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 1152 September 17 2002

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Southwest seminar Saturday 2 pm.

American imperialist intimidation of the United Nations, and its gun-thug threats to Iraq, are bringing contempt and ridicule onto the West's world leadership but getting nowhere as far as securing monopoly-capitalism's global domination is concerned, now challenged by incurable international economic crisis and slump. The traditional warmongering "solution" to inter-imperialist market crisis (World War I and II) is now so out-of-synch with world development that (a) it is having trouble even getting off the ground; (b) it could suffer total humiliation even in its earliest stages; and (c) it will, as usual, have no effect on the inter-imperialist economic imbalance until such vast global destruction and devastation has been inflicted on the planet that communist revolutions will be obliged to seize power anyway. Even US defeats for the Taleban, al-Quaeda, and, Iraq (with no brilliant results from ANY of these stunts yet) - would still be empty trivia compared to the challenges from inter-imperialist contradictions and from massed communist revolutions which will inevitably threaten the 'New World Order' further on in the crisis. Fake-'left' debacle at the TUC fails to dispute Blair's disgraceful warmongering propaganda because of its own philistine ignorance and cowardice on Marxist crisis theory. Even ridiculous lapsed Blairites threaten more danger to New Labour imperialism than the 'No to war' social-pacifist futility of the fake-'left'.

However successful the US arm-twisting and aid-bribery to get UN Security Council "approval" for blitzing Iraq, it will remain nothing but an act of American imperialist bullying to try to shore up its dominant political position in the world as insoluble economic crisis humiliates Washington's role as "guardian of free-market capitalism's triumph for civilisation", etc, - AND IT WILL FAIL.

The attempted deception (getting a UN cover for blatant warmongering) is meeting hostility enough from all sides to indicate that a new neo-colonial kick-arse era is completely out of date, but the catastrophic mess that US blitzkrieg intervention into the Middle East will result in, will crystallise anti-imperialist antagonisms dramatically in all directions.

The "success" of al-Quaeda arrests is not the issue. It is the billions throughout the Third World who are turning against imperialism. As the EPSR has always explained, the tragi-comic DIY amateurism of Sept 11 was, however heroic and shattering, merely an exotic and shallow SYMPTOM of the trouble that the Western imperialist domination of the world is now in, (99% because of its coming failure as a global economic SYSTEM and only incidentally because of its mainly Western orientation).

Just as the arrests and targeted assassinations of militant Palestinians by Zionist imperialism can only steadily STRENGTHEN the growth of TOTAL revolutionary national-liberation struggle to overthrow the Jewish colonisation of Palestine, so will the al-Quaeda arrests merely reveal an ever widening revolt of the Third World billions against continued imperialist domination.

Even if blitzkrieging Iraq could be got away with (a big 'if'), it would still mean that US imperialism's difficulties for continuing to dominate the planet were nevertheless only just beginning, and would clearly be facing such arduous further perspectives that the monopoly-capitalist system's survival on Earth would be seen by all to be impossible. The most disastrous global economic slump in the whole of modern "free-market" history will see to that.

Even if the rabid, crooked, and philistine regime currently running US imperialism does succeed in blitzkrieg destruction of Iraq, it is likely to remain a shameful, isolated, fascist act which will fail to make arbitrary, aggressive warmongering routinely acceptable to world opinion, as the American monopolists would wish, - and it will fail even more spectacularly to halt or divert attention from the devastating international economic crisis about to poison capitalist civilisation (even worse than war will).

With varying degrees of shame or embarrassment, even the most polite and sycophantic rationalisers in the bourgeois press quite openly admit that US imperialism just wants war.

President Bush's concern over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is a pretext for a global strategy of pre-emptive attack. He and his advisers intend to establish precedents with Iraq that can be used against other states that stand out against US global control. The US, he says, cannot allow anyone the capacity to attack it, but the country will keep its own power to destroy all comers.

He summarises his policy as tackling "the worst weapons in the hands of the worst leaders". But little is being done with respect to the "worst weapons". Attempts by the international community to control nuclear, biological and chemical weapons have been relentlessly undermined by Bush's Republican party for more than a decade.

Military action against states flouting international norms on WMD can only be justified if we and the US are implementing them too. Saying "do as we say", not "do as we do", is an invitation to everyone to acquire them. Tony Blair is making terrorism and proliferation far easier by accepting Bush's deliberate introduction of anarchy in international security. Members of the Bush administration were in office in the 1980s and were silent when Iraq used poison gas on Iran, the US's arch-enemy at the time. And we in Britain may have forgotten that our airforce used poison gas to suppress rebellion in Iraq in the interwar period; one can be sure that the Iraqis have not.

You will hear two further arguments in support of US policy. The first is: "We are democracies so our weapons are OK and we do not need further control."   This is no more than saying that because we are good we cannot be bad.  The second is that only western nations believe in ethics and law, so they are no good in the real world. This is as self-contradictory as the first, and insidiously racist.

Sustained by such principles, the architects of President Bush's policy hope to see it applied to Iran, North Korea and, ultimately, China. For those Republicans who pride themselves on having destroyed the Soviet Union and unified Germany, their duty now is to achieve the same success over Beijing's nuclear-armed communist dictatorship.

The skills of the best speech writer could not blot out the gulf between last year's rhetoric and the reality that followed. Maybe it was the cutaway to Hamid Karzai in his green striped coat of many colours sitting in the chamber. It came as a sharp reminder of America's failure to invest in serious nation-building in Afghanistan,  failure to send in enough troops to stop the old warlords seizing power again, the paucity of aid and the brazen carelessness once war was won. 

So Bush's conjured images of a post-war Iraq,  peaceful and democratic, sounded like empty phantasms. War in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban was necessary - but so was investing in long-lasting security and prosperity if he wanted to prove how democracy wins over fundamentalist fury. 

From Kyoto and Johannesburg, to the ICC, steel tariffs, NMD and nuclear testing, too much has happened (or not happened) since last year's speech to take this one at face value.

Even so, good words are still preferable to bad ones. It was, after all, remarkable that the president was there in that chamber at all. A month ago the strident voices coming out of the White House would have none of it. The Rumsfeld/Cheney axis of was in the ascendant, the UN was for wimps. The hawks would never have let their emperor stand there soliciting UN support in dulcet tones.

