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 1370   7th  June 2010                                                                                                   25p fortnightly
Attacks like the Nazi Zionist flotilla massacre demand a world revolutionary response to imperialist crisis, not more pacifism, saturated in petty bourgeois anti-communism. The entire fake-“left” still fails to link the Palestinians struggle to the need for a world revolutionary struggle to end the imperialist system and mostly capitulate to the “reality” of the Zionist occupation as a “state”. Gaza onslaught is of a piece with the gunning down of democracy demonstrators in Bangkok, the shanty town poor in Jamaica and renewed death squad killing in Latin America. Leninist clarity and willingness to examine past mistakes is vital 

The browbeating accusations against the Gaza peace convoy, of “being responsible” for the piratical violence on board the Gaza peace convoy, attacked in neutral international waters, is not just the sickest confirmation to date of Zionist fascist arrogance but the complete essence of all imperialism’s “might is right” tyrannical dominance and exploitation of the world.
It is also the only answer the monopoly capitalist world has in general to the rising tide of rebellion and hatred against it, caused by its permanent oppression and now the devastating failures, incompetence and catastrophic collapse of its economic and political system, the greatest ever of its inevitable recurring and ever deeper crises. 
Anyone who even dreams of resisting the endless exploitation and brutal discipline of the US Empire and the other rich nations of world capitalist dominance deserves everything they get, including city destroying  punishments, carpet-bombing, murder, massacre and torture, it says.
Gunning down of the Thai democracy Redshirt protests, cold-blooded police slaughter of the unarmed poor in the shanty towns of Jamaica, the endless civilian blitzing “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the arbitrary “collateral damage” of the sinister drone attacks in Pakistan, the renewal of the Latin American death squad terror in Honduras and Colombia, and above all the endless, non-stop, repeated genocidal persecution and massacres of the Palestinians, are all of a piece.
Stepped up collective “punishment” and world intimidation has even more been the 15 year long crisis strategy by dominating US imperialism, to impose “shock and awe” discipline on the entire planet and keep at bay both the growing wave of Third World rebelliousness and all political and economic challenges by its major capitalist rivals which are becoming ever more desperate for their own survival as the world capitalist economic order cataclysmically disintegrates.
Mass bombing, torture, police killing, civilian blitzing, revived death-squad attacks, cold-blooded sniping and army massacres of protesters are now happening so frequently that news of one pushes the others off the front page even before the blood has congealed in the gutters.
It makes a mockery of the constant "human rights" and “freedom and democracy” hypocritical stridency and Goebbels Lies pumped out by the Western intelligence agencies and background ruling class counter-revolutionary networks to keep the world constantly in thrall, whipping up the war fever it needs for the oncoming slump by vicious non-stop fascist demonisation of victim "rogue" states, to distract attention from its own disastrous failures and incompetence in running the world (witness BP oil spills even). 
The depraved and demented upside-down “logic” of the latest onslaught, blaming the victims for causing their own massacre to excuse and “justify” this foul atrocity, is the purest Goebbels Nazism Big Lie yet (dutifully and “fearlessly” parroted by the “probing journalism” of the entire mainstream Western media in one heavy-handed bludgeoning interview after another).
It echoes the infamous fascist joke about “he attacked the bottom of my boot with his face”.
It is clear in this case that the only “fighting and weapons used” against the heavily-armed trigger-happy illegal Zionist boarding was some last minute self-defence efforts by a few of the less shocked and perplexed Turkish peace activists, using whatever means that they could improvise from furniture and kitchen utensils.
But the argument is irrelevant anyway, a preposterous diversion from the actual criminal terrorising of the protestors which was the only reason and purpose to the interception, trying to suggest that they “had it coming”.
Even if the “activists” had been armed to the teeth with the latest high velocity rifles, rocket launchers, torpedoes and grenade throwers, the Zionist onslaught would still have constituted a monstrous fascist aggression.
That is not simply because the attack was in international waters making it an act of piracy, and resistance and defence completely “legal”, as the jurists and lawyers have argued, but because the attack is just a monstrous extension of the foulest expression of world finance capital tyranny and oppression of all, the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
Its out-of-time colonialist, apartheid, Frankenstein monster of a “state” will always and forever be nothing but completely concentrated and permanent aggression, just as it has been from the moment it was jerked into life by systematic terror, ethnic cleansing and massacre in the 1940s, to endlessly harry and genocidally torment an entire people, after stealing their land, villages, fields and olive groves, with their dignity, history, 1500 year long traditions and a significant and proud cultural heritage utterly trampled under the jackboot,  
Everything that is done to fight back against the Jewish-Nazi occupation and blockade of the benighted and non-stop persecuted Palestinian people, and the oppression of the Arab nation around them, and the broader Middle East beyond that, is entirely justified just as the growing worldwide eruptions of the masses from Thailand to Nepal, Jamaica to Jakarta and more are not only entirely justified but increasingly being understood to be the absolute necessity for the downtrodden of the world.
For the savaged and persecuted poverty stricken masses in Palestine the only hope of a future that does not see their faster or slower complete extinction in utter deprivation and misery is to fight back, which can only be done against this kind of fascist jackboot by using every possible weapon they can obtain or improvise (and little enough against the overwhelming firepower of the Zionists – the most heavily armed military in the world relative to its population size).
This is not “terrorism” but the genuine self-defence of a mass population.
Its defiance and determination has inspired the entire Third World for decades and continues to do so with increasing significance as the devastating world slump forces the whole planet into struggle. 
The Zionist entity, deliberately inserted into the resource rich Middle East by the imperialist powers in the post-World War Two period (and tragically, recognised and even aided by Stalin led-Moscow revisionist peaceful coexistence illusions), has been a dagger in the heart of the entire region, lavishly funded and armed by US imperialism ever since, (and other imperialist powers, particularly the UK) to ensure it could play a key role keeping the whole area under control for finance capitalist exploitation.
The demented arrogance of its “chosen people” master-race ideology has suited the entire Western world down to the ground for smiting and suppressing every sign of upheaval and resistance to the plunder and exploitation of the oil and other wealth – so well that the whole rich West has tolerated and turned a blind eye to the genocidal terrorising and attempted destruction of the Palestinian people, the indigenous Semitic inhabitants of the region for the last 1500 years (to put to rest the insane self-pitying and tired self-justifying claims of the Jewish Zionists that the world’s hostility is nothing but “anti-semitism” rather than the well-deserved political contempt and hatred its fascist occupation has bred).
