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
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e-mail: contact@epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk                         www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk www.epsr.org (repeat site)
No 1331  26th Apr 2008                                                                                                                            25p
 
Same slump that’s spurring teachers into action is also causing food riots in Egypt, Asia and Philippines – and shows how devastating new Depression will force the world’s masses to turn to revolution. The price of rice and other foodstuffs is not doubling for ‘agricultural’ reasons but because global capitalism’s swaggering post-war credit-fuelled boom has turned to a slump-spiral bust.  With all reformism – such as New Labour – despised for joining in Washington’s murderous warmongering on the Middle East in its insane drive to World War III, the deck is cleared for raw class struggle. Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF right not to fall for West’s counter-revolutionary MDC stunt – enraging all reactionaries, from Bush and Brown to the anti-communist fake ‘left’, like the SWP, who also back the CIA/Hollywood lies with their rubbish about Tibet 

At one end of the spectrum of increasingly violent class struggle on the planet as capitalist economic crisis worsens into another Great Depression are the world’s poorest masses – fighting their police and state forces for handfuls of food. 
The genuine workers uprisings in Egypt, the Philippines, Haiti and India reflect the sharper, pre-revolutionary conditions now breaking out, as the so-called credit crunch and the slide in the dollar sparks hyper-inflation in commodities – especially fuel and foodstuffs. The capitalist press reports, for example: 
Thousands of garment workers in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka went on strike yesterday, closing down factories in protest at spiralling food prices. Demonstrators clashed with police during a rampage in which cars and shops were smashed.
Local news agencies said the army had to be brought in and police opened fire to scatter the striking workers. Nearly two dozen people were injured. Factory workers, whose basic minimum salary is less than a dollar a day, say high food prices mean many have little to eat, and are demanding wage increases. The price of rice, the staple of the Bangladeshi diet, has leapt by a third since a devastating cyclone last year. Experts say 30 million of the country’s 150 million people could go without daily meals. India has agreed to ship in half a million tonnes of emergency rice stocks, but it could take a month to arrive.
The president of the Phillippines said yesterday that the country had enough rice for the “foreseeable future”, but told cabinet colleagues the unprecedented surge in rice and fuel costs had strained Filipinos’ finances.
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said moves to prevent rice shortages included measures to tackle hoarding and price speculation, while securing imports and eliminating distribution bottlenecks. Farmers in the Philippines, which is one of the world’s largest rice importers, warned that already high rice prices could climb by a further 40%, leading to unrest. 
But teachers and other sections of workers propelled into struggle by cuts in conditions and pay also need to realise that they are coming into total conflict with the capitalist system. The reformist-imperialist days of the crushing of Third World dissent by CIA-run death squads and US monopoly-backed right-wing dictatorships is crashing into the mass resistance to exploitation by the neocolonial countries, and there is limited scope for crumbs off the table for the ruling class system, whose banks are now shaking with panic. 
This conflict has got to start making teachers and other sections of workers in struggle become even more hostile to the New Labour government frauds, but also to be a lot more suspicious of the opportunist anti-communist politics of fake ‘left’ groups, such as the SWP, Socialist Party, CPGB etc.
Why do these “socialist activists” claim to be totally against the capitalist ruling class but nevertheless back the ruling class’s non-stop TV, radio and newspaper hate campaign against Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF government and against China over Tibet and “human rights”? 
One moment, the ‘lefts’ are feigning opposition to the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, the next moment the ‘lefts’ are joining in the mass media campaign to steamroller Robert Mugabe (the leader of Zimbabwe’s bitter armed liberation struggle) out of his own country? Whatever the shortcomings of the regime, in the face of a decade plus of Western sanctions and tough agricultural conditions, the reality is that ZANU-PF is HATED by the British and US imperialist ruling classes for not backing down from its anti-imperialist stance; for aiding the liberation struggle across the frontline states, and in the Congo; for being prepared to put its troops into these struggles for the African peoples’ overthrow of white colonial rule. 
Who do these wretched middle-class ‘left’ fakers think they’re kidding when the West targets both Zimbabwe AND China over the supply of arms to the Mugabe government – and the SWP and other opportunists SIMPLY JOIN IN with racist British imperialism’s attempted weakening of the Mugabe regime for overthrow? 
And in favour of WHAT? The white-farmer and Western intelligence backing for the MDC “democratic opposition” is clear for all to see, and the “free election” campaign to unseat Mugabe follows the tried-and-tested pattern of all such CIA campaigns. 
The ‘lefts’ had to be more circumspect with the less hard-bitten Sandinista movement in Nicaragua in the 1980s, prior to ITS DEFEAT at the hands of such a CIA shit-storm, to a blood-soaked Western financed Contra coalition, that promptly dragged all development in that country back into the mud of ruling class exploitation. 
So the ZANU-PF liberation government is EVEN MORE HATED by the utterly RACIST West for its bravery and tenacity for hanging on, going to the military aid of other African revolutions AGAINST THE WEST etc etc –– and all the gutless ‘left’ charlatans of Britain, Europe and America (all with totally RACIST and COLONIAL backgrounds) line up AGAINST ZIMBABWE too.
One week they pretend to protest mightily against the imperialist West’s bloody mayhem in the Middle East. Next week, they believe every word its privately-owned or state-run media says about a crucial class struggle. 
For anyone who genuinely despises the bullying racist British and US hate-campaign against Zimbabwe, this SWP support for the CIA line is both pure middle-class anti-communist sickness and laugh-out-loud hilarious, because these fake ‘lefts’ regurgitate the CIA propaganda lies about Zimbabwe being in the grip of an MDC-led “general strike”, when nothing of the sort happened: 
An indefinite general strike was under way in Zimbabwe as Socialist Worker went to press. 
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) called it to demand the release of presidential election results, still withheld two weeks after the election.
Most independent observers accept that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai beat president Robert Mugabe who has been in power since independence. 
Briggs Bomba of the International Socialist Organisation in Zimbabwe said, “Mugabe’s continued hold on power, after an election he visibly lost, now constitutes a coup.”
Though the economic crisis means that only 20 percent of workers are formally employed, the strike is an opportunity for the opposition to retake the initiative. 
Workers have always spearheaded resistance in Zimbabwe. This is an opportunity to provide a more powerful opposition than the MDC has supplied since the election.
The strike will not be easy as demonstrations are banned. MDC secretary general Tendai Biti said, “If you demonstrate in Zimbabwe, Mugabe will kill you.”
Mugabe looks set to proceed with “recounts” in parliamentary seats where his Zanu-PF party did badly.
The MDC’s indecisiveness has allowed Mugabe’s government to take the initiative, and he has launched violent attacks on opposition supporters. 
Two MDC activists have reportedly been killed and 200 hospitalised after attacks from Zanu-PF thugs.
The MDC had been hoping to gain international support through other African states in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which includes South Africa. 
But South African president Thabo Mbeki said “the situation in Zimbabwe is manageable”.
Briggs said, “President Mbeki’s unfortunate statements and the deafening silence from other African leaders in SADC and the African Union raises serious problems of accountability with the current crop of African leaders.”

