Back issues
No 1419 23rd January 2013
Algerian attack and Mali revolts are further symptoms of massive Third World discontent rising at the non-stop oppression and poverty forced on their backs, now intensified dramatically by the catastrophic failure of capitalism which is imposing disaster, penury, starvation and misery everywhere. Western “outrage” is hypocritical humbug and crocodile tears, being used to “justify” the endless war which it has deliberately set going itself, to escape its own disastrous historical failure and the catastrophic collapse of the private profit making system. These blows against imperialist interests are no more to be condemned than any other desperate struggles from Palestine to Pakistan. But the fake-“lefts” are already lining up with imperialism as they did over the World Trade Centre attacks, and continue to do with their foul joining in anti-Islam scapegoating. “Principled” revisionism is no better, hiding behind convoluted “conspiracy” theories to “condemn terror” as well
The puritanical Islamic self-determination revolt in northern Mali and the latest suicide squad blow against Western capitalist corporate interests in the Algerian desert will predictably bring forth a stream of denunciations and “condemnations” from the ranks of fake-“left”s echoing the stung artificial emotionality of capitalism’s ruling class, once again drowning the world in an ocean of crocodile tears “for the victims” (which it could not care two hoots for) along with a demented revival of nonsensical “war on terror” vengefulness.
Cameron has already been out blustering about “decades of war” in the “new arena” of central Africa, despite simultaneously cutting thousands of troops because of the desperate world capitalist crisis.
Other fake-“left” groups trying to avoid too obviously lining themselves up directly with the criminal hypocrisy of imperialism against “murdering terrorists” – as if the overwhelming blitzing, torture, drone terrorising and murdering mayhem going on in the world was not carried out daily by imperialism itself from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Gaza and Somalia, and all points around – have already been punting out the most labyrinthine theories to “explain” that these Mali and other north African rebellious movements are “really not what they seem” and actually are “organised by the West”.
Just like the ridiculous and over-complex “conspiracy” elaborations after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, going into extreme convolutions to supposedly ”prove” that the CIA had in fact organised the plane attacks and the subsequent collapse of the twin towers, this will let them join in the universal bending to the capitalist propaganda onslaught.
They pretend that, unlike all the rest, they are not actually cravenly denouncing the rising tide of world revolt caused by monopoly capitalism’s catastrophic crisis failure, “because such incidents are just another manipulation by Washington” (or France perhaps in this case) etc, etc.
It is utter festering cowardly gobshyte from assorted revisionists, black nationalists, anarchists and “no leaders” street occupiers, no different to the outright shameful capitulation of the Trotskyists, anti-racists and others who directly “condemn terror” as “the wrong way to fight” and campaign against the various mostly Islamic-coloured struggles and nationalist regimes (like Iran eg) as “criminal” or “more reactionary than capitalism itself”, usually combined with degenerate scapegoating hate-phrases like “Islamo-fascist” to justify themselves.
These foul Trotskyist betrayals have long demonstrated their total petty bourgeois capitulation in the teeth of the Western warmongering ideological pressure, echoing every Goebbels scale “anti-dictator” and “horrible atrocity” lie in their own press, and helping feed into the working class the most disgusting demonising hatreds which have greased the wheels for the Nazi-NATO war blitzings from Afghanistan to Libya and Syria and readying plenty more.
Their position is as significant a betrayal of the working class as the capitulation of the Second International to the imperialist war in 1914 (and mostly again in 1939) which used the fraud of “defence of the Fatherland” or “stopping the warmaking bullies” to stampede the working class into the trenches, all fighting in reality for their own ruling classes and the expansionist aims of the major capitalist powers fighting for the “right” to carry out even more colonialist plunder and exploitation.
Leninism declared then that the only rational position for the working class was to call for the defeat of their own ruling class, to open up the opportunity for revolutionary change against the multiple “Labour” parties helping keep the ruling class in power.
The twisted “black is white” over-cooked conspiracy theories, far from getting the rest of the “fake”-left off the hook (of having to take a stand against imperialism and welcoming its partial defeats in whatever form, even from the tragic horrors of “terrorist” blows), simply confirm their duplicity too.
This opportunism is all the worse for being dressed up as “Marxist” theory, a pretend intellectualism to talk their way out of a corner when the West is mobilising the most demented hatreds.
It has got nothing to do with any kind of revolutionary understanding, proletarian sympathy or class consciousness.
Least of all has it got anything to do with the world Marxist-Leninist perspective of the collapse of capitalism into the greatest catastrophic failure in all its centuries of domination and class oppression.
Whatever their crudity and desperation, and the horrible and tragic consequences for the hapless victims caught up in these “terrorist and insurgency” events, they are still more shattering blows against world monopoly capitalism – just as 9/11 was.
And while they would not be the chosen methods and forms of struggle for Marxist-Leninism, and even can be counter-productive at times, they are causing defeat and major panic from Washington to Paris.
These latest incidents – which pinprick aspects are only part of the wave of uprising in Africa and the Middle East (and worldwide) – have sent the entire world ruling class into a panicked spin of bloody interventionism, half-ready military blitzings and yet more of the very tyranny and semi-colonialist indiscriminate torture and “punishments” (already with massive euphemistic civilian “collateral damage”), which have forced a huge intensification of growing Third World into revolt in the first place.
The world wide historic perspective is crucial.
The mind-bending complexities of this growing world revolt against the catastrophic imperialist crisis and its intractable unfolding is making the reestablishment of Leninist methods of struggle for understanding ever more crucial, to untangle just which of the many piecemeal conflicts erupting are part of the struggle, how continuing illusions in “democracy and peaceful struggle” (punted out by the latest Western publicised “firebrand cleric” in Islamabad and the Muslim Brotherhood class collaborators in Cairo) have diverted and contained temporarily the underlying rebellions and how in places completely artificially provoked pseudo-rebellions for counter-revolutionary and wilful scorched earth destructiveness (Syria and Libya) have been set in train by an increasingly frantic ruling class, desperate to stop the rising tide of rebellion everywhere.
