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 and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 0771 2639934 www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk or www.epsr.org (alternative site)
No 1344 January 20rd 2009                                                                                                        25p fortnightly

Obama silence on Gaza blitzkrieg horrors (conveniently stopped for the Inauguration) is the real measure of the “new broom” presidency – a hollow fraud to pull the wool over working class eyes while US continues sweeping into World War Three warmongering unstoppably.  Capitalist politicians have no other choice because capitalism has no other choice – the “mother of all economic failures” cannot be solved by printing money because too much money (capital) is the problem as Marx analysed. Take over the banks and all industry, but without compensation – by revolutionary means. Working class ownership to end capitalism and exploitation and build communism the only way out of Depression and War.  Build a Leninist party

The great question is just how deep does the spiralling catastrophic crisis of the capitalist system have to go, collapsing into desperate anarchic chaos and Slump – and how utterly barbaric must it prove itself to be, directly and through its fascist proxies like the Zionists in Gaza – before the understanding starts to grow again that only a revolutionary solution can stop the world sliding into utter warmongering degeneracy?
Is the savagery of the white phosphorus horror weapon, burning flesh to bone on six-year-olds in Gaza, as foul and depraved as napalm terror on the Vietnamese villagers, not enough?
Is the obscene humiliation and insult of tearing up Palestinian graveyards by shelling them and driving tanks across, of blowing the tops from mosques, of wantonly destroying houses and infrastructure (and the lives they inadequately sustain) not sufficient?
Is the agony of hundreds of families watching their children, relatives, and sometimes all of them, blown to fragments, not enough?
Is this kind of heart-wrenching pain not enough?:

Israel’s assault on Gaza has exacted the bloodiest toll of civilian lives yet, when the bombing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of housing killed more than 50 people, including an entire family of seven young children.
The UN protested at a “complete absence of accountability” for the escalating number of civilian deaths in Gaza, saying “the rule of the gun” had taken over. Doctors in Gaza said more than 40 people died, including children, in what appears to be the biggest single loss of life of the campaign when Israeli bombs hit al-Fakhora school, in Jabaliya refugee camp, while it was packed with hundreds of people who had fled the fighting.
Most of those killed were in the school playground and in the street, and the dead and injured lay in pools of blood. Pictures on Palestinian TV showed walls heavily marked by shrapnel and bloodstains, and shoes and shredded clothes scattered on the ground. Windows were blown out.
Hours before, three young men who were cousins died when the Israelis bombed Asma elementary school in Gaza City. They were among 400 people who had sought shelter there after fleeing their homes in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza.
Abed Sultan, 20, a student, and his cousins, Rawhi and Hussein Sultan, labourers aged 22, died. Abed Sultan’s father, Samir, said the bodies were so mangled that he could not tell his son from the cousins. “We came to the school when the Israelis warned us to leave,” he said. “We hoped it would be safe. We were 20 in one room. We had no electricity, no blankets, no food.
“Suddenly we heard a bomb that shook the school. Windows smashed. Children started to scream. A relative came and told me one of my sons was killed. I found my son’s body with his two cousins. They were cut into pieces by the shell.”
The UN was particularly incensed over targeting of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with families as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaflet drops and loudspeakers. It said it had identified the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates.
Explaining its attack on al-Fahora school, the Israeli military claimed that a mortar was fired from the playground, and it responded with a single shell which killed known Hamas fighters; the resulting explosion was compounded because Hamas “booby-trapped the school”. Two Hamas militants were among the dead, both part of a rocket-launching cell.
The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency, John Ging, said three shells landed at the perimeter of the school. “It was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties,” he said.
He said UN staff vetted those Palestinians who sought shelter at the school. “So far we’ve not had violations by militants of our facilities,” he said, though responding to questions he accepted there had been clashes between Hamas and the Israeli army in the area.
Earlier in the day, Ging visited Gaza’s hospital and was shocked at the scale of civilian casualties. “What you have in this hospital is the consequences of political failure and the complete absence of any accountability for actions that are being taken. It’s the rule of the gun now, and it has to stop,” he said.
At least 12 of one family, seven children aged from one to 12, three women and two men, were killed in an air strike on their house in Gaza City. Nine others were believed trapped.
Israel continues to insist most of those killed by its forces are Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters - although its assertion it is going to extraordinary lengths to target only “terrorists” has been undermined by a tank firing on a building used by Israeli troops, killing four of them, on Monday. 
****************************
As I am writing, 315 children have died in Gaza in the last 19 days. Most probably, more will have died by the time this is published. About a third of the dead and injured have been children.
The dead children in Gaza take me back two years, to Israel’s last war, with Lebanon. Again, it was the children who were dying. I remember seeing seven children lying together on a filthy brown blanket - next to the bodies of their relatives and parents - after their house, in the village of Qana, was bombed by Israeli planes. They all had acquired the monochrome beige colour of the debris they had been buried under all night. They had a look of astonishment, agonised confusion, their lush lips twisted, their mouths stuffed with dirt. But they looked peaceful even in the ugliness of their death.
All dead children look alike, that’s the thing - even those mangled and disfigured by a Baghdad car bomb. They look asleep, not dead, just asleep after a long night of bombing and shelling.
There is no mystery as to why so many die in these wars: there are lots of children in Gaza - half of the population are children - so when you start bombing residential areas, they die.
Walk in any alleyway, refugee camp or slum in the Middle East and you will see them in their dozens, alive, and annoying: screaming, shouting and running around; chasing each other between cars, legs and push carts; gathering around any scene, a car with a flat tyre, a street scuffle - or just happily engaged in stone throwing matches. When these streets are hit, those annoying children are the first to die.
The families will grieve - and they will never forget. Last week, the day when four rockets were fired from south Lebanon towards Israel, I saw a Lebanese woman with a white headscarf sitting on the edge of her son’s grave, just under a kilometre from the Israeli border. The grave, made of marble, its edges painted in green, was fenced by few bushes of red roses still wet from the early morning rain. The woman’s sunken eyes were filled with tears; she cried and talked to her son Ali in the grave. “I didn’t see you when you died Ali, they took you to the hospital and buried you and I wasn’t there, right Ali?” She wiped her face and the marble with tissues and cried more. “May Allah burn the hearts of those who killed you like they burned my heart.”

Perhaps not. 
But the events of the three week Zionist onslaught on Gaza, secretly and not so secretly supported by the entire capitalist world, are rapidly accelerating the learning process of the billions of downtrodden throughout the world about the reality of capitalist “freedom and democracy”, a transformation that will turn the bloody mayhem “victory” of the fascist Jewish occupiers of Palestine into long-term defeat, and one for imperialism too.    