It would be nice to believe that Tony Blair played some part in strengthening the arm of the Colin Powell internationalists who won the argument on the need for UN legitimacy. Sadly, he features hardly at all in US commentators' accounts of the internal Republican rows that finally brought Bush to the UN. For a very little influence, Blair has paid a frighteningly high price: the split with the rest of Europe, weakening his own influence by becoming Bush's tool, never again independent honest broker: At home there is angry puzzlement among many more in his own party than the usual suspects. Was it worth so much damage? Only if in the end this war is successfully averted.

Even now, the drafters are working at a UN resolution to square (or fudge) the needs of the US war party with French and Russian hesitation. Deals are brokered, poor countries' arms are twisted with aid and trade while Russia may be allowed to kill a few more Chechens. But a deal there must be. The only ones who hope the UN fumbles are the Rumsfeld/Cheney warriors who want no straitjacket, no option for Saddam to avoid the war now sharpening its knives on his borders. Moving command headquarters from Florida to Qatar could hardly send a louder message: America wants war, America. means war.

The only hope of  avoiding it is that Saddam takes fright at a security council resolution with a firm time limit for the weapons inspectors to return any time, any place or else, no runaround or obstruction. The message that the US means war has beam conveyed to him forcefully by everyone who has his ear, including former weapons inspector Scott Ritter. The US sabre is out of its scabbard.

There 	were very good reasons why Bush senior did not march on Baghdad in 1991, reasons that remain unchanged. Saddam's  elite troops around Baghdad would inflict very heavy casualties. 'In his death throes, he would certainly use anthrax and nerve gases. Iraq might fall apart, with Shi'ite lands defecting to Iran, 	strengthening another vile regime, destabilising others. If Afghanistan cannot hold US attention for one short year, how would far more complex Iraq be nurtured long term? Fermenting terror, recruiting generations of terrorists to come, the cure looks worse than the disease.

Curiously, the louder Bush and Blair call for an end to this villain, the less convincing it sounds. Why now? That remains the perplexing question. Containment works well: few observers think Saddam can launch anything. under present no-fly, daily bombing pressure. What is Bush's obsession? It remains a mystery. It is not a vote-winner in the US where the danger looks not clear and present, but cloudy and distant. The risks are frightening and the costs staggering. Petrol prices rise while stock exchanges fall at the prospect. Oil say some, but if US companies want Saddam's oil, an oil-driven cynical administration could make peace not war and help themselves to fat contracts.

No, it appears to spring from a new ideology, a neo-conservative dream which Charles Krauthammer, guru of the right, calls the US's "uniquely benign imperium". Hyperpower is not enough unless it is exerted so forcefully that no state ever again challenges benign US authority. One thing was made crystal dear yesterday -there is no other source of authority but America, and that means there is no other law but US law. 

What the US wants, the UN had better solemnise with a suitable resolution - very like the Roman senate and one of its lesser god emperors. But this is not the real America. A small coltish sect is battling for the "imperium" within this bizarre administration; resisted by mainstream Republicans - so what is Tony Blair doing in there with them?

But it is only not "the real America" to this type of Blair-loving reformist imbecility which pretended that paradise on earth was within reach of all under New Labour's "dynamic" class-collaboration "revolution".

That idiocy is now collapsing fastest of all as the appalling (but in fact never changing) warmongering realities of the capitalist-imperialist system in crisis are being painfully and terrifyingly brought home to the whole world.

The "real America" for the moment has to remain what it must always be under the capitalist system, namely, the currently dominant idea of the dominant (ie ruling) class.

The US imperialist bourgeoisie knows that the sweet and lucrative worldwide power that it enjoys is SERIOUSLY threatened by uncontrollable global economic dislocation, and then by the sort of implacable insurrectionary hostility represented in varying aspects and degrees by al-Quaeda terrorism, Iraqi intransigence. Palestinian suicide bombers, FARC guerrillas in Colombia, etc, etc, etc, etc, and by the fact that beyond that, such giant countries as Russia, China, India, Brazil, etc, have ineradicable anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist experience which won't be bullied and which might take a stand against complete licence for any amount or any type of warmongering which US imperialism wants to inflict.

Hence this superficially posturing (but in reality quite fearful) bluster by this crude super-monopolist business-mafia around Bush is forcing the pace to try to stampede the whole of American opinion into the warmongering camp, using the sick patriotism, the wounded pride, and the xenophobic vengeance (arising out of the Sept 11 humiliation for the USA) to keep this neo-Nazi 'real America' mood going for as long as possible.

And because of the debilitating effect on working-class politics universally from decades of anti-Marxist Revisionism, Trotskyism, and all other fake-'left' opportunism, - reactionary US imperialist warmongering is likely to keep its representation of "real America" going indefinitely until a DEFEAT of some kind halts this aggressive bluster in its tracks.

But there is no long-term way out for this global imperialist system in crisis.

And this short-term expediency of Bush and Blair attempting cunning propaganda speeches (at the UN and the TUC) to make their grotesque Nazi aggression arrogance sound 'rational' and 'justifiably patriotic', - fools only those who want to be fooled, and only temporarily at that.

As quoted above from the Guardians Polly Toynbee, the queen of idiot Blair worship, even the half brain-dead are seeing through this sick US fascist warmongering bluster with horror.

And the ridiculous flag-waving national chauvinism by fat-arsed Americans, momentarily keeping Bush high in the polls, will vanish rapidly as soon as this crazed global re-colonisation policing mission against all axes of evil runs into military disaster.

But it is the utter futility and stupidity of trying to turn round the imperialist system's insoluble global economic crisis by relentless armsrace warmongering which will remain the fundamental stumbling block for this terminal historical delusion (of being able to conceal capitalism's failure by an all-round "aggressive shake-up").

It won't work. The very same "over-production" force, now economically driving the planet towards the most devastating global slump ever in history, - the longest and deepest by far, - stir up exactly the same irreconcilable international political and social difficulties on crude matters of military threats and dirty tactics as happens when mere trade-war issues start the whole global confrontation game off.

From the largest countries to the smallest, no nation-state or ruling class can survive its domestic class-war difficulties if it simply capitulates to arbitrary bullying pressure, - whether ordered to stop or resume particular tariffs or trade-agreements, or whether ordered to submit to foreign troop movements, disarmament instructions, or enforced materials supplies.

