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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 issues

No 1396 23rd November 2011

Ruling class "technocrat" Slump imposition on Italy and Greece confirm Marxist view that democracy is nothing but a sham - always torn up when the crisis inevitably returns in catastrophic failure. Only revolutionary action to end capitalism will ever change anything for the masses as the great Egyptian upsurge is once more learning. But there can be no revolution without revolutionary theory - good that debate is bubbling but still diverted by fake- "left" confusion. Leninism crucial

Fresh new surges in the genuine Arab Spring revolts in Egypt are shaking the world capitalist ruling class to the core.

Despite a year of confusion and brutal counter-revolution through the NATO Nazi slaughter of Libya, to intimidate the whole region, and vicious domestic killing and torture repression by the Western-backed Cairo military (which after nine months of limited reporting, the mainstream Western media and "human rights agencies" has suddenly "discovered" - because they have no choice), the mass surge continues forwards:

Mass protests against Egypt's military junta have swept beyond Cairo and into several major cities across the country, raising questions about the viability of elections due in just over a week.

Following a night of violence that left two dead and more than 600 injured, protests erupted in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, and further demonstrations were reported in the towns of Port Said, Tanta, Mansoura and Sohag. In Suez, a large urban centre on the Suez canal, protesters clashed with armed police who fired teargas in an attempt to disperse crowds.

Meanwhile in the capital, demonstrators who are still occupying Tahrir Square continued to repel sporadic attacks from security forces. Heavy fighting is still taking place in side streets off the central plaza, particularly around the area of the interior ministry where a large contingent of riot troops has been stationed to ward off protesters.

Critics of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), which took power after the toppling of former president Hosni Mubarak earlier this year, are demanding the ruling generals set a date for the return of the country to civilian rule. Parliamentary elections are due to begin on 28 November but, under the current transition plan, the power of new MPs will be closely circumscribed, with executive authority continuing to reside with Scaf and no date yet set for a presidential vote.

Many activists poured scorn on the military's promises to defend the revolution. "Mubarak's regime did not fall. Mubarak's regime is in full power," claimed Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, a prominent member of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition.

Egypt's interior ministry said its forces had acted with "admirable" self-restraint, despite multiple eyewitness accounts of police firing teargas, rubber-coated steel bullets and "birdshot" pellet cartridges directly into crowds from armoured vehicles, often at head height. In a statement, it said that the forced evacuation of Tahrir Square on Saturday morning, which prompted the subsequent clashes, was "in the public's interest, aiming to benefit civilians and lighten traffic congestion". The interim prime minister, Essam Sharaf, himself a target of public anger, also called on protesters to leave the square.

Cairo violence enters a third day: Clashes between protesters and police have broken out in in Tahrir Square and looks set to intensify. Demonstrators were attacked by the army overnight – with some 20 people killed, according to reports. Field hospital doctors say they treated scores of people with injuries from excessive use of teargas and rubber bullets. Protest has spread all over Egypt during the build-up to elections, with many candidates announcing they would be suspending their electoral campaigns

The heroic and rising movement threatens to spread everywhere against US dominated Western oppression.

It signals the ultimate unstoppability of a world revolutionary struggle against centuries of oppression and near-starvation exploitation, which will eventually turn over, and end for good, the vicious and ever-more degenerate capitalist-imperialist order, led by the huge power of the USA.

But while shattering in its impact, the latest wave of revolt also raises even more urgently the crucial need for the re-building of clear, scientific Marxist-Leninist understanding and conscious revolutionary leadership.

Only by establishing socialism under the firm control of the masses (through the dictatorship of the proletariat) via a mass-supported and intertwined leadership, is the ever faster degeneration of the capitalist world into Slump and war disaster going to be ended.

As the last nine months have shown, the Western intelligence agencies, political manoeuvring and rabid media campaigns have had the capacity to hugely muddy the waters over the Arab Spring with the massive NATO bombing Libyan destruction stunted-up behind a deliberately provoked counter-revolutionary pretence of "popular revolt", and current provocations in Syria, like Libya, being pushed into complete civil war mayhem by the demented Western media campaign of hearsay, distortion, and outright lies,

It underscores the desperate need for clarity and coherence on what forces are what in the world and what needs to be done if masses are not to be led up the garden path to confusion and slaughter.

A huge debate has rightly begun on the streets, not just in Cairo but via the Occupy movement in the Western countries, stimulated and inspired by the onrushing capitalist crisis and by growing Third World rebellion generally and in particular the (true) Arab Spring.

It is a vital step in the world re-finding and grasping revolutionary socialist theory.

But its current rejection of "leadership", embrace of anarchy and/or continuing illusions in "real democracy" and "flat leadership" fed by numerous Western "liberal and "left" philosophers from Naomi Klein to Noam Chomsky, are completely disarming the masses everywhere.

