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 and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 0771 2639934 www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk or www.epsr.org (alternative site)
No 1343 December  23rd 2008   

Rotten revisionist opportunist fears of “adventurism” – the result of decades of retreat from revolutionary theory – is exposed as total betrayal of the working class in Greece as spontaneous revolt explodes in the heart of Europe, escalating the Third World rebellion which has paralysed imperialism from Iraq to Afghanistan. Bejing’s decision to send warships to join imperialist “anti-piracy” armada off Somalia – a part of the specious “war on terror” – further underlines the anti-revolutionary end point of Third International Stalin inspired theoretical degeneration and the urgent need to re-build Lenin’s vibrant living understanding of revolution

The importance of clear thinking revolutionary Leninist theory, ready to constantly to expose the mind-rot of revisionist complacent “peaceful roads” and Trotskyist anti-communism posing as “left” leaderships for workers, has never been more urgent than now, as decades of stirring discontent against imperialism turn into explosive rebellion everywhere and the greatest slump collapse ever relentlessly deepens.
Escalating “piracy” in Somalia, “shoe throwing” anti-American demonstrations in Iraq, the non-stop popular recruitment of more insurgents in Afghanistan, “terrorism” in Mumbai and across India, breakdown of Pakistan’s government, huge street demonstrations in Bolivia and Venezuela, awful war turmoil in Africa, the growing struggle and resistance of the Palestinian people against the continuing genocidal oppression by the Zionist occupation, the endless quagmire disasters of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and now the unprecedented eruption of ten days of rioting and anti-state hatred in Athens and throughout Greece’s other major cities – right inside “sophisticated and prosperous” Europe – indicate that the masses everywhere throughout the imperialist order can no longer tolerate the agony of life caused by the non-stop exploitation and oppression of the greed ridden profit making system, and the antagonistic national and class divisions it creates everywhere.
The dead hand of Stalinist revisionist “communist” politics (not communist at all) on working class readiness to fight capitalism is even more badly exposed by recent events, with the Greek communist party, KKE, writing off the upheavals in Greece as “just anarchists and police provocateurs” and Beijing now even sending warships to the African coast to help capitalism’s “anti-piracy” armada against Mogadishu (the latest variant of the “war on terror” Goebbels Lies that imperialism is using to get into world war).
This holding back of the spontaneous struggle – to the point of joining in policing it – is the disastrous end point of decades of social pacifist “containment” theory, based on Stalin’s 1952 perspective (revising Lenin) that imperialism was now incapable of returning again to the world war as long as the working class “waged peace” by anti-war struggles and actions.
It parallels the sick class-collaborating stoogery of the Mahmoud Abbas wing of the Palestinian struggle, sliding inevitably from the Revisionist-influenced, (and never realisable) “two state” solution, “peaceful” negotiation, compromise into out-and-out cooperation with imperialism, accepting money and arms from the US and Zionism to “control” the spontaneous militancy currently led by Hamas, which correctly says there can never be an answer to the genocidal Jewish occupation until the Zionist colonial state is destroyed.
Only prevent too much “rocking of the boat” and avoid “provoking the imperialists”, says the opportunist revisionist logic which evolved relentlessly out of Stalin’s retreat away from revolutionary philosophy, and imperialism will gradually shrivel back, contained from degenerating into Third World War by the strength of the working class “peace offensive”.
And from that flows the bemusement of revisionism with “democracy” (bourgeois “democracy” within capitalism), and “peaceful road” and “parliamentary” struggle, pumped out even by the likes of the otherwise (and continuingly) heroic and brilliant Cuban revolution led by Fidel and Raul Castro, and Beijing’s efforts to help “stabilise” the capitalist economy.
It leads all the way to the logic of lining up with imperialism to “condemn terrorism”, the shameful capitulatory grovelling that the entire 57 varieties of fake-“lefts” mired themselves in by knee-jerk reflex, one way or the other, after the 9/11 events for example.
It is a sickening failure and opportunist kow-towing to the Goebbels warmongering lies that the American Empire and its stooges such as the UK have been foisting on the entire world for the last two decades, from the Balkan intrigues and final NATO blitzing (by more than two dozen Western countries) of tiny revisionist Serbia and the pale remaining shadow of its Yugoslavian communist legacy, to the Iraq siege and then Afghanistan and Iraq “shock and awe” endless wars.
With it has gone a complete failure to either see, or warn the working class of, the catastrophic failure ahead of capitalism’s economic and political order (which drives all this warmongering at root – not the “battle for oil” e.g), and worse still, decades of total mockery of such perspectives, or silence and evasion, or even the physical blocking of attempts to present them at meetings, trade union rallies and on demonstrations, (against the EPSR’s small voice for example). 
The Trots and the revisionists are now in total confusion as the reality of capitalist crisis bites home, their bourgeois trailing ideologies reflecting the crisis and either torn open by internal faction fights, turned inwards to dense, defeatist, academic debates about parties, and/or floundering to pretend that they “saw it coming”. 
But none are, even now, explaining the totally sudden catastrophic revolutionary nature of the economic meltdown and its intrinsic connection with war plans and with the waves of upheavals and revolt taking place across the world.
None are seizing the chance to call for the building of a revolutionary party and movement to defeat and bring down imperialism (as opposed to “stopping war” etc), the only way out of the crisis. 
But exactly that, a Leninist movement, is what is urgently needed, to take command of the rapidly growing spontaneous movement against imperialism and give it the grasp and understanding, achieved only by constant study, struggle and theoretical battling for a scientific perspective and view of all developments, from which the best tactics, strategy, and programme can be devised for the working class.
The rapid unfolding of the long developing monopoly capitalist crisis, being sucked into a vortex of bank and Stock Exchange collapses and industrial failures (exactly as Marxism alone has predicted), with the economic news growing more disastrous hour by hour, is stretching the alienation and antagonisms of capitalist life to breaking point.
These are “interesting times” as the ancient Chinese said about periods of turmoil and upheaval (and with more wisdom 1000 years ago that than the current wooden Beijing revisionism).
