Is Russia’s Intervention in Ukraine Revolutionary? Joti Brar Responds

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Without further ado, let me welcome our guest today, Joti Bra. Joti is the chair of the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist Leninist. Joti, welcome to India and Global Left.

>> Thank you so much for having me.

>> Maybe I'd start with, um, the special military operation, um, Russian special military operation in Ukraine. Uh, given that it divided a lot of, uh, people on the left, and I've realized you have been involved in that, uh, debate, in that kind of reorganization, in that argument. Um, if you could spell out, um, what do sections of the left miss out on, um, when they don't see this as a special military operation and instead see this as a Russian invasion of Ukraine?

>> Thanks, Jish. Excellent question. And really, the, the, the launch of the SMO, um, revealed to us, uh, a deep split in what was calling itself the International Communist Movement, uh, and a, a real lack of theoretical grounding of many organizations that call themselves Marxist Leninist. Um, essentially, they allowed themselves to be swept along with bourgeois propaganda, which every Leninist should know how to, how to see through and, uh, withstand. These, um, our lives are punctuated, isn't it, by hysterical overloads of bourgeois propaganda. And, you know, when everybody is screaming at you one message, the ruling class wants you to think something, and it wants you to have an emotional reaction to a whole load of assertions they're making. It wants you to not use, you know, the programming, you know, the, the, the sensible thinking part of your brain. It wants you to be swept along in emotion. And it creates this kind of wall of hysteria that's supposed to stop people having sensible conversations. But obviously, the job of communists, because we study Marxism, is to apply our understanding to the situation and come up with an analysis of what's really going on. And the first thing to ask yourself about any war is, what's the context? What's the background? What were the policies that were being pursued by both sides before this war broke out? And as soon as you look into the context of the SMO, you have to admit a whole raft of things that the Western propaganda has completely wiped out. In fact, the whole of the West's narrative management, um, starts from the day the Russians launched the SMO, and everything that preceded that is wiped out.

So the fact that there have been two coups in Ukraine to replace governments that tried to be more neutral in their positioning between Europe and Russia, that's not talked about at all. The fact that, in fact, we had since 2014, there was a fascist junta in Kiev which was controlled by the CIA and MI6, that's obviously not talked about. The fact that since 2014, this fascist junta with its MI6 and CIA handlers had been overseeing pogroms against, uh, Russophone Ukrainians who were, you know, almost half the population, right? It's a huge section of the population, but which of course has naturally friendly feelings towards its Soviet history and towards its Russian neighbors, um, that's wiped out. The fact that, in fact, they, it was not, um, the Russians who started this war. The war started in 2014 when sections of Ukraine refused to, uh, accept the fascist coup that had taken place through the Maidan process. Right? So all of that is wiped out. Actually, what you had in the Donbas was an anti-fascist war of resistance against what was essentially a colonial project. Ukraine already lost its sovereignty to the West in 2014. In fact, it had been a process of undermining Ukraine's sovereignty really since, um, uh, 1991. You could say in many ways Ukraine lost its sovereignty then because the Ukrainian people voted to stay in the Soviet Union, but their will was overturned. The Soviet Union was dissolved. They didn't want to lose socialism. They didn't want to lose the USSR. They voted that way. They were ignored. You know, so there's been a process of eroding Ukraine's sovereignty ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, uh, the counter-revolution that took place in 1991. Um, but very much, you know, 2004 with the so-called Orange Revolution, that was the first attempt to install a West-backed dictatorship. Didn't quite succeed. They, they came back in 2014, but in the meantime, they'd been funding fascists. In fact, if you look at the history of Ukraine, again, something that's not talked about in the West, funding of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, uh, who then became fascists since, you know, the 1930s onwards by Western imperialist powers has been ceaseless, nonstop funding of Ukrainian fascists. Why? There has always been a desire by the Western imperialist powers to use Ukraine as a launchpad and as a battering ram to try to destroy Russia. Russia, and the destruction of an independent Russia. The destruction of the Soviet Union for a certain period, but before that, Russia, and after that, Russia again. That has been a long-term goal of the imperialist powers. So we've seen a continuation of imperialist policy throughout this whole period since 1991. In 2014, they got their way. They got a regime that they were completely in control of. All sovereignty lost to the Ukrainian people. All opposition crackdown on trade unions banned, political parties banned, media outlets banned. Um, independent activity of the working classes basically banned. Terror gangs roaming the streets to discipline the workers. Um, fascism out in the open again. Whole history of Ukraine totally rewritten. The history of World War II totally rewritten. Uh, fascism from World War II period whitewashed. The people who carried out, and assisted enthusiastically in carrying out the Nazi Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland during, uh, the '30s and '40s, uh, completely whitewashed, and those people rehabilitated, not only in Ukraine but across, uh, Western and global media, whitewashed. And these people, you know, these terrible war criminals held up as, you know, the fathers of the nation. Um, and we see our own politicians in the West saying their slogan of these fascists. Slava Ukraini is the slogan of the Banderite fascists who carried out, um, massacres of Jews, uh, communists, uh, Slavs, uh, Poles during the World War II Holocaust period, and who carried on fighting against the Soviet Union after the war was officially over for another, what, eight years? There was an ongoing West-backed kind of resistance war, so a terrorist campaign essentially in Poland and in Ukraine that went on all the way up to 1953 with the funding from the West of, uh, fascist remnants who they kept in Ukraine. And when they were defeated, as many of them as possible, they airlifted out and they looked after them in the hopes that one day they'd have the opportunity to make use of them again. And so we saw in Canada, in Australia, in the USA, in Britain, there were communities of essentially rescued fascist Ukrainians who were paid, funded to bring up their children with their traditions. That's, that's the nice word for, you know, keeping fascism alive in their, in their mentality and their customs, right? They, they were funded. They had these little Ukrainian cultural centers that got state funding to keep all of that alive, to keep their community, uh, feeling alive, their culture of fascist supremacism alive. Um, and they, the imperialists are good at this. They like to keep their proxies on ice just in case they get an opportunity to use them again. They did get an opportunity, sad to say. The Soviet Union, uh, was, um, overthrown. Uh, it dissolved, and in country after country, fascist proxies who'd been kept on ice were parachuted back in. And the, um, uh, propaganda moguls from the West started their job of rewriting the history and the history books, setting up museums, etc., to create a new cultural memory, changing the syllabus in the schools, you know, so that new generations of kids growing up in Ukraine are taught a complete, um, reversed picture of their own history, and therefore are being propagandized to become Russophobic. That's the whole aim is to turn not just the territory and the resources of Ukraine, but its people into a willing proxy force to be able to be held at Russia. And now we see the result. We see the result that the, the men of Ukraine have been either exterminated or have had to leave the country in order not to be exterminated, all in the cause of, um, the imperialists' goal of destroying Russia.

