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 1406 24th May 2012                                                                                                   25p fortnightly

Greek election paralysis underlines the starkly unsolvable nature of capitalist crisis. But the fake-“lefts”, in Greece and outside; Trotskyist and revisionist; Syriza or KKE, utterly  fail to give the working class the revolutionary understanding that it needs to fight back. There is no “end to austerity” possible while capitalist rule continues because it is the contradictions in capitalism itself which have brought the world to the abyss of complete Slump disaster and hunger, and the world war destruction underway for 20 years and ever escalating. The world is pregnant with spontaneous revolt – it needs transforming by conscious Leninism

The question is posed whether Leninists should support the alleged “anti-austerity” revolt in Greece as some step on the way towards opening up revolutionary struggle and the current alleged expression of it in the voting surge for the Syriza “left” coalition.
To which surely the answer can only be that the rebellious instinct of the working class to reject the Slump class-war impositions being pushed down on them in penury and misery, is an excellent sign of the spread of the growing spontaneous revolt against world imperialist tyranny, already ripping through the Third World in multiple insurgencies, “terrorisms”, guerrilla war attacks like 9/11, “piracy”, revolution in Nepal, national or regional rebellions, the endless and heroically dogged fight of the Palestinians (and Hezbollah etc) against fascist Zionist land-theft oppression, and last year, and still unrolling, the titanic mass upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt.
But it needs clear conscious revolutionary leadership.
But this new expression of the growing world revolt against US led monopoly capitalist domination repeatedly and diversely erupting is not remotely understood let alone explained, or led, by this clutch of assorted Maoists, Trotskyists, “greens” and ex-Communist Party Stalinists.
For all their pretences about “revolution” the “leadership” they offer is nothing but a loud version of all the old reformism and protest pumped out for a century or more by fake- “lefts” everywhere.
Far from being a possible solution to the desperate Slump collapse being forced down on them, this clutch of opportunists and anti-communists is almost the last ditch stand for the ruling class to head the working class off.
Head them off from what??
From the all out revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the seizure of ruling class property, banks, factories, land and other assets.
There is no other way out of the intractable contradictions of the capitalist crisis failure, which has reached its sharpest expression in Greece for the moment.
Adventurism?
Premature?
But the crisis in Greece has reached a point of utter paralysis where there is no answer left within capitalism.
There is no “stopping austerity” because it is not some chosen “policy” of the ruling class, not a “mistaken” drive to austerity,  as the fake-“lefts” and reformists pretend, but an expression of capitalist meltdown failure itself.
There is no “making the bankers pay”. 
Apart from being a completely half-arsed solution anyway, which would leave the bankers in place at half salary or whatever fantasy level this nonsense supposes, it would only leave the entire profit making system in place which has caused the failure, melting down even further.
The capitalist ruling class, and its system is the problem.
And how would they be “made to pay” anyway since they would not be the ruling class if they were willing to give everything (or anything at all) to the working class. 
They would have to be forced to “pay”.
There is only one way to do that. 
Back to the same answer, of course, by revolution.
And if the working class is carrying that through why not overturn everything???
It is going to happen.
But there is “no organisation or revolutionary preparation”, it could be argued.
“Why not?” it should be argued back. 
Because the great ranks of pretend revolutionaries and fake-“lefts” from the Trotskyists to the revisionist CPs (all shades including the Greek Stalinist KKE) have made no such preparations.
Exactly the opposite.
For decades they have headed the working class away from the battle to develop revolutionary philosophy and understanding.
And now when  crisis has never been more sharply clear, there is total avoidance by any of these strutting and posturing bravehearts of any mention of the glaring obvious revolutionary nature of world developments.
Exactly the opposite.  The solution proposed is simply to shout loudly “no to austerity” and demand that everything return to the "steady reformist progress" of the past.
“We want to stay in the Euro monetary system but not under the German austerity impositions” shouts Tsipras, the Syriza leader of this rag tag gang suddenly elevated to star status by the bourgeois press.
Beware the rush-to-gush over any alleged “firebrand” by the capitalist media should be next warning signal for workers everywhere about the real validity of any “new politics” supposedly for the working class.
Tsipras, like the alleged “left” populist Mélenchon, in France, says no more than a dozen generations of “left” stomping reformists dating all the way back to the Second International (and who said far more “fiery” stuff in many cases, like Ramsay MacDonald who even declared in favour of “proletarian dictatorship).
Tsipras says no more than the “left”-Labourites in Britain, desperately pretending that there is a way to “get back to growth” by “making investments” or “managing the economy differently”.
This is monstrous, cynical, consciously lying, garbage about “better strategies” which deliberately heads attention away from the fact that it is capitalism itself, and its fundamental, surplus value-extracting mechanism that has failed, not banks, not currencies, not regulation, not “lack of investment”, not “credit”, not “profligate states”. 
All sorts of explanations pointing to failures in this technical mechanism or that control, to growing cynical dishonesty in the banks, to short-termism in the markets, to wrong priorities for investors, or to the growth of corruption, fraud, manipulation, and cover-ups for it all, by bought academics, can be spelt out, as in the newly released “Heist” book does in excellent detail. But none of them are explaining anything about the cause of the problems, only the symptoms, and expressions of the crisis in assorted financial and market disorders.  
Of course capitalist society and the profiteering which guides it for the small minority ruling class, is the most obnoxious, festering, smelly, degenerate, wasteful, depraved, philistine, pointless, small-minded, nasty, vengeful, twisted, antagonistic, treacherous shit-palace ever built.
But even if it was the nicest and most “morally principled” in all the known universe (it is not and could not be) it would still be falling apart.
Throughout the world these r-r-revolutionary posturers and play actors of all shades do much the same thing – all completely hostile to revolutionary developments when it comes to it in practice.
The paralysed political turmoil deepening in Athens is exposing ever more their rottenness, ineffectuality and class-collaborating opportunism – the whole multi-hued gang of squabbling fake-“lefts” from top to bottom, both inside Greece and throughout the world.
What they avoid is telling the working class that only total revolution can now solve their problems, instead offering yet more “pressure” and “negotiation”.
The intractable unsolvable nature of the monopoly capitalist system’s inevitable periodic return to ever more cataclysmic failure has rarely been more starkly outlined than in the world financial meltdown now, and in few places more than in Athens.
It is being starkly outlined in Brussels too by the completely unsolvable disintegration of the Euro, which can be stopped neither by “austerity” or “stimulating investment”.
Still the entire fake-“left” presents the crisis struggle as nothing but a somewhat more extreme version of the “normal” “day to day” issues of class struggle, which have always been contained in reformist battles to “improve things”.
“Resisting austerity” might be a more severe battle than usual, it is suggested, but the questions are still posed as “defending living standards” by little more than the usual back and forth argie-bargie between the working class and the “greedy” or “mistaken” ruling class, between bankers and ordinary people, or between Greece and Berlin.
Such shallow philistinism, is the result of decades of opportunist reformism and posturing pretences, bolstered by idiot revisionist fantasies about “democracy” and the supposed impact of “left pressure” and militancy “to win advances”.
To maintain their credibility various subfactions of the Trotskyists and revisionists make sniping criticism of the Syriza movement, recognising the dangers of its rapid exposure as class collaborators, as the crisis spirals rapidly down and shows the complete nonsense of its position.
Some of these more “fly” of the fake-“lefts” pretend a little more sophistication, like the Socialist Workers Party “warning” the working class (of Greece) not to be taken in by compromises and to “maintain strike actions and street movements”. 
But this is just another “rank and file-ist” level of the same “left pressure” by a group which plays into the hands of imperialism’s warmongering slump “solution” helping set up Libya and Syria for the slaughter with its foul denunciations of “dictators, and its “condemning” of Third World struggle as “unacceptable terrorism”.
Even more sinisterly “clever” is the even more bilious anti-communism of the vile, formerly revisionist and now crypto-Trotskyist CPGB Weekly Worker which pretends a sober recognition of the revolutionary nature of the situation in Greece:

It is very hard to see a stable coalition government emerging. Then what? History repeats itself and there is another military coup? In this way, the crisis in Greece is beginning to resemble Lenin’s famous dictum about a revolutionary situation - whereby the masses refuse to be ruled in the old way and the ruling class is unable to rule in the old way.

No less than the EPSR has said itself, it seems.
Except it is a lot less since Lenin’s further condition, and the most important, is completely ignored – the need for a revolutionary leadership, or as Lenin said for “revolutionary theory without which there can be no revolution”.
And that is no chance omission – the CPGBers really do NOT want a revolution. And in case anyone should not get it, they go on to present the most convoluted case to “prove” to the working class that it should not make one based on pure petty bourgeois defeatism around the Trotskyist myth that there cannot be “revolution in one country”:
First, to bolster its “revolutionary” posture the CPGB  offers some pompously high-handed advice to Syriza:

We in the CPGB counsel in the strongest possible terms that Syriza - and the Greek left as a whole - should stay clear of all coalition governments with bourgeois parties, whatever the result of the  elections in June. Eg, to enter into a coalition with Pasok would represent a disastrous setback for the movement. Under no circumstances should left parties take any responsibility for capitalism or austerity, whether in Greece or anywhere else. No “renegotiation” or “rewriting” of the memorandum (the austerity bill passed by the Greek parliament) or, for that matter, the European Union fiscal pact that seeks to institutionalise the “barbaric” austerity economics.  

But why not welcome any such moves as exposing this gang of frauds, rather than try to advise them on how to mislead the working class that little bit more effectively, would be the first question.
But more is to come: 

Nor should the left fall for the temptation of forming a workers’ government which sets its sights on managing capitalism.
The only government we should countenance is one that represented the coming to power of the working class under circumstances where there is a realistic prospect of carrying out the full minimum programme of Marxism. In other words the smashing of the old bureaucratic bourgeois state and replacing it with a semi-state, and the beginning of the transition to genuine human freedom. By definition, that means transcending wage-slavery, commodity production and all rest of the old exploitative crap.

Leaving aside that a “government” that was managing capitalism would not be a workers government at all, Marxism and Leninism (the alleged roots of this bunch of twisters) never said anything about a “semi-state”.
Even if it meant anything, it would be a recipe for disaster, overthrowable immediately by even the most minor counter-revolution, probably even a “semi” one.
It is a fudged nonsense emerging from these charlatans’ constant advocacy of “pure democracy” a concept Lenin scorned as the most treacherous betrayal, and misleadership, covering up the reality of capitalist rule which is the dictatorship of capital itself, hidden by the pretence of “parliamentary democracy” but as repressive, fascist, and violent as it feels it needs to be, in most of the Third World always and as crisis deepens, everywhere else too.
Only establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, the firmest possible workers state (100%) would it be possible to retain power by the working class and start to build a socialist world.
Generations later when that is irreversibly achieved the state will fade away, no longer needed to coerce anyone and suppress the old shit. 
But the CPGB like all the fake-“lefts” wants to avoid this issue above all others.
Their toytown play-acting at revolution, not only avoids all the real questions of struggle but actively denounces and decries the real fight, from huge working class achievements from 1917 onwards.
They are full of hatred and poison for the Soviet Union’s astonishing seventy years of socialist construction, which took human organisation, culture and science to new levels, despite enormous difficulties and handicaps, (a backward starting point, low cultural level, and repeated near total destruction of its country three times) and for the continuing dogged fights of Cuba, Vietnam, China and North Korea, and wave of other struggles (including the magnificent communist Greek partisans in 1945-49).
Now much of that has been subverted and temporarily contained (mostly because of the philosophical failings and retreats by revisionism leading to idiotic self-liquidation of still viable socialist economies, and alongside, the complete failure of these same “lefts” to support and defend these giant achievements (with the open struggle for revolutionary understanding - including most ironically the failure of posturing museum-Stalinists to do so, equally washing their hands of the USSR from Khruschev onwards)) -- now they turn their attention to denouncing all the great rising struggles of the Third World, from denouncing 9/11 as “unacceptable criminal terrorism” to swallowing every western CIA bogeyman lie and warmongering provocation going.
It is the foulest anti-communist and treacherous class collusion which completely undermines and invalidates their supposed “militancy”.
A deep down class position of petty bourgeois complacency and smug self-righteousness underlies everything they do.
And at the heart of it is the fear of the working class really erupting against capitalism as it will soon be driven to do.
And at the heart of that is the fear of discipline and control that the working class will impose when it finally takes power, suppressing and holding down the old ruling class and its counter-revolutionary violence and depravity. 
They fear the dictatorship of the proletariat in other words, the central issue of Marxist-Leninist understanding.
Because the fake-“left” refuses to confront this vital core of all future human progress, they cannot build any kind of true revolutionary perspective.
If revolution is staring everyone in the face anyway, why, then they will tell them not to make revolution as the CPGB continues:

It would be impossible to carry out such a programme in Greece alone.
Capitalism cannot be overcome in one country acting on its own: the doctrine of socialism is one country, and all its variants, was always a monstrous Stalinist negation of the Marxist programme. A workers’ government in Greece would mean some form of coalition government between Syriza, DL and possibly the KKE - and/or other much smaller parties that might emerge from future elections. None of these parties are unambiguously committed to the rule of the working class and the destruction of the old bureaucratic state apparatus. The KKE envisages a Greek Stalinism, while Syriza dreams of a left nationalism and the DL would settle for a reformed capitalism.
Yet the problem does not end there. Let us not mince our words. Were such a workers’ government ever formed, then Greece would be immediately kicked out of euro/EU - assuming it had not been already.
Without a shadow of doubt, the ‘new’ drachma would be massively devalued, there would a catastrophic economic slump and more likely than not hyperinflation - and that is before things got really bad.
What then? Such a government would have absolutely no choice but to preside over its own austerity regime. To keep itself in power and the workers in line, our ‘workers’ government’ would have to resort to authoritarian rule or a military socialism if it wanted to stave off counterrevolution and external intervention/invasion.

But that is just to the point – it would only be by revolution such a workers government could be formed – and of course it would need “authoritarian rule” or to put it in less petty bourgeois emotive propaganda terms, the very authoritative dictatorship of the working class!
That is a dictatorship like no others in history, the dictatorship of the majority to suppress and hold down the counter-revolution, exactly as was built in the USSR, in Cuba, in North Korea and in China.
The real criticism of the KKE that should be made is that it too does not tell the working class of this perspective and limits the issue to voting and pressurising parliament, in other words to all the disastrous illusions in “democracy” that Stalinism has fostered since the end of the Second World War, and even before (in the Popular Front for the “democratic republic” in the Spanish civil war for example, which hid the question of the dictatorship).
But this disastrous CPGB Trot nonsense is even more disgusting in its deliberate defeatist view that revolution in Greece would be “isolated”.
This has nothing to do with Leninist understanding.
To begin with, even the bourgeois press accounts constantly spell out how intertwined the entire European finance and credit system is – shock waves from Greece would at least shake if not topple all of Europe, or even possibly the entire world finance system. 
Gigantic opportunities for revolutionary progress would open up.
Globalisation is exactly that, the tying together of the entire world market and exploitation system.
Endless panicking bourgeois ministerial meetings reflect the knowledge of the bourgeoisie that they could all go down at any minute into financial armageddon. 
Secondly the Greek working class rebellion is not alone at all. World upheavals erupt constantly in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and even into the “rich northern countries” like the UK .
Movements like the “indignados,” the “Wall Street occupiers” and St Pauls for all their anarchist amateurism and hopeless eclectic “everyone’s opinion is valid” petty bourgeois vapidity (hostile to Leninist polemical openness which vigorously battles for a coherent line in politics, to establish the truth about emerging phenomena and with it the unity of the working class behind a leadership getting the understanding correct), show the worldwide extent of the upheavals.
Even more so do the heroic uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and the counter-revolutionary onslaught of NATO blitzing and bourgeois press lies and distortions, on Libya and now Syria, aimed at suppressing this Middle East revolutionary surge.
What foul sabotage this is by these comfortable Islington academics constantly pouring out their smothering anti-revolutionary advice from the comfort of their polytechnic offices and Islington gastro-pub corners.
The EPSR has exposed this anti-Marxist rot many times:   

