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 1394 10thrd October 2011                                                                                                   25p fortnightly

Dire economic signals confirm the “credit crunch ” of 2008 was just the beginning of the greatest meltdown crisis in capitalist history. The world is facing a catastrophe of unprecedented proportion leading inexorably to  fascist dictatorship and world war chaos in EVERY country as the ruling class fights vicious class war to hold its power. The only answer is revolution demanding the greatest struggle for Marxist Leninist clarity against class colluding reformism, anti-communist Trotskyism and Stalinist pacifism. Build Leninism

Repeated confirmations of the catastrophic failure of capitalism are coming so thick and fast that the world is dizzy.
The grasp that the private profit system is heading for terrifying Slump chaos and inevitable inter-imperialist war upheaval can no longer be mocked as “exaggerated catastrophism” and “hysterical overstatement”.
The ruling class is shattered by fear of the potential uprisings and turmoil that its epochal failure and incompetence is producing, already breaking out throughout the world from Chile to Thailand, Cairo to Riyadh and right into the major capitalist heartlands, in Athens Madrid, London and New York’s Wall Street.
But while spontaneous rebellion is bubbling and a mass of doubts, uncertainties and confused fears are being voiced from all sides by disquieted petty bourgeois commentators, the ranks of fake-“lefts” still have come nowhere near to giving the working class the lead it requires, and ever more urgently.
However shaken, the ruling class is not only still in well in control but preparing itself for the all-out class civil war it knows is coming (and as Cameron said effectively in his “laying the foundations” remarks at the Tory conference last week - foundations for what?).
All-out class war to the end, to destroy the old society and rebuild a new world is precisely what the fake-“left” is not preparing the working class for.
But it is the only possible way out of an historic meltdown which daily threatens all mankind with deadly destruction one hundred times greater than ever seen before.
Revolution is confronting everyone, to end capitalism and establish planned socialist production, using the world’s resources sanely, reasonably and cooperatively to provide a rich fulfilling and rational life for all seven billion humans on the planet (easily achievable and the more so as the genius and strength of those billions is unlocked from the imposed ignorance, poverty and deprivation of endless imperialist exploitation).
But instead of making this issue central, everything from bemused paralysis and sick confusion to class collaboration and outright opportunist arse-licking are pumped out in giant slabs of yet more “democracy” illusions (voiced as shallow “anti-dictator” philistinism and anti-communist anti-workers state hatred from the petty bourgeois Trots to “peaceful road” and “containment of capitalism”, “Stop the War” “peace-struggle” pacifism from the old revisionists, be they “Euro-style” or allegedly “hard” Stalinists, the Greek CP or revisionist workers states like Beijing, Cuba and Vietnam). 
Not a scrap of decades of mighty posturing “revolutionism” from all shades of the “left” swamp has translated into any kind of understanding of what is now happening, let alone guidance for the working class on the historic revolutionary challenges they are confronted with, to end this foul and degenerate capitalist order which cannot but accelerate in to the greatest whirlpool failure ever.
When even the governor of the Bank of England – the absolute heart of “moneybags” finance capitalism and power – says that the economic crisis is not just as bad as the 1930s but possibly the worst in history it is surely time to draw revolutionary conclusions.
It was not supposed to be like this according to the reformist perspectives, constantly bolstered by the whole gamut of “lefts”, which the Leninist understanding has constantly challenged and exposed.
There is no “steady improvement” in conditions and living standards as more than one hundred years of fake-“left” “democratic-way” reformism has misled the working class.
Instead the Marxist science of complete economic and societal breakdown is being confirmed and re-confirmed hourly as the economies of entire countries are wiped out, giant banks and whole groups of banks teeter on the edge of disaster, world currencies implode and the dealings on the Stock Exchanges look ever more like a rodeo ride on an untamed bronco, shaking the world trading system violently towards complete disintegration.
And how did the world recover from the devastating and desperate Slump of the 1930s?? 
Through the most dread-filled and destructive world war aggression and chaos ever witnessed in history,  the only means the profit system knows as a way out, while hanging onto its sweet power and luxury.
That is to destroy the vast “over-capacity” and “excess production” that had inexorably clogged the entire profit-making production system solid, as Marx long ago explained was inevitable (see economics box page 6). 
Whole countries were wiped out in the process, with nearly 100 million people killed amid the utmost fascist depravity and terror, scarring and bereaving many times more than that and leaving them destitute, distraught and damaged for a lifetime. 
The world was so shocked and stunned by the horrors of the two great wars (1914-18 and 1939-45) that it had to be  fed the illusions that it “must never happen again”. 
But the deliberate path towards just such devastating war once more is now 15 years down the line, from the disgusting, bullying, blitzing of once-communist Yugoslavia, through the scorched and blasted civilian slaughter of Iraq and the ten-year Afghanistan destruction to the latest foul devastation and civilian slaughter in Libya.
It is culminating in the current NATO atrocities against Sirte where an entire city of 100 000 people is being killed, starved, besieged or driven from their bombed and blasted homes by the fascist counter-revolutionary “rebel” scum, backed by NATO “sorties” and all under the laughable pretence of “protecting civilians” (and doing exactly what the lying Goebbels propaganda had falsely alleged against Gaddafi as an ostensibly war crime monstrosity).
Fascist onslaught by “our boys” (be they US marines or British, French, or other squaddies) abroad and escalating police state viciousness at home to impose the Slump (by kettling Wall street protesters, rendering and torturing in Guantánamo or secret bases worldwide, beating demonstrators or imposing savage prison sentences for “disobedience”, “riot” and protest on students and deprived youth) are the twin faces of a slide into a new Nazi “normality” to get the ruling class through this greatest ever crisis.    
The sheer chutzpah of the open cynicism of this depraved mayhem in Libya currently, gravely and ponderously reported as a “fight for freedom” by the major media outlets without cracking their faces at all, would have shamed the Nazi propaganda department in Berlin for not going far enough.
But not one iota of this terrifying plunge of the world into complete fascist disaster and bloody mayhem informs the fake-“lefts” and their analyses, speeches and stories.     
Of course they fill their papers with talk of Marx’s “crisis” and economic meltdown or have done since it became glaringly obvious in 2008, though even then such reports are nitpickingly academic, agnostic (is it really a crisis?, the Weekly Worker still asks) and “theoretical” in the worst, “not-really-for-the-day-to-day” sense that British backward pragmatism has always sunk to.
But they are always disconnected from other stories like Syria, Libya, or the Slump cuts with not the slightest grasp present that all these events are part of the greatest and most overwhelming contradiction of all human history, reaching explosion point and demanding the greatest transformation of all time.
The old world is rotten ripe for change.
Even the bourgeois press accounts (which in practice they tail-end) have more spirit than these alleged “lefts” – though the likes of  reformists like Will Hutton (third cutting) weasel their way out of the true story by inventing something called “modern capitalism”, pretending there could be some other kind, that just needs some “proper controls”:

