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 

No 1142  July 02 2002

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Mad US bombing terror on Afghanistan is no "accident". The highest and mightiest global imperialist power in history is collapsing into the most humiliating economic catastrophe in history. As the biggest military superpower ever, it has no other intention than to blast its way out of difficulty. Inter-imperialist conflict is inevitable. Leninist revolutionary DEFEAT for imperialism is the only applicable science. All socialist agitation which does not start with this is not just a complete waste of time but a conscious counter-revolutionary fraud on the working-class. And moralising "condemnation" of Middle East "terrorism" by the
fake-'left' - which could become the spark for the DEFEAT of US imperialism, - is even worse defeatist hypocrisy. The biggest enemy of workers now is class-collaboration "democracy", sucking workers into more endless defeats as all "left pressure" promises of "reforms" get nowhere worth getting to.  No "reforms" can stop imperialism's warmongering crisis, only revolutionary DEFEAT of the American monopoly bourgeoisie. The plea for "common-sense compromises" in the Middle East and elsewhere can only delay imperialism's terminal explosion, and can only disarm the international working-class.

The ever-clearer emergence of the INSOLUBILITY of the capitalist-system crisis and of the INEVITABILITY of it dragging the world only into more and more violent warmongering, and therefore more and more violent revolution as the sole solution to that warmongering, is putting lethal pressure on every variety of the fake-'left' to finally say something about what is going to happen next to international civilisation (and therefore what the working class should do about it) or become indelibly branded as part of counter-revolutionary confusion and conservatism.

The 'new' so-called 'militant' trade unions are cutting only SOME of their additional financial support for the more despicable Parliamentary cretins, who help keep this murderously reactionary Labour Government in power, but they don't stop all of it, and the Scargillite rail-union boss Crow declares:

"The patience of many of our members is now wearing thin, but for the trade union movement to abandon the Labour Party would be a serious mistake. Labour was created as the political voice of the trade union movement, and our-members have the right to expect our political representatives to take up the cudgels on the issues that affect workers".

The chief 'theorists' of the Socialist Alliance then add in the Weekly Worker that Crow has done well to avoid "automatic anti-Labourism" and "has pointed to a more sophisticated and fruitful way forward".

It repeats its programme for the Alliance to not run rival candidates but give full support to Labour to elect such MPs as Diane Abbott.

Now all this confused and REACTIONARY nonsense is as "sophisticated" as vintage disastrous Revisionist-Stalinist rottenness of the 1950s.

It is philosophical COUNTER-revolutionary gobshite.

It is the catastrophe of the "peaceful road to socialism" and the eventual self-liquidation of the Soviet Union workers state and the Socialist Camp.

It is REFORMIST class collaboration, ultimately total capitulation to the "superior" virtues" of "market democracy".

It is SUICIDE for the working class, allowing a Labour Government to help US imperialism stumble derangedly but ruthlessly and relentlessly towards inter imperialist World War III.

And the odd part of the fake-'left' which is less enthusiastic about all this "left pressure" reformist nonsense, such as Lalkar, itself refuses to openly challenge either Scargill's refusal to denounce this Crow nonsense OR the historical Stalinist idiocy which it prolongs. Indeed, Lalkarism wants to preserve ALL of Stalin's crap theories.

Worse still, the entire fake-'left' swamp refuses any serious polemical debate about all these issues.

Moreover, Lalkar's connivance was crucial for Scargill's EXPULSION of the EPSR's growing influence from the SLP.

And the theoretical challenge to the disaster-course the Labour Movement is on (alongside the West generally) which the EPSR puts up, is likewise deliberately ignored by the rest of the fake-'left'.

The 57 varieties of Trot and Revisionist sectarianism are recreating the pattern of small-minded 'left' cliques which disgraced the Second International in the 1914-18 War by all opting for class-collaboration with their "own national interests", - with the honourable exception of the Bolsheviks (and a few other like minds in East Europe) who upheld the Marxist science that the only salvation for the working class, being killed in their millions, was the revolutionary overthrow of their "own ruling-class".

All those fake-left, groups and parties ended up in the petty-bourgeois camp of COUNTER-revolution.

Only an open polemical struggle to reach the best understanding possible of the direction and balance of class and national forces, and of the best Marxist science for programme, strategy, and tactics in this vastly-complicated world situation, can help limit a similar debacle for the 57 varieties as this next great imperialist system crisis plummets down towards war and revolution.

It is hopelessly inadequate to simply be "for socialism", or even to be "prepared for revolution" or even giving an academic acknowledgement to "the dictatorship of the proletariat" as one or two of the more opportunist fake-'lefts' try to get away with to bolster their ludicrous "Marxist" pretensions.

It is equally disastrous to lean on the "better than nothing" delusion that goes along with kidding people that supporting Diane Abbott is a "step forward" of some kind.

Equally, it is a farcical statement of the uselessly obvious to merely state that "capitalism is synonymous with pollution, exploitation, crisis, and war", and that "socialism can never come through Parliament" as the posturing Weekly Worker has just proudly announced in its "updated" statement of aims.

The whole question is how, where, when, and why of the breakup of imperialism, and the how, where, when, and why of the development and transformation of the class and national global forces which will destroy the imperialist bourgeoisie's dictatorship over the planet in due course.

Being "for socialism" or saying "Parliament won't do it", or stating the obvious about imperialist pollution, exploitation, and warmongering, are all, on their own, UTTERLY USELESS.

The entire history of the 'left', and 'reformism', and all opportunists, has ALWAYS said as much.

