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No 1672 7th May 2026

Iran’s staggering war resilience forcing retreat on US blitz bluster and the overstretched genocidal Zionist barbarism is a humiliation the entire Third World is cheering on. But the real damage done is to the rest of the world economic system facing massive inflation and disruption, adding to the breakdown and chaos already hammering the imperialist order as capitalist crisis heads into total paralysis. America’s blockade solves nothing but escalates the damage – increasing already intolerable burdens of capitalist Catastrophe driving the whole world into disastrous conflict. Only revolution can end this vile and deadly system. Build Leninism

Iran’s astonishingly dogged national resistance continues to humiliate Washington’s dementedly vicious and brutal war onslaught and its Trumpian “wipeout civilisation” threats.

Its capacity to inflict significant blows in all directions against imperialist war aggression has shaken both the US forces and their berserker Zionist allies to the core.

Its direct impact is in breaking through to hit multiple targets, with missile defence ammunition running low in Zionland and the US’ stooge Gulf states.

Indirectly its impact has been even greater through the world shattering economic impact of its throttling grip on the Strait of Hormuz.

And this latter question, heavily downplayed by the Western media under instruction by a fearful ruling class to avoid creating panic, is already of gigantic significance, exposing the great rifts in the whole imperialist order which will not be healed whatever immediate outcome there might be.

The further movement remains hard to call however.

The fanatical and sadistic butchery of the Zionists has not stopped its depraved killing and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the West Bank or its blitz killing and wanton demolition destruction in south Lebanon and Beirut and the enormous US military power is still extant.

But, at least partially and temporarily, a retreat has been forced by Tehran onto the barbaric US Empire and its vicious and sadistically genocidal Zionist henchmen, (despite their lies about the blows that have been struck), aided by allies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Yemeni Ansar Allah (Houthis), and above all Hamas in Gaza and its staggering resistance to continuing, utterly depraved, US/Zionist brutality, torture and genocidal killing.

What is not in doubt is that this current stand is sending economic and political reverberations in all directions both internationally and domestically for the whole imperialist system – and that those are just part of an unfolding Catastrophe for humanity across the entire globe.

Economic collapse will only deepen massively whatever the immediate outcome.

Mankind faces the greatest crisis slump and war disaster in all history and not solely or even primarily because of the devastation caused already by the maniac actions of a seemingly deranged US President (who in fact only reflects the material reality of the great US Empire’s decline).

Certainly this war is shattering economies worldwide and its effect is a long way yet from working through in full, with breakdown, hunger and chaos facing hundreds of millions from the Gulf blockade, which will be even worse if the current US buildup restarts the war.

But it is not the cause of the problems.

It is “merely” an extension of, and expression of the great collapse of the whole capitalist system, the intractable and unstoppable economic crisis which has already been unfolding for decades and which hit complete implosion with the 2008-09 global credit collapse, described then as a potential world “financial nuclear winter”.

Despite international trade being artificially propped up ever since with manic dollar credit creation (on top of the endless inflationary dollar printing since Richard Nixon’s time) the Catastrophe then revealed has been unstoppably heading for complete implosion ever since.

War and its destruction of infrastructure, industry, facilities, hospitals, farms and homes, and above all people, is the bourgeois “answer” to its inbuilt failure as demonstrated twice in the twentieth century – and World War Three has been under way since Serbia was blitzed by NATO in 1999.

It was followed by Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the Yemen and more, and most recently Russia too, provoked into attacking Ukraine by the $5bn CIA/MI6 subversion which successfully installed the Nazi-infested reactionary nationalist regime now in Kiev and which (along with assorted Pentagon generals) now controls the country’s endless war from the initially secret Wiesbaden coordination centre in Germany.

Warmongering in the Middle East now is part of that whole unfolding Catastrophe.

Iran is not causing the world crisis – the world crisis is the cause of war on Iran.

As Marxism has always made clear cataclysmic disintegration is inevitable and unstoppable while this bourgeois order continues, the contradictions in its profit-making and monopoly concentrating system inevitably driving into worldwide overproduction crisis, cutthroat trade war and then hot war (see box, Marx’s great work Capital, Lenin’s Collected Works and multiple past issues of the EPSR).

Mankind is threatened with an armageddon scale of destruction and pending world war horrors to dwarf even those of the twentieth century, – the Great War of 1914-18 and Second World War.

And war disaster will increasingly envelope everyone (save possibly in China, a workers state which despite its revisionist leadership is now sufficiently powerful that it could keep out – though it is far from guaranteed).

Revolutionary struggle to overturn and end the increasingly insane rule of ever more concentrated monopoly capital is the only way to escape the great slump and otherwise unstoppable war Catastrophe unfolding.

Never has the need been greater for a revolutionary Marxist perspective for the world working class, to try and make sense of these dizzying events – or even to appreciate just what hair raising implications they have for the whole of humanity, necessarily shaking billions into anti-imperialist action as the world catastrophe accelerates.

Only forging parties of revolutionary science (Leninism) to give a full, world spanning perspective of imperialism, its development and movement over 800 years of capitalist class society and now its historic breakdown into degenerate, genocidal and ecocidal world war, can provide the world’s masses with the understanding and leadership vital for the coming onslaughts and the huge struggles they will propel the masses into (and which have been erupting already, partially, in multiple, sometimes seemingly backward, “terrorist” or anarchic forms).

It is impossible to make the great leap to a new collective socialist society and the planned rational economy that becomes more and more urgently needed, to solve the deadly disaster the ruling class is imposing on the planet, without an enormous effort to rebuild and advance Marxist Leninist understanding, the huge battle for conscious revolutionary leadership.

But consciousness remains blocked by the 50-shades-of-“red” fake-“leftism”, reformist, Revisionist, and Trotskyist, hostile to revolution despite much posturing and preening nonsense about their alleged “Marxism” or their “genuine mass democracy” (as the latest Your Party squabbles demonstrate, on all sides), and endless single-issue diversions, “practical activity” and useless pacifist protest marches.

Pursuit of relatively trivial PC issues, and footling squabbles about organisation and structure but all with no world crisis perspective, can only be shallow-minded distractions from the grasp of imperialism’s great class war contradictions and the complete impasse they have brought civilisation too.

Within that context of imperialism’s great breakdown, the Iran war is delivering huge lessons for the great struggles facing the working class everywhere, both specific and general.

First is the contrast with recent capitulations to the US Empire nazi bullying by the Venezuelan “Bolivarian revolution” confirming a fundamental thread of Marxist understanding, that defeat for imperialism’s bragging might-is-right world domination is a key and necessary aspect of the unstoppably growing world struggle, vital to stimulate its growing revolutionary understanding.

The collusion of the Caracas government under Delcy Rodriguez with the Donald trump regime since (and possibly before) the monstrous lying criminal raid to kidnap president Nicolás Maduro demonstrated just the opposite, giving a boost to US Empire’s bragging “confidence” and almost certainly helping tip the decision to open up the warmongering on Iran (even if that would certainly have continued brewing anyway).

