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No 1668 31st January 2026

Western propaganda deluge reaches a new level of demented lying and fabrication as monopoly capitalism’s Catastrophic crisis failure drives the system ever further into fascist repression and warmongering. Frenzied upside down LIES now told about Gestapo ICE killings in Minnesota; LIES about “peace” in Palestine when nothing but sadistic Zionist genocide continues; LIES about Russia as “bogeyman threat” demanding ludicrous arms buildup in Europe to back up Ukraine’s Bandera Nazis; LIES about China’s workers state; LIES about left nationalist Venezuela as a “drug cartel” and “thuggery”; and LIES about Iran, with demented and absurd exaggerations and fabrications of “regime killings”, in response to the Western/Zionist induced and inflamed demonstrations laced with ludicrous pretences about “wanting the Shah back” the reactionary Savak torture regime thrown out in 1979. Popular opinion is fooled to back up demented war, imperialism’s only way out of the greatest meltdown in its 800 year history, paralysed and split by overproduction trade war contradictions as Marx analysed. Revolutionary Leninism ever more vital

The New Year slew of gross US Empire fascist-aggressions makes clearer than ever the historic bankruptcy of the degenerate imperialist monopoly system and with it the uselessness of the fake-“left”, all shades.

Specific lessons on the “lefts’” opportunism, feebleness and treachery emerge from every one of the dizzying stream of vicious barbarities, from the thuggish illegal kidnap raid of President Maduro from Venezuela (and potential collusion around it); the lurid Goebbels big-lie counter-revolution demonisation and terror bombing threats against Iran; the Trumpite “hand it over” tantrum aggression against erstwhile NATO imperialist “allies” on Greenland; the staggering sadistic and racist mass slaughter brutality of imperialist-backed Zionism’s continuing Gaza and West Bank genocide (and blitzing of Lebanon and Syria); the murderous terrorising of the US working class by the newly enhanced racist ICE “anti-migrant” Gestapo; and the Washington contempt for its Kurdish stoogery in Syria now abandoned in favour of the new al-Sharaa “jihadist” stooge in Damascus for suppression of the ISIS “terrorists”.

To understand these events they first need to be seen as facets of the same plunge of an outmoded class system towards its historic doom, trapped by the contradictions of its crisis Catastrophe in a welter of depravity and gangsterism.

Taken as a whole, as well as separately, these atrocities rip apart all bourgeois lies about “prosperity” “freedom” and decades of grotesque Orwellian claims of “peaceful democracy” as the bourgeoisie now openly imposes dictatorial class rule by outright censorship, repression, terrorising of scapegoats and escalating war.

They also rip apart the fake-“left” and its decades of bogus Trot or Stalinist posturing about “communism” which still says nothing about the need for a serious revolutionary leadership party to be built, to develop in full the perspective of systemic capitalist collapse and the ruling class turn to open bourgeois dictatorship to save its skin.

The necessity and the opportunity to (re)develop the scientific leadership vital for the struggle has never been greater as the whole imperialist order implodes into backbiting, lacerating conflict and recrimination, trade war and hatred, and with far more to come as the whole Bretton Woods dollar-based credit-fueled economic framework disintegrates further.

But the “left” still avoids the now incontestable need to put the defeat and overthrow this disgusting, venal, arrogant, incompetent and world-threatening ruling class at the forefront of understanding, as the only way to stop its nazi depravity and war provocations.

Instead they just pump out the same disarming, useless and content-free organisational squabbles and hollow “alliances” for yet more reformist parliamentary “struggle” at home; more class-collaborating “trade unionist” reaction; more uselessly diversionary “devolution” and mayoral gimmickry; more head-of-a-pin academic wrangles over “defining fascism” (in order to ignore it or complacently assert “we are not there yet”); and more ineffectual social-pacifist protest or unachievable “stop war actions” (strikes etc) on US and imperialist blitzings, founded in Stalinist retreat from revolutionary perspectives and his mis-assessment of imperialism’s capacities (see EPSR Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics).

Most of all, the “lefts” either poisonously rubbish the great achievements of disciplined workers states, past and present, which were and are the main instrument for mankind’s future development (however much they may have made (inevitable) sometimes severe mistakes in their early development, or even still do); or they disarm workers by glossing over those mistakes and especially by advocating the revisionist “peace struggle” retreats by Stalin and the imbecilic and complacent “multipolar world” fatuous form it takes currently.

All are oblivious, (i.e. deliberately blind-eyed) to the unstoppable warmongering nature of imperialism as its Catastrophic crisis forces it into ever more demented lies, racism, jingoism, hatred and inhuman atrocity on a path further into already raging World War Three.

Worse still they denounce the great stirrings of rebellion throughout the (neo)colonial world as nothing but “terrorism” or “jihadism”, lining up with imperialism’s “anti-terror” justifications for endless blitzing and war (lately on Syria, Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and Lebanon) and missing the significance of the hatred and hostility erupting everywhere against the Western capitalist domination system.

Bizarre, crude and often barmy or even reactionary as the ideologies in these stirrings might be, far from Marxism, they are symptoms of the great breakdown in alienated world society which is endemic to the profit system, and indicate a raging by an ever more uncompliant mass against its intolerable inequality, arrogance, philistinism and tyrannical exploitation.

What they are not is “instruments of the CIA and imperialism” or at least “serving its interests” (despite very occasional, limited and usually transient or partial success by the intelligence agencies to recruit them) as the fake-“left” asserts, always citing the one-off exceptional success of 1980s Afghanistan, to cover up their craven siding with imperialism and their own petty bourgeois craving for “stability” i.e. hostility to the chaos of societal breakdown created by the crisis.

Nor are Islamic or other notional aims anything but an incidental, virtual irrelevance, historically speaking, the subjective froth on the underlying material movement of these huge sections of humanity.

Eventually this giant seething mass, already long past forelock tugging or kowtowing ignorance, must find its way towards the consciousness of revolutionary communist civil-war class-war struggle which alone will bring to an end the millennia long era of class-divided society and its latest “free market” anarchic monopoly capitalist profiteering form, for centuries a stimulus for progress on balance but now dragging mankind solely to war and ecological destruction.

But the spontaneous mass eruptions driven by the crisis (such as the Arab Spring eg) can only do that if led by Marxist theoretical grasp, won by deep study of the broadest span of the long historical unfolding of capitalism and all class society and its irresolvable contradictions, and continuous polemical development of theory and its vital testing in practice by a revolutionary party built for the purpose.

Only that dialectical materialist philosophy can explain the worldwide turmoil, incompetence, corruption, violence, and bourgeois anti-science unreason now ever-more ascendant, and thereby guide workers to the only stable solution there can be – the class war fight to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat to build a rational socialist world in a completely new epoch of human society.

The gobsmacking horrors being imposed by imperialism are preparing the way, and especially as they split the floundering ruling class wide apart, as even some accounts in the mostly reactionary bourgeois press indicate:

When precisely did the rules-based order die? Mark Carney’s speech last week at Davos was the first time a western head of state has said outright what has been hanging over political proceedings for some time. The rules-based order is “fading”, in the middle of a “rupture” and there’s no going back. But outside Davos, the G7 and Nato, that is old news – many believed the rules-based order had expired long ago, depending on what moment you take as your watershed.