That the desperate crisis of the capitalist order is the driving force and nothing else is the central element to grasp first and foremost.
It is the meltdown economic failure, political disintegration and rising inter-imperialist competition which is producing the now universal warmongering which the ruling class is deliberately and cynically turning to as a “way out” of its intractable failure.
This is essentially the same pattern as the run up to the 1914-18 World War One – but on a much greater and broader international scale now – when deadly and deliberate international war plans and arms build up went on for two decades of world skirmishes (amid economic turmoil) before the pre-planned conflict erupted over an incidental “terrorist” incident in Sarajevo, and most obviously World War Two, using the carefully fostered build-up of “aggressive Nazism” (supported throughout the 1930s by all the Western powers) during the devastating hunger, unemployment and pain of the Depression collapses.
The credit crunch of 2008 has incontrovertibly RE-confirmed the disastrous underlying epochal scale failure of the entire private profit way of running the world, as analysed by Marx, Engels and Lenin over a century ago (see economics box) and belittled and ridiculed as ”old hat wooden dogma” ever since by the fake-“lefts”, though they now pay lip service to the academic elements of the theory now the proof is glaring and inescapable.
But their grasp of a world in total historic failure and disintegration, heading unstoppably into the most profound and catastrophic collapse of all history, and unstoppably confronting all of mankind with an end to normal life and existence as it has been until now, does not begin to inform any of the understanding of the fake-“lefts”.
In other words they have not got a grain of the actual revolutionary understanding (that they preen and posture about so much in words), that the world faces an incredible overturning upheaval of all past relationships and societal structures.
That is why they do no begin to see the enormous bubbling ferment of the Third World as part of one gigantic huge world scale revolt.
Instead if it does not fit their preconceptions and limited reformist preconceptions of “slow improvement by left pressure” (which is how they see even “revolution” effectively - just more extensive left pressure), or the “right way to do things” with the masses displaying approved “politically correct” single-issue individualist attitudes (some like “gay is normal” quite suspect in themselves) they denounce and write-off its significance, ending up hostile to it.
Yet despite massive world confusion and continuing absence of any clear revolutionary science, revolt against the now desperately Slump ridden viciously warmongering capitalist order is spreading ever further from the Nazi-NATO suppressed Middle East throughout northern Africa, into Mali, Nigeria, Algeria, the Central African Republic and more.
Supposedly pacified Iraq and Afghanistan remain a festering disaster of insurgency and attacks which have spread their chaos deep into Pakistan, now itself teetering with gigantic revolt and mass street rebellion (on top of decades of instability, corruption and repeated military coups).
And as Cairo and Tunis showed, this is reaching a qualitatively new level of revolt, not only through continuing insurgency and “terror” but into mass street rebellions which lack only a clear revolutionary leadership to topple entire regimes (and in the case of the hugely populated and influential Arabic nation of Egypt, entire regions).
What is clear is that imperialism is increasingly reaping a whirlwind of escalating rebellion from its “war on terror” efforts to “shock and awe” its way out of the greatest meltdown failure and collapse in all history.
Far from suppressing world revolt and “terrorism”, which has been erupting everywhere against its continued tyrannical and bloody exploitation, every move that the monopoly capitalist order makes is stirring up even more hatred and turmoil.
Furthermore it comes as the result of capitalism’s war and crisis and its increasingly unsuitable divisive, unfair, stifling and oppressive system, which is less and less suitable for modern humanity and has been becoming so for over a century of gigantic war destruction and repeated world shattering crisis.
“Terrorism” is not the cause of such conflicts as the twisted idealism of capitalism presents it, as some sudden inexplicable historic emergence of “evil people” who are “intent on destroying out peaceful democratic way of life” as the foul and rotten exploitation world is ludicrously presented.
It is the result.
The Palestinians are perhaps the sharpest of all examples suffering nearly 65 years of non-stop genocidal blitzing, imprisonment, dispossession of their own land, ethnic cleansing by terrorist intimidation, massacres, mass imprisonment, torture, contempt, poverty, abuse and racist apartheid by colonialist Zionism implanted in their country.
It has led them to the most dogged and determined struggle because they have no choice but to fight using whatever means they can find – just as the rest of the Third World and much of the working class in even the rich countries (especially now Slump is biting) has no choice, particularly as the capitalist crisis wipes out even the pathetic share of the world’s wealth which was thrown back to the working class in “boom times”.
The pressure is building up.
It has come with accelerated impact as the catastrophic failure at the heart of its economic order has burst into the open, pushing Depression penury and “austerity” onto the great, already tyrannised and exploited, mass of mankind, increasingly in the “rich” countries as well as the long-suffering and endlessly deprived Third World.
This material basis to the gigantic swirlings underway is the only proper Marxist way to see things.
But the fake-“lefts” have no real grasp of the primacy of material reality over its reflection in human consciousness, for all they might print endless turgid screeds about “philosophy” and academic accounts of “dialectical materialism”.
This is reflected daily in the petty bourgeois trade union and “left pressure” sloganising against the ruling class’s “austerity” Depression measures which they declare to be “ideologically driven”, implying that the class war savagery, cuts and poverty imposition are a “choice” of nasty Tories which could be “reversed” if only the right polices were adopted.
Equally the warmongering is presented as more “nastiness” that could be halted in its tracks if everyone shouted loudly enough “Stop the War” and “Hands off Syria” or Libya, or whichever victim is next in line.
