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 1431  16th August 2013                                                          25p fortnightly

Bloody Pinochet-like butchery of the Egyptian coup exposes the foul hypocrisy of Western “democracy and freedom” lies. The underlying fascist reality of bourgeois capitalist rule gets clearer by the day from universal secret police-state surveillance to endless drone assassination and “punishments”. But lessons emerge because of capitalist weakness and desperation at the greatest ever collapse and failure of its private profit system now being dragged into Slump and World War disaster bigger than in all history. Ever sharper contradictions of the crisis are forcing revolution necessarily closer to the surface as the only way to end a slide into total turmoil and destruction. But the world masses are still denied the clear leadership and understanding vital for finally ending capitalism, not least because of the fake -“left” capitulations to imperialist lies, caught out supporting the reactionary side in Egypt, Trot and Stalinist (Lalkar/Proletarian) both. Need for Leninism grows daily 

The daily more obviously murderous brutality and repressiveness of the Western-funded Egyptian military’s bloody coup, now on a par with the 1973 Pinochet fascist takeover in Chile, and the foul US death-squad drone killings of fighters and civilians in Yemen, in response to the humiliating panic withdrawal of embassy staff and officials forced on Britain and America, and are further signals of the trouble the ruling class is in, as its catastrophic crisis unravels and world revolt grows. 
Imperialism is increasingly facing collapse and defeat across the world forcing it to show its hand as the brutal and fascist dictatorship system that it actually has always been, via stooge military, torture, invasion and indiscriminate terror everywhere.
Its fraud of “democracy” is now even more a lying hypocritical joke, torn up and overridden or manipulated and twisted everywhere.
The lessons this teaches the worlds masses in the need for revolutionary struggle as the only way to end this greed ridden tyranny for good are invaluable.  
So too are the lessons from the grotesque continuing barbarity of the artificially stimulated Syrian “revolt”, a bogus extension of the “Arab Spring” (as with Libya), provoked and transmuted into a vicious civil war by Western funding (direct and via the Gulf monarchies), “training” and arms, taking advantage of long unresolved sectarian and societal tensions which local Ba’athist opportunism in Damascus and its revisionist “communist” support, has never dealt with.
Imperialism wants to muddy the waters of the mass revolution in Egypt, intimidating genuine revolt and stepping-up the warmaking needed to evade crisis collapse (the ruling class believes).
Underlining all this even further is the storming presidential success of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF revolutionary nationalist movement in Zimbabwe, decisively seeing off the West’s attempts to topple them via crudely manipulated electoral racketeering and an international media onslaught of fabrication, misrepresentation and provocations.
A deluge of demented and absurd lies about alleged “vote rigging by ZANU” has followed, dutifully hyped-up by the BBC capitalist-state controlled broadcast machine, and the monopoly-owned capitalist press, which is nothing but sour grapes because imperialism’s manipulations, bribery and media saturated brainwashing have failed completely.
The bogus, petty bourgeois “Movement for Democratic Change”, artificially set up and sustained by the CIA and British intelligence to try and topple the anti-colonialism of the Mugabe-ites, has fallen flat on its face.
The MDC alone has been reported (with little balancing ZANU commentary) and supported one-sidedly as if it were the wronged-victor in an astonishingly biased campaign with every specious allegation reported as gospel by these dutiful reactionary media outlets, glibly repeating what they are told by the intelligence agencies.
But the play-acting of the Western hypocritical “concern for the democratic rights of the masses”, combined with its arrogant assumed rights to judge and intervene in country after country (which gives off a foul enough stench at the best of times), is a hundred times more disgusting while the West simultaneously stands to one side watching the uncontested and internationally “recognised” and “democratic” Morsi presidency drowned in blood in Egypt, with just a few quiet murmurs to the massacring generals about “not taking things too far, old boy” (including the tamest of responses by the disgusting opportunist Labour Party).
No threats of years of economic blockade are being made to Cairo, like the sanctions strangling and starving the economy in Zimbabwe (and Myanmar, and Iraq, and Libya and Iran etc etc) for over a decade, and only the tamest of comments about “suspending” military aid temporarily (!!!) as Labour ineffectually made as a token suggestion this week (knowing it will not happen); no drones are sent in to “stop the violence” as demonstrators are supposedly cold-bloodedly shot down; no potential NATO blitzkrieg and punishment killings threatened because the “regime's generals are shooting down their own people” (an emotive and hysterical phrasing now strangely absent when it is imperialism’s own stooges doing the butchery).
For all their limitations from a Marxist point of view, ZANU-PF continues to doggedly pursue land redistribution and other anti-colonialist measures, returning to local ownership the giant farming estates purloined in the early twentieth century by brutal British invasion and colonialist theft of up to 80% of the country’s useful land.
Far from being a “betrayal” it is what the bitter revolution against the foul Ian Smith UDC fascists and their Nazi torturing Selous Scouts (and the British too) was fought for, at great cost.
It is massively popular within Zimbabwe and among African masses all around. 
Leninism could wish for more clarity from ZANU about the nature of the world and the need for far greater theoretical struggle, giving all the world a much deeper perspective of the slump, and of the crisis of imperialism.
But its resistance helps teach further lessons everywhere in the real meaning of Western “freed’m, democracy, and the rule of law”, the Goebbels mantra justification for at least four major wars since 2001 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria (by proxy) and endless war-drum banging, sanctions, sabotage, assassinations and threats against many other alleged “rogue states” like Sudan, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and others. 
One of the biggest lessons of all these events for the working class will be the continuing exposure of the bankruptcy and duplicity of the fake-“left’s" and their pretences to be for “revolution” and the “overturn of capitalism”.
With some variations, they have presented all of it upside down and arse-about-face, with the forces inflicting defeat on crisis-riddled capitalism declared to be the enemy to focus on, or somehow “bringing it on themselves” (the vile excuse by the Egyptian ambassador on the radio for the massacre in Cairo essentially punted out in “left theoretical” form).
The crucial issue is that imperialism is reeling from blow after blow; in the defeats by Hezbollah and the Assad regime of its foul, terrorising mass murdering counter-revolutionary “insurgency” in Syria; from the near takeover of whole swathes of southern Yemen by the al-Qaeda rebels; from the challenge to French imperialist control in Mali; from the exposure of its bogus “democracy” fraud in Egypt giving the entire world another lesson in the cynicism and fraudulence of the whole abstract “freedom and democracy” racket (which has been the greatest of all capitalist weapons for two centuries hiding the reality of its actual non-stop bourgeois class dictatorship) and confirming the barbarous fascist reality of capitalist rule); doing nothing about this blatant overriding of “democracy” even as it pretends to be “concerned about electoral probity” in Zimbabwe, because the CIA/MI6 has been soundly thrashed in its efforts to manipulate the voting (as it does with “democracy” everywhere).
Other movements are rising, however confusedly in Somalia, Nigeria, Central African Republic, the Congo etc etc. Latin America is increasingly going out of control, even though a long way from clear revolutionary struggle and dangerously vulnerable to coups itself, as already carried out in Honduras and Paraguay (by the Obama fascists ).
Such blows and defeats for all their confused messiness, are elements of the world struggle against imperialism which help loosen not simply its physical repression and control but also the ideological grip of anti-communism and “freedom” bullshit which holds the world’s masses back, bound to illusions in “having a say” and “steady bit-by-bit” reformist progress without any “unpleasant” revolutionary upheaval or “totalitarianism”.
But far from seeing and explaining the importance of such defeats inflicted on the all-encompassing world wide exploitation tyranny of the monopoly capitalist order, led by “top dog” US imperialism (which aims to bluster and bully its way through the bankruptcy of the US economy and the catastrophic general failure of the whole capitalist system with “shock and awe” intimidation of the rest of the world) the “lefts” help bolster imperialism’s demented “war on terror” against “Muslim fundamentalists” who must be “wiped out” because of their “threat to our peaceful, calm, prosperous and democratic way of life”.
What monstrous crap!
This Goebbels nonsense is one of imperialism’s central propaganda lies to cover up its own sole responsibility for the devastation and turmoil now tearing the world apart.
The “lefts” even provide ever more elaborate and convoluted “theoretical” explanations, to “condemn terrorism” and Islamic fundamentalism, as they have done ever since the 9/11 attacks struck a shattering blow to American imperialist confidence and as they continue to do now in Egypt.
To set up the Third World revolt philosophically as being an alternative cause, or another source, of reaction in the world is a cowardly lie, a million miles from the “revolutionary socialist” (or even sometimes alleged “Leninist”) principles claimed by the 57 varieties of fake-“lefts”.
It all echoes the “condemnation of terror” which all these groups rushed to make after the 9/11 guerrilla war attacks on the New York World Trade Centre in 2001.
Discounting the blow to Washington dominance and prestige because “al-Qaeda is a reactionary ideology” and terrorism was “beyond the pale” (bolstered by twisted and misrepresented “Leninist theory”) was wooden anti-Marxism then, and denouncing the Muslim Brotherhood now or the insurgency in Yemen now is just as much so now.
Not since the Second International betrayals of 1914, when the social-chauvinism of all the European reformist socialist parties turned to open support for their own national ruling classes as the war pressures erupted, has such vile grovelling and opportunism been on show.
The then Labour parties of Europe used the alleged “principle” of “defence of the Motherland” to help drag millions of workers into  the industrialised carnage of the trenches, covering up for the capitalist ruling classes who were slugging it out against their imperialist rivals to redivide the colonial world and the rich plunder they got from world exploitation (still continuing).
