Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. - V.I.Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£20 p a.) & circulation:078679 96074    [P&P Bulletin Publications PO 80X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]    
 July 31 2001 No 1100                                                                                                                                 25p

A fear of out-of-control anarchy and free-thinking (as imperialist world crisis unstoppably deepens) makes New Labour self-righteousness pretend 'concern' for allegedly-offended paedophile victims suffering from Brass Eye 'satire' but not give a damn about the Genoa brutality to protesters or the Occupied Zone brutality to the native Irish, which acts of police-state barbarism the Blair government really could do something about if it wanted to. The entire middle-class fake-'left' uses the degenerate 'democracy' stunt to effectively help prop up capitalist society from deserved collapse and inevitable mayhem anyway. 'Anarchy' is not the problem. Petty-bourgeois ideological brainlessness, - especially of the fake-'left' - is blocking the road to serious Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science.

The British imperialist failure to resolve its regime of reactionary violence in Ireland (see p 8),and Blair's glib approval of the murderous pogrom in Genoa (see p7), confirm that the deepening international capitalist crisis will be un-ignorable because of its utterly irrational demented chaos, violence, and paralysed confusion.

Weak and out-of-their depth ruling-class governing circles which have put such wretchedness into office as New Labour in Britain and Berlusconi and the neo-fascists in Italy will be swept by the forces of worldwide imperialist economic and political upheaval into ever-stupider and ever-more-dangerous panic measures of all kinds.

All that Blair & Co had to achieve in Ireland's Occupied Zone this week (in the new initiatives being announced) was to finally accept that the idiot propaganda game of still trying to paint the national-liberation struggle as the real evil violence in the equation, and the real obstacle to a peaceful settlement, had been a failure.

And with the current onslaught of 'Loyalist' viciousness playing into London's hands, nothing should be simpler than confirming that the Good Friday Agreement will now be implemented in complete social, economic, political, and constitutional fullness at last, overcoming Ulster Unionist obstructionist and delaying tactics, IN ORDER THAT AFTER TWO YEARS SATISFACTORY OPERATION OF ALL THE AGREEMENT'S MANY RAMIFICATIONS TOWARDS THE ENDING OF SECTARIAN COLONIST-SUPREMACY NONSENSE WHICH PREVIOUSLY PREVAILED IN THE OCCUPIED ZONE, AND T0WARDS THE EVENTUAL REUNIFICATION OF IRELAND; - PROVIDED THE REACTIONARY UNIONIST POLITICAL COMMUNITY GENUINELY COOPERATE TO SEE HOW THINGS MIGHT WORK OUT MINUS THE HATED SECTARIAN 'NORTHERN IRELAND' ORANGE DICTATORSHIP, - THEN AT LONG LAST SOME REAL CONDITIONS FOR SERIOUSLY DECOMMISSIONING SECTARIAN-TARGETED WEAPONS IN IRELAND MIGHT STAND A PROPER CHANCE OF BEING ESTABLISHED.

But so divorced are the New Labour muddleheads from most connection with the political reality of the actual world-imperialist crisis currently breaking over their heads, that even such simple tasks of saying that the B of implementation of the actual words of the Good Friday Agreement should obviously at last now follow the A of everyone actually signing the document in 1998, - is likely to be fudged yet again.

The obvious option of letting dog-in-the-manger political Unionism limp away to sulk alone and out of office, to be replaced by representatives of other important sections of the old colonialist community who no longer thirst for ridiculous and pointless orange triumphalism and who can see the sound economic, social, and constitutional logic of re-uniting Ireland eventually, - is still probably going to remain unobvious to baffled, Blairite brains.

The following capitalist press admissions of what the 80-years British-state-approved lawlessness is really like for the Irish trapped inside the artificial 'Northern Ireland' effective colonial dictatorship, - still as murderously relevant this week as every day since Partition in 1921 (and for centuries before that too), - are totally ignored by Trimble & Co in order to posture about IRA arms which in reality are the only thing which has finally forced British Imperialism to call a Good Friday Agreement halt to this domineering, Orange-triumphalist barbarity:

Gavin Brett, a Protestant, was celebrating a friend's birthday with a group of Catholics and Protestants near a nationalist GAA sports club in Glengormley, on the outskirts of north Belfast, when he was shot by someone in a passing car. 

Police believe the assailants fired indiscriminately, assuming all the boys were Catholic.

Last night Catholic children enjoying a community play as part of the annual Ardoyne festival had to be evacuated after two homemade bombs were hurled at a small business centre in north Belfast. A caller from the Red Hand Defenders contacted a Belfast newsroom to also claim responsibility. A month ago, a Catholic, Ciaran Cummings, 19, was shot by the pillion passenger of a motorbike near his home in Antrim. The Red Hand Defenders also claimed the shooting.

The UDA announced a fortnight ago that it no longer supported the Good Friday agreement, but it insisted its ceasefire remained intact.

Yesterday, Gary McMichael, who leads the Ulster Democratic Party linked to the UDA, admitted in a BBC Radio Ulster interview, "they [UDA] are the ones who know what they are doing. I'm in no better position than you are."

The Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, called on loyalists to stop the violence. Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams blamed the UDA, but offered to meet its leaders to reassure them he was committed to the peace process.