To quote an EPSR from a decade ago:

This anti-theory climate is obviously helped by the growing dislike for all 'politics' which inevitably spills over from the justified contempt now felt for most bourgeois party politics in Britain (and elsewhere). Anarchist direct action and Green environmentalism win support to the extent that they seem to be free of longwinded but disregarded political programmes, manifesto promises, conference resolutions, committee decisions and the like, - and the fight for revolutionary theory can be shallowly misunderstood as coming into the same category.

The reality is of course that something always fills the vacuum and when it comes to it, that is the great soup of more or less coherent anti-communism and lies about "tyranny" which has been deliberately pumped into brains everywhere for decades by the great capitalist cultural machine, from newspapers, TV and Hollywood to compulsory police-fink George Orwell as the core literature on the school curriculum.

It is backed up by the craven cowardice of the pretend "revolutionaries" (all shades) and the "Labour left" (including such breakaways as George Galloway and Respect) and their shallow philistinism about "democracy" and "peace struggle", and at worst complete philistinism against "totalitarianism" and "dictators", swallowing every CIA calumny in the book (which if even remotely true, would already have seen the entire world population wiped out about half a dozen times by supposed communist "dictatorial monsters").

Most of all, this surfaced in the universal fake-"left" "condemnation of terrorism" after 9/11 and since, and in the course of the last year, with one or two exceptions, the feeding of imperialism with a "left" excuse for the Nazi Libyan blitzkrieging, by parroting most of the Western media inventions, unproven (and unprovable) hearsay accusations of non-existent atrocities (like the "massacre" of Benghazi which neither happened not was going to), Goebbels lies and distortions poured out against Gaddafi around the deliberately stunted-up "revolt".

All of which has only reinforced the distrust of ordinary people for "politics" and "leftism".

But these gross betrayals of the rising Third World struggle, which for all its incoherence, sometimes counter-productive impact and confused ideologies, has found initial expression in "terrorism", piracy, suicide bombing, insurgency, and anti-Western state defiance (Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan, Iran, etc etc), will backfire badly on the great swamp of fake-"lefts" as the mass struggle swells, exposing the falsity and petty bourgeois anti-communism of their strutting and "rank-and-file" posing.

It will equally show up the opportunism and cover-ups of the few (very slightly) more honourable revisionists who managed to avoid the grotesque stampeding of the past year's warmongering, but whose "victory to Gaddafi" (or the Syrians etc) shallowness just as much misses the point, spreading illusions in the daft ideology (and anti-communism) of assorted bourgeois nationalists when what is needed is an emphasis on defeat for imperialism.

The world faces the problems it faces because, and entirely, because of the catastrophic failure of capitalism, and only waves of defeat, weakening it until total overthrow is possible by conscious mass socialist revolution, will change things and rescue the world from a horrifying spiral of Slump and war destruction.

The fake-"lefts clinging to "parliamentary ways" and still calling for votes for "left" candidates (either in Labour or outside it) – which includes all the assorted Trots and all the revisionists down the "toughest" Stalinists even at the last general election – are certainly being exposed.

The unstoppable spiral of world economic collapse is now degenerating so quickly that the panicky capitalist ruling class itself has abandoned even the farcical pretence of "democracy" altogether in Europe, insisting that "things are so bad that we don't have time for such 'clutter' when the 'markets demand' austerity".

Even the grotesque media swamped electoral manipulations of the jumped-up fascist buffoon Berlusconi are now "clutter"!!!

But as "technocratic" dictatorships are installed behind an excuse of "urgent necessity" to save the rich by imposing devastating Slump on Greece, and Italy; as the craven bourgeois government of equally devastated Ireland is marched to Berlin to have its no-longer-sovereign budget "vetted" before publication by ultra-rich German bankers (to undemocratically ensure it is harsh enough); and, with much the same effect, the supine paralysis and retreat of the reformist "left" everywhere else, (and the bankrupt and corrupted fixing of "parliamentary elections" anyway) leaves the ruling class imposing its poverty diktat by default (UK minority coalition via Labour and Trade Union inaction, Spanish "socialist" meltdown letting in the reactionary Francoist right etc), the world continues to be told that yet more countries must be invaded and blitzed into the ground "because they do not have freedom and democracy".

Such staggering barefaced hypocrisy is underlined even further by the latest war-drum beating against Syria to set it up for yet another barbaric Western blitzing and invasion, either directly or if resources are stretched, via NATO stooge Turkey and the fascist Zionists, just as hungry for war distraction as any other part of capitalism.

And all this done under cover of the complete Western charade of favouring "freedom for the people" via the preposterous Arab League, a body dominated by the most corrupt and backward feudal sheikdoms and principalities of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco and the artificial Gulf statelets, who have spent the last year repressing and slaughtering their own peoples' "democracy" demands and demonstrations.

Some member states like the continuing military dictatorship in Egypt are even now shooting down yet more hundreds of genuine demonstrators and "ordinary people" as, with covert US and Western backing they attempt to head off the rising mass struggles against brutal gangster and Washington funded-dictatorship.

