Current Paper

No 1662 10th September 2025

Imperialism’s crisis plunge into war barbarity grows ever more depraved in the Middle East Zionist genocide, a class war to suppress liberation struggle fully backed by the ruling class everywhere despite through-the-teeth lies on ceasefires and “recognising Palestine”. Capitalism has no wish to find peaceful solutions because it NEEDS war – everywhere – to smash down growing mass resistance and destroy surplus capital clogging its outmoded system. But “left” groups leave workers confused and vulnerable by failing to spell out the Catastrophic scale of this crisis breakdown (long ago analysed by Marx) and necessary revolutionary class war to end it. New parties are uselessly reformist but reflect crisis and could be forum for revolutionary debate. Europeans humiliated by US over Ukraine defeat

Landslide election of a “radical left” leader for the Greens, mass support for an imminent Corbyn/Sultana “left alternative” post-Labour party and stampeding of some workers behind jingoist “migrant” scapegoating by the “national socialist” (Nazi) Reform party hyped with a bourgeois media frenzy (and Labour hysteria), all reflect ruling class desperation as decades of growing class contempt finally shatters its already completely threadbare “two party” parliamentary grip on things.

Each of these potential replacements (substitutes) for rotten, corrupt and despised Tory/Labour ruling class domination needs exposing for the specific diversionary feints they are, trying to keep workers tied to the lying fraud of bourgeois elections within capitalism even as its system implodes.

But they also raises much bigger issues that need to be confronted reflecting the weakness of the capitalist order.

Why is this fragmentation underway at all??

Only a full explanation of the gargantuan scale, severity and intractability of the great crisis collapse of this worldwide monopoly capitalist system, can answer, which is to say a Marxist-Leninist perspective.

But the historic capitalist Catastrophe and its mind-numbing unsolvability is still not remotely spelled out or even understood by these class-collaborating “new” movements nor by any of the Trot and revisionist “lefts” circling around them, (for and against) leaving the whole of society in ignorance, sleepwalking into disaster.

Instead the “common sense” view prevails that whatever else happens “life goes on” and things could never get “that bad” as long as “we fight back to defend our rights”, and could even improve things (still!!).

It is utter deadly garbage, as millions in the world can already testify from Gaza to Sudan, a complacency founded in hostility to theory and from more than a century of anti-communist brainwashing (and the revisionist retreats that have left it all unchallenged).

The world is heading into complete chaos, collapse, fascist barbarity and deliberate warmongering caused by the bourgeois response to the astonishing irrationality of its inbuilt “over-production” crisis (see economics box).

A stream of horrific wars has already been imposed behind ever more lurid psyops lies about “evil bogeymen”, “totalitarian regimes” or “terrorist threats” about to “take over the world” from the demonised Slobodan Milosevic in the Serbia remnant of communist Yugoslavia, the “Taliban threat” in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, to the various uprisings and struggles against the imperialist domination in the resource-rich Middle East, designated as “terrorists” and now being suppressed with unprecedented barbarity.

Failure of all of these invasions to change anything has seen the endless grinding war in Ukraine follow on, calculatedly manipulated into existence by Western NATO provocations against Russia, via backing for the Nazi stoogery put into power in Kiev by a decade of CIA/MI6 “colour revolution” skulduggery.

It has failed too, with the Europe/US imperialist powers now split wide open over its defeat.

But war will not stop.

It is not primarily about “more plunder” as shallow leftism says but about destruction itself.

To survive, the ruling class must wipe out vast swathes of ever accumulating monopoly capital in order to “restore profitability” – vicious bankrupting trade war inevitably extended into all out destructive hot war, driving the costs onto whichever powers can be forced to bear them (exactly as Trumpite belligerence makes explicit and has escalated to gobsmacking levels).

To fight that cutthroat to-the-death war for survival, the burdens must be imposed on the working class in each country, slashing wages and conditions to Victorian levels, with the greatest pain forced onto the most precarious at the bottom of the heap domestically, and onto the neocolonially exploited Third World (in the sweatshops and plantations overseas or through near-slave conditions for “migrant workers” imported into the “rich” countries, the latter crucial for capitalist profit-making but useful as scapegoats too, blame targets for an increasingly Slump hammered working class).

Working class resistance and much of the petty bourgeoisie too is being pushed down with ever more crude and open imposition of the bourgeois dictatorship which actually runs things (and always has done) behind the Wizard of Oz “democracy” curtain.

Trumpite nazism is leading the way but all the bourgeoisies are following in trampling across civil liberties, “human rights” and “free speech” (always illusory and notional in practice for workers anyway but now openly suppressed), whipping up xenophobic hatred and division and tearing up all rationality, objectivity and science, suppressing universities and hyping backward superstition.

Euphemistic “austerity” which has already torn life apart for many domestically, and especially since the near armageddon bank collapse of 2008/9 is savage enough now with unprecedented poverty, penury and pain for millions on the lower rungs, but the imperialist system is heading for far greater universal breakdown – total bankruptcy ripping up even the very basics taken for granted domestically about life, from everyday services (councils hitting debt-ridden bankruptcy), fundamental health provision and pharmacology (sold to rapacious hedge funds), clean water (plundered by private equity), and provision of food and shelter, already forcing many into food banks or living in mould-ridden slums or fire threatened buildings like the Grenfell tower.

That is just for the “privileged” West with far worse horrors already imposed for barbarically massacred multitudes in Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and more, and most of all the unspeakable public holocaust imposed by the fanatical fascist Zionists, hellbent on eradicating the entire population of Palestine (the West Bank as well as Gaza) not only for daring to fight back against the Zionist/imperialist theft of their own land but for even existing at all, a permanent threat of the national liberation fight for restitution and eventual justice.

But all international relations, already savaged by an unstoppable plunge into ever spreading destructive conflict, will be torn apart eventually as the World War Three continues to be imposed by the American Empire including war between the biggest powers (already contained in the Ukraine conflict – see below).

It is not going well. Three decades of shock and awe, by the US-led imperialist order, bombing, torturing and mass murdering in country after country from Serbia and Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria and more has resulted only in defeat, setback and forced pullout, failing to intimidate the world back into compliance for ever greater wasteful and ecologically devastating corporate plunder.

Far from stabilising things, the cataclysmic breakdown of the 800-year-old bourgeois order has erupted in full force – first in the great world banking collapses of 2008-9, temporarily fended off only with insane new credits but about to break again, magnified ten times over in a welter of looming dollar collapse – and second in demented warmongering violence, abandoning all restraint and pretence of fairness and justice, painfully built up as the bogus “freedom and democracy” counter to “evil communism” since the end of the Second World War behind the reactionary stooge “United Nations” façade.

It is this complete degeneration that really is not understood even as Trumpism tears up all restraint and reason – imposing domestic terror against scapegoated workers, military intimidation on whole cities like Chicago, murderous shoot-ups of random boats at sea deemed “enemies”, world “punishments” behind belligerent tariff walls and punitive “sanctions” and above all in keeping the fanaticism of useful Zionism’s “final solution” on the boil to the point of a total genocide of such barbarity that its horrifying historic implications have still not sunk in, nor its abandonment of all standards of humanity.

And most of all what has not sunk in is that this is the only future for everyone while capitalism lasts.

It will not be stopped by rules, regulations and pacifist class pressure, as 150 years of failed fraudulent class-collaborating reformism has proved through three major inter-imperialist wars so far (1870, 1914-18 and 1939-45).

And it will not be stopped by fantasies about a “multipolar world”, an opportunist revisionist nonsense that disarms the world’s masses from understanding that imperialism is relentlessly unstoppably world war bound as Lenin warned.

