SERVANTS OF IMPERIALISM, DOMESTIC NATIONALIST, TIGHTEN THE LOOP AROUND THE NECK OF MACEDONIA

ABOUT OUR PERSPECTIVES AND NEW NAMINGS IN THE BALKANS INCUDING ALREADY ESTABLISHED TERM OF "WESTERN BALKAN": We share here the comment on the FB post about the new name of Macedonia (no, it will not be called St.Petersburg, someone heard that it will be called the Republic of Ilinden Macedonia) and our comment was as follows:

     The rulers of the world are rearranging the Balkans on a right-wing basis, and this degradation of Macedonia's name is also the first step towards ethnic disintegration. The Albanian parliament recently renamed current Macedonia's national minority in Albania, and it became Bulgarian national minority in Albania ... The Macedonian Orthodox Church has asked the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to become its "church mother" and Bulgarian church accepted this - which is not surprising. However, it is amazing that the Serbian Orthodox Church accepted with approval the merging of the Macedonian church with Bulgarian... The Bulgarian Brain Foundation started in Macedonian schools the action "my hero", in which students of some Macedonian schools in essays describe their admiration for Bulgarian officers from the First World War...
     These are not all coincidences. It is a deliberate and very comprehensive action that somebody pays and whose final act will be the disintegration of Macedonia along ethnic lines - the recipe of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Black is written to us with new bosses behind the neck, but this is our reality that we should not underestimate in the way of petty bourgeois consciousness of sentimental discharges. It is necessary to face this reality seriously, in the manner of an organized working class. The only way is to respond to the changes that are our reality and not to be exhausted in isolated and infertile actions... Synchronized actions of capitalist servicemen of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania should be noted. How smoothly and silently tighten the loop around the neck of Macedonia following the script written in the centers of power. So they strangled Yugoslavia too. And what are we doing? We are taking solo actions in nationalistic strait jackets. Within this framework we have no salvation and help, and as far as the insoluble frames seems insurmountable, we must break and crush them. Only the unique working class of the Balkans can prevent the Balkans from becoming a devastated Frankenstein, made in the mirror and image of its imperialist master

NOVI BORAC INTERNATIONAL

MEMORIES ON THE TUZLA'S REVOLUTION

MEMORIES ON THE TUZLA'S REVOLUTION


       It is the centenary of the Great October Revolution, and at the same time the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Revolution in Tuzla (February 2014), when workers and students demolished the government of Tuzla canton and declared "no" to privatization, ethnic division of Bosnia and the breakup of Yugoslavia ... (1) I arrived in Tuzla as a delegate of the Erased Workers of Slovenia, the day after the government fell (February 8 or 9, if I remember well), a strong revolutionary emotion was felt in the streets of Tuzla. These were the days of anarchy, the government building was destroyed, burnt, organized groups of workers and people carrying banners and flags marched thru Tuzla and in the cold air, despite the chaos, the atmosphere was hopeful. Everywhere there were expectations about forming a popular government, which was a workers' request.
         I took a room at the Tuzla Pensioner's House, and there, on the third floor, immediately received a comrade from the Left party (“Lijevi”), who vehemently informed me about the situation. He was talking, I was writing, full two and a half hours (2). Although I was warned from the side of the French Independent Workers' Party (POI), before I went to Tuzla, that in Bosnia and in Tuzla, just like in Slovenia, were active Pabloites (opportunists) I did not know what exactly this would mean in the situation of insurgent Tuzla. Then, when the comrade from Left party began to inform me about the preparation for organizing the "plenum," I realized. That same evening, in my telephone conversation with Pavluško Imširević, I expressed my opinion that "plenums" were the beginning of counter-revolution. This was what I was told by the experience from Slovenia where, through similar quasi-anarchist formations, the regime established a system of control of marginal groups (Erased!) and rebellious people. All of this was led, of course, by professionals, politicologists from the state universities, what is in line with Badiou's statement written in the book "The meaning of Sarkozy"(Verso, 2008) that universities in the West after 1968 were strictly controlled by secret services and turned from revolutionary bastions into instruments of counter-revolution. Pavluško was not sure what was going on exactly, he understood what I was saying, but he advised me to wait for the conclusion until the results were shown. It seems that he believed that workers will be capable to face and solve the problem ...
          And the results quickly showed up. "Plenums" served as a means of diluting revolutionary energy by which the class character of the revolution turned into ordinary civil discontent - as if the people rebelled for unresolved communal problems.(3) The creation of a popular government was blocked, and soon plenums “voted” in favor of the government of "experts" who were planted by political godfathers from the shadow using the opportunist left-wing apparatus of Left party. The "Experts", of course, quickly showed their face and the people from Tuzla had already figured out a fraud in April, but it was too late - "they chose them themselves" - in democratic, the most democratic way by the means of "direct democracy". The opportunist left (Left party, Enough!, “Democratic Socialism”, New Left, Marks23 etc.) proved to be the main ally of mafia capitalism against workers and peoples in the Balkans, and it is financed from the centers of the opportunist left in Germany (Die Linke and its Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Soros' Open Foundation).(4)