The “fascist” face of imperialism, its real nature, hidden by the pretence of “democracy”, has always been its weakness, with Nazism (which all imperialist nations have shown – not just Germany) generating the resistance and struggle that will finally overturn the whole historically bankrupt profit system, when its crisis weakens it. 
The nature of the rotten and brutal imperialism is already rapidly becoming clearer once again now that the decades of dumbed-down celebrity-bedazzled, debt-fueled consumerist illusion is collapsing into total Depression disaster, out-of-control economic disintegration, dizzying spirals of unemployment growth and worldwide escalation of basic food deprivation, hitting one billion already desperately poor humans and on the way for many, many more, including into the heartlands of the “richest” countries once currency meltdowns and total bank collapses destroy whole national economies far bigger than just Iceland or Argentina.  
The total topsy-turvy breakdown of “normality” and opportunist overnight tearing-up of all the old “rules and principles” of the sacrosanct “free market” by an utterly unprincipled wealthy ruling class, confounds the very basis of their historic claim to lead and control and develop society by the “laws” of “competition and efficiency” which supposedly “weed out the poor performers and make the economy sound and efficient for the prosperity of all”.
Rising racist chauvinism in East Europe, and Germany, and France, and Italy, and everywhere else, as economies head for collapse, hostility and social turmoil and despair, with its undertone of inter-imperialist bitterness and eventual escalated trade war conflict, all warn of the reality, after a decade of the American Empire’s attempted stomping and crushing militarism already, that the warmongering essence of capitalism and the deliberate hatreds and ignorance it fosters, are back again, and heading for total destructive mayhem, the place where it always ends up, just as it did in 1914 and 1939.
World War Three in other words.
The sick and cynical depravity of the three week Zionist turkey-shoot slaughter calmly and uncritically watched by the entire West for two weeks, until its utter inhuman monstrousness made a few token murmurings about “disproportion” necessary, to prevent immediate exposure of all the posturing bourgeois politicians, is only a taste of what is coming.
This is not simply the special case of a bizarre out-of-time colonialist implant forever driven into violence and war by the untenable contradictions of its complete land-theft of Palestinian land by forced exodus and Stern gang terror-ising ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in the 1940s, though it is all that with its genocidal logic rising inexorably through decades of massacre, blitzing, siege, imprisonment and torture (see leaflet page 5  and many past issues of the EPSR).
Nor is utter willful destruction of the already primitive state infrastructure and civilian social “provision” of the concrete hellhole of the Gaza strip ghetto – its crowded population starved and hounded and tormented and besieged even more than usual for the last eighteen months by shutdown borders, routine persecution by sniping, and shelling and daily supersonic aircraft shocks, – just the next step on the dialectically driven path of a totally genocidal “final solution” of the Palestinian “problem” for the Zionists. 
It is also part of the complete atmosphere of total warmongering that all of capitalism is now desperately pushing onto the world as the only solution it has to slump disaster.        
It is not a joke that the most fundamental argument of the cold-blooded Zionist monsters was to point to the “lessons” of the Western “war on terror”, and its already mass-produced killings and destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and now Pakistan, as “justification” for their stepped up brutality.
Western ruling class complicity in this degeneracy was total, supporting the murderous Nazi Zionist onslaught and its “right” to “defend” itself, repeating every cynically crafted and tailored Goebbels propaganda justification and lie which poured in a tide of arrogant Nazi filth out from the long-plotted and coordinated Jerusalem propaganda machine, diligently parotted by the BBC and ITV and the newspapers and the entire American media machine.
Not one of the “intrepid” reporters in the Western newspapers and TV opposed the Zionist censorship and sneaked into Gaza (through the well known tunnels e.g.) to make the kind of breathless and hushed “must-be-true” because “here we are secretly filming with a hidden camera” reports that are utterly routine propaganda when the West is coordinating its lies and innuendoes about supposed “atrocities” and “repression” in Burma, or China, or Zimbabwe, or Sudan or Cuba or whichever demonised victim is currently top of the war-provocation list, for alleged coordinated “rape gangs” or “disappearings” or beatings and killings, which are never seen on camera but only ever by hearsay comments from dubious petty bourgeois “witnesses”, unchecked and unverified.  
In Gaza even when the evidence was glaring, unavoidable (and even filmed) of gratuitous destruction and open war crime killing, of mass child murder and open terror, the TV commentators and “human rights” bodies still trod around on eggshells muttering evasively about “possible incidents” and the “need to verify the allegations”, gravely “interviewing” the fascist propaganda spokesmen from Jerusalem with none of the usual browbeating hostility and interruptions that the Syrian ambassador, or the Iranian foreign minister can expect, or the Palestinian representatives without exception.
And all turned a blind eye to such obvious contempt as the deliberate revenge shelling of the UN’s main compound – twice –  destroying the pathetic amounts of food aid it had available anyway.
The UN ground staff, with 24-hour atrocities in their face, had had the temerity to raise questions of war crime and that was enough to draw fire too. 
George W Bush’s Washington bolstering and support for the disgusting strut of Tel Aviv’s vicious little Nazis was unchallenged by the ranks of “concerned” Western politicians too – right and “left” - and crucially was equally unchallenged by the resounding silence of the Barack Obama giant fraud new presidency, along with the also completely unremarked “coincidence” of the “ceasefire” just in time for the Inauguration, a cynical timetable set up and programmed during his summer visit to Zionland and opportunist pledges of support for the Jewish occupation to ensure his election.
Non-stop references to the “war” in Gaza, as if there was some kind of parity between the desperate resistance efforts of the Palestinians and the non-stop industrial terrorising of the Jewish occupations, and the “deep concern” about “civilians on both sides” are Nazi lies too.
Small wonder the fascist Zionists could hardly bother to hide their smirks at the hollow pointlessness of the charades of “diplomatic mediation” and the transparency of their fascist Goebbels-Lie justifications for civilian massacres (that they were “accidental” while shooting at Hamas resistance, a lie anyway based on the Nazi premise that all resistance is to be smashed and killed utterly and the only laughable “ceasefire” possible should comprise utter humiliation and surrender to Jewish and imperialist  diktat). 
Might is right and the downtrodden have only themselves to blame for the devastation rained down on them is the message for the whole planet, most of all the dirt-poor decades-long victimised and humiliated Palestinians for daring even to think about lifting their faces out of the mud with a small show of resistance, for which a barbaric hurricane of bombing and shelling is rained on them. 