There were several components to the order, which of course was a layered, complex thing. The first is structural, that is, the agreement between powerful and prosperous countries that there would be certain mechanisms and protocols to maintain political stability, contain the outbreak of wars and promote their mutual economic interests. All the bodies that direct international traffic – the EU, Nato, the UN, the WTO, the IMF – make up that top layer of organisation.

The second was more abstract, the norms that those countries adhered to in action and rhetoric. They would not launch aggressive protectionist economic policies against each other, definitely not have designs on each other’s territory and not pass opinion on each other’s domestic affairs.

The third was the ideological glue that held it all together, one that advanced the impression that these were not simply transactional arrangements in everyone’s interest, but something rooted in liberal ideals: the promotion of universal human rights, rights to self-determination and the sanctity of individual freedoms.

In many ways, the final component was the most important, what Carney called a “pleasant fiction”. This pretence that the whole thing wasn’t fundamentally about American hegemony. The US and its allies committed violations of international law frequently, or endorsed them, or let them pass – but broadly put in the effort to make those actions seem coherent. They had to sometimes violate the order so they could save it. They did so not because they could, but because they must, as the custodians of moral standards and global security.

The “war on terror” was the first challenge to that argument. If there was any faith that powerful countries would not indulge their imperial rights to invade other countries, rendition people illegally and imprison them for years without due process, it ended then. The victims of the “war on terror” did not have the privilege of being able to partake of the pleasant fiction, as their lands became theatres for foreign troops. Their countries succumbed to years of war and fracture with disastrous results, proliferation of sectarian violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a handing back to the Taliban when the spasm of post-9/11 temper subsided. But the architects of the “war on terror” could still offer the consolation to themselves and their public that it was all in the service of combating the great threat of Islamic terrorism, and that its calamitous consequences were unfortunately due to “unknown unknowns”.

That consolation became near impossible in Gaza, where another part of the order died and the necrosis spread. Every feature of the genocide throttled the pretence that the order was rooted in any ideals – or rather that those ideals applied to anyone but those at the top of the hierarchy. The scale of killing, the violation of every rule in the book, from the wholesale murder of non-combatants to depriving them of food and medicine, obliterated the fiction.

But it wasn’t just that. It was that Israel was both armed and given diplomatic cover to pursue its campaign, rendering its allies not just bystanders but partners in crime. This was not a genocide enacted in an African country by a party remote from Washington or Brussels, allowing for hand-wringing and condemnation from afar. It was a joint venture that continued only because Israel is a close ally, making it clear that the rules were applied selectively.

But Gaza was also destructive and catalysing in other ways, because it introduced an internal tension between the parts of the order that had spoiled and those that still worked. In maintaining support for Israel, some European countries and the US went to war with their own institutions, refusing to respect the rulings of the international criminal court when it came to the indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and, in the case of the US, imposing sanctions on the court. Gaza exposed that these institutions are only allowed to function as a sort of international club in which insiders were immune.

And then, the most recent death, in which the constituent parts of that order became the targets of the American hegemon, rather than its handmaidens. This encompasses Trump’s designs on Greenland, his contempt for European allies and Nato, and his tariff wars against them. They are now reckoning with how to coexist on new terms, hastily and violently rewritten by a US that has decided covert supremacy is for the birds.[...]

It was notable that, as Carney detailed the hypocrisies of the old way, there was no acknowledgment of the people who have always suffered them.

The solutions proposed so far – more middle-power coordination to create groupings that act as a counterweight to the US, higher investment in defence spending, lowering taxes and trade hurdles to make up for the US’s isolationism – are policies that continue the security and economic supremacy of the old order.

Those looking to spring free of it are still imprisoned by the very structures they created and continue to believe in.

Of course this petty bourgeois account – despite the justified rage of its Palestinian heritage author – comes nowhere near spelling out what “structures” are involved, namely monopoly capitalist society and its ruling class domination.

And it still concedes that there might have been some validity to such instruments as the IMF and United Nations, rather than the reality that they were also deliberately set up as part of the great post-war hoodwinking racket from the very beginning, covering over imperialism’s ruthless world exploitation.

And even less does it state that no “breaking free” or ending of this system will be done by the capitalist class itself – which like all rulers in history will not leave the stage until forced out by the rising class, no longer able to tolerate its suppression and humiliating misery.

Just the opposite. It is clinging on with ever fouler hatred and brute hostility to prevent its own demise as a class, ready to take down the whole world rather than see its necessary departure from history.

The only real challenge there will be is the challenge of revolution, necessarily a class challenge (and therefore a collective challenge, far from the cited “sanctity of individual freedom”, which is just a petty bourgeois notion hostile to any class discipline).

That challenge began long before the “war on terror” which was devised as an excuse and justification precisely for smiting down the inevitably rising world hatred and hostility against this collapsing system already erupting in the 1990s, even as the idiotic Gorbachev revisionist liquidation of first great workers advance, the Soviet Union, was being hailed as the “end of history” by bourgeois academics.

Inasmuch as it can be pinned down the EPSR’s Marxism said its:

‘conclusion so far has been that the USA’s massively adventurous Middle East blitzkrieg recolonisation (of Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan to start with, but with everyone else under direct explicit threat, and every other “rogue state” or “axis of evil” connection on the planet being menaced too) is both a continuation of America’s routine bullying imperialist role anyway as the world counter-revolutionary gendarme (more than 400 coups, invasions, and subversions staged since 1941 to try to halt or overturn the progress of the anti-imperialist struggle), PLUS the added venom and dimensions that Washington had been pouring into its blitzkrieging for at least a decade following the surprising emergence of “international terrorism” after Soviet self-liquidation was supposed to have made the world “safe from communism for ever”.

World War III began with the monstrous blitzkrieg destruction of Serbia in 1999, inflicting far more terror-destruction on this part of the heart of Europe than even the World War II blitzkrieg had ever managed to do, ignoring a UN “illegal” criticism to do so, and “justifying” the invasion with the ludicrous “Reçak village massacre” fabrication which would have made Goebbels Propaganda Ministry blush, even, — and which put the CIA’s Big Brother news tampering management back in full stride such as it was for the outrageous “Gulf of Tonking incident” fabrication, which “justified” the 10-year devastation war on Vietnam & Indo-China (EPSR No1231 04-05-04).

Those propaganda “justifications” have now reached a dementedly new level of big lie that not only fabricates utterly ludicrous demonising assertions against victims but blatantly denies the glaring reality of its ever fouler atrocities even when witnessed, filmed, measured and attested – and then insists the opposite is true, in full Orwellian blackwhite and doublethink style.

Thus the Zionists just deny there is genocide in Palestine, the NATO-backed Ukrainian fascists fabricate endless “civilian killing” in their war on Russia or the White House turns the US ICE murders in Minneapolis on their head, blaming the victims.

Ceasefire is war; war is peace; America is great again.

