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 
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[P&P Bulletin Publications PO 80X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]           
No 1113 November 20 2001                                                                                                                                25p

Seminar change Dec 8. S.West 

The ruthlessly murderous fascist nature of the US imperialist blitzkrieg begins to reveal its historical inevitability as the international bourgeois-monopoly economic crisis deepens unstoppably. Events like the callous laying-waste of Afghanistan and its people will begin to educate world opinion to the unavoidable need for a planned world socialist system more certainly than any propaganda can. The cosmetic fraud of UN 'nation-building' will be as catastrophic a hoax as everywhere else that post-imperialist destruction has been sticky-plastered over. Middle-class 'moralists' of the fake-'left' bear greatest responsibility by their condemnation of the only way that sections of the US-tyrannised Middle East know how to strike back, by terrorist conspiracy, the honourable origins of most later revolutionary traditions, including Bolshevism. Bogus 'Marxists' distort history to try to excuse their opportunist back-stabbing betrayal of Third World desperate hatred of Western domination.

The imperialist-fascist terror assault on Third World revolt continues to demonstrate how the events themselves of the capitalist-system crisis are the great educator.

Anti-war demonstrations are growing, not reducing. Middle-class opinion is becoming more alarmed, not less. The 'triumph' in Afghanistan only leads to evermore difficult perspectives and questions, not fewer and easier ones. Fake-'leftism', blocking off the working class from revolutionary understanding, becomes more and more exposed as a fraud, not less so.

And the greatest lesson of all, transforming the situation dramatically further and faster, has yet to even emerge clearly at all, - that this sickening exhibition of blitzkrieg bullying by Western world-domination, far from being a 'one-off' out of 'extreme necessity' is in fact merely a small foretaste of routine permanent warmongering to come as the worldwide economic catastrophe of collapsing markets and monstrous suffering and injustice (against which al-Qaeda is symptomatically struggling) begins to avalanche.

If Bin Laden's pinprick terrorist adventurism is considered an intolerable affront and challenge to America's interests, then what will a string of communist revolutions around the world be regarded as, wholesalely confiscating endless prized possessions of US imperialism's international economic empire???

That, and the inter-imperialist trade-war aggressiveness that will be part of such destructive-slump developments, will mark the start of crisis-warmongering proper (leading eventually to World War III) of which the Afghanistan outrage (like Kosovo ' Sierra Leone, Somalia, and the Gulf Wars before it) was just a muscle-flexing, mind-conditioning warm-up.

Widespread revolutionary communist consequences of an international capitalist markets crash may not yet be clearly in view but the impact of the imperialist system's economic failure itself, which will teach the world everything it wants to know about this barbaric NATO warmongering, in the Middle East, is more than evident, - and from the capitalist press's own admissions:

In the past year Argentina has lurched from one crisis to another as the government of President Fernando de la Rua  battled to save his country - the seventh richest in the world a century ago - from bankruptcy. The big fear on the markets is that any day now Argentina may fail to pay the crippling interest on its $132 billion public debt.

But for many the country is already socially in default. State salaries and pensions were slashed by 13 per cent in July and some teachers, doctors, dustmen and police have not been paid for up to five months.

Since the beginning of November, social security benefits for the elderly have dried up, reducing health cover to emergencies only, and leaving most of the four million subscribers stranded and scared.

Cash-related crime is soaring, with shootouts reported in the city centre almost daily.

Some 42 policemen have been killed this year alone and armed bouncers in bulletproof vests guard supermarkets, pharmacies and restaurants.

On average, there are two armed bank robberies a day and people are frequently abducted in broad daylight; in taxis or on the streets, and forced to withdraw their savings from a cash point.

'This is like being in a war. People are going to die if they don't do something,' shouted Horacio Bullman, shaking his fist in anger as he queued for an X-ray in a public hospital after being turned away at two others. 'What did I work for all my life? This? They don't care about us. It's as if they think we are disposable items.'

'It's shameful. Our old people don't even have the right to die any more because they have stopped paying for funerals,' said Hugo Moyano, the lorry-driver leader of the strongest national union, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), which has called for a massive protest in the streets of Buenos Aires on 20 November.

Argentina has long prided itself on being an oasis of European living standards, with a large middle class, in a region dogged by poverty. But unemployment is now at 18 per cent, another 15 per cent are 'underemployed' and just under a third of the country's 37 million population live under the poverty line.

Horse-drawn carts have appeared on the streets of the capital, Buenos Aires, used by hundreds of families who travel from the surrounding countryside to scour the pavements for old, reusable junk. Many shops and restaurants are boarded up; the grand avenues that cut through this elegant capital city, described as the Paris of Latin America, are often deserted.

DOORBELLS get a lot of use in Argentina. Often it is people selling unsolicited kitchen sponges or asking for a few pesos to prop up the district fire service. When Elsa Gutman rang the bell of a Buenos Aires house last week wrapped in a thick fur coat and with immaculately-coiffed hair, the inhabitants thought at first she might have lost her poodle. It was only when she started talking about plumbing and painting that it became clear that she was peddling DIY aid.

Elsa, 54, is typical of a once thriving middle class in Argentina that is struggling to make ends meet after more than three years of devastating recession. Her husband, who lost his job in a bank 16 months ago, has turned himself into an odd job man and Elsa, a former teacher, helps to find him work.

'I never thought I'd be doing this, but Argentina is falling apart. This is the only way we have left to pay our bills,' said Elsa, whose chipped nail varnish and laddered stockings are the only tell-tale signs of her troubles.

