Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is 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.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Rgd.]  e-mail:  
No 1320 18th September 2007                                                                                                                            25p

Sales mting in West 29th Sept. 2pm. Pls bring recpts 

 Desperate market panic “credit crunch” turmoil underscores consistent warnings, only from Leninism,  that capitalism is headed for catastrophic slump collapse and disaster, merging into inter-imperialist aggression and world war.  The growing ferment of  “terrorism” and “insurgency” worldwide reflects the spontaneous revolutionary upheaval against the disastrous plunging of the ossified imperialist system into chaotic horror to outdo even the Second World War,  and the general maturing of total rejection by the Third World billions of their endless repression and poverty level exploitation by the fat-cat west.  But Western might will keep on stepping up ruthless terrorising blitzes – already winding up against Iran – until its overthrow.  Dumbed-down philistine rejection of rationality and reason in the working class needs confronting to build Leninist scientific leadership   

The pressures on imperialism to escalate its warmongering agenda to “solve” its increasingly terrifying systemic crisis collapse, are growing ever more urgent as disasters pile up in the Middle East, and the financial system shows urgent symptoms of its inevitable unravelling, not so far off, into catastrophic failure.
Marxist science has always insisted that the intractable contradictions of the profit making system and its unstoppable collapse at some point into total slump disaster are the fundamental driving force in world history, creating the chaos and mayhem which will open up the world class struggle for the revolutionary overturn of the stinking tyranny and exploitation that imperialist domination has imposed across the planet.
It can only be done by building a conscious revolutionary Leninist leadership, with a party constantly analysing and explaining the disaster of capitalism and its drive to war.
Evidence of the core economic understanding in that science has rarely been more certain. 
And despite due caution in declaring that the latest huge lurch in the money markets and credit agencies is “the big collapse” – because of the enormous complexity of the modern world market system – the signs of major panic about the entire interconnected world banking and Stock Exchange system are reaching fever pitch over the “subprime” credit mortgage disaster in the US.
Extraordinary moves by the major international banks over the summer weeks to pour billions of paper dollars into the market to salvage the system; the signals that even some of the world’s largest banks (such as Barclays !!!) are in deep trouble, having to borrow huge emergency loans at massively increased interest; plunging prices on the property market in the States and the follow-on collapse in consumer confidence leading to economic downturn and now rising unemployment: the extraordinary moves by the Bank of England to prop up the Northern Rock mortgage Bank (unprecedented since the secondary banking failures of the 1970s, when the British economy almost collapsed) ;  and the just-about-contained panic by numerous bourgeois commentators that the entire banking system could tip into the abyss,  are all pointing to the likelihood that the long-deferred but ultimately unstoppable downward spiral of economic implosion, which Marxism predicts as inevitably resulting from the production for profit system, is now well underway.
As the fears grow there is no doubt that neocon agenda, decided on by the US Empire as its strategy for riding out the devastating inter-imperialist trade war and eventual shooting war conflicts which such disaster will bring, remains not just live and deadly but more sinister than ever, currently winding the anti-Iran propaganda scapegoating to fever pitch.
The whole capitalist system is trapped on a downhill path into insane and demented warmongering destruction.
Its failing social and economic class system is hitting the buffers after centuries of power and class domination because its profiteering and exploitation driven motivation, which once powered forwards the development of industry and commerce in its brutal fashion, is no longer remotely useful for mankind, turning all progress and growth into its opposite, slump and destruction. 
At the heart is the supreme US Empire, established as the dominant monopoly capitalist power from 1945 and ready to go to any lengths to hold on to its sweet luxury and indolence.
If it cannot maintain its supremacist rule by the old methods of worldwide capitalist exploitation via bribed and violently installed stooge gangster and fascist regimes, which is has pursued for the last 100 years, (via over 400 coups, assassinations, fixed elections, violent takeovers, brutal interventions, invasions and outright destructive wars since the Second World War under the astonishing joke fraud of “installing freedom and democracy”), then it will do it by overt bullying and blitzing, declaring “talk to the hand” to anyone who challenges it, or tries to recover their trading payments and debt returns.
Despite the disastrous progress so far, and because of it, the warmongering is even more urgently required by the ruling class as the crisis at the heart of its class system threatens finally to break into total collapse.
The aim of terrorising the entire plant with the most ruthless Nazi “shock and awe” to suppress rising Third World rebellion and equally, if not more importantly, pre-empt all crisis challenges from rival imperialist powers as a Third World War sort out reaches explosion point, is the path long ago decided by the overwhelming might of Washington and the Pentagon, ready to fight the “long war” and to threaten all-comers with blitzkrieg aggression.
It has been steadily escalated for the last decade from the initial NATO bullying bombing of tiny once-socialist Serbia and then into Afghanistan, using every Goebbels trick in the book to demonise the victims and get a “righteous” war mood going among enough of a brainwashed and dumbed-down population to slide the policy through.
Endless lying campaigns are pumped up against potential new victims by the intelligence agencies against selected targets such as Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the Sudanese regime, Iran, North Korea, communist Cuba, left-leaning Venezuela etc., singled out for attention as supposed ‘anti-democratic’ villains, ‘dictators’ etc in an “axis of evil” despite plenty of pro-western fascist stoogery not only always unmentioned but continuing to be financed and supported, from dictator General Musharraf in Pakistan to the gangster Mubarak regime in Egypt and the backward feudal tyranny in Saudi Arabia (among many).