But the Guardian piece does see that a critical stage has been reached, that of the imperialist system turning on itself, which none of the “left” “Marxist” pretenders remotely explain or even grasp (as the main aspect of the Ukraine warmongering for example - see below).

Inter-imperialist rivalry is at the heart of the antagonistically competitive monopoly capitalist system and its trade war is the great driving engine of crisis and collapse and ultimate transformation into open world war.

The seemingly shock aggression by America on the other big powers has always been inevitable, the real end target of the warmongering warmed up by blitzing half a dozen “rogue” states so far since Serbia.

Destructive as their devastation has been, from Afghanistan to Iraq and Yemen, it is far too little to wipe out enough “surplus capital” to solve the gigantic historic impasse of the crisis.

It can only be the beginning of blitzing and warmongering to come.

So the “free world” (!) leaders are running round like headless chickens (at the Davos finance meeting most lately) because their whole capitalist system is collapsing once more (see box and Marx’s lifework multi-volume analysis in Capital, Lenin’s Imperialism and much more).

This time it is plunging into the greatest Catastrophe in all human history, far worse than the last great Depression in the 1930s and its World War Two conclusion, (in turn a magnitude greater than the horrors of the first “Great War” crisis end point).

The 2009 banking implosion never went away and the massive dollar printing to prop things up was always leading to complete currency collapse and breakdown of the all-powerful dollar, a major and highly lucrative part of America’s financial and political power.

And its demise is unstoppable in this incurable greed and profit system despite Trump’s recent boasting that “we won’t allow that to happen”.

That proves only that if he wants to be a king, his name should be Cnut (in every sense).

The world knows that the US economy is bankrupt and that its insane AI, and other, investment frenzy is a giant bubble about to burst and the markets reflect it:

In just a decade, gold has gone from around $1,000 per ounce to over $4,800 as of this week (already now past $5600 - ed). In 2025 alone, gold added nearly 70% – despite relatively high interest rates (which usually push investors out of non-yielding gold). This is a huge flashing red light indicating something has broken deep in the bowels of the current monetary system.

Yet the financial and political establishment pretends all is normal.

“Prices are expected to push toward $5,000/oz by the fourth quarter of 2026, with $6,000/oz a possibility longer term,” JPMorgan wrote in late December in an end-of-year research note (using) analyst jargon to massively understate what is actually an extraordinary phenomenon. We’re not even through January and gold has already blown through most of JPMorgan’s full-year upside.

There are many factors unnerving investors at the moment: Japan’s shaky bond market, the fraught geopolitical backdrop, and the general sense that the threads holding the world together are coming unraveled at an accelerating pace. Now, the ‘debasement trade’ – a belief that excessive debt and deficits are eroding the value of fiscal currencies – is making headlines. This profoundly underappreciated aspect strikes close to the truth. The gold price couldn’t have quadrupled in a decade and more than doubled in just two years on sentiment alone.

The structural driver of the vertiginous rise of gold is that central banks have been fork-lifting the metal by the palette into their vaults. [..]Whereas the market was previously dominated by Western institutional investors – who mostly bet on gold as a proxy for expected interest-rate moves – pricing is now being dictated outside of Wall Street as price-insensitive central banks load up on the metal.

The main buyer has been China, but India, Türkiye, Brazil, and Poland have also been notable. Notice also that only one of those countries is fully in the Western orbit. But pretty much everyone else wants in too. According to the World Gold Council’s 2025 survey, 95% of central banks anticipate an increase in global gold reserves over the next 12 months.

Gold is now the fastest-rising international reserve asset – largely to the detriment of the dollar. It is estimated to have reached 30% of total central-bank reserves as of late 2025. What’s more, actual gold holdings are likely significantly understated. [...]The main source of official information about each country’s gold holdings is what countries self-report to the IMF. Never an exact science, these figures may not even be ballpark-worthy anymore.

Many governments buy gold through non-central bank entities for plausible deniability. There are, for example, numerous Chinese entities that report directly to the People’s Bank of China that can buy gold.

These opaque volumes are not just a few tons whisked around on the sly. The World Gold Council estimated in 2024 that around two-thirds of official-sector gold demand is now unreported. Analysts cited by the Financial Times believe, for example, that China’s unreported gold purchases could be more than ten times its official figures as it quietly diversifies away from the dollar. Gold analyst Jan Nieuwenhuijs calls these covert gold purchases “hidden dedollarization.”

[..]Holding dollars is now a losing proposition. This is the case not only because the greenback has become a bludgeon for subduing Washington’s adversaries (real and imagined), but because it is simply a bad investment. The US has absolutely no credible path to getting a grip on its spiraling debt and isn’t making the slightest effort to chart one, so it will almost certainly have to run negative real rates (interest rates below inflation levels) erode the burden.

[...]The actual purchasing power of the dollar assets held by central banks across the globe is decreasing and will further decrease. It’s bad enough to have to worry about the capricious nature of US foreign policy, but to also slowly go broke by holding dollars[..]gold is indeed making a return to the center of the system.

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As Donald Trump shatters the global rules-based order, official institutions (and private investors) are scrambling to buy gold: the share of the asset in central banks’ reserves has doubled in the past decade to more than a quarter, the highest level in almost 30 years.

Although this partly reflects the soaring bullion price, experts say central banks are also stuffing their vaults as an insurance policy in a volatile world. Many are also rushing to repatriate gold stockpiles held overseas, and slashing their exposure to the US dollar.

“We have moved from Pax Americana to global discord, geopolitically. It is the law of the jungle when we see what the US are doing,” says Raphaël Gallardo, the chief economist at the asset manager Carmignac.

“Investors – private and sovereign – believe their strategic reserves are no longer safe in dollar terms, as they can be confiscated overnight. The dollar is losing the credibility as the nominal anchor of the global monetary system because the Fed is losing credibility, and US Congress is losing its credibility.”

Official reserves are critical. Underpinning national currencies as a kind of safety fund, they are typically made up of currencies such as the dollar, euro, yen and pound, as well as gold, bonds and International Monetary Fund assets. They are used to help maintain investor confidence, and can be deployed to stabilise exchange rates in times of stress.

For much of the past century the dollar has been the primary reserve currency; grease in the wheels of global finance and the medium of exchange in the majority of world trade.

Historically, the monetary system pegged currencies to the value of gold – with countries committing to convert paper money to a fixed amount; reflecting millennia of obsession with the precious metal. However, the link for the dollar – and with it other currencies pegged to the US currency under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement – was severed in the economic upheaval of the 1970s by then US president, Richard Nixon. Since then, exchange rates have floated on international currency markets based on supply and demand.

However, the dollar’s status is dwindling; reflecting Trump’s erratic policymaking – including interference at the Fed and the fragile US public finances – as well as Washington’s readiness to deploy economic sanctions. This includes the targeting of Russian central bank reserves after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

[..]Historically, many central banks have held their gold stockpiles in London, Switzerland and New York – the centres of the global bullion trade, with records of political and economic stability.

The Bank of England is the world’s most important hub. Serving about 70 official institutions worldwide, its vaults deep under London’s streets contain about 400,000 bars, worth more than half a trillion dollars.