Nature has added to Argentina's woes. Thousands of farmers in the vast central pampas region watched helplessly as their crops and livestock were washed away by record floods in the past six weeks: About 14,000 stranded villagers are still frantically struggling to build levees of sand, and more rain is expected.

Public anger has grown since Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo slashed the state salaries and pensions. In recent mid-term elections, more than a fifth of voters cast blank or spoilt votes to show their despair.

Meanwhile the hunt is on for countless absentee state employees, nicknamed the 'gnocchi', who quietly collect a salary every month, traditionally celebrated with copious servings of the Italian potato-based-dish, without ever going to work.

'This government is catatonic. It has abandoned its people to their fate,' said Roberto Bacman, a political analyst in Buenos Aires. 'People are at their wits' end.'

In the queue outside the Spanish embassy, bleary-eyed young people stake out their place at four o'clock in the morning for the much prized work visa or dual nationality that will allow them to bail out of their sinking ship of a country.

'I don't want to leave. I love my country, but there is just no future here,' said Juan Fernandez, a 26-year-old engineer, clutching his file full of papers and emigration forms.

Many young, educated Argentinians, whose grandparents emigrated from war torn Europe in the first half of the last century, have fled back to Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Britain in the past year in search of work.

'Argentina is not just in a crisis, this country is a write-off,' Fernandez said. 'Our politicians have plundered the system for so long, corruption is so much part of life. I can't believe that will ever change.'

As night follows day, the notion that surely civilisation’s economic development can be rationally planned to proceed steadily in the interests of everyone on earth rather than have this periodic terrifying slump-catastrophe, will rapidly again become the chief aspiration of all human longing, - as socialism has been, already, for nearly 200 years. What precise battles for socialist ideas will have to be fought is not yet known, of course; but that there is no alternative but world socialism to the slump and warmongering catastrophes of capitalism's grotesquely-unfair and uneven development is not doubted by anyone. Exactly how to conquer the world for a totally classless international society of planned cooperation is the stuff of all future argument; but there can be no question that even spontaneous developments (in Argentina and elsewhere) will sooner or later suggest the mass of the people taking over the ownership, running, and planning of their own country's whole economy rather than let the present insane mess continue. Organised revolutionary communist proposals will already be fermenting there for certain.

It will take the beginnings of such revolutionary upheavals (in Argentina or in any one of a score of other countries where capitalism's failure is already proving intolerable), - plus US imperialism's inevitable threatening response, - before the connections between international imperialist slump and international imperialist warmongering begin to be widely-made; but once events themselves start to teach the world such lessons (rather than the tiny propaganda output of the few circles of genuinely revolutionary Marxist understanding, which could never achieve such an educational effect on their own), - then all further mind-conditioning that "bombing is best" as a cure for the planet's ills by the likes of Bush, Blair, Polly Toynbee, Clare Short, and Christopher Hitchens, will be self-branded as more and more demented.

"War without end" was one of the more perceptive slogans already appearing on the huge London demonstration against imperialist blitzkrieg politics at the weekend.

And deepening splits in the ranks of middle-class mind-conditioning - all united in their horror-stricken "condemnation" of Sept 11, - are observable in the capitalist press:

What the events of the past few days have starkly revealed is that the US had only one interest in this war in Afghanistan, capturing Bin Laden and destroying al-Qaida; that imperative outstripped all considerations of Afghanistan's future. So the timing of the attack was decided by US military preparedness rather than any coherent political strategy for the region, and the US war aim determined the crucial switch in tactics around November 4 when the US decided to throw its weight behind the unsavoury Northern Alliance by bombing the Taliban frontlines.

For the US, the whole country of Afghanistan is collateral damage. Or, to put it another way, a little hors d'oeuvre before they move on to the next course  -  Somalia, Yemen or, most worryingly of all, Iraq? The latter is already being openly touted in Washington as a possibility for the "second stage" and tension is growing in the Gulf region. Meanwhile, as far as the US is concerned, the UK with its nation-building agenda, the UN and everyone else is welcome to spend their soldiers' lives on the onerous task of clearing up the mess the US bombing has left behind, freeing it to concentrate on the next task.

This strengthens the view that what we have to fear from September 11 is not just Islamist fanaticism, but the US response to it. Indeed, the latter could well prove a far greater threat to the stability of many countries, further stoking the Islamist fanaticism it seeks to extinguish. The template has been developed in Afghanistan: lavish bribery of neighbours, unchecked deployment of vicious military hardware, keep US soldiers out of it and use others to do the fighting. It is a foreign policy of brute force and it draws legitimacy within the US from a lethal combination of three factors: a profound sense of righteous anger, the reality of unchallenged economic and military power and a pervasive ignorance of and indifference to the rest of the world.

To increase the danger, the US actions are unchecked by fear of another superpower and, at present, unchecked by its usually vibrant civil society where debate about the purposes or methods of the war against terrorism has been cowed into virtual silence in the mainstream. The result is that an ugly ruthlessness is creeping into US political culture. For example, "physical interrogation" or torture is proposed in the columns of Newsweek while President Bush signs an order allowing military tribunals of suspected terrorists in private and without a jury, for the first time since the second world war.

For all the US has needed western support for its war, we seem to have been singularly unsuccessful in extracting in return any compromises on US unilateralism. Putin's protestations on NMD are brushed off, and barely a murmur is raised in criticism of the US's failure to deliver its climate change plan while the world went ahead in Marrakesh last week. From the start, this administration has been unabashed, denying any sense of responsibility to anyone other than its own citizens. Now, everyone has the almighty headache of how they are to tiptoe round and placate this raging colossus. 