Until the now thoroughly decadent and out-of-date 'Ulster Unionism' starts seriously to even BEGIN implementing the GFA provisions with a good will to make them work, the IRA would be wise to keep every gun and bullet intact. Tackle the remaining  'loyalist'-dictatorship hotheads, and particularly the 'Unionist' political obstructionism which inspires that die-hard 'No Surrender' violence.

A seriously Patten-re-organised RUC, aided by the British Army, the Irish Army, and the Garda in reserve, would have no trouble at all in routing the final few pus-ridden sores of fascist-colonial 'loyalist'-sectarian resistance to the necessary restoration of Ireland's sovereignty, - albeit as a bourgeois state with all the problems of its own capitalist crisis to come in common with 'free-market' entrepreneurial anarchy worldwide, - but no longer pointlessly artificially divided and further complicated by a dying imperialist-colonialist grip on its northeast corner.

But in advance of London-announced new details for Ireland’s troubles, the central confusing questions of when is violent armed struggle legitimately or crucially on the agenda, in what range of political perspectives for which kind of constitutional crisis, and what theory of leadership is needed to make such struggles succeed, - are all raging currently again in any case because of the attempted political annihilation of the Genoa summit protesters by consciously fascist police methods unleashed by the ultra-rightwing Berlusconi government (of 'entrepreneurial excellence' of the kind so admired by the Blairites).

In the issue of anti-globalisation protesting, the relationship between international economic bourgeois-crisis hysteria and unenlightened local capitalist-government savagery is immediately obvious. The world G8 leaders don't know what they're doing, and haven't a clue about even how to start trying to solve the impossible economic collapse that is soon to devastate the 'free-market' planet.

And their confusion, and sterile posturing humbug, is inevitably reflected locally in the bovine fascist viciousness of the Berlusconi regime, which 'knows' even less in 'global' terms, but has an obvious dumb faith in the nastier Mafia market-tactics for surviving on ones own patch.

As the Review immediately commented last week, the hardly unique brutality of capitalist-state police forces is even surpassed in eye-catchingness by the damning spotlight shining yet again on the whole question of 'democracy'. 

Whose 'democracy' is it, Marxism has never ceased asking, and has never ceased giving the answer that the whole racket of 'elections' and 'parliament' belongs lock, stock, and barrel to the bourgeois-capitalist social system, totally dominated by the ruling class, broadly speaking.

By one means or another, capitalism effectively has total control over the production and supply of television and radio broadcasting, newsprint and publishing, meeting halls and the regulation thereof, etc, etc, etc. On top of that, the bourgeois-capitalist employing and management class are the vital economic lifeline of more than 90% of the working class, with enormous influence over how people act and think, or how they literally survive at all in the nastiest periods of McCarthyite black-listing and witch-hunts for 'communists', etc, etc, etc.

And even when all those imperialist control methods fall down locally because the CIA international subversion and manipulation-machinery has been asleep or because the regional stooges have been too stupid, violent, or gross to even win a managed election racket, then the world bourgeoisie will simply have the votes rigged, and news about it suppressed internationally, or else arrange a counter-revolutionary coup soon after and inflict years of fascist-dictatorship punishment to give an added edge to normal brutal capitalist-state rule, - as all happened, for example, in Chile in 1973, in Spain in 1939, in Germany in 1933, and in Italy in 1921.

Berlusconi is the epitome of every aspect of the vicious murderous reality of this whole fraud of 'democracy'. He has virtually bought and bullied his way into government office by being one of the biggest billionaire moguls in Italian business, and owning a vast media monopoly as part of it. At the same time, Berlusconi has never been shy of making common cause with every rotten revanchist mentality that failed Italian fascism left in its putrid wake, a sick history which has in modern times seen endless alarming evidence of all the continued unbroken links between fascist-provocateur politics and the organs of the Italian capitalist state, - conspiratorial relations inherited directly from Mussolini's 22-year reign of terror which filled the 'democracy' gap in Italy between the bloodbath tyrannies of the First and Second inter-imperialist wars.

These Italian-style 'excesses' only mark the rule of all bourgeois 'democracy' in essence, and not in any way the exception that proves the rule that 'democracy' is basically the 'fairest' and most 'civilised' way of government. What Berlusconi's police do in Genoa, Blair's police are equally capable of in the cold-blooded shooting down of harmless citizens in Brixton and Liverpool recently; and in the 'anti-rioting' brutality of Leeds, Oldham, Bradford, and Burnley recently which set the pattern for much worse police 'heavy-handedness' to come; and as the British establishment's local fascist 'loyalist' stooges in the Occupied Zone of Ireland are nightly inflicting even at this very moment, - gunning down, blowing up, and burning out the Irish just for being Irish in their own country.

It is this priority issue of 'democracy's' exposure in Genoa (rather than the merely incidental actual acts of police violence inevitably perpetrated by the capitalist state machine), - which makes the prissy, mealy-mouthed small-mindedness of the fake-'lefts' so monstrously obnoxious on this 'street violence' issue. No, Marxist revolutionaries are not anarchists, and detest the infiltration of the labour movement by provocateurs and police-agents. But the tone of the following diatribe against any stupid provocations that the anarchists in Genoa ere responsible for carries even more serous danger for the working class, - far more serious, - spreading crass illusions in 'democracy', and sowing the nonsense that police violence is hampered if it has not got a good 'excuse' to stage its brutal reaction, and that the problem of police agent infiltration and provocations might be solved if anarchists could be kept away from the scene of anti-imperialist struggle.