Let the liberals and pacifists and their illusions in “human rights” and “aid” and “charity” watch out as the world imperialist crisis rapidly develops because the collapsing monopoly capitalist order has only one way out of total disaster; war destruction and fascist repression everywhere.
But as the EPSR has pointed out many times, the long fostered illusions of “democracy” will also tangle themselves around the bourgeoisie’s feet as it tries to move towards the open dictatorship – as witness the growing protests against tightening police state surveillance moves by growing numbers of intellectuals and the most impeccable of petty bourgeois commentators. 
Even inside even the richest countries the stream of agonised petty bourgeois pain, horror and protest which the Gazan onslaught has caused is telling sign of the deeper disaster that the re-imposition of Nazi terror on the planet is causing.
As parts of the bourgeois press’s critical realism has been obliged to note among the stream of violence, long decades of petty bourgeois support for “Israel” or at least indifference to its colonialist racist jackboot suppression of the Middle East, has turned to overwhelming hostility, calls for boycott and growing disillusionment in the West “way of life”. 
A pithy letter, among the petitions and outrage, is typical of how the mood is changing: 
It is disgraceful that, on the heels of the ceasefire in Gaza, Gordon Brown, along with other European leaders, was seen attending a dinner hosted by Ehud Olmert (Gaza crisis, 19 January). This, which looks to all the world like a celebratory meal, took place while the bodies of Palestinian children still lay buried under rubble, and many more lay injured and dying. Such action by Britain and Europe shows contempt for the UN and international law, with the concern that Israel has committed war crimes apparently dismissed. Change of name has not meant change of policy; in Brown we see a continuation of Blair’s war mongering.
Jacqui McCarney
Norwich 

In Obama’s White House too this monstrous hypocrisy will be seen soon enough.
Mankind is changing everywhere, incapable of accepting any longer the alienation and inhumanity of capitalist exploitation and its intractable contradictions which must endless return to disastrous slump and war on an ever extended scale.  
Most of all consciousness is being brought to boiling point throughout the Third World billions where the rising tide of insurgency, piracy, “terrorism” and anti-imperialist turmoil is already a vast human stew pot of hatred and anger at the centuries of direct or wage-slavery imposed on them by the violence and economic might of imperialism, a ferment of argument, discussion and leadership experiment which grows increasingly able to fight and defy imperialist might, despite all sorts of barmy religious side-paths and unscientific demagoguery.
It is this movement combined with now unstoppable catastrophic and rapidly unravelling capitalist economic structure which is magnifying the long-developing transformation of the mass of humanity from over-awed plantation and factory fodder into increasingly determined fighters and rebels against imperialist domination.
They have already inflicted devastating blows on the blitzkrieging arrogance of the US Empire which has long been preparing for the World War that the bourgeoisie knows in its bones (even if incapable of understanding a Marxist analysis proving the point) is the only way out of the disaster of complete economic meltdown, and vicious trade war battling ahead.
The “shock and awe” imposed on victims like Afghanistan and Iraq has turned into defeated “shame and humiliation” to such an extent that the Bush presidency is now the most despised in history, its failure compounded by the breaking of the long feared capitalist crisis into the greatest collapse in history.
For the moment enough illusions remain from the decades of anti-communist brainwashing and bullshit about “freedom” (and the tragic “democratic peaceful way” and “good” imperialism and “bad” imperialism confusion caused by the long retreat of Moscow revisionist leadership from revolutionary perspectives) to keep much of the world away from the ever-clearer certainty that capitalism is a busted flush, a class system out of its time historically and now turned inside out by the constant development of history and mankind (which it has driven along for 800 years) so that its always brutal genius is now good only for tipping the world back into disaster and war.   
Only communism, the planned cooperative development of the whole world by the mass of humanity, its currently downtrodden, exploited and despoiled proletarian masses, can save the world from the plunge into an abyss of economic and military meltdown disaster that is truly imminent. 
It will only come by revolution and the Leninist leadership and science urgently needed for such a transformation has been stifled for decades by the inanities of “parliamentary roads”, and negotiated solutions (like the charred remains of the always impossible “two-state” solution for the Palestinians). 
It will increasingly be seen as the solution as every other option collapses in further disaster and mayhem, starting with the super-charged hype of the Obama presidency.
The arrogant US white ruling class establishment has had to give ground to the despised black and minority masses, in order to buy time for the capitalist system, using the decades-long prepared petty bourgeois black nationalist movement to hold onto the illusions of “democracy” and the myth of “essential American decency” by putting in the first Black President as a holding move, relying in the meantime on the proxy Zionists to keep on smiting.
It is a real enough concession historically but long after the battle has been fought and is granted only to distract attention from the much greater crisis which is horrifying the rich and powerful ruling class with nightmares of rebellion and revolution if it does not throw something to the crowd.
The outbursts seen in Europe in the last two years, like the Paris banlieue frustration and the Athens riots, are due to multiply a thousandfold and right into the heart of the richest country on the planet once the reality of the catastrophic failure is understood.
This reformist move, playing the race card in reverse, can be pulled off only once, and the price to be paid will be dramatic. 
The illusions the bourgeoisie has had to feed in about an “end to war” and “return to building our lives” can only be horribly smashed, and in far less time than the slick advertising glitz of “New” Labour Blairism (and its other “fake-“left” diversion of feminism in the form of the “Blair babes”)  was revealed to be nothing but petty gauleiter “discipline” for the working class (to “solve” crime, and drugs and health, and poor education and unemployment) and stoogery for international Nazi-Lie warmongering over Iraq and Afghanistan. 
Blair (and Brown the Chancellor) had the advantage of one more spin of the plates from a last surge of the Bushite tax cut and Iraq war dollar printing which has already deferred the inevitable Slump crash of monopoly capitalism several times. 
But the Obama “new broom” regime is sitting on the greatest disaster ever in capitalist history and with no bottom visible for the plunging collapse.
The most hyped-up hopes across the world and not simply in the US are to get the greatest historic slap in the face ever – or to be more honest if more graphic, the biggest kick in the balls ever.
The ruling class is barely holding the line in pretending that somehow all is going on as normal despite “some problems” or even conceding the “greatest economic problems in the twentieth century” while continuing to pretend that everything is “solvable” and “when we get through the recession” this or that is going to happen; that it is all a matter of policy.
The tweededum-tweedledee nonsense of the lying Parliamentary system, and the non-stop media charade of “serious” analysis and interviews and “opinion polls” continues to blame one side or the other, not because any of them can solve anything but because that way, attention is diverted from the reality of the economic disaster all around.
