Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.V.I.Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
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No 1321 2nd October 2007                                                                                                                            25p
Next sales meeting Midlands – 8th December

West uses artificial “democracy” stunt laced with sanctimonious hypocritical “freedom” lies to wind up hatred against yet another potential “axis of evil” victim for warmongering aggression and anti-communist propaganda.  Look out China too – potential next victim of a repeat Tiananmen provocation in time to disrupt the world-impressing Beijing Olympics – just as the first followed earlier dress-rehearsal in Myanmar (Burma). But bourgeois “democracy” no longer inspires anyone except die-hard petty bourgeois. Key purpose of the CIA trickery is to divert attention from the rapidly deepening economic crisis of capitalism recently confirmed by subprime mortgage credit black hole panic.  Marxist Leninism predicted all this. Only answer is revolutionary overturn of capitalism

Bang on cue, as yet another great lurch of the unsolvable capitalist economic crisis is brushed under the carpet by the spin and lies of the ruling class (and its repellent New Labour “spin” frontmen), comes another of its routine intelligence agency organised “democratic” protest stunts – this time led in Burma by the backward feudal priesthood and the longtime Western-sponsored “democracy” counter-revolutionary movement around middle class British-educated (and how!) socialite Aung San Suu Kyi.
Burma has been a long-running thorn in the side of imperialism for its refusal to open up completely to the western investment and exploitation that grinds tens of millions into the dirt throughout South and South-East Asia, and the rest of the Third World from Africa to South America.
Its history of “socialist orientated” nationalist military rule and defiance of total US and other imperialist diktat may not be even close to Marxism but it has been sufficient to draw constant festering hatred from the West, particularly from Britain which is still smarting, decades on, that its colonial domination was forced out post World War Two, and the US Empire, resentful of any part of the world that does not capitulate totally to its dollar domination.
Myanmar as it is correctly called (the continuing use of “Burma” being yet another sign of the racist contempt and arrogance of the West against “little brown people” who dare defy it) has been a constant target therefore for the fraudulent noise about “democracy” that the West reserves for “upstarts” painted as “the axis of evil”, even as it keeps total silence on the dozens of western supported stooge gangsters, dictators and fascist regimes around the planet from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, from Colombia to Guatemala.
And now it proves a suitable case for a giant feint in the West (aided and abetted by the petty bourgeois hand-wringing lies of the fake-”lefts” and liberals who always line up with imperialism when a sharp moment arises) all aimed at heading working class attention away once again from any thoughts of socialism, (and the necessary firm dictatorship of the proletariat needed to achieve it), which the recent dramatic evidence of the bankruptcy of the entire capitalist system and the depth of its unstoppable slump crisis unfolding (Northern Rock collapse, pending bank failures, subprime credit ‘black hole’ etc etc) will have been reviving.
Just as in the Ukraine, Serbia, Tibet, Byelorussia, and plenty more (going all the way to Tian an Men and the programmed and western funded “Solidarnosc” and other joke petty bourgeois reactionary “people’s movements” in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, and in general the non-stop organised subversion of anti-imperialism by the Western intelligence agencies throughout the 20th century), the supposed “peoples” movement in Rangoon had all the hallmarks of carefully organised CIA “democracy” fraud stunts – save only this time there was no need to organise the usual “colour” public relations symbolism for the carefully prompted “demonstrators”, since the reactionary Buddhist feudalist monks are wrapped in orange anyway.
The compliant western press lie machine obliged anyway, to call it the “saffron revolution” – which was nice.
But it did not help this enormous counter-revolutionary stunt go much further.
Faced with such a massive and open challenge to its authority the 40 year old anti-imperialist regime stood solid enough, and the only surprise is that it did not crack down harder than it has against such an overt challenge to its authority, and the calls for “regime change” fed in from Washington and London, totally against all international legality and notions of sovereignty.
The firmness it has shown and understanding of the West’s manipulative hand in all this, despite some possible wobbles in what is by no means clear Leninist understanding by the “generals”, has already shattered the supposed “determination” and “will of the people” for “freedom and democracy”, exposing it for the shallow petty bourgeois hysteria it was as the “rebellion” has fizzled out again.
All demands for bourgeois “democracy” are equally hollow and without substance, most of all in the current historical and  political period when even the richest and most entrenched “democracy” rackets on the planet, in the major imperialist countries, are being torn up in favour of increasing surveillance, arbitrary arrest, stripping of human and legal rights, punishments, torture and police state crackdown – in other words when the bourgeoisie is in such desperate straits that it is tearing up its own best weapon (the illusion of democracy) to turn again to outright open dictatorship in order to force through the warmongering violence it needs to “escape” (it falsely believes) oncoming crisis disaster.
There has not been a worker to be seen among the marchers in any of the western film footage, all carefully edited to inflate the significance of the events and sustain some kind of illusion in the pumped-up Western “diplomats report that” numbers, supposedly out on the street.
These are deluded middle class youth and dissident sour petty bourgeois – fall guys and sacrificial victims for Western manipulation.
The West has managed to provoke sufficient state response violence (after two weeks of holding back) via the threatened violence by the demonstrators, securing itself a few videos of supposed “innocent” people being killed or beaten, to give some core to its lurid and utterly unsubstantiated allegations of “much greater numbers killed” from Gordon Brown etc, as propaganda to smear the regime with non-stop “brutality” allegations for the next years (numbers which will be quietly revised downwards in following weeks just as the lurid “1000s” killed in Romania, China, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc etc are always revealed to be total fabrication months later, in small news stories tucked away on little read foreign pages, but which will be left outstanding as “true” in the public mind).