Major questions continue around the nature of the Tehran Ayatollah regime, whose barmy and often reactionary ideology cannot be a long term solution for the working class and has many drawbacks, not least in its anti-communism and a history of suppression and frequently brutal repression of the class struggle in Iran, (one of the reasons it was tolerated by the West when the vicious Western-backed Shah reaction was overthrown in 1979 – imperialism understanding that, despite the “Great Satan” posturing, the Ayatollahocracy filled a vacuum where communism would otherwise develop).

But the stirring anti-imperialist fight the mullahs have been forced to ride more and more by the sheer depth of the world crisis, will have, and is already having, an impact that will shift mass consciousness towards the eventual ending of this foul and degenerate capitalist world tyranny.

However backward, bizarre, religious or superstitious might be the subjective rationalisation for this staggering defiance (and the even huger human price Iran’s allies’ revolts have paid and continue to pay) it sits on an objective refusal by the increasingly oppressed world masses to submit any further to the centuries long tyranny of Western colonialism and slavery.

As noted even by the Western media the war has essentially united the Iranian population against the American and Zionist blitzing, with even those who oppose the regime currently in support of its defiance.

This is effectively a spontaneous expression of the Marxist understanding that the critical issue is the defeat for the imperialist enemy, and that until the greater threat is seen off, the local struggle to overthrow reactionary backwardness should be suspended, as it will only weaken the fight.

Without a conscious Leninist grasp there obviously remains the danger of conflating this anti-imperialist resistance with actual support for the regime rather than only standing alongside it but without any illusions in it – necessarily maintaining a healthy distrust just as with many anti-imperialist struggles from Serbia’s fight against the NATO blitzing to the Iraq invasions (in 1990 and 2003) as expressed at the time in a polemic against the Trotskyists:

The CPGB argument is against seeing that there is anything of the old Yugoslav workers state to defend any longer from this new imperialist blitzkrieg. Therefore “the working class must not take sides with either camp” in this NATO versus Serbia massacre, these ‘Leninists’ conclude.

With ‘anti-imperialists’ like this, the authors of NATO-NAZI aggression will be rubbing their hands.

Support of any kind for the Milosevic regime and its policies is not the issue, nor is that the question in Iraq. To be for imperialist defeat is NOT the same as being for ‘victory for Saddam Hussein’, – no more than the epoch-making Bolshevik call for the defeat of their ‘own’ ruling class in World War I meant ‘victory for German imperialism’ which was in a rapacious war for spoils with Russian imperialism.

This is the ABC of Marxist science and it is a key part of the appalling crisis that the working class and international society is in that such loudly posturing ‘communists’ as the Weekly Worker/CPGB frauds possess only such philistine ignorance of real anti-imperialist history.

Basically, these CPGB Trots are just another brand of anti-communist stooges for imperialism, covering their tracks with their bleeding-heart liberal ‘concern’ for the wretched people of Kosovo whose existence has already been, and is being now, torn apart by the realities of the IMPERIALIST SYSTEM which dominates the world, nothing else (EPSR No994 14-04-99) .

Unsurprisingly the Weekly Worker-ites have been getting it just as treacherously wrong now, from the beginning of the Iran blitzing urging the “people of Iran” to take advantage (!!) of the chaos to “fight for socialism” even while ostensibly “against the war”. So immediately on March 12 the CPGB was calling for a struggle against the Iranian government:

First of all, it is true that the overwhelming mass of the population are against the regime; around 20% genuinely support it. However, that does not mean that the 80% are prowar. Even many expatriates who did support the war in the first few days are now thinking maybe there won’t be much of the country left for them to go back to.

No-one in their right mind would underestimate how bombs and wars actually engender an enraged sense of patriotism and nationalism. In the last few days, most of what I have had to struggle with is to try to convince young Iranians - who until last week were strongly critical of the Islamic Republic and now say this is not the time to criticise the Islamic Republic - that this is precisely the time to do so and to organise for its overthrow from below. You can be against this war and not fall into the trap of becoming a supporter of the new supreme leader or the current interim council.

Lenin’s disciplined Bolsheviks, in the August of 1917, stood with the new bourgeois government of Alexander Kerensky against the sudden attack by the troops of monarchist/fascist General Kornilov who was attempting to bring down the new parliament to restore Tsarist feudalism, but without remotely “falling into the trap of supporting” the bourgeois prime minister – just the opposite, Lenin was very clear that there should be no trust placed in him at all.

More than that, he explained that a firm Bolshevik stand against the more reactionary enemy would help expose the vacillation and outright treachery of the bourgeoisie, as proved the case with Kerensky’s dirty dealing with the reactionaries behind the scenes, – the necessary suspension of the direct fight was also an oblique continuation of the fight for the proletarian revolution which resumed with redoubled strength the moment Kornilov was routed.

The Weekly Worker-ites go even further by late April, sneering at other “lefts’” ideas of building neighbourhood groups in Iran and instead urging all out disruption by the alleged 80% (a highly dubious figure in itself, which swallows the laughably inflated claims of the Western intelligence-fed media and its hyping of the western (and Zionist) provoked and inflamed petty bourgeois street movements, both in January this year and all the way back to the obviously bourgeois counter-revolutionary “Woman, life, Freedom” stunts in 2022 and the Green “democracy” demonstrations in 2009, and their violent attacks on state forces, all heavily promoted and encouraged by the Western media at the time). The CPGB urges:

A revolutionary perspective would push toward collective demands and confrontation. For example:

• Expropriation of private capital involved in war profiteering.

• Seizure and redistribution of hoarded goods and resources.

• Control of distribution systems by workers and communities.

• Prosecution of corrupt officials and profiteers.

• Opening of all accounts and supply chains to public scrutiny.

• Formation of popular militias for self-defence, independent of the state.

Every one of these is an outright provocation that would imply a full-on revolutionary struggle if they were to have any chance of implementation and, therefore, each implies an already well-prepared working class and conscious Leninist leadership for the necessary struggle to carry them through.

Quite apart from the deadly nonsense of waging such a titanic class war struggle in the middle of a direct onslaught by Zionism/imperialism – which would obviously disrupt and fragment all wartime nationalist defensive efforts, this would demand a deep and thought-through understanding, well-promulgated, of the class war battle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But these Trots’ endless posturing of their “extreme democracy” notions, are completely hostile to such proletarian firmness and the class discipline of the workers state that would have to follow.

They hate the history of all the workers states where it prevailed and are filled with poison for the titanic achievements of the Soviet Union and the other subsequent advances from China and Korea to Cuba and Vietnam.

These demands are all fanciful nonsense anyway, typical idealist posturing by these mountebanks and frauds.

Most of all is the demand for “popular militias”, which apart from the obvious implication of creating immediate civil war conditions just as the Iranian state militias are organising against invasion, is just a petty bourgeois idealist fantasy attempting to big-up their image.

It is their go-to “militant” sounding demand added into every academic “programme” and framework and always as a means of covering up their failure to raise the serious revolutionary questions; frequently it is put forwards as a “demand” in itself on the bourgeois government, as if the ruling class were going to accede to any such proposal, and with not a word to the working class about just what civil war conditions are implied.

