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 1449  23rd July 2014                                                                                                   25p fortnightly

Whatever the immediate cause of tragic MH17 plane downing in Ukraine, responsibility lies with the Kiev fascist coup and Western skulduggery which put it in place, to violently suppress the working class and further surround and threaten Russia (and any possibility of a Soviet revival). Western hypocritical “concern” is a giant warmongering fraud, deliberately whipping up a hate campaign over a highly suspicious incident  while ignoring the genocidal massacre underway in the Middle East by the monstrous Nazi-Zionist occupation of Palestine. Staggeringly heroic response of the Palestinians is a sign of the revolutionary upsurge everywhere that will eventually take-on and topple the entire world capitalist order, the only way to stop such stinking depravity and slide to all-out world war. But  mass movements must sort out multiple confusions in order to build the Leninist revolutionary consciousness that alone can carry struggle to a vital world socialist end point

The bucketsful of crocodile tears poured out over flight MH17’s tragic passenger victims are not just monstrous hypocrisy by Washington and Europe’s politicians, but aimed at forcing the deliberate world war atmosphere up another notch as capitalism’s crisis failure deepens.
The cloying play-act “sympathy” and manufactured “outrage” is grotesque and sickening, and even more when set alongside the deafening silence over the Nazi-Jewish genocidal butchery of the Gaza Palestinians, deliberately and systematically killing three times as many innocents (so far), wounding thousands and driving tens of thousands into terrorised homelessness.
It is further underlined by the equal silence on the continuing bloody civil wars fostered, funded and armed by imperialism in Syria, and re-started in Iraq, in each of which hundreds more civilians and children have been massacred, made homeless or bereaved even in the few days since the Ukrainian incident – on top of hundreds of thousands, in fact millions, killed or with lives wrecked already and by NATO blitzing in Libya etc.
This unctuous self-righteous of the Western leaders and their pretence that a “proper investigation is needed to establish the cause of the crash” aims only to stampede the world into a frenzy of sanctimonious hatred, against the working class rebellion in Ukraine and beyond that against Russia.
It is all part of capitalism’s deliberate provocations to push the world back into universal warmongering, the “escape plan” for the  ruling class from its catastrophic crisis breakdown, imposing Slump “austerity” on many already and heading for another disastrous collapse once more as soon as the Quantitative Easing credit trickery runs its course.
Coming disaster will be worse than 2008’s near world banking failures by far, not least for having been put off even further by the Mickey Mouse money printing.
War as a diversion and war as a way of destroying surplus capital (on a scale far beyond a few bankruptcies) is the “answer” and imperialism will push the world along this path with this Goebbels propaganda (which will always carry the day initially, overriding all “reasonable” pacifism and revisionist “peace struggle” ineffectualities).
The ruling class concern is to whip up a thoughtless frenzy of “public opinion”, not “bringing closure to the bereaved families” etc etc.
Along with all the politicians’ put-on “sombre-faces” for the TV cameras and the manufactured media hype about “public outrage grows” (classically creating and manipulating the supposed “public mood” they claim to be reporting as “objective reality” - how could they possibly know what “the public thinks”?) this whole coverage is all part of a multilayered and utterly cynical diversion.
It heads attention away from the real culprits of this killing.
It diverts deliberately from the fascism installed in Ukraine, away from the Zionist “collective punishment” war crimes depravity imposed on Gaza,  and most of all from the historic collapse of the entire capitalist system.
The point is underlined by the just announced “public inquiry” stunt by the Cameron Tories into the alleged “murder” of the nasty anti-communist oligarch stooge Alexander Litvinyenko.
This completely unrelated anti-Russian hate allegation is suddenly and deliberately revived out of the blue a full eight years after the event, with one purpose,  to further whip up the hate fever. 
Ruling class in-your-face denials that the “timing has nothing to do with the Ukraine” should not even be dignified with a sneery “yeah, right”.
The now extraordinary crudeness of the Western war propaganda follows the old Goebbels adage “if you are going to tell a lie tell a big one and keep on repeating it”.  
It parallels too the Nazi principle of blaming the victim for fighting back, just as the Nazi-Zionist monsters pretend the Palestinians are to blame for the mass killing against them because they have the temerity to resist and fight back, as best they can, against six decades of colonised degradation and terror, poverty, misery and expulsion from their own lands, and now concentration camp levels of imprisonment within the besieged and strangled concrete hellhole of Gaza.
Their persecution borrows too exactly the Hitler principle of wiping out whole towns whenever the anti-Nazi resistance carried out an action against the SS or occupying troops and blaming the population for “attacking” the overlords.
