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 1173 February 25 2003                                                                                                                                 25p

World competitive supremacy and a dollar collapse rapidly emerging as the real story behind the mad drive to war and the ferocious rift in the Western alliance. All the rival ways for continued domineering of the Third World and imposing the economic burdens of a trade crash and slump could all come to grief in this post-globalisation transformation, and end in inter-imperialist conflict itself again, - repeating the whole pattern of history's previous great monopoly-capitalist crises. It is DEFEAT for Western domination which is the crucial next step for civilisation's advance. Fraudulent Western demands for "evil-regime end", and "disarmament now" when US imperialism is nuclear-arming to the teeth and backing its own rotten stooges everywhere, will push Third World revolt over the top in due course. Western workers soon facing economic disaster must make common cause with the EFFECTS of all anti-imperialist struggle. Fake-'left'  get it wrong again.

The economic-crisis CAUSES of imperialist warmongering hysteria, and the crucial prospect of imperialist DEFEAT, have both exploded clearer into view as frustration with each other has further turned NATO "allies" into bitter opponents.

Open trade-war calls against Germany and France from the American ruling-class war lobby, based on longstanding grievances and fear of slump, show that the monopoly-capitalist system's insoluble contradictions and splits are the primary issue, and the tactical differences about bullying Iraq are merely a symptom of this, and not vice versa.

It is just a TV comedians' joke for now to add 'France' onto the end of the USA's "axis of evil" target list, but the cynical humour is far closer to the truth than it realises.

The approach of virtually a global economic collapse, and chaos, is accelerating faster and faster, - and the unsurprised, brutal, matter-of-fact, hostile language in public between the "allied" pillars of Western world "responsibility, authority, and calm reasonableness", etc, etc, indicate that the "free world" leaders have known for years that irreconcilable inter-imperialist economic conflict was ALWAYS going to be the only possible final outcome of the massive dollar-based post-1945 international trade boom and-arms race which saw off the feeble Revisionist leadership of the Soviet workers state bloc into self-liquidating suicide and humiliation.

Some of the issues dividing the West actually touch on Iraq and oil, - (the shallow "explanation" for US warmongering by fake-'left' opponents, from the Daily Mirror to the Socialist Alliance, who all fear the REVOLUTIONARY lessons of what is going on, and like to pretend that mere reforms can sort crippled Western capitalist democracy out)-, but reveal that the differences challenge the very existence of the monopoly-imperialist-dominated postwar world.

The American ruling class is not just fighting for its all-powerful position but for its survival. (See below).

As reflected in the giant corporate triumphs and disasters in the anarchy of the global "free market", monopoly-capitalist power must be forever expanding and winning, or else it goes down and under. (See Marxist science on this, box p 3).

The rise and fall of imperialist state power merely reflects (and then has repercussions on) this pattern, British imperialism's decline being an obvious historical example.

The uncontrollable economic CRISIS of "over-production" (see box) brings this hostile conflict of uneven development to a head.

As the capitalist press itself is revealing when the fine print is read (see below), the USA is threatening violence to the whole world to preserve its all-powerful position, regardless of ANY economic verdicts or market consequences on its imperialist state conduct, - verdicts and consequences which it has declared in advance IT WILL RIDE ROUGHSHOD OVER.

Washington's determination to blitzkrieg Iraq despite a whole world's entreaties, to devastate a "rogue regime" which is not remotely responsible for any of the enormous difficulties and challenges that American capitalism's world domination now faces, and whose destruction and colonisation will not reduce the USA's crisis by a fraction but on the contrary will escalate the economic and political problems and turmoil a 
thousandfold, - has been embarked upon SOLELY AS A WARNING, AND AS AN EXAMPLE TO FRIGHTEN THE WHOLE WORLD,--  but in particular to rub America's major economic rivals' faces in it, reminding them of the real POWER relationship behind 58 years of "Western-democratic-alliance" bullshit in the anti-communist crusade at the United Nations, NATO, the WTO, IMF, and everywhere else.

Thus the ESSENTIAL character of the modern world is emerging exactly as the EPSR has been describing it since first publication, - a world dominated by the eventual inevitability of unsolvable and devastating imperialist economic crisis, which equally inevitably would mean the return of INTER-IMPERIALIST war hostilities as the initial driving force governing the planet's affairs, - exactly continuing the sole longterm pattern of all 20th century history.

The POINT of stressing the EPSR's perspectives is not to boast but to explain why its undroppable fight to convince all on the left that REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS is what has to be built, nothing else, - (a party of revolutionary theory, in practice,- i.e. a Bolshevik Party)-, must go on and on intensifying.

The understanding is simple. This US imperialist warmongering is being driven along by ECONOMIC NECESSITY; and the class mentality of the American monopoly capitalist bourgeoisie is not going to be stopped or influenced by reformist pleas, pressure, or protests wherever they come from. This reality is what the whole of Marxist-Leninist science is about.

Regardless of whether any particular war takes place or not (such as Iraq) because of the peculiarities of timing or tactical considerations, the GENERAL COURSE of imperialist warmongering is now being locked firmly into place.

How to fight this is then COMPLETELY DICTATED by the understanding of how, alone, this imperialist warmongering can possibly all end, which can only be by DEFEAT of some kind for this final historical version of this phenomenon, so crucial for centuries of antagonistic social development, - namely, class domineering arrogance.

No ruling-class system in history has ever given up power voluntarily, no matter how blatantly out-of-touch, unloved, and incompetent it had become.

Murderous and disruptive resistance to the bitter end is always the rule, - witness the "Loyalists" (failed British colonists) in Occupied Ireland, still pipe-bombing the Nationalist stable doors long after the horse of Reunited Ireland has bolted well down the course following the good start given by the Good Friday Agreement to eliminating the artificial sectarian colonial statelet of "Northern Ireland", a police-military dictatorship, completely; and witness the White Colonial land-theft monopolists in Zimbabwe still today using imperialism's international press agency monopoly to dominate Western news with wishful-thinking hopes of reversing ZANU's justified Revolution.

