Friday, May 31, 2019

The Browning of the Left Part Two: ALEXANDER DUGIN AND THE RISE OF ‘POLITICALLY CORRECT’ FASCISM by Dan Glazebrook



Dugin, clever dickhead posing as a threat to US imperialism but ultimately sharing its goals

Alexander Dugin is quite possibly, after Steve Bannon, the most influential fascist in the world today. His TV station reaches over 20 million people, and the dozens of thinktanks, journals and websites run by him and his employees ultimately have an even further reach. You yourself have probably read pieces originally emanating from one of his outlets.



His strategy is that of the ‘red-brown alliance’ – an attempt to unite the far left and far right under the hegemonic leadership of the latter. On the face of it, much of his programme can at first appear superficially attractive to leftists – opposition to US supremacy; support for a ‘multipolar’ world; and even an apparent respect for non-western and pre-colonial societies and traditions. In fact, such positions – necessary as they may be for a genuine leftist programme – are neither bad nor good in and of themselves; rather, they are means, tools for the creation of a new world. And the world Dugin wishes to create is one of racially-purified ethno-states, dominated by a Euro-Russian white power aristocracy (the ‘Moscow-Berlin axis’) in which Asia is subordinated to Russia by means of a dismembered China. This is not an anti-imperialist programme. It is a programme for an inter-imperialist challenge for the control of Europe and Asia: for a reconstituted Third Reich.



Dugin represents a strain of fascism known as National Bolshevism, which first emerged in the years following the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent civil war. Some of the defeated remnants of the white army began to believe that if Bolshevism could not be overthrown by force, then perhaps its authoritarian currents could be developed and gradually pushed towards right wing ultranationalism. This was a classic infiltration strategy of taking over the left and destroying it from within. Under the leadership of Stalin, some of the National Bolsheviks were allowed to return to the USSR, and were partially rehabilitated in an effort to bring nationalist and patriotic credibility to Stalin’s government; essentially, both sides were using each other to legitimise and expand the appeal of their respective projects.



The current remained relatively marginal, however, until the Brezhnev era. Then, in the 1980s, the National Bolshevists joined forces with other ultranationalist trends to form ‘Pamyat’, an anti-Semitic and monarchist association which blamed a Zionist-Masonic plot for the Russian revolution, and indeed for pretty much all of Russia’s problems. Dugin joined its central council. But he apparently found it too ‘modern’, and sought to develop a more mystical and ‘traditionalist’ form of fascism. Following his expulsion from Pamyat in 1989 – after a failed attempt to change its direction – he embarked on a tour of western Europe, where he became influenced by French fascist Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite and developed close relationships with leading figures such as Jean-Francois Thiriart, Robert Steuckers, and Benoist himself. These figures had been instrumental in a developing a strategy of whitewashing and rehabilitating fascism by appropriating the slogans and concepts of the left and even liberals (see my piece in the last edition of Counterpunch), and were to be hugely influential on Dugin’s own political trajectory. De Benoist had advocated stepping back from the overt promotion of a fascist programme in order to focus instead on cultivating the intellectual terrain in which such a programme would again become acceptable. To this end he created a think-tank, GRECE (the “Research and Study Group of European Civilisation”) to wage a long-term ‘cultural-ideological struggle’ he termed ‘metapolitics’, based on a strategy originally advocated by the Italian communist leader Gramsci. Dugin, following some abortive attempts to enter politics directly (receiving less than 1% of the vote when he stood as a candidate to the Russian State Duma in 1995, for example), soon began to employ a similar strategy. His first journal, Elementy, founded in 1993, praised the Nazis and the Conservative Revolutionaries which preceded them, and published the first Russian translations of esoteric interwar fascist Julius Evola. Since then, he has founded or developed dozens of journals, think tanks, publishing houses and web platforms to spread his ideas, including Katehon, Geopolitika, Arktos, Eurasia journal, Editions Avatar, Voxnr.com, Arctogaia, Fort-Russ, the Centre for Syncretic Studies, the Duran, New University, Vtorzhenie (invasion), Eurasianist Review, Evrazia.info, Russian Time journal, the Global Revolutionary Alliance, The Green Star, New Resistance/ Open Revolt, the Centre of Conservative Research at the Faculty of Sociology of Moscow State University, the St Petersburg Conservative Club at the Faculty of Philosophy of St Petersburg State University, and the Amphora publishing house. A worrying number of them have gained traction amongst some on the left, their articles shared and posted unsuspectingly on social media by people who would never have dreamed of circulating material by more overt white supremacists like the KKK.



Much of this work is financed by the Russian billionaire Konstantin Malofeev, and the various platforms cover a wide base in terms of their appeal and intended audience. Some sites are more traditionally right-wing, whilst others appropriate more anarchist and workerist imagery and language. The US-based New Resistance is a case in point. New Resistance was founded by James Porazzo, previously leader of the more openly white supremacist American Front (modelled on the UK’s National Front) who once described Jews as “a filthy, evil people the world would be better without”, and is clearly part of Dugin’s global network, frequently republishing Dugin’s pieces, and with links to the site prominently displayed on Dugin’s Centre for Syncretic Studies and in his books. New Resistance issues classically leftist-sounding phrases like “Too often we in the working classes internalize the zero-sum, dog-eat-dog ‘logic’ of capitalism” and “Workers of all nations are cynically pitted against each other by the ruling classes, forced to wage military and economic warfare that is contrary to our own class interests” and even publishes stickers of communist freedom fighter Leila Khaled for its supporters to download. Their 11 point programme is a classic fascist mish-mash of traditional socialist wishlist, return-to-the-land tribalist nostalgia and right wing dogwhistles like gun ownership and overpopulation, and it is only when you get deep into the manifesto that the demands for ethnic purity and segregation become more apparent. Elsewhere, Gramsci’s understanding of ‘organic intellectuals’, rooted in the working class, gets twisted into support for a ‘New Aristocracy’.



