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 1390 11th July 2011                                                                                                           25p fortnightly

Murdoch press row underlines the desperate panic of the ruling class as the catastrophic capitalist economic and political disaster keeps steamrolling forwards. Squabbling factions are panicking at how fast and how quickly to tear up the “democracy” illusions as the urgent need for class war repression grows rapidly, to prevent inevitable rising rebelliousness already seen in Spain, Greece,Portugal and throughout the Middle East. Illusions in parliament and “democracy” fed by decades of fake-“left” pacifism and reformism are still relied on to hold back the working class and prevent it turning to revolutionary politics. But Egyptian “spring” and Greek demonstrations can go nowhere until revolutionary perspectives are made the order of the day in every march, occupation and strike. The sovereign debt defaults (now lapping at Italy and even the US) will keep spreading along with dangerous inflation. Urgent need for revolutionary politics to be built immediately 

Rats scrambling from a sinking ship have more honour than the capitalist establishment (Tory and Labour alike) currently “distancing” themselves from the phone-hacking revelations around the Murdoch media empire being driven out by the disastrous capitalist crisis.
So much butter failing to melt in so many mouths could feed half the starving Third World.
Grotesque hypocrisy ranges across the board from Murdoch himself professing to have known nothing, to the police, to the corrupt parliamentarians, to the holier-than-thou petty bourgeois commentators. 
The moralising pretences of David Cameron, declaring “disgust” etc etc at the sleazy spying and blackmailing revelations would alone be worth an Oscar for sheer hypocrisy.
On top could come an award for agility in spinning around so rapidly to face in the other direction, one minute building the very UN-democratic Coalition propaganda machine around a central figure from Murdoch’s stable of reactionary chauvinism and anti-communism, the next stabbing them in the back in best Mafia “it’s just business” tradition. 
None of them are remotely “shocked” at what is actually routine capitalist press skulduggery and blackmailing bullying in the interests of keeping capitalism in power and the masses fooled and manipulated.  
That is why they have all traipsed to the court of the media king in the first place, the sleazy opportunist Labourites as much as the slimily slick Tory toffs, because of the huge importance of the propaganda machine which helps keep the world’s minds corralled and constrained behind the enormous LIES that make up capitalist rule and domination (along with the saturation of all culture, plays films, education etc, with non-stop anti-communist bogeyman stories and, lately, the ludicrous hysterical scaremongering of the almost nonexistent “international terrorist threat” pumped up to James Bond villain proportions by Hollywood, politicians, TV drama, and the press to keep people in permanent hysterical panic and stampeded by small-minded racist reaction).
The constant mind-rot of celebrity chasing and shallow philistinism is also used to keep working class brains well away from the serious (and potentially revolutionary) politics they could (and would) develop otherwise.
But the press machine can additionally take down and destroy, with vicious rumour and character assassination – (and worse incitements against them) – any individuals becoming too “uppity”, or “rocking the boat” too much, from liberal intellectual and middle class types whose disquiet is growing fast at the obvious warmongering and torturing degeneration of capitalist society, to working class militants and particularly those few consciously struggling for revolutionary understanding, which alone will lead the world out of the catastrophic collapse of the system now unravelling fast.
The capitalist media machine (and all of it too, not just the “right wing” Murdochs or Berlusconis but the “liberal” anti-communist press as well), controlled by big money, is a key part of the manipulation and control mechanisms by which the pretence of “parliament” and a “free world” has been kept going, the entire fraud firmly under the control of the bourgeoisie, who actually take all the important decisions in society behind the scenes, pulling 1001 strings and secret connections.
They are all completely in cahoots with each other, and with the bankers, the Stock Exchange, the military, the Church, the universities, the professions, the police and the big industries and corporations, which in a series of freemasonries and clubs and social networks, the secret Privy Council and all the other institutions, act purely in the class interest of big money come what may.
Capitalism has long got away with dragging the masses along behind it under the pretence that they “have a say” and can “gradually push through changes” and “improve the world with better working and living conditions”.
This humbug of “democracy” in the richest countries (only) is of huge value to the ruling class.
Developed over more than two centuries of modern “suffrage” it is by far the best way to impose its rule domestically without the dangers of revolutionary upheaval that more brutal and direct (and therefore obvious) fascist oppression would bring.
So why is the British Establishment suddenly lining up to twist the knife into the Murdoch press and media machine when it has proved so useful and powerful?
Surely only because the latest International News scandal reflects the crisis reality of complete bankruptcy which is making it harder and harder to maintain these illusory “gains” supposedly achieved for the working class.
Desperate fears and uncertainties are eating into the ruling class as the catastrophic collapse of the system unrolls, with potential devastating overnight credit and finance implosions now permanently on the agenda,  as already witnessed in 2008 and certain to break again at any minute (if not already unrolling in the sovereign debt defaults).
Rebellion has been stirring and bubbling throughout the Third World for decades for precisely that reason (that capitalism cannot afford the “democracy” racket there), growing more insistent and more sophisticated year by year and reaching a qualitatively new level in mass ferment of the street revolts in the Middle East in the spring.
It is an irreversible change in world consciousness. 
It is now closing in on the ruling class in even the richest countries as the catastrophic failure of its entire system unravels into Slump disaster.
Until now the capitalist ruling class has gone to great lengths to keep on hoodwinking the working class, and bribing and corrupting the petty bourgeois and upper layers of the working class with the super-profits generated from worldwide colonialism (or the post-war financial neo-colonialism which replaced no longer tenable direct rule). 
In the post-war years to make this stick, it even included social reforms, health provision, pensions and other concessions to try and head-off the overwhelming attractions of communism in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries where the building of planned economies was making major strides forwards for the working class, free of exploitation (and continued to do so right up to the idiot liquidation by Gorbachevism which was a revisionist philosophical failure of revolutionary understanding, not the Western propaganda lie of an “economic collapse”).
But the 1980s crisis lurch which triggered the Soviet collapse (because the West could no longer afford the full nuclear arms race arms and had offered a temporary pause in the build-up which idiot Gorbachevism fatuously assumed to be the end of hostilities) was the forerunner of far greater seismic economic and political shakings for ever more bankrupted US world capitalist domination (itself, staggeringly, now facing debt default) and the entire profit driven system.
Less and less can the ruling class everywhere afford the partial retreats and compromise concessions which have been crucial to help maintain the democracy pretence (thin and sour pickings though they have always been for the craven petty bourgeoisie relative to the fabulous wealth held by the bosses and landed wealth interests).
The reality of the gigantic historical crisis now unfolding for the profit system is shattering every aspect of the ruling class’s confidence and power.
Part of that is to drive to the surface the most desperate squabbling and recriminations over the best way to handle the class war realities which the greatest ever Slump disaster is imposing.
The more “modern” “entrepreneurial” wing of monopoly capitalism, staffed by the “self-made” men of the former colonies like Murdoch, has always despised what it sees as the “namby-pamby” niceties of the establishment ruling class and its “chinless wonder” landed gentry traditions and snobbery, favouring a much more aggressive approach to the class war “necessities” and ready to tear up the old aristocratic traditions in order to impose them.
Murdoch has been at the forefront of this “no nonsense” approach of union busting and anti-communism.
