Trump, Netanyahu and Jerusalem
1106/12/2017 by Ian
Trump’s shift of US policy on Jerusalem is a perfect example of a US policy of supporting a predatory project that benefits Israel but is likely to destabilise US interests over a very wide area of the world.
The recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by the US could easily be seen by Jewish fanatics as a green light to destroy Al Aqsa, which would make Indira Gandhi’s 1984 destruction of Amritsar’s Sikh Golden Temple seem a minor local matter.
The United States would be blamed, rightly, for encouraging Israel to annex East Jerusalem and all that follows. This is why previous administrations, even when they pandered to the most hardline elements of the powerful Jewish-Zionist caste within their own ruling class (and their fellow travellers), hesitated to actually do this. Obama paid lip service to this idea when he was trying to get elected but shied away from it in power.
Now Trump, whose regime is even more servile to Israeli interests, has actually done it. At the same time as he is trying to destroy Obama’s Iran deal. Meanwhile many of his most odious followers almost worship Israel’s form of racism and call themselves ‘white Zionists’. Political Zionism truly is playing a major, vanguard role in world reaction.
For further food for thought on this see this article:
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/05/trump-jerusalem-israel-palestine/
Socialist Fight 
I think a proper Marxist-Leninist response to Trump’s move needs to go a lot further. His action is a major escalation of imperialist warmongering. A fighting determination has to be shown that provides socialist revolutionary leadership.
In truth, Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the ‘capital’ of the Zionist occupation of Palestine (never say “Israel” – there is no such place whatever the UN thieves kitchen says) highlights the stepped-up OVERT fascism being pushed by Trump, and exactly expresses the genocidal nature of the Zionist project.
But is twisting the dagger that has been driven into the Arab peoples by Zionism a “winning line” for crisis-hit Western imperialism? What is going to happen to the world balance of class forces?
Instead of defeatist scholasticism, what the world proletariat is crying out for is revolutionary Leninist leadership which needs to explain that just as Hitler fascism was the last gasp of the steamroller of imperialist reaction in the 1930s-40s, so Trumpism should be seen as the latest expression of the US Empire’s desperate attempts to maintain world supremacy by force of arms and dollar power. But it is failing, and this move will worsen things for Washington – and rapidly.
The hatred of the world masses for Washington’s vile murderous interventions into the Middle East will redouble; the pressure for renewed revolution and intifada to take down stooge regimes like Sisi in Egypt and Abbas in the PLO will also multiply; the awareness of the masses around the world that Western “freedom n democracy” is a total fraud will rise; the chances of explaining to brainwashed British, European and American workers that the “war on terror” is a lying cover for imperialist warmongering that is driven by the need to destroy surplus capital clogging up the monopoly-capitalist system and causing a world-historic crisis will increase as well.
Trump was elected on the back of numerous speeches reflecting the US Empire’s sense of DEFEAT and LOSS OF PRESTIGE in the world; recognising Jerusalem as Zionland’s capital plays up the warmongering-fascist attempt to restore Washington’s grip on the planet – but like the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, this strategy is doomed to failure.
Rather than lasting a thousand years, the sick degeneracy of Hitler-period fascism (with the honesty of goose-stepping around in theatrical uniforms covered in skulls and crossbones) lasted 12 years, before being smashed into the ground by the Red Army and the revitalised world communist movement and liberation struggle (which reverberated for years afterwards into the 1970s etc). D-Day only came because Europe would otherwise have been totally communist.
The even more sick and dishonest Western bourgeois-dictatorship world of today (“look at our moral superiority – we have political parties, and we have elections”) which has been blitzing the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades – driven by ECONOMIC crisis, will be made more BRITTLE, more BREAKABLE by Trump’s criminal fascist escapades.