Alexander Reid-Ross explains how these Duginist sites and think tanks then amplify their influence across the rest of the web: “Dugin’s thought pieces are read by journalists and editors with other sites like Fort-Russ, which claims to receive some millions of views per month. RT and Sputnik pick up stories and writers from sites like Fort-Russ and Katehon, elevating the Kremlin’s “spin” to more and more users. They then bring on leftist journalists from North Atlantic countries in order to make that spin more attractive to larger audiences in the West.” Fort-Russ’s own website confirms this strategy: “With 3 million readers a month, we have often featured ‘uncomfortable truths’ which ‘mainstream’ Kremlin backed sources like RT and Sputnik were unable to. We gave the raw story to readers before RT and Sputnik found the right angle to couch it in. As a result, many of our features and breaking stories have been featured by both of these outlets later on.” In December 2013, Dugin compiled a list of hundreds of politicians and intellectuals he sought to cultivate through involvement with RT, entitled “Countries and persons, where there are grounds to create an elite club and/or a group of informational influence through the line of Russia Today”. The list included rightwingers like Viktor Orban and de Benoist as well as leftwingers such as Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras.



At the same time as following this ‘metapolitical’ strategy, Dugin also had a role in developing and influencing almost every far right Russian formation that now exists. After co-founding the National Bolshevik Party in 1993, he went on to write the programme of the (grossly misnamed and deeply anti-Jewish) Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), and served as advisor for Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s (similar misnamed and fascistic) Liberal Democrat Party. Subsequently he has been advisor to the Speaker of the Duma and has established the Eurasia Party (2002) and the Eurasian Youth Movement (2005), whilst also briefly a leading member of the overtly fascist Rodina party. In 2008, he gained a professorship at the prestigious Moscow State University, and his textbook “Foundations of Geopolitics” is apparently required reading in Russia’s military academies. He is also close to the American far right, with links to former KKK leader David Duke, whilst one of his disciples, Nina Kouprianova, is married to leading US fascist Richard Spencer and him and Alex Jones feature on each other’s TV shows. But he has also attempted to develop links with left groups such as Syriza, whose former foreign minister Nikos Kotzias invited him to give a lecture on Eurasianism at the University of Piraeus in 2013 according to the Financial Times. Dugin even appears to have a role as ‘unofficial envoy’ of the Russian government, allegedly helping to broker the rapprochement between Turkey and Russia following Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian fighter jet in 2015.



Dugin’s outlook essentially boils down to a combination of “ethnopluralism” and what he disingenuously terms Neo-Eurasianism. Both ideas lend themselves well to the building of a ‘red-brown’ fascist-led alliance, as both have elements which are superficially appealing to the left whilst in fact providing theoretical cover for genocide and imperial war.



Following de Benoist, ethnopluralism purports to be based on a respect for the unique cultures of all peoples, urging an end to the high-handed universalist arrogance of imperial liberal modernity. Politically-correct fascists in the Benoist-Dugin mould often claim to support ‘Black Power’, ‘Red Power’ and so on, along with White Power: Africa for the Africa; Europe for the Europeans. The corollary of both, of course, is that non-Europeans should get the hell out, and immigration is presented as a threat to, or even a plot against, the essentialised traditional European culture Duginists support. Indeed, a key strategic aim of the Duginists appears to be the morphing of the antiwar movement into an anti-refugee movement, portraying war refugees as a weapon employed by Jewish financiers such as George Soros to dilute and weaken European culture.



Nevertheless, this hostility towards migrants as an impure degenerate influence on pristine European cultural tradition is matched with a flattery towards other ‘traditional cultures’, Islam in particular. Dugin has had some major successes in co-opting Muslims to his cause, his close collaborator (and fellow former Pamyat member) Geydar Dzhemal having set up his own fascist think-tank the Florian Geyer Club. Dugin’s 2014 book Eurasian Mission also claims that Sheikh Talgat Tadzhuddin, Chief Mufti of the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate, is a supporter. Whereas the mainstream hard right have shifted, post 9/11, to a superficially ‘pro-Jewish’ (or at least pro-Israeli) position of unity against Islam, the Duginists appear to want to return the far right to its pre-9/11 tradition of courting right wing Muslims into a joint anti-semitic programme. Ethnopluralism is, by definition, antisemitic, for what Dugin calls “subversive, destructive Jews without a nationality” are, by their very existence, a threat to its conception of racially-purified, culturally homogenous, ethno-states. This does not, of course, rule out support for Israel as the potential basis of such a state itself, and Dugin’s Arctogaia has indeed cultivated links with ultranationalist Zionist groups whose conceptions of cultural purity resonate with his own.



