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 1506 10th February 2017                                                                                                        25p fortnightly

     
Trump bellicosity, bullying contempt for legal  principle, and trampling “diplomacy” underlines desperation of ruling class facing the greatest breakdown collapse in all history. The 2008 Great Catastrophe returns any moment as artificial QE breathing space runs out. Imperialism must drag the world to war to escape its failure and culpability for (barely started) Depression savagery and has no time or money left for “reformist” niceties. Sections of ruling class fear rebellious turmoil that sharp realities of raw Slump  and cutthroat trade war will bring as raw profiteering is reimposed and slide to World War accelerates. Near civil war splits emerging with philistine Nazism underline bourgeois fears. But trusting “the Constitution” is pointless as are all reformist and single-issue politics still  played by the fake-“left” and its moralising posturing. Trump bigotry feeds on this hopeless petty bourgeois “left” play-acting which has never achieved anything and still refuses to confront the real issues of capitalist dictatorship and epochal breakdown and crisis (or even see them). Fake-“left” “British jobs” nationalism and Brexit support plays into hands of Trump, UKIP and European neo-fascism. So too does treacherous “left” “condemnation” of Third World rebellion and anti-imperialist “jihadism”,  feeding the “kill them all” frenzy and Muslim scapegoating, one of capitalism’s main tools to stampede war. Leninist revolutionary science needed.

In-your-face contempt, domestic aggression and international bellicosity in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s new American regime make more obvious than ever the unstoppable slide of slump ridden world capitalism into the foulest of minority scapegoating, chauvinist hatred and international war conflict.
Equally the deliberately fostered and media-boosted Brexit nastiness, and its European mirror-images in “alt-right”  ultra-nationalist and xenophobic bigotry, underline the desperation of ruling classes everywhere as they lurch towards ever sharper cutthroat trade conflict and outright protectionist hostility.
Trumpism, Brexitism, Le Pen, Wilders and the rest all are part of a desperate turn by the ruling class towards the openly fascist tone and atmosphere needed to stampede the public for the deadly warmongering its Great Catastrophe is driving to, not simply against the hapless Middle East but between the great imperialist monopoly rivals. 
But the fake-“left” of all shades still refuses to draw the crucial lessons from the obvious tearing up of reformist gains,  pacifist anti-war protest and liberal principles (even basic Geneva anti-torture and atrocity conventions) across the board, the unshackling of corporate profiteering from the most basic “restraint”, trashing of environmental standards, abandoning of safety regulation and unlocking of finance and banking controls.
That lesson is that reforms, “left pressure” and “defending living standards” don’t work.
Bourgeois “democracy” and “looking out for ordinary people” is a more clearly than ever a monstrous hoodwinking lie, long  bamboozling the working class with notions of “steady gain” and step-by-step progress towards a fairer, regulated society and socialism.
If reforms ever did achieve temporary advances here and there, like the National Health Service, free libraries, social care, etc they were always historically transient, designed as sops to lull the working class away from understanding the only way that permanent human progress can be made, the overturn of the greed ridden, vicious, ever more unequal, oppressive and crisis-ridden capitalist system, always returning to disastrous collapse and antagonism at every level.
All reforms are being taken away now as the NHS collapse shows and it will continue, driving the working class right down.
Of course all kinds of local and partial “fightbacks” can be valid starting points.
All kinds of battles and strikes can draw people into the vital class war (which is built into capitalism itself) – all kinds of resistance can stir their consciousness.
But without a revolutionary perspective, to bring down this entire system, such struggles are at best a fraud on the working class and, increasingly as crisis bites deeper, deadly diversion and misleadership, demoralising and alienating people rather than forging crucial unity and class confidence.
Only revolution can save the world from the greatest slump disaster ever in history and it can only be carried through with a firm and clear leadership by a revolutionary party of trained cadres, deliberately struggling to constantly build and develop scientific Marxist understanding.
The continued posturing and prancing around social-pacifism and single-issue subjectivism by the fake-“left”, issuing pompous and self-righteous strictures on anti-racism, feminism, “homophobia” and other partial issues like environmentalism, not only fails to mention this crucial and central need, but gets right in the way of it.
Worse, on the key questions they mostly capitulate to the rising “British jobs” (or “American greatness”) chauvinist nationalism, and help whip up the international “kill them all” atmosphere around the meaningless “war on terror” with their craven condemnations of the Third World revolt.
For all their pretences it leaves them lined up with Trump.
Their single-issue posturing meanwhile merely alienates workers with its high-handed moralising and diverts attention with secondary, irrelevant or outright reactionary questions. They are simply not serious.
Trump’s White House crew is not dangerous or reactionary because it is crudely misogynist, racist or “disrespectful”, though it is all that.
It is dangerous because it is personifies the agenda of capitalism itself, dragging the entire world into the greatest collapse and destruction ever seen.
Hysterical calls to “stop fascism” are just as bad.
Of course this new turn is fascist for what it is worth to use the term.
The Trump White House bluster and contempt for all the “rules” has many of the hallmarks of the Nazi takeover in Germany in the 1930s when the liberal Weimar Republic collapsed in feebleness and incompetence.
Hitler also rode a populism whipped up around the most backward chauvinist hatreds, declared himself to be “against the establishment” and the “international financiers”, and scapegoated minorities (communists and trade unionists, Gypsies and mentally disabled, some homosexuals and eventually, notoriously, the Jewish population).
Hitler, like Trump, pretended to be “for the workers” even christening his movement “National Socialism” (which is where the short form Na-zi comes from).
And Hitler, it should also be remembered, came into power using the “democratic” mechanisms and “popular” votes of the Reichstag to take power (shortly after which the leadership of the deluded Brownshirt, more working class wing of the Nazi party was literally knifed in the back during the infamous Night of the Long Knives and the full capitalist war character of the new regime became clear).
Relying on “democracy” then was a disaster – it was just torn up and the socialist working class movement disbanded, imprisoned and slaughtered, before the “after Hitler our turn” complacency of the German Communist Party could win over the masses by “everyone seeing what a disaster Nazism was”.
Building up an “anti-Nazi” movement is just as misleading now with its implication that “democracy” is a somehow less deadly option.
It is capitalist “democratic society” which is the problem – all of it. 
What is required is not anti-Nazism or even anti-capitalism and “resistance” to Slump austerity and warmongering.