The “left-wing anti-Semitism” pro-Zionist propaganda nonsense also takes a blow from Trump’s latest action – since the more overt the Western bias towards Zionland, the greater the horrified reaction from all reasonable human beings, and the greater the awareness of the monstrous fraud that is being perpetrated by those vicious right-wingers who want to defend the Jewish occupation of Palestine from the world’s fully justified opprobrium for this most heinous of all modern war crimes, the theft of a country from its people by Western colonialism.
DEFEAT FOR IMPERIALISM! Build Leninism!
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Furthermore, the disgusting Trump move highlights the USA’s completely dishonest, pro-Zionland role in the region and the total impossibility of a “two-state solution”. For Palestine, there is only the political and military fight to destroy Zionism – nothing else.
And as Lenin said, the best form of solidarity is to fight for the socialist revolution in your own country.
In the UK, that means working to destroy the influence of the social-democratic Labour party, which of course still backs the Jewish occupation of Palestine, whatever Corbyn’s pacifist bleatings – he still explicitly sides with the UN’s acceptance of the “state of Israel” (sick joke! – and shame on the Stalinist Moscow decision to support its “founding” in 1948 – though it should also be recognised that the Soviets broke with this stupidity and campaigned against Zionism in subsequent decades).
The heroic response of the Palestinian masses and the call by the Islamist movement Hamas for renewed intifada correctly reflects the grim reality that there is nothing to be done except to fight the Zionists until they give up and go back to New York, Russia or elsewhere – or, if permitted, accept living in a single Palestinian state.
A further revolutionary action is for those who want to think of themselves as Leninists to expose how all those fake “left-wingers” who “condemn terror” are simply aiding the propaganda for the “war on terror” by going along with the disgusting Western mythology that the Middle East, Arab world and Islamic anti-imperialist resistance movements have absolutely no reason to be retaliating against the Western countries – despite all the US/UK/French/German etc bombing and bullying of the Third World and support for Zionland and other tyrannical regimes like the Saudis the West always pretends that all “terror” blowback is just “pure evil” for no reason whatsoever.
For any “left” to go along with this “condemning of terror” is simply repeating the treachery of the Second International in 1914-18 – where the social-democratic parties voted for “war credits” and urged “defence of the Fatherland”, rather than the correct Leninist line of defeat for their own imperialism and turning the imperialist war into a civil war.
“Condemning terror” (the fighting response of the oppressed, whatever their confused ideology or methods – and which need to be superseded by socialist revolutionary ideology and methods) is voting “propaganda credits” for Western imperialism.
Lenin never “condemned terror” – especially by oppressed peoples and peasants fighting imperialism, and famously employed Red Terror himself to defeat the violence of the counter-revolution and Tsarist forces in the civil war.
“Condemning terror” is just dirty petty-bourgeois moralising that distracts attention from the destruction of the Middle East, the killing of hundreds of thousands in Mosul and Falluja and Pakistan’s Swat valley etc, and aids and abets the Washington warmongers in their “war on terror” propaganda fraud.
Because there is NO “war on terror”. The Western world, led by the US Empire, needs war on a massive scale to destroy the surplus capital that is clogging up the monopoly-capitalist economic system. Washington, in fear of its top dog status in the world trade war, is lashing out to try to maintain its grip on the planet and scare its enemies – and its rivals, especially Japan, France and Germany. World War III is planned, and the retaliations by despairing and brutalised people are totally incidental in that.
Defeat for imperialism! Build Leninism!
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The above contributions are largely pointless. Why? Because invective and leftist rhetoric is not a revolutionary strategy. You wont build a revolutionary movement through subjective, angry tirades, but only through showing a way forward to people involved in struggle.
You can denounce the Labour Party in such terms if you want. It has no effect. If you intervene, in however a small way, it can make a difference. Our intervention in LAW was a case in point. We managed to strike a modest blow for workers democracy and force some people who are themselves involved in a struggle that is about workers democracy, to abide by it themselves. That, however modest and reversible, is a gain.