Allied to this posturing is the relentless defeatism of these Trots who take a swipe at all other “lefts” who see Iran’s survival so far as a victory: “but the country is already in ruins” they wail, declaring that Tehran is “desperate for the ceasefire to hold”.

Superficially there is a correct point to made about the pro-Iranian liberals and “lefts”, especially those like the Lalkar/Proletarian and other revisionists, who have uncritically and misleadingly hailed Tehran for decades, calling for its “victory” as the centre of an “axis of resistance”, just as they have fallen four square behind other such flaky bourgeois nationalist or revisionist figures such as Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic or Muammar Gaddafi, all variously forced into struggles against imperialism.

As explained above while a call for the Empire’s (and stooges’) defeat was sound in all these cases, this revisionist-brainrot all-out support never was, as all these cases and more have demonstrated (eg see EPSR Book2 Vol21 Unanswered Polemics).

Every one proved unstable and unreliable, with tragic consequences for any proletarian movement putting its faith in them.

And there is more, not least around a decade of civil war confusion by the revisionists’ full on support for Syria’s just-as-untrustworthy Bashar Assad regime as a supposed stable future (after “victory” was declared around 2021 in the 13 year long civil war).

But the crisis was never mentioned in any such assessment nor Assad-ism lining up in practice alongside the West by declaring jihadist terrorist turmoil to be the “main enemy” in the world (which likewise the Proletarian deemed a mysterious “evil” on a par with imperialism itself rather than the confused mass expression of world crisis turmoil and anti-colonial hostility, sometimes in part manipulated by the West but mostly hostile to it).

Further confusion has followed since, after imperialist/Zionist skulduggery and local Gulf feudal Arab funding finally managed to recruit, bribe and “turn” enough of the more venal “jihadist” elements to arm and train them to topple Assad in 2024, installing the quisling Ahmed al-Sharaa as president (wrongly labelled an al-Qaeda figure but in fact one who had broken with the mainstream jihadists years before).

And where is Assad now and giving what inspiration or scientific clarity to the world revolutionary struggle??

Even further back is the gushing approval the Brarites gave to the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas in February 2005 as he replaced former petty bourgeois PA president Yasser Arafat after his death:

No doubt Abbas will be derided in the Trotskyite ‘ultra-left’ press as a moderate, a sell-out, etc. However, as a diplomatic leader of the Palestinian national liberation movement, his credentials are impeccable. He was a co-founder, with Arafat, of Fatah, and has lived in exile with the PLO in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. He was a central architect of the Oslo Agreements (which failed when Israel refused to fulfil their side of the bargain), and was named as Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) after Yasser Arafat died in November 2004.

Abbas has stated in no uncertain terms that he is not willing to budge on the three minimum conditions for peace that have long been agreed by the PLO:

* Israeli withdrawal from all the West Bank and Gaza Strip, equating to 22 percent of Palestine before the creation of Israel in 1948.

* East Jerusalem to be the capital of the new Palestinian state.

* A negotiated resolution for Palestinian refugees based on their right of return to homes in what is now Israel (Abbas himself is from Galilee, part of modern-day Israel, and has a strong history of pushing the refugee issue).

Not a word has anyone heard from the CPGB-ML admitting its errors since this disastrous assessment (and pages more) despite 20 years of Abbas’ grovelling collusion with the Zionists, including CIA training for the PA’s security and its crackdowns against all militant Palestinian resistance.

But the WW Trot sneers are not making any such useful philosophical points against the Stalinists, to expose their one-sided and mechanical “support” for Iran and possibly over-optimistic consequences.

And they are themselves immediately undermined by their own point that

“Washington faces growing frustration that the Strait of Hormuz is closed, calls for regime change exposed as empty rhetoric and a war becoming increasingly unpopular”.

So, a bit of a defeat then???

In fact much more, as is first of all apparent in the splits and recriminations in the ruling class.

There are growing divisions and discord both within America’s bourgeoisie and with the rest of imperialism as the bourgeois press reports, endlessly:

US Vice President JD Vance’s address at an event on Tuesday drew widespread ridicule after images of sparsely filled seating circulated, with critics saying voters were increasingly unwilling to support politicians they see as backers of Israel’s wars on Iran and Palestine.

Vance was also heckled at the event by what should have been a supportive and friendly crowd.

Posts shared across multiple platforms showed wide sections of empty seats at a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) event inside the Akins Ford Arena in Athens, Georgia, fuelling commentary that attendance was far lower than expected.

Some social media users wrote that Americans were “done listening to Zionists”, while others framed the turnout as a sign of growing public fatigue with US military adventurism in the Middle East.

Comments Vance made about Pope Leo XIV, the US-Israeli war on Iran, a heated exchange with a heckler over the genocide in Gaza, and his defence of conservative figure Erika Kirk, who did not attend the gathering, all invited controversy and criticism.

The event took a tense turn when an audience member interrupted Vance while he was discussing Middle East policy.

According to witnesses and footage circulating online, a man began shouting accusations that the administration was “killing children” in Gaza, prompting a sharp response from the vice president.

In response, Vance blamed former President Joe Biden for allowing what he described as an “absolute catastrophe” in Gaza, while crediting President Donald Trump with brokering a peace deal.

Video clips of the exchange spread rapidly online, with users debating both the protester’s comments and Vance’s response.

The interruption further fuelled criticism from activists who accuse the administration of supporting Israeli military operations that have caused widespread civilian casualties in Gaza, where over 72,000 people have been killed in Israel’s war on the enclave. (Actually many more - ed).

Over the weekend, Trump launched a lengthy attack on Pope Leo, accusing him of being “terrible for foreign policy”, following the Catholic leader’s condemnation of the Iran war.

Pope Leo, the first US-born pontiff, responded that he had “no fear of the Trump administration” and wrote earlier on X that “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

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Scott Jennings, CNN’s most prominent pro-Trump commentator, swore at a fellow panelist on live television on Thursday night after being repeatedly pressed to name a single political concession the US had extracted from its war with Iran – and failing to answer.

The outburst came during NewsNight With Abby Phillip, where Jennings clashed with Adam Mockler, a 23-year-old commentator with the progressive MeidasTouch. When Mockler asked him to name a concrete gain from the conflict, Jennings responded with the party-line response that the conflict had a singular, clear purpose – preventing a theocratic regime from acquiring nuclear weapons – but Mockler shot back that the non-answer was itself an answer.

“So you can’t answer the question,” Mockler replied. Moments later, as Mockler kept gesturing with his hands while speaking, Jennings, a former George W Bush campaign staffer, snapped: “Get your fucking hand out of my face.”

Jennings’s most recent outburst may be a reflection of the times. A new Washington Post–ABC News-Ipsos poll from Friday found 61% of Americans now consider the use of military force against Iran a mistake – a level of opposition the pollsters compared to the Iraq war in 2006, when violence was at its peak, and to the Vietnam war in the early 1970s.

