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 (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]  www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk               
No 1134 Apr 30 2002                                                                                                                                            25p                                                                                                                                           
Northwest seminar Sat June 29. Pse collect receipts.

Street crime, racism, and 'fascist' electorates are the products of the capitalist class system, and their growth will only be encouraged by the promises of 'left' opportunists to 'solve' these problems by 'democratic reforms'. It is the REAL fascism of Western imperialism's counter-revolutionary colonial rampaging all round the world since 1945, based on the really 'evil axis' of anti-communism, which provides the incurable background to the irresistible triumph of crime, corruption, lies and bullying hypocrisy now rampant throughout 'free world' culture. Trying to put the 'blame' for the electoral support for Le Pen's bogus 'anti-establishment' posturing onto the workers who vote for him is as stupid and reactionary as trying to 'condemn' the turn to terrorist violence by the Middle East in despair at unending Western-imperialist tyranny. Refusing to debate the 'race' issues exploited by philistine chauvinism will only drive more questioning about asylum-seeking and immigration into the arms of the BNP. Refusing to condemn Zionist racism and religious fanaticism will only breed anti-semitism.

The way that 'free world' and fake-'left' hypocrisy is meeting the problem of Le Pen's fascist ignorance is only going to increase support for racist backwardness in the long run.

And all the responses to "out-of-control teenage crime" following the farce of the Damilola Taylor murder trial, amount to the same useless squawking.

As many of bourgeois ideology's own 'reformist' reports themselves admit, any emerging patterns of intolerant, racist, or criminal behaviour in society depend on the examples set by existing society for young people to look up to.

But the great ideological conspiracy is to then look no further than parents or families, or 'peer-group pressure' at the most.

Not even the hypocrisy and corruption of politics, outrageous commercial ripoffs and nepotism, or major City and financial frauds and crimes, which do occasionally get reported on or come before the courts, are routinely included in the 'bad examples' being set before young minds.

And while 'violence' on television is sometimes mentioned as a target for 'reform', the sickness of capitalist 'culture' and commercialism as a whole, - the selfishness, self-centredness, greed, exploitation, and violence of ALL of it, plus the utterly philistine trivia of 90% of it, - is never addressed.

The very principles of the 'free world' would never allow it.

But the greatest joke of all is how the very perspectives and conduct of 'Western policy' in the world get ignored, which are more murderously rapacious, criminal, and exploitative than anything else forming the general cultural and educational background to which society is growing up.

And what a society! The major cities in England are now going to have to have police units operating permanently inside schools in the hope of rescuing the concept of "law and order" before it disintegrates completely, - stopping truancy, and street-crime, and extortion, and bullying violence, etc, etc, before it starts.

In practice, of course, some parents might at least feel slightly relieved or reassured about this, purely from a safety-of-their-children point of view.

But how long before people start asking just what sort of system of life is this which now needs the police permanently in school to try to give parents, teachers, and children a feeling of security FROM OTHER CHILDREN; and in a situation which can only be seen as getting steadily WORSE, relentlessly so???

And even more pointedly, how long before people start asking if the lies, tyranny, and criminal violence which the West imposes on the whole world, has a negative influence on teenage bullying and crime on the streets and in school?? How does the West's 'war on terrorism' and 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' posturing square up with the following admissions in the capitalist press itself of violent lawlessness either tolerated, or condoned, or actually carried out by the 'leaders of the free world'???:

The United States had been considering a coup to overthrow the elected Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, since last June, a former US intelligence officer claimed yesterday. It is also alleged that the US navy aided the abortive coup which took place in Venezuela on April 11 with intelligence from its vessels in the Caribbean. Evidence is also emerging of US financial backing for key participants in the coup.

Both sides in Venezuela have blamed the other for the violence surrounding the coup.

Wayne Madsen, a former intelligence officer with the US navy, told the Guardian yesterday that American military attachés had been in touch with members of the Venezuelan military to examine the possibility of a coup.

"I first heard of Lieutenant Colonel James Rogers [the assistant military attaché now based at the US embassy in Caracas] going down there last June to set the ground," Mr. Madsen, an intelligence analyst, said yesterday. "Some of our counter-narcotics agents were also involved."

He said that the navy was in the area for operations unconnected to the coup, but that he understood they had assisted with signals intelligence as the coup was played out.

Mr. Madsen also said that the navy helped with communications jamming support to the Venezuelan military, focusing on communications to and from the diplomatic missions in Caracas belonging to Cuba, Libya, Iran and Iraq - the four countries which had expressed support for Mr. Chávez.

Navy vessels on a training exercise in the area were supposedly put on stand-by in case evacuation of US citizens in Venezuela was required.

In Caracas, a congressman has accused the US ambassador to Venezuela, Charles Shapiro, and two US embassy military attachés, of involvement in the coup.

Roger Rondon claimed that the military officers, whom he named as (James) Rogers and (Ronald) MacCammon, had been at the Fuerte Tiuna military headquarters with the coup leaders during the night of April 11/12. And referring to Mr Shapiro, Mr Rondon said: "We saw him leaving Miraflores palace, all smiles and embraces, with the dictator Pedro Carmona Estanga [who was installed by the military for a day]... [His] satisfaction was obvious. Shapiro's participation in the coup d'etat in Venezuela is evident."

Mr Rondon has also claimed that two foreign gunmen, one, American and the other Salvadorean, were detained by security police during the anti-Chávez protest on April 11 in which around 19 people were killed, many by unidentified snipers firing from rooftops.

"They haven't appeared anywhere. We presume these two gentlemen were given some land of safe-conduct and could have left the country," he said.

In the past year, the US has channelled hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to American and Venezuelan groups opposed to Mr Chávez, including the labour group whose protests sparked the coup. The funds were provided by the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit agency created by the US Congress.