This complacent and disarming mind rot is more or less echoed by the entire “left” in one way or another, with varying degrees of “militancy” stirred into the mix and inter-group squabbling over who is the better pacifist.
But it all abandons the simple materialist grasp that the ruling class is complete driven by the disintegration of its catastrophe prone system to impose vicious additional exploitation on workers or go under itself.
If its class domination is to survive – and history has no examples of a ruling class rationally deciding its time has come to step down and hand over its wealth and power – it cannot do otherwise.
The is no “reversing” or stopping the austerity and war drive which has only just begun to show how brutal and savage it will be in wiping out the poor and oppressed and driving tens and hundreds of millions more downwards.
Only ending the entire epoch of world capitalist exploitation by revolutionary overturn to establish socialism can “say no to austerity” or “stop war” and all sloganising without such perspectives is a giant betrayal and fraud.
It means destroying the capitalist system and rebuilding the world as planned socialism under the control of the great majority using the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That destructive component will inevitably arise in the great spontaneous struggles and is part of its character.
The great Third World revolt begins first and foremost with a complete hatred of the oppression and poverty it has been forced to endue and however crudely done or weirdly expressed in bizarre and limited religious ideology and cultural forms, is showing an astonishing determination to fight, driven by a necessity to change.
If that fightback is not the best or most coherent way to win through to the socialism that alone can transform human society then it is the duty of revolutionaries to give it a better and clearer understanding of the revolutionary needs of the epoch not to join with the West’s denunciations.
This is exactly the point made in Lenin’s staggering understanding expressed in the revolutionary period in Russia of 1905-07 in his article Guerrilla War (see past EPSRs or Lenin Cllctd Works Vol 11)– don’t repudiate those who have turned to terrorist methods he said, but battle for a clearer leadership of those involved explaining the need for mass revolutionary struggle based on scientific Marxist methods.
The fake-“left” avoid this conclusion with a variety of phony “intellectual” analyses all designed to let them wash their hands of such struggles and ride with petty bourgeois opinion, stampeded by Western idealist brainwashing about “evil” people.
It spreads utter confusion and slippery opportunist evasions, built around the ideas of “deep conspiracy” by the West.
These “theories” can be hard to disentangle because there is a small kernel of truth.
Of course capitalism and its intelligence agencies are constantly at it, using a whole gamut of provocateurs, covert agents, bribery, media campaigns and manipulation to bend “democracy” and foster dozens of coups, assassinations, wars and overthrows since the Second World War, not least in the great “street rebellions” and colour-coordinated faux revolutions against the communist workers states (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Solidarnosc in Poland, around the edges of the former USSR post-1989 in Ukraine, Georgia etc) but also throughout the world, establishing compliant bribed stooge regimes suppressing any class revolt to allow Western monopoly corporate exploitation to flourish.
The shallow Trots, deeply poisoned with hostility to the reality of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and full of semi-anarchist shallow views of socialism as just some la-la land of “distributing the wealth through workers committees” - and therefore essentially anti-communist, – have always swung this way and that with the changing wind of imperialist propaganda, one minute ready to denounce terrorism as the “wrong fight” as they all did after the World Trade Centre attack in New York without exception, and the next ready to support the most violent terrorism on the ground (in the alleged “democracy” struggles in Libya and Syria eg now incontestably documented by even the complicit bourgeois media machine as a mess of fascist racism, gangsterism and warlord loot-chasing mayhem) if it is presented as a “street” movement however obviously reactionary its political content (as with Solidarnosc which put the old Polish imperial eagle on its leaflets - symbol of the Pilsudski fascist state pre-1939 and a foretaste of the reactionary backwardness which it has put into place which intrdikcued draconian capitalism and supports wholeheartedly all the NATO warmongering).
The shallow petty bourgeois Trotskyists have virtually all bent to the hurricane wind of imperialist propaganda poured out against “dictators” “rogue regimes” and “terrorists” and go through the hoops to justify their continuing support for alleged “rank and file” movements on the ground despite non-stop reactionary declarations and lavish material support from the entire Western ruling class for the bogus Libyan and Syrian “revolts” eg, while parroting the most lurid propaganda lies and preposterous calumnies against whichever anti-imperialist regime is in the cross hairs for blitzing and destruction, be it Gaddafi, Assad, Mugabe, the Iranians or the Sudanese etc etc.
Their twisted contortions to swallow the most outrageous lies while pretending the gun-toting reactionaries, racists, opportunists and warlords whipped up on the ground constitute a “peaceful and progressive mass movement” is the sickest of capitulations to imperialism’s manoeuvres to head of the GENUINE revolution in Egypt and Tunisia.
But assorted other “lefts” trying to present a more “principled” stand, correctly identifying the imperialist manoeuvres in Syria for example, also go through their own ideological gymnastics in the gale of propaganda and fearful middle class panic.
They get out of the difficulties with the notion that capitalism is manipulating just about everything, in itself a completely false picture of the crisis ridden US and its world domination (usually backed by the other major powers but equally more and more in conflict with them) which is making more and more desperate – and crudely obvious – moves to try and head off growing world revolt.
In Mali, they say, the self-determination struggle is secretly being run by the West and that the rebels and Al-qaeda are “reactionary”.
Apart from ignoring the greater picture, usually analysing each specific struggle as a one-off – Syria separate to Mali, Libya as the West’s “wish to get rid of Gaddafi” rather than its drive to stop Middle East rebellion and turn up the universal war atmosphere above all) this gives completely false picture of imperialism being calmly in charge.
But Syria, Libya and now the emergency blitzing of Mali are panic measures.