To put forwards this rag-tag "League" band of backwardness and US stoogery as "world opinion", fresh from their financing and participation in the disgusting counter-revolutionary Nazi NATO wholesale destruction of Libya, which has killed and ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in scorched-earth high altitude, high-explosive blitzkrieg, dirty ground war by secret western troops and local fascist vigilante vengefulness, underscores this ultra-Goebbels hypocrisy a thousand times over.

So too does the ever escalating death-squad and drone assassination program of US imperialism, now daily executing and "taking out" alleged "militants" worldwide without trial, and with casual disregard for the death and destruction of bystanders, families, innocents and children.

All this done with complete contempt for any "rule of law", "sovereign rights" of other countries (like Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen etc), or "humanitarian concern" and culminating in the depraved and fascist torture and killing of hundreds of Libyan fighters and civilians, (Sirte, an entire city of 100 000 people utterly flattened and its people killed or de-housed and turned into refugees), and the de facto war-crime vigilante buggering and lynching of Muammar Gaddafi, (for which not an attempt has been made to bring anyone to trial, and the usually strident "humanitarian" braying of the Western media and bogus "international law" justice calls of the Hague court's pomposity have been entirely silent.)

New details emerge daily of Washington's fascist monstrousness with even the mostly complicit bourgeois press forced to say something now and then (to preserve a semblance of verisimilitude for its non-stop distortions and lies) albeit some 18 months late and buried away in downpage foreign news or web-only discussions in the "liberal" and "serious" press. This following exception to the rule even makes a few comments itself about overall Western media bias:

Imagine that an opposition organiser were murdered in broad daylight in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador or Venezuela by masked gunmen, or kidnapped and murdered by armed guards of a well-known supporter of the government. It would be front page news in the New York Times, and all over the TV news. The US State Department would issue a strong statement of concern over grave human rights abuses. ..Now imagine that 59 political killings had taken place so far this year, and 61 the previous year. Long before the number of victims reached this level, this would become a major foreign policy issue and Washington would be calling for international sanctions.

But we are talking about Honduras, not Bolivia or Venezuela. So, when President Porfirio Lobo of Honduras came to Washington last month, President Obama greeted him warmly and said:

"Two years ago, we saw a coup in Honduras that threatened to move the country away from democracy, and in part because of pressure from the international community, but also because of the strong commitment to democracy and leadership by President Lobo, what we've been seeing is a restoration of democratic practices and a commitment to reconciliation that gives us great hope."

Of course, President Obama refused to even meet with the democratically elected president who was overthrown in the coup that he mentioned, even though that president came to Washington three times seeking help after the coup. That was Manuel Zelaya, a left-of-center president who was overthrown by the military and conservative segments of society in Honduras after instituting a number of reforms that people had voted for, such as raising the minimum wage and laws promoting land reform.

But what angered Washington most was that Zelaya was close to the left governments of South America, including Venezuela. He wasn't any closer to Venezuela than Brazil or Argentina was, but this was a crime of opportunity. So, when the Honduran military overthrew Zelaya in June of 2009, the Obama administration did everything it could for the next six months to make sure that the coup succeeded. The "pressure from the international community" that Obama referred to in the above statement came from other countries, mainly the left-of-center governments in South America. The United States was on the other side, fighting – ultimately successfully – to legitimise the coup government through an "election" that the rest of the hemisphere refused to recognise.

In May of this year, Zelaya stated publicly what most of us who followed the events closely already guessed was true: that Washington was behind the coup and helped bring it about. While no one will likely bother to investigate the US role, this is plausible given overwhelming circumstantial evidence.

Porfirio Lobo took office in January 2010, but most of the hemisphere refused to recognise the government because his election took place under conditions of serious human rights violations. In May 2011, an agreement was finally brokered in Cartegena, Colombia which allowed Honduras back into the Organisation of American States. But the Lobo government has not complied with its part of the Cartegena accords, which included human rights guarantees for the political opposition.

Here are two of the dozens of political killings that have occurred during Lobo's presidency, as compiled by the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America (CRLN):

"Pedro Salgado, vice-president of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA), was shot then beheaded at about 8.00pm at his home in the La Concepción empresa cooperative. His spouse, Reina Irene Mejía, was also shot to death at the same time. Pedro suffered a murder attempt in December 2010 […] Salgado, like the presidents of all the cooperatives claiming rights to land used by African palm oil businessmen in the Aguán, had been subject to constant death threats since the beginning of 2011."

The courage of these activists and organisers in the face of such horrific violence and repression is amazing. Many of the killings over the past year have been in the Aguán Valley in the north-east, where small farmers are struggling for land rights against one of Honduras' richest landowners, Miguel Facussé. He is producing biofuels in this region on disputed land. He is close to the United States and was an important backer of the 2009 coup against Zelaya. His private security forces, together with US-backed military and police, are responsible for the political violence in the region. US aid to the Honduran military has increased since the coup.

Recent US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that US officials have been aware since 2004 that Facussé has also been trafficking large quantities of cocaine. Dana Frank, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz who is an expert on Honduras, summed it up for the Nation last month: "US 'drug war' funds and training, in other words, are being used to support a known drug trafficker's war against campesinos."