They are going to get a thousand times more interesting very quickly as the “finger-in-the-dyke” money printing of the capitalist ruling class fails completely to “stabilise” the rotted-through edifice of credit and profit taking capitalist accumulation, already crashing into unemployment, bankruptcy and massive fraud exposure ruins on a scale never before seen.
It is destined to get much, much worse as measure after measure fails to change anything and the insane pumping of even more credit into the system in its turn implodes, this time potentially taking whole countries with it, (Iceland and Argentina virtually there already) especially those most badly exposed like Britain, looking more and more to be the weakest link in the entire capitalist framework.
Conflict, vicious beggar-they-neighbour trade war, and ultimately, destruction and total inter-imperialist war has been the appalling and horrific outcome of past Depression disasters as the imperialist monopoly blocs have struggled for dominance in the collapsing markets, determined to push all the burdens of slump, incipient workers rebellion and the necessary destruction of capital (in the form of bombed factories and plant etc) onto their rivals (and onto the working class).
Early signs of the underlying tensions between the major powers (now re-gaining relative influence as the US Empire fails) are already growing with the astonishing outburst of the German finance ministers against Gordon Brown over the disastrous “printing money” non-solution to the slump for example, reviving the US/European bloc hatreds exposed during the Iraq invasion when the French were berated for being “surrender monkeys” and Donald Rumsfeld and the German foreign minister publicly rowed.
The time has never been more ripe for revolutionary understanding to be built so the working class can finally organise itself to deal with capitalism, overturning it once and for all, to build socialist planned society and make rational use of the world’s huge resources, still there to be used as capitalism shuts down production and moves on eventually to wipe out as much “over”-capacity as it can.
Destruction of humankind’s painfully built and vast production resources (sweated from the labour of billions of workers appropriated over centuries and especially in the “globalised” decades of the post-World War Two American Empire dominance of the whole planet) is the only dementedly insane way the “logic” of capitalism knows to revive the falling rate of profit.
As Karl Marx showed scientifically and incontrovertibly, falling profit is inevitable in the profit taking system (see page 6 quotes and the volumes of Capital) as it accumulates more and more capital, all desperately seeking to make profit from the same limited market and the ever more impoverished masses (stripped of the capacity to buy by the exploitation that makes the capital).
Capitalism’s answer is to destroy the extra capital (the rivals’ capital) clogging the system, so what is left can start afresh. 
It has led to the shattering blitzkrieging of cities, wiping out whole countries, tens of millions dead, and tens of millions more homeless, bereaved, starving and forever scarred and damaged, in two apocalyptic World Wars (and earlier inter-imperialist European wars before that). 
Removing private ownership and eliminating the steady parasitical appropriation of workers’ “surplus” labour for private use in ever increasing, obscenely wasteful, environmentally damaging and vacuous, consumerist, indulgent luxury for the few, and for the continuing arrogant minority, financial and political power of the tiny ruling class, is an alternative solution which mankind must eventually grope its way towards.
Communism in a word.
Without the imperative to make private profit, factories, mines, farms and raw materials resources of capitalism could be controlled by all, the enormous output already established by capitalism – and general technology – turned to satisfying the real needs of all mankind. 
But planned socialism, and letting go of its now historically degenerate power will never be voluntarily conceded by the ruling class which is ready to go to any depraved and brutal lengths to stop it, as in Nazi World War Two attacks on the USSR already, 400 wars, coups, assassinations and invasions since 1945 and now, again, torture camps, blitzing “punishment” terrorising of civilians, escalating police state surveillance and economic strangulation and war destruction of selected scapegoat countries, with brainwashing Lies (WMD in Iraq) and twisted propaganda, to hold on to power and the sweet taste of dominance.
It will not be achieved with step by step “reforms”, the line of the “official Labour Movement” (Labour Party and Trade Unionism) which after 150 years of such “legal” struggle and “persuasion, has only brought the working class in even “wealthy” Britain full circle back to appalling slump, wage cuts (JCB e.g and more coming), unemployment, cuts in social services, collapses in hard-saved pensions, NHS failure, fuel poverty, cuts in dole and benefits (such as they are, the worst in Europe) and rapidly rising desperate homelessness and imminent major poverty. 
It will not be achieved by the 57 varieties of the “lefts” who have only ever offered “left” variations of the same reformism with some “pressure” here, some street demonstrations there, or “winning influence” by being elected to official positions directly or “having the ear of” various lefter variants of the entire opportunist parliamentary circus.
It must be taken by a working class clear in its leadership about the revolutionary nature of reality and the impossibility of solving the class and national contradictions of existence except by total defeat of the ruling class and its overturn.
But even as the spiralling implosion of economies worldwide confirms unassailably the truth of Marxist-Leninist understanding, the revisionists and fake-“lefts” are heading in the opposite direction, filling the working class with confusion and doing imperialism’s dirty work for it. 
The EPSR has recently been recapping and developing the exposures of the “revolutionary” posturing of the CPGB-ML (Proletarian/Lalkar) for example precisely because its “organise strikes to stop war” demand is the same old opportunist “peaceful roadism” protest politics which it criticises and fierily condemns in the CPB and NCP revisionists for example or lambasts the “Stop the War” coalition for doing “too feebly” (EPSR last two issues).
For all its loud noises about “smashing the capitalist state” in semi-academic pieces about the slump (commendable in words) when it comes to actually dealing with events Lalkar/Proletarian reveals its complete inability to do anything different to the other “peaceful roaders”.
Just how damaging this revisionism can be is revealed by the explosive battles and street fighting in Greece which have shocked and stunned imperialism.
Does the Greek revisionist party the KKE draw out for the working class the stunning revolutionary implications of this spontaneous explosion of frustration?? 
Just the opposite – it condemns it, exactly as the entire “left” went along with “condemning” the 9/11 events in 2001. 
And far from taking up the enormous energy of the working class (and petty bourgeois elements too), and giving it revolutionary leadership, the KKE calls for - “protest”.
Here is the KKE statement:

Dear comrades –
Some information about the developments in Greece: 
Activities of KKE (Communist party) and KNE (Greek Communist Youth) Since the first moment KKE and KNE spoke out condemning the murder of the 15-year-old boy by the police, and highlighting the huge political responsibilities of ND’s government and noting that the anti-democratic and authoritarian measures and attitudes, the state repression, are the natural supplement of a policy that delivers blow after blow to the labour and social rights of the workers and the youth.
