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No 1679 18th September 2026

Demented war and doom hysteria grows louder as the capitalist crisis veers closer the edge of total Catastrophe, with bond markets plunging, inflation rising, and the AI shares bubble ever closer to bursting. The whole monopoly capitalist system has reached the end of the road hurtling mankind into slump, world war turmoil and destruction. Only workers revolutionary overturn of this disastrous out-of-time and increasing vicious degeneracy can change things but fake-“lefts” still refuse the battle for vital Leninist scientific revolutionary leadership

The rapidly deepening capitalist crisis is driving bourgeois propaganda to new heights of Goebbels big-lie fearmongering.

Hyperbolic warnings over out-of-control Artificial Intelligence “ending humanity in just ten years”; deranged bogeyman hysteria against “the tyrant Vladimir Putin” and non-existent or false-flag “Russian invasion threats”; lurid MI6 inventions about Chinese surveillance, spying and “police agent” infiltration (with ancient racist “yellow peril” undercurrents); wild fabrication of “Iranian kidnap and death squads on the streets of London”; topsy-turvy “anti-semitism” accusations painting Zionist/Jewish torture and genocide perpetrators and their supporters as “victims”; vile racist migrant scapegoating and violence; and scary Armageddon “end of times” near-suicidal religious-fascist barminess sweeping millions of fundamentalists in the United States – all show a system reaching a fever pitch of inhuman hatred and panic.

Whatever tiny germ of fact there might be beneath the exaggerated lies, these are all, without exception, expressions of a totally demented society being driven round the bend into near psychosis and fear, and lashing out in fascist frenzy creating more fear.

There is a single Catastrophe-truth that underlies all these doomy dismays and which they actually express and it is exactly the same for all of them, despite their disparate forms, – namely the collapse of monopoly capitalism, riddled with contradictions and paralysed by incurable, inevitable economic failure.

It is a truth of disaster, cataclysm and world shattering breakdown into war and ecological collapse, tearing everything fixed and certain to chaotic shreds internationally and domestically.

In one sense the end of the world is coming.

But not for everyone despite the horrors that capitalism is imposing and will increasingly impose – ultimately this is a terminal collapse only for the class domination of the bourgeoisie, split ever wider by inter-imperialist conflict and heading for the historic rocks.

As it gets more and more depraved it will be facing total overthrow by the working class so that a rational socialist future can be built.

But that can only be achieved by fighting for a conscious revolutionary scientific leadership – of which there is still not a glimmer throughout the Trot or revisionist fake-“left” despite all its pretences to be Marxist.

So for the while the bourgeoisie’s culture and psyops dominates public opinion.

That arrogant ruling class view of the world is totally subjective-idealist seeing only its own existence as of any importance, equating class rule with universal truth and eternally decreed – “aprés moi le déluge” as the French feudal monarchy put it just before it was overturned (by this very bourgeoisie).

But it is also a weapon.

The apocalyptic frenzy has two sides; a reflection of stomach-cramping bourgeois class fear but equally its willingness and intent to drag the whole planet into deadly destruction as a means to escape its own disaster.

Imperialism is deliberately creating and imposing this cataclysm on the rest of humanity by whipping up war fever with its huge psyops operations and intelligence agency propaganda departments.

Capitalism is trapped, its relentless and insane accumulation of monopoly concentrated wealth and debilitating inequality now stifling all progress with the greatest “overproduction” crisis in history, as far too much investment and credit chases far too few chances to make profit.

That remains the basic incurable contradiction of its system, as identified, analysed and teased apart by Karl Marx’s titanic work in three volumes of Capital (see box), a perspective still unchallenged and unchallengeable, despite the huge complications of modern monopoly imperialism (as Lenin went on to analyse), and its unprecedented concentration of power, international credit creation, and dollar domination (and the coming $collapse as the terrified rising bond markets indicate).

Only destroying the “surplus” capital, both financial and physical factories etc, can restore the system to its nascent entrepreneurial beginnings (as petty bourgeois fantasy thinks – but there is no “going back”).

Mass destruction is exactly what was done, twice already, in two great world wars (and the embryo inter-imperialist 1870 Franco-Prussian war before that) both escalating unstoppably growing cutthroat trade war contradictions into all-out war, while blaming “others” for the problems, from scapegoated minorities to all the great rival imperialist competitors (see Trump!!) as a diversion from the real cause, the profit system itself.

All Goebbels hysteria is now turned to escalating a third World War, already underway for nearly three decades.

Opening shots were the blitzkrieg on tiny Serbia by the nineteen country strong NATO in 1999, a war itself stampeded by a previous decade of lurid lies about “rape camps” and massacres while backing the fascist-minded Ustashe Croats and Bosnians, all continued to this day.

Country after country has been wiped out since with ten of millions displaced, starved, tortured, maimed and massacred as the belligerence has escalated, from the (possibly premature) revenge destruction of all Afghanistan after the 9/11 World Trade Centre bin Laden attack, and the pre-plotted 2003 invasion of Iraq, to the destructive confusions and civil war mess created in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Yemen, the Sahel etc and elsewhere.

But that has only added to the contradictions and problems, not least by hugely inflaming the already discontented Third World masses, filled with hostility for the tyrannical imperialist system’s never-ending exploitation and now driven to explosive outbursts against it, including obviously the 2001 WTC attack itself, the subsequent risible “war on terror” against the resistance, insurgency and “jihadism” in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider Middle East, then the great millions-strong street demonstrations of the Arab Spring in 2011 in Tunisia, Egypt and spilling into movements in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – the latter now transforming into anti-imperialist revolution.

Those eruptions were driven by the great lurch in the world finance system and the near terminal “financial nuclear winter” breakdown of the global capitalist banking system in 2008, “rescued” by insane QE credit creation and by the “stabilising” input of the already huge Chinese workers state, and then the bullying aggression of the US, as well as the imposition of tightening “austerity”.

That was only ever going to deepen the crisis and come round again, multiplied ten times with the full implosion looking more likely any moment, despite relentless US Empire aggression made overt by Trumpism, lashing out in every direction.

Total dollar collapse, long warned of by EPSR Marxism is now widely speculated about as bond markets plunge:

The price of oil rose to the highest level in months and stocks and bonds slumped on Thursday as the escalating war in the Middle East and intensifying fears about inflation weighed on investors.

Oil prices surged above $107 a barrel, a 48 percent increase since the start of the war in Iran in late February. The rise in energy costs threatens to push prices up more broadly, squeezing consumers and businesses already grappling with stubbornly elevated inflation.

Investors are looking to a crucial report on U.S. inflation, set for release on Friday, that could alter expectations for the Federal Reserve’s decision on interest rates at its meeting next week. Traders believe that a rate increase is more likely than not. The European Central Bank raised its key interest rate on Thursday, the second time it increased rates since the war began.

Fears of accelerating inflation and forecasts for higher Fed rates have been major factors behind a steady rise of bond yields. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a measure of borrowing costs that influences mortgages, business loans and many other types of debt, jumped above 4.9 percent on Thursday, the highest level since 2023.

The effect of rising yields, which move inversely to prices, is apparent in the housing market. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the most common home loan in the United States, hit 6.76 percent this week, the highest level in more than a year, according to the mortgage financing giant Freddie Mac. Sales of existing homes fell 2 percent in August from the month before, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday.

“Americans are hitting the pause button on home buying,” said Heather Long, the chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union.

The S&P 500 was down about half a percent on Thursday, setting the benchmark stock index on track for its fourth consecutive decline.

The latest turmoil on Wall Street was provoked, in part, by reports from Yemeni officials on Thursday that the Iranian-backed Houthi militia had captured a port city, giving it greater control over passage through the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia had been using this route to export its oil and bypass the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

The continued disruption to shipping in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea has snarled the global supply of energy, with few signs of an end in sight. President Trump said on Wednesday that the fighting would continue through the November midterm elections in the United States.