The extraordinary difficulty for anti-imperialist forces to win at the bourgeois election game under conditions of permanent Western subversion, dark propaganda on a global scale, economic sanction and every other bit of skulduggery that the rich and world-dominant imperialist system can muster is a TOTAL MYSTERY to the blinkered middle-class SWP and other opportunist ‘lefts’ – they even feign not to notice that their “clever, socialist” perspective on this class-war frontline exactly tallies with the CIA/British colonialist view. 
The more thoughtful liberal-left commentator, Seamus Milne, has a feeble non-Leninist go at the Western hypocrisy over elections:

There is no question that the struggle over land and power in Zimbabwe has brought the country to a grim pass. Nearly a decade after the takeover of white-owned farms and the rupture with the west, economic breakdown, hyperinflation, sanctions and Aids have taken a heavy toll. With the expectation now that a second round of elections, mired in claims of fraud, may after all keep President Mugabe in power, the prospect must be of continued economic punishment and crisis.
On a different scale, there’s also no doubt that in Tibet - the other central international focus of western concern in the past month - deep-seated popular discontent fuelled last month’s anti-government protests and attacks on Han Chinese, which were met with a violent crackdown by the Chinese authorities. Certainly, given the intensity of the US and European response, from chancellors and foreign ministers to Hollywood stars and blanket media coverage, you’d be left in little doubt that these two confrontations were the most serious facing their continents, if not the world.
The US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, said as much this week when he declared Zimbabwe the “most important and urgent issue” in Africa. Gordon Brown and George Bush both denounced the delay in releasing election results, the prime minister declaring that the “international community’s patience with the regime is wearing thin”. The British media have long since largely abandoned any attempt at impartiality in its reporting of Zimbabwe, the common assumption being that Mugabe is a murderous dictator at the head of a uniquely wicked regime.
China’s growing economic muscle means western leaders prefer to tread more carefully around its human rights record, but Angela Merkel and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, were not shy about steaming in, along with the US presidential candidates and the House of Representatives, which demanded unconditional talks with the exiled Dalai Lama. Meanwhile, any official restraint was more than made up for by a string of Dalai Lama-dazzled celebs from Richard Gere to Ab Fab’s Joanna Lumley, who proudly recalled that her father had once helped Tibet against China on behalf of the British Raj.
But, on the basis of the scale of violence, repression and election rigging alone, you would be hard put to explain why these conflicts have been singled out for such special attention. In the violence surrounding Zimbabwe’s elections, two people are currently reported to have died; in Tibet, numbers estimated to have been killed by protesters and Chinese forces range from 22 to 140. By contrast, in Somalia, where US-backed Ethiopian and Somali troops are fighting forces loyal to the ousted government, several thousand have been killed since the beginning of the year and half the population of the capital, Mogadishu, has been forced to flee the city in what UN officials describe as Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis. 
When it comes to rigging elections, countries like Jordan and Egypt have been happy to oblige in recent months - in the Egyptian case, jailing hundreds of opposition activists into the bargain - and almost nobody in the west has batted an eyelid. In Saudi Arabia there are no national elections at all, let alone the opposition MPs and newspapers that exist in Zimbabwe. In Africa, Togo has been a more flagrant rigger, while in Cameroon last week the president was given the job for life. And when it comes to separatist and independence movements, the Turkish Kurds have faced far more violence and a tighter cultural clampdown than the Tibetans.
The crucial difference, of course, and the reason why these conflicts and violations don’t get the deluxe media and political treatment offered to the Zimbabwean opposition or Tibetan separatists is that the governments involved are all backed by the west, compounded in the Zimbabwean case by a transparently racist agenda. But it’s not just an issue of hypocrisy and double standards, egregious though they are. It’s also that British and US involvement and interference have been crucial to both the Zimbabwean and Tibetan conflicts.
That’s most obviously true in Zimbabwe, which was not just a British colony, but where Britain refused to act against a white racist coup, triggering a bloody 15-year liberation war, and then imposed racial parliamentary quotas and a 10-year moratorium on land reform at independence. The subsequent failure by Britain and the US to finance land buyouts as expected, along with the impact of IMF programmes, laid the ground for the current impasse.
As for Tibet, Britain’s role in the former serf-based system (helpfully recalled by Lumley) was assumed after the communist takeover by the CIA, which bankrolled the Dalai Lama’s operations for many years. Such arrangements have in recent years passed to other US agencies and western NGOs, as with the Zimbabwean opposition. And even if there is no prospect of Tibetan independence, for a US administration that has designated China as the main threat to its global dominance, its minorities are still a stick that can be used to poke the dragon.
What has made human rights edicts by the US and Britain since the launch of the “war on terror” even more preposterous is that not only are they themselves supporting governments with similar or worse records, but they are directly responsible for these outrages themselves: from illegal invasions and occupations to large-scale killing and torture - along with phoney elections - in Iraq and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that more than 700 people were killed in the recent US and British-backed attacks on the Mahdi army in Iraq - a central motive for which was to stop them taking part in elections. 
The current focus on China is of course linked to the Olympics, and Britain must face the likelihood of large-scale protests over its own record in 2012. Meanwhile, the best chance both of settling the Zimbabwean crisis and of meeting Tibetan aspirations is without the interference of western powers, which would do better improving the human rights records of their allies and themselves. The days of colonial dictat are over and where attempts are made to revive them, they will be resisted. China is now an emerging global power - and, as the Zimbabwean ambassador to the UN said yesterday, Zimbabwe “is no longer a British colony”.

