They mistake the rump of the working class for its head

In the Economic & Philosophic Science Review No 1536 for 8^th June 2018 [1] Don Hoskins has another go at replying to Socialist Fight, having replied on EPSR No 1532 on 31^st March to the Socialist Fight critique of EPSR No 130: EPSR: Stalinism and the utter confusion of Don Hoskins. [2]

In that reply we concentrated on Don’s assertion that Sinn Féin had struck a great blow for anti-imperialism by defeating the British empire via the Good Friday Agreement. We tried to introduce ideas of communist methodology on the United Front and the Transitional Programme, the differences between oppressed and oppressor nations, basic class concepts like bourgeois nationalism and Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution.  These concepts were totally absent from Don’s narrative as see here:

“It (Gerry Adam’s Sinn Fein!) remains the most outstanding political party of anti-imperialist achievement in the entire Western world, but it has no answer at all to the far more complex socialist revolutionary challenge facing Western civilisation as a whole. Worse than that, Sinn Féin has no allegiance whatever to building a party of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and becomes a bad role model at that point of future development.”

Surely a statement of such monumental political confusion that we have to retreat several political paces to begin the reply. Sinn Féin has morphed from a petit bourgeois nationalist party to a straight bourgeois nationalist party in Ireland. It belongs to a different class, moreover, one which has now completely repudiated all struggle against imperialism and become one of its junior agents in Ireland. The sight on 14 June of Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill, SF leader and deputy leader, welcoming Prince Charles, the Commander in Chief of the Parachute regiment that murdered the 14 peaceful demonstrators in Derry on 31 January 1972, into Cork City hall under the Butcher’s Apron and holding private meetings with him, would turn the stomach of every serious anti-imperialist.

“On top of all that, the SF role model for revolutionary socialist political struggle in Britain gets several crucial points completely wrong.”

Of course, they never had such a model and never attempted one, they belong to the capitalist class and could never aspire to overthrow those of the same class as themselves, openly acknowledged as such by the GFA, as we pointed out in our previous reply. The fish cannot ride the bicycle and nobody except Don Hoskins thinks it can.

Communist Methodology

But we wish to concentrate this reply on communist methodology, on the United Front of Marx and Engels, on Lenin and the Bolsheviks and on Trotsky’s development of it, the Transitional Programme of 1938 and the Transitional Method embodied in the document.

It is impossible to educate the whole class on the necessity to make the revolution. Whatever progress we might make in times of heightened class struggle is lost again as the class falls back in defeat and again accepts bourgeois ideology, to a greater or lesser extent, consequent on the relations of production – they have to sell their labour power to the capitalist to survive; consequently, the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.  This is the source of what Marx calls “the muck of ages:

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” [3]

But Don Hoskins will have none of all this. For the EPSR, who are the most Healy-like in their catastrophism, which Healy learned from the post WWII James Cannon’s American Theses, the revolution or counter-revolution is upon us now and the world economy is going to collapse in the next five minutes, we must adopt the very non-revolutionary tactic of mass educating the masses against prejudices against immigrants, which we will deal with later:

“The only hope of a solution to this threat is a massive education-drive to explain the degenerate rottenness of the whole capitalist system and society … But this is the one thing that the ‘politically correct’ hordes, wagging a finger at racist backwardness, will make certain is not said and never explained.” [4]

Press conference to launch News Line 1976. Pictured John Spencer, Royston Bull, Alex Mitchell & Stephen John

Don does not consider who might perform this task and how we might train and assemble sufficient numbers of these teachers, properly qualified and dedicated to accomplishing this massive task of “explain(ing) the degenerate rottenness of the whole capitalist system and society”. Marx himself can now be counted amongst the ‘politically correct’ hordes of shirkers from this impossible task. Of course, following Marx, Marxists have understood since 1845, that, whilst socialism via mass education and voting its representatives into parliament to implement radical reforms amounting to socialism, as the 19^th century Red Republicans aspired to, is impossible, fortunately neither is it a precondition for revolution. Trotsky explains here that it is struggle and not education that wins the masses to action and the party must then politically educate the vanguard; the old difference between theory and practice, between agitation for the masses and propaganda for the vanguard.