The constant terrorisation, ethnic cleansing, massacre, torture and inhuman siege starvation of an entire nation, and all those around who sympathise and support it, over sixty years has been covered up and ignored in stark contrast to the endless lurid “human rights” sniping and stunted-up “totalitarian repression” lies which the West pours out against the workers states and anti-imperialist nations, and its endless stitched up “war crimes tribunals”, unfounded and unproven “massacre” accusations (like the lies over Racek, Tian an Men, Srebrenica etc etc) and provocative Nazi warmongering stunts, from the Gulf of Tonkin made-up ”boat attack incident” used to trigger the Vietnam war to the latest nonsense allegations of torpedoing a boat levelled against North Korea, 
The siege blockade of Gaza for the last three years, a punishment for the population because they elected (perfectly properly) the defiant Hamas government rather than class collaborating Fatah, has taken the savagery and racist oppression to a new level of brutality, starving and routinely blitzing the people.
But all this is sticking more and more in the world’s throat.
The uproar over this monstrous flotilla killing has already rocked the imperialist world back on its feet forcing, temporarily, the vicious gangster stooge Mubarak regime in Cairo to suspend its craven fascist collaboration with US imperialism, and treaties with Zionism sufficiently to open again the border crossings into besieged and benighted Gaza.
It has even more significantly shaken the entire structure of the Middle East, accelerating the splits between Zionism and the once useful Turkish Western-stooge regime which has been forced by the growing hatred of its masses for the West’s Middle Eastern warmongering to bring itself to the edge of a complete split with Tel Aviv.
The turmoil and ferment caused by the US warmongering bullying and blitzing, and the barbarities of its Zionist cohort now stretches from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea and to the far reaches of Afghanistan, a continuous band of bogged-down unwinnable occupation and military quagmire consuming vast amounts of American and European lives, political momentum, trillions of dollars in finance and resource, and with nothing to show but the relentless recruiting of ever great numbers to the insurgency and resistance.
It is this enormous potentially revolutionary mass and its teeming enthusiasm for a challenge of any kind to the Zionist monster and its US and Western backers which is driving the limited partial retreats for the moment, and the dutiful cosmetic and diversionary world diplomatic calls for “inquiries” and “regret at the deaths” token comments, as the crisis harried Western ruling class sees the potential for totally explosive turmoil to spread.
As always ruling class concessions only come when the revolutionary volcano beneath begins to rumble, with a few scraps thrown from the back of the sled to hold up and divert the wolf pack. If they warn that the blockade is “unsustainable” it means not any consideration for the people there but a warning to the Zionists that they are stirring up too much of a rebellious response beneath.
Reforms have never been achieved any other way and have only that purpose, to divert and head off the real revolutionary struggle (with plenty of help from the fake-“left”).
It may even be, in the end, that the interests of American monopoly capitalism drive it to a split with the more rabid Zionists and the rottweiler attitudes of the current Netanyahu aggression, an extraordinary possibility that the EPSR has long voiced speculatively as a crisis development, should the particular and specific fascist interests of the Jewish Palestine occupation and its non-stop (and unstoppable) local aggression bring it into conflict with the broader strategic fascist interests of the Empire.
US imperialism has bigger fish to fry overall.
The unravelling of crucial networks of compliant bourgeois or even feudal reactionary regimes (Saudi Arabia) in the region would be a disaster and never more than in the onrushing capitalist crisis shaking ruling class confidence and grip to the bone, and especially in the increasingly bitter fight to hold onto world strategic position and interest against other major powers, for the devastating world war conflicts to come, the only outcome there has been in modern times to capitalist crisis implosion.
Despite making the right posturing nationalist noises for the sake of their “Arab streets” most of these regimes have quietly and complacently colluded with imperialist interests for decades, holding back the growing militancy in sometimes brutal local oppression as in Egypt, or the nationalist posturing but compromising inaction many others around, from Syria to Yemen.
Most of all the Turkish regime has been a major US imperialist stooge for decades, siteing anti-USSR missiles and working militarily against Iran, Iraq and others, as well as maintaining close cooperation with the Zionist military  and an important ally of the Zionists, and the current alienation reflects a serious disintegration of US strategic interests.  
But Arab nationalist pressure has meant three major anti-Zionist Middle East wars have erupted nevertheless and it is not so long ago that the same pressures (and the growing capitalist crisis) pushed the once kingpin local CIA-trained and placed, thug tyrant Saddam Hussein from being “our bastard” into a leading challenge to the West, requiring a major put down and leaving a mess that still festers and smoulders in the centre of the overall Middle East disaster created by the “war on terror” .
The Arab league meeting in Cairo this week was obliged to pedal hard to keep up, with the token diplomatic  hostility. 
For the moment the Obama presidency is continuing to back the Zionist fascists just as the Bush presidency did, heading off “world criticism” and using its power over the puppet UN to stall even limited demands for “international inquiries” and so forth, tame enough diversionary tactics as they are, and like reams of UN resolutions before, never to be acted upon.
But even that is at the cost of further damage to US imperialist “democracy” posturing, with some of the more trusting petty bourgeois voices voicing their disgust at Obama over the latest incident in stung commentaries on the bourgeois press websites, 
The incident has helped further shatter petty bourgeois world illusions in a new “nice” Washington (for which 40 years of fake-“left” single issue illusions in black politics, and feminism had softened them up) reflecting how the crisis itself and the spontaneous hostility and hatred on the ground it stirs, will be a major part of transforming consciousness at multiple levels, (and incidentally providing further confirmation for the EPSR’s polemic last autumn against its west country “outsider” renegades whose petty bourgeois hostility objected to the EPSR declaring Obama to be nothing but the latest extension of US Empire fascist warmongering, cosmetically hidden behind a “black nationalist” Mr Nice Guy “democracy” façade to fool the world).
Capitalism itself teaches many of the lessons that drive revolution to the surface.
The dominating and powerful influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington particularly (already complaining that Obama is being too hard, with its cosmetic rapping over of the knuckles of Tel Aviv) and the importance of Zionist aggression in “smiting” the ferment around the Middle East and particularly the constantly demonised Iran, means that the Jewish occupation may not yet be reined in or come into conflict with Washington outright.
But despite the surfacing of these political shifts (long developing beneath the surface), it is a complete misrepresentation to say that changes have been caused by the “peace protests” or even, going further as many of the fake-“lefts” have been trumpeting this week, that the flotillas have either brought the monstrous anti-Gazan blockade siege close to being lifted or as the Zionist oriented CPGB Weekly Worker has even tried to declare, is challenging the very future of Zionism itself and that the “end of the Zionist state is in sight”.
