Charting the future in China

By Andy Brooks

New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks took part in a seminar on China’s Two Sessions at the Chinese embassy in London in March. This is his contribution to the discussion.

This has been a stormy month. While the millions upon millions of people in all five continents recoiled in shock and horror at the American-Israeli onslaught on Iran plunging the Middle East into the flames of a war that threatens the entire stability of the world another event – in the heart of China – charted the future not only for the Chinese people but for the cause of peace and socialism throughout the world.
There, in Beijing, the annual legislative sessions of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the National People’s Congress (NPC) were the focus of discussions on the way forward for the people’s government and the 1.4 billion people it represents.
The ‘two sessions’ are always significant events in the Chinese people's political life, bringing together thousands of deputies and delegates from every corner of the country and all walks of life. Their proposals are aimed at solving everyday issues to build a better life for the people. 
This year marks the commencement of China's 15th Five-Year Plan, a pivotal phase in the country’s medium to long-term development. In a turbulent world threatened by the grasping hand of American imperialism the Plan and the discussions during the Two Sessions give momentum and certainty into global development, charting a steady course for the new journey ahead.
The Chinese revolution that established the people’s government in 1949 has transformed the country that was then the poorest in the world. China has now risen from being a weak semi-feudal, semi-colonial country to become a force for peace in the global arena, with the second largest economy in the world. Productivity gains, innovation and consumption need have become the main drivers of growth.  As a major industrial country, China's manufacturing, innovation and construction will continue to serve the world. As China transforms it shares what it has learned with other developing countries facing similar challenges. And equally the communist party, which led and continues to lead the Chinese people’s march to socialism, is always ready to share its knowledge and experience with the rest of the communist movement around the world.
Marxist-Leninist philosophy challenges the fatalism which is promoted by those who are afraid of change and believe that we can turn back the clock to a past socialist “golden age” that only exists in their imagination.  But  we believe that we make our own history by our actions. The building of socialism is far more than raising production or economic indicators.  It is concerned with the evolution of human thought as well as social and cultural progress.  The failure of comrades in the past to recognise this fact has led to serious setbacks
For many years communists in the imperialist heartlands of Europe and North America looked to what many of them called the “Soviet model”.  Others thought the experience of the people’s democracies in Europe could simply be repeated in their own countries. They sent delegations to the USSR and Eastern Europe but they did not fully understand what they saw. In fact the Soviet Union was a unique state based on Soviet power that could not be replicated in other countries. People’s democracy, on the other hand, in the immediate post-war period, was understood to be the way communists could build united front governments on the road to socialist advance. And in those early days most expected it to be a long road.
However the Soviet communists from Khrushchev’s day onwards used their influence to accelerate the process throughout Eastern Europe sharpening the existing contradictions and social problems that contributed to their downfall – and indeed that of the USSR in the late 1980s.
This isn’t the time or place to look at the Chinese experience except to note that the Communist Party of China took a number of differing roads ranging from the “Soviet model” to the socialist emulation of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which all worked for a time but eventually failed. People’s democracy or the people’s democratic dictatorship as it is known in China has proved successful. Reform and opening up has transformed China. Absolute poverty has been eradicated. Measured in terms of real GDP  (the real value of goods and services without such American features as exorbitant medical fees, high rents and legal costs) China is on a par with the USA.  Its mixed economy does have certain risks but the cardinal task of the Communist Party of China is to put people first and ensure that no one is left behind. Over one third of China's major development targets for the 2026-2030 period will focus on resolving the pressing difficulties and problems that concern the people most. 
Democracy is a shared value of humanity and a right of the people of all countries. In China a prosperous society is being created for everyone to enjoy.  And people’s democracy is an instrument to solve problems for the people who are the masters of the country. We see it in the Two Sessions and in the words and deeds of the Communist Party of China.