Ramsay Macdonald, the most notorious name in all Labour Movement treachery, was most notorious of all for having declared his public "sympathy" with the Bolshevik Revolution and even with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the electrifying international period after 1917 when the Labour Party had to be held back from further revolutionary development and stimulation by the adoption of the treacherous Clause IV lie that Labour's aim was "the public ownership of all means of production, distribution, and exchange", i.e. expropriate the bourgeoisie and nationalise the entire economy.

But what is CRUCIAL for the working class to be inspired for the fight against imperialist crisis, is to have some idea of what disasters the system is heading for.

It is equally vital that all of the treacherousness that false 'left' leadership will inflict on the working class is well chewed over BEFORE it happens, if possible, and not just afterwards.

The Second International, under Marxist influence, was smart enough to have adopted a total revolutionary denunciation of World War I two years before it had even broken out.

But what had not been exposed was how deviously and speciously virtually the entire Second International parties would all argue their way out of pursuing the agreed policy (to each fight for the revolutionary DEFEAT of their "own" ruling class in the war, not only not minding if that revolution became possible on the back of a defeat in war by a foreign power but actually WELCOMING such a "national" defeat in a foreign war.)

Thus already, plenty of anti-Bolshevism needs exposing around the fake-'left' now, before all the "no to war" posturing has even been adopted.

In the cut-throat trade-war upheavals to come around the European Union, for example, where a British economy and political perspective might suffer disastrously through its association with the more powerful German economy or with EU aggressiveness which Britain might not have voted for and been dragged into against its better judgement, - the SLP is already agitating to PREVENT any defeat for British imperialism in such circumstances by urging the Ruling Class to "let us keep the pound" in the so-called "national interest", and thereby avoid "being dictated to by foreign bankers and monopolists" etc, etc, etc. (See countless past EPSR's for a complete discussion of the utterly reactionary stupidity and misleadership by this SLP class-collaborationist line).

And as another example, the whole swamp is playing into the imperialist system's warmongering direction generally by helping the monopoly-bourgeois propaganda fears to demonise the joke "terrorist threat to mankind" from the heroic but tragic Hamas suicide bombers and al-Quaeda anti-imperialists who only want to try in their very limited way to get the neo-colonialist tyranny they suffer in the Middle East (because of US and Zionist domination) lifted or lightened just a little, - valiant national-liberation struggles which the class-collaborating fake-'left' in the West immediately declare "condemnable".

But where will such hypocritical petty-bourgeois moralising in league with imperialist domination tyranny leave the fake-'left' if and when these anti-imperialist national-liberation struggles start to merge with or develop towards the global mass-proletarian anti-imperialist revolution which history is making NECESSARY and therefore inevitable???

And down a different avenue, the Trot part of the swamp has always put its membership permanently into the pocket of imperialist counter-revolutionary warmongering by its fake-'populist' stunts of backing neo-fascist counter-revolutions against workers states or national-liberation regimes accepting Socialist Camp influence or protection.

Thus Lech Walesa's Pilsudskiite counter-revolution of extreme pre-war Polish nationalism (pro-Hitler and anti-Soviet) won not just the sympathy but the active support of the entire Trot petty-bourgeois movement, falling in behind the anti-socialist conspiracy financed and organised around Walesa by the CIA and the Vatican.

And although the wrecking of the Polish workers state has now destroyed the lives of millions of poor Polish workers and peasants, that whole generation of Trot influenced Western public opinion is now hearing not a word of apology or correction from the SWP, Militant, or any of the Trots on this score, - which means that they are all liable to such monstrous potential warmongering imperialist stunts as the threat to oust Mugabe in Zimbabwe for nationalising the land and the food industry, etc.

And the SWP & Co likewise leave untouched the outrageous mess created by this Trot "for revolutionary rank-and-file socialism" posture in respect of Cuba, where another imperialist warmongering stunt is possible, and where Trots have in the past (and uncorrected still) called for "the overthrow of the dictator Castro" (i.e. for counter-revolution in reality).

With this counter-revolutionary Trot "leadership" still intact on the 'left' of the labour movement, how can that brainwashed generation of working-class public opinion be expected to rise up in revolt should the West make "the freedom of the people of Cuba" one of the first warmongering diversionary stunts as part of preparing world opinion for World War III levels of generalised warmongering???

And the only way to restrict the influence of almost 60 years of Cold War anti-communism on mass Western minds is by the fight for a fully detailed COMPLETE THEORY of all that has happened since 1945 and the inevitability of anti-imperialist revolution as the only way to halt the slide to capitalism's economic catastrophe and its accompanying warmongering tyranny.

Without that hard theoretical polemical struggle and complete re-education of the working-class in the West, more mere flagwaving "for socialism" (which just won't debate the terrible influence on history of Stalin's crap theories, or debate the imbecility of shouting "condemn" at the current tragic-heroic "terrorist" efforts to fight back against imperialist warmongering domination in the Middle East) is not just hopeless but is a reactionary FRAUD on the working class; it is part of the problem of idiot fake-'leftism', not part of the solution.

The complaints about workers not responding much to 'left' tubthumping about being "for socialism", should alert those in the swamp who want to try to move onto an important lesson about the post-1945 period in the world when the international communist movement was approaching the peak of its worldwide influence.

What the working-class was happy to go along with (in greater or lesser numbers, depending on which part of the planet) was the fairly clear and plausible PERSPECTIVE for the world's future which the majority of the 'left' could not easily be dissuaded from or confused over.

And the most important thing is not what was in that postwar perspective so much as the existence itself of a clear PERSPECTIVE.