Most contradictory of all is the revisionist Lalkar-Proletarian account which says the French set the whole thing going - making it difficult to understand why French imperialism has taken the lead in blitzing and torturing it to pieces subsequently.
Similarly say some, including the black nationalist groups, the Algerian events are allegedly some twisted plot to depose the Algerian bourgeois nationalist regime.
Both these analyses depend on the Stalinist view of partial bourgeois nationalist regimes as straight line “steps towards world socialism” an essentially reformist view which leads them to uncritically support and defend everything from Saddam Hussein and currently the Assad Ba’athists to Gaddafi, with the added confusion in the case of black-nationalist groups like “Sons of Malcolm” of declaring Algeria to be a “black” struggle representative against “white oppression”, abandoning all class understanding.
Algeria is a bourgeois nationalist regime, established by a heroic revolutionary anti-colonial struggle in the 1950s and 1960s (using plenty of “terrorist” methods itself against the French – see the great film account “Battle of Algiers”).
But as a bourgeois regime, for all its past anti-imperialist form, it is as limited giving the necessary revolutionary leadership as any other bourgeois capitalist state, and as vulnerable to major imperialist pressure as any other.
Its form in the current events has not been edifying, colluding with imperialist forces, allowing overflights by American surveillance planes and much more.
It has also done little to take a lead in offering world leadership on the critical questions which face workers everywhere including the very issues of “world terorism”.
The same issues arise about Algeria as from other anti-imperialist movements like Zimbabwe as discussed in the past such as this in EPSR 1044 (16-05-00):
Lalkar’s Zimbabwe piece is just as barren. Apparently written in a spirit a bit critical of the EPSR’s cautious scepticism towards Mugabeism, it bizarrely refuses itself to identify wholeheartedly with ZANU policy, but once again merely tells the story of imperialist counter-revolutionary skulduggery, past and present, and of rotten bourgeois propaganda, masquerading as media coverage of the conflict, backed of course by New Labour.
All well and true, but how does the 20-year record of Mugabeism match up to the requirements for world anti-imperialist leadership? What did ZANU tell us about Gorbachev at the time? What do they think now? What is the future for international class-collaboration South Africa style? What should Milosevic have done?
Etc, etc, — not just Lalkar’s responsibility to have a go at, nor ZANU’s. But how do these issues need arguing with regard to the confused ‘left’ in Britain (including the SLP and Lalkar) and its inability to build a new leadership in the working class???
When Lalkar cannot even openly discuss its own failings and problems, let alone those of the SLP, it is obviously fatally handicapped for seriously discussing Mugabeism either, — or anything else.
The EPSR was circumspect about Mugabe because international leadership is now the crucial issue facing the worldwide anti-imperialist struggle, and ZANU merely hovers between not saying nearly enough and not saying anything at all.
Obviously, its revolutionary actions against imperialism will take the socialist cause further forward than a thousand new programmes for socialism will, — but that perspectives are still vitally needed for the longterm defeat of monopoly-imperialism is beyond question now civilisation’s greatest requirement.
EPSR 1040 placed Zimbabwe properly in the context of the international class struggle and the unsolvable world imperialist crisis, fully explaining the anti-communist and CIA background to such phenomena as the suddenly mushroomed MDC in Zimbabwe
What has Algeria said to guide the world working class (or even the “black fight against white oppression”) over such crucial matters as the Egyptian revolution and the entire Middle East struggle, which as an Arab nation it is critically bound into, let alone of the general world imperialist crisis?
Nothing significant is the short answer.
What equally has Mali said, which Lalkar declares to have been an “essentially stable and democratic country”.
“Democratic”?
Since when except in revisionist addled brains has the concept of abstract democracy, ignoring the class nature of a society, been the guide to anything?
None of which says either that the upheavals and terrorist events in either country are necessarily going in the right direction either.
But neither does it identify them as “counter-revolutionary”.
Such an analysis comes from starting with the nature of these regimes themselves and defending them against all comers as if they were 100% revolutionary communist workers states, instead of starting with the world view of imperialism.
Seeing “suddenly mushrooming Western conspiracies” like the MDC in every event is to ignore the much greater overall world ferment which is producing plenty of upheaval and desperate rebelliousness simply as a result of the crisis.
The character of these rebellions is utterly different to the panicked artificial campaigns stirred up to try and counter the Egyptian revolution, with none of the great demented Western propaganda campaigns supporting the pseudo-”rebels” and painting the most lurid picture of the Libyan and Syrian governments with daily hysterical allegations of nonexistent “atrocities”.
There are no lying Western media descriptions of “peaceful protests” being suddenly “set upon” (they were in fact violent from day one) as in Benghazi and Damascus.
Nor is there any of the “democracy” demands so glaringly and hypocritically made around the “suddenly mushrooming” MDC and many other obvious CIA stunts (as mentioned above), combined with endless stories about supposed “corruption and abuse” against Mugabe etc.
Nor have the Malian self-determination fighters been supported with constant statements from William Hague and Hilary Clinton and pompous declarations about “this regime must change” etc,.
Nor have the reactionary Gulf states and the Saudi Royals poured in money and support (the revisionists suggest or imply there is support from Saudi for the Al-qaeda but that, if it is so, is from the discontented Saudi bourgeois class whose opposition to the West-colluding Saudi tribal monarchy in the form of Osama bin Laden especially, was at the root of Al-qaeda in the first place).
These Malian rebels equally from their side have not been making constant and well publicised demands for Western support and military intervention and have not effectively been guided and organised by the West as is obviously the case in Libya first of all and Syria now, and have not had constant media exposure on the mid-evening news to set out their case.
Just the opposite – the allegations and stories have all been of the “inhumanity” and “fanaticism” and “horrifying” nature of the draconian discipline imposed by the Sharia law system of the rebels and a world wide imperialist campaign against them.