Defend the Islamic Republic

Millions upon millions have taken to the streets of Britain and throughout the rest of the world to demand an end to the imperialist war on Iran. Donald Trump and the fools he surrounds himself  with talked about   a “decapitation” victory. Benjamin Netanyahu thought his dream of a “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates was about to come true. The Americans and their Israeli and feudal Arab lackeys thought that Stealth war-planes, missiles and drones would soon have the Iranians on their knees begging for mercy.  But it didn’t happen. The dream of The Donald died in the smoke of burning American bases and the bombed out  ruins of Tel Aviv.
The leaders of the European Union have wisely spurned Trump’s call for help to break the Iranian blockade of the Persian Gulf. So has Starmer who’s now trying to rebuild the links with his old mates in Brussels while still keeping sweet with the Americans and the oil sheikhs.
The bourgeois media talk about the crisis in the Persian Gulf that threatens Western supplies of oil and gas – and indeed that is a crisis for them, Soaring energy prices could plunge the imperialist world into a slump of 1929 proportions – but re-opening the waterway won’t solve the underlying problems that once again set the Middle East on fire.
The immediate issue is to end the fighting, lift the imperialist sanctions on the Islamic Republic and recognise Iran’s right to control its own economy and develop a nuclear energy programme. But the heart of the matter is Palestine. The legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs must be recognised including the right of return for the millions of Palestinians whose families were driven from their homes by Zionist terror in the 1940s and the equally legitimate right of the Palestinian Arabs to self-determination and the independent state they were promised when Palestine was partitioned in 1947. 
UN resolutions have provided the basis for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. First of all Israel must totally withdraw from all the occupied territories seized in 1967, including Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. The Palestinians must be allowed to establish a state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian refugees whose homes are now in Israel must be allowed to return or, if they so wish, be paid appropriate compensation in exchange. And all states in the region should have internationally agreed and recognised frontiers guaranteed by all the Great Powers.

Defend the right to protest

Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal and Stop the War vice-chair Chris Nineham have been found guilty of breaking the Public Order Act this week. Though their punishment – they were fined and conditionally discharged – was not severe they shouldn’t have been in court in the first place. These were clearly trumped up charges designed to stifle the massive Palestinian solidarity movement that has swept the country in recent years. The two campaign leaders have made it clear that they will appeal and so they should. This is an attack on civil liberties. It affects us all. The verdict raises huge concerns about any further powers granted to the police through the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently progressing though parliament. It confirms the view that these proposed increased powers represent a seismic threat to democratic freedoms.

In Search of Gerry Healy

by Dermot Hudson 

My Search for Revolution & how we brought down an abusive leader : Clare Cowen, Troubador Publishing Ltd 2019, 200 pp, rrp £19.99