The clamour for central banks to repatriate their gold – and the difficulties it can involve – has recently come to the fore: Venezuela has bars locked-up at the Bank of England worth $2bn, which it cannot access while the UK government refuses to recognise the Caracas regime. Russia has also threatened Belgium, where the bulk of Moscow’s frozen foreign-currency reserves are held.

Alongside Serbia, governments that have sought to repatriate their gold reserves include India, Hungary and Turkey. Poland has brought back hundreds of tonnes of gold bars that it transported to London, the US and Canada amid the outbreak of the second world war. In the 2010s, Germany was an early pioneer of repatriation, amid political pressure to return thousands of tonnes of bullion from the US and France, where its reserves had been moved to because of fears of a Soviet invasion during the cold war.

Gold was not an “obsession” (implying some kind of irrational “choice”) – it is the historically evolved basis for trade because it has real value; paper currency, bonds etc (and bitcoin) are nothing but inherently worthless tokens for value as Marx demonstrates in the very first chapters of his Capital on money.

And it is not Trump’s erratic behaviour causing the problems; it is capitalist collapse causing Trumpism.

To escape its fate, the American super-power, has decided the old game is up.

The hoodwinking “democracy” racket, and its just-as-fraudulent 80-year long international “freedom” and “rule of law” postwar manifestation is no longer affordable the aggressive hawks of the US Empire ruling class have concluded.

Ruling the world via dollar bribery, bought or installed local fascist stooges from the Duvalier “Docs” in Haïti, Pinochet in Chile, Marcos (old and new) in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, and Sadat, Mubarak and now Sisi in Egypt (etc etc etc), and the continuing bamboozling racket of “democratic change and freedom” which class-collaborating “permanent peaceful coexistence” Revisionism has helped extend for decades, smothering spontaneous revolutionary sentiment and holding back consciousness (with often deadly results like Chile’s coup-butchered Salvador Allende), is no longer working.

Brute force alone must now come to the fore as unstoppable crisis failure demands ever intensifying speed-up and surplus value extraction from the great multi-billion majority (i.e. cut wages and slashed living standards) who must wage-slave for their living – primarily in the neo-colonially exploited “global south” but increasingly domestically in the “rich” nations including in the US, as Minnesota is finding out among other working class cities.

Openly imposing its bourgeois dictatorship intimidation (always present but hidden by the “democracy” game) is the only way to keep profits rolling for the ever more concentrated monopolies and the ever tinier number of the ever richer ruling class, and for the smaller-fry wannabee billionaires around them and the better-off corrupted petty bourgeois networks that service it all as managers, accountants, lawyers, etc, even as the inexorable laws of capitalist development drive the whole rotten system onto the rocks of its incurable “overproduction” contradictions (see box).

So the strong-will-prevail, might-is-right fascist mantra is now openly proclaimed (EPSR last issue) in Washington, as it was by the Italian fascisti blackshirts in the 1920s and Germany’s Nazis soon after.

But this comes at a staggering political cost in international (and domestic) hatred and hostility far beyond the huge wave of anti-imperialist, anti-American and anti-Zionist hatreds stirred up by the Afghanistan and Iraqi blitzings and invasions.

So while US moves do not necessarily bother the rulers in the other imperialist countries as such, where draconian police state censorship and repression measures are being ratcheted up as well, mostly under the “justification” of a “fight against terrorism” now embracing mere “thought crimes” of “support” or even simply positive opinions about anti-imperialist struggles, it does make their political and trading relations more fraught too,

And the antagonistic relations which permeate every level of capitalist society, now emerge into the open between the major powers.

At one level they still row in behind the US anyway having accepted at the end of the Second World War and the resultant enormous revolutionary strengthening of the Soviet Camp and its prestige throughout the world working class, that they needed to rely on the US gendarme, holding back the tide of working class and national struggles.

But the seemingly “stable” arrangements of the Cold War epoch, with the other imperialist powers all lined up in strict pecking order is now shaken to the core as well, and potentially either being abandoned or ripped up completely by a rampaging Washington.

As Lenin explained (see writings after 1914), the great powers informally “share out” the colonial plunder from the ruthlessly exploited “global south” and from their domestic working class, in proportion to the size and influence of their economies and associated military powers.

But as the crisis deepens and profit rates fall (inexorably so), that is no longer affordable.

And it is anyway increasingly off balance as the one-time WW2 defeated powers have rebuilt their economies, and “new kids on the block” have arisen (India, Brazil etc) all increasingly becoming a trade war challenge to the post-war US topdog and the once uncontested “great” status Trumpism hankers after.

Major advances in economic, industrial, commercial and scientific capabilities in new, sharper rising powers like Germany and Italy in the late nineteenth were a fundamental part of the build up to World War One (and its “part Two” in 1945), especially as the great colonialist seizures of the past century had come to an end leaving no more capacity to expand by exporting capital.

The whole world was “used up”, already occupied by the older powers like France and especially the Anglo-Saxons; only an all out fight could shake the status quo to reflect the “rightful” division of the spoils.

And it was hugely shaken by war though mostly by the intervention of the biggest rising power of all, the US, swooping in like a seagull stealing fish-and-chips.

But the huge turmoil and horror of war and defeats for the major protagonists also opened the way for the giant revolutionary overturns by first the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia and then their 1945 Red Army re-assertion against Hitlerism and the wave of new revolution and anti-imperialism it inspired, including the gigantic 1949 Chinese communist victory.

American imperialism had to let its old rivals redevelop, to hold back the communist tide and they have done just that.

Far from being just “satraps” who have always been “under the thumb of post-war US imperialism”, completely dependent on it and ready to “quickly jump to attention when barked at by Washington” as the fake-“lefts” declare with their usual defeatism, smothering all understanding for the working class of the great splits now emerging with a vengeance between Europe and the US – and therefore great weaknesses in the class position overall of the capitalist system – these bourgeoisies have inevitably developed their own capacities.

More and more they have outcompeted American commerce and industry (German cars, Bosch, Airbus, etc etc, Japanese electronics etc) as the EPSR has been documenting for decades – including in its analysis of Gorbachev’s Soviet capitulation (a revisionist wishful thinking consequence of idiotically misinterpreting Reagonite America’s shift of (some) resources from its most extreme and expensive Cold War belligerence towards the trade war against these capitalist rivals (EPSR Book Vol 13 Gorbachevism, and Perspectives 2001, 2002) as “an end to imperialist aggression”.)

Certainly the US ruling class has been able to rein in the most severe aspects of this rising competition, imposing massive tariffs and currency burdens on Japan in the 1990s and against the German-dominated EU as well but also storing up growing hostility.

And while differences have smouldered strongly, – over conduct of the 2003 Iraq war for example (as witness US diplomatic contempt for the French “cheese eating surrender monkeys”), all imperialism’s common class interest has prevailed in seeing off “upstart” anti-imperialist regimes like Saddam’s Iraq (however opportunist those are) or rising “terrorist revolt”, all smashed down to preserve the general pattern of exploitation.

But the slump contradictions just keep on intensifying.

Europe has built up huge holdings in American state and private debt, of at least $8trillion.

