The following paper was delivered by our party to the World Anti-imperialist Platform’s international conference in Dakar, Senegal on 26 October 2024.
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No one paying attention can have failed to notice how the steady undermining of the supposed ‘democratic freedoms’ enjoyed by workers in Britain – a process that has been underway for some considerable time – is now being rapidly accelerated. And that the preferred means for achieving this aim has been the installation of a supposedly ‘pro-worker’ Labour administration in Downing Street.
In fact, the British imperialist ruling class is no stranger to the suppression of democratic rights. One has only to examine the history of the British empire to understand that ‘democracy’ was not a prominent feature of British rule in its colonial possessions.
Even at home, although the ruling class preferred to rule via bribery and the appearance of ‘consent’, whenever meaningful working-class action posed a real threat to capitalist profit-taking, those involved met with brutal state violence, vilification and criminalisation – as was amply borne out during the year-long war waged by the British state machinery against the striking miners 40 years ago.
The Irish model
To take another example from Britain’s recent history, many of our readers will remember the combination of media lies, mass incarceration, political policing, Diplock (jury-free, single judge) courts, criminalisation of political prisoners and the surreptitious state backing of fascistic armed militia that operated under the aegis of the notorious ‘prevention of terrorism’ law during what is still euphemistically referred to in Britain as ‘The Troubles’ (ie, the liberation war waged by the Irish Republican Army and others from 1969 to 1998).
These measures, introduced by the Labour government of Harold Wilson (who also sent British troops to the occupied six counties after it was seen that the notoriously fascistic local police were no longer able to keep the restive population under control), combined to form a brutal regime which aimed to crush both the Irish national-liberation struggle and all support for that struggle amongst the wider working-class population.
This created a situation in which Irish or Irish-descendent workers in Britain were routinely harassed, arrested and vilified, some of them even being framed for crimes with which they had no connection – all in order to support the British state’s narrative that the Irish were an ‘enemy within’, that their freedom struggle was ‘terrorism’, and that even the mildest support for that struggle was somewhere beyond ‘eating babies for breakfast’ on the scale of moral outrage.
As all those who have seriously threatened British ruling-class interests over the last 80 years could attest: the ‘great British democracy’ in which most of us presumed we were living was an accompaniment to and justification for always a sham. Free speech and the right to protest have been allowed only so long as no one was listening and no action looked likely to result. A ‘fair trial’ has been permitted only by the grace of the authorities, and due process has been entirely dependent on how the state viewed the ‘crime’ in question.
In the words of Roy Bailey, who added this verse to Jack Warshaw’s classic protest song If They Come in the Morning:
They tell you that here you are free to live and to say what you please
To march and to write and to sing, as long as you do it alone
But say it and do it with comrades united and strong
They’ll send you for a long rest with walls and barbed wire for a home.
Looking at the actions of the British state in the occupied six counties of Ireland, we can see how the imperialists honed methods of repression which were then brought these back to be used against the working class at home, starting with the industrial struggles of the 1970s and 1980s.
The so-called ‘war on terror’
Fast forward to the year 2000, under another Labour government (Tony Blair’s), and a good year before the official start of the collective west’s ‘war on terror’, Britain’s supposedly ‘temporary’ and ‘targeted’ ‘prevention of terrorism’ legislation was made into a permanent feature of British political life.
Looking back, it is now clear to many who were unable to see past the emotive propaganda at the time that while the ‘war on terror’ was supposed to have been launched in ‘response’ to the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, it was in fact an accompaniment to and justification for a series of wars that had already been planned by US imperialism. (In fact, the roots of the USA’s notorious ‘Project for a New American Century’ can be found in a 1992 document on ‘draft defence planning guidance’, written immediately after the fall of the USSR.)
As the USA and Britain got ready to bomb and invade a string of countries whose governments had had the nerve to stand up for their sovereignty in resource-rich parts of the middle east and Africa, Britain’s new terrorism law introduced a newer, broader and extremely vague definition of ‘terrorism’. It also solidified and extended the concept of “proscribed organisations”, which the government simply declares (without having to provide any substantiating proof) to be “concerned in terrorism”.
