Monday, January 13, 2020
Worker Socialist: Turning their Backs Upon History, Stalinists Prepa...
Worker Socialist: Turning their Backs Upon History, Stalinists Prepa...: - Rajesh Tyagi/ 11.10.2018 "In India today, neither has fascism been established, nor are the conditions present- in political,...
Thursday, January 09, 2020
No War with Iran! Defeat the U.S. War Machine!
Defeat the U.S. War Machine!
Victory to the Iraqi Revolution, Victory to Palestinian Revolution, Victory to the Syrian Revolution!
US out of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan! Stop arming Saudi Arabia and Israel!
For International Labor Actions to Stop Trump Now!
The assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani by Trump may stumble the U.S. into WWIII and garner condemnation from the Democratic opposition and especially from some Democratic presidential candidates. But make no mistake, their objections are tactical and political, not strategic or irreparable. The Democrats are as committed to propping up the declining US imperialism as the Republicans. Their votes in both houses including those of 188 Democrats granted Trump the unfathomable sum of $738bn for war spending.
Trumpsters may play attorney and claim the assasination was nothing other presidents have not done, reaching all the way back to Yamamoto. The truths excluded from this reasoning are the experience of Trump lived by anyone who is not among his base, plus the who and the what he is. Trump has inflicted great misery on the victims of international reaction, principally abroad, but also upon the poor and working poor at home. He is credibly a rapist, demonstrably a racist enemy of Latin Americans and a Muslim-banning Islamophobe, as evidenced today by his target list of Iranian cultural sites.
What he is is a Bonapartist with fascistic ambitions and values. He hopes to inspire his followers to make him President-for-life and make his programmatic wishes operative. His followers seek to make the war danger his free pass from impeachment on “patriotic” emergency grounds. Others, like John Bolton and Benjamin Netanyahu, seek the total war itself, and have since the early ‘90s, at least. We have never seen the Democratic Party resist any war, so far as their majority voting record shows. Their first definition is as partners with the Republicans in maintenance of the superstructural parliamentary excrescence atop the dictatorship of Capital. Their objection to killing Soleimani boils down to timing.
President Obama regularly worked from “secret kill lists” and conducted assassinations with no audible objection from any significant wing of the Democratic Party. Rather they heaped applause and adulation upon him for his ‘wise surgical methods’ of assassination despite the ‘occassional’ incidents of collateral damage where civilians die by the thousands as victims of the Great Game, under the guise of counter-terrorism.
As comrades wrote in Redrave in July, 2018:
“There is a lot of confusion about Trump’s behavior in Helsinki. Is he crazy, a traitor, or dupe of Putin? Nah. It’s not that hard. It’s still about the Great Game for Eurasia. Trump is picking a fight with China which is the main economic threat to US imperialism. China has said it will ignore the sanctions on Iran. Trump wants to test the loyalty of Putin to Xi in the hope of weakening the China/Russia bloc. He wants a new deal.”
Today these Democratic wanna-be campaigners trip all over each other mustering their moral and legal indignation when Trump applies the very same methods Obama honed and which they just weeks ago funded. And like Clinton before him, Trump attempts to get impeachment off the public’s mind with a missile strike. A leading Republican Senator says China is a far greater threat to the U.S. than Iran, and Democrat criticism can’t be heard over the crickets. Perspective is important here; the policy of proxy war with Iran, now on-again, now off-again, was not supposed to lead to inter-imperialist war with the China/Russia bloc, with Iran’s allies. Trump has sought to break Russia from its bloc with China (and not incidentally, personally profit from the deal.)
We say you will not smash Trumpism with Democrats! We are told to judge a person not by their words but by their actions and this applies equally to political parties. The anti-war rhetoric from the Democrats today is totally disingenuous; their hypocrisy is exposed from every angle. They are impeaching Trump because he threatened to abandon the western imperialist bloc’s strategic project, the post-Maidan Ukraine regime.
Trump, just weeks ago, was impeached by the House for abuse of power and obstruction of congress. He was not impeached for his many crimes against the workers, the poor, and the oppressed at home and abroad. He wasn’t impeached for gutting of the EPA, OSHA, and social programs such as food stamps, nor for bullying and incitements to violence, nor for his embrace of rabid racists, nationalists and fascists at home and authoritarian thugs abroad. No, the Democratic Party could only find unity around impeachment when their leading candidate and imperialist planner Joe Biden (author of the Biden Plan to redraw the map of the Middle East) became a target of Trump’s mafia-style arm twisting of the Ukranian President, who the bipartisan congress had allocated funding for the purchase of U.S. military hardware. Hardware to be used against the Donbass insurgency that has been ongoing since 2014, following the rightward trajectory of the Ukranian Maidan.
