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 (£40 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 76261, London SW17 iGW [Post Office Registered.]  www.epsr.org.uk   Contact@epsr.org.uk
No 1603 Jan 7th  2022                                                                                                                      40p fortnightly

Sleaze, incompetence and croneyist callousness on Covid; inflation; and the further impositions of homelessness, foodbank and drug-crime chaos and penury are pushing the weak-link British ruling class towards open dictatorship (as Trumpism continues to do in the US). When even backward rural  petty bourgeois Toryism melts down, the game is up potentially for  the parliamentary racket, already threadbare from decades of declining working class votes and contempt for reformism and Labour treachery. Ruling class problems  compounded by Brexit disaster, trapped by the victory of the Irish national struggle storming towards full reunification – undermining jingoism and scapegoating the bourgeoisie always turns to in crisis. No crisis is bigger than the Catastrophe now unfolding towards dollar collapse and the rising turmoil of world anti-imperialist struggle (labelled terrorism) or in left turns in Latin America. Cuba stands firm against “democracy” colour revolution stunt but revisionism still fails to spell out the need for proletarian dictatorship. Leninism vitally needed

The ossified British ruling class is more on the ropes than ever as the world capitalist system plunges towards Catastrophic breakdown and war.
By-election meltdowns in the populist “Boris” vote, the Tory revolt by “anti-Covid restriction” barmpot reactionaries, non-stop “partying” scandals over the pandemic callousness, and exposés of sleaze, corruption, and cronyism, as well as the Irish border Brexit humiliations, all signal the desperation of a bourgeoisie losing its grip while unable to stop wallowing in its own greed and “high life” entitlement.
From another angle, so too does the slew of draconian new laws to extend police powers; suppress legal challenge and judicial review of repressive laws or legislation; intimidate “liberal” lawyers; arbitrarily remove citizenship (Shamima Begum etc): defy international asylum principles; establish untrammelled ministerial diktat (evading even the pretence of parliamentary process); outlaw and criminalise even peaceful protest and civil disobedience; stitch-up, sack, arbitrarily detain, and even effectively torture, whistleblowers and journalists like Julian Assange; bully and censor an already reactionary enough BBC; block or dismiss warcrime and atrocity inquiries and process (in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and Ireland for example); suppress rebelliousness with joke “British values” under the risible “Prevent” scheme; and criminalise sympathy with, or even understanding of and explanation of, worldwide anti-capitalist rebellion (labelled “terrorism”), including prison sentences for wearing a pro-Hamas T-shirt eg, part of demonising or neutering support for the Palestinian cause, or for the refusal to accept the Jewish colonialist and land-thieving, genocidal occupation of Palestine as “valid”.
Eat your heart out reactionary police-fink George Orwell, “thought crime” is here, imposed not by communism but by capitalism.
All this repression and censorship, like universal surveillance and police charges for “offending” others if they simply “feel offended”, as well as all the dirty dealing trickery around parliament itself (such as the proroguing illegality added to the business-as-usual big money opinion manipulation and gerrymandering which “won” the 2019 election), together with the atmosphere of small-minded xenophobic scapegoating, racism and poisonous Union Jack jingoism that surrounds these measures, – fed by the mendacious and laughable Brexit  empire-throwback fantasies of long gone British “world beating” exceptionalism, – are notches on a tightening fascist throttling of society which grows nastier by the day in its intent (see last two issues).
But they also confirm the total failure and weakness of the British bourgeoisie, split down the middle and losing control across the board, unable to keep up with its rivals internationally and giving ground more and more in the cutthroat tradewar rat race, just as the inflationary wind of the greatest ever monopoly capitalist economic and political crisis is starting to blow with hurricane force (boosted by global warming you might say).
Even the sneaky means by which these Nazi measures are introduced behind the scenes, as hidden amendments to parliamentary bills; smuggled clauses and changes at secondary stages of legislation; moves by the unelected and ever more Tory-packed House of Lords; or by unpublicised (essentially secret) ministerial decree, etc all speak of the weakness and fearfulness of a ruling class which is terrified by the imminent collapses rushing towards it, and of the social upheaval and turmoil that are inevitable as already brutal “austerity” conditions imposed on the working class become ever more intolerable.
If it is to survive, the ruling class must drive the working class down much further.
But as many, many more of an increasingly hard-pressed population begin to suffer the now normalised food bank, homelessness, collapsing health service burdens, and growing drug and crime wave, disintegration of social and life conditions, – and increasing numbers of the middle class too are driven towards the debilitating uncertainty, unemployment and even outright poverty of the Slump – social upheaval will become explosive. 
However, the growing revolt will remain chaotic and anarchic without an understanding of the crisis which is driving the whole world towards breakdown and collapse.
All kinds of confused rebelliousness is erupting already, but winning public support for toppling imperialist statues (as the shock Bristol jury “not guilty” verdict indicates) or resisting Covid vaccination because of perfectly reasonable deep-seated distrust in monopoly capitalist Big Pharma corporations, and governments, is not getting anywhere near the problem.
Just the opposite. Such movements, however genuinely felt the issues might be, can quickly tip into self-righteousness individualism, and even find themselves directly lined up with most reactionary Bufton-Tufton Tory wing of the ruling class and its petty bourgeois demands for “freedom” (for them and their businesses only) - or indirectly so, because of the fake-“left” posturing which embeds itself immediately in such movements, and is deeply hostile to the only way out of growing world chaos, the class fight to establish disciplined workers states and build a planned socialist world. 
In other words, it is missing the Leninist scientific understanding and leadership needed for rebellion to become conscious class-war revolutionary struggle, which alone can finally end this brutal and destructive system.
The ruling class knows this full well, at least from class instinct (since they are obviously not Leninists, nor could be), and is desperate to shut down all polemic, propaganda, or debate that might lead anywhere near crucial revolutionary theory.  
By doing so however it only inflames the situation and increases distrust and contempt.    
As the EPSR has long stated (and Marxist science long before that):

Fascist menaces are [] – the product of appalling bourgeois weakness, – a confession of total bankruptcy and complete inability to carry on ruling with the most effective and insidious weapon capitalism ever devised, – the fraud of ‘parliamentary democracy and justice’.
A hated vindictive ‘democratic’ government (which might survive for a while to hammer working-class living standards due to the utterly class-collaborating futility and fecklessness of the Labour and Liberal ‘opposition’) can hang on to power but represents a dangerous defeat as far as the real point of bourgeois democracy is concerned, which is to bamboozle and swindle the masses but to get them to regularly vote to be skinned nevertheless.
It is an even greater weakness for the bourgeoisie’s survival when an unpopular parliamentary system has to give way to an openly capitalist dictatorship system.
German imperialism’s enforced turn to Nazism in the 1930s was in fact not a clever trick to use the ‘democratic process’ to deprive the masses of democracy but a fatal capitulation to suicidal delusions of a ‘short cut’ to capitalist ‘recovery’ success which ended in total disaster just 12 years later unleashing a postwar revolutionary avalanche which did not stop until a third of the planet had turned socialist, (despite the continuing class-collaborating feebleness (with imperialism on a worldwide basis) of the wretched Moscow revisionist leadership.) [EPSR No 701 25-03-93].