In 1974, the list of proscribed organisations had only one entry: the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Today, the list includes 81 (mainly middle-eastern) organisations alongside another 14 that have been carried over from the Irish conflict. As in the case of northern Ireland, the list offers up a confused mixture of western proxy fascists (some European and some islamic) and genuine liberation movements, the better to confuse the British people. The real targets, of course, are those national-liberation forces operating in areas of strategic importance to British monopolies – and anyone supporting those liberation forces in Britain.
And so, as the military phase of struggle in Ireland was coming to a close, the Prevention of Terrorism (Northern Ireland) Act, instead of being scrapped, was quietly transformed from a localised to a generalised law, the Terrorism Act 2000, applying not to ‘an emergency’ but in perpetuity, and not to a part but to the whole of the United Kingdom.
At the same time, the ‘enemy within’ that was now to be consistently demonised and victimised by British laws, police, politicians and popular culture shifted from the ‘evil, violent, catholic’ Irish (and anyone who supported them) to the ‘evil, violent, muslim’ Arabs (and anyone who supported them).
Under this new legislation, which has since been supplemented by a further thirteen anti-terrorism laws, any activity that the state deems to be “in support of” a proscribed organisation (whether posting information about a resistance operation on social media, handing out a leaflet pointing out the just basis of the resistance struggle, or merely wearing a t-shirt or headband in the organisation’s colours) can bring on a prosecution for a ‘terrorist’ offence. But despite the obviously draconian nature of this law, its selective application has meant that beyond the muslim community and a few antiwar activists, very few people really noticed what had happened.
Until recently, the illusion remained for many that Britain was a ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ country; that the police and courts were fair and unbiased, and that the state machine generally was either benevolent or neutral in its approach to the majority of British people.
But one has only to look at how rampant islamophobia has become in Britain to see how successful the ruling class’s strategy has been.
Far too many British workers allowed themselves to be neutralised by the rhetoric of the ‘islamist’ other, looking the other way while the British muslims were vilified, and while the British ruling class joined the USA in launching war after criminal war of aggression that laid waste to countries and whole regions by economic and military means as they tried to ensure their total domination of the world’s peoples, markets and resources.
Role of the self-identifying ‘left’
Labour and Tory parties alike, whether in government or in opposition, played equal parts in furthering this bloodthirsty agenda. And so too, to their shame, did the self-appointed ‘leaders of the working class’, whether by endorsing imperialist propaganda that demonised the Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan governments whose leaders were standing against imperialism, or by frittering away the energy and passion of the millions who really did oppose Britain’s wars for oil but who needed sincere leadership and meaningful organisation in order to turn that opposition into effective action. They were to have neither.
Quite the reverse, in fact. Both the TUC and the mis-named ‘Stop the War’ coalition played crucial roles in making sure the antiwar movement never found its teeth. The regime they oversaw never carried out any but the most tokenistic acts of ‘resistance’ and those who joined it were never allowed to understand what power was resting in their lap, never mind being organised to use it.
The blood of the millions of victims of these wars is on the hands of this movement’s misleaders as much as it is on Tony Blair’s or David Cameron’s. Their carefully choreographed charade of ‘antiwar activity’ served merely to keep hundreds of thousands of concerned British citizens pointlessly, impotently busy, before ultimately spitting most of them out as cynical and disillusioned former activists.
Beyond the reaches of this impotent antiwar movement, and lacking a decent workers’ press to challenge the dominant narrative, far too many British workers allowed themselves to fall for media lies about the inherently terroristic nature of Islam and its followers; allowed themselves to believe that muslims who had lived peacefully in Britain for decades were suddenly a threat to “our way of life”, to “our peace and security”, because they did not “share our values” and never would.
This propaganda dovetailed neatly with the ruling class’s ongoing anti-immigration scare stories, which were now specifically targeted at muslim migrants to Britain, deliberately generating as much confusion and division within the working class as possible.
In truth, the only ‘value’ that British muslims were unable to share was the collective blindness of much of the working class to what was going on in the warzones. These were countries where many of them had families and friends. Moreover, their shared muslim faith, with its teaching of a globally connected ‘ummah’ (religious community), made them feel a deep connection with and responsibility to the victims of these barbaric aggressions, who were being daily terrorised and murdered by RAF carpet bombing and further brutalised and murdered by British occupation forces.