Oil exports from Saudi Arabia, long the world’s biggest oil exporter, fell last month to their lowest levels in at least 13 years, according to Kpler.

With Iran targeting tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Houthis targeting Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia is now exporting more oil north through the Red Sea via the Suez Canal. This route is longer and costlier, but Saudi Arabia has few good options.

Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics, said the Houthis viewed the war in Iran as their best opportunity to both consolidate power and completely cut off the route that Saudi Arabia just months ago considered a lifeline for its oil exports.

“If this descends into all-out war, this could have catastrophic implications,” he said.

Even more catastrophic after the astonishing sweep of Yemen’s Ansar Allah “jihadists” or “terrorist” national-liberation forces to the Red Sea, sealing off Saudi Arabia’s export routes when combined with Iran’s blockade on the Gulf, bringing Riyadh’s oil economy to its knees.

Dizzied bourgeois economists and fake-“lefts” alike still puzzled by the seeming Hormuz Strait complacency-ineffectuality of Trump’s White House, as oil prices rise, and its abandoning of the Saudi allies are not paying attention to the total world picture of universal capitalist breakdown, in which every major power is now confronted with life-or-death trade struggle, not caused by the oil blockade but the cause of it (though obviously exacerbated by it).

Only that broadest perspective i.e. Marxist-Leninism can begin to make sense of these astounding developments.

In that light there could be some truth to theories that the US actually benefits from the Middle East blockade because it is self-sufficient in oil (and with supply soon to be supplemented with stolen Venezuelan output after Maduro’s kidnap) though.

But this has not some clever Empire plot “all along”; it is a relative advantage for a desperate collapsing Empire; shafting former allies in the Gulf – (Trump has refused to aid Saudi’s Mohamed bin Salman and may abandon all the other stinking stooge reactionary gangster sheikhs and princes) – will cost it dear in trust but needs must when the devil rides and the crisis is hell itself.

Washington calculates it will hurt a bit less from oil and resource starvation than its major rivals like China, South Korea, Japan and particularly German dominated Europe, which until recently was crucifying American commerce and industry with superior products and finance.

It is also intimately entwined with the beserker Zionist fascists through the major Jewish and Zionist supporting billionaire lobby in the US, bending politics ever more openly by censorship, arrests, sanctions and massive financial lobby power (exposing the mockery of “democracy”).

Zionist fanatical fascist/genocidal “greater Israel” ambitions want local “rivals” hamstrung, providing the Empire in return a ruthlessness to bolster enfeebled US aggressiveness, whose morale has been hammered by two decades of failure and defeat, pushed out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan, failing in Libya and increasingly unable to control its old stooge networks, or handle the giant “problem” of ever more successful workers state China.

US-Euro-rivalry is a major part of an overall tangle of crisis contradictions plunging the world to disaster and another “inexplicable” US action, as it pulls back from support for the nazi-saturated Ukrainians and their stooge war on Russia for NATO.

But it is incomprehensible only to petty bourgeois public opinion (and multiple celebs like Ed Sheeran or George Clooney) still gullible enough to swallow the “Russian invasion” of “plucky little Ukraine” self-determination bullshit.

The war was instigated as part of all Western imperialism’s general belligerence and warmongering pressure on re-established capitalism in Russia and the former Soviet camp, using NATO expansionism and fraudulent “democracy” subversion like the CIA/NED to push down its challenge for a place alongside the rest of imperialism (which has no space for new competitors) while simultaneously keeping a lid on return-to-socialism sentiment which persists in Russia and many Eastern European countries, with frequent large votes for the old “communist parties” (most obviously Belarus) despite their dire revisionist uselessness.

And it served all imperialism as another front in its push for an international warmongering crisis diversion, usefully corralling public opinion with its Moscow “bogeyman” propaganda.

It heated up after years of skulduggery in 2014 in the CIA-planned Maidan coup, violently establishing revanchist reactionary nationalism in power replete with fascist-nazi repression of the large Russian minority and then eight years of fascist warmongering on the eastern provinces, where they mainly live, before provoking the Russian “invasion” response.

But almost immediately the major inter-imperialist contradiction came to the fore with the US sabotage destruction of the NordStream pipelines, ostensibly to hit Russia but damaging the German industrial economy.

The split has been made primary by the Trumpite hawks, happy to keep wamongering going but only if it hamstrings European rivalries (including by making them bear the war costs).

But a desperate Europe needs the war to distract populations from economic disaster and justify their own re-arming as each bourgeoisie necessarily vies to demonstrate its own “strength”; vital to hold its place in the ever more vicious trade battles.

Britain is now one of the weakest in this jostling for pecking order positions in the imperialist world exploitation racket, and desperate to keep up. Hence the hasty suppression of “left” MP Diane Abbott’s outburst debunking the whole “Russian threat” after bourgeois press hysteria:

Diane Abbott has become embroiled in yet another controversy [..]The veteran Labour MP wrote on social media that ‘the imminent threat from Russia is a NATO fiction to justify their complete capitulation to Trump’s demands for more military spending’ – despite Moscow’s sabre-rattling reaching new heights this week.

She added that ‘the increase should not go ahead’ in reference to Government aims to boost defence spending.

Ms Abbott’s remarks come as Putin issued his clearest hint yet that Russia would attack Britain for supplying arms to Ukraine.

And her comments follow the German government confirming on Tuesday that a drone attack on Leipzig airport had emanated from Russia.

Ms Abbott has now been roundly criticised for her post.

In true opportunist form, the grovelling “restored Labourite” Abbott quickly withdrew her posting which breaks the four years of censorship and lies from British governments of all shades on Ukraine, to justify huge arms increases (and new taxes and austerity to pay for it).

Meanwhile British imperial hubris is getting another kick in the teeth from Washington, now effectively backing the renewed call from Argentina for the restoration of its occupied Malvinas Islands (Falkands).

No support can go to Javier Milei who is a nasty fascist of course but the nationalist claim is nevertheless a valid one.

The feeble UK military will not manage another reactionary adventure like Margaret Thatcher’s “task force” and Britain rightly faces only the defeat that should have hit (and almost did) its farcical imperial bullying in 1981.

Build Leninism Tony Lee

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A reply to confused criticism of the EPSR and recent exposure of renewed fake-“left” Trotskyist attempts to undermine confidence in workers states, past and present, using the Trot nonsense of “political revolution” to pretend their sabotage is actually support. Desperate denial of the Spartacists’ about-turn on the bogus Polish “trade union” Solidarnosc demolished and Leninist theory defended

An EPSR reader has been driven to submit a long(ish) article to the paper, ostensibly taking up and challenging the paper’s exposure and denunciation of recently revived “political revolution” gibberish and particularly its 1980 Polish Solidarnosc manifestation.

Various Trotskyist groups have been trying to resurrect this stale anti-communism from its theoretical tomb (RCP, Sparts – see EPSR No 1665 and 1666), in an attempt to undermine, worldwide, workers’ grasp of Chinese workers state successes, of others like North Korea and Cuba, and beyond that of the great achievements of the Soviet Union (for over 70 years despite its eventual revisionist-induced liquidation).

By doing so they aim to undermine communism in general, and confidence in Marxist-Leninist science just when workers turn their attention to the vitally needed revolutionary transformation of society because of the profound capitalist breakdown into slump, war and ecological devastation now threatening all of humanity as the imperialist system hits a crisis brick wall on a scale never before seen.

