Back issues
No 1410 18th August 2012
Fake-"left" complacency still fails to warn the working class of the full devastating extent of the catastrophic breakdown failure of the capitalist world economic system which has just begun the slide into the greatest Slump and world war disaster of all time. Workers' fights to "reject austerity" can only be the start of the all out revolutionary struggle that history confronts them with. Fake-"left" single issue reformism – feminism, "gay rights", black nationalism, – blocks revolutionary grasp and feeds Western subversion around Assange and Pussy Riot etc. Leninism vital
Renewed downward lurches of the major Western economies not just in Europe but across the world (including the capitalist economic elements of the Chinese workers state) and the increasingly shameless Goebbels demonisation and destruction of selected war victims by the Western NATO and CIA forces, are twin confirmations that the Marxist-Leninst understanding of total catastrophic failure of capitalism is unrolling as analysed (see economic quotes).
There is no possibility of either "returning to a sound economy" by controlling debt, nor of "stimulating an upturn","re-establishing growth", "putting things on a sound footing" and "reining in the excesses" and all the other deluded or deliberately lying phrases pumped out by the bourgeois politicians (including the Labourite shadows and TUC lackeys) to lull the masses while it prepares all-out class war for the turmoil ahead.
But glaring as the slump reality is now becoming, the crucial understanding that is needed by the working class, – that this epochal failure and disaster is unstoppable and can only end in total worldwide Depression, increasing fascist repression domestically and inter-imperialist trade-conflict savagery and world war destruction, (deliberately imposed by imperialism as a "solution") – still is not being explained by the twittering collection of fake-"left" parties, sour Trotskyist or insipid revisionist flavours both.
Of course they will variously will describe, explain and oppose the unfairnesses, collapses, austerity and mistreatment of capitalism, and in some cases at least, even stand notionally on the right side with the blitzkrieged and war devastated victims of the non-stop and ever-growing world capitalist aggression and manipulated chaos, such as the artificially induced Syrian "civil war", or the deliberately provoked parody of the Arab Spring set going as counter-revolution in Libya (against the hated anti-imperialism of Gaddafi), both done to head off real revolution in Egypt.
But their answer to this unfolding world disintegration remains light years from the response needed by the billions of exploited and downtrodden on the planet, namely the revolutionary overturning of outmoded and degenerate private profit making in favour of worldwide planned socialism.
They are still effectively stuck in the half-hearted protest, pacifist and reformist ruts which have helped keep the working class bound and tied within the capitalist exploitation framework for centuries, hamstrung with illusions in the fraud of "parliamentary democracy" and "freedom".
The only difference now is that the promises of "slow and steady improvement" to come by putting on enough "left pressure" or "voting for true socialism" and finding "genuine left representatives" finally, have given way to "defending workers gains" and "fighting against austerity" by "making the bosses pay" etc. all still within the framework of "electing better representatives" as for Syriza or the KKE in Greece etc.
Even that is barely done, with the British working class so far being offered a couple of protest marches against the savagery of two years of Tory cuts, the next one put off until October.
Those parties and groups which will occasionally mention the concept of revolution as the necessary answer to capitalism's crisis and add a few paragraphs to their papers about the need to "overturn the capitalist system and its state", do not offer anything different in practice, still fatuously suggesting war can be "stopped" and demanding "people's democracy".
At best they might talk about capitalist production now being incapable of meeting people's needs and being "ripe" to be "superseded by social ownership and a planned socialist economy", correct in itself but divorced from any grasp of the storming urgency of the devastating crisis now sweeping the world and the necessity it imposes for the revolutionary fight.
Where such phrases are laced into the last few paragraphs of an article (almost always as a tacked on afterthought) they come nowhere near raising the giant questions of how the working class struggle will erupt and coalesce around the world and of the gigantic violent destruction that is coming against the entire world tyranny of capitalism.
"Superseding" capitalism, and even the "conquest of power" are not incorrect but a million miles from the urgent and central question of the need to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, to win working class power and then suppress and hold down the constant subversion and counter-revolutionary violence of the ruling class once it is overturned.
Mostly they still all call for "protest" against the Slump and "Stop the War" pacifist struggles against the warmongering on Syria for example.
It is not only a hopeless and ineffectual prospect but misleading and criminally disarming of the working class.
There is no stopping the Slump except by the total destruction of the capitalist order and the complete rebuilding of the world under the control and discipline of the working class on a basis of common ownership and planned production on an international scale.
This socialist perspective, from which follows all the political understanding and grasp of the need for revolutionary theory and action, is barely touched on by the "lefts" let alone expounded at the heart of every issue.
To begin with this needs to be explaining that full devastating picture of the capitalist financial meltdown which is intractable and unstoppable, sliding into ever greater turmoil.
The lies of the ruling class, desperate to cover up this historic cataclysm and humiliation for fear of the revolts its will stir, and to give themselves time to repress the coming upheavals, need to be exposed in every situation.
Most of all the working class needs the understanding that this collapse is now full of sudden lurches downwards and on a scale never before seen.
The crisis is not simply about imposing worse and more draconian austerity – it is about a complete world collapse that confronts the masses everywhere with the urgent need for an utter transformation of the entire basis of human society.
The pant-wetting panic of the bourgeois commentators in the "credit crunch" moments of summer 2008 gave a few clues about how terrifyingly precipitous is the underlying crisis.
Since then its devastation has been put off only by the demented printing of paper and electronic credit, the utterly valueless trillions pumped into the world economy as "Quantitative Easing" managing to hold things together, just about, for a short period.
But the contradictions which run through the capitalist private profit driven way of organising the world are intractable (as Karl Marx's great analysis untangled) and will always find their way back to the surface.
In one form or another the Great Crash, which has only just begun to impose its devastation on tens of millions of lives, can only lurch suddenly into much greater disaster yet.
Even the depredations imposed on the working class in the smaller and weaker countries of the capitalist world economy in Greece, or Ireland or Spain, facing devastating breakdown, shattered lives, soup kitchens, bleak futures, joblessness, despair (and suicides) - and already beginning to be felt in the richer countries too (severely so in some pockets) in the form of inflation, wage stagnation, welfare slashing, homelessness etc - are only a taste of what is coming and which the ruling class in each of the major countries must impose on workers if it is to hope to survive the cutthroat murderous competition for markets in the future.
