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 1393  10thrd  September 2011                                                                                                   25p fortnightly

Ground Zero schmaltz only repels while blitzkrieg destruction is visited on country after country so that Washington can build the warmongering “answer” to ride out world capitalist Slump disaster. But Third World rebellion which 9/11 signalled and now grown into mass revolutionary upheavals of the Arab Spring and riots in the capitalist capitals, will be stymied and blocked until it can develop clear Leninist revolutionary leadership to guide it through imperialist “democracy” frauds and wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing counter-revolutionary bogus “freedom” revolts in Libya, Syria and more. Beijing recognition of Libya rebels poses even more urgently the need to re-examine revisionism’s dire legacy of mistakes and cover-up (still covered-up)

The sick, manipulated, tear-jerking Hollywood schmalz at the “Ground Zero” 9/11 tenth anniversary in New York, and the fascist triumphalism of the West at its “victory” over Libya’s bourgeois nationalist revolution, both underline the continuing failure of the “lefts” (all shades) to give the working class any coherent leadership at all.
Just the opposite. The fake-“left” collusion with, and capitulation to, bourgeois moralising condemnation of “terrorism”, or shallow one-dimensional notions of “evil dictators”, has played right into the hands of the latest warmongering escalations.
Their shallowness and cravenness has let imperialism take Goebbels-type BIG LIE propaganda to a new level of demented fantasy (eagerly pumped out in conscious misrepresentations and shallow counter-revolutionary provocations about alleged “repression of the people” by the bourgeois press and TV) against selected victims, currently Libya and Syria, but with plenty more prepared from Zimbabwe and Sudan to Cuba and China.
This latest monstrous blitzkrieg intimidation and “punishment” of the Third World on top of a decade and a half of warmongering depravity in the Middle East has been aided and abetted from the start by the fake-left’s anti-communist denunciations of “dictators”, apeing the shallowest petty bourgeois prejudices about “freedom and democracy” and “human rights” which are cynically pumped out by lying Western propaganda (even as it supports a host of fascist, gangster and reactionary regimes all around the world).     
It extends the foul and shameful lining-up of all the “lefts” with imperialist condemnation of the 9/11 suicide bombers as “criminals” or even “reactionaries”, or at best as “wrong-headed and hampering the struggle”, an opportunist capitulation which was already a watershed moment a decade ago, definitively exposing the 57 varieties of pretend “revolutionaries” as nothing more than colluders and apologists for imperialism.
It was as significant a betrayal of the working class as the anti-revolutionary capitulation of the Second International in the run up to the Great War, exposing them as social pacifists and social chauvinists, toadies and apologists for their own ruling classes, each justifying the warmongering of their country’s capitalist order as “in the national interest” and “defence of the fatherland” and leading millions of workers into the machine slaughter of the trenches.
Only Bolshevism consistently exposed the warmongering as imperialist piracy and a struggle for colonial plunder which would only further enslave and hold back the working class, both in the colonies and in the “advanced” countries, and called for the defeat of the ruling class in every country including - most importantly - its own, as the crucial step on the road towards revolutionary overthrow of the old order, the only way in which war can be stopped.
Now the “left” “condemning of terrorism” feeds modern monopoly capitalism the justifications for its warmongering and blitzkrieging which have helped continue a ten year long war against the Third World, both to try and intimidate it and suppress the growing rebellion against endless tyrannical exploitation and to set the world up generally for the World War conflicts that capitalism needs to ride through its great catastrophic crisis.
Despite a decade of the Pentagon’s avowed “endless war” and the stream of ever more revelations of torture, abuse and fascist mayhem which are integral to it, and the ever clearer picture of total failure to bring anything resembling a “bright new future” of democracy and prosperity to the scorched destruction of Iraq’s civilisation (until 2003 one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East despite the CIA installed Ba’athist anti-communism of Saddam Hussein) or the corrupt drug-running warlordism which passes for “government” in shattered and repressed Afghanistan, the “left” has repeated almost verbatim the glaring fabrications and lies.    
Apart from one or two specific exceptions they have swallowed hook line and sinker every word of the deluge of allegations made against Gaddafi by the coordinated propaganda onslaught which stampeded the civil war and they STILL pump out the foulest hatred and lies against the Libyan revolution even as the evidence has poured in of the fascist and reactionary nature of the “opposition” and the dirty cynicism of capitalism in coordinating it.
And the worst of this craven opportunism still repeats the mantra that 9/11 was a “criminal act”, from the petty bourgeois liberals like Shami Chakrabarti of the Liberty Group and “left” Labourism, to the ranks of assorted Trotskyists and the remnants of CP revisionism in the “Weekly Worker”.    
But the Goebbels performance at the WTC site was a sick hypocrisy, contrasted with the decade of continuous war in the Middle East and the anonymous killing of thousands more soldiers and civilians in Libya in the final blitzkrieg destruction of its bourgeois nationalist achievements, all under the cynical and lying pretence of “fighting for freedom”.
No emotional and trembling name readings will be made for the hundreds of thousands, millions, already slaughtered by the terrifying high-tech high-altitude, high-explosive and now robotic destruction and massacres in Iraq or Afghanistan (or Pakistan, Yemen etc).
Nor will they be made for the tens of thousands actually slaughtered by Nazi-NATO raids (despite the outright lies of “targeted” smart bombs and the myth that it only matters if “civilians” are killed anyway) in the current Goebbels lie “civilian protection” blitzkrieging of Libya.
No eulogies will be heard for the hundreds and thousands of Libyans killed by the secret, and undeclared British, American and French ground force troops (illegal even under the bourgeois figleaf “law” of the United Nations resolutions) and massive resources of powerful weaponry from helicopter gunships to computerised missile launchers.
And no memorials will be built for the multiple victims and prisoners strung up or tortured and beaten by the nasty little death-squad vengefulness, vigilantism and racist killings by the capitalist-trained and instigated “rebels” (all reactionary monarchists, fascists and petty bourgeois collaborators on the make), echoing the purest Nazi mantras of “first you get a trial and then we shoot you” for pro-Gaddafi prisoners or “unfortunately found dead” (like the man alleged to have shot PC Fletcher in the 1980s).
And no sympathy and help will emerge for the millions more condemned to misery by bereavement, injury and the massive devastation of the infrastructure and fabric of cities and towns which the Libyan people have doggedly built from scratch over forty years to provide universal high standards of living.
All they get is the arrogant and contemptuous “serves them right” strutting and self-righteousness of the latter-day Hitlerites, from Cameron, Hague and Sarkozy, to Obama and the feminist icon Hilary Clinton in the States, exactly as imperialist domineering has always treated any “natives” who dare to challenge the writ and rule of its domination, – massacring, torturing and killing tens of millions in the long decades of American world supremacy since 1945 (and as its stooges have been doing simultaneously in nearby Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc throughout the West’s cynical sham of “self-sacrificing concern” for “democracy” in Libya). 
Bush and Obama’s WTC gush of bible-readings and crocodile tears, was more than comparable with the German Hitler Nazi sentimentality over its own soldiers and “Aryan heroes” made while tens of millions were blitzkrieged, tortured and destroyed in concentration camps in the last World War, most of all in the blasted and pulverised Soviet Union (which lost one third of its people and cities), the intended major victim of the capitalist war buildup throughout the 1930s.  If the numbers do not yet apparently compare (which is only arguable at all by ignoring the Vietnam, and Korean wars, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chilean and Indonesian massacres, the post-1945 Greek “civil war” fascist suppression of the communist partisans, Malaysia, Kenya, South Africa and dozens more coups, putsches and colonialist atrocities post-1945, and four hundred years of colonialist genocide before that), then simply wait.
Once the latest and most disastrous of all capitalist meltdown crises finally unravels into the catastrophic Slump collapse that is unstoppably unfolding, held back only transiently since 2008 by insane money printing (which will only magnify the onrushing disaster) then even worse destruction is inevitable.
Then the current turmoil of already collapsed markets, failed currencies and bankrupted countries will rapidly accelerate into all-out warmongering and inter-imperialist conflict, the only answer capitalism has ever had to its humiliating incompetence, to divert attention from its failure, head off rising working class resistance by pumping up chauvinism, to scapegoat and blame outsiders and “others” (clear visible in deliberate hounding of gypsy travellers at present with police raids over alleged “slave-keeping”, and evictions), and eventually try to destroy them along with great “surpluses” of capital which clog its world trading and production system.  
This onrushing World War devastation is the real point to all the fraudulent “human rights” and “anti-terrorist” wars being waged, preparing the world for the all-out destruction that the epochal collapse of capitalist class rule is bringing, just as it has done three times already, escalating massively each time in scale and intensity, from the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) to the industrialised carnage of the Great War (1914-18) over all of Europe, to the world scale destruction and devastation of World War Two (1939-45), which dwarfed everything before it.  
But while the foul blitzkrieg destruction of the tiny Libyan nationalist revolution (five million in population), by the combined might of Western arms and its Nazi-NATO military (over five hundred million) may have “succeeded” in asserting yet again the “right” of “Might” for the moment, it will not hold back the huge rising anger and hatred of the Third World.
It was at the World Trade Centres that this often confused but ever-growing rebelliousness gave mighty US imperialism its own taste of “shock  and awe” in September 2001, shattering its arrogant confidence.
The Twin Towers victims of the plane crashes are themselves tragic losses in the endless and increasing chaos and devastation of capitalism’s collapse, but they are a drop in the ocean of the permanent mayhem, torture, repression, and brutality inflicted on the billions of the Third World, via fascist violence or simply the slow massacre of tens of millions through starvation, poverty & imposed ignorance. 
Just as tragic are the suicide perpetrators, like thousands or tens of thousands of the downtrodden, who at huge personal cost and self-sacrifice gave notice that the world dominating tyranny of imperialist exploitation would never be safe again.