It is a fight to completely overturn capitalist rule, taking everything into the hands of the working class, under the firmest possible working class rule.
All capitalism is driving towards massive international conflict and destruction and has been most obviously doing so since the nazi-NATO onslaught on Yugoslavia in 1998 and then the non-stop devastation wrought on the Middle East after 9/11, continuing even now with utterly barbaric – and clearly fascist – destruction of Yemen by Western stooge Saudi Arabia (fed with US and British high-tech arms and military ‘advice’) now threatening 80% of the population with outright famine on top of the hellish terrorising of daily bombing runs, drone missiles and ground attacks.
All monopoly capitalism is now “fascist” in other words, and separating the belligerence and reactionariness of one facet or manifestation from some supposedly “other” “democratic” capitalism is simply to mislead the working class.
Eight years’ sanctions bullying, worldwide drone terrorising, warmongering destruction of half a dozen countries and endless CIA torture and coup skulduggery under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, as well as the huge military buildups against China and Russia etc, show just the opposite. 
Obama-ism like George W Bush before him and Bill Clinton before that, has run an increasingly aggressive and warmongering US Empire sliding down a path towards total world war, held back from direct intervention only by defeats and domestic discontent.
Britain has been the same, helping create the outright lies to trigger the Iraq War and “loyally” torturing and blitzkrieging ever since. 
Domestically, universal surveillance, state brainwashing (Prevent programme, laws against “anti-Zionism”) and increasing press control and censorship have been in train for at least three decades. 
But Trump will be “contained” argue the “democrats”.
There clearly is an unprecedented, as yet “polite”, civil war now raging in America between the bourgeois legal system and the cruder moves of the newly “elected” Trump presidency.
It does not prove the “democratic” case however.
Even on the most basic Marxist understanding, to trust in the American constitution and its “check and balances” as a way forwards for workers would be to put your head in the hungry lion’s mouth and hope it would not bite you.
The legal moves against Trump‘s Muslim scapegoating travel ban have nothing to do with “principles”, “democracy”, the “rule of law” and “American decency” or “human values and rights” as lyingly presented by the establishment anti-Trump wing (and swallowed by much of the craven and cowardly “liberal” and fake-“left”). 
What they do reflect is the weakness of capitalism and splits in a nearly paralysed American ruling class as crisis grows and its fears deepen about just how badly things might go.
On the one side is the impatience of more aggressive elements, ready to tear up all existing “democratic” rules, and all international relations.
The berserk jingoist and reactionary cabal in Trump’s White House says the time has come and wants to whip up as much populist hatred and xenophobia as possible to inflame the popular mood behind outright war bluster and the international threats being pumped out in all directions.
But the other “liberal” wing is nervous and fearful of the coming onslaughts (unstoppable) and aware of the turmoil it will unleash worldwide as the true nature of capitalism is made even more glaringly obvious. 
It knows that tearing up all democratic pretences is to give up one of the greatest weapons the ruling class has ever had, the masking of its actual bourgeois class dictatorship (which calls all the shots always in reality) behind the great hoodwinking confidence trick of “everyone getting a say” through voting.
But the great “democracy” racket is almost worn through anyway, in constant decline for decades as the working class has experienced endless betrayals and lies (and has seen worldwide what happens to any real progress through parliaments and presidencies - coups and massacres like Chile in 1973 or Egypt in 2013).
Bush was the least popular US president ever and cynical Obama-ism had to tap the full panoply of single-issue reformist illusions from feminism to anti-racism, to give it one last go.
That has failed dismally, the promised brighter future failing to materialise and working class despair and contempt once more on the rise.
Nor was the Trump election a great surge of working class populism backing nationalist reaction, as presented by bourgeois analysis (which only ever looks as the formal processes), but a collapse of support for all the “democratic” parties. Voting was at miserably low levels and Trumpism is already at low approval ratings; the furore over the inauguration reflected this.
What support it did get comes mostly from inchoate disgust and despair for the entire system of crime, decadence, blighted opportunity and collapse, channelled for the moment in primitive rage against “Washington”.  
Even so this aggressive wing will certainly have the edge over the “legal restraints” because everything is breaking down.
There is no stable future for capitalist profit making.
All the ruling class knows that capitalism needs war and destruction to “escape” the disastrous epochal collapse its profit system is bringing on the world (again). 
And all of them know that the temporary suspension of the disastrous “global credit meltdown” which erupted in 2008, cannot be sustained for much longer. 
Endless printing of completely valueless Mickey Mouse dollars has allowed a hollow and cynically lying pretence of restored economic growth and even “upturn” to salvage things for nearly a decade.
The full savagery of the Slump has been held at bay.
QE “stability” has been maintained, while the ruling class (and its “loyal” reformist “left”-Labourites and Democrats etc) has continued to bamboozle everyone that “democracy”, “freedom” and international diplomacy and agreement still rule the day with only “policing” against “rogue elements and terrorism” required (in reality practice for oncoming barbaric war).
Even that QE salvation was only partial; weaker countries (eg Greece) have anyway been forced to take savage Depression levels of austerity (about to be reimposed) and even the bigger powers have mostly trodden water in economic stagnation and cutbacks as they prepare the world for even greater collapse, due any moment.
Devastating economic burdens and economic sabotage have been forced onto weaker and particularly left-orientated nations, like the southern Europeans, and even more so the thorn-in-the-side Latin American “left” bourgeois nationalist regimes, “rebellious” African nations like Zimbabwe, Congo, and non-compliant “rogue” states such as Iran, Sudan and Putin’s Bonarpartist Russia.
And even before the great world shock nine years ago, the monopoly capitalist system was being routinely shaken by ever larger crises, currency failures, national and regional bankruptcies and stagnation (in Japan etc for over 20 years).
Meanwhile the underlying reality has always been dirty dealing, arms race profiteering, and massive corruption and bribery also escalating (witness the latest revelations about Rolls-Royce, just fined over £600M, or endless revelations about grotesque banking skulduggery and fraud such as HBOS or Libor fixing).
Increasingly aggressive international “fines” take chunks out of the great monopolies, (BP, Volkswagen, Google, Apple, Deutsche Bank etc), along with swingeing tax impositions, devastating “sanctions” punishments, while humiliating grovelling and kowtowing to the most primitive of artificially sustained regimes like ultra-rich Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, is pursued to siphon off their $billions with arms deals, money laundering, property rackets and oil plundering.
