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Economic and Philosophic Science Review

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V. I. Lenin

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Back issue

No 1391 1st August 2011

Special add-on: Leaflet for the London riots - 20th August

Ruling class humbug and vicious class vengefulness over the riots is another step into the fascist repression the capitalist system must more and more desperately turn to as its onrushing crisis deepens. Only socialist revolution can produce a “moral”, fair and peaceful society.

 

Astounding threats of curfews on British streets and the vindictive, small-minded savagery of family evictions and other collective “punishments” after the riots signal only the desperate weakness of the ruling class.

They know very well that the explosion of frustration and anger from the unemployed and futureless teenagers and youth is only a tiny harbinger of future social turmoil.

When the short-term alleviation of the Slump from “quantitative easing” dollar printing is worked through, the full impact of the crisis will begin to bite far harder and on a far worse scale than it has already.

The complacent petty bourgeois illusions that somehow “they have got over the credit crunch” and economic growth can be got “under control” (deliberately lied about one way or another by Tories, Labour and assorted trade union leaders alike, with just different shadings of “answers”) is already being smashed into a thousand pieces by the latest rounds of Stock Exchange collapses and bank failures.

This time there is not even the chance to bail out the bankers’ greed and incompetence, because whole countries are bankrupt.

Capitalism across the whole world is bankrupt.

The full devastation of the greatest capitalist crisis failure in history, a catastrophe on an epochal scale has already sent tens of thousands of Los Indignacios onto the streets and Madrid, Athens and elsewhere, and triggered the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen (though the “revolutions” in Libya and Syria are bogus, deliberate confusions provoked by the West for its warmongering and counter-revolutionary purposes supported by the West riding the turmoil of the genuine “Arab Spring”).

The real Slump coming through in the collapse of the Euro, threatening sovereign debt defaults and the unprecedented downrating of the US credit status, will cause far greater turmoil than the relatively small outbursts by the unemployed and dispossessed youth.

It is against this massive upheaval that the ruling class is preparing its class war dictatorship moves.

It fears the revolutionary implications.

It fears even more that this might coalesce into a clear consciousness that the unfairness and deprivations of capitalist rule are not only never going to change for the better but will have to be overthrown – the only answer to the recurring nightmare of economic and social disaster, and the war and social chaos it has always led to, and is once more leading to and on a far greater scale than ever seen in history.

Hence the monotonous single-note propaganda onslaught by Cameron and the ranks of Tories and middle class commentators to assert that the riots were “nothing but mindless criminality and violence”.

The only “mindlessness” on display is the stupidity which tries to pretend there is no cause for the explosive developments other than alleged “fecklessness and immorality” of thousands of kids across the country and the ridiculous idea they all, out-of-the-blue, decided overnight to “go looting”.

It is not just stupidity but a deliberate attempt to steer attention away from the real disaster – the onrushing Slump collapse of the capitalist system wiping out livelihoods and lives throughout the world, and all hope of a future for tens of millions.

The monstrous hypocrisy and lying pretence could not be more glaring.

The news of the growing economic disaster was on the same front pages of the newspapers as the riots themselves.

But the great big LIE of the ruling class is to keep these things entirely separate and pretend that one has nothing to do with the other, and that the huge contradictions of this failed and historically bankrupt exploitation order are not the real cause of the social pressure exploding outwards.

The ruling class wants to tap the fears of the petty bourgeois and whip up the most disgusting moralising populism in order to “justify” the introduction of even more intensified open dictatorship moves, from greater surveillance to police repression and the use of military on the streets.

Note how in the riots the use of armoured police wagons was slipped through, without any public announcement.

Where did such vehicles suddenly come from???

Of course riot, looting and anarchic destruction by youths are not a solution as such to the giant capitalist system’s failure.

And the injury or damage to lives and livelihoods of some individuals caught in the crossfire is tragic.

But the “criminality” is not the real content.

It is the agony of a society which has totally failed and offers only collapsing living standards for the majority even as the rich continue their ever more in-your-face plundering of the world’s wealth and value.

The endlessly repeated mantra that it all stems from a “moral failure” is the most sanctimonious humbug going.

First the immediate cause was a police killing and then police lies about that killing which it turns out was not a “response to a shooting” at all but seemingly “preemptive” – and therefore tantamount to murder.

The fact that the capitalist press and politicians have buried this fact away does not mean it was not a reason for the outbursts.

Like all such upheavals it is ruling class violence and repression which triggers them.

Second it is a response to endless police harassment and hounding of the youths, universal in the inner cities and particularly the racist stop and search without justification that is the norm for black youth.

Third it is the growing frustration and grievance of the young, but all of the working class too, that opportunity, education, decent housing and other conditions and a fair share of society’s resource have always been denied them, and that now even basic employment and even survival is threatened by wages and social service cuts, pension collapse, redundancy and massive monopoly capitalist price hikes for basic necessities.

Jobs always have been denied but are now totally an impossibility.

But if the specific surface “criminality” of the looting and destruction is examined - from where does the mass get its guidance and morality anyway??

From the leadership of the society around it of course – and that is the bourgeoise and its dominance (and overwhelming influence) through big finance, the ruling class networks, clubs, institutions and assorted freemasonries, the constant brainwashing of society from cradle to grave via schools, TV, culture of all forms from theatre to literature, and much more.

What insufferable arrogance and monstrous hypocrisy it is for these plummy-voiced, overfed and privileged prigs and pigs to sneer at the have-nothing youths who have always faced blighted and empty futures.

Starting at the top, half the Tory cabinet (Boris Johnson too) spent their privileged and pampered youths in university doing precisely the kind of wilful damage they are now railing against, most of all in the infamous Bullingdon Club at Oxford dedicated to trashing pubs and rampaging through restaurants.

But this is trivial compared to the enormous corruption and greed which is endemic in capitalism and at times even vaunted (“greed is good”) as its driving force.

Who is trying to get “something for nothing” – a sixteen year old jobless youth running off with a pair of sneakers or the bankers who hoover up hundreds of millions of pounds in bonuses every year – trousering even more from public funds after they have brought the world to total collapse and meltdown?

Who is “undeserving” – the poor housing estate resident with a leaking apartment or the insider traders who cream off vast profits from speculation in shares or commodities, not to mention the tens of millions in “commissions” and “fees” they take from all the ”legal” market transactions in the goods and products sold to ordinary people.

Who is the real criminal – the street corner kid smashing a police car window or the police chiefs (and plenty more ordinary cops), there allegedly to “fight crime”, but pocketing tens of thousands in bribes from the newspapers and all the other rackets revealed time after time? (And turning out in force only when it is time to suppress the working class – the real function of the state).

