Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.
V. I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074        www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.] 
No 1163  December 03 2002                                                                                                                                   25p

The rotten swindle of capitalist-dominated Britain, which is what is really sickening workers, will still be there no matter how 'sensibly' and politely conciliatory the FBU are at ACAS. The firemen's political instincts to stuff Blairism are the BEST thing about them, not the delusion that a 'reasonable enough' wage negotiation will transform working-class happiness in 2003. But the real significance of standing up to New Labour stooging for monopoly capitalism lies in its reflection of the international warmongering disasters seen coming out of the West's sordid cover-up attempts to blame imminent economic collapse, before it has arrived, on "foreign evil-axis powers", and to prepare to bully a way out of "free-market" catastrophe. This degenerate arms-race stunt is FAILING, and worldwide forces of anti-imperialist revolution, taking many bizarre initial forms, grow irresistibly.

More emphasis on the stinking class-elitism Blair's vicious muddleheads represent, 'masterminding' the approaching greatest economic crisis in history, and less on 'Real Labour' illusions would do nicely, but class-war emerges nevertheless.

The potential political challenge to Blairism surfacing via the firemen's dispute (see below) fits EPSR expectations of a new centrist movement developing shortly but needs to be seen in its international context to be properly understood and worked with.

And it is a deeper issue than merely linking the government's shabby propaganda against the FBU claim while approving Blair and the MPs 40% salary increases and even more lucrative moonlighting second incomes; setting £1billion aside for the depraved, needless, and illegal slaughter of Iraq; and generally condoning the ludicrous glitzy lifestyle of the grossly overpaid and useless tycoons and celebrities New Labour loves to surround itself with.

The fawning petty bourgeois trade-union mentality would stick with Blair IF NEW LABOUR IMPERIALISM WERE WORKING.

The decisive issue, well beyond the fake-'left' consciousness of Gilchrist & Co, is that western imperialist global domineering IS IN DEEP TROUBLE.

The 'free market' economy is collapsing towards slump everywhere, despite all denials, and with no possible remedy.

The 'over-production' crisis will soon not merely be paralysing ALL the major monopoly capitalist economies, as Japan has been for the past 12 years without cure, but will rapidly force such huge balance-of-trade debtors (failures) as the USA and Britain to ruthlessly start putting MILLIONS on the dole queues from every walk of life.

But far more significantly than even that, the West's warmongering blitzkrieg programme against "foreign enemies" in the "axis of evil" (as the diversionary cover-for and excuse-for the catastrophe of imperialism's own economic management) is ALSO FAILING.

In unfathomable roundabout ways, the sickness now becoming evident in NATO imperialism (and always there in reality) is beginning to affect the working classes who have traditionally usually gone along with the arrogant trampling domination of the world by the West.

If the aggressive NAZI mentality of the Bush/Blair warmongering plans remained a surefire winner in a world, now, of just one superpower, then mass opinion would continue to go docilely along with such NATO blitzkrieging.

But as when Cold War anti-communism started seriously being given the bird following US imperialism's humiliating defeat in Vietnam (in spite of inflicting holocaust destruction on the entire Indochina region via bombing, napalm, blockade, and savage, defoliating chemical warfare), so are workers now doubting a successful outcome for failing Western economies to be able to crush anti-imperialist resistance, (now dubbed "terrorism' rather than "communism" all round the Third World.)

Still too nervous and politically naïve to denounce "capitalist freedom" outright, now being so wholeheartedly embraced by New Labour, workers have certainly been sensing that enough is going wrong with the pensions scandal; the stock market collapse; the ludicrous housing market; more unsolved problems than ever in schools, higher education, and the health service; hopeless road congestion and public transport chaos; and now the beginnings of unemployment fears and falling living standards which are agitating all the public service professions (firemen included); - enough to raise doubts about this "enemies abroad" scam, and wonder why such expensive and dangerous foreign military adventures are so suddenly "urgently needed".

Workers confidence in Western propaganda will then have taken a hammer blow from Chancellor Brown's astonishing and abrupt casual confession that all his rosy economic forecast figures were totally wrong after all (as the EPSR's alternative collapse outlook, always taken from capitalism's own sources and admissions, as again below in this issue, has consistently demonstrated, for years, would prove to be the case).

But the even more corrosive suspicion of a global system failure in economic, political, military, and philosophical domination has now started merging in with the fears that the whole "New World order" lifestyle aspirations are nothing but utterly deceitful garbage.

Workers will fully grasp this (and its revolutionary consequences) last of all.

But it is an interesting speculation how much the mood of petty bourgeois intellectual doubters starts to affect attitudes throughout the West, including in the ruling class itself, where damaging hesitancy and splits are already well established (see last EPSR) and where the real knowledge of imperialism's difficulties obviously begins.

Here is the view from the Foreign Affairs editor of the traditionally Foreign Office-linked Observer, mouthpiece of capitalist interests:

Anyone who tells you the war against terrorism is being won is lying.

It is the great heresy of free societies, so speak it softly, but the accumulating evidence of the past four years is that terrorism can - and does - work. And it is working on a global scale.

It is a simple fact that is more terrifying than any of the attacks themselves, 11 September included.

Strip away the millenarian agenda and its language of apocalyptic struggle - the Great Satans, the enemies of God, references to the Crusaders. Strip away, just for a moment, its extreme religious aspects and what you are left with is a non-negotiable political agenda. That aim is to remove - or neutralise - American and Western influence from large areas of the globe, including states that are not exclusively Islamist.

It is a tension that was in part foreseen by Benjamin Barber in 1992 in his essay 'Jihad versus McWorld', which predicted that the greatest threat to democracy would be the clash between the spread of a homogenising American culture - paradoxically indifferent to what was happening in the world it touched on - and a new kind of anti-political tribal politics which, he predicted, would see 'the breakdown of civility in the name of identity;  of comity in the name of community'.

For the time being at least, it seems it is the terrorists who are winning.

It is a pessimistic outlook, but an easy case to make. Let's start with the most obvious economic impact. The fear engendered by a spate of attacks by Jihad International  --  al-Qaeda and groups that share its agenda  --  is crippling the long haul tourist industry; threatening the West's airline industry and has almost shut down tourism outside of the US. That cost is likely to amount to billions of pounds in the long run, its impact being felt as keenly in countries such as Indonesia and Kenya which are heavily dependant on tourist dollars.