The Independent recognises, five years on, that although the Maidan’s initiators were Europhiles seeking entrance to the EU as liberal democrats, the far right gained leadership on the streets and…,
“…In the months that followed, as a shell-shocked nation came to terms with its revolution, these nationalist groups claimed a chunk of the political vacuum. To this day, they continue to occupy key positions in and around government, and without clear popular legitimacy. The interior ministry’s links with the far right continue to be one of Maidan’s most troubling legacies.”
The liberal humanitarians who form a large piece of the base of the Democrats are well known supporters of international human rights and provide shade and cover for imperialism trying to smooth its ‘excesses’ but not challenge its power. As regards Ukraine their hypocrisy is again brought into focus by far right attacks on Romany people as reported by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ,
“…That these far-right extremist groups have been awarded grants from the Ukrainian government is likely to be of great concern to Kyiv’s Western backers and leading international human rights organizations, four of which published an open letter to authorities on June 14 (2018) decrying what they called a sharp spike in political violence from these groups, who they say pose a great danger to Ukrainian democracy.”
From 2014, while the bi-partisan courtship of the ultra-right Ukraine regime was being led by the late war hawk, war criminal and imperialist darling Senator John McCain, Trump was just launching his presidential campaign and sorting out (or not) his business prospects and ongoing relations with Russian oligarchs, Russian mafiosi and Putin. Can we smell conflict of interests? Consider a March Washington Post article:
“…for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. … the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.”
The Financial Times, loyal as it is to its own ruling class, is not shy about applying journalistic scrutiny to the Russian money sustaining the Trump empire.
“The Financial Times has been investigating the money behind Trump Toronto for 10 months. Legal documents, signed statements and two dozen interviews with people with knowledge of the project and the money that flowed through it reveal that the venture connects the US president with a shadowy post-Soviet world where politics and personal enrichment merge.”
Clearly there is a split in the ruling class here, and the Supreme Court is obscuring it, burying the Deutsche Bank loans/money laundering case until spring, i.e., after the impeachment embarrassment. Republicans, in the main believe their party can repair the split in the future and are content to hold onto power now. But U.S. allies can see this rift and that Trump would risk wrecking NATO if it benefits himself and his Moscow bankers, VEB and VTB, i.e., Putin.
Does the tail wag the Dog ?
Russia has made noise declaring the illegality and immorality of the Soleimani offing. And the number of psychiatrists who say Trump is unhinged is mushrooming. But we see things differently, and so will you when you pull up to the gas pump.
Why Trump appears to be so irrational is his amateurish attempts to hide the decline of U.S. imperialism relative to its emerging rivals. This decline forces Trump to engage in risky military adventures and destruction of the ecosphere that will ultimately blowback at home not only for the ruling class but for his populist base when U.S. troops get killed in such adventures. So his need for such adventures shows his Bonapartism is well on the road to fascism.
Trump has been in regular communication with Foreign Minister Lavrov and with Putin. There is little likelihood that the Soleimani killing surprised them. Trump needs to change his image at home, and hopes you won’t notice that he drove the anti-government protesters from Iranian streets, proving his claim that he does not seek Iranian regime change. Killing Soleimani has mobilized the pro-government “patriots” to rally around commemorations of their martyr. Trump hopes you won’t be too sore about the gas price he just drove up and you will rally round the flag as Iran threatens retaliation, which can be immediate, long delayed or any time!. As he sends another brigade to Iraq, his message to you is, he is bringing U.S. troops home! He is wagging the dog to preserve the Khamenei theocracy against the revolutionary uprising of the Persian masses. Khamenei has had to kill over 1500 and jail tens of thousands recently, but Trump solved his problem and Capital’s with one missile. Solved, that is, for the moment.
Ruling class thinking about whether this move was sage or “unhinged” is mixed, however. They cannot be too happy when one result is a vote of the Iraqi Parliament demanding the expulsion of U.S. troops. And while Pompeo declares that Iraq is a safer place without Soleimani, NATO allies have suspended their military training missions and are withdrawing them now.