It all helps provide more material for constant anti-communist and anti-”upstart” confusion mongering in general; for feeding, by proxy the growing hate campaign against the staggeringly successful Chinese workers state which has links with Burma, and for stepping up the warmongering atmosphere that imperialism urgently needs to keep the world war chaos going, which it began in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan but which has ended in disastrous setback. 
There could be a discussion whether the Myanmar regime could have avoided any bloodshed at all by moving slightly earlier, and with more open political clarity, against the total Goebbels provocation.
But the real point is that it was the West’s intention for weeks to precipitate violence by the beleaguered government, (as its “Orange revolution” of fascist minded petty bourgeois elements in the Ukraine was eventually revealed to be openly threatening e.g. and as the Tian an Men reactionary students were aiming to do in 1989 – see following pages) by openly calling for “revolution” and “overturn” and “displacement” of the government, fed by covert and overt western intervention Goebbels lies (not least the non-stop beamed in BBC World Service propaganda exaggerations of “tens of thousands demonstrating” and the supposed “peaceful” marching of the Buddhist priesthood and the “spontaneous support of the people”).
The constant and deliberately repetitive refrain of the western press reporting “the peaceful marchers” this and the “non-violent demonstration” that, are a complete conscious Goebbels lie.
To begin with everyone knows that if the Burmese government was toppled in this way there would have followed the most barbaric orgy of bloodletting and vengeance, exactly as the counter-revolution has unleashed time after time when it has got the upper hand, from the indiscriminate and inhuman slaughter of tens of thousands of workers after the collapse of the original Paris Commune in 1871, to the fascism of the 1930s, the barbarism of the Francoites at the end of the Spanish Civil war, the horrors imposed on the Greeks in the 1945-49 civil war by British backed fascist monarchists, the near total destruction of North Korea and Vietnam, the one million communists killed in Java and the Indonesia islands in 1965 by Suharto’s coup and the atrocities, and death squad massacres, torture and slaughter mayhem which is routine in CIA saturated South America, from Pinochet’s Chile to Rios Mont’s Guatemala and El Salvador etc etc.
The fascist violence would be like that which started to appear among the gilded youth “pro-democracy” (meaning pro-imperialism) demonstrators and provocateurs in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, where there was a fevered determination to create the violence (“there must be blood” as one self-appointed student leader demanded) which eventually erupted beginning with lynchings and attacks on the workers state forces, by the demonstrators.
It was contained, not by the Goebbels lie fantasies of some utterly non-existent Tian an Men “massacre” (never photographed or filmed despite the two month long presence of the worlds’ media in Beijing at the time – because it never happened) but by the firmness of the state forces around the square, forced to skirmish with the more frenzied of the demonstrators and causing a loss of a few hundred lives only, about half of those the army and police.
The Myanmar regime is by no means a workers state in the way that China remains – despite its huge revisionist shortcomings – but its anti-imperialist nationalist stance still draws Western venom.
It also serves as a stalking horse and dress rehearsal ground for potential attacks on China just as the 1989 Tiananmen incidents followed months after the last Rangoon “democracy” stunt” the West created in 1988.
It is no mistake that the bourgeois reactionaries wheeled out to pontificate unchallenged on the news programmes should have demanded “action against China” on the tenuous grounds that “China has influence” with Burma.
“China can be influenced because it is fearful that its Olympic Games will not go well” opined one slimy LibDem lord something-or-other on the Today programme, meaning the exact opposite; that the West is fearful China’s 2008 Olympics will go only too well, demonstrating the enormous progress that this still planned economy (albeit using capitalist economics) has made.
Minds are working overtime in the West to try and disrupt it, preferably with yet another major “democracy stunt”.  
And if possible stimulating “violence” to put the wind up the entire liberal and pacifist fake-“left”.
There was plenty of that going on in Myanmar.
 Nothing was “peaceful” and “non-violent” about the carefully synchronised marches of the Buddhist reactionaries in Rangoon or the hysterical anarcho-”democratic” students and middle class dissident elements which made up the sum total of the flash-in-the-pan “rebellion”. 
First came the “self-sacrifice” martyrdom histrionics of the younger petty bourgeois elements fired up by beamed in incitements and encouragement of the western news agencies, “free radio this” and “Voice of Freedom” that, planted mobile phone call messages, and the Internet etc, rushing around inciting frenzy. 
But behind that was the already sinister pushing of the Buddhist monks who had already revealed their violent intentions three weeks previously, as this heavily biased bourgeois press report shows from 7th September:
Hundreds of Buddhist monks in Burma held government officials hostage for more than five hours yesterday in a further escalation of the protests against the military regime’s crippling increase in fuel prices two weeks ago.
Angry young monks surrounded the largest monastery in the provincial town Pakokku, trapping about 20 officials inside after they apparently came to apologise for soldiers firing shots to break up a demonstration the previous day.
The tense stand-off was eventually ended after a senior abbot intervened to secure the hostages’ freedom, but not before the angry monks had burned four of the officials’ cars.
Protests across the country have continued almost daily since the price of petrol and diesel was almost doubled, and that of cooking gas increased five-fold without warning, worsening the economic hardship already endured by most Burmese.
The arrests of 13 leaders of the 88 Generation Student Group and more than 100 others, and the beatings of demonstrators by pro-junta militia who have been mobilised on the streets of the commercial capital, Rangoon, has one little to dampen the mood of anger.
