Victory to the Iraqi Resistance

It is two years since the Anglo-American imperialist armies stormed into Iraq uninvited, in a manner reminiscent of the Nazi invasions of dozens of countries in the period leading up to, and during, the Second World War. Every Nazi-like pretext, including the liberation of the Iraqi people from the alleged tyranny of the Ba’ath regime of president Saddam Hussein, served them as an alibi for their flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty and the subjugation of its people.

Instead of receiving freedom and prosperity from their would-be liberators, the Iraqis presently find themselves face to face with unprecedented levels of poverty and privation, destitution and misery, systematic torture and humiliation. Seventy per cent of the Iraqi workforce (12 million people) is without a job; there is a chronic shortage of water, food and petrol; most of the country gets no more electricity than three hours a day. While 25 years ago, Iraq’s income was equal so that of Spain, today thanks to the benevolent ‘wars of liberation’ waged against Iraq by Anglo-American imperialism, and the UN sanctions sponsored by them, it is much closer to that of Bangla Desh, one of the poorest countries in the world.

These conditions have, in a very short time, produced a resistance of heroic proportions which has put the fear of God into the occupiers and torturers of the Iraqi people. Faced with fierce Iraqi resistance, the occupation forces have resorted, as ever, to savage brutality and wholesale slaughter, in the process murdering more than 100,000 Iraqis – mostly innocent civilian men, women and children – in a vain attempt to subdue the Iraqi people. Instead of achieving this aim, the imperialist brutality has merely served as an instrument for spreading the resistance far and wide, with the result that the writ of the Iraqi puppet regime does not run across vast swathes of the country, including almost all the major cities and towns of Iraq.

Providing an Iraqi face to the occupation

Unable to overwhelm the resistance and in a desperate attempt to provide an Iraqi face to the occupation, the Anglo-American imperialists first installed the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) on 13 July 2003, only to replace it eleven months later (28 June) with the so-called Interim Government (IG), headed by a former US and British intelligence agent, Iyad Allawi, as prime minister. This alleged transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people by no means fooled the latter, for despite the change of nomenclature, the IG was a much a puppet and a creature of the occupation as was its predecessor – the IGC. Its installation, far from pacifying the Iraqi opposition, only served to strengthen the resistance in its determination to intensify the armed struggle aimed at expelling the occupation forces and liberating Iraq from the military grip of the predatory Anglo-American imperialist forces.

30 January Elections

It was in the face of this virile Iraqi resistance that the occupation regime came up with the plan to hold elections with the forlorn hope of fooling the Iraqi people into giving up the armed resistance in the belief that the elections would restore a sovereign democratic Iraqi regime.

For months prior to the 30 January 2005 farce of an election, the political spokesmen of Anglo-American imperialism, as well as their powerful propaganda machines, daily and hourly spewed out the lie that these elections were for the restoration of democracy and sovereignty to the Iraqi people and that they would be “free, fair and democratic”. The reality, however, could not be further from these vile lies. Held under the shadow of the guns of the occupation forces, amid curfews, country-wide travel restrictions and frontier closures, with boycotts by whole regions and vast sections of the population, the conditions of rising resistance which deny the occupation forces and their Iraqi puppets any meaningful access to large areas of the country, these elections can hardly be characterised as an exercise in the representative democracy that Anglo-American imperialism feigns to be spreading. During these farcical elections, the candidates never revealed their names, there was no campaign, the location of polling stations was kept a secret, and there were no international monitors or elections observers willing to enter the country, leaving the assessment to the occupation regime and its puppet government, with every opportunity to practise fraud, inflate the performance, manipulate and rig the results. People living abroad, with the most tenuous of connections with Iraq, including Israeli Jews of Iraqi origin, were allowed to vote.

Two weeks after the supposed poll, the results were announced. Not surprisingly, these results were tailor-made to suit the needs of the occupation. No party, we understand, emerges with an overwhelming mandate so as to be able to form a government on its own or write a constitution to its liking. See Table 1 for the details of the votes cast for the main electoral lists that participated in this charade of an election (as printed in Financial Times, 14 Jan 05):

In terms of percentages, the United Iraqi Alliance, stitched together by the counter-revolutionary cleric al-Sistani, and including SCIRI (Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and the Dawaa Party, won 48% of the votes, while the Kurdish coalition secured 26% – giving it a veto over any future government – and Allawi’s Iraqi List got 14%. While the turnout across the country was supposedly 58%, in Anbar province it was a mere 2%.