Leninism alone has constantly warned the working class (against the great “57 variety” swamp of “left” reformism and pseudo-”revolutionaries” and their mockery of “catastrophism”) that far from there being any “recovery” the QE binge simply put off the problem.
Even the financial bullying power of the giant American economy and its stooge international agencies like the IMF and the World Bank, or the equivalents within the rival trade and currency blocs like Japan and especially Europe, cannot stop the relentless slide of this monopoly capitalist system into ever greater “overproduction” troubles.
It is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the production for private profit system which is always eventually stifled with “surplus” capital – the inevitable debilitating consequence of the anarchic “free market” system of production as Marx explained (see quotes page 6, and more fully the Communist Manifesto, Capital or Lenin’s writings like Imperialism and 45 volumes of collected works).
The US is totally bankrupt and mired in debt (like its poodle offshoot in the UK).
It survives only on endless debt creation and uses constant dilution of the dollar to renege on payments for the world resources and production output it sucks in. 
The economic implosion will be now magnified a hundred times because of this insane pumping out of electronic inflationary dollars, continuing for nearly a decade and adding to the Great Catastrophe facing an international currency system already poisoned by decades of inflationary dollar credit creation.
Austerity and trade war is not an “ideological choice” which can be “fought against” or “reversed” etc.
It is a necessity for the ruling class to survive and it must shortly be re-imposed far more severely than ever, with full on Slump conditions far worse that the 1930s.
Slump and World War has always been the ultimate path monopoly capitalism uses to get out of its disastrous overproduction crisis, eventually extending the bankruptcies and closures of Slump collapse and cutthroat trade war into the all out physical destruction of rivals and the production capacity clogging the system.  
This was the path from the earliest days of the rise of monopoly capitalism in the Franco-Prussian War, and onwards into the gruesome horrors of the First World War trenches and the subsequent and even more devastating, widespread and degenerate Second World War.
That is the pattern under Trump now as the greatest devastation ever is being prepared, and the greatest ever “sorting out”.
But as the great US turmoil shows, capitalism has been putting off the day, terrified of the consequences.
The world is no longer what it was. 
Two shattering world wars have transformed world humanity and its consciousness.
Persuading the masses that a Third and even more destructive war would be a good idea is more difficult than ever.
It must happen, the only “solution” as long as capitalism remains in control (and the ruling class is not about to give up its obscene power, wealth and privilege).
But it is fraught with danger for continuing class dominance.  
Even two years into the First World War growing dismay and disgust at the appalling barbarism and slaughter was building up everywhere, and within 12 months, exactly a century ago in 1917, was erupting into the world shattering revolutions that first brought down the Tsar in February and then, guided by Lenin’s Bolsheviks, established the world’s first great workers state, the USSR, in October.
As Lenin many times said, the realities of the suffering and horrors of capitalism taught the masses the lessons that drove them into revolution, which a revolutionary leadership party then made conscious.
Even twenty years after that, special theatricality, aggression and scapegoating was needed to get the second phase of world war going (Nazism, Japanese feudal honour and discipline etc).
The result was even more disaster, the lead warmongers hammered by the heroic struggle of the Soviet Union’s Red Army and a wave of working class revolt sweeping across the world, toppling much of east European capitalism and setting in train further socialist revolutions (China, Korea, Cuba and eventually Vietnam) and worldwide anti-colonialist struggle which ended for ever the great period of direct rule by the capitalist empires (Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands etc).     
Only the disastrous philosophical retreats and errors of the de facto world communist leadership led by Stalin in Moscow hampered this movement post-WW2 and mostly held it back from potentially further revolutionary progress.
Heroic and staggering Second World War Soviet sacrifices (as significant as the 1917 revolution itself in defeating capital) were followed by further brilliant achievements post-war of still vibrant socialist cultural and technical development in a re-energised  workers state, which poured generous aid, training, and political support into the world anti-capitalist movement.
But revisionist mistakes ate away at the revolutionary spirit, relying instead on delusions in permanent peaceful coexistence and the “containing of imperialist aggression” through “peace struggle” (see EPSR Perspectives 2001 eg for detailed analysis).
But far from imperialism being permanently hamstrung by the war and the growth of the workers states (as Stalin analysed it), it continued to expand.
The destruction of capital by 1945 had been so huge that there was room to “start over”, with profitability restored for those capitals left standing (primarily the US top-dog victors and its sidekicks). 
There was even enough to mostly buy off the giant revolutionary discontent the war had stirred everywhere, with reforms, better wages and “welfare” in the richer countries, all paid for by relentless slave labour squeezing of the Third World, where financial neo-colonialism replaced the direct rule of pre-war times, all held in place by a network of mostly CIA installed, tinpot dictators and stooges, bribed and kept sweet with the endless dollars.
Violent coups, massacres and outright war far beyond the 2WW in destructive power was used to suppress movements that went “too far”, (Greece, Malaya, Kenya, Indonesia, Korea, Latin America and Vietnam saw tens of millions killed) but much of it was hidden or blamed on “tyrannical communism.” 
But great illusions in “democratic paths” and step-by-step progress of “reformist gains” were fostered by the treacherous class collaboration of Labourism, (bolstered by the “peaceful road” delusions of Stalinism) to help neutralise the attractions to the Western working class of the great socialist revolutionary achievements in the Soviet Union, and then east Europe, China, Cuba etc.
“Just as good” health services, education etc, as provided freely in the USSR’s socialist state, were supposedly achieved.
For a while there was even the pretence within the West of the full employment which Soviet life offered from the very beginning. All this helped a deluge of cradle-to-grave anti-communist propaganda saturate brains, aided by the disastrous failures of Stalinist retreat from world revolutionary perspectives and even more its disastrous cover-ups.
The treacherous poison of the Trotskyists, supposedly “countering Stalinism” also helped rubbish the image of workers states, and with its “political revolution” nonsense, even helped imperialism prepare counter-revolutionary stunts like Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 and the reactionary Pilsudski-fascist supporting pretend “trade union” Solidarnosc in Poland which finally helped push Moscow’s ever-deepening revisionist capitulation into liquidating the USSR in 1989 (giving up on the dictatorship of the proletariat and its still viable, if sluggish, socialist economy in favour of shallow delusions about the “advantages of the free market” and building of a “common European home” - all now looking sicker than ever.) 