Workers democracy is a crucial part of our programme for workers power. Indeed our anti-imperialism is itself driven by the impulse to defend the democratic rights of the oppressed in order to promote workers democracy, through permanent revolution and the proletariat hegemonising the struggle around democratic questions through its own consistent workers democracy.
This cannot be emphasised enough. Third period Stalinism, which the above tirade epitomises, has contempt for workers democracy. And without that locus of politics, you dont have a strategy, you dont have a lever that can have a shot at winning new forces to the revolutionary banner, you don’t have a hope.
You just have a sterile ranting sect like the Economic and Philosphic Science Review, which rants against capital and social democracy, as well as promoting social backwardness on questions like gay rights, without the slightest hint of showing a way forward to anyone.
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I fully agree with Ian, these people which are always repeting generalities and know not the way of tactically putting them in practice, are a plague.
How many leftits groups have pratice the same “policy” with absolute no result at all. On the contrary, they make worker’s run away as fast as they can and take marxists for a preacher’s sect, a bunch of goods for nothing that said the same thing whatever the timing, the ocasion or the public.
Reformism, revisionnism and this kind of leftist preacher plague are the principal obstacles for a marxist conciousness of the working class.
They are so boring and tiresome that it is dificult to finish reading or hearing what they preach, that is always the same, an always out of tune, ever saying the same things, causing a big damage to the worker’s mouvement.
Here in France, the masses are terribly disapointed with this kind of preach and with the continuos treachery of socialdemocrats of all kinds (call it them “socialists”, “communists” or “anticapitalists”) and with the Unions (their chefs) and becomming quite pasives, distrusting calls to action because they know they will be called for demos that have not following. As they called them “promenades syndicales sans lendemains”. Even they are abandoning “left” socialdemocrats as Mélenchon, because theirs is not an issu there also and going to …no where.
Only working as Ian shows it can constructed an independent political party for the working class.
But it is a task for giants that could analyse and answer daily to the real questions of the political life of a country. Or work in this perspective.
Perhaps comrade Barratt could understand this.
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The comments from Ian and Viriato above are nothing but small-minded petty-bourgeois cynicism intended to spread defeatism in the working class about world revolutionary socialist perspectives.
In my two comments above, I made many specific political points that can be taken up by anybody who wishes to take them up. Why not dispute some of these particular points? Why instead just pour out twisted middle-class cynicism?
My comments are described as “subjective anger”, when in fact they are scientifically objective and give Leninist leadership in all the areas touched on.
Is the world in a historic capitalist crisis? Is the US Empire warmongering? Is there a way out for civilisation other than communist revolution? What about my specific argument that fake-‘left’ condemnations of “terror” are treachery to the workers movement?
Is the Labour party’s social-democratic reformism going to reverse the slump and warmongering -or is it an obstacle? Should workers follow Jeremy Corbyn? Or is he just a continuation of lethally dangerous ‘left’ illusion-mongering that has been seen in more than 100 years of Labour ‘leftism’ that goes nowhere except support for capitalist parliamentary democracy and could potentially lead to an Allende-style catastrophe (Pinochet coup in Chile 1973)?
And all Ian’s talk of “workers democracy” is, in Marx’s, Engels’ and Lenin’s view, total hogwash.
Lenin railed against notions of “workers democracy” or “pure democracy”. For him, in modern nations, either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie ruled or the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky”, Lenin says: “In Russia, however, the bureaucratic machine has been completely smashed, razed to the ground; the old judges have all been sent packing, the bourgeois parliament has been dispersed — and far more accessible representation has been given to the workers and peasants; their Soviets have replaced the bureaucrats, or their Soviets have been put in control of the bureaucrats, and their Soviets have been authorised to elect the judges. This fact alone is enough for all the oppressed classes to recognise that Soviet power, i.e., the present form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.”
