Back issues
No 1475 31st August 2015
World market turmoil confirms Marxist “catastrophist” grasp of unstoppable monopoly capitalist crisis, sole cause of world wide degeneration and collapse into chaos and war. Any “bounceback” temporary, fed by ever more insane Mickey Mouse QE credit “creation” making oncoming cataclysm even worse. Only the total revolutionary overturn of the entire class-based world imperialist exploitation tyranny can now stop rush towards total war destruction, not pacifist “No to War” calls and “refusal to accept” austerity. But crisis now so deep even such tame “left” reformism is panicking the ruling class, fearful that deeper revolutionary debate will be unlocked. Dirty dealings to head off Corbynism simply prove the fraud of “democracy” and make need for Leninist revolutionary theory even more urgent in likely centrist developments. But a thousand issues need sorting out over fake- “left” PC individualist diversions, moralising “condemnation of terror” and cringing before CIA “anti-semitism” lies to head off correct world hatred of Zionist Nazism. Build Leninist science
The roller-coaster Stock Market, panicking petty bourgeois punters worldwide, confirms more deeply the Marxist understanding that capitalism is bankrupt and out-of-time.
And it points up completely the philosophical sterility and failure of the fake-“left” circus and its opportunist hokum saying “no to austerity” and “no to war.”
None of the “left” groups come remotely near dealing with the epochal failure of the capitalist world and its degenerate world warmongering “way out” being imposed via the nonsensical and meaningless “war on terror” and being brought to red-heat again by new “rogue state” demonisations (ISIS, Eritrea, Syria once more, Russia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, North Korea etc) and the astonishingly racist and aggressive fascist tone making the running in the US presidential campaign.
None of them, from the current Corbynite-“old Labour” reformist surge to the great swamp of Trotskyist and Revisionist parties, consistently and insistently warns the working class that there is no end to the warmongering capitalist crisis unless and until the ruling class is defeated, and its degenerate, vile, lying murderous system is brought down by revolution.
But that is exactly what the latest turmoil makes clear.
Far from being “just a blip” the near meltdown is the strongest signal yet that the whole disarming idea of economic “recovery”, Tory Big Lie version, Blairite humbug or “left” reformist “anti-austerity”, is a gigantic fraud.
Capitalism as a system has run into the brick wall of its own contradictions as long ago analysed by Karl Marx (Capital etc), and repeatedly shown in ever greater world slumps and world war destruction for over 100 years.
For as long as its international monopoly exploitation tyranny continues, there is no stopping this plunge into Slump disaster everywhere and the increasing war and destruction “solution” (dressed up as nonsensical “war on terror”) which has already ripped apart half a dozen countries, directly blitzed by Washington and permanently droned and terrorised ever since, or deliberately inflamed into savage scorched earth civil war, killing hundreds of thousands and sending millions into refugee camps and desperate life-and-death migration.
All this is relentlessly heading for far worse and far more widespread disaster, breakdown, and chaos as soon as the global financial cataclysm inexorably returns.
It is due any minute.
Markets may have “bounced” for now but their very jumpiness and contagious panic is the real story.
The ruling class speculators at least are clear about it. They know very well that world finance collapse, building up relentlessly in crisis after crisis over decades (1987 Black Monday, Mexico credit failure, Argentine bankruptcy, Asian currency meltdown, endless Japanese stagnation, Russian bailout, Enron collapse etc) and which finally surfaced in the general world bank implosion of 2008, just continues to unroll.
It is held off from even worse catastrophe only by the insane electronic “printing” of utterly valueless Mickey Mouse dollars, Euros and Yen, under Quantitative Easing, pumping yet more massive inflationary pollution into the already poisoned world finance system, and escalating international currency and trade war, while forcing ever greater Slump savagery onto weaker countries and the working class everywhere.
The speculators know these chickens will soon come home to roost, even as they continue to bet on the markets, desperate to make a last fast buck before the whole edifice collapses.
Each of them is nervously primed to cut and run in a real life game of “dare”, the “winners” hoping to sell-up just before everything goes down, coming away with riches while the “suckers” are bankrupted.
They cannot get off the ride; selling up too early means potentially being wiped out as well, losing out in the fearsome aggressive greed logic of international competitive profit-hunting.
Hence the extreme volatility as markets are bid up higher and higher, their paper values ever more detached from the underlying possibilities for real production and returns on investments.
Those real returns already collapsed long ago as the iron laws of competitive capitalist production for private profit operated to saturate the world with ever more goods and services, all jostling for an ever diminishing pot of purchasing power from the exploited masses, whose total wages eventually cannot afford to buy (at a profit) the much greater value of the commodities their own labour has created (but which is taken from them by the “rules” of private ownership appropriation of “surplus” value in the hire-and-fire wage exploitation system).
When the latest artificial “recovery” does finally disintegrate it will sweep away all pretence about “upturns” which a nervous ruling class has been using to buy time while it makes its counter-revolutionary preparations for the gigantic social upheavals it knows are coming everywhere, on top of the huge “jihadist” and other anti-imperialist rebellions already well underway in the “war on terror” ravished Third World.
Their gut-wrenching fearfulness emerged in some of the bourgeois press last week as the bottom dropped out of Chinese Stock Market, the strength of the Chinese planned economy framework around its use of capitalist methods having ironically been the one prop still keeping things turning over for the hollow rottenness of the world capitalist system.
The Western CIA instruction which went out to astonishingly blame the Chinese for the crisis, turns reality on its head by declaring its planned economy to have “hampered” the “free market”, as much of the bourgeois press and TV have dutifully “analysed”; the truth being that it is the capitalist methodology used to stimulate some of China’s economic development (under overall state direction) that is creating the problems.
The crisis comes from and originates in the capitalist “free market” alone.
Such scapegoating and finger pointing is part and parcel of capitalist crisis, the ruling class whipping up aggression and hatred to distract attention from its own responsibility for the world’s problems, feeding the chauvinism it needs for war, while simultaneously adding the most absurd charge of all against the workers states, on top of its non-stop demonising of communism as usual, now even holding it responsible for the flaws and faults of the very system it must replace (precisely because of its historic and epochal failure after 800 years of rising capitalist power and dominance).