What is less quantifiable is what John Stevenson, senior fellow in counter terrorism at the International Institute for Strategic Studies describes as al-Qaeda's aim of 'neutralising' America and the West's influence in large areas of the world. Already the US and other countries have reduced embassies in vulnerable areas of the world, like other nations - Britain included - closing down missions at times of threat. But it is not just diplomats who carry our message into the world. Business too is supposed to fly the flag for our values. And as businesses become more wary of operating in threatened areas, they too will withdraw to safer areas of operation.

AND IN OUR withdrawal from exactly those places where the kind of Islamist extremism we fear most is at its most threatening, we give up the intellectual and psychological space to those who most threaten our values. Because the real war with al-Qaeda, as James Thomson, president of the Rand Corporation think-tank, pointed out in the organisation's summer review, is not simply one of missiles, snatch squads and bullets. It is quintessentially one of ideas.

And it is in the war of ideas that we are most notably failing in the war on terrorism. As Thomson's overview points out, even a year after 9/11 America and its allies still have little idea of the roots of the discontent that has made Jihad International so attractive to so many young Islamist men, or the etiology of the hatred of America.

Not only is the message not getting across, but there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of where the real sophistication of Jihad International comes from. It is not in its ingenious and despicable skill in butchering innocent civilians, or even in its apparently formidable organisational skills, which in reality may be far less formidable than assumed, but in syndicating and marketing its brand of terror. This is not the old terrorism of the IRA or ETA, with structures, doctrines and pseudo-military organisation. What Bush and Blair and all their allies do not understand is that it is the idea of al-Qaeda, not its physical reality, that is the key, an idea which has taken deep root in countries from Afghanistan to South East Asia and Africa.

At the centre of that idea is an oppositional discourse that seeks to drive the west - particularly America - out of what Osama bin Laden has claimed as the wider Islamic nation. That misunderstanding is represented at its worst by George Bush who - it is said - keeps a list of 12 names of the top al-Qaeda terrorists in his desk and ticks them off as they are captured or killed.

But al-Qaeda is less a hierarchical organisation out of James Bond led by a sinister mastermind, than a dynamic dialogue between like-minded radicals conducted via mosques, radical publications and the internet. A specific order is almost redundant as individual groups know exactly what must be done and when, adapting themselves to new security constraints and to new targets. And what appears to have been 'understood' before the attack on Mombasa was that it was the right time to polarise the war on terrorism. Just at the moment Bush and his allies had constructed a grudging consent from the Arab world for its tough line on Iraq, Jihad International brought in Israel. In his belligerent threat to hunt down the perpetrators of the Mombassa attacks, Israel's right-wing prime minister Ariel Sharon has threatened to upset the delicate consensus between America and its allies on the issue of the war on terrorism, and on the Security Council over Iraq.

FEW OF SHARON'S friends among the hawks that surround George Bush are unaware of his motto- 'Always escalate' - and his long history of ill-conceived military responses from the Gaza raid, the invasion of south Lebanon to his handling of the al-Aqsa intifada, that have delivered a quick political or military fix at the cost of long-term disaster.

By bringing Israel explosively into the mix a week before the deadline for Iraq's weapons declaration, Jihad International has shown a political and operational astuteness that is quite terrifying.

What is more terrifying still is the notion among the West's political classes that it is an organisation, not an idea, that they are fighting. With each new arrest, each new targeted killing, we congratulate ourselves that we are winning - until the next atrocity takes place. All the while, we fail to tackle the ideas that replace each arrested or dead terrorist with a new recruit.

For a bourgeois ruling class whose 800 year reign is notoriously founded in part on its seemingly inexhaustible enterprise optimism, this does not sound very confident at all.

But what could be more damaging for relations with the working class than this, an establishment whose whole class rule runs on effortlessly-assumed (and deferred-to) notions and networks of superiority and privilege, suddenly and unexpectedly not sure of itself in what should have been a pushover, knocking six bells out of assorted 'daft towelheads' all round the world.

Kicking your own working class in such circumstances is very dangerous indeed, and in fact is what revolutions are made of.

In these newly developing conditions where all manner of glib fake-'left' nonsense-programmes of centrist confusion (talking 'revolution' but still basically relying on reformist pressure to sort imperialist crisis out), will flourish, - it is important to keep on reviewing all the crucial sources of Western monopoly capitalism's breakdown.

First and foremost, the imperialists CANNOT make their economy work any better once it has reached a stage of global 'overproduction' crisis (the endless greed of all the giant arrogant multinational corporations, endlessly investing in slicker production, so as to capture world market leadership off each other, using the profits of sweated-labour to do it, thereby creating more products in the end than can be bought back by the ever more scrimped on wages of the world's workers).

The anti-Marxist 'left' posturers (Socialist Alliance, etc) hate such science because of its unavoidable revolutionary communist implications (dictatorship of the proletariat, etc), and so try to dismiss the consequences of such analysis as "catastrophism" or "crisisism".

But Marxism is unashamedly a philosophy of history moving ONLY in class-war revolutionary upheavals, when the old way of ruling has run into a total CRISIS of no longer being able to satisfy everyone's ever growing aspirations because of that very class domination screwing everything up.

The steady growth in towns of bourgeois workers and entrepreneurs could ultimately no longer tolerate being restricted by the landed aristocracy, and the monarchical feudal systems all eventually had to be overthrown.

The steady growth of working-class aspirations and anti-imperialist aspirations has been challenging Western monopoly capitalist world domination for a long time, with ever-increasing dimensions and success (Paris Commune; Bolshevik Revolution; national liberation triumphs post-1945; etc; etc).

Imperialist rule has now reached a stage of economic, political, social, and cultural rottenness, decadence, and plain failure, protected by ever more vicious arms-race bullying, that the system's greatest-ever CRISIS now looms, and is fully to be expected by even the faintest grasp of Marxist science.

For economic evidence of the crisis, the EPSR follows a good tradition in relying on the evidence and admissions from capitalism's own sources, such as the bourgeois press:

The boom in the US at the end of the 1990s thus took place in a new environment. Despite the longest post-war expansion, inflation kept on falling because capacity grew at an even faster rate than the economy overall. America's bust was much more like the collapse of a business cycle in the 19th century, when periods of debt-fuelled over-investment led to long periods of stagnation or retrenchment as the boom's excesses were purged. Lower interest rates helped, but were not a complete cure. 