It is no coincidence that the Murdoch press machine is republican (in the anti-monarchist sense as well as US reactionary Republican), not out of any progressive rationale against the remnants of ancient  feudalism which insinuated themselves into the new capitalist order after the English bourgeois revolution (under Cromwell in 1640-60) but to clear the decks for the most reactionary populism, – a sharp step towards more openly fascistic means of intimidating and controlling the class upheavals which the entire ruling class can feel bubbling just beneath the surface, (and as they have seen erupt throughout the Middle East and into Europe around the “fringe” and bankrupted Mediterranean countries including now the giant economy of Italy, eighth largest in the world and capable of bringing down the whole of Europe if not the world trading system if it should default).
Ranged against that is the traditional and moribund ruling class of Europe which has relied on super-profits of Empire throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and most of all in the dominant world power of the British, to partially placate and corrupt the revolutionary instincts of the working class.
Despite toying with the imposition of direct fascist rule in the 1930s, not simply via the Blackshirt Moseleyites but throughout the establishment under the Nazi-sympathising King Edward VIIIth, the Empire wealth was enough for the ruling class to continue the valuable pretence of parliament (and to avoid facing the difficulties direct dictatorship would bring). 
Since 1945 that “method” of confusion and control has been refined throughout Europe into the “welfare state” provisions of the post-war period, apeing the genuine achievement of next-door socialism (and its powerful influence) in a distorted and inadequate and corrupted way, by providing early pensions, health services, dole money, etc etc on a huge scale (in  capitalist terms), for a section of the working class (the public service etc etc).
Nowhere has that been more so than in the dangerously unstable southern European countries around the Mediterranean, all of which have teetered on the edge of communist revolution throughout the twentieth century, with ruling classes which have swung between open fascism (Mussolini, Metaxa and later the 1960s Greek Junta, Francoism, and Salazar in Portugal) to overt “welfare” bribery (because fascism  failed). 
It has bankrupted all of them, leaving them the greatest “basket cases” from debt implosion, from Greece to Portugal and Spain, raising urgent problems for the entire European ruling class (and world ruling class too). 
All that was paid for by the huge injection of printed paper credit dollars of the post-World War US sponsored Marshall plan – itself a retreat by the now dominant US ruling class in the teeth of incipient revolutionary developments throughout Europe, desperate to head off and confuse workers who were disgusted with the Slump and war of the 1930s and 1940s and ready for revolution which the capitalists knew they would not have stopped.
The confusion was tragically aided and abetted by the philosophically corrupting influence of opportunist reformism (Old and New Labour etc) and the idiot theories of Moscow revisionism (still claiming to be “communism”) – that imperialism was permanently hamstrung by the war and only needed “containing” with “vigorous peace struggle”.
The logically-following implication was that change could therefore come without revolution, leading to parliamentary opportunism of the CPs of all kinds, the equally opportunist workerist tail-ending of the Trots (just as non-revolutionary but soured with additional anti-workers state hostility) and even the pacifist “Stop the War” mind-rot which is pumped out to this day by even the most “hardline” Stalinist pretend revolutionaries.   
While the ruling class can sustain it, such a “democratic” method of control is a softer option than the dangers of trying to impose direct dictatorship (fascism) showing the true nature of monopoly capitalist rule.
This “easier” and comfortable way is hard to tear up, and all the more so now, as taking away the supposed “gains” of the long reformist decades can only rebound dramatically eventually as the working class is taught a double or treble lesson in how it has been fooled and has to be kicked even harder to force it down even further by the unstoppable Slump disaster it again faces.
Open fascism has failed before and nowhere more dramatically than in the short 12 years of Nazism in Germany.
So what to do?
The question is how quickly and sharply does the ruling class have to tear up the last pretences of “democracy” and openly intimidate the working class???
The Murdoch wing, echoing the harder-edged corporate rule of the US heart of capitalism, which did not make so many concessions post-1945 (unlike the neocon-despised Europeans) wants to go quicker.
The Europeans are reluctant, paralysed by the crisis.
And the “old money” despises the crude roughness of the entrepreneurs (despite a long Empire history of grotesque brutality themselves to equal any modern violence.) 
But all of them are panicking, which maybe also helps explain why the Murdoch wing as well has shot itself in the foot, so cynical and contemptuous that it has even used its degenerate and foul methods on the soldiers’ wives and families, on Establishment politicians and on the police.
Giving away what contempt the ruling class has for all such “lower orders” sacrifice is too much, when part of the ruling class still thinks there is mileage in capitalism’s giant lying racket about “democracy and the right to free speech”.
 Patriotic” “our boys” reactionary “British nationalism” is a key weapon for the ruling class in all this, one of the last resort methods for dragooning and stampeding the working class and heading off any turn to revolution by building up warmongering, exactly how the First and Second World Wars were initiated and mobilised. 
It has been cynically manipulated and hyped for two decades (and especially by the tabloid capitalist press) as capitalism has deliberately heated up the war atmosphere with its hypocritical, barbaric and lying blitzkrieging of victim after victim from Serbia to Afghanistan, using every Goebbels BIG LIE to pretend “humanitarian concern” in order to whip up the most backward petty bourgeois elements as in Libya and Syria at present, or in Sudan where a fraudulent Numibian “self-determination” stunt is suddenly being whipped up in the new northern state to try and further balkanise it.
The true nature of capitalist rule is always one of brutal violence and suppression – an essentially fascist nature through and through at all times (see following archive pieces).
But to expose that means sharpening up the class war to a new level which parts of the ruling class do not feel ready to do yet, counting instead on the supine class collaboration of the long Labourite tradition and the ranked layers of fake-“left”s, propping them up to hold back working class struggle and undermine any revolutionary understanding it is striving for. 
But the hesitations of the ruling class are running out of road.
The parliamentary racket has been getting more and more threadbare for the entire 20th century, and the working class correctly more and more disillusioned as one after another “left” or populist promise (including “popular” house ownership under Thatcher etc) has been proven yet another confidence trick. 
The proportion of workers voting has dropped dramatically election by election, and such turnout as has remained comes from either the areas where the public sector is the main employer such as the north-east, and the northern big cities, (therefore reflecting residual reformist illusions and hopes in the post-war “settlement”) or is not a positive vote for anyone, but simply an expression of hostility against “an even worse bunch of corrupt self-seekers”.
The last ditch New Labour spin has collapsed in the ignominy of the slump and the defeats and quagmires of imperialist neo-colonialist warmongering (and exposed lies) and the Coalition is a cobbled-together racket that satisfies no-one, and without authority. 
The EPSR has constantly made this clear for three decades in its revolutionary analysis, saying the only point of using elections and running candidates is for them to be able to say loud and clear that the entire bogus racket should be denounced.
Only the fake-“lefts” from the Trots to the Museum-Stalinists) still urge workers to vote for yet more supposed “left representative” alternatives (and so bolster parliament) when what the working class needs to hear is that their contempt for Parliament and its corrupt pocket-lining is not only justified but a major step towards throwing off all residual historical illusion, clearing the way for revolutionary understanding.
But at the key moments, in actual practice, the world revolutionary perspectives and tactics are never put forwards, being kept for academic and turgid articles debating some never-to-be-arrived-at dry academic future revolution (if at all).
Leninism has constantly argued that the time for building revolutionary parties is not only now but long, long overdue.
But the crisis is so sharp now even some of the fake-“lefts” can begin to discern that the game is almost over like the Trot influenced Gary Younge in the Guardian:  

