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 (£12 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 0771 2639934  www.epsr.org.uk 
No 1367 8thrd April 2010                                                                                                   25p fortnightly

Fake-“left” drag workers back towards parliament just when bourgeois “democracy” has never been (rightly) more distrusted and despised. The time to end it is over-ripe. The greatest capitalist crisis and war drive ever will expose ever more Trot and revisionist posturing about “revolution”. Real revolutionary leadership – Leninism – urgently needed

The pointlessness, lying fraud and irrelevance of the Parliamentary election circus and its shallow advertising gimmickry and cynicism is even more underlined by the expectation of a “hung” parliament.
“It should be (hung)” is increasingly the instinctive response of the working class – all of the greasy repellent liars, mountebanks and transparent spin shysters who make it up (including the fake-“lefts” of assorted shades who tie the working class to its illusions with claims of “honestly standing for ordinary people”).
The class judgement is sound (metaphorically speaking) reflecting a century and a half of disillusionment and growing class experience of the empty trickery of bourgeois “democracy” and its “jam tomorrow” reformism, underlined by the last two decades of shallow huckster “spin” and glitz trickery and empty lies.
Even when there is a “massive majority” for one or other of the rival gangs claiming to “represent” the mass of the population and their interests, the reality is that they do no such thing – since all the important decisions in society are taken by and on behalf of big capital, via the City, the Stock Exchange, the banks, and a thousand other threads and connections.
In fact the very gangs of politicians themselves are selected and put in place primarily by the influence and power of the state intelligence agencies, bosses clubs and associations, big press and TV organisations and fabulously expensive advertising.
And woe betide any of them who would ever presume to bite the hand that feeds them.  
But there is far more to this paralysis and floundering.
The “hung” indecisiveness reflects disastrous splits and collapse in confidence of the ruling class on a vast historic scale caused by its greatest ever catastrophic economic and political collapse.
It is all of a piece along with unstoppable stream of revelations of ever more degenerate parliamentary corruption scandals, escalating corporate greed, police cover-ups for phone tapping and violence, constant torture revelations domestically and dire scandals and degeneration internationally including the devastating depravity and cover-up in the Catholic Church, the growing Nazi sympathies of the East European counter-revolutionary parties and the fascistic continuing gung-ho blitzing and warmongering in the Middle East and Africa, not least the latest videos of arbitrary killings and murder by US forces, like these:

A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today.
The footage of the July 2007 attack was made public in a move that will further anger the Pentagon, which has drawn up a report identifying the whistleblower website as a threat to national security.
The release of the video from Baghdad also comes shortly after the US military admitted that its special forces attempted to cover up the killings of three Afghan women in a raid in February by digging the bullets out of their bodies. 
The newly released video of the Baghdad attacks was recorded on one of two Apache helicopters hunting for insurgents on 12 July 2007. Among the dead were a 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Adrian, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40. The Pentagon blocked an attempt by Reuters to obtain the video through a freedom of information request. 
In the recording, the helicopter crews can be heard discussing the scene on the street below. One American claims to have spotted six people with AK-47s and one with a rocket-propelled grenade. It is unclear if some of the men are armed but Noor-Eldeen can be seen with a camera. Chmagh is talking on his mobile phone.
One of the helicopter crew is then heard saying that one of the group is shooting. But the video shows there is no shooting or even pointing of weapons. The men are standing around, apparently unperturbed. 
The lead helicopter, using the moniker Crazyhorse, opens fire. “Hahaha. I hit ‘em,” shouts one of the American crew. Another responds a little later: “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.”
One of the men on the ground, believed to be Chmagh, is seen wounded and trying to crawl to safety. One of the helicopter crew is heard wishing for the man to reach for a gun, even though there is none visible nearby, so he has the pretext for opening fire: “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.” A van draws up next to the wounded man and Iraqis climb out. They are unarmed and start to carry the victim to the vehicle in what would appear to be an attempt to get him to hospital. One of the helicopters opens fire with armour-piercing shells. “Look at that. Right through the windshield,” says one of the crew. Another responds with a laugh.
Sitting behind the windscreen were two children who were wounded. 
After ground forces arrive and the children are discovered, the American air crew blame the Iraqis. “Well it’s their fault for bringing kids in to a battle,” says one. “That’s right,” says another.
Initially the US military said that all the dead were insurgents. Then it claimed the helicopters reacted to an active firefight. Assange said that the video demonstrated that neither claim was true. 
Wikileaks says it will shortly release a second secret US military video showing the deaths of civilians in an attack in Afghanistan. 