As a result, the quite substantial easing of economic policy over the past couple of years has not had the potency it had in the past.  US interest rates have come down by 5.25 percentage points, those in the eurozone by 1.5 percentage points and those in Britain by 2.0 percentage points. Yet all three economies have been stuttering along this year and, according to the OECD, will not grow much faster in 2003. 

In countries such as China and Singapore,  prices are already falling, and in the G7 inflation is running at little more than 1%. Inflation falls when economies are operating below trend - when there is a gap between actual and potential output. The OECD is expecting that every G7 country apart from Canada will have an output gap next year, leading to downward pressure on inflation.

There are also plenty of early warning signals of deflationary pressure. In the US, inflation as measured by the consumer price index is running at 2% but half of the goods and services that make up the index are falling in price. Ian Harwood, global head of economics and strategy at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, last week said that Japan was in a similar position in the 1990s, where prices of goods started falling four years before outright deflation set in.

The country most imminently at risk of deflation is Germany. DKW say that there is historically a close link between the output gap and the change in the inflation rate in the euro area. "Based on an unchanged exchange rate, we see euro area inflation falling to around 1% by the end of next year and only 0.5% in 2004. Given the dispersion of national inflation rates inside monetary union, that spells major deflation risk for Germany and France."

Poor profitability

America is not immune either. Three years after the peak of the hi-tech bubble, the US remains saddled with a glut of capacity and the corporate sector's profitability is poor. Profits are what makes capitalism tick: they determine how much companies invest and how many people they hire. The state of corporate profitability in the US is not good news for the global economy and will intensify deflationary pressure.

Mr Harwood identified five reasons why deflation is a problem: wages fall more slowly than prices, thereby squeezing profits still further; expectations of further price declines mean spending is postponed, creating a deflationary spiral; rising bankruptcies hit banks and their willingness to lend; falling prices mean rising real interest rates - even if the latter are reduced to zero; and a falling price level raises the real burden of debt. 

It is the last that could be the real killer. Modern western economies have been built on an ever rising quantity of debt. In the 1970s and 1980s, borrowers could rely on rising prices to inflate away the real value of their debts; now for the first time since the depression of the 1930s there is the looming threat of debt deflation, where the burden of debt grows bigger rather than smaller.

Policy makers are not about to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s (at least, let's hope not), but if the global economy fails to respond to the stimulus, they don't have an awful lot left to offer.

This ends with the typical bourgeois illusions that the 1930s need never have happened (if only there were cleverer-clogs like the writer around) but this typical conceited optimism looks immediately doomed by such daft blatant nonsense as Chancellor Brown, fresh from admitting that all his previous forecasts were wrong "because international developments cannot be predicted", then bizarrely going on to claim that his future forecasts would be fine because of world trade profitability going back up again in two years time!!!!

No wonder the firemen are starting to question exactly what nonsense they are dealing with in government.

Capitalism's achilles' heel has long been its relentless monopolisation process which eventually forces it to exploit the entire world for its profitable survival, - but thereby only rapidly expanding by the billionfold the numbers of victims of Western economic imperialism, really mercilessly exploited and full of nationalist hatred to bring the domination down as soon as it goes badly wrong.

EPSR 1158 reported the huge (and hugely damaging) boycott movement around the Middle East (and beyond) against such well-known US monopoly representatives as McDonalds, Burger King, and Coca Cola, etc, etc, (including restaurants, stores, and bottling plants firebombed, etc).

The hatred is spreading, as recorded in this fascinating essay which the Guardian reprinted (in its need to maintain its 'liberal' posturing) in the aftermath of last week's Mombassa bombings:

Thirty years ago, this predominantly Muslim and ethnically mixed town was a model of communal harmony and co-existence. Western visitors to the Old Town were almost forced to stop by and share a cup of tea. Today, they need armed police escorts to guide them around the old alleys and sites. I grew up surrounded by mosques full of imams and scholars who oozed wisdom and dignity. Their discourse was love-based and God-centred. Today, the sermons echo a message of anger, frustration and hate. As president of the Muslim Students Union at the University of Nairobi, I was obsessed with so many local concerns that Palestine never made it to the top five. Today, Israel and the plight of the Palestinian people is on the tongue of every Kenyan Muslim you speak to. Then it was only us young people who admired the Islamic revolution and the Ayatollah Khomeini: today, young and old, men and women, they all adore Osama bin Laden.

The transformation is total. Tourists are no longer seen as friendly neighbours who have come to share. A young man outside a mosque told me they were the "vanguard of western cultural decadence and exploitation". Despite the massive growth of the tourism industry, only a limited number of local people have a stake in it. It is not only seen as a way of exploiting the local people - all tourist-related industries are either owned by foreign multinationals or non Muslims - but also a way of corrupting society. Perhaps western tourists by themselves could be tolerated, up to a point. But US soldiers visiting town, most seeking "entertainment", have become particularly unacceptable. They are associated with gambling, prostitution and excessive alcohol.  Especially detested is the Americans' attitude towards the local population. Over the years the neglect of the coastal province by the central government has not helped in the process of alienation and marginalisation. The fact that the Kenyan regime, one of the most corrupt on the continent, has close relations with Israel, has not helped.

Many people told me that the existence of several Israeli hotels in Mombassa was a provocation, with their high security fence and policy of not employing local people. However, the most volatile ingredient in the cocktail is the changing nature of Islam itself.  Local institutions that used to produce the core of Islamic leaders have long ceased to exist. Most imams in Kenya today are now graduates of universities in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan and Egypt.

The result is the emergence of a brand of Islam dramatically different from the traditional one. The new community-based faith being propagated is modernistic in outlook, highly politicised and extremely confrontational. 

Mombassa has always had strong links with the rest of the Muslim world, particularly the Arabian peninsula. But the arrival of satellite technology, combined with the impact of migrant workers returning from the Middle East, has helped spawn a new world view. 

Most households in Mombassa - where substantial numbers are of Arab ancestry and understand Arabic - are keen followers of events through the al-Jazeera satellite channel. The effect has been to focus discussion on the Palestinian issue above most others.

The activities of the American intelligence services following the Nairobi bombing in August 1998 and September 11 have also greatly contributed towards the pervasive anti-American and anti-western feelings. People have been infuriated by the habit of CIA and FBI agents, accompanied by Kenyan intelligence officers, to barge into people's homes and search them. To date, the whereabouts of at least 20 people arrested by the intelligence services remain a mystery.

