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No 1655 8th April 2025

Trumpite trade war tariff turmoil and aggression is the strongest confirmation yet of total breakdown of the capitalist imperialist system into the greatest Catastrophe in all history – as warned by Marxism. Belligerent whining about ”hard done by” American people, because their long assumed right to live high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the world has collapsed in ignominy and incompetence, will only draw contempt and hostility, and escalate the hatred of the little people everywhere for imperialist tyranny, US and others. But the depravity and degeneracy of the whole warmongering system – exemplified by the unspeakable holocaust extermination horror in Gaza and the West Bank by Jewish landtheft occupation with Washington (and other Western) ruling class support, encouragement & participation – will only escalate into World War Three until the world masses take up the revolutionary struggle to finish this foul system for good. They are held back by continuing “democracy” delusions, and “condemnation of terrorism” by revisionist retreat and Trotskyist anti-communism. Leninism is the need

Poleaxed confusion continues everywhere from the seemingly shock transformation of international relations as the “maverick” or “unpredictable” Trumpite US presidency spews out predictable bullying belligerence and contempt in all directions.

Trade war is ramping up towards World War Three.

White House backing for yet further Zionist nazi-extermination horrors and outright lies about sick murder and starvation in Gaza and the West Bank; in your face violent annexation threats on Canada, Greenland and Panama; bullying universal tariff assaults on world commerce and trade; trashing of agreed “human rights”, “civilised practice” and “justice” both domestically and abroad; the vilest of scapegoating barbarity on migrants; and even the Pentagon “chatgroup” scandal (or deliberate leak?) gleefully cheering on now continuous barbaric bomb runs on Yemeni civilians, have left the world dizzy with dismay.

And America’s self-interested abandoning of the disastrously failing NATO-provoked war on Russia by Kiev’s Banderite nazi-nationalist stooges has created further stunned turmoil among the “allies”, particularly in Europe as their bourgeoisies find themselves in the inter-imperialist tradewar firing line (or at least notice they are there, at last).

For America, reining in Europe with war chaos was the major basis for, and reason for provoking the Ukraine conflict from the start, not the ludicrous inflated CIA/MI6 lies about bogeyman “Russian expansionism” the rest of the bourgeois powers are still using to try and keep war going as a diversion covering up their crisis collapse.

There is actually nothing complicated about this great shift, if it is examined with a Marxist-Leninist understanding putting to the forefront the great capitalist economic catastrophe and the class war revolutionary ending it demands for this stinking, violent and viciously depraved system threatening all humanity (as still none of the fake-“lefts” will do).

It is simply a stripping-away of the “niceties” of capitalist dictatorship rule and its lying pretence of democracy, because they can no longer be afforded.

Trumpism is not some maverick aberration but the expression of ruling class necessity.

The bourgeoisie profit system has hit the buffers exactly as Marxist science has always warned must happen, in an epochal crisis which has been unfolding in effect for the last 20 years plus and was brewing for decades before that.

Only far more devastating and chaotic Slump collapse, ecological devastation and ever more vicious trade war, and its rapid degeneration into allout shooting war, lies ahead for everyone (save the ultra-rich and their paid entourages and acolytes) as the great Catastrophe spirals down.

It is made inevitable by monopoly capital’s greed ridden, brutal and anarchic “free market” contradictions, imploding from the unstoppable “overproduction” fatally clogging its profit making system (as Karl Marx teased apart and explained in the profound and detailed three volume Capital, multiple works around it, as was spelt out even earlier in the Communist Manifesto, and as developed by Lenin’s Bolsheviks - see EPSR box).

To try and ride it out, every bourgeoisie must now ramp up its workers’ exploitation rates to unprecedented levels, abroad and at home, in order to battle out the cutthroat competition for markets, to the death, against its major rivals and most of all against the overwhelming dominance of the monopoly concentrations of the US Empire.

Destruction is the core necessity, wiping out the “surplus capital” this insane and inhuman monopoly capitalist system relentlessly accumulates and which is paralysing all possible movement forwards.

Everyone is against Washington’s plan to use its raw “might is right” bullying power and threats to stay on top as everything disintegrates.

But it will continue for as long as capitalism continues, plunging into all out war, ending only when the ruling class is defeated and overturned to build a rational planned socialist world.

There is no space in this for all the old (and expensive) “democracy” rackets and reformist “concessions” to the working class nor even “defence of conditions” through “left pressure” as all the 101 varieties of “leftism” still campaign for, nor for reining in the plundering, poisoning and breakdown of hospitals, transport, water and energy, schools and housing.

All dogged fights for workers jobs and conditions should go ahead, but like the determined Birmingham bin men strikers, Scunthorpe or Port Talbot steelworker occupations, or the car assembly-line operatives in the Midlands, they all immediately run into the same giant questions of international capitalist profiteering irrationality and inevitable economic breakdown, whether through bankruptcy for local authorities or the “saturated international markets for steel” etc etc. And now tariffs.

Whatever isolated occupations or strikes workers pursue they need everywhere to take on the much, much bigger questions of an entire world system in unprecedented breakdown.

Only “occupying” the whole thing, ie taking over the whole stinking centuries old capitalist system and bringing everything into common ownership, can any kind of planned economy be created that can solve all these questions.

And that poses giant questions of conscious mass revolutionary struggle.

Meanwhile the bourgeoisie has even less space for social-pacifist international “ceasefires”, “stop the war” peace deals or truces or “soft power” amelioration of Third World conditions (USAID etc).

Just the opposite. It now needs to cow and intimidate the whole world, demanding by brute force and fear, what it can no longer achieve by “fair” trade and “normal” methods of exploitation.

So all illusions are being torn up, not just in this stooge fascist regime here or that coup-imposed clampdown there as has served for decades.

Everything taken for granted by generations of petty bourgeois liberalism, is being ripped apart and outright barbaric holocaust now rules, with the Zionist horror backed by the CIA-imperialist-Jewish lobby, just the start of WW3 atrocities to come.

The latest tariff turmoil makes clearer than ever to the whole world what a disastrous and vicious mess has been created by this once stimulating but no longer useful “free market” way of doing things and what a monstrous lying joke is the “freedom”, “democracy”, international harmony, and prosperity it promised after the last great war (especially once the bogeyman of “communism” was toppled by the liquidation of the titanic soviet state, it was declared).

As Leninist understanding has spelt out from the beginning, the reality of capitalist rule has always been one of total dictatorship by the bourgeoisie (see Lenin State and Revolution).

But it has been hidden behind a great paraphernalia of parliaments and elections, “rule of law” and fairness, local councils and mayors, courts and justice, all just a giant hoodwinking hoopla, there to disguise and smooth over the raw class dominance of the rich and powerful “owners” and their ruthless non-stop exploitation of the great majority.

This clever process, historically evolved from the individual freedoms and partial rationality fought for arms in hand by the early revolutionary bourgeoisie (Cromwell, Robespierre, American independence etc) as their rising capitalist class overcame stagnant feudal absolutism and superstition, was turned into the greatest tool of class control ever devised.

Parliament’s ever-more deviously manipulated mechanisms have long held the petty bourgeoisie and better off worker layers away from further, socialist, revolution, placated in the rich countries at least with capitalist notions of “democracy” and a few crumbs of reformist “better living standards” and shallow consumerism, paid for with the staggering slave-level exploitation super-profits ripped from a still brutally suppressed Third World to enrich the big bourgeoisie.

