Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class straggle 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 (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL (Post Office Registered.) Phone 0771 2639934 www.epsr-marx-lenin.co. uk   or www.epsr.org   (alternative site)
No 1500 Nov 9 th 2016                                                                                                              40p Weekly

Trump not the problem for the world –capitalist imperialism is, & unsolvable Catastrophic breakdown crisis, heading for war and destruction any which way.  Reformist and “left” despair at US result comes from PC footling failure to take on the revolutionary questions – leaving the working class vulnerable to the fraudulent “anti-establishment” pretences of incipient fascism. The new Nazi tone is part of capitalism itself in crisis and cannot be stopped except by taking on capitalism and overthrowing it to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Fake-“left” condemnation of “terrorism” is part of the problem, lining it up with the imperialist “endless war”  and the chauvinism being readied for the great conflicts to come.  Trump trade war against Europe is the real war in preparation, as capitalism hits the buffers. Defeats for imperialist slaughter in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere should be the call, not moralising - and urgent building of Leninist revolutionary consciousness by open polemics to re-examine all the questions of the past. 

Whatever the US election outcome the world will continue to be dragged into the foulest vile chauvinism, war, and killing until the class-war monopoly capitalism system is finally overturned.
It is the devastating catastrophic economic breakdown of the bankrupt, out-of-time greed ridden private profit system, dominated by topdog power the US, which is shattering all human progress and potential.
The great majority will continue to be driven backwards into Slump and poverty, while degenerate greed and ever greater inequality escalates.
A deliberate turn to savage world war chaos and destruction – (mostly at present under the lying pretence of having to “fight terror”, as in the current imperialist savagery flattening Iraq’s city of Mosul) – is the vicious, bullying, ruling class strategy to escape its responsibility and humiliation, threatening all existence.
It is not “terrorism” which is the problem however but the system which has provoked it, with its centuries of obscene and violently ruthless exploitation, especially of the Third World and the domestic working class and now endless armsrace warmongering to escape its Great Catastrophe. 
Slump and worldwide destruction will force the working class into a revolutionary upheaval as conditions make life more and more impossible everywhere.
All that is missing is the revolutionary leadership, buried under decades of anti-communist brainwashing and fake-“left” confusion mongering and defeatism that “no one will listen to old hat Marxist ideas” or wants to know about socialism, let alone revolution.
But contradictorily, the sheer hatred and antagonisms of the election prove the opposite.
Despair, a sense of betrayal and righteous anger now exists everywhere against all conventional “politics”, (meaning bourgeois politics), and the more so as the crisis-riven ruling class itself becomes ever more fragmented, fractured and fractious over what to do, even itself tearing up the pretences of “rule of law” (demonising its own judges etc in Britain), and tearing up rational argument or the “democratic” process, as both Trump is doing and Nigel Farage in Britain, with his incitements to “street violence” (under the disingenuous pretence of “warning what might happen” if Brexit is ignored).
The hoodwinking “bourgeois democracy” illusion that life can be improved by everyone “having a say” and winning reforms, has never been more threadbare; if voting still happens at all it is done not with any faith in the system but only order to kick it.
Parliament is treated contemptuously and fascist style plebiscite elevated.
The pretence that right wing demagoguery is “against the system” is another fraud of course and will change nothing about the disastrous catastrophic world collapse, save speed it up. 
So all remains a giant vacuum, not filled at all by the fatuous “political correctness” nostrums, open-door welcome to all migrants moralising and “no to war” social pacifism of the reformists and the fake-“left”.
Keeping the death-drone warmonger Obama in power because he is black – or supports “gay marriage”????
Or voting for his follow-on, the disgusting blitzkrieger and big business stooge Hillary Clinton just because she is a woman???
Or to “keep out Trump” when she will run exactly the same system - capitalism?
Such hopeless PC evasion of the real issues is not only inadequate but plays into the hands of imperialist reaction and stirring up of war fever (“gay rights” demonising of Russia for example) – leaving the right wing nazi demagoguery of the racist Trumps, UKIP Brexiters, Le Pen, Duterte’s Filipino “anti-drug” death squads and the brutal “secular” military dictatorship in Egypt, to fill the space.
None of the above is the only response possible for the interests of working class.
So what then can fill the void? 
The full answer can only be revolutionary understanding calling for the total defeat and overturn of the capitalist system and the takeover of all its privately “owned” resources – mines, farms, factories and finance – by the working class, using all those resources in common ownership to establish a rational, planned, socialist world.
Communism in a word.
Clarity and understanding is needed not just of the now glaringly obvious irresolvable contradictions of the capitalist disintegration but of the way out of it through winning the class war to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Only in this way can the working class maintain the control (against capitalist counter-revolution) to build the socialism that will develop equality and participation for all (including ending the discriminations and prejudices which the PCers object to) and thereby end class society forever. 
It demands the greatest and most far reaching debate and discussion, guided by a consciously built party of leadership, taking understanding forwards by hammering out the issues (not wallowing in eclectic circles of endlessly repeated petty bourgeois hostility) to reach a clear consistent revolutionary perspective and agreed line (itself constantly developed by the party as the struggle unfolds).
Most of all, the anti-communist myths and demonisations that keep the working class paralysed and held back must be challenged and demolished.
Particularly huge reconsideration is needed of all the staggering achievements of the first great attempts to build communist workers states such as the Soviet Union (which was already far exceeding all capitalism in some limited respects, eg social provision, education, the space race, music and culture, and potentially, exponentially beyond it), as well as the mistakes and philosophical flaws which led them to abandon the struggle, not defeated but liquidating opportunistically through long evolving revisionist weakness and retreat.
But the open polemical way (and there is no other) of building revolutionary understanding and leadership in the working class continues to be evaded or distorted by opportunist reformists and a slew of pretend revolutionaries, Trotskyist anti-communists and nostalgic Stalinists alike, and their sectarian refusal to polemicise and even to suppress debate with PC moralising strictures. .
They continue to stick with “left pressure”, “peaceful roads”, “step by step progress” and “democratic solutions” even as popular contempt and dismay for the hoodwinking lies of “parliament” and “the presidency” has not only reached rock bottom but turned into outright rejection.
They prop up the very mechanisms that should be exposed and brought down.
They also prop up the “anti-terror” warmongering.