Imperialism’s ever-more cutthroat trade war and economic crisis, and the consequent plunge into deadly genocidal World War; untrammelled fascist barbarity against growing international revolt at imperialist domination; and the continuing rise and success of the workers states, are shaking apart the whole ideological framework of “liberal” bourgeois society and its complacent fixed point delusions (in the rich West primarily) about “freedom” “justice” and “democracy”.

The chaos, incompetence, callousness and sick irrationality of the capitalist system’s Catastrophic crisis is equally shattering all the petty bourgeois posturings and pretences especially from all shades of the fake-“left”, dressing itself up for decades as “revolutionary” but never amounting to anything but hopeless pacifism, general, and single-issue PC, reformist diversionary “pressure”, and delusions in abstract “democratic paths”, all riddled with anti-communism.

Far worse than mere uselessness, this ideological poison constitutes one of the main weapons for imperialism’s suppression and domination of workers, smuggling imperialist brainwash confusion, diversions and reaction into the working class under cover of being “for socialism” and “democracy” – yet always leaving bourgeois class domination intact, the cause of all alienation, crime, violence and degeneration and now plunging the world into existential eco-disaster and war.

Something positive can possibly be gleaned from this latest mostly hostile polemic. Inasmuch as it has appeared at all, it confirms one basic Marxist understanding – that the material reality of the deadly monopoly capitalist world collapse will force minds everywhere to take up the fight for revolutionary understanding.

Its apparently serious effort to make an argument at all, after decades of mostly polemical quiescence (bar a couple of exceptions) could be considered some kind of advance on the long post-WW2 refusal to debate by 57 varieties of revisionist and Trotskyist sects and groups.

Unfortunately the seemingly significant work and effort put into some thousands of words ends up only with shallow, naïve confusion, and conceited posturings which are anything but the revolutionary science needed as the world hurtles into imperialist chaos and genocidal conflict.

Just the opposite. Its sneering academic pontificating about “structures and methods” is the shallowest of petty bourgeois philistinism amounting to a contemptuous dismissal of Leninist theory, built around an attempted rescue of the Sparts’ Solidarnosc line.

Attempted summaries and outlines of the EPSR’s positions are a hollow joke, misstating and misunderstanding the detailed arguments.

Scant attention is paid to real world events and there is an obvious failure to have read or grasped even the basics of Marxism let alone the developments set out by the EPSR in multiple analyses of the rise of the workers states as well as the flaws in the revisionist leadership which led to the liquidation of the USSR particularly.

Analysing the latest concrete developments of barbaric imperialism and its hurtling plunge into inter-imperialist mayhem and destruction, is crucial for any serious perspective, for which the great economic disintegration of the crisis needs to be the starting point, (as Marx made it) and kept front and centre all through.

Deadly NATO war forced onto Russia via the corrupt nazis in Kiev by the European bourgeoisies trying to escape economic collapse; the sick inhuman turmoil of the Sudan civil war sponsored by the reactionary feudal sheikhs; the even more disgusting fascist genocide and destruction by the Zionist occupiers of Palestine on Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and above all the demented US/Zionist warmongering belligerence, on Iran immediately, but in all directions and especially against imperialist rivals like Europe, all need to be constantly assessed.

Instead long discredited idealist academic theories about “bureaucratic castes” – and particularly from the Sparts – are used as a springboard to attack the entire thrust of the EPSR’s Leninist philosophy and practice and its fight for scientific revolutionary understanding, with a sneering condescension mixed with simple incomprehension.

So at one point our author staggeringly declares that

[the] “EPSR should follow the Maoists and Trotskyists in developing a theory to explain why workers states “degeneration” remains such an issue”,

when that is pretty much the entire core content of the EPSR’s battle to restore Leninist theory (see for example EPSR Books Vol 18 Five Polemics on the bankruptcy of the Third International; Vol17 Perspectives for 2001 or Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism, and five volumes on Theory and party building plus multiple papers).

Besides which neither the Maoists nor the Trotskyists (nor the museum-Stalinists) get anywhere near explaining these questions with either their shallow bogeyman Nikita Kruschev theories of a hidden counter-revolution swooping in to subvert “the genius Stalin”, or the even worse anti-Stalin notions by Trotsky that “everything has gone rotten and must be overturned” (from the moment he was passed over as Lenin’s successor in the early 1920s – see EPSR Books Vol 5 on Trotskyism) with that obviously counter-revolutionary notion masked by devious theories of “new castes”.

Exposing those nonsenses, which bolster imperialism’s own great century long deluge of anti-communist brainwashing to hold the working class back, is part and parcel of the fight to explain the huge advances as well terrible setbacks and difficulties of the first titanic Soviet moves to end the outdated and truly degenerate and depraved monopoly capitalist order.

The drivel now presented does the very opposite, attempting to justify the Trotskyists.

A grudging concession that the EPSR is “genuinely revolutionary” is a positive start, but immediately undermined by the insulting and inaccurate qualification of that being “among orthodox Marxist-Leninist sects” (as if there can be many, whoever they are supposed to be – all unspecified).

There is only one real world and only one correct understanding of any development and only one struggle to find it.

And there are not “many Marxist traditions” in which none is the “sole repository of the truth” as the piece goes on to say, echoing the “no monopoly of the truth” agnosticism which has always been used by the petty bourgeoisie to avoid the sometimes difficult battle for correct understanding, (see eg EPSR No 942, 964, 969) wallowing instead in individual idealist fantasies about the world, all asserted to be the way forwards and none put to the polemical test.

“Vagueness” is later sneeringly attributed to the EPSR’s output, which is also contradictorily asserted to be nothing but “a series of tedious articles about global politics” (!!) while simultaneously

“placing the question of developing the party in Britain above the International”

(in fact a reference to the Trotskyist anti-Soviet Fourth International and so obviously not any kind of opposite to alleged parochialism).

The EPSR’s Leninist point, being distorted here incidentally, is one made against much “charity” style “international solidarity” work and useless “Stop the War” pacifism, that while solidarity is important it needs always to begin with the perspective of revolutionary struggle against workers’ own ruling class.

Any amount of international links are obviously important and a perspective is required with a wide spanning grasp of national and international developments, (hopefully analysed in the least “tedious” manner possible and with the writing always open to improvement) but battled for initially at home.

But any lessons on that will not come from this contribution whose opening is filled with multiple distortions disingenuously attempting to reconcile the EPSR with the Spartacists and its Trotskyist poison.

One particularly should be highlighted before moving to the Solidarnosc question, namely the notion that the EPSR could find common ground with the Sparts because it is “against peaceful coexistence as they are”.

No such thing. Proper peaceful coexistence was a major, not to say vital, tactic for the Bolsheviks under Lenin and remains so as a diplomatic tool for workers states and anti-imperialist struggle to avoid provocations (like perhaps the Sparts’ gung ho “Hail the Red Army” call for a Soviet invasion over Afghanistan in the early 1980s).

It can be a useful means to split the imperialists, between bourgeois hawks and doves, where and while the socialist camp is not strong enough to resist capitalist aggression as in the Brest-Litovsk treaty in the early years of the Soviet Union and many times thereafter as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact demonstrated in 1939-41.

Judging when armed revolutionary resistance is possible is complex question, drawing on a host of factors, and it has been wide open to revisionist hesitation and retreats.

So of course the tactic can become an expression of bureaucratic conservatism as it was in Cuba in 1958 for example or later in Nicaragua where the local CPs (and their Soviet advice) hung back from the armed guerrilla uprisings by Fidel Castro or Daniel Ortega, or even counselled against them – though, contrary to the Trot fabrications, not to deliberately scupper them because of being “secretly against the workers”.

As was demonstrated eventually, the Soviet Union went on to give massive support and aid to both including from the allegedly “counter-revolutionary” Kruschev.