The involvement of the monks in the latest protests touches a chord with many in devoutly Buddhist Burma. Rumours sweeping the country that a number of monks were injured in Wednesday’s protests provoked widespread outrage.

“Rumours” were sweeping the country because they were constantly beamed in by the west of course, as the BBC, CNN etc boasted, all coordinated to propel this movement forwards with notions of  “toppling the government”.
The “liberal” western press lie machine and foul slimy hypocrisy of the Western political establishment will naturally continue full steam into mock “outrage” and sanctimonious concern now over the shootings they have managed to provoke from the regime in Rangoon, even as they continue the indiscriminate blitzings (directly or indirectly caused by occupation) of ten times that number of civilians and innocent bystanders every day in the totally illegal and lying Iraq war and Afghanistan; as the monstrous siege blitzing genocidal imprisonment of the Palestinians in Gaza not only continues but is stepped by the fascist Zionist occupation and its endless genocidal attacks and  repression.
Perhaps the sickest expression of the sheer hypocrisy of the vomit-inducing western media lie machine is the way that they all reported from “next door Thailand” because of the “military regime” in Burma. But Thailand had a military coup last summer, and is also a “military regime” with “no democracy”. 
But Thailand’s coup was a pro-western one, supporting a monstrously backward feudal monarchy, and so not a word is breathed.
The BBC even had the temerity to put out this apologia of a story this week, perhaps by the same Bangkok based correspondent reporting “Burma” and breathlessly discussing with Karen rebels in the mountains the ongoing revolt on the border!! Note the completely neutral, if not sympathetic tone, with none of the “sclerotic generals” or “savage crackdown” terminology etc. It is a “military council” not a “junta”, it has “colleagues”, not henchmen, generals are not “ousted by plotting and bitter infighting” they “step down”:  
Thai coup general quits position
The general who has headed the military council which has effectively run Thailand since a bloodless coup last year has stepped down from his post.
Gen Sonthi Boonyaratglin, who helped depose former PM Thaksin Shinawatra last September, resigned as head of the Council for National Security.
Defence officials and army colleagues said Gen Sonthi was likely to be offered a cabinet position.
The general is said to be close to the revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Bloodless! Only because the Thais live in fear of the bloodletting that was imposed in previous coups (several) when demonstrators have swung from the lampposts.
The Myanmar issue is nothing to do with “military rule” and everything to do with the class character of the regime in place there just as in any country.
Its firm nationalist anti-imperialist control is simply not compliant enough with western imperialist diktat and tyrannical corporate exploitation.
Pakistan is one of the most brutal oppressive torturing exploitation regimes on the planet, sitting not a million miles from Myanmar (just the other side of India) but not a word has been heard about its monstrous coup dictatorship and constant torturing brutality and suppression of revolt (including the disgusting Red Mosque massacre) during the Burmese “outrage” from any of the “deeply concerned” politicians of the West, because it is on their side in the increasingly stepped-up hysteria of the insane “war on terror”.  
And that is the point.
Endless examples can be found of the monstrous hypocrisy of the West, its arrogant assumptions of interference in other people’s countries (when it suits their warmongering or anti-communist or neo-colonialist purposes). 
But to highlight them is not to moan about the dishonesty of “politicians” or the “double-standards” they have, though all of that is true.
It is to make an assessment of what is happening in somewhere like Myanmar by seeing it in a complete and total perspective of world events.
The point of a stunt like the Rangoon demonstrations (carefully incited and coordinated by western interference) is to mislead the working class once again with horror stories of supposed “military crackdowns” and lurid, made up or grossly exaggerated stories of supposed atrocities, to present the endless lie (by implication even with Myanmar) that communism or resistance to imperialism does not work.
Just as with every other provocation from the plastic and artificial “Movement for Democratic Change” in Zimbabwe to the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine, still squabbling over the petty bourgeois carpet-bagging spoils after the fixed election this weekend, the petty bourgeois liberals and fake-“left” are completely taken in, swallowing every lie and regurgitating it in “theoretical ‘left’” form, to back up the imperialist campaign. They switch from supposed “left” criticism and condemnation of Gordon Brown and warmonger George Bush one second, to complete support for them the next over the latest shallow stunt and demonisation, without a pause or hesitation.
The petty bourgeois wants to be fooled by these lies because of its deep down hatred of all workers’ state authority. 
Its fearful and nervous class instincts have a deep loathing of all workers’ discipline which is why they constantly harp on about the “awful Stasi” or “secret police informer ‘finks’” in the workers states etc. and respond to every western stunt about “crackdowns” and military rule, and “political prisoners”.
But it is entirely natural that once the working class takes power it should want to protect its newly established majority class authority with the greatest vigilance, mobilising the entire community to be alert for sour minority counter-revolutionary and restorationist influence and of course reporting suspicious activity to the KGB, or Cuban state forces etc which are the specialised arm of the working class’s own majority control (and no more so than in Nazi-riddled post-war East Germany, Hungary etc.)
People’s street committees, committees for the defence of the revolution etc, are the expressions of real democracy, drawing the working class into politics and rule through the dictatorship of the majority.
Imprisoning fascists and those who ferment counter-revolutionary violence to re-establish capitalist tyranny is not oppression but the necessity of class war  – and far more just and humane in workers states than ever state control was in the torturing, death squad, “collateral damage” civilian blitzing and fascist “collective punishment” colonialist and corrupt gangster regimes of the imperialist order, as constantly underlined for the world by the likes of the genocidally vicious Zionists in the Middle East e.g. and their endless blitzing, bombing, siege strangulation and imprisonment of an entire people in the concrete hellhole of the Gaza strip.