No foreign leaders are sleeping through and not seeing what this means: The U.S. rulers have NOT solved the world crisis of capitalism signalled by the crash of 2008, and the demand for U.S. expulsion from Iraq is just the latest index of how far the powers of U.S. imperialism have diminished. The big boss appetites for increasing their world market shares are thus whetted in every imperialist country. And meanwhile U.S. capitalism has to worry how unpopular a new Middle Eastern war could be and become! Allies, already wary of Trump’s attitude towards alliances, NATO in particular, are not rushing to support such a war. Watching and worrying also are the sections of the U.S.A. where the military is the biggest employer. These are also the most usually jingoistic, and are also the bulk of Trump’s base, something the latest polls of the troops show they are not a part of now, if they ever were. Our ruling class and all their class internationally know that Trump’s base of support can turn against him should too many neighbors die for his glory.
In a NY Times Jan. 4th opinion piece, Jon Stevenson, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies explains how the Soleimani killing is a strategic blunder that shows how the U.S. foreign policy is broken, and that broken is the process of oversight and review provided by informed strategic planners. Serious foresight, he argues, would have considered the possibility that this would trigger a new round of terrorism and the potential for Hezbollah, “the A Team to Al Qaeda’s B Team” to venture out of the Middle East. The ruling class is concerned because, “…Mr. Trump’s move looks like either an impetuous act of self-indulgence or, somewhat more probable, a calculated attempt to bury his domestic political troubles.”
Newsweek speaks for most liberal quarters expressing the fears of the mental health community,
“…Following the attack that killed Soleimani in Baghdad, professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Bandy X. Lee, told Salon: “This is exactly the kind of dangerous event we foresaw as Donald Trump’s response to the impeachment proceedings, just as his pulling troops from northern Syria was a direct response to the announcement of an impeachment inquiry.”
Spotlight Center Stage, Inter-imperialist Conflict
The U.S. ruling class, since the middle of the Obama presidency, has been turning the focus of the military ship of state away from counter-terrorism and toward the emerging imperialisms of Russia and China. The Pacific pivot and support of Ukraine’s absorption into the EU was their strategic orientation. Crushing the Syrian Revolution and the spread of the Arab national revolution could be left to the Russians assisting Assad and the Iranians whose forces did the yeoman’s piece in crushing ISIS. The U.S. ruling class now needs to re-exert U.S. imperialist hegemony in the Middle East. It is a necessity given the strategic importance of the region, the Arab Spring uprisings, the Palestinian and Syrian revolutions and the growing strength and dominance of Russian/Chinese imperialism. But there is a “rational” imperialist policy and then there is the loose cannon that runs counter to strategic U.S. interests.
The Democrats feigned outrage over the killing of Soleimani (losing no sleep over Obama’s drone strikes) and really were upset that Trump kept them out of the loop and did not seek Congressional approval for assassinations. They have a “better” means of killing and maiming abroad. They see him losing a trade war with China and taking Russia’s side against Ukraine and attempting to get reluctant allies to take more defense spending out of the wages of their workers. To make a flip side of his cover-up “hoax” song, his obstruction of Congress, the Democrats now spin Trump in power should be made to appear as the masses’ major problem, and that before his “incompetent” (says Biden) amateur act they had a deal with Iran.
Senator Bernie Sanders, the darling of Jacobin and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), did not oppose imperialist war on principle in his statement against the Iran war funding, but instead stood for war as a “last recourse.” Protecting his dovish credentials he safely voted against the massive $738 billion military budget, complained about lack of Congressional authorization and that a war could cost “countless lives and trillions more dollars”. Of course Sanders means American lives, not the lives of the working people of the Middle East. He also has few qualms about the projected $1.5 trillion F-35, so much of which is built in Vermont. He also has supported military actions and funded the military in the past, including Clinton’s bombing of Kosovo. Bernie has sheep-dogged many youth into the Democratic Party in 2016 and continues to do so today and he took the Democratic National Committee leadership’s loyalty pledge. He is no socialist at all, only proposing to bandage capitalism’s bruises and is supporting imperialism wherever it is challenged.
He is the right’s last barricade against workers’ class-political independence. We call for a fighting workers’ labor party, based in the unions and the champion of all the oppressed! Bernie will fight our party to his last gasp, and should there come to be a class-independent party of the workers and the oppressed, he will try to lead those who want a reformist and pro-imperialist program and policy. In practical terms this means today, while he camouflages his real support for Middle East wars, we support the AFL-CIO’s campaign for a Protect the Right to Organize law (PRO ACT), but take the further logical step to call for Enlisted Service Members Unions and a “Let’s Go Home” movement among our sisters and brothers, the workers in uniform overseas.