Only the principled stand of a tiny minority of parties, Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the lead, stood for the downfall by class war of the home ruling class in each country, the revolutionary defeatism policies that eventually became the Russian revolution, overturning first Tsarism and ending the Russian war front fighting in 1917 and through socialist revolution triggering the general end of the appalling horrors in the trenches in 1918.   
Now a similar opportunism sees both Trotskyist and revisionist Stalinist fake-“left” capitulate to imperialist war propaganda in another form.
Most sharply in focus is Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood has been blamed by every fake-“left” group and bourgeois “left” liberal analyst for “bringing things on their own head” and all variously swallowing the Tony Blair black-is-white spin declaring the petty bourgeois and reactionary forces gathered in Tahrir Square to be a so-called “second wave of revolution” either cheered on openly, as by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party has done, now joined by the Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian CPGB-ML as well (see below), or cheered on tacitly, hidden behind a few token warnings about the danger of it “going too far” with the army.
But academic caveats about the dangers of violent coups, made while simultaneously pouring the poison out onto “fundamentalism” and “islamism” (as the Weekly Worker CPGB does for example, painting it as “just as” or even “more” reactionary than imperialism), as being “anti-democrats and dictators”, or simply denouncing it as CIA stoogery (as Lalkar/Proletarian paints the al-Qaeda), or as “terrorists” (which amounts to much the same thing) is a pathetic, duplicitous and opportunist excuse for a complete failure of politics.
If the resistance is “reactionary Islam” which is “just as fascist” as the West then all “Stop the War” or “No to Western intervention” sloganising is rendered even more sterile and pointless than usual, since most ordinary people would either go along with the Western military “police” repression of such horrors if they were truly so, or would at least not object.
It is a monstrous twisting of reality and an utter betrayal.
It does nothing, quite deliberately, to warn of the real class forces at work and the real reaction underway in the world, driven solely and entirely by world monopoly capitalist imperialist domination and the desperate stepping up of its barbaric and tyrannous rule to try and escape the intractable and unstoppable catastrophic crisis breakdown of its system.
The ruling class has reached the end of its 800 year long historical purpose but refuses to let the world move forwards into socialist rationality, ready to destroy everything rather than give up its sweet indolence, power and degenerate luxury. 
The fake-“lefts” are caught on the wire by thee events, the real nature of their pretend revolutionary politics sharply delineated as complete opportunist capitulation to imperialist pressure and intriguing.
This degenerate posturing by the “lefts” of all varieties from the most dogged and “hard-nut” “principled” Stalinist revisionism, to the most “oppositional” anti-Stalinist Trotskyism, is deadly poison for the working class and always has been, leading them up the garden path and straight onto the gun muzzles of the ruling class over and over again.
Their “democracy” illusions, social-pacifist “protest”, and the festering hatred of workers state discipline and the dictatorship of the proletariat which must underpin it, is the hallmark of these dilettantes and play-acting poseurs, all bound in by their petty bourgeois attitudes and narrowness.
Desperate back-pedalling is now underway by all these “fakes” to talk their way out of the Egyptian events as the reality of outright butchering reaction has made itself unmistakably clear in piles of hundreds of bodies and thousands of maimed and injured ordinary and poorer people, confirming what the EPSR’s Leninism alone was already warning when the middle class crowds were in Tahrir Square two months ago, that the hyped-up and ludicrously exaggerated populist movement (“filling the streets with 33 million people” as the Egyptian ambassador absurdly declared, post-slaughter, on BBC’s Today programme this week – (did he count them??)) was clearly different in nature to the initial spontaneous anti-imperialist revolts of early 2011 against the Mubarak gangster dictatorship. 
The middle class nature of the protests should cause it to be treated with the greatest circumspection, Leninist theory declared, even while the bourgeois media deluge was painting a picture of more “peoples’ mass movement for freedom”.
Since when has capitalism been for revolution was the obvious first question to ask.
It rapidly thereafter emerged as the reactionary movement it was, made up from the business class, army, former bureaucrats and petty bourgeois backwardness cheering the army helicopters etc. 
Any “genuine” progressive elements lost in the middle were at best naïve “democrats” or petty bourgeois anti-theory anarchists, now learning painful lessons about the need for much deeper revolutionary understanding and coherence.  
What the fake-“lefts” do not warn about or even see, and cannot grasp with their blinkered vision, is the real revolutionary upheaval and ferment which is spreading in the world and has been for decades, and especially so since the turn to all-out non-stop warmongering and increasingly open fascist “shock and awe” bullying by the American Empire domination of the world, from the 1998 NATO blitzing of Serbia through the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and, of course, the endless genocidal terrorising and oppression of the benighted Palestinian people by imperialism’s attack dogs in the Middle East, the Zionist fascist land-theft occupation of their lands.
Yemen is a case in point.
Imperialism has been humiliated by its sudden and forced withdrawal from the peninsula. 
Whatever “vindication” the fascist-minded supporters of non-stop world secret police surveillance might claim for the sinister all-penetrating spy posts at America’s National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ because they have “foiled an al-Qaeda plot”, the reality is that imperialism has had to scuttle the Arab peninsula in a panic withdrawal.
It is another humiliation for capitalist world dominance with shades of the scuttling from Vietnam in the mid-1970s (if yet a very long way from anything like that still rankling defeat).
For however temporary a period, days or weeks for some of the embassies, the writ of US empire authority no longer runs continuously, not just in Yemen itself but on the whole Arab peninsula with its valuable stooge regimes of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states just next door, crucial for control of the entire Middle East and its vital resources.
The panic and shame of the Western withdrawal is a further loosening of the world control imposed on tens of millions of the downtrodden in the region and throughout the Third World.
The masses everywhere will have been delighted.
Recruitment to the rebellions will increase. 
Ripples of further “instability” will spread far and wide from this incident throughout the increasingly turmoil ridden Middle East, into important compliant stooge regimes like Saudi, already a centre of massive discontent and festering rebelliousness and across the water into the ferment in the Horn of Africa in Somalia, and even Kenya.
Riyadh’s primitivism, after all, is the original generator of the bourgeois nationalist al-Qaeda revolt against the backward tribal feudalism and corruption which has smothered the whole Gulf Arab region for decades, stifling all intellectual development and progress under such primitive social relations that they were out of date and overturned everywhere else in the Middle Ages (and are kept going in only horribly corrupted gangster-ish form now by modern imperialism, – long after such class relations become untenable in themselves – only because of the strategic and mineral resources they control).
Holding down the anti-imperialist revolt in Yemen has been a major issue for decades and with devastating consequences for imperialist control if it goes wrong.
Yemen has a long history of anti-Western revolt, including a significant period when South Yemen had a workers state socialist regime following the revolutionary expulsion of British imperialist oppression from Aden.
It has also been one of the major flashpoints for the spontaneous upheavals of the genuine “Arab Spring” revolutionism, alongside Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain, focussed around hostility and hatred for the imperialist stoogery which has ruled Yemen since its 1960s pro-communist revolt in the south was subsumed back into North Yemen at the time of the Gorbachevite liquidation of the Soviet Union.
War has raged between the Saudis and the insurgents in Yemen for some years with secret American aid, recently revealed, which itself will further escalate the growing rage of the region’s masses. The bourgeois press has a better grasp of the US setbacks than the fakes:
It was revealed in February that the CIA was secretly using an airbase in Saudi Arabia to conduct its drone assassination campaign in Yemen. Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks had earlier exposed the scale of US covert involvement.
AQAP is monitored by Saudi intelligence as well as the CIA and MI6, which both have liaison officers in Sana’a and Riyadh. The Nigerian underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009, was radicalised in Yemen while claiming to be there studying Arabic. Earlier that year the group tried to assassinate the Saudi security chief, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, with a bomb concealed on the attacker’s body.
...But it comes as no surprise that the poorest country in the Arab world and the home of al-Qaida’s most active local “franchise” is the apparent focus of the international terrorist alert that has led to the closure of western embassies across the Middle East.
Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) emerged in Yemen in 2007 after the organisation’s effective defeat in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. It is the regular target of US drone strikes. Little is known about the links between it and al-Qaida central in Pakistan. But it is sustained by local factors including wild terrain, economic misery, tribal divisions and the weakness of the Yemeni state, battered by the Arab spring and the threat from secessionist movements.
AQAP is led by Nasser al-Wahayshi, a charismatic Yemeni jihadist who has created “a unified and cohesive militant organisation that has been involved not only in several transnational terrorist attacks but also in fighting an insurgency that has succeeded in capturing and controlling large areas of territory”, according to Stratfor, an international security consultancy.
In recent weeks Wahayshi, 36, has reportedly been appointed to a senior al-Qaida position by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s Egyptian successor. Wahayshi, who was Bin Laden’s private secretary in Afghanistan, fled to Iran in 2001 and was extradited to Yemen in 2003. In 2006 he escaped from a prison in Sana’a in a mass breakout that did much to invigorate the country’s violent extremists.
The group has been under heavy pressure over the past 18 months. Its fighters have been pushed back to desert hideouts from much of the territory they captured in southern Yemen. Despite these setbacks, they have continued publishing an English-language online magazine called Inspire, a magnet for jihadists from Pakistan to Mali.
AQAP regularly attacks Yemeni security and intelligence officers, with more than 60 killed in the past two years, according to the country’s interior ministry.