All these disclosures emerge because of the disastrous meltdown crisis of the capitalist system and its worldwide setbacks and defeats. 
The astonishing venality of the latest “minister for hire” corruption scandals, and Blair’s personal enrichment programme, would almost beggar belief in their cynicism and contempt for “the public” if they were not stood alongside the in-your-face escalating greed of the ruling class fat-cat bosses filling their boots in the middle of bankruptcy and disaster, fiddling while Rome burns.
The frantic and worried masses facing company collapses, pay cuts, and fears about the kids education, the next rent or mortgage payment or even the next meal can only look on in dismay,
Internationally the disintegration of the Catholic Church’s authority continues as exposé after degenerate exposé emerges of its institutionalised paedophilia, child abuse, and cruelty, masquerading as “love and charity” etc.
Continuing failure and chaos of Washington’s Iraqi, Afghanistan and Middle East “shock and awe” occupation war blitzing projects and the growing spats between US imperialist and Zionist-beserker flavours of fascist Middle East bullying, are all further symptoms of the same thing – the implosion of an entire system of rule and dominance by capitalism that has reached the end of its time.
These are not separate and disparate matters, hiccups in the general development which are just happening to come to the surface by chance, here and there in the world as the entire fake-”left” continues to analyse and write about them.
Nor are they just routine parts of the “greed and arrogance” of the ruling class (though they are all of that) but the symptoms of a complete disintegration in ruling class authority and confidence.
It is the crisis which is driving out the revelations, conflicts and chaos.
The cracks and scandals in the great façade of capitalist order are all part of a complete disintegration and crumbling of the long historic supremacy of the bourgeois class which has reached the end of the road and needs to be replaced by the working class taking power.
It is driven by the great breakdown of the profit making system, an economic failure beyond anything ever known.
Far from being just another slump, or “recession” or, as even the bourgeois economists and politicians are forced grudgingly to concede, “the worst collapse in 60, or 80, or over 100 years” (take your pick), this is the greatest implosion of the now outmoded capitalist system, the most violent swing in the ever more unstable credit saturated exploitation profit system. 
The world is clogged with surplus capital and production capacity, while the billions of hapless and desperate working class “consumers” who are supposed to buy the ever expanding output are driven ever further downwards in their incomes, able to afford less and less – not even the basics of food and shelter for many of the billions in the Third World, and increasingly little more for tens of millions in the West now being thrown out of houses, jobs, pension rights and health schemes as Depression begins to bite.
This is the core issue, the catastrophic disintegration of the huge and elaborate finance and credit structure built on the profit plundering of the world’s billions, at home and even more throughout the benighted and tyrannised neo-colonial Third World. 
It is the capitalist crisis, exactly as Marxism has spelt out in its scientific revolutionary understanding of the world.
As Karl Marx untangled in his profound philosophical, historical and economic investigations (Capital Vol 1,2,3, and dozens of other books, articles, letters and speeches, and as other great figures like Lenin  developed it), the entire elaborate superstructure of society rests on the production of goods and services to satisfy humanity’s needs and wants and, in class exploiting society, the superpower luxuries for the privileged few.
But every form of production (and the coordination of human effort and interchange required for it) that mankind has evolved so far has been based on class domination, and each with its own inbuilt contradictions, from slavery and feudalism to modern world monopoly capitalism.
Always it has involved appropriating the “surplus” value from the labouring mass (beyond what it needs for bare survival) to sustain the class rule, organisation, power and luxury resting above the masses.
When the economic foundation disintegrates, as it must because of the contradictions inherent in a system of production for private profit for the minority of owners and fatcats at the expense of the billions of workers and proletarians everywhere, so too does the elaborate and complex society above it and all its illusions, trickery, conceits and lies.
Marxist understanding of imminent catastrophic breakdown – long belittled and ridiculed as “out of date” and “no longer relevant” (especially by the great swamp of Trot and revisionist fake-“lefts”) – has been totally vindicated, the only science and philosophy to predict and explain the unfolding disaster now unravelling.
It will keep unravelling whatever short term “boosts” might be pretended.
The desperate “optimism” and pretence of normality and “business as usual” as soon as “the upturn comes” being disingenuously play-acted out by the parliamentary posturers for the ruling class will soon enough give way to full-on Depression collapse.
The nonsense that they are trying to find the “best way to help the recovery” is pure play acting to fill the giant vacuum and head everyone’s attention away from the need to end this degenerate mess.
The stomach churning panic of the October 2008 bank failures and Wall Street credit vacuum have been hastily hidden behind a curtain of hundreds of billions of paper dollars by the terrified ruling class which saw for an instant the potential for almost instant collapse and anarchic failure of the elaborate and false “prosperity” which it has bamboozled the working class with for decades.
As soon as the insane credit creation, used to stave off immediate system failure, works through and adds to the mountain of debt and paper dollars already created steadily for decades by the US Treasury printing presses, there will be no further putting off the day of reckoning when the crisis finally spirals down. 
The shallow consumerism and celebrity philistinism used to hold back working class consciousness and keep it well away from any turn to communist or socialist ideas (backed by non-stop Goebbels propaganda and lies against the giant achievements of the Soviet Union and other workers states) will evaporate overnight once the working class is given the full-on kicks in the teeth that the slump disaster is already threatening everywhere. 
Everything faces collapse and turmoil, into Slump and rapidly escalating trade war and then open World War conflict, turning far more of people’s lives upside down than any cuts in pensions. 
The implosion of capitalism is unstoppable, however many credit and banking tricks, currency manipulations and trade war stunts are used to defer problems or push them onto others (as Washington has previously forced the slump burdens outwards onto Japan, the Far East, Latin America, etc etc for decades), or however much the Third World is kept under the jackboot for further plunder by bribed, stooge, gangster and fascist regimes. 
While in theory capitalism could yet revive again, through the massive destruction of “surplus” capital, leaving room for surviving capitalists to invest again once “peace” is re-established under a re-jigged exploitation pecking order (as put the US at the top after 1945), it is likely that the whole system now faces a terminal collapse.
The destruction of the Second World War, which allowed the revival of 1930s Depression-hammered capitalism in the post-war order under the newly established “top dog” US imperialism, was already magnitudes greater than the European devastation of the First World War, which blighted and destroyed lives, lands and property throughout Europe in the supposed “war to end all wars”.
What will be required now to revive a “free market” (meaning monopoly corporation) system which has penetrated and intertwined the whole planet on a far wider and more intensive scale than anything possible in the twentieth century?
Destruction on a scale hundreds of times greater is the answer, which it happens is now technologically and “scientifically” possible with the modern weapons and firepower of late imperialism.
It is coming, unless the world takes action to finally end the capitalist system in favour of building internationally cooperative planned socialism, under the firmest possible control of the working masses, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat holding down and suppressing all the old capitalist shyte and reactionary counter-revolution (trying to restore old privileges for the small minority).
World-shattering change is on the way, threatening to sweep away all the assumptions and “certainties” of modern life completely, not simply reversing some of the reformist gains made (only in the richest countries) during the imperialist epoch but overturning lives, destroying communities and wasting resources and the environment on an unprecedented scale.
The giant turmoil and destruction of the past led equally to the huge rebellions of the working masses, firstly in the Paris Commune of 1870 and its short but heroic months-long existence, before counter-revolution slaughtered tens of thousands of the French workers who made it; then in the giant history changing Soviet Revolution of 1917 which the bourgeoisie also tried to slaughter, with an intervention by more than a dozen Western countries in a 3 year long war behind the White Russians, which killed and wasted huge parts of Russia, though failing to destroy the Leninist workers state that was created.
Endless counter-revolutionary subversions, sabotage and plots culminated in the massive 1930s Western conspiracy (falsely labelled “appeasement”) to turn Nazi Germany onto the new growing Soviet state, which was cleverly headed off by Moscow’s Stalin-Hitler pact; forcing the growing slump aggression back against the other imperialists and splitting them all, to buy time for the build-up of Soviet industry and defences.
It was enough for the USSR to not only survive the eventual attack in 1941 despite the devastating cost of almost 25 million lives but to inspire a vast wave of anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and outright communist struggle, taking in one third of the world.