For Serbia, pumped up hysteria was manufactured around supposed “ethnic cleansing” Goebbels lies and eventually a civil war firefight at Reçak, lyingly declared a “cold blooded massacre”, exactly as the Nazis had used incidents like the fraudulent Reichstag fire to push through aggressive repression and war as “self-defence” and “restoring stability”.
For Afghanistan the neocons took advantage of stunned indignation after the surprise World Trade Centre and Pentagon Al-Qaeda attacks to “justify” blitzing and pounding the Afghanistan deserts and destroying the lives of ten of thousands of civilians, still continuing as “mass punishment” and “killing the terrorists”.
The even sicker Goebbels nonsensical lie of “imminent danger from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction threatening us all in our beds in 45 minutes time” was badly exposed by the disastrous quagmire that US occupation forces (and the British sidekicks) have run into, but has not stopped even more monstrous civilian massacres and outrages, torture, rape, destruction of whole cities like Falluja, and deliberately fostered sectarian chaos and agonising bombings etc. with the ruling class simply shifting from one “justification” to another (the equally false notion of bringing peace, harmony and prosperity under a supposed “democracy” (run by the west) by “replacing” a dictator, who was anyway installed and trained by the CIA, before turning “rogue”). 
But the desperate and accumulating failure for the first wave of fascistic “shock and awe” blitzings in Iraq, bogging the US forces down in a slow motion grinding defeat which has almost cracked its existing military wide open, makes the need for much nastier open ruthlessness to be imposed with “no mistakes this time” about the capacity of the system to be barbarically vicious re-imposing its rule. 
Nothing is ruled out by a ruling class which has twice taken mankind into the “total war” horrors of 1914-18 and 1939-45, reducing cities and entire countries to mud and blood, smouldering rubble and mountains of corpses in order to maintain its rule and sort out who shall be top dog for continuing the monstrous profiteering exploitation of the world’s billions of poor people.
The technology and firepower, already hugely multiplied between the First and Second World Wars, is now magnitudes greater even in its possibilities for devastation, destruction and terrorisation.
Driving this along is the now rapid surfacing of the nightmare prospect of complete economic and credit disintegration in the capitalist order, threatening an unravelling financial domino collapse at least as great as the devastating Austrian Credit Anstalt bank failure which knocked the props out from the entire world banking system in 1931 and led to a decade of total Slump, with universal misery, starvation and unemployment, merging and developing eventually into the unspeakable horrors of the Second World War (always the capitalist “solution” as Marx and Engels explained as far back as 1850 in the titanic “Communist Manifesto”).
Alone and consistently (and against the ridicule, incomprehension or deliberate opportunist denial of the entire spectrum of fake-”lefts” from capitalist stooge Labourism to complacent bureaucratic trade unionism (militant and comatose sections) to anti-communist Trots and muddle brained revisionists) the EPSR has continuously warned the working class for two decades of this oncoming and unreformable capitalist slump disaster, an understanding at the very core of Marxist science and the only clear basis to the scientific analyses which can tease out the forces driving all the interlinked events on the planet, setting the perspective within which the working class and the masses can understand their own strengths and the overall balance of class forces on the planet, 
No other leadership will be able to provide the full range and richness of historical and current events and developments and their full interconnectedness which can lead, inspire and guide the working class in its vital revolutionary struggle, the only way to end capitalist class rule. (Even those “lefts” hurriedly backpeddling now to recover credibility by suddenly starting  talking about crisis (after years ignoring it) do so only in a wooden academic way with no real connections made to the remainder of world developments.) 
The economic collapse and organisation and trade war mayhem this time, is likely to be far worse than the 1930s slump. The same relentless accumulation of capital in the system, eventually swamping the entire world with so much additional capital that it cannot all find opportunities for investment where it can make a profit, has been underway for six decades since the end of the Second World War, when the profit system had been re-started, got underway again because of the devastating destruction of industrial machinery and men which had left space for new profitable investment to begin all over again (this time to the advantage of newly supreme US imperialism). 
It is the “overproduction” of capitalism which routinely leads into slump disaster when the surplus value embedded in newly made goods cannot be realised on the world markets and unsold products pile up, capital cannot be invested and production stagnates, as Karl Marx so brilliantly disentangled in Capital (see also page 6 quotes).
Rational planning of human production and output on a worldwide scale, tailored to sensible human rational needs rather than the insane anarchy of simultaneous bloating over-consumption and desperate starvation in the commodity system, is the only way to avoid such chaos and antagonism. 
This was already partially demonstrated by steady if unflashy growth of even the first experiments in workers states, right up to the last years of the deluded self-liquidation of the Soviet Union by addle-brained revisionism in 1989 (taken to new levels of imbecility by Gorbachevism after years of Stalinist retreat from revolutionary understanding).
The full benefit could only ever be realised once socialism was established throughout the whole planet but the 70 year history of the USSR already made clear what huge progress was possible without a capitalist class – easily outstripping the West in science, culture, technology, social provision, housing, education and health with far fewer immediate resources and none of the swat shop slavery which is the norm for capitalism, the only basis of its “success”.
