Current Paper

No 1673 20th May 2026

Local election meltdown is far more than just disaster for Starmer, or even Zionist backed Labour but an expression of contempt for the whole collapsing capitalist order and its monstrous lying pretence of “freedom and democracy” – a giant raspberry as much from those who don’t vote as from the minority who still think it matters (though few believe even that much). Media-hype talks up nasty Reform fascism but this vicious rebranded Toryism is a hollow joke, barely filling the vacuum. Ditto petty bourgeois Greens and nationalists. They would go nowhere if workers had a sound grasp of capitalist Catastrophe, plunging into genocidal destructive warmongering, gross profiteering corruption and outright depravity as world imperialism hits the buffers. Fake-“leftism” fails to explain the unstoppable nature of this historic collapse irreversibly heading into WWIII. There can be no “upturn” or stability, no pacifist “stopping war” nor fantasy revisionist “multipolar world”. Only communist revolution can rescue mankind. Build Leninist leadership

The pantomime “leadership contest” for the “meltdown” Labour Party is a desperate cover-up for, and diversion from, the complete breakdown of the entire parliamentary racket as revealed by just-held local and devolved national elections.

In fact the whole Labour government, put in place by an outrageous pretence of a “landslide” just 20 months ago (on a minimal 15% vote!!! and even that mostly highly distrustful), is a giant fraud from top to bottom.

But then so is all the whole voting farce, Tory, Labour, Greens, Reform and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

The whole bourgeois “democracy” game is a giant stinking confidence trick on workers, a cover-up for the dictatorship of big money and its brutal genocidal tyranny over the great mass of ordinary people on the planet growing more deadly by the minute in its terminal frenzy.

And it is about time this reality was stated out front, clearly and sharply, along with its crucial conclusion – that the fœtid, festering, degenerate war-bound capitalist system needs to be brought to an end, with a firm working class leadership taking control to guide the building of workers states for planned and rational socialism.

“But we say that” the fake-“lefts” will protest, and “we even call it ‘revolution’”.

But not really, not declaring that there needs to be class war to overturn the entire racket and establish proletarian class dictatorship; not calling for defeat for all the ruling class repression at home and savage blitzkrieging abroad – (for NATO and Europe in Ukraine against Russia: for the American empire in Iran and the Gulf; for its berserker Zionist stooges in Lebanon, in Yemen, in Syria, in Iran, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in the rest of Palestine too (i.e. the whole genocidal colonialist occupation artificially labelled “Israel”); for Taiwan’s US-backed aggression provocations on China’s workers state; for US-backed South Korea’s aggression on Pyongyang’s workers state; for Pakistan against Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Balochistan; for India against Pakistan; for America in dogged communist Cuba, America in Colombia, America in Haïti, and in all of Latin America; for America over the Greenland theft and everywhere; and for Britain over the Malvinas islands (Falklands), Gibraltar etc etc) – not explaining, (and even denying) the great Catastrophic economic failure of the profit system, and not spelling out that imperialism, and its bankrupt US Empire centre is the driving engine for every brutal, fascist war destructive and ecocidal barbarity unfolding, and will inexorably continue down this historically insane path until it is stopped, in the only way it can be, through world anti-imperialist defeats and all out mass socialist revolutionary overthrow.

Instead the whole slew of “leftism”, trade unions, Trots, Eurocommunist types, and museum Stalinists still avoids the central issue; either the bourgeoisie rules or the working class rules.

They fuss and footle about the details of which party to “support”, and “to what extent” and what “rules” there should be when there is only one real point of electioneering at all – to use the platform precisely to explain what a giant bamboozling lie the entire thing is.

And this is nothing new; Parliament and “voting” has always been a colossal hoodwinking scam on ordinary people ever since the bourgeoisie worked out over 200 years ago what a useful mechanism a widened franchise could become for keeping the working class bemused and confused, away from their soundest instincts (of class war against the boss exploiters) and trapped in class-collaborating reformist fantasies.

But the public, and particularly the working class has increasingly learned to distrust the whole delusory nonsense, with illusions falling away decade after decade, particularly after the post-WW2 Attlee government and its promises to deliver socialism, (to head off rising world communist sentiment after the titanic victory of the Red Army over the last great capitalist Depression and war disaster).

Labourism turned out to be about nothing but rescuing and reestablishing capitalism (under the guise of “nationalisation”), running the same old British Empire and class exploitation and waging the anti-communist crusade against the Soviet Union, helping found NATO, creating the nuclear “deterrent” to threaten it, setting up anti-socialist intelligence links with the newly supreme US and waging horrific war on anti-imperialist communist movements in Greece, Malaysia, and later Kenya as well as partitioning India.

Cynical distrust has seen voting fall away ever since as half a dozen Labour governments have only confirmed this record as mountebanks and shysters, and particularly under Blairism, as nothing but Tories Mark II, running things when the faltering ruling class needs a breathing space.

With Starmerism, a vicious semi-fascist parody even of the Blairite reaction, it is falling apart.

But the masses cannot get to the other side of this inevitable disintegration – to the necessity for revolutionary ending of the 800 year old bourgeois system – without a leadership party to spell that out consciously in all its scientific depth and ever developing dialectical materialist complexity.

The Leninist party needs to be built and the time has never been riper.

Government after government is tumbling in turmoil, sleaze, incompetence and lies, and most obviously so since the Global Credit meltdown in 2008.

Everything they touch turns to shit, (and not just the privatised water companies).

And it not just Britain, though that is one of the weakest links among all the imperialist powers if not the weakest of all.

Government is falling apart everywhere, because the capitalist imperialist system it fronts for (with Labour as the servile grovelling B-team) is falling apart, disintegrating into a whirlpool of trade war hatred, slump collapse, credit and currency implosion and non-stop horrifying war.

And this is not because there are “bad people” in charge, or “mad people” or greedy people, who if they could only be changed, or removed, or defeated enough to make them understand, would allow a new “multipolar” order to be built with prosperity for all.

That is delusional garbage, a deadly dangerous disarming fantasy left by the residue of Stalinist revisionism, still fooling the world that this great crisis can be put into reverse by “peace struggles”.

Crap. The international monopoly capitalist system has hit the buffers as Marxism has always warned it would because of the great contradictions built into a system of profit for private ownership (see ecoomics box).

Inevitable “overproduction” of finance capital, surfacing in the form of too much stuff – (too much to sell at a profit that is while hundreds of millions still starve, live in penury and face war destruction across the planet) – is ineluctably spiralling into the greatest degenerate collapse and devastation in all history.