Mombassa will not be the last lost paradise. The cocktail of local grievances; doctrinaire Islam, insensitive western attitudes and the festering wound of Palestine is too intoxicating, too seductive for any Muslim people to ignore. Add the notion of suicide bombing and paradise and you really have a war on your hands.

Fuad Nahdi is publisher of Q-News, the Muslim magazine

And the Times did an entertaining follow-up to the boycott story, relating how local Middle East capitalist opportunism has gleefully joined in the undermining of the American imperialist monopolies:

AMERICA may be girding for war with Iraq but it is already fighting "cola wars" throughout the Middle East. As a boycott against US products spreads across the Islamic world, Muslim manufacturers are taking on America's biggest brand names by producing their own fizzy drinks. Factories in Iran making Zam Zam Cola are struggling to keep up with demand for their slightly sickly version of Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

Ten million bottles of Zam Zam have been exported to Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries in the past four months and the Iranians are working overtime to churn out enough of their cola to slake the thirsts of the two million Muslims expected in Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

This cola has been so successful that others are racing to get in on the act. Tawfiq Mathlouthi, a French Muslim entrepreneur, will launch Mecca Cola in Paris next month. No superstar is being paid millions to sing its jingle but there will be an advertising campaign promising that 10 per cent of the profits will go to a Palestinian children's charity.

M Mathlouthi admits he has taken the idea from the producers of Zam Zam but says he has had inquiries from interested parties in Belgium and the Netherlands. He has high hopes that British Muslims may acquire a taste for it as well.

His launch is being timed for the start of Ramadan when the call for a boycott of all US brands will be stepped up. American companies such as McDonald's, Starbucks, Nike and the cola giants admit the campaign is wounding them. Sales of Coca-Cola have dropped between 20 and 40 per cent in some countries.

In Morocco, a government official estimates sales of Pepsi and, CocaCola could fall by half in the north, which is a stronghold of Islamic groups, In the United Arab Emirates, sales of the local Star Cola are up by 40 per cent over the past three months.

The Islamic cola warriors say this is an easy way for Muslims to feel they are punishing George W. Bush. 

Mr Mathlouthi said his Mecca Cola would "answer the needs of world citizens by contributing to the fight against American imperialism and the fascism of the Zionist entity". The advertising men promise to come up with a snappier slogan.

Advertising chiefs say the Islamic cola campaign represents a new attack on America's grip on fast-food outlets, soft drinks; leisure wear and cigarette brands.

Rita Clifton, chairman of Interbrand, the global brand consultancy, said last night: "'This is an alternative to the usual protest which just says, 'Don't eat or drink these American brands'. This has the powerful message, 'Hurt the US by supporting your own brands'.

"Coca-Cola is the world's most valuable brand - worth $45 billion - so it's. not going to be put out of business: But no company wants to be boycotted or have its product poured out in the streets by protesters."

Zam Zam's executives are delighted at putting one over on the "Great Satan" but are careful not to gloat in their adverts. Similarly, while Coke and Pepsi are stepping up their promotions in the Gulf they do not want to get dragged into a war of words with Zam Zam.

The cola is named after the waters that flow from the Zamzam holy spring in Mecca. It exceeded all expectations by selling four million cans in its first week. After the success of its original cola, Zam Zam now comes in other flavours such as orange, lemon and lime.

The company, which also produces non-alcoholic "Islamic beer", has a long pedigree in Iran, where it was founded in 1954 and today has 47 per cent of the domestic market For many years it was the Iranian partner of Pepsi-Cola until their contract was ended after the 1979 revolution. 

Zam Zam was taken over by the Foundation of the Dispossessed, a powerful state charity run by clerics, and today it employs more than 7,000 people in its 17 factories in Iran. They are now planning to build factories in the Persian Gulf.

Its cola is already exported to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the company says it will soon ship its drinks to Lebanon, Syria and, Denmark - its first European client Mr Kheiri rattled off the inquiries he has handled in recent weeks from France, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and several countries in Africa who fancy a taste of Zam Zam. "After Arab countries in the region started boycotting some American goods, including Coca-Cola, demand for Zam Zam really took off." 

Mr Kheiri said Coca-Cola executives distanced themselves from US Middle East policy. A spokesman said: "We are a business, so we do not get involved in political issues."

Trade with Arab countries in leading American brand names is estimated to have dropped by at least 25 per cent in the past year. 

Fast food outlets - KFC, McDonald's and Burger King - in Saudi Arabia report a 50 per cent drop in business since September 2000. 

Morocco estimates that sales of Pepsi and Coke will drop by 50 per cent in the north, where hardline Islamic groups are based. 

The United Arab Emirates says sales of its local Star Cola are up by 40 per cent in the past three months. 

Branches of McDonald's and Burger King have been attacked in Lebanon, Oman, Bahrain, Cairo and Qatar. Bahrain's Al Muntazah supermarket chain has pulled all US brands from its shelves.	

In Egypt, pressure is growing to boycott of McDonald's and Burger King, Tide and Ariel detergents, Pampers, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Marlboro cigarettes, and Heinz ketchup.

Department stores in Cairo have stopped buying US branded clothing and footwear like Nike. 

Arab imports from the US estimated at between $16 billion (£10.2 billion) and $17 billion per year, with additional $20 billion for insurance, tourism and financial services.

Saudi Arabia cutting price of US imports by half.

In normal times, such local Muslim-capitalist rivalry might not necessarily be a problem for Western imperialist market-penetration (and therefore political penetration), mimicry being one of the sincerest forms of flattery, - as previous liaisons (noted above) demonstrated.

But these are not normal times because the imperialist world control system has for a long time been relentlessly plunging towards the Mother of all Crises in which no serious challenge to Western total global domination can possibly be tolerated, - otherwise the whole planet will be lost to the Western monopoly-capitalist system, it is (correctly) feared.

Thus it is obvious that there will be no happy sharing of the market between Pepsi and Zam Zam (e.g.) because of the threatened warmongering devastation to Muslim Iraq (and then other Evil Axis countries after that, including Iran) as a result of Saddam having dared to stand up POLITICALLY (not with just a rival cola brand) to American regional domination.

(In other circumstances, of course, and if it was not too delicate a situation and if the USA could have got away with it, there are plenty of colonial historical precedents for speculating that even the cola rivalry itself would have been brutally crushed, - as the cotton industry in India once was by the British imperialist state representatives of Lancashire export trade interests).