Quantitative easing is printing money by another name and is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed. Not my words, but those of George Osborne in early 2009 when he was still only shadow chancellor.
David Cameron, the then leader of the opposition, was also highly sceptical about quantitative easing – a method of boosting growth pioneered during the great depression of the 1930s. Speaking to the Conservative party conference of 2009, he warned: “Sometime soon it will have to stop because in the end printing money leads to inflation.”
That was then. Now, with Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England warning that we face perhaps the greatest financial crisis in history, the time for cheap political point-scoring and comparisons with banana republics is over.
Osborne and Cameron preside over an economy that has been through the deepest recession since the second world war. They have imposed deep spending cuts and tax increases at a time when output has recovered barely a third of the 7.1% lost during 2008 and 2009. They can hear the thunder and see the lightning on the other side of the Channel as a violent storm breaks over the eurozone. A desperate government? You bet.
Naturally, that’s not the way Downing Street would like the decision by the Bank of England to be perceived. As far as the government is concerned, its tough action in reducing Britain’s record peacetime budget deficit has created the space for Threadneedle Street to inject £75bn into the banking system through the purchase of assets from banks.
The banks are credited with electronic money in exchange for their gilts, which they then push out into the wider economy through increased credit. This is all part of Plan A, under which a steadfast chancellor reduces the overdraft so that interest rates can stay ultra-low, rather than the launch of Plan B.
And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
...In the boom years before 2007, the economy had three main motors of growth: a speculative bubble in the City, a speculative bubble in the housing market, and a growing public sector that was dependent on bubble tax receipts.
Then the lights went out. The housing market sagged. Consumers decided they had too much debt. The banks belatedly became a lot more choosy about the people to whom they would lend. Demand collapsed as the credit machine ground to a halt and getting the economy going again has proved mightily difficult.
Initially, the response was to rapidly slash short-term interest rates, from 5.5% to 0.5%, the lowest level in the Bank’s history. Because the banking system had been so damaged by the downturn, this was seen as insufficient, so the Bank stepped in with its first tranche of quantitative easing.
It pumped £200bn into the economy between early 2009 and 2010 in an attempt to drive down long-term interest rates, which are determined by movements in the financial markets rather than by central bank technocrats.
Fiscal policy – tax and spending decisions – was also relaxed, with a temporary cut in VAT and fast-tracking of infrastructure projects. That, coupled with tumbling tax receipts, punched a big hole in the government’s finances.
For a while, it seemed the patient was responding to the medicine. By the time the coalition government was formed in May 2010, Britain was growing at around 1% a quarter, and Osborne and Cameron decided that the economy had enough juice to cope with the biggest fiscal squeeze since the IMF laid down the law to Jim Callaghan’s government in 1976.
The private sector was robust enough to take up the slack left by a retrenching public sector, while exports would compensate for the weakness of domestic demand caused by consumers spending more prudently. It was the wrong call.
The economy has flatlined since last autumn, and the Bank fears worse may be ahead this winter. In part, its pessimism is due to the intensifying problems of the eurozone, but Threadneedle Street also cited the squeeze on real incomes and the government’s fiscal austerity as reasons for the depressed level of demand.
The timing of the move speaks volumes. Inflation is running at 4.5% – double the government’s target – and on the Bank’s own estimates will rise to 5% in the next month or so. Members of the Bank’s monetary policy committee would have preferred to have seen inflation peak before resorting to another dose of quantitative easing but have thrown caution to the wind. The risks of a double dip recession are seen as far more significant than the risks of double-digit inflation.
This is not the end of the story. The Bank has estimated that the original £200bn tranche of quantitative easing resulted in inflation being 0.75-1.5% higher while the level of real GDP was 1.5-2.0% higher. Much of the boost leaked abroad and – in the absence of a transmission mechanism such as an investment bank – did rather more to push up global commodity prices than to help struggling UK businesses.
...More quantitative easing can be expected during 2012, with some City economists believing asset purchases will eventually total £500bn.

***********

The British economy is on the verge of an economic and social catastrophe. So is our principal export market, the eurozone. And the mighty United States, whose treasury secretary has commendably urged Europe to pull itself together, is up against the unfortunate reality that the Republicans are doing their level best to pull their own country apart.
First, though, a health warning. I am not a great one for hyperbole; in fact I am often accused of being too inclined towards English understatement...Nevertheless, things are getting serious. So, when I use the word “catastrophe” I use it advisedly, desperately hoping that policymakers on both sides of the Channel, and the Atlantic, will re-examine their collective view that simultaneous deflation is the answer to all our problems.
...On the broader macroeconomic policy front, Posen strikes a chord with me when he complains: “Throughout modern economic history, whether in western Europe in the 1920s, in the US and elsewhere in the 1930s, or in Japan in the 1990s, every major financial-crisis-driven downturn has been followed by premature abandonment – if not reversal – of the macroeconomic stimulus policies that are necessary to sustained recovery.”
Posen is emphatically not a believer in the Viennese school of “creative destruction” as espoused by Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Joseph Schumpeter. He told the International Herald Tribune last week: “The Austrians would say you just have to suffer through it. But suffering is not good for the soul.” He might have added that unnecessary economic suffering is not good for the employment, health, education, and general wellbeing of the populace, although it almost certainly gives one hell of a boost to the crime statistics.
...As for the UK scene, the idea that a private sector phoenix would spontaneously arise from the ashes of the public sector redundancy policy has been shattered by the latest unemployment figures.