Fewer than one in five Americans believe the campaign has been going well, with roughly four in 10 saying it has not been successful and a further four in 10 saying it is too early to render a verdict.

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Tucker Carlson, conservative podcaster, has said he is “tormented” by his support of Donald Trump, issuing in an extraordinary mea culpa that called for “a moment to wrestle with our own consciences”.

Carlson delivered that comment in a conversation with Buckley Carlson, his brother and a former Trump speechwriter, on The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday that reviewed the sidelining of traditional conservative values in a Republican party now dominated by the president.

“You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time – I will be,” Tucker Carlson said. “And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional, that’s all I’ll say.”

Though Carlson in 1999 had referred to Trump as “the single most repulsive person on the planet”, he beat most pundits in calling for Trump to be taken seriously before he won his first presidency in 2016.

Then, as Trump successfully ran for a second presidency in 2024, Carlson supported him throughout the race, speaking at a campaign event for him just five days before election night.

But the podcaster has now been at odds with the president over US support for Israel and the war the two countries started in Iran in late February. Carlson called Trump’s language on Iran “vile on every level” – and said he took personal responsibility for the president’s return to power.

“You and I and everyone else who supported him – you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him – I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” Carlson said. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’ – or like, ‘Oh, this is bad – I’m out,’” he told his brother.

He added: “In very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now.”

Carlson’s revisionism comes soon after Trump issued a stinging attack on him as well as other rightwing media personalities who were hardliners in his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, including Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Alex Jones and others.

Trump recently published a social media post calling Carlson “a Low IQ person – Always easy to beat, and highly overrated!!!” And the president threatened to produce “a list of good, bad, and somewhere in the middle” Maga supporters.

In 2024, Carlson was fully onboard the Maga train, campaigning with Trump in Arizona five days before the election and praising Trump as a “national leader” at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where he said Trump had been transformed by the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.

[..]In his latest comments, Carlson repeated his criticisms of the war in Iran, saying Trump “clearly had no plan for [it], wasn’t enthusiastic about [it], was fully aware of the risks, fully aware that it was a betrayal of his explicit promises for 10 years not to do this – he did it and did it against his will.”

As these and other reports declare, the huge impact of the Zionist-Jewish freemasonry lobby in the West and particularly the US, has been rapidly falling, despite the vast resources of groups like the America-Israel Political Action Committee AIPAC (and others) which have had a near stranglehold on Zionist questions on the utterly corrupt and money dominated US electoral system for decades.

And internationally there is a growing division between the US and its “Israel” stoogery, with the fascist and depraved genocide by the Jewish occupation now having to be reined in by Washington from its ever more berserker pursuit of its Greater Israel colonialist ambitions potentially threatening Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well as Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, and obviously Tehran too.

Potential conflict between Washington and Tel Aviv/Jerusalem has long been speculated on by the EPSR:

Not all of Zionist aggression’s wag-the-dog warmongering (to please the USA’s master-race-plans to kick arse worldwide as a cover and diversion from insoluble economic crisis), is necessarily going to please Washington all of the time.

It is not completely impossible (although still a long shot) that American blitzkrieg repression might just have to exert some of its authority on Zionist colonial-military wildcatting itself in order to preserve its credibility in the world’s eyes, and possibly to see through any particular aspect of strategy or tactics that the US warmongers decide, in their confusion, is “vital” for imperialism’s chaotic “plans”.(EPSR No1190 24-06-03)

The Jewish occupation agenda for Palestine has always suited imperialism as a rabid insertion in the West Asian (Middle East) region to smash down all the local forces and their ever deepening objection to imperialist control and domination of this strategic region, and the piratical plundering of its rich resources that they obviously would want for their own development.

And as the crisis has deepened, and US (and “allied”) imperialism’s own turn to ever escalating warmongering and brute intimidation by sanctions siege starvation, blitzing, torture, and grotesque genocidal destruction (Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Russia via Ukraine) has failed to solve any of its problems, let alone reestablish the calm “stability” of the unquestioned post-WW2 supremacy for the topdog US empire and its trailing small fry imperialist acolytes (most of all the pitiful long-gone has-been British empire) the Zionists have been more and more relied on for their utterly sadistic “smiting” abilities, sustained by their master-race occupation ideology far beyond any levels of fanatical self-sacrifice the rest of imperialism can nowadays inspire or its societies tolerate as the flag-draped coffins are flown home (in marked contrast to the German Nazis for example).

But the out-of-control fanatical Jewish barbarities in occupied Palestine (relentlessly trampling across the risible “ceasefire” to continue the Gaza genocide), in Lebanon and Syria (see below), have stirred such hatred among not just the Arab masses, and the wider Middle East but among all the multibillions of the oppressed Third World – themselves being driven even further downwards by the imperialist crisis turning the screw on their already desperate exploited condition, – that it threatens to stir even greater resistance than already seen, including the astonishing blows against the Zionist occupation army in southern Lebanon by a Hezbollah movement which is suddenly revealed to be far from destroyed by the shocking “pager-sabotage” terror blow inflicted two years ago, and now by the Ansar Allah (Houthis) rejoining the fray from Yemen after they had stepped back because of the supposed Gaza “ceasefire”.

Suspicions grow too that for all the frenzied aggressive settler-fascist bluster around Benjamin Netanyahu, and the overtly warcrime genocidal Jewish cabinet, the Zionists are losing their nerve too; already in the first war attempt they managed to induce on Iran last year they had to be rescued after 12 days once the Iran Dome defences started running out and Tehran’s missiles and drones started getting through.

It took the flamboyant bluster of the US’ (pointlessly) long-range B2 raid on the nuclear facilities as a cover to call a halt.

It seems likely the US is fearful that the Zionists are even more over extended now.

But even more crucial than this split is the exposure of growing inter-imperialist tensions, most of all between Washington and Europe with Trumpite rage and insults now almost daily and accompanied by lurid threats of punishment and economic aggressions – returned with increasing contempt by the Europeans:

Pentagon officials said on Friday that they were pulling 5,000 troops from Germany and would redeploy them to the United States and other posts overseas.

The Defense Department is also canceling a plan developed under the Biden administration to place a missile-equipped artillery unit in Europe.

The moves will return U.S. forces in Europe to the level they were in 2022, before Russia began its war in Ukraine, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the planning process. Last year, the Pentagon redeployed a brigade in Romania and did not send replacement forces.

Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman, said [..]“This decision follows a thorough review of the department’s force posture in Europe and is in recognition of theater requirements and conditions on the ground.”

The Defense Department — particularly during both of President Trump’s terms — has for several years considered decreasing the military presence in Germany. But senior defense officials privately made it clear that they wanted the move to be seen as a punishment for Germany, whose recent comments about the U.S. war in Iran have annoyed Mr. Trump.

Earlier this week, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said Iran had “humiliated” the United States, and he questioned how Mr. Trump planned to end the conflict.

“The Americans obviously have no strategy,” Mr. Merz said.

Mr. Trump then took to Truth Social, his social media site, to vent.