(It is a measure of how much on the back foot Western imperialism now is, that monopoly capitalism is relieved to be able to get away with being allowed to continue officially trading, despite the unofficial boycott of goods by spontaneous hatred of the West).

And Saddam, of course, has dared to stand up POLITICALLY to American domineering because the imperialist system IN INSOLUBLE CRISIS can less and less satisfy the ever-growing aspirations of a world fast growing out of Western monopoly capitalist tutelage, exploitation, and being dumped upon (in every way) when things go wrong for the West.

How intolerably screwed-up ALL the relations of the capitalist imperialist stitch-up become, when the system reaches terminal CRISIS, was indicated by the mess Washington got into with its vilest, oldest, and most decadent stooges in the region, in Saudi Arabia.

This remarkable outburst against American domineering does not remotely make anti-imperialist heroes of this reactionary feudal tyranny, and the EPSR's regular discovery of thieves falling out and rats deserting a sinking ship is not invalidated in the slightest.

But an interesting historical point emerges that even backward feudal tyrants can bridle positively when the patronising imperialist protection they depend upon starts becoming internationally hated itself.

Is it a revolutionary indicator of fear of the anti-imperialist masses when the bloated regime decides to emphasise its hostility to Western domination rather than to al-Qaeda when accused of laxly allowing family funds to be siphoned to the terrorists:

A row between the US and Saudi Arabia over the funding of terrorism turned into a no-holds-barred battle yesterday, when the kingdom unleashed the fury of its normally state restrained media against Washington.

Accusing the White House of becoming caught up in an "hysterical media-frenzy", and pandering "to congressional prima donnas in a most disgraceful way"; the Jeddah based Arab News said Mr Fleischer's veiled attack had opened a breach between the two countries that would be difficult to close.

"Who does it [Washington] think it is to administer such a slap in the face or make such imperious demands?" the paper asked.

Other Saudi papers joined the fray. In language that could not have been used without official blessing, al-Watan accused the US of trying to blackmail the kingdom.

A report in the Washington Post on Tuesday, citing an unnamed American official, said the US would ask the Saudis to act on intelligence about terrorist financing with the threat of an ultimatum if they failed to do so.

"We tell them the problem and leave it to them to solve, presuming they will act in good faith. But if they do not act in 90 days, we assume solving the problem is beyond their ken and the United States will solve it," the official was quoted as saying.

'A number of wealthy and prominent Saudis are also the target of a $600bn (£400bn) compensation claim brought by families of the September 11 victims. Among those named in the lawsuit - which alleges that they helped to fund the al-Qaida network - is Prince Turki al-Faisal, nominated last month as the kingdom's new ambassador in London.

Another American lawsuit arises from a congressional investigation into child abductions which alleges that children with US citizenship have been taken to Saudi Arabia against their will.

The House committee on government reform is seeking to subpoena documents over the allegations from Qorvis Communications, a public relations company, and two other firms contracted to the Saudi government.

A statement issued by the committee said: "Criminal conduct, in some cases aided and abetted by the Saudi embassy, is at the heart of this investigation."

The flare-up began with allegations that thousands of dollars in charitable gifts from princess Haifa bint Faisal - wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington  -  had found their way to friends of two of the September 11 hijackers.

Although there is no evidence that the princess knew where the money had gone, Riyadh views the affair as part of a campaign led by American neo-conservatives to implicate prominent Saudis in the financing of al-Qaida.

An attempt at a placatory statement by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer that "Saudi Arabia is a good partner in the war against terrorism but can do more" only fuelled the Saudi anger.

Although Osama bin Laden has some popular support in Saudi Arabia, many Saudis dismiss as ridiculous the idea that members of the royal family would willingly provide al-Qaida with funds - the overthrow of the monarchy was one of Bin Laden's original aims.

Unexpected support for the princess came from Saad al-Fagih of the London-based Saudi opposition group, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia.

"I'm sure the royal family especially Princess Haifa and Prince Bandar [her husband] - are not at all involved in any of this business," he said.

"The royal family are much more keen to destroy Bin Laden than the Americans and are more than motivated in their hostility to al-Qaida"

But the US does have a list of wealthy individuals mostly Saudis  - who it believes are financing al-Qaida and it is seeking to freeze their assets.

The other side of this coin (of reaction finding that it can no longer rule on in the old way) is the phenomenon of the repressed masses being no longer willing to be put down, no matter what the price to be paid for revolt.

Both sides of this drama are captured in these remarkable capitalist press admissions of how Middle East hatred of the West's favourite reactionary cause, - the Jewish monopoly-capitalist colonisation of Palestine, - and the ever-increasingly ferocious Palestinian resistance to that colonisation, has started to undermine the sick and backward Zionist self-belief:

But during his most recent posting, a year ago, guarding an isolated Jewish settlement in Gaza, he was profoundly troubled by an experience at an Israeli roadblock set up outside the only local hospital that could treat seriously ill Palestinians. "We were told there was car bomb in the area, so I had to stop and search all the ambulances coming in" he recalls. His overriding concern had to be protecting his soldiers, even if this meant keeping people who had had heart attacks and women in labour waiting in the blazing heat. "I wanted to be humane, but there was no middle way. How many innocent people may have died because of me?"

Another reservist in his unit, Lt Aniv Itzkovitz, asked himself much the same question after one of his men opened fire on a Palestinian who he thought had a weapon: "The soldier concerned was a good person, but though we had no idea who that man was or what he was doing, we came close to killing him."

The safety of his own troops was paramount, yet Itzkovitz, a 27-year-old university lecturer, knew this meant enforcing measures against Palestinian civilians that he found deeply repugnant. "All the time, you point guns at their cars, fire warning shots over their heads and destroy their houses and olive groves."

When their tour of duty ended, the two men talked things over and came to the conclusion that on moral and ethical grounds they would never again serve in the occupied territories. They drafted a letter urging other reservists to come forward and refuse any further part in "blockading, killing, starving and humiliating an entire people".

Published by Israel's bestselling newspaper, Yedioch Ahronoth, last spring, then posted on the Internet, The Courage to Refuse petition sent shock waves through a society that reveres the concept of citizen soldiers defending the Jewish state. Able-bodied men are conscripted for three years at 18, and stay in the reserves until they are 45. The army could not function without them; reservists provide around threequarters of its fighting strength.