Proletarian dictatorship will become unnecessary in the far distant future as, some generations down the line, society re-educates itself and learns how to build rational and cooperative life, and as the old pressures of capitalist antagonism and the counter-revolution it constantly inspires, disappear in a new worldwide planned socialist economic and cultural environment.
But constant subversion is what faces any opposition to imperialism in the current imperialist order.
None of which for one second suggests that the Myanmar State Peace & Development Council is necessarily at all solidly on a path to proletarian dictatorship and the building of socialism, and most especially to very much enlightenment and leadership for the world working class.
But the first reference point for understanding anything in the world is to see where it sits in relation to imperialism which is the root and cause of all the antagonisms and conflict and chaos in the modern world, permanently keeping most of it under the most monstrous tyrannical exploitation and now increasingly escalating a drive towards total World War Three conflict and destruction.
On that measure alone there should be deep suspicion about the supposed “horrors” of the Myanmar regime’s control.
Why does imperialism hate it so much is the first question? (In contrast to the wide spectrum of monstrous dictators, “military governments” and reactionary backwardness (like the monstrous Saudi Arabian feudal repression) it sponsors everywhere.) 
It is not enough to try to find an answer only by looking at the superficial resemblances.
That way lies confusion and the working class constantly run round in circles by ruling class stunts and diversions, and pushed back over and over again into defeat and dismay.
Revolutionary understanding and theory is crucial if the working class is to tread through the devastating catastrophic collapse that capitalism is imposing on the world. 
That means a conscious struggle to built a party capable of fighting for such theory openly alongside and in the working class, to provide a constantly deepening leadership that is ever more and more developed by the working class itself, first by the best and clearest elements and increasingly throughout. 
Marxism is a thoroughgoing scientific philosophy which takes not only the widest possible contextual view of any events in the world – immediately feeding the knowledge gained by examining each new particular event, in the light of this overall perspective, back into the total view of the world, to then develop and expand that complete understanding in a constant dialectical development of theory where “everything is connected”. 
It also does the same in time, taking the long view of the historical development of all phenomena both in detail and in the generality, in order to see where they have come from and understand their movement and change.
Burma, now independently asserting its place as Myanmar, has a complex historical record of anti-imperialist struggle.
It learned bitter lessons about the brutality of imperialism during the 60 years of British domination until the Second World War, which was utterly callous, vicious and draconian, 
Even arch anti-communist imperialist stooge and police fink George Orwell (who was busy fingering communists and fellow traveller intellectuals to the forerunner of MI5 in the late 1940s (during the time of the “left” Attlee Labour Government )) admitted being disgusted by early experiences he made on Burmese duty for the Indian empire colonial police, which maintained a regime of such brutality that it comprised little more than beatings, torture, imprisonment and routine hangings to suppress the Burmese national resistance throughout the early twentieth century.
No pretence even, then, of “bringing democracy” as the refined intellectuals of Chatham House, the disgusting slimy hypocrisy of the New Labourites and the more repellently ignorant and anti-communist fake-”left” like to bang on about.
What a sick and disgusting joke and fraud on the working class these monsters are!
The lessons the Burmese people learned was one of house searches, intimidation, collective punishments, beatings, rape, blackmailing kidnappings (a technique taught the world by European imperialism long before the Nazis had even been thought of), and a panoply of other repression and brutality as imposed throughout the Middle and Far East to “keep the natives in their place”.
And they learned far more in the immediate post-war years when the rebellions that erupted throughout the planet against the horrors of the capitalist-caused Second World War, (and which ultimately pushed out direct colonial rule in country after country, or established workers states,) were brutally suppressed in Malaysia, Burma, Greece, Vietnam, Korea and West Africa and many other places.
The Greek revolutionary communist and heroic anti-Nazi partisan movement, sadly addled by revisionist illusions from Moscow and the “strategic” decision of Stalinism to abandon them to the west, was utterly slaughtered by first the British army and when that proved too stretched, (and potentially rebellious itself in the left leaning post-war period) by US resources, including one of the first uses of napalm bombing against civilians.
The Malaysian insurgency was put down with barbaric force, and imperialist atrocities including routine beheadings of captured communists (with many pictures extant of gloating British soldiers holding up the heads of insurgents), as well as the widespread use of concentration camps (just after the world had condemned the Germans for using them!!!) to herd villagers away and prevent them supporting the rebels and communists,
Equally monstrous hostilities were simultaneously underway against nationalists and communists in Vietnam by the French, against the communist influenced Sukarno nationalist movement in Indonesia by the Dutch, throughout Africa’s anti-colonialist movement and in China where the Americans were attempting to bolster the vicious and brutal pro-capitalist Kuonmintang to destroy Mao Tse Tung’s communist movement with as much violence and repression as possible.
The world was in uproar and learning enormous lessons about the extent of the atrocities and horror imperialism was prepared to inflict in order to maintain its rule after the devastation and destruction it had caused throughout the Second World War.
Capitalism lost, most of all in the giant China in 1949, and later Vietnam from the 1950s onwards, part of Korea by the early 1950s and in Indonesia, desperately hunting then for ways to retreat from numerous other places while leaving maximum mayhem and as much confusion as possible. 
The tide was against imperialism which could not hold the line in India, China and much of Africa, all in ferment from the clear understanding of the real nature of imperialism (and its weakness) revealed by the six years of war and the slump beforehand.