Um, they want to repeat, you know, there's a huge, we have to recognize also the, the big picture is we have this massive global capitalist crisis of overproduction. Last time, it got to a really bad situation for the, for the global economy, uh, actually in the, it was, it was the, the post-war boom came to an end, end of the '60s, and the overproduction crisis was deepening again through the '70s and '80s. There was a whole load of civil unrest. There was unemployment. There was closing down of industry. There was, there was big problems, uh, in the economies across the capitalist world. And essentially, the imperialists rescued their system and restabilized themselves and brought back profitability by looting the resources of the Soviet Union and the former Eastern European socialist countries. So they gave their system a huge shot in the arm. But it's important to notice that while they were doing that, while they were in clover and making so much money by looting the huge wealth that had been built up by the socialist countries, they also took the opportunity to accelerate and deepen their attacks on their own working classes. So they weren't saying, "Oh, well, now that, now that finances are better, we can, we can carry on with the nice distribution of wealth we had after World War II." No, now that the threat of the Soviet example was gone, they no longer saw the need to keep bribing off the, the whole of the working class with the, with the welfare reforms that the whole imperialist world had to put in place after World War II in order to stem the tide of revolution, which was spreading fast around the world. Um, so even good times for the imperialists don't result in good times for the working class. The only thing that gets good times for the working class is the threat of revolution. And really, for me, the, the lesson to be learned from that is we've got to stop just threatening and go all the way and, you know, finish the job.

Um, but coming back to your question about, sorry, tangential, coming back to your question about, um, how, um, the communist movement failed in this moment. So what you saw was a whole bunch of communist parties who have essentially allowed themselves to become so rotten with revisionism, uh, so demoralized by the victories of capitalism, that they have essentially become amplifiers of bourgeois propaganda. They've accepted the bourgeois narrative and they've stopped studying. They've stopped analyzing in a Marxist Leninist way the real class forces at work. Um, and they've stopped really having any faith in the ability of the working masses to make a revolution. So they no longer have, see their job as helping the working class make sense of what's going on, helping the working class understand why capitalism has to be replaced with socialism. Instead, they see themselves as a kind of permanent oppositional force that just kind of rings its hands and says, "Oh, things aren't very fair, are they?" But essentially, who, who buy into the kind of petty bourgeois critique of capitalism, which is, it's not fair, and we should fix the unfairness, rather than the Marxist understanding, which shows us why it is that the problems that are built into the capitalist system of production for profit cannot be resolved within that system, and therefore the job of a communist party is to help the working masses organize to remove the capitalist system of production and replace it. And what you see is the parties that are unable to recognize that Russia is not an imperialist country and Russia did not start this war. Russia is the target of the entire imperialist camp because it is sovereign, and its sovereignty essentially makes it, whatever the wishes of its leadership and whatever the financial system that they are overseeing, they are objectively a bulwark of anti-imperialism in the world. And given that the main contradiction on the planet is between the imperialist bloc and the oppressed masses, uh, we have to, as revolutionaries, we have to be on the side of the anti-imperialists. It is our job to call for the victory of Russia, not to say, "Oh, they invaded," like kind of, uh, pacifist cretins. It's obviously nonsense if you understand what's been happening. Eight years of war was inflicted by NATO through the Kiev junta on Russophones who just tried to resist a fascist coup in their country. Um, it was actually Russia was very slow to come to the defense of the Donbas, but it realized in the end. What did their, I'm not sure if it was Vladimir Putin or Sergey Lavrov, but one of them pointed out after extended experience of trying to come to agreements with the Western powers, that these people are agreement-incapable. They only understand one language, and if we want to defend our sovereignty, we are going to have to do it through facts on the ground and through force, because it doesn't matter how many treaties you sign, we will abide by our side and they will undermine it from their side. So, you know, the, the anti-imperialist world has been learning these lessons that unfortunately a lot of people calling themselves socialist and communist have not.

If I could add one point to your earlier, uh, point about that stagflation of the '70s. I mean, eventually in the '70s, it becomes stagflation, but the falling rate of profit started even in the '60s in the developed parts, uh, because of over-competition, and the periphery was not able to buy these products because the purchasing power was so limited. That was resolved, as you said, by looting up the countries behind the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. But I would also add, by looting a lot of the global South that was not socialist, or let's say not communist, so to speak, but by imposing this neoliberal project on large parts of Asia, Africa, to extract surplus labor. That's how it allowed to resolve, uh, the crisis of overproduction for a while.

Um, uh, if I could play, um, a devil's advocate here, um, there are sections of the left who, uh, are very categorical, very clear in their minds that, uh, Russia's response is something that is a response, uh, Russia has responded to what it has been provoked. They are very clear about that. But I guess there is a division even within those who accept that this is a provoked, uh, response. But there are some within that camp who would say that, ultimately, maybe Russia shouldn't have invaded. Yes, they are provoked, we should blame the West, we should blame NATO, etc., etc., etc., and they spend a lot of time in critiquing, as we do. But ultimately, they say that maybe Russia had other means than invading, and they still call it an invasion. And I'm thinking about, not necessarily all leftists, but even Scott Horton, a libertarian, who has written the book, *Provoked*. He documents, it's a huge book, he documents the whole history of this conflict, but then he has a chapter where he lays out possibilities that Russia could have done instead of this special military operation. I also interviewed Claire Daly, and she's very, uh, vocal, but if I am not mistaken, and correct me, viewers, if I have misrepresented her, I think she also said that Russia shouldn't have invaded, or it's wrong. I wonder what you would say to that line of analysis.

