Fanning the flames

The shameful decision of the Sunak government to send the RAF in to bomb Yemen in support of American offensive against the defiant Arab republic has done nothing for the merchant shipping the imperialists claim to be protecting. The Houthi government that controls most of the country have stepped up their blockade that’s closed the Red Sea to all Israeli shipping. And the US campaign, ludicrously called “Operation Prosperity Guardian” has now put the Red Sea off limits to British and American vessels as well.
    Though crawling to the Americans is second nature to Conservative and Labour leaders it’s a different ball game in Europe. Franco-German imperialism wants to sit this one out and the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrel says that the bloc has no intention to send warships to the US naval mission in the Red Sea.
    “This bloc does not intend to escalate the conflict with the Yemeni army, we must do everything possible to ensure freedom of navigation, but at the same time avoid escalation,” Borrel said.
    The EU wants to distance itself from Anglo-American aggression to guarantee the continued supply of oil and gas from Qatar and the other oil kingdoms of the Persian Gulf which supply most of the continent with its energy needs these days. Qatar, which has long supported the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, has warned that the escalation of the crisis in the Red Sea could force shipping to take a much longer and more expensive diversion via South Africa that would seriously impact on LNG cargoes to Europe.
    It will also affect the delivery of supplies from the Far East to Europe. Tesla has announced that due to the auto parts flow disruption caused by transportation delays, it will stop its production in its Gigafactory in Berlin. Volvo, the now Chinese-owned car manufacturer. Has suspended production at its plant in Ghent, Belgium, due to delays in parts deliveries.
    The Houthi leaders have repeatedly said that their objective is to stop the slaughter in Gaza. Their blockade will end when the Israelis cease-fire. One call to Tel Aviv from the White House would do the trick, If the Biden administration had any sense it would do it now.

Preparing for Power?

The Tory government is on its last legs. Playing the race card over the refugee crisis has done nothing to boost their flagging fortunes. The pundits say Sunak will go for an autumn general election. The opinion polls put Labour streets ahead of the Tories. The media tell us Labour is preparing for power and Starmer is already writing the next King’s Speech. But what is Labour preparing us for?
    Absolutely nothing if anything the Labour leadership say is anything to go by these days. No national mass housing plans. No renationalisation of the railways or the energy and water utilities. No major increase in public investment in education or the health service, Doing whatever the Americans want – well that goes without saying.
    It difficult to see where Labour actually differs from the Conservatives on most issues – and this is what Starmer wants. Starmer’s spent most of his time knifing Corbyn in the back and driving out the former Labour leader’s supporters out of the party. The Labour leader clearly thinks this is the key to victory at the next general election.
    But a manifesto that consists entirely of vacuous platitudes will do nothing to mobilise working people to vote Labour – and if Labour can’t get their vote out then the Tories will win by default.

A dangerous escalation

In the 19th century the imperialists used “gun-boat diplomacy” to carve up Africa the rest of the world into various European spheres of influence. It worked because only the colonial powers could manufacture the weapons of mass destruction needed to enslave the people of what is we now call the Global South. They thought their realms, like the British Empire on which “the sun never set” would last forever. They called it “civilisation” and “the White Man’s burden” when they brutally crushed all resistance to the forces used to build colonial empires that spanned the globe. But they couldn’t crush the spirit of freedom amongst the oppressed masses who swept away the colonial system after the second world war.
The masses of the Third World who took up the gun in the national liberation wars in Algeria and Zimbabwe showed that it was people, not arms, that decide the outcome of struggles while the Korean and Vietnamese people taught the American imperialists a lesson they still have yet to learn.
If the Anglo-American attacks on Yemen were meant to build a new NATO bloc in the Middle East to protect Israel and intimidate the Arabs it has clearly failed. Most of America’s allies have refused to join this new “coalition of the willing” which only consists of Britain, the United States, Canada and some tiny islands in the Pacific that no-one’s ever heard of.
If the US-led attacks were meant to force the Houthi government to abandon its blockade of Israeli shipping they have clearly failed. The Red Sea remains the “Arab Sea” and the Houthis are now adding British and American vessels to their list.
The Yemenis say they will end their blockade once the fighting in Gaza stops.  All the Americans have to do to make that happens is to tell their puppets in Tel Aviv to cease-fire and end the carnage.

One up for the RMT

The RMT transport union ended its dispute with Transport for London (TfL) following an improved pay offer from City Hall that has added an extra £30 million to the pay budget to meet union demands on pay, grading structures and travel facilities. 
Last month RMT rejected  a below inflation pay offer of five per cent from the London Underground. This, they said was “unacceptable when TfL has created a bonus pot of £13 million for senior managers and the commissioner took an 11 per cent pay rise in 2023 taking his salary up to £395,000”.
RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: “Following further positive discussions today, the negotiations on a pay deal for our London Underground members can now take place on an improved basis and mandate with significant further funding for a settlement being made available. This significantly improved funding position means the scheduled strike action will be suspended with immediate effect and we look forward to getting into urgent negotiations with TfL in order to develop a suitable agreement and resolution to the dispute”.
Though Management initially refused to budge the solid response by the membership to past strike calls and the union’s determination to continue prolonged industrial action forced them to respond realistically to the union’s demand for higher pay and the restoration of full staff travel facilities for all Tube workers.This is what collective bargaining is all about and this is why it has to be defended.

 

Stop the war – support the Palestinians!

