February 2021 saw a fresh political crisis for the nation of Haiti, as President Jovenel Moïse arrested a fresh batch of opposition figures, claiming they were undertaking a coup against his administration. What followed after was to be the usual for the Haitian masses as they gathered once more to oppose the hegemonic rule of Moïse. A general strike was declared, citing corruption and austerity. In response the police and army have ramped up their repression, shooting two journalists on the 9th of February. Running battles between the masses and the armed might of the institutions currently grip the nation, yet the demands of the Haitian people not only refer to the corrupt Moïse but also to American influence within the country.

When focus is applied to the current batch of Haitian resistance, a pattern emerges from the imagery of the protests. The protestors are seen to be consistently burning the flag of the United States of America. The reason may not seem obvious at first, yet the people of Haiti have long seen the connection between their woes and the history of US influence in their country. It’s one that dates back to the very foundations of the modern Haitian state.

From the beginning, the great success of the Haitian slave revolt put the scare into the plantation class of the US in the late 18th century. Through their own tactical prowess and spirit, the former slaves of Haiti (violently imported from Africa during the slave trade) defeated the armies of numerous colonial nations and eviscerated white racist rule within their country. This historic victory was predictably met with fear and loathing from the American settler colonial planters who believed that their own slaves would similarly revolt and take vengeance upon their white masters. Embargos soon followed but Haiti continued to resist as it had done before. After the consolidation of the United States into an imperial entity, full scale intervention was soon to hit the island.

The term “Yankee Imperialism”, an analysis developed by Latin American socialists fighting against the Monroe Doctrine, best describes US policy towards the island even to this day. The term’s further formulation by Turkish Maoists, including Mahir Çayan, describes the policy as a neo-colonial one. It’s one which places emphasis on the role of the comprador bourgeoisie (localised upper-class elements in colonised nations) who collaborate with American authorities to ease the day-to-day management of imperialism, whilst also requiring the hard use of force by the American imperialists themselves in order to quash dissent during times of crisis. The American government, be it Democrat or Republican, has continually enforced this policy to the general detriment of the Haitian working masses.

The most notable instance of this naked colonialism was on July 28, 1915, when 330 US Marines were ordered to occupy the nation by president Woodrow Wilson - the very same Wilson who would later famously announce his “14 Points for Peace'', which included the concept of national self-determination, during World War I. Yet, only a few years earlier he had forcibly quashed a peasant rebellion which he felt threatened American colonial investments in the form of the Haitian American Sugar Company.

The intervention was predicated and acted out within the deep-rooted notions of American white supremacy, with the soldiers exporting the violence used against black people in the US to the Caribbean. American troops killed and segregated with impunity, their racist butchering empowered by the looting of Haitian economic subsidiaries by the US ruling class. The NAACP executive secretary Herbert J. Seligman made the following remarks emphasising this point, following an investigation into goings on on the island:

“Military camps have been built throughout the island. The property of natives has been taken for military use. Haitians carrying a gun were for a time shot on sight. Machine guns have been turned on crowds of unarmed natives, and United States Marines have, by accounts which several of them gave me in casual conversation, not troubled to investigate how many were killed or wounded.”

In the latter half of the 20th century, American involvement in the island would mirror the precedent of bloodshed left by the occupation. In order to garner support from the United States, the brutal neo-colonial Haitian dictator François Duvalier would put a spotlight to his anti-communist credentials, stating that:

“Communism has established centres of infection . . . No area in the world is as vital to American security as the Caribbean . . . We need a massive injection of money to reset the country on its feet, and this injection can come only from our great, capable friend and neighbour the United States.”

To back up these claims, Duvalier embarked on a violent anti-communist crusade which included a law which stated: “Communist activities, no matter what their form, are hereby declared crimes against the security of the State . . . The authors of an accomplices in crimes listed above shall receive the death penalty…” The killings matched up with American foreign policy throughout the Cold War. Deemed the “Jakarta Method” after the policies’ effectiveness in Indonesia, this murderous anticommunist policy was to be re-used by American agents not just in Haiti but all across South and Central America, as despots used CIA intelligence (including from Nazi war criminals turned American assets such as “the butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie) to destroy their communist opposition.

American black ops and economic measures have plagued the island even since the overthrow of the Duvalier dynasty in the late 1980s. The democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in 2004 by right wing paramilitaries with US assistance. Leaked information in 2011 showed the Obama administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour when the Haiti government passed a law raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. Even as recently as 2 years ago, heavily armed former Navy Seals were captured in Haiti as riots erupted against corruption once more. The incident was eerily reminiscent of the failed so-called Operation Red Dog, where American Klansmen and Canadian Neo-Nazis attempted a coup in Dominica with an expressively white supremacist motivation, backed by an imperialist economic relationship.

In more recent events, IMF-imposed economic sanctions have continuously reigned misery upon the Haitian working class. The measures have in recent years under the administration included the hiking of gas prices up to 38 percent to US$4.60 per gallon and were inflicted on Haitian working people in spite of the fact that the average income for a Haitian is a mere 5 dollars a day.

The response from many sections of Haitian society has been quick and militant. A police station in the Artibonite region was set on fire, as were a courthouse and government tax offices in Petit-Goâve, whilst a policeman was killed in the Delmas 83 neighbourhood outside of Port-au-Prince. The targets are by no means random, with institutions associated with the capitalist class both national and foreign being burned down across the country. In spite of some American reservations about Moïse, the US looks set to give his rule-by-decree free reign over the next year, due to the protest’s distinct anti-imperialist edge. If successful, the current uprising would put American assets at considerable risk of a mass redistribution of resources in Haiti. The spate of arson actions against US businesses such as Coca Cola (who have consistently abused the rights of workers within Haiti) only reaffirm the stance of the Haitian resistors towards the United States and its oligarch class.

The crisis of corruption within Haiti is intrinsically linked with imperialist attacks all across the Americas. After revelations that Haiti’s elite had pilfered the funds from Petrocaribe, a Venezuelan scheme wherein oil was to be sold to the caribbean states and paid back at staggeringly low interest rates, the IMF has forced Haiti's poor to foot the bill as the nation now has to pay $20,000 per day to each American oil ship that is sitting in the harbor as a penalty. Economic warfare by the US imperialist bloc against Venezuela has placed Haiti in a similar stranglehold to the South American nation. Unable to now obtain subsidised fuel, the American’s oil hegemony over the island reigns once more. This is a policy that has stood firm under both the Biden and Trump administrations. The liberal imperialist method vs the conservative imperialist method is a false dichotomy; both are rooted in American white power and both continue the subjugation of the majority of the planet using both economic and military methods. The neoliberal administration of Biden constitutes no change for the people of Haiti, as it's a presidency with the very same settler colonial “exceptionalism” as its predecessors.

Throughout its history, Haiti has remained a sore spot for American foreign policy. In spite of continuous repression, both economic and military, the people of Haiti have resisted with all their might against foreign domination. The current uprising is yet another moment of this continuing history, one which places the coloniser against the colonised. With violence rising and Moïse remaining in place, the people in Haiti are unlikely to give in easily as repressive measures begin to be enforced once more. Even more so, they will neither forget nor forgive the American government for the role it has played in the island’s subjugation. The memory of the greatest slave revolution in history still holds strong in the spirit of the Haitian masses.

All power to the Haitian people, no compromise with US imperialism!

Nomadland is a serious film about serious issues. Not three minutes in, we see two-time Academy Award winner Frances McDormand pissing in an open field, before we cut to the title card (white text on black screen, no music. Distributed by Fox Searchlight, a subsidiary of Walt Disney, Nomadland depicts the struggles of the houseless in Arizona. Now, why someone would need Disney to tell them about the plight of the houseless is certainly a question to ponder over.

At absolute face value, Nomadland has all the right ingredients for a Critically Acclaimed ‘Issues’ Film; reliable leading performance from great actor, pan shots across the American West, an ability to relate to almost every viewer despite its specific subject matter, a score from the typically overwrought Ludovico Einaudi that only occasionally pops up. But where Nomadland crosses the line between middling and morally questionable is in its casting.

In director Chloe Zhao’s previous film The Rider, she essentially recreated the events that actually happened to the lead actor after his actual traumatic head injury in a rodeo accident, as a traditional narrative-based drama. This is nothing exactly unusual, or in and of itself unethical; my favourite film of 2020 was Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela, which saw the titular lead actor recreating her experience returning to Lisbon after forty years to discover her absent husband had died. It’s a chance to really pursue the truth in image-based storytelling, and to unravel the contradiction between fact and fiction. The best scene in The Rider features lead Brady Jandreau training a horse, an event that serves as a dramatic milestone in the character’s journey, and sees the actor in real-time training the actual horse on-screen.

Similarly, Nomadland features many nonactors. Throughout the runtime we are introduced to many of the actual houseless people who live in vans in the Arizona desert; they tell us their stories, their struggles, and how they get by, many directly relating the cause of their houselessness to the 2008 recession. But, the film’s primary focus is on Fern, a fictional character written for the film by the director, portrayed by two-time Academy Award winner Frances McDormand; Frances McDormand who owns two houses and is worth $30 million. Frances McDormand, who could probably buy every one of the actual houseless on-screen a house.

In terms of narrative, we only hear the stories of the other houseless because they’re talking to Fern, interactions written into the script. It is at least assumed that these are real stories; while Nomadland is presented as a fictional drama, the nonactors are indicated in the credits to ‘play themselves’. So, a contradiction arises: does Chloe Zhao feel these stories can only be digested by the audience through a fictional narrative drama? This framing only serves to keep the audience at a distance; not only is it disrespectful to its subject, it’s disrespectful to the audience. Most viewers would think the entire film was a work of fiction and the whole cast were professionals; ‘yes, this is a horrible thing, thank God it’s not real!’

Throughout the film’s dialogue are suggestions of the state of houselessness being a means to acquire transcendence, or a more fulfilling lifestyle; very early on a fellow worker in the Amazon plant Fern works at shows a tattoo of the Morrissey lyric ‘Home, is it just a word? / Or something you carry deep within you’. This is not a knock at this worker’s tattoo (we never actually see her again so we have no idea of her circumstances; it figures that she has served her purpose and so is discarded on the cutting room floor), but remember that Zhao chose to show the audience this tattoo, at this time in the runtime. We also hear Fern’s sister say ‘It’s always out there that’s more interesting than here’, and numerous times Fern rejects offers of accommodation.

What this builds up to can only adequately be described as an exploitation of the state of houselessness. Fern ends the filmic narrative still traveling in her van. The character has consumed all these real-life stories to fuel her fictional character’s journey, to help her process her fictional husband’s fictional death. Indeed, by the end of the film one of the actual nonactors we saw has actually died. She has been cannibalised for the purposes of this Disney film.

Nomadland actually almost relates capitalism to the state of houselessness; we see Fern working in an Amazon warehouse (did we mention this is a Disney film?), we also hear from Youtuber Bob Wells about the ‘tyranny of the dollar’ and workers ‘willing to work themselves to death and be put out to pasture’. But this is all controlled opposition. There’s no active class struggle or organising, just box-ticking to cynically ride the zeitgeist and get plaudits from Chrissy Teigen. By pointing the camera at this Bad Thing the viewer already knows about, Nomadland can reassure you that Disney too knows about it. Quite simply, it’s pandering. One character even discusses how ‘great’ the pay is. ‘The film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity’.

In effect, Nomadland is for no one; no one will come out of this film learning anything about houselessness or capitalism. The actual houseless nonactors will not fare any better for this film being produced; their struggles being co-opted and spat out as pathetic navel-gazing for the ‘indie’ cinema circuit. But, at least one critic from The A.V. Club will see two time Academy-Award winning Frances McDormand shitting in a bucket and feel a little bit of class guilt.

Some Kind of Hell

Last night I found a note on my laptop I couldn’t remember making. It simply read ‘Bollywood dancing to let it snow’. After much puzzling, I realised I had made this note whilst watching ‘Some Kind of Heaven’, the debut release from documentary film-maker Lance Oppenheim.

The Villages is a 130,000 strong retirement community in Florida; Disneyland for pensioners. We are treated to a brief clip of residents ‘Bollywood dancing’ to Let it Snow as the documentary takes us through the hundreds of clubs and activities on offer to inhabitants of the village. In the Villages, politics is itself reduced to a pastime; residents riding round on golf carts wearing novelty t-shirts and shouting at each other. Such political fanfare is simply another activity to pass the time — of as little consequence as an afternoon of water aerobics.

In a way, life in The Villages gives us a taste of what life could be like under Communism; more free time to dedicate to our passions and learn new skills. As Marx envisioned, in a socialist society where relations of production are radically transformed, we could ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening [and engage in] criticism after dinner’.  However, ‘Some Kind of Heaven’ shows us that such a ‘utopia’ is unachievable in present, capitalist conditions. These pensioners — overwhelmingly wealthy and white — have worked all of their lives, sold a dream that decades of wage labour in service of capital would allow them to live out their twilight years joyfully. Now they’ve reached their nirvana, there’s something missing.

Residents arrive at The Village and stumble into a world of overly routinised, ‘organised’ fun. Marriages breakdown as couples suddenly have too much time and recreational drugs on their hands. A resident’s husband dies, and she is stuck in The Villages, having to work a full time job to survive whilst everyone around her (supposedly) lives out their wildest dreams. The film follows an ‘interloper’; a man who lives in a car park just outside of The Villages as he hunts for a wealthy woman to take him in and meet his material needs. When this happens, he is bored and absent. He has hustled to get a roof over his head, but loses his ‘freedom’ in the process, the ‘freedom’ to languish in the back of his van at 81 years old on the run from a DUI.

Whilst the film follows Villagers (and aspiring Villagers) as they grapple with the town’s empty promises, the workers responsible for reproducing The Villages daily are notable in their absence. What of the cleaners at the leisure centres, the waiting staff at the restaurants, the care workers supporting dsiabled and elderly residents? Without this invisible labour (inevitably performed by underpaid and/or precarious staff), The Villages would cease to exist.

There is another notable absence that goes unaddressed in the course of the film. The Villages overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, perhaps unsurprising for a community of 98% white, wealthy retirees living in a model village. Whilst Villagers can indulge in a buffet of ‘multicultural’ pursuits, such as Bollywood dancing, there is no discussion of race or the overwhelming whiteness of the towns’ residents and the ‘utopian’ vision it offers.

People move to the Villages to escape the realities of a planet hurtling towards extinction; a fantasy land with no bad news, no work. ‘Some Kind of Heaven’ — in the hauntingly absent stares of its subjects — shows us that such an escape is not possible. Capitalism tells us that if we just keep working hard, we’ll be rewarded with a comfortable end. ‘Some Kind of Heaven’ exposes this lie. The communist horizon, in contrast, sees life as a reward that should be experienced to its fullest; such a dream cannot be realised in a capitalist world, however hard the Villagers try.

Protest The Hero and Musical Self-Criticism

Many musicians have publicly criticised their own work. Thom Yorke famously hates Creep, Kurt Cobain grew sick of Smells Like Teen Spirit, and James Blunt constantly makes fun of himself for You’re Beautiful. Usually it’s one song they criticise, often because it’s overplayed, but rarely do they criticise whole records. Even rarer do they immortalise their criticism in song form. Rarer still, possibly unprecedented, is criticising a whole record, in a song, on that same record.

That’s what Protest The Hero did with Caravan from their 2016 EP Pacific Myth. How did this happen? Why didn’t the band change the EP before releasing it if they were so critical of it? The answer lies in how the EP was released. Following the success of crowdfunding their 2013 album Volition, and tired of the 2 year album cycle, the band tried out a subscription model through Bandcamp. 1 song every month, for 6 months. In their words, the idea was to release ‘songs we love now, songs we are proud of now, and songs which are inherently more candid than our other material’. They certainly delivered on that last one with Caravan.

What they perhaps failed to fully account for is that creativity is a difficult thing to muster on command and you can’t know if you’ll be proud of your creation by a certain deadline, yet that is what this kind of subscription model demands. If you’ve ever struggled to be creative to a deadline—whether it’s an essay you had two weeks to write, a D&D session you had a week to prepare for, or indeed a song you had a month to make—you’ll know there comes a point where you have to aim for ‘good enough’ or miss the deadline, pride be damned. In this way, rigid deadlines can encourage falling into old, comfortable patterns and well-worn tropes, creating ‘just words punched in a template’ rather than bold, new ideas.

The progressive metal genre, as much as I love it, is particularly prone to this kind of cookie-cutter writing, to finding ‘a catchy way of saying nothing’, often conveying unfocused anger at ~something~, vague metaphysical nonsense, or metaphors so abstract they’re essentially meaningless. Indeed, you can ‘interpret the meaning to mean whatever you want it to be’. This is the trap that Protest The Hero fell into repeatedly with Pacific Myth. It was something I sensed, but didn’t interrogate. A vague feeling that something was missing. But I pushed it aside. I love this band, after all. Maybe I just need to listen to the songs a few more times, then they’ll click like their old ones did.

Caravan woke me from that stupor. It begins in much the same way the rest of the tracks do, with an extended, largely incomprehensible mixed metaphor that washes over me, leaving very little impression behind. I’m once again lulled into shutting my brain off, enjoying the ‘empty poetry’ and tasty riffs, until, suddenly, there’s a shift.

‘The Sun, the Moon, the Earth, the shore. Tired metaphors played out before your eyes.’ I start to rouse. Before I was entirely passive, but now all of a sudden my eyes are involved. And hey, isn’t that first lyric similar to one from the other tracks? The critical direction continues, but, eyes still bleary, I do not yet realise where it is headed, until the song crescendos and lead singer Rody Walker screams ‘You are the problem! I am the problem!’, condemning us both for allowing our standards to slip. Finally, as I’m wide awake and alert, Rody asks ‘Are you satisfied?’ and before I even have the chance to answer he tells me ‘Don’t be satisfied.’

What makes this so affecting is how right he was. I made excuses and pushed aside that hollow feeling while listening to each song come out, month after month. I convinced myself I was satisfied, but truly, I wasn’t. Caravan changed all of that.

Whereas much of our media is designed to be ‘consumed’ passively and subconsciously (did you really find events depicted in the film particularly sad, or was it the swelling strings of the score that made you cry?), Caravan draws attention to itself by directly addressing the listener and acknowledging its own form. In that way, it employs a kind of ‘alienation effect’—popularised by communist playwright Bertold Brecht—distancing (or alienating) the listener from the work instead of immersing them in it, to encourage engagement with the song and its criticisms on a conscious level. A bold choice, especially when those criticisms—and more importantly, self-criticisms—are so scathing towards the very record the song completes.

In the moment, criticism is often intellectually and emotionally challenging. It is easy to get defensive and focus on the inaccuracies of a criticism, conveniently ignoring all the accurate parts. We must acknowledge and overcome that emotional response, allowing ourselves to reflect on our mistakes and correct them. As communists, criticism and self-criticism are invaluable weapons in our struggle to improve ourselves, strengthen our stance, and take aim at the ruling class. Good criticism and self-criticism brings what previously went unacknowledged and unexpressed to the forefront. It allows us to confront our mistakes head on, to correct them, and to come out of the process stronger.

After Caravan, Protest The Hero abandoned the subscription model, instead taking 4 years to release their next album: Palimpsest. Possibly their most direct, political, and meaningful work since they were raging against ‘the system’ and ‘the 2%’ (it’s been a while!).

That is the power of self-criticism.

Reflections from a member.

I don’t want a person with AIDS for president. I don’t want a president.

It’s LGBT history month. Even writing that is a betrayal, honestly, because it shows how effective the divorcing of “LGBT issues” has been from its broader origins in anti-racist, anti-capitalist class struggle. The radical, revolutionary and disruptive potential of gay liberation has been misdirected to serve the needs of state and capital. And that is incredibly clear in the politics of blood donor activism which seems often lacking in material analysis.

This summer, the blood donation policy in Britain will change to a “gender neutral”, “risk-based” approach. This appears to be equality. Doesn’t matter who you are anymore, it only matters what you do. If you test negative for blood-borne infection and have had the same sexual partner for the last three months, you can give blood. Therefore, men in monogamous relationships with men are welcome! Come in, sit down, enjoy your post-donation juice and cookie.

I simply do not care that some gay men are now allowed to donate blood. I don’t care in the way I don’t care that some same sex couples are allowed to marry, that people can be openly gay in the military, that Alan Turing is on the £50 note. By which I mean: it bothers me deeply.

This project of inclusion into the healthy, life-giving “blood donors” is a project of separatism, of assimilation, of symbolic inclusion into white, bourgeois homonormativity. You only have to look at the way the changes are praised: it’s a step in the right direction, they say. Ethan Spibey (the founder of the blood donor activist group FreedomToDonate) said that the new criteria challenged “the stereotype of a gay man being dirty”. Alright, Spibey, let’s unpack that. In your haste to distance (monogamous, respectable, white) gay men from the ghost of HIV, you’ve really achieved nothing but pushing that “dirtiness” onto other marginalised queers. Blood donor activists tend to be self-identified “healthy” gay and bisexual men who take issue with what they deem to be an outdated HIV/AIDS-linked homophobia that marks all gay and bisexual men — regardless of their sexual practices — as possible infection risks.

I get it, I really do. The shadow of the homophobia associated with HIV and AIDS looms large. The pain and the injustice are still being worked through (see Russell T Davies’ It’s A Sin, which, I contend, is a five-hour therapy session focussing on white boys who seroconvert while not mentioning the cis women, trans women, intravenous drug users and many others who acquired AIDS). But now, as then, the public conversation is around gay men having gay sex. This very public labelling of men who have sex with men as a “risk group” is entrenched in the murderous policies of Reagan and Thatcher, who declared this an issue of “personal responsibility”. Is sex the virus? No, the virus is the virus.

Just as the political tide turned when HIV was detected in haemophiliacs, surgical patients, and babies of infected mothers, with cries about how the innocent are being infected, blood donor activism is only ever going to create a condition where there are good gay men who don’t get HIV, and bad gay men who do. Indeed, blood donor activism is a direct response to the prevention, in 1983, of “high risk” groups from donating blood. It could only ever be shaped by that original exclusion and, therefore, cannot be truly liberatory. The innocent patient who must be protected is held up against those who are deviant, who deserves to be excluded. But queer subjects, as Jasbir Puar writes, are no longer figures of death, but are becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity. Same sex marriage, adoption, the military, the literal £50 note.

This is rainbow capitalism, where some LGBT people are targeted for inclusion into the market and their “diversity” is profitable.  However, as Marxist Leninists, we know that capitalism produces and reproduces oppression. Liberation is not a Barclays pride float and liberation is not the mythical “gay blood donor”, the upstanding citizen who could not be further from HIV. Nothing to do with him.

The HIV crisis is not over. Men who have sex with men still shoulder a disproportionate burden when it comes to HIV transmission and, like everything under capitalism, the epidemic plays out along lines of class and race. In the United States, in 2018, the highest rate of new infections was among Black people (45.4 per 100,000). Latinos and multiracial people both had higher rates of transmission than the population average. In Britain, a report published in 2019 indicated that the “steepest fall” in HIV transmission were in white gay and bisexual men. The numbers of people acquiring HIV through intravenous drug use is low but constant.

This is the material reality. HIV transmission persists and it is from these people that the blood donor activists wish to politically distance themselves; from the 4000 mostly gay and bisexual men who are diagnosed with HIV each year.

So, are you a good gay or a bad gay? Are you monogamous, in a long term relationship, have sex in private, behind closed doors, on one hundred count Egyptian cotton sheets? Is your blood sufficiently pure, sufficiently close to the heterosexual, white ideal that you are considered worthy to literally assimilate your body into the nation state? Are you good and healthy? Are you innocent? If you happen to get a blood borne infection because, let’s face it, there is no permanence to the safe gay male subject, it won’t be your fault, not like those risky queers, those ones that are intravenous drug users or sex workers or enjoy condomless sex with a stranger in the sauna in Vauxhall.

The history of queer “liberation” shows us that when the most privileged segment of the community gets a little crumb, everyone else goes even hungrier. Trickle down economics doesn’t work and nor do trickle down rights. The HIV crisis will not be properly addressed by reforms that centre condom-using, monogamous, white bourgeois men. Indeed, the whole rhetoric around Undetectable = Untransmittable, state-sanctioned monogamy, PrEP and anti-retrovirals, seeks to portray HIV as something of the past. Men who have sex with men are conditionally accepted on a very narrow set of lifestyles. Those who can assimilate should not forget that many can’t.

If men who have sex with men want to be able to donate blood the same way as their heterosexual counterparts, then the focus should be on eliminating the material conditions that render some people disproportionately at risk of HIV transmission. Until it is safe to be a sex worker, to be an intravenous drug user, to be non-monogamous, to be Black, to be working-class, then no one can be safe.

Until we all work together, not on symbolic inclusion, but on free treatments for HIV, on access to housing and food and education, on dismantling violent border regimes and on the decriminalisation of sex work and drug use, then we will be doing the work of racial capitalism and further dividing our community. This month, let’s learn from the radical, anti-capitalist, anti-racist LGBT history and make sure we are fighting for the right freedoms.

On 1st January 2021, bourgeois media outlets such as the New York Post kicked off the New Year by announcing the FBI’s renewed offer of up to 1 million USD in reward money for tips regarding the whereabouts of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur, who was framed and charged in the killing of a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. After spending years in detention and on trial for this and various other frame-ups, she was condemned to life in prison in 1977, but two years into her sentence, Black Liberation Army members and accomplices facilitated her escape — first from prison, and then from the country. She lived underground in different locations for brief periods before finally making her way to Cuba as a political refugee in 1984.