On principle, the CWG says Not one man or woman, not one penny for the imperialist U.S. military! No War with Iran! Down with the sanctions against Iran! No sanctions against Iraq!
For Permanent Revolution
The working class has the power to stop the imperialist wars. In an exemplary action we should repeat, on May 1, 2008, 10,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), one of the strongest and most militant unions in the United States, walked off the docks at all 29 West Coast ports, completely shutting down the U.S. Pacific trading network. When the ILWU conducted this laudatory action it showed how the working class can directly challenge the military might of imperialism. To make such actions indefinite, instead of one day and exemplary, and to spread such actions to every sector of the economy is the way the working class at home can stop the wars and unite in solidarity with the workers of the world.
We don’t expect the class enemy to take such strikes in stride, like a cost of doing business. With U.S. imperialism in decline there is nothing so precious to them as their profits! Bush showed this when he sought to victimize the ILWU, but much more general strikes will be much harder to repress, perhaps impossible without fascistic measures rejected by all except the rightmost and Ku Kluxers. Sympathy strikes and sit down strikes are called for, exactly the strikes called political and banned by the Taft-Hartley “slave labor law.” The PRO Act would re-legalize the “secondary boycott,” i.e. the sympathy strike. However we see the Trumka leadership going about this cynically and otherwise all wrong, expecting Democrats in Congress to push the measure into law. This was how we DID NOT WIN the Employee Free Choice Act!
It was Leon Trotsky who developed the theory of Permanent Revolution, that in the colonial/semi-colonial countries and those with combined and uneven development, the tasks of the bourgeois revolutions such as land reform, securing democratic rights and national independence could not be carried through by the native capitalist ruling class that was tightly tied to and dependent upon world imperialism. Those tasks fall to the working class, which after achieving power, would not relinquish power but carry forward the socialist revolution.
It is the task of the Middle Eastern working class and peasantry to overthrow the reactionary bourgeois regimes of the region. This liberation is not the job of the imperialist U.S.A., who did the most to create the satrap regimes, and we see imperialist interventions pretending to liberate the oppressed as crimes against humanity. The fates of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have returned as “the Great Game” because of the terminal crisis of capitalism that drives all the imperialist powers to try to solve their crisis at the expense of their rivals and the working people of the world!
Defeat for the U.S. military, driving them from the Middle East, would provide a strong impetus to all the struggles of the masses against their own ruling classes, who are tied to world imperialism and exploit and oppress their own people. In every conflict between semi-colonies and imperialism, internationalist workers oppose the imperialists with the fight for permanent revolution in the semi-colonies and class war against the workers’ own ruling classes in the imperialist states.
The International Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), of which the CWG-USA is part, fights for revolutionary Leninist-Trotskyist working class parties, as part of a new revolutionary workers International, to provide leadership in the fight for socialist revolution and a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. The only way to break Iran, Iraq, Syria and all the semi-colonies from world imperialist exploitation is through workers revolution that establishes workers states and spreads the revolution internationally to the imperialist centers.
Workers in the imperialist countries must overthrow their “own” warmongering ruling classes. Workers in uniform in the U.S. and troops of other imperialist countries must unite with their class sisters and brothers across the trenches, organize military strikes and mutinies and appeal to workers at home to wage political general strikes against war. Troops should be organized to come home and arm and especially train workers’ armed pickets, Labor Black and Brown Defense Guards and Workers’ Militias to replace all the armed bodies of the capitalist class dictatorships.We are not Anarchists. The champions of the working class, and in the first place our International Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency proclaim and promise that any body of armed men and women must be strictly overseen and accountable to the political organs of the masses.
This means the factory and shop committees, the neighborhood committees, the wages and price committees, and the city and regional workers councils, the soviets that gather the representatives of all these direct democracy organs. These councils will take all political power away from the capitalist ruling class operatives and create a workers government that will end imperialist wars and begin building a just and humane socialist world. We will save the planet, save as many species as remain, feed the hungry better than the “virtuous” and “charitable” ever did in the age of the military beasts, and we will expand civilization to liberate all of today’s oppressed peoples, first by spreading the available work and in time eliminating most of human want, so that work’s enduring social incentive can become the engine of healthy personality development in a democratically planned world economy devoted to human needs.
