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 1402  13th March 2012                                                                                                       25p fortnightly

Fascist killer rampage in Afghanistan is not some exception but the core character of US NAZI degeneracy and war being imposed on the whole planet by monopoly capitalism to distract from and evade responsibility for its own failure and desperate Slump crisis. Barbarism is routine and trained into imperialist troops. The backlash against this horror may precipitate US pullout from the 10 year long quagmire and defeat but cannot end warmongering, which the historically bankrupt profit making system needs and is deliberately fostering; to scapegoat everyone else, to intimidate any capitalist rivals and to suppress rising Third World rebellion (and especially the Arab Spring). Anti-war protest useless – only revolution to end out-of-time class rule can stop depravity.  Leninism crucial

The bizarre cold-blooded mass murder of 16 mainly women and children from local families perpetrated by an American soldier in Afghanistan could be a watershed moment in what even the Western press increasingly describes as a debilitating defeat and setback for Western imperialist domination of the planet after ten years which have achieved nothing but scorched earth destruction, and now the likely return of the Taliban anyway.  
Whether or not it is “accidental”, in the sense that such a psychotic and deranged rampage is not essentially part of the endless military blitzkrieging and brutality imposed on the country (though similar enough to the casually racist and constant “collateral” slaughter of civilians which is part of the relentless neo-colonialist wars in the Middle and Far East), it will become an instant symbol of the fascist depravity of American world tyranny and a certain rallying call for even more hatred and resistance than has already paralysed Western resolve.
Not just Afghanistan but the entire Third World is in uproar over this and justifiably so.
Even if there is no direct connection with the daily round of Terminator “robo-drone” terrorisation and official fascist assassinations, it is arguable (if difficult to prove completely), that most of the murderous rampaging that periodically erupts within the “advanced democratic” societies is the result of the same ever-worsening contradictions and cultural degeneration within capitalism that is intimately bound up with its tyrannical oppression and exploitation of four-fifths of the entire world (including its own working class more and more), and with the deliberate warmongering violence and fascist onslaughts it is imposing far and wide to try hold onto sweet power and profit.
Such incidents are clearly incited by a cultural climate of Western “crusading” “might is right” frenzy around the propaganda whipped up to stampede Western public opinion into blitzing and suppressing the growing rebellious of the entire planet. 
The revolt has been rising everywhere against the humiliation and oppression it has been kept in for the last centuries by colonialist exploitation and plundering.
There is a massive difference between such domineering violence in such incidents incited by the Great Power needs to suppress the rest of the planet into accepting eternal exploitation and humiliation and the few outbursts of “terrorism”, like 9/11 and 7/11 in London, which are the desperate and limited response of the Third World to such endless oppression and the suppression they suffer at the hands of Western finance and power, seeing millions killed through poverty and starvation every year and tens of millions living in degradation, enforced ignorance, disease and homelessness or worked into the ground on plantations and in sweatshops.  
But it is not the Third World which has been waging nearly 15 years of non-stop wars and punishment blitzkriegs, pulverising and destroying scapegoated country after country across the planet from tiny Serbia in 1999 to Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya and Syria (by provoked civil war). 
Almost certainly their sense that such depravity emerges from the very culture and nature of monopoly capitalist society and the conditions it creates of racist arrogance, and warmonger destruction, is correct.
Their view will undoubtedly be confirmed by the difference in press and political coverage that this foulness gets, compared to the weeks-long agonising and front-page heartwrench that such incidents produce when they happen within Western society, as happened with assorted American campus and school massacres, maverick snipers, or more directly politically obvious, with the Nazi slaughter at a Norwegian socialist youth camp.
Weeks of headline soul-searching versus the downpage and limited “objective” accounts of numbers killed in Afghanistan and “neutral” reports of diplomatic flurries to “contain the damage to bilateral relations” is the shape of things.
No demented right-wing radio tirades followed the virtual abandonment of any serious attempt to punish the soldiers who were arrested last year for a systematic “killing for fun” rampage through Afghanistan, even collecting, in the most Hollywood horror film style, the cut-off thumbs of their victims. One at least goes virtually scot-free.
And the contemptuous Koran burning is reported in terms only of the “setback to Western interests” with little done to discipline the perpetrators.
But let one of the billions of downtrodden attempt to stand up and fight back and however limited or justified the “violence” they perpetrate and there will be all hell unleashed upon their heads (along with the daily oppression, suffering, mass imprisonments, sporadic straffings, intimidations, harassment, deprivation, and occasional all-out blitz attacks which the Palestinians and others are familiar with). 
Routine and constantly repeated “punishment” smiting is visited on the downtrodden Palestinians in their endless siege misery within the half-destroyed concrete hellhole of the Gaza strip, a permanent concentration camp monstrosity which is utterly ignored by the Western imperialist media hype.
Meanwhile the sanctimonious human-rights hypocrisy about “concern for freedom and democracy” and “protection of civilians” pours out non-stop against selected bogeyman targets, as currently against Syria, and being wound up for Iran (with the class collaborating fake-“lefts” playing along with it all in their “condemn terrorism” and “anti-dictator” philistine philosophical stoogery, giving “justification” to this fascist agenda and in the worst cases, like the Weekly Worker’s CPGB-run Hands off the People of Iran campaign, pumping out even more hate propaganda that the mainstream media can manage).