In fact the stunning rise of China, cleverly using Western capitalist investment to turbocharge its backward economy while still remaining a workers state, only adds to the desperation of the imperialist system and its drive to frenzied warmongering.

No ruling class just gives up its historic dominance without being overturned and least of all will this US Empire, the greatest in history in one sense.

None of this will stop, and cannot, until this entire outmoded and bankrupt capitalist class system is ended, possible only by the greatest mass revolutionary struggle in history to topple and overturn this stinking, degenerate and increasingly fascist ruling class.

As Lenin made clear, it is not a choice, or a “wish for a better world” which is at stake.

It is an existential necessity for the world population, to end the 10,000 year rise of class-divided contradiction-ridden slave and feudal civilisation and especially its most advanced form in the 800 years of capitalism, now at its paralysed limit and dragging mankind into the abyss.

It demands class war to establish workers states to build cooperative planned socialism.

It is erupting, in ever growing disparate, inchoate and sometimes contradictory struggles deemed “terrorism” and “jihadism”, to mass street turmoil like the Arab Spring in Egypt and currently exploding in Indonesia, Kenya, Haïti, Nigeria, as well as increasingly coherent and organised Middle Eastern resistance from Lebanon and Yemen to Iran, against the Zionist/imperialist horrors.

But that can only go so far until the world rebuilds a revolutionary scientific perspective (Marxist Leninism).

No such crucial understanding will come from these newly created efforts in Britain to further bamboozle the working class, filling the vacuum left by past treacherous class collaboration with yet more class collaboration laced with ineffectual social-pacifism and limp protest, nor from the circling flocks of “left” parties – Trotskyist or Stalinist – either backing up these alleged “new politics” for their own opportunist ends, hoping to piggy back on their possible success, or in a few slightly more “sophisticated” cases, posturingly denouncing them (though for equally opportunist reasons a million miles from any Leninist fight for understanding).

Just the opposite. Workers and petty bourgeois intellectuals will continue to be run around in circles swallowing all the lies, “justifications” and grotesque demonisations that imperialism is using to for its monstrous warmongering diversionary cover-ups like Ukraine war for example, where public opinion still swallows the ludicrous notion that such bourgeois reactionaries as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, (grandson of a Nazi) are “fighting for the rights of a plucky persecuted people facing genocide” (non-existent) – even as these same and other bourgeois leaders have helped, funded, armed and aided the Zionist warcrime occupation carry through its (very existent) attempted total eradication of a hapless population by starvation, torture, arbitrary detention, child-maiming “turkey shoot” sniping, drone attack and non-stop missile and bomb blitzing.

Failure to grasp or even examine these issues is the greatest obstacle to rebuilding the revolutionary theory which is vital for uniting the working class and its necessary class war, starting with a gigantic political philosophical debate for a profound reappraisal and assessment of the great working class achievements of the twentieth century, notably the Soviet Union, and the revisionist retreats which saw its liquidation “failure” after 70 years of staggering progress.

Obviously the nasty xenophobia, poisonous chauvinism and petty racist thug scapegoating of the Nigel Farage party is not offering any such prospect but neither are the two “left”options – one reason why they are no real answer to the simplistic and vile victim blaming by Reform, other than the moralising and useless self-righteousness of reformist PC “anti-racism” as the EPSR pointed out long ago:

It is a very, twisted, smug, and self-regarding ‘civilisation’ which feels so self-righteous about its ‘anti-racist’ stand (when forced to it by the glare of publicity in England), but has not the faintest thought of asking why conditions should at times be so intolerable in parts of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the West Indies, Africa, etc, to force millions of people annually to want to sever their links with their own homeland, language, culture, history, and family in order to risk the very uncertain life of an ethnic immigrant minority somewhere in the two dozen or so most affluent monopoly-imperialist countries around the world. Why should any human beings have to suffer this degradation and humiliation in the first place?

And the reason that the ‘liberal’-minded have no interest in pursuing their ‘concern’ for Third World suffering any further than the odd contribution to Oxfam or the occasional gesture saying ‘let us not be beastly to the immigrants’, etc, is because their petty-bourgeois caution instinctively tells them that any deeper probing of why there is such grotesque injustice and unevenness in the distribution of wealth and poverty in the world would almost certainly force them to admit that communist revolution against Western imperialist exploitation (and against the falsified lifestyles of the West) is not only probably inevitable but would also have to be accepted as a ‘good thing’, which no middle-class soul could ever happily contemplate.

The leftist “no barriers to immigration anywhere in the world” stance in order to ostentatiously adopt a totally heroic ‘anti-racist’ pose, – is just as great an avoidance of the real issue.

In a fully planned rational and stable world, it will no doubt eventually be possible for everyone to live just about where they want to (assuming reasonable coordination to avoid 5 billion people turning up with their suitcases on Bali).

But just posturing in this ‘principled’ way is hardly even a ‘transitional’ demand (supposedly demanding reasonable reforms which really require a revolution to make possible).

Full ‘freedom’ for the entire planet to settle just where they want to in the immediate future is both economically and politically unrealistic even with the most far-reaching revolutionary perspectives in mind, and is also a potentially contradictory minefield when the case, say, of Occupied Palestine is considered where the native Arab population is only just clinging onto life as it is, overwhelmed by Zionist colonisation.

The real issue is being avoided. Not ‘full immigration rights everywhere now’ which is a diversion, but ‘the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist market-forces system everywhere now, and its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat everywhere, now’.

But conscience-mongering ‘liberals’ just do not want to know about what is really going to make a difference to an increasingly nationalist-divided and racist-divided bourgeois society deep in fascist slump everywhere on earth. (EPSR No718 21-09-93)

Each of the “left” alternatives is putting forwards the same kind of reformist nostrums that have been presented to the working class for a century or more for improving things, not by ending but by “reining in” capitalism and the rich, redirecting state resources from the arms industry to the needs of the poor, taxing the wealthy etc etc.

So it is with the “broadened” version of environmental politics advocated by the newly elected Green leader Zack Polanski now including traditional left reformist demands like “nationalising utilities” (but only by paying off the rich “owners”), taxing billionaires and tackling climate change, which even the cynical anti-communist Guardian could declare “not so much radical leftism as a no brainer”.

What is a “brainer” of course is how any such fairness and necessary ecological measures against plastic pollution, global warming, species depletion, and poisoned rivers would begin to be carried out in the teeth of a ruthless ruling class and its giant international corporations which are driven by the fundamental logic of the profit system, and its ever intensifying battle for markets, to trample across all social and environmental concerns backed up by violent bourgeois state force.

Even where token and cosmetic policy shifts have been made by companies like BP towards “sustainable power”, investing in windfarms for example, the market pressure has put things into reverse with a return to more profitable oil exploitation, after the company lost out to its monopoly rivals, weakened so badly that it has recently been subject to takeover speculation.

The conscious and deliberate policy of crisis imperialism, personified by the Donald Trump’s White House and equivalents like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, or the wannabee-Zionist and fascist Argentine president Javier Milei, ramps up this with total hostility to “eco-politics” like wind power or forest preservation to the extent of ordering shutdowns, and Orwellian diktats that “global warming does not exist”.

Only the revisionist-led Chinese workers state does real “green” development, because it is not controlled by capitalists (despite running a huge capitalist sector in its overall planned economy, a potential danger but so far contained).