Everyone KNEW what was going to happen. Therefore the world communist movement grew to its most massive proportions ever, despite the barbaric campaigns of anti-communist brainwashing and endless provocative anti-Soviet stunts.

The agreed understanding was that the appeal of socialism would gain a relatively peaceful worldwide triumph as the socialist camp planned economies proved their worth in practice, and as the imperialist economies found less and less room for expansion and profitable exploitation (Stalin). All that was needed was to avoid revolutionary adventurism and any other communist activity which might give the imperialists the excuse to put a halt to ALL further international development by launching nuclear war. (Stalin). More and more "peaceful roads to socialism" would be opened up as the Socialist Camp economy proved its superiority to the imperialist camp economy (Stalin).

This utterly crap Revisionism eventually disillusioned even Moscow because under constant credit-creation and frenetic global neo-colonial exploitation, the honey-pots of the 'freemarket' world were inevitably easily able to demonstrate a vastly more 'glitzy' success story than the shared steadily-developing (but slowly developing) humanity of the workers states' planned economies; - and political allegiances followed suit precisely because of the destruction of serious Marxist-Leninist scientific reasoning and agitational abilities by that self-same Revisionist bureaucratic complacency (which almost added up to a counter-revolutionary influence on the planet by the end).

With the death of all socialist PERSPECTIVE, only the ineffectual and meaningless "for socialism" posturing remained.

(Other, more localised perspectives which died a similar death included the Militant variant of the CP "peaceful road", for example, which decreed that the Labour Party itself could be turned into the "revolutionary vehicle" and without having to	go along with the pro-Moscow CP plus 'left' Labour version of	"socialist success".)

And with the death of any socialist PERSPECTIVE, the only general ideological framework which remained to play the role of a working-class philosophy of life was that of the "market democracy" perspective whereby "liberated entrepreneurship" would bring about rapid and unending universal affluence, and "electoral government" would ensure justice and fair-play for all, "reforming" all nastiness out of the capitalist system.

Few workers buy that enthusiastically any more. But where is there ANY 'alternative' perspective for them to start believing in??

Fake-'left' posturing still says "for socialism", but nothing believable says HOW it will come about.

And one obvious contrast is that the "democracy" which all fake-'lefts' spout about is the very vehicle by which the imperialist bourgeoisie maintains its fraudulent total grip on the planet.

And it is precisely this sort of contradiction in dialectical theory that not one scrap of the entire fake-'left' is remotely interested in debating.

The entire swamp puts up candidates in national and local elections, and while it may claim in general posturing to be for "extra-parliamentary action too", and to believe that "Socialism can never come through Parliament", nothing of this is ever highlighted in the election literature or on the doorstep.

Just piecemeal 'reforms', exactly like any 'left' Labourite for over 100 years, is all that workers are agitated to support and believe in.

And it is a total FRAUD.

And a routine swamp giveaway about the typical fake-'left' counter-revolutionary treacherousness in all this bogus "socialist" posturing, is inadvertently contained in the "new" Weekly Worker "Aims" for example.

It emerges in the "daring" paragraph (which all incorrible anti-communist class-collaborators always like to include in their "Aims" as part of their sick 'Marxist' act.

This starts off with a fatuous knowing wink which declares with deliberate ambiguity throughout: "The capitalist class will never willingly allow their wealth and power to be taken away through a parliamentary vote. They will resist using every means at their disposal."

So what is this "daring" nudge-nudge all about? 

Is capitalism a bourgeois dictatorship, as Marxist science has ALWAYS explained, and as the anti-Allende coup and the attempted anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela have most recently given armed murderous witness to??? In other words, is state power an armed bourgeois dictatorship or not under capitalism? And will that murderous tyranny inevitably be used by the monopoly-capitalist establishment to hang onto power at all costs regardless of what any stupid 'democratic election' might have declared should happen in terms of total expropriation of all Big Bourgeois property????

The treacherous fake 'lefts', any sect, will never say.

Their blunt total capitulation to bourgeois parliamentary class-collaboration comes later: "Communists fight for extreme democracy. Socialism represents victory in the battle for democracy".

But this "daring" paragraph, hinting at serious class war to come, goes on as follows:

"They will resist using every means at their disposal. Communists favour using parliament and winning the biggest possible working-class representation. But workers must be readied to make revolution peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must."

And that is all. No class-war education at  all.	

The actual living experience of Marxist-Leninist science since the Communist Manifesto was written 155 years ago has never known the faintest suggestion of bourgeois-capitalist state power ever being given up without civil war savagery being inflicted, no matter what any "election" or "parliamentary democracy" declared should happen, and no matter what out-of-context single sentences these fake-'left' anti-Marxists try quoting from Lenin, etc, about "winning the battle for democracy".

ALL of the living scientific experience of Marxism tells only of the socialist revolution involving the mass revolt of the whole working class, starting spontaneously but then getting mobilised by its own communist agitators.

"Working class representation" is a different era and a different realm entirely, and has nothing essentially to do with this part of the revolt process.

"Working class representation" is precisely another description of 100 years of Labour Party "parliamentary democracy" FRAUD on the working class, tying it to imperialist counter-revolution while only PRETENDING to be out to "reform all the nastiness out of capitalism", - an impossible nonsense anyway, 'sincerely' meant or not.

And this continued "representation" racket and fraud is clearly all that this "daring" paragraph is still all about. The notion of any serious revolutionary struggle is not remotely near the minds of these petty-bourgeois "socialist" dilettantes. They are giving no serious thought to the actual class-terror reality of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It is all a silly piece of bravado posturing.