To deservedly reduce the American ruling class to the defeated wretchedness of "Loyalist" self-destruction or suicidal White Farmer sabotage, may require two things, - first, a defeat by any of the "evil" or "weasel" enemies it is aggressively challenging everywhere; and secondly a REVOLUTIONARY defeat at home by an American working-class (backed by much of the middle class intelligentsia) which will before long have found it intolerable to have to put up with the personal economic disaster of a national "over-production-crisis" collapse which is all the fault of just the capitalist system and nothing else; and then to have to bear the burdens of a cripplingly expensive international warmongering campaign as well, -ESPECIALLY one which then FAILS.

First, a DEFEAT for US warmongering insanity in the field. 

Second, a DEFEAT for that sick American ruling-class at home; that is the likeliest historical pattern that the whole world needs to understand.

It dictates the NECESSARY pattern of anti-imperialist struggle everywhere.

Even when divided by bitter inter-imperialist hostilities, the international monopoly capitalist bourgeoisie never forgets whose CLASS side they are on in the even greater, longer-term battle for world supremacy: - continuing bourgeois rule everywhere, or an advance to proletarian rule the whole world over.

The "weasel betrayal" of America's specific warmongering drive by the EU's "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is not being conducted out of love or sympathy with "peace" or "the real interests of the Iraqi people" as such, - the nonsense which all the NATO warmongers have ALWAYS maintained (and do now) in all of the degenerate armed imperialist bullying of weaker Third World countries which has gone on over the years, - but purely out of a very nervous TOTAL distrust of how the USA will fix things in this warmongering so that EVERYONE bears huge burdens of that insane and destructive American "solution" to its slump-crisis problems.

France and Germany joined in the bombing blitzkrieg of Afghanistan; help maintain the present imperialist tyranny there; did not object to 11 years' sanctions torture of Iraq still continuing; don't mind artificially scapegoating Iraq as the one nation on Earth to be totally punished (and left defenceless) by complete disarmament, despite being permanently under threat from non-stop Zionist-fascist aggression in the region; and don't really mind about the destruction of Iraq as such if that is what the USA is intent upon.

There is no question of any real anti-imperialism or any serious "peaceful democracy future" for the world in these rival NATO warmongering positions.

So that if these warmongering differences do escalate from minor spats (about which particular burdens of the crisis should be inflicted on which particular Third World "axis of evil" victims, and how it should be done), - to major trials of strength between the Big Imperialist Powers themselves, - then as much DEFEAT as possible for all or any of them, - at each others hands, or at the hands of Third World resistance, - would all be grist to the mill for the working class to go on and inflict their own DEFEAT on their own ruling class as a consequence and at such an opportunity.

Building each revolutionary party to deal with their own ruling class is a subjective problem for the workers in each country to solve. The petty-bourgeois fake-'left' resistance to building a party of REVOLUTIONARY THEORY remains as stubborn as ever, based on a century and a half of "trade union pragmatism" (i.e. class collaboration), in Britain.

But that class revolution is the only way out of capitalist catastrophe for the world as a whole, including Britain, is an objective necessity, fixed by the whole weight of history's observable class-society laws of development.

And equally hard as any of it is to envisage at the moment, a revolution in Britain, built on an inter-imperialist warmongering catastrophe for the monopoly imperialist British state, is now a real possibility, at last just in view.

As evidence towards this from the current situation (which is the EPSR's weekly aim) the evidence for the IRRECONCILABLE CONTRADICTIONS (of the imperialist, unequal, crisis-ridden, and domineering system) continues to pour in from capitalism's own sources (see below).

At the same time, there is evidence, even from Iraq, of just how silly it is IN THE LONG RUN to assume that Third World resistance to imperialist bullying will always be effortlessly smashed and brushed aside by the Western World's aggressive warmongering "solution" (when facing economic crisis contradictions or slump - World Wars I and II, and now III).

The explosive and tyrannical oil politics of Western imperialism have just received this analysis in the pro-war Observer, fully explaining the intolerable and unbalancing nonsense of America's imperialist domination, but also how flawed it is with contradictions, and how it must crash in ruins, having itself contributed largely to the 'surplus-capital' unevenness at the heart of the "free-market" global economic crisis (see box, and last week's Oxford University confirmation of Marxist science):

Effectively, the normal standards of economics have not applied to the US, because of the international role of the dollar. Some $3 trillion (£1,880 billion) are in circulation around the world helping the US to run virtually permanent trade deficits. Two-thirds of world trade is dollar-denominated. Two-thirds of central banks' official foreign exchange reserves are also dollar-denominated.

Dollarisation of the oil markets is one of the key drivers for this. The majority of countries that require oil imports require dollars to pay for their fuel. Oil exporters similarly hold, as their currency reserve, billions in the currency in which they are paid. Investing these petro-dollars straight back into the US economy is possible at zero currency risk.

So the US can carry on printing money - effectively IOUs - to fund tax cuts, increased military spending, and consumer spending on imports without fear of inflation or that these loans will be called in. As keeper of the global currency there is always the last-ditch resort to devaluation, which forces other countries' exporters to pay for US economic distress. It's probably the nearest thing to a 'free lunch' in global economics.

But now there is the euro. At the time of its launch, various overblown claims were made to its role as 'co-hegemon', sharing the spoils of reserve currency status. The rapid fall in the euro after its launch put paid to such suggestions. But the single currency has since rescued itself, re-igniting talk of euro-ised oil. In fact, it's happening already. 

Iraqi oil, two-thirds of which is being snapped up by US companies, can only be paid for in euros.

'It was a political move on the part of the Iraqi government to show that the euro could be a substitute for the dollar in denominating the oil price,' says Fadhil Chalabi of the Centre for Global Energy Studies.