Peaceful coexistence became a huge problem when transformed into an overarching philosophical perspective for world development on a permanent basis, as began to colour Stalin’s leadership even in the 1920s, in the Popular Front of the 1930s in France and Spain, and particularly as expressed in his 1952 Economic Problems of Socialism, (see Vol21 op cit) with its opportunist notions of containing capitalist belligerence with “peace struggle” while socialism simply “outgrew” imperialism.

Its modern form of “multipolar development” continues to confuse and muddle basic Leninist understanding that there is no end possible to imperialist war for as long as the capitalist system exists and with it the ever intensifying trade war contradictions of the monopoly “free market” system, reaching white-heat belligerence as now clear from Trumpism and its Zionist stooge fascism lashing out in all directions and dragging the world into armageddon

(And as TUC conference opportunists are currently demanding like Sharon Graham’s “use British steel only” chauvinist demands.)

Failure to grasp the severity and intractability of the paralysing incurable crisis hampers all anti-imperialist struggle, and notions of compromising, and “coming to terms” with Washington debated by “moderates” in Tehran for example, or for Russia to establish relations in Ukraine to allow “future peaceful development” reflect the same failure of understanding.

Temporary truces there may be but ideas of a capitalist world remaining stable long enough to (re)develop economies and cultures are idiotically dangerous.

While all these matters are part of the submission’s hostility to theory (and expanded on later), its main initial criticism is that the EPSR has unfairly traduced the Spartacists for their about turn on Poland’s bogus 1980 Solidarnosc “trade union”, shifting after 15 months from effectively backing the “uprising” to a call for it to be suppressed as counter-revolution.

That four decades old exposé – still unaddressed – is significant not simply because it demonstrates the general tricksiness and dishonesty of the Sparts, always presenting themselves as sincere “defenders of the workers states” when the whole thrust of their politics is hostile to proletarian dictatorship and the leadership it entails, but because it is now mobilised for very immediate purposes, trying to try and undermine the rapidly strengthening Chinese workers state and simultaneously undermining any positive views it might encourage about communism in the West.

That question was the major issue tackled in the two EPSRs now being challenged (and tackled in great detail over six pages in each which our author appears not to have grasped or even read).

So keen is our author to defend these mountebanks that he goes one further then they do themselves, claiming that they did not ever support Solidarnosc and that even their earliest prevaricating assessments were getting it right.

The Sparts know better and have always simply buried their initial enthusiasm once events had made it untenable, covering it up and giving no explanation of their complete reversal in 1981 as the EPSR has many times pointed out.

To bolster their cynical fraud of being pro-Soviet they even berated other groups for being “caught out” once the dust had settled (see archive piece below).

It is unclear if the “rescue” effort made in this submission is influenced by the Sparts themselves, as much else of this attack on the EPSR appears to be although the author denies being in full agreement with them, but if it is, the aid is misplaced. The effort to go back into some of their initial stories and demonstrate the Sparts were not supporting Solidarnosc simply achieves the opposite:

Across his articles, Hoskins does not actually give a citation for the claim that the ICL once supported Solidarnosc, (but see below - ed) however the allegation seems to relate to an article published under the title ‘Polish Workers Move’ in the 5th of September edition of Workers Vanguard, and then republished in an edited form in the autumn 1980 edition of Spartacist with the title ‘A Workers Poland Yes! The Pope’s Poland No!’. Given Solidarnosc was not founded until August 1980, it seems doubtful that the ICL were able to produce any earlier analysis of the movement.

The article appears fairly balanced, summarising as follows the outcome of two weeks of strike action by Polish workers:

"The Polish workers have forced the bureaucracy to agree to “new self governing trade unions” with the pledge that these recognize “the leading role” of the Communist party and do not engage in political activities. Insofar as the settlement enhances the Polish workers’ power to struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, revolutionaries can support the strike and its outcome. But only a blind man could fail to see the gross influence of the Catholic church and also pro-Western sentiments among the striking workers. If the settlement strengthens the working class organizationally, it also strengthens the forces of reaction. Poland stands today on a razor’s edge. (Page 1)"

This certainly does not amount to a condemnation of Solidarnosc, but it is hard to read it as support either. The position advanced appears to be that the strike wave includes both progressive and reactionary features, thus creating a political crisis from which Poland -now standing on a razor’s edge - could head in either direction. The article continues:

The compromise creates an impossible situation economically and politically; it cannot last. In a country facing international bankruptcy, heavily subsidized by the Soviet Union, the strikers are demanding the biggest free lunch the world has ever seen.

This reads even less like support! While the opportunity for struggle against the bureaucracy is a positive outcome of the strikes, the specific demands of those who are using that opportunity are not positive. Not only are the strikers pro-church and pro-West, they are making economic demands which are fundamentally unreasonable.

The sensible management of the workers’ state is evidently one that the Spartacists take seriously.

A few pages later, the Spartacists compare the situation in Poland with earlier worker uprisings that they did support:

Poland presents the most combative working class in the Soviet bloc, with a history of struggling for independent organizations going back to the mid 1950s. It is also the one country in East Europe with a mass, potentially counter-revolutionary mobilization around the Catholic church. Thus, unlike Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, the alternatives in the present crisis are not limited to proletarian political revolution or Stalinist restabilization. At the same time, it is not Afghanistan where the Soviet Red Army is playing a progressive role in crushing an imperialist-backed clerical reactionary uprising. In a sense Poland stands somewhere between Hungary in 1956 and Afghanistan (Page 6-7).

It might be possible for Hoskins or others in the EPSR to spin this as being at odds with the Spartacists’ later position of supporting Soviet intervention in Poland. In reality, however, the argument being made is that Poland sat between a proletarian revolution and an imperialist counter-revolution because it contained the germ of both. That the Spartacists would soon switch their position to one of complete opposition to Solidarnosc was not a “sly” reversal, but a logical development of the initial analysis offered in 1980.

Why were revolutionary and counter revolutionary forces both present in Poland? According to the Spartacists,

[s]ome of the strike committee members had been shop-floor leaders in the official trade-union apparatus who were victimized for trying to defend the workers’ interests. They undoubtedly were and possibly still are members of the ruling Polish United Workers Party (PUWP, the official name of the Communist party). These advanced workers surely desire a real workers Poland and world socialism... [however] there is no question that to a considerable degree the strikers identify with the powerful Catholic church opposition (Page 1).

This is not far from the position recently put forward by Hoskins - that Stalinist communist parties play a key role in “drawing in” the masses. Cadres and former-cadres of the PUWP are “advanced workers” who can be assumed to desire world socialism, while the rank-and-file are much less reliable.

The Spartacists note that the strikes were disproportionately situated on the Baltic coast, where workers ‘lack[ed] the socialist traditions common to the other main sections of the Polish proletariat’ (page 6). The failure of the PUWP to draw the Baltic workers in to the task of constructing socialism owed in large part to the multi-party system implemented in Poland.

Since 1956 the Catholic Znak group in the Sejm (parliament) has been the only legally recognized opposition in any East European country. And that opposition has in general been anti-democratic. Church spokesmen have denounced the public schools’ “atheization” of Poland’s youth and have called for state financial support for religious instruction (Page 7).

The ideological leadership of Poland was therefore not consistently Marxist, but based on a rather strange alliance of Marxist and Catholic factions, which were involved in active competition over the task of socialising Polish workers and young people.

It does not take any “spin” by the EPSR (i.e. lying, an outrageous libel among a stream of insulting slurs), to declare that “A workers Poland yes” is a full on declaration of support for Solidarnosc; nor is it remotely “hard to read” as such.

Just calling this movement one of “workers” when its character was clearly backward lumpen, and petty bourgeois, saturated in religious reaction (as the cited headline and article is aware) is enough to make the point.