Assata’s ongoing residence in Cuba is no secret — she writes about it in the final chapter of her 1987 autobiography — but the FBI maintains her entry on the Most Wanted Terrorists list and continually circulates calls for information, along with the number for a tip line where would-be snitches can call in to report on her. The New York Post’s write-up describes her as a “notorious cop-killer” and “black militant” and links to several other puff pieces whose headlines identify her the same way. Yet Assata Shakur is hardly the only person to be convicted of killing a cop, and as the article itself points out, her escape from prison occurred “more than four decades ago.” So why is the U.S. government still putting resources towards her re-capture, 41 years later? Why does the world’s most brutal empire so deeply fear and revile a single 73-year-old woman?

Considering our own place in the history of capitalism and anti-capitalist struggle provides a simple answer. Our party is largely a young party — a fact that has been raised both to our credit and against it — and as such, most of us in Red Fightback have no first-hand knowledge of the world before neoliberalism. While we may have been radicalised by the “War on Terror,” the fallout of the 2008 Great Recession, or other such landmarks of imperialist and capitalist degradation of our time, we missed out on arguably the greatest period of class consciousness and revolutionary activity in recent history: the 1960s-1970s. Most if not all of us born in the decades that followed have been processed through education systems specifically designed to beat back the previously growing awareness of racial capitalism and imperialism, erase the Black radical tradition from public consciousness, and reduce the revolutionary resistance of the 60s-70s to a whitewashed, cherry-picked version of history in which individuals like Martin Luther King, Jr. “ended” racism, armed only with the liberal virtues of patience and nonviolence. But the capitalist approach to suppressing revolutionary consciousness has been two-fold: while the legacies of figures such as King have been rehabilitated to suit liberal sensibilities, emphasising and distorting their pacifist beliefs while stripping them of their radical anti-racist and socialist/communist politics, other revolutionary organisers — generally, those who espoused violence as a legitimate tactic in response to the violence of the state, such as members of the Black Panther Party — have been demonised as “extremists,” with the political and social context of their wider movement being all but erased.

Many such revolutionaries have been assassinated by the government outright, but many others remain imprisoned in maximum-security institutions, serving life sentences or on death row: Romaine Fitzgerald, Mutulu Shakur, Mumia Abu Jamal, to name a few. Their incarceration is just another method of erasing their resistance; to borrow Angela Davis’ phrasing, the state sought to “disappear” them, and their ideology along with them. Assata was subjected to the same fate — until, against the odds, she escaped it. The U.S. state’s ongoing fixation on her, its obsession with vilifying and containing her, points to the power she holds, the existential threat she poses, as a free Black revolutionary. Unable to keep her words locked behind bars, it must resort to attempts to discredit them instead. And it’s not hard to understand why: the points she makes in her book, Assata: An Autobiography, ring truer than ever today, after decades of “peaceful” liberal reforms have left the fundamentally imperialist and anti-Black logic of the capitalist state unaltered. What follows is a series of observations on the connections between the world Assata describes and the one we live in today, and reflections on what we can learn from her analysis as communists struggling within the imperial core in 2021.

Abolition of police, prisons, and anti-Blackness

Assata begins her narrative from the night she and two other members of the Black Panther Party were attacked by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike. The chapters in which she recounts her subsequent hospitalisation, incarceration, and trials alternate with chapters about her tumultuous childhood and, later, her journey to becoming a part of the Black liberation movement. Although the term “abolition” in the narrow sense of modern-day prison abolition does not appear in the text, the struggle to free Black people from the white supremacist, anti-Black institutions of prisons and policing is central in both halves of the narrative. From police using the claim of a “faulty tail light” as an excuse to pull over Black drivers, to white women being let out of jail with no consequences after being arrested with 40 pounds of marijuana, the structural white supremacy Assata describes is no different than that which prevails today. Her speech “To My People” was delivered 47 years ago,  but every word resonated as if it had just been recorded on the streets of Minneapolis in June 2020. In it, she says:

Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.

Today, these words bring to mind the Grenfell Tower disaster; the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; the hugely unequal distribution of COVID-19 casualties along racial lines. In 1973, Assata spoke of the police shootings of Black children, naming Rita Lloyd (16), Rickie Bodden (11), and Clifford Glover (10); the decade from 2010 to 2020 echoes: Trayvon Martin (17), Tamir Rice (12), Aiyana Stanley-Jones (7). The historic uprisings over last summer, which drew the participation of an estimated 15-26 million people nationally, sought justice for the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless more. More recently, two prominent organisers of the summer movement — Travis Nagdy and Kris Smith — have also turned up murdered, just like many of the prominent organisers from the 2014 Ferguson uprising. The police, of course, have identified no suspects in any of these cases — and indeed, history leaves no room for anything as uncertain as suspicion, no question of who has it out for Black radical leaders and community organisers. The same forces that drove Assata into hiding and eventual refuge in Cuba, that imprisoned and assassinated many of her contemporaries, are still working today to suppress Black liberation struggle. The legacy of COINTELPRO lives on.

Assata also discusses the 13th Amendment as legalised slavery, showing clearly how police, prisons, and capitalism form a unified system for the purpose of controlling Black people and extracting their labour:

[…] so many Black people can’t find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know how. Once you’re in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don’t want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions.

This reality has only intensified since she wrote these words, with the U.S. prison population skyrocketing in the 80s-90s due to the intensification of the ongoing “War on Drugs” under politicians such as Bill Clinton. While private prisons did emerge out of this exponential increase in prisoners, and the use of private prison labour by corporations has drawn the bulk of critical attention in recent years, state prisons remain the pillars of the modern enslavement of Black people in the U.S., holding about 91% of the total imprisoned population. The financed aspect of the hunt for Assata since her escape has also revealed how the U.S. state itself, rather than just a few rogue corporations, is responsible for the monetisation of Black people. On the 32nd anniversary of the shooting for which she was charged, the FBI raised the bounty on her head to an unprecedented 1 million USD — the largest bounty ever placed on an individual in the state of New Jersey. In response, the state police superintendent remarked that “she is now 120 pounds of money.” The words of Dr Joy James come to mind: “[Black people] are monetised because we came here [to the United States] as monetary objects, and that’s tracked us through to our rebellions, so our rebellions become monetised.” Though Dr James is referring here to the academia’s appropriation of Black struggle into a profit-producing mechanism through research and knowledge production, the making of Assata into a monetary object in response to her rebellion is another example of the same phenomenon. To the United States of America, Black life is capital. Such a system cannot be rehabilitated or reformed: Black liberation demands its total abolition.

Reproductive justice

While being held for trial on a charge of bank robbery, Assata conceived a child with her co-defendant Kamau Sadiki. Her experience of pregnancy while incarcerated — as well as her thought processes leading up to the decision to risk this situation in the first place — speaks to issues of reproductive justice under white supremacy which are ongoing today. She describes being manhandled and denied basic prenatal care, having to fight to be allowed access to a doctor she trusted instead of the prison physician, who was complicit in the state’s intention to harm her. The treatment of pregnant prisoners effectively aims to induce miscarriage — or, put another way, normal conditions for all prisoners pose serious health repercussions, and no meaningful accommodations are made for pregnancies. Even before becoming pregnant, Assata knew she would face these obstacles as well as many more, and hesitated at the thought of bringing another Black life into a violently anti-Black world. However, she describes how she ultimately arrived at the belief that Black parenthood and procreation constituted another form of resistance against white supremacy:

I am about life,” i said to myself. “I’m gonna live as hard as i can and as full as i can until i die. And i’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind, before they are even born. I’m going to live and i’m going to love Kamau, and, if a child comes from that union, i’m going to rejoice. Because our children are our futures and i believe in the future and in the strength and rightness of our struggle.

Struggles around reproductive issues came to mainstream attention several times in 2020 and were, predictably, met with painfully white bourgeois analysis. In mid-September, the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg triggered an eruption of panic and anguish among liberal U.S. feminists who venerated her as the last bulwark standing between Roe v. Wade — a landmark Supreme Court decision, but one which provides a only a bare-minimum protection of abortion rights — and the government’s Christo-fascist campaign to criminalise and ban abortion completely. Meanwhile, only four days prior to Ginsburg’s death, former ICE nurse Dawn Wooten had blown the whistle on mass hysterectomies being performed on migrants detained in ICE facilities, who neither consented to the procedures nor had any medical reason to be subjected to them. Throughout the year, the inhumane conditions in these same facilities also caused high numbers of COVID-related deaths among detained children. And in the days leading up to Christmas 2020, a tweet was widely circulated from Breonna Taylor’s account, originally posted on Christmas Day in 2019: “I hope next year I have a kid so I can be super excited about today like y’all” — making a shattering example of how anti-Black violence by the state directly deprives Black people of the autonomy to create new life, as well as live out their own. The already-present reality of these examples, though, did not dissuade white liberals from framing a  judge’s death as a unique and unprecedented threat that brought on the mere possibility of the future loss of reproductive rights.

After all, in mainstream political discourse, “reproductive rights” is usually shorthand for white women’s access to birth control and abortion, i.e. the right not to become pregnant or give birth. In her book, though, Assata discusses the struggle of herself and other Black women for the right to become pregnant and give birth on their own terms. While white women have been encouraged and sometimes coerced into pregnancy for the sake of perpetuating “the white race,” Black women (and non-Black women of colour) have been subjected to white supremacist policies of total sexual and reproductive control — eugenics and medical experimentation on the one hand, enslavement and forced reproduction on the other. Access to both safe, autonomous reproduction and natal care and abortion/birth control are systemically denied to Black people; to make either choice is often a struggle, and constitutes a reclamation of political power and bodily sovereignty. “Reproductive rights” are meaningless unless they include the rights to gestate and give birth safely and raise children in prosperity — rights which are systemically denied to Black and Indigenous people. There can be no reproductive justice without anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and police/prison abolition; reproductive justice must centre colonised and incarcerated people.

Gender, white patriarchy, and trans ‘inclusion’

When Assata is a 13-year-old runaway, she meets a woman, Miss Shirley, who is heavily coded in the text as transgender — to use today’s terminology —  though Assata’s teenaged self within the narrative is unaware of this at first. Miss Shirley is “big, tall,” flirtatious and flamboyant; she wears heavy makeup and false eyelashes, and is strongly implied to be a sex worker. She immediately sees through Assata’s made-up story about why she is out on the streets and begins to look out for her in many ways: feeding and sheltering her, helping her find safer work, teaching her how to do her makeup, and giving her life advice. A little while after they meet, Assata learns that Miss Shirley is (again, to apply current terms) not a ‘cis’ woman as she had assumed:

She opened the door with a razor in her hand. I almost fainted. She was shaving her face. Miss Shirley was a man. When she saw my reaction, she fell out laughing. “You got a lot to learn, sugar. Ya got a lot to learn.” We both sat there laughing up a storm. Somehow, it was funny as hell.

In the context of present-day trans politics, this scene could easily be read as problematic. But when Assata writes that “Miss Shirley was a man,” is she actually attacking or denying trans womanhood? This exchange would have occurred circa 1960, the book was written and published in 1987-1988, and the language frameworks around non-normative gender have changed and developed rapidly over the past 30-60 years. Focusing on the material rather than linguistic aspects of the scene reveals something more important than a choice of vocabulary: Assata continues to refer to Miss Shirley as a woman, the way they relate to one other does not change, and the narrative she constructs around this part of her life presents Miss Shirley as a mother figure whose experience is aligned with, not oppositional to, her own.  This portrayal could be sharply contrasted with the currently prevalent bourgeois politics of trans ‘inclusion,’ by which ‘progress’ equals assimilation to white gender norms, appropriation of various Indigenous genders as a talking point to validate white colonial frameworks of non-binary identity, fixation on biomedical pathology as a form of legitimation/validation (i.e. the medicalisation of gender dysphoria), and generally putting trans people on pathways to legal and social normality — however oppressive ‘normality’ might be under racial capitalism.

Pronoun-sharing, declarations of clearly demarcated identity, and all the other hallmarks of 21st century ‘progress’ towards trans ‘acceptance’ and ‘inclusion’ are absent from this scene, yet it is still more humanising, and more human, than much of the discourse around trans women (particularly Black trans women) that can be seen in the world today. The text’s treatment of Miss Shirley is a demonstration of radical solidarity between women, regardless of their designated ‘biological’ sex according to white patriarchal ideology, which uses the body as justification for hierarchical social order (in the form of both gender and race). In the dominant logic of the coloniser, “Miss Shirley was a man.” But materially, the situation shows rather than tells readers that she was a woman — she shared with Assata the precarious social position of Black womanhood, and the mother/daughter-like relationship between them is plainly one of solidarity. Their laughter at the absurdity of the situation and Assata’s youthful naïveté, grounded in a plain acknowledgment of their common positionality as Black women, shows a joyful, healing approach to transness — ‘accepting’ and ‘inclusive’ in a meaningful sense, and so distinct from the pathologising focus on trauma and tragedy that plagues white bourgeois narratives of gender-nonconforming people.

Although the chapter including Miss Shirley is the only point in the narrative where anything intelligible as ‘transness’ is in the picture, Assata discusses at several other points how Black people experience white gender structures differently. She identifies several reasons for this, one being generational trauma stemming back to the social relations enforced between Black men and women during slavery, another being the way that white society in the mid-20th century defined gender by an idealistic economic division of men as breadwinners (productive labour) and women as domestic figures (reproductive labour), not accounting for the reality of many Black families in which both parents were heavily exploited workers:

Black people accepted those [bourgeois white heterosexual] role models for themselves even though they had very little to do with the reality of their own existence and survival.

She also connects this issue to the media representation of white bourgeois families as the norm that all should aspire to, the overall absence of representation of societies other than the white U.S. and Europe in media and education, and her consequent lack of awareness of material conditions in Asia, Africa, and Latin/South America. Bourgeois media convinced her as a child not only to uphold a particular mode of gender and sexuality as the norm, but also to believe in imperialist and capitalist propaganda about conditions in other nations. Without saying so outright, Assata’s analysis shows how patriarchy and capitalism are intimately interlinked, and how — contrary to the “one-dimensional,” single-issue modes of feminist and queer identity which the bourgeoisie has strategically proliferated over the last thirty years — the liberation of oppressed genders will never be achieved without racial justice, international solidarity, and the total rejection of imperialism and colonialism.

Revolutionary organisation and party ethics

Discussing her experience in leftist political spaces prior to joining the BPP, Assata identifies arrogance, both (inter)personal and political, as the primary blight of white socialists and communists. The trends she describes sound all too familiar to anyone involved in radical left politics today: mindless dogmatism; disdain for workers and the masses; loyalty to the bourgeois media and the imperialist propaganda it peddles against other countries; a chauvinistic belief that white Westerners in reading groups are the rightful arbiters of what ‘real’ socialism is and whether non-Western countries are successful in their pursuit of it. She observes that white-led organisations and white socialists/communists in general would “spend more time arguing over who had the correct line” than uniting to take necessary action against common enemies, as well as showing a pervasive lack of respect for active liberation movements — for example, insulting the struggle in Vietnam because the Viet Cong did not approach their own situation as white leftists thought they should, or idolising the texts of Marx and Lenin without considering the specific applications and adaptations of Marxism-Leninism being developed by colonised people outside of the imperial core. The situation today is pathetically similar: the political ‘left’ is plagued by those who parrot the U.S. State Department’s every line on Cuba, China, and the DPRK, seeming almost eager to participate in imperialist smears against these countries, and using their own supposed ideological ‘purity’ — an imagined commitment to ‘true’ socialism, which they alone have the authority to determine — as a justification for sympathising with reactionaries over revolutionaries.

Later, after finally joining the BPP, she found that arrogance and attitudes of superiority persisted even there, among the party’s senior cadre members. This often had a negative impact on the party’s otherwise impressive ability to develop effective praxis, organise the masses, and recruit new members (herself included — she had been put off joining by the abrasive demeanour of many cadre members). Based on this experience, she argues that the failure of party members to self-criticise and reflect on their interpersonal relations will not strengthen the party, but will reduce it to an unapproachable clique, driving a wedge between the party and the people. As she writes:

The only great people i have met have been modest and humble. You can’t claim that you love people when you don’t respect them, and you can’t call for political unity unless you practice it in your relationships.

In the years since Assata penned these words, a frustrating number of self-described socialist and communist organisations have damned themselves to positions of complete ineffectiveness (at best) and outright reactionary antagonism to class struggle (at worst) by allowing such problems of conduct to fester, cultivating party cultures of disdain for the masses and, notably in many cases, wanton chauvinism towards oppressed groups. Perhaps the most important takeaway from Assata is this: holding the correct political line is not the sole basis for a successful revolutionary movement. In this time of intensifying struggle, it is vital that every aspect of our organisational practice be in alignment with our theoretical ideals of liberation for all those oppressed under racial capitalism. Assata Shakur’s ongoing life and legacy of revolution-building and the sharp analysis provided in her writings should serve as lessons for those of us who wish to follow in her footsteps — to become revolutionaries capable of striking fear into the heart of empire, and hope into the hearts of the oppressed.

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, released September 2020, is the epitome of his film-making. He promises dynamic action scenes and ponderous, philosophical plots that provoke and challenge. He fails abysmally.

Tenet’s dynamism is perhaps contentious ground. The audience could be forgiven for finding the action drab. It is hard to feel excited about vast battle scenes where the enemy they are shooting at is not shown on screen. Or when the action is just a flat shot of a plane very slowly crashing into a building. Simply using practical effects as opposed to special effects, whilst nice, is insufficient to challenge the nauseating mundanity of contemporary action movies. We have been oversaturated, and whilst that isn’t Nolan’s fault, it means these comparatively tame scenes are just not noteworthy anymore.

And then comes the “intellectualism”, Nolan’s brand. He has successfully posited himself as some mastermind whom the audience should, and largely do, trust to guide them to universe-brain conclusions. Even when the audience doesn’t get what he is trying to convey at all, they are more likely to simply accept that Christopher Nolan has it all mapped out rather than think he might just be a bit of a hack. Critics perpetuate this just as much. That is not to say that all of Nolan’s films are awful, but rather that they are not good solely because they “make you think”. Indeed, Nolan rarely offers a thesis; his tool is not complexity but convolution. There is nothing philosophically radical or subversive about films like Interstellar, Inception or Memento. They’re little more than “what if?” thought-experiment scenarios dressed up in layers of complication. In some cases, like Memento, the end result is decent enough, but far more often Nolan’s pursuit of a complicated thesis leads to a lack of complex characters or plots. That’s not to say there is never any nuance present in Nolan’s films. But it is easy to take a complex concept and present it in a complicated way, and yet much harder to present it in a simple way. This is where Nolan fails. That failure makes him look smarter, because the gestures all appear so spectacularly complicated. Tenet is by far his worst film in this regard. It has been regularly compared to James Bond, an analogy that is interesting and presumably insulting to intellectual giant Chris, given that Bond films are some of the most simplistic there are.

The key to understanding Nolan’s films is that he doesn’t want you to feel like you “get it”. His sound mixing is consistently bad across his films, and that’s no accident. Having to rewatch, listen closer and try to understand what characters are saying on multiple levels (audibly, linearly, philosophically) is part of his process of complication. The reason why is simple: Nolan does not like his audience. He is not the first director to feel such a way, and that’s unsurprising. Bourgeois film-making and artistic production more broadly is predicated on bourgeois values: they seek to inform and instruct culture, to direct the masses for whom they politically and personally, ultimately, hate. Nolan wants your money and adoration, and does not care for your interest in his films or worlds beyond their capacity to generate more for him. His film is the capitalist classroom, where a teacher imparts knowledge for those “clever” or accepting enough to keep up, and disciplines those who cannot or will not engage. In contrast, proletarian education sees that everyone, teacher and student, has something to offer, and that access to this knowledge must be given and taken by all. Proletarian film seeks to express and stimulate, to facilitate working and oppressed people elevating ourselves.

But whilst Nolan’s film offers us little more in thesis than posturing and admonishment, that does not mean that there is nothing to analyse. We should have little interest in rummaging around his text for presumed philosophical insight, but instead look to the political work being done. Nolan, a bourgeois writer/director with a singular distaste for those who earnestly try to understand his films, created Tenet, and in that we might find intimate details about the bourgeois worldview during these tumultuous times.

Algorithmic Crisis

Tenet speaks to an apocalyptic moment. Scientists in our present day have discovered objects and information that have been sent backwards in time; they are ”inverted”. An inverted bullet shot is one that comes back into the gun, rather than out of it. The crux of the plot, however, is not the individual manifestations of this technology, but that there is something bigger coming: “the algorithm”, which once assembled marks the end of the world.

This threat comes from the future itself. The future has found itself in a disaster that threatens to end humanity (it is alluded to be the climate crisis), and they have decided that their solution is in the inverted technology that they have developed. They look to wage war on their past, presumably our present, to (somewhat ambiguously) solve the crisis in which they find themselves. The class dynamics of Tenet are fraught: despite a wide range of characters, they are exclusively cops, soldiers, art dealers and arms dealers (and one kid, who may or may not grow up into one of the cops in an awful fan theory). It is typical for Nolan’s films to entirely erase the masses from the picture, and yet he still manages to avoid characterising what he is left with. But whereas the working classes might be absent in the present day, Tenet’s future humanity is vitally capitalistic. It is the capitalist class who would be willing and able to wage warfare on their own ancestors for their survival. The capitalist class has long had its future: its property, wealth and entrenchment has allowed it to comfortably stride forward. The futurity of the working and oppressed people has long been robbed from us. We are rendered and relegated to the Present, focusing on getting through the day. To show us a “gritty”, “realistic” future is to show us a capitalist future. Time war is class war.

The device set to end this war, “the algorithm”, is ambiguous within the film, but interesting in what it alludes to. As we know from horror films, even the most generic depictions of evil can reveal political dynamics to us. In everyday language we usually refer to the algorithms that select the information that we see, manifesting primarily on social media. Like the platforms themselves, the influence of such algorithms seeps far beyond their immediate parameters and into what we feel, know, live and buy. Algorithms inform every facet of our lives, but occupy a sort of technological otherworldliness to those of us who depend on this technology. Even words like “Cloud” and “Silicon Valley” portray a physical separation between us and the technology that informs us. Technology that we rely on constantly, that is designed by capitalists to extract profits via, and yet technology that most of us do not intimately understand below the interface. The very governance of society rests evermore on large data sets and optimisation for a ruling class of capitalists, interested solely in profits and their defence and expansion. Nolan’s algorithm itself is a physical object: 9 parts, that collectively form something akin to an oversized sonic screwdriver. This is by no means a complaint - god forbid the algorithm was pictured on screen as a memory stick. But like our own grapples with technology in our lives and how it informs the daily class warfare of capitalism, Tenet’s most important depictions of violence are similarly below the surface. Despite the cartoonish objectification of the algorithm, the threat presented by the future is behind the screen, with the future and its people never actually shown on screen. The threat is not just the bullets, but also that which exists behind what we see in front of us.

Once highlighted, that the weapon is an “algorithm” becomes a clumsy allusion to something said with sinister tones, but also one that provides us with insight into crisis. Richard Sennett describes uncertainty as something that ‘exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism’. Algorithms, apocalyptic or otherwise, can be viewed in a similar light; they represent not a looming threat towering over us, but violence that seeks to supplant us from under the ground, within the wires, behind the panels or our very existence in time itself. Nolan needed to materialise this threat into something concrete for the language of film, but by doing so has reminded us of the physicality, materiality and by extension mutability of technology and our conditions. The “algorithms”, computer and data that shape so much of our lives seem to be unreachable. A physical object that can be obtained, lost, bought, sold, stolen and broken is something we might be able to overcome.

Cracking the Paradox

Throughout most of the film’s working logic, the algorithm might as well be a generic weapon. In one particular portion of exposition it is suggested that what the algorithm does is allow time to flow backwards, for the whole world to invert and allow the future to live out life in inversion across the past, avoiding the future crisis. This opens up for more possibilities, including the dissolution of our future happening in and by bourgeois culture, but in the film the algorithm’s threat is presented as little more than a doomsday device. There is a device, and everyone is going to die. We know that it’s coming from the future, but the way it is most regularly expressed by the characters is as simple annihilation. Neil, the Protagonist’s sidekick played by Robert Patterson, provides an explanation that everyone who has ever lived will die instantly (followed by an exemplary case of Nolan characterisation, having Kat add “including my son” to remind us of the personal stakes of this pan-temporal, instant and universal extinction).

Those with a touch of familiarity with time travel fiction will know of the Grandfather Paradox - if I was to go back in time and kill my Grandfather, would that not prevent him from having my parent who would have me who would do that preventative act in the first place? Nolan’s answer to this conundrum, which should undermine the very premise of the film, is fascinating: Neil simply argues that the future believes they have solved this paradox, and whether they have or haven’t is irrelevant because they are acting on that belief. There is an implication within sidekick Neil’s regularly stated phrase “what happened, happened” that solves the problem, by excluding the possibility of the future’s plan ever happening and thus resolving the paradox but rendering it an impossibility. This naturally kills all the tension because the threat is an impossibility, and therefore is only ever implied to be the solution in the film; if Nolan spelt this out for his audience to understand, he would be exposing his sloppy storytelling.

