Back issues

No 1458 15th December 2014

Foul and grotesque CIA torture disclosure is not a reflection of “self-correcting” democracy but the impact of defeats and turmoil on the crisis wracked US top-dog imperialist power, splitting its ruling class and demoralising the petty bourgeoisie to force out revelations. But it is also a signal of the barbarism to which the imperialist order will sink, dragging the entire world into the filthiest and most depraved warmongering chaos as its “escape plan” to evade responsibility for the greatest ever catastrophic failure of human society. Capitalism is dictatorship by money and the rich ruling class, and has always been fascist – openly so in much of the Third World and just beneath the surface in the hoodwinking “democracy” of the rich countries. It will get much worse. The only answer is revolution, already boiling everywhere in street riots and confused “jihadism” but lacking the coherent Marxist leadership it needs.

The foul degeneracy of the capitalist warmongering order is underlined ever further by the shocking new further disclosures of CIA torture and the cover-up scandal of child abuse and even murder in Britain.

Great layers of even the complacent middle class are being sickened to their stomachs as astounding revelations pour out of the depths of the degeneracy and fascist foulness into which the entire Western “free world” has descended, (or rather is increasingly exposed to always have been).

Just as disgusting as the revelations themselves is the desperate dissembling nonsense from assorted liberals and Democrat politicians (and their echoes in the UK) that these monstrosities are all simply the action of some few “bad apples” or at most “an ‘understandable’ period of excess and wrongdoing now being corrected” as if the admissions are somehow a vindication of “democratic transparency”.

What gobshite!

Firstly most of the account is censored anyway (“redacted”).

Secondly even the full investigation can only touch on the full horrific barbarity of virtually non-stop blitzing and invasions since 1998 and Pentagon and CIA world interventions since 1945.

Thirdly for “diplomatic” reasons great sections of other Western imperialist participation are deleted (such as the UK’s).

Fourthly, even if were just a crime and not part of the fabric of world imperialist domination, nothing is going to be done about it, least of all the usual trumped-up “war crimes” prosecutions the West is so ready to shout loudly about and impose on assorted demonised victim states and rebellions against its rule (now being wound up once more around Sudan, North Korea eg). Perhaps one or two token minor figures will be sacrificed, if it cannot be avoided, but even that is unlikely.

Finally, it has not stopped at all, with Guantánamo etc still existing, and the warmongering barbarity of capitalism in full swing directly, by drone assassinations and terrorising, or by fascist proxies, throughout 8 years of the Barack Obama “step forwards for the world working class” black presidency, long proven as a giant extension of the cynical bourgeois “democracy” lie.

In other words this is not some aberrant exception but part of capitalism itself, as is proven almost daily as ever more incredible revelations pile on top of revelations of current and past depravity, fascist savagery and barbarism by the capitalist world dominating and exploitation system.

Not only do official reports and unofficial leaks make it clear that the vilest of CIA and Pentagon torture and brutalities now equal anything the German Nazis could manage (but with a modern “sophisticated” touch); but non-stop drone terror, and “kill them all” air blitzings and death squad massacres are casually imposed by the Empire throughout the Middle East and Africa.

Troop levels are slowly being increased again in Iraq and Afghanistan; NATO build-up around Russia is inexorable.

In Britain details are slowly emerging into the open of the foulest of Establishment homosexual child abuse and degeneracy, to the point even of perverted murders (as re-emerged with the death of Jeremy Thorpe, a scandal “discreetly” buried away during his lifetime along with much else); sinister and knowing cynical establishment cover-ups continue, via stitched up “inquiries” by their friends and overall long-term silence colluded in by the entire “political class”, Labour and Liberal as well as Tory(bar one or two breakaway mavericks) which have already involved even murder conspiracies.

Endless corruption, bribery and sleaze ever more obviously permeate the entire political superstructure; “big Brother” surveillance and police spying and provocateur infiltrations saturate even the mildest of pacifist or environmentalist protests, demonstrations, and political opposition; judicial savagery is ramped-up with long prison sentences for even thinking anti-state thoughts (alleged “terrorism”); prison brutality and “deaths in custody” persecution and anti-immigrant racist violence are revealed to be the norm.

