Back issues

No 1454 1st October 2014

Fake-“left” condemnation of “horrifying violence” in the ISIS Iraq revolt are a total copout playing into imperialism’s hands. So too are complex conspiracy theories evading Marxist understanding by blaming everything on the CIA. If the rebels are nothing but “evil demons” as Obama and Cameron maintain then all anti-blitz protest is invalidated. “Stop the War” social-pacifism not only ineffectual but a misleading fraud, tying the working class to continuing reformist notions when the world needs revolutionary understanding. Defeat for the imperialist onslaught is the crucial message, by whatever forces. Capitalism and its crisis collapse are the sole cause of war, not the growing Third World revolt, however crude or violent. Defeats for barbaric warmongering opens new possibilities for revolutionary struggle for the total overturn of this bankrupted system of greed and exploitation. But Leninism is now crucial

Yet more ineffectual calls from the fake-“left” to “Stop the bombing” in Iraq (or Ukraine), to “Stop selling off the National Health Service” or to “end austerity”, all demonstrate their complete failure to understand, or to want to understand, the cataclysmic nature of the unfolding capitalist crisis.

So too does the continued infighting over the Scottish referendum – with both “yes and no” “Lefts” beating each other around the head about the “revival of political spirit and energy” it allegedly generated.

Certainly such spirit emerged but as the result of the crisis, only to be channelled into renewed illusions in parliament, constitutions, reforms and petty nationalism, in short into fraudulent and lying bourgeois “democracy” – and all with the help of the fake-“left” “celebrating” the increase in voting etc, pumping up once more the fraud of regionalism and “municipal socialism”.

This is the exact opposite of the revolutionary understanding now urgently needed by the working class, and which the “contempt for Westminster” and parliament demonstrates they are more than ready for.

They are not getting any such grasp from the fake-“left”.

The entire swamp of Trotskyists and Revisionist “communists” profess to be Marxist but say nothing about the urgent revolutionary implications of the daily worsening economic and political crisis and the drive towards World War Three, just escalated again in the Middle East against the demonised Islamists.

Worse, they play into imperialism’s hands by joining in the demonisation and “condemnation” of the growing Third World revolt, which for all its ruthlessness and terrorising is an expression of the crisis breakdown of capitalism itself, not its cause but its result.

The world is breaking down into destructive chaos and revolt because capitalism is finished as a historic system capable of taking mankind forwards and paralysed by contradiction.

Revolution is the only possible future, the long complacent “slow steady change” of reformist opportunism a dead duck.

Without ending capitalism, there is no “ending of austerity” because austerity is not an “ideological choice” by a “greedy” ruling class, or a “strategy” (as the Weekly Worker of the CPGB one-time revisionists put it just this week) but a ruthless necessity for a ruling class facing complete meltdown collapse and failure of its system, and obliged by the intensifying cutthroat trade and currency wars to squeeze the working class into the floor in order to try and survive.

There is no “stopping” the privatisation of the National Health Service (or conversely “re-nationalising” of rail, post office, airports, utilities and so forth either) whatever proof there might be found (plenty) to show public industries are far more efficient, and private monopolies less and less so, because a desperate British ruling class has to allow international capital to plunder its economy or go under.

There is no “better future for Scotland” cut free of “Tory domination” because Scotland will continue to be capitalist and subject to the same hurricane economic disaster tearing all of this system apart.

Nor is there a way to end “global warming”, or depletion of animal species, or pollution, or racism, or inequalities of the sexes, or any of the other side single-issues which the fake-“left” constantly falls for, or deliberately promulgates to distract from its complete failure to deal with the central issue – the need to build revolutionary understanding immediately.

Most of all there is no ending to the constant and expanding war destruction which the imperialist system is continuing to impose, despite the enormous hostility it has created worldwide with a huge expansion of the very “terrorist problem” (in reality the resistance to world imperialism) that is supposedly being fought against and the disintegration and mess it has left in country after country.

The latest ludicrous and demented excuses by Western leaders for yet more Middle East “anti-terror” blitzing, indicate an ever greater desperation by imperialism deliberately to get into war.

A fight is needed to suppress “pure evil” and bring peace, calm and prosperity say the Western warmongers, who have not stopped blasting, torturing, blitzing and pounding the world for more than two decades, creating far more horror, sick depravity, torture, death, bereavement and destruction than anything the “jihadists” could ever preach let alone actually carry out, and long before they even existed in fact.

Whole countries have been torn apart, millions killed, and an enormous worldwide insurgency and rebellion ignited, on top of the endless prior tyranny of colonialist exploitation which routinely kept, and keeps, the great mass of humanity in poverty, ignorance, starvation, foul life conditions and deprivation, as well as daily killing them with industrial accidents, collapses and poisoning, or simply working them to death.

All this while they are pushed down by non-stop intimidation and repression by fascist stooges from Hosni Mubarak to Ferdinand Marcos, Augustus Pinochet to Papa (and Baby) Doc Duvalier, Suharto to the Somoza family, punctuated by repeated massacres and war blitzing by imperialism itself.

More than 400 direct and indirect coups, killings and wars have been imposed since WW2, including Vietnam; Indonesia’s 1965 anti-communist genocide; Algeria; suppression of the Polisario; endless Congo agony (with deaths in tens of millions); the US organised Rwanda “genocide”; South African apartheid; Korean war; Grenada invasion; Angola; Peruvian suppressions; Nepalese anti-communist war; Colombia death squads and lying “drug war” suppression of communist rebellion; El Salvador and Guatemala mass killings; Chile’s torture and butchery; Argentina “disappeareds”; Serbia bombing; Libya; Iran-Iraq war; Iraq directly hit three times; Afghanistan; and many more - killing tens of millions) and now escalated by the deprivations of world financial failure and collapse on top of daily plunder of the world.

But “we have to stop a ‘medieval monstrosity’” says the Western propaganda machine “which threatens us all”!!!!!

What a foul fascist joke.

It is not the Islamic State revolt, generated by capitalism itself, (both by direct manipulation and arming initially, and indirectly anyway as part of the Third World rebellious response to imperialist degeneracy), which is “a medieval throwback” threatening humanity.