This was not the first time Israeli soldiers had refused duty for reasons of personal morality: during the war in Lebanon that began in 1982, about 170, mostly reservists, went to jail rather than serve there. The peace group Yesh Gvul ("There Is a Limit") was formed, and it supports conscripts and reservists unwilling to fight in the occupied territories.

But the Courage to Refuse petition was different: for the first time in Israel's turbulent history, soldiers were encouraging others to disobey orders they believed were illegal. They described how Israeli troops shot, beat and humiliated Palestinian civilians, and how the army covered up acts of brutality.

Unsurprisingly, the Israeli public reacted with scorn and fury. "We were branded as traitors, cowards, Arab-lovers," says Zonshein, who had 12 years of dedicated service behind him. The military high command issued a denunciation of the petition; the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, accused its organisers of undermining "the basic tenet of Israeli democracy"; a rabbi claimed the Torah (Jewish  bible) permitted their summary execution. The vast majority of reservists, many of whom shared their concerns about where occupation was taking the country, would have nothing to do with the refuseniks.

Yet as the controversy raged, others began signing up, a dozen at first, then 50, then 100: by last month, over 500. Most came from combat units: many had fought in Lebanon as junior officers and senior NCOs - the hard core of any army - and all were adamant they would serve anywhere outside the occupied territories. 

"If we were at war tomorrow morning with Syria,' said one decorated veteran, "I'd jump into my car and drive straight to my unit; believe me, they'd take me back.'

"You can't dismiss guys like this as bleeding hearts or pacifists in disguise," one senior military official acknowledged; but the challenge to the political and military establishment could not be ducked.

When Zonshein refused orders to rejoin his unit in June, he received the maximum sentence of 35 days at Military Prison No 6; in August, Itzkovitz was sent to the same jail for 28 days.

Behind bars, both found fellow prisoners - mostly deserters or petty offenders - sympathetic. Helped by his lawyer, Zonshein prepared a petition requesting a full court-martial. If that happens, he will argue that soldiers cannot be compelled to serve in the West Bank or Gaza, because the presence and conduct of the army there contravenes both Israeli and international law.

Temporarily at liberty while his case is being assessed by three judges keenly aware of the far-reaching issues it raises, Zonshein points out he is taking a considerable risk for his beliefs. "I could get two years from the military tribunal. That's pretty scary, but there's no going back now."

Of all the tasks that reservists undertake, checkpoint duty is widely regarded as the most destructive of army morale. Hugely boring and occasionally dangerous - six soldiers were shot dead like sitting ducks at a roadblock - it also exposes them to the devastating impact of occupation on the lives of Palestinians.

Three miles from the northern edge of Jerusalem, the Kalandiya checkpoint cuts the main road to the Palestinian city of Ramallah with a jumble of steel and concrete barriers and thick coils of razor wire. Manned by soldiers around the clock, overlooked by snipers in observation posts, it has become one of the most hated and humiliating symbols of Israeli domination.

From dawn to dusk, long lines of sullen Palestinians wait, often for hours, to be gestured forward by twitchy soldiers and to produce their papers, perhaps be searched, perhaps turned away. Tempers are on edge, exacerbated by the din of car horns, revving engines and swirling dust; soldiers bark orders, Palestinians plead and cajole; sometimes tensions explode into shoving matches. 

'After three days at Kalandiya, I begged for a transfer to something less degrading, even if it meant cleaning out latrines;' says an armoured-corps reservist who asked to be identified only as Uri.

There is abundant evidence from human-rights observers that troops at checkpoints are trigger-happy and indifferent to Palestinian suffering. In one incident about a year ago, a woman from the Bethlehem area had to give birth in her car after soldiers refused to allow her, to pass roadblocks surrounding her village. “As the birth took place, her husband pleaded with soldiers to see what was happening," said a Palestinian human-rights activist. "Permission to cross was refused again, and the couple went home. Later that day the baby turned blue, and they returned. This time they got through, but their baby died in hospital".

Earlier this year, troops at a roadblock near Jenin twice turned away women in labour who urgently required medical treatment. One went home to have her baby, who died soon afterwards; the other was allowed to cross after waiting for 12 hours, but her baby also died soon afterwards in hospital.

"This systematic oppression of the Palestinians is corrupting what was an exceptionally moral army; and by extension the people of Israel as well," argues Itai Haviv, a geologist and reserve captain in the artillery, who became a refusenik after many tours of duty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The first cases of looting by Israeli troops were reported earlier this year, and Palestinian homes, schools, government offices and health centres temporarily occupied by the army have been trashed.

In more peaceful times, it was no secret that many Israelis avoided reserve service by getting disability certificates from accommodating doctors or psychiatrists or disappearing abroad for while. With the intifada, it has become harder to dodge duty through "grey refusal", but a recent study concluded that barely 25% of reservists put in more than one day a year: only 30,000 men complete their annual stint, almost all of them front line troops.

"Call us the suckers" suggests Noam Peleg, a combat paramedic who signed the petition in disgust at the Sharon government's politically motivated decision to exempt most ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service. A group of reservists just back from an extended stint in a West Bank hot spot was equally outraged. A letter of protest they delivered to Sharon concluded: "Thank you for spitting in our faces."

The refuseniks have a long way to go before they can exert significant influence on Israeli society, but their campaign has focused greater attention on the army's conduct towards Palestinians in the occupied territories. The former head of the Shin Beth internal security service, Ami Ayalon, startled viewers of the state television channel by arguing that soldier have a moral duty to disobey "blatantly illegal" orders, whatever the consequences.

A reserve major general, Danny Rothschild, publicly attacked the government for pandering to hardline Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza who need large numbers of troops to protect them. Even before the petition appeared, he observed scathingly: "It was clear that (refusals to serve) would grow if we continue calling up reserves to accompany settlers' children to music lessons and protect their real estate."

Hirsh Goodman, a respected Israeli commentator who once fought in a paratroop unit, wishes the refuseniks would tear up their petition and rejoin the reserves, but welcomes their message. In a cruel and ugly war where civilians on both sides bear the brunt of casualties, Goodman warned, the risk is that "we lose our humanity and go too far in enforcing security measures".

Instead of worrying about what the refusal movement is doing to discipline and motivation in the army, he argued, Israel should give thanks that "kids like these officers have the moral gumption to say what has to be said".

It is the emergence of imperialism's historical failure which helps start make refuseniks of everyone in due course, - even such consciously reluctant fake-'lefts' as the FBU's Gilchrist.