Nonetheless in attempting to solve the paradox Nolan articulates the mindset of the capitalists perfectly. Capitalism is dying; as we have articulated, it is hurtling towards its end point. The rate of profit continues to plunge ever lower, with inflation soaring and currencies crashing after the pandemic catalysed the bubbling crises. It is our belief that we are in the final time of capitalism. We see the Future’s belief in solving the Grandfather Paradox replicated in the present capitalist’s belief that capitalism will survive. Indeed, it is the same logic from the same class: the capitalist class truly, authentically believe that they will survive anything, and that there is no alternative other than their survival. They will wage wars and destroy land and lives for profit, or even for just the pursuit of profit, fruitful or not. Nolan correctly represents his class: they would wage war across time and in direct contradiction to the laws of cause and effect, in rampant belief in their own eternity, should they be able to. The bourgeois class, a death cult, believes in and celebrates its Divine Right of Kings, even as their palace crumbles.

Where is our salvation?

Tenet is in many ways a film about salvation. On screen, we have the pursuit to save the world and literally everything in existence. This task is entrusted to our hero, the Protagonist. Literally named after his function, one might get an idea of how much history, backstory, or development he is afforded when Nolan refuses to even name him. His characterisation is scripturally bare, helped only by a solid performance from John David Washington. Our other hero, Neil played by Robert Pattinson, offers that nihilistic answer to the troubles of the film: “what happened, happened”.

Tenet’s inversion cannot be mistaken with retroactivity. In other words, the events of the past don’t inform the characters anew; they are limited to only act as they would before. Bullets are shot by characters who know that they don’t want those bullets to find their targets, but proceed to shoot anyway because… what has happened, happened. For all Tenet’s promises and potential, it refuses to allow anything to bloom.

What we find in the text of the film then, is not a plight for a humanity to save itself by elevating itself in the present, but a resigned acceptance that the characters must act as they do. There is an ambivalence that comes with removing all emotion and motivation from characters, exacerbated by their platitudes about the inevitability of everything. They don’t resist the motions they go through, but placidly proceed. The audience feeds off this: like the characters, we just sort of accept that Nolan will take us where he takes us. We are asked to trust him and believe that he has the mechanics and ingenuity of it mapped out. The cast are asked to just go with it too. Pattinson described not knowing what was going on for “months at a time”, as did Branagh. Not only do we lose a connection with the plot itself, but we lose a connection with the tension of the film; at one point the characters note that if they're still alive, clearly the end of time has not occurred. This point is just sort of asserted; sure, they still need to do what they must to prevent the end of time. But the tension just slips away.

There is a deep irony to Tenet’s inevitable saviours. Despite the impossibility of not saving the day in the film, Nolan helped to secure his own failure in saving cinema. After three delayed release dates, Tenet was intended to reinspire the masses to cinemas after the worst (!) of the Pandemic was over: a huge, multimillion dollar blockbuster with action and the costume of thoughtfulness (better understood as a blank canvas on which the audience can project) that'll make the most of the big screen and respark cinema. It failed, making half the amount the far cheaper and less-hyped Dunkirk made (itself only a moderate success compared to others in Nolan’s history). Various films, ironically including the newest Bond film, have subsequently been delayed ever further backwards. Tenet’s critic score is slightly below the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, with both in the 70s. This is not very good compared to Nolan's other films; even The Dark Knight Rises is in the high 80s/low 90s range. All the same, the fact these reviews are fairly positive and yet people are not turning out to see it speaks to a moment of particular pessimism and inertia, naturally driven by the pandemic and our conditions. Public engagement with film is giving further way to private consumption. As cinemas struggle to stay relevant, in a time where theatres are falling behind streaming services and a pandemic is keeping people at home, Tenet was never going to succeed. Nolan was destined to fail.

For the deterministic logic of Tenet is that there is no choice, no responsibility, no emotionality. We see characters going through the motions to prevent the destruction of the world, whether they make sense or not. In Nolan’s worldview, this is all they can do. Everything is mundane, from travelling round the world, to talking to loved ones, to inverted technology: everything is met with blank expressions. “Don’t understand it, just feel it”, the scientist says as they explain the technology that fundamentally changes time and space, and threatens all life.

There is a far more communistic answer to the presented conundrum of Tenet, but it is one that Nolan could never consider. To reject the creation of that future ruling class in the first place, by rejecting our present ruling class. It is the survival and perpetuation of the capitalist class and their system that is driving us towards a future extinction.

If we abolish the capitalist class, we create a liberatory future.

New feet have slipped into the same old jackboots. In the heat of the political moment, people are all too willing to forget this fact, leading them to false interpretations of Trump’s defeat as definitively progressive. Only a marked transfer of class power signals actual progress, which the Democratic Party will never offer. We will only see meaningful change once we stop defining our politics by what we are against (anti-Trump, anti-Tory, anti-capitalist), and act on the basis of what we are for: communism.

Negative politics, or ‘anti-ism’, causes us to enter a fantasy world in which proletarian anti-fascism may reconcile with the bourgeois electoral apparatus. The liberals and social-democrats in every capitalist country sing a siren’s song of ‘unity’ against the reactionaries. Some of our comrades are tempted, never to return to revolutionary work.

What do the imperialists gain from such symbolic unity with the proletariat and other oppressed classes? Votes from the politically ill-informed and the diminution of the revolutionary ranks. And what do the proletariat stand to gain from this unity? Disappointment, and the further confusion of our ill-informed comrades. To those ‘socialists’ who see Biden’s victory as one in whose glow they may bask, we ask: where and how was bourgeois power eroded by the election of yet another white-supremacist warmonger? To the credit of bourgeois ‘democracy’, who has learned from its feudal predecessor, the downward pressure on humanity does not ease even momentarily throughout presidential transitions. They are purely ceremonial, their pomp reveals but one veiled message to the international working class: imperialism has changed costume.

This act of political trickery, hyped to the heavens by the self-satisfied bourgeois and their servants in the media, is the circus that distracts from the theft of bread. Its purpose is sucking in, chewing up, and spitting out the proletariat, to sap them of their political will through steady and repeated cycles of hope and disillusionment. We in Britain are aware of this better than everyone, where our government’s rhetoric of care overshadows their eugenicist policy. The story is similar in the US, where thousands of workers each day are silently massacred by a brutal marketised healthcare regime. Additionally, the Amerikan working class is presently exiting the heat of Black proletarian struggle, manifested in the reignition of Black Lives Matter protests beginning last summer. In the face of this radical movement, the bourgeois send into working class communities both their fascist police forces and their ‘opposition’ parties. This serves to defang and misdirect the revolutionary impulses of the uneducated masses while brutally repressing those protesters who understand the traps that the bourgeoisie lay and continue to take action. This dual-pronged approach creates general injury and disarray among the oppressed masses, who are made to doubt their proven ability to burn the whole thing down if they so choose. The election of anti-busing Biden and the cop Kamala attest to the success of this strategy, who faced only the hissy fits of fascists in protest to their election. The only intention of these Democrat snakes is co-opting the blood, sweat, and tears of colonised people to legitimise their imperialism with a ‘diverse’ face. The only means the working class in all countries has for countering bourgeois hegemony is to construct vanguard organisations with deep roots in working class communities, capable of sharpening the wits of the people in the field of struggle.

The liberal bourgeois wring their hands and clutch their pearls over Trump’s distinct brand of quasi-fascism. But what seems like disgust is in fact embarrassment, the kind that comes with being stripped in public. More than anyone else, Trump represented the lurid decadence and sordid depravity of the Amerikan capitalist system in general, that preaches the doctrine of the self-made man while accruing wealth through stolen land and labour. All attempts to oust him from politics stemmed from a bourgeois anxiety regarding how he gave their game away.

Only the complete destruction of the US state can fundamentally alter the relations of imperialism. This fact, however, should not lead us to a wholesale negation of this moment’s importance. Due to its hegemonic status in the imperialist world order, the election of each new presidential vulture takes on great international significance. This is especially the case in Britain at this historical moment, for we must prepare for a closure of ranks around our ‘special relationship’ with Amerika following our departure from the EU, which amounts in fact to increased financial predation on our people.

Because the proletariat are defined by our economic powerlessness, our struggle is principally over the state: a political struggle. Where the bourgeoisie conducts class warfare through the extraction of surplus value, and uses their politics to distract from this fact, the proletariat must use its politics to highlight capitalist theft, conquer the political apparatus, and use it to repurpose production to satisfy our  needs. Shifts in the political style of imperialists open up new tactical potentials that the proletariat must seize upon in its quest for state power. There is no perfect defence. Every new costume that the enemy wears shows new vulnerabilities. It is by spotting and exploiting them that a spear may be lodged in Capital’s brain.

The principally political nature of our struggle means that reformist and economistic ‘socialisms’ spell doom for the working class. Included in these strains is revisionist Marxism, which seeks, ad infinitum, to push the bourgeois parties left. These amount to a controlled opposition - tolerated by the bourgeoisie as a necessary evil - used to forestall the unified might of the whole exploited people. As earnest supporters of oppressed people, we must only endorse the construction of a wildly uncontrollable opposition to capital.

Communists recognise the utility of having such a blatant reactionary as Trump in power, in that he served as the best advertisement for socialism. We often find our way towards communism via liberalism, which presents itself as the only legitimate opposition to unapologetic reaction. It is only once we’ve had our fill of vacillation and two-faced betrayal from those within the bourgeois apparatus that we make a declarative leap towards revolutionary Marxism. It is our personal history and that of our class which makes us trust no bourgeois. Each day/month/year/election cycle, we are retaught this lesson, which pushes new comrades into the fold of the revolutionaries and solidifies the resolve of our oldest ranks.

Class consciousness, as well as permanently altering the worker’s future activity, also retroactively changes their view of the past. At a certain point, we glimpse a clear historical picture, that upon study teaches us: intensifying opposition to conservatism and fascism correspondingly entails the sharpening of the wit and strengthening of the spirit against liberal lies and social-democratic impotence. It is the dialectical movement between the two political wings of the bourgeoisie in all capitalist states that brings one to communism. The complete political bankruptcy of  both wings of the bourgeoisie is evidenced by the sheer amount of money required to pervade their mythology and sustain their dying system. In Cuba, money is kept out of politics; instead, the people feel democracy in their workplaces and communities, from which they elect their leaders. Imperialism is in a downward spiral. The only place for the bourgeoisie is the grave. That is why Cuba will outlive Amerika, and its history shall be infinitely more glorious.

While the same conditions that led to the rise of Trump are produced by the Democratic victory, we must remember that history has no reset button. There are two ways in which Biden’s presidency differs from Obama’s. Neither of them discourage fascist ascendence, but both are cause for limited optimism. The first is that the empire is in decline, stooping lower by the minute. Anti-imperialism is coming off of its defensive streak and is exposing the paper tiger for what it is. Humanity’s progressive forces will only gather strength during this period, and Western imperialism can only respond by increasing its violent reaction. This international context in which Biden begins his presidency lines him up as the head of global imperialist reaction and liberal double-dealing. This will only widen the gulf between the British imperialist bourgeoisie, who will inevitably sell us out to Amerikan capitalist interests, and the British proletariat. As too many of us remain deluded by the honeyed words and petty crumbs of imperialism we must prepare to permanently discredit the British bourgeoisie when the opportunity presents itself.

The second note of central importance that changes the conditions between an Obama and Biden presidency is that the socialist movement has grown hugely over the last four years. It has been demonstrated to the Amerikan people, time and time again, that the settler ruling class have in their hearts only the will to subjugate, imprison, and impoverish. The socialist revolution in the US will be decolonial, destroying their empire in name and material reality. The layered contradictions of the bourgeois settler colony, weighed down by chronic overaccumulated capital, will ensure its own implosion. This, however, is not a forgone conclusion, and cannot be done without class struggle. It is on this count that future generations will owe a great debt to Amerika’s immigrant, Black, and Indigenous populations, for these groups more than any other have advanced the struggle towards proletarian emancipation in general. How are they doing this? By dealing relentless blows to white supremacy, eradicating the false unity between the chauvinists and revolutionaries, exposing the former and developing stronger unity within the latter. These too are lessons we are learning from our Amerikan comrades.

The Amerikan situation and the development of its communist movement illustrate the link between politics and economics. It is objectively and essentially the crisis of imperialist-capitalism that creates the communists who are able to wrest society from the bourgeois colonisers and construct a truly democratic, socialist society. For this reason, the crisis of imperialism must be seized by communists, as we capitalise upon the chaos under heaven.

As we struggle in the imperial core, we know that the defeat of our reactionary states will shake capitalism to its very foundation, facilitating worldwide socialism on an unprecedented scale. Our analysis of the Amerikan situation allows us to signpost our progress and set out our tasks, which are: expose all liberalism, counter pacifism and defeatism, root out class collaborationism, strengthen our relations with the depoliticised, disenfranchised, yet-to-be radicalised majority, and build the movement against imperialism and war. A line in the sand must be drawn over these next four years, so that by its end there may stand two clearly defined camps: one revolutionary, one reactionary. The former must be distilled by a most resolute vanguard: educated, organised, and prepared to employ any means necessary to attain full and lasting freedom. They must stand in opposition to the reactionary camp, containing the class-traitors, counter-revolutionary petit-bourgeois and imperialist bourgeoisie. With these conditions met, the numerical, intellectual, and spiritual strength of the proletariat will leave the reactionary camp no other destiny than a defeat of world historical proportions. We implore all comrades to bury their liberalism, next to the bourgeoisie who use it to dupe the working class into passivity, complacency, and confusion.

yu not remembah

how di whole a black Britn did rack wid rage

how di whole a black Britn tun a fiery red

nat di callous red af di killah’s eyes

but red wid rage like di flames af di fyah

Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘New Crass Massahkah’

On 18 January 1981, a fire at a house party in New Cross, South-East London, led to the deaths of 13 young Black people including Yvonne Ruddock, who was celebrating her 16th birthday. One of the survivors later took their own life.

Police declared the fire to be an accident, but to this day many suspect it was a racist arson attack. The authorities failed to seriously investigate these claims, despite the fact that racially abusive letters had been sent to the homeowner, and an incendiary device found outside the house. The police treated the families of the dead like suspects, rather than victims, and the Daily Mail falsely suggested several Black people had been arrested in connection with the fire. The government, police and media expressed complete indifference at one of the single biggest losses of Black life in the country’s history. PM Margaret Thatcher didn’t even offer condolences to the bereaved families.

The suspicions of foul play were well founded – New Cross was known to many as the race hate capital of Britain. Many other Black homes in the area had been attacked by supporters of the fascist National Front, and a Black community centre was burnt down. Almost exactly a decade earlier, white racists had petrol bombed a Black people’s party in Lewisham, injuring 22 people.

Ever since the ‘Windrush generation’ had been brought to the country to help rebuild Britain’s post-war economy, they were met with hostility and violence. The police regularly raided Black meeting places such as the Mangrove restaurant, as well as the annual Notting Hill Carnival. The same year as the New Cross fire also saw the passing of the British Nationality Act, the last of a series of immigration laws explicitly targeting people of colour; tearing apart countless families in the process.

Black activists were unequivocal in their response: ‘Here to Stay, Here to Fight’. The New Cross Massacre Action Committee arranged a ‘Black People’s Day of Action’ for 2 March 1981. It was organised by Darcus Howe, a prominent member of the British Black Panthers and one of the Mangrove Nine (recently depicted in filmmaker Steve McQueen’s Small Axe); and John La Rose, co-founder of the Black Parents Movement. Howe explained, ‘if they are going to kill so many kids in a fire, we have to show them we got some power in this place, and the only way to do that is to call a general strike of blacks.’

The Action Committee organised support groups from across the country. A staggering 15,000 attended on the day, making it the ‘largest demonstration of black political power Britain has ever seen’. Slogans included ‘Thirteen Dead and Nothing Said’, and ‘Come what May, We Are Here to Stay’. The march consciously challenged the symbolic epicentres of the white ruling-class establishment; setting out from New Cross to Fleet Street, moving past Scotland Yard and then the Houses of Parliament.

Only a month after the Day of Action, the Metropolitan police launched ‘Swamp 81’ – a mass stop-and-search operation. Black residents responded in the Brixton uprising, and the following summer saw further inner-city disturbances by working-class Black, Asian and white youths across the country. For Howe, these ‘riots’ represented ‘an insurrection of the masses of the people’. Further such insurrections occurred in 1985 – partly in response to the police shootings of two Black women, Cherry Groce and Cynthia Jarrett.

Britain still not innocent

Today, the Tory government continues to do its best to maintain a ‘hostile environment’ for people of colour. The abuse of stop and search laws, racist attacks, cruel deportations, and Black deaths in police custody have all continued unabated. It is then unsurprising that the 1981 ‘riots’ resonated 30 years later, after the police killing of Mark Duggan. Both Labour and the Tories blamed the 2011 disturbance on ‘gangs’ and lack of family discipline. Keir Starmer, then Director of Public Prosecutions, fast-tracked the sentencing of protestors (and in 2009, he also approved the decision not to prosecute the police officers who murdered Jean Charles de Menezes).

The spirit of Black resistance has endured, from the Stephen Lawrence justice campaign, to Black Activists Rising Against Cuts, and now Black Lives Matter UK. Young activists of colour are increasingly applying lessons from the long history of Black political struggle in Britain. In Jay Bernard’s poetry collection Surge, a direct line is traced from the New Cross fire to Grenfell’s ‘towers of blood’, where 72 working-class people including many migrants from North Africa were the victims of corporate murder. The utter disregard for the lives of impoverished and racially oppressed people was again shown when Theresa May refused to meet with victims’ families, and denied amnesty to those migrant survivors facing the threat of deportation.

White supremacy is endemic to capitalism. The same logic driving Black death within Britain is the one that leaves African migrants to drown in the Mediterranean, and perpetrates neo-colonial violence against the anti-SARS protestors in oil-rich Nigeria. As Tania Apaza puts it,

‘We die by their bombs. We die by their multinational companies. We die by their fires. We die by their police brutality. We’ve died and we’ll keep dying until this parasitic government no longer has the power to kill us. Until we take that power away from them. This is capitalism-imperialism. Here, the lives of working-class immigrants don’t matter. We are displaced from our homelands and forced into slum housing wrapped in what is essentially solid gasoline.’

Forty years on from New Cross, the need to build a mass anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement is still paramount. No justice, no peace!

On Wednesday 6th January, an array of far-right protestors stormed the US Capitol, breaking into the Senate Chamber, leading to the evacuation of Congress and the deaths of multiple people. It is hard to look at these events, even from a distance, and not see them as a depiction of something simultaneously obscure, significant and rotting.

With white supremacist fascists assualting a white supremacist fascist state, we must understand what is occurring in the details: that the alliance between Trump-styled fascists and bourgeois politicians of the old order is fracturing, and civil society is breaking apart. It is easy to assume that this comes as a direct response to the US election, and indeed that is the overt justification and catalyst. But we cannot forget the context that goes beyond any election or figure: that the fabric of American capitalism and neoliberalism is in decay, with the strands of capitalist alliances and society fraying from one another.

It is being said by liberal pundits that “this is not what America is about'', that this is “a dark day for a beacon of democracy”. Having white supremacist fascists in the Senate Chambers is not a change but a direct continuation. The breakage here is the way that they got in the room ― they did not need votes, they just walked in. They did not need the pretence of democracy but sheer force. This is an amalgamation of Trump’s presidency, who pulled at the civil society, the norms, the dominant ideas of “how society should be”, that allow the capitalist state to function in its interests and suppress the working classes. This attempted seizing of power amounts to a further uprooting of the ideas of “democracy” and “order” which serve the material function of entrenching power. US democracy has always been a lie, a pretence that allows their capitalist class to dominate their own population without opposition and export violence across the world for greater exploitation. At the heart of this event, and the various fascistic groups from “Stop the Steal” to QAnon, is an intention to replace an old order, one that inflicts its violence upon working and oppressed people, with one that kills us quicker.

As fascistic powers have stumbled electorally, old bourgeois liberalism has attempted to reassert itself, leading to ruptures in their relationship. Both Democrats and Republicans have drawn closer and away from the Trump-led fascistic movement, cashing in on his spiralling position and thus cutting off Trump’s by-the-book road to the Presidency. The political differences between these parties have always been minimal as both represent the capitalist class. They might sometimes represent different sections of that class, such as different industries or methods, but the fundamental interests are the same. The relationship between these parties has always been one of amicable rivalry rather than fundamental conflict. Trump has never been fully integrated with the Republicans. As shown with this attack, he primarily mobilisés the petit bourgeoisie, the lower ranks of military and intelligence services, farmers and american manufacturers (who have notably now switched their allegiance); these class dimensions represent different interests to the big bourgeoisie, financier capitalists and technology monopolists that the Republicans and Democrats naturally align with. Trump has been slowly abandoned over recent weeks as he has scrambled to find avenues of power to hold onto; the GOP has rallied with the Democrats. We have seen this type of division before. In Britain, Brexit has been the epitome of divisions in the bourgeois class, between a borderline-to-outright fascistic Leave campaign to a liberal, bourgeois Remain campaign. Like Republicans and Democrats, they differ on method, but their task and outcomes are the same: to defend and expand capitalism, at any cost to the rest of us.

Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell, the two most senior Republicans other than Trump and undoubtedly competent politickers, have both refused to back him in recent weeks before and after the storming of the Capitol, followed by multiple resignations from Trump’s cabinet and staff. McConnell in particular is significant: his position as the Senate Majority Leader, and presumptive most-senior Republican during a Biden Presidency, suddenly holds a lot less influence. This is because he has become the presumptive Senate Minority Leader, after Democrats won both seats in the Georgia Senate run-off election held that same day (and understandably forgotten about amidst the chaos). Epitomising the changing alliances, the rocking of the boat has led McConnell to jump ship to what he understands as safer, more familiar ground. There is no doubt that his alliance with the fascistic elements of the GOP was no struggle for him; again, his difference with them is primarily tactical wherein he is willing to play the longer, patient, institutional game,. These types of Republicans, the majority of the Party machine, have been seeing the way that things are falling in institutional terms, and are looking to build a Republican Party beyond Trump to defend the old bourgeois structures that have served them well. And indeed, Trump’s second speech — a scripted attempt at peace by deriding the protests and confirming his intention was always to accept the election result — along with his suspension from Twitter shows that his authority is only getting weaker.

Symbolised most by the attempted bombing of Republican Party Headquarters, fascism is created by bourgeois liberalism and nonetheless seeks to smash and replace it. Its forces were not powerful enough to do so on Wednesday. That is not to say they will not be in the future.

With the waned support of the political class, the fascist movement will reconfigure itself around the strongest alliance it has: that with the police. This was embodied in this week’s attempt on the Capitol, when pigs were seen taking selfies with fascists. They were filmed actively letting in the “patriots” (and indeed they represent the US fairly), offering none of the opposition that would and has been deployed against far less volatile but left-wing protests. The police are naturally loyal to the capitalist state, but they have proven to be more specifically supportive of Trump, such as in the fact that every policing organisation endorsed him for President. It is primarily not personal, but political: as the pigs aligned with and populated fascist groups in the past, they would continue their support even without Trump as the figurehead. And despite what we are told about the policeman, a “humble family man looking to help out”, this fascistic sympathy makes sense with the reality of who they are. Whilst police serve to defend the private property of the capitalist class, a Trump Presidency and emboldening white supremacy allows them to go on the offensive. Fascism takes the violent, white supremacist impulses trained into cops by the bourgeois state, and welcomes them into the daylight.

The response, therefore, must be inherently abolitionist. We do not bother to critique the pigs for their lack of opposition to the fascists, for we see no distinction in these groups that are fundamentally aligned in their interests. Nor do we accept law and order from any capitalist — not from Biden or Trump, nor Labour or Tory. We do not support demands on the bourgeois legal system to designate the protestors as terrorists, as doing so only buys into the anti-Black and islamophobic structure of counter-terrorism itself, and centres the individuals in the room and not the structures that put them there. The abolitionist answer is clear: we respond to fascism with a united front of those who oppose it, and led by the revolutionary classes who know that in defeating fascism we can similarly defeat liberalism. As the fascists know well, now blaming anti-fascists for the Capitol attack, both fascism and liberalism are the enemies of communists.

The protestors claimed this as a moment of revolution, where the traitors in Congress were made scared and accountable. That is no revolution. The revolution of the masses will not be about loyalty to a sham democracy for love of a country, but the betterment of working people for love of each other. The socialist revolution will not be surrounded by the marble walls of the Capitol or Westminster, but on the streets of our communities. And it will not be in defence of some individual’s grip on office and his desire to expand the violence of capitalism ever wider, but in the defence of working and oppressed people and the expansion of our liberation into every aspect of society. This is a revolution, and it is coming.

Under capitalism, people are forced to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage which they can use to purchase what they need to live. As a result of this, capitalists are always seeking to reduce the labour-power they need to purchase (in an ill-fated attempt to increase profit) through increased mechanisation. These machines are designed to be as generalised as possible so that the largest number of people from the working class could operate them, without the expense of specialist training. As imperialism shifts manufacturing to poorer nations we see a rise in service industries which require a large amount of emotional labour, the additional labour of performing a particular emotion while working.