The real medievalism is in the primitive superstitious nonsense from Cameron and Obama to arrogantly “justify” this latest wave of non-stop “kill-them-all” hi-tech Nazi barbarity, threatened to be just the beginning of “years more war” (on top of endless blitzkrieg of Iraq since 1991).

What does it mean to talk of “evil” causing the world’s problems??

How is this gibberish supposed to be a guiding principle for blasting and destroying yet tens more thousands of people or perhaps millions, dispossessed, ‘refugeed’, bereaved and traumatised??

Where does this alleged “evil” come from anyway, thin air? The pernicious influence of “the Devil”? Is he green?? Does he have horns?? Is he called Beelzelbub????

Or is it perhaps supposed to emerge from the ground as a “black miasma”?

Such utter mystical garbage can only mean capitalism has swallowed too many of its own twisted Hollywood fantasies, constantly pumped out to dull brains with superstition and irrationality, part of the non-stop deluge of anti-science and anti-communism which comprises capitalist mass “culture”, entertainment and education.

The truth is that Western capitalist intrigue triggered the civil war in Syria, creating, arming, training and financing the “horrific” methods of ISIS and other groups, (just as they did in Iraq in 2005-7) forcing the Assad regime’s also brutal responses, and stirring up the sectarian civil war devastation, in order to head off and contain the spontaneous Arab Spring in Egypt, which threatened imperialist control of the entire region.

Western leaders could not care less about the devastation and carnage of millions and their “horrified” speeches are the most monstrous Nazi lying.

On a wider perspective, monopoly capitalism is ever more desperate for excuses to get into war because its laughable pretences about “maintaining order and the rule of law” and “bringing democracy” in the world are exposed ever more as a hollow fraud, the lie of “Western values” glaringly lit up by nearly two decades of war and blitzing disasters, failures, setbacks and above all defeats for its interventions.

What “democracy”?

Egypt perhaps? - torn up by the mass-street-slaughter General Sisi fascist coup against a legitimately elected president,(after elections had been “granted” for the first time ever in panic to try and head off the 2011 genuine mass rebellion), with Morsi now in prison and his Muslim Brotherhood party outlawed by a repressive and arbitrary judiciary, handing out mass death sentences (all with US (Obama) financial backing)?

Ukraine, where openly Nazi gun and baseball-bat toting thugs overthrew a properly elected president and the swastika-tatooed Hitler-worshipping death gangs are now killing workers by the thousands?

Venezuela, where Western-backed and financed street violence is trying to depose the properly majority elected Nicolás Maduro, successor to the highly popular “left” nationalist reformist Hugo Chávez, hated by imperialism and himself targeted by an illegal though failed CIA backed coup in 2002, despite being a long way from the communism and its dictatorship of the proletariat that Latin America really needs?

Bolivia too?

Honduras, where another pale “left” president was deposed by a military coup (with full Obama and Hilary Clinton approval) and now subject to constant terror killings of left and liberal journalists and resisters?

Syria, where the Western provoked and financed chaos has created a deadly and destructive civil war, blamed, in best Goebbels style, on the state forces trying to resist the attacks?

Libya, with a popular bourgeois nationalist revolutionary regime under Muammar Gaddafi, was simply blitzed by Nazi-NATO into total destruction (to give credence to a pathetic alleged revolt by disaffected monarchists, petty bourgeois spivs and racists, which was an entirely specious construct by Western intelligence, hastily organised like Syria to head off the true Arab Spring in Cairo, and so thin and inadequate, and against the flow of history, that it would have run into the sands otherwise)?

Iraq itself perhaps, manipulated and controlled by US interference and dictate (with its own fascist CIA stooge in Saddam Hussein until he went off the rails), and where the West has just forced out its elected president (himself a US stooge replacement for Saddam Hussein to begin with)?

Or above all, Palestine where the 8 million local inhabitants not only have no say but have suffered nearly seven decades of genocidal and ethnic cleansing persecution, dispersal and terrorised butchery by Nazi-Zionism, held in poverty and concentration camp repression in between regular bouts of war destruction with the foulest of fascist and illegal weaponry including bone burning white-phosphorus, anti-personnel “flechette” bombs, cluster bombs, and bunker busting heavy explosive?

Then there is Thailand, where even a tame and tepid “left” reformist government has again been toppled just this spring by a vicious feudal monarchist military, responsible for a stream of coups and massacres since WW2 (with nearly 100 innocents shot in cold blood just three years ago) and without a word of protest or “outrage” by the Western politicians and media?

Or Haiti, where the remotest sign of “left” reforms sees Washington step in, as it did with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, backing the 2004 military coup to oust him?

Or degenerate and corrupt Nigeria, a yo-yo of Western colluded and accepted military coups and wars, alternating with the most corrupt pretences of “elected government” stooging for Western oil rapacity?

Or Pakistan, likewise subject to repeated coups and totally corrupt manipulated “elections” in between?

Or perhaps Hong Kong where no-one had the vote at all until 1997 when increasingly confident revisionist workers state China finally forced a humiliated British imperialist direct autocratic colonial rule to withdraw and granted universal suffrage as part of the deal (a possible mistake in the light of the outrageous and violent provocations currently being mounted by a minority of anti-communist petty bourgeois, aided and abetted by deliberate British interference and carefully coordinated Western media posturing about “democratic choice” – a laughable parody when the Western press machine says nothing about any of the above cases and a stream of others, and not a smidgeon of protest is heard from Bangkok to Kiev.)

No mistake that this one has just “burst out” (anything but spontaneously) as the Tories stampede the war blitzing along and announce savage new “austerity” cuts against the working class (far outpacing the already devastating workhouse disciplining imposed so far).

Or what about Britain and the US themselves, where elections even in the “boom times” are a giant racket of grotesquely expensive brainwashing advertising, press manipulation, parliamentary corruption, pocket lining, boundary redrawing and a thousand and one other methods of pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes, only to ignore public opinion anyway (such as it is on the back of ludicrously small and contemptuous turnouts) when it comes to it, as in the lying Iraq war in the first place and now the latest stampeded slaughter.

Both are riddled with total electronic surveillance, police infiltration of protest groups and now open censorship with “extremism” to be “banned” says the Tory conference – ostensibly aimed at “evil preachers” but in fact a catch-all repression censorship for all “left” politics which opposes the bourgeois dictatorship, with obviously Marxist revolutionary politics to be at the centre.