“Any reformist or revolutionary government that might arise amidst the turmoil would suffer instant retaliation. Fascist counter-revolution or, that failing, isolation through asphyxiating trade embargoes and perhaps a joint EU-US ‘peacemaking’ force.”
But why not fight such counter-evolution? It was the MAKING of the Soviet workers state which rewrote all the world’s history books in its 70 years existence, just as defeating counter-revolution in China and Vietnam was the MAKING of those two great proletarian revolutions.
Cuba’s whole workers state prestige is built on the same heroic basis, building a brilliant society in total defiance of every filthy counter-revolutionary stunt and subversion and propaganda that the entire might of the world’s greatest imperialist power can throw at them.
But the anti-communist counter-revolutionary Gods of anti-Leninism must be appeased. “No” to dreams of making the best of unfavourable circumstances by setting about building socialism in the (single) Soviet state when world revolution failed to spread in the 1920s.
And so no let-up in the Socialist Alliance’s anti-Chinese workers state venom either, no doubt; or cynical contempt for Cuba, it probably goes without saying among these class prejudice-driven anti-communists.
Yet suddenly, what is this tacked onto the end of Conrad’s rant???
“Winning the battle for democracy in the EU and securing working class rule in this geographically small but economically and politically powerful corner of the world would give us a fortress from where US counter-revolutionary threats could be confidently rebutted. The revolutionary contagion would then rapidly spread. That is the best service we in the EU can perform for our comrades in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia.”
Is this Western cultural prejudice recurring again? ...Suddenly, after a Trot lifetime of “no breakaway country of socialism, no socialism in a single country” counter-revolutionary garbage, the fake-‘left’ now tells us that a totally disunited tower-of-Babel Europe COULD build socialism and defy US counter-revolution, to the deserved congratulations and delight of all, - but that Cuba, e.g. still deserves contempt for being the “socialism of fools”.
Ah, but the EU (350 million), while “geographically small” is an “economically and politically powerful corner of the world which would give us a fortress from where US (280 m) counter-revolutionary threats could be confidently rebutted. The revolutionary contagion would then rapidly spread,” etc, etc.
Cuba’s successful fortress?? No, - “FOOLS”.
Cuba’s successful influence?? Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Zapatistas, Venezuela, FARC, FMLN in Salvador, etc, etc, etc??????? No, -”FOOLS”.
The Soviet workers state’s 70-year fortress defiance of western imperialist counter-revolution and fascist aggression; and spreading influence like contagion (China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, East Europe, national-liberation struggle internationally, etc, etc, etc)?????? No, “Socialism of FOOLS”.
The EU (350m) powerful and capable-enough to survive US imperialist counter-revolution and thrive despite being a Tower-of-Babel basket case of conflict and disharmony, - but China (1,200 million and most powerfully politically united and culturally cohesive) only capable of the “socialism of FOOLS”??????????? (EPSR 1143  09-07-2002)

And Greece too now, would be the “socialism of fools”.

Trotskyite petty-bourgeois individualist philosophy, on the other hand, may make the occasional opportunist gesture of one cheer for Cuba (because all the best of the working class is cheering Cuba on) but is really only concerned to sneer at Cuba for supposedly ‘getting things wrong’.
Trot derision ranges from “It is doomed to give socialism a bad name, because socialism cannot be built in one country, Cuba or anywhere else” to “Castro is a Stalinist dictator” or “Such a homophobic regime does not deserve to survive”. etc. In all of this ivory-tower ‘socialism’ from the comfort of armchairs in the affluent West, all this counter-revolutionary disinformation is the product of single-issue idealism, the philosophy of petty-bourgeois individualism hostile to Marxism-Leninism.
Empty or downright misleading slogans such as ‘permanent revolution’ or ‘no socialism in one country’ are Trotskyism’s hallmark in which some supposedly ‘logical’ idea or other is pursued to its absolute extreme, transformed by mere windy verbiage into a ‘historical necessity’, and then used as just a stupid sectarian cudgel with which to bash away at the serious collective revolutionary struggle. Deep down, the real aim is one only, - to give each individual sectarian his philosophical motivation, convincing himself he is right, and convincing himself he is correct to court martyrdom in pursuit of this ‘supreme issue’, etc.
But only idealist ‘history’ is made in this way, not real history. And Marxism is the science of real historical necessity.
The Cuban revolution goes on alone because it has no choice. Only in idealist fantasy can the Cuban socialist revolution break out of its total US-imperialist blockade-isolation by marching or sending emissaries into Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, etc, to stir up successful revolutions there in order to totally undermine and defeat US imperialism all in one go, - which is the fantasy world which the Trotskyite “no socialism in one country” armchair socialists live in.
It always remains the great mystery, of course (not really), as to why these self-proclaimed ‘mighty’ Trotskyite sects, all 57 varieties, never club together to go and start what they claim Cuba should go and start, - exporting revolutionary war to further undermine US imperialism, whose blitzkrieg reaction would then, theoretically, be halted by the inflamed response of still more revolutionary proletarian millions even further round the American empire, - which is supposed to be how Cuba would escape annihilation for invading Haiti, or Puerto Rico, for example.
As it happens, the Cuban socialist revolution has in fact carried out some of the most heroic and self-sacrificing acts of generous international revolutionary assistance in the whole history of progressive civilisation, sending important troop contingents and ill-affordable economic and military resources to Namibia and Angola to wage successful war against reactionary South African apartheid-intervention against the national-liberation revolutions in those countries, and risking major imperialist intervention against Cuba  itself in retaliation.
As it also happens, the Cuban workers state did in fact indulge in some revolutionary fantasy by sending its most outstanding revolutionary emissary, Che Guevara, to first Zaire and then Bolivia to try to spark off anti-imperialist revolutions in those countries, both ending in failure and eventually in the death of Guevara.
The Cuban revolution is weakest where it should be strongest, - in the mastery and further development of Marxist-Leninist theory, the one really crucial export for all revolutionaries worldwide. (EPSR 901 29-04-97)

The challenge to the validity of trying to build socialism at all in Soviet Russia isolated from world revolution, is best answered by Lenin himself in his articles “Our foreign and domestic position and party tasks” (1920); Speech at plenary session of Moscow Soviet (Nov 1922); “On co-operation” (Jan 1923); “Better fewer, but better” (March 1923). Far too much criticism of the USSR has been based on its supposed failures as the vehicle for progressing the completion of the world socialist revolution, which was a hazy concept at best, and was not in the forefront of Lenin’s mature mind, as the above quotes indicate. Far too little estimation has been given to the Soviet Union as the world’s first workers state, an actual historical place and event of real complex living millions, all coming from a most difficult background, but achieving miracles.
The more gruesome crimes of Soviet history are still a painful puzzle such as the Show Trials and the largescale purges, but the extent of German imperialist subversive agencies’ penetration is still not fully revealed, and the colossal sophisticated ability of the CIA to undermine regime after regime around the world should cause hesitation in condemning the Soviet socialist baby with its contaminated political bathwater.
Many alleged Soviet ‘atrocities’ are just pure slander. The real tragedy for the small Caucasus Chechen nation, one of the minority of 180 Soviet nationalities which was never fully reconciled to proletarian-dictatorship rule, especially under Russian or Soviet leadership, came not from their temporary deportation during the German Nazi imperialist invasion to avoid them collaborating with the Occupation. It only became a bloody catastrophe when so-called ‘freedom’ was restored to Soviet lands after 1990. Then the Chechens started to suffer racial discrimination in Moscow, e.g., for the first time ever, - and to feel so seriously neglected by the new regime of petty-bourgeois wretchedness in Moscow that full independence was immediately demanded, - and naively expected.
The Chechens got the shock of their lives, and their entire country destroyed all around them, massacring nearly 50,000 and totally wrecking their impressive Soviet capital Grozny and all their remarkable Soviet-era social advances, none of which had existed in such tribal areas pre-Bolshevism. The Chechens had always skirmished with Moscow power in the USSR,- but never had fullscale war been declared, or any major military operations been required at all to keep relations moving on slowly but surely. Only anti-communist ‘freedom’ brought the Chechens such untold humiliation, suffering, damage, and despair.
The same favourable comparison in the effects of the USSR versus restored capitalist ‘democracy’ will be observable in every aspect of state involvement in human affairs.(EPSR 898 06-04-97)