The world is already unstoppably exploding with spontaneous struggles of all kinds – giant mass street outbursts in the Tunisian and Egyptian Arab Spring (still in ferment and held down only by the vilest western stooge dictatorship repression and torture under General Sisi); the working class anti-Nazi resistance in eastern Ukraine; riots against the reactionary monarchy in Morocco; demonstrations in Indonesia; strikes in Greece and France and Spain and Italy; and insurgencies everywhere including the great Third World eruptions from Africa to Asia labelled “terrorism”.
Far more is coming.
The crudest of electoral manipulations, violent provocations, economic sabotage and judicial coups have been needed to keep crisis-hammered Latin America suppressed; an outright military coup needed for the reactionary monarchy in Thailand (stirring barely a murmur of “disapproval” by the “international community” of hypocritical “democracy and freedom” posing Western rich nations); bizarre vigilante demagoguery by Duterte in the Philippines is using summary police and “freelance” executions to slaughter thousands of the poorest as alleged “drug dealers” (with again, only notional “concerned” murmuring from the “rule of law” West) to keep the middle class pacified and the lid on otherwise explosive anti-imperialist sentiment.
South Africa’s Stalinist-influenced bourgeois-compromising ANC is increasingly under challenge.  
And while none of this ferment is yet Marxism, nor mostly anything to do with it, it has been inflicting blows and damage on imperialism which will further open up the conditions for building a conscious revolutionary movement. 
It is one of the great treacheries and betrayals by the reformists and the fake-“left” (all of them) that they continue to condemn such eruptions, effectively siding with the ruling class and failing to explain the huge revolutionary significance of these outbursts (or the dictatorial fascist repression against them). 
Their capitulation to the notion of “world terrorism” with their continuing “condemnations” lines them up with capitalism’s war and slaughter against the inchoate Third World anti-imperialist rebellion (see further down) instead of calling for imperialist defeat.
They are letting imperialism’s degenerate Great Catastrophe warmongering off the hook even as its skulduggery and sabotage gets into even deeper trouble.
They play right into the hands of the frenzied “kill them all” hate campaigning of imperialism, desperate to drag the whole world deeper into a war atmosphere for the great inter-imperialist conflicts to come as the unparalleled crash and economic breakdown of its system continues to unravel into ever more unsolvable trade war and cutthroat competition.
Their silence over the brutal onslaught on Mosul currently underway exposes their cravenness more than ever.
Not one of the “left” speaks out against this grotesque butchery.
Nor do they expose the lying Western media propaganda bolstering it all.
Just the opposite, they tacitly go along with it, their petty bourgeois minds recoiling from the violence and ruthlessness of the Third World revolt against imperialism and particularly the form it takes in the Islamic State rebellion.
So they end up giving credence to the imperialist pretence that it is the jihadists which are the source and cause of the terrorising destruction and mayhem in the world.
Blaming unspeakable destruction and war mayhem on some alleged terrible “evil” which “wants to destroy our ‘democratic’ way of life” must be one of the greatest scapegoating nonsenses of all time (second to the endless anti-communist brainwashing – which continues everywhere).
Such jihadism, its suicidal nihilism and crude terrorising (learned from capitalism) is obviously not yet any kind of answer to the world monopoly system’s endless oppression and the plunge into ever greater degenerate oppression driven by economic and political collapse, the Great Catastrophe, which has been brewing for decades and which erupted in the global credit meltdown of 2008, still unrolling and about to lurch into total economic collapse (via inflation, or credit failure or trade war tariff barriers or other mechanisms). 
That answer can only be the Marxist revolution to overthrow the capitalist order worldwide, consciously establishing the firmest rule of the working class to finally build cooperatively planned socialism.
Jihadism is not sympathetic to such communist notions – though its utterances have shown it to be well aware of the depredations, depravities and oppression of imperialist capitalism – and the most extreme aspects of its despairing apocalyptic religious fanaticism are often counter-productive in getting there.
But it is the shape at present of the world upheaval which the gigantic crisis of the capitalist system and its brutal warmongering has generated, in the absence so far of conscious and scientific (i.e Leninist) revolutionary leadership (because of the great vacuum left by decades of revisionist theoretical retreats and confusions after Lenin’s brilliant achievements (See EPSR books vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against Revisionism), and at least as much again because of the Trotskyist anti-workers state poison which arose as an even more reactionary fake-“left” “counter” to Stalinism’s philosophical errors). 
And this desperate all-out hatred of the West’s oppression, stunningly willing to sacrifice everything in its suicide methodology, will continue to be generated, eventually working through its own self-defeating sectarian and other contradictions to a better grasp of what the fight is really about.
It is the result of the world imperialist crisis, not its cause, and is the early stages of the great rebellion against it, attracting the attention and often the support of millions of disaffected throughout the world.
But all the violence and depravity in the world, is generated and originated as a result of monopoly capitalism directly or in response to its oppression and is solely and totally its responsibility.
To condemn the response as the whole fake-“left” has done ever since the 9/11 attacks is total defeatism (see multiple past issues of the EPSR) capitulating entirely to the West’s Goebbels war lies, dragging public opinion behind its non-stop war frenzy which is preparing for the all out international destruction that trade war and economic collapse is heading for, just as it did twice in the early twentieth century in the Great  War and its extension in World War Two. 
To stand with capitalism’s barbarism, aiming to obliterate completely this revolt at whatever cost in civilian lives and further devastation of the whole of Iraq is the most treacherous betrayal of the working class.
The imperialist onslaught is what needs to fail, defeated by whatever means possible.
Only failures and setbacks for the fascist barbarity now being inflicted by imperialism and defeats for the ruling class everywhere will open up the possibility for revolutionary consciousness to develop (or rather re-develop) and the understanding of the need for a complete overturn of this vile monopoly capitalist system, the most degenerately vicious in all history. 
That implies no support at all for the particular “terrorist” ideologies in which the hostility to imperialism currently finds expression.  
But it does stand against the condemnation and blame of such uprisings.
As Lenin explained in his astonishing article of 1906 on Guerrilla War (see quotes in EPSR 1248 14-09-04 eg) the world will inevitably explode with such struggle in all kinds of ways at sharp moments of intensifying crisis, spontaneously arising from the agonies and pains faced by the masses, particularly when confronting a floundering and split ruling class.
It is a complete betrayal of revolution, he said, to denounce them for their inadequacies.