Even so, despite all these setbacks (finding temporary modern defeatist expression in widespread notions that “communism doesn’t work” or that it “failed” or that “life was a grey tyranny” – all total lies and distortions) capitalism still had to maintain the pretence that ordinary lives will eventually be transformed for the better and that capitalism is the route to prosperity and peace for all.  
The cost in ideological terms has been enormous, declaring capitalism will “never again” go to war, and that all horror and destruction “belongs to the past” (pumped up by such wooden anti-Marxist “science” as reactionary pop psychologist Steven Pinker in his Better Angels book, declaring that war and violence is “slowly being overcome” - try telling the Yemenis or the Iraqis in Mosul, Steven); that world “justice” prevails with “international courts” to prosecute “war crimes”; that a United Nations can now police remaining conflicts and “action by the international community” stop “terrorism” etc.
It is all a grotesque farrago of twisted propaganda lies, the International Criminal court for example a complete fraud of biased prosecutions and preposterous show trials against any presumptuous regimes or movements attempting to challenge imperialism, like Serbia, and like many of the African nations, while the major aggressive wars and invasions by the West and its stooges are ignored, notably the outrageous WMD lies used to set the Iraq war going, the completely false justification for the Libyan war (the alleged Benghazi “genocide threat” by Gaddafi now admitted to be a complete fabrication), the routinely imposed, genocidal intent multiple blitzkriegs and civilian butchery rained onto the Palestinians in their own land by the colonial Zionist landtheft occupation, and the barbaric slaughter of the Chechens by restorationist oligarch rule in Russia, and many past crimes including Vietnam, Korea, the million strong massacres in Indonesia, the Latin American butchery in El Salvador and Guatemala, Argentina and Chile, etc etc. etc etc.
The West’s barbaric military atrocities and routine torture abuse (see Ian Cobain book Cruel Britannia eg) is overlooked and its illegal use of drone terrorising, summarily executing alleged “terrorists” without trial or even solid proof (and even any justification, since why should the Third World not fight back against occupations and invasion?) – and “taking out” of dozens of innocent bystanders on many occasions, are ignored (and without the actions of various brave and determined whistle blowers such as Wikileaks, would remain unknown even).
Obama’s weekly signing-off of death warrants with no international legal basis, even in bourgeois terms, has seen no appearances at Hague, nor the totally illegal death-squad raid and execution of Osama bin Laden.
But these post-war WW2 “promises”, to quote past EPSR understanding (No 1125 26-0202), have created the:

universal assumption now that the ‘free market’ has ‘won the battle of history against the planned workers states’ and that ‘never again’ will a major world slump ‘be allowed’ to disfigure civilisation’s progress, let alone another major world war.
So the inevitable influence on ALL thinking of such universal ‘popular’ understanding makes it necessary to weigh up how things are going to look once the total indignation and bewilderment of the whole of the Western world kicks in at the sight of the major ‘free world’ powers deliberately setting about destroying and damaging each others economies in a vicious trade-war slump conflict; and weigh up in addition how the world’s perspectives will look once racist political extremism has started to really cut loose, blaming ‘foreigners’ and ‘unfair competition’ for the closure of British factories and jobs, and locally blaming ‘immigrants’ for specific unemployment difficulties up and down every Western country.
What new Mosleys, Longs, Wallaces, Mussolinis, Hitlers, etc, will emerge then to spice up the warmongering-chauvinist illusions, not to mention the Haiders, Berlusconis, Thurmonds, Griffiths, Koizumis, Le Pens, already making huge progress with nationalist aggression as the main political ingredient now.

Proving the importance of Leninist science, that warning was already emerging 15 years ago as the Iraq war developed.
But ruling class fears continue.
Problems for imperialism have been further compounded since by the huge destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan and now the rest of the Middle East stirring the enormous rebelliousness of the Third World.
Instigated with the most outrageous Goebbels big lies about “terrible threats to ‘our peaceful way of life’” (and the West wonders where “fake news” has come from!!!!) these wars were the first long-planned moves by bankrupt imperialism to get back into major world war and blitzkrieg, knowing what disastrous intractable economic collapse was brewing.
The “shock and awe” strategy of the New American Century neocons around Bush (as reactionary and “fascist-minded” as any of Trump’s cohort) was to bully and intimidate the world, forcing back revolt and at the same time demonstrating to all the major powers too, just how ruthless and violent the Empire would be against any challengers to its top dog position.
But all this ran into disastrous failure and defeat, bogged down in insurgency, anti-occupation resistance and seemingly open-ended costs in young soldiers’ lives and finance.
Domestic war-weariness and dismay grew exponentially, crashing the popularity of the Bush White House, and further undermining confidence in “democracy”.
And as all rational commentary (including even much bourgeois intellectual opinion) warned at the time, the imposed horrors and devastation inevitably fed already long-brewing Third World rebelliousness against the endless exploitation and humiliation imposed on it, which keeps four-fifths of the world in desperate poverty and sweatshop slavery.
The revolutionary mood of anti-Western hatred has seen recruitment to anti-Western militancy massively multiplied ever since, primarily into the anarcho-religious jihadist movements which for the moment have taken on the leadership role filling the vacuum left by the revisionist abandonment of coherent objective scientific revolutionary leadership and its eventual liquidationism.
So Obama-ism reflected a huge defeat, its key element the promise to withdraw US troops, morale shattered and unaffordable, particularly after the global crash when resources had to be poured into the banks to prop up the world wide credit system or face immediate breakdown and anarchic chaos (as shutting down all cash withdrawals would obviously have led to within hours).
Imperialism is not about to actually let go, of course and warmongering continues by other means, through subversion and manipulation and the massively escalated programme of drone terrorising. 
But far from reimposing US empire dominance, the events have caused even further problems.
As crisis hit the Third World, the ever widening rebelliousness erupted into the Arab Spring, with millions of people spontaneously pouring onto the streets in Tunisia and Egypt. 
This gigantic revolutionary upheaval threatened to topple not just US stooge dictator Hosni Mubarak, but also the nazi-Zionist occupation of Palestine next door, imperialism’s key stooge for suppressing the whole region, and then the entire Middle East as its inspiration spread everywhere (already triggering revolt in Bahrain, the UAE, Yemen  and even Saudi Arabia within weeks); its impact was bound to spread far wider particularly into Africa, as the rest of the Third World cheered on the revolt.
Multiple “terrorist” rebellions have erupted too like al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, Islamist and Maoist movements in the Philippines, Islamists in Indonesia, a still continuing Maoist movement in Nepal.