No punches are pulled on the West’s murderous “justice” supposedly being meted out against any of the genocidally oppressed and permanent refugee Palestinian people who despite their hellish conditions, still become more and more doggedly determined to fight with every passing year.
Just the opposite – all pretences of holding up the “international rule of law” and “innocent until proven guilty” are thrown out of the window to pursue out and out deathsquad assassinations of anyone deemed to be a “terrorist leader”, and using the most powerful and deadly destructive fighter plane technology against the primitive weaponry the underdogs manage to find. 
The latest Zionist Nazi blitzkrieging outrage also has killed 16 civilians as the planes came in, not only oblivious to the ordinary people around this revenge assassination of an alleged “terrorist leader”, Zuhair al-Qaissi, declared to be commander of the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committee, but utterly indifferent and contemptuous of them in a way that only the foulest “master-race” fascist arrogance could manage.
There was nothing “accidental” or a “one-off unfortunate psychosis” about the high-technology military jet bombing run which completely ignored a four month long cease-fire agreement with the Palestinians, whose rocket retaliation afterwards was blamed by the Zionists for further blitzing in the usual inside-out Goebbels logic  of holding the oppressed “responsible” for the fascist oppression poured onto them.
This is the expression of a society which is dementedly destructive in its totality – and of the complete fraud of its pretence to be bringing “peace and prosperity through civilised democratic norms” to the planet, as alleged for Zionism and as the entire Western world, more or less lined up behind, pretends.
What foul Goebbels lies!!
The particularly concentrated Zionist expression of this neo-colonialist degeneracy may yet create special difficulties for the overall Washington strategy for continuing to control the world, not least Tel Aviv’s demented campaign to launch all-out war at any minute on Tehran, threatening massive and possibly uncontrollable spread of turmoil and revolt throughout not just the Middle East but Africa too.
As the EPSR has speculated in the past, this might even lead to severe splits with its US master which heavily funds and subsidies this colonialist land-theft Israeli parody of a “state”, built on foundations of vicious terror and the ethnic cleansing of an entire indigenous people from land they had inhabited for 1500 years to now be held in appalling poverty and virtual imprisonment. 
But that has got nothing to do with any US disapproval of its fascist methodology – only a squabble over tactics and strategy overall in when, and how much, “smiting” should be done, and how much bullying intimidation should be done by other means, balancing between the strategic alliances with other backward and reactionary regimes like the feudal primitiveness of the stooge Saudi Royals and the Gulf etc.
The Zionists learned most of their fascist intimidation and terror tricks from the past colonial powers anyway which invented collective punishment slaughter, kidnapping, terror, siege starvations (now euphemistically called “sanctions”), torture, germ warfare and concentration camps etc etc etc. long ago.
And to reinforce the point the “civil-rights-feminist-progress” Obama presidency (hailed by the petty bourgeois EPSR south-west renegades as a “step forwards for the world”) has stepped up such assassinations itself, most sharply  with the vigilante “justice” of the internationally illegal killing of Osama bin Laden (no trial there or even proof of his identity required before summary execution by invasive death squad on Pakistani sovereign soil) and continued in the depraved iron-bar buggery war-crime killing of Muammar Gaddafi which so delighted and amused Hilary Clinton. 
The only surprise is that there has not been far more maverick, rampaging, wilful individual slaughter.
It is hardly needed. It is an overall Western monopoly capitalist assumption, that it has the right to straffe and destroy lives everywhere when it decides they are “against the interests” of its continuous stranglehold on the world’s resources and production capacity, that has continued non-stop for the entire imperialist epoch since the first European capitalist colonialist domination (particularly the British, which has genocidally brought to extinction, or as good as, numerous nations and peoples including divers Native Americans, Maoris, Aborigines, Zulus, Sudanese Arabs) and since World War Two, of Washington’s overriding “topdog” power.
Washington has carried out more than 400 coups, massacres, invasions, CIA manipulated overthrows, assassinations, and all-out bloody wars since 1945 including the years-long non-stop B52 high explosive bombing of Vietnam (along with geographical scale chemical warfare) which alone exceeded all the destructive power of the entire Second World War (both sides) and brought suffering and devastation on an unparalleled scale.
All under the staggering hypocrisy of “bringing democracy”.
But it has been stepped up into ever more glaring destruction and “punishment” since the turn of the 21st century when its crisis began to accelerate, and the prospect of all out international global conflict for shrinking markets between the major capitalist powers, made it necessary to turn back to the general warmongering path again, with Washington determined to “shock and awe” the world into submission to its continuing overlordship, despite total bankruptcy, brooking no refusal to continue accepting its increasingly worthless paper dollars or to supply it with the lion’s share of the world’s produce and raw materials to feed its indolent and increasingly pointless luxury lifestyle (for the rich minority). 
The twin aims of suppressing Third World revolt and intimidating any rivals for the “Big Daddy” role have produced a stream of wars and a propaganda deluge to demonise a dozen more potential victims with non-stop Goebbels level lies about their alleged “dictatorial oppression of their own people” etc etc as with Libya and Syria currently (see inside story).  