An enormous bubble of ever more inflationary credit, of demented monopoly profiteering, of in-your-face corruption (permeating Kiev’s warmongering from top to bottom eg, endemic to Netanyahu’s Zionism and even, or rather especially by the White House itself and its billionaire cronies!!!!), of ludicrous over-investment (AI etc) and speculation like the multi-billion cryptocurrency scams, continues to grow.

And the whole world holds its breath for its colossal deafening burst, due any minute (see past EPSRs, quotes from the bourgeois economists and virtually daily additional warnings from universities, think tanks, international agencies and investment “experts”).

The planet is being dragged into unsolvable Depression “austerity” and world war just as it has been twice before but potentially far worse.

Austerity, conflict and genocidal destruction is already the “norm” and has been since little Serbia was bombed by NATO in 1999 in an inter-imperialist squabble for influence in the Balkans vacuum as well as butchering any lingering Yugoslavian communist sentiment.

But most of all it was simply to acclimatise the world to war and chaos once more.

Invasions and blitzing ever since have torn country after country apart, killing, torturing and maiming by the millions, devastating lives and wrecking families, villages, towns and cities in a welter of horror, bereavement, unbearable pain and trauma and blighted futures.

But the real warmongering is still brewing, that between the great powers, hinted at firstly with Ukraine where the conflict between Europe and America has festered from the beginning, with the hidden impact of the war being the economic disruption and sabotage of German-dominated Europe (including the US/(+UK?) sabotage of the NordStream gas pipeline), and now the seeming insanity of the American ruling class and its beserker rottweiler Zionists against Iran, closing off the Strait of Hormuz and escalating the world economic squeeze against everyone – but leaving the US relatively unscathed (as Trump boasts “we have our own oil”).

In this mælstrom of cutthroat world capitalist competition the British ruling class and its laughable, City finance-parasite “service economy” is the worst-placed of all, outcompeted across the board and the least capable in almost every respect (save in levels of nastiness, divisiveness, has-been Empire arrogance and misplaced belligerence) and potentially facing disastrous implosion.

Staggeringly this ruling class and its crawlarsing Labourite stooges continue the great election “democracy” pretence, backed up by the endlessly complicit media, all solemnly reporting the charade of “interviews” “probing analysis” and carefully curated “debates” if it really meant something when they all know, (but dare not say for fear of losing their huge salaries and cushy expense account lives) it is an outrageous lying farce, covering up the big money and monopoly corporate dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The leadership contest racket, frantically looking for a sacrifice to head off attention from the giant raspberry delivered by the public in the local elections is just a disgusting spectacle of cynicism and treachery, which by its twisted and manipulated nature demonstrates the very opposite of any “popular will”.

It is firstly no different to the monstrous “et tu Brute” stab-in-the-back leader stitch-ups the Tories carry out in the backrooms, whatever different “proper procedure” is proclaimed.

In fact the “rules”, votes, stuffed committees and “disciplinaries” by the bureaucratic Labourites are at least as cynically twisted as the Tories, as was clear from the Mandelson orchestrated parliamentary coup carried out against hopeless pathetic soft-left reformist Corbynism a decade ago, which put this latest crew of servile Blairite fatcat-lovers and Zionist genocide-backing warmonger stooges back into place to begin with, (with much aid from the Zionist-Jewish lobby).

But far more importantly, as everyone knows, it is a panicked distraction.

These results were nothing to do with “choosing a better council” to empty the bins, (as if local democracy has ever been anything but a corrupt joke anyway – see EPSR Book Vol 9 on “Municipal Socialism” and the fortnightly crop of dirty dealings reported in Private Eye) but, insofar as there was an effort to vote at all, were a raging shout of hostility, contempt and dismay against the way the entire country is run.

How it is run of course, is as it has always been in the last few centuries, a totally degenerate, sleazy, fatcat capitalist profit racket – and worse still, one that is imploding into the greatest slump, war and ecological Catastrophe in history.

Elections of any kind have never made the remotest difference to how this actual power of capital is wielded in bourgeois society, which is controlled by the banks, finance houses, Stock Markets, corporate bosses and, nowadays, other investment paths such as the completely opaque hedge funds, and newly emerged “private lending” (to evade banking regulations) – all hidden behind endless networks of overseas holdings and tax havens.

Privatisation scams, profiteering buyups of services, social provision and basics like housing, are rampant, as is the opening up of just about all state functions to the plundering and lucrative data-stripping by the great tech companies – squeezing taxpayer subsidies and natural monopoly prices to blood-from-a-stone levels while sweating assets to collapse point in even basic public provision (like drinking water!!) and trampling across regulation, controls and safety standards (where even the inspecting and monitoring bodies get privatised and thereby castrated).

The water and sewage racketeering is a non-stop shitshow quite literally of disease threats, ecocide and blighted leisure; housing safety over issues like Grenfell and millions more, is a criminal scam, as is much private landlording; the Post Office is an in-your-face price gouging racket; the tax-funded NHS milked dry by private finance construction, bent equipment suppliers (remember Covid) and overpricing Big Pharma (and suffering yet more valuable data hijacking); the arms industry another monstrous scam of incompetence and profiteering; the railways a ludicrously expensive inadequacy in construction, maintenance and service provision; energy a monopoly stranglehold leaving millions in freeze-to-feed dilemmas every winter; roads a chaos of local potholes and unsafe overcrowded motorways and education a mess of ridiculous Gradgrind regimentation and inadequate provision, leaving pupils and staff alike in stress, exhaustion and burnout, and university students in lifetime debt unless they come from wealth and privileged backgrounds with resources to jump the queue, to live in the right catchments or simply buy the advantages.

Anyone seriously objecting to, resisting or rebelling against an essentially class dictatorship of capital has always faced the full force of the bourgeois state and its laws, to whatever repressive degree necessary (and the ruling class can manage) from censorship and unemployment to police violence, military strike breaking, draconian prison sentences, torture, concentration camps (Ireland’s H-blocks), “transportation”, stripped citizenship and sometimes the death penalty (officially judged, or by secret assassination and death squad).

Now outright fascist police censorship, “1984” surveillance and repression measures have been massively increased with the continuing fraud of “counter-terrorism” used against protest activism and particularly against Palestinian protests, under pressure from the Zionist lobby, such as with the Palestine Action protestors and their pacifist supporters designated as “terrorists” (and secretly so during recent trials, ruling out any possibility of legal defence, or jury independence in a Kafkaesque mockery all notions of “democracy and rule-of-law justice”).

The great bourgeois “democracy” racket has served for two centuries as a mask for this domination, and a very effective one at that, at least in the wealthy and privileged imperialist countries where it could be combined with enough “crumbs from the table” of colonial superprofits to give some credence to the notion of winning “gradual improvements”, pathetic though they are.