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

Eighty years ago, faced with today’s economic events, nobody would have been in any doubt: we would obviously be living through a crisis in capitalism. Instead, there is a collective unwillingness to call a spade a spade. This is variously a crisis of the European Union, a crisis of the euro, a debt crisis or a crisis of political will. It is all those things, but they are subplots of a much bigger story: the way capitalism has been conceived and practised for the last 30 years has hit the buffers. Unless and until that is recognised, western economies will be locked in stagnation which could even transmute into a major economic disaster.
Simply put, the world has trillions upon trillions of excessive private debt financed by too many different currencies whose risk is allegedly mitigated by even more trillions of financial bets which in aggregate do not minimise the systemic risk one iota. This entire financial edifice, underwritten by tiny amounts of capital, has been created over three decades backed by the theory that markets do not make mistakes. Capitalism is best conceived and practised, runs the theory, by hunter-gatherer bankers and entrepreneurs owing no allegiance to the state or society.
This is nonsense. Business and the state co-generate wealth in a system of complex mutual dependence. Markets are beset by mood swings and uncertainty which, if not offset by government action, lead to violent oscillations. Capitalism without responsibility or proportionality degrades into racketeering and exploitation. The prospect of limitless pay is an open invitation to bad, or even criminal, behaviour. Good capitalism cannot happen without referees to blow the whistle or robust frameworks in which markets can function; neither is reliably created by capitalism itself, hence the role of democratic government. Yet the world is trying to solve the legacy of the last 30 years as if none of this were true and, instead, that the practice and theories that created the mess are still valid.
US treasury secretary Tim Geithner, joining EU finance ministers in Poland as again they pondered how best to end the ongoing euro crisis, was at least recognising today’s interdependencies between countries when he urged his fellow ministers to stop bickering because the markets were terrified by the threat of a catastrophic event – with all the risk that posed the US.
George Osborne was also right to declare that a strong euro was in Britain’s interests. But worrying about how a failed euro might impact on yourself is old speak. What the markets need to hear is that western politicians – whether in the eurozone or not – see the euro as part of the potential solution to capitalism’s current crisis, not its cause, and that they are prepared to do all in their power to support the reforms necessary to make the euro survive and take other measures vital to make the world financial system functional again. Geithner and Osborne must put some money where their mouths are.
The euro’s critics, endlessly emphasising that it is a monetary straitjacket and that the best reform now would be its break-up, miss the point. It was not this so-called straitjacket that is the cause of today’s euro crisis. It is the interaction of the euro system with a once-in-a-century crisis of capitalism that its designers and supporters, like its critics, never anticipated. Yes, what the crisis has exposed is that the eurozone needed a €1trillion-plus fund to recapitalise bust banks and underwrite sovereign debt write-downs; this was not written into the original treaty. And that the investment and retail banking arms of the EU’s universal banks need to be ringfenced or formally separated, as Sir John Vickers’s banking commission proposes for Britain –if they are to be remotely safe. But neither notion was a battle cry of the eurosceptics over the last 10 years.
In fact, the existence of the euro has, until now, been a bulwark against disaster. Suppose it had not been created and that the financial crisis in 2008 had broken over a Europe with multiple floating exchange rates and no European central bank – the eurosceptic utopia. The Irish, Portuguese, Greek, Spanish, Italian and French banking systems would have stood alone and they would have collapsed in a domino effect, interacting with the mega-crisis in Britain and the US. Even some German banks would not have been immune. There would have been a 1930s-scale slump, the break up of the EU and a rise in beggar-my-neighbour devaluations and trade protection.
We have not yet escaped that prospect. If the euro breaks up, the cascade of subsequent bank failures and debt write-downs will be no less threatening and Britain will be pulled into the vortex. The EU has created a “financial stabilisation facility” to try to hold the line. But there is no urgency in launching it; it is still not a proper fund but, rather, a stop-gap provider of borrowing facilities and it is too small. As bad, the German and French governments are wedded to collective European austerity; they want to impose long-term balanced budgets not only on themselves but chilling austerity on the unfortunate states which have to borrow to support their banks and bond markets.
An entire continent is to be blighted by lack of demand in the midst of a capitalist crisis, compounded by Britain’s scorched earth, deficit-reduction plans. Already, many European banks are technically insolvent, recognised by Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s new managing director, if not by the banks themselves.
...We are living through the most dangerous confluence of economic circumstances in modern times. Trying to pretend the interdependencies do not exist or that the collapse of the euro is the answer can only make matters worse. It is a straight choice: we do all we can to help each other or risk going down in what could be the worst economic contraction for a century.

The petty bourgeois accounts always evade the obvious revolutionary conclusions as the eternal Labourite Polly Toynbee does below, despite excellently pinning down the reality of the crisis on the NHS:

The (House of Lords) should be constitutionally affronted that this colossal reorganisation is already imposed on the NHS without waiting for their consent. No one can remember a similar case of pre-legislative implementation, as if parliament were irrelevant.
Without waiting for them: 300 clinical commissioning groups are taking over, nominally run by GPs. Private sector involvement is already compulsory: by this month every commissioner must find at least three outside providers for diagnostic tests, audiology, primary care psychological therapies, treatment for back pain, feet and other services.
Department of Health website instructions say: “Commissioners cannot refuse to accept providers once they have qualified.” That’s what “any qualified provider means” and it’s happening now – forget the law. McKinsey and other consultants are already being paid millions by commissioners to work out the payment system.
How do these new providers become “qualified”? They must register with the Care Quality Commission, the regulator whose severe stress was revealed over the Winterbourne View scandal. Created from merging three bodies, plus possibly the human fertilisation authority, this bill gives it the new HealthWatch too. Can they cope? CQC has 30% less cash than the bodies it replaced. Last year it cut inspections by 70%. It has just 900 inspectors to cover 18,000 care homes, 8,000 GP practices, 400 NHS hospital trusts, 9,000 dental practices and now every new “qualified” entrant. Will the Lords really think proliferating providers will be sufficiently inspected?
The British Acupuncture Council was first respondent on the department’s site, asking for its members to be registered as qualified to offer back pain treatment. How will the CQC know which pins are qualified pins? Second respondents were audiologists warning that private sector cowboys will “manipulate the facts”, pretending they have better hearing aids, and older people will be tricked out of using NHS hi-tech audiology. 
GPs will have small say in this market: forget the cosy image of them choosing the best for you. This week’s scandal of the Haxby GP practice shows what Professor Alan Maynard calls the “overwhelming temptations” in the system for GPs to set up their own services and urge patients to use them, even charging them. In the US and New Zealand doctors cannot refer patients to any service in which they have a financial interest: no such caveat is in this bill.
Commissioning services will not be done in your cosy GP surgery: the 300 CCGs will be cut back to many fewer, commissioning from afar and often outsourced to private companies. Professor John Appleby says the Treasury is right to worry about control of the cash. The NHS Confederation warns that finance directors, highly employable elsewhere, have been walking away, unwilling to take financial responsibility for the coming mayhem at a time of the most severe cutbacks ever in the NHS.
Monitor, the regulator’s first duty is to stop “anti-competitive behaviour”. Already competition challenges are filed against GPs for purchasing from familiar NHS hospitals. With more hospitals in financial trouble, losing more funds when services are soon cherry-picked by outsiders, nothing in the bill says what happens when some go bust. Big companies will soon gain monopoly muscle.
NHS community staff are being forced, not invited, into friendly sounding social enterprises, as a fig leaf for privatisation. Central Surrey Health, an enterprise run by nurses, was hailed by Cameron as Big Society Award winners. But they failed to win their first genuinely competitive contract, losing out to private group Assura. Surrey nurses could only raise a £3m bond, while the winners reportedly raised a £10m bond. So much for social enterprise and NHS staff security when up against big capital.  
...The NHS Commissioning Board, a gigantic £80bn quango, will run it with the secretary of state forbidden by law from interfering. MPs will be shocked when the Speaker has to rule out of order any questions about hospital scandals, closures, waiting lists and all the imminent NHS crises...David Owen makes a telling comparison with the privatisation of the railways. ... Do they really want to do that to the NHS?