Capitalism was forced to give way to armed revolutionary struggles which ended the epoch of direct colonialism (the “peaceful resistance” of Ghandi was an imposed movement deliberately imported by British imperialism (Ghandi had been allowed in from South Africa) to muddy the water and head off attention from the long running insurgency and fighting which had built up for decades and which pushed back British Empire rule).
The Burmese insurgency was part of it, cleverly ducking and weaving against the colonial power during the Second World War, siding with invading Japanese one minute and the British/American forces later, as did the resistance in Vietnam and elsewhere, taking tactical advantage of inter-imperialist conflict and defeats.
The Burmese leadership was destroyed by the mysterious assassination of the entire cabinet of the successful independence movement in 1947 under Aung San, leader of the Arakan National Army, allowing imperialism to establish a “democratic republic” pro-western government, just as it managed to place pro-western leaderships into place elsewhere in the Empire, such as India, allowing some continuing British and indirect imperialist influence.
In 1962 this was overturned by an anti-imperialist movement that established a military rule and declared itself to be building the “Burmese way to socialism” which lasted until 1988 under General Ne Win.
It would be highly useful to know more of the nature of the regime and its ideology, (and of the indigenous communist movement and its ideology), but it is fairly clear that it orientated towards the socialist camp until the deluded Gorbachevite liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1989.
No surprise then that it should have been subject to one of many provocations organised against the workers states, and anti-imperialist nationalist regimes, as Moscow’s soft-headed revisionist capitulation to capitalism temporarily caused confusion and lack of confidence in the working class across the planet. 
Imperialism and the counter-revolution have never missed a chance to kick the door down of any anti-imperialist or workers state resistance and Burma was one of the first to be tested out with a choreographed and artificially created “democracy” movement in 1988 – headed by the flown-in western trained Aung San Suu Kyi – which was firmly dealt with by the state forces at the time (though there is every reason to doubt the much repeated figures of “3000 killed” being pumped out by the capitalist press lie machine currently).
The movement then was clearly a dress rehearsal for the Tiananmen stunt in China a year later, with imperialism trying to extend the confusion caused by the dire weaknesses of Gorbachev (the logical capitulatory end point of Stalinist revisionist philosophical retreat from revolutionary understanding begun decades previously).
The same period saw the reactionary Solidarnosc movement in Poland (whose legacy of fascist backwardness now left in Poland has still not drawn any apologies from the fake-”left” Trotskyists who supported it at the time – on the equally shallow and philistine basis as they now support the Burmese movement ( because it said it was a trade union – rather than examining all the class balance forces at work in that situation, such as the reactionary Catholic Vatican financing, its hostility to the achievements of the workers state and much more) ) and a series of carefully coordinated “velvet revolutions” etc which were allowed to push over the Soviet workers state and Eastern European workers states.
The outcome is clear to all in a series of increasingly racist and backward regimes from the nasty little fascist nationalism of the Baltic states through to the restored Nazi sympathies of Croatian Ustaše chequered flag wavers;  and the economic havoc wrought on the working class (massive unemployment in Poland, reduced living standards,  poverty for the pensioners, hugely cut life expectancy and obscene flaunting of wealthy by the gangster oligarchs, still persisting throughout even Russia despite massive oil revenues.) 
None of which means Leninism has to shout some one sided “support the Burmese government” slogan which could only confuse the working class (as the Proletarian does for example in the case of Iraq or Serbia, its revisionist soft-headedness incapable of grasping the dialectical understanding of Leninism that defeat for imperialism is crucial – and welcome and useful however it is achieved – but does not imply uncritical support for the movements fighting it.) 
They can be, and often are incredibly heroic and throughout the world are growing more sophisticated and better organised.
But just as a variety of local anti-imperialists (including those declaring themselves communists) stood alongside the Hizbullah to repel the fascist blitzing of Lebanon by the Zionists last summer, so it is correct to recognise and fight alongside those against imperialism.  But Leninism continues to fight for its rational understanding separately.  
Their ideologies are not Marxism and “victory” slogans are a cause of confusion. Defeat for imperialism makes the point much better. 
Only the establishment of revolutionary communist rule is going to solve the world’s problems anywhere. 
At the heart of Leninism is the scientific understanding of the huge crisis of the capitalist system which is driving the entire centuries old system into desperate catastrophic slump disaster and war, just as it has plunged the world into chaos and devastation before in 1914 and 1939. 
It is founded on the titanic understanding of Karl Marx of the economic contradictions of the system which via a tendency to constantly falling rate of profit and the ever increasing surplus of capital unable to find a place for profitable investment, eventually hits a wall of “over-production” crisis and slump disaster, which only enormous destruction of capital can rescue the system from (or more rationally, the ending of the system by overturning capitalist class rule and using resources in a planned way for human need rather than the insanity of ever increasing profit hunting at the expense of untold human exploitation misery).
The huge lurches from the subprime credit crunch have  confirmed this analysis once more despite the lying “assurances” of the ruling class (and the eager and servile stooge Labourites supported always by the numerous onion layers of the fake-“left”).
Huge collapses in public confidence are now being seen in the economic future of capitalism anyway, though yet without the obvious follow through understanding of the need to end the decadent and stifling imperialist system finally.