“The United States is studying and reviewing the possible reduction of Troops in Germany, with a determination to be made over the next short period of time,” he wrote on Thursday.

Later, he added: “The Chancellor of Germany should spend more time on ending the war with Russia/Ukraine (Where he has been totally ineffective!), and fixing his broken Country, especially Immigration and Energy, and less time on interfering with those that are getting rid of the Iran Nuclear threat, thereby making the World, including Germany, a safer place!”

The announcement, and the criticism of Germany, represents a shift for Pentagon officials, who recently had praised Germany’s efforts to increase military spending and take over more of the burden of supporting Ukraine.

Even if the Pentagon pulls 5,000 troops out of Germany, the country would still host the second-largest U.S. troop presence in the world, at more than 30,000, behind only Japan.

[..]Many U.S. troops evacuated from bases in the Middle East that were targeted by Iran were moved to Germany. And many of the U.S. troops wounded in the war have been taken to Germany — to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near Ramstein Air Base — for treatment.

The U.S. Africa Command and European Command are also headquartered in Germany.

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Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw US troops from Italy and Spain a day after saying he was looking at reducing the number deployed in Germany.

The US president’s threat to Germany came after the country’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said America was being “humiliated” by Iran.

Trump has severely criticised Nato allies for not sending their navies to help to open the strait of Hormuz, a crucial commercial shipping corridor.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has spoken out against the US-Israeli war on Iran from the start, and Rome had played a balancing act until late March, when it refused the use of an airbase in Sicily to US planes carrying weapons for Iran.

Asked late on Thursday whether he would consider pulling US troops out of Italy and Spain, Trump told reporters: “Probably … look, why shouldn’t I? Italy has not been of any help to us and Spain has been horrible, absolutely horrible.”

Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, said he did not understand Trump’s motives for the threat to withdraw US troops from Italy and rejected accusations that Rome had not helped the US, especially in relation to maritime security. Crosetto also alluded to Trump’s accusations that European-linked ships had crossed the strait of Hormuz.

“As is clear to everyone, this never happened,” Crosetto told Ansa. “We have also made ourselves available for a mission to protect shipping. This was greatly appreciated by the American military.”

Crosetto added: “The incredible thing is, they’ve used the strait of Hormuz, while we haven’t.”

There was no immediate official response from Spain, which has denied the US permission to use jointly operated military bases on its territory for attacks on Iran and been the most outspoken EU critic of Trump’s war. Last month Trump threatened to impose a full trade embargo on Spain.

About 13,000 US military personnel are stationed across seven naval bases in Italy.

The US naval air station in Sigonella, Sicily, has been under the spotlight since the start of the conflict in Iran as residents and politicians protested against increased activity at the base, especially after the US navy shared a photo on its Instagram account showing a US military helicopter landing at the Unesco-listed Madonie natural park, close to Palermo, during a training exercise.

Italy refused to allow US military aircraft bound for the Middle East to transit Sigonella in late March because the US had sought authorisation to land only when the aircraft were already en route to Sicily. According to treaties established in the late 1950s, the US navy bases can be used for logistical and training purposes but not as transit hubs for aircraft used to transport weapons for war unless in an emergency situation.

Relations between Rome and Washington were further ruptured after Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, criticised Trump’s broadside against Pope Leo over the pontiff’s condemnation of the war on Iran. Trump in turn accused Meloni of lacking courage for not joining the war and in a subsequent outburst on his Truth Social platform, he shared a link to a story by the Guardian about the Sigonella dispute and wrote: “Italy wasn’t there for us, we won’t be there for them! President DONALD J. TRUMP”.

In Spain, the US military presence centres on two joint-use facilities, the Rota naval station and the Morón airbase, both in Andalusia, which are under Spanish sovereignty and commanded by Spanish officers but receive significant US funding.

Rota is a key hub for the US navy’s sixth fleet, and Morón a strategic staging post for the US air force and marine corps for operations across Europe and Africa. Both are seen as core elements of US power projection in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.

According to the US defence figures, just over 3,800 active-duty US military personnel were stationed in Spain at the end of 2025, but the Spanish government’s refusal to allow the bases to be used has since prompted the relocation of multiple US aircraft.

[..]The Spanish prime minister had already upset the US president last year by rejecting Nato’s proposal for member states to increase their defence spending to 5% of their GDP, saying the idea would “not only be unreasonable, but also counterproductive”.

At an EU summit last week, Sánchez said Spain worked “with official documents and statements. The Spanish government’s position is clear: absolute cooperation with allies, but always within the framework of international law.”

He said Trump’s “illegal war” showed “the failure of brute force”.

And the hostilities have been directed at the Zionists too, even by the openly fascist government in Rome:

Italy is declining to renew a longstanding defense agreement with Israel, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Tuesday, a sharp reversal for her right-wing government.

Ms. Meloni made the announcement on the sidelines of an event in Verona, and a government official said that Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, had sent a letter to his Israeli counterpart, Israel Katz, announcing the decision.

The defense accord, ratified in 2005, established cooperation between the two countries in areas including “defense industry and procurement policy,” importing and exporting military equipment, exchanging technical data and other forms of military collaboration. It has been renewed every five years, and was set for another renewal this month.

Opposition parties had put pressure on the government for over a year to suspend the renewal. Marco Grimaldi, an opposition lawmaker, said the decision was “a victory” for those who had protested Israel’s military offensive in Gaza over the last three years.

Foreign Minister Gideon Saar of Israel played down the importance of the agreement. “There isn’t even an agreement,” he wrote in a social media post. “There is a memorandum of understandings that was never materialized or had any substantive content. Israel’s security will not be impacted.”

Until recently, Ms. Meloni’s government had been one of Israel’s closest supporters. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visited Rome in March 2023, Ms. Meloni described Israel as a “friend and key partner of Italy, in the Middle East and at global level.”

But relations between the two countries have deteriorated sharply. When Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, visited Lebanon on Monday, he angered Israel by posting on X that the trip intended to show Italy’s “solidarity” with Lebanon “following the unacceptable attacks by Israel against the civilian population.” He added: “We must avoid at all costs another escalation like the one in Gaza.”

Israel’s foreign ministry on Monday summoned Luca Ferrari, Italy’s ambassador in Tel Aviv, to protest Mr. Tajani’s comments. Mr. Tajani had summoned Israel’s ambassador to Italy the week before to condemn “the bombings on the Lebanese civilian population,” as well as a gunfire incident earlier this month in which Israeli soldiers fired warning shots at an Italian convoy that was part of a United Nations mission in Lebanon.

Italy’s stance on the Middle East conflict has also worsened relations with President Trump. Speaking to a reporter at Milan daily newspaper Corriere della Sera on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he had been “very shocked” by Ms. Meloni’s decision to not assist the United States in the war against Iran, and by her “letting America do all the work” for Italy, “which gets its oil from Iran.” Ms. Meloni had said on Monday that it was “unacceptable” for Mr. Trump to attack Pope Leo XIV, who has been critical of the war.

“Do people like her? I can’t believe it,” he said in the interview, adding: “I thought she had courage. I was wrong.”