Furthermore, the only correct response for Marxists was to defend unconditionally the Polish workers state as the EPSR did from the beginning, notwithstanding the earliness of its own assessment, and certainly not adopt some allegedly “balanced” picture.

As for declaring for “self-governing” trade unions, this is the very essence of petty bourgeois reaction.

Whether or not they dissemblingly “recognise the leading role of the CP” self-governing means rejecting the authority of the state, and is therefore an out-and-out challenge to the dictatorship of the proletariat – their own i.e. workers state, – by a movement that was political through and not in any revolutionary sense at all.

There was no “sitting between” revolution and counter-revolution, the conciliatory line pursued by Trotsky throughout his entire career.

As the extensive quotes used in the original (criticised) articles say, any “progressive features” were a figment of the Trots’ petty bourgeois idealist imaginations as were the alleged “revolutionary forces”.

Citing earlier disputes does not change the situation, whether or not there were shop-floor workers involved who “undoubtedly” (says who?) were PUWP members, who the Sparts want to declare “surely desired a real workers Poland”(!!).

Firstly, these workers had gone over to the other side against the workers state, and were obviously therefore far from being “advanced” let alone it being “assumed” they “desired world socialism”. World Catholic feudalism more like.

The bizarre suggestion is that because they had ostensibly been “rank-and-file” they were pure as the driven snow in their principles – rather than demonstrating through their defection either outright opportunism or misled “sincerity” and naïvety.

If they truly “desired world socialism” they would have stuck with the workers state itself, the result of a class overthrow and dispossession of the pre-war and WW2 Pilsudski-feudal backwardness, capitalist reaction and Nazi-collaboration, and which was now the instrument for workers control through the party under whose guidance the huge majority in Poland remained despite the sometimes uninspiring leadership being given by Warsaw revisionism and Moscow behind it.

The “bureaucracy” is no more than the organisation and leadership, an integral part, of the workers state which is to be defended unconditionally against every onslaught and attack by imperialist forces and agencies and most of all in the difficult moments.

But our author says the “opportunity for struggle” against the bureaucracy “was a positive” despite Solidarnosc’s obvious Western influenced demands, and reactionary backwardness.

It reflects utter contempt for the workers state and hostility to its achievements which were considerable.

That does not for one instant imply acceptance of revisionist philosophy as the author repeatedly states suggesting the EPSR declared the “Stalinist communist parties” to be playing a positive role.

That is a completely shallow misreading of the EPSR’s Leninist understanding in principle of the development of democratic participation in a workers state, whereby the firm suppression of the previous bourgeois class domination by the proletarian dictatorship, creates the space for the development and education of the rest of society through Bolshevik leadership and the steady expansion of participation in its running.

And when a rational society is reached where everyone grasps and understands Leninism (and thereby necessity) as part of self-disciplined daily life, there will be no need for any kind of authority at all, and the state will “wither away” as Lenin quotes Engels’ formulation in State and Revolution.

That is nothing to do with Stalinism whose retreat from Leninism led eventually to Gorbachevism’s full blown turn to counter-revolution.

Conflation here of the workers state with Stalinist philosophy only testifies to the incomprehension in this polemic.

Constant criticism of revisionism is vital, but not in the moment when it can be seen as joining in Western onslaught.

To repeat the point above, the Sparts clearly and definitely supported the Polish counter-revolution initially and recognised only later that their pretence of being pro-Soviet would not hold up with any serious minded workers or communist intellectuals if they continued.

The Sparts know that there is no possible “spinning” of their initial line as the current author attempts (to throw his disgusting insult of the EPSR back in his face) so they just cover it up (a trait frequently found among the fake-“left” of all shades).

That he makes this attempted “justification” on the Sparts’ behalf (or in collusion with?) reflects deepening desperation by petty bourgeois sensibility now to avoid the increasingly obvious need for Leninist conclusions as imperialism’s crisis descends into appalling chaos tearing all past certainties to pieces, and especially those of the complacent middle class trapped between history’s great protagonists, the doomed monopoly bourgeoisie and the working class which is being driven into the great fight to overthrow it.

With this central argument shot through, the subsequent attacks founded on these discredited Trot theories and the “political revolution”, also fall apart.

They come thick and fast over alleged inadequacies and failures from ostensible EPSR incapacities in public speaking, and “pointless polemics which never get a reply” (a damning of fake-“left” sectarianism surely??) to “having no evidence for defending socialism from above” (apart from the entire history of the workers states presumably and all Lenin’s writings). Attempted disproofs of EPSR positions are farcically shallow, especially where they touch on real events, like the barbarous US kidnapping in Venezuela:

Before moving on to a specific discussion of the ICL’s position on class dictatorship, it is worth noting that the willingness of a workers’ state to grant political influence to the organised Catholic church might lead us to question Hoskins’ rather bold claim that ‘either the bourgeoisie rules with its dictatorship or the proletarian dictatorship does so and no other possibility exists. The EPSR have long recognised that the political line of the official communist parties has been characterised by ‘begging the West for permanent peaceful coexistence and class collaboration’ (originally in EPSR 649, 1992, but quoted favourably in Hoskins’ 12th December article). If no alternative to bourgeois dictatorship and proletarian dictatorship exists, then we would presumably be forced to conclude that while the communists are able to “beg” for class collaboration, they are unable to actually implement this collaboration.

Whatever one thinks about the class character of the eastern bloc, a useful counter example to Hoskins’ black-and-white view of class dictatorship might be Venezuela. Venezuela is not, and has never been, a workers’ state, but it is hard to argue that “the bourgeoisie ruled with its dictatorship” while Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro were in power. These men were sincere anti-imperialists, who owed their power to popular support, not to the diktats of the bourgeoisie. The apparent capitulation of Delcy Rodríguez to US imperialism does not disprove that Venezuela was – for over 20 years – a transitional regime in which the capitalist class was unable to decisively exercise political power. Rather, it demonstrates that such transitional regimes are unstable, and will necessarily collapse into either socialism or capitalism – a claim made by Trotsky himself in The Revolution Betrayed (see Chapter 11, section 3).

According to Hoskins the Trotskyist theory of degenerated workers’ states centres on the claim that the bureaucracies in workers’ states constitute new castes, characterised by economic privileges that place their interests at odds with those of the working class. This idea is rubbished by Hoskins, who suggests that no “third form” of property relations exists outside of capitalist relations and socialist relations. Before returning to an examination of the ICL’s position, we might begin by noting that Hoskins’ attempted refutation does not work. Firstly, even if only socialist and capitalist relations are the only property relations capable of existing on a macro-level, it is not true that these are the only ways that individuals might relate to property. It would be impossible, for example, for a society to exist in which the majority of people made a living through theft, but clearly some people - within both capitalist states and socialist states - are career thieves. Similarly within both socialism and capitalism it is possible to improve one’s material conditions through corrupt means. The danger posed by corruption is not some Trotskyist fantasy, but is raised by Xi Jinping, who has said that

Party members are only entitled to some personal benefits and job-related functions and powers prescribed by laws and policies, and must not seek any personal gain or privilege over and above those. The issue of privilege is not only a major concern in our efforts to improve Party conduct and build a clean government, but also a crucial problem that affects the Party’s and the state’s capacity to preserve their vitality and vigor. We must adopt effective measures to resolutely oppose and curb ideas and instances of seeking privilege. (2014: page 427)

By acknowledging that privileges may be sought by members of the bureaucracy, has Xi discovered the mythical “third form” of property relations?

Moreover, Xi argues that corruption risks alienating the party from the class, stating that

‘it will build an invisible wall between our Party and the people.

[a]s a result,

our Party will lose its base, lifeblood and strength’ (2014: page 425).

