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 1458 15th December 2014                                                                                                    25p fortnightly

Foul and grotesque CIA torture disclosure is not a reflection of “self-correcting” democracy but the impact of defeats and turmoil on the crisis wracked US top-dog imperialist power, splitting its ruling class and demoralising the petty bourgeoisie to force out revelations. But  it is also a signal of the barbarism to which the imperialist order will sink,  dragging the entire world into the filthiest and most depraved warmongering chaos as its “escape plan”  to evade responsibility for the greatest ever catastrophic failure of human society.  Capitalism is dictatorship by money and the rich ruling class, and has always been fascist – openly so in much of the Third World and just beneath the surface in the hoodwinking “democracy” of the rich countries. It will get much worse. The only answer is revolution, already boiling everywhere in street riots and  confused “jihadism” but lacking the coherent Marxist leadership it needs.

The foul degeneracy of the capitalist warmongering order is underlined ever further by the shocking new further disclosures of CIA torture and the cover-up scandal of child abuse and even murder in Britain.
Great layers of even the complacent middle class are being sickened to their stomachs as astounding revelations pour out of the depths of the degeneracy and fascist foulness into which the entire Western “free world” has descended, (or rather is increasingly exposed to always have been).
Just as disgusting as the revelations themselves is the desperate dissembling nonsense from assorted liberals and Democrat politicians (and their echoes in the UK) that these monstrosities are all simply the action of some few “bad apples” or at most “an ‘understandable’ period of excess and wrongdoing now being corrected” as if the admissions are somehow a vindication of “democratic transparency”.
What gobshite!
Firstly most of the account is censored anyway (“redacted”).
Secondly even the full investigation can only touch on the full horrific barbarity of virtually non-stop blitzing and invasions since 1998 and Pentagon and CIA world interventions since 1945.
Thirdly for “diplomatic” reasons great sections of other Western imperialist participation are deleted (such as the UK’s).
Fourthly, even if were just a crime and not part of the fabric of world imperialist domination, nothing is going to be done about it, least of all the usual trumped-up “war crimes” prosecutions the West is so ready to shout loudly about and impose on assorted demonised victim states and rebellions against its rule (now being wound up once more around Sudan, North Korea eg). Perhaps one or two token minor figures will be sacrificed, if it cannot be avoided,  but even that is unlikely.
Finally, it has not stopped at all, with Guantánamo etc still existing, and the warmongering barbarity of capitalism in full swing directly, by drone assassinations and terrorising, or by fascist proxies, throughout 8 years of the Barack Obama “step forwards for the world working class” black presidency, long proven as a giant extension of the cynical bourgeois “democracy” lie.    
In other words this is not some aberrant exception but part of capitalism itself, as is proven almost daily as ever more incredible revelations pile on top of revelations of current and past depravity, fascist savagery and barbarism by the capitalist world dominating and exploitation system. 
Not only do official reports and unofficial leaks make it clear that the vilest of CIA and Pentagon torture and brutalities now equal anything the German Nazis could manage (but with a modern “sophisticated” touch); but  non-stop drone terror, and “kill them all” air blitzings and death squad massacres are casually imposed by the Empire throughout the Middle East and Africa.
Troop levels are slowly being increased again in Iraq and Afghanistan; NATO build-up around Russia is inexorable.
In Britain details are slowly emerging into the open of the foulest of Establishment homosexual child abuse and degeneracy, to the point even of perverted murders (as re-emerged with the death of Jeremy Thorpe, a scandal “discreetly” buried away during his lifetime along with much else); sinister and knowing cynical establishment cover-ups continue, via stitched up “inquiries” by their friends and overall long-term silence colluded in by the entire “political class”, Labour and Liberal as well as Tory(bar one or two breakaway mavericks) which have already involved even murder conspiracies.
Endless corruption, bribery and sleaze ever more obviously permeate the entire political superstructure; “big Brother” surveillance and police spying and provocateur infiltrations saturate even the mildest of pacifist or environmentalist protests, demonstrations, and political opposition; judicial savagery is ramped-up with long prison sentences for even thinking anti-state thoughts (alleged “terrorism”); prison brutality and “deaths in custody” persecution and anti-immigrant racist violence are revealed to be the norm.
Historical records (again heavily censored) court hearings and the occasionally principled bourgeois journalistic investigation (a rare animal) meanwhile detail past colonialist atrocities of utter gruesomeness and inhumanity from castrations and live roasting of prisoners in Kenya to the deliberate reinstatement of the Gestapo collaborators in traumatised post-war Greece in 1945 by British imperialism, to suppress and destroy the communist movement whose staggering partisan heroism had fought the Nazis to a standstill (a story bizarrely emerging in the bourgeois press recently after six decades of suppression and silence on the Greek Civil War).
The four-year anti-communist war which followed was one of utter brutality, firstly by the British and then the USA, with torture, summary execution, terrorising and new deadly weaponry being tried out such as napalm. 
Simultaneously concentration camps and beheading of communist partisans were imposed by British colonialism on Malaysia. 
It was the much-venerated Attlee post-war “left” Labour Government which put both through.
As recently as the 1960s (again sanctioned by Labour) an entire people was secretly forced out and made refugees to this day from the island of Diego Garcia by the British to make way for a giant American airbase, itself now one of the torture and rendition locations implicated in the CIA scandal.
And none of this was or is anything to with alleged “communist totalitarianism” or “terrible dictators” as the non-stop lies of capitalist propaganda, culture, education and media constantly, universally and continuously brainwash, but is the reality of the capitalist “freedom and democracy” itself – and always has been.