“Independence from the influence of the bourgeoisie cannot be a passive state. It can express itself only by political acts, that is, by the struggle against the bourgeoisie. This struggle must be inspired by a distinct program which requires organisation and tactics for its application. It is the union of program, organisation, and tactics that constitutes the party. In this way, the real independence of the proletariat from the bourgeois government cannot be realised unless the proletariat conducts its struggle under the leadership of a revolutionary and not an opportunist party. The epigones of syndicalism would have one believe that the trade unions are sufficient by themselves. Theoretically, this means nothing, but in practice it means the dissolution of the revolutionary vanguard into the backward masses, that is, the trade unions.” [5]

But the vanguard is found not only in trade unions and in the centrist and radical leftist, including Stalinist, parties but also in the mass social democratic organisation of the class. Proclaiming these as simply capitalist/Imperialist parties is one sided and wrong. If we take the British Labour party as an example, that is historically built by the trade unions, albeit by the trade union bureaucracy because the Liberals had betrayed them repeatedly. The working class, in the main, vote Labour and most of trade union members pay the political levy to the party.  Here is Lenin in August 1920:

“Comrades Gallacher and Sylvia Pankhurst cannot … refute the fact that, in the ranks of the Labour Party, the British Socialist Party enjoys sufficient freedom to write that certain leaders of the Labour Party are traitors; that these old leaders represent the interests of the bourgeoisie; that they are agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement. They cannot deny all this because it is the absolute truth. When Communists enjoy such freedom, it is their duty to join the Labour Party if they take due account of the experience of revolutionaries in all countries, not only of the Russian revolution (for here we are not at a Russian congress but at one that is international). Comrade Gallacher has said ironically that in the present instance we are under the influence of the British Socialist Party. That is not true; it is the experience of all revolutions in all countries that has convinced us. We think that we must say that to the masses. The British Communist Party must retain the freedom necessary to expose and criticise the betrayers of the working class, who are much more powerful in Britain than in any other country. That is readily understandable. Comrade Gallacher is wrong in asserting that by advocating affiliation to the Labour Party we shall repel the best elements among the British workers. We must test this by experience.” [6]

The political writings of left communist Sylvia Pankhurst were on class, women, communism and fascism.

Lenin and after his death Trotsky, never wavered from this orientation to Labour in Britain. Here is Lenin in 1916 again spelling out the correct United Front tactics so scorned by Don and the EPSR:

“But on the other hand, every imperialist “Great” Power can and does bribe smaller strata (than in England in 1848–68) of the “labour aristocracy”. Formerly a “bourgeois labour party”, to use Engels’s remarkably profound expression, could arise only in one country, because it alone enjoyed a monopoly, but, on the other hand, it could exist for a long time. Now a “bourgeois labour party” is inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries; but in view of the desperate struggle they are waging for the division of spoils it is improbable that such a party can prevail for long in a number of countries. For the trusts, the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc., while enabling the bribery of a handful in the top layers, are increasingly oppressing, crushing, ruining and torturing the mass of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat.” [7]

We would add that today these “bourgeois labour parties” exist also in the semi-colonial world, where servants of imperialism via the national bourgeoisie also buy off the top layers of the workers and separate out a layer of servants for the interests of imperialism. The Workers Party in Brazil and the ANC in South Africa, the Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India (Marxist) are clear examples. Of the imperialist countries only the USA does not have a mass social democratic “bourgeois labour party” and of the advanced semi-colonies, only Argentina has not got at least one. Continental Africa and South East Asia have many nations who are too oppressed by imperialism and local despots to have mass bourgeois labour parties, but even here the bourgeois nationalists value the collaboration of leaders of the trade unions to keep the workers in check. Argentina and Ireland, to take two examples, do not have mass bourgeois labour parties because Argentina has the Peronist movement, which had a certain anti-imperialist orientation to win the workers to its trade unions and in Ireland the Irish Labour party effectively sided with the British agents led by Michael Collins by taking no side in the Civil War of 1922-23 and so anti-imperialist workers supported Sinn Féin and then Fianna Fáil, after its founding in 1927, in the main.

We must orient to them in imperialist countries via the United Front tactic and in the semi-colonial world via the Anti Imperialist United Front, entering the Bourgeois labour parties and even the revolutionary petty-bourgeois nationalist parties who are really fighting imperialism when possible and tactically advantageous as advocated so strongly by Lenin and the revolutionary Comintern in its first four revolutionary, congresses.