>> I think fundamentally, it's a, it's a response to the fact that these people are living inside the overwhelming hysterical media bubble, and it's very, very hard to stand firm on the correct position when everybody around you is like, "How can you possibly say that? They're lunatics, they're maniacs." So they say, "No, no, they were provoked, but okay, it wasn't a good idea." And, you know, it's also, it's a kind of a nod also to a kind of bourgeois pacifism that refuses to understand what imperialism is. Um, the Russians were very, very, very, very slow to act. They acted very carefully and very properly. You'll see that Vladimir Putin is a president who cares very much about, um, international law, as well as national law, of, of making sure that you have everything in place to be able to show your own people, the international community, your allies, and, and your critics. "No, look, we've followed the correct procedures at every, at every step of the way." Um, I think people have to understand properly. It's not just Russia wasn't just provoked. If you look at what was going on in Ukraine from 2014, and look at the course of the war, uh, since the SMO, uh, developed, what you'll see was NATO. Okay, there was all this toing and froing about whether or not Ukraine could ever be in NATO. But de facto, it already was. The Ukrainian army was built up by NATO to be NATO's biggest army. That was happening. Now, no one was threat planning. No one was threatening Ukraine. So why were they doing that? There was only one reason. It was preparations for war on Russia. They built huge fortifications. They turned the east of Ukraine into a massive fortress ready for a war on that territory. And finally, um, well, not finally, actually, there was a, there was supposed to be a peace process, right? The Minsk process, that Russia signed up to as a guarantor. So did France. So did the USA. So did Germany. I want to say they were all supposed to be guarantors of a peace process that everybody had agreed to. What happened? Russia abided by it. Everybody else ignored it and undermined it. And after the SMO was launched, they all even came out in public and said, "Oh yeah, we never meant it. We were just buying time to keep making facts on the ground to make the Ukrainian armed forces bigger." What was the purpose of all of this? They wanted to find a way to launch the kind of war that they thought was what brought down the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. We won't have that conversation now, but they're wrong. That wasn't what brought down the Soviet Union, right? But they wanted to launch the kind of war that they thought would bleed Russia and undermine the Russian economy and Russian social cohesion and force a regime change in Moscow so that they could come, you know, dancing in and, um, and have another looting orgy like they had back in the '90s, right? That was their plan.

Um, just before the SMO was launched, we started to get, it was only sort of became clear what had been happening properly afterwards, because at the time it was very hard to make sense of it. We started to get a lot of overwhelming propaganda that Russia's going to invade, Russia's going to invade, Russia's going to invade. And it all seemed for people who weren't, didn't know all the details on the ground, like, why are they suddenly screaming like that? Um, what it turns out is the Western forces, the NATO-backed Ukrainian forces were massing on the borders of Donbas for a big invasion operation to try to retake the territory. And basically, that was the moment at which Russia stepped in to stop that. So even at that point, you know, for the West, the way they wage their wars is they need to have narrative control. So they try to always make it look as if the other side started it. I don't know if you noticed, um, back in December, January time in South Korea, there were a whole load of, well, all through October, November, December, January, there were a whole load of provocations which were actually aimed at tripwiring the DPRK into an invasion of the South, which they're ready to do at any moment if they need to. But the USA wanted to restart that war front in, but they, they only want it to restart if they can present to the world that the other side started it. So they, they did a whole load of provocations. They were flying drones over Pyongyang. One of the things they did, they tried to set up, um, an assassination of a politician, and I can't remember all the details of the names and the parties and everything, but essentially, um, it, it didn't work out, but they had North Korean army uniforms that they were preparing to leave at the site to make it look like some North Korean, you know, soldiers came over and assassinated this politician, right? And it was supposed to bring the South together in a, you know, anti-DPRK moment and trigger a trigger the outbreak of the war, but with a narrative that says the North started it. Well, essentially, it was the moves of the NATO forces to launch a big invasion of Donbas that triggered the Russian, uh, special military operation to stop that in its tracks. So, it was presented to us that one day Vladimir Putin woke up and was a genocidal maniac and decided he needed to crush his neighbors and just rolled his tanks in. And it all came out of the blue, didn't it? And that's the narrative that's been thrown at people in the West so hard. And I think even the people who have resisted that narrative, because they're so surrounded by people who are propagandized and hysterical, I think they, they find themselves softening at the edges. Um, and a big part of that, in my view, is not having a kind of Marxist base from which to draw your strength when everybody around you has gone hysterical and following the propaganda.

>> One last question here. Um, maybe as Marxists, I'm, um, I would ask you to help me look at the impact of the Russia's special military operation through the lens of class struggle. How does it look like? Um, you have said elsewhere that the special military operation opens up revolutionary possibilities. It's easier for me to understand that through the analytical framework of anti-imperialism because this is like, after many, many years, maybe since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has said that to the Western military empire that it's enough, we are not going to tolerate your bully. And this is also the time when China is asserting itself against the imperial bully at its backyard, and all not just the retaliation through, uh, through the tariff wars, but also its own military demonstrations through parades and so on. So to that extent, it's very clear that the West has been pushed back. And now, some of the documents that the National Defense, uh, National Security Defense document that has been presented to the Pentagon, written by Albridge Kirby, suggests that the United States is considering to retract its military focus from China and Russia towards Latin America. Now, we would have to see how much of that would be implemented and how that goes. But there is one signal at least that they have understood that Russia and China have been asserting now, and it's not going to be a cakewalk to keep doing what they have been doing. But help me understand it through the class lens. How does it look from the working class? I mean, Russia is not, uh, a communist country. Um, I can think about the implication for the working class in Eastern Ukraine, Donbas, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, that it would be very positive, obviously. But beyond that, what realignment of class forces does this special military operation do, if at all? And this is not to say that pushing back against the military empire is not revolutionary in itself, but I'm just trying to understand if there is a direct class layer beyond that.