This means that those people whose bodies or behaviours exist beyond the design of the machinery, or who cannot do the emotional labour required, are either expensive or impossible to employ. In addition, capitalism demands more and more productivity: for workers to work faster which further excludes workers who cannot keep pace.

Thus there exists, in Britain, an ever expanding group of disabled people who are excluded from capitalist production and therefore are reliant on other means of survival. In a society where the worker is valued only through the wage, those who cannot earn are considered worthless to capitalist society.

Disability and Work

We see this focus on whether or not a person can “work” at the core of Britain’s disability benefits. In Britain, there are broadly two types of disability benefit. One is intended for the extra costs of disability, and the other directly relates to whether the state thinks you should be working.

The money awarded for the extra costs of disability is inadequate, because it is not enough to meet the costs of living in an ableist society. No amount of money would meet this cost because there is no individual solution to a systemic problem. The existence of the “extra costs of disability” benefit is a tacit acknowledgement of the hostility of society to disabled people, a hostility that is only increasing.

When considering disability benefits, the state categorises people in several ways. Firstly, by their age. People can be a “child” (under 16), a “qualifying young person” (16-19, in education), “working age” (under state pension age, which is different depending on when you were born, but today is 66) or “over state pension age”.

If you are of working age then you are expected to work or look for work. If you cannot work due to sickness or disability then you are required to submit evidence of this, for example, a sick note. After an indeterminate period of submitting sick notes (supposed to be 28 days but often longer), the assessment process begins. This is the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), carried out by a private company, Maximus, which is functionally the state acting as a gatekeeper to disability benefits. Because the DWP is concerned with keeping out “fraudulent” claims, the assessments err on the side of caution (huge percentages of mandatory reconsiderations and appeals are successful). Before the pandemic, these assessments consisted of forms, evidence from doctors and, for some people, a face-to-face assessment.

The outcome of the WCA is that you are sorted into one of three more categories. Fit for Work, which means you must look for work (aside from the necessity under capitalism of selling your labour power, your other benefits may stop if you do not look for work). Limited Capability for Work, where you also do not get any more money, and where you must attend “work-focussed interviews” or be required to take part in “work preparation”. These activities, for the reasons explored in the first section, have never been shown to do anything to help people find work. The final category is Limited Capability for Work Related Activity, also known as the “support group” which is a deeply insulting misnomer. If you are in this group, you will receive more money. You are not required to do anything to look for work and you are exempt from the benefit cap.

Disability Benefits and the Pandemic

Against this backdrop, the pandemic. All face-to-face assessments are currently suspended, with no date for this to return. As of the date of this article, assessments are carried out on paper and by telephone.

This has detrimental effects on claims for both types of disability benefit. There are more poor decisions to be challenged, more disabled people excluded from the process itself because they are unable to make or participate fully in telephone calls, and the recent reintroduction of a negative determination if you fail to participate. The DWP thinks that there are no valid reasons for not taking or making a telephone call. Neurodivergent, non-speaking people, or people with depression or anxiety are much more likely to be unable to participate (not least because the history of assessment is, itself, traumatic). This is consistent with the DWP’s move towards online benefit claims; Universal Credit is only available to claim online which creates a significant delay to accessing benefits to which you are entitled or, in some cases, making claiming at all completely impossible.

There is also a concern amongst welfare rights advisors that the reason for the documented fewer claims for disability benefits and the fewer challenges to DWP decisions is because access to advice has been so limited during the pandemic. One of the core functions of advice services is help with filling claim forms – with advice centres closed, this help is simply not available.

The effects of the pandemic are particularly noticeable in the Work Capability Assessment. It is not possible to get a “Fit for Work” or “Limited Capability for Work” determination without a face-to-face assessment and as explained earlier, these are not happening. The DWP has repeatedly said that only a “Limited Capability for Work Related Activity” outcome can be recommended by assessors on the basis of the claim form and telephone assessment. The result of this is that large numbers of disabled people are left in limbo with no outcome decision. Even when a face-to-face assessment happens, this is no guarantee of a correct outcome as the assessments themselves are fundamentally flawed. People are known to have been determined “Fit for Work” at their assessment and then, at tribunal, been moved to the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity category.

The government claims that the reason for this decision is that the money awarded in the “Fit for Work” or “Limited Capability for Work” categories is the same. However, there are several practical issues with this approach which result in additional hardship. The first is that under Universal Credit you are not treated as having “Limited Capability for Work” while waiting for the assessment. The DWP have also recently reintroduced conditionality (that you must look for work in order to receive your benefit) which means that in theory, while waiting for your assessments you would have to look for work or be sanctioned for not doing so.

The second problem is that under Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), whilst you are treated as having Limited Capability for Work while waiting for your assessment on the contribution-based form of the benefit, you are limited to 365 days of benefit before you must have a determination. What welfare rights advisors are starting to see is an increasing number of people whose contributory-ESA runs out before they have had an assessment, and therefore many people are being forced to claim Universal Credit (which we understand to be a worse benefit for many reasons, not least that you may then be forced to look for work). This also disproportionately affects people who do not have an immigration status that allows them to claim public funds; Universal Credit is a public fund whereas contribution-based ESA is not.

Conclusions

Thus there exists, in Britain, an ever expanding group of disabled people who are excluded from capitalist production and therefore are reliant on other means of survival. In a society where the worker is valued only through the wage, those who cannot earn are considered worthless to capitalist society. There is no easily accessible alternative means of subsidence: the system of disability benefits in Britain is dehumanising and humiliating and exists to reinforce this ideology. The government’s response to the pandemic has been a methodical eugenics campaign against disabled people. The violence of structural ableism is seen again here, as people are denied the money they desperately need to live.

There is no possibility of reforming these systems beyond ending wage labour and that must remain our focus. There must be a disabled peoples’ inquiry into all aspects of this pandemic response and we must expose these decisions for what they are: eugenics.

The Roaring Twenties

Today, the period of the 1920s is associated with hope and a new lease of life. We look back on them as a period of quaint naivety, when people celebrated despite the raging violence of capitalism and in ignorance of the economic crisis and wars to come. It is an idyllic conception of peacetime that many thought would be evoked as we enter the 2020’s, in the century and era of capitalism’s supposed victory.

The 2020s shall have no such peace, faux or otherwise. This first year of the decade has been difficult beyond expression, and almost universally — the pandemic has touched every corner of our lives. Indeed, it seems farcical to think of New Year celebrations now that we can see how little a new number can present us in the way of peace. 2021 will be nothing more than the next day along. As 2019 made 2020, 2020 has made 2021. The last year has shaped our future, and irreversibly so.

Over the last year, we have grappled with what is going on in the world. And in analysing, we have come to a simple, yet monumental, conclusion: that capitalism is entering a period of breakdown, its final crisis. This article will summarise the political-economic analysis that we developed in 2020, to ready us for the coming years.

The fight for our lives is on.

Theoretical outline - What is Crisis?

Let us start by unpacking some key aspects of a Marxist understanding of capitalism.

Firstly, we need to distinguish between crisis and breakdown.

Crisis is recurrent; a cycle of 'booms' and 'busts' is an inherent feature of capitalism. Of course, we cannot be flippant about this; such crises, met with shrugs of inevitability by capitalists, entail very real violence and death. But they do not end capitalism, they are a part of its normal routine. That said, they do certainly change it; a crisis such as the Great Recession of 2008 altered the functioning and trajectory of capitalism irreversibly. But a knock to the system is not death.

Breakdown is the death of capitalism. It is the process of its inherent contradictions, its fundamental problems, that drive it towards its termination. This is a broader historical notion, of the final crisis of capitalism.

Understanding the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is absolutely vital to understanding this historical moment of capitalist breakdown. It is the fundamental reason why capitalism must collapse. In simple terms, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall means that the total rate of capitalist profit will decrease over time.

What is the rate of profit? Simply, the rate of profit is the ratio of profit to total investment. If you were to take the total amount of value produced, and compare that to the amount that was realised as profit, the ratio of the one to the other is the "rate of profit."

Constant capital is the value invested in the means of production, whilst variable capital is the value invested in the hiring of labour power. Labour power is the only source of value generation in a commodity.

So, take for example a production line making phones. It might take 2 hours for a worker to produce a phone. When the production line is made more efficient — say, by the introduction of an automated element — it might only take 1 hour to produce a phone. This increases the amount of phones on the market (as 8 phones could be produced in an 8 hour working day, instead of 4), and allows them to lower the price per unit. The competition, losing out by having higher prices, is forced to automate and otherwise increase their efficiency in order to lower their prices and remain competitive. By transferring more and more of the production process into automation, the ratio between constant and variable capital shifts. As the ratio moves towards greater and greater constant capital (and smaller and smaller variable capital), value generation, and thus surplus value, decreases.

We are not concerned here with the individual capitalist, but the trend of capitalism and its capacity for profit decreasing overall; there is a contradiction here between individual capitalists (who cut production costs and increase productivity by shifting from variable to constant capital) and the capitalist class as a whole.

We can see that this is true; profit is decreasing over the course of capitalist history. You can see this in the below graph, adapted by economist Michael Roberts from Esteban Maito.

It is important to recognise that profit does not need to hit zero for capitalism to break down. The rate of profit during the height of British hegemonic power was typically more than 25%. Its decline to 10-15% marked the end of the British Empire. During the Great Depression, US profitability fell below 10% for the first time (the second time was in the 1980s). In 2008, it fell to 12%. During these periods there was deep crisis; we can understand that anything below 10% will undoubtedly cause economic and political instability.

It is difficult to calculate the rate of profit even in times of stability, but by looking at projections from the likes of Roberts, even before we consider the pandemic and related economic factors, we can safely assume that the rate of profit will plummet far below 10% and thus into unknown terrain.

2020: The Crash

And so here we are, looking back at 2020. What happened?

Firstly, we again must acknowledge that the current economic chaos is not uniquely or solely a result of the pandemic, but a build-up waiting to burst. A recession was already anticipated at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic had even started. As Michael Pento has said: ‘The virus was a pin that pricked the stock and junk bond [debt] bubbles. We wouldn't have had stocks fall by 30% if we weren't in an epic bubble. Stock prices have been at a record high of 150% of GDP. They were extremely vulnerable to an external shock...the real crash is coming.’

The markers of economic breakdown on an unparalleled scale are plain to see; whilst all crises are unique, the projected scale and implications of this moment are unprecedented. As Ted Reese surmises, ‘Between January and the end of April 2020, small businesses in the US collectively lost 50% of their revenue. Joblessness soared, with 30 million people seeking unemployment benefits after the federal government allowed employers to lay them off.‘

The IMF project a global growth of -4.4% in 2020. By contrast, the 2008 crash led to a fall in global growth of -0.1%. The Bank of England estimated that the first six months of 2020 would see Britain suffer a near 30% contraction — the country’s worst recession since 1709. The Bank of England forecast a 2% contraction in the economy for the final three months of the year, reversing its projection in August of 5.5% growth. The Bank of England said the British economy will be 11% smaller at the end of 2020 than it was at the end of 2019. These are phenomenal factors, but the economic outlook for capitalism looks even worse in the details. Looking beyond growth rates, or lack thereof, and rather at indicators such as interest rates, inflation, currency and so on paints an evermore damning picture.

Indicators

What are interest rates? Interest rates are, in brief, what it costs to borrow money. Interest rates are the source of profits for banks and other lenders: a bank lends you £100 at a 5% annual interest rate – at the end of the year you owe the bank £105, and they have made £5 profit.

Capitalism’s current predicament is premised on long-term decline in interest rates since 2008.  Falling interest rates started then, and plummeted evermore rapidly leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. At this point, negative interest rates are rapidly expanding for the first time in history. Negative interest rates are best understood by thinking first of positive interest rates, where you get paid to save/invest, versus negative interest rates, where you pay to save/invest. In your personal bank account, instead of getting interest paid to you, you’ll have that money deducted. We saw the beginnings of negative interest rates at play earlier in the year in oil. The Bank of England is already preparing for negative rates, with interest cut to 0.1% and with further cuts below 0% anticipated in 2021.

Why have interest rates been falling? Because production has shifted from the imperialist triad of North America-Europe-Japan into the peripheries where wage exploitation is more profitable. This is furthered by military aggression and institutions like the World Bank, WTO and IMF. This means that capitalist-imperialists have grown more reluctant to invest in domestic production. Instead, they invest in financial assets, such as branding, intellectual property, stocks and bonds; this is true even in the peripheries, where the trends of capitalism might be delayed but are nonetheless in motion.

As we see greater investment, interest rates fall to remain competitive and asset (or economic resources) values increase. This leads to two consequences: the rising asset values/inflation of asset bubbles, and the piling up of debt. These are two sides of the same coin: for every debtor there is a creditor and every debt is someone’s else’s asset.  Asset bubbles will either gently deflate (via production increase, as investment moves back towards production instead of the financial industry) or burst. Debt mountains will gently erode (via economic growth, as there becomes the possibility of paying debt back) or collapse.  However, productivity has stagnated since 2008 and GDP growth is at an all time post-WW2 low.

The key point here, then, is this: we have an asset value bubble about to burst and a debt mountain about to collapse. And the options for gentle diffusal have vanished.

We can see proof of this inevitability in the fact that Britain faces £40bn a year tax rises to stop debt spiraling. Starting with £40bn next year, tax raises will continue to increase by +£40bn each year (£80bn in 2022, £120bn in 2023 and so on). To quote the Institute of Fiscal Studies, ‘government borrowing was set to reach  350bn, or 17 per cent of gross domestic product, this year, the highest level in peacetime in more than three centuries.’

Why must we care about interest rates and inflation? Roberts states that ‘it has become a conventional wisdom that moderate inflation is good for capitalist production; as against hyper-inflation nor deflation’. But the implications are much bigger. Lifting the economy out of recession usually takes a 4-5% base interest rate cut, as managed by central banks like the Federal Reserve in the US or the Bank of England. 4-5% is a historic figure — this is typically the amount by which  central banks cut the basic lending rate to attempt to bring an economy out of recession.

The current rate set by the bank of England is 0.1%. In the US and across Europe base rates are currently already at zero, having been cut by around only 2%. Central banks have said that going negative would make the banks unviable. The very notion of a cash economy is at risk: if that goes, there will be nothing left.

Ted Reese notes that capitalism is launching ‘for the first time in its history into a crisis of worldwide hyperinflation, since rates will have to start going back up to re-incentivise bond holding and sustain the tax base. But debt-to-GDP — already at record highs and rising — will surge, and so the tax base will continue to shrink; bondholders will realise that what they are owed cannot be repaid and increasingly transfer their funds into hard assets, especially precious metals. The only way to avoid hyperinflation is for states to default on their debt through hyperdeflation – which the record bailouts imply they are understandably trying to avoid – but that would happen after hyperinflation anyway.’ In short; hyperinflation, and its deathly implications for a cash/monetary economy, are on the horizon.

Meanwhile, the dollar continues to wane. The US dollar has lost more than 96% of its purchasing power since 1913, and due to the challenges made by primarily the EU, Russia and China, continues to fall. Russia and China are leading the charge on dedollarisation, with the amount of dollar transactions between them falling below 50% for the first time this year and the euro gaining around 30% of their transactions, higher than any other currency. No successful transition from the dollar to another currency could happen without hyperinflation, war, or both; after spending decades cementing the dollar  as the global currency, the US will resort to any means necessary to avoid giving up its economic hegemony.

And we have yet to even mention Brexit. As our analysis indicates, the ramifications on Britain’s economy will be huge and damningly negative. With services, 80% of the British economy, unprotected, the financial sector that has kept Britain’s imperialist economy alive will plummet.

After World War Two, it was the US that saved capitalism, such as by pumping money into western Europe via the Marshall Plan". Às Anthony Monteiro argues, now ‘there is no capitalist nation that can save capitalism’. To again quote Reese: ‘If all these converging factors – near-zero prices, flat productivity growth, unsustainably high debt, zero interest rates, exhausted currencies – do not constitute a final breakdown of the system, then what will?’

Capitalist Response to Economic Crisis

“Surely capitalism will survive this? It always has, after all.”

This argument needs to be addressed materially. Yes, capitalism has survived thus far. But we must look at the specific avenues available to capitalism right now and assess its current viability, rather than assume it will always survive. Capitalism has existed for only a brief part of humanity’s history, and shall not exist forever. It will, eventually, break down — the question is whether that time is now.

Henryk Grossman argues that where there is lack of sufficient surplus value for accumulation, we enter breakdown. Grossman identifies  four broad solutions to falling profit and the breakdown it causes. Roughly, these are: 1. destruction of constant capital (war), 2. war on labour-power (lowering wages), 3. exporting capital or 4. increasing productivity.

Each of these four have particular barriers at this juncture in capitalism. :

Destruction of Constant Capital: During an economic crash, large quantities of capital are devalued because they can't be used or sold profitably. This leads to forms of abandonment, such as the abandonment of offices (often by less successful capitalists, leading to richer capitalists taking offices over). This is distinct from the destruction of capital, which is literal: an example is when they pour away unsold milk or burn produce. They need to get rid of existing capital to reduce the over-accumulated mass and make room for new profitable expansions. This destruction of capital has historically been best achieved via war, where destruction is essential. War is a gamble, an endeavour to make their capitalist competitors lose more than they do.

At our current stage of military development, war will either be insufficient to re-energise capitalist accumulation, or it will create a post-nuclear extinction society. Whilst it might provide a technical basis for reinvestment, labour power would be in short supply, and every corner of the earth would essentially be rendered unusable — it would produce  a reality of annihilation like that we've only seen in fictional media. It would restore capital to a kind of Mad Max/Fallout-esque form of primary accumulation after a period of complete collapse at most. Capitalism would still be functionally dead.

Let us presuppose that war could be carried out in a way that does not result in that sort of post-nuclear society. The world market is at full saturation; globalisation has enabled it to reach its limits. For US imperialism, even the hypothetical redivision of the world is no longer a recovery condition. After World War Two (especially since 1971, and even more so since the fall of the USSR & Eastern Bloc), the US dollar has had total market penetration. There is no area of the world for the dollar to expand into that it hasn’t already - it has saturated the world, and yet the trend towards breakdown has continued and led us to this moment anyway. European imperialism could see the waning US and a war as a chance to redistribute the various monopolies at play (if they won, which is questionable), but it would not change the fundamental finity of the capitalist market as a whole.

War on Labour-Power: The war on wages is here, but it will create further unprecedented social unease; the working classes will not be content with ever greater wage cuts, especially in the context of this moment. This is especially true in the peripheries, where the placation of the working classes was barely possible even before now. We can expect resistance, even in the imperial core; the strength of this resistance depends on the labour movement, on us. And so whilst this is actually the least destructive thing capitalists can do for their rule at the present moment, it means fighting us directly.  

Export of Capital: The export of capital has run out of possibilities - it was the very expansion of capital via imperialism that brought us to this moment. Where else can exports go that they don’t go already? To be clear, the export would have to be sufficiently large scale to save capitalism, and such an unsaturated market does not exist.

Increasing Productivity: Increasing productivity of labour power is largely done through the incorporation of new technologies. If capitalists continue with automation, then capital will abolish itself. This is, of course, not sustainable in the long term, as it would require the Green New Deal and the extraction of all of the minerals on the planet to accomplish  for even sections of the Western world, thus hastening climate collapse. Other avenues like new management systems might increase productivity in individual workplaces, but there is no precedent for them being implemented across industries and on the necessary scale to hold back the tide.

One additional way to attenuate the falling rate of profit is super-exploitation, i.e. driving wages below the value of labour-power, which is only possible through intensive political repression. So we may see further dictatorial regimes like those of Modi in India and Duterte in the Philippines. Indeed, we already see rising fascism across the US, Britain, and Europe, as well as an ever-sharpening Tory government who view the Pandemic as an “opportunity.” For this reason and others we have already mentioned, we  should be aware that fascism will continue to advance in the coming times; it  may then seek to facilitate other avenues of profit restoration, such as war. The implications here are as Roberts argues, that ‘it is possible for capitalism to recover and soldier on “endogenously” when sufficient old capital is destroyed in value (and sometimes physically) to allow a new period of rising profitability … capitalism can stumble on or society may eventually fall back into barbarism.’

To be clear, any combination of these avenues, if successfully implemented, could potentially temper the death of capitalism, but they cannot stop it. Paul Mattick argues that any crisis could be the breakdown. As we surge ever forward, ever deeper into contradiction. It is a yank of a fraying rope; it will break, and each yank makes the drop ever more likely. Even if they cannot prevent capitalism’s death, we must understand that the capitalists will still try many, or all, of the above attempts to save it — they will not just give up.

Robert Kurz notes that key indicators of the final crisis, as opposed to a typical crisis, include the growth of unproductive labour (which is labour that is broadly distinct from the production process, such as police, security, legal system, banking, accounting, licensing authorities, insurance — growth of these sectors is certainly a feature of present-day capitalism), and the growth of state debt (which is currently reaching a level unparalleled in history). What’s more, we can observe an inability to utilise technology to reap further profitability. Can 3D printing, AI, nanotechnology and other technologies be exploited? Perhaps. But to the extent that capitalism can get over this world-historic breakdown? Doubtful. Sooner or later capitalism has to go, and it simply is not holding enough cards to match the task in front of it.

Some may remain unconvinced, perhaps believing that despite the odds, the history of inaccurate predictions of breakdown will repeat itself and capitalism’s talent for resurgence will save it yet again. Firstly, the evidence above refutes this; again, the depth and totality of this present moment is utterly unparalleled. The Great Depression was unprecedented, but came at a point in capitalist development where multiple avenues were viable for its resurrection. Those avenues are, at this time, dead ends.

But let us hypothesise. Perhaps capitalism will reassert itself, in some route we have not considered. That possibility is not at odds with the fact  that the processes at play right now are those that mark its death. Even if one is not convinced that the current crisis  will be sufficient to end capitalism, it is incontrovertible that what is happening now is leading to that death.

We are not yet able to call time-of-death, but can plainly see that capitalism is terminal. The ecological factors alone provide a deadline that we did not know existed for most of the twentieth century; that alone determines the finality of our situation. Even without any of the factors discussed so far, the climate crisis bodes societal collapse within this century.. So whilst there is the (ever-shrinking) possibility of re-accumulation and re-stabilisation, we must remember that Marxism fundamentally articulates the finity of capitalism. Capitalism will end; it cannot last forever. As history marches, the odds get worse for capitalism and its viability depletes.

2021: Turmoil and Resistance

We may well be tempted to throw our hands in the air and claim that it is impossible to work out what will happen. But this would be a deeply un-Marxist response; our dialectical method requires not only interrogation of the past to understand the present, but also an interrogation of the future, in which we are fundamentally invested. Ours is the position of futurity.

The classes of capitalism are playing chess, and we’re in the end game. Capitalism cannot win. If we play the right moves, we can secure a checkmate and defeat it. But if we don’t, or if capitalism has a final trick up its sleeve, then we risk stalemate — everyone losing. If that happens, we even have the possibility that our opponent, confronted with no winning move, tosses the board into the air, scattering and destroying it and every piece on it. Then there are no winners, not even a legal draw, only total destruction. But if we play right, if we understand the game,the board and our opponent, we might just win this.

We will see all sorts of arenas emerge. The developing economies (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa, or BRICS) do not have their own peripheries to support accumulation, and they are increasingly unable to grant economic concessions to their working and middle classes. The global revolt has already started. Last year there were mass anti-austerity movements in Chile, Colombia, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, Haiti, Iraq and Lebanon. In November 2020, 250 million workers in India, or 3% of the world’s population, marched alongside red flags in the largest general strike in history. It’s worth noting that the anti-imperialism of this century will be qualitatively different to the post-war era, when it was principally centred on the peasantry and national liberation. But now, as Torkil Lauesen summarises: ‘The development of the productive forces in the Global South provides them with much power. If they throw a monkey wrench in the global chains of production the imperialist countries will get hurt. The industrialization of the Global South has created a much more promising base for the development of socialism than the national liberation struggles did. There is no reason to be pessimistic. We need to start to organize and prepare for the changes to come.’

The flip side of this development is the transformation of class structure in the imperialist core, as the welfare state is being hollowed out and the material privileges of the labour aristocracy slowly eroded, broadening the prospect of future revolutionary struggles. The possibility of a truly mass base, rather than only the ‘oppressed of the oppressed,’ is paramount for us in Britain. What is more, in our current era of communicative capability, awareness of global struggle and responsibility of replication will be vastly increased. The ripples of revolution will spread faster than ever before.

Although various theorists contend specifics, the broad trend seems to be for capitalism to reach a historical impasse in terms of profit somewhere in the middle of this century. Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and others have been pointing to the mid-21st century as that impasse  for decades. That said, we should understand the death of capitalism, or perhaps more specifically the period of transition out of capitalism (into what, we shall see), as protracted. As Amin put it, ‘the transition from capitalism to world socialism will be long, very long even.’ John Smith states that ‘this crisis is still in its early stages, will endure for decades, is inescapable, and inevitably leads to wars and revolutions. What is not inevitable is the outcome of coming battles that will determine not merely the future of humanity, but whether humanity has a future.’

The factors we have explored allow us to make such predictions, but the nature of politics allows for untold variables. War may well be pursued, and we must make every attempt to prevent it; it could well pronounce the death of life itself, or speed up the decline of capitalism. Likewise, ecological disaster and its acceleration could rapidly increase the speed of transition. Civil society ( culture, social norms and so on) might keep capitalism on life-support for longer than we expect. The lack of provision that capitalism increasingly necessitates will render stark class battles, battles that workers may win or lose.