A head and a rump

Politically speaking the working class, in crude terms, has a head and a rump, as have most living organisms. The EPSR never countenances any tactical orientation to the working class via head, its vanguard, at all, in fact it is to its rump, the most backward and supine ideological victims of capitalist oppression and imperialist propaganda that, again and again, they orient and take as typical of the whole class.  And moreover, some sections of the class may be infected with pessimism and reaction at one point and those same sections may later lead the class struggle at a later point. We must not patronise their reactionary moods, excuse them or alibi them but fight them openly lest they become permanent and whole sections goes over to the class enemy.

Trotsky explains in his 1939 work, Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism, that a “centralized organization of the vanguard” is necessary not only for revolution but to guide the revolutionary state post-revolution, and not just mass education, which is only possible post revolution:

“Victor Serge has disclosed in passing what caused the collapse of the Bolshevik party: excessive centralism, mistrust of ideological struggle, lack of freedom loving (“libertaire”, in reality anarchist) spirit. More confidence in the masses, more freedom! All this is outside time and space. But the masses are by no means identical: there are revolutionary masses, there are passive masses, there are reactionary masses. The very same masses are at different times inspired by different moods and objectives. It is just for this reason that a centralized organization of the vanguard is indispensable. Only a party, wielding the authority it has won, is capable of overcoming the vacillation of the masses themselves.” [8]

The vanguard of the class quickly finds a political home in one centrist or radical reformist group or another because they understand that they can only make progress by uniting with likeminded radicals like themselves. Some are subjectively socialist revolutionaries, others seek radical reformist change in favour of the working class but our attitude to all of them should be to see them as comrades, despite the miseducation the centrists and reformist give them. And always to engage in united front work with them on issues that affect the whole class, housing, unemployment and disability benefits, student loans and fees, pensions, wages and conditions, special oppression, etc. No rejecting joint work and struggle ever because that is to put the narrow sectional interests of a party or group before the interests of the class as a whole, a practice which most left groups are guilty of.

We must not regard rival political groups as the scum of the earth, as all cults do, the old WRP of Gerry Healy, its present-day descendants in the WRP/News Line, the SEP of David North, the “Spart family” (ICL/IBT/LFI), the AWL, Socialist Resistance and the larger centrists in Britain, the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. The smaller they are the more cultist and defensive they are, forbidding their member from talking to, left alone engaging in joint actions with other leftists. The properly operated United Front orientation does not mean you do not engage in sharp polemics with those tendencies; approximately 50% of the texts in the 45 volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works are polemics against opponents within the Bolshevik party and other tendencies and groups in the workers’ movement and outside it. The website of the Socialist Fight is full of such polemics. But that reflects political and nor person hostility to comrades who have devoted their lives to serving the cause of revolutionary socialism or at least advancing the situation of the working class with methods and politics they judged best.

of course, all serious socialists advocate open borders, welcome immigrants and fight the anti-immigrant bigotry of sections of the working class

The pure but backward working class

Having dismissed all the advanced, if misguided, worker’s leaders now the EPSR seek out the pure working class and alibi their backwardness. In EPSR no 1530 there is another purple passage where Don defends anti-immigrant prejudices in the working class:

“The obvious issue above all else is immigration and/or migrant workers, blamed by much of the indigenous working class (mainly white but including a range of mostly second and third generation migrants) for the difficulties they face.

“And once unemployment starts to rise and there are not enough jobs to go around of any description, how are longer-established residents expected to react when hard-to-come-by jobs start going to ‘economic migrant’ newcomer ‘foreigners’???? How are longer-established residents likely to respond to the ‘explanation’ that “these poor people have only come here to better themselves”, especially in an ‘advanced’ and ‘sophisticated’ a country of extravagant consumerism such as Britain where mindless unserious smut, advertising gimmicks, and trashy pop music are relentlessly heaped on people’s heads as ‘culture’ to try to guarantee that there is no room for the tiniest scrap of political philosophy in anyone’s brain????

“The worst way to fight this diversion is to denounce workers for racism. All that this does is take everyone’s eye off the main issue more than ever. Reactionary ‘political correctness’ is the Council of Europe’s sinister game. The hypocritical ‘moral’ pressure on ordinary people to feel guiltily ‘xenophobic’ because they react enviously and politically backwardly to what they see as ‘foreigners’ taking their jobs is almost certain to drive more and more of the poor, lumpen, and petty-bourgeois minded into the arms of the nationalists like the BNP.

The only hope of a solution to this threat is a massive education-drive to explain the degenerate rottenness of the whole capitalist system and society … But this is the one thing that the ‘politically correct’ hordes, wagging a finger at racist backwardness, will make certain is not said and never explained.