The usual anti-Leninist sneering of the middle class “left” – brain dead from decades of class collaboration and revisionist backpedaling away from revolutionary understanding – will undoubtedly quibble about “raising Hitler” warnings under some smugly academic “principle” alleging it to be “over the top” or just “hysterical Catastrophism”.
Screeds of turgid and mechanical (undialectical) pontification about the exact “definition” of fascism and whether or not we are “there yet” will follow as usual (if the “left” is not already too far gone in its opportunism and sectarian refusal to engage in polemic and debate, and especially with groups deemed too small to count). 
But it will only demonstrate their bankruptcy and the continuing delusions in bourgeois “democracy” and, its opposite face, their hostility to the working class actually taking power through the class war to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, (always labelled “totalitarianism” by the bourgeois propaganda outlets and political “philosophers”).
They play into the hands of the ruling class which does not want to lose the advantages of the “democracy” racket sooner than it need to, threadbare as it is, and wants to continue hoodwinking the masses away from their own revolutionary interests, (helped by the deliberate collusion of the reactionary revived Blairites, every other flavour of reformism, and the opportunism of the “left”).
The bourgeoisie hopes to get away with its increasing crackdown by lulling the working class for as long as possible, like the cliché of a frog in water being slowly brought to the boil without noticing until it is too late. 
Workers are left defenceless and unarmed, trapped by reformism, anti-communism and philistine rejection of theory, even as the ruling class is forced by the pressure of cutthroat international competition, to impose its dictatorship ever more openly, (using theatrical and crude “fascist” parties or not) in order to intensify exploitation and stop any resistance.
And this goes hand in hand with the anti-communist brainwashing which buckets out every propaganda and education channel to convince the world that the only possible alternative to historically bankrupt and outmoded bourgeois rule, communist rationality and human cooperation, “does not work” and is nothing but a terrible gray tyranny and repression.
Of course they would say that, wouldn’t they, the billionaires and multi-billionaires who would lose all their sweet power and ungraspably vast wealth in a rational planned world?
But Labourite/TUC class-collaboration (still currently inviting the bourgeoisie to “join us to create a fair and resilient economy”(!!!) as TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady just said), and Trotskyite revisionism which has long propped it up from the “left” (by entryism or voting recommendations) all accepts and mostly helps promulgate the non-stop lurid and ever-more demented Goebbels lies and demonisations about “torture, repression and massacres” poured out against workers states both historically and currently (see EPSR Perspectives 2001).
And even the ostensibly pro-Soviet revisionist (mostly “Stalinist”) wing of the “left”, decries and denounces the widespread international stirrings of revolt, or national resistance that is heading in an anti-imperialist direction such as in Ethiopia or Sudan, or across the Sahel, or from “rogue states” like Myanmar, which refuse to kowtow to Western monopoly interests.
Despite posturing and posing as “Marxists” and “revolutionaries”, all fake-“left” squeamishness and petty bourgeois fearfulness has been disarming and hoodwinking the working class across the world for decades.
Workers have been left prey to the dangers of counter-revolution and brutal repression imposed whenever the bourgeoisie felt demands for “reforms” went too far, or judged itself strong enough to stamp on them anyway, or the deepening crisis dictated that always limited “welfare concessions” to head off revolution, could no longer be “granted” or had to be dismantled (as Reaganism/Thatcherism began doing in the 1980s when the temporary boom enabled by World War Two capital destruction, was seriously faltering).
The lessons are ignored still, most obviously lately in Chile where the revisionist nonsense of achieving socialism through parliament is now being repeated all over again with the December election of the fake-“left” (and anti-communist) demagogue Gabriel Boric to the presidency, cheered on by the crowds without any warning from the “left”, (in fact mostly with their approval, including from many Communist Parties), as if the horrific torture and butchery of the 1973 Pinochet coup against Salvador Allende had never happened.
Multiple examples of coups and overturns in particularly post-1945 years have repeatedly made clear the crucial importance of breaking up the capitalist state and establishing workers state authority, as known in Marxist theory for more than a century (see the post-1871 preface to the Communist Manifesto or Lenin’s State & Revolution).
The complete overturn of the bourgeois dictatorship is vital if the working class is not to be pushed back down by ruthless and bloody counter-revolution after “winning”, as proven by the Suharto coup in Indonesia in 1965, slaughtering as many as three million in cold blood, through to the toppling of Egypt’s newly established Arab spring “democracy” in 2013 by General Sisi’s repressive and torturing regime, cold bloodedly gunning down thousands of men, women and children in the street and executing and torturing thousands since (including the overturned Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi himself).
As in Chile in 1973, he was toppled by one of the generals (Sisi) trustingly appointed to the new “democratic” cabinet to “maintain order”, exactly in the way  socialist alliance leader Salvador Allende had invited General Augusto Pinochet in, to “restore calm” after months and months of non-stop CIA-coordinated capitalist disruption and reactionary strikes.
Chile remains the archetypical instance, demonstrating the dangers and delusions of such “democratic path” as the way forwards in itself, rather than parliamentary participation (where it is possible) being used as an adjunct of revolution, a tactical tool only, providing a platform to further develop the revolutionary education and organisation of the working class, including explaining the fraud of bourgeois parliamentary “democracy” itself and the need to overturn the bourgeoisie and its “ownership” of the means of production hidden behind it.
Such disarming nonsense followed particularly since Joseph Stalin’s assertion in his 1952 Economic Problems analysis, that post-WW2 capitalism was now so hamstrung and hobbled that it could be “contained” from plunging into all-out war (despite its unstable and belligerent nature), as long as the “peace struggle” was waged sufficiently firmly.
Across the world “official” Communist Parties dutifully adopted this lead, and then misled the working class with notions of steady progress being possible through parliamentary struggle to improve conditions and eventually to win through all the way to full on socialism without the need for all-out class war (see EPSR Books Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism and many other EPSRs).
Allied to the post-war Moscow notion of there being “bad” aggressive imperialism and “liveable with” “good imperialism” (essentially those which took an allegedly “anti-Nazi” line during the Second World War – in fact just a cover for inter-imperialist aggression essentially no different to WW1), this revision of Marx and Lenin’s profoundest grasp of the revolutionary nature of all reality, and particularly of class-divided human society, led on to the idiotic and unnecessary liquidation of the Soviet Union, as well as hampering and holding back the understanding of the inevitable plunge of the entire world monopoly capitalist system into total collapse and war – now unfolding with increasing momentum but still not grasped by the 50-shades of the fake-“left”.
None of them make it the centre of their analyses even though it was the great question Karl Marx made it his life’s work to untangle in Capital, still a vital foundation text for communists and the working class.
Its understanding and Lenin’s further development in Imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism, have never been more crucial. 
After decades of deepening economic crisis with repeated partial and regional collapses, (Black Monday 1987, Asia currency meltdown in the 90s, repeated Latin America bankruptcies including whole countries such as Argentina and almost Mexico, Russian hedge fund bailouts, Japanese eternal stagnation, the Enron implosion, the dotcom crash, etc etc) the great global credit collapse of 2009 erupted, the full expression of the ever intensifying contradictions within the capitalist system (see page 6) which inexorably lead to Slump disaster and world war, as already seen twice in the 20th century.
And this Catastrophic international failure not only continues, but its downward spiral is now on the edge of total implosion as the trillions of QE credit dollars (“money printing”), which held back all-out collapse for the last decade, turn into the opposite and become the very factor pushing inflation to bursting point.
Dollar collapse is now on the cards, and world chaos that will eventually see the entire rotten and overripe bourgeois order necessarily swept away by revolution as it degenerates into slump and world war. 
It is this which is driving world events, not the incidental problems of the Covid pandemic, damaging though it is, but which only exacerbates and inflames a crisis which was happening anyway because of capitalism’s intractable contradictions.
Bourgeois analysts still play down the uncontainable price surge which is becoming a major symptom of the collapse, pretending it is “just a temporary result of Covid”.
But step by step they are admitting its significance with grudging admissions that it is “going on longer than thought” and that the only mechanism they have for keeping going is to print yet more dollars on top of the 60 years of paper dollar creation which has been polluting the world trading system since Richard Nixon was forced to abandon the gold standard in 1972, bankrupted by the Vietnam war:

America: Policymakers in the United States spent much of 2021 insisting that inflation was a “transitory” effect of a rapid recovery, yet they start 2022 scrambling to apply the brakes to rising prices.
A majority of the Federal Reserve’s rate-setters now expect at least three interest rate increases in the coming year. The central bank has not merely started tapering its vast support for the American economy, it has picked up the pace and its asset-purchase scheme is on course to wind down within months.
While this hawkish tilt is designed to alleviate the risk of the economy overheating, the emergence of yet another variant of Covid-19 has clouded the road ahead. Mounting numbers of coronavirus cases “pose risks to the outlook”, 
Should Omicron, the latest variant, undermine the overall recovery, some economists fear that inflation — driven by robust demand for goods in the face of sustained supply and labour shortages — is unlikely to be alleviated by another wave of infections. Nevertheless, the Fed reckons that price growth will cool markedly in the United States in 2022, from 5.3 per cent to 2.6 per cent.
There are caveats, though: the present forecast remains considerably above the central bank’s 2 per cent target; and the Fed was forced to upgrade its forecasts repeatedly during 2021.[]
Germany: Olaf Scholz, the new German chancellor, may be the old finance minister, but this is likely to be a year of substantial upheaval for his country’s economy.
The government will have to pick its way through the consequences of a fourth Covid wave, soaring gas prices and stubbornly high inflation at the same time as galvanising public investment, hitting highly ambitious climate targets, rewriting the European Union’s fiscal rules and recasting its relationship with China, its largest trade partner.
Scholz aims to generate 80 per cent of Germany’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030, up from 45 per cent last year, while simultaneously pulling out of coal and nuclear. In practice, this means that solar and offshore wind capacity will have to be almost quadrupled over the next eight years, alongside a massive expansion of the grid, all measures that could cause political ructions in a year of four closely contested state elections.
The chancellor was not exaggerating when he said on the campaign trail in September that this shift would require the greatest “industrial modernisation” that the country had been through in a century. Paying for it will not be easy, particularly since Scholz has committed to reapplying the “debt brake” — a legal straitjacket limiting the deficit to 0.35 per cent of GDP — in 2023.
One answer is to use state-owned banks, tax incentives and smart regulation to leverage private investment, but this will go only so far. The state has already quietly reassigned €50 billion of pandemic funding for capital expenditure and it may well have to borrow a good deal more than that, taking Scholz into constitutionally tricky territory.
Looming over it all is the spectre of inflation, the primal anxiety of German politics. This month it is expected to exceed 6 per cent, the highest level in three decades. The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, has doubled its inflation forecast for 2022 to 3.6 per cent.
So far the European Central Bank has declined to raise its rate, insisting that the underlying pressures are transitory. After a winter of record energy costs and strained household finances, it is unlikely that this argument will wash with many German voters.
Japan: When Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, came to office in October, he promised nothing less than a “new form of capitalism”, a virtuous cycle of growth that would double wages and reduce Japan’s growing levels of inequality.
Pro-business, right-wing conservatives in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party quickly forced him to pull back from his most radical proposals, such as an increase in capital gains tax. And, rather than creating a new kind of capitalism, Kishida will be largely preoccupied in 2022 by the job of preserving the existing one.
Japan has been relatively unscathed by Covid-19, which has killed far fewer people as a proportion of population than it has in other G7 countries.
But the methods used to achieve this, including strictly closed borders and the discouragement of domestic travel and consumption, have damaged the economy. It has contracted in five of the past eight quarters and growth next year is expected to be the weakest among the big industrialised nations.
For all his radical talk, Kishida thus far has depended on the LDP’s familiar economic tools — massive economic stimulus packages and pleas to companies to increase wages. Last month, the Diet, the Japanese legislature, voted through 55.7 trillion yen (£379 billion) in spending, adding to more than Y1,200 trillion yen of debt. But the effects of massive spending are still failing to impart the necessary sense of security and lift that would convince bosses to increase salaries and set off the longed-for cycle of consumption, manageable inflation and growth.

Weaker economies, are feeling the impact even more as the bigger powers force their problems outwards, using their banking and currency control powers. But that simply causes new problems:

The 30% drop in the Turkish lira in November alone has alerted financial markets to the dangers of a crisis in emerging markets. In truth, most of Turkey’s problems are country-specific, caused by the unorthodox approach to monetary policy of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Currency dealers have been unimpressed by Erdogan’s insistence that the way to cope with soaring inflation is to cut interest rates. Faith in the other big emerging market economy viewed as high-risk – Argentina – is also in short supply.
There is, though, a more systemic issue, which is that many emerging markets have borrowed heavily in US dollars often using future export earnings as collateral. In the event that the US Federal Reserve tightens policy, the dollar is likely to strengthen, making it more expensive for poorer nations to service their debts. If the global economy also slows, they will face a double whammy. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are already warning of increased debt distress.
Asset prices – shares, bonds and property – have all risen since the initial sell-off at the start of the pandemic. Rock-bottom interest rates and the flooding of financial markets with money created by quantitative easing programmes have made it cheaper to move home and to borrow money for speculative activity.
Asset prices have also been boosted by the message sent out from central banks that any tightening of policy will be limited and gradual. But economies have started to slow after a period of catch-up growth in the aftermath of lockdowns. The risk is that despite weaker activity central banks are forced into more drastic monetary policy action by higher-than-expected inflation, thereby kicking away the prop that has been supporting richly valued assets.