In the life-or-death, global, cut-throat economic turmoil ahead, all 190 nations at the UN could in theory cause some kind of difficulty for this US imperialist incurable dementia of believing that its top-dog power and glory could be totally lost if it now fails to control everything happening on the planet as this terrifying warmongering revolutionary crisis relentlessly deepens.

With real reason from its monopoly-capitalist global ruling-class point of view, US imperialism really can see "axes of evil" threatening from all directions, China, Cuba, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, North Korea, Colombian FARC, al-Quaeda, the Taleban, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

But before the utter uselessness of Washington's insane global policing mission's failures (already) are examined in detail, the even more immovable obstacle of INTER IMPERIALIST irreconcilable economic conflict must be looked at.

If the attempt to bully somewhere as small and backward as Afghanistan can cause US imperialist domination such humiliating difficulties (see below), what nonsense it makes of past fake-'left' perspectives in Britain which capitulated before the barmy notion that the US New World Order would "impose" unwelcome "peace settlements" on all "hot spots" in the world such as Ireland, South Africa, Palestine, etc, which amounted effectively to "defeats" for those national-liberation struggles (typical anti-revolutionary petty-bourgeois defeatism, shared in part by the Socialist Alliance, CPGB, SLP, and hordes of Trots).

Even the fake-'left' treacherous and cowardly snigger that the "condemnable" amateur terrorism of A1-Quaeda would soon be punished mercilessly, and put in its place by the US superpower", etc, is looking in the completely wrong historical direction.

It is imperialist INABILITY to control the world any longer which will be the utterly decisive characteristic of the 21st century, not the opposite.

And it is most obvious of all on inter-imperialist economic matters, where the fake-'left' philistine contempt (of long standing) for making Marxist-Leninist theory the ONLY basis for ALL political work, has left them all not just ignorant of overproduction crisis as the sale basis for understanding contemporary imperialism, but AGGRESSIVELY ignorant of the Marxist theory, jeering at the EPSR's longstanding strictly Bolshevik methods of political work as "catastrophism", or "inopportune tactics", or "academicism", etc, etc, etc.

As a result, the entire fake-'left' (all 57 varieties had delegates there) sat totally paralysed in the TUC hall as Blair delivered his disgusting variant of Goebbels warmongering propaganda, talking up the need for the mighty West to blitzkrieg tin; Iraq "because of the threat to our rights and our values", - - exactly the same way that imperialist warmongering's German pacemakers in the 1930, used to ludicrously talk about the "threat to Germany" from tiny Czechoslovakia and feeble Poland, etc, etc, etc,. 

The fake-'left' sits mute and dumbstruck with the "excuse" that we don't know what's going to happen yet", etc.

What utter anti-Marxist and anti-working-class garbage.

Even bourgeois creeps like Mowlam and Toynbee are now saying loudly what the EPSR has for years been scientifically DEMONSTRATING, from capitalism's own sources, is inevitably brewing, namely an uncontrollable global imperialist economic crisis WHICH CAN ONLY END IN DELIBERATE WARMONGERING ONCE AGAIN, - exactly as capitalist crises succeeded in inflicting twice last century.

So what are Scargillite-unionists doing on national television interviews last week, telling the entire working-class to not even beware of private capital being invested in the former nationalised industries, - just worry about PFIs being given too favourable a deal, etc, etc.

And this just minutes before Blair was about to make his declaration of global war to rescue the whole system of private capital from the insoluble economic crisis it has got itself into.

Of course we "know" what is going to happen. Capitalism is inflicting warmongering breakdown and revolutionary crisis on civilisation once again.

What does the precise detail matter of exactly how the warmongering escalates? Even the imperialists themselves don't know yet if the next phase of warmongering escalation will actually begin with a blitzkrieg of Iraq.

A military diversion to quell revolution in Argentina is just as much on the cards at some stage, or to quell riots in downtown Los Angeles as this vicious poison of world economic slump starts to crush human aspirations everywhere.

Even saying just "no to war" is futile since imperialism has never acted in any other way in crisis, and never can act any other way.

And saying "no to war without a UN mandate" is even more stupid, sowing even more dreadful illusions in imperialist 'democracy'.

Strutting to the UN rostrum after Bush's sad attempt at a "democratic American" version of Goebbelsian propaganda, presenting bullying warmongering as most "reasonable" the Blairite stooge Jack Straw showed what real zero value the imperialists put on the "democratic" decision-making of the "world parliament".

"The responsibility of the Security Council is very clear," Straw told them without waiting to hear any of their views or the outcome of any "democratic vote".

"There's no doubt about the urgency of the situation, and the responsibility resting with the UN".

Without waiting for any discussion to be heard from the supposed "wisdom" of "civilisation's world forum" Straw was warning them like the little sidekick that he is, peeking out from behind Bush's trousers, that they had "better vote for war, or else", cowardlily repeating Washington's gunslinger's "ethic" which warns that "those who aren't with us on this, are against us".

So much for "global democracy".

And even in advance of the irreconcilable economic conflict between the imperialists bursting fully onto the global agenda, already Bush's Nazi-imbecile-like bluff of "with us or against us" has been called.

With increasing firmness, Germany's Schroeder has begun saying at ever-louder volume: "Under my leadership, Germany will not take part in a military intervention".

Seemingly as a direct result, Schroeder has apparently begun to spurt ahead in the coming General Election opinion polls for the first time.

"But our whole relationship with the USA will be threatened by this", warned his opponent Stoiber for the even more reactionary Christian Democrats.

As a result, Schroeder's lead for the Social Democrats grew even more.

Not to be outdone in this "independent" imperialist posturing, Chirac of France went even further, terming the US plan for pre-emptive blitzkrieg "extraordinarily dangerous", and pointedly jeering at Blair by saying that France would never act as a lackey for America.

"In life, one must not confuse friends with sycophants", he pointedly added, saying that Bush and Blair now had most of world opinion against them.

"The Middle East doesn't need more war, it needs more peace " added Schroeder, taking the inter-imperialist split even further.

And considering the economic background, nothing could be more obvious or inevitable.

Listen to the language of the capitalist press's own admissions of how seriously and unavoidably the major imperialist powers have already been put at loggerheads by just the first beginnings of the global capitalist markets collapse.