And the EPSR petty bourgeois dissenter breakaways declare “you cannot talk about fascism” because we have freedom of speech”!!!!!

The turn to ever more open repression even in the “heart of democracy” is desperate weakness by a ruling class abandoning all pretences, because it is so desperate in the face of its giant crisis.

Its twists and turns in support and funding for brutal “jihadists”, followed by attacks on the same insurgents, the constant chopping and changing of alleged scaremongering “world threats”, with yesterday’s “ultimate threat to mankind” or “new Hitler” (in Iran, or Syria, or Egypt etc) becoming today’s ally, and vice versa, and the rank hypocrisy of its pseudo-”horror” over the ISIS fighting (while ten times more depraved Zionist genocide continues right alongside for example, armed, munitioned and paid for by Washington), are more grotesque and obvious than ever, reaching new depths of Goebbels derangement.

The anger and hatred erupting everywhere, however confused and sometimes bizarrely expressed in religious or similar forms for want of a clear Leninist communist ideology (completely undermined for the time being by Third International revisionist stupidity and USSR liquidationism, and now to be outlawed), has been growing for a century or more as the masses have become increasingly educated and trained (because capitalism requires trained workers for its production) and therefore aware of their own humiliation and of forced sweatshop and plantation slavery and misery.

But it has intensified a thousandfold more with the turn to fascist world “shock and awe” suppression by Washington, aiming to hold the entire world (including all other capitalist powers) in thrall to its domination despite the total bankruptcy of the private profit system, clogged with “surplus profit” and poisoned with worthless paper dollars and Quantitative Easing Mickey Mouse “credit”, the greatest Ponzi scheme in all history (on top of the anyway enormous capitalist crisis - see Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism for example and economic quotes) all due to implode disastrously again at any moment. To dismiss the rebellion against all this as some inexplicable “evil” arising from the mystic regions is the most absurd of Goebbels excuses, to stampede corrupted and brainwashed mass opinion in the privileged countries into a frenzy of “righteous” hatred and fascist Goebbels scapegoating to keep warmongering going.

Marxist rationality understands that war emerges from the real concrete conditions of class struggle and above all the inevitable crisis of overproduction that is built-in to the capitalist way of doing things.

There are material explanations and class war reasons for the all the developments and upheavals taking place and most of all for the growing revolt of the Third World which can no longer tolerate the grotesque slave exploitation and degradation imposed on its billions by the tiny handful of rich countries in the world, or more to the point (and increasingly obviously as the working class is driven down into penury) by the far tinier handful of ruling class owners and hangers-on who control and expropriate everything, internationally and domestically.

Material class reasons dictate that the ruling class at the same time needs war (any war) as the only way out of catastrophe and crisis it has ever found, just as it pushed the entire world into war in 1914, and 1939 to escape the great financial collapses and Depressions which built up beforehand (including a giant Stock Exchange disaster on the eve of the First World War, and the huge slump of the 1930s).

Things are far worse now as the Tory conference promises of £25bn worth of cuts in the next few years suggest (which is only part of the picture anyway).

Since when did a bourgeois election ever get fought on the basis of promising total economic savagery and repression – affecting at least half the population adversely? And why?

To whip up civil war hatred and nationalist scapegoating among the middle class and opportunist elements of the population is the answer.

Because far worse economic disaster is on the way, which deep down the ruling class is well aware, which will be a completely disastrous world Slump and trade war Depression to make even the tragic soup kitchen and starvation of the 1930s look like a tea-party.

Global collapse of the credit system in 2008 was not a blip, nor a now-overcome result of “bad banking practice” nor the result of “bad Labour policies” (though Labourism’s fawning on the rich and bankers, and massive encouragement of public and private borrowing, to hide the effects of the already tearing world crisis, were a disgusting lying trick on the working class too, hoodwinking them that capitalism and “democracy” could continue and disarming any grasp of the impossibility of the post-war “boom” being sustained).

It was an international and inescapable breakdown and collapse of the entire Western world financial order which is the inevitable result of capitalist production for private profit.

The greatest lie now being told about this is that it can be “sorted out” if only “Tory austerity” or Labour “economic discipline but softer on the working class” is imposed.

But the money printing Quantitative Easing which has kept things afloat since then is a smoke-and-mirrors trick which held off immediate world bank failures from running everywhere like toppling dominoes in 2008, (when Britain, the US and much of Europe were just 24 hours from shutting down all the cash machines, with all the unimaginable social chaos that would have followed as supermarkets and everything else shut down, food ran out, and nothing worked).

Billions of dollars pumped into the finance system every month have no intrinsic value and this mechanism will itself implode as soon as this false and highly inflationary “money” percolates through the international bank and credit system.

It is due anytime as urgent warnings from the bourgeois press keep indicating, like this from the very rightwing Telegraph and the “impeccable” Financial Times:

The UK and US economies may be on the mend at last, but that’s not the pattern elsewhere. On a global level, growth is being steadily drowned under a rising tide of debt, threatening renewed financial crisis, a continued squeeze to living standards, and eventual mass default.

I exaggerate only a little in depicting this apocalyptic view of the future as the conclusion of the latest “Geneva Report”, an annual assessment informed by a top drawer conference of leading decision makers and economic thinkers.

“Deleveraging? What Deleveraging?”, points out that, far from paying down debt since...2008/9, the world economy has geared up even further.

There was a brief pause at the height of the crisis, but then the rise in the global debt-GDP ratio resumed, reaching nearly 220% of global GDP over the past year. Much of the more recent growth in this headline figure has been driven by China, which in response to the crisis, unleashed a massive expansion in credit.

However, even developed market economies have struggled to make progress, with rising public debt cancelling out any headway being made in reducing household and corporate indebtedness..

Reduced mortgage finance during the banking crisis temporarily succeeded in capping and partially reversing the growth in UK household debt. Yet with a reviving housing market, these reductions may have come to an end, with the Office for Budget Responsibility expecting household debt to income ratios to start climbing again shortly.

In the meantime, the government has been piling on borrowings like topsy, not withstanding attempts by the Chancellor, George Osborne, to bring the deficit under control. Total national non-financial indebtedness has therefore barely budged since the start of the crisis.

