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 1368 7thrd  2009                                                                                                                 25p fortnightly

Detestable fatcat-loving Labourites get the contempt they deserve but there is no “mandate” for any of the despised and manipulated parliamentary circus, least of all to impose devastating Slump catastrophe on the back of the working class. The entire election has avoided even mentioning the meltdown failure of capitalism for fear of the working class eruptions that are coming, just as in Greece, Thailand, the Middle East and much more. Fake-“left” support for assorted reformist “left” candidates underlines their total class-collaborating opportunism and supine failure to grasp or understand the revolutionary upheavals shaking the world. But revolution is the only perspective which can end crisis. Leninist scientific leadership needed now

Whatever outcome the advertising and media circus pretends is the election “result” it will be a total disaster all round for the ruling class.
The owners, bosses, bankers and fatcats (which all the parties serve effectively) face massive potential revolt, turmoil and upheaval whatever bogus “mandate” they claim to have been given by the media, press and advertising manipulated voting racket, for the draconian Depression cuts to come.
The future for the moribund British ruling class is exactly the same mass turmoil already confronting the bourgeoisie across the world, from the seething misnamed “terrorism” revolts of the Middle East, Afghanistan and Somalia, against US exploitation dominance, to near civil war Redshirt rebellion in Thailand, the burning streets of Athens and potentially much more from Lisbon to Lagos, East Europe to Latin America. 
The world is being hammered by the catastrophic collapse of the profit making system (which half the fake-“lefts” still deny!!!) which has been inevitably developing for decades, put off only by the endless inflationary printing of the dollar, steadily ensuring the eventual disintegration is far, far worse. 
Parliamentary “authority” is breaking down into total humiliation just like the collapse in respect and deference for the Catholic Church which is falling away in a welter of disgust and dismay and for the same fundamental reasons; the epoch of class rule and vicious exploitation is out of time and out of historic validity.  
There is much to be said in itself on the grotesque and widespread revelations about homosexual and paedophilic scandal in the ancient Church institution, one of the great pillars of both feudal and capitalist class dominance and reaction.
There is even more to be explored about how fake-“left” single-issue PC-ism and “homophobia” posturing has helped such scandals persist and continue. 
But above all the immediate question is why is it all coming into the open now after decades, perhaps even centuries, of hidden abuse, always covered up by the freemasonry (to use a dialectically appropriate term) and connivance of the ruling order?
For the same reason that the parliamentary fraud is losing its grip, the bankers are despised, Athens aflame, the Stock markets plunging and the military onslaughts on the Third World bogged down in slow defeat and stalemate.       
Capitalism is in ferment everywhere because capitalism has hit the buffers, its profiteering exploitation “over-production” unstoppably imploding, exactly as Marxist-Leninism, and Marxist-Leninism alone, against all fake-”left” Trotskyist and Revisionist posturers and poseurs, has consistently warned and predicted.
The complex interlocking structures and networks of ruling class control and dominance, and its most “venerable” institutions, Parliament to Pope, are falling apart, along with the economic foundation of this class society superstructure, just as analysed, dissected and predicted by the great Marxist thinkers.
The degeneracy and collapse will not, and cannot, end until the rising class in society, the working class, finally and consciously takes matters into its own hands to end the overripe rotten epoch of capitalist class rule for good and build communism. 
Until it does there is only increasing Slump disaster and war destruction to come.
That is only one way out of its crisis collapse known to the ruling class in the monopoly capitalist (imperialist) period, blitzkrieging, torturing war destruction, just as dominant US imperialism has been trying to inflict on the world for a decade and half.
Washington’s aim has been to try and intimidate all resistance, from both the “little people” which it has so tyrannically exploited for so long, the poorer workers at home and the masses throughout the Third World, and from all its rivals among the major capitalist powers, constantly (if covertly) seeking to undermine its top-dog position, and driven more desperately by the minute to a warmongering edge of direct challenge as the Slump unravels.
But American imperialism’s bullying “shock and awe” efforts to warm the world up for the all-out conflict coming, and intimidate all thoughts of challenging its might and power, has been a disaster too, only making matters ten times worse, multiplying the growing hostility and hatred of the downtrodden billions and driving them by the thousands and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, into open resistance. 
Capitalism is historically out of time and doomed to fall apart into ever greater degeneracy and chaos.
But it will continue to impose ever more openly fascist mayhem for as long as it is left in place, exactly as the reformist PC “black” Obama presidency has continued the US tradition of coups and plots (Honduras, Thailand, Somalia, Yemen), continues to wind up the civilian blitzing and depraved torture in Afghanistan and pours out the Goebbels provocations against the Middle East, and demonised victims like Iran and Syria, Sudan and Zimbabwe etc etc, while supporting the genocidal anti-Palestinian siege and blitz oppression of the Zionist Nazi monsters.
There is only one way out for the great masses of the planet from the utter chaos and slump disaster now being imposed, and its inevitable degeneration into Third World War, and that is revolution to completely overturn and end the entire degenerate monopoly capitalist order.
It demands the urgent building of a politically disciplined revolutionary leadership, with the crucial scientific understanding to guide, inspire, organise and coordinate the spontaneous struggles of the working class and Third World proletarian masses which will increasingly erupt as the slump is forced onto ordinary people everywhere.
That does not mean “telling them what to do” but developing the widest possible perspective and understanding within the working class, via its most advanced members, of the great historical crisis now unravelling into the greatest cataclysmic disaster which has ever faced mankind.
Armed with such constantly developing clarity they can not only win the great class war battles which are now unfolding, but have the coherence and discipline to hold onto power with the dictatorship of the working class to suppress all the endless counter-revolutionary barbarity that will constantly revive and attempt to re-impose its exploitation, until mankind has matured its society under socialism to the point where the old bourgeois reaction has finally disappeared and class society can disappear forever, leaving only the cooperation of equal, rational self-disciplined humans.  
It means disentangling, re-assessing and facing up to the problems and difficulties which confounded the first giant and historic steps in building socialism in the Soviet Union, and the stultifying effect over many decades of Moscow’s revisionist retreats from Bolshevism, hampering world revolutionary understanding and hamstringing further progress of anti-imperialist and communist struggle.
The huge achievements and historic transformations of running the great Soviet workers state without a capitalist boss in sight, are a permanent step forwards for mankind that cannot be undone.
It had demonstrated irreversibly by its very existence for 70 years, that not only is capitalism no longer necessary, but that society is already many times fairer even in the early few decades of building socialism, and an order of magnitude greater in scientific, cultural and social advance, even in the teeth of endless subversion, repeated warmongering devastation and siege conditions (as the US trade strangulation blockade brutally hampers little Cuba for example), as well as self-inflicted problems and mistakes.   
But the mistakes and errors of the first huge, full experiments in socialism (still underway in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam) need to be grasped, not swept under the carpet as the revisionists do, nor “condemned” and written-off as “fatally flawed” as the petty bourgeois Trots do.
The unstoppably erupting revival of the working class fight and struggle is not going to get any such leadership from the great swamp of assorted fake-“lefts” and pretend “revolutionaries” who for all their token articles about Marx, parroting of “revolution” phraseology (in the occasional article or the unread “what we stand for” back pages of their papers) do not actually have any grasp of the titanic sweeping historical upheavals which are already shaking the planet.
For all their pretences to be “Marxists” and academic articles mentioning the “dismantling of the capitalist state” their grasp is completely dead, with no conception, feel, sensuous grasp, and dialectical appreciation and explanation of the living, driving, burning hatred and frustration which is just beneath the surface and already exploding into mass upheavals everywhere.
They still insist it is “premature” to be talking about revolution!!!
They are not Marxists in other words – they cannot, and do not want to see the real world revolutionary ferment all around them.  
Revolt, rebellion, insurgency and resistance are only going to grow more widespread and intense whatever temporary setbacks, retreats, confusions and difficulties they encounter.
Mankind has seen the possibilities of the technology and organisation made possible by constant progress of science and knowledge, and its glaring misuse and misapplication for the destructive blitzing, degenerate, philistine shallowness, waste and unfairness of capitalism, ready to wipe out half the planet for greed and profit (like the disastrous BP oil slick currently of Louisiana) in even its day-to-day operations and plunging into total war destruction as its slump bites.
The routine “protest”, anti-war pacifism, and “no to cuts” calls still pumped out by the “lefts” are blind to these huge movements, or do not want to see them.
The “lefts” not only do not tell the working class anything about the revolutionary nature of the world but head them in the other direction with the illusion that a little bit (or even a lot) more resistance or “pressure” can stop the Slump being imposed.
Nowhere has it been clearer than in their election calls for the working class to keep on voting, dragging them back into the ballot box just when the collapse of the great historical fraud of “democracy” under bourgeois rule has never been more complete.
Parliament has always been a lying fraud, the greatest confidence trick devised to hoodwink ordinary people. Most of the working class has been gradually getting the idea for some time – correctly despising the entire stinking fraud and the self-seeking opportunism and lies of the “representatives” of all shades, even in the supposed “boomtime” of post-war credit inflated “prosperity” (for the richer countries and better off layers of society at least).
Votes and turnout have rightly been dropping for election after election as the great historical lesson has been absorbed that “democracy” is a mere front for the endless rule of big money and profiteering which takes all the decision of any importance in capitalist society – and always at the expense of the working class.
But the contempt and distrust of the working class can only reach a new level still in this election whatever new gimmicks have been tried, and whatever transient “interest” is stirred up to bolster the “voting figures”. Firstly it comes after a decade or more of the last-ditch glitzy “emperor’s new clothes” spin and public relations lies of “New” Labourism and, on top the sickening exposés of the huge scandals and outrages of the MPs’ expenses rackets (echoing the corruption and bribery which is normal throughout capitalist society but surfaces particularly in times of crisis).
And secondly it is clearly incapable of tackling any of the onrushing disaster facing the whole world capitalist system and particularly its hopelessly outdated and moribund has-beens like the British “empire” ruling class.
The shallow frenzy of the gimmicky election “leadership debates” and the supposed swing of the result on minute differences in body language, appearance, phraseology (or even off-the-cuff campaigning remarks) only serve to emphasise the complete triviality and pointlessness.
The poring over the entrails by the capitalist media is like the soothsayers of ancient times, and with as much connection to reality. 
The overheard “bigot” remark of Gordon Brown straight after smarming over a hapless pensioner further underlines that the whole racket is nothing but a public relations confidence trick. (The sickest part of that is that it is Labourism itself which has deliberately fed and encouraged the notion that “immigration is a problem and needs to be controlled”, as much as any racist BNP campaign, Tory backwoodsmanship or other bourgeois reactionary trend.)
It is all part of an atmosphere of scapegoating and petty nationalist narrowness which has long been whipped up by all the mainstream bourgeois parties (and echoed by the equally opportunist “official” Labour Movement and “Trade Unionism”) to blame outsiders for the disastrous collapse of class rule and its monopoly capitalist exploitation of the world.  
Anything to divert attention from the real issues facing the working class in Britain and everywhere else in the world, – the complete meltdown failure of the capitalist system.
Anything to head them into chauvinism, hatred and hostility, ready for the inevitable international conflicts which are ready to explode as the unstoppable market collapses and trade and currency wars degenerate into all-out war on a world scale.
And most of all anything to keep them tied to the idea that there is no other solution.
The joke election racket no longer confers even the lying pretence of “authority” at all on the hucksters and conmen who strut and posture as representatives” of the interests of ordinary people.
Trying to revive it by offering yet another variant of the Tweedledum/Tweedledee stitch-up that comprises a “choice” in capitalism, with the Tweedledoo Liberals is a desperate last throw by a panicking bourgeoisie which is terrified of the alternative, the eventual stripping away of all pretence in order to impose direct class rule.
They have done it before in “national emergency” war suspension of the vote, (meaning mortal threat to the interests of property and wealth) or the sneaky “consensus” of coalition government, by Labour traitor Ramsay Macdonald (cutting dole in the 1930s). 
But it will only confirm the moral and political bankruptcy of the whole system.
So in ride the “lefts” of all shades to rescue them!!  
This craven servitude to the bourgeois order is covered up by imposing sets of “demands” or “principles to be followed” supposedly on candidates, to decide if they are suitably “left”, or by calls for yet another variant of “Old” Labourism or “trade union” sponsored politics. 
In its worst manifestations (most of the Trots, CPGB, SWP, SPEW) it gives “conditional” (read opportunist) support even to assorted Labourites, guaranteeing the continuation of the same old lies.
All this is no better than the “righteous” left reformist scribbler George Monbiot (and plenty of other fake-“left” “heroes”), who spout the fiery phrases and disillusioned anger and then turn round and demand yet more voting:

But from 2004 onwards the trend went into reverse. In the three years to 2007-08 the number of people in households living on less than 60% of median income rose by 1.3 million – producing a total better than in 1997, but worse than in 1989. This was before the recession hit, so God knows what the next set of figures will show.
The number of people in extreme poverty (living on less than 40% of median income) never substantially fell: it held steady through the first eight years of Labour government, then rose. There are now 700,000 more people in this condition than when Labour took office, and more than at any point since records began. The average real incomes of the poorest tenth declined by 2% in the 10 years to 2007-08. These figures, again, predate the recession.
The rich, on the other hand, have seldom done better. Of the extra income enjoyed by British households over the Labour years, 40% has accrued to the richest 10% (all references are on my website). The richest 1%, according to Injustice, Danny Dorling’s new book, have captured a higher share of national income than at any time since the early 1930s. Inequality in the United Kingdom is now higher than at any point since consistent records began, in 1979. I feel that needs repeating. After 13 years of Labour government, the UK has higher levels of inequality than after 18 years of Tory government.
Why has this happened? Partly because Labour has shifted taxation from the rich to the poor. It cut corporation tax from 33% to 28% and capital gains tax from 40% to 18%. It introduced an entrepreneurs’ relief scheme, taxing the first £2m of capital gains at only 10%. It raised the inheritance tax threshold for couples from £300,000 to £600,000.
Yes, the government has introduced and strengthened the minimum wage, and this is real progress. But it has also blocked employment rights for temporary and agency workers and preserved the opt-out clause in the EU’s working time directive. The old workers’ party has switched allegiance to the bosses, handing key positions to corporate executives and private equity tycoons, even appointing Digby Jones, the neanderthal former head of the CBI, a minister of the crown. It reduced workplace inspections (causing a rise in the number of deaths at work), dropped the requirement that meetings between ministers and corporate lobbyists must be recorded, and stopped the corruption case against BAE.
Having promised to scrap it when in opposition, it has extended the private finance initiative into sectors the Tories didn’t dare to touch. Labour left sweeteners in PFI contracts for corporations to find, rigged the figures to make it look as if the scheme delivered value for money, then had to bail out the private operators when it began to collapse. The party also broke its promises to renationalise the railways and take private prisons back into public ownership: the UK now has a higher proportion of its prisoners in corporate jails than the United States.
While Labour has liberated billionaires, it has trussed up the rest of us with 3,500 new criminal offences, including provisions that allow the police to declare any demonstration illegal. It has introduced control orders that place people under permanent house arrest without charge or trial. It has allowed the US to extradite our citizens without producing evidence of an offence. It has colluded in kidnapping and torture. Britain now has more CCTV cameras than any other nation, and a DNA database that is five times the size of its nearest competitor. The number of prisoners in the UK has risen by 41% since Labour took office.
This government blocked a ceasefire in the Lebanon; sacked Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan after he complained that the regime was boiling its prisoners to death; gave aid to a Colombian military that collaborates with fascist death squads; announced a policy of pre-emptive nuclear war; and decided to waste our money on replacing Trident. But worse, far worse than any of this, it launched an illegal war in which hundreds of thousands have died. This is the government that colleagues of mine on the Guardian want to save.
...I understand the hazards of voting for the smaller parties and allowing the right-hand glove puppet to replace the left-hand glove puppet. I know that the Tories are even worse than this government. But by voting for the candidates on the list compiled by the democracy campaign Hang ‘em – not all of whom are Liberal Democrats, but all of whom are reformers with a good chance of taking or keeping seats – we can break this rotten system while remaining true to our beliefs.
Whatever the outcome of the election, the real fight begins after 6 May, as we build a mass democracy movement that ensures that we can never be colonised by a parasitic political class – of any colour – again.

