Forty years ago, on 12 October 1984 - when British miners were 7 months into their 13-month strike against pit closures - the Irish Republican Army set off a bomb inside Brighton's Grand Hotel. Their target was Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, along with dozens of Tory colleagues, was in town for the Conservative's annual party conference.

   Thatcher escaped unhurt - a matter of some regret for many among the working class at the time. This was probably the one and only time that an IRA terror attack had “popular” approval, such was the hatred Thatcher evoked among those on the receiving end of her anti-social and anti- working class policies.

   But while the bomb missed Thatcher when it exploded in the early hours of the morning, it blew off part of the front of the hotel, collapsing several floors. Five conference delegates were killed and 31 seriously injured, among them the wife of Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Norman “on-your-bike” Tebbit. He was another despised figure, who had famously told the unemployed to get on their bicycles to look for a job, implying that the only reason they had no work was because they made no effort to find it. His wife was left permanently paralysed as a result of her injuries.

   In the aftermath of the bombing, the scene outside the hotel was chaotic; evacuated guests possessed nothing but the pyjamas and nightgowns they were wearing when the bomb went off. Brighton's “Marks and Spencer” opened early to offer them a free set of clothes and toiletries.

   Thatcher, who had initially been whisked away from the scene, returned in order to address the gathered press, the traumatised delegates and onlookers. She surprised everyone by announcing melodramatically that the conference must go on, exactly as scheduled! For her, it was obviously an unprecedented opportunity to deliver a demagogic closing speech. Never mind that many of her fellows were lying severely injured in hospital or dead in the morgue. In fact at this point bodies were still being found under the rubble and nobody knew what the toll of killed or injured would be.

   Within hours, however, to a standing ovation, Thatcher defiantly declared that not only had the attack failed in its objective “to cripple Her Majesty's democratically elected Government” but that (...) “all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail”. Rhetoric which was to be expected, of course. But the real purpose of this speech - prepared before the bomb - was to attack the striking miners and the rest of the organised working class behind them.

Attacking the miners: her “democracy” and theirs

The wife of one of the “working” miners had been invited to address the conference. Thatcher praised the bravery of those who “kept the industry alive” by working during the strike – saying “they are lions”... while condemning the intransigence of the overwhelming majority (142,000!) of those on strike.

   According to her, the “strike was not of this Government's seeking, nor of its making”. Which was, of course, patent nonsense. Her government had deliberately provoked a stand-off with the miners. For one thing, the miners had brought down the government of her predecessor, Ted Heath, in 1974. And for another, if she managed to defeat them, it would serve as a lesson to the rest of the working class, which had fought and won against the Labour government's pay policy in the “Winter of Discontent" strikes of 1978-1979.

   So at the beginning of 1984, the National Coal Board announced the closure of pits which it had previously guaranteed would stay open - and at a time when there were enough coal reserves to withstand a strike. Several pits were already on strike when the union declared the national strike, and without a national ballot. Thatcher, the self-proclaimed enemy of the working class, led the accusations against the strikers that their strike was therefore “undemocratic”. But of course the strike had already been spread by the miners themselves: a far more democratic way of “voting”.

   Thatcher “explained" to party conference why the strike was not yet resolved, blaming the executive of the National Union of Mineworkers for refusing a pay offer, when she knew full well that this strike was not about pay. Her argument was comical: she asked how workers could “dare” to ask for theirjobs to be guaranteed, which is what the miners’ “coal not dole” slogan demanded! “They know that what they are demanding has never been granted either to miners or to workers in any other industry”, said she: “Why, then, demand it? Why ask for what they know cannot be conceded? There can be only one explanation. They did not want a settlement. They wanted a strike”.

   She went on to accuse the miners of de facto wanting to overthrow the state: “What we have seen in this country is the emergence of an organised revolutionary minority who are prepared to exploit industrial disputes, but whose real aim is the breakdown of law and order and the destruction of democratic parliamentary government. If their tactics are to be allowed to succeed, if they are not brought under the control of the law, we shall see them again at every industrial dispute organised by militant union leaders anywhere in the country”.

   She ended thus: “The nation faces what is probably the most testing crisis of our time – the battle between the extremists and the rest. (...) This Government will not weaken. This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail”.