Just the opposite. The explosive anger of the Egyptian masses at the recent (routine) Zionist attacks on Palestine and the Zionist killing of five Egyptian police, which has ready seen imperialism’s number one stooge forced to retreat from its Cairo embassy, is the latest confirmation that massive world turmoil is not going to die down, but only increase and intensify.
The Arab Spring revolutionary developments in Egypt and Tunisia, which imperialist intrigue has tried to head off with its bogus “revolutionary extension” via deliberate COUNTER-revolutionary upheavals in Libya and Syria (long planned by CIA, Mossad and  western subversion and even armed provocations) have shown already that mass struggle against Western tyranny and torturing fascist stooge dictatorship is now spontaneously lifting the inchoate, desperate and sometimes contradictorily backward “terrorist” struggles to a new stage of rapidly widening mass rebellion.
And this rage and anger at the devastation and repression of capitalism is fast spreading across the world as the unstoppable and accelerating crisis collapse of the entire profit system spirals into catastrophe. 
The riots and upheavals tearing city centres apart from Santiago in Chile to Athens, Madrid, and Paris in Europe and multiple towns and locations in Britain, all underline that far from having pacified world resistance to its depravity, the endless warmongering and the crisis which is driving it towards all out World War, have massively increased the turmoil which will reach into the heartlands of even the “rich” capitalist powers which have long dominated the world.
What does hold back the masses however is the continuing legacy of decades of confusion poured out by the fake-“lefts”, all utterly corrupted by the long inflationary “boom” of imperialism and opportunistic notions of “peaceful roads” and “democratic ways” to achieve “steady negotiated progress” for working class conditions and living standards (with more or less militancy and “extra-parliamentary pressure” to push it along according to taste). 
And always it has ignored the Third World on whose backs this “progress” has been built.
For decades the Slump catastrophe that capitalist crisis must always return to (which is guaranteed to wipe out all these tactical concessions by the ruling class) was ignored by the fake-“left” and only since it has become so obvious with the 2008 bank disasters, has it been alluded to here and there in “left” articles.
But despite token references to “the recession” and the crisis, or even long-winded articles spelling out academically the Marxist theory of crisis, no living reference to the devastating failure of the capitalist system as the driving force underlying all the world’s major events ever emerges in the reams of petty bourgeois fake-“left” nonsense poured out about “wars for oil” and other such partial explanations.
And despite the pretences of being “revolutionary parties” there is equally no mention in tactics and practice of the only possible solution, the complete ending of this degenerate and long out-of-time class rule society, rotten to the core with philistinism, crudity, corruption, criminality, drugs, pornography, racism, violence, environmental destructiveness, pollution, torture, repression, alienated despair and endless bloody destructiveness, wilfully wasting billions of human lives and their vast potential genius in ignorance and poverty and crushing exploitation.
And all to keep the tiniest minority of ruling class in insane pampered luxury and power at the expense of the gigantic possibilities which modern science, technology and resources make possible for everyone on earth if they were harnessed in a controlled and planned manner for human development and not pointless anarchic profiteering.
To the contrary the same old tepid mixture of opportunist reformism and protest mixed with pacifist wishful thinking and mostly larded with cynical anti-communism, continues to pour out, perhaps with some slightly more defensive “Stop the Cuts” sloganising and protest (though precious little of that even from the official “Labour Movement” so far, with even the threatened pension strikes simply arguing to retain the old reformist status quo).
The fake-“left” is so far gone in opportunism that they no longer even grasp the need for a revolutionary party of open polemic struggle to develop and constantly update and extend a scientific world perspective describing and warning of the unbearably stretched historical contradictions which are plunging the world towards chaos and destruction.
Capitalism is desperate to ratchet up the war atmosphere and keep it on the boil even as the “war on terror” has lost its momentum in a welter of exposés, revelations and growing petty bourgeois disquiet about imperialist massacres, torture, and barbarity (like the latest Abba Mousa inquiry findings of widespread British Army fascist violence).
And it has been ever more frantic to do so since the eruption of the Arab Spring revolts in Egypt and Tunisia have signalled a qualitatively new level has been reached in the Third World rebellion, adding to the enormous (and intractable) problems of the greatest ever crisis failure its out-of-time class rule has ever faced.
The ferment of militant “terrorism” and other forms of often heroic but piecemeal struggle are now transforming into a mass revolt which is adding further to the already impossible-to-resolve contradictions of the capitalist “credit crunch” – the technical expression of the unrolling crisis disaster which Marxism long ago identified as the unstoppable core contradiction of the production for private profit system.
Slump, crisis, market failure and Depression are inbuilt in a system which anarchically pursues the “opportunities for expansion and new investment” irrespective of human needs or all other equally demented investment in the same sectors, always leading to complete over-saturation, with none of the capital eventually able to get back any meaningful profits.
As Marx declared, the insanity of “want in the midst of plenty” is produced by the demented demand for profit at all costs, while pushing the exploitation rate of the working class to ever more intolerable levels, cutting away the very capacity for the masses to buy the things they need, and producing the inevitable gluts of unsold goods that create market failure.
In the complex epoch of monopoly world domination this basic “overproduction” is short-circuited, disguised and hidden by the manipulation and forcing of the markets through world monopoly dominance of the giant multinationals backed up by the overriding power and influence of the leading imperialist powers, most of all the “top dog” United States.
Via ever more complex credit mechanisms and currency manipulations the crisis emerges on the surface around the glut of finance capital itself and the endless stretching of its control by fantastical credit mechanisms which eventually has snapped like an elastic band.
The implosion has been stopped only by the insanity of adding yet more fantastical valueless credit to the enormous mountain of paper dollars which just collapsed in 2008.   
But that only temporarily delays the impact of the “credit crunch” which is resuming once more, and at an even deeper level now that governments have poured all their national resources into the bottomless pit, as the panic measures of money printing and bank rescue inevitably fails to stimulate production.
Nothing can increase the profitable output of the system because its underlying structure is clogged solid with “surplus” capital unable to find anymore investment opportunities, exactly as Marx’s titanic analysis of capitalism demonstrated 150 years ago will always eventually be the case.
And this fundamental understanding (see page 6) remains unchallenged and unchallengeable (despite endless bourgeois attempts to discredit it) because it accurately and scientifically describes the reality of capitalist exploitation and the contradictions which are built into it and which can only ever lead to repeated slump disaster, on ever greater scale.
Far from “solving” the credit crunch problems the latest money printing just intensifies the contradictions, feeding massive inflation into the system (swamping the Slump DEFLATION which is paralysing commerce and industry) and intensifying the unbearable inter-imperialist tensions with new escalations in the currency and trade wars as each major power tries to force currency collapse and bank failure onto rival major capitalist centres.
With such a perspective the war on Libya was immediately identifiable by Marxism as yet another step in the long build-up to world war, and with a particularly specific function as a deliberate feint, set off and provoked by imperialism because of the truly spontaneous mass rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt in previous weeks, themselves triggered by the overall disastrous crisis of the American Empire dominated world.
The genuine revolts caught the monopoly capitalism world order on the hop, threatening to topple the long established imperialist stooge dictatorships which have been heavily financed and armed by imperialism to bolster and support the monstrous Zionist entity, the key instrument of occupation and permanent jackboot domination to pacify the entire Middle East, rich with both resources for exploitation and a long and honourable cultural and scientific civilised tradition that has threatened to become a major challenge to Western capitalist power since the Second War.
Libya’s bogus events are a desperate bid to contain this spreading revolutionary movement by launching massive turmoil and intimidatory war while simultaneously distracting  attention from the vicious and brutal suppression taking place in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain (all “shooting down their own people” as the weasel UN NATO “protection” propaganda puts it).
It was ABC Marxist understanding to know that Libya is completely different to the pro-imperialist gangster dictatorships and reactionary feudal and tribal regimes in the region, being instead part of a long opposition to imperialism which began with a revolution against the old monarchy and colonial stoogery and has been a thorn in the side ever since.
Not only was Libya not supported or funded by the West but it has been variously bombed, subverted, intrigued against (over Lockerbie eg), bullied and trade-blockaded throughout its history, and threatened endlessly with worse.
That alone was cause for major hesitation in seeing the events there in the trivial and shallow way the Trots and Labourites did, swallowing the shallow empty slogans of “freedom” waved by the tiny groups which provoked the initial, obviously paid-for, “demonstrations” which the Western press then hyped up, pretending this was more of the same as Egypt.        
Instead of parroting this garbage, even the most junior of self-respecting revolutionaries would immediately have understood from the beginning that the “rebels” were capitalist stooges and have taken a stand against them, most of all when they began openly waving monarchist flags and calling for “aid and help” from the West and NATO fresh from the destruction of Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
And whatever the reality of the Libyan state rule (which, while confused and bourgeois nationalist, is a long way from the thuggery and brutality of such CIA installed figures as Saddam Hussein) it would never be worse than the reality of capitalist domination of the world; in a conflict Marxist could want only to see the defeat of imperialism.   
In fact the thuggery and brutality has been on the side of the “rebels” so carefully nurtured by the West (many in comfortable exile over the years in London and America),  as has trickled out even through the Goebbels level distortions of the Western intelligence-fed press campaigns (see past EPSRs).
Some more independent minded journalists have been able to report a bit of the truth and a few disquieted petty bourgeois have raised unsettling questions, though as always interlaced with yet more bilious and unsubstantiated poison (edited out):