About a month ago I was walking around Ipswich when I came across a charity shop actually giving away free books. The title of this book caught my eye. It turned  out to be a book about the scandal in the 1980s around the Workers’ Revolutionary Party(WRP), a Trotskyist party, which led to the WRP splitting into eight factions – yes eight factions!
 I vaguely recall reading about the implosion of the WRP in 1985  so the book excited some interest in me. The Cowen book is basically an expose of the WRP and a narrative of the events around the expulsion of Gerry Healy, the founder and leader of the WRP.
This self-published tell-all account was written by Clare Cowen, a WRP full-timer (of which there were 100 at one time) and a member of the party’s leadership.
When I first became interested in politics in my youth during the mid-1970s the WRP’s main claim to fame was its support from the glitterati that included the famous actress Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin and  a host of other celebrity members. In those days the WRP was possibly the biggest Trotskyist party in Britain. It was certainly the most sectarian – though that was challenged by rivals that included the Socialist Workers Party and the International Marxist Group then led by former student leader Tariq Ali.
The WRP’s ascendancy on the Trotskyist left was in part due to the huge amount of money they had not just received from the Redgraves but other wealthy members of the WRP including the author of this book, Ms Cowen.
Clare Cowen herself was not from a poor working-class background. She was actually from a bourgeois family – in fact a White Zimbabwean whose family had black servants and owned gold mines. Some of Ms Cowen’s money was used to bankroll the WRP and if I read it correctly some of the WRP’s companies and properties were partly owned by her. To me the book not only illustrates the bankruptcy of Trotskyism but the dangers of what happens when revolutionary movements get mixed up with people from wealthy backgrounds who always see things differently to a worker.  
Sects like the WRP grew after 1956 when Khrushchev's attack on Stalin opened  the door to Trotskyism as well as modern revisionism. The old revisionist CPGB failed to deal with Trotskyism. They simply labelled different Trotskyist groups as “ultra left” (even though most Trotskyist groups in the UK actually existed as entryist factions, like the Militant Tendency, within the reformist Labour party) . Little did  the burnt-out revisionists of the old CPGB realise that trailing behind left social-democrats with their third-rate “Euro-communist” drivel actually drove many young people out of the party and into the arms of the likes of the WRP.
The WRP tried to organise the unemployed through its “Right to Work “ marches. It had a trendy youth section called the Young Socialists. The WRP was, unlike the old CPGB, a very disciplined party that demanded hard work from its activists and not paper members sitting at home.
The real power in the WRP, however, rested not with the Redgraves or people like Clare Cowen but with the founder, leader and guru of the WRP, one Gerry Healy. Healy, a renowned ranter, once described as having a “Hitlerite” speaking technique, liked to pose as a master of Marxism. But in the last years of his life Healy became a supporter of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ Gorbachovite revisionism. This may be viewed as bizarre but it can be argued as appropriate because Trotskyism is really a form of revisionism.
Curiously the WRP, despite proclaiming to be “revolutionary “ and implying by their name that they were for proletarian revolution, actually began as a sect inside the Labour party believing in the parliamentary road to socialism and standing candidates in general elections. Like the CPGB modern revisionists who dumped the Daily Worker and launched the Morning Star, the WRP rebranded their Workers Press as Newsline.
Healy and other Trotskyists continually denounced what they called “Stalinist bureaucracy “ but Healy ran the WRP in an extremely bureaucratic fashion with a huge full-time staff plus his own security . In fact reading between the lines it was clear that the WRP was run like some of the worst capitalist companies; Healy was overbearing, pushy and authoritarian. He bullied staff, sacked people he did not like and even had his own BMW. In the capitalist corporate world bosses sleeping around and demanding sexual favours is common. This is exactly what Healy did. Healy had sexual relationships with his secretary Aileen Jennings and the author of this book, Clare Cowen. Although both women remained in these relationships for a long time  it was also alleged that Healy had sexual relations with dozens of other female WRP members. 
By the 1980s the WRP’s luck was running out. Its dominance of British Trotskyism was challenged by the likes of the SWP and the Militant Tendency. The WRP was overstretched and ran into financial trouble .Rows over money erupted. It was then Aileen Jennings and Clare Cowen  who decided to spill the beans on the scandalous activities of Healy and the rest is history .
Although the book is a great account of the workings of a Trotskyist faction Ms Cowen has not broken with the tradition it comes from. She repeats Trotskyist anti-Stalin propaganda. Cowen also criticises the WRP for some of the better positions that it took like support for the Libyan Jamahuriya and Baathist Iraq and the defence of the Iranian revolution. Cowen also repeats some of the dafter claims about the WRP such as it having 10,000 members in the 1980s (it was about one tenth of that)! I was myself disappointed because I had expected to find an account of the split between the WRP and Royston Bull who founded the International Leninist Workers Party(ILWP) and later briefly rose to fame in Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party.  But all mention of Royston Bull and his ILWP is omitted.
To conclude, although the book is a good read for those who like a bit of scandal, it fell very short of offering any serious insight into the WRP and the bankruptcy of Healyism.