China’s use of capitalism to push forwards its growth from still backward beginnings, and sensibly to trade with the still capitalist dominated world may cause it some problems but its Stock Market is only a small part of the overall planned economy, and it has far more capability to absorb and cope with the difficulties than the monopoly capitalism of the West, as some of the bourgeois press nervously worried. This astonishing gloom and fearfulness was from the reactionary Daily Mail:
Barely six weeks have passed since the Chancellor, George Osborne, delivered his post-election Budget.
His speech was suffused by the most sanguine financial assumptions as he confidently said that he foresaw a virtuous cycle of steady economic growth, low inflation and rising employment...
However, this week’s stock market collapse in China, which has set off a chain reaction in global markets, has made the Chancellor’s rosy assumptions look dangerously complacent.
Indeed, if China’s financial meltdown continues, that summer Budget statement might have to be ripped up.
Instead of rising growth, we could face a vicious economic downturn.
Instead of rising employment, we could have the prospect of a return of mass unemployment on a scale not seen since the Eighties.
(Much worse in fact).
Instead of steady prices, we could risk rampant inflation that will wipe out the savings of millions and make home ownership increasingly out of reach for those not already on the property ladder.
Admittedly, stock market prices rallied yesterday. But that short-term recovery (known in the City as a ‘dead cat bounce’) should not reassure anyone with the FTSE fully 1,000 points off its April peak of 7,100.
If financial crisis turns to economic calamity in China, almost every family in Britain will be affected, some brutally.
Living standards, which have begun to improve marginally after a long period of contraction, will lurch downwards yet again. Many businesses will be thrust into liquidation and the numbers of jobless will surge.
The consequences for the national finances could be truly appalling. For all the Chancellor’s efforts in five years at the Treasury, the national deficit stands at an unmanageable £70 billion. There is a serious risk it could go back over £100 billion.
History’s lessons are menacing. Stock market collapses tend not to be isolated events. Again and again, they presage dire economic developments.
The Wall Street crash of 1929 was the forerunner to ten years of depression in the U.S. and Europe — opening the way not just to mass unemployment, but the rise of fascism and ultimately World War II.
In Britain, the terrible stock market failure of 1974 led to the collapse of the post-war economic settlement (the consensus to maintain full employment as the government cut taxes and boosted state spending to increase economic activity). Labour Chancellor Denis Healey was forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to save the country from bankruptcy.
Stock market disasters are not only portents of economic turbulence, but also of deep political instability.
As for China, can President Xi Jinping survive if the country’s stock market carries on falling? I would not bank on it.
Meanwhile, I fear that the British economic recovery is also very vulnerable to Chinese financial weakness.
... despite all the signs of recovery, our economy is not yet on anything like an even keel after the banking collapse of 2008. Since that year, our national debt has more than doubled to an out-of-control £1.5 trillion.
This is truly terrifying because it means that if British banks were to go to the wall, as they did in 2008, then the State would have neither the means nor capacity to bail them out.
Apart from a handful of superficial reforms, Osborne has managed to achieve little to rein in or restructure the banking sector. Just as in 2008, our banks are fatally ‘too big to fail’.
Thus, the ingredients are in place for another fiscal crisis.
Most worryingly, Osborne has allowed the City of London to return to the deeply flawed system of ‘light touch’ regulation, which helped to cause the 2008 crash.
Our financial institutions have once again been liberated to bet trillions of pounds on assets they cannot value or even understand.
This new lax environment was symbolised five weeks ago with the disgraceful sacking of Britain’s top financial regulator, Martin Wheatley, as the chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority.
...Most troubling, the Cameron government has done little to challenge the failed system of its catastrophic Labour predecessor, which was led by Gordon Brown, who allowed spending and credit to run rampant. George Osborne (who has run up larger deficits by far than Brown managed) has pursued the same policy.
In the short term, this very loose economic policy has helped Britain clamber out of recession. But the amount of growth is shallow. It is based on soaring asset prices, printing extra money (otherwise known as quantitative easing) and other chronically short-term financial expedients.
As a result, our economy is vulnerable to global squalls — whether resulting from terrorism, the collapse of the eurozone or meltdown in China.
Unlike the economies of Australia and Germany, for example, ours is unprepared to deal with global setbacks and disasters.
For all the optimistic talk in recent months, I fear that the British economy is looking over a precipice.
Many financial experts (though sadly not Treasury officials) have been awake to the scale of the problem for some time.
In May, Stephen King, the hugely respected chief economist of HSBC, the world’s third largest bank, sent out a sobering note to clients: ‘We may not know what will cause the next downturn but, at this stage, we can categorically state that, in the event we hit an iceberg, there aren’t enough lifeboats to go round.’
This chilling comparison to an ocean liner without lifeboats did not just apply to Britain, but the global economy as a whole.
He stressed that the world has become far too dependent on debt — estimated to stand at well over £100 trillion, which is more than twice the size of the world economy.
If the stock market frenzy in China does, indeed, mark the end of the long period of world growth that has stormed ahead since the Eighties, then we are collectively in very deep water.
One major beneficiary would be Jeremy Corbyn, if the hard Left MP becomes Labour’s new leader.
But even his socialist solutions could soon look moderate compared to the political extremists who would undoubtedly exploit the collapse.
The world would face an era of unprecedented fear and instability, and Britain would be tossed around by economic forces that politicians could not control.
If the current crisis continues, it will be time for all of us to feel very worried indeed.
Indeed, and far more in the capitalist West than in China, for all the concerns about how far its dire revisionist illusions might have jeopardised its progress.
It remains to be seen what lessons its draws from the exposure of sections of its economy to the crisis – and particularly in recognising the intractability of the contradictions and flaws in capitalism, and the re-emphasising the importance of its state control capabilities via the overall dictatorship of the proletariat.
But the Western propaganda notion that the workers state authority is dependent on “continuing to satisfy the consumerist needs of the population” reflects actually the fears of the Western ruling class for its own survival, once the Slump really begins to bite throughout the West.
