This issue of Communist Fight is the first of a new series.
In a recent discussion, the Consistent Democrats, who publish Communist Fight, decided on a change in our press policy and format. Previously we had regarded our website as important, but subordinate to the publication of a printed journal, and we have operated on that basis for three-and-a-half years. But experience has taught us that this press paradigm is obsolete: the fact is that our website now has a substantial readership, whereas the printed journal is limited by our physical capacity to distribute it, which is small at the moment. The pro-imperialist, repressive capitulation of much of the left to Russophobia and Zionism has made it difficult to distribute a substantial and quite expensive publication like the first series of Communist Fight by the legacy route of failing left bookshops run by fakers who are subservient to right-wing forces.
We have therefore decided to make a change: to produce a much cheaper and slimmer publication more often – we hope to produce a 16-page journal 8 times a year, reflecting the material on the website. It will cost £1.20, with a 70p concession, instead of £2.50/£1. The journal will be a supplement of our website, instead of the other way round. That way we hope to be able to intervene in political events offline more effectively, and continue to grow our movement, which has already significantly grown from its very small beginning in 2020, but we want to be considerably more effective. We think this change of policy will assist in this.
The new issue focuses heavily on the genocide of the Palestinians, which is among the most crucial and immediate questions facing movements of workers and the oppressed right now. Genocidal Zionist racism against the Palestinian people has become a political cult and a cause celebre among the decaying ruling classes of the imperialist West. In Britain it was used to defeat the Corbyn movement that attempted to reassert some basic elements of class politics in the second half of the last decade. But now Zionism’s genocide has ignited a world-wide movement of workers and the oppressed that is mobilising worldwide to defend their Palestinian victims.
The lead article contains an analysis of the Zionist cult in Western bourgeois politics and a materialist explanation of how it came into being. It ends in a call for the defence of the democratic rights of workers and the oppressed through the formation of a workers’ militia based on the mass organisations of the working class, based on the need to counter the ruling classes’ modern, barbaric techniques of warfare against insubordinate parts of the population. It contains a warning: it is quite possible that in the future the methods that are being to drown Gaza in the blood of its civilian population – drones, carpet-bombing, mass murder by AI, could be used by the bourgeoisie in the West to destroy mass movements of our class. The working class needs to arm itself politically and physically against this likely form of counterrevolutionary violence.
Regarding attacks on democratic rights, we have an article from our Brazilian comrades about the new forms that fascism is taking in this period of US imperialist decay and disaster. We have an article denouncing the outrageous arrests of Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier and other left-wing opponents of genocidal Zionism, with smears ranging from ‘anti-Semitism’ to supposed support for ‘terrorism’. All totally fraudulent, formulated by racist cops acting in cahoots with far right Tory politicians, encouraged by Zionist New Labour.
A particularly well-read article by Davey Heller of the Australia/United States ClassConscious group is reproduced in this issue. It analyses the nature and social composition of the huge protest movement that has errupted over Gaza, not only in Australia but around the world, its character as a movement predominantly of the working class and oppressed, and how the influence of the bourgeois liberal element that played a major role in previous anti-war movements has declined.
We also reproduce a draft ‘Open Letter’ to George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain, regarding his announced intention to stand against Labour’s Sadiq Khan for Mayor of London. There was a time when such a challenge would have been an inspiring call to arms. But in the past decade Galloway has attempted to mix militant anti-imperialism over Ukraine and the Middle East with an adaptation to the populist right. These do not mix, to put it mildly, and our letter, which has been sent to larger organisations with a proposal for endorsement, places demands on Galloway to break with such reactionary allies and stand as a champion of the victims of capitalism and imperialism at home and abroad.
The back page of the new journal reproduces a joint statement of the LCFI and ClassConscious defending the Houthi, of Yemen, against imperialist threats for their bold actions in seeking an armed blockade of the Red Sea against Israel-bound shipping, which is particularly important now the US, with Britain in tow, has attacked Yemen in solidarity with Zionism’s mass slaughter of Palestinians.