Strategy for the class struggle

back in the day

by John Maryon

For the working class to successfully advance towards socialism it requires an understanding of most effective tactics for the class struggle. It is important to learn from the lessons of past generations but also we must adapt  to the reality of today's modern world. Arguments that took place over a century ago should not hold back the formation of joint actions and alliances. We must look at the world through the eyes of a new generation.
The victory of the 1917 Russian revolution was followed by the active promotion of a Communist International. Initially the strategy aimed to ride the revolutionary wave by building communist parties worldwide. In Britain the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was established in 1920. Following the First World War the revolutionary wave abated and the strategy was changed to reflect the new conditions. It was an initiative that aimed to encourage joint action with other working class parties. It was going to be a lengthy process to overcome the reformism and class collaboration of the social-democrats. This tactic became known as the United Front. By 1928 a new strategy was adopted to advance a more revolutionary struggle to take advantage of the severe capitalist crisis by advocating a more militant approach. It encouraged the formation of strong trade unions. There was an attempt to expose the treachery of social democracy which had betrayed the workers and had  increasingly co-operated with imperialism.
With the rise of fascism it was the communists who led the struggle against the new menace and it doing so gained great respect. The Bulgarian communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, realised the seriousness of the situation and proposed the creation of a new alliance, which he called the Popular Front. It reflected the new situation in which a number of communist parties had become mass movements. Communists with both right-wing and left wing social democrats now often shared the same prisons. Unfortunately a number of communist parties now saw their role as taking the  parliamentary option and the revolutionary road was abandoned. In Britain the CPGB  was to adopt this approach and in doing so abandoned its revolutionary vanguard role. It adopted an increasingly revisionist position under the illusion that participation in bourgeois democracy offered a way forward. It effectively denied a revolutionary approach in which the working class would seize power and take control of its own destiny. 
As Western European communist parties, following the Second World War, adopted a left social-democratic position they started to lose respect and purpose. They failed to learn the lessons of history in which it had been the great revolutionary leaders like Lenin, Mao and Kim Il Sung who had successfully led their people to socialism.
For today we may look back at the strategies that have succeeded and those that have not. We cannot stick to one fixed tactic but must adapt and change as conditions alter. Social democracy no longer pretends to be socialist and in practice presents itself today as yet another bourgeois bandwagon that in practice cannot achieve anything. 
No revolution can succeed without working class support.  But the working class in Britain is demoralised and confused with limited aspirations. They have been conditioned into meekly accepting a few crumbs from the rich man’s table. They vote for liberals, social democrats and reactionary populist parties. 
The anomalous named 'Your Party' is left social-democratic and contains many sincere well-meaning people who are opposed to imperialist wars and see the need for a more fairer society. However they are not revolutionary, have not embraced the scientific teachings of Marxism and not grasped the essential concept that a class struggle is necessary to defeat the forces of reaction that blight all of our lives. 
A so called Popular Front alliance is full of dangers. There cannot be a successful alliance between communists and social democrats in a bourgeois parliament. History shows that communists may be used by the bourgeoisie and then dumped when it suits them. Bourgeois democracy is a cruel illusion. When the inevitable break comes it splits the working class. The Popular Front transfers the class battle from the streets and workplaces to a bourgeois parliament that is totally ineffective.
It is important to note that a popular front government may be in government but not in power. Lenin pointed out that an alliance implies that the bourgeoisie no longer have the ability to rule alone and that then is the time for revolutionary change. Social democracy offers only tinkering with a failed system, based upon exploitation, that is well past its sell-by date. We need a radical change to challenge the power and oppression of Imperialism. 
A true communist party is always to be found where the battle is the hardest. One that is committed striving for unity of the workers in the class struggle to achieve full state power rather that a sham bourgeois parliament. A United Front alliance between revolutionary and reformist parties remains the only viable policy until a revolutionary situation develops.

The edge of the precipice

Guns blaze to the roar of drones and rockets as the flames of war spread across the entire Middle East. The Iranians are throttling the Western energy market with their blockade of the Persian Gulf. Americans and their Israeli lackeys are intensifying their attacks on a broader range of industrial and economic targets in Iran. The Islamic Republic is paying them back in kind with devastating missile attacks on Israel and America’s feudal Arab puppets in the Gulf. And Trump’s response has been a mixture of meaningless peace offers coupled with the usual threats that he thinks is what negotiations are all about that has spiralled the price of oil and gas that has raised the spectre of an energy crisis not seen since the October 1973 oil crisis . No wonder there’s panic in Westminster and the other chancelleries of Europe. 
Who is fanning the flames is clear to all. Whether the American president is senile or clinically insane is, of course, a matter for medical opinion. Whatever, those behind him – those sections of the American ruling class that represent manufacturing, Big Oil and the high-tech industries clearly thought they knew what they were doing when they gave the nod to the treacherous attack on Iran that has plunged the Western world into economic chaos.  
Though grovelling to the Americans comes as second nature to the leaders of Western Europe the  Spanish have become outright opponents of Trump’s war and the French, Germans and Italians are washing their hands on the American-Israeli onslaught. 
Of course the real opposition to the war is from masses on  the street and the leaders of the Global South. As a responsible major power, People’s China firmly stands on the right side of history. China's foreign minister has continued his diplomatic efforts to end the fighting and  promote de-escalation and peace. The special envoy of the Chinese government on the Middle East crisis has visited the region to help ease tension. China has also voiced principled positions at platforms such as the UN and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, defending international fairness and justice. 
China has always advocated harmony and believes that strength of force does not equal strength of reason. It insists that hotspot issues should be resolved through equal dialogue and political solutions - a reflection of historical clarity and long-term vision.
Keir Starmer, to his eternal shame however, wants it both ways. He aligns himself with  Franco-German imperialism to get better terms for the UK’s realignment with the European Union while crawling to Trump by allowing American war-planes to use British bases for their operations against the Islamic Republic. No-one’s fooled by this. The Europeans take no notice as they don’t think he will remain in office after the regional and local elections in May. On the other hand Trump, with his strange and childish comments on social media, does little to mask his contempt for the Prime Minister.
Starmer likes to wave the flag and claim he’s ‘standing up for Britain’. He could start by cancelling the King’s visit to the United States in April.