From one of the more “left” commentators in the “liberal” but equally reactionary Guardian some similar gloomy conclusions:
For all the finger-wagging hubris of western commentators over the fact that the latest mayhem has erupted in China, this is a global firestorm. And after three decades of deregulation punctuated by financial crises and a systemic meltdown, there is every reason to fear more fallout from casino capitalism.
Financial markets pumped up with credit and quantitative easing to keep the real economy afloat are in any case ripe for a crash – or “correction”, as the market players like to call it. The only question is how far and fast they go – and how great is the price paid by the rest of us.
Paradoxically, Beijing may be better placed than others to ride out this storm. China’s economy is slowing down, as it shifts from export-led growth to consumption. But it’s still growing at 7%, nearly three times as fast as Britain and the US, which are supposed to be the west’s current star performers. Even if China’s figure is overstated, its growth is still at least double the Anglo-American rate: the kind of economic problem the rest of the world would be happy to have.
That follows three decades when Chinese growth averaged 10% a year, delivering the fastest economic development and reduction in poverty in world history – as well as rising inequality and environmental degradation. But China’s stock market is small compared with its western equivalents and relatively insulated from the rest of the economy.
Despite its huge private sector, China is still a hybrid economy, dominated by state banks and publicly owned corporations. That means its financial system is shielded from the impact that a stock market crash on this scale would have in a western-style private banking system.
China rode out the 2008 crash by pumping public investment into the economy, delivering 78% growth between 2007 and 2014, while the US managed 8%. That has left it with a huge debt pile, estimated at 282% of national income, which some now believe will bring China’s economy to a juddering halt.
But that is mostly debt between state-owned institutions, so there is no basis for a speculative Lehmans-type collapse. In fact, some of the problems China is now facing as it tries to bring the stock market crisis under control, such as capital outflow, stem from the liberalisation urged on it by the World Bank and its own home-grown would-be oligarchs.
China’s room for manoeuvre would certainly be much narrower if it had gone for their full deregulation and privatisation package. But the main drag on the Chinese economy isn’t the failings of its own economic model, but stagnation in the rest of the world. Global trade suffered its largest contraction since 2008 in the first six months of this year, partly as a result of the ongoing crisis in the eurozone. Eight years after the financial crisis erupted in the US, its aftershocks are still being felt across the world.
A dysfunctional model of capitalism, built on deregulation, privatisation and low wages, crashed and burned seven years ago. But the fallout from that crisis is still ricocheting around the world, from Europe to the “emerging economies”, as the attempt to refloat a broken model with cheap credit inflates asset bubbles and share buybacks – or enforce it with austerity – fuels new crises.
That is what has been played out across financial markets this week, in which China has been a transmission belt rather than the motor. Any idea that the western economies that generated stagnation have been fixed is not serious. Their recoveries have been the slowest on record and interest rates remain at a historic low – because owners of capital are prepared to invest in anything except the productive economy. The likelihood must be that this stagnation continues indefinitely, punctuated by financial upheavals.
Without far-reaching change in economic policy, they can be expected to trigger crises that will tip western economies, and others, back into full-blown recession.
That’s one reason why the anti-austerity movement and the demand for economic alternatives is growing across Britain, Europe and the US. The elites so evidently don’t know what they’re doing, even as they rake in the spoils. In such a context, calls for large-scale public investment, ownership and quantitative easing for the real economy made by Labour’s leadership frontrunner, Jeremy Corbyn, look far more realistic than the business-as-usual offered by his rivals.
If the current market chaos turns into another crash, the demand for much stronger measures will become unstoppable.
The “ifs and buts” hedging both these pieces, and the mealy mouthed language – (“full blown recession” hardly expresses the scale and scope of worldwide catastrophic breakdown disaster underway)- reflects the usual petty bourgeois reluctance and unwillingness to look directly into the face of the epochal and historic failure of an entire centuries long class exploitation system, which cannot go any further except into war turmoil and agony.
That is the “price to be paid by all of us” as the second piece fails to explain.
But they capture the “very worried indeed” fearfulness which briefly reached surface again last week and has only temporary disappeared as panicked governments - including the Chinese revisionists running Beijing’s workers state – have pumped yet more credit and artificial boosts into the system.
Of course the market chaos will turn into “another crash” and far worse ultimately than anything yet seen, again as the bourgeois press commentators half-heartedly concede:
financial markets are by no means free...Everything possible is done to boost asset prices and when overstimulation leads to bubbles bursting it is all hands to the pump to prevent them from falling too far.
So, in the last couple of days we have seen the chief economist of the European Central Bank musing openly about the possibility of additional QE. We have had the president of the New York Federal Reserve dropping the biggest possible hint that an interest rate rise will be delayed. And we have had the authorities in Beijing buying up shares on the Shanghai stock market.
And guess what? It has worked. Shares have been going up around the world because investors have been given guarantees that they will be protected from the consequences of their own folly. Despite the upward revision to US growth figures, all that Wall Street needs to do to prevent a Fed rate rise is to have another flash crash between now and mid-September. The Fed will then back off. If things get really bad, it will need to consider a fourth dose of QE. Yes, really.
George Saravelos, of Deutsche Bank, says there is a reason western central banks, starting with the ECB and the Bank of Japan, might need to again resort to the electronic printing presses: China’s use of its foreign exchange reserves to defend the external value of the yuan.
Effectively, China has been selling a chunk of its holdings of foreign bonds, such as US Treasuries. QE involves buying bonds, so what the People’s Bank of China has been doing is QE in reverse or, as Saravelos puts it, quantitative tightening or QT.
Ostensibly, QT has always been part of the plan. When central banks embarked on their asset-buying programmes, the intention was that they would be sold back to the markets when things had returned to normal. The problem is that things have never returned to normal and, judging by recent events, never will.
Zero interest rates were supposed to be temporary. They are now the norm. QE was an unconventional measure for use in an emergency only. It is here to stay, albeit subject to the law of diminishing returns.
Clearly then, you can buck the market. Corrections can be delayed and halted, even reversed, by determined policy action. But, as the history of bubbles from Dutch tulips to subprime mortgages has shown, only for a while.
So what then?