Who is trying to sponge off society, the hapless dole collector on £60 a week in London – poverty conditions – and harassed from pillar to post, or the MPs supposedly representing them and constantly lining their own pockets, corruptly or “legally”, with lavish expenses, a luxurious lifestyle and dozens of rackets from mortgage frauds to fantasy salaries for “assistants” – not to mention pocketfuls of extras they all get from “non-executive” directorships in companies outside, even while they are still in parliament and even more so when they leave and “go into the private sector”.

Who is “acting together to steal from society”, the alleged gangs in the streets or the revolving door consultants and contractors who collude with government and local authorities for the award of plush “private partnership” schemes etc etc?

What disgusting and foul hypocrisy!!

Even more foully does the hypocrisy stink when it comes to violence.

Capitalism’s only “solution” is violence, constantly used to install, manipulate and prop up tinpot fascist dictators everywhere to keep in place the multinational sweatshop and plantation slavery that feeds the relentless greed of the capitalist ruling class via superprofits squeezed from the Third World (and now the domestic working class too).

In crisis this turns into the escalating warmongering now being waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc etc (but not against other supposed “human rights violators” like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Thailand which all “shoot down their own people” as the sham Western “concern for freedom” pretends).

And it eventually becomes all-out World War as in 1914 and 1939 to “solve” the crisis of “over-production” by destroying huge swathes of “surplus” capacity.

Only violent revolution ever stopped that, in order to establish peace in the only way possible, by building socialism under the firmest possible dictatorship of the working class to permanently suppress bourgeois violence.

The problem for the world is not the riots, and the “destructive threat” to bourgeois order, it is the shallow confusion and lack of political understanding which the working class has been offered for decades by Trot and revisionist fake-”leftism”.

The hatred of the working class for this bourgeois world is not “mindless” but the most valuable class feeling, that when it is harnessed to Leninist discipline and leadership will overturn the warmongering degeneracy of capitalism and for the first time build a fair and stable, peaceful world.

Build Leninism. DH

 

Main issue

 

Norwegian madness driven by capitalist racist Nazi degeneracy, blitzing and killing anti-imperialists and Third World victims by the dozens daily with much more to come as Slump deepens. The solution to individual “insanity” same as for stopping monopoly capitalist war madness – overthrow capitalism and establish the dictatorship of the working class to build planned socialism. It begins with the call for DEFEAT for imperialism wherever and however but without any confidence or support for non-Marxist petty bourgeois leadership. Only Leninist science can provide the leadership for urgent revolutionary struggle to end it.

While the capitalist press, media and politicians take out the onions for pseudo-tearful “agony and heartbreak” over the Norwegian beserker’s victims, the West, including “quiet peaceful Scandinavia”, continues to blow apart at least that number daily in the Nazi NATO and CIA drone onslaughts on Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, including dozens of innocent “collateral” women and children.

What disgusting hypocrisy and lies in all directions.

And what an obvious source for the reactionary inspiration which found its extreme expression in the demented running amok at the Scandinavian summer school.

This warmongering degeneracy which continues to escalate relentlessly as the only solution capitalism knows to its sickening, and daily more clearly unstoppable crisis collapse, is the source and cause of all the mayhem and turmoil on the planet in whatever form it comes, from sporadic Third World “terrorist” attempts to fight imperialist oppression to the twisted racist monstrosities that its foul, divisive and supremacist “culture” throws up inside its own societies.

It can only get a million times worse once the “sovereign debt” defaults now bringing European and American monopoly capitalist finance to the edge of the abyss again, start to load onto workers the real Slump deprivation already devastating lives in Greece, Ireland, and other bankrupted states, and to some extent in all the capitalist countries.

Despite the vicious unemployment, pension cuts and wage reductions imposed so far, the ruling class has until now held back from trying to impose the full catastrophic Slump conditions on workers, by printing mountain ranges of valueless confetti-dollars to pretend “recovery is coming”.

But the disasters everywhere for the entire ossified and outmoded class domination are making matters worse and worse, economically and in its desperate military bludgeoning to try and sustain its world neo-colonialist exploitation tyranny.

The capitalist class was terrified by the 2008 bank failures which proved once and for all the catastrophe the capitalist profit making system will always and repeatedly produce, as Marxism has constantly warned the working class and continues to do so.

The bourgeoisie knows the revolutionary consequences that will follow and has been buying time to get ready for the class war onslaughts it also knows it must make to force the burdens on to the working class, all the time winding up the international war atmosphere for the eventual inter-capitalist conflicts (world war) which is the end point of capitalist crisis.

Yet despite the posturing and pretences of numerous assorted fake-“lefts” claiming to be Marxists and “revolutionaries” not a word about this World War fascist path of capitalism – now clearly visible in everything happening, – is ever brought to the fore.

But it is the key development underlying all the class struggle and conflict on the planet.

So too is its disastrous failure everywhere from Iraq to Afghanistan and now in the foetid mess created by the deliberately instigated civil war in Libya where the squabbling fascist depravity of the pretend “rebellion” (the opposite to the “Arab Spring”) becomes clearer by the day.

No attempt is made to identify and name, let alone give a powerful Leninist lead to, the obvious world readiness of the increasingly vast number of ordinary people genuinely on the street everywhere from Egypt to Thailand (as opposed to counter-revolutionary stunts like Libya which have ridden the upheaval on its back) to take up the only answer there can be to the crisis – revolutionary overturn of the entire capitalist order – permanently and for ever.

The “lefts” line-up with, or tailend, or supinely accept, the fascist Goebbels “human rights” big lies about alleged “dictators” and “atrocities” used to provoke and instigate the bloodshed against anti-imperialist scapegoats like Libya (just as they lined up with the imperialist ruling class to “condemn” the earlier “terrorist” Third World manifestations of anti-imperialist revolutionary stirring).

Or else they verbally “defend” regimes like Gaddafi’s in lip-service “solidarity” without making any of the connections to world level crisis warmongering which would demand a perspective of defeat for imperialism and its catastrophic Slump collapse.

Whatever long-winded academic discussions the “lefts” pursue (occasionally) about “is the time ripe for revolution?” or “technical” proof of the intractability of the capitalist profit system and the need to replace it with planned socialist production (which is true as far as it goes), the living reality of the world warmongering mayhem never enters their analyses and perspective in practice.

They are a million miles away from Marxism and from Leninism in other words.

They are nothing but part of the system which always heads workers away from the grasp of building revolutionary parties and leadership as the crucial task immediately, and essential for the struggle to overturn the festering rotten foulness of the arrogant class based exploitation of the planet.