In addition to the "forcibly if we must" giveaway, which could never possibly inspire a single worker to mobilised for revolution as a realistic PERSPECTIVE, the lines about "representation" and "workers must be readied" prove that the irresistible spontaneous mass revolt which must provide the necessary impetus for an organised socialist revolution, has never even entered the thinking of these anti-communists, or if it has, only to cause them a nasty attack of sheer petty-bourgeois horror.

So what IS required for a serious socialist PERSPECTIVE which will start getting workers mobilised as a serious CLASS-POLITICS force again???

Well, a FULLY detailed prescriptive "programme" is (a) unlikely to be produced by ANYONE at this stage, if only because of the Marxism-deficient uncertainties about the actual denouement of the imperialist global economic crisis as it unfolds in all its colossal complexity and unprecedented 'single super-power' circumstances; and (b) not what the EPSR would suggest as the wisest or most necessary immediate way forward anyway.

Fully-detailed prescriptive "programmes" have historically become nothing but a paradise for fake-'left' pedants and dilettantes to cavort-in endlessly.

As Lenin explained in his first letter 'On Tactics' in April 1917 in which he almost casually (and without a Congress vote or any other formal 'democracy' to "legitimise" (insane concept) the sound sense of what he was saying) disposes of the pedantic insistence with which some 'Old Bolsheviks' were trying to disrupt Lenin's bid to rapidly win new revolutionary leadership positions for the Bolsheviks, (claiming that the "programme" demand for "the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" had not yet been achieved, thereby invalidating Lenin's call for the Party to start preparing for the proletarian socialist revolution,) - any tiny amount of real movement in the class struggle always could teach the revolution more than all the "programmes" for revolution ever written:

Marxism requires of us a strictly exact and objectively verifiable analysis of the relations of classes and of the concrete features peculiar to each historical situation. We Bolsheviks have always tried to meet this requirement, which is absolutely essential for giving a scientific foundation to policy.

"Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action," Marx and Engels always said, rightly ridiculing the mere memorising and repetition of "formulas", that at best are capable only of marking out general tasks, which are necessarily modifiable by the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.

Before the February-March revolution of 1917, state power in Russia was in the hands of one old class, namely, the feudal landed nobility, headed by Nicholas Romanov.

After the revolution, the power is in the hands of a different class, a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie.

The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.

To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.

But at this point we hear a clamour of protest from people who readily call themselves "old Bolsheviks". Didn't we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry"? Is the agrarian revolution, which is also a bourgeois-democratic revolution, completed? Is it not a fact, on the contrary, that it has not even started?

My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more variegated than anyone could have expected. 

To ignore or overlook this fact would mean taking after those "old Bolsheviks" who more than once already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality.

"The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" has already become a reality ** in the Russian revolution, for this "formula" envisages only a relation of classes, and not a concrete political institution implementing this relation, this co-operation. "The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies" - there you have the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" already accomplished in reality.

This formula is already antiquated. Events have moved it from the realm of formulas into the realm of reality, clothed it with flesh and bone, concretised it and thereby modified it.

A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, "Communist" elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists, who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of "supporting" the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government).

The person who now speaks only of a "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of "Bolshevik" pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of "old Bolsheviks").

The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat  and the peasantry has already been realised, but in a highly original manner, and with a number of extremely important modifications. I shall deal with them separately in one of my next letters. For the present, it is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, - which like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

"Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life." 20

To deal with the question of "completion" of the bourgeois revolution in the old way is to sacrifice living Marxism to the dead letter.

All revolutionary "programmes" start being a bit out of date from the very moment that they are written down. But what ALWAYS takes the revolution forward, without fail, is the latest, most up-to-date "analysis of the relations of classes and of the concrete features peculiar to each historical situation".

The EPSR's contribution towards a revolutionary programme for the international working class is always its very MOST RECENT attempt to analyse what is going on in the world IN THE LIGHT OF Marxist scientific theory about the class-war end to imperialist crisis (Leninism).

And so far, over 23 years, each issue of the EPSR has always been a far better guide towards developing working-class revolutionary understanding than anything else published at any time by any of the self-serving opportunist sects of petty-bourgeois Revisionism and Trotskyism which make up all 57 varieties of the fake-'left'.

The current specific imperialist crisis in the Middle East provides another object lesson, for example.

The whole world revolution is now inextricably tied up with the necessary DEFEAT of American imperialism.

And that defeat is closely connecting itself to the fate of the Zionist-imperialist attempt to WHOLLY CRUSH by warmongering terror all Palestinian and Arab resistance to the TOTAL subjugation-colonisation of the Palestinian nation's homeland from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

It is hard to see how any future revolutionary overthrow of imperialist tyranny worldwide can proceed apart from the revolutionary DEFEAT of Zionism. 

Since EITHER imperialist military might world domination must prevail, OR the revolutionary defeat of Zionism must prevail, then compromise is not a realistic option.

But Lalkar, for example, alerts the international working class to none of this, but misleadingly preaches instead that a two-state compromise deal is the obvious "solution" to that Middle East crisis, and the obvious "way ahead" for socialism"
presumably.

Nothing, of course, is impossible within a temporary framework. But in the framework of a REVOLUTIONARY crisis threatening the survival of the imperialist diktat worldwide, then trying to engage workers attention with the possibility and the "need for" a two-state compromise "solution" to this particular frontline in the international anti-imperialist revolution would seem to be (a) deliberately denying workers any chance of developing a revolutionary understanding of the world; and (b) promoting the worst kind of 'reformist-compromise' ignorance (anti-Marxism) about how history really works.