To their shame, the petty-bourgeois nationalist weaknesses of Sinn Féin show through in the An Phoblacht questions about the appropriate tactics and perspectives for this growing international anti-globalisation movement (see p 7).

Only revolutionary communism has ever actually overthrown imperialism (as opposed to administering a very serious but one-off defeat for imperialism, and replacing a red, white, and blue capitalist state with a properly green capitalist state, as the Irish national-liberation struggle is on the brink (a few more years, or so) of finally achieving.

But Bolshevism in its struggle for power very rarely made the mistake of imagining that as well as fighting imperialism, it was obliged to help squash other violent anti-imperialist protesters who disputed the Bolsheviks' leadership of the movement to overthrow the autocratic capitalist state. Even terrorist methods were never rejected by Leninism on principle, but only not employed because the method of mass revolutionary political organisation was so much superior in the given circumstances.

Until quite late on in the revolutionary struggle for working class power, the Bolsheviks and anarchists still fought alongside each other when occasion demanded, despite 60 years of blistering Marxist political polemics exposing every aspect of anarchism as a death-trap of petty-bourgeois ideological confusion for the working class.

Only after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat did the issue of doing something about anarchist provocations AGAINST THE WORKERS STATE emerge as a genuine responsibility of those struggling to build socialism.

At this current anti-imperialist stage of the fight, such suggestions can only be tainted with the worst kind of pro-'democracy' class-collaborating confusion. For nationalists to get muddled is bad but not totally surprising because nationalists are not Marxist-communists.

But what sort of 'communists' could come up with the following 'provocateur'-sounding bilge from the Weekly Worker???

We must demand the disarmament of all police forces. We should openly state our aim to replace them with working class militia and defence organisations. But we must also protect our movement from the enemy within.

The so-called black bloc acted as provocateurs. They gave the police every excuse to suppress the whole anti-G8 protest, No more than 2,000 anarchists were able to hijack our demonstrations and trigger undisciplined rioting. The pacifistic GSF did its best to steward on the day, but was totally overwhelmed by the determination of both anarchists and police to provoke trouble. The black bloc was made up mainly of Italian anarchist grouplets, backed by a number of Spanish and French co-thinkers.

The bloc is rumoured to have been rife with police agents and other infiltrators. Thomas Harding, a Daily Telegraph reporter, luridly describes how he turned up to a few meetings of the Wombles in London and claims he was easily integrated into the core group which organised the riots (July 23). With their undemocratic and sect-like organisational structure anarchists can easily be infiltrated and manipulated. At a press conference the GSF actually showed video footage that clearly identities police agents amongst the anarchists.

None of the anarchist groups took part in the preparation meetings of the GSF and refused to accept majority decisions. They did not attend the migrant workers' demonstration on Thursday, where 30,000 people demanded open borders and an end to immigration controls. Far too political for our anarchists, who hid in the hills preparing for Friday which was labelled 'direct action day'.

Not surprisingly, they split right down the middle during their first big test. The non-violent group Ya Basta had prepared big shields made of plastic, behind which 10 or so demonstrators could hide. The shields on wheels were supposed to push aside the police forces during stand-offs. Dressed up in their usual white overalls and protected by foam and pieces of cardboard, their aim was to peacefully break through into the red zone that sealed off the city centre. The 'real' anarchists, however, were keen to fight the police and unleash mayhem. All hell broke loose. The whole city seemed in flames. Streets and squares became battle zones. The anarchists set ablaze dozens of cars, looted offices and fire-bombed a bank, disregarding the flats above. Sometimes they chased after the police.

It is not the job of communism to effectively finger the anarchists in this shameful way and virtually accuse them of being responsible for police state savagery's existence. What an insane and counter-revolutionary slander! Who are the real provocateurs here? What grotesque and really lethal delusions in bourgeois society's 'democracy-of-protest' fraud do these despicable fake-'lefts' harbour??? And how many police-agents and other infiltrators does the Socialist Alliance crawl with???????

This is some of the sickest anti-communist filth yet from this treacherously mis-named CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain).

People who think they are anarchists or who believe in anarchism, even if as confusedly and as insincerely as the CPGB posturers claim allegiance to communism and Marxism, can be argued with polemically in the anti-imperialist movement to establish the serious science of revolutionary struggle (Marxism-Leninism); but the idea under a capitalist state of trying to deny anarchists the freedom to fight imperialism as successfully as they delude themselves they can, is no more than counter-revolutionary self-deluded finking on behalf of, effectively, the EXISTING 'order' in society, namely the capitalist-bourgeois order, - or 'democracy' as these anti-Marxist poseurs ritually defer to.

And just for the record, let it be shown that in reality, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie has never needed any 'provoking', and never will, in order to launch its always-ready full brutal might into action. The sly notion that police-state methods would hardly exist if it wasn't for the anarchists silly provocations making it all possible, - is well put in its stool-pigeon place by these admissions from the bourgeois capitalist press itself:

In one corner of the city there were scenes smacking of a police state: Just after midnight, a police raid on sleeping protesters at a Genoan school had netted more than 90 people suspected of being ringleaders of the riots. Most had been savagely beaten as they were arrested. Then, as dawn broke, came the torture.