Response of the resistance

Even according to these manufactured statistics, 42% of the electorate boycotted this sham poll. The resistance treated these elections with well-deserved contempt, correctly perceiving them for what they are – a tool to legitimise and prolong the occupation of Iraq by Anglo-American imperialism. On the day of the poll, the resistance launched eight attacks across Baghdad in quick succession in defiance of the high security. All over the country, including Basra, where five mortar explosions took place, the resistance kept up its attacks. At least 40 people were killed on polling day. On the same day the resistance shot down an RAF C-130 Hercules aircraft, killing ten British soldiers – the largest number in a single day. The plane was shot down near Baghdad International airport and was on its way to Balad, one of the largest US bases in Iraq. Only the day before, 45 people were killed in a series of attacks by the resistance in northern Iraq.

In the weeks leading up to the 30 January ‘poll’, the resistance intensified its attacks against the occupation and its puppets and quislings. On 2nd January, the resistance exposed the vulnerability of the puppet Iraqi forces by killing at least 23 national guardsmen in Balad and 10 others in separate attacks in Samarra, Diyala, Jabala and Kirkuk. Such was the ferocity of the attacks by the resistance that the occupation regime was forced to despatch several thousand additional US and Iraqi soldiers to Mosul to join the 8,000 troops there struggling to combat the resistance. On the same day a bomb exploded outside the offices of Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord just as his party was about to announce its list of candidates. In order to ensure coverage of its press conference, Allawi’s electoral group resorted to offering a “gift” (i.e. bribe) of a $100 bill to each of the Arab reporters, for whom it represented half the starting monthly salary for a reporter at an Iraqi newspaper.

On 4 January, the resistance killed Baghdad’s provincial governor and hit the headquarters of an elite police unit in a series of attacks against government targets. Three vehicles with gunmen pulled alongside Ali al-Haidari’s four-car motorcade as it drove through north-east Baghdad and then opened fire. The resistance has targeted government officials over some time. In July, it killed the governor of the northern city of Mosul, and then Hatem Kamel, Haidari’s deputy on 1st November last year. However, Haidari was the most prominent official to be killed since the occupant of the country’s then rotating puppet presidency, Izzedin Salim, was killed in May last year.

Also on 4 January, a checkpoint outside the headquarters of the interior ministry’s Commando Forces was attacked, resulting in the death of eight policemen. Five US troops were also killed on the same day in three separate attacks across the country.

On 10 January, in an attack on a police headquarters in Tikrit, seven police officers were killed. On the same day, eight Iraqis were killed in a minibus in Yussifiyah, just south of Baghdad, while a gas pipeline between Kirkuk and the Bayji refinery was hit and damaged. In these attacks, many top quislings were killed, including the deputy police chief of Baghdad, who was shot dead when his car was ambushed in a Baghdad street.

In the light of such resistance, it is hardly surprising then that dozens of election officials resigned in Mosul, Bayji and several other places. The Financial Times [FT] reported that it had been unable to find a driver willing to place an election window sticker on the window of his car.

So afraid are the leading quislings of the Iraqi resistance that both Iyad Allawi, the current puppet prime minister, and Dr Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Alliance candidate for the same post, maintain family homes in London and live under constant threat of assassination in the heavily guarded Green Zone in Baghdad.

Occupation under another name

After the election, US president Bush congratulated the Iraqi people “for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom”. Blair droned on in similar moronic fashion. As for the Iraqi people – and they are the only ones who matter – the newly elected national assembly is no different from the 2003 Iraqi Governing Council and the 2004 Iraqi Interim Government, stuffed full as it is of Iraqi exiled puppets of US imperialism with no social support among the Iraqi people. The daily reality is that the imperialist armies, uninvited and unwanted, will still be in occupation. Their very presence is the source of all the resistance. It is not the constitution, to be written by the new assembly, but the end of the occupation, that will put an end to the resistance. Even bourgeois, but perceptive, analysts understand this much. Writing in the Daily Mail of 14 February, Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC journalist who was sacked by his spineless employers for correctly saying that the British government had ‘sexed up’ the intelligence dossier in an attempt to justify the war against Iraq, had this to say on this score:

“Important as the elections were, nobody should confuse them with the arrival of an effective government. It may end up running little more than the assembly building. Across a good part of the country, the new ministers will not be able to show their faces for fear of death. Much of Iraq is effectively run by … tribal chiefs or insurgents. Basic services have never been worse and the economy of Arab Iraq is in ruins.