What Dugin calls ‘Neo-Eurasianism’, meanwhile, builds on US fascist Francis Parker Yockey’s advocacy of a grand coalition against ‘Atlanticism’ and US power. Again, this is at first sight appealing to genuine anti-imperialists; after all, what could be more anti-imperialist than a policy to isolate and weaken the world’s leading imperial power? On closer inspection, however, Dugin’s Eurasianism amounts to a crude attempt to form a Russian-led white power bloc aimed at destroying China and preparing for grand inter-imperialist world war. Dugin’s Manichean and occultist view of world history posits an eternal struggle between a degenerate ‘sea empire’, a ‘Leviathan’ represented today by the Atlanticism of the US and UK in particular, and a Russian-led ‘land empire’ – a ‘Behemoth’ upholding traditional Slavic and European culture, and defending it against the Muslim and Chinese hordes unleashed by Atlanticist globalisation. Dugin’s “Foundations of Geopolitics”, whilst advocating a propagandistic focus on the USA (“the main ‘scapegoat’ will be precisely the U.S.”, as he succinctly puts it), sees the real enemy as China, which, he writes, “must, to the maximum degree possible, be dismantled”. Thus, despite its apparent hostility to the US, Duginism’s immediate goal is in fact precisely the same as that of US imperialism – the destruction of China.



In fact, Neo-Eurasianism is a euphemistic misnomer for this project. The original Eurasianists of the interwar period – who, like the National Bolsheviks, arose from the remnants of the Russian white army in exile – were inspired by the Mongol Empire, and sought in some ways to recreate it. Dugin’s project, however, as Edmund Griffiths has pointed out, is essentially the reconstitution of the territories of the Third Reich (including the parts of Russia it never conquered) under joint German-Russian tutelage (the ‘Moscow-Berlin axis’ as he terms it). In this, he is close to his mentor Thiriart’s conception of a ‘white-power bloc’ from Lisbon to Vladivostock (and excluding all of Southwest and Southeast Asia). The real inspiration Dugin appears to have gained from classic Eurasianism was its strategy of the infiltration and colonisation of the left rather than direct confrontation with it.



Like Hitler, Dugin’s model for his future ‘Eurasian empire’ appears to be the British empire. Following the First War of Indian Independence of 1857 – the largest anti-colonial uprising of the nineteenth century, which took the British three years to quell – Britain began to focus more on cultivating ‘traditional’ (and preferably sectarian) leaders for the outsourcing of some of empire’s dirty business, with the ruling families of much of today’s Arab peninsula a still-existing product of this period. In the same fashion, Dugin’s vision for ‘Eurasia’ appears to be a vast collection of cultural-nationalist bantustans controlled by Russian-anointed gangsters (or representatives of the traditional, patriarchal natural hierarchy, to use Dugin’s own formulations) under overall Russian control. At the same time, Dugin’s flattery of Islam has a geopolitical corollary in his advocacy of a “continental Russian-Islamic alliance” – with Iran in particular – based on the “traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilisation”. None of this flattery, it should be noted, has prevented Dugin from applauding a US President who has made the strangulation of Iran a defining feature of his foreign policy, just as it has not prevented Putin from collaborating with this strangulation of his supposed ‘ally’, both by greenlighting Israeli airstrikes on Iranian forces in Syria, and by pumping extra oil to allow Trump’s blockade of Iranian oil. Far from it; indeed such actions only increase Iran’s dependence on Russia, illustrating the chauvinist nature of the ‘alliance’, both as it appears in Dugin’s philosophy and its realpolitik manifestation today.



Where ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ really reveals its compatibility with its supposed Atlantic enemy, however, is in its attitude to China. The dismemberment of China – identified in “Foundations of Geopolitics” as Russia’s chief regional rival – should begin, Dugin suggests, with the Russian annexation of Tibet, Xinjiang and Manchuria (as well as Mongolia) as a “security belt”. The ‘metapolitical’ cultivation of hostility towards Russia’s supposed rival is subtly but clearly underway throughout Dugin’s networks, as even a cursory glance at the Katehon website reveals. One article, entitled “China is on the warpath: who will be the first victim?”, tells its readers that “ the Chinese army [is] preparing for war…breaking the delicate balance that has developed in the world after the Second World War” as “One by one it pinches off the territories of the countries of the former USSR – Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan”. Its “aggressive aspirations” are also apparently revealed by its role in the South China Sea, though the article completely airbrushes out of the picture the increasingly belligerent US military encirclement and attempts to gain control over crucial naval ‘choke holds’ which are the obvious context and cause of China’s defensive actions. As such, the piece, with a little subediting for grammar, could easily have been a straightforward US neocon oped. Another piece – “Is there an alternative to the Chinese New Silk Road?” – attempts to discredit China’s Belt and Road Initiative as against the interests of the partner countries, and openly salivates about opportunities for Russia opened up by Trump’s economic war on China. In the sense Dugin’s geopolitics is little different from those of Kissinger, Brzezinski, Clinton or Trump: the sowing of division between Russia and China. The only difference is which of the two they flatter and which they attack at any particular moment.



Thus, ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ is far from being the anti-western, even pro-global South, initiative it is sometimes falsely seen as. It is the polar opposite of the ‘tricontinentalism’ of the 1960s and 70s, seeking instead to unite with one section of western imperialism (Europe) whilst actually fulfilling the geopolitical goals of the other (the destruction of China). This may well ultimately backfire for Russia. Indeed, the very fascist militias now waging war against ethnic Russians in the Donbass were but a few short years ago part of Dugin’s ethnopluralist networks. 