And the Left bourgeois nationalism of Latin America was also able to make headway, because imperialism had so much on its plate. 
Washington was desperate to suppress all this but trapped by crisis bankruptcy and Iraq defeat, no longer able to directly invade without enormous potential revolt at home.
Hence the Libyan and Syrian wars, which had to use covert interventions, stirring sectarian discontent bogusly presented as further “Arab Spring” (a laughable nonsense when all the other revolts were against Western stoogery and backward feudalism and these were rebellions against Western hate targets and “rogue states”).
The hope was to intimidate and isolate the Egyptian revolt, using the tricks practiced in Afghanistan of recruiting local discontent and opportunism, particularly tapping sectarian hatreds already deliberately inflamed in Iraq, using Shia stooges  to suppress the Sunni rebellion against the occupation.
But such proxy war methods are a fraught business and have proved disastrous too.
The bribed middle-class and monarchist opportunism in Libya was so feeble (because hopelessly out of time historically), that direct invasion was needed anyway by NATO with Obama’s ‘no more war expense’ pledge hidden behind the pretence it was a “European-led” operation.
In Syria things are even worse, the Western strategy fatally split between toppling the bourgeois nationalist Assad, using bribed and manipulated Sunni sectarianism, and maintaining the “war on terror”, the major propaganda tool for keeping the world warmongering atmosphere on the boil.
Civil war was successfully provoked against the flakey bourgeois nationalist Assad regime, imposing utterly depraved horrors and ethnic cleansing initially while covert action got on with toppling the newly installed Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, using all the “colour revolution” techniques long refined by the CIA.
Fomenting middle class support in Cairo and the military, using the “secular democracy” illusions swallowed wholesale by the shallow petty bourgeois “left”(unable to grasp the class war anti-imperialist reality of the 2011 events), – then brought down the new MB presidency with a welter of subsequent cold-blooded street massacres, re-installing a pro-Washington stooge dictatorship under General Sisi and heading off potential support for the Palestinian cause in Gaza (which the MB supported). 
But all this has stirred even more anti-Western hatred, (espeically within Egypt) and the Syria “revolt” has fallen apart in splits and “blowbacks” with the most ruthless of the jihadists breaking loose and merging with the former anti-American occupation revolt in Iraq to make up the Islamic State revolt.
Nonsensical categorisations like “moderate rebels” - meaning those jihadists run, armed and financed by Washington and Zionism, or through the backward Arab feudalism, to bring down the Assad government – have had to be invented to explain away the grossly hypocritical Western imperialist support and training for the various jihadist groups which have used all kinds of depravity, ethnic cleansing and terrorist intimidation in a continuing fight against Assad, (terrorising the Syrian population) even while the West has supposedly been “fighting the war on terror”.
But even more confusion continued.
Because Washington’s proxy war failed to topple the Assad regime, it continued trying to make use of ISIS long after the jihadists broke away, as was quickly clear when ISIS’ ruthless fighting took it within a short distance of Baghdad in Iraq, threatening the Washington installed stooge government – Western bombing and military support quickly pushed it back despite the virtual military collapse of the corrupt stoogery in the Iraqi capital.
But no such effort was made to use the full capacities of Western air power in Syria against ISIS.
Just the opposite, 
Attempts were made to stampede public opinion behind an no-fly zone or even air onslaught against Assad using yet another Goebbels Big Lie about alleged “chemical weapons”, effectively making an intervention on the same side as all the anti-Assad forces including ISIS.
This only further confirmed the total hypocrisy and cynicism of the Western “war on terror”. 
But public opinion was not convinced by yet more manipulative and specious allegations against Assad, planted in a willing media by the intelligence agencies, particularly after the stream of leaks and revelations from Wikileaks etc. about the depravities in Iraq and Afghanistan etc.
Washington (and London)’s failure to pull public opinion behind it further demonstrates the hill to be climbed in keeping the war momentum going. 
Its mess of divided strategy - pursuing the meaningless “war on terror” against ISIS while simultaneously trying to continue “herding” it alongside the remaining more obviously stooge “rebel” groups to topple the Assad “rogue state” (to head off the Egyptian revolt) reflects dire weakness and confusion for embattled imperialism, unable to use its own forces to impose its writ, for fear of the domestic turmoil it would cause.
It is like herding cats.
The Russian intervention in Syria only adds to its problems.
Putin’s bonapartist oligarch capitalist restorationism, laden with anti-communism, is no way forwards for the working class either, any more than the opportunist Syrian bourgeois dictatorship, and its intervention is for defending Russian nationalist interests essentially, with its only Mediterranean sea base on the Syrian coast.  
Russia has been a target for Western demonisation and sabre rattling from sections of the Western ruling class, partly because of concerns about the Soviet communist legacy, which created deep-running (if not permanent) changes in society from seven decades of workers state progress, still not completely shaken off and even likely to revive as Slump conditions bite, (and which Putin has to constantly balance against) and partly because of its own imperialist “Great Russian” pretensions, demanding “respect” as another “major player”.
There would be no room for that even in the boom conditions and certainly not now as economic disaster escalates the struggle for markets to desperation levels.
But constant demonisation (with more endless laughably unproven bogeyman stories planted in the Western press (always “unverified”) and, yes, “fake news”) – is one thing, actually escalating the Syrian war to full scale confrontation with the relatively huge Russia is another only adding to the floundering of Washington.
Which all leaves the question of getting the world into war, festering on the table.
It has to happen, the entire relentless progress of monopoly capitalist competitive battling for collapsing markets, eventually to the death, and underlying that, the need to destroy “surplus capital” on a huge scale, demands it.
Hence the escalation into Trumpism, the face of the ruling class which says ‘to hell with that entire post-war pretence of “freedom and democracy”, regulation, and peaceful cooperation  – it no longer works. Tear it up’.
The deluge of “presidential orders” from Donald Trump ripping up complex and difficult trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, threatening tariff walls and trade war in all directions and removing even the most limited of restraints on monopoly capitalist exploitation underlines the desperation.
It also makes the raw trade war nature of the conflicts more obvious, particularly in the bellicosity towards Europe and its highly efficient central German economy (where Volkswagen for example, easily outcompetes the US car monopolies, and Airbus challenges Boeing’s dominance), the loud threats against Mexico (including military bluster) and the trampling across diplomatic relations with China.