Already in figurative language, the talk is of "war" between US domination and its rivals, and of "nuclear weapons threats" to each other:

The EU yesterday stepped up pressure on the American government in its long-running trade row over illegal tax breaks when it threatened to exert punitive tariffs on thousands of exports, from nuclear reactor parts to chewing gum.

Announcing a list of $14bn (£9bn) worth of goods that it is considering targeting, the EU insisted it would accept nothing less than a complete repeal of the tax breaks which the World Trade Organisation has deemed contravene global trade rules.

Brussels won the right from the WTO last month to impose $4bn worth of sanctions on US goods, and the list will be whittled down after the European commission has considered submissions from industry.

As business leaders warned that a transatlantic trade war could be the last straw for the fragile world economy, Brussels insisted that it was prepared to go ahead with the sanctions if Congress refuses to change its tax laws.

The Bush administration has promised to amend the offending legislation but is facing opposition from rightwing members of its own party, who resent interference from the WTO in America's tax code.

A spokeswoman for the EU trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, said Brussels was monitoring their efforts closely.

"If the work is not progressing, we will not have patience;" she said.

The European commission has deliberately targeted goods in which America accounts for less than a fifth of imports in order to minimise the prospect of price rises for European consumers.

Business leaders yesterday urged the commission to take care of detonating what Washington has described as a nuclear weapon.

"Sanctions are a last resort" said Monique Julien, a spokeswoman for another business lobby, UNICE.'

Washington warned that the tariffs could harm European industry as well as American companies.

"This is truly a doubled-edged sword,' said Rich Mills, a spokesman for the US trade representative's office.

Both sides have played down the immediate threat of a transatlantic trade war in recent months as the world economy has weakened.

European industry is also in an ambivalent position because its imports of US goods will be made more expensive if the EU goes ahead with the sanctions.

"It is important to retaliate as the EU cannot tolerate the unilateralism that is shown by the US, and it is important to give a signal that this is not possible," said Ralph Kamphoener, an international trade adviser at industry group Eurocommerce.

"On the other hand, it is not tolerable that the commerce sector in Europe is caused any harm"

Mr Moore leaves his successor, former Thai finance minister Supachai Panitchpakdi, with a demoralised and unhappy organisation and an enormous task: steering the WTO's 145 members to a successful conclusion of the new round of global trade talks by the deadline of 2005.

In a year's time, Mr Supachai faces his first big test when trade ministers gather for a mid-term progress report in Cancun, Mexico. On present form, it will be one of the shortest international meetings of all time: virtually no progress has been made since Doha. "When ministers meet in Mexico, they will be in state of complete and furious disagreement," predicts one trade analyst.

The spirit of cooperation between Washington and Brussels which enabled the Doha round to be launched on November 14 has proved ephemeral. Since then, America's decision to impose punitive tariffs on foreign steel imports and to authorise an 60% rise in agricultural subsidies has infuriated its biggest trading partner and raises the risk of a renewed cold war between them.

"Without terrorist attacks on the US there would have been no agreement at Doha," says Duncan Green, a policy adviser at Catholic aid agency Cafod. "The period between September 11 and the fall of Kabul on November 14 marked the high point of US multilateralism."

There is little love lost between European governments and the Bush administration - as a succession of leaders made clear at the recent world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg. Europe is angry about American unilateralism in the war on terror, in the Middle East and over global warming.

If Brussels is looking for an opportunity to get its own back, it has been handed the ultimate weapon. Last Friday, a WTO dispute panel authorised it to impose $4bn worth of trade sanctions in a long running fight over tax breaks for American multinationals like Boeing and Microsoft. It is the largest retaliation measure ever approved by the WTO and the US trade representative, Robert Zoellick, has warned it would be the equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb.

So far, Europe's top trade negotiator, Pascal Lamy, has shown no signs of wanting to escalate already tense transatlantic relations. The fact that the EU chose to challenge the American tax breaks at all is a testament to how bad relations between the two can get. The case was brought by Mr Lamy's predecessor, Sir Leon Brittan, as direct revenge for the humiliations Europe suffered at the WTO over beef and bananas.

Honeymoon hiatus

Trade observers worry that this kind of tit-for-tat behaviour is how protectionist trade wars start. While the administration has promised to amend its legislation, hardline forces within Congress who resent having America's tax code dictated by bureaucrats in Geneva will be pressing for Europe's tax laws also to come under the spotlight.

No immediate crisis is likely. Mr Supachai's arrival is likely to usher in at least a brief honeymoon in Geneva and the EU will not want to aggravate tensions with Washington ahead of November's mid-term elections.

The road to Cancun is littered with obstacles. Mr Supachai must win the trust of the US which backed his rival, Mr Moore, for director general's job, forcing them to split the term. The global economy has taken a turn for the worse, inflaming protectionist lobbies in the US and Europe. Then there ere is the thorny issue of cutting agriculture subsidies, which proved a stumbling block in the last round of global trade talks.

Tensions over agriculture could blow up as early as next March, when WTO members must agree the framework for cutting export subsidies in the new round. There has been no meeting of minds so far. Progress has been minimal.

Agricultural charges

America's proposal that average agricultural tariffs should be reduced from 60% to 15% and spending on subsidies be cut by $100bn worldwide was greeted with howls of derision by the EU. Member states said Washington's decision to authorise the farm bill proved its stance on agriculture was hypocritical.

The EU has failed to advance a counter-proposal of its own and has disappointed developing countries and the Cairns group of agricultural free traders with its unambitious plan for reforming the common agricultural policy.

The chief opponent of reform is France, which some observers believe is adopting an almost Trotskyite approach to negotiations in the hope of precipitating a crisis.

"The French believe you need talks to break down completely so that everybody lowers their expectations," says one former trade negotiator and long-time observer of the Geneva scene.

The source added that while this tactic enabled the French to block significant agricultural reform in the Uruguay round, since Seattle the stakes have become much higher. A WTO crisis now would take place in the full glare of the world's media and to the accompanying cheers of the anti-globalisation movement.

The Americans need to export to Europe to reduce their trade deficit, running at almost $40bn a month, while the only bit of the European economy which is providing any boost to growth is the export sector.

In the present circumstances, a collapse in negotiations or a return to tit-for-tat tariffs increases could trigger the double dip recession the financial markets fear. In trade talks, as in diplomacy, common sense does not always prevail.