Turning the screws on Labour

Unite the union has decided to cut its donations to the Labour Party by 40 per cent. Labour will lose over half a million pounds from one of its major affiliates – and all down to the Starmer government’s refusal to intervene in the year-long Birmingham bin strike that was triggered by the Labour-run council’s move to cut the bin workers’ wages.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham told striking members that "we're pushing back on one of the most vile attacks on workers we have seen in a long, long time.
"And the joke about this - it's not an attack from Rupert Murdoch, not an attack from Amazon. But an attack from a Labour council, under a Labour government. Labour should hang their heads in shame. They're an absolute disgrace”.
She’s right, of course. But punishing Labour is one thing – changing its course is another. Though Sharon Graham was the outsider who upset the grandees apple-cart when she won the race for the top job in her union in 2021 on a left platform it was still a battle of the bureaucrats. She only differs from the other full-timers that she defeated in showing more deference to rank-and-file militancy than her predecessors. But generally her faction differs little from all the other “left” factions that run most of our unions today. Their leaders see themselves as “professional negotiators” rather than workers’ leaders. They see mass action as a last resort and then only as a bargaining factor. None of them want to assert real control over the party the unions still largely fund. All they want from Labour is a bigger piece of the action.
That, some say, is how it’s always been. It’s not for nothing that the cartoonist David Low portrayed the TUC as a “cart-horse” in the 1950s. But there were exceptions. The post-war Communist Party of Great Britain helped draw up the constitution of the electricians’ union – in the days when local stewards could call strikes and every strike was “official”  from day one unless later deemed “unofficial” by the Executive.
By the 1970s the old communist party, with its staid Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Union Rights,  embraced the view that the highest form of life was that of a full-time official. It was easily eclipsed by “rank-and-file” movements led by the left social-democratic posers in a variety of self-styled Trotskyist fronts. Those that climbed up the greasy pole of the union apparatat soon sold out. Their grass-roots organisations came and went. But that’s not to say the method was wrong. Look at the Anti-Nazi League of the Seventies. It has evolved into the anti-fascist and anti-racist mass movement that confronts the Faragists and the likes of the man who calls himself “Tommy Robinson” on our streets today.
This is what we need to get back to in the unions today – building a united front with all left forces ready to build a genuinely rank-and-file movement and willing to take on the employer for higher wages and fight for peace and socialism.

The Chosen Men return!

 by Ben Soton

Sharpe’s Storm by Bernard Cornwell, Harper-Collins. Hbk: 2025, 368pp, rrp £22.00. Sbk: 2026, 368pp, rrp £9.99. Audio: 628 minutes, rrp £17.99.