Statement of Communist Workers Group (USA) January 8, 2020.
Member of the International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT).
Friday, December 27, 2019
India: Support Workers Socialist Appeal against the CAA-NRC-NPR
End the Citizenship Laws and National Borders!
Advance the struggle to build a world socialist organisation!
Reverse the communal divide of 1947, re-unite the Indian subcontinent, and spearhead the struggle for a United Socialist Union in South Asia!
The Modi government, the agent of India's major capitalists, is busy attacking the working people's anger over the failing power of capital in the economic-political crisis. Therefore, it is making every effort to maintain the corruption and robbery of those in power with the poisonous nostalgia of ethnocentrism and Hindu supremacy, dividing the masses of the working people. To keep the politically backward sections of the Hindu majority under the rule of the capitalists, the Modi government is creating a tool for Muslim oppression. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) defines the terms of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR), under which an entire network of detention camps is being spread on the lines of Nazi Germany.
The Modi government is not alone in this desperate attempt. In the wake of the economic crisis of world capitalism in 2008, there has been a catastrophe in capitalist countries. Until yesterday, boasting of globalization on a capitalist basis, the elite rulers of these countries have joined forces to close their borders for migration and to exclude parts of the working people. Imprisoned in the tight cages of the national states, capital with its falling rate of profit, in this period of ever-increasing crisis, has become unable to provide food and employment for the people. There is only one way forward for the bourgeois governments - closing their borders and deporting large sections of the people.
The Modi government wants to maintain its grip on power by allowing Hindu settlements in Muslim-majority parts of the country and tightly controlling Muslim immigration into the rest of the country. Opposition parties cannot resist this poisonous communalism of Modi. All these parties, right and left in the opposition, agree with the Modi government on keeping India safe for 'Indians' only and closing it for 'foreigners'. None of the opposition parties, including the Left parties, were in favor of the Rohingya and Bangladeshi immigrants. We should not forget that the NRC was first implemented by the Nehru-led Congress government in the name of stopping 'foreign invaders', and before Modi, the Manmohan government had drafted it.
We strongly oppose this anti-globalist campaign, which the Modi government has tried to give a deep and clear communal color to, and warn the proletariat about this conspiracy. Perpetuating the unfortunate communal divide of 1947, igniting religious-regional enmity, the anti-people rulers of India want to maintain their power. The horrific tragedy of the communal divide of '47, in which more than two million victims were killed, victims of plunder and oppression, and more than two million were destroyed, was the largest humanitarian tragedy in the history of the world. By dividing the people on communal grounds, they put them under the grip of the bourgeoisie and destroyed the anti-imperialist revolution. From 1947 onwards, the capitalist rulers fought, constantly wiping out opposition to the communal poison, dividing the working people in the name of Indo-Pakistan and Hindu-Muslim. The whole of South Asia has maintained its sovereignty. The suffering people, like sheep, are encircled in their controlled national enclaves, by the national gangs of capitalists, putting them in hellish living conditions.
Today, all the capitalist countries of the world are engaged in a hotly contested war against one another, which is becoming increasingly violent, and the world is passing through unlimited wars, terrorism and bloodshed. Capitalism cannot unify the world, it can only divide it. The only way out of these hellish situations created by capitalism is to fight for the socialist revolution.
We reject all divisions of the world on a national, racial or communal basis. On behalf of the international proletariat we invite the dissolution of all barricades that divide the world, impose borders, restrict travel, and freedom of residence or employment. We are struggling to abolish the passport-visa state and to eliminate national boundaries, to build a World Socialist Union. In this task we have a clear goal: to re-unite the Indian subcontinent by reversing the communal divide of 1947, and to establish the United Socialist States of South Asia.
The bourgeois rule in South Asia, which is dominated by India's right-wing and Hindu-backed Modi government, is a major obstacle to achieving this goal. By overthrowing them through the revolution, by establishing Workers' Governments, South Asia can be consolidated into a socialist union and the narrow national borders and national states eliminated.
- We oppose citizenship laws, religious, communal, racial or ethnic discrimination, and all citizenship laws and national boundaries.
- We appeal to the youth, the proletariat, that 'action committees' are formed in all cities, campuses, factories, to unite in the fight, further accelerating this opposition!
- Oppose all citizenship laws!
- Oppose religious, racial, ethnic, and national oppression!
- Unite the national across borders and unite the world into a socialist union!
- Forwards to the struggle for 'South Asian Socialist Union', uniting the Indian subcontinent by overthrowing the communal divide of 1947!