The Emperor has no clothes in other words.
The anarchic nature of capitalist production for private profit, and the imperative it imposes for ever increasing production by every competing monopoly needing constantly to expand, each trying to capture the entire world market (and artificially forcing shallow consumerism to ever higher levels of grossly wasteful, polluting and planet-damaging, mind-numbing pointlessness in the process – see the latest TV series on the vacuous rich populating Dubai for example) produces ultimately unbearable antagonism and conflict between the great multinational combines and between the bourgeois nation states they are entwined with, as Marx analysed in the three volumes of Capital, (and many more detailed notebooks and writings and as Lenin and other Bolsheviks took forwards).
The intractable and increasing vicious antagonistic contradictions of this system are unsolvable and planet-threateningly deadly, not just because of the ecological and global warming cataclysm exercising so many middle class minds (real enough but in fact diverting attention from the capitalist cause of eco-disaster), but far more immediately threats of starvation and war for the great majority of the poor and downtrodden masses.
Blitzing destruction, sanction strangling and outright famine for tens of millions in the Yemen and Afghanistan, and the threat of conventional and, potentially, nuclear armageddon once world war erupts in full, is an unstoppable end point to capitalist crisis, as Lenin insisted against petty bourgeois and revisionist complacency.
It needs stating loud and clear and the revolutionary implications too, exposing all denials or opportunist justifications for “playing it down” because it would “frighten the horses”.
Hints that revisionist brainrot about war “not being inevitable”, in the social-pacifism and revisionism still confusing minds could be apparent in the latest international declaration that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” as just asserted in a joint statement from Russia, China, the US, the UK and France.
Such a declaration (to be further analysed) is perfectly valid as international peaceful coexistence diplomacy, used as a tactic to split the bourgeoisie and particularly hem in the more berserkly belligerent wings of imperialism, or even to redirect their aggression against each other as successfully achieved by the Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the Brest-Litovsk agreement in 1918, and again by Stalin’s pact with Nazi-Germany in 1939 (see eg EPSR No830 28-11-95).
Both were treaties with belligerent German imperialist threats against the Bolsheviks, that led to a war-turn westwards by Berlin, against other just-as-vicious imperialist rivals like Britain and France, buying time for the still weak Soviet Union to build up its forces, without giving away any fundamental principles of the revolutionary struggle (despite some revisionist retreat already), and in fact knowing that further onslaughts were inevitable, as subsequently happened.
The latest just announced declaration by the five members of the United Nations security council, might well be a basis for further disarmament agreements. 
And it is possible that it reflects a sense of confidence within the Chinese workers state particularly, and perhaps oligarch-dominated Russia, that they can avoid direct war through being large enough and sufficiently well-armed to be indigestible, as was a serious perspective for the Soviet Union in late 1985 when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a similar agreement. 
But if this new statement reflects the full philosophical position of Beijing revisionism (or Putinite bonarpartism for that matter) seriously suggesting that nuclear war “can never happen” or by implication, could even be “outlawed”, as Moscow analysts like a certain professor Krasin suggested at that time (see EPSR Book Vol 13 on Gorbachevism - item 1) it would be a worrying sign of revisionist complacency which, it is now clear, led onto the political collapse of the Soviet Union (despite its still viable workers state economy). 
Such a position would temper enthusiasm for the recent encouraging signs from Beijing of much greater firmness against non-stop counter-revolutionary slander and CIA organised “democracy” stunts, over Hong Kong, Tibet or the absurd “genocide” allegations about the Uighur population in Xinjiang province and for the renewed insistence, in “Xi Jinping thought”, of the importance of Lenin.
The same would apply to a smaller extent to Putin, who despite his relentlessly philistine anti-communism and running a  capitalist restoration in Russia with all its sickening oligarch carpet-bagger exploitation, has been forced by the still continuing legacy of 73 years of communist society (expressed in pro-Stalin sentiment and rallies etc as well as social expectations) to rein in the worst excesses of the new gangster billionaires and, as he said recently, the subversion and infiltration of Western intelligence:

In the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Russian government was swarming with CIA workers, and they eventually had to be “cleaned out” and sent back to the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed on Thursday.
Speaking to a meeting of the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, Putin used the example of Americans within the Russian government to show how foreign countries attempt to interfere in the country’s internal affairs.
“In the early 2000s, I had already cleaned everyone out, but in the mid-1990s, we had, as it later turned out, cadres of the US Central Intelligence Agency sitting as advisers and even official employees of the Russian government,” Putin explained.
“They were later prosecuted in the United States for violating US law and taking part in privatization while they were CIA employees working for us,” the president claimed.
According to Putin, some American specialists were stationed at Russian nuclear weapons facilities and even sat at a desk with a US flag.
“They lived and worked there. They didn’t need such subtle instruments of interference in our political life because they controlled everything anyway,” he continued.
Earlier this year, Ruslan Khasbulatov, the former chairman of Russia’s parliament, claimed that the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was surrounded by “hundreds” of CIA agents who told him what to do.