These Greens are little more than the Liberal-Democrat reactionaries on steroids, just as ineffectual and just as committed to the overall warmongering direction of the capitalist system as the rest, despite some recent posturing about “withdrawing from NATO” a pledge itself quickly withdrawn “until there is a European Defence Force”!!!.

In fact their German equivalents have been at the forefront of the Ukraine warmongering with the former Foreign Minister for the Green/Social-Democrat (SPD) coalition Annalesa Baerbock the leading voice pushing for escalation of German arms supplies and aid to the Kiev nazis.

But the seemingly more “purist” leftism of the incipient “Your Party” is not looking any better not least because of Green alliance possibilities already hinted at by Jeremy Corbyn’s insipid congratulations to Polanski

“look(ing) forward to working with you to create a fairer, kinder world.”

However, the EPSR has speculated that this Sultana/Corbyn new group may nevertheless have to be tactically supported because of its significance in finally breaking with the (already weak) 130-year grip of the reactionary Labour Party, underlined by the popular support it has already received, heading up to nearly one million online signatures in just a few weeks.

These factors could indicate a need to expose the illusions it might be fostering in the working class (see EPSR No1660) as well as offering a potential forum for revolutionary argument.

So far public pronouncements, like the following Middle East Eye interview, do not even hint at any kind of outright anti-capitalism, let alone the revolutionary calls, however hollow and showboating, that would be expected from a centrist party such as the Scargillite Socialist Labour Party initially appeared to be in the 1990s, before it shut down Leninist discussion and reverted to philistine and reactionary anti-theory and chauvinist syndicalism (see for example EPSR Books on Revolutionary theory and party building – Part Four):

The basis of the new party is the Independent Alliance: a collection of six independent MPs that have a larger grouping in parliament than Reform UK. Zarah Sultana is a recent addition to the group.

“We have a broadly similar political direction,” Corbyn explains.

“On Gaza, there is no disagreement at all. Generally, on economic and social justice issues, in the same direction....We all work together with each other. We share out strategies of how to ask questions [in parliament] and do things.”

He adds: “If something arises where we’re not all of the same mind, fine. We make our own points. We don’t attack each other.” [..]

Corbyn lays out five principles which he said are behind the party. The first is peace: “Therefore, no bombs to Israel to drop on Gaza, for example.”

The other principles “are about economic justice within our society. They are about dealing with the worst vestiges of poverty within our society”.

“They are about environmental sustainability, and they are about public ownership of public service,” Corbyn says.

“But it’s also about the kind of creativity and democracy we are,” he adds. “So when you bring people together in a creative endeavour, through local forums and grassroots democracy, you defeat the far right, you defeat the racists.

[...][One of the more unusual elements of the party is the ambiguity surrounding its leadership. Although much media commentary tends to present Corbyn and Sultana as co-leaders, this hasn’t been set in stone.

[..]he will only take on a leadership role if the membership wishes him to. Whatever job people want me to do, I’ll do it,” he adds.

One major issue that has dogged the party is the sense that Corbyn and Sultana aren’t really in lockstep. For one thing, Corbyn took over a day to follow up her initial announcement of a new party in July, and his statement was much more ambiguous.

Then, over the weekend, an interview Sultana gave to the New Left Review was published in which she [...]suggested Corbyn had capitulated by adopting the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, which critics say has been used to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

“I think it wasn’t really necessary for her to bring all that up in the interview, but that’s what she decided to do,” he said.

“The party did adopt the IHRA definition. Personally, I was more in favour of the Jerusalem Declaration, which is simply saying that antisemitism is wrong.

“It is wrong to be antisemitic, and it is perfectly possible to discuss the politics and behaviour of the state of Israel without being antisemitic.

“People do that all the time. Indeed, many people in Israel do that all the time, and so our party will have a resolutely anti-racist position.”

Corbyn said he would like the new party to adopt a “general declaration of respect for all communities, all ethnicities, all languages, all faiths and no faiths”.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury would sign up for that of course, or the Pope (mostly) and certainly the local vicar and with just as little prospect of getting there – only ending capitalism by class war revolution can clear the way to such supposedly well-meaning dreams.

The worst part of this perspective, if it can be called such, is the dire lowest common denominator passivity and willingness to “just see what we can agree on while accepting differences”.

Corbyn’s “not necessary to bring that up” IHRA comment embodies the same hostility to debate and polemical struggle that characterised a slew of past socialist “alliances”, “coalitions” and party “fusions”, burying disagreement in favour of “the 80% or 90% we can all agree on”.

But this seemingly common sense approach to unity, frequently voiced in street conversations and public meetings, always falls apart not least because the differences will not go away, representing ever-deepening irreconcilable class divisions as they do, and constituting a lot more than an apparent mere 10% of not-so-decisive issues “which we can sort out later”.

It echoes the philistinism of the SLP’s repeated platform declarations that “we don’t want any internecine conflict” which saw the EPSR eventually expelled after two years of determined building of the SLP (to help create an open forum in the working class for revolutionary debate) a censorship approvingly voted for by the Stalinist Lalkar, (then entryists in the SLP) which follows the same hostile sectarian line to this day, not simply refusing debate but actively disciplining any of its members who try to examine other arguments, even confiscating (!) other groups’ papers from them.

As the EPSR has analysed, it is rejection of conflict which underlay the revisionist philosophical retreats in the Stalin leadership which eventually led to the mindrot class collaboration of Gorbachevism and outright liquidation in 1991 of the still viable and capable Soviet Union:

“The key to that fatal wrong-turning in history was the banning of genuine debate, the failure to dialectically hold fast the conflicting opposites in order to see understanding further grow out of the contradiction, and to benefit from it, – the failure to grasp the very essence of all scientific method but especially that of Marxist analysis, – the wish to kick out the discordant voices and have everyone singing [..] in perfect harmony. Stalinism was right to clamp down on counter-revolutionary factionalism* [*as Lenin had, in the 1920s Soviet Union against mostly Trotskyist disruption - ed].

It was the disastrous start to Revisionist ultimate catastrophe when all conflicting views about how imperialism would develop next, and how to tackle it, were banned as well.

Without genuine conflict and contradiction, correct Marxist scientific analysis can only slowly die. The ultimate debacle of the self-liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat under longtime steadily maturing (beginning with Stalin) delusions about the development of imperialist crisis and its nature, and about Soviet relations with imperialism, duly followed.

The key lesson for renewed communist struggle at the end of the 20th century has to be that not only must the free conflict of ideas be allowed but it must be positively encouraged as the most fertile educative source for the working class of all.

How was the whole world communist movement originally educated? Via virtually nothing but polemical writings by the best leaders against other leaders’ mistaken ideas INSIDE the communist internationals (I, II, and III), and INSIDE the Bolshevik Party. The communist education of mankind in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin consists of virtually nothing but polemics, in book, pamphlet and article form, against other communist leaders; – against Plekhanov, Martov, Trotsky, Kautsky, Bernstein, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Lassalle, Liebknecht, etc, etc.

But as soon as Stalin’s polemics against Trotsky, Bukharin, etc, petered out at the end of the 1920s, to be replaced by loftily ignoring alternative voices or silencing them, the inevitable deterioration in Marxist scientific understanding and ability began slowly to infect the whole world party.

And what crucially helped drive out Marxist scientific inquiry (and the method of all-ideas-in-conflict as the only source of development, through contradiction) was this stifling human wish to belong, this stifling wish to be part of the team at all costs, this stifling complacency, the reactionary bourgeoisification of the former communist leadership of the workers movement (EPSR Books Vol 34 Theory Part 4 op cit).