Burma is intended to divert attention from all this but it is not stopping pieces like the following appearing in the bourgeois press:
The bull runs of the 1980s and 1990s, and the first half of this decade, with their epoch-making transfer of wealth to the richest 1% of the population, have distracted attention from the actual long-term weakening of advanced capitalist economies. Economic performance in the US, western Europe and Japan has, by virtually every standard indicator - output, investment, employment and wages - deteriorated, decade by decade, business cycle by business cycle, since the early 70s.
The years since the current cycle began in early 2001 have been the worst of all - in the US, growth of GDP and jobs has been the slowest since the end of the 1940s, and real hourly wages for about 80% of the workforce have languished at about their 1979 level. The decrease in the dynamism of the advanced capitalist economies is rooted in a major drop in profitability, caused by a chronic tendency towards overcapacity in global manufacturing, going back to the late 1960s. Reduced profitability has, since the 1970s, led to a steady decline in the rate of investment as a portion of GDP, as well as step-by-step reductions in the growth of the capital stock and of employment. This slowdown of capital accumulation, along with a push by corporations to restore their rates of return by holding down wages, has reduced aggregate demand - a weakness that has long constituted the main barrier to growth in the advanced economies.
Governments, led by the US, have underwritten ever greater volumes of debt, through ever more baroque channels, to subsidise purchasing power. In the 70s and 80s they incurred continuously larger deficits to sustain growth. But since the mid-90s they have had to resort to more powerful and risky forms of stimulus to counter the tendency to stagnation, replacing the public deficits of traditional Keynesianism with the private deficits and asset inflation of what might be called asset-price Keynesianism - or, with equal accuracy, bubblenomics.
Despite his recent protestations to the contrary, none other than Alan Greenspan launched the experiment in the new macroeconomics, nurturing the great stock market run of the late 90s, after the attempts by the Clinton administration and the EU to wean the economy from its dependence on credit, via neoliberal budget balancing, were met by deep recessions in Europe and Japan, the jobless recovery in the US, and the Mexican peso crisis. 
As corporations and wealthy households enjoyed their growing paper wealth, they embarked on a record-breaking increase in borrowing, sustaining a powerful expansion of investment and consumption, the ill-fated “new economy” boom. However, the ascent of equity prices in defiance of falling profit rates and the escalation of overcapacity that resulted from accelerating investment prompted the crash and recession of 2000-01.
Undeterred, central banks turned again to the inflation of asset prices. By reducing real short-term interest rates to zero for three years, they facilitated an explosion of household borrowing that contributed to, and fed on, rocketing house prices. Inflated household wealth enabled increased consumer spending that, in turn, drove the expansion. Personal consumption plus residential investment accounted for 90-100% of the growth of GDP in the first five years of the current cycle. However, the housing sector alone was responsible for raising the growth of GDP by more than 40%, obscuring just how weak the recovery was.
The rise in demand revived the economy. But while consumers did their part, the same cannot be said for business, despite the incitement of unprecedented household borrowing. Focused on restoring profit rates, corporations unleashed a brutal offensive against workers. They increased productivity growth, not so much by investing in equipment as by cutting back on jobs and compelling employees to take up the slack. They held down wages as they squeezed more output per person, allowing them to appropriate an entirely unprecedented share of the increase that took place in net non-financial GDP.
Non-financial corporations have, then, raised their profit rates significantly, though still not back to the already reduced levels of the 90s. But by holding down job creation, investment and wages, they have held down the growth of aggregate demand, undermining their own incentive to expand. Instead, exploiting the cheapness of credit, they have devoted a record share of their resources to buying back their own shares, financing mergers and acquisitions, and paying dividends to stockholders - rather than expanding investment and creating new jobs.
Against this background of fundamental weakness in the real productive economy, the crisis set off by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market is indeed extremely threatening. Ben Bernanke - who replaced Greenspan as chairman of the US Federal Reserve - thus had little choice but to cut the cost of borrowing. The deflation of the housing bubble from its 2005 peak was already exerting pressure on consumer spending and residential construction, a problem that can be expected to worsen as house sales and prices plummet. Moreover, in view of their feeble response to one of the largest stimulus packages in history, corporations could hardly have been expected to take up the slack, and in fact had begun to reduce job growth even before the financial crisis hit.
Yet there is reason to doubt the efficacy of the Fed’s reduced rates. How can consumers again rise to the occasion, when declining house prices increase saving, not spending? The consumption-led boom seems set to peter out. Will not the fall in the dollar that is bound to accompany the Fed’s move force up longer-term rates, threatening to drive down asset prices and curtail real growth? How can lower borrowing costs reduce the massive mortgage security losses that cannot but result from the tide of defaults that has only just begun? There is little doubt that rough times are ahead: the expansion may end with both a whimper and a bang.
· Robert Brenner is the author of The Economics of Global Turbulence
The man has been reading Capital (all three volumes) surely? 
He simply fails to finish the analysis – capitalism is historically finished and communism must be fought for. Build Leninism 
Don Hoskins

E P S R   BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

*******

" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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EPSR archive material

The Burmese stunt echoes in many respects the great Tiananmen anti-China provocation of 1989 –  both in its general technique and its intention to stir up again the Goebbels lies of “massacre” against the Chinese workers state – an important indirect target of the Rangoon stunt now. No “cold blooded massacre” can be proven in China because it never happened but capitalism endlessly repeats such lurid stories in the press as if it had.  ‘Mud sticks’ is the lie technique and more mud sticks if you tell a whopper. A section below from the epsr coverage of the time (when it was known as the ilwp). Issue 501 28th June 1989.  Full analysis also available in ilwp Books Volume 16 [ilwp was the forerunner of the epsr].