In other words world socialism, possible only under the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the only path forwards to avoid chaos and war and to develop the world’s full potential for all.
Such temporary boomtime “stability” as capitalism has ever shown comes only from the much wider penetration of capital into all areas of the world (on the back of endless violent interventions and coups to install pretend “democracy” or just outright fascist and gangster regimes) and the relentless stretching of credit made possible by the total monopoly dominance of the dollar over world markets. 
The deepening and widening of neo-colonialist imperialism has carried the post-war “boom” to unprecedented lengths fooling shallow philistine minds that Marxist economics, philosophical struggle and scientific understanding is “no longer valid” etc.
But it has always been a roller coaster of near disasters, only just riding out major collapses that would have tipped into slump in previous epochs (like the 1974 oil price rises e.g., the 1987 Stock Exchange collapse, the 2000 technology share collapse, and many other near collapses); or escaping by managing to force the crisis burden onto poorer Third World countries like the squeezing of most of Africa since the 1980s; the Far East currency collapses in the late 1990s; bankruptcy in South America in Mexico, Argentina and others in the same decade and after; and the imposition of economic stagnation for a decade onto major trading rivals like Japan and to some extent the European imperialist bloc around the Euro. 
Endless printing of paper dollars and creation of complex new credit mechanisms and techniques has staved off the inevitable eventual disaster by pumping more and more inflation into the world trading system. 
Aggressive trade war  manipulation of currency and banking systems has helped shunt problems away from the dominant US power as well.
The steady and rapid growth made possible by the planned economies of the workers states has also bought time at points for the capitalist system, by workers state trading ironically helping stabilise the perturbations in the system, firstly during the Soviet period of artificially sustained “peaceful coexistence” balance (which deluded Stalinism declared had superseded revolution) and now with the impact of the Chinese workers state-controlled economic expansion.
But every trick used to stretch production a bit further has only added more contradictions to the overall system, promising an even huger catastrophe when the contradictions finally break.
In the end as Marx pointed out, the relentless extraction of surplus value from workers, and the determination of capital to invest as if there are no limits to the market, creates a world where there is not enough buying capacity to sell all the output at a profit and something has to give. 
The most obvious expression of the intractable difficulties is the debt mountain built up by US imperialism (and its sidekick British echo of the laughably named “Anglo-Saxon economic model”), to extraordinary and utterly unrepayable levels, forcing everyone else to hold ever increasing amounts of surplus dollars on pain of damaging their own currency exchange rates and therefore export prospects. 
Huge credit surpluses in the banks in highly efficient economies such as Japan, Germany and also China (where planned workers state overall control has created a framework for unprecedented capitalist economic growth) have built up. 
The extraordinary transformation of capital export by the leading imperialist power, a key feature of the imperialist phase of capitalism analysed by Lenin, into net capital import has been a significant reversal also, so that all aspects of the American economy are financed by outsiders - holding bonds, property titles, debts, and currency which can never be repaid in real value, and which decline in value relentlessly as the American ruling class lets the dollar value slip continuously.
Part of this enormous sloshing surplus of paper dollars has also corrupted the entire banking and investment system as the ever greater desperation to find a profit has led to unwiser and unsecured lending practices to disperse the money – and with the ultimate outcome that it cannot find a profit – as the subprime (which means effectively “bad debt”) sector collapse demonstrates clearly (threatening to unravel the entire elaborate capital networks).
Sheer market domination and financial power allowed this arm twisting to continue all through the late 20th century but it has become increasingly obvious that eventually someone would need to challenge the US for what it is owed – part of the complex breakdown into trade war and eventually outright inter-imperialist aggression that capitalism routinely returns to.
So the arm twisting has been supplemented with overt bullying warnings by US imperialism.
Sheer ruthless violence and murderous intimidation is to face anyone complaining, as the dollar is let go into total freefall on the world markets. 
Sheer might is displacing the “niceties” of legal capitalist trading relations and their ostensible social contract. It has been supplemented with a massive escalation in the already huge dollar pollution of the world with masses of additional dollars pumped in the system by the Bush regime through tax reductions, and gobsmacking levels of war spending  (including dollars flown into Iraq by the pallet load and literally handed out with no accountability).
The world is to owe the US superlords a living (the minority in the ruling class while the US working class is also driven down e.g. New Orleans) to maintain the sweet life come what may, and anyone who objects will get a kick in the teeth – as demonstrated on Iraq etc. and overtly threatened for all who might raise a challenge.
This turn to overt fascism (for what the term is worth, since all imperialism is continuously brutal, barbaric and genocidally murderous, simply hiding it behind a democratic façade when it can afford it) by the leading imperialism power, accompanied by the full range of human “rights” clampdowns, arbitrary arrests surveillance, torture etc now being imposed in all the leading imperialist countries and especially the US and the UK, is a one way street, a major sign of the weakness of the ruling class unable to rule in the old way and ready to tear up its greatest weapon, the illusion of “democracy” which has allowed it to keep control for centuries, more effectively than any open dictatorship.  