Historical records (again heavily censored) court hearings and the occasionally principled bourgeois journalistic investigation (a rare animal) meanwhile detail past colonialist atrocities of utter gruesomeness and inhumanity from castrations and live roasting of prisoners in Kenya to the deliberate reinstatement of the Gestapo collaborators in traumatised post-war Greece in 1945 by British imperialism, to suppress and destroy the communist movement whose staggering partisan heroism had fought the Nazis to a standstill (a story bizarrely emerging in the bourgeois press recently after six decades of suppression and silence on the Greek Civil War).

The four-year anti-communist war which followed was one of utter brutality, firstly by the British and then the USA, with torture, summary execution, terrorising and new deadly weaponry being tried out such as napalm.

Simultaneously concentration camps and beheading of communist partisans were imposed by British colonialism on Malaysia.

It was the much-venerated Attlee post-war “left” Labour Government which put both through.

As recently as the 1960s (again sanctioned by Labour) an entire people was secretly forced out and made refugees to this day from the island of Diego Garcia by the British to make way for a giant American airbase, itself now one of the torture and rendition locations implicated in the CIA scandal.

And none of this was or is anything to with alleged “communist totalitarianism” or “terrible dictators” as the non-stop lies of capitalist propaganda, culture, education and media constantly, universally and continuously brainwash, but is the reality of the capitalist “freedom and democracy” itself – and always has been.

Capitalism is a system of total class dictatorship and an increasingly fascist one at that, hidden behind the pretences of democracy and the “rule of law”, and imposing open thug rule to whatever extent is needed, crudely and barbarically in dozens of stooge Third World regimes installed and supported by the West (via the CIA, but MI6 and French and German intelligence too, and others) – or hidden to various extents behind the lying fraud of “Parliamentary” or “presidential” “democracy” where it can be afforded, but still imposing police state repression on the working class even in the best of times of “reformist gains” and showing its true face when class war conflict erupts (as during the police militarised violence and repression of the great 1984 miners strike and now via in the ever-more heavily militarised police in the USA as it explodes with anger over police killing after killing.)

“Democracy” is the ruling class’s cleverest trick, hiding its true class domination behind the pretence of “having a say” but it is falling apart, leaving the ruling class imposing outright dictatorship which is more sharply expressed increasingly everywhere as the great capitalist epochal collapse unrolls into Depression disaster.

“Fascism” is not some over-used cliché word that “balanced” and “reasonable” opinion would not use, but is the truth about all capitalism and its sometimes hidden nature).

The smug petty bourgeois shallowness that “you can’t call it fascism yet” and that “raising the name of Hitler automatically invalidates the argument” is an opportunist evasion.

It is the product of completely wooden and complacent thinking, saturated in idiot illusions in “democracy” borne of revisionist philosophical shortcomings from Stalinist mis-assessments of imperialism dating all the way back the 1930s.

These have not only misled the working class for the entire post-war period but repeatedly led them onto the counter-revolutionary guns as with Indonesia’s horrific 1965 one million plus massacres of communist suspects and the CIA colluded and torture-trained Chile coup of 1973 to mention just two.

These liberal and fake-”left” opportunist evasions completely fail to draw the obvious revolutionary conclusions needed as these scandals are forced ever more into the open by accelerating crisis collapse and rising world rebellion.

What they never say despite their “Marxist” posturing and lip service to its ideas (always buried away in separate academic articles or in passing at the very end of different analyses), is that capitalism has to be completely overturned and the working class needs to take power, establishing the firmest of proletarian dictatorship to suppress this fascist minority ruling class and its inevitable counter-revolutionary plotting and subversions, so that the great majority can build socialism and develop genuine democracy (even if they pay lip service to the idea in various back page articles, isolated from any particular immediate events or upheavals).

Their continuing pursuit of “left pressure”, reforms and parliamentary elections (even by the “revolutionaries”), and diversionary and reactionary single-issue campaigns for feminism, black nationalism and “gay rights” keeps the working class away from any such understanding.

Worse, their capitulation to the “condemn terror” scapegoating and anti-Islam demonisation of imperialism plays directly into the warmongering plans of imperialism to escape its crisis collapse.