When the elections finally took place the political class could sense a certain degree of cynicism. The Portuguese president, Anibal Cavaco Silva, warned voters they could not complain about what politicians did “at a time of sacrifice and serious doubts about our future” if they did not take part. But the future had already been decided. With major economic decisions rejected and then imposed by powers beyond their control, there was precious little to vote on. At 58%, turnout was the lowest since Portugal became a democracy. “[When people] see the prime minister go to Brussels to announce austerity measures, they understand that the government itself decides very little,” the political analyst Marina Costa Lobo told Agence France Press.
The basic assumption about electoral politics in a democracy is that the process connects popular will to political power. In the absence of that fundamental assurance, disaffection and the cynicism that comes with it are almost inevitable. Elections become discussions not about who or what will or could change, but just who will win, and politicians become performers, embraced for their ability to articulate the concerns of the electorate without any real sense that they might meaningfully address them. In the gap between democratic aspirations and the stasis of the political class, legitimate resentments fester. Where solutions are needed, scapegoats are offered. With a handful of exceptions (including the US) voter turnout is falling across the globe while confidence in electoral politics is fading. According to a Gallup poll from 2002, majorities on every continent believe governments do not represent the will of the people.
This is not a new dilemma. The question of how to render democratic engagement viable at the national level within the context of neoliberal globalisation has been a key question for some time. “By many measures, corporations are more central players in global affairs than nations,” writes Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs McWorld. “We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as postnational, transnational or even anti-national. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space.”
But the nature of the economic crisis has intensified the implosion of democratic legitimacy within nation states and made the consequent contradictions particularly acute. When the Greeks default and how (few believe they won’t) is a matter for the EU, the IMF, the bond markets. The Greeks will find out with the rest of us.
In this context the huge demonstrations on the streets of Athens and elsewhere, while encouraging to the left on an emotional level, seem more like expressions of impotent rage than a strategic intervention. It is telling that the youth protest movement that has emerged around Europe is called the indignant ones. They’re angry. But there is little sense that they see the polling booths as a means to get even, or that some other route has emerged that might also be effective. This comes more by way of critique than criticism. For now anger may be all that is available.
“The big question is whether any political force is capable of stemming the tides of globalisation – of capital, trade, finance, industry, criminality, drugs and weapon trafficking, terrorism, and the migration of the victims of all these forces,” writes the eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has spearheaded much of the thinking in this area. “While having at their disposal solely the means of a single state.”
This global south, saddled with colonial legacies, overbearing neighbours, interfering sponsors, is no stranger to these democratic deficits. In June 2009 the Haitian parliament unanimously passed a law that would raise the minimum wage to $5 a day. Given Haiti’s endemic poverty and brittle democratic culture, the fact that an elected parliament could pass a law that would earn such popular support was encouraging.
The US thought otherwise. According to WikiLeaks, the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy, David Lindwall, insisted the law (which would have paid Haitians less per day than the US minimum wage per hour) “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at “the unemployed and underpaid masses” (as though this were a bad thing).
A series of articles based on the WikiLeaks cables by a Haitian paper, Haiti Liberté, in collaboration with the US magazine the Nation , revealed how the US then lobbied alongside factory owners, including contractors for some of the priciest jeans and underwear in the west, to force the 38p an hour rate in the poorest nation in the western hemisphere even lower.
They pressured the former Haitian president, René Préval, to undermine the popular democratic will in the interests of greater profits for garment manufacturers until he created two-tier minimum wage with workers in the textile industry getting just £1.86 a day.
Two years later, during presidential elections, the US was back, interfering even as it preached democracy and good governance. The country’s main party, Fanmi Lavalas, was excluded and turnout was only 24%. The former singer Michel Martelly – who has previously allied himself with coup leaders and a convicted human rights abuser – was elected with the help of a Spanish marketing company.
Martelly’s “victory” crudely illustrates the broader nature of electoral politics in a period in which the outcome has little relationship to who wields power. For without that basic connection two key questions arise. Why vote if real power resides beyond democratic control? And why stand if you won’t be able to do anything? The first is answered in the low turnouts. But the second answer comes by way of the transformation of a singer into a politician by way of marketing.
Given their inability to deliver a great deal politicians have to provide some other justification for their existence, and entertainment is often a proxy. Take Sarah Palin, who moved effortlessly from vice-presidential candidate and Alaska governor to reality show star and media pundit. She clearly has no more interest in holding political office – there is more money, status and power being a media personality. But in order to sustain her brand she must keep up the speculation that she might return to the fray. So she rides around the early nominating states, mixing it up but remaining coy. Electoral politics is part of the act.

Younge, of course, cops out at the last minute with the conclusion:

This is not to say that voting is necessarily a waste of time or that all politicians are performers. The outcomes of national elections can be relevant but the parameters for that relevance are narrowing to within fairly slim margins. National electorates may chose the protagonists. But increasingly it is global economics that shapes the narrative.

He should (but won’t) say that the entire superstructure of capitalism  and its culture, propaganda and hypocritical lies about progress and civilisation are rotten right through and disintegrating rapidly.
The contradictions built into production for private profit, first exposed clearly by Karl Marx 150 years ago, are more concentrated and intense than at any time in history.
After numerous currency collapses and failures in the rest of the world (shattering tens of millions of lives and livelihoods in Latin America, Africa, the Asian “tigers” and even mighty Japan) they exploded finally in the devastating international bank collapses and meltdown of October 2008.
Only the demented printing of ever more incomprehensible and uncountable trillions of worthless paper dollars, on top of the hundreds of billions pumped out by the US for decade after decade to sustain the post-war artificial “boom”(for the tiny ruling class in the privileged Western nations) has kept the world from the instant chaos and mayhem that would have followed.
Credit and world trade was on the verge of overnight collapse, the greatest and most widespread breakdown and implosion the world economy has ever witnessed with unknowably devastating impact.
But “quantitative easing” it is only an emergency stopgap, already heating the inflation levels to a dangerous level and ready to implode again at any moment as the “sovereign  debt” tremors in Greece, Portugal, Spain and even the UK are all warning.
The ruling class wants to buy time to step up domestic class war and international world warmongering, its only “solution” to the intractable and unstoppable disasters that capitalist production has built into it, bringing repeated and ever worsening Slump downturns.
The latest and greatest of all crisis, in a capitalist world which is more rotten ripe than ever and long overdue for collapse, has already seen the warmongering agenda unrolling for a decade with dominant US imperialism determined to get in first to demonstrate its brutal ruthlessness as sharply as possible, even deliberately naming it the “shock and awe” doctrine.
The aim is for the US to ride out the crisis however devastating it becomes, by bullying and intimidating all possible contenders and challengers, whether in the form of the great groundswell of mass hatred for Western exploitation tyranny, or rival capitalist challenges, from the German controlled European block, to Japan and the rising contenders like Brazil, Russia and (workers state) China.
At the same time the ruling class wants to divert the world from the devastation that its profiteering alone causes, blaming the disasters on “enemies” and other people.
But time is rapidly running out.
What urgently needs saying is that the only way out of this is to overthrow this lying pretence which can never be “voted out” or reformed or transformed or contained because the ruling class is never going to voluntarily give up its sweet wealth and power, however much damage is done to the world.
And that means fighting for the working class to take power, establishing a dictatorship of its own, the dictatorship of the majority which can hold down the old profiteering, take all the productive forces into public ownership and develop a rational planned WORLD socialist economy. 
No “free world” is ever going to be reached except by such a dictatorship of the proletariat, which will hold down all the old conspiracies and networks which the ruling class uses to hold on to power.  Build Leninism
Don Hoskins