It is echoed elsewhere by the deliberately fostered and media-boosted Brexit chauvinism in Britain, and the European mirror-images in “alt-right” nationalism and bigotry.
And in Europe, the same via the rise of chauvinism and anti-migrant scapegoating tapped into by neo-fascist parties across the board. 
It is still a hair-raising prospect for the ruling class, not least because the first, Bush, neocon attempt crashed in flames.
But for the moment it will almost certainly get away with it, the neo-fascist momentum reflecting 
how demoralised, cynical, and small-mindedly bitter, people are being made by the INCURABLE failure of capitalist society to any longer remotely satisfy vital human needs (EPSR 1133 23-04-02).

and not least because of the dire craven capitulations of the fake-“left” feeding the chauvinism and “anti-terrorism” hatred and fear which is the main instrument for the ruling class to keep its war fever on the boil. 
Virtually the whole of Labourite and TUC reformism  (and its “left revolutionary ” backers in Momentum etc, all jostling for entryist positions and influence) has gone along with “British jobs” chauvinist backwardness of the “left” Brexiters, obviously playing right into the hands of the likes of UKIP and other nationalist agendas and even on occasion trying to outdo them:
Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson has called on UK citizens to “buy British” in response to President Donald Trump’s repeated pledge to “put America first” – placing him at odds with party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
In a controversial speech, Mr Watson said the UK could experience a “Brexit bounce” when it leaves the EU and questioned the prevailing belief that free trade was always a good thing.
As politicians and the media rush to condemn Mr Trump, Mr Watson suggested people should “keep an open mind” about the new President’s policies.
What does ‘buy American and hire American’ actually mean?
Speaking at the Co-operative Party Economic Conference in London, Mr Watson said: “If Trump says ‘buy American’, our rational response is ‘buy British’. 
“Yet to say ‘buy British’ these days risks sneering derision from much of Britain’s commentariat and chattering classes, few of whom have been on a factory floor lately. When did you last hear Theresa May say it?”
But the MP, who has a background in trade unionism, asked: “What if he does bring back the manufacturing jobs to America?
“What if the interests of the rust-belt workers, who had their lives turned upside down by cheap imports from China, are prioritised over the ideological beliefs of Davos habitués?”

A better question would be “did not Oswald Mosley say much the same?” - another senior Labour politician turning to nationalism and its inevitable end point, full on Blackshirt fascism, cultivated for a while in the 1930s by the British ruling class and abandoned only because there was still enough Empire wealth at that point to continue bribing the petty bourgeoisie and layers of the working class and keeping the safer “parliamentary” illusion going (nationalist ferment and Nazism always a much more unstable path, having to tap and channel volatile discontents that are halfway aimed at the ruling class).The British ruling class also, then as now, opted to go with an American alliance rather than team up with Germany for the oncoming conflicts (after dallying with the idea for most of the 1930s).
Screw the rest of the international working class, says Watson, helping set worker against worker and setting a path for the massive escalation of international tensions, and the  tit-for-tat retaliations that savaged international economies in the 1930s.  
And in America the “left” Democratic hope Bernie Sanders, the opposition to Hillary Clinton, who built his entire campaign around chauvinist calls for trade protection and international protectionism, has now also backed up Trump‘s abandoning of the TPP agreement, only a small step perhaps for an opportunist who ended up endorsing the monstrous warmonger Clinton, but a big indication of how the entire “left” reformist racket treacherously drags the working class onto the nightmare path of chauvinist hatreds, and eventual international war, just as in 1914 and 1939.   
And the fake-“left” of all kinds delivers the same treachery, most of them lining up with Brexiteers and fostering the “British jobs” (or American jobs) backwardness which inevitably is bound up with clannish and local interests and antagonism and hostility to “foreigners trying to take our jobs”.
The rapid escalation of the crisis and of the chauvinism being whipped up around it, has glaringly exposed much of the “left” who advocated Brexit, with groups like the Trot SWP now wriggling and squirming to try and distance themselves from the chauvinism and backwardness being tapped by UKIP and other reaction.
The revisionists too have been caught in the headlights, notably the Stalinist CPGB-ML Brarites who campaigned full on for Brexit and astonishingly, still do.
In a desperate attempt to wriggle out from the obvious fact that Brexit must inflame the most backward and primitive instincts its Dec/Jan Proletarian paper (alter ego of its Lalkar) ran a full page piece attempting to square the circle, “denouncing” xenophobia and explaining the deadly mistake for the working class of being trapped into blaming and scapegoating others. It even declares, soundly enough, that:
Xenophobia enables the miniscule ruling capitalist class to maintain its class rule in spite of the harm its capitalist economic system inflicts daily on the majority of the population. Foreigners are constantly blamed for the lack of jobs, low wages and poor social provision that are caused by capitalism, and workers are urged by bourgeois politicians and media alike to swallow the lie that if it wasn’t for ‘all the immigrants’ there would be jobs available at high wages for all native-born Britons, along with readily available....
So long as capitalism exists, so long will workers have to fight every inch of the way to maintain reasonable living standards for themselves and their families - and will periodically suffer real deprivation as a result of battles being lost. So long as capitalism exists, there will always be a reserve army of unemployed - both of local people and of people abroad - who are desperate for work. Competition among workers for jobs is built into the capitalist system, and so the proletariat must not allow itself to be tricked into believing that it is other workers who are the enemy. The sole and only cause of this desperate situation is the continued survival of the capitalist system, which stands convicted of an utter inability to cater to the even the most basic needs of the overwhelming majority of humanity.
If capitalism was overthrown and replaced by a planned, socialist economy, in which all society’s resources were used to provide for the needs of the working people and their families, there would be no such thing as unemployment and no such thing as competition for jobs. Every person would be found something essential to do, and all labour would enrich the whole of society. Although all socialist countries to date have had to face unceasing attempts by powerful internal and external enemies to sabotage their economies - through war, sanctions and terrorism - they have still been able to perform miracles in building up their productive capacity. In the decade from 1928-38, for example, the Soviet Union was able to turn itself from a backward peasant nation into a superpower, even though a catastrophic economic crisis much like the one we face today was gripping the capitalist world, decimating productive capacity, destroying workers’ lives and leading inexorably to WW2. 
Because of the fierce, cruel and ruthless resistance of the exploiters - whose wealth gives them control of the capitalist world’s governments, armies, police forces, judiciary and propaganda media - overthrowing capitalism is never going to be easy. Without doing so, however, the future for the world’s workers looks bleak indeed.