Capitalism is a system of total class dictatorship and an increasingly fascist one at that, hidden behind the pretences of democracy and the “rule of law”, and imposing open thug rule to whatever extent is needed, crudely and barbarically in dozens of stooge Third World regimes installed and supported by the West (via the CIA, but MI6 and French and German intelligence too, and others) – or hidden to various extents behind the lying fraud of “Parliamentary” or “presidential” “democracy” where it can be afforded, but still imposing police state repression on the working class even in the best of times of “reformist gains” and showing its true face when class war conflict erupts (as during the police militarised violence and repression of the great 1984 miners strike and now via in the ever-more heavily militarised police in the USA as it explodes with anger over police killing after killing.)
“Democracy” is the ruling class’s cleverest trick, hiding its true class domination behind the pretence of “having a say” but it is falling apart, leaving the ruling class imposing outright dictatorship which is more sharply expressed increasingly everywhere as the great capitalist epochal collapse unrolls into Depression disaster. 
“Fascism” is not some over-used cliché word that “balanced” and “reasonable” opinion would not use, but is the truth about all capitalism and its sometimes hidden nature).
The smug petty bourgeois shallowness that “you can’t call it fascism yet” and that “raising the name of Hitler automatically invalidates the argument” is an opportunist evasion.
It is the product of completely wooden and complacent thinking, saturated in idiot illusions in “democracy” borne of revisionist philosophical shortcomings from Stalinist mis-assessments of imperialism dating all the way back the 1930s.
These have not only misled the working class for the entire post-war period but repeatedly led them onto the counter-revolutionary guns as with Indonesia’s horrific 1965 one million plus massacres of communist suspects and the CIA colluded and torture-trained Chile coup of 1973 to mention just two. 
These liberal and fake-”left” opportunist evasions completely fail to draw the obvious revolutionary conclusions needed as these scandals are forced ever more into the open by accelerating crisis collapse and rising world rebellion.
What they never say despite their “Marxist” posturing and lip service to its ideas (always buried away in separate academic articles or in passing at the very end of different analyses), is that capitalism has to be completely overturned and the working class needs to take power, establishing the firmest of proletarian dictatorship to suppress this fascist minority ruling class and its inevitable counter-revolutionary plotting and subversions, so that the great majority can build socialism and develop genuine democracy (even if they pay lip service to the idea in various back page articles, isolated from any particular immediate events or upheavals).
Their continuing pursuit of “left pressure”, reforms and parliamentary elections (even by the “revolutionaries”), and diversionary and reactionary single-issue campaigns for feminism, black nationalism and “gay rights” keeps the working class away from any such understanding.
Worse, their capitulation to the “condemn terror” scapegoating and anti-Islam demonisation of imperialism plays directly into the warmongering plans of imperialism to escape its crisis collapse.
Nearly all of them are shown up even by the mystical anarchism of figures like Russell Brand who at least highlight the need for revolution if yet failing to understand the profound depths of the crisis and knowing nothing of the great historic achievements and understanding already won by 150 years of Marxist science, particularly in the titanic history of the Soviet Union.   
The current “left” hysteria about organising for the next election “to unite to stop UKIP” and to “keep the Tories out” is a case in point.
UKIP is undeniably a repellent and backward petty nationalist movement, a “polite” version of past racist Little Englander Nazism like the BNP, and being deliberately fostered and popularised by the ruling class with money, ruling class connections and acres of uncritical or “jokey and blokey” favourable press and media attention (including that which is ostensibly critical).
It taps the most backward and narrow blinkered traditions of British Empire nationalist arrogance instilled into layers of the working class over two centuries of colonialist “superiority”, mingled with confused but quite genuine working class fears of job losses and wages cuts in the teeth of deliberately imported cheap labour competition and community destabilisation, often calculatedly concentrated by the ruling class in limited regions and areas to whip up maximum tensions.
The ruling class has been carefully grooming and elevating it with mass publicity to try and fill the vacuum left by the collapse of working class faith in any parliamentary “democracy” at all (expressed correctly in the common and contemptuous opinion that ‘they are all the same corrupt self-seeking rubbish’, and the increasing abstention from voting at all and more recently by Brand’s articulation.) 
But to declare that this is “the fascist threat” which has to be “stopped at all costs” is utterly misleading, implying firstly that parliament can stop fascism, and secondly that “normal life” would somehow be better if only UKIP was blocked.
By corralling the working class back behind parliamentary elections?
Voting Labour (but only “left” candidates of course and “holding the nose”), is to put back the capitalist reserve team who run the same vile, corrupt, warmongering, blitzing torturing system and collude in and cover-up its foul degeneracies and stinking abuses, its sinister police state surveillance and provocations, its pocket-lining corruption and monopoly exploitation. 
But Labour plays the “anti-immigration” dog-whistle racism card just as much as UKIP (and the Tories too).
This is the party that initiated and carried through the Iraq war in one of the greatest Goebbels confidence tricks of all history, as well as wreaking over a decade of slaughter and repression on the Afghan people, backing the nazi-NATO destruction of Libya. 
Its leading figures are up to their necks in British involvement in Guantánamo, Iraqi detention centres, and torture, unchallenged by even the “left” mavericks like “principled Dennis Skinner” etc who help prop up its continued existence.
The Stalinist revisionists like Lalkar who make much of the “need to break with Labour” VIA shoot-into-a-barrel polemics with the moribund Morning Star Communist Party of Britain and similar elements, are no better either; for all their huffing and puffing they still call for votes for “left” candidates and sustain the democracy illusion. 
Pretending there can be “real democracy this time” because this time we will have “real socialist representatives” is just to rebuild illusions in the greatest capitalist confidence trick of all time.
One of the great historic achievements of the working class lies in its slow, ponderous, decades-long but deep running learning of the lessons that capitalist “democracy” and “freedom” and “steady change for the better” are an enormous confidence trick which has been pulling the wool over their eyes for the last 150 years.