The Labour party has traditionally been deeply split over the conduct of US foreign policy. Vietnam, Central and Latin America and the Iran-contra affair all provoked intense controversy. That was bad enough, but we were not involved in playing the supporting role. At the risk of further incensing my American correspondents, the manipulation of the CIA in Central America could come to seem like child's play compared with what we are likely to glimpse over the next decade.

As usual, this well-meaning liberalism is unable to provide any perspective for any kind of end to imperialist warmongering rampaging, revolutionary or otherwise.

As usual, if there is any message at all, it is that the world would be a better place if it did not go down this route of American fascist domineering. Reformism, in other words, is the only answer put forward.

And the essence of parliamentary cretinism, Wedgwood Benn, was on hand at Trafalgar Square to actually declare: "We have a fascist parliament and a cringing Cabinet", but still the 'answer' is reformism.

But of course it solves nothing. It was the total fraud of bourgeois democracy elections to a parliament under capitalism which gave Hitler the power in 1933. It was what put Bush in office last November. And it is obviously the system responsible for what Benn now calls a "fascist parliament", (according to reports).

It is not a historical record of 'lesson-learning' either. Imperialist warmongering, colonial tyranny, and the never-ending arms race are the entire unbroken story of the capitalist system and "clearer-headed" or "more decisive" parliamentary voting is not about to change anything, no matter how many warnings are delivered by periodic outbreaks of fascist aggression.
 
The lesson-learning has to be about the 'free market' system itself, and its impossibility of ever achieving economic and technological progress for the potentially useful benefit of mankind without creating, by those very same 'free market' means, the most grotesque inequality, injustice, and uneven development on earth, plus periodic slump catastrophes, that must always unalterably end in total frustration, envy, hatred, revolt, and consequential domineering warmongering-tyranny ultimately, for as long as a capitalist class is allowed to rule, (i.e. even exist, since once a capitalist class exists it is bound to rule).

This is where the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' plays its major role, posturing as 'revolutionary socialists' but utterly confusing the picture of total, all-the-way hostility to the imperialist-state world-domination and nothing else. The "No to war, and No to terror" line of the SWP and the Socialist Alliance completely disarms the working class, playing them straight into the hands of Western propaganda pretending that the destruction of Bin Laden, al-Queda, and the Taleban regime will make the world a "safer and better place". As even the capitalist press admits, the last time that imperialism's current allies in the Northern Alliance took power in Afghanistan, there was a widespread bloodbath of more degenerate savagery than the imagination can master:

Both plans were designed to prevent Kabul becoming the scene of savage urban warfare between factions in loose alliance only to secure short-term gains. The first version failed. 

After the almost bloodless capture of the capital by the Northern Alliance on Tuesday, many Kabulis fear the second will as well, plunging them back into the nightmares of 1992-1994, when 40-50,000 civilians perished under the bombardment that flattened most of the city, while hundreds of thousands more fled.

Law and order had broken down within days of the mojahedin entering Kabul in April 1992, after the defection of the pro-government Uzbek general Rashid Dostum to guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. Dostum's mounted militia from Jowzjan province, who had previously fought against the mojahedin without mercy, fell upon the civilian population, leaving many dead in their wake.

The factions set up roadblocks every 100 metres, dividing the city into a mosaic of conflicting territories and embarking on a spree of looting, rape and summary execution against their ethnic rivals. Amid the jubilation that greeted the alliance troops driving into the capital on Tuesday, the refusal of most Kabul women to cast off the hated burka was a potent reminder of the dangers that face those who reveal their faces to hard-bitten fighters from the mountains.

The fighting in Kabul in 1992 erupted when a council of wise men, summoned by Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, appointed him president of Afghanistan to the outrage of five of the seven faction leaders, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, head of the Pakistani-backed Pashtun party, Hizb-I Islami.  Rabbani, still nominally head of the Northern Alliance, won the support his own party, the Tajik Jamiat-I Islami, and Ittehad-I Islami, a Pashtun splinter group headed by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who is still a junior member of the alliance. Fighting alongside Hekmatyar were the Shia forces of Hizb-I Wahdat, now the most influential voice in the Northern Alliance after the Tajiks.

On February 1993, Massoud and Sayyaf’s forces entered the Hazara suburb of Afshar, killing - by local accounts - "up to 1,000 civilians"; beheading old men, women, children and even their dogs, stuffing their bodies down the wells.

Sayyaf's other speciality, according to Human Rights Watch, was to take one of the metal shipping containers that litter Afghan cities, fill it with Shia captives, and then light a fire around it. After the conquest of Mazar-I-Sharif in August 1998, the Taliban used the same technique. The sight of Northern Alliance troops escorting Taliban captives in Kabul into the very same cage gave a ghoulish hint of what might lie in store.

Shia Hizb-Wahdat fighters, led by Karim Khalili, have taken vicious revenge against Taliban captives on the few recent occasions in the past four years that they have won the upper hand. After the collapse of the Taliban attack on Mazar-I-Sharif one year earlier, some 2,000 Taliban prisoners were discovered buried in mass graves. Their deaths were attributed to the Shia and Uzbek defenders of the northern capital.

Some Northern Alliance critics, and particularly Pakistan's President Parvez Musharraf, are disingenuous when they attribute to the former mojahedin factions total responsibility for the disastrous human and infrastructure toll of the civil war period. The greatest contributor to the list of Kabul dead was the Pashtun Hizb-I-Wahdat faction, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Pakistan's main protégé until it switched its support to the Taliban.