Leaving aside the somewhat patronising tone of “everyone being found something to do” - which utterly misses the essential total transformation from exploited and alienated labour, done to stay alive, to that in communist society where everybody “lives to work”, in other words where inventive, inquiring, creative, varied and socially productive labour becomes not only possible for all but mankind’s prime want – this is a million miles from revolutionary grasp. 
While the piece mentions the need to overthrow capitalism (good) and even quotes Stalin that “imperialism brings the working class to revolution” the dictatorship of the proletariat is not mentioned, nor the class war needed to establish it.
And the crisis gets only a glancing mention – interestingly the Proletarianites are finally using the term “catastrophic” but only for the usual tedious Stalin worship – and without grasping anything of its central role in any hope of understanding the unfolding crisis, let alone the true extent and scale of the oncoming breakdown, and utter chaos already being rehearsed in the Middle East.)
It is crucial for the explanation why capitalism is now driving its warmongering to total world war (also not mentioned).
Just as importantly it misses out the whole question of analysing the great Gobachevite liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1989 or indeed any of the great questions that need sorting out about the giant achievements of the Soviet Union and other workers states and the philosophical flaws and errors which began to emerge early on under Stalin’s leadership, which underpinned the entire development of revisionism (as set out in the EPSR book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics v Lalkar/Proletarian (2003)- still unanswered) which eventually ended the USSR.
Those revisionist errors and opportunism were the real crimes, as they set a social-pacifist tone for the entire post-war revisionist world leadership which was anything but revolutionary.
As always with Stalinism, this whole article is a cover-up for past errors, failing to explain why even, if this critical xenophobia question is so important, the Proletarian has been enthusiastically encouraging the whole Brexit line at all, since it inevitably comes weighed down with anti-foreigner, “restoring British sovereignty” baggage.
The clue come in the first paragraph where it is declared that Brexit 
delivered a splendid blow by workers against British imperialism

to which the only response can be a puzzled question mark.
The moribund and incompetent British ruling class most certainly is all over the shop in working out its strategy in the maelstrom crisis, and as split in two as the US bourgeoisie, deciding whether to stick with German imperialism or line up with the Americans in the coming trade and hot wars - but the notion that Brexit has done this is totally misleading.
It is the crisis which is driving the splits.
The working class remains  as much under the heel of imperialism as before, saturated with nationalist delusions even more rawly exposed to rapacious world markets as demonstrated when Theresa May has had to grovel and kow-tow to the new Trump administration, selling more of the British capitalist economy for a pittance (including the right for American health companies to plunder the NHS).
Slipping in the notion that the Brexit vote is “a blow to British imperialism” is just a cover for the Proletarian’s line during the referendum that “damaging the EU” was to damage all imperialism, which does not follow at all – damaging one bloc of imperialist powers, the EU, could equally well strengthen its rivals, particularly American imperialism. 
What really underlies the Proletarian view is the same argument about “getting out of the EU bosses club” that the Brar-ites were advancing in the days when they were themselves grovelling to the chauvinist bureaucratic trade union backwardness of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party as “left advisers” on policy. As then explained (EPSR 989 09-03-99):
it is a still-capitalist Britain that is envisaged, with “coming out of the EU” described as “a crucial first step towards fighting against global capitalism”, but with still never a mention of any class war against the British capitalist class. 
These are just the paltry warmed-up leftovers from the utterly discredited and failed CP/Morning Star anti-monopoly policy of Alternative Economic Strategy which marked Revisionism’s final spiral downwards into total class-collaborating pointlessness and deserved death and obscurity.
This historically-bankrupt Revisionist nonsense, imagining some kind of rational planned way out of global imperialist crisis, - a total and dangerous delusion, - is treacherously augmented by its inevitable nonsense-counterpart of import controls, spelled out in the national assembly elections spiel for reviving the coal, steel, and engineering industries in Wales and Scotland.
Again this is simply put forward by the SLP as the best policy of any party to meet the current economic situation. There is not the slightest suggestion that class war will first have to take place against the British ruling class, and then international class war against the domination of the world economy by imperialism, before planned revival out of capitalist slump can take place.
Any idea that “not everything has to be spelled out” or “why upset people by telling them more than they need to know at this stage”, etc, etc, is the most foul gross deception on SLP members and on the working class.

And even now the CPBG-ers declare that their Brexit advice is part of a strategy for “step-by-step“ advance, a completely reformist perspective. 
And this is clear in two ways.
Firstly in a further effort to cover its back the Proletarian advances the same pie-in-the-sky “niceness” about “welcoming all immigrants” as all the other fake-“left” groups, declaring them to be “just as hard done by and oppressed” as domestic workers.
This near-Christian moralising, like its twin “anti-racism”, is an utterly shallow piety when clearly migrants are a problem – for as long as the working class is trapped within capitalism (see EPSR issue 1135 07-05-02 as below) which uses them relentlessly to undercut local labour and wage rates, and siphon off the best workers from other countries, simultaneously heading off revolutionary struggles there – East Europe a notable example for example where the working class would be much more driven to take up the revolutionary socialist path again if they were forced to confront the reality of capitalist restoration day-to-day.
Blaming the migrants themselves, and from there moving on to scapegoat them, is another matter, as the Proletarian quote says but pretending the problem is solvable by the “free movement of labour” (falsely declared a “principle of Marxism” by many of the “left” groups) is nonsensical, economically and politically.
Can all 500 million in Africa, and more in Asia, be welcomed into the UK???
Firstly, moral exhortations and cultural level-raising will never on their own stop clannishness, racial awareness, and racial prejudice in current society where gross income inequalities, consumerist envy, and serious economic competitiveness, between individuals for a particular job, between regional factories for a particular contract, and between countries for trade-war survival, - - are the very way of life.
Secondly, the exposure of the statement “immigration is a problem” as racist, itself deliberately leaves out even more important truths which become clear if the notion is analysed a bit deeper.
Specifically, is “immigration a problem”? After eliminating all kinds of philosophical prejudices to do with “unchanging human nature”, plus genetic voodoo, plus racial/religious obscurantist traditions, etc, etc, - - the only certainty is that “immigration is a problem” under the capitalist-competitive system in a period of deepening economic crisis and insecurity when jobs and livelihoods, and whole aspirations in life, start coming under threat from slump and even worse, - civil-war, war, etc, which historically have always been inseparable, in modern times, from major economic crisis.