What a rotten conclusion and cowardly avoidance of the great opportunity to expose the parliamentary racket ever more certainly.
All these mountebank “lefts” are actually going backwards at a point in history when the working class despises the whole game. 
In other words this posturing pretend “leftism” is actually reactionary.
By all means use the opportunities offered to speak out at election time, and the stirring of political debate and interest which the bourgeoisie is obliged to instigate in order not to give the game away.
But use them, as Lenin insisted to expose the lies and denounce Parliament for what it is - a cover for bourgeois rule.
Here is just one of many things Lenin had to say, quoted in its full context:

What has lately happened in Germany, the brutal and treacherous murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, is not merely the most dramatic and tragic event in the revolution beginning in Germany. It is something more. It sheds an extraordinarily vivid light on the way the problems of the present-day struggle are presented by the various trends of political thought and in the various theoretical systems of today. It was from Germany that we heard most talk, for example, on the celebrated subject of democracy, on the slogan of democracy in general, and on the slogan that the working class must be independent of government. These slogans may at first glance seem to be unconnected, but they are actually very closely connected. They are closely connected because they show how strong petty-bourgeois prejudices are to this day, despite the proletariat’s immense experience of the class struggle; how to this day often lip service is paid to the class struggle which is not recognised by the minds or hearts of those who talk about it. Indeed, if we recall even the rudiments of political economy as we learnt it from Marx’s Capital, that theory of the class struggle by which we all firmly stand, how can there be any talk of democracy in general or independence when the struggle has grown as acute and far-flung as it is today, when it is clear that the socialist revolution is facing the whole world, and when this has been palpably demonstrated in the most democratic countries? Whoever thinks there can be shows that, as far as the theory of political economy is concerned, he has not understood a single page of Marx’s Capital, by which all socialists without exception now swear.
But, as a matter of fact, although they swear by this work, now that they are on the verge of that cardinal struggle to which Marx’s Capital led, they retreat from this class struggle and imagine there can be an extra-class or above-class democracy. They imagine that in modern society, while the capitalists still retain their property, there can be a democracy other than bourgeois democracy, that is, other than a bourgeois dictatorship masked by false and hypocritical democratic labels. It was from this very Germany that we recently heard voices saying that over there the dictatorship of the proletariat, possibly, in fact most probably, would not transcend the bounds of democracy, that there democracy would remain. It was there that people who claim to be teachers of Marxism, people who from 1889 to 1914 were the ideologists of the entire Second International, people like Kautsky, unfurled the banner of democracy and failed to understand that as long as property remains in the hands of the capitalists democracy is nothing but a thoroughly hypocritical cover for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. They failed to understand that there cannot be any serious question of the emancipation of labour from capital as long as this hypocritical cover is not torn away. Not as long as we do not put the question as Marx always taught us to put it, and as we have been taught to put it by the proletariat’s day-to-day struggle, by every strike and by every acute turn in the trade union struggle – namely, that while property remains in the hands of the capitalists, all democracy will be nothing but a hypocritical cover for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. All talk about universal suffrage, about the popular will and about equality at the polls will be a sheer fraud, for there can be no equality between the exploiter and the exploited, between the owner of capital and property and the modern wage-slave.
Of course, compared with tsarism, absolutism, monarchy and all feudal survivals, bourgeois democracy historically denotes immense progress. Of course, we shall have to utilise it. And until the time comes for the struggle of the working class for full power it is incumbent on us to make use of the forms of bourgeois democracy. But the fact is that we have now arrived at this decisive moment of the struggle internationally. For the issue now is whether the capitalists can maintain their power over the means of production and, above all, their ownership of the implements of production. And this means they are preparing for new wars. The imperialist war has quite clearly demonstrated how capitalist property is connected with that slaughter of the nations, how it led up to it irresistibly and inexorably. But that being so, all talk of democracy expressing the popular will is obviously sheer deception, nothing but the privilege of the capitalists and the rich to dupe the more backward sections of the working people both through their press, which remains in the hands of the property-owners, and by all other means of political influence.
There is and can be only one alternative: either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, disguised by constituent assemblies, all kinds of voting systems, democracy and similar bourgeois frauds that are used to blind fools, and that only people who have become utter renegades from Marxism and socialism all along the line can make play of today — or the dictatorship of the proletariat for suppressing with an iron hand the bourgeoisie, who are inciting the most backward elements against the finest leaders of the world proletariat.
 This dictatorship means the victory of the proletariat for the purpose of suppressing the bourgeoisie, who are now putting up a most desperate resistance, which gets all the more furious the more clearly the bourgeoisie perceive that it is the people that have raised this issue. Previously, in the vast majority of cases, they regarded dissatisfaction and indignation among the workers as only a temporary expression of discontent. That, in fact, is the way the matter is quite often regarded to this day by the British capitalists, for example, who are perhaps the most experienced in deceiving the workers politically, and politically the best trained and the best organised. 
They realise that the war has, of course, led to discontent, and that this discontent inevitably gives rise and will continue to give rise to unrest among the workers. But, they argue, the workers have not yet said who is to head the state, who is to hold state power, and whether the capitalists are to be allowed to retain their property.
REPORT AT THE SECOND ALL-RUSSIA TRADE UNION CONGRESS JANUARY 20, 1919

