The bombing of La Moneda on September 11, 1973, by the Chilean Armed Forces.

A wealth tax is a transitional demand. Together with windfall taxes on the super profits of transnational corporations, increasing corporation taxes and seriously targeting moving vast sums abroad to tax havens to avoid tax at home implies the beginnings of a rejection of the neo-liberal agenda of Regan and Thatcher, begun at the ‘other’ 9/11, the Chile coup of September 11, 1973. Back in 2016 John McDonnell said that the City of London is seen as a “tax haven” at the centre of a worldwide system designed to help the super-rich avoid paying tax, as he called for an independent inquiry into the Panama Papers. But when he was the shadow chancellor following the big success of Labour in the 2017 election, he became very anxious to placate the City of London, and he stopped all that foolish leftism – he also apologised for a sympathetic remarks he made about the IRA.

After all this was what the 1945 Labour government did, despite its appalling record of class collaboration with Winston Churchill in alliance with the CPGB Stalinists, then in full popular front alliance with capitalism as spelled out in the Yalta conference, guarantying capitalism’s survival in Europe by crushing revolutionary upsurges in France and in seven other countries and accepting dominance for Stalin where the so-called red army was in control. This meant that revolutionary uprisings in Warsaw, in Czechoslovakia, Greece, Vietnam and most shamefully in Northern Italy were betrayed. Tito attempted to support the Greek working class much to Stalin’s displeasure, but in Northern Italy the working class, led by communists, liberated many cities only to be bombed by the Allies.

Stalin’s hack, Togliatti, even entered a government led by the fascist Pietro Badoglio, From April 1944 to June 1945, he was both a minister without portfolio and Deputy Prime Minister of Italy under Badoglio (April–December 1944). To enforce the Salerno Turn and the alliance of the PCI, socialists, liberals and Christian Democrats he then proceeded to expel and assassinate the naïve communists, the Communist Movement of Italy, MCd’I. They were under the impression that Stalin was still a revolutionary socialist like the 1917 Bolsheviks because, under illegality, they had not experienced the popular front degeneration turn of 1934-5 and thought they could repeat the Russian Revolution. Of course, as in Greece, they were falsely accused of ‘Trotskyism’ and allying with the fascists.  In the Morning Star letters page Trotskyist renegade Ollie Coxhead defend these appalling acts of class treachery. The Trotskyists were the leading forces seeking revolution and the Stalinists even collaborated with the Nazis to murder them. David Broder, in his excellent book, The Rebirth of Italian Communism, 1943–44: Dissidents in German-Occupied Rome (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), tells this story in great detail.

So, we have arrived at the reason for the CPGB’s reluctance to advocate a wealth tax; it would unleash the downtrodden working class who would then be open to the demand for the expropriation of the capitalists and a workers’ government. A workers uprising is the US, UK, EU is inevitable, despite the Democrats, the Labour party, Social Democrats and trade union bureaucracy attempts to stop it as they betrayed the 2023 strike wave.  Like John McDonnell’s retreat from his 1916 anti-capitalism Timothy Garton Ash tells us that what The Spirit of Churchill and De Gaulle: we need that now in The Guardian March 11. Stalin and the communist parties all agreed back then.

Jack Conrad seeks to marginalise these historical lessons by telling us that under socialism and communism it is democracy that will wither away and not the state, the true Marxist position. This is tied to the confusion about extreme democracy, which they imply is simply and extreme version of capitalist democracy and not its complete opposite, soviet or workers’ democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat. There was no democracy for capitalist parties or publications under the Bolsheviks after January 1918 as the soviets took control and imposed the new mode of production for human need and not profit.

It is true that with the decline of the soviets the Bolsheviks we obliged to substitute the party for the workers’ councils after the 1921 famine and the Kronstadt failed colour evolution, but that was because of the huge death rates of the vanguard of the class in the civil war and the failure of the revolution to spread to Europe and Germany.

In 1948 Ted Grant wrote an article pointing out that it was a great difficulty for Stalin to deal with the communists in Czechoslovakia and impose his corrupt bureaucracy there because of the far more experienced class struggle vanguard there. In Czechoslovakia: The Issues Involved he quotes Trotsky in 1939 in support of the degenerated workers’ state theory, “This measure, revolutionary in character – ‘the expropriation of the expropriators’ – is in this case achieved in a military-bureaucratic fashion. The appeal to independent activity on the part of the masses in the new territories – and without such an appeal, even if worded with extreme caution it is impossible to constitute a new regime – will on the morrow undoubtedly be suppressed by ruthless police measures in order to assure the preponderance of the bureaucracy over the awakened revolutionary masses…” (USSR in War, September 1939).

The replies to SPEW member Joseph O’Connor Meldau at the Communist Forum on 23 March all miss the central problem with the politics of that group. That is, they believe we can achieve socialism via a left Labour Government or an adequate TUSC-led substitute via an Enabling Act in parliament without the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state itself. Ted Grant in 1948 was a qualitatively different to his legacy in SPEW 2025.

In Trump’s US what we are seeing is the construction of a fascist state with the strong possibility of a civil war with the abolishing of the constitution. In 1991, George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, now the most senior Supreme court judge and a believer in the original purpose of all Supreme Courts judgements and amendments to that constitution. One recent commentator cited him as the central character who would defend the constitution. But black man Thomas cited the shocking Dred Scott 1857 judgement, that black people were not citizens and could never escape slavery, which sparked the Civil War, in justification of the 2022 abolition of the right to abortion contained in the Roe Vs Wade 1973 judgement.

We are seeing the construction of a fascist state in the US, to be followed by Germany and elsewhere if it is not defeated. And, contrary to Jack, we do have substantial Blackshirts and Brownshirts in the US now, the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys etc particularly after Trump’s pardoning those who attempted the 6 January 1921 coup, which did have the support of key parts of the Home Guard and US Army and come close to success. His replacement of leading army, CIA/FBI figures and judges with his own supporters shows he has advanced plans to abolish elections in the US.

Neither Mussolini nor Hitler came to power solely with the support of these street thugs. After the President George H.W. Bush meets with embattled Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in the Oval Office on Oct. 10, 1991. | Dennis Cook/AP Photo, he was allowed to abolish the constitution by the King. Similarly, Hitler came to power constitutionally and on June 30, 1934, completed the construction of the fascist state by executing the leaders of the Strasserite movement, who sought a second, socialist, revolution after getting rid of the Jews, who allegedly represented finance capital. Ernst Rhom, the Brownshirt leader, was executed despite Hitler’s opposition because the Gestapo, the state terrorist now replaced these.

Gerry Downing Socialist Fight