Combining these two aspects of race-awareness together, what emerges as the real problem is not the cultural-difference POTENTIAL for prejudice (which might theoretically linger on, dwindling-away slowly, for centuries since it cannot be simply eliminated by moral exhortations or deliberately improved conditions BY THEMSELVES); nor the nastiness of political opportunism for either exploiting brazenly people’s race-prejudice, (Le Pen, BNP), - surreptitiously playing up to it (New Labour), - or self-righteously ‘condemning’ its very existence (fake-‘left’).
And just as well that none of these are the real problem, because nothing can be done about the existence of any of them.
Civilisation must simply outgrow all such backwardness, very slowly.
The REAL problem of race-prejudice-flaring “due to” economic and social pressures which are complicated by immigrants and asylum-seekers, is the underlying issue of capitalism’s economic crisis.
And most interesting of all, the one great thing which society can actually DO to eliminate circumstances and conditions which breed racism and to help eradicate this primitive backwardness from civilisation completely, is, oddly enough, just to get rid of capitalism.
What would seem to be so vast an undertaking as to be absolutely impossible, is, in fact, the only thing that IS possible in this whole, menacing, racist-crisis mess that society is now facing (Le Pen & BNP votes; racist and ultra-right parties mushrooming all over Europe; etc).
It is an infinitely EASIER perspective to use the slump crisis disaster (capitalism is collapsing into) to overthrow this monstrous class-divided system (and therefore race-divided and nation-divided) than to merely bemoan all the unpleasant social problems that capitalist competitive culture throws up and self-righteously inflict ‘moral’ blame on the many areas of rat-race living which lend themselves to race-prejudice, - sermonising them to stop it (which is obviously something which cannot possibly happen because of mere preaching).
But the perspective needed for overthrowing capitalism crucially includes the grasp of defeat and setbacks for all the imperialist warmongering.
And much of that will happen through the giant struggles that the already barbaric blitzing and warmongering has already stirred.
On this issue, the Proletarian like every other “left” group has already shown its true opportunist and utterly craven colours, with its characterisations of the great ferment in the Third Word as “terrorism” and not only non-stop denunciations and condemnations, but calls for the obliteration and destruction of “headbanging jihadists” all alleged to be “mercenaries for Washington” (- introducing the strange concept of suicide fighting for money).
The great tangle of contradictions these Stalinists get into are never dealt with, such as a) declaring that this Islamic jihadism is “just backward headbanging reaction that only wants to set up an Islamic state”, in which case why support Iran, a fully fledged sharia state? b) why do they not only support, but declare it a revolutionary duty to support Hamas in Gaza, the militant Islamic leadership of the Gaza Palestinian anti-Zionist struggle at present c) how do they explain their approval of the foul Egyptian US stooge dictatorship and its suppression of the Sinai Islamist jihadists, allies of the Gazans and also struggling against the murderous and massacring counter-revolutionary General Sisi regime in Cairo (heavily subsidised with Washington money after Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry met with them)??????  
And a thousand other questions such their still continuing acceptance of the “1967 borders for Israel” tacitly accepting the existence of the monstrous land-theft colonial state??? 
But most critically in current conditions:

the class-war battle for the world’s opinion largely revolves around this symbolic matter of whether the Third World guerrilla war/terrorist attempts to fight back against imperialist military tyranny are to be “condemned” or not.
The entire Third World cheers on every such blow struck by FARC, Hamas, Nepal Maoists, al-Qaeda, or whoever. The entire forces of bourgeois-liberal ideology on earth, - desperate to destroy all idea of REVOLUTION as a way forward for civilisation - tries desperately to keep up the pretence that UN ‘democracy’, and Human Rights, and the ‘rule of law’, etc, etc, etc, will still eventually, one day, deliver justice, and equality, and ‘freedom’ for all, etc, etc, etc, - in which case it is therefore only “reasonably obvious” that such “blind, gratuitous, reactionary violence, playing into the hands of the US imperialists”, etc, etc, “should be condemned”, etc, - - playing up the issues that “backward Islamic nuttiness” inspires the suicide bombers; that the victims were “innocent New York workers”; and lying that “Marxism is against terror anyway”, etc, etc.
It is certainly true that the terror weapon would seldom be first choice tactics for Marxist REVOLUTIONARIES, but what idiotic posturing are these fake-‘lefts’ indulging in who have no wish to stoke up a REVOLUTIONARY struggle anyway????
The issue is guerrilla WAR. Effectively, the entire Third World is under military DOMINATION from well-guarded US imperialist firepower sources, KILLING the Third World people with abandon whenever and wherever the fancy takes it.
Collective punishment of Palestinian homes, Afghan villages, Sudanese medical facilities, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc - all are targets and it will never stop until US imperialism (and its Zionist and UK and other stooges) is defeated.
It is total WAR on millions of innocents from imperialism’s side, only interested in one thing - remaining the WORLD DOMINANT power at all costs.
So how can this well-guarded US-Zionist imperialist WAR machine be fought back against if not via total WAR against everything American or Zionist, as far as spontaneously-erupting Third World guerrilla-war terrorism is concerned????
Lenin specifically dismissed fake- ‘left’ attempts to use ‘moral’ or ‘tactical’ posturing arguments (for condemning terrorist spontaneity) as a “degradation of Marxism”.
More shame on the ‘Marxist revolutionaries’ Lenin added, if tactically ill-judged spontaneous terror was becoming dominant to the organised socialist revolution’s cost.
The only solution that was even thinkable, Lenin goes on, is for the Marxists to organise a more effective revolutionary uprising themselves, - in other words to capture the LEADERSHIP of the violent response to ruling-class tyranny.
In particular, Lenin insisted that very specific historical analysis of ALL the conditions of any action against imperialism was needed, not trite labels stereotyping anarchists or terrorists for immediate dismissal:

Capitalism is driving the world towards the greatest and most depraved war destruction in history. To get there it has been winding up the chauvinist hatreds seen in the 1930s and using the meaningless “war on terror” as a key weapon to feed scapegoating demonisation of Muslims, especially around Trumpism. 
Job-protectionism calls and “condemnations of terror” help capitulate to this hate atmosphere fail to see its world ferment significance, reinforcing defeatism.
Leninist understanding vital. 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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