The same applies to China over Tibet --- but if anything the sick Western fake ‘lefts’ burnt their own fingers even more with their collusion with the hate campaign against China’s torch procession for its Olympic Games.
This is a major provocation against revisionist-nationalist China (aimed at achieving whatever can be achieved by the stinking fascist viciousness of Western intrigue -- from just spoiling China’s Olympics showcase for its astonishing economic and social advances, to splitting away Tibet to give to monks (!!), to plunging 1.1bn people into civil war, and never mind the bloodshed). 
The less lunatic Western “human rights” activists are aghast: 

I’ve been involved in the cause of human rights in China and the Tibet issue for many years now, and the protests have backfired disastrously, and not just among ordinary Chinese. The vast majority of regular people I know (Britons, Germans, Americans, Australians, Canadians) without a prior inclination either way on this issue, now find the Tibet movement and the drive to improve human rights in China overall, to be populated by a combination of fools, zealots and professional protesters with far too much spare time on their hands.
The assault on the Paralympian torchbearer in a wheelchair was an utter fiasco, you’re right. 
But the Tibet protesters in San Francisco also suffered international humiliation when a reporter there walked up to the protesters and simply asked them to find Tibet on a map-- almost none of them, hardly a single one, even had any idea where Tibet was. http://tinyurl.com/5kgdse
..before the Chinese entered Tibet, the truth is that most of the Tibetan population was subjected to virtual slavery, in the form of being serfs on their land subject to the rule of nobles. For all their flaws, the Chinese authorities have prohibited this while actually encouraging a decent degree of freedom of religion and cultural integrity among Tibetans, certainly in recent years. And not just in Tibet itself-- most Tibetans aren’t in Tibet anymore, they’re in other parts of China along with the country’s 50 other or so minorities. I visited Tibet last year, and all the signs are in both Mandarin Chinese and Tibetan, the Tibetan people are encouraged to celebrate their culture, to take part in festivities, to celebrate their holidays. And no, there wasn’t a government minder with us, we were free to go where we wanted. 
The truth is, much of the Western media outright lied about some of the Tibet coverage-- falsely labeling people as “Tibetan protesters” when in fact they were Han Chinese fleeing violent riots, or making false claims about the origin of the protests (they indeed weren’t peaceful), even an Australian fellow in Tibet recorded the violent attacks against individuals and shops in Tibet-- http://tinyurl.com/6nm8ne In fact, many of the scenes claimed to be taking place in Tibet, actually occurred in Nepal, and the police (claimed to be Chinese security services) were actually Nepalese security forces! A total misrepresentation in Western media that does grave damage to our credibility.
These kinds of things have understandably enraged ordinary Chinese...

The West in general, Bush, Brown and Rupert Murdoch (as it transpires) are certainly forced to kowtow to the power of socialist China, whose most stunning achievement is precisely to ensure that 1 billion Chinese cannot be kicked around like dogs, as the Western Great Powers did to this vast civilisation for the best part of a century, prior to Mao’s great socialist revolution. Lifting 300m people out of poverty (World Bank figures) in the past decade is also a pretty impressive achievement to any but the tiniest middle-class brains (of the SWP and other anti-communist ‘lefts’), using a planned economy under the control of the Chinese Communist Party but also using mass trading connections to the capitalist world, to ensure the necessary protective rapid industrialisation, exactly as Lenin envisaged for backward, principally peasant economies starting out on the road to socialism: 
Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 32, p316, 
To the Comrades Communists of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, etc: 
“You will need to practise more moderation and caution and show more readiness to make concessions to the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and particularly the peasantry. You must make the swiftest, most intense and all possible economic use of the capitalist West through a policy of concessions and trade. 
“This must be done on a wide scale, with firmness, skill and circumspection, and it must be utilised to the utmost for improving the condition of the workers and peasants, and for enlisting the intelligentsia in the work of economic construction. Through trade with Italy, America and other countries, you must exert every effort to develop the productive forces of your rich land...”