That move was made in the same week that the euro reached its historic low of $0.82 in October 2000. The subsequent 30 per cent rise in the euro has greatly helped the United Nations' oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

Soon afterwards, Jordan launched its own bilateral trade scheme with Iraq, carried out entirely in euros.

Last year, in a little noticed Opec speech to a Spanish Finance Ministry conference, Javad Yarjani; a senior Iranian oil diplomat, said: 'It is quite possible that as bilateral trade increases between the Middle East and the European Union, it could be feasible to price oil in euros. This would foster further ties between these trading blocs by increasing commercial exchange, and by helping attract much-needed European investment in the Middle East.'

The rising value of the euro makes re denomination in the immediate financial interest of European oil majors such as TotalFinaElf and Shell. Over the past year both companies have seen profits gobbled up by the dollar slump, as them profits are calculated in euros. Opec member countries too would have a strong interest in moving to euros. The eurozone is the biggest importer of oil in the world and 45 per cent of Middle East imports are from Europe. Even US oil majors would benefit from selling their oil in a currency that is increasing in value, say US energy consultants.

The Iranian and Russian parliaments have recently discussed adopting the euro for oil sales.

Last year Russia entered into negotiations with Germany over the establishment of an exchange to sell oil futures denominated in euros. Russia, which on some measures is the world's Number 1 oil producer at the moment, is awash with petrodollars, but trades mainly with Europe. Russia's foreign exchange holdings recently reached an all-time high of $50bn.

So there is a huge list of potential winners from a move to price oil in euros, but movement remains slow.

'At various points in time since the early 1970s, oil producers have discussed this, especially in periods when the dollar has been weak. Opinions have tended to be wide-ranging, depending on the strategic and trade alliances certain members have with particular trade blocs,' said Yarjani.

That was an elliptical reference to the overwhelming influence of Saudi Arabia, whose government is the staunchest ally of the US within Opec.

'The Saudis are holding the line on oil prices in Opec and should they, for example, go along with the rest of the Opec people in demanding that oil be priced in euros, that would deal a very heavy blow to the American economy,'  Youssef Ibrahim, of the influential US Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN.

Last year the former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia told a committee of the US Congress: 'One of the major things the Saudis have historically done, in part out of friendship with the United States, is to insist that oil continues to be priced in dollars. Therefore, the US Treasury can print money and buy oil, which is an advantage no other country has. With the emergence of other currencies and with strains in the relationship, I wonder whether there will not again be, as there have been in the past, people in Saudi Arabia who raise the question of why they should be so kind to the United States.'

Historically, empires have been exporters of capital, rather than importers like the US. The dollar has been vital to this revolution. At the euro's launch Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist, pointed to the possibility that the single currency could weaken the status of the dollar to the extent that it 'could complicate international military relationships'. Feldstein is an outside contender to replace Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve.

Oil pricing is just the background to a wider issue. The Bank of China and the Russian Central Bank are both rumoured to be waiting for the best moment to increase the holdings of euros. Only 5 per cent of Chinese reserves are held in euros, but more than 20 per cent of its trade is with Europe. Middle Eastern states hold $700bn of US assets, but comparatively little in Europe.

So is the euro the missing link between the 'axis of evil' and the 'axis of weasel'? It is greatly appreciated in the former and was invented in the latter. Research by State Street shows that the euro has gained 'safe haven' status sine last August as the dollar has lost it.

The EPSR has never tried hiding that the implications of a dollar collapse are way beyond its comprehension, but they have not been reached by full-time bourgeois economic science either, - and possibly won't be, out of gob-smacked class prejudice that such a thing might happen, or because there is no comparable historical experience of a world currency collapsing in such circumstances and with no obvious replacement.

But it is right to speculate a little, and to try to draw in other indications that the world is approaching historic upheaval of cataclysmic proportions.

Most reeking of disaster ahead for capitalism is the startling contrast between the "open, democratic, and united Western world" which in 45 years of postwar sabotage, armsrace encirclement, and propaganda-brainwashing on an unprecedentedly vicious and global scale, managed to drive Revisionist stupidity into liquidating the epoch-making achievements of the USSR, the world's first workers state, - and the closed-sect, warmongering, isolationist psychosis now threatening US blitzkrieg or abuse on the whole "cowardly and treacherous" world, just about.

Almost the entire global intelligentsia is scratching its petty bourgeois head in disbelief that everyone's "gallant, freedom-loving American allies" are behaving more ruthlessly, dishonestly, and dementedly than Nazi Germany at the time of the imperialist system's last great need for worldwide warmongering to try to get capitalism out of its previous greatest 'over-production' crisis and slump. 

And going from the sublime scale of global bafflement, indicating that something awful and 'unnatural' is about to happen to the world as we know it, to the ridiculously trivial echo of this, further down the line, - what an interesting speculation it is that the virtual disintegration of British imperialism's premier party, the Tories, with nothing coherent to say any more, is precisely because imperialism itself has come to the end of the historical line, and can no longer believably say anything in its own defence.

The bizarre phenomenon of New Labour itself; which has usurped the Tory role but which consists solely of utterly empty and meaningless spin which can be twisted to signify anything that Blair's millionaire backers order it to signify, is a further sign of a whole world coming to an end.

The New Labour stunt can never be repeated, the public would surely never fall for such PR mountebanks again, except ever-so briefly, but equally makes it impossible for Old Labour to ever be successfully resurrected longterm either, because everyone knows where that shallow fake-'left' fraud finally leads and ends up, i.e. revealing the true CONSERVATIVE class essence of all 'reformism' all the time.

So with the whole of bourgeois Parliament just a posturing opportunist joke, which Lib-Dem bogus petty bourgeois "niceness" can only vacuously recreate, then it is just the fate of the capitalist crisis system itself which will be occupying public attention (unless the equally useless fascist "parliamentary" variant of capitalist crisis goes unexpectedly further than the initial racist spurt it will get from immigrant-bashing and asylum-seeker panic).

And capitalism's prospects are unrelieved warmongering doom, as even its own sources endlessly report.