Bribing the petty bourgeoisie and some layers of the working class with class collaboration (trade union) notions of reformism helped hold off the attractions of communism and the necessity of revolution for most of the last two centuries and, beyond that, provided fertile soil for non-stop cradle-to-grave anti-communist propaganda to brainwash popular opinion, particularly since the great October 1917 revolution and 73 years of Soviet Russia.

But the inevitable and unstoppable development of repeated “overproduction” crises and economic breakdown in a profit system riddled with contradictions, as Marx demonstrated (see box), and the extremes of “Depression” and World War, constantly brings home to the working class what a ride it is being taken for.

Ever-dropping low turnout, always most obvious in council elections, this time went into reverse to an extent rising 8% to 44% (still low and still not reflecting the whole population, especially workers, where many do not even register for various reasons, but significant).

That was hardly from renewed faith in the system.

Just the opposite, this deliberate kick in the teeth for the Labourites and the Tories before them is a symptom of rising hostility even among the largely petty bourgeois sections who still vote at all, and one that will eventually explode in revolutionary turmoil.

It is the sea drawing back before the tsunami.

The point needs to be underlined: the almost random assortment of alternatives voted for, from Greens to often pro-Palestine independents, confirms the vote as almost entirely a negative phenomenon.

Certainly it is not an alleged rise in support for assorted other groups as trumpeted by the bourgeois press and media “analysts”, and particularly for the ultra-reactionary Nigel Farage Reform Party, heavily hyped and favourably presented by the fascist-minded elements in the ruling class (who infest the BBC, the “liberal” C4 News and lately the other new channels) as well as the bourgeois press, in a conspiracy to bolster this reaction.

Their vox pops as usual try to stampede public opinion, carefully selecting their subjects from areas like street markets (where petty bourgeois “Dell boy” stall holders are anything but working class) and from older subjects to tap old prejudice and the racist attitudes inculcated by two centuries of class collaboration with British imperialist world supremacy.

That is always to be fought against but even the supposed “positive voices” for Farageism are mostly not those of hard bitten racism so much as just the inchoate disgust of a working class that has been given no proper explanation for the crisis and is looking for “something different” to fill the vacuum.

“Giving a chance” to those who claim to be building a “different politics” (a risible notion when most of them are just cynically re-badged Tories, like the assertively nasty Robert Jenrick, opportunistically jumping from one reactionary wing to another) is dangerous enough obviously.

But it will not be countered by the idiot reformist posturing of the “lefts” and its moralising as the EPSR has spelled out before:

Given bourgeois society’s refusal to even consider examining the very nature and structure of capitalism itself as the cause of mounting social disorder and unpleasantness, – where else are minds (which are intellectually limited to popular-television and Mediterranean-resort culture) likely to seek ‘causes’ for why society is going rotten than in the obvious thing they see that is ‘new’ or ‘different’ in postwar life, – namely the arrival of large ethnic minorities all over Britain.

Such small-mindedness will need fighting on a far broader front than just single-issue anti-racist campaigning. Without an understanding of world imperialist crisis and the inevitability of communist revolutions everywhere, trying to mobilise the current working-class mentality to eschew blind-alley race-prejudice with the slogan: “Unconditionally oppose all immigration controls” is worse than useless. This barminess, widely supported in the Trot press, is the fruit of posturing that ‘moral principles’ should, and can, rule politics.

This is subjective-idealist nonsense at its worst. The fascist victimisation of asylum-seekers is odious and dangerous filth that working-class communities must be fought-with over, as hard as possible. But it is just as big and loony a diversion to try to persuade workers to go round saying “Asylum-seekers welcome here” instead. Economic migrants are not all necessarily petty-bourgeois-minded opportunists, eager to embrace all the West’s crap values, but the chances of them being outstanding communists and determined revolutionaries are even less likely.

What people fed up with life in Turkey/Albania/Bangladesh/Nigeria/etc, really need to be doing is taking up the fight for revolution there, not helping swell the illusion of the ‘good life’ under Western imperialism, and distracting local anti-capitalist struggles with welfare demands, which are more pure reformism.

Not for ages after world socialist revolution will a planned new planetary order be sufficiently well-established to start creating a genuine ‘freedom for all to move and live where they want’. And it can only create more confusion than clarity to adopt it now as a slogan supposedly disruptive of capitalism. What the world proletariat needs the ruling class off its back for is not “for everyone to be free to do what they like” but for the working class to be free to build a strong, affluent, secure, educated society where voluntary mutual discipline can eventually resolve all difficulties with the best reasoned argument available.

The idea that this will be automatic upon the overthrow of the world imperialist system is insane. As all past revolutions have proved, there would initially ‘automatically’ be much total anarchy. A new party-led proletarian dictatorship order is the only possibility for preventing world imperialist counter-revolution and for getting planned socialist reconstruction under way. (EPSR No1057 12-09-00)

Nor did the results indicate a surge in other variants of allegedly more “progressive” nationalism in Scotland and Wales; the notion that (actually reactionary) petty bourgeois separatism is suddenly being positively taken up at this late stage, particularly after three decades of experience in Scotland of its uselessness, incompetence and potential corruption, is nonsensical – as indicted by an actual fall in the SNP’s number of seats, despite it retaining overall control of the Scottish devolved parliament.

The “fresh new” Plaid Cymru vote was equally another ”vacuum filler”, yet again a petty bourgeois diversion rather than any great new hope for workers as also spelled out previously:

Directly on the national question, Lenin was even more at odds with the mentality of the petty-bourgeois fake-‘left’ which, today in Britain, supports more and more ‘politically correct’ cultural-national autonomy. The Trots, Revisionists, and bogus ‘anti-Stalin communists’ have all abandoned Marxism to go tail-ending the reactionary separatist delusions of Scottish and Welsh middle-class nationalism, and other such ‘cultural-national autonomy’ throwbacks. EPSR No 1085 17-04-01)

 

The working class in this country has been fighting a fully integrated and united battle against capitalist central government for at least 300 years or more. A positive cultural cosmopolitanism has been achieved even under the strains of capitalist exploitation, an enormous social evolutionary achievement with colossal significance for the future socialist-community development of the whole planet.

The whole of anti-capitalist reformist history in Britain (for its strictly-limited social and economic and political worth as opposed to its longer-term anti-revolutionary disarming aspect) has been the stronger for English, Scottish, and Welsh working class unity rather than the weaker because of it.

The next necessarily revolutionary stages of the struggle for socialism within this economy would undoubtedly be indescribably weaker if fought totally separately from one another by workers in Scotland, Wales, and England, – each presumably against their “own” ruling class (which would be impossible to find, of course, since it is not even just mixed British in inextricably interwoven and complex connections, but is as much international as anything into the bargain).