More reformism from Corbyn or anyone else will not stop the degenerate mess that capitalism has been creating with its endless and now continuous warmongering – and which is about to impose far worse conditions on workers everywhere.
The crash and its cutbacks not just an “ideological expression of ruling class greed” imposed wilfully, arbitrarily and somehow “unnecessarily”, as the populist “left” Labour campaign has declared (and as most of the Trot and revisionist fake-“left” are tailing-ending, all suddenly desperate not to miss out on the chance to ride the back of another populist movement, their former revolutionary “principles” abandoned overnight in their haste to scramble on board).
Only for a while, if at all, can any changes be made by “social quantitative easing” or other such reforms to “neoliberal” capitalism and they will only add to the problems anyway.
There can be no “nicer” or “regulated” version of capitalism however much “public ownership” is mixed into it, that will hold off the giant unfolding disaster.
In what way is such money printing any different to capitalist money printing?
It is not and will be wiped out just like the rest of collapsing international capitalism, even if the ruling class were not to take much more overt and brutal counter-revolutionary measures in the first place to stop it, (as in Allende’s “elected socialism” Chile for example, wiped out by military coup torture and massacres and dozens of examples since, notably in Latin America currently where the “Bolivarian revolution” of reformist nationalism is being deliberately sabotaged in country after country from Venezuela and Bolivia, to Brazil and Ecuador, all subject to right-wing disruption and economic siege).
Pretending that this is any kind of solution, let alone a permanent possibility to move the world forwards, is cynical trickery, an opportunist falsehood which simply ties the working class back to the long and now burnt-out tradition of reformist Labourism and its class collaborating stoogery for imperialism.
More likely anyway, as the Greek Syriza has already demonstrated, such reformism and “democratic refusal” to accept the cuts and cutbacks which the desperate cutthroat international trade war rivalries of the capitalist world are forcing every ruling class to make, will get nowhere at all, forced down and bullied into submission by the international ruling class and its finance and state force powers, which has no room to manoeuvre in giving reformist concessions in the desperate world crisis conditions and is tramping allover pretences of “democratic rights”.
The capitulation may not be as grotesquely obvious and careerist as the rank-opportunist Alexis Tsipras’ game-playing in Greece, turning round the Syriza ragbag collection of fake-“lefts” (all cheered on by the Trotskyist and revisionist CPers - and by Jeremy Corbyn too) in just a few months to cynically sell to the working class the same draconian cuts and Slump impositions that they was elected to stand four-square against, but it will be as complete.
Corbyn, for all his alleged “principles” and for all the cohorts of “left” Labourites, trade unionists and assorted Trots and revisionists supporting him at present, will be up against the same crisis realities.
It is the great fraud and failing of all the opportunists and fake-“lefts” that they cover-up and fail to explain this revolutionary conclusion, complacently and philistinely dismissing as “old hat ramblings of dead white males” etc the very heart and essence of Karl Marx’s great battle to analyse and understand the world, and the continuing struggle to take his revolutionary grasp forwards, by Lenin above all and the tiny minority of Leninist still developing the polemical battle for clarity.
Not even “stronger” measures, whatever that is supposed to mean in Seamus Milne’s Guardian piece above, can change things, unless of course “stronger measures” means completely ending capitalism, and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat under which firm control it will be possible to start building planned socialism.
But that is not what any of the “left”s are spelling out.
Just the opposite, by pitching in behind the sudden reformist “left” Labourite surge nearly all the “left”s leave the working class without any kind of perspective of a capitalist system that cannot go forwards and which obliges them to take up the revolutionary fight because there is no other way out.
Any revolutionary “stronger measures” in reality appal the petty bourgeois and some layers of the “metropolitan” working class still under their influence, (an influence from the past running very deep in the long imperialist-corrupted European and US class psyche and above all in once-all-powerful Britain, particularly in the “public sector” educational, municipal and health services, directly dependent on the institutions and framework of past class-collaborating reformist gains) saturated as they are in decades of anti-communism and “personal rights” posturing, sanctimonious PC individualism (feminism, homosexual “rights”, black nationalist separatism, environmentalism etc) which substitutes for revolutionary politics (and increasingly becomes one of its main obstacles).
The surge of support behind Corbyn for the moment, is driven by the crisis and is an interesting symptom of growing ferment against the ruling class, but it is desperate to avoid any sharper conclusions, by pushing his old-style “Old Labour principles” to sudden unexpected (least of all by Corbyn) prominence.
Its frantic hope is that if only reformism is put “more firmly” it will somehow be possible avoid the revolutionary conclusions that grow more insistently necessary by the day.
It remains to be seen how much of the rest of the working class in Britain gets swept along with this sudden upsurge, after the long slow withdrawal from the illusions of parliament and class collaboration of official trade unionism which it has made over nearly a century and particularly in the post-war period.
Much of it is unlikely to be very impressed with notions of reviving Labour all over again after the experiences of a dozen opportunist Labour governments which have sold out and betrayed every notion of improving things, and demonstrated clearly that they are thoroughly in the pockets of the ruling class, nothing but the second-team bourgeois ruling party to fill in when the increasingly moribund capitalist ruling class is particularly falling apart and fragmented.
From Attlee onwards Labour has always enthusiastically and diligently run imperialism and its colonialist exploitation as brutally and viciously as ever, such as in suppressing the Greek working class in the civil war against its partisan communists from 1945-9.
The resulting contempt shown by the working class for the corrupt and degenerate racket of “democracy” and the pocket-lining self-interested, bribery, corruption and revolving-door jobs for the boys (and girls) in hock to private companies and fatcats, now goes (correctly) very deep, as expressed in the huge and ever increasing abstentions during elections, where by far the largest part of the population either does not vote, is not even registered to vote or votes only out of hostility to others, not in favour of anyone.
What is needed to transform this passive hostility into the organised class war that alone can change things, is the deliberate building of the revolutionary party, dedicated to the struggle for open scientific analysis of the crisis and the balance of class forces in the world, and critically as part of that, for the struggle to expose the inadequacy and anti-communist lies and hostility to the workers states that deluges all of capitalist society, including from the most of the “lefts”, particularly bilious petty bourgeois Trotskyism.