Misguided opportunism has restrained the firemen hitherto from an open all-out onslaught on the thieving hypocrisy of the corrupt and useless 'parliamentary' stooges (of the monopoly-capitalist dictatorship of British economic, social, political, and cultural life), - paying themselves 40% increases and more, and getting their hands in the till in as many other ways as possible while the going is good, yet denouncing the FBU pay claim, and condemning (!?) the firemen for having to moonlight at other jobs to make ends meet, which all MPs do non-stop to help pay for their mistresses and bar bills, and second & third & fourth homes, etc, etc, etc.

The FBU policy has been to stress their own pay merits, - but the EPSR noted the atmosphere that an openly political attack on Blairism was waiting to break out on behalf of all the poorly-paid and disgruntled public service professions as well as the firemen. But while yet still insisting that he was not attacking Blairism politically, the Observer thought he was, stitching Gilchrist up on Sunday in the following way:

THE leader of the Fire Brigades Union last night pledged to overthrow Tony Blair's New Labour project as the bitter dispute widened into an ideological confrontation between union bosses and the Government.

In a move that is set to turn the strike into one of the gravest political battles since the miners' dispute of the Eighties, Andy Gilchrist said that the Government had 'ensured and provoked' a strike and that it was time for the trade union movement to consider whether it should fund the Labour Party.

'I'm quite prepared to work to replace New Labour with what I'm prepared to call Real Labour,' Gilchrist said at a rally in Manchester. His comments brought immediate condemnation from the Government, with one Minister accusing the FBU leader of 'losing the plot'.

Gilchrist strongly denied that his aim was to bring down the Blair Government.

'I fundamentally refute that what I am about or what the union is about is wrecking Mr Blair's career. I don't want to and I have no plan to do so. This is not a political strike. It is a simple dispute about firefighters' pay. All the provocation has come from the Government.'

But despite his protestations, the FBU leader appeared determined to extend the breadth of his attack against the Government beyond the issue of the 16 per cent salary increase, which has been rejected.

He said that war against Iraq would be wrong and directly attacked the Chancellor's decision to provide £1 billion pounds of funding for any future military campaign. 'It's disgraceful to say that for people in this country who are prepared to risk their lives to save others you can't find any extra money, but you can find at least a billion to bomb innocent men, women and children in Iraq,' he told the rally.

'I have no nostalgic romanticism about old Labour but there are real Labour values built on real social progress, on real justice for working class people and indeed for fairness for all.'

Bourgeois commentators are instantly crowing that the FBU's postponement of this week's planned strike in favour of exploratory talks at ACAS has shown Gilchrist in
full political retreat immediately.

But it is not that simple, no matter what confusion fake-'left' consciousness might be pushed into by its reactionary trade-union class-compromising.

The steady avalanche of capitalist crisis events worldwide can never stop driving things forward; and while centrism is more a step sideways than ahead, it nonetheless provides some new ground for Marxism to try to seed; and once a Real Labour
project is out in the open, it is likely to be only a matter of time before something like it catches on again, - filling the slot that (with widely varying success and failure) various movements have tried to occupy in the past  (ILP, Bevanism, CP Revisionism, Bennism, SLP, Socialist Alliance, Militant, etc) of "pushing the labour movement 'left'".

It is always ultimately a failed fatuous exercise because it always runs like the clappers away from revolutionary consciousness, without which socialist transformation (of Britain, or anywhere else) will always remain impossible. If workers do not UNDERSTAND why they should take the power and become the new ruling class of Britain (or anywhere else) at the head of a workers state, then it will never be done, and the de facto bourgeois dictatorship of Britain will rule on for ever, routinely toppling 'left' parliaments by capitalist media dominated propaganda or elections, or by Pinochet-style coups as toppled Allende's 'left' parliament in Chile in 1973 masterminded by the CIA (which has more agents submerged in Britain than anywhere else in the world).

But while centrism is thus running away from Marxist pro-workers state consciousness, there is nevertheless still the opportunity to make more progress for revolutionary science and serious anti-reformist experience.

Still more proof needed? Consider this capitalist press admission of the dire class war trouble that the American bourgeois imperialist state's insoluble economic crisis will shortly be facing all over the USA, - enough to sink it:

THE STEPS of City Hall, for many years empty of angry protests - especially since 11 September - were crowded and noisy again last week as New York City plunges towards bankruptcy, with the poor and middle class picking up the tab.

First there were pensioners armed with placards reading 'Seniors Vote!', furious at the proposed closure of 32 daycare centres for the elderly. Then the firefighters - the heroes of 9/11 - demanding that eight fire stations due for closure be rescued.

But these are just two measures on the table as the financially rotting Big Apple faces a deficit more awesome that at any time since the Seventies, an era all New Yorkers like to forget, since when the city is seen to have risen, phoenix-like.

Former business tycoon Mayor Mike Bloomberg - now known as 'Mike the Knife' -  was elected a year ago on a promise to run New York like a corporation - echoing his party's President in the White House. But since responding to the crisis with an austerity plan that City Hall officials call 'slash and tax', Bloomberg's approval rating has fallen 16 points since July.

Every city service is on the chopping block: from transport to policing to tree pruning. There are plans to reduce public sector staff in every quarter, cut back on foster care, community education, library hours and family support, and to eliminate 2,500 infant day-care slots.

New York will be levying more tax on cigarettes than anywhere else in the world. Subway and bus fares will rise and even the zoo has been ordered to raise its admission charges.

Signs of strife are already visible. As the first icy blast of winter blows down Manhattan's streets, the number of homeless people sleeping under piles of blankets and cardboard has mushroomed. On average, more than 37,000 people spend their nights in New York City shelters, the highest level on record. The number of homeless families sleeping in shelters has more than doubled since 1998. And there are uncounted numbers of people who sleep outside.

'It's getting steadily worse out there,' said James Inman, 54, as he finished Thanksgiving dinner at a Manhattan mission. 'All the shelters are full.'

The usually reliable rattle of the subway trains is less evident outside Manhattan, with services to the outer edges of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx becoming sparse. As cuts to the police force were yesterday revealed, with a freeze on the recruitment of 2,000 officers, some forms of violent crime, including shootings, are rising again after a decade of falls.

Education leaders were entertained at Bloomberg's mansion last week to discuss cuts in schools, at a time when they are already crowded and teachers struggle with low salaries in an ever-more expensive city.

The city's deficit for this year stands at $1.2 billion, but is set to rise by S6.4bn in 2003. It is by far the biggest debt for any city in America.