Nearly all of them are shown up even by the mystical anarchism of figures like Russell Brand who at least highlight the need for revolution if yet failing to understand the profound depths of the crisis and knowing nothing of the great historic achievements and understanding already won by 150 years of Marxist science, particularly in the titanic history of the Soviet Union.

The current “left” hysteria about organising for the next election “to unite to stop UKIP” and to “keep the Tories out” is a case in point.

UKIP is undeniably a repellent and backward petty nationalist movement, a “polite” version of past racist Little Englander Nazism like the BNP, and being deliberately fostered and popularised by the ruling class with money, ruling class connections and acres of uncritical or “jokey and blokey” favourable press and media attention (including that which is ostensibly critical).

It taps the most backward and narrow blinkered traditions of British Empire nationalist arrogance instilled into layers of the working class over two centuries of colonialist “superiority”, mingled with confused but quite genuine working class fears of job losses and wages cuts in the teeth of deliberately imported cheap labour competition and community destabilisation, often calculatedly concentrated by the ruling class in limited regions and areas to whip up maximum tensions.

The ruling class has been carefully grooming and elevating it with mass publicity to try and fill the vacuum left by the collapse of working class faith in any parliamentary “democracy” at all (expressed correctly in the common and contemptuous opinion that ‘they are all the same corrupt self-seeking rubbish’, and the increasing abstention from voting at all and more recently by Brand’s articulation.)

But to declare that this is “the fascist threat” which has to be “stopped at all costs” is utterly misleading, implying firstly that parliament can stop fascism, and secondly that “normal life” would somehow be better if only UKIP was blocked.

By corralling the working class back behind parliamentary elections?

Voting Labour (but only “left” candidates of course and “holding the nose”), is to put back the capitalist reserve team who run the same vile, corrupt, warmongering, blitzing torturing system and collude in and cover-up its foul degeneracies and stinking abuses, its sinister police state surveillance and provocations, its pocket-lining corruption and monopoly exploitation.

But Labour plays the “anti-immigration” dog-whistle racism card just as much as UKIP (and the Tories too).

This is the party that initiated and carried through the Iraq war in one of the greatest Goebbels confidence tricks of all history, as well as wreaking over a decade of slaughter and repression on the Afghan people, backing the nazi-NATO destruction of Libya.

Its leading figures are up to their necks in British involvement in Guantánamo, Iraqi detention centres, and torture, unchallenged by even the “left” mavericks like “principled Dennis Skinner” etc who help prop up its continued existence.

The Stalinist revisionists like Lalkar who make much of the “need to break with Labour” VIA shoot-into-a-barrel polemics with the moribund Morning Star Communist Party of Britain and similar elements, are no better either; for all their huffing and puffing they still call for votes for “left” candidates and sustain the democracy illusion.

Pretending there can be “real democracy this time” because this time we will have “real socialist representatives” is just to rebuild illusions in the greatest capitalist confidence trick of all time.

One of the great historic achievements of the working class lies in its slow, ponderous, decades-long but deep running learning of the lessons that capitalist “democracy” and “freedom” and “steady change for the better” are an enormous confidence trick which has been pulling the wool over their eyes for the last 150 years.

There is only one purpose any revolutionary could have in participating in this racket – to use the mechanism of the bourgeois elections which capitalism is forced to offer to maintain the pretence, as a platform to denounce the parliamentary game for the lie it is and to explain the need for revolution.

All this is becoming ever more urgent as the gigantic crisis of the capitalist system unravels.

It is not “self-correcting democracy” which has forced the latest (limited) revelations to the surface but the collapse of its system into total bankruptcy, the associated intensification of the rising world rebellion and middle-class despair and disillusionment, particularly as it watches and feels the collapse in ruling class confidence in the world; the petty bourgeois awe of the ruling class is being eaten away as the entire system flounders, unable to impose its exploitation on the world as it has for two centuries despite non-stop “shock and awe”.

The most disastrous collapse of an entire global economic order has only just begun, the greatest catastrophic failure and breakdown of society in 800 years of capitalist history, or in fact an entire epoch of class rule civilisation.