On top now comes the staggering rise of the great Chinese workers state, increasingly out competing everyone with its planned economy (both state sector and by directed use of capitalist enterprise) squeezing all the “traditional” imperialist market shares even more – and thereby intensifying the contradictions and above all those between all the imperialist powers.

Exactly that is visible in the otherwise seemingly inexplicable shifting allegiances of the Ukraine war where the conflict between the Western imperialists has been at least as significant a factor as the alleged strategic aim of the West to topple and balkanise the Russian federation, for straightforward expansionist purposes and “plunder” of its economy.

Various “knowing” “left” analyses also point to the long-term aim once that is achieved, of further encircling China, to eventually bring that down too.

Both market competition and anti-communist hatred play a role in both targets though they are by no means equivalents as the pro-Russian “left” tend to treat them (notably Stalinists like the Proletarian).

Russia is now a restored capitalist-imperialist economy albeit a second tier in size. But something of its 70 years Soviet history survives in working class sentiment, and in the Bonapartist balancing act Putin carries out; it is something the more hawkish anti-communist imperialists would like to see completely smashed down “to make sure”.

China is a workers state with a giant rising economy, on some measures already bigger than the colossal US, which imperialism doubly hates for “communism” (however hamstrung that is by Beijing revisionism) and as a major trade war competitor.

But while both are targets for the Western provoked war, set going by endless skulduggery and subversion within Ukraine from the very moment the 1991 Soviet liquidation left it wide open to every Western intelligence and reactionary “democracy” agency – the “left” war-on-Russia theories are still missing the real underlying cause.

That is war itself, to be a diversion and distraction for imperialism to cover up its own responsibility for the great world Catastrophe, setting up Moscow as the scapegoat to blame for it, and as a yet another means to keep warmongering itself on the boil (and ever rising rebellion suppressed).

Additionally the “encircle Beijing” theory, is saturated with yet more of the defeatism from the fake-“left” that implies the imperialists are in calm control, with the Ukraine war a part of a long term programme steadily unfolding.

Look they say, it all fits with the relentless expansionism of NATO through east Europe to the Russian border.

And part of the same picture are the multiple admissions of the massively expensive EU and US programmes over decades to build-up western Ukrainian reactionary (and nazi-saturated) anti-Russian nationalist elements, culminating in the Western-organised violent coup in the 2014 Maidan events (replete with hidden snipers to create mayhem), all along with subsequent disclosures of Anglo-Saxon military coordination from the beginning such as the joint command base set up in Wiesbaden reported by the New York Times and (later) the tight intertwining of the CIA & MI6 with the Ukrainians:

Back in 2024, the New York Times published a startlingly frank account of the CIA’s activities in Ukraine. Speaking long after the fact, American and Ukrainian sources described how a 2014 phone call started a chain of events that would culminate in open war with Russia.

Days after President Viktor Yanukovich was overthrown in the US-orchestrated Maidan coup, the country’s new spy chief, Valentin Nalivaichenko, called the CIA’s station chief in Kiev and asked for help rebuilding Ukraine’s intelligence apparatus. The CIA accepted. working first with the country’s secret police agency, the SBU, and later with its military intelligence agency, the HUR.

The agency trained and equipped a paramilitary force known as Unit 2245. This team would conduct sabotage and assassination operations on Russian soil long before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, according to the New York Times and ABC News. The current head of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s office, Kirill Budanov, served in this unit and went on to lead the HUR from 2020 until earlier this month.

Such was Budanov’s value as an asset, the CIA flew him to a military hospital in the US when he was wounded in a raid on Crimea in 2016.

The agency also trained “a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence,” and oversaw “a training program, carried out in two European cities, to teach Ukrainian intelligence officers how to convincingly assume fake personas and steal secrets in Russia,” the NYT reported.

By February 2022, the CIA had built more than a dozen underground bases near Ukraine’s then-border with Russia. “Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians,” former SBU chief Ivan Bakanov told the NYT.

”US intelligence services, such as the CIA and others, have been present in Ukraine long before the coup broke out,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in 2024. “After the coup, they set up camp there. They occupied a whole floor, perhaps even two floors, in the SBU building. No one has any doubt about it. Ukraine is run by Anglo-Saxons and some other NATO and EU countries.”

But while that might be true, the underlying contradiction in the war has been that of the US against the European powers, as the NordStream gas pipeline sabotage made crystal clear for any serious analysis, – obviously carried out by Washington (and British stooge help) with the aim of crippling the German-led EU economies and Berlin’s cheap Siberian-gas based industries, along with the war’s general disruption in Europe and huge expense (piled on further with demands for “bigger NATO contributions”).

And that is why America toys with pulling out, abandoning the “sacrifices” of the detestable and ultra-corrupt croaking green fascist toad Zelensky, now that the war has clearly been a disaster now on the edge of humiliating collapse.

Russian offensives steadily advance, (despite endless psyops stories planted in a compliant Western media about alleged “massive Russian casualties”, risibly declared to be twice those of the desperate and massively corruption-ridden Ukrainian forces and non-stop hype about their “resilience and inventiveness” blah-blah).

Yet another defeat for imperialism, on top of the humiliating and expensive failures in Afghanistan, pushed out by the primitive Taliban after nearly two decades and from the invasion of Iraq by its ferment of jihadist and anti-occupation “terrorist” resistance, further intensifies the crisis contradictions, more sharply exposes the inter-imperialist conflicts.

The “Empire” can afford to retreat having achieved its main purpose, leaving Europe holding the baby – still needing to keep the war going in order to have a Russian bogeyman to blame for the economic implosion now made even worse by four years of chaos and demented ruling class armsrace spending justified by hysterical nonsense about coming “Russian invasion”, and lies about “hidden attacks” even less credible than the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” fantasies solemnly presented as an imminent threat to us all from Saddam Hussein.

It is in this context, as speech after speech bewails the “end of the post-war epoch and 80 years of security and stability” etc etc with dire warnings about “dangers to the world economy” if we ”go down the path of trade war and tariffs” (there’s a choice??) and of the need to “confront authoritarianism” that the military onslaughts on Venezuela and Iran need to be seen.

These gross tramplings are the epitome of imperialist authoritarianism, – which is to say completely fascist – in crushing all sovereignty and local independence with a brutal kidnap assault killing hundreds.

And those attacks (or imminently threatened on Tehran) come with the intimidation behind them of the huge naval, missile and air force buildup over three months, multiplied by the sinister background threat from two years of genocide in Gaza – an extermination level holocaust on an entire people, notionally blamed on the fanatical Zionist occupation of Palestine but encouraged, financed, supplied, enabled and participated in by US, and other imperialist forces, notably British imperialism with direct military and intelligence help (out of Cyprus where British imperialism still maintains military and intelligence bases on swathes of land deemed to have UK “sovereign authority” by colonially imposed “right”).