Mr. Trump had in the past described Ms. Meloni as a “fantastic leader and person.” She was the only sitting European leader to attend Mr. Trump’s second presidential inauguration, and had long boasted of having a “privileged relationship” with the American president.

Britain too gets it in the neck:

Footage has emerged of Donald Trump mocking Keir Starmer by claiming the prime minister said he would have to consult his team before deciding whether to send UK aircraft carriers to the Middle East.

In a new low for UK-US relations, Trump appeared to impersonate Starmer during an Easter lunch speech at the White House.

Trump appears to mock Starmer and derides Britain’s ‘broken-down aircraft carriers’

The US president said the UK “should be our best” ally but had not been during the Iran war, accusing Starmer of prevaricating over sending aircraft carriers.

However, Whitehall sources said Trump had never asked the UK for the vessels and Britain had not offered them.

During his speech, the president said: “I asked [the] UK, who should be our best. In fact the king is coming over here in two weeks, he’s a nice guy, King Charles.

“But should be our best but they weren’t our best. I said: ‘You have two, old broken-down aircraft carriers, do you think you could send them over?’

“‘Ohhh, I’ll have to ask my team.’

“I said: ‘You’re the prime minister, you don’t have to.’

“‘No, no, no, I have to ask my team. My team has to meet, we’re meeting next week.’

“But the war already started. Next week the war’s going to be over … in three days.”

The remarks were made at a lunch that was not open to the press. It was released by the White House on a social media channel but later deleted. However, it was downloaded and republished by a politics reporter for the US website Business Insider.

During the lunch, Trump also mocked Emmanuel Macron, saying the French president was “still recovering from the right to the jaw” and claimed that Marcon’s wife, Brigitte, “treats him extremely badly”.

Trump has repeatedly hit out at the UK over its decision not to authorise the use of military bases for the initial strikes on Iran, as well as the move to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

Starmer has not retaliated but said he would stick to his position on the war “whatever the pressure and the noise”.

When asked previously at parliament’s liaison committee about the “quite rude” comments made by Trump about him, the prime minster said: “I’m utterly focused on what is in the best interests of our country and I am unapologetic about that.

****************

Rachel Reeves had an angry exchange with her US counterpart, Scott Bessent, in Washington last month over the war in Iran, sources have said, in the latest sign of the deepening tensions between the two countries.

The chancellor and the US treasury secretary argued in person during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund, according to people briefed on the exchange, confirming a story first reported by the Financial Times.

The row centred on Reeves’s criticisms over the Iran conflict, which she made in public before the meetings began, triggering an angry backlash from some in the Trump administration.

Criticisms by Reeves and the prime minister, Keir Starmer, have caused the biggest rift in US-UK relations for decades, with the US president, Donald Trump, threatening to rip up a trade deal and to recognise Argentina’s claims to the Falkland Islands in response.

Reeves told the Mirror on 14 April she felt “very frustrated and angry that the US went into this war without a clear exit plan”, calling the war a “folly”.

She then travelled to the US, where she told CNBC the goals of the war had “never been clear”.

“I’m not convinced this conflict has made the world a safer place,” Reeves told a panel organised by the US broadcaster. “It’s not been clear over the last six weeks what exactly the aim of this conflict is.”

According to those briefed on her meetings, Bessent upbraided her over the comments during an in-person meeting on 15 April, including invoking the threat of an Iranian nuclear attack on Britain.

He is understood to have made comments along the lines of those he made to the BBC a day earlier, when he responded to concerns about the war’s economic fallout by saying: “I wonder what the hit to global GDP would be if a nuclear weapon hit London.”

Reeves responded by telling the treasury secretary she was not his employee and did not like his tone.

One UK official said: “Reeves was as direct in private with Bessent about her views on the Iran [war] as she was in public.”

Downing Street said on Tuesday: “The chancellor and the US treasury secretary have a good relationship. They have had constructive conversations together since the chancellor’s visits to Washington.”

British government sources also pointed to a US treasury readout of the meeting in the immediate aftermath.

The department said at the time: “During their discussion, Secretary Bessent underscored the US treasury’s commitment to Economic Fury, leveraging all tools and authorities against those who continue to support Iran’s terrorist activities.”

The war in Iran has created arguably the biggest divide between the US and UK since the Suez crisis of 1956.

Having gone to great lengths to keep Trump on side in the early months of his premiership, Starmer has taken an increasingly outspoken position against the president’s foreign policy.

At a meeting of the European Political Community in Armenia this weekend, the prime minister said: “We cannot deny that some of the alliances that we have come to rely on are not in the place we would want them to be.”

With transatlantic tensions high, the president has in recent weeks threatened to unpick a trade deal that has already been agreed, impose fresh tariffs in response to the UK’s digital services tax and recognise Argentinian control of the Falklands.

It is more than a bit rich for the stinking Labourites to upbraid Trump over the Iran war of course, when the war was initiated and pushed by the Zionists – as made clear for example in the detailed New York Times reconstruction of the February Netanyahu briefing for Trump in Washington which persuaded him it would all be over in a week or two (trading on the hubris of the Venezuela kidnap raids).

The whole of Labourism is up to its neck in total support for the Zionists both in Israel and in the pro-Zionist Jewish “community” (freemasonry) in the UK – which apart from a minority who join the regular pacifist Palestine support marches, and/or speak out against the genocidal oppression, is completely in favour of Israel and its actions as multiple polls have indicated (as well as the absence of any vigorous, or even lukewarm expressions of opposition).

In many cases individual Labourites have received massive financial political support from Zionist sources including many in the Cabinet, which has sanctioned arms supplies, intelligence provision and other aid to “Israel” throughout the Gaza genocide, the horrifying fascist terrorising of the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon.

Keir Starmer of course remains for ever damned by his warcrime comments after the October 2023 breakout from the decades long siege and isolation of the Gaza strip – a largescale concentration camp in all but name – that the Zionists would be justified in withholding water and food from the population, a comment has been given concrete form in the 2½ years subsequently.

But while these points of gross hypocrisy need pursuing further, (and not least in the light of the deliberate hysteria about “anti-semitism” whipped up around the actions of a clearly mentally disturbed individual, to justify censorship and political repression) the critical question needing immediate further examination is the huge sharpening of inter-imperialist antagonism revealed by these “diplomatic spats”.

Writing these off as due simply to erratic and aggressive Trumpism would be to miss the point in a big way and not only because Trump and his rise is as much a product of material conditions as any other phenomenon. As basic Marxism has always explained, history is not made by individuals except perhaps in the fine tuning of how events pan out.

Any “time-machine assassination” of Adolf Hitler as fantasised by most adolescents, would not have altered much about the rise of German Nazism and the Second World War, nor its resounding defeat at the hands of the revolutionary masses of the Soviet Union.

Instead they are the expression of the great unfolding crisis and a key part of its plunge into world war as it was before WW1 and WW2.