The bitter rivalries between the capitalist are driving towards ever greater skulduggery and viciousness - witness how the American ruling class has moved to try and destroy the City of London's financial influence now the crisis has exposed the corrupt and underhand dealing that passes for "probity" in the concentrated finance and banking circles.
Weakened British imperialism, is one of the capitalist stragglers in the increasingly vicious international trade and currency wars, hopelessly incapable industrially and forced for decades to turn to "deregulation" - meaning turning a blind eye to every under the table dirty practice going, as in the Libor interest fixing scandal – to try and maintain its presence in the "service industries" of the finance markets.
It has suited the other imperialist powers to take advantage, most of all the USA wracked by its own scandals and bankruptcies and needing to maintain a pretence of clean hands, all siting their own banks in prostituted London where they can do what they like.
But the rapidly degenerating crisis has exposed the fraudulent and dirty dealings, leaving the British ruling class desperately weakened and near panicked as the rivals circle like sharks round a wounded pack member ready to tear it apart, a desperate and floundering Wall Street and major European power Germany too, long resentful of the profits hoovered up by the City at the expense of its Frankfurt centre.
These intense crisis pressures, finding their sharpest expression in the "pure" concentrated capitalism of the finance markets, have only just started and are heading to all out vicious conflict.
This is the real war pressure the capitalist system, all out world war destruction for which the Middle East blitzings are just the warm-up.
It needs underlining over and over again that there is no way that this Slump savagery can be stopped, any more than capitalist war, (which is an intertwined aspect of the crisis anyway) can be stopped by pacifist demands for "Hands off Syria" or "No to NATO invasion".
Capitalist markets are now in a state of near permanent instability and nervousness as the bourgeois press constantly reports, with the promised "growth" repeatedly disappearing:
Spain dragged the eurozone closer to the edge of collapse despite winning the backing of finance ministers from the single currency's major economies for a €100bn (£77.8bn) bank rescue fund.
Concerns that Madrid is running out of options to bring down the debts of its ailing banks and bankrupt regions sent the country's borrowing costs soaring above 7.2% – a rate seen as unsustainable for a country that cannot devalue its own currency and is suffering a lengthy double-dip recession.
The bank bailout had been supposed to push down the country's borrowing rates, but the country's problems continue to mount. On Friday the region of Valencia was forced to turn to the Spanish central government for cash help.
That move, together with a downgrade of Spanish bonds to junk status by the credit ratings agency Egan Jones, saw the Madrid stock market suffer its biggest one day fall for two years.
Markets in London, Paris and Frankfurt followed suit with the FTSE 100 falling 1% to 5651. The euro crashed to historic lows against several currencies. Against the pound it fell to 77.72 pence, marking its lowest since the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse in October 2008.
The prospect of Spain standing near the exit to the eurozone with Greece and Portugal had seemed outlandish only a few weeks ago, after eurozone leaders agreed to press ahead with more co-operation and a rescue for Madrid that targeted its banks.
Stock markets climbed and solvency fears eased after the summit, which many saw as provided a lengthy breathing space for politicians to work out a broader rescue package. But the shortcomings of the agreement have once again undermined renewed confidence in the eurozone and sent the bond yields of several countries higher, including Spain and Italy.
Comments by German officials added to the febrile atmosphere with hardliners questioning the eurozone's ability to carry on while southern European countries wrestled with major reforms and public spending cuts.
The Spanish government said a predicted rise in GDP next year of 0.4% had proved optimistic, and the economy would suffer another year of recession. The new forecast that the economy will contract by 0.5% shocked analysts, who said a raft of austerity measures would delay a recovery for several years.
Mariano Rajoy, the leader of Spain's right-wing government, has pushed through €65bn (£50.6bn) of spending cuts and tax rises to meet deficit targets set by Brussels, which are widely blamed for pushing the economy back into recession for another year.
Shortly before the bank bailout was agreed by eurozone ministers on Friday, the Valencia regional government admitted it could no longer fund itself on the markets and requested what is, in effect, a bailout by the Spanish government. Regional governments deliver the key parts of the welfare state, including health, education and social services.
Eastern Valencia said it was asking for central government help as it could not refinance loans that must be paid off this year. Regional vice president José Ciscar did not say how much was needed. "Like other regions, Valencia is suffering the consequences of liquidity restrictions in the markets," he said.
It will become the first of Spain's 17 semi-autonomous regions to tap a new, week-old €18bn (£14bn) fund designed to provide them with liquidity. The fund is part-financed with a loan from the state-owned lottery company.
Valencia, which has long been run by Rajoy's PP, is emblematic of Spain's current crisis. A property crash has hit both regional government income and the region's banks, with its three main banks having to be rescued. Local politicians, meanwhile, have a growing reputation for corruption and frivolous spending.
Valencia mopped up a quarter of the €17bn (£13.2bn) of extra money made available by central government in April to pay a backlog of regional government bills.
Just as Rajoy's government refuses to call the European rescue fund money a bailout, so Valencia's government insisted its request for special funding should not be described as one. "Valencia is signing up to a financing mechanism which other regions will also need in the coming days, without any further measures," Ciscar said.
Last year the regions not only failed to meet government-set deficit reduction targets, but actually increased their joint deficit. Rajoy's government has passed legislation allowing it to take direct control of the finances of regions that stray too far off target.
Analysts believe most regions will miss this year's 1.5 percent deficit target. The government last week asked at least eight of them to revise their 2012 budgets, threatening to take over the finances of some of them.
Before the days of the financial crisis, QE was seen as a drastic emergency measure, which only Japanese policymakers had used on a large scale in recent times, to little avail, as their economy slumped into a "lost decade" of deflation and recession.
Make no mistake: this latest £50bn-worth of electronically created money being pumped into the financial system is a sign of deep desperation, not a simple chip out of the rough.
As the Bank said in the statement that accompanied its decision to expand QE to an eye-popping £375bn, this is an economy that had failed to grow for the past 18 months, and has now slipped into recession – and the headwinds are getting worse.