The UK remains the fourth most highly indebted major economy in the world after Japan, Sweden and Canada, with total non financial debt of 276% of GDP. The US is not far behind with debt of 264% of GDP.

However, the real stand-out is China, which since the crisis began has seen debt spiral from a very manageable 140% of GDP to 220% and rising. This is obviously still lower than many developed economies, but the speed of the increase, combined with the fact that it is largely private sector debt, makes a hard landing virtually inevitable.

There are those that say it doesn’t matter, or that rising debt is merely a manifestation of economic growth. And in the sense that all debt is notionally backed by assets, this may be partially true. But when rising asset prices are merely the flip side of rising levels of debt, it becomes highly problematic. Eventually, it dawns on the creditors that the debtors cannot keep up with the payments. That’s when you get a financial crisis.

...(the report) argues that rising indebtedness in developed economies has been crimping potential output growth ever since the 1980s.

The crisis has made an already bad situation worse

...that Anglo-Saxon economies, the US and UK, have done better in managing...deleveraging and output,..may be largely a conjuring trick.

To the extent that meaningful reductions in private and financial sector debt have been achieved without greater damage to output, it is only because there has been a parallel and very substantial increase in public indebtedness.

Despite the deficit reduction rhetoric, George Osborne, the UK Chancellor, has in fact been doing the bare minimum to keep the markets off his back. He’s also had plenty of help from the Bank of England, which itself has become leveraged to the gunnels with government debt to ease the path back to fiscal sustainability.

None the less, this is plainly a much better place to be than the Eurozone, which has imposed entirely counterproductive debt controls on governments and thus far at least, denied them the luxury of debt monetisation by the European Central Bank. The result is a crushing depression for much of the single currency bloc.

Ten warning signs of global financial meltdown. The record run of gains for investors might be running out of steam.

1 - China slowdown. ..increases risks for investors around the world. China contributes more than a quarter of world economic growth and is the largest buyer of commodities to fuel its massive construction boom...cracks in the Chinese economy are growing wider as its property market falls. For the past five years the credit glut in China has been driving world economic growth, but now it looks like the Chinese dragon is running out of puff. Premier Li Keqiang is determined to try and bring the debt mountain under control.

2 - Iron ore price slump (for) an essential raw material to feed China’s steel mills. The numbers are shockingly bad. Shanghai steel futures have fallen to a record low and the sector’s profit margin has also apparently halved to just 0.3pc. As a result...the price of iron ore has collapsed. The benchmark iron ore price has fallen to a five-year low of $83 per tonne, down 40pc this year (and) could slump further undermining some of Britain’s biggest listed companies.

3 - Oil price slump. The purest barometer of world growth...driv(ing) nearly all industry. China is world number one importer. Brent Crude, the global benchmark for oil, has been falling in price sharply to a two-year low of $97.5 per barrel, below the important psychological barrier of $100.

4 - Global Commodities. The prices are now falling in a sign of weakening demand across the globe...to a five-year low.

5 - Smallcap selloff. Shares in small UK-listed companies are more sensitive to the underlying economy and quickly show investors sentiment. When shares start falling despite companies reporting strong increases in profits and revenues then it is time to worry.

6 - Bursting of the tech market bubble. Collapse of share prices has been brutal this year as results miss expectations.

7 - US Money printing is driving the market higher. Since late 2008 the US has been printing an incredible amount of money with the monetary base soaring, and that wall of money has found a new home in the stock market driving the FTSE 100 higher. The US is now reducing its bond buying programme. The Federal Reserve may end purchases in October

8 US Markets are overvalued. The S&P 500 closed at another record high of 2,011.36 and that means the Shiller PE for the S&P 500 is currently at 26.6, well above the long run average of 16.5, and indicated the S&P 500 is more than 60pc overvalued. The ratio, devised by Yale professor Robert Shiller, averages out US corporate earnings through a 10yr period to reach an earnings ratio that smoothes out the wild swings of the business cycle and is viewed as a better indicator of long term value.

9 - Shares don’t go up forever. The FTSE 100 bull run has been underway for more than five years now, the fourth longest run on record. The longest was 1990 to 2000, ending in the dotcom bubble. Then there was 1921 to 1929, before the most famous stock market crash on record.

10 - Interest rate shock. The Federal Reserve in the US and the Bank of England in the UK are both set to increase interest rates from next year. The world economy has become addicted to cheap debt and could struggle to survive

This is the context and underlying driver for all the chaos and war now erupting in the world and which capitalism needs ever more desperately.

But the defeats it has faced, from the shattering demoralisation of the 9/11 attacks to the failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya the have made keeping the war momentum going far more difficult.

Defeat saw the Blair government discredited (salvaged only by effectively sidelining Blair himself, suitably paid-off for past class collaborating services, and burying the Chilcott report (still unpublished ten years later)) and George W Bush’s neocon presidency reaching a new low in popularity.

That was not simply mass public detestation of a rank individual, but a historic shattering of the public confidence in the presidency itself, and thereby the entire democracy racket (accelerating long growing disillusionment in US “democracy”, just as in the UK).

Only by pulling out every carefully prepared “politically-correct” single-issue campaign, from feminism and black nationalist civil rights to eventually “gay rights” (the key issue in the 2012 campaign around “gay marriage”), was the presidency rescued (for the moment), in one of the greatest slick political hoodwinking frauds of all time, fooling most of the world’s working class masses that “now things would be different”.

The fake-“left” played a crucial role in this rescue, having spent decades building up these subjective PC diversions and in many cases also hailing Obama as a “step forwards” or failing to expose the collapse in “democracy”.

Obama-ism, and its “black president for the first time” is not “different” as the EPSR warned from the beginning, but driven by the same capitalist crisis forces which have made the US the world’s leading fascist warmonger.

Part of the Obama trickery was to play to the deep running war weariness that the Afghan and Iraqi debacles had caused, draining money and morale on a gigantic scale and American body bags came home and the insurgencies grew in strength.

No more American “involvement” was promised.

It is a total lie, but getting back into war has required increasingly bizarre and fantastical excuses.