What began early last week as a series of security sweeps to uncover the remnants of Gaddafi’s loyalists has edged towards a larger and more troubling persecution. It is not a good time to be a sub-Saharan African here. It is an especially poor time to be black and in hospital with a gunshot wound.
A tour of the capital’s overworked hospitals over the past fortnight revealed sizable numbers of such men in beds alongside soldiers from Gaddafi’s ousted army. How they got there is an issue of much conjecture.
“I swear by God I was walking in the street when I was shot,” said a Senegalese man, Ali Senegal, in Mitiga hospital. A bullet had entered the right side of his neck and shattered his jaw.
A Gaddafi soldier in a bed opposite spoke up. “You were a sniper and you know you were,” he said. Senegal looked horrified and alone. Even if he was telling the truth, there is little chance that he will be believed.
In the next room, a second man from Niger had just been brought in from a triage centre with a gaping wound to his right leg. “I am a mechanic,” he said angrily. “I have been working in Abu Selim for three years.” Both men had the misfortune to be injured in a battle that raged on 26 August in the staunchly loyalist neighbourhood just south of Gaddafi’s Bab al-Azazia compound.
In the eyes of the doctors treating them, they had no good reason for being in Abu Selim. But at least here, the men can expect to be fed, given water and have their wounds tended to.
The street outside is not proving as kind. Across Tripoli, thousands of black Africans no longer enjoy the status bestowed on them under Gaddafi, when hundreds of thousands were welcomed over the past 25 years and given work permits or citizenship.
At least several thousand have been detained in the past fortnight on suspicion of being mercenaries. Many thousands more have fled or are in the process of doing so. Yet more still remain holed up in small groups in Tripoli neighbourhoods too frightened to venture out.
At Mitiga hospital two badly wounded men, one a Tuareg tribesman and another from Chad, walked gingerly into the emergency ward, wincing with every step. They had been staying together in a private home, not willing to seek help for fear of what might happen to them. “We were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said the Tuareg man. “Help us.”
Hundreds of thousands of Africans fled Libya to their home countries, mainly Chad, Mali, Niger, Sudan and Somalia in the early days of the revolution in late-February and March.
...The desperate and savage last days of Gaddafi’s 42 years in power are rapidly recasting Libya’s historical association with Africa.
In the wake of the regime has come resentment and a current of racism that Libya’s new leaders have vowed will not become entrenched.
“Some people chose to fight,” said Winston Emerson Adango, who is trying to leave Libya to return to Niger. “But people like me just want to live.”