It has been the best method in all history for keeping order and retaining power, far superior to mere bread and circuses.

For the last 75 years the whole lying racket has been extended internationally into a more or less stable world of alleged “freedom”, democracy, Geneva conventions, International Criminal Courts, human rights and the United Nations by the imperialist powers, under the American Empire’s overall dominance, all holding back revolutionary instincts with bamboozling promises of steady peaceful progress towards a better fairer world.

This initially Cold War perspective that capitalism could be “just as free, equitable and prosperous as communism” for the working class was utter garbage but was sold to the capitalist masses with the aid of revisionist theoretical delusions pumped out from Moscow about a “containable” post-war imperialism.

Monopoly capitalism was no longer able to expand, according to postwar Stalinism, and therefore needed only vigorous “peace struggle” by the international network of mostly unquestioning official Communist Parties to keep its aggression at bay while the rest of the planet got on with a steady democratic advance, until the capitalist system shrivelled away presumably and a distant socialist future was reached.

The trick worked brilliantly, though the Third World, under the cosh of non-stop imperialist exploitation tyranny imposed by some 400 wars, coups and barbaric interventions, understood rather better than Moscow the need for constant armed struggle and revolt against the reality of imperialist control (an anti-imperialism contradictorily inspired by the revolutionary side of the same Soviet Union and its gigantic Red Army fight in World War Two, virtually single-handedly (90%) defeating imperialism’s last great Nazi onslaught).

But while the grossly exploited world majority made substantial anti-imperialist headway in throwing off the crudest forms of direct colonialism after 1945, (only to be replaced with financial neo-colonialism) and in significant cases pushed on with violent revolution to establish full-on workers states, (in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba etc) its heroic struggles never quite climbed to the theoretical levels of advanced Leninism needed to overcome the deepening Soviet philosophical retreat and its overall stifling effects (despite much aid and assistance provided by the USSR).

That bureaucratic and complacent decline eventually went so far that it tipped into counter-revolution under Gorbachev, seeing the liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat which had kept the Soviet Union’s giant achievements still growing until the late 1980s.

Far from releasing the world’s entrepreneurial potential, producing Golden Uplands and the “end of history”, the story of “globalised” expansion has been one of seismic economic shocks from the non-stop crisis inevitable in a profit driven system of private ownership (as Marx analysed in Capital) culminating in the 2000 dotcom implosion and the much greater global credit bank collapse eight years later.

From the credit and currency breakdowns in Latin America in the 1990s and in south-east Asia, (Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia etc), in newly restored Russian gangster capitalism, and in the advanced West itself in fraud and failures (Enron collapse, Long Term Capital Management) to the dot.com implosion, the crisis has been gathering pace, always put off and deferred with yet more inflationary dollar credit (as done from the 1970s after Nixon’s removal of the dollar gold standard) but always returning in credit-inflated multiples for just that reason, dragging in more and more of the world.

Every kind of credit creation trick was used for decades to keep the plates spinning and especially so since 2008, only making the depth and severity of the onrushing crisis that much greater and the “necessary” war solution that much more devastating and deadly.

Imperialism’s only means of surviving this greatest Catastrophic breakdown in all history, is to once more plunge into inter-imperialist conflict and inevitable Third World War exactly as it did three times before, in 1870’s Franco-Prussian War (inter-imperialist conflict in embryo) in the full on Great War and in the far greater destruction of the Second World War.

And WW3 has been underway since the initial 1999 NATO blitzing of tiny Serbia, picked on by a coalition of two dozen Western nations for its residual links to former Yugoslavian socialism as a suitable “warm-up”, extended with Afghanistan and Iraq subsequently, and then into the wider Middle East, into Africa and eventually the war in Ukraine.

Now imperialism is far down the path to allout war as the EPSR alone was warning 21 years ago, (and for two decades before that) with the most demented and foul blaming of “others”.

As explained, the Trumpite abusive excuses are pouring out against all and sundry from the Empire (and every other bourgeoisie), to cover up its own collapse and failure, with an economy hollowed out and incapable because of the parasitism and degeneracy of its ruling class, outcompeted and outclassed for decades by growing rival economies (particularly Japan, Europe, and now China):

[..]the despairing American Empire’s turn to warmongering as the “solution” to an “eternal world of American prosperity rule” which is all now going wrong because of iron economic laws undermining the crap and ignorance and deliberate neglect coming out of the White House for decades now, is eventually to turn militarily on Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and every other international monopoly-commerce force which is clearly the “cause of the American Empire’s problems” – just by being there.

This was EXACTLY how inter-IMPERIALIST World Wars I and II were inflicted, with catastrophic effects, on the planet, – again after much initial zapping of minor powers and much initial skirmishing around the world for the major imperialist powers to warn EACH OTHER about how “tough” they were, about how “determined”, etc and about what “invincible” military powers they had become, etc, etc, etc. But already these beginnings towards WW III are a DISASTER of sorts, – a crucial historical concept to grab hold of (EPSR No1254 26-10-04).

That alone makes any sense at all of this callous and cynical arrogance, a deliberate shift by the US empire ruling class to nastiness, hatred and brute hostility as it is forced to impose its increasingly intolerable world rule by direct force, demanding tribute and investment.

That it must abandon the much more congenial “democracy” racket, and common unified ruling class suppression of the masses with its “allies”, is the greatest weakness yet in monopoly capitalism’s 800 year long history, and the signal of its inevitable historical defeat at the hands of the world’s proletariat who can only be driven into the greatest revolutionary struggles ever seen, if they are to survive war and ecological disaster.

The revolt is seething in a dozen forms of often heroic and self-sacrificing anti-Westernism, especially in the Middle East, all designated “terrorism” and has struck significant blows.

But only the consciously led struggle for a new rational socialist society under working class control, established by class-war civil war to destroy this stinking and brutal bourgeois order for good, can fully end this plunge into chaos.

That is the only possible counter to this disaster, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a party of Marxist-Leninist science, constantly polemically developed and extended.

Never has the need for theoretical clarity been greater, particularly to disentangle the superficial, hypocritical and fraudulent “freedom” demands and “colour revolution” stunts pumped out by Western psyops to mislead the world, masquerading as part of the real tide of hostility and anti-Western-exploitation revolt, spreading everywhere as the great crash of the capitalist system deepens inexorably.

But the world is yet denied this obvious revolutionary leadership, thanks to the still continuing influence of brain-dead revisionism and its poisonous alleged “antidote”, biliously anti-communist Trotskyism.

For all their bragging about “revolution” and declarations of the “need for communism”, no clarity is emerging from these 101 varieties of fake-“leftism” who still tie the working class back to reformist demands, social-pacifism and “democracy” illusions, not least by poisoning all understanding of the giant achievements made by the Soviet Union and following workers states in the first great historical moves towards mankind’s only possible future, rational communist society.

One current way they are avoiding the question is by endless pointless disputes about whether or not Donald Trump can be called a “fascist” or not.

But all such arguments from Guardian-style liberal scribblers to the treacherous anti-communism of the Trots and revisionists alike are academic evasions, dancing around formalised and mechanical “definitions” which never spell out the real issue, namely the degeneration of the whole capitalist system into a depraved warmongering morass, because they want to avoid the obvious revolutionary conclusion.