Much like the Irish-descended workers in Britain during the liberation war there, muslim workers in Britain have had access to far more reliable sources of information about what has been happening in middle-eastern warzones over the last 23 years than have the wider working class; and more incentive to pay attention to what they are hearing.
This is why muslims have been disproportionately represented, and disproportionately active, in the antiwar and Palestine solidarity movements.
Drumming up pogroms to justify permanent emergency measures
All of which provides the background to the situation we face in Britain today, where our new, supposedly ‘antiracist’, Labour government has already begun trialling ways to ‘overhaul the justice system’ in order to make it ‘fit for purpose’ to face what it claims are new and terrible threats.
But what are these threats? Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer tells us that his government wants to “protect minorities” and “stamp out hate speech”, but coming from the man who only two months ago was agreeing with the Sun newspaper that immigration is the major problem facing the British people, and who told the audience at a televised hustings that he was ready to get tough by “removing the Bangladeshis”, this seems a bit rich.
It all looks even more suspect when one considers that the racist pogroms that broke out in a number of British towns and cities this summer were deliberately stirred up by the British state.
On the one hand, the ruling class has spent decades endlessly pushing virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric, with the aim of convincing workers that the steady export of capital to more profitable avenues of investment abroad, the consequent decline in British industry and rise in unemployment in formerly industrial areas, and the rapid dismantling of the welfare state (housing, healthcare, education, social services, legal aid, infrastructure, cultural and leisure facilities and more) would all be magically reversed if only the ‘impossible pressure’ of ‘mass immigration’ were removed.
On the other hand, state agencies have been employing a deliberate strategy of ‘housing’ (a better word would be penning) asylum-seeking refugees in disused hotels in run-down areas of the country, abandoning some of the world’s most distressed, impoverished and traumatised people in the middle of nowhere, without means of transport and with only enough money for the most meagre subsistence. These unfortunates are banned from working and denied access to education that might help them develop useful skills for the local job market or acquire enough language proficiency to communicate and make friends.
And these permanently alienated ‘foreigners’ are purposefully placed in areas where the local infrastructure is already crumbling; where unemployment is high, where housing is falling into disrepair, where decent jobs are few and far between and doctor’s appointments are as rare as hen’s teeth. Into this tinder-dry mix, already seething with frustration and resentment, the state sends far-right agitators whose job is to point to two self-evident facts – that the area is going to pot and that there are a group of migrants housed nearby – and to conflate the two in the minds of impoverished residents.
The Labour government has no intention of stopping this game. It is as much a supporter and enabler of the far right as are the Tories. And, as we are seeing today, Labour is in a far better position that the far right to behave fascistically, whether by stirring up pogroms or enacting repressive anti-worker legislation. This is because it has what passes for an organised working-class movement – the leaders of Britain’s trade unions and of its ‘antiwar’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘anti-austerity’ movements – in its pocket.
These gentry can be relied upon to make only the mildest verbal protest against the warmongering, anti-worker and anti-democratic activities of a Labour government. Their main energy will be spent on containing workers’ anger via a combination of empty posturing, bureaucratic manoeuvrings and dire warnings not to ‘rock the boat’ too hard for fear of ‘bringing in the Tories’.
As has been consistently proved over the last century, Labour governments are in many ways more effective at pushing forward the class war on behalf of Britain’s rulers precisely because they are able to control the organised working class.
Targeting anti-imperialism
While the zionist-supporting Tories began the job of working out how to demonise Britain’s anti-genocide, pro-Palestine protestors and how to criminalise their activities, it has been left to the zionist-supporting Labour government to complete this vital task.
Rishi Sunak’s government had great difficulty in bringing prosecutions and still less in achieving convictions against Palestine activists, whether they were charged with ‘hate speech’ (‘antisemitism’) under the Public Order Act or with ‘support for a proscribed organisation’ (Hamas) under the Terrorism Act.