It has been setback eventually because of the renewed growth of imperialism combined with the retreats from revolutionary understanding from Stalin’s times onwards which, in spite of giant unprecedented social, cultural and scientific achievement in the workers state, slowly ate away at the coherence and confidence of the USSR itself, and of the whole worldwide communist movement, following its prestige.
The whole movement everywhere lost all capacity for Leninist polemics and independent grasp in this process, degenerating into the shallow philistinism eventually of Gorbachevism and its mindless capitulation to illusions in “market forces” to guide the economy, sacrificing the crucial dictatorship of the proletariat (expressed in the form of the Soviet state intelligence etc) and disintegrating into the appalling capitalist oligarch carpet-bagging plunder of the huge Soviet made economy, driving its masses back into dire poverty conditions and deprivation (which persist everywhere outside metropolitan Moscow where the opportunists and new bourgeoisie now live).    
But just as the degeneration of Marxist philosophy in the complacent petty bourgeois influenced layers of the pre-1914 German, British and French working class did not stop revolution once the World War One crisis unfolded, so the greatest ever crisis of capitalism now unfolding will drive revolution back onto the agenda.
A spontaneous revolutionary response is already emerging from the growing discontent and impatience of the great downtrodden ordinary mass of people, frustrated more and more by the immense possibilities of universal human development which modern technology and organisation could make possible but which remain untapped in philistine consumerist indulgence and waste (for the minority only) and forced ignorance and poverty for the mass.
It must find a conscious expression in clear revolutionary leadership sooner or later despite a blanket of confusion and opportunism produced by the post-war fake-“left” which exceeds even the crassness, cowardice and eventual opportunist betrayals of the Second International.  
Nothing else makes sense now or can give the working class the clear leadership and perspective that it needs to deal with the oncoming turmoil and bitter class war it faces. 
Enormous spontaneous upheaval has already been growing across the planet, multiplied hundredsfold by the crude blitzkrieg warmongering of US imperialism, desperate to maintain its dominance and sweet life exploitation of the rest of the planet, by brutally intimidating the resistance and simultaneously putting a shot across the bows of all major rivals for the “topdog” imperialist position it has held since 1945.
But far from being cowed by the “shock and awe” fascist intimidation of the “war on terror” there is a growing rebelliousness and resistance of the masses, particularly in the Third World and the more so as slump Depression threatens lives and livelihoods once more on an unprecedented scale.
A mood of militancy, anger and rejection and contempt is pressurising ordinary people towards a social explosion which has already erupted over and over again in national liberation and anti-”Western” revolt throughout the Middle East, parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America and which can only grow deeper and more bitter.
The form of these struggles in various oddball cultural or religious manifestations is a long way yet from fully conscious scientific Marxist revolution and remain hampered to a greater or lesser degree by backward attitudes and anti-communism. 
But they are not going to go away, and are only intensifying, the more that capitalism attempts to bludgeon them with its preposterous “freedom and democracy” propaganda and trickery, as this capitalist press piece despairingly recounts:
The west’s proudest export to the Islamic world this past decade has been [...] elections [...] at the point of a gun and a missile to Iraq and Afghanistan, to “nation-build” these states and hence “defeat terror”. When apologists are challenged to show some good resulting from the shambles, they invariably reply: “It has given Iraqis and Afghans freedom to vote.”
As British electors don democratic finery and troop to the polls next month, elections in both war-torn countries are looking sick. Last month’s poll in Iraq, blessed (or cursed) with a Westminster-style constitution, has failed to yield a coherent government. It appeared to show the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, just beaten by his predecessor, Ayad Allawi. If so, it would be a remarkable case of a developing world democracy actually ejecting a sitting leader. In that respect, Iraq would be ahead of Britain, where the opposition must lead by at least 10 percentage points to be certain of power.
For the time being, Baghdad’s government has been in abeyance. The Sunni militias, reportedly backed by al-Qaida, have returned to the streets, and the death rate is again soaring. Kurdistan is all but a separate country, and the odds are on the Sunnis being forced back into a semi-autonomous region. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died and millions been driven from their homes – including almost all Iraq’s ancient population of Christians. The import of democracy has so far just inflamed local tension and fuelled fundamentalism...
At least in Iraq western troops are leaving the country to its fate. The west’s guilt at the mayhem left behind will start to diminish with time. People will blame George Bush and Tony Blair, leaving them, as they wish, to render their account not to the Iraqis but only to God.
In Afghanistan, a similar saga has been running for nine years, and is growing ever more tragic. Last year saw the deaths of more Afghans (2,412) and more western troops (520) than since the 2001 invasion. Nato is locked in a struggle to hold Helmand province for the government of the president, Hamid Karzai, against insurgents who can wait as long as they like to defeat the hated invaders.
Nato is only now seeking control, nine years on, of the country’s second city of Kandahar, in which the Taliban is dominant and the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is the power broker. Karzai is said to have told local elders that there will be no assault on Kandahar “without their permission”. If Nato cannot negotiate a deal over the city, rather than reduce it to rubble, its mission is surely doomed.
The fact that Hamid Karzai was elected, by whatever dubious means, seems to infuriate western leaders. Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and their respective foreign ministers rage and telephone and pay visits and expostulate. The repetitive criticism hurled at Karzai for being corrupt and in the pocket of drug lords has become near comical, not least because of his eccentric response. Last week he threatened privately to swear allegiance to the Taliban himself (which might solve many problems).
The west is constantly telling Karzai to “clean up his act” or, as the New York Times harrumphs, “stop doing whatever he and his aides choose”. This is not because there is any likelihood of his obeying, but to help make the domestic case for the war look less shaky. As the joke in Kabul goes, as long as the west pretends to uphold his regime, Karzai must “pretend to be Swedish”. He is America’s exhibit A for world democracy. The idea that he might regard himself as the elected representative of the Afghan people, warts and all, with a future to consider and his neck on the line, is beyond consideration.
Democracy in both America and Britain is coming under scrutiny these days. Quite apart from the antics of MPs and congressmen, it is said to be sliding towards oligarchy, with increasing overtones of autocracy. Money and its power over technology are making elections unfair. The military-industrial complex is as powerful as ever, having adopted “the menace of global terrorism” as its casus belli. Lobbying and corruption are polluting the government process. In a nutshell, democracy is not in good shape.
How strange to choose this moment to export it, least of all to countries that have never experienced it in their history. The west not only exports the stuff, it does so with massive, thuggish violence, the antithesis of how self-government should mature in any polity. The tortured justification in Iraq and Afghanistan is that elections will somehow sanctify a “war against terrorism” waged on someone else’s soil. The resulting death and destruction have been appalling. Never can an end, however noble, have so failed to justify the means of achieving it.
The high-minded attacks on corruption in Muslim states from London and Washington is futile. In most countries corruption is the lubricant of power. Nor is the west that clean. Britain showered corruption on the Saudis to obtain arms contracts. The activities of American firms in “rebuilding” Iraq were wholly corrupt. In 2001 the British in Kabul – in the person of Clare Short no less – were put in charge of suppressing Afghan opium, fuel of most of that country’s corruption. Britain allowed it to continue, when the Taliban had been in the process of stamping it out.
The Tories and Liberal Democrats are dishonest to say that the Afghan war is justified “provided” Karzai ends corruption, stops rigging elections, and trains his army and police. None of this will happen, and is merely cover to avoid saying what these politicians know to be true – that British soldiers are dying for a dud hypothetical.
...The invasions of their countries was not their choice. They did not ask to be a model for Britain’s moral exhibitionism. They did not plead for their villages to be target practice for western special forces.
Karzai is told he will lose Nato protection if he continues to associate with drug dealers and warlords – many of whom appear to be his relatives. He knows – as we know – that this is bluff. There can be no counter-insurgency without a client regime. Obama and Brown need him as much as he needs them.
Amid this bluff the only certainty for Karzai is that, one day, Nato will get fed up and leave him to his fate, as it is now leaving Maliki in Baghdad. If he wants to live, he must make his peace with Afghans, not Americans, and that means on Afghan terms. Free and fair elections and a stop to corruption will have no part to play in that survival game.