This is Bernard Cornwell’s 24th novel in the Sharpe series – set in 1813, as the British army along with their Spanish and Portuguese allies advance into France during the Napoleonic wars. Most of the Sharpe novels are set during the war with France when Britain was aligned with the absolute monarchies of Prussia, Russia and Austria. So I wouldn’t imagine the Sharpe saga, with its glorification of war, especially a conflict where this country was arguably on the wrong side, to be especially popular on the left.           
What of the character Sharpe? Richard Sharpe was born around 1780 in poverty, becomes involved in crime.  In the television series, Sharpe, played by Sean Bean, is a Yorkshireman; in the original novels he is a Londoner.  He eventually joins the army and begins a successful military career.  So successful that he is given a commission by Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington.  This gives him both strength and vulnerability.  On the one hand he is Wellington’s man, giving him a degree of protection. But he lacks the wealthy connections of most other officers and therefore Wellington can easily break him as he could make him.  
For this reason Sharpe is often given dangerous missions; in the case of Sharpe’s Storm Admiral Sir Joel Chase.  has been tasked by Wellington to overview the river Ardour, check its bridges and examine the possibility of getting warships down it. This is made increasingly difficult as the events take place during a storm.  Although Sharpe is admired by the military top brass, he still manages to make enemies amongst junior officers from the ranks of the gentry. In this story Sir Nathaniel Peacock, a man who obviously bought his commission and with limited experience, is a liability.  Peacock continually reminds Sharpe of his social superiority; which Sharpe is able to brush off with a degree of humour and sarcasm.
The idea of Sharpe is based on the notion that the ruling class, which may contain a few bad apples (anyone who has watched the news recently knows that it is more than just a few), is fundamentally good, recognises talent and is willing to occasionally bring in new blood.  This positive view of the ruling class explains why the series is popular on the right.  Sharpe, although a fundamentally decent individual, has absolutely no concept of class loyalty. Meanwhile the character also has deep insecurities; which emanate from the knowledge that he may never be fully accepted.  Thus accepting the limitations of meritocracy. Sharpe is ultimately a mercenary for his own ruling class.

Stop the drift to war

It didn’t take long for Starmer to switch from blocking the Americans from using  British bases to attack Iran to permitting it and now actively collaborating with US imperialism and Zionist Israel in their onslaught against the Islamic Republic. He can count on the Faragists and Tories to back him while Tony Blair, who can barely show his face in public in Britain these days, thinks we should have gone in with Trump from the start.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Farage thinks he’s Trump’s mouth-piece in Britain while crawling to the Americans is almost compulsory for Tory and Labour leaders who drone on and on about “partnership” and the “special relationship” to justify British imperialism’s slavish support of American power throughout the world. 
But on the street millions upon millions have seen through the lies of the bourgeois media. They want no part in Trump’s crusade. This is the message that must be heard throughout the labour movement as well. Stop the bombing! End the War!

Every cloud...

This week we saw a minor victory for free speech when the High Court ruled in favour of the Guardian journalist Owen Jones in the Raffi Berg libel case. Jones, best known for his book Chavs –The Demonising of the Working Class back in 2011, launched his career as a man of the left but soon gravitated to the centre to join the prominenti of the mainstream media. He did, however, attract the ire of the Zionists when he accused a BBC journalist of pro-Israeli bias in December 2024
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Jones' article cited BBC journalists who accused BBC news online editor Raffi Berg of fostering a culture of 'systematic Israeli propaganda'.  But the court rejected Berg's lawyers' core argument that Jones' reporting presented him as "a rogue journalist and editor who deliberately disregards and breaches the duties of accuracy and impartiality".
Jones' piece in Drop Site News quoted BBC staffers saying Berg "reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images" and "repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity". Jones said that "facts unfavourable to Israel have been stripped out of Berg’s reports" and that he played a "crucial role" in "conduct that imperils the integrity of the BBC".
Berg instructed Mark Lewis of Patron Law, previously a director of UK Lawyers for Israel, as his solicitor. His legal team says that Owen’s piece strikes "at the claimant’s professional reputation as a journalist and editor" and has led to "an onslaught of hatred, intimidation and threats", including death threats. 
Nevertheless the judges ruled that the article by Jones expressed an opinion, and indicated the basis for that opinion through examples of Berg's journalism and editorial role. The ruling is central to determining whether the case is to be pursued.
Berg will now need to show that Jones did not genuinely hold the opinion he expressed in his reporting, or demonstrate that the opinion is not one an honest person could hold on the basis of any fact that existed at the time of its publication. It will be interesting to see if Berg decides to take this any further...