The whole Ukraine plane racket is a giant and deliberate aggressive provocation by Western imperialism, and this is true whatever the actual technical cause of the Malaysian flight incident – an accidental targeting of the plane by the anti-Kiev anti-fascist rebels or a foul and cynical trick by the West via its nasty little Swastika-toting “government” in Kiev.
For all the “conspiracy theory” overtones (made suspect by endless excessive unMarxist convolutions, which defeatistically  capitulate to the idea that capitalism organises everything – and therefore is “all powerful”), it is by no means ruled out that the downing was carried out as a deliberate act by the new Nazi regime in Kiev.
The scummy little Nazis there are desperate that their much vaunted military “cleaning up” of the anti-fascist workers revolt in East Ukraine (deliberately and misleadingly referred to as “separatists”) is going so badly, and want to pull in more Western NATO support, as the bogus Libyan racist monarchist counter-revolutionary stunt did from the beginning, or the Syrian counter-revolution has constantly pushed for Western help, with set-up stunts like the bogus “chemical weapon attack” alleged against the Damascus regime last summer for example.
But such skulduggery, while possible, or even likely, is not a necessary explanation of events in order to still make clear that responsibility for the disaster and the tragedy of so many innocent lives lost lies exclusively with the aggressive provocations and manipulations of imperialism in Ukraine itself to suppress workers' resistance and to subvert Russia.
Whether triggering of the missile that blew the plane up was a tragic error by some of the rebels (and at worst is was an error, despite the Western propaganda innuendos of a it somehow being deliberate) or a conscious “Reichstag fire” provocation by Kiev, is not the critical question.
The cause is  the war set going by the fascist coup government in Kiev, and the genuine and justifiable resistance to this new Nazism by the working class in East Ukraine.
Even the Bonapartist idiot Vladimir Putin, blinded by his egotistical Russian-nationalist anti-communism and self-delusions about “controlling” the oligarch gangsters who now dominate and exploit the Russian working class, can get it right.
Without a fascist coup in Kiev, a fascist terror and the war forced onto the Donetsk workers, there would be no “incident” in the first place, he declares correctly.   
Responsibility lies totally with the instigation of the March coup in the first place, from the training and instigation of the appalling armed violence and thuggery used to overturn the legally elected government (such as it was) in Ukraine and install pro-Western oligarch gangsters in a CIA stunt “Orange revolution”.
Beyond that it lies with the $5bn of funding poured into Ukraine over a whole two decades (including the 2004 bogus  CIA organised “Orange” demonstrations) to subvert and bend public opinion and whip up the anti-communist reactionary nationalist atmosphere and to covertly train and advise the rightwingers and fascists (through “democracy” NGOs etc).
Responsibility lies with the astonishing Western media campaign in support of these outright Nazis and the demented political hate campaign of the Western leaders like John Kerry in the Obama presidency (and sidekick Britain’s William Hague) which stirred and pushed this bogus “Orange revolution” for months to inflame it to the point of reactionary coup; that now continues to prod and push these extreme right wingers and pro-imperialists, including outright Nazi-tattooed Swastika-toting thugs controlling the key security ministries; which says nothing about the continuous anti-working class rallies, intimidation “parades”, baseball bat thuggery and violent suppression of (laughable anyway) “democracy” and “free press criticism” in Kiev; that supports these fascists in creating and waging a war of suppression against the rest of the country with rightwing gangs, bombing, shelling, and shooting civilians, squads of openly fascist thugs (Svoboda, Right Sector, etc etc), and deliberate terror atrocities like the recent slaughter of dozens of trade unionists and anti-fascist fighters herded into and locked into an Odessa  building, deliberately set on fire, in best WW2 Nazi atrocity style).
Behind that, it lies with the deliberate continuing encirclement of Bonarpartist Russia by NATO forces, the same aggressive military (with its US core) that has already blitzed half a dozen countries from Serbia and Afghanistan, to Iraq and Libya or stands behind their proxy destruction by drone warfare and Washington instigated civil war destruction.
The sequence of events specifically around the Malaysian airline flight raises even more detailed questions of responsibility and deliberate provocation, even without the more direct conspiracy possibilities that the West itself downed the plane.
Why did the air traffic control – in the hands of the new Ukrainian Nazi government in Kiev – direct the airliner over what is a dangerous war zone?
Why, even more, was that done when at least two and possibly more, Ukrainian military planes had already been shot down in the previous week? (One Hamas (amateur) missile, a mile from Tel Aviv airport this week, was enough for most of the Western countries to suspend all flights, even though nothing was hit and there is far less risk there than over Ukraine).