The US militarisation of the drug war in the region is also pushing Honduras down the disastrous path of Mexico, in a country that already has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The New York Times reports that 84% of cocaine that reaches the US now crosses through Central America, as compared to 23% in 2006, when Calderón took office in Mexico and launched his drug war. The Times also notes that "American officials say the 2009 coup kicked open the door to [drug] cartels" in Honduras.

When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I never thought that his legacy in Central America would be the return of death-squad government, of the kind that Ronald Reagan so vigorously supported in the 1980s. But that seems to be the case for Honduras.

The Obama administration has so far ignored pressure from Democratic members of Congress to respect human rights in Honduras. These efforts will continue, but Honduras needs help from the South. It was South America that spearheaded the efforts to reverse the 2009 coup. Although Washington ultimately defeated them, they cannot abandon Honduras while people no different from their friends and supporters at home are being murdered by a US-backed government.

Yet simultaneously "human rights", "protection of civilians" and "freedom" continue to be invoked directly, and indirectly through obvious stooge provocateurs, as alleged justification for yet more devastating economic (sanctions), a slow form of war by starvation and siege, and military blitzkrieg, on country after country.

It has nothing to do with "freedom" and everything to do with capitalism's stampeding of the world back into a permanent war atmosphere, to whip up reactionary chauvinism everywhere (like in this year's near-compulsory UK thought-police insistence on poppy wearing, even in football matches, to back "our boys", currently a leading part of the Nazi rampaging through Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and more).

It is a complete sham whose purpose is to scapegoat and blame others, and divert attention from capitalism's own stinking world-collapse failure.

This monstrous and bloody hypocrisy could be seen through by a ten-year old child.

But not by the fake-"left" which continues to pour out all the utterly ineffectual and pointless pacifist and reformist garbage about "resisting the slump", "making the bosses pay" and "Stop the War" protest which criminally misleads and confuses the working class, heading it away from the only possible perspective it needs which is revolution.

And worse; in many cases, these scum pour out a "left" version of the hatred and demonisation of selected war victims, from Gaddafi to Mugabe, which is the central propaganda weapon for Washington and its "allies" to dragoon "public opinion" behind the NATO onslaughts which are now the central strategy for capitalism to try and escape its crisis (of which more below).

Not an iota of the real world perspective of complete economic and social breakdown into escalating fascist repression and world war, demanding the urgent establishment of working class domination, and rule of the majority (the 99% if you like) through the dictatorship of the proletariat, is ever heard from the multitudes of fake-"lefts" who swamp the "Labour movement" (and whose "theories" still fill the air around the "Occupiers" camps).

Genuine Marxist understanding is being confirmed daily, that the capitalist world system is doomed forever to collapse back into insoluble cataclysmic breakdown, imposing desperate Slump disaster on workers by ever more overtly Nazi repression while a hysterical escalation of war fever is deliberately whipped to stir chauvinist hatreds, and drag the world eventually back into all-out international war.

Confirmed with it is the Marxist-Leninist grasp that democracy and "peaceful reform" is an impossibility, either achieving nothing or being blocked-off and "suspended" if it ever comes remotely near influencing anything in the direction of the working class.

And this is not a signal to demand "the restoration of proper democracy" but the lesson that democracy under capitalist domination is now, and has only ever been, a gigantic confidence trick to head off and bemuse the working class, while the power of big money, capital, rules the roost always, behind the scenes.

There is no progress for the working class anywhere to be achieved by "slow determined piece by piece" improvement and gains.

Everything supposedly "won" by 150 years of reformism and the "Labour Movement" struggle, from a health service to pensions, to education, decent housing, jobs for all, fulfilling lives and a say in the world, is being torn to shreds by the vicious Tory ruling class (and Labour just as much) under the impact of the crisis.

It always was a giant fraud.

It always was ephemeral, destined to collapse and disintegrate, mere sops thrown out by a desperate ruling class when the real revolutionary pressure underneath was building up too much and domestically and even more when the international working class revolutionary struggle was pushing forwards with the titanic achievements of 70 years of building a communist workers state in the Soviet Union with not an owner or capitalist in sight.

The appeal of these titanic class achievements was particularly strong after the disasters of the 1930s Depression and WW2 had demonstrated the full horrors of capitalist slump yet again (after the Great War "to-end-all-wars" promises only 20 years previously) and the powerful social, economic, scientific cultural and educational gains of the USSR were set in contrast, reinforced by the historic heroism of the massive Red Army defeat of Hitlerite fascism.

And this continued despite all sorts of mistakes and errors, including the eventual retreat from revolutionary philosophical struggle which underlay the difficulties and problems of Stalinist revisionism and its ultimate end-point of complete pointless liquidationism of the still successfully operating Soviet economy under Gorbachevite capitulation to alleged "free market efficiency" (a soft-brained anti-Marxist nonsense that is looking sicker by the minute as the inevitable (as Marxism declares) crisis disaster unravels and drags the world into chaos including newly re-established Russian capitalism).