Millions upon millions throughout the world are again demanding an end to the carnage in Gaza – not least in London where the biggest demonstrations in support of the Palestinian Arabs in the Western world are regularly taking place. Across the bourgeois political spectrum mainstream politicians justify their crawling to American imperialism by parroting Zionist lies and claiming the public as a whole largely support Israel. But a recent YouGov poll tells a different story.
    The survey commissioned by Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Council for Arab-British Understanding shows that there is an overwhelming level of public support in this country for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
    The survey conducted on 20-21 December 2023 found that 71 per cent of the British public believe there definitely (48 per cent) or probably (23 per cent) should be an immediate ceasefire in Israel and Palestine. Only 12 per cent felt that there should definitely not (6 per cent) or probably not (6 per cent) be an immediate ceasefire.This echoes the results of a similar YouGov poll on 19 October,     demonstrating robust and continuing public support for an end to the current violence in Gaza.
The poll also found that only 17 per cent of people approve of the Sunak government’s handling of the conflict and only 9 per cent approved of the Labour Party’s handling of the conflict.
    Chris Doyle, Director of CAABU, says “This poll shows a total and utter lack of public confidence in the way both the UK government and the Labour Party have handled this. The figures could hardly be lower. This should be a wake-up call to the political leaderships to realign themselves both with public sentiment, international law and the need to address the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza”.
    There’s not much chance of that happening in the near future. Crawling to the Americans comes as second nature to the ruling class who believe that their global interests are best preserved through the might of US imperialism. Since the Second World War grovelling to the White House has been 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. So it’s no surprise to read this week that Keir Starmer regularly liaises with US national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
    But some Labour MPs disagree. One former shadow minister, told the parliamentary news blog PoliticsHome, that Labour should support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and expressed concern over how much the US position appeared to be influencing Labour's foreign policy approach. "We don't have an independent foreign policy, a Labour policy," the MP who was not named, said. "We have outsourced it to the US administration: that's not helpful. I don't like it”.
    Starmer and his cohorts would have us believe that we live in what the Americans call the “free world”; that the USA is some sort of democratic utopia and that anyone who opposes imperialism is evil, mad or both. Backed by bought and paid-for labour leaders and a daily dose of lies from the bourgeois media these people think they can play this cynical game forever and ever. We must prove them wrong.

A man of his times

by Ben Soton

Yours For the Revolution – The Evolution of Tom Mann’s Political Thought: Phil Katz, Manifesto Press, 2023, £20.00

“Yours For the Revolution” was how the legendary trade union leader Tom Mann would sign his letters; his life is the subject of Phil Katz’s latest book. Katz is also the author of works such as Freedom From Tyranny: The Fight Against Fascism and the Falsification of History; a study into how the, EU-backed far-right is attempting to falsify history and equate communism with fascism. With this in mind any book by Katz is certainly worth reading.

    The book, by its name covers the ideological development of Tom Mann (1856-1941) from Christian Socialist, through syndicalism to eventually arrive at Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party of Great Britain. It is divided into seven sections covering key periods in Mann’s life. Subsequently the book is useful for anyone interested in the history of the labour movement from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.
    Mann is best known for his involvement in the 1889 London Dock strike and the development of New Unionism. New Unionism saw the emergence of Trade Unions representing unskilled workers; a move away from unions representing primarily skilled, and to that matter male workers. The 1889 Dock Strike saw gains for many workers including an eight-hour day and the establishment of a Royal Commission of Labour. The Royal Commission eventually saw some union leaders bought off by the establishment; most notably John Burns, who later became a Liberal Peer. This was far from the case with Tom Mann. He remained active in the Labour Movement in Britain and abroad; with his activism taking him to Australia, South Africa, America, Russia and eventually China. His support for workers across the globe drove him in the direction of internationalism and his understanding of the state eventually lead him from the limited ideology of Syndicalism to Marxism-Leninism.
    Katz criticises revisionist historians who wish to keep Mann in his early Christian (Utopian) socialist phase; thus, hiding the syndicalist and especially communist phase in his development. To achieve this, they often make little reference to his life after the 1880s; subsequently ignoring the remaining sixty years of his life. The author points out that there have been attempts to dilute the work of William Morris in a similar war; portraying him as a romantic artist and a designer of wall-paper rather than a Marxist revolutionary.
    In this, highly detailed book Katz performs an outstanding role in debunking this reactionary myth; making the book a fitting tribute to one of the British labour movement’s most outstanding figures. Tom Mann was after all a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which he remained a member of until his death in 1941.

The hopes and fears of all the years

So this is Christmas. Celebrating the winter solstice goes back to hallowed antiquity from the Stone Age hunter-gatherers whose lives revolved around the seasons to the Saturnalia when Roman masters served their slaves in orgies of feasting and drinking in which all the rules of society could be temporarily broken. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church, itself largely a product of the feudal era, turned the old pagan holiday into a Christian holiday to celebrate the birth of the founder of their faith in pageants and parades that heralded the coming spring.
In Britain Jesus seldom gets a look in these days. Though still fun for the kids the modern festival has been largely been reduced to eating and drinking and a ritual exchange of cards and gifts.
This orgy of consumerism is, of course, a welcome break from the drudgery of work. A chance to put one’s feet up, eat and drink and enjoy the life the rich enjoy in their mansions every day of their worthless lives. But for the homeless, unemployed and destitute victims of the capitalist crisis, it’s just another day of despair. The festive clichés of the politicians and the princes of the church mean nothing to them. Meanwhile the Palestinian Arabs fight to stave off a brutal Israeli enemy in Gaza.
In Britain millions of people of many faiths or none at all have taken to the streets to call for an end to the fighting. People from all walks of life are now campaigning for Palestinian rights and freedom. They are taking on corporations that profit from the Israeli occupation, the Sunak government that still refuses to hold Israel to account and the media that does not report the truth.
Palestinian solidarity protests have been held every week in London and in many other towns throughout the country. Huge marches, the biggest in Western Europe, have rocked London. They must continue until the guns fall silent and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs are recognised once and for all.
  Over Christmas we get the usual drivel from the Established Church, whose clergy reserve their most pious platitudes for the supposed birthday of the ‘Prince of Peace’ on 25th December while ignoring his teachings for the rest of the year. 
These modern Pharisees talk about the “poor and needy” while ignoring the words of the Nazarene who drove the money-changers out of the Temple and told his followers to “go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven”. 
They tell us to think about those needier than ourselves and many of us, will indeed, give generously to beggars or charities. But what we should be thinking about is those much wealthier than ourselves and the capitalist system they uphold and how they’ve got the money to spend every day of the year like Christmas, living off the backs of workers forced to make do with the miserable crumbs left at the rich man’s table.
   But the days when people listened to the rich men who told us that the greatest virtue of humanity was the possession of the largest amount of money are over.
    The ruling class maintains that capitalism is the only game in town. And it is – but only for themselves. Capitalism, in the final analysis, is simply a system designed to perpetuate the rule of the rich to ensure that a tiny handful of parasites can live the lives of Roman emperors on the backs of the millions upon millions of working people. There is only one answer to the crisis and that is socialism. Speed the day!