Instead the same tired reformism and “left-pressure” for “better democracy” and a “cleaned up” press emerges across the spectrum from the sour anti-workers state (anti-communist in effect) Trotskyists to the confused and evasive cover-ups of the Stalin-inspired pacifism of the revisionists, still pleading to “Stop the War” 13 years after the latest round of capitalist blitzkrieging was unleashed against little Serbia and going on non-stop ever since with more scapegoats constantly being lined up to extend it with new hysterical (and distorted) press campaigns (Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela etc, etc,etc).

And this deluge of lies and half-truths is throughout the capitalist press, not simply the temporarily discredited and exposed manipulations and bullying of the reactionary Murdoch papers etc.

In fact the pretence of “restraint on excess” and “greater impartiality” which the current “official hearings” about phone-tapping are attempting to bolster is firstly just a token anyway and secondly is aimed at making the remainder of the capitalist media even more of an effective brainwashing tool for confusing and misleading than the more strident reaction of the Murdoch/Tea Party right-republican wing.

If anything it is the allegedly “neutral” or even “liberal” press which pumps out the most pernicious and sinister “human rights” and “freed’m and demo’cy” garbage which is being used to whip up the warmongering atmosphere across the planet (along with half the fake-“left” themselves it should be added, who repeat like parrots the ruling class “condemnations” of “terrorism” and “rogue states”).

The non-stop barrages of alleged “incidents” and stunted up demonstrations against assorted demonised “dictators” like Gaddafi, Bashir, Ahmadinejad, Mugabe and Assad (and many more from Myanmar to Venezuela), larded with lurid and unsubstantiated allegations of “massacres” and “rape-squads”, etc etc etc, reported in great hearsay detail but without “verification” or confirmation, from axe-grinding “witnesses”, mysterious “human rights observers” (now one of the world’s biggest industries it could be thought) or from mysterious “diplomatic (meaning CIA or MI6 etc) sources” are now the crucial weapon for the ruling class to stampede the world back into the warmongering feverishness the ruling class needs to escape its greatest ever shaming and humiliating Slump disaster.

That was clear in the immediate racist allegations that the Oslo bombing “must have been” Islamist “terrorists” though this time even the “mainstream press” got caught out, as some more rational threads of commentary pointed out:

On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to al-Qaida. Countless security experts queued up to tell me so. This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn’t add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they’re the experts. They’re sitting there behind a caption with the word “EXPERT” on it. Every few minutes the anchor would ask, “What kind of picture is emerging?” or “What sense are you getting of who might be responsible?” and every few minutes they explained this was “almost certainly” the work of a highly-organised Islamist cell.

In the aftermath of the initial bombing, they proceeded to wrestle with the one key question: why do Muslims hate Norway? Luckily, the experts were on hand to expertly share their expert solutions to plug this apparent plot hole in the ongoing news narrative.

Norway was targeted because of its role in Afghanistan. Norway was targeted because Norwegian authorities had recently charged an extremist Muslim cleric. Norway was targeted because one of its newspapers had reprinted the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Norway was targeted because, compared to the US and UK, it is a “soft target” – in other words, they targeted it because no one expected them to.

When it became apparent that a shooting was under way on Utoya island, the security experts upgraded their appraisal. This was no longer a Bali-style al-Qaida bombing, but a Mumbai-style al-Qaida massacre. On and on went the conjecture, on television, and in online newspapers, including this one. Meanwhile, on Twitter, word was quickly spreading that, according to eyewitnesses, the shooter on the island was a blond man who spoke Norwegian. At this point I decided my initial gut reservations about al-Qaida had probably been well founded. But who was I to contradict the security experts? A blond Norwegian gunman doesn’t fit the traditional profile, they said, so maybe we’ll need to reassess . . . but let’s not forget that al-Qaida have been making efforts to actively recruit “native” extremists: white folk who don’t arouse suspicion. So it’s probably still the Muslims.

Soon, the front page of Saturday’s Sun was rolling off the presses. “Al-Qaeda” Massacre: NORWAY’S 9/11 – the weasel quotes around the phrase “Al Qaeda” deemed sufficient to protect the paper from charges of jumping to conclusions.

...The next morning I switched on the news and the al-Qaida talk had been largely dispensed with, and the pundits were now experts on far-right extremism, as though they’d been on a course and qualified for a diploma overnight.

Some remained scarily defiant in the face of the new unfolding reality. On Saturday morning I saw a Fox News anchor tell former US diplomat John Bolton that Norwegian police were saying this appeared to be an Oklahoma-style attack, then ask him how that squared with his earlier assessment that al-Qaida were involved. He was sceptical. It was still too early to leap to conclusions, he said. We should wait for all the facts before rushing to judgment. In other words: assume it’s the Muslims until it starts to look like it isn’t – at which point, continue to assume it’s them anyway.

...As more information regarding the identity of the terrorist responsible for the massacre comes to light, articles attempting to explain his motives are starting to appear online. And beneath them are comments from readers, largely expressing outrage and horror. But there are a disturbing number that start, “What this lunatic did was awful, but . . .”

These “but” commenters then go on to discuss immigration, often with reference to a shaky Muslim-baiting story they’ve half-remembered from the press. So despite this being a story about an anti-Muslim extremist killing Norwegians who weren’t Muslim, they’ve managed to find a way to keep the finger of blame pointing at the Muslims, thereby following a narrative lead they’ve been fed for years, from the overall depiction of terrorism as an almost exclusively Islamic pursuit, outlined by “security experts” quick to see al-Qaida tentacles everywhere, to the fabricated tabloid fairytales about “Muslim-only loos” or local councils “banning Christmas”.

 

 

I can’t help but feel a sense of embedded passive racism developing; if the terrorist attacks in London, crimes against UK citizens with the intention to terrorise the public, were committed by a fellow white, previously law-abiding, devoutly Christian UK citizen, would they have been considered terrorism, or just mass murder? Yet here in Norway, the suspected perpetrator of the attacks is still due to be charged and is being held for acts of terror.

White terrorists are always humanised by the media and labelled differently. The individual is now stated to be a Christian, an extremist, somebody who enjoyed “popular films, television shows and video games”. Muslims are dehumanised through stereotype. It’s portrayed as being in their nature to be cruel and hence deserve invasions and torturous imposition of foreign rule.

So, can we continue to refer to the acts of terror in Oslo as such, or do we now see a future where all terrorist attacks are merely terrible crimes, with the criminal humanised, regardless of race, religion or targeted nation?

Matt Cox

Oslo, Norway

It seems a fundamentalist rightwing Christian was responsible for the attacks in Norway. Following precedent, does our government now have the right to attack any other country which harbours similarly minded people?

Liz Brandow

Leicester

Once the fascist white supremacist agenda of the Norwegian killer became clear and the potential lessons it held for everyone about capitalist degeneracy, the bourgeois politicians and the press machine rushed to protest that the deranged gunman “must have been a loner and probably insane”.