It may be that Corbyn’s view, blocking discussion, already makes it pointless to do anything but decry this new party as a trap for the working class but it is not yet clear quite what will emerge and whether it will be forced by concrete conditions to focus the giant debate which the imperialist crisis and its overt savagery is unstoppably pushing the masses towards (as Corbyn’s initial Labour leadership was forced to the surface from below).

Some signs of token revolutionary sentiment have been expressed at least according to a (possibly play-actingly) fearful Sunday Telegraph:

Jeremy Corbyn’s new party could take inspiration from the ideas of Vladimir Lenin, one of his closest advisers has said.

James Schneider, who served as Labour’s director of strategic communications under Mr Corbyn, made the comments in an interview about the direction the new Left-wing movement could take.

He told the New Left Review: “I’ve been working on this for about a year now, and I think there are structural factors which make it difficult to launch anything.”

Mr Schneider said the party could initially be led by “a small group of closely aligned, politically advanced people, who can make decisions collectively”.

He said: “There have been many communist parties throughout history, which have been formed by 12 or so individuals sitting around a table, which in short order became mass vehicles.”

He also suggested that the party - which was founded in July and has the working title of Your Party - could take inspiration from Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, by thinking about what “Lenin today” might do.

He told Oliver Eagleton, who interviewed him for the New Left Review: “You ran a short, thought-provoking piece by Dylan Riley the other week titled Lenin in America, which, following [Antonio] Gramsci, argued that Lenin today would pursue a ‘productive and creative relationship to the specific national-democratic revolutionary political culture in which one operates’. The British Left needs to be thinking along these lines.”

Lenin established the world’s first communist state in Russia in 1917 as head of the Bolshevik party.

He overthrew the provisional government, established after the Tsar was ousted and made up of liberals and moderate socialists, in a military coup, and dismissed the democratically elected Constituent Assembly to impose one-party rule on the country.

Lenin’s government indulged in state violence against its opponents, including the notorious “hanging order” in which Lenin told his revolutionary comrades to publicly execute no fewer than 100 rebels in each of the rebellious districts of Russia, referring to them as “the rich and the bloodsuckers”.

Andrew Murray, another of Mr Corbyn’s former advisers, also invoked Lenin when discussing the new party.

In an interview with the New Left Review this week, he said: “As for Leninism: that requires a much higher degree of ideological militancy and unity from the outset than we are likely to get with this new party.”

Mr Murray cited Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto when discussing the direction of the new party.

He said: “The Communist Manifesto enjoins socialists to first of all organise the proletariat as a class – and this task clearly needs recapitulating.

“The old organisations and institutions, both formal ones within the labour movement and informal ones within communities, have been broken apart over the past forty years. Reversing this, even partially, is an imperative for moving towards socialism.”

Summarising his ambitions for the new party, Mr Schneider said: “My dream is a party [..]instantly recognisable; unmistakably British and rooted in everyday life, from the pubs to the pavements.

“A sound – or in our case, a politics – that effortlessly blends cultures and traditions, anchored in class and community but moving forward with confidence and style. We need to inhabit this sort of national-popular register.

“To put it in a more theoretical way, the efficacy of this kind of politics stems from unlocking the potential progressive valence of the ‘national’ dimension of the capital-nation-state triad.”

All this is not so much as a “more theoretical” way as an obfuscatorily gibberised way – Lenin must be spinning in his mausoleum – which can only give Marxism a bad name with yet more anti-theory anti-leadership buried in its seemingly democratic “collective decisions”.

So too the anti-revolutionary garbage from Andrew Murray, from the old CPB revisionist class-compromise tradition which not long ago was still calling on workers to vote for Blair.

Demanding that the working class rebuild the disastrous class collaborating TUC and bureaucratic organisation framework which has been an integral part of opportunist left-reformism, holding workers back from Leninism for the last 100 years is nothing but treachery.

The whole “official labour movement” leadership which created and colludes with the now near-fascist Labour Party (helping Zionism’s intention to blitz the Palestinian people to extinction and fostering the Nazi war in Ukraine in cahoots with reaction across Europe while imposing Slump conditions on workers at home) needs to be completely broken apart.

Certainly let the working class build its grassroots unions bigger and better, and all its other forms of collective struggle but not with this historically disastrous self-interested bureaucratic leadership which has betrayed and misled working class struggle since its very inception, hostile to the revolutionary understanding that alone can extract the world from its disastrous plunge into destruction.

And this Murray plea for “organisation” before working out how to move forwards (slyly misrepresenting the Communist Manifesto) is completely upside down anyway as the EPSR quote above continues:

A party has lost its way the moment that organisation and activism come first and the conflict of ideas is relegated to second place (or banned altogether if possible). The perfunctory organisational ‘debates’ on the fringe of political questions miss the point entirely which is to make the continuing conflict of political theory itself the main driving force of all political activity. [...]All political work is first and foremost an act of convincing the mass movement of the need to take the next steps forward, – to vote in a certain way, to organise demonstrations and agitation, to make a revolution, whatever. And the key to that successful activity is to enthuse and educate still further the workers party itself which has to lead the mass movement into struggle.

And that work will precisely include reconvincing the party that the leadership’s line is correct against the doubters and wrong-thinking which would otherwise hold the party back from giving 100% of its best.

These garbled Lenin references are a million miles from communism, and deliberate distorted flannel to give some verisimilitude to this new racket, but their appearance at all suggests that something is happening which cannot be palmed off merely with sneers about “nothing to see here, it’s just rehashed 'left' Labourism” and grandstanding phrasemaking about revolution, but devoid of content or serious explanation as various groups have done from the Trot Socialist Equality Party, the fence-sitting FRFI Revolutionary Communist Group and the museum Stalinist CPGB-ML (Lalkar/Proletarian).

Final judgement about where this new party will move must hang fire, realising that the its mass enthusiasm might have to be ridden for a while in order to demonstrate to the working class that it is not an answer, (as Lenin argued in his book “Left wing communism - an infantile disorder”).

And it might be a forum for Leninist revolutionary argument, if forced to play a centrist role initially at least.

There is plenty of infantile enthusiasm around, gushingly declaring “Your Party” to be potentially winnable for conversion into “the revolutionary party” itself, as some of the more shallow ultra-left have done like the Trot Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).

Notionally at least this goes further than the immediate all-out backing from the various activist anti-theory groups like the SWP and the Socialist Party, and the bland British-chauvinist anti-communist revisionism of the CPB, who do all see the new party as little more than a souped-up version of “old” Labourism, “now that Starmerism has revealed New Labour’s true nature as a complete tool for imperialism”.

(For any halfway thinker – even the opportunist George Galloway, expelled from Labour more than 20 years ago, (and now contemplating joining Corbyn) – this was clear long before, and especially with, the Blairite ascendancy; and in fact working class disgust and dismay has been growing for far longer than that, with contempt for parliament and falling vote levels stretching back to the imperialist-backing Attlee government in the late 1940s).

Even if the “revolutionary” perspectives of the RCP could be taken seriously, they are nothing but disastrous Trotskyist poison anyway, filled with hatred and hostility for the Soviet Union and its achievements and for every other workers state, including the continuing revisionist-led powers like Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and above all China in its sheer size and weight.

But in reality the RCP support is just as reformist as the other supporters as rival Trot group, the just-as reactionary but more “sophisticated” Socialist Equality Party (on the World Socialist Website) takes great delight in showing.

It has a field day mocking the newly-minted RCP “revolutionism”, detailing at length its decades-long history as useless Labour entryists under the Militant and then Socialist Appeal labels, abandoned only when the reactionary Blair-inheriting Starmerites expelled them along with virtually every other shred of even tame “leftism” purged during the monstrous dirty lie “left-anti-semitism” stitch-up to suppress anti-Zionist anti-imperialism.