Changing Britain’s immigration laws is pure reformism and not ‘revolutionary’ at all, no matter how apparently extreme the “no immigration controls at all” academic posture might seem … A socialist revolution in Britain would have the immediate clear internationalist duty, – as posturingly accepted by both the SA and the SLP, – to instantly start helping every other nation on earth to achieve their own socialist revolution. Tens of thousands don’t like life in Kosovo, or Iraq, or Sudan, or Nigeria, or Bangladesh, etc, etc????? Fine, great. So instantly equip them with training, revolutionary education, and material support for an organised return to their homelands to fight for a revolutionary improvement in conditions there. (our emphasis)

So, do not accuse racist workers so being racist because they will only make them more racist. Do not challenge their ideas sharply because “how are longer-established residents expected to react when hard-to-come-by jobs start going to ‘economic migrant’ newcomer ‘foreigners’????”. These workers, almost 100% Brexit and Ukip voters, now rallied behind the 10- 15,000-strong neo-fascist Democratic Football Lads Alliance march on 9^th June and would have surely killed many of the smaller 300-strong antifascist opposition if the police had not protected us. “Education” will not stop the rise of the far right, mass mobilisation and physical force is now needed to establish the rights of the working class against these lumpen elements. And quoting Scargill’s advice about what a future revolutionary government would do – “send them back” can be read as a nod and a wink to Thatcher then. Is it also a nod and a wink to Theresa May by Don to send them back NOW! He needs to make clear that this is not his view but unfortunately, he has made it clear that they are not welcome now, so it really is a legitimate inference to take – pandering to the rump of the working class!

There is even an attack on the Rohingya and a defence of the genocidal Myanmar regime in EPSR No 1520 in order to appear sympathetic to workers with racial prejudices:

“Whatever “atrocities” there might be, in this situation they are on both sides and certainly not the sole or even main responsibility of the nationalist regime; its response might be heavy-handed, but it has been provoked by initial murderous attacks of a “separatist” movement on not one but half a dozen police stations and military bases, killing many and triggering the whole of this latest crisis. But the real issue is that the subsequent conflict is being inflated out of all proportion by a Western media campaign of hype and even outright fabrication, with ludicrous hysteria about “genocide”.”

Wikipedia reports:

“The 2017 Rohingya persecution in Myanmar began on 25 August of that year when the Myanmar military forces and local Buddhist extremists started attacking the Rohingya people and committing atrocities against them in the country’s north-west Rakhine state. The atrocities included attack on Rohingya people and locations, looting and burning down Rohingya villages, mass killing of Rohingya civilians, gang rapes, and other sexual violence. Using statistical extrapolations (based on six pooled surveys conducted with a total of 2,434 Rohingya refugee households in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh,) Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) estimated in December 2017 that during the persecution, the military and the local Buddhists killed at least 10,000 Rohingya people. 354 Rohingya villages in Rakhine state were reported as burned down and destroyed, as well as the looting of many Rohingya houses, and widespread gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against the Rohingya Muslim women and girls. The military drive also displaced a large number of Rohingya people and made them refugees. According to the United Nations reports, as of January 2018, nearly 690,000 Rohingya people had fled or had been driven out of Rakhine state who then took shelter in the neighbouring Bangladesh as refugees. In December, two Reuters journalists who had been covering the Inn Din massacre event were arrested and imprisoned.”

I suppose we could call that “heavy-handed” and put quotation marks around “genocide” if we wanted to take an extreme position no one else in the world agreed with to consolidate a sect of two. It doesn’t seem to have worked. The logic is the mass media always lie to us, they must be lying now despite all the evidence against, let us be the first to spot this fraud. Well, Jack the Ripper got a bad press too, so he must have been innocent. Pitching towards Islamophobia by rubbishing the appalling suffering of this Muslim minority is a shocking tactic. And the pattern of ethnic cleansing and genocide by Myanmar has a long history, inherited from the British Empire’s divide and rule tactics.

In October 2016, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), under the name Harakah al-Yaqin, claimed responsibility for attacks on Burmese border posts along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, which left 9 border officers and 4 soldiers dead. The ARSA was only founded in 2013 as a defence group against these murderous assaults, ongoing since the British left Burma in 1948.