It begins with a basic understanding of the crisis, which Marxism-Leninism has consistently fought for, explaining that this devastating Slump-producing system and the world war it will end up in, cannot be stopped, muted, turned around, ameliorated, transformed or pressurised into change.
Only this kind of politics has insistently declared (against the smugness and complacency of the petty bourgeois “left” sneers over “catastrophism”) that the only way out of the greatest disaster is the revolutionary transformation of the world, overturning for good the monstrous private ownership of production profit system and its vile, venal, degenerate and barbaric ruling class.
The working class needs to seize and take into public ownership all the banks, mines, factories, and farms, not simply so that “everything can be fairly shared out” but so that a new planned socialism can be built eventually on a world scale, removing the contradictions and antagonisms of capitalist exploitation, and allowing the building of a rational and humane society, developing and tapping the now suppressed and wasted talents and capacities of all (especially the enormous untapped genius of the grossly exploited Third World billions).
It is not only the grotesque and cruel unfairness and tyrannical armsrace military oppression of capitalism – ready to starve millions of children to death each year as it keeps most of the world in dire sweatshop and plantation poverty and ignorance, to ensure and increase the power and indolent wealth of the tiny ruling class (and its servants and “professional” dependents) but its permanent inefficiency, gross waste, philistine consumerist pointlessness, ecological and environmental carelessness and contempt, which has to go.
And above all it is its ultimately destructive crises, periodically destroying everything that is built, because of the contradictions of overproduction, which make its overturn vital.
That raises a thousand new questions about how such a total takeover can be carried out.
The ruling class is not about to quietly retire from the scene because the “majority” tell it to go by voting.
The pretence of “democracy” is just that, a hoodwinking fraud which covers up the dictatorship reality of rule by big capital and the tiny ruling class that controls and owns it.
It will subvert, undermine, manipulate, bribe, and twist the process to the extent needed to prevent any real change or even serious reforms in favour of the working class, using a panoply of slick (and expensive) techniques from advertising and media control to gerrymandered voting boundaries and outright vote fixing.
Only under revolutionary pressure, such as it faced in the aftermath of the last great 1930s Slump/and Second World War, have any changes ever been made within capitalism and those last only until conditions emerge to allow them to be clawed back, (or crisis deepens so far they have to be clawed back if the rich are to stay in the saddle).
The whole class-collaborating TUC/Labour reformism racket is part of the game, making sure the “workers representatives” are corrupted, bought out, (literally or philosophically) and never ready to challenge the status quo beyond a few token gestures, or so steeped in illusions in “parliamentary democracy” that they play the same role, however “sincere” they might be.
If any of them still go too far with any left moves then the behind-the-scenes machinery of intelligence agencies, ruling class establishment freemasonries (all kinds, from the actual Freemasons to all kinds of networks and string pulling), “listen-here-old-boy” club connections, the secret Privy Council, military, etc etc comes into play to head them off as happened with Tony Benn’s Labour leadership challenge in the 1980s (via the establishment links of challenger Dennis Healey and the right wing MPs of the time) and as has been glaringly clear with Jeremy Corbyn’s “left surge” in the Labour leadership campaign.
The pretence of a “balanced election” has rapidly turned to a concerted “Stop Jeremy” movement waged by the establishment of Toryism, Blairites and “liberal media” which is astonishing in its brazen hostility to a clearly highly popular movement, using every kind of underhand trick in the book to smear and vilify Corbyn, and already preparing a dirty parliamentary conspiracy to depose him if the vote goes his way, as is increasingly likely.
It is teaching highly useful lessons to the working class about the dirty dealings of the establishment and media (the bogus “liberal” reputation of the Guardian and Channel Four News shattered forever for example) and equally about the treachery of numerous fake-“left” intelligentsia like the reactionary one-time revisionist CP-er David Aaronovitch and their “sophisticated” sneers and put-downs of “left conspiracy theorists” etc (an entire sneery book).
It also underlines the jumpiness of the ruling class over its own crisis and the exposure of some aspects of its warmongering hypocrisy.
Corbyn as such is no threat at all, his “left” Labourism part of the problem for the working class, still propping up what remains of the whole Labour racket, including all the monstrous Blairite conspirators his naïvety (or pseudo-principle) keeps offering olive branches to, while they stiletto him in the ribs, and giving credence to a slew of mountebanks and opportunists like the disgusting Dianne Abbott, war-supporting Ken Livingstone, and other “left” parliamentary careerists.
But the movement, even as tame as this, is rattling the ruling class, not because of its content as such, but because of what it might further unleash.
If pushed too far – by the Blairites splitting Labour open for example to sabotage any “left” move – a complete shift and reorganisation of the Labourite “left” might occur which could go well beyond simply a reversion to “Old Labour”.
A refounded “Old” Labour party has no prospect of going anywhere in current crisis and historic conditions and would either have to become some new kind of centrism – at least declaring itself openly against capitalism while likely remaining tied to “democracy” illusions, or disappear altogether and leave a vacuum in which such a centrist movement would be almost certain to appear, in much the way the Greek social-democracy disappeared and the fake-“left” Syriza suddenly emerged.
(The alternative of the working class having no voice - the opportunist argument of the anti-Corbynites – is impossible as the crisis forces more and more into the necessity for class action.)
Either way, simply writing off these developments as “nothing but the same old fraud” as a few of the less band-wagoning fake “left” have done, like the rigid-Stalinist revisionism of Lalkar/Proletarian, is to miss the point; while correct at one level it misses completely the great movement underway in this Corbyn surge.
If – and it is as yet a highly speculative “if” from this particular populist eruption – such a shake-up occurs, the revolutionary necessity is surely to be in the middle of it, to be battling for the understanding of the need for Leninist politics - as Lenin argued.
And an immediate need would be the fight for the working class to organise its struggle around the firmest leadership with the grasp of the dictatorship of the proletariat, at the heart of it.
The ruling class is not going to stop at tricky press campaigns in its fight to stay on top, but will go all the way to the most barbaric and brutal repression.