The above-noted fears of Russia taking a pro-German stance in the oil intrigues against US domination are currently multiplying rapidly with Primakov hard at work in Baghdad seeking alliances to try to prevent oil glut price-anarchy in every conceivable set of future circumstances.

And just about the whole G7 (bar Britain) ganged up at the weekend finance forum to further denounce world threatening American economic aggression:

Open hostilities broke out between Europe and the US and Britain this weekend.

At a fractious meeting in Paris of the financial ministers from the world's seven most powerful economies, senior European officials and politicians warned that President George Bush's $695bn (£440bn) tax cut could destabilise a world economy already undermined by threat of war against Iraq.

Mirroring the widening transatlantic rift over disarming Saddam Hussein, Britain stood alongside America to defend the Bush administration from attacks by the rest of Europe over its ballooning budget deficit.

European countries fear that the re-emergence of the so-called "twin deficits" - on the US budget and on its current account - could prompt a run on the dollar if investors lose faith in the world's largest economy. The dollar has already fallen by 25% against the euro in 12 months.

Wim Duisenberg, the president of the European Central Bank, described the record shortfalls in America's public finances and between its spending and earnings abroad as a "cause for concern".

Speaking on behalf of European finance ministers, Nikos Christodoulakis, the Greek finance minister, said the Bush tax cut was unlikely to achieve its aim of boosting the US economy and the surge it could cause in US borrowing could become everyone's problem.

The continental European financial leaders expressed their unusually strongly worded concerns about US economic policy at the first G7 meeting attended by the new US treasury secretary, John Snow.

But seemingly aware that economic collapse is inevitable now anyway, US representatives everywhere are unleashing abusive chauvinist attacks on former NATO and European "allies" as though inter-imperialist war had already been declared. 

Despite having gone on for years in the EPSR about the creeping trade-war essence of the whole fraudulent "free-world" economy, the speed with which fully-elaborated trade-war vitriol has been poured into this superficially minor tactical difference about how best to keep on screwing Iraq and/or the whole of the rest of the oil-producing Middle East, or the whole of the rest of Arab or Islamic anti-imperialist resistance, - remains startling to behold:

A LEADING adviser to President Bush last night launched a savage attack on President Chirac's diplomatic campaign to block war with Iraq, saying that it was merely the product of French commercial interests masquerading as a moral case for peace.

But in words that will serve only to deepen the transatlantic rift over Iraq, he added: 'These five countries, the permanent members of the Security Council, are not a judicial body. They're not expected to make moral or legal judgements, but to advance the respective interests of their countries.'

In Perle's view, the French position against regime change in Iraq is fatally undermined by its multibillion-dollar oil interests negotiated since the last Gulf war: 'There's certainly a large French commercial interest in Iraq, and there are contracts that a new government in Iraq may not choose to uphold, partly because they're so unfavourable to the people of Iraq. Saddam has been prepared to do deals to keep himself in power at the expense of the people.

'My understanding of the largest of these deals, which is the French TotalFinaElf contract to develop certain oil properties in Iraq, is that it is both very large and very unfavourable to the Iraqis.'

Most important, there is talk in the Department of Defense of integrating policy on trade with national security policies One official at the very highest level asked me: "Why shouldn't we use trade policy to reward our friends and hurt those who don't support us?" His idea: to transfer China's textile quota to Turkey.

Use of access to American markets as a weapon is nothing new. Boycotts and trade sanctions have often been used to retaliate against our enemies. The question now being debated in Washington is whether it is worth the undeniable cost of deviating further from President Bush's free trade agenda to let our friends know we appreciate them, and our opponents know that tweaking Uncle Sam's nose is not a costless bit of strutting on the international stage.

Some congressmen are calling for consumer boycotts of French and German products. They feel that Jacques Chirac's farmer constituents will not enjoy seeing French wine sales plummet as wines from America's allies - Australian shirazes, Spanish riojas, Portuguese ports - replace them on the nation's dining tables.

And they might just ask their president to tone down his anti-American rhetoric if they see French cheeses replaced in supermarket coolers by Danish Blue Castello and Havarti, and British Montgomery Cheddar, Stinking Bishop, and Lancashire Kirkhams.

Don't underestimate the power of consumer boycotts. When I recently gave a speech to the German-British Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Birmingham, a representative of Germany's carmakers worriedly inquired about the effect on sales of Gerhard Schröder's attacks on America.

He has reason to worry. Remember: sponsors of television programmes here are often pressured by the threat of boycotts into dropping support for programmes that consumers find objectionable.

Which is why so-called "non-tariff barriers to trade" are being considered. This is an art form most recently used by the French and Germans to keep genetically modified foods out of the EU, even though their own scientists found these foods perfectly safe. EU trade representatives privately admit that they could not sustain the ban if the US challenged it at the World Trade Organisation.

So some congressmen are suggesting similar measures, such as requiring more detailed labelling of Evian and other French waters that we consume by the millions of gallons. Picture large red letters on an Evian bottle, honestly revealing: "This water contains magnesium, silica and sulphates." Scary stuff to most consumers.

Then there are all those German cars. There is a lesson to be learnt from the French, who once required that electronic products coming into the country pass through a single port of entry, manned by a single inspector, who quite understandably fell far behind in the paperwork required of importers. Or from the Japanese, who at one time required that each vehicle imported into the country be given a safety test; blanket approval of each brand not allowed.

Such a programme might well succeed in getting the business communities of Germany and France, which both run a trade surplus with the US, to ask their governments to reconsider the more blatant aspects of their anti-American foreign policies.

Germany is in recession, its official unemployment rate at 11 % and rising, and with no prospect of a recovery of domestic demand. Selective measures making it more difficult for German products to penetrate US markets would be a blow to its hopes of an export-fed recovery, and show there was a price to be paid for Bush-bashing.