   The mining areas were inundated with police; in the course of the strike 11,291 strikers were arrested and 8,392 were charged. There were hundreds of serious injuries and 4 deaths. For Thatcher, crushing the miners was the first step in pre-empting a challenge to her rule and, moreover, her plans to sell off public industries and utilities. She mobilised her state - the armed bodies of men - to defend the interests (and future interests) of the capitalist class. Her conference speech included the promise of further “denationalisations" as she called them. In fact after her successful privatisation of British Telecom and British Airways, virtually the whole of the public sector was to be rolled back and dismantled, and handed over to private profiteers.

From the fight for civil rights to civil war

For working class people in Northern Ireland, Thatcher's defence of “democracy” was risible - even if they were not supporters of IRA terrorism.

   “British democracy" in Northern Ireland had denied the (mainly) Catholic poor of basic civil rights ever since partition in 1921. It was only after a sustained fight by the Irish Civil Rights Movement and its Housing Action Committees in the 1960s, that some of these rights, like the right to vote in local elections, for instance, were granted. Official discrimination against the ghettoised Catholic population however did not disappear. Loyalist, Unionist (Protestant) pro-“queen and country” institutions enforced a sectarian divide in the population, imposing an apartheid-like system to defend unionist privilege. A privilege, by the way, that dated back to 1610, when England's King James the First planted Protestant settlers in Ireland (giving them land which had been expropriated from the native Catholic Irish) in order to reinforce Eng|and’s hold over its first colony.

   When British troops were sent to Northern Ireland in 1969 to “keep the peace” after the fight for civil rights had blown up into near-civil war - with Unionist mobs, backed by the Unionist-controlled police and paramilitaries burning Catholics out of their homes - the poor in Belfast’s working class areas soon discovered why the soldiers were really there. So on the contrary, in their eyes, it was the British state and its army which was destroying their attempt at “democracy”, by terrorising them and upholding a sectarian, Unionist, “Orange State".

The commemorative documentary

The BBC documentary “Bombing Brighton: the plot to kill Thatcher”, shown on the 40th anniversary of the IRA attack, is well worth watching. But while doing so, it is impossible not to think of today's context.

   The film shows harrowing scenes from the aftermath of the bombing - survivors, some wounded, emerge, covered in dust, from underneath the rubble. One cannot avoid making a comparison with the bombing of Gaza - but of course in Gaza, there are no firefighters, engineers, ambulance crews to rescue anyone, or even proper TV cameras to record the catastrophe. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, not one presenter of this TV documentary (or any of the others shown around the same time) - felt the need to draw a parallel.

   The film explains the context of the bombing. It shows Thatcher responding to the killing of the Conservative Shadow Secretary for Northern Ireland, Airey Neave, on the eve of the 1979 general election - which the Tories would go on to win. A bomb had been placed under his car, not by the IRA in fact, but by the much smaller Irish National Liberation Army.

   Their reason they targeted Neave was because he had proposed to change the government's Northern Ireland policy from “Ulsterisation" to all-out war against the IRA and any others opposing the British occupation. “Ulsterisation" (also called “Containment") had entailed replacing British army personnel with local forces, to avoid casualties amongst soldiers from the mainland and consequent calls for “troops out”or even “Britain out” from the population “at home”.

   Thatcher claimed (you see this in the documentary) that it was the assassination of her “friend, the kind and gentle”Airey Neave, which caused her to opt for a policy of “Criminalisation” instead, that is to deny that the fight against Britain's occupation and partition of the island of Ireland, was a “political” struggle. Under Thatcher, anyone involved in this fight was to be treated henceforth as a common criminal.

   One should keep in mind, however, that Airey Neave’s proposal for all-out war against the guerilla militias of the IRA and INLA, who lived among the population in the Catholic ghettoes, would have turned Northern Ireland into a version of today's Gaza. Indeed, all-out war would have meant bombing all the homes along the Falls Road, for instance, since the “terrorist” operatives lived among the population. Ordinary civilians would have been considered to be acting as “human shields”, protecting their sons, brothers, sisters, etc., who were involved in the struggle... Apparently even Thatcher could not bring herself to implement such a drastic policy - or her advisors would not let her.