What the Tory supporting Simon Jenkins and many similar middle class intellectuals don’t yet get is that Western “democracy” has never been anything BUT a fraudulent cover for endless exploitation.
Well might Karzai need to watch his back and make some notional anti-Western moves, as assorted Western gangster stooges have had to do previously to keep on top of rising anti-imperialist sentiment, from Noriega in Panama to Saddam Hussein himself:
But not only the tortured populations of the Middle East are in ferment. Conflicts are spreading uncontrollably against various stooge regimes levered into place by Western manipulated “democracy” movements, already ripping Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen apart, and threatening assorted other stooges of the West from the gangster Mubarak in Egypt to the Nigerians, the Ethiopians and more. 
The stream of Western intelligence organised “popular movements” for democracy, under assorted colours and flower symbols, aiming to subvert and disrupt the remnants of the old Soviet Union from “Orange” Ukraine to “Rose” Georgia are all coming a cropper, the CIA plant Mikheil Saakashvili, now a humiliated and humiliating laughing stock:

when division among the opposition suggested that his United National Movement party would sweep all before it in the forthcoming Tbilisi city elections, due on 30 May, he went one huge step further.
On Saturday 13 March, any Georgian who happened to switch channels to catch the main 8pm news would have been confronted by his fantastical vision: the war has started, Russian fighter bombers are strafing the capital, their tanks are rolling towards us, while part of the opposition is actively collaborating with the invaders and ready to accept a future as a satellite of the Kremlin. Barack Obama has made a pro forma statement of support, Europe is silent and Saakashvili has sent an appeal to western partners: he might be dead or in hiding, and the army has defected…
In Tbilisi, the panic spread immediately. Emergency services and the cell phone network were overwhelmed, police could not answer emergency calls, and people tried to escape. In the towns closer to the frontline the situation was worse. 
It did not matter that the faked broadcast was made from heavily edited archive material. If a national TV station tells you that you are perhaps minutes from death as a result of a stray bomb or an artillery duel, you do not notice what the weather is like in the background of the report.
The truth is now plain, we were all subject to an experiment in collective psychology as part of an attempt to warn citizens about the disaster that would follow if we used our democratic rights to support opposition candidates in the local elections.

The bloody explosiveness of Kyrgystan appears to the latest, at least according to bourgeois press accounts. More information about the demonstrators would be useful for making a full judgement but the signs are of yet another US puppet biting the dust:

The return of Viktor Yanukovich as the duly elected president of Ukraine in February seemed to mark a reversal of the colour revolutions that started with Georgia’s rose revolution in November 2003 and ended with Kyrgyzstan’s tulip revolution in March 2005. Following a rigged election, Yanukovich was deposed by peaceful demonstrations in Kiev in the country’s orange revolution in December 2004.
After the successful tulip revolution in the mountainous central Asia republic of Kyrgyzstan, which resulted in the flight of President Askar Akayev, the opposition leader, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, promised to curtail presidential powers and eradicate corruption and nepotism. He won 89% of the ballots in an election with a voter turnout of 53%, a refreshingly true figure.
But once in office Bakiyev reneged. The long-running tug-of-war between the parliament and president on the division of power resumed. By introducing a new electoral law and founding his own party, Ak Zhol (bright path), he gained control of the legislature in the 2007 parliamentary poll.
Despite his enhanced powers, Bakiyev failed to tackle the rise of the black economy, persistent corruption, and the general weakness of the economy. It was estimated that as much as 52% of the Kyrgyz economy was black or related to smuggling. Another problem was the growing influence of organised crime related mainly to the smuggling of drugs from Afghanistan via Tajikistan on their way to Russia and beyond.
Having failed to learn a lesson from the past, Bakiyev and his close aides resorted to fraud in the presidential poll in July 2009. Protesting against widespread malpractice on polling day, the leading opposition challenger, Almazbek Atambayev, withdrew his candidacy. This dashed any lingering prospect that this small republic of 5 million people would turn into a beacon of democracy in central Asia.
Armed with a fresh mandate, Bakiyev intensified his persecution of opposition leaders and independent journalists with a series of arrests and physical assaults by government agents, who authorities described as “criminals” but failed to apprehend.
The long-simmering popular disaffection began crystallising around the steep rise in fuel and water and gas charges that the Bakiyev government decreed. This provided a platform on which the fractious opposition groups could unite. They did. The condemnation of Bakiyev’s curtailing of democratic rights by the visiting United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, on 3 April led to the united opposition to name 7 April as the day of national protest.
To the surprise of opposition figures and the authorities, the protest escalated into a national uprising, with demonstrators occupying official buildings and state-run TV stations all over the country, including the capital, Bishkek. The bloody reprisals by the security forces left between 40 and 100 people dead. Bakiyev took off in his presidential plane to an unknown destination.  