Justice for Palestine – cease-fire now!

 Gaza faces a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe as Israel mercilessly maintains indiscriminate attacks on the civilians in the beleaguered Palestinian enclave that is bitterly resisting the Israeli onslaught. But world public opinion made its voice heard at the United Nations this week when 153 member-states voted for an immediate end to the fighting. Only eight lackeys of US imperialism joined Israel and the Americans in voting against the call for peace. Some of America’s NATO allies took the principled stand and supported the demand for peace. Others like Britain shamefully abstained – though some say this modest departure from the American script is a step forward for the Sunak government.
    If that’s so, and we can only hope it is, it is largely down to the wave of support that we have seen for the Palestinians in Britain and throughout the rest of the world. Grovelling to the Americans and turning a blind-eye to Israeli war crimes may be second nature for the Tory government and the leaders of the Labour Party but even they cannot blind-eye the mass protests of millions of people that rock the streets of Britain week after week. Nor can they ignore the view of their Saudi friends, who have shelved a planned summit with Sunak in London over the crisis, or those of the other Arab princes who’ve invested their oil riches in the UK and made this country their second home.
    These protests have encouraged those in the Jewish community that the Zionists claim to exclusively represent to also take the principled stand of supporting the demand for justice for the Palestinian Arabs. These protests are now rippling through the broader labour movement and now we’re seeing Palestinian demands taken up by unions at a local and regional level. We’re even seeing support for a ceasefire growing within the Parliamentary Labour Party with even some of Labour’s biggies now going beyond his meaningless calls for “humanitarian pauses”.
    This week Labour’s Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy slammed Israel over its attacks on Palestinians. He described the death and destruction in Gaza over the past two months as “intolerable” and attacked two Israeli cabinet ministers for “totally unacceptable” support of illegal Zionist settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
    A permanent ceasefire must be the starting point to address the underlying causes of the crisis, including decades of Israeli military occupation and a system of oppression against the Palestinian Arabs that is considered internationally to meet the legal definition of apartheid.
    Nearly 18,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with over 40 per cent of those being children. Now is the time to really put the pressure on labour and trade union leaders and all the other powers that be in the UK to end the slaughter. They need to hear the call for a cease-fire from as many as possible and that Britain must end its complicity in Israeli war crimes now. Make sure they hear it by supporting the protests until the fighting stops.

Take action for Palestine!

It didn’t take long for Israel to resume fighting in Gaza. The Netanyahu government has shown its true colours, jeopardising the lives of the remaining Israeli prisoners held by the Palestinian resistance by its indiscriminate bombing that is clearly intended to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for many years to come. 
On the Arab street millions upon millions are demanding action to stop the carnage. Across the world, not least in Britain, millions more are demanding an end to the fighting and justice for the Palestinians.
The Sunak government crawls to US imperialism and turns a blind eye to Israeli war-crimes. The Labour leaders who soon hope to form the next government do much the same. But the mass protests that week after week rock the streets of London and the protests that are taking place right across the country are fuelling the opposition to Starmer & Co within the broader labour movement. 
The demand continues for a ceasefire and for our politicians to halt their support for Israel’s war crimes. Make sure they hear it by supporting the protests until the fighting stops.

Kissinger leaves the stage

Though it ill behoves anyone to speak ill of the dead it would nevertheless be hard to find a good word to mark the passing of Henry Kissinger, the former US foreign minister who passed away last month at the ripe old age of 100.
Kissinger, the academic turned diplomat who served US imperialism during the Nixon era will, of course, be remembered as the pioneer who made a historic contribution to the normalisation of American relations with People’s China. He was also a supporter of detente which led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union that curbed the nuclear arms race during the 1970s.
The political career of the man who was said to be the master of “realpolitik” in his hey day ended in 1977 with the defeat of the Republicans in the presidential elections. Kissinger returned to academia to promote his own legend while retaining an advisory role in Republican ruling circles right up until his death in November.
Kissinger may have called his dealings with the USSR “reciprocity” or “realism”. In reality it was just horse-trading with the Brezhnev leadership that was pursuing a futile attempt at achieving nuclear parity with the Americans to divide the world into Soviet and American spheres of influence.
But in what US imperialism considered to be its own “sphere” Kissinger merely continued the Cold War tactics of supporting worthless kings like the Shah of Persia and military dictators throughout the Global South who willingly sold themselves to US imperialism while supporting what we would now call “regime change” with disastrous results for the people of Chile and Cambodia. 
In reality Kissinger achieved little during his years in Washington. While he remains one of the few post-war American foreign ministers any can recall this is simply because those that followed him were much, much worse.

Hospital workers stand for Gaza!

by New Worker correspondent

NHS workers held a moment of silence in memory of their colleagues killed during the brutal Israeli onslaught against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at a solidarity picket outside St Thomas’ Hospital in central London on Tuesday. Hospital staff and Palestinian solidarity activists called for an urgent and permanent cease-fire to end the slaughter of defenceless civilians that has already claimed the lives of over 11,000 Palestinian Arabs during the Israeli invasion. 

Stop the Slaughter in Gaza!