No-one knows, least of all the endless pundits and economists wheeled out to pontificate about “when the upturn comes” and “once we get through this” just how rapidly the now spiralling vortex of collapse and failure will completely implode.
But Marxism alone knows for sure one thing, that crisis is unsolvable.
It is not greedy bonuses, or “lack of capital” or “toxic loans” or “speculation and short selling” or “excessive credit” etc etc etc and all the other increasingly desperate and meaningless “explanations” being pumped out by petty bourgeois commentators (even now on the make to win a fast buck!) which is to blame for the total implosion of capitalism, though all these things are part of the foul, poisonous and poisoning mixture of late imperialist monopoly capitalism; it is too much capital.
Karl Marx disentangled the problem in the Victorian age and though the complexity and extent of the imperialist system has increased a thousandfold since then, his understand remains essentially true (see page 6 and three volumes of Capital and a host of Marxist Leninist development since).
This is a crisis that has been unrolling for decades, put off time and time again by printing money already in the early 1970s oil “crisis”, the Thatcherite 1980-1 recession, the 1987 Crash, the 1990s financial and currency turmoil (which anyway almost wiped out whole countries including mighty industrial powerhouse Japan), and the 2000 Stock Market failures, each time extending the world dollar system a bit further and polluting it a bit more.
The unexpected capitulation of the USSR workers state to “market forces” because of the mind-rot of Moscow revisionism (not some supposed “failure” of the steadily, if slowly, growing workers state economy) has been a bonus which helped stretch things a little; so too has the possibly excessive use of capitalist method by the Chinese workers state and its equally revisionist illusions in “stabilising” the West by soaking up its mountains of dollar debt (which is stirring yet to be analysed difficulties for the planned economy there).
Dollar failure has been on the cards for decades as the EPSR has warned.
Talk of solving this mess by printing even more is demented, the panicked desperation of a ruling class which dare not face the spontaneous upheavals that the billions of the planet will erupt in if the crisis is driven down onto their backs in savage unemployment, starvation, and inter-imperialist hostility and war.
Through it all the EPSR has warned of total, catastrophic, IMMINENT disaster against the mockery, hostility or sheer hostile incomprehension of the entire fake-“left” from the opportunist inheritors of the tragic retreat from Leninist revolution by Stalin-led Moscow revisionism (which incidentally not only recognised the Israel monster in 1948 but even, tragically and stupidly, offered it arms, bemused by its own philosophical confusion) to the petty bourgeois poseurs and academics of the Trotskyites, sour and full of fear and detestation of any working class discipline, and most of all of the workers states and the struggling, mistake-filled but forward progress they have made, from Cuba to Vietnam, from China to North Korea and most of all the USSR  and Eastern Europe. 
The EPSR’s refusal to let go of Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding has had to be maintained against even the cynics who hung around it constantly sniping that talk of crisis was “premature” or “excessive” and eventually trying to sabotage it completely when its leading figure died.
But the scientific record of analysis and understanding over nearly 30 years now highlights the utter failure of understanding across the fake-“left” board – all now rapidly pumping out claims that they “knew all along” how bad it was going to get and that they can “explain Marx” but still prevaricating about whether this is “the crisis” or not, still mocking the idea that it is “catastrophic” and in some cases still sabotaging with bar room bravado any serious efforts to rebuild understanding.
There is little point in crowing about such vindication; the point is to demonstrate that the scientific dialectical method, taking the long historical view and the widest geopolitical study of the class struggle and its balance on the planet, built on the titanic achievements of past figures from Marx to Lenin, and partially by many others despite mistakes, like Mao or Castro, is the only way forwards for mankind, to lead out of the chaos which capitalism is sucking the world into.
It declares that the crisis is an intractable devastating mess, for which there is no way out for the imperialist order but the same destruction which it tried in two past world wars.
Only this time it is one hundred times worse.
It will lead to war to destroy as much “surplus” capital as possible and intimidate all resistance.
The neo-con agenda is not some now dispensed with historical aberration but the essence of the crisis, suspended only because of the massive failure to impose renewed Nazism on the planet by Washington and the growing revolt that has stirred.
But it is a temporary suspension.
Either the world dominating American ruling class commits hari kari (which no ruling class has ever done in history, least of all the most powerful ever) or Obama is destined to be O’Bomber in short order.
There may be a pretence of something different in the meantime, to lull the world disquiet yet again. There may even be a conflict with the more demented adventurism of the rabid Zionists as the EPSR has long speculated as a possibility if the self-obsessed savagery of the Jewish Occupation stirs up too much difficulty for the US’s wider ambitions and efforts to balance its world exploitation.   
But for sure WAR is being plotted as this piece made clear right on time:

Sudan’s government is increasingly fearful that the incoming US administration will resort to military intervention to end the six-year-old crisis in Darfur that has killed up to 200,000 people and left 2.7 million homeless, diplomatic sources in Khartoum say.
“There is a great need for us to sound the alarm again about Darfur,” Hillary Clinton, who was endorsed as secretary of state yesterday, told the US Senate this week. “It is a terrible humanitarian crisis compounded by a corrupt and very cruel regime in Khartoum.”
Clinton said the Obama administration, which takes office on Tuesday, was examining a wide range of options, including direct intervention in support of a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force, known as Unamid, which has struggled to make an impact after beginning operations last year.
“We have spoken about other options, no-fly zones, other sanctions and sanctuaries, looking to deploy the Unamid force to try to protect the refugees but also to repel the militias,” Clinton said. “There is a lot under consideration.” Clinton has previously asserted that the US has a “moral duty” to help Darfurian civilians.
The US accuses Khartoum’s leadership of committing genocide in Darfur. Washington has eschewed direct military involvement since the crisis erupted in 2003, despite growing pressure to act from Sudanese insurgents, exiles, and evangelical Christian groups.
But in a surprise move last week, President George Bush ordered the Pentagon to begin an immediate airlift of vehicles and equipment for the peacekeeping force.
Alain LeRoy, head of UN peacekeeping operations, told the Security Council last month that violence in Darfur was intensifying and stepped-up international involvement was urgently required to avoid a descent into “mayhem”.
Influential US-based pressure groups such as the Save Darfur Coalition and Enough are meanwhile demanding that US president-elect Barack Obama act swiftly to fulfil campaign pledges to take more robust action.
“I will make ending the genocide in Darfur a priority from day one,” Obama said in April. He has also previously backed a toughening of sanctions and said the US might help enforce a no-fly zone.