Everything delivered by the new workers state, building, as far and fast as limited resources and initially backward cultural development would allow, an astonishingly new, egalitarian and fair world, for the first time in all human history, was aped (under pressure) by capitalism in distorted form – health, housing, education, employment, holidays, pensions, – "granted" to head off bubbling European revolution everywhere in the post-war years, but only ever partially, always leaving private medical treatment for the rich in place etc, the privileged Oxbridge universities, privileged schooling etc etc.

And it was only done in the very richest of countries anyway, living on the backs of the great mass of Third World exploitation where near-slave plantation and sweatshop labour has constantly prevailed under the stooge management of numerous tinpot gangster dictatorships and fascist regimes, bribed and installed by more or less direct western interventions and post-colonial corruption, through CIA organised coups, death-squad intimidation, ghastly massacres (one million suspected communist sympathisers killed in Java in 1965), invasions and, where "necessary", all-out bloody blitzing wars destroying whole countries such as Greece, Malaysia, Vietnam, North Korea, to hold back and restrain any resistance.

Generations of hundreds of millions have never seen even the hope of even decent basic living conditions, in the sewage-ridden, dirt-street shanty town hovels, starvation and lack of education, let alone such "luxury" as university or even decent schools.

In the "well-off" West such reforms have anyway always been a trick, unevenly distributed and leaving millions in poverty, unemployment and bleakness anyway.

Now millions more are being forced back to that, and the "gains" are all being dismantled and taken back, from the miners strike onwards as an increasingly pressed ruling class has faced cutthroat competition from more powerful and efficient rivals (like Germany and the Euro-bloc it is forming around it, to be able to take on America as crisis deepens all the way to renewed world war).

As Marxism constantly warned, everything will turn to dust as the crisis collapse makes it impossible for the ruling class to deliver.

It is equally impossible for the "left" reformists to deliver either, or "defend living standards" etc because the world spiral of collapse is overwhelming – so they have simply abandoned the field, opportunistically happy not to be in power while continuing to play a game of pretend opposition and tepid sniping, to occasionally "justify" their comfortable salaries and lavish perks and expenses and try and keep the parliamentary charade going.

That is why they did not even attempt to form a "Labour" Coalition and why the Spanish Labour Party equivalent did not even put up a fight in the elections just held.

The working class increasingly sees every supposed "democratic" path to improvement being closed off.

Revolution is increasingly the only option as Marxism has always insisted.

But for all their pretences and decades of "we'll be there when the time comes, comrade" sneering, the fake-"lefts" they still do not raise the revolutionary questions as the central issue and the vital need for working class understanding and struggle, immediately and now.

Which part of rapidly unfolding catastrophic failure of capitalism is not glaringly clear enough yet for the posturing antics of the Trotskyist pretend "revolutionaries" (anti-communist through and through in reality) or the ineffectual revisionists (hiding their inadequacies and evasions under a dishonest pretence of "Stalinist hardness") and the slimy opportunist Trade Union and "left" reformists they back up, with their feeble and hopeless illusions in "controlling the banks", "forcing the ruling class to share out the money", making things "more democratic" and "stopping war" by "peacefully" protesting against it?

Is it that they cannot see the rapidly deepening devastation of wage cuts, unemployment, youth despair, slashed pensions and privatised health provision which has only just begun and can only inexorably continue as week after week of market and credit system turmoil demonstrate?

Is it that they did not notice the cynical and casual tearing up of supposed democracy in Italy and Greece where the panicking European ruling class (in the allegedly unchallengeable form of the "markets") has decided to abandon even the outrageous manipulated pretences which pass for "democracy" under the jumped-up fascist buffoon Silvio Berlusconi or the pseudo-"socialist" reformism of the treacherous Pasok-ites, all under the muttered excuse of "not upsetting the markets" (thereby proving that it is the dictatorship of capital which is in charge)?

(As if any "democracy" has ever been anything anyway but the most monstrous deception and hoodwinking charade, hiding the permanent dictatorship of capital and big money behind the confidence trick of "everyone having a say"?)

Or is it the next instalment in the now endless Goebbels demonisation of victim country after victim country now being stirred up by the filthy and conscious distortions and outright LIES of the intelligence agency-fed Western media machine, all done outrageously and barefacedly under the pretence of "bringing democracy and the 'rule of law' to (allegedly) benighted counties", which they still fail to see?

Is all that not an obvious enough Goebbels Nazi joke????

War fever is being whipped up for no other purpose than to get capitalism out of the giant historic hole that the inbuilt contradictions of production for profit have got it into – complete meltdown failure of the world credit and currency systems in a crisis collapse of unprecedented proportions.

The fake-"left" has not somehow missed reading the papers or can't see what is happening in front of their eyes – this failure is a class blindness by petty bourgeois pretenders who have sickeningly capitulated to the overwhelming pressure of the demented war propaganda that has poured non-stop from capitalism for a decade and a half and with added poison and ferocity since the "credit crunch" in 2008, which has shaken the profit system to its foundations and confirmed once and for all the Marxist scientific predictions (the only science to do so) of economic failure and political disintegration.