Fighting for state power just in Wales, say, against the international power of counter-revolutionary monopoly-imperialist intervention (especially pouring over the border from England) seems like pure idiocy, not political wisdom. Ditto for Scotland or England separately. A united workers state power in Britain, on the other hand, would be a vastly different proposition, especially in the likely circumstances of an already totally fragmented imperialist world in an already advanced condition of revolutionary international upheaval, as would be the case by the likely time of breakdown here. EPSR No1159 06-11-02)

The exception obviously is Irish nationalism which has been fighting against 800 years of vicious imperialist colonialism and which never came to terms with the English ruling class except by defeating it through repeated armed struggles for independence, a quite different history to the merging of the ruling classes in mainland Britain, where the Scottish bourgeoisie and aristocracy particularly became willing partners with London and in British Empire world domination (including over Ireland).

As previously declared by the EPSR, “Sinn Féin remains the most outstanding political party of anti-imperialist achievement in the entire Western world” with a heroic history of revolutionary nationalism in the 32 counties and then again in the nonsense “Northern Ireland” monstrosity violently carved off from the new Eire in 1921 at Black & Tan bayonet point.

As the EPSR declared from its first issues in 1979, this was a revolutionary struggle that would defeat Westminster and it went on to do so, the fight culminating in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which consolidated the long drawn out retreat by the British and set in train its eventual culmination in re-unification (see EPSR Books 1-7 Ireland).

While full conclusion of that process is still pending, its outcome is inevitable, despite being drawn out to inordinate length by the deliberate snail’s pace established in the GFA to confuse the whole world and obscure the reality of imperialist capitulation to revolutionary armed struggle (as the British ruling class has cleverly done throughout its long withdrawal from the Empire, from India to Zimbabwe etc), pretending instead there has been an “acceptance of democratic process”.

So there has, in once sense, but precisely because Westminster was forced into it and the subsequent referenda etc were clearly only going one way, reflecting an already accepted defeat (unlike supposedly similar “peace processes modelled on Ireland” such as the Colombian reactionary government agreement with FARC where no clear cut victory had been achieved for the revolutionaries).

Even the Irish process has been constantly reneged on as far as could be got away with, with Westminster taking eight years to properly implement the GFA in the teeth of non-stop foot-dragging and sabotage by the Orange fascist “Unionist” colonists (with an additional 2006 St Andrews Agreement coda required) and constant attempts later to put it all into reverse, particularly by the petulant Orangemen taking arm-twisting advantage of the Tory weaknesses in the minority government period in the decade after the 2009 bank breakdown.

For all the deliberate confusion however, a unified Ireland is already established in practical terms with life for the Irish in the north a million miles from the murderously repressive and humiliating conditions of the last century of racist deathsquads and thuggery, whatever poison might linger in some political attitudes.

But it will remain a bourgeois Ireland even when finally ratified – and Sinn Féin’s sometime tendency towards socialism does not make it a communist movement; it remains limited to nationalist perspectives.

The result has been mistakes in the past “condemning” the 9/11 attack on the WTC in New York for example and denouncing the 2004 “terrorist” bombing in Madrid, which forced Spain to pullout of its eager military participation in the Iraq invasion and occupation with public opinion toppling the government despite the tragedy for many civilians.

And Sinn Féin’s position on the Ukraine war is even worse, its one-sided view of nationalism seeing it side with the reactionary Kievites, (and their NATO backers across every reactionary government in Europe and the US too), swallowing the shallow nonsense that this is a “fight for self-determination” and ignoring the whole historical background, not least the worship of WWII Nazi leader Stepan Bandera by the whole post-Soviet Ukraine nationalist movement.

Defeat to NATO is the only call to make, without remotely supporting the dunderhead bonapartist Putin and his backward Orthodox Church relic-kissing Great Russian nationalism.

But Sinn Féin’s Stormont leader Michelle O’Neil compounds the problem, bolstering up the Scots and Welsh votes as a

“a seismic change in politics”.

“I think it sends a very strong message that people are tired of the shackles of Westminster, both in Scotland and Wales, but I’ll let the leaders of the parties that have entered into those races speak more about that,” she said.

“I will work, in good faith, with whoever comes out the other side of the elections and work with them and where we have common ground and I think that the common ground that we certainly have with, I certainly have, with the SNP and Plaid (Cymru) is in the area of national self-determination.”

Seismic it is, but as explained, there is no equating the Irish struggle with the shallow middle class opportunism in Edinburgh or Cardiff. The replacement for the “shackles of Westminster” can only be development of revolutionary theory and perspectives for the international struggle for socialism within the broadest and deepest historical sweep of the class war.

And that battle remains stymied by every kind of complacency and hostility to theory saturating the British labour movement particularly, currently exemplified by the Your Party launch debacle and the squabbling on all sides which has almost stifled it at birth, through both the sectarian “martyr-opposition” manoeuvres of the anti-communist Trots, who have spent a year or so trying to ride this new movement for their own parasitic purposes, and the wooden bureaucratic control imposed by the reformist/revisionist Corbyn group party-founders in an effort to block out the Trot posturing.

Self righteous Trotskyism has never led any struggle to success over imperialism and only ever survived by leeching off the actual achievements of the proletarian movement by sniping and carping, sometimes making “clever” or correct criticism of theoretical weaknesses (more so Trotsky himself than his even more reactionary inheritors) but always ruining any useful understanding by declaring everything “to be rotten”, as Lenin said, throwing the proletarian state baby out with the error-filled bathwater (see EPSR Books 5, 29,30 Trotskyism).

This was clear in the early days of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, a forerunner to Your Party and one initially looking even more like the expected centrist movement (revolutionary in words but reformist in content) that Marxism suggests world crisis conditions will generate initially, breaking with Labour (though Scargill could not get beyond “left” syndicalist reformism in the end).

Part of the experience then was uncannily similar to YP, exposing the Trot parasitism (which is why little attention has been drawn to those lessons save in five EPSR volumes on Party building) which made some correct points about the need for free discussion but was a million miles from grasping the point of such polemical debate. That is to attain a correct grasp of the world, working the debate through to establish a disciplined party line, not wallowing forever in unresolved eclectic differences. As said of the SLP:

The people who launched it obviously did so when they were happy that they had consulted and organised widely enough to get the project off the ground. Thereafter, it is up to those socialists who wish to join the SLP as genuine individual members of the SLP, not another party, to work for its development as a party in whatever direction they think would be best. After some settling down, the party is likely to reflect majority opinion inside the SLP, obviously heavily influenced by its leadership, as all parties are.

