This issue is once again heavily concentrated on NATO imperialism’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, with the lead, front page article (though something of a personal view) addressing the political reasons for the accelerating war drive by US imperialism, as the world hegemon, against Russia and China.
The Ukraine war has become a watershed where US hegemony itself is at stake: the ex-workers states of Russia and China may well be capitalist, but the capitalism that has been restored there is so marked and deformed by many decades of anti-capitalist, collectivised social relations as to make these societies fundamentally deformed, ‘hybrids’ that imperialism does not regard as reliably capitalist at all. It regards them as troublesome and subversive rivals that threaten its ‘full spectrum dominance’. Hence the ideologically driven new Cold War of US/NATO.
A start is made in this article in addressing these questions in terms of Marxist theory and it explores the implications of the perspective of the emergence of a ‘multipolar world’, a perspective put forward by prominent Russian politicians and ideologues that has itself become the banner of a revolt by many semi-colonial countries against imperialist world bullying. Far from Russia being ‘isolated’ by the imperialist sanctions regime, BRICS, the Russian- and Chinese- led trading bloc, which already embraces around 40% of the world’s population, has around 20 mainly ex-colonial and developing countries queueing up to join it.
The other major question related to the war addressed in this issue is the big problem with No2NATO, No2War as a putative anti-war bloc, that aims to support the anti-fascist struggle in of the Donbass people against the NATO-Nazi regime in Ukraine. A major blow was struck at this aspiration when George Galloway and his Workers Party of Britain had the idea of putting one David Clews on its platform as a speaker.
As well as being an anti-vax/anti-lockdown activist over Covid, an examination of his politics reveals he is a fellow traveller of the neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant group Patriotic Alternative, and insofar as he is critical of them, it is from an ‘orthodox’ Hitlerian standpoint(!). Both the Consistent Democrats and the bloc of communists and anti-imperialists we support, the International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity, have put out statements sharply attacking this bloc with part of the far right.
So far, others at the core of N2NN2W have not opposed this, in fact they have doubled down and broken relations with people who criticised this. But we are not prepared to passively allow far right elements to try to hitch a ride on the anti-imperialist movement hoping to profit from social and political turmoil, if, as seems likely (to all, including Clews) the West loses this proxy war.
Apart from that we have a substantive article on the Coronation/Monarchy issue, as well as material addressing repression and purges against leftists. Most important is an article defending Tony Greenstein, veteran Jewish leftist, who is facing a possible prison sentence for his activities on behalf of the direct-action protest group Palestine Action. This a result of Tory and Zionist undermining of the democratic rights of protesters and of their right to present their full case to juries.
Related to that, there are articles on Starmer’s purges of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and of Diane Abbott from the parliamentary Labour Party, all of which underline why no one on the left should be voting for any Starmer-loyal or -subservient Labour candidates in the General Election, when it comes.
On the contrary, we should be working toward the emergence of a real working-class party that can take on the Starmerites for their support for NATO’s Nazis in Ukraine, as well as their overt approval for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. One step forward recently was when the Socialist Labour Network adopted a principled position of defending the Donbass people in the current proxy war, thus siding with Russia’s armed intervention to defend them. This was a small but real victory in the struggle for genuine anti-imperialist politics. Another step forward was the re-adherence of Socialist Fight, which parted company with us over three years go in a disagreement mainly over Zionism, to the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI), our international movement, with a coincidence of views particularly over Ukraine.
And we republish a somewhat pacifist-tinged, but pro-Russian, call for an anti-war conference in Rome this coming October as a preliminary announcement of our critical adherence. We see this as akin to the flawed Zimmerwald initiative in WWI, as a real indicator of the incipient coming together of leftists to oppose the threat of WWIII, but without having the kind of programmatic answers that are needed. We look to the Zimmerwald left, formed by revolutionaries who intervened within the original Zimmerwald movement, which became the nucleus of the Communist International.
And finally, this issue contains a short piece on the candidacy of Robert F Kennedy Jr for the Democratic Party nomination in the US. This might well cause some problems for Biden and his Ukraine war campaign and might even result in a third (or fourth) party challenge, which along with the further travails of Trump, makes next years US Presidential Election extremely unpredictable. An index of the deep crisis and decline of US imperialism and its so-called ‘democracy’.