So what would Lenin have made of the front-page of the latest Weekly Worker and its slogan, no different to Monbiot’s posturing: 

“Transform voting: from an instrument of deception into an instrument of emancipation”.

Under capitalism??????? 
Only one “deception” is being pulled here, that of the fake-”left” – “the utter renegades” – great lie, to pull the working class back under the Great Deception even after 100 years more of painful experience!! 
Demanding that candidates support “troops out of Afghanistan” or “the restoration of trade union rights” or “defence of public services” is just more of the old reformist pleading and seeking after “crumbs-from-the-table” which has sold out the working class for over a century.
All completely pointless without making clear that only revolutionary movement will now achieve anything.
And that is what the whole spectrum of the revisionists and Trots dare not and will not confront.
All calls to vote without a revolutionary message are utterly opportunist while the bourgeoisie continues to hold all the wealth and property in society as Lenin makes clear.
Such reformist “gains” as were achieved (in the rich countries only), especially post-WW2 in a supposed “advance for the parliamentary left”, were achieved because of the huge underlying and incipiently revolutionary pressure of mass disgust at the last Depression and its world war destruction, by a working class which had had six years of lessons in fighting and armed struggle, and was hugely influenced and inspired by the USSR Red Army’s triumphal and dogged victories against Nazism. 
All these gains (which were as much granted by the Tories as by the “great Attlee government” to try and head off the working class socialist ferment) are now being stripped away ruthlessly and the more so as the Slump crisis bites.
“Alternative” candidates would be no better, unless their entire platform is denouncing the “democracy” and making overt a revolutionary perspective. 
Why should this new set of reformist commitments by “left” MPs or Monbiot’s independents or the fake-“left” be any more adhered to than the tricks and broken promises of nearly a dozen past Labour governments ostensibly representing the interests of the working class?
They will not be.
They cannot be – the problem is caused by the capitalist system itself which all the parliamentary parties support, and have never warned anyone about however much they “blame” each other for the problems and pretend they would “do things differently”.
The relentless laws of capitalist profit making and the unstoppably repeated crashes and slumps of its vicious antagonistic competition, are in control and driving all the way to another round of world war destruction, 
It is not a question of telling the working class about the greed and ruthlessness of the capitalists to impose wage cuts and speed ups and how they should “resist” as the Stalinist dullards are doing currently in Greece.
This is a million miles from a living understanding that the entire world is now being turned upside down and will be turned upside down whatever happens.
Capitalist overproduction is dragging the world into chaos and destruction exactly as explained by Marx in his staggering three volumes of Capital, and numerous other writings, and development of the science by Lenin and others, setting out the iron laws of capitalist production (see economy box page 6).
Anyone who defies those laws, without the understanding of the need to end capitalism itself, will be swept away, slaughtered by the pressures of the great international finance sharks just as any out and out capitalist, if they attempt to “resist” within capitalist perspectives.  
Capitalism must now impose the most savage and draconian slump cuts ever seen if it is to remain capitalism.
And this is true however principled this “Green” candidate or that “left bloc”, – support for which assorted outsiders is urged by the opportunists like the museum-Stalinist Proletarian/Lalkarites, pretending to be more “principled” than the rest of the swamp by “not voting Labour” but equally dragging back the working class to illusions in something changing through “representation”.
All such reformists face the intractable devastating logic of the catastrophic Slump failure which broke surface in October 2008 when the world was hours away from shutting down the cash machines completely and the social chaos that would have resulted. 
It was not some “out of the blue” storm, “nothing to do with me guv” but totally predictable as the EPSR’s Marxist scientific analysis has constantly warned the working class for three decades, against allcomers including the entire petty bourgeois capitulationist bogus swamp of “left” Trot and revisionist academics and opportunists.
So imminent is this disaster and so serious that the more edgy sections of the petty bourgeois commentators and economists felt obliged to speak out at the glaring avoidance of the real issues by the entire election racket and its la-la land fantasies about “upturns coming”, or “all in this together” Tory bullshit about homely neighbourly society helping each other out:
Finally, some home truths. Three weeks into an election campaign that has plumbed new depths of fatuity, somebody told it the way it is. Sadly, that person was not Gordon Brown, David Cameron or Nick Clegg, but Robert Chote, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The IFS is not just any old thinktank; it is the holy writ on anything to do with tax and spending.
Bluntly, the plague-on-all-your-houses message was threefold. First, they are lying to you (although the IFS would never use such intemperate language). The real choice facing the electorate is not whether wasteful spending should be cut by £6bn this year to avoid increases in national insurance contributions. That is sound and fury, signifying nothing. Instead, the choice is between four years of draconian spending restraint under Labour or the Lib Dems not seen since 1976-1980, when the International Monetary Fund imposed an austerity programme on the Callaghan government as the price of supporting sterling, or five years of cuts under the Tories that would be unprecedented in the entire postwar era.
Second, the chances of any of the parties taking the axe to public spending in this way are strictly for the birds. Britain’s last big bout of fiscal retrenchment came in 1993, when Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke did a repair job on the public finances after the recession of 1990-92. It was a 50-50 arrangement: for every pound saved through reduced public spending a pound was raised through higher taxes. This time, all the parties are putting more emphasis on spending restraint. Labour’s deficit reduction plans involve a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, the Tories’ a 4:1 ratio; the Lib Dems fall somewhere in between. Apart from some vague promises to make “efficiency savings” none of the parties has specified how it is going to make the big cuts in public spending required to meet these testing goals.
The task is made all the more difficult by the fact that both Labour and the Conservatives (although not the Lib Dems) have ring-fenced bits of public spending deemed too politically sensitive to cut. In Labour’s case this is the NHS, overseas aid and parts of the education budget, while the Tories have given guarantees only to health and international development.
What that means, according to the IFS, is that other departments get a double dose of pain. If Labour and the Conservatives want to ring-fence their spending priorities for the whole of the next parliament, they will have to save one pound in every five currently spent by other Whitehall departments. This is not remotely plausible.
As a result, the IFS has a third and final message. Since the parties are being wildly optimistic about what they are likely to achieve through spending restraint, something else has got to give: either an increase in taxes or a cut in benefits. Making the poor carry the burden will be a hard sell for two reasons: they didn’t cause the crisis, and the gap between rich and poor is already wider than it was when Labour came to power in 1997. 