But the result has been to massively increase the growing Third World ferment which despite huge confusions, backward ideologies, and sometimes primitive ideas, continues to grow more and more sophisticated, more and more doggedly resistant and gradually more capable.
Combined with the eruption finally into the open of the raging capitalist crisis, in 2008’s credit crunch, (irreversible confirmation of the onrushing Slump disaster) the lessons learned in the Bush/Obama epoch have evolved the resistance of sporadic and erratic “terrorism” into the mass rebellion of the Egyptian and Tunisian “Spring” against continuing Western stooge tyranny (intertwining with huge regional sympathy fpr, inspiration from, and collaboration with, the Palestinian struggle).
Afghanistan itself has been a long running disaster for the US, shattering the brash Texas bravado of George Bush and helping bring his presidency to one of the lowest points in the 200 year history of the White House.
Obama-ism’s fresh attempt to “surge” a victory (while pretending a liberal “opposition” to the war) has been equally disastrous and will become even more so with the backlash that the latest incident is already threatening with warnings of revenge from the Taliban. 
The disastrous mess underlines the intractable contradictions facing crisis-ridden capitalism, unable to impose its will onto the world but equally unable to abandon the warmongering which is its only strategy for dealing with the intractable collapse of its entire profit making system.
The disastrous mess is now causing major scepticism even among the normally Conservative wing of the intelligentsia, which expresses some of the defeat facing this new colonialist bullying:

It is obvious that Taliban commanders are reading Sun Tzu, and “building the enemy a golden bridge across which to retreat”. They are talking to go-betweens, opening offices in Doha and giving soothing interviews. This week’s leaked American intelligence report, The State of the Taliban, shows that the Afghan people, too, are coming to terms with the return of their former rulers, and might even welcome some stability and order after 10 years of Nato-induced chaos.
The US president, Barack Obama, ... is now calibrating his departure. Militarily, the path to defeat has been straightforward. While it is easy to bomb a capital and deploy armies to topple a regime, occupying foreign countries for any length of time is usually disastrous. Soldiers become brutalised, allies desert, operations become costly and counterproductive.
Nato strategists did not need Napoleon or Hitler for a warning, merely Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even after Mikhail Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and decided to withdraw in 1985, it took him four years to do so. As also indicated in this week’s report, the Pakistanis, supposedly allies of the west, have long sided with the Taliban. Even Kabul’s ruler and western puppet, Hamid Karzai, has said he would support Pakistan in any putative war with the US. It does not matter what America or Britain does. The logic of a prolonged occupation of a Muslim country is remorseless.
More alarming about the Afghan war has been its psychology. It has generated some two dozen books on my shelf, and every one of them warns, cautions, criticises, condemns. The Pashtun Taliban should not be underestimated. Defeating them by main force flew in the face of all experience. Pakistani intelligence would offer them sanctuary and support. Nato should not drive al-Qaida, a tiny Arabist cell in 2001, into alliance with the Taliban. The idea that force of western arms could turn a corrupt Muslim statelet into a sanitised, pro-western democracy was arrogant and unreal.
Every warning was disregarded in a classic of “cognitive dissonance”. The Afghan war has been sustained by years of mendacity and deceit from western governments. Elected representatives, the media and public opinion were induced to buy the line that success was “just around the corner”. Embedded journalists would report that the army was “winning hearts and minds” and the Taliban were on the run. Sooner or later Nato would “retrain” the Afghan army, despite constant reports of the hatred and unreliability this army felt towards the occupation. Just last week, the British government bizarrely pledged to build “an Afghan Sandhurst”, presumably as a palace for some future Taliban warlord.
All military and diplomatic experience, all the history and the scholarship in the world, did not stop this crude punitive venture being backed by conservatives and liberals alike in both the US and Britain. It was declared a good war. The drumbeats of battle stifled criticism. Any general got a cheer who could boast that the war would be over in weeks, and without a shot fired. Critics were met with the timeless, drear refrain, that their talk was defeatist, cowardly and lacked patriotism. Like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, they were drowned by the lust for glory.
Nor were the lobbies idle. Bruised from its Iraq debacle, the British army wanted somewhere to walk tall. Helmand, with its echoes of Beau Geste and Lawrence of Arabia, was ideal. Behind the army lurked the call of money, an ever-burgeoning regiment of arms suppliers, security firms, contractors, NGOs and aid agencies, all fat on the war’s staggering $500bn cost. Add to them Kabul’s kleptocrats, politicians and aid recipients, and the war took on a self-sustaining quality. Even today few participants have an interest in its ending. Hundreds, then thousands, die, and no one can honestly say why.
Withdrawal will not be as easy as from Iraq, messy and unresolved as that remains. The new Taliban may be media-friendly and, for the present, amenable to calls for moderation. They are said to be more sophisticated than those who seized Kabul amid appalling bloodshed in 1996. But it is hard to believe their leaders will have cause to compromise in a year’s time, hailed as heroes of Islam for having humbled the might of Nato. Their Pakistani backers will be equally exhilarated. Whatever might have been achieved against al-Qaida with minimal force in 2001 – on which I recommend Lucy Morgan Edwards’ book The Afghan Solution – is past history. Resumed chaos beckons.