>> There absolutely is. It's not a nice and clear and simple one as everybody would like it to be, I think, sometimes. But, um, fundamentally, um, the enemy of the anti-imperialist camp and all the oppressed nations is the same enemy as the workers in the imperialist countries. And this is something that, this is what the communist parties should be telling their working classes all the time, right? Our allies. If you live in an imperialist country, your allies are not the petty bourgeois kind of fake left who want to reform and fix the system and who are fundamentally bought off and loyal to the system. Our allies are in the oppressed world and the anti-imperialist world. And we need to be building one big united camp. Because yes, I said the SMO really has marked the opening of a new era. It's on the one hand, it's a, it's a new moment in the development of the overproduction crisis, which is really reaching, um, uh, extreme proportions. The economic troubles of the imperialists are deepening by the day, and you must recognize this is the driving force for their war drive is their economic desperation. They need this looting. They need this orgy of destruction and reconstruction to rebalance the system and try to regain profitability, because they're otherwise they're in very, very, very deep trouble there. The economic system is on the teetering on the brink of a humongous meltdown. Um, I think there's a lot of quiet bailing out of institutions going on behind the scenes just through money printing. But of course, that brings with it all kinds of problems itself, which are slowly, um, building up social and economic problems locally and globally through inflation and through lack of confidence in the dollar and the euro and the pound, and all of that, which the imperialist countries have relied on and and forced down everybody's throats for so long. But at the same time as the imperialist camp is in such a crisis, the anti-imperialist camp, as you said earlier, it's refinding its feet. It's finding its feet, actually, in a way we haven't seen since the death of Stalin. Coming together with common recognition of a common struggle, despite the fact that all the members of the camp are not socialists. Right? You've got China, you've got the DPRK, you've got Vietnam and Laos, but you've also got Russia, you've got Brazil, you've got, you know, of course, we've got Venezuela, Cuba, um, Nicaragua, you know, um, Yemen, Iran, you know, there's a variety of types of, uh, economy and society in that camp. But what characterizes them all is a recognition that they will never be sovereign. They will never be able to develop their own economies independently. They'll never be able to control their own resources and deliver anything for their populations while imperialism is there threatening them. And one by one, they can be picked off. Increasingly, there's a recognition that the, that the fight has to be fought in a unified, coordinated way. So you were starting to see the, the revival, actually, of an international order that began with the October Revolution, where the socialist country was the, was the bedrock of that, the socialist USSR. But the socialist USSR recognized, again, that, you know, imperialism is the big enemy in the world, and it made fraternal ties with all kinds of nations that just wanted to be sovereign and independent. They weren't necessarily all going socialist tomorrow. Right? If you read Stalin's *Foundations of Leninism*, which was written in 1924, he points out that the Amir of Afghanistan, who is obviously a feudal ruler, was objectively on the side of the revolutionary forces in the world because he was standing up for a sovereign and independent Afghanistan. Whereas, um, there were bourgeois forces in in Egypt, or Hussein, the bourgeois forces in Egypt were also more objectively revolutionary than the Labor Party aligned forces in Britain, which actually were there to enforce for the empire, although they called themselves working class and socialist, right? So we have to look at what's objectively the content of somebody's struggle and not just the words they use to wrap it up in. You know, the Yemen fighters, um, are constantly quoting from the Quran when they objectively get together with people from across all kinds of, uh, religious and political spectrums to have a united front against Zionism, and they recognize that Zionism is a tool of imperialism. They recognize ultimately their struggle is an anti-imperialist struggle. So, you know, this coming together is something which is hugely significant, very, very important. It offers the possibility that this drive into World War II doesn't have to end in, you know, either nuclear obliteration, which is a thing that we've all been blackmailed into, you know, to be terrified about. It also doesn't have to end with the ruling classes of the West getting their way and reasserting their dominance. It can actually end in their defeat. But what we have to recognize as workers in the imperialist countries, um, is that the job of vanquishing imperialism cannot be left to the forces of the anti-imperialist world elsewhere. They may militarily defeat it. They may earn for themselves a respite. But while the financiers, um, in in Britain, in Germany, in France, and in America are still sitting on huge, huge mountains of finance capital, they will never leave alone territories which have got free. They will continue to pay for armies and and and media and all kinds of provocations and dirty operations to make trouble and undermine those countries' ability to progress and develop while they're allowed to do it. It's the job of the workers in the imperialist countries to stop them. And we also have to recognize that, you know, the days of the post-war bribes, essentially the, the social contract that was made where we agreed not to make a revolution in return for being given some of the things we would have got if we had made a revolution. Those things are all been taken away. They're not coming back. We're not getting back to 1945. That was a product of a revolutionary situation. The only way that things are going to get better for British workers is the same way they get better for workers, you know, in other parts of the world, is when the imperialists are stopped from being imperialist. And that means they've got to be dispossessed of their stores of finance capital. They've got to be separated from their ability to control economic and political life. And so this is a, this is a two-front struggle. The opportunities for that struggle are opening up. People's life conditions are teaching them a lesson that no reading of Lenin could have taught them, which is what the system really is, what the ruling class really thinks of you. Right? If we watch the way our ruling class has thrown Ukrainians into the meat grinder in the most reckless fashion, and what we see now is so much of that was directed by British operatives. It's, you know, there's a lot of evidence now that says they're the, they're the mastermind behind the, the worst and most bloody operations in this, in this war. Um, what we see is a continuity of attitude towards ordinary working people, whether at home or abroad, from 1914. I don't know if you may not be so aware of it, but it's still something that was in very strongly in the folk memory when I was growing up in Britain of how the generals in World War I treated the ordinary soldiers as so much disposable cannon fodder. That's actually where we get that expression from. I believe certainly it's, it's where it came to my mind from, you know, in my education was that attitude, that total supremacist, they're just disposable. And the horrible stories we grew up with about, you know, wave after wave of human bodies being sent into machine gun fire to be mowed down, you know, as a fight went over this hill or that hill, you know, we go forward two meters and we lost 300,000 men. You know, fundamentally, that war wasn't, of course, wasn't about those scrap traps of land. It was about who gets looting rights on the colonies, right? That wasn't made clear either to us in our history books or to the people who were fighting it. But in that war, the working people of Europe were treated as entirely disposable cannon fodder. And the reason that our rulers can treat us that way is they don't consider us to be real human beings. They don't consider the oppressed to be, you know, in the colonial countries to be real human beings. You see that exact same attitude, the way that they've treated Ukrainian men. Um, they, they do this bleeding heart media to try to make, you know, nice people in the West feel that they must be on the side of Ukraine because they're told all sorts of horrible stories. But it's all absolute crocodile tears. All of the tragic and horrific things, the crime that's been inflicted on the Ukrainian people has come from these Machiavellian, you know, imperialist financiers who treat the whole world as, the way the East India Company treated India, as a, as a just a, uh, an opportunity for corporate looting, essentially.