Rational scientific explanation – Marxist theory – has never had a more fertile ground to finally develop the mass revolutionary grasp that is needed to end capitalism, the only possible end not just continuing stagnation Slump but the hugely escalated poverty and exploitation the ruling class is now preparing for.

Small wonder “extremism” is to be banned.

But the hugely complex debate needed to work out the developments in the Middle East is being thoroughly confused by the fake-“lefts” and their non-stop sectarian anti-Marxist refusal to polemicise and battle out the scientific understanding crucially needed, and particularly sorting out the great historical conundrums of the former Soviet Union, and the giant successes it had, but also historic philosophical failures which led to its unnecessary liquidation by the Gorbachevite end-point to Stalinist revisionist mistakes and retreats.

Their petty bourgeois opportunism and anti-revolution (despite pretended “Marxism”) has completely capitulated to the Western “war on terror” gibberish demonisations since the 9/11 attacks, drowning all scientific understanding in moralising and “anti-dictator” shallowness, born from petty bourgeois illusions in abstract “democracy” (revisionist originally) and even worse Trotskyite detestation of the workers states and their necessary class discipline.

(Undoubtedly the Trots will all be rushing around in support of the latest counter-revolutionary provocations in capitalism-saturated Hong Kong, going along with the West’s attempt to create another Tian an Men stunt against the Chinese workers state – CIA and British agents already stirring up street violence in the hope of triggering a state crackdown and a few “democracy martyrs” just as they initiated the violence in Beijing 25 years ago around the square after it was peacefully cleared, by the PLA – there was no “massacre” in Tian an Men at all despite the constant lying repetition of the term by consciously lying Western reporters. Hopefully the soft-brained don’t-rock-the-boat revisionist illusions in Beijing’s leadership will not stop the Chinese from responding just as firmly this time. But nothing is guaranteed.)

There is no “democracy” achievable for the working class until it has taken power, and contradictorily, that can only be done by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat to suppress all such counter-revolution and oppression, after which society can gradually expand decision making outwards to everyone (at which point no state (majority working class dictatorship) will any longer be required).

Defeat for imperialism is the critical question everywhere it is imposing its war blitzing and destruction.

That means defeat by any of the forces imperialism is trying to destroy, whatever Marxism thinks of their ideology or methods.

It is ABC Leninism that the cause and generator of war and mayhem is capitalism itself and the crisis, and that alone, not the “enemy” it is blaming or forces which are driven into fighting against it (designated “terrorist”).

If the Assad Ba’athist regime is Syria is attacked by an obviously Western provoked “revolt” just after the genuine Arab spring burst out in Egypt, (as was obviously the case from the Western political and media storm of support for the tiny groups of laughably bogus ”freedom demonstrators” in Damascus and elsewhere, and the deluge of lying, unproven, hearsay atrocity allegations pumped out day and night to stampede the existing sectarian tensions into civil war, and the political collusion of these stunted-up “rebel” groups with the West, constantly calling for intervention by NATO bombing, just as had been done in Libya (another Western bogus “extension of the Arab Spring") then a Marxist understanding can only wish for these Western funded and armed forces to be defeated, but without giving any credence at all to the complacent and inadequate bourgeois-nationalist Assad as a path forwards for the working class.

If then these same forces turn on their western masters and funders and are then blitzed and bombed by imperialism, the same guiding principle still applies; that the greater enemy should be defeated, this time the US and its “imperialist coalition”.

Marxism says that every blow inflicted on capitalism is a useful weakening of its morale and capability that will open the door to greater revolutionary understanding in the masses.

That still implies no support for the ideology of the Islamists as such, (including even the heroic Hamas leadership in Palestine) which cannot rise to the scientific socialist understanding of Marxism which is required for the world’s masses, and either hampers or is outrightly hostile to Marxist science.

“Strike together but march separately” is the classic summation.

Without this core dialectal grasp of the complex movement and changes in the world’s balance of class forces, using as its anchor point an awareness of the underlying capitalist crisis which drives everything, and the need to overturn the entire capitalist system, and all its twisting and turning skulduggery, there is no possibility of avoiding utter confusion.

The Middle East is now an incredible tangle of contradiction and confusion and the fake-“left” is contributing to it, and particularly in trying to understand the ISIS eruption, because of their shallow, wooden and essentially anti-revolutionary minds.

Not one of them puts the crisis at the heart of things and as a result these petty bourgeois “revolutionary” groups have all in one way or another capitulated to the Western “war on terror”.

It makes a mockery of the social-pacifist protests “against war” if, at the same time, they declare that “terror” must be condemned, is “the wrong way to fight” or is an expression of reaction or even “criminal”, or that the ISIS is “beyond the pale in the horrifying terrorising and brutality of its methods”.

Horrifying it is, and Marxism, is not advocating such methods.

But declaring Islam to be “reactionary” (as Trotskyists and revisionists alike do) is an unscientific nonsense that capitulates entirely to the bourgeoisie’s propaganda that there is an new “evil” in the world that has to be “cleaned up” and “destroyed” - invalidating all the posturing about “stopping war” and playing into the Western chauvinism and Nazi-minded minority scapegoating.

Islam is a powerful ideology that has filled the vacuum left by disillusionment in what was seen to be “communism” but in fact was Moscow revisionism’s disastrous retreat from revolutionary perspectives (beginning with Stalin’s mis-assessment of imperialism’s capacity for growth and renewed world war after WW2 and the disappointment of the USSR’s self-imposed reversion to “free market” idiocies and oligarch rule, abandoning the workers state).

For all its religious inadequacy it is giving form to an underlying revolt against imperialism; it needs supplanting not because it is “reactionary” as the fake-“lefts” declare, lining themselves with capitalism, but because it is inadequate, at times counter-productive (particularly in its sectarianism) and ultimately not the revolutionary science needed to change the world.

Some of the most obscenely deranged of the fake-“lefts” are in an extraordinary confusion, with a few of the more outlandish Trot groups having been supporting the sectarian terror whipped up against Assad, their petty bourgeois “anti-totalitarianism” falling right in behind the West’s “street revolt” pretences of a “people’s revolt”, blithely ignoring the obvious signs of its manipulated nature (like opening inviting NATO in for example – something of a giveaway).

Where do they go now that these same “freedom fighters” have turned and are being blitzed themselves??