Various engagements have happened since then, with the Buddhist chauvinist Myanmar regime claiming to have killed scores of rebels and claiming that the ARSA have also killed scores. No mention is made of the 10,000 slaughtered civilians or the 690,000 refugees, who had to flee for their lives into Bangladesh. This is clearly a Palestinian/Israel type conflict with a massive imbalance of forces and overkill by the Myanmar army intent on genocide. For instance, in July 2017, the Burmese government accused ARSA of murdering 34 to 44 civilians and kidnapping 22 others in reprisal attacks against those ARSA have perceived as government collaborators. ARSA denied the accusations. The Gaza pattern is obvious. To defend this in any way is absolutely shocking.  [9]

Reply to the Socialist Fight

In EPSR No 1536 Don Hoskins attempts a reply to the Socialist Fight Stalinism and the utter confusion of Don Hoskins.

He takes a long quote from our article and then proceeds to attack it, first on the question of socialism in a single country. Of course, you had socialism in the USSR if socialism was whatever Stalin said and did; Harold Wilson claimed socialism was whatever the post-war Labour party did. And when was this achieved? By 1936 it seemed equality of opportunity had been achieved because that is the definition of the first stage and from that, we can go on to full communism, social, economic and material equality on the basis of the production of the superabundance of wealth. 1936 is just five years after the great famine which took some seven million lives mainly in Ukraine as a result of the forced collectivisation embarked on after 1928.

By then the Right Opposition were defeated; they were Stalin’s allies against the Left Opposition led by Trotsky up to then. Certainly, no equality of opportunity for the victims of that outrageous bureaucratic imposition. The Left Opposition had advocated planned industrialisation and gradual collectivisation, but Stalin and Bukharin laughed it off as foolish idealism. “Enrich yourselves” Bukharin infamously encouraged the rich peasantry, the Kulak, until they turned on the working class by withholding grain from the cities to force the price up in 1928, making an intervention inevitable.

In 1936, when the USSR was supposedly embarking on the second stage, full communism, Stalin introduced a new, semi-bourgeois constitution and that year also saw the beginning of the Great Purges and the Moscow Trials. The opening of the Kremlin archives in recent years revealed that from 1936-1938 1,548,366 were arrested, of whom 681,692 were shot, over 1,000 a day. There was no war, no internal revolts only mass terror in which the all the remaining members of Lenin’s Central Committee were executed, apart from Alexandra Kollontai and Trotsky, to be assassinated on Stalin’s orders in August 1940. The world’s working class naturally concluded that if this was socialism and communism they certainly did not want that.

But then Don tells us that, “Certainly, this was hampered by the weakness and errors of Stalinist leadership, and there was a retreat by Moscow from revolutionary perspectives identifiable in Embryo even in the 1920s”

Well if you want to find out what these “weaknesses and errors” were read Trotsky on the subject, Lessons of October, The Third International after Lenin, the first five years of the Communist International. But this is all “counterrevolutionary bile”. How’s this for a piece of “counterrevolutionary bile”?

Molotov and Stalin, justifying the Stalin-Hitler pact.

On October 31, 1939, Vyacheslav Molotov delivered a report on the foreign policy of the USSR, which is best known for his words about Poland and recognition of the joint aggression with Germany:

“It turned out to be sufficient for a short blow to Poland from the German army first and then the Red Army so that nothing remained of this ugly child of the Treaty of Versailles, who lived by the oppression of non-Polish nationalities.

But much more interesting is the defence of National Socialism as an ideology:

“In connection with these important changes in the international situation? some of the old formulas that we used not so long ago – to which many are so used to – are clearly outdated and now inapplicable. We must realize this in order to avoid major mistakes in assessing the new political situation in Europe.

“During the last few months such concepts as ‘aggression’ and ‘aggressor’ have acquired a new concrete content, have taken on another meaning…Now…it is Germany that is striving for a quick end to the war, for peace, while England and France, who only yesterday were campaigning against aggression, are for continuation of the war and against concluding a peace. Roles, as you see, change…The ideology of Hitlerism, like any other ideological system, can be accepted or rejected – that is a matter of one’s political views. But everyone can see that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force…Thus it is not only senseless, it is criminal to wage such a war as a war for ‘the destruction of Hitlerism,’ under the false flag of a struggle for democracy.”

But again, the most shocking thing is not the cover-up of past historical crimes of Stalinism but the attitude to the oppressed and the glib acceptance of national chauvinism. In another purple passage, Don defends the mass rape of German women by the so-called Red Army at the end of WWII. First Don, who does not attempt to deny it happened, pleads context, as Stalin did, “the long, casualty-filled and exhausting sweep of the Red Army across Germany”. Stalin asked, “Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?” [10]  Djilas was a Yugoslav, Tito’s partisans were allied with the USSR, and he was complaining about the Red Army mass raping Yugoslavian women.