Here Xi avoids using the Trotskyist jargon of ‘caste’, but the content of his claims rest on a similar theoretical basis. It is possible, at least in theory, for the accumulation of privileges by a Communist Party bureaucracy to separate that bureaucracy from the working class, leading the party to lose its “lifeblood and strength”. Losing one’s lifeblood and strength might be considered a form of degeneration!

Whether systemic corruption existed among this or that communist party is an empirical question, but the creeping influence of corruption in China is acknowledged by Xi:

Our Party is by and large sound. Yet, we must be fully aware that some areas are still prone to misconduct and corruption, major cases of violation of Party discipline and state laws have had serious adverse effects on society, the fight against corruption remains a serious challenge. (page 424)

These words were spoken in 2013, and it appears that since then Xi has made major steps towards reducing corruption in the party. It is worth noting, however, that simply addressing formal corruption does not address all of the ways in which privileges may be accrued by Communist Party officials that risk separating them from the class they represent. Working class people in general do not live in luxurious gated mansions, for example, but Xi Jinping does, because the norm that heads of state should live in palaces is one that transcends both socialism and capitalism.

In Trotsky’s The Class Nature of the Soviet State, Trotsky explained that bureaucratic castes are dependent on the dominant form of property relations, without occupying an identical material position to the dominant class. Fascist states, for example, are led by bureaucrats, but these do not constitute an independent ruling class:

It is the hireling of the bourgeoisie. True, this hireling straddles the boss’s neck, tears from his mouth at times the juiciest pieces, and spits on his bald spot besides. Say what you will, a most inconvenient hireling! But, nevertheless, only a hireling. The bourgeoisie abides him because without him, it and its regime would absolutely go to the dogs (Trotsky, 1933).

Similarly

[The Soviet bureaucracy] devours, wastes and embezzles a considerable portion of the national income. Its management costs the proletariat very dearly. In the Soviet society, it occupies an extremely privileged position not only in the sense of having political and administrative prerogatives but also in the sense of possessing enormous material advantages. Still, the biggest apartments, the juiciest steaks and even Rolls Royces are not enough to transform the bureaucracy into an independent ruling class (Trotsky, 1933 - emphasis added).

Trotsky and Xi Jinping would have a lot to disagree about, but it is not clear that they would disagree about the position of the bureaucracy in society. Xi Jinping obviously sees less possibility for the bureaucracy’s forthcoming withering away, but this does not blind him to the fact that the bureaucracy as it exists occupies a position distinct from the rest of the proletariat. How else could we make sense of his warnings against privilege seeking, or of his exhortations for the party to ‘[maintain] close ties with the people’ (Xi, 2014: 403). Hoskins does not seek to make sense of such things.

It is also worth noting that while Trotsky viewed the Soviet bureaucracy as entirely dependent on socialist property relations, in states like China, socialist and capitalist property relations are able to coexist. The great success of the Communist Party of China has been in their ability to permit capitalist enterprise, while (i) subordinating market relations to an overall economic plan, and (ii) limiting the ability of the capitalist class to engage in political struggle. Capitalist relations do exist, however, and are engaged in by China’s ruling elite. In 2001, Jiang Zemin declared that capitalists would be permitted to join the Communist Party1, and by 2013 they constituted 3% of party members2. While the purging of billionaire Jack Ma might be held up as evidence that the capitalist class does not rule China, the fact that he had previously been permitted to join the CPC might equally be taken as evidence that the political defeat of the capitalists is incomplete. Those at the very top of the CPC are very unlikely to own shares in businesses themselves, but they do share membership of a social strata in which those that do will play a sizable role. This might lead to material privileges accruing to CPC elites if capitalists buy them gifts or take them out to dinner, but it will also mean that capitalists will be able to exert direct political influence through the party.

In summary the EPSR’s opposition to caste theory in general makes very little sense.

“Little sense” only to a congenital petty bourgeois whose grasp of the very basics of Marxism and its modes of production is so tenuous that they can spend paragraphs on some gibberish about societies where many people live by thieving – the kind of illogical nonsense that Capital knocks down in its opening chapters and the old theories of “clever merchants” who outsell others to “make money” (which leaves out the balancing “outsold losers” and accounts not one whit for the overall value produced).

To be fair of course there is a society which does live by thievery – capitalism itself founded on the bourgeois class theft of the entire surplus value produced by the working class over and above that needed for its own survival and reproduction needs, (and constantly seeing even that “fair wage” eaten into by the double-dealing shysters who exploit them, particularly in imperialist crisis when workers are literally worked to death).

That is the very basis of capitalist accumulation and power, and eventual monopoly domination.

Such silly side excursions (and there is only the one fanciful idealist “example”) go nowhere to “refuting” Leninist understanding of property relations, not even by quoting Xi Jinping and ludicrously asserting that his battle against corruption and backsliding “parallels Trotskyism”.

Lenin’s writings after the USSR was established – including against Trotsky – constantly battled against the excesses or errors of bureaucracy but insisting all the time that it was an unavoidable instrument for organising and building the new workers state. Trotsky’s ideas of “shaking up” the state, later becoming a full on notion of “overthrowing the bureaucracy” drew only his full on ire and contempt, notably in the famous “trade union debate”, as leading to the downfall and ending of the new and hard-pressed Soviet state (as the eventual outcome of the Solidarnosc story in Gorbachevism ultimately demonstrated).

And while China suffers multiple, sometimes unnerving problems because of its revisionism, compounded by its extremely extended use of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP)-style capitalist methods in the economy, the Xi Jinping counter corruption measures are a million miles from any Trotskyist calls for “overturning” or struggling against the bureaucracy. Far from “discovering a third form of class relations” Xi is aiming to strengthen the state.

Quoting Trotsky on a bureaucracy that

devours, wastes and embezzles a considerable portion of the national income

is an outrageous libel, as is comparing it in any way to the nazi populist regime which fronted for the bourgeoisie in Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy.

Excesses there clearly were, and privileges abused – all a completely disgusting and reprehensible insult to the mass of the working class.

That universal corruption and self-seeking is supposedly the defining character of “the elite” is stinking calumny born of petty bourgeois hatred for the discipline needed to build the soviet state, and particularly in the conditions following the First World War, the Western war intervention against the new Bolshevik state and White Civil war, a seven year stretch of destruction, deprivation, horrors and famine which left the population exhausted.

The Soviet Union would never have achieved the superpower status it did by the 1960s despite the gigantic onslaught of the Second World War and the victorious, essentially revolutionary, fight against its Nazism (which saw major sacrifices including by a majority of the “officials” who organised the great fight to defeat Germany) if it were really just dominated by a giant parasitic “caste” eating all the pies and unable to plan or develop technological advances.

Incidentally the trivial nature of this hate-filled Trotskyist fantasising is underlined by the bizarre suggestion that capitalists in China might wield their influence by “buying dinner” for officials. John McEnroe’s cry of “you cannot be serious” seems the only response.

The limited CP membership given to some billionaires in China obviously raises eyebrows, but if the workers state is keeping political control of the capitalist sector – and multiple arrests and firm punishments all the way to death sentences (imagine that for giant corporate scandals in the West!) seem to suggest that, as does the reference to Jack Ma – then this could well be a case of better keeping your class foe inside the tent “pissing outwards” than vice versa.

As many times argued, the problem of the revisionism was one of political failure to give Leninist revolutionary leadership, from which the dissolute or corrupt behaviour emerges as a consequence not a cause.

And none of this remotely counters the derided “black and white” assertion above that either the bourgeoisie rules or the working class, which is not so much an EPSR “view” as the most basic and crucial understanding, repeatedly set out by Lenin as in the State and Revolution or Proletarian Dictatorship and the Renegade Kautsky for example, forgetting which was at the heart of the Gorbachevite liquidation:

The categoric science of Marxism-Leninism has never been repudiated, nor ever will it be: Either the rule of ‘free’ monopoly-finance capital (i.e. the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie); or else the rule of the working-class under a party of leadership (the dictatorship of the proletariat).