Starting from the Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE of global economic collapse and aggressive fascist-imperialist warmongering as the terminal revolutionary pattern of all major monopoly-capitalist crises in the modern era, the EPSR has posited instead the DEFEAT of imperialism rather than the halfway-house 'compromise' (i.e. continued subjugation) for the Palestinian people as the only realistic longterm expectation, to the background of which ALONE can much revolutionary sense be made by workers of what is going on in the Middle East.

Telling workers to look for a two-state "compromise solution" in these world significant events is to spread nothing but defeatism and confusion.

The Bush regime's latest crazed policy to overthrow Arafat has currently been adding confirmation to the EPSR's analysis, - even for the most middle-class Jewish anti-communists writing for the capitalist press:

That was a fantastic speech. Quite literally, fantastic. George Bush's address on the Middle East, delivered outside the White House on Monday evening, consisted, from beginning to end, of fantasy.

It bore so little relation to reality that diplomats around the world spent yesterday shaking their heads in disbelief; before sinking into gloom and despair. Our own Foreign Office tried gamely to spot the odd nugget of sense in the Bush text - but, they admitted, it was an uphill struggle. Israelis committed to a political resolution of the conflict were heartbroken. Even Shimon Peres, foreign minister in Ariel Sharon's coalition, reportedly called the speech "a fatal mistake; warning: "A bloodbath can be expected".

The core of the president's message was that the Palestinians must embark on a sweeping process of internal reform before they can even think about getting back to the negotiating table. They must transform themselves into a democratic market economy, free of corruption and with a separate judiciary and legislature if they are to be considered eligible for statehood - which, when it comes, will be merely provisional.

Shall we count the ways in which this is completely absurd? George Bush is demanding that Palestine become Sweden before it can become Palestine: it must be stable, prosperous and boast constitutional arrangements which still elude Britain - our judiciary and legislature are not separate - let alone the Arab world before it can become even a state-in-waiting.

This would be laughable if Palestine were in tranquil Scandinavia. Even there it would count as putting the cart before the horse, asking a nation to create the institutions of a highly developed country before it becomes a state. But this, remember, is being demanded of the Palestinians - statebuilders with every possible obstacle in their way.

Like the fact that they are under military occupation. As the New York Times noted yesterday: "How the Palestinians can be expected to carry out elections or reform themselves while in a total lockdown by the Israeli military remains something of a mystery." Palestinian ministers complain they cannot visit a village 10 minutes away; they can pass laws but not implement them. They are Potemkin ministers, existing on paper only. Yet now they are to build the Switzerland of the Levant, where the streets are clean and government functions like clockwork. This is George in Wonderland stuff.

Monday's speech even had a touch of black comedy. The president said the new Palestine should be taught good governance, nominating the Arab states for the role. Imagine it: democracy lessons from Saudi Arabia, a masterclass in liberty from Kuwait.

But that is not the president's greatest fantasy. Yasser Arafat must go, he says, though without naming him. It may be refreshing to hear a US president come clean in his conviction that he has the right to pick other nations' leaders, but this demand exposes fully the vacuousness of Bush's thinking.

For who does he imagine might replace Arafat? Does he not realise that Palestinians are angry with their leader not because he has been insufficiently pro-American but because they see him as too moderate, too willing to do Israel's bidding. The Palestinian street is not clamouring for a man who will crack down harder on Islamist militants or sing a western song about free trade and local elections.

So if elections go ahead, here's what will happen Either Palestinians will deliberately defy Washington and re-elect Arafat  or they will choose someone more hardline. Any leader who has the Israeli or US stamp of approval will immediately be discredited as a puppet and promptly rejected.

Also, for all his flaws, Arafat has an asset none of his, rivals can match. He is still, thanks to his long history, Mr Palestine: his signature on a compromise deal is the only one that could persuade his people to accept it. By rushing his exit now, Bush is depriving any future peace agreement of the only Palestinian who could deliver it.

So the president's speech shows a man unconnected to Middle Eastern reality. But it is worse than unhinged; it is dangerous. First, Bush has given a green light to Sharon to continue his policy of military force coupled with a refusal to freeze settlement building on the West Bank. Monday's wording implied that Sharon is only obliged to pull back from Palestinian cities or freeze settlements once the Palestinians have worked their way through the US wishlist. So long as violence goes on, or Arafat remains in place, the Israeli PM can do what he likes.

Given that the president refused to specify what the final settlement might look like - delaying that and other questions to later talks - he has supplied Sharon with an incentive to get busy now, building settlements, putting up fences and carving new borders. If Bush had declared that the eventual Palestinian state would be on the other side of Israel's 1967 borders, there would be no point in Israel trying to redraw the map.  But now Sharon has every motive to create his notorious "facts on the ground".

There is danger on the Palestinian side too. The only people celebrating yesterday were the Islamist extremists of Hamas and Jihad, chiding moderate Palestinians for ever believing that politics, rather than violence, might bring results. Bush has not dangled any serious carrot before the Palestinians: no promises on Jerusalem or refugees or final borders. Even Colin Powell's planned international conference seems to have vanished. All Palestinians will get if they comply with Washington's demands is a provisional state on 42% of the West Bank. Maybe. Few will consider that a prize worth the sacrifice of their own leader and a national transformation.

So this new plan of Bush's is a flight of errant, irresponsible fancy that can only fail, bringing more bloodshed and ruin to the peoples of the Middle East who are desperate for something better.

But it will reverberate far beyond. It will damage the international standing of the US president and America along with it. Muslim and Arab nations will be antagonised by this plan of inaction, while chancelleries from London to Moscow will realise they are dealing with a leader who pays no lip-service to them - or to basic reality.