There is only one purpose any revolutionary could have in participating in this racket – to use the mechanism of the bourgeois elections which capitalism is forced to offer to maintain the pretence, as a platform to denounce the parliamentary game for the lie it is and to explain the need for revolution.  
All this is becoming ever more urgent as the gigantic crisis of the capitalist system unravels.
It is not “self-correcting democracy” which has forced the latest (limited) revelations to the surface but the collapse of its system into total bankruptcy, the associated intensification of the rising world rebellion and middle-class despair and disillusionment, particularly as it watches and feels the collapse in ruling class confidence in the world; the petty bourgeois awe of the ruling class is being eaten away as the entire system flounders, unable to impose its exploitation on the world as it has for two centuries despite non-stop “shock and awe”.
The most disastrous collapse of an entire global economic order has only just begun, the greatest catastrophic failure and breakdown of society in 800 years of capitalist history, or in fact an entire epoch of class rule civilisation.   
Even greater upheavals are to come once the smoke-and-mirrors illusion of “economic recovery” implodes again, as it must once the massive inflationary impact of Mickey Mouse Quantitative Easing money printing works its way fully through the complex world economic system, its total lack of all value further diluting and contaminating the international credit system, and bringing complete failure of the world trading currency, the dollar, ever closer.
It could be about to implode at any moment as the disastrous oil price collapse indicates and bank and Stock Exchange failures domino their way through the world economic system again, Bourgeois press agitation is non-stop if totally confused:
The price of oil continued its precipitous fall on Friday,hitting five-and-a-half-year lows after the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted demand next year would be lower than expected.
Benchmark Brent crude has dropped 47% since June and fell to just over $61 a barrel as the IEA warned of the threat of global social instability and the potential for financial defaults in big producer countries such as Venezuela and Russia.
The oil price has plummeted in response to a massive buildup of shale-derived oil in the US, reduced fears of fighting in Iraq disrupting supplies, and slower growth in demand as the world economy falters.
A decision by the Opec two weeks ago to keep its production at existing levels has been taken as a signal by traders and shippers that the producers’ cartel is happy to see prices fall for the forseeable future.
The IEA said in its December monthly oil report that it was cutting its 2015 demand growth forecast by 230,000 barrels a day to 900,000, partly because of falling output in former Soviet countries.
It believed surging US oil supply would push total non-Opec output to a record increase, averaged over the year, of 1.9m barrels a day for 2014, but predicted “the pace is expected to slow to 1.3m barrels a day for next year.”
It also warned: “The resulting downward price pressure would raise the risk of social instability or financial difficulties if producers found it difficult to pay back debt.”
The Paris-based IEA singled out Russia and Venezuela as potential flashpoints for trouble and the warning came as the rouble, which has lost 40% in value against the dollar so far this year, hit a fresh record low. One dollar now buys more than 57 roubles, compared with 35 in the summer.
But while the oil-producing countries face lost revenues and budget shortfalls, lower energy prices are expected to have a beneficial impact on the world economy.
Many countries, particularly in Asia, are desperately dependent on foreign oil and gas imports, so cheaper prices should cut inflation and give impetus to manufacturing output and consumer spending.
Analysts at investment bank ING said: “The recent fall in oil prices may not be sustained but, in the meantime, it provides a very welcome boost to real incomes for most major economies. In time, low oil prices themselves should be their own undoing, as supply withers, although politics will remain a further layer of uncertainty.”
Hans van Cleef, senior energy economist at ABN Amro in Amsterdam, said: “[Oil] is following the trend lower. The market has reacted strongly to the Opec forecast cut, and it is focusing only on the negative.” Lower energy prices will cause havoc in the UK North Sea, where companies such as BP and Shell are cutting jobs at a time when exploration levels have already dropped to very low levels.
The average UK price of petrol has now dropped below £1.20 a litre and is at its lowest level since December 2010, according to government figures.
Airlines have said they expect air fares to fall next year if the lower prices continue, but have warned that there are unlikely to be immediate reductions because fuel is bought a long time in advance of use.
There are strong signs in the US that lower energy prices are having a big effect on consumer spending with store and restaurant sales rising by 5% in November against the same month the previous year.
One reason for lower prices is the weak state of the global economy, and no one can predict with accuracy whether oil prices will stay at the current levels or fall further.
Tom Kloza, co-founder of the US-based Oil Price Information Service, has warned that the world could be heading for $45 per barrel oil, although he maintained that this kind of price was not sustainable longterm.

US shale production and “reduced fears of fighting in Iraq” may be minor factors of these latest meltdowns, but it is the total slump in world production which is the key problem, exactly the overproduction crisis which Karl Marx long ago pinned down as the central and unavoidable contradiction of production for private profit (see page 6 and three volumes of Capital, and the Communist Manifesto, and multiple other writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin)
This petty bourgeois shallowness is still hampered by the glib nonsense poured out by the fake-“lefts” of all shades who since the blitzing of Serbia have been pompously declaring that the world warmongering crisis is “all about oil”.
Oil is a factor but the problem now is that nobody wants it or rather that nobody can make a profit selling it. 
As for an oil price fall being “good for the world economy”, the phrase “clutching at straws” springs to mind. There may be some temporary effect but the picture is one of international currency war and trade war disaster as more capitalist press fears spells out:
I don’t want to put a dampener on the festive cheer, but here are five reasons to think things are not quite the unadulterated picture of harmony and advancement many stock market pundits would have you believe.