Of course Trump is fascist but then so is the entire imperialist system now plunging into the greatest economic collapse and warmongering chaos seen in all history as its ruling classes everywhere writhe and squirm, to escape the great unfolding capitalist Catastrophe. To cite past EPSR Perspectives (2002):

The essence of all ‘fascist’ repressive reaction in a crisis is to cow the working class to make it bear (in unemployment and poverty, etc) the burdens of the economic crisis; to divide the working class tribally to make them more easily pacified and less capable of organising a revolution; and to divert the working class and petty bourgeoisie into ‘patriotic’ war-chauvinist channels by playing on the ‘national interest’ in xenophobic conflict with ‘foreign’ enemies of one kind or another.

In every international economic crisis in history, every single capitalist state has always gone down this repressive reactionary route.

Only in very rare special circumstances has a named specific fascist party had to be put into office in order to achieve the basic task in every crisis-situation, namely, the survival of the capitalist-bourgeois system despite the cataclysmic horrors of slump, reaction, war, and destruction it has led a country into (EPSR No 1118 07-01-02).

Nor, necessarily, does it have much to do with the theatrical forms, or particular types of street fighting or various other characteristics cited the by fake-“left” groups’ pettifogging evasions.

As a matter of fact all kinds of “symptoms” are appearing as fearful petty bourgeois opinion is pointing out:

Do you like being shackled and strip-searched? Anyone who isn’t into that sort of thing may want to avoid a holiday to the US at the moment. Although I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. Unless you’ve been hiding under a news-blocking rock (in which case: what’s the address? And can I join you?), you’ll have noticed that Donald Trump’s America hasn’t exactly been rolling out the red carpet for visitors. There have been a number of recent incidents where white westerners – people who aren’t normally targeted by overzealous US immigration authorities – have been detained, deported or denied entry for obscure reasons.

Take the 28-year-old Welsh artist Rebecca Burke, for example. She was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) for 19 days in what her father described as “horrendous conditions”. Now, to be fair, Burke had the wrong paperwork: she hadn’t realised that she needed a working visa instead of a tourist visa in order to exchange domestic chores for accommodation with a host family. But getting imprisoned for almost three weeks over a mix-up and then being led on to a deportation flight – in chains! – back to a country that is supposedly a close ally, is obviously extreme. A Canadian woman also made headlines after being detained by Ice for two weeks when immigration enforcement officers flagged her visa application paperwork. And two German tourists were similarly held for almost two weeks in a detention centre.

In response, some countries have beefed up their advice about travel to the US. Last week, Germany updated its US travel advisory to emphasise that a visa or entry waiver does not guarantee entry. [].

Forget being careful about following the rules – just don’t come here. Why spend your money in the US, which is threatening to annex its neighbours and rapidly descending into authoritarianism? I don’t say any of that lightly, to be clear. The US government is not synonymous with the American people. The majority of those didn’t actually vote for Trump: only about 32% of eligible voters cast a ballot for him.

If I (a British-Palestinian with a US green card) wasn’t based in Philadelphia already, I absolutely wouldn’t be thinking about travelling stateside right now.

I’ll tell you what I am thinking about a lot at the moment, however: whether it’s wise for me to do any sort of travel that involves interaction with US border authorities. I thought I’d finally be able to stop worrying about my US immigration status. Now, of course, as the high-profile detention of Mahmoud Khalil over his pro-Palestine activism shows, not even permanent residents are secure. Particularly if (like me) you have publicly expressed “controversial” ideas such as: Palestinians are human beings; Israel shouldn’t be allowed to kill children with impunity; and Americans should be outraged that their taxpayer dollars are being used to fund a genocide.

But not even keeping quiet about Palestine will protect you. Fabian Schmidt, a German green card holder, was recently detained and “violently interrogated” by US border officials – who reportedly forced him to strip and take a cold shower – for reasons that aren’t clear. Heck, you’re not even safe if you’re an American citizen. Trump recently threatened to send anti-Tesla protesters to a notorious prison in El Salvador. I used to joke about getting deported, but it’s not really something to laugh about any more – it’s something to have an emergency plan for.

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Trump’s breach of the justice department’s traditional independence last week was neither shocking nor surprising. His speech quickly faded from the fast and furious news cycle. But future historians may regard it as a milestone on a road leading the world’s oldest continuous democracy to a once unthinkable destination.

Eviscerating the federal government and subjugating Congress; defying court orders and delegitimising judges; deporting immigrants and arresting protesters without due process; chilling free speech at universities and cultural institutions; cowing news outlets with divide-and-rule. Add a rightwing media ecosystem manufacturing consent and obeyance in advance, along with a weak and divided opposition offering feeble resistance. Join all the dots, critics say, and America is sleepwalking into authoritarianism.

“These are flashing red lights here,” Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director turned Trump critic. “We are approaching Defcon 1 for our democracy and a lot of people in the media and the opposition leadership don’t seem to be communicating that to the American people. That is the biggest danger of the moment we’re in now: the normalisation of it.”

Much was said and written by journalists and Democrats during last year’s election campaign arguing that Trump, who instigated a coup against the US government on 6 January 2021, could endanger America’s 240-year experiment with democracy if he returned to power. In a TV interview, he had promised to be “dictator” but only on “day one”. Sixty days in, the only question is whether the warnings went far enough.

The 45th and 47th president has wasted no time in launching a concerted effort to consolidate executive power, undermine checks and balances and challenge established legal and institutional norms. And he is making no secret of his strongman ambitions.

Trump, 78, has declared “We are the federal law” and posted a social media image of himself wearing a crown with the words “Long live the king”. He also channeled Napoleon with the words: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And JD Vance has stated that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”.

Trump quickly pardoned those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, placed loyalists in key positions within the FBI and military and purged the justice department, which also suffered resignations in response to the dismissal of corruption charges against the New York mayor Eric Adams after his cooperation on hardline immigration measures.

The president now has the courts in his sights. Last weekend, the White House defied a judge’s verbal order blocking it from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime, to justify the deportation of 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador, where they will be held in a 40,000-person megaprison.

Trump accused James Boasberg, the chief district judge in Washington who made the ruling, of being “crooked”, said he should be “impeached” and labelled him a “radical left lunatic of a judge”. The outburst prompted John Roberts, the chief justice of the supreme court, to deliver a rare rebuke of the president, emphasising that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision”.

In an interview on the conservative Fox News network, Trump denied defying a court order and said he would not do so in future. But he added ominously: “We have very bad judges and these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed. I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge?”

David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W Bush, posted on the X social media platform: “Almost every major Trump action is intentionally illegal. Trump is gambling that the US democratic system is too broken to stop him. He assumes, to borrow a phrase: ‘All we’ve got to do is kick the door in and the whole edifice will come crumbling down.’ Testing hour is here.”

The White House has yet to release the names of the deported Venezuelans or proof that they were indeed criminal gang members. In another recent incident, it sent 40 undocumented immigrants to the notorious detention facility at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, only for a judge to intervene and force their return to the mainland.