Except China had even more complex MASS peasant population difficulties, and poor agricultural conditions to overcome, and here, despite any mistakes that might need to be conceded when socialist minded historians set the record straight, it has fulfilled all expectations - and more.
Surely there is no doubt that the entire objective of the Chinese Communist Party is the central direction of the full development of China (barring the overthrow of all socialist policy in the country), and that having lifted 300m people out of poverty over the last decade the next step is the next 300m, then the final 300m? And their constant betterment? 
To hate-filled, anti-working class petty bourgeois minds, all this should be overthrown in favour of (CIA-run) “elections” and an end to the dictatorship of the proletariat. In reality, the scorn and subversion directed against Third World communism or anti-imperialist development suits the British racist colonialist domineering mindset perfectly, because the Red-hating agenda is the wrecking of ALL states resisting Western rule, in order to open them up for monopoly-capitalist exploitation, so that the smug, rich lifestyles of the complacent middle class (inc. the ‘lefts’) can continue for ever (No chance.) 
Hatred of communism at the Guardian newspaper – mouthpiece for all deranged Trot, feminist and ‘liberal’ anti-communist nonsense, for example, saw an attempt to pour contempt on China for its alleged failings to address the world AIDS pandemic (which started in poor, oppressed Africa and callous, anarchic American society), concede (in the same article!!) that 25% of the people with HIV in China are on anti-retroviral medicines –-- an astonishing achievement!
Then the piece claims that NGOs need to intervene “because the state is doing so little” having just explained that the state programme is supporting all manner of initiatives across the vast country --- simply because the Guardian-type middle-class brain is so full of anti-communist bile that it cannot even comprehend the sentence it has just written:
The government has backed landmark programmes, which range from educating migrant workers on the use of condoms to commissioning public information films featuring stars such as Jackie Chan.
Yet, as Wan points out, some subjects remain beyond bounds. UNAIDS estimates that 41% of those with HIV in China were infected through heterosexual sex, 38% through intravenous drug use, 11% through homosexual sex - and almost 10% through selling or receiving blood and blood products.
The scandal over the blood-driven epidemic that spread through rural China, and particularly Henan province, was one of the factors which propelled HIV up the political agenda. Peasants who sold their blood for money discovered they had also sacrificed their health as blood-collection services reused dirty needles.
But Wan believes that officials will not admit that transfusion was a problem - as in the Shahe case - because they are reluctant to admit to failings in the system.
“The government has admitted there’s an epidemic among people who sold blood - but not among those who received it. It has not informed the public of the risk from blood transfusions and doesn’t suggest people are tested,” he said.
He warns that the government’s top-down approach also makes it hard to tailor services to different needs, makes it easier for corrupt officials along the way to pocket cash, and offers little space for grassroots work.
The organisations which get cash focus on meeting government needs rather than those of the public: building capacity and educating but not engaging in enough direct work.
“The government is supporting work in the gay community, and that’s good.
“You have more than 100 organisations working in that sector now. But you go to a bathhouse and there aren’t any condoms,” he said.
That leaves the essential work of engaging with high risk groups to NGOs - when they are allowed to do so. Those working in civil society argue that security preparations for the Olympics have made officials much more suspicious in their dealing with NGOs.
This week the Aizhixing Institute announced an emergency protocol to protect its staff, volunteers, colleagues and clients in the run-up to the Olympic Games.
By way of explanation it offers a tally of recent incidents, including the house arrest or surveillance of more than 100 HIV positive people and activists in the first half of March. The list begins last December, when Wan himself was briefly detained. It ends with the detention at Shahe.

Sounds amazingly civilised for a vast developing country, and on a par with the mass effort by the Chinese CP, Red Army and state services to battle with the floods of past years, the blizzards of this, and still be able to spring surprises on the West’s so-smug liberal pious “green” activist brigade, for example, by shaping up to be the first country to ban plastic carrier bags. 
As for not trusting NGOs, the Chinese workers state officials are clearly treating all those NGOs in touch with the West as nests of spies. They’re not stupid, then.
The Chinese CP’s failing is its revisionist lack of interest in the promotion of the international socialist revolution, and its lack of Marxism-Leninism will cause internal development problems, now and again, and on a scale large enough to cause substantial damage. But these are matters for genuine communist polemic to sort out, in the course of the deepening global capitalist crisis.
Certainly, the appalling treatment meted out to the Olympic torch procession by the handfuls of media egged-on ignorant, pro-Buddhist monk protesters will be a wake-up slap in the face for the revisionist Chinese leadership. And it will turn out to be a big mistake for the West in its eagerness to play confusion-mongering anti-communist cards (to hoodwick its own populations about what’s truly tyrannical in the world ie. monopoly-capitalist warmongering, exploitation and brutality to the Third World and for counter-revolution at home.
Bitter protests and revolts can only follow all over the Third World at capitalism’s total failure to achieve worthwhile development for millions upon millions of people, now turning to a system of looming starvation under what is called the sub-prime crisis, but more accurately described as the surplus capital economic crisis of the imperialist system, which only Marxism-Leninism has ever warned the working class would once again seize hold of the planet, threatening all with the barbarism of trade war, mass unemployment and eventually shooting war, as it did in the 1930s Great Depression which was only “cured” by the infliction of breadline poverty around the world, and a second world war – killing 50m – that completed the slump destruction required for the profit system to carry on.
Washington’s and London’s savage fascist warmongering on Iraq, Afghanistan and threats to Iran have been imposed with one major purpose – to cow the world into accepting US domination at this very juncture of boom turning to bust, and to suppress even the resistance to slump of the better-off sections of the working class in the West, by putting all countries on a war footing. 
This week’s £50bn handout to the mortgage banks by the Bank of England, for example, will not “cure” anything about the monopoly-capitalist system’s workings. It may give a chance to the big banks to pilfer the public purse (and buttress them for profiteering at the public’s expense by jacking up their lending rates), but it cannot restore the underlying profitability of capitalist enterprise.
Nor will all the pumping-in of extra liquidity by the world’s central banks and the US Federal Reserve: the massive hyper-extension of credit that has kept the international capitalist system going since WWII, drenching the world in dollars, has finally burst and imploded, stretched beyond all feasible limits.
A $1 trillion write-down of world bank values won’t help either – the global-monopoly economic system needs surplus-capital destruction of real factories, real produce, real commodities, and their millions of hired-hand workers on a truly staggering scale to allow for an international recovery in trading conditions – until then the US Empire billionaires (shortly to be followed by the German ruling class, the Japanese, French, British, Indian, Brazilian etc etc ruling classes) actually NEED WAR. Their system is collapsing: 