But there is more to a national defence-orientated trade policy than putting a bit of stick about. There are also carrots to be offered. Mexico, a member of the Security Council, might be promised some form of legalisation for the millions of so-called "undocumented" immigrants who cross into America looking for work, and send billions in remittances back across the border:

Chile might receive prompt congressional approval of the- freetrade agreement it has negotiated with the US trade representative, and a similar agreement could be reached with Australia, which has already committed troops to the Gulf. Poland can be assured that if Nato hesitates to come to its aid if assistance is needed, we stand ready to fill the gap.

Americans are prepared to give Great Britain just about anything within their gift by way of thanking Tony Blair for risking his political future.

And finally, any EU applicant that is vetoed for supporting the US should immediately be granted a free-trade agreement with us.

The use of trade as a weapon is not costless, and Adam Smith might spin in his grave were he still among us and a reader of this column.

But the cost of keeping hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women sitting in the desert waiting for France to end its UN stall costs a lot more than doing without champagne and chablis.

Even more usefully, some parts of the capitalist press have tried to maintain their bogus "free media" credentials (see last week's exposure of press-tolerated US government censorship; - it will be totally blanketing when the time comes, depending on any dissident idiosyncrasies by an odd press-baron or two) by reporting the words of leading Iraqi intelligentsia critics of Saddam, themselves in exile or fear of their lives, who nevertheless have gone public with their denunciation of American's demented warmongering.

The line taken by this particular piece is useful for bringing out one crucial factor in the catastrophic miscalculations that will mark this end-of-the-imperialist-epoch total global turmoil, the fact that the Third World has been utterly transformed by capitalist globalisation, - in exactly the way that Marx originally described the future transformation of the proletariat under capitalism, going from dumb wage-slaves in hovels to mobile and technologically-able political activists whose class consciousness would eventually be able to (and would be forced to) seize power as the new ruling class.

Kamil Mahdi argues it from the point of view of Iraq's independent pride to be able to resolve its own internal problems over time, having had its fill of imperialist patronising tyranny and intervention, and having seen off most of it for the far greater betterment of Iraq.

But perhaps even more immediately relevant is the picture this gives of a really dynamic society that is newly awakening in history, and which might just have already developed enough national cohesion and organisational and technological know-how and experience to actually be able to put up a stout fight against the imminent imperialist invasion, and to have developed enough anti-imperialist political consciousness to want to do it, in spite of their contempt for Saddam:

Having failed to convince the British people that war is justified, Tony Blair is now invoking the suffering of the Iraqi people to justify bombing them. He tells us there will be innocent civilian casualties, but that more will die if he and Bush do not go to war. Which dossier is he reading from?

The present Iraqi regime's repressive practices have long been known, and its worst excesses took place 12 years ago, under the gaze of General Colin Powell's troops; 15 years ago, when Saddam was an Anglo-American ally; and almost 30 years ago, when Henry Kissinger cynically used Kurdish nationalism to further US power in the region at the expense of both Kurdish and Iraqi democratic aspirations.

Killing and torture in Iraq is not random, but has long been directly linked to politics - and international politics at that. Some of the gravest political repression was in 1978-80, at the time of the Iranian revolution and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. But the Iraqi people's greatest suffering has been during periods of war and under the sanctions of the 1990s. There are political issues that require political solutions and a war under any pretext is not what Iraqis need or want.

In government comment about Iraq, the Iraqi people are treated as a collection of hapless victims without hope or dignity. At best, Iraqis are said to have parochial allegiances that render them incapable of political action without tutelage. This is utterly at variance with the history and reality of Iraq. Iraqis are proud of their diversity, the intricacies of their society and its deeply rooted urban culture.

Their turbulent recent history is not something that simply happened to Iraqis, but one in which they have been actors. Iraqis have a rich modern political tradition borne out of their struggle for independence from Britain and for political and social emancipation. A major explanation for the violence of recent Iraqi political history lies in the determination of people to challenge tyranny and bring about political change. Iraqis have not gone like lambs to the slaughter, but have fought political battles in which they suffered grievously. To assert that an American invasion is the only way to bring about political change in Iraq might suit Blair's propaganda fightback, but it is ignorant and disingenuous.

It is now the vogue to talk down Iraqi politics under Saddam Hussain as nothing but the whim of a dictator. The fact is that leaders cannot kill politics in the minds of people, nor can they crush their aspirations. The massacres of leftists when the Ba'athists first came to power in 1963 did not prevent the emergence of a new mass movement in the mid-1960s. The second Ba'ath regime attempted to buy time from the Kurdish movement in 1970 only to trigger a united mobilisation of Kurdish nationalism. Saddam co-opted the Communist party in the early 1970s, only to see that party's organisation grow under a very narrow margin of legality before he moved against it. In the 1970s, the regime tried to control private economic activity by extending the state to every corner of the economy, only to face an explosion of small business activity.

The regime's strict secularism produced a clerical opposition with a mass following. When the regime pressurised Iraqis to join the Ba'ath party, independent opinion emerged within that party and Saddam found it necessary to crush it and destroy the party in the process. In the 1980s, the army was beginning to emerge as a threat, and the 1991 uprising showed the extent of discontent. In the 1990s, Saddam fostered the religious leadership of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, only to see the latter emerge as a focal point for opposition. Even within Saddam's family and close circle, there has been opposition.

Of course Saddam Hussain crushed all these challenges, but in every case the regional and international environment has supported the dictator against the people of Iraq. It is cynical and deceitful of Tony Blair to pretend that he understands Iraqi politics and has a meaningful programme for the country. Iraq's history is one of popular struggle and also of imperial greed, superpower rivalries and regional conflict. To reduce the whole of Iraqi politics and social life to the whims of Saddam Hussain is banal and insulting.

Over the past 12 years of vicious economic blockade, the US and Britain have ignored the political situation inside Iraq and concentrated on weapons as a justification for their policy of containment. UN resolution 688 of April 1991, calling for an end to repression and an open dialogue to ensure Iraqi human and political rights, was set aside or used only for propaganda and to justify the no-fly zones.