The first reason to worry is the curiously juxtaposed state of asset prices, with generally buoyant equities but falling sovereign bond yields and commodity prices. They cannot both be right. High equity prices are – or at least, should be – indicative of investor confidence and optimism. Low bond yields and falling commodity prices point to the very reverse; they are basically a sign of emerging deflationary pressures and a slowing economy. If demand was really about to roar away, both would be rising along with equities, not falling. T
There’s good reason  – pumped up by central bank money printing, abundant cash is desperate for fast vanishing yield, and is chasing it accordingly...If it is yield you are after, sovereign debt markets are again exceptionally poor value, barely offering a real rate of return at all. Commodities were the next port of call, but that game too seems to be up.
The much trumpeted commodities super-cycle has taken a giant lurch down, leaving hundreds of billions of dollars in debt... stranded by the receding tide.
...equities and property have become the asset classes of last resort. Any damage done to stock markets by the collapse in oil and mining shares has been more than made up for by the boom in pharmaceutical and technology stocks. Abundant buybacks and gushing dividends from companies that cannot think of a productive use for the money have fed the frenzy.
After 10 years of going nowhere, pharma is all of a sudden the sector of choice, in eager anticipation of thousands of miracle cures that may never come. 
In their oblivious disregard for the uncertain world around them, stock markets look today very much as they did in 2000 and 2007. We had a slight premonition of what’s to come in the October mini-crash.
Saecond...our old friend Europe, the problem economy that refuses to go away. The collapse in the oil price should be a boon, and indeed would be were it not for the fact that it gives the European Central Bank yet another excuse for doing nothing. Markets are promised jam tomorrow because that’s all that can be delivered; a tomorrow that never comes....Since there is no practical likelihood of federalisation, or even appetite for it, the eurozone is condemned to a kind of locked-in syndrome of helplessness. Eventually, there will have to be a massive, European-wide debt restructuring if the euro is to survive. Such an endgame is years, if not decades, away.
Political uncertainties provide a third anxiety.Populist parties such as the Front National in France, Podemos in Spain, Ukip in England and the Scottish National Party upset the established political order. Stable, pro-business policies become hard to impossible to sustain. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Fourth worry is an increasingly turbulent international situation, made worse in some of the world’s major flashpoints by declining oil prices. Such risks are always with us, but are greater today than markets like to believe.
Finally, overarching all these concerns, is the biggest of the lot – that few of the underlying problems highlighted by the financial crisis have yet been convincingly addressed. If anything, they’ve got even worse.
Since 2007, the ratio of non-financial sector debt to GDP among G20 countries has risen by more than a fifth. This has helped prop up demand, but it has led to new financial booms which mask fundamental weaknesses and loss of productive potential in many advanced economies. There is an evident disconnect between buoyant financial markets on the one hand and underlying economic realities on the other...Hang onto your hats. Conditions will be getting decidedly ugly again in the new year.

Friday, the FTSE 100 [fell] its worst in more than three years. Since Monday, £112bn has been wiped off the value of Britain’s leading companies.
Investors headed for the exits amid growing fears about the Chinese economy, the tumbling price of oil, and the prospect of another eurozone crisis prompted by political uncertainty in Greece.
The FTSE 100 finished at 6300.63 on Friday, its lowest level since 20 October. 
It was the biggest weekly decline in percentage terms since August 2011, when recession fears and worries about America’s debts stalked the markets.
In Europe, Germany’s Dax fell 5% and the Eurofirst 300 lost 5.9% over the week. Wall Street was down more than 200 points, or 1.1% on the day, by the time the London market closed on Friday, despite better than expected US consumer confidence figures for December.
The UK has been affected more than other markets because of its bias towards commodity companies, which have been hit hard by the fall in oil. Brent crude dropped 3% to just over $61 on Friday, a five-and-a-half-year low. As recently as June, the oil price had climbed as high as $155, but fears of a global slowdown hitting demand has seen a slump in the price. In its latest monthly report, published on Friday, the International Energy Authority, the world energy watchdog, cut its forecast for demand growth in 2015 by 230,000 barrels per day to 900,000. This was the fourth time in five months it had lowered its expectations and followed a similar prediction from oil cartel Opec earlier in the week.
This latest market rout followed a decision on Monday by Greece’s prime minister, Antonis Samaras, to call a snap presidential election for next week. If three rounds of voting in the Greek parliament, the last on 29 December, fail to back the ruling coalition’s candidate, Stavros Dimas, this could trigger a general election. Investors fear that the far-left Syriza party, already ahead in the polls, could win that vote and attempt to negotiate a new debt write-off with European lenders. If key players such as Germany fail to agree, the prospect of a breakup of the eurozone is again on the horizon.
...On Friday, Syriza’s parliamentary spokesman, Panaghiotis Lafazanis, said if it assumed office, the party would not only cancel the bailout memorandum signed by Athens and its creditors, but ensure that the troika of lenders leaves Greece.
The Athens stock market, which fell almost 13% on Tuesday after the poll announcement, lost 20% over the course of the week.
A host of poor economic news from around the globe added to the gloomy mood. After weak Chinese import numbers earlier in the week, China reported a worse than expected 7.2% rise in industrial production in November, down from 7.7% the previous month, which fuelled fears of a slowdown in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
In the UK, there was an unexpected 2.2% drop in construction output in October, compared with forecasts of a 0.7% increase and a rise of 1.8% in September.
Russia was also in the spotlight, for the wrong reasons. The rouble hit new lows – down 1.7% at almost 58 to the dollar – as the twin effects of western sanctions over Ukraine and the falling oil price raised fears about the outlook for Russia’s economy, with a 1% hike in interest rates to 10.5% and central bank intervention failing to halt the slide.
Markets have been supported for many months by the extraordinary stimulus measures introduced by central banks aimed at stimulating the flagging global economy. But the US has now finished its bond-buying programme and at next week’s Federal Reserve meeting, analysts will be seeking clues as to when the US central bank plans to raise interest rates.