Many others also particularly the left-“Labourites and many of the Trots also go along with the Western demonisation of the jihadists, swallowing this mystical notion of “an evil force” that is “beyond the pale” and has to destroyed, finding various sophistries to still “oppose the warmongering”.

Typical is the maverick ex-Labourite and now Respect MP George Galloway declaring himself against the British onslaught on the grounds that “the Saudis and Gulf states should be asked to use their planes instead" but still declaring “Isil is a death cult, it is a gang of terrorist murderers.”

This is much along the lines of the Weekly Worker CPGB who have long declared there to be a new forces in the world of “reactionary Islam” which astonishingly is capable of a new kind of “reactionary” anti-imperialism.

This craven cowardice and arrogant Western petty bourgeois contempt for the mass Third World struggle allows them to push themselves right up the arse of imperialist warmongering under cover of supposed “principles”.

This “analysis” is pure idealism, beginning with the notion that what is in men’s heads is the driving force of history and declaring with an arrogance only possible from the smug complacency of an Islington front-room that the huge struggles that have erupted everywhere in the Third World are all “wrong”.

But the Third World is fighting back as best in can in the absence of any clear Leninist scientific grasp of what they are doing, and using whatever methods it can manage to pull together. As the EPSR said in the wake of 9/11 (No 1115 04-12-01):

Some of the “democracy” dupes have already accepted the sick ‘logic’ of their social-pacifist cringing (CPGB, etc) by denouncing the Hamas and Islamic Jihad activities too.

Instantly, all of the specious ‘arguments’ why Sept 11 has to be declared a “bad thing” in fake-’left’ eyes, are placed under a harsh different glare, exposing their fallacies.

As events move on, this servile and treacherous “condemnation”-’morality’, siding with stinking bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy, will unavoidably become more and more obviously the measure of class-collaborating rottenness, petty bourgeois stupidity, and total untrustworthiness as far as the working class is concerned.

Depending on how events develop, this filthy betrayal of the impoverished and tortured Third World’s obvious incapacity or perspective-limitation to start fighting back against colonial-imperialist humiliation and totally-repressive domination in any other way, could rank alongside the 1914 voting of war credits by the Second International as the greatest fake-’left’ treachery in history.

Endless revolutionary-sounding arguments were aggressively put forward in 1914 by the Second International leaders of the Revisionist retreat from Marxist-Leninist science then, just as now, - but in practice all were just a cover for class-collaborating chauvinism.

No different today. To condemn Sept 11 as only a “barbaric atrocity” by “fascist anti-imperialists” is to concede the field of argument completely to the bourgeois-reformist imbecility which thinks that the poverty causes of terrorism should be eradicated soon, but that the ‘indiscriminate slaughter of innocents’, cannot be tolerated, and has to be stopped immediately.

To agree with bourgeois hypocrisy that “something must be done about barbaric terrorist atrocities”, which helped put Bush and Blair in total charge of world opinion (superficially and temporarily), but to then protest the blitzkrieg outcome with pacifist ‘No to war’ objections, is the cynical absolute in self-delusion by the fake-’left’.

To wriggle away from the obvious collusion with imperialism represented by the great wave of condemnations of “terror” (amounting to condemnation of Third World struggle itself) a stream of elaborate and ever more complex conspiracy theories emerged after the 9/11 attacks, the essential philosophical purpose being to allow the fake-“left” to continue lining up on the imperialist side while pretending not to overtly denounce the masses in the Third World.

By allegedly “proving” that everything was organised by the CIA etc these groups can safely carry on their cowardly condemnation under the cover of “really we are condemning the West”.

It was already a nonsense in 2003 as again analysed (EPSR 1123 12-02-02)

The fake-’left’ pigeonholes Bin Laden as just a for-all-time CIA stooge (and as still acting as an agent of American policy even as he was supposedly masterminding the Sept 11 incidents) only because to think less statically and more dialectically would require digesting the full terrifying possibilities of what a total breakdown of imperialist law-and-order in the world might mean, and thereafter oblige Trot anti-communist opportunism to stand up against the full force of petty-bourgeois public opinion at its most self-righteously hysterical vengeance-seeking, by explaining Sept 11 as just a trivial tragic accident but providing a profoundly useful marker for the world of just what destructive upheavals society was INCURABLY being driven to, and would be even further driven to in the near future, - by the onset of imperialist crisis until socialist revolution NOW could put an end to such a degenerative universal warmongering development.

That was true on Sept 11 as the EPSR immediately explained on that very day within five minutes of the incidents occurring.

And it is even more true today. Just how much more blitzkrieg mayhem and pointless destruction and economic disaster does the fake-’left’ have to see before it starts tackling its own wooden undialectical anti-revolutionary stupidity about such matters?? Sept 11 as a CIA conspiracy so as to launch warmongering blitzkrieg domination of the Middle East????

Only an insane delusion in the ‘power of democracy and a democratic media’, etc, by the fake-’left’ could produce such a barmy rigmarole.

Why would imperialism need to go to such astonishing extremes of fraught organisation and ‘own goal’ humiliation and deaths just to launch a minor blitzkrieg destruction of Afghanistan? Or a longer bogus ‘war on terrorism’?

The entire Vietnam War and the dioxin defoliation poisoning of the whole of Indochina, not to mention the napalming and B-52 saturation bombing of the undeclared war against Laos, etc, etc, , etc, - was all casually ‘justified’ by Washington by the totally fictional ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident’ when a Vietnamese tiny naval patrol boat was supposed to have sailed ‘menacingly close’ to a huge Seventh Fleet US armada hovering off the coast of Vietnam.

And this infamous cynical imbecility was got away with at the very height of the Cold War conflict with the nuclear-armed Soviet bloc and China.

If no more plausible subterfuge for invading Vietnam and conducting a 10 year holocaust was needed in those conditions of genuine international contradiction, why would the CIA need such an astonishingly complicated and difficult-to-set-up rigmarole as the Sept 11 guerrilla-war coup just in order to start a short bombing campaign so as to let the Northern Alliance win the long-drawn-out Afghan civil war????

Especially with the warmongering Bush mafia now in the White House??