Most of the bleats so far against the SLP’s constitution have been by rival ‘leaderships’ who would obviously like to be where Scargill and his close associates are today. In other words, the bleats are just ridiculous sour grapes. More genuine hopes that the SLP might encourage more diversity for longer in its initial inaugural moves in order to increase its own strength and experience in handling controversial political questions (rather than to allow more hostile cuckoos to become entrenched in the SLP’s nest as some diversifiers intended, it is now clear) were quickly drowned out by anti-SLP sentiments (EPSR No880 19-11-96).

Living polemic is vastly different to the “permanent factionalism” and “collective leadership” demanded by the Trots, and the “Grassroots Left” they have mainly condensed into, and its domination of the “proto-branches” where all the Trot sniping has managed to drive away the initial wave of support for the project.

In true petty bourgeois tantrum fashion they then declare the whole thing a “failure”, blaming it on the mess they themselves have created as just expressed by arch ex-WRP Trot Ken Loach, currently being lauded by the establishment in a revival of his anti-communist Orwellian poison about the Spanish civil war (see EPSR No 988 02-02-99):

Ken Loach has accused Your Party of squandering an opportunity to unite the left in the fight against the far right after the upstart socialist movement founded by the former Labour figures Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana became mired in infighting.

“There was great hope when Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana joined forces; 800,000 people expressed interest – that’s three times the size of a political party,” he said. “But I’m afraid some of the behaviours were very poor and they lost a historic opportunity.”

The British film director and longtime Corbyn ally spoke to the Guardian before an official Cannes film festival screening of Land and Freedom – 31 years after the Spanish civil war drama first premiered.

The film follows a British communist (really??- ed) who travels to Spain expecting a united anti-fascist struggle, only to encounter bitter ideological divisions between competing leftwing factions – tensions Loach believes remain deeply relevant today.

He said: “The split on the left was very important to explore in the film. It contributed to the defeat in Spain.”

Loach, who was expelled from the Labour party in 2021 after refusing to disavow other removed members, said mainstream political parties had increasingly adopted rhetoric once associated with the far right. “The Conservative leadership uses the same language as Nigel Farage, and the Labour right responds to that,” he said.

“The people who have nothing are always blamed, and the people who got rich on the system escape. They’re the ones now funding the far right. They fund Trump. Farage’s £5m is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Loach remains virulently critical of Keir Starmer’s leadership, [...]

“There is no relation to the labour movement or the interests of working-class people. They’ll do all they can to keep Andy Burnham out of the running because he’s just slightly to the left.”

[..]“It’s extraordinary to be back with this film,” Loach said. “It’s about the first war against fascism. When we made it, our feeling was that fascism wouldn’t arise again. And now, of course, we face the far right again, but they don’t come in jackboots this time, they come under a different guise.”

The Labourites are doing anything but keeping Burnham out of it of course, needing his “slight leftism” fraud to keep on with the threadbare “democracy” game. And that is just one misassessment in an interview saturated with defeatism and idealist nonsense, from the notion that “fascism” is something different to “ordinary” capitalism and alleged “democracy” (ask the millions butchered by the British Empire) to the vague sniping against bad “behaviours” and its implication that debate and “internecine strife” is to blame for setbacks.

It was actually Trot dilettante adventurism which caused splits in the anti-Franco fight, and partially weakened it around Barcelona; it was Stalinist proletarian discipline which armed and fought with the Republican side and went on to destroy Nazism by 1945 (despite the Popular Front mistakes it made in Spain and the full consequence of that creeping retreat from Leninism which much later degenerated into Gorbachevite liquidation of the USSR).

Loach’s “split” shallowness is one version of overall hostility to theory which saturates all sides of this Your Party argument (and the only “unity” he ever knew was the bullying sectarianism of the appalling Gerry Healy WRP).

Other Trot demands for permanent factions reflect a contempt and a distrust that any agreed position can be arrived at, which itself is founded in pure idealist denial of an objective reality and the scientific struggle to understand it as far as human reason is able.

It is a recipe for confusion as endless failed “Socialist Alliance” projects have proven in the past, (burying differences behind a “let’s work with the 80% we agree on” formula which always breaks down because of the intractable 20% - actually much more – around such critical questions as the nature of the Soviet Union, and what happened to it, the nature of remaining workers states like China, Cuba and Vietnam and the craven “condemnation” of the huge “terrorist” anti-imperialist wave of world upheaval for the last three decades).

Denial of an objective truth is also expressed in the seemingly opposite approach, distrustful of an agreed party line, currently being advanced as a rejection of “democratic centralism”, by the majority “The Many” wing of Your Party, citing the worst petty bourgeois errors of Rosa Luxemburg and her anti-Leninist individualism.

Thus an argument from former Leicester MP Claudia Webbe begins with the philistine notion that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the “self-activity” of the working class and the discipline of an agreed party line:

THERE is a theoretical question at the heart of Your Party’s April 2026 decision on membership eligibility, [...] what kind of socialist party does the British working class actually need in 2026? A disciplined vanguard, or a broad democratic mass party? An organisation built around the co-ordination of professional revolutionaries, or one built around the self-activity and democratic participation of the widest possible cross-section of the working class itself?

[It is..]one of the deepest debates in the socialist tradition.

Rosa Luxemburg spent much of her political life engaged in precisely this debate with Lenin. Her position was not, as is sometimes caricatured, a rejection of organisation. She was a lifelong organiser who died at the hands of counter-revolution.

Her argument was something more precise: that the revolutionary transformation of society could not be accomplished by substituting a disciplined party for the self-activity of the working class.

The mass of workers would come to political consciousness not through the transmission of a correct party line from above, but through their own collective experience of struggle, of solidarity, of discovering their power through using it.

This argument was not anti-party. It was anti-substitutionist.

Luxemburg believed in a party that leads and gives direction — but whose leadership is always accountable to, and rooted in, the actual democratic experience of the class. The moment the party’s internal discipline becomes more important than the democratic self-expression of the membership, the party has begun to substitute itself for the class it claims to represent.

The democratic centralist model — whatever its many sincere adherents have intended, and whatever genuine work those adherents have done — contains a structural substitutionist risk.

When binding internal lines determine how members vote and act within broader democratic bodies, the democratic body’s integrity is compromised. Not through malice, but through structure.

As one important analysis of broad left parties notes, the precondition of allowing organised currents to operate within a mass party is that they do not circumvent the rights of the members who are not members of organised currents.

Democratic centralism, by its nature, creates a structural asymmetry that tends to do precisely that.

But this crass alleged “philosophy” is both mistaken and self-contradictory, confusing Leninist “democratic centralism” with Trotskyist sectarianism and anyway wrong about party lines, party discipline and above all leadership.