With injuries ranging from broken bones to bloodied scalps, the protesters had been put in prison vans and taken to a detention centre in the suburb of Bolzaneto. A week earlier, the GOM, a special police unit from Rome, had arrived. They converted a gym into a 'recognition centre'. It was here the supposed ringleaders were brought for brutal interrogation. Piecing together testimony from three Britons taken to the centre, The Observer has built up a picture of appalling violence and systematic abuse. On arrival, detainees were spread-eagled against a wall for up to two hours while abuse was hurled at them. They were bastards and scum. A woman was reviled as a 'Jewish gypsy', hinting at the torture to come.

Norman Blair; 38, a former worker with Hackney council in London, entered the building and heard cries of anger and pain: 'It was the sort of place where you know terrible things happen,' he said.

Detainees were spat on, urinated on and not allowed to go to the toilet. Some were made to sing fascist songs. "I could hear people screaming and one woman begging 'please help me' over and over again", said Blair.

Then, one by one the detainees were asked: 'Who is your government?' Blair thought the police wanted to know their nationalities until he heard his neighbour, reply in Italian: 'Polizia.' Anything else would have meant another beating.

For 24 hours, the prisoners were kept awake. Some began to hallucinate from lack of sleep and food. Police took away the clothes of a German protester and left naked bar a plastic apron. It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate and an act of revenge for the riots of the days before.

Denied access to toilets, some had to defecate where they sat. The stench of sweat, faeces, urine and fear was overpowering. It would linger on their clothes for days afterwards. The lucky few allowed to leave their cells for the toilet had to march, heads bowed. Women were led by the hair. As they shuffled along, rows of policemen shouted insults and 'Auschwitz' and 'Swastika'.

As Nicola Doherty, a care worker from London who had been picked up with Richard Moth, her boyfriend, was escorted to the toilet she passed a cell, its door window covered with a blanket to obscure whatever was taking place inside.

Women seemed to be singled out special forms of abuse. Police took knives and scissors to their hair. A Kurd, who had suffered torture at the hands of police at home, became hysterical as her long hair was cut. The police said it was for her own safety, to prevent her hanging herself. They also took away medicine she had to take daily. A Young German called Daphne sustained a broken nose when a policeman struck her with a baton and she stood, her hands behind her head. It was a day of utter hell. When the protesters were dispersed to jails it came as a blessing. At last the torture would stop. By the time Blair arrived at a prison in Pavia on Monday, he was relieved to be alive.

THE TERROR HAD BEGUN just after midnight on Saturday night. Giving his account, Blair's eyes filled with tears of anger as he told how he and Dan McQuillan, a friend, were beaten by police in the raid on the Genoa Social Forum.

Police had battered the two as they cowered on the floor. 'The blood was coming out of Dan in big dollops, like jelly. It was just horrible,' he said.

Minutes earlier, Blair, McQuillan and a New Zealander who was sharing their room had been jolted awake by screams and a low rumbling from the street outside. Blair froze as a phalanx of police jogged down Cesari Battisti Street, battering anyone in its path. The police were heading for the school where he was staying with other demonstrators. It had been a good day for the anti-capitalists: some estimates said there had been 250,000 on the streets and there was talk of scaling down future summits. It was payback time.

The raid started when a police van rammed the school gates. Riot police then poured into the building. Police documents seen by The Observer show 93 people were arrested in the course of two-and-a-half hours of violence and, of these, it is thought more than 60 ended in hospital.

The first in the line of fire was Mark Covell, a journalist, who was outside the building when the police came. 'They take a running jump at you like kicking a football. I heard my ribs break, like snapping matchsticks. I thought, my God, this is it, I'm going to die,' said Covell, 33, from his hospital bed. Splinters of rib punctured his left lung and 10 teeth spewed from his mouth. Blood obscured his vision as police charged past and he collapsed. 'The last thing I heard was screaming.'

Covell's ordeal was merely the first of many. Moth and Doherty had just returned to the school when the violence began. The building had been converted into a dormitory for the duration of the G8 summit by the Genoa Social Forum, one of the main organisations behind the protests. The pair zipped their sleeping bags together to bed down. As Moth, 32, returned from the bathroom he heard the commotion. He and Doherty followed fellow protesters running up some stairs. But it was too late. The couple crouched on the floor, Moth on top of Doherty to shield her. The blows came thick and fast, breaking Doherty's wrist and splitting open their scalps. Moth's blood dropped on Doherty. "I heard the man next to me cry, 'Please stop'," she said.

A second wave of police came. One officer took out a knife and held it to the face of a man next to Doherty and cut off a lock of hair. Then he pressed the blade to her face. 'I closed my eyes. I don't know if he cut off my hair or not,' she said. Another policeman appeared. He hit her on the back and then stroked her arm, sighing 'Aaah' in mock sympathy.

Police rained blows on the terrified protesters as they were herded into the main hall. Then they were made to kneel, hands stretched out, as their blood formed pools around them. Petrified paramedics ran out of the most basic supplies for the injured. Ambulance staff made splints from cardboard boxes.

Stretchers were made from sleeping bags and mats were used to drag unconscious out into the street. One police officer, concerned that at least two people seemed to be in a coma, was allegedly reassured by a superior: `Don't worry, we're covered.'

IT WAS FOUR DAYS after the raid that the British protesters were freed. On Wednesday, they were brought before a magistrate and told their arrests were illegal. Though not charged with any crime, none can return to Italy for five years. But they were free.

Although British consular staff met them from prison and escorted them to the airport, they were made to pay for their flights home. Their possessions had been seized, including in some cases, passports and credit cards and they had only the clothes they stood in or gifts from Italian well-wishers.