Obviously many remain, however covertly, in a society which is restored capitalism and open economically, physically and philosophically to all kinds of Western “agencies” and individuals, having abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat.  
The latest defensive Russian military buildup is sound enough against the military and political provocations by the Nazi regime in Kiev, installed in 2014 by a $5bn US organised “colour revolution” complete with Hitler-worshipping militia atrocities and torchlight parades, and the subsequent suppression of the east killing thousands and thousands to prevent its self-determination and impose Western diktat (with forced “Ukrainisation” and language suppression etc).
Assertive Kremlin warnings against the NATO build-up on the Russian or Belarus borders in ultra-Catholic reactionary Poland, and by the equally fascist-minded Baltic states (with their annual WW2 SS celebration marches) as well as potentially in eastern Ukraine, are also signs that Moscow has not completely lost its marbles.
So too the newly declared military alliance with Belarus and the dogged if bureaucratic Alexander Lukashenko, still clinging on to elements of past workers state ownership and organisation, and popularly supported despite deliberate Western organised middle-class demonstrations for “freedom” etc (the same “freedom” they have in Saudi Arabia or Palestine??).
Neither Lukashenko not Putin are remotely anything to do with Leninism, however and the working class needs to be highly circumspect about their dunderheaded politics – standing alongside them against non-stop Western-organised lying petty bourgeois-“dissident” and “democracy protest” stunts, yes, but not remotely swallowing their hopeless acceptance of the world status quo and its thuggish billionaire domination.  
The legacy of the communist past’s titanic achievements does remain, as a pale shadow, however.
Expectations and wishes of the huge former Soviet population for a cultured socialist existence are still not extinguished, with signs of the hankering for past “Stalinist” society still regenerating even under the philistine Vladimir Putin who has to respond.
And the lid is only kept on hankerings in former workers states in eastern Europe for “the old Stalin days” (ie a workers state life) by the crudest of fascist populism like that in Poland or the Baltic states, propped up by Western subvention and bribes (via European Union infrastructure and development funds and loans, corporate investments seeking cheaper labour and job seeking migration in the West).
But Putin’s nationalist-religious relic-kissing, cynicism about “enough revolution” and his hostility to Lenin are disastrous weaknesses, a capitalist “hyper” expression of the revisionist mind-rot which produced the Gorbachevite liquidation in the first place, and which is traceable all the way back to the embryonic retreat from revolutionism in the early 1930s which steadily ripened (under Stalin) into the disastrous capitulatory revisionism of the 1980s (via various dialectical to-and-fros like the titanically heroic stunning World War Two sacrifices and discipline of the anti-German-Nazi struggle, 85% carried through by the Red Army, and by such defiances as the Cuban missile “crisis”). 
Anti-Western defiance is good though, and possibly reflecting the impact of world turmoil (which contradictorily, Putin’s dunderheaded acceptance of, and cooperation with, imperialism’s meaningless “war on terror” tries to suffocate).
Throughout the world, imperialism’s grip is being shaken apart by the unstoppable economic disaster, intensifying trade war and the rising tide of rebelliousness and hatred at endless tyrannical rule, most of it declared to be “unacceptable terrorism” but in fact for all its backwardness, crudity, and even reactionary notions, still the spontaneous prelude to what will inexorably and necessarily become conscious revolutionary struggle.
The Houthi struggle against backward and vicious Saudi feudalism in Yemen, Taliban nationalist anti-Americanism, the Ethiopian nationalist fight against Tigrayan Western stoogery, continuing al-Shabaab rebellion in Somalia; the Sudanese coup rejection of “democratic” pro-Westernism (which had invited in the IMF after its colour revolution in 2018); the non-stop turmoil across the Sahel countries against imperialism (largely in its French manifestation); the ferment in Egypt which can only be controlled by the most brutal dictatorship measures; the “jihadist” anti-imperialist upsurge in Mozambique, the ever more dogged and determined Palestinian struggle to end the Zionist/imperialist occupation of its land; the ever-more disciplined and organised Hezbollah militancy alongside in nearly bankrupted Lebanon; Iran’s refusal to capitulate to American bullying sanction pressure and the never-publicised “slow war” constant bombing runs, shipping attacks and assassinations by US-backed Zionist aggression; Syria’s continuing resistance ditto; and not forgetting the long running and determined Polisario national-liberation struggle in the western Sahara region colonially oppressed by Morocco’s reactionary regime – are all part of a turmoil that will give imperialism and its exploitation, ever growing resistance.
And signalling even more trouble for imperialism is the revived leftward move in country after country in Latin America, set back by physical or judicial coups and legal stitch-ups over the last decade (Bolivia, Brazil, Honduras, Paraguay) or hampered by constant CIA-organised coup attempts and counter-revolutionary violence provocations (Venezuela, Nicaragua) but once-again winning popular backing in elections in Peru, Bolivia again, Nicaragua again, Venezuela again and now even Chile.
Possibly shortly, giant Brazil will swing left too where the pandemic horrors under the callous indifference of the “macho” fascist Jair Bolsonaro and crude “free market” eco-destruction have destroyed lives on a massive scale.
Most of these reformist “left” moves will remain vulnerable to disruption, and coups, or will compromise to “tone down” or sellout their professed “improving lives” ambitions, as class collaborationist reformism has always done and as described earlier, as is certainly on the cards for the new “left” presidential order elected in Chile.
The question has to be asked for example why the Brazilian bourgeoisie which went out of its way to stitch-up Lula on trumped-up corruption charges out of fear of the left momentum he represented, should suddenly use its judiciary to declare him “free to go”, just at the point where the fascist crudity of Jair Bolsonaro is becoming unsustainable, triggering gigantic street demonstrations?
Could it be that the bourgeois class, for all its detestation of Lula “leftism” understands that it needs such reformism to head off and divert a movement that might otherwise start generating more radical and eventually unstoppable revolutionary sentiment?? 
But while all this movement is bad news for Washington, its limits are made clear by most of these recent “left” regimes cheering on the new Boric order in Santiago without a word of warning about the Allende past, confirming that none are the full-on Marxist takeovers that alone can defend against the imperialist skulduggery and sabotage that imperialism will never stop instigating, particularly here in its “own back yard”.
Nor have they drawn attention to the outright reactionary position of the posturing pretend “left” Boric’s statement on Cuba, decrying the authority of the revolutionary workers state and supporting the latest outrageous counter-revolutionary “democracy” stunt the CIA has been attempting this summer.
The allegedly “left” Biden-ism is carrying out all the same vicious reactionary skulduggery as Trumpism, hoping that the difficulties of the tightened sanctions squeeze (extending the American killer blockade first established 60+ years ago, which prevents medicines, and even basic supplies reaching the island causing deaths and suffering) would combine with the economic crisis and the pandemic troubles to weaken the workers state.
Havana has demonstrated instead the force of class understanding by correctly identifying this racket for what it is and quickly mobilising tens of thousands of the masses to resist on the street, seeing off the disruption despite the severe privations facing the population.
The middle-class stooges who set this going have scuttled away in the night as admitted in the following poisonous and over-hyped bourgeois press account (in the “liberal” Guardian natch’) with its ludicrous “thousands” of “protestors” claims:

As they drove by night through Havana’s Revolution Square Yunior Garcia, a figurehead of opposition to the Cuban regime, and Dayana Prieto, his wife, felt a surge of adrenaline.
Fearing for their lives, they had decided to flee one of the world’s last communist strongholds. With the help of a European friend they were on their way to the airport, hoping to board a plane to Madrid, wondering if they were being followed, if they would be arrested and jailed.
As they were passing the State Council, the president’s official residence, the car broke down in front of the guards. “I thought, that’s it, it’s over,” Garcia said. There was little chance he would not be recognised. “Mine was the best-known face in Cuba at that moment.”
A playwright activist, Garcia, 39, was being demonised by the government over his calls for street protests. “I was like Dracula, Osama bin Laden, a CIA agent, a mercenary that’s what they were saying about me every day on television,” he said last week.
The story of his escape from Havana on November 16, recounted in detail for the first time in an interview with The Sunday Times, is the stuff of airport thrillers, but it also sheds light on the drama unfolding in Cuba, where President Manuel Díaz-Canel, the first post-Castro leader, is struggling to keep afloat a sclerotic regime amid rising discontent about oppression, shortages and the collapse of the health care system.
In July, demonstrators took to streets all over the island over the regime’s failure to contain the pandemic. The government cracked down hard, beating and ritually humiliating protesters, many of whom were sentenced to long prison terms. It was the greatest social unrest since the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.
Garcia, who joined the protests with artist friends, was dumped in a rubbish truck and taken to prison, but he was released after 26 hours and an outcry from his supporters.
He called for another, peaceful demonstration on November 15 in support of the estimated 600 protesters detained in July — enraging the government. It cut off his mobile phone and internet access, deployed state security agents to follow him and mobs to harangue him as a “traitor” at his front door.
Summoned one day to the secret police headquarters, he was told that he would spend the rest of his life in prison if he continued defying the regime. One morning, his mother-in-law found two decapitated doves on the doorstep. “There were feathers everywhere, blood on the wall,” Garcia said.
Fearing for the safety of his family, and other protesters, he said he would march alone, carrying a white rose. “The mob outside replied that they would shove the rose up my arse.”
As the vilification campaign intensified, he feared for his safety. “I was worried some fanatic might come at me with a machete.”
Then the European friend, whom he declined to identify, came to his rescue, helping him acquire a visa to travel to Spain. One night, the mob outside his house vanished, allowing him to escape a weeks-long siege. He left home in the early hours of November 14, wondering if he was walking into a trap.
The next evening, after spending a night hiding in a house outside Havana, he and Dayana found themselves trapped in the nerve centre of the regime. “I thought ‘we’re about to be arrested’,” said Dayana, an actress, as the guards outside the State Council building walked up to the car.
Instead of arresting them, the two men offered to give them a push. “They didn’t even look to see who was in the car, they said they didn’t want us parked in front of the building,” said Garcia, who got out to help give a push.
They abandoned the vehicle further down the road and got a taxi to the airport, where they boarded a flight to Madrid. In retrospect, Garcia thinks that the government wanted him out of the country. 
“They took a picture of us at the airport, it was as if they were saying, ‘Go and tomorrow we’ll destroy you, the traitor who abandoned his people, the coward’,” he said.
“Lamentably that’s what happened, that’s what they did,” he added, referring to official media coverage depicting him as the “traitor” who had called for people to march in protest and then ran away.

Unfortunately, despite its grasp, and practical application at home of the importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and a heroic revolutionary history of resistance to such endless hostility, the Cuban leadership still shows  revisionist weaknesses in understanding, that can only hold back the whole Latin American and in fact world struggle, such as its mistaken support of the undisciplined defiance of Grenada’s Leninist revolutionary leadership, by Maurice Bishop, which split the central committee and opened the door to Reagonite invasion nearly 40 years ago (EPSR Book Vol 12 Grenada). 
Stirrings of anti-Westernism in the Caribbean such as Barbados’ break with the British Queen as head of state (alongside all these other world anti-imperialist stirrings) and growing Chinese workers state trading influence, are bringing such questions back to the fore and they will increasingly need sorting out.  
On Chile too, Havana still upholds Salvador Allende as a “hero” – rather than making sharply clear the lesson that his soft-brained revisionist electoralism was a disaster which could now be repeated allover again.
Tragically it seems to be heading that way in Colombia, where Havana’s advice to pursue the “peaceful parliamentary route” has left the FARC revolutionary movement wide open to non-stop assassination by Colombia’s reactionary US allied regime, and the foul slanders of the US Goebbels disinformation machinery (while capitalist exploitation continues apace):    
Violence in remote areas of Colombia is increasing again, say campaigners, five years after a landmark peace deal was signed with left-wing guerrillas to end decades of conflict.
As the country marked the anniversary of the peace process between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) yesterday, the United States was reported to be poised to remove the once notorious rebel group from its list of terrorists.
The 2016 deal led to about 13,000 Farc fighters laying down their weapons and reintegrating into civilian life, ending the bloody war which displaced millions and left more than 260,000 people dead.
After demobilising, existing or dissident rebel groups and new illegal armed groups involved in drug production or trafficking and illegal gold mining have moved into the areas the Farc left behind.
Alejandro Perez, from Caritas Colombia, a Catholic NGO, said there had been some advances, but progress in implementing the peace deal has been “too slow”.
“The Farc has left many rural areas but the government hasn’t been able to occupy them, leaving a vacuum where armed groups have moved in and are using the land to grow illicit crops, mining and logging,” he said.
Nearly 300 former Farc members have been killed across the country since the deal was signed, according to the local advocacy group Indepaz.
Former rebels who rejected the peace accords have also commandeered the lucrative production of cocaine, and meted out violence against perceived rivals, including those who take a stand against illegal logging and mining.
Last year 65 environmental activists were murdered in Colombia, according to the international NGO Global Witness. The office of the UN High Commission on Human Rights has said that 69 leaders of indigenous tribal groups were killed between 2016 and 2020.
Visiting Colombia on Tuesday to mark the fifth anniversary, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, called for “guaranteeing the safety of ex-combatants, social leaders and human rights defenders”.
“Every day they renew their commitment to building a country in peace [and] addressing remaining challenges,” Guterres said in a tweet about his visit to Llano Grande, one of 24 reintegration camps for former Farc fighters. “They know that peace doesn’t come from one day to the other. It takes effort to build and maintain.”
It is believed the US will remove the Farc, which has reinvented itself in civilian politics as the Common People’s Party, from its international terrorism list. However, new dissident groups who split off from the Farc after the peace deal could be newly added to the list.
José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, told The Times that the Colombian government had implemented the peace accord in “an uneven manner”.
“It has prioritised the reincorporation of former Farc fighters while dragging its feet on land reform and ignoring provisions of the accord designed to protect communities at risk,” he said.
Vivanco also said that many communities were seeing a return to the levels of violence that existed prior to the peace process.