Such savagery has tragically seen the implosion of the “Bolivarian revolution” and its Chavismo principles, now compliantly colluding with the Trumpite bullies to privatise the oil industry again, and going so far that the replacement for kidnapped and deliberately humiliatingly shackled president Nicolás Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez, has calmly met with the CIA boss, the agency which penetrated the regime (allegedly) over the months before the American operation and facilitated the military attack:

The C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, met with Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president of Venezuela, in Caracas on Thursday, reinforcing the Trump administration’s message that it sees the interim government as the best path to stability in the country in the short term.

Mr. Ratcliffe is the most senior American official, and first cabinet member, to visit Venezuela since the U.S. military seized President Nicolás Maduro in a raid in the capital nearly two weeks ago.

The meeting came a day after President Trump spoke to Ms. Rodríguez on the phone and on the same day he met with María Corina Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s opposition and a Nobel laureate.

The high-profile visit by Mr. Ratcliffe, and the message of cooperation, could be seen as something of a snub to the opposition, whose supporters have been frustrated that the Trump administration has not tried to put Ms. Machado’s ally Edmundo González into power since Mr. Maduro was seized. Mr. González won the 2024 election, international election experts say, after Ms. Machado was barred from running, but Mr. Maduro refused to give up power.

A U.S. official said that Mr. Ratcliffe met with Ms. Rodríguez at Mr. Trump’s direction “to deliver the message that the United States looks forward to an improved working relationship.” The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the sensitive meeting, added that the two discussed intelligence cooperation, economic stability and the need to ensure that the country was no longer a “safe haven for America’s adversaries, especially narco-traffickers.”

To Trump administration officials, Mr. Ratcliffe’s visit is meant to be an endorsement of the kind of stability that Ms. Rodríguez offers and a sign of trust-building and collaboration between the two governments.

As early as last summer, senior U.S. officials were discussing how to maintain stability in Venezuela. At the time, the Trump administration was beginning to put together a counterdrug campaign that would involve attacking boats at sea that it said were smuggling drugs and that would eventually lead to Mr. Maduro’s capture.

As officials planned the campaign of boat strikes, removing Mr. Maduro, either through negotiations or by force, was the president’s goal, officials said. But there was intense talk about how to prevent chaos from spreading around the country after Mr. Maduro was forced out.

Senior officials raised the prospect that breaking up the Venezuelan government after removing Mr. Maduro — even to make way for an opposition leader — would be akin to the mistakes the United States made in Iraq when it dismantled the Iraqi army and created an insurgency, officials said.

Amid the discussions last summer, the C.I.A. delivered an early assessment that Ms. Rodríguez, then Venezuela’s vice president, was a pragmatic politician, rather than an ideologue, who would be willing to negotiate and potentially even work with the United States.

One intelligence report circulated to senior policymakers mentioned that she wore a $15,000 dress to her inauguration, prompting an official to quip that “she is a socialist but the most capitalistic one I’ve seen.”

The lessons learned from Iraq hung heavily over the debates at the top ranks of the Trump administration. Administration officials said that the Bush administration’s decision to push out the entire Iraqi government and dismantle the army ushered in a long era of instability and insurgency that cost Iraqi and American lives and mired the United States in the country.

***********

Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez has signed into law a reform bill that will pave the way for increased privatisation in the South American country’s nationalised oil sector, fulfilling a key demand from her United States counterpart, Donald Trump.

On Thursday, Rodriguez held a signing ceremony with a group of state oil workers. She hailed the reform as a positive step for Venezuela’s economy.

“We’re talking about the future. We are talking about the country that we are going to give to our children,” Rodriguez said.

The ceremony came within hours of the National Assembly – dominated by members of Rodriguez’s United Socialist Party – passing the reform.

“Only good things will come after the suffering,” said Jorge Rodriguez, the assembly’s head and brother of the interim president.

Since the US military’s abduction of Venezuela’s former leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on January 3, the Trump administration has sought to pressure President Rodriguez to open the country’s oil sector to outside investment.

Trump has even warned that Rodriguez could “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”, should she fail to comply with his demands.

Thursday’s legislation will give private firms control over the sale and production of Venezuelan oil.

It would also require legal disputes to be resolved outside of Venezuelan courts, a change long sought by foreign companies, who argue that the judicial system in the country is dominated by the ruling socialist party.

The bill would also cap royalties collected by the government at 30 percent.

While Rodriguez signed the reform law, the Trump administration simultaneously announced it would loosen some sanctions restricting the sale of Venezuelan oil.

The Department of the Treasury said it would allow limited transactions by the country’s government and the state oil company PDVSA that were “necessary to the lifting, exportation, reexportation, sale, resale, supply, storage, marketing, purchase, delivery, or transportation of Venezuelan-origin oil, including the refining of such oil, by an established US entity”.

Previously, all of Venezuela’s oil sector was subject to sweeping US sanctions imposed in 2019, under Trump’s first term as president.

Thursday’s suite of changes is designed to make Venezuela’s oil market more appealing to outside petroleum firms, many of whom remain wary of investing in the country.

Venezuela nationalised its oil sector in the 1970s, and in 2007, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, pushed the government to increase its control and expropriate foreign-held assets.

Following Maduro’s abduction, Trump administration officials have said that the US will decide to whom and under what conditions Venezuelan oil is sold, with proceeds deposited into a US-controlled bank account.

Concerns about the legality of such measures or the sovereignty of Venezuela have been waved aside by Trump and his allies, who previously asserted that Venezuelan oil should “belong” to the US.

Whether or not these dire developments indicate outright treachery to the Venezuelan masses in the kidnap itself – with much speculation around alleged meetings and agreements with the US held months before the abduction and multiple questions unanswered about the lack of resistance of some elements of the military, – the smooth assertions of a “future for the country” when the world Catastrophe promises anything but a future for anyone, certainly betrays the heroism and struggle of the masses in Venezuela over the last two decades and their belief that they were struggling for socialism.

What then has been the point of their efforts and sacrifices?

And even more what is the future the various militias and armed masses groups will face, and particularly their leaders, now it is being agreed that the CIA (!!!) should set up a base in Caracas?:

America’s “priority number one” is to establish a CIA “annex” in Caracas, an anonymous US source told CNN on Tuesday. Long before the formal opening of a US embassy, this outpost will allow CIA agents to reach out to Rodriguez’s government and opposition parties, and “target third parties who may be threats,” the source said.

That the CIA would want to expand its operations in Venezuela is no surprise. US President Donald Trump authorized the agency to conduct covert operations in Venezuela last October, three months before Maduro was abducted by US special forces. [...]

However, one comment by CNN’s source stands out. Paraphrasing the official, CNN said the CIA’s work in Venezuela would parallel “the agency’s work in Ukraine.”

That, as already detailed later in this same bourgeois cutting (above cutting on Ukraine) goes as far as assassination.

It would certainly involve complete undermining of those elements of working class defensive organisation created in the battle against non-stop subversion and repeated coup attempts over the last 20 years. Those are the aspects which attract the most bilious slanderous sentiment in bourgeois press accounts (with the most poisonous edited out):

When the United States raided Venezuela this month and seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration called it a law enforcement operation, pointing to a new indictment accusing Mr. Maduro of narco-terrorism.

Another name prominently featured in the indictment? Diosdado Cabello. And like Mr. Maduro, the U.S. government has placed a bounty for his capture.