Despite the avowed commitment of Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, to push the Italian authorities for a full explanation of the events of last week, as we go to press no one from the Foreign Office or the British police has contacted the Genoa Four for statements. However, their interviews with The Observer will form the basis of a file that we will pass to the Foreign Office.  

The police were spoiling for a fight. On the Friday morning, before a missile had been thrown, Andy Hay, a British protester, saw a police vehicle pass his part of a peaceful march. An officer leaned out and made his hand into the shape of a gun. 'Police were ready for a rumble,' Hay said.

Preparations for violence had been taking shape for months. By the time the mass of protesters arrived on Thursday, Genoa was already a city under siege. It hack been divided into a 'yellow zone' and an inner 'red zone' ringing the G8 meeting. Police would seek to keep protesters out of both, falling back to the massive fortifications of the red zone if the yellow zone was over-run.

At a cost of £78 million, more than 20,000 police, army and navy personnel were on alert. Steel fencing had been erected at the 240 entrances to the red zone. The shooting of three protesters in Sweden the previous month had also upped the ante. But if the defences were medieval in aspect, so was the invading army trying to breach them. By Friday morning, tens of thousands had flocked to the city, ranging from unionists to anarchists, from grandmothers to teenagers.

No one knows for sure exactly where it began. But around noon, as thousands of protesters thronged the streets dancing, waving banners and singing, Black Block anarchists clashed with the police to the north of the red zone. For a few minutes, scores of protesters clad in black and wearing gas masks, trashed a branch of the Credito Italiano bank. The police response was immediate, brutal and widespread.

Alfred Scott, 25, a protester from London, was marching east of the red zone when he saw smoke to the north. Then a helicopter hovered overhead. Without a single riot policeman in sight, objects began to fall, trailing plumes of billowing white as they dropped. They were being bombed with tear gas.

'Half of us had no protection. It just turned into mayhem,' he said. The riot police quickly followed. In scenes repeated across the city, they charged into the protesters, firing volleys of gas and lashing out with batons. Protesters responded with bricks, poles and cobblestones.

The battle had begun. It engulfed the city centre.

The fighting was fiercest around Brignole Station, to the east of the Ducal Palace where the G8 leaders were talking. Warning shots were fired into the air as protesters broke into a nearby post office. Just hours later, the shots were for real. Near the Piazza Alimonda, Carlo Giuliani ran forward, a fire extinguisher raised in his hands, to attack a police Land Rover surrounded by protesters. Inside, Mario Placanica, 20, a Sicilian conscript, aimed his pistol and fired. Giuliani fell, mortally wounded. Panicking, the driver reversed the Land Rover over his body. Protesters rushed forward to help but rounds of tear gas sent them fleeing. Via internet and news wires the word was around the world in minutes. The stakes of global protest had been raised. The protesters of Genoa had a martyr.

That night, as an uneasy calm descended, the mood was of disbelief. It was also of suspicion. Reports circulated of agents provocateur who had started the violence, of Black Block activists being dropped off by police vehicles, of right-wingers from Italy or elsewhere infiltrating their ranks. To stem the tide, the Genoa Social Forum; an umbrella group of 700 organisations, called for a peaceful march on Saturday morning. The violence had to stop, it said. But even as the flowers began to build up over the bloody spot where Giuliani died, thousands more people were arriving in the city. 

On Saturday, the sun rose over Genoa in a clear sky. By mid-morning an estimated 100,000 people were on the streets. They converged on the red zone. Battalions of police were waiting for them. At first the marchers, many chanting 'murderers' and 'assassins' obeyed instructions to make a diversion. But not all. Several thousand refused to move. Again, the response was instant. Despite the killing of the previous day, the police reacted even more violently. Scores of protesters said tear gas rounds were fired directly at them. Beatings were random and vicious. Journalists, passers-by, protesters, whether peaceful or violent, were all seen as legitimate targets by a police force gone mad.  'Anyone who got isolated by themselves was in trouble. It was a nightmare,' said Sue, a teacher from north London who had arrived that morning.

The yellow zone was quickly over-run, but the red zone was held. The only breach was tear gas grenades thrown back over the wire. Inside all was still. As the violence raged, the G8 participants and their delegations met untroubled, choosing their snacks from 170 types of cheese, 54 of bread and a cellar of 7,000 bottles of wine:

Outside, in the smoke and violence the running battles had ended by early evening. They left a scene of devastation. Along the Corso Torino, the main route of the protest, rubble and burnt out cars marked the skirmishes.

The summit quickly ended. An anti-Aids deal for Africa had been agreed but no one was listening. It seemed time to go home. Yet, as many battered and bruised protesters prepared to leave the order was given to raid the GSF building. After two days of the worst rioting in Western Europe for decades, the police needed the final blow. 

Anarchists may well be suckers for a provocation, and weak-minded communism-illiterate elements (like the Alliance 'democratic socialism' supporters) will always provide a permanent conduit for CIA disinformation and black propaganda. 