And in general the whole history of imperialist warmongering chauvinism is one of the easiest propaganda triumphs imaginable in order to ‘justify’ getting into war in the first place, just plenty of national flags and imaginary ‘threats to our women folk’, plus boastful promises of an ‘easy victory’ etc, etc, is usually more than enough. The problem for the bourgeois-capitalist epoch is the danger of imperialist-war defeats and the revolutionary come-uppance which frequently has followed (1871, 1905, 1917, and a whole rash after 1945, etc), not how to start wars.

... Apart from all the naïve mistaken-analyses exposed above, however, - one of the most wretched and damning nonsenses of all about this “Sept 11 is a CIA conspiracy” stuff is its pitiful subjective defeatism. These middle-class mice of the fake-’left’ apparently want to tell the world in all seriousness that a) it is not uncontrollable contradictions that rule (and eventually bring down) the crisis-ridden imperialist system but the fiendish imperialist spies and intelligence services which totally manipulate world events, completely fooling the whole planet (with the exception of this handful of very clever ‘left’ sleuths, of course) that Sept 11 was an act of guerrilla-war terrorism by Middle East Islamic fanatics, when in reality it was the CIA who invented, dramatised, and faultlessly carried out the whole operation themselves without anyone knowing it; and b) that this was done because these world-manipulating imperialist fiends are about to impose an entire warmongering colonising perspective onto the whole of future history which will capture all the world’s oil resources, permanently militarily dominate the entire Middle East and Central Asia, and force or persuade every other imperialist power to either willingly dance to America’s tune, or else be ruthlessly crushed, just like everyone else in this Star Wars scenario, etc, etc; and c) that the only hope for mankind lies in people recognising the investigative genius of the authors of this ‘penetrative study’ and agreeing with them to...... do what, exactly?

Probably to go on a protest march outside an embassy somewhere.

This infantile rubbish is widespread from the SLP to Neue Einheit. It is a ludicrous misunderstanding of the whole content and purpose of the Marxist science of how uncontrollable contradictions endlessly tend towards imperialist-system break-up in crisis when it ceases to be able to rule on in the old way, and of how the international balance of class forces develops and changes spontaneously to create the conditions at some stage for mass proletarian revolution to consciously bring down the whole capitalist system under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Even more of this garbage is now pouring out over the ISIS events, particularly from the revisionist side of the fake-“left” spectrum including tragically even in the Granma newspaper of the brilliant Cuban workers state (tragically because the continuing practical example of anti-imperialist defiance and workers state building gives its revisionist philosophical errors an additional kudos):

A recent report by Edward Snowden, former analyst for the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA), confirms what has been evident, that the U.S. (CIA), Britain (SIS) and Israel (Mosad) created the Islamic Army of Iraq and the Levante (ISIS), which has, declared an Islamic State in the region it has occupied - from the city of Alepo in Syria to Faluja, Mosul and Tal Afar in Iraq - and installed a caliphate for Muslims throughout the world.

The triple alliance’s intelligence services created a mercenary recruitment system entitled “Wasp nest,” according to Snowden.

The ISIS has followed the pattern of earlier creations -meant to generate international and local rejection of genuine resistance movements which struggle against the Israeli-British-U.S. occupation of the Middle East - and is functioning like an extremist al-Qaeda organization. This way, the real promoters of terrorism remain hidden, free to continue their re-mapping of the region and appropriation of its natural resources, while encircling Russia and isolating China. Directed toward these same goals are the current ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine; Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; as well as the war being carried out by mercenaries against the independent republics of eastern Ukraine.

The strategy of creating organizations and co-opting leaders to serve Zionist interests has always been the same. Once they have served their purpose, these groups and individuals are discarded and replaced. First a price is put on leaders’ heads and then the organization is “rebuilt.” Over the last few years, the Color Revolutions, the Arab Spring, and the White Hand military organizations are all movements which illustrate very well how groups are armed and leaders “created.”

The case of Iraq provides a clear example of how the strategy works. Beginning in 2000, Abu Musab al Zarqaui, a supposed leader of al-Qaeda whose real name was Ahmed Fadel al Jalaylah, was co-opted to take charge of terrorist acts in Iraq, before, during and after the U.S. invasion of 2003, including the assassination of Saddam Hussein. Second in command to Osama Bin Laden (who the triple alliance used in Afghanistan and Kosovo, then pursued and killed), al Zarqaui was linked to the massacre in Tall’Afar, identified as an al-Qaeda bastion and from where the organization had extended its operations into Syria.

Of Jordanian origin, al-Zarqaui was a mercenary with a record of attacks not only in the Middle East, but also in London and the United States, including involvement in September 11, who was finally killed in a U.S. air strike onBaquba, June 12, 2006. He was getting “dangerous” and Bush decided he needed to be “hunted down.” Toward this end, the U.S. President mounted the farce of announcing a reward for his capture. Given that al-Zarqaui was outranked only by Bin Laden, the amount offered was similar: 25 million dollars.

Once al-Zarqaui was dead, the U.S. government put al-Queda in Iraq into the hands of Abu Ayyub al-Masri - or Abu Hamza Al Mohayer - who after being used was ordered killed in 2010, with a reward also offered.

Currently, in the case of ISIS, which the servile media describe as an extremist wing of al-Qaeda, its leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi already has a price on his head of 10 million USD. The Zionist triple alliance used him to destroy Iraq and allow U.S. oil corporations to once again appropriate the country’s resources, while making Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation appear terrorist. With these objectives accomplished, he is no longer of use.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has always been a mercenary group organized by Zionist intelligence services, in an effort to dismantle independent states in the Middle East, weaken Arab unity, encourage tribal conflicts and those between Kurds, Sunni and Shiite, just as is currently happening, to discredit legitimate resistance to the U.S. and its Zionist allies, open the door to narco-terrorist governments, such as those established in the Balkans which have placed control of natural resources into the hands of U.S. and Western elites and ensured the flow of drugs to that country and to Europe. (Excerpts from Rebelión)

Where to begin with the flaws in this defeatist gobshyte? Did the CIA/MI6/Mossad alleged triumvirate therefore create the Nigerian Boko Haram? Al-Shabaab in Somalia? Al-Qaeda in the Yemen, the Tunisian revolt, the Taureg northern Mali revolt, the recent Muslim upheavals in the Central African Republic, the Ivory Coast anti-imperialism, the Islamic insurgency in Indonesia (ongoing), the Philippines southern revolt (ongoing) all of which are a major problem for imperialism requiring massive interventions by French troops, Kenyans, the US Africor.