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi wants to introduce quantitative easing but faces resistance from within the bank’s board, notably from Germany.

Catastrophic breakdown will shortly resume and on a scale ten times worse than the pants-wetting “global financial crisis” six years ago, made far deeper for having been deferred. 
The already agonising “austerity” (a lying hoodwinking weasel word for Slump speed-up) imposed on the working class will be multiplied a hundred times over in penury, unemployment and workhouse cuts and social savagery.
The panic-stricken Tory ruling class know this all too well as the Chancellor George Osborne’s recent bizarre outburst against the tame Establishment BBC reflected, accusing it of “exaggerating the impact of cuts” after his Autumn Statement budget.
Of course it was completely the other way, with all the petty bourgeois media commentators and “think tanks” if anything playing down just how desperately serious is the crisis now unravelling.
So far the ruling class has not imposed anything like the scale of exploitation savagery it knows it must, and despite much talk of belt tightening and discipline and some Victorian workhouse measures viciously penalising the poorest, the Tory government has copped out completely, boosting the economy again half way through its office with yet more credit for a housing bubble etc.
The desperate absurd flannel about “upturns and new spending plans” which the Tories hyped up to try and cover over the “return to the 1930s” reality of the much greater cuts they have no choice but to impose (if they are not to be wiped out by world trade war) is a sign of ruling class fearfulness of working class rebelliousness.
Lashing out at the tame BBC reveals how desperate the ruling class is to avoid the implications being spelt out in any form at all.
They are clear that a seething anger lies just beneath the surface, as the riots two years ago gave a tiny taste of, and want at all costs to keep it headed off and confused.
They are aided by the fake-“left” - from intellectuals, “official trade unionists” “left” Labourites to the assorted Trots and revisionists, none of whom either grasp nor spell the profound gut-wrenching depth of the crisis, nor its implications and effects in massive and above all unstoppable fascist worldwide turmoil imposed by Washington and its acolytes.
Least of all do the “lefts” explain that non-stop worldwide war blitzkrieg and chaos is completely driven by this collapse as the international ruling class, dominated by top-dog US imperialism, squirms and writhes to distract and avoid its responsibility for the chaos and world economic breakdown.
The strategy of permanent world warmongering was set going by the neocon dominance of US power a decade and a half ago, knowing the slump disaster it was facing, 
Imperialist “shock and awe” aimed to distract attention from its epochal breakdown, to suppress already rising Third World hostility to slave-level exploitation (as the world’s masses became drawn into capitalist production everywhere and thereby made more aware of their own degradation, exploitation and humiliation) and to face down inevitable challenges from other imperialist powers as the cutthroat trade war crisis threatens all of them and their very survival.
Washington is deliberately dragging the world into a complete Armageddon of blitzkrieging devastation and destruction and ready to use the foulest and most depraved barbarities to do it.
The need for an ending to this system has never been clearer.
It is achievable only by the revolutionary overturn of an entire class based order of society which is out of time, and incapable of taking mankind forwards .
But for all their decades of “revolutionary” and “Marxist” posturing, the lefts still say noting about it in practice.
The justify their weaselly election bandwaggonning by saying the working class is “not ready” to hear about revolution.
It is a staggering exposure of the complete bankruptcy of all of the “left” groups.
In what way is the working class “not ready” to start building revolutionary understanding? World events prove there is a gaping void.
Riots have already been seen in London and rebelliousness and ferment are exploding across the world. 
In Mexico the streets are filled with protest, initially about the foul murder of 43 leftist students but now incorporating a complete spectrum of discontent; in the Ukraine’s east a bitter working class war, already costing thousands of innocent lives, is being waged against the Nazi death gangs from Kiev; in Africa Burkino Faso has just seen spontaneous rebellion bring down its Western stooge president after 25 years, another corrupt stooge himself installed by fascist coup against the murdered socialist Thomas Sankara.
Mali smoulders with “jihadist” anti-Western turmoil, now suppressed by brutal French troop interventions, and the stinking corruption of “democratic” Nigeria is mess of Islamic insurgency and anti-Western hatred by the Boko Haram in the north-east and rebel militias in the oil-poisoned delta regions.
Somalia’s islamist Al-Shabaab leads a fight against corrupt Western stoogery in Kenya and its military incursions and recently revealed death squad repression into Somalia by covert Kenyan forces (trained by the British). 
The Central African Republic sees continuing bitter fighting against the French-imperialist backed re-instated stooge government and its atrocities, after French intervention last year to overturn a rebel movement.
Seething hatreds and discontent fester beneath the surface in Egypt against the Western funded and supported Sisi coup and its cold-blooded street massacres of thousands, mass arrests and trials sentencing hundreds to death at a time, and with another 40 000 now imprisoned for “political” crimes (a coup supported by the fake-“lefts” of all shades including with the astonishing declaration from the Lalkar Stalinist revisionists that it was “taking the people’s revolution forwards”. (Did that include the just declared release without punishment of the criminal gangster dictator Hosni Mubarak carried through by the Sisi government?????)  
Revolt and suicide attacks proliferate through the Middle East, first around the long struggle of the Palestinians against the monstrous Nazi dispossession of their lands by the Jewish occupation and then across a confusion and mess of civil war destruction and chaos, fostered and initiated by Zionism and the West but continuously coming back to anti-US anti-Western hatreds.  Yemen is on fire with anti-imperialist jihadism and uprising is fermenting in Bahrain, and the Gulf, and potentially into the heart of primitively feudal Saudi Arabia.
Thailand is equally festering, its people suppressed by bloody military coups four years ago and again this spring.