(1) Speaking on Austrian TV, Valentin Inzko, High Representative of the Western Powers threatened: “…if the hooliganism continues EUFOR [EU] troops may be asked to intervene”. As if in echo, the Director of the Directorate for the Coordination of Police Units in the Bosnian Federation, Himzo Selimović, tendered his resignation and, admitting the inability of the police to ensure the safety of members of the Bosnian Presidency, called on the international community and the European Union to consider deploying the international military forces in Bosnia if events were to repeat themselves.

(2) The openness and comprehensiveness of the information, later I realized, is the result of a misunderstanding. At the presentation, I greeted the Tuzla's comrades in the name of Slovenian Erased Workers and then also in the name of the “comrades from Paris” (Having in mind the POI, not the NACP). Since Tuzla's Pabloites expected the arrival of representatives of French Pabloites (which I did not know at the time, but later I heard they were visited later in March by the president of the French New-Anti-Capitalist Party (NACP), Olivier Besancenot). Probably, when I mentioned the “comrades from Paris”, the Tuzla's comrade, the Pabloite, thought that I was coming as a predecessor of the French Pabloites. So, by chance, getting the extensive information, I probably heard something that I may not be allowed to know.

(3) At the first "plenum" there were 15 people, at the second 25, at the third 700 and the fourth, through the video link, 6 500 citizens.

(4)That the so-called “extreme left” ally of the capitalists has been shown not only in Greece during the Tsipras government, but also in France in 2018 during a strike of railroad workers against the privatization of state railroads NSFC , when “extreme left” of MP Melenchon "Unbowed France" staged a "party" in the Opera place giving opportunity to police action of broad dimension and redirecting the political attention from the strike to street clashes.

SOROS' LEFT IN PARIS 2018 ORGANIZES "PARTIES" SIMILAR AS IN TUZLA 2014 IT ORGANIZED "PLENUMS"

SOROS' LEFT IN PARIS 2018 ORGANIZES "PARTIES" SIMILAR AS IN TUZLA 2014 IT ORGANIZED "PLENUMS"

       France was hit by a wave of workers' strikes in response to a privatization policy led by a financial capital agent, French president, Emanuel Macron. In the foreground, a three-month railroad strike that began on April 3 paralyzed the French state, challenging not only the announced privatization of the French state railways (SNFC), but also the credibility of president Macron himself and his devastating, slavish, privatization policy. When the workers' power is strengthened so much that it threatens the power of capital over the people - the so-called "extreme left" (a left that not need the class), their main sponsors are George Soros along with his German friends from Die Linke and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, is activated. 
        The goals of the extreme left all over the world are to dilute the power of the working class and make it dysfunctional, so that the energy of organized workers misses its goals, evaporates, goes empty. Labor actions are exhausted in that way. Extreme leftists showed their slavish function to capital not only in Tuzla 2014 but also elsewhere in the Balkans (in Sofia, Belgrade, in Ljubljana and Romania, while in Greece, where the people gave them power to rule, they carried out counterrevolution) and we see that „extreme leftists“ are equally serving to their masters in Western Europe, this time in Paris. 
        When a railroad strike erupted, blocking the work of the government, European Union envoy Jean-Luc Mélenchon , the leader of the extreme left-wing movement, "La France Insoumise" („Unbowed France“), emerged with the idea of ​​starting "protest parties" in France (read: "plenums") against president Macron. According to the plan of Melenchon, these "parties" would be led by "multi-sector open assemblies" of citizens and workers. This means disassembling organized workers and their leadership (remember the shouts from provocateurs in Tuzla, Sofia, Ljubljana and Belgrade "We do not need leaders!") and subordinate them to "open assemblies" (read "plenums" of citizens) and that means destroying, diluting, the strike. 
        The party in Paris started yesterday on May 5, and the government sent 2,000 policemen on them (police action want to say: "parties" are dangerous to the government). It's completely redirecting attention from the strike to street clashes and possibly an attempt (future) banning strikes if the unrest is escalating. The escalation of the riot is also a threat to the workers. Who else has a suspicion of what is the role of Soros's left should start thinking about seriously... It is good that the leadership of the workers' strike were not fooled yet by Melenchon so that "parties" run without the workers.