A KKE delegation went to central police headquarters in Athens on Sunday and lodged a protest over the death of the young boy, whose funeral will take place today at 3 pm.
Yesterday, December 8th, the KKE held a series of protests and demonstrations in the major cities of Greece against the state repression. In Athens the General Secretary of the CC pf KKE Aleka Papariga addressed a massive rally in the centre of the city. She noted that the events that led to the murder of the boy is an “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by a policy that considers people as the enemy, by a policy that detests the strike, the demonstration, the struggle.
Also, the MPs of KKE submitted a parliamentary question to the government over the case.
At the same time the KKE has also called upon the trade unions and other mass organizations of the people and the youth to organize their own mass protest actions, stressing that the state repression and authoritarianism target first and foremost the labour and peoples’ movement.
Since morning of Monday December 8th, all faculties are closed upon initiative of KNE The students’ coordination board of Athens has decided to close all schools from 8-10 of December and has called for a demonstration on 9 of December in Athens, while strong local students’ protests take place all over the country.
Also today December 9th, 24-hours strikes have been declared by the professors in the secondary schools and higher education, while the civil servants will hold work stoppage after 12 pm. The funeral of the murdered boy.
Higher Education Professors are staging a 24-hour strike on Tuesday indicating their bereavement to the loss of 15-year-old Alexis. Kindergarten a primary schools will remain open. However, the teachers’ Federation is staging a strike. The funeral of the 15-year-old will take place at Faliron cemetery at 15:00 For Wednesday, December 10, the general strike that had been announced over the pensions, salaries, against lay-offs, for the right to education and healthcare, will be definitely linked to the events.
About the riots
At the same time KKE stressed that what is needed today is political condemnation of the government, of the whole net of mechanisms of intimidation and state repression, including the invisible ones. The reply to state autocracy is organised struggle within a mass movement in order to ensure the true causes were not covered up.
The continuous organized and co-ordinated riots that we witness parallel to the huge mobilizations and protests have little to do with spontaneous expression of anger and rage, and more and more take the form of open provocations against the growing wave of protest. In any case the way to react does not lie in retaliatory riots. On the contrary such events are quite accommodating for those that want to impose fear and intimidation to the people, who are trying to prevent the emergence of an organized and mighty mass movement that will be able to sweep not only the ND and any other anti-peoples’ government, and pave the way for a real change at the level of the power in favour of the people. They will be used as an excuse for the further intensification of anti-democratic and repressive measures and attitudes.
The political context
The events found Greece in a moment when peoples’ unrest was growing, and the position of the ND government was already quite difficult. The recently announced “crisis measures” in favour of the monopolies, the demands of the industrialists for further reversal of labour and social rights – the even spoke of working week of 4 days!-, the state budget, the scandals, the rising toll of lay-offs have already built up dissatisfaction. At the same time centres of the establishment make concrete efforts in order to rejuvenate the system of the bi-partisan alteration that was loosing reliability before the eyes of the popular strata. In fact, at the last opinion polls PASOK appears to be on the lead. In the opinion of KKE the most urgent task is the stepping up of the mass, organized action of the labour and people’s movement. Only this can provide an adequate response to the anti-peoples policy and the repressive measures, can check and isolate manoeuvres, provocations and plans to entrap the emerging radicalism, and at the same time pave the way for positive developments for the people.
Statement by the PO of the CC of KNE: The obvious and «hidden» mechanisms of repression will finally fail. 
* We are greeting the thousands of young men and women, workers, schools and university students who participated and demonstrated in huge blocks of the KKE and KNE, stating their outrage for the cold-blooded murder of 15 year old boy named Alexis and the intensity of state repression. 
We express our condemnation to all the Greek people and youth an organized plan of intimidation , creation of images of chaos, arsons, disasters that have nothing to do with the spontaneous outbursts of anger among young people. We have to face a well trained, mechanism well-known to the state services and the parties of the plutocracy. The effort to hit and disband the rally of the KKE and KNE in the center of Athens, has failed. 
We stress the necessity all the political youth wings to take a clear position condemning this mechanism. This is designed in order to be taken new measures of repression against the labor movement. These well-known provocateurs had as an umbrella the block of SYRIZA throughout the whole demonstration. Such forces that are caressing provocateurs and fish in dirty water are contributing to the objective of struggling youth and labour movement. 
The only appropriate answer is people and youth not to hang their heads. Now more than ever a response is necessary by the organized movement, self guarded, politicized movement against the power of monopolies and imperialism. 
* Everybody today and tomorrow will participate in the organized demonstrations of the Coordinative Body of Struggling Unions of Schools in all cities of Greece! 
* Everyone to participate in the all worker’s strike on Wednesday !
The obvious and «hidden» mechanisms of repression will fail. Athens, 8-12-2008 The Press Office of the CC of KNE

What a disastrous mess of confusion, timidity and treachery the long legacy of revisionism has left in the world!
The shattering capitalist crisis is breaking wide open, on a scale that even the capitalists themselves concede is the greatest economic disaster in all of history, and the best that the KKE can ask for, despite its widespread influence in the country (one of the last remaining mass CPs left in Europe) is mild chiding of the reactionary government, a few afternoon strikes and obscure, unexplained talk about “hidden forces”.
Where is the (obvious) demand for the government, totally weak, incompetent, utterly corrupt and unstable, to be brought down?
Where is the (obvious) demand for the failed banks which have already been fed billions of dollars, to be taken over totally, without compensation?
Where is the entirely possible organisation for a continuous general strike that could do just that? 
Where is the obvious demand for self-defence squads and community coordination in the working class areas to counter the revival of the old 1960s and 1970s Greek military junta fascism in the hated police (about which presumably the mealy mouthed references to ‘invisible ones’ are made)? 
Where is the revolutionary explanation of the crisis and the explanations of the need to end capitalism? 
Where is the explanation of the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be established?