And if they did what on earth was the purpose? Why would imperialism organise simultaneous rebellions against itself across the world creating massive difficulties for its rule (while also at the same time waging difficult and expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, firefighting the “left” nationalist reformists in Latin America, the Bonarpartist Russian nationalist anti-Westernism of Moscow, growing domestic discontent, upheavals and crisis riots throughout Europe (and potentially much more to come))?

Why, most of all in the middle of a terrifying world financial crisis, would it organise a giant spontaneous mass street rebellion in the most explosive of all the Arab countries, namely the giant 80+million strong Egypt as alleged in this piece?

Egypt was firmly under control by a bureaucratic imperialist-stooge dictatorship led by the gangster Hosni Mubarak, funded by Washington to the tune of billions and, while he was ageing, quite ready to simply continue with another of the reactionary military hierarchy in charge.

What is the point of stirring a previously quiescent population into dangerously politicised action and street revolt, which would be virtually uncontrollable and unpredictable in its nature, and likely to stir and inspire an entire region including the almost as large and vital NATO member Turkey (already under unwanted Islamic rule), Iraq, Syria, Libya and all other countries surrounding the crucial Zionist occupation, including the weak feudal Gulf states??

Why further inspire and revitalise the dogged Palestinian struggle (which will not go away)??.

There is no sensible point – and it is nothing to do with Marxism to claim it.

The analysis of the Arab Spring as “all manipulated by the CIA” is anyway a total impossibility.

The 2011 Cairo revolt was no carefully tailored “Orange revolt” where a few thousand petty bourgeois elements were choreographed and organised over years, with massive Western media hype, to give a picture of alleged “freedom” struggle, and always with the giveaway calls for greater involvement of the West (as in Ukraine eg) and NATO intervention.

It was a spontaneous and unexpected upheaval by millions pouring on the streets and totally hostile to the West, the military and the middle class (who stayed at home).

The CIA could not have organised such a sudden explosive social upheaval in a million years, and particularly one hidden from sight until it erupted.

It is anyway clear that the world crisis pressures were the underlying factor.

It gobsmacked the world (as once the anti-Shah revolt in Iran had done) and panicked imperialism with the fear of a complete unravelling of the vital Middle East.

Of course the West is constantly interfering and manipulating the world and certainly went into overdrive after the initial Arab Spring, both within Egypt, to try and head the revolt into relatively safe channels (as it did by the pretence that “democracy” would now be “achieved” taking advantage of the naïvity and perhaps opportunism too of the reformist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood) and ultimately by using “secular democracy” illusions to whip up the middle class into a counter revolution, (which for all the Western media and Tony Blair wild exaggerations about “millions supporting it” was never on anything like the scale of the initial outburst of the poor masses who mostly supported the MB).

The “left” and anarchist “Occupy”-style anti-leadership (meaning anti-communist) influence, and the fake-“left” anti-Islamism which fostered the 2013 counter-rebellion (opening the door to the bloody Sisi fascism) has a lot to answer for.

So to do all the other “lefts” who went along with it as a “step forwards in the revolution” (as the Lalkar/Proletarian revisionists do, with no word of explanation to this day for their support for the mass killing of thousands on the streets).

For all that reformist Morsi-ism was not an answer either for the working class, it was a anti-imperialist orientated regime that the West did not want, and particularly the Zionists, fearful of the MB links with the Hamas in Gaza, and the mass support in Egypt for the Palestinians.

More nonsense still, pervades this conspiracy “theory”.

Take the notion that it is all done to control oil, one of the persistent “clever” understandings allegedly of the fake-“left”.

As the EPSR has argued a decade ago, the crisis and the warmongering would continue even if the West could invent some magic substitute for oil because the crisis is not about oil at all but the collapse of its entire profit making system.

And lo and behold exactly that is happening. Firstly America has fracking, frantically developed to give it total self-sufficiency in oil for decades to come – the “magic” answer to overseas dependency.

And secondly as the FT piece above makes clear, the price of oil (and all the other commodities that the revisionist “cleverness” insists is the explanation for war) is plunging disastrously, because in a slump noone wants them.

None of which declares that the sinister hand of imperialism is not deep into all the chaos in the Middle de East or anywhere else.

Precisely in the wake of the Arab spring panic the agencies stirred the bogus “revolutions” in hated anti-imperialist Libya and Syria, both next door to Egypt.

But the point is that capitalism is not in control. The ISIS rebellion, like Osama bin Laden before, or Saddam Hussein, or Noriega in Panama, may all have started as Western stooges serving anti-communist and local repression purposes but they all changed because of the crisis, the growing anti-imperialist hatred of the Third World and the underlying weakness of imperialism caused by its crisis collapse.

Deepdown, unstated, - the only possible conclusion to draw from all this is that (a) no spontaneous own-goal, enemy-action disasters ever befall the imperialist system; and that (b) the imperialists never-endingly plan and successfully carry out such brilliantly masterful subterfuges that only the maddest day-dreamers could ever think that something like the Bolshevik Revolution would ever be allowed by imperialism ever to succeed again; etc, etc, etc. (EPSR 1146 30-07-02)

Of course the ISIS is not the answer to the world’s problems and its ruthlessness, (trained and encouraged by capitalism and fed with its weaponry) may be as much counter-productive as useful for setting back imperialism.

But it is also indicating that the growing Third World revolt is becoming much more organised and capable of confronting the Nazi-violence of imperialism itself.

What is also revealed is the complete breakdown of existing forms in the world – including the entire Middle East division of the imperialist spoils after WW1 imposed by Britain and France.

Utter chaos and destructiveness is an inevitable expression of the historic impasse reached by the profit making system.

The only escape is the total transformation of human society through a giant leap - via revolutionary upheaval and change – into a new socialist planned and cooperative society building on the ruins of warmongering imperialist slump destruction.

Defeat for imperialism and the (re)building of Leninist science and leadership are the crucial elements.

Build Leninism.

Don Hoskins

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