As our own comrades found out when seven of them were arrested on two occasions (one of them both times), the best the state seems to be able to manage at the moment is to set up conditions whereby “the bail is the jail”, as was neatly summed up by Sarah Wilkinson, an online collator of Palestine solidarity journalism whose terroristic treatment by ‘anti-terror’ police shocked thousands last month.
Put simply, despite the plethora of laws at its disposal, the British justice system as presently constituted finds it very difficult to pursue successful prosecutions against people whose only crime is to publicly oppose a genocide that has been repeatedly condemned by the International Court of Justice and the United Nations general assembly.
While holding a pamphlet or wearing a t-shirt in support of Palestine can certainly get you arrested in Britain today, the police are finding it difficult to do more than impose restrictive bail conditions on the targeted individuals, and then extend those conditions for as long as possible before ultimately dropping all charges.
The British government’s assertions that ‘opposing Israel is antisemitic’ and that ‘supporting Palestinian resistance is terrorism’ have been repeatedly debunked in both international and British courtrooms, so that the longer the zionists go on perpetrating their genocidal campaign with the full and open complicity of the British state, the harder it is becoming to persuade any jury to convict on such charges.
The recent trial of four Palestine Action activists in Bradford crown court is a case in point. During their trial for criminal damage to an Israeli arms factory, the judge refused to allow the defendants to use ‘acting to stop a genocide’ as their defence, although in point of fact this is a duty under international law. Having been directed to ignore this defence, which was tantamount to being ordered to find the defendants guilty, the jury simply refused to come to a verdict at all and the case collapsed. Despite the obvious lack of public appetite for such prosecutions, a retrial is expected in 2026.
All of which makes it clear why our new ‘human rights lawyer’ prime minister used this summer’s events to conflate the concept of ‘rioting’ with the concept of ‘protesting’. When denouncing racist rioters, spokesmen for the government, police and media repeatedly referred to them as ‘protestors’ – with the aim of justifying the suppression of protest in general.
At the same time, ministers and police justified a draconian crackdown on free speech by claiming to be targeting those who ‘stir up hatred’ – a vague definition that just happens to coincide with the one that has been used to target anti-genocide activists for their alleged ‘antisemitism’.
And finally, the government used the opportunity to trial a ‘speeding up’ of the justice system, allegedly with the aim of getting the nasty racists off our streets as quickly as possible, but in reality to normalise the concept of fast-tracked non-jury trials in the British criminal justice system.
Only by taking the jury out of the equation and reducing the time allowed for the accused to prepare a defence can the state ensure convictions on the spurious charges of ‘hate speech’, ‘support for terrorism’ and ‘causing a nuisance’ that it has been levelling at Palestine solidarity activists over the last year. If this summer’s riot convictions are any indication, the government would like also to remove the time needed to find an appropriately specialised lawyer, leaving arrested individuals to the bare minimum of ‘representation’ via the station duty solicitor and processed through judge-only court hearings (ie, purely rubber-stamping exercises), transferring them from police cells to prison cells with all possible speed and the minimum of publicity.
No wonder the Labour party is also discussing how to free up (and build more) space in Britain’s overcrowded prison system.
On this note, an important anti-protesting precedent has already been set this year. This was the conviction in June of five environmental activists for “conspiracy to cause public nuisance” under the new, extremely draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, one and a half years after they had caused severe disruption to traffic on the M25.
During their trial, although he was unable to do dismiss the jury altogether, the judge did the next-best thing by denying the defendants the right to give any evidence that might explain the motivation for their actions. When they tried to do so anyway, the public gallery was cleared, and the defendants were arrested and locked up, missing large parts of their own trial. Their time for closing remarks was limited to 20 minutes and had to be prepared in isolated prison cells.
And the sentences handed down for the terrible crime of causing a traffic jam while trying to make their voices heard on an issue which those involved believed was genuinely urgent and on which they felt that the government was not taking the necessary action? Four to five years.
Just as in the case of the anti-immigrant rioters, the fact is that the British state itself has put huge efforts into creating the environmental movement and promoting a mindset of climate doom, which works to divert those who worry about the state of our environment under capitalism away from taking a revolutionary path.