Such relief for the Gazans there is comes from the underlying revolutionary pressures building up as described.
No peace movement or solidarity groupings ever changed anything in themselves; they may reflect a shift in world sympathies which compound and add to the difficulties faced by imperialist dominance and are a starting point for some previously apolitical people who express their indignation and anger this way.
The petty bourgeoisie shifts and swings in the wind because of the lead and strength of the great class forces, the proletariat and the capitalist ruling class.  
Nixon’s retreat from Vietnam was the result of devastating revolutionary armed struggle waged by the Viet Cong against all the odds, which then stimulated the anti-war movement as it struck major blows against the US forces, particularly in the 1968 Tet offensive which triggered a wave of turmoil throughout the West; South Africa’s apartheid was brought down by the heroic sacrifices of the political and armed struggle of the ANC and Umkontu We Sizwe, not boycotts and cricket tour bans; Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF won the anti-imperialist independence war, not the token and ill-enforced Labour “sanctions” against Smith’s white supremacists, Che Guevara is a world icon because of the revolutionary armed struggle which overturned Batista, and Ireland’s dogged IRA/Sinn Féin armed struggle won the right to now fight peacefully for growing progress towards a united Ireland, etc etc. 
Only defeat will push back the imperialists, not peaceful exposures.
The more that the Zionists and their Western backers feel their grip on the world is slipping, the more barbaric they will become, just as the deepening of the world crisis and the slipping of American imperialism into permanently unrepayable world debt has forced Washington into taking the lead in stirring “shock and awe” warmongering.
The aim from the late 1990s onwards at least has been for America to bluster and bully its way through the giant unfolding cataclysm, demanding the subservience of the whole planet to its rapacious plundering exploitation, suppressing revolutionary stirrings in the Third World and rival capitalist challenges from the other Great Powers, and new challengers like Brazil, the oligarch Bonapartism of post-Soviet Russia and even India.
For all that the overt bullying of the Bush era has stirred such hatred and resistance that it eventually destroyed Republican credibility (as Thatcherite brittleness failed before), the US continues on the warmongering path, using the post-Blairite “soft cop” PC-ism of Obama to restore the momentum.    
The breaking of the crisis into the open has weakened and undermined all ruling class confidence but the agenda remains, and the pressures and contradictions driving war and aggression are unstoppable.
In order to survive the huge catastrophe of the economic disaster now unfolding – and which will break with renewed force shortly whatever temporary “alleviation” quantitative easing money printing is supposed to have achieved, – it has to massively accelerate the already draconian regimes of cuts and “austerity” being “promised” by the ruling class A-team Tories (and their alternatives, Lib or Lab) and every other reactionary bourgeois government (including the Greek New Labour equivalent of PASOK in Greece and the social democrats in Spain).
The street turmoil in Athens is a tiny taste of the response that will come, joining the turmoil in the rest of the world.
But no ruling class ever gave up power even when its system was rotten to the core, and the bourgeoisie has shown over and over again that it will do any torture, slaughter, and terrorising it must to stay in power.
The world is heading for the bloodiest and most destructive World War slump disaster and destruction ever witnessed.
Zionism, specifically, must, additionally, maintain its military jackboot smiting oppression over Palestine and its “buffer zone” surroundings, if its out-of-time land theft colonialism is to survive, because in the modern post-colonial epoch it will never stop generating the resistance and hatred of the dispossessed people and their growing and ever better organised rebellion and militancy which will climb yet to greater heights of determination and, together with the rising tide of world anti-imperialist struggle, threaten more and more certainly to eventually utterly destroy the Zionist political entity and its artificial occupation “state”.
The shocking attack on the convoy was no “public relations mistake” despite the misgivings and nervousness of even some of the Jewish petty bourgeois colonists in Jerusalem about its in-your-face fascist violence.
It is where all of capitalism is going as constantly made clear in Afghanistan and Pakistan etc.
Against this depravity the politics of “peaceful resistance” expressed by the “peaceniks” is at best well meaning but ineffectual.
It says the world can be “shamed” into relieving the genocidal siege and constant blitzing “punishments” and terror imposed on the hapless Palestinians.
It tells the world that yet more “pressure” will change things, telling the Palestinians and all the world that resolve, and “humanitarian and peaceful” actions can “alleviate their suffering”.
The bravery, determination and personal dedication of the hundreds of well-meaning and concerned activists who joined in the great international aid flotilla is undisputed, as is the tragedy of the lives sacrificed facing the barbaric Nazi-Zionist raid on the ships. 
But this deluded nonsense is going to change nothing,  and is utterly hostile to the only solution there is to the world crisis, the revolutionary Marxist overthrow of the entire system.
It may be that the Gaza peace flotilla has done sterling work in further exposing to the world the monstrous fascist murdering arrogance and Nazi depravity of the Jewish-Zionist occupation of Palestine, and that was always its intention.
And it may even be that the many of the Turkish participants at least, if not the assortment of international pacifists and peaceniks on board, reflect a growing anti-imperialist mood which had every intention of triggering exactly such an action in order to make such an exposure (even at the cost of their own lives), knowing that the convoy could only be an intolerable provocation to the occupiers.
Their readiness, when it came to the boarding, to defend themselves against the armed hostility is far better than simple passivity (which was being shot down anyway).
But a far better grasp of the reality of the slump and the revolutionary future contradictions rapidly being pushed to the edge by the crisis, is what everyone needs – and not just the Palestinians.
Just the opposite. 
Pacifism is a complete diversion from the only solution that is going to help the Palestinian nation – the militant struggle against Zionist oppression which the masses on the ground in Palestine, Lebanon, and the wider Arab and Middle East region have been developing with greater and greater coherence and confidence and which eventually must reach the point of conscious revolutionary overturn, to develop a Leninist socialist consciousness.
The current uncompromising leadership of Hamas, for all that it is hampered by its religious ideology which in the end can only interfere with the clearest scientific, (which is to say Marxist), perspective, has won widespread support because it has taken militancy and dogged refusal to compromise far further than the revisionist influenced and petty bourgeois collaborationism of the previous Fatah leadership (of which more below). 
It is not helped by an entire fake-“left” movement which effectively condemns the Palestinian (and other Middle East) struggles by writing off “terrorism” as being “inadmissible” or “criminal” or “the wrong way to fight”, and at key moments like the 9/11 attack cravenly lining itself up with imperialism to “condemn” the growing  Third World uprisings (or to evade the question by denying the Third World ferment with ludicrously complex conspiracy theories suggesting the West carries out all these things). 
This is how the EPSR argued the case at that time (EPSR 1144 16-07-02) on the academic anti-Israel boycott:  