The SEP damns the RCP for notions of fighting alongside Corbyn for “achievable” reforms “to improve workers living standards while continuing to advocate a programme of socialist revolution” supposedly – a step-by-step strategy “without which socialist revolution would be just a ‘utopia’”, it quotes RCP leader Alan Woods as arguing.

The SEP rightly derides this line and the excuse that it did not work before (under Corbyn) because of “rightwing reformists who do not fight effectively” but could now do so, especially if the Corbynites were kept in line by RCPers for the “eventual” (i.e. never-arriving) revolution.

But its tedious fratricidal point-scoring against rival Trots gives no better guidance to the working class with its just as hollow alleged “principles” and “theory” and demands for “exposure of the left-reformists” leading it to write off all significance in this development.

The SEP’s denunciation of reforms is not Leninist anyway – the Bolsheviks never rejecting any struggles for improvements that can be won but understanding that they can only be judged in the light of how they aid necessary revolutionary struggle (by loosening censorship for example).

And they are always won as a consequence of revolutionary struggle which has been unable to go the full distance at any particular moment but forces concessions from the ruling class.

Any such struggles must always be saturated in revolutionary perspectives Lenin said (see last quote EPSR box).

And such tactics need to be seen in the light of total Catastrophe now unfolding, with “winning reforms” effectively a disarming notion when the reality is at best of defensively holding back the worst of reaction (exactly as the dogged fight to reverse the “terrorism” designation for Palestine Action is doing).

The major criticism from the SEP is to deride the Woodites for insisting that the new party can be transformed into a revolutionary party, larded with multiple quotes from the General Strike of 1926 and Trotsky’s insistence at the time that the Fabians, the TUC, and the seemingly very left Independent Labour Party should be exposed as counter-revolutionary influences

“systematically poisoning the Labour movement and clouding the consciousness of the proletariat”.

But this is missing the point in a big way and not simply because the party does not yet exist.

That is not the question to be answered.

Of course all fake-“leftism” should be resolutely exposed as part of the battle for revolutionary consciousness with

ruthless criticism of all the leading staff of the British labour movement day to day and unmasking of quasi-left leaders of every hue.

But where and how is that to be done?

Surely it must be a fight which goes where the working class is going and takes up the argument there, including in reactionary trade unions and, if possible, in this new party?

The issue is not winning Corbynism to revolution but of what discussion could be possible within or around it, and whether the argument for Leninism can be battled for.

Much experience on this question has been made already with Arthur Scargill’s SLP, the first great break from Labourism by the working class, as detailed in the EPSR Books series on Party Building and Theory which early on said for example:

Entryism into Scargill’s centrist movement[...]is not to try to turn it into the revolutionary party (which would be impossible without exhaustively shaking up every vexed historical question of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice), but to support it as a broad electoral front where a revolutionary-socialist critique of imperialist crisis can be properly and usefully (for all concerned) argued for, and worked for in practice too, thus further helping clarify everyone’s understanding (EPSR No843 05-03-96).

That was made impossible eventually by sectarian expulsion of the EPSR once its revolutionary politics did make headway (winning the deputy president election) and the SLP reverted into “left” trade union syndicalism and “British working class” chauvinism, demonstrating that conditions in the crisis had not ripened far enough to sustain its initial centrist character.

But that was not before hugely valuable theoretical developments were made, which notably all the “left” groups now discussing Corbynism have studiously ignored despite the obvious relevance – not least because exposure of their manoeuvring and trickery was a major part of those lessons.

The aloof dismissal of Corbyn’s nascent party is pure sectarianism hiding behind supposed principles borrowed from the wrong situation (1926) which misses a major opportunity for Marxist-Leninist influence.

But far more important is that the major target for the exposures being demanded needs to be the entire Trotskyist tradition itself, the epitome of the “quasi-left” which has been non-stop undermining and poisoning workers’ understanding ever since Trotsky’s allout attack on the new Soviet workers state in 1923 in The New Course.

Endless calls for the overthrow of the “Stalinist bureaucracy” behind the pretence of a “political revolution” to supposedly free up the working class from an alleged “tyranny” of a new “ruling caste” (sneakily named to avoid saying the easily-debunked “class” – see multiple past EPSR books and papers) to establish “proper” socialism, have constantly undermined workers’ confidence for the seven decades of gigantic achievement by the Soviet state.

And its backing for every imperialist fostered “democratic” anti-communist movement, like the Hungarian “uprising” attempted fascist coup in 1956 and the similar 1968 Prague Spring, led onto backing the CIA-organised $billion Vatican-funded Solidarnosc in Poland, the bogus “trade union” 1980s counter-revolution which helped trigger the whole Soviet liquidation and whose legacy in current ultra-reactionary Poland is a mainstay of NATO.

Trotsky’s sick and garbled nonsense was fully exposed by the eventual liquidation of the USSR by Gorbachevism in 1991.

Then it was definitively demonstrated (tragically at the expense of the masses in the former Soviet Union and East European socialist camp) that such a “political” revolution was nothing but counter-revolution as Leninism has always insisted.

Few Trots and crypto-Trots like the CPGB-PCC Weekly Worker ever dwell on this definitive debunking of their anti-Soviet poison, always keeping their theoretical disputes to the early soviet period, ignoring the titanic developments of the Soviet camp over 70 years, not least the staggering WW2 victory over German Nazism, built up throughout the 1930s by the whole of imperialism (including the ostensibly “anti-nazi non-aggressive” powers who secretly colluded with Hitlerism) with the intent of smashing and destroying communism.

That virtual second run of the Bolshevik revolution (which did 85% of the WW2 fighting - see back page) made possible by the disciplined and determined struggle to build a Soviet state, with all the complications and sacrifices that involved, went on to the giant achievements of the Soviet Union post-war, which stimulated and supported anti-imperialist and communist struggle world wide (at great cost) including China, as well as showing the potential for a society without bosses or private capital to make great advances in science, technology and culture, some outpacing the imperialist West despite all its privileges and wealth from several hundred years of exploitation and colonialist slavery and plundering, and in the teeth of blockade, sabotage, and the intimidating encirclement by the West with nuclear arms and NATO forces.

None of which lets off the hook the dire revisionist flaws in Moscow’s leadership already apparent way back in the 1920s – as reflected in mistaken advice given the British Communist Party of the time which the SEP says was

subordinated to the general council of the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party leaders through the “lefts” organised in the Anglo-Russian Committee

in citing Trotsky’s supposed “revolutionary tasks”.

But Trot hyperbole that this advice “betrayed” the General Strike (rather than TUC treachery) with the further absurd implication that the Soviets wanted the strike to fail, just gets in the way of understanding the actual philosophical retreat that began to emerge in Stalin’s leadership and which needed constructive exposure, not the cynical and debilitating claims that “all is rotten” – the lifelong petty bourgeois defeatism which Lenin identified in Trotsky from the very beginning.

With this individualist poison, and its continuation from then on against every mistake the Stalinists made, the Trotskyist hostility to the dictatorship of the proletariat (and earlier the Bolshevik party principle it was founded on) just overwhelmed any efforts to expose flaws and weaknesses in the Soviet leadership, while simultaneously recognising the huge advances that were being made in building the workers state.