America’s mortgage crisis has spiralled into “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression” and there is now a one-in-four chance of a full-blown global recession over the next 12 months, the International Monetary Fund warned today.
The US is already sliding into what the IMF predicts will be a “mild recession” but there is mounting pessimism about the ability of the rest of the world to escape unscathed, the IMF said in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook. Britain is particularly vulnerable, it warned, as it slashed its growth targets for both the US and the UK.
The report made it clear that there will be no early resolution to the global financial crisis.
“The financial shock that erupted in August 2007, as the US sub-prime mortgage market was derailed by the reversal of the housing boom, has spread quickly and unpredictably to inflict extensive damage on markets and institutions at the heart of the financial system,” it said.
After warning earlier this week that the world’s financial firms could end up shouldering $1 trillion (£500bn) worth of losses from the credit crunch, the IMF said it expects the US to achieve GDP growth of just 0.5% this year, and 0.6% in 2009, with the housing crash getting even worse.
Simon Johnson, the IMF’s director of research, said later the key risk to the forecasts was the danger of a vicious circle emerging, as house prices continue to fall, dealing a fresh blow to the banks, and exacerbating the problems in the markets. “Sentiment in financial markets has improved in recent weeks since the Federal Reserve’s strong actions with regard to investment banks. But we have seen how strains in markets can quickly become reinforcing, and the possibility of a negative spiral or ‘financial decelerator’ remains a possibility.”

What the world, in this desperate crisis, is horrendously short of, is Marxist-Leninist leadership, because the credit boom which financed the US Empire’s global domination via the buying up of all labour movement “opposition” in the rich West and maintained scores of CIA-run military dictators and death squads (to literally snuff out the slightest signs of social revolt) across Africa, Latin America, and South East Asia – also saw off all confidence in building socialism in the Soviet camp, where the bureaucratic and inferiority-complex burdened Stalinist leadership eventually allowed the ideology of socialist revolution to dribble away into Gorbachev’s liquidation of the proletarian dictatorship. 
The Western consumer credit boom (even though the Third World mostly existed in starvation and mass unemployment hell) and its stupefaction of both the Western labour movement and the Soviet workers states has therefore been one the greatest con-tricks in human history – because the capitalist boom is now turning into a total BUST.
The sub-prime, credit crunch crisis -- meaning the system’s financial implosion into its WORST EVER slump depression of global mass unemployment and war –– eventually has to trigger the world’s greatest flourishing of COMMUNIST thinking and mass enthusiasm for socialism, but now has to reconquer this territory while still working through the disillusionment in socialist struggle caused by both post-war non-revolutionary Moscow revisionism AND that caused by the subsequent Soviet capitulation to Western shallowness and glitz. 
Hamstrung by years of brain-washing Cold War anti-communism, and driven from political involvement by Labour party and TUC treachery (now fully committed to US Empire NAZI warmongering), the working class also has to fight its way past the hordes of middle-class fake ‘lefts’ who play such a key role in spreading dumbed-down anti-communism. 
‘Lefts’ such as the SWP, running the electioneering Respect bandwagon, preach reformist parliamentary pacifism on their home turf (over the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan) but go guns blazing for the imperialist West’s chosen targets of Red China and anti-imperialist Zimbabwe.
Meanwhile, the revolution marches on; even if it can only get away with election victories when the local revolution is on a roll and everyone knows that the arms in hand in the background won’t be denied: 
Nepal’s former Maoist rebels emerged triumphant as the largest party in the country’s new parliament last night, signalling they would work with the traditional politicians who have been routed.
The Communist party of Nepal (Maoist) will end up with a shade fewer than 220 seats in the 601-member assembly, winning half the 240 constituencies and a third of the 335 seats allocated under proportional representation.
The cabinet will nominate a further 26 members of the assembly, which will write a new constitution and end the 240-year-old monarchy. The Nepali Congress (NC) party, which currently heads the ruling coalition, and the mainstream communists known as the UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist) will each have 100 seats.
The Maoist party’s stunning success appears to be founded on its use of identity politics - and a campaign of intimidation. Analysts say the former rebels directly elected 21 women, compared with one female NC assembly member. 
“The dalits [untouchables] of Nepal voted solidly for them. That is 14%of the population. These people have been outcasts in Nepali society for decades and finally they felt they could teach the older parties who were seen as corrupt a lesson,” said CK Lal, a columnist. “In a number of ways [Maoists] have shown themselves to be much more inclusive.”
The party’s chairman, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a charismatic former guerrilla known as Prachanda, is likely to become prime minister. 
Although the Maoists will be dominant, they cannot rule alone, and talks have begun to bring the established parties into government. The leadership met the country’s business community yesterday to assuage fears that they would embark on a programme of nationalisation. They appear also to be quietly shelving their election pledge to abolish Gurkha recruitment in the British and Indian armies.
More pressing is the ending of the monarchy and integrating the 25,000 members of the People’s Liberation Army into Nepal’s armed forces. 
The party is positioning itself as a champion of social justice, with its student wing taking to the streets to demand free education until the age of 15. What the Maoists want is control of health, education, control of village development - the stuff that has immediate impact on ordinary people,” said a diplomat in Kathmandu. “They want to show that they can manage a peaceful transition, end up as revolutionaries in the land of Buddha. But how long it lasts, who knows?”
Fifteen Palestinians, including at least four members of Hamas, and three Israeli soldiers have been killed in separate clashes inside the Gaza Strip today.
According to Hamas, eight Palestinians were killed this afternoon when Israeli helicopters fired four missiles into central Gaza. 
Different accounts by Palestinian witnesses said they heard separate explosions. The Israeli army confirms a helicopter fired at a group of armed Palestinians. Earlier today, three Israeli soldiers and 4 Hamas gunmen were killed in clashes near Gaza’s main fuel terminal. 
“Raiding our areas will never be a picnic,” Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, told a news conference in Gaza.