The overthrow of the radical Hugo Chávez in a military coup on April 11 followed by Chávez's return to power within 48 hours was spectacular even by Latin American standards.

President Bush said after Chávez's return that he hoped he had "learned the lesson"; but the main lessons need to be learned further north in Washington itself. The precise part played by the US in the coup remains unclear. What is known is that in January Mr Bush appointed, against the advice of the senate foreign relations committee, a man with a shabby record of covert meddling in Latin American politics: Otto Reich. Reich, a CubanAmerican who was once the US ambassador to Venezuela, is now the assistant secretary at the state department for the western hemisphere and as such, calls the shots for the US - almost literally - in Latin America.

In the Pentagon, the man with responsibility for Latin America is Rogelio Pardo Maurer, who was the aide to the head of the Contras when they were waging their US-backed war against the elected leftwing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Two of the Venezuelan military who supported the coup, General Efrain Vasquez and General Eddie Ramirez Poveda, are graduates of the US Army School of the Americas in Georgia, where many members of the Latin American military leave been trained in how to deal with troublesome lefties.

The tycoon who led the media onslaught that preceded the coup and whose television station announced it, CubanAmerican Gustavo Cisneros, is an old fishing pal of Bush senior.

While the US may not have been involved in the final timetable for the coup, it knew that one was imminent and clearly gave it a green light. While the world's attention was on the Middle East, the coup was greeted with speedy acceptance by the White House. One wonders if a Zapatista force had overthrown the elected Mexican President Fox whether Mr Bush would have responded by saying that he hoped Mr Fox had "learned his lesson".

The true crime of Jenin camp is this act of physical erasure. It is covered by Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention in its prohibition on 'the extensive destruction or unlawful appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity committed either unlawfully or wantonly.'

Article 147 mentions other crimes that may be applicable to Jenin: the alleged taking of hostages for human shields by the Israelis; the same army's refusal of access for humanitarian and emergency medical assistance and deliberate targetting of civilians by snipers. But it is the sheer scale of the destruction that Israel will most likely have to answer for.  

I am reminded of this prohibition on 'wanton destruction' of civilian homes by Miranda Sissons, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.

'Whether or not there appears to have been any mass killing here,' says Sissons, who appears inclined to be cautious of this claim until better evidence is provided, 'there have been very serious violations of the rules of war that need to be investigated'.

'Those key issues are the disproportionate use of force; the excessive use of force and the extensive destruction of property. There has been a total lack of respect for the rights of civilians. And those breaches are still continuing. Israel is still blocking the facilitation of humanitarian access and continuing to shoot on civilians here.'

Some describe one group of soldiers calling to them to evacuate their homes before destruction then being threatened with being shot by other soldiers who insisted that a curfew was still in force. What they describe is a panic that seems to have taken hold of the Israeli army in Jenin camp, and in its panic it laid the camp to waste.

The Jenin refugee camp, whose physical erasure has come to symbolise the devastation and death inflicted by the Israeli army in the past four weeks, lies at the northern extremity of the territory. While the world has been preoccupied with the camp, the stories beginning to unfold from the Palestinian cities, towns, refugee camps and villages that lie between Jenin and Dura show that the Israeli army has been engaged in systematic abuse throughout the West Bank.

"Jenin is not so different from any of the other attacks," said Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The focus of the international community has been on events in Jenin, but equally serious violations took place in Ramallah, particularly, and in Nablus."

The most grievous abuses break down into four categories: the killing of Palestinian civilians, the denial of medical care, the wanton destruction of civilian property, and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields for house-to-house searches.

Human rights organisations have not even begun to investigate the raids on the smaller West Bank towns and villages such as Dura. The scale of the offensive, the biggest since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, is too forbidding, as is its use of a military curfew to deny international organisations access.

The first human rights field worker, from the Israeli group B'Tselem, reached Dura on Thursday, when the village had, been under curfew for 17 days.

Arif Said Ahmed's life ended at 5.05am on April 9 when two Israeli helicopter gunships soared over the hillside, firing a rocket at him and his cousin Naif as they walked home from morning prayers.

The helicopters returned, firing their machine guns for several terrifying minutes as Arif's wife, Samira, stumbled out to their bodies with her infant daughter. Mother and daughter were saved from serious injury by her brother Farooq, who flung himself over them.

A bullet pierced his side and fragments ripped his leg.

That was the beginning of the invasion of Dura, a village south-west of Hebron which marks the southernmost extent of the Israeli army's offensive in the West Bank.

The first civilian deaths B'Tselem recorded were those of Arif Said Ahmed, 34; a teacher and the acting imam of the local mosque, and Naif Said Ahmed, 33, who was his cousin and brother-in-law. After dawn prayers they had paused outside the mosque to smoke a cigarette when the rocket killed them.

Their bodies were not removed for 36 hours. Despite his serious injuries, Farooq Said Ahmed was rounded up with the other Palestinian men of the village, propped up by two other men. One asked the soldiers for a doctor.

"The soldier told him in Arabic: "Whoever is dead is dead, and whoever is injured can wait," he said.

The army allowed an ambulance through 10 hours later, by which time his jeans were so soaked in his own blood that he considered wringing them out.

It took three hours to reach the hospital, he said. Twice soldiers shot at the ambulance, and twice they stopped it, unloading him on his stretcher, prodding his injured leg until he yelled in pain, and flipping him over on his face to check for weapons on both occasions.

Nothing that happened in Dura is extraordinary in the context of the past month.

In Arrabah, south-west of Jenin, a pair of helicopter gunships fired on Mohammed Nabil Hardan and his wives, Amal and Jamila, killing all three as they walked home from their fields. Jamila was five months pregnant.

A few minutes later they fired a rocket at the barn where Mohammed's father, Nafeh Abed Hardan, 67, was sleeping, wounding him in the hand and the foot. The foot may have to be amputated.