What foul, misleading and damaging petty bourgeois cowardice is revealed instead with the allegations that the mass of riots, demonstrations and street battles are supposedly all “organised by provocateurs”.
This is treachery on several levels; it dangerously fingers, completely without evidence, a mass of students, anarchists, some workers and petty bourgeois elements caught up in the riots and exploding with decades of resentment and hatred against the exploitation they have suffered.
But there is a long history of fascism, and struggle against it, to feed that. Greek capitalism has always been one of the weakest imperialist powers and without the wealth to cover over its dictatorship with the lying fraud of “parliament”, which the richer nations use to disguise the barbaric and brutal rule of capital (which is always “fascistic” in its raw reality – there being no special thing called “fascism”). 
It runs at least from the unstable Western propped Metaxa dictatorship of the 1930s (a pathetic echo of Mussolini and Hitlerism), to the invasion and direct World War Two rule over Athens of Nazi Germany and the appalling starvation and repression that followed.
There were long years of heroic and bitterly desperate Greek partisan mountain, islands and Cretan fighting in the Second World War (evilly misrepresented by the disgusting anti-communist Captain Correlli’s Mandolin book) which pushed back the Germans; the cynical support and then appalling 1945 betrayal of that communist-led fight by firstly Churchill’s British imperialism, trying to force the hated Greek monarchic reactionary exile government back on the country (and local reactionaries who had collaborated throughout the war with Germany), and then by the “left” Clement Attlee post-war Labour Government (so beloved by the fake-“lefts” like Tony Benn and George Galloway) which waged one of the most dirty and foul imperialist wars ever against the communists for two years, including early use of napalm, handing over to the Americans in 1947 (because the UK was too economically incapable to continue) to conclude the appalling civil war in 1949 with their greater economic and military resources. 
It includes Moscow’s tragic revisionist decision (directly, by Stalin) not to support with military advice or material aid this determined and heroic struggle because of the “deal” reputedly done by Stalin in Potsdam to hand some sections of Europe back to imperialism, for fear of “provoking” it, entirely the wrong perspective for a system that at that point was even more exhausted than the Soviets and reeling from defeat, but which would anyway later revive its warmongering come what may (as it has in over 400 wars, coups and fascist takeovers since 1945). 
It runs through the reactionary governments then installed to the military junta of the 1960s when even the post-war defeat for the communists proved inadequate and more damaging torture and repression had to imposed until enough of the post-war boom could be imported (via European Union subsidy and tourism etc) to allow the cynical modern period of parliamentary illusions - though extremely thin under the left opportunist PASOK (a variant of British Labourism, and opportunist and corrupt) and the weak conservatism currently.
And the working class in Greece doesn’t have extra cause to be utterly explosive as crisis bites – inevitably hitting the smaller economies hard??????
Secondly, the KKE line suggests that the Greek capitalist state is totally in control and powerful, able to organise and direct at the drop of a hat (after three and half decades of not being able to do so) a mass of upheaval which is somehow in the control of the “rightists” and a secret plot to “re-establish” fascist rule.
But capitalism does not want to reimpose fascism, which in reality means exposing its true face of repressive dictatorship, which always gives valuable lessons to the working class in the reality of the system. 
It would much rather continue with the soft delusions of parliamentary “democracy”, reformist sops and fatuous consumerism, which have kept the working class held back in self-deluded consumerist dumbed-down quiescence in the richer Western countries almost trouble free for the rich and the hidden rule of big money capital. 
Capitalism is planning and conspiring to turn to dictatorial rule more and more (with the constant escalation of police state preparations, prison building, surveillance systems, etc etc which disturb even many of the once-complacent middle class) because it has to – the only way to keep the lid on the ferment going on beneath.
It is a sign of total weakness that the ruling class is pushed back towards attempting crude dictatorship and fascism once again. 
Last time, Nazism lasted in full control for just 12 years.
Thirdly, the KKE statement completely misses the depth of the crisis which is spontaneously setting off rebellion and upheaval across the planet, demonstrating what confusion and blindness lies in revisionism. 
It is utter nonsense!! 
Is it not much simpler to assume that the onset of total disaster for peoples’ lives everywhere will make this happen anyway? 
Even the bourgeoisie knows it. The IMF, three days before Christmas, was publicly warning of the likelihood of “mass discontent”, meaning riots and violent demonstrations, throughout the world as the Depression begins to bite hard.
Is that all to be “organised by the bourgeoisie”?
The Indonesian ruling class, already shattered by the 1997 currency collapses and the poverty, unemployment and social breakdown (and riots) which ensued, as an earlier stage of the globalised monopoly economic crisis was forced onto Japan and Asia by US and Western currency trade war moves, is also clear about what is coming:

Jakarta Post: The National Police and the Indonesian Military (TNI) are to partake in a joint training program next week to increase their ability to safeguard the country against internal security threats.
The plan was announced amid warnings from the government that next year’s elections, forecast mass layoffs due to the financial crisis and recent attacks and riots in other countries could spark serious security threats in Indonesia. 
Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs Widodo Adi Sucipto said Friday the training program, which will run from Dec. 18 to 24 and include simulations, will increase the TNI’s and the police’s coordination.
“Learning from the Mumbai attack and the demonstration in Bangkok recently, we have noticed potential security threats that could take various shapes. Therefore, the training program is necessary to provide a sense of safety for all people, including foreigners,” Widodo said after a Cabinet meeting.
Widodo said the President had been briefed about preparations for the training program during the meeting.
The program, Widodo said, would act as a deterrent to would-be troublemakers.
“Political and security problems should not disrupt the elections,” he said....
Indonesia will hold its legislative elections on April 9, 2009, and the presidential election three months later.
A run-off presidential election would take place in September next year.
Election watchdogs have warned of conflicts between supporters of candidates, citing a number of regional elections marred by violence.
Fears have also been raised over the possibility of a worker uprising, as 2 million people are forecast to lose their jobs as the economic crunch peaks in mid 2009.
Early this month, the President warned the public against holding “unnecessary demonstrations” that could threaten political stability and ordered the police and military to take necessary measures to safeguard the country.
In response to recent mass rallies, Widodo said the government would only allow peaceful demonstrations and crack down on those that violated the law.