Unlike most European countries, sucked into the Afghan vortex by Nato blackmail, Britain and the US were willing warriors, with belligerence in their cultural genes. Discussing “what must be done” to order the rest of the world is second nature to their political class. Successive British governments bought into the lies and scaremongering of George Bush’s war on terror. Gordon Brown and David Cameron alike claimed that the killing fields of Helmand were integral to safety on the streets of London, and indeed to the security of the British state. People believed them. War induced a cockeyed credulity.
The Afghan war has not made the west one jot safer, almost certainly the reverse. Islamist terrorism and its obverse, panicky security, is polluting this year’s Olympic Games in London. Yet the war clearly responded to a yearning in many Britons to see the world as still their ancestral responsibility. To them a war that turns out right, such as in Libya, “proves” Britain’s manifest destiny.
Which is why this is not the endgame. Britain is even now rattling sabres and dicing with disaster alongside the US against Iran. Such a war would be as catastrophic as could be imagined, and against a country that poses no conceivable threat to western security. The sole reason for going to war against Iran is to go to war against Iran. That is how we went to war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Clearly, nothing has been learned

The “amenability of the Taliban” will be even harder to reach now of course and this bourgeois view misses out critical issues including the deliberate Western CIA campaign to fund the anti-Soviet backward fundamentalist resistance in the 1980s, the arming and stimulation of which via Pakistan was the prime cause of the Soviet pullout from backing the revolutionary communist government, rather than some inherent semi-mystical Kipling-like notion of the resilience of the local tribespeople.
The Afghanistan communist government was building a new society in Afghanistan whose excellent social and economic progress and openness (in women’s education for example) was hated by the more backward tribal and fundamentalist forces. But they had been defeated and the revolution could easily have survived if the hilltribe backwardness had not been given outside aid and modern weaponry. 
The revolutionary government went on for four more years of developments and achievement, proving incidentally that it was not the result of a “Soviet invasion” but of a mass local and popular revolution, (like many others in the post-war Soviet period, in Ethiopia, Nicaragua, etc) which produced many of the advances that the West now claims for itself. 
But Jenkins it captures well enough the impossible difficulties facing imperialism and the demoralising impact of defeat from any source, including even the fundamentalism of the Taliban.
Defeat for imperialism is the key understanding of Marxism as the means by which rampaging monopoly capitalist exploitation will eventually be weakened sufficiently for its overthrow and historic ending, defeat implying not one iota of support for the Taliban’s ideology or any other confusion, but recognising that it is imperialism which is the enemy and cause of the devastation in the world and which needs to be ended.
But while war weariness and the obvious failure of the West to establish any kind of “stable and democratic governance” for Afghanistan leads to petty bourgeois questioning of Afghan war success this also misses the point.
Washington cannot pull out of warmongering. 
The purpose of Iraq and of Afghanistan never were to “deal with dictators” nor “the Taliban” nor to “hunt down the al-Qaeda threat that is coming to get us all”.
It is simply – war.
Capitalism’s crisis can only be resolved (if capitalism is to survive and its ruling class maintain its privileges) by ever increasing war turmoil; to distract the masses attention from the slump crisis; to destroy the “excess” production clogging the world; and to suppress and destroy the rising rebellion of the Third World (a key aspect of the NATO onslaught on the Libyan bourgeois nationalist regime, the West provoking a pretence of the “next stage of the Arab Spring” under a demented and distorted media onslaught (swallowed wholesale by most of the fake-“left” bar a few museum Stalinists), which was in fact a violent counter-revolution stirred up among the most backward and reactionary monarchist and middle class stooge elements to topple the long-hated anti-imperialism of Gaddafi and to intimidate the Egyptian revolt and put Western military forces into this next door country to back up the remnants of the military dictatorship in Cairo.)
It cannot pull out of war – and if some high level tactical decision is being made to pull back from Afghanistan (allegedly in 2014 but that is awaited) then it will surely only be to stir up war somewhere else, most likely Iran perhaps Sudan, and almost certainly in the Pacific basin where the US military forces are being heavily reinforced and deployed on a widening scale, from new bases in Australia and elsewhere.)
War is unstoppably part of capitalism in crisis and will descend all the way into all-out World War as the QE suspended crisis unravels.
Gradually and steadily the massive Third World revolt will start to find and develop Marxist leadership. 
When that merges with the necessarily growing revolts in the Depression savaged-West it will be an unstoppable force to end finally the capitalist crisis depravity that the US and its Western stooges are going to continue escalating. 
That requires a huge battle to make sense of the confusions and complexities of the unrolling crisis, only possible with a renewed determination to build an openly polemical Leninist movement ready to examine all the mistakes and difficulties of the past, and most of all the philosophical failures of Moscow revisionism which degenerated ultimately into the idiotic abandonment of the workers state in 1989-90.
 Leninist theory is crucial. 