Hekmatyar's missile and artillery bombardment of Kabul, beginning in August 1992, made the US air raids look like brain surgery. A single attack on August 13 killed 80 civilians, injuring a further 150, and such attacks were repeated daily over two years. In two months of intensive rocketing in 1994, 4,000 people were killed, 21,000 injured and 200,000 forced to leave the city. Whatever concerns Islamabad may have expressed about Kabul, it sustained Hekmatyar's demolition of the capital.

And even worse than that, the anti-war sections of bourgeois press opinion are also currently drawing attention to the astonishing fact that far more "terrorist outrages" have been committed by the US imperialist system itself, in crushing its opponents by fair means or foul, than have been perpetrated by anti-imperialist struggles:

For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.

Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the Americas", or  SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch show, Latin America. has been ripped apart by its alumni.

In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala's D-2, the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti-insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores studied at the School of the Americas.

In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El  Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads, the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero, and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976.

Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all benefited from the school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico.

All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner, Alex Loper.  Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven former pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its students from Colombia than from any other country.

The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the activities of SOA's graduates. But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.

Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it and then immediately re-open it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself - Whisc. 

So the fake-'left' posturing 'morality' of agreeing with the West’s propaganda to "condemn Sept 11" not only effectively justifies the US imperialist pretence that "terrorism must be eradicated", but allows the West to literally get away with murder in its hypocrisy.

There is nothing to "condemn". Arbitrary savagery and brutal injustice are inseparable from the class-war and national-war struggles for the survival or overthrow of the international imperialist-rule system; and 'morality' will play no part at all in bringing down the monopoly-capitalist class; only organised communist-revolutionary strength and mass political understanding will.

Even "terrorism" could be a legitimate weapon, as EPSR 1106 explained in detail, quoting in full from Lenin on the subject.

'Only' two months late, at least the hoax 'Marxist' wing of one degenerate fake-'1eft' sect, the SLP, has limped into line with the EPSR’s Marxist-Leninist understanding of class-war history by briefly repeating the same Lenin quotes, but with no acknowledgement, of course, of how and why Lalkar has now seen the light, and, more disastrously-pathetically still, with no reference to how Lalkar got it completely wrong in its previous issue two months ago.

Last week's EPSR derided Lalkar’s opportunist cowardice for at last denouncing fake-'lefts' who "condemn" terrorism but for not having the political guts to explain that it was Scargill's SLP they were really targeting, which has just belatedly formally joined the petty-bourgeois "condemnation" brigade.

This time, the charge is even more serious. Scargill’s Lalkar stooges lack the political courage to admit even their own mistaken analysis, even when the progress of historical events themselves have shown up the stupidity.

It was nearly three weeks after Sept 11 that Scargill’s arbitrary decision to "deplore the loss of life in the United States" and to express "fear that the world could see more of this type of attack" was revealed to those in the international working class who might have been waiting for a lead from the SLP.

The EPSR tore this mealy-mouthed petty-bourgeois idiocy to pieces for limping along half-heartedly behind middle-class "condemnation" and fascist-imperialist revenge-seeking belligerence.

Lalkar came out at roughly the same time, not just failing to criticise this SLP nonsense, and calling Sept 11 a "disaster", but indirectly supporting Scargill's reactionary confusion in a separate attack denouncing anarchist anti-globalisation street fighting as only damaging the working-class cause, and only playing into the hands of imperialist counter-revolution.

"The tactics of deliberate violence are detrimental", Lalkar scolded, and approvingly quoted an allied Danish Stalinist sect branding the international anti-globalisation anarchist protesters as "tools of the bourgeois establishment, - paid or otherwise" and as "the instrument of the reactionary forces".

With Sept 11 still the world's number 1 talking point, Lalkar then pointedly quoted Stalin on the Narodniks, the dominant anti-Tsarist revolutionary movement before the Bolsheviks' rise began, and renowned internationally as practitioners of terrorism against imperialism:

"The method of combating Tsardom chosen by the Narodniks, namely, by the assassination of individuals, by individual terrorism, was wrong and detrimental to the revolution."

Lenin never said this about the original Russian revolutionary movement. On the contrary, he paid tribute to the "heroes" and the "grandeur" of their struggle against huge odds and fearful repression.

Lenin's massive output against the Narodniks was to expose their utopian views about using the Russian peasant commune system as a possible non-capitalist development, and their philosophical idealism which failed to grasp the Marxist materialist basis of social, economic, and political attitudes.

Lenin's more dismissive comments were directed against the Liberal Narodniks of the 1890s, a sad reformist retreat from the Revolutionary Narodniks of the 1870s.

Lenin's attacks on terrorist methods were always on the question of terrorism as an inferior tactic once the Marxist movement had won support for the idea of a mass working-class revolutionary movement of open political understanding as opposed to the earlier anti-Tsarist belief in a conspiracy movement of outstanding individuals.

In particular, Lenin attacked a verbal infatuation with terrorist methods which many Leninist supporters still were influenced by, and which the Socialist-Revolutionary claimants to mass working-class revolutionary leadership also continued to put forward "in the Narodnik tradition".

The problem for all today’s fake-'left' parties remains the same, SLP included.

By "condemning" terrorist methods in the aftermath of Sept 11, these wretched petty-bourgeois opportunist sects all effectively line up behind the savage imperialist blitzkrieg on the Middle East to "destroy terrorism".