And in what way are the ever more disgusting depravities of the Zionists’ monstrous onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank, with deliberately vicious war crimes butchery, population starvation and water deprivation besiegement, bombing, drone assassination and sniper shooting murder and massacre, gleefully imposed torture on civilians, doctors and arbitrarily detained civilians, not symptoms and characteristics of fascism???

An Israeli bombing of a school turned shelter in Gaza City has killed at least 27 people, rescuers said, and hundreds of thousands in the Rafah area are fleeing in one of the biggest mass displacements of the war amid Israel’s newly announced campaign to “divide up” the Gaza Strip.

Three missiles hit Dar al-Arqam school in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood on Thursday afternoon, the civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal said, killing several children and wounding 100 people.

The building was being used as a shelter for Palestinians displaced from their homes. In a statement, the Israeli military said it had taken precautions to avoid civilian casualties in the bombing of what it described as a control centre for the militant group Hamas.

Another 20 people were killed in a dawn airstrike on the Shejaia suburb of Gaza City, bringing the total number of casualties reported by the local health ministry to 97 in the past 24 hours.

The intense wave of Israeli bombing comes amid a major expansion of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) aerial and ground operations in the besieged Palestinian territory following Israel’s decision to abandon a two-month-old ceasefire two weeks ago.

The Israeli military said on Thursday it had struck more than 600 “terror targets” across the strip since resuming large-scale airstrikes on 18 March. Gaza’s health ministry, which the UN relies on for casualty data, says 1,163 people have been killed in bombings since the ceasefire collapsed.

This “objective” parroting of the Zionist military lies for a year and a half is even sicker in the light of the latest outright exposed atrocity lies, yet still the mealy-mouthed cover-up obfuscations about “errors and mistakes” go on from the colluding and craven Western media:

Israel’s military has backtracked on its account of the killing of 15 Palestinian medics in Gaza last month after footage contradicted its claims that their vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire.

The military said initially it opened fire because the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” on nearby troops without headlights or emergency signals. An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations late on Saturday, said that account was “mistaken”.

The almost seven-minute video, which the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Saturday was recovered from the phone of Rifat Radwan, one of the men killed, appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle. It shows a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.

The vehicle stops beside another that has driven off the road. Two men get out to examine the stopped vehicle, then gunfire erupts before the screen goes black.

Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including at least one UN employee, were killed in the incident in Rafah on 23 March, in which the UN said Israeli forces shot the men “one by one” and then buried them in a mass grave.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the incident was still under investigation. It added: “All claims, including the documentation circulated about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation.”

The official said the initial report received from the field did not describe lights but that investigators were looking at “operational information” and were trying to understand whether this was due to an error by the person making the initial report.

Does not culpability lie not only with the inhuman Jewish instigators and perpetrators (of the entire 18 month genocide) but with the entire imperialist system which pays for, arms and aids the whole unspeakable horror and has done so not only during the duration of this laughably designated “war” but since the very foundation of “Israel” by the arrogant declarations of the US dominated United Nations stoogery in 1947-8 and the non-stop terrorising that has gone on ever since ????,

And does it not lie as much with Trump as the rest of imperialism’s ruling class, whose first term presidency deliberately inflamed and escalated the fanaticism of the Zionist reaction, approving and urging on its illegal and internationally criminal annexations, while ignoring, or rather dismissing with contempt the rights, let alone aspirations, of the Palestinian people???????

All the fake-“left” fascism definitions and categorisations, avoid the central question, that of the class war made more obviously necessary by the turn to openly violent dictatorship suppression of all protest and revolt by the ruling class.

They disarm the working class by keeping it tied back to parliament and “peaceful protest”.

And this applies to both sides of the argument, those who say the Trumpite world is fascist and those who variously deny that it yet fits their mechanical “definitions”.

If this is “not yet fascism” then the same old reformist and left pressure politics can be pursued must be the conclusion, just as for the last 150 years of failed class collaboration, pretending that permanent and steady advances can be made for the working class through “democratic paths” (if “properly done” it is implied).

If it is “Fascism”, the same conclusion is reached by another path – that it constitutes something different to “normal” capitalism and therefore there must a battle to “restore democracy”.

Both “democratic path” sides are founded in the idiot postwar notion of good and bad (“aggressive and non-aggressive”) imperialisms deludely advanced by Stalin after the staggering defeat of the Hitlerite Nazi onslaught, for which a very temporary alliance had been made with Britain, America and France.

But those powers’ “anti-fascism” was nothing but the most cynical posing out of necessity in the desperate inter-imperialist conflict of the last great crisis collapse, when these older imperialists faced obliteration by the rising of Germany and Japan and were forced to side with the Soviet Union to survive (which cleverly had allied first with Berlin, turning the inevitable German attack westwards to begin with, forcing the hand of the British etc who through the 1930s had been egging on Hitlerism to take on Russia).

Not so cleverly, Moscow later wrongly concluded there was some fundamental difference between the imperialists, which it could count on for “peaceful coexistence” class collaborating progress from then on, tragically disarming the world working class despite witnessing the immediate encirclement of the USSR with a deadly Cold War nuclear threat, and non-stop barbaric brutality and vicious atrocities across the rest of the world.

All imperialism is utterly barbaric and the older powers worst of all.

Endless coups and wars were imposed by these same “good” imperialists from the millions strong slaughter in Korea and Vietnam, to the 1 to 2 million butchery of Sukarno’s Indonesian communist and anti-imperialist movement by CIA/MI6 informed Suharto fascism, (and subsequent genocidal war in East Timor);the torture and killing coup against Salvador Allende in Chile (equally deluded by peaceful path notions); and dozens of other massacres and fascist stoogeries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

There was no essential line to be drawn at all between “fascism” and “democratic” imperialism as the record for the Soviet Union’s “allies” demonstrates, both pre-WW2 and afterwards, all historically far outpacing even the gross systematic holocaust horrors of the Nazis who never succeeded in wiping out whole peoples (Jews, Gypsies etc), as did happen to various extents in the Americas, in Asia, in Australia and throughout Africa to dozens of different peoples and their cultures at the hand of the British, French, Spanish, Belgians, Dutch etc etc.

And there is no boundary now.

Among the fascism deniers currently is the Trotskyite group Socialist Appeal which made a virtue out of expulsion by the Starmerites after decades lurking in the Labour Party (propping up its reformist reaction even through the Blair period) and now rebranding itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party and posturing loudly and mightily as a bold new anti-capitalist leadership, concentrating particularly on the “youth” and students, but in practice heading-off rising anti-imperialist sentiment with the philistine but poisonous anti-communism it specialises in.

Their recent shallow “analysis” of Donald Trump proves the point, not only denying the obvious fascist reality of a lurch into poisonous racist chauvinism and international trade war belligerence, while mocking the dismay of petty bourgeois liberal opinion whose illusions in the post-war “rules based” order are being usefully ripped apart, but essentially siding with Trump against the Bidenites despite formally stating that “of course, he only serves the interest of his own class.”

It starts with an astonishing downplaying of the Trump agenda, who is apparently “merely” trying to return to the early twentieth century of a “vibrant young America” and not all as repressively as the Democrats:

How does this (Bidenism) compare with the ideology and content of the Trump phenomenon? We have already had the experience of one Trump government, which – according to the dire warnings of the Democrats and the entire liberal establishment – would proceed to abolish democracy. It did no such thing.