Yet Mr. Cabello remains firmly in power, part of interim leader Delcy Rodríguez’s core circle, seen by her side in televised events.

But with Ms. Rodríguez needing to placate Mr. Trump, one of her biggest challenges could be Mr. Cabello, arguably the second most powerful figure in her government whose fate is now intertwined with the fate of the political movement that has ruled Venezuela for more than two decades.

Through allies he controls security services, pro-government militias known as colectivos that are deployed to stamp out dissent and has deep ties to Venezuela’s military. In late 2024, he helped install a cousin to run the country’s secret police, known as the SEBIN.

Mr. Cabello and the forces under him are some of the most fervently anti-imperialist members of a movement whose roots are anchored in resisting foreign intervention.

While publicly supporting Ms. Rodríguez, he has also continued condemning the U.S. raid, calling it in one speech a “barbaric, treacherous attack.”

Mr. Cabello, in a recent broadcast alongside police commandos, said the country had remained calm following the U.S. attack because of the state’s monopoly on weapons. “We are guarantors of the country’s tranquillity,” he said, a comment that some experts said suggested the strong hand Mr. Cabello wields.[...]

Mr. Cabello is widely seen as representing the most opaque and hard-line wing of Chavismo, the political movement founded by Mr. Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez.

A former Venezuelan government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said Mr. Cabello was something of a mystery, even within the upper echelons of his government, with no personal ties except with a small number of military officers.

Few Venezuelan officials have more to lose from any weakening of the government’s grip on power: the United States has indicted him for drug trafficking, accused him of running a transnational criminal network and offered a $25 million payment for information leading to his detention. The United Nations and human rights groups have cited him in some of Venezuela’s gravest abuses.

“He’s just as bad a guy as Maduro, if not more,” said Risa Grais-Targow, the Latin America director for Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

[...]For years, Ms. Rodríguez and Mr. Cabello have represented competing strains within Chavismo — she the outward-facing technocrat focused on sanctions relief, he the uncompromising militant. Today they have a shared stake in Chavismo’s survival: she needs him to maintain control of the country and he needs her to safeguard his position in a U.S.-friendly government.

as a teenager, joined an extreme left-wing student group that foreshadowed Chavismo. He later trained as a military officer, graduating in 1987 from the Venezuelan Military Academy and then earning two degrees in engineering. He met Mr. Chávez at the military academy.

He and Mr. Chávez were part of a group of military officers who mounted a failed coup against a democratically elected government in 1992. In the ensuing years Mr. Cabello was a top ally to Mr. Chávez as he built his political movement, helping organize grass-roots organizations and consolidating different factions to create a disciplined political machine.

During Mr. Chávez’s presidency, he became a fixture of power, serving separately as governor, head of the National Assembly, cabinet minister and vice president.

Chavismo, a blend of populism, nationalism and state control of key industries, like oil, was founded by Mr. Chávez, who was elected president in 1998. Fueled by a prolonged oil boom in the 2000s, the government expanded social programs and reduced poverty, but a drop in oil prices set off an extraordinary economic collapse, a mass exodus and popular discontent. The government’s response was to crush dissent.

Mr. Cabello has long controlled the system that has sustained the government: arresting, torturing, and disappearing political opponents while hollowing out democratic institutions. Multiple former intelligence agents, detainees, and senior Venezuelan officials told U.N. investigators in a report that Mr. Cabello gave direct orders to the SEBIN intelligence service, including whom to arrest, release, and torture.

Mr. Cabello opposed the July 2024 elections, according to analysts, which Mr. Maduro agreed to hold in exchange for partial sanctions relief from the United States.

But though tallies collected by the opposition and verified by international observers showed that Mr. Maduro had lost decisively, he declared himself the winner. He would use Mr. Cabello to help legitimize his authority.

A month after the election Mr. Maduro appointed Mr. Cabello as interior minister — a move widely interpreted as a rebuke to Ms. Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, the president of the National Assembly, who experts said had supported the election, and an acknowledgment that the Maduro government would rely on brute force to maintain power.

Mr. Cabello soon announced the implementation of “Operation Knock Knock,” the deployment of security forces to raid homes and arrest government opponents. In all, the government said it arrested more than 2,000 people for protesting election results, a policing campaign widely denounced by human rights groups.

From his new post, Mr. Cabello consolidated authority over the intelligence services, the national police, the national guard and the armed civilian groups known as colectivos.

While Mr. Cabello has toned down some of his rhetoric attacking the United States since Mr. Maduro’s capture, experts say he has long opposed any form of liberalization or opening up internationally.

“I think of him as being from the old school of dictatorship,” said David Smilde, a sociologist who studies violence in Venezuela at Tulane University and lived in the country part-time until last year.

Antonio Marval, a lawyer appointed as a Supreme Court justice several years ago by Venezuela’s legislature, which at the time was controlled by the opposition, recalled how his appointment quickly put him in Mr. Cabello’s cross hairs.

On July 17, 2017, Mr. Cabello warned on his show that the new justices named by the legislature, which included Mr. Marval, would be targeted.

“We all know that when a threat is made publicly on Con el Mazo Dando, with the national reach that its host had — and still has — it is accompanied by real actions,” Mr. Marval said. “The message was clear: to silence us, to break us, and to instill fear.”

He fled Venezuela shortly afterward, escaping by boat to Curaçao.

To some critics, Mr. Cabello embodies the ugliest characteristics of Venezuela’s Chavista revolution: a system built not on popular consent, but on fear, violence and corruption.

“If the U.S. wanted to make another point or wanted to do something very decisive,” Ms. Grais-Targow said, “I think he would be the most obvious target.”

It is clear so-called Chavismo verged at times towards a grasp in practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat, (at least in the firm suppression of the most disruptive aspects of non-stop and often viciously violent bourgeois counter-revolutionary disruption such as the murderous riots in 2014 and the outrageous Juan Guaido coup after the 2017 election, the drone assassination attempt etc.)

It is that which stimulates the New York Times here to rail slanderously and without a scrap of evidence anyway against “torture”, “violence” and “repression”, as if the rest of the world were a peaceful calm nirvana of quiet rational discussion between equals (economically, educationally and politically) and not the grossly exploited and tyrannically repressed Third World, and the stitched up “democracy” rackets in the metropolitan countries, and endless warmongering.

But the difficulty is that Hugo Chávez and Maduro subsequently, and the left nationalist leadership in general, never made this question a conscious central tenet, let alone any Leninist philosophical understanding around it, and never pushed forwards a theoretical understanding and education in the masses, of the need to complete the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in the country, or failing that, to keep it at the forefront of struggle as the aim.

There is no other way ultimately that workers can really get on with building socialism.

As far as can be understood the bourgeoisie remained with and still has substantial grip on major sectors of the economy, as well means to promulgate their endless counter-revolutionary poison, particularly in elections.

A much wider Leninist perspective would have gone hand in hand with a grasp of the fraudulence and danger of bourgeois elections so that the obvious Western manipulation and skulduggery around last June’s presidential election could have been better exposed and explained to the population for example.