But the only real issue of course is that, as throughout history, the sole effective class-war and national-war means against absolute tyranny (the existence of ‘Israel’ means the stealing of the best part of the Palestinian homeland for keeps) is to fight total conflict. The ‘violence’ of the Palestinians, all of it, is 100% justified both historically and ‘morally’. There is no other way.
The ‘violence’ of the Zionists, all of it, is 100% contemptible fascist brutality and criminal aggression.
Their ‘solution’ (the boycotters - ed) is even more corrupt, consciously exploiting any ‘average commonsense opinion’ on earth by going for the supposed “fifty-fifty mutual-tolerance compromise solution”.
“Yet every rational person knows that the only prospect of a just and lasting peace lies in Israel’s recognition of the legitimacy of a Palestinian state and the Arab world’s acceptance of a secure Israel behind its 1967 borders. That is what every peace plan proposes. But how to get from here to there? Is there anything that ordinary citizens, that is civil society, can do to bring pressure to bear to compel our governments and international institutions to move the peace process forward?”

This is utterly cynical and sick Zionist gobshite, the total viciousness of imperialist global military tyranny in all its rotten glory.
All 100% of Palestine (as was until 1948) is 100% Palestinian, and always will be.
The colonialist limit these gents want everyone to call it quits at (Palestinians all confined to the West Bank and Gaza; Zionist colonisation getting all the rest up to the 1967 limits of their military conquests) would leave the Palestinian people with just 22% of their own homeland.
What a monstrous joke.
But there is even more harm than that in this sinister “even-handed ‘peace’ proposal” for the permanent humiliation, misery, and shame of the Palestinian nation.
These ‘left’ protesters have an even more vicious and demoralising purpose than their wretched condoning of the colonisation-theft of 78% of the land of Palestine from the Palestinian people, – and even more crucial than their predictable bourgeois orthodoxy in echoing the worldwide Western ‘democratic’ con-trick of getting the whole planet to “condemn violence” while the actual imperialist global military dictatorship gets on with brutalising everywhere into enforced submission, bit by bit.
Their big fraud is in so adamantly implying that there could not possibly be ANY OTHER SOLUTION than for the Arabs and Zionists to “share” the land of Palestine (as was) (Some “sharing”, - 78% to 22%!!).
Utter total nonsense. It is the one ‘solution’ which could obviously never work in practice; (where would the ousted Palestinian millions with no more home to go back to end up, - on the already overcrowded West Bank and Gaza?  and with already not enough water, or land, or manoeuvrability there for any tolerable life even for the Palestinian natives of Gaza and the West Bank????; it is a nonsense ‘solution’, meaning certain continuing anti-occupation conflict for the rest of time).
But worse still, what does such a hopeless temporary ceasefire compromise imply about the world as a whole??????
It implies that history never solves ANY problems, and that intolerable grievances must continue for ever.
This is the most monstrous philosophical brainwashing assault that could be conceived against the working class.
Unless it takes the power by revolution, the working class will remain the working class forever, perpetually exploited by the private monopoly-ownership total control of economic, political and social life by the ruling class, and forever doomed to an ever widening gap between rich and poor as an ever increasing percentage of total wealth is cornered by an ever narrowing Establishment of the super-rich.
These polite ‘protesters’ are telling the entire working class to remain wage slaves forever, always subject to the capriciousness of the hire-and-fire jobs market, and in times of crisis of ‘over-production’ crash and slump, facing certainly FALLING living standards and fraught prospects and likely inter-imperialist trade-war warmongering for the indefinite future, - all on the bourgeois philosophical basis that “nothing ever changes”.
It is a stinking lie, of course. And it is the dramatic transformations within the crisis itself that are the only ULTIMATE historical reality.
The whole pattern of national-liberation itself was set up by the great imperialist system crisis of the 1930s (and its ensuing inter-imperialist World War II), with the anti-colonial liberation wars-struggle (to end direct Empire control) all proceeding from the blows to imperialism which that crisis represented.
The neo-colonial control of the American ‘New World order’ is the obvious next stage of imperialist tyranny which will be brought down by the next ludicrous crisis of monopoly-capitalist economic anarchy and trade-war destruction (accompanied by imperialist warmongering bluster and bullying, and inter-imperialist score settling, as the Great Diversion to stop the international working class turning to the socialist revolution as the only possible way forward for civilisation now).
These bourgeois ‘protesters’ sit right in the middle of this Great Diversion with their condoning of the continued Zionist US colonial-military tyranny over the Middle East, the key to which is the subjugation of the post 1940 seized territories of Palestine, the bits which have outrageously been re-titled ‘Israel’.
And what is this ‘protest’ diversion protecting???
It is hoping to satisfy anti-imperialist hatred, rapidly spreading all round the Middle-East, by taking this joke “halfway-house’ stand against Western bourgeois orthodoxy.
For where all revolutionary consciousness is undoubtedly heading is towards challenging the ludicrous “right” of this Zionist colonisation called ‘Israel’ to exist at all.
There is not a scrap of sensible rational justification in it of any kind, and as soon as the rotten nonsense of the 1948 imperialist imposed colonisation tyranny is challenged in its entirety, the obvious ONLY solution (to the whole catastrophic business of ethnically cleansing the entire Palestinian nation from the main heartland of their OWN country), - becomes immediately crystal clear.
The Zionist colonisation (and UN 1948 tyrannical decision) must be rescinded forthwith, and the whole Palestinian people restored to the WHOLE of their rightful homeland.
And this is the consciousness, - the only sensible and rational one, - which is obviously on the advance.
And hence the objective historical role of all this middleclass ‘peace mongering’ is to stop all thinking and to con everyone with this non-existent ‘compromise’ daydream as rapidly as possible.