The barmy and backward religiosity of the al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants in Timbuktu, tearing up historic monuments, suppressing daily life and imposing a draconian discipline hostile to modernity, can be painted in the worst possible light and is no ultimately no solution to the problems of the benighted masses.
Its confusion is often hostile to socialist or communist development.
Hand amputations are not the Marxist answer to crime and nor would it have the same puritanical obsession with alcohol (though even that was an issue at points in the Russian revolution for example).
But the attempts to impose a discipline on society are not necessarily the sign of irrationality and “evil” either.
These are movements which are striking significant blows against imperialism and its domination.
But, the revisionists argue, backward religious sectarianism has past form in being used for imperialist anti-communist skulduggery.
This is wooden straight line thinking.
As Lenin constantly emphasised every situation and its concrete circumstances has to be analysed separately, paying attention to all the complexities.
In a great dialectical transformation of great movements into their opposites, it is in part at least the very forces that imperialism has attempted to unleash for its own Cold War counter-revolutionary manipulations which are now threatening its interests everywhere.
Most of all this is the Islamic militancy which imperialism has been trying to use itself for anti-communist and anti-revolutionary purposes, for thirty years at least, beginning with the time when it parachuted the Mullahs into Iran in 1979.
The panicked aim then was to head off any communist direction that might be taken by to the huge, sudden and unexpected volcano eruption of mass street revolt which toppled the brutal Peacock Throne Shah monarchy and its vicious Savak secret police (a regime itself installed by a CIA “popular demonstration” coup created in 1953 in order to topple left nationalist leader Mossadeq).
But having given the Ayatollah Khomeini a free plane trip from his Paris suburb exile into Tehran to head off the communist danger (though the Iranian Tudeh’s (Communist Party) boneheaded Moscow-influenced revisionism had failed to take the revolutionary lead anyway during the staggeringly heroic mass uprising) the subsequent “Great Satan” posturing of the Islamic republic has been a thorn in the side for Washington ever since.
It was tolerated however as “better than Bolshevism”.
Alongside came the Western conspiracy to set an anti-Soviet trap in Afghanistan, provoking and arming to the teeth the backward pre-feudal Islamism of the tribal Taliban countryside, to destroy the progressive (and majority) communist Afghan revolution of the 1980s which began building a new cultured socialism in cities like Kabul with extensive and generous military, educational and cultural aid poured in by Moscow to help it survive (including training for women to university level which the Soviets carried out far deeper than any current efforts and which the West deliberately helped destroy).
The West got its way with the tide of weaponry and “advice” to bolster the mountainside Islamists, unnerving less-than-revolutionary Moscow Stalinist revisionism and its “permanent peaceful coexistence” illusions and forcing a retreat that finally contributed to the USSR’s disastrous ultimate capitulation to Western “free market” philosophy under the idiot Gorbachev in 1989, liquidating the gigantic achievements of the Soviet Union and its firm dictatorship of the proletariat (KGB, Red Army and other workers state security etc).
But the Islamic radicalism set going in Afghanistan has equally backfired on imperialism, not least with the eruptions against the World Trade Centre, making it necessary for the West to move in with the post-9/11 revenge destruction of the country under the guise of a “hunt for Osama bin Laden” and the non-stop torture and slaughter going on ever since.
Ironically, the Stalinist Lalkar has swung full circle to support the Taliban, even as they denounce other Islamists as reactionary, an unexplained contradiction like many others they cover up, caused by an inability to understand that wanting to see defeat for imperialism is a separate question to all out support for those confused elements and even opportunist regimes (Saddam Hussein) that might end up fighting it.
Leninism alone grasps that being against imperialism implies no need to confuse the working class into believing that the Assad regime, or that Gaddafi’s weird Green Bookism will give them the clarity they need, or that they should support the thuggish Saddam Hussein.
The subsequent great failure to pacify Iraq, despite the “hi-tech” blitzkrieging and the escalated torture and brutality of the occupation, deliberately re-introducing the world to the notion that war, body bags, bombing and militarisation are “normal life” (which is in fact the usually hidden truth about capitalist rule anyway) as part of a universal escalation of war everywhere, also further stirred deliberate bloody Islamic sectarian turmoil to prevent the anti-imperialist national liberation and resistance opposition from fully consolidating within Iraq and with next door Iran’s increasingly stubborn anti-imperialism.
But this too has backfired, spreading yet more confusion and feeding ever more hostility into the Middle East and the Third World generally, on top of the massively heated up rebellious caused by US-led imperialism’s heavy handed stomping across the planet to pre-emptively intimidate the entire world from challenging its “right” to endlessly plunder and exploit the great masses, despite reaching total historic bankruptcy.
Washington’s war aim is to both head off the massive upheavals which it knew the oncoming crisis collapse would be causing, long before the obvious bank failures and collapse of 2008 finally emerged, and to put a shot across the bows of any major capitalist rivals that might try to challenge the top-dog status of the USA (established by WW2 victory) as the Slump disaster ate away its supremacy.
Recruitment for general anti-imperialist militancy has escalated and for the moment much of it, in the absence of any coherent revolutionary communist clarity and leadership is still taking the cultural and social form of Islamism, perceived to be at least leading a fight against Western domination and degeneracy.
After using sectarian rivalries in Iraq the West has again tried to stir the Middle Eastern civil war conflicts by tapping and manipulating assorted Islamic threads within the counter-revolutionary chaos and destruction deliberately set alight in Libya and Syria, with its media flame-fanning and covert interventions.