**************
If the barrage of US drone strikes over the last week weakened al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate, the terrorist organization that has captured Washington’s attention isn’t acting like it. Not only is it vowing another attack, it has prompted the US to keep its Yemen embassy closed while reopening all the others – implicitly highlighting the weakness of the US policy of launching drone strikes first and asking questions later.
Intelligence chatter indicating an imminent attack by al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula (Aqap) prompted two reactions by Washington. The first was to order a dramatic, temporary shutdown at embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East and Africa. The second was to order a surge in drone strikes in Yemen.
A Saturday strike marked the ninth such attack in two weeks. At least 38 suspected “militants” are reported dead. Throughout 2013, the US has launched 21 airstrikes in Yemen, the vast majority from drones; displacing Pakistan as the epicenter of the covert air war, which has seen 18 strikes thus far, according to statistics compiled by the Long War Journal, which tracks the drones closely.
Should that trend hold, it would mean there would be more annual US drone strikes in Yemen than in Pakistan, the home of al-Qaida’s central leadership, for the first time in the entire post-9/11 era. The steady rise in drone attacks strikes some as an ominous sign about America’s true capabilities in Yemen four years after identifying Aqap as a major terrorist threat.
“The US doesn’t seem to have good human intelligence [in Yemen]. It’s essentially bombing and hoping, which is neither sustainable nor wise,” said Gregory Johnsen, author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia.
“It doesn’t seem to have an impact on al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula.”
The strikes, conducted under parallel programs run by the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, are significant not only for their intensity and timing. A US official acknowledged to the New York Times that they are no longer targeting simply the top tier of leadership in Aqap – an expansion that may be hard to reconcile with President Obama’s May pledge to rein in the drone campaign.
But while Obama indicated he would restrict the drone campaign during a May 23 speech at the National Defense University, his criteria for using lethal force left the CIA and the military with significant leeway. He did not pledge to only kill senior leaders of terrorist organizations – although his reference to “highly skilled al-Qaida commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives” may have left that impression.
Expanding the pool of eligible targets for strikes is rarely a sign that the power launching them believes itself to be winning. Yet such expansion has been a feature of the drone campaigns in Yemen and Pakistan before it: intelligence and military officials have succeeded in both countries to launch strikes against suspected militants without even knowing their names, something known by the shorthand “signature strikes.”
Any individual strike might perhaps be sound; or have a tactical effect on Aqap. But the organization hardly sounds like it’s under stress.

To declare all this impact on imperialism as “reactionary” because Al-Qaeda has been on the wrong side in Libya or was once involved in the anti-Soviet sabotage of socialist Afghanistan in the 1980s, and thereby declaring them to be simply “reactionary agents of imperialism” or “CIA instruments” (which amounts to much the same thing) is the mark of wooden and opportunist thinking typical of the Stalinism.   
Crude, sometimes misguided, ideologically weird, and backward as some of the world revolt can be with its bizarre and nutty religiosity (even taking it into self-defeating sectarian infighting at times, as in Syria or Libya), this unstoppable eruption will not go away but can only massively increase.
It will be obliged to struggle for, and learn a better and clearer understanding, finding its way eventually to discover and develop the scientific socialist revolutionary leadership that alone will get the world out from under the greatest disintegration, slump and warmongering disaster in all of world history. 
The multiple forms of insurgency, suicide bombings, “terror attacks” and now the mass street rebellions of 2011 onwards, will coalesce into or be superseded by a powerful tide of consciously socialist struggle, that will ultimately sweep away capitalist rule for good.
What holds them back is the failure of revolutionary theory, stretching all the way back to the first weaknesses in the leadership grasp of the titanically important and successful Soviet Union whose staggering achievements over 70 years have permanently shifted human history forwards as will eventually be universally re-understood.  
Only Stalinist retreat from revolution, failing to grasp world events and degenerating more and more into revisionist opportunism finally ended its progress, its final ripened revisionism (with roots in Stalin’s errors) under Gorbachev shallowly capitulating to notions of the “free market” and abandoning the crucial defence of the workers state.
It pointlessly liquidated the USSR completely and allowed a grotesque capitalist restoration, urged on by the petty bourgeois “political revolution” garbage of the anti-communist Trotskyists who joined every Western counter-revolutionary provocation like the Hungarian and Czech “uprisings” and the bogus fascist-tinged Solidarnosc “trade union” in Poland, and now back every Western reactionary “anti-totalitarian” movement from Libya to Syria. 
The failure to sustain Leninist understanding has seen disillusionment world wide (temporarily) in Marxist communist leadership, the vacuum filled for the moment with local cultural traditions like Muslimism, altered and adapted to suit revolutionary struggle (as “moderate” petty bourgeois class collaborating Muslims never cease pointing out, to distance themselves from the revolutionary anti-imperialist content of the “fundamentalisms”).
Plenty of complications and contradictions beset this substitute ideology, making the analysis of the Middle East turmoil extremely complex, not least in the partial compromises made by the Morsi-ites in Egypt with imperialism to gain and sustain the presidency, and the MB’s illusions in “democracy” in the first place, for example.
The contradictory role played by Al-Qaeda or the Taliban is just as difficult, one minute fighting against Sovietism, the next for national liberation against the Western occupation in Afghanistan, Yemen or Mali and setting back imperialism, the next helping feed the sectarian turmoil and chaos in Syria, and Iraq, which Washington and the backward Gulf states are sponsoring, or which imperialism itself has even intervened in directly with all-out nazi-blitzkrieging as in Libya (where Al-Qaeda and Sunni elements were also on the wrong side).
But far from clarifying these muddy waters, deliberately stirred up by Western intelligence agency interventions, and local counter-revolutionary intrigue from the Gulf feudalists and Zionist intelligence (possibly the most sophisticated and ruthless in the world) in Syria and Libya and Egypt, the “left” feeds out even worse confusion.
In doing so it tangles itself in ever more glaring contradictions, the only common point being that they mostly fall into line with the imperialist supported movements.
The Trot groups continue ludicrously to suggest that the grotesque atrocities of the counter-revolutionary Syrian “rebellion” are some progressive “Arab Spring” development, even while it is supported by the most reactionary forces on the planet including the degenerate wealthy feudalism of the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, and all the major imperialist powers.
It is nothing but the counter-revolutionary stunts against East Europe now modified to “take-out” the victim states which Washington and Tel Aviv deem insufficiently quiet and compliant to imperialist rule.
The Trots even still declare the Libyan “uprising” to have been a people’s revolt despite its overt monarchist, petty bourgeois stooge and racist character (including the foul war-crime murder-by-iron-bar-buggery of Muammar Gaddafi cheered on by Washington), the massive NATO-nazi blitzkrieg backing and bombing destruction which backed it up, and the festering mess of gangsterism, warlordism, comprador stoogery, and torturing brutality that has been left in place of the relatively equitable society that Gaddafi’s anti-imperialist revolution had achieved, despite his also somewhat bizarre individualist non-Marxist “Green book” ideology.    
The Stalinists from the CPGB-ML get into equally disastrous convolutions; falling on the right side just about over Libya and Syria but taking a wooden and unLeninist position of unconditional support for Gaddafi’s flawed regime first of all and the even more limited Assad regime in Syria.
Instead of following Leninist principles of calling for a defeat of the reactionary forces of imperialism ranged against them (because they refused to fall into line completely with imperialism and to intimidate the Middle East rebellion), but with no illusions in the regime as a future for the working class to follow (Lenin’s anti-Kornilov united front with the treacherous bourgeois Kerensky parliament in August 1917 being the model), the “supporters” mislead the world working class with illusions in these bourgeois nationalist regimes and the reforms they made, declared to be a foundation for future progress and a way forwards.
It is utterly non-revolutionary, overtly reformist gibberish, reflecting the true opportunist nature of all the museum-Stalinist social-pacifist politics.
Only revolution can now “defend” the gains of the working class and take it forwards.
Even if the vacillating petty bourgeois nationalist Assad government has made some partial concessions to the working class, they are inevitably subject to the hurricane onslaught of the world capitalist crisis now unstoppably unravelling universally on a scale never before seen in history, irresistibly wiping out such reformist gains everywhere including in even the richest countries.
They were certainly never going to be left intact in one of the smaller nations of the world, even if the nation itself somehow remains intact.
Such uncritical support for Assad also leaves the Stalinists subject to going along with everything the regime says, including Assad's sectarian condemnation of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Or they find themselves woodenly condemning all the other movements themselves, all analysed in isolation and with no reference to the wider picture with imperialism at its centre. 
As a result they find themselves tied in complete theoretical knots elsewhere.
Most obviously they are confronted with the problem that the Hamas leadership in the Gaza strip section of Palestine is a supporter of the “rebels” in Syria for both sectarian reasons and from grudges against Syria’s past vacillations over support for the anti-Zionist struggle. 
Furthermore, as part of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which is the parent body which generated Hamas in the first place, it has also backed the anti-Gaddafi “rebellion” in Libya, again for various sectarian reasons.
But Lalkar/Proletarian declares, equally undialectically, that it is a “duty” of revolutionaries to totally support the Hamas leadership! (after abandoning its initial eulogistic support for Mahmoud Abbas once the CIA and Zionist collusion of the Palestinian Authority become public - as usual covered up by the Stalinists).
So they simultaneously call for total support for Assad, and for the brilliantly organised anti-Zionist fighting force of the Lebanese Hezbollah, which has helped recently achieve significant victories over the Syrian subversion and sabotaging terror funded by the West, and at the same time support the Hamas fighters the Hezbollah are in conflict with!!
Could blinkered confusion get any worse?
Well yes it could, as the latest Proletarian declares its essential support for the “revolution” against the Morsi-ites, feeding the propaganda nonsense that the overturn of the MB was a “mass popular uprising”.
In true Stalinist style the paper avoids saying specifically that it supports the coup, to avoid having to polemicise and explain itself in the future, (a show of the classic anti-polemical philosophical marsh mallow-ism which has helped destroy the world communist movement). 
But if not explicit, the eulogistic tone says it all:

Under pressure from mass protests, the like of which have never before taken place in Egypt, the Egyptian armed forces overthrew President Mohamed Morsi on Wednesday 3 July and appointed Adli Mansour, the head of the supreme constitutional court, as the interim president at the head of a new ‘civilian’ government.
Thirty-five million people across Egypt are believed to have taken to the streets over recent weeks, demanding that Morsi step down, and Mansour has been charged with the task of putting in place an inclusive government to write a new constitution, to be followed by fresh parliamentary and presidential elections early next year.
While the incoming administration was being portrayed as being a civilian one, the power of the armed forces was patently clear as the Egyptian air force flew over a smoggy Cairo minutes before the interim leader was sworn in. Troops and armoured vehicles were deployed in force on the capital’s streets to counter any violent response from Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB)...
Though doubtless a coup, the removal of the MB regime enjoyed the enthusiastic support of large sections of the Egyptian masses, who had begun to realise over the preceding weeks that only the generals could get the MB off their backs.
Tens of millions of Egyptians celebrated Morsi’s fall – in Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square and elsewhere – hailing it as a second revolution. Jubilant opposition supporters transformed central Cairo into a grand street party, with crowds waving flags and sounding horns – in scenes reminiscent of the fall of Mubarak in February 2011.
As the crowds in Tahrir Square erupted in joy, fireworks lit up the sky and a thousand laser pointers covered the buildings in green light. Across the country, people roared from their balconies and rooftops, waving flags and blowing vuvuzelas by way of celebrating this ‘second revolution’. This time, they were celebrating the removal of an islamist head of state, who had taken it into his head to misinterpret a slim electoral victory as a mandate for the islamisation of the country.

Tens of millions!!! Celebrating!! Fireworks!!
Gullibility and grovelling could hardly get more servile.
What 35 million(?!) anyway, a figure two million more than even the most luridly exaggerated figures put out by the reactionary Mubarak forces and rapidly discredited even before the coup had taken place – did Proletarian count them or does it always repeat the “are believed” bourgeois press accounts? (Believed by whom incidentally except gullible Stalinists???)
Enthusiastic support??? For the army flypast which the Tahrir Square (holding just half a million at the outside) “erupted in joy” at???
Apparently so:

The air force’s fighter planes flew over downtown Cairo on the afternoon of 4 July in a demonstratively triumphant show “in celebration of the victory of the people’s will”. The exhaust fumes, matching the colours of the Egyptian flag, evoked outbursts of delight from the people on the ground.

Is the cold-blooded butchery, now also evoking “outbursts of delight” from some of the reactionaries interviewed in the last days, to be supported too???
And what about the snide comments about a “slim electoral victory” when the Lalkarites still cling on to the Stalinist analysis of the 1952 Economic Problems of Socialism which underpinned the entire post-war revisionist strategy of parliamentary roads and “peace struggle”?
More tangles follow.
The Morsi-ites are berated because they wanted to establish a Muslim state.
Well of course, sharia law is not going to solve capitalist crisis.
But further on, lashing out at Turkey’s prime minister Erdogan, who has protested at the coup and supported Morsi, the Lalkarites declare not only that Syria, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran should be defended from the attacks of imperialism (though better and more Leninist would be simply to say the imperialist attacks should be defeated) but that these are all “progressive regimes”:

What has angered the reactionary Mr Erdogan is not the killing of the Egyptian revolution, as he perceives the events of the first week of July to be, but the upsetting of the reactionary alliance between imperialism and its flunkies in the Middle East, directed against all progressive movements and governments – from Hizbollah to Syria and Iran.
Under the Brotherhood’s rule, Egypt had been a strategic partner in this counter-revolutionary alliance, which had assigned Turkey an increasingly crucial role and had made it possible for Erdogan to assume the airs of a latter-day Ottoman Turkish sultan.
The events in Egypt will serve to bring him and the other, even more insignificant, surrogates of imperialism in the region down to earth. They will have the sobering effect of making it clear that the power they exercised, and which they thought was theirs, was mainly derived from the support given them by imperialism.

But Iran is a Muslim state too, and in fact an Ayatollahocracy established for over three decades, with full on sharia law, and a history of repressive and nasty anti-communism, not least in the persecution and driving underground of the Tudeh revisionists.
It is still obliged to posture with anti-”Great Satan” anti-imperialism however, which makes it permanently on the edge of tipping into genuine revolutionary upheaval, as it began to do under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (allied with such anti-imperialists as Venezuela etc) and is a prime “rogue state” target for Washington neocons’ war frenzy.
But it is also a long way from being a Marxist state.
So why is that “progressive”, when the far tamer and more limited sharia ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood, which continued to include many non-MB participants in cabinet for the entire year, apparently constitutes--
the pursuit of an islamist agenda, which infuriated large sections of the population, including minorities, secular, liberal and left-leaning people
Since when has a Marxist analysis been determined by the wishes of “secular, liberal and left-leaning” people (whatever that might mean)?
Or consider another part of this gush, that the Morsi-ites demonstrated their backwardness as the Proletarian sneers, because they -

played the democratic game so touted by imperialism only to have their president subjected to summary dismissal!

Well and good, though perhaps an explanation might be useful about why Lalkar/Proletarian played the same game in the last UK election, suggesting “left” candidates to vote for, and saying nothing about the Leninist policy of using elections only to denounce parliament, –or why it supports elections for Assad in Syria as way forwards. 
But then, beyond that, why is the Morsi presidency also condemned because-- 

Instead of solving the urgent economic problems faced by the masses, Morsi concentrated on amassing dictatorial powers and promoting his cronies – some of them rather tainted – to high positions. Five months into his presidency, he issued a constitutional declaration that granted him powers to override the judiciary – a move he was later compelled to rescind, but the damage had been done.