The “peaceful” demonstrators in Ukraine were no such thing, making covert threats to precipitate a violent storming during the two weeks of the carefully Western intelligence coordinated stunt demonstrations just as the West constantly prods the middle class and backward feudal monk movements in Myanmar or Iran to instigate violence hoping the numerous provocations and stunts will make the regimes respond with crackdowns which however justifiable to defend a government under attack, can be painted as a “vicious dictatorship”.
But despite successfully pushing the wilder elements in the “green” middle class movement against the Ahmadinejad government in Iran, currently top of the list of demonisation victims for Washington’s scapegoating hypocrisy to keep the world on the boil in case a new warmongering victim is needed in a hurry, the counter-revolution has fallen flat on its face here too, despite hours of airtime on the BBC and Voice of America assuring the world of the “resilience” and supposed size of the petty bourgeois movement in Tehran. 
The opposite is the case in Thailand where the Western media machine, and the “democracy loving” Western politicians kept totally silent following the military coup two years ago and the imposition of a stooge “democratic government” with none of the non-stop hysterical hatred and vilification poured out for days on end against Iran, or Zimbabwe, or Myanmar (Burma) or Sudan or any other “rogue” state that does not toe the line properly for Western interests.
But the genuine discontent in Thailand is escalating by the minute, even as the EPSR is written:

Thailand’s beleaguered government shut down a satellite television station and the web sites of anti-government demonstrators today after declaring a state of emergency, then issued arrest warrants for protest leaders accused of storming parliament.
The Red Shirts, attempting to drive the prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva from office and force new elections, planned another mass rally tomorrow despite the emergency order that empowers the military to move against large gatherings.
Abhisit cancelled a trip to Hanoi to attend a summit of South-east Asian leaders as he groped for ways to resolve the month-long crisis without use of armed force.
“What the government wants is peace and happiness,” Abhisit said on television, explaining that the government had clamped down on opposition media that were “manipulating information that is creating hate”.
He said that arrest warrants had been issued for seven protest leaders accused of briefly forcing their way into the parliament compound on Wednesday. MPs were fled on ladders over a back wall and senior officials were evacuated by helicopter.
The confrontation is part of a long-running battle between the mostly poor and rural supporters of the former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 military coup, and those who oppose him.
A government spokesman said the government has shut down PTV, the satellite TV station of the Red Shirts, and was searching for web sites that have put out allegedly false information such as that Abhisit had authorised the use of force against demonstrators.
At least 36 sites connected to the opposition were banned, including content from a Twitter page and YouTube.

Anti-government protesters in Thailand today rejected negotiations and insisted they would not give up their fight for early elections, after clashes left 20 people dead.
In the country’s worst political violence for two decades, troops fired rubber bullets and teargas at thousands of red-shirted supporters of the former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra who gathered in Bangkok yesterday in defiance of emergency rule. The demonstrators, who are calling for the resignation of the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, fought troops with guns and petrol bombs.
Countries including South Korea have issued warnings about visiting Thailand, in a move that could damage its tourism industry. The Australian foreign minister warned of a “strong possibility of further violence” in protest areas.
The street fighting, which included gunfire and molotov cocktails and left pools of blood on the streets, spread to the Khao San Road, a popular backpacker destination, and around Bangkok’s Democracy Monument.
The dead included four soldiers and 16 civilians, according to an emergency centre set up to deal with casualties. At least 834 people have been injured in Thailand’s worst violence since 48 people were killed in an anti-military protest in 1992.
One victim, Hiro Muramoto, a Japanese cameraman for the Thomson Reuters news agency, died after being shot in the chest. A Japanese tourist who was wearing a red shirt and mistaken for one of the protesters was clubbed by troops until being rescued by bystanders. Protesters reportedly captured about 28 soldiers during the violence, but they were later released.
The violence is part of a long-running uprising by the mostly poor and rural-dwelling supporters of Thaksin, who accuse the ruling elite of orchestrating a military coup against him in 2006 amid allegations of corruption. On Wednesday, Vejjajiva was forced to call a state of emergency after protesters briefly broke into the parliament building, forcing some government officials to flee by helicopter.
Veera Musikapong, one of around 27 red shirt leaders, said: “We are changing our demand from dissolving parliament in 15 days to dissolving parliament immediately. And we call for Abhisit to leave the country immediately.”
Jatuporn Prompan, another of the protest leaders, said Vejjajiva’s hands were “bloodied”. “There is no more negotiation. Red Shirts will never negotiate with murderers,” he said. “Although the road is rough and full of obstacles, it’s our duty to honour the dead by bringing democracy to this country.”