Marching through Camden

by New Worker correspondent

The first Saturday of December saw the latest round of pro-Palestine solidarity events calling for a ceasefire, with unions joining the protests for the first time. Local protests were held all around the country and all over London. London comrades joined demonstrators at two of them.  
In North London, protesters marched down to a rally outside Camden Town Hall in Bloomsbury sending a vocal message to the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, the local MP who still refuses to back calls for a ceasefire.
RMT President Alex Gordon addressed the rally, speaking of the need for union representation at these events, and pledged his union’s ongoing support and solidarity while Liz Wheatley, from Camden Unison, spoke of the overwhelming support for a ceasefire among the Camden Council workers that her branch represents, and how no Camden Labour councillors have called for a ceasefire.
Sabby Sagall, of Camden PSC, and Sam Weinstein of IJAN (International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network) both spoke of how their Jewishness informed their support for the Palestinian cause and people, and that to them, being Jewish meant always being on the side of the oppressed and not the oppressor, echoing the words of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising leader Marek Edelman.
There were also speakers representing predominantly Bangladeshi Muslim local Community Groups. Among the points they made were opinion polls in Camden suggest 90% local support for a ceasefire, even higher than the 74 per cent national average, and that our local representatives, at local and national level, do not represent the communities they are supposed to serve.
South of the river supporters of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign along with the South East London People’s Assembly gathered outside Lewisham Library to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza as well as to mobilise support for the big rally on the 9th of December and to support the boycott of Puma.
Speakers said that the oppression of Palestinians did not start on the 7th of October but existed long before that. The local Labour MP Ms Janet Daby was notable by her absence  and was denounced by one speaker for not supporting the motion in parliament for an immediate ceasefire.

The road to Brussels

The Remainers are on the march. The newly ennobled Lord Cameron is back in the saddle as No 3 in the Sunak government and while his first overseas visits were predictably to Ukraine and Israel, his major task is to rebuild economic and diplomatic bridges with the European Union.
    Rishi Sunak has made it clear that he’s not going to do anything to rock the Brexit boat in the run-up to the next election. But the return of David Cameron to the Foreign Office is more than a sop to the Remainers in his ranks. It’s a victory for those sections of the ruling class that want Britain back in the UK and it can only help build their block in Parliament. The Scottish nationalists and the Liberal-Democrats are long-time Returners. So are most Labour MPs. The next strep for the Remainers is to move for the return of the prominenti kicked out by Boris Johnson in 2019 when they tried to stop the no-deal Brexit. This will then, they hope, create enough cross-party support for a second-referendum in the near future regardless of who’s in power at the time.
    The Tory Brexiteers are rudderless. Their self-appointed parliamentary leader was Boris Johnson – now seen for the fool he always was. Their real leader was, of course, Nigel Farage who has abandoned politics for the more lucrative shores of reality TV. Johnson reduced the Eurosceptic argument to a crude choice between the Treaty of Rome and a Treaty of Washington which was a figment of his imagination. Now all these Brexiteers have got left is planes to Rwanda, racism and anti-immigrant hysteria.
    But the European Union isn’t a benevolent society. It’s a fraud, an institution designed solely for the benefit of the oppressors and exploiters. What few benefits the EU has brought, such as increased trade and open borders, could all have been achieved through separate agreements and treaties.
Johnson had a golden opportunity to make Brexit work. He squandered it with all this nonsense about a deal with Donald Trump that was never going to happen. But it still can work if the UK takes Brexit seriously and open its doors to free trade with China and the rest of the world.

The Covid enquiry

The nonsense about “herd immunity”; the callous and incompetent response to the pandemic that led to many avoidable deaths amongst the frail and the elderly and the indifference of a Prime Minister who most of them time seemingly let Dominic Cummings, his Rasputin-like aide, steer the ship of state. It’s all coming out in the Covid inquiry. None of this should surprise us. Johnson’s despicable conduct, and that of his henchmen showed how totally unfit all of them were for high office.
    Johnson counts for nothing in the political arena now. Crawling to the Trump crowd in the United States and grand-standing amongst the Ukrainians is all that Johnson’s got left these days. Johnson is fortunately gone. Sunak will, hopefully soon follow.
    Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, may have jumped the gun when she claimed the UK could be on the path to rejoining the European Union last week. But she clearly reflects the thinking of the European old guard that want to see Britain speedily returning to the European fold.

Keep up the fight for Palestinian rights!

Though the prisoner exchange between Hamas and the Israelis may bring about a temporary halt in the fighting there can be no let up in the campaign for a permanent cease-fire and an end to the siege of the Gaza Strip. 
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) quite  rightly says that “while a temporary truce is welcome it is not a solution. We won’t stray from our demands. We demand a permanent ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza and to Israeli apartheid”.
. Next week’s national demonstrations in London, Cardiff and Glasgow must go ahead and the campaign must continue to mobilise mass pressure throughout the labour and peace movement not only to end the fighting but to restore the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs.
Truces and armistices may have brought about temporary pauses in the Arab-Israeli war that began with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. But they never led to a permanent end to the conflict let alone the “comprehensive, just and lasting peace” that the imperialist leaders pretend to support while ensuring that it can never be achieved.
The first war led to the expulsion of around a million Palestinian Arabs from their homes by the Zionist regime. Those refugees and their descendants have never given up their right to return to their land. And this is the heart of the crisis in the Middle East that has led to five full‑scale wars and continuing simmering conflicts.
The Zionists still dream of dominating the Middle East and colonising Palestine. But their petty ambitions are not the driving force of American imperialism.
Israel is an American protectorate – economically and politically entirely dependent on US imperialism. Israeli governments exist simply to serve the needs of American imperialism in the region. And those needs are to weaken and divide the Arabs to ensure that the big oil corporations can continue their exploitation and plunder of Arab oil until it eventually runs out.
We are, once again hearing the Americans talk about a “two-state” solution. This was, indeed, the basis for the partition of the British colony in 1948 which gave the Palestinian Arabs 44 per cent of their land with Jerusalem under an international administration. It is also the basis of the current UN proposals that simply call for Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories they seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to allow the Palestinian Arabs to establish their own independent state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.
But what the Americans are talking about doesn’t even go that far. Their “two-state” solution would see the Israelis retaining all their West Bank settlements in exchange for  worthless desert in Israel that would be attached to the Gaza Strip and what’s left of the Arab West Bank for the establishment of a powerless “state” whose independence would barely stretch beyond that of an Indian “reservation” in the United States. It’s all there in Donald Trump’s worthless “Abraham Accords” that were supposed to bring peace to the Middle East but in the end were only accepted by Israel and the craven oil-princes of Bahrain and the Emirates. 
American imperialism believed it called all the shots. They thought  all resistance can be crushed by brute force. They hoped to find enough willing Arab tools to do their bidding and sign a surrender peace. The Palestinians have, once again, proved them wrong.