**************

the masses of men and women of Tripoli who turned out in rallies against the rebels, felt confident that should the rebels show up in their city they would be able to defeat them with the arms that Gaddafi’s government had been issuing to them since the beginning of the crisis.
Now many of those people have been massacred, have fled or are in hiding. They may or may not have underestimated the ruthless might of NATO, but the media’s narrative that Tripoli fell without resistance is contested by the fact that it took the massacre of thousands and at least five days to establish tentative NTC control of the capital as well as by eyewitnesses accounts of what happened during those five days and beyond.
From the beginning of the fighting in Tripoli on August 20th when I and 35 other journalists became trapped inside the Rixos hotel, it was virtually impossible to get a clear idea of what was happening on the streets outside. Throughout that period the sounds of bombs, gunfire and other heavy weaponry was almost non-stop, with shrapnel and bullets occasionally making their way inside the hotel. But like the rest of the world, the only information we had, apart from the odd moments of communication with contacts inside the city, was from the mainstream international media.
Since my release, I have begun to collate information from residents in the capital in the absence of information from sources which are recognized internationally as “independent”. The following report is based on these accounts and the sources identity must be kept confidential due to the systematic targeting of anyone who betrays disloyalty to the rebels, which as I experienced myself, includes challenging their version of events in the media.
On the first day after rebels from sleeper cells inside Tripoli emerged and began attacking checkpoints manned by Libyan special forces. As is the pattern with their advance into areas on the way to the capital they faced a swift initial defeat. But with the first images emerging around the world of the rebels inside Tripoli NATO ensured it would not be short lived. The organisation sanctioned to “protect civilians”, rapidly moved to bomb all checkpoints in the densely packed city. The vast majority of these were manned by volunteers – i.e. ordinary citizens that had been armed with Kalashnikovs since the beginning of the crisis – so that the rebels could easily move into the city by sea and by road.
This was followed by masses of youth and other residents in the capital pouring into the streets to defend their city as they had pledged to do during the mass rallies mentioned above and elsewhere.
The following day, NATO responded with intensified aggression. Eyewitnesses report that during this day, the broadcasting station in Tripoli was bombed, killing dozens. Shortly after the rebels claimed control of Libyan TV and the international media dutifully repeated the claim, blocking any mention of how the takeover had occurred.
Adding to the media’s campaign of confusion, reports of Gaddafi’s sons being caught and that Gaddafi along with other family members had fled the country continued to beam out of televisions across the world.
Having become accustomed to such psychological operations designed to weaken the people’s support for the government by making them believe it had betrayed them, masses defied the reports and marched to Green Square. From inside the Rixos, during the short periods when phone access was revived, my contacts in the city who were in Green Square at the time, informed me that Muammar Gaddafi had been seen driving through the city in his army fatigues urging people to remain strong and not be deceived by the west’s relentless propaganda. This has since been reported by further contact with other residents who were in the streets at the time.
Following relentless bombardment, the masses were pushed back to Gaddafi’s compound Bab al-Azizia where they resisted the rebels’ advance for a further 24 hours. It was during this time that Saif al-Islam, who until then the media and International Criminal Court had been insisting was captured and arrested, showed up at the Rixos hotel where we were trapped. Calm and confident, he took out a group of journalists to Bab al-Azizia where upon their return, they confirmed seeing thousands in and around the compound waving the green flag, including as the tribes had pledged, from their people across the country.
But like the peaceful march in the western mountains on July 24th which was attacked by NATO and the rebels, the masses in Bab al-Azizia were broken up by NATO bombing an entrance for the rebels and attacks by Apache gunships.
The same fate was visited upon gatherings in Green Square. Bab al-Azizia alone was reported to have been bombed 63 times during that period.
With both Green Square and Bab-Alzizia now in control of the rebels, the resistance continued in areas like Tripoli’s poorest neighbourhood Abu Saleem, which a few weeks previously had held a mass demonstration against the NATO aggression and in support of the Jamahiriya. Fighting against the rebels also raged on in Salah Eldeen and El Hadba.
Armed with Kalashnikovs and Rocket Propelled Grenades, the citizens of these areas fighting 8,000 kg bombs, Apache gunships, US, European and UAE special forces and the rebels laden with NATO’s sophisticated weaponry, became part of the carnage and piles of bodies were reported to line the streets.
Since then, any area known to have supported Gaddafi has reportedly been bombed or been subjected to homes and apartments being burned and looted. And even the mainstream media has been unable to ignore the systematic targeting and lynching of anyone with black skin. It is widely known that Gaddafi’s opponents deeply loathed his rhetoric and policies in support of Black Africa.
With Sirte, Sabha and Beni Walid being amongst the last areas still flying the green flag high, the rebels claim to be giving these a deadline before they resort to a “military response”, implying that in the meantime, a nonmilitary avenue will be pursued. Yet again, the media fail to highlight the hypocrisy that the rebels’ ally, NATO, has been openly bombing these areas.
The same media has unquestioningly swallowed NATO’s line that the targets have been exclusively “Gaddafi’s forces”, in the face of evidence before their very eyes to the contrary and in the absence of any independent investigation into the death toll of the 30,000 bombs estimated to have been dropped over the past six months.
The last concrete figures on the second day of fighting put the death toll in 12 hours of fighting in Tripoli alone at 1,300 with 900 injured. Far from Tripoli falling without resistance these figures suggest that Tripoli fell with the masses resisting being massacred.
As in Zlitan, Zawiya and elsewhere, the same atrocities as those committed in Tripoli, are being carried out in Beni Walid and Sirte with the complete silent complicity of journalists and “independent” observers on the ground. This is “free Libya”, so long as the thousands of dead and in hiding upon which it is based goes unmentioned.

****************

No one deserves to die without their death being recorded. Except, it seems, when they are the “collateral damage” of military interventions to “protect” them.  Nato intervention in Libya holds itself to no standard of measurement at all.
Obtaining accurate figures is even more vital in the case of Libya, where the declared purpose of military intervention was to protect civilians. In Libya, an immediate note of caution was sounded by the UN’s humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, Valerie Amos, who called on all parties to spare civilians from the effects of hostilities, which “includes refraining from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas”.
This is an understandable response: it is reasonable enough to anticipate saving lives when your weapons are medicines, food and shelter, but this was effectively a declaration of war and those are not the weapons of Nato. Whereas potentially life-saving drugs have their side-effects scrupulously studied, there was no indication that the full human consequences of intervention would be examined by any of the parties so vigorously undertaking it.
It is never easy to arrive at an early and reliable figure for deaths in armed conflict – all the more so when the media have restricted access, and official recording capacity is in disarray or itself suppressed. Iraq Body Count (IBC) is a member of a newly-formed international network of organisations (currently 29) who record the victims of armed conflict, each by the best means they can. All are forced to make the most of very limited means, with media reports often treated as a main source or as a lead to later, on-the-ground investigations. The number of reported civilian deaths from post-invasion violence in the IBC database now exceeds 110,000 – a number that continuing analysis of the Iraq War Logs published by WikiLeaks will probably raise by 15,000. These logs revealed that governments can and do collect data on the deaths of “local nationals” – the Pentagon just didn’t publish it, except in infrequent and barely penetrable aggregate trend-line figures.
For Libya, recording did briefly take on an official and international character, but this came to an abrupt end on 4 June, with the closure of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs-funded Libya crisis map, tracking security incidents across the country. This means there is now no high-profile international project dedicated to recording deaths in the Libya conflict, although there are certainly some dedicated volunteers contributing to the Wikipedia page on the subject which is forced – at present – to hedge its bets with a figure of 2,000 to 13,000 overall deaths across different timeframes.
As with Iraq, government data on casualties remains undisclosed – and, judging by the regular press releases from Britain’s defence ministry, Nato planes only ever destroy military facilities and equipment, with nary a soul anywhere near or within them. In April, 14 NGOs involved in monitoring human rights and armed violence wrote to the UN security council, the Arab League and others, urging all parties to the conflict in Libya to commit to record and report on civilian casualties. Only in this way, we argued, could the outcome of the intervention be judged in its own terms of “protecting civilians”.
The reply we received from under-secretary Alistair Burt at the Foreign Office had some good in it, including a commitment that “[any] reports that civilians have died as a result of Nato airstrikes will be carefully investigated”. But this falls far short of investigating the full human consequences of the conflict, which would require inquiring into all deaths, caused by all parties.
One can usually expect parties in armed conflict to highlight, often in gruesome detail, deaths caused by the opposing side. But that is hardly enough, as illustrated by the reports of African migrants being targeted in Libya in revenge killings as suspected Gaddafi loyalists. In any event, sole focus on deaths for which there is a clear and identifiable link to a particular perpetrator leaves a lot of casualties unrecorded, unidentified, and unacknowledged.
 