The Empire cannot now let up, as the apparently demented determination of the discredited and bankrupt Bush regime to continue its massive troop presence in Iraq “for years”, seems to confirm, as promised in a statement, significantly from the “conciliatory” wing of the White House Condoleezza Rice. News of construction of a giant base on the border with Iran reinforces the signals.
Bush’s promises of token withdrawals of a few thousand troops may be made – but only as sops thrown to the more panicky sections of the scumbag opportunist political establishment which never opposed the war but which has cold feet at the disastrous defeats and setbacks suffered by the US forces in Iraq, and the massive disquiet and public anti-war hostility it has stimulated in the US and all the other western countries.
A major question in all this is of course the paralysing impact on ruling class capacity to rule and take things forwards in the teeth of such debilitating defeat. As Marxism has always understood, this shattering of ruling class confidence by defeat and setback is the crucial factor in opening revolutionary opportunities for the class struggle to finally get out from under its endless suppression.
And undoubtedly the scale of the defeat in Iraq is now reaching historically unprecedented levels as the bourgeois press reports make clear:  
Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.
When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.
The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.
Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad’s international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.
Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. ‘The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,’ says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the ‘surge’ in Baghdad began.
They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: ‘We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it’s like we’ve become no more than numbers now.’
The first soldier starts in again. ‘My husband was injured here. He hit an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury. The blast shook out the plates. He’s home now and has serious issues adapting. But I’m not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted to see him I’d have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army counts it.’
A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. ‘We’re plodding through this,’ he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. ‘I don’t know how much more plodding we’ve got left in us.’
When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain’s assistant who has come to bless a patrol. ‘Why don’t you tell the truth? Why don’t you journalists write that this army is exhausted?’
It is a weariness that has created its own culture of superstition. There are vehicle commanders who will not let the infantrymen in the back fall asleep on long operations - not because they want the men alert, but because, they say, bad things happen when people fall asleep. So the soldiers drink multiple cans of Rip It and Red Bull to stay alert and wired.
But the exhaustion of the US army emerges most powerfully in the details of these soldiers’ frayed and worn-out lives. Everywhere you go you hear the same complaints: soldiers talk about divorces, or problems with the girlfriends that they don’t see, or about the children who have been born and who are growing up largely without them.
‘I counted it the other day,’ says a major whose partner is also a soldier. ‘We have been married for five years. We added up the days. Because of Iraq and Afghanistan we have been together for just seven months. Seven months ... We are in a bad place. I don’t know whether this marriage can survive it.’
The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State - have been insisting for months now: that the US army is ‘about broken’. Only a third of the regular army’s brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the problem is expected to worsen.
And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army’s equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn).
But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories they tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.
The army’s exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.
‘They are scraping to get people to go back and people are worn out,’ said Thomas Grieger, a senior US navy psychiatrist, told the International Herald Tribune in April.
‘Modern war is exhausting,’ says Major Stacie Caswell, an occupational therapist with a combat stress unit attached to the military hospital in Mosul. Her unit runs long group sessions to help soldiers with emerging mental health and discipline problems: often they have seen friends killed and injured, or are having problems stemming from issues at home - responsible for 50 to 60 per cent of their cases. One of the most common problems in Iraq is sleep disorders.
‘This is a different kind of war,’ says Caswell. ‘In World War II it was clear who the good guys and the bad guys were. You knew what you would go through on the battlefield.’ Now she says the threat is all around. And soldiering has changed. ‘Now we have so many things to do...’
‘And the soldier in Vietnam,’ interjects Sergeant John Valentine from the same unit, ‘did not get to see the coverage from home that these soldiers do. We see what is going on at home on the political scene. They think the war is going to end. Then we have the frustration and confusion. That is fatiguing. Mentally tiring.’
‘Not only that,’ says Caswell, ‘but because of the nature of what we do now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations - even as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately planning and training for your next tour.’ Valentine adds: ‘There is no decompression.’
The consequence is a deep-seated problem of retention and recruitment that in turn, says Caswell, has led the US army to reduce its standards for joining the military, particularly over the issue of no longer looking too hard at any previous history of mental illness. ‘It is a question of honesty, and we are not investigating too deeply or we are issuing waivers. The consequence is that we are seeing people who do not have the same coping skills when they get here, and this can be difficult.
‘We are also seeing older soldiers coming in - up to 41 years old - and that is causing its own problems. They have difficulty dealing with the physical impact of the war and also interacting with the younger men.’
Valentine says: ‘We are not only watering down the quality of the soldiers but the leadership too. The good leaders get out. I’ve seen it. And right now we are on the down slope.’