LEAFLET: for the teachers’ anti-pension cuts strike day June 30th
Anti-cuts strike struggle a good start but urgently needs to deepen understanding everywhere of the irreversible catastrophe of the capitalist crisis collapse. NO upturn is possible and the class war savagery of the cuts, combined with fascist warmongering everywhere, is the only future until capitalism is overturned. Without revolutionary consciousness strikes will go no further than the heroic miners were able. Leninist debate and leadership crucial

The  widespread anger giving massive support for the June 30th anti-cuts strike can only be the tiniest beginning of the struggle now facing workers everywhere.
The world is facing far more than the savaging of wages and pensions, and the imposition of harsher conditions and extended working lives.
It is facing the catastrophic collapse of the entire monopoly capitalist order in Slump disaster and failure.
On top there is ever escalated Nazi war and blitzing of demonised countries like Libya and Syria, following on the destruction and chaos wreaked on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This deliberately engineered general war chaos under grotesque Goebbels BIG LIES against selected bogeymen victims like Gaddafi etc, is being increased daily with new victims set up like Damascus for NATO member Turkey to invade, and new South Korean war provocations against the North Korean workers state among others.
Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Cuban workers state etc, Burma and of course China are among the others being lined up with endless CIA propaganda, eagerly broadcast by the lying Western media machine, just as it has got fascist counter-revolution going in Libya with the hoodwinking pretence of a “fight for freedom”.
The capitalist system has only one way out of crisis and that is to take its the Slump all the way into cutthroat trade war, and finally all out World War destruction of “surplus capital” just as it did in 1914-18 and 1939-45.  
The pattern has been long apparent to Marxist science which has constantly warned the working class of what it faces, against the opposition and ridicule of the dozens of reformist (Labour and official TUC) and fake-“left” pretend revolutionary parties.
The Leninist voice went largely unheard in the artificial credit-fed American “boom” consumerism times of the post-war years.
But it is an understanding that has been vindicated completely now that the inevitable crisis disintegration has broken through in the 2008 “credit crunch” which took the world to the edge of the abyss, just hours away from shutting down all the cash machines, retail payments, salary systems and other sources of finance for everyone, in unimaginable mayhem.
The “quantitative easing” which pumped trillions of worthless paper dollars into the bank system to “save it” (and the bankers’ fabulous fat-arsed existence of unbelievable luxury and power) may have fooled some into thinking the crisis was over and “the upturn” could be on the way, but it has changed nothing.
In fact the huge inflationary surge the worthless extra credit pushes into the world economy will rapidly bounce back making the problems one hundred times worse.
There is no upturn, as the Tories and Labourites lyingly pretend, and there is no end to the epochal failure of a class exploitation system which is historically at the end of the road (see box following and for more, Marx and Engels great Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s Imperialism and a hundred other great volumes of Marxist science, totally proven correct by the crisis against all bourgeois and pretend science.)
Debt failures of entire countries are continuing (Greece for the second time) and each time threatening again to domino topple the entire bankrupted world trading system.
And the desperate ruling class in each country is stepping up its class war against workers to squeeze them tight and extract as much as they can from them to save the ruling class skins while they prepare for war.
Everywhere across the planet workers are seeing their lives and conditions savaged.
Far greater Slump deprivation and misery is to be imposed yet and – at any moment – new credit collapses and currency failures threaten to sweep away even the miserable livelihoods that are being left to the working class – in Greece, in Ireland, in Portugal in Spain, not to mention the desperation facing the exploited masses of the Third World, staring at imminent starvation and want (beyond that which is anyway routine under endless Western monopoly capitalist exploitation tyranny).   
The dismantling of the great “welfare state” and “public service” gains supposedly made for workers by the “proper” “democratic way” politics sold to the working class by the fraudulence and opportunism of Labour and the TUC, are part of the same world shattering disaster.
And to fight it will demand a jump in understanding to a new level far beyond the “Stop the cuts” sloganising that the opportunist official trade union leaders have produced – and that only under duress. 
It has to go much further than “fightback” or “defend our jobs” perspectives. 
It has to be a revolutionary struggle.
Otherwise all is doomed to the same defeated failure as the miners in 1984, the heroic high point of titanic sacrifice and bitter class struggle of the old reformist way of seeing things. 
No “Plan for Coal” under a new Labour government was possible then and no restoration of living conditions will be possible now.
It is a conscious LIE for the trade union bosses to threaten major general strikes that they say will win back the conditions of the past.
They are hoodwinking workers with a pretend militancy that cannot win within capitalism because the ruling class can no longer provide such niceties for workers.
There is no end to the class war cuts now being imposed because the profit system itself has run into a brick wall of catastrophic historical failure.
Only a new socialist way of doing things with a planned world economy can provide these things.
Just as Marx analysed long ago, the production for the private profit of the minority will always lead to disastrous crash and Slump failure caused by the “overproduction” contradictions it gets into.
By demanding a giant slice of the all the value produced by workers (and labour is the only source of value) the capitalists guarantee the eventual collapse of the markets.
It has led to the greatest crisis in 800 years of capitalist rule and threatens to destroy half the planet.
Despite all the lying pretences of “when the upturn comes” and “a few months of belt tightening discipline” the disastrous credit collapse has not stopped unravelling since.
As the Greeks know only too well, further shocks and shattering blows will follow.
The ruling class can no longer afford to sustain the reforms and benefits granted to the working class in the richer countries during the times when they sucked the world dry with their colonial and neo-colonial exploitation.
And it will no longer be able to sustain the pretence of “freedom and democracy” which the great reformist lies have propped up, and the layers and layers of fake-“left” parties beyond them.
None of which means that the working class should not take up the fight with strikes, demonstrations and much more. 
But it needs to begin the struggle for revolutionary consciousness and leadership as not only part of those struggle but the most crucial part.
For as long as it continues to believe in the existing capitalist system and to swallow all its chauvinist lies and Goebbels warmongering the working class is going nowhere.
No amount of reforms, trade union battling, and “refusals” have ever stopped, or can stop the slide into slump disaster,
No amount of “Stop the War” shouting, or “Stop the Cuts” sloganising will prevent the class war onslaught of a ruling class. 
Workers need to finish shaking free of the supine opportunism of the reformist and corrupted parliamentary Labourites who have done or said precisely nothing about the huge tidal wave of cuts and repression.
But they also need to shake off the decades of pseudo “leftism” of the Trots who in reality hate the workers states experiments of the past, and the soft-headed pacifism of the museum-Stalinists who posture and preen about the “hard-nut”  credentials but say nothing different in practice to the other fake-“lefts” all crawling around parliamentary opportunism.
A giant debate is needed to develop a revolutionary understanding so that the world can get to socialism – buildable only under the total control of a working class that takes power from the debilitating and contradictory private ownership of capital to build planned socialism in its place.
That means the firmest suppression of all attempts to revive capitalist rule by counter-revolution, the dictatorship of the working class in other words, taking power and suppressing the remnants of the old fascist ruling class with the will of the majority, so that socialism, fairness and reason can be built.  
How to do all this is the great debate that needs to open up, building Leninist understanding and the Leninist revolutionary party, to lead the working class to take power.
Egypt and Tunisia show the battle is on everywhere. But Leninist science needs to be developed. Build Leninism. 
DH