>> Yeah, I, uh, you are right. I'm not old enough to have, uh, heard those folk memories, but I have read, um, a couple of books on this subject. I mean, there are now increasingly more books written on India's participation in the, um, what was called as the Great War at that time. Um, and not just combatants, I mean, the combatant participation was massive, more than a million people. But, uh, uh, I think more than 500,000 non-combatants participated with the combatants, and there are many books now written on the lived experience of Indian soldiers. And I'm assuming you have roots from Punjab, but, uh, yeah, so Punjab was the, the canal colony, and, you know, that was the recruiting ground, and there are both Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs. They went to France and Flanders, and, you know, what they saw was, it, it was a very difficult time for them to cope up with racism, wars, etc. But I think even more difficult was the Muslims who were sent to Mesopotamia because at that time, the British Empire was claiming it to be the Muslim Empire because their claim was that more number of Muslims live under our empire than the Ottoman Empire because they were competing with the Ottomans. And the Muslims who went to Mesopotamia and were seeing all the blasts and, you know, ammunitions, they were very divided because they had heard about the land of Harun al-Rashid, and, you know, these were their holy lands, but people are just being killed now. And they, so, so there are books written on that. Um, all right. Um, you spoke about the, uh, responsibility of the working class, uh, in the imperial core, and that brings me to a question that I wanted to ask you about, at least from your party's perspective, in an imperial core, having a party which wants to convince the working class about the struggle against capitalism, about the struggle against empire, at a time when a lot of working people are bought into the parliamentary electoral form of politics. I mean, politics for a lot of people, over and above all, is election, although I don't want to overemphasize that as well, because it's that, that's not necessarily true for everyone. And we are grappling, probably with this, not just in the imperial core, we are also thinking about other liberal democracies, liberal, quote unquote, like India, where the whole role of the communist parties are being debated and discussed, because in India, there are parts like, uh, Kerala, for instance, where the communist parties can actually fight elections and so far they have been winning. But over and above, I think largely speaking, the communist movement in India remains very strong. I mean, that's my reading of it. I don't know how you read it. But when I go to, uh, the farmers' demonstrations, the farmers' marches, any kind of trade union mobilizations, these are largely under any one or other form of umbrella organizations of the communist party. So outside the electoral politics, of course, massive presence of the communist parties in in India. I'm not sure about Britain. You would enlighten me about that. I don't think that's true. As a communist party, as someone associated with the communist movement in that imperial core, where politics is so often thought and imagined through election, even the left would be obsessed with a Corbynite party or dissident Labour. And what would be your strategy, or or what's your agenda or framework to convince the working class about the struggle that they are ought, they ought to fight?