DFLP: Israeli war-crimes in the Gaza Strip

by Fouad Baker

Commander Abu Khaled of the DFLP

The barbaric Israeli aggression supported by the West, especially the United States, which has been continuing since the 8th October, was not the first. Rather, it was preceded by many wars on the Gaza Strip, resulting in thousands of martyrs in addition to the systematic destruction of homes and infrastructure.

Aggression, massacres and war-crimes are an inherent feature of the Zionist entity. The Gaza Strip is an area with the highest population density – 2.2 million people live in the 365 km enclave. Over the last 17 years, from the start of the brutal siege that began in 2006, on Israel has launched 12 incursions into the Strip, including six destructive invasions. Over 4,300 Palestinians were martyred in these wars and over 19,500 wounded while the number of Israeli deaths did not exceed 136 dead and about 4,000 wounded.

2006: 277 Palestinians were killed and 1,167 wounded in Israeli raids that continued for three months.

2008:125 Palestinians were killed and large numbers of wounded over the course

of five days of bombing.

2008 – 2009: 1,430 Palestinians were martyred, including about 400 children and 240 women, 5,400 wounded, in addition to the complete or partial destruction of more than 10,000 homes. In the Battle of the Shale Stones about 180 Palestinians were martyred, including 42 children and 11 women, and about 1,300 others were injured. In the battle of the Eastern Storm 2,322 Palestinians were killed and 11,000 wounded. In the Battle of the Cry of Dawn 34 Palestinians were killed, and more than 100 others were injured and some 250 Palestinians were killed and over 5,000 wounded in the Battle of Saif al Quds (the Sword of Jerusalem).

The Gaza Strip is an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories and it is not possible to create any kind of geographical or political separation between them. These territories are a single and unified territorial unit. Any dealing with them in a partial manner is an attempt to divide the Palestinian land  and divide the Palestinian people. We will fight to defend the unity of the land, the people, and the cause.

What must be emphasised repeatedly is that what happened on 7th October is an extension of what was happening before that date in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the city of Jerusalem in terms of criminal practices against the Palestinian people. Therefore, the battle of Al-Aqsa Flood must be seen in the context of responding to the massacres and crimes committed against our people in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and in the Gaza Strip. 

It was a response to the daily killings, arrests, theft of land for the purposes of

settlement, demolition of homes, the burning of entire towns and the storming and destruction of cities and refugee camps by the Israeli aggressors. 

  Therefore, we say that there is no solution to our national issue without recognising that the basic issue is the occupation and settlement of our land.

Israeli aggression is not against any Palestinian faction or party, but rather against all the Palestinian people and all their parties and political and social components.

It is a systematic aggression, a genocide, against an entire people – women and children, the sick and the elderly –  everything that lives and moves in the Gaza Strip.

It’s not just in Gaza. It’s all over Palestine. This year over 500 Palestinians have been killed on the West Bank –   200 martyrs since 7th October. This, the bloodiest year for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Jerusalem, confirms that the main problem is the physical presence of the Israeli occupation army and the Israeli settlers.

The United Nations and its resolutions consider the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem to be Palestinian lands occupied by Israel. International law allows persecuted peoples to resist invaders. The Palestinian people have the right and even the duty to resist the Zionist occupier, and the legal, political, moral and humanitarian duty of the international community is to support the people’s resistance.

The Palestinians struggles to liberate their land and enable them to freely exercise

their national rights free from occupation, subjugation and colonialism.

The Israeli occupation and the Israeli settlements are the main root of the problem, and any solution that does not take into account the national rights of the Palestinian people will perpetuate the conflicts in Palestine and the region.

The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) calls on all parties of the world and its political and popular institutions to condemn the war of extermination pursued by the Israeli enemy against the Palestinian people, to take punitive and deterrent measures against Israeli war criminals, and to exert pressure on Western governments that support the aggression to stop their partnership in killing and crimes against civilians of the Palestinian people and to work from In order to stop the series of crimes against humanity.

USA: Brave voices speak out for peace

 

Solidarity action in Chicago

by Chris Mahin

“It feels like the new McCarthyism”. That’s how Genevieve Lakier described the mood in the United States since the Gaza crisis began in early October. Genevieve is a professor of law at the University of Chicago whose work focuses on freedom of speech. In an interview with Politico in early November, she compared attacks on those who oppose Israel’s brutal attacks in Gaza to the anti-communist Red Scare campaign spearheaded by US Senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950s.
Dima Khalidi, the director of Palestine Legal, an organisation that seeks to preserve the civil rights of supporters of Palestinian rights in the United States, told The Intercept: “We are seeing people being fired from their jobs, being investigated by HR over their social media posts or conversations with colleagues, and having job offers rescinded.”
The attacks on freedom of speech started almost as soon as the crisis erupted on 7th October. Some examples:

On 7th October at Harvard University, 34 student groups co-signed a statement calling on Harvard to “take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.” Within days, personal information about the signers was being posted online and their family members were being threatened. Numerous CEOs from billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Newman called for the list of signers to be made public so that companies could blacklist them. A truck with a digital billboard – paid for by a right-wing group – circled Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts, flashing the names and photos of the student signers under the headline “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites”.

On 10th October New York University Law School student body president Ryna Workman sent an intra-community message to classmates expressing “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians”. As a result, Workman was ousted as student body president, had a job offer from a prestigious law firm withdrawn, and received many death threats online.