Against all bourgeois ridicule (and fake-"left" contempt) that Marxism-Leninism is "not really science" (which is still taught to every new generation of undergraduates year by year) this dialectical understanding alone has been warning the working class for over three decades of the Slump/war disaster coming.

And it has done so equally in the teeth of ridicule, dismissal as "irrelevant" and "no longer useful old hat dogma" etc. etc. from the fake-"lefts" (see constant anti-Trotskyist and anti-union bureaucracy battles within the Socialist Labour Party in the mid-1990s for example).

Leninist understanding is daily proven exactly right and no more so than in declaring that the crisis is not only bringing capitalist warmongering (as some of the "lefts" will at least say, now that it is obvious) but essentially is war, a complete intertwining of economic disintegration with a drive into total war which is all part of a single unfolding epochal crisis of the class rule system – not, as revisionists like Lalkar/Proletarian tepidly say "a series of plundering wars" and not stoppable by protest "if only enough workers get together for peace".

The unfolding wars are neither a "series" nor "predatory" but the desperate last world war resort of a ruling class which has utterly failed and is staring at the abyss of complete historic extinction.

Extinction is exactly what the ruling class will have as a class as soon as the working class shakes itself free of the anti-communist brainwashing of the last sixty years, the disastrous petty bourgeois counter-revolutionary garbage of the Trotskyists and the pathetic retreats of revisionism from revolution (and the endless cover-ups made to disguise their opportunism).

The signs are already apparent that the nearly two decades of war which has been used primarily to suppress the growing rebelliousness of the Third World is spreading rapidly into a general conflict between the great capitalist powers, already surfacing in the international cutthroat banking and currency rivalries between the great capitalist blocs.

Not for nothing is the British ruling class in a blind panic as the dominant German capitalism in Europe swings its weight around calling for a "Tobin tax" to fund the Euro.

The German ruling class cares not a hoot about "fair taxes on banks" but sees a major opportunity to put the boot into the financial centre of London which is the core of parasitical "Anglo-Saxon" capitalist exploitation on which the UK is now entirely dependent.

It is a major opportunity to eliminate one of its key rivals, and with it an ally of the biggest rival of all, the giant US imperialism.

All this goes hand in hand with German and "middle Europe" contempt for Britain, French and German insults against Italy, and sneering and diplomatic insults from the Americans against "Europe" etc, all crisis-fuelled tensions which are generating a febrile and hate-filled atmosphere which echoes the jostling "diplomacy" of the pre-World War One colonial skirmishes and the 1930s Depression period's shifting alliances.

It is destined to explode eventually in massive war conflict in one way or another, even if as yet the precise alliances and groupings that form are still only shaping up.

Two world wars already have been capitalism's "solution" to slump disaster, as markets shrank.

The Third World war is ripening rapidly.

Again, Leninist science alone has been pointing to inter-imperialist conflicts as inevitably returning because of the unstoppable collapse of markets and currencies which the contradictions of production for profit always must generate as Marx titanically first analysed and the Bolsheviks extended (see economics Page 6).

Leninism alone has been pointing to the Nazi war pattern of dominant US imperialism's deliberate aggressiveness which has long set a path of deliberate worldwide intimidation (labelled "shock and awe" at the time of the whipped-up and completely bogus "weapons of mass destruction" blitzing of Iraq) which has continued non-stop to make sure Washington could get in first with Nazi terrorising, to ride out the world crisis as continuing top dog against all comers, be it Third World rebellion or the market and currency challenges of the other major powers.

The signals of war are overwhelming.

Is it important to "crow" about who was right and who has been proved wrong?

Not for any reasons of pride or "told you so" hubris, but absolutely to demonstrate once again to the working class the capacity of scientific Marxism to get things right, and by that give the only clear and consistent leadership that will prevent them being led up the garden path yet again, to be fooled once more by promises of change, and improvement, while the capitalist state prepares as much violence as it thinks is necessary to smash down and intimidate all struggles against it.

The British ruling class now is being forced to try and drive workers all the way down, as far as conditions of the Third World if it can, as its only hope for continuing the sweet life of privilege and super-indulgent indolent luxury, and of keeping intact in vicious international trade and currency war.

With it comes the imposition of direct dictatorial force as the expensive niceties of the democratic pretence are torn up, union "rights" shackled and dismantled, protest disbanded (as the student fee demonstration marches have been "kettled" and bullied by draconian court judgements and long prison sentences e.g.) and the freelance thuggery of lumpen fascist elements stirred up via petty chauvinism, racist scapegoating and brainwashed ignorance:

Britain's biggest unions are warning of a threat of violence by far-right groups during national strike action this month, amid concern that fascist elements are increasingly intent on targeting striking public sector workers.

Unite, Unison and the TUC said they were taking the prospect of disruption by far-right supporters seriously, and had begun to liaise with police to assess any risk to pickets or those on protest marches. The development follows signs that splinter groups from the English Defence League are broadening their campaign from targeting Muslims to trade unionists and socialist organisations. Members of the EDL have recently been involved in attacks on anti-racist and anti-cuts protesters, as well as attempting to target the Occupy movement which has camped outside St Paul's Cathedral.