(It’s also an excellent way of promoting Malthusian ideas about how ‘too many people’ are the cause of society’s or the planet’s problems, of creating divisions amongst the working class between those who have and haven’t bought into this idea, and of brainwashing as many young working-class people as possible into a belief that it is somehow morally wrong to have children, of whom the ruling class certainly considers there are too many.)
If we look back at the early activities of XR (Extinction Rebellion, which spawned the more militant Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain), we can see how the state actively encouraged all of XR’s decidedly unthreatening pink-leotarded street theatre antics, giving them huge publicity, both positive (for recruitment) and negative (to encourage a polarised, culture wars response to their protests). The more that ordinary workers were irritated by XR fatuity and inconvenienced by XR roadblocks, the less likely they would be to raise objections when the law moved from pretending it was impossible to stop the protestors holding up the traffic to coming down on them like a ton of bricks and locking them up for years.
One doesn’t have to be a climate activist to see where this is going. Just as little as it really cares about ‘fighting racism’ does the government care about ‘preventing irritating protestors from spoiling your day’. These are merely fig leaves to hide the ruling class’s true motivations, which are to force the Palestine solidarity movement off the streets and to criminalise its most militant anti-imperialist elements.
This growing anti-imperialist core of the movement is the part of the British working class that poses the most serious threat to British imperialism’s war drive, and its example and influence will only grow as the Gaza genocide continues and the imperialists’ war and answering liberation struggle widens across the region.
Moreover, with the global capitalist economic crisis deepening by the day, the ruling class is no doubt aware that it will soon be needing a machinery of mass repression to deal with unrest stemming from a far wider section of the impoverished and alienated masses.
Sham of British bourgeois democracy revealed
So as a growing number of British workers become increasingly outraged that our ‘elected representatives’ are not only doing nothing to stop the slaughter but are actively fuelling it, we find that all options for ‘democratic’ response by the people are being taken off the table.
Taking direct action against arms companies engaged in facilitating war crimes? Jail.
Stopping the traffic in an attempt to catch public attention and direct it towards the issue? Jail.
Holding a mass demonstration on a Saturday, disrupting nothing and no one? Subject to police disruption or simply banned as a ‘public nuisance’. Distributing pamphlets and leaflets that try to explain the issues to the public? Arrest, draconian bail conditions, harassment, victimisation … and before long if Starmer and his ministers have their way, jail.
Reposting information on social media to try to draw public attention to this ongoing atrocity? As above.
And hand in hand with all this is the widening of the state’s supposedly ‘anti-terror’ Prevent programme to include socialism and communism alongside fascism and ‘islamism’ as ‘extremist ideologies’ that every worker in the public sector must be trained to look out for, especially when working with children. Which means that as well as being threatened with persecution and jail for expressing anti-imperialist sentiments, you are now also threatened with the removal of your children by the state.
Truly, George Orwell’s anticommunist parable has been turned entirely on its head. Orwell presented Nineteen Eighty-Four to the British public as a nightmare warning against a horrific socialist future, claiming that omnipresent surveillance to detect ‘thoughtcrimes’, hypocritical ‘Newspeak’ by media and politicians, and a state of perpetual war were “perversions to which a centralised economy is liable”. But while the dystopian vision he conjured up had nothing to do with workers’ power or central planning, it has turned out to be an eerily accurate depiction of the draconian measures resorted to by a decaying capitalist state that is struggling to keep a tiny clique of monopolists in control as their senile system is sinking into economic and political crisis.
When the ruling elites feel that the only way out of their troubles is through vicious austerity and bloody wars, both of which are extremely unpopular and liable to lead to revolutionary sentiments among the masses, state repression and increasingly hysterical and controlling propaganda are necessary adjuncts to their continued rule.
Why now?
An important question to answer is: given how weak and disorganised the working class has become in Britain since the postwar retreat of the communist movement and the defeat and emasculation of the trade unions, why does the ruling class need to bother with authoritarian measures? It’s not as if the elites are threatened with pitchforks at their gates right now, after all.