From the limited Western bourgeois press accounts it is not clear what illusions the masses have in their “democracy” demands. 
But what they need is the sharpest understanding of the real nature of class rule and the class war/civil war realities of imperialist rule which will stop at nothing to hang onto the power and will be driven to increasingly violent attempts at repression as the crisis deepens.
Revolt is already erupting too in Europe (Athens, Paris and in growing industrial discontent) and everyone knows that the growth of unemployment, cutbacks and Depression will produce an increasingly febrile and explosive atmosphere. Even the British ruling class is fretting at the problem in its establishment influenced “free” press, with Liberal leader Nick Clegg even warning of “Athens-style” riots on the streets if draconian cuts are made (as the ruling class cannot avoid).
The billions of downtrodden and tyrannised masses, exploited to the bone to feed the great corporations of Western capitalism, are no longer willing to tolerate their drudging poverty and daily dispossession of everything they make and do, by the all-powerful wielding of financial power and its ever-present background supplementary threat of violence, terror and war against any who object or resist.
The various individual struggles will rise and fall for some time yet but in general are on an unstoppable upwards climb.
What is missing everywhere is the conscious positive understanding to turn the contempt and hatred into a revolutionary movement for the overturn of capitalism, the only way to end the devastation and turmoil which is the result of crisis and breakdown.
That needs rebuilding, after the disastrous retreats from revolutionary perspectives which began in Stalinist times in the Soviet Union and gradually undermined the Leninist philosophical grasp of the unending need to overturn capitalism with dire notions of “permanent peaceful coexistence”, eventually leading to the tragic self-liquidation of the still viable (and steadily growing) Soviet Union under Gorbachevism.
The worldwide discrediting of the notion of communism by this dire capitulation, and the long decades of wrong decisions and poor or disastrous advice before it, heading off militancy and energetic willingness to fight in struggle after struggle into “democratic paths” and “peaceful roads” at worst, or the “fight to contain imperialist warmongering” by the “struggle for peace” (still being punted out by the Museum-Stalinist today!) has a left the huge vacuum currently filled by the assorted religious ideologies, national struggles, populist left demagoguery in Latin America, “terrorist” freelancers, and even piracy in Somalia as well as the Maoism in India and Nepal, 
It will develop – necessarily so as the rising militancy across the planet increasingly runs into the limitations and shortfalls of its understanding, and the setbacks those cause (which are the more inevitable the less the working class is given the clarity and grasp it needs of the urgent need to end capitalism altogether and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat).
But struggles like the heroic 60 year long fight of the Palestinian nation, become increasingly capable, motivated and organised, despite the horrific, repeated cycles of near genocidal violence and strangling siege deprivation forced on them by the fanatical fascist Zionist occupation of their land. And that experience cannot but eventually require the broadest and deepest scientific understanding of the developments and events of the world to emerge.
But that will not be through the leadership of the fake-“ lefts” of endless shades and types in the British “Labour movement”.
Exactly the opposite.
Just when it has never been more important and more possible to argue the case again for revolutionary understanding and to give completely discredited Parliament a through political kicking they are out in force to drag the working class back into the polling booths, by one trick or another.
And not just that – mostly they are calling for a vote for Labour!!!!!
That – after more than ten years of the outright lies and trickery of the New Labourites and their shallow “improvements” which are mostly complete “black is white” lies (poverty reduction, better education, etc) or built on draconian punishment and blame scapegoating (social services, teaching) for disastrous failures caused by bureaucratic and wooden systems of “standards” and methods, or directly hammering the poorest and most hard pressed with ASBOs and vicious persecution of desperate and minor infringements like “benefit cheating” or “Tube ticket evasion” complete with Nazi style poster campaigns and deliberate encouragement of police finking and informers worthy of the Nazi period in Germany, 
That has been combined with the wholesale mortgaging of what remains there are of state resources (mostly sold off by the Tories) to fatcat financiers via “privatisation”, or lavish state contracts for “IT” or “consultancy”, and the endless backscratching of the City and its excesses in 13 years of a sickening orgy of collusion with the greed and excess of the fatcat bosses and capitalists, which even without the eventual disintegration of the “City” banks through their unregulated greed, and outright fraudulence, were steadily tying up the whole future income of the government public provision and revenue (i.e. working class tax payments) into paying back enormous debts and service payments for massively overpriced hospitals, roads, airports etc which far from being “more efficient” have been variously collapsing into scandal and failure, incompetence and incapability, (like “left” Labour London leader Livingstone’s disastrous Tube system, the railways and power and gas supplies) while racking up charges and payments, - roads tolls, private sector health,  first class train travel, etc etc.
And even such odd “improvements” here and there, which might be cited, are achieved only with the most artificially sustained “on the never-never” economic system, held up by the creaming off of fees and payments from the wholly parasitical world capitalist trading system in which the British “service economy” (so encouraged by Thatcherism and the Tories and unchallenged by any of the mountebanks in parliament in its essence) is a leading part, to the point of running down all productive activity like agriculture and industry, leaving the British economy one of the least self-capable in the world.
And that, under Gordon Brown, itself only kept in the air by massive borrowing and escalating debt (selling off the gold reserve for example). 
Now the world capitalist failure has swept in – which is not some “unforeseeable” external event which is “hardly something you can blame us for” as the election campaign excuses evade the question, but an entirely predictable outcome (by Marxist Leninist science which alone did constantly warn of it) of the monstrously distorted, bloodsucking nature of late finance capitalism (which takes to new extremes the monopoly capitalist grip and squeezing of world production analysed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Lenin’s Bolshevik party in Imperialism – the highest Stage of Capitalism and Bukharin’s Imperialism for example) – with trillions of dollars traded daily.
These sums are great multiples of any actual value produced by the world’s labouring masses (the only source of value) and each time with a fat “fee” involved, scooping more of the surplus exploited from the suffering masses into the hands of the banks and hedge funds, etc etc.
And after all this the fake-“lefts” want a “vote for Labour”.
Of course this is hidden under various caveats and “principles” and sets of “conditions” about supporting assorted candidates by asking them if they support various tepid and halfway house reforms or principles such as “opposition to war” or “trade union right to strike” challenges.
All very fine of course but as diversionary and nonsensical as any of the pure fantasy “jam tomorrow”, “peoples’ will” and “sunlit uplands” bullshit being delivered by the dumptruck load by the “main” parties - because it does not mention or deal with the rampaging crisis of the capitalist system which is the only issue to deal with.
The great reformist and overpaid Labourite and Trade Unionist officialdom, in the teeth of the greatest crash in history,  which has so quietly gone along with the long decades of capitalism and the extreme glitz and spin fraudulence of New Labourism, can barely make the most tepid of protests: 

Since 1948, Britain has supported the principle of social solidarity through state pensions, healthcare, education and other public services provided by society as whole. This idea is now under threat.
Whoever wins the next general election will be targeting the welfare state and public services as a way of cutting public expenditure to pay for the mistakes of the bankers and speculators. Never was so much put at risk by so few.
What they seem to forget is that good public services are important to everyone at every stage of their life from the cradle to grave. That is why we are supporting the demonstration in London on 10 April to remind all politicians that a civilised, compassionate society needs a welfare state and decent public services that pool life’s risks and provide support to all who need it, irrespective of their individual ability to pay.
Brendan Barber TUC, Lee Billingham Love Music Hate Racism, Christine Blower NUT, Brian Caton POA, Bob Crow RMT, Jeremy Dear NUJ, Gerry Doherty TSSA, Peter Fisher NHS Consultants’ Association, Dot Gibson National Pensioners Convention, Sally Hunt UCU, Tony Kearns CWU, Chris Keates NASUWT, Paul Kenny GMB, Prof Harry Keen NHS Support Federation, Jonathan Ledger Napo, Hamish Meldrum BMA, Lesley Mercer Chartered Society of Physiotherapists, Gerry Morrissey Bectu Keith Norman Aslef, Peter Pendle ACM/AMiE, Dave Prentis Unison, Alan Ritchie Ucatt, Wendy Savage Keep Our NHS Public, Mark Serwotka PCS, Eileen Short Defend Council Housing, Derek Simpson Unite, Vanessa Stanislas Disability Alliance, Christine Steel Carers Poverty Alliance, Gordon Taylor PFA, Tony Woodley Unite, Matt Wrack FBU  