(On the pictures: a railroad strike with the resulting crowds on the first two images and a third picture is the Melelenchon "party" in the Opera Square in Paris, 5.5.18)

NOVI BORAC INTERNATIONAL

MARXISM AND DEMOCRACY (Novi Borac International)

MARXISM AND DEMOCRACY (Novi Borac International)

            Recently a heated debate stirred up the ranks of the French section of the Fourth International concerning democratic relations within the Marxist movement as something which was also reflected on the Independent Workers’ Party (POI). The key question was the right to a different opinion and to the creation of an inner tendency based on the different political view. Both the section and the Party were divided into greater and smaller parts, into a current and a tendency which later took to calling itself „democratic“ and that is how the Independent Democratic Workers' Party (POID) came into being. However, the issue of democracy within the Marxist movement does not exhaust itself in local rivalry among French comrades. It becomes evident right away in the relationship between activists of bigger and smaller nations, of the „center“ and the „periphery.“ In fact, this problem lingers on for quite some time but only recently has it escalated; it can be conditionally called a „personnel issue.“ Can the French comrades lead a personnel policy in the Balkans? They have given us considerable help in our constitution and yet their help must not compromise democracy of our relations...

           The dispute started concerning our assessment of a certain „comrade“ of ours, otherwise very respected in Paris, while we, in the Balkans – from the very start and with good reasons – have disputed the opinions of the French comrades today belonging to the „democratic“ tendency. For two years this issue has been a source a certain tension. While collecting signatures for the Palestine petition one member of our Editorial Board left us since the French comrades, by-passing our office, used certain “strong connections” of their favorite...The dispersal of the editorship of the New Militant seems to be something irrelevant for Paris... The arguments supporting our opinion have accumulated in time and, yet, Paris has shown no interest in them.

          More recently this very comrade - “very much respected” by Parisians - has openly taken part in the election campaign in Serbia on the side of the pro-nationalist “Left” closely connected both with the present government and the reactionary circles. For this he was awarded a position of the clerk and though we presented all this – clearly and with evidence – to the comrades in Paris, no reaction followed. We first got the answer, “we shall ask him about this...”, and later “no reply from him yet...” and that’s where it all ended. This situation might be analogous to the one in which we, from the Balkans, would keep up our relations with Cambadélis (1) and use the same ways of „argumentation“ as our Parisian comrades and say that there is nothing wrong in it since he is, first of all, a „good guy“ and, besides, we can still use his political connections... and to objections and proofs, we would give replies such as, „all right, we shall ask him...“ or „no reply from him yet...“.

           Have our Parisian comrades made any sign of recognizing their responsibility with respective consequences? Has anyone at least made an excuse?... Of course not... That is how democracy is taken care of by those who parade as democrats. Perhaps the "democracy" is the name for the exercise of bureaucratic formalism?

1. Jean-Christopher Cambadélis, former Trotskyist, today a high executive of the ruling socialists.

Written by Dimitar Anakiev

HOW TO FINANCE REVOLUTION? HOW TO FINANCE AN ORDINARY MEETING? (Editorial No.8)

HOW TO FINANCE A REVOLUTION?
HOW TO FINANCE AN ORDINARY MEETING?
(Editorial No. 8)