Given the lack of a social base for genuine socialism (anti-imperialist and internationalist) in the west, leftists can be utilised by fascism without fear. By helping to delegitimise liberal democracy, leftists can inadvertently help lay the basis for fascism, which is, I believe, the natural home of the western masses in eras of crisis. Dugin is in this way in some ways similar to Trotskyist groups such as the British Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) – harnessing anger at the injustices of capitalism and imperialism but using this anger to actually further imperialist aims, whilst never challenging, and in fact perpetuating, colonial attitudes. In the case of SWP, for all their revolutionary spiel, when push comes to shove, they support Brexit, campaign for imperialist parties at election time, oppose all successful third world revolutions, etc. With Dugin, meanwhile, his programme amounts to a geopolitical attack on the USA’s chief rival combined with the scapegoating of migrants for the cultural depredations of capitalism. Duginism is a classic fascist blend of ‘anti-elite’ rhetoric, demands for ethnic purification, and an imperial foreign policy agenda, all dressed up in politically-correct appeals to cultural distinctiveness and anti-western tubthumping. Its particular danger comes from the deep inroads it has made into anti-imperialist and leftist circles.

This piece originally appeared in Counterpunch magazine

SEE ALSO:

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-browning-of-left-how-fascists.html


https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2014/04/aleksandr-dugin-radical-conservatism.html

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2015/03/maoism-is-too-modern-for-me-says.html

Speaking in the language of YouTube | Ash Sarkar Meets ContraPoints

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Comrade Ajith to be Freed ? The Supreme Court of India has declined the appeal filed by Pune Police




The Supreme Court of India has declined the appeal filed by Pune Police against the bail granted to Ajith by the Bombay Supreme Court.

WE EXPECT HIS RELEASE SOON


SOURCE:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10218142306085889&id=1135488264




The EU, Corbyn and the “Hollowing Out” of Labour’s Left Wing by Danny Nicol


Democracy and Class Struggle says the last few days provides much food for  thought and has seen the Labour Party be pushed/forced into a remain reform EU Party to which it was drifting even before the European Elections. 

How did it get here ? Danny Nicol  Professor of Public Law and the University of Westminster explains how the Labour Party got here.

Brexit has exposed the fact that it is not only the Labour Party's right wing that has succumbed to neoliberalism. 

By embracing the European Union, so, too, has the party's left.

The key difference between Labour’s left wing and Labour’s right wing has been that the Left wish to create a new society whereas the Right seek to ameliorate the worst aspects of the existing one. Just over a century ago, the Left had a victory when the Party adopted a democratic socialist objective. 

In Clause IV(4) of its rule book, it committed itself to replace capitalism with a system which, in order to secure for the workers the full fruits of their labour, would be based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Democracy would be further reinforced by adopting the best possible system of popular administration of each industry or service.



The 1945-51 Labour government nationalised some 20 percent of the economy but its “Morrisonian” model of nationalisation, whereby publicly-owned companies were run much like private companies, with no over-arching national economic plan nor industrial democracy, failed to capture the public imagination.  Thereafter Clause IV(4) was resisted by right-wing Labour leaders. Hugh Gaitskell fought against it in the 1950s, Harold Wilson ignored it in the 1960s and 1970s, and Tony Blair had it abolished, or rather replaced, in the 1990s. Under Blair the commitment to common ownership was abandoned. The current Clause IV(4), however, nonetheless commits the Party to ensure that “power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few” – an objective impossible to realise within a capitalist framework.



The irony of 1975


The Labour Left’s original stance on the EEC (now EU) was driven by desire to construct the new society envisaged in the original Clause IV(4). In the 1975 referendum on the EEC, the Labour Left opposed continued membership absolutely solidly. This was largely out of fear that EEC state aids rules would scupper a socialist economic programme as well as regional policy. The Left also favoured planned trade over free trade.



By the 2016 referendum things had completely changed. The majority of Left-identifying Labour Party members supported EU membership. Yet ironically EU law now contains far greater obstacles to the achievement of democratic socialism than in 1975. Back then, state aids law was rudimentary. 

Now it is a developed sphere of law which severely erodes national economic autonomy.  Moreover, whilst EEC law in 1975 seemed not to interfere directly in the balance between public and private ownership in the Member States, this is no longer the case. EU law now virtually prohibits states from replacing marketisation of economic sectors with nationalised monopolies. 

We are compelled towards the conclusion, therefore, that something has fundamentally changed within the Labour Left.



The Labour Left and neoliberalism’s tsunami

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s successive governments gradually established Thatcherism as the new common sense, at least among the political elite. The Labour leadership’s response was to initiate a policy review in the late 1980s to move its programme in a more capitalist direction. Three key policies pushed by the Labour Left – an alternative economic strategy, withdrawal from the EEC and a non-nuclear defence policy – were discarded. Eventually, even opposition to the extensive Conservative privatisation programme was jettisoned. 

With the Major, Blair and Brown governments supercharging Thatcherism rather than reversing it, the ideology outlived its political initiator and was redubbed neoliberalism.