Last week's eurozone summit in Brussels may have been greeted with a great fanfare as a sign that Germany was prepared to make solid moves towards standing behind its troubled partners' debts.
But as the dust has settled, there have been growing doubts about whether the deal Italy and Spain thought they had wrung from Berlin was as good as it first appeared. The Bank of England monetary policy committee certainly does not seem convinced: as it said, "in spite of the progress made at the latest European council, concerns remain about the indebtedness and competitiveness of several euro-area economies, and that is weighing on confidence here".
Meanwhile, the recovery in the US seems to be grinding to a halt; and the anxious Chinese authorities are cutting interest rates to avoid a so-called "hard landing".
It is not quite the global loss of nerve that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 and early 2009; but there is no doubt that there is a deep malaise in many of the UK's major markets.
Given that one of the few sources of hope for the clapped out British economy was a jump in exports, that is very bad news.
At home, meanwhile, whether or not George Osborne's slash and burn approach to restoring the public finances caused the double-dip, the further belt-tightening that is due over the next couple of years certainly will not help boost growth.
The collapse in construction as orders for taxpayer-funded schools and public projects have dried up, and which has been a key cause of the latest downturn in GDP, is just one example of the coalition's fiscal tightening leeching demand out of the economy.
And while it is re-starting QE, the Bank is also working with the Treasury to launch a battery of other emergency measures, including the "funding for lending" scheme announced by George Osborne in the Mansion House speech – a clear acknowledgment that QE is reaching the limits of its effectiveness.
So the real message to take from the Bank's decision on Thursday is not, "don't panic," but, "be very afraid". King knows very well that this is an economy that's buried deep in a bunker.
The UK's biggest trade deficit since modern records began 15 years ago prompted calls for the government to provide more help for exporters struggling to cope with weakening global demand for their products.
The British Chambers of Commerce called on the business secretary, Vince Cable, to boost infrastructure spending, create a new investment bank and assist with trade finance after the latest official figures showed the gap between imports and exports widened from £2.7bn to £4.4bn in June.
David Kern, the BCC's chief economist, said: "British exporters have untapped potential to expand, but they need more government support to help them compete globally and diversify towards growing markets outside the EU. We need firmer action in key areas such as trade finance, promotion and insurance. More infrastructure spending and the early creation of a business bank would make a major contribution towards stronger growth in UK exports."
Labour also seized on data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the value of UK exports of goods and services fell by 4.6% between May and June while imports declined by 0.7%.
The shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, said: "The Business Department has failed to adequately help firms which want to export, in particular small companies. It speaks volumes that the government's finance scheme to boost exports only helped five firms before being quietly dropped."
Umunna added that the government's promise of an export-led recovery had been "shattered" by the figures and called on ministers to adopt "industrial strategies across the board".
The ONS said the UK trade deficit was the largest since comparable records began in 1997. It was made up of a £10.1bn deficit in trade in goods, offset by a £5.8bn surplus in services.
City analysts said the figures were poor even when allowing for the disruption to business caused by the extra bank holiday in June to celebrate the Queen's diamond jubilee.
They noted that the trade gap for the second quarter – a better guide to the underlying trend than one month's figures – increased from £7.8bn to £11.2bn, enough to wipe a percentage point off economic growth. In the three months to June, the value of exports was down by 2.7% while imports were flat.
Although Britain's export performance has been hampered by the prolonged crisis in the eurozone, the slowdown in the rest of the world has also started to hit British firms.
The ONS said Britain's deficit with the European Union increased by £0.5bn in June to £4.9bn, while the deficit with the rest of the world widened by £1.3bn to £5.2bn. Exports to the US, the Netherlands, France, China, Italy and Spain fell heavily in June.
In the second quarter of 2012, the EU deficit increased by £1.8bn to £14.1bn and the non-EU shortfall rose by £1.5bn to £14.2bn. The biggest falls in overseas sales during the quarter were to the US and Germany.
The government's aim since it arrived in power more than two years ago has been to rebalance the economy towards exports but the figures for the first half of 2012 show that the deficit is on course to be higher than in 2010.
Ministers have blamed the problems in the eurozone for the difficulties faced by exporters, but City analysts said there were now problems in North America and Asia.
Daniel Solomon, economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research, said: "Growth in much of emerging Asia has been slowing for some time and, while the US is growing slowly, the labour market has been fragile there for a while."
The Bank of England's governor Sir Mervyn King hinted at further action to boost the ailing UK economy on Wednesday after the Bank slashed its 2012 growth forecast to zero and said inflation was under control.
King said there was no urgent need for fresh stimulus, but signalled more money creation through the Bank's quantitative easing (QE) programme in response to an economic performance that has "continually disappointed expectations of a recovery".
Against a backdrop of a worsening crisis in the eurozone and tighter lending conditions imposed by UK banks, the Bank's quarterly inflation report cut its growth forecast for 2012 from the 1.25% pencilled in three months ago and believes the bounce-back next year will be weaker than previously anticipated.
King said: "The overall outlook for growth is weaker than in May, reflecting downside news in the near term and, in the medium term, the possibility that the weakness in output and productivity growth that we have seen since the financial crisis persists.
"GDP growth is more likely than not to be below its historical average rate in the second half of the forecast period."
The governor said it would not be until 2014 that activity would return to its pre-recession peak in 2008 and he used an Olympic analogy to underline that recovery would be long and hard.
"Unlike the Olympians who have thrilled us over the past fortnight, our economy has not yet reached full fitness. But it is slowly healing. Many of the conditions necessary for a recovery are in place, and the monetary policy committee [MPC] will continue to do all it can to bring about that recovery.
"As I have said many times, the recovery and rebalancing of our economy will be a long, slow process. It is to our Olympic team that we should look for inspiration. They have shown us the importance of total commitment when trying to achieve a goal that may lie some years ahead."
King said it would take a "bit of time" to assess the impact of the Bank's new funding for lending scheme (FLS), which came into force last week and is designed to encourage banks to lend more at lower interest rates. Last month, Threadneedle Street announced a £50bn increase in its QE programme to £375bn by November, and the governor said further purchases of government gilts to create money were an option.