Afghanistan goes from bad to worse too:

The number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan’s Helmand province has fast become the conflict’s most controversial element, and now threatens to undermine Britain’s entire war effort. Attempts to stop the resurgence of the Taliban are uniting the population against UK troops.
Last week I saw the damage being done in the battle for hearts and minds. In the British headquarters a girl was brought in by her family. She lay on the table, blood leaking from her tiny frame. Occasionally her body would convulse, her screams reverberating around the base. On either side, three of her siblings whimpered. They, too, had been lacerated by masonry after a US bomber strafed their home last Sunday morning while the Taliban were firing from the same compound.
An hour earlier, soldiers at the base in Sangin had recognised the thud of a nearby explosive. By the time its disbelieving victims appeared at the British outpost, they had already buried two children. Others lay entombed beneath the rubble. Bombed by their would-be liberators, their parents had passed the bloodied bundles of their remaining children to the British army to save them.
New unpublished figures confirm that the rate of civilian casualties is accelerating. They also reveal that, for the first time since current operations began in Helmand last year, the number of innocent people killed by international troops has eclipsed those killed by the Taliban. No one knows how many have died, only that the numbers are high. Forty minutes before the four children arrived at Sangin compound, I saw two wounded women arrive at its gates and beg for treatment.
Accusations grow that authorities are trying to suppress the consequences of waging a war in a populated area such as the Helmand valley. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which oversees British and international forces in Afghanistan, warned that queries risked ‘treading on dangerous territory’. Despite admitting that all reports of civilian casualties were logged, a spokesman said they were too ‘busy’ to provide data.
Using hospital data from the region, however, independent researchers have substantiated at least 348 civilian deaths caused by British, Nato and US operations in Helmand in the first six months of the year. Another 118 were injured. Last year international forces killed 320.
Researcher Michael Shaikh, said: ‘It has been a very bloody period.’ He added they had found evidence indicating ‘indiscriminate and disproportionate’ use of force by international soldiers.
The true total of civilian victims is certain to be higher, as Shaikh did not have access to the numbers of civilians treated at Helmand’s military hospitals. Scores have been taken to front-line bases. The ISAF admitted that, ‘typically’, victims went to army compounds - the children involved in last Sunday’s tragedy near Sangin, close to where a British soldier was killed last Friday, were flown to the main British army hospital 30km away.
No details of the incident have been made public. Only my presence will mean that what happened will spread beyond the circle of troops and medics who tried to save them. An army spokesman said the children were operated on at the British Military Hospital at Camp Bastion and will be taken back to Sangin when they had recovered.
Officers had given their relatives $600 to help rebuild their lives. What else they will receive in compensation is unclear, a matter for the US military. The British government has so far received 227 compensation claims and settled 67, most of them relating to the firefights between British troops and Taliban this summer.
...Four days later, as dawn broke over northern Helmand, I was with British troops as an American F-15 swooped from the east before peeling away. Two seconds later, there was a blinding flash, a thunderclap and then a tremor that shook the soldiers squatting in trenches 700 metres away. A giant cloud swamped the town of Rasaji beneath a halo of dust.
The fighting stopped in the aftermath of the 500lb bomb. A Taliban commander was heard to demand reinforcements because his men had been all but obliterated. It is precisely the power of such air strikes that lies at the centre of concerns over collateral damage.
Nato recently announced that the use of 500lb bombs in Helmand would not be tolerated. Seeing the ruins of Rasaji emerge, it was not difficult to see why. British troops have called in US air strikes hundreds of times in recent months: the strikes represent their greatest asset against a resolute enemy.
Requests for US air support are frequently made when troops are pinned down. In such frenzied moments, things can go wrong. Last Thursday’s fighting was fearsome, but for the soldiers of B Company of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Anglian Regiment it was a routine scrap. During the 80-minute dawn exchange, British troops fired more than 6,000 rounds and at least 11 Taliban were killed. Mortars pitted the plain below. In all, 237 shells rained on the enemy. So frenetic was the exchange that guns overheated. Oliver ‘Dusty’ Hale, 20, from Sudbury, Suffolk, who was protecting the unit’s left flank, was forced to spit on his barrel to help cool it. By sunrise, a thousand used shells from his weapon filled the trench.
...Predictably, reports of civilian casualties have become a propaganda tool for both sides. The Taliban, masters of mining the distrust that has attached itself to the international forces, blame the British even when they are the perpetrators. The British, in turn, point to the Taliban tactic of using ‘human shields’ or shooting from civilian compounds.
...Yet the bottom line, according to latest figures, is that, while Taliban civilian casualties are falling, those attributed to international forces are rising. We will almost certainly never know what happened to the children caught in the horrors of war as they played at home one sunny Sunday morning. If they survive, it is safe to assume they will never again flash a welcoming smile at the British in Helmand.