“Obama is the [ruling] National Congress party’s worst nightmare,” said a diplomat in Khartoum. “They wanted [John] McCain and the Republicans to win. They thought they were pragmatists. They think the Democrats are ideologues. They haven’t forgotten it was the Democrats who bombed them.”
That was a reference to a retaliatory US cruise missile attack on a suspect pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in 1998, ordered by President Bill Clinton after al-Qaida attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Sudan provided a base for the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, from 1991 until he moved to Afghanistan in 1996.
A source in Khartoum said Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, was especially alarmed by Obama’s selection of Susan Rice, a former Clinton national security council adviser on Africa, as a cabinet member and US ambassador to the UN.
Rice has spoken passionately in the past of the need for US or Nato air strikes, or a naval blockade of Sudan’s oil exports, to halt the violence in Darfur.
...Khartoum’s concerns about American intervention extend to southern Sudan, fuelled by reports, denied by the US, that Washington is arming the separatist Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
The SPLA is the military wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement with which the north fought a 30-year civil war. Salva Kiir, the SPLM leader and Bashir’s likely rival in elections due later this year, received red carpet treatment by Bush at the White House last week.
“The government knows the US does not arm the SPLA. They’re already heavily armed,” a Khartoum-based diplomat said. “But the US does train them. It helps with logistics, planning, and so on. And they (the SPLA) do need air defence. Whether to provide air defence to the south will be a key question for the Obama administration.”
Fears of direct confrontation with Washington are being fuelled by expectations that the International Criminal Court, backed in this instance by the US, will issue an arrest warrant for Bashir within the coming weeks. The ICC chief prosecutor charged Bashir last year with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to Darfur.
A call this week by a leading Sudanese opposition figure, Hassan al-Turabi, for Bashir to surrender himself to the ICC to avoid further confrontation with the US and the west has added to tensions in Khartoum. According to family members, Turabi was subsequently arrested.

The tragedy of the worldwide failure (fed by revisionist confusion and opportunism) to build a clear understanding and Leninist perspective, is that so many petty bourgeois and the workers they influence, will be stampeded into war hatred by the non-stop demonising propaganda against such victims, because of a failure to see the worldwide shape of the crisis and the imperialist machinations to get into war – even when as in the piece above, the continuity between Bush and the “new” White House is already spelt out.
Imperialism will get itself into war again. It has no choice.
The world will eventually build Leninist grasp again. It has no choice.
Don Hoskins

Leaflet: For anti-Zionist Demonstrations 02-01-09

Western imperialist artificial “Israel” implant will continue its Zionist fascist atrocities until completely smashed as a state (Jews can stay on under Palestinian rule if asked) — but “no to massacre” pacifism diverts from this vital revolutionary perspective. Hamas militancy is heroic but finally Leninism needed in the Middle East and against capitalist Slump catastrophe everywhere

Desperation and fear in the ruling class, not confident, arrogant might, is the real story of the Zionist fascist onslaught on Gaza.
Rising Third World struggle, gathering momentum for decades and especially in the stepped-up Middle Eastern warmongering of the last decade, has triggered the panicked barbarities being inflicted.
Exponential increase in the overall world rebellion which must surely now follow the catastrophic failure of imperialism, in the greatest crisis of the monopoly capitalist system in all history (and all class history too), is forcing the hand of the entire ruling class towards repression and open dictatorship everywhere, even in the rich “democracies”.
The masses of the planet have  grown increasingly discontented at the starvation, ignorance and shortened sweat-shop “life” that tyrannical imperialist exploitation grants them as an existence.
Explosive outbursts of “terrorism” or “piracy”, “kidnapping”, “insurgency” or “anarchic rioting”, and increasing defiance by assorted demonised “rogue” states, already signal that they are not prepared to continue living in the old way.   
The increasing revelation of the true face of bourgeois class dictatorship – stop at nothing ruthless Nazism to contain the working class and proletarian masses of the planet and allow it to wind up WW3 inter-imperialist destruction – is stimulating massive unrest and hatred throughout the world from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan, Somalia, Latin America, Africa and south-east Asia, and Europe’s Paris suburbs and cities of Greece. 
Nowhere is this fascist face of capitalism more exaggerated than in the Zionist occupation. 
The atrocity of stolen Palestine is at the heart of this growing spontaneous world rebellion, a central cause and central example of determined resistance for the downtrodden billions of the planet.
The entire world has been increasingly following and supporting the desperate and heroic example of the Palestinian people who were put on the front line against imperialist oppression from the Second World War onwards, the victims of a peculiar and special revival of imperialist colonialism.
“Israel” was deliberately implanted into the Middle East as a new “state” but in truth has never been anything but a Frankenstein monster, artificially assembled and brought to life, to assuage western WW2 guilt and usefully keep the entire region under the thumb of Western capitalist exploitation, (and generally, by ruthless example, to suppress the entire Third World).
Despite its “official” UN recognition (tragically given extra weight by the idiot delusions of Stalin-led Moscow revisionism going along with the 1947-8 founding fraud, and unchallenged by all fake-“left” politics ever since) it has always been a total lie, neither a “democratic” example, nor an economic miracle, but a permanently-subsidised and otherwise unsustainable apartheid occupation, armed and financed by the West. 
It has induced constant and rising rebellion since it was installed.
All Marxist materialist understanding of history says that it can only continue to do so, for as long as this festering and belligerent implant sits in the middle of rightful Palestinian land and in the Arab world around it.
Equally, rational materialist understanding says Zionism’s foul occupation can do nothing but continue to smash and smite down the rebellion with utmost barbarity because the very existence of “Israel” is a total lie imposed by the post-war imperialist settlement. 
Such physical colonial occupation is a complete anachronism in the epoch of 20th century anti-colonialism which has ended formal Empire colonies everywhere (though not indirect dollar colonialism and oppression).  
The “logic” of its position is like that of the grit in a oyster, to be smothered and expelled, unless it permanently and aggressively hits all signs of resistance in its neighbours.
Year by year this proves to be exactly the case, with yesterday’s bombing runs, and deliberate sonic boom torture, shelling of civilians blowing little children apart, escalated by today’s tightening siege starvation and deprivation, all exceeded once again by out and out bombing “punishment” and cynical “collateral” killing of civilians.
The blitzing of the desperate fighters who dare to resist the permanent concentration camp imprisonment that is ever more the reality of life imposed by the Zionists on the concrete warrens of Gaza, is equally cynical. They are just as “civilian” as the rest of the population, not some highly financed rival capitalist “army” as the Goebbels lie Western press likes to present the case, as if this were a “war” of equals. 