As now standard practice for the propaganda machine and its lurid hearsay stories of alleged “repression and torture and killing” etc (repeated verbatim without any attempts at cross examination, explanation of who is grinding an axe, verification, corroboration, or return check visits), once the damage has been done, mass passions stirred and the chaos and heat of civil war has been provoked and unleashed, with all the horrors and inevitable “crimes” that such bitter struggle and despair forces out on all sides, it is suddenly discovered that “perhaps the initial stories of atrocities were not true” after all. 
Alongside buried away downpage retractions in the bourgeois press and “measured comment” by the “human rights agencies”, the fascist filthiness of the counter-revolutionary “rebels” starts to smell so badly that some admissions have to be made on those too, though always mingled with supposed “even-handed” reporting of the “war crimes” alleged against the blitzkrieged masses (on the same unverified “witnesses report” basis which built-up the initial lurid tales). 
This barbaric reality of the Western trained counter-revolutionaries and the savagery and intensity of the (illegal) Western onslaught has left the fake-“lefts” twisting in the wind as their great and continuing betrayal of the working class, is now so badly exposed.
Much of the “left” has been desperately trying to backpedal from direct association with the NATO onslaught, pretending that they never wanted “things to go so far”, or that NATO has “overstepped the mark” or that “the ‘people of Libya’ should be allowed to pursue their own agenda of freedom”.
Typical is the mealy mouthed admissions of one of the more “left” pieces in the bourgeois Guardian - its logic all over the place in trying to pretend the rebels were “genuine” and “capable” while conceding that the NATO onslaught did the fighting (as months of TV news footage had demonstrated to all but the wilfully politically blind from the beginning): 

It’s all supposed to be different this time, of course. The lessons of the west’s blood-drenched occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are said to have been learned: no boots on the ground, UN backing, proper planning and Libyans in the lead. But the echoes of Baghdad and, even more, Kabul have been eerie – and not only in the made-for-TV images of the sacking of compounds and smashing of statues, or the street banners hailing Nato leaders.
As in Afghanistan in 2001, the western powers have taken sides in a civil war, relying on air power and special forces to turn the tide against an unpopular authoritarian regime.
In Libya, the basis for foreign military intervention has been the claim that Muammar Gaddafi’s forces were about to carry out a massacre of civilians in Benghazi after he threatened to hunt down armed rebels “house to house”. Violent repression was certainly meted out against a popular uprising, but once insurrection had morphed into war there’s little evidence that the regime’s troops were in a position to overrun an armed and hostile city of 700,000 people. And reports from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have since cast serious doubt on a string of war atrocity stories used to justify Nato bombing.
But they helped deliver UN resolution 1973, authorising “all necessary means” to protect Libyan civilians. That has since been used as Nato’s fig leaf to justify the onslaught against Gaddafi and deliver regime change from the air. And while the western powers claimed to be saving lives, thousands have died on the ground – including uncounted numbers of civilians killed by Nato’s own air attacks, such as the 85 reported incinerated near Zlitan earlier this month.
If stopping the killing had been the real aim, Nato states would have backed a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement, rather than repeatedly vetoing both. Instead, after having lost serious strategic ground in the Arab revolutions, the Libyan war offered the US, Britain and France a chance to put themselves at the heart of the process while bringing to heel an unreliable state with the largest oil reserves in Africa.
None of that means the euphoria on the streets of Libyan cities at the fall of a regime long decayed into dynastic despotism isn’t entirely genuine. Or that the rebels who fought their way across the country haven’t made heavy sacrifices for a victory they regard as their own – let alone that Libyans were incapable of bringing down the Gaddafi regime by themselves.
But the facts are unavoidable. Without the 20,000 air sorties, arms supplies and logistical support of the most powerful states in the world, they would not be calling the shots in Tripoli today. The assault on the capital was supported by the heaviest Nato bombardment to date. Western intelligence and special forces have been on the ground for months – in mockery of the UN – training, planning and co-ordinating rebel operations.
It was the leading Nato states that championed and funded the Transitional National Council – including members with longstanding CIA and MI6 links – and officials from Nato states who drew up the stabilisation plan now being implemented on the ground.
However glad people are to see the fall of the Gaddafi clan, it’s clear that such intimate involvement of the US and the former colonial powers taints and undermines the legitimacy of Libya’s transformation. They will expect a payback for their investment in the Libyan war: in oil and commercial deals, political support and perhaps even the return of western military bases.
The British government’s refusal to rule out sending troops to take part in a “stabilisation operation” is an ominous sign of where Libya may be heading. And if Libyans end up with the kind of democracy foisted on Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of their western advisers, that will be no liberation at all.
Beyond Libya, the apparent success of Nato’s operation has given an unwelcome boost to the doctrine of pick-and-choose liberal interventionism, just as its dangers had come to be recognised in the wake of the disasters of the war on terror. That matters in the Middle East now more than ever.
Since the Arab revolution despatched two western-backed dictators in quick succession at the start of the year, there has been a three-pronged drive by the west to bring it under control. In Egypt, US and Saudi money has been poured in to suborn it. In Bahrain, conservative Gulf states have been given support to crush the uprising by force. And in Libya, the western powers have attempted to hijack it, while channelling covert support to the opposition in Syria.