Even to ask such a question reveals the petty bourgeois mindset – “they” never wanted an NHS at all. 
The fake-”left” gets no higher either than the “need to make the bosses pay” as their philistine and shallow chants put it.
Of course such demands will increasingly be responded to by workers.
But the unstoppable spiral of collapse which has been unfolding world wide for at least three decades (1987 Black Monday Stock Exchange disaster, 1980s and 1990s Latin American debt breakdowns, Japanese stagnation, 1997 south-east Asia currency meltdown, more Japanese stagnation, dotcom bubble burst, the stripping bare of Africa, near bankruptcy of restored capitalism in Russia, numerous interspersed corporate and bank breakdowns, the 2002 bankruptcy of Argentina, mass destruction of oil production (taking out Iraq e.g.) has not only been ignored for all that time but was never mentioned as a pivotal and central aspects of understanding.
In fact the EPSR was constantly ridiculed, attacked and suppressed in meetings, discussions and because of its warnings of imminent capitalist failure and descent into trade and shooting war, which it correctly declared to be the underlying driving force of history and the prime reason why revolutionary understanding, not criminally disarming campaigns of parliamentary tailending and pressure was absolutely crucial.
There is no stopping the crisis.
It is not a “bad patch” which the fake-“lefts essentially see it as, or imply in their pacifist solutions.
Most of them deep down see “crisis” as nothing but a bit of a swing in the constant tug-of-war between the overweening power and influence of the tiny arrogant ruling class, and the working class, with financial difficulties driving the ruling class to impose harsher conditions.
As the perspectives of the “lefts” go “crisis” only means a bit more “tug” is needed in this constant tussle between the classes, to “defend” living standards and jobs.
With enough “heave ho” and “properly organised picket lines” it is supposed, the “burdens of the crisis” can be forced onto the ruling class.
It is a sick joke.
The devastation unfolding now is a qualitative failure of an entire system that cannot be stopped, by “making it fairer”.
There is no possible reverse, upturn, suspension, amelioration, cut-reduction, “Stopping” of war, or “fighting the cuts” except by the struggle to end capitalist class rule domination forever, everywhere.
That cannot be done through “voting” and “democracy” which is a total lie and manipulation to disguise the hidden rule of the bourgeoisie, but by revolutionary communism, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat to end for good the monstrous destructive, wasteful, poisonous, depraved, torturing, callous, intolerable arrogance and greed of the tiny boss and owner class, appropriating the hard-sweated output of billions of humans for their own private and pointless pleasure and power.
No new way doing things, “better” capitalism, better regulated capitalism without “greedy bankers” (a nonsensical impossibility), “small business” capitalism (another impossibility in a world which always produces bigger and bigger monopolies), re-industtrialised capitalism (another nonsense – parasitic finance will always win out as Lenin analysed in Imperialism -the highest stage of capitalism), – no “sensitive capitalism”, capitalism “with compassion”, nationalised capitalism, controlled capitalism, reformed capitalism, “democratic” capitalism, limited capitalism, trade unionised capitalism, “pacifist” capitalism, European capitalism, internationalised capitalism, “freedom” capitalism, socialised capitalism or “Big Society” capitalism, is going to change anything.
The demands of capital to make profit, and drive out all competition by whatever means necessary are relentless, insatiable, irreversible, unchangeable and inarguable, even if the odd (and it is usually very odd) nice, philanthropic, generous, or reasonable boss should attempt to swim in the other direction.
Utopians are always swept aside by the unrelenting profit-hunger (or will go under) and the more so as the overall crisis breaks, taking down entire countries and even continents (as in World War Two).
Capitalism is out of time, a social and economic order which has dragged mankind from the torpor of agricultural serfdom into technological and scientific progress but which is tangled in its own even deepening contradictions which besides being inhumanly unfair, alienating, damaging, wasteful, and vicious, can only bring the world repeatedly back to ever greater disaster.
Such gains as have been achieved have only ever been granted because of the underlying class threat of revolution, and always to be taken back when the ruling class feels it can (after the idiot  and pointless liquidation of the still viable and growing USSR by Gorbachevism for example) – or when it is so desperate it has no choice but to turn to direct intimidatory dictatorship (fascism), tearing up the expensive pretences of parliament and Congress.  
The ruling class know very well what they have to do – and the Tory ruling party has been accelerating its preparations behind the pretence of “rebuilding the economy”, which has just been a means of buying time for the class war savagery that it knows it must impose.
That was the meaning of Cameron’s speech declaring that the “foundations were being laid”. It means preparing to impose penury and poverty to intimidate and “discipline” the working class into accepting massively increased exploitation. 
An inkling of the true agenda is outlined by some of the more perceptive “lefts” like this piece from reformist left academic Stuart Hall, worth reading at length despite its academicism,  and gloomy hand-wringing:
What sort of crisis is this? ... Is this the start of a new conjuncture?