If anarchistic and other spontaneous uprising falls short or carries out crude or wrong actions then it is the responsibility of the Marxists to provide the better, revolutionary, leadership. 
Constant denunciations of “jihadism” and playing along with the meaningless abstraction of a “war on terror” has put all the “lefts” – Trotskyist and revisionist - effectively on the same side as the imperialism they pretend to be opposing.
The Mosul onslaught is a particularly sharp lesson.
The fake-“left” does not even speak out against this latest military onslaught on Iraq let alone call for the defeat of the universal degenerate war blitzing everywhere dragging the world towards appalling world war.
Most of the reformist left tacitly goes along with the imperialist Goebbels speak blaming the world’s chaos on “terrorists” and going along with the West’s scapegoating demonisation of Islamists, particularly ISIS, helping stampede the working class behind chauvinist hate frenzy.
So too do the fake-“left” revolutionaries denouncing “terror”.
They get into appalling tangles by doing so – ending up supporting some of the most barbaric regimes on the planet such as the Zionist and Washington funded Egyptian General Sisi coup presidency (as Lalkar/Proletarian does eg).
Such is the murky skulduggery of imperialism’s warmongering interventions elsewhere, particularly in Syria that they have been able to run amok with all kinds of ludicrous and “conspiracy theories” (explored below) to cover over their capitulation.
But the situation is clearer in Iraq.
This truly degenerate barbarity is carried out by imperialism itself, extending the original Iraq war blitzkrieg to try and wipe out the resistance that has been battling against it ever since.
The hi-tech mayhem now being rained down on the middle of Iraq has nothing to do with “rescuing the people of Iraq” “restoring normality” and “ending violence and depravity” by “terrorists” so that we can “build a new democratic Iraq” etc etc.
Just how stupid is the world supposed to be???
Wiping out ISIS will only add to the agony and pain of the population – life will certainly not get better suddenly but imperialism’s repression will increase.
The monopoly capitalist order could not care less about the pain and suffering, bereavement and agony which is inflicted and the wrecking of multiple lives as a result of its rampaging and the hatred it stirs up, nor of restoring normal life; most of the destruction is imposed directly by its own forces anyway using the full panoply of hitech weaponry inflicting unspeakable carnage and destruction completely flattening several towns, with barely a single building left standing and civilian populations driven into bleak refugee exile. 
It is imperialism that has completely destroyed Iraq and thrown it into 25 years of absolute hell, starting with the original barbaric 1990 Gulf war (built around hysterical Goebbels lies about “babies thrown out of incubators” etc) and the following decade-plus of agonising siege “sanctions” and routine “no fly” bombing raids, which killed half a million children and many more adults as medicine, equipment and supplies dried up, to the 2003 invasion, and the hundreds of thousands blitzed and maimed and made homeless, and millions driven into refugee status, suffering endlessly since in the chaos, depravity and torturing mayhem imposed then and since by the US (and its UK stooges) all on the basis of outright lies and fabricated “justifications” over “weapons of mass destruction” etc.
Imperialism triggered the local resistance which inevitably developed in the years of occupation savagery, unspeakable atrocity, prisoner humiliation, torture and often arbitrary civilian killing after the Washington led invasion. 
As any rational brain understood, the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions would generate and magnify hugely the insurgency and resistance against Western intervention, labelled “terrorism”, and so it has proved.  
This new barbaric and brutal butchery and slaughter on Kirkuk and now the one million strong city of Mosul has echoes of the depraved 2004 war-crime (white phosphorus bone-burning bombs etc) destruction of Falluja in the original Iraq war occupation, and the grossest depravities since.
Despite the pretence that this is an operation by “Iraqi government troops” to “deal with the violent terrorism” and reestablish the “rule of law” and “democracy” in “their own country” etc etc. the whole operation is clearly direct warmongering by Washington.
The Iraqi government is a total US stooge anyway, a sectarian Shia regime established by the US occupation (which failed to put a new Sunni Saddam in place) before it “pulled out” in 2009 (except for half a dozen major US military bases of course); the latest prime minister Haider al-Abadi was installed under Western pressure and approved by the US embassy after the former US-selected appointee Nouri al-Maliki slid so far into outright pocket-lining corruption that it was threatening even a local Shia revolt (despite Maliki being a Shia himself).
And there are masses of US troops on the ground for this attack, some 5000, as well as further forces from imperialist sidekicks like Britain and France and the devastating force of their combined air power, supplemented with drones and Hellfire missiles.
On top of that they are supported by a slew of local stoogery including the paid-off petty bourgeois Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, and even the Turks (though this in turn causing all kinds of splits and problems), as the bourgeois press makes clear:
As the wounded were evacuated to ambulances on a nearby main road, a British man in military uniform stood behind a machine gun on a pickup truck, which moved towards the fire.
He would not say where he was from, and insisted that his face should not be photographed. But alongside him were an array of weapons typically carried by Special Forces. The British and Australian SAS are active in northern Iraq, along with US forces, where they have been calling in airstrikes to support both Kurdish and Iraqi advances. Their role at the frontline has not been well documented, however. Peshmerga officers said the New Zealand SAS are also present. The NZ defence minister said it was incorrect to say NZ SAS were calling in airstrikes or involved in other combat operations in Iraq, NZ media reported.
********
Kurdish troops backed by foreign special forces including a Turkish contingent advanced on a town near Mosul on Sunday, pushing to within five miles (nine kilometres) of the northern Iraqi city as Islamic State launched another diversionary attack on the western town of Rutba.
Its liberation was expected last week when Kurdish peshmerga forces swept into the area, only to be pinned down by a barrage of suicide attacks, buildings filled with homemade bombs, and militants using tunnel networks to reappear in “cleared areas” to launch fresh ambushes....
Two apache attack helicopters hovered over the town, despite a thick pall of smoke from tyres set ablaze by Isis to try to obscure aerial views of the town.
At a US special forces base nearby, troops were constructing earth berms for protection, their artillery pointed at Isis positions below. Near the local fighters’ forward outpost two British special forces fighters warned against photographing them as they scanned the valley for enemy fighters, before a hail of mortars flew towards Isis positions.
**********
There are 500 Turkish troops training both Sunni and Kurdish forces for the offensive at the Bashiqa base, and the Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim, said on Sunday that after requests for support, Turkish tanks and artillery had joined the battle.