Either a fully-fledged capitalist system where the only serious dynamic is the relentless monopolisation of economic and political power; Or else the total suppression (or strict curbing within clearly defined lines for a limited period of transitional licence only) of profiteering individualism in order to compulsorily re-educate the whole world in the direction it has to go of communally-owned economic cooperation (EPSR No595 01-05-91).

In other words this is the very essence of Marxism and raising eyebrows about it the essence of dilettante fake-“left”ism.

Venezuela hardly constitutes “evidence” for some fuzzy middle way either.

To the contrary, its disastrous current fate of grovelling collusion with Washington, via the opportunist Delcy Rodríguez, and US castration of its political or economic solidarity with anti-imperialism (for Iran to some extent, or the Palestinian struggle, but most of all with besieged communist Cuba and with China) underlines the repeated warnings from the EPSR that it was not enough to develop local communes and well-meaning “grassroots” socialist measures or even workers militias as the fake -“left” like the RCG or the Lalkar/Proletarian made great play of in their regular “pat on the head” patronising “solidarity” visits (eg EPSR 1550 06-02-19).

The masses would remain vulnerable to non-stop subversion and sabotage for as long as the leadership did not push through the complete takeover of the state, overturning the bourgeoisie, smashing up its existing state forced and dispossessing the big owners and monopolists.

Or, if not strong enough to do that, at least building a corp of revolutionary cadres developing the deepest theoretical understanding that revolutionary struggle for such a workers state should necessarily be the objective, and that relying on hoodwinking and always manipulated bourgeois “democracy” would be a disaster.

While the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro by the fascist US forces in January has not (yet) seen as much horrifying mass torture and death as imposed on Chile in 1973 for example in the overthrow of the Salvador Allende’s “democratic” socialist government it reflects the same revisionist failings, however “sincere”, and is equally disastrous in its consequences.

All the constant coup attempts, sabotage and subversion by the bourgeoisie, over two decades, including the murderously violent middle class demonstrations, killing hundreds ten years ago, Western theft of the country’s gold reserves in the Bank of England, and the years of crippling sanctions the local capitalist class has colluded in with the US, have hardly been peace and stability anyway.

Nor does the opening up of Caracas to US CIA agents, corporate bosses and “diplomats” bode anything but ill for the socialist minded sections of the populations now subject to non-stop close surveillance and “restraint” by their “own” government and who knows what repression or even assassinations etc to come.

That the local bourgeoisie was temporarily pushed back for two decades by a popular movement proves nothing about possible “transition” states.

And why would Chávez and Maduro deserve plaudits for being “sincere anti-imperialists with popular support” and not the leadership of the workers states, which have done far more in struggle against imperialism particularly nearby Cuba which has a seven decade long history of dogged anti-capitalist resistance to its name, including massive overseas aid at great sacrifice to countries like Angola, Namibia and South Africa’s anti-apartheid liberation movement, as well as to Venezuela itself??

In one sense only, the ill-understood Trotsky prognosis is correct; that such a halfway house is completely unstable – except that there can be no “collapse” back into socialism which requires the conscious action of the masses led by a Leninist party. It will “collapse” only into the more obvious rule of the bourgeoisie, because it had only been biding its time and had never been overturned.

But the cunning Trotsky was not making a warning about such left nationalism and a bourgeoisie on the back foot but not overcome; he was pushing his poisonous hatred of the Soviet Union by implying it was no longer a workers state.

His “theory” of a state teetering on the edge of a collapse into capitalism only applies if the state is already halfway there, an implication he fully intends to make with the “caste” theory (which every knows is actually declaring “the bureaucracy” a new class akin to capitalists).

But that is complete garbage, as his other similar “warnings” of the period, (read lying slanders) also proved to be, as set out in Hitler-Stalin Twin Stars and Stalin Hitler’s Quartermaster for example, nothing but deliberate international demoralisation propaganda against the USSR just on the verge of WW2.

Our new Spart champion manages to make himself look more and more stupid or duplicitous as he moves on to some high flown “philosophical” pronouncements about “ecumenical Marxism” (the aforementioned lowest common denominator “no monopoly of the truth”, as pious as any vicar with its “everyone has a few good points to make”) to patronising swipes at the EPSR condescendingly admitted to be “dialectical in orientation” but in the same breath declared to be “one sided and stunted” (the very opposite of dialectical of course).

The same pomposity disguising ignorance appears over issues like the Hungarian 1956 “Uprising”, one of the first major Western anti-Soviet counter-revolutions, in a line of nowadays almost formulaic CIA stunts. Though without the “colour” revolution theme at that time, the Budapest events were at least as reactionary, and brutally so, with dozens of communists or their supporters lynched in the streets, though that has which has never stopped the Trots declaring it to be a “political revolution”, which our Spart-fellow traveller takes up too despite the entire collapse of his Polish thesis.

But this only further demonstrates the shallowness and dishonesty of his polemic because he has been challenged on this previously by the EPSR, pointing out the fascist nature of the whole putsch, laden with pre-war and wartime nazi exiles (who left just ten years before or went to ground), supplemented with Western agents and funded and armed by the West. Caught out he pleads ignorance on learning of some:

helpful context concerning the role played by right wing elements in the 1956 Hungarian uprising. This is very interesting, and perhaps suggests that the Spartacists are wrong to support this uprising, although I have not studied the matter in sufficient depth to make that judgement. The matter is, though, largely a distraction from the matter of Solidarnosc, and of political revolution in theory.

To which barefaced non-retraction retraction the only question to pose is why does such an “irrelevance” get referenced in support of the nonsense “political revolution” at four different points????

Plenty more such conceited drivel follows along the lines that the EPSR is isolated, knows nothing about public speaking, is not listened to anyway and refuses to “engage”. Let a reply to a similar attack from long back deliver some of the answers:

It is not the temporary influence on mass struggle which tests the truth of polemics or party policies, but how well such analyses match up in time to actual world developments.

The fact that the anarchists, or the Militant, or the SWP, or the SNP in Scotland, – appear to “test their ideas in the real world of working class struggle by engaging in mass work” (to quote a recent ILWP critic) and enjoy some momentary popularity, – is no guarantee at all of their historical assessments being correct.

If observed “struggles around the elementary needs of working and oppressed peoples” were the qualification for putting forward an alternative world view, then the Labour Party and the TUC would deserve to keep the workers movement in Britain sewn up for as long in the future as they have already kept it in the past.

But reformism and centrism are wrong, no matter how completely they can claim to have “tested their ideas in the real world of working class struggle” for more than 150 years (with some “success”.)

They are wrong because a correct scientific theory of social development is able to explain how history itself will eventually prove reformism and centrist opportunism wrong.

The fact that only a tiny handful of people on earth may at any one time be saying why, scientifically, reformism and centrism are wrong does not invalidate revolutionary theory, – (even if some of those arguing for a Leninist view can be derided for individual subjective weaknesses, real or imagined, - such as having “petty-bourgeois ego needs of generals without armies to lead”, etc.)[...]

No apologies are being made for “finding bombast and vituperation so congenial a political style”. One man’s bombast is another man’s brilliant polemic. Surely the only point is: Is the vituperation making correct or false criticisms?

[..]The ILWP has no wish to apologise for using rough language, – only to apologise in advance to sensitive souls who might be put off from answering theoretical polemics because of the ego-bruising that is inseparable from an attack on subjective idealism.