“There is little prospect that any elected government, even one more united and experienced than this one is likely to be, can change any of that in a hurry”.

Under the occupation’s dispensation, the newly-elected Transitional National Assembly of 275 members is charged with the task of drafting a new constitution by 15 August. This draft must then be submitted to a national referendum by 15 October, followed by an election by 15 December for a permanent government – and the new government, emerging from the election, is scheduled to take office on 31 December this year. On the same day the mandate of the occupation forces comes to an end – unless, of course, it is renewed, which it doubtless will be, for the puppet government taking office on 31 December will not last more than a few weeks in the face of the resistance without the support of the imperialist armies of occupation.

Even if all goes according to the imperialist plans, the new puppet government will confront problems which it will not be able to even begin to tackle, let alone solve. The most important of these problems will be how to put an end to the resistance without ending the occupation, for without the removal of the imperialist armies the resistance cannot be ended. Further, the collection of puppets is riven by its own internal contradictions. Whereas the Kurds want a robust federalist Iraqi state, this by no means is acceptable to the other disgraceful sections of this shameless gentry of imperialist flunkeys. Again, while Sistani’s followers want to enshrine Islam as the official state religion of Iraq, others want Islam to be just one of the sources of legislation.

Anglo-American imperialism heading for defeat

Meanwhile, as the Iraqi puppets indulge in horse-trading over the spoils of office and attempt to carve out cosy little niches for themselves, the national liberation forces of the Iraqi people will continue to intensify their armed struggle against the occupation armies and their Iraqi minions. All the signs are that they will be successful in defeating and expelling the imperialist armies. Here are some of the factors pointing to an imperialist defeat in Iraq.

1. US army – a broken force

First, the morale among the US soldiery is at an all-time low. The FT of 11 January reported that

“… the wearing-down of the military, particularly the army – long predicted by defence experts because of extended and high-intensity rotations in Iraq – may be showing the first signs of having an impact.

“This is most glaringly evident in the army national guard and reserves, part-time soldiers that now comprise about 40 per cent of US forces in Iraq.

“Last month, the general who heads the army reserves complained in a memo to his superiors that current deployment policies meant his units were ‘rapidly degenerating into a broken force'”.

Thousands of US soldiers on home leave have deserted to Canada and quite a few have taken the much more risky route of deserting through Iraqi networks, paying the current rate of $1000, a weapon and a uniform, for desertion through the Kurdish province of Iraq. With the death toll among US soldiers nearing 1,600 and those injured being in excess of 15,000, it is hardly surprising that there is a precipitate drop in morale among the US predatory army. Although the US authorities do their best to hide the scale of their losses, the daily flights between Iraq and the US base in Ramstein, Germany, carrying wounded US soldiers to the Landstuhl military hospital, tell their own story.

2. Failure to build up Iraqi forces

Second, the Americans had hoped to enlist Iraqis in large enough number into the security forces to do their dirty work for them, but are now taking an increasingly dim view of the strength, quality and reliability of these forces. According to the State Department’s figures, the Iraqi army presently numbers 4,400 soldiers – a number far short of the requisite 24,000. Likewise, only 51,700 police are on hand and trained – a number less than half of the 135,000 that the US officials judge as necessary. A large number of those who join, do so merely “… to get a uniform and get paid, but when anything tough is required, they are unavailable”, says Walter Slocombe, who led Iraqi military rebuilding efforts for the Coalition Provisional Authority.

As if all this is not enough, the Iraqi security forces have been heavily infiltrated by the resistance. The most deadly attack on the Iraqi forces on 2 January (already referred to), when a vehicle packed with explosives detonated after pulling alongside a bus carrying national guard troops back to their base in Balad, illustrated the sophisticated system of gathering intelligence employed by the resistance. During the last four months of 2004 alone, more than 1,300 Iraqi policemen died at the hands of the resistance. During the first week of January this year alone, close to 90 Iraqi security personnel were killed, including those killed in the 5 January attack on a graduation ceremony at a police academy near the southern city of Hilla, which claimed the lives of 10 recruits. With the strategy of replacement of US forces by the upgrading of Iraqi security personnel thus in ruins, the Pentagon has been obliged to resort to a far longer deployment of American troops despite the increasing political opposition to the war among the US population.