Why furthermore was the MH17 flight diverted from the normal European overflight path running near but not over the fighting zone, to a line across the north of Donetsk where the anti-Kiev fight is hottest? Ostensibly, as this rapidly buried bourgeois press report suggests, it was for “weather reasons” but missiles are clearly far more of a risk than thunder storms:
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was guided off its most recently used course as its pilots hoped to avoid thunderstorms brewing in the south of Ukraine, it has been claimed.
When it was shot down, the doomed jet was many miles north of the flight paths it had used on previous days to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.
Nico Voorbach, a pilot who flew the same journey earlier this summer for KLM, and who is president of the European Cockpit Association, said poor weather might have been the reason why flight MH17 found itself in the sights of a surface-to-air missile launcher. The aircraft was shot down in the separatist Donetsk region of east Ukraine.
Voorbach said: “I heard that they were diverting from some showers. I think there were thunderclouds. You would ask air traffic control to divert left or right, and they would give you the permission.”
It also emerged that flight MH17 had initially filed a flight plan requesting to fly at 35,000ft above Ukrainian territory. On entering Ukrainian airspace, however, the plane’s pilots were instructed to fly at 33,000ft by the local air traffic control due to other traffic. Malaysia Airlines said the pilots had to follow the lead of the local authorities.
Malaysia’s transport minister, Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai, told a press conference: “MH17’s flight path was a busy major airway, like a highway in the sky. It followed a route which was set out by the international aviation authorities, approved by Eurocontrol, and used by hundreds of other aircraft.
“MH17 flew at an altitude that was set and deemed safe by local air traffic control, and it never strayed into restricted airspace. The flight and its operators followed the rules. But on the ground, the rules of war were broken.”
In response to claims that weather led to MH17 changing its flight plan, Malaysia Airlines director of operations Izham Ismail said that it had no reports from the pilot to suggest that this was the case. The airline has been keen to stress that after the International Civil Aviation Organisation in April identified an area over the Crimea peninsula as risky, its aircraft had “at no point” flown into or requested to fly into the area. The tragedy has, however, raised questions over the wisdom of commercial airlines continuing to fly over conflict zones.
Airlines currently take their cue on risk from national governments, who are responsible for the airspace over their territories, although states have an interest in keeping flight paths open because they are able to collect overflight fees.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority recently urged UK-based airlines not to fly over a wide area near the Crimea, Black Sea and Sea of Azov, and several airlines, including British Airways, have followed that advice.

These sinister decisions are beyond stupidity and give more credence to the possibility of a deliberately engineered “accident” particularly when taken with other factors.
Not every conspiracy is “loopy” and there has been plenty of such trickery and subversion throughout imperialism’s history, with at least 50 CIA provocations and manipulated coups around the world just since the end of the Second World War with such key examples as the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin “attack” used to start to the Vietnam war; the 1939 Gleiwitz radio station attack by Hitler stormtroopers dressed in Polish uniforms; the false “generals tipped into a well” communist coup in Indonesia which began the 1965 Suharto crackdown massacre of between one and even as many as three million suspected communist sympathisers; the set-up bodies of the alleged “Racek massacre” to start the NATO bombing of Serbia, and the even more fanciful “threat of genocide in Benghazi” to justify the Libyan destruction (the latter so crude a conspiracy that was no actual event – just the West’s lying pretence that it had been ‘threatened’ and would be “worse than Srebrenica” (another big LIE massacre in itself that never happened)).
Adding to it is the unseemly haste with which Kiev, and then its Western backers, immediately laid the blame on the “separatists”, the Nazis in Kiev screaming for NATO intervention and revenge virtually before the plane wreckage had hit the ground, long before it was even possible to know how the plane had been damaged let alone by whom, and well before any evidence could be gathered.
A series of unanswered questions has been casually brushed aside such as the presence of three ground based Buk anti-aircraft mobile missiles launchers with the Ukrainian Army in the immediate area, and the corresponding lack of such capacities in the scrappily armed rebel forces; only with these kind of missiles would they have a firing range to reach 10,000 metres where the plane was flying. 
Recent stories even suggest two Ukrainian fighter planes, equipped with missiles, had flown near the plane.
The West alleges that the rebels had captured a Buk unit, which is possible.
But firstly this shows the scale of defeat and failure facing the Kiev Nazis’ army campaign, adding to its desperation for a stunt.
Secondly it makes the air traffic control decisions even more suspect.
Thirdly, it raises further questions, because the rebels have neither the skill to operate this unit nor the sophisticated radar; if skilled Russian technical “help” was given as alleged by the West (to further its demented Goebbels anti-Moscow agenda), they would have been able to distinguish types of plane, so why would they deliberately select a target like MH17??? 
