Communist Fight issue #8 out now

Communist Fight issue 8 is out now, in hard copy format. It features an extensive analysis centring on the huge ‘cost of living’ crisis which is the biggest attack on the working class since the early Thatcher years, and the need to fight it by the left getting organised politically and preparing to lead struggles. It analyses the decay of the right-wing populist Johnson government, and how the ruling class have turned against it as its brutal and corrupt nature has become clear to large sections of the population. It analyses why it was ever promoted by the ruling class in the first place, Johnson being an instrument of a kind of soft coup against Jeremy Corbyn’s reformist Labour. It notes that now Corbyn has been ousted from Labour, and Starmer has massively weakened the left within Labour, he has gained ruling class support as the replacement for Johnson. Which explains the almost unanimous attack on Johnson for raising Starmer’s complicity in the Jimmy Saville scandal and the persecution of Julian Assange when he was the Director of Public Prosecutions under both New Labour and Tory governments.

It also includes an analysis of the creation of the Socialist Labour Network (SLN) though the merger of Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) and the Labour in Exile Network (LIEN) which was completed in January. This includes and analysis of why LAW was not run as a genuine United Front of all leftists in the Labour Party against the witchhunt but engaged in its own mini-witchhunts against leftists like Socialist Fight and Peter Gregson – who founded Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism (LAZIR) – that these leftists deemed ‘anti-Semitic’ – that is, more consistent in their attack on Zionist racism than the then-dominant forces in LAW. The article also analyses the strategy put forward by LIEN’s Roger Silverman of forming ‘shadow CLPs’, that is, local organisation of Labour activists and expellees outside the bureaucratic structures dominated by neoliberals, part of a ‘slow-motion split that is taking place in Labour. We also include a letter that was published in the Weekly Worker that nails the absurd justification for the CPGB’s petulant walk out of LAW when they lost the vote on unification with LIEN.

The issue contains an analysis by a sympathetic comrade, Anna Brogan of the refugee crisis, not only in Britain but also in Europe, and what is behind the refugees flows that racists and xenophobes are trying to exploit.

We publish also a statement agreed by the LCFI with other revolutionary-minded organisations and individuals, including Marxist groups in Australia, Greece and South Korea, on Kazakhstan, which analyses the recent upheaval that was prompted initially by workers protests against the removal of fuel price subsidies. We consider that the workers protests, which were peaceful, were used as a pretext by elements in the old Nazarbayev regime, which came to power closely aligned with the neoliberal Russian president Yeltsin at the time of the destruction of the USSR, to attack the government of the new president Tokayev, which is closely aligned with Putin. This statement produced some discussion in our own ranks, and we hope to publish more about this subject in due course.

We also, relatedly, publish a more extensive analysis of the dialectic of the new Cold War that is underway between the US on the one side, and Russia and China, by our Latin American comrades. This is also enhanced by the back page LCFI statement on the war provocations by the US against Russia over Ukraine, obviously aimed at goading Russia into war by threatening it with NATO expansion into Ukraine. This statement contains a theoretical enhancement of our position on defending Russia and China, noting that despite the end of central planning and the bureaucratised proletarian dictatorships that existed in those states prior to the 1990s, the capacity of these states to act independently of imperialism is a residual gain from their long period as workers states, and is the real reason they are still targeted by imperialism for war drives.

We also have two articles on the Americas: firstly, an article by our comrades in the US about Honduras, and the victory of the leftist candidate Xiomara Castro in the recent election there, together with the steps that the US and its clients in Honduras have been up to in trying to undermine the victory of Castro, who is the wife of Manuel Zelaya. The second is about the potential for fascism in the US, and the fascist-like development of the US Republicans as they consolidate around Trump and further propagate the myth that Trump was in some way cheated out of the Presidency in 2020, when he lost the popular vote for the second time, by 7 million. The article notes that both major parties in the US are now cross-class blocs, with the Democrats keeping hold of the traditional pro-capitalist labour movement as well as the passive support currently of many black and anti-racist/civil rights activists, while Trump’s base in the rust belt working class is driven by resentment at the loss by workers of what was, and was felt to be, a privileged status. The article analyses the convulsive decline of labour aristocratic sentiment that has bred national-populist resentment in the US in support of Trump, and in Britain with Brexit, as parallel phenomena.

This 28-page edition contains substantial material on the international and domestic class struggle, and we urge socialists and those sympathetic to revolutionary politics to take out a subscription, which costs £17 per year for 4 issues. See our Communist Fight page for details.

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