On 19th October the prestigious arts magazine Artforum published an open letter on its website calling for a ceasefire and suggesting that Israel is responsible for a genocide. The letter condemned all violence against civilians. It criticised the silence of cultural institutions about the Israeli bombing of residents in Gaza. The statement was signed by thousands of artists, academics, and cultural workers, including the magazine’s top editor, David Velasco. On October 26, Velasco was fired by his publisher Penske Media. Velasco had been at Artforum or 18 years. After Velasco was fired, multiple top editors at Artforum quit, and some contributors announced that they would boycott the magazine.

On 20th October Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was scheduled to appear at the 92NY in New York, a prominent cultural hub, to promote his new memoire A Man of Two Faces. Earlier in the week, Nguyen had joined more than 700 other writers in signing an open letter published in the London Review of Books calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A few hours before the event was supposed to take place, a spokesperson for the ‘Y’ said that the event had been “postponed”.

On 23rd October Michael Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that he was being replaced as the editor- in-chief of eLife, a prominent open-access science journal, for retweeting a satirical article from The Onion critical of Israel. 

 On 24th October Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s colleges to shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Florida was the first state to outlaw the group on its campuses.
On 25th October the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) wrote to the presidents of almost 200 colleges and universities urgently requesting them to investigate the chapters of the Students for Justice in Palestine on their campuses. The ADL claimed that these students should be investigated for “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”

On 27th October the US Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning what it called “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups” across the country.

On 7th November, perhaps the most high-level attempt to silence dissent about Gaza took place. That evening, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 234-188 to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the only Palestinian-American in the US Congress. (The tally included 22 Democrats voting in favour of the censure.) The censure resolution viciously distorted comments that Tlaib had made about the Gaza crisis.

In addition to the cases which have garnered widespread publicity, there have also been many others involving less prominent people. Just weeks after the crisis began, the Palestine Legal organization had received more than 200 reports of retribution against people speaking out on the Gaza crisis. A concerted effort is underway to use the Gaza crisis to further limit what people are allowed to say at work or on their workplace social media and to punish those who challenge the status quo. This is extremely dangerous and is setting a terrible precedent which will curtail discussion and debate on many issues other than American policy in the Middle East.
However, at the same time that censorship is growing, so is the resistance to it. The crisis has spurred many people of good will to speak up and loudly defend freedom of speech for those advocating a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Israeli apartheid. In many of the cases where speaking engagements were cancelled or editors fired, tremendous outrage and protest has followed. More of this is needed. We cannot allow a new McCarthyism to take root in this country!

Stop the Israeli war on Gaza

 

Hospitals stormed. Innocent women and children are being slaughtered. Thousands upon thousands of Palestinian Arabs have been made homeless. This is Gaza today as Israeli missiles rain down on the beleaguered Palestinian enclave and Zionist troops pour into Gaza spreading death and destruction in their wake.
    On the streets of London and in the capitals of all the other imperialist heartlands millions upon millions are joining in the world-wide demand for an immediate and unconditional end to the fighting. But in Washington Joe Biden turns his back on demands to end the war being waged by America’s most loyal puppet in the Middle East. In London the craven Sunak government does the same and sadly so does Sir Keir Starmer, who is determined to outdo the Tories in crawling to imperialism.
    But more and more Labour members are refusing to toe the imperialist line. It began with breakaway councillors in mainly Muslim areas. It rapidly spread to Scottish Labour and the regional leaders of London, Manchester. Now 56 Labour MPs have taken the principled stand to defy the Starmer clique in Parliament this week.
    They rejected Starmer’s meaningless call for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting which Biden and Netanyahu support simply to buy time for the Israeli army to finish the slaughter. They supported a Scottish nationalist call for an immediate cease-fire. And ten Labour front-benchers, including eight shadow minsters, left their jobs to vote with the SNP.
    The SNP motion called for an end to the "collective punishment of the Palestinian people" and urged "all parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire". It was defeated by 125 votes to 294, with the 56 Labour rebels joining the other opposition parties to demand a ceasefire, against the Conservatives who opposed it.
    Outside protesters gathered to call for a ceasefire and justice for the Palestinians. Every week the protests get bigger. Last weekend around a million people marched through London to demand and end to Israeli aggression. Let make it even bigger next Saturday...

Sunak shuffles his pack

The Prime Minister reshuffled his pack on Monday. Suella Braverman is out. David Cameron is in while Sunak played musical chairs with the Cabinet to create a new ministerial team which he clearly hopes will reverse the Tories flagging fortunes in time for the general election next year. Sacking Suella Braverman was the easy part. Bringing Cameron back from the political wilderness is more problematic.
    Braverman may have been an icon for the Neanderthal wing of Tory party but amongst the public at large few will miss her. But even fewer missed Cameron when he resigned after losing the Brexit referendum.
    Some, however will be pleased. The Remainers were delighted at the news that one of their own is now in charge of the Foreign Office. They clearly hope that Sunak will encourage more of the pro-European old guard to return to the fold. Whether it will have the same effect on the electorate remains to be seen.
    Labour is still streets ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls with a 27 point lead over the Conservatives that would give them a victory of landslide proportions if repeated at a general election.
    Still, as Harold Wilson famously said a week is a long time in politics. The veteran Labour leader won four elections in the 1960s and 70s. Wilson was the master of come-backs. Sunak is not. But neither is Sir Keir Starmer…

A call to all free people in the world

communist & workers' parties joint statement

Amidst the continuous and severe Zionist airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, targeting residential, civil, and healthcare facilities, particularly escalating attacks on hospitals and their surroundings, notably the Al-Shifa Medical Complex, one of Gaza's largest hospitals, which has ceased operations due to the lack of fuel, supplies, and necessary medical drugs for treating the injured and ill. According to the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, there have been over 100 corpses for days in the hospital's yard, starting to decompose, unable to be buried due to continuous gunfire targeting anyone moving inside or outside the hospital. Continuous fatalities of infants and critical cases persist due to the halt of medical equipment, including incubators, ventilators, and other vital devices, with similar conditions prevailing in other hospitals across the Gaza Strip. 