But while this piece makes some admissions it is mainly useful only for demonstrating the utter horseshyte and disingenuous pretences saturating the fake-“left” that somehow it was not possible to know that imperialism’s ruthless agenda will always ride roughshod over any initial pretences of “legality” or “non-interventionism”.
It also swallows the Goebbels garbage that Gaddafi was “unpopular”, a complete fabrication built on endless western video clips of small groups of clearly set up whooping “rebels” (violent and armed from day one) and ignoring the huge turnouts made in favour of the Libyan revolution by the people in Tripoli, even long after the Western bombing had begun. 
And it swallows the hoodwinking pretence that Syria and Libya are “popular” uprisings,  just parts of an overall Arab Spring movement, which “just happens” to have got Western support for some inexplicable reason while the repression continues elsewhere.
The is either idiot blindness or deliberate dissembling garbage.
The “rebels” were long preparing to try and topple the Libyan revolution by such “popular” revolt in the way numerous stunted up “colour revolutions” against the Soviet remnants have been set off, following the post-war pattern of CIA manipulated counter-revolution (Latin America, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc) which reached its high point in the Western toppling of the Polish workers state by the heavily CIA and Vatican funded sham-“trade union” Solidarnosc,  confirmed when in power to be nothing but capitalist/fascist restorationism, as was clear from early days to all except the shallow Trots. 
These trivial rank and file-ists have so far abandoned Marxism that they are taken in by any alleged “street movement” like baby chicks latching onto a moving object as “mother”.
The are not only incapable of analysing any of the concrete characteristics, or  world class war context and perspective, but so poisoned with petty bourgeois hatred of working class discipline that they eagerly regurgitate any nonsense dreamed up by Langley, MI6 and the rest.
An equally idiotic petty bourgeois “opposition” reflex is triggered by the word “dictator”, reflecting their continuing faith in notions of abstract “democracy”, the great fraud which the bourgeoisie has hidden behind for the last two centuries and which is the mainstay of its preposterous “human rights” and “freedom” aggression and neocolonialist war-making.
Under capitalist rule, there is only massively manipulated and twisted “parliamentary democracy” which is totally controlled by big money, big media (and media blackmail as the Murdoch News of the World case has shown once more), corruption and self-interest, a thousand links to boardrooms and Stock Exchange and banks, boundary stitch-ups and gerrymandering (again underway), powerful monied lobbying and bribery, and the behind-the-scenes influence of the ruling class via informal clubs, the army, the police, freemasonries, and the hidden secretive Privy Council.
And in case the vote should swing at all, the possible choices are all essentially identical in what they will or can do anyway.
In other words, “parliament (or Congress etc)” is nothing but the dictatorship of capital and the ruling class, as will be made increasingly, glaringly obvious as the Slump deepens and the more vicious side of capitalist class rule has to be brought into the open to suppress resistance and class protest.
What “democracy”?  
The world has only class rule dictatorship which is exercised either by capital, or by the working class, once it has taken power (and only once it has taken power, by revolution).
The long unrolling process of revolt against total monopoly dominance includes multiple national liberation and anti-colonial struggles standing against imperialist dominance which can get so far but remain potential victims to be brought into line when imperialism can manage it.
The anti-Libyan subversion was long in train despite the recent use of tactics to try subvert the Gaddafi regime itself by sweet-talk and alleged compromises over its weapon developments, and trade deals, including the handing over of selected regime opponents by the extreme Machiavellian cynicism of Western capitalism and its intelligence services (now shamefully exposed in the turmoil).
It is the panic at the eruption of the Arab Spring which led to the abrupt switch. 
That Washington and London reneged on this “understanding”, taking the Libyan regime by surprise as many of its spokesmen made clear in the initial upheavals, should teach the world even better lessons about the duplicity and venality of imperialist perfidy.
There is no deal making to be done with capitalism, no concessions and no treaties that will not be torn up and trampled into mud and bloody massacre reprisals as soon as the ruling class has the opening and means to do it, as the class struggle has learned bitterly and painfully over and over again from Spartacus to the Paris Commune.
And while negotiation and compromise will always be part of the tactics and strategy of struggle, a constant continuing grasp has to be maintained that these retreats are only ever made by the ruling class because it is forced back by the weight of underlying revolutionary class struggle.  
Only revolution and the establishment of proletarian dictatorship will suffice to change the world.
All “Stop the War” protesting, pressure and “Resist the cuts” demonstrating, however much it fills the streets, is going nowhere unless it incorporates this perspective at the heart of all tactics, and strategy.
Let the mass working class be drawn in by all sorts of battles to defend their conditions and demand more say, but let it be learned too that they will be completely disarmed and vulnerable unless they start to build revolutionary understanding as part of those struggles. 
That is a million miles from the fake-“left” who all leave such questions “until later” when the “working class is ready”. 
Apart from  the contempt shown for the working class, this is a complete evasion.
Tomorrow never comes to quote the old proverb.
It stems from the complete retreat made by “leftism” from the battle for revolutionary understanding in the working class, dismissed as “old hat” or ignored, the polemical lifeblood of the struggle for scientific understanding evaded, suppressed and censored for decades under the corrupting impact of capitalist super-profits in the rich countries (bemused with the “reformist gains” crumbs from the exploitation of the Third World) or from the apparent revived strength of the capitalist system and its intimidatory apparent suppression of post-war revolutionary fights in both 1918 and 1945. 
This all has roots right back into the same anti-revolutionism and Stalinist retreat that spawned the entire fake-“left” circus and its endless “angels on the head of pins” “theoretical” disputes over trivia and detail while ignoring completely the raging crisis of capitalism.
This disastrous abandonment of the living core of Marxist theoretical struggle (developed into the understanding of the Leninist Party by the Bolsheviks), taints all the “lefts” including those notionally “taking a stand” over Libya and Syria, including the Lalkar/Proletarian (CPGB-ML).
The CPGB-ML’s resistance and opposition to the deluge of “human rights” and “peace ‘n freedom” hoodwinking manipulations and sophisticated capitalist media brainwashing, is creditable enough on the surface but is combined with massive further confusions and misleadership by these museum-Stalinists.
A gigantic lack of crisis perspective is combined with their complete refusal to examine past mistakes and errors, constantly brushing past mistakes and difficulties under the carpet, from the early errors in of Moscow’s leadership (the support for bourgeois democracy in Spain in the 1930s eg as sufficient counter to Franco’s fascism when proletarian revolutionary struggle was required standing alongside the republicans but with no trust in them) to the current expression of revisionist confusion in the disastrous Chinese failure to oppose the Libyan intervention initially, and now staggeringly even recognising the rebel government before the dust has settled on Gaddafi.
The Lalkarite confusion starts with the idea that Gaddafi’s brand of individualist egalitarianism constitutes a “good enough” leadership for the masses in the Middle East and therefore can be uncritically supported with “Victory to” slogans - a “defencist” nonsense that is a million miles from Leninist grasp that imperialism is the enemy and the sole cause and instigator of all the repression, exploitation and horrors on the planet.
‘Defeat for imperialism’ as a succinct expression of Leninist understanding will include the notion that such a defeat might take place through the dogged resistance of Libya’s masses, whether or not still led by Gaddafi, if that is what happens, without feeding out any illusions in a leadership which has made its own share of disastrous mistakes and errors (including putting some faith in British imperialism’s MI6 and the possibility of “deals”) and which, more importantly, has no grasp or understanding of the imperialist crisis and the need for socialist revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, let alone the desire to promulgate such theory.
Just the opposite, Gaddafi-ism has shown itself hostile to Marxism despite its use of local committees, peoples courts and much egalitarian development of the country from a relatively poor base to its modern standing of having the highest standard of living in Africa.  
As with the Leninist tactic on General Kornilov’s attack on the new bourgeois government in Russia in August 1917, the Bolsheviks understood the need to face down and defeat the reactionary enemy, and stood alongside the bourgeois democratic Kerensky forces to do it while always making it clear to the working class that they should have absolutely no trust in Kerensky and the Duma, and be prepared to turn the revolutionary struggle against them as soon as Kornilov had been dealt with.
Gaddafi is a long way from being the best leadership of the masses in Libya, which can only be provided by revolutionary Leninist understanding. 
Identifying the shortcomings of Gaddafi-ism is a crucial lessons for the entire world working class, as well as those in Libya.
But the latest statement from the Proletarian on the NATO “victory” makes it clear that any such lessons will not be made. 
Far from giving a world perspective of the crisis which this is driven by and is part of, it falls back on the same limited and simplistic notions about “a war for oil” that have been advanced for Iraq and Afghanistan, which not only tells only a fraction of the story but actually sets a completely wrong context.
If it is just another “predatory” war for oil, then it is a routine bit of plundering business seemingly, and one limited to this particular victim with all the wider connections missed out.
And why is it happening now and not five years ago for example???
Not only is the issue limited to the one country, but it implies that imperialism is more or less getting on with business as usual (albeit pressed “a bit” by its crisis). 
But the war is not “predatory”, it is defensive, a stung response of capitalism to a huge lurch in its crisis via the  Arab Spring, mobilising suddenly and even prematurely a panicked move to try and confuse and suppress the entire Middle Eastern upheaval before it goes out of control, even at the cost of teaching the world major lessons in the hypocrisy, duplicity and double-dealing of alleged “democracy” and “freedom”. 
But Egypt and Tunisia are not even mentioned in the Lalkar/Proletarian explanation and even less the crisis driven basis of these uprisings.
The Syrian events are also handled as “another case” rather than as a part of the same overall counter-revolution. 
The Libya onslaught is also the latest chapter in the overall capitalist world war drive, which was due to find its next victim shortly anyway to keep the warmongering going – Libya was as good as any of the potential targets, but not necessarily any more than Sudan, or perhaps Burma, Zimbabwe, Iran, etc (though possibly an easier bet with only 5 million to pummel).
And while the endless war is aggressively pursued by Washington, it is still a desperate measure to try and ride over its Slump disaster.
Document the barbarity as much as you will it does not bring out that the war is part of a giant world build-up of conflict and “shock and awe” intimidation.
The additional reasons for the war given by Lalkar, of capitalism’s hatred for Libya’s partial “socialism” using oil fund wealth to benefit the population (rather than the outright Goebbels lie of some supposed “kleptocracy” syphoning it all away as the Duvaliers did, or Marcos, or Mubarak and all the other capitalist stooges), or the West’s thieving wish to confiscate of Libya’s financial reserves, may be factors in the equation but they are equally missing the point.
Even the international dimension to Lalkar’s analysis, that Libya’s anti-imperialist stance over years (support for the Irish republican struggle for example, and various African struggles) and its material and political support for pan-African development across black Africa, (hated by the racist “rebels”), still fails to draw out the central issues of crisis and the world rebellion it is stirring.
And they again miss the chance to explain the world revolutionary solution that is needed in Africa as much as anywhere else.
Regional anti-imperialist groupings in Africa or Latin America for trade blocs, communications systems, finance and other measures to develop free of imperialist interference and exploitation are all good resistance steps, but once again without a grasp of the world crisis which is sweeping everything to disaster.
This is a treacherous fraud, actively diverting great masses from the urgent understanding of revolution that is crucial.
But there is  worse in the Proletarian/Lalkar output; a complete cover up of the disastrous and disgusting role that Beijing’s revisionist leadership has played in the vicious massacring onslaught against Libya, until recently completely ignored.
It would be bad enough if Lalkar and Proletarian simply had not taken up the matter, but its glaring silence is combined with continuing eulogies and flatteries for the Chinese state in issue after issue of gushing uncritical “solidarity”, reports of “fraternal greetings during comradely visits” and regular “rallies for China” meetings held in Lalkar’s  Southall base.
What disgusting sycophancy and hypocrisy, from a party that in its last Proletarian paper was mounting a “vigorous polemic” under the claim of representing Leninist straightforward honesty and willingness to face up to mistakes,  directly quoting Lenin on the question:

In Left-Wing Communism, Lenin pointed out:
“The attitude of a political party towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and how it in practice fulfils its obligations towards its class and the toiling masses. Frankly admitting a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it, analysing the conditions which led to it, and thoroughly discussing the means of correcting it – that is the earmark of a serious party; that is the way it should perform its duties, that is the way it should educate and train the class, and then the masses.”
Viewed from this Leninist standpoint, the RCPB(ML), throughout its history, has failed abysmally.

It is an excellent quote but the use of it is gobsmacking in its brazen chutzpah since the evasions and cover-ups of the preposterous  Lalkarites easily outdo anything from the “British jobs” chauvinist-flavoured revisionist RCPB-ML, even with all its tacking and diving. 
“Polemics” at great length against a bizarre and essentially defunct ex-Maoist ex-Hoxa-ist and ex-everything else-ist weirdness is like shooting fish in a barrel.
But “fireworks” and strong language like this are a speciality of the Lalkar/Proletarian, to make a great show to cover-up their deliberate refusal ever to respond to much more serious challenges. 
The  Lalkarites still have pending numerous polemics against them by the EPSR from up to a decade ago (on questions like why they stayed in the SLP for eight years, for example, when the anti-communist anti-debate censorship nature of the old style bureaucratic leadership had long become manifest) which go constantly unanswered.
The SLP was a giant mistake as they finally conceded, so why no attempt to examine that, as Lenin says (and as yet another EPSR challenged)?????
But if such issues and many more (how about the early support for degenerate CIA and Zionist colluding Mahmoud Abbas as the leader of the Palestinian struggle, the urging of a two-sate solution recognition of Israel as a “state” within the 1967 borders (accepted as legal!!!)) already make their claims to the Leninist legacy of open and honest debate look pretty sick, the silence on Beijing takes the biscuit.
China’s revisionist leadership has let itself be stampeded along by the Goebbels nonsense against Libya from the beginning, voting with imperialism for sanctions on Libya in the first UN vote and simply abstaining in the Security Council on the second “no fly zone” which the whole world and its dog knew was a figleaf cover for all-out NATO aggression and war, as has proven to be the case.
It is the most repellent and disgusting betrayal yet perpetrated by the cowardice of the pacifist “don’t rock the boat” revisionist perspective of permanent peaceful coexistence with capitalism.
Astoundingly, despite its vigorous and correct denunciations of the NATO blitzkrieg, hardly a word has emerged from Lalkar and Proletarian on this stunning foulness, save some very oblique comments about the failure of “certain members” of the UN  to take the opportunity to veto the vote.
As full members of the Security Council the option is open to stop a motion by veto.
It might not prevent the imperialists finding a way to make war but it removes one layer of “legal” pretence, and challenges world understanding.
Even in the latest “emergency” leaflet on Libya from Proletarian the question is not mentioned at all.
And in the latest Lalkar, issued just prior to the recent events,  this tiny commentary, appears, not even  in the Libya article on the front page but buried away in a long turgid account of the achievements of the Ba’athist regime in Syria (!!), which in itself is  another massive misleading of the working class to set alongside  Lalkar/Proletarian “Victory to” support for numerous revisionist or national bourgeois leaderships from Milosevic in Serbia to Saddam Hussein(!!):

However, earlier in August, the imperialists did succeed in getting a resolution condemning Syria passed by the Human Rights Council, a specialised UN body based in Geneva. This resolution was jointly sponsored by the imperialist countries and by the Arab reactionaries, led by Saudi Arabia. However, this has proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. A principal reason given by Russia and China for their lamentable failure to take a clear stand against the barbarous assault on Libya at the Security Council was that regional organisations were supposedly calling for such action. The clearly expressed hope was that by having Saudi Arabia and others take a clear lead in Geneva, the Russians and Chinese could once more be herded into line or at least into grudging acquiescence.
But this is not at all what transpired. The resolution passed, with 33 votes in favour, four against and nine abstentions. The four negative votes were those of Russia, China, Cuba and Ecuador. In response, the Financial Times reported that banners had been hung in the streets of Damascus thanking Russia and China for their support and since then the two countries have continued to stand firm at the Security Council.
One can only hope that Moscow and Beijing have quietly drawn an appropriate lesson from the disastrous mistake they made over, if only for reasons of self-preservation, as they are in fact the ultimate targets of imperialism’s successive wars against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.