        The destruction of the material base of a worker's life, of workers' movement, means its very independence is undermined. The question of how and in what way to restore material base, to provide for finances, is of crucial importance for the workers' movement. Do we have an answer to this question? What way are we to take in the process of restoring its material and political independence? The working class cannot be doomed to being financed by its class enemy since in this way it goes for class cooperation. Especially in the Balkans where riches are not in the hands of bourgeoisie but mafia, this issue is burning and much more dramatic than in the West. If the workers of the Balkans cannot reestablish their material base, does that mean they are doomed to charity of its class enemies, class friends and maybe even mafia? This and such bitter questions are posed in the days when we celebrate the jubilee of the Great October Revolution. Very few are relevant records of how Lenin, Trotsky and comrades used to finance their undertakings while today's Marxists seem unwilling to talk about it, regardless of how crucial it is. How, then, are we to finance a revolution? It seems that by opening up such an issue, the revolutionary theory steps on an irrational terrain since revolution cannot be financed from union or party membership fee. Not only because parties of independent workers today lack such mass membership as the Bolsheviks had in early 20th century (at the July Congress in 1917 registered were 240.000 members while in April there were only 80.000) but because union and party membership fees lack ideological and material capacity for financing any real struggle whatsoever.
      At the Balkans the state is such that not even activists' meetings can be financed. Those held today, in the largest part of the „Left“, are financed by Die Linke and its foundations such as Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung; consequently, they are meetings and actions and ideological copies of Philistine fake-left that likes to act and present itself as proletarian activity while in fact it is only raising fog to cover the capitalist caravan thus enabling it to go its own way.
      Again: to accept help from class friends and comrades, it is necessary to sign the deals providing for transparency without affecting independence of the party receiving the given help. This would mean that a given working group at the Balkans can accept someone else’s material help only under the condition that it has got free hand and freedom of decision-making. And this is very hard to agree upon.
       To accept help with only one objective, namely, to become a branch of a much richer class friend means democratic capitulation, that is, loss of one's own subjectivity. These days, as it happens, we are witnessing divergence of national, class and ideologically congenial groups of wealthy nations for the sake of preserving democratic rights. Then, how can we, sans-culottes and barefoot Balkan peoples, preserve our democratic rights that everyone wants to trample on? This is not so easy to find out. For this reason, what rules on the Balkans – otherwise lacking predisposition for a spineless lackey - is brigandage and it is hard to deny its full meaning for our territory. And brigandage is, as is well known, an anarchist phenomenon.

        That is why the task of Marxism and Marxists is to argumentatively discuss this problem and try to order, conceptualize and place it within some agreed framework of strategy and tactics. We are of the opinion that each true revolutionary and revolutionary organization will have to act in this way. If we fail to settle it today, the future of an independent workers' movement in the Balkans is not promising. It will either lose independence or will turn to brigandage and each one of us will settle for what suits him best: either among brigands or among lackeys. Yet, we hope that organized independent labor that has just begun to get organized in the Balkans, can find, in this region, a place and perspectives for itself.

Editorial Board

IMPERIALIST FINALE, MARXISTS WITHOUT BASE AND ENTRYISM, Editorial #7

IMPERIALIST FINALE, MARXISTS WITHOUT BASE AND ENTRYISM, Editorial #7

       It is in the finale of a great imperialist match that Venezuela and North Korea have found themselves. These are two states that are still resisting, at a high price, the world capitalist order. Even the driving force, soul and head of the capitalist imperialism today – the United States – have also found themselves under attack by their own policy of global imperialism: the state is devastated for a great number of jobs that are, in the master's greed for infinite profit, transferred to the cheap labor force markets. That is why many companies in America are closed down, including even the whole industrial branches (coal mines, for instance). Capitalism, in its gluttony, eats its own body besides gulping down the small and the powerless. The Republican Party has won the election under the slogan „America First“ which means it would withdraw from its imperialist adventures and take up the renewal of its ruined nation. That is why the conservatives' program was greeted by many notable communists all over the world. Still, all this is, as proverbially said, making a bill without the bartender. As early as 1961 American President Eisenhower warned that the state was led by the “military-industrial complex (MIC)”. However, the guys from the MIC, those that the Democratic Party has quite a fair understanding with, have nothing to do in America. They need new markets and new wars. Here one should remember Chomsky’s words about the MIC being not “specifically military”; it is simply the very heart of American industry. As well as the heart of capitalism, we’d like to add. This refers to the companies such as Boeing and Hewlett-Packard. After having recently devastated the Balkans, North Africa, Near East and Afghanistan and after having overmastered Eastern Europe, they turned to the finalists, Venezuela and North Korea.