“Democracy provides people with freedom of expression, but the way the freedom is exercised should not sacrifice public interests,” he said.
Human rights groups have criticized the National Police and the TNI for their heavy-handedness in managing mass protests.
The National Commission on Human Rights named the police the most frequent perpetrator of state violence. 
Did the Suharto fascist regime, which in 1965-6 killed around one million communist or simply “suspected communist sympathisers” (from US CIA and British intelligence supplied lists) and then ran one of the most repressive fascist Western stooge regimes in the world for 30 years (with British and US arms), deliberately organise and provoke the demonstrations which brought them down, and forced them into exile in the late 1990s? 
Or even more appositely were the bread queue riots which began the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, organised by the Tsarist state police???
It is a nonsense.
So does that mean there are no provocateurs amongst the anarchists? Obviously not, capitalism will try every dirty trick in the book.
But across all of Greece and coordinated to erupt?
Does it mean there are no “hidden forces”? 
Of course there are “hidden forces” and fascist minded groups – capitalism’s reserve should its direct dictatorship state authority prove inadequate.
But they will not be countered by “refusing to provoke” them – they will be countered by the revolutionary energy and clarity of the mass movement.
Or course all sorts of tactical and strategic decisions will be needed – but without a revolutionary perspective there is no basis for beginning to make the assessments and understanding of the class forces that are crucial. 
Does it means that the working class should support anarchism?
Not in the slightest – as the EPSR has long insisted, a scientific understanding of the need for a disciplined working class state is crucial. Anarchism will never finally manage to completely deal with capitalism as the EPSR explained in issue 1057:

What the world proletariat needs the ruling class off its back for is not “for everyone to be free to do what they like” but for the working class to be free to build a strong, affluent, secure, educated society where voluntary mutual discipline can eventually resolve all, difficulties with the best reasoned argument available.
The idea that this will be automatic upon the overthrow of the world imperialist system is insane. As all past revolutions have proved, there would initially ‘automatically’ be much total anarchy. A new party-led proletarian dictatorship order is the only possibility for preventing world imperialist counter-revolution and for getting planned socialist reconstruction under way.

That is a million miles from “denouncing” the anarchists – it is offering firm leadership. It is exactly what Lenin insisted on, time and time again, when dealing the with allied question of “terrorism” another spontaneous expression of the growing hatred of the Third World for imperialism. Here is how the EPSR – quoting Lenin – put it (EPSR 1248) and the argument applies equally to “riots” and “street violence”:

[Since] fundamentally, the reality of imperialist tyranny ALONE is the background for the existence of the now widespread phenomenon and regular historical routine of terrorism, then certain unavoidable implications follow from this.
It makes no sense whatever to BLAME the terrorists for ending up in this desperate, hate-filled, and frequently suicidal frame of mind. (The argument about whether the conscious perspective for the socialist revolution should engage in or “approve of” acts of terrorism IS A DIFFERENT QUESTION ENTIRELY — see Lenin quotes).
It makes even less sense to “condemn” the phenomenon of terrorism taking place.
Society is heading for TOTAL CIVIL WAR. Vastly more elements will be caught up in or actively engaged in this civil war than just the Marxist-Leninist party of revolutionary theory.
Indeed, it is most likely to be the case, as it has been in history so far, that whenever the civil war has finally spontaneously broken out, the serious revolutionary party has at that point no more than the tiniest of tiny minorities among the huge social forces initially spontaneously going into battle. But as Lenin makes crystal clear in his remarkable 1906 article on Guerrilla Warfare, the Marxist revolutionary spirit ALWAYS is in sympathy with any civil war activity, and ALWAYS hostile to all “condemnation” of acts of civil war, however anarchic the terrorism.
To those so-called “communists” and “revolutionaries” and “socialists” who capitulate to the immense social-conformity pressure of a modern bourgeois state to “condemn terrorism”, Lenin says: “I am hurt by this degradation of the most revolutionary doctrine in the world.”:

Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.
The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any revolutionary organisation.
The usual appraisal of the struggle we are describing is that it is anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution. Examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers. But are such examples convincing?
The fact that “guerrilla” warfare became widespread precisely after December, and its connection with the accentuation not only of the economic crisis but also of the political crisis is beyond dispute. The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker. Blanquism and anarchism easily occur to the minds of people who have a weakness for stereotype; but under the circumstances of an uprising, which are so apparent in the Lettish Territory, the inappropriateness of such trite labels is only too obvious. The example of the Letts clearly demonstrates how incorrect, unscientific and unhistorical is the practice so very common among us of analysing guerrilla warfare without reference to the circumstances of an uprising. These circumstances must be borne in mind, we must reflect on the peculiar features of an intermediate period between big acts of insurrection, we must realise what forms of struggle inevitably arise under such circumstances, and not try to shirk the issue by a collection of words learned by rote, such as are used equally by the Cadets and the Novoye Vremya-ites: anarchism, robbery, hooliganism!
It is said that guerrilla acts disorganise our work. It is not guerrilla actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control. Being incapable of understanding what historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an uprising.
What we have said about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation. Condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes. It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal and demoralising phenomenon, this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal and demoralising methods of struggle. But such an objection would be a purely bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e., into an armed struggle between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.
We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But we absolutely demand in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and that senseless methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general.
The argument that guerrilla warfare disorganises the movement must be regarded critically. Every new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices, inevitably “disorganises” organisations which are unprepared for this new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by recourse to methods of agitation. Our committees were subsequently disorganised by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all.
When I see Social-Democrats proudly and smugly declaring “we are not anarchists, thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this, we reject guerrilla warfare”, — I ask myself: Do these people realise what they are saying? Armed clashes and conflicts between the Black-Hundred government and the population are taking place all over the country. This is an absolutely inevitable phenomenon at the present stage of; development of the revolution. The population is spontaneously and in an unorganised way — and for that very reason often in unfortunate and undesirable forms — reacting to this phenomenon also by armed conflicts and attacks. I can understand us refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations is no easy matter. But when I see a Social-Democratic theoretician or publicist not displaying regret over this unpreparedness, but rather a proud smugness and a self-exalted tendency to repeat phrases learned by rote in early youth about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, I am hurt by this degradation of the most revolutionary doctrine in the world.
It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close association, with degraded, drunken riff-raff. That is true. But it only means that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all, positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted and prostituted. Strikes, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become corrupted into “alliances” — agreements between the workers and the masters against the consumers. Parliament becomes corrupted into a brothel, where a gang of bourgeois  politicians barter wholesale and retail “national freedom”, “liberalism”, “democracy”, republicanism, anti-clericalism, socialism and all other wares in demand. A newspaper becomes corrupted into a public pimp, into a means of corrupting the masses, of pandering to the low instincts of the mob, and so on and so forth. Social-Democracy knows of no universal methods of struggle, such as would shut off the proletariat by a Chinese wall from the strata standing slightly above or slightly below it. That being so — and it is undoubtedly so — the Social-Democrats must absolutely make it their duty to create organisations best adapted to lead the masses in these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters as well. In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy’s forces.
This is a difficult task, there is no denying. It cannot be accomplished at once. Just as the whole people are being retrained and are learning to fight in the course of the civil war, so our organisations must be trained, must be reconstructed in conformity with the lessons of experience to be equal to this task.
We have not the slightest intention of foisting on practical workers any artificial form of struggle, or even of deciding from our armchair what part any particular form of guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in Russia. We are far from the thought of regarding a concrete assessment of particular guerrilla actions as indicative of a trend in Social-Democracy. But we do regard it as our duty to help as far as possible to arrive at a correct theoretical assessment of the new forms of struggle engendered by practical life. We do regard it as our duty relentlessly to combat stereotypes and prejudices which hamper the class-conscious workers in correctly presenting a new and difficult problem and in correctly approaching its solution.
The Bolshevik Social-Democrats are often accused of a frivolous passion for guerrilla actions. It would therefore not be amiss to recall that in the draft resolution on guerrilla actions (Partiiniye Izvestia, No. 2, and Lenin’s report on the Congress), the section of the Bolsheviks who defend guerrilla actions suggested the following conditions for their recognition: “expropriations” of private property were not to be permitted under any circumstances; “expropriations” of government property were not to be recommended but only allowed, provided that they were controlled by the Party and their proceeds used for the needs of an uprising. Guerrilla acts in the form of terrorism were to be recommended against brutal government officials and active members of the Black Hundreds, but on condition that 1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working-class movement in the given locality be reckoned with, and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away.
Guerilla Warfare – Proletary. No5. September 30,1906
While not the revolution itself (in fact, frequently nothing like it and often a hindrance to it), Lenin nevertheless abundantly makes it clear that he “takes the stand of” the civil war activists , — all of them and any of them.
Society under capitalism is disintegrating, “so let it happen” is the revolutionary’s response.
Only petty-bourgeois minds with an incurable attachment to piecemeal improvements that feeds into and is fed by a natural not-properly-thought-through optimism that “things always get better”, stick to the treacherous reformist opposite which “condemns” such messy civil-war breakdowns as Beslan and such international “outrages” as 9/11 (which equally signal a disintegrating world).
The appalling tragedy of the Caucasus school massacre IS A REALITY OF LIFE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE IMPERIALIST SYSTEM, and another such pitiable disaster will be along in a week or two somewhere on Earth, and more and more frequently. 
Only imperialist tyranny and deluded reformists think “this has got to be stopped”, damning the act of terrorism.
Revolutionaries think “this has got to be stopped”, striving harder than ever to see a way that the defeat, overthrow, and crushing of the imperialist system, every scrap of it, can be achieved.
With every new “appalling outrage”, the unthinking majority forgets that the snarling imperialist threats of “we’ll get them for this”, universally applauded, are exactly what the imperialists said last time. And has this programme of blitzkrieg brutality led to the diminishing of terrorism???
No, it has only led to its dramatic worsening, exactly as the EPSR from the start has explained was inevitable.
As usual, there are claims that “the Chechen situation is different entirely” and “not supportable in any way”.
First, it is continued pure ignorance to see this Leninist scientific analysis as “supporting” all terrorism, simply because it refuses to condemn it and blames imperialism instead.
It is a failure of basic logic. It is the phenomenon of the imperialist system disintegrating which M-L sees as the historically positive continuity. The tragic details of HOW it is falling apart, of which Beslan is just a tiny part of a vast horror story in which 40 million children die painfully, prematurely, and needlessly every year around the world, are 100% the responsibility of the giant imperialist powers alone that no-one or nothing can stop them perpetrating EVERY year for as long as the capitalist system rules — EXCEPT the world socialist revolution.
Marxism-Leninism has always demonstrated its GREATER sympathy with human suffering, and its GREATER courage in trying to do something about it, in this way. The historical record of poverty-stricken and tragedy-stricken countries TRANSFORMED by socialist revolution is unequalled in the whole record of humanity.

The argument might well be thrown back that “this is just dreamland - you are jumping the gun and supposing the situation is riper than it is.”
To make revolutionary demands (e.g take-over all the banks and major capitalist [and bankrupt] industries without compensation) at this stage, it might be argued, would be to precipitate a level of struggle for state control which is not prepared against a capitalist state that would “never allow it”.
“You need organisation and knowledge and the readiness to take on the full struggle – otherwise workers could be set back and defeated” it could be said.
To which the only response can be – why is the working class in Europe and the world not prepared after 70 years of the enormous, inspiring, stupendous, practical achievements of the Soviet Union and now 20 more years of unfolding disastrous crisis which has been glaringly clear to Marxist-Leninist science that has not fried its brains with Stalinist “deocracy” delusions?
Why is it not prepared with the revolutionary theory and grasp that was available for whole century and which is widely available; why is it not prepared by the huge mass parties that have existed for decades and which were and are well placed to train cadres and build knowledge and understanding?
Why is it not prepared by the workers state forces which despite enormous hardship and struggle and constant hostility from capitalist subversion, demonising propaganda and economic blockade, have not only survived but have demonstrated the enormous superiority of socialist organisation such as Cuba, North Korea, China and Vietnam, and for much of the post-war, the Soviet Union and the East European countries?