Under a US-brokered agreement negotiated in the run-up to the offensive, the Peshmerga and Shia militias such as the Iranian backed Hashd al-Shaabi are supposed to stop short of entering Mosul itself, which is mostly Sunni, allowing the Iraqi army’s counter-terrorism force, federal police and local tribal fighters to conduct the house-to-house fighting in the city, with the aim of minimising sectarian conflict in the aftermath of the battle against Isis.
US, British and French special forces are playing a supporting role in the offensive, some giving coordinates on enemy targets for airstrikes. The US has a total 5,000 troops in Iraq, many serving as advisors to the 12 Iraqi brigades that have been specifically trained for the battle of Mosul. An ABC correspondent covering the peshmerga advance reported that US troops from the 101st Airborne Division were operating openly with the Kurds.
“Early indications are that Iraqi forces met their objections and are ahead of schedule on this first day. Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, said.
State-sanctioned Shiite militias meanwhile launched an assault to the west of Mosul aimed at driving IS from the town of Tal Afar, which had a majority Shiite population before it fell to the militants in the summer of 2014.
Rights groups have accused the militias of abuses against civilians in other Sunni areas retaken from IS 

In a further exposure of the endless nose-tapping “we-know-what-is-going-on-really” theories Washington is now massacring the “terrorists” it is supposed to have “created” using various stooge forces it has bribed in the region (some themselves hailed at various times by the “lefts” as supposed progressive “resistance”, the Trots supporting the petty bourgeois opportunist Kurds from Syria and northern Iraq and the revisionists siding with Baghdad’s Shia “militias”, and the anti-communist Islamists from the Iranian Ayatollahocracy, all alleged to be a progressive “axis of resistance”).
All this is sustained by the endless brainwashing lies poured out of the bourgeois media denouncing all the rebellion which has arisen against it.
The distortions and hypocrisy of the media deluge is occasionally sickening enough even for a few of the more principled bourgeois journalists such as the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn to point out the gross bias in the coverage, if not completely seeing the Goebbels big lie cynicism of it. The confusions of the Aleppo siege are further looked at below:
Compare the coverage of Mosul and East Aleppo and it tells you a lot about the propaganda we consume.
In both countries, two large Sunni Arab urban centres – East Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq – are being besieged by pro-government forces strongly supported by foreign airpower. Yet the coverage is very different... 
In Iran in early 2011 there were reports from opposition exiles that protests were sweeping the country. There had been a demonstration of 30,000 protesters in north Tehran on 14 February – recalling the mass protests against the allegedly fixed presidential election of 2009 – that had caught the authorities by surprise. There was hopeful commentary from Western pundits suggesting that the Arab Spring uprisings might be spreading to Iran.
But, by the time I got to Tehran a few days later, nothing much appeared to be going on, though there were plenty of bored looking riot police standing around in the rain doing nothing. It looked as if the protests had dwindled away, but when I checked the internet I found this was not so. Opposition spokesmen were claiming that protests were taking place every week not just in north Tehran but in other Iranian cities. Videos running online showing protesters resisting baton-wielding riot police and militiamen.
I met some friendly Iranian correspondents, well informed, but with their press credentials suspended by the Iranian authorities. They laughed when I described my vain pursuit of the anti-government protests, explaining that I was failing to find them because they had ceased earlier in the month.
One journalist usually sympathetic to the opposition said that “the problem is that the picture of what is happening in Iran these days comes largely from exiled Iranians and is often a product of wishful thinking or propaganda.” I asked about the videos online and he said that these were mostly concocted by the opposition using film of real demonstrations. One, supposedly filmed in winter, had trees covered in leaves clearly visible in the far background.
...The stringers...added gloomily that, even if they were free to report, Western editors “would not believe us because the exiles and their news outlets have convinced them. If we deny this, our bosses will simply believe that we have been intimidated or bought up by the government.”
... in Libya and Syria opposition activists were able to gain control of the media narrative and exclude all other interpretations of what was happening. In Libya, Gaddafi was demonised as the sole cause of all his country’s ills while his opponents were lauded as valiant freedom fighters whose victory would bring liberal democracy to the Libyan people. Instead, as was fairly predictable, the overthrow of Gaddafi rapidly reduced Libya to a violent and criminalised anarchy with little likelihood of recovery.
In present day Syria and Iraq one can see much the same process at work. In both countries, two large Sunni Arab urban centres – East Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq – are being besieged by pro-government forces strongly supported by foreign airpower. In East Aleppo, some 250,000 civilians and 8,000 insurgents, are under attack by the Syrian Army allied to Shia paramilitaries from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon and supported by the Russian and Syrian air forces. The bombing of East Aleppo has rightly caused worldwide revulsion and condemnation.
But look at how differently the international media is treating a similar situation in Mosul, 300 miles east of Aleppo, where one million people and an estimated 5,000 Isis fighters are being encircled by the Iraqi army fighting alongside Kurdish Peshmerga and Shia and Sunni paramilitaries and with massive support from a US-led air campaign. In the case of Mosul, unlike Aleppo, the defenders are to blame for endangering civilians by using them as human shields and preventing them leaving. In East Aleppo, fortunately, there are no human shields – though the UN says that half the civilian population wants to depart – but simply innocent victims of Russian savagery.
Destruction in Aleppo by Russian air strikes is compared to the destruction of Grozny in Chechnya sixteen years ago, but, curiously, no analogy is made with Ramadi, a city of 350,000 on the Euphrates in Iraq, that was 80 per cent destroyed by US-led air strikes in 2015. Parallels go further: civilians trapped in East Aleppo are understandably terrified of what the Syrian Mukhabara secret police would do to them if they leave and try to pass through Syrian government checkpoints.
But I talked earlier this year to some truck drivers from Ramadi whom I found sleeping under a bridge in Kirkuk who explained that they could not even go back to the ruins of their homes because checkpoints on the road to the city were manned by a particularly violent Shia militia. They would certainly have to pay a large bribe and stood a good chance of being detained, tortured or murdered.
The advance on Mosul is being led by the elite Special Forces of the Iraqi counter-terrorism units and Shia militias are not supposed to enter the city, almost all of whose current inhabitants are Sunni Arabs. But in the last few days these same special forces entered the town of Bartella on the main road twelve miles from Mosul in their black Humvees which were reportedly decorated with Shia religious banners. Kurdish troops asked them to remove the banners and they refused. An Iraqi soldier named Ali Saad was quoted as saying: “(T)hey asked if we were militias. We said we’re not militias, we are Iraqi forces and these are our beliefs.”