The hares were set running using most notably the Saudi originated hardline Wahhabis, and more generally Sunni sects with money from reactionary and primitive semi-monarchical semi-tribal Sheikdoms of the Gulf to finance and arm various extreme tendencies to counter the Shia rebelliousness in Iran and large parts of Iraq, which increasingly verges towards hard line anti-imperialism.
But Washington and its stooges have abandoned the CIA created “Free Syrian Army” almost as soon as this theatrical nonsense had been got off the ground for example, because it had been “joined by al-Qaeda” (which further questions the Lalkar/Proletarian position that al-qaeda is just part of a “Western conspiracy”).
Meanwhile the legacy of decades of revisionist illusions in democracy has helped further confusion in Egypt itself, with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi levered into power by the existing stooge regime and its bourgeois legal system (and with heavy “advice” from Washington) to play a stooge role heading off further street turmoil, another version of the Iranian shoehorning in of the Mullahs three decades ago to prevent greater revolutionary turmoil.
But this Western manipulation of “moderate” Islam (pitching Egypt against Assad, and failing to support the Palestinians for example) only underlines even further the need to look at the world in a Leninist perspective.
Meanwhile the chaos created and deliberately whipped up in Libya, again primarily to surround and contain the Arab revolt using a bogus “democracy” movement of petty bourgeois opportunism, has also now spread outwards, providing arms, and feeding militancy into the heart of northern Africa.
If it has stirred up the self-determination struggle of the Tauregs, then that is part of the overall picture of the crisis collapse and the contradictions spreading everywhere driven above all by the growing hostility to imperialism which is the overriding factor.
An additional anti-Leninist sneer is added from Lalkar that “it is hard to see how the splintering of Mali into two or more states whatever the grievances of particularly national groups, would serve any progressive purpose.”
So all of Lenin’s great understanding about self-determination is to be thrown out of the window in one of the few situations in the world where it is still valid (rather than in the bogus situations whipped up by the West for anti-communist purposes in Kosovo or Tibet for example)?
To justify its position Lalkar implies that the Taureg revolt is yet “more conspiracy” this time by French imperialist interests driven by possible oil deposits in the north of Mali, back to the old - “its all about oil” shallowness to explain the crisis.
So why, it is immediately to be asked, has France taken the lead to viciously suppress this struggle militarily?
This sly nonsense is doubly rich coming from the CPGB-ML which has devoted long academic pages to the Marxist understanding of nations recently, (with particular attention to Stalin’s 1912 contribution naturally), all of which would back up the notion of an independent national struggle of the Tauregs.
The Taureg demands have not “suddenly arisen” the Lalka/Proletarian CPGB-ML concedes but have been around for decades and are based on exactly the ponderous explanations set out by Lalkar of nations defined by culture, language and origins, rather than arbitrary boundaries drawn by imperialist colonialism in the first place.
Writing all these incidents off as “conspiracies” is an evasion.
There is further work to do to understand the full complexities of the new turmoil in Africa as the EPSR is clear.
But without constantly setting it all in the context of a world revolutionary ferment driven by the greatest ever catastrophic world capitalist system collapse there is no chance of beginning to grasp what is happening.
That requires an enormous seething debate in the working class, and the study and development of the great past Marxist science to levels of understanding and science beyond even that understood by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others.
It requires building a party to debate and discuss all the difficulties mistakes and flaws of past understanding with the methods of Leninist polemics built by the Bolsheviks.
Don Hoskins
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
U.S. colonial expansion in the Pacific
José Luis Robaina García
THE United States has created a vast colonial empire in the Pacific Basin, primarily for military purposes, although this fact has not been widely reported in the media.
This network of small islands, converted into military bases with large nuclear weapons arsenals, polygons for tests and space warfare experiments is structurally consistent with the expansionist history of the United States, given that this development began after the occupation of large areas of Mexico and continues through today.
Historically, the first steps in the process took place in 1853, when Commodore Perry demanded sovereignty over the Japanese Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands and, three years later, promulgated the Guano island Act, a veritable colonialist manifesto, claiming sovereignty over no less than 60 Pacific islands.
From that moment, and confirming the consolidation of the United States as an imperialist power, those steps accelerated. In 1867, Midway Island in the Marianas archipelago [was occupied] and converted into a naval base, while the neighboring Palmyra and Wake were transformed into a communications center, and Western Samoa in Polynesia began its conversion into another military enclave. Other actions took place throughout the entire Pacific basin.
By the end of the 19th century, the United States had occupied Guam and the Philippine archipelago and annexed Hawaii, today the 50th state of the Union, and the base of the 7th Fleet, the largest naval force. These were three points of vital strategic importance for the U.S. offense system.
However, control over the former Spanish colony of the Philippines was only achieved after years of genocidal war, which cost the lives of more than one million national fighters and civilians, according to Philippine historians Manuel Arellano Remondo and E. San Juan Jr.
Colonial domination over the Philippines, severely criticized by the writer Mark Twain, among others, lasted until 1946, when it was granted independence, but with an amendment allowing the United States to maintain 20 bases in the archipelago for close to 100 years. Imperial voracity continued during the first half of the 20th century. In 1900 Washington proclaimed full sovereignty over Western Samoa, subsequently establishing military enclaves; in 1922 the U.S. Navy annexed the strategic Kingman Atoll and, in 1934 and 1935 the Johnston, Howland, Barker and Jarvis islands were seized, converted into airbases and later, nuclear weapons storage facilities.
The Japanese defeat at the end of World War II removed all impediments. The United States occupied large stretches of Japanese territory, covering the whole of Micronesia with bases and claiming sovereignty over 40 countries and territories in the area, including Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands; Holy Spirit in Vanuatu; parts of New Caledonia, Cook and Tokelau islands; and Christmas and Kanton in Kiribati and Funafuti, capital of Tuvalu. This gigantic expansionist effort had and still has specific objectives: to have bases installed as close as possible to countries considered enemies, from which to launch devastating attacks in conjunction with the 7th Fleet without directly exposing U.S. territory.