Jacob Tremain 

Tame trade union protests to stop  “cuts” fall far short of the revolutionary understanding needed to fight oncoming Slump magnitudes beyond any previous crisis and heading for WW3. “When the upturn comes” thinking is disarming middle class complacency.

Loud ruling class denunciations of Unite union threats to disrupt the Olympic Games in anti-cuts protests are a signal of the jumpiness of a ruling class that now sees potential revolutionary upheaval around every corner.
There is nothing exceptional about the threatened actions – which are long overdue from a virtually supine TUC official union leadership anyway which has so far done little to respond to the greatest Slump disaster that has ever faced the working class.
And they are a million miles from the radical perspectives for occupations, takeovers, demonstrations and all-out mass strike, and general-strike levels of class struggle required to tackle the now overwhelming onrush of the crisis which is already tearing lives apart and forcing desperation and despair onto millions – and with plenty more to come.
But the fear of the ruling class is that even the tamest and most limited actions might go “out of control” as the riots did last summer.
The capitalist ruling class knows that any struggle will produce a ferment of discussion in the working class that opens up all kinds long ignored notions, including more and more serious revolutionary debate and, most importantly of all, the vital discussion of what was good and what went wrong with the gigantic socialist achievements of the Soviet Union and other workers states. 
It is a crucial discussion that they know will feed into a renewal at some point of revolutionary Leninist understanding and with it the great danger for their own class future and existence – which is out of time and a fetter on humanity’s future development.
Coming when its world warmongering “shock and awe” neo-colonialism is in greater trouble than ever before – with Iraq in continuing turmoil and the ten year long Afghanistan intervention a festering mess of warlordism, civilian killing, drone blitzing and corruption which has not only solved nothing at all, but increasingly looks to see a profound long-term defeat with the return of the Taliban openly discussed as a likely outcome – such struggles could escalate out of control, drawing strength and momentum from the huge upsurge of anti-imperialism underway throughout the Third World.
“Left” union leader Len McCluskey and other “firebrands”  have to respond to a growing impatience and frustration of the working class.
But the Unite leadership, or any of the “militant left” trade unionists like the railwaymen, are nowhere close to giving the kind of revolutionary leadership that grows more and more urgent with every passing month of the unravelling capitalist catastrophe.
Nor will they ever. 
For all their media attention and high public profiles, none of them ever do anything to warn the working class about the historically unprecedented and unsolvable level of disastrous slump and world war which is unfolding. 
None of them say a word to warn the working class that there is no end possible to the crisis which is spiralling all the way to the deadly future World War Three which has been warming up (and is effectively underway) since the monstrous NATO blitzing of tiny Serbia in 1999 and has continued non-stop ever since, stampeded with the foulest of Goebbels level lies and demonisations through Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan, to Libya last year and now Syria and possibly Iran.
Just the opposite. They capitulate completely to the shallow philistinism of “anti-totalitarianism” and bogey-man parodies about “terrible dictators” which are pumped out of the Western media night and day in a welter of lies, ludicrous hearsay allegations presented as “fact”, exaggerations and hypocritical “freedom” moralising from the likes of William Hague, Hilary Clinton, the medieval primitiveness of the Saudi Royal houses, the reactionary Gulf Sheikhdoms and France’s jumped-up little fascist squirt Nicolas Sarkozy.
Hardly a role-call of the world’s progressive forces to endorse the fake-“lefts” – who virtually all reproduce this garbage and in practice stand alongside them.  
Since when have these medieval and arrogantly degenerate tribal throwbacks been the standard bearers of “human rights” in the world??
Their regimes are not only some of the most unjust, unfree, undemocratic, and repressive in all of modern history but actively part of the violent and savage repression of the (genuine) Arab Spring demonstrations that have seen tens of hundreds shot, killed, wounded arrested and tortured over the last year throughout the Gulf, Saudi, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, and Somalia, not to mention the most stifling and barbaric backwardness imposed since they were elevated into power by manipulative Western interests after the First World War (including the early “popular rebellion” provoked and stirred up by Western intelligence in 1916 in the person of “Lawrence”, the forerunner of a thousand CIA/MI6 subsequent provocations now done much more slickly and covertly).
In what way does the ultra-reactionary Republican anti-communist John McCain, one of the US most aggressive political figures, who still believes the only problem  with the horrific slaughter and killing of the Vietnam war was that America did not stick at it long enough or drop sufficient high explosive devastation over nearly a decade on non-stop blitzkrieg horror, give credence to the notion that the world is somehow concerned for the “downtrodden” with his calls for yet more NATO bomb run savagery???
Union “militancy” has always been part and parcel of a “left pressure” game of reformist and trade union politics which has done nothing but argue for a share of the imperialist ruling class profits from Empire, elevating the privileged working class in Britain (its “better off” layers anyway), while decrying and suppressing revolutionary notions by every kind of bureaucratic and philosophical slyness in the book.
It has been one long racket to head the working class away from the ideas of ever fundamentally changing the bankrupt profit system, with the pretence that “things can gradually get better”.
In more than a hundred years of endless reformist perspectives it has never challenged the basic existence of the exploitative and plundering ruling system which will endlessly bring the world back to ever worsening Slump disaster and breakdown.