It may be that Isis will not fight for Mosul, but the probability is that they will, in which case the outlook will not be good for the civilian population. Isis did not fight to the last man in Fallujah west of Baghdad so much of the city is intact, but they did fight for Khalidiya, a nearby town of 30,000, where today only four buildings are still standing according to the Americans.
The extreme bias shown in foreign media coverage of similar events in Iraq and Syria will be a rewarding subject for PhDs students looking at the uses and abuses of propaganda down the ages.
This has been the pattern of reporting of the wars in Syria and Iraq over the last five years. Nothing much has changed since 2003 when the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein had persuaded foreign governments and media alike that the invading American and British armies would be greeted with rapture by the Iraqi people. A year later the invaders were fighting for their lives. Misled by opposition propagandists and their own wishful thinking, foreign government officials and journalists had wholly misread the local political landscape. Much the same thing is happening today. 

For Cockburn’s mild “misreading” substitute deliberate “non-stop distortion and lies” of course, both from the twisted and biased media itself and from the diet of allegations and accusations from coached or axe-grinding “witnesses”, constantly fed through by the Western intelligence agencies and “diplomatic representatives”. 
Cockburn only goes so far, and is still essentially onside with the West, managing not to point out for example that the bias he sees is due to the Western support and funding for this reactionary stooge “opposition” in Aleppo – himself going along with the US warmongering hostility against the Assad government.
It is this skulduggery and manipulation which has been used by the fake-“left” as an excuse to line themselves up with the “war on terror” and the blitzkrieg on ISIS, just as they have used conspiracy theories from 9/11 onwards to excuse themselves from the need to make a revolutionary analysis of the whole Third World rebellion.
After all, if the “insurgents” and terrorists are actually “all run by the CIA”, then condemning them is no problem – and a “left” anti-American posture can be elaborated without any need to actually grapple with an understanding of the Third World revolt and certainly no risk being run of being associated with the revolt.
Imperialist skulduggery and intriguing around the Iraqi and then Syrian civil wars has given scope for endless confusion over such questions, not least because Washington and its stooges certainly do try to inflame and provoke historic sectarian differences, do recruit, fund and train various factions both overtly and covertly, and do foster, organise and push bogus “demonstrations”, “street rebellions” and sometimes even entire (counter) “revolutions”, all carefully colour coordinated from Georgia and the Ukraine to the 2013 counter-revolution which put in General Sisi in Egypt.
Most of the “left” concentrate their theorising therefore on Syria where imperialism has obviously and increasingly openly provoked the war to bring down the Assad regime, triggering it from the beginning with infiltrated provocateurs and then feeding, training and arming the sectarian rebellion both directly, and via assorted reactionary state backers from Zionism to the feudal sheikhdom primitives which Washington (and the UK to some extent) keep propped up and defended in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia.
This all suits the wooden undialectical thinking that all of the “lefts” engage in, their petty bourgeois minds categorising and assigning things to fixed boxes. 
And once things are assigned they remain in their boxes
The pathetic and crude apeing of capitalism’s “war on terror” by Putin’s befuddled bonapartism in Moscow, running a restored capitalism of gangster oligarch exploitation, Russian Orthodox church mindrot, and declared anti-communism constantly looking to “cooperate” with the West (!!!) does not help.   
So sometimes useful figures such as Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and “left” journalist John Pilger can discuss, in a recent interview, discoveries about Hillary Clinton’s emails revealing knowledge of support of ISIS by Saudi etc to declare that ISIS is for all time really an instrument of imperialism (instead of blowing back against it, as it has).
And Pilger goes further by declaring that because the CIA used the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan early on against the Soviet backing for the 1980s socialist government, it is proof that essentially all such upheavals are really part of an imperialist plot.
But the Taliban has been fighting the Americans since 2001!!
Variously the entire left goes along with this kind of thinking and has done since 9/11.
And it is  hopeless as pointed out in EPSR 1223 12-02-02):

 - one of the most wretched and damning nonsenses of all about this “Sept 11 is a CIA conspiracy” stuff is its pitiful subjective defeatism. These middle-class mice of the fake-’left’ apparently want to tell the world in all seriousness that a) it is not uncontrollable contradictions that rule (and eventually bring down) the crisis-ridden imperialist system but the fiendish imperialist spies and intelligence services which totally manipulate world events, completely fooling the whole planet (with the exception of this handful of very clever ‘left’ sleuths, of course) that Sept 11 was an act of guerrilla-war terrorism by Middle East Islamic fanatics, when in reality it was the CIA who invented, dramatised, and faultlessly carried out the whole operation themselves without anyone knowing it; and b) that this was done because these world-manipulating imperialist fiends are about to impose an entire warmongering colonising perspective onto the whole of future history which will capture all the world’s oil resources, permanently militarily dominate the entire Middle East and Central Asia, and force or persuade every other imperialist power to either willingly dance to America’s tune, or else be ruthlessly crushed, just like everyone else in this Star Wars scenario, etc, etc; and c) that the only hope for mankind lies in people recognising the investigative genius of the authors of this ‘penetrative study’ and agreeing with them to...... do what, exactly?
Probably to go on a protest march outside an embassy somewhere.

This categorising woodenness is applied by all the lefts to the Islamic State revolt in Syria but immediately runs into difficulties.
For the Trots who also go along with the Western hate campaign against the “dictator” Assad it has thrown all their sophistries about a “peoples revolt” into the dustbin.
They all went along with the fraudulent uprising pretence against the Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and shortly afterwards against Assad, both intended to head off the real Arab Spring in Egypt, despite it being clear from the start that these were stooge revolts calling for Western “help” and arms (to justify invasion).
But as the manipulations of imperialism, using all kinds of Islamic sectarianism, have been more and more revealed, their laughable fantasies about a “peoples’ revolt” on the ground have become completely untenable. And the obvious dominance of the US in the barbarism against Mosul has only made their posturing pretences even more untenable. 
So now they have retreated to total petty bourgeois despair, the Weekly Worker former revisionists and now crypto-Trotskyists declaring recently that everything would have to start from the beginning again because all the assorted factions gathered around Mosul were either outright reactionary or compromised with imperialist collusion – and the same for Aleppo, damning both the obvious stoogery deliberately terror-sabotaging the city and the Assad regime and its Russian alliance outside.