Surely attempting to dismantle the old Mubarak dictatorship state structures such as the judiciary was a correct move to try and make sure that the hamstringing sabotage of the old order could be dealt with?
It was not enough of course, and failure to understand the questions of the need for the working class and poor to fully take power is part of the problem faced by even the most determined militancy, until it begins to grasp the scientific understandings, lessons and experience of 100 years of Leninist struggle starting with Lenin’s own great State and Revolution perhaps.
But Proletarian is not criticising it for doing too little too late, but for doing it at all!
This Proletarian garbage is the shallowest (and wrong) impressionism mostly swallowed wholesale from the capitalist press (and like all the CPGB-ML museum Stalinism) mostly not even analysis but just repetition of their details.
It has nothing to do with Marx or Lenin or even the most basic class analysis and is certainly the most wretched philistine nonsense, a million miles from any serious attempt to present a clear view of the world.
It makes no attempt to guide the working class towards an understanding of the real enemy, imperialism itself.
Only starting with that can the rest of the complex turmoil begin to be understood.
On what basis is Erdogan painted a “reactionary tool” of imperialism anyway for example?
Stooge he is, and the military in Turkey has helped the anti-Assad backwardness and civil war terrorising with links into Syria,  compromising with imperialism.
But even in Turkey the election victory of the muslim movement ten years ago was not the preferred option for Western interests and represented a setback for the safer  reactionary Turkish military “secular” dominance, which itself had carried through three coups in the late twentieth century to ensure pro-Western government.
Erdogan may be, is, a monstrous opportunist but has been forced to carry through various anti-imperialist measures, to keep on top of the mass hostility to Zionism in particular, including pulling the army out of the once overt ties with Tel Aviv and the once routine military exercises that it used to do with the Zionists. 
The infamous massacred peace convoy to Palestine a few years ago set out from Turkey and was largely made up from Turkish protestors.
And as the gangster thugs Noriega in Panama, and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein demonstrated, even the greatest stoogery can turn septic for imperialism under the pressure of the growing crisis and the movement of the masses in response to that, 
Morsi’s government equally was carrying through measures that aided the Palestinian struggle.
Along with the attempted appointment of a militant in Luxor province (rescinded) it was clear to imperialism that things in Egypt could turn turtle too. 
Declaring the MB to be simply US stooges is nonsensical. 
The West was panicked profoundly by this eruption in the biggest and most influential of the Arab countries, which signals an entirely new level in the rising world anti-imperialist rebellion.
It may be that US imperialism had decided that fixing up a showpiece “democracy”, with a seemingly compliant MB candidate, was at least a usable stopgap solution to the desperate problem of an overwhelming mass movement that had erupted and which could rapidly spread and deepen its understanding. 
Some of the US ruling class still believe that that was the best solution and that tearing up the democracy illusion so quickly is a very bad move, paying a huge price in lost illusions in “democracy” by the masses.
The delusions of “democracy”, threadbare though they have become as the working class has seen endless betrayals and corruption, are still a powerful weapon for the ruling class.
Reactionary Republican, former presidential candidate, John McCain clearly believes so, declaring events to be “a coup” this week – though he did not go so far as to demand the arming of the Cairo demonstrators, as he did with Libya and Syria.
The outbursts was more to try and salvage some of the pretence of “concern” for democracy.
The ruling class is badly split however (another symptom of the gigantic unrolling crisis), and paralysed about what to do, which is why the US vacillated throughout the events.
Some of the more panicked elements in the ruling class clearly thought that the Morsi-ism itself had gone too far, despite its going along with continuing peace treaties with Zionism, the IMF dictates etc. 
They might have judged that temporarily the MB had little choice, but sense that the crisis would soon have pushed them to sharper challenges.
More nervous ruling class elements obviously did not want to trust in the old parliamentary illusions holding the day.
Possibly the pace was forced on Washington by the more aggressive line of the Zionists (and maybe the Saudi regime which has promptly funded the new dictatorship) which would indicate even more the vacillation in Washington’s leadership.
Certainly an immediate result has been to again give a free hand to the Zionist nazis to “smite” the anti-Zionist insurgents operating in the Sinai desert:
An Israeli drone strike killed five suspected Islamic militants and destroyed a rocket launcher in Egypt’s largely lawless Sinai Peninsula on Friday, two senior Egyptian security officials said, describing a rare Israeli operation carried out in its Arab neighbour’s territory.
The attack came a day after Israel briefly closed its airport in the Red Sea resort of Eilat, close to the Sinai, in response to unspecified security warnings. Eilat was previously targeted by rocket fire from the Sinai.
Israel maintained official silence about the strike, suggesting that if the Jewish state was involved, it might be trying to avoid embarrassing the Egyptian military. An Egyptian military spokesman later denied the report but did not provide another cause for the explosion.
Egypt’s official MENA news agency said an explosion destroyed a rocket launcher set up near the border to launch attacks against Israel, and at least five Islamic militants were killed. But it did not elaborate.
An Israeli drone attack in the Sinai could signal a significant new level of security cooperation between the two former foes following a military coup that ousted Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, last month. The military has alleged that Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood movement had turned a blind eye to Islamic militants in the Sinai.
Morsi’s departure, which came after mass protests demanding he step down, has triggered a rise in attacks against security forces on the peninsula, raising fears that extremists could exploit Islamist anger to spread their insurgency.
The Egyptian security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to release the information, said the Israeli attack was launched in cooperation with Egyptian authorities despite past insistence that the government would not allow other countries to use its territories to launch attacks.

Finally what is this criticism that the Muslim Brotherhood should have been “solving the urgent economic problems”!!!???
Quite apart from the known sabotage during the Muslim Brotherhood’s time, of the local economy, which is largely controlled and mostly owned by the army, which instigated a regime of deliberate power and gas cuts for example, just where on the planet is anyone “solving” economic problems anyway??
Only the unsustainable and nonsensical practice of pumping endless mountains of totally valueless paper dollar (or Euros, or Yen) “Quantitative Easing” into the world trade arteries, is going on, inducing massive additional instability and inflation over and above that already caused by 60+ years of “boomtime” credit creation. 
Lalkar/Proletarian, like many of the fake-“left” groups, runs occasional academic articles about the capitalist crisis and even says (in the final paragraphs only) that it is “ultimately unsolvable and that only the overturn of capitalism can get the world out of the meltdown”.
But it clearly it does not really believe a word of it.
It never forms the central element of analysis of all developments and struggles, all analysed as separate issues.
But it is the most important point of all.
The crisis IS the issue, the central point, and the HEART of Marxist understanding, which is why Karl Marx himself spent 30 hard working years primarily at his desk in the British Library’s reading room studying capitalist economic mechanisms and writing the giant three volumes of Capital.
But these mountebanks don’t grasp a word of it.
Morsi could no more “solve” the economic problems of Egypt than the new dictatorship can, which is why however brutal the takeover, it is in the greatest trouble in history, as is the entire imperialist system.
The crisis, the catastrophic crisis which the fake-“lefts” all contemptuously dismiss as “old hat” Victorian dogma which “we don’t need to spend our time reading and thinking about” (as the Trots and revisionists jostling for the soul of the new “Left Unity” hodge-podge are already declaring) is the essence of all the developments now unfolding.
As the bourgeois politicians might say, “it’s the crisis stupid” which underlies everything, which expresses the epochal failure of the entire private profit system and which confronts the whole of humanity with the intractable and inescapable need to completely overturn and destroy the old monopoly capitalist order.
It dictates that the world must battle for the understanding of revolution, the only possible way out of a disaster which will make even the horrors and destruction of the Second World War look like an Enid Blyton adventure story.    
These unfolding complexities require far deeper analysis yet and the building of the greatest debate and polemical struggle in history to tackle the contradictions.
But that will not come from the anti-theory philistinism of the fake-“lefts” who long ago abandoned all serious polemical battling to resolve the great questions (including the failings and successes of the past.)
The great Leninist process of battling out issues to find an agreed line and understanding on the world is ignored. 
The Egyptian contradictions in Proletarian for example will all be resolved by typical museum-Stalinist methods of completely ignoring and dishonestly covering-up the glaring disparities in their analyses, turning a deaf ear and blind eye to any polemic which tries to tease out and untangle these problems (as they do on the profoundly important questions of 70 years of the Soviet Union and the errors of leadership which led eventually to its implosion despite still continuing progress and titanic achievement right up until the Christian tinged idiocy of Gorbachevism finally handed it over to carpet-bagging plundering capitalism).
International events like Egypt must be understood in a complete context, a world revolutionary perspective to assess and judge the balance of class forces.
The “lefts” take their eye off the ball as to the real and only cause and driving force of slump devastation, oppression in the world, monopoly capitalism and its devastating and catastrophic economic and political meltdown.
So to repeat, it is basic Marxist Leninist understanding that there is only one expression of, and generator of, historical reaction and oppression on the planet and that is capitalist imperialist class rule and exploitation.
Revolutionary dialectical materialism says that every phenomena needs to be examined concretely and all sides must be considered.
Lo an behold al-qaeda demonstrated in September 2001 that it would not simply be or remain a compliant weapon for imperialism but would organise and carry out one of the most shattering guerrilla war attacks in history on the heart of the Empire itself when it flew its suicide plane missions into the WTC in New York and the Pentagon.
Numerous insurgent missions, suicide attacks, “terrorist” war sallies, national resistance movements and rebellions have erupted since and the more so as imperialist fascist bullying has wiped out, tortured, maimed and killed hundreds of thousands of victims, both those fighting for national liberation and to oppose its tyranny, as well as multiple innocent women and children, bystanders and innocents.  
Leninism has always explained that it does not “support” the barmy religious ideologies of al-Qaeda, the Taliban or even the militant Palestinian Hamas. But crucially it does not either condemn the blows they strike against imperialist rule, as explained then eg in issue 1129 on the WTC attacks in New York:
Let Islamic religious voodoo fall by the historical wayside as soon as possible, but this guerrilla war is the reality now of the genuine anti-imperialist struggle to prevent Western domination from destroying the planet with its colonial warmongering nightmare.
It is a logical Washington decision to make this ‘war on terrorism’ and on ‘rogue states’ a global issue because resisting the bullying trade-war impositions of imperialist economic crisis in one place (e.g. Iraq, Colombia, Occupied Palestine, South Philippines, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc) can plainly be identified by colonial economic domination as quickly infecting an ‘axis of evil’ virus elsewhere if not rapidly crushed.
This is the reality of imperialist-crisis warmongering to try to divert the world from the destructive catastrophes of the freemarket economic crash and slump itself, so as to preserve the credibility and respectability of continued long-term planetary rule by the monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie. In these initial circumstances, it is not absolutely essential at all that some of the forces of spontaneous mass resistance to Americas worldwide colonial domination should necessarily have clear-cut revolutionary socialist perspectives, or inspiration, at all. 
All that matters is that this monstrously decadent Western imperialist attempt to reassert colonial policing control over the whole planet should fail, and with it its warmongering ‘solution’ of ‘surplus’-capital destruction as a cure for the crisis of ‘over-production’.