To “remind” all politicians! What a sick joke.
This posturing “compassion”, in itself a giant opportunist fraud, deliberately avoids talking about the real issue of crisis and the devastating transformation on its way which is posing a revolutionary challenge to the working class.
A century and a half of “protest” and ineffectual pacifist “stop the war” protest has achieved nothing. 
It lets off the hook the entire Labour circus, and all the other mainstream parties who are notable for completely ignoring the giant crash of capitalism and the cuts it is bringing, or the war it has created.
Just as sick are the arguments from some sections of the fake-“left that it is necessary to “keep the Tories out”, as if New Labour had done anything over its 13 years that is any different in its essence than the first team bourgeois party.
A variant on this is the hysterical call “to keep out the fascists” and the racist BNP or the trend represented by the seemingly lumpen English Defence League .
By all means let the backwardness of anti-immigrant scapegoating be challenged but only with the complex understanding of how such attitudes are deliberately engendered by the vicious dog-eat-dog antagonisms created among workers by the foul competitiveness of capitalism itself, and which can only be tackled by tackling capitalism itself.
This communist perspective should be the centre of all clear leadership for the working class – not blaming them for their own shortsightedness and imperialist corrupted chauvinism, which plays completely into the hands of the ruling class and its escalating need for war – but explaining patiently how they have been misled.
Only dealing with capitalism will ever deal with “racism” in a revolution that will be made by workers and proletarians of the most imperfect kind (as capitalism has formed  them) including with multiple “incorrect” attitudes.
Telling them to return to voting Labour is the last way this problem will be tackled since like all the capitalist establishment, Labour is constantly making a fetish out of “immigration” and “preventing” it, feeding all the hostility and hatred which the slump is bringing to the surface.
It is capitalism and its stooges which create the backwardness and reaction which feeds the BNP. 
It is Labourism which has waged the criminal fascist racist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq using the crudest “clash of civilisations” anti-Muslim demonology; which supports the monstrous Zionist land-theft occupation of Palestine and the endless repeated genocidal blitzkriegs of Gaza’s militant resistance; which feeds every foul anti-communist “failure and totalitarian tyranny” lie and prepares for more fascist blitzing on a scale the BNP can only fantasise about.
It is Labourism which continues capitalism and the illusions of Parliament as the crisis deepens, which are the very cause of warmongering fascist disaster.
No better is the Trade Union & Socialist Coalition, for all its posturing about a “new party” which fails utterly to mention the only issue that matters, the giant glaring crisis and its unsolvability by any means except revolution.
It too tries to drag workers back into voting, once more under cover of some kind of test setting out a series of yet more reformist principles; exactly what has failed historically.
Tricksiest of all the opportunists and pretenders is the Museum Stalinist crew around Lalkar, and the Proletarian party it launched to cover up its long grovelling support and cover-up for Scargill’s SLP Labour Party Mark two. 
Since the bursting of the crisis – which it signally failed to warn the working class about for the long decade of its SLP membership and still cannot sensibly tie to the Washington’s rampaging warmongering (which it explains only as a routine “war for oil”) – some notional references to smashing the capitalist state and taking it over have started to appear here as an afterthought at the end of its articles.
Which is fine. But the Proletarian/Lalkar remains as far from clear revolutionary perspectives as revisionism has ever been, glaringly so in its latest paper where it launches a new youth movement, Red Youth, which promptly pumps out such disastrous revisionist idiocies as’ “No cooperation with war crimes!” Workers have the powers to stop these unjust wars.’ 
This “stop the War” pacifist nonsense is no further advanced than Stalin’s disastrous 1952 analysis that “Capitalism can be contained” bullshit all over again; the same puddle brained idiocy with has helped bemuse and disarm the working class for decades.
War is unstoppable except by ending capitalism - war is the heart of the crisis.
The new supposed “revolutionary” line on the election turns out to be just as idiotic.
Only this time the opportunist line is a little bit sly.
A dramatic headline shouts boldly “Don’t Vote Labour” in its latest paper, with a long explanation to follow of the betrayals and failures of reformism and how “as communists” we “don’t have any illusions about the electoral process in capitalism”.
A long account follows denouncing the realities of bourgeois rule and (almost) touching on Lenin’s profound understanding that the only use for Parliament is to stand on the platform it provides and denounce its lies and fraud, declaring that crisis and war is the inevitable outcome of capitalism. (Note the reformists’ get-out key  – “ultimately”.):

Ultimately, the only cure for the many ills of capitalism – for economic crisis, poverty, homelessness, joblessness, racism, war, imperialist plunder and environmental catastrophe – is a revolution by working people that takes public control of the means of production and uses them to create a decent, sustainable, cultured and rising standard of living for everyone. And we won’t get that by voting in even the most revolutionary set of parliamentarians.
A Marxist-Leninist understanding of the state teaches us that it is necessary for workers, in Marx’s words, not merely to take over the existing state machinery with a view to wielding it in its own interests, but rather to smash it and replace it with the workers’ own state. Whenever the election is called, and whatever the outcome, the working class and its allies will be exploited and oppressed on the day before polling, on polling day, and on the days after. The election cannot make any fundamental difference to our revolutionary goals or tasks.
All the same, communists do not boycott all capitalist elections on principle. 
Instead, they view them as a prime opportunity to talk to people at a time when political issues are being talked about far more widely than usual. And parliament itself, while not capable of delivering meaningful change, provides one of many platforms that communists have a duty, if they are able, to use to expose the true nature of the capitalist system and of capitalist dictatorship (also known as ‘bourgeois democracy’, ie, democracy for the capitalist ruling class).
Well, perhaps but only if they talk revolution: 
Since continued illusions in and affiliation to Labour by trade unions and antiwar organisations is the major obstacle to advance for the British working-class movement at this time, we believe the main work of communists and progressive workers during the election should be to help shatter those illusions, certainly not in attempting to preserve some vestiges of them by claiming voting Labour can somehow help to diffuse the ‘threat’ posed by the BNP (which in fact stands absolutely no chance of securing more than one seat at most (and is highly unlikely even to get that..

Wonderful! So what conclusion should workers come to after all this stirring stuff??? Why get right back in there and vote for even more tepid and unachievable reformist representation and pacifism!!:

We therefore call for:
* No vote for any of the main, bourgeois parties, who are all as racist and pro-capitalist as each other.
* Workers should, however, consider giving support to credible candidates who stand against Labour and the other main capitalist parties and who they consider to fulfil enough of the following criteria:
1.Antiwar – a candidate who calls for a complete British withdrawal from Afghanistan; one who supports the struggle of the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples against imperialism; one who stands against British participation in any new imperialist wars (e.g., against Iran).
2.Pro-worker – a candidate who calls for the repeal of the anti-trade union laws; one who stands against closures and privatisation of schools, hospitals etc; one who stands against making the working class pay for the capitalist crisis; one who stands for unionisation of low-paid migrant workers (whatever their official status).
•	While single-issue campaigners (e.g., around health care) might not fulfil all of the above, if they are putting serious pressure on Labour and highlighting an issue of importance to working people, they might well be worth endorsing.