The hegemony of Thatcherism-cum-neoliberalism plainly changed the Labour Right. Unlike in the social democratic era of 1945-1979, it became enthusiastic for privatisation. It also distanced the Party more clearly from working-class interests whilst consorting more overtly with the super-rich.



The effect of neoliberal hegemony on the Labour Left attracted far less attention, which was understandable given the Left’s marginalisation in the Blair-Brown era. Crucially, however, the Labour Left was not impervious to the profound domination of neoliberalism. From the 1990s onwards it quietly abandoned its commitments, especially to a transformed economy. The impact was to empty the Labour Left of its distinctiveness and deprive it of its purpose. The idea of replacing capitalism with democratic socialism was forgotten or redefined out of existence. 

Instead, much of the Labour Left retreated into left-liberalism. Left-liberal preoccupations came to the fore, such as faith in human rights and judicial decision-making, over-emphasis on identity politics, an excessive focus on struggles elsewhere in the world and a new tenderness towards supranational institutions. Such “radicalism” provided useful cover for accepting the capitalist status quo. As argued elsewhere on The Full Brexit, there was a pervasive abandonment of the interests of the working class (see Analysis #7 - Why Does the British Left Love the EU?, Analysis #12 - When the Left Abandons Workers, They Are Easy Prey for the Right, and #Analysis #16 - Understanding Leave Voters’ Motivation in Northeast England).



Psychologically the Labour Left in the 1990s needed to break out of its protracted state of marginalisation and isolation. Adopting stances closer to those of the Labour Right was a short-cut to doing so. The Labour Left chose to identify more with the Labour Party as a whole and less as a faction desirous of replacing capitalism.  Accordingly, the Labour Left cultivated a mood of consensus-building, reflected in a shift against Left-versus-Right voting at meetings of the Party’s National Executive Committee. As for Labour Left figures, they increasingly enjoyed an aura based on hero-worship and ties of personal friendship with the rank and file Labour Left maintaining an uncritical, unquestioning stance towards them.



Against this backdrop of general ideological surrender, Labour Left fondness for the EU developed without any real analysis of its true nature. It is not the progressive organisation that many think. Its “Four Freedoms” – of goods, persons, services and capital – encapsulate a supra-political, supra-democratic devotion to capitalism. 

Its Fortress Europe policy involves running concentration camps for non-EU migrants within EU territory and outsourcing and funding other concentration camps in countries like Libya, Sudan and Turkey.  The same policy makes it responsible for the deaths of several thousand Africans and other migrants in the Mediterranean Sea every year.[1] Its treatment of the citizens of Greece, Spain, Italy and other poorer Eurozone countries has been appalling and racist. 

Similarly, the Labour Left pays no attention to the way in which the EU has fashioned a system in which EU institutions and national leaders work in constant cahoots with each other to entrench and constitutionalise neoliberal policies, cocooning them from the rigours of national contestation, democracy and accountability (see Analysis #1 - The EU’s Democratic Deficit: Why Brexit is Essential for Restoring Popular Sovereignty). For instance, the Blair-inspired liberalisation directives, which provide a permanent guarantee of privatisation in most public utilities, are routinely brushed under the carpet by the EU’s Labour-Left supporters. Despite the EU’s nature, however, the majority of the Labour Left either like it or are devoted to it. This only clearly emerged after the Party elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader in response to the disappointments of the right-wing Blair, Brown and Miliband leaderships.



Corbyn capitulation #1

Corbyn seemed like a breath of fresh air after Labour’s long years of neoliberal domination. He is, after all, ostensibly the Party’s first left-wing leader since the interwar years. But, in fact, despite all the spin his policy programme is modest and his commitment to introduce an unprecedented level of party democracy has resulted in only puny improvements.



Corbyn’s elevation coincided with the looming EU referendum. At hustings meetings, leadership candidate Corbyn repeatedly said that he would need “a great deal of persuading” to support EU membership, instancing the organisation’s various neoliberal activities.  Once elected, Corbyn crumbled within three days: the decades-long opponent of the EU committed to campaigning for Remain in the referendum.  So much for “honest politics”. His main justification for his volte face was that he’d suddenly discovered that relinquishing EU membership would mean a “bonfire of workers’ rights”. This stance is comprehensively discredited by Mary Davis on this website (see Analysis #13 - The Chimera of Workers' Rights in the EU).



Corbyn capitulation #2

It turned out that Corbyn had defected from the winning to the losing side. With the referendum over, the government and Parliament now had the choice as to what arrangement should replace EU membership. The Labour Left’s response was remarkable in its emptiness (see Analysis #17 - Labour Stands Exposed on Brexit). It did not fashion principled “red lines” for the negotiations on such matters as public ownership, state aids and public procurement. Instead, Corbyn committed a second capitulation: he started a campaign of denunciation against a No Deal outcome and in favour of “taking No Deal off the table”. He jumped on the establishment bandwagon of massively over-hyping the risks of No Deal, and is now regularly parroted in apocalyptic terms by Corbynista lieutenants John McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey.