Chancellor George Osborne said the government had an opportunity to give "110% attention and effort and energy to getting the economy moving."
He said: "I think the governor is right on the big picture, which is the economy is healing, but it is a slow and difficult process and we're dealing with some very deep-rooted problems at home and some storms from abroad."
...Labour seized on the admission in the inflation report that banks might use the FLS to inflate their profits rather than lowering interest rates, and said it was time for a Plan B on the economy.
Rachel Reeves MP, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: "With growth forecasts slashed yet again, not just this year but in future years too, it is clear that we cannot go on with the same failing plan from this government. The chancellor's policies aren't only causing short-term pain, but long-term damage to our economy too. And despite the crisis in the eurozone, Britain is just one of two G20 countries in a double-dip recession."
Marxism needs to expose all the lulling nonsense that capitalist ideology now pours out about "business as usual" as long as "measures are taken" to deal with "past mistakes" and "bankers excesses" etc.
The working class is confronting an utter disaster of collapse which is dragging the world into the greatest devastation yet, beyond even the horrors and depravities of the First Great War and even the ten times greater, Second World War, the last great expressions of the capitalist crisis.
It was only their world scale of destruction, eliminating whole countries' production output and capacity, which removed enough of the clogging "surplus" capital in the world to temporarily salvage capitalism again for a few more decades of "peaceful" world oppression, neo-colonial wars and fascist stoogery, punctuated by ever greater partial economic disasters.
The contradictions have continued to accumulate and reach surface all over again in an even deeper crisis than ever seen before.
The fake-"lefts" do not come near explaining, or understanding the overwhelming significance of this crashing economic failure, driving everything to disaster.
They mention "crisis" in separate, academic discussions, perhaps explaining Marx's Capital or Lenin's Imperialism:the highest stage of capitalism but without understanding it at all.
This comes out in the way they always talk of the "ultimate" solution being the establishment of socialism, while "in the meantime" workers are to get on with "defending" their conditions, "resisting" austerity, "fighting for their rights" etc.
In other words in practice, the lead they give is always the same old reformism, tarted up with some militant phraseology perhaps, but always avoiding putting the revolutionary perspective at the centre of their analysis.
Attend any of the public meetings of these groups and they will mostly never even mention revolution let alone explain that it needs to be at the heart of all explanation and analysis of the world.
It is only with a total and comprehensive view of the world being completely interconnected and all the events in driven forwards by the desperate and now terrifying meltdown failure of the profit system and its entire elaborate structure, that the leadership can be developed around which the class strength and unity needed to solve by revolution the world's ever increasing difficulties.
That means understanding the crisis as the driving force for the Egyptian revolt, the Greek chaos, the summer riots in Britain, and now once again in France, and most of all the West's constant warmongering.
It means a constant struggle to monitor and describe all these and other developments in the world class struggle, analysing them in the context of the overall crisis and drawing out all their hidden connections, interactions and causes, arising from and contributing to, the spiralling breakdown of worldwide finance, trade, societal and international relations, and explaining this historical scientific perspective to the working class to arm it with the deepest possible understanding and develop its best elements to deepen and extend that knowledge too, becoming part of the revolutionary party's cadre force and leadership as they do so.
But the fake-"lefts" do not have the remotest conception of such a dialectical struggle for theory and perspective.
Their view of the world is presented piecemeal, each event or incident like the Syrian civil war upheaval, or the Greek financial disaster, or the Julian Assange hounding and persecution presented separately which in turn makes an overall view of the causes and reasons for such events impossible to comprehend, and prone to error or complete capitulation to the constant howling storm of bourgeois ideological brainwashing and anti-communism which besets everyone within capitalism from the moment the radio alarm comes on in the morning to the closing TV news headlines at night, and at all points of entertainment or "culture" in between (if they are lucky enough to have such gadgets).
Attempts to say accurately what is happening which are isolated from this world picture, as with the deliberately stirred up Syrian civil war for example, are much more likely to go off the rails, capitulating to imperialism's world intimidation on the one hand by going along with its stampeding media onslaught about "totalitarian dictators" as the Trotskyists do, or sticking in the rigidities of past revisionist retreats and woodenly "supporting" the dubious bourgeois nationalism of Assad and the Ba'athists instead of focussing of the crucial issue of DEFEAT for imperialism but no faith in the vacillating bourgeois nationalists in Damascus.
Only a world context can help grasp that Syria is the latest scapegoat for a worldwide war of intimidation and destruction which Washington imperialism has already been running for a decade and a half because of its devastating crisis, and its intention to "get in first" with the fascist intimidation to smash down rising world rebellion which the growing sophistication of the world's masses has been generating for decades, while warning major imperialist rivals of what they will get if they challenge Washington.
But not a jot of this overwhelming global significance of the crisis, penetrating and generating all the great conflicts on the planet, emerges in the accounts of the Trotskyist and Revisionist "left".
The smug petty bourgeois complacency that underpins their politics cannot even comprehend the notion that the bourgeois world has essentially hit the buffers and is not only unable to develop any more, but can only drag the world into war horror.
Least of all is it able to contemplate that the capitalist ruling class is equally facing its historic end point, as the private ownership of the means of production comes to a full stop, along with all past class domination and rule, no longer necessary and no long capable of dragging society and production forwards.
Their class position has always been tied to the dominance of the big capitalists (who use and pay the middle class services and skills like law, and accountancy and management etc,) and they cannot conceive, and do not want to conceive, of a world where the ruling class ownership has come to an end.
At its most smug and deluded, as in the pages of the increasingly "designer trendy" Weekly Worker (apeing the "stylish" pages of the equally fatuous former CP Marxism Today) from the once Stalinist and now crypto-Trotskyist CPGB, there is an endless academic and completely detached "debate" about whether capitalism is in fact "in a major growth period" and heading for a new a long term expansion and period of prosperity and strength!
You could not make it up.
But even where the "left's" feet are slightly nearer the ground and some account at least is given of the economic disaster underway and the desperation the working class is facing at least faintly registers – no real grasp emerges of the immediacy of the world revolution, and the importance of revolutionary theory to guide its growing ferment.