A few examples suffice. The bombings which savagely massacred the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first atomic attack in the history of humanity, left from Tinian in the Marianas.
During the Korean War (1950-1953), nuclear attacks on densely populated cities in Korea, China and the ussr were planned from bases in Japan, Guam and the Philippines, approved by President Truman.
In 1954, Operation Vulture was designed for an atomic attack on Vietnam in the wake of the historic victory of Diem Bien Phu. This particular act of aggression was intended not so much to rescue the defeated French colonial army, but to provoke a war with China and thus prevent its consolidation as a country which might one day become a rival for the United States, as Arthur Radford, chief of general staff, revealed at the time. Once again against Vietnam, and after the saturation bombings on Hanoi and Hai Phong which failed to crush the heroic people, President Nixon ordered a study of variants for nuclear attacks against the country from bases in neighboring countries and, in October 1969, placed the B52 bombers on maximum nuclear alert. Meanwhile, taking advantage of conflicts in the Taiwan Strait, its obsession with China prompted the United States to plan nuclear attacks in May 1954 and August 1958, with the approval of President Eisenhower. Declassified documents recently released by the Pentagon confirm the magnitude of this demented nuclear arms race. In 1971 the United States had 7,300 nuclear weapons stored in Europe and a further 12,000 in various locations outside of the country, in a number of cases without the knowledge or consent of the states involved.
These documents state a total of 27 storage bases for these weapons but, strangely, only identify nine, in Alaska, the Guantánamo Naval Base, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, Germany and Pacific locations (Hawaii, Guam, Johnston).
Experts state that the non-identified locations include Spain; nato member countries such as Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. However, the facilities in the Pacific meet many other unscrupulous objectives: the United States undertook 60 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands and 40 using hydrogen bombs around Line Island, Kiribati, with consequent effects on the health of local populations.
In the Marianas, specifically on the Kwajalin Atoll, intercontinental missiles launched from bases in California are being precision tested, in conjunction with research into wars in and from space, prepared many years ago. The indigenous peoples of Guam, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands have all risen up in struggle against this abusive system of domination over minuscule countries and populations, to be met with total indifference on the part of U.S. authorities and an impenetrable wall of silence in the Western media.
Thus, a living history cynically constructed on racist wars, is fully in effect today with renewed U.S. militarist expansionist plans in the Pacific and Oceania aimed at China, North Korea, Russia or any other country which could become a rival. [Granma]
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Franco government sitting on a powder keg after Paraguay coup
Joaquín Rivery Tur
CHARGES of corruption against Federico Franco, including revelations about the enormous increase in his personal fortune during the five months of his administration, have undermined even further the image of those who engineered the parliamentary coup against former President Fernándo Lugo, this past June.
The Franco regime has rejected the presence of observers from the Union of South American Nations UNASUR), demanding that the organization recognize the constitutional legitimacy of the legislative move, during which an elected president was charged, tried and ousted in the course of 24 hours.
The high-ranking UNASUR group charged with monitoring the situation in Paraguay reported the negative response given by the current administration, which is more inclined to accept the discredited Organization of American States representatives as adequate, along with those expected from the European Union.
Former Peruvian premier Salomon Lerner, president of the UNASUR group, told Prensa Latina that the issue will be the subject of a report at the next foreign ministers meeting, scheduled for November 29, as a prelude to the UNASUR Summit to take place the following day, which will be attended by heads of state.
In addition to the insecurity and charges of corruption, the Ultima Hora daily newspaper adds that according to the Comptroller General, Franco’s personal fortune has grown by some 1.2 million dollars over the last few months.
Franco tried to explain the rapid increase citing a previous, allegedly erroneous evaluation of his wealth by the Comptrollers Office, which he asked to be corrected.
An international organization has described Paraguay as a state in decline, given its instability, corruption and fragile infrastructure.
A global study disseminated by the Future Brand consulting firm and picked up by Prensa Latina, ranked Paraguay as number 104 among nations analyzed for its most recent report.
The investigation presents evidence of the declining trend within the nation which appears to be going from bad to worse.
Without mincing words, Future Brand indicates that the isolated Paraguayan government faces a poor reputation and lack of confidence on a world scale, exemplified by its expulsion from the integrationist blocs mercasur and unasur.
Add to this the social conflicts which the current government cannot, or does not care, to address, since the population is incensed by the reigning poverty, low wages, corruption and the appropriation of land by national and foreign companies.
Just this month, taking to the streets have been literacy instructors in a program initiated by Lugo, who have not received their salaries in five months and on strike some 6,000 workers and officials in the court system demanding scheduled pay increases.
Most constant have been the demands of campesinos and indigenous peoples without land, whose protests continue across the country while the best areas remain, legally or not, in the hands of foreigners. Among other actions, some agricultural workers have chained themselves to trees outside of the Parliament building.
The campesino organizations’ coordinating committee, the largest group of its kind in the country, told AP that it has begun to mobilize thousands of workers in Caazapá and Misiones provinces, demanding that the government provide food for families living in extreme poverty and the $65 monthly subsidy established by the Lugo government..
Franco is sitting on a powder keg and the fuse is lit.
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Spain Hit by Epidemic of Despair
Rising rates of depression and suicide are among the most obvious signs of the increase in mental illness resulting from the economic crisis in Spain.
“Between December 2011 and March or April 2012, the number of suicides presumably linked to economic problems has increased significantly,” a forensic investigator in the southern Spanish city of Malaga, who asked to remain anonymous, told Tierramérica.