The first glaring contradiction comes in the suggestion that Luxemburg “believes in a party that leads and gives direction” but then promptly says the very opposite, with the gibberish of “self-activity” by the working class which, if it means anything, means complete individualism, a petty bourgeois notion.

So does the working class follow the party lead or not, acting as a unified class or go its own “self-active” way?

In what way does an agreed party line, constitute “substitutionism” whatever that is?

What this is of course, “structural” or not, is a petty bourgeois term for the rejection of leadership whenever party members feel like it, in some vague allegedly “democratic” morass which could well see a vote for Reform (or the Nazi party) by an unguided majority.

That would apparently be alright because it was “built around the widest possible cross-section of the working class itself”.

But it would be both wrong and deadly, however big the “democratic majority”.

The anti-theory climate at present is partly a reflection of the correct overall contempt for all bourgeois politics, and there is something positive in it, but to jump from that to philosophically rejecting Marxist theory and leadership is disastrous.

The working class does not come to an understanding of the need for revolution spontaneously and through its own “collective experience of struggle and solidarity” as the philistine workerism of the most shallow Trot groups (notably the SWP) has always maintained (achieving nothing over nearly 100 years), but through scientific leadership.

And that party needs to study and develop its theory, based on all the great understanding made so far (obviously in Marx, Engels and Lenin) and constantly dialectically deepened with the non-stop movement and development of the class struggle.

And then it must fight for it in unity and conflict with the working class, (in the process further developing understanding) necessarily battling hard at individual and collective level (with argument, leaflets, use of the paper, trade union motions, speeches and polemics etc) against the great deluge of bourgeois lies, brainwashing and disinformation which swamps minds from the day they are born.

That battle includes the fight to expose all fake-“left” anti-communism, anti-leadership and anti-science which is part of the whole bourgeois tide, sometimes just reflecting bourgeois and petty bourgeois class interests and sentiment, and sometimes deliberately fostered by every sinister agency going.

Fighting for leadership within the party and necessarily in front of the working class (publishing all sides of the polemics) is not anything to do with “instructionalism” and “being told how to vote”.

Just the opposite, the Leninist party encourages the widest possible debate and conflict on rising issues, in order to explore all sides of phenomena; but it also fights the polemic through to a conclusion:

Without a CORRECT Marxist analysis of all the processes of imperialist-world crisis, the working class would never be able to transform itself into the temporary new ruling class and thereby transform the world into an equally-shared socialist one of peace and prosperity for all.

Without crucially learning from mistakes and moving on from them, the revolutionary party would stagnate into lifeless dogma.

That factional ARGUMENT was the lifeblood of developing party theory (in order to take it into practice to clarify it as correct understanding or not, one way or the other), was true. That forming permanent FACTIONS (which never needed to agree with each other) was ‘the Bolshevik way’, is scandalously false. The CPGB is lying. Of course there are countless examples of the Bolshevik Party sensibly carrying disagreements within it in the course of letting further developments clarify where a better understanding lay; but once a major disagreement about which way forward was established, and Leninism became convinced that there was no more room for doubt or argument, or that there was no more time for the party to limp on only half agreed about what was the right thing to do, – then Leninism would act utterly ruthlessly to move things on.

Individuals could always be invited back on board if they made their peace with Leninism. Wrong and discarded ideas were firmly left behind (EPSR No 1089 15-05-01).

Rosa Luxemburg did not achieve the revolutionary transformation of society.

Lenin (and successors) did do that, guiding and leading a Bolshevik party which above all got things right in the middle of the huge societal breakdown of the pre-1914 economic crisis, the world war which followed and the revolutionary eruptions which that caused:

The entire stance of the anti-Leninist ‘left’ was, of course, totally buried by history itself. Not only did the puny Soviet revolution survive the most brutal military-invasion onslaught that the entire might of Western imperialism could throw into the destruction of Soviet Russia followed by vicious economic embargo and non-recognition, lasting in the USA’s case until the 1930s, – but the USSR workers state went on to become the greatest state power on earth, – the beacon of the national-liberation struggle to overthrow the colonial empires of Western imperialism in the post-1945 period, – having smashed German imperialist Western fascist might virtually single-handed. The ‘democracy’-worshipping and ‘freedom’-loving Luxemburg did not survive this Western fascist reaction, butchered by German social-democracy in 1919 (EPSR No676 24-11-92).

The whole “dictatorship of the masses not party” argument was hammered to pieces in Lenin’s 1920 book “Left Wing Communism; an infantile disorder”:

Any Bolshevik who has consciously participated in the development of Bolshevism since 1903 or has closely observed that development will at once say, after reading these arguments, “What old and familiar rubbish! What ‘Left-wing’ childishness!” [..]The mere presentation of the question—“dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the class; dictatorship (party) of the leaders, or dictatorship (party) of the masses?”—testifies to most incredibly and hopelessly muddled thinking. These people want to invent something quite out of the ordinary, and, in their effort to be clever, make themselves ridiculous. It is common knowledge that the masses are divided into classes; that the masses can be contrasted with classes only by contrasting the vast majority in general, regardless of division according to status in the social system of production, with categories holding a definite status in the social system of production; that as a rule and in most cases—at least in present-day civilised countries—classes are led by political parties; that political parties, as a general rule, are run by more or less stable groups composed of the most authoritative, influential and experienced members, who are elected to the most responsible positions, and are called leaders. All this is elementary. All this is clear and simple. Why replace this with some kind of rigmarole, some new Volapük? On the one hand, these people seem to have got muddled when they found themselves in a predicament, when the party’s abrupt transition from legality to illegality upset the customary, normal and simple relations between leaders, parties and classes. In Germany, as in other European countries, people had become too accustomed to legality, to the free and proper election of “leaders” at regular party congresses, to the convenient method of testing the class composition of parties through parliamentary elections, mass meetings, the press, the sentiments of the trade unions and other associations, etc. When, instead of this customary procedure, it became necessary, because of the stormy development of the revolution and the development of the civil war, to go over rapidly from legality to illegality, to combine the two, and to adopt the “inconvenient” and “undemocratic” methods of selecting, or forming, or preserving “groups of leaders”—people lost their bearings and began to think up some unmitigated nonsense.

Further petty bourgeois complacency expressed in this Webbe piece is that all that “revolutionary conditions” stuff is “old hat”. What a reactionary disarming nonsense just when the world is seeing the brazen tearing down of the whole post-war edifice of “freedom, democracy and international justice through a United Nations” racket set up for Cold War purposes to delude the masses with the lie that capitalism could offer just as much fairness as communism. More than 400 coups, massacres, CIA interventions and barbaric wars told a different story but it was got away with in the privileged West until Trumpism and Zionism (and the rest of imperialism) has made it clear all that is over and brute force capitalist dictatorship (fascism) is to prevail.