Bullying of the Greek economy is already one step beyond, but the lessons are much more widespread, from the constant “colour revolutions” organised by the CIA in former Soviet territories, installing outright fascist governments like the Swastika tattooed Nazi nationalists in Kiev and its death-squad intimidation and repression of the eastern Ukraine working class, to the overthrow of the 2011 Arab Spring revolution in Egypt by the reactionary military of General Sisi, toppling the newly established democratically elected President Morsi (now monstrously under death sentence), slaughtering thousands of unarmed civilian protestors in the street to do so, and imposing a regime of brutal judicial mass death sentence execution against all opposition and resistance, lavishly funded and supported by Washington.
And Latin America’s left reformist nationalist movement against US domination and exploitation, focused around Venezuela and Bolivia particularly, but with a variety of “left” governments (of varying reformist degree) in Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, etc is now facing deadly economic sabotage and subversion, particularly in Caracas, but emerging in various forms in these different countries, as disruptive “popular demonstrations” are stirred up with a deluge of Western press coverage for sometimes thin and obviously middle-class and better-off supporters (Brazil), non-stop accusations of “corruption” pour out and economies are paralysed by local ruling class investment strike and deliberate trading disruption (as in Venezuela where basic supplies are held back in warehouses etc), combined with international financial siege and sanctions.
Single-issue politics and Western liberalism comes into its own as part of the mixture, used to whip up hostility, as in Ecuador currently against oil investments by China, for example, but in reality against a “left” government looking to expand its economy. Supposed “concern for the environment” and “indigenous” protest has everything to do in fact with preventing the Ecuadorians from breaking with US investment dominance and as punishment for defiance of the US in various ways such as sheltering Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in its London embassy, enraging the US establishment.
Comments beneath one recent Guardian report about supposed “dictatorial police brutality” made the point:
This article is incredible biased and doesn’t reflect the reality. A relatively small demonstration - some 6000 people or so - in Quito, attacked police in an effort to enter the area where pro government demonstrators were gathered. Look at this video and see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKcZnH0-zAo . In Saraguro, protestors attempting to block roads, have shot at security forces.
This article doesn’t mention either part, and over inflates the number of people that have participated in these opposition actions.
ArturoRosales Barrio Nuevo: This comment is spot on. Eleven pólice were shot in the demonstration and the protests have become increasingly violent. The riot pólice have a duty to defend them selves and break up violent demonstrations as they would in any country....[aan] unequivocally biased account of what is happening in Ecuador.
The whole plan is to depose President Correa as he is by far the most popular politican in the country and will win another term in 2017 despite this insurrectional activity which is inspired by the US.
All the countries that are not “flavor of the month” in Latin America are underpressure right now except for the ones where the US approves of internal policies.
This is not a surprise. Ecuador is targeted for regime change...
himborazo ArturoRosales: Billionaire Alvaro Naboa and his colleagues, I am guessing, are funding and organizing these protests. He stands to lose power and wealth if some of Correa’s policies are implemented.
I agree that Correa is popular still but not as much as past years. When I was visiting in June it seemed that most of those I asked seemed to like him still but were unsure about him running for another term (against the current constitution).
The right wing tried to kill him once, Correa that is. This violent upsurge in a small amount of indigenous communities is all aimed to destabilize the government and return it to the oligarchs.
weilunion ArturoRosales
Yes, no reporting of the illegal use of wooden sticks tos beat police. No reporting of Perez urging the armed forces to turn their guns on Correa. No reporting about how the banana King, Noboa is part of the right wing coup attempt. No reporting on how Lucio Guitierrez the last right wing president of the country was in Miami before the ‘failed strike’ nor how the reactionary oligarch and mayor of Guayaquil, Jaime Nebot was in NY before the ‘failed strike’ getting his marching orders from the CIA. No reporting on the criminal Isaias brothrers who fled Ecuador with 150 million in stolen bank funds and now live in Coral Gabels with some of the worst of the worst anti-Castro pro CIA Cubans. No, this article is keeping with imperialism’s mission: to manage consent, distort minds and contaminate truth with lies
These suspicious comments get halfway to the point in correctly seeing the hand of CIA and local bourgeois disruption and sabotage in most of the chaos and turmoil but fail to lift the understanding to the real point; that until the working class fully takes power, consciously aware of and resisting such disruption and manipulation, it will constantly be exposed to Western skulduggery.
The same kind of turmoil is underway in country after country and most of all Venezuela, currently almost brought to its knees by right-wing violence and disruption,and economic sabotage imposing devastating inflation and shortages, as well as the impact of the capitalist crisis in general and devastating fall in the world oil price it has brought because of “overproduction”.
The “left” demagogues and reformists in most of them have to varying extents pushed through some “left” reforms to benefit the working class but none are the answer; mostly they abandon or compromise most of the stronger “left” measures and reforms in their populist campaigns anyway, in order to make their “democratic” victories in the first place; they continue to run capitalism, and are therefore vulnerable both to the corruptions and double dealings of the ruling class, if not personally then in the establishments around them; and by running capitalism are vulnerable to the hurricane forces of the international “free market” crisis.
But most of all they are a problem because they do not take measures to establish the dominant rule of the working class, its proletarian dictatorship authority over society and the economy in which it is possible to build some defences and resistance to the constant subversion and sabotage; because, in other words, they are not Leninist revolutionaries and have not built any kind of movement of conscious working class leadership.
The archetypal lessons for all these “left” reform regimes is first of all the barbaric CIA/General Augusto Pinochet Chilean coup of 1973 against elected socialist president Salvador Allende which followed precisely such a period of internal turmoil, reactionary strikes (particularly by the petty bourgeois owner-driver truck hauliers), and economic sabotage, and secondly the collapse of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, which despite its initial heroic and costly struggle and insurgency to overturn the brutal American backed Somoza dictatorship, capitulated to the idea of a “democratic” vote overturn by the rightwing after ten years of subversion and vicious “contra” counter-revolutionary savagery, trained by American imperialism (School of the Americas etc) in the most barbaric terror and torture techniques.
In both cases they failed utterly to develop the full class understanding of the need for the firmest class war organisation and refusal to relinquish power once it had been taken, defending the gains with the armed might of the working class against the fascists.