During the first months of 2012, two wen-known businessmen were found burned to death in their own cars in seaside towns in the province of Malaga, and all of the evidence seems to suggest that they took their own lives after their businesses went bankrupt, said the investigator, who did not offer any further details.
Suicide is already the leading cause of violent death in Spain, ahead of motor vehicle accidents. The number of suicides did not grow significantly between 2007, prior to the crisis, and 2010, the last year for which official statistics are available.
In 2007, deaths by suicide numbered 3,263, divided between 2,463 men and 800 women, according to a report on fatalities by cause of death released by the National Statistics Institute (ine). In the following years, slight fluctuations were observed: 3,457 in 2008, 3,429 in 2009 and 3,158 in 2010.
Statistics on suicide are not generally made public, and emergency services do not report them to the media, although deaths from other causes do receive news coverage.
“In 95% of cases, journalists do not go to the scenes of suicides, but they do show up at the scenes of homicides or accidents,” the forensic specialist reported.
Journalist Gema Martínez, who works for a local daily newspaper, told Tierramérica that suicides are generally not treated as “news” in order to avoid the potential for “copycats”.
“A great deal of care is taken when it comes to information on suicides and, in fact, when it is known that, a death is the result of self-harm, this is not reported. It is almost as if it were part of an unwritten code of ethics,” she said.
But the scope of the health problem represented by an increase in suicides for social and economic reasons should be addressed by the media, said Martínez.
As psychiatrist Concha López told Tierramérica, suicide is generally the end result of a combination of factors. “The crisis and economic problems are one more reason that has been added, but not the only one,” she stressed.
Nevertheless, the crisis is undoubtedly becoming an increasingly powerful factor.
Unemployment currently affects 24.6% of the country’s economically active population, and there are 1.5 million households in which every member of the family is out of work, according to the ine. Spain has a population of over 47 million.
In addition, Spaniards have endured successive cuts in basic health care and education services, undertaken by the government to reduce the public deficit to 6.3% of gdp by the end of the year [2012], so as to meet its commitment to the European Commission.
López said her psychiatric practice is receiving increasingly more men and women suffering from the symptoms of depression after losing their jobs, as well as others who are still employed but are facing a deterioration in work conditions and enduring considerable hardships to keep their jobs at any cost.
These patients suffer from “sadness, insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, feelings of guilt and suicidal thoughts,” reported Lopez, who said there has been a sizeable increase in the number of unemployed people who are “seeking answers” in the offices of psychiatrists and psychologists.
“In Malaga, the hospital emergency rooms admit two or three people who have attempted to kill themselves every day,” said López, who has worked for eight years at the Community Mental Health Unit in Fuengirola, a town in the province of Malaga.
More than 50% of young people in Spain are unemployed and, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef), one in every four children is poor.
The income gap between the rich and poor has grown more in Spain than in any other of the 27 countries of the European Union, according to the report “Exclusión y desarrollo social - Análisis y perspectivas 2012 (Exclusion and social development: Analysis and outlook 2012), published by the Catholic organization Caritas in February. The report places the poverty rate in Spain at 21.8%. (Excerpts from IPS) •
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Social discontent erupts in Europe
Juan Diego Nusa Peñalver
A Europe diminished by debt crisis, unemployment and poverty has irremediably assaulted the media, given social protests by millions of Europeans, who took to the streets last November 14 to express their profound indignation at the harsh austerity and fiscal adjustment plans advocated by Germany, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund,
Financial corporations are determined to do away with the welfare state because it does [not] generate profits. Until a few years ago this model presumably guaranteed public education, universal health care, decent housing, a living wage or stable employment, and was presented as a triumph of representative democracy, the paradigm of the European Union.
Europeans cannot take any more. From Portugal to Poland, passing through Italy, Spain, France, Germany and other European nations, millions of peoples took to the streets under the slogan “Enough!” to reject policies which are asphyxiating most citizens, thanks to draconian cuts by authorities to education and health programs, tax increases, housing evictions, offensives against labor rights, and official determination to transfer the cost of the crisis to citizens and to protect corporations - in particular the banks - from the consequences of their own greed.
The European Trade Union Confederation (etuc) has asked EU leaders “to take note of the breadth of the mobilizations of November 14 in the framework of the European day of action, in which 50 labor organizations from 28 countries took part.
“Hundreds of people demonstrated in cities throughout the continent against the brutality of the austerity measures,” the labor organization stated.
Bernadette Ségou, etuc general secretary, noted that coordinated actions on the part of nearly all member states emphasized the social urgency of changing current austerity policies being implemented in the EU, in her view a total failure.
Protests made themselves felt above all in Portugal, Ireland and Greece, whose governments have been obliged to ask their EU partners for a rescue package and thus have had to implement unpopular policies dictated by the troika and Berlin; and Spain, whose government is on the verge of asking for a rescue, while continuing to deny the fact.
The etuc-convened day of action included general strikes in Spain and Portugal, partial strikes in Greece and Italy, and demonstrations, sector strikes and other actions in 23 EU countries and another five on the continent, against policies which are increasing poverty, hunger, malnutrition and other social ills.
According to labor unions, the strike was a great success, generating a 77% response (nine million of the 14 million employed workers in the bloc). It did not pass unobserved by analysts that President Rajoy of Spain had to face the second general strike in barely 11 months in power and it is speculated that the Partido Popular government will not survive its current term and will be forced to leave the Palacío de la Moncloa by the back door.
The official response was not long in coming and once again protest actions were met with brutal police repression, with hundreds of people injured and detained in a Europe which boasts of human rights and democracy, principles now bearing the brunt of 115 million citizens at risk of poverty or social exclusion, the equivalent of 23.4% of the population, and a two-digit unemployment rate.
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