"I swear I don't know why," he said. "There was no reason for them to kill my son and his wives, and if I knew they were going to fire on the barn, I certainly would not have slept there.'

During the siege of the Nablus casbah, doctors used a mosque as a mortuary and hospital. It was strewn with the stained mattresses of the wounded who bled their lives away. Two dozen corpses lay there for six days, stacked up like firewood, before a chaotic evacuation on April 8.

But the fighting devastated much of the West Bank. In the Nablus casbah several historic buildings with 2ft-thick stone walls, including a soap factory, were reduced to mounds of rubble.

In the Balata refugee camp, homes were destroyed as punishment. The army blew up four houses near the entrance of the camp. One belonged to the Badawi family, whose two sons were commanders in a Palestinian militant group.

Ramallah, the seat of Yasser Arafat's administration, was another destruction zone.

This was where the army established its pattern of compelling male civilians to walk in front of soldiers when they were hunting the Palestinian militants and police.

On March 30, Israeli soldiers exchanged fire with more than 20 Palestinian policemen and threw grenades into their hideout in a third-floor flat in a town centre building.

Moments later Nader Mansi, 22, an architecture student, was ordered to enter the building and approach the flat to see if the policemen would surrender.

In Jenin refugee camp the following Friday, Ali Mustafa Abu Siria, 43, an Arabic teacher, was marched from his flat in handcuffs and at gunpoint and forced to walk ahead of troops and army sniffer dogs seeking gunmen.

He went to 11 houses before he was shot in the kneecap. "As soon as I knocked on the door, a bullet was fired at me," he said.

Capt Dallal emphatically rejected the term "human shield"; though he admitted that Palestinian civilians were used as "guides".

Nor is the fascist-military terrorism attempt to deprive the Venezuelan people of their 'democratically elected' government, (for what it is worth) by any means the full extent of the American imperialist ruling class's criminal tyranny: - The 'free world leadership' (as honoured by Blair and throughout the West) has for months wagged its approval like a dog with two tails at Musharraf, the military dictator of Pakistan whose stealing of a whole country at gunpoint is now accepted with a smile and a shrug by the 'free world' because of his help in the war on 'terrorists' in Afghanistan (whose only crime has been to oppose the West's manipulation of the whole Middle East in its own interests, using dictatorships like the Saudis, Musharraf, etc, whenever it suits the US, as in Venezuela, and in Chile before that, despite the pretence of 'democratic' world rule).

And how does the Zionist genocidal persecution of the Palestinian people out of their own land (especially when they fight back) square with the West's Nazi-blitzkrieg destruction of Serbia in 1999 (for allegedly 'persecuting' inside Serbia the minority Albanian population), - going so far as to rip out Serbia's Kosovo province to hand it over to the KLA terrorist-separatists?

The Palestinians are fighting back INSIDE their own country, trying to chase out the colonising Zionist invaders, fighting with whatever they can against the overwhelming might of the Zionist-imperialist colonial forces, first murderously sent in there by US-run "United Nations democracy" in 1948. But the Palestinians are dubbed 'terrorists' and the 'free world' even refuses to insist on a UN inspection of the massacres against them in Jenin and elsewhere.

But no sooner had the Albanian 'exodus' stunt been staged after the bogus 'Reçak massacre' (30 bodies artificially piled up in a village, all casualties of a lengthy gun battle between separatist KLA forces and the Serbian state authorities) than the whole of Serbia was destroyed by NATO-blitzkrieg air war.

And now the proof is emerging that the armed anti-Yugoslavia separatists were not even the genuine article, but were armed and put up to it by the West, exactly as the EPSR explained at the time:

Now we have the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims - some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in "the war against terrorism". Pentagon operations in Bosnia have delivered their own "blowback".

The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, released last week, contains one of the most sensational reports on western intelligence ever published. Officials have been staggered by its findings and the Dutch government has resigned. One of its many volumes is devoted to clandestine activities during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. For five years, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University has had unrestricted access to Dutch intelligence files and has stalked the corridors of secret service headquarters in western capitals, as well as in Bosnia, asking questions.

His findings are set out in Intelligence and the war in Bosnia, 1992-1995. It includes remarkable material on covert operations, signals interception, human agents and double-crossing by dozens of agencies in one of dirtiest wars of the new world disorder.

In the 1980s Washington's secret services had assisted Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. Then, in 1990, the US fought him in the Gulf. In both Afghanistan and the Gulf, the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an IranContra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Wiebes reveals that the British intelligence services obtained documents early on in the Bosnian war proving that Iran was making direct deliveries.

Arms purchased by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia made their way by night from the Middle East. Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft. The report stresses that the US was "very closely involved" in the airlift. Mojahedin fighters were also flown in, but they were reserved as shock troops for especially hazardous operations.

Light weapons are the familiar currency of secret services seeking to influence such conflicts. The volume of weapons flown into Croatia was enormous, partly because of a steep Croatian "transit tax": Croatian forces creamed off between 20% and 50% of the arms. The report stresses that this entire trade was clearly illicit. The Croats themselves also obtained massive quantities of illegal weapons from Germany, Belgium and, Argentina - again in contravention of the UN arms embargo. The German secret services were fully aware of the trade.

Rather than the CIA, the Pentagon's own secret service was the hidden force behind these operations. The UN protection force, UNPROFOR, was dependent on its troop-contributing nations for intelligence, and above all on the sophisticated monitoring capabilities of the US to police the arms embargo. This gave the Pentagon the ability to manipulate the embargo at will: ensuring that American Awacs aircraft covered crucial areas and were able to turn a blind eye to the frequent night-time comings and goings at Tuzla.

Weapons flown in during the spring of 1995 were to turn up only a fortnight later in the besieged and demilitarised enclave at Srebrenica. When these shipments were noticed, Americans pressured UNPROFOR to rewrite reports, and when Norwegian officials protested about the flights, they were reportedly threatened into silence.