Prisoners fight for political status

Thatcher did not invent the policy of “Criminalisation”, however. It had already begun under

   Labour's Callaghan government, which withdrew “special category status” from Republican prisoners as early as 1976, just after the new Maze prison, the H-Block, was opened. They were forced to wear prison uniforms, had their privileges withdrawn, had to “slop out”, etc.

   However, the prisoners refused to have their dignity stripped from them in this way. So they began a “blanket protest" - covering themselves with a prison blanket, and wearing nothing underneath. Their five demands were: “the right not to wear a prison uniform; the right not to do prison work; the right of free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits; the right to one visit, one letter, and one parcel per week; full restoration of remission lost through the protest”.

   By 1978, with the prison authorities unrelenting, this escalated to the so-called “dirty” protest, with 300 Republican prisoners refusing to slop out and instead smearing their faeces on the walls of their cells, where it soon dried and thus stopped smelling.

   The online news resource “the Conversation” gives a graphic description of what this protest was like: “Beyond most people's imagining, this world of faeces-handling, unremitting stench, and contamination was frequently shared with a cellmate. There was no cell sanitation, so each performed bodily functions in front of another. They slept on mattresses on the floor because their organisation decreed [sic] that they should destroy all cell furniture. Even the mattress covers were torn apart to spread the foul mixtures. (...)”

   “This was the nightmare of the dirty protest (...). It lasted for 40 months and was the most remarkable campaign in any prison anywhere, certainly in the 20th century, and possibly at any time”.

“Viva” Bobby Sands

By 1979, Mrs Thatcher had taken office and she is shown in the BBC documentary speaking in that artificial drawn-out upper-class accent, about how she will never give in to “those criminals”. So at the beginning of 1981, Republican prisoners in the Maze decided to launch a hunger strike, demanding political status, with the same 5 demands..

   The first prisoner to begin refusing food - on 1 March 1981 - was the prisoners’ elected “commanding officer”, the 27-year-old Bobby Sands. However something happened shortly after this which would change the strategy of the IRA. Frank Maguire, a republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died suddenly of a heart attack. Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing, decided to put forward Bobby Sands as their candidate (standing as a “Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner”) in the subsequent by-election. On 9 April, Bobby Sands was declared the winner.

   His victory resulted in international celebration - the face of Bobby Sands appeared in public squares all around the world; bonfires were lit and fireworks set off. No surprise that Thatcher responded with a law to prevent any prisoner serving a sentence of 1 year or more from standing in an election thereafter. Nevertheless, from this point onwards Sinn Féin/the IRA were to adopt a strategy using “the ballot” alongside the “the bullet", systematically contesting elections on both sides of the border, preparing for the day when they would take their place in the bourgeois democratic institutions of the capitalist class system.

   Bobby Sands died on 5 May 1981 in the Maze's prison hospital after 66 days on hunger strike. Another 9 prisoners were then to die, one after the other. Thatcher refused to concede political status. Her intransigence is discussed in the BBC documentary. Former Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison, tells the interviewer how shocked he was by the way in which Thatcher dealt (indeed refused to deal) with the hunger strikers: “She killed people to us, she represented war”. In fact this shock was felt by very many ordinary people - all around the world - whether they supported the Republicans or not.

   This is the last verse of a song by the Irish band, the Wolf Tones called simply “Joe MacDonnell”, who was hunger striker number four. It gives an idea of the frame of mind of the prisoners; isolated from the real world, (even when free, they were in hiding) and their idea that they were engaged in a “heroic” struggle, even religious martyrdom... It is the regretful last line which is most revealing.

“May God shine on you, Bobby Sands, for the courage you have shown

May your glory and your fame be widely known

And Francis Hughes and Ray McCreesh, who died unselfishly

And Patsy O'Hara, and the next in line is me

And those who lie behind me, may your courage be the same

And I pray to God my life is not in vain

Ah, but sad and bitter was the year of 1 981

For everything I've lost, and nothing’s won. ”

This is the chorus:

“And you dared to call me a terrorist while you looked down your gun

When I think of all the deeds that you had done

You had plundered many nations, divided many lands

You had terrorised their peoples, you ruled with an iron hand

And you brought this reign of terror to my land”...

    Are hunger strikes ever worth it? Thatcher did have to give in, in the end. The demands of the hunger strikers were eventually granted, but not until long after all of these 10 young men were dead and buried.