All this was completely on show in the rash of demonstrations and marches after the event with the entire Trotskyist and revisionist fake- “left” spectrum posturing mightily around the dampest of squib “demands” and petty bourgeois “left” poseur celebrities such as the anti-communist former Trotskyist filmmaker Ken Loach “boldly” demanding “fairer coverage from the BBC”. You might as well demand Marxist science from Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry!!!  
The remaining left poseurs who constantly protest that they are “revolutionary” prove exactly the opposite with their “analyses” and “demands” like the Workers Power Trots for example demanding “World leaders must act” (and pigs must fly). 
The Weekly Worker supposition that “Zionism is finished” is doubly tricky, implying firstly that the pacifist struggle can achieve miracles of change but with a deeper cover up. Its real meaning is that the particular aggressive brand of rule in Israel is finished, not that the Zionist-Jewish state is finished.
Like all the “lefts” they do not even raise the issue of the existence of the non-state of Israel in the first place; let alone that it should be completely smashed (with the Jewish residents in the region free to live on in a Palestinian state on the same basis as everyone else once rightful property was returned, or to go back to their earlier homes in the US, Europe or Russia etc.)
The implication of all the slogans to “lift the blockade” etc goes no further than the compromise solutions discussed in the quote above.
All of them, implicitly or explicitly recognise the “state of Israel” - usually in calls for a “return to the 1967 borders”, a demand that goes no further than “left” journalism in the mainstream capitalist press such as this:

...Hamas has maintained an effective ceasefire and the rocket launchers have been mostly silent, but the siege and the boycott of Gaza grinds on. Sooner or later Hamas will conclude that passivity is a dead end.
Meanwhile, the United Nations estimates that Gaza is now only getting around a quarter of the supplies it received before the blockade was tightened three years ago. Sanitation has broken down, the economy has collapsed, 80% of the population are on UN subsistence handouts, and postwar reconstruction is impossible because Israel has blocked the supply of cement – along with anaesthetics, baby formula, books, fresh meat, canned fruit and donkeys. If the underground steel wall now being constructed by the US and Egypt on the Egyptian-Gaza border is effective, even Gaza’s lifeline of tunnels will be shut down.
In reality, though, the blockade of Gaza is only a symptom of the 43-year-old occupation that enforces it – and the Palestinian dispossession that means most of its people are refugees. Despite Israel’s withdrawal of settlements in 2005, the Gaza Strip remains occupied both legally and practically, its access by land, sea and air controlled by Israel, whose forces invade at will. But it is the elected administration of Hamas that is blockaded and boycotted for resisting and refusing to recognise the occupier, while the occupier’s security is deemed paramount at all times.
Hence the proximity talks going nowhere with a Palestinian Authority that has lost legitimacy, a continuing US veto on Palestinian reconciliation, and the mirage of a state for ever held in prospect while relentless colonisation on the ground makes its realisation ever more remote.
As the international activists running Israel’s blockade grasped long before most of their leaders, this cannot go on. The impact of Monday’s attacks on the already soured relations between Israel and Turkey – now increasingly seen as a regional leader across the Middle East – looks set to be far-reaching. Israel’s long-time strategy of making common cause with the non-Arab powers of Turkey and Iran against the Arabs has finally been turned on its head.
It would be hazardous to assume this week’s events will be a watershed. Israel has brazened out many far greater outrages before. Something is shifting, however. ...

One of the more posturing left groups, the Proletarian/Lalkar pretends to have gone past this, declaring that Zionism has now “made the two-state solution impossible”.
But while this is this is a step forwards from its past revisionist advocacy of a partial Palestinian state (see above), it is also highly dishonest, covering up not only its “peaceful settlement” delusions, but also the consequences this has had.
For a start the two-state solution has always been an impossibility rather than being “ruled out” because of Zionist intransigence. It is not “history moving on” as Lalkar sneakily suggests, but Lalkar’s realisation that its old position is not longer tenable.
But then to admit that would open up a major can of past mistakes and errors, starting with one of the most glaring errors of the Lalkerite guru figure, Joseph Stalin, in recognising Israel in the first place and even offering it arms and support in the late 1940s.
And that would draw in necessarily the re-assessment of the errors and problems of revisionism in total – which despite numerous polemics over many years with the EPSR for example, the Brarites resolutely and dishonestly refuse to do.
Consequences have been dire, part of the soft-brained “peace struggle” imperialist containment confusion which has utterly destroyed world militancy’s confidence in communism (or what was perceived to be communism) and which led ultimately to such a decline in Moscow’s revolutionary grasp that the later stages of Stalin’s revisionist trained leadership finally capitulated completely to the supposed cleverness of the “free market” and in 1989 abandoned the vital proletarian dictatorship defence of the giant achievements of the Soviet Union altogether, leading to the monstrous capitalist counter-revolution and current oligarch mess.  
What most of all has disappeared, step by shifting (and shifty) step over the last five years, in Lalkar’s suddenly “bold” position is the dire errors and mistakes it made by first of all hailing the arch-petty bourgeois compromiser Arafat as a “master tactician” and then telling the world to back his Palestinian Authority successor Mahmoud Abbas, declaring him to have the same kind of tactical skills, “weaving between armed struggle and peaceful negotiation”.
It was an appalling error stemming from a continued insistence that a two-state compromise was either possible or represented anything but a total betrayal anyway.
And Lalkar has covered it up, just as its revisionist Stalin-worship politics covers up decades of mistakes and errors, by Moscow itself and now Lalkar’s own opportunist and devious evasions.
Year by year the disgusting stoogery that this Abbas petty bourgeois leadership inevitably sunk into, has exposed its errors further and further, with not a word of explanation or honest re-appraisal from Lalkar-Proletarian, only the unexplained increasing “militancy” of the latest articles (which just 18 months ago were still calling for a withdrawal to 1967 borders. That has mysteriously changed too with no word of explanation).     
But the class collaborating stoogery of the Fatah, lost in the notion that a “deal” was possible if it “kept its nose clean” (as “don’t rock the boat” revisionism always suggests - and Obama continues to advocate) has really begun to stink.
From a beginning accepting “training and arms” from the US it has become clear just how far the Abbass-ites have sunk: 

Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.
Less than a year after Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is co-operating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.
The relationship between the CIA and the two Palestinian agencies involved – Preventive Security Organisation (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI) – is said by some western diplomats and other officials in the region to be so close that the American agency appears to be supervising the Palestinians’ work.
One senior western official said: “The [Central Intelligence] Agency consider them as their property, those two Palestinian services.” A diplomatic source added that US influence over the agencies was so great they could be considered “an advanced arm of the war on terror”.
While the CIA and the Palestinian Authority (PA) deny the US agency controls its Palestinian counterparts, neither denies that they interact closely in the West Bank. Details of that co-operation are emerging as some human rights organisations are beginning to question whether US intelligence agencies may be turning a blind eye to abusive interrogations conducted by other countries’ intelligence agencies with whom they are working. According to the Palestinian watchdog al-Haq, human rights in the West Bank and Gaza have “gravely deteriorated due to the spreading violations committed by Palestinian actors” this year.
Most of those held without trial and allegedly tortured in the West Bank have been supporters of Hamas, which won the Palestinian elections in 2006 but is denounced as a terrorist organisation by the PA – which in turn is dominated by the rival Fatah political faction – and by the US and EU. In the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has been in control for more than two years, there have been reports of its forces detaining and torturing Fatah sympathisers in the same way.
Among the human rights organisations that have documented or complained about the mistreatment of detainees held by the PA in the West Bank are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, al-Haq and the Israeli watchdog B’Tselem. Even the PA’s human rights commission has expressed “deep concern” over the mistreatment of detainees.
The most common complaint is that detainees are severely beaten and subjected to a torture known as shabeh, during which they are shackled and forced to assume painful positions for long periods. There have also been reports of sleep deprivation, and of large numbers of detainees being crammed into small cells to prevent rest. Instead of being brought before civilian courts, almost all the detainees enter a system of military justice under which they need not be brought before a court for six months.
According to PA officials, between 400 and 500 Hamas sympathisers are held by the PSO and GI.
Some of the mistreatment has been so severe that at least three detainees have died in custody this year. The most recent was Haitham Amr, a 33-year-old nurse and Hamas supporter from Hebron who died four days after he was detained by GI officials last June. Extensive bruising around his kidneys suggested he had been beaten to death. Among those who died in GI custody last year was Majid al-Barghuti, 42, an imam at a village near Ramallah.
While there is no evidence that the CIA has been commissioning such mistreatment, human rights activists say it would end promptly if US pressure was brought to bear on the Palestinian authorities.
Shawan Jabarin, general director of al-Haq, said: “The Americans could stop it any time. All they would have to do is go to [prime minister] Salam Fayyad and tell him they were making it an issue.. Then they could deal with the specifics: they could tell him that detainees needed to be brought promptly before the courts.”
A diplomat in the region said “at the very least” US intelligence officers were aware of the torture and not doing enough to stop it. He added: “There are a number of questions for the US administration: what is their objective, what are their rules of engagement? Do they train the GI and PSO according to the manual which was established by the previous administration, including water-boarding? Are they in control, or are they just witnessing?”
Sa’id Abu-Ali, the PA’s interior minister, accepted detainees had been tortured and some had died, but said such abuses had not been official policy and steps were being taken to prevent them. He said such abuses “happen in every country in the world”. Abu-Ali sought initially to deny the CIA was “deeply involved” with the two Palestinian intelligence agencies responsible for the torture of Hamas sympathisers, but then conceded that links did exist. “There is a connection, but there is no supervision by the Americans,” he said. “It is solely a Palestinian affair. But the Americans help us.”
The CIA does not deny working with the PSO and GI in the West Bank, although it will not say what use it has made of intelligence extracted during the interrogation of Hamas supporters. But it denies turning what one official described as “a Nelson’s eye to abuse”.
The CIA’s spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, denied it played a supervisory role over the PSO or GI. “The notion that this agency somehow runs other intelligence services … is simply wrong,” he said. “The CIA … only supports, and is interested in, lawful methods that produce sound intelligence.”
Concern about detainee abuse is growing in the West Bank despite an effort by the international community to create Palestinian institutions that will guarantee greater security as a first step towards creating a Palestinian state. More than half of the PA’s $2.8bn (£1.66bn) budget came from international donors last year; more than a quarter was swallowed up by the ministry of the interior and national security. Human Rights Watch and al-Haq have said that in raising the security capacity of the PA, donor countries have a responsibility to ensure it observes international human rights standards.
At the heart of the international effort is the creation of the Palestinian national security force, a 7,500-strong gendarmerie trained by US, British, Canadian and Turkish army officers under the command of a US general, Keith Dayton. Many Palestinians blame Dayton for the mistreatment of Hamas sympathisers, although the general’s remit does not extend to either of the intelligence agencies responsible.
Some in Dayton’s team are said to have been warned by senior CIA officers that they should not attempt to interfere in the work of the PSO or GI. Privately, some of them are said to fear that the mistreatment of detainees, and the anger this is arousing among the population, may undermine their mission. One source said: “I know that Dayton and his crew are very concerned about what is happening in those detention centres because they know it can jeopardise their work.”

Such mistakes matter, not because every group can make errors but because they expose the critical political flaws and philosophical mistake of the past which need clarifying and grasping by the entire world proletariat, to know what went wrong with the first giant 70 year long massive achievements of the USSR and the Third International and to make sure it does things better the next time.
Look how sneakily the Lalkar tries to distance itself:

At the time of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians, under enormous duress, made temporary concessions to the occupying forces which nobody had any right to demand of them, for the moment ceding 78% of their historic homeland in exchange for a promise of peace.  No Palestinian doubted the intolerable historical injustice represented in this tactical retreat, or believed that a piecemeal reversion to the pre-1967 borders could ever satisfy the legitimate demand for self-determination on the whole of the national homeland.  But those in the West who held the Palestinian cause dearest had respect for this agonizing choice made by the liberation movement, and understood the tactical considerations which underpinned it.
Now the world must recognise and respect a different choice made by the Palestinian people.  The mandate for the road of intifada represented first, by the landslide vote for Hamas, and second, by the continuing steadfast support for the Hamas and their call for unity in the face of all Israel’s subsequent crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, can leave no honest observer in doubt as to the will of the Palestinian people. As is well known, Hamas has not insisted on the immediate reversal of the Nakba, satisfied for the moment to keep the focus on the territories occupied in 1967.  But those in the West who would give solidarity to the Palestinian people need now to understand that history has moved on.  Those imperialist politicians who allow Gaza to burn and starve, who egg on the settlers’ fascist land grab on the West Bank, who promote the ethnic cleansing of arabs from Jerusalem, whilst all the time mouthing pious homilies about “road maps” leading to some fantasy “Two State Solution” – these fraudsters with blood on their hands must be exposed and denounced. 