But year by year such rebellion grows deeper, more determined and more capable than before, overcoming past political illusions, lack of organisation and motivation, and increasingly demonstrating its fighting skill, which showed in Lebanon two years ago its capacity to halt and defeat the supposedly “invincible” ruthlessness of the Jewish occupation.
So the demented dialectic drives the Zionists ever closer towards a genocidal extinction or utter dispersal of the 8M Palestinian people – a “final solution” to revolt which is one of the most appalling  ironies of history, a ghastly reversal of the Nazi horror visited on the Jews as part of imperialism’s last devastating crisis and WWII destruction which followed.
There is no end to this disaster other than the total dismantling of the Zionist entity.
Zionism, and the imperialism that stands behind it (and once again exposed by its complete collusion with the criminal blitzing or total ineffectuality in opposing it – including the deafening silence of US “new broom” president elect, Barack Obama) will never voluntarily give way.
It will have to be smashed and overturned, exactly as the entire capitalist order must be overturned in order to end its deadly spiral of slump Depression crisis and the inter-imperialist warmongering it is inexorably leading to once again.
The Palestinians’ struggle and the world struggle are increasingly merging.
Both mean revolution. 
The struggle to do it is growing continuously.
It can only grow further whatever immediate devastation is wrought by the seemingly all-powerful weaponry of Zionism.
Just as everywhere throughout imperialism, the blitzing and torture, atrocities and killing, “shock and awe” B52 terrorising and more are recruiting more and more fighters.
What hampers the struggle now is the dire legacy of Moscow revisionism on world understanding, and the disgusting imperialist-collaborating stoogery of the petty bourgeois Arab leaderships around.
This suffocating hypocrisy, reformism, and anti-communism needs to be swept away too.  
Ultimately nothing but Leninist revolutionary perspectives will be sufficient to carry through the great fight against imperialism to finish it for good and to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, capable of developing a disciplined workers state which can begin to build a new world of planned production and worldwide cooperative development.
That will not be achieved by the continuation of social-pacifist leaderships misinforming the world that simple calls to “Stop the blitzing of Gaza” or “Stop the war in Afghanistan” or “bring the troops home” can change anything.  
An anger-driven urge to oppose Zionism by coming on a peace march is one thing: deliberate philosophical perspectives of halfway house compromise, pumped out for sixty years by revisionist extension of Stalinist “peaceful coexistence” distortion of Leninism, are another. 
Opportunist groups of the fake-“left” – revisionists and ostensibly “anti-Stalinist” Trotskyites alike who have pumped out the  call for an impossible and humiliating permanent capitulation “two state solution” for all that time – have foisted effectively the same unworkable class-collaboration on the Palestinians that has created the years of cynical “left”-reformist Labourism in the West.
Just as Labourism (and official Trade Unionism) inevitably rapidly slid into total stoogery for imperialist interests (e.g post-war Attlee imperialist warmongering in Malaysia and Greece (and creating “Israel” too) or Blairite warmongering) – so the “two-state” influence of Moscow on Arafat’s PA has degenerated into the out and out stoogery of the Mahmoud Abbas leadership of the West Bank Palestinian Authority, taking arms and bribes from Zionism and US imperialism to stab the Gaza militancy in the back.
Hamas may not ultimately be the rational scientific leadership that the world struggles needs either, but its totally correct determination to declare that the “state” of “Israel” has no historic validity, and to lead a militant struggle, has won the mass support of the Palestinians (who defied massive imperialist election bribery and manipulation to overwhelmingly and legally elect Hamas in 2006, exposing ever since the universal capitalist Goebbels-lie of “freedom and democracy”, because the entire West cynically rejected its huge majority).   
The masses have turned to local cultural forms (such as Muslimism) because official “communism” and so-called revolutionary “opposition” of Trotskyism (petty bourgeois anti-communism in disguise) have so utterly disgraced the revolutionary understanding of Marxism/Leninism that communism has temporarily been given a bad name.
Even now, not one of the 57 fake-“left” groups will raise the falsity of the 1948 “state” – and even where they purport to be for a “one-state” solution, still slyly continue to recognise that Israel exists (e.g a “withdraw to 1967 borders” demand accepts their validity).
Nor do the fake–“lefts” put this struggle in the context of the world crisis catastrophe facing mankind.
And their disgusting capitulation to imperialism’s “condemning” of “terrorism” has been a historic betrayal of the rising Third World struggle since 9/11 on a par with the Second International’s vote for their own capitalist states in WWI.
How do they square purported support for Palestine with that? 
Leninism argues that the way to end terrorism is to build a movement with an even more determined and world wide leadership to complete the total overturn of capitalism, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leadership. 
Zionism is part of the imperialist order, and is being shattered by the crisis like all of imperialism. It has been defeated before and will be defeated totally eventually – ahead of or as part of defeat for all imperialism.  
Palestine’s struggle merges into world oppression and oncoming Slump devastation. It needs revolutionary Leninism to beat it. 
Jim Wright

Fraud argument of ‘anti-semitism’ used to justify the murderous genocidal suppression of the Palestinians [EPSR 1221 24 Feb 2004] 
Far worse than the problem of lumpen anti-Semitism from small racist parties is the scandal of the international Zionist lobby trying to brainwash the world into preventing the origins of the Palestine catastrophe from ever being discussed....
The aim is simple: Be as critical, controversial, or challenging as anyone could wish about any past or present deeds in the Arab-Jew conflict; but NEVER allow the 1947 implantation of the so-called state of “Israel” onto the land of the Palestinian nation EVER to be re-examined or even discussed.
This powerful and hugely well-connected Zionist lobby within the ranks of Western monopoly capitalist ruling circles has even managed to con the duffer archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster into declaring that it is “prohibited anti-Semitism and immoral” to even start talking about how “Israel” got there in the first place in a post-1945 act of deliberate Western colonial tyranny to genocidally usurp the country of the Palestinian people to make a “homeland for the Jews”.
The sickest and most destructive trick of all by the Zionist lobby is to keep on disingenuously asking: “Well, should not the Jews have their own country?”; — knowingly falsely implying that this is what the argument over the origins of “Israel” is all about, plus the further conversation-stopping sneering implication that it could only be anti-Semitism to doubt that the answer must be “yes”.
But that is NOT the question, — as the entire Zionist lobby is well aware.
The real question is about WHY and especially HOW did this armed colonial seizure take place post-1945 of the land of Palestine by Jews of the Western imperialist countries????
The totally abstract question of “Should the Jews not have a homeland at all?” is a consciously cynical TOTAL DIVERSION, — — provocatively thrown in purely in order to excite “anti-Semitism” hysteria. 