It is a checkmate for capitalism. But what about us?

We Hold the Future

Dark days are coming. Darker, perhaps, than any that we have seen thus far. This is not a joke, roleplay, game, nor a fantasy. This is the reality we are flying into, and every one of us needs to be ready. There is no half-assing this; you’re fighting tooth and nail, or not fighting at all. Your call.

We must prepare. We must recognise that we are situated in the imperialist core, in Britain — a weak link in the chain. We must build our base, build our social force across the masses, and build our capacity to both weather the gathering storm and drive forward amidst it. This must be done with adamant urgency — it is, by far, our most important task.

We must reconsider how we analyse the world in this light. This is a new era, with new implications; when we look to analyse inter-imperialist rivalries, economic policy or military maneuvers, we must do so in the knowledge that these are the hopeless efforts of capitalism not to thrive but to survive. And indeed, a dying monster can be most brutal.

We must build resilience. Capitalism is dying, and the bourgeois class have successfully conferred their morbidity onto us. We suffer amidst their terminality. We must reject it, for the working and oppressed people of the world will live. Just as capitalism is predicated on us, socialism is born in us too; if humanity is to survive in any form, it is in us. The capitalists will die; the question, the fight, is whether we shall die with them. Resilience is personal and collective, and must be developed so we can withstand.

We must practice against the capitalist realism that incarcerates us with the impossibility of alternative. It is still hard to comprehend that this is happening, but that is what is in front of us. We must face the end of the world. Capitalism is totalising in its reach, holding every aspect of this world, the planet itself, in its violent grip. Without falling into accelerationism and rejecting every hint of violence, we must follow Frank Wilderson’s challenge to accept the death of this world in order to fulfil the world of life ahead of us. As Abou Farman offers, the future could be imagined growing out of an apocalyptic end. ‘What if we imagined the future from the end rather than imagined the end as the future?’

Though it may be daunting and terrifying beyond anything we can comprehend, we must find solace in the simplicity of this task: an unrepentant, unrelenting pursuit of love and life.

Appendix - Further Reading

John Smith – Why Coronavirus could Spark a Capitalist Supernova

Mike Davis - The Monster Enters

Abou Farman - Termanility - The Ticking

Hortense Spillers - Apocalypse Now and Then

Ted Reese - Socialism is now an economic necessity

Prolekult Podcast: A review of Marxist writing on the final crisis

Michael Roberts - Crisis or Breakdown?

Michael Roberts - COVID and inflation

Michael Roberts - World Rate of Profit: A New Approach

Torkil Lauesen - The Principle Contradiction

Black Agenda Report - Has Covid-19 Initiated the Final, Fatal Crisis of Capitalism?

Communist Party of Great Britain, For Soviet Britain (1935)

[The] revolution can and should be achieved peacefully as far as possible, combining the power of mass organisations such as trade unions and campaigns to push the struggle forwards with representation at parliamentary and local elections.

Website of the Young Communist League (2020)

The ‘revolutionary’ left in Britain has long suffered from an unhealthy obsession with parliamentary manoeuvrings. Even with the demise of Corbynism, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB)’s ‘strategy’ for achieving socialism revolves around brokering electoral alliances with ‘left-wing’ Labour MPs. Yet the Labour left has always exerted a moderating influence on the working-class movement, helping make Britain safe from revolution during key periods of inter- and post-war industrial militancy, as well as successfully co-opting and defanging countless extra-parliamentary social movements. The CPB remains stuck in the eternal farce of assuming that the end goal of electing a left-reformist government justifies the most self-defeating means: permanent class collaborationism, equivocations and ‘lesser evilism’, betrayal of proletarian internationalism, and erasure of Labour lefts’ longstanding occupation as agents of the ruling class.

The CPB’s notion of a harmonious parliamentary road to socialism through cross-class coalitions is predicated on revisionism – specifically, its negation of the foundational Marxist understanding of the state as functionally a ruling-class dictatorship, and subsequent inability to prepare the working class for defensive measures against counterrevolutionary terror. In order to understand this sorry state of affairs, this article examines the development of revisionist deviations in the original Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), formed 100 years ago.

The seeds of revisionism were present at the CPGB’s inception in its decidedly soft attitude to the Labour Party, for which it was repeatedly censured by the Communist International (Comintern). Problems were caused by the relative absence of an existing Marxist tradition in early-twentieth century Britain, exacerbating the confusion sown within the CPGB by the post-Lenin Comintern’s policy vacillations. With the notable exception of its ‘Class Against Class’ period (1929-34), the CPGB often found itself riding the coattails of Labour and the conservative trade union bureaucracy, and it failed to provide independent revolutionary leadership during crucial moments of class war,  like the 1926 General Strike, and the miners’ showdown with Thatcher. What began as a ‘temporary’ abandonment of the Leninist insurrectionary path to socialism in the face of the anti-fascist Popular Front, ended with the CPGB advocating all-out class collaboration in the form of the neo-Keynesian ‘Alternative Economy Strategy’. Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, the purportedly ‘Marxist-Leninist’ CPB today has, as we will see, relegated its role to that of a think tank for pro-capitalist reformers.

Lenin’s original assessment of the Labour Party has been heavily sanitised by the CPB (and various Trotskyist groups), and his insistence on exposing the political opportunism of left reformists is forgotten. Lenin, while not rejecting engagement in electoral politics altogether, insisted that ‘criticism of parliamentarism is not only legitimate and necessary’ but is ‘quite correct, as being the recognition of the historically conditional and limited character of parliamentarism, its connection with capitalism and capitalism alone … and of its reactionary character as compared with Soviet power.’ Socialism can only realistically be achieved by building up counter-hegemony (dual power) capable of confronting the existing capitalist state machine, and the historical example of the workers’ Councils of Action in interwar Britain remains instructive. In this critical conjuncture in the protracted global breakdown of capitalism, we need to shatter any remaining illusions in the bogus parliamentary road, and reconnect with the post-war anti-revisionist critique.

Roots of Revisionism

When the Communist International (Comintern) was formed in 1919, one of its first tasks was to encourage the creation of a unified Communist Party in Britain. Lenin was particularly concerned to check the syndicalist and ‘left Communist’ tendencies of British socialism, which spurned involvement in electoral politics altogether. In his ‘Speech on Affiliation to the British Labour Party’ in 1920, Lenin instructed the CPGB to attempt to affiliate with Labour as a strictly tactical gambit, based on his (hotly contested) assessment that Labour was still a flexible political federation, in which revolutionaries would retain ‘sufficient freedom to write that certain leaders of the Labour Party are traitors … [and] agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement.’ Lenin still viewed Labour as a ‘thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie’.

The CPGB was formed from a number of small existing socialist organisations, and especially because of the loss of prominent leftists like Sylvia Pankhurst during the affiliation controversy, the largest contingent came from the British Socialist Party. The BSP took a very lenient approach to Labour and placed an overemphasis on parliamentarism, to the extent that it was censured for this by Lenin.[1] Further problems arose from the general immaturity of Marxism in Britain – notably the absence of English-language translations of many of Marx’s political writings, and, until 1929, of Lenin’s seminal What Is To Be Done?[2] In May 1924 Ruth Fischer, the German Communist Party leader, attended the CPGB congress and reported to the Comintern how the British Communists expressed ‘the loyal attitude of the left wing within the Labour Party itself rather than the attitude of a Communist Party really fighting against the government’. In his reply, the Comintern Chair Grigory Zinoviev admitted that the CPGB was ‘at present no better than the Left German Social Democrats’.[3]

Lenin himself did not write much specifically on Labour’s ‘left’ wing, but from his fierce polemics against Mensheviks in Russia and the renegade Kautsky, his position on left reformism was hardly a secret. Lenin lambasted the brand of opportunists who ‘flaunt before the workers high-sounding phrases about recognising revolution but as far as deeds are concerned go no farther than adopting a purely reformist attitude’; emphasising how the capitalist class ‘needs hirelings who enjoy the trust of a section of the working class, whitewash and prettify the bourgeoisie with talk about the reformist path being possible, throw dust in the eyes of the people by such talk, and divert the people from revolution’. The United Front strategy, formalised by the Comintern in 1922, instructed ‘absolute autonomy and complete independence of every Communist Party’ vis-à-vis social-democratic organisations, including ‘freedom to present its own views and its criticisms of those who oppose the Communists’.

However, after Lenin’s untimely death in early 1924, the Comintern’s application of the United Front became increasingly muddled. A watershed moment came during the Fifth Comintern Congress in July 1924 when Zinoviev, frustrated by the slow advance of the CPGB, promoted the misguided notion of ‘the other door’ to a mass Communist Party in Britain: through strategic alliances with ‘not merely the lefts in the TUC [Trades Union Congress] but also the left wing of the Labour Party’, which was to be encouraged to develop along ‘revolutionary’ lines. By December 1924, the Comintern was insisting that ‘one of the most important prerequisites for the development of the Communist Party of Great Britain to a real mass party is to be found in the crystallisation of a left wing within the Labour Party. On this account the Communist Party should assist in the organisation of this Left Wing, which is the expression of the masses’ desire for struggle’.[4] During a crucial period in the class war in Britain, Zinoviev’s intervention inadvertently consolidated the latent rightist tendency that already existed in the CPGB, catalysing an absolute shift away from Lenin’s original line on tactical affiliation, to a pursuance of strategic alliances with the left wing of governing reformism.

It is often forgotten how revolutionary the interwar years were in Britain, which witnessed a groundswell of popular indignation against mass unemployment and savage wage cuts. There was a full-scale revolt on the Clyde, with wholesale arrests and deportations of strike leaders. The Comintern’s new position on the Labour ‘left’ was especially devastating in the lead up to and during the 1926 General Strike, as the CPGB refused to acknowledge the treachery of the reformists. Taking his cue from the Soviet delegation, Rajani Palme Dutt, the CPGB’s foremost theorist, greeted the election of Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government in 1924 as ‘a victory for the working class’, and wrote that ‘We are not fighting against the Labour government, which it is our concern to uphold and sustain against the attacks of the bourgeoisie’.[5] But it was immediately apparent that MacDonald was intent on suppressing the new strike wave, with the first ever meeting of a Labour Cabinet setting in motion the Emergency Powers Act, enabling the government to use troops against workers.[6] In 1925, the new Conservative government prepared for a class showdown by drawing up extensive martial law plans to take control of essential supplies, as well as enlisting the assistance of paramilitary fascist strike-breakers. A police raid on the CPGB’s London headquarters led to the arrests of 12 leading Communists including Harry Pollitt.

During April the following year, 2.5 million workers struck for eight days, paralysing the movement of goods and fuel. They were joined by a further million workers on the last day of the strike. Certain areas of the country including Northumberland and Durham were under the total control of workers’ Councils of Action, which had begun to link up on a regional basis and even establish proletarian militias. Despite the internment of their national leadership, Communists played a crucial role at the local level: ‘Wherever the Councils of Action were most effective, wherever the local strike was most solid, there a knot of CP members was usually to be found in the thick of it’, coordinating actions, organising strike funds and food distribution, and printing bulletins.[7] Ultimately the strike faltered in the face of acute state repression, with mass arrests including of over 1,000 Communists, gunboats anchored at Mersey, Clyde and Cardiff, and battalions dispatched to Liverpool and Hyde Park.[8]

However, the CPGB made a crucial strategic error in failing to expose the reactionary role of Labour and the TUC General Council. On the instruction of the Soviet delegation on the eve of the strike, and instead of advancing an independent revolutionary line, the CPGB adopted the tailist slogan ‘All Power to the General Council’.[9] This was despite the fact that, as Clydeside revolutionary and founding CPGB member Willie Gallacher later explained, the TUC and Labour leadership had ‘succeeded, through the decisions of the 1925 [Labour] conference, in isolating us from the general body of the workers, and the Baldwin Government, as part of its preparations for the attack on the miners, followed up with our arrest and imprisonment. As early as 1925 [Ramsay] MacDonald, [J.H.] Thomas and Co. were working in close combination with Baldwin against the revolutionary advance of the working class.’[10] The CPGB’s muted criticism of Labour was based on its desire not to alienate TUC and Labour ‘lefts’ like George Hicks, George Lansbury, Alfred Purcell and John Bromley; even though these politicians had backed the Labour Party’s expulsion of Communists. A March 1926 CPGB statement targeted only ‘a small number of labour leaders’ for failing to represent working-class interests, presenting a narrative of betrayal by a minority of right wingers. In the runup to the national confrontation, the CPGB’s manifesto The Political Meeting of the General Strike failed to pinpoint the opportunism of the left reformists, and instead of presenting a Communist transitional programme it merely called for the election of another Labour government. As Gallacher retrospectively lamented, ‘A class action such as was in progress then demanded a class leadership, a leadership that had not been corrupted by, and made part of, the bourgeoisie.’[11]

Among Trotskyists and the revisionist ‘C’PB today, charges of ‘left Communism’ are frequently levelled whenever anybody has the gall to advocate independence from Labour. Such accusations confuse Lenin’s own analysis in several ways. Firstly, they typically equate his positions on political parliamentary reformism with the role of revolutionaries within trade unions (the latter being based on a distinct struggle against spontaneous economism/trade union consciousness). Secondly, they forget his conditionality of retaining absolute political independence and freedom to criticise Labourites (affiliation with Labour on such grounds has never, in one hundred years, proved to be possible); and thirdly, they wrongly assume Labour is the same loosely federalist organisation it was in the first decade of the 1900s.

It is worth remembering that Lenin’s writings on affiliation were before the Labour Party had accrued ruling experience (the first Labour government was formed the very day after Lenin’s death). Once in power, left reformists are not immune from the ‘parliamentary embrace’ – the inevitably moderating effect of mingling with ‘the Great Ones, the Powerful Ones, the Lordly Ones’. The multifarious pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to conform to the role of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition saw the life-long anti-monarchist and purported internationalist singing along to the national anthem and giving a tribute speech to the queen of the realm on the occasion of her 90th birthday. As Lenin emphasised, governing bodies are ‘bound by thousands of threads to the bourgeoisie and permeated through and through with routine and inertia’ – one example being the ‘revolving door’ of the establishment, with politicians spending their time in business boardrooms and meeting with senior civil servants, media bosses, police commissioners, arms traders and so on. These threads have only gotten tighter and tighter as imperialism developed throughout the twentieth century, and the increasing concentration of economic power into fewer hands has engendered a corresponding concentration of political power, severely limiting the scope for manoeuvre in the parliamentary sphere within the advanced capitalist countries.

The contemporary CPB and various Trotskyists make a mockery of Lenin’s analysis of Labour. When Lenin referred to the ‘bourgeois labour party’ he did not mean ‘half proletarian and half capitalist’! Its ‘left’ wing has always shared the right’s commitment to bourgeois-reformist Labourite politics and ideology: in essence a merger of the British traditions of bureaucratic trade union collaborationism, Owenite social-reformism and imperial English patriotism. Even the New Leftist Ralph Miliband (the father of Dave and Ed) was forced to admit that ‘the belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone.’ The hegemony of Labourism on the British left ensures that whenever working-class struggles (whether inside or outside the workplace) transcend narrow economism, their political aspirations are diffused into safe mediatory channels. As Dutt wrote after the experience of the 1920s:

The workers are urged to believe that if only the Labour government would move a point or two to the “Left”, all would be well; instead of being assisted to see that the whole line of the Labour government is the line of capitalism and imperialism, against the workers and that, therefore, support of the Labour government is necessarily support of capitalism. In this way, the “Left” and the “Right” in the Labour Party are objectively allied parts of a single machine. (Labour Monthly, January 1930)

The relationship between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of reformism is symbiotic. The Labour left functions as a ‘safety valve for the radical mood of the masses’, converting workers’ emancipatory aspirations into ‘left phrases of opposition’ that place no real obligations on the pro-capitalist reformers.[12] When the Labour Party headquarters joined in the anti-Communist witchhunts in 1924-6, the foremost ‘left-wing’ Labour MP George Lansbury supported the policy in the name of party ‘unity’, and in his Labour Weekly denounced Communist sympathisers as ‘wreckers’. After Lansbury inherited the Labour leadership in 1932, he pursued a policy of ‘MacDonaldism without MacDonald’, blocking proposals that Labour-controlled councils refuse to enforce the draconian Means Test on unemployment relief.[13]

The wild contradictions within the CPGB generated by the Comintern’s Third Period (1928-34) are largely beyond the scope of the present analysis, but for now it’s worth noting that despite pinballing from Labour-tailism to ultra-left sectarianism (i.e. frenzied splittism and calling left reformists ‘social fascists’), these years did see the party begin to develop an independent revolutionary politics of ‘Class Against Class’. Communist historian Willie Thompson outlines how during this time the CPGB ‘schooled its activists diligently in both political analysis and practical organisational and agitational skills. They were therefore able to become very effective practitioners, influential far beyond their numbers, in trade union and political struggles, whether on the shop-floor, pursuing Comintern objectives in the British colonies or engaged in anti-fascist activity’.[14] The problem was that the renewed critique of reformism was seen primarily in tactical terms, and the underlying revisionist strain was allowed to fester. The overall outlook of the CPGB’s 1935 programme For Soviet Britain was red, but it still contained ‘a pink vein of Social-Democratic thought’.[15] As a result, with the advent of the anti-fascist Popular Front, the party had little trouble seeking alliances ‘first with Labourites, then Liberals and finally “progressive” Tories such as the Duchess of Atholl’; and by the end of the Second World War, it had virtually become an organic appendage of the bourgeois Labour Party.[16] As Jack Conrad puts it, what ‘starts off as a minor watering down of principle’ for the sake of short-term advantage ‘ends in class treachery.’[17]

Peaceful Coexistence in One Country

The CPGB’s revisionism solidified post-WWII, as it seamlessly transitioned from the Popular Front policy of winning the war to an absurd permanent class-collaborationist position of ‘winning the peace’. Its wartime no-strikes policy continued in the months following the Allied victory, including opposition to the industrial action taken by dockers; while its new programme, The British Road to Socialism (BRS), placed a renewed emphasis on parliamentarism and a reorientation of party work towards residential branches and away from workplace organising.[18] The party’s adaptation to reformism was inextricably tied to its social imperialism, which is discussed in a recent Ebb Magazine article.

While Stalin was involved in drafting the BRS (which for CPBers is grounds to dogmatically uphold the programme, and for Trotskyists provides ammunition for the simplified narrative of the retrograde ‘Stalinisation’ of British Communism), he nevertheless criticised the CPGB for holding in his words ‘a very soft and completely unprincipled position in the struggle against the Labour Party’. M.B. Mitin, a leading Soviet theoretician, subsequently drew up a report on the ‘Social-Democratic deviation’ in the CPGB, arguing: ‘the Communist Party’s Executive Committee clearly overestimates the role of the Labour Party and in fact gives the Communist Party only an auxiliary role ... The Communists of England do not understand the independent role of the Communist Party and its special tasks. The Labour Party becomes for them, as it were, the center of all their aspirations’.

As in 1920-6, the CPGB focused on influencing the Labour ‘left’, which it saw ‘as a bridge between itself and the rank and file of the Labour Party’. But as Miliband explained, this approach was fundamentally flawed:

What [the CPGB] fails to see is that the Labour Left has traditionally been and remains a bridge (and a much-trampled bridge at that) between the rank and file and the Labour leadership. The Labour Left does not, so to speak, open out leftwards but rightwards: it affords an important link between the activists and the leadership, and cannot as a constituent element of the Labour Party help but do so. It may be a nuisance at times; but it is nevertheless exceedingly useful to the Labour leaders. It helps to keep alive the myth of a transformable Labour Party. The Communist Party in its turn and at one remove is involved in the same enterprise.

Oppositional sentiments within the party began to spill over, and there were ‘a whole slew of branch resolutions to the 1945 congress that were critical of the CPGB’s attitude to the Labour government’.[19] The Glasgow Party Secretary Bob McIlhone laid out the major points of contention:

The slurring over of class differences in Britain and the sharpening class struggle against monopoly capitalism. The neglect of basic propaganda and agitation on the decisive role of the working class against the dictatorship of monopoly capitalism and for socialism. The confusing of the class relations in Britain by an emphasis on the mutual interests of “progressive Toryism” and the labour movement in the post-war period. The failure to study and learn from the working class that our policy of “national unity” was not in accordance with the developing political sentiment of the workers.[20]

The CPGB’s anti-Leninist deviation was indeed so overt (mirroring the Browderised CPUSA) that the Australian Communist Party published an official polemic in 1948, stating that:

[Revisionism] reached its climax in the [CPGB] central committee’s pronouncements that Britain was “in transition to socialism”. The non-Marxist character of this estimation is quite clear when it is remembered that here we are dealing with the second-strongest imperialist power in the world, where monopoly capitalism is in complete control and the bourgeois state has not been undermined and the government is led by social democrats whose role is so well known to students of Marxism-Leninism as that of the saviours of capitalism, more particularly in the moments of its gravest crisis[21]

The CPGB was once again tailing a Labour ‘left’ devoted to safeguarding capitalism. The current Communist Party of Britain characterises Labour as an organisation permanently polarised between a ‘social-democratic’ and a ‘socialist trend’, with the latter supposedly being hostile to monopoly capitalism, but this is magical thinking.[22] Labour has never been a ‘centrist’ party like the German USPD, straddling a line between revolution and reform: both its ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings are wholly committed to reform within the current capitalist system. Immediately after the Allied victory, the Labour government imposed wage constraints and efficiency measures in the nationalised industries, provoking strikes by dockers, gas workers, miners and lorry drivers. From 1945-51, Labour declared two states of emergency and on 18 different occasions deployed troops to take over strikers’ jobs. In secret, the government also revived the Supply and Transport Organisation, used in 1926 to help crush the General Strike, with the active involvement of prominent ‘left wingers’. These included Aneurin Bevan (celebrated as the ‘socialist’ founder of the NHS) and Stafford Cripps, previously a proponent of unity with the CPGB, who upon being appointed President of the Board of Trade, declared: ‘I think it would be impossible to have worker-controlled industry in Britain’.[23]

The counterrevolutionary pressure of McCarthyite state subversion also played a significant role in the CPGB’s deterioration. The new Labour government set up a cabinet Committee on Subversive Activities in 1947, and the following year there was an anti-Communist purge of the civil service. The TUC General Council encouraged unions to ban CPGB members from office, leading to nine Communists being expelled from the executive of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. While MI6 spent ‘years penetrating the official Communist Parties in Western Europe’, the domestic state apparatus ‘firmly fixed its sights’ on the CPGB: its headquarters were bugged by MI5, and influential academics associated with the party including E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm were placed under extensive surveillance. Before the war the party was even infiltrated by a sleeper agent, Olga Gray, resulting in the arrest and imprisonment of several members.

The party nevertheless retained significant influence among the organised working class, and in 1966 it formed the Liaison Committee for the Defence of the Trade Unions (LCDTU) in response to the Wilson government’s attack on collective bargaining rights. The LCDTU, however, remained subordinate to the party’s new strategy ‘with its stress on a parliamentary road and its perspective of building up of electoral alliances within the trade unions to pressurise Labour towards more left-wing positions’. This hamstrung the CPGB’s ability to constitute any political vanguard during the militant workplace struggles of 1970-4 – although, as in the interwar years, rank-and-file Communists were often at the forefront of these industrial battles.[24] Complementary to the CPGB’s tailing of the Labour left was its innocuous ‘Broad Left’ approach to trade unionism, which entailed brokering alliances with ‘radical’ reformists, in a plea to exert Communist influence on the trade union bloc vote at the annual Labour Party conference and drag the party leftwards. In the 1967 presidential election in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) the CPGB canvassed for Hugh Scanlon, regarded an ‘extreme’ left-winger, instead of the Communist candidate Reg Birch (who subsequently turned to Maoism). Once in office, Scanlon, a self-avowed Marxist, spurned rank-and-file militancy, dropped the engineers’ demand for a shorter working week and put an end to their sit-ins, essentially eroding the credibility of the left within the union. The Communists for their part ‘faithfully executed official [AEU] strategy and opposed attempts even to organize a joint occupation committee.’[25]

The CPGB had abdicated its duty to struggle against the limits of narrow trade union consciousness. The purpose of unions is the short-term fight for better wages and conditions, rather than the abolition of the capitalist system: thus, as Lenin recognised, they inevitably inculcate ‘a certain craft narrow-mindedness, a certain tendency to be non-political, a certain inertness, etc. [i.e. pure “economism”]’. Communist must, as Lenin stressed, wage a relentless battle against economism, ‘to a point when all the incorrigible leaders of opportunism and social-chauvinism are completely discredited and driven out of the trade unions.’ To eschew this duty is to throw the working-class movement into the hands of the reformists and social patriots. The current Communist Party of Britain continues to defend the Broad Left ‘strategy’ at its Trade Union Futures website, while the 2020 edition of its BRS programme states that the TUC ‘must play a leading role in taking bold, broad-based and campaigning initiatives’, and utilise its ‘unique leverage within the Labour Party’.[26] What was true in the 1960s remains true today:

Given its affinity to the trade union bureaucracy, the BRS is afraid to call for trade unions to become politically dependent on the Communist Party, afraid to say that communists should fearlessly fight for democracy in the trade unions and seek to replace reformist leaders with communist ones who would work under the iron discipline of the Party, afraid to call for trade unions to be made into schools for revolution.[27]

The CPB presents a historical narrative that blames any rightist deviations in the original CPGB on the Eurocommunist intellectuals like Hobsbawm associated with the party’s theoretical journal Marxism Today, which was counterposed to the ‘traditionalist’ trade union flank aligned with the Morning Star daily paper. Yet as the party had long since abandoned Leninism, there was little qualitative difference in the Eurocommunist-authored 1977 BRS: as Willie Thompson admits, the changes ‘were more of style and terminology than of real substance’ – for instance the formulation ‘broad popular alliance’ was replaced with ‘broad democratic alliance’.[28] Likewise, Lawrence Parker in his study of minority anti-revisionist trends in the CPGB notes that, throughout the entire post-war period, ‘the culture of most CPGB trade unionists and their practical and ideological reliance on bourgeois institutions that regulated and controlled labour power (trade unions) was complementary to the reliance of the BRS on the bourgeois crutch of the Labour Party’.[29] The difference between the original BRS upheld by the CPB and the Eurocommunist revision was simply a matter of degrees of reformism.