At the same time, the usual Mary Poppins optimism of the Times economic guru Anatole Kaletsky has turned decidedly miserable about the global imperialist economy's prospects, notwithstanding all the allowances such anti-communist propagandists usually-make for the "unexpected jolt" the West's prospects are supposed  (inexplicably) to have suffered in the aftermath of Sept 11, 2001.

Without any real explanation, Kaletsky seems to be saying that a Crash is on the cards anyway:

A year ago it was widely believed that the US economy would quickly return to the rapid rates of economic growth and productivity that it achieved in the 1990s. It also seemed reasonable to hope that Europe might eventually catch up with that performance, if it accepted the necessary reforms.

Today, such hopes seem forlorn. Estimates of America's trend rate of growth are falling steadily, from almost 4 per cent to 3 per cent or less. Europe's trend growth rate is now put by many economists at only 2 per cent. In Britain, where last year Gordon Brown raised his cautious estimate of the trend growth rate from 2.25 to 2.5 percent, there is now pressure 'to return to the lower figure. Such small changes may sound trivial, but they can make the difference between prosperity and stagnation, between full employment and mass joblessness, between swelling public coffers and fiscal crisis.

Starting with Europe, the chilling political effect of this year's slowdown could set back by years, if not decades, the prospects for economic reform. The complacency and incompetence of politicians and central bankers has brought back to Europe the nightmare of mass unemployment. This, in turn, now threatens to paralyse the conservative politicians who have swept to power.

These new European governments are now condemned to manage economic and fiscal crises instead of implementing the desperately needed labour-market and tax reforms that voters had been promised and that held out the prospects of major improvements in long-term economic performance. To make matters worse, the pressure from the ECB and the Commission for more deflationary policies is making unemployment and budget deficits even worse.

The ECB and the Commission have done much more to damage the European economy in the past 12 months than al-Qaeda ever could.

Turning to America, the increasing pessimism can also be explained by government policies, but of a very different kind. Since September 11 the Bush Administration has deliberately encouraged paranoia about the terrorist threat. Whether President Bush has whipped up this hysteria out of genuine fear, or in order to retain his popularity, to gain support for military spending or distract attention from regressive tax cuts, is uncertain. Whatever the motivation, the outcome has been clear. The war fever has damaged confidence, discouraged investment and contributed to the collapse of share prices. That, in turn, has raised the cost of capital, further discouraged investment and therefore reduced the prospects for long term productivity growth.

Making matters much worse has been the President's sabre-rattling against Iraq and the failure of his Middle East policies. That has sent oil prices soaring, inflicting direct damage on the US and world economies. At the same time, his vacillation is undermining international confidence in US leadership. It is no coincidence that the dollar peaked against the euro on the night that Mr Bush delivered his speech on the "axis of evil" and has been falling ever since.

The Bush Administration has also used the political cover from September 11 to damage the US economy more directly. By showering Republican industrial interests with subsidies and protectionist favours, President Bush has broken with a free market philosophy of economic management that has served America well. By procrastinating in response to the Wall Street accounting scandals, he has undermined confidence in US business practices. By frittering away the budget surpluses he inherited from Bill Clinton he has reduced the Government's capacity to offer short term fiscal stimulus if required. And by reneging on his promises that the Government would bear the direct economic costs of September 11, he has left most US airlines on the verge of bankruptcy, crippled the global insurance industry and severely damaged the local economy of New York.

All these blunders when put together are starting to have a long-term impact on America's economic structure; The loss of financial and business confidence has led to a major weakening of investment and that, in turn, will imply lower productivity growth. The long-term tax cuts and huge defence programmes threaten an uncontrollable expansion of the budget deficit that will become a burden on the economy for decades to come. The abandonment of free trade and the refusal. to deal promptly with Wall Street's accounting scandals have led businessmen and investors everywhere to start wondering whether the American economic model really works, and indeed whether the spectacular economic  statistics of the 1990s might have been as fictitious as the profits of Enron.

Over time, such questions corrode US self-confidence, undermine financial markets, damage investment and productivity, and threaten to set off a vicious circle that quite plausibly could drag America back into  a 1970-stype period of economic malaise.

It is not too late to reverse these errors. But these things will not happen of their own accord.

They will not happen if the ECB and the Bank of Japan balk at their responsibility to sustain growth by managing demand; if European governments fail to deregulate their economies and reintroduce free labour contracts; if the Bush Administration wrecks US fiscal policy with ideological tax cuts, protects and subsidises inefficient industries to buy votes and irresponsibly disrupts the world economy by waging unnecessary wars, and cripples U5 fiscal policy with ideologically inspired tax handouts for its rich supporters.

If the world's leading governments continue to behave like this, they will be doing bin Laden's work for him. If the world economy is still stagnant next year, voters will not blame Saddam or bin Laden. They twill blame Bush, Prodi, Duisenberg, Koizumi and all the rest And they will be right.

It is not clear whether this reactionary mouthpiece thinks more warmongering would be a good thing, or less of it.

Or is it a plea for warmongering minus the Bush gang's corporate corruption?

Either way, this revered soothsayer and eternal optimist is suddenly singing very different notes from his usual chirpy tune.

But imagine how damning such "independent press" commentators will sound when the fat is really in the fire as far as catastrophic global economic prospects are concerned.

The fake-'left' petty-bourgeoisie (from the Alliance to the SLP) are sure to remain comatose for a long while yet as bureaucratic sectarian conceit of the "leaderships" holds back any serious return towards totally OBJECTIVE scientific Marxist ways of trying to understand civilisation's greatest ever crisis.

But all the 'moral' and reformist consciences posturing of the supposedly "independent" petty-bourgeoisie, staffing imperialism's own direct propaganda outlets (as opposed to the fake-'left' indirect outlets for pro-imperialist propaganda of the "condemn terrorism" brainlessness), could in part go even further and faster to anti-US imperialism than the inter-imperialist split is already travelling.

There is already colossal and steadily growing middle-class unease, for example, at some of the sicker and more unexpected spin-offs from Western imperialism's warmongering outbursts.

Russia's threat to do an Iraq on Georgia, for example, for allegedly harbouring Chechen "terrorists" in the Pankisi Gorge area of the Caucasus, is causing nightmares to the "soul" of the "free world" press.

To the Bonapartist thugs holding office in Moscow on behalf of the mafia-riddled anarchic economy, the "international democratic" logic and clear political advantage could not be more obvious.