Even greater upheavals are to come once the smoke-and-mirrors illusion of “economic recovery” implodes again, as it must once the massive inflationary impact of Mickey Mouse Quantitative Easing money printing works its way fully through the complex world economic system, its total lack of all value further diluting and contaminating the international credit system, and bringing complete failure of the world trading currency, the dollar, ever closer.

It could be about to implode at any moment as the disastrous oil price collapse indicates and bank and Stock Exchange failures domino their way through the world economic system again, Bourgeois press agitation is non-stop if totally confused:

The price of oil continued its precipitous fall on Friday,hitting five-and-a-half-year lows after the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted demand next year would be lower than expected.

Benchmark Brent crude has dropped 47% since June and fell to just over $61 a barrel as the IEA warned of the threat of global social instability and the potential for financial defaults in big producer countries such as Venezuela and Russia.

The oil price has plummeted in response to a massive buildup of shale-derived oil in the US, reduced fears of fighting in Iraq disrupting supplies, and slower growth in demand as the world economy falters.

A decision by the Opec two weeks ago to keep its production at existing levels has been taken as a signal by traders and shippers that the producers’ cartel is happy to see prices fall for the forseeable future.

The IEA said in its December monthly oil report that it was cutting its 2015 demand growth forecast by 230,000 barrels a day to 900,000, partly because of falling output in former Soviet countries.

It believed surging US oil supply would push total non-Opec output to a record increase, averaged over the year, of 1.9m barrels a day for 2014, but predicted “the pace is expected to slow to 1.3m barrels a day for next year.”

It also warned: “The resulting downward price pressure would raise the risk of social instability or financial difficulties if producers found it difficult to pay back debt.”

The Paris-based IEA singled out Russia and Venezuela as potential flashpoints for trouble and the warning came as the rouble, which has lost 40% in value against the dollar so far this year, hit a fresh record low. One dollar now buys more than 57 roubles, compared with 35 in the summer.

But while the oil-producing countries face lost revenues and budget shortfalls, lower energy prices are expected to have a beneficial impact on the world economy.

Many countries, particularly in Asia, are desperately dependent on foreign oil and gas imports, so cheaper prices should cut inflation and give impetus to manufacturing output and consumer spending.

Analysts at investment bank ING said: “The recent fall in oil prices may not be sustained but, in the meantime, it provides a very welcome boost to real incomes for most major economies. In time, low oil prices themselves should be their own undoing, as supply withers, although politics will remain a further layer of uncertainty.”

Hans van Cleef, senior energy economist at ABN Amro in Amsterdam, said: “[Oil] is following the trend lower. The market has reacted strongly to the Opec forecast cut, and it is focusing only on the negative.” Lower energy prices will cause havoc in the UK North Sea, where companies such as BP and Shell are cutting jobs at a time when exploration levels have already dropped to very low levels.

The average UK price of petrol has now dropped below £1.20 a litre and is at its lowest level since December 2010, according to government figures.

Airlines have said they expect air fares to fall next year if the lower prices continue, but have warned that there are unlikely to be immediate reductions because fuel is bought a long time in advance of use.

There are strong signs in the US that lower energy prices are having a big effect on consumer spending with store and restaurant sales rising by 5% in November against the same month the previous year.

One reason for lower prices is the weak state of the global economy, and no one can predict with accuracy whether oil prices will stay at the current levels or fall further.

Tom Kloza, co-founder of the US-based Oil Price Information Service, has warned that the world could be heading for $45 per barrel oil, although he maintained that this kind of price was not sustainable longterm.

US shale production and “reduced fears of fighting in Iraq” may be minor factors of these latest meltdowns, but it is the total slump in world production which is the key problem, exactly the overproduction crisis which Karl Marx long ago pinned down as the central and unavoidable contradiction of production for private profit (see joining box and three volumes of Capital, and the Communist Manifesto, and multiple other writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin).

This petty bourgeois shallowness is still hampered by the glib nonsense poured out by the fake-“lefts” of all shades who since the blitzing of Serbia have been pompously declaring that the world warmongering crisis is “all about oil”.

Oil is a factor but the problem now is that nobody wants it or rather that nobody can make a profit selling it.