Instead of generating a real political dynamic backed by international strength and moral authority, Iraqis were prevented from reconstructing their devastated country. Generations of Iraqis will continue to pay the price of the policy of sanctions and containment, designed for an oil glut period in the international market.

Now that the US has a new policy, it intends to implement it rapidly and with all its military might. Despite what Blair claims, this has nothing to do with the interests and rights of the Iraqi people. The regime in Iraq is not invincible, but the objective of the US is to have regime change without the people of Iraq. The use of Iraqi auxiliaries is designed to minimise US and British casualties, and the result may be higher Iraqi casualties and prolonged conflict with predictably disastrous humanitarian consequences.

The Bush administration has enlisted a number of Iraqi exiles to provide an excuse for invasion and a political cover for the control of Iraq. People like Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya have little credibility among Iraqis and they have a career interest in a US invasion. At the same time, the main forces of Kurdish nationalism, by disengaging from Iraqi politics and engaging in internecine conflict, have become highly dependent upon US protection and are not in a position to object to a US military onslaught. The US may enlist domestic and regional partners with varying degrees of pressure.

This in no way bestows legitimacy on its objectives and methods, and its policies are rejected by most Iraqis and others in the region. Indeed, the main historical opposition to the Ba'ath regime - including various strands of the left, the Arab nationalist parties, the Communist party, the Islamic Da'wa party, the Islamic party (the Muslim Brotherhood) and others - has rejected war and US patronage over Iraqi politics. The prevalent Iraqi opinion is that a US attack on Iraq would be a disaster, not a liberation, and Blair's belated concern for Iraqis is unwelcome.

Kamil Mahdi is an Iraqi political exile and lecturer in Middle East economics at the University of Exeter K.A.Mahdi@exeter.ac.uk

On this point of potential Iraqi resistance to imperialist conquest, the entire fake-'left' further demonstrates its remoteness from any real grasp of the monopoly-capitalist system's REVOLUTIONARY crisis, an understanding of which has to be the background and basis for any correct orientation to any part of this whole vast, complex and global political turmoil that the "free market" insoluble contradictions have led the world into.

The various Trot and Revisionist 'independent' or 'Alliance' posturers either want their fellow-thinkers in Iraq (hopefully there won't be many) to form a 'military bloc' with Saddam and suspend (or oppose) independent workers revolutionary actions; or just condemn the imperialist invasion but carry on condemning the Saddam regime exactly as before, promoting only their own "pure" anti-imperialist struggle; or in practice defend the Saddam regime from imperialist attack but not publicise it as a positive political stance to take.

This sad jibber is all the same daft 'armchair socialism' but from different angles.

None start from imperialist CRISIS and the enormous possibilities coming soon of the history-making DEFEAT and overthrow of imperialism resuming, via communist revolutionary process.

"Defeat for Western imperialism" is the only slogan for the whole world in this situation.

But for lefts to continue to attack the Saddam regime themselves while making this call would make nonsense of it.

Yet it would be equally hopelessly misleading of the Iraqi masses to help create any illusions or confidence in the corrupt and degenerate Saddam regime by saying its presence is needed in a military bloc with the left if imperialist invasion is to be defeated.

Utter nonsense. The Iraqi people can defeat imperialist aggression, and in reality do it far better if there were no Saddam degenerate regime than if it staggered on.

But to press on with civil war actions and sloganising against Saddam while in the middle of an imperialist onslaught on Iraq which the Saddam regime for its own rotten interests was actually fighting against too, would be needlessly dangerous tactical folly.

"DEFEAT FOR WESTERN IMPERIALISM - but no confidence in Saddam" is the Bolshevik solution from the ABC of Marxism-Leninism (compare with the Kornilov-Kerensky situation, August 1917).

If and when the main international revolutionary requirement of a defeat for the imperialist western invaders has been achieved, the civil-war cudgels can then immediately be taken up again against the Saddam regime, entirely necessarily since no internal class struggle progress can be made in Iraq until that fascist chauvinist opportunism of phoney 'anti-imperialism' has been overthrown.

So backward and anti-theory is the petty bourgeois fake-'left' in Britain that there were 'communist revolutionary' leaflets on the Feb 15 march (CPGB, for example) calling in bold, emphasised type "Down with Saddam Hussein's Ba'athism! Down with bin Laden and political Islam!" in supposedly agitating workers to OPPOSE a "Western invasion of Iraq to rid the world of Saddam tyranny and Bin Laden terrorism", in a Labour government's stated aims.

Fake-'left' tactical muddleheadedness of these proportions is every bit as reactionary and dangerous as New Labour's DELIBERATE pro-imperialist warmongering treacherous confusion.

For the rest, the ENTIRE fake-'left' continues to plod along merely exposing Labour imperialist lies, evasions, and hypocrisy, a job the fulltime bourgeois press and TV (D. Mirror; Rory Bremner; etc) is doing just as well but in infinitely more telling volumes.

All still steer clear of making a case for a Bolshevik party of REVOLUTIONARY THEORY; and even the word REVOLUTION still rarely gets any mention at all, let alone any understanding of the type of crisis imperialism is in.

With one exception. Paul Foot has amazingly called for "revolution" in the Socialist Worker.

Sadly, it is cunning, centrist crap. But at least it is a start to a largescale centrist process which the EPSR has been arguing will inevitably have to be suffered on the way towards an emerging truly REVOLUTIONARY consciousness in Britain and the world.

Foot's is an old dirty trick. The "revolution" is equated only with the Paris Commune, the early Soviets, the Councils of Action, and the like. Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the absolutely necessary essence of all serious socialist revolution in history (see box, p3) does not get a mention.

Capitalism's essential bourgeois dictatorship (also not mentioned) which hides behind its essential modern cover of parliamentary democracy (which the SWP take part in without any warning to the working class of what a total fraud it is, and in which the SWP routinely support the return of a Labour government;) is to be overcome (good) by.... better parliamentary democracy!!!!!