My argument is that the present situation is another unresolved rupture of that conjuncture which we can define as “the long march of the Neoliberal Revolution”. Each crisis since the 1970s has looked different, arising from specific historical circumstances. However, they also seem to share some consistent underlying features, to be connected in their general thrust and direction of travel. Paradoxically, such opposed political regimes as Thatcherism and New Labour have contributed in different ways to expanding this project. Now the coalition is taking up the same cause.
Neoliberalism is grounded in the “free, possessive individual”, with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in particular, is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern society, dictate to free individuals how to dispose of their private property, regulate a free-market economy or interfere with the God-given right to make profits and amass personal wealth. State-led “social engineering” must never prevail over corporate and private interests. It must not intervene in the “natural” mechanisms of the free market, or take as its objective the amelioration of free-market capitalism’s propensity to create inequality.
According to the neoliberal narrative, the welfare state mistakenly saw its task as intervening in the economy, redistributing wealth, universalising life-chances, attacking unemployment, protecting the socially vulnerable, ameliorating the condition of oppressed or marginalised groups and addressing social injustice. Its do-gooding, utopian sentimentality enervated the nation’s moral fibre, and eroded personal responsibility and the overriding duty of the poor to work. State intervention must never compromise the right of private capital to grow the business, improve share value, pay dividends and reward its agents with enormous salaries, benefits and bonuses.
The formation of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition in May 2010 was fully in line with the dominant political logic of realignment. In the spirit of the times, Cameron, with Blair as his role model, signalled his determination to reposition the Tories as a “compassionate conservative party”, though this has turned out to be something of a chimera.
At the same time, many underestimated how deeply being out of office and power had divided the Lib Dem soul. Coalition now set the neoliberal-inclined Orange Book supporters, who favoured an alliance with the Conservatives, against the “progressives”, including former social democrats, who leaned towards Labour. A deal – its detail now forgotten – was stitched up, in which the social liberals were trounced, and Cameron and Clegg “kissed hands” in the No 10 rose garden (the former looking like the cat that had swallowed the cream). The Lib Dems thus provided the Cameron leadership with the fig leaf it needed – while the banking crisis gave the alibi. The coalition government seized the opportunity to launch the most radical, far-reaching and irreversible social revolution since the war.
Coalition policy often seems incompetent, with failures to think things through or join things up. But, from another angle, it is arguably the best prepared, most wide-ranging, radical and ambitious of the three regimes that, since the 1970s, have been maturing the neoliberal project. The Conservatives had for some time been devoting themselves to preparing for office – not in policy detail but in terms of how policy could be used in power to legislate into effect a new political settlement. They had convinced themselves that deep, fast cuts would have to be made to satisfy the bond markets and international assessors. But could the crisis be used, as the rightwing economist Milton Friedman had suggested, to “produce real change”?
The legislative avalanche began immediately and has not let up. It begins negatively (“the mess the previous government left us”) but ends positively, in embracing radical structural reform as the solution. Ideology is in the driving seat, though vigorously denied. The front-bench ideologues – Osborne, Lansley, Gove, Maude, Duncan Smith, Pickles, Hunt – are saturated in neoliberal ideas and determined to give them legislative effect. As One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest put it: “The crazies are in charge of the asylum.” They are single-minded about the irreversible transformation of society, ruthless about the means, and in denial about the fallout. Osborne – smirking, clever, cynical, “the smiler with the knife” – wields the chopper with zeal. Cameron – relaxed, plausible, charming, confident, a silver-spooned patrician, “a smooth man” – fronts the coalition TV show. This crew long ago accepted Schumpeter’s adage that there is no alternative to “creative destruction”. They have given themselves, through legislative manoeuvring, an uninterrupted five years to accomplish this task.
Its wide-ranging character must be judged in terms of the operational breadth of the institutions and practices they aim to “reform”, their boldness in siphoning state-funding to the private sector, and the number of constituencies they are prepared to confront. Reform and choice – the words already hijacked by New Labour – are the master narrative. They may be Conservatives but this is not a conserving regime (it is a bemused Labour that is toying with the “blue-Labour” conservative alternative now). Tories and Lib-Dems monotonously repeat the dissembling mantras of their press and public relations people: “We are clearing up the mess inherited from the previous government.” But the neoliberal engine is at full throttle.
We cannot deal with the cuts in any detail here. They have only just started and there is much more to come. Instead we limit ourselves to tracking the neoliberal logic behind the strategy.
First, targeted constituencies – ie anyone associated with, relying or dependent on the state and public services. For the rich, the recession never happened. For the public sector, however, there will be massive redundancies, a wage freeze, pay running well behind the rate of inflation, pensions that will not survive in their present form, rising retirement ages. Support for the less well off and the vulnerable will be whittled away, and welfare dependency broken. Benefits will be capped, workfare will be enforced. The old must sell homes to pay for care; working parents must buy childcare; and incapacity-benefit recipients must find work. Sure Start, the schools refurbishment programme and Independent Maintenance Grants are on hold. Wealthy parents can buy children an Oxbridge education: but many other students will go into lifelong debt to get a degree. You cannot make £20bn savings in the NHS without affecting frontline, clinical and nursing services. Andrew Lansley, however, “does not recognise that figure”. Similarly, though everybody else knew that most universities would charge the maximum £9,000 tuition fees, David “Two-Brains” Willetts doesn’t recognise that figure. Saying that square pegs fit into round holes has become a front-bench speciality.
Women stand where many of these savage lines intersect. As Beatrix Campbell reminds us, cutting the state means minimising the arena in which women can find a voice, allies, social as well as material support; and in which their concerns can be recognised. It means reducing the resources society collectively allocates to children, to making children a shared responsibility, and to the general “labour” of care and love.
Second, there is privatisation – returning public and state services to private capital, redrawing the social architecture. The Blair government was an innovator here. To avoid the political hassle of full privatisation, it found you could simply burrow beneath the state/market distinction. Outsourcing, value for money and contract contestability opened the doors through which private capital could slip into the public sector and hollow it out from within. Privatisation now comes in three sizes: (1) straight sell-off of public assets; (2) contracting out to private companies for profit; (3) two-step privatisation by stealth, where it is represented as an unintended consequence. Some examples: in criminal justice, contracts for running prisons are being auctioned off and, in true neoliberal fashion, Ken Clarke says he cannot see any difference in principle whether prisons are publicly or privately owned; in healthcare, the private sector is already a massive, profit-making presence, having cherry-picked for profit medical services that hospitals can no longer afford to provide; while in the most far-reaching, top-down NHS reorganisation, GPs, grouped into private consortia (part of whose profits they retain), will take charge of the £60bn health budget. Since few GPs know how, or have time, to run complex budgets, they will “naturally” turn to the private health companies, which are circling the NHS like sharks waiting to feed. Primary Care Trusts, which represented a public interest in the funding process, are being scrapped. In the general spirit of competition, hospitals must remove the cap on the number of private patients they treat.
Third, the lure of “localism”. In line with David Cameron’s Big Society, “free schools” (funded from the public purse – Gove’s revenge) will “empower” parents and devolve power to “the people”. But parents – beset as they are by pressing domestic and care responsibilities, and lacking the capacity to run schools, assess good teaching, define balanced curricula, remember much science or the new maths, or speak a foreign language, while regarding history as boring, and not having read a serious novel since GCSE – will have to turn to the private education sector to manage schools and define the school’s “vision”. Could the two-step logic be clearer?
Fourth, phoney populism: pitching communities against local democracy. Eric Pickles intends to wean councils permanently off the central grant system. Meanwhile, social housing is at a standstill, housing benefits will be cut and council rents allowed to rise to commercial levels in urban centres. Many will move to cheaper rentals, losing networks of friends, child support, family, school friends and school places. Parents must find alternative employment locally – if there is any – or allow extra travelling time. Jobseekers’ allowances will be capped. As the private housing lobby spokesperson said: “We are looking forward to a bonanza.” Since the early days of Thatcher we have not seen such a ferocious onslaught on the fabric of civil society, relationships and social life.
Fifth, cutting down to size state involvement in quality of life. Amenities such as libraries, parks, swimming baths, sports facilities, youth clubs and community centres will either be privatised or disappear. Either unpaid volunteers will “step up to the plate” or doors will close. In truth, the aim is not – in the jargon of 1968 from which the promiscuous Cameron is not ashamed to borrow – to “shift power to the people”, but to undermine the structures of local democracy. The left, which feels positively about volunteering, community involvement and participation – and who doesn’t? – finds itself once again triangulated into uncertainty. The concept of the Big Society is so empty that universities have been obliged to put it at the top of their research agenda on pain of a cut in funding – presumably so that politicians can discover what on earth it means: a shabby, cavalier, duplicitous interference in freedom of thought.
What is intended is a permanent revolution. Can society be permanently reconstructed along these lines? Is neoliberalism hegemonic?
The protests are growing. Weighty professional voices are ranged against structural reforms, and the speed and scale of cuts in a fragile economy. There are pauses, rethinks and U-turns. Finally, there are unexpected developments that come out of the blue, such as the phone-hacking scandal that enveloped Rupert Murdoch’s News International. In the free-for-all ethos of neoliberal times, this sordid affair blew the media’s cover, compromised the Cameron leadership and penetrated echelons of the state itself. As Donald Rumsfeld ruefully remarked, “Stuff Happens!” If the Lib-Dem wheeze of delivering cuts in government and campaigning against them at the next election fails to persuade, they face the prospect of an electoral wipe-out. The coalition may fall apart, though at an election the Conservatives might get the majority they failed to muster last time. What happens next is not pregiven.
Hegemony is a tricky concept and provokes muddled thinking. No victories are permanent or final. Hegemony has constantly to be worked on, maintained, renewed, revised. Excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose interests have not been taken into account, form the basis of counter-movements, resistance, alternative strategies and visions … and the struggle over a hegemonic system starts anew. They constitute what Raymond Williams called “the emergent” – and the reason why history is never closed but maintains an open horizon towards the future.
However, in ambition, depth, degree of break with the past, variety of sites being colonised, impact on common sense, shift in the social architecture, neoliberalism does constitute a hegemonic project. Today, popular thinking and the systems of calculation in daily life offer very little friction to the passage of its ideas. Delivery may be more difficult: new and old contradictions still haunt the edifice, in the very process of its reconstruction. Still, in terms of laying foundations and staging the future on favourable ground, the neoliberal project is several stages further on. To traduce a phrase of Marx’s: “Well grubbed, old mole.” Alas!