“Left” union leaders like McCluskey and Bob Crow at the RMT - and even “new” alleged breakaway parties like the Scargillite SLP might have made a few noises here and there about their members’ interests and the unfairness of capitalist society but overall never say anything about the scale and pace of the disastrous crisis facing the working class now.
But what needs to be said is that there is no solution.
The crisis is effectively the terminal breakdown of the eight hundred year rise of bourgeois class society and capitalist exploitation which is tangled in ever greater contradictions, its profit making interests not only out-of-line with human needs but destructively suppressing the rational development of society and technology.
It has to be ended in favour of socialism. 
That cannot be done by reformist improvements. 
The old game of “left pressure” and “defending the members’ conditions” was always a gigantic confidence trick anyway, which succeeded for a decades-long period of history only because of the super-profits pouring in from the heavily exploited Third World, tyrannically dominated by the European capitalist colonial powers, and post-war by US imperialism with the other major capitalist powers (defeated and then revived after World War Two for anti-communist reasons) settling for a smaller slice of the cake.
With that fabulous plunder from the labour of billions of poor sweatshop and plantation workers, the ruling class could make a few token concessions in craft level “better wages” and public housing and municipal improvements.
When eventually reeling under the impact of the powerful example of the new fairer society being built (with no capitalist ownership or bosses at all) in the revolutionary socialist Soviet Union, and confronting the post-WW2 revolutionary wave across Europe, the ruling class made (small enough) “welfare state” concessions for the working class in the richest countries.
Such “gains”, to keep workers away from revolution, were always unstable, impermanent and ready to be rescinded by the ruling class once it felt it was strong enough again to push back the post-1945 pro-Soviet pro-socialist challenge, or when conditions forced its hand anyway.
The great Moscow inspired revisionist delusions at the time, which abandoned revolutionary understanding in favour of pacifism, permanent “peaceful coexistence” and the alleged possibilities of parliamentary struggle (still tragically and confusingly pumped out to this day even by the likes of Fidel Castro, despite Cuba’s gigantic practical example of revolutionary rule via the authority of the dictatorship of the proletariat) have created years of befuddlement and confused anti-communism that has helped the ruling class push back many of these gains already with thirty years of privatisations and dismantling of working class rights, particularly all the old reformist trade union rights after the high point of the heroic but misled 1984 miners strike.
Scargill’s Labour perspective demand for a massive investment in the “Plan for Coal” was a reformist pipe dream by 1984 already, which could never be fulfilled by a ruling class increasingly under world competitive pressure and unable to find the super-profits to pay for such “luxuries” anymore as Empire declined and disappeared.
The ruling class’s hand was being forced then and it is a hundred times more so now, obliged to tear up everything ever granted the working class, including even the great illusion of a National Health Service, the centrepiece of all reformist improvement fantasies and “beloved” by even the middle class.
But this fabulous NHS illusion cost the ruling class intolerable sums, which are unsustainable now the crisis is crashing down.
It is all being torn up, sold off and dismantled under the pressure of the “markets”, the “objective” international representation of universal capitalist profit hunger, the inarguable force which drives all before it, sweeping away all the “regulations” and “controls”, all “fairer taxes”, all “people orientated” reforms which the Occupy movement and other liberal protesting still demands, and even any capitalists themselves who are “nice”.
Capitalism in the end cares only about “the bottom line” and will ruthlessly sweep aside everything in the fight to stay afloat against even more ruthless monopoly capital.
Early 1930s Depression levels of misery and “austerity” that must be imposed, if capitalism is to continue its existence in power and luxurious indolence, have only been hinted at so far. 
In fact they are clearly going far beyond anything ever seen before even in the Great Depression as Greece already gives a taste:

Greeks will suffer austerity measures for another five years as the price of their government securing a €130bn (£109bn) bailout to prevent national bankruptcy and chaos within the eurozone, it has emerged.
The scale of the wage and spending cuts required to implement the rescue package prompted an array of analysts to raise the spectre of yet another Greek debt crisis later this year and the country’s exit from the euro as recession deepens.
But Olli Rehn, the EU economic and monetary affairs commissioner, said Greece had lived beyond its means for a decade and savage cuts in labour costs were vital to restore competitiveness and growth.
...Senior EU officials admitted, that, after enduring wage cuts of 30% since 2009, Greeks would suffer a further 15% reduction in the next three years and even more cuts would be required after that.
The country’s economy, which contracted by 7% last year, is forecast to decline by a further 4.5% this year, stagnate in 2013 and then grow by 2% in 2014. But officials conceded that the Greek rescue programme is “accident-prone” and their forecasts are high-risk. Greece has been in recession for five years, losing 17% of its GDP.
Unemployment, now running at around 20%, is expected to remain above 18% this year and next, be just below 17% in 2014 and still be above 15% in 2015.
The Greek government has barely a week to implement tough “prior actions” to release the next tranche of loans enabling it to pay €14.4bn of debt by March 20 and securing final eurozone approval for the second bailout within less than two years.
These include legislation to set up a blocked account to ensure that EU/IMF loans are used to service debt, not meet current spending on health, pensions and the like.