She made a U-turn

On 15 November 1985, barely one year after the Brighton bomb, Thatcher reluctantly signed the “Anglo-Irish Agreement”, laying down some of the groundwork for the 1998 Belfast Peace Agreement, which, 13 years later, finally brought the last phase of the Anglo-Irish war (1969-1999) - euphemistically called “the Troubles” - to an end.

   According to CAIN, Ulster University's “Conflict and Politics in Northern Ire/and” website, the 1985 agreement “was the most important development in Anglo-Irish relations since the 1920s. Both Governments confirmed that there would be no change in the status of Northern Ireland without the consent of a majority of its citizens. Both Governments also viewed the Agreement as a means of inducing unionist leaders in Northern Ireland to accept a devolved power-sharing arrangement”.

   Of course this agreement in no way meant an acceptance by the British government of the right of the Irish to full self-determination and therefore a united Ireland. But by agreeing, for the first time, to what amounted to a referendum over reunification in the future, it was seen as a step forward by moderate Republicans. That said, in 1985 the Unionists were still in the majority in the Six Counties - and this agreement thus gave them the veto. The irony is that they were so appalled that Catholic nationalists from the Republic of Ireland should have been consulted by “their” prime minister, that their MPs in the House of Commons all resigned their seats in protest! In fact for pro-Unionist Thatcher herself, it was almost a step too far, as she admits in her autobiography: “I started from the need for greater security, which was imperative. If this meant making limited political concession to the South, much as I disliked this kind of bargaining, I had to contemplate it”.

   Anyway this turned her claim at the Brighton party conference that the IRA’s terrorism had “failed”, on its head.

The terrorism of the oppressed

Let us state clearly, at this point, that in no way did, nor would, revolutionary Communists like ourselves endorse the narrow petty-bourgeois nationalism of the IRA; nor do we agree with terrorism as a form of struggle. It is a blind alley and worse, inevitably brings deliberate retribution on ordinary civilians from the “enemy”. If class struggle is not an option when there is oppression and denial of basic rights, and that may be the case for all kinds of reasons, then the task is to ensure that everything is done to develop it - by politicising and organising workers and convincing those who are divided by sectarian, religious or any other "differences" of their common enemy. Because to be sure, it is a common enemy.

   Certainly this kind of political work in the context of military occupation and the operations of “illegal" nationalist paramilitary groups, would have been dangerous to undertake in Northern Ireland. And it would have been difficult not to react when, for instance, British soldiers fired live or rubber bullets, made constant raids and arrests, placing suspects in prison without trial - a situation which Palestinians on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, for instance, have been experiencing every day for decades.

   But while IRA operatives on the ground may have been brutal, misguided and without regard for their “targets”' lives, the lives of bystanders, or indeed the lives of their own supporters and compatriots (who were victims of the British state's reprisals), there are two points which need to be made as regards one’s attitude to these “terrorists”. And it's important to make them, given the parallel today with Hamas and Hezbollah - the two “terrorist” organisations currently fighting the Israeli state.

   So, first, let us be clear that Irish nationalists’ cause" i.e., the struggle to be free of British rule was undeniably valid, as was and is, every struggle to resist colonisation, settler plantation, partition, land theft, oppression and denial of civil rights - and military occupation... Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all regarded it as the duty of internationalist Communists to support these struggles, which later also took on an anti-imperialist character, if not in deed, certainly in word, while maintaining their political criticism and class approach.

   And the second point to make is that it is understandable that organisations such as the IRA almost always arise in given, similar, circumstances in order to fight against the colonisers and oppressors. In Ireland, the British oppressed the native Irish and denied them civil rights; the country was deliberately kept as an agricultural backwater. Little wonder that the politics of the Fenians and Irish Republican Brotherhood (the forerunners of the IRA) expressed the aspirations of the peasant and the petty-bourgeois. And worse than that, Catholic reaction (like Islamic reaction) meant the leaders of their struggle aspired merely to take power in place of the “usurper”. It’s true that by the 1970s, Sinn Fein claimed that its political programme presented “socialist” aims. But today, this same organisation heads the government of Northern Ireland and has shown very clearly on which side of the class divide it stands.