       Introducing capitalist order in Venezuela and North Korea is not only a matter of prestige. Venezuela is one of the biggest world producers of oil as well as the state possessing the greatest reserves of oil in the world. After the collapse of the USSR in the nineties, exactly when imperialism and its collaborators began their bloody predatory campaign east, in Venezuela appeared Hugo Chavez who was to take it out from the American backyard towards socialism. Today this is a possessed country of marauding gangs of mercenaries that Tramp has recently imposed new sanctions on. The state faces the shortage of food and drugs; the price of oil it exports is record low. The propaganda war against Venezuela is led most intensively from Australia; yet all the states subordinated to the USA have to spit on it. North Korea, in order to defend itself from the predators, had to produce an atom bomb. Maybe it is the very bomb that would destroy the empire and half of mankind with it.

        On the other hand, the organized workers have been, all over the world and after the collapse of the USSR, decimated. The major part of its leadership has crossed over to the capitalist side, to opportunists, while some groups of Marxists have remained without base which means they have been pushed astray to the extreme Left (Left that needs no class). It often happens that class actions are replaced by Internet ones (“Web Marxism”) and involvement in social networks – especially popular is Facebook thanks to its enabling painless ranting of revolutionary fantasies: everyone can put a couple of red flags on his FB page and thus proclaim himself a revolutionary. The more flags and five-pointed stars, the greater revolutionary. Another phenomenon to observe is the making of obscure political marriages with politically suspicious elements (recently, in America, Antifa’s activists, certain people from the Serbian Left and Lukashenko’s pawns as well as magazines such as Jacobin, financed by the Democratic Party of the USA). All of them are manifestations of the lack of base. The editorial board of the Novi Borac (New Militant) is of the opinion that the revolutionary work is possible only from the clear class position and that the union is the basic cell of organized workers without which we cannot talk about representativeness. Even when the unions are few in number, they, in their companies, in their production activities and thus in the state, have a great power. In the eighties in Britain 180,000 miners led a struggle against the state for two full years. Today we see the power of 1,500 cabin crew of the British Airways that they have accrued during – for them quite a long – 85-day strike. The first task of every revolutionary Marxist is to set up contact with the class and join it, to become its part (even if it means employment at a lower level than one’s qualifications). Since it is only within the class that one can practice Marxism. This is the essence of “entryism” that Trotsky, in other circumstances, spoke about. This is the very essence of revolutionary activity.

(Editorial Board)

A VICTORY OF THE WORKING CLASS AS A MARGINAL EVENT

Dimitar Anakiev

         A VICTORY OF THE WORKING CLASS AS A MARGINAL EVENT

         (Confrontation with Scholastic Marxism)

           My humble opinion is that Brexit and Grexit are not exactly the same phenomena. Grexit was mainly an expression of people’s will (and that is why bourgeoisie did not allow it) while Brexit mostly expresses the unwillingness of the British (and partly American) bourgeoisie to subject itself to the German interests in the EU. That is why for me Brexit is, to a great extent, a bourgeois phenomenon and I do not agree with the celebration of “a win of people’s will” that is on a large scale trumpeted, as befits their wishes, by immature leftists... At the same time I understand the disappointment of many Britons, especially young ones, who do not want to live in a prison house of national conceptions. Brexit is an expression of the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois bloc distrust of the German-French EU.