As for an oil price fall being “good for the world economy”, the phrase “clutching at straws” springs to mind. There may be some temporary effect but the picture is one of international currency war and trade war disaster as more capitalist press fears spells out:

I don’t want to put a dampener on the festive cheer, but here are five reasons to think things are not quite the unadulterated picture of harmony and advancement many stock market pundits would have you believe.

The first reason to worry is the curiously juxtaposed state of asset prices, with generally buoyant equities but falling sovereign bond yields and commodity prices. They cannot both be right. High equity prices are – or at least, should be – indicative of investor confidence and optimism. Low bond yields and falling commodity prices point to the very reverse; they are basically a sign of emerging deflationary pressures and a slowing economy. If demand was really about to roar away, both would be rising along with equities, not falling. T

There’s good reason – pumped up by central bank money printing, abundant cash is desperate for fast vanishing yield, and is chasing it accordingly...If it is yield you are after, sovereign debt markets are again exceptionally poor value, barely offering a real rate of return at all. Commodities were the next port of call, but that game too seems to be up.

The much trumpeted commodities super-cycle has taken a giant lurch down, leaving hundreds of billions of dollars in debt... stranded by the receding tide.

...equities and property have become the asset classes of last resort. Any damage done to stock markets by the collapse in oil and mining shares has been more than made up for by the boom in pharmaceutical and technology stocks. Abundant buybacks and gushing dividends from companies that cannot think of a productive use for the money have fed the frenzy.

After 10 years of going nowhere, pharma is all of a sudden the sector of choice, in eager anticipation of thousands of miracle cures that may never come.

In their oblivious disregard for the uncertain world around them, stock markets look today very much as they did in 2000 and 2007. We had a slight premonition of what’s to come in the October mini-crash.

Saecond...our old friend Europe, the problem economy that refuses to go away. The collapse in the oil price should be a boon, and indeed would be were it not for the fact that it gives the European Central Bank yet another excuse for doing nothing. Markets are promised jam tomorrow because that’s all that can be delivered; a tomorrow that never comes....Since there is no practical likelihood of federalisation, or even appetite for it, the eurozone is condemned to a kind of locked-in syndrome of helplessness. Eventually, there will have to be a massive, European-wide debt restructuring if the euro is to survive. Such an endgame is years, if not decades, away.

Political uncertainties provide a third anxiety.Populist parties such as the Front National in France, Podemos in Spain, Ukip in England and the Scottish National Party upset the established political order. Stable, pro-business policies become hard to impossible to sustain. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Fourth worry is an increasingly turbulent international situation, made worse in some of the world’s major flashpoints by declining oil prices. Such risks are always with us, but are greater today than markets like to believe.

Finally, overarching all these concerns, is the biggest of the lot – that few of the underlying problems highlighted by the financial crisis have yet been convincingly addressed. If anything, they’ve got even worse.

Since 2007, the ratio of non-financial sector debt to GDP among G20 countries has risen by more than a fifth. This has helped prop up demand, but it has led to new financial booms which mask fundamental weaknesses and loss of productive potential in many advanced economies. There is an evident disconnect between buoyant financial markets on the one hand and underlying economic realities on the other...Hang onto your hats. Conditions will be getting decidedly ugly again in the new year.

 

Friday, the FTSE 100 [fell] its worst in more than three years. Since Monday, £112bn has been wiped off the value of Britain’s leading companies.

Investors headed for the exits amid growing fears about the Chinese economy, the tumbling price of oil, and the prospect of another eurozone crisis prompted by political uncertainty in Greece.

The FTSE 100 finished at 6300.63 on Friday, its lowest level since 20 October.

It was the biggest weekly decline in percentage terms since August 2011, when recession fears and worries about America’s debts stalked the markets.

In Europe, Germany’s Dax fell 5% and the Eurofirst 300 lost 5.9% over the week. Wall Street was down more than 200 points, or 1.1% on the day, by the time the London market closed on Friday, despite better than expected US consumer confidence figures for December.