The Stalinists are equally trapped by their woodenly abstracted non-dialectical “rules” and “principles” mechanically applied to analyse things rather than a complete overview of the entire crisis ridden world and the shifting of various elements within it relative to imperialism.
Their position of defending the bourgeois nationalist Syria and declaring along with Assad that the fight is “against terrorism”, which is allegedly driven by “head banging mercenaries for imperialism” creates all kinds of difficulties and contradictions.
Something call “terrorism” is a real phenomenon as imperialist propaganda ludicrously says????
But it is all done by the CIA???
So therefore capitalism is organising against itself to carry out such attacks as the Paris killings or Brussels???????
Or it is running destabilising turmoil throughout Africa such as the Somalian revolt by al-Shabaab (including terror attacks against Western orientated and allied Kenya) to Boko Haram, again causing havoc for an existing Western stooge power??? 
Or attacking the pro-capitalist regimes in Indonesia and the Philippines????
What about the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, Hamas in the Gaza strip - are they really all “headbanging mercenaries for Washington” too?
Or even more bizarrely, the Stalinists end up defending the gross dictatorship in Cairo (which has slaughtered thousands of civilians and is currently notorious for the killing of an Italian trade union researcher from Cambridge) because it is “fighting against terrorism” in the Sinai where the Islamist anti-Zionist revolt has declared itself an ISIS ally.
But this revolt is clearly against the bloody US funded dictatorship:
An Egyptian general has been killed by militants near his home in North Sinai, the military has said, the second soldier of his rank to be shot dead in as many weeks.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, in which gunmen opened fire on Brig Gen Hesham Mahmoud Abualazm from a moving car in Arish city, North Sinai’s provincial capital.
Abualazm, 47, died instantly. He was on a visit to Arish, where he owned a house, and did not serve in Sinai, security sources said.
Hundreds of soldiers and police have been killed in an Islamist insurgency led by the jihadi group in the rugged and thinly populated Sinai peninsula.
Attacks have been stepped up since the military overthrew President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest Islamist movement, in mid-2013 following mass protests against his rule.
A new group calling itself Louwaa al-Thawra, or the Revolution Brigade, claimed responsibility for an attack on 22 October in which another general was killed in the same way as Abualazm.
Another senior military officer and a soldier were killed on Saturday in North Sinai in a roadside explosion.
Egyptian authorities said earlier on Friday they had arrested leaders and members of Louwaa al-Thawra and another recently emerged militant group, the Hasam Movement, and had seized weapons and explosives.
Authorities also said they had proof the organisations had been set up by the brotherhood, which says it is a non-violent movement.
Judges, police officers and senior officials have increasingly been targeted by radical Islamists angered by hefty prison sentences imposed on members of the now outlawed group.

This disastrous straitjacket thinking of the Stalinists comes, about because it fails too see the big picture of the overall world imperialist crisis and its warmongering, and the shifting pattern of struggle within it.
Taking positions in support of halfway house or compromising bourgeois nationalist regimes (Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi etc etc) prevents them seeing all the different struggles in relation to the overall problem in the world, the imperialist monopoly capitalist system.
But everything must be measured against that alone with constant attention to the concrete specifics as Lenin repeatedly explained, looking always for the defeat of the imperialist forces but without fostering any trust or support in anything but Marxism and the workers states.
Other contradictions emerge as soon as the perspective is widened outwards.
First of all of course the Middle Eastern onslaught is far wider and more general than simply Syria and the ISIS in Syria and often completely contradictory to it.
Imperialism (and its Zionist stooge) has pulverised or is now devastating half a dozen other countries from Libya to Yemen to keep a lid on the explosive Middle East and warmongering on the boil.
Barely even a pretence that it is not in charge is made over the millions being tormented, tyrannised and slaughtered in the Saudi Arabian war on Yemen for example, designed to put down the spontaneous rebellion of its masses against the former American-leaning stoogery which was running it, a revolt triggered by the genuine Arab Spring in nearby Cairo in 2011, and which has nothing to do with “ISIS terrorism”.
To the contrary, inasmuch as there could be some influence by “regional alliances”, or regional attempts to take advantage of the chaos, (though this could be disinformation) it is by the opposite sectarian factions to the Sunni ISIS, namely the Shi’ite Iranian Ayatollahocracy – an “enemy” of the US here therefore, while the “ally” in Iraq. 
Cynically in Yemen, topdog imperialist Washington is here not just allied with the “Sunni side of the street” (in Riyadh) but completely running the sick war-crime butchery, all controlled and approved by the “non-interventionist” (!!) Obama presidency. 
Together with £-billions of sidekick British imperialist weaponry and hundreds of its “technical advisers”, the US is directly running and controlling the imposition of the most gruesome war-crime civilian massacres, starvation, and terrorising of most of the northern Yemeni (Houthi) entire population, consciously imposing killer malnutrition siege conditions by the destruction of ports, harbours, food stores and infrastructure and quite deliberately targeting civilian gatherings which are “on the wrong side” (all further war-crimes for what such formal juridical niceties are worth).  
The same is true for the stinking warlordist chaos left in Libya after the savage 2011 nazi-NATO blitzkrieg (masterminded by Hillary Clinton) which on the shallow pretext of a now admitted fabrication about a “potential (!!!!) genocide in Benghazi” – even flimsier than the “Saddam’s WMD” lies used to start the Iraq war – tore apart a perfectly sound and equitable society (insofar as such a bourgeois nationalist regime as Gaddafi’s could be so, without a socialist planned economy) to leave a disastrous mess of bereavement and poverty now in near permanent civil war, with nothing but gangsterism and thuggery amid the ruins and destruction of swathes of the country and many of its cities.
Gaddafi was murdered in one of the most ghastly war crimes ever, buggered with a steel blade, to the tinkling laughter delight of Hillary Clinton the next morning.
War occupation is still continuing in Afghanistan after 14 – count them – 14 years of bloody mayhem, brutal prison camp torture and renditions (including to the still extant fascist torture and “interrogation” concentration camp of Guantánamo) and constant drone terrorising (long before ISIS came into being or was even being provoked), and a Western bribed and degenerate regime in Kabul which is a byword for corruption among its own brand of tribalist mafias.