Mass left sentiment has been headed off by centrism for the moment in Spain but is as explosive as the riots and demonstrations erupting once more in the Athens capital of bankrupted Greece; similar left moves see the old East German revisionists elected for the first time to regional government in Thuringia, if only in watered down class-collaborating form of a parliamentary Die Linke, in itself part of the fake-“left” problem but tapping a surge of nostalgia for the old workers state. 
Similar nostalgia for communism is sweeping Bosnia and Hungary, despite Western efforts to bolster fascist Jobbick racism.
Most dramatically of all, huge demonstrations, riots, and political ferment has broken out across multiple cities of the United States, the richest and most powerful country on the planet, with an incredible street debate going non-stop for a month or more over racism and police repression.
Confused, contradictory and often self-defeating as these different seemingly piecemeal struggles are, with their assorted Great Russian nationalist, Stalin-nostalgia, Islamic sectarian, local bourgeois nationalist and black nationalist flavourings, they represent a common pattern of upheaval and revolt driven by the historic bankruptcy of the production for private profit system now riddled with unsolvable contradiction and rotten ripe for overthrow. 
The planet can no longer tolerate the endless suffering, imposed ignorance, philistine dumbing-down, antagonism and conflict at all levels of society, which has always been the reality for 80% of the world’s population (including millions in desperate poverty in “rich” Europe, Japan, and America) and which is now being imposed on the remainder too, whatever complacent illusions they have of being “middle class” or “different” because they live in “democracy and freedom”. 
All these struggles need urgently to find a coherent scientific world view around which they could coalesce. 
It is Marxist Leninist science that is needed, taking on and sorting out all the past confusions and mistakes, and seeing the widest possible view of unrolling current struggles as all reflecting the agonised hatred and hostility of a world population that can no longer bear or accept the grotesque tyranny imposed on it by capitalist exploitation. 
But the “left” avoids drawing out the common patterns in all this, keeping all these struggle separated in their analyses, and finding a dozen ways to capitulate to Western warmongering provocations and confusion as they have done since 9/11, denouncing “terrorism” and “jihadism” and either “condemning” it, or declaring it to be “all setup by the CIA”.
Elaborate conspiracy theories proliferate, and all with one purpose, to get these pretenders off the hook of being painted as “extremists” themselves, making sure that when it comes to the sharpest class war issues they signal their deep down compliance with the existing order whatever the posing.
So in common they all line up with imperialism to paint  the extraordinary explosion of ruthless anti-Westernism in the Islamic State as some mystical “pure evil”, and most of  the  other “jihadism” so-called too, which continues to grow everywhere.
Their horrified response is a complete reflection of middle class squeamishness and opportunism, dismayed by the crude destructiveness and chaos of the breakdown of capitalist rule and revealing their own fears of the complete historic collapse which is unfolding in a revolutionary fragmentation and implosion of all past certainties and relationships.
Their “revolutions” have to be done “properly” by protest and step-by-step improvements whether it be with the alleged steady progress of ostensibly anti-imperialist bourgeois nationalist regimes like Syria, deemed “progressive” by ossified Stalinism, or by the “street fight for democracy” stunts swallowed by the Trots, who go along with anything that is set up by capitalism if it taps their own anti-Soviet and anti-discipline petty bourgeois individualism.
In other words these “revolutions” are just reformism; these “lefts” have no grasp of the inevitable epochal disintegration which capitalism is bringing the world too.    
Leninism does not “support” the chaos as such either; to the contrary it declares that the firmest possible discipline and control is needed, achievable only by a coherent struggle of the working class under an agreed and worked out programme and strategy, which can only emerge from a thoroughly scientific world perspective, battled for and developed constantly  by open polemical struggle in front of the working class.
But Leninism cannot either denounce the emerging fight against capitalism – just the opposite it recognises that this giant turmoil is revolution. 
Of course there are conspiracies and interference and subversion by capitalism spreads octopus tentacles everywhere; and there has undoubtedly been all kinds of Western intelligence manipulation of local sectarian differences and elements, already well-known from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan and in the deadly death squad Sunni-Shia divisions in Iraq’s civil war.
But the notion that this is all caused by sinister puppet masters in Langley is to completely misrepresent the events unfolding in the world and to give crisis-ridden imperialism a coherence and omniscience it not only had never possessed but is losing more and more each day. 
The “lefts” all get into a complete tangle trying to work out who they should “support” because of their failure to see other than in straight lines and step by step “improvement”, instead of understanding that imperialism is the problem and defeat for its skulduggery and warmongering is the key question to focus on.
Most of all they get in the way of building a clear revolutionary perspective, the urgent need.
Don Hoskins

E P S R   BOX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Cuba’s communist achievements even greater in light of 55 year blockade  siege imposed by vicious US reaction

THE negative impacts of the blockade on Cuba are seen in all sectors of the Caribbean country, but with regards to food, the damages directly affect the level of satisfaction of the population, with the aim being clear: to defeat the Cuban people through starvation and need.
  This genocidal policy of the U.S. government, maintained despite international condemnation, particularly attacks this sector, as reflected in the rising price of imported products, the high cost of imports and the restrictions on exporting Cuban products.
  According to officials from the Ministry of Food Industry (Minal), from March 2013 to March 2014, the damages in this sector amounted to 102,275,000 dollars, due to loss of earnings from exports of goods and services, losses due to geographical relocation of trade, and impacts on production and services.
  At a press conference, Betsy Díaz Velázquez, vice minister of Minal, explained that during this same period the number of fines imposed on banks operating with Cuban companies increased, resulting, among other things, in further costs associated with confirmed letters of credit for payments to suppliers abroad in order to ensure the arrival of goods and services.