Both the CIA and British SIS had a more sophisticated perspective on the conflict than the Pentagon, insisting that no side had clean hands and arguing for caution. James Woolsey, director of the CIA until May 1995, had increasingly found himself out of step with the Clinton White House over his reluctance to develop close relations with the Islamists. The sentiments were reciprocated. In the spring of 1995, when the CIA sent its first head of station to Sarajevo to liaise with Bosnia's security authorities, the Bosnians tipped off Iranian intelligence. The CIA learned that the Iranians had targeted him for liquidation and quickly withdrew him.

Iranian and Afghan veterans' training camps had also been identified in Bosnia. Later, in the Dayton Accords of November 1995, the stipulation appeared that all foreign forces be withdrawn. This was a deliberate attempt to cleanse Bosnia of Iranian run training camps. The CIA's main opponents in Bosnia were now the mojahedin fighters and their Iranian trainers - whom the Pentagon had been helping to supply months earlier.

Meanwhile, the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs. Mossad was especially active and concluded a deal with the Bosnian Serbs at Pale involving a substantial supply of artillery shells and mortar bombs. In return they secured safe passage for the Jewish population out of the besieged town of Sarajevo. Subsequently, the remaining population was perplexed to find that unexploded mortar bombs landing in Sarajevo sometimes had Hebrew markings.

The broader lessons of the intelligence report on Srebrenica are clear. Those who were able to deploy intelligence power, including the Americans and their enemies, the Bosnian Serbs, were both able to get their way. Conversely, the UN and the Dutch government were "deprived of the means and capacity for obtaining intelligence" for the Srebrenica deployment, helping to explain why they blundered in, and contributed to the terrible events there.

And having disrupted UN peacekeeping and criminally broken the arms embargo to keep their anti-Serb terrorist provocation going, the American imperialist ruling class now wants the rest of the world to do its dirty work in Afghanistan, dying in policing battles to try to curb the very 'Islamic terrorist' forces which Washington encouraged, armed, and unleashed in the first place, - exactly as this capitalist press reports notes the USA had to do with Saddam Hussein, another former creature of American anti-socialist foreign policy.

But the West's crimes and interference provocations, driving the whole world towards ever-increasing warmongering chaos, do not stop there.

The brutality of monopoly-imperialist economic tyranny is utterly limitless and without conscience, exploiting and dominating the whole planet for the West's own ends, but then forcing the Third World and the weaker countries to also bear all the burdens of economic collapse when this anarchic system of 'free market' monopoly domination runs into one of its periodic, unavoidable, and insoluble 'over-production' crises when too much profit-seeking credit-created finance capital piles up in any particular industry or market to allow any more profits to be made by anyone for as long as the 'glut' or 'slump' lasts.

The capitalist press reports on this tyranny quite openly:

The European Union and the United States are robbing the world's poor of billions of dollars each year in export earnings by preaching free trade while protecting their own markets, development campaigners claim today.

Analysing western approaches to trade in a report, Rigged Rules and Double Standards, Oxfam names the EU as the worst offender followed closely by the US.

"Governments of rich countries constantly stress their commitment to poverty reduction," says Kevin Watkins, the report's author. "Yet the same governments use their trade policy to conduct what amounts to robbery against the world's poor. Rich countries are fierce advocates of liberalisation in developing countries, while retaining high trade barriers against exports from the same countries.'

While the anti-globalisation movement has identified trade as a leading cause of the widening global inequality, Oxfam says that trading rules are the problem, not trade itself.

Oxfam ranks Europe first according to an index which measures protectionism by the world's biggest trading powers, followed by the US, Canada and Japan. They impose the highest trade barriers against the industries of most importance to poor countries: agriculture and textiles. Oxfam estimates that high tariffs and subsidies cost poor countries $100bn (£70bn) a year - twice as much as they receive in aid.

The EU and the US spend billions of dollars each year subsidising their farmers and protecting them from more efficient producers in the developing world. The surplus cheap produce is then exported to developing countries, wiping out local farmers' livelihoods.

Oxfam estimates that they export their farm crops at prices more than a third lower than the cost of production.

"These subsidised exports from-rich countries are driving down prices for exports from developing countries, and devastating the prospects for smallholder agriculture," the report says. "Some of the world's poorest countries are competing against its richest treasuries."

By posing as free traders while protecting their own industries, rich countries are forcing poor countries to open their markets to western goods, using their control over the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Poor countries tries which borrow from the IMF and the bank are forced to cut subsidies and tariff barriers as a condition of receiving aid.

"Poor countries have been opening their economies much more rapidly than rich countries," Oxfam says. "Average import tariffs have been halved in subSaharan Africa. and south Asia, and cut by two thirds in Latin America, and east Asia."

In many cases, it says, rapid liberalisation has harmed poor countries.

It is good to kill a country from time to time, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire might have said. That, at least, seems to be the message the international community is trying to send to debt burdened countries in its handling of the crisis in Argentina.

The seven leading industrialised countries have announced an end to the increasingly large international bailouts needed to rescue countries which have got into difficulties with their creditors. In the words of one senior Group of Seven official,  International Monetary Fund bailouts had become "a welfare system for Wall Street" with the money flowing straight from the Fund's coffers into the waiting hands of western bankers.

At their meeting in Washington last weekend, the G7 countries agreed to limits on future IMF loans, and to ram home that message, they took a tough line with Argentina's finance minister, Jorge Lenicov, who attended the gathering to plead for help for his imploding country He went home empty handed, and two days later resigned.

The G7 is worried that IMF-bailouts encourage reckless lending to developing countries by the private sector because the banks know that in the end, the Fund will step in to rescue any country which gets into financial difficulties. As one commentator observed several years ago, " the costs of inaction - a severe economic contraction, an extended interruption to capital market access, and a lengthy and difficult restructuring  -  are too painful for the official community to bear".