Instead of terrorising the masses in the Middle East, the onslaughts have stirred a hornets nest of Third World hatred and hostility, recruiting willing fighters on exponentially multiplied scale into the insurgencies and “terrorist” movements, which for all their confusions and ideological backwardnesses and quirks, splits and sectarianisms, have virtually stalled the American military terror machine.
The wars have increased ten thousandfold the hatred of the downtrodden billions for the system imposing permanent exploited slave labour status and degradation onto their backs. 
The impact has reached right around the planet, far beyond the Middle East. 
This is far beyond local nationalist and anti-imperialist resistance, reflecting a long term irreversible shift in the grasp, maturity and understanding of the once-cowed “natives” overwhelmed by the bedazzling strength of the colonisers from Europe and America.
Capitalism’s need to draw tens of millions into work in its factories and plantations has inevitably trained and transformed the great exploited masses, who even if they remain formally uneducated and deliberately kept at a primitive level of culture, are no longer ignorant but ever more burningly aware of exactly how oppressed and exploited they are.  
There is no longer any pushing the Third World back into the submissive acceptance of its lot as near slave labour for the benefit of the tiny handful of rich western imperialist countries – and above all the US Empire. 
Meanwhile the war’s fabulous costs – around one trillion (!!!) dollars so far - are compounding the catastrophic credit collapse and inflationary economic disaster eating at the heart of the US and Western world imperialist order. No amount of plundered oil revenues or other carpet bagging expropriations can directly compensate (which the shallow fake-“left” “war for oil” analyses suggest).
The relentlessly rising toll of hundreds of dead US soldiers and tens of thousand wounded, with no end in sight, has torn public opinion and support in the US to shreds, splitting the ruling class and paralysing with doubts even the republican constituency on Bush’s side. 
The shattering impact of the slow motion defeat has also claimed victim after victim from the gung-ho neocon Bush Administration, including arch-reactionaries Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and others, and in sidekick stooge Britain has brought down a complete Government, with the downfall of the now hated Blair New Labourism, a titanically significant event on  par with the working class’s demolition of the hated Heath Government in 1974 and the equally disgusting Callaghan Labour anti-working class anti-union government of 1979’s “Winter of Discontent” semi-political strikes.
These are hugely significant markers of the impact of the growing spontaneous revolutionary struggle in the Middle East which is why the Blair demise has been so slyly and deceitfully covered up for the ruling class by disgusting opportunism of the class collaborating Brown-nosing Labourites in their supposed “orderly” transition to a “new” government (equally a ruling class instrument and essentially a clone of Blair without the “charisma”). So much for the endless posturing about bringing “democracy” to the world.
But for all the panic and fears of the heavily fractured American establishment over the fearful and dangerous mess that four years of occupation quagmire has produced, imperialism has no choice but to continue the demented blitzkrieging path it has begun, first in Serbia and Afghanistan and then Iraq. 
Not only must it continue to try and control the crucial Middle East, which it has dominated and bled dry for decades as a central strategic location for worldwide plundering of resources and labour exploitation, keeping the lid on the massively rising hatred and hostility to its system, but it has to recover ground lost in the Baghdad and Kabul debacles.
Iraq is not Vietnam, where the failure to stop the communist victory nevertheless went hand in hand with an overall containment of the “domino” effect toppling of imperialist regimes, by imposing such brutal costs on the struggle that it made further anti-imperialist and communist movements hesitate in the then prevailing conditions (especially under the mistaken perspectives of ‘peaceful coexistence” revisionism). 
This time imperialism faces the total loss of its authority and an unravelling of control in not just the Middle East but increasingly through Africa, the Far East and its “own back yard” of Latin America.
Retreat is surely out of the question and most of all in a world of anti-imperialist ferment, where every material blow against dominant capitalism will lend huge new strength to the anti-imperialist momentum and the certainty that it will eventually be forced to develop the vital Marxist-Leninist conscious leadership which alone can lead the transformation of the world from imperialist mayhem and destruction into planned socialism. 
Already the steadily increasing determination of the militant resistance in such struggles as the endlessly heroic Palestinian people’s fightback against the monstrous, decades-long foul genocidal Zionist occupation of their homeland has shown deepening maturity of understanding of the oppression of imperialism, as do many others – even the weird religious fanaticism of the various “terrorists” struggling in various ways against imperialism, is tempered with a deepening understanding of the realities of imperialism’s contradictions.
Religious mysticism is not the answer to mankind’s problems and there is a long way to go before the battle for Marxist understanding can be won on a wide enough scale for imperialist aggression to finally be toppled and turned over and the crucial workers states (and their defensive proletarian dictatorships) to be built.
But the enormous upwelling of insurgency, nationalist resistance, hostility to imperialist decadence, overtly declared Marxism (in Nepal, Colombia etc ), and left nationalist movements in South America, is a massive development in human history. 
Far from “condemning” its chaotic anarchy and incoherence – though major weakness as yet – the crucial understanding for Marxism is that these movements all show the enormous eruption of revolutionary potential on the planet.
The entire spectrum of fake-”lefts” with their moralising and wooden academic failure to see the significance of the ferment, lining up instead with imperialism to “condemn” it, have made it very clear where their real class loyalties lie.  
The battle for Marxist understanding will ultimately benefit hugely from this ferment of discussion and upheaval against imperialism.
Huge caution needs to be applied to leaderships such as the Chávez Bolivarian “new socialism for the 21st century” which despite warning of the dangers of Yankee imperialism as yet does not come near developing core elements of genuine Marxism such as the conscious building of a Leninist scientific leadership party and its central insistence on  the need for the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to be established as the only sure way for socialism to develop.