This Your Party, like the SLP, was never going to be the revolutionary party. But it could perhaps be a centrist forum for the arguments; that remains a possibility but these stifling moves, born of stale reformism/revisionist attempts to counter the Trots, are not good signs.

Build Leninism. Tony Lee

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The great economic Slump and world war Catastrophe is the crucial historical context for (re)building revolutionary perspectives to end out-of-time capitalism. That must includes grasping why the USSR gave in to imperialist pressure and needlessly liquidated itself. But far from an answer to Stalinist revisionist retreats and mistakes, “political revolution” fantasies only aid imperialist counter-revolution. There can be no conciliation with such Trot OR revisionist trends. Polemical class-war struggle to build correct (Leninist) understanding alone can win workers over to socialist revolution. [Part One]

A comrade has raised questions about past EPSR exposures of the Trotskyist-Luxemburgist Spartacist League’s support for CIA-Vatican financed and organised Solidarity in Poland during the crucial first 15 months of its existence from August 1980 to October 1981 (see Nos 1665-66).

The comrade argues that the EPSR made false claims about the Sparts’ position, and that the Sparts did not support Solidarity, using quotes from Spartacist Bulletin articles in an attempt to back this up.

Further to this, the comrade asserts that disputes over historical matters, whilst not entirely without value, do not necessarily help develop an analysis of current developments; that it is not useful to define groups from positions they had taken decades ago when the world context was different; that both Trotskyism and Stalinism have a part to play in building socialism today despite their flaws; and that debates should orient towards what needs to be done now.

The Sparts themselves are currently taking a similar “neutral” line of argument on the question of debate in their factionalising call “to the left in Your Party” in March for a conference to “stop the downward spiral” and “find a way forwards” in response to the YP CEC election defeat of the Trot entryist Grassroots Left platform.

This call was brought up again three weeks later after an interim constitutional ban on dual membership for “national parties” was ratified bureaucratically at the CEC and a list of proscribed Trotskyist groups was publicised (but denying the Sparts their much desired “Left Opposition” martyrdom status by not including them on the list!).

For all the appearances of “sincerity”, their call for “open, honest and democratic debate” on “all of the different perspectives and shades of opinion that exist on the left” comes with hoped for preconditions that would effectively suppress debate. In a YouTube podcast to promote their conference proposal, the editor of their British publication Workers Hammer specifically ruled out any discussion on historical “divisions”, which he dismissed as “kind of stupid”:

“You see often in the British left people arguing about, ‘What was your position in 1980-something about this thing?’ or, ‘What’s your position on this issue 50 years ago?’ I’m not saying these are unimportant, but come on,... these are secondary divisions that can be pushed aside, and we have to learn to push those divisions aside and focus our differences on what matters today. We’re not saying lets all get together and forget our differences. No, but lets focus the debates on what’s needed today… Lets learn to focus on the important question, to put historical questions a bit to the side… and put the socialist cause first, and try to discuss where to go forwards.”

The editor clearly had Trotskyism’s treacherous class-collaborating support for Polish Solidarity in 1980-81 in mind when he referred to “1980-something”, and he probably regretted saying it as the Sparts, alongside the rest of the Trots, were badly exposed by the support they gave to this Pilsudski-ite fascist “free trade union” alongside Thatcher, Reagan, the pope and the CIA, and hope to keep it covered up.

This support was concealed under the fiction that these potentially existential threats the Polish workers’ state were “steps towards the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy”, when unconditional support needed to have been given to Poland’s bureaucratic leadership from day one, alongside calls for the Gdansk shipyard provocations to be put down immediately by the proletarian dictatorship they led.

These crafty Sparts, recognising that associating themselves too closely with Solidarity’s bogus “free trade union” demand would mean being seen to be backing a slogan pushed by the CIA’s Radio Free Europe and the Catholic Church, countered it with a call for an “independent trade union”, which amounted to the same thing.

As the comrade points out, the Sparts argued that the choice for the Polish working class was either, in their (apparently neutral) words,

“proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy or capitalist counter-revolution led by Pope Wojtya’s church” and that “the central task of a Trotskyist vanguard [!!!] is to split the workers from the counter-revolutionary influence of the Catholic hierarchy”.

He quotes this to suggest that “their version” of “political revolution” was somehow different from the rest of the Trots and has been misrepresented by the EPSR.

The comrade also argues that the initial Spart article from where this quote was taken (“Polish Workers Move” (SB30)) did not imply any “support” for Solidarity, but that their position was that Poland stood “on a razor’s edge”,– that Trotskyists should not support either the strikers or a Soviet intervention to suppress them; and that the Sparts' sudden line reversal into support for its suppression 15 months later was consistent with this.

But this was a deception. The only real choice from the start was to side with the Polish workers state as it was (for all its revisionist limitations and bureaucratic mistakes) and any moves it made to defend itself, or line up behind pro-Western counter-revolution, – and the Sparts backed the wrong side.

The KOR “Workers Defence Committee” “strike movement” was a counter-revolutionary stunt from the moment Lech Walesa popped his head over the wall of Lenin Shipyard in August 1980. It was skilfully prepared and organised by the CIA and the Vatican, and financed by money laundered by the mafia through Bank Ambrosiano (and included installing the strategically useful Polish anti-communist fanatic Pope John Paul II after his predecessor had conveniently died in mysterious circumstances after just three weeks in office).

The correct revolutionary response was to call for this reactionary stunt to be crushed immediately by the bureaucratic revisionist leadership and state forces, using as much coercion as necessary to defend the workers’ state before counter-revolutionary contagion set in (and spread across the then east European socialist states to the USSR). Proletarian-dictatorship authority needed to be strengthened.

There is no Spart “political revolution” with any more of a material basis in reality than that posed by rest of the Trots, or Trotsky himself. The entire rigmarole was completely made up by Trotsky to give his personal bid to seize the leadership of the USSR after Lenin’s death (after he had been rejected by the Bolshevik Party) a bogus “Marxist” cover to avoid being seen as a counter-revolutionary.

A key part of this “theory”, necessary to maintain a pretence that it was “scientific”, was his totally invented idea that the state bureaucracy had transformed into a new “caste”, – a made up non-Marxist concept used to avoid declaring a new “class”.

There is no class basis for such a “revolution” as there are no property relations or exploiting-class production to sustain it. It is a fantasy dreamed up by a defeated petty-bourgeois individualist extremist who hated proletarian dictatorship/workers party discipline to the core, and carried forwards by similar minded extreme individualists to cause maximum disruption to the development of the workers states post 1945. There is no “third force”. There is only the proletarian dictatorship or the capitalist dictatorship.