The answer is to be found in the chronic weakness not only of British imperialism, which was fatally damaged by two world wars and has been leaning on the USA for support ever since, but of the whole system of imperialist plunder and exploitation. The USA, which has since 1945 been the economic and military bedrock of global imperialism, is in terminal decline – hollowed out industrially, functionally bankrupt, losing its technological edge, and unable to sustain its bloated military machinery either with adequate recruits or adequate armaments for the multi-theatre wars it now needs to wage to keep its hegemony in place.
At any moment one or another disastrous defeat could plunge western economies into chaos the like of which has never been seen, even in the darkest days of the 1930s Great Depression. A major banking, stock market or commodity market collapse. Defeat in Ukraine. The cutting of oil flows and/or complete eviction from the middle east. The ejection of imperialist armies and corporations from the Sahel, or the Caribbean, or Taiwan, or south Korea. A further delay or even complete halt to shipments of consumer goods from China. The completion of China’s Belt and Road trading and transport network. The development of an alternative trading mechanism that successfully bypasses western financial control and essentially removes the dollar from its role as global reserve currency.
The list is long, and all are increasingly possible. They are also interconnected, so that one domino falling could trigger others in a catastrophic (for the imperialists) and unstoppable chain reaction.
And while the mass of impoverished workers in Britain may be badly demoralised and disorganised, they are in no mood to accept meekly the sudden and drastic further fall in their living standards that would result from any of the above disruptions to global imperialist supply chains and wealth-extraction. The last 40 years of steady erosion of their pay, pensions, conditions of work and access to healthcare, education and decent jobs, combined with the exposure of ruling-class lies over the Afghan and Iraq wars, Brexit, Covid and more, have created a situation of social and political instability that simmers ever closer to boiling point under an apparently calm surface.
With the lies about Israel and Palestine increasingly exposed, this crisis of legitimacy for all western leaders is deepening. More workers are looking more deeply than they ever did before into what precisely zionism is, and why it should receive the unconditional backing of the western powers. And their research is leading them inevitably to anti-imperialist conclusions and demands.
The defeat of Nato and its proxy army in Ukraine is having a similar (although still relatively limited) effect on the understanding of growing numbers of people regarding their previously accepted shibboleths about ‘dictatorial Putin’ and ‘Russian aggression’, which is naturally leading to a deepening anger at the systematic lies and manipulation to which people are only now realising they have been subjected to all their lives.
This is the context in which the state now seeks to victimise and silence online journalists like Craig Murray, Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson and Kit Klarenburg, whose offence has been to highlight uncomfortable truths about imperialism’s wars in Ukraine and Palestine, and Britain’s criminal role in both.
This is the context in which our own party comrades have been persecuted for the double crime of not only pointing out the lies that are told to workers but also explaining why they are lied to and what the solution is.
So on the one hand anti-imperialist sentiment is rising significantly in Britain and deepening the existing crisis of legitimacy, while on the other the prospect of losing their wars in Ukraine and Palestine is presenting the imperialists with a truly existential crisis.
Taking into account everything we have seen over the last year, we can see that the British imperialist ruling class is moving steadily towards repurposing the ‘emergency powers’ model it used to combat the Irish liberation movement into a UK-wide permanent emergency that will affect every worker in Britain.
Which means: no right to free speech, no right to assemble, no right to protest in public, no right to protest online, no right to highlight the criminality of government policy on the question of Israel or Ukraine (and no doubt China soon also), and no right to due process or trial by jury for those who offend on these issues.
And Britain is by no means alone in this. In every imperialist country (and in colonial outposts like Ukraine, Israel, south Korea and Taiwan), we see the same direction of travel, the same plan more or less implemented, depending on the level of awareness and resistance among the working class and on the ability of politicians and media to garner the necessary parliamentary support. [1]
Oppression breeds resistance
So what should our response be to all this? To submit meekly to state terror and wait quietly for better times? To allow ourselves to be overcome by fear of Big Brother, believing the propaganda that he is indeed all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful? To leave our rulers in peace as they try to save their collapsing system by means of aggressive and criminal wars against workers in other countries? To allow them to continue their attacks on workers at home? To allow them to condition our children into becoming cannon fodder for their forever wars?
Are we ready to sign such a certificate of our own inadequacy?