Thereafter, subjected to unprecedented budgetary surveillance by an increased posse of inspectors and advisers, Athens will have to find further savings equivalent to 5% of GDP by the end of 2014.
Rehn indicated this could be eased by a clampdown on tax evasion, aided by officials from other EU countries. They and others are to be permanently stationed in Athens to “further strengthen Greece’s institutional capacity”.

Even this is an understatement. 
And the same is coming in even the “more stable” countries like the UK.
Just the formal “cuts” and “Budget restrictions” announced so far and  which are 90% still to work through, are wrecking lives and imposing appalling misery and fears, as the hand-wringing agony of the “Guardianista liberals” regularly bewails:

In half a century of reading the Guardian no act of state cruelty has ever hit home as hard as that which has led to “the pupils are asking teachers to find them a new home” (Report, 17 February). If Dickens were alive, the remarks of Westminster’s housing director alone would be worth a whole book: “Is it correct for the state to support anyone to live wherever they want to live? That’s the philosophical question.”
Its answer is to provide landlords with a massive incentive to evict children from their homes. The very policy which has brought it about simultaneously extends to expulsion from school and borough. It is in the nature of the housing benefit cap to target families with the largest number of children. It is unconscionable. Plainly its perpetrators gambled that tenants would respond to market forces and up sticks long before the bailiffs could get there. Your article shows why this was never on the cards, with parents preferring the most awful conditions of homelessness in order to preserve progress at school and precious relationships between children and teachers.
It is a terrible warning of the tidal wave of pain set to break across inner London. The grim emergency facilities for families on the street are already choked. There must be an immediate change of direction. Nothing is more urgent than the need to protect children from the sickening fear so tangible in your pages.
Tom Snow
London

Poverty, we are often told, is not “actual”, because people have TVs. This gradual erosion of empathy is the triumph of an economic climate in which everyone, addicted or not, is personally responsible for their own lack of achievement. Poor people are not simply people like us, but with less money: they are an entirely different species. Their poverty is a personal failing. They have let themselves go. This now applies not just to individuals but to entire countries. Look at the Greeks! What were they thinking with their pensions and minimum wage? That they were like us? Out of the flames, they are now told to rise, phoenix–like, by a rich political elite. Perhaps they can grow money on trees?
Meanwhile, in the US, as this week’s shocking Panorama showed, people are living in tents or underground in drains. These ugly people, with ulcers, hernias and bad teeth, are the flipside of the American dream. Trees twist through abandoned civic buildings and factories, while the Republican candidates, an ID parade of Grecian 2000 suspects, bang on about tax cuts for the 1% who own a fifth of America’s wealth. To see the Grapes of Wrath recast among post-apocalyptic cityscapes is scary. Huge cognitive dissonance is required to cheerlead for the rich while 47 million citizens live in conditions close to those in the developing world.
This contradiction is also one of the few things we in the UK are good at producing. I heard a radio interview recently with a depressed young man with three A-levels (yes, in properly Govian subjects) who had been unemployed for three years. The response of listeners was that he was lazy and should try harder. Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” comes to mind. Understanding what three years of unemployment does to a young person does not produce a job, any more than the scratchcard will change a crackhead’s life. But pure condemnation is divisive. This fear and loathing of those at the bottom is deeply disturbing.
Three years ago I was on a panel with Vince Cable at The Convention of Modern Liberty, when Cable was still reckoned a seer for predicting the recession. He said then that the financial crisis would mean civil liberties would be trampled on. But what stuck in my mind was a sentence he mumbled about the preconditions for fascism arising. Scaremongering? The emotional precondition is absolutely this punitive attitude to the weak and poor.
Our disgust at the poor is tempered only by our sentimentality about children. They are innocent. We feel charitable. Not enough, perhaps, as a Save the Children report tells us that one in four children in developing countries are too malnourished to grow properly. Still, malnourishment isn’t starvation, just as anyone who has a mobile phone isn’t properly hard-up. Difficult to stomach maybe, but isn’t all this the fault of the countries they live in?
At what point, though, can we no longer avoid the poor, our own and the global poor? Or, indeed, avoid the concept that frightens the left as much as the right: redistribution, of wealth, resources, labour, working hours. Whither the left? Busy pretending that there is a way round this, a lot of the time.
The idea that ultimately the poor must help themselves as social mobility grinds to a halt is illogical; it is based on a faith for which there is scant evidence. Yet it is the one thing that has genuinely “trickled down” from the wealthy, so that many people without much themselves continue to despise those who are on a lower rung.
The answer to poverty, you see, lies with the poor themselves, be they drain-dwellers, Greeks, disabled people, or unemployed youth. We will give them bailouts, maybe charity, and lectures on becoming more entrepreneurial. The economy of empathy has crashed, and this putsch is insidious and individualised. No more cruel to be kind. We must be simply cruel.
The argument that there is enough to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of neo-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. 

Worry about shut libraries? Then this should make your hair stand on end: only 6% of public service cuts have happened yet. Another 94% are still to come, with cascades more public servants sacked. In benefits, 88% of cuts are still to come. But Tory and Lib Dem MPs voted through an £18n benefit cut for the “squeezed” bottom half with few qualms, taking £1,400 from disabled children and £94 a week from the sick who don’t die or recover within a year.