It could gain them nothing and makes no sense.
All this political and bourgeois press focus on the mechanism of precisely how the plane was downed (what kind of missile, at what angle etc) is only a side issue anyway, as it does not explain why all this has happened, and the context. It is Western obfuscation, designed to prevent analysis of the massive war struggle underway for months and the life and death conflict reality.
Of course missiles will be launched as part of the fighting; if there is a terrible accident it is just that, a tragedy, arising from the war, not a condemnation of the resistance which has faced constant deliberate atrocities by Kiev including arbitrary shooting of civilians, shelling civilian streets and apartments, and bombing etc. 
Their resistance to it is perfectly valid.  
The Western imputation, completely nonsensical, is that somehow the passenger plane was deliberately downed and therefore the rebels should be “punished”.
It is the “kill them all” Nazi rational that has been inculcated everywhere by the capitalist crisis and its ludicrous “war on terror” (the same “bomb them all” Fox News tirades against the ISIS revolt in Iraq, or increasingly heard from the fanatical Jewish zealots demanding that “all of Gaza” should be wiped out to “prevent Palestinian  families breeding more terrorists”.)
What outrageous arrogance is the Obama statement that the rebels “should not be given such weapons” in case of such disasters. What hypocrisy and double standards. 
Then first the Americans should not be using the missile cruisers which downed an Iranian passenger plane in the Gulf two decades ago “accidentally”? (They should not, for other reasons, because they are part of imperialist tyranny and bullying to subjugate the whole world.)
Much huffing and puffing about “investigators not having immediate access” has gone on.
But this is a war zone and the anti-fascists are rightly suspicious that such access will be used to infiltrate Kiev’s military forces [into the area] and kill them – forces controlled by a regime of overt Nazis who cannot be trusted one centimetre.
But again this “access” question is highly suspect anyway; the rebels and Russia both say there has been nothing to prevent the investigators arriving, they simply have not turned up.
Why not? To create maximum emotional disgust in public opinion seems the obvious answer, just as the endless attention on the gathering of the dead bodies has been twisted to derive maximum emotional pain. It turned out after three days of non-stop TV allegations of callousness and incompetence that this had actually been done locally, with sensitivity and care; the Dutch investigators declared to camera that the storage and handling of the bodies in a refrigerated train had been “good”.  
To add to the stampeded public hostility, the CIA-fed Western press has even been likening this situation to the downing of Korean flight 007 by the Soviet Union in 1983, to imply some “demonic” motivation, and the laughable idea that rebels somehow just “want to kill”.
But this backfires badly; the Korean flight was very clearly a provocation against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War and the deadly threatening nuclear encirclement of the whole communist world (which various Pentagon generals repeatedly urged the use of in that period, something that “they’ll never use the bomb” petty bourgeois complacency needs constantly reminding as the crisis warmongering gets increasingly unstable).
The 007 shooting down was a tragic necessity but a firm and correct response by the workers state forces of the USSR against a potential deadly danger (it not being known what was on the plane).
It came after a long period of multiple US spying flights by RC-135 electronic surveillance planes riding piggy-back on the flight path of passenger planes (as in this case) or even direct use of civilian craft for carrying spy equipment (with better resolution than then satellite capabilities). Korean Airlines was noted for regular flights in Soviet air space to engage in military reconnaissance activity.  
The 007 plane flew for hours way off course over land, and across the most sensitive military areas of the Soviet Union when its proper course was over the ocean, – not a “mistake”.
It was not warned by Western-run air traffic control at either end of the route of its deviation; refused to respond to all communications (despite fully working equipment); refused to acknowledge repeated wing signalling and lights flashing from Mig interceptor jets; refused to hold to international law in landing when instructed. As the forerunner of the EPSR, the Workers Party Bulletin, said then (WP Bulletin No 205 08-09-83):
The crazed abuse of the entire socialist system pouring out of the White House is exactly reminiscent of Hitler’s vilification of Bolshevism as his justification for preparing the blitzkrieg holocaust of World War II, with the invasion of Russia and the ‘extermination of communism’ as its main aim.
What is more, the speed and readiness with which Washington delivered its bellicose propaganda onslaught, without any need to wait for all the facts in a very confused and complex affair to unravel, raises a second big question mark...:- To what extent was this whole incident deliberately engineered?
Once again, many sinister facts show exact parallels with the way the NAZIs organised trivial provocations such as a ‘Polish insult’ to justify the invasion of Poland, the Reichstag fire to impose dictatorship on Germany, and the Paris assassination of a minor German diplomat to introduce the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish question’.