Whether we call to mind the law of physics formulated by Isaac Newton that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” or we remember the dictum of the Marxists that “oppression breeds resistance”, it is clear looking around the world that the mass of people can only be cowed into subjection for so long. As the great Paul Robeson once put it: “The people’s will for liberation is stronger than atom bombs.”
And it is worth remembering that in making these moves towards open fascist dictatorship our rulers are acting not from a place of strength but from one of weakness. We must help our fellow workers grasp this truth and grasp also the fact that only by mass, organised resistance can we halt the downward spiral into economic collapse, ever deeper austerity, draconian totalitarianism and all-out global war.
It may well be that the very arrogance and exceptionalism that the ruling class has taken such pains to instil into the minds of British workers – that our democracy is superior to everyone else’s; that our country is the home of really advanced civilisation, and that we gave birth to the ‘mother of all parliaments’ – will ultimately rebound on the British bourgeoisie. As the ruling class continues to enrage its citizens by more and more brazenly flouting all the principles which it has for centuries claimed to uphold, it is in the process undermining the last shreds of prestige of every pillar of its own state machinery – from the police and judiciary to the media, Parliament and the civil service.
We must help the workers of Britain to understand that the solution to this crisis does not lie in the past but in the future. There can be no ‘going back’ to 1945, 1960 or any other year of supposed ‘peace’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘democracy’. The face that British imperialism is revealing to us now in all its hideousness was always there, only the mask was kept firmly in place by a social contract.
By means of the postwar pact with the devil, workers in Britain were bribed to look the other way when our rulers used their mailed fist abroad, and we accepted the ‘velvet glove’ in which their dictatorship concealed itself at home because our conditions of life had been made comfortable enough.
But the truth is that those days are gone and can’t be brought back. The particular combination of circumstances that followed the second world war, with rising socialist and national-liberation movements all over the world and the old imperialist powers all in deep crisis, forced the imperialist ruling classes of every western country to make a historic bargain with their own workers. Not only has that period long since ended, but the price for the temporary reprieve that it gave western workers from feeling capital’s hand at their throats was paid through the increased exploitation of the colonised peoples abroad, and the most bloody and brutal suppression of the anti-colonial liberation struggles.
The lesson to be learned from this period is not that if we could only get back to it all our problems would be solved, but that it was always flawed and it was only ever temporary. For a permanent solution to the problems created by capitalist production relations and the global system of monopoly capitalism (imperialism), we must look forward, not back.
Today, the capitalist overproduction crisis has returned on an unprecedented scale, and the global capitalist economy is teetering on the brink of total collapse, for which all the peddlers of bourgeois-economic voodoo have no answer other than to print more and more money and to hope austerity and war can combine to stave off the looming disaster.
This approach of ‘kicking the can down the road’ sums up the entirety of bourgeois strategy and short-termism. This is the mentality that leads failing companies to borrow money so they can pay dividends to shareholders for one more quarter. This is the mentality that leads the imperialists to extend wars they are losing. This is the mentality that leads central banks to print more money in the midst of an inflation crisis.
All is done on the basis of hope. The desperate hope that if they can just keep the plates spinning a little longer, something will turn up to save their system … and their position at the top of that system.
Perhaps just a little more pressure on Russian society will bring about regime change in Moscow. Perhaps just one more mad gamble on the battlefield will somehow collapse the opponent’s morale and transform defeat into victory. If just one looting and/or reconstruction bonanza somewhere on the planet could be created, perhaps the economy could be rebooted before banks and stock markets suffer a meltdown and the impoverished proles start to rise up at home.
Hence the desperation of our rulers to grab Ukraine’s resources, to colonise, balkanise and loot the Russian Federation, to keep the huge energy reserves of the middle east under their control, and to stop the rise of China – and with it the escape route that China is offering to the oppressed nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America from their status as eternally underdeveloped, dependent, impoverished and indebted nodes in the imperialist wealth draining system.
We must show the workers of Britain that, far from being a time of doom and defeat, the present period of imperialist crisis is offering to the masses everywhere a historic opportunity to take on and deliver a death blow to the combined forces of decaying imperialism.
All around the world we see the signs of the new world that is being born out of the decay and ruin of the old.