Capitalist class ownership remains in Venezuela and it remains to be seen whether the Chávez movement is playing a tactical game, developing in the right direction but cautiously or has fallen into the revisionist trap of believing there is a way to keep imperialism at bay by “not provoking it”.  
Meanwhile all the signals are that imperialism will certainly escalate the warmongering horrors, with its outrageous anti-Iranian Goebbels aggression and threats:
The journalists who had turned out in large numbers were there for another reason: to question head of Israel’s airforce, Major-General Eliezer Shkedi about a mysterious air raid that happened this month, codenamed ‘Orchard’, carried out deep in Syrian territory by his pilots.
Shkedi ignored all questions...
Operation Orchard can be seen as a dry run, a raid using the same heavily modified long-range aircraft, procured specifically from the US with Iran’s nuclear sites in mind. It reminds both Iran and Syria of the supremacy of its aircraft and appears to be designed to deter Syria from getting involved in the event of a raid on Iran - a reminder, if it were required, that if Israel’s ground forces were humiliated in the second Lebanese war its airforce remains potent, powerful and unchallenged.
...the raid on Syria has come as speculation about a war against Iran has begun to re-emerge after a relatively quiet summer...both London and Washington have increased the heat by alleging that they are already fighting ‘a proxy war’ with Tehran in Iraq.
Perhaps more worrying are the well-sourced claims from conservative thinktanks in the US that there have been ‘instructions’ by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney to roll out support for a war against Iran.
...troubling details chimed uncomfortably with the known facts. Two detachable tanks from an Israeli fighter were found just over the Turkish border. According to Turkish military sources, they belonged to a Raam F15I - the newest generation of Israeli long-range bomber, which has a combat range of over 2,000km when equipped with the drop tanks. This would enable them to reach targets in Iran, leading to speculation that it was an ‘operation rehearsal’ for a raid on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
Finally, however, at the week’s end, the first few tangible details were beginning to emerge about Operation Orchard from a source involved in the Israeli operation.
They were sketchy, but one thing was absolutely clear. Far from being a minor incursion, the Israeli overflight of Syrian airspace through its ally, Turkey, was a far more major affair involving as many as eight aircraft, including Israel’s most ultra-modern F-15s and F-16s equipped with Maverick missiles and 500lb bombs. Flying among the Israeli fighters at great height, was an ELINT - an electronic intelligence gathering aircraft.
What was becoming clear by this weekend amid much scepticism, largely from sources connected with the administration of President George Bush, was the nature of the allegation, if not the facts.
In a series of piecemeal leaks from US officials that gave the impression of being co-ordinated, a narrative was laid out that combined nuclear skulduggery and the surviving members of the ‘axis of evil’: Iran, North Korea and Syria.
It also combined a series of neoconservative foreign policy concerns: that North Korea was not being properly monitored in the deal struck for its nuclear disarmament and was off-loading its material to Iran and Syria, both of which in turn were helping to rearm Hizbollah.
Underlying all the accusations was a suggestion that recalled the bogus intelligence claims that led to the war against Iraq: that the three countries might be collaborating to supply an unconventional weapon to Hizbollah.
It is not only the raid that is odd but also, ironically, the deliberate air of mystery surrounding it, given Israel’s past history of bragging about similar raids, including an attack on an Iraqi reactor. It was a secrecy so tight, in fact, that even as the Israeli aircrew climbed into the cockpits of their planes they were not told the nature of the target they were being ordered to attack.
According to an intelligence expert quoted in the Washington Post who spoke to aircrew involved in the raid, the target of the attack, revealed only to the pilots while they were in the air, was a northern Syrian facility that was labelled as an agricultural research centre on the Euphrates river, close to the Turkish border.
According to this version of events, a North Korean ship, officially carrying a cargo of cement, docked three days before the raid in the Syrian port of Tartus. That ship was also alleged to be carrying nuclear equipment.
It is an angle that has been pushed hardest by the neoconservative hawk and former US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. ...
Most explicit of all was Andrew Semmel, acting deputy assistant Secretary of State for nuclear non-proliferation policy, who, speaking in Rome yesterday, insisted that ‘North Koreans were in Syria’ and that Damascus may have had contacts with ‘secret suppliers’ to obtain nuclear equipment.
But despite the heavy inference, no official so far has offered an outright accusation. Instead they have hedged their claims in ifs and buts, assiduously avoiding the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
There has also been deep scepticism about the claims from other officials and former officials familiar with both Syria and North Korea. They have pointed out that an almost bankrupt Syria has neither the economic nor the industrial base to support the kind of nuclear programme described, adding that Syria has long rejected going down the nuclear route.
Others have pointed out that North Korea and Syria in any case have also had a long history of close links - making meaningless the claim that the North Koreans are in Syria.
The scepticism was reflected by Bruce Reidel, a former intelligence official at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Centre, quoted in the Post. ‘It was a substantial Israeli operation, but I can’t get a good fix on whether the target was a nuclear thing,’ adding that there was ‘a great deal of scepticism that there’s any nuclear angle here’ and instead the facility could have been related to chemical or biological weapons.
The opaqueness surrounding the nature of what may have been hit in Operation Orchard has been compounded by claims that US knowledge over the alleged ‘agricultural site’ has come not from its own intelligence and satellite imaging, but from material supplied to Washington from Tel Aviv over the last six months, material that has been restricted to just a few senior officials under the instructions of national security adviser Stephen Hadley, leaving many in the intelligence community uncertain of its veracity.
Whatever the truth of the allegations against Syria - and Israel has a long history of employing complex deceptions in its operations - the message being delivered from Tel Aviv is clear: if Syria’s ally, Iran, comes close to acquiring a nuclear weapon, and the world fails to prevent it, either through diplomatic or military means, then Israel will stop it on its own.
...In the end there is no mystery. Only a frightening reminder. In a world of proxy threats and proxy actions, the threat of military action against Iran has far from disappeared from the agenda..