Despite these philosophical weaknesses and necessary battles to expose them, explaining how they continue damaging its own and world revolutionary struggle it must however, first and foremost, be said that Cuba remains a stunning example for the world working class in determination and heroic working class sacrifice, demonstrating the gigantic achievements possible by building socialism, and remaining a beacon for the entire Caribbean and Latin American region, and even the world.
Its defiance of the latest stunt is another boost everywhere, and along with the overall movement leftwards in Latin America underlines that crisis turmoil and troubles can only get far, far worse for the ruling class. 
It is in this hugely wide-ranging, complex and difficult to grasp crisis perspective alone that the instability and floundering in the British ruling class can be analysed and some sense made of the increasing chaos and desperation facing the masses, and what to do about them. 
Thirty years on from the opening EPSR quote, the parliamentary system has never been so despised, the capitalist crisis more apocalyptically threatening and the warmongering more destructive and horrific than ever.
Every capitalist ruling class is being shaken to the core, not least the giant dominating power of the US, split down the middle over how to confront the world crisis.
Should it be aggressive Trumpite isolationism imposed by domestic civil war as foreshadowed by the Capitol Hill semi-coup events one year ago, whipping up irrational racist populism (fascism) to suppress rising working class rebelliousness and potential revolution, along with flag waving chauvinism for hair-raising belligerence in all directions, including (or even primarily) against other major capitalist powers large and small??   
Or can there be yet more credit creation to try and spin out the democracy fraud and “freedom” delusions a little longer, keeping domestic petty bourgeois opinion corralled, as Bidenism suggests, while mobilising continued “alliances” with other imperialist powers to continue the fraudulent post-WW2 “international order of democracy and the rule of law” to contain the overwhelming political and economic challenge of the Chinese workers state in a new Cold War and to scapegoat all the rising challenges, be they large or small, from Russia to Ethiopia?
There is little to choose between the aims and intent of either side; both are in the service of ultra-reactionary multi-billionaire monopoly corporate American imperialism and its plans to keep the world under its thumb, suppressing/and or bribing anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggles to allow the continued multinational plundering of resources and ruthless wage-slave (and actual slave) exploitation of the Third World billions ie the great bulk of humanity, – save those in a few communist countries like China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam  who have managed to extract themselves from the imperialist orbit by revolution and the building of workers states (albeit still obliged partially to deal with imperialist labour purchases). 
The difference is one of judgement about how soon the dollar crashes and the trade war necessarily becomes hot war, and of how much of a risk open civil war will be at home (and was already proving to be under the Trump presidency).
The British ruling class reflects similar splits, as the shallow Borisite jingoist populism falters, failing (inevitably) to deliver the supposed benefits that Brexit “restored sovereignty” was supposed to produce (and never could in the teeth of the oncoming Catastrophe), and floundering badly over the Covid pandemic through a mixture of callous indifference, economic panic and corruption. 
The Tory party itself is ripped wide open.
On the one side is further money printing to keep popular opinion onside after the hollow populist promises of the Brexit campaign and the panic of the pandemic, by throwing at least some token sops of investment to the petty bourgeoisie and workers lucky enough still to have jobs (all the cynical nonsensical hype about “levelling up” etc).
On the other, the desperation and fear of the mainstream middle-class, particularly in the south, as the economy tanks, frenziedly wanting to impose further cutbacks.
These are the millions of professional and small-business elements most dependent on servicing City finance, which is ever more the central part of the parasitical and increasingly near criminal money-laundering British economy.
They live off the flow of international big bourgeois and corporate wealth through the banks, insurance companies and Stock Exchange etc, helping filch it away and hide it into “tax havens” – either directly by providing legal, accountancy, “IT” and other backup, or indirectly through the huge leisure and “hospitality industry”, (only the commodifying distortions of capitalism could make “hospitality” a paid-for product) embracing bars, clubs, the colossal media “industry”, and the ever more distorted construction and property market selling always empty flats as “investments” etc etc etc.
The giant pyramid of dependency is a huge part of the London and south-east economy which consumes the lion’s share of resources and investment, and naturally attracts the contempt and hostility of the benighted north (despite some finance being located in Leeds for example or media in Manchester).
Small wonder the Bufton-Tufton Tories across the whole region make up the backbone of the reactionary anti-Covid measures group, impatient with any pandemic measures involving rational and disciplined shutdowns or anything that tepidly comes near it like the Plan B restrictions made necessary by the latest wave of Omicron(even such measures as sensible mask wearing) .
They are casual about its impact on the NHS etc since they use the ever-expanding private medicine services which the ruling class is covertly fostering daily, and which benefit from chaos and overload – witness the sudden flurry of advertising for private medicine on TV.
This wing, concerned only with its own narrow and blinkered lives and livelihoods, is willing to distort and lie about the dangers of the disease (as legions of “industry representatives” come onto the media to do daily, dismissing the scientific views of professors, doctors and researchers out of hand as if their own opinions are “just as valid”) and its political line was behind the callous “bodies pile high” cynicism of the initial “natural immunity” approach of the government, (equally reflected in the Trumpite casualness and the even more cynical mix-and-mingle encouragement of the pandemic spread by the Nazi-minded Brazilian leader Bolsonaro, both presiding callously over the highest levels of death and bereavement in the world).
Above all it is completely hostile to even the notion of collective action and the discipline and state support required to achieve it, as demonstrated from the beginning of the pandemic by the lockdown policy of the Chinese workers state, which has kept the loss of life to a few thousand among a population of 1400 million, more than twenty times the size of Britain (and which is largely supported in its efforts by the entire population).
In other words it is the apotheosis of petty bourgeois individualism, and its expression as vicious anti-communism swallowing or promulgating every kind of lie possible about China and anywhere else that even begins to look like opposing Western capitalism.
It is not a coincidence that this individualism overlaps strongly with the British empire arrogant fantasies of the most reactionary Brexiteers, sustaining the jingoism and belligerence being deliberately fostered by the ruling class, its last resort always as the crisis deepens.
One weird side effect of the “freedom” demands (which are limited only to their “freedoms”) as recent press letters pointed out:
I do think it is wrong to characterise rightwing Conservatives as “freedom loving” (Rebellious mood on Tory backbenches puts Boris Johnson on notice, 14 December). True, they like to promote certain limited sorts of freedom – the freedom for people rather like themselves to do what they want without interference from pesky regulations, the freedom to spend their money and manage the economy as they would like, and so on.
But there are a lot of freedoms they have little interest in – freedom from want, from squalor, from hunger, from disease, of assembly, of the courts, of movement and to settle in this country. These are instead to be dealt with through firm and strict regulation.
Richard Williams Hove, East Sussex