No major steps were taken to limit the right to strike and demonstrate, still less to abolish free trade unions. Elections were held as usual, and finally, although amidst a general uproar, Trump was succeeded by Joe Biden in an election. Say what you like about the first Trump government, but it bore no relation whatsoever to any kind of fascism.

The main assault against democracy was in fact led by Biden and the Democrats, who went to extraordinary lengths to persecute Donald Trump, mobilising the entire judiciary to drag him before the courts on innumerable charges, intended to indict him at all costs, place him safely behind bars, and thus prevent him from standing again for the presidency.

The entire media was mobilised in a vicious and consistent campaign of vilification and character assassination, which eventually created a climate in which at least two attempts were made on his life. Only by a fluke did he escape actual assassination (although he typically attributed it to protection by the Almighty).

The ideology of Trumpism – insofar as it exists – is very far from fascism. Far from desiring a strong state, Donald Trump’s ideal is that of free market capitalism, in which the state plays little or no role at all.

His programme represents an attempt to return to the policies of Roosevelt to an imaginary America that existed before the First World War – an America where business thrived and profits boomed, where free enterprise thrived and the state left it alone, where America felt free to exercise its young and powerful muscles in order to exert its dominance over Mexico, Panama and the whole Western Hemisphere, driving the decrepit Spanish colonialism out of Cuba, in order to turn it into an American colony instead.

The age of Teddy Roosevelt was a time when capitalism had not yet completely exhausted its potential as a progressive economic system. Whatever one might think of this, it is a model that has very little to do with fascism. And this enticing view of history lacks any real substance or relevance to the world of the 21st century.

“No relation to fascism” takes the biscuit for disarming gobshyte as the above quotes spell out (and much else).

As for “no repressive measures”, there was a stirring of near civil war at the time of the Black Lives Matter mass protests. As a later bourgeois account recalls

On June 4, 2020, as peaceful racial justice protesters were at Lafayette Square Park outside the White House protesting the killing of George Floyd and demanding greater accountability for our nation’s law enforcement personnel, they were assaulted with tear gas, rubber bullets, clubs and shields to clear the way for a photo-op for former President Trump.

And now:

This week, government workers near the White House, on two blocks lined with luxury hotels and union headquarters, used a jackhammer and a pickax to tear up a mural that read “Black Lives Matter,” painted on the road during the long hot summer of 2020.

The symbolism was potent.

The erasure of the bold yellow letters of Black Lives Matter Plaza, installed on 16th Street after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, was a concession from Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, who faced threats from congressional Republicans to cut off federal funds to the capital city if the words were not removed. But to Black Americans grappling with a fierce resurgence of forces that they believe are beating back the causes of social justice and civil rights, it felt like much more.

As far as Roosevelt goes, it was precisely at the beginning of the twentieth century, that “progressive” capitalism became monopoly capitalist imperialism as Lenin spells out in Imperialism; the highest stage of capitalism, and was the point at which its policy necessarily turned to bloody domination and repression as its main character, including the US.

Extending this complacency further the RCP then virtually champions Trump as an upholder of democracy, hard done by the “establishment” (as if his own billionaire crew were not the “elite” as well, just a different wing of it with different notions of how to pursue the Empire’s crisis interests).

Of course the Bidenites were up to the neck in conspiracy and misuse of the state forces, from prosecutors to multiple intelligence agencies – a dirty dealing which underlines the scale and extent of the splits in the whole ruling class and its contempt for “democracy”.

But the significance of that is as a sign of weakness of the whole Empire – not as an “assault against democracy” the very notion of which is a giveaway of this petty bourgeois world view.

What “democracy” are these frauds talking about???

With typical Trotskyite defeatism the RCP sees only an imperialism which is still in charge:

But to imagine that the class struggle has reached the critical stage, where the rule of capital is threatened with immediate overthrow and the only solution for the ruling class is to hand power over to a Bonapartist regime is pure fantasy. We have not yet reached that stage, or anything like it.

Of course, it is possible to point to this or that element in the present situation that can be said to be an element of Bonapartism. That may be so. But similar comments could be made of almost any recent bourgeois democratic regime.

In ‘democratic’ Britain under Tony Blair, power passed in practice from the elected parliament to the Cabinet, and from the Cabinet to a tiny clique of unelected officials, cronies and spin doctors. There were undoubtedly elements of what might be called a regime of parliamentary Bonapartism.

However, merely to contain certain elements of a phenomenon does not yet signify the actual emergence of that phenomenon as such. One could of course say there are elements of Bonapartism present in Trumpism. Yes, one might say that. But elements do not yet represent a fully developed phenomenon.

Best to wait until workers and proletarians are actually being herded up and put in the concentration camps then – just to be sure, – before preparing any serious revolutionary perspectives?? Guantánamo anyone and its torture cages??

What a staggering travesty of Marxism this is – of course “elements” of things appear first – that is exactly what the dialectical understanding of all phenomena is about, the coming into being and passing away in endless movement, the lack of fixed boundaries and sharp edges, the interpenetration of the old and the new, the intensification of contradiction as the old pushes back on the emerging new until the point is reached where only a leap to a new level is possible – revolution in a word.

And this RCP has the cheek to throw in the odd “philosophical” phrase (not even whole sentences) from Spinoza and Lenin – to try and give a theoretical veneer to its static and disarming gibberish.

There are also whole paragraphs from Trotsky inevitably, (though even that is limited) but no more enlightening, including some ponderous warnings about “lesser evilism” – which essentially restates Lenin’s subtle tactical understanding of the need to focus on the immediate main enemy, as set out at the time of the monarchist reactionary General Kornilov‘s attack in August 1917, against the February revolution’s new bourgeois democracy under Alexander Kerensky, but with less clarity.

The Bolsheviks stood alongside the bourgeois government to head off Kornilov (who was effectively a fascist) but without at all supporting Kerensky, and in fact warning workers of what treachery he embodied, and that they would need to continue the fight against the new “parliament” all the way to proletarian revolution, as soon as the coup attempt was seen off.

Defeat for imperialism’s reactionary interventions without at all declaring support for the anti-Empire forces is a central understanding in multiple situations now, from the NATO-instigated Ukraine war to multiple CIA provoked “colour revolutions” (Georgia, Serbia, Bangladesh, Venezuela) or “lawfare” coups and attempted suppression of “anti-imperialist” electoral candidates (Romania, South Korea), many who hold ultra-right views, saturated in chauvinism and hostile to communism.

Who for example would suggest the neo-fascist racist chauvinist Marie Le Pen should be supported in France? But denouncing, and calling for the defeat of the outrageous legal stitch up which has just been used to block her running in the next presidential elections is an important part of exposing the falsity and treachery of disintegrating bourgeois “democracy”. The crucial perspective to present to workers is of the entire capitalist system being a stinking reactionary mess and all of it needing overturn, Macron first but also Le Pen and every other part which upholds capitalism.

Trotsky’s quoted warning against supporting a seemingly less reactionary bourgeois party as a “lesser evil” does not state that clearly enough; and it gets misused by the RCP anyway.

By denying that Trump is at all fascist it ends up effectively supporting him against the Democrats despite formal caveats:

it is entirely impermissible to identify ourselves with the policies of Trump. That would be a serious mistake.