On merely the most manufactured rumours that "some" al-Quaeda might be hiding in remotest parts of Iraq, US imperialism is expecting to get away with justifying its threatened blitzkrieg destruction of Iraq as part of its lunatic "war on terrorism" to get vengeance for the one-off minor indignities of Sept 11.

With slightly greater semantic logic but with equally degenerate philosophical justification, Moscow's big business stooges declare that Moscow has been bombed by Chechen "terrorism" just as New York has been by al-Quaeda, and that Georgia can be invaded without permission in order to let Russian forces rout out Chechen "terrorists" in exactly the same way that America says it has the right to invade Afghanistan to rout out the al-Quaeda terrorists.

Putin insists that the USA has far less "right" to go into Iraq than Russia has to go into Georgia because of far less proof of direct terrorist attack emanating from what is being targeted.

The Moscow regime is cynical enough to help the USA get Security Council "approval" for a blitzkrieg of Iraq provided Russia can invade Georgia without too much fuss.

Such sordid inter-imperialist skulduggery will rapidly become the norm once the blitzkrieg of Iraq is forced on the world as "acceptable conduct".

And this will reflect not the silliness of passing fashions in international political correctness but the deadly serious permanent background (to all future diplomacy) of the fiercely-contested rival trade-war interests.

Even if defeats for imperialism in its early minor-country skirmishes (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc) are not forthcoming, - beyond that stands the absolute CERTAINTY of imperialist defeats in that the only possible end  product of the major powers throwing their weight about (ie pursuit of their separate specific interests as the economic crisis tightens its grip) is DIRECT warmongering conflict once again between the imperialist major countries themselves.

Germany, Russia, and France are currently only engaged in minor pointscoring at the expense of the USA's arrogant warmongering bluster (and the UK's ridiculous stooge role). But age-old serious questions of vital economic interest, trade-war matters, and issues of crucial national prestige and long-term political influence, - all of them impacting back on the domestic class struggle's state of play in each country, - are all on unavoidable collision course as the epoch of imperialist world trade boom (during which ALL major countries can flourish and do sufficiently well in relative terms) is replaced by an epoch of markets collapse and world trade slump.

And while historically inexperienced human imagination grasps these things only with difficulty, the whole pattern of modern imperialist history proves that the major powers must go ALL OUT for victory in this inter-imperialist conflict or else each ruling class, which fails or gives up, faces losing everything to domestic class war, turned incandescent by ever worsening economic turmoil.

It is, of course, a very long way from blitzkrieging Iraq to inter-imperialist world war, but World Wars I and II started off in exactly the same way of smaller nations being militarily bullied by a major power in order to grab for itself some envisaged advantage in the constant Great Game of inter-imperialist economic and political rivalry. 
The PROCESS is unmistakable. It is a process of crisis-driven, arbitrary, prestige posturing, military sabre rattling, and economic political arm-twisting.

Hut since there is no SOLUTION to the incompatible rival economic interests of the major imperialist powers (as world slump and economic devastation become the arena of never-ending competition), than it is a process which can only ultimately end in a new World War of some kind or other.

So just saying "no to war" is worse than useless.

It is social-pacifism, - more hated by the Bolsheviks than anything else - which was preventing the working-class from taking action to put a stop to insane inter-imperialist warmongering once and far all, namely REVOLUTIONARY action to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist bourgeoisie.

Just saying "no to war" simply disarms the working-class, fooling them that 'moral pressure' will force a halt to warmongering.

It will do nothing of the sort, as all of history proves.

Only the overthrow of the ruling-class, usually in the wake of a DEFEAT for it at the inter-imperialist stage of the warmongering, - can bring an end to war.

And there are no other "political priorities", as all the fake-'left' claim.

What is it other than a total DIVERSION to insist that a workers party can only have "protect the nationalised industries", "improve pensions", and "restore trade-union rights", etc, etc, in its political programme when the imperialist states being agitated are all in reality only calculating their next moves several years down the line in the inter-imperialist warmongering conflict which is the only place where this insoluble economic crisis can end up???????

It re-states the never changing Marxist case against all 'left' reformist pressure of every kind. Only REVOLUTION can seriously emancipate the working class from wage slavery and warmongering exploitation.

And since imperialism's unalterable long-term pattern of boom slump revolutionary crisis is pushing the proletariat ultimately only in the direction of revolution anyway, - and since the only successful revolutionary struggles will be those where workers have become CONSCIOUS of what must be done to end the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by building a specific PARTY OF REVOLUTIONARY THEORY, - then all 'choice' of 'left' groups to NOT agitate their followers into consciousness about the need for REVOLUTION, can only be described us deliberately COUNTER-revolutionary behaviour, as the decisions of CONSCIOUS REACTIONARIES.

The fake-'left' is holding back the working class.

But as always, world events themselves will be decisive in at last providing the international working-class with a Marxist education.

The West's basic proposition in the modern world has been that 'free-market' economic prosperity will bring unending benefits to all people on Earth, and that imperialist 'defensive' military might will "selflessly" come to the aid and protection of "democracy" everywhere to allow this "free-market miracle" to take place, etc.

But in reality, the imperialist record stinks.

Huge areas of the world like most of Africa, much southern and central Asia, and large areas of Latin America have not only never crawled out of grinding poverty, but have never even escaped out of vicious dictatorship, and now even find themselves facing ever deeper poverty once again as the world slump starts slashing West-dependent economies' trade earnings once more.

Guerrilla-war revolutions continue to strengthen right round the world from Colombia to the Philippines; and collapsing economies in more advanced countries like Argentina, Turkey, and South Africa, etc, now threaten a return towards old-fashioned communist revolutions.

And even where varying degrees of "benign" Western intervention have taken place for economic or political reasons of spreading the "good life", the contemporary results are largely disastrous.

Potentially 190 countries at the UN need to be successfully bullied or bribed in some way or other far the modern epoch of US imperialist unchallenged world domination to be able to survive the coming "impossible" capitalist economic catastrophe and humiliating "New World Order" breakdown.

The crushing of Serbia's resistance to US imperialist diktat has, in many eyes, produced an even worse situation in parts of former Yugoslavia (e.g. Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Albanian populated territories) than existed before.

But even if the wrecking of Serbia is counted a "success story", that still left 189 countries to go.