As the recent Channel Four documentary on the feral street children of the Ukraine – tens of thousands struggling to survive on scavenged rubbish in cellars and ruins in sub-zero temperatures,  – shows, the deprivations of “capitalist choice” brought by the petty bourgeois fascist CIA Orange “revolution”  have not ended.
It was not like that in Soviet times when everyone ate, everyone was housed and warm, everyone educated, and everyone got a job. 
The former Soviet states will equally be waking up to the reality of capitalism shortly - more dry tinder for the massive spread of revolutionary flames.
And the CPGB wants to damp it all down!!!!!!! (As do all the rest of the fake-“lefts”.)
That is reflected in a complete lack of any understanding about what is really happening in the world, particularly in any attempt to build such understand in and with the working class. 
Make the bankers pay” they shout as if all that is involved in the crisis is a bit of temporary agony and an argument about who should suffer the “belt tightening”.
Behind this lies the shallow philistine notion that the “crisis” is just a bit of a downturn, which the capitalist system will overcome by a few bankruptcies and temporary disruption.
This shallow garbage, which more or less all the fake-“lefts” present as “Marxist economics” is a million miles from the genuine revolutionary Marxist-Leninist understanding that the rolling crisis of the capitalist system is an ever deepening historic failure of the entire class rule profit system on a gigantic scale that is reaching unbearable levels of contradiction throughout the entire world and bringing to an end an entire centuries long historical period of class domination.
The world is rotten ripe for change and transformation of everything, everywhere.
The issue is not pushing the crisis onto the bosses; it is utterly overturning all existing society, class relations, domination, rules, exploitation, and oppression.
That is not a choice but an increasingly urgent necessity (not a “task” or “duty” as the Stalinists woodenly and formally put it, if they mention it at all) for all of mankind (including even the individuals making up the ruling class, though they would never accept it).
This dialectical buildup of impossible tensions within the profit making system is breaking open, threatening the entire world, and ALL HUMANITY with devastation and destructive chaos, just as it has done in two world wars in the twentieth century.
It cannot be solved except by massive and explosive transformation to a completely new way of organising human society, namely socialism.
Gigantic questions are being put in front of the working class everywhere by the greatest ever failure of the capitalist profit making system in all of its eight centuries of existence.
There is no other way out of the now rapidly accelerating catastrophe which has been unfolding in wave after wave of world disaster and collapse for the entire post-war period, and particularly in increasing shock wave failures of currency markets, international trade war, bank collapse and sovereign debt failures building up over decades. 
The 1974 “oil crisis”, 1970s inflation, Stock Exchange meltdowns, massive and savage credit wipeout through Latin America (1980s and 1990s), 1990s Asian currency collapses causing mass misery, Mexican debt collapses, two decades of Japanese economic failure and endless stagnation, 2002 bankruptcy of Argentina, massively forced poverty on Africa, collapse of the dotcom “boom”, Enron, Russian credit defaults, the Madoff Ponzi scheme collapse, and many more disasters are all part of the same thing, the increasing failure and catastrophe of the entire capitalist system which is riven with intractable and utterly unsolvable contradictions.
It is all the same crisis, reaching a head in 2008’s “credit crunch” world failure, which after four years of artificial boosting with massive dollar printing (Quantitative Easing) is once more on the edge of universal chaos.
This cannot be solved by “making the bosses pay” except in the very deepest sense of confiscating all privately owned means of production permanently and forever so that the working class can take over and build socialism, using all the massive real wealth of the world (houses, resources, factories, farms etc etc) in common ownership to build a planned socialist world.
Under those conditions, of working class power and common ownership, without exception, the greatest sacrifices, temporary austerity, hard work and dedication will be possible, (made equally by all – not pushed onto the poor and working class)  to climb out of disaster (bequeathed by capitalist failure).
It will be done by organising a complete rebuild of the world in a completely new way, rational, internationally cooperatively and without insane nonsensical consumerist overconsumption for some, while others fester in grinding deprivation and poverty (the great majority, and most of all throughout the Third World).
No such future is possible while the world in owned and dominated by the tiny ruling class, appropriating to itself all wealth and power, solely on the basis of what it already owns – a eternal spiral of ever increasing accumulation that only expands and adds its power. Or would do for ever if the self-serving logic of profit-making and further accumulation did not contain the seeds of its own destruction, the fatal contradiction of “over-production”.
This is no Greek disaster but a single devastating worldwide cataclysm on a scale never seen, and far beyond even the horrifying failures that led to the First and then Second World Wars. 
The monopoly capitalist system of oppression and exploitation has hit the buffers because of its own internal contradictions, financially and  through the worldwide resistance it has engendered from the billions it exploits.
All that is missing is revolutionary understanding. It needs to be built urgently.
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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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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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles

Capitalism’s false justifications for its likely next victim of escalating war-provocations, driven by its need to divert the world and scapegoat blame for the its own catastrophic crisis failure 
US-lsrael War on Iran: The Myth of Limited Warfare

by James Petras *

The mounting threat of a US-lsraeli military attack against Iran is based on several factors including: (1) the recent military history of both countries in the region, (2) public pronouncements by US and Israeli political leaders, (3) recent and on-going attacks on Lebanon and Syria, prominent allies of Iran, (4) armed attacks and assassinations of Iranian scientists and security officials by proxy and/or terrorist groups under US or Mossad control, (5) the failure of economic sanctions and diplomatic coercion, (6) escalating hysteria and extreme demands for Iran to end legal, civilian use-related uranium enrichment, (7) provocative military ‘exercises’ on Iran’s borders and war games designed for intimidation and a dress rehearsal for a preemptive attack, (8) powerful pro-war pressure groups in both Washington and Tel Aviv including the major Israeli political parties and the powerful aipac in the US, (9) and lastly the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (Obama’s Orwellian Emergency Decree, March 16, 2012).
The US propaganda war operates along two tracks: the dominant message emphasizes the proximity of war and the willingness of the US to use force and violence. The second track targets the ‘liberal public’ playing down the war threat and arguing that reasonable policy makers are aware that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons, to confuse and undermine the majority public opinion, which is clearly opposed to more war preparations.
When the US and Israel talk of war, prepare for war and engage in pre-war provocations - they intend to go to war. Under present international political and military conditions an attack on Iran, initially by Israel with US support, is extremely likely, even as world economic conditions should dictate otherwise and negative strategic consequences will most likely reverberate throughout the world for decades to come.
Iran’s Capability
American and Israeli strategic policy makers do not agree on the consequences of Iran’s retaliation against an attack. For their part, the Israeli leaders minimize Iran’s military capacity to attack and damage the Jewish state, which is their only consideration. They count on their distance, their anti-missile shield and protection from US air and naval forces in the Gulf to cover their sneak attack. On the other hand, US military strategists know the Iranians are capable of inflicting substantial casualties on US warships, which would have to attack Iranian coastal installations in order to support or protect the Israelis.
The US government has now overtly committed itself to supporting an Israeli assault on Iran when it is launched. More specifically, Washington claims it will come to Israel’s defense unconditionally if it is attacked. How can Israel avoid being attacked when its planes are raining bombs and missiles on Iranian installations, military defenses and support systems, not to mention Iranian cities, ports and strategic infrastructure? Moreover, given the Pentagon’s collaboration and coordinated intelligence systems with the Israel Defense Forces, its role in identifying targets, routes and incoming missiles, as well as integrated weapons and ordinance supply chains will be critical to an idf attack. There is no way that the US can dissociate itself from the Jewish State’s war on Iran, once the attack has begun.
The Myths of Limited War: Geography
Washington and Tel Aviv claim and appear to believe that their planned assault on Iran will be a “limited war”, targeting limited objectives and lasting a few days or weeks -with no serious consequences.
We are told Israel’s brilliant generals have identified all the critical nuclear research facilities, which their surgical air strikes will eliminate without horrific collateral damage to the surrounding population. Once the alleged ‘nuclear weapons’ program is destroyed, all Israelis can resume their lives in full security knowing that another ‘existential’ threat has been eliminated. The Israeli notion of a war, limited in time and space, is absurd and dangerous.
To approach Iran’s nuclear facilities Israeli and US forces will confront well-equipped and defended bases, missile installations, maritime defenses and large-scale fortifications directed by the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Armed Forces. Moreover, the defense systems protecting nuclear facilities are linked by civilian highways, airfields, ports, and backed by a dual purpose (civilian-military) infrastructure, which includes oil refineries and a huge network of administrative offices. To ‘knock out’ the alleged nuclear sites will require expanding the geographic scope of the war. The scientific-technological capacity of the Iranian civilian nuclear program involves a wide swath of its research facilities, including universities, laboratories, manufacturing sites, and design centers. To destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear program would require Israel (and thus the US) to attack much more than research facilities or laboratories hidden under a remote mountain. It would require multiple, widespread assaults on targets throughout the country, in other words, a generalized war.
Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated that Iran will retaliate with a war of equivalence. Iran will match the breadth and scope of any attack with a corresponding counter-attack: ‘We will attack them at the same level as they attack us’. That means Iran will not confine its retaliation to merely trying to shoot down US and Israeli bombers in its airspace or launch missiles at offshore US warships in its waters but will take the war to equivalent targets in Israel and in US-occupied countries in and around the Gulf. Israel’s ‘limited war’ will become a generalized war extending throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Israel’s current delusional fetish about its elaborate missile defense system will be exposed as hundreds of high-powered missiles are launched from Teheran, Southern Lebanon and just beyond the Golan Heights.
The Myth of Limited War: Time Frame
Israeli military experts confidently expect to polish off their Iranian targets in a few days -some might think a mere weekend - and perhaps without the loss of even a single pilot. They expect the Jewish state will celebrate its brilliant victory in the streets of Tel Aviv and Washington. They are deluded by their own sense of superiority. Iran did not fight a brutal, decade-long war against the US-supplied Iraqi invaders and its western/Israeli military advisers, to just turn over and passively submit to a limited number of air and missile attacks by Israel. Iran is a young, educated mobilized society, which can draw on millions of reservists from across the political, ethnic, gender, religious spectrum, galvanized in support of their nation under attack. In a war to defend the homeland all internal differences disappear to confront the unprovoked Israeli-US attack threatening their entire civilization - its 5000-year culture and traditions, as well as its modern scientific advances and institutions. The first wave of US-lsraeli attacks will lead to ferocious retaliation, which will not be confined to the original areas of conflict, nor will any such act of Israeli aggression end when and if Iran’s nuclear research facilities are destroyed and some of its scientists, technicians and skilled workers are killed. The war will continue in time and extend geographically.
Multiple Points of Conflict
Just as any US-lsraeli attack on Iran will involve multiple targets, the Iranian military will also have a plethora of easily accessible strategic targets. Though it is difficult to predict exactly where and how Iran will retaliate, one thing is clear: The initial US-lsraeli strike will not go unanswered.
Given Israeli-US supremacy in long and medium range sea and air power, Iran will probably rely on short-range objectives. These would include the highly valued US military facilities and supply routes in adjoining terrain (Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan) and Israeli targets with missiles launched from Southern Lebanon and possibly Syria. If a few Iranian long-range missiles escape the Jewish State’s much vaunted ‘anti-missile dome’, Israeli population centers may pay a heavy price for their leaders’ recklessness and arrogance.
The Iranian counter-strike will lead to an escalation by US-lsraeli forces, extending and deepening their air and sea war to the entire Iranian national security system - military bases, ports, communication systems, command posts and government administrative centers - many in densely populated cities. Iran will counter by launching its greatest strategic asset: a coordinated ground attack involving the Revolutionary Guards together with their allies among the Iraqi Shia troops, against US forces in Iraq. It will coordinate attacks against US facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the growing nationalist-Islamic armed resistance.
The initial conflict, centered on so-called military objectives (scientific research facilities), will spread rapidly to economic targets, or what US and Israeli military strategists refer to as “dual civilian-military” targets. This would include oil fields, highways, factories, communications networks, television stations, water treatment facilities, reservoirs, power stations and administrative offices, such as the Defense Ministry and headquarters of the Republican Guard. Iran, faced with imminent destruction of its entire economy and infrastructure (which occurred in neighboring Iraq with the unprovoked US invasion of 2003), would retaliate by blocking the Straits of Hormuz and sending short range missiles in the direction of the principle oil fields and refineries of the Gulf States including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a mere 10 minute distance, crippling the flow of oil to Europe, Asia and the United States and plunging the world economy into deep depression.
According to US General Mathis, who commands all US forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, ‘an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for thr United States there’ (NY Times, 3/19/12) General Mathis “dire cost” estimate only take account of the US military losses, likely several hundred sailors on warships within missile distance of Iranian gunners.
However the most delusional and self-serving assessment of the outcome and consequences of an Israeli air attack on Iran, emanates from top Israeli leaders, academics and intelligence experts, who claim superior intelligence, superior defenses and supreme (if also racist) insight into the ‘Iranian mind’. Typical is Israeli Defense Minister Barak who boasts that any Iranian retaliation will, at worst inflict minimal casualties on the Israeli population.
The ‘Judeo-centric’ view of re-ordering the balance of power in the region, which is prevalent in leading Israeli war circles, overlooks the likelihood that war will not be decided by Israeli air strikes and anti-missile defenses. Iran ’s missiles cannot be easily contained, especially If they arrive several hundred a minute from three directions, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and possibly from Iranian submarines. Secondly, the collapse of its oil imports will devastate Israel’s highly energy dependent economy. Thirdly, Israel’s principal allies, especially the US and the EU, will be severely strained as they are dragged into Israel’s war and find themselves defending the straits of Hormuz, their army garrisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their oil fields and military bases in the Gulf. Such a conflict could ignite the Shia majorities in Bahrain and in the strategic oil-rich provinces of Saudi Arabia. The generalized war will have a devastating effect on the price of oil and the world economy. It will provoke the fury of consumers and workers rage everywhere as factories close and powerful shocks throughout the fragile financial system result in a world depression.
Conclusion
An Israeli-US war against Iran is indissolubly linked to the asymmetrical US-lsraeli relationship, which sidelines and censors any critical US military and political analysis. Because Israel’s Zionist power configuration in the US can now harness US military power in support of Israel’s drive for regional dominance, Israeli leaders and most of their military feel free to engage in the most outrageous military and destructive adventures, knowing full well that in the first and last instance they can rely on the US to support them.