We see the rise of the Brics nations and their determination to find ways to cooperate and trade without having to pay tribute to, or bow to the diktat of, imperialist financiers and corporations.
We see the resurgence of national-liberation struggles, from Venezuela to the Sahel and across the middle east, and the way these are increasingly looking to and gaining support from Russia, China, Iran and the DPR Korea.
We see nations that the USA has sought to crush through sanctions and other means of economic warfare breaking down the walls of their imposed isolation, cooperating and trading with one another and triumphing against all the odds.
We see the increasing cohesion of a global anti-imperialist axis of resistance, underpinned by Russian military and Chinese economic strength, powered by the towering achievements of socialist construction, sharing technological and military know-how, and offering support to the underdeveloped and oppressed nations of the world based on the socialist principles of fraternity and cooperation.
We see the shift in the balance of global forces as the anti-imperialist nations and resistance forces close the technological gap that has been so vital in maintaining imperialist hegemony over the world’s peoples and their resources.
And we see the growing anger and alienation of the workers in the imperialist heartlands, who are increasingly distrustful of politicians and journalists, increasingly aware of the vast gulf between the words and the deeds of those in charge, steadily losing faith in a system that no longer delivers the social bribe that previously kept most of us quiescent and compliant.
There are indeed tremendous possibilities and opportunities opening up in the theatre of the global class struggle, of which the British arena is but one small, but significant, interlinked part. A rising by the British working class would deliver a massive blow to the imperialist system, since British imperialism is situated right at the heart of this system and plays a vital role within it.
Our tasks
But to take advantage of this situation and play our part in making history, the working class needs several things.
It needs an organisation that can train and direct the working-class vanguard, equipping it with the scientific understanding needed to take on the imperialists and win. It needs a communist party that seriously and systematically studies, applies and popularises Marxism.
Such a party needs to link up the British working-class struggle for socialism with the struggle of the oppressed masses around the world against Anglo-American imperialism, understanding that their victory is ours, and that the best solidarity we can deliver to those struggling elsewhere is to weaken our common enemy in its rear, on the home front.
And such a party needs to build a real workers’ press: a physical network of distribution for physical literature – leaflets, newspapers, pamphlets, books – that cannot be turned off or algorithmically suppressed by our class enemies.
While we make use of every platform available to us, we must never forget that the internet is in the hands of the ruling class and our presence on it can be wiped out without notice. We must not substitute online for physical activity but supplement the physical with the digital, using every means available to us according to the current situation, while remaining flexible and adaptable.
A physical distribution network of course requires a national network of trained communists. There must be tribunes of the people in every community across the country who are able to connect a Marxist understanding with the mass of the people and spread the party’s influence and analysis amongst them.
A true workers’ press must set itself the task of countering the stream of lies and misinformation that overwhelms workers in the modern world, breaking the mental stranglehold of the omnipresent bourgeois media that work incessantly to cause confusion, sew prejudice, stir up divisions and misdirect the people’s righteous anger.
A workers’ press and its representatives must not only counter all of this but also empower the working people with class-consciousness. It must help to accelerate the pace at which workers learn, from their own experience, the impossibility of solving their problems while the present system remains in place; helping them arrive at an understanding of the necessity of carrying through the socialist revolution as the only real, permanent solution to the problems we face.
This is the essential work that must be done if Britain’s working class is finally to move from its present position as the ruling class in waiting to its rightful position as the firmly established ruler in situ, master both of British society and of its own destiny.
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NOTES
[1] See the case of Adolf Hitler’s coming to power in Germany for a perfect illustration of the way authoritarianism is introduced to imperialist countries via bourgeois elections, the better to gull bourgeois liberals and their followers in the labour aristocracy into believing that since the ruling class’s chosen party of repression has an ‘electoral mandate’ there is nothing to do but confine oneself to whatever forms of ‘protest’ and ‘opposition’ are still permissible under the always-sacrosanct (although constantly changing) laws of the country.
Note also in this context that while Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has a huge parliamntary majority, allowing it to pass whatever measures it sees fit without any troublesome ewrangling, it gained this ‘supermajority’ with the votes of just 18 percent of the UK’s adult population!