>> Um, fundamentally, our job is to help the working people learn from their own experience. So show them how what it is life is teaching them to kind of accelerate the learning process, if you like. Um, it's not our job, if you like, to convince the workers that they need to make a revolution. A revolutionary situation will arise. Uh, it's our job to help enough workers understand that there is no way to fix this system to deliver the things that they need. And really, that means popularizing a Marxist understanding. So our job is first of all to train Marxists, and then for our Marxists to go amongst the people and, and, you know, be connected with them, be part of them, and popularize, uh, a, a class-conscious understanding of what this society is, how it works, why it can't and doesn't deliver for them, why their lives are getting so much harder, and all of those things. When it comes to the obsession with electoralism, um, you're right, it's been totally dominant in the post-war period, but that is actually, it's changing fast. You know, since the, as you said, kind of neoliberal agenda was coming back through the '80s, '90s. Um, working people's experience in Britain was very much that, "Oh, look, we're under attack, and nobody's defending us." And we've been told that Labour Party is the working party of the working class, and we've been voting for them religiously for generations, and we have a Labour council and a Labour MP, and they haven't even, you know, shifted themselves to save a library book in a library, never mind a job or a factory or an industry, right? So, in fact, working people in Britain who have seen, you know, the increased accelerated pace of de-industrialization of Britain, which, of course, let's not forget, began actually at the end of the 19th century, because this is the, this is the inevitable development of capitalism as it becomes monopoly. And, you know, this Britain is, in fact, the most advanced in this respect. We have the least productive industry left in our country, that was once the workshop of the world, right? We make almost nothing. Our entire economy has essentially become parasitic, a parasitic body, uh, on the, on the global economy, is basically what the, what the British economy has become, rather than there being, um, pockets of parasitism that were identified by Lenin. That pockets now extended to almost the entire country. There's so little that we make here now. Um, parliamentarism is losing its hold on the minds of the mass of Britain's poorer workers. Let's give you an example. In the last election, where, you know, the Tories have been in power for, I don't know, 13 years or something, and they were thoroughly discredited and hated by everybody, because obviously life's been getting worse, and they've been at the front of the government while that's been happening, and they've been fronting up for a massive austerity drive since 2008, um, and overseeing, you know, the implementation of a far harsher regime for workers in terms of casualization, you know, um, and, uh, precarity of work, right? So, people on zero-hours contracts, not proper, not proper working conditions, no pay, um, no holidays, you know, no sick pay, no pensions, no, you know, um, so people's working lives have got much harder. They're working either longer hours or not enough hours, and either way, they don't make enough to make a living. A lot of people in work are on benefits. A lot of people in work are using food banks. You know, a lot of people in work are homeless. So we have this huge developing, uh, crisis, a poverty crisis, a food, a hunger crisis, a homeless crisis, a work crisis. Um, and the trade unions and the Labour Party leadership have completely facilitated all of this taking place over the decades. Um, so working people have really lost faith in the two-party system or in the idea that the Labour Party is a real alternative. Um, despite the fact that there's a huge machinery just on the outside of the Labour Party of people calling themselves socialist and communist, but who are revisionist communists and Trotskyite socialists, who basically work to catch people sort of at the who are falling out of the Labour fold and kind of herd them back in and say, "No, no, no, but we just got to get rid of the Tories, and then everything's going to be better." So they were working very hard at the last election telling everybody, "No, no, we just got to get rid of the Tories, and then everything will be better." Despite this, in fact, the turnout for that election was, was really, really low. And if you don't just look at the electoral roll, but at the over-18 population, and there's an increasing disparity between those two numbers now in Britain. There's a lot of people who aren't even on the electoral roll. Because on the one hand, it puts you in the firing line for taxes if you're on the electoral roll. And on the other hand, there's people who are like, "Well, I'm not bothered. It doesn't make any difference who you vote for." So, um, the electoral roll is not everybody who's eligible to vote, but if you look at the population of adults over 18s in the UK, you'll find that, um, about half of them, actually, didn't vote at the general election. And only 18% of them, one eight, voted Labour. And because of the way the system is set up, the ruling class was able to manage that so that they got Labour a supermajority in parliament, and they could trumpet it as this massive landslide. But actually, only 18% of adults in the UK voted Labour for them to be able to get that. So there's actually quite a crisis of legitimacy for British politicians and for British parliamentarism. Um, and you can see at the moment that Labour has become even more toxic since then because of what they've been doing in terms of austerity at home, and because of what they've been doing in terms of war crimes abroad, in particular, facilitation of and cooperation and participation in the genocidal assault on Gaza. Um, and simultaneously, alongside that, the crackdown on, uh, free speech and protest, um, at home. So all of these things have made Labour super, super toxic. There's almost no chance they could get re-elected at the next election. The ruling class strives for a stable majority in parliament because if there's a party with a majority, they can, you know, get their laws through with relatively little, um, upset. It's very difficult when there's a bit of a hung parliament and there's negotiations all the time to get legislation passed through. So they prefer a stable majority, uh, party to be in government. Um, we see right now that forces are being set up where essentially, I think what's happening is you're getting the left wing of the Labour Party is being reconstituted outside the Labour Party, but its job remains the same thing. Right? So that's your party kind of thing. And then we have the right wing of the Tory Party being reconstituted on the outside of the Tory Party, and that's Reform. And these two are being held up to people in the hope that they can be brought back into the electoral fold, the, the, the wishing and hoping that things are going to get better through voting, if only you have the right person in charge, and it's a new party, and this is all fixed. But we've actually seen this story before. You know, in Britain, we've not seen so much of it. But across Europe, we've seen the collapse of the main social democratic post-war parties and their replacement by new organizations or their supplementation by new further left organizations. And every single time they come to the brink of doing something that looks like it might really get in the up the nose of imperialism or upset the ruling class's agenda, they knuckle under and end up propping up the very forces that they're supposed to have been brought into, um, oppose. So we saw it with the, the new anti-fascist front, or whatever they called themselves in France, didn't we? Uh, not so long ago. They ended up supporting the very establishment that they were promising their followers that they were going to be an alternative to. Um, we saw it with Syriza in, um, Greece. They went right to the brink, didn't they, of saying no. So because Pasok, the social democratic party, Pasok collapsed, there was this, um, drive by the, uh, European Union to inflict most horrific austerity on Greece. The Greek working class, um, voted for Syriza because Syriza promised them that they could vote on leaving the European Union and rejecting the terms of this austerity, and that they could have sovereignty and and not be brought into essentially becoming a kind of semi-vassal of the EU. And what happened? They, they had a, they ejected a, they elected

A Saresa government. Saresa carried out a plebiscite. There was a referendum on EU membership or no, not EU membership. It was on the terms of the, of the, um, bailout. The bailout. That was it. Thank you. It was the terms of the bailout. The people voted to reject it. Saresa buckled and accepted it anyway. So every time we see the same, the same pattern.

Now, when it comes to Britain, we saw the Corbyn project already, right? All the, all the fake left in Britain who call themselves socialist and communist have been telling us ever since 1945. And really, they have been part of a quite criminal conspiracy to, um, lull the working class into a false sense of security about what they had won after World War II and to undermine their class consciousness and take away their revolutionary spirit and tell them, "Oh, look at all the things we've got now. All we have to do is keep voting Labour and, and putting pressure on Labour to have left-wing policies and a left-wing leader and, and you know, some pressure from the streets, and we will just step by step, we will find this road to socialism that doesn't require revolution and can be delivered through the British Parliament." Of all institutions, the British bourgeois parliament, they told, they've been telling working people since 1945 is the vehicle for delivering socialism in Britain. Patently not the case. Patently, you know, they've thrown away any understanding they once had of, of Lenin and Leninism and, and, you know, socialist analysis generally.

But in the process of doing that, their maximum program, of all these organizations, and why it is that despite having apparently different philosophies, they all work so well together is because underneath all of their apparent differences, they had one real program, which was: keep voting Labour and put pressure for a left-wing leader. And a left-wing leader of the Labour Party was like the holy grail, and it was never going to happen. And then suddenly, it did happen. And there they had their left-wing leader of the Labour Party. Their maximum program, basically, came to effect. And what did we see? Well, our party's written a very useful analysis of what we learned in the Corbyn project. But having learned that, I think it's criminal to try to keep workers busy repeating the exercise, only, you know, in a slightly different organizational form. It's the exact same thing all over again.