These petty bourgeois “revolutionaries” revel in play-acting poses but want at all costs to avoid the real conclusions that would follow obviously and clearly from focusing on the capitalist crisis.
First - that the cataclysm which began unravelling in 2007-2008 is complete confirmation of Marxist science’s warnings of devastating, intractable and irreversible crisis built in to capitalism, inevitable and unstoppable. 
Second that this Marxist science is based around a historical materialist understanding of the class struggle in the world and a deep analysis of the contradictions and conflicts within the capitalist system which cannot but bring it constantly back to disintegration and collapse, resolvable within the capitalist order only by utmost destruction and pain as “surplus” capital (and surplus rival capitalists and masses of the working class) are wiped out, by regular Slump disaster in the early period of capitalism and by all out war in the imperialist period, as in 1914 and 1939. 
Third that to overcome a slide into Slump and World war, which will be on a scale beyond anything yet experienced in destruction and human horror and degradation, a hundred times worse than WWI and WW2, the ordinary people of the world must confront the need for revolutionary upheaval to end capitalist dominance and exploitation for good as the only way for mankind to escape utter disaster it is being dragged into.
Fourth that this struggle is simmering and bubbling up everywhere throughout the Third World particularly and has been for decades as the viciously exploited and repressed people of the world grew more and more discontent at the ever widening gap between the possibilities for human progress (which is offered by constantly evolving technological progress, science and overall human knowledge) and the poverty, ignorance, deprivation and slave level exploitation imposed upon them while an ever tinier minority of the world ruling class grows fatter, more indolent and more pointless with every passing day.
It is a struggle which has explosively accelerated with the onset of the inbuilt crisis of monopoly capitalism which Marxist science alone has constantly insisted was the nature of the world imperialist order, against all  bourgeois science (whose main purpose in the political and economic arena is to try and disprove Marx’s grasp - and if that could not be done to “prove” that Marxism was not a science allegedly).
It can be resolved only by Leninist revolution.
Build revolutionary Leninist leadership. 
Don Hoskins

Leaflet produced for Hugo Chávez commemoration meeting in London - May

Presenting Venezuela as “the way forwards” further spreads revisionist and reformist confusions, democracy illusions and pacifist notions that have held the working class back for the entire post-war period. However good Chávez’ reforms are, they do not constitute ‘revolution’. Labelling them such is a deliberate obfuscation by the entire fake-“left”, avoiding Leninist proletarian dictatorship necessities

In a day of “celebration” of the life of Hugo Chávez and “solidarity for Venezuela” the one thing sure NOT to be mentioned is the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Nor will the significance of the world war drive being imposed by imperialism to escape its catastrophic and epochal world economic collapse be spelled out (or even be mentioned mostly).
That, even though every shade of fake-“left” is to gather in London, from “left” Labourites like Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, through various liberal “left” pundits and journalists to assorted Trotskyists,  revisionists and ossified Stalinists, all burying their alleged “principles” and supposed fundamental differences.
Everyone of them will gush forth their plaudits, vying with each other to outdo the platitudes and exaggerations about Chávez’ significance, just as they have in print for the last month or more.
But none of them will bring up the fundamental flaws in Chávez leadership – his rejection of revolutionary struggle to overturn the ruling class and establish proletarian dictatorship as the only possible future for mankind.
The pretence is that Chávez’ was a revolutionary.
The pretence of the one-day event is that “his legacy shows the way forwards”.
What a giant preposterous, opportunist fraud!
What a deliberate stunt to avoid the real question confronting everyone of the need for revolution.
By all means the reforms Chávez put through to spend the country’s oil revenues on improving working class lives should be credited, and the anti-imperialist stance he took was significant. 
So too was his help and aid to the workers state of Cuba.
But calling his oil-revenue funded improvements a “revolution” – Bolivarian or not – is strip Marxist philosophy and grasp of all meaning.
Chávez was a bold enough reformist but a million miles from the “great revolutionary leader” or “eternal hero” he has been painted in screed after uncritical screed. 
He was nowhere near figures like Che Guevara and lightyears from being a Lenin, a Mao, a Ho Chi Min or even, despite Havana’s uncritical support, another Fidel Castro.
Just the opposite – his conscious hostility to revolutionary politics and Marxism makes him deeply flawed figure who has dangerously misled the working class.
To his dying day he asserted that he stood by “democratic principles” and repeatedly declared he would be against any kind of “dictatorship”.
So the constant twisting and manipulation of imperialist subversion, bribery, lie-machinery media onslaughts and intimidation (the reality of bourgeois “democracy”) should be capitulated to the moment it succeeds “legally” in its non-stop sabotage??  
Small wonder that the entire spectrum of the fake–“left” is listed on the speakers platform and the audience will be packed with more. 
Every single one of these groups long ago capitulated to the treacherous illusions of “democratic ways forward” which rotted the entire wold communist movement from the head down as revisionist mistakes and retreats took hold, in Stalin’s Moscow of the 1930s and perhaps earlier.
Whether spiced up with “militant left pressure”, or “anti-Stalinist bureaucracy” hostility, with the promise of “revolution ultimately” (but reform “in the meantime”) or “the peace struggle”, etc these mind-rotting nonsenses have tied the working class hand and foot ever since.
The devastating Slump and world scale warmongering disaster which resurfaced in 2007 and has not stopped unravelling since has massively confirmed the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the intractable contradictions of an anyway always intolerably unfair and viciously exploitative system – monopoly capitalism. 
There is no way out of this disastrous spiral of collapse and failure which can only degenerate into Depression and war turmoil far beyond anything ever seen in history – as country after bankrupted country is beginning to understand, from bankrupted Cyprus to civil war sabotaged Syria, being victimised, tortured bullied and threatened with war.
Only Marxist science predicted this meltdown catastrophe and has warned of it for three decades.
Only Marxist science has repeatedly called for the building of revolutionary understanding and science to educate and lead the working class as it grows daily clearer that they have no choice but to change the world.
There is only one way to do that, only one way out for mankind and that is to end the historically bankrupted production for private profit system and its individual “ownership” of society’s resources by taking everything into common ownership so that a cooperative planned economy can be built on a world scale (as staggeringly begun by the Soviet Union and others over seventy years but abandoned through revisionist capitulation and retreat from revolution).
But the fake-“left” of all shades has never put any such understanding at the centre, if it mentions it at all.
Just the opposite – even as “parliamentary democracy” has fallen apart in a welter of corruption, sleaze and lies in even the most advanced countries because the capitalist class rule lies are out of time, they all continue to tell the workers things can be changed “if only they vote for a real left this time” just as they did in the last general election.
“Step by step” advances are still punted out even as the Depression is destroying all reformist gains and only defensive “step by step” rejection of the cuts and “no to war” hopeless pacifism remain and it is daily made clear that the class war is being escalated by a desperate ruling class, terrified by its own incompetence and failure and the revolutionary ferment it is stirring up.
 Elections should be used by genuine revolutionaries but for one purpose only, which is to expose and denounce the entire “democracy” racket for the giant fraud it is and to warn the working class of the hidden but true face of bourgeois dictatorship behind, which turns openly fascist as its crisis deepens.
The point is already being made clear in Venezuela where the arrogant and racist ruling class oligarchs and owners have continued their existence and power throughout Chávez’ time, controlling major media channels and constantly plotting counter-moves and coup violence, against this “upstart”.
The death of Chávez’ has seen a massive escalation of the subversion at all levels, from Washington’s outrageous and contemptuous diplomatic refusal to recognise the validly elected president Nicolás Maduro, to a series of violent and disruptive attacks on rallies and even, astoundingly (and deliberately intimidatingly), on Maduro himself at the swearing-in.
These are not just indiscipline but a deliberate destabilisation with hallmarks of the CIA lorry-driver strike and demonstration campaigns which preceded the coup against Salvador Allende and the orgy of killing and torture which followed under General Augustus Pinochet (stupidly invited into power by – Allende and his “democratic” illusions). 
Death did not make Allende a “socialist hero” as sadly even the brilliantly revolutionary but revisionism tainted Havana calls him, but a revisionist fool who misled the working class and fed them illusions in “a new democratic way to achieve socialism by elections”.
What is so different now??? 
Washington has long hated this Venezuelan thorn in its side as it hates various other assorted anti-imperialist flavoured regimes from Iran to Sudan, from Zimbabwe to Myanmar, and above all remaining workers states like Cuba and North Korea.
The CIA and other agencies are constantly at it with the local bourgeoisie to try and topple this uncompliant and potentially dangerous left anti-imperialist shift in the US’ “own backyard” to which it arrogantly abrogates all rights of exploitation.
Subversion, plotting, destabilisation and sabotage will go on non-stop as they do against any attempts by the poor and exploited to alter their situation, as fifty years of brutal and barbaric suppression has demonstrated.
Massacre has followed massacre in Latin America, from Allende in 1973 through most of South and Central America.
An entire US training college in torture and disruption, the former “School of the Americas” has pumped out an endless stream of fascist “paramilitaries”  and foul and vicious military stooges to slaughter and murder their way through El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Nacaragua and points south.
Hundreds of thousands have been killed, maimed and “missing-ed”.
Under the “Black hope” Obama presidency there have already been two coups, in Honduras and Paraguay, reviving (continuing) all the past tyrannies and brutalities.
Except for the preoccupation of the US with crisis induced assorted wars and blitzings everywhere else, and rising Third World turmoil and revolt it is certain there would have been more.
The excuse can be made that Chávez' Venezuela  was too close to America [physically speaking] to “go all the way” or the working class was not ready for all out revolution.
It might be, but the question is what philosophical preparation did he make for the working class to understand the need to end capitalism – in their own country and on a world scale?
He did not - and neither is the opportunistic riding of his populist image by the fake-“lefts”, desperate to pick up some “left” kudos as their own bankrupt politics are more and more exposed by relentless crisis.
The “lefts” defeatism, hopeless confusion and opportunist evasion of the public polemic to clarify the objective truth about the world needs exposing as part of re-building and extending a Leninist scientific perspective. 
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.