Of course they should; but then so should the Basques, and the Kurds, and the Irish, and the Kashmiris, and the Chechens, and the Australian Aborigines, and the North American Indians, etc., etc., etc., many of them more ancient, or more numerous, or with as rich a historical legacy, or with an even more precise or more just claim to a particular territory than the Jews have to Palestine, not least of all the Palestinians of course. 
Many have literature or culture far MORE notable than the Bible for their claim, but the Bible and its tacked-on Christian mythology was the religion adopted by Western feudalism, capitalism, and then imperialism in its long march to world domination, and therefore Jewish folklore has always received extra attention in the West’s ruling circles. 
Thus the rhetorical “abstract right” question is not only an obviously diversionary attempt to provoke an “anti-Semitism?” eyebrow raising, but thereby also manages to actually avoid any evaluation of which of the very many peoples on Earth, who are denied a state, really are the most deserving of nationhood , — bearing in mind all of the colossal upheaval, conflict, and warmongering any such re-running of history to achieve a more “just” outcome inevitably always entails.
Leaving aside that massive minefield of whether for example the Vikings, Celts, or AngloSaxons deserve England back (all losing their homeland to war or upheaval MORE RECENTLY than the Jews lost their place among all the Semitic tribes around Palestine); or whether the Iroquois and Sioux nations should get North America back, or the Aborigines Australia, etc, etc, etc; or whether even more ANCIENT claims than the one the Jews promote, such as the Basque or Cyprus questions, should be the issues demanding world sympathy more, — — there is even then little but obnoxious special pleading and rotten string-pulling behind the Zionist neo-colonial propaganda.
Even the Biblical history claim amounts at best to just a tiny part of Palestine compared to the Philistines (Palestinians) who were there first until overrun by the Israelites and many other Semitic tribes.
And unlike the Jews who were subsequently scattered, absorbed, and lost their language (Hebrew) like most of these ancient Semitic nations, — the modern Palestinians have been in Palestine for the last 1,500 years, and speaking Arabic, the dominant Semitic language.
Palestine has overwhelmingly been the country of the Arabic-speaking Palestinian nation for twice as long as England has been the country of the English-speaking nation, finally established only 700 years ago.
Hebrews stopped using Hebrew, (which effectively died as a language), and they became by-and-by Spanish Jews, Greek Jews, Italian Jews, French Jews, German Jews, English Jews, etc, etc,  all mostly growing up speaking the local language as their first native language. 
Hebrew has now been only artificially revived again as a deliberate political act to try to lend some legitimacy to this post-1945 colonial conquest by these Western imperialist Jews. 
But despite all this, the Jewish colonisers (especially the American ones, the largest and most aggressive contingent of the landgrabbing “settlers”), relentlessly pound out “their God-given right to all this land”, etc, etc, — bristling murderously with a NAZI “master-race” fanaticism.
It is all a complete joke and a complete con.
Even more obnoxious special pleading hype is then added in on account of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, all round, was the “achievement” of Western imperialist “democracy”, both in the elected Hitler government which introduced it, and in the rest of the monopoly capitalist West which deliberately encouraged the rebuilding of German militarism under the National Socialist party as a bulwark against the Soviet workers state, and which took its time in Second World War counter offensives in order to let the USSR be destroyed as much as possible first, through fighting 90% of Germany’s mighty forces on its own virtually, for most of the war.
The Holocaust had nothing whatever to do with Palestine or the Palestinian people who live there.
But it is the Palestinian people who now have to bear the brunt of this hate-filled vengeance which self-righteously spews out of the most aggressive Zionist colonisers and NAZI-style assassination deathsquads Jews support.
And they are subsidised to the hilt to do this by the selfsame Western imperialist “world order” racket which financed Hitler Germany’s re-militarisation to start with.

Letters: public meeting report
Hopeless ‘lefts’ need defeating over their rotten reformist perspectives

The recent public meeting of the Stop the War Coalition ‘lefts’ (SWP etc) in Balham highlighted how these petty-bourgeois ‘socialist’ frauds are skating on thin ice, now that their posturing “against war” runs into the reality of capitalist economic crisis breaking into the open. 
Speaking on the theme, “Economic Crisis at Home, Spread of War Abroad”, CND’s Kate Hudson could only expose the ‘lefts’ agnosticism and ignorance of Marxism by describing the economic crisis of business closures, rising unemployment and home repossessions, AFTER IT’S BROKEN OUT, and reveal total middle-class reformist capitulation to belief in the monopoly-capitalist ruling class by saying the ‘solution’ lies in reinvestment. These ‘lefts’ fear the REVOLUTION to end capitalist crisis because they have an incurable middle-class fear of the working class taking power in the form of proletarian dictatorship.
Bizarrely, because of their anti-Marxism, the most striking aspect of the three speeches at this meeting by the ‘left’ platform speakers was that they all effectively DE-LINKED the war from the economic crisis. Hudson, for example, was dismayed that incoming US president Barack Obama is ready to STEP UP the war in Afghanistan, conflict with Russia over missile bases, collusion with the Zionists, threats to Iran,  etc.
The ‘lefts’ simply refuse to understand that US imperialism’s surplus-capital crisis demands the DESTRUCTION of all the previously accumulated productive capacity and wealth in order for profitable expansion to resume, and that STAYING ON TOP and COMING OUT ON TOP in the forthcoming global-war chaos has been Washington’s determined strategy since the mid-1980s.
Even worse, with these ‘lefts’, any movements that grow to oppose this warmongering or push for working people’s interests in the teeth of the slump are only to CHANGE THE MINDS of US and British imperialist leaders such as Obama and Brown.
But far from causing Washington’s war drive to hesitate, the very spread of such notions by ‘lefts’ that “Obama has good intentions” and “can be helped to turn to peace” will only be used (on top of all the usual ‘parliamentary-democracy’ lies) to put a hypocritical HALO around US fascist warmongering. Once again, the ‘left’ ‘pacifist’ fakers are worse than useless.
Platform speaker Chris Nineham was more scathing about Obama, and highlighted the ongoing carnage in Afghanistan, but also collapsed into reformist lunacy with the notion that the anti-war movement could “change policy” and that everything depended on “building for two big protest days”.  
Economist Graham Turner, author of the Credit Crunch, gave some useful descriptions of how in the 1990s the capitalist-boom inflationary credit bubble had wreaked havoc with Third World countries and the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and how these same countries were being devastated a second time as the hot money flooded out again.