Its extension into the even fouler nonsense that the Soviet Union deliberately sabotaged the Spanish Revolution (some undermining, by alone among nations and at great risk sending the anti-Franco fascist forces huge arms and volunteer forces!!) completely blocks the vital criticism of Moscow’s emerging Popular Front tactic, and its confusion for the working class in believing an alliance with petty parliamentarian “anti-fascism” was enough to hold off the utter bestiality of capitalist reaction.

And that confusion, still with anti-communist Trotskyism muddying the water, continues to this day, not least in the hyping of the BRICS alliance.

At least the SEP acknowledges some historic significance to the Corbyn/Sultana development as

a major milestone in the ongoing breakup in the Labour Party

though bizarrely immediately declaring it not to

represent a political break from Labourism...(it is) a Labour Party Mark 2.

The same offhand declaration comes from the Revolutionary Communist Group which declares it to be

in no sense new but the embodiment of reactionary left Labour politics of the past. In the absence of any real working class movement its focus will be entirely electoral

going on to declare that seeking a parliamentary majority for even radical sounding economic measures is doomed to disaster, with a ruling class that will never allow it to happen.

Correctly enough it says that only when the working class seizes power from the hands of the ruling class can it make any progress like that promised by Corbyn:

We will only fix the crises in our society with a mass redistribution of wealth and power, This means taxing the very richest in our society. That means an NHS free of privatisation and bringing energy, water, rail and mail into public ownership. That means investing in a massive council-house building programme. That means standing up to fossil fuel giants putting their profits before our planet.’ (yourparty.uk)

What force is going to make this happen? There is no mass movement out on the street calling for these policies whatever illusions the left is peddling. It is clear that the new party will commit itself to the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy as the vehicle for satisfying the economic interests of the working class. It will inevitably avoid awkward questions about state power or which class rules. Its demands for more public investment or nationalisations spread the illusion that we can have a kind-hearted capitalism, a capitalism without the venal capitalists. It is a reactionary wish to return to the conditions of the post-war boom.

But this criticism for all its references to “state power” manages to avoid talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat, very core of Leninist understanding, and the historically proven form in which the working class can take and hold power (until society has developed via increasing democratic participation, to a such level of maturity under planned socialism that no coercive power is required).

Nor does the RCG give any serious understanding of the revolutionary theoretical grasp that will need to be hammered out in order that the working class could carry through the united class war struggle that would be needed to establish it.

Simply pointing out that there is no “mass movement” on the street is no answer – how would such a movement come about and what would keep it united enough to carry through the revolution needed for establishing a workers state?

And how would the working class know which movements to trust or join in with?

The crisis itself will drive masses onto street and the world is full of movements as it happens, such as the millions who spontaneously poured out in Cairo in 2011 to topple the repressive imperialist stooge and Zionist collaborator Hosni Mubarak in the Arab Spring to the petty bourgeois counter-movement organised two years later by Western intrigue and the Egyptian military to violently topple the newly established Muslim Brotherhood presidency (itself far from socialist but still with anti-imperialist content, supporting the Palestinian struggle for example) and reinstall a new Western stooge, General Sisi .

Currently Haïti is afire with alleged “gangs” so-called by imperialism but defying decades of capitalist domination; Kenya has been exploding with street turmoil against the stitched up pro-Western presidency; Indonesia is in a ferment of anti-government riots that seem to continue the anti-dictatorship anti-Western mass sentiment which began in the late 1990s revolutionary turmoil against the Suharto dictatorship.

But simultaneously Bangladesh has recently seen a huge street movement beginning as “student riots” which have toppled the Sheikh Hasina nationalist government now replaced with pro-American stoogery under Mohamed Yunus, violently suppressing the previous Awami League and cooperating with reactionary pro-Pakistan elements hostile to the national liberation dating back to 1970 (see EPSR No1654 08-03-25); Myanmar next door has been devastated for three years by half a dozen alleged “liberation” movements, armed, supplied and supported by the West to try and balkanise a country insufficiently compliant with Western interests (against China).

In Serbia there has been a nine-months long “student” campaign of often violent demonstrations against yet another government, which while hardly progressive has not been sufficiently compliant with the West, possibly because of a refusal to take the side of Ukraine against Russia, and links with China; not coincidentally it is a Chinese rail modernisation project where the construction collapse occurred which is the ostensible focus for the demonstrators’ demands.

The latter upheavals have all the characteristics of a Western intelligence “colour revolution”, like the obvious pro-Western “popular” demonstrations in Georgia last year.

So too, when in 2019 Hong Kong was severely disrupted by the reactionary and increasingly violent petty bourgeois “umbrella” “democracy” movement, provoked and coordinated by Western intelligence, until eventually suppressed by firm Beijing directed workers state control.

Brazil has seen years of rightwing street demonstrations, currently trying to block and disrupt the prosecution of former reactionary president Jair Bolsonaro, on trial for attempting a fascist coup, provoking the violent 2023 post-inauguration riots in Brasilia that tried to topple newly elected “left” president Lula da Silva.

It is with a deep revolutionary perspective alone that the masses can avoid being hoodwinked and misled.

The RCG berates the new party for its “lack of democracy” which not only prejudges what will emerge but again misses the point; while supposed

“zealous policing of any opposition”

would obviously be an insurmountable obstacle to any struggle for revolutionary theoretical debate, it is not the “democracy” that needs emphasising but the fight for correct understanding that it would facilitate.

Seemingly better reasons for standing aloof are given by the Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian though its assessment that the working class response was “lacklustre” is not among them. Of course the sign-ups could all be petty bourgeois – hard to say without details – but the large numbers would surely indicate a useful opportunity to battle for revolutionary theory in some way if possible?

That by no means implies swinging round to support or create any illusions in or compromise with the hopeless anti-revolutionary politics so far on show – but nor does it necessarily writing off all interaction with this movement, not least because that is exactly what it is - movement, driven by the rapidly degenerating crisis.

It cannot be simply a Labour Mark 2 as they quickly write it off because the historic conditions no longer exist for one.

But its politics are dire says the CPGB-ML citing particularly past reactionary positions taken by co-leader Zarah Sultana, notably on China, when she denounced Beijing over the Uighur minority, regurgitating grotesque Western propaganda Goebbels lies about Uighur “slave camps” and “forced sterilisation” and more recently n her celebration of the toppling of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria and its supplanting with the CIA/Zionist coordinated HTS stooge “jihadists”.

And dire they are – and Corbyn’s too.

So let Sultana and Corbyn and similar opportunism be denounced for all its backwardness part of the great battle for understanding that must be fought.

But that will equally have to be fought against these appalling Stalinists whose criticism of Corbyn’s failings is simply a listing of the reformist measures he failed to carry through as Labour leader, such as opposing NATO, standing against the Trident nuclear deterrent , and most of all of not supporting Brexit (!!!).

So not reformist enough in other words, not sufficiently pacifist and to top it all, not resolutely Little Englander chauvinist enough, the deadly jingoist confusion currently feeding the great anti-migrant scapegoating.

Some revolutionary internationalists these are. And in all their critique they mention revolution once and that only in a tacked on platitude about

“developing the self-reliance and fortitude to build a genuine revolutionary m0vement”

without the remotest indication of how that is to be done, or what it means, least of all in calling for the class war struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In remaining space a critical point needs to be made about the Ukraine war missed by all the “lefts” over the great split between the desperate Europeans and Trump’s withdrawal of support for Kiev, supposedly “outsmarted” by Vladimir Putin.

No such thing. It is Europe that has been outsmarted, by the US. The biggest contradiction driving this war has always been the crisis trade conflicts with Europe and particularly Germany whose relentless growth and efficiency has seen it outsell American competition for decades (Airbus, cars, engineering etc).