Permanent terror is imposed on the remoter regions of Pakistan with secretive and illegal cross-border CIA drone patrols and regular Hellfire missile blastings of “suspected terrorists” (meaning locals who presume to take a stand against Western interests and domination) and any hapless bystanders including multiple women and children.
And such cowardly, comfortable, remote drone death-squadism goes on continuously in country after country such as Somalia, Chad, Nigeria, Iraq, and others.
And at the heart of everything there is Palestine, an entire country stolen and fragmented with half its population permanently and continuously terrorised for seven decades, its people imprisoned, humiliated, and corralled into the besieged and blockaded concrete nightmare “territory” of Gaza, more akin to a concentration camp than a country, endlessly harried, bullied, beaten, bombed and sniped even between the regular bouts of outright blitzkrieg “punishments” by Zionism’s armoury of hi-tech tanks and planes, wiping out hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands, of men, women and children at a time, from an indigenous population that dares to stand up to the vile and brutal Jewish nazi apartheid occupation of their stolen lands.
It is imperialism which generated rebellion against it everywhere, and which taught it the ruthless terrorising methods which it has turned to - either deliberately and consciously as the hellish late-twentieth century Latin American massacring regimes were taught (and the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan Contras), in the School of the Americas, or with CIA tutelage, or indirectly by the resistance learning to counter in kind, the savagery imposed upon it.
It all comes from imperialism.
It is imperialism that needs to be defeated.
Only the longest and broadest perspective, – a Marxist understanding -  can even attempt to unravel things, and simultaneously make clear for the working class just what deadly confusion the pretend “left” is leading them to.
As well as a broader geographical view a longer historic view is needed.
Some recapping can help starting with the deliberate turn to escalated warmongering (on top of its routine coups and CIA interventions) in the late 1990s by neocon dominated Washington, to solve the ever deepening inflationary dollar economic crisis which they knew was teetering on the edge of disaster (as became universally clear in 2008’s global credit collapse).
The aim was to “shock and awe” the rest of the world out of any thoughts of challenging the supremacy of the American Empire despite its bankruptcy and the growing Third World “guerrilla war” resistance which had been on the rise for over a decade.
After the degenerate 200 day “practice run” NATO blitzing of tiny Serbia in 1998 (killing hundreds and deliberately destroying major infrastructure) the shock New York attack of 9/11 became the excuse to launch all-out war on a suitable victim - the unplanned Afghanistan attack first and, long-prepared, the blitzing of already demonised former stooge Saddam Hussein, to demonstrate the ruthlessness of US imperialism against all comers, Third world revolt and potential capitalist rivals alike such as the German-dominated Europe or Japan. 
But this all out Blair/Bush warmongering, accompanied by dire warnings and threats against the whole world and especially big capitalist rivals (“surrender monkeys”), rapidly turned sour, its attempted neo-colonial domination and re-assertion of American supremacy all running into a disastrous quagmire, draining hundreds of billions of dollars from the economy and sending an ever increasing number of body bags back home, sapping public morale.
And as any rational brain understood even then and has seen confirmed a thousand times over, both invasions would generate and magnify hugely the insurgency and resistance, and so it has proved. 
Local resistance inevitably developed in the years of savagery, unspeakable atrocity, prisoner humiliation, torture and killing, much of it in the Sunni “triangle” region, where the flaky Saddam Hussein regime had been based, and which almost succeeded in rebelling against the US occupation in the “civil war” of 2005-7 (to suppress which the US consciously inflamed sectarian hatreds by training the southern Iraqi Shia population with US death-squad techniques imported from the foul and bloody massacres imposed on El Salvador in the 1980s and 1990s). 
That anti-occupation revolt has now largely merged into and is part of the Islamic State Sunni rebellion and the enormous and ever expanding seething ferment of anti-western hatred which has been created throughout the Middle East (and beyond in the whole Third World), firstly from the entire past two centuries of “dirty Arab” humiliation, oppression and exploitation by Western colonialism and then by the horrors rained down on the region since the beginning of the century. 
The Taliban, once “used” by the CIA for entrapping the Soviet support in Afghanistan for the Najibullah socialist government, also turned into a dogged insurgency against the US occupation.
This war-wearying mess of dollar draining military stalemate and stalemate defeat effectively brought down both Blair and Bush, shuffled sideways and well-rewarded but reaching a nadir of popular support never seen before.
The already contemptuously regarded “democracy” of bourgeois parliament and especially the White House presidency almost collapsed under this defeat, rescued only by urgently and cynically playing the “politically correct” cards of feminism (partially) and of a “black” president (despite it sticking in the throat of the ruling class) .
But as well as PCism rescuing things, Obamaism was also obliged (notionally) to rein in the debilitating and unsustainable war interventions, a need compounded by the breaking out of the 2008 global economic collapse (which remains the overriding fear for all the ruling class, held off only by desperate Mickey Mouse money printing and soon due to implode again).
In reality the world terrorising continued, troops remaining in Afghanistan, Guantánamo open and the “safer” option of illegal drone assassination stepped up massively.
But then came the gigantic upheavals of the 2011 Arab Spring as the world economic crisis hit the Third World ever harder, the impact of 2008 forced outwards from the richest and most powerful countries, using their credit and financial armouries of world banking and currency control to impose the burdens on weaker small economies (in Europe and Latin America too - the cause of the economic turmoil now laughably blamed on “socialist” reformist governments like Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil).  
This revolt made the blood run cold for the imperialist ruling class everywhere – a gigantic spontaneous uprising, bringing millions onto the streets in by far the biggest Arab country, (85 million compared to Iraq’s 25 million eg) with a long cultured past and a significant anti-imperialist history, took already escalated revolt and insurgency to a qualitatively new level.
This was not just the already hugely escalated resistance but a mass street rebellion against the stooge dictatorship kept in place by imperialist/Zionist bribery and pressure.
It was a rebellion that needed only clear revolutionary leadership (nationalist or communist) to threaten the West’s control of the entire Middle East.
With it would go down Zionist occupation in Palestine, the West’s main regional stooge permanently ready to ”smite” any too obvious and prominent anti-imperialist developments, for as long as that coincides with its own interest (which is of needing constantly to suppress, as brutally as possible, the Palestinian people, who can only ever be driven to the most determined struggle to throw off this out-of-time colonialist theft of their homeland).