That, at least, used to be the assumption. Now the G7 is trying to prove that it is tough enough to stand aside and watch a country suffer and unfortunately for Argentina, it has become the guinea pig.

Limiting big bailouts is a necessary reform, but there is as yet no alternative system in. place for dealing with sovereign bankruptcies.

As some observers noted, the G7 has left itself an enormous escape clause. Future IMF lending is to be limited except "when circumstances justify an exception"

You could call this the Turkey exemption if you were a cynic. Turkey received the largest handout last year from the IMF of any country since. the Asian crisis.

Defenders of the package would no doubt argue that the country has stuck to the IMF's tough conditions more successfully than Argentina, at considerable economic cost. Cynics might note that the country is an EU accession candidate with an overwhelmingly Muslim population, and an important ally in America's war on terror.

The moral of the story seems to be, no bailouts except for countries which are strategically or economically important. Poor old Argentina is neither.

Worse than that, the Argentines will also find that they will have a CIA military fascist coup imposed upon them should they try to move towards a radical planned socialist direction to get out of their plight, as Chile suffered in 1973 (unleashing 20 years of Pinochet concentration camp terror) and Venezuela nearly got two weeks ago.

The indirect influence of all this on anti-immigrant prejudiced voters in France, and anti-society teenage thugs in Peckham is inescapable. If the great 'leaders of the free world' are all total liars and hypocrites themselves, rapacious exploiters, and no better than the criminal-fascist thugs they regularly provoke to do their dirty work for them, - then how and why are disenchanted young people at the bottom of the social rat-race expected to have any higher morality???

As the foully philistine Le Pen sneered in his election campaigning, "the young immigrant offender told the court that he stole without conscience because the President of France was a far bigger crook and getting away with it".	

And the fact that Le Pen's colonial minded backwardness is even more viciously reactionary than Chirac's, and that Le Pen not only ignores the West's worst international crimes but is vigorously in favour of strengthening that imperialist domination, does not invalidate his electioneering point, which no one has yet answered.

And the capitalist press in Britain can only confirm that society under its present system of 'free world' leadership, is degenerating rapidly:

Operation Seale, involving 120 police officers, had been launched to solve the killing of 10-year-old Damilola, who had been sent from Africa to Britain in the hope of a better life, but bled to death in a filthy Peckham stairwell.

The teenager, with a scrawny build and pock-marked face, had been identified as a suspect. He was taken to Edmonton police station in north London in early December 2000, just 10 days after the murder.

With his lawyers and social workers present because of his age, a detective constable asked him about the killing. Without warning, the boy rushed him and planted a vicious head-butt in the officer's face. As the detective stumbled backwards, blood rushing from his smashed nose, the teenager folded his arms across his chest and sneered: 'Well? What you going to do about that?'

Working to values that matched the youth of two decades ago, detectives had, assumed that any kids they arrested would be so terrified, so intimidated by the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison, that they would soon name those responsible.

Tougher boys who put on a brave front would be offered the chance to move away from the North Peckham estate to a nicer area with greater prospects of a good life.

The approach was fundamentally wrong from the start. The police had underestimated the rise of a new breed of teenager: feral children, who run wild with no fear of the law, looking to score drugs and easy sex.

They meet mostly at night, roaming in packs around the estate's monolithic blocks of flats, many of which are being torn down and replaced with low-rise houses and flats. Identifying themselves by gang names such as the Ruff Riders, the Ghetto Boys, the Firehouse Crew and the Peckham Boys, they listen to gangster rap, and idolise the heroes of films like Scarface, Goodfellas and Menace II Society, adopting their values and some of their language. They talk about people getting jacked robbed or mugged - being blazed [shot] and how they want  'the Cris life', a reference to Cristal champagne, the ultimate in underworld chic.

Most of all, they adopt the same attitude to the police: they are the enemy, and the worst thing anyone could possibly do is cooperate with them.

That is why the detectives immediately found themselves up against an unbreakable wall of silence, as all the area's youths seemed to clam up and refuse to pass on any information, even though many of them clearly knew who killed Damilola.
 
The only person to break ranks during the investigation was a 19-year-old girl, known by the codename 'Bromley', - who claimed to have seen the murder take place. But during the trial at the Old Bailey, when videos of her police interviews were shown, the jury were shocked to see her.

Today Bromley is living under the Witness Protection Programme and seeking psychiatric help.

Walking around the streets of Peckham, however, there is no doubt how her actions are viewed by locals. Graffiti giving her name followed by the word 'betrays' appears on dozens of walls.

Examination of Bromley's school record shows she was every bit as violent and wily as the boys she accused of carrying out the murder. The parents of such children, most of whom come from broken homes, face an impossible battle to try to bring them into line.

'I tell my sons that they have to go to school and study hard so they can make something of themselves; but they just laugh in my face,' says Carl,  the manager of a Peckham clothing shop and one of the few fathers living on the estate where Damilola died.

'They say "why should we study? So we can end up like you? No thanks." There are kids on the estate of 12 and 13 who are going out stealing every day, and they are making more money than their parents earn. How are you supposed to convince people like that you know what's best? It's impossible.

'But it's not just about money, it's also about respect. No one wants to do well at school because you don't get any credibility for that. You don't get MCs in a club saying, "Let's all big it up for John who got top marks on his geography homework this week".'

'When the unruly youth of yesteryear went about smashing up phone boxes and stealing sweets from the local corner shop, none of them would have considered trying to make a career from such activity. Today, the muggers and street drug dealers are the richest kids on the estate, and are heroes to a new generation.