...The obvious conclusion is that the ex-army air crew of the South Korean military dictatorship, - US imperialism’s most insane puppet followers, - flew for 2½ hours over a strictly-excluded area, ignoring all Soviet instructions to leave, as part of a deliberate provocation to learn Russian air-defence secrets, which the CIA’s RC135 would have monitored, as well as the 747.
US imperialism’s other insane bellicose clients, the Zionist occupiers of Palestine, use exactly the same technique, flying dummy runs over Syrian air defences in order to get full data on Syria’s electronic detection and retaliation systems. 

That was then, in the tail-end of the long 70 year history of the titanic Soviet Union, still firm enough as a workers state to defend itself, as necessity dictated, by shooting down the plane, to the disgust and hand-wringing disowning of the petty bourgeois “left” groups, who as always at key difficult moments in history fail to stand with the anti-imperialist and working class forces, and fail to understand the necessity of a firm dictatorship of the working class to defend against capitalist sabotage, subversion, war provocations, and non-stop counter-revolution.
Far from being some kind of monstrous act, this was an unavoidable tragedy created entirely by capitalism.
There is no obvious spying aspect to the latest incident but the whipped up moralising is the same, and possibly even the incident’s deliberate nature and it is a situation created entirely by capitalism.
To understand fully means grasping the broadest picture of imperialist domination of the world and its constant warmongering, some elements of which even a few more principled bourgeois journalists will express:

Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”, as if the truth “never happened even while it was happening”.
Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy” which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.
In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – “our” terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato’s campaign in 2011, “Libya has become a terrorist safe haven”.
The name of “our” enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.
Washington’s role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last “buffer state” bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington’s planned seizure of Russia’s historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.
But Nato’s military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend’s provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine’s population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels”, as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.
Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of “special units” from the CIA and FBI setting up a “security structure” that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.
A doctor described trying to rescue people, “but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didn’t even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent.” [see footnote]
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta’s defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks on “insurgents” would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow “trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation”, according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama’s grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its “remarkable restraint” after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is “duly elected”. As Henry Kissinger once said: “It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true.”
In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as “murky” and a “tragedy” in which “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) attacked “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia’s “undeclared war”. For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.
A popular truism is that “the world changed” following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs “special operations” – secret wars – in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?

What this John Pilger piece, from May before the MH17 downing, does not explore, despite its excellent round-up of the Empire’s endless subversion, is the Marxist dialectical understanding of unravelling crisis and its historic movement driving the desperation of the capitalist world to avoid and escape unstoppable catastrophic disaster that its production for private profit system is heading for (and which repeatedly erupts in ever greater manifestations, in various parts of the world, of currency failures, stagnation, credit collapses and national bankruptcies, and finally in the 2008 world meltdown.)
The account sees the non-stop skulduggery as continuous and getting worse only because “bad men” have taken over Washington, rather than grasping the material basis of the crisis and the driving motion of the contradictions built-in to capitalism and completely unresolvable as they force the world towards the greatest war chaos ever seen.
Though well meaning enough, it relies on “good journalists” and principled liberals to expose the nefarious and foul actions of the Empire which it hopes will  finally turn around enough ordinary good people into stopping this by refusing to “tolerate it”.
This is fanciful idealism.
The world is not driven by subjective feelings and righteous opinions (as pious Christians, Quakers, pacifists and the like have found out over centuries) but by the deep internal contradictions of its material reality as analysed by Marx and Lenin.
Consciousness is created by these conditions and will change because of them – though not without the deliberate battle for objective revolutionary science led by a party dedicated to the task, building on the great past achievements and constantly developing understanding in open polemical struggle.
In other words the crisis and the increasing horrors and deadly devastation and Slump it forces the ruling class to impose will drive the world towards the great revolutionary struggles (and the process is well underway as the huge eruptions of the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine demonstrate).
World imperialism is being driven by a crisis which has ripened far beyond the days of the Cold War and which has now thrown the top-dog imperialist power itself into the role of aggressor, as Germany once was (and Japan may yet again be in the Pacific) attempting to shock-and-awe bully and intimidate the entire world to keep its bankrupt system in the saddle against ever rising rebelliousness from the Third World and increasing cutthroat challenges from the other capitalist powers, particularly the major blocs dominated by Germany, and Japan.
Signs of the growing inter-imperialist conflict are already there in the latest diplomatic “spat” over US spying and surveillance on the Germans for example, and at least as much in the Ukrainian situation which the US has taken in hand, scattering contempt and insults in all directions at, once again, the Germans (as leaders of the EU).
All this cannot be stopped by changing minds and persuading people to be better (especially if they continue to live in a capitalist system).