Translated from https://workersocialist.blogspot.com/2019/12/caa-nrc-npr_27.html
Errors in translation are the responsibility of CWG/ANZ
Errors in translation are the responsibility of CWG/ANZ
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Friday, December 13, 2019
Where is Britain Going?
After 9 years of bitter austerity, how did the Tories turn an entitled, lying clownish toff like Johnson into such a winner, and an avowed parliamentary socialist like Corbyn into a weak chump? The answer lies in the failure of Labour to stand up to Johnson’s Trumpish rally to ‘make Britain great again’. Fatally, Lexiteers like Corbyn tried to meet Brexit halfway with a ‘Socialist’ Brexit, or Lexit.
The Tories were split over Brexit but the Brexiteers fought inside the party to defeat the Remainers, so the campaign was all about Brexit. Labour was also split, but refused to take a position and compromised on a second Referendum. So, Labour broke the stalemate by allowing Johnson to turn its Brexiteer working class voters into his pawns.
Never mind. Brexit is far from over, and Johnson’s hard Brexit will explode on the streets and workplaces rendering parliament impotent to stop the breakup of Britain. It will push Scotland towards independence, and give Northern Ireland every reason to join a united Ireland. This will pose for socialists the test of their ability to organise the working class against reactionary bourgeois chauvinism and for proletarian internationalism.
To understand why this election will launch an open class warfare that can only be resolved by fascism or socialism, we need to explain how Britain’s existential crisis, as part of a wider terminal crisis of global capitalism, has forced Brexit to the top of the bosses’ political agenda.
Brexit stalemate
The stalemate over Brexit is a symptom of the paralysis of the British ruling class facing the dilemma of its future as a declining imperialist power maneuvering between the US bloc and the Russia/China bloc. The rise of Russia and China threatens the waning US world hegemony. The EU is torn between the two but increasingly drawn towards Russia/China.
This poses a problem for the UK ruling class: to remain in the EU as it gets pulled away from the US towards Russia and China, or to leave the EU and stick with the US come what may. The British ruling class is split between the finance sector, the legacy of Britain’s rentier role in the world economy, and the national bourgeoisie who are now in partnership with US, EU and Asian transnationals.
Both fractions are globalist in outlook and make their profits in a multilateral world where capital and labour know no borders. Johnson in copying Trumps ‘exceptionalism’ is acting contrary to Britain’s globalist role. There is no case for abandoning the EU for the US – since Britain profits from both – unless Britain is so uncompetitive and sees no future in the EU allied to Russia/China and is desperate to gamble on the declining US. So, what part of the ruling class has an interest in writing off the 20th century and building a fantasy of reclaiming the glory days when “Britain ruled the world”?
None except a small section of British capitalists that wants to share in a US takeover and asset stripping of British assets including the remaining state assets such as the NHS. This is the Trumpist strategy to save the US that the reactionary Tories endorse.
The trade deal being negotiated with the US will reduce Britain from the status of declining imperialist power to a client lackey state. Those who stand to gain from a hard Brexit are those who blame Britain’s decline on EU membership and want to become the servile junior partner of the US. They are a tiny, backward chauvinist fraction that rejects globalism to make Britain great again. But this slogan actually means becoming mere neo-colonial compradors (agents) of US vulture capital. This is the reason that the Brexit comprador fraction needs to manufacture a populist movement of chauvinist workers and petty bourgeois social imperialists to give it parliamentary legitimacy.
Lexit succumbs to chauvinism
The left is mightily confused over Brexit when it puts itself into the camp of the comprador Brexit faction of the British ruling class. While the left propagandizes that Brexit creates a Left-exit (Lexit) for workers to take power, in practice they are acting as stooges to call on workers to side with British imperialism over German imperialism. What’s more they sign up to ‘their’ ruling class to defend Britain from all foreigners, migrants, militants, and revolutionaries to defend ‘glorious Britain’. The bankruptcy of this ‘social imperialism’ (socialism at home paid for by imperialism abroad) explains Labour’s defeat by the Brexit populists.
The problem with the Lexit position is that it takes a historical construction of the bourgeoisie, the nation state, and defends it as timeless. But since the arrival of the age of imperialism early in the 20th century, capital has known no borders. It has had to expand globally to boost profits at home. Giant monopolies backed by their nation states have gone to war to make their rivals and the world’s workers’ pay for their crises of overproduction.