In the best cases workers threw up organisations based on elected councils, with their representatives paid the same and subject to instant recall.

These councils were more efficient and effective representatives than their parliamentary equivalents because they were more democratic.

They formed themselves quite naturally in the struggle for emancipation by the exploited masses. And they all emerged at times of revolution.

The reason for that is very simple. The existing power structure, including parliamentary democracy, is tolerated by the controllers of wealth only as long as that control is not threatened.

It follows that the only real democratic alternatives to parliamentary democracy can emerge when the minority control of the capitalists is challenged.

In each of these cases of revolution, the pendulum swung back to different points of reaction - either to terrible tyrannies or to parliamentary democracies every bit as feeble as before. 

The chief reason for this decline was the failure of the revolutionary forces to organise their new strength, to unite their forces powerfully enough to stave off the reaction and move forward to a new social order.

It is a grim irony of history that on the one occasion where the revolutionaries were led by a party - Russia in October 1917 - the working class base of that party was destroyed in civil war before it could consolidate its advances.

The lessons are plain. There are democratic alternatives to parliament, but they are only likely to emerge when there is a challenge from below to the economic rule of the minority.

How can we encourage such a challenge? Revolutions cannot be created out of thin air. They can only arise in an atmosphere of confidence.

So the only way to work for a revolution and a more democratic society is to relate to the day to day struggles that always absorb the exploited lives of the working people.

Every strike, every demonstration. every manifestation of revolt carries with it the seed of revolution.

The pompous and self absorbed activities of the representatives of parliamentary democracy work, against such a revolution because they constantly dampen down, mock and humiliate live protest.

They pretend they are democrats, but by their actions prove the opposite.

The seeds of a new more democratic society can only be sown in struggle against the old one.

This 'revolution' precisely does arise out of thin air. It is given no context in warmongering imperialist collapse and turmoil.

In the real world, colossal international revolutions of the bloodiest dictatorship kind are inevitably going to emerge out of the insane, destructive warmongering tyranny which Western 'parliamentary democracy' is about to inflict on Iraq and then on who knows how many "rogue regimes" thereafter.

The "civil war" which Foot ludicrously claims destroyed Bolshevism's working-class base after 1917, was in fact, of course, the greatest triumph of the Leninist proletarian revolution, a class-war achievement against all the odds and against the mightiest imperialist intervention that the West could organise; which will forever rank with the Soviet workers state's triumph over the fascist imperialist axis in WWII; the colossal Chinese communist revolution; the titanic revolutionary Korean War struggle against Western imperialism 1950-53; and the even more dramatic Vietnam communist victory over Western imperialism later on; - as among the most history making, revolutionary, class war achievements in the whole record of civilisation's struggle against dying reaction. So far. EPSR

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

Western imperialist war crimes

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL says there is clear evidence that acts committed by the Israeli Army during 'Operation Defensive Shield' were war crimes.

The human rights watchdog levelled the charges in its report into the actions of the Israeli Army in Jenin and Nablus in March and April.

In Hawasashin and neighbouring areas of Jenin refugee camp, 169 houses and 374 apartments were bulldozed, mostly after the fighting had ceased. Ten people were killed and six others on the hospital lists of those killed in Jenin were recorded as being crushed by rubble. Over 4,000 people were made homeless by the actions of the Israelis.

"The Israeli authorities have failed in their responsibility to bring to justice the perpetrators of serious human rights violations. War crimes are among the most serious crimes under international law and represents offences against humanity as a whole and bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to justice is the concern and the responsibility of the international community."

Amnesty also accused the Israeli government of blocking, "all attempts to end human rights violations and install a system of international protection by introducing monitors with a clear human rights mandate in Israel and the Occupied Territories, have been undermined by the refusal of the government of Israel and supported by the USA."

"It is imperative that the international community stop being an ineffective witness of the grave violations that take place in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Meaningful, urgent and appropriate action is long overdue," concluded Amnesty International. 

The report, released on 4 November, documents serious human rights violations by Israeli forces, including unlawful killings; torture and ill treatment of prisoners; destruction of homes, sometimes with residents inside; blocking of ambulances and the denial of humanitarian. assistance to Palestinian people; and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Amnesty International submitted most of the individual cases included in the report to the Israeli Army for comment following meetings in May but despite promises to answer the cases, no response has yet been forthcoming.

In Jenin and Nablus, the Israelis blocked access for days to medical assistance and in addition they shot at ambulances and fired warning shots around them while ambulance drivers were harassed or arrested. The wounded lay for hours unattended or were treated in homes and the dead lay in the street or in houses for days. Several people died in circumstances where lack of access to medical care may have caused or hastened their deaths.

The report went on to say that Palestinians not involved in fighting were killed as a result of disproportionate use of force and the failure of the Israeli Army to take adequate measures to protect those not involved in the fighting. In Jenin refugee camp and Jenin city, more than half of the 54 Palestinians who died as a result of the incursion between 3 and 17 April appear not to have been involved in fighting. Among those killed were seven women, four children and six men aged over 55. In Nablus, at least 80 Palestinians were killed by the Israelis, including seven women and nine children, between 29 March and 22 April. 

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

British Imperialism's "Loyalist" butchers are killing each other because the colonial "union" is as dead as the Nazi Third Reich.

On the evening of Saturday 1 February, as they returned from a Rangers game in Scotland, UDA leader John "Grog" Gregg and another UDA man, Robert "Rob" Carson, were gunned down in a taxi in the Docks area of Belfast. The taxi driver remains in critical condition.

Blame for the Gregg killing immediately fell onto Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair's "C" Company, who have been involved in a vicious feud with the mainstream UDA. It didn't matter that Adair was sitting in Maghaberry Prison at the time of the shooting. Everyone knew who gave the order.

With this latest brazen act, Adair and his gang had effectively thrown down the gauntlet of loyalist violence in no uncertain terms and all that remained to be seen was who would be left standing after the smoke had cleared.