This is a foreign policy failure for George Bush. If he were a Democrat, both the Washington press corps and Congress would already be racking it up alongside the unextinguished threat from al-Qaida and the continued freedom from captivity of 0sama bin Laden Those failures, and now the guarantee of further slaughter in the Middle East, should be prompting hard questions about Bush and his war on terror. America needs to snap out of its post-9/11 torpor of consensus and realise there is a leadership problem in the US - and his name is George Bush.

Powerful voices in Israel, effectively backed last night by President Bush, are calling on Ariel Sharon to crown his reconquista of the West Bank by naming a new Palestinian leader. If he does so, it will be his second exercise in Arab kingmaking. The first was 20 years ago in Lebanon. 

Eighteen years and thousands of dead later, Israelis were as happy to leave as the Lebanese were to see them go.

The parallels between the invasions of Lebanon and of the Palestinian Authority zones are too many to ignore. Sharon holds Arafat responsible for Palestinian violence in exactly the way Israeli leaders used to blame Lebanon. The Lebanese government,  like Arafat, was too weak to stop a war whose roots go far deeper than whoever happens to be in nominal charge.

Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the Palestinian commando movement came into being. And Israel hit Lebanon after every Palestinian raid organised in Beirut, waging a steady war on Lebanon's cities, villages and infrastructure. In 1968, Israel destroyed 13 civilian aeroplanes of Lebanon's airline at Beirut airport, just as this year it destroyed the Palestinian airport in Gaza. Israel's raids strengthened the PLO in Lebanon then; Sharon's destruction of Arafat's Ramallah headquarters has restored some of the tatter's popularity now. In Lebanon, the Israel-PLO battles sparked a war that destroyed the Lebanese state. Israeli actions in the West Bank have crippled the PA.

When Israel failed both to control the PLO in Lebanon and destroy its popularity in the occupied territories, it invaded Lebanon twice, in 1978 and in 1982. In 1982, the defence minister, Ariel Sharon, played Lebanese kingmaker. After expelling 14,000 PLO fighters from Beirut, he forced the Lebanese parliament to choose as president the Christian militia commander Bashir Gemayel.

Sharon and Gemayel then plotted an assault on the Palestinian refugee camps in west.

Beirut that bears an uncanny similarity to Israel's operations in the West Bank since March. The Israeli army would seize key buildings and roads. Gemayel's militiamen would be transported to the refugee camps to root out "terrorists" ; in violation of Israeli undertakings to the US to leave west Beirut unmolested. The Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that the plan called for Gemayel's Phalange to "do the dirty work in the refugee camps, carrying out arrests, interrogations, and demolition of buildings":

When a Syrian agent assassinated Gemayel, Sharon put the plan into action. He told Gemayel's lieutenant Elie Hobeika, as Israel's Kahan commission discovered: "I don't want a single one of them left:' Sharon said he meant "terrorists", but there were no armed fighters in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Hobeika, whose men slaughtered civilians for 30 hours under the light of Israeli flares, took him to mean Palestinians. The distinction was lost, as it sometimes has been in recent Israeli attacks in the West Bank.

Hobeika was due to testify earlier this year against Sharon in a Belgian court examining the Sabra and Shatila massacres, but he was assassinated. Israel's justice ministry, meanwhile, announced that Israel would not ratify the international criminal court treaty because the tribunal "could consider the settling of Israelis in the territories as a war crime".

For Sharon to assassinate or remove Arafat and appoint a tame Palestinian in his place would repeat the mistakes of Lebanon. Israel occupied Lebanon and helped destroy the Lebanese state. Twenty years later, Sharon is reoccupying West Bank cities and dismantling the Palestine Authority infrastructure. Sharon named Lebanon's president, as some in his cabinet want to choose a new Palestinian leader. He further demands that the next PA president do Israel's bidding, as he and Menachem Begin ordered Gemayel to do theirs. The first policy was a catastrophe for Israel and Lebanon. It led to the creation of Hizbullan, Muslim fundamentalists who became the first guerrillas to drive Israel out of territory it had occupied. If Sharon disposes of Arafat and finds a quisling, what reason is there to suppose he will succeed with a policy that failed before?

The other question is what, in Sharon's reckoning, would constitute the success of this week's Operation Determined Path? If it is to assume military control and leave a Palestinian administration to collect the rubbish, he may succeed. If it is to increase the area of West Bank land under settler control from 42% and integrate it into Israel, he may succeed in that as well. But Palestinians will go on dying to oppose him, because such action negates their survival as a people. If the Determined Path is intended to achieve a peace for Israelis and Palestinians to live beside each other in dignity, failure is etched into its very bones.

The conclusion to draw from all this is NOT to say: "There you are. Even middle-class Jews and Americans are joining Europe to tell Bush how unreasonable he is being. Now a compromise solution will be forced on everybody," etc., etc.

The only point to make is that this relentless longterm subjugation of Palestine, backed by US imperialism as the way to permanently intimidate ALL Arab nationalism, is the sole REALITY.

This is what has happened and is happening now, despite countless middle-class objections of "unfair" and "disastrous" over the decades. 

And toying with "commonsense solutions" provides no understanding whatsoever.

It is a matter of the world-dominant imperialist system in a long-term ever-deepening crisis because its whole system global rule is basically out-of-date and increasingly universally hated.

The only obvious historical pattern to conjure with is that the more catastrophic America's imperialist economic crisis becomes, the WORSE and MORE DERANGED will become its aggressive leadership thrashing-about.