Authoritative figures and think tanks in the US have an extremely bleak view of the military situation in Iraq. According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Audi Arabia and now head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr Bush recently asked Colin Powell for his view of the progress of the war in Iraq. “We’re losing”, Mr Powell was reported as having replied. Mr Bush then asked the Secretary of State to quit, says Mr Freeman (see FT, 13 Jan05).

In the last week of January, the US Institute of Peace, an ‘independent’ body funded by the Congress, hosted the ‘Iraq Experience Project’, which according to reliable reports had all the atmosphere of a confessional based on the interview of 110 Americans who had worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Listing a whole litany of US failures, many speakers were of the view that the costs in lives both American and Iraqi had been too high and the mission a failure.

In its leading article of 1st February, such an authoritative organ of British monopoly capital as the FT expressed the view that the US and its allies’ “… presence has become part of the problem, not the solution” and that, therefore, they ought to make “a clear commitment … that they are ready to leave as swiftly as possible”.

3. Dwindling coalition

Third, the coalition of the willing is dwindling fast. On 3 November last year, the Netherlands and Hungary announced their plans to pull their troops out of Iraq in March this year, thus undermining Washington’s desperate efforts to give the appearance of greater international support for its predatory war for domination. While Hungary’s contingent numbers only 300, that of the Netherlands, with 1,350 soldiers, is “the seventh largest in Iraq after the US which has 142,000 troops in Iraq, the UK (9,000), Italy (3,000), South Korea (2,800), Poland (2,400) and Ukraine (1,600). Hungary is among about 25 states which have each sent up to 1,000 troops” (FT, 4 Nov 04).

About 10 states have already pulled out, including Spain, which had 1,400 troops in Iraq. On 10 January the outgoing Ukrainian president, Leonid Kushma, ordered an early withdrawal of his country’s 1,600 soldiers form Iraq, in response to the killing of eight Ukrainian soldiers over the weekend of 8/9 January. Governments of other countries, including Italy, are under severe pressure from their electorates to pull their troops out of Iraq, thus leaving Anglo-American imperialism more isolated than ever.

4. Costs

Fourth, the military costs of maintaining the crisis-ridden American empire and waging endless wars for domination all across the globe are spiralling out of control and imposing an increasingly unbearable burden on the US tax-payer while monopoly corporations, especially those involved in the oil business and the manufacture of armaments, make fabulous profits. The US military expenditure this year of $437 billion is 50 per cent higher than it was in 2001. Astronomical though it may be, it is expected to climb still higher to $500 billion (Euro 392 billion, £269 billion) within five years. The fiscal 2006 military budget of $419 billion requested by the Bush administration does not include the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are funded by supplementary budgets. Since these wars are costing the US in the region of $70 billion a year, the American military spending has already hit the level of $500 billion a year – a sum greater than that of all the military budgets around the world.

This increased military spending takes place at the same time as the US lives beyond its means to such an extent that it needs the injection of $2 billion a day of foreign funds to keep it afloat. The triple burden of its current account and budget deficit, as well as foreign debt, is such that sober bourgeois analysts speak of America as being “on the comfortable road to ruin”.

And despite all this increased spending, the US economy is hovering on the edge of recession. The day of reckoning for crisis-ridden US imperialism is approaching – and approaching very fast. Its rival imperialist powers, grouped in the EU, are increasingly and boldly challenging it on a range of fronts, from the Middle East to relations with China and Iran, the Kyoto Treaty on carbon emissions, subsidies and other trade issues. Notwithstanding the toning down of aggressive rhetoric by the political representatives of US imperialism, as witnessed during the February visits of Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Ronald Rumsfeld to Europe, the inter-imperialist contradictions are rising inexorably, for it is not their discourtesy to each other and the impolite language which has soured relations between them; rather, it is their irreconcilable economic and political interests which have given rise to the harshness of tone and intemperate language in their dialogue. In the world of capitalism, in the final analysis, such matters cannot be settled amicably because “once the relationship of forces changed, what other solution of contradictions can there be under capitalism than that of force” (Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism). And no objective student of world imperialist economics and politics, of the relations of the various imperialist powers, can deny that the relationship of forces between US imperialism, on the one hand, and its rival imperialists, especially those grouped in the EU, has undergone a drastic change, giving rise to a desire on the part of those who were weak after the Second World War, but have since regained their economic strength, to challenge the US in an effort to redivide the world – an attempt which the US is determined to resist. The exacerbation of these inter-imperialist contradictions, while bringing the menace of war nearer, nevertheless furnishes an opportunity to the oppressed peoples of the world and the proletariat in the centres of imperialism to forge a common front for the overthrow of imperialism. Confining ourselves to Iraq for the moment, the Iraqi resistance is well-placed to be the beneficiary of the rising contradictions between the US and its rival imperialists.