***********

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

*********

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

*********

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

*********

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.

Name ............................

Address.........................

Postcode........................

For a £25 annual subscription to receive EPSR by first class post every Wednesday, write to (but send no money initially): EPSR, PO Box 50, L0NDON, SW17 9NL

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Cuba’s wellbeing: the intangible humanity of socialism stripped of capitalist antagonisms

Dr. Patricia Arés Muzio
ON many occasions, I have asked my students what might be the principal reasons to support for saying that it’s good to live in Cuba. The majority of the responses refer to universal health care, education, social security. These are precisely the pillars of our socialist model, but they constitute, for many young people, common realities of our daily lives, thus becoming altogether customary, frozen in the popular discourse, practically irrelevant as a result of constant repetition.
  I would go so far as to say that there is a Cuban model of wellbeing that has been incorporated with such uncritical familiarity that it has become invisible to us, paradoxically more often noted by those who are no longer here, after having lost it, or by visitors who live in other realities in their countries of origin. In daily life in Cuba, most conversation is generally about the difficulties, above all those of an economic nature. Very rarely is there talk of our assets or strengths.
  Some of my professional experiences have led me to think a great deal about our socialism, seen as an alternative culture and civilization. When, as psychologists and other specialists, we were involved in the process of securing the return of Elían González [2000], this issue emerged as significant.
  More recently, ideas about Cuba’s model of wellbeing have reemerged in my practice as I have conversed with older Cubans who have returned to the island; with children who, as a result of their parents’ decisions, must leave to reside in another country, and young people who have returned from Spain after having experienced being thrown onto the streets there, without money to pay their rent.
  I recall that when Elían was in the United States, his grandfather Juanito told him over the phone how he was making a chivichana (an improvised box-car on skate wheels) for the boy to have upon his return. The next day, Elían’s Miami relatives appeared on our television screens giving Elían a life-like remote control car. When his father told Elían his dog missed him, the next day the boy appeared with a Labrador puppy. If he said he had bought Elían a little Elpidio Valdés book, the next day there was Elían dressed up as Batman. Nevertheless, his family’s affection, the love of those waiting for him here, the solidarity of his young classmates and teachers, were more powerful than all the material things.
  Conversing recently with an older man who made the decision not to return to the United States after living there for 19 years, he told me, “It’s true, Doctor, you can live more comfortably there, but that’s not all there is to life. Over there, you’re nobody, you don’t exist for anyone.”
  He told me he spent long hours alone in the house, waiting for his children and grandchildren to return from work or school. He was left imprisoned because they told him not to go out, since, according to them, he was too old and they wouldn’t let him drive. The neighborhood, he said, looked like a deserted model town, he hardly saw anyone at all, and no one would take the time for a conversation.
  On a visit to see a daughter living in Cuba, he decided to stay. He told me he was exercising in the park, playing dominoes in the afternoons, helping his grandson and two little friends with their homework. He had found some mates from the “old guard” and with money sent from the States, he helped his family here and had enough to cover his expenses. Here are his very words, “Some acquaintances told me I was coming back to hell, but in reality, Doctor, I feel like I’m in heaven.” Clearly the lifestyle he is now living is not heaven, but it does offer greater wellbeing.
  One day, a young boy was brought to see me, the son of two diplomats, who was on vacation here. He didn’t want to return with his parents to the mission where they were working. He was rebelling, on strike, saying that they should leave him here with his grandmother, that he didn’t want to leave, didn’t like being there. When I asked the parents about the boy’s life abroad, they explained that he lived locked up, for reasons of security, and hardly had any friends to play with after school. His cousins, who he adored, weren’t there. Since he had been back in Cuba, he was as free as a bird, his parents said, going to the corner park with his neighborhood friends, going out with his cousins, playing baseball and football in the street. He spent the day surrounded by his grandparents, aunts, uncles and neighbors. During my interview with the boy, he told me that his cousins said he was a fool for wanting to stay in Cuba, passing up the opportunity to live in another country. He said, “When I’m here, I really miss the pizza with pepperoni, but I would trade a million pizzas to stay and live right now in Cuba.”
  A young man who had returned from Spain told me that he had been left without work and, of course, didn’t have the money to pay his rent. The landlady gave him three months to come up with it and when he couldn’t, he was evicted onto the street. But the saddest thing was that no one, none of his friends lent him a hand, saying that given the economic crisis, “he would have to figure something out as best he could.” He was obliged to return to his parents’ home in Cuba, since his only other option was sleeping in the subway. “In the end, it’s your own people who are willing to take you in,” he said.
  I’ve been thinking about this which could very well serve many young people who see nothing good whatsoever about living in Cuba, who only imagine a better life abroad, overvaluing life there as successful, with great opportunities.
I ask myself: What do we have here that is lacking in other places? What did the diplomats’ boy, the older man and the young one who returned from Spain, discover during their time abroad, that those of us living here don’t see?
Does the lifestyle offered by contemporary capitalist societies truly constitute a model of wellbeing, despite being sold in the mass media as the promised dream of progress? Are we talking about the good life or living well? Of a life full of things or a full life? Is it necessarily economic and technological development which guarantees personal and social wellbeing?
  I will attempt a synthesis of these professional experiences to shed light on what I believe are some of the fundamental elements of Cuba’s model of wellbeing.
Inclusion, not living 
anonomously
 This is an issue of profound spiritual and ethical connotations. When you arrive in a Cuban neighborhood and ask for someone, generally you are told, “He lives in that house.”
  All Cubans have a name and a life story because we all belong someplace, be it a family, school, community or workplace, and have social participation. We have all assumed responsibilities during our lives, attended neighborhood meetings, visited the family clinic, voted in the same locale, bought our food at the same markets or had the same person pick them up for us. Surely, at some point, we’ve all said, “The same faces everyday...” but that is precisely where a vital element of great solidarity and humanism resides.
  Social anonymity - which the grandfather I interviewed described when he said “You don’t exist” - is far removed from the way we live in Cuba. It is the experience of living without a place of your own, without being recognized or noticed. The opposite is not necessarily a physical place, but rather a symbolic one where there is belonging and participation, a place that gives meaning to life. Living ‘nowhere’ is feeling isolated, alone, strange and this is one of the problems the world currently faces. Even places where many people co-exist are no longer meeting places, but rather true nowheres. It is incredible that in a subway where hundreds of people see each other everyday, few say a single word, most showing more interest in their technological media than in human interaction.
  Other non-places are airports and malls, cathedrals to consumerism. Many people around you and absolutely no contact. If you fall, people hesitate to help you up, since so many laws exist to supposedly protect people, from an individualistic point of view. People are afraid of being charged with sexual harassment if they touch you. Non-contact and indifference are legislated.
  Today, the social reality in other countries has left people more excluded than included. Given the existence of social inequality as a consequence of Cuba’s current economic reality, our policies promote social inclusion in an effort to overcome differences of gender, ethnic origin, physical ability and sexual orientation. Cuba, as a social system, is attempting to construct a world in which we all belong and in which spontaneous human reciprocity is promoted by the very conditions of life. In other geographical locations on the neoliberal world map, people are divided by class, interpersonal relations are eroded by a variety of differences and some are separated from others by invisible borders, which damage cohesiveness and participation.
Diverse areas of 
socialization
Areas of socialization are important in life, social structures are a resource and support for everyone, given that it is within them that people can develop their full potential. Currently, families live in isolation in many parts of the world, and the higher the standard of living, the greater their cloistered lifestyle. Nobody knows their neighbors, who is who; within the home members do not have much interaction, given that the technological invasion is such that a father can be chatting with a colleague in Japan and not have the least idea what is happening with his son in the adjoining room. Studies in various countries have revealed that the daily average of direct conversation between parents and children (particularly fathers) does not exceed 15 minutes.
  One of the major impacts of the current hegemonic capitalist model is lack of family time or other community areas; during the week the family as a group does “not exist.” Long and intensive working days, multi-occupations in order to meet ever-growing consumer demands have banished former family rituals and traditions. Psychologists and sociologists have stated that the greatest impact of this reality is infant isolation and the absence of links with older adults. Many middle or upper class children arrive home from school without seeing an adult face until late in the evening, or have a child minder who provides food but cannot supplant the affection and attention of parents.
  Technology has appeared as an antidote to solitariness, but lacking restrictions imposed by adults, this can lead to an addiction to video games, increase violence and stimulate early eroticism. Access to public places, streets and parks as meeting places are infrequently available for children and adolescents, given the lack of citizens’ security. Space and time universes in the urban network directed toward youth are perceived by adults as places of threat and danger rather than places for recreation and the construction of social ties. In Cuba, parks and plazas continue being areas of socialization for different generations.