But the capitalist state's brutality will still rule undiminished, with or without such 'help', and ideological confusion. Routing the anti-Marxism and anti-communism of the Weekly Worker is going to be of far greater importance to building a strong revolutionary-movement than fingering anarchists will be; and it is precisely a brilliant grasp of Leninism which will give the socialist revolution the biggest possible protection against the rearguard-action brutality and terror of the besieged capitalist state. It is, for example, the outrageous failure of the fake-'left' in Britain to have the Marxist-Leninist understanding (to see the Irish national-liberation struggle led by Sinn Féin and the IRA as a massive REVOLUTIONARY blow against imperialism, despite the nationalist limitations of the immediate goal of a green capitalist state) that has made it harder for the anti-British political offensive by Adams & Co to win more support in Britain to weaken the brutal semi-official 'loyalist' backlash. Wider Leninist understanding and international anti-imperialist solidarity would in this case have lessened the total amount of police-state violence and terror being suffered by the Irish revolution in these last days of the dying 'Northern Ireland' monstrous historical obscenity. 

Far from any such Leninist understanding, these anti-communist CPGB wretches actually encourage this 'loyalist' colonial-fascist intransigence for all they are worth, thus increasing the amount of mindless semi-official violence and mayhem, by encouraging the orange backwoodsmen to agitate for a new Partition hell-hole, but this time bayoneted in place over only three of Ulster's nine counties, instead of over the greedy six counties that the genocidally-vicious land-grabbing British colonist mentality had seized control of at bayonet point at the first barbaric Partition of Ireland in 1921. With fewer Irish to persecute or boot out, the CP of 'Great Britain' fervently hope that a truncated monstrous sectarian police state run by the RUC killers and Mad-Dog Adair will quietly cease to violently trouble anyone too much any more. This garbage even makes the anti-revolutionary class-collaborating Revisionist gibberish of Stalinism in its worst mistaken moments look sound by comparison. Under its 'new' management, the CPGB title has gone from the frying pan of Gorbachevian imbecility into the fire of raving Weekly Worker lunacy and finking. 

Self-righteous posturing is becoming a mass epidemic throughout the petty-bourgeoisie on all subjects as the relentlessly approaching imperialist crisis drives up frustrations everywhere and a thirst for 'solutions'. The advice to 'forget solutions this side of the world socialist revolution that will sweep away this corrupt and dying capitalist system' is not something the middle class can grasp or tolerate.

The self-righteousness, - and the nonsense, - has exploded in all directions over Brass Eye. And there is an interesting link to the fear of anarchism. Beyond Channel 4's crude commercially-driven 'satire', the squawking New Labour feminists & Co are afraid that all 'restraint' and 'good taste' is about to disappear into total anarchy. That is why they don’t need to see the programme to nevertheless threaten open media censorship (as opposed to the blanket anti-communist political censorship which has unofficially regulated all bourgeois media output in Britain and the West for the last 80 years).

But ALL the fears about 'anarchy' are totally academic because it is already inevitably beginning to swamp all 'restraint', 'good taste', and 'reason' everywhere, on all life issues, large and small. The furore over whether it is 'good' to break taboos hushing things up, or 'bad' to allow just any views to be aired on certain subjects, are two sides of the same middle-class 'solutions' delusion. It is the whole capitalist-society way of life itself which is falling apart. Total censorship? It would probably do imperialism more harm than good. Total licence for an 'anything goes' society? It is halfway there already. More bitterly-controversial debate all round? Inevitable whether it is wanted or not. More all-round nastiness as the country goes to the dogs? It is already irrevocably under way. Is all this a good thing or a bad thing? Forget worrying about it, it is going to happen anyway. Just start concentrating on Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science, the only possible next stage for civilisation.

As to where the anti-globalisation protesting can develop next, clearly a working-class party movement of mass Marxist-revolutionary political consciousness will become most workers obvious dream eventually, but the key to the success of this struggle will always be for the agitation for such a development to have the correct perspectives on the next phase of the international anti-imperialist revolution.  

The CPGB and the Socialist Alliance are likely to do even worse than their dismal 'election' results by pushing such 'challenges' as this week’s WW call: 

"A united congress of trade unions, European industrial unions, and a Socialist Alliance of the European Union palpably meet the needs of the hour". 

Which is all very touchy-feely, but also mindless bollocks. A revolutionary consciousness, deliberately counter to the especially traditionally entrenched class-collaborative reformist Labourist delusions of the TUC, must be the pre-eminent requirement, an ideological historic struggle which can and should certainly be taken into every trade-unionist or comparable reformist milieu wherever possible, but surely which must be envisaged as only becoming possible if flourishing independently of all the existing class-collaborative 'democracy'-lumber of the thoroughly imperialism-corrupted British labour movement, and as needing to remain a concretely-embodied independent entity once established. A revolutionary party, revolutionary workers councils, and revolutionary trade unions would seem to be a more likely way forward than a naff conglomerate-gathering of existing pro-EU class-collaborative trade-unionism and existing hopelessly-reformist Socialist Alliances. This WW call is the perspective of the lost and the doomed.

But when, where, and how will revolutionism return???

Well, certainly not through the 'socialist' appeal of such peashooters as Weekly Worker, or even Socialist Worker, or even 'Socialist Appeal' (or even the EPS Review, come to that). As the EPSR has consistently explained, it is paradoxically only the massive brainwashing power of the capitalist press and media which will nevertheless begin to convince workers, in spite of itself, that the imperialist international economic and political-domination system is plunging ever-deeper into irrevocable crisis-disaster of unspeakable brutality and destruction of all human aspirations, and that only a complete revolutionary change to how modern society is organised will be able to drag civilisation out of the murderous mire.