The ILWP certainly “tests its ideological struggle by mass work” in the best way possible, – by publishing its analysis of world developments and what line revolutionaries should adopt in response, and being prepared to defend or correct this analysis, publicly, in the light of subsequent events, taking on allcomers.

Petty-bourgeois revolutionism (the ‘left’ swamp) significantly refuses to do this. To this day, for example, the Sparts refuse to answer how they came to spend eleven uncomfortable months in 1980-81 stumbling from an appeal for worldwide military action in support of Solidarnosc, to ostentatiously dismissing it as a CIA company union but without one word of explanation to the working class as to why the Sparts had so disastrously misjudged the situation and given workers internationally such catastrophic counter-revolutionary advice for so long, – long enough to help the CIA and Pentagon to stage a counter-revolutionary intervention into Poland there and then (had that been Washington’s intention).

The ILWP has misanalysed a few things in its time – but never so calamitously – and never without a prolonged period of public self-analysis subsequently to discover exactly why the mistake was made, and what idealist illusions need correcting in the ILWP fundamental world outlook to ensure no similar mistakes are made again.

The new criticism of the ILWP makes repeated play of the fact that “the masses do not follow the leadership of the ILWP”, in order to crack jokes about it being “sheer instinctive wisdom on their part”, pursuing the already-discussed notion that “the masses ultimately must accept responsibility for history”.

Bulletin 630 insisted that the failures (or success) of leadership are the crucial factor in the record of communist revolutionary struggle, not the failures of the masses.

The US critics joke that either they are correct about the masses being responsible for the leaderships they get, or else the ILWP is right about it being a question of leadership failures in which case the ILWP must be a self-confessed leadership failure because it has not won a mass following.

But these critics supply the ‘answer’ to their bogus conundrum themselves when trying to describe how the Bolsheviks succeeded in winning the masses of Tsarist Russia:

“In part it had to do with the specific experience of the working class and peasantry, and without that experience, a hundred Lenins could not have led a successful revolution.”

Marxist science explains that would-be revolutionary leaderships slowly convince more and more followers to build the party because its world view, programme, strategy, and tactics are usually proved by developments to have been the correct approach. The theory has to be worked out before workers can make experience of it in practice in struggling to supply mass movement with comprehensive revolutionary leadership. In the course of real political struggles to demonstrate what policies and leadership-philosophy the revolution will need in order to seize and hold onto power, the theoretical understanding is further refined and developed.

How far or fast any would-be leadership party progresses obviously depends on a combination of the subjective input (how much successful experience in theory and practice the individual revolutionaries collectively can offer) and the maturity of objective factors (how far developed is the masses’ understanding of imperialist crisis).

Contrary to the American critics’ abuse, the ILWP has claimed no special position for itself. The party emerged out of the complacent theoretical sterility of the Third International, and the fraudulence of Trotskyism’s pretence of unconditional solidarity with the Soviet workers state and proletarian dictatorship, to argue the case for critical support of the socialist camp and national-liberation struggle plus a return to open Leninist polemics between revolutionary organisations everywhere.

The ILWP could only develop the need for this understanding out of its own experiences initially; but immediately, it contacted every other organisation remotely close to such an outlook with a view to friendly merger discussions.

To cut a long story short not one single organisation came remotely close to understanding the history of the world revolutionary struggle the way that the ILWP sees it. There was either relentlessly continuing camp-following by such as the NCP, or else unmitigated “everything is rotten” Trotskyite sectarian opportunism on the other side.

The crunch for the ILWP’s development came, within months of its launch – the question of Solidarnosc.

To this day as far as we have been able to ascertain, the ILWP alone adopted the position (relevant to all socialist states) of unconditional support for the workers state of proletarian dictatorship against every single ‘freedom’ lobby or ‘human rights’ attack from the world of bourgeois idealism, coupled with an insistence on open polemical struggle with the complacent revisionist illusions of the Polish United Worker Party and similar governments, and with the whole bureaucratic class-collaborating essence of latter-day Third International politics.

And the ILWP still publicly argues that the revisionist illusions in Havana and Peking, etc, are deadly dangerous to the survival of those workers states and should be openly polemicised against at the same time as unconditional support is given to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat workers state in Cuba, China, etc, in every conflict with bourgeois-democratic ideology and Western ‘free market’ interference.

Moreover, the ILWP sees no possibility of compromise on these questions with other ‘revolutionary’ groups without destroying the very essence of Marxist Leninist understanding towards the international class struggle.

If this stand means that the party spends far more time polemicising as opposed to becoming a “mass movement” immediately by opportunist adaptations, then so be it.

But the US criticism is silly if it thinks that the ILWP theoretical positions can be disposed of just because there is no guaranteed rapid transformation into a mass party yet in sight. Incidentally, what “mass work” are these US comrades so self-satisfied with? No news of any great revolutionary breakthrough in the USA has yet reached this country, just the same way as there is no obvious mass-transformation in sight for any of the scores of “revolutionary” groups in Britain.

And this reality leaves us only with polemics among small groups (where, that is, even a willingness for this can be found, which would at least be a start towards clarification). The US critics, however, choose only to sneer at the ILWP’s efforts to provoke public discussions.

The record of small groups embarking on careerist gimmicks in order to ‘break out’ of the narrow-circle tradition of revolutionary agitation is disastrous.

The most pathetic tragedy of all such opportunism is what happens to the ‘revolutionary’ cadres themselves. The entrist ambitions of ‘Militant’ which aimed to capture the Labour Party from within and at the same time train a steeled Marxist vanguard, ended up with the monstrous philistinism and spivvery of Derek Hatton & Co, who are to revolutionary theory what the British parliamentary Labour Party are to freedom and democracy for the working class.

Now, not surprisingly, these Trot opportunists are split all over the place. The entrist route to building a significant revolutionary party is no more.

The WRP Trots made a fetish of vowing never to neglect the task of building a party of revolutionary theory even in the midst of the Healy-Redgraveites’ most extravagantly theatrical activist gimmicks.

But the opportunist stunts around the leadership cult became so fanatical that fund-raising and newspaper sales became an exercise in zombiefication, – and all the reading of Lenin’s vol.38 Philosophical Notebooks was turned into an occult prayer-meeting. There was a breakout of sorts from very small numbers, – but only to turn the WRP into one endless mass-rally of the living dead. James Jones and the Maharishi achieved similar dramatic effects on large numbers but with just as little benefit to real revolutionary struggle.

This opportunist fear of remaining a tiny minority opinion for too long can only corrupt people, always ending up where all revisionism ends up, in total philistinism.

At one extreme, the British SWP will embrace any philosophical crap from feminism to militant homosexualism in order to avoid remaining unpopular. At the other, CPSU ‘permanent peaceful coexistence’ revisionism compromised itself out of existence in order to suck up to world bourgeois ‘public opinion’. [Both] result in the triumph of subjective idealism over Marxist philosophy.

The necessary materialist progress is quite simple, – as, for instance, explained in Lenin’s ‘What is to be done’. The fight for revolutionary theory has to overcome the spontaneous petty-bourgeois trade unionist consciousness of workers under capitalism.

It can only involve repeatedly telling workers and intellectuals that the current ‘left’ politics on offer are muddle-headed idealism. The case for a Marxist-Leninist party has to be put to workers individually and collectively in as accessible forms as possible, and as relevantly as possible to the experiences they are making about the world which might change their understanding of it. Hence the notion of the revolutionary newspaper published as frequently and cheaply as possible and distributed as widely as possible.

Starting from scratch, the great need is for training a revolutionary cadre party, – isolated individuals who ahead of their time are capable of responding to a new understanding of world history (ILWP Bulletin[EPSR] No638 03-03-92).

The unrolling of the crisis and its mass educative effect is longer and more complex than could be grasped but the need remains – Leninist revolutionary theory. Don Hoskins

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