Martha Spurrier (Who will stop human rights abuses if the government puts itself above the law?, 14 December) is absolutely right about this government’s systematic dismantling of our freedoms. That is why the freedom and liberty claims by Tory MPs as the reason for voting against the new Omicron restrictions ring so hollow and mendacious.
If they were honest and sincere in their beliefs, they would not be sitting on their hands as this government trashes the Human Rights Act; disenfranchises citizens without a photo ID; criminalises protests; intends to abolish or at least dilute judicial review; removes protection from whistleblowers; and threatens to castrate the Electoral Commission. I wonder, too, how many of them consulted their constituents before making their decision?
Michael Newman Shefford, Bedfordshire
–  is the anti-vaxx movement, and the slew of barmier conspiracy theories around it. 
Now, there is nothing inherently barmy about seeing conspiracy everywhere, – the ruling class constantly plots and manipulates, which is why it runs such huge secret police, surveillance  and intervention operations such as the CIA, Mossad, and the MI6, funded with tens of billions of dollars, and swamps the world with anti-communist propaganda lies.
But the anarchic and individualist “freedom” demands in these movement overlap uncannily with the petty bourgeois fears among the Tory “rebels”.  
They are not the same; clearly the history of capitalist monopoly experimentation and sometimes its “science” (or mostly the deliberate misuse and cover-up of sound science) has been monstrous by accident or design,  including the devastation of tobacco; thalidomide; nuclear testing; germ-war experiments; radiation experiments on prisoners, the disabled and pregnant women, and even entire unsuspecting communities etc, etc (eg see EPSR No 733, 741,811), and lately the deliberately inflicted opioid addiction epidemic in the USA –making billions for Big Pharma.
Suspicion is sound and it is understandable that it makes many communities, especially working class, hold back.
But it also needs to be tempered by a broader perspective; not every aspect of bourgeois science is sinister – it is after all the essence of the capitalist revolution which overturned  the irrationality and religious mumbo-jumbo of the feudal middle ages to set mankind on a path to rationality. Without Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, thermodynamics, electronics, hydraulics, etc etc etc etc the modern world would not exist.
Of course, neither would disastrous eco-disasters and war threats.
How to judge the dross from the lies and shysterism and ultimately to use and develop science for building a rational society?
Surely only through the study of the most profound science of all, the Marxist dialectical science which not only overcomes the mechanical one-sidedness of bourgeois materialist science (see Lenin Materialism and Emperio-Criticism) but which can grasp, explain and lead living human society and its balance of class forces, including scientifically grasping and seeing the anti-imperialist content and materialist driving force  of seemingly irrational movements like jihadism (sneeringly written off as just “barmy religion”  by such high-handed scientists as Richard Dawkins revealing precisely the limitations of bourgeois science and its capitulation to bourgeois class interests). 
In other words surely by overturning the profit system and its distortions, ie by revolution?.
On the specific question of vaccines and their safety, Marxism would not suggest any more than making personal judgements, but within such a context of overall understanding, one aspect of which would be that the bourgeoisie is no more keen to die from a pandemic than anyone else (as even Trump has conceded!!). 
Other factors to bear in mind are how the issue impacts on the ability of revolutionaries to battle for Leninist science.
If the bourgeoisie insists on compulsory vaccinations, as Italy is about to do, then does it make sense to make that into an issue in itself?
The Bolsheviks, during the First World War, did not resist conscription or take a pacifist non-cooperation line,  but went to the trenches with the working class and peasantry, judging that the possibility for agitation and undermining of the Tsarist war was greater there than by making gestures.
Winning mass understanding that way was a significant part of the abandonment of the trenches in 1917 and the beginning of the revolution which did stop war (in the only way it can be stopped).
The vaccine issue has parallels with the hijab issue about which EPSR No 1220 17-02-04) declared:

In the year 2004, what the ‘Muslim’ communities and nations need is the same that everyone else needs on Earth, — a Leninist revolutionary party to take state power internationally off monopoly imperialist economic slump-corruption and warmongering degeneracy.
Making a specific issue (one way or the other) of anyone thinking a hijab will help them get there, or bring this about, hardly seems the most fertile furrow to plough, — or any other belief totem or personal idiosyncrasy.
A 100% concentration on Marxist scientific truth about the world and civilisation’s understanding is surely the best approach, leaving individuals to personally grapple with their own emotional or ideological crutches.
Any individual reformist fight against ‘authority’ over such an issue (e.g. French Muslims v state schooldress-code policy) needs treating as such, i.e. pure single issue reformism.
Often, such ‘causes’ are a complete diversion and even a reactionary waste of time.
For example, the very essence of every capitalist society is to endlessly create and recreate divisiveness of all kinds (racial; ethnic; religious; sexist; and above all class, embracing all the others).
And while it is inevitable and good to be always combating racism e.g., the dream of “one day eradicating all traces of racism from all human thinking”, however laudable, is going to be far better served in the long run by building a proletarian dictatorship communist revolution than it is by endless anti-racist campaigning, no matter how determined, energetic, self-sacrificing and inventive.

The indifference, confusion,  and callousness of the bourgeois response to Covid is obviously one further reason for  the meltdown in public support seen in the by-elections. 
As mentioned the greater question is the crisis itself and the impact of that will massively intensify in the next months as the squeeze on living standards is hugely intensified with tax rises, further spending cuts and the predicted massive increase in energy bills bringing millions to the edge of penury.
 The ruling class will be driven even closer to censorship and repression.
The fascist jingoist atmosphere will be further intensified. 
But it is also hampered by  the  failure of its Brexit posturing over the Irish border, symbolised by the resignation of Lord Frost, unable to overcome the contradiction between the delusion of “world beating Britain standing proudly alone etc etc” and the reality of its defeat in Ireland by the national-liberation struggle, storming forwards towards the re-unification as Sinn Féin momentum becomes the dominating factor politically in both Dublin and the north.
Far greater analysis of this is needed, but must be held over.
Particularly needing examination are the flaws and weaknesses in the Irish national liberation  movement, (despite its giant achievements which the EPSR has been second-to-none is analysing and extolling over three decades – see EPSR books part  1-5), on struggles such as Ethiopia or Myanmar, where it falls on the imperialist side of the fence.  
But its huge success and defeat of British imperialism, forcing it out, is another factor sending the British ruling class reeling and undermining the  ideological grip of “great British” chauvinism which has held back the working class on the mainland for centuries (through collusion with its own ruling class in suppressing another people).
It further undermines confidence and particularly among the less gung-ho wing (Remoaners so called).
This side of the bourgeoisie is more inclined to the Biden-esque line of not yet abandoning the “democracy” racket and seeing if it can be spun out a bit further.  
Just in case, the gross opportunism of the Blairite Starmer Labour party is being warmed up, after a decade of deliberate refusal to challenge the Tory ruling class, handing power over to the coalition in 2010 despite the option of a deal with the Liberals themselves – and still helping prop it up now with the most grovelling of votes for the government in the House of Commons whenever the Tories are split among themselves (in the “national interest” of course).
Every effort has been made to strip it of any vestige of the pale “leftism” which was given voice by the surge of support from the youth and working class after the leadership election of fake-“left” posturer Jeremy Corbyn, (either by accident or to calculatedly try and contain growing austerity discontent within the old class collaborating boundaries).
The huge extent of that enthusiasm clearly shocked the ruling class, but the Starmerites have done their best to ensure it was all thoroughly stamped on with their sick and craven adoption of the CIA/Zionist “left anti-semitism”  campaign (now there is a major conspiracy, even revealed with video evidence). 
Nothing is too treacherous and backstabbing for Labourite opportunism –imperialism’s B-team.
 Build Leninism Alan Moss.

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. (Lenin Dec 1916: Principles involved in the war issue.)

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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperia1ist struggles).

A Message From Grenada - Forward Ever