A class-war struggle has taken place in China, with more workers-state soldiers killed than anarchist protesters. There is nothing to judge in terms of ‘violence’. Tens of thousands more are being killed daily all round the world by capitalist violence of one form or another (famine, infant mortality, disease, civil war, inter-imperialist war, etc), - including the suppression of protests of various kinds (from the Philippines to Chile, from South Africa to Turkey, from Indonesia to Peru, from Palestine to Guatemala, from Ireland to Argentina, etc.). What must be judged is who should win, - the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the capitalist-fascist anarchy of ‘parliamentary democracy’ worldwide? Or as Marxism-Leninism repeatedly stated the question: Either the dictatorship of the proletariat, or else the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
There is no alternative. By not supporting the dictatorship of the proletariat in China, the anti-communist ‘left’ swamp is willy-nilly supporting the dictatorship of the Western bourgeoisie, worldwide. 
The charge that there need not have been any violence at all in the recent Chinese conflict is firstly the most trivial hypocritical nonsense since it was such a minor clash compared to the past bloodbath history, of China under imperialist domination, and compared to the truly colossal slaughter in modern times in anti-communist Third World countries, not just cheerfully condoned by the West but actively encouraged with imperialist arms supplies, as the capitalist press itself admits happened just a few years ago in Indonesia:

Between October 1965 and March 1966 around a million people were killed and thousands more imprisoned.
This military oligarchy has striven to eliminate all opposition, imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands of people over the past 20 years. Newspapers and books which criticise the regime have been banned, and trade unions crushed.
But while other despots have been overthrown, President Suharto lives; on, under the economic and political patronage of the western industrialised powers.
One major aspect of this patronage has been the sale of military equipment which still flows into Indonesia, particularly from the US and western Europe, despite the brutality for which the Indonesian military are responsible.
The US doubled its arms trade with Indonesia and massively increased military aid to the Suharto government following Communist victories in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the Suharto government is in the business of brutally expanding Indonesian territory. 
In 1962, West Papua was occupied and in December 1975 the Indonesian armed forces launched a full-scale invasion of the former Portuguese colony, East Timor.
Since then East Timor has been the scene of untold atrocities leading to the death of 200,000 people.

Secondly it is an outrageous piece of humbug charging the Chinese workers state authorities with responsibility for the violence in any case, since they clearly had spent seven weeks bending over backwards to avoid a clash with the protesters, allowing their own police and troops to be frequently humiliated as they tried to talk the arrogant and ignorant anarchistic petty-bourgeoisie into restoring law and order (which irresolute softness, and political naiveness by the authorities, was partly cause of the eventual scale of the confrontational trouble when it did finally have to inevitably come).
The Bulletin has compiled in recent weeks irrefutable evidence showing that the protesters were hellbent on a bloody armed conflict in spite of all their lying deceptions about being purely for peace and democracy’, etc.
More evidence has just been supplied by these alleged ‘rebel documents’ in the capitalist press.
First they show the anti-democratic conceit of these rampant individualists. “I am in charge of the rebellion” boasts ‘student heroine’ Chai Ling. And who elected her as head of ‘the people’ challenging the legitimate revolutionary government of 1200 million Chinese? Absolutely no one at all, it is plainly obvious. So like all ‘democracy boasting, this particular episode in petty-bourgeois idealism starts with a typical piece of aggressive individualist piracy:

Chai Ling, who had organised the hunger strikes, said the occupation should continue, and was greeted by the crowds as the movement’s ‘Commander-in-Chief’.
TODAY is June 8, 1989, it is now 4pm. I am Chai Ling, Commander-in-Chief in Tiananmen Square. I am still alive.
I believe I am the best qualified critic of the situation in the Square during the period, June 2 to June 4
After this, let me briefly talk about our position. I was Commander-in-Chief.
At 9 pm sharp, all of the students in the square stood up and with their right hands raised, vowed: “I vow that, for not to be destroyed by a handful of schemers, for saving our 1.1 billion countrymen from dying in the white terror, I vow that I will give up my youthful life to protect Tiananmen Square, to protect the Republic. Heads can fall, blood can run, but the People’s Square can never be abandoned. We are willing to use our youthful lives to fight until the very last person.”
“Even with the frenzied fascists’ crackdown, a true people’s democratic republic will be born. The critical moment has come. My compatriots, all Chinese nationals with a conscience, all Chinese people, wake up. The ultimate victory must be the people’s. Yang
Shangkun, Li Peng, Wang Zhen and Bo Yibo ... the doomsday for your puppet regime is near.
Down with fascism!
Down with military rule !
Long live the republic !”
The response to being pushed off their occupation of central Peking after 7 weeks dithering by the authorities was for these anarchist opportunists to idiotically scream ‘Fascism’ and to make absolutely certain that blood was spilled (as they had been ‘advised’ to do if they did not want their protest to quickly be forgotten). These ‘rebel leadership’ claims were openly violent and openly counter-revolutionary.
Once again, the senior anti-communist correspondent in Peking, Gittings of the Guardian, has obliged with an uneasy mealy-mouthed admission that the rebel mob started the violence,- but as usual hedged it around with attempted ‘justifications’ trying to put the real blame on the state - just as happened in an earlier admission (see last week’s Bulletin) that in the actual ‘massacre’ between 5 and 7 a.m. on Sunday morning June 4 when Tienanmen Square was finally cleared, not one person was actually killed:
There were cases of civilian violence against the army as it came in. There were many other cases where the students restrained violence, and more too where we suspect that army provocateurs were at work. The leadership must have known this was likely and that blood would then be shed. The inference is strong that this was the result they wanted.