A warning by France’s foreign minister that the world should prepare for war over Iran’s nuclear programme has drawn an angry response from Iran.
Iran’s foreign ministry said the remark had damaged the credibility of France, while the official Iranian news agency accused Paris of aping Washington.
On Sunday France’s Bernard Kouchner said: “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.”
Meanwhile, the top UN nuclear official said force should be a last resort.
At a conference of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Austria, Mohamed ElBaradei said he saw no clear and present danger, and that talk of force was counter-productive.
Iran denies it is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and says it only wants nuclear power to generate electricity for civilian purposes.
But it has repeatedly rejected UN demands to give up the enrichment of uranium, which the US and other Western states fear is being diverted to a nuclear weapons project.
Mr Kouchner said negotiations with Iran should continue, but that an Iranian nuclear weapon would pose “a real danger for the whole world”.
Iran says its nuclear programme is peaceful
He said a number of large French companies had been asked not to tender for business in Iran.
Iranian official media responded with contempt.
“The occupants of the Elysee (the French presidential palace) have become the executors of the will of the White House and have adopted a tone that is... even more inflammatory and more illogical than that of Washington,” IRNA news agency said.
Mr Kouchner was visiting Russia on Monday, where he was expected to push for tighter UN sanctions to try to force Iran to give up enrichment.
Russia has a UN Security Council veto over any new sanctions, and its support is seen as vital for any new approach.
On Monday Mr Kouchner said even in the absence of UN action, the European Union should prepare its own sanctions against Iran.
Following talks in Paris, his Dutch counterpart Maxime Verhagen said his government would be willing “to apply EU sanctions in common with the United States sanctions”.
Iran has warned that any new punishments could push it to stop co-operating with the IAEA.
The United States has not ruled out a military attack against Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
However, a top general in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards said any bombing raid on targets in Iran would provoke a tough response.
US positions in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan “are within our range”, Gen Mohammad Hassan Koussechi told IRNA.
The $30bn arms deal for the Zionist monsters, the $20bn being promised to the backward feudal monstrosities in Saudi Arabia and other stooge Arab states like Egypt, the latest British huge multi-billion pound British Aerospace arms dealing and training for the corrupt Saudi ruling class all point the same way – escalated warmongering.
Capitalism is a system of slump and war and the realities are surfacing with a vengeance. 
The only answer is revolutionary transformation by the overthrow of capitalism. 
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins

E P S R   BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

***********

It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

*********

"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

*******

" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

Name ............................

Address.........................

Postcode........................

For a £25 annual subscription to receive EPSR by first class post
every Wednesday, write to (but send no money initially):
EPSR, PO Box 50, L0NDON, SW17 9NL