Total class was is coming - is already erupting in various crude or mainly inadequate forms around the world, from riots and piracy, to assorted insurgencies, national resistances and in recent times taking a qualitative step forwards into such mass spontaneous revolts as Egypt and Tunisia, the street protests of the Indignacios, riots in European cities and waves of strikes and occupations in the particularly hammered economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal and potentially more.
More, they always avoid the vital discussion of decades of mistakes and mis-analysis caused by the long retreat from revolutionary understanding begun virtually from the moment of Lenin's death in 1924 into ever greater revisionist muddle and confusion which eventually self-liquidated itself and the titanic achievements of the first great permanent (70 year) experiment in socialist production and society in the USSR.
Neither the wooden Stalinists sunk in their pacifist delusions, nor the sour "left opposition" of the Trotskyists, throwing the baby of socialist achievement out with the theoretical mistakes and errors of Stalinism and long degenerated into complete capitulation to imperialist "anti-totalitarian" philistine "human rights" bullshit, swallowing all of its foul and poisonous anti-communism, - come anywhere near even beginning the open theoretical battling discussion and polemic for re-establishing Leninist understanding urgently required to lead the revolutionary fights which will increasingly erupt worldwide.
Instead of taking on and exposing all the lies and brainwashing confusion of dominant capitalist ideology and the endless varieties of fake-"leftism" that reflect it, they bury past mistakes and suppress the debate, filling the air with the single issue diversions and distractions of feminism, "gay rights", black nationalism, and other sanctimonious individualism, which block the grasp of an overall world perspective and the need to totally transform society before any kind of equality, fairness, universal development and rationality can be built.
The latest example of this self-righteous blinkered narrowness comes with the "feminist" denunciations of Wikileaks campaigner, Julian Assange, prepared to accept potential US arrest, torture, and even imposition of the death penalty on him, in order to satisfy some trivial and vengeful Swedish "date rape" shallowness.
Assange is no Marxist or even revolutionary, but it is glaringly obvious that despite his petty bourgeois liberal limitations, the drive to expose the corruptions, cynicism, illegal warmongering, warcrimes and conspiratorial realities of Western imperialism's "diplomacy" and military campaigning, has stung imperialism and particularly Washington to the core, using every dirty trick in the book to get revenge and more importantly shut down Wikileaks.
"Knowing" pretences by reactionary capitalist media and commentators to rubbish the stream of revelations published by Wikileaks as "nothing new", has not disguised the reality that the information has been of major importance and significantly damaging to imperialism's plotting world manipulation.
He is one of the most hated targets of the reactionary backwoodsmen in the US, subject to the foulest vilifications and blood-curdling threats and would undoubtedly be targeted by every loony going, if the CIA did not torture him first, "render" him somewhere that would, or the Pentagon drag him through a Guantánamo military "tribunal" (which Obama-ism has failed to disband, part of its stepped up fascist policies which the fake-"left" black nationalist single issue diversions helped to install).
The real character of the light-minded feminists emerges in their idiot declarations that Assange should "face the fair justice" of Sweden's "democratic system" and their anti-communist denunciations of the Ecuadorian presidency, full of the same hostility about "totalitarianism" that has been manufactured against the workers states since the first days they existed.
What "fair justice" and "democracy" would be got from a country as reactionary and corruption-bound (Bofors arms scandal eg) as any, which has participated in CIA renditions, and supports the world warmongering "free West"???
What "free privately owned press" does the West have that is allegedly "suppressed" in Ecuador? Murdoch?? The British imperialist run BBC???
President Correa is no Marxist either and his "left nationalism" demagoguery is dangerously vulnerable because of its refusal to build Leninist understanding to end capitalism and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat - already suffering one coup attempt in a Latin America which is seeing renewed waves of Washington organised coups (Paraguay, Honduras) once more, after the non-stop massacring horrors of the post-war decades.
Imperialism has been thrown into confusion by the Assange asylum, and particularly moribund British imperialism shooting itself in the foot diplomatically with its nonsensical threat to override international law and tresspass on the Ecuadorian embassy space, a bullying threat of sovereign invasion that has stirred massive worldwide hatred of its colonialist arrogance – and set even its own ruling circles in confusion as its diplomats point out the implications for all British embassies abroad, all now vulnerable to occupation.
Feminism shows its true role in this situation, helping imperialism.
The feminist nonsense of the Pussy Riot anarchist provocation against Russia's president Putin equally plays into the hands of CIA and Western sham "freedom" provocations against the awkward aspects of the Bonapartist regime.
Marxism should have no illusions in the oligarch-backing Putin who runs a gangster capitalist billionaire state which promptly declared the demonstrators "should have been more overtly anti-communist by demonstrating at Lenin's tomb".
But even Putin has not dared remove all remnants of former socialist USSR society such a health care, and his Russian nationalist imperialist ambitions defy Washington.
Slump ridden imperialism has no room for yet another imperialist power, and local Russian capitalism wants a free hand for even more exploitation via lying bourgeois "democracy".
The fake-"lefts" feed this hoodwinking but the working class needs to build a clear world view and demolish these petty bourgeois pretences of revolution.
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins
[Leaflet – 17-07-12].
Washington backed "judicial coup" in Paraguay deposing reformist 'left' president Lugo demonstrates yet again the dangers of illusions in "democracy" and "left" pressure of the masses. A century of CIA plotted coups and bloody overthrows, particularly of Allende in Chile is proof that only revolution to end capitalism will ever change anything. Solidarity with Latin America is worse than useless if it feeds illusions in "restoring" democracy when what is needed is building Leninist revolutionary understanding
Exposing the laughably sudden "legal" impeachment of Paraguay's left reformist president, Fernándo Lugo, as a Washington-backed "judicial coup" to install the reactionary deputy is a useful lesson for the world in the way imperialist monopoly capitalism will always conspire and manipulate its way around "democratic change" in favour of the super-wealthy and the interests of international exploitation.
But organising protests in "defence of democracy" or for its "restoration" in Asunción, as assorted fake-"left" Trotskyists, revisionist groups and solidarity organisations are now doing, is far from being useful for the working class there or anywhere else.