And now they are now part of the plunge towards World War Three as is beginning to dawn on some bourgeois commentary, albeit turning everything upside down by blaming Russia, China and North Korea for the “growing authoritarianism” which is entirely down to the bourgeois system and its increasingly open expression of the bourgeois dictatorship which runs everything:

When Donald Trump hosted Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, last month, he could not resist a gratuitous reference to Pearl Harbor. The US president is impelled to trash longstanding alliances. He has done more than anyone to demolish the postwar global order.

This week alone, the Polish president, Donald Tusk, questioned whether the US would be “loyal” to Nato if Russia attacked. A Pentagon memo reportedly floated suspending Spain from Nato and reviewing support for the British claim to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. And a report said US officials believe that it has depleted munitions so rapidly in Iran as to put in question contingency plans to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion in the near future.

But the outlines of the new world being built in response to authoritarian menace and US unpredictability also came a little more clearly into view. Two major powers are shaking off postwar restraints. Germany published its first military strategy since the end of the second world war – laying out the context for its vast rearmament and recruitment plans. While the country says it is taking on more responsibility within Nato, it is also setting out its national interests more distinctly.

Nato was famously intended “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”. With the US threatening exit and Russia knocking at the door, other members are mostly urging Germany upwards – even if the popularity of Alternative für Deutschland, and its sympathy for Moscow, may give some pause for thought. But there are concerns at home and abroad around the politics and economics of this shift. Defence will always be the most sensitive part of pooling sovereignty – and defence industries gain lobbying power at times of economic stress. This week France and Germany yet again failed to resolve differences over the Future Combat Air System joint fighter jet project, announced shortly after Mr Trump first took office.

Meanwhile, Japan relaxed its export rules for lethal weapons. Many saw that as a direct challenge to its postwar pacifism. Conservatives have long wanted the 1947 constitution to be revised and Ms Takaichi has seen her opportunity. Whatever happens on paper, Japan is already becoming more like a normal military power, committed to doubling its arms spending to 2% by 2027.

Major recent protests demonstrate deep domestic concern at a shift away from pacifism, including from fear that Japan may be drawn into US wars. Greater anger comes from China and South Korea, where many believe Japan has never sincerely or sufficiently atoned for wartime atrocities. Yet Ms Takaichi and her South Korean counterpart Lee Jae Myung have, perhaps against expectation, continued a bilateral thaw. Both countries are heavily dependent on the US for security; both are anxiously watching China’s growing might and forcefulness, and a North Korea which is fast expanding its nuclear capacity and working more closely with Russia.

As the second world war reaches the peripheries of living memory, the fear of new conflict looms. And as Mr Trump hammers relationships, others are seeking to strengthen partnerships near and far: visiting Tokyo and Seoul last week, Mr Tusk described South Korea as Poland’s most important ally after the US. Politicians know that security must be built on diplomacy as well as defence budgets. But acting on that insight, perhaps especially with neighbours, can prove tougher.

As the EPSR alone has been explaining throughout its 45 year existence, understanding and analysing the great cutthroat battle for monopoly capitalist markets is crucial to grasp every aspect of the great world balance of class forces and its developments, and it is one that the entire “left” fails to see.

Far from Germany and Japan being in thrall to American imperialism post-1945, it is their unstoppable rise back to world status (necessarily allowed by WW2 victor and now dominant monopoly power the USA in order to contain the “communist menace”) which is at the centre of world developments.

Above all it was crucial for grasping the reasons for the liquidation of the triumphant Soviet Union which had not only survived as a workers state for 73 years but become a world power on a par with the West after the heroic Red Army victory over Nazism, and by some measures already exceeding it in science, technology, and the arts of all kinds, as well as in the rationality and fairness of its society.

But its weakness was in the complacency and conservatism of the revisionist bureaucracy which had long abandoned the revolutionary core of Marxist understanding, in a mixture of fearfulness to “not rock the boat” and complacency, derived from the retreat from Leninism which began to creep into the Soviet leadership even by the 1920s.

Yet as the EPSR analysed (See Book Vol 13 on Gorbachevism and the long Perspectives of 2001) it was the was growing market competition with the US from the other imperialist powers, forcing Washington to shift its resources to an extent from “defence” to trade war, which tipped Gorbachevism into the final disastrous delusion that imperialism was relaxing its Cold War aggression, and thus to abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat and embracing the “free” market.

The subsequent period has been understandable largely by grasping the trade war tensions at the core of imperialist relations; particularly the US currency and tariff bullying of Japan over the 1990s which threw Tokyo into two decades of economic stagnation, (and almost certainly triggered the Asian Tigers currency collapse), as well as non-stop trade skirmishing with the European Union.

And it is aggressive inter-imperialist jostling for position which underlay the Balkans turmoil over Serbia; which surfaced at the time of the Iraq war, with Europe initially holding back from the Anglo-Saxon warmongering (despite eventually wanting to get in on the plunder); and which has been a major factor in the Ukraine war, waged as a distraction from the great economic collapse of the whole monopoly capitalist order and as a means of draining the Russian economy, but equally as much about US monopoly capital undermining and sabotaging European industrial and commercial competition, by disrupting the continent, and destroying its cheap energy advantage from Russian gas and oil, through war and then by outright sabotage of the NordStream pipelines, blown up by the US (and probably British) naval forces too.)

The advent of Trumpite belligerence against all comers to put “America first” has brought the inter-imperialist contradiction even more starkly to the fore with its belligerent bullying and piratical demands, even to the point of demanding other imperialists hand over territory, like Greenland.

And it is these which are the fundamental contradiction in this war blitzing on Iran and the explanation for the current bizarre imposition of an American blockade on Hormuz, which far from easing the siege, effectively adds to it.

The real target is not Iran alone – despised and hated though it is – but the rest of the imperialist world which is facing disastrous economic impacts, particularly the rival European powers.

America calculates that it can stand the strain of increased petrol prices and slowed growth far more than the rest – Trump boasts that “we don’t need the oil” – and, so far, continues relatively unaffected compared to the devastating impact facing the rest.

Yet the humiliation of the US retreat remains and the damage done to its relations with allies and stooges across Asia, all suffering massive economic disruption from India and Indonesia to Taiwan, the Philippines and South Korea, is potentially irreparable.

As a “strategy” it only makes (imperialist) “sense” in a world heading for utter disintegration which is exactly what the world working class needs to grasp, along with the only possible answer - revolution to overthrow the whole festering and deadly mess. That will not come from the fake-“left”. Build Leninism

Alan Moss

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Trot RCP’s utopian student “revolution” make-believe - exposed by the stitched-up election in Bangladesh after 18 months violent persecution of bourgeois-nationalist Awami League – now degenerates to outright apology for fascist violence, to cover up its treacherous class-collaborating role helping imperialist intrigue topple the League’s Sheikh Hasina. Part two (concluding)

The objective counter-revolutionary essence of this movement was further demonstrated by the electoral alliance the student NCP made with JeI following the fascist-Islamist violence that broke out after Hadi’s assassination. This was not some opportunist retreat from “socialist revolution” as the RCP slyly imply. The student movement never did have anything to do with socialism, except in the wildest of petty-bourgeois Trot fantasies.