Even if, um, they weren't just trying to make another party of social democracy, uh, that says to you, "We will fix things through elections," which you can't do. So they're already lying to the working class. But standing up, you know, rolling everybody up behind Jeremy Corbyn, who already showed himself absolutely incapable of standing up in the face of ruling class propaganda, in the face of their political, um, and economic attacks. You know, uh, we learn, we saw what Jeremy Corbyn did. You know, one thing that especially the Palestine solidarity and anti-Zionist movement must take, take full account of is the role that was played by Jeremy Corbyn's leadership in facilitating the Zionist pogroms of Labour Party members. It was while Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party that the most vicious, vicious purge of pro-Palestinian members of the Labour Party was conducted. And even to the, to the extent of high leadership figures and prominent MPs and, and politicians who were pro-Palestine were kicked out of the party as so-called anti-Semites.

Including himself. Right. Well, he was branded as an anti-Semite, wasn't kicked out of the party, but instead of standing up and saying, "This is nonsense and these charges are politically motivated and anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism," he said, "Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry." He let all the people close to him be kicked out. He let a whole load of his members who were loyal to him be kicked out. And he facilitated the introduction or the acceptance by the Labour Party of the IH definition of anti-Semitism, which basically says that, so IH, for people who don't know, that's the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. It's a Zionist organization. And they made a definition of anti-Semitism which they have been aggressively pushing through governments and state institutions across the West. And it's a complete lie. What it says is not anti-Semitism is, um, hatred for Jews just because they're Jews. They said anti, basically they conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. They said, "Oh, if you, if you attack Israel, you're an anti-Semite." Right? So they essentially made Palestine solidarity anti-Semitic. And the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn accepted this definition of anti-Semitism, which then facilitated the, the government's roll-out of that, or the state's roll-out of that across all bourgeois political parties and a whole load of state institutions. Hospitals and councils and schools and universities were then all adopting it. And Jeremy Corbyn played a crucial role in that process. And we are now seeing the results of it because we now have laws whereby, you know, my own party members, uh, have been arrested and charged under hate crime legislation for selling a book, uh, about Zionism and being told, "No, you're conflating, you know, that's hate speech, you can't do that." This is all part of a process that Jeremy Corbyn, I'm afraid, was deeply, deeply complicit in facilitating this, this atmosphere that we, that we currently have to work in.

Do, do you mean, uh, his ineffectiveness is his complicity? Or do you mean, he wasn't just ineffective. He accepted the IH definition. He didn't, he didn't, he didn't just kind of flounder around. He accepted it, and that allowed it to be accepted in a whole load of other places. So on so many points of important principle, he just, you know, buckled under pressure and reversed and, and turned. One of the reasons, in fact, what's interesting, I think, about the, your party thing, there are a lot of, um, Labour aristocrats, trade union types, Trotskyites, um, who are running around acting like it's the, it's, you know, the second coming of the Messiah and wanting it to be this massive, big deal. But the massive poor workers in Britain turned their backs on Jeremy Corbyn a long time ago and don't really have any interest in this party. And one of the main reasons for that was his U-turn on Brexit after the Brexit referendum. He initially said the vote should be respected and we should work just to get a decent deal for working-class people as we're leaving. And then under pressure from the ruling, from the ruling class and their agents inside his party, he basically buckled. And at the 2019 election, he was going in with this most ridiculous kind of platform of, um, we're going to have, what was it? We're going to have a second referendum and we're going to, uh, recommend people that they should vote against leaving the EU, essentially. And for the, for the working people who voted for Brexit and had spent three and a half years watching what was essentially a parliamentary sitting where the entire parliament was united in trying to work out how not to do Brexit. And that's all they did, literally for three and a half years. They just argued over the details of different ways of doing the least possible to implement Brexit, or to either completely overturn it, or to pretend you're implementing it, but in the least effective way possible, in a not really Brexit. And, you know, that was why Boris Johnson got elected in 2019 because he just came to the election with the one slogan, "Get Brexit Done." Um, but Jeremy Corbyn basically sabotaged, uh, his chances of winning that election by, um, turning against the, the, the majority of British people who had, uh, who had voted for Brexit and were so angry to see how their decision was being completely ignored.

Uh, there has been a great debate going on in the United States about this, um, you know, the Democratic Party, or a third party, or no party, right? And, and I, as you spoke, I had a similar sense of, uh, you know, trigger responses in, in some ways. Um, um, I would say that there would be a section of the left who would say that I completely agree what Jotis said. I would accept all of those things, but I would say that don't spend time in electoral politics, parliamentary politics. But once in a four-year, or or whatever, if there is a moment, um, and your party has a chance to win, um, go vote for your party. That should not be your focus, but go there. Because after all, your critique could say that if you would not support them during parliamentary processes, or in France, for instance, um, if you are not supporting Jean-Luc Mélenchon's LFI, or in Germany, if you're not voting for, maybe they have a range of options, let's say Die Linke, or, you know, Sahra Wagenknecht. And I don't know what's your take on Pedro Sánchez's Socialist Workers' Party. But effectively, what I'm saying is, uh, to put it very provocatively, um, if you are not voting for the biggest alternative, um, what would the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist) be? A very, very small party. And I'm being deliberately provocative here, with all respect. What would you do by yourself?