Just the opposite. Such continued fostering of illusions in parliament, the "rule of law" and "peaceful change" by "mass left pressure" leaves the working class vulnerable and confused about the reality of world capitalist class rule, and particularly as its greatest ever crisis bites home.
Understanding of the need for the working class to take power by revolutionary struggle to completely overturn the ruling class and take over the land, banks and factories under control of a working class dictatorship is the central question.
What is required is the exposure of "democracy" as a total fraud within capitalism, a fraud which is always gerrymandered, subverted, undermined, twisted and bribed, swamped anyway with ruling class elements via social and education connections, and corrupted with self-seeking careerism to constantly frustrate any changes in favour of the poor, and which even it if ever did want to do anything for them is anyway completely powerless to influence the real decisions of the ruling class, which are taken by big money and the closed "establishment" behind the scenes.
And if all that does still does not head off any changes threatening the ruling class's power and wealth, it will be ultimately overthrown by open class dictatorship whenever deemed necessary using as much brutal violence and fascist torture as required, to re-impose the diktat of ownership and bourgeois power.
Nowhere more so has this been repeatedly proven than in Latin America, long arrogantly declared to be the "backyard" of US imperialism and subject to whatever exploitation it wishes to impose (plenty).
The entire twentieth century history of the South and Central American countries has been one of endless bloodshed, torture, repression and massacre, with the toppling of numerous left and reformist movements and figureheads if they have got anywhere near power or the possibility of change with attempts finally to bring social justice and improvements to the lives of the desperately poor and viciously exploited masses, labouring in near slavery in sweatshops and on fruit, coffee and other plantations.
Just like throughout the rest of the world in fact, there has been a non-stop stream of vicious gangster and fascist regimes installed, from Somoza's 50 year rule in Nicaragua to Argentina, Panama, Peru, Chile and all points in between, suppressing any "popular movements" with the utmost barbarity and torture, a record of continuing slaughter, massacres, "disappearances" and terrorising brutality which counts its victims in multi-millions (without counting at all the hundreds of millions of lives destroyed by poverty, malnutrition, disease and imposed ignorance and despair).
The special attention paid to South America by Washington has thrown up some of the foulest and most depraved of all fascist barbarities in such countries as Guatemala, El Salvador and (continuing) Colombia, and most of all in the archetypal example of the modern coup in Chile in 1973, where the overthrow of Salvador Allende by General Augustus Pinochet was an object lesson in the disarming of the working class by reformist and revisionist stupidity and opportunism.
The deluded promise of 'the world's first communist/socialist government through a legal parliamentary route' was shattered with the bloody armed fascist coup by the Chilean military who had been invited into the cabinet by the deranged revisionist Stalinist influenced stupidities of Allende-ism, declaring Chile's military to be honourable and "different", an idiot nonsense which gave an open door to the CIA organised conspiracy to destabilise the country via reactionary strikes and disruption (lorry drivers etc).
The tens of thousands rounded up and viciously tortured and killed have been a witness ever since to the depravity of
capitalist rule.
Many other developments in South America then and since have confirmed the Marxist understanding that "parliamentary democracy" is the greatest hoodwinking scam in all of history, disguising the outright dictatorship of capital which will always impose the most violent suppression if it needs to and is able to do it.
This will only ever be ended by an all out class war fight for the revolutionary overturn of capitalist domination, and the establishment of a working class rule of sufficient firmness and understanding to suppress and hold down all the constant and non-stop counter-revolutionary attempts which will be made by the once-privileged minority to re-establish capitalism.
Such a dictatorship of the proletariat, a dictatorship in the interests of the majority working class and other poor and exploited, will need to continue until society has been rebuilt everywhere as planned socialism, with the pursuit of rationality and self-disciplined conscious cooperation prevailing throughout world society.
The one country which has imposed just such firm rule (despite its own revisionist illusions sadly), the workers state of Cuba, is the only one which has survived and even flourished even in the teeth of subversion, invasion and a debilitating 50 year long economic siege blockade, causing massive deprivation.
But far from developing this lesson, as regime after regime has been toppled and sabotaged, including the Nicaraguan revolution undermined by horrific US trained "contra" terrorism, Panama and Grenada, invaded by the US military, Colombia, blitzed by chemical warfare, military "aid" against the FARC revolutionaries, and paramilitary terror death squads, the fake-"left" has continued to foster illusions in "steady advances" (ironically even including revisionist philosophical leadership in Havana which to this day lauds Allende and never raises the crucial dictatorship of the proletariat question for Venezuela and Bolivia eg).
The advance of elected "left" reformism and "left" bourgeois nationalism in the Latin American region in the past decade has bolstered the nonsense that mass pressure under such "Bolivarian" figures as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia will gradually push back American imperialism and its non-stop bloody counter-revolutionary subversion.
But the key understanding is that such progress has to be seen within a broad revolutionary perspective of the world, being possible only because of the overwhelming crisis of the entire capitalist system, the greatest meltdown collapse of the profit making system in all history.
To hold its own, dominant American imperialism has had to turn its attention to world wide warmongering, monopoly capitalism's only way out of the unstoppable epochal and catastrophic collapse of the entire profit making economic system, which the ruling class knew was coming at least two decades ago and which it knew would provoke ever greater Third World rebellion ("terrorism") as well as massive potential challenges to hold onto shrinking markets by other capitalist powers.
Endless preemptive war to ruthlessly "shock and awe" all challenges to its rule, (aided by most of the fake-"left" cravenly capitulating to "war on terror" propaganda - condemning 9/11 etc) and to force the entire world to continue supplying it for worthless dollars, despite the bankruptcy of the giant US economy, and to suppress rising revolt (erupting throughout the Third World but particularly the Middle East) has meant partially and temporarily taking its eye off the ball in Latin America.
That has given a small space to assorted "left" demagogues as well as outright "left" opportunist frauds like Lula in Brazil, to make some headway with varying "reforms" while leaving the capitalists in place.
But none of these regimes are remotely safe.