American world domination will not go quietly. Far too much is at stake for the most magnificently powerful and fabulously wealthy global ruling class in history.

And what is happening in the Middle East, as a segment of world developments, can represent what will happen around the rest of the planet too, as imperialism's crisis becomes more and more chaotic.

There MAY be one or two temporary partial 'solutions' patched together here and there, as US imperialism's hold on the planet starts getting swamped.

And some temporary compromise 'solution' is clearly not absolutely impossible even in the Middle East.

But to concentrate international working-class attention on this remote temporary possibility is to MISS ENTIRELY the whole point of what is happening to the world.

A total REVOLUTIONARY crisis, which will dwarf 1917, is clearly unstoppably on its way. That is the only perspective. Build Leninism. 		EPSR

World Socialist Review

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

The Colombian elite fear that the US wants a devastating war which will reduce their political independence to the point where the US can annex a corridor in the North of Colombia to build a new canal linking the Pacific to the Atlantic

IN 1948, an assassin killed Eliecer Gaitán, Colombia's Liberal presidential candidate. Gaitán had been seen as a great champion of the poor and promised much needed reform. On hearing of his death, thousands poured out onto the streets of Bogota and bloody rioting followed in what became known as El Bogotaza. It was the start of an incredibly vicious civil war between conservatives and liberals.	

Not everyone took sides. Large numbers of peasants and refugees journeyed to remote mountain and jungle areas and set up independent republics of the poor. When the civil war was over, the rich conservatives and liberals agreed a form of power-sharing and set their principle task as the destruction of the peasant independent republics. It took many years for the people's resistance to recover from this widespread repression.

	Around 1965, the FARC was founded to defend the peasants. Under the leadership of Marulanda, the FARC evolved as a full-time, 	uniformed army that not only survived but put the military largely on the defensive. Other, more left-wing movements, also sprang up, 	though none achieved the size or support of the FARC.

	In the 1950s, the US introduced the infamous "Food for Peace" 	Programme. This involved flooding Latin America with cheap, heavily 	subsidised food from the USA. (The US, at that time had enormous stocks of grain, which it was unable to sell at world prices). The effect was to undermine agriculture in the recipient countries, where with 	cheap food aid, the local market  price fell through the floor. Local 	producers could not compete, and consequently Colombia became 	totally dependent for food on the 	USA. Colombia had been more than self-sufficient, especially in wheat, but ended up impoverished, especially in the countryside, where the local economy was destroyed.

	The guerrillas got a lot of support as poverty gripped the land and the 	livelihoods of the people declined into subsistence farming.

	In 1962, US President John F Kennedy imposed a change with 	the most far-reaching and terrible effects. He forced the Latin American countries to change their military doctrines from national defence to counter-subversion. It 	was the strategy of the Death Squads. He sent a military mission  to Colombia to institute the changes.

	As US academic Vazquez Carrizosa put it, this US strategy established "the right to fight and 	exterminate social workers, trade 	unionists, men and women who do not support the establishment and 	who are assumed to be communist extremists, the right to destroy 	permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socio-	economic privilege by eliminating political 	participation of the numerical majority".

	By 1963, Colombian military textbooks read as follows: "Every individual, who in one or another manner supports the goals of the enemy, must be considered a traitor and treated in that manner." Since the guerrillas preached social and economic reform, the military and police had a very wide range of "traitors" to deal with. More and more supported the rebels.

In 1964 the UN Conference on Trade and Development tried to give effect to the socio-economic aspects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The UN called for the establishment of trade arrangements "for the creation of an international trading system consistent with the promotion of economic and social development." This raised the Colombian people's hopes. Phrases such as "Preposterous", "a dangerous incitement " and "Countries do not have a right to development", were used by the USA and other imperialist countries, to describe UNCTAD's aim. The hope of the United Nations died and the ranks of the guerrillas swelled again. Stabilisation of commodity prices became an unrealisable dream. The price of coffee, one of Colombia's main export earners, fell and fell again, causing havoc to the peasant economy which relied on coffee for its main cash crop.

By 1985, the FARC, other guerrilla organisations and progressive people all over the country thought that there was an electoral, non violent road to achieve their goals. They were encouraged in this hope by the Colombian elite and the military. They formed a political party, the UP, the Patriotic Union. The UP had good success in elections and seemed to be on the road to achieving power with a popular presidential candidate. Then the elite struck back. Using paramilitaries, they killed the presidential candidate, a dozen or so mayors of towns, several members of Parliament and 3,000 activists of the party, effectively wiping it out in urban areas. The lesson was learned and the guerrillas were forced back out of the political process and into defensive resistance to this armed onslaught, which had wiped out their political organisation.

In 1991, a new Colombian constitution enshrined neo-liberal economic policies, which threw the country open and left it totally vulnerable to the global corporations. Anything that could be profitable was denationalised. To ensure smooth integration into globalisation, the government also introduced laws to reduce popular participation in government, to enhance executive power and to reduce the autonomy of the judiciary and the legislative body. Economic planning was put completely into the hands of a small group of very pro-USA 'experts'.

These measures gave rise to a further alarming increase in poverty and inequality, with 55% of the population reduced to abject poverty, and, ominous for the future, a renewed crisis in agriculture.

By 1998, rural dissatisfaction was boiling over, in spite of massive state terror inflicted by the North American-trained and equipped Colombian military. The US began to implement its policies, which have devastated Central and Southern America. They trained and equipped a special elite fighting force with the best of everything money could buy. They sent a 250 strong special force after the FARC. The elite force had a string of easy victories and they went deeper and deeper into guerrilla country. Then the FARC ambushed them and took all their weapons, in effect wiping them out. Clinton was livid and the result was Plan Colombia.