The UK has been affected more than other markets because of its bias towards commodity companies, which have been hit hard by the fall in oil. Brent crude dropped 3% to just over $61 on Friday, a five-and-a-half-year low. As recently as June, the oil price had climbed as high as $155, but fears of a global slowdown hitting demand has seen a slump in the price. In its latest monthly report, published on Friday, the International Energy Authority, the world energy watchdog, cut its forecast for demand growth in 2015 by 230,000 barrels per day to 900,000. This was the fourth time in five months it had lowered its expectations and followed a similar prediction from oil cartel Opec earlier in the week.

This latest market rout followed a decision on Monday by Greece’s prime minister, Antonis Samaras, to call a snap presidential election for next week. If three rounds of voting in the Greek parliament, the last on 29 December, fail to back the ruling coalition’s candidate, Stavros Dimas, this could trigger a general election. Investors fear that the far-left Syriza party, already ahead in the polls, could win that vote and attempt to negotiate a new debt write-off with European lenders. If key players such as Germany fail to agree, the prospect of a breakup of the eurozone is again on the horizon.

...On Friday, Syriza’s parliamentary spokesman, Panaghiotis Lafazanis, said if it assumed office, the party would not only cancel the bailout memorandum signed by Athens and its creditors, but ensure that the troika of lenders leaves Greece.

The Athens stock market, which fell almost 13% on Tuesday after the poll announcement, lost 20% over the course of the week.

A host of poor economic news from around the globe added to the gloomy mood. After weak Chinese import numbers earlier in the week, China reported a worse than expected 7.2% rise in industrial production in November, down from 7.7% the previous month, which fuelled fears of a slowdown in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

In the UK, there was an unexpected 2.2% drop in construction output in October, compared with forecasts of a 0.7% increase and a rise of 1.8% in September.

Russia was also in the spotlight, for the wrong reasons. The rouble hit new lows – down 1.7% at almost 58 to the dollar – as the twin effects of western sanctions over Ukraine and the falling oil price raised fears about the outlook for Russia’s economy, with a 1% hike in interest rates to 10.5% and central bank intervention failing to halt the slide.

Markets have been supported for many months by the extraordinary stimulus measures introduced by central banks aimed at stimulating the flagging global economy. But the US has now finished its bond-buying programme and at next week’s Federal Reserve meeting, analysts will be seeking clues as to when the US central bank plans to raise interest rates.

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi wants to introduce quantitative easing but faces resistance from within the bank’s board, notably from Germany.

 

Catastrophic breakdown will shortly resume and on a scale ten times worse than the pants-wetting “global financial crisis” six years ago, made far deeper for having been deferred.

The already agonising “austerity” (a lying hoodwinking weasel word for Slump speed-up) imposed on the working class will be multiplied a hundred times over in penury, unemployment and workhouse cuts and social savagery.

The panic-stricken Tory ruling class know this all too well as the Chancellor George Osborne’s recent bizarre outburst against the tame Establishment BBC reflected, accusing it of “exaggerating the impact of cuts” after his Autumn Statement budget.

Of course it was completely the other way, with all the petty bourgeois media commentators and “think tanks” if anything playing down just how desperately serious is the crisis now unravelling.

So far the ruling class has not imposed anything like the scale of exploitation savagery it knows it must, and despite much talk of belt tightening and discipline and some Victorian workhouse measures viciously penalising the poorest, the Tory government has copped out completely, boosting the economy again half way through its office with yet more credit for a housing bubble etc.

The desperate absurd flannel about “upturns and new spending plans” which the Tories hyped up to try and cover over the “return to the 1930s” reality of the much greater cuts they have no choice but to impose (if they are not to be wiped out by world trade war) is a sign of ruling class fearfulness of working class rebelliousness.

Lashing out at the tame BBC reveals how desperate the ruling class is to avoid the implications being spelt out in any form at all.

They are clear that a seething anger lies just beneath the surface, as the riots two years ago gave a tiny taste of, and want at all costs to keep it headed off and confused.

They are aided by the fake-“left” - from intellectuals, “official trade unionists” “left” Labourites to the assorted Trots and revisionists, none of whom either grasp nor spell the profound gut-wrenching depth of the crisis, nor its implications and effects in massive and above all unstoppable fascist worldwide turmoil imposed by Washington and its acolytes.