Thus, excess capital is destroyed in depressions and wars, while workers’ wages have been driven down by depression and their resistance defeated by conscription to fight the bosses’ wars. The 20th century proves that workers used as cannon fodder must mutiny and unite with workers everywhere to overthrow crisis-ridden global capitalism. In the place of bourgeois nation states workers will create socialist republics that replace chauvinism with internationalism and a global federation of workers’ republics.
Fascism or Socialism
The extreme logic of bourgeois nationalism leads to the rise of fascism to smash workers refusal to pay for the bosses’ crises. This is where we are again today, in a full blown, terminal crisis of global capitalism, where new movements are beginning to rise up against global capital. And once more the bosses are encouraging fascism to raise its ugly head to smash workers struggles for basic democratic rights from Algeria to Hong Kong.
Within this framework, the situation in Britain is consistent with a declining imperialist power reverting to imperialist xenophobia, led by a reactionary comprador clique of the bourgeoisie that has been defeated by monopoly capital. In its desperation to protect its wealth it exploits the fears of workers against migrants to ape Trump in backing imperialist Britain against imperialist Germany and France. And in many European countries the same centripetal forces of national populist movements are creating the swamps in which fascism breeds.
There is nothing progressive in defending bourgeois nations in the name of the ‘left’. It leads to the enlisting of workers behind the national flag to fight workers in other countries in the interests of the ruling classes and against the interests of humanity and nature. Against the populist/fascist movements that are forming to divide and smash working peoples, the only left position that can lead to the end of capitalism, is that which unites workers across national borders into one international revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism and building socialism.
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Bolivia: Down with the Coup! For a Workers' and Peasants' Government!
| Masses rally against the Coup |
The following is translated from our Brazilian comrades of the Grupo de Trabalhadores Revolucionários do Brasil (GTR-BR)
As Leninism-Trotskyism taught us, the Popular Front opens the way to fascism! For more than a decade, left-wing populist and traitor governments ruled by applying imperialist plans and attacking the Latin American working class.
The coup d’état in Bolivia and the instability throughout Latin America is a consequence of the terminal crisis of capitalism, which shows that this system cannot be improved, as the “progressive” governments of the region wanted us to believe.
These popular front and reformists leaders demoralized and demobilized the direct struggle of the workers. They created illusions in the bourgeois democratic regime and they never tired of saying that capitalism was now “democratic” and military coups were no longer possible. Just as they sold imperialist propaganda with the end of the USSR and the neoliberal offensive, of “good” and “peace” capitalism.
The global crisis of capitalism is the affirmation of the Leninist theory that capitalism in imperialist times is destructive, that this is the epoch of crises, wars and revolutions. “21st Century Socialism” proved to be a farce, as well as its supposed “sovereignty” and the theory of a “multipolar” world, which they use to justify their alliances with Chinese imperialism and the BRICS.
The trigger for this coup is the decline of US imperialism that loses influence over the Bolivarian ALBA that turns to China for trade and investment. But China is not just a semi-colony capable of rescuing the ALBA from US imperialism. She is the largest imperialist rival of the US, globally and also in Latin America. It is their economic power that is turning American semi-colonies into Chinese semi-colonies. It is Morales’ agreement with China on raw materials, especially lithium, that has deprived the US and the Santa Cruz oligarchy of most of this great wealth.
The reformist left that shifts all direct workers’ struggle to bourgeois elections and now allies with Chinese imperialism as an alternative to American imperialism is part of the counterrevolution. Bolivia and the whole world are being drawn to the growing inter-imperialist impulse leading to the war between the US bloc and the China / Russia bloc. And the “left” is splitting, supporting one or another imperialist bloc!
Stalinists, RT socialists and some fake Trotskyists defend the imperialist bloc of China / Russia and their allies in LA (Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia) against US imperialism. These LA governments have confrontations with American imperialism that are not at all “anti-imperialist” but pro-Chinese and Russian imperialism. To this left, it is no longer fighting the large foreign enterprises that often drive workers from their homes and lands, and devastate the environment as do the lithium mines today, which destroy the water and destroy the whole Uyuni Salt Flat region. They advocate handing over to Chinese companies, repeating Beijing’s propaganda that their worldwide expansion would be “win-win,” “help” for the semi-colonies. They join with the “progressive” or “democratic” bourgeoisie nationally, and in a great popular front with the imperialist bloc of China and Russia, internationally.