The Tory journalist Simon Jenkins, was in denial as just a taste of his piece shows:

The Norwegian tragedy is just that, a tragedy. It does not signify anything and should not be forced to do so. A man so insane he can see nothing wrong in shooting dead 68 young people in cold blood is so exceptional as to be of interest to criminology and brain science, but not to politics. We can sympathise with the bereaved, and with their country in its collective sense of loss. But the tragedy does not signify.

No, Anders Breivik does not tell us anything about Norway. No, he does not tell us anything about “the state of modern society”. He tells us nothing about terrorism or gun control or policing or political holiday camps. His avowal of fascism could as well have been of communism or Islamism or anarchism. The desperate, perhaps understandable, search to find meaning in such acts is dangerous. Breivik does not even measure up to the ideological coherence of the nazism he admired. He is plainly very sick.

Jenkins’ insistence is so urgent because he is often an intelligent observer (within petty bourgeois limits), exposing Western cant such as the “war on terror” hysteria deliberately kept on the boil, and other nonsense.

But to admit that the entire culture and philosophy of capitalism (and its violent decay) permeates this incident would cut away all the philosophical and psychological props to his comfortable middle class existence

His generalised “could have been an anarchist or communist” is just a foul slander; the point is precisely that this deliberate cold-blooded mayhem, psychotic and deranged as it might be, was caused by, and done in, the name of arrogant Western supremacism, in very different circumstances and with a very different perspective to the inchoate rebellion of the Third World.

As Jenkins himself says in other places, it is the non-stop blitzkrieging and tyrannical exploitation of the masses in the Third World which has driven them to fight back with whatever weapons they can find, including the heroically desperate suicide bomb, and there is a solution to that problem; the ending of capitalist oppression and sweatshop slavery and its replacement with socialist planned economies.

The “madness” of starvation, victimisation, poverty, humiliation and a bleak future of blocked opportunity and exploitation driving such outbursts is utterly different to the madness of a ruling class, ready to take the world into world war hell all over again (like 1914 and 1939) to sustain its fabulous wealth and power despite the destruction of half the planet.

And the difference is the class difference between the owners of capital and “right” to plunder and “own” the world’s wealth, and those who create all value by their endless appropriated labour.

The same solution – the defeat of western capitalism – is the only solution to its decay and rot, and the stench of overt fascism which is completely part of it (see EPSR last issue).

And this perspective of defeat is what all the fake-“lefts” fall down on.

“Resisting” the slump or “opposing” NATO is not the same thing at all; it is reformist pleading.

It is all the worse of course when the same Trots and revisionists were stampeded along with the lurid “human rights” Goebbels lies of the West, pouring out the filth against Gaddafi etc.

Their alleged anti-war posturing which has followed is a sick sham (and an unexplained about-face because they have been caught out) when they helped build up and justify the hostility against Libya, Syria and others and continue to do so by painting the Tripoli regime as monsters even while they shout “Stop the War”.

If Gaddafi is a “torturing Hitler” why should we not bomb him replies imperialism.

Because imperialism is the real enemy should be the reply.

Even if he were as thuggish as Saddam Hussein (which he is not) and deserved everything coming to him, now is not the time for the masses to topple him, with a Marxist or socialist revolt since it would undermine the fight for the Libyan masses to defeat imperialism.

But neither should they be given any illusions in Gaddafi as groups like the Lalkar/Proletarian do.

Shouting for victory to Libya, Syria etc under Gaddafi’s leadership fails to clarify the working class about Gaddafi or the Syria regimes and so on, which are not Marxist and therefore not able to provide a full answer to the working class’s problems.

In truth the fight against the NATO onslaught would be better carried out by ordinary Libyans without the philosophical failings and confusions of Gaddafi’s anti-communism.

By all means let imperialism be defeated by this particular manifestation of the anti-imperialist struggle if that is what happens.

The more doggedly they resist the onslaughts on them the better and the more damage done to the imperialist attacks the better, in political, economic, military or any other terms.

The current splits and infighting by the nasty little fascist Benghazi rebels, and the bigger splits between the NATO powers over the levels of “support” being given them are both excellent signs of capitalist failure and defeat for example.

But even the best of the anti-imperialists like Gaddafi’s bourgeois nationalist revolution (with a 40 year history of hostility to imperialism and partial progressive development) have a very patchy record of leadership, bizarre and confusing ideologies which do not give the masses in Libya the answers they need let alone provide a perspective for the world to learn from.

Most such leaders have proven to be completely unsound, like the revisionist nationalism of Slobodan Milosevic which failed to defend itself, and more importantly abandoned the working class, when the monstrous 1998 NATO blitzing of Belgrade was begun, or like the discontented gangster Saddam Hussein in two half-hearted Gulf War rebellions against Washington.

The Syrian regime, for all its past form of anti-Zionist anti-imperialism has a long record of petty bourgeois collusion with imperialism at key moments, or simply silence and ineffectuality, and its domestic regime is far from developing socialism.

That it is being victimised by Washington (and undoubtedly via the West’s Zionist stooges) with a deliberately provoked counter-revolutionary force whipped up by the petty bourgeois “human rights” agencies, armed provocation, and twisted Western press campaign of rumour mongering and distortion (as used to stampede the monarchist and fascist scum in Libya) only underlines the depths of imperialist desperation at present, ready to sacrifice a halfway compliant and useful petty bourgeois regime because of its desperate need to break up the growing and genuine rebelliousness in the Middle East (in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen etc).

But it does not change the fact that the masses in Syria and the rest of the Middle East need to break past these bourgeois limitations as soon as conditions are tactically suitable.

Now, however, the enemy to focus on is imperialism’s direct attack via world media lies, intelligence agency skulduggery and whipped-up reactionary turmoil posing as “revolt” to destabilise and weaken the country; while constantly making it clear that the anti-communist Ba’athist regime and its petty bourgeois compromises is not to be trusted and will not take the masses forwards, however much they might temporarily put up an anti-imperialist stance for their own immediate survival.

And all this is a core of Leninist tactical understanding.

But a far bigger issue with the “victory to Libya”, (or the Taliban, or Zimbabwe, or Syria, or Serbia) slogan is that it philosophically limits the perspective of any particular struggle to that single country, or regime, or battle.

The implication is that the fight is only about Gaddafi, or Mugabe etc.

And reading Lalkar/Proletarian or other “supporters” in the fake-“left” press underlines just that limitation, always discussing each issue on its own and separately.

However much “useful detail” they may present about the realities of life in Syria or Libya, and Gaddafi’s past good form in supporting pan-Africanism, or anti-imperialist struggles such as Sinn Féin in Ireland etc this is not only not what is needed but misleading.