Two indomitable struggles among many as imperialist slump worsens into catastrophic Depression, trade war and shooting war – WW3. The struggle for Leninist science has to deepen too. Build EPSR. Chris Barratt 

Revolt against aggressive homosexual indoctrination for kids (!!) in Bristol shows how healthy working-class attitudes will reassert themselves in the teeth of monstrous PC bullying – and defy the divide-and-rule tactics of the warmongering British ruling class, which wants to have sticks to beat the Islamic community with

It is not just the Islamic parents at two schools in Bristol who have come out in revolt against a campaign to put picture-books into schools which assert that homosexual relationships are “normal” and the same as heterosexual relationships.
The forced withdrawal of the books from the school libraries follows an outburst of anger from the local community that militant gay teachers were being allowed to propagandise for homosexual relationships in their primary (!!) schools, under the cover of fighting “homophobic bullying”.
Suspicions must be raised immediately that this extraordinarily self-righteous provocation was staged by militant gay-rights campaigning as part of its dodgy political dealing with the warmongering pro-imperialist Labour government (and Establishment generally), as part of their joint agenda to demonise the Islamic community. 
Aggressive homosexual campaigning cannot wait for the Third World to “catch up” with the “modern” Western liberal view in its attitudes to gay sexuality; and the putrid Brownite poodles for Bush’s neo-con onslaught on the Middle East (to terrorise the world with US aggressiveness and military might as US dollar-imperialism plunges into Great Depression and World War Three) in order to whip up Islamophobia and spread propaganda for the fantasy “war of civilisations”, “war on terror” nonsense that is used as the cover for the fascist blitzkrieging carried out by the Anglo-Saxon Western “democracies”. 
The Marxist EPSR has a long record of warning that aggressive gay-rights campaigning as a form of super-reformist but pro-imperialist posturing (and therefore always totally class-compromising) would be open to all manner of mischief-making conspiracies.
Equally, the EPSR has strongly asserted that normalcy would reassert itself, always confident that working-class and Third World family values would sooner or later come into conflict with the promotion of viciously unscientific and irrational individualist degeneracy.
While insisting that the persecution of people for their sexual orientation is medieval and barbaric, the EPSR has always warned that in a society sliding into worse and worse alienated nihilistic crisis and despair (driven down by permanent capitalist rat-race exploitation in a drink, drugs and warmongering-soaked atmosphere, and then exacerbated a thousand times over by the foul treachery of the Labour party’s parliamentary opportunism – now henchmen for Washington’s death-dealing war drive (– next demonised target, Islamic-led Iran), the ability of some highly-driven individualist groups to come to the fore with irrational agendas would be startling. 
According to reports in the local press, Bristol parents have been treated contemptuously by school officials, who left them standing in the rain, rather than talk to them, and have had their concerns dismissed – but their protest was strong enough for the contentious books to be withdrawn – for the time being.
The militant gay-rights campaigners in Bristol are being backed by the PC lobby (for example the Guardian newspaper) insisting that this campaign is only about preventing “homophobic bullying”. 
But the real word that should be accurately applied to efforts to put pro-homosexual picture books into primary schools is GROOMING. 
No wonder parents in Bristol are up in arms. 
If, in fact, the Bristol parents knew a fraction of the real story about Labour and the PC lobby’s cover-up of child abuse scandals involving known homosexuals (which couldn’t be properly investigated and stopped because of the ‘homophobia’ barracking that always ensued eg. the atrocious Mark Trotter scandal in Islington in the 1990s, see EPSR 874) – the parents would be twice as defensive of their children’s interests.
The accusation will be flung that small children are as much at risk from heterosexual teachers or adults as they are from gay teachers or older students. But it flies in the face of all parental instincts to believe that children are not immediately at great ADDED risk from militant “in your face” gay-rights activism, that insists gay sex is the same as straight sex. How many social barriers and psychological needs are being subverted by this doctrine?
It is far too close to opening the door to the sexual exploitation and seduction of children and young people by homosexual adults and people in authority, and is obviously intolerable. 
The Establishment is giving up on its last pretences of maintaining even the old bourgeois social taboos governing abnormal sexual behaviour because it is DEGENERATE and an open sewer of NAZI-loving warmongering against the Third World’s billions. In the West, the brainwashed right-wing can cheer on the bombing of Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is a society suffering all manner of psychological problems because of this warmongering, rat race alienation, anxiety and depression. The commodification of sex, the West’s vast commercial sex industry and porn industry are symptomatic of terminal decadence. 
The dead giveaway that the campaign in Bristol is NOT about ending all forms of bullying but about the promotion of homosexuality as “normal” and a “lifestyle choice” is the books being pushed on to the children.
The fairytales King and King, about two princes who fall in love, and the book based on the true story of the pair of male New York zoo penguins who raised an abandoned chick together are the purest subjective fantasies of homosexual relations being accepted as normal, and “occurring naturally throughout the animal kingdom too”. 
Of course, for saying these things the EPSR will be vilified as “homophobic” “fascists” by the lunatic anti-communist Trot “left” in the Weekly Worker-CPGB, and elsewhere. But these are the same people who join in the Western hate campaign against Iran, Hezbullah and Hamas in Gaza/Palestine, abusing them as “Islamo-fascists”, when these leaderships are the current half-way house vehicles of anti-imperialist revolt against the REAL FASCISM of Western militarism. 
Are the Islamic parents (and others) in revolt against militant homosexual stridency in Bristol “fascists”? 
The real sickness is with utterly irresponsible anti-communist individualism that isn’t confronting Western warmongering but instead egging it on under a fake “radical” cover.
The pro-imperialist variety of gay-rights campaigning has been used to join in Western hate campaigns against: Zimbabwe, Cuba, USSR, Iran, Afghanistan, China, etc etc – now it is being turned on the proletariat of this country. 
It needs to be labelled as pro-imperialist, and a supporter of the “Islamo-phobia” provocation to split the working class along West v East “clash of civilisation” lines. The real enemy of all mankind is the warmongering US Empire, and all its stooges.They need to be defeated.
Build the EPSR. Chris Barratt