It can only be stopped by completely ending capitalism everywhere;  and the consciousness of that objective necessity is the great “persuasion” that needs to be developed.
Only revolutionary scientific theory can make sense of, and fully guide, the enormous upheavals and rebellions that the agony and destruction of the crisis collapse is bringing to the surface.
The consciousness does not develop without a deliberate struggle; and without it the great upheavals will be far more protracted, confused and sometimes self-defeating than necessary.
The Palestinian fight illustrates much of this, its militancy and indomitability already some of the most heroic in all human history against one of the foulest expressions of imperialist colonialist tyranny and oppression, the Zionist occupation intrusion into the Middle East.
As with much of the growing Middle Eastern revolt and rapidly increasing Third World anti-imperialism this has used militant variations of the Muslim religious creed for organisation and leadership, and one which has grown ever more and more sophisticated and organised, with now stunning technological capacities (the more so in the light of the extremely restricted resources they are built on).
But this use of modified local historic and cultural traditions to overcome a vacuum in revolutionary Marxist leadership has its problems; not least the pointless sectarian infighting which even now sees Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood behind it, in conflict with the Shia forces.
All have, and partly know they have, Zionism and imperialism as the main enemy but take their eye off the task of defeating this real enemy of the working class – the cause of all the degeneracy, collapse, misery, alienation – instead fighting each other pointlessly or even being manipulated by imperialism on occasion, as in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s or initially part of imperialism’s efforts to contain the great spontaneous Egyptian revolt of 2011, by toppling Libya’s anti-imperialist Gaddafi regime and the follow-on to topple Assad (or neutralise Syria by scorched earth destruction) .
These tangles and complexities of the rising rebellion of the Third World, and the crudities of their strategies, must and will eventually be overcome, by the necessities of the crisis, as to some extent seems to be happening with the latest massacring onslaught by Zionism.
The backwardness (and even reactionariness in part) of the ideologies will have to be overcome.
But this will not happen by condemning them and their fight as the fake-“left” do constantly, joining in the Western propaganda about “criminal terrorism” etc or what amounts to the same thing, declaring them to be just “agents of Washington or the CIA”.
Just the opposite, it has to be through recognising that this is a major part of growing revolution that imperialism’s crisis is driving to the surface, and recognising that the defeats inflicted on imperialism are part of the process of weakening its influence and opening up the possibility for a better revolutionary consciousness and leadership. 
That will only come by clear Leninist struggle against the confusions and retreats of the past, most of all to understand and overcome the impact of the total retreat and philosophical capitulation of Moscow’s revisionist “communism” to “market forces” begun by Stalin’s theoretical errors and concluding with the 1989-91 liquidation of the then still viable USSR. 
It is that great disastrous retreat from Leninism which has left the Third World vacuum, currently filled with predominantly Muslim militancy.
The fake-“lefts” continue to muddy the water and refuse to take up this fight to understand past mistakes, either writing-off the whole of the giant communist achievement of the past, as poisonous Trotskyism does (which is anything but the ‘revolutionary communism’ it pretends to be, helping capitalist anti-communist poison at every turn) or covering up things instead like the museum Stalinists.
Their ludicrous hero worship of Stalin needs to think about the 1948 disastrous Soviet recognition of “Israel” (made directly by Stalin long before the Khruschev succession on which they idiotically and opportunistically blame all Moscow retreats) which helped install the poison dagger of Zionism into Palestine in the first place. 
The disastrous tangle of the Stalinist woodenness has even worse effects, its one-sided support for the bourgeois nationalist Assad regime, (instead of a Leninist dialectical call only for defeat of imperialist war and sabotage against it but no illusions in the regime either) leading it to denounce just as woodenly the “jihadists” fighting in Syria, including the Muslim Brotherhood and by extension, Hamas itself.  That goes even further with their support for the massacring Sisi dictatorship in Egypt as a “step forwards for the people’s revolution”) - the same Sisi military dictatorship which has made the Brotherhood (and its Palestinian offshoot Hamas), illegal and blocked the lifeline smuggling tunnels into Gaza.
How has all this helped the desperate struggle of the Palestinians??????
It will not help the Ukrainians either to call for a “return to Stalin”.
The world needs Leninist revolutionary theory, taking on and confronting all the mistakes and confusions of  the past and the present, and challenging all anti-communism head on.

Build Leninism. 