Any agitation for “political revolution” to address the real problems of bureaucratic mismanagement and inertia in the workers’ state immediately invites hostile Western propaganda, sabotage, and armed confrontations by the reactionary dissident residues of the old capitalist order to seize power and restore capitalist class relations (as was happening in Hungary 1956 before the Soviets moved in to crush it(see below)). Bogus “political revolution” can only lead to actual counter-revolution if it is not put down as firmly as necessary.

The communist trade unions in a socialist state (as opposed to the Sparts’ “independent trade unions”) have a role to play in this coercion as participants in the exercise in state power; whilst also, contradictorily, being the “schools of communism” necessary to overcome bureaucracy by steadily training workers to take on the administrative and managerial functions of the state until a point of self-administration is reached, by which time the state begins to wither away and communism established, as Lenin argued in his 1922 writings against Trotsky on the role of trade unions then.

The Sparts only discovered the counter-revolutionary nature of Solidarity 15 months after it first appeared, despite all the evidence demonstrating this set out by the Workers Party (as the EPSR was then known) throughout that period. They only declared, out-of-the-blue, that Solidarity were “agents of counter-revolution” and suchlike once the stench of Solidarnosc counter-revolution had got too much for advance workers to swallow. They never explained this sudden reversal of their political line (when they turned up to protest the opening of a Solidarity office in New York at the end of September 1981).

Here is a detailed summary of the Workers Party’s (EPSR) polemics against the Sparts up to that point and immediately afterwards (from EPSR Books vol 3, “Against Solidarity” [Bulletin 158, 07-10-82], which still remain unanswered:

The language used against the Sparts has thus been marked by enormous RESTRAINT.

Consider their record. They began by welcoming the counter-revolutionary Solidarity movement in Poland (‘Polish Workers Move’ 5/9/80).

As late as May 1981, 9 months after the Workers Party had first (and repeatedly) fully exposed the counter-revolutionary essence of Solidarity, the Sparts were still urging workers to join Reagan’s world-wide anti-communist claque to “bitterly protest a Russian military intervention” in Poland.

Only in October 1981, after 5 months’ licking their wounds after the Workers Party’s denunciation of them, did the Sparts put up the pretence of begrudging support for the USSR to rout Solidarity’s “counter-revolution” (at last admitted, 15 months late).

But NOT ONE WORD do they say about this dramatic switch in their line, no mention of the fact that they have been forced to completely change their position.

And most of all no mention of the correct criticism made of their dangerous error by the Bulletin.

Lenin correctly said that the decisive test of the revolutionary party was how it could face up to its own mistakes and learn from them.

In May 1981, the Sparts declare (SB32):

“Genuine proletarian internationalists must bitterly protest a Russian military intervention which would represent a defeat for the cause of socialism.”

But less than 20 weeks later (SB36), they declare:

“Solidarity’s counter-revolution must be stopped. If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal stupid way intervene militarily to stop it, we will support this.”

But TOTAL SILENCE to their readers that the line has been changed.

The least the Sparts are is a bunch of DISHONEST FRAUDS.

But their political position is in fact FAR FAR WORSE.

For 15 months until October 1981, anti-communist Polish reaction, aided by at least $1,000 million from the CIA and the Vatican (see Bulletin 151 on the Vatican’s missing funds scandal), was been screeched on by an unprecedented campaign from Western political circles (all departments), press, and television, to maintain the dual power that Solidarity had established, – with the Sparts either joining in the sneering at the Polish workers state or at best remaining neutral.

Suddenly they discover that this movement, whose suppression the Sparts were going to “bitterly protest”, is in fact a raging counter-revolution.

But NOT THE SLIGHTEST ATTEMPT TO ANALYSE how supposed ‘Marxist revolutionaries’ could have been on the brink of making the fatal mistake of joining in the international bourgeois clamour (CIA orchestrated) to undermine the defence of the Polish workers state and assist the triumph of a counter-revolution which could have been turned into an excuse by US imperialism for launching their final annihilation atomic holocaust against the Soviet Union and the entire socialist camp.

WORSE STILL, the Sparts totally ignore the correct revolutionary Marxist voice raised in the West against this counter-revolutionary conspiracy, thereby showing an utter contempt for the real interests of the working class and a completely doomed REACTIONARY preoccupation with their own subjective interests.

But even worse than that, the Sparts SMUGLY justify their own reactionary analysis, implying that life was at fault for not confirming to the Sparts’ bankrupt prejudices, and not vice versa. For at the bottom of their amazingly thick-skinned statement completely changing their international line without a word of explanation, the Sparts guiltily sneak in a little self-consoling paragraph excusing their earlier wrong position:

“As Trotskyists we orientated towards the potential for the development of a left opposition from amongst those Socialist and Communist Party militants who wanted a genuine ‘socialist renewal’,”

an opposition which “would have” put forwards a programme, etc.

The only thing wrong with this is that there are no such ‘militants’, there is no such ‘programme’. The whole thing is a complete figment of the Sparts’ imagination.

In other words, the Sparts are saying that a fictional “third force” fantasy, existing solely in their poor deluded petty bourgeois heads, should be ample justification in workers eyes for the Sparts having mislead the working class for 15 months into not demanding the crushing of counter-revolution in Poland (as urgently in the interests of the international socialist revolution and the fight against imperialism.)

Even worse than that, the Sparts quickly show that their hasty conversion to the anti-Solidarity camp is a complete OPPOSITIONIST FRAUD anyway, done merely because the stink around the anti-communist ‘free trade unions’ was getting too bad for these wiliest of ‘revolutionary’ charlatans to dare risk any longer.

For not long after their announcement that the Sparts will no longer join Reagan in opposing the crushing of counter-revolution in Poland, these incurable petty bourgeois go back to their “third force” idiocy, urging a “period of underground regroupement” for Solidarity’s ‘militants’.

Lenin’s exhaustive theoretical struggle against the enormous petty bourgeois counter-revolutionary reaction against the dictatorship of the proletariat under the Bolsheviks – stressing again and again that there were only TWO forms of class power, proletarian dictatorship or bourgeois dictatorship, – was in vain as far as these philistines are concerned.

To underline their comfortable, arrogant, Western contempt for the Polish workers state and the enormous difficult problems of constructing socialism in a still hostile imperialist world environment, the Sparts add that they won’t

“advise the Warsaw bureaucrats who have ruined the Polish economy, how to get out of the hole they are in”,

in a remark of breathtaking conceit and stupidity (Workers Vanguard 296).

No wonder these Trotskyite tricksters now want to push aside “stupid divisions over 1980s-something history” and focus on the here and now, – how very convenient!!!

Phil Waincliffe

[Part two continues next issue]

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