5. Strength of Iraqi resistance

Finally, the Iraqi national liberation struggle is growing by the day in depth and breadth. More and more Iraqi people are rallying to the banner of national armed resistance against the Anglo-American imperialist occupation. Even the intelligence chief of the Iraqi stooge government, Major-General Muhammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, admitted at the beginning of January that the Iraqi resistance has a strength of 20,000 to 30,000, backed by another 200,000 who render active assistance to it by supplying intelligence, shelter and logistics: “I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people”.

What is more, the resistance has the sympathy and tacit support of the population, while the US forces and their Iraqi puppets are hated by the Iraqi masses. If the Iraqi resistance swims like a fish in the sea of the Iraqi people, the predatory Anglo-American soldiery operate like a fish out of water. Only this explains the intensity, the frequency and the sophistication of the attacks launched by the resistance against the imperialist armies and their stooges. The latest such attack took place on 28 February in the town of Hilla, where a massive bomb was detonated by the resistance into a crowd of police and army recruits who were queuing outside a government health office for medical examination. 125 people were killed and 130 left wounded as a result.

Ignoring the pleas of imperialism, its puppet Iraqi government and the quislings of the so-called Iraqi Communist Party and its offshoot – the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), treating with contempt the sham election just staged by the imperialist occupation, the Iraqi resistance are carrying on with the work of the revolutionary destruction of the imperialist occupation of Iraq with a single-minded determination.

Opportunists in the service of imperialism

Just as the tide of Iraqi resistance is beginning to overwhelm the occupation forces, and just as the opposition to the predatory imperialist war grows in the countries waging war against the Iraqi people, the opportunist leadership of the British anti-war movement (Stop the War Coalition – STWC) is doing its best, as it has done all along, to reconcile the anti-war movement to what amounts, albeit through several intermediary steps, to the needs and requirements of the imperialist bourgeoisie through its support for the imperialist Labour government and party.

The revisionists of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), who along with their Trotskyite cousins of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), run the STWC, have opened the paged of the Morning Star to Iraqi traitors, such as one Abdullah Muhsin of the IFTU, to propagate the wonders of democracy under the occupation regime. Writing on the eve of the election of 30 January, in the Morning Star of 27 January, this shameful, not to say shameless, representative of IFTU argued that the election, even if held under the conditions of foreign occupation, provided the only road to “representative parliamentary democracy …, stability, peace and prosperity”, to “progress, democracy and the rule of law”. The thrust of Muhsin’s argument is that the predatory imperialist occupation of Iraq has but one purpose, that is, to spread democracy, rule of law, peace and prosperity. Even Messrs Bush and Blair could not advance better arguments in favour of the occupation and in the service of prettification of imperialism. It could furnish as a blueprint for further imperialist wars in the Middle East or elsewhere – all of course in the name of promoting democracy, freedom and prosperity.

In opposition to the opportunists, the proletariat in the imperialist countries is duty bound to associate itself with the armed resistance in Iraq, which is weakening and shaking imperialism, our common enemy, to its very foundations. There is one – and only one – slogan that must permeate the working-class and anti-war movement in the imperialist countries, namely, Victory to the Iraqi resistance. It is our duty to make this the guiding slogan of the anti-war movement, just as we made Victory to the NLF our cry during the Vietnam war in the teeth of opposition by opportunists of the same variety as we face today. It will be no easy task, considering the vice-like grip of counter-revolutionary social-democracy and its hangers-on and apologists, the Trotskyites and Revisionists, in the anti-war movement. All this gentry combined to defeat a resolution at the 12 February Conference of STWC asking for the adoption of this slogan. The revolutionaries in the anti-war movement must increase their efforts a hundred-fold to expose, oppose and defeat the opportunist leadership of the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), which is sacrificing the struggle against imperialist war and occupation to the interest of ensuring a third electoral victory for the blood-thirsty imperialist Labour Party. All this, of course, in the name, and under the fraudulent guise, of the “cardinal importance of maintaining the unity of the anti-war movement during the election campaign, recognising our multi-party character”. Shorn of all euphemism, and translated into simple ordinary language, it merely amounts to unity with the two wings of social democracy – the imperialist Labour government and the labour aristocratic trade-union barons – in other words, the very counter-revolutionary forces who are presently representing British imperialism and waging a predatory war against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of merciless and bold exposure of counter-revolutionary social democracy and its scoundrelly representative, what we get from the leading lights of the STWC is an apology for the representatives of imperialist war, plunder and occupation in the name of unity – a misplaced concept in the concrete situation for reconciling the working class to the bourgeoisie.