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.

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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

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"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.)

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" 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."

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EPSR archives
extracts from past issues
Leninist science on the issue of militant gay rights campaigning shows that the imperialist BULLYING side is the one which lines up with the violently anti-working class Labour (or Tory) establishment provocations, not the vast majority of parents worried about the safe and normal development of their children
From EPSR 976,  24 November 1998: 
...shouting ‘homophobe’ at people you have lost out to politically, etc has become an enormously reactionary phenomenon, trying to prop up bourgeois anti-communist ideology by any means possible in this FINAL, GREAT, DECADENT CRISIS of the capitalist system; — — and everyone else is fixated (by feminism, gay rights, black nationalism, and every other kind of ‘reformist’ single-issue delusion).
It matters because actually dealing with any impairment of any kind is a sensitive question for the whole of society, and a particularly complex, emotional, and often painful matter for parents. If any of these ‘homophobe’-screaming thought police had any experience of such personal family tragedy, they would know that the one ludicrously IMPOSSIBLE suggestion about any physical or emotional disability is to just pretend it is not there and never discuss it. The great human need for ALL malfunctions is to be able to discuss everything about it freely and openly. 
Extremist hysteria, which screeches that ‘homosexuality is the same as heterosexuality’, helps absolutely no one, and presumably arises out of some sort of denial. It clearly isn’t true, — as every scrap of parental evidence, biography, and autobiography proves. The emotional difficulties of a homosexual orientation just add to the burdens of growing up anyway, — lifelong; and they deserve the most sensitive understanding possible, — from the whole of society.
These cretins screaming swearwords at any discussion of the subject, could not be a worse enemy of homosexuals if they tried. Their ‘contribution’ to society’s progress in this matter is nothing but a piece of ignorant self-advertising: ‘Look at me, I’m a progressive’. It is as likely to increase misunderstanding of the homosexual emotions as decrease it.
Like all ‘reformism’, it will delay that rational socialist world where EVERY condition of mankind will get infinitely better circumstances in which to flourish to every individual’s satisfaction.
The world of ‘free market choice’ produces exactly the opposite reality, — a world where rigid class hierarchies,and alienation for the masses, create an incurably violence-ridden and prejudice-driven society, full of potential factional, communal, and race hatred. There is no chance of homophobic prejudice disappearing from the international workers movement before the capitalist system is overthrown. 
It is correct to keep up the educational and cultural fight on these issues, but it is also time to stop missing the wood for the trees. The feminist movement as such will NOT be on the side of the REVOLUTIONARY struggle by the working class, nor will any of the other single-issue ‘reformist’ movements. ALL of the leading feminist writers and activists have been 100% unthinking anti-communists, swallowing the whole history of anti-communist propaganda.
Individual Gay Rights campaigners, Black Nationalists, and Feminists may occasionally line up with one of the easier ‘progressive’ political options like Cuban Solidarity, but they are not remotely organisations dedicated to the defeat of imperialism, starting with the imperialist system in one’s own country, which is the Marxist-Leninist understanding of really serious international solidarity.
And they will never become such because philosophically, they start from a purely SUBJECTIVE view that life is wrong because they suffer from the way of thinking of everyone else living under capitalist society (where racism, male chauvinism, and homophobia are endemic), but make no further progress with their understanding, and end up CONVINCED that changing the way people think WITHIN THE EXISTING SOCIETY is the road forward.
This is subjective IDEALISM which ignores the fact that it is divisive, envy-making, exploitational and unjust capitalist society ITSELF which constantly recreates subjective backwardness IN EVERYONE.
Even in ‘healthy’ times, the cut-throat competitiveness of capitalism is one long round of never-ending racial and nationalist banter (just study the ads of the last few years), and trade-war chauvinism is never far from the surface.
The shattering of livelihoods, and all aspirations, by the coming world slump will bring out all this rottenness to the full, both international AND internally. The Germans, the Japanese, eventually ALL ‘foreigners’ will be blamed forthe slump. And the collapse of industries and jobs around the country will breed endless rounds of “THEY have got OUR jobs”, meaning London if you live in Scotland, or vice versa; or Birmingham if you live in Cardiff, or vice versa; or Liverpool if you live in Manchester, or vice versa, etc, etc, all round the country.
And even worse. It will mean one side of town hating the other side of town if only one of two factories has to close. 
And worse still, it will mean hatred BETWEEN workers in the same factory when one half get laid off but the other half stay and double up on the labouring.
And worse still, there will be plenty of idiots who will see racist differences in who has kept jobs and who hasn’t. 
And it can get even worse in housing shortages and disrepair, and in the shortage of good school places, and in shortages of health and hospital care, etc, etc, etc, — all of which will soon be pressing more heavily on the working class than ever before.
It is the OBJECTIVE realities of the capitalist system which create the subjective unpleasantness, — envy, self-protectiveness, fear, sense of inadequacy, opportunism, discrimination, self-deception, etc, etc, — all of which sets up a monstrous stew of feuding and competitiveness and prejudice.
A subjective-idealist approach blames the problem on individual responsibility for people not thinking the right way. 
An objective scientific approach urges exactly the same re-education, but fights for the overthrow of capitalism to ALONE make it possible to seriously start clearing out all the old prejudices and ignorance of mankind on ALL matters which keep people confused, backward, and easy prey to continued divide-and-rule by capitalist exploitation indefinitely.
Build Marxist-Leninist education. Royston Bull 