           Dimitar Anakiev, Facebook & Izbris-blog, June, 26, 2016

         A recent victory of xenophobic policy on the referendum for exit from the EU has been declared, in almost all of today’s Marxist journals, as a “victory of the working class” since the EU is classified exclusively as an instrument of the global capital super-government over the European nations.(1) These media, however, pass over in silence an evident role that is played, in the campaign for Britain leaving the EU, by global capital itself and in which it is impossible to overlook the mega-capitalist Rupert Murdoch whose media empire served as one of the major means of the campaign. Likewise, Brexit enjoyed undisguised sympathies of the British crown (see the accompanying picture). Though the reason for engagement of the most reactionary forces of the British society in favor of Brexit could be rather searched for in a bourgeois game of power – namely, in the Anglo-Saxon capitalist lobbies opposing an increasing power of Germany headed by Angela Merkel that has successfully met its demand for cheap working force by “importing” more than a million refugees from the devastated and plundered Near and Far East – today’s Marxist regard the victory of the reaction as that of the working class although no notable mobilization of the working class in Britain ever took place, especially for the sake of the class struggle; and for this reason Brexit greatly differs from the unsuccessful Grexit that was dominated by extensive mobilization of people and of the idea of class struggle. Today’s Marxists, tired of a series of historical defeats and constant defensive and stagnation, seem to be leaning, in their conclusions, more on their wishes rather than facts. Instead of argument-supported discussions they offer scholastic schemes and cheap demagogy, including, among them, those “democratic” parts of the Trotskyist movement who have recently resigned from their “undemocratic” curent since, allegedly, they could not voice their opinions in it. Let’s just have a look now at the “argumentation” of the scholastic Marxists:

           Editorial of 45^th issue of La Tribune de Travailleurs published on June, 29, signed by the Editor-In-Chief in person who is also the leader of the “democratic” Internationalist Communist Tendency (TCI) Daniel Gluckstein, is entitled “Two of Three Workers” (“Deux ouvriers sur trois”).(2) The title implies that two of three workers voted for Brexit, that is, if we add to this information the dominant dogma about progressivity of the working class, then the assumed meaning is that Brexit is the result of a proletarian action (instead of a bourgeois complot) and that, as such, it is the first step of the impending revolution. Gluckstein further states that the next step would be annulment of all the actions of privatization. Yes, this might have been the next step if the Brexit had been a result of the proletarian action. But it was not. In Britain no mobilization of the working class, such as we have seen in Greece, took place. Nor many years of street fighting, either. Nor hand to hand fighting. Nor dead. Then what was there, after all? Gluckstein does not mention any bourgeois precursor of Brexit: the conservative government which itself has announced the referendum (and which has wrestled with the EU to obtain xenophobic concessions that are part of the same political package as Brexit) does not mention Murdoch's media which were the main lever of the Brexit campaign; neither does it mention the Crown, the main symbol of Brexit. It is unusual for such high-ranking communist to overlook, in his considerations, major actors of political developments and then to proceed to elaborate at length the dogmatic theses which, as a form of idealist thinking, do not belong to Marxism. Obviously the text has an agitating character and is intended for cheering up its membership; yet it has no analytical value and neither can it be even a signpost that it obviously tries to be. Statistics is an important method in estimating social events but quantity does not always indicate quality. Dealings with statistics are often manipulative; in this case we do not know the motives of these „two of three workers“; yet, we claim, dogmatically, that these are class-conscious workers setting out on the road to revolution. What if, however, these are the workers who read Murdoch's Sun and worship the Crown? By passing over Murdoch they have shown that they consciously manipulate members and readers. Isn't it true that Hitler was voted to power by workers? Isn't it true that Milošević and his fascist program was supported, for the whole decade, and on several elections voted to power by Serbian workers? Of course, they were all media-manipulated but that is exactly what we are speaking about here. Facts are stubborn (“Les faits sont têtus”), says Lenin.

            In the same issue of La Tribune de Travailleurs we come across the article entitled, “June, 23, Vote of the Class” (“23 juin: un vote de classe”) by a big agitator (though a poorer analyst and polemist) Dominique Ferré. This author also calls upon the dogmas to assist in explaining the statistics distributed to all sides of the world with a special emphasis on Northwest and Northeast. His agitating talent is, however, even more evident in his other text published in the same issue of La Tribune de Travailleurs. The article in question is “The European Union favors workers’ immigration? What is being mocked here?” (“'Union européenne en faveur des travailleurs immigrés? De que se moque-t-on?”). Though the author claims that the xenophobic reasons are not a true political actor on the scene but that xenophobia is a mask covering up the class character of Brexit, the facts speak otherwise. This article wants to conceal and reduce the political significance of the German import of more than a million refugees. The economic importance of this event is first-rate whereas its negation and concealment can be only amateurish dilettantism which serves its own purposes (while wishes are that the dogmas are efficient even when they are not) instead of serving the facts. But, as we know and like to quote, following Lenin, facts are stubborn (Les faits sont têtus). What is in question is not just a light, non-invasive kind of import of cheap work force which is expected to build up even more the powerful German economy – which is in itself dramatic enough – but also the fact that Germany, due to refugees, will stop paying in its economic surplus to the common EU funds so that its position will be even more or almost absolutely strengthened at the expense of its competitive Anglo-Saxon capital. Of course, neither does this article mention Murdoch nor its media empire that has led the Brexit campaign; instead, as carriers of the Anglo-Saxon nationalism are mentioned marginal figures such as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. The simplified ideological manipulation which completely denies the reality of capital and its power is intended for uneducated readership. A typical cheerleading gesture! That is why in the texts by Dominique Ferré we often find metaphorical expressions (“The right cherishes its ugly head...”) whereas Daniel Gluckstein’s texts also start with poetic phrases (“The wind of panic blows through the leading circles of the capitalist class...”). Metaphors are usually used in political discourse to induce emotional reactions and reduce analytical demands of readers. Metaphors blur facts, conceal them. That is why they are, in political discourse, typical means of demagogy and populist approach.