Exactly right in seeing the counter-revolutionary conspiracy of capitalism – or “ideology” as the piece calls it as if somehow it is coming from people’s heads rather then being an expression of material class interests – which is constantly fighting to push back the working class.
But Hall is exactly wrong in not underlining the obvious conclusion for the working class that “democracy” is a giant fraud (even despite mentioning Marx), and not a word about the glaring revolutionary solution needed.
The latest revelations about Tory “defence” minister Liam Fox and the secret, behind-the-scenes wheeler dealing with various paid but undeclared assistants confirm the more general conspiratorial conclusions of a ruling class that is constantly manoeuvring to push its class was domination.
The key part of that story is not an extension of the MP corruption scandal, (telling enough in itself as another tiny facet of the overall network of connections and manipulation by which the ruling class maintains its dictatorship while pretending “democracy” has some meaning) but the fact that the mysterious “assistant” to Fox was running a sinister right-wing network out of the minister’s office as a charity”.
The dictatorship of capital will become a lot more vicious yet as the crisis drives a panicked ruling class to the most desperate measures of open fascist dictatorship.
An interesting Internet piece hints out how the neocon “New American Century” agenda for intimidating the whole world via shock and awe blitzkrieg (to allow dominant American imperialism to ride out the slump but ruthlessly facing down all challenges, from Third World upheaval and rival capitalism alike) is readying itself to impose domestic dictatorship.
While specific details may or may not be right, the thrust of its allegations is not only credible but exactly in line with Marxist understanding:

by Tony Cartalucci September 30, 2011 - The US intelligence community, in conjunction with Wall Street corporate-financier interests, have spent an inordinate amount of time positioning themselves for a possible military coup and martial law take over of the United States. This is being done under the guise of the fraudulent “War on Terror” but in preparation for a very real and inevitable economic collapse. In particular, one personality above all others is being groomed by intelligence operatives and policy wonks, while built-up by the corporate media [1][2] in the eyes of the public to intercede in America’s accelerating political, economic, and even global tactical decline. This man is General David Petraeus who served as former head of US Central Command which included combat operations in Iraq and former commander of US forces in Afghanistan before being sworn in as the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in September 6, 2011.
Posing as a venerable American hero, “leading” American troops through two wars in service to his nation, Petraeus’ ties are in fact to Wall Street and London corporate financier oligarchs. His membership [3] in the corporate-financier Council on Foreign Relations [4] is perhaps the most significant conflict of interest in America’s political landscape today. He has been both commander of America’s troops and now director of the CIA, all while privately associating with the unelected policy makers of the CFR, an organization that represents the collective interests of the largest banks, private institutions, and corporations on earth. Whether Petraeus is guilty or not of improprieties amidst this enormous conflict of interest is irrelevant. The fact that he hasn’t shown the proper judgement to rectify such a conflict of interest by either resigning from his post, or ending his CFR associations, should be alarming to all Americans.
To add further fears regarding the ambitions and agenda of Petraeus, one must examine those that are gravitating around him and indeed prodding him along.
In 2010, Petraeus gave a speech before the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) [5], another private institution funded by corporations, working on behalf of corporations, essentially producing their own self-serving policy and using their vast connections and resources to have it rubber stamped by Congress and executed by the US Government at the American people’s expense. In his speech, Petraeus would praise Neo-Conservative policy wonk Frederick Kagan who he credited for developing the “surge” strategy in Iraq.
In fact, almost all military strategy comes not from a large mahogany desk with maps strewn across it with a calculating general hovering above, but rather from institutions like AEI and other corporate-funded think-tanks including the Brookings Institution or the RAND Corporation. Frederick Kagan, along with other “resident scholars” at AEI, have also developed the current strategies being employed in Afghanistan and soon in Pakistan [6]. One might say that Petraeus, and many other lack-luster officers in the United States military are nothing more than empty vessels with administrative and operational capabilities merely carrying corporate-funded, crafted, and serving policies onto the battlefield, while equally empty vessels for politicians sell the policies and their tremendous costs back at home to the American people.
AEI’s board of trustees represents a wide variety of corporate-financier interests including those of the notorious Carlyle Group, State Farm, American Express, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (also of the CFR). Dick Cheney also acts as a trustee. Joining policy wonk Frederick Kagan as members of AEI’s “research staff” are warmongers Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, Richard Perle, John Yoo, and Paul Wolfowitz. AEI’s work is done entirely with the concept of “American exceptionalism” in mind, or in other words, American global hegemony. The AEI’s own annual report is rife with talk of US strategic preeminence and its assertion over the sovereignty of foreign nations in the form of sanctions, military operations, invasions, and occupations. The AEI, in tandem with the Heritage Foundation, Foreign Policy Initiative, and many others, all with interconnecting memberships and corporate-financier sponsors, are literally the “Project for a New American Century (PNAC)” in motion.
If a general commanding the summation of America’s military might and now America’s immense, omnipresent intelligence network, being bent to the will of corporate-financier interests who literally write the script from which he acts isn’t frightening enough, then maybe is the fact that these same apparently “Neo-Conservative,” “right-wing” organizations are also engineering and executing the latest “liberal-humanitarian” war in Libya.
In fact, as notorious “Neo-Con” Paul Wolfowitz, an AEI “visiting scholar,” expounded the merits of “Obama’s war” in Libya [7] and the desirable effect it could have on helping topple regimes in Syria and Iran, one might recall Wolfowitz’ aspirations back in 1991 where he spoke with General Wesley Clark about an opportunity to clean up the old Soviet “client regimes” before the next super power rose up and challenged western hegemony [8]. Amongst these “client regimes” were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Iran. It would appear than one linear agenda serving these corporate-financier interests unfolds regardless of who is in office.
With this in mind, we see that Petraeus is in no shape, form, or way a “political” or “establishment” outsider, or by any means a hero capable of saving America from its decline. He is amongst one of the most entrenched “insiders” there are, with his position in the CIA digging him in even deeper. His, or others like him, potentially entering into the political fray will be nothing more than a dangerous new ploy used to manipulate the American public. As Republican hopefuls flounder in front of an increasingly skeptical and angry public and the path for real political outsiders is being opened, the American people must be ever vigilant against pretenders like Petraeus, or other “military men” who might attempt to cross the proverbial Rubicon and pose as “reformers,” or “saviors” here to rescue us from our flawed form of government.
It should be noted, that Republican candidate Rick Perry is also entirely compromised by the special interests described above. Perry, who farcically claimed America “cannot afford four more years of this rudderless leadership,” already has the very men currently engineering Obama’s multiple wars behind the scenes, lining up behind him for indeed, four more years of what Perry called “rudderless leadership.” Foreign Policy reported [9] that notorious “Neo-Cons” including Douglas Feith, William Luti, Andrew McCarthy, Charles Stimson, and Daniel Fata, with the help of certified warmonger Donald Rumsfeld, had been introduced to Rick Perry to help him “brush up” on foreign policy. Also meeting with Perry was Dan Blumenthal of the above mentioned AEI, Peter Brookes of the Fortune 500-funded Heritage Foundation (page 35), and Zalmay Khalizad, a PNAC signatory and a member of the extraterritorial meddling National Endowment for Democracy’s board of directors, to help Perry define his “hawk internationalist” foreign policy stance.