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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EPSR Archives
Selected quotes from past issues
The squeamish liberal academic notion that fascism is “a word we should not overuse” is based on the completely false notion that fascism and Nazism is a “special” condition different to “normal” capitalism. It is one of the greatest disarming notions of the fake-“left” – the opposite side of the coin fostering a belief in bourgeois democracy and “reforms”, leaving the working class with the idea that “democracy” is somehow real and the important fight is to “stop the Nazis” etc etc. But overt fascism is only the raw face of all capitalism which is brutal and tyrannical to the core – and only fighting capitalism totally will ever change it or “stop” Nazi warmongering, as the EPSR has repeatedly made the centre of its analysis. Just a few samples follow:

Which all raises the most worrying thing about Blairism’s vacuousness while promoted by monopoly-imperialism,- which is that almost any content could be poured in to suit any big business emergency.
Blair’s shallow godfearing self-righteousness is a long way from fascist—chauvinism as it stands. But the period of British imperialist decline is ripe for it, and flag-waving nationalist nastiness might become the decadent ruling class’s last desperate gimmick for trying to revive its ailing fortunes.
Like Labour Cabinet minister Oswald Mosley’s break from his party tradition into New Party politics in the 1930s, and eventually into fascist-chauvinism,- substantially nothing about this new Blair opportunist style of politics could rule out such an even more degenerate turn in the troubled future. EPSR 902 6th May 1997

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Blairism is just an empty vessel, - just philistine petty-bourgeois opportunism but being used by the imperialist system. Only with outright fascism could Blairism remotely approach “transforming itself and its role” in the declining British imperialist scene. And as EPSR analysis has consistently demonstrated, fascism itself is not really different from routine imperialist-warmongering aggression and ethnic-racist divisiveness, - the same old divide-and-rule that the imperialist system has lived by since imperialism began, (playing the Orange card; letting asylum-seeker/immigrant problems fester; demonising certain ‘foreign’ hate-figures like Saddam, Gaddafi, Milosevic, etc; treating the incurable cancer of racism throughout capitalist society with a ‘race-awareness’ elastoplast; etc).
Whether imperialist-system behaviour is formally or informally fascistic makes a difference only in how blatant or aggressive the public propaganda about imperialist warmongering and violence is deemed to need to be. The current Pinochet extradition fiasco proves this point well. Slightly shockingly, the New Tory plans, thinking ahead to the authoritarianism which is going to become vital and widespread throughput the capitalist system, don’t feel too ruffled when their more hardline exponents like Lamont and Thatcher choose to publicly identify with ‘the man who saved Chile from communist chaos by firm public order, independent national pride, and a free enterprise economy’, etc.
But New Labour is no less hostile than the Tories to the idea that imperialist regimes anywhere should one day face a day of reckoning for the crimes they committed. For the real butchers of the Chilean working class in 1973 were not the local military and secret-police stooges at all but the Western-world imperialist-system string-pullers who put Pinochet & Co up to it, - as the capitalist press itself is now belatedly lifting the lid on very marginally: EPSR 1016 13th October 1999

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With such lunacy running the world, but presented as ‘the best possible of all possible worlds’ by 99.99% of all bourgeois culture and information (television, radio, press, magazines, book; school and university curriculums, party political programmes, etc, etc, etc), no wonder that all sorts of other lunacy is free to flourish like fascism, racism, bigotry, etc. That there will be opportunities for nazi movements in this chaos, and any number of other weird cults, - is absolutely inevitable. Just trying to ‘stop’ them, by whatever means, is akin to putting a finger in a small hole in an enormous dyke that is about to give way. Once fascism gets a hold, ‘stopping it’,  - just on its own, - could only be valid as a brief tactic on route to the revolutionary overthrow of the whole capitalist state, which is clearly well overdue if nazism is already on the march. For the moment in Britain, would it not be more realistic to leave this anti-paedophile rabble-rousing to get on with it, while explaining to everyone that such breakdowns of authority-trust and of law & order are just a further sign that the whole capitalist system is falling apart and needs seeing off in its entirety by a Bolshevik Revolution. EPSR 1055 8th August 2000

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The big mistake the German people made was in not seeing its bourgeois-capitalist society as incurably putrid and needing to be overthrown from the first moment that the Nazis got going in the 1920s. Immediate replacement of ‘parliamentary democracy’ by the dictatorship of the proletariat was the issue, not electoral calculations bearing the fascist influence in mind. Without revolution as the sole, constant, instant aim, the error was precisely in making the brownshirts the main issue, either way. The German CP was particularly foolishly mesmerised, tailending German parliamentary democracy in all its sick gyrations. The need during the whole 4-year crisis was all-out preparations to seize state power at the earliest possible opportunity. The German CP never adopted any such policy or made any such preparations (after the brief ultra-leftist flourish of ‘Third Period’ revolutionariness following the 1928 6th World Congress of the Comintern, soon forgotten about). In that sense, it was completely missed that the German capitalist crisis was a revolutionary crisis. One would hope that by the next time it becomes meaningful to pretend that ‘for or against the brownshirts’ is a possible question that a nation might be asking itself, communists would have long since been declaring loudly that socialist revolution was the only conceivable way forward, and as soon as practicable. EPSR 1055  8th August 2000

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On a wider issue, some of the most disastrous revisionist nonsense Stalinism ever inflicted on the international workers movement was in analysing fascist imperialism as something fundamentally distinct from warmongering imperialist aggression in general. In recorded history, Western imperialism has inflicted a hundred times more ‘nazi’ brutality and tyranny than the newer ‘fascist’ imperialist powers (Japan, Germany, and Italy) had chance to inflict in their briefer period of joining in the role of world gendarme traditionally played by Britain, France, the USA, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal etc. Domestically, more murderous tyranny and persecution has been inflicted on the working class in history, in total, by routine anti-communist and counter-revolutionary regimes than has ever been inflicted by self-proclaimed ‘fascists’.
Were segregation, victimisation and lynchings of blacks in the USA for 400 years (on officially until 30 years ago, and not much better now in many areas) not also ‘fascism’?? Was 100 years of apartheid tyranny in the Commonwealth in South Africa not ‘fascism’ and equally as barbarous in the French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonies in Africa? Was the bombing, napalming, and chemical defoliating of Vietnam, massacring millions, by the ‘world’s greatest democracy’ not ‘fascism’? Was the blitzkrieg destruction just last year of utterly defenceless Serbia by the whole of Western imperialism in unison on a complete fiction of ‘defending human rights in Kosovo’ (look at the persecution and slaughter of Serbs there now) not as bad as anything which Nazi Stuka divebombers perpetrated during World War II??
The whole separate identification of what a danger (to the working class) ‘fascism’ is (as opposed to the majority of police state violence to workers in history which has not been called ‘fascism’), ), or what a danger ‘fascist imperialism’ is (as opposed to the majority of imperialist tyranny to mankind in history which has not been called ‘fascism’), misled the Moscow revisionist bureaucracy into some of its worst theoretical disasters of all when convincing the Stalinists that post-war imperialism would be nothing like the threat to world socialist revolution that fascist imperialism had been; and that the ‘peaceful road to socialism’ was now ‘well within reach.’ Coupled with the equal nonsense that imperialism would no longer be in a position to economically re-expand because of the growth of the socialist camp, this mentality of ‘non-dangerous Western imperialism’ gained a firmer and firmer grip on revisionist minds as the post-war period rolled on until things ended up with Gorbachev proposing to class-collaborate with Western imperialism to build ‘our common European home’, and abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat and embracing market forces accordingly. The rest is history, the most shameful catastrophic revisionist nonsense of all, - and started by the useless train of thought that ‘fascism’ and racist-imperialist police-state repression are somehow two fundamentally different things. Not so. Reactionary violence is ever-present under capitalism. As bourgeois society’s crisis of disintegration and degeneration deepens, people need to be agitated to prepare to take the power, not waste time counting the brownshirts. Build Leninism. JH 
EPSR 1055 8th August 2000