This has served to make the Labour Left a force of the status quo. In the present circumstances No Deal is the only outcome which would make lawful democratic socialist objectives of common ownership and state intervention in favour of the working class (see Analysis #15 - Is No Deal the Only Socialist Option?). Without No Deal, fundamental change will remain legally impermissible. This would actually cripple Labour in tackling far more serious economic problems such as the looming global debt crisis. More fundamentally still, it would prevent Labour from creating a more egalitarian society in place of capitalism. Moreover, “taking No Deal off the table” leaves a government with no bargaining power in negotiations with the neoliberal European Commission. So if a Labour government under Corbyn were still negotiating with the EU, it would have no alternative but to accept EU measures which make privatisation permanent and which give the EU power over UK industrial subsidies and public procurement. “Taking No Deal off the table” also opens up the prospects of a second referendum, which would not only have disastrous consequences for the Left but also represents a cliff edge for British democracy itself (see Analysis #20 - Parliament at the Cliff-Edge: Why a Second Referendum Could Destroy its Authority).



The hollowed-out Labour Left

If a Labour Left government cannot nationalise major sectors of the economy, cannot support them through industrial subsidies that are “incompatible with the single market”, and cannot deploy public procurement in a way which helps working-class people, then what exactly is the Labour Left? Its one remaining fig-leaf is its commitment to end austerity. But anti-austerity is vague. Moreover, it is precarious. If the Labour Left in office preserves the power of the economic elite then public spending will, as in the past, remain entirely dependent on the political goodwill of that elite. Since the late 1970s, the economic elite have been anything but tender towards the needs of the “lower orders”. If a Corbyn government confined within EU parameters increased corporation and income tax to finance public spending, this would almost certainly prompt capital flight on the part of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals. Labour would be powerless to prevent this, since capital controls are illegal within the EU. Marooned in a globalised, neoliberal economy which it has no intention of changing, how long would it take for a Corbyn government to buckle?



The Labour Left’s tenderness towards the EU therefore needs to be set in context. Far from being impervious to capitalist ideology, the tidal wave of neoliberalism had a profound effect upon the Labour Left. Bowing to the neoliberal dictum that “there is no alternative” the Left deprived itself of its distinctive commitment of creating a new society to take the place of capitalism. In so doing it largely abandoned the working class interest. It did this long before Brexit emerged as a pressing issue. The Labour Left’s attachment to the EU is thus a symptom, not a cause, of that political disarmament.



References

[1] See, e.g., Liz Clark “Inside the EU refugee camp driving people to suicide”, Medecins Sans Frontieres, 8 October 2018; Human Rights Watch, No Escape from Hell: EU Policies Contribute to Abuse of Migrants in Libya, 21 January 2019.



About the Author

Danny Nicol is Professor of Public Law at the University of Westminster and author of The Constitutional Protection of Capitalism (Oxford: Hart, 2010).

SOURCE: 
https://www.thefullbrexit.com/labour-left?fbclid=IwAR0ba5QfpjwpL55ZjlYY0STmqQw-tDTE5iwTMcNrjlRE4PN8lK8LyJDoyY4


Sunday, May 26, 2019

Reds Review: "Mission To Moscow" (1943) movie



Respect to Joseph Davies and his relationship with Tregaron in Ceredigion in Wales.

 A Tribune of Truth in Times of Universal Lies.

READ MISSION TO MOSCOW HERE:

https://www.bookyards.com/en/book/details/14959/Mission-To-Moscow#
file:///C:/Users/roder/Downloads/Joseph%20E.%20Davies--Mission%20to%20moscow.pdf

IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THIS BOOK IT IS TIME YOU DID

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Arundhati Roy on Kashmir, the Danger of U.S. Attacking Iran & Her New Book “My Seditious Heart”

Arundhati Roy on the Indian Election and Narendra Modi’s “Far-Right, Hindu Nationalist” Agenda

Wales: Liberation 4 Coming Soon



"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game"

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The reason for Liberation Magazine is that we take the view you cannot win a game where the rules are made by your opponent.

In the case of Wales, the British State determines the rules and Welsh people are supposed to play the Welsh Assembly game according to its rules.

It is arrogant imperial intellectual and practical colonialism where very important decisions on Welsh Life are taken in London and not Wales.

The Welsh are closetly seen has unfit to govern their own country.

Liberation Magazine unashamedly stands for a Welsh Socialist Republic an idea that has been maturing in Wales for over a century.

The Labour Party and Plaid Cymru in Wales have never really embraced the idea of Welsh Socialist Republic.

Sometimes Plaid Cymru flirts with the idea but quickly backtracks under pressure.

Monarchism has not only infected the Labour Party but also sections of Plaid Cymru.

We launched Liberation Magazine because we want a journal where the Welsh, the Socialist and the Republican cases can be argued and discussed.

A new strategy and new tactics needs to be developed for the social and national liberation of Wales in the 21st Century if Wales is to arrest its current trajectory of economic and social decline.

Liberation Magazine is about ideas, the precursor of events and the inspirer of people.

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people".

Eleanor Roosevelt.

Our ambition is to create new ideas and start a winning game for Wales.



Monday, May 13, 2019

India: New Issue of New Dawn

SEE: http://toanewdawn.blogspot.com/

CONTACT: nickglais@yahoo.co.uk if you want a PDF Copy

Why People on the Left Ally with this Man over BREXIT is beyond us - He is an enemy NOT a friend of the PEOPLE



Nigel Farage is into Bannon and his Global Right Wing Networks and wants to marketize the NHS  - that is privatize it and make it an insurance based system,,

We understand the feeling of betrayal people have over the Labour Party abandoning a Left Brexit position of putting workers rights over EU Competition Law and in effect becoming Tom Watson's Remain and Reform Party - that is why we call the Labour Party a Judas Goat.