   If genuine anti-capitalist revolutionaries help to win a victory against the coloniser (and this is certainly their duty), they will, in the aftermath, find themselves in a confrontation with former comrades at arms. This was already a situation which was developing in Ireland in the first part of the 20th century.

Connolly's workers' army

James Connolly, one of the organisers of the 1916 Easter Rising - the failed insurrection against the occupying British army - certainly saw the “big picture” and knew that a struggle confined to nationalist objectives would not free the poor and the working class. But he knew too, that there was no alternative but to struggle and to try to build class consciousness in the process, at every possible opportunity.

   The British army executed him (they had to tie him to a chair because he was badly wounded) after they had crushed the insurrection, which had seen socialist-minded workers from his Irish Citizen's Army fighting side by side with nationalist Republicans. Connolly had anticipated the defeat of the uprising. But he dreaded a future where struggles were led only by nationalists. When the scheme for partition of Ireland was put forward before World War 1, to retain six counties of nine-county Ulster as “British”, this is what Connolly wrote: “Such a scheme as that agreed to by Redmond and Devlin [reactionary nationalists who collaborated with the British, including with the WW1 war effort], the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured. (Irish Worker, 14 March 1914)”.

   Connolly was a Marxist revolutionary. He undertook to take up arms and encouraged fellow workers and trade unionists to do so - to fight division; to fight partition, even when this was suicidal - but he hoped it might galvanise others into action. However the problem for the oppressed Irish, North and South was always that any “war” they engaged in for their freedom was going to be asymmetric; that like the Boers in 1900, they might be able to hold out with guerilla tactics, but eventually they would lose. It is a case of the weak against the strong. And in fact that brings us back to terrorist tactics: these are the tactics adopted everywhere and in all periods of history - tactics of the weak against the strong. And are always doomed to fail.

The last word goes to Eleanor Marx

In the face of the denial of civil rights , constant harassment, internment without trial, torture, and with troops on the streets - the Provisional IRA emerged in 1969. In Israel today, it is Hamas and other smaller nationalist organisations who, after 17 years of Israeli state blockade and encroachment, in the context of 76 years of living as refugees on land which belonged to their forefathers, without civil rights, in quasi-“bantustans”, resort to suicide missions and indeed, the attack of 7 October, which so horrifically spiralled out of control.

   Years lived under occupation, repression, blockade, harassment, exile, isolated in solitary confinement in prison - what kind of outlook does this produce? Of course, that does not mean that terrorist actions should be excused. But does it mean that those who carry out such actions do not warrant sympathy and even solidarity?

   In the late 1880s, when the whole of Ireland was a colony of Britain, the Irish Republican Brotherhood along with other organisations - funded from Irish-American immigration – conducted a huge bombing campaign in London in the name of their fight for“home rule". There were multiple bombs placed in railway stations, police stations, army barracks - and even in the London Underground. As a result, 4 people were killed, including a small child, and 86 were injured. Unsurprisingly, there was a huge backlash among the British population - which also targeted ordinary Irish workers.

   Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor, wrote an article entitled “The Irish Dynamiters” reminding readers “what socialism is” to counter this backlash. While she obviously did not defend the bombings, she reminded her readers of the cause and motivation of the fight for Irish liberation, and in particular, she exposed in very graphic detail, the terrible treatment of Irish prisoners. Her whole article is worth reading - and all the more so, in the context of what is going on in Gaza, Lebanon, the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem today. Here we reproduce an extract:

   “Those who know anything about the real meaning of Socialism will not need to be told that with such attempts as those of the ‘dynamiters’ at Victoria Station, Ludgate Hill, etc., Socialists are not in sympathy. But many do not know what Socialism means, and it may therefore be necessary that I should preface my remarks on the Irish dynamiters by a few words on ‘outrages’ generally

   “To consider the use of physical force as anything very desirable in itself, is what no Socialist dreams of doing - save in the imagination of our scurvy politicians. \Ve know we are engaged in a terrible class struggle - a struggle not, as so many believe, for the replacing of one class despotism by another, but for the abolition of all class rule.