(Global Research quoted in Granma)
* James Petras is a retired Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, Canada, •

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Honduras expands as Pentagon hub in Central America

John Lindsay-Poland
DESPITE persistent reports of serious corruption and human rights abuses by the Honduran army and police, the Pentagon increased its contract spending in Honduras to $53.8 million in Fiscal Year 2011, up by 71% from the previous year. President Obama’s budget also proposes increased assistance to the Honduran military in the 2013 foreign aid budget administered by the State Department.
Much of the Pentagon contract spending in Honduras last year - nearly $24 million - specifically names work on the Palmerola U.S. air base, known as Soto Cano, according to contract data posted on usaspending.gov and compiled by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (for). Contracting, Consulting, Engineering (cce), a construction firm in Annapolis, Maryland, was awarded a $15 million contract last August to build new troop barracks at Soto Cano.
The U.S. military also spends money on periodic exercises that are supposed to be for training of visiting U.S. forces. These are not counted in foreign aid totals, but they are being used in Honduras both to give training and to leave behind constructed facilities for Honduran forces. A four-month exercise scheduled to begin on March 12, known as “Beyond the Horizons” is a case in point.
“Beyond the Horizons” will include exercise related construction on a Honduran infantry battalion base in Naco, Cortes, according to a contract solicitation posted by U.S. Army South. Earlier contracts showed U.S. construction of bases in Caratasca (on the Atlantic coast) and Guanaja (in the Caribbean), in addition to the larger Soto Cano presence.
Pentagon contracts in the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole increased by $31.5 million in 2011, or 8.7%, to $417 million, excluding contracts for fuel. Contracts in the Bahamas, where the Navy operates the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (autec) off of Andros Island, totaled $93 million. autec includes a deep water weapons range, and is tied to a headquarters in West Palm Beach, 177 miles to the northwest.
The military last year signed $163 million in contracts for work in Cuba, where the Navy’s (illegal) Guantánamo base continues to operate a prison for terrorism suspects held without trial.
Pentagon contract numbers do not include costs paid in the United States, including for personnel directly employed by the federal government, such as the thousands of Navy sailors on aircraft carriers deployed to the region.
Nor do they count arms sales or U.S. military aid administered through the State Department’s traditional foreign aid programs.
The Just the Facts website posted an analysis of the Obama budget request for military and economic aid to Latin America in 2013, which also showed an increase in proposed U.S. military aid in Honduras and a decline in Colombia, Haiti and Mexico.
Military contracts in Guatemala included funds for the design and construction in 2012 of a “counter-narco terrorism operations center” in Champerico, a counternarcotics maintenance facility and pier Puerto San Jose, and training and force protection facilities in Coban. (Excerpts from voselsoberano.com) •

