ESSENTIAL

OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT—Considerable controversy continues to swirl over the issue of whether Israel did or did not inflict significant damage on Iran on October 26. I trust the voices of Crooke, Ritter, Macgregor, McGovern and Johnson more than I trust Israeli claims or those of the Pentagon. Iran is a technologically advanced entity, a country of 100 million people with powerful alliances and major historical grievances with the rules-based order. Its enemies do not seem to understand that.

EDITORS—This narrative of a “softening” does not stand up to analysis, masking police excess when faced with protesters. A freelance journalist was injured thus and had a testicle removed after being struck with a baton by a policeman during a protest on January 19 in Paris. Moreover, the apparent change in strategy after the appointment of Laurent Nuñez did not stop the unjustified beatings of a few dozen people protesting peacefully during police charges (January 19, January 31, and February 11).

In particular, from March 16 on, and after the government forced through its pension reform without a vote by using Article 49.3 of the Constitution, journalists and observers have documented widely how police forces have used physical violence against protesters. They have employed arbitrary arrest, and tactics of humiliation during the night-time marches (which unions didn’t declare) after the recourse to Article 49.3.

JOTI BRAR—Prominent theoreticians besides Ludo Martens who attended the yearly May Day seminars in Brussels during the 1990s included Harpal Brar (Great Britain), Tamila Yabrova (Ukraine) and Nina Andreyeva (Russia). It was greatly to the credit of Comrade Ludo and the PTB that they made contact with so many currents within the former Soviet Union that were struggling to come to terms with what had happened in their country and who continued to uphold the banner of Marxism. It was unfortunate that there was no party or individual with the prestige to bring together the various warring factions and establish a common line, however.

This has been a recurring theme in our movement since the loss of a unified leadership – divisions abound and the impetus to overcome them has never yet been strong enough to create meaningful unity of action across international borders or to unify separate groupings within each country in the way Lenin and the Comintern were able to after the October Revolution.

The truth is that this will probably continue to be the case until a new socialist revolution is successful, and is led by a party that is guided by scientific socialism, restoring the prestige of Marxist science in practice, inspiring the masses of the world, and earning the right to be seriously listened to by Marxists and revolutionaries around the world.

EDITORS—Joti tracks the reasons for the Dems’ recent embarrassing defeat at the polls, and the UK Laborites’ dismal performance. 
TOPICS: UK/US working class apathy and alienation from the political establishment and taking part in elections, a fact that worries the ruling elites as elections serve to legitimate their rule.  • Trump’s MAGA people may represent the last contingent of true believers in the US promise of an actual popular democracy, notes  • Joti describes in detail how WOKISM (identity politics) is nothing but a shameless ruling class tactic to disarm the working class by introducing issues that serve to divide it, while presenting the state (in the hands of one or another wing of the plutocracy) as their saviours.  Insofar as identity politics replaces the actual class struggle, in which economic factors play the preponderant part, it buries the possibilities for revolutionary social change. This is seen in issue after issue. Radical bourgeois feminists, for example, taught women in the 1980s that their “natural” enemy was men, not the ruling elites.  Bourgeois feminism ended up subverting women’s power. • Same with the “woke” anti-racist movement. Capitalism, in fact, needs racism; it is one of the ideologies fuelling and justifying colonialism and the ruthless expropriation of people around the globe, often using racist imperial soldiers who come from the exploiting country’s working class.

EDITORS—Students with the youth-led Sunrise Movement walked out of over 30 high schools and universities across the United States on Friday to stand against U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s “extreme agenda” and promote “the fight for climate justice, workers’ rights, and democracy.”

The protesters carried signs and banners with messages including “This Is a Climate Emergency,” “Protect Our Futures,” “People Not Profit,” “Fuck Trump,” “Together We Rise,” and “The Dems Failed, The People Won’t.”