If there really had been “a system somewhat like dual power” in existence when Hasina was toppled (a system in which “something akin to soviets” existed alongside the bourgeois interim government) and if those alleged “soviets” were led by students, it would be reasonable to expect to find some sort of “left” opposition gaining traction on university campuses. Instead, as the RCP report, the student wing of the JeI won most of the seats in student union elections in the key protest campuses of Dhaka and Jahangirnagar universities last September, filling the vacuum left by the proscription of the AL’s previously dominant student wing (unmentioned by the RCP), and gaining positive support amongst many middle-class students (because of the JeI’s “charity work” and “outsider status” according to these duplicitous Trots).

These results add weight to claims Hasina made back in July 2024 that the student movement was then being manipulated by such counter-revolutionary forces, as reported in Al Jazeera:

As protesters demanded that the quota for families of freedom fighters be scrapped, the PM pushed back. The quota system was first introduced in Bangladesh in 1972 – after the country became independent in December 1971 – by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, father of Hasina.

“Why do they have so much resentment towards freedom fighters?” Hasina asked in public comments. “If the grandchildren of the freedom fighters don’t get quota benefits, should the grandchildren of Razakars get the benefit?”

The students pushed back, accusing her of trying to portray all critics and opponents as Razakars. They adopted the slogan, “Who are you? Who am I – Razakar, Razakar?”, along with another chant, “Asked for rights and became a Razakar”, which has become ubiquitous among the protesters.

Hasina then doubled down in her criticism of the protesters, calling the slogans “regrettable”.

“They don’t feel ashamed to call themselves Razakars. They don’t know how the Pakistani occupation forces and Razakar Bahini [Razakar Army] had resorted to torture in the country – they didn’t see the inhuman torture and bodies lying on the roads. So, they don’t feel ashamed to call themselves Razakar,” she said.

Author and scholar Anam Zakaria said Razakar is a “loaded term”, evoking memories of war crimes, including the killing and rape of the Bengali population and other ethnic minorities in 1971.

“It is used synonymously with collaborators and anti-liberation forces and thus also seen as antistate and pro-Pakistan. There is hence a lot of stigma, pain, and trauma that is evoked with the use of this term,” she told Al Jazeera.

The students criticised here were, at best, extremely light-minded if their sloganeering was simply “being ironic”. As Hasina explained, JeI had collaborated with the brutal Pakistani army of occupation in the war for national liberation. Its Razakar Army paramilitary force was made up of Urdu-speaking migrants who had previously moved to “East Pakistan” (now Bangladesh) and pro-Pakistan Bengali bourgeois. It had participated in Pakistan’s Operation-Searchlight genocidal massacres of up to 3 million national-liberation fighters and supporters during the war. It was suppressed by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s national-revolutionary government that took power in 1971 but was rehabilitated after Mujib’s assassination. It was again suppressed by Hasina in 2013 after the execution of a number of its leaders for war crimes, but rehabilitated once again by Yunus.

Deepening capitalist crisis pressures, including rising inflation, falling living standards, and increasing competition for university graduate jobs, including government jobs, fuelled this middle-class student discontent. However, the quota system they initially objected to had already been largely abolished for higher-stage graduate jobs by Hasina in 2018 anyway, so the accusation, amplified by the RCP, that it was being used as a corrupt “patronage system” to reward “Hasina’s loyal stooges” was bogus. It was reinstated by the High Court in June 2024, a ruling which Hasina’s government challenged. The Supreme Court reduced the quota to just 5% of jobs on 21st July, thereby effectively meeting the protestors’ demands. The protests then became increasingly, and suspiciously, frenzied and violent, aimed at bringing Hasina down. [see EPSR No1647]

The student movement did not propose any reforms to ameliorate any social and economic difficulties that may have arisen from the abolition of the quota system. Instead, driven by self-interest, these middle-class students would have been satisfied if they simply had the jobs for themselves. And that is exactly what they achieved for those alleged “families of martyrs”, according to the RCP’s own twisted account:

The main student demand in July 2024, which resonated with millions of Bangladeshis, was to get rid of quotas for government jobs for the family members of the martyrs of the War of Independence of 1971. Everyone knew such quotas were merely used to reward Hasina’s loyal stooges.

We argued at the time that the only way to seriously combat the corrupt use of job places was to inscribe the demand for jobs for all. Only a socialist planned economy could guarantee such a thing.

What, instead, has the Yunus government done? The quotas were indeed repealed… and replaced with job quotas for the family members of the martyrs of the 2024 July Revolution! In other words, the patronage system of the old clique is thrown out, and a new patronage system for a new clique is introduced.

The call here for “socialism” is a pretence. The RCI international wing said nothing about the need for “a socialist planned economy” in its frenetic July 2024 “Victory to Bangladeshi students” statement aimed at the student protestors, let alone explained how this would be achieved. Any thoughtful Bangladeshi student looking there for a genuinely revolutionary political lead would have even been hard pressed to find anything in it that came close to “jobs-for-all” reformism either, despite all its “down with capitalism” posturing. This demand for socialism in hindsight is a deceptive “we-were-right-all-along” cover up to create a distance between them and the student leaders they now denounce for betrayal.

As part of this cover up, they tack onto the end of their piece a declaration of an international “crisis of revolutionary leadership”, throwing some Marxist-sounding phrases in for good measure, calling for

a revolutionary communist [e.a.] party that strives to replace the dictatorship of capital with the dictatorship of the proletariat”

with the implication that their brand of subjective Trotskyist sourness and cynicism is the solution. But this is just play-acting because they, in their previous guises as Socialist Appeal, and previously Militant Labour entryists, joined in with the huge imperialist propaganda onslaught against the USSR and all other workers states when class war firmness was necessarily imposed to suppress capitalist-class disruption and subversion, such as against the CIA/Vatican-financed fascist “rank-and-file” Solidarnosc counter-revolution in Poland, and as they still do against China, Cuba, etc. For them, proletarian dictatorship is just synonymous with purist notions of “workers democracy” in the abstract. They are hostile to its living class force. [see EPSR No1665 17-11-26].

They also, crucially, say nothing about the need for revolutionary theory, around which only can a serious revolutionary leadership be build, and only though which can the proletarian dictatorship be established.

As Lenin’s Bolsheviks demonstrated, revolutionary leadership can only come from developing a convincing explanation of all world developments, and the exposure of all incorrect analyses, distortions and outright lies, such as these philistine Trots’ superficial and distorted explanation of developments in Bangladesh and everywhere else.

The primary task of the revolutionary party is to wage this constant living struggle to correctly understand and explain world events as they emerge, using imperialism’s Catastrophic breakdown as the starting point, and building on the titanic scientific achievements of Marx, Engels and Lenin, as well the theoretical strides made by the EPSR in the modern era.

All shades of Trotskyist philistinism, including RCP, are hostile to such an approach to party building, – as are the Stalinist revisionists.

Build Leninism now. Phil Waincliffe.

(Part One in previous issue No1671)

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