More than two million workers are expected to walk out on 30 November during a day of protest against public sector pension changes.

Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, the country's main public sector trade union, said: "We take any threat to our members' health and safety very seriously. As a matter of course, ahead of a major day of action, we work with the police to assess risks, and our many stewards work hard to keep people safe. The far right's latest attempt to stir up hate and fear is a disgrace."

Rob Johnston, the Midlands regional secretary for the TUC, said: "There is a concern, a general wariness, that the EDL are very active. There have been attacks on trade unionists. We need to put our heads together and think about how we deal with it."

Nine days ago an EDL faction attempted to attack the north-west headquarters of Unite, the UK's biggest trade union. Online messages from the EDL in Merseyside stated they were "patrolling for leftys [sic]". Those they finally identified turned out to be former council workers protesting after they lost their jobs when a contractor went bust. A march of female asylum seekers has also been recently targeted by EDL supporters in the city.

One EDL splinter group, the Infidels, has stated that it considers any leftwing or anti-cuts activists fair game.

Scotland Yard said they believed a breach of the peace was about to take place after they got intelligence that the EDL were planning the Armistice Day attack. The law states officers can arrest if they believe the breach of the peace to be "imminent."

A member of the tented community outside the cathedral expressed gratitude to the police for preventing any violence.

"It is fantastic if they are using their resources to try and stop people getting on to this site," said Bryn Phillips, a member of the Occupy LSX community. "If this has prevented violence then I am pleased."

The English Defence League had issued statements and made threats on Facebook to burn down protesters tents if they were still outside St Paul's on Remembrance Sunday, according to Phillips.

Some members of the EDL had also attempted to enter the encampment, most recently on Thursday night.

A statement by the EDL on Thursday was read to the Occupy LSX general assembly on Friday morning to make people aware that there was a threat being made. "They called us all sorts of names in the statement and said we should leave "their" church and stop violating their religion," said Phillips.

Later the Met said three of those arrested had been released on police bail pending further inquiries, and the others released with no further action.

Earlier, police had angered the protesters outside St Paul's by saying on Twitter that anyone intent on disrupting the two minute silence would be dealt with "robustly." They were accused of using the a macho approach to quash freedom of speech.

There was anger that the Met appeared to be adopting an intimidatory style of policing after the announcement earlier in the week that plastic bullets had been pre-authorised in advance of the student anti cuts protest on Wednesday.

Police had initially believed that Muslims against Crusades would be protesting at the Cenotaph. But, on Thursday, Theresa May, the home secretary, banned the group and Scotland Yard carried out a series of raids on three addresses in east London to execute search warrants.

The naïve gratitude of the Occupation movement to the police may not yet be on a par with the touching faith of the peasantry in the "father" Tsar in Russia in 1905, calling on him to deal with the oppression of the aristocracy and finding themselves sabred and slaughtered by cavalry outside the Winter Palace, the great shock massacre which precipitated two years of revolutionary upheaval and despite, its eventual defeat at the time, set in train changes which culminated in the even greater revolution of 1917 which eventually toppled backward Tsarism and then saw the Bolsheviks take power.

But the occupiers are equally mistaken.

The very same news stories give the real clues about the role of the police and state forces in capitalism, to suppress and hold down the working class.

But such is the pernicious influence of decades of official trade unionist reformism, Labourism and the fake-"leftism" which feeds illusions in being able to "pressure" capitalism through strikes and marches, through protest and playing the game of "winning left positions" in parliament (including the Stalinist pretenders who make lots of noise about "breaking with Labourism", only to call for "left" reformist votes) -- that even now they fail to draw the obvious conclusion that only revolution creates the means by which the world can go forwards, completely overturning the degeneracy of this foul and vicious historically doomed and out-of-time ruling class, now sliding once more all the way into world wide destruction.

The occupiers need to pay attention to the great ferment of revolt and anti-capitalist hostility which has been building up for decades throughout the Third World, in a variety of forms, and especially year in the great mass revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, which despite their heroism have so-far been fobbed off with capitalism's "human rights" trickery and jam-tomorrow promises of "democracy".

Even more disastrously they need to examine again just what capitalism has been doing to distract divert their understanding.

Rejecting "party" leadership" has not stopped them being completely hoodwinked by capitalism's latest counter-revolutionary provocations against Syria, even falling in with this demented campaign by even setting up a "live hook-up" up to the so-called rebels, from St Paul's camp recently.

There is no need to "support" the erratic bourgeois nationalist Assad regime at all, to recognise that the latest "rebellion" is a capitalist stunt, deliberately provoked (and there is even filmed evidence of unknown masked gunman early on, sniping into crowds) to create further mayhem, and steamroller local tribal and Muslim sectarian tensions into deliberate civil war. And this has been true for more than a decade of warmongering as warned by Leninism in the past:

It is only the DEFEAT of Western imperialism (including the British ruling establishment) that workers who seriously want a socialist transformation can be interested in.