Given these dire and dangerous circumstances and due to the stubborn refusal of the fascist occupation to heed international appeals from organizations like the Red Cross, the United Nations, and others to allow the necessary medical supplies into hospitals, the Palestinian Communist Party calls upon all freedom-loving individuals worldwide and all Communist and Workers' Parties globally to rally and demonstrate outside the embassies of the fascist occupying state, and the embassies of the United States of America. This is to pressure their governments to sever ties with this fascist occupation and form a global alliance to halt aggression, lift the siege on Gaza, and allow all humanitarian and medical aid without conditions.
 
We call upon all parties to sign this appeal
 

• Communist Party of Albania  
• New Communist Party of Britain
• Colombian Communist Party
• Communist Party of Chile
• Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia
• Communist Party of Denmark
• Communist Party of Greece
• Communist Party of Kenya
• Kuwaiti Progressive Movement
• Lebanese Communist Party
• Communist Party of Pakistan
• Palestinian Communist Party
• Philippines Communist Party [PKP 1930]
• Romanian Socialist Party
• Communist Party of the Russian Federation
• Communists of Serbia
• New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
• Communist Party of Sri Lanka
• Communist Party of Swaziland
• Syrian Communist Party [Unified]
• Communist Party of Turkey

End the siege of Gaza now!

 

Week after week millions upon millions around the world have taken to the streets to stand with Palestinians and demand a ceasefire. These marches are so powerful because when we come together we create a force that cannot be ignored. In Britain its encouraged the long-standing Palestinian solidarity campaigners to stand firm and emboldened others to take the principled stand and support the demands of the Palestinian Arabs.
    Within Labour ranks the call for a cease-fire has gone far beyond the Corbynistas and the Muslim community. Some of the Labour prominenti have stood up to challenge their leader’s mealy-mouthed apologies for Israeli aggression. More are joining them and more will join them as the marches and protests get bigger and bigger and more and more stand up to those who serve imperialism inside the labour movement.
    In Gaza the genocidal slaughter that has taken countless lives, including thousands of children, has horrified and outraged humanity. Yet the prospect of the hated apartheid apparatus of the Zionist regime crumbling has given hope to workers and oppressed people all over the world. All communists must close ranks around the demand for a cease-fire now and a just and lasting peace in the Middle East that can only be based on the restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs.

One up for the unions!

The Government decision to axe plans to scrap all ticket offices on the railways was a significant victory for the transport unions and the passenger lobbies that defended the crucial role booking clerks played in sorting out the best deals for the pensioners, students and the disabled that are sidelined by the ticket machines the companies thought could simply replace the human touch.
    Over 750,000 responses were received by the transport watchdogs during the public consultation, with 99 per cent of them opposing the proposals. RMT, the main rail union played a major role in the campaign. Its Save Ticket Offices campaign inspired local protests outside stations; mobilised public opinion and generated a large number of responses to the surveys. This is what unions are for – defending jobs and defending the services they provide to passengers.
    The railways were once a truly national service during the days of publicly-owned British Rail. You could buy a ticket to any station in the United Kingdom at any station on the network. In those days fares were set at a national standard. These days passengers have to go through a confusing maze of offers and deals from the companies that now run the rail network – not to provide a service to the travelling public but simply to make a profit for their shareholders.
    These days it’s fashionable in the corridors of power to talk about air pollution and “green” agendas. Electric cars are all the rage amongst the well-to-so. But if the Government is serious about discouraging excessive use of the internal combustion engine both by individuals and haulage companies, much more must be invested in the railways to make them pleasant and reliable for the travelling public and to restore the freight rail network which could remove so many heavy lorries from our roads.
    The current situation on the privatised railways is a sick joke that will not pass until they are brought back into public ownership.

We are all Palestinians!

By New Worker correspondent

NCP leader Andy Brooks and other London comrades joined the huge crowd at Trafalgar Square on Saturday 4th November demanding an immediate end to the Israeli offensive on Gaza. And all over the world millions of other protesters were also taking to the street to stand by the Palestinians defiantly resisting the merciless onslaught of the Zionist aggressors.
Chanting “ceasefire now” and “in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians” demonstrators held sit-down protests in Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circus before moving on for a rally that overflowed into the many side-streets around Trafalgar Square. Hundreds more took over the concourse of Charing Cross station in the afternoon shutting down the nearby mainline railway station for several hours.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is now calling for a million-strong march through London on Armistice Day, Saturday 11th November Though the solemn ceremony at the Cenotaph will be held, as usual, on the following Sunday the Tories are still trying to stop the Palestinian demonstration in a drive to stifle the solidarity movement that is sweeping the county.
Rishi Sunak says the solidarity march would be “provocative and disrespectful” and warned that the Cenotaph could be “desecrated”. His Home Secretary, “Cruella” Braverman,  has gone even further  calling the demonstration a “hate march” that poised “an obvious risk of serious public disorder, violence and damage”. Both the march organisers and the police have said the protest will avoid Whitehall, where the war memorial is located.
Ben Jamal from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign told the media that “the attempts to frame the planned national demonstration on Saturday, November 11th , part of a cycle of weekly marches calling for a ceasefire, as disrespectful to Remembrance Day commemorations is at best misinformed and at worse an incitement to public disorder. This is a march calling for a ceasefire in order to stop the current slaughter in Gaza. To highlight this democratic action taking place on November 11th , well away from Whitehall, as disrespectful is dangerous and disingenuous politicking that defames many hundreds of thousands of people who want the current violence to stop.”
The Labour mayor of London Sadiq Khan says the Government is playing politics over the “terrible tragedy” unfolding in Gaza, and the solidarity campaigns say they have no plans to disrupt Remembrance weekend events. Now Gary Lineker has joined in the fray. The outspoken sports commentator and former England footballer weighed into the row to defending the planned protests saying “marching and calling for a ceasefire and peace so that more innocent children don’t get killed is not really the definition of a hate march”.