From the beginning the US was aiming at disrupting Europe, not least in the sabotage of the NordStream gas pipelines which give Germany a huge energy advantage for its industry.

Certainly there is a general interest for all powers in war as a diversion from capitalism’s crisis, and to target Russia for plundering and to suppress revival of any residual communist sentiment. But given its failure and staggering cost, it suits the US to cut its losses. Trump’s negotiation with Putin in Alaska leaves the Europeans hung out to dry because as far as possible it is “job done”.

All this needs further analysis.

Build Leninism. Alan Moss

Back to the top

The “new” RCP’s bogus “Defence of Lenin” is in reality an attempt to breath new life into tired old Lenin-Trotsky “joint-leadership” fictions and instant “workers’ democracy” fantasies to hide their petty-bourgeois class hatred for Lenin’s proletarian-dictatorship science.

Review: In Defence of Lenin – Volume 2* by Rob Sewall and Alan Woods – Part 4 (final)

(*Part 3 last issue. Also Vol 1 review in EPSR No 1652)

The difficulty the authors have is that they cannot hide the fact of the breathtaking, against-all-the-odds achievements of the Soviet workers state led by the Stalinist-revisionist bureaucracy after Lenin’s death; and all carried out under the Party-led proletarian dictatorship bequeathed by Lenin (and only brought to an end by Gorbachev’s idiot 1989-91 liquidationist end-point of Stalinism’s revisionist retreats). Nor can they conceal Trotsky’s and latter-day Trotskyism’s non-stop defeatist and counter-revolutionary campaigns to bring down the Party leadership heading all these hugely significant developments for humanity.

For all their idealist protestations that it was not possible to build socialism in the Soviet Union in enforced isolation (the USSR was temporarily isolated because the material circumstances internationally meant that it would take another two decades and renewed world war before socialist and anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles would triumph throughout the Third World), the two authors are forced to concede that “an entirely new economic system” had been established that had “rapidly transformed” Russia into “one of the most advanced nations on earth” and “could not easily be destroyed”.

Confusingly, all this follows a claim that the Soviet Union under Stalin was “thrown right back”, and that “many of the worst features of the old regime were restored.” They don’t say what it was supposedly thrown back to, or what features were allegedly restored. If, as they defeatistly claim in the subsequent paragraph, the Russian Revolution “degenerated because it lacked the materialist basis for socialism”, what was this hard-to-destroy “new system” that had made such titanic advances? If it was not capitalism because that had been overthrown, then what else could it be but socialism????

There is no third way, and the authors don’t attempt to propose one. Instead, they throw in a completely abstract, non-class idea of a “nationalised planned economy” that has “colossal potential”, and coincide this with an equally abstract notion of “democracy” without stressing that complete democracy can only be arrived at through a long period of proletarian dictatorship. Despite their protestations that they are not referring to “formal bourgeois democracy”, by negating the proletarian dictatorship they are in fact smuggling in reactionary Labour-movement reformism and chauvinism, which is where their petty-bourgeois class instincts feel most comfortable:

The regime established by Stalin had nothing whatsoever to do with Lenin’s idea of a workers’ state, which was democratic through and through. By democracy, of course, we do not refer to the hollow farce of formal bourgeois democracy, which is just another name for the dictatorship of the bankers and capitalists. Lenin’s conception as outlined in The State and Revolution, and clearly spelled out in the 1919 Party Programme, was based on the model of the Paris Commune, in which the working people themselves control society from top to bottom.

Under Stalin the Russian Revolution was thrown right back. Many of the worst features of the old regime was restored. However, the revolution was not thrown back to its starting point. The October Revolution had established an entirely new economic system which could not easily be destroyed. Nor, indeed, was it ever Stalin’s intention to destroy it, since his power was ultimately dependent on it.

There were important gains that were worth preserving and defending, and they allowed the Soviet Union to make extraordinary progress, despite the appalling costs imposed by a corrupt bureaucratic administration. The remarkable gains made by the Soviet Union in a very short time remain a powerful testament to the advantages of a nationalised planned economy, even when it is hindered by the arbitrary and wasteful rule of a parasitic bureaucracy.

As we have pointed out, the Russian Revolution degenerated because it lacked the material basis for socialism. Stalinist totalitarianism completely destroyed the workers democracy that had been established by the October Revolution. This is what Marxists call a political counter-revolution, as opposed to a social counter-revolution. The difference consists of the fact that a political revolution changes the regime, but does not alter the basic socio-economic conquests of the revolution, that is the nationalised economy and planned production intact [sic].

In the end, the potential was never fully allowed to realise itself. A nationalised planned economy requires democracy as the human body needs oxygen. The planned economy was fatally undermined by the rise of a parasitic bureaucracy, which slowly strangled the economy, wasted its resources and destroyed it.

However, the colossal potential of a nationalised planned economy was revealed by the unprecedented rapid transformation of a formerly backward, illiterate, semi-feudal country into one of the most advanced and highly educated nations in the world. (pp.897-898)

Woods and Sewall’s middle-class ‘perfect revolution’ delusions misrepresent Lenin’s scientific, materialist understanding in State and Revolution, that such complete democracy can only come through the proletarian dictatorship, by not even mentioning this revolutionary essence of the matter. Instead, they childishly misrepresent Lenin’s “idea of a workers’ state” (“idea”???) as simply something that was “democratic through and through”, and make-believe that this is what The State and Revolution was all about. They seem to be arguing here that the Soviet Union could have leapt past an entire generational, historic period of proletarian dictatorship to end bureaucratism and arrive at complete democracy, whilst contradictorily declaring that the transitional stage of socialism was not materially possible in Russia!!! Such are the subjective-idealist imbecilities petty bourgeois hatred of proletarian dictatorship can lead to.

Their dystopian fantasy that “Stalinist totalitarianism” had “completely destroyed workers’ democracy” ignores the fact that the Soviet masses were only just recovering from four years of the most brutal of civil wars and imperialist invasions when Trotsky launched his New Course assault. During the civil war the Bolshevik Party, under Lenin’s influence, imposed the firmest of proletarian-dictatorship measures (including the use of Red Terror when necessary) to not only to suppress the White counter-revolutionary forces but also to maintain strict discipline within the ranks of the proletariat and poor-to-middle peasantry whilst the war was raging (or “regimentation” as the authors word it in the above civil war quote).

Whilst October created the conditions in which steps towards genuine workers’ democracy could, and did, begin (and the 1919 Party Programme they mention sets out how the Bolsheviks planned to work towards this goal), this was a gradual process that necessitated a lengthy period of cultural, educational and economic development before the mass of workers could take over functions of the state in its entirety, eradicate bureaucratic practices, and, in the authors’ words, “control society from top to bottom”.

This had to be carried out under a continued lengthy transitional period of proletarian dictatorship once the civil-war emergency was over, to suppress the capitalist bourgeoisie and restrict their “democratic” freedoms, and to encourage healthy, collective working practices amongst the proletariat and peasantry, whilst simultaneously introducing genuine democracy for the vast majority of the people. This means involving ever widening sections of the population in the administration and control of the socialist state until an advanced self-disciplined socialist society emerges; at which point such coercion of the minority becomes unnecessary and the state begins to wither away.

This proletarian dictatorship was virtually, in practice, the dictatorship of the party; and at various times, including during the civil war or in the decision to launch the 1917 October Revolution, it amounted to a dictator- ??ship of a small circle of leading Bolsheviks, or even at times, one person, Lenin, – which gets to the heart of all this petty-bourgeois individualist Trot hatred.