All weaselling that "a police action" would have been "an alternative" to the imperialist blitzkrieg, or that "United Nations peacekeeping" should have been used to stop "the deplorable massacre of innocents on Sept 11, which the whole world must condemn", etc, etc, is the most monstrous dissembling. The fascist-aggressive turn in contemporary US imperialist world-domination under the so-called 'New World Order' has long been obvious to everyone on earth. And this murderous, ruthless, genocidal terror-bombing of Afghanistan was freely predicted by the whole of world opinion. So what was crucially needed was for that whole world opinion to avoid at all costs giving the slightest justification for this demented imperialist blitzkrieg, which is still inflicting airforce massacres all round Afghanistan utterly indiscriminately, despite the effective abdication of the Taleban government, giving cover simultaneously to equally murderous warlord opportunists in the Northern Alliance. 

World opinion predictably failed. But for so-called 'lefts' to join in the wittering bourgeois hypocrisy about "appalling horror" and "unacceptable barbarism", etc, about a worm-turning retaliation at last by Third World hatred against the PERMANENT warmongering terror-domination by Western tyranny against the slightest anti-imperialist revolt anywhere, - was more cowardly political treachery than the whole wretched history of anti-communism has produced in a long time.

The fate of the reactionary religious delusions of the Taleban and Bin Laden are not the issue. Serious revolutionary anti-imperialism will not miss them.

Providing imperialist "anti-terror" humbug with a 'left' cover is the truly barbaric horror which has been committed over this Sept 11 issue, - a lame-brained ignorant betrayal which will help add tens of thousands more "innocent victims" to the endlessly growing world's total out of deepening imperialist system economic crisis in the longer run, now that this ludicrous Bush-Blair 'anti-terror' posture has been allowed to get away with such blatant fascist tyranny and murder.

But still the fake-'lefts' continue peddling the same old lying tune as an 'excuse', - namely, that Sept 11 "had to be condemned, - otherwise it would have meant supporting Bin Ladenism", etc, etc. EPSR 1109 has already quoted Leninist science in full refuting that idiotic non-sequitur in respect of the Bolshevik hope to take advantage of Tsarist imperialism's defeat by German imperialism in World War I, dismissing Trotsky's incomprehension of Marxism which slandered that Lenin's slogan for Tsarist defeat amounted to "support for German imperialism as the lesser evil".

There were no such stupid implications, Lenin explained.

Equally stupid is the current Trot and Revisionist anti-Marxist drivel that hoping to see US imperialism further humiliated by the disastrous failure of its attempted "war on terrorism" retaliatory barbarism against Afghanistan, similarly amounts to "support for the Taleban".

No such nonsense.

A further example of Leninist dialectical science on such matters was provided by the challenge to clear-thinking priorities which the Kornilov rebellion against the Kerensky government presented in August 1917 to the Bolshevik propaganda demanding Kerensky's downfall.

Kornilov represented fascist counter-revolution against the great anti-autocracy gains of the February Revolution. It had to be fought against unconditionally.

But Kerensky’s suzerainty over February's gains had already plunged them back towards total loss, (temporarily, effectively,) by continuing Russia's full participation in inter-imperialist WWI, and would doom them to certain permanent loss in the near future, if the war was continued with for much longer, and if the bourgeois-state Provisional Government was not overthrown by the socialist revolution and the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat.

The Bolshevik conclusion was to make opposing the Kornilov Rebellion to bring down Kerensky the priority, but to explain vigorously to the world why that in no way meant any support at all for the continuation of the Kerensky regime.

It is equally clear today that agitating for the defeat of the imperialist blitzkrieg implies not a shred of support for the reactionary ideology of the Taleban. At the same time, however, any "condemnation" of al-Qaeda terrorism clearly invalidates all 'No to war' posturing social-pacifism, and plays Afghanistan and the international working class totally into the hands of the bourgeois-imperialist propaganda racket.

Lenin declared:

The Kornilov revolt is a most unexpected (unexpected at such a moment and in such a form) and downright unbelievably sharp turn in events.

Like every sharp turn, it calls for a revision and change of tactics. And as with every revision, we must be extra cautious not to become unprincipled.

It is my conviction that those who become unprincipled are people who (like Volodarsky) slide into defencism or (like other Bolsheviks) into a bloc with the S.R.s, into supporting the Provisional Government. Their attitude is absolutely wrong and unprincipled. We shall become defencists only after the transfer of power to the proletariat, after a peace offer, after the secret treaties and ties with the banks have been broken - only afterwards. Neither the capture of Riga nor the capture of Petrograd will make us defencists. (I should very much like Volodarsky to read this.) Until then we stand for a proletarian revolution, we are against the war, and we are no defencists.

Even now we must not support Kerensky's government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren't we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must.  But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here, which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise and allow themselves to be carried away by the course of events.

We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky's troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness. There is the difference. it is rather a subtle difference, but it is highly essential and must not be forgotten.

What, then, constitutes our change of tactics after the Kornilov revolt?

We are changing the form of our struggle against Kerensky. Without in the least relaxing our hostility towards him, without taking back a single word said against him, without renouncing the task of overthrowing him, we say that we must take into account the present situation. We shall not overthrow Kerensky right now. We shall approach the task of fighting against him in a different way, namely, we shall point out to the people (who are fighting against Kornilov) Kerensky's weakness and vacillation. That has been done in the past as well. Now, however, it has become the all-important thing and this constitutes the change.