The trend has been accelerated by the fact that younger kids have become easy, worthwhile targets for criminals. Ten years ago a boy of 11 carried his dinner money and little else. Now, even on the poorest estates, he carries a mobile phone, portable CD player and perhaps a handheld gaming console, all of which can be readily converted into hard cash.

Being arrested or stopped by the police is less of a hazard, and more a rite of passage. The idea that mugging and violence are wrong doesn't occur to them.

'All the kids know that the law says you can't touch them.'

The father is not at home, and the teenager 'won't listen to me', she says. 'There's peer pressure too, and lots of bullying at his school. They all use drugs. He smokes weed, but there is always a lot of crack around, and that makes people more violent. They need more crack so they commit more crimes to get money.

Unemployment in Southwark, the borough covering Peckham, is running at twice the national average and with - many of its wards being among the most deprived areas in the country, a lot of youths believe they have few other options.  Darren, who is 20 and was brought up in Peckham, left school early and support himself entirely through drug dealing.

'If I 	go out to get a job I take home £150,  but I have to take a load of shit with that. So instead I do a bit of hustling, trying to make myself a bit of cash just so that I can get a house and a girl and be happy.

'People say I'm a criminal: they put me in with those people who rob and beat people,  but I'm not like that, I've got morals.  I'm the good guy, but life is fucked. The only time I feel good is when I buy new clothes or go to a party. Otherwise it's just grim.'

A bus driver who lived in Peckham for 10 years before moving to improve his quality of life experienced the new youth culture when he spent time in prison. 'The whole place was full of kids like them. A lot of them will do a spell inside, because they've got no ambition and they don't care. They just want to be on the streets with the wickedest car, the best clothes and the best trainers.   

LIKE MANY kids of his age, Damilola had been bullied by some of the older children in the weeks leading up to his death. Detectives working on Operation Seale were shocked to discover a miniature protection racket operating in which children as young as eight were forced to hand over money as the price of avoiding being beaten up.

The lure of the gangs is powerful that even those who are being picked on are unable to resist. A year ago, 16-year-old Joshua was kidnapped by a gang of his own friends. They held him prisoner for hours and tortured him by burning him with cigarette ends and cutting him with knives. Despite his ordeal he can still be seen hanging out regularly with the same gang. He was seen as weak, and now he is seen as one of them.

'It is the terrible normality of this sort of behaviour that is the most shocking. For this young man what happened to him at the hands of his friends was not unusual for him. They are still his friends because they are all he has,' said Camilla Batmanghelidjh of Kids' Company, a social charity working with Peckham's youth.

'They just don't care what happens to them any more. The law and adults mean nothing to them - they have never had positive experiences of either,' she said. 'They have shut down their capacity to feel. That makes them incredibly powerful.

'The gang culture has developed because these children don't feel they can trust adults. They turn to each other for support, and in Peckham the only currency they have is violence and anger.'

'Those who are weak are repeatedly victimised,' she said. 'They are socially lethal. They are just emotionally cold, and the only way to deal with them is to restore a sense of guilt by giving them a relationship with an adult that does not abuse them. They don't need swimming pools or libraries, just need good adult contact.'

Batmanghelidjh warned: 'Peckham is just the beginning. If the Government does not act this sort of culture will develop in all our inner cities.'

The children of north Peckham have come to learn they can get away with most things. Now murder has been added to their list.

But all the action to 'reform' things ever proposed, is worse than useless, only always continuing the selfsame 'free market' rat-race that has resulted in society's ultimate degeneration in the first place.

Even the 'nicest' or 'least imperialist' capitalist countries all show the same social decay because it is absolutely impossible to genuinely provide "equal opportunities for all" within a system of private-enterprise anarchy which can never even seriously curb for long its constant-tendency towards monopolisation, - with the rich ending up getting ever richer, and the poor ever poorer, relatively speaking (and absolutely speaking when the periodic catastrophes of slump and war are also taken into account which totally wreck all lives and aspirations every so often, and frequently so throughout the Third World).

Nothing better sums this up than the utter confusion in the responses to Le Pen and to Peckham lawlessness.

Asking 'what can we do against racism' or 'what can be done about vandalism' is the wrong question.

Why do people want to be fascist thugs in the first place, is the only worthwhile question.

And even more importantly, why do increasing numbers want to take the path of bullying hatred?????

Total alienation from existing capitalist society is the not-hard-to-find answer.

And every ludicrous proposal about policing, youth clubs, street lighting, school wardens, counselling, incentives, punishments, rewards, community relations, etc, etc, etc, - which can all be summarised in the totally contradictory formula of "more/less carrot and/or more/less stick", - has been around since capitalist society began its 700-year march through early urban beginnings; through commercial, industrial and trade flourishing; to imperialist maturity; and finally through fascist warmongering decline.

But NOTHING can alter the reality that the world's population has now outgrown the class-divided exploitation system.

Globalisation has completed the technological, organisational and educational transformation of the majority of people on earth to be no longer suited to hire-and-fire wage slavery and imperialist-colonialist domination, which is simply no longer tolerable.

Equally intolerable are the periodic and insane trade war/slump crises requiring the destruction of 'surplus' capital to get a new boom cycle going again but via the warmongering wrecking of lives and aspirations of ordinary people everywhere (World Wars I and II, e.g.)

But still all the 'reformists', - from the fascist ultra right to the Trot and Revisionist fake-'left', - still insist on the 'democracy' status quo (i.e. capitalist 'freedom') but with more/less public ownership; more/less taxation; more/less EU federalism; more/less self-determination for everyone who wants it; etc, etc, etc.

And as well as all being utterly meaningless utopian blueprints which can never get further than just a bit more fudging of the existing brink-of-disaster crisis-ridden setup, even when the ultra-'lefts' promise 'revolutionary' reformist fudging as Militant did in Liverpool, and as Scargillism did in the NUM and around the TUC and Labour, and as the Socialist Alliance now promises at every election, - all of these voluntarist fantasy daydreams of "what would happen if the people put their faith in our leadership", etc, suffer equally from their pointless arbitrariness.