Instead of allowing the CIA to get away with the outrageous stunt of a supposed “popular collection of voting tallies by the opposition” showing a “loss for Maduro” and the associated fraud of “verified by international observers” - a complete nonsense stitch-up – the regime should have been able to declare that it was getting on with the necessary business of building a workers state anyway rather than dispute the vote numbers.

From the press account above Cabello’s instincts were along those lines in his opposition to the election in the first place, but the depth and coherence of Leninist theoretical grasp would have allowed for a much clearer political battle on the question, and for the working class too, if carried out in front of them, set out and explained, developing the revolutionary understanding at all levels that is the greatest weapon and inspiration the working class can have in taking on imperialism.

And it could gone hand in hand with a clearer understanding of the need for Leninist party building and discipline which possibly could have exposed the class collaborating illusions now being advanced by Delcio Rodriguez which play into the hands of the imperialist onslaught.

There may be echoes in this of the deadly splits in the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, from the petty bourgeois individualist breaking of party discipline by “figurehead” Maurice Bishop, which caused such disruption that it gave Reagan’s America the excuse it was looking for to invade the island in 1983 (with a massive sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut naval force on a par with Trump’s excess) to wipe out its brilliant revolutionary example (se EPSR Books Vol 12 Grenada).

There were reasons then to suppose that even tiny Grenada could have given the US a bloody nose, and the various commentaries in the bourgeois press, explaining the reluctance of Trumpism to carry out a ground invasion – fearful of the “mess” (defeat) suffered in Iraq indicate the lack of confidence now in the failing imperialist order which is being covered over by brash belligerence in all directions.

That would have been even more likely with full backing from the Cubans at the time, instead of their wrong support for Bishop and dismissal of the NJM arguments as just “squabbling”.

The Cubans in the Maduro incident have behaved with staggering heroism, suffering 32 deaths among the fighters in the presidential guard that tried to fight off the American kidnappers. Other self-sacrificing aid Havana has given Venezuela over decades such as medical and pedagogical support is also exemplary.

But the revisionist perspectives continuing from Cuba, including its eulogising of figures like Salvador Allende (instead of exposing the peaceful road “democracy” illusions his leadership promulgated, which left Chile open to the vicious CIA guided coup by General Pinochet’s army – fatally trusted by Allende as “honourable and principled” instead of always serving the ruling class) are disastrous.

Lack of Leninist grasp and possibly excessive trust in the state forces (once against described as “different”) is one possible weakness in the left nationalist regime which left vulnerabilities; bourgeois press accounts, and the witness account from a surviving Cuban guard, suggest for example that the US forces knew exactly the layout of Maduro’s quarters and positions of various guards, taken by surprise, suggesting at least penetration of regime forces or collusion.

Details of special weapons, including possibly a disabling sonic beam, electronic jamming planes and cyberwar shutdowns of power supplies, radar for missiles and launchers have been both leaked and boasted of by the Americans, all of which might have made the military defence more difficult.

But these boasts smack of psyops – not necessarily untruths, but a hyping of US capabilities to intimidate and cover up uncertainties and potential political weakness and even treachery.

The potential revolutionary capacity to set back imperialism is hinted at by the White House strategy of “maintaining stability” in Venezuela – only possible because of the Rodriguez compromising.

It reflects fears of war conflict and therefore of US body bags returning home, inflaming the increasingly near-civil war US domestic situation where the MAGA populist support is founded on the (false) illusion that Trump was going to rein in expensive overseas warmongering in order to improve living standards domestically.

And the Afghans have demonstrated just how even the most primitive forces facing imperialism’s overwhelming might and high tech capacities, still can inflict major defeats.

The current compliance is highly dangerous for the Venezuelan masses nevertheless; in two decades of Chávezism Washington and its various stooges (including Britain - even this time with military embedded in the naval force albeit claiming “not to be participating”) have carried out non-stop attempts to topple it and it will not stop now.

Most of all letting in the CIA is disastrous since its purpose can only be non-stop counter-revolutionary warfare on every socialist enterprise, while trying to avoid provoking a revolutionary response and it clearly leaves figures like Cabello hung out to dry as potential targets.

The fake-“lefts” like the FRFI RCG and the CPGB-ML Stalinists have a lot to answer for, both lauding the Chavismo confusion, but leaving all the crucial theoretical issues unchallenged, while elevating its commune developments to a principle of “from the ground up socialism” – a worship of spontaneity which the RCG even declares to be an example of the way forwards that should be seen as a pattern for the working class everywhere.

Could anything be more disarming in petty bourgeois shallowness and hostility to theory?

Much more needs to be discussed on this but Trumpism is already escalating the US’ desperate crisis warmongering with the colossal build up of carrier forces, aircraft and missiles around Iran and yet further sick and monstrous intimidatory demands on the regime to suppress the limited anti-imperialist anti-Zionist militancy it has been forced into by world crisis.

The imminent attack follows an almost insane campaign of Goebbels lies eagerly promulgated by a Western capitalist media with the wildest exaggerated demonisation stories – stories in the sense of pure fiction - poured out a scale about the mostly Western provoked demonstrations, that exceeds the lurid tales of “70,000 shot down in Timosoaria” during the 1989 counter-revolutionary overturn of revisionist leader Ceausescu - later admitted to be just a “few hundred” and even that dubious, or the ludicrous Tian an Men fabrications of “10,000 killed in Beijing” during suppression of the reactionary “student uprising for democracy” which even the bourgeois press now concedes was only "a few hundred” (though always with an innuendo about “some say thousands” etc) - and many of those state forces victims of deliberate violence (EPSR Books Vol 16 China).

Total Goebbels hate-nonsense from the intelligence agencies is poured through the bourgeois media machine about “patients being shot in their beds” and “the regime demanding money for bodies”, with carefully coached fabrications by bourgeois minded exiles such as “doctors taken away and killed for attending to victims” the latter being a deliberate distorted echo of the true, witnessed and testified abductions, torture and murder of dozens of surgeons in the Palestine genocide.

The Ayatollahocracy is no answer for the working class and its ascendancy was tolerated, even encouraged, by Western imperialism during the huge spontaneous 1979 revolution against the vicious Shah’s regime as preferable to the communism that was otherwise the likely outcome (see past EPSRs). It still suppresses the working class.

But it is a thorn in the side for Zionism/imperialism and has been deliberately stampeded into a draconian response to initially contained economic protests by a calculated CIA/Zionist campaign of violence and destruction, with hundreds of provocateurs, openly acknowledged to be agents by Mossad and ex-CIA director Mike Pompeo, attacking and burning police stations and killing state forces to induce precisely the forceful response then to be presented as “repression and terror”.

The initial petty bourgeois (bazaar shopkeeper) upheavals are like the wave of “GenZ” demonstrations worldwide against economic crisis, infiltrated and inflamed by reactionary destructiveness (such as in Nepal).

The fake-“left” is further exposed; either like the Trot Weekly Worker calling for support for the demonstrations (!!) or like the Stalinists, all-out for the Ayatollahs. Leninism says only the priority is “defeat for imperialism but no illusions in the mullahs”.

Alan Scott

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