The Cairo rebellion, itself triggered by the smaller Tunisian revolt toppling the mainly French supported tinpot dictator there,  threatened to spread rapidly into Africa, Asia etc.
And its influence has been felt, - the upheavals in Yemen now being savagely suppressed, are precisely the ripples from that revolt; Bahrain has seen constant turmoil too and it reaches right into Saudi Arabia (and into many disaffected youth in the West).
Everything since in the Middle East then has been a desperate fight by a panicked imperialism to head off this contagious rebellion.
Within Egypt the CIA and Zionism worked overtime in conjunction with the former Mubarak bureaucracy and military to turn around the popular support for the Muslim Brotherhood which had ridden this revolutionary wave for the time being. 
It succeeded with a counter-revolution among the middle class in 2013 (abetted by yet more wooden “democracy” deluded inability of the fake-“left” to grasp that the Muslim Brotherhood presidency, while itself narrow and backward, was a defeat for imperialism seen dialectically.) 
Outside, both the Libyan “revolt” and the Syrian civil war were deliberately provoked with mass media campaign demonisations and the kind of bogus street demonstrations used frequently by the CIA for its “colour revolutions” to cause total mayhem (and completely violent from the beginning).
The aim was to hem in Egypt and suppress the “rogue states” which might join it and coalesce the revolt.
But these were desperate measures, by an imperialism which was already shattered by war weariness and economic implosion and fearful of spending yet hundreds more $billions and sending home hundreds more body bags.
Libya failed to catch anyway and Washington had to intervene directly with a nazi-NATO invasion, the shattered Americans hiding their costly involvement behind a pretence it was “led by Europe”.
Syria caught fire with the Western skulduggery using its special forces and secret interventions to whip up the foulest of terrorising and ethnic cleansing horrors from the early days, all blamed on the Damascus government in a deluge of Goebbels lies. 
But all this desperate under the table manoeuvring has only produced an even bigger problem, inevitably so, because the historic conditions are stacked against this bankrupt and appalling class domination and exploitation – it is out of time, its epoch over.
The growing insurgency its was manipulating has turned against the bullying warmongering of the bankrupt Empire. 
The West is now forced to try and destroy, or rather punish, the sectarian forces it has cynically been trying to manipulate elsewhere as a “tool” for attacks on the Syrian “rogue state” of the bourgeois nationalist Ba’athists under Bashir al-Assad.
They have “blown back” as the CIA phrase has it and become part of the anti-imperialism its non-stop warmongering is trying to suppress (as one of its aims).
The “left” cannot, or do not want to, see the difference between the continuing stoogery which Washington has managed to keep going or artificially set up in Syria, and the ISIS breakaway, which for all its sometimes gruesome lashing out is clearly hostile to imperialism and with its own self-determination aims, tearing up the imperialist imposed borders from the First World War. 
This all remains true even if the Washington still has hopes of using the ISIS rebellion against the Assad regime, as it used the jihadists in the first stages of the Syrian war and as it is still using the “moderate” quisling rebels (!!!!) that it has still got under its control in east Aleppo and other anti-Damascus enclaves.
But killing half of them does not seem a good way to keep them on side.
Reports by some Western journalists, echoed by the Stalinists, that there is an intention to “allow some of the ISIS to escape across the border” do not change the essence of the onslaught on Mosul which is intended to butcher them in Iraq, along with however many  civilians it takes.
And it does not mean the ISIS is “really under control” by imperialism anyway - only that Washington hopes to be able to corral it in Syria and tap the sectarian weaknesses against Assad.
And it may not be the case anyway according to the latest reports:
Senior US military officials have met their Turkish counterparts in Ankara to seek approval for the launch of a largely Kurdish-led move to isolate Islamic State’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.
An alliance of Kurdish and Arab armed groups – the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – announced on Sunday that the isolation of Raqqa had started as part of a pincer movement designed to defeat Isis not just in Raqqa, but in Mosul, the second city of Iraq.
The SDF claimed the US had agreed that Turkey and its factions would not play a role in the attack, and the assault would be backed by US air support.
Ankara had previously expressed alarm that the SDF is dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia, which it considers to be an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) and has repeatedly targeted inside Syria.
In an effort to gauge Turkish reaction to the SDF’s announcement, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Joseph Dunford, met his Turkish counterpart, Hulusi Akar, in Ankara on Sunday.
The US regards the SDF as the most effective fighting force in northern Syria but Turkey has repeatedly said it will not tolerate a large Kurdish role in the attack on Raqqa and has been fighting to limit the Kurdish-controlled area in Syria.
Announcing the assault on Raqqa at a press conference in Ain Issa, about 30 miles north of Raqqa, Jihan Sheikh Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the SDF, said the “major battle to liberate Raqqa and its surroundings has begun”.
Ahmed said the operation – called Wrath of the Euphrates – would involve about 30,000 fighters and had begun on Saturday night.
She said the operation aimed to free Raqqa from “the forces of global, obscurantist terrorism represented by Daesh [Isis] that took it for their presumed capital”.
The SDF spokesman Talal Sello said the operation would proceed in two phases, “first liberating the countryside around Raqqa and isolating the city, and secondly taking control of the city”.
The announcement came as US-backed Iraqi forces continued fighting in the eastern edges of Mosul. Kurdish officials said the two campaigns were not coordinated, but simply “good timing”.
Isis fighters fought back against Iraqi troops with car bombs and ambushes on Sunday, stalling the advance in their northern Iraqi stronghold. Maj Gen Maan al-Saadi, a commander in Iraq’s elite counter-terrorism force, told state television that Isis fighters had launched more than 100 car bombs in the city’s eastern districts.
Suspected Isis bombings killed at least 20 people elsewhere in Iraq.
Washington says the battle for Raqqa will overlap with the assault on Mosul, in part because of concerns that any delay would allow Isis to use it as a base to launch attacks on targets abroad.

Declaring ISIS to be “the enemy” either because they are “reactionary Islamists” or because of Stalinism’s acceptance of “terrorism” as the problem – something real rather than a ridiculous abstraction set up by imperialism as a bogeyman for its own warmongering - has led to all kinds of tangles.
But for all that this barbaric US coordinated and reinforced attack is one of the most cynical lurches yet into world war depravity by the bankrupt Western capitalist system yet, it is also a sign of its weakness.
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins

E P S R BOX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).