There was violence against the army “as it came in” to effect its martial-law instructions to evict the occupation from the square. In other words, as all the evidence shows, the counter-revolution started the bloodshed.
But bourgeois sophistry then insists that since the Chinese workers state ought to have known that the students would feel provoked (especially after dropping yet another fascist rumour-mongering hint that army provocateurs were at work, - an infamous slander with no proof whatever), - then it was really the authorities who were to blame for the violence beginning after 7 weeks anarchist defiance of state laws. What wretchedly-twisted Goebbels-speak is produced by blind anti-communism!
And Chai Ling’s statement above confirms that even in spite of its lurid hysterical wording and exaggerations, she only claims ‘beating and harassment’ (in reports of government activity to end the rebellion) prior to the counter-revolutionary anarchists taking their vow to “fight to the finish”.
Another ‘rebel document’ reports a tape-recorded dialogue between an anarchist and a soldier during the long period of peaceful government attempts to persuade the rebellion to go home.
This is remarkable for the good sense of the soldiers and the total lies of the anarchist whose only ‘argument’ for the rebellion is that “several million people” had joined the revolt in Peking, which was a ludicrous distortion eagerly fanned by the Western media. There were never more than 10,000 active protesters at the maximum period, and far fewer by the end; plus another whopping deception culled straight from the CIA’s Voice of America and BBC World Service broadcasts that the Peking military garrison had defected to the rebels (plus a string of other named armies in various other insane rumours).
Exactly how rumour-spreading plus idiotic exaggeration of how many protesters there are qualifies as ‘pro—democracy’ activities is not examined by this latest capitalist-press anti-communist stunt.
And on a further point, how does boasting about the number of demonstrators (no matter how many are claimed) prove any ‘democracy’ argument one way or another in a country of 1200 million people?
The communist revolution won power by proving itself the leadership of the people of China in a 22-year-long guerrilla war and anti-imperialist struggle. Not one single reactionary, from the capitalist press to the ‘left’ Trot and Euro swamp, seriously believes that these current posturing young stooges of Western cultural influences are going to sustain any kind of serious struggle to overthrow China’s socialist revolution’. The dim and dismal memory of this anarchist excrescence will be forgotten within a few years.

[Except in its constant revival by the Western intelligence and petty bourgeois ‘intellectuals’ - and the more so as China’s economic success powers forwards and Western crisis deepens towards war – ed]

Endless counter-revolutionary stunts - epsr issue 956 (30/06/1998)

Instead, the ‘free press’ hacks completely miss the present-day political significance of the tour in order to drone on with their oldest and most sterile anti-communist stunts such as Tibet, arrested ‘dissidents’, the non-existent ‘Tiananmen Square massacre ‘, and the like.
The cheap philosophical trick in all this is the imbecile pretence that ‘democracy’ is the sole aim and essence of all Western culture, and ‘tyranny’ the only interest communism has.
Bourgeois ideology makes great play of ‘free world’ elections which are in fact always dominated by the huge press and television monopolies and by the lavishly-funded pro-capitalist parties which this brain-washing gives all the publicity to. The actual class dictatorship by bourgeois capitalism is kept hidden, as is its periodic turn to violent tyranny both at home and abroad in order to keep in control.
Trot mindlessness makes its anti-communist points by admitting that imperialism may be bad at times but that ‘communist tyranny is ten times worse’ and pretends that a ‘proper’ socialist revolution will mean complete instant ‘freedom’ for everybody, and that class violence of any kind would disappear completely of its own accord if ‘real socialism’ was only given a chance.
Marxist-Leninist science has always made completely contrary assertions.
................. And the obscene feudal relics, overthrown by socialist revolution in China’s Tibet province, receive hero-worship, led by Hollywood’s reactionary billionaires but backed by petty-bourgeois fake-’lefts’ everywhere.
And with 1.2 billion Chinese to talk to about their country’s important attitudes and responses to the present crisis-situation in the world, all that the idiot Western correspondents want to do is search desperately everywhere for just one ‘repressed dissident’ to interview, wherever the Clinton caravan goes, - no matter how irrelevant, obscure, unrepresentative, deluded, or even deranged and making-it-up such ‘dissidents’ might be.
But China remains a disciplined workers state, with the same communist aim as ever of transforming society completely to give boundless opportunities for ALL its people EQUALLY at the conclusion of the long transformation process of building a totally abundant planned economy ultimately.
There will be no revolt from below.
The ‘dissidents’, therefore, will remain unrepresentative isolated pockets of petty-bourgeois-minded opportunists (such as the street spivs and America-loving shallow youth mobilised by counter-revolutionary agitation in 1989), or local nationalists (such as in Tibet province) whipped up by backward religion or other feudal-chauvinist hang-ups, financed or culturally-inspired from abroad.
Clinton went propaganda-posturing to a Christian church service in Beijing, - representative of less than 0.01% of the people of China. Even in the West, God-worship now strikes most serious-minded workers as being a sign of laughable immaturity and emotional instability or else just a hypocritical pantomime, filling in the vast and terrifying blank spaces now in the attempts at a coherent bourgeois-imperialist world view.
But instead of world scorn on Clinton’s stupid and devious head, the pathetic media clamour continues to be raised against the workers state for declining to capitulate to petty-bourgeois counter-revolution in 1989 as the degenerate revisionist leadership did in Moscow.