  For example, she said, the joint venture Los Portales S.A had difficulties buying a stainless steel water tank measuring 50 cubic meters at a cost of 68,900 dollars. “The banks, with which the firm representing us operates, refused to finance the purchase, because of the blockade.”
  Due to the need to relocate trade to more distant markets, the entity spent millions of dollars that would have been saved if Cuban products had access to the U.S market.
  Los Portales S.A imported 400,698,300 dollars worth of goods from Europe and transported 57 40’ containers at an estimated cost of 196,200 dollars. This would have cost just 94,100 dollars if the goods could have been imported from the United States, Velázquez added.
  “The joint venture Bucanero could purchase hopps from the U.S. market, as this is one of the largest producers in the world. However, today they are imported from Europe. “
  During 2013, alimpex, importer and exporter of food, purchased goods with freight expenditures amounting to 200,270,104 dollars due to trade relocation. 38% of the ocean freight costs paid were for goods from Europe, where there was an increase in freight rates due to rising fuel costs as well as surcharges for dangerous cargoes.
  Antonio Guerra, director of Caribex trading company, specializing in seafood, highlighted that his company is restricted with regards to exports of fish products to the United States, one of the most important markets in the world and the main price reference for these products, marking patterns and trends internationally, crucial in setting prices for various marine and aquatic species.
  “The American market has the capacity to absorb almost all of our exports, especially lobster tails and shrimp, which are duty-free in the United States, while in Europe, Japan and Canada, they are taxed at 4.3 and 5% respectively, which accounts for annual losses of 464,700 dollars to the Cuban food industry.”
  Meanwhile, Juan González Escalona, President of the Cubaron Corporation and the joint venture, Habana Club Interna-cional, explained how the blockade prevents the marketing of these products on U.S. soil.
  Internationally, premium rum brands reached an estimated volume of 45 million cases in 2013, of which 18 million are consumed in the U.S, representing approximately 40% of the total.
  Havana Club is the number one premium rum brand in several countries including Germany, Italy, Chile, France, the UK, Canada, Greece, Switzerland, Peru, Bolivia, Denmark, Holland and the Czech Republic, as well as being the absolute leader in the rum category within the Cuban market.
  “The joint venture, Havana Club Internacional, lost out on more than 100 million dollars alone due to the ban on selling our rums in this market, without counting other rum brands which the international market demands. 
The blockade is not against a brand, it is against a country,” Escalona concluded.

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Evo Morales victory in Bolivian election a blow to the US Empire interests but revisionist illusions in “democratic” socialist path still leave the masses vulnerable 

BOLIVIA’S first indigenous President secured an overwhelming victory in the country’s October 12 general elections and another term in office (2015-2020).
  The Movement toward Socialism (mas) candidate easily defeated his four opponents, winning in all national and international polling stations, with more than 60% of the vote, according to preliminary reports.
  Samuel Doria, a wealthy businessman and leader of the opposition party Democratic Unity, obtained 25% voter support, representing the main opposition force in the country; while Jorge Quiroga (Christian Democratic Party) came in third with 9% of the votes. Juan del Granado (Movement without Fear) and Fernando Vargas (Green Party) both received 3%.
  Another important result is that mas will now hold a significant majority in the Pluri-national Legislative Assembly, with 25 of the 36 seats in the Senate, and 80 of 139 in the Chamber of Deputies.
  After hearing preliminary results, crowds of Bolivians across the country came out on Sunday night to celebrate Morales’ re-election.
  Before a crowd of supporters gathered in front of the Government Palace, the President thanked the people for their trust and recalled, “Two models were debated here: privatization and nationalization. Nationalization won with more than 60%.”
  He added, “After hearing the election results, in my name and the name of our brothers, of the Vice President and those fighting for the liberation of all of Bolivia, thank you very much, brothers and sisters, for the Bolivian people’s most recent victory.”
  “Only as a united and organized people can we demonstrate what we can do (...) In your name this triumph of the Bolivian people is dedicated to all the peoples of Latin America, and the world, fighting a-gainst capitalism and imperialism. This victory is dedicated to Fidel Castro and to Hugo Chávez, may he rest in peace,” stated Morales to the applauding crowd.
  According to analysts, the overwhelming MAS victory will allow for the continuation of the process of change initiated nine years ago, which has led to socioeconomic progress, international recognition and the reduction of poverty:
  They emphasize Morales’ ability to implement a coherent and humanist policy, which transformed a once exclusionary and unstable state into a plurinational country, free from neocolonial influences, serious and respected at a global level.
  Argentine journalist Carlos Aznárez outlined in an article the significance of the MAS leader’s convincing victory.
  In his opinion, the Bolivian President resoundingly defeated the racist right wing and colonialists, which since 1492 have
tried to humiliate, annihilate and extinguish indigenous communities.
 His victory - stated Aznárez - is synonymous with the recognition of the coca leaf as a sacred plant of the indigenous peoples; the necessary nationalization of basic economic entities to drive forward social projects; and fulfilling the promise of greater inclusion of the poorest communities in all levels of government.  
Aznárez stated that Morales won due to his support for Latin American and Caribbean integration; participation in mechanisms such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the People’s of Our America (Alba), and given that he did not hesitate in denouncing the threat which the Pacific Alliance posed to continental unity.
  Journalist Ignacio Ramonet added that the former coca grower showed the world that an indigenous person can be an effective President, be proud of his origins, and implement new policies to promote economic development.
  “Bolivians are sending a message that they are satisfied with the cultural, economic and Latin American solidarity policies, because they have all resulted in improved living standards,” stated Ramonet in an interview.
  He cited as positive elements of Morales’ administration, that Bolivia is no longer considered a poor state and is in fact a key provider of raw materials, boasting the greatest growth in Latin America and gaining ground on its neighbors, previously considered to be unachievable.