The fascist onslaught by the "legally constituted law-abiding police service of the constitutionally elected government of the Italian democracy" as Blair would put it, - has just shown exactly how this inevitable process of enlightenment works - the worried capitalist press and media coverage being (because they have difficult paying customers to satisfy) part of the process of enlightenment too.

So the amount of 'silly and unnecessary anarchist provocation' (if it was really worthy to describe any of it at all in such treacherous terms) doubly didn't matter at all. Fascist police onslaughts are going to steadily escalate in every capitalist state on earth as the crisis relentlessly deepens, with or without 'anarchist provocations'; and the majority response of the public already is overwhelmingly in favour of sorting out the G8 summitteers, the Berlusconi regime, and the Italian police rather than sorting out the Black Bloc as the CPGB petty bourgeoisie would like to see happen.

And the key to Marxist-Leninist leadership of revived revolutionism will be the defeat of the ingrained anti-communist prejudices of the existing fake-"left" of the workers movement, - obviously a massively sizable job involving the review of the entire history of the workers states' brilliant achievements on earth so far, but one which could gather pace very quickly once the actual return to successful communist revolutionary movements throughout the Third World starts to expand quickly in the not too distant future, (with or without the help of the still-brooding Revisionist giant of the Chinese workers state).

As pro-imperialist reactionary regimes start to tumble again to communist revolution, and as American imperialism only makes itself more hated than ever in what will be its futile and clumsily barbaric efforts to halt the communist tide, - so will all the unanswered questions of the successful Western Cold War offensive against the workers states (sold the pass by Revisionist stupidity) force a reappraisal on everyone.

The 20th century of anti-communist brainwashing (which still has to run-on full blast throughout the world's bourgeois media in spite of 'communism' having been 'completely vanquished' more than 10 years ago with the success of the Yeltsin counter-revolution), will go down as the most astonishingly sick and most shamefully reactionary episode in all class society history.

And the entire fake-'left' is up to its opportunist neck in every degenerate slander that the Great Brain-Washing Epoch ever unleashed. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

TO REPUBLICANS, the scenes broadcast from Genoa that shocked the world last week were hauntingly familiar. Images at once recognisable and foreign rolled across the screen as demonstrators fought running battles with heavily armed police units. It could almost have been Ardoyne, Garvaghy, the Bogside or anywhere else in Ireland where the state let the police loose on peaceful protesters. And like many such clashes, it left hundreds injured and a family in mourning.

The unforgettable image of Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old demonstrator from Rome, lying in a pool of blood where he had been shot at point-blank range and run over by a police Land Rover, brought home to viewers just how far the Italian state was prepared to go to protect the G8 summit.

The hope of moderate groups like the Genoa Social Forum for peaceful direct action to be the tool of choice for protesters had been dashed. They had not taken into account an Italian police force psyched up for confrontation. Media reports in the week leading up to Genoa only served to raise tension. The announcement that the Italian Army was deploying SAM missile sites, presumably to take on the demonstrators armed with rocks and sticks, raised the feeling of impending violence to a new level.

But few of the demonstrators, many of them veterans of Gothenburg, Prague and Seattle, can have expected the brutality with which the Italian police force treated anyone who got in their way. Among the Irish protesters, possession of a Swiss army knife was enough to get one protester arrested, beaten and strip-searched.

Accounts of police brutality, accompanied in many cases by images, have been sped across the globe by independent non-corporate media groups.

The raid on the headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum was possibly the greatest indicator of the depths to which the Italian police had sunk. 

The Forum represented hundreds of groups organising for Genoa and had played a key role all week in attempting to defuse violent situations and keep marches calm. In the middle of the night the police descended on the Forum, clubbing people in their sleep, destroying media and computer equipment. Images the next day of blood splattered on the walls and pooled on the floor testified to the brutality of the Italian police in a way words could not.

There are also suggestions that the police may have been involved in provoking some of the incidents through the use of agents provocateurs. Groups of 'anarchists' were seen alighting from police vehicles before engaging in acts of destruction. Links between shadowy element of the Italian security forces and fascism have been uncovered in the past, none more famous than a bomb attack on a railway station in Bologna in the '70s, initially blamed on left-wing guerrillas and now linked to collusion between the Italian far right and Italian security forces.

But the anti-globalisation movement is itself in crisis. The debate on violence at the protests has begun anew following the death of Carlo Giuliani. There is a fear that the violence of the protests will discourage workers and official trade unions from joining the protests. The aim of the anti-globalisation movement has been to build a broad base from which to mobilise people but the street battles between police and a small minority of the protesters do nothing to help that strategy.

In the wake of Genoa the question facing the anti-globalisation movement, particularly in Ireland, is where does it go from here?

Should the movement concentrate on exposing the police as the real source of violence and provocation at these gatherings? Should the more moderate groups condemn those who get involved in clashes or simply make clear the differences between violent and non-violent protesters? Is it time for the movement to police itself in regard to violent protesters?

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

Dog-in-the-manger holocaust of 'loyalist' colonial-fascist triumphalism is cue for the retreating British imperialist establishment to finally clean up its poisonous residue in Occupied Ireland.

SINN Féin Assembly member Alex Maskey is calling on unionist leaders to act in the face of the ongoing sectarian campaign of attacks against nationalists.

"The increase in loyalist attacks on Catholics right across the North can only be described as a sectarian pogrom," he said.