The bourgeoisie will continue to rule the bourgeois system until it is SMASHED by REVOLUTION, - the arrival of which is under no one's control.

The final revolutionary reckoning between the proletariat and the capitalist class cannot be manufactured by anyone. It can only be understood, inspired, and led successfully or else misunderstood, demoralised, and led to defeat by anti-Marxist ignorance and fake-'left' opportunism.

That total international conflict against the imperialist system by no means will necessarily break out with anti-imperialism represented by the "purest, socialist-minded, proletarian revolutionaries".

Just the opposite. This conflict is breaking out in a variety of unexpected forms, both old and new.

The street-fighting anarchists-against-globalisation are part of the upsurge, as are the suicide-bombers of Hamas and al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad.

But the fake-'left' in the West from the SLP to the Socialist Alliance are all busy 'condemning' such struggle, - exactly in line with the rotten anti-communism of Trotskyism and Stalinist-Revisionism from whence they have slithered.

And they are at their non-Marxist class-collaborating gobshite again now over Le Pen, continuing the Revisionist nonsense that fascism is 'bad' imperialism, - meaning, willy-nilly, that 'anti-fascism' with presumably 'good' bourgeois (social-democrats liberals, etc, and other wielders of governmental office in imperialist states) can continue in the postwar Stalinist class-collaborating spirit of looking for the (nonexistent) "peaceful road to socialism" under the (nonexistent) "peaceful coexistence" between imperialism and the workers states".

The imbecility that postwar US imperialist domination of the planet was "better than" wartime German and Japanese imperialist domination of the planet still persists, despite the unspeakable terror-tyranny, inflicted on the people of Vietnam and the whole of Indo-China; the people of Korea, Palestine, Algeria, Turkey, Chile, Indonesia, etc, and literally scores of other fascist-military dictatorships or colonial holocausts imposed by Western world domination since 1945.

Listen to the most 'revolutionary' representatives of the Socialist Alliance, quoting, with just mild criticism, what the French Trots are saying to workers about the election now:

"We understand those who will vote Chirac in the second round to keep out Le Pen, but we don't think Chirac will be a bulwark against this new rise of the extreme right....This is not Germany 1933 and it is clear that Chirac will win without difficulty".

This Alliance rebuke that Chirac himself will have an authoritarian programme and should NOT be voted for, - actively boycott the election instead, by strikes, occupations, barricades, street demonstrations, etc, academically arrives at some of the correct 'revolutionary' sounds but still totally misses all the crucial political/historical points.

Voting bourgeois to keep out Hitler would have been a nonsense in 1933 as well. Only an all-out revolutionary struggle in the 1930s stood any chance of preventing the imperialist system from imposing fascist-aggressive warmongering regime after regime throughout the 'free world' to forestall the growing attractiveness of the Soviet workers state and communist revolution.

And there were revolutionary situations in plenty to have been taken advantage of all round the planet.

The disaster was the beginnings of Stalinism's 'peaceful road' class-collaborating-with-'good'-imperialism, Revisionist defeatism about world revolution, - seen most tragically in Germany and Spain where 'parliamentary democracy' was ludicrously analysed as some sort of possible barrier to 'fascism', temporarily or permanently, instead of as the obvious and inevitable conduit to fascism, (i.e. more rightwing and chauvinistic authoritarianism) once the imperialist system had decided that capitalism's continuation depended on the spread of warmongering nationalist diversions from revolution.

The imperialist system is now collapsing towards the same historical revolutionary crisis situation once again.

Parliamentary democracy will again be a barrier to absolutely NOTHING.

The point is NOT that a deluded vote for Chirac represents "the danger of an authoritarian programme" (Weekly Worker 429).

The point is that the imperialist system is ALREADY imposing its warmongering-destruction programme on the world (ask Palestine, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Argentina, Serbia, etc, etc) and French imperialism is ALREADY fully participating in that warmongering-destruction holocaust to try to save the world for the capitalist system.

Of course WHOLESALE arrests and open dictatorship/racist persecution all round the 'free world' would be statistically 'worse than' the present course of the Bush-stolen US presidential election; the US-approved armed-dictatorship takeovers in Venezuela and Pakistan; the US tolerated creeping genocidal holocaust against the Palestinian nation; the colonial occupation of Afghanistan; the threatened blitzkriegs against Iraq and Colombia; etc, etc, etc.

But now that the imperialist system has ALREADY seen the need to start arbitrary arrests, detention and surveillance all round the 'free world' in pursuit of the totally insane fiction of the 'global war on terrorism', - then the historical process towards 'total fascism' (as the fake-'left' like to call it, imitating the bourgeois imperialists' idiotic diversion) has ALREADY begun, and no amount of 'parliamentary democracy' is going to stop it.

The sickest and most dangerous illusion of all is that "parliamentary democracy and protest marches stopped the turn to fascism in Britain and elsewhere in the 1930s".

Absolute NONSENSE. It was the entire imperialist SYSTEM which was turning to crisis-driven warmongering chauvinism in the 1930s, and enough 'fascist' regimes were encouraged or tolerated to make an anti-Soviet crusade and World War II easily achievable, exactly as required.

How much 'fascist warmongering' intention does the imperialist system need to OPENLY reveal?

It depends on how much resistance to the system's despicable destructive domineering course is shown.

If there had been more decisive revolutionary resistance shown in the 1930s to the initial destructive warmongering adventurism inflicted by Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc, then even more openly fascist-chauvinist hostages to fortune would have had to have been imposed even further around the West, even beyond the Vichy regime in France, and the Quisling fascists in Norway, Holland, Portugal, etc, etc, to guarantee a sufficient volume of warmongering-chauvinist insanity to allow World War II to complete its 'surplus' destructive purpose.