We again suggest that the world’s working classes were not impressed by this warm tribute to the Nazis. Upwards of two million German women were raped in the last months of WWII. Politically it was because Stalin made the war “the Great Patriotic War”, i.e. a war between nations and not classes, the goal of October 1917 was well and truly dead in his political outlook by 1939.  He labelled all Germans as Nazis, equally guilty as Hitler himself. And outrageously Dom Hosking take this view too:

“Even if this were true, such rape revenge would pale into insignificance compared to what the fury and anger could have unleashed – as one commentator said it is lucky that every single German was not slaughtered”.

What abysmal uncultured social values are contained in that comment. What a shocking and appalling contrast to how Trotsky led the Red Army, no reports of mass rape here, only open revolutionary propaganda “rise up against your oppressors, we have come to liberate you”. No such revolutionary orientation from Stalin’s “Red Army” – counter-revolution and mass rape were its goal, putting down revolutions in Warsaw in August 1944 and in Czechoslovak shortly after, and betraying revolutions in Northern Italy and Greece to consolidate his alliance with Roosevelt and Churchill. In full accord with the self-same policy in Spain’s revolution of 1936-39 which Stalin betrayed by mass executing the Trotskyist and Anarchist revolutionaries because Spain could not have a socialist revolution because Churchill and Roosevelt would not approve.

Lastly, the comment on what might happen in Israel/Palestine after a putative successful revolution which allowed the Palestinians to return is truly shocking also. Remember that old men and women and children defended Berlin to the last against the Red Army because they never came as liberators, but oppressors and they knew the fate that would befall them if they lost. Similarly, if we pose as oppressors of the Jewish working class they too are obliged to fight to the last and not welcome us as liberators. Don takes issue with Tony Greenstein because, while he is for the destruction of the state of Israel, he does not want to drive out all the Jews. “so where will they “continue to live”, Don asks rhetorically, “and how and on what?” And that sounds to me and will sounds to all Jews as a demand for a new Holocaust. Whilst Don’s ultra-leftism allows his to oppose the “left anti-Semitism” campaign he refuses to support any of the actual cases of this being put into practice because, you know, Livingstone, Walker, Greenstein, and Wadsworth are terrible scoundrels who deserve what they get and we could not possibly support them. This amounts to support for the Zionist attacks. And his determination to ethnically cleanse all Jews from Israel/Palestine is also back-handed support for Zionism; it is vilely reactionary.

Notes

[1] The Economic & Philosophic Science Review No 1536  http://www.epsr.org.uk/

[2] Stalinism and the utter confusion of Don Hoskins https://socialistfight.com/2018/03/20/epsr-stalinism-and-the-utter-confusion-of-don-hoskins/

[3] Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)

[4] Don Hoskins, EPSR No 1530

[5] Leon Trotsky, Communism and Syndicalism, (October 1929), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/unions/3-commsyn.htm

[6] Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Thirteenth Session, August 6 1920, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch13.htm

[7] V. I.   Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, October 1916, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm

[8] Leon Trotsky, Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism, Peddlers of Indulgences and Their Socialist Allies, or the Cuckoo in a Strange Nest, (June 1939), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/06/moral.htm

[9] Rohingya persecution in Myanmar refers to a recurring pattern of persecution of the Rohingya people, a largely Muslim group in Myanmar. Examples include:

1. Rohingya conflict, a series of ongoing violent clashes in northern Rakhine State, Myanmar.
2. Arakan massacres in 1942, commonly regarded as the event that started the conflict.
3. 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis, a mass migration of Rohingya people from Myanmar and Bangladesh, due in part to the conflict.
4. 2016 Rohingya persecution in Myanmar.
5. 2017 Rohingya persecution in Myanmar, which included:
6. Gu Dar Pyin massacre, Massacre of Rohingya people by the Myanmar Army on 27 August 2017.
7. Inn Din massacre, Massacre of Rohingya people by the Myanmar Army on 30 August 2017.
8. Tula Toli massacre, Massacre of Rohingya people by the Myanmar Army on 2 September 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_persecution_in_Myanmar

[10] Conversations with Stalin (1963) by Milovan Djilas, p. 95