Latin American leftist organizations, Trotskyists like LIT and UIT, do not support Evo or Maduro, and have always placed themselves in leftist opposition to these governments. However, their solution for a way out by bourgeois democracy have placed them in positions of direct defense of the reactionary actions of the bourgeoisie, such as support for the maneuvers that led to Dilma’s impeachment in Brazil. There are also ultra-leftist organizations that stand directly on the right side, defending the coup in Bolivia or Venezuela as progressive that will overthrow the dictators and establish bourgeois democracy. The LIT comes to the nonsense of calling to combat the coup in Bolivia with “free elections!”. LIT, UIT and FT do not see China and Russia as imperialists, but they do not defend them as the Stalinists do. They ignore Chinese expansion into the world and rivalry with the US in their daily politics, and the issue is restricted to a mere formality decided by their leadership, with empirical methods that lead them to revisionist theories of “sub-imperialism” as the LIT thinks, or in “transition” to imperialist, as the FT leadership concluded.
The FLTI says China and Russia are semi-colonies and accuses as revisionist the position that these countries are imperialists. She is right when she says that in the imperialist era, because of its destructive character, it is not possible for a semi-colony to develop its productive forces and become imperialist. This theory of “developed”, “multipolar”, “transitional” capitalism is revisionist and serves the reformist politics of the left to ally itself with the “progressive” national bourgeoisie or “good” China / Russia or “democratic” imperialism. from the USA. FLTI concludes from its analysis of the coup that Morales sold out to the US. If that was the case then how to explain a US backed coup? China and Russia are today imperialists because their revolution recognised that it was only possible to develop the productive forces by ending capitalism. That’s what these countries did. But they failed to defeat global capitalism and were forced to rejoin it. With capitalist restoration they return as rival powers of the USA. Failure to recognize the imperialist character of the China / Russia bloc creates illusions about who is the enemy and precludes a program that fits reality, and that consequently combats imperialism and traitors within the ranks of the working class, especially the Stalinists, who advance in their alliance with China and Russia, defending dictatorships like Assad’s in Syria.
Workers need to get rid of these opportunistic leaders that tie them to the bourgeoisie and its “democratic” regime. The masses that have been suffering the fury of the counterrevolution, as in Syria or the repressions of the coup in Bolivia, show that fascism is growing in this crisis as a necessary method for the bourgeoisie to attack the class and crush it. The only force capable of combating imperialism, fascism and military coups is the organized and independent working class and its revolutionary struggle for the end of capitalism and the bourgeois state, with its Party with a Revolutionary program.
Faced with the crisis in which the country was in, with roads and streets blocked by protesters, government-linked and opposition parliamentarians attacked and their homes being burned down, the COB has spoken publicly to call for Evo Morales to resign without giving any class alternative to the offensive of the traditional right allied with American imperialism. The reformist, “trade unionist” leadership of the COB, and the bureaucratization of the unions where there is no grassroots organization led to capitulation for the coup and betrayal. It is important to call on the COB to form councils and militias and fight for a workers’ government, but this will not happen without a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party leading the struggle.
After the coup, the COB bureaucracy gave more proof of its reformism and treason giving the coup-makers a 24-hour ultimatum “to restore the constitutional order, social peace and unity of the Bolivian people and to avoid further bloodshed, sadness, mourning and violence,” if left unattended, will make a “general strike to march to La Paz.” The sectors linked to Evo’s MAS party demand that the march demand the return of Evo.
For Bolivian workers and peoples not to fall into the counter- revolutionary trap of the bourgeois elections and not be defeated by reaction, a revolutionary party with a Marxist program is needed to lead organized workers in the COB, unions and indigenous organizations to break with their opportunistic leaderships, to build their grassroots and self-defense committees, and General Strike, march to La Paz to defeat the reaction, seize government buildings, occupy the factories and strategic facilities of the Bolivian economy, expropriate the Transnational and landowners, break with all imperialism and install a Workers’ Government that advances the measures by Socialism.
From Bolivia to Syria, Iraq, Lebanon to Hong Kong, from Barcelona to Chile and Ecuador, popular uprisings and revolutionary processes have been driven to defeat by the Popular Front and illusion in the bourgeois democratic regime. The necessary class independence and solidarity among the world’s workers has been replaced by class division to support one or another imperialist bloc and their respective regional bourgeois government allies.
Faced with the capitalist crisis combined with the threat of a climate collapse, capitalism must die! Long live Socialism!
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