Against the authors' defeatist prognosis of the inevitable failure of Russian socialism because the USSR in isolation “lacked the material basis for socialism”, Lenin argued in 1920 that all that was needed to build the foundations for socialism was electrification and the support of technical experts to reconstruct industry:

There can be no question of rehabilitating the national economy or of communism unless Russia is put on a different and a higher technical basis than that which has existed up to now. Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country, since industry cannot be developed without electrification. This is a long-term task which will take at least ten years to accomplish, provided a great number of technical experts are drawn into the work. A number of printed documents in which this project[6] has been worked out in detail by technical experts will be presented to the Congress. We cannot achieve the main objects of this plan—create so large regions of electric power stations which would enable us to modernise our industry—in less than ten years. Without this reconstruction of all industry on lines of large-scale machine production, socialist construction will obviously remain only a set of decrees, a political link between the working class and the peasantry, and a means of saving the peasants from the rule by Kolchak and Denikin; it will remain an example to all powers of the world, but it will not have its own basis.

Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks, Nov 21st, 1920, vol. 31

Because the triumph of the Soviet Union’s 73-year-long history of socialist construction is so obvious that Woods and Sewall are obliged to acknowledge it, the authors resurrect some completely discredited non-Marxist (i.e. Trotskyist) voodoo about “political revolutions” to cause confusion. This is a totally unscientific fiction because no changes in property relations are involved.

Left unexplained is why their lunatic predictions of a “political revolution” in the 1980s that would to “kick out the Stalinist bureaucrats” and “introduce genuine workers’ control” in then socialist Poland (when they, along with the rest of Trotskyism, joined forces with the CIA, the Vatican, Thatcher, Reagan and the mafia in backing the alleged “rank-and-file socialist” Solidarnosc fraud) proved to be a disaster for the working class once Lech Walesa’s Pilsudski-ite fascist quislings came to power in 1990.

The real difficulties the Revisionist bureaucracy got into were not a result of a “lack of democracy” or “ the rise of a parasitic bureaucracy” (whatever that means), but arose out of deep philosophical flaws inherited from Stalin. The Soviet system did not “fail” as such, it was hopelessly misled.

The fatal flaws that led to the unnecessary liquidation of the Soviet Union were rooted Stalin’s nonsensical belief as summed up in his 1952 Economic Problems that expansionary booms were no longer possible in the imperialist world because the spread of the Socialism Camp after WW2 meant that socialist production and living standards could now out-compete Western monopoly-imperialism to the point that, with added pressure from peace struggles, capitalism disappears from the world.

This was a catastrophic retreat from Lenin’s revolutionary perspective of the inevitability of capitalist collapse into Slump and world war driving forwards world socialist revolution as the only way out. It fatally disarmed the working class as the revolutionary crisis escalated, and led Gorbachev to idiotically dismantle the still economically viable Soviet proletarian dictatorship when such peaceful triumphs for socialism inevitably failed to materialise (and still lingers on in modern revisionism’s current “multipolar world” class-collaborating idiocies).

No amount of correct voting procedures or other idealised “democracy” claptrap would have rescued the Revisionist leadership from the philosophical disaster it ended up being for the working class.

However, and despite all its flaws, it was the same Stalinist bureaucracy that not only

“transformed a formerly illiterate country into one of the most advanced nations in the world”

as the authors begrudgingly concede, but also achieved the greatest military triumph in history in defeating the Nazi invaders in World War Two (inspiring the entire Third World to fight for revolution at home in the process), against Trotsky’s endlessly sour, back-stabbing predictions of Soviet defeat, disintegration and collapse; and then went on for another 40-plus years of unprecedented developmental and scientific achievements, continually disproving the sour prognoses of the cynical latter-day Trotskyist “anti-bureaucracy” gloom-mongers (and, incidentally, the almost as defeatist museum-Stalinists’ view that nothing positive happened after Stalin’s death).

Similarly, it was the East German revisionist bureaucracy that transformed society in the former GDR post-WW2 despite all its flaws and confusions, as the RCP begrudgingly concede by publishing this positive book review in a recent paper:

In her book Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990, East German-born historian Katja Hoyer does her part to bust the myth of capitalism’s unique and divine ability to produce the best living standards.

Hoyer details how in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), East Germans had universally available housing, rewarding and secure jobs, and an affordable and widespread childcare programme.

At the time of its demise in October 1990, it had the best female employment statistics in the world. After reunification, workers were forced to work to destroy their factories and their livelihoods as previously state-owned firms were sold to venture capitalists.

Hoyer humanises these facts of life in the GDR with dozens of personal stories from GDR citizens.

We hear about the life of manual labourer Ulrich Struwe, who flourished in his volunteer job in the USSR and returned to East Germany able to re-furnish his family’s flat.

There are many stories from women, such as Inge Schmidt, who – long before their western counterparts – were able to pursue careers in the government, academia, engineering and more.

Hoyer poses a strong left-critique of the Stalinist policies from Moscow which kept the East German economy behind: the theft of production by the Soviets from East German factories, the destruction of the democratic process, and so on.

Beyond the Wall falls short in some ways here, for example by not emphasising the West German regime’s own anti-democratic tendencies.

It also neglects to examine the impact of western sanctions on the GDR economy – although, as the multitude of personal accounts demonstrate, these were not a major concern for many East Germans in the 1970s and 80s.

The book closes with a frank, emotional, and solemn reflection on how the 1990 reunification and return of capitalism has failed the East German people.

This book is an enlightening read for any socialist.

Interestingly, despite some token anti-Soviet after-thoughts squeezed in to maintain Trotskyist ‘credibility’ (possibly under editorial ‘guidance’), including the old “destruction-of-democracy” perfect-revolution chestnut discussed above, the tone of this reader’s review is far more positive towards the achievements of the post-WW2 Socialist camp than Woods and Sewall’s well-versed anti-communist venom.

The “Soviet-theft-of-production” accusation is an outright lie, however. Until 1953, East Germany was obliged to pay reparations to the Soviet Union to rebuild its economy and infrastructure following the devastation wrought by the Nazi war machine during WW2. Despite this necessity (to ensure the survival of the USSR in the new conditions of non-stop, nuclear cold war threats and intimidation), the GDR received enormous levels of technical assistance, training and support from the Soviets to develop its own industries and infrastructure, which helped it to achieve the brilliant successes that so impress the reader. The GDR had the highest standard of living in the Socialist camp by the 1970’s. These achievements also included the huge steps towards female emancipation the reader mentions, which were in far advance of anything achieved under capitalism then or since.

Following the Bolshevik’s example under Lenin, a great party-led debate fought in front of the proletariat is required today to convincingly resolve all such philosophical questions keeping the working class confused and divided and provide the revolutionary leadership required to end imperialism’s renewed Catastrophic breakdown into slump and total war devastation (including amongst the alienated workers of the former GDR who hate the capitalist restoration that German reunification imposed and, in part, are turning either to the fascist populism of the AfD or to anti-‘politics’ cynicism in the leadership vacuum left by revisionist failure and retreat from revolutionary perspectives).

Battling against Trot sectarianism and philistinism, which is all the RCP’s crudely revived anti-Leninist “defence of Lenin” bile amounts to, is a crucial part of this fight, as is the battle to expose the disastrous retreats from revolutionary perspectives of the equally sectarian and anti-theory latter-day revisionists.

Only a return to the genuinely Leninist traditions of open polemical debate to fight for and achieve a correct understanding on all issues dividing the working class can give the revolutionary leadership needed. Build Leninism now. Phil Waincliffe

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