Far from being a “tragic hero” (as sadly even the revisionist flaws in the leadership of the otherwise brilliant Cuban workers state declare him to be), Allende for all his “sincerity” and ultimate sacrifice, was a disaster for the working class, continuing to feed it illusions in the “democratic path” born of Third International revisionist mistakes and errors in concluding that post-WW2 capitalism was permanently hamstrung and its aggressive expansionism “containable” by steady growth of the socialist camp.
These are the illusions that continue in the fake-“left” to this day, which universally (including the Stalinist CPGB-ML Lalkar/Proletarian) has lauded and celebrated the Latin American movement as “a great example to us all and an inspiration for a new way forwards”, pouring out not only uncritical but celebratory eulogies for Chávez and the supposed “Bolivarian Revolution”.
It is no such thing as “revolution” because the working class has not taken power and deposed and suppressed the old ruling class. It is left nationalist reformism open and vulnerable to counter-revolution.
For all the fairer distribution of oil wealth and advances for the working class, - excellent as far as they go, – Chávez’ supposed “21st century socialism” is at least as bad as the illusions created by Allende, a mess of eclectic confusions which has at its core the implied contempt for and rejection of “20th century socialism” (i.e the great record and achievements of the workers states, starting with the 70 year long history of the Soviet Union) and for the struggle for Leninist understanding.
And the fake-“left” Chávez eulogies express precisely a total hostility to such understanding, underlining their petty bourgeois opportunism and pretences which when it comes to it are a million miles from “revolutionary”.
Of course it is a fundamental of Marxist understanding that the Langley-led skulduggery, subversion and disruption being provoked throughout Latin America should come a cropper, and that the doggedness of the working class should defeat this Washington counter-revolution; but the battle to do so is a thousand times reinforced with the fight for revolutionary understanding and a fight to expose these “democracy” illusions.
It would be a nonsense for example in the upcoming December presidential election for the Maduro regime to calmly step aside and hand power over to the oligarch reaction as the Nicaraguans abandoned their struggle in the 1980s, simply capitulating to the manipulation and demoralisation that non-stop disruption has caused, and the international and local media deluge against it.
But to mobilise the working class against such a “democratic” coup requires a huge deepening in revolutionary grasp and perspectives.
Such a transformation in understanding is vital everywhere and achievable only by building the conscious Leninist party to battle for understanding, examining every question of society, class, and “morality”.
Particularly important is to take on and challenge the single-issue petty bourgeois moralising of the fake-“lefts” and the Politically Correct individualism which swamps their politics, replacing it with the grasp that it is not until capitalism itself, and the antagonisms and contradictions it imposes on society, is ended that any of the divisions, inequalities, injustices and oppressions it creates can be finally ended.
Not only does this PCism divert from revolutionary understanding, by pretending there are various reformist battles that can be fought and won as a “step on the road to socialism” (eg women’s rights, anti-racism) - a false view of society which will constantly see such divisions RE-generated for as long as class exploitation continues, – but it is totally hostile to revolution and increasingly used as a battering ram against it, as with the hate-denuniciations of Russia over “gay rights” by the likes of the reactionary Steven Fry for example, irresponsibly feeding the vicious war atmosphere the West is whipping-up around the Kiev fascists, Syria etc.
This petty bourgeois moralising is a major weakness and any struggle within emerging centrism would have to take them up and battle them out.
One of the greatest is the entire question of “terrorism” and the fake-“left” capitulation across the board to the imperialist moral hypocrisy of “condemning” its ever growing manifestations as some new kind of “evil” or “headbanging madness” a nonsensical and thoroughly unMarxist un--materialist and undialectical notion.
It plays right into the hands of the nonsensical imperialist “war on terror” rational for imposing draconian blitzkrieg and terrorising torture itself, the sole and only cause of the destruction and mayhem in the world.
The “terrorist” upsurge is in essence the explosion of Third world revolt against imperialist domination, using whatever ideology and means of fighting that can be found in the absence of rational Marxist revolutionary leadership. As the EPSR has previously said 1224 16-03-04):
Sept 11, and all related activities which both preceded it and followed it, remain what they have always been, — isolated lucky strikes by anarcho-individualism whose “terror” strategy is not a political programme of any kind and is not meant to be.
It is a simple obvious vengeance strike-back by various Third World elements who are being driven to total desperation by the vicious cruel exploitation-injustice of Western imperialist domination of their region and their lives.
It is a loud cry for the West to get off their backs, as they have repeatedly made clear.
It is not for genuine revolutionary anti-imperialism to pronounce either “good” or “bad” at such inevitable phenomena at this phase of Western imperialist economic crisis.
Every bit of political damage to the West needs capitalising upon; and every suspected political or religious “negative influence” arising from such anarcho-individualist terror needs dealing with by serious revolutionary anti-imperialism, as Lenin scientifically explained in his work On Guerilla Warfare (1906).
Any “Marxist” condemnation of “terrorism” for striking blows against hated imperialism is nothing but a self-confession of inadequacy by such “Marxists”.
If the revolutionaries want to see a better-led and more effective long-term anti-imperialist struggle, — then go out and do it.
If the communists were getting on with their revolutionary war properly, then there would be very little space for anarcho-individualist terrorism to spark so brightly, Lenin concluded.
And this remains valid, however much it can be shown or proven that such anarcho-terrorism is used by or manipulated by imperialist intelligence, here and there. So it has been, but to suggest, as many fake-“lefts” do that it is essentially all a “CIA” or Zionist plot is simply another way of evading the issue and rationalising the same “condemn them” moralising to avoid having too obviously to stand against the “bomb and kill them all” demented fascist war atmosphere being kept on the boil by imperialist crisis.
The theoretical tangles that such theories get into leads to appalling conclusions - currently one of the worst being the support by the “left” for the reactionary General Sisi government in Egypt, a counter-revolutionary monstrosity worse than the forerunning Hosni Mubarak dictatorship, which is either directly celebrated by fake-”lefts” groups like the “Sons of Malcolm” black nationalists, and the Lalkar/Proletarian (now gone very quiet on the subject, simply not mentioning it), or effectively is left unchallenged by condemning the Muslim Brotherhood and Sinai ISIS insurgency against it as “terrorism”.