Afghanistan was next for the "New World Order" treatment, but all that the non-stop stories in the capitalist press itself continue to do is pile up more and more doubts about whether even overthrowing the barmy Taliban has really done the Afghan people much good:

THEY WERE living in a bombed-out school. It had no roof and no windows. They had no food and no blankets. There were three families: nine adults and 16 children. Or at least there were when I first spoke to them. Two days later there were eight adults and 19 children.

The school was on the outskirts of Garden, a town high on a plateau in eastern Afghanistan. It was November and, although the days were warm, the nights were cold enough to freeze puddles in the dirt streets, cold enough to make the town's packs of stray dogs howl, and cold enough to kill Mohamed Rahmatullah's mother and five-year old daughter one night and his four year old son the next.

Rahmatullah and his family had left their homes on the Shomali plains, 150 miles to the north, six weeks earlier, when the US bombardment began. Their money got them to Garden, but not to safety in Pakistan as they had hoped, and they did not have the cash to buy food or a roof over their heads. Overhead the vapour trails of American jets streaked across the washed out winter sky.

Six months later Rahmatullah was gone. Other families were living in the wreck of Garden's primary school. The day before a local warlord had mortared the town, killing 25. A year on, little has changed for the innocents in the way of the bombs. And that is a failing that threatens to derail the war on terror.

To start with, the US-led campaign achieved most of its immediate aims with ease. The Taliban collapsed, al-Qaeda's camps were destroyed and the group itself was dispersed. Most of its leaders, notably Osama bin Laden, have yet to be captured, but are, for the moment, out of action.

Why, then, is there a growing sense that the war on terror is in fact far from won? Partly because we now know far more about the nature of al-Qaeda. And partly because, after a week in which Humid Karzak the Afghan President, narrowly escaped assassination and a bomb killed at least  30 in Kabul, we are realising that a stable Afghanistan is still long way off.

Just north of Garden is a wide, open plain studded with small villages. In May I stepped out of an RAF Chinook with a troop of Royal Marines who were in search of 'AQT' as the British military call 'al-Qaeda and former Taliban' elements, watched by the locals. 'We are pleased to see them here,' one village headman told me. 'Now maybe things will be good for Afghanistan.' 

AFTER THE FALL of the Taliban there was joy. In Kabul, coffee shops were thronged with returning refugees discussing the past, the future and the rapidly rising prices, In Herat, people like Mairy Bursa were able to watch female students in public. Her husband, Abdul, who fought the  Soviet forces and had seen six of his brothers killed by the Afghan communist secret police remembers dancing in the   streets.

In April in Bamiyan, where the Taliban had destroyed two 1,700 year old Buddha statues a year before, people spoke to me of democracy and justice. Now they speak of their fears, not their hopes.

So what is going wrong? Afghan government officials, aid workers and development economists all say that the problem is money.

last November the leaders of the developed nations promised that the Afghans would not be abandoned.

But out of £1bn pledged for 2001, only a fraction has arrived, and there is little prospect of more in the near future. The situation is so bad that even the UNHCR - which dealt with 1.5 million returnees - has run out of cash. Now, as winter nears again, seven million people are at risk of famine.

The whole reconstruction project is threatened. Traditionally, Afghan leaders owe their authority to their skill in battle, their wisdom in settling disputes and the resources they can access for their followers. In a country this poor, the latter is critical. Any leader who fails to bung benefits swiftly to his followers will find them defecting.

Karzai is now in an unenviable position. His bravery and judgement are not in doubt, but he must deliver practical benefits soon. If he is killed, few doubt that chaos would follow.

In late 1999 Mohamed Atta, the man who would lead the strike on 11 September, left Hamburg for Afghanistan. With him were three other key men in the hijack plot.

Details of the trip emerged 10 days ago in pre-trial hearings for Mounir al-Motassadeq, a Moroccan alleged to have been a key 'cog' in Atta's scheme. According to the prosecution, the four men were travelling to Kandahur, the al-Qaeda centre, 'to get backing for their plan'. That detail is crucial. It indicates that Atta and his co-conspirators thought up the 11 September attacks, not the al-Qaeda leadership. Atta went to Afghanistan to seek bin Laden's approval and logistical  help.

He would have joined a long queue. It is increasingly clear that bin Laden and his aides instigated only a fraction of the attacks for which they have been blamed. 

Hundreds of activists from all over the world beat a path to bin Laden's door to present him with their dreams of destruction. The Saudi, with his funds, his reserves of experienced experts and his training camps could turn those dreams into reality.

Early last year, for example, two Islamist groups from Iraqi Kurdistan arrived to request aid and training. The men then returned home and launched suicide attacks.

Even where al-Qaeda has been more proactive, it has looked to 'plug into' pre-existing groups in Algeria, SouthEast Asia and elsewhere. Their offers of help have not always been accepted.

A close reading of court testimony and interviews with al-Qaeda associates shows that many activists overcame huge obstacles to make their way to Afghanistan. Men like Rasheed Daoud al'Owhali, who drove a truck bomb into the US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, gave up a comfortable life in Saudi Arabia.

Ahmed Ressam, a penniless thief who tried to blow up Los Angeles airport in 1999, made his way across half the world to find bin Laden's camps.

Letters found last November in the deserted Kaldan camp in Afghanistan, where the hijackers are suspected of having trained, showed again that the hundreds of men who passed through were angry, motivated and full of ideas for waging a violent 'jihad' against the West.

This is crucial. Bin laden built a 'terrorist university' unlike any previously seen. He was able to do it because of a historically unique set of factors: chaos in Afghanistan, the weakness of its neighbours, especially Pakistan, the emergence of a new, violent ideology with powerful backers in the Middle East all compounded by a profound lack of interest in the region on the part of Western powers.

He - or someone similar - will only be able to do it again if a similar set of circumstances occur. This shows the importance of reconstructing Afghanistan and preventing any situation developing elsewhere that is as much 'counter-terrorism' as the sexier, special forces operations.

Bat the fact that bin Laden was a facilitator, not a Bondstyle villain orchestrating a global network, stresses another key point. Destroying the 'terrorist university' does not eliminate its students' reasons for wanting to attend. Nor does it step them acting.

IN CONVERSATIONS in Gaza, Algiers, Karachi, Damascus and Amman and in hundreds of kebab stalls and in taxi ranks and hotel lobbies throughout the Middle East and Asia in the last two years, the same fundamental themes resurface.