The point to be making to workers is that a giant unrolling crisis of an entire epochal class system which has risen over 800 years to dominate and exploit the whole world is unrolling and now threatens an entire planet with devastating economic and fascist military destruction.

It really is not about Libya in the broadest sweep of things.

Of course, in the narrowest sense, right there happens to be the sharp end of imperialist Nazi brutality and destructiveness for the moment (along with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc).

And the Libyan masses have been making the running in doggedly resisting, and long may it continue.

But to the inevitable wooden, one-sided bourgeois-logic question of “is not defeat for imperialism equally implying support for the other side and is it not easier for people to understand that by stating it directly?” the answer is a hundred times no.

“Supporting” Libya, or calling for “victory to Gaddafi” is posturing showmanship and bravado by the Stalinists and a few others making a hollow gesture of notional “international solidarity” while avoiding any talk about the bigger questions.

The slogan of “support “ is far “easier to explain” because it evades the explanation of revolution as the all-embracing issue, which includes taking up the revolutionary fight here and now by all wherever they may be.

Precisely to understand the great questions faced across the world as the intertwined and interpenetrated world exploitation system crashes heavily to the ground is the central reason for Leninism to insist that the question is one of defeat for imperialism and not victory to whichever scapegoated victim is in the gunsights faraway.

Everyone faces the oncoming Slump disaster and world war conflicts it is throwing up.

The world’s masses need to fight the bankrupted monopoly capitalist order and bring it down everywhere.

The question of defeat for imperialism is the central question because the devastation and Nazi blitzing being imposed on Libya (directly and via pushing the nasty little petty bourgeois monarchists and opportunist reactionaries) is only the beginning, and a small part geographically, of the total destruction and chaos coming if capitalism is left unchallenged.

“Support for Gaddafi” is essentially a limited reformist perspective.

In the Lalkar/Proletarian articles this is made explicit in the long accounts and details of the achievements made by Gaddafi’s Green Book egalitarianism, (or even the reforms by the Syrians), and in the pious hope that if they see off imperialism, more of these changes will be able to take place.

It is pure reformism.

It is pure nonsense since the world crisis is not going to leave anyone alone to get on with anything.

It is pure opportunism which misses out the uncomfortable world revolution questions which the NATO onslaught raises.

Taking up the revolutionary question is in fact the best and most effective way to support the Libyan people anyway, a genuine “solidarity”.

But instead workers everywhere are left without any of the vital revolutionary science that is crucial if the spontaneous rebellions welling up everywhere are to get beyond their illusions in “democracy” which at best solve nothing and at worst lay them open to counter-revolutionary onslaught, as by the army and state thugs in Cairo recently.

Just how imperialism has been ready to take advantage of this lack of leadership and vital philosophical struggle for theory has been surfacing in Egypt:

July24:

dozens of protesters were attacked by assailants during a rally in Cairo at the weekend.

The march on Saturday evening began with a two-week sit-in in Tahrir Square, the iconic heart of the revolution, and was heading towards Cairo’s defence ministry when it came under attack by armed baltagiya – Arabic for thugs. The unidentified assailants appeared to be sympathetic to the ruling generals, who were a pillar of the old regime.

Thousands of placard-wielding and chanting protesters, who had approached the ministry of defence in the Abbasyia district, were blocked en route by tanks and hundreds of soldiers stationed behind a makeshift barrier of metal frames and barbed wire. They found themselves trapped and were set upon by armed thugs wielding swords, knives and hurling rocks and molotov cocktails.

Among the protesters was Hossam El-Hamalawy, a prominent activist, who later wrote on his blog: “We stood our ground, demanding we pass. We were refused. The attack started. Young men carrying swords and knives flocked to our right, while others were stoning us from the side streets. Soldiers kept firing their machine guns into the air, to be followed later by a chopper circulating around our heads. It was a war zone in every sense of the word.”

Dozens were injured in the chaos, as they were showered by rocks hurled from rooftops, while others were hurt in the ensuing stampede. The injured, estimated to run into hundreds, were ferried to nearby hospitals. It was reported that at least one journalist was attacked.

...The violence in Abbasyia marked a significant escalation in tensions between activists, who have been at the vanguard of the revolution, and Egypt’s military rulers, known as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who assumed control of the country on 11 February. While the military has denied any involvement in Saturday’s violence the protesters have accused them of at least being complicit as they did not intervene to protect them from the attacks.

A wall of distrust has been building for several weeks as activists have complained that conservative elements, including the military, were betraying their push for freedom and democracy by shielding members of the former regime.

Angered by the lack of progress, protesters reoccupied and erected tents in Tahrir Square on 8 July to pressure the military into bringing those accused of killing protesters during the 18-day uprising to trial and to persuade interim rulers to stick to their pledges of bringing social justice, civil liberties and democracy.

Activists want them to move faster in bringing former regime officials to justice and set a date for the transition to civilian rule. The military accuse activists of treason, warning protesters against “harming national interests” and calling on “honourable” Egyptians to confront actions that disrupt a return to normal life.

As news of the bloody clashes in Abbaysia was relayed back to Tahrir Square on Saturday night, young activists gathered to discuss whether they too might be targeted by military or armed thugs there. Ahmed, a young man who had camped in the square from the earliest days of the revolution, took a microphone and told the crowd to stand strong. “Tonight we may die here,” he bellowed, as some in the audience applauded. “If you are ready to die then stay. If not, then go home.”

As the night wore on the injured from Abbasiya returned to the square to receive treatment as fears of an assault dissipated. Many in the camp felt it was a matter of time before another showdown with the military, who they believe will attempt to clear the square of protesters. “The military are just another face of the old regime,” said one demonstrator.

July 6:

Riots and protests have been escalating recently over what many see as the reluctance of the military rulers to prosecute police and former regime officials for the killing of nearly 900 protesters.

Ahmed el-Ganadi, the father of a protester killed in Suez during the revolt, said hundreds of residents had marched towards the government building housing the courts and security headquarters to protest against the court decision.

“The courts are corrupt. They are complicit in denying us justice,” Ganadi said. “We will no longer wait for a court decision to get our retribution.”

Suez, at the southern tip of the strategic Suez canal, was the scene of some of the most dramatic confrontations between police and protesters during the 18-day uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in February.

The military council that took over from Mubarak has promised democratic elections in the coming months and a transition to a civil government.

Justice for those who killed demonstrators has become a rallying point for the protest movement, which has splintered in political debates over how to manage the transition period.

“This is the spark … God help us with what is to come,” Ganadi said.

The court in Suez rejected an appeal against the decision in a Cairo court on Monday to grant bail to seven policemen facing trial for the killings of 17 protesters in Suez.