The US and other NATO countries had what they described as a "positive experience" in Turkey, where they crushed the Kurds after a massive campaign of state terror and ethnic cleansing. Two-and-a-half million refugees, 3,500 villages destroyed and around 50,000 killed. It was all done with Turkish troops, police and paramilitaries. This gave the North Americans and NATO excellent "plausible deniability" of involvement in the massacres and widespread torture.

This was to serve as a model for crushing resistance in Colombia. A key feature in Turkey was the holding of negotiations with opposition parties to keep them quiet while the ethnic cleansing went on. Turkey had been the biggest recipient of US military aid, with its concurrent pattern of abuse of human rights and paramilitary death squads. Colombia then became the chief recipient of US military aid, with the awful pattern repeating itself. 

To get the FARC into talks a large military free area around San Vincente in the South of the country was conceded. While the talks have gone on changes were taking place on the ground. The Colombian Army has a disgraceful record of abuse of human rights, which did not bother them in the slightest but was an embarrassment to the Clinton administration.

There were two requirements. A strike force was needed that could intimidate and terrorise the population that supports the guerrillas as well as "troublesome" people like journalists, trade unionists, human right lawyers and community leaders who protest about living conditions and human rights. And it was necessary that if units of the strike force did get wiped out by the guerrillas, it was important that this should not be seen as yet another defeat for the government.

These two objectives were neatly solved by the military building up, arming, training and uniting under a common command structure the various right wing militias and private armies. The new structure was named the "United Self-Defence Forces" (AUC), better known as the paramilitaries. While carrying out this massive task, the Colombian military never stopped denying any link with the paramilitaries, and there are hundreds of paramilitaries in prison, but the core and structure is well looked after. The strategy has parallels with the British manipulation of the UDA and UVF in Ireland.

The result of this work is that the Colombia military and police have a very much improved human rights record over the last two years because the paramilitaries now carry out the massacres, assassinations and torture instead of state forces. To further increase the factor of plausible deniability, the military have largely handed over the task of training and organising the paramilitaries to mercenaries who work for private American security companies.

As a final touch of cynicism, the US State Department has recently declared the AUC a "terrorist" organisation - perfect for its purpose and completely deniable. In the small print they point out that "as the AUC did not threaten the interests of the United States, no sanctions will be imposed on them".

Of course, a major requirement for any massive repression is to convince international opinion that it is justified and necessary. Plan Colombia is therefore long on talk about a "war on drugs" while in reality it is about a war to protect North American interests in that region and to enable a privileged elite to survive against the armies of the poor.

So is the Colombian peace process genuine, or merely a part of a counter-insurgency strategy? It certainly appears that the FARC and the government negotiators and the observers from other countries are acting in good faith. A lot of solid progress has been made. The FARC want a constitutional assembly, land reform, an end to neo-liberal economic policies, no more denationalisation of services, protection for local industry, a system to enable the peasants to grow and market alternative crops to coca, prisoner exchange and so on.

The government negotiators are discussing these things and are also in talks with another guerrilla group, the  ELN, who are more left wing.

The Colombian elite are not totally in the power of the North Americans - fear and hatred of the gringo is widespread in Latin America, even among the rich who tend to be anti-nationalist and know that their country is being systematically looted, even if they do get a share. Colombian natural resources, which should fund health, education and work, go instead to global corporations.

A very real fear among the Colombian elite is that the US wants a devastating war which will reduce their political independence to the point where the US can annex a corridor in the North of Colombia to build a new canal linking the Pacific to the Atlantic. The Panama Canal can no longer take the size and volume of shipping now waiting to use it, so a new, bigger canal is needed in either Nicaragua or Colombia. Colombia has large supplies of water from rivers in the north of the country. Panama lacks enough water to work the locks on the canal. Colombians on all sides want the talks to succeed and they believe agreement can be reached.

But what if the talks are indeed only part of a cynical counter-insurgency strategy? The FARC have taken this possibility seriously. In the zone that they control they have imposed a 10% "war tax" on all business that has a turnover of more than $1 million. This includes oil companies and other large global corporations and drug traffickers. Those who do not pay are liable to kidnapping, "imprisonment for tax evasion". The massive flow of money has resulted in the FARO becoming quite well equipped.

They are building quite a formidable guerrilla army to meet any treachery the US and the Colombian elite may be planning. They are building an impressive network of roads, bridges and river transport.

The Colombian military boast of the massive shipments of weapons, aircraft and helicopters they have received from the United States. They plan to have a force of 200,000 men very soon, which represents a more than three-fold increase in their previous numerical strength. They receive, massive overt and covert training and "live time" intelligence from US planes and satellites. There is said to be massive "on the ground" intelligence services, not only trained by the US but working under their direction, with sophisticated electronic listening equipment and communications.

The zone, and the rebel leadership in it, are surrounded by a ring of troops who can invade at very short notice. Military experts in neighbouring countries express alarm at new work preparing US air bases and radar stations. A prime consideration in all this is Venezuela, an oil rich country with a common border with Colombia, which is ruled by President Chavez, a man who will not take orders from the USA. This makes him a "bad example" for the rest of Latin America.

The Americans have made it plain they do not want a negotiated settlement.

A lull in the conflict. Villagers who are known to have helped the guerrillas 
- even to the extent of selling them a bottle of water -are a target for torture or death at the hands of the paramilitaries. In the southern zone of Colombia, where Farc is in control, a mother and her children have, for the time being, little to fear as a troop of rebel fighters passes through San Vice