Mervyn King is warning that the victor in next week’s election will be forced into austerity measures that will keep the party out of power for a generation, according to the US economist David Hale.
Dragging the Bank of England governor unwittingly into Britain’s political battle, David Hale said he had been told by King at a private lunch about the likely fiscal pain ahead.
Asked about the possible contagion from Greece’s sovereign debt crisis, Hale cited the high debt levels of the major developed economies, including Britain, and then went on to comment on the British election campaign.
“I saw the governor of the Bank of England [Mervyn King] last week when I was in London and he told me whoever wins this election will be out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be,” Hale said in an interview on Australian TV reported by Reuters.
The Bank confirmed that the governor had had a private lunch with Hale...
Earlier this year, however, he made it clear that he saw tough decisions ahead for ministers as they attempted to reduce the budget deficit amassed during Britain’s deepest and longest recession since the second world war.
The governor, speaking at the press conference to launch the last quarterly Inflation Report in February, said: “The need for a credible plan to ensure a substantial reduction in the fiscal deficit is now clear to everyone.” King added the deficit would not be tackled without “significant fiscal consolidation”.

Even these academic warnings and pompous ruling class euphemisms conceal the kind of savagery which not even the ruling class has yet fully grasped is demanded by the “black hole” logic of this financial profit system implosion.
Some clues come from the demands already being imposed upon the Greek working class, at the insistence first of all by the leading capitalist power in Europe, the once-more rising German bourgeoisie but which every ruling class has to insist upon it is going to have even midge-in-a-monsoon’s chance of surviving the cutthroat trade war and currency wars which are rapidly escalating
And this will come from every direction:

The rescue plan, which will see an estimated €120bn (£104bn) injected into the near-bankrupt Greek economy over the next three years, comes at a heavy price: a stringent regime of structural reforms, cost-cutting policies and tax increases that will, it is hoped, modernise Greece and do away with its infamous state profligacy. The measures – which include reducing collective bargaining rights, abolition of the 13th and 14th monthly wages paid each year to supplement low public sector salaries, the slashing of bonuses and the overhaul of the pension and health systems – will wipe out almost every right won by workers over the past 30 years.
“Say goodbye to the old Greece,” lamented one Greek newspaper yesterday. “From now on everything is going to change.”
A leading political commentator, Takis Michas, voiced the same sentiment: “What is certain is that Greece is going to become a much poorer place; schools will be poorer, hospitals will be poorer, people will be poorer. We won’t have happy-go-lucky Zorbas dancing in the streets or on the top of tables. It’s over.”
For many, the intervention of the IMF, in the wake of three austerity packages already announced this year, has seen Greek humiliation mutate into unbridled bitterness and fury. “The IMF deals with injustice. It never targets the rich, who have deposits abroad and luxury cars and are buying properties in London. It always targets the poor,” said Maria Koumoundourou, a retired bank employee as she joined the marchers. “Its involvement in our affairs is truly offensive and very worrying. It has made us very angry.”
The prime minister, George Papandreou, called on the IMF and EU to activate emergency funds 10 days ago after it became apparent that Greece was heading for economic collapse; unable to refinance because of soaring borrowing costs racked up by merciless markets. The country has to find €8.5bn to fund maturing debt by 19 May.
The painful measures that came with the bailout were, Papandreou told Greeks on Friday, necessary for the nation’s survival.
In Greece’s hallowed culture of leftwing politics and workers’ rights, unions have been quick to react, announcing walkouts, including a general strike that will paralyse the country on Wednesday.
“These policies are totally unfair. They place all the burden on the have-nots to pay the price of this crisis and not the plutocracy,” said Yannis Papangopoulos who heads the Confederation of Greek Workers. “There will be a social explosion once they begin to bite.”
Amid the protests, the question that is inevitably being asked is: will Greece become ungovernable in the months ahead? While the EU is putting a brave face on the bailout, saying it will save Greece from insolvency and secure European financial stability, analysts fear the emergency aid will suffice only to stave off bankruptcy in the years ahead.
In Athens the belief is growing that, in the face of stiff resistance to reforms, the country will lurch from crisis to crisis until it eventually defaults and is forced to drop the euro and leave the 16-member eurozone. “Greece is heading for eventual default,” said Michas. “They can extend the period [with the aid], but I cannot possibly see how it can repay its debts when the economy is contracting.”
As concerns over the future grow, more and more Greeks are packing up their belongings and heading abroad. 
Athens erupted into violence as traditional May Day festivities turned into a bitter protest against draconian austerity measures aimed at tackling Europe’s worst debt crisis in decades.
For the tens of thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets in rallies that quickly descended into clashes with riot police, the show of force was just the beginning – a prelude of the storm that will rock Greece if its Socialist government “caves in” to the dictates of the IMF and enforces policies that have been likened to “the coming of Armageddon”.
To make the point, scores of stone-throwing youths chanted “people don’t bow down, it’s time again for revolution” as a petrol bomb set fire to a police officer in the heart of Athens.
“They say the only way of salvaging our economy is more austerity, but that’s a total lie,” said Nicolaos Danizis, a 60-year-old shipyard worker participating in a Communist-led demonstration outside parliament. “These latest measures have been cooked up by outsiders and are totally outrageous. They are aimed not at the rich but at the poor. What we are saying here today is that they will pass only over our dead bodies.”
Leftwing and anarchist demonstrators heckled and threw plastic water bottles at the former parliamentary speaker, Apostolos Kaklamanis, a governing Socialist MP, after spotting him on the sidelines of the Athens march. Kaklamanis, 73, was hit and kicked but suffered no serious injury and was whisked away by police. Mounting social unrest, worsening recession, strikes and spiralling debt will be the backdrop against which the ruling Pasok party will announce further belt-tightening measures today, agreed with European nations and the IMF as part of the biggest bailout in history.