             The text by the American Trotskyist Alan Benjamin entitled “Brexit Vote in Britain and Its Lesson for US Workers” with the subtitle “The Meaning of the June 23 Vote in Britain to Leave the European Union” published on August, 15, on the web site of the Socialist Organizer, in essence, sums up the texts from the French La Tribune de Travailleurs, issue 45. Though somewhat more serious and analytical in its tone than his French colleagues, the author, stylistically, remains at the same level of scholastic presentation besides using the same emphases. At one point he says that the EU is a framework imposed by imperialists for lowering wages, democratic and workers’ rights while making working conditions more difficult (and destroying union independence) as well as democracy itself, all over Europe. It has to be attacked with even more Brexits, Frexits or Grexits, all over Europe. Still, such a claim does not explain why the Swiss have similar problems though Switzerland is not a member of the EU. Should Switzerland be destroyed, too? And what about the USA? This kind of rhetoric does not explain why Slovenia, though a EU member, has managed, to a great extent, to preserve its public health care system inherited from socialism while Serbia, though not a EU member, has completely destroyed the same, from socialism inherited, system of public health care. Obviously the explanations propounded by scholastic Marxism are too simplified and schematized up to the point where they cease to be Marxism. They are much more in need of followers than people whose thinking about reality is far more penetrating. And this is a characteristic of Stalinism rather than Trotskyism.

             Alan Benjamin does not tell us what kind of Frexit he wants: is it of the kind that has just been announced today by Marine le Pen? Is it going to be another “win of the working class” smiling at us even if financed by Putin? Tragic is not to see any difference between Brexit and Grexit since it means, in essence, to deny five and more years of street fighting in Greek cities in which millions of Greeks took part with many dead young people killed in a direct clash with the regime. What kind of mockery is being put up by scholastic Marxism? By those very Trotskyists who claim to be Trotskyists longer than Trotsky himself? Instead of schematic, dogmatic babbling, it would be better for them to engage themselves in analytical issues. First and foremost, I would be interested in the answers to the questions of relevance for estimating the political events they describe:

• Has the working class of Britain become stronger or weaker by exit from the EU?
• Has the British capital weakened or strengthened once it broke free from Germany’s hug?
• Is a crack in the bourgeois formation (of the EU) the reason for workers’ celebration if it is not a result of the class struggle and increased power of proletariat?
• Is the EU to be understood as Zubatovshchina and its legal frame used for mobilization of workers? Or should it be destroyed by nationalism?
• Can balkanization of the EU be a goal of workers’ struggle?

September 4, 2016, Radovljica

(1)-European Union is called “prison of nations” - what was the nick name of Austro-Hungary; today Spain is called like that. It is overlooked that the EU is an alliance of sovereign nations. Despite the obvious democratic deficit of the EU, the referendums to join the EU should be mentioned. In Slovenia almost 90% of citizens voted for the entry into the EU and in Croatia, more than 2/3 of the voters. The phrase "prison of nations" is clearly not effective and inaccurate; it sounds more like a parade cliché in expressing, targeting (again) emotions of readers; the phrase is not really dedicated to the factual accuracy.

(2)-It would be interesting if the method of counting workers and differentiation of workers from the bourgeoisie in elections/referendums could be presented to wider audience, to know how it works and that we can assure the credibility of these claims.