In this shameful enterprise, the leadership of STWC has the ideological support of the mummies of the New Communist Party, whose weekly organ, the New Worker (NW), yet again repeated its mindless mantra thus: “Whoever we put in power in Westminster will be forced to do much the same thing. Blair is a scoundrel but the Labour Party is still the only party in which the organised working class has any input or influence at all” (NW 18 Feb 05).

A party which calls itself communist and yet utters such profanities has simply signed its own death warrant. It has no raison d’etre, and no right to exist, for if the Labour Party is indeed the only party in which the organised working class has any input or influence, and if that is an overwhelming argument for supporting a political party, then why maintain a separate party – why does the NCP not simply join the Labour Party.

Besides, since the NCP claims to be a Marxist-Leninist Party, let us confront it with one or two propositions of Leninism on the question under discussion. Speaking at the Second Congress of the Comintern in August 1920, Lenin had this to say apropos the British Labour Party:

“Of course, for the most part the Labour Party consists of workers, but it does not logically follow from this that every workers’ party which consists of workers is at the same time a ‘political workers’ party’; that depends upon who leads it, upon the content of its activities and of its political tactics. Only the latter determines whether it is really a political proletarian party. From this point of view, which is the only correct point of view, the Labour Party is not a political workers’ party but a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although it consists of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst reactionaries at that …”.

Elsewhere Lenin says: “One of the most common sophisms of Kautsky is his reference to the ‘masses’; we do not want to break away from the masses and mass organisations! But think how Engels approached this question. In the nineteenth century, the ‘mass organisations’ of the English trade unions were on the side of the bourgeois Labour party. Marx and Engels did not conciliate with it on this ground, but exposed it. … it is not so much a question of how many members there are in an organisation, as what is the real, objective meaning of its policy: does this policy represent the masses? Does it serve the masses, i.e., the liberation of the masses from capitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority, it conciliation with capitalism?”

In the fashion of Kautskyism, and flying in the face of Marxism-Leninism, the NCP seeks “to reconcile the proletariat with the ‘bourgeois labour party’, to preserve the unity of the proletariat with that party and thus uphold its prestige” (Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism).

Two weeks later, the leading article in the NW quite correctly denounces the government’s new Prevention of Terrorism Bill as Blair’s creeping fascism. The only conclusion to be drawn from it is that the Labour Party, and the Labour government, is an instrument for creeping fascism in Britain. That being the case, is it permissible for those who call themselves communists to advocate support of this agency of creeping fascism, solely on the grounds of the formula that “… the Labour Party is still the only party in which the organised working class has any input or influence”.

The correct response is to work for the destruction of the influence of the imperialist Labour Party among the organised working class – not to reconcile the latter to the former. The working-class movement in Britain will never come within even striking distance of its enemies without destroying the hold of social democracy among the working class. Just think about it, comrades of the NCP, instead of burying your heads in the stand and repeating mindlessly the mantra that you learnt by rote long ago. When one is in a hole, the best thing is to stop digging. Whether you take it or not, this is our comradely advice to you.

The need, at the moment, is to “… explain to the masses the inevitability and the necessity of breaking with opportunism”, to unmask “the hideousness of National-Liberal-Labour politics and not to cover them up” (ibid).

This is the only Marxist-Leninist line to be followed in the labour and anti-war movement. Let the anti-war movement be harnessed to the struggle against imperialism. Let it not be turned into an instrument for the propagation and advancement of the interests of the counter-revolutionary imperialist Labour Party.

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