Not just Greece is teetering. This is the continuing unfolding of a world shattering crisis:

Global stock markets have fallen sharply on fears that the proposed €110bn (£95bn) rescue package hammered out over the weekend for Greece will not be enough to solve its financial crisis, as well as concern that the problems could spread to other European countries.
Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was forced to deny market rumours his country would ask for €280bn from the European Union, something he described as “complete madness”.
But Spain’s stock market has lost nearly 5% today, while Germany’s DAX is down more than 2% and France’s CAC is around 3% lower. Portugal’s PSI 20 is also down around 4%, while the cost of protecting the debt of a number of European countries has also jumped.
The New York Stock Exchange was more than 200 points lower in early trading, while the FTSE 100 closed down more than 2.5% or 142 points at 5411. The euro has tumbled to a one-year low against the dollar, down 1% to $1.3048.
With Greece suffering protests and strikes against the austerity measures the country has introduced, an emergency summit of the heads of the 16 countries using the single currency has been convened for Friday in an attempt to hasten the release of the first tranche of the €110bn aid package.
Banking shares are among the major fallers, on concerns about their exposure to Greece and the other European countries. Miners are also under pressure after a new Australian tax was proposed over the weekend which could knock their earnings and delay development projects.
Gold prices also hit record highs today as investors flocked to the precious metal as a safe-haven investment amid the market uncertainty.
Sterling-priced bullion hit a high of £783.33 an ounce and gold also set records in euros and Swiss francs. Spot gold in dollars hit $1,188.86 an ounce, the highest since early December.
German economy minister Rainer Brüderle added to the uncertainty by telling Reuters that the €110bn package was not intended to cover Greece’s entire financial requirements for the next three years. Instead, Brüderle suggested, Greece will need to return to the financial markets in perhaps 18 months to satisfy its borrowing needs.
Brüderle’s warning helped to knock the Greek banking sector down by almost 6% today in Athens, where public sector workers began a two-day strike in protest at the austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund.
The cost of insuring Greek debt from default rose, wiping out some of Monday’s falls. Spanish and Portuguese credit default swaps were also up, showing there was still concern that the crisis would spread from Athens to the eurozone’s weaker members.
Germany continued to take a tough line against Greece, having finally agreed to contribute €22bn to the rescue effort. Finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble said that Greece would be plunged into insolvency if it failed to meet its promises to raise taxes across the economy, increase the retirement age to 65, and cut the size of its public sector.  

At 2.03pm today, on the third floor of a neoclassical building in the heart of Athens, three people died – and Greece changed. As the bank employees tried to beat back the flames, ignited by a firebomb tossed into the building by protesters, the economic crisis enveloping the debt-stricken country not only claimed its first lives: it shifted from bewilderment and disappointment into violence carried on an unpredictable current of rage.
The young bank employees, a man and two women, one of them four months pregnant, died in the fire which came within an hour of irate protesters laying siege to the Greek parliament.
“All of us are angry, very, very angry,” bellowed Stella Stamou, a civil servant standing on a street corner, screaming herself hoarse, a block away from where the bank had been set alight.
“You write that – angry, angry, angry, angry,” she said, after participating in one of the biggest ever rallies to rock the capital since the return of democracy in 1974. “Angry with our own politicians, angry with the IMF, angry with the EU, angry that we have lost income, angry that we have never been told the truth.”
Across Athens today the signs of that anger were everywhere: in the central boulevards and squares that resembled a war zone, the burning cars, the burning hotels, the burning government buildings and rubbish bins and shattered windows and pavements.
Surveying the debris, Karwan Ahmet a 28 year-old Iraqi Kurd caught up in the chaos, described the scene as “being straight out of Iraq. It reminds me of all the shit we saw in Kirkuk.”
What had started as a general strike called by unions to protest against deeply unpopular austerity measures turned into a tidal wave of fury as an estimated 100,000 private and public sector workers took to the streets screaming “let the plutocracy pay”.
By midday that rage had assumed a new and determined dynamism as demonstrators – including once-stalwart supporters of the governing socialist Pasok party – began to shout “thieves, thieves”.
Their venom soon turned towards the large sandstone building that is the Greek parliament. After scuffling with police, chasing the ceremonial guards away from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and taking axes to the monument, hundreds tried to storm the building, screaming “let the bordello burn”.
As MPs inside debated the draconian economic reforms that eurozone nations and the IMF have demanded in return for the biggest bailout in history, riot police outside fired off rounds of acrid teargas to keep the crowd at bay. “All of them are dirty and have eaten from the trough,” said one man brandishing a large wooden club. “Our politicians are squarely to blame and the worst of the culprits know it because they have fled the country.”
With Greece facing a 19 May deadline to refinance its staggering €300bn euro debt, the EU and IMF agreed last week to inject up to €120bn euro into its cash-starved coffers on condition that Athens makes unprecedented budget cuts.
The tough regime, which also includes a freeze on public sector wages and pensions in addition to tax hikes, has not been seen since the country emerged from the privations of civil war in 1949.
“Why should we, the little man, pay for this crisis?” said Giorgos Didimopoulos, a 55-year-old jeweller who belongs to a communist-backed union which on Tuesday stormed the ancient Acropolis to make precisely that point.
“What people forget is that we Greeks don’t like authority. We have always resisted when we think something is unfair. We fought against the Persians at Marathon, the Germans during the second world war and we will fight the IMF because in reality we no longer have a government. It is foreign forces who are in charge of us now.”
Polls show that he is not alone. The perception is growing that it is low-income Greeks, already hit by three previous packages of austerity measures, who are being made to suffer disproportionately from the three-year fiscal and structural programme. In repeated surveys the vast majority have said they will take to the streets to oppose the “barbaric” measures. For many, today’s violence is a taste of what is to come.
The Pasok’s (Labourite equivalents) cravenness cannot be overcome simply by anarchist Molotovs, however justifiably fiery the spirit of rebellion and resistance becomes.
Nor will anarchist enthusiasm take the working class anywhere. The youthful call for “revolution again” is excellent in spirit but without a revolutionary party and a conscious grasp of the bitter civil war barbarities that the ruling class will attempt to impose in order to stay in charge, it has neither the depth nor coherence to carry through the fight to the full conclusion, nor defend itself.
History has demonstrated that the bourgeoisie will do anything, however degenerate and brutal, to stay in power, over and over again, from the slaughter of tens of thousands of workers after the 1871 Paris Commune to the entire history of the twentieth century and its fascist, blitzkrieging, torturing, death-squad, concentration camp, mass destruction wars and the endless horrific interventions against all communist states, including the appalling chemical-warfare scorched-earth monstrosities of Vietnam and Korea, and the genocidal suppressions of Latin American people’s movements, the one million strong slaughter of communist sympathisers in Indonesia in 1965, the brutal war against China’s Mao led movement and constant subversion and nuclear intimidation of the Soviet Union itself. 
British imperialism has played its role too, from the British (Attlee Labour led!) anti-communist brutality of the Malaysian suppression, continuing African colonialism, and most appositely the napalm-using suppression of the Greek partisan communists between 1945-49 (with American help and funds).
The world is long beyond the point of “defending gains and human rights”, into a class-fight to the death for the future of humanity and the whole planet. 
Until these lessons are learned, the angriest and most passionate eruptions will be dashing themselves onto the rocks to no purpose.
And the heart of learning lessons is to examine the tragic and flawed history of the retreats from revolutionary grasp which have smothered and suppressed the ever recurring revolutionary instincts of the working class for most of the twentieth century, the dire legacy of the revisionism begun long ago, from almost the earliest days of Stalin’s leadership.
For all the sound and determined socialist development, and titanic achievement of the Soviet workers state and the socialist and revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle it has inspired around the world, most particularly after the shattering setbacks for imperialism after the Second World War (which amounted after 1941 essentially to a massive rerun of the Russian revolution against the western-goaded Nazi-German counter-revolutionary onslaught), the seed of class-collaborating retreat was sown, and germinated into the dire mistakes and misleadership of the post-war period which has led the working class up the “democracy” and “peaceful road” garden path for the long artificially paper dollar “boom” decades, limited to the “fight for peace” (which even the most posturingly “hard” of the Stalinists like the Lalkar/Proletarian in Britain still put forwards to the working class, a completely fantastical and criminally deluded nonsense of supposedly “stopping war” by organising the working class to keep the weapons out of the hands of capitalism).
As if. 
And as if it were possible at all to organise the working class on that scale, would it not be far easier simply to get on with overturning the whole capitalist system??
Total confusion about the nature and character of capitalism and where it was heading has reigned, which has almost destroyed much of the giant prestige and influence of what was declared to be “communism”, and leading to its eventual and completely unnecessary liquidation of a still growing Soviet economy to “market forces” by the idiot, Christian-minded tide of Gorbachevite capitulation, dismantling the dictatorship of the proletariat workers state forces.
The failure of revisionism (see many past issues of the EPSR and especially 1190-96) is the main reason for the confusing vacuum which reigns throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, leading to the temporary rise of the “fundamentalist” leaderships which at least appear to offer the masses a focus for the rising militancy and hatred they feel against the endless tyrannical oppression and poverty imposed on them by the US monopoly corporations and military and CIA force and subversion which backs them up.
Religious ideology is not science and even its most militant and fighting disciplined expressions like the Hamas leadership in Palestine, or Hizbullah in Lebanon, can only fall short of the ultimate need of the working class everywhere to understand what kind of fight it is in. 
But the determination to fight back against fascist colonialism and master-race intimidation will continue to draw the enthusiastic response of the masses throughout the world until a better and more clear Marxist revolutionary movement can build a leadership for the total war against capitalism which is the only answer to the collapse and slump disaster now rushing across the planet.
None of these lessons are coming from the Stalinist legacy in Greece itself.  
The Greek Stalinist party, the KKE is one of the few remaining communist parties in Europe retaining a mass influence in the working class and yet there is not one mention of revolution on its website analysis and statements.
What is the point of draping banners on the Acropolis demanding the workers of Europe “rise up” if you give them not a jot of understanding of the nature of the world they live in and dire universal crisis of capitalist crisis; if you make no mention of the enormous ferment of revolution which has been on the boil throughout the Middle East; which has taken over the streets of Bangkok and which is explosively beneath the surface everywhere.??
This is Duke of York “leftism”, leading workers up to the top of the hill only to lead them back down again.
It sharply confronts the workers precisely with the question of “what next”
And it leaves a complete vacuum, as in this web statement:

As noted by the main speaker of the rally of PAME in Athens “In the name of all the dead of our class and of the young generation, PAME calls upon the working class to lead the struggle to confront the brutal offensive against all peoples in Europe”....

How???

But above all the measures include the most important element for the increase of the capitalist profits that is the complete overthrow of the labour relations while they grant new provocative benefits to the big capital. At the same time, they prepare the ground for the complete abolition of the 13th and 14th salary and pension both in private and public sector.
The class oriented forces of PAME are giving a militant response to this wave of anti-labour measures. They call on the people to be in alert and to go on a new general strike on Wednesday 5 May. With the slogan “the plutocracy to go bankrupt” they call the working people to participate even more determinately in the picket lines and the strike demonstrations of PAME throughout the country.

To do what exactly???????
This refusal to make clear the very basics of revolution, which has the effect simply of tying the working class to a kind of “super-protest” is made a thousand times worse by the “condemnation” of the street violence by the KKE, a total betrayal of the spontaneous anger and spirit erupting currently.
This is on a par with its writing off as “police provocations”, of anarchist street riots two years ago when the anti-police demonstrations erupted after killing of a student demonstrator in Athens (a KKE condemnation which the Lalkar/Proletarian left strangely unmarked in a gushing eulogy to the Greek party’s “analysis” of the collapse of the USSR last year, despite having themselves “celebrated” the street outbursts in Proletarian. But the KKE analysis bolstered their own opportunist evasions on the question of Stalin and the fatal undermining of Leninism that his mistakes and retreats led to; opportunism will use any trick and slyness to cover up its past mistakes it seems): 

In the early morning thousands of workers and young people were outside the workplaces defending the right of the workers to go on strike, against employers’ intimidation. Hundreds of thousands of people protested at the demonstration organised by PAME in 68 cities throughout Greece. 
At the same time, provocative groups tried to undermine the strike demonstration. Aleka Papariga, General Secretary of the CC of KKE, highlighted the importance of the organised political struggle and denounced also in her speech at the parliament the efforts of the provocateurs that led to the death of three young people who died of suffocation after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a bank. 
In Athens the central strike demonstration of PAME took place at Omonoia Square, at the centre of Athens. Giorgos Perros, member of the Executive secretariat of PAME delivered the main speech stressing: 
“No more sacrifices for the bankers, for the industrialists, for the monopolies. We will make sacrifices so as to defend, all together and united, our rights, our life; so as to defend the life of our children, not hand them over to the most brutal exploitation bound hand and foot. We do not give up our gains.

No one wants to see workers killed, (or anyone else) as the three unfortunate bank employees were in the tragedy of the fire, but this constitutes a grotesque repetition of the “condemnation of terrorism” by which the entire fake-“left” demonstrated its cowardice and capitulation to the bourgeoisie just after the 9/11 events.
What a foul and monstrous betrayal of the huge and explosive spontaneous rebellious that is underway on the streets.
If the tragic loss of life is to be blamed on anyone blame it on the capitalist disintegration and vicious class imposition of draconian wage, pension and conditions cuts and the completely justifiable volcano of anger – “write it down” one ordinary middle-aged woman in Athens told a journalist, “I am,  angry, angry” – which it has provoked.  
Capitalism is to blame for all the violence.
This is what the EPSR said in 2001 [Issue 1147 07-08-02]:
But to bolster their opportunism, these fake-’lefts’ love to wallow in total confusion about “violence”, and use it ruthlessly to effectively bury the idea itself of the OVERTHROW of the ruling class. And they moralise “against violence” in this cod-christlike fashion cruelly regardless of the quite stupendous volumes of murderous genocide, brutal violence and torture, starvation, and constant total humiliation that the US-led global imperialist SYSTEM is EVERY DAY inflicting NOW on the worlds poorest exploited billions.
...Collective punishment of Palestinian homes, Afghan villages, Sudanese medical facilities, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc - all are targets and it will never stop until US imperialism  (and its Zionist and UK and other stooges) is defeated.
It is total WAR on millions of innocents from imperialism’s side, only interested in one ‘ thing - remaining the WORLD DOMINANT power at all costs.
So how can this well-guarded US-Zionist imperialist WAR machine be fought back against if not via total WAR against everything American or Zionist, as far as spontaneously-erupting Third World guerrilla-war terrorism is concerned??`7?
Lenin specifically dismissed fake-’left’ attempts to use ‘moral’ or ‘tactical’ posturing arguments (for condemning terrorist spontaneity) as a “degradation of Marxism”.
More shame on the ‘Marxist revolutionaries’ Lenin added,  if tactically ill-judged spontaneous terror was becoming dominant to the organised socialist revolution’s cost.
The only solution that was even thinkable, Lenin goes on, is for the Marxists to organise a more effective revolutionary uprising themselves, - in other words to capture the LEADERSHIP of the violent response to ruling-class tyranny.
In particular, Lenin insisted that very specific historical analysis of ALL the conditions of any action against imperialism was needed, not trite labels stereotyping anarchists or terrorists for immediate dismissal, etc.:

Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.
The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any revolutionary organisation.
The usual appraisal of the struggle we are describing is that it is anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution. Examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers.
But are such examples convincing?
The fact that “guerrilla” warfare became widespread precisely after December, and its connection with the accentuation not only of the economic crisis but also of the political crisis is beyond dispute. The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker. Blanquism and anarchism easily occur to the minds of people who have a weakness for stereotype; but under the circumstances of an uprising, which are so apparent in the Lettish Territory, the inappropriateness of such trite labels is only too obvious.
The example of the Letts clearly demonstrates how incorrect, unscientific and unhistorical is the practice so very common among us of analysing guerrilla warfare without reference to the circumstances of an uprising. These circumstances must be borne in mind, we must reflect on the peculiar features of an intermediate period between big acts of insurrection, we must realise what forms of struggle inevitably arise under such circumstances, and not try to shirk the issue by a collection of words learned by rote, such as are used equally by the Cadets and the Novoye Vremya-ites: anarchism, robbery, hooliganism!
It is said that guerrilla acts disorganise our work.
It is not guerrilla actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control.	 Being incapable of understanding what historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is engendered by powerful economic and ‘political causes. It is not in our power to eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an uprising.
What we have said about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation.   condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes: It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal and demoralising phenomenon, this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal and demoralising methods of struggle. But such an objection would be a purely bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e. into an armed struggle between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.
We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But we absolutely demand in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and that senseless methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general.
The argument that guerrilla warfare disorganises the movement must be regarded critically. Every new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices, inevitably “disorganises” organisations which are unprepared for this new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by recourse to methods of agitation. Our committees were subsequently disorganised by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all.
When I see Social-Democrats proudly and smugly declaring “we are not anarchists, thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this, we reject guerrilla warfare”, - I ask myself: Do these people realise what they are saying? Armed clashes and conflicts between the Black-Hundred government and the population are taking place all over the country. This is an absolutely inevitable phenomenon at the present stage of development of the revolution. The population is spontaneously and in an unorganised way-and for that very reason often in unfortunate and undesirable forms-reacting to this phenomenon also by armed conflicts and attacks. I can understand us refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations is no easy matter. But when I see a Social-Democratic theoretician or publicist not displaying regret over this unpreparedness, but rather a proud smugness and a self-exalted tendency to repeat phrases learned by rote in early youth about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, I am hurt by this degradation of the most revolutionary doctrine in the world.
It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close association, with degraded, drunken riff-raff. That is true. But it only means that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all, positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted and prostituted. Strikes, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become corrupted into “alliances”,  agreements between the workers and the masters against the consumers, Parliament becomes corrupted into a brothel, where a gang of bourgeois politicians barter wholesale and retail “national  freedom”, “liberalism”, “democracy”, republicanism, anti-clericalism, socialism and all other wares in demand. A newspaper becomes corrupted into a public pimp, into a means of corrupting the masses, of pandering to the low instincts of the mob, and so on and so forth. Social-Democracy knows of no universal methods of struggle, such as would shut off the proletariat by a Chinese wall from the strata standing slightly above or slightly below it.
That being so - and it is undoubtedly so - the Social-Democrats must absolutely make it their duty to create organisations best adapted to lead the masses in these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters as well. In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy’s forces.
This is a difficult task, there is no denying. It cannot be accomplished at once. Just as the whole people are being retrained and are learning to light in the course of the civil war, so our organisations must be trained, must be reconstructed in conformity with the lessons of experience to be equal to this task.
We have not the slightest intention of foisting on practical workers any artificial form of struggle, or even of deciding from our armchair what part any particular form of guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in Russia. We are far from the thought of regarding a concrete assessment of particular guerrilla actions as indicative of a trend in Social-Democracy. But we do regard it as our duty to help as far as possible to arrive at a correct theoretical assessment of the new forms of struggle engendered by practical life. We do regard it as our duty relentlessly to combat stereotypes and prejudices which hamper the class-conscious workers in correctly presenting a new and difficult problem and in correctly approaching its’ solution.
• The Bolshevik Social-Democrats are often accused of a frivolous passion for guerrilla actions. It would therefore not be amiss to recall that in the draft resolution on guerrilla actions (Partiiniye Izvestia, No. 2, and Lenin’s report on the Congress), the section of the Bolsheviks who defend guerrilla actions suggested the following conditions for their recognition: “expropriations” of private property were not to be permitted under any circumstances; “expropriations” of government property were not to be recommended but only allowed, provided that they were controlled by the Party and their proceeds used for the needs of an uprising. Guerrilla acts in the form of terrorism were to be recommended against brutal government officials and active members of the Black Hundreds, but on condition that 1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working-class movement in the given locality be reckoned with,  and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away. 
Proletary, No 5, GUERRILLA WARFARE September 30, 1908

There is a truly staggering and heroic partisan and working class fighting tradition in Greece which has so often boiled up that it was necessary for capitalist to impose a vicious overt fascist military Junta on the country throughout the 1960s, and which previously had taken the anti-Nazi partisan WW2 struggle to the verge of total revolution in the late 1940s, a bitter four-year struggle abandoned by Moscow as part of its miscalculated “deals” with imperialism to divide up Europe into zones of influence after the Second World War, trusting to a perspective from Stalin that said imperialism was exhausted and would be contained and gradually overwhelmed by socialist economic growth, requiring only patience and “anti-war” peace struggle by the working class to eventually see its demise.
The entire legacy of the Greek Civil War remains undiscussed; the row with partisan Titoism nearby; recognition of the Zionist “state”by Moscow and much else.
It deserves better; it deserves Leninism.
It needs to be built.
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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