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Remembering the massacre horrors capitalism imposes on Latin America 

CASA de las Americas in Havana opened its doors on March 24 to the Day of Memory, Truth and Justice. The event, convened by the embassies of the Republic of Argentina and El Salvador, was attended by many of the survivors of the 20th century dictatorships inflicted upon Latin America.
Prompted by the coup d’etat on March 24, 1976 in Argentina and the assassination of Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero on March 24, 1980 in El Salvador, the event, which included accounts given by those involved, acquired the value of a spiritual tribute to hope. Far from being destroyed by the suffering resulting from their actions, they once again joined voices to salute life and, looking back at the past from the fullness of the present, raise the banner of “Never again!”
The Day of Memory for Truth and Justice was instituted in Argentina on March 24, 2002, in order to condemn state terrorism, repression and torture and to give younger generations an awareness of what took place.
Argentine Ambassador Juliana Merino affirmed, “The dictatorship in Argentina wanted to destroy at its root the idea of social justice as an essential value and persecuted a generation which constituted a very important social movement.”
She recalled the methodology followed by the regime which “dared all,” from the theft of babies to the disappearances of people whose whereabouts are still unknown, in an attempt to “erase from our people’s consciousness the values of justice and internalize fear and terror.”
The exemplary conduct and figure of the Salvadoran Catholic priest Monsignor Romero, who personally suffered repression for denouncing the monstrosities being committed against the people by the regime, was reaffirmed at the event by Domingo Santa Cruz, Salvadoran ambassador to Cuba.
The priest who became “the voice of the voiceless” and categorically refused to carry out his fundamental activities until the human massacre had ended, was threatened by terrorist groups until he was finally assassinated in Church while celebrating mass.
Ariel Bergamino, the ambassador of Uruguay, recalled that more mass burials of the disappeared have recently been uncovered in his country and, in fulfilling the ruling of the International Court of Human Rights, the Uruguayan state has assumed responsibility for those events in violation of human rights, which took place 30 years ago, in a reference to the disappearance of the daughter-in-law and granddaughter of the poet Juan Gelman.
The existence of a world stigmatized by irony - absurdly calling “dictators” heads of revolutionary and progressive governments like those of Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega, Fidel and Raul and “democrats” those who, sponsored by imperialism, eliminate peoples - was the theme of remarks by Luis Cabrera, ambassador of Nicaragua, who remembered not only the fallen in the region but all victims of injustice who gave the best of their youth in an attempt to change the world.
“To them, we, the survivors, owe our survival,” he stated. He asked for remembrance of the preceding generations and those fighting the empire every day in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya and in Palestine; for those who have refused to surrender, and who, tike the five Cuban heroes unjustly incarcerated in the United States, constitute “the dignity of all of us.”
Chilean Tato Aires, director of the Allende Memorial, and Argentines Carolina Aguiar and Maria Santucho also spoke of their painful experiences.
“I am the survivor of a family ferociously persecuted in Argentina and annihilated in ‘75. We lived underground because of my parents’ political affiliations. We were betrayed and then kidnapped; my sisters, mother and I were taken to one of the most ferocious extermination camps with minimal survival rates,” Santucho explained.
“I feel deeply proud of my last name because of what it means in the revolutionary struggle of my country and proud of having belonged to an exceptional generation of men and women prepared to give up their lives for their country. I feel committed to those young people who did not have the fortune to survive. 

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
May Day in Cuba  - half a million celebrate
Massive demonstrations of support for the Revolution and commitment to socialism took place on May Day in all of Cuba’s 15 provinces. Workers and the entire people carrying banners and posters filled Plazas and avenues across the country.
President Raul Castro presided during Cuba’s national May Day march in which 500,000 participants celebrated International Workers’ Day, in Havana’s Jose Martí Plaza de la Revolución.
The march began with a speech by Salvador Valdes Mesa Secretary General of the Cuban Workers Federation (ctc) and a member of the Party’s Political Bureau. He described the mobilizations across the country as genuine expressions of the workers’ and the people’s support for the Revolution and their commitment to socialism.
He said, “We are celebrating a day of reaffirmation and commitment to the fulfillment of the Social and Economic Policy Guidelines approved at the 6th Communist Party of Cuba Congress.”
Valdes added that workers and the trade union movement are the principal protagonists in efforts to perfect Cuba’s economic model, acknowledging that the current economic battle is not without obstacles and hardship. He called for increased production, improved discipline on the job and greater productivity.
Workers from the health sector carrying an enormous banner reading ‘Preserve and perfect socialism’ led the march, in which leaders of the Party, government and mass organizations also participated.
Health workers were awarded the honor of leading the march this year in recognition of the importance of their work to the country and the role they play in Cuba’s international collaboration, currently working in 66 nations around the globe.
Workers and communities were organized into 23 blocks, each assigned a place within the march, and carried an incredible variety of banners, posters and photographs of Fidel, Raúl, Che and revolutionaries from around the world, including Karl Marx and Lenin.
Most evident were images of the Cuban Five, unjustly convicted for their anti-terrorist activities in the United States: Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio GuerArero, Fernando González and René González. Posters and banners called for their immediate release and definitive return to Cuba.
Witnessing the event from a tribunal in the Plaza were 1,900 special guests, trade unionists and members of solidarity groups from 117 countries. •