Least of all do the “lefts” explain that non-stop worldwide war blitzkrieg and chaos is completely driven by this collapse as the international ruling class, dominated by top-dog US imperialism, squirms and writhes to distract and avoid its responsibility for the chaos and world economic breakdown.

The strategy of permanent world warmongering was set going by the neocon dominance of US power a decade and a half ago, knowing the slump disaster it was facing,

Imperialist “shock and awe” aimed to distract attention from its epochal breakdown, to suppress already rising Third World hostility to slave-level exploitation (as the world’s masses became drawn into capitalist production everywhere and thereby made more aware of their own degradation, exploitation and humiliation) and to face down inevitable challenges from other imperialist powers as the cutthroat trade war crisis threatens all of them and their very survival.

Washington is deliberately dragging the world into a complete Armageddon of blitzkrieging devastation and destruction and ready to use the foulest and most depraved barbarities to do it.

The need for an ending to this system has never been clearer.

It is achievable only by the revolutionary overturn of an entire class based order of society which is out of time, and incapable of taking mankind forwards .

But for all their decades of “revolutionary” and “Marxist” posturing, the lefts still say noting about it in practice.

The justify their weaselly election bandwagonning by saying the working class is “not ready” to hear about revolution.

It is a staggering exposure of the complete bankruptcy of all of the “left” groups.

In what way is the working class “not ready” to start building revolutionary understanding? World events prove there is a gaping void.

Riots have already been seen in London and rebelliousness and ferment are exploding across the world.

In Mexico the streets are filled with protest, initially about the foul murder of 43 leftist students but now incorporating a complete spectrum of discontent; in the Ukraine’s east a bitter working class war, already costing thousands of innocent lives, is being waged against the Nazi death gangs from Kiev; in Africa Burkino Faso has just seen spontaneous rebellion bring down its Western stooge president after 25 years, another corrupt stooge himself installed by fascist coup against the murdered socialist Thomas Sankara.

Mali smoulders with “jihadist” anti-Western turmoil, now suppressed by brutal French troop interventions, and the stinking corruption of “democratic” Nigeria is mess of Islamic insurgency and anti-Western hatred by the Boko Haram in the north-east and rebel militias in the oil-poisoned delta regions.

Somalia’s islamist Al-Shabaab leads a fight against corrupt Western stoogery in Kenya and its military incursions and recently revealed death squad repression into Somalia by covert Kenyan forces (trained by the British).

The Central African Republic sees continuing bitter fighting against the French-imperialist backed re-instated stooge government and its atrocities, after French intervention last year to overturn a rebel movement.

Seething hatreds and discontent fester beneath the surface in Egypt against the Western funded and supported Sisi coup and its cold-blooded street massacres of thousands, mass arrests and trials sentencing hundreds to death at a time, and with another 40 000 now imprisoned for “political” crimes (a coup supported by the fake-“lefts” of all shades including with the astonishing declaration from the Lalkar Stalinist revisionists that it was “taking the people’s revolution forwards”. (Did that include the just declared release without punishment of the criminal gangster dictator Hosni Mubarak carried through by the Sisi government?????)

Revolt and suicide attacks proliferate through the Middle East, first around the long struggle of the Palestinians against the monstrous Nazi dispossession of their lands by the Jewish occupation and then across a confusion and mess of civil war destruction and chaos, fostered and initiated by Zionism and the West but continuously coming back to anti-US anti-Western hatreds. Yemen is on fire with anti-imperialist jihadism and uprising is fermenting in Bahrain, and the Gulf, and potentially into the heart of primitively feudal Saudi Arabia.

Thailand is equally festering, its people suppressed by bloody military coups four years ago and again this spring.

Mass left sentiment has been headed off by centrism for the moment in Spain but is as explosive as the riots and demonstrations erupting once more in the Athens capital of bankrupted Greece; similar left moves see the old East German revisionists elected for the first time to regional government in Thuringia, if only in watered down class-collaborating form of a parliamentary Die Linke, in itself part of the fake-“left” problem but tapping a surge of nostalgia for the old workers state.

Similar nostalgia for communism is sweeping Bosnia and Hungary, despite Western efforts to bolster fascist Jobbick racism.