Leninists argue and fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Ian’s description of “progress” as sitting in social-democratic committees to painfully make an inch of ‘left’ advance that – as he admits – could be instantly reversed the next morning by some Labourite bureaucrat is the very opposite of the fight for revolution by battling to win over and develop Leninist cadres.
The really futile time-wasting for workers lies entirely with Ian’s truly hide-bound reformism and pontificating in a totally fetishistic way for “workers democracy” that in practice will only keep workers tied and befuddled by parliamentary democracy.
As for the “I am so bored of all this” arguments from Viriato – it conjures up the hilarious image of the notorious, truly petty-bourgeois French intellectual sitting in a left-bank café, pained by existential angst and ennui, whose contribution to the struggle for Marxist leadership of the socialist revolution is a big fat zero.
But I also have to point out that Viriato is being completely self-contradictory in what he says. His comments are utterly confused. If you are against revolutionary talk and writing but also against trade unionism, reformism and “communists” what are you arguing for? Waiting for a political ‘giant’ to do it all? Why not raise your own game?
Surely the proletarian revolution rises for HISTORIC reasons and is far, far BIGGER than any self-preening ‘big name’ social-democrat, big shot trade union leader or celeb? (Russell Brand anyone?)
And what lies behind Ian’s and Viriato’s cynicism? Middle-class anti-communism that hates and fears the dictatorship of the proletariat and the October 1917 revolution but has to dress it up for workers’ consumption as “actually” only being hatred for Stalinism. Ian hails Trotskyite “permanent revolution” but this has achieved precisely NOTHING for the world’s workers, unlike Soviet and Leninist revolution which beat the NAZIs in WW2, won in China, won in Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea etc.
It is tragic that Moscow’s 1930s-1991 revisionism saw so many mistakes (as well as triumphs of socialist construction) and even worse that it ended in the Gorbachev liquidation of the CPSU and socialism. The EPSR has always argued against Moscow revisionism.
But Trotskyism hasn’t worked to remedy any of the problems for the world communist movement. Instead it has spewed up George Orwell-style fake ‘left’ anti-communism that has helped the West’s Cold War – before and after the end of the USSR.
Look at Ian’s comment again: he argues against anyone being an angry (if you like, Marx famously described himself as being angry at capitalism, especially when his boils played up) anti-capitalist revolutionary and instead is effectively supporting the tail-ending of workers’ typical bloody-awful (pro-imperialist) British trade unionist consciousness in the Labour party.
Pass the sick bag!
As for his line: “Why? Because invective and leftist rhetoric is not a revolutionary strategy.” Look at Lenin’s famous book “What is to be done?” – it is all about building support for the Iskra paper so he could build a party that would unleash his invective and leftist rhetoric against the Mensheviks across the vastness of benighted Tsarist Russia.
It was the winning line, and is the only winning line.
Down with petty-bourgeois cynicism and defeatism. Build Leninism.
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“The comments from Ian and Viriato above are nothing but small-minded petty-bourgeois cynicism intended to spread defeatism in the working class about world revolutionary socialist perspectives.”
This is just silly phrase-mongering and you have no world revolutionary socialist perspectives.
If you think workers democracy is the same thing as ‘pure democracy’ that marks you out as a Stalinist and thereby an opponent, even if unwitting (perhaps!) of the proletarian revolution. For the organisational locus of any proletarian revolution is independent organs of workers democracy. Without such organs, which were called Soviets in the three Russian revolutions in 1905, Feb and October 1917, no proletarian revolution is even possible. They who sneer at workers democracy and equate it with ‘pure’ bourgeois democracy will inevitably capitulate to bourgeois democracy and will defend it against the proletariat. That was the role of Stalinist terror in Spain: defending bourgeois democracy (i.e. the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) against workers democracy (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and the insurrectionary working class and peasant organs.