The CPB especially plays up the self-serving ‘Euros versus traditionalists’ schema in its account of the great miners’ confrontation with Thatcher in 1984-5, emphasising how the ‘Eurocommunists, now the dominant force in the Party leadership, had launched a furious attack on the class-based, pro-Soviet politics of the Morning Star and its editor Tony Chater’.[30] But in practice, the Euros and the Chater faction from which the CPB sprung were united when it came to tailing Labour and the TUC. An anti-revisionist factional publication in the CPGB, The Leninist, complained of the traditionalist wing how, on the eve of the miners’ strike, ‘instead of directing this struggle against the capitalist system, we are told to “support all campaigns by the TUC”, to fight for “binding ever closer the traditional organic links between the trade unions and the Labour Party, which is the mass party of the working class and its allies”; for our leadership believes that the crisis of capitalism can be overcome, without socialism, that the TUC’s Alternative Economic Strategy can transcend all the economic laws of capitalism’.[31] Indeed, the ‘C’PB says the problem was that the Euros should have given more support to the Labour ‘left’, stating:

In a period when the resurgent Labour left headed by Tony Benn would have benefited from Communist support and advice about the importance of extra-parliamentary alliances and mass struggle, the Eurocommunists instead denounced Labour Party socialists as the “hard left”. … The revisionist leadership spent much of its time sniping at Scargill and militant picketing rather than meeting the NUM [National Union of Mineworkers] leadership to plan solidarity activities.[32]

As usual, however, the left Labourites played a reactionary role, putting a brake on the miners’ militancy. Tony Benn, while rhetorically sympathetic to the miners and their leader Arthur Scargilll, did not want to upset the right-wing Labour leadership and so withdrew a motion to the National Executive Committee (NEC) calling for countrywide demonstrations, in favour of calls for discussions with the NUM bureaucracy.[33] The CPGB particularly failed to expose the opportunism of Neil Kinnock, originally a member of the Tribunite left, who upon becoming Labour leader set about making the party safe for Blairism. On 19 April 1984 the Morning Star ran the headline ‘Kinnock Gives Complete Backing to Miners’ Fight’, but in reality Kinnock took a ‘both-sides’ approach to the confrontation, and at that year’s annual Labour conference went out of his way to attack the ‘violence’ of the strikers.[34] Similarly, on 9 March 1985 Morning Star reported that the Scottish miners’ leaders ‘were greatly encouraged by positive support from Labour leader Neil Kinnock in their campaign to get hundreds of sacked miners their jobs back’ – when Kinnock had actually refused to support amnesty for all those who had been sacked.[35]

Scargillism was essentially a militant syndicalism that never transcended radical reformism, and yet the CPGB leadership (and several Trotskyist groups) attacked it from the right, criticising the strikers’ combative tactics and opposing the formation of miners’ defence squads. This was hypocritical, since these groups universally celebrated historical workers’ defensive militias, like those formed in 1926, but when there were themselves in the midst of class war – and this was warfare in a literal sense, as trade unionists came up against a force of 20,000 police officers armed with truncheons and utilising mounted charges, illegal fingerprinting, snatch squats and agents provocateurs – they suddenly became pacifists.[36] Some leading CPGBers did refuse to condemn the miners’ confrontational approach, and instead attacked the constitutionalist fetish of their critics – for instance Mick McGahey, a prominent Communist in the NUM, mocked the ‘ballotitis’ of the Labour lefts.[37] But, contra the CPB’s retelling, Morning Star also distanced itself from workers’ militancy:

The Morning Star and its new breed of centrist followers, the positive interpreters of the British road, have also considered it their “communist duty” to tail the NUM, following every twist and turn of the NUM executive like a shadow. Thus in the wake of Arthur Scargill’s declaration that “the NUM disassociated itself” from the attack in which taxi driver David Wilkie was killed [the tragic blunder that provided an excuse for Kinnock’s attack on Scargillism], the Morning Star editor came out with the following statement: “Throughout nine months of warfare against the pit community the Tory media has focused on violence no trade unionist would condone.” This is, of course, a foul attack on the justified, heroic and audacious resistance of rank-and-file miners, who have been forced to organise their violence against police terror.

At the local level, individual CPGB members took leading roles in organising picket lines, winning solidarity from other sectors and collecting strike funds. But in their desire not to alienate the left Labourites, the party leadership, along with the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, followed Kinnock in hiding behind calls for a national ballot, and opposed the launching of flying pickets into the Nottinghamshire coalfield, the crucial strategic site in the conflict where half the workforce scabbed. Thatcher successfully isolated the area through a military-style onslaught, and rather than the lack of a ballot, which likely would not have passed anyway, what may have proved fatal was the absence of an ‘active picketing strategy’, which ‘backed up with a propaganda offensive from the outset of the strike might have won a much larger network of support in the area, thereby considerably diminishing the damage to the strike that transpired.’[38] And instead of clinging to the coattails of the trade union bureaucracy, the CPGB could have encouraged the formation of militant committees modelled on the 1926 Councils of Action, an idea raised by the leader of Kent NUM:

If organised and under the democratic control of the militant rank and file in the National Union of Mineworkers and the miners support committees … such bodies could have transformed the defensive actions of the miners - the spontaneous retaliation against police attacks, the sporadic attacks on scabs or coach companies transporting them - and put the strikers on the front foot.

In addition to the Euros and the Chaterites in the CPGB was the Straight Left faction, which contained a number of members who later became prominent figures in the CPB including John Foster (the CPB’s ‘International Secretary’) and Andrew Murray (currently Chief of Staff to Unite). The Straight Left represented ‘a “traditionalist” distillation of the CPGB’s post-war reformist drift’, and held a right-liquidationist position of literally merging the Communist Party with Labour.[39] During the miners’ strike Murray (who in 2016 jumped ship from the CPB to become a close advisor to Corbyn) wrote in the Morning Star that ‘the Parliamentary Labour Party did its duty to those who sent them to parliament’. As The Leninist complained, ‘Such is the Labourphilia of the Straight Leftists that they insist on lionising scabs like Kinnock, ascribing the treachery of the Labour Party not to its loyalty to the capitalist system, not to the fact that it is a bourgeois workers’ party, but to mere “mistakes”.’ There is a striking parallel here to the CPGB’s calamitously passive approach to Labour during the 1926 General Strike. The inability of the CPGB to provide a modicum of revolutionary direction during the Miners’ Strike cannot just be put down to the ‘rotten elements’ of the Eurocommunist wing, but was rather the result of revisionist ideas about the nature of the capitalist state which the Communist leadership had long shared with Labour ‘lefts’.

Alternative Economic and Political Strategies… for Capital

Interpretations of socialism became even more muddled in the discussions surrounding the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES). In the context of waning global economic boom conditions, successive Labour administrations in the late 1960s and 1970s broke with social-democratic orthodoxy, implementing massive cuts to public spending in exchange for several IMF loans to bolster the pound.[40] The AES, developed by Labour lefts like Tony Benn, some leading trade unionists and the CPGB, was an attempt to revive Keynesian class compromise.[41] An important reference point in the AES debates was British Leyland, the state-owned car company whose nationalisation under a Labour government in 1975 was interpreted by Communists as a vindication of the BRS. At Longbridge factory, the biggest in Leyland, the key union figure was Communist Works Convenor Derek Robinson, nicknamed ‘Red Robbo’. Robinson declared a need to convince ‘the broad masses of people on the shop floor that they’ve got a vested interest in efficiency’, and that to ‘make Leyland successful as a publicly-owned company … will be a major political victory.’ As James Eaden and David Renton explain, ‘Leading Communist activists such as Robinson, effectively saw their role as winning the loyalty of the rank and file for a restructuring plan which entailed job losses and speed ups on the production line’. In February 1977, when skilled toolroom workers at Leyland struck against the terms of Labour’s collaborationist Social Contract, they were publicly denounced by their union leader, and the Broad Left, Scanlon, and Robinson all encouraged Leyland workers to cross picket lines. The lack of principled political leadership ensured there was little resistance to the 12,500 redundancies at Leyland under Jim Callaghan’s Labour government the following year.[42]

As the Revolutionary Communist League of Britain (RCLB, a Maoist grouplet) pointed out at the time: ‘What is class collaboration in “private” industry is class collaboration in nationalised industries too. This class collaboration with a “left” face is the hall-mark of the so-called “Communist” Party of Great Britain.’ Placing a few workers on company boards, an AES staple that was revived by Corbyn, was identified by the RCLB as little more than a ploy to ‘involve workers in the planning of their own exploitation’. As happened at Leyland, ‘workers’ participation’ under collaborationist terms simply leads to a situation where the gap between lay employees and ‘an increasingly bureaucratised layer of full time stewards and convenors’ grows.[43] The AES is a prime example of the one-way route to reformism identified by Miliband. The CPGB basically achieved what it laid out in its programme, from the successful defence of Clause IV to the crystallisation of a left-Labour faction committed to revisionist parliamentary ‘socialism’, and yet all this ‘certainly brought [the CPGB] no recognition from its putative allies and produced no communist gains of any consequence.’[44] In 1965 a Tribune editorial advised CPGB members to just join Labour, because: ‘The programme for the immediate future outlined [by the BRS] contains almost nothing to which a Labour left-winger … could take exception’.[45]

The CPB now refers to an ‘Alternative Economic and Political Strategy’ (AEPS), formulated by the likes of Murray, Foster, Seumas Milne (another Corbyn advisor), Jonathan White and Mary Davis, but the addition of ‘political’ has made no concrete difference, with the 2020 version of the BRS advocating a ‘popular democratic anti-monopoly alliance’ of Labour ‘lefts’ and trade unionists. The AEPS is nothing but a utopian project to return to the ‘golden era’ of welfare-state imperialism, making references to Roosevelt’s New Deal and Attlee’s state-capitalist nationalisations.[46] Of course, the AEPS authors forget to mention the post-war Labour governments’ record of neo-colonial violence, strike-breaking, and ruthless rationalisation measures including the closure of 4/10 collieries.[47] Instead of workers’ control, the AEPS advocates for ‘public ownership’ and ‘public stakes’. It makes no attempt to hide its overriding aim of streamlining capitalist exploitation, highlighting ‘functions necessary for the maintenance of an economically effective labour force’, and calling for measures to ‘bring the deficit down in a consistent and sustainable manner’.[48] As the RCLB commented 30 years ago, ‘If the BRS is little more than a blueprint of the battle for a “left wing” Labour government, then the question is raised: why two reformist parliamentary parties of the left?’

As in the 1970s, a problem related to the revisionists’ abandonment of the fundamentals of Marxism is their anachronistic equation of monopoly capitalism with finance capital and foreign trade, and subsequent erasure of the class character of national industrial capital. The AEPS speaks of ‘restoring democracy’ in Britain by curbing ‘the economic and political power of the City [of London]’ (similar sentiments are advanced by several tiny surviving left-nationalist ‘Communist’ sects like the CPB-ML and CPGB-ML).[49] For the CPB, ‘democracy’ is clearly equated not with workers’ control and ownership, but with state nationalisation measures under a bourgeois Labour government. The real issue for the working class is not whether the state runs industry, but the question of who controls the state. The CPB’s long-standing General Secretary Robert Griffiths has seized on Lenin’s argument in 1917 that the development of state-monopoly capitalism involved a ‘material preparation for socialism’, but that statement was mostly in reference to the context of agrarian Russia, where the nascent development of capitalist production had birthed an increasingly militant proletariat class. The comparison to a highly developed imperialist country is quite absurd, as is Griffiths’ claim that in Britain ‘state capitalist measures continue to prepare the ground for fundamental change’. Lenin further explicitly stressed that while the development of monopoly capitalism in the early 1900s had increased class contradictions, and thus in a purely objective sense was a ‘material preparation’ for revolution, this was ‘not at all … an argument for tolerating the repudiation of such a revolution and the efforts to make capitalism look more attractive, something which all reformists are trying to do.’

Nationalisation is not inherently bad, and there is a pressing immediate need to fight to defend key services and the health and care sectors in this country, but the CPB muddleheads have obscured the true socialist terms of engagement: rejecting class collaborationism and pay-outs to private owners, being clear about the fact that public ownership under capitalism will never be adequate, and opposing any concessions to economic imperialism – while simultaneously advancing an independent revolutionary politics. An incisive breakdown of the AE(P)S-style state capitalist logic was made four decades ago by the anti-revisionist Workers Newsletter Group and Coventry Workers Association:

What is more significant is the total absence of any class analysis or any characterisation of the state as an instrument of class rule. Nowhere do they [the left reformists] indicate how the fundamental contradiction within the capitalist mode of production can be resolved; nowhere do they discuss the response that might be expected from capitalists in defence of their class interests; nowhere do they deal with the role that the police and the armed forces might be expected to play; nowhere do they seem prepared to learn from the experiences of others who have taken that road, only to have their hopes of achieving socialism thwarted by the iron heel of the dictatorial Right. Perhaps of equal significance is the definition of the enemies of the working class used by Benn and others on the Left of the Labour party (and Communist Party) which generally consists of “the City, the IMF, the multinationals”, all of which are part of finance capital. Industrial capital is not only largely excluded, but is, indeed, seen as the lifeblood of the nation. The nature of industry, production for profit, and the relations within production are not criticised. The problem is characterised as one of decline within manufacturing industry.

Corbynomics was even less ‘radical’ than the AES of the ‘70s, essentially presenting a programme for capitalist growth based on technological innovation, with John McDonnell invoking ‘the Entrepreneurial State’ and ‘socialism with an iPad’. McDonnell quickly dropped his initial talk of nationalising all the main banks, in favour ‘people’s quantitative easing’ through a single state investment bank which, as Marxist economist Michael Roberts points out, is hardly extreme when there is already a European Investment Bank, a Nordic Investment Bank and many others, ‘all capitalised by states or groups of states for the purpose of financing mandated projects by borrowing in the capital markets’. The CPB’s AEPS programme likewise in 2012 highlighted the utility of French and German-style state investment banks for securing ‘additional competitive advantages [for capital!].’[50] The kicker comes when it barefacedly states that ‘An alternative economic and political strategy also has the potential to bring the trade unions and working people into alliance with large sections of the business community.’[51] In an act of gross class betrayal, the CPB has once again relegated its role to that of a think tank for capitalist Labour Party policies. It’s no surprise that the CPB’s original 1989 Draft BRS and the Morning Star were full of praise for the counterrevolutionary reforms of Gorbachev – which the farsighted CPB leadership claimed did ‘not in any way herald a return to capitalism’ in Russia(!)[52] Like a pathetic broken record, in the wake of Corbyn’s 2019 election defeat and Labour’s complete reversion to neoliberal orthodoxy, the revised 2020 BRS tells it readers that ‘it remains to be determined whether the left trend in the party can – with enough trade union support – win the struggle not only for leadership, but also for policies that challenge British state-monopoly capitalism’.[53]

The politics of the BRS are clearly not of a revolutionary flavour, but of Marxism deep-fried in Labourism. As Lenin wrote of ‘centrist’ parties like the USPD, the CPB expresses ‘both an inability and an unwillingness to really prepare the party and the class in revolutionary fashion for the dictatorship of the proletariat.’

The Spectre of Dual Power and Insurrection

The CPB’s ‘strategy’ for working-class revolution amounts to an electoral front of socialists and reformists, combined with loosely-defined ‘extra-parliamentary struggle’: ‘Through an upsurge in working class and popular action, a left government can be elected in Britain based on parliamentary majorities of Labour, socialist, communist and progressive representatives’.[54] But we have already seen how it’s an iron law that the Labour ‘left’, from Lansbury to Bevan to Benn, will not hesitate to sacrifice the working class on the altar of ‘party unity’. This is why the need to build up a politically-independent revolutionary force is paramount. As CPGB dissenter Dick Jones wrote half a century ago, ‘Lenin never advocated the “Transforming of Parliament into an instrument of the peoples ‘will’”, neither did he envisage an alliance of Communist and Left Labour MP’s bringing in Socialism’. It is worth recalling the warning of the leader of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (April-May 1919) Eugen Leviné, who summed up the treachery of ‘left’ reformists shortly before his execution: ‘The Social Democrats start, then run away and betray us; the Independents [USPD] fall for the bait, join us and then let us down; and we Communists are stood up against the wall.’

As Ralph Miliband observed, ‘people on the left who have set out with the intention of transforming the Labour Party have more often than not ended up being transformed by it, in the sense that they have been caught up in its rituals and rhythms, in ineffectual resolution-mongering exercises, in the resigned habituation to the unacceptable, even in the cynical acceptance and even expectation of betrayal’: the effect of which is to block any serious challenge to capitalist exploitation and racial imperialism. The same drive to assimilate and defang characterised the Corbyn project. The grassroots anti-austerity campaigns that arose post-2010 were undermined when young socialists once again flocked into a Labour Party intent on implementing ruthless cuts at the council level. Labour appropriates and disposes of activists’ demands as proves convenient: the Labour Campaign for Free Movement poured its efforts into securing a nonbinding resolution and was subsequently ‘betrayed’ by the 2019 manifesto, as was the campaign to get Labour to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Corbynism even reinforced trade union passivity, as left-wing unions like the FBU re-capitulated to their traditional ‘don’t rock the boat and ruin Labour’s electoral chances’ posture. As we put it in our article on the general election last year, Labour is a black hole for social movements, ‘drawing in energy, work, time and hopes and dissipating them into nothingness.’

If such a left-reformist parliamentary coalition did get in power, it would more than likely soil the name of socialism in succumbing to the inexorable pressures of capital accumulation and the entrenched state bureaucracy, along the lines of the rapid capitulation of Syriza in Greece to an austerity package from the EU and IMF. On other occasions, nominally-‘socialist’ parties have entered into governing coalitions with reactionaries and ended up helping implement brutal anti-working-class and pro-imperialist policies, as was the case with François Mitterrand’s Parti socialiste in the 1980s, and the Italian Partito della Rifondazione Comunista in the 1990s. Miliband noted of the post-liberation Popular Front government in France that ‘Communist participation, far from notably “radicalising” the government, helped, on the contrary to “de-radicalise”, or at least to subdue, the most militant part of the working-class movement.’ Likewise, the ill-conceived involvement of French Communists as junior partners in the first Mitterrand government was a disastrous endeavour that led to an absolute decline in their support.[55] There is little reason to believe a successful BRS­­-style ‘broad-based anti-monopoly alliance’ or ‘other door’ entryist strategy, as unlikely as both scenarios are, would be any different in their results. One of the glaring lessons of the twentieth century is that there is no Kautskyan ‘third way’ to socialism.

This is not to say that anti-electoralism should be made into a dogma: under certain conditions the parliamentary arena can be weaponised by socialists for agitational purposes, as when Karl Liebknecht made his heroic stand against the imperialist First World War in the German Reichstag. But in general when it comes to electoral work, the Comintern’s guidelines laid down at its Second Congress remain applicable, namely that Communist MPs must ‘subordinate all their parliamentary work to the extra-parliamentary work of their Party’; and must not only expose the bourgeoisie, but also ‘systematically and relentlessly’ expose reformists and centrists – Communist MPs are first and foremost party agitators in the ‘enemy camp’.[56]

By advocating a ‘peaceful transition’ the CPB and its youth wing resolutely turn away from the ramifications of confronting the ruling-class dictatorship. It is certainly the case that, because the superprofits of imperialism give the ruling class more leeway to grant concessions to workers within the advanced capitalist countries, direct coercion is less prevalent here than in the global periphery. Nevertheless, vicious reprisals have followed whenever workers have asserted themselves, from the Peterloo Massacre to the Miners’ Strike. Throughout the imperialist core after WWII there was intense state repression of progressive forces, and while ‘Lenin established the Communist International to support socialist revolutions and hoped they would follow in the Bolsheviks’ footsteps, the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] and CIA engaged in covert and overt warfare to defeat communist revolutions in Western Europe.’[57] Winston Churchill helped fascists in Greece crush left-wing partisans, and the CIA and MI6 spearheaded Operation Gladio which allied with right-wing terrorists in Italy.

In post-war Britain, violent counterrevolution has mostly been retained at the level of a threat, but there have been killings of several protesters including Blair Peach, Kevin Gately and Ian Tomlinson in clashes with police, as well as paramilitary ‘swamping’ of Black communities by the Special Patrol Group; not to mention the occupation of the north of Ireland. In 1968 the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, plotted a coup against Labour leader Harold Wilson, and Edward Heath’s government authorised the potential use of armed forces to stop Britain becoming a ‘Communist state’. Such overt threats from more reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie against reformist parliamentarians, of the kind Corbyn was also subjected to, are double-edged. Partly, the attacks on Corbyn and odious revival of Red-baiting reflected real anxieties within the bourgeoisie about the breach in the neoliberal status quo. Primarily though, this open hostility served the role of further moderating pressure on the Labour leadership in addition to the principle day-to-day regulatory functions of the parliamentary and public spheres. Given all of Corbyn’s political backtracking even while in opposition, it is extremely doubtful the bourgeoisie would ever have resorted to an actual coup, just as they never needed to with Wilson, who capitulated to the IMF and supported the US’ butchery in Vietnam. But suffice it to say that if any serious revolutionary challenge is posed in Britain, state terror would be readily unleashed.

In the present context of ruling-class anxieties about economic disintegration, there has been an intensification of arbitrary state power in Britain, seen for instance with the stripping back of civil liberties via the emergency Coronavirus Bill rushed through the House of Commons in March. The mailed fist of state repression is primarily trained against migrants and colonised people, but workers in general are under fire – the draconian 2016 Trade Union Act introduced an extremely undemocratic double strike ballot threshold, along with authorised supervisors on pickets; and blacklisted trade unionist Dave Smith has exposed the ongoing collusion between police, security services, private agencies and construction companies. The organised left has also been targeted, and it recently came to light that police have been infiltrating socialist and anti-racist organisations from 1999 to at least 2011. Last year, the Met implemented a city-wide ban against the Extinction Rebellion (XR) climate demonstrations in London, and arrested 1,300 protestors. The XR protests were capitalised on by reactionaries as an excuse to ramp up repression, with talks held between police and the government about strengthening the 1986 Public Order Act, while a report by the UK Commission for Countering Extremism portrayed the far left as a potential terrorist threat. As this article is being written, Labour leader Keir Starmer is helping the Tories vote through the ‘Spy Cops Bill’ that will give a green light for police and MI5 to infiltrate unions and social movements. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, ‘bourgeois legality … is nothing but the particular social form in which the political violence of the bourgeoisie, developing its given economic basis, expresses itself.’

Lenin similarly captured something fundamental when he insisted that in ‘every single country in the world, even the most advanced and “freest” of the bourgeois republics, bourgeois terror reigns, and there is no such thing as freedom to carry on agitation for the socialist revolution, to carry on propaganda and organisational work precisely in this sense. The party which to this day has not admitted this under the rule of the bourgeoisie and does not carry on systematic, all-sided illegal work in spite of the laws of the bourgeoisie and of the bourgeois parliaments is a party of traitors and scoundrels who deceive the people by their verbal recognition of revolution.’ It was the most politically liberal state in Europe, Weimar Germany, that birthed the horrors of Nazism; and it is in the supposed ‘land of the free’ that fascism is once again threatening to rear its ugly head. ‘The more highly developed a democracy is’, wrote Lenin,

the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with every profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie. The learned Mr Kautsky could have studied this “law” of bourgeois democracy in connection with the Dreyfus case in republican France, with the lynching of negroes and internationalists in the democratic republic of America, with the case of Ireland and Ulster in democratic Britain, with the baiting of the Bolsheviks and the staging of pogroms against them in April 1917 in the democratic republic of Russia.