'This is the worst fiscal crisis the city has ever faced,' said council speaker, Gifford Miller, a Democrat who supports Bloomberg's cuts.

The attacks on 11 September are seen as the primary cause, but any sluggishness in the economy hits especially hard in a city that depends on Wall Street for revenue.

Bloomberg's remedy is a pincer movement: an 18.5 per cent hike in property tax, the biggest in New York's history, offset by a controversial income tax windfall benefiting the rich. As a result, Bloomberg stands accused of implementing a municipal echo of President George Bush's national tax policy: making the poor pay the bill while the rich bag the money.

Watchdog groups say the combination of a property levy and tax breaks will be a final eviction order for all but those who can afford to pay the city's soaring rents.

Under Bloomberg's tax plan, the non-partisan Independent Budget Office found that a person earning $24,000 a year would gain $174 on income tax, but their rent increase - after property tax rises have been passed on by landlords - would top $300.

On the other hand, a condominium owner earning the property-owning average of $180,000 a year would save some $1,200.

The budget watchdog group City Project called the Bloomberg package 'inadequate, irrational and unfair'. It has, the group says, the potential to break up what remains of traditional communities in now over-priced and 'yuppiefied' neighbourhoods, as landlords break through rent controls to levy vast increases.

But the Democrat controlled council has, with some defections, swallowed the mayor's prescription as a necessary medicine.

 'People are really going to have to get used to doing without,' says councillor Bill de Blasio.

No wonder these fascist-mentality Bush corporatists are so hell-bent on warmongering against whoever can be vilified as an evil enough target. Build Leninism. EPSR

[Leaflet]

Revolutionary perspectives vital for firefighters' dispute just as for proletarians worldwide facing the imminent capitalist collapse. But fake-"left" politics hold back the working class and prevent the political issues being clarified - for all workers

The are signs that the fireman's dispute is reflecting a much deeper discontent in the working class than a simple wage and conditions struggle.

Without overstating the case, the tone of the grievance, its confident pursuit of supposedly "outrageous" demands, its emphasis on the unfairness of society and its questioning of worker/management roles, are embryonic political challenges to the whole degenerate, outdated, ossified and increasingly incompetent class ridden capitalist order, and its laughable "democracy" and "freedom".

These seeds of a brewing questioning of society all through, are part of a massive political and revolutionary challenge to imperialism erupting planet wide. Nepalese Maoist peasant guerillas are now close to overthrowing the backward feudal monarchy which keeps their mountain country in poverty and despair, the FARC jungle revolutionary fighters are growing in skill and confidence day by day in Colombia and the extraordinary determination and heroism of the Palestinian intifada gains new strength and even greater will to fight with every additional barbaric torture, deprivation and bloody humiliation smashed into them by the fascistic Zionist colonial stooges for imperialism.

And in the absence of clearer revolutionary leadership and understanding worldwide, billions more of the downtrodden masses throughout the Third World have cheered on the struggles of those they do see attacking and opposing imperialism, from the bizarre cleric Osama Bin Laden, Muslim upheaval generally and even to the Iraqi leadership (despite its monstrous record) while it faces imperialist onslaught.

In bankrupted Argentina the masses are festering with hatred for the banks and corporations which have stolen their lives and livelihoods, just as they are in Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico as well as potentially many more. 		 
Such hatred of the tyrannical and ever more rapacious exploitation by the worldwide imperialist system and its now INCREDIBLE (but still always increasing) disparities in wealth, power and opportunity, ($100 a year income for millions of peasants and Third world workers - $5M ANNUAL bonuses for City fat cats) can only grow ever more deeply and rapidly.

The highly visible attacks which have profoundly shocked, if not yet much damaged, imperialism's power indicate how that inchoate mass hatred has already erupted. 

This human volcano of billions upon billions of the downtrodden and exploited, is building up for much greater eruptions yet.

And it will be challenging a numerically tiny minority imperialist ruling class with daily less grasp and understanding of the world it controls, or ability to take it anywhere historically. It is a system aptly personified by the mundane, incapable, incoherent, bullying, shallow, philistine bar-room mediocrity of President George W Bush and his half demented cronies.

The dithering, splitting, fear of defeat and confusion of the ruling class, and the conflicts both within particular countries and increasingly between major imperialist powers, will massively increase as soon as the imminent cataclysmic collapse in the world capitalist economy gathers pace.

The unprecedentedly disastrous economic failure which is INEVITABLE in the profit grabbing capitalist system, is already signalled by huge corporate scandals, record-setting bankruptcies, the dot.com and telecoms collapses, pension fund disintegration, trade war skirmishings, farm subsidy and commodity tariff battles, desperate bank nationalisations and even, throughout east Asia, currency failures and endemic unsolvable DEFLATION, closure and unemployment.

But, as endless capitalist reports themselves make clear daily, nothing has been seen yet of the slump to come. The hollow edifice of sixty years of post-war debt, currency inflation, and insanely extended production (relative to the potential to make profit by actually selling the output) is beginning to implode on a scale that will dwarf even the once paralysing impact of the 1929 Crash and the 3 years of slump collapses that followed.

Whenever that happens (and the exact time scale remains scientifically demanding to predict) the ruling class, already seeking increasingly desperate and lunatic "solutions" in warmongering (to divert attention politically and destroy "surplus" production capacity economically) will be closer than ever to total paralysis historically; out of time and out of depth.

Unprecedented opportunities will open up for the world proletarian and working masses to finally rise up and end this stinking system for good, and completely, over all the planet, so that backward influences can never again hold back and subvert workers states achievements. It lacks only clear historical perspectives, guidance, and leadership to rise to the challenges of taking human beings forwards, overturning outmoded capitalism and creating the new kind of society, communism.

Sadly such revolutionary leadership, or even the fight to produce and develop such leadership, has been stultified over decades by the Third International (former USSR, Beijing, etc.) revisionist retreats from world revolutionary perspectives into permanent "peaceful progress" delusions (a retreat which itself reflects the continuing impact of imperialism), or by the defeatist, petty bourgeois reluctance of the Trotskyists to cope with the necessities and discipline of the dictatorship of the working class, endlessly heading vigorous proletarian instincts to struggle, off into cul-de-sacs of reformism, "piece by piece" improvements and "democracy".

The hamstringing of class consciousness that such anti-revolutionary perspectives bring seems to be reflected in the firefighters' dispute.