The change, further, is that the all-important thing now has become the intensification of our campaign for some kind of "partial demands" to be presented to Kerensky: arrest Milyukov, arm the Petrograd workers, summon the Kronstadt, Vyborg and Helsingfors troops to Petrograd, dissolve the Duma, arrest Rodzyanko, legalise the transfer of the landed estates to the peasants, introduce workers' control over grain and factories, etc., etc. We must present these demands not only to Kerensky, and not so much to Kerensky, as to the workers, soldiers and peasants who have been carried away by the course of the struggle against Kornilov. We must keep up their enthusiasm, encourage them to deal with the generals and officers who have declared for Kornilov, urge them to demand the immediate transfer of land to the peasants, suggest to them that it is necessary to arrest Rodzyanko and Milyukov, dissolve the Duma, close down Rech and other bourgeois papers, and institute investigations against them. The "Left" S.R.s must be especially urged on in this direction.

It would be wrong to think that we have moved farther away from the task of the proletariat winning power. No.

We have come very close to it, not directly, but from the side. At the moment we must campaign not so much directly against Kerensky, as indirectly against him, namely, by demanding a more and more active, truly revolutionary war against Kornilov. The development of this war alone can lead us to power, but we must speak of this as little as possible in our propaganda (remembering very well that even tomorrow events may put power into our hands, and then we shall not relinquish it). It seems to me that this should be passed on in a letter (not in the papers) to the propagandists, to groups of agitators and propagandists, and to Party members in general. We must relentlessly fight against phrases about the defence of the country, about a united front of revolutionary democrats, about supporting the Provisional Government, etc., etc., since they are just empty phrases. We must say: now is the time for action; your S.R. and  Menshevik gentlemen have long since worn those phrases threadbare. Now is the time for action; the war against Kornilov must be conducted in a revolutionary way, by drawing the masses in, by arousing them, by inflaming them (Kerensky is afraid of the masses, afraid of the people). In the war against the Germans, action is required right now; immediate and unconditional peace must be offered on precise terms. If this is done, either a speedy peace can be attained or the war can be turned into a revolutionary war; if not, all the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries remain lackeys of imperialism.

To the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. August 30 1917

An incidental lesson against fake-'leftism' included here is that when bringing a regime down [it] is the revolutionary perspective, then make that overthrow propaganda the clear main priority, swamping everything else that might need raising for educational purposes.

But when overthrowing the regime is temporarily dropped as the immediate next perspective, only then should the propaganda campaign consist of "partial demands" (i.e. specific reforms in their literal perspective) as the main emphasis, but solely, of course, in order to bring out the complete inadequacy of Kerensky for even completing the rout of Kornilov's Rebellion, for the achievement of which the Bolsheviks' own wish to see Kerensky overthrown has alone temporarily been postponed.

Normally, the game-playing routine posturing on 'theory' by such fake-'left' Socialist Alliance 'Marxist' sects as the Weekly Worker are not worth pursuing, but the CPGB's self-destructive determination to 'justify' its "condemnation" Canute-like of something as natural as the tides and as unstoppable, - namely the frustrated terror lashback by the Third World against imperialist exploitation and domination, - has this week tried arguments by analogy which hold the entire Trot & Revisionist swamp up to ridicule.

As always, the point of analysing this nonsense is not to score points off the laughably useless Socialist Alliance or its comical 'theoretical conscience', the CPGB, but to stress again that in times of approaching international revolutionary crisis, the most dangerous enemy of working-class understanding can be the petty-bourgeois mentality of fake-'leftism'.

To shore up the WW contention that cheering for imperialist military defeat is tantamount to supporting the Taleban, Trotsky is approvingly quoted (Trot and Revisionist anti-communists are losing much of their distinction) from 1935 on why the Ethiopean autocracy feudal emperor Haile Selassie deserved to be supported in the fight to resist Italian colonial conquest, and not merely by-passed in the course of opposing the fascist invasion.

Similarly, the CPGB quotes Trotsky favourably from 1927 implying that the Kuomintang regime in China was progressive enough to be sided-with in trying to establish full independence from imperialist domination.

Both examples miss the point that Lenin makes about precisely NOT supporting or siding-with the Kerensky government despite the priority need for all the forces of the February-Revolution-transformation to all join in the resistance to the Kornilov counter-revolution in August 1917.

And historical perspectives exactly confirm this Marxist understanding.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the epoch making triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat in being able to start transforming the massive backwardness of the Tsarist empire into a technologically-advanced and totally politically-educated and socially-organised workers state which the entire might of the imperialist world could not subsequently dominate, demonstrated that communist revolution could be a practical way forward already everywhere on earth, given enlightened Leninist leadership of the proletariat, both locally and internationally.

What the world sadly got instead, of course, was a sick choice between Stalinist or Trotskyist Revisionist ignorance and opportunism, the degeneration of the necessary Marxist scientific understanding of world development either way, and equal treachery to the dictatorship of the proletariat too, in the very long run. (see EPSR 2001 Perspectives document).

Illusions in the Kuomintang was precisely one of the revolutionary movement's problems in China, and the National government's uselessness against Japanese domination later on doubly proved the point.

And the CPGB canvassing to spread retrospective illusions in the Ethiopian feudal emperor of the 1930s must set some kind of new barmy record even for the off-the-wall Weekly Worker.

The problem of retreating from the gains of Marxist-Leninist science was seen clearest in Spain. Creating 'support' illusions in the bourgeois 'parliamentary Republic' was fatal. The international bourgeois-imperialist system was turning to fascist aggression wherever it had revolutionary problems, and the middle-class 'democracy' stood no chance of survival.