The 2020 BRS admits that ‘the British ruling class and its allies can be utterly ruthless in defending their interests’, yet as to how to combat this it remains suspiciously vague, indicating that violence can simply be prevented by securing ‘the greatest possible support’ for socialist policies.[58] But as the cases of Salvador Allende in Chile, Lula da Silva in Brazil and Evo Morales in Bolivia all tragically illustrate, pursuing a popular electoral path to ‘democratic socialism’ is no insurance against counterrevolution. The BRS also points to ‘extensive’ reforms of the police, secret services and military, and claims that ‘Over time … the balance of resources will tilt away from a full-time selective professional army towards popular military reservists’.[59] But ‘time’ for such reforms of the repressive state apparatus is precisely what we will not have in the heat of a revolutionary situation. The British army is a highly disciplined weapon of imperialism, dominated by an upper- and upper-middle-class officer caste, and it is extremely ideologically reactionary (recall the leaked video of paratroopers shooting a target of Corbyn’s face). Its function as a tool of capitalist domination cannot be ‘reformed away’ or solved, as the BRS suggests, by simply getting rid of a few ‘reactionary personnel in top state positions’.[60] As Conrad insists, we can only ‘rely on the class strength of the proletariat; namely its ability to cause internal divisions in these “bodies of armed men” through a combination of political magnetism and willingness to physically confront the armed might of the state with the armed might of the working class in the form of the workers’ militia.’[61] Replacing the capitalist standing army with armed workers’ bodies was identified by both Marx and Lenin as one of the first fundamental tasks of socialist revolution.

By wilfully ignoring the revolutionary laws of motion, the CPB’s BRS is setting the working class up for failure. As Donald Parkinson argues in Cosmonaut Magazine, ‘Saying that insurrection is off the table while saying you will do whatever is possible to defend a revolutionary government is contradictory if not dishonest, or at least a confusion of legitimate insurrection with putschism. … at some point, there must be a decision to engage in military confrontation with the bourgeoisie or not.’ Put bluntly, in the revolutionary context, to be indecisive is to die. Defensive measures against bourgeois reaction cannot be delayed until the last moment, because ensuring the least damage to workers is predicated first and foremost on ‘the potential of the working class to inflict massive, irresistible and overwhelming punishment in the event of capitalist resistance.’[62] The 1917 October Revolution was itself relatively bloodless as the Bolsheviks had organised workers’ militias (Red Guards) that managed to occupy strategic government buildings. Conversely, the municipal stronghold of Red Vienna in the 1920s and ‘30s was brutally defeated because the Austrian Social-Democratic Party failed to prepare their party and paramilitary organisation (the Schutzbund) for decisive action before the appearance of the revolutionary situation.

It is not enough, as the revisionist authors of the BRS would have us believe, to elect a left-wing government and attempt to just shuffle around resources within the existing state. As Marx identified, reflecting on the lessons of the 1871 Paris Commune, ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’, because the bourgeois state, ‘with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature’, is nothing but the concentrated expression of ‘the national power of capital over labour … [and] an engine of class despotism.’ Whereas all previous revolutions had merely passed control of the state machine from one exploiting class to another, in 1871 the old structures of state power in Paris had been smashed and, for the very first time, workers had begun replacing those structures with their own rule. The elected Commune government was ‘a working, not a parliamentary body’ – all officials were on workers’ wages, and the standing army and police were replaced with a citizens’ militia.

As Parkinson puts it, the task of socialists is to ‘build a counter-sovereignty to the capitalist state, not become integrated into it.’ This counter-sovereignty is achieved through a long period of protracted struggle, with the ambition of forging a ‘state within a state’ – the ideal of early-twentieth century revolutionary Marxism. ‘Dual power’ established alongside the existing state is won by a variety of extra-parliamentary means – soviets, Councils of Action, shop-floor committees, mutual aid societies, self-defence networks, trade and tenant unions, carceral abolition groups, even social and educational clubs. Lenin explained how Bolshevik success in 1917 owed to the fact that ‘for years illegal machinery was systematically built up to direct demonstrations and strikes, [and] to conduct work among the troops’. We can also point to the example of the CPGB in the 1920s-30s, which set up ‘Little Moscows’ in mining communities such as West Fife, Rhondda and the Vale of Leven: ‘The local Communist parties of these industrial villages were deeply integrated with every aspect of the community’s social life and culture as well as exercising their strengths in the workplace.’[63] Agitation around wages, poor relief and housing was coupled with the creation of red co-ops, sports leagues and even music bands. Local governance by the Communist Parties in post-war France and Italy also ‘led to a massive provisioning of social services’.

Ultimately, it is not enough to merely establish red islands in a capitalist sea: as Sophia Burns puts it, socialism ‘isn’t a gradual process where reforms (or mutualist co-ops!) stack on top of each other until one morning, you wake up to find that capitalism is gone.’ As we’ve seen of 1926 in Britain, the CPGB should have been calling for immediate power to be handed to the spontaneously-formed Councils of Action while advancing its own revolutionary programme, rather than tailing the TUC. Burns is particularly critical of certain strands of the ‘base building’ activist fad in North America, in which community work goes little further than creating ‘red charities’. An absence of revolutionary political direction in worthy base-building projects like the US Marxist Center and its British counterpart will inevitably result in their co-option by liberals and social democrats. Revolutionary socialist leadership on a national basis is necessary to prevent various movements from remaining struggles within the capitalist system, rather than against the system itself. This is not to make a fetish of the vanguard party, as is often the case with neo-Maoist critics of base building: as Salar Mohandesi recently argued in a Viewpoint article, ‘The party is not, and can never substitute itself for [dual power] bodies. … But the party can help catalyze, develop, and protect them – and most importantly of all, it can hold these oppositional organizations together in a deeper unity through its articulating function.’ After the February revolution in Russia, the soviets (workers’ and soldiers’ councils) comprised a parallel government in parts of the Capital. However, this dual power on its own was neither adequate nor sustainable, and in Lenin’s words the capitalist state machine had to be ‘broken, smashed’. Alyson Escalante expands:

After months of compromise, the workers had grown tired of the opportunist bourgeois socialists [the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties]. They had seen that the dual power of the soviets and the provisional government was not tenable. One side had to take unitary power. Most importantly, the workers saw that the bourgeois government had done nothing for them: it had smashed their printing presses, it had crushed their demonstrations, it had broken their strikes. Of course, it could do nothing else, the bourgeois state is designed to do precisely this. The events of October, 1917 ought to have concretely proven that the strategy of infiltrating the bourgeois government is untenable. Lenin and the Bolsheviks proved that the workers are willing to throw the bourgeois state away in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

The insurrectionary ‘October road’ was not a uniquely Russian episode: ‘before the dust settled in Russia other countries experienced their “Octobers”. In Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia and various German cities short-lived soviet republics were established.’[64] Soviet power was also briefly won in interwar Germany, Ireland, Austria and Italy. As we slip ever-deeper into another inter-imperialist crisis, the lessons of that period will be especially relevant.

Conclusion

The overriding lesson to be gleaned from the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain is that the parliamentary road leads inexorably to the treachery of class collaboration. For all its faults, the pre-BRS CPGB in the 1920s-30s was the closest thing to a mass vanguard party that’s ever existed in this country – it had begun to build an independent revolutionary politics, and also established red bases in a number of working-class communities. The surviving Communist Party of Britain, however, is not a revolutionary organisation in any sense; it is a splinter group that emerged from a relatively small network of Morning Star-aligned trade unionists (the Communist Campaign Group) in the mid-1980s, and has inherited the Labourphilic politics of its predecessor. Its leadership comprises a collective of British Mensheviks hiding behind the historical prestige and branding of the original CPGB.

Labour tailism has been the most persistent and insidious brand of opportunism within the British Communist movement. It has engendered a sustained historical revisionism that fails to educate the working class about the left reformists’ true role – giving ‘socialist’ legitimacy to austerity policies and strike-breaking, exerting a moderating influence during critical moments of industrial militancy, from the 1926 General Strike to the miners’ confrontation with Thatcher, and diverting extra-parliamentary social movements into safe constitutional channels. Obviously, there is still a qualitative difference between the Labour ‘lefts’ and Blairites; but equally, the idea we should avoid ‘alienating’ Corbyn supporters by tempering our criticism is precisely what enables self-proclaimed ‘revolutionary’ groups to constantly slip into the same self-defeating habits: it is an absolute law that in attempting to appease the Labour left, socialists and Communists have ended up pandering to the dominant right. It is high time to put the nail in the coffin of what Luxemburg referred to as the ‘stinking corpse’ of social democracy.

In the midst of the unprecedented twinned economic and environmental crises that will define this century, socialists and Communists of all stripes need to stop mourning their projected fantasies of ‘what could have been’ with Corbyn. Instead, we must begin the serious task of rebuilding the revolutionary alternative from the wreckage, including: the development of a transitional programme that completely transcends AE(P)S-style state capitalism, and a return to the Leninist path of Soviet power, and of building counter-hegemony capable of smashing the capitalist state machine. Breaking the nightmarish logic of capitalist realism expressed by TINA (‘there is no alternative’) necessitates a shattering of illusions in left reformism and the ‘parliamentary road’ as representing anything other than a brake on working-class emancipation.

Endnotes

[1] Lenin also admitted that ‘a larger section of the finest revolutionaries [not least John Maclean] are against affiliation to the Labour Party’.

[2] Ralph Darlington, The Political Trajectory of J. T. Murphy (Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 266.

[3] Raymond Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism (Croom Helm, 1977), p. 234.

[4] Darlington, The Political Trajectory of J. T. Murphy, pp. 129-30.

[5] Ibid., p. 126.

[6] Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), p. 109

[7] James Eaden and David Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 23-7.

[8] Rob Sewell, In the Cause of Labour: A History of the British Trade Unions (London: Wellred Publications, 2003), p. 195.

[9] Eaden and Renton, p. 22.

[10] William Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde: An Autobiography (4th edn, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), p. 268.

[11] Ibid., p. 269; Eaden and Renton, p. 28.

[12] It may surprise readers that these comments on the Labour left are from Leon Trotsky’s writings on the ‘Problems of the British Labour Movement’ (1925-6). In the context of factional struggles within the Comintern, Trotsky, the leader of the Left Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, took up an implicit critique of Zinoviev’s open door concept and restated the orthodox Leninist insistence on exposing left reformists’ duplicity. During the Third Period when the Comintern’s foreign policy veered sharply to the left, Trotsky lurched in the other direction and began claiming Labour was ‘a workers’ party’ that should be ‘critically supported’ by British Communists because, unlike the governing Tories, it ‘represented the working class masses’ – something Lenin never came close to suggesting – and he even encouraged the centrist Independent Labour Party (ILP) to temporarily undertake ‘entryism’ within it.

[13] Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, p. 212.

[14] Willie Thompson, The Good Old Cause: British Communism 1920-1991 (London: Pluto Press, 1992), p. 8.

[15] Neil Redfern, Class or Nation? Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2005), p. 3.

[16] Jack Conrad, In the Enemy Camp: Using Parliament for Revolution (November Publications Ltd, 1993), p.49

[17] Jack Conrad, Which Road? A Critique of ‘Revolutionary’ Reformism (November Publications Ltd, 1991), p. 2.

[18] Lawrence Parker, The Kick Inside – Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991 (2nd edn, November Publications Ltd, 2012), pp. 15-21.

[19] Ibid., p. 22.

[20] Quoted in Redfern, p. 195.

[21] Quoted in Parker, The Kick Inside, p. 34.

[22] ‘Communist’ Party of Britain, Britain’s Road to Socialism: Programme of the Communist Party (Updated 8th edn, Croydon: Manifesto Press Cooperative, 2020), p. 36.

[23] Jim Phillips, The Great Alliance: Economic Recovery and the Problems of Power, 1945-1951 (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 125.

[24] Eaden and Renton, p. 156.

[25] Dave Lyddon, ‘“Glorious Summer”, 1972: The High Tide of Rank and File Militancy’, in John McIlroy et al. (eds), The High Tide of British Trade Unionism: Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, 1964-79 (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1999), p. 345.

[26] ‘C’PB, Britain’s Road to Socialism, p. 35.

[27] Conrad, Which Road?, p. 55.

[28] Thompson, p. 171.

[29] Parker, The Kick Inside, p. 36.

[30] ‘C’PB, ‘1979-88: Reaction on Every Front’ (2012). Accessed at https://www.communist-party.org.uk/history/42-history/90-years-of-struggle/1540-79-88-thatcher-euros.html

[31] James Marshall, ‘Britain: Before and After the Election’, The Leninist, no. 5 (August 1983).

[32] ‘C’PB, ‘Reaction on Every Front’.

[33] David Reed and Olivia Adamson, Miners Strike 1984-1985: People Versus State (London: Larkin, 1985), p. 38.

[34] Quoted in Michael McGeehan, ‘Do Kinnock and Co Back the Miners?’, The Leninist, no. 11 (August 1984), p. 3.

[35] Quoted in Reed and Adamson, p. 10.

[36] Ibid., p. 4.

[37] Thompson, p. 191. Peter Carter, the CPGB’s Eurocommunist industrial organiser, opposed the use of mass pickets but so did George Bolton, the party chairman and vice-president of the Scottish NUM. Donald MacIntyre, ‘Close Up on Mick McGahey’, Marxism Today (September 1986), p. 60.

[38] Ralph Darlington, ‘There is No Alternative: Exploring the Options in the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike’, Capital and Class (April 2005), p. 10.

[39] Lawrence Parker, ‘Understanding the Formation of the Communist Party of Britain’, in Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds), Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956 (Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 90.

[40] Robert Clough, Labour: A Party Fit for Imperialism (2nd edn, Larkin Publications, 2014), pp. 159-64.

[41] In his epic history of the European left, Donald Sassoon writes that the AES ‘should be taken to represent one of the very few attempts by British socialism to develop an industrial policy aimed at making capitalism more profitable. That it should have been supported by the Labour Left, and not by the Labour Right, is a demonstration of the extent to which the political reform of capitalism, and not its abolition, had become part of socialist thinking.’ Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (Revised edn, London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010), p. 525.

[42] Eaden and Renton, pp. 164-5.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Thompson, p. 11.

[45] Quoted in ibid., p. 142.

[46] Jonathan White (ed.), An Alternative Economic and Political Strategy for 21st Century Britain: Building an Economy for the People (Manifesto Press, 2012), p. 28. Accessed at https://21centurymanifesto.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/an-economy-for-the-people-free.pdf

[47] Royce Logan Turner, ‘Post-War Pit Closures: The Politics of De-Industrialisation’, The Political Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1985), p. 170.

[48] White, p. 12; 27.

[49] Ibid., p. 6; 17.

[50] Ibid., p. 15.

[51] Ibid., p. 67 (emphasis added).

[52] Quoted in Conrad, Which Road?, p. 146.

[53] ‘C’PB, Britain’s Road to Socialism, p. 37.

[54] Ibid., p. 2.

[55] Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, p. 116.

[56] Conrad, In the Enemy Camp, p. 56.

[57] Radha D’Souza, ‘The Surveillance State: A Composition in Four Movements’, in Aziz Choudry (ed.), Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression (Pluto Press, 2019), pp. 43-4.

[58] ‘C’PB, Britain’s Road to Socialism, p. 60.

[59] Ibid., p. 64.

[60] Ibid., p. 61.

[61] Conrad, Which Road?, p. 100.

[62] Ibid., p. 30 (emphasis added).

[63] Thompson, p. 38.

[64] Conrad, Which Road?, p. 79.

Brexit is upon us. A deal has been struck, and we have some picture of what January will likely bring. Big changes are coming, and we need to be prepared to respond. In order to do this, we must understand Brexit beyond its surface appearance as the product of a divided nation, and explore how we can handle its consequences. That is what this article is for.

Brexit is an expression of divisions in the British ruling class, catalysed by the deepening of rivalries between capitalist powers globally. In order to understand Brexit, we must first gain some understanding of these rivalries internationally, and then examine how they’ve manifested domestically.

What is Imperialism?

Politics is an expression of economics. The economic system in which we live is capitalism. Capitalism is an unstable system, which progresses towards its own downfall over time. We intend to produce an article explaining this process soon, but we shall explain it briefly here: due to the nature of how profit is produced, competition between capitalists results in profits falling relative to investments over time. In other words, capitalists get less out for the money they put in. Marxists call this process “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” – and it makes the collapse of capitalism economically inevitable.

Capitalists respond to this process through imperialism: large capitalist monopolies make investments in countries where labour, raw materials and other costs are lower. This makes it possible for corporations operating in those countries to reduce workers' wages to  significantly less than the value of their labour, and therefore briefly return to profitability. As large monopolies control governments with their economic power, those governments will help those monopolies secure these investments. This happens through the enforcement of violent border regimes, to trap workers in countries where poor working conditions and low wages are maintained. It happens through diplomatic and economic pressures, such as trade tariffs, to force market deregulation in those countries – in order to maintain those poor working conditions and low wages. And it happens through military power, including wars to take control of territories and resources, and to overthrow governments who prioritise their own people over the needs of monopoly capital. Whilst capitalism may be temporarily returned to profitability by imperialism, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is not eliminated. Eventually therefore, capitalism returns to crisis.

The Historical Context of Brexit: Imperialist Rivalries

To understand Brexit, we must now look at how crisis and imperialism have shaped the current global political order. The first and second world wars were wars between imperialist powers to take control of new territories, in order to resolve their own national crises. The massive destruction caused by the wars, the lowering of exchange rates, and the lowering of wages affected by fascism, created the conditions for capitalism to return to profitability. The US emerged from WWII as the dominant imperialist power in the world. The weakened European imperialist powers increased their cooperation, in order to remain competitive in the face of this increased US dominance. The US initially supported this union, as a united Europe was seen as valuable in combating the Soviet Union. This is the background for the formation of the forerunner to the EU, the European Economic Community, in 1957. Here we see the beginnings of a formation of two imperialist blocs: the US and Europe.

Having lost much of its empire, and been significantly weakened by the wars, Britain was left with a choice: which emerging imperialist bloc to ally with. Britain divided its loyalties. By planting a foot firmly in each camp, and situating the City of London as the centre of global banking, Britain was able to establish itself as the financial middle-man between US and European imperialism – as recently as 2016, 87% of US banks’ EU staff worked in Britain. Financial services fees allowed British capital to build its wealth parasitically from that of these two imperialist blocs, who exchanged their profits derived from their own imperialist systems through the financial institutions in London. British capital therefore depended largely on maintaining strong relationships with both of these competitors. It is in this contradictory alliance that Brexit was conceived.

In 1973, the post-war boom came to a close, and imperialism returned to crisis. Britain, the US and Japan all reported negative GDP growth the following year. With a return to crisis conditions, competition between imperialists was set to deepen once again. Peace among such virulent competitors is always temporary, and only happens when they can all extract vast profits. But when crisis returns, conflict returns with it. That same year, Britain finally joined the EEC. The European imperialists further solidified their relationships through the 1990s, to strengthen themselves in the face of this intensified competition. The European Union was established in 1993 following the signing of the Maastricht treaty between Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The treaty mandated the creation of the European Central Bank, subsequently established in 1998, and the creation of a common currency – the Euro, introduced in 1999. Each of these moves sought to increase economic cooperation between European states, so as to strengthen their competitive position relative to the US.

The Present: Breaking Point

This intensification of competition between the EU and US has achieved its most concrete and dramatic expressions under the Trump presidency. This is not to say that Trump is the driving force behind this process – he is merely the concrete expression of the wider historical forces we’ve discussed. We can see the increased economic tensions between the US and the EU in a number of US foreign policy decisions. We’ll give two examples. EU trade with Iran more than doubled in the two years following the signing of the Iran deal in 2015. Trump’s withdrawal from the deal, and subsequent sanctions on companies seeking to continue trade with Iran, forced a number of European corporations to withdraw operations from the country. Similarly, Trump has imposed sanctions on companies aiding the construction of Nord Stream 2 – a natural gas export pipeline, under construction between Russia and Europe, across the Baltic Sea. Several European politicians have condemned these sanctions as profit-seeking attempts by the US to force out their Russian competitors, opening the door to build their own energy monopoly within the European market. These are just two examples, but each represents a deepening of the fault lines between European and US imperialism.

These fault lines have manifested in Britain, in the form of Brexit. To reiterate: since the end of the Second World War, Britain has straddled European and American capital, securing the majority of its wealth through financial services. As the gulf between these bodies of imperialist capital has widened, this position has become increasingly untenable. Brexit is a division between two strands of British capitalism: that which wishes to strengthen alliances with EU imperialism, and that which wishes to strengthen alliances with US imperialism. The majority of big capitalists fall into the pro-EU camp. HSBC, for example, is a multinational bank based in Britain with extensive operation in Europe. HSBC have defied US sanctions in the past, and made statements counter to US interests in China. HSBC has been deeply anti-Brexit. The pro-US camp is constituted predominantly of right-wing members of the political class, who favour closer military alliances with the US, as well as sections of the capitalist class with close links to Big Oil and the military-industrial complex. The close personal alliances between Farage, Trump and Steve Bannon are illustrative of this.

Opportunism and Racism in Leave and Remain

The so-called “Lexiteers'' argue that the EU forced neoliberal economic policy and austerity on its member states through the Maastricht Treaty and subsequent policies. This is undeniably true. The EU is an enemy of the international working class. Upon leaving, however, Britain will be subject to the regulations of the World Trade Organisation – an institution which subjects participant states to precisely the same trade-liberalisation measures, which will continue to inflict harm on the working class. Britain has jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Furthermore, the notion of a “working-class Brexit” is based on racist and xenophobic conceptions of who constitutes the working class. So-called leftists – from George Galloway to Len McCluskey, and yes, Jeremy Corbyn – supported Brexit on national chauvinist grounds. “British jobs for British workers!” – that was the substance of their position. This is unsurprising, as neither the Labour Party nor the British trade union leadership are truly socialist. Both sustain British imperialism by bribing and deceiving the working class with promises of an improved life under capitalism, and thus suppress the revolutionary potential of the workers. By obscuring the true nature of Brexit as a rift within the British capitalists class, and painting it as a pro-working class project, these opportunists are tricking British workers into alliances with their own exploiters. Let us be clear: borders are a tool of imperialism. British nationalism is inherently racist and anti-worker, even when dressed up as left-wing.

The “Remain” camp is no more progressive, however. Their slogan of “Remain and Reform” is as much a lie to the British workers as the idea that there can be a “working class Brexit”. There can be no socialist reforms to an imperialist institution. To claim otherwise is just another iteration of the same opportunism that drives the Lexit camp. It is true that Brexit will disproportionately hurt migrants, and the remain camp has been less explicitly racist than the Lexiteers. However, to paint remain as a pro-migrant position is at best an over-simplification, and at worst, a lie. The European Union is responsible for some of the most brutal border violence in the world. “Fortress Europe” is a term used by activists to describe the border policies of EU states – policies that have led to the deaths of at least 40,555 people since 1993 and continue to trap refugees in detention centres at Europe’s periphery. The imperialist wars in which European states are involved, and low wage pools upon which EU imperialism depends, are themselves the root cause of many people having to leave their homes and migrate elsewhere. The free movement advocated by the remain camp is in fact the free movement only of European, and majority white, workers – meanwhile working class people from the global south are allowed to die in the ocean at the hands of the EU’s murderous border controls. Advocacy for migrants on the grounds that they are “crucial to the British economy” or that they “built our NHS” reduces human beings down to their productivity for the capitalist class. This is not a socialist or an anti-racist position.

From this understanding, we draw the following conclusion: there is no working class solution to Brexit. Neither of the choices offered at the referendum came from the real wishes of the working class, and neither "camp" held the interests of the workers and the oppressed in any regard. There is no working class position in the leave/remain dichotomy. It is through this understanding that we can begin to explore what a socialist response looks like.

No Deal? No, Deal! No Big Deal.

Endless hours in the last few years have been spent debating whether or not Britain will get a deal with the EU. At face value, this seems significant. However, we must root ourselves in the fact that, no matter where this process ends up, there is no one at the negotiating table interested in the wellbeing of the working classes – and there never could have been.

Whilst an “oven-ready” deal is now agreed and being sold to us, to be voted on in Parliament on the 30th December, we should not ease our concerns in the slightest. The public points of contention – largely around fishing rights, competition rules and the governance of the deal thereafter – were largely conceded to the EU, despite claims to the contrary. And these are only the points of contention that are being publicised; fishing has been emphasised on the British side because it represents an imagined “Island Sovereignty”, not because fishing is particularly economically significant or likely to help us avoid catastrophe. A deal will not prevent the imposition of technical barriers to trade, such as in the form of regulatory checks, from the start of 2021 onwards. When we think of trade we often think only of goods, but services are included in this too. The British economy is built on services. Britain's vital services sector accounts for 80 percent of economic output, and indeed is not involved in the deal – Johnson’s reference to services was to say “there’s some good language…. Some good stuff about lawyers’.

All those years ago the notion of a 'hard Brexit' was contestable ground, whilst now it is being posited by once-Remainers as the best option. After repeated losses from the original referendum to calling for a second referendum, the Remainer position has whittled down to mere opposition to a no-deal Brexit. This is not to imply that no-deal would not be catastrophic, either. We would default to World Trade Organisation rules. That means taxes and tariffs would be introduced on goods coming from Britain and the EU, potentially raising the cost of imported products, such as food. The meagre benefits of trading with Britain would dissipate, and throw us into deep economic turmoil: the Governor of the Bank of England says that a No Deal would hit the economy harder than the pandemic. These two events would not be in isolation, but occurring at the same time: hyper-inflation, food shortages and even higher rates of unemployment are on our horizons.

What is important is that a great deal of this forecast may be the case regardless of the deal being struck.

With our conversations focused on whether we will get a deal with the EU or not, it is easy to forget the simple fact that the vote to leave the EU was an attempt to align Britain with US imperialist interests. A bad deal with the EU was expected to happen, but with the expectation that this would be remedied by a deal with the US - one that would supersede the supposed limitations of the EU. Trump and Biden's administrations appear to be aligned on how to approach negotiating this deal. Neither thinks there is any benefit to the US in rushing through a deal; these things take time, and it is Britain seeking the US' help, not the other way around. Better to let Britain sweat it out before begging the US for whatever scraps it will offer – scraps that will surely bolster the US far more than they will Britain. Biden, if anything, has positioned himself as even less keen to reach an agreement than Trump.