The angry relatives stormed the Cairo courtroom after the initial ruling on Monday, while others blocked a highway linking Cairo to Suez for hours. Hundreds in Suez have been holding a sit-in since Monday at one of the city’s main squares.

Lawyers said the courts had consistently denied a request to add more policemen to the case.

“A sit-in until we get retribution,” read one of the signs raised by the protesters.

Only one policeman has been convicted in more than a dozen court cases over the deaths of at least 846 people killed in the government crackdown on protesters. He was tried in absentia.

Mubarak and his two sons also face charges of killing protesters and amassing illegal wealth. Their trial is scheduled to begin on 3 August.

Protesters complain that court officials have generally been lax with police officers accused of shootings during the uprising, allowing many to stay in work while facing murder charges or setting them free on bail. They say this leaves victims’ families subject to intimidation.

By contrast, human rights activists complain that minor offenders and protesters are referred to military tribunals known for quick and harsh sentences.

12 July:

You could say our revolution has stalled. Or you could say a revolution is not an event, but a process – and that our process needed a push. As I write the revolution is once again gathering pace in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Arbaeen Square in Suez and Qaed Ibrahim in Alexandria, and streets and squares across Egypt. A march has been called for 6pm, and various escalatory activities are under consideration.

With hindsight, we left the streets too early. We were victorious, and yet we left with nothing. When we managed to push out Hosni Mubarak and the army took over, we should have stayed and demanded that power be vested in a government of the revolution. But we had no defined “leadership” that could speak on our behalf to the military, and we had no government in waiting ready to take power. But that was also the beauty of our revolution; our leaderless, authentic, grassroots, peaceable revolution.

We have ended up with Scaf – the supreme council of the armed forces – as acting president. Not a problem, except that they’ve stripped our caretaker cabinet of power. The interests of the revolution coincided with the interests of the highest levels of the army in one area: removing the possibility of Mubarak’s son Gamal coming to power. The revolution achieved that. Gamal Mubarak is in Tora prison, awaiting trial for profiteering, along with his brother and some members of his once extremely powerful parliamentary “strategy committee”.

The army promised to protect the people and implement the aims of the revolution. But really, with Gamal Mubarak out of the picture, the interests of the military top brass were with the continuation of the old regime, with perhaps some minor sprucing up. So first they tried hard to hold on to the cabinet that Hosni Mubarak had left in place, headed by General Ahmed Shafiq. When the people rejected that, the military accepted our candidate for caretaker prime minister Professor Essam Sharaf, but stripped him even of the power to change his office staff.

And so on every front the revolution has met obstacles. Our great aims cannot be achieved overnight – but our demands for “bread” and “social justice” can be helped along by some measures. Yet an attempt to impose tax on profits made by speculating on the stock exchange has been blocked. An attempt to halve the subsidy granted to fuels used in cement factories (which sell their goods at a profit of 65%) was blocked. Meanwhile, we are told that there’s no money to provide a minimum wage, and that no one can find out what the maximum – government employee – wage is in order to cap it.

Our declared aim of “human dignity” requires the dismantling and restructuring of the ministry of the interior and the entire security apparatus that has humiliated the citizenry for so long. It hasn’t happened, and the ministry now refuses even to carry out normal policing duties. Officers either clash with citizens and protesters, or shrug and say: “You didn’t like how we did things, now sort yourselves out. Go find your own stolen car.” The hated state security service, which was meant to have been dissolved after protesters stormed its offices and seized files, has re-emerged as the “national security service”. And the unconstitutional central security forces have been redeployed on the streets. The 500,000-strong baltagiya – paramilitary forces, long in the pay of the interior ministry, who achieved their finest hour on 2 February in camel-mounted attacks on protesters – are still out there, wreaking havoc, although we suspect they’re now being paid by “the remnants” (of the old regime) rather than directly by the police. The security situation discourages tourism, and so also holds up our economic recovery.

And we also have a raft of problems and issues created by the way the police – and now the military – have dealt with the revolution: we have some thousand shaheeds (martyrs) killed since 25 January; another 800 young people have been blinded by shots to the eyes; 1,400 have received disabling injuries; and a further thousand are missing – probably killed. Nobody – not one police officer, paramilitary thug or sniper – has been found guilty of these crimes. And yet the army, rushing in to arrest protesters or suspected trouble-makers, is quick to put them – young civilians – on military trial and sentence them. There are now more than 10,000 young people given sentences of one to five years by military courts.

The new wave of protests that is re-energising the revolution has as its impetus the demand for justice: trials for the Mubaraks and their retinue, and for the killers of our children. And a rejection of military trials for civilians. But at its heart is the desperate need to push our revolution out of the rut it’s in.

Scaf has just announced that it will continue to run Egypt and warned anyone against attempting to vault to power. General Mohsen el-Fangari – who was acclaimed in February when he accorded our young martyrs a military salute – had shoes raised to him on Tuesday when he frowned and waved a finger in our faces.

We have now invited Scaf to share power with a civilian government: not, this time, a caretaker government, but a revolutionary government that will start the process of implementing the great social aims of the revolution, and that will oversee our progress to free and fair elections in the autumn.

Our spirits are still high. We still believe the revolution will prevail. We are in a better place now than we have been for the last 40 years. The country, for all its troubles, is more at ease with itself. Innovative forms of collective action – unions and syndicates – are springing up.

People are carrying the principles of the revolution into the workplace. For instance Cairo University’s faculty of arts defied the university president when he insisted on his right to appoint a dean; it conducted elections and chose a young female professor of English literature for the position. Other colleges have followed suit. Stages and songs and street art are springing up all over our cities. People everywhere are talking and debating fearlessly – and what a wealth of opinion and energy and eloquence there is here.

Thousands of families have paid a terrible price for bringing us even this far. To begin to make sense of this sacrifice, we have to go further; we have to make sure this revolution works.

July17:

Egypt’s embattled prime minister, Essam Sharaf, has fired several of his top ministers in the latest attempt to end mass nationwide protests against his government’s slow pace of reform.

The most high-profile departure was that of Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities minister and a self-styled ‘Indiana Jones of the East’ who attained celebrity status through his global television ventures with the National Geographic and Discovery channels but was tainted by his strong praise for Mubarak during the anti-government uprising earlier this year.

The ministers of finance, industry, education and foreign affairs also followed in the footsteps of Sharaf’s deputy, Yehia el-Gamal, who stepped down last week amid demonstrations that have called the legitimacy of Egypt’s ruling military generals into question.

Protesters have demanded that the interim cabinet be purged of all politicians linked to the Mubarak regime. They are also insisting that the executive power of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), which has controlled Egypt since February but is accused by many of deliberately stifling revolutionary progress, be curbed.