It is precisely their petty bourgeois fear of unlimited destructive breakdown in "the world as we know it" which keeps the fake-'left' today pretending that 'civilised order' still prevails, and that 'terrorism' goes too far and must be 'condemned', etc.

Or pretending that Le Pen or BNP racism would be a 'worse' development than what is under way already in the world.

And in refusing to see that not only do they end up on the same side as imperialism's fascist-chauvinist warmongering in their 'condemnation' of the Middle East/Islamic fightback with the terrorist weapon against Western domination, but that they also share the worst delusion of all that allows Le Pen, BNP, etc, to be given room to flourish at all, namely the total historical-revisionist conspiracy which allows the dictatorship of the proletariat to be written-off and ludicrously misrepresented as 'the Gulag' and 'arbitrary tyranny', etc, instead of properly assessed as a first planned workers-state magnificent flourishing in history, marred only by the stupid Revisionist retreat from Marxist-Leninist science which ended up with Gorbachev joining Reagan to 'condemn international terrorism', sinking the world's first socialist gains in the process as the ludicrously misunderstood 'market forces' started the destruction of the USSR's planned development.

The fake-'left' describes the three Trots who ran for president in France as "three candidates openly standing for revolution".

It is complete nonsense. Like Le Pen, they stand for open anti-communism, dismissing the Soviet workers state (the only alternative way forward for history from endlessly recurring fascist-chauvinist destruction and tyranny by warmongering imperialism) as nothing but a 'wrong turn' in history, and as 'worse than what democracy has brought the world', etc, etc.

But the silliest and most dangerous nonsense of all is the tendency throughout the fake-'left' to 'blame' people for voting BNP or Le Pen, especially poor or working-class voters (who form the majority of 'fascist' electoral support).

This 'condemnation' is close in class spirit to that trade unionist petty-bourgeois collaborationist lifestyle which believes in the deluded notions of 'fair play' and 'democratic rights' as supposedly being fundamental properties of Western bourgeois-capitalist society, or 'parliamentary democracy'.

Such utter confusion has been regularly lethal to the working-class hitherto in history, and will be so again. The ESSENCE of the capitalist class's continued domination over the planet is the colonial fascism currently grinding down the Palestinian nation in economic, political, and cultural genocide; which inflicted total blitzkrieg destruction on the nation of Serbia; which pulverised Iraq and stands ready and itching to do so again and again; which inflicted the most concentrated and widespread mass-slaughter rates in the whole history of colonial blitzkrieg on the peoples of Vietnam and Indo-China; and which would impose the concentration camp tyranny of fascist dictatorship on ANY country on earth if its political direction was deemed to be "against Western/US interests", as has happened scores of times around the world since 1945, most notoriously in Chile in 1973, Iran in 1952, and Indonesia in 1965 the world's fourth most populous state, and as has just been threatened to Venezuela in 2002.

The most lunatic 'anti-imperialist' delusion of all is that if 'opponents' of capitalism conduct their struggle in a civilised way, then that will 'continue' to help 'civilise' the imperialist system.

It is total fantasy. The monopoly-capitalist class domination of the planet is poised to assert its 'might is right' more barbarically than ever before in history.

And it is not just phony 'liberal' opportunists like Blair and Salman Rushdie who are denouncing working-class people for their 'fecklessness' in voting for Le Pen or having unruly children (to be fined via benefits cuts).

The whole of the fake-'left' is tied up in endlessly bemoaning the achievements of conventional politics, but refusing to target the whole conventional political game itself, which is how Le Pen and the BNP start to pick up votes.

The empty posture of "refusing to debate with Le Pen" will only add to the confusion of people drawn to vote that way because of dislike or distrust of everything conventional politics stands for.

And the notion that by shunning Le Pen and the BNP, all of the racism in capitalist society will have been properly publicly condemned and isolated, is just head-in-the-sand insanity.

Racial fears and tensions will grow as the total insecurity of capitalist crisis grows ever worse; and the issues of what nonsensical non-solutions are mass emigration and asylum-seeking (to capitalist crisis problems elsewhere which do not even get mentioned by this 'free world' stunt to defuse revolutionary situations around the planet), - need to be discussed.

Letting capitalism drive masses of people around the world into the desperation of emigration (often into even worse conditions) without debating it, just lets capitalism off the hook, - especially when, the DELIBERATE divide-and-rule tactics of imperialist states will CONSCIOUSLY play the race-card whenever it suits them inside the metropolitan countries emigrated to.

All racial awareness is undoubtedly part of the backwardness of this 'prehistory' period of human society (before the epoch of class domination and division has been overcome with the ending of capitalism); - but it is also universal, and not talking about it in the deliberately conflict-ridden circumstances into which imperialism is consciously thrusting every country, is just playing into the hands of Le Pen and the BNP philistines.

But still fake-'left' political correctness blunders on, now making anti-semitism a new stick with which to beat Palestinian resistance (by any means) to Zionist genocidal colonisation. "Sharon is a war criminal but don't blame the Jews" makes no sense. History is not made by individuals. In the present world, the sick religious-freemasonry notion of "the promised land for the chosen people" automatically becomes colonial fascism, and if Jews insist on defending this nonsense and colonising the modern land (any of it) of the Palestinians, then anti-semitism will inevitably continue to grow, - still further playing into the hands of such political degeneracy as Le Pen and the BNP.

The 'two-state solution' Mary Poppins politics favoured by fake-'lefts' from Naomi Klein to Lalkar, is typical middle-class academicism, utterly divorced from any real revolutionary class feelings about the disgusting tyrannies which bourgeois confusion is permitting to continue around the world. The Arab Revolution will properly end this 'two-state solution' tyranny. Build Leninism. EPSR