But it would be a far more serious mistake – in fact it would be a crime – to stand even for one moment with the so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ bourgeois elements whose attacks on Trump are guided entirely from the standpoint of the reactionary bourgeois establishment against which Trump is waging war at the present time.

“Far more” serious, obviously implies that Trump is, er..the lesser evil! And it does so because these “revolutionaries” are still in thrall to bourgeois democracy, declaring it to be “different” to the outright bourgeois dictatorship of their fixed category of “fascism”.

In fact:

as EPSR analysis has consistently demonstrated, fascism itself is not really different from routine imperialist-warmongering aggression and ethnic-racist divisiveness, – the same old divide-and-rule that the imperialist system has lived by since imperialism began (EPSR No 1016 13-10-99).

But the Trots need a fixed boundary. Cross it and real revolutionary struggle is unavoidable, which the last thing these petty bourgeois really want, for all their phrasemongering.

That is why they insist Trump is not fascist. But it leads to some bizarre conclusions, making Trump the champion “waging war on reaction” – even as his White House crew is backing the European bigots like Orban (fresh from hosting genocide perpetrator Binjamin Netanyahu), Italy’s fascist Meloni, and Romania’s Georgescu.

Not only that, he is more “in touch” with workers it seems:

it is no exaggeration to say that it was Donald Trump – a billionaire, right-wing demagogue – who alone claimed to champion the interests of working-class people in his speeches. One might say that he alone was responsible for placing the workers at the centre of American politics once again.

There is no need to tell us that this is mere demagogy, empty rhetoric with no substance. Nor do we need to be informed that Trump says these things for his own purposes, which are inevitably connected to the interests of the class to which he belongs.

That is perfectly clear to us. But that is entirely beside the point. The plain fact is that that was far from clear to the millions of working-class people who voted for Trump in the presidential elections. We neglect this fact at our peril.

It should not be at all difficult to explain our attitude to Trump to any thinking person. It is really very simple. We say:

This billionaire defends the interests of his own class. Anything that he says will ultimately be in his own interest and in the interests of the rich – the bankers and capitalists. It follows as night follows day that those interests can never be the interests of the working class.

However, in order to gain the support of the workers, he will sometimes say things that appear to them to make sense. When he speaks of jobs, employment, falling wages, rising prices, he naturally gets a response.

And it may well be that one or two things he says might be correct. In fact, Trump once admitted that he had taken several ideas from Sanders’ speeches and used them to appeal to the workers.

To be sure, Trump is a reactionary bourgeois politician, but that does not mean that he is exactly the same as any other reactionary bourgeois politician. On the contrary. He’s got his own interpretation of things, his own outlook, policy and strategy, which differ in many fundamental ways with, for instance, the positions of Joe Biden and his clique.

In some respects, his views may seem to coincide, at least to some degree, with our own. For instance, in his attitude to the war in Ukraine, his disbanding of USAID, or his rejection of so-called ‘woke’. That some coincidences can indeed exist between what bourgeois politicians say and what we ourselves think was already explained by Trotsky.

In May 1938, he wrote an article called Learn to Think – A Friendly Suggestion to Certain Ultra-Leftists.

In it, we read the following:

“In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond best to the interests of the proletariat. This rule applies just as much to the war period as to the period of peace.”

Even when Trump says things that are correct, he invariably does so from the standpoint of his own class interests and for reactionary purposes with which we have absolutely nothing in common.

Trump’s class position is “beside the point”, “to be sure he is reactionary ...but”, “not the same as other bourgeois”, what Trump says is only “ultimately” in his own interest???

What giveaway phrasings, on a par with the usual “in the meantime” excuses made by the fake-“left” for putting off revolution in favour of mere reformism.

Despite correctly surrounding Trumpism with these caveats all such warnings end up as empty phrases and verbiage because these Trots are a million miles away from any real revolutionary perspectives, for all their constant sloganising about it.

They end up implying that because Trump cynically rides the back of the disillusionment, sourness and alienated discontent which workers feel in ever degenerating capitalist crisis, that he is actually speaking for the working class to some extent.

But Hitler did exactly the same, – and he too did everything “by the book” within the bourgeois democratic rules, voted into office by the supine idiot faith in parliament which tragically the German CP allowed itself to over emphasise, leaving the working class with illusions in the whole process, arguing about tactics within its framework instead of making all-out class war the focus.

Certainly to get anywhere with mass opinion the Hitlerites were forced to present themselves as having an anti-imperialist, even “socialist” agenda and necessarily made valid propaganda points on the crisis to do so.

So too now does Trumpism and in various ways the anti-EU reactionaries in East Europe.

To be usefully exploited for the working class however such criticisms need to be very strongly embedded in a genuine Marxist framework.

That does not come from the cod mathematics presented by Trotsky, who from early on, even before Lenin’s death was putting the biggest of all minus signs where there should be a positive; namely in front of the Soviet Union and ever more strongly so, particularly by May 1938 when the main thrust of his writing was to treacherously denounce the USSR workers state as irredeemably “counter-revolutionary” and if anything slightly more reactionary than Nazi Germany itself, with an alleged new ruling class under Stalin (dishonestly only called a “caste” because he knew that there were no new property relations in the Soviet Union to back that up) having become essentially part of the international war drive (see EPSR 1094 19-06-01).

From then on just when the world working class most needed to show its solidarity with Moscow it was being poisoned with writings like Stalin:Hitler’s Quartermaster and Stalin-Hitler Twin Stars, encouraging hatred and hostility against the great planned socialist state, misleading it for the world struggle against the greatest and most monstrous ruling class onslaught in history.

And it was thereby being held back from understanding just how great a revolutionary triumph the Soviet state attained, at least on a par with the 1917 revolution itself and, by virtue of non-stop Trotskyist anti-Sovietism ever since declaring everything to be rotten, from understanding what was good in Moscow’s leadership and what was stupid, weak or wrong.

But the RCP’s post-war Trotskyism is even more poisonous than Trotsky himself (See EPSR Books Vol 5, 29 and 30 on Trotsky), and not about to confront workers with any such serious politics – let alone the need to establish revolutionary workers states as the only answer to the great crisis:

it is necessary to take (workers) as they are – not as we would like them to be. In order to enter into a dialogue with the workers, we must begin with the existing level of consciousness. Any other approach is merely a recipe for sterility and impotence.

If we wish to engage in a meaningful conversation with a worker who has illusions in Trump, we cannot begin with shrill denunciations or accusations of fascism and the like. By patiently listening to the arguments of these workers, we can base ourselves on many things that we agree with, and then, using skilful arguments, gradually introduce doubts as to whether the interests of the working class can really be defended by a wealthy billionaire businessman.

Of course, at this stage, our arguments will not necessarily succeed. The working class in general does not learn from debates but only through their own experience. And the experience of a Trump government will prove to be a very painful learning curve.

Therefore, when we speak to workers who support Trump, we should have a friendly approach and agree with the things which we can agree with, then skilfully point out the limitations of Trumpism and make a case for socialism. The contradictions will eventually come to the surface. However, despite this, the illusions in Trump will persist for a time.

Nothing will be achieved by adopting a belligerent and hostile attitude to the many honest workers who, for absolutely understandable reasons, have rallied to the banner of Trump. Such an approach is both sterile and counter-productive, and will lead nowhere.