Well, we're not going to do anything, are we? It's the working class that's going to do something. And the idea that, "Oh, if you're not involved in the election, you're irrelevant." Um, that's also, you know, that's basically repeating all the mythos of bourgeois parliamentarism that says this is our democracy and this is how you change things. But there are certain facts that, you know, all the left need to get their head around, just like the working class needs to get its head around, which is, ever since the working class was given the vote, mass of the working class in Britain, which was really post-World War I, there has been a shift of decision-making out of parliament. So if you actually look at parliament, you could fill parliament with 600 Karl Marxes. Would they be in charge of the reins of power in Britain? The answer is no. Right? So from my perspective, I would find it useful to engage in elections at such a point where, number one, there was actually a demand by the working class for communist candidates. Well, right now, there isn't that demand. So we have to, you know, we've got to build that. There's no point standing as a communist, you know, to, but, but if there was a real demand for communist candidates, the job of the communist candidate is to help to open people's eyes to the futility of this whole process because you're electing us here, but we have no power. And showing how the mechanisms, you know, showing how all the, uh, uh, the power is being exercised elsewhere, and how the process of all of these parliamentarians being bribed by various lobby groups and under the control of various, you know, wings of the ruling class. How, how the procedures are manipulated, and how the circus is, you know, to, to almost like in The Wizard of Oz, you know, pull the curtain back on the circus and show the working. So the job of a communist is to expose bourgeois parliamentarism and hasten the day when the mass of the workers turn away from it altogether. It's not to go to the workers and say, "Oh, you know, all of those parties are awful, but our party is going to do it better." Do what better? Run British imperialism better. That's what you're auditioning for. Please, can I be allowed to run British imperialism better than the last lot? The idea that you are going to stop British imperialism being British imperialism through the British imperialist bourgeois parliament, that is a myth that has to be broken.

And yes, you're right. We're very, very small, but people are learning that through their life experience. And so when we tell them the truth, the truth lands with them. Now, if we start telling them lies just to get votes or, you know, we start jumping on board with all kinds of projects. You know, I've been involved in electoral projects. It's not like I've, you know, got this absolute, you know, must never ever do anything electoral. But I was always there with the aim of trying to connect my message with working people. So sometimes you can take part in an electoral process simply because it's an opportunity to to meet people at a time when they're prepared to talk to you. We've been through peaceful periods where working people didn't really want to talk politics to you, and it was almost they would only recognize your right to talk politics to them at an election time. I actually think that time has passed now. There is so much crisis and there are so many problems working people are facing on a daily basis that actually if you just take a stall into the street and talk to people who pass by you, they're ready to talk politics. You know, you can knock on people's doors, they've got a lot to say for themselves. What they're lacking is a sense that there are organizations that really speak for them.

The reason that the right is able to pick up so many disenfranchised poor working people is that, um, they are pushing a very plausible narrative for the reason for the decline and decay of of British society and, and, and, uh, British, um, uh, standard of living. Um, they are, they are basically got a one-point program which says it's the immigrants. And that message is amplified by the entire bourgeois press, the entire bourgeois machinery. Every single bourgeois party says, "Yes, immigration is a problem." Uh, and then they argue, you know, about the fine details of how you fix the problem. But because it's endorsed from left to right, and across the entire spectrum of the bourgeois media, it's a very easy sell. And the voices of the far right, uh, uh, so-called, are also massively amplified in our media. They are platformed everywhere. And that is precisely because they are serving the ruling class in catching disenfranchised workers and trying to herd them back into, um, believing there's a way to fix the system and believing that their problems will be solved if just, you know, all the immigrants were kicked out, which of course is nonsense. But the people who could actually tell them something different are like my party. Why is my party so small? It's because the bourgeois media world pretends we don't exist. And they're very effective in silencing the voice and the analysis that we have to put forward. But to the extent we're able to, we absolutely need to get it out to people that they are being misled. And the people who are posing as their friends are not their friends. The people are actually serving the, the class enemy. The people who spread these anti-immigrant rhetoric in their midst are are inciting them against other workers. And the whole function of putting workers against workers is so the people who are getting rich off the back of all of you can stay in power and keep exploiting you all and keep you misdirected, keep you confused, uh, and, and facing pointing your anger in the wrong direction.

Fair enough. So, um, you would probably say that, uh, uh, you would, uh, campaign against, uh, or or maybe not campaign against, but you would make a point against, let's say, your party.

Yes. I don't think they're offering anything to anybody that's anywhere useful. I think they are offering delusion. And more than that, actually, at this moment in time, I find it honestly, jotic. I find it kind of criminal to be trying to bring people back to the idea that bourgeois politics will deliver for them when they're waking up to the fact that it won't. And on top of that, when you look at all of the deep, deep and urgent crises facing working people right now, which are urgent and which urgently need attention, whether it's the, you know, the genocide that needs urgent attention to do something, or the housing crisis, or the hunger crisis, or the employment crisis, or all the problems that are facing working people that need an urgent response, that need us to work out how to organize ourselves, use our collective power, get rid of the leaderships who are tying us to the imperialist system, and actually use our mass organization so that we, as a class, can exercise our power and start to fight for ourselves. Now, this is urgent. What are they saying to people? "Sign up to our mailing list. Come along to some meetings, and we'll get organized for the general election in 2029." It's actually a criminal endeavor in sewing false hope and b, in keeping people busy doing nothing while the ruling class carries on with its policy of driving into World War II, committing genocides. And Palestine is not the only one. Ask the Yemenis. Ask the Syrians, right? Ask the Lebanese, ask the Congolese. Um, committing all these genocides right now in our faces and, and pushing down ever harder on the, on the conditions of workers at home and repressing all of those who try to stand up and, and stop any of that. All of this requires the working class to, to urgently organize itself in its own interest to, to stop all of this in its track and start fighting for itself. Uh, the idea that, um, a kind of, um, wishy-washy, wouldn't it, you know, where everybody comes together and does their little wish list of how they would like the world to be and sits in a room and talks about it, you know, how we can, how we can build a parliamentary organization in time for 2029, is actually a criminal diversion of people's real desire to, to fix the problems that they see.

We'll leave it there, Ji. This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for your time.

You're welcome. Nice to meet you.

All right. Hi, my name is Aish Man. I, along with Jotis Man, have started this platform. The last two years, we have tried to build content for the left and progressive forces. We have interviewed economists, historians, political commentators, and activists so far. If you have liked our content so far and want us to build an archive for the left, I have two requests for you. Please do consider donating for the cause. Link is in the description below. Also, if you are not able to do so, don't feel sad. You can always like our videos and share our videos to your comrades. Finally, don't forget to hit the subscribe button.

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