  Cuban families are interwoven within social networks of interchange, with neighbors, organizations, schools, relations, and including the emigre community. Characteristic of the Cuban way of life are socialization areas, or a social network in which nobody is excluded or unnamed. I would say that, in addition to the family as home, the basic nucleus of Cuban society is the social and neighborly interchange network, which represents one of the major and invisible strengths of the Cuban model of wellbeing. It is here where the greatest success of the social process is located, taking the form of social solidarity, social containment, constant social interchange. This capital is only perceptible to those who lose it or embark on a different lifestyle outside of the country.
  In spite of unresolved economic difficulties and problems, the family exists in Cuba. Family life becomes intensive after the school or college day, when children and students begin their family-community life. Family life in Cuba does not take place behind closed doors. Those doors are also frequently opened to fumigators, neighbors, family nurses, grassroots leaders or self-employed vendors. People have to leave their homes daily, to go to the store or collect food items from a neighbor, dispose of the garbage, visit the pharmacy, fetch the children from school. Family life in Cuba is multi-generational, persons from all age groups interact and older adults do not live in senior citizens’ homes, their real place in general being the community.
Social solidarity versus individualism
In the present day international arena, individual wellbeing is given greater importance than social wellbeing. The predominant economic development model places people before the desire to live “better” (at times to the cost of the rest) and above collective wellbeing. The discourse is, “I’m not doing anyone any harm, I don’t want anyone interfering in my life, I like it, it’s good for me, it’s my body, my life, my space,” and electing a conduct which will maximize their benefits and income.
“We” has been replaced by “I.” Egoistic conduct in the present hegemonic world is identified and praised as “instrumental rationality,” when in real terms what this rationality conceals is great social insensibility.
  Social solidarity exists in Cuba, although we are currently living in a kind of parallelism between solidarity conduct and the insensibility of certain persons. The socialization of transport, or the botella (hitching a ride), for example; plus making neighbors part of one’s family, sharing neighborhood private telephone lines, passing on school uniforms and certain medicines, offering one’s house as a temporary classroom in the wake of a hurricane, are all examples of cooperative interchange. A young girl studying at the Lenin Senior High (a weekly boarding school) told me that her group of friends equitably shared out everything they brought from home and thus all ate the same, independently of whether some brought more and others, next to nothing. The most important aspect was friendship and sisterhood. This was a generalized practice.
Creativity and collective intelligence
In Cuba, in addition to conversing and having multiple social interchanges, we have the luxury of serious discussions with a number of people. Everyone knows something about something, everyone can express an opinion or have good ideas. Cubans have a political culture, a sports culture, and others are well informed about art. We have an accumulated cultural capital, part of our social heritage and invisible wellbeing. We are not an ignorant people, given the educational levels attained. Cuban men and women are impressive in their capacity to converse, express ideas and beliefs. One of my major problems as a clinical psychologist attending to patients is that time flies, because we are used to conversing. Some people bring me a written list so as not to forget something they want to say. We are used to giving ourselves time and this has become a luxury in an age when nobody has spare time, where the hurried syndrome is apparent.
  During visits to give lectures in Latin American countries or in family study classes I have taken there, students express a family-social reality which leaves me perplexed, on account of the burden of accumulated social problems which cut across social class. From what I hear, I have realized that we are light years apart, because the issue is not an economic one, but one derived from ignorance; accumulated mental poverty; social stigmas; class, gender and race prejudices; violence against women; magical solutions to problems which lack any scientific basis; child sex abuse; polygamy; genetic defects resulting from irresponsible sexuality or incestuous relationships; all of these are daily problems. They are problems associated with social neglect, the absence of social prevention programs. What is daily life for them is the exception for Cubans.
  As a professor, I feel that our population is educated and developed and we live that almost without realizing it. Although the quotidian may seem insignificant, it is the great backdrop of history. Young émigrés usually become aware of a very distinct social reality with which they have to do battle.
How to promote the Cuban model of well-being?
The objectives of Cuba’s new economic model include increasing productivity. The major challenge of this model is to strengthen our proposal for wellbeing, which represents an alternative to the dominant anti-model, a concept shared and reiterated by virtually all indigenous peoples on the continent and in the world. This concept comes from a long tradition within diverse religious manifestations.
  All of these visions, including the Cuban one, is that the global objective of development is not constantly having more, but being more; not amassing more wealth, but more humanity. It is expressed, in terms of living well instead of better, which implies solidarity among all, reciprocal practices and the desire to attain or restore environmental balance and at the same time improve the living conditions of the population. However, improvements in living conditions are not going to resolve the problems of a social nature we have accumulated. The economic dimension cannot be isolated from the social, cultural, historical and political dimensions, which endow development with a comprehensive and interdisciplinary context, in order to recover the sense of wellbeing and decorous living as a fundamental objective.
  One does not have to be a social scientist to notice that, apart from living conditions, there are many families in Cuba who, more than material poverty, are mired in spiritual poverty. Some families suffer from mental poverty expressed in life strategies distanced from the most elemental decent conduct, in consumer habits removed from the country’s realities, close to having surplus objects, removed from shared wellbeing in their aspirations. This is the source of the culture of banality and frivolity reflected in the current hegemonic model.
  The accumulation of material problems arising from the acute economic crisis of the 1990’s has substantially deteriorated values at the social level. Values are not principles, but must be accompanied by behavior to avoid them losing their effectiveness. If practices contradict principles, then we are facing a crisis of values.
  Cuba is not removed from the hegemonic influences of the current unipolar and supposedly global world. We must continue trying to build an alternative model of wellbeing, despite all the influences which generate the colonization of subjectivity; one of inclusion, despite the modulating effect of our social policies. Ideals are valueless in the market, only consumer capacity. Non-consumers become “unrecognized” human beings, excluded from any kind of social recognition.
  In the present-day world, there is an over-saturation of information, some of which is very good, but a large volume which is plagued by mediocrity and superficiality. The media of the current hegemonic model foment banality with the aim of selling more. We are crammed with entertainment, soap operas, series and violent movies which possess incredible enchantment because they entrap, but we run the risk of being drawn into idleness and addiction (to drugs, alcohol, sexual promiscuity, easy money, games of chance, video games)
 ... we are immersed [in] riches without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without utility, commerce without morality, science without humility, adoration without sacrifice and politics without principles.
  In general terms, publicity and the market associate wellbeing with pleasure, with being successful, having status.
  It is a fact that if we do not have a strong culture, the tendency to think that wellbeing lies in having and letting ourselves be ensnared by consumerism grows like a weed. We are subjecting ourselves to ignorance. The ethic of being requires a moral foundation, training, family education, an education of greater magnitude in general, and that is what we have to promote as a society.
Fomenting social solidarity
With the strengthening of self-employment in Cuba, the community signifies a vital area for many families. Family-community-organizations-work are fortified in their links. However, new social landscapes constitute an excellent opportunity for strengthening community life, in addition to promoting work to the benefit of shared wellbeing. Cuba contributes the difference in the context of solidarity and the social responsibility we have incorporated.
  It is necessary to promote a culture of solidarity and social responsibility which will serve as an antidote to the penetration of the culture of the market. It is important that people maintain their solidarity ethics, that the collective project does not fragment.
Fortifying community areas
Families and the community have increased in importance in Cuba as scenes of life. When visitors observe the community way of life here, they sometimes comment that life in their country used to be like that, but for more than a decade now, people have been living behind closed doors. And houses are empty during a large part of the day. In the main, this is due to the emergence of new technologies, ever-increasing hours of work, more frequent changes of job and home, ever-growing and more densely populated cities. The exacerbated growth of individualism is making it increasingly difficult to have a sense of community. Community has been reduced to the minimal family nucleus, and in these circumstances it is very easy to fall into isolation, which brings with it loneliness and depression, creating an extensive social collapse, with results as drastic as increased violence, drug abuse and mental illness.
  When people of all ages, social and cultural groups feel a sense of belonging to a community, they tend to be happier and healthier and create stronger, more stable and cooperative social networks. A strong community contributes many benefits, both individual and to the group as a whole, thus helping to create a better society in general. The great challenge is not to close the doors, not to lose sensitivity toward others, the neighborhood and the environment, to continue being concerned for the common good.
  Different forms of insertion in the economy have not noticeably deteriorated the existing social tissue, Cuban society is not a stratified one of social class, but woven together in family, neighbor and social networks, maintaining an ethic of solidarity.
  One important aspiration is to find innovative solutions within the community for many existing social problems, fundamentally based on the concept of the community empowering such solutions. For this, greater community dynamism is needed at the local level.
  It is important to maintain citizens’ involvement in social life, to preserve caring for these areas, respecting senior citizens, children, women, people with disabilities and above all, maintaining a sense of social responsibility in educating younger generations.
  Taking into account all these aspects, I believe we have a great social responsibility to uphold the Cuban model of wellbeing, that the country has unprecedented conditions for marking the difference, which is precisely by continuing to resist the colonization of culture and subjectivity, and that the great challenge is to continue proposing other models of human beings and collectivity which genuinely lead to the paths of true humanity.

EPSR Archives
Selected quotes from past issues