“Shrill” or otherwise, exposure of capitalist fascism (or just normal capitalist depravity in fact) would immediately demand a serious call for building a revolutionary movement, not the empty phrasemongering of these mountebanks whose sole aim is to mislead.

But this tailending excuse-mongering is the very opposite of Bolshevism, as fought for by Lenin in his work What is to be done? explaining that what the working class needs in every struggle is to have their understanding lifted to the highest theoretical and political level.

Of course this means a battle to overcome backward or limited understanding (but nothing like as limited as the patronising fake-“left” assert, constantly telling workers “how to picket” etc) and the revolutionary party will always have to work in unity and conflict with the working class to do so.

Additionally the very lifeblood of revolutionary understanding is the constant struggle to update, to correct and to advance theory – primarily within the party itself, specifically set up as an instrument for the needed theoretical polemics (see EPSR Books 1 and 2 on Party Building) – but always in front of the working class, and including interaction with advanced workers.

It is nonsensical to suggest that this necessarily means “adopting a belligerent and hostile attitude” – in fact the greater the grasp and theoretical depth achieved by cadres, and crucially the more correct is their party’s understanding and analysis of the very latest objective balance of class forces and world developments, the more calmly and confidently such struggle for understanding can be pursued with workers at any level, patiently explaining.

That is a profound task of education and theoretical struggle which goes far beyond the shallow shouting of “revolution” on university campuses, (or contextless “occupy now” slogans for isolated actions at Scunthorpe etc).

But the tailend Trots just leave workers to come to their own conclusions, inviting deadly consequences:

Trump has aroused enormous expectations and hopes among millions of people who were without all hope before. Such illusions are deep-rooted and powerful enough to withstand a whole series of shocks and temporary disappointments.

It will take time for the hypnotic spell of Trump’s demagogy to dissipate. But sooner or later, the disillusionment will set in, and the longer it takes for the workers to understand that their class interests are not represented, the more violent the reaction will be.

Donald Trump is now quite old and even if he succeeds in dodging an assassin’s bullet, nature must sooner or later impose its iron laws. In any event, he is unlikely to stand again for president – even if the rules could be changed to allow it.

It is impossible to imagine Trumpism without the person of Donald J Trump. It is precisely the power of his personality, his undoubted skill as a mass leader and master demagogue, that is the glue that holds his heterogeneous movement together. Without it, the inner contradictions that exist within it will inevitably come to the surface, bringing about internal crises and fractures in the leadership.

J.D. Vance seems the most likely successor of Donald Trump, but he lacks the immense authority and charisma of his leader. He is, however, an intelligent man who may well evolve in all kinds of directions on the basis of events. It is impossible to predict the result.

There is a well-known law of mechanics that states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Donald Trump is a master of hyperbole. His demagogic utterances know no bounds. Everything he promises is marvellous, tremendous, wonderful, enormous, and so on. And the degree of disappointment, when it finally comes, would be correspondingly enormous.

At a certain point, his movement will begin to fracture along class lines. As the workers begin to desert him, the crazed petty bourgeois elements will probably coalesce in what will be the embryo of a new and genuinely fascist or Bonapartist organisation.

Out of the chaotic situation, the movement in the direction of a third party will become irresistible. By its very nature, it will be a confused affair – not necessarily with a left-wing or even particularly progressive programme in the first instance. But events will have a logic of their own.

Many workers, having burnt their fingers with Trump’s experiment, will be looking for an alternative banner that will more accurately reflect their anger and deep-seated hatred of the rich and the establishment, which is merely an immature reflection of their instinctive hostility to the capitalist system itself. This will push them sharply to the left.

It is not at all far-fetched to foresee that some of the boldest, most dedicated and self-sacrificing militants of the future communist movement in America will consist precisely of workers who have passed through the school of Trumpism and drawn the correct conclusions from it. There have been many precedents for such developments in the past, as we have seen.

Such spontaneous working class disillusion has been tragically relied upon before in history, ironically by the very Stalinists these Trot frauds always like to claim they are “saving” the working class from, namely in the early 1930s when the German CP used the “after Hitler our turn” slogan, assuming Nazi chaos would swing things the other way.

But its obvious fatal flaw was that such an opportunity never came for the working class, disarmed by such class collaborative parliamentary perspectives, limiting their struggle to “voting” and Redshirt street conflict “pressure”, when only taking a shot at complete revolution – however uncertain in a reactionary period – would have given any chance at all of staying out of the concentration camps, and would have developed vital conscious experience even if unsuccessful, exposing the Nazi’s capitalist reality to those workers taken in by its “national socialist” slogans.

As for the idea Trumpism cannot last because he might die soon, this is pure subjectivism, the hallmark of Trotskyism, declaring that history is made by men’s wills (with obviously the conceited Trotsky himself in charge).

“If only someone had shot Hitler...” says this idealism, then there would have been no Second World War.

It is a million miles from Marxist objective analysis where human consciousness, including class consciousness, is formed by the material conditions, and the overall direction of history is set by ten thousand complex factors and contradictions which would be at best marginally affected by specific personalities, however charismatic.

That does not at all eliminate the need for revolutionary consciousness or leadership one iota – identifying and articulating the unfolding class struggle is essential for the mass struggle.

And to get a correct perspective needs the deepest understanding that can be built, requiring a giant debate in society to re-examine all the great developments now and in their historical origins and movement.

Most particularly the enormous impact and influence of the Russian Revolution needs to be assessed, its virtual repeat in the 1941-45 Red Army defeat of Nazism, and the staggering achievements of the Soviet Union workers state over its 73 year long existence, as well as the reasons for its eventual demise, not through “collapsing” (it was still growing and moving forwards all the way up to Gorbachev’s liquidation, including under Stalin and the post-Stalin bureaucracy from Khrushchev on despite degenerating revisionist perspectives) but through philosophical retreat turning to counter-revolution in the mid-1980s.

That and much else (the rise of China’s workers state eg) is slid past by the revisionists and Trots alike who hate the dictatorship of the proletariat conclusions it all leads to.

So while struggle with the working class can be as patient as possible there will and must always be constant theoretical antagonism and conflict against the baleful influence of all the petty bourgeois fake-“left” groups like the RCP itself, exposing which is a key part of the overall fight for Leninism.

Their real purpose is not simply to leave workers unchallenged – bad enough – but to smuggle in the most poisonous anti-communism in their world view, dressed up as revolution (see EPSR Books op cit).

With typical slyness, the recent Meaning of Trump piece quoted here mainly does that by omission, using its denial of fascism (via a wooden undialectical tick-list of fixed characteristics preposterously and deliberately misrepresented as “scientific” Marxism) to lull minds and lead workers away from grasping the profound depth of the crisis and the urgency of the struggle they face.

It relies on other articles for the usual bilious Trot lies about the former Soviet Union as an “endless nightmare of bureaucratic control etc etc” and Stalinism as “deliberately counter-revolutionary”, along with confusing and philistine rubbish that China, the US and Russia be equated as “major imperialist powers”.