There is a simple truth to all this: Britain is a waning imperialist power. Its reliance on financial capital means the economic crises to come will hit swiftly and brutally, and it will be unable to support its population. A lorry comes hurtling down the road, there are two sides of the pavement. Britain has stepped out and has frozen, not sure whether to withdraw or continue to the other side. The lorry comes ever closer.

Britain's capitalists have set us all up – what can we do?

Revolutionary Possibility

We must not despair - there are options through this, which lead us to a society so much greater than is possible under capitalism. It starts with rejection: rejection of the faux-choice of Leave or Remain, Britain or Europe, Deal or No Deal. We have to see what's going on, whilst recognising that this is not inevitable.

This starts today, with concrete action. As migrants face ever more attacks and an even more violent border system comes into effect on January 1st, simply posturing our disapproval is not enough. We need to see migrant solidarity and anti-racist action across Britain.

Our communities, geographical and beyond, need to prepare to defend ourselves - the capitalists and their state won't look out for us, so we must look out for each other. This looks like building mutual aid structures, that go further than just providing food but by educating, resisting, revolutionising each other and making solidarity a practice, not a slogan.

We all need to get unionised, right now. Materially support migrant-centric unions like United Voices of the World and the Independent Workers of Great Britain. If you're in a different union, even one with a reactionary position on Brexit, organise. Work with others and get this necessary arm of the working classes in order and on task: to defend all workers via all means.

Brexit, an expression of bourgeois infighting, is a sign of capitalism becoming ever more desperate, and thus ever more vicious.  We must understand it and reorientate ourselves to the real decision at hand: the working classes or the capitalist class? Revolution or resignation? Socialism or extinction?

Like many things about modern Britain, Christmas is riddled with contradictions. Joy and goodwill to all, and a frantic dash for the best shifts and days off. Peace and relaxation, on a tight schedule and bookended by packed trains. Perfect gifts and an elbow in the back — that is, if you're lucky enough to be queuing up today rather than working the tills. No amount of baubles and tinsel can drown out the nagging feeling that these conflicts — large and small — aren't an unfortunate side-effect but a central feature of the way that our society is structured. Capital, it seems, flows quickest when we're at least a bit pissed off with each other. Bah-fucking-humbug.

And like contradictions in general, it's not one side or the other that exposes the reality of the situation, but the system as a whole, in motion. Whether we observe Christmas or not — or would even like to avoid it entirely — it structures the economic rhythm of Britain. Jobs and rotas ebb and flow around it, retailers live or die by it. Just as the long defunct demands of harvest season have left their mark on the school year — and in turn the prices and timings of all manner of things — so the Christian calendar determines office closures and late openings.

The government response to COVID-19 is no exception to that rhythm: the lives of the most vulnerable have been mortgaged — a quite literal death pledge — in service of an ailing economy. The Summer cries that "it'll all be over by Christmas..." carried with them an unconscious ultimatum: it'll all be over by Christmas, "or else".

And just as surely as the need to see rents paid drove a bout of ruling class amnesia over the inevitability of Freshers Flu in Autumn — with intentions as pure as the driven snow — the Winter holidays are "saved". Five days of relaxed rules and bigger bubbles, in exchange for another peak in Spring. Hallelujah. If this were just a matter of secular deference to old tradition and deeply held conviction, we'd have seen the same dispensation given for Rosh Hashanah and Eid al-Adha. Instead, we got Eat Out to Help Out and a second wave.

But as the state flounders in its attempt to save the economy and maintain some appearance of saving lives, even this rhythm begins to falter. Not even the famed Tory enthusiasm for ground rents could sustain the straight-faced insistence that the economic boost of a lunchtime tuna melt was worth the risk of packing office workers onto the tube like sardines. As the capitalists picked off what they could, a PPE shipment here and a call-centre there, the Chancellor played chicken with the end of furlough — a last ditch extension with P45s already posted. And November ended with Arcadia and Debenhams in administration and 25,000 more jobs at risk anyhow.

And after a year spent funneling the elderly from COVID wards into carehomes bereft of support or supplies, the government has met its match. 1 in 20 care home residents has died as a result of the pandemic. 2 in every 3 people the pandemic has killed were disabled. The symbolism of a Christmas without hugs though — as much as the very real pain it would add — was too much. The government has promised twice weekly testing in care homes — surprise! — "by Christmas".

Like any other year in Britain, it's been a year of contradictions. The spectacle of clapping for carers against a backdrop of pay freezes and PPE shortages. The lockdown rules are broken, but please don't break them. Stay the fuck at home, but for fuck's sake don't snitch on those who don't. These aren't convenient gotchas, nuance or realpolitik, but contending forces in motion — with which we in turn must contend.

And now, we must contend with Christmas. The expansion of the bubble. A miserable end to a miserable year or brief moment's respite. It can be both, it can be neither. After a year under varying degrees of lockdown, it might be tempting to say "fuck it". The rules have served to kill off the most vulnerable, criminalise those already cast as criminal, and tried in vain to stabilise capital. What's new? But we have to hold our nerve.

The rules haven't changed because it's safe now. They've changed because they couldn't not change. And in so many ways, that's a bigger kick in the teeth than if they hadn't changed at all. We "can" — however briefly — do more than we could, even if we shouldn't. And others are going to anyway, so why not?

Peaks and troughs don't speak frustration and indignation, and no measure of malice or incompetence on the part of others can change that.  And while a vaccine might be on the way, it's impact is still a way off. By now, none of us needs a lecture on the specifics of what to do, and any such lecture would be painfully ignorant of the material detail of so many of our lives. But whatever our conditions, we should understand the risks, seek to minimise (or eliminate) them, and communicate openly with those close to us so that they can do likewise.

After all, all we've got is each other. Stay safe.

You can read Part One of this series, in which we expose the lies and contradictions of the consultation paper and explain who really profits from the client-criminalisation ‘Nordic Model’, here.

This article contains our response to the consultation paper – and explores the differences between our response and SCOT-PEP, whose guide to the consultation is very helpful and can be found here. The key differences relate to how we understand the role of the state in the exploitation of sex workers. SCOT-PEP’s response suggests in places that the state is a force that mediates between the exploited and the exploiters, that it can be convinced to support one side or another. Our position is that the state exists for the purpose of securing exploitation and protecting the capitalists, and that there is no issue over which the state can be safely invited to ‘work with sex workers’.

To organise in partnership with the state is to invite a trojan horse – it will parasitically depoliticise, discredit and dismantle any organisation that pairs with it. The state is always organised against the workers – and this consultation demonstrates this clearly. There is no number of responses, however well written, that will compel the government to change its position – as many have learned painfully, through the sequence of Gender Recognition Reform consultations over the last several years. The consultation is a measurement of the class consciousness of the workers and their organisational capacity – it should be used to frighten the state, not to convince it to our side.

Ultimately, the struggle for decriminalisation will be only won by the organised actions of sex workers, and what solidarity they can rally from the class as a whole. The consultation should be used as a vehicle towards this, not an end to itself – this was the grave error made by the ‘trans rights’ struggle and the state-partnered charities that led the campaign.

We have reproduced SCOT-PEP’s responses to each question, and explored points where our response differs– if at all– beneath each response.

Question 1. Do you agree or disagree that the Scottish Government’s approach to tackling prostitution, as outlined in this section, is sufficient to prevent violence against women and girls?

SCOT-PEP’s response:

We disagree with the Scottish Government’s approach to preventing violence against women in this area.

You can use these two paragraphs below as a template. However, your response will be even stronger if you add anything in addition. For example, if you are (or have been) a sex worker, how do you feel about services which define all sex work as violence against women? What have your experiences been with such services? You don’t need to have ever worked in Scotland to answer.

The Scottish Government’s approach to prostitution drives violence against women. The criminalisation of brothel-keeping forces sex workers to work alone, as they risk arrest for working with a friend –with clear negative implications for their safety. The criminalisation of soliciting and kerb-crawling mean that street-based sex workers have to rush their screening processes and work in hidden, isolated places in order to evade arrest for themselves or their clients. This makes street-based sex workers very vulnerable to violence. When street sex workers face criminalisation for soliciting, their need to pay their fine and their resulting criminal record both serve to trap them in prostitution. Far from being ‘sufficient’ to prevent violence against women, the Scottish Government’s current approach creates the conditions in which violence against women who sell sex can thrive.

The Scottish Government’s definition of prostitution as a form of violence against women is not fit for purpose. Women’s sector organisations have to sign up to this definition in order to access Scottish Government funding around service provision, despite the fact that sex workers often report that this attitude leads to stigmatising or inadequate service provision. It also locks out sex worker-led organisations from accessing Scottish Government funding to tackle violence against women –even though peer support and service provision informed by sex workers’ own expertise is internationally-recognised best practice.

Red Fightback’s comments:

We agree with this response. Our only point of contention is with the line “The Scottish Government’s definition of prostitution as a form of violence against women is not fit for purpose.” We would say the Government’s definition is fit for the purpose of ensuring violence against women and deepening the exploitation of sex workers. This is in line with the government’s interests, set out in our article in Part One. We would also add that the Scottish Government perpetrates violence against women and girls through the carceral system, where women locked up for survival ‘crimes’, drugs or prostitution are routinely abused by guards and subject to state-sanctioned sexual violations like strip searches. We can be certain that the government is not really concerned with sexual violence against women and girls so long as the state-sanctioned rapists in the military, police and prisons continue to exist.

Question 2. What are your observations as to the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on women involved in prostitution in Scotland?

SCOT-PEP’s response:

You can use these paragraphs as a template. However, your response will be even stronger if you add something of your own. If you are a sex worker, how have you been impacted by COVID-19? What has been difficult, and what would have made those difficulties easier?

Sex workers are informal, precarious workers, who live and work in a context of stigma and the fear of criminalisation. Many sex workers have little-to-no savings. Universal Credit and the UK government’s self-employment income support scheme both present specific barriers for sex workers, who may fear stigma about having to disclose sex work as a condition of accessing these forms of support –or sanctions, prosecution or the stigma of being branded a ‘benefits cheat’ if they access this support and return to sex work. Sex workers often fear that a disclosure of sex work to a mainstream support service or the job centre could put them at risk of sexual harassment, eviction, or loss of child custody. All this is compounded for migrant sex workers, who may not be eligible for any financial support from the government and who may risk their right to stay in the UK if they make a disclosure of sex work. This means that the pandemic has hit sex workers, particularly migrant sex workers, particularly hard.

Lockdown represented a huge ‘reduction in demand’ and the result for sex workers was disastrous, as the consultation document itself acknowledges. The consultation document notes the likely link between this drop in demand and “higher-risk practices, including ncreased reports of women offering unprotected sex throughout lockdown”. Making sex workers more desperate, and therefore less able to turn away clients who seem dangerous, or to refuse requests for unprotected sex, is the function of ‘targeting demand’. It is appalling that the Scottish Government can look at this outcome and consider enacting policies that aim to reduce demand.

What sex workers in Scotland need now is money and tangible support, not new criminal law targeting their means of survival. Sex worker communities themselves stepped up during lockdown to offer much-needed financial support, with sex worker organisation SWARM running its own hardship fund. This project funded more than £250,000 of public donations and distributed funds directly to 1,250 sex workers across the UK (including Scotland). Umbrella Lane, which is based in Glasgow, ran a similar hardship fund, distributing £7,200 in April and £10,050 in May. These hardship funds barely scratched the surface of the need that was out there. It is striking that it is sex worker-led groups that reacted fastest and most effectively, giving direct financial aid to sex workers regardless of immigration status and without bureaucratic barriers. The Scottish Government should fund sex worker-led projects, not further criminalise what people are doing to survive.

Red Fightback’s Comments:

We agree entirely with this response. We would add only some comments on the Scottish Governments’ record on the treatment of women in general during the pandemic:

All workers are impacted by the coronavirus outbreak. Women working in hospitality or schooling, who have almost all been sent back to work, are being exposed to the coronavirus. Women working in household childcare or cleaning have been exposed to the coronavirus since having been forced back to work on May 13th. Women classed as ‘key workers’ have been exposed for the duration of the pandemic, not least by lack of PPE provision. Women working in care homes have been exposed to the pandemic because the government consistently discharged patients from hospitals into care homes without negative COVID-19 tests, as part of a eugenics programme directly causing a death rate in care homes of 400 per day at the peak. Women sex workers have been exposed not just to coronavirus but also to sexually transmitted infections because the lack of financial support has forced them into more dangerous working conditions, as the consultation notes. The Scottish Government has made it obvious that it has no concern for any women impacted by coronavirus, least of all sex workers.

Question 3. Which of the policy approaches (or aspects of these) outlined in Table 3.1 do you believe is most effective in preventing violence against women and girls?

SCOT-PEP’s response:

You can use these paragraphs as a template,but your response will be stronger if you add personalised content too. If you’re a member of the public,you could talk about why you feel that increasing harms to sex workers cannot be a ‘feminist’ response to the sex industry. If you’re a sex worker, talk about how the criminalisation of clients would impact your safety.

Decriminalisation is the policy approach that best prevents violence against people who sell sex, who are disproportionately women. Decriminalisation in a Scottish legal context would mean the removal of laws targeting soliciting, kerb-crawling and brothel-keeping, as well as changes in housing law to ensure that no one can be evicted on the basis of sex work, and a moratorium on immigration enforcement targeting migrant sex workers. Laws targeting harm such as violence or abuse would remain. Decriminalisation is supported by international bodies such as the World Health Organization and UNAIDS as well as by NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Fear of arrest drives violence against sex workers as perpetrators know that these workers are likely to be working in isolated ways and unlikely to feel able to report them. Decriminalisation is therefore a crucial piece of the puzzle in challenging violence against people who sell sex, and it needs to come with well-funded health and support services for sex workers, and measures to reduce poverty for everybody in Scotland –particularly women, LGBTQ people, and migrants.

The criminalisation of clients, like the criminalisation of sex work as a whole, has been shown all over the world to increase the harms that sex workers experience. When clients are criminalised (a legal model often referred to as the Nordic model), sex workers have to rush or skip screening processes, including allowing jumpy clients to be entirely anonymous. Sex workers have to meet with clients in a place where the client feels safely hidden from police, with obvious negative implications for sex workers’ safety. Research in Ireland, which introduced the Nordic model in 2016, found that since the change in the law, reports of violence against sex workers have jumped by 92% (Ugly Mugs.ie, 2019). France introduced the Nordic model in 2016 and health NGO Medecins du Monde found that, as a result of the law, “the vast majority of those interviewed reported that they had far less control over their working conditions” and that “the law [criminalising clients] has had a detrimental effect on sex workers safety, health, and overall living conditions”. (Médecins du Monde, 2018). Far from ‘reducing harm’, the criminalisation of clients increases harms such as violence, poverty and HIV transmission.

Criminalisation of clients has been wholly rejected by sex workers and sex workers’ rights groups around the world. When the law was introduced in Northern Ireland, it was opposed by 98% of sex workers (as reported in the Guardian, October 2014), and sex workers in Scotland have responded to previous consultations in opposition of the Nordic model. The government should not push forward with a legal model that is strongly opposed by the people it purports to help, but instead work with sex workers to bring about changes that fulfill and protect their human rights.

Red Fightback’s Comments:

We agree with SCOT-PEP’s response. We reject the false choice the consultation presents, with the document acknowledging the decriminalisation model, but then only presenting variations on Regulationism & Criminalisation “outlined in Table 3.1”, to prevent respondents from selecting Decrim.

Question 4. What measures would help to shift the attitudes of men relating to the purchase of sex? Do you have any examples of good practice either in a domestic or an international context?

SCOT-PEP’s response:

We have rejected the Scottish Government’s focus on ‘men’s attitudes’ here and have tried to draw attention to sex workers’ material conditions. Do you have additional suggestions for how the Scottish Government could improve sex workers’ material conditions? If so, please add them to the template response below.

Sex workers in Scotland care deeply about challenging men’s violence. The claim that the purchase of sex is inherently violent enables governments to refuse to see which legal contexts produce more or less violence against sex workers, and to refuse to derive policy lessons from that. We/I would prefer to see greater focus from the Scottish Government on improving sex workers’ material conditions, instead of focusing on ‘shifting men’s attitudes relating to the purchase of sex’ -this is a harmful distraction from the real issues affecting sex workers in Scotland.

The criminalisation of sex workers themselves, of their clients, and of their workplaces, shapes people’s attitudes towards sex workers, and produces and enables violence against sex workers (as discussed in detail in question three). Street-based sex workers in Scotland fear arrest for soliciting. Indoor sex workers in Scotland are forced to work alone because they risk arrest for brothel-keeping if they work with a friend. The knowledge that sex workers must work alone or risk being arrested for brothel-keeping is a gift to violent clients.

Red Fightback’s Comments:

We agree with SCOT-PEP’s response, particularly the focus on women’s material conditions. The government cannot change the attitudes of men, only women’s self-organising can do this. The government must be forced to end policies that weaken women. Supporting women by removing the two-child benefit cap, scrapping universal credit and welfare conditionality, ending the hostile environment and right-to-work restrictions, and decriminalising sex work and drug use are fundamental.

Question 5. Taking into account the above, how can the education system help to raise awareness and promote positive attitudes and behaviours amongst young people in relation to consent and healthy relationships?

SCOT-PEP’s response:

You can use these two paragraphs as a template, but your response will be stronger if you add something of your own.

Homophobic and transphobic bullying are still sadly rife in schools, as is sexual harassment, ‘revenge porn’ and misinformation about sexual health. We believe that much more must be done to challenge anti-LGBTQ attitudes, empower girls and young women, and embed good consent practices in young peoples’ lives.

Stigma around sex work has a profound impact on both people who sell sex and their families, including their children. Any attempt by the Scottish Government to promote consent and healthy relationships through the education system must take great care to not contribute to stigma against people who sell sex. We urge the Scottish Government to remember that the children of sex workers will be in classrooms where the sex education curriculum is being taught.

Red Fightback’s Comments:

We agree with SCOT-PEP. Any educational programme aiming to create a ‘taboo’ around purchasing sex will only cause sex-working women to experience more shame and isolation and minimally affect the men who buy.

Question 6: How can the different needs of women involved in prostitution (in terms of their health and wellbeing) be better recognised in the provision of mainstream support?

SCOT-PEP’s response:

You can use these two paragraphs as your response, but it will be stronger if you add something of your own. What different needs might sex workers have, and how can support services best respond to them? Are there any good or bad examples of support services that are local to you?

The context in which women in prostitution are best able to access healthcare is decriminalisation. Criminalisation endangers the health of people who sell sex by constraining the measures they might want to take at work to stay safe –for example, Police Scotland used condoms and lubricant as evidence of sex work when they raided saunas in Edinburgh in 2013, with the result that sex workers felt pushed to choose between protecting their health and hiding from police raids. Criminalisation also drives people who sell sex away from healthcare and support by making sex workers fearful of approaching services, especially when those services work closely with the police. The World Health Organization has repeatedly called for the decriminalisation of sex work as a vital measure to protect sex workers’ health, and this link between sex workers access to healthcare and support services and the need for decriminalisation has been detailed in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet. The criminalisation of clients obstructs sex workers’ access to healthcare and support services –research by HIV Ireland on the criminalisation of clients in the republic found that “following the introduction of the new laws, sex workers now perceive themselves to be more vulnerable to health risks and to have limited access to health supports and interventions” (HIV Ireland, 2020).

The different needs of sex workers can best be recognised through service provision that respects sex workers’ own self-determination about what that person needs. This has to entail not only emotional support where needed, but also, crucially, material support –for example, many of the most precarious sex workers will need access to stable, secure housing where they are safe from the threat of eviction. Sex workers who use drugs may need to access the drugs they use on prescription, rather than paying street prices for drugs of varying strength and quality. Peer-led support has been shown all over the world to increase sex workers’ access to services and the Scottish Government should fund sex worker-led harm reduction services such as Umbrella Lane. Services should investigate the ‘sex worker community hardship fund model’ and consider making easy-to-access grants of money directly to sex workers facing crisis or hardship.

Red Fightback’s Comments:

We agree with SCOT-PEP’s response. Support services must stop trying to push people towards “exiting” whenever they seek assistance. We must cut all links between services, the Police and the Home Office, and end the hostile environment that prevents migrant sex workers from getting PrEP on the NHS.

Question 7: In your opinion, drawing on any international or domestic examples, what programmes or initiatives best supports women to safely exit prostitution?

SCOT-PEP’s response:

You can use these two paragraphs below as they are, but your response will be stronger if you add something of your own. Are there any initiatives local to you that you think are particularly good or bad? If you are a sex worker, what would help you exit, if that’s what you wanted to do? If you are a former sex worker, what helped you exit –and what didn’t help?

‘Exiting’ sex work is a complex process. It requires services to take a holistic approach and to prioritise gaining trust, listening and relationship-building with the person they are working with. This has to mean a focus on the goals that the person identifies for themselves, not on goals pre-determined by the service. This might mean helping someone while they stay in sex work –for example with healthcare, or to regularise their immigration status, or with a housing problem. It might mean helping them while they reduce or change the way they do sex work. This support has to come without the service pushing ‘exit’ onto the person they are working with. It also requires engaging with the reality that it is, to a large extent, economic factors which keep people in sex work, and unless the support service can help make a concrete plan for how to replace the income that someone was gaining from sex work, any move to exit is likely to be unsuccessful.

The criminalisation of clients does not help people ‘exit’. Making people poorer and making their lives more dangerous is not a good way to help anyone to take a step which requires safety and trust. Well-funded, non-judgmental, peer-led services are what help people to exit (if that’s what they want), and the criminalisation of clients not only doesn’t provide that, it actively impedes the existence of those services by intensifying stigma against sex workers which blocks people from accessing support. Evidence from France, Sweden and Canada has shown that client criminalisation increases stigma against sex workers when they access service provision (as one Swedish social worker told researcher Jay Levy in 2014, “if they make so much money, perhaps they could buy their own condoms”). In Canada, large budgets were allocated to ‘exit’ programmes, but sex workers found them hard to access as it was often a requirement that they stop working altogether from the point of accessing the service. There are also numerous examples of stigmatising comments made by social workers, police and others in relation to sex workers accessing state services. Researchers in France found that racism coupled with anti-sex work stigma was causing social workers to block Black women from the exit scheme, and that applications from Nigerian women were being systematically blocked.

Red Fightback’s Comments:

As SCOT-PEP identifies, and as the Scottish Government Report concedes, sex work is usually a matter of economic necessity. Ending the hostile environment, welfare conditionality, raising the minimum wage, repealing laws restricting trade union activity, scrapping universal credit and the two-child benefit cap – all these measures support women. But the consultation is not interested in supporting women, merely in what measures would push more women to ‘exit’ without reducing deprivation.

Question 8. Support services are primarily focussed within four of Scotland’s main cities –Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow –how can the needs of women throughout Scotland who are engaged in prostitution be met, noting that prostitution is not solely an urban issue?

SCOT-PEP’s response:

You can use these two paragraphs below as a template. However, your response will be even stronger if you add anything in addition.

In order to meet the needs of women who sell sex in Scotland, the Scottish Government should prioritise funding peer-led support services that accept sex work as work. A greater level of funding should be allocated to women’s services in general, with expertise on sex work being provided by sex worker-led organisations with the skills to provide non-stigmatising support and advice. This should be prioritised across Scotland with advice from sex worker-led organisations, such as SCOT-PEP and Umbrella Lane, and National Ugly Mugs.

At a policy level, the Scottish Government needs to take prostitution and other forms of sex work out of the definition of violence against women in Equally Safe. This inclusion creates stigma for sex workers accessing services, and erases sex workers’ own experiences with selling sex. By defining all sex work as violence, this policy flattens all experiences with selling sex -including experiences of violence and exploitation -into one definition. If all sex work is defined as violence, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for sex workers to seek support when they experience specific instances of violence at work.

Red Fightback’s Comments:

We agree with SCOT-PEP’s position in the first paragraph. In the second, our position is that it is not for the government to define what does or doesn’t constitute violence against women when the government itself is a great perpetrator of violence against women. We would not take a position that sex work is not patriarchal violence – but we take a much more expansive definition of violence against women than the typical legal definitions – ultimately implicating institutions like the state, the family, marriage, heterosexuality and the gender binary as forms of violence against women. Like SCOT-PEP, we do not single out sex work as a particularly exceptional form of violence against women, and this is of particular importance when it comes to definitions with legal (& therefore carceral) consequences.

You can respond to the government consultation directly here, or using SCOT-PEP’s tool here. The deadline is Thursday 10th of December, so be sure to respond before then. Government consultations will group identical or similar responses in the counting, so the more you can personalise your response, the more weight it carries. If you respond using the government link, you do not need to complete the section asking for personal information - you can submit completely anonymously and your response will still be counted.

This consultation may force the government to hesitate in pushing through the Nordic Model, but it won’t stop it by itself. Only sex worker organising and unionisation guarantees the successful defence of sex workers, so be sure to donate to SWARM’s Sex Worker Hardship Fund and show support for organisations such as SCOT-PEP, who continue to work dilligently in the fight for sex workers’ rights.