The view from the Donbas

Boris Litvinov, Theo Russell & Andy Brooks

by Theo Russell

Members of the New Communist Party and International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity recently held an online meeting with Boris Litvinov, the Secretary of the Donetsk Region of theCommunist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). The meeting was also joined by Gedrius Gebrauskas, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania, who is currently living in exile in Moscow. We publish here a summary of the main points which were discussed.
Boris Litvinov, the Donetsk communist leader,  said that though recent initiatives have led to talks on the Ukraine conflict the war continues unabated. On the US-Russian peace talks there are currently plenty of delegations meeting in various places, creating the illusion that the Americans want peace. But while Trump says he won’t send troops to Ukraine, he’s happy for the Europeans to pay for weapons to send to Ukraine to continue the war.
The leading European states dream of endlessly prolonging the conflict, with the aim of doing away with Russia. The European media spreads the idea that Russia is preparing to invade Europe, and the EU representative for foreign policy, Kaja Kallas, has made the ridiculous claim that in the past 100 years, Russia has attacked at least 19 countries, “some as many as three or four times”. 
We need to explain that Russia isn’t preparing to attack anyone. But Ukraine is our concern. It was part of the Soviet Union. It is our problem and we need to solve it. Let Europe solve their own problems with the United States!
We hope to convince the European countries to stop sending money and weapons for the war.
We still don’t understand why the European states blew up the Nord Stream pipeline and cut off Russian energy.
On Western claims of about a million Russian casualties let’s be clear. There are victims on both sides in any war. But when we return 1,000 body-bags to Ukraine, Ukraine sends us 80 in return, and this is the normal ratio in such exchanges. War is very complicated, now with modern systems such as drones, and inevitably the war will carry on. 
 Zelensky is a criminal. His latest demand is for 1.5 trillion US dollars to cover Ukraine’s budget for five years. If Europe continues to send money to ther Kiev regime, a global catastrophe, including the possibility of a nuclear conflict, becomes highly likely.
We want to see a just settlement of the Ukraine crisis. We also want conflicts elsewhere in the world to end in Palestine, Iran,  Lebanon, Yemen and Sudan. This is our main concern.
Andy Brooks, the NCP general secretary. said that the primary contradiction in the world today is between United States imperialism and the rest of the world it seeks to control and exploit. President Trump may not want world domination but he does want to divide the world into spheres on influence – with the lion’s share in American hands –  in line with the wishes of the dominant sections in the USA – manufacturing, big oil and the tech giants. As with Biden, the aim is still to control the world market in energy, and to challenge any country which tries to establish genuine economic independence.
Europe believed that Russia would lose quickly in 2022 and that the sanctions against Russia and against Russian oligarchs would create the possibility of a change of leadership in the Kremlin. This they believed would enable British and Franco-German imperialism to exploit Ukraine in partnership with the Americans. This did not happen.
Trump’s 22 point “peace plan” for Ukraine includes total American control of Ukraine’s mineral resources and the current US-Russian talks cover economic projects which completely exclude Europe. 
These talks are secret. Now we oppose secret diplomacy, which was banned by the UN after 1945, and we still don’t know what is happening in the US-Russian talks, which are by-passing the United Nations. What does seem clear is that Trump’s goal is to take 70 per cent of Ukrainia’s assets for himself leaving the 30 per cent of liberated territory for Russia and nothing for the Europeans.
For our part we hope that a future settlement will recognise the legitimate right of the people of the Donbas and southern Ukraine to join the Russian Federation and that the democratic forces in Ukraine will be given complete freedom of expression. 
Boris Litvinov said our mission is to help people to open their eyes. The capitalist part of our state wants to join the US dollar system, but there is another section which is patriotic. This section includes capitalists and left forces. We recognise that we need to protect our country’s national interests , even in alliance with capitalist forces.
Now Trump is hoping to impose a digital currency on the world. When this happens and a new international situation comes about, the European states need to choose what to do. If they decide to ally with Russia, China, India, Brazil and the other BRICS states, then there will be no space left for the Americans and the dollar will collapse.
We feel sorrow for the people of Ukraine. They are being used as cannon fodder to achieve the future aims of the United States. Many Ukrainians have fled to find a better life and there are not many people left to continue fighting. Now the Western countries are talking about sending troops to Ukraine. That means you too will have coffins returning – who will be responsible for this madness?