But the first is a workers state (making use of a capitalist economic sector of its economy, but under its overall control); the second the overwhelmingly largest concentration of monopoly imperialist reaction on the planet, and the last a complex restoration of oligarch capitalist imperialism, but with a still not-yet-extinct legacy of communist sentiment which delivers major votes for the Russian communist parties despite Putinite domination and manipulation of the media and electoral process.

This commingling of the descriptions of very different regimes reflects a complete absence of any class grasp at all – born of the middle class capitulation to imperialist “democracy” pretences and the bogus notion that there is some “freedom” which stands in opposition to “authoritarianism”.

But the question is always “what class is imposing its will”?

China is clearly a workers state which imposes the will of the proletariat (whatever criticism might be made about how well it is doing that or of revisionist mistakes, or illusions, in how it does it).

That is the complete opposite to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the West.

It is only by such working class “authoritarianism” that bourgeois dictatorship will ever be overcome which is why the West hates it so much and still tries to muddy the water with its “democracy” pretences, even as it is tearing them up.

The Trots go along with this because they fear and detest the necessary class war firmness and discipline their petty bourgeois lives would be subject too in a workers state and particularly when the brute force of its dictatorship must be applied against subversion, sabotage and disruption.

So much do they hate the idea that a completely gratuitous swipe is felt necessary against the current Putin regime, which despite the previous strictures against characterising things as “Bonapartist” – “only a few elements” but “not that stage yet” if considering Trump or Blair – is declared to be just that.

And the watertight evidence? No more than subjective “belief”!

While it is true that the use of accurate historical analogies can sometimes provide clarification, it is equally true that the thoughtless and mechanical juxtaposition of essentially different phenomena is a sure recipe for confusion.

For example, I believe that it would be quite correct and apposite to describe the Putin regime in Russia as a bourgeois Bonapartist regime. That’s an example of a helpful analogy. But in the case of Trump, it’s more complicated than that.

The problem is that Bonapartism is a very elastic term.

Not so much “elastic” as complete gibberish cover up.

Now, there is good reason to suggest Putinism is Bonapartist but not on the cod-scientific basis presented here where “Bonapartism” is misdefined as “rule by the sword” and used as a synonym for fascism – both wrongly.

Bonapartism has a much wider meaning, usually understood as the state (bodies of armed men and associated legal and enforcement mechanisms like judges and prisons etc) acquiring temporary ascendancy over society because the dominance of one class has been brought to an impasse by the rising, and now equal, or near equal, power of a previously suppressed class.

In the balancing moment when neither can dominate, the state alone, at the pivot point, is all that can act on society, acquiring a magnified apparently independent capacity to make decisions for a temporary period (shorter or longer depending on concrete conditions) which is far more than just “rule by force”.

So it was with the absolute monarchs (the Sun King, the Tudors) when the new bourgeoisie countered the old landed aristocracy, and notably in mid-19th century France when Louis Napoleon seized power, not by the sword but by plebiscite, during the struggle of the new working class, challenging but unable to overturn the already declining bourgeoisie at a moment of crisis, as Marx spelled out (for the first time) in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

But as already shown, fascist suppression means essentially the open expression of the bourgeois dictatorship using violence to whatever extent judged to be required – and is much broader and varied than just through such specific mechanisms, and mostly carried out directly by the ruling class itself.

Certainly the Bonapartist description could be applied to Mussolini in Italy and Hitler’s Nazi movement in 1930s Germany where repeated (unsuccessful) revolutionary assaults on capitalism by the working class had left the Depression crisis-wracked Weimar bourgeois democracy paralysed and the bourgeoisie did acquiescently stand to one side.

But it is not a necessary condition – and vice versa, Bonapartism does not equate to fascism as generally understood or presented by these Trots.

Bonapartist Putin’s Russia balances uneasily between the gangster-oligarchs of re-established monopoly capitalism and still significant mass working class nostalgic sentiment for the seven decades long Soviet state and its huge achievements.

But the Trots cannot understand that at all because their sour petty bourgeois view of the Soviet Union wrote it off as “overtaken by bureaucratic counter-revolution” at some never quite pinned-down point in the 1920s (vague, because it never really happened) which means they cannot see the communist legacy at all, and only advance a crude caricature of “Bonapartism”.

If fact with noses trained by decades of petty bourgeois anti-communism they do detect a whiff of working class potential movement, enough to instinctively “believe” Putinism is bonapartist, meaning in their definition, fascist, a hostility which goes all the way back to their anti-Sovietism.

That in turn is then used to bolster their cowardly evasions on the Ukraine war, where like most of the fake-“left” they adopted the “No to War” line of condemning all sides of the conflict as “imperialists” (blaming the Russians for invading but NATO for provoking the war).

That goes with a crude mis-application of Lenin’s World War One understanding, which calls for defeat for all the imperialist powers and for each working class to “turn the war into a civil war” against its own ruling class, making it into a revolutionary overturn.

Instead of calling for defeat for NATO, and its Ukrainian stoogery, as that would imply for those on the Western side, they wash their hands of the whole thing effectively by quoting Karl Liebknecht’s World War comment in Germany that the “main enemy is at home” (i.e. correctly following Lenin in calling for defeat of the German side in his case and revolutionary war on its ruling class), but reinterpreted to mean “and therefore Ukraine is not our business”.

Some “advice” is given to the workers in Ukraine and Russia to take up the domestic struggle against their own rulers but the Trots are not about to get involved here.

This cowardly evasion, bolstered with sophistic distortions of Lenin would be bad enough were the different sides in the war to be remotely comparable; it is even worse when examined concretely in all its aspects.

Then it can be seen that “defeat for all sides” is not even the correct understanding.

The situation is much more about defeat for the main enemy, as with Kornilov. So during imperialist attacks on bourgeois nationalism like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, on Afghanistan, on the generals in Myanmar and more, Marxism calls for defeat for the imperialist forces, standing alongside the various flaky or dubious regimes forced into an anti-imperialist stance by the pressure of their masses but without any support for them i.e. temporarily suspending the struggle to overthrow them until the bigger threat is seen off.

And Putinism?? Certainly it is a bonapartist balancing act serving the interests of the new oligarchs and therefore not simply controlling a bourgeois nationalist power (as some of the fake-“left” mechanically declare, like the Lalkar/Proletarian to justify all out support for Putin) but an imperialist one with Great Russian nationalism exploiting its own multitude of nations like Chechnya as well as Western investments when it can).

But monopoly capitalism has become vastly more concentrated over the last century and US imperialism and its henchmen are out of all proportion to anything else; there is no equivalence with Russia and the call must be for the US Empire’s defeat as the main deadly force and influence on the whole planet.

But as with Saddam etc there can be no illusions in the chauvinist anti-communist Putin regime and its reactionary participation in the overall domination of the imperialist-capitalist order, including brutal suppression of so-called “terrorism” which is to say to the violent struggle of the world’s downtrodden masses, finding whatever means they can to get imperialist domination and tyranny off their backs, however crude or sometimes reactionary their ideology.

The struggle to overturn this Putin restorationism and reestablish communism needs to continue as soon as possible which may be sooner rather than later as the Western war onslaught in Ukraine faces a more and more obvious defeat.

Trumpite America is cutting its losses rather than throw away more good money (which it doesn’t have anyway,) and focusing its aggression on the real rivals, the other imperialists.

Workers need to bring it all down.

Build Leninism.

Alan Moss

 

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