What a bunch of frauds!!!!
This tricksy nonsense simply turns round and pulls the workers right back into the lie. The working class is already clear in its dismissal of Parliament – and expressing it day by day in all the vox pops as the desperate media election attempts to carry on, as if it all meant something. 
Even jokey middle class columnists put their finger on things better than this: 

sceptical civil servants are planning what to do in the event of a hung Parliament.
I like this thinking ahead. About time too. Imagine where we’d be if a few of them had thought: “What if the bankers don’t really know what they’re doing? What if they lose all the money?”
Hurray for forethought. Now I’m wondering what the plan is if nobody votes at all.
It’s possible, isn’t it? 0% turnout. It could happen. The entire nation might think: “Hmm, nothing appetising here. We’ll just skip pudding.”
Take heed, civil servants, as you mark out theoretical plans. If not one single vote is cast in this country, who wins?

The working class has been learning these lessons gradually for 100 years as endless promises by all sorts of firebrand radical “lefts”, to finally sort the world out to be run fairly and reasonably for all have turned to dust, time after time, foundering on the rapacious and ruthless demands of capital and the ever increasing expansion of its profiteering grip on the world.
No sweeping landslide of some new “workers representatives” will change things – unless the only reason they stood was to call for revolution to finish off this lie.
Enough with this confusion and opportunism. Build Leninism and now. Don Hoskins 

E P S R   BOX

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

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

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

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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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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.

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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
HONDURAS — Only one battle has been lost 

by Nidia Diaz
JUST three days before taking power after “winning” the illegitimate presidential elections, which took place at bayonet point in the midst of the bloodiest violation of human rights and even the country’s Constitution, Porfirio Lobo has complained to the media about the trifling international presence expected in Honduras on January 27 for his inauguration event, conceived by the United States and the region’s right-wing forces as the last step in whitewashing the military/business coup that removed President Jose Manuel Zelaya from power last June 28.
Those expected at the Tiburcio Carías Andino National Stadium, where Lobo Sosa will be sworn in, include Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli, one of the first and few Latin American statesmen to recognize the elections, even though they were rejected almost unanimously by the international community. According to sources in the de facto Ministry of Foreign Affairs, others include Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos, if Alvaro Uribe decides not to travel; representatives of the United States, complicit in the coup and all of the subsequent manoeuvres; and representatives of Peru, India and Taiwan, among others who have not as yet confirmed their attendance. Apparently, though, the organizing committee does not have much hope of other representatives with short memories or under a lot of pressure from Washington, joining in the merrymaking.
In the midst of such an obvious message of international opposition to participation in such an illegitimate event, set to go ahead against the will of the majority of the Honduran people, Jose Miguel Insulza. OAS secretary general has expressed his “confidence” in the hemispheric organization once again engaging in dialogue with Honduras following Porfirio Lobo’s inauguration. We should remember that Insulza is waiting for a decision by the White House and the State Department on whether or not to support his reelection as head of the discredited Organization of American States.
The sustained pressure from the immense majority of countries comprising the Latin American community during the coup and the days following, forced Insulza and some who are still shielding themselves behind the Washington-controlled organization to stand with the firm and courageous positions taken by those who blocked the ambiguous statements of the yanki master and its desire to quickly end the isolation of the fascists.
While it is no secret that the only purpose of the presidential elections was to provide a fresh start in Honduras, now Insulza is joining right-winger Roberto Martinelli - the same individual who just agreed to hand over four military bases in his territory to U.S. troops and has told the media that “I am a supporter, like the Panamanian president, of normalizing the situation in Honduras, and I hope that that can be done soon.”
According to the OAS president, through the empire’s magic, Porfirio Lebo is now a legitimate president and a valid interlocutor who will return the Central American nation to the hemispheric organization.
A “dignified and safe” exit for Michelleti, the serial violator of the Honduran constitution and international law, implies an act of betrayal of the majority will of the Honduran people. They, for their part, have continued to take to the streets every day since June 28 to demand the restoration of constitutional powers, the return of their only legitimate president, Mel Zelaya, and the convening of a constituent assembly to end the possibility of the fascist powers continuing to do whatever they want in Central! America. At the same time, the people want reconciliation, but with Justice.
Meanwhile, in the powerful northern country, State Department spokespeople are defending the outcome of the de facto elections and pressuring for good attendance at the “cake-cutting” of the pro-coup right-wing, put into power (against the popular will).
There is little that Lobo can do, however. The amnesty law that he wants for “national reconciliation” did not pass in the pro-coup Legislature. It is to be discussed on January 25 when the new, likewise illegitimate Congress is installed, the majority of whose members are representatives of the now-ruling National Party, who are seeking to help the military brass.
As the final action of its mandate, the outgoing Congress approved Honduras’ withdrawal from the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), which sparked a protest march by Hondurans who saw this as extinguishing all hopes of social justice.
The Congress also committed the affront of declaring Roberto Michelleti a deputy for life, copying exactly what the pro-Pinochet forces did in Chile. Not content with this, they honored the satrap with the Gold Plate Grand Cross Extraordinary Decoration and a gold medal, for which Michelleti expressed his thanks, saying, “I feel at home (referring to Congress). Thank you for this reception, but my satisfaction is even deeper at being declared a deputy for life and at being officially decorated for my actions in defense of democracy, peace and the rule of law.”
Only five deputies, from the Democratic Unification Party (UD), left the legislative chamber to express their rejection of the sinister and macabre tribute, which concretely speaking, has ensured congressional immunity for the dictator Michelleti.
Porfirio Lobo will be inaugurated as president on January 27. He will not be accompanied by Michelleti, who has said that to please the new president, he will watch the ceremony at home on TV instead of attending. Lobo will be the 95th president of Honduras to be sworn in since Dionisio de Herrera, on September 16, 1824.
Since the day he won elections marked by a very high rate of abstention, he has visited the United States to receive, live and direct, the “indications” of his masters. He has had meetings with the business sector and the entire political right wing, and attempted to divide the resistance movement by attempting to hold bilateral dialogues with some of its leaders, instead of with the movement as a whole.
The events of January 27 will be a dramatic fiction. What is clear is that Porfirio Lobo has not won. The U.S. government has not won. The coup perpetrators, both uniformed and suited, have not won. Since the day when the usual spineless and pressured elements managed to divide universal opposition to the coup d’etat and came out in an attempt to legitimize the coup with support for the new government in Honduras, turning their backs on President Zelaya and the Honduran people, a new stage of struggle has begun.
It is not Just the Movement of Natural Resistance that is in that battle. It will also have the support of the liberation processes which, likewise in difficult conditions and confronting countless threats and campaigns against them, are determined to fly the flags of dignity and national sovereignty from the highest peak on this continent, Morazán’s heirs have joined with those who have always maintained their struggle to boot out the colonialists of the past and present. It is just a matter of time.