Are the Palestinians to be condemned as “terrorists” too, and their desperate fight against the Zionist Nazi occupation of their land (particularly as their current leadership is the Hamas offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood)?
The petty bourgeois moralising would seem to do so, and thereby instantly lent itself to an attack by the reactionary anti-Corbyn conspiracy, which has attempted to smear the campaign with “anti-Semitism” charges because Corbyn’s perfectly sound support for the Palestinian struggle happens to have shared a platform with more overt anti-Zionism.
But instead of washing their hands of any “connections”, and floundering around with explanations about not being connected with various anti-Zionist figures, working class politics should take on and expose these charges as pure humbug. Again as observed by past EPSRs (1209 18-11-03) :
It looks as if a key imperialist counter-revolutionary planning decision has been made by the CIA to use reluctance to face “race prejudice” smears as a major propaganda weapon for taking the pressure of popular hatred off of the vicious colonial warmongering tyranny inflicted by Zionist (“Israeli”) aggression against the WHOLE of Arab and Muslim nationalism, and genocidally against the Palestinian people in particular.
The spokesman in Britain for Zionist tyranny, Rabbi Sachs, was given a ludicrously soft propaganda platform on Today to spin the exact mirror-image of the original NAZI Big Lie when Hitler and Goebbels claimed that the Jewishness of international monopoly finance capital was responsible for all of its anti-human evilness and damaging-to-humanity destructiveness.
Worldwide anti-Jewish actions recently “have nothing whatever to do with” Israel’s tyranny against Palestine (which is sickening the whole world), this apologist for the Jewish international freemasonry solemnly lied.
On and on he was allowed to whine, unchallenged, that the world’s problem was not the NAZI-genocidal Zionist butchery of the Palestinian nation, (which is crucially allied-to and influential-on the Western imperialist decision to develop its own blitzkrieg intimidation of the Arab nationalist and Muslim Middle East, echoing frequent earlier Jewish blitzkrieg strikes on defenceless Arab nations out of its colonised-Palestine fortress), — — but the resurgence of “anti-Jew race prejudice and persecution around the globe”.
But this utter garbage is going to now come pouring out of every Nazi-CIA propaganda orifice (such as the BBC) non-stop from henceforth, wherever considered “appropriate”.
The pressure now is going to be put on the anti-imperialist struggle everywhere to come to a decision at long last about whether there is any worthwhile meaning any more in distinguishing the international Jewish freemasonry from the international Zionist freemasonry, or whether continuing to do so just plays into the deliberate political-confusion hands of reactionaries like Sachs to try to double slander the worldwide anti-Israel movement as both “terrorist” and as “racist”.
Since the armed Jewish colonisation of Palestine began, what further use is the old distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” since the number of Jews who do not believe in their right to a homeland in “Israel” are no longer worth counting as a significant international or domestic factor in politics.
All that the vast majority of “anti-Zionist” Jews want to do is separate themselves from the vicious Nazi-aggression tactics of the non-stop warmongering which has created their “Israeli national home” from the very beginning.
But an utterly negligible number come out to agitate for an end to the foul nonsense of an “Israel” altogether.
In which case “Jew” and “Zionist” are now completely interchangeable.
Nevertheless, there is clearly still a “racist” element in the terrorist attacks on synagogues in Istanbul, for example, or on Jewish schools in France, or Jewish cemeteries anywhere.
But what can be done about that, and what deserves to be done about that, in the light of the conscious deliberate international NAZI-aggression role that has been played by the Jewish colony to constantly be the tail wagging the US imperialist dog towards ever-more-escalated warmongering tyranny against Arab and Muslim nationalism throughout the whole of the Middle East and beyond???
Are not these anti-Jewish terrorist “outrages” exactly like the “outrages” committed against American subjects abroad everywhere????
There is obviously not a scrap of humanity, justice, or justification on any “rational” basis, in any one of these acts of terrorist vengeance perpetrated against innocent individuals just because of their nationality or their religion.
But there never has been. There was no such rational “justification” for the Twin Towers attack on Sept 11, or for any of the IRA bombing casualties in many London and Ireland “atrocities” in the past.
Nor for any of the attacks on Red Cross or UN personnel going on in Iraq now, etc, etc, etc.
But what hypocritical line is being drawn here?????
The Jewish homeland can butcher the Palestine nation all it wants in total NAZI blitzkrieg and concentration-camp style for 55 years and NOTHING has been done about it BY ANYONE, or will be done.
This gets admitted all the time, — by everyone, Jews included, and by the imperialist press which supports “Israel”:
And it is with deliberate and blatant RACIST “state laws” that JEWISH policy is inflicting this tyranny, helping the build-up to World War III.
The racism is inevitably sown by Jewishness itself.
The Palestinians are going to have to find a way of fighting back themselves, and they now HAVE found a way, — the only one possible in their dire circumstances of incarceration inside one giant virtual concentration camp, — the weapon of suicidal terrorism. More strength to them. It is working. Zionist tyranny is backing off. Let the identical Jewish tyranny stop playing word games internationally, and back off too. End this tyrannical fascist nonsense of “Israel” immediately, for good.
And support for this anti-Jew terrorist weapon is bound to grow worldwide. It is identical to the anti-West terrorist weapon. Let it grow. End Western imperialist domination of the planet.
The Palestinian people have been in situ for more than 1,500 years, longer than any Western nationality has been in existence.
Leave them there. Let the colonising members of the multinational international Jewish freemasonry go back to their American, British, Polish, Russian, etc, homelands and cultivate their property interests and their pro-imperialist warmongering passions there.
This continued colonial warmongering onslaught on the Middle East is a powder keg waiting to blow the whole world apart.
But this crisis driven imperialist tyranny is now inseparable from this Middle-Eastern Jewish colonial tyranny.
And the reactionary irrelevant jeers of “anti-semitism” are protecting them both.
Of course the Palestinian fight would be far better and more coherent with a Leninist revolutionary perspective and understanding.
So then it needs to be built, challenging all the fakery.
Steven Tudy
Back to the top