A 20 year old university student in any of these places is confronted with an invidious choice. He can either aspire to the perceived glamour of the West and accept, as he looks at the squalor around him, the lack of jobs and fundamental freedoms, that his will always be a second-rate, ersatz version of Western life as shown on MTV. Or he can embrace the empowering certainties  of extremist Islam. Hardest of all, he can try to reconcile the two.

On Friday, on a hill above Kabul, a father helped bury his 21- year-old son who had died of wounds sustained in the market place bombing. "I had two sons before, now I only have one,' Shah Mohamed said, weeping quietly.

The tragedy for Shah Mohamed, for Rahmatullah and for all the Afghans is that, as the world attempts to work out solutions to these pressing problems, whether through military force or other means, someone is always going to get caught in the crossfire.

Nobody knows exactly how many Taliban prisoners were secretly interred in this mass grave, a short distance from the main road. But there is now substantial evidence that the worst atrocity of last year's war in Afghanistan took place here; most controversially, during an operation masterminded by US special forces.

A 10-minute drive away is Shiberghan prison, where about 800 Taliban fighters who surrendered late last November at the town of Kunduz are held. The Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum controls the prison; his mansion is nearby.

It was his commanders who transported the Taliban captives to Shiberghan. "It was awful. They crammed us into sealed shipping containers," a 24 year-old survivor, Irfan Azgar Ali, told the Guardian. "We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot.

"There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Shiberghan, only 10 of us were still alive."

The prisoners still in Shiberghan - half of them Afghans, and half Pakistanis estimate that about 400 people suffocated to death during the journey. Other sources say the figure is between 900 and 1,000. The Physicians for Human Rights group from Boston, which identified the mass grave earlier this year and later sent out a forensic scientist to carry out further tests, suggests that 2,000-3,000 of the 8,000 prisoners taken to Shiberghan died on the way.

But the Guardian has obtained harrowing details which suggest that their death was not a tragic accident but a deliberate act of revenge.

Some of the first Taliban fighters to surrender made the initial part of the journey in open lorries, their faces caked with dust. When they reached Mazar-i-Sharif, 90 miles from Kunduz, they were taken to Qala Zaini, a mud-walled fortified compound on the outskirts of the city.

There Gen Dostum's soldiers crammed them into shipping containers. When they protested that they could not breathe, the soldiers told them to duck down, then fired several Kalashnikov rounds into the containers. "I saw blood coming out of the holes," an eyewitness who refuses to be identified said.

A driver who made four trips to Dashti-Leili said not all the prisoners in his lorry were dead when they arrived: some were merely unconscious or gravely injured. The guards laid the dead and the still living out on the desert.

"They raked them all with bullets to make sure they were dead," the driver said. "Then they buried them."

What makes this massacre different from atrocities carried out by the Taliban regime is the presence of US special forces in the area, both at Shiberghan and at Erganak, 200 miles away, where the Taliban prisoners were first loaded into lorries. The question human rights groups want answered is: how much did the American soldiers know at the time?

The Pentagon said last week that the US troops had reported that they were unaware what had happened to the prisoners. But the evidence suggests that they were so close to Gen Dostum's soldiers that they may have been informed.

The general has been on the US payroll for nearly a year. According to Newsweek magazine, an elite team from the Fifth Special Forces Group first met up with Gen Dostum last October, when its members were dropped by Chinook helicopter at his mountain base.

They coordinated the Northern Alliance's dramatic assault on Mazar-i-Shariff which fell on November 6, and then pursued the Taliban's northern army to Kunduz, where it remained trapped for more than two weeks.

During this bloody period the US special forces unit, the 595 A-team, paid repeated visits to Shiberghan prison plucking the American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, for example, from his cell hours after his detention.

Mr Lindh and the other 85 Taliban survivors from the Qala-i-Jhangi were also transported to Shiberghan by container, despite the intervention of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

One source claims that a dust-covered special forces vehicle pulled up at Dashtn-i-Leili and parked on the side of the road, 500 metres from where bulldozers were busy burying the Taliban dead. Gen Dostum's soldiers instructed local villagers to stay away from the area.

Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, has called for an inquiry into the massacre, which appears to have taken place at night. Last-week he sent a team to investigate. But given Mr Karzai's tenuous grip on power, the team is unlikely to  come to any definite conclusions.

A confidential UN memo obtained by Newsweek concluded that there was enough evidence to justify a "fully-fledged criminal investigation": But earlier this week Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy, said the government was too fragile to investigate further. "Politics is the art of the possible," he said.

The Pentagon has so far declined to answer several tricky questions, among them, were US soldiers present when the containers were first opened at Shiberghan prison? 

US intelligence officers spent weeks interrogating Taliban and al-Qaida suspects at the jail, and in time removed 114 prisoners from their cramped, lice-ridden cells to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they remain without charge.

But the same soldiers appear to have no knowledge of the mass grave just down the road.

But just suppose for argument's sake that Afghanistan can be bombed and beaten into some kind of shape which Washington can pretend to "approve of" in its grotesque hypocritical arrogance, - there would still be 188 countries potentially yet requiring some stiff neo-colonial "policing" in order to make US world domination feel more secure.

Then, beg a host of even bigger questions and pretend that Iraq could be reasonably quickly and safely blitzed into line, - and then what????  Still a potential 187 countries yet in need of some violent American "policing" in order to let the past era of US world control continue to expect to survive the crisis intact.

It is all the most ridiculous pipe-dream.

Even ignoring, the epoch-making resumption of communist revolutions everywhere, the global imperialist economic collapse on its own will inevitably inflict as dramatic and humiliating a destruction of the USA's near-absolute political and economic domination of the planet as has befallen any toppled empire in world history, not excluding the decline and fall of Rome.

The dollar currency collapse and the total annihilation of American imperialism's credit all round the world (vastly used at the rest of the planet's continual expense for bribing US stooges for decades with aid and armaments) would see to that on its own.

Add in a new wave of worldwide communist revolutions even more powerful than the outbreaks after 1917 and 1945 which the West even then could barely control, -- and it can be seen that the only serious driving force and perspective on the planet is the crisis and crash of the imperialist system itself, shortly to prove itself rotten ripe for revolutionary overthrow everywhere.

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