That does NOT mean wanting a victory for Saddam Hussein in the slightest. It means ONLY that the West's outrageous warmongering adventure/distraction to massacre "evils abroad" as a cynical fascist imperialist cover for catastrophic economic and social failure at home SHOULD COME A GIGANTIC CROPPER.

That way, there will not be 'world rule' by barmy Saddam or even barmier Osama (who have not the slightest thought or interest in world rule anyway, and least of all any means to achieve it, but merely want to drive out US imperialist domination and military tyranny over their homelands), - but simply massive strides towards a completely new world of working-class power everywhere, cooperating and building a planned socialist planet.

The Cairo "Arab Spring", via these attacks, has been intimidated and confused (itself partially taken in by the alleged "rebellions") opening it to yet more repeated counter-revolutionary onslaughts once again gunning down the ordinary people.

Only with revolutionary clarity can the working class understand who is on their side and who is spreading deliberate mayhem.

The staggering and chaotic pace of Slump developments is screaming out for revolutionary solutions, including the great armoury of potential working class actions from takeovers and factory or bank occupations, to land seizures and appropriations, especially where all other alleged "democracy" options have already been shut down such as Greece and Italy.

That cannot be done in a vacuum but demands revolutionary Leninist leadership and organisation, with the clearest understanding of organising to struggle against the inevitable counter-revolutionary class violence any such moves will encounter.

Even where such "bold" tactics might be advanced by the fake-"lefts", they remain a posturing formality, an abstraction or backpage academic "discussion" a million miles from actual developments on the ground.

Or they are thrown out entirely without any revolutionary perspective (usually declared "premature", leaving the working class bereft and vulnerable, missing the crucial central ingredient that can make sense of all such struggles, won or lost in the immediate circumstances but preparing ever deeper revolutionary understanding.

The titanically heroic 1984 miners strike would have been a thousand times more useful to the working class if it had been carried through with a revolutionary perspective, instead of the hampering Labour-supporting illusions of Scargill in a "Plan for Coal", relying on yet more reformist economic expansion at a moment when the capitalist slump (now so obvious) was already beginning to force the hand of the ruling class (and as Leninism said clearly then).

Not only might that have helped expose the criminal betrayal of the rest of the official trade union movement, which failed to mobilise the massive potential additional forces of the working class to fight what was clearly a ruling class Tory civil war against workers' organisation and fighting solidarity, and which might have tipped the balance, but it would have left a giant legacy of revolutionary understanding throughout the vanguard sections of the working class, of inestimable value subsequently.

And that, avoiding much demoralisation, would have been the case even if the defeat of the strike had been inevitable in the conditions then prevailing (which is by no means certain).

The disastrous politics of the pacifists, reformists and above all the fake-"left" revolutionary pretenders are a fatal flaw in the protest movement against the Slump disaster of the onrushing world capitalist crisis.

They are saturated in fatal illusions in abstract "democracy", hopes for a "moral" capitalism, and "passive protest" to win restraint and fairness in a system that by its very nature can never be anything but ruthlessly exploitative, and increasingly, openly fascistically violent to keep its power and wealth.

Most of all they shy away from the only possible solution there can be to the epochal and irrecoverable catastrophic failure of capitalism - revolutionary overturn and the establishment of working class power.

Anti-communism remains the central flaw, so that a major class movement can never gather momentum.

Until the true history of the giant achievements of communism, as well as its retreats and flaws, are all honestly examined, any mass movement is holed beneath the waterline.

But far from being willing to look back at the entire history of the working class struggle in the modern era and the massive impact of the great Soviet Union, and the difficulties it got into because of the philosophical failings of Stalinism, the great revisionist swamp continues to cover-up past errors and difficulties and those of current times.

So in the latest Lalkar/Proletarian output there is once more not a mention throughout a eulogy to Gaddafi, of the disastrous role Beijing's revisionist flaws have played in going along with Western manipulations against Libya and Syria, in the former case even supporting the initial sanctions motion and refusing to use the powerful security council veto to stop the "no-fly-zone" motion which gave NATO carte blanche effectively to destroy the entire country.

And the KKE revisionist Greek communist party remains uncriticised for its disastrous continuing peaceful struggle perspectives, failing even now to use the huge class base it still has to mobilise and educate the working class in an all-out revolutionary perspective.

Instead a totally distorted account of the Greek civil war history is included by a KKE member, dutifully and uncritically lauding Stalin and failing completely to mention the famous 1944 Yalta meeting at which Stalin divvied up Europe with Roosevelt and Churchill, abandoning Greece to the pre-war monarchists and fascist collaborators.

But these questions will continue to be forced to the surface by the collapse of the entire world capitalist system, demanding more and more answers, until Leninist mass revolutionary consciousness is developed which can lead the great struggle to finally transform the world.

Build Leninism.

 

Don Hoskins

 

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EPSR supporters from the London EPSR

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