As the EPSR said after Chávez rode out the 2002 coup attempt (issue 1132 16-4-02):
"Despite the CIA's failure this time, the Chávez regime is now in greater danger than ever before. The most cretinous lesson of all to draw from this coup debacle would be the idiot conclusion that some fake-'lefts' will come to that "the strength of democracy and the power of people's democratic protests proved mightier than the CIA's big business and military plotters".
The foul civil wars deliberately set going in Libya and now Syria to bring down "left" nationalist anti-imperialist regimes, and intimidate the genuine revolutionary upheavals in Cairo and Tunisia indicates that imperialism's capacity for the most depraved manipulated counter-revolution continues.
The willingness of the liberal and fake-"left" to buy every bogeyman story pumped out by the Western media against these regimes, playing into the Western fascist agenda, indicates what their "solidarity" is worth.
Meanwhile the Honduras coup, two years ago and approved by the "right-on" black nationalist and feminist Obama/Clinton "Democrat" presidency (which more single-issue fake-"left" illusions helped into power) has reverted to death squad terrorising of the population while making room for more American bases in the continent, demonstrating that despite its preoccupations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere US imperialism is constantly plotting against South America too.
Lugo personally has escaped lightly but the desperately poor peasants and workers of Paraguay are already seeing any dreams of land reform and alleviation of their hunger vanishing. The stunted up disinformation campaign and press crusade by the tiny oligarchy of rich landowners (2% of the population who own just about all the land), the international corporations and the CIA behind them, which ousted Lugo's populist leftism, has hardly been resisted because Lugo has no organised base of political support other than "popular democracy" enthusiasm.
The only resistance that can change things is revolution – and the best solidarity is building revolutionary theory everywhere - Leninism. DH
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
U.S. unleashes cold war on China
José Luis Robaina García
OVER the next few years, the United States is to transfer 60% of its navy to the vicinity of China, as part of a grander strategy aimed at attempting to detain the country's meteoric rise and, in parallel, reaffirm American regional and global hegemony in a kind of cold war.
The master designs of the plan were disclosed by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in Singapore, the first confirmation of a decision announced by President Obama this past January to readjust strategic priorities for the immediate future, which - from now on - will focus on the Asian-Pacific region,
Panetta revealed that six aircraft carriers, an unspecified number of extra nuclear submarines, new strategic bombers, anti-submarine and electronic warfare devices, plus the majority of available surface vessels are to be sent to the region.
Part of the plan is to continue reinforcing existing cooperation agreements with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia and other states in the region, which include joint exercises and patrols of the vast region.
Separate military cooperation agreements recently signed by the United States and nato with New Zealand, and Washington's negotiations with the Philippines to re-establish the U.S. military bases that existed in this country up until a few years ago should also be seen in this context.
One significant step in this readjustment is the deployment beginning last April of the first contingent of marines in Robertson Barracks, Darwin, northern Australia, planned to become a rapid Intervention force operating in Oceania and the Indian Ocean.
It is known, moreover, that the United States and Australia are negotiating the establishment of a joint naval base on the Cocos Islands atoll, 2,000 miles from the Australian continent, but very close to the Strait of Malacca, via which 80% of the oil which China imports from the Middle East and Africa is transported, as well as the Indonesian Sunda and Lombok straits, the fastest links between South East Asia and the Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, a $15 billion budget program is in progress for the construction of new nuclear and strategic bomber facilities in Guam, a virtual U.S. colony and one of the gateways to Southeast Asia.
In this demented race to encircle China one has to include U.S. agreements signed with Afghanistan, a neighbor country of the Asian giant, to maintain a long-term American military presence there.
All of this compounds the enormous military deployment which the United States maintains in Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, consisting of 300,000-plus troops located in dozens of bases in Japan, South Korea, Australia, Guam, the 7th Fleet based in Hawaii and the largest of all, plus the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
This colossal deployment, with a large number of nuclear weapons, operates under the pompous motto disclosed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when, in an article published in the Foreign Policy magazine last November, she called for consolidating "America's Pacific Century," a species of Monroe doctrine for the region.
Other media pillars in these hegemonic attempts are constant references to the alleged dangerousness of China and an official statement referring to the South China Sea, tens of thousands of miles from the United States, as being of vital strategic interest to Washington.
The irrationality from all points of view of trying to contain, detain and encircle a country of the magnitude and power of China can easily be seen and is comparable in dimension only with U.S. attempts to halt movements toward multi-polarity in many other states.
Of course, this readjustment does not signify that the United States is abandoning its interventionist pretensions in other regions, as evidenced by constant threats of aggression in relation to Iran and Syria, the installation of a missile system in the vicinity of Russia, the creation of dozens of airbases in Africa and the activation of the 3rd Fleet in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean.
In addition to the obvious political objectives of these moves, it is worth noting the attraction these military plans represent for the U.S. military-industrial complex, one of the cornerstones of the American system.
As is apparent with the pro-independence rebellion in Latin America, the world is tired of American subjection, an undertaking conducted as if the U.S. were a contemporary Roman Empire when, in real terms, while it remains the only superpower - particularly in military and technological terms - it is a declining economy and power strategically speaking.
The gendarme of the planet is simply trying to procure the impossible and in fact is harvesting storms and hatred everywhere, as evidenced by the results of its atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Throughout the world and particularly in Asia and the American continent, nobody has forgotten what the supposed champion of democracy did in the name of democracy and human rights in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Korea and Vietnam and its support for all the bloody dictatorships which put Latin America in mourning for more than a century.
In summary, it is embarking on a battle lost beforehand, because the world does not fit in anybody's pocket.*
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
The CIA has become a paramilitary organization
IN an article published September 1, (last year) by Greg Miller and Julie Tate, The Washington Post reports that the cia has been transformed into a paramilitary organization, with the primary objective of killing targeted individuals.
Given this strategy, the agency has developed an anti-terrorist unit with the mission of locating Al-Qaeda targets in Yemen and has built a new secret runway on the Arabian Peninsula for its drone aircraft.
"When the missiles start falling, it will mark another expansion of the paramilitary mission of the cia," says the article.