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Nothing could be more “old politics” than fascism (the essence of all colonial domination and imperialist warmongering since monopoly-capitalist Western bourgeois started dominating the whole planet more than 500 years ago).
But the worst and most dangerous deception of all that fascism is being allowed to get away with by default is when it is allowed to dismiss the workers states as “failed old politics” along with everything else.
The one thing the Soviet workers state didn’t do was fail. It was betrayed by fake-‘Left’ Revisionism and philistinism and petty-bourgeois anti-communism of exactly the same kind which constitutes the fake-‘Left’ in the West today.
Planned economic and educational and scientific and cultural development, - all working without any capitalist culture or market forces in sight, continued to ‘work’ right up until the last inheritor of Stalinist Revisionism, Gorbachev, finally pulled the plug once and for all on the abandoned perspective of world socialist revolution, and let ‘democratic’ market forces back in to rule the roost.
And now the former Soviet workers-state-lands are openly in the grip of big business/mafia street crime, fraud, exploitation, prostitution, loss of sovereignty, etc, etc, etc, - exactly the chronic daily-life insecurity of slumps, race-riots, and inter-imperialist trade-war threats which make the fascists’ case for them (in France, around Europe and in Russia too now) but which the USSR had been virtually free of and constitutionally and socially immune to.
The entire fake-‘Left’ refuses to take up this challenge. Occasional bits of pro-workers-state propaganda are allowed, but these are always ‘balanced’ by allowing-in rancid anti-communism too, especially if it is a ‘useful’ trade-unionist insisting on having his ‘anti-Gulag’ worthiness reasserted.(e.g. SLP).
But this is utterly HOPELESS.
The world does indeed wait for a proper historical assessment to start (on where the Soviet workers state went wrong, and where it crucially went right). It might even be assumed that civilisation’s progress is unlikely to get much further forward along anti-capitalist channels until such a complete historical reassessment has been made of all the workers-state experiences.
But just continuing with occasional bits of pro-Soviet or anti-Gulag ping-pong as SLP and others do is just reactionary “old politics” and playing right into BNP/NF hands.
There is no other way of tackling fascists or racism itself.
It is the capitalist exploitation system ITSELF which breeds racism, not any alleged shortcomings in ‘democracy’ under capitalism.
Telling non-whites in Oldham or France that racism can be stopped by “more democracy” is just a lie.
Telling would-be BNP or Le Pen voters that “the problems seen arising from immigration” can be solved by “better democracy” is a lie too.
Assuring the public that “Le Pen can never win a presidential election”, as some fake-’lefts’ are already doing, is also utter nonsense.
And the ultra-left politically-correct bravado of declaring that “a welcome to all immigrants and to all asylum-seekers is the only progressive way forward” is the silliest dilettantism of all.
Insoluble economic ‘overproduction’ crisis, which can only end in world slump and inter-imperialist tradewar warmongering, is irrevocably driving the whole ‘free world’ towards increasing racial/communal strife.
And racist considerations will increasingly become part of OFFICIAL policy everywhere too (on matters of immigration, nationality privileges, law and order, language education, social engineering, etc, etc).
No amount of do-good ‘anti-racism’ can stop this growing tendency, - hence the Le Pen and BNP phenomena (and many more around Europe).
Nothing can stop fascism from taking advantage of this increasing sickening of capitalist society.
Nothing can stop victimised or abused communities from increased self-organisation to resist this persecution.
More and more conflict is inevitable, thereby unavoidably confirming the more ‘realistic’ scenario of fascist politics, and rubbishing the petty-bourgeois PC idealism of all “we will stop fascism” subjectivists.
And in these circumstances, all ultra ‘left’ ‘anti-racist’ posturing of the “open the doors to all immigration and all asylum-seekers” kind will only be seen by the whole working class as throwing more fuel on the flames, and will thus further play into the BNP’s hands.
The anti-immigrant turn by ‘official’ social-democracy will solve nothing either, - other than possibly save New Labour some votes that Blunkett & Co might otherwise have lost to the BNP.
But increased racist legislation is still a further drift down the road to fascism, whether introduced by Blunkett or the BNP.
And although it is precisely all the OTHER problems of imperialism (slump, inter-imperialist trade war, etc) which make fascism the system’s final destination in crisis, (racism being the SYMPTOM of fascism and not remotely its CAUSE), ever-increasing confusion about ever-increasing social degeneration is not helping anything.
Only a programme which is nothing whatever to do with racism, or immigration, or asylum-seeking directly, can now affect this increasingly deteriorating situation, - the programme explaining capitalism as now declining irrevocably into revolutionary warmongering crisis everywhere, and at last giving the opportunity to start building a planned socialist flourishing for ALL, in workers states in every country in the world, stopping all need for emigration or asylum-seeking so cruelly placed on people of the Third World by imperialism for so long. EPSR 1133 23rd April 2002

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And they are at their non-Marxist class-collaborating gobshite again now over Le Pen, continuing the Revisionist nonsense that fascism is ‘bad’ imperialism, - meaning, willy-nilly, that ‘anti-fascism’ with presumably ‘good’ bourgeois (social-democrats liberals, etc, and other wielders of governmental office in imperialist states) can continue in the postwar Stalinist class-collaborating spirit of looking for the (nonexistent) “peaceful road to socialism” under the (nonexistent) “peaceful coexistence” between imperialism and the workers states”.
The imbecility that postwar US imperialist domination of the planet was “better than” wartime German and Japanese imperialist domination of the planet still persists, despite the unspeakable terror-tyranny, inflicted on the people of Vietnam and the whole of Indo-China; the people of Korea, Palestine, Algeria, Turkey, Chile, Indonesia, etc, and literally scores of other fascist-military dictatorships or colonial holocausts imposed by Western world domination since 1945.
Listen to the most ‘revolutionary’ representatives of the Socialist Alliance, quoting, with just mild criticism, what the French Trots are saying to workers about the election now:
“We understand those who will vote Chirac in the second round to keep out Le Pen, but we don’t think Chirac will be a bulwark against this new rise of the extreme right ....This is not Germany 1933 and it is clear that Chirac will win without difficulty”.
This Alliance rebuke that Chirac himself will have an authoritarian programme and should NOT, be voted for, - actively boycott the election instead, by strikes, occupations, barricades, street demonstrations, etc, academically arrives at some of the correct ‘revolutionary’ sounds but still totally misses all the crucial political/historical points.
Voting bourgeois to keep out Hitler would have been a nonsense in 1933 as well. Only an all-out revolutionary struggle in the 1930s stood any chance of preventing the imperialist system from imposing fascist-aggressive warmongering regime after regime through-out the ‘free world’ to forestall the growing attractiveness of the Soviet workers state and communist revolution.
And there were revolutionary situations in plenty to have been taken advantage of all round the planet.
The disaster was the beginnings of Stalinism’s ‘peaceful road’ class-collaborating-with ‘good’ imperialism. Revisionist defeatism about world revolution, - seen most tragically in Germany and Spain where ‘parliamentary democracy’ was ludicrously analysed as some sort of possible barrier to ‘fascism’, temporarily or permanently, instead of as the obvious and inevitable conduit to fascism, (i.e. more rightwing and chauvinistic authoritarianism) once the imperialist system had decided that capitalism’s continuation depended on the spread of warmongering nationalist diversions from revolution.
The imperialist system is now collapsing towards the same historical revolutionary crisis situation once again.
Parliamentary democracy will again be a barrier to absolutely NOTHING.
The point is NOT that a deluded vote for Chirac represents “the danger of an authoritarian programme” (Weekly Worker 429).
The point is that the imperialist system is ALREADY imposing its warmongering-destruction programme on the world (ask Palestine, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Argentina, Serbia, etc, etc) and French imperialism is ALREADY fully participating in that warmongering-destruction holocaust to try to save the world for the capitalist system. 
EPSR 1134 30th April 2002

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Of course WHOLESALE arrests and open dictatorship/racist persecution all round the ‘free world’ would be statistically ‘worse than’ the present course of the Bush-stolen US presidential election; the US-approved armed-dictatorship takeovers in Venezuela and Pakistan; the US tolerated creeping genocidal holocaust against the Palestinian nation; the colonial occupation of Afghanistan; the threatened blitzkriegs against Iraq and Colombia; etc, etc, etc.
But now that the imperialist system has ALREADY seen the need to start arbitrary arrests, detention and surveillance all round the ‘free world’ in pursuit of the totally insane fiction of the ‘global war on terrorism’, - then the historical process towards ‘total fascism’ (as the fake-‘left’ like to call it, imitating the bourgeois imperialists’ idiotic diversion) has ALREADY begun, and no amount of ‘parliamentary democracy’ is going to stop it.
The sickest and most dangerous illusion of all is that “parliamentary democracy and protest marches stopped the turn to fascism in Britain and elsewhere in the 1930s”.
Absolute NONSENSE. It was the entire imperialist SYSTEM which was turning to crisis-driven warmongering chauvinism in the 1930s, and enough ‘fascist’ regimes were encouraged or tolerated to make an anti-Soviet crusade and World War II easily achievable, exactly as required.
How much ‘fascist warmongering’ intention does the imperialist system need to OPENLY reveal?
It depends on how much resistance to the system’s despicable destructive domineering course is shown.
If there had been more decisive revolutionary resistance shown in the 1930s to the initial destructive warmongering adventurism inflicted by Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc, then even more openly fascist-chauvinist hostages to fortune would have had to have been imposed even further around the West, even beyond the Vichy regime in France, and the Quisling fascists in Norway, Holland, Portugal, etc, etc, to guarantee a sufficient volume of warmongering-chauvinist insanity to allow World War II to complete its ‘surplus’destructive purpose. EPSR 1134 30th April 2002 

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In reality, the capitalist crisis must inevitably proceed through to economic collapse, slump, trade-war, and eventually shooting war, in some sort of repeat of inter-imperialist World Wars I and II.
Extreme chauvinist warmongering and racist hysteria is going to get stronger and stronger anyway. The votes for parties like the BNP and Le Pen will grow inexorably.
So what is being achieved by the fake-‘left’?
It makes sure that no one thinks about revolution to overthrow the rotten racism creating system but that everyone should concentrate on these mere symptomatic pimples (BNP and Le Pen) to “deny them support” (impossible anyway); and to what end? Only to guarantee that capitalism’s insoluble crisis rages on, ensuring that in time, major fascist warmongering regimes really DO start taking over the capitalist states again, just as happened all over Europe, - in the crisis leading to WWII.
And why? To make sure that the bourgeoisie’s ludicrous illusion of “democracy” is preserved. EPSR 1135 7th May 2002

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And what hypocrisy to extol the “individual-opportunity to thrive” alleged aspect of capitalism but to keep deliberately quiet about the inevitable certainty of racism, fascism, and wars-everlasting because of the unchangeable cut-throat competitive domineering essence of the exploitation system.
And what conscious brainwashing to print ‘exposures’ of the rotten ‘Third Way’ Giddens-Blair subterfuge of using the “immigration is a problem” code for covert race-card playing but to then remain silent about the far worse smokescreen in all this which hides the capitalist system’s responsibility for the very existence and every delinquent deed of fascism.
Only worse confusion than ever for the working class will have been achieved by the fake-‘left’ helping to create an utterly ludicrous ‘anti-fascist front’ around voting for Chirac, a PROVEN monster of Western imperialist warmongering, to continue the monopoly-capitalist domination of the planet (Gulf War, anti-Yugoslavia wars, Afghan War, Zionist blitzkrieg, new Iraq War, countless African interventions on behalf of colonialism’s stooges, etc,etc) and a potential nuclear-chauvinist warmonger of the nastiest kind once the ‘free market’ has moved on from routine graft and corruption (Chirac is an expert practitioner) to international armed crookedness.
This silly stunt of totally sterile humbug has only managed to steer Le Pen’s opportunist philistine bandwagon to nearly 6 million votes by adding credibility to his sick fascist fraud that he was the “anti-establishment candidate” against whom all of the “failed old politics” had been forced to unite to “stop the people hearing the truth and voting it into power”, etc, etc, etc.
What a shameful farce all round for the dying Revisionist and Trot fake-’left’ to dribble out its last days perpetrating. EPSR 1135 7th May 2002

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As examined last EPSR, shouting ‘fascist’ at everything which moves on the right has nothing whatever to do with it.
The problem is NOT any individual parties or leaders thrown up by capitalism’s political-cultural degeneracy.
The problem is the historic class and international CONFLICT direction into which the unalterable iron laws of capitalist ‘over-production’ crisis have now hurled the entire ‘free-market’ system worldwide; to which the ONLY answer... is REVOLUTION.
Once imperialism has been driven by uncontrollable economic forces into inter-imperialist warmongering-for-survival mode, then nothing can stop reactionary chauvinism from spreading, (all the time that capitalism lasts) EXCEPT REVOLUTION.
The ludicrous mistake of the 1930s (and in 1965, 1973, etc) lay in the fake-‘left’ delusion that “fascism can be stopped” on its own, thus completely miseducating the working class about the historical phase that was on the horizon for the ‘free market’ system.
Far from a period of “ever-improving democracy”, the cyclical-crisis nature of capitalism must ALWAYS eventually return to a phase of uninhibited class-repression and international warmongering.
Always knowing this, the imperialists merely have to make tactical timing judgements about what can be risked,or what needs to be risked,in such matters as unleashing a 1965 on Indonesia or a 1973 on Chile, or a 2002 on Venezuela, etc, etc. NOT knowing this, the working class has frequently been misled to catastrophe by fake-‘left’ leadership into deluding itself that “the bourgeois democratic state can be preserved and is all the progress we need at this stage”, etc, etc, as in Chile in 1970-73, and in Spain around the petty-bourgeois Republican parliament against Franco in the 1930s, when in reality only a complete REVOLUTIONARY seizure of power by the working class under the dictatorship of the proletariat could possibly have saved the people from total repressive tyranny by that selfsame bourgeois state. EPSR 1136 14th May 2002

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There are other ways too, showing that monopoly-imperialism’s fascist-blitzkrieg-ruthlessness is not a national (German, Japanese, etc) characteristic, but the universal way of life of the cut-throat capitalist system with its insatiable appetites to rule the world:
The Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane was not the only one caught out by Hugo Chávez’s return to power in Venezuela on Sunday, but he was certainly one of the most embarrassed. Mr MacShane committed the undiplomatic error of describing Chávez as a “ranting demagogue”:
Of course, when he let slip those unfortunate comments, Mr MacShane thought that Hugo Chávez was a leftwing ex-president of a country with important mineral reserves in which the US takes a strong interest.
Unfortunately for Mr MacShane, the ranting demagogue in question was restored to his job by a combination of people power and constitutionally minded army officers. Odd, though, that Friday’s coup, a procedure not normally considered an aid to democratic practice, did not attract the condemnation it deserved. Chávez, after all, has twice been elected president by the largest margins in Venezuela’s history. In Washington, where the administration blamed Chávez himself for the coup that briefly removed him from office, the reaction to his restoration was even stranger. Far from welcoming the triumph of democracy, the US administration reprimanded Chávez expressing the menacing hope that he would be more careful in future, presumably in case he overthrew himself again. EPSR1137 21st May 2002

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Still not a true potential for the kind of fascist irrational murderous tyranny that WWIII destructiveness might be supposed to encompass???
But plenty of other CIA-run Latin American coups have resulted directly in the most vicious Nazi regimes imaginable, Pinochet’s concentration camps and Guatemala’s death squads being typical.
And look no further than the ‘hidden war’ in Afghanistan itself where all this bourgeois commentary is complaining that the truth is not being told and that only brainwashing ‘patriotic’- censorship prevails.
Look at this capitalist press estimate of how many ordinary Afghans are getting slaughtered by “collateral damage” or just driven into early death by disease and starvation. EPSR 1137 21st May 2002

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Pilger is cleverer than most, and sometimes manages to avoid the cruder “we condemn Sept 11 terrorism” sick class-collaborative Western cringing that the entire rest of the fake-‘left’ have fallen for.
But the anti-theory philistinism remains as debilitating as ever.
“The United States is not Germany”. Nonchalantly adding “of course” is fine for imbecile-level logic or geography, but dozens more historical comparisons between imperialist crisis 2002 and imperialist crisis 1930s need examining more purposefully. Assassination, subversion? Coup-making? Military expansionism? Secret-police surveillance at home? Foreign agents in every country? Global economic exploitation?? Contempt for international courts and world opinion? Blitzkrieg aerial destruction of defenceless regimes declared ‘hostile’? An ideologically batty and arrogantly corrupt ruling elite? An insane international warmongering mission? Etc, etc, etc, etc???
Opportunists like Pilger can start to be taken seriously when they can be heard using their platform to argue for the rights of the dispossessed to fight with terrorism or any other weapons they can lay their hands on for combating intolerable tyranny, and when they can be heard hammering the rest of the fake-‘left’ for its miserable cowardice in going along with the West’s Goebbels lying arrogance demanding that “terrorism be condemned”.
It might be a long wait, but meanwhile imperialism will still not stop losing more than it gains from having to encourage these fake-‘lefts’ so as to hold the anti-Leninist line. EPSR 1144 16th July 2002

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The best final answer to all this hysterical rehashing of anti-Soviet “evil empire” propaganda will of course come when East Europe resumes its revolutionary workers state development after overthrowing failed ‘free-market’ capitalism (and its global imperialist warmongering domination reality) for a second time in history.
But the route to that eventual shattering blow to all bourgeois anti-communist propaganda probably lies through unimaginable Third World revolutionary turmoil meanwhile, - turmoil which could at any moment see geared-up Western imperialist warmongering preparations diverted from Iraq, say, to somewhere like Argentina in the event of communist revolution breaking out there, as the global capitalist economic crisis relentlessly worsens, and as bourgeois ruling-class reactionary repression turns all the screws to breaking-point everywhere.
It is a mistake to think that another ‘special case’ Hitler-Germany phenomenon (the persecuted victims of the scapegoating Versailles Treaty which put a temporary end to inter-imperialist warmongering in 1919 (WWI)) is necessary for justifying the monopoly capitalist system’s return to a permanent all-out aggression footing.
Colonial-fascist arrogance against “inferior” Second and Third-World targets was far from just a German imperialist mentality. It was almost universal all round the ‘free-market’ Colonial empire system, backed by Japan, Italy, Spain and Portugal particularly strongly.
That specific cocky blitzkrieg mentality is proving more difficult to re-establish now in this new international imperialist economic crisis, which is what is making the finding of specific targets to assault first, more difficult to “justify” this time around for the monopoly capitalist system’s acute warmongering needs (for trying to rescue the international ‘freemarket’ racket from humiliating collapse).
No lesser imperialist powers “lebensraum” demands will be easily tolerated or understood after the post1945 propaganda brainwashing onslaught universally against “evil empire communist expansionism”.
But the “anti-violence” hysteria of the general “war on terrorism”, - so helpfully being provided for imperialism by the anti-communist fake-‘left’, will serve a similar purpose, bouncing off inevitable chance phenomena such as Sept 11, and more than capable of entirely inventing and materially stunting up some totally fictitious “major provocation” by Iraq, or Colombia, or Argentine revolutionaries, or Gaddafi, or Mugabe, or whatever. EPSR 1151 10th September 2002 

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Those ‘excuses’ would not go down well today, and so US-led imperialist propaganda is obliged to make an unconvincing fuss about a global “war on terror” and about non-existent “axes of evil” who are supposedly “threatening the world with weapons of mass destruction”, etc.
American imperialism’s “pre-emptive strike doctrine” amounts to a declaration of war against the whole world, plus a declaration that the United Nations is finished.
Announcing that no state will ever be allowed to rival the USA in military might, and that any which approach that level of economic and technological power will be attacked, is WORSE than the Hitler doctrine.
And whereas the Nazis merely abandoned the League of Nations in the late 1930s in rejecting its strictures against aggression, these US imperialists around Bush are actually threatening to put the UN under house arrest to stop it inspecting Iraq’s weaponry on terms which Washington consider not belligerent enough.
All round, the US position amounts to the most arrogant statement of bullying imperialist hypocrisy and fascist militarism in all history.
The clue to this panic-stricken philistine aggression (in the insoluble economic crisis which is shattering global capitalism) is also the explanation of how this warmongering tyranny will be ended.
Inter-imperialist rivalry will not cease just because the USA is so much more powerful than anyone else. 
And in the devastating trade-war conflicts which will ensue, including many humiliating defeats for some of the powers forced to the wall by the competition or by military bullying, working-class revolution will increasingly become the best or the only way out of the destructive crisis of capitalist over-production. EPSR1153 24th September 2002

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State and Revolution, - and just about everything else in 100 volumes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, provides the only serious modern scientific history and worthwhile commentary on what to do about the world of imperialist crisis. It is the only scientific way to build on from Pinter’s raw, emotional, break from reformist delusions, expressed in his own poem called “Democracy”:
There’s no mistake.
The big prick’s out.
They’ll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.

If Pinter’s arresting bellow of rage and hatred, discovering how “democracy” is precisely the ROUTE to fascist tyranny, can push his circles back towards Marxist science, it will become a very good poem indeed. Build Leninism. EPSR 1189  17th June 2003