Certainly all the forces of the new Republic in Spain needed to join the fight against Franco's counter-revolution, but, as with Kerensky in August 1917, without sowing 'support' illusions in a uselessly weak government, but continuing to spread the campaign instead that only the dictatorship of the proletariat building a workers state could save Spain from the bourgeois-imperialist world system’s fascist onslaught.

And given the Bolshevik Leninist understanding and organisation that first transformed backward Tsarist Russia and then set the Soviet workers state off on its path that was eventually to achieve such mightiness, Spain could have become an even more glittering triumph of planned socialist organisation and anti-imperialist defiance.

What the world now desperately needs is a return to Marxist-Leninist science, and the problem it faces is the remnants everywhere of the same Stalinist versus Trotskyist backwardness which destroyed the international revolutionary movement with Revisionist ignorance last time round, forming the 57 varieties of sectarian opportunism around the Alliance, the SSP, the SLP, 'left'-Labourites, and everywhere else.

This cretinous CPGB ignorance of history sums the problem up, still approving the Revisionist tail-ending of feudal emperors and bent Nationalists of the 1930s, and even more stupidly pretending that the only choice today is either support for the Taleban, or opportunistically joining in with the Western 'condemnation' of terrorism.

Neither. There are no forces anywhere resisting this US imperialist turn to fascist blitzkrieg which are more reactionary than this crisis-driven imperialist nightmare.

But no illusions whatever are needed in Bin Laden's religious backwardness to nevertheless see that joining the bourgeois world’s 'condemnation' (of the desperate al-Qaeda terrorist attempt to strike back at US imperialism's tyrannical domination of the Middle East) is itself the most opportunist reactionary atrocity on view by far. Build Leninism. EPSR supporters. 

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

Capitalist-state brutality against anti-globalisation protesters will combine with US imperialist warmongering ruthlessness to shake up their reformist and anti-communist illusions

The presence of Bush in Europe, his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and his proposal to create a nuclear missile shield turned everybody's stomach.

The arguments of the White House chief to defend the anti-missile shield project are laughable: to halt possible attacks from countries considered hostile, like Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea.

But in reality what Bush wants to counteract is the downturn of the U.S. economy through the revitalization of the arms industry.

And even though Bush was prepared to be as amiable as possible at the European meeting, he was unable to convince either Russian President Vladimir Putin or the European Union of his "well-intentioned" anti-missile treaty.

"The EU feels obliged to reinforce disarmament and non-proliferation norms and, in this sense, wants to adopt a relevant role. As a result, an international conference could be called, states the joint declaration adopted at the conclusion of the Göteborg Summit.

The insistence of the EU in combating an arms build-up by strengthening international norms and the use of political measures has been interpreted as backing away from U.S. plans for the so-called nuclear shield, according to the German news agency DPA.

The press notes that both Russia and China have made particularly severe criticisms of Bush because he still does not have a clear vision of the defence system.

In a world where arms of mass destruction proliferate nuclear, chemical or biological - including long-range missiles, the biggest military and economic power in the world feels "vulnerable" to political blackmail. Or that is what the United States would have its allies believe.

But while Bush, upon his arrival in Washington, declared his five-day tour of the Old World a success, Secretary of State Colin Powell hinted at the true language of power, assuring that the United States would continue to move ahead with plans to build a national defense system, even if it does not have Russian support.

Powell stated that the United States thinks it knows what is needed in the future, and that its hopes to convince Russia to give its support, but if not, the United States will have to move forward alone.

Powell said that present longstanding accord between the United States and Russia - the ABM treaty signed with the former Soviet Union in 1972 - is a relic signed in an era that no longer exists. He warned that the White House would unilaterally abandon it when it believes the new project should move forward, according to CNN. 

This contrasted sharply with the image created of Bush as the world's savior during a visit to Poland, where he declared that the western countries are all products of the same history, from Jerusalem and Athens to Warsaw and Washington. He stressed that they share more than an alliance; they share a civilization. The only thing he left out was that his "civilization" is armed to the teeth.

In his meeting with leaders of the European Union, U.S. President George W. Bush tried to maintain the appearance of neutrality on the issue of the Kyoto protocol.

To the press, he presented the image of a man concerned about climate change, but he opposed the idea of digging into the pockets of the government he heads, in order to save the planet.

CNN reported that Bush and the European leaders agreed to disagree about the U.S. president's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Washington rejects the Kyoto Protocol because it fears negative consequences for the U.S. economy, and according to AFP, this position has hardened with the recent decision to promote an energy policy accelerating the use of fossil fuels such as. petroleum, coal and natural gas.

As one would expect, the United States also opposed the idea of the developing countries receiving special concessions in order to adapt to the environmental protocol. Bush doesn't see that as unjust. The Texan, who is known in Europe as The Bull, puts all his money on economic interests, with the implication that the right thing to do is to continue damaging the planet's health.

About 25,000 activists descended upon that Swedish industrial city to protest the policies of the largest world powers, according to the group Action Göteborg 2001, EFE reported.

That normally peaceful city had to mobilize 1,700 police, 300 security police and gendarmes from neighboring Denmark and Germany, who cooperated with Sweden in intelligence matters.

Environmental activists from organizations such as Greenpeace, the World Nature Fund and the European Green Party demanded that the EU defend the Kyoto Protocol, reminding the leaders that the document can go into effect without the United States, if at least 55 countries ratify it, and that this would represent more than 55% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, AFP noted.

But experts feel that the treaty could not be effective without U.S. participation, since it is the world's largest polluter.