The ‘radical economist’ Turner showed just how orthodox a bourgeois he is by claiming that what was needed to save the “world economy” was a Keynesian “reinflationary policy” like FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s. But massive global reinflation is exactly what the US, UK, Europe and Japan are attempting right now. It is ONLY buying time for the capitalist system (as it has been for the past three decades), and particularly intended to give the Big Powers opportunities to push the crisis elsewhere, TEMPORARILY. Turner pointed out that the US suffered double-digit mass unemployment from 1932 to 1942 – but only in order to pretend that the drive to WW2 and the vast, savage war destruction that killed 50m people on top of the 10m killed in WW1 had nothing to do with ‘recovery’ from the Great Depression. 
Finally allowed to speak from the floor, EPSR speaker Don Hoskins pointed out that Marxist science has been able to say for over 25 years that the capitalist system was heading for TOTAL CATASTROPHIC FAILURE, against the concerted hostility of the entire fake ‘left’. He highlighted that even bourgeois economists were now fearing that this economic crisis could be worse than those of 1910-1914 and the 1930s Great Depression, and that solving capitalist crisis – outside of the monopoly ruling class’s own solution of world war (1914-18 and 1939-45), meant the REVOLUTION. 
This had the reformist ‘lefts’ squirming in their seats, but more than half the participants took EPSR papers at the end of the meeting. 
The meeting showed very usefully how the ‘lefts’ are in greater and greater difficulties over their reformist nonsense, and how their middle-class anti-revolutionary politics are falling apart. 
Build Leninism. 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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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Massacres by the Zionists – constantly repeated: 
Jenin was loneliness, helplessness, emptiness; there was nothing anyone could do for the locals. Are there any words that can be said to a child who has just found a human leg in the debris?  Granma 2003

TWELVE MONTHS have gone by of total indifference and silence on the part of the international community.
Exactly a year ago the idf (Israeli Defence Forces) launched what is still regarded as the most horrific assault on Palestinian civilians since the Sabra and Chatila massacre in 1982. What happened last year in the West Bank, and especially in the town of Jenin and in its refugee camp, was condemned as a crime against humanity. 
During Operation Defensive Shield, as the attack was codenamed by the idf, more than 600 Palestinians were killed across the West Bank, thousands were arrested (the vast majority of them are still imprisoned) and hundreds are still missing and in many cases their bodies have never been found.
The rape of Jenin lasted for more than two weeks but the butchery of innocent civilians has never ceased as ordinary people, medical personnel, UN officers and peace activists have all being shot regardlessly by the idf.
The assault on Jenin began the night of 2 April 2002. For two days, Israeli artillery shelled the refugee camp from all directions. Then the shooting from the helicopters, often operating in pairs, began in a blaze of fire. It barely stopped over the next four days; eye witnesses counted over 400 missiles being fired in less than four hours.
Using a satellite, the IN had outlined in red the positions of 1,100 houses. Sometimes the helicopter pilots got a random number and opened fire indiscriminately. The idf tried to get the infantry in but because of armed resistance, the plan failed. The Israelis suffered 23 casualties, although the real death toll might well be much higher.
In retaliation, they razed the centre of the refugee camp to the ground, fired upon hospitals and ambulances, bulldozed hundreds of houses.
IN was still shooting, even if armed resistance had been wiped out in the previous days, and Operation Defensive Shield was far from over. It was a ghost place, you could hardly see the sky through a thick cloud of dust, ashes and smoke from burning buildings and rubbish set alight, floating in a deafening silence. It was like entering a nightmare.
A family took me into their home to avoid army patrols; their child, zig-zagging to avoid the bullets of an idf sniper, showed me the bodies of two children, wrapped in white plastic bags and left at a corner. When I returned to Jenin in July 2002, the family’s house was a pile of debris, as the idf bulldozers had pulverised the district. Twelve months after the attack, I still have to find out whether they are dead or alive.
Into a house which had been raked by helicopter missiles. There were 3 bodies in a room, one of them was decapitated but the head was nowhere to be seen. Fat flies filled the rays of light filtering through the holes made by the rockets.
Another body was partially covered with the pages from an Arab paper: the image of a smiling child on the paper advert was on his stomach; his arms were opened and his mouth was filled with insects, his teeth as white as snow contrasting against the black swollen face.
The old woman took her quilt off, she sat on the debris, threw dust over her head and started crying.
I recall the old railway station at the bottom of the camp, which once linked Jenin to Haifa; like the mosque it had been turned into a morgue and four injured people were crying for help in a corner. The air was saturated with the smell of human flesh burning; body parts were stuck to the wall. Throughout the assault, medical staff were prevented by the IDF from reaching the wounded in a calculated policy which meant many people were left bleeding to death.
Jenin was loneliness, helplessness, emptiness; there was nothing anyone could do for the locals. Are there any words that can be said to a child who has just found a human leg in the debris? Is it possible to describe the horror of seeing the blood gushing from a woman who is bleeding to death in her daughters’ arms?
Twelve months have passed since that assault on the Palestinian people and no one has been accused over the slaughter in Jenin: Brigadier Eyal Shlein, divisional commander for the idf operation in the Jenin area, has since been promoted; Shaul Mofaz, the then chief of staff of all armed forces, is now Israel’s minister for defence; the Sabra and Chatila instigator, Ariel Sharon, is still Israeli prime minister.
The silence following the war crimes perpetrated in Jenin was ensured by the lifting of the siege around Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. Four months after the attack, the UN finally published a report without any of their officer’s being allowed into Jenin. Amnesty International, if possible, did even worse, with its findings (54 Palestinian deaths) related only to the refugees registered with unrwa (the UN agency for refugees). These figures did not include all those from surrounding villages, Jenin city or those not registered but still living in the camp itself and the bodies which have never been found: crushed by the tanks, spirited away, burnt out, even booby-trapped, buried in mass graves or bulldozed in the sewage system.
When I returned to Jenin last summer, 150 bodies had already been identified.
Although the world has been unanimous in accusing Israel of a long catalogue of war crimes, human rights abuses and breaches of the Geneva Convention (both the UN and AI report confirm the accusations), the plunder of Jenin was silenced and put aside. But victims of human rights violations should be entitled to justice. Or have we really forgotten Jenin’s mass executions, its children blown to pieces, the handicapped people bulldozed in their wheelchairs, the use of civilians and often kids as human shields, the torture inflicted on those caught and deported?
Maybe the search for the truth should start from the simple fact that this vicious act of evil was deliberately planned well in advance (it was made public in December 2001). Every politician and news agency in the world was aware of Sharon’s plan for the re-occupation of the Palestinian Territories.