  For Ramonet, plans to develop the hydrocarbons sector, renewable energy and nuclear technology for peaceful purposes are promising; all of which will involve a larger national workforce, and training a greater number of highly qualified professionals.
  In addition, throughout his Presidency, Morales has recognized, empowered and been accompanied by social movements, in which the voice of the people can always be heard.(Granma International staff) 

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Socialist Cuba is one of the first to send medical aid for the Ebola crisis. It appeals to the world to join the fight  
THE Cuban government, as it has throughout these 55 years of Revolution, has decided to participate in the global effort being conducted by the World Health Organization to confront the dramatic situation unfolding in western Africa, while at the same time, calling on all countries’ governments and ministries of health to join the struggle against this disease.”
  With these words, Cuban Minister of Health Roberto Morales Ojeda, began his statement in Geneva, September 12, announcing the sending of a 165-person brigade, including 62 doctors and 103 nurses, who possess on average 15 years of experience. All, he added, have previously participated in responses to natural disasters or epidemics, as well as medical collaboration missions, with some 23% having participated in more than one internationalist effort.
  Morales explained that the brigade, which is will function through the World Health Organization (who) in Sierra Leone, includes participants selected from among the many who voluntarily expressed their willingness to work in conjunction with all who become involved, including the United States.
  The Cuban minister reported that he had traveled to Geneva to meet with who General Director Dr. Margaret Chan, to respond in the name of the Cuban government, to the request she and UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon made to President Raúl Castro Ruz, as part of a worldwide effort to combat the ebola epidemic in western Africa.
  The minister explained that, at the very beginning of the crisis, Cuba decided to maintain its medical brigades offering services in Africa, in particular the 23-person group in Sierra Leone, and the 16 member contingent in Guinea Conakry.
  During Dr. Margaret Chan’s press conference, Morales called upon other world governments and health ministries to collaborate with the affected countries.
  He also said that Cuba has taken steps as stipulated by international health standards with regards to the entry and exit of travelers, as well as strengthening its National Hygienic-Epidemiological Vigilance System.
 The minister continued saying that Cuba’s response is a continuation of Cuba’s tradition of solidarity, recalling that the Revolution did not wait to develop its own health care services, before offering help to other peoples. Just one year after the triumph of the Revolution, in 1960, Cuba  provided international medical aid for the first time, to earthquake victims in Chile. In May of 1963, the country’s first medical brigade of 55 internationalists departed to Algeria, to offer their services for a one year period.
  In the decade of the 1970’s, Cuba’s solidarity in the field of healthcare was extended across Latin America, Africa and Asia. In 1988, after Hurricanes George and Mitch ravaged the region, the Comprehensive Healthcare Program was begun in the Caribbean and Central America, while to date, some 25,288,000 Cuban health professionals have offered their services in 32 countries.
  Cuba has also collaborated in the training of medical sciences professionals from 121 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. To date, 38,940 doctors have been trained, 24,486 of which graduated over the last 10 years from the Latin American School of Medicine, inaugurated by Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz in November, 1999, as a means of making the Comprehensive Healthcare Program sustainable.
  Cuba currently provides collaborating medical sciences professors for medical schools in 10 countries, serving a total of  29,580 students.
 One of Cuba’s most humane programs was initiated in July of 2004, with the collaboration of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: Operation Miracle which has restored or improved the sight of more than 2.8 million people in 35 countries. Of these, 36,636 in Africa.
 Morales also recalled the catastrophe which followed Hurricane Katrina’s trajectory over New Orleans, September 19, 2005, and the creation of Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Confronting Disasters and Epidemics.
 At that time, some 10,000 Cuban doctors were readied to offer help to the people of New Orleans, help which was not accepted by the U.S. government. Since then, however, 39 brigades have been created which have provided emergency aid in 23 countries.
 Disability, as one of our peoples’ most pressing problems, led to Cuba’s conducting of psycho-sociological and clinical-genetic surveys in Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Since 2008, Cuban medical personnel and collaborators have visited the homes of 1.5 million people with disabilities to determine needs.
  In Africa to date, 76,744 health care providers have offered their services in 39 countries. Currently, 4,048 heath workers, including 2,269 doctors, are collaborating in 32 countries.
  Cuba is present today in 66 countries, with 50,731 health workers, of whom 64.6% are women and 25,412 are doctors.
  Over these years of solidarity and cooperation, 595,482 missions have been completed in 158 countries, with the participation of 325,710 health workers, many of whom have completed two, three or more missions. More than 1.2 million medical consultations have been provided; more than 2.2 million births assisted; 8 million surgeries performed; and more than 12 million children and pregnant women immunized.
  who general director Dr. Margaret Chan emphasized, during the press conference, that having the right people, the right specialists, is critical to preventing the spreading of Ebola. These medical professionals, she said, must be appropriately trained and know how to keep themselves safe, as well.
  “Money and materials are important, but with these means alone we can not stop the Ebola outbreak... What is most important is that they be people who feel compassion, doctors and nurses who know how to comfort patients despite the barriers, for example, of wearing a protective suit, and working in very difficult circumstances,” she said.
  After reiterating that the Ebola outbreak ravaging part of western Africa is the longest, most severe and complex in the almost 40 years since the virus was first identified, Chan commented that Cuba is recognized internationally for its capacity to train excellent doctors and nurses, as well as “its generosity and solidarity with countries on the road to progress.”
  Later, in response to a reporter’s question, Dr. Chan stated that China has also responded, and has provided medical equipment to three of the affected countries.
  She added that UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon has been speaking with world leaders, especially those in Britain, the United States, France, South Africa, and China, saying, “All of the conversations have been very positive. It is now about the details, how many people, what materials, and where.” •