The “restore the American republic” conclusions this piece comes to are a long way from the Marxist communist necessities which alone can solve capitalist collapse, (though the original bourgeois colonialist fight against British imperialism has a proud enough revolutionary tradition still detectable in American democratic ideology). 
Capitalism has not been “subverted and taken over” by corporations, it inevitably spawned this monopoly form.
It is changeable only by revolutionary overthrow.
But to get there means rebuilding class understanding in communism – against all the brainwashing “it doesn’t work” Goebbels lies holding back workers.
To clarify that means a hard look at all the mistakes and difficulties made in the first titanically great experiments to build working class rule – not writing it off in the foul petty bourgeois sneering of Trotskyism or covering up the difficulties as the Stalinists do, but through open polemical struggle for scientific understanding of the enormous achievements of the USSR and other workers states and the philosophical retreats from revolutionism which eventually liquidated them (despite their continuing solid progress).   Build Leninism. DH
Don Hoskins

E P S R   BOX

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

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

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

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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

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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
EPSR: Why no mention of revolution and vital dictatorship of the proletariat? Chile is the warning par excellence of the failure of revisionism and the deadly danger of “democratic-communism” illusions, – and Salvador Allende of the opportunism which not only did not arm the working class with crucial Leninist theory but refused them the physical means of defence against the brutal, fascist CIA/Pinochet coup in 1973 after idiotically inviting in the generals to “restore order”. The Chilean CP now leaves the same disastrous vacuum, and for revolts like Egypt too. Cuban accounts underline weak spots in otherwise  heroic workers state leadership.

Social tremors rock Chile
Joaquín Rivery Tur - Granma July 24th

UNIVERSITY and secondary school students are massively rebelling against privatization and profit making in education despite brutal repression by police. The indigenous Mapuches are struggling on their lands, and protests are erupting in city streets against the degradation of natural areas in Patagonia, in the wake of the government’s failed attempt to hand over a portion of this unique environment to transnational corporations.
This July 14, thousands of students and citizens led a tremendous march which passed in front of Moneda Palace, the seat of government, from where President Sebastian Piñera must have heard the shouts and chants repudiating profit-making in education and, even more inconveniently for the regime, the demands of miners who, during a 24-hour strike, shut down copper production to oppose privatization of the state owned enterprise, Codelco, the largest company of its kind in the world - precisely on the 40th anniversary of the industry’s nationalization by the Salvador Allende government.
The Reuters news agency described the miners’ strike as historic - copper production stopped as a warning - and put forward the reasons. It was called to protest the planned restructuring -of the company which would entail the dismissal of 2,600 workers and the sale of part of Codelco.
The Chilean government does not appear to know how to react to the conflicts engendered by its neoliberal policies directed toward privatizing the little that is controlled by government and promoting the greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the oligarchy. 
The government is not listening to the people and its response consists of social attacks which have led youth to call for a Constituent Assembly. They are becoming radicalized.
Everything seems to indicate that Sebastian Piñera’s four years in office - ending in 2014 - are to be characterized by confrontations with the nation’s popular sectors, given his economic policies which openly favor the rich. This move to the right has only produced a more radical popular response.
The militarized police, the Carabineros, have brutally attacked the masses of young people on an almost daily basis -plus the many citizens who have joined the protests - with tear gas, beatings, rubber bullets and water cannons. On Thursday, July 14, they did not do so. The popular rage seemed to reach a boiling point and they preferred to simply observe.
Over the weekend of the 17th, Chile witnessed the largest and broadest demonstration of students. - some 200,000 strong - against the new laws turning education into a profit-making venture through privatization.
Chilean students have a long history of struggling for their rights and those of their people. It cannot be forgotten that Salvador Allende had in the student body a great reservoir of support. During his administration, they did not concede the streets to the fascists and after the coup, they formed an integral part of the resistance against the bloodiest regime the country has known.
Those mobilized today are the continuators of previous struggles.
The other issue which has provoked a response across Chile, from the icy south to the northern deserts, is the approval of the Hidroaysén project, a plan to build five hydroelectric plants on the rivers of Patagonia, a region which has been maintained, until this point, as practically virgin territory, beyond the reach of neoliberal business interests. The repudiation was such that the plan had to be shelved.
The most pressing problem for the Sebastian Piñera government is that it cannot control the students, or the miners, much less the Mapuche, the indigenous people of Chile, who will not rest in their battle to reclaim ancestral lands and whose leaders have been entenced in accordance with a Pinochet era anti-terrorist law.
University and secondary school student federations have gone beyond their education-related demands and are now calling for a new constitution which would guarantee free public education. Such a new Magna Ccarta would mean taking a step forward, joining the new current recently asserting itself in Latin America.
Rodrigo Rivera, student leader in Chile’s northern region, stated to the press, “Students will not end their mobilizations... we want education to be returned to the state.” •

Massive general strike by Chilean workers - Adolescent shot and killed, more than 1,300 arrested

by Joaquín Rivery Tur

• CHILE’S streets were overflowing August 23 with a people unanimously demanding change in the country’s economic system during a general strike called to protest the effects of neoliberal policies which have increased inequality, as President Sebastian Piñera himself has acknowledged.
The two-day general strike was called by the Unified Workers Federation (cut) and beginning August 23, hundreds of students came out to demonstrate during the night and confrontations with the police developed.
Local support marches took place and the people’s enthusiasm and willingness to fight for the demands presented became evident.
On the 25th, Notimex reported that tens of thousands of Chileans, workers, students, teachers, members of social organizations and the population in general, marched along different routes converging on Santiago’s central avenue, Alameda Bernardo O’Higgins, to express their demands for change in the neoliberal system.
Arturo Martínez, cut president, said that he could not put a figure on the number of participants in the protests, but added, “The important thing is that the streets of Santiago are full.”
The people came out into the streets to express their opposition to inequality and a government which appears to be following in the steps of the Pinochet dictatorship, attacking demonstrators with water cannons which sent everyone reeling.
On August 26, it was announced that Manuel Gutierrez, 14 years of age, had died in the capital as a result of a high-caliber gunshot to the chest.
Undersecretary of the Interior Rodrigo Ubilla reported that there had been 1,394 arrests and that 153 police and 53 civilians had been injured.
The daily newspaper Nación reported that the political parties of the unified opposition had joined the popular mobilization.
During the two-day strike, demonstrators demanded a national referendum on free public education, a new constitution, tax reform, new labor laws, re-nationalization of the copper industry and adequate health care, among other demands which would require fundamental change in Chilean society. Students and workers are in total agreement.
The student leader Camila Vallejo declared that the strike showed the breadth, diversity and strength of the movement and commented that the general strike was only the beginning of a process of strengthening, organizing and building participation within Chilean society, which lacks the unity it needs to move forward.
As this edition is closing the students had negotiated a meeting with President Piñera, to whom they have proposed an agenda of 12 fundamental points.
Clearly, students are not the entire Chilean citizenry but with great valor they threw themselves into a struggle which represents the needs of the majority of their compatriots who have been drawn into the battle in great numbers, supported by the solidarity of the dispossessed.
The magazine Punto Final emphasized that “What was just a few months ago considered impossible has happened. A clear majority has emerged sharing the idea that the country’s economic, social, institutional and cultural system installed by the dictatorship of generals, admirals and big business must be fundamentally changed in order to open the way to social justice.
“The change taking place in Chile these days, as a product of sustained social protest which has taken on the dimensions of a revolution, has surprised the world, but also many privileged Chileans who had not perceived the indignation that was developing deep within the society.”•