The IFS says these cuts are “almost without historical or international precedent”. “How deliverable these will prove remains to be seen,” it adds. The answer is blindingly obvious. Cuts of these dimensions are impossible. Austerity will not be politically tolerable in a rich country in peacetime where boardrooms pay themselves 49% rises. The Attlee government was toppled by peacetime austerity that voters no longer trusted. The government reassures itself that the country is muddling along, coping with cuts, getting by. But the frightening truth is that it’s hardly begun.
The IFS chart showing the sunny uplands of 2016-17, with a 0.4% current spending surplus, is hard to credit. It’s a dereliction for forecasters to ignore the political reality. A miraculous growth spurt might save the day: but how, when George Osborne’s hyper-austerity smothers all oxygen in the economy? What of a 2015 election, plumb in the middle of this seven-year run of cuts? The irony is that the best hope of hitting that surplus and restoring more growth is that many of these cuts never happen. Cameron will bend or snap or both.
The NHS tops No 10’s risk register, but a close second should be the benefit cuts now being railroaded through by claiming “financial privilege” to avoid another bruising Lords encounter with angry bishops and former Tory cabinet ministers. Cameron’s government by opinion poll tells him he’s on terra firma: the public thinks £26,000 is more than enough benefits for any family. But the public is fickle: starting last month, 670,000 households lose an average of £13 on housing benefit occupancy rules. In council tax benefit, because pensioners are exempt, the rest of low earners will pay an extra £330 a year. In April tax credit cuts take £305 from 2 million households, while the bottom half are already £427 a year worse off in spending power, says the Resolution Foundation. With long-term unemployment set to rise even higher than already predicted, this bill touches millions more voters than Cameron expects. It may not touch his leafy heartlands, best protected from council cuts, but elections are won among middling folk: wait for the great cuts tsunami to hit them.
If bad news is good news for Labour, then it’s been a good week. Ed Miliband’s challenge to the Hester bank bonus sprang from his well-prepared critique of irresponsible capitalism. Ed Balls drew support from the IFS, finding that a £10bn growth stimulus might indeed be available, supporting his own remedies – an emergency VAT cut, a cut in employers’ national insurance, and ready-to-go building projects to stir moribund demand. IFS charts obligingly showed what a small fraction of the debt problem was caused by Labour overspending in the good years, the rest caused by the crash. David Miliband’s irritating attack on old Labour, inevitably trumpeted on the Telegraph, looked curiously out of the loop and irrelevant to what’s happening on the frontline. It rallies the rusty muskets of old Blairites and distracts from the firefight with the real enemy – a government barely begun on its path of destruction. If only he would roll up his sleeves and take a frontline shadow cabinet post – any job is open to him – or do something else altogether. His Commission on Youth Unemployment will next week show how well he can take on the government.
The London Community Credit Union has 12,000 Hackney and Tower Hamlets members, low-earning thrifty savers who are about to be hit hard. Among them was Fenella, who paid off huge rent arrears and now saves £5 a week. She was with her aunt, in bad trouble after borrowing £1,000 in an emergency but now owing the Provident £1,700. A man in his 30s joined the credit union just in time, after he saw friends falling into the snakepit of pay-day loan debt. Most members live on the edge. Ed Miliband’s speech on Friday on “one-nation banking” needs to include those shunned by conventional banks: credit unions still cover only 1%.
Staff here dread the welfare reform bill, waiting for debts, arrears, evictions and pitiful hardship to wash up on their doorstep. Yet Lord Freud declared: “The government remains committed to eradicating child poverty.” The effect of £1,400 cuts for disabled children was “negligible”. The aim of cuts is to “incentivise” people out of “dependency”. Presumably the way kicking away crutches incentivises the lame to walk.

The dogged refusal to see the revolutionary implications of these savageries by the likes of Labourite Polly Toynbee (the final piece), still clinging to the idea that Labourism would do anything differently, even as the Millibands were leaping across the room to reach the microphones before the Tories, denouncing McCluskey etc, for even thinking about a “fightback” – is a phenomenon of such touching irrational faith it could have been beatified in the Catholic Church in past centuries (and may yet still be).
It comes from the deep running anti-communism that has been brainwashed into the entire Western culture over sixty years of Cold War and post-Cold War “boom” when the West pretended that the huge achievements of the new socialism, providing free health care, universal employment (with reasonable working hours), holidays, cheap housing for all, state funded higher education for all, a dignified pension-provided old age and a wide range of cultural and sporting facilities (as Cuba still does today), could somehow be echoed in the capitalist countries.
It was a vast extension of the fraudulent “democracy” racket used to pretend that people would gradually improve their lives by “having a say” in how things were done.
And it was to be made easy for the middle class, without the need to submit to the discipline of the majority under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state authority of the revolutionary majority (the 99% to use a current phrase) which is vital for the working class to defend its new power and build socialism.
Capitalist propaganda rammed home the point by luridly distorting and twisting working class dictatorship into the wildest “totalitarian” nightmare in Hollywood films, “literature” like George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm (not surprisