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 (£12 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 0771 2639934  www.epsr.org.uk 
No 1366 19thrd March 2009                                                                                                      25p fortnightly

Revolutionary perspective is vital for the increasingly bitter disputes and fights that all workers are being driven towards by the worldwide slump collapse. Only an understanding of the full depth and scale of the devastating Slump disaster ripping through capitalism everywhere, and only temporarily put off (for the rich) by insane money printing  can orientate and guide workers and give them the crucial strength for constant growing battles ahead. The whole world fight needs to be seen as one, which needs to go all the way to end capitalism. Leninist party building urgent

Rising militant trade union action against oncoming slump disaster would do ten thousand times better if the working class was given a proper revolutionary context of the struggles they are being drawn into.
Far from simply defending themselves against cutback and imposition of yet another recession on their backs, workers face upheavals and transformation on a titanic scale. 
A revolutionary perspective is vital to arm them with the full knowledge of the huge fights and battles they need to prepare for.
More. Without such a perspective even the most militant determination is heading mostly for demoralisation and defeat, or at the very best, where the ruling class is unprepared for the fight or reflects its growing splits and weakness, allowing some mitigation of the slump to be achieved, yet more confusion is produced that leaves workers as fragmented and vulnerable as before, and open to the next onslaught.
There can only be wave after wave of cuts and speed-up in general now, or worse, complete chaos.
Every fight is, more obviously than ever before, part of a giant class conflict which will only be resolved by the full overturn of capitalist society, whether or not that is consciously grasped yet (which it is certainly not, after decades of opportunist fake-”leftist” and reformist working class leadership has consciously stood against revolution and communism). 
There is no stopping the endless attacks that ruling class must be driven to try if it is to have even a fragment of hope of riding out the oncoming Slump disaster.
The world has been brought to the edge of the greatest economic and political failure in all history by capitalism.
A tidal wave of banking and Stock Exchange failures, currency collapse and sovereign debt default (entire countries going bankrupt) has been unrolling for two years and is going to worsen relentlessly, whatever temporary “upturns” are engineered, if at all, in the meantime.
Human society does not face simply another “recession” or downward blip to be ridden over, or a bit more “greed” to be defied, but the devastating failure of a class system that has outlived its historic time, and can only offer mankind worsening catastrophe, slump and war.
This is a crash disaster which will sweep away the great junk heap of credit card and printed-dollar-fed consumerist illusions, celebrity fashion-following vacuity and philistine backwardness which has been deliberately fed to the working class by TV and Hollywood etc, to let the ultra-rich Western imperialist owners of the world keep it in thrall for the last century and a half, and most of all in the post-war, artificially extended “endless boom”.
It is a cataclysmic disintegration posing huge questions of firstly, simple survival and out of that, the urgent need to take power under working class control and rebuild the world in a new way with rational, planned, socialist, internationally cooperative production, as started in the first titanic historic experiments of the Soviet Union, East Europe, and continuing to some extent in China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam, but yet to be carried through for the whole world, the only full answer.
Capitalism otherwise is taking the whole world to hell in a handcart, environmentally, economically and militarily.
But Dante could never have imagined the horrors on offer if the crisis unrolls all the way, which will outdo by far World War One’s industrial slaughter, and the blitzkrieg city-pulverising destruction and 100 million plus deaths of World War Two, the end points of capitalism’s last great failures. 
Only the demented printing of ludicrously inflated mountains of yet more artificial credit by the panicked Western ruling class and its disgusting Labourite stooges (with Gordon Brown claiming “world leadership” in this) on top of the river of economically poisonous paper dollars already pumped out from Washington into the world trading system for the last six decades, has temporarily staved off immediate disaster.
But the consequences of the sudden wholesale failure of the banks and the international currency system which crashed into the open in October 2008, threatening the worst and most precipitous Depression collapse in eight hundred years of capitalist exploitation, cannot be headed off forever.
Worse, just as the endless dollar printing of the boom years had already made any eventual Slump disaster that much steeper and deeper (by storing up the problems), the “quantitative easing” will pile on even worse turmoil and collapse shortly than the terrifying Armageddon scenes briefly speculated upon by even the most serious bourgeois commentators in the weeks when Lehman Brothers went under, and the bank cash-machines were hours away from being shutdown, throwing society into utter chaos.
In some form or another the crisis will return to the surface with a vengeance, an unstoppable consequence of the contradictions built in to the capitalist system and its organisation of production for private profit and gain, which will always accumulate ever greater “surplus” capital and an ever diminishing capacity to make a profit (at the expense of the workers it ever more impoverishes, throughout the Third World always and more and more into the rich Western imperialist heartlands too), clogging the world with “over-production”, unsold goods and uninvested capital (“surplus” capital only insofar as far as profit making is concerned, not relative to the desperate basic needs of billions in Africa, Asia and Latin America without even rudimentary sanitation or clean water, primary education, jobs, food and security etc etc, and the poverty beset lower layers of the working class in even super-rich Europe, America and Japan).
Destruction and devastation, forced onto the weaker links in the imperialist chain by the fascist ruthlessness of the strongest, which has always been the core of monopoly capitalist dominance, is the only answer capitalism has even come up with, as Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal and others are finding out (and the UK too shortly). 
World War is the end point, forcing even the greatest rivals to swallow disaster and destruction too, the means by which the most powerful sections of the ruling class (the modern USA) hope to ride out the collapse until the “next upturn”.
Washington has already been warming things up for a decade in the blitzing and torture of Serbia, the Middle East, Pakistan, Somalia and an ever spreading ring of scapegoated victim countries, getting the whole world back into accepting that war and talk of war is “normal” and laying down markers for its fascist “shock and awe” ruthlessness to impose the Slump on everyone else, from Third World masses to major capitalist rivals in Europe and Japan. 
Despite the disastrous setbacks and stalemate defeats the bankrupt US ruling class has suffered, it cannot stop pushing ever further on this Nazi war path, as the Barack O’Bomber “liberal” presidency has made clear in Afghanistan and with constant lurid threats against Iran etc. 
But far from recognising the necessity to lift the leadership of the working class to a new and transforming level – the only answer to the utter murderous mayhem which capitalism is heading to – still the entire spectrum of the fake-“left” refuses to talk about revolution.
Just the opposite. The great bureaucracy of “Trade Unionists”, Labourites, equality quangos, single-issue protest and support groups, and the “peace movement” (all constantly interchanging their “organisers” and committees) is busy wheeling round the wagons into a circle to defend the old reformist order just when it is (deservedly) ready to be swept away, along with the whole complex capitalist society of which it is an integral and intertwined class-collaborating part.
Even the “firebrand” “lefts” like Bob Crow of the RMT, the BA cabin crew leaders etc, are propping up the Labourites again, paying over hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds from ordinary unions members’ hard-earned dues to prop up Labour, or in the case of the few mavericks like the Labour-expelled RMT’s case, to sponsor allegedly “left” Labour “anti-war” MPs (asked a few questions on the Iraq war for example to establish their “Old labour” style credentials).
The official unionists support those very “left” pretenders who stay in parliament and support and keep in place the whole Labour racket, which supports and keeps in place the democracy lie, in onion layers of misleadership and opportunism.
It all helps to keep the parliamentary system going when it has never been more exposed as the giant lying fraud it has always been on the working class, the bogus “everyone-gets-a-say democracy” front for the actual unchanging dictatorship of capital and its ruthless exploitation.
And further propping up these layers are the fake-“lefts” in one way or another, from the anti-communists Trots to the soft-brained revisionists also currently punting yet another “populist left” grouping, the Trade Union & Socialist Coalition, which is even more of an anti-Marxist brush-all-theory-and-differences-under-the-carpet soup of theoretical confusion and backwardness than the disastrous Socialist Alliance, George Galloway's opportunist Respect (also now calling for Labour votes!!!) and assorted other counterfeit candidates for a centrist break in the working class towards rebellion and revolutionary politics that have emerged in recent times (see EPSR 1220, 1202 etc).
TUSC’s main contribution is to also drag the working class into voting for the Labourites (!!!), using a farcical parody of Lenin’s clever electoral revolutionary tactics of the 1920s to lyingly suggest that doing so (supporting Labour) would be a defensive socialist move “against the Tories” (if there were no TUSC candidate in any particular constituency) and to “stop the BNP“.
There may still be a point in using the remnants of the bourgeois election machine for revolutionary purposes, where the hurdles of ever higher deposits etc can be overcome, to get a platform, as Lenin recommended in “Left Wing Communism - an infantile disorder”, but not to reinforce the old illusions, and lies about “representatives” making reforms for the working class, which he condemned then and which should be condemned now as rampant opportunism. 
The only sensible and truthful tactic is to take advantage and use such election publicity to expose to the working class the lies and fraud of the whole parliamentary game, which is exactly what Lenin said was the purpose – and the only allowable purpose for a revolutionary – of any participation in the bourgeois mechanisms.
The main thing to be said about parliament is that the working class needs to bring the complete rotten edifice to the ground.
And this has never been more true, when the working class has seen Labour Government after Labour Government sell it down the river, and the culminating monstrosity of Blairism and its fractious shamefaced lying Brownite inheritors who have taken up capitalism’s degenerate and increasingly fascist warmongering mantle, blitzing and torturing its way across the planet more enthusiastically than the Tories ever managed yet, and certainly way beyond the fantasies of the backward BNP etc (which is always used as a justification to “vote Labour” again).
What stinking dissembling lies. 
Voting for a TUSC candidate to supposedly do slightly more “left” reforms is as much of a giant fraud as anything else, let alone rebuilding the shattered New Labourites, helping them back on their feet and the entire Parliament lie with it.
The working class long ago has learned to despise the whole lying game (whatever it goes on to grasp yet about the revolutionary implications of that) and does so ever more deeply.
The material circumstances of the spiralling crisis and the hammering the ruling class has taken in its authority and confidence from economic disaster, and the punishing failure to re-stamp its authority on the Third World via the terrorising of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan and Palestine (to continue the super-profit exploitation of the world that sustains the sweet life for the tiny ruling class), is creating an ever greater political vacuum.
It is most sharply expressed in the contemptuous lack of interest in voting for parliament and its corruption, now universal throughout the working class (and sections of the intellectual middle class), and particularly erupting in the recent exposures of the parliamentary club expenses rackets for the self-regarding MPs.
These “scratch-your-back” “benefits” and inflated salaries (which incredibly the whole MP gang still defend as “justified”) are actually nothing new, no different to the clubby privileges, lavishly paid second jobs in the City, “non-executive” directorships and other sleaze that has always been on offer for the bought front men of the “democracy system” (left, and right, and even the ostentatiously “honest” Johns who take a lower wage and posture emptily as “anti-Toff”, without ever helping the working class understand the true depths of this lying racket) – right back into the “Rotten Borough” times pre-1832 and onwards throughout the post-war boom and a “voice for Labour” down in the Thameside club (as the EPSR has scathingly emphasised for its entire 30 year history).
But it becomes an issue of seething mass public anger now because of the rottenness running right through the capitalist system and the accumulation of experiences made by the working class in Labour, combined with the urgent threats against ordinary livelihoods, pensions, housing, social services, and all the supposed slowly won gains for the working class which it has been promised would be achieved by the “steady pushing back” of the greedy bosses and the step-by-step building of “poverty alleviation” and “education, education, education” and “homes fit for heroes” and a “National Health Service”, all being ripped up in front of their eyes by a ruling class which cannot stop itself stuffing what diminishing wealth remains into its pockets on an ever greedier scale.
The Slump will rapidly heat society to boiling point, just as it is in Athens, and Bangkok, and Paris, not to mention the whole Middle East, Nigeria, etc etc.
Plunging vote levels are an even deeper long-term symptom. 
The agonising about “apathy” which the middle class is constantly wringing its hands over (as in yet another whole TV series just starting as the joke “election” looms up, with such luminaries as the headmistressy Tory Anne Widdecombe) is missing the point.  
This is a 100 year long lesson which the working class has been absorbing in correctly rejecting being herded along yet again to vote for capitalism, an extremely healthy historic dismissal of this fraud and weapon of ruling class rule. 
However badly led the working class has been, it is not made up of turkeys.
The latest figures show that many cannot even be bothered to register (let alone drag down to a polling booth, and even less, actually vote enthusiastically for anybody – rather than just against the worst of the stinkers):

More than half of 18- to 24-year-olds are not registered to vote, according to the Electoral Commission, which suggests that more than 3.5 million adults are in effect barred from voting because they are not on the official register.
In 41% of areas officials charged with overseeing the electoral register are failing to promote it properly, the report by the official elections watchdog says.
A survey of sample areas reveals that 56% of 17-to 24-year-olds, 49% of tenants in private sector-rented homes and 31% of black and minority ethnic residents are not registered to vote. There has been a 40-year decline in the proportion of people registered to vote, with 3.5 million missing from the register in 2000 and a further decline since. Between 1988 and 2008 the registration rate fell from 97% to 91%, the report says.
The watchdog called on individuals to register, but also for independent registration officers around the country to make more of an effort to promote registration. “A UK general election can be called at any time, and there might only be a few days to register to vote in time, once it has been called,” Jenny Watson, chair of the commission, said. This year, for the first time, people will be allowed to register up to 11 days before the polls open. In previous years the registration closed the moment the election was called.
In 41% of local authorities electoral registration officers are failing to adequately promote registration and inform people of how they can sign up to take part in the general election, the commission says.
...She is also calling for reform of the registration system to move the annual canvass from autumn to the beginning of the year amid fears that in some areas up to 10% of voters are lost in the six-month gap as they move house and fail to re-register. Some 15% of registration officers are also falling short of a measure of integrity, which suggests they are failing to keep accurate documentary evidence of people on the electoral register. 

Again this is nothing new but a 40 year trend (though always totally ignored in the trickily worded bourgeois press reports of elections which only ever discuss the percentages of “those entitled to vote” thus sneakily hiding away the contempt for “democracy”).
Now comes the even more disastrous “hung parliament” result, universally expected even before the tired joke election racket process is worked through in May, where nothing of the old “majority rule” trickery can be salvaged at all by the manipulation and hoodwinking of the past and the hundreds of thousands of pounds poured in by rich patrons and supporters for advertising and propaganda.
It expresses the complete paralysis of the ruling class, unable to decide how it is going to impose the slump on the working class but equally terrified of the financial whirlwind it faces internationally if it doesn’t.  
It is a signal of utter weakness, perhaps heralding a period of completely unstable parliamentary rule, just as in much of Europe in the inter-war period, in France, in Weimar Germany, and the failing regimes of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and more, all replaced with openly fascist dictatorships of varying capacities, 
Nature abhors a vacuum, even a political one.
Material conditions scream out for something to emerge to fill the gap.
It is the nature of human society, class struggle and history shattering movement that people will always focus around a leadership.
But the anticipated centrist party or leadership that events suggest would be arising in the working class (which has not yet got any long term, honed, experienced revolutionary cadre party in its midst to fill the void when needed, because of decades of fake-“left” idiocy, mistakes, and dishonesty in dealing with them, as well as out-and-out anti-communism including all the “left” poseurs like the middle-class Trots who claim to be revolutionary but are full of anti-workers state bile and hostility) – has yet to emerge clearly.
False starts like the Scargillite Socialist Labour Party, despite early promise as being an historic break with the old Labour-TUC  order and its useless anti-communist degeneracy (under the much-lauded anti-communist stinkers Michael Foot, Kinnock, etc) eventually proved as much of a regimented suppression of Marxist discussion as Old Labourism which is all it wants to re-establish (and which is an impossibility, long out of its imperialist super-profits crumbs-from-the-table grabbing time).
Nothing that is immediately trying to drag back workers into the old reformist ways is going to be adequate for a now thoroughly disillusioned, and rightly cynical and anti-parliamentary, working-class that correctly despises all “representational” politicians as self-seeking pocket-lining liars.
Scanning the horizon for some real centrist movement (which at least talks revolution while perhaps not fully embracing the Marxist-Leninist science which is vital to finally breakthrough and end capitalism) remains a constant in the oncoming slump, though speculation arises as to whether there have been so many tricks and gimmicks tried in the past that only by moving directly to an out and out revolutionary consciousness will the working class finally jump over all the obstacles to begin the full out revolutionary struggle it needs. 
Meanwhile the current early skirmishes of trade union disputes are a sick parody of reformism, with the Tony Woodleys and Crows negotiating only to “alleviate” the crisis and “limit wage cuts and redundancies” and celebrating, as Woodley did over recent car closures, that the union had “reduced the number of job losses”. 
What a sick joke!
And what a comment on 150 years of “steady progress” through winning reforms by doing things the “proper way”.  
The sickest aspect of the great swamp of opportunism and posturing that makes up the alleged “left” in Britain (and everywhere else) is that it has constantly blamed the working class for its own cowardice, cravenness and crawlarse capitulation to the ruling order.
“Or course we agree with you – ‘comrade’ –  that we need to end this system” will be grudgingly conceded (only if pushed) by the more ‘militant’ Trade Unionists, full-time officials, “left” variants of the pocket-lining MPs, and bolstering them up, the Trotskyist pretend-revolutionaries (who are deep down anti-communists) as well as the soft-brained Stalin worshipping revisionists all still punting out that idiocies about the “democratic way” or the “struggle for peace” (firebrand hard-nut Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarianites included).
But “in the meantime” they are still pleading with capitalism (or “pressuring” it) to “stop war”.
You might as well plead with the measles virus to “stop causing spots and fever”.
Capitalism is a system of crisis and war disaster and endlessly destined to return to devastation and collapse – as Marx and Engels demonstrated irrefutably over 150 years ago and as real events have proven over and over again ever since, on an always increasing scale. 
Staggeringly the fake-“left” and pretend revolutionaries still trot out (no pun intended) the old excuses that it is “too early”, the working class “would not understand - doesn’t agree - is demoralised - is confused”. 
Only because you have deliberately confused them for the last hundred years, comrade trade unionist-reformist, is the only suitable reply.
And only because you continue to do so.
It takes the demented arse-about-face sour defeatism of Trotskyism to declare, for example, that a “hung parliament” is bad news for the working class as the Weekly Worker CPGB-ites have just done, telling them it will lead to a coalition government – as it might – which would therefore be “more difficult to deal with because all the bourgeois forces would be united together”.
Could brains get more addled by deep-seated anti-communism???
Quite apart from the laugh that the obvious “hung parliament” jokes would get from most workers, only those with not a single ounce of revolutionary understanding or feeling could see the obvious giveaway of actual bourgeois contempt for democracy, which such coalitions express, as a “triumph” for the bourgeoisie.
If it was such a solid move for the ruling class why would they only use it in dire Depression or wartime conditions (as they did in the 1930s and Second World War “national emergency” for example)??
Because it gives the whole game away of course and leads directly to a revolutionary conclusion, that bourgeois rule is actually a dictatorship, imposed openly when necessary by tearing up all voting niceties, and therefore can only be supplanted by a dictatorship of the majority, the working class.
The parliamentary racket is a far better way for the rich to run things, with its lying illusions of “choice” and participation for ordinary people, to keep them compliant, than military and fascist dictatorship.
But proletarian dictatorship is exactly where the Weekly Workerites (and all their fake-“left” ilk) do not want to go with their endless deliberate anti-workers state confusions and lies about “real democracy”. 
The same Weekly Worker has been telling the working class since the credit crunch began that Slump and Depression and economic collapse is “bad news” for the struggle, a line pumped out more or less by most of the fake-“left” in one form or another (SWP notably) who declare that workers will have to “wait for the upturn and returning confidence before real struggles can be successful to improve living conditions”.
The giveaway assumption that capitalism will never be facing total disaster, and there will be an upturn, expresses entirely the philosophical capitulation of all the swamp, in thrall to the ruling class because of its own petty bourgeois class position and its tiny limited horizons that assume that capitalism is all powerful and always going to recover,
They actually do not see, nor want to see, even the possibility that the world is hitting the buffers.
They fall utterly for the deliberately punted lie from the establishment, coordinated at the highest levels by the CIA and  intelligence agency instructions which constantly feed the press and media, that there is nothing wrong with capitalism as such, just a “failure of regulation” and “excessive greed for bonuses”.
Look how consciously it is stated in these recent comments by Labourite City Minister Lord Myners, with the deliberate repetition of the mantra:

In August 2007 a shock to global credit markets sparked the most severe financial crisis in a century. A crisis that saw world trade contract for the first time since the second world war and 200 million people around the world lose their jobs...
The failures have not been failures of the market economy. They have been failures of men and women who forgot that market discipline meant that they had to be disciplined in order to get results out of the market place. Too many people got complacent and lazy – and the market responded as we should have predicted, by extracting great costs from a great number of people. Some deserved it, but many did not.
An unswerving confidence in the efficiency of markets became an excuse for many to simply rest on their laurels. Making money is about hard work. It is about taking risks and just as importantly owning up to the fact that you are truly taking risks. And that means being smart, sceptical, and thinking through things before you do them. But for the market fundamentalists making money was about following formulas, plugging in the numbers, sitting back, and waiting for exactly what you predicted to happen, to happen.
The crisis of the last two years should be one unholy reality check for the fundamentalists. The market did not fail. People failed...

Total bullshit. The shock to the system is a shock of the system.  
The crisis now is the greatest evidence ever that Marxist understanding is correct.
The syphoning off of surplus value and divvying it up, which is all the City does, is not “making money”. All value is created by the workers as they work and a small amount of necessary management (which the working class can also do). 
The rest is parasitism and the cause of the problems.  
There is plenty of abuse, misuse, greed and fraud (emerging particularly in slump, as Marx explained at length in Capital).
But it is part of, and an expression of, capitalism, which will always find its way around any “regulation” (as if regulation was ever a serious option anyway since big money will always avoid every law and control, by bullying, bribery and a thousand establishment links and connections).
These are the capitalists and they must follow the demands of capital to out-compete and out-profit all other capital, pushing the risks all the time. Or they go under.
There is nothing “fair” and “regulated” about it.
And even if there were, the contradictions of overproduction would still accumulate.
The petty bourgeois economists cannot see their way past this pretence that the tiger can be ridden, either. But they are clear enough about what is coming:
Even as many Americans still struggle to recover from the country’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, another crisis - one that will be even worse than the current one - is looming, according to a new report from a group of leading economists, financiers, and former federal regulators.
In the report, the panel, which includes Rob Johnson of the United Nations Commission of Experts on Finance and bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren, warns that financial regulatory reform measures proposed by the Obama administration and Congress must be beefed up to prevent banks from continuing to engage in high-risk investing that precipitated the near-collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008.
The report warns that the country is now immersed in a “doomsday cycle” wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management - and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government.
“Risk-taking at banks,” the report cautions, “will soon be larger than ever.”
Without more stringent reforms, “another crisis - a bigger crisis that weakens both our financial sector and our larger economy - is more than predictable, it is inevitable,” Johnson says in the report, commissioned by the nonpartisan Roosevelt Institute.
The institute’s chief economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, calls the report “an important point of departure for a debate on where we are on the road to regulatory reform.”
The report blasts some of Washington’s key players. Johnson writes, “Our government leaders have shown little capacity to fix the flaws in our market system.” Two other panelists, Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT, and Peter Boone of the Centre for Economic Performance, voiced similar criticisms.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner “oversaw policy as the bubble was inflating,” write Johnson and Boone, and “these same men are now designing our ‘rescue.’”
The study says that “In 2008-09, we came remarkably close to another Great Depression. Next time we may not be so ‘lucky.’ The threat of the doomsday cycle remains strong and growing,” they say. “What will happen when the next shock hits? We may be nearing the stage where the answer will be - just as it was in the Great Depression  a calamitous global collapse.”
The panelists call for major banks to maintain liquid capital of at least 15 to 25 percent of their assets, the enactment of stiffer consequences for executives of bailout recipients and for government officials to start breaking up firms that grow too big.
In the report, Elizabeth Warren, who was chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, reiterates her calls for an independent agency to protect consumers from abusive Wall Street practices.
“While manufacturers have developed iPods and flat-screen televisions, the financial industry has perfected the art of offering mortgages, credit cards and check overdrafts laden with hidden terms that obscure price and risk,” Warren writes. “Good products are mixed with dangerous products, and consumers are left on their own to try to sort out which is which. The consequences can be disastrous.”
Frank Partnoy, a panelist from the University of San Diego, claims that “the balance sheets of most Wall Street banks are fiction.” Another panelist, Raj Date of the Cambridge Winter Center for Financial Institutions Policy, argues that government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have become “needlessly complex and irretrievably flawed” and should be eliminated. The report also calls for greater competition among credit rating agencies and increased regulation of the derivatives market, including requiring that credit-default swaps be traded on regulated exchanges.
With the Senate Banking Committee, led by Chris Dodd, D-Conn., poised to unveil its financial regulatory reform proposal sometime in the next week, the report calls on Congress to enact reforms strong enough to prevent another meltdown.

Capitalism (“the markets”) has failed utterly, not some “misuse” of the system. “People” (another lie, these are capitalist “people”, a particular class), are the personification of that system.
And the working class needs to understand it.
But if we are to mobilise struggles, we have to take things “step-by-step” winning smaller battles first, say the Bob Crow’s and other ostensibly “militant” leaders, in a variant of this same fake-“left” defeatism.
“That way we can build up confidence and a left momentum that will come eventually to the fight to finish off the capitalist system and establish socialism and fair society for all.”
This evasive excuse-making garbage reflects at best (in a few percent of cases) a philistine ignorance of Marxism and the deep (and particularly British working class) rejection of theory and science, and mostly a stinking opportunist refusal to take up its vital understanding even as the proof of its correctness becomes overwhelming.
It has been the mainstay of 150 years of reformist stoogery and class collaborationism, always finding reasons not to talk about revolution and deliberately heading in the other direction. 
It has led repeatedly to the sick spectacle of the professed workers leaders taking over the asylum – and running it just like the capitalists do, from the dole cutting 1920-30s Labour prime minister Ramsay McDonald (joining the Tories in a coalition – just as is again being floated to “save democracy” now) to the Attlee post-war majority Labourites who pushed through the horrific colonial and monarchist restorationist and anti-communist slaughter in Greece, Malaysia, Kenya and elsewhere in the “Empire”, helped found the anti-Soviet Cold War NATO, built up the ruthless oil exploitation of Iran and Iraq, established the Zionist fascist occupation of Palestine and its endless genocidal brutality since, and domestically, rescued the bankrupted coal, electricity and rail industries to keep capitalism going while workers lived on austerity rations.
And so it went on with Wilson and Callaghan beginning to push back the working class and unions to take back from workers such concessions as were made after the Second World War (to head off the huge rise of mass sympathy for the Soviet Union and communism which swept Europe), to impose wage cuts and austerity. 
It all culminated in the Blairite spin and glitz rescue of discredited parliament after the failure of Thatcherite poll tax ruling class “hardness” to restore the fortunes of the moribund British ruling class, and the degeneration into the Nazi blitzkrieg and torture of the last ten years of constant warmongering in Serbia, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention supporting Zionist genocide in Lebanon and Gaza).
The underlying, real (and always present) fascist face of capitalist dictatorship has been more and more openly exposed as crisis bites, led by the Labourites themselves (not the BNP which is just a nasty backstop).
And always it is justified with the “jam tomorrow” promises of change and reform, which will eventually allegedly bring the possibility to establish socialism, either by piecemeal accumulation of reforms or by piecemeal development of greater militancy for the eventual revolution and overturn.
Except there never is any jam, just blame, sackings, ASBOs and punishment for the working class and the poorest and most deprived.
And neither is there any “eventually”.
The devastation and chaos of the crisis is here already.
And holding back the understanding to step-by-step “build confidence” is the opposite of what is needed.
Only the full sweep of a world revolutionary understanding can begin to make a difference.
“But if you went to workers now they would never go for the revolutionary argument” say the “militants”.
This is just more evasion and opportunist bowing to limited consciousness and confusion.
Firstly how would you know unless the argument was made? 
Secondly, decades of being fed anti-communism and anti-Sovietism by the great “official left” might well have something to do with such resistance there is, and the decades of post-war confusion and failure, including the pointless and idiot liquidation of the still successful Soviet Union (under yet more revisionist Stalin-planted confusion).
Thirdly, this has got nothing to do with “persuading workers” to come out for revolution, with endless variants on the mocking “is it to the barricades tomorrow morning then comrade”, shallowly used to justify reverting back to old anti-revolutionism and “in the meantime”-ism.
Workers will be driven towards revolution by material conditions not any amount of slick persuasion or argument.
But as they are driven they will need to articulate and understand the great conflicts they are hurtled into, which only revolutionary science can do. 
At which point they will be looking for the understanding that explains the truth of the world, Marxist science.
The truth of the world is as revolutionary now as it will be when conditions ripen to the point of mass revolutionary upheaval.
Far from the “don’t frighten the horses” excuses of the left swamp and militants (to justify their deliberate avoidance of revolutionary argument), it is the head-on understanding which workers crucially need and which is the only way develop the great struggles opening up (whatever the outcomes of the particular battles which necessarily and unavoidably the workers are being driven into and which will continue anyway).
But who says the conditions are not opening up into the most dramatic revolutionary challenges anyway???
As the Greek, Irish, Icelandic, Latvian, Portuguese, Spanish and other workers are finding out already in the “rich” West, and hundreds, even thousands, of millions more proletarians constantly experience throughout the desperate Third World, suffering increased famine, homelessness, violence, chaos, enforced ignorance and rampaging imperialist blitzkrieg massacre (“collateral damage!!), the Great Slump is unravelling fast.
Far worse is due at any minute.
It will put into the shade the appalling deprivation, hunger, despair, unemployment and chaos of the 1930s Depression.
The great homeless encampments of the 1930s Chicago stock yards are already visible again in even the ultra-rich USA, including in near bankrupted California, the fifth richest economy in the world considered on its own, let alone as part of the overwhelming wealth and power of the USA, and in the devastation of the great city of Detroit, reverting back to prairie wilderness because of its bankruptcy.
And if the ruling class gets its way, the subsequent warmongering turmoil – the great diversion from the utter humiliating failure of capitalism and its insane destruction of the great clogging surpluses – will eclipse, a hundred times over, the destruction, savagery, torture, and brutalised inhumanity of the First and Second World Wars.
Life is about to be changed utterly for the whole planet, as the Greeks are finding out:

The European Union’s monetary affairs commissioner Olli Rehn tonight said the debt-plagued nation would have to endure deeper spending cuts to put its shattered economy back “on a sustainable path”.
Calling it a “critical moment” for the future of Greece, the Finn urged the socialist government to reinforce the unpopular cuts it has already announced with “additional measures” to tame a credit crisis that has reverberated across the euro area.
“It is of paramount importance for the Greek people to get their public finances back on a sustainable path,” said Rehn after holding high-level talks in Athens.
“The risks related to macroeconomic and market developments are now materialising [and] additional measures are necessary … In parallel, emphasis should be given to structural reforms aimed at regaining the country’s economic competitiveness,” said Rehn.
The eurozone’s weakest economy, Greece is saddled with some €300bn of debt, more than 120% of its GDP. At 12.7% its public deficit as a percentage of GDP is four times higher than that permitted by the EU. The socialists, who inherited the crisis when they were elected to power last October, have pledged to trim the deficit to below 3% by 2012.
Looking unusually solemn as he broke the news at the end of a highly anticipated 24-hour visit, the EU economics chief said extra measures were essential if the government was to not only reassure markets but meet its stated target of reducing its public deficit by four percentage points.

But even the capitulation of the PASOK “socialists” to the pressures of the world bourgeois finance system (via the “markets”) to force huge speed up and wage cuts on the working class there, is not enough to deal with the underlying hollowness of the whole interlinked capitalist system.
The German bourgeoisie, despite some arrogant strutting and bullying over the recent weeks, demanding that Greece sell its treasures and islands to “pay its debts” (to the Germans for the old Nazi demand of “lebensraum” perhaps!!!) has backed off like all the bourgeoisie from forcing even worse burdens onto the Greek working class.    
But the Nazi contempt is palpable:
After yesterday’s call by two German politicians that Greece sell off islands, historic buildings and artworks before receiving aid, the German tabloid Bild has written an open letter to the Greek prime minister George Papandreou:
Dear prime minister,
If you’re reading this, you’ve entered a country different from yours. You’re in Germany.
Here, people work until they are 67 and there is no 14th-month salary for civil servants. Here, nobody needs to pay a €1,000 bribe to get a hospital bed in time.
Our petrol stations have cash registers, taxi drivers give receipts and farmers don’t swindle EU subsidies with millions of non-existent olive trees.
Germany also has high debts but we can settle them. That’s because we get up early and work all day.
We want to be friends with the Greeks. That’s why since joining the euro, Germany has given your country €50bn.

This viciousness coming back to the surface is a sign of weakness and panic, not strength, like all bullying bluster. Like the rest of the world bourgeoisie, the Germans who dominate Europe, are almost paralysed currently in the face of the unrolling financial and political disasters facing them. 
As the Dutch government has collapsed in the teeth of the Afghanistan resistance and the anti-war disquiet it has caused at home; the British parliament is held in such contempt that the old illusions have collapsed completely into the hung parliament expectations in the next despised election, German imperialist arrogance has been forced to make an abrupt about turn to support yet another money printing bailout (on top of the huge world dollar printing), to prop up the local southern “democracy” trickery (already one of the most threadbare after the rein of the fascist military junta in the 1960s gave workers there valuable lessons in the realities of bourgeois class rule). 
The decision reflects the terrified panic of the capitalist ruling class of the instability that could spread like forest fires throughout its finance system if it goes out of control.
Just like the US/UK bank meltdowns in October 2008, a “sovereign debt default” – in other words an entire country being driven into bankruptcy – could cause a domino implosion of the finance system, certainly throughout Europe and most likely throughout the world. Spain, Portugal, and much of East Europe is at risk, as the bourgeois press analysts constantly fear:

Europe has been standing at a proverbial crossroads longer than bluesman Robert Johnson, but today truly forces a decision on the union. EU leaders in Brussels face a crucial choice: do they spend billions rescuing Greece from the brink of financial collapse, or do they opt for the Lehman Brothers option and let a national debt default serve as this year’s lesson to investors and irresponsible governments.
Last night it looked certain the EU, clutching a German chequebook, would choose to stump up. The chance of panic spreading to other eurozone members and their already battered banks is a risk no post-Lehmans politician dares contemplate. Not only that, but the future of the single currency itself is at stake if Greece decides to pull out instead. Only the detail of the bailout remains to be decided.
What is more uncertain is what Brussels – and Berlin – demand in return. The fear on the streets of Athens is that Europe will impose the sort of austerity binge seen in Ireland, deepening the Greek recession and the sense of injustice felt by civilian victims of the credit crunch the world over.

Despite the hands-off warning from Brussels, the IMF has been itching to send a hit squad across the Atlantic to help sort out Greece’s acute budgetary crisis. “We are there to help,” says the managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. “I have a mission on the ground to provide technical advice requested by the Greek government. And if we’re asked to intervene, we will.” But he adds: “I understand that the Europeans don’t want this for the moment.”
They certainly don’t, but a mission may still be sent, if only to prevent the contagion spreading. Nouriel Roubini, economics professor at the Stern School of Business at New York university, said in Davos last month: “If Greece goes under, that’s a problem for the eurozone. If Spain goes under, it’s a disaster.”
He has been strongly advising the beleaguered socialist government of George Papandreou to seek help from Washington, a view shared by Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the fund: “Greece is going to end up with an IMF programme of some sort in order to get credibility.”
Rogoff, who has just published a book on eight centuries of financial crises, said that Greece was “a serial defaulter”. Since the modern Greek state was founded in 1830, the country has, on average, been in sovereign default every other year and had been through five big defaults in less than 200 years. “Greece has been worse than any Latin American country,” he adds.
The risk of another default or – the doomsday scenario – of Greece deciding to leave the single currency has spooked investors, who are demanding a high price for holding risky Greek debt. The gap between the interest rates on rock-solid German bunds and Greek bonds has widened sharply.
The IMF would probably already be involved were Greece outside the eurozone. But according to Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, the commission wants to keep the fund at arm’s length because it would give the Americans a say in single currency affairs, a blow to European pride.
...Some argue that the cuts being inflicted on the eurozone’s weaker economies highlight a fundamental weakness in the single currency – its lack of a centralised budgetary mechanism, such as exists in the US, to move resources from rich parts of the union to poor parts.
Gerard Lyons, chief economist at Standard Chartered, says there have been several examples of monetary unions that have collapsed because they were not accompanied by fiscal union: “For monetary union to survive, it has to become a political union. If it doesn’t there is likely to be some sort of implosion and a move towards a two-speed Europe.”
...In the short term, leaving the single currency is not on the policy agenda in Greece, Spain or Portugal. Nick Parsons, head of markets strategy for NAB Capital, the wholesale markets division of National Australia Bank, says: “Has the euro been a disaster for Greece? No. You have to think about where they would have been without it. Arguably, the financial crisis would have been greater outside the eurozone.”
Grant at the Centre for European Reform notes that Portugal, Spain and Greece had all been dictatorships until the final third of the 20th century.

Such a contagion  would be a disaster for the European bourgeoisie and its long laid plans to build a powerful finance and trade bloc against the monopoly dominance of top-dog imperialist power the US, their solution to riding out the disastrous collapse of the entire world capitalist system which they know is coming.
But like the bourgeoisie everywhere German imperialism is paralysed by the disastrous contradictions of the profit making system’s total failure and disintegration.
On the one hand the “ruthless efficiency” and monetary discipline of the German dominated European bloc has been crucial for the plans of the European bosses to survive the relentlessly intensifying trade battles and conflicts which put the great monopoly powers constantly at each others throats (whatever diplomatic niceties and “alliances” they might concoct) even in “boom times” and which reach to-the-death intensity when the ever-repeated slump disasters recur which are built into production-for-profit.
On the other the impossible demands on the tiny semi-Third World economy of Greece to keep up with the powerhouse industrialism and finance networks of Germany threatens to collapse the European Union edifice at the very least. 
But the Greek ruling class and its PASOK “socialist” stooges know that they can only go so far in the monstrous demands to squeeze the wages, conditions and livelihoods of workers.
They are caught by the financial implosion and by the huge upheavals it is causing as workers take to the streets.
But even more terrifying for the bourgeois order is the knowledge that soon enough that it will not just be Athens in turmoil but the greater economies of Europe and most of all the bankrupt rentier British “City” economy where pure finance capital parasitism and the winding down of all real industrial production has gone further than any economy on the planet. The bourgeois press can hardly keep up:

“I am becoming convinced that Great Britain is the next country that is going to be pummelled by investors,” said Kornelius Purps, Unicredit ‘s fixed income director and a leading analyst in Germany. 
Mr Purps said the UK had been cushioned at first by low debt levels but the pace of deterioration has been so extreme that the country can no longer count on market tolerance. 
“Britain’s AAA-rating is highly at risk. The budget deficit is huge at 13pc of GDP and investors are not happy. The outgoing government is inactive due to the election. There will have to be absolute cuts in public salaries or pay, but nobody is talking about that,” he told The Daily Telegraph. 
“Sterling is going to fall further over coming months. I am not expecting a crash of the gilts market but we may see a further rise in spreads of 30 to 50 basis points.” 
...Ian Stannard, currency strategist at BNP Paribas, said markets are fretting over how the UK will cover its deficit following the pause in quantitative easing by the Bank of England. The Bank has absorbed £200bn of debt, more than total Treasury issuance over the last year. 
“The UK may have difficulty in attracting extra investors to fill the gap. We think they will have to do more QE as recovery falters,” he said. 
BNP Paribas expects sterling to drop to $1.31 against the dollar this year and reach parity against the euro despite troubles in Club Med. “We’re very bearish on the UK,” he said. 
...UniCredit said Greece is better placed than the UK in coming months even if deficits look comparable. “The polls point to a minority government in the UK, while Greece’s government can count on a majority to push austerity measures through parliament. Secondly, the British tax system offers less leverage for a rise in revenue,” he said.
Even tiny Iceland has panicked the mainstream bourgeoisie. It cannot let the Icelandic banks “get away” with failing to pay back the money lost by depositors because it is the “right” of investors to receive “interest” (ie extract surplus value) which is the fundamental building block of capitalism.  Let that go by the board and the whole “legality” of the world of imperialist exploitation is open to challenge. 
But the doughty Icelanders are in a ferment:
Negotiations with Iceland over the repayment of £2.3bn owed to the UK broke down last night after representatives of the island nation walked out of talks in London. The withdrawal means that Iceland will next week hold a referendum expected to reject a deal for repayment of cash owed to Britain and the Netherlands as a result of the collapse of Landsbanki, the bank behind the Icesave internet savings account.
The UK and Dutch governments said they were “disappointed” that no deal had been reached after 18 months of talks.
Sources close to the talks said that Iceland had been offered an advantageous floating interest rate on the debt that would have represented a significant cut on the 5.5% currently being charged. Also on the table was a two-year interest holiday worth £400m
A Treasury spokesman said: “The UK and Dutch governments are disappointed that despite their best efforts over the past year and a half the Icelandic government is still unable to accept our best offer on the Icesave loan. We have consistently supported Iceland’s economic recovery and our latest proposal built upon this, offering the Icelandic government the same interest rate as their current loan from the Nordic countries and, in addition, an offer to waive interest for the first two years amounting to €450m. This money is still outstanding to UK and Dutch taxpayers and we remain committed to reaching a final agreement with Iceland.”
Jan Kees de Jager, finance minister of the caretaker Dutch government, reacted even more sharply, saying: “If they [Iceland] think this will be paid by the Dutch taxpayer, they are wrong.”

The local bourgeoisie dares not demand the money, backing off with the time-buying “referendum” (which later saw a 95% two-fingers vote from the people to “paying back”).
So what next? 
Does the bourgeoisie send the bombers over to Reykjavik???
And if so what will it do about Greece where the ferment is already ten times as hot????:

The Greek government today announced a barrage of austerity measures in the hope of appeasing its eurozone partners and the financial markets.
The radical package, unveiled after an emergency cabinet meeting and a call from the EU for deeper cuts, was essential for the country’s “survival and economy” said George Papandreou, the prime minister.
“We have done what we need to do. We are now justifiably expecting EU solidarity. Europe has a historic responsibility,” said the socialist leader, two days before a crunch meeting with the German chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
The measures, the third in as many months, are expected to raise an extra €4.8bn (£4.36bn) for the cash-strapped country – deemed crucial if Greece is to meet its target of reducing its massive public deficit by 4% this year and avert a financial meltdown that has threatened to bring the single currency crashing down.
They include further cuts in civil servants’ annual pay through a 30% reduction of bonuses traditionally handed out at Easter and Christmas; a 2% hike in VAT, from the current 19% to 21%; higher taxes on alcohol, tobacco and luxury goods, including cars and yachts and a freeze on state-funded pensions.
Previous belt-tightening policies include a public sector pay and recruitment freeze, rise in the pension age and new levy on fuel. In a humbling development for the government, however, EU inspectors deemed them insufficient.
Within minutes of being announced the new measures ignited a firestorm of protests, with the hardline KKE communist party inciting Greeks to take to the streets.
”It is the responsibility and duty of workers and the poor to reject the lies of the government, the EU, the plutocracy and to rise up against them,” the party said in a statement.
The civil servants’ union, which appealed to Greeks to join a third one-day strike on 16 March, also vowed to fight the “barbaric” polices and warned of a “social explosion”.
In a sign of the looming civil unrest, pensioners staged a mass demonstration outside the prime minister’s office yesterday to demand that the measures be withdrawn.

Or Spain, or Portugal or Italy, all just as desperately threatened by collapse?
Or Britain???????
And the fake-“lefts” declare that it  is “premature” to be talking about revolution???
Turmoil is spreading around the world – tearing apart the Middle East in the ever growing “insurgency” and “terrorist” hatred of the West’s domination, which has been multiplied a thousand times over already by the fascist Nazism of the “war on terror” (once again arbitrarily “accidentally” blowing up civilians by the dozen every day in the latest futile pacification attempt in Afghanistan – so “patriotically” talked up by the BBC/ITN capitalist propaganda machine) and now taking in most of the Horn of Africa. 
Even gentle smiling Thailand, – where “democracy and human rights loving” Western hypocrisy calmly watched a military coup oust the populist prime minister two years ago with barely a murmur (and implied approval - as again for Honduras last year), while simultaneously, Bangkok-based Western TV correspondents were berating nearby Myanmar for being “undemocratic”, (because its military anti-imperialist government would not capitulate to the reactionary provocations of its feudal monks which the BBC World Service etc had stirred up in the first place) - is in an astonishing revolt:

The Thai prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, has refused to bow to demands for his resignation as “red shirt” protests against his government intensified today, with two soldiers injured in a grenade attack on an army barracks.
Protest leaders promised rolling demonstrations that would cripple Bangkok amid reports of plans for each protester – more than 100,000 turned out yesterday – to donate 10ml of blood to be ceremoniously poured outside Bangkok’s Government House morning.
On the fourth consecutive day of mass rallies in the Thai capital, four grenades were launched towards troops at Bangkok’s main army barracks, injuring one soldier in the stomach and another in the arm. No one was arrested.
The major protest was at a separate army barracks of the 11th infantry regiment in the city’s north, where the prime minister and key government figures were being held in safe houses and from where the government’s security operation was being run by a self-described war cabinet.
Appearing on national television from the barracks this morning, Abhisit rejected a demand to announce by midday that he would dissolve parliament and hold fresh elections.
“The coalition parties agree the demand cannot be met,” he said. “Elections must be held under common rules and genuine calm. We have to listen to other people’s voices, not just the protesters’.”
Red-shirt leader Natthawut Saikua said he would spill one thousand litres of blood donated by protesters around Government House, forcing Cabinet ministers to walk over it as they entered the building to work. Another 1,000 litres are to be spilled at Democrat Party headquarters, and another at Abhisit’s house.
As they noisily made their way through the streets – past shops and offices that have now been closed for four days and may stay shut the rest of the week – protesters were cheered on by residents who waved red scarves and offered water and fruit.
Walking, piled on to motorbikes, riding in the back of utility trucks and jammed into buses, the column of more than 50,000 protesters stretched more than six miles and took several hours to arrive at the barracks.
They found the prime minister gone and the barracks heavily fortified. The perimeter of the compound was ringed with razor wire and armed troops in combat gear stood one every five metres behind a broad moat. The heavy metal gates were reinforced, with army earth-moving equipment parked behind them.
After several hours of incendiary speeches and patriotic songs blasted from loudspeakers, the protesters returned to their city base.
Historically, most of the red-shirted protesters are supporters of the fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and hail from the north and north-east of Thailand, the base of Thaksin’s still-potent electoral power. They claim the current administration is run by unelected Bangkok powerbrokers for the benefit of the capital’s already wealthy elite, and is illegitimate because it came to office in a “silent coup” two years ago when a court ruling forced the dissolution of the ruling party.
The traditional reds have been joined in this protest by a growing number of Bangkok residents, members of the city’s growing middle class who, while not Thaksin supporters, see the current administration as undemocratic, elitist and self-serving.
“If Abhisit dissolves the parliament and calls an election we’ll all go home,” said a senior protest organiser, Weng Tojikram. “We’d like Abhisit to give the power back to the people.”

This perhaps not-so-gentle movement from a people who have lived some of the most desperate, poverty-hammered, sweatshop lives in all the Third World, and have, right next door, the huge historic examples of communist Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos, which inflicted the greatest relative defeats ever on brutal B52 US imperialism (and the French before that), is going to be impossible to put back in the bottle, for all the confusion and anarcho-posey showmanship swirling around in it. 
A few Thai flavoured reforms by the billionaire Thaksin will not particular help them either, however “sincere” or not he may be, and even if the current demands for “a proper democratic vote” and restoration of the “people’s party” were to be given way to by a nervous ruling class, in an effort to head off the struggle. 
But what the Thais need too is a world revolutionary perspective to see themselves standing alongside the same struggle in its various forms erupting across the planet. 
More likely is that the “bloodless” nature of the military (not “court decided”) coup two years ago (a lying description since there is a history of extremely bloody violence in past Thai repression, hanging protesters from lampposts notoriously, and the threat of more permeates society constantly) will turn a lot nastier, as the “yellow shirt” petty bourgeois fascist counter-revolutionary movement has already shown.
A proper warning and understanding that only a complete overturn of the monarchical capitalist regime will solve the issues, is vital.
But not one of the fake-“lefts” anywhere is at all close to expressing this, most of all in the UK where any understanding and grasp of the world spanning nature of the crisis and the interlinked nature of all the various struggle in the world continues to be ignored, deliberately avoided.
It is the avoidance of the obvious - that revolutionary understanding is crucial.
And it goes right through the reformists, Trotskyists and revisionists, including those who love to strut and posture as “unafraid to be Stalinist”.
Even the “toughest nut” types like the Lalkar/Proletarian continue to wallow in all the old “struggle for peace” idiocies of Moscow “containing capitalist aggression” nonsense, calling for a “strengthening” of the “Stop the War” movement and its illusions that somehow capitalism can be prevented from the unstoppable degeneration into warmongering.
There is no “stopping war” except by stopping the system which produces it.
Lalkar too has been making much play in the last year of supporting the Greek communist party and a supposed renaissance of old pre-Eurocommunist analysis which it advanced in February last year, which blames the collapse of the Soviet Union on “counter-revolutionary elements” who took over after Stalin’s death in 1953.
It declares that a growing pressure for “market mechanism” to replace communist strategic state planning of industry and agriculture was the prime cause of the eventually shaming and unnecessary liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1989 carried through by the disastrous end point of revisionist retreat from revolutionary grasp, the Gorbachevite confusion.  
This shallow idealist blaming of later “elements” is yet another attempt by the Museum-Stalinists to slyly avoid all polemic and discussion of the huge philosophical failures which ran through the entire Stalin period and culminated in the disastrous  post-war revisions of Lenin in the “Economic Problems of Socialism 1952” which was Stalin’s last major work.
However much the degeneration of Soviet leadership was worsened by continuing revisionist decline in the later workers state bureaucracy, it had already set in long before, as the EPSR has studied and argued in multiple polemics, [including its Future Perspectives 2001 and EPSR 1190 -1196, and 1245] all evaded, and still ignored, by Lalkar.
But this dishonest refusal to examine, polemicise and understand the past errors of the first great 70 year long brilliant attempts to build socialism in the USSR, leaves the working class devoid of the vital clarity to understand the forward movement of revolutionary struggle, hamstrung with the disastrous false conclusion (heavily reinforced with lying Western capitalist propaganda) that “communism did not work”.
The struggle to get a complete dialectical scientific clarity of the epoch and the balance of class forces in the huge erupting world struggle now, is not served by self-seeking opportunist sweeping under the carpet of all the difficult questions about errors and flaws in these historic workers state experiments.
Just the opposite. Such rank opportunism compounds the problems of Moscow revisionist mistakes and cover-up with even more.
The Greek CP it “hails” so portentously is a case in point.
In 2008 the Greek CP condemned the anarchist rioters in Athens who erupted over the state killing of a demonstrator, as “police  provocateurs” while the Lalkarites were busy celebrating them as “the beginning of the working class fightback”, a contradiction Lalkar does not even mention in its gushing approval for the Greek CP.
This silence (and many other contradictions which need further comment) avoids awkward questions which might jeopardise its Stalin-propping.
Lalkar is equally uncritical of the latest pronouncements from the KKE on the upheavals, which despite some token comments about ending capitalism, say nothing about the world crisis context of the savage cut impositions being made on the working class in Greece, and of how capitalism should be ended, leaving intact all the parliamentary and “peaceful road” illusions fed by half a century of worldwide revisionist confusion.   
Take this for example from the KKE website statement following the national general strike of March 14th :

Vasilis Petropoulos, member of the Executive Secretariat of PAME who was the main speaker of the strike rally, mentioned: “There is no national risk; no national duty calls the workers to sacrifice their rights; there is only the greed of the capitalists for profit”.
Aleka Papariga, General Secretary of the CC of KKE said in the mass media: “Do not trust the declarations of the government. Do not trust the employer-led forces. They lie; they intimidate workers, they expect them to stop struggling so as to promote worse measures. The worst is to come. Thus it is necessary to continue and escalate the struggle.” The demonstrations were very powerful. When the mass blocks passed in front of the offices of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises workers threw red paint which symbolised that their profits are dripping with workers’ blood. Earlier this week the chairman of the Federation had made provocative statements that in Greece “industrialists are the only ones who have made sacrifices”…
The mobilisation of striking workers met with the block of the redundant employees of the privatised airlines “Olympic Air” who haven’t received any compensation for their dismissal and have been blocking Panepistimiou Street, the most central road of Athens, for the last 8 days claiming their right to work.
PAME has been by their side supporting them since the very first moment. The government and the capital demanded them with threats and intimidation to end the sit in and even mobilised procurators. Alexis Tsipras, head of SYRIZA and president of SYN which is member of the European Left Party (ELP), stated that: “If 200 people block Panepistimiou Street, they themselves have to realise that this way will not make them to win the rights they assert”.
Full in line with his statement was also the MP of SYRIZA, Papadimoulis, who said: “I disagree with this form of struggle because it undermines their struggle”. Their statements whitewashed the intervention of prosecutors aiming to intimidate the redundant employees who imposed with the struggle that “law is what is just for the workers”, a slogan that the opportunists of SYN which represents European Left Party and the yellow trade unionist forces of GSEE and ADEDY as well as ITUC and ETUC not only do not understand but also oppose actively. The multiform mobilisations of workers will continue the next period highlighting that the workers will make no sacrifices for the profits of the plutocracy; the strike on March 11 sent a clear message.

It is anything but the clarity that the working class throughout the world is in urgent need of, an unequivocal statement of the need for a revolutionary overturn of capitalism to inform and guide all the struggles that the working class is now being driven into, across the planet.
Its woolly and halfway phraseology is an expression of the total confusion and retreat that has been the defining characteristic of revisionism for decades.
“Escalate the struggle” - how? To do what?
Defy the “greed of the capitalists”? Well and good, but is that the full content of the enormous unrolling world crisis which is shattering country after country and demands the complete ending of centuries long class rule – a staggering historic upheaval.
Where has “revolution” disappeared to? Whether or not the conditions right this second allow for the final revolutionary takeover is not the point – but that the conditions demand and are overripe for the rapid education and preparation of the working class in understanding what all these fights are now leading to, is unarguable. 
Build Leninism urgently.    
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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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.

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