But uncritically supporting the Hamas, is not an answer either. Lalkar’s floundering efforts to get out of its past errors has pushed it more and more into uncritically jumping onto the back of every anti-imperialist leadership going, now shouting stirring slogans supporting the insurgency in Iraq, now some other anti-imperialist movement. 
This is a million miles from understanding the Leninist dialectical grasp of wanting total defeat for imperialism (by whatever forces and leaderships might be rising and taking on the struggle currently) while constantly insisting on the need for scientific Marxist revolutionary understanding, not supporting irrationality.
Wanting to see Saddam defeat the US invasion by no means implies support for the monster.
And while Hamas is a different thing altogether, Marxism still needs to point out the barminess of its religious ideology and the limits of non-scientific understanding.
But Lalkar/Proletarian is so far gone in evading the theoretical questions it can no longer see their significance.
That is why it declared the recent turmoil in Thailand as “the revolution”: 

What all this shows is that the necessary ingredients that together constitute a revolutionary situation are steadily coming together in Thailand - the ruling class in no longer able to rule in the old way and the people are no longer prepared to be ruled in the old way.

But while the turmoil and upheaval in Bangkok are clearly part of the growing wave of world struggle against the imperialist order, which is a major shift towards revolutionary development, to describe it as “the revolution” is a an ultra-left exaggeration, part of Lalkar/Proletarian’s posturing cover-up of its past failures.
What Lalkar’s gushing slyly misses out is the third and most crucial part of Lenin’s famous dictum, that there also be a revolutionary party, to provide consciousness to the masses, without which the turmoil will not take power. Leninism is urgently needed.
And this is not “interfering in someone else’s struggle” as one CBP Morning Star paper seller cynically and aggressively (and counter-revolutionarily) put it on the recent London Gaza demonstration (somewhat begging the question of why he was therefore there) but a vital necessity of world struggle.
The Palestinians' struggle is not "our struggle too" as the glib "solidarity" movements, (and the CPBer’s fake-left opportunism) always put it, with a tone little different to carrying out charity work (and with exactly the same petty bourgeois smug and complacent patronising of the "dispossessed"). 
It is the forefront of the same struggle that everyone is in across the planet whether or not they have ever heard of the Palestinians or not.
To take up another of the CPBer’s defeatist sneers, the way the Palestinian struggle can overcome the huge firepower of Zionism is precisely because their struggle merges with the collapse of the entire capitalist world and the great wave of revolutionary ferment against it which is reaching boiling point everywhere.
Jamaica and Bangkok and the whole Middle East and many more places are great outbursts of struggle which are challenging Washington’s world dominance. When that has become dozens at the same time it will be providing the greatest aid possible to the Palestinians.
So when are the fake-"left" going to stop criminally misleading the workers and masses into yet another disaster and dead end with the "steadying hand" to restrain "anarchism" (by which they mean street anger) and hold back rebelliousness in the straitjacket of yet more "protest" to "achieve change" by "finding better representatives" for left pressure, or by "organised trade unionism" to "defend conditions" or push forwards the "peace struggle" on the "parliamentary road" to change and better conditions?
The great lessons being made by the masses in the teeth of escalating wars, massacres and tyranny which have been non-stop in the Third World for a century and half, and are becoming universal in the last decade, will discredit for ever the smugness, complacency and anti-communist opportunism of the pretend revolutionaries. 
But it is “too early” to be talking about revolutionary theory say the Trotskyite and revisionist posturing mountebanks and charlatans, who have led the working class around in pointless protest circles and on “parliamentary roads” for the last six decades (including Lalkar/Proletarian for all their posturing) achieving precisely nothing permanent except to suppress revolutionary perspectives. 
But world is crying out for real Marxist science and leadership. Build Leninism. 
Don Hoskins

E P S R   BOX

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

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

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

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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
As with Thailand and Jamaica,  Western silence and lack of condemnation speaks volumes about its “human rights” posturing lies and constant, loud, fraudulent “war crime” stunts against Sudan, Iran, Burma, North Korea and Cuba etc.  But lefts and revisionism still fail to call for revolution 

Journalists hunted down in Honduras
SEVEN journalists have been murdered in Honduras during the brief period in power of the coup government of Porfirio Lobo