"The silence of unionism and unionist leaders in the face of such a sustained pogrom is nothing short of appalling. Unionist leaders such as David Trimble need to use their undoubted influence to halt this sectarian pogrom." 

In the week after the 12th, sustained attacks by loyalist gangs saw nationalists in the Dundairn, Limestone and Whitewell areas of North Belfast as well as the Short Strand in the East of the city, endure some of the worst loyalist violence since 1969.

And while most commentators saw that violence as the high point of the loyalist onslaught, the reality proved to be different in the past seven days or so.  

An attack on the Ashton Community Centre on Friday 20 July saw UDA gunmen fire eight shots at two workers. Neither of the men were injured but as they made their escape into the centre the gun gang fired indiscriminately into the building, which houses a crêche and where a summer school for five-to-eight-year-old children was in progress. 

Then on Saturday 21 July, a group of loyalists, possibly as many as 14 men, purporting to be from the LVF, assaulted six security-guards in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. The gang described the Royal as a "fenian hospital" and told the security men they "would be dead within two weeks". 

While these incidents may represent the more serious threat posed by loyalists, the reality for dozens of Catholics throughout the Six Counties in the last week is that for no reason other than their religion, loyalists have attempted to kill them. 

Last Wednesday 18 July, in the Deerpark area of North Belfast, a bomb exploded outside the home of a Protestant family. Blaming loyalists for the attack, Sinn Féin Councillor Eoin O'Broin said it was designed to "frighten the nationalist community in a mixed area that has seen a lot of loyalist activity". 

On Thursday 19 July, two petrol bombs were launched across the 'peace wall' at Alliance Avenue in North Belfast. One exploded, causing minor damage to the home targeted... This was the second night of attacks on the area. 

Also on Thursday, a GAA hall in Attical near Kilkeel, County Down, was gutted in a fire set by loyalists. The fire occurred at a time of tension in the area and Sinn Féin councillor Martin Cunningham is warning nationalists to be vigilant after reports that hooded loyalists were running amok in Kilkeel. 

In the early hours of Thursday morning, in Colinbrook in Poleglass, West Belfast, over 20 cars had their tyres slashed as a loyalist gang went on the rampage. Sinn Féin councillor Veronica Willis blamed loyalists based in Seymour Hill, Dunmurry for the raid. 

On Friday 20 July a pipe bomb was hurled into the back of a Catholic home in Westland Gardens near the Westland Estate, a UDA stronghold in North Belfast, at 11 pm. The bomb detonated, although none of the occupants were injured. It was the second time in a week that the house had been singled out for attack. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, a bomb attached to the oil tank at the rear of the home exploded. Fortunately for those inside, the device failed to ignite the tank.

On Sunday 22 July on Cupar Street off the Falls Road, the house of a Catholic family of six was the target of loyalist petrol bombers. Two bombs were hurled at the house but fortunately they fell short, exploding harmlessly on waste ground. The area from Bombay Street to Cupar Street has been under constant from loyalists since the beginning of the year. 

In Coleraine, County Derry the same day, a pensioner picked up a pipe bomb from the doorstep of his daughter-in-law's home but left it down when he became wary of the object. The British Army later defused the device. It was the second time this year the home was targeted by bombers. 

In Coleraine on Monday 23 July, a hoax bomb was discovered on the doorstep of a Catholic woman's home at 1am by the postman. The incident happened in the predominantly loyalist Heights area of the town.  

In Newtownstewart, County Tyrone, three pipe bombs were thrown at St Eugene's Chapel in the small County Tyrone village on Sunday 22 July. Some damage was caused to the building. The town has been at the centre of controversy in recent weeks as nationalists objected to a series of loyalist band parades through mainly nationalist parts of the village.

In Ballycastle, County Antrim, two hoax pipe bombs were discovered on Monday morning, 23 July. The devices, attached to telephone poles where loyalists had attached loyalist flags, were both left in the Glenshesk Road area and in the mainly nationalist Altananam Estate the scene of a protest against an Orange 12th parade last week.

The same day, a bomb exploded outside the home of a Catholic family near Derfiaghy outside Lisburn. No one was injured in the attack on the Curran home. However, in the past two weeks loyalists have targeted the homes of other Catholic families in the general Lisburn area. 

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

THE PACKAGE OF PROPOSALS expected to be unveiled by the British and Dublin governments this week must stay within the bounds of the Good Friday Agreement if they are to be accepted by republicans, says Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly.

Kelly spoke to An Phoblacht following a meeting with Dublin Foreign Affairs Minister Brian Cowen and a delegation of residents from North Belfast to discuss ongoing sectarian attacks in the area. 

The three men and three women who made up the delegation, including Ardoyne Sinn Féin councillor Margaret McClenaghan, told Cowen that they were of "one mind" that the UDA was orchestrating nightly attacks on their area and that they were dissatisfied with the behaviour of the RUC. 

As they were meeting, a loyalist mob emerged from the Tigers Bay area of North Belfast and attacked homes on the nationalist Limestone Road. 

Kelly said that the new beginning to policing envisaged by the Good Friday Agreement was something that residents in the North Belfast area were "crying out for". He said the policing issue would require amending legislation and that the British government must return to the 'Patten Commission report. 

"We need to see amending legislation. If it does not stay within the bounds of the Good Friday Agreement then it will not be acceptable. I've no great confidence in the ability of the British government to deliver. We'll wait and see."