China’s unseemly haste in recognising the Transitional National Council of counter-revolutionaries even before the smug and repulsive reactionary duo of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Tripoli to “congratulate” the rebels (along with the Labourites and Trotskyites too, in spirit, presumably) , has rather  put the lid on this thin and tepid piousness, so sneakily buried away in another article and hedged around with excuses.
“One can only hope” (!!) that this kind of platitude will help further expose the “lamentable” failure of the Lalkar/Proletarianites to be at all serious in their professed “facing up to mistakes” and “fiery” denunciations.
Better polemics could be heard from an infant school playground scuffle over marbles.
It is a craven cover-up no better than the other fake-"lefts”, a repulsive dissembling lie which does not even deal with the immediate circumstances of the warmongering, let alone the enormous philosophical failings of Beijing’s revisionism which have increasingly aped all the disastrous characteristics of the late Soviet period.
Even less does it tackle the urgent question of where such decisions come from, which is from the mind-rotting influence of revisionist “containment of imperialism” theories which stretch all the way back to Stalin’s mistake and errors.
No Leninist reassessment of the great legacy of errors and mistakes in the leadership of the first great experiments in socialism is ever even mentioned let alone seriously considered by the museum-Stalinists, which makes a total mockery of all their claims to be the “experienced and capable revolutionary leadership” which they (correctly) declare vitally needs building in the working class to lead the inevitably erupting struggles against Slump disaster. 
As the EPSR has constantly re-iterated:

It is the lessons of history forgotten by the international workers movement (thanks to a steady increase in theoretical mistakes by the CPSU Third International leadership from the 1920s onwards, mainly challenged only by Trotskyism’s even worse Revisionist errors and treacherous opportunism) which matter most in this crucial understanding of what happens next, —  not the notorious ruling-class inability to avoid past pitfall patterns.
The bourgeoisie have not forgotten the lessons of how to fight slump and war.
The US ruling class are not fooled now. They know what nonsense it is to “wage war on terrorism”, but they also know that ruthlessly putting the boot into all world developments henceforth will be the best way to prepare for the inter-imperialist trade-war and political conflicts to come, basically intimidating everything in sight and preparing for military adventures of the greatest destructiveness possible, the only ‘cure’ for worldwide ‘surpluses’ of investment capital in every industry which are steadily choking world trade profits by recession.
Little of this Marxist understanding appears in fake-’left’ anti-war propaganda, from the Stalinists to the Trots, from the SWP to the SLP. All either still want to protect their own incorrect historical stance on the questions of war and revolution such as the “peaceful road to socialism” or the “neither Washington nor Moscow” Third-Camp academicism (turning into pro-Solidarnosc ‘rank-and-file’ counter-revolution at every opportunity); or else just wash their hands of all attempts to understand correctly the triumphs and failures of world revolutionary socialist history, and stick to routine ‘left’-reformist electoral futility and ‘No to war’ endless social-pacifist protesting like the useless Socialist Alliance, (basically just yet another attempt to dig-up again the long-dead corpse of ‘left Labourism’, the worst fraud ever perpetrated on the working class).
But as the EPSR has insisted since its launch as a weekly paper 22 years ago, until the greatest ever polemical debate and theoretical rethink has challenged the ultimately negative results of Revisionism’s and Trotskyism’s long hold on the international workers movement, then every attempt at any new serious ‘revolutionary’ party’ building is doomed to never get beyond the squabbling-sect stage.

...

With one or two honourable exceptions, the whole ex Third International virtually fell apart at the end of the Revisionist epoch which deliberately set out to kill all notion of polemical struggle (on all matters with all comers in order to develop an independent ability everywhere to grapple with the ever-developing truths of Marxist-Leninist science.)
One of recent history’s most tragic ironies is that all the split-offs from narrow-minded Stalinist complacency inherited exactly the same authoritarian philistinism as the sectarian bureaucracy they were breaking with.
In every case, it was the complete failure to establish any kind of correct perspective on the world’s future developments (different from Stalinism’s warped vision) which skewered the endeavour.
The lack of a credible and defendable world view will always embarrass any sectarian ‘revolutionary socialist’ posture into stifling any real debate or polemic in due course.
The development of 57 varieties of even worse bureaucratic Revisionist authoritarianism than Stalinism itself, marked the essential petty-bourgeois opportunism of the intellectual or trade-union-bureaucrat-cadres (and their working-class followers), splitting for careerist reasons from the Soviet monolith in a decades-long intimidating atmosphere of relentless anti-communist propaganda and vilification. And the specifics of Stalinism’s own failure to read world developments correctly contributed to all its critics getting their perspectives hopelessly wrong too.
The Trotskyite Fourth International came spectacularly to grief at the end of the 1930s after the ‘Death Agony’ manifesto predicted total Stalinist capitulation to fascist warmongering, and an easy 4th I[nternational] revolutionary triumph over imperialism’s death throes via programmatic steadiness demanding little more than “a sliding scale of wages” and “opening the books of big business to union inspection”, etc, etc.
Seven years later, after the Soviet workers state’s 1945 triumph over imperialism’s fascist-aggression conspiracy (as great a triumph as 1917 itself), and as total US dollar hegemony started reviving monopoly-capitalism towards its most awe-inspiring world trade boom ever, — no Trot faction realistically had a perspective left to stand on; and so authoritarian stifling of all serious theoretical discussion was all that was left for all wannabee true Trot sects, and the splits inevitably began mushrooming faster than ever.
All subsequent sizable Trot sects imposed the same authoritarian dogmatism, — and all always broke into further smithereens as soon as a major theoretical difficulty was thrown up by further world developments.
The splits from Moscow’s theoretical paralysis in a more nationalist or reformist direction but which equally failed to come up with a more convincing world perspective than Stalinism’s Revisionist nonsense, fared no better.
Maoism (for understandable reasons) totally failed to get to the bottom of Stalin’s theoretical mistakes because of Mao’s own involvement in their perpetuation; and the resulting non-polemical bureaucratic authoritarianism then left the party prey to even wilder voluntaristic excesses (and the start of serious splits, inevitably sparking off even more dogmatism), from the lack of any polemical party mechanism to cope with the theoretical questions thrown up by the clash with Moscow.
The inevitable subsequent further entrenchment of unchallengeable theoretical authoritarianism by a less-and-less confident(because less-and-less polemically-trained) leadership, unavoidably plunged towards even worse Revisionism later on, a tragic decline which the confused Chinese workers state has yet to see the end of.
[EPSR Perspectives for 2002 EPSR issue 1118 08-01-2202]

The tragedy for Libya underlines yet again the urgent need for the world to re-develop the Leninist struggle for understanding, the only way to build the revolutionary leadership necessary to end an ever more foully destructive and warmongering capitalist order.
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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