Sharaf, who is under pressure to resign from many of his former supporters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, has been locked in negotiations for days over the details of his reshuffle – a sign, according to analysts, of a power struggle behind the scenes between Scaf and the relatively impotent civilian government.

In a further indication of division, a senior military official told local news sources that Sharaf was not entitled to appoint or dismiss ministers under the interim constitution.

Major General Hassan al-Ruweiny said Scaf had “sole authority” over cabinet personnel – a statement likely to infuriate protesters, who have already drawn comparisons between recent public statements by Scaf and the rhetoric deployed by Mubarak’s regime.

The waves of continuing defiance and Arab street sacrifice, only occasionally reported in the Western press are a significant sign of what a huge transformation in mass consciousness has been achieved through the pressure of the crisis and the maturing of the mass experience in the Third World and particularly the hugely important Middle East.

Equally significant is the ferment of discussion and debate it has set in train, part of a qualitative lift in mass struggle and readiness to fight for the understanding that will eventually change the world.

What is missing in this “stalled” revolution (as the third press piece here says) is exactly the crucial political perspective and revolutionary understanding that are needed everywhere.

“Ourt great aims” are nothing more than the demand for “democracy” which while it may carry the movement for a while in Egypt, cannot solve the problems facing the Egyptians any more than anywhere else.

Just the opposite. The obvious signs of counter-revolutionary organisation pose all the major questions faced by revolution everywhere of the class war barbarity that capitalism will always unleash when it is able – and exactly as it has done from the earliest days of revolutionary socialism, from the slaughter of tens of thousands to suppress the Paris Commune in 1871 to the massacring horrors unleashed against the Soviet Union over and over again, and the relentless bloody brutality of post-war imperialism against every kind of anti-imperialism and socialist struggle, not least in the million “suspected” communists slaughtered in Java in 1965 on CIA prompting, four million in Vietnam, the complete B52 flattening of Pyongyang in the 1950s Korea war, tens of thousands disappeared and death-squad murdered constantly in Latin America.

Or by the British throughout its Empire as partially spelt out in this limited petty bourgeois admission:

As a nation Brits nurture memories of empire that are deceptively cosy, swathed in a warm, sepia-tinted glow of paternalistic benevolence....We take pride in this imperial heritage, pointing with scorn at the lesser achievements of other European powers – the French, Italians, Germans, Belgians and Portuguese – whose empires we variously view as haplessly mismanaged, malignly exploitative and brutally coercive. Britain’s empire was better than all the others, historians such as Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Lawrence James have assured us?

The reasons to worry became all too apparent last week: Mr Justice McCombe ruled that the British government has a case to answer in relation to charges of systematic torture and abuse of detainees during Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.

We have long known that Kenya was a dirty war and that bad things happened. But the extent of abuse now being revealed is truly disturbing. Documents brought to light in connection with the Mau Mau court hearing catalogue more than 400 separate charges of abuse, spanning every element of the British security and administrative services in Kenya at the time.

And the matters raised are far from trivial. Of the four elderly Kenyan plaintiffs who brought this case, two were allegedly the victims of castration, one claims to have been savagely beaten and left for dead on a mortuary slab, and another was allegedly the victim of repeated sexual abuse – all acts conducted during British “interrogation” of suspects against whom no crime had been proved.

In Kenya there has long been indignation at British cant in refusing to acknowledge that such things happened. The sense that Britain has tried to deny Kenyans their own history by removing documents and concealing them in the bowels of the Foreign Office for more than 50 years has only deepened these resentments. All of this will be aired in the high court early next year, when the Kenya case will be heard in full. It is going to be very uncomfortable for those in the Foreign Office who have tried to prevent this case coming to court – and for many in the British political establishment who are still in denial about the realities of our imperial past.

And the problem goes far beyond Kenya. In a further revelation, it has been admitted in the House of Lords that the Foreign Office “irregularly” holds 9,500 files from 36 other former British colonies.

Squaring up to the seamier side of our empire is long overdue. However benevolent empires aim to be, they are invariably built on political, economic and military domination. Empires are by their very nature exploitative, the authority of imperial rule often established and sustained through violence and coercion. In all of this, Britain’s empire was no different than any other ...(a) history of oppression, of occupation and of subjugation.

... Though the history of the British empire is now available to students at GCSE and advanced levels, it is seldom taught. As history has shrunk in our schools, the diet of courses offered has come to resemble fast food – familiar topics, hastily thrown together from familiar ingredients: comfort eating. Can it be right that our schoolchildren are far more likely to learn about the Americans in Vietnam, or the Russian revolution, than they are about the British empire?

.... When revelations about these atrocities (torture and abuse of detainees in Kenya) were first published in 2005, the reaction of many in the British establishment was to dissemble and deny. The bitter truth about torture was disguised behind arguments about death rates and the relative levels of abuse, as if such things mattered.

some of Europe’s other great imperialists of the modern world have done so with greater honesty and humility than have the British. The German government has formally apologised for the enslavement and genocide of the Herero peoples of Namibia in the early part of the 20th century, and even the French have managed to swallow some national pride over the Atlantic slave trade – though not yet over Algeria.

Sometimes the reasons for an apology can be transparently political, as David Cameron learned to his cost in Pakistan. Such flagrant opportunism aside, the British have so far remained implacably opposed to an honest assessment of their empire.

What the working class needs is a perspective for total revolution to overturn capitalism, not polite nostrums about democracy and a reformist tax on the wilder end of Stock Exchange speculation.

By all means let any such moves be made, but as the first and initial steps within a process (as the commentator puts it) of taking total power.

What really needs to be heard is about seizing and occupying the capitalist factories, farms and institutions which poses even bigger questions since that cannot be done within capitalist society and economic structures.

What is posed is the process of the working class seizing and holding power with its own organisation and fighting strength, in other words the question of a struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, to overturn and suppress the class dictatorship of capital which hides behind the pretences of democracy and “Freedom”.

But none of the fake-“lefts” (including the renegade petty bourgeois elements who broke with the EPSR over Obama-ism) begin to raise this question, without which all of the great spontaneous movements are in grave danger of being setback and disrupted by the inevitable counter-revolutionary fascism and subversion of capitalist dominance.

There is plenty of posturing about the need for alleged revolutionary “politics” but none of it comes near these critical and fundamental matters.

None of it is anything but a floundering pretence, and with multiple layers of cover-up of past mistakes and errors, and a refusal to take up any polemical struggle to understand past difficulties.

Typical is the Lalkar/Proletarian attempting to revel in reflected glory from the street demonstrations and anger in Greece, which has been in the front line of the economic collapse ripping through the capitalist world economy.