   “There are those among us who think this can be brought about by ‘gradual development’ and moral force only. Others of us believe we shall not be allowed to thus bring about a ‘silent moral revolution’. History teaches us that no great social revolution has ever come about by the use of mere moral force, and history has taught us that no class willingly expropriates itself. In the struggle between king and noble, between noble and bourgeois, something more than moral persuasion was resorted to. It was not quite by ‘gradual development’ that England confiscated the Church lands or that America freed her slaves.

   “No doubt if all human beings were capable of developing equally, force would never be needed. But the reactionary - i.e., undeveloped and unevolvable - class, whatever it is, will make a stand for its vested wrongs. When the time comes, I, for my own part, believe the bourgeoisie will resort (as it does now, for the matter of that) to force, and that we shall be driven, by the very circumstance, to fight for our cause - a cause which, as it is that of Humanity, must triumph.

   “But be this as it may, no Socialist looks on ‘outrages’ as a virtue or thinks that violence can ever be anything but a miserable necessity. \Vhen it is not a necessity it is naturally a crime. With the acts of the Irish dynamiters Socialists do not and cannot sympathise - but are we therefore to be unjust to these men? Why should they be called cowards and dastards? Surely they risk their lives for what they foolishly believe to be the good of their unhappy land. No man - no matter what his folly - is wholly despicable or a ‘dastard’ who is willing to die for what he believes is a good cause. It is positively grotesque to hear the penny-a-liners who come so smug into Fleet Street, and who would not fight with their own quill-armed shadows, brand these men ‘cowards’. It is grotesque to hear some of our bold shopkeepers, who probably would not have the poor courage to sell the Freethinker, denounce these men as ‘dastardly wretches’. Wicked as are their acts, foolish and mistaken as are their notions, cowards at least these fanatics are not.

   “But in speaking of the dynamiters there is another important matter which Englishmen systematically ignore - the long years of torture that many of these men suffered in British ‘bastilles’. When Mr Gladstone assumed an indignant attitude of mind at the treatment of Bomba’s [the King of Naples] prisoners; when he thundered against the unspeakable Turk or melted over the interesting Greek, England applauded. When Vera Zasulich shot Trepov [governor of St Petersburg] and a jury acquitted her, all the world echoed that acquittal. But neither Bomba’s prisoners, nor Bulgarians, nor even Nihilists, have suffered more than Irishmen in English gaols.”

***

Today, Ireland is still divided, but the war is over: the Provisional IRA was “contained” and eventually agreed to lay down its weapons, after 30 years of wielding them. Maybe at some point the population, north and south, will decide on reunification.

   But today, when we read Eleanor Marx's words, it is the Palestinian prisoners who come to mind - over 11,000 of them, many of them teenagers, held without trial in Israeli jails. And what also comes to mind is how the leader of Hamas, Yayha Sinwar spent 22 years confined in Israeli prisons, before being freed in a hostage deal, which exchanged just 1 Israeli soldier for 1,026 Palestinian prisoners. This is the relative value of Palestinian life; this is what conditions “terrorist” thought and methods.

   After Sinwar had been assassinated by the Israeli Defence Force by two blasts from a tank's barrel, while he sat in a chair in a bombed-out building, injured and unarmed, throwing sticks at the drone which was hovering above him, an Israeli journalist who had interviewed him in prison, was asked what kind of a man he was (as if he would know)? He said “he had evil eyes”. After 7 October, the president of the USA, Joe Biden repeated the oft-told tale that Hamas killed babies and cut their heads off.

   As the rotting and ever more reactionary capitalist system struggles to survive, Communists cannot be too surprised that backward thinking, conspiracies and religious obscurantism are revived as it takes its dying breaths. And that it becomes enough for the political leaders of the “free world”(l) to label those who fight against them (by whatever methods) as “evil”! There is a moral stand to take, in the absence of the possibility of intervening. Which means, de facto, to take the side of those who fight the oppressor, while abhorring their methods and their policy, just as Eleanor Marx abhorred the IRB “fanatics” in her day - since their oppressor is also our enemy.

    Of course, the way to end this tragi-comic end-stage of capitalist-imperialist madness, takes more than a moral stand. It is through class struggle, waged collectively by all those who have nothing to lose and everything to gain - the poor and working classes, Arab, Israeli, Russian, Ukrainian - since this fight is able to, in fact must, transcend borders and all of the imposed boundaries, even the rivers of blood, which divide the working class today.

 

26 October 2024