by Joaquín Rivery Tur
Georgino Orellana was killed with one shot to the head in San Pedro Sula as he left the TV-Honduras building after his news program.
The police took him to a public hospital and it is not known how long he had to wait for medical attention. There is no news of any hunt for his killer. Why? He was probably another police officer or soldier.
Without any doubt, the death squads have been resurrected.
On March 1 in Tegucigalpa two gunmen killed Joseph Ochoa, who was accompanying his colleague Karol Cabrera, who received a bullet wound. She was already the victim of another attack last December and has now been declared herself a political exile and refused to leave the military hospital where she was treated.
I do not believe that she will be safe in this hospital from the savage hunting down of journalists unleashed by the regime that Washington is helping and supporting and considers to be “democratic.”
The justification for Cabrera’s fears came 10 days after the last crime, when a number of unknown individuals gunned down David Mesa in La Ceiba, 350 kilometers north of Tegucigalpa, and four days later, Nahún Palacios suffered a similar fate... Journalists fighting against the regime from their trenches are now considered hunting game.
On April 20, agricultural engineer Jose Oscar Flores was kidnapped by police after taking part in a march in Tegucigalpa. He had carried a placard counting the days of mass resistance to all the demonstrations that he had attended.
The National Popular Resistance Front stated that they had received a call from a trusted person on Flores’ cell phone, informing the Front that he was in police custody in an unknown place and was being tortured.
The Lobo [“wolf in English] is on the prowl all over Honduras in a diabolical fiesta to the music of submachine guns and, worse, with the knowledge of the so-called Organization of American States (OAS), the U.S. military base in Palmerola and its embassy in the country.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel, El País, Le Figaro, L’Stampa, the Financial Times and other major newspapers have not given any space to the barbarity that is taking place in that Central American nation; neither have U.S. and European television networks.
For them, violating human rights are actions being undertaken for the well-being of the peoples in progressive countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. These countries are being accused of everything, while the horrors of Guantánamo Naval Base, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and the CIA secret prisons are forgotten, and there is silence on the ignominy of the federal government order preventing the names of torturers from being revealed. Now they are also concealing the atrocities in Honduras.
According to the National Resistance Front website, Lobo and his “Parliament” have modified laws approved by the defeated government of Manuel Zelaya which granted social and labor benefits to the population, while the privileges of the large landowners and business sector - which had barely been touched - are increasing. Up to their necks in terms of responsibility for what is taking place, oligarchs such as Miguel Facussé, Rafael Ferrari, Fredy Nasser, Schucry Kafie and the bloody Roberto Micheletti are continuously banqueting with the repressive new government - of their same class, of course. They are toasting with the blood of the peoples.
The regime has reserved the worst role for the mass media. Sinister and perverse, television, radio and newspapers are concealing or manipulating the repression so as to represent the country as sailing on a calm sea. With the exception of certain radio stations and small newspapers - whose journalists are playing with death given the persecution of the new death squadrons - the silence of the media owners is as murderous as the bullets destroying reporters’ lives.
Only a few newspapers and radio stations are daring to state the truth, plus a handful more in Latin America. The corporate media is mute. International news agencies reporting each death confine themselves to noting that such and such a journalist was killed, plus a reproduction of the lax police version.
The struggle against the coup forces, however, is continuing. On April 20, thousands of people blocked highways in various parts of the country calling for the convening of a constituent assembly, a demand that is being constantly reiterated in the impoverished country.
In Tegucigalpa alone, around 3,000 people, led by the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), cut off the highway to the south in the Germania locality, and called on the people through loudspeakers to sign a statement in favor of convening a constituent assembly, which has now become the banner of the Honduraris’ battle.
The demand is anti-oligarchical. The document signed by those present and passers by insists that in the Assembly, “which must be installed by popular majority, we will draft and approve a new Constitution of the Republic which effectively guarantees the fundamental collective and individual rights of Honduran women and men, by democratizing in a participative manner the political, economic, cultural and social life of the country.”
It is not a sporadic initiative, but the Front’s battle plan, as the organizers expect to collect 1.25 million signatures legally backing the demand by June 28, the first anniversary* of the coup d’etat, according to the: ever-combative popular leader, Juan Barahona.•
Granma -  2nd May 

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Latin American death–squads return 

...the anti-democratic and reactionary politics of the Honduran elite have begun to bear their predictable fruit. Isolated within Latin America since the 2009 coup, the country is on a downward economic trajectory and social tensions are escalating.
In recent months, citizens of the country have seen concrete proof of the country’s descent into a form of authoritarianism that is scarily reminiscent of the 1980s: the death squads are back. Opponents of the coup regime, democratic activists and trade unionists are now abducted in broad daylight and their lifeless bodies dumped from passing cars a few hours later.
One such victim was 28-year-old nurse Vanessa Zepeda, who disappeared after attending a union meeting, in the capital Tegucigalpa. Witnesses say the young mother was bundled into an unmarked car by two masked men in fatigues. That was the last time she was seen alive.
Hours later, her body was thrown from a moving car in the Loarque area of the city, a location chosen with care by her killers or their superiors.
Loarque is known across the country as a stronghold of the popular resistance movement that opposed the coup regime which ousted President Manuel Zelaya in June 2009. Since then, a questionable ballot has been held to “legitimise” the regime and install one Porfirio Lobo to the vacated presidential office.
Resistance to the regime  – the old business elites with a new public face – has crystallised around the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), which is focused less on the physical return of Zelaya than  on protecting and maintaining socially progressive reforms and programmes he instituted.
Zelaya himself is now in exile in the Dominican Republic and the coup regime has been recognised by the US, the EU and some in Latin America. 
 But thus far, the big regional powers – Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia – have ignored President Obama’s entreaties to ‘normalise’ relations with Tegucigalpa.
...It is worth noting that one of the Lobo regime’s advisors is none other than Billy Joya, a former member of the infamous Battalion 3-16, a Honduran Army unit involved in disappearances and torture during the 1980s. Joya has since publicly repented for his death squad activity.
General Romeo Vasquez, the 2009 coup organiser, was named last month as the head of the country’s national phone company. As ever, the links between business and military are many and seamless, protecting and profiting the other.
To date, at least 43 FNRP members have lost their lives.
Vanessa Zepeda was murdered on February 3rd. Between March 1st and April 8th, the state-backed assassins went on a literal spree, murdering five journalists and 13 members of the FNRP. One victim, a teacher, was executed in front of his young students.
...it is unlikely to be just a ‘happy coincidence’ that nine of the murdered FNRP members were active trade unionists. Of course, trade unions play a key role in the FNRP, but the state’s private killers appears to have singled their activists out for special attention.
On the night she was abducted and murdered, Vanessa Zepeda had attended a meeting called to co-ordinate greater trade union involvement in the FNRP’s campaign of resistance.
Gilda Batista of ‘Refuge without Limits’, a human rights organisation based in Tegucigalpa, has investigated the recent executions of union leaders and concluded that the death squads are financed and directed by the “corporatocracy and the military”.
It would appear that the original ‘banana republic’ (the term was first coined in relation to Honduras) has gone back to what it does best.
It is obvious that the Zelaya presidency, despite being short-lived, genuinely spooked the traditional Honduran elites. And the re-emergence of the death squads is ample proof of their failure to kill off the movement that his presidency engendered.
Like most elites who live in fear of progressive social movements, they fundamentally confused the individual with the idea, the man or woman with the movement, failing to realise that the former can be dealt with, but the latter is almost impossible to suppress – particularly, when they have tasted hope and seen change is possible. 
Thus, the Zelaya administration had initiated state programmes to provide poor schoolchildren (the vast majority) with free lunches, subsidised travel to school and free classes. Those small reforms ensured that an extra 450,000 children were able to attend school, most for the first time ever. The numbers living in poverty fell for the first time in decades.
Those programmes were closed by the coup regime.
But now the regime faces threats on other fronts also.
The slide into economic disorder that accompanied the coup (150,000 jobs lost, $50 million a day to keep the troops on the streets) saw Honduras declare bankruptcy in February. It is now on IMF life-support.
Into this economic vacuum have stepped the narco cartels. Last December, the head of the national drugs control office warned the country was on the verge of becoming a “narco state”. He was executed days later. An Phoblacht 6th May