Most dramatically of all, huge demonstrations, riots, and political ferment has broken out across multiple cities of the United States, the richest and most powerful country on the planet, with an incredible street debate going non-stop for a month or more over racism and police repression.

Confused, contradictory and often self-defeating as these different seemingly piecemeal struggles are, with their assorted Great Russian nationalist, Stalin-nostalgia, Islamic sectarian, local bourgeois nationalist and black nationalist flavourings, they represent a common pattern of upheaval and revolt driven by the historic bankruptcy of the production for private profit system now riddled with unsolvable contradiction and rotten ripe for overthrow.

The planet can no longer tolerate the endless suffering, imposed ignorance, philistine dumbing-down, antagonism and conflict at all levels of society, which has always been the reality for 80% of the world’s population (including millions in desperate poverty in “rich” Europe, Japan, and America) and which is now being imposed on the remainder too, whatever complacent illusions they have of being “middle class” or “different” because they live in “democracy and freedom”.

All these struggles need urgently to find a coherent scientific world view around which they could coalesce.

It is Marxist Leninist science that is needed, taking on and sorting out all the past confusions and mistakes, and seeing the widest possible view of unrolling current struggles as all reflecting the agonised hatred and hostility of a world population that can no longer bear or accept the grotesque tyranny imposed on it by capitalist exploitation.

But the “left” avoids drawing out the common patterns in all this, keeping all these struggle separated in their analyses, and finding a dozen ways to capitulate to Western warmongering provocations and confusion as they have done since 9/11, denouncing “terrorism” and “jihadism” and either “condemning” it, or declaring it to be “all setup by the CIA”.

Elaborate conspiracy theories proliferate, and all with one purpose, to get these pretenders off the hook of being painted as “extremists” themselves, making sure that when it comes to the sharpest class war issues they signal their deep down compliance with the existing order whatever the posing.

So in common they all line up with imperialism to paint the extraordinary explosion of ruthless anti-Westernism in the Islamic State as some mystical “pure evil”, and most of the other “jihadism” so-called too, which continues to grow everywhere.

Their horrified response is a complete reflection of middle class squeamishness and opportunism, dismayed by the crude destructiveness and chaos of the breakdown of capitalist rule and revealing their own fears of the complete historic collapse which is unfolding in a revolutionary fragmentation and implosion of all past certainties and relationships.

Their “revolutions” have to be done “properly” by protest and step-by-step improvements whether it be with the alleged steady progress of ostensibly anti-imperialist bourgeois nationalist regimes like Syria, deemed “progressive” by ossified Stalinism, or by the “street fight for democracy” stunts swallowed by the Trots, who go along with anything that is set up by capitalism if it taps their own anti-Soviet and anti-discipline petty bourgeois individualism.

In other words these “revolutions” are just reformism; these “lefts” have no grasp of the inevitable epochal disintegration which capitalism is bringing the world too.

Leninism does not “support” the chaos as such either; to the contrary it declares that the firmest possible discipline and control is needed, achievable only by a coherent struggle of the working class under an agreed and worked out programme and strategy, which can only emerge from a thoroughly scientific world perspective, battled for and developed constantly by open polemical struggle in front of the working class.

But Leninism cannot either denounce the emerging fight against capitalism – just the opposite it recognises that this giant turmoil is revolution.

Of course there are conspiracies and interference and subversion by capitalism spreads octopus tentacles everywhere; and there has undoubtedly been all kinds of Western intelligence manipulation of local sectarian differences and elements, already well-known from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan and in the deadly death squad Sunni-Shia divisions in Iraq’s civil war.

But the notion that this is all caused by sinister puppet masters in Langley is to completely misrepresent the events unfolding in the world and to give crisis-ridden imperialism a coherence and omniscience it not only had never possessed but is losing more and more each day.

The “lefts” all get into a complete tangle trying to work out who they should “support” because of their failure to see other than in straight lines and step by step “improvement”, instead of understanding that imperialism is the problem and defeat for its skulduggery and warmongering is the key question to focus on.

Most of all they get in the way of building a clear revolutionary perspective, the urgent need.

 

 

Don Hoskins

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