Don Hoskins

London leaflet for Palestine demonstration Sat 19th July 

Nazi-Zionist Gaza butchery the most depraved expression of untenable Jewish land-theft occupation of Palestine, and genocidal suppression of 8* million strong nation. No “solution” save disbanding the artificial “Israeli state”; it will come as the Palestinian struggle grows more sophisticated and entire Middle East climbs towards revolutionary ejection of all imperialism. Fake-“left” pro-Palestine hypocrisy exposed by constant condemning of “terror” and pro-Sisi Egypt support. Revolutionary Leninism vital      [*including the diaspora]

The depravity of the most fanatical Zionists, calling for the “whole of Gaza” to be eliminated in the latest butchering onslaught, underlines the sick and inexorable reality of the entire Jewish occupation of Palestine.
As women, children, (whole families), hospital patients and the disabled are blown to pieces by F16 high-explosive bombing runs and high-velocity shelling, these most extreme of the Jewish occupiers are effectively calling for total genocidal slaughter.
Even the “limited invasion” by the arch-reactionary Benjamin Netanyahu (that the ultra-Zionists declare to be “a wimp”) demonstrates the inescapable historical trap the occupiers are in.
The unstoppable Palestinian resistance can only grow, pushing the Jewish occupation of the land of Palestine towards the sickest of all ironies – that the greatest scapegoat victims of Second World War capitalist crisis-war degeneracy are now demanding their own “Final Solution”, imposed on the innocent and hapless inhabitants of a land faraway from German and Europe.
Who are the Nazis now???
This is no hyperbole; it is objective reality and can only worsen. 
Events are not driven by deranged Old Testament fanaticism alone but the relentless logic of history and the background of the catastrophic capitalist crisis which is forcing all of imperialism into ever more demented aggression and counter-revolution (witness the latest Kiev fascist “kill-them-all” “answer” to the conflict in Ukraine, using the tragic airline disaster as a pretext for the crudest hate-campaigning to generate war fever against Russia and the East Ukraine working class).
There can never be any resolution of the “Palestinian question” until either the colonialist occupation completely wipes out the 8 million strong dispossessed nation – or the land-theft occupation of their territory (theirs for the past 1500 years) is ended, and the occupying “state” is disbanded. 
Nothing else but their complete suppression will ever stop the resistance of the dispossessed Palestinians, and their astonishing dogged and heroic revolution, growing ever more organised and capable (against all the odds).
“Israel” can only exist at all by constant force and smiting against the dispossessed, and has a future only if they are utterly destroyed as a people (because they will never stop fighting for their rights).  
The “state” of “Israel” is a colonialist implant that would have no right to exist or justification in any epoch, but least of all in the modern era of post-colonialism.
That means all of it, from the original 1947 “gift” of someone else’s land by Western imperialism (through the stooge United Nations) onwards, not just the “illegal occupations” of subsequent wars and endless “settling” (all blind-eyed by Western “democracy”).
Total suppression of indigenous peoples is the ruthless unstoppable path which all colonialism has trodden, forced along it by the objective reality and the contradictions it creates.  
And that is true however far this vile and disgusting butchery of the persecuted Palestinians continues for now in this particular barbaric massacring – or, perhaps it can be said, is allowed to continue by a fearful US-led imperialism (world community) worried about the further lessons this monstrous barbarism and brutality will teach the growing Middle Eastern revolt, and the thousands of additional “terrorists” it will create, both there and far beyond throughout the Third world too.
If this atrocity halts now, then another blitzkrieging will be imposed shortly – and another beyond that, and another and another ad infinitum or until the “problem” no longer exists.
In the meantime there will be the non-stop, (and mostly unreported by the capitalist press), daily shelling, terrorising by jets, imprisonment round-ups by the hundred (including children) kept for years in solitary, torture, sniping deaths of occasional victims, beating with rifle butts, smashing of houses, poisoning of wells, destruction of farmland, uprooting of olive trees, stealing of water and, on top, the endless besieging of Gaza, keeping hundreds of thousands of people in desperation and fear inside the gigantic concentration camp (another historic irony) that has been made of the Gaza strip by the Zionist total border blockades and closures (aided by the West’s fascist military stooges in Egypt).
There is no “peaceful resolution” possible, via one-state, two-state,or any other number solutions (all contemptuously rejected or deferred by Zionism anyway).
All such “compromises” endlessly advocated over decades by the craven fake-“lefts” from Labourism to the Stalinists, would leave the Palestinians crammed permanently into less than 20% of their own land (and the very worst parts) just as a hundred colonially occupied peoples in the past from the Aztecs and Incas, to the Aborigines in Australia and the 200 Native American nations, have all been reduced to a rump and left to fester in suicidal or alcoholic misery on “reservations” without jobs, pride, culture or hope.
But the Palestinians are not living in the old colonial epoch and they are equally driven by history to fight back.