This is the classic role that Social Democrats play a a little knowledge of history would have warned you of this impending  great Labour Party Betrayal

This is a frying pan and fire European Election and there is nobody worthy of your vote.

SPOIL YOUR BALLOT PAPER OR BOYCOTT THE EUROPEAN ELECTION - DO NOT EMPOWER NIGEL FARAGE AND THE RIGHT





America in denial: Gabor Maté on the psychology of Russiagate



We accept some self criticism based on Gabor Mate analysis of Russiagate - we are Russophiles not Russiaphobes and that is our saving grace.

We love the Russian People not the Russian Capitalist State.

Saturday, May 11, 2019

Remembering the Malayan Emergency - Social Democrats and Imperialism



CRIME OF THE POST WAR LABOUR GOVERNMENT

Joint statement on the European Parliamentary Election and call for Europe wide boycott




May 2019

The European elections do not belong to the peoples!

They belong to the multinationals and the imperialists!

Abstention and denunciation of the European Union!


The European Parliament election in May will be held at a time when the reactionary nature and role of the European Union (EU) are fully exposed. 

The EU operates under the law of the mighty; the powerful imperialist states and monopolies rule and impose their policies and interests.

Throughout the years of the capitalist crisis, the EU reinforced barbaric policies against the working class and the peoples, aiming at retaining and increasing the profits of multinationals, capitalists, bankers, and monopoly groups. 

They promoted a storm of anti-labor measures, drastically reduced labor wages, attacked trade unions and the right to strike, set back by decades the rights and the living standards of the working class and the peoples. This was the case in all EU member-states. 

Unemployment, marginalization and poverty, not only in the south but also in the north of Europe, hit millions of toilers and young people. Social benefits were reduced or abolished, public enterprises were taken over by capitalists, and parts of the middle classes drowned financially. 

The EU and the capitalists that rule over it have transformed societies into jungles of exploitation, competition, and historical regression. The long and fierce struggle of the French people and toilers against Macron’s austerity measures and murderous repression is strong proof of this. 

The immediate payment of the repairs in Notre Dame is one more proof of the outrageous hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie who’s overflowed with wealth and at the same time forces austerity measures against the working class and the masses of France.

Due to these anti-social policies, the reactionary, racist, nationalist, and fascist forces have been reinforced in all EU member-states. 

These forces are not opposing the capitalists and imperialists, albeit they so present themselves. They are propagandists and supporters of extreme anti-labor policies and the push of public life towards fascism. 

They express the most extreme forces of capitalism, exploitation, and social, ethnic, religious, cultural, and gender discrimination. They are the forces that pave the way to war and the slaughter of toilers and peoples of Europe.

The EU is a reactionary construction of the capitalist-imperialist elites, which is historically doomed to fail. It is a reactionary alliance with internal contradictions and deadlocks. The developments around Brexit confirm this assumption. 

The EU resembles a laboratory aiming to design policies against the toilers and the peoples and plundering of the wealth that the toilers and peoples of the dependent and neo-colonial countries are producing. It is a new "sacred alliance" against the working class, the social resistance movements, the migration flows, and peoples' struggles for national and social liberation.

The EU has a leading role, together with, but at the same time discretely from, the US and other imperialist countries, in defending the global power of the capital and the multinationals. It supports imperialist economic and military interventions and loots the semi-colonial and dependent countries of their natural and human wealth. 

Only in the recent years they directly and actively -or indirectly- supported military interventions in Libya, Mali and Central African Republic. 

They stirred up the civil war in Syria and led the escalation of the internal crisis, bloodshed, and the risks of separation in Ukraine. They support the imperialist campaign against the people of Venezuela, they participate in the illegal economic sanctions and reinforce the anti-constitutional initiatives of the opposition

They actively support the so-called anti-terrorist campaign by collaborating with the US imperialists against the liberating and revolutionary peoples’ movements. They adopt tough anti-immigration policies, they build legislative and practical barriers and walls against desperate migrants and refugees and they are responsible for thousands of deaths at the borders. 

They promote anticommunist hysteria and, with their policies, they reinforce the revival of racism, fascism and Nazi gangs. They push for the adoption of tough measures to suppress and reduce democratic rights.

The European Parliament -and the direct general election in the EU member-states- is a well-planned project to build a democratic facade for this reactionary alliance of European bourgeoisie. 

It is a tool of disorientation of people and workers’ resistance movements. It is an institution of ratification of the reactionary policies of the European Commission, the European Council and the Council of the EU. 

It legitimizes policies against the movements of social and ethnic liberation and promotes anti- communism. It is an institution that has been devastated since the very beginning of its existence in the eyes of the European peoples and that is why it faces complete deprecation through the high abstention rates in the European elections.

The so–called European Parliament is a construct of the powerful and not a fulfilled demand of the struggles and movements of the peoples of Europe. All these years of barbarism it has been identified with the policies of the capitalists and imperialists. 

It is not just an “elephant cemetery”, some silent, highly paid MPs who only know how to applaud and subscribe; but a body of supporters and propagandists of the rotten capitalist European idea, which has nothing to do with the long–standing demand and need for fraternity and common struggle of the toilers and peoples of Europe. This is a need that can only be served in the struggles to overthrow this barbaric and reactionary alliance of capitalists and imperialists.

