captors.
The Need for a New Communist International
Those on the Trotskyist left who claim to be consistent defencists of struggles against imperialism but have not yet unequivocally taken a side with Russia against imperialism, instead engaging in third-campist rhetoric about how Russian and Ukrainian workers should unite against Putin and NATO, ought to be forced to re-assess their wrong position by recent events involving Storm Shadow and ATACMS. The new Spartacists have been the prime example of supposedly orthodox Communists/Trotskyists who have been promoting these erroneous views recently. But the idea that this is in any way a national war between Ukraine and Russia ought to be completely blown away by these events. Even the most dull-witted should be able to discern that the Ukraine conflict is now, and always was, fundamentally a defensive and progressive war by Russia aimed at defending this non-imperialist, ex-workers’ state against imperialist-planned dismemberment.
World War III is very much on the horizon. Some may even argue that it is already underway. That is a matter of interpretation at this point. Trotsky’s remarks about the leadup to World War II make sobering reading today:
“Under the increasing tension of capitalist disintegration, imperialist antagonisms reach an impasse at the height of which separate clashes and bloody local disturbances (Ethiopia, Spain, the Far East, Central Europe) must inevitably coalesce into a conflagration of world dimensions. The bourgeoisie, of course, is aware of the mortal danger to its domination represented by a new war. But that class is now immeasurably less capable of averting war than on the eve of 1914.” (Transitional Programme, 1938)
Though today we are in a different situation, as we are not facing an inter-imperialist conflict, but the threat of a war by NATO imperialism to maintain US/Western hegemony against a loose alliance of remaining workers states, non-imperialist ex-workers states (retaining significant elements of previous post-capitalist productive and state apparatus as major deformations on a weak restored capitalism), and more classically semi-colonial countries seeking to escape imperialist domination and dictat. But the West does not tolerate this kind of insubordination, and the threat of a world war to restore US hegemony and imperialist domination is very real. All these insurgent countries must be defended against imperialism as a matter of principle by the workers’ movements of the world.
Communists need to be providing revolutionary leadership in this situation, advocating anti-imperialist united fronts to deal with these barbarities. The problem of Zionism and its genocidal aggression against the Arab peoples needs to be resolved by an anti-imperialist united front. We must demand that Russia and China throw their full economic and military resources into fighting the Zionist genocide and defeating Israel in this life-and-death struggle for the Arab peoples. We advocate the independent mass mobilisation of workers wherever it is feasible. Previously we have advocated a ‘coalition of the willing’ to intervene militarily to stop the Zionist slaughter wherever it is happening – the recent Iranian retaliatory actions against Israel also underline that this is feasible.
But in the end, even an anti-imperialist united front is not completely adequate. Every such united front needs a consciously revolutionary, working-class component to make it effective and viable. The only permanent road to peace, the only solution to all the deadly problems that beset humanity in this situation, from the threat of nuclear annihilation to disaster through the capitalist-induced destruction of the biosphere, is through the creation of a mass Communist Movement internationally. We need a new world party of socialist revolution to unite all subjective communists, all consistent anti-imperialists, under one banner based on free discussion of differences, but unity in action, in pursuit of international socialism. For workers revolution is the only road to real peace!
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