Extracts from EPSR no 1146 30 July 2002 highlight that the US Empire warmongering is NOT for oil, and NOT because the region is Islamic – but because capitalism is in total global economic crisis –– and the warmongering will continue until it is defeated, and ended by revolution

It is a complete misunderstanding of Marxism to imply that the imperialist system is in crisis, focused on the Middle East in particular (“all the burning questions of war and peace in this area”) because of territorial oil-pipeline frustrations, or whatever.
US warmongering is on the march (in the Middle East and everywhere) because its global economic system (and therefore political control) is falling apart due to an insane “overproduction” crisis of collapsing profits.
It is the total productive basis of the capitalist class system of society which is in trouble, and not its oil-supplies at all, or any other particular problem or requirement.
Such a major global industry as oil will of course always be a significant incidental detailed feature of some of the actual workings of the imperialist crisis, - but it lets CAPITALISM ITSELF off the hook entirely, and is a COMPLETE TRAVESTY of Marxism, to pointlessly pretend that oil as such “unlocks the door to an understanding of all the burning questions of war and peace in this area”.
And it is well worth pedantically insisting on this point when the wretched reason for this fake-’left’ oil industry concentration is so as to distract attention from the insoluble HUMAN political disaster in Palestine, which much more graphically and interestingly reveals the revolutionary future of the world to mankind, & which much more requires a history of rotten imperialist/Revisionist-era PHILOSOPHY as its deeper explanation rather than oil (which directly does not motivate the Palestinian REVOLUTION one bit, the key to the only real SOLUTION to “all the burning questions of war and peace in this area” by pointing the way to the DEFEAT of imperialist warmongering).
If there really is a need for aphoristic shorthand to sum up the Middle East focal point of imperialist crisis, which is key to the world imperialist crisis, that word would be PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION, and not oil.
And one of the main ingredients making this so is, once again, not oil but something even more permanent, and timeless, and material, - - namely the unalterable political-philosophy of colonial-imperialism, - the essential political-economic human relationship of capitalist production (a key to civilisation for the last 800 years, much longer than oil) which incurably imposes the ‘kill-or-be-killed’ class-war material imperative on (ultimately) the whole character of the whole of society or else it can no longer remain capitalism (class-war and national-war domination).
This irresistible material imperative forces the Zionist ruling class to keep its boot on the neck of its exploited Palestinian subjects (and their exploited lands) or else ‘Israel’ will be no more.
It will be claimed that such stark ‘clever sounding’ theory does not get reflected in the typical fudge and mudge of class-compromising confused reality.
Just the opposite. If it is insisted that a capitalist ‘Israel’ remain a reality, then it can be incontrovertibly deduced that as night follows day, the persecution of the Palestinians can NEVER come to an end.
Minus any philosophical deductions, the capitalist press’s own ‘reports’ of the region invariably agree with this conclusion, or point to it.
...the human problem in the Middle East (...will not go away (oil or no oil) and will not go away from any other part of the world either (oil or no oil), -- the MATERIAL problem of the human ingredients which make up 800 years of capitalism simply being no longer compatible. REVOLUTION is inevitable.
What will work: 
The great historical question to be faced by the whole world is whether or not capitalism’s injustices can be resolved through piecemeal reformist pressure (as all parliamentarism has always pretended, including Revisionism Scargillite syndicalism, and all centrism and Trotskyism in practice (with the SWP support for ‘left’-Labour candidates; or Trot entryism into the Labour Party, etc, etc)), --- or whether on the contrary the Marxist science of history is what needs to be followed which ONLY ever tried to teach REVOLUTIONARY understanding in all things as the sole possible way forward for civilisation, building on the ruins of warmongering imperialist slump destruction.

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