With great fanfares it declares:

The continuing mass struggles in Greece against the government’s implementation of the IMF-dictated austerity package remain a constant inspiration. If McInally wants to strengthen the mobilisation of British workers against the cuts, he could pay some attention to the political analysis that the communists there are laying out for workers to study and act upon, apparently without fear that workers will prove to be reluctant students.

Explaining why they had called another mass communist rally in Athens, the KKE did not talk about marching for a (capitalist) ‘alternative’, or marching to put pressure on the social-democratic government, or the need for Greece to ‘grow its way out of recession’. They said rather that “The KKE escalates its political activity and intervention in this way in order to win over new working-class and popular consciousness, in the direction of rupture with the power of capital, for its overthrow...”

The party’s general secretary, Aleka Papariga, so far from encouraging her listeners to fix their hopes upon a capitalist recovery and a return to politics as usual, actually counselled them to embrace the political instability that accompanies capitalist crisis. People “should not fear anything that weakens the power of the monopolies, which stems from its own intervention”. On the contrary, “people must be fearful when there is a stable government, a majority or coalition government which uses the people’s fear of anarchy to push forward the worst measures”.

So far from praying for the end of recession, Papariga predicts that “In the end, there will be some sort of recovery for the capitalists, but not for the people’s living standards and the right of the people to work. It will be temporary. There will be a new cycle of crisis, even deeper than the one which we are experiencing today... From here on things will worsen if we do not work for a radical political change ... As long as capitalism develops, it will become more reactionary, inflexible to the demands of the people, barbaric, dangerous and parasitical.

“The cause of the economic crisis is the incentive of capitalist profit from the increasingly intense level of exploitation of the workers, which is the driving force of production and the economy. The capitalists push the increase in production to its limits because they desire superprofits. They produce in order to achieve profits, and at the same time undermine the buying power of the workers.”

 

But this “political analysis” is hopeless, a smattering of formalised infant school Marxist economics mingled with prevarication, and the same old reformist transformation (“working for a radical change”).

The only “radical change” there can be, that will rescue the world from Slump and world war, is revolution – so why not say so????

For all its correct enough exhortations to the working class not to fear collapse but to embrace it, and declarations of a “rupture with the power of capital” nothing is explained about the world revolutionary crisis, nothing is said about the need for the working class to organise to seize the institutions and industries, and nothing is said about the Leninist essence of revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Nothing is said about the international scope and scale of the capitalist disaster and the fight against it from Egypt and Tunisia to the Redshirt struggle in Thailand, the Latin America battles, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and shortly the UK too, and topping everything, the bankrupted giant of the United States itself.

The KKE has marched people up and down the Acropolis for months but still does not put to them a complete perspective of the terminal collapse of the entire capitalist system.

It can correctly be argued that the conditions have to be carefully assessed and the readiness of the working class to move is part of that and so too the extent of the influence of the KKE.

But building the revolutionary perspective is exactly the way to achieve readiness.

The usual sneer of the opportunist fake-“lefts” always appears of “so its to the barricades tomorrow morning is it comrade” in heavily sarcastic tones.

But that is middle class evasion and excuse making for the complete failure to argue for revolution.

What can be done, and is urgently needed now, is for the revolutionary perspective to be at the centre of everything, as the only sound basis on which to build the greatest possible movement which can take the power, and just as importantly, hold it.

Yet all this, it seems, is to be put off until tomorrow anyway until the “new cycle of crisis”.

What “new cycle” and how long is it being suggested this will go on??

What does it mean?

What is this confident talk of a “temporary upturn” and how long is that supposed to be lasting???

Not even Karl Marx himself would have been able to say exactly how the capitalist crisis will unravel further because the world imperialist economic structure is immensely complex and the appearance of a lull in the downturn is not ruled out (and that is exactly what is happening now through quantitative easing).

But that is just the point – no-one can know precisely and noone can suggest there will be yet another “cycle” to come.

What can that be except tailending the bourgeois pseudo-confidence in “recovery”??

What Marxism can and does know is that the entire monopoly capitalist system has hit a cliff face of crisis and there is no way out of it, save for the insanity of destroying half the world in order to remove the “surplus” capital – or the replacement of capital by the common ownership of the means of production and the building of rational planned economies and societies, as already shown brilliantly by the Soviet Union but done this time without the same mistakes.

Only completely limited revisionist minds could fail to see the entire devastating unrolling of the biggest crisis in 800 years which is expressed in the endless warmongering abroad and increasingly open domestic surveillance, torture, police oppression etc (the prelude to open bourgeois dictatorship in one form or another – either via overt fascism or directly).

But the KKE suggests there is going to be a hiatus – a pause while the world sits and waits for “another cycle of capitalist boom and bust”!!!!

Tell the Egyptians, the Afghanis, the Africans, the millions of poor and downtrodden in the big city slums of America facing savage cuts to their oppressive lives, even in the richest of countries.

The Lalkar/Proletarian gang suggest in their usual pompous and smug manner that this constitutes the apotheosis of Marxist leadership, with an attempted polemical sarcasm:

How foolhardy of Papariga to hit the working class with all this Marxist theory!, They will surely yawn and walk away? Yet the strikes, demonstrations and rallies organised by the KKE and the PAME popular front on a regular basis routinely pull out numbers as great as or greater than the TUC’s once-in-a-blue-moon 26 March effort. ‘

And “routinely” mislead them too, with the same old garbage that has failed the working class for the last sixty years, with its “peaceful roads” and “Stop the War” pointlessness.

The Stalin-written and expounded post-war theory of an imperialism hobbled and wounded by the rise of the socialist camp, needing only to be “contained” from episodic war-making by a vigilant “peace struggle” laid the groundwork for the “democratic way” delusions of the past decades which has disarmed and disillusioned hundreds of millions of workers, culminating in the disappointment of the liquidation of the USSR, which that revisionism led to, under Gorbachev.

It all needs to be reexamined and debated so that the world can get on with rebuilding Leninist revolutionary grasp, now more urgently needed than ever.

It will not happen by avoiding the arguments as the Lalkarites do, shiftily changing position when they are caught out by events and hiding gross errors (on questions like 8 years of uncritical support for the anti-communist SLP, or hailing Mahmoud Abbas as the best leader for the Palestinians when Arafat died (whose petty bourgeois compromising was also ludicrously hailed as “great” leadership), until Abbas’ PA collusion with the CIA and the Zionists began to stink to high heaven, or uncritically tailending Beijing’s revisionist failings, “hailing” it constantly and covering-up even its vote for sanctions against Libya and failure to veto the UN anti-Gaddafi war resolution).

It will be done by the most open possible discussion and debate and polemic in front of the working class to go over all the errors and failings of the past so that a Leninist understanding can be built and the revolutionary leadership parties the world is crying out for.

Build Leninism.

Don Hoskins

 

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