Against all of them, against the EU and the governments of the member-states, against the capitalist barbarity and imperialism, the power of the struggling working class and the peoples’ movements must rise again. We fight to strengthen internationalist solidarity and common struggles, we defend the right of the peoples to choose their own path of development and social organization. We support the resistance against the EU policies. We strongly oppose the revival of fascism, racism and neo-Nazism. We stand in favor of the socialist prospect of the peoples and the working class

We who sign this common public announcement, left and communist organizations and parties from European countries, address the toilers, the unemployed, the youth, the immigrants and all the progressive and struggling people and the movements of resistance against capitalist barbarism and imperialism. 

We call on them to actively resist the policies of the EU, with the ultimate goal of crushing this imperialist reactionary alliance. We are struggling for the secession-withdrawal of our countries from the EU. 

We call for mass boycottage to the farce of the European elections and we are struggling to turn passive action to a massive and militant movement against the EU.

NO TO THE EUROPEAN UNION OF CAPITALISTS AND IMPERIALISTS!

ABSTENTION FROM THE EUROPEAN ELECTIONS!

AGAINST THE ANTILABOR POLICIES OF AUSTERITY AND OF SOCIAL BARBARISM!

INTERNATIONALIST, ANTI-IMPERIALIST, CLASS FRONT OF EUROPEAN TOILERS AND PEOPLES AGAINST WAR, RACISM AND FASCISM!



Democracy and Class Struggle – Wales

Committee for the Construction of the Maoist Communist Party Galicia – Spain

CPG(m-l) -Greece

PMLI- Italy

Initiative for the Construction of a revolutionary- Communist Party – Austria

Jugendwiderstand- Germany

Marxism Leninism Maoism - Ireland


The European Elections - From Farce to Tragedy - Social Democrats are Judas Goats by Nickglais



Outdistanced and Outsmarted by the Right because we have a social democratic and not a revolutionary Left in British Isles.

Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party cannot deliver a Left Brexit they triangulate to the remain camp and even negotiate with the Tories and have left the field wide open to the political right with their Judas Goat leadership.

The European Elections have also exposed the political opportunism of so called Leftists like Claire Fox and George Galloway and the utter political bankruptcy of The Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist Leninist who say to support the Brexit Party.

Democracy and Class Struggle say we have no choice but to spoil our ballots papers or boycott the farce of the European Elections which looks like a tragedy - a self inflicted one -  the EU will provide lots of funds for right wing revival of Brexit Party given they are the likely winners.




GALLOWAY AND CPGB ML SAY TO VOTE FOR THIS MAN NIGEL FARAGE WHO LEADS THE BREXIT PARTY 

NIGEL FARAGE USES THE POLITICAL LANGUAGE OF MARINE LE PEN AND THE FASCIST RIGHT IN GENERAL 

AND OPPOSES CLASS ANALYSIS OF EUROPEAN UNION AND NATIONAL RIGHTS FOR NATIONS IN THE BRITISH ISLES.

An Interview with InfoWars in the last few weeks revealed the right wing fascistic thought of Nigel Farage on the Left.

Alex Jones: “Why is the left allied with radical Islam?”


Nigel Farage: “Because they hate Christianity. They deny, absolutely, our Judeo-Christian culture, which if you think about it actually are the roots, completely, of our nations and our civilisation. 

They deny that. They also want to abolish the nation state – they want to get rid of it. 


They want to replace it with the globalist project, and the European Union is the prototype for the new world order.


BOYCOTT THE EUROPEAN ELECTION TRAGIC FARCE OR SPOIL YOUR BALLOT PAPER - DO NOT GIVE LEADERSHIP TO THE POLITICAL RIGHT ON BREXIT.

PS : It is no accident that Galloway and CPGB ML are social chauvinists and defenders of unitary British State and OPPOSE Scottish and Welsh Independence.

Note: On Radical Islam it is our own Intelligence Services (not noted for being Left) that have been allied with Radical Islamists to defeat Progressive Secular Governments. 


Friday, May 10, 2019

Manufactured Iranian Threat in the Persian Gulf

Col. Wilkerson: US Would Face a Unified Venezuelan Military in an Armed Intervention



Democracy and Class Struggle can see why Colonel Larry Wilkerson is called the voice of neo realism in US Foreign Policy - his analysis is based on facts not fantasy.

We say: 

Pompeo is nothing but a political prostitute of the Koch Brothers and their Oil Refinery in Texas desperate for Venezuelan Oil.

Bolton frankly has mental problems principally his hatred of Iran and his love of the MEK and Maryam Rajavi is a profound sickness - Venezuela comes second to Iran in his hate list.

Abrams should be in prison for his murderous role in Central America - he hopes  for a re run in Venezuela  - prison calls him - justice will not evade him for ever.

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Monday, May 6, 2019

Die Thälmann Kolonne - Song of the German Republican Volunteers (1937)



Red Salute to 1,500 Volunteers of the Thalmann Battalion one of the largest in the International Brigades - Red Salute to the Anti Fascist Youth of Germany who fight Fascism Today - especially in Berlin.

Ernst Thalmann German Communist leader 
16 April 1886 – 18 August 1944

Prof. Richard Wolff: What Is Class?



Professor Wolff making sure we understand the basics