And if it is not prepared – then seize the time now, when the popular discontent is spilling over, and the reality of capitalism once more sharply presented, to build the vital revolutionary understanding and perspectives that are the only possible response now to capitalist slump and war.
Taking this opportunity is nothing to do with a misplaced understanding of what is immediately achievable, – though toppling the government would almost certainly be available – but is the best way, and the only way, precisely of trying to get to the best and most correct understanding by building as quickly as possible the Leninist leadership needed, with revolutionary perspectives at its core.
The alternative is the disaster of holding back the working class – ending up on occasion by playing imperialism’s game for it, like the Chinese at present:
China is sending warships to the seas off Somalia to join the international fleet battling the rising threat from piracy, a foreign ministry spokesman said today.
The move marks a major shift in naval policy and would be China’s first active deployment outside the Pacific region. Three Chinese ships have been among those attacked in the last few months in the shipping lane that links Europe and Asia.
Countries have joined together in the face of a sharp increase in hijackings that have cost millions of pounds in ransom and inflated shipping insurance costs. Hundreds of hostages are still being held.
“The Chinese government welcomes international cooperation to counter piracy,” Liu Jianchao told a news briefing in Beijing.
“We decided to send naval vessels to crack down on Somali piracy,” he said, adding preparations were “under way”.
Chinese media had previously dropped hints that the government would join the multilateral force. Until today, it was the only permanent member of the United Nations security council not to participate.
The security council this week stepped up the drive against the attacks, authorising countries to pursue the gunmen on land. 
China’s Global Times newspaper had predicted this morning that China would send two naval destroyers and a large depot ship to the Gulf of Aden after Christmas. It described the three-month tour of duty as China’s biggest naval expedition since the 15th century.
The modern navy has only left the Pacific region for “goodwill tours”.
Professor Li Jie, a military strategist and naval expert, told the state-run China Daily newspaper: “”Apart from fighting pirates, another key goal is to register the presence of the Chinese navy.”
While other countries have been keen to see China play its part in tackling piracy, the move may increase concerns in the US about the country’s increasing naval capability.
China’s military budget has soared in recent years, as the authorities attempt to modernise forces that boast vast numbers of troops, but saw relatively low investment in equipment in the 1990s.
The country insists that its armed forces are purely defensive and its doctrine of non-interference in other countries’ affairs has meant most troops are deployed close to home.
The announcement came as the crew of a Chinese ship described their attempts to fight off hijackers with a water cannon and beer bottles, before their rescue by a warship and helicopters from the joint fleet. Somali pirates attempted to seize the Zhenhua 4 on Tuesday.
Andrew Mwangura,, of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Associated Press there had been 124 incidents of piracy off Somalia this year and about 60 successful hijackings.

By all means defend Chinese shipping – but this “cooperation” is feeding the “peaceful coexistence” illusions of  “international cooperation”, and going along completely with the Western nonsense of a “war on terror” which has been used to scapegoat Somalia and justify completely illegal military interventions sponsored by the US, from the reactionary stooge Ethiopian regime, to break up the anti-imperialist Islamic Courts movement which had made some headway in the country.
Not a word on this will be heard from the Lalkar/Proletarian revisionism which routinely runs sycophantic eulogies to the “wise” leadership in Beijing.
Organising meetings to demand “Hands off China” – correct and vital exposure of the lies of imperialism against China, explaining its achievements as a workers state and solidarity in its defence, is one (very positive) thing; complete uncritical support for its dire revisionist line (or more usually Beijing’s total revisionist silence) is a disastrous other.
How does Lalkar square that with its sometimes ultra-left swings, when its lack of philosophical bearings take it entirely in the opposite direction to normal “anti-adventurism”, to uncritical support, and calls “for victory”, for assorted insurgencies (from Afghanistan to Iraq) – failing to warn the working class against the backwardness and unscientific nonsenses in the current Third World leaderships that are at best inadequate to take the working class through to victory and, at worst, are simply demagogic opportunism riding on the back of the genuine hostility and rebelliousness of the proletarian movement beneath.
Leninism, as explained above, welcomes all defeats inflicted on imperialism – but it would never cause confusion by suggesting that anything but revolutionary Marxist understanding was going to solve the problems, and more, would make it clear that such non-marxist leaderships will need to be pushed past or be dealt with vigorously by the working class also.
Even a well-informed petty bourgeois letter writer to the capitalist press can see deeper than that:
The European Union’s armada against Somali pirates (Report, 8 December), led by Britain and France and coordinated from Northwood, raises imperial associations and past memories of the Falklands. The reality is that Somali piracy is linked to a failure of governance from within Somalia and could be stopped in its tracks tomorrow if the land bases from which it operates within Somalia were brought under the rule of law.
Piracy ceased within Somali waters when the Union of Islamic Courts controlled the local administration between June and December 2006. As a former adviser to the European commission in Somalia, my advice centred on using aid to build consensus and coalitions of civil society and building upon the peace dividend, to reinforce good local governance. 
The European commission has, unfortunately, become embroiled in supporting an Ethiopian-led invasion in partnership with a Transitional Federal Government controlled by former clan-based warlords that lack popular legitimacy. Assistance to the health and education sectors received less priority. An “armada” of warships will not bring peace to Somalia or cease attacks on marine traffic. As the largest single donor to Somalia, the EU, in concert with the UN, UK, Italy, US and African Union, should vigorously address the humanitarian tragedy of 3.5 million people and build governance on the basis of compassionate humanitarian action.
Joseph Mullen
Eastbourne, Sussex

The reformist notions of “aid” and resources are pie-in-the-sky of course, missing completely the deliberate policy of imperialism to stamp on all incipient rebellion with utmost brutality, if needed, and to scapegoat as many “rogue state” victims as it can from Sudan to Zimbabwe, and especially if they show any signs of spirited defiance as those places have.
“Aid” has only ever been a part of the elaborate system of bribery and reformist palliatives created by US dominated post-colonial imperialism to keep the Third World better under control, while imperialist capital exploitation has ruthlessly plundered its resources and labour.