"Kyoto no longer exists," indicated Belgian Prime Minister Guy Vernofstand, after meeting with Bush.

The police resorted to violence. In the main hospital in Göteborg a youth fought for his fife, with kidney and lung punctures.

In a nation where the law prohibits parents from slapping their children, the television images shocked the citizens. One Swedish newspaper pointed out: "The Göteborg Summit should have been a triumph for Prime Minister Göran Persson, but instead turned out to be the worst days of his political career."

In what has been called the "fight against violence" as opposed to the fight against injustice the European Union has had to create defense mechanisms against progressive movements. 

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

Capitalism's crisis conditions are relentlessly deepening the revolutionary situation facing Latin America. The imperialist 'neo-liberal New World Order' is coming off the rails.
 
LATIN America offers a desolate panorama of inequality, poverty, debt and emigration, and consequently political and social volatility. The migratory tide depopulating the subcontinent is the most accurate reflection of the failure of the systems prevailing in it.

The neoliberal wave and pressure from transnationals, financial agencies and the governments of economic powers with interests in the region have dismantled the Latin American states and privatized their public enterprises, natural resources and social services.

The sale of state enterprises to private capital responded to recommendations from the International Monetary Fund , (IMF) aimed at reducing external debts, among other objectives.

On the contrary, the total Latin America debt has almost doubled in less than 10 years: from $440 000 billion USD in 1990 it rose to nearly $750,000 billion USD last year, equivalent to 39% of the gross domestic product and 201% of exports from all the nations in the area. Worse still, the payment of exorbitant interest is preventing any possibility of development or an effective fight against poverty and social exclusion.

Who could doubt that constant increases in the aforementioned interest respond more to a political decision intent on perpetuating the financial instability of the South, than to continual market fluctuations? That is the harsh and cruel reality. Every Latin American child is born owing $1,550 USD.

After various decades of atrocities committed by dictatorships and repressive governments like those of Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador, whose consequences are still hanging over these nations like Damocles' sword, Latin America experienced the arrival of more or less democratic systems.

It seemed as if the human right to full liberty would arrive with the "new" political and economic model, possible variants aside. 	 

Many believed, or imagined, that with the end of the cold war and the blood baths within the American continent, in addition to the cessation of internal crises in a general sense, the capital funds relocated elsewhere during the times of repression would return and economic activity with other regions and countries would improve. The illusion was even greater: it was thought that growing inequalities would diminish.

That was never the case. What really happened? Latin American countries have been burdened down by the neo-liberal recipe provided by the North, which has not desisted from its determination to dominate the South, taming it as if it were a wild beast and turning it into its backyard, never ceasing to find increasingly complex, subtle and almost perfect formulas to achieve this covertly or openly.

In scandalous business operations, foreign companies have taken possession of state and national heritages at an irreversible cost. Tariffs were eliminated in such a way that small and medium-sized national enterprises were left at the mercy of unequal competition, to be rapidly bankrupted by their logical incapacity to stand up to the transnationals.

Condemned to live paying out to die in debt Latin American governments are continuing to accept harsh adjustment plans in exchange for fresh loans. Meanwhile their economies continue declining and their peoples become more impoverished.

The recent Summit on Social Debt and Latin American Integration, which took place in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, openly tackled that lean panorama without a defined horizon which is shaking the region.

According to Bernardo Kliksberg, research director at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), poverty is devastating 60 of every 100 Latin Americans - including a further 40 who are experiencing an extreme situation - and he added:  "One third of the population has no potable water, one of every five mothers gives birth without any medical assistance and the average Latin American education level only reaches fifth grade."  But the consequences are leading to previously unimaginable and extremely frightening realities. It is estimated that 30 homicides take place for every 100,000 inhabitants in Latin America, six times the figure in the developed countries.

Kliksberg is convinced that this is not a problem of localized violence, but an epidemic propagated by unemployment among young people, low education levels, families devastated by misery and inequality bordering on insurmountability if immediate measures are not taken, because Latin America has the worst distribution of income and wealth: 10% of the rich have an income 84 times greater than that of the poorest 10%.

Parliamentarians from the 22 nations represented in Caracas, as well as trade union, church and governmental leaders evaluated the possibilities for the necessary reversal of such a desolate scenario, but once again neoliberalism prevented concrete and immediate agreements. It is impossible to avoid calls for consultation before uttering a conclusive word or firmly voting on a proposal, and what Latin America really needs in order to stop being the most unequal region of the planet is the implementation of concrete policies aimed at egalitarian access to basic services, particularly health and education.

The summit in the land of Bolivar, Venezuela's liberator, helped to confirm that many Latin Americans understand the need for integration without bowing - and this is very important - to Washington's designs.

Parliamentarians in the region agreed that links between Latin American and Caribbean nations are more urgent than ever, not only to combat the alarming and devastating poverty, but also to retain dignity, and as far as Latin American dignity is concerned, it is up against its worst enemy, the ostensible Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would be better named "area for the free appropriation of Latin America and the Caribbean on the part of the United States." 

As the meeting clearly showed, the FTAA is an obstacle and not a tool; if Latin American integration fails to advance before that monstrous creation promoted and advanced from the White House goes into operation, the process runs the risk of being lost and clearly left behind.

Every passing day makes it more pressing to take the road to integration in order to attain a force that can reverse current poverty and debt. The chance to create a bloc capable of reuniting the dispersed power of the debtors in order to negotiate with the creditors, given that to date regional agreements to tackle the situation have been nothing more than phantoms as they have never existed.