This is the programmatic trap Chris Barratt falls into. The same one that the CPGB’s Jack Conrad does as explained in our recent polemic about Labour Against the Witchhunt here. The difference is that whereas Jack Conrad moved from Stalinism partly towards Trotskyism but drew back, capitulating to bourgeois democracy through the Third Camp, Roy Bull’s Workers Party/ILWP/EPSR group abandoned Healy’s terribly deformed Trotskyoid centrism and embraced a deranged form of third period Stalinism, but marked by Healy’s own weaknesses.
The collolary is the same. Those who blur or dismiss the difference between bourgeois democracy and workers democracy will end up embracing the former, sooner or later.
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Ouh la la!
Well for an inmigrant worker defending reason against non sens I have had my lesson…
“Build Leninism” of course but how?
Jus preaching the triumphs of the anti colonialist mouvement, that went wrong some time later?
The question is not an sportif competition between “trotskism” (which I know not what exactly is. I know SF and Lutte Ouvrière, NPA and POI in France which in my opinion are not trotskists) and …I know not what you defend, but the need of clarification, explanation I can understand it.
Well, even if I understand your point of view against…(I can’t say trotskysm because SF is trotskist and till know they are fundamentally correct in every subject they treat).
As a matter of fact, myself has been for more than 50 years a “marxist-leninist” militant in Chile and in France, but I am not fully satisfied with the ML explanation of things.
Then, I have searched, red and compared and, I am forced to tell the truth, the best, the unique maxist leninist explanation of the whole thing has been done by…Trotsky. An IMHO, his learnings are usefull even today. Period.
but you could say, as me, Trotsky is not “trotskism”.
All your mistrust of “trotskism” (i know not what that means because as “MLs”, “maoists” and even revisionists today goes from the extreme right to the ultra left with very, very little cases of correct ones, SF is one of them till today as far as I know from afar.
As I say, I know only a right wing a center and a left wing of the worker’s movement and, sorry to say it, some distrust not only of the so called “trotskist” but also of the “MLs” and the maoist (they were not even able to celebrate the 100 day of the October Revolution because of theirs diferences going directyly to the individual level, here).
Then I think than better of looking for cutties on the heads of every one, better is to work on a common plateform of the left wing. That is, on a socialist program, based on a leninist perspective (trotskist for SF and theirs friends).
Recently I have had a mail with a Statement of revolutionary principles coming from SF that is OK with me fully.
Perhaps there could be some understanding on the base of this plateform.
Ah, next time put your insults out of the debate, they are very frequently the reflet of the fight between boutiquiers, translated in political disputes. Very petit bourgeois.
Sorry for the english.
V.
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One additional point that I should make is that when Chris Barratt plays lip service to the Soviets in his contribution, he negates their nature as organs of workers democracy by equating them with the various ‘triumphs’ of Stalinist regimes, that may have fought progressive battles against imperialism, but whuch also crushed and negated workers democracy. Which is largely why these regimes collapsed.
Socialism in one country is the expression of a privileged bureaucracy within a workers state that undermines it and crushes soviet democracy. It is analogous to, but not identical with, the labour bureaucracies in workers organisations such as unions, in situations where the proletariat does not hold power.
It does not lead to socialism but to a detour leading back to capitalism in due course. Only workers democracy can bring durable and irreversable gains for the working class. This is why every gain for workers democracy within workers orgsnisations, including the Labour Party, is a gain for the working class and every blow against it is a blow against the revolution.
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Ian’s comments above imply IMPROVING the Labour Party. To what end would this be?
This is not Marxism. This would be trying to reform reformism. Surely this is a totally hopeless and counter-productive approach.
I’ve already explained that Corbyn is just another continuation of the old, old game of Labour ‘leftism’ – the appearance, when in Opposition, of the Labour party “turning to the left” to fool the more backward workers and wide-eyed students (after more than 10 Labour governments that in practice front for capitalism, MI5, MI6 and all the Nato/Cold War/Western warmongering).