“Aid” (and charity) simply bandages the worst poverty against potential revolutionary upheaval and rebellion, or more often corruptly feeds the pockets of the local leaderships to bribe them blind, to themselves keep a fascist lid on dissent, as in Egypt for example, or Kenya.
Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe may not be a Marxist, or anything like it, but his ZANU anti-imperialist revolt’s refusal to go along with the “international aid” racket has earned him the undying hatred of imperialism and especially the British dispossessed colonialist ruling class (in the form of the “white farmers”) precisely because he was not recruited by the bribery like many once anti-colonial leaderships (especially those such as in Kenya or Botswana recently calling for his downfall – put-up jobs as part of their stooge “duties”). 
Zimbabwe has seen the tap turned off, and worse, brutal economic sanctions imposed, now leading to the cholera epidemic and other difficulties which, outrageously, imperialism blames on the ZANU. 
But sneering at a besieged Third World ex-colony is going to look pretty sick soon, as the unravelling of the crisis rapidly continues. and even the once-giant economies are brought down to chaotic Depression, unemployment and hunger, most of all in the UK which is becoming more and more obviously the weakest link in the imperialist chain. 
The capacity to herd along the stooge regimes will be severely tested as the realities of slump disaster mean the “aid” tap dries up from a bankrupted imperialist order. 
For the moment imperialism and its dutiful New Labourites, continue to lull the working class with the notion that we simply all face “difficult times” which could “last a year or two” --- steadily dripping out admissions that it “might be worse” than thought, as if the crisis is nothing to do with them and the capitalist system they run, and somehow they are just as taken aback as everyone else.
It is an enormous Goebbels Lie – the ruling class has been preparing for the disaster with its warmongering and police state moves for more than a decade.
As the reality sinks in to ordinary people that there is no end to this crisis except in world war, it will be more and more possible to argue for the revolutionary Leninist understanding which is needed to end the cause of the problem – capitalism itself.
Revolutionary struggle is decades overdue, confused and stymied by revisionist failure, including its disastrous ultimate “holding back” which saw it liquidate the entire dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union and re-introduce “market forces” in 1989, and the even more dire petty bourgeois Trotskyist, supposed counter to Stalinism, which is nothing but bitter anti-communism (and fear and hatred of working class rule) disguised as “leftism”.
The slump is making it easier to expose this philosophical retreat and finally deal with its pernicious influence.
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.)

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" 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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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
East Timor and Cuba
United in the fight for life

LOCATED north of Australia, and covering 14,874 square kilometers, East Timor sits in South East Asia, along with Brunei, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Despite its rich deposits of oil and gas, which are controlled in a draconian manner by Australia, East Timor is one of the 10 poorest nations in the world. Rudimentary and subsistence farming is the main source of employment, particularly coffee and rice crops.
The country’s civil infrastructure has been ruined, the legacy of colonial neglect and the turbulent period of 1975-1999 under General Suharto’s military occupation of Indonesia.
Moreover, this island country, the youngest in the world, has a deplorable health situation: infant mortality of 60 per 1,000 live births; 47% of children under 5 years old suffer from chronic malnutrition, both moderate and grave, and life expectancy is just 50 years. The population has high rates of malaria, dengue fever, malaria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.
East Timor, aspiring to a better future, has found the solidarity of Cuba, which is providing “irreplaceable cooperation (in health and education),” according to the country’s health minister, Dr. Nelson Martins, in an interview with ain at his office in the capital, Dili.
Timor needs a strong public healthcare program, because its population is affected by many diseases and it does not have enough doctors or nurses, particularly in rural areas, Martins explained.
“Now we are working on our national development, but you can’t make progress on that with diseases,” he said, noting the “very positive” impact of Cuban brigade members in improving the health situation of a country so far from home.
East Timor’s people call it Loro Sa’e (where the sun is born), the heart of their legends. It was on April 3, 2004, that the first Cuban medical brigade of 15 internationalists arrived here, also known as the “island of sandalwood.” Since then and to date, 538 Cuban doctors and paramedics have provided their services, traveling over rugged roads, including steep cliffs, to find struggles
and bring relief to sick people, accompanied by education for attaining better health and lifestyles.
At the same time, the Cubans respect the customs and are learning the culture of this country, where there are two official languages, Portuguese and Tetum. The latter is spoken by 60% of Timorese. 
Four years after this work was begun, the Cuban medical brigade’s results are palpable. The lives of more than 10,700 people have been saved; almost two million patients have been attended (in doctor’s offices and in the field); more than 13,800 births have been attended, and some 17,000 operations have been performed. 
The infant mortality rate in communities attended by the Cuban brigades has been reduced. The internationalists also provide medical care to refugees (some 100,000 in 33 camps), whose situation is a direct result of the serious domestic political conflicts here in May 2006.
The Timorese speak with satisfaction of the Cuban doctors’ dedication, their efforts to learn Tetum, and the fact that they never left the country, not even during the worst moments of the violent political-military conflict of two years ago or the successive crises that followed, according to Doctor Alberto Rignak Vaz, head of the Cuban medical brigade.
One patient, 32-year-old Clara da Costa, who is five months pregnant and has had 11 children and one miscarriage, said she felt very comfortable with the Cubans, and revealed that none of the other births of her children had been attended by a doctor.
“I wish Cuba would send more doctors, so that they can help more pregnant women, and our children,” Da Costa commented as she was been seen by Dr. Abilia Mejía Estalella, an obstetrician from the eastern Cuban province of Santiago, at the Maubisse teaching hospital in the central-southern district of Ainara.
Frenky Ramiro de Jesús, 20, has made a substantial change in his personal aspirations, and is now in his third year of studying medicine at Dili Clinical Center.
In clear Spanish, he said, “I would like to send greetings to the Cuban people, especially Commander Fidel Castro, for his humanism and determination, for allowing young people like me to be able to study medicine in Cuba and in Timor with our Cuban professors.”
Joining these voices was that of Doctor Odete Viegas, president of the Society of Timorese Doctors (smt) and Maíia de Fátima Ximenes Díaz, president of the Timorese Women’s Organization, who highly value Cuba’s solidarity with Timor.