That is why there can never be an “Israel”.
They have no choice and will never stop their dogged fight.
They are getting better and better as the sophisticated level of the missiles and even remote drones they have created indicate.
Their logistic and militant organisation, under the most astoundingly difficult circumstances of permanent siege blockade is incredible.
And if the Zionists shout they are being “helped” well then so much the greater significance; that this is not a Palestinian struggle alone but draws mass support and sympathy from the entire nearly 300 million strong Arab nation, the wider Middle East beyond that, and the hundreds of millions throughout the Third World. 
This struggle is a pivotal part of the entire growing world rebellion against imperialist domination and the Slump and world war disaster its entire system is being driven to.
The barbaric treatment of this people is inspiring and enraging hundreds of millions.
It is itself strengthened and driven by the enormous upheavals everywhere which are now making the imperialist writ and world exploitation ever more difficult.  
The Zionists and their imperialist backers can shout “terrorism” as loud as they like but the reality is that this is a spearhead of anti-imperialist struggle.
It is perfectly justified in fighting back in every way it can possibly manage against the non-stop aggression and oppression it faces.
And every defeat it inflicts on the Jewish-Zionist occupation is a blow weakening and damaging the immediate Zionist tyranny and the imperialist system of which it is a part. 
The latest incident is once again blamed on the Palestinians in a monstrous Goebbels inversion of reality, ignoring the continuous and never-ending violence and oppression inflicted.
Specifically, even in the weeks before the ostensible three Jewish teenagers kidnap, “cause” of the latest invasion (which is just a pretext anyway to excuse yet more war interventions), the Palestinians had been rounded up, brutalised and subject to killings by the Zionist domination.
Generally imperialist media and politicians ignore the origins of the entire conflict which lie in the original Jewish land grab of the 1947 “state” – the very aspect of the conflict here that is never ever mentioned in all the allegedly “reasonable debates” etc or the more demented Wester media onslaughts and denunciations of Hamas and other militant leaderships.
It is a fight going back to the very first days of the Jewish terrorism under the Irgun, the Stern gang and others which instigated and initiated this endless war.
A major impact of the latest “conflict” (as the biased Western Goebbels propaganda likes to pretend, as if this is all some kind of equal-sided “dispute”) is the steady discrediting of the insane nonsense of the West’s “war on terror” which tries to blame the oppressed of the entire Third World for supposed “inhuman extremism” when all they are doing is using whatever weapons they are able to find to fight back against the real inhumanity of imperialist oppression, and most of all, this concentrated foulness of Nazi-Zionism.
But far from condemning the Palestinians for the desperate “suicide bombing” and such other ways of fighting, all astoundingly heroic, world mass opinion is swinging ever more in support of the Gazans and the whole dispossessed Palestinian nation, and the more so as their struggle grows beyond such methods into the now highly sophisticated missile and drone weapons.
The battle is still hugely unbalanced but the huge turmoil throughout the Middle East shows that the revolutionary genie is out of the bottle, lacking only a scientific revolutionary understanding, the Leninist perspective that is vital to win through and build a socialist world.
Another crucial gain from the huge Palestinian fightback is in exposing the cravenness and collusion of the fake-“lefts” of all shades, long since damned as capitulators to imperialist war provocations by their “condemnation” of “terrorist methods” from 9/11 onwards.
They are desperate now not to be caught out by mass sympathies, to ride with the popular struggles and most of all the be “on the side of the Palestinians” (currently led by  Hamas).
So how do they square that with non-stop contempt for “reactionary Islam” (the CPGB Weekly Worker eg) , or their disruptive demonstrations against the Palestinians because they are allegedly “homophobic” (the “gay lobby” and all assorted fake-“left”single-issue supporters of it),  or the writing-off of all such Islamic struggles as “backward jihadism” (Lalkar Stalinists) or even as “all organised by the CIA” (various groups like “Sons of Malcolm”)???
Or just “condemning terror”??
How do all these groups explain their denunciations of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in some cases like Lalkar even calling the brutal fascist General Sisi military coup a “step forwards for the world working class”? (!!!)
The US-funded Sisi coup suppressing the Arab  Spring revolt by cold-blooded killing of thousands, has most of all hampered the Palestine struggle, shutting down the crucial smuggling tunnels  and cooperating with the Zionists. 
But none of them say as single word about these gross errors – as always covered-up by posturing and pretences.
What monstrous hypocrisy by all these fake-“lefts”!! What scummy opportunism. 
Trots and Stalinists alike just hamstring the working class with slyness and falsities, and need exposing constantly.

Build Leninism.
 Steven Tudy

E P S R   BOX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.

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