Over the course of the past several years, infighting within unionist paramilitary groups has led to the deaths of more than a dozen loyalists.

According to PSNI statistics, aside from internal conflicts, unionist paramilitaries were also responsible for 114 shootings and 89 serious assaults in 2002 alone.

Their reign of terror has also resulted in seven dead Catholics (including young Ciaran Cummings and postman Daniel McColgan,) a journalist, (Martin O'Hagan) and several dead Protestants killed in the mistaken belief that they were Catholics - Gavin Brett and David Cupples among them.

However, one of the most disturbing trends that has emerged out of recent events is the way in which the British press has been portraying the UDA and other unionist paramilitaries.

Casual observers could be forgiven for thinking that UDA members were part of a legitimate organisation, instead of a sectarian killer gang. The media was addressing UDA leaders respectfully as, "Mr Adair" or "Mr Gregg" and by their self-awarded titles – "Brigadier".

There was, one might conclude, a "Good UDA' and a "Bad UDA" and by the end of the feud the press seemed content to paint Adair as the bad guy and John Gregg as one of the good ones.

Ulster Political Research Group spokesman Sammy Duddy described Gregg's death as "a terrible waste".

"It is sad when loyalists die in feuds," lamented Duddy. "John Gregg was interested in building bridges not starting feuds."

That was not all John Gregg was interested in.

He, Adair, and the other thugs of the UDA, earned their reputation and status by engaging in vicious sectarian murders and treacherous criminal pursuits such as drug dealing, prostitution and extortion.

The bloody feud that threatened to tear their organisation apart was not about political differences. It was about the UDA reasserting its power and control. It was about money, power and influence.

Indeed, after the speedy Shankill exodus of Adair's gang, Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly pointedly remarked, "the replacement of one group of sectarian killers and drug dealers with another will do little to benefit the people of the Lower Shankiil".

And as republicans know only too well, a re-united UDA does little to reassure nationalists. Historically, every time a split or shake up has occurred within the unionist arena, Catholics die. After all, nothing brings unionist paramilitaries together like a good progrom.

So, as the feud ran its course nationalist politicians in interface areas - like Kelly and Sinn Féin's Gerard Brophy - were already warning their communities to remain vigilant. It wasn't fear mongering. It was common knowledge. The fact is, the UDA was, and remains, a sectarian killing machine. After all, it was set up to kill Catholics. That was its original mandate.

Unionist paramilitaries have always been encouraged to kill Catholics, and they have no qualms about doing so. They have long operated as a covert extension of the physical force of the British state, and were an effective method of instilling fear and terror in the civilian population.

On the same day that John Gregg was buried - the day John White claimed in a telephone call from Scotland that he would soon return to the Six Counties - the Mayor of Belfast, Sinn Féin's Alex Maskey, was being informed by the PSNI that his personal details were in the hands of UDA death squads and his life was again under threat.

And no sooner had things grown quiet in the Shankill then trouble began yet again in interface areas of North Belfast, with an orchestrated attack on the Limestone Road.

Over on the Shankill, another unionist paramilitary was solemnly telling a journalist that "the turnout today was a clear sign that 'C' Company stood for the cancer in loyalism. The days of loyalists shooting loyalists have to be finished."

So there is definitely something tougher than being a poor, misunderstood unionist paramilitary - being a Catholic who happens to live next door to one.

On Tuesday 4 February, only days after the Gregg/Carson killing, the ruling UDA leadership issued a statement saying that members of 'C' company had 48 hours to distance themselves from Adair or "face the consequences". If they refused, said the statement, they would be "treated the same as the enemies of Ulster".

Catholic nationalists knew exactly what they meant, and so did the UDA's rank and file.

Remaining UDA companies in West Belfast rushed to their telephones to condemn Adair and his cohorts, saying that they "no longer recognised 'C' Company's current leadership". Members of Adair's own group headed into nearby pubs to formally switch sides and declare their allegiance. Even Adair's allies in the LVF, whom he sided with in the past as a further challenge to his UDA adversaries, washed their hands of the whole mess, saying "the LVF have not and would not become involved in any act connected to this ongoing problem".

Within days of Gregg's killing, the UDA leadership issued a further statement, announcing plans for a mass mobilisation on Adair's home turf in the Lower Shankill the following Saturday. A UDA spokesman was quoted as saying, "this was an act of war, and there will be no hiding place for those responsible".

What was left of Adair's dwindling faction responded with the usual bravado, saying it would meet any attacks with "a measured military response against the aggressors" and that it, in turn, was planning "a street party" for the same day.

Later that night, John White defiantly told a reporter he was "indifferent" to Gregg's killing. "Those who live by the sword, die by the sword," he said.

Infuriated, the rest of the UDA decided not to wait until Saturday for their show of strength. Instead, at about midnight on Wednesday 5 February, they flooded into the Lower Shankill.

Hand-to-hand fighting took place, homes were attacked, shots were fired, and in the ensuing chaos, 'C' Company phoned the PSNI for protection - prompting Chief Constable Hugh Orde to remark that "those who live by the sword, as soon as it starts to get difficult, call the police for help".

Within hours, the remaining Adair gang - including John White, Adair's wife Gina, his children, and other 'C' Company allies were packing their bags and fleeing to Scotland under PSNI escort. The violent clash that had been anxiously anticipated became a bloodless coup as the "corporate" UDA re-established its dominance.

While the British tabloids rushed to splash pictures of Johnny Adair's abandoned dogs onto their front pages and think up amusing captions for the morning headlines, the remaining members of Adair's notorious "C" Company were sitting in a Scottish hotel, hunched over plates of haggis and looking over their shoulders with every hurried bite.

And so, the latest unionist episode of the Sopranos comes to a temporary close - not with a bang, but a whimper. Within the Six Counties anyway.

"It wouldn't matter if they went to the Mediterranean," a UDA source was quoted as saying. "John Gregg is lying in a coffin and that is a disgrace. It's never over until it's over. There is still work to do."