"In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the agency has undergone a fundamental transformation. Although the cia continues to gather intelligence and furnish analysis on a vast array of subjects, its focus and resources are increasingly centered on the cold counterterrorism objective of finding targets to capture or kill.
"The shift has been gradual enough that its magnitude can be difficult to grasp. Drone strikes that once seemed impossibly futuristic are so routine that they rarely attract public attention unless a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure is killed."
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With the 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks drawing attention and the naming of General David H. Petraeus as cia director, the agency's reorientation has become more evident, according to Post:
"The drone program has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001, a staggering figure for an agency that has a long history of supporting proxy forces in bloody conflicts but rarely pulled the trigger on its own.
"The cia's Counterterrorism Center, which had 300 employees on the day of the attacks, now exceeds al-Qaeda's core membership around the globe. With about 2,000 on its staff, the ctc accounts for 10 percent of the agency's workforce, has designated officers in almost every significant overseas post and controls the cia's expanding fleet of drones.
"Even the agency's analytic branch, which traditionally existed to provide insights to policymakers, has been enlisted in the hunt. About 20% of cia analysts are now "targeters" scanning data for individuals to recruit, arrest or place in the crosshairs of a drone.
"Critics, including some in the U.S. intelligence community, contend that the cia's embrace of "kinetic" operations, as they are known, has diverted the agency from its traditional espionage mission and undermined its ability to make sense of global developments such as the Arab Spring.
"Human rights groups go further, saying the cia now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The cia doesn't officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules".
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
One in six live in poverty in the world's richest country, the USA
NEW YORK. - One in six people in the United States now lives in poverty, with 2.6 more joining the ranks of the poor in 2010, reaching the highest number in more than 50 years, according to official figures. At the same time, the middle class has been eroded to the extent that inequality in the country is comparable to that in Mexico.
Meanwhile, large corporations which have for decades depended on the enormous U.S. middle class market believe that this is a long-term trend and are adjusting their strategies to focus on two growing markets, the country's poor and the richest.
The figures released will no doubt further fuel the intense debate about unemployment and the stagnant economy which both President Barack Obama and the two parties in Congress must confront, as well as contributing to the view that there isn't much hope for economic recovery in the short term.
The U.S. Census Office reported September 13 that 46.2 million people in the country were living in poverty in 2010 (an increase of 2.6 million over the previous year) to reach a 15.1% level, the highest poverty rate since 1993, as well as being the third consecutive yearly increase. In terms of sheer numbers, this is the highest total ever recorded by the Census since it began gathering this kind of information 52 years ago. The official poverty line, in 2010, was defined as $22,113 for a family of four.
INCOME AT 1970'S LEVEL
At the same time, the [2011]data also reveals a significant decline in the middle class, with a reduction in real income of 2.3% in 2010, as compared to 2009. Average yearly household income was calculated as $49,400, 7% less than in 1999.
Several analyses over the last few years have shown that, despite significant increases in productivity, the average incomes of workers have remained, in real terms, at levels reached during the 1970's, given that wealth has continued to be more and more concentrated in the hands of the richest.
In fact, the Census reported that reductions in average household income were much more significant among the poor than among the rich: 10% of those at the lowest income levels suffered a 12.1% loss in income between 2009 and 2010, while the 10% at the highest income levels experienced only a 1.5% decline.
Worse off, as always, were minorities, women and children. The Census reported that, among Latinos, the poverty rate increased to 26.6% (25.3% in 2009) and for Afro-Americans it rose to 27.4% from 25.8% the previous year. Among whites the rate was estimated at 9.9%, up half a point since 2009.
In 2010, more than one of every five minors lives in poverty, 22%. Close to 35% of Latino children and 39% of Black children fall within this category.
Given the deteriorating economic situation, it can be assumed that all of these figures have only worsened during the last year.
All of this is an obvious outcome of the escalating unemployment rate, with 14 million out of work, 10 million underemployed and many who have given up, no longer looking for a job. The unemployment rate has been above 9% (16% when the underemployed are included) for more than two years. "Families are struggling to put food on the table and do not have the purchasing power to support an economic recovery," according to Isabel Sawhill, from the Brookings Institution, commenting on the new data in an interview with the Bloomberg news service.
These figures only serve to highlight growing economic inequality in the country. The United States remains one among those with the highest rates of poverty within the 34-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Only Chile, Israel and Mexico have higher rates and for two years now, the U.S. had the greatest inequality except for Mexico and Turkey, among countries in this group. On a list of 136 countries ranked according to the Gini coefficient, which places the country with the most inequality at number one, the U.S. ranked 39th in 2010, with a coefficient of 0.469. The Gini system is a statistical measure of inequality within a country's household incomes. A coefficient of zero would represent complete equality among all households and a one would indicate an extreme range of inequality. Mexico is ranked as number 27.
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, has reported that, in the last 10 years, the incomes of the 1% richest in the U.S. have risen 18%, while those of industrial workers have fallen 12%. One percent of households possess a third of the nation's wealth and in 2009, this 1% had a net worth 225 times greater than that of average households, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
The situation has reached such extremes that some of the largest companies in the U.S. have designed market strategies based on the reality of a shrinking middle class. According to the Wall Street Journal, Procter & Gamble, which once focused on promoting products to the middle class, has now shifted its focus to the less prosperous and the wealthy, both of which are expanding groups.
The company which estimates that its products are found in 98% of U.S. homes (detergent, toothpaste, etc.) is the largest consumer product producer worldwide and is projecting that the middle class, defined as households with annual incomes between $50,000 and $140,000, representing 40% of U.S. families, will continue to decline. "It has obliged us to think differently about out portfolio of products, by targeting the high-end and low-end markets. Frankly, that is where most growth is occurring," said Melanie Healey, president of the company's North American division, to the Wall Street Journal, which reported that various companies are perceiving the same trend. Tiffany's and other purveyors of luxury products enjoyed a great year in 2010.
The Journal reported that executives are studying the notorious Gini index which has recorded a 20% increase in inequality over the last 40 years, a trend which is now even more accentuated.
"We now have a Gini coefficient similar to that of the Philippines and Mexico; we never would have imagined that," said Phyllis Jackson, Procter & Gamble vice president. •