Corbyn’s efforts have been to attempt to resurrect the standing of despised parliamentary democracy after the Blair warmonger years, the MPs’ expenses fiddling, the MPs’ child abuse scandals, the MPs’ pay rise scandals, their lavish Westminster club lifestyle scandals etc while the poor are attacked by mass unemployment, zero hours contracts, Universal Credit, etc – and the total failure of the Labour party and trade unions to stop any of this.
Hence for the long-suffering and confused working class – as Viriato correctly explains – the disgust with the existing social-democratic leaderships and trade unions that call them out for demos that are INTENDED to achieve nothing.
So what is to be done?
What is LEADERSHIP in the working class?
Take a look at Greece.
There are hundreds of thousands of Greeks who would think of themselves as trade unionists, socialists, Marxists, Trotskyists, Stalinists etc – some may even present themselves as Leninists.
They have had an “anti-austerity” Syriza government made up of revisionists, socialists, Trotskyists and trade unionists. They promised much, and delivered nothing. They are just a big, fat embarrassment as human beings.
So why is Greece as much under the thumb of capitalism as ever?
Because it needs socialist revolution for anything to change. That means the building of a party that actually wants to do that.
That means Leninism, and as Lenin explains, “without revolutionary theory, there will be no revolutionary practice”.
What about the other matters that Ian and Viriato have raised? What about the role of Trotskyism, the importance of workers democracy, the nature of the Soviet Union, what its problems were, and the contribution to Marxism of Roy Bull, former leader of the Workers Party/International Leninist Workers Party and the EPSR?
To kill five birds with one stone, here’s a small extract from an article by Roy from back in July 2000:
“The most catastrophic mistake of all by the fake-‘left’, dominating the international workers movement – a mistake which makes them the permanent paralysed stooges of Western propaganda on the essential question of anti-imperialist struggle – is the imbecile delusion that the Soviet workers state ‘failed’ because of ‘a lack of democracy’. Firstly, it was not the workers state which failed at all. It was its leading philosophy which failed disastrously, deliberately handing the workers state over for destruction by dismantling the dictatorship of the proletariat [Under Gorbachev – Chris]. Secondly, it is utterly fanciful nonsense, closer to voodoo than Marxism, to speculate that practices closer to Western traditions of ‘party democracy’, – basically petty-bourgeois traditions, -would have saved the CPSU bureaucracy from its ultimate revisionist lunacy of liquidating its own state power.
“It makes utter gibberish of Marxist history to give credence to the barmy notion that Revisionism’s damage to the international workers movement should best be categorised as a leadership behaving bureaucratically or dictatorially, and that stricter observance of a more democratic set of standing orders for a revolutionary party is the essential question to worry about for solving the problem.
“In 100 volumes of the collected works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, an enormous part of which was devoted to the polemical defeat of Revisionist nonsense attempting to undermine, hold back, or mislead the understanding of the world being fought out in the First, Second and Third Internationals – it was the WRONG ANALYSIS and ideas of the Revisionist backsliders, misinterpreting capitalist society developments, which bore 99.99% of the Marxist-Leninist onslaught, not the undoubtedly arrogant and undemocratic disposition of these Revisionists, or their bureaucratic practice.
“Lassalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, Bernstein, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Trotsky, etc, may all have been the biggest ‘democracy’ hypocrites on earth, denouncing Marx, Engels, or Lenin for their allegedly ‘dictatorial ways’, etc, while being genuinely hostile to the true spirit of communist democracy and objective truth themselves.
“But denouncing such ‘democracy’ humbug hardly features at all in the classic Marxist-Leninist destruction of these false prophets. Always it was their utterly wrong leadership which they attempted to give the socialist movement about the correct assessment of the latest changes in the capitalist system and the class and national struggle internationally, and the perspectives for revolution – which Marxist science concentrated on.”
[…]
“The notion of the Bolshevik regime ‘protecting itself from the pressure of the working class’ is just sick slick meaninglessness from the phrasebook of anarchist philosophy, the longtime historic rival to Marxism in the workers movement, which dreamed that after capitalism was overthrown, there should be no more governments or leadership of any kind. It has been the childish mantra of ‘rank-and-file socialism’ dilettantes ever since.
“A government of communist leadership invariably tries to put pressure on the working class to change its ways, adopt new methods, respond to new challenges, and make even more sacrifices, etc, etc.
“Nearly 73 years of positive communist government in the Soviet Union led the working class to miraculous achievements. Just when, on what occasions, over what incidents, did communist government in the USSR ever identifiably or memorably ‘protect itself from the pressure of the working class’??? It is more pure anti-Marxist gibberish.”
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Sorry comrade Barret but I think we must not use concepts in whatever way is convinient to your argumentation, but truly, not as they factually are.
Can you define every ML group as really “marxist-léninists”? I cannot because they are so many in so many diferent postion in every complex issu of our poilitical life, that many of them could be defibned as “revisionnists”, “ultra-left” and so on, depending on the actual position they take in every case.
It goes the same for “trotskists”, “maoists”, enverhoxistes” and all the others refering themselves to the working class movement, to Lenin and Marx as a common base.
What can we really have as concepts? Right wing, center and left wing of the working class movement.
Another quite deferent question is wether Trotsky or Staline were right. This a factual question today easy to solve, but with at least two (I find not the words) backwards weights hanging on them. Because of the objective triumphs of the Soviet Union (more or less led by Staline) for some period (even if there are some critics also) and the defeat of nazism but mainly because of rock hard prejuidices that goes to the civil war between Stalinists and Trotskysts.
But today we need a sound theory to go in avance (further). I will take it from whoever or whatever party can give it. That’s the point today.
An over this point there is a special question: I have had some practice going to a severe defeat of the working class in Chile and seeing what are the MLs (or were because they are none today) and the so called “trotskyst” (LCR Pabloide, LO centrists, POI…I can’t define it in marxists terms).
Every one of these people going from the chilian PCR (ml) to LO (which I have known more) falls in the same anarcho-sindicalist trap. They preach quite correct generalities, make a very serious (in uinonists terms) union work and that’s all. In international matters (Libia, Siria for instance) they are centrists objectively supporting US imperialism.
They are incapables, as Mao Tse tung said “to join correct generalities to the particularites of the political fight” of the daily political fight. They do as anarchists has always have done: Call for the “great day” (with nuances, but in fact is this) and do union work in narrow union perspectives.
Having taken conciousness of this seriuos problem you please excuse my exabrupt againsts the ones who, in every ocasion, begin with theoretical and “principled” developpments (in fact not principled at all if we take real Lenin) and, with a langage known just by the happy few who knows the doxa, finish to annoy every willing person who would act or read something “a step forward” but not a mille out of his conciousness and/or his interest.
Otherwise, Marxists (Leninsts and trotskists alike) must go where the most advanced masses (of the working class) are. I know not Britain, but perhaps they are in the Labor Party and you must have a political work there (and perhaps outside. I don’t want to give counsels fort a reality I know very little).
These SF people are real marxist leninists (they call them trotskists). I think you should ask yourself why these people have always all correct, for a time now. Better is to try to work together in a United Front scheme than taking just the word trotskist for a fight and not what they really are for.
Have you any link to a blog or site to have a look to other of yours proposals?
V.
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What I actually said was: “There are hundreds of thousands of Greeks who would think of themselves as trade unionists, socialists, Marxists, Trotskyists, Stalinists etc – some may even present themselves as Leninists.”
“Who would think of themselves as…” are the operative words. What they really are in practice is, as Viriato says, a different matter.
But all these points about Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky do need to be DEBATED. It is the only way that the workers movement can re-educate itself into being an anti-imperialist revolutionary movement. Nobody is going to be able to sneak up on a modern, parliamentary democracy without all these problems of capitalist counter-revolutionary ANTI-COMMUNISM being thrown at the movement, to confuse, split and divide it.