The outrage of Chilean youth

HAVING the right to free education starting in early childhood is a privilege that sometimes Cubans don’t adequately appreciate. A portion of the population lived or at least has an idea of what a private education meant before the triumph of the Revolution; that is to say, exchanging money for knowledge. The majority of youth, however, born in a free country, with equal rights and free education, may not understand the magnitude of the accomplishment, they take it for granted, as an individual perogative.
In countries like Chile, for example, more than 80% of the students attend private schools at a cost in excess of $40,000. The rest of the schools are not much more accessible, requiring many to resort to the “solidarity fund,” which allows for a 15-year bank loan, at 2% interest. The pressure on families to assume these debts, when the majority of them do not earn adequate salaries, leads many students to abandon their studies.
Thus, since May 12, a battle has been waged by university and secondary school students against the government. The Federation of Chilean Students, (fech), The Federation of Chilean University Students (confech) and the National Coordinating Committee of Secondary Students (cones) have confronted the government policy of privatized education initiated by the Pinochet dictatorship 30 years ago.
The school system in 1967 provided widely available education free of charge, and profoundly democratized administration, but by the 1980s these gains had been lost due to policies implemented by the coup d’état government of Augusto Pinochet, transforming the view of education to that of a subsidiary and taking the lives of hundreds of students, professors and academics during the dictatorship.
After the reformation of many student federations (1990-1995) and the refoundation of the fech (1996-2005), an understanding of the unequal and arbitray nature of the model began to develop and resistance to the lack of justice took shape in the form of protests, marches and dissent, since 2006.
A new challenge now confronts the student organizations. The September 3 meeting with members of the Sebastián Piñera government only served to further stir the pot. Camila Vallejo, student leader, emphasized that positions were clarified but that the meeting would not mean an end to mobilizations in the country’s streets. While Minister of Education Felipe Bulnes is convinced that there is an ample basis for agreement.
During another meeting September 5, the minister announced a task force timetable to analyze three issues with the students: the student stipend and the financing of universities and high schools, the strengthening of public education and constitutional reform, which will be further discussed. Again, more half-measures, since experience has shown that the model has failed.
Recovering the right to a not-for-profit education, broadening social support, restructuring the scholarship system to avoid families becoming endebted, and internal democracy within educational institutions are the objectives, among others, of the struggle in the streets led by stifled youth denied the right to a quality education.
In this battle, students have been subject to arrests, abuse and even the loss of life, as in the case of high school student Manuel Gutiérrez. •

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Colonial war on Libya
by Stella Calloni

• THE perversion of U.S. and European agencies and their subordinates worldwide in calling what is happening in Libya “civil war,” demonstrates how a colonial intervention in a country which the United States and its partners want to seize for diverse motives was converted into an internal “rebellion” which had to be aided for “humanitarian” reasons.
The reality is that, since mid-March, the Libyan people have been enduring the savage NATO bombardments of a country of close to six million inhabitants, given that a large part of its territory is desert.
The NATO bombings have caused death and destruction throughout the country in order to open the way to the mercenaries who, from the beginning, were the driving force of the supposed popular “rebellion” against Muammar Gaddafi.
There are no images of that “popular” rebellion, or of the “excuse” - Gaddafi’s bombardments of the civilian population -used as the grounds for a brutal intervention well into the 21st century. Meanwhile, the civilian population is being massacred by its NATO “protectors,” and their homes, schools, food centers, medical laboratories, universities and hospitals, all destroyed.
Nobody can deny the advances in Libya after Gaddafi headed the rebellion which did away with a colonial monarchy and the country’s colonial status in 1969.
All of that effort is being demolished, while Libyan territory is being sown with depleted uranium, signifying a human and ecological disaster for the future.
Resolution 1973 adopted by the Security Council on March 17 this year to establish a supposed air blockade of Libya was solely intended to prevent the government of that sovereignty country from defending itself. The resolution was
approved without listening to what direct observers had to say.
They thus insured that Libya had no air defense. And it could be noted as a moral defeat the fact that the country has resisted the bombings for almost six months, making it abundantly evident that, without NATO, the “rebels” would not exist.
In order to guage the truth that the media is concealing, suffice it to see a recent photograph published by certain media showing alleged “rebel troops,” whose physique, clothing and weapons resemble those of the typical mercenaries which the powers took to that region. In order to initiate and sustain the intervention, the United States and its associates utilized the international corporate media which, in real terms, is under their military and security control.
In this case they could also count on the
self-interested or disinterested - but fulfilling the same objective - collaboration of certain journalists and intellectuals considered progressive, but who were the accomplices of this intervention and the network of lies utilized to justify it.
In order to justify themselves to themselves, these are now waiting for NATO to win and tell the victors’ story about “the horrific human rights’ violations” committed by the Libyan government in order to cover up what the mercenaries and invading troops are doing. As they did in Afghanistan and Iraq and long before that.
Have they so quickly forgotten the Nicaraguan Contras who attacked Sandinista Nicaragua from U.S. bases in Honduras, destroying villages, killing, torturing and raping women and children? At the time, Ronald Reagan called them “freedom fighters.”
Calling groups of mercenaries handled by the CIA and its associates “rebels” is to demonstrate a lack of respect for the real rebels in the world fighting for their liberation.
The Libyan people and government not only had the right but also the obligation to defend themselves. Any country in the world under foreign attack has the duty to do so.
If they manage to hold onto Libya in order to transform the country into “a new Somalia,” as Moussa Ibrahim, spokesperson for the Libyan government, stated August 19 in the aftermath of increased NATO bombings, all the countries of the world will be left totally vulnerable..
With the addition that an Argentine attorney at the International Criminal Court (ICC) wants to condemn Gaddafi and, at the same time, protect those responsible for criminal interventions and genocide in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Somalia is a country without government, with a food crisis and that is what the Western powers want to make of Libya by continuing their attacks, “While we are working on peace plans,” the Libyan spokesperson also recalled.
Authorities warned on August 19 that the bombardments are to increase in the days leading up to the 42nd anniversary of the so-called Green Revolution which Gaddafi headed on September 1, 1969.
At this stage of events, when the powers have appropriated Libyan state funds and a Transition Council embassy has been opened in Washington, something that has never happened before, nobody can doubt that these “rebels” never represented the Libyan people. It is a fact that before controlling any territory whatsoever, the “rebels” created the Benghazi Central Bank. Does this have any parallel in history? •  GRANM 04 September