Problems of Peace and Socialism

by Robin MacGregor

Revolutionary Democracy :Volume Two, No. 2 (New Series) October 2023 
£5 plus £2.50 P&P from NCP Lit. PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ

 Another issue of the Indian Marxist journal has arrived on these shores. It maintains now familiar format of articles on Indian affairs past and present, article from parties belonging to the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (ICMLPO, plus materials from Soviet archives. This time there are slightly fewer, but longer articles than hitherto. 
With regard to contemporary Indian the issue opens with two short articles on violent attacks on tribal peoples in Manipur state and the increasing number of anti-Muslim pogroms which increasingly common features of Indian life under the BJP government. 
There follows two longer articles on India. The first offers a detailed critique of the latest national budget for India. The author found that beneath the predictable fine words, there are ill thought out programmes and discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. An interesting study of India: Broken Legacies of the Land and Forest Rights Movement provides an account of the subject from pre-colonial times through the British Raj to the present day, noting that things did not improve very much after independence. 
  The centre-piece of this issue, occupying almost a quarter of the space is the Asiatic Mode of Production in South Asia: An Empirical Study by Tripta Wahi. The concept of the “Asiatic Mode of Production” is a much debated one in Marxist thought. It was invented by Marx, but was not developed by him to any great extant. It refers to societies where government power and prosperity depends on large scale irrigation systems which had to be maintained by peasants. Some critics (both Marxist and non-Marxist) say the concept is unnecessary and what it describes is simply a variant of feudalism common in Europe. The present article covers what was British Punjab in pre and colonial times. 
  An Interview of Qemal Cicollari, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Albania with a Brazilian journalist defends the reputation of Enver Hoxha and blames the fall of socialism in Albania on his successor Ramiz Alaia. Unfortunately parts of his comments about other present day “communist” parties in Albania tends to resemble Private Eye’s Dave Spart.  
A transcript of an August 1946 "Record of the Meeting Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, I.V. Stalin, and Members of the Delegation of the Labour Party of Great Britain” reports a two hour meeting in Moscow. The exchange of views was a polite one, so we should not read too much into Stalin’s comments including one to the effect: “That the Soviet Union advances towards socialism via its own, Russian way, which is the shorter one, while the British advance towards socialism by a longer roundabout, way, both of these ways being appropriate”. Interestingly Stalin had a more realistic view about the possibility of a return to power by Churchill than his visitors. This reviewer is happy to identify the delegates as party chairman Harold Laski, General Secretary Morgan Walter Phillips, Harold Clay, Assistant General Secretary of the Transport & General Workers Union, and Alice Bacon, the new MP for Leeds North-East. Hopes for better relations between the two wartime allies were destroyed by Labour Prime Minister Attlee who secretly authorised the production of British atomic weapons less than six months after the meeting.
  The issue concludes with two sets of historical documents. The first is Materials for the Draft Programme of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks drawn up in 1947 with comments by Stalin. This is given a helpful introduction by the journal’s editor Vijay Singh. While it has been published in Russian, this is the first English publication. Finally we have a reprint of a 1951 Communist Party of India pamphlet containing comments from various party branches  making Suggestions and Criticisms on the Draft Programme and Policy Statement of the CPI, 1951. This is followed by an internal Soviet Party document about it which was sent to Stalin’s for information before publication in Pravda. 
All in all another worthwhile issue. Occasionally a few concessions to non-Indian readers would be helpful, particularly for those of us who tend to forget that a lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10 million.

Stop the war in Gaza!

Millions upon millions of people have taken to the streets all over the world to call for justice for the Palestinians and an end to the fighting in the Gaza Strip. Not least in London which saw over half-a-million march  for Palestine through the heart of the capital last weekend and other flash demonstrations that included the take-over of the concourse at Liverpool Street station and a sit-down protest at Waterloo station. 
This huge protests and similar demonstrations in towns and cities throughout the country are sending a clear message to Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer to break with US imperialism and join the demand for an immediate cease-fire that’s echoing throughout the imperialist heartlands and the Global South.
Its clearly been heard in the Labour Party. Some Labour councillors have resigned the whip in protest at Starmer’s refusal to call for an immediate cease-fire and his pathetic defence of the brutal Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. Tens of thousands more have joined the protests ignoring the threats of disciplinary action from Starmer’s henchmen to stand with the Palestinian resistance in their struggle against Zionist terror.
Now some of Labour’s big guns, like the Scottish Labour leader and the mayors of London and Greater Manchester are, at last, taking the principled stand – breaking ranks with Starmer & Co to call for a truce to save the beleaguered people of the Gaza Strip. Anas Sarwar, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham are all calling for an immediate cessation of the violence and a just resolution of the Palestinian issue while the militant RMT transport union leader, Mick Lynch, spoke in support of Palestinian rights at the mammoth London march on Saturday.
We can’t expect much from the Tories. Crawling to the Americans comes naturally to  the Conservatives. They’ve been doing it since the Second World War. But even they are not immune to public pressure.
This week Paul Bristow, the Conservative MP for Peterborough, was dismissed as a ministerial aide at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on Monday after writing to the Prime Minister to call for an end to hostilities between Israel and Hamas to save lives.
Millions of people have seen through the lies of the bourgeois media. They want to see justice done for the Palestinian Arabs. Mass demonstrations and protests play a crucial part in mobilising public opinion in a just cause. They bring people together and by their actions they encourage others to take the principled stand. This is why some Tory politicians call  Palestinian slogans  “hate speech” and say that even waving a Palestinian flag could be an arrestable offence. 
We saw this in the run-up to the Gulf War when millions took to the streets to try to stop the imperialist invasion of Iraq. The protests peaked with a two million strong march through London that shook the Establishment.  But it was never followed up. The momentum was lost and the war was not stopped.We must make sure that never happens again.
The protests are getting bigger and bigger and more and more frequent – and that’s what’s got to happen to help end the suffering of the Palestinian people. End the fighting. Lift the siege! Let them hear it in Tel Aviv – let them hear it in Washington!