I have tried to explain how Trotskyism as a philosophy is a version of George Orwell’s anti-Sovietism in practice, and how “workers democracy” arguments both support rotten capitalist parliamentary democracy and, as Roy Bull explains above, are the watchwords of anarchism against the proletarian dictatorship – whether the USSR or the struggle for Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leadership are being talked about.
I am really glad to hear that Viriato recognises the achievements of the Soviet workers state – that is the foundation for at least some sanity on the topic.
No Leninist thinking needs to support anything that went wrong in the Soviet state leadership’s thinking at any time. It’s the workers state that has to be defended, not Stalinist revisionism. It’s a matter of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
As for my various comments NOT being of any leadership use whatsoever as alleged by Ian, I’d like to point out that the world’s reaction to Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Zionland’s capital has precisely drawn the profound reaction I predicted (the mark of objective, scientific leadership) – with furious hatred for Trump on Third World streets (Jakarta etc), the Western countries split on the issue, and the Arab world and the Palestinians in uproar against the PLO bourgeois traitors, such as Abbas.
Abbas’s line of “peace talks officiated by the USA, two-state solution, and no fight against Zionland required” has been blown out of the water. Abbas and all his cronies are now right in the firing line.
Decades of utter lying pacifist garbage have gone down in flames, and the Western world is scared silly that this level of destroying their “freedom, justice and democracy” bullshit is a very bad lesson to give to the planet.
To be fair to Ian, he hinted at such developments and further suggested that the Zionists would look in the future to the demolition of Islamic sacred sites in Jerusalem which would inflame the conflict immeasurably. That this line of thought about cultural genocide occurs to all Palestinians too is seen in their furious upsurge.
And when it comes to spreading the word and trying to draw a response from workers and activists, which Ian claims is impossible for me (Communist Revolution) and the EPSR because of our “subjective ranting” I have just had a notable success in discussing with seven members of RCG at the pro-Palestine demo this week at the US Embassy – taking them up for “condemning terror” as discussed above.
They responded in a very reasonable way and all wanted to shake my hand and take papers – even though I’d been firmly going over what treachery it is to “condemn terror” that is a response to Western bombing and brutality even when perpetrated by confused jihadis (while never supporting non-Marxist ideologies).
I am also completely open to further debate and meetings to go through all matters of concern to the workers movement. I do discuss with members of Socialist Fight, NCP, etc. I have already contributed to united front work over the defence of anti-fascist forces in eastern Ukraine, for example.
As I’ve said, trying to sort out all these vexed questions around the attempt to build Marxism is the ONLY way to go to build a Leninist party, as well as approaching workers on all world revolutionary issues (ie not talking down to them).
Or put it this way, to further have a go at Ian’s “workers democracy is the only thing that counts” argument, I was there talking to those RCGers with no hindrance to what I wanted to say. The question was: what should be said?
What analysis would give any leadership towards the building of a Leninist party and the eventual seizure of power? I did my best to do that.
I have spoken numerous times at Weekly Worker and Socialist Appeal conferences recently. There was no real problem with getting to speak (which makes a change!) – the REAL PROBLEM is that these activists are so ill-educated in Marxism that they believe the most shallow anti-communist nonsense about the jihadist revolt, Trotsky’s role in the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Catalonia, the nature of the USSR etc.
And all round they suffer from completely anti-Marxist, anti-proletarian dictatorship notions that are the TYPICAL level of understanding of middle class, Western-educated students.
As Lenin said, we need to raise our game to educate these activists (if they are the real deal as left-wingers, and not fakers) in genuine Marxism.
The EPSR website is epsr.org.uk and when the next paper is out (next week) it will focus on what Trump’s move means for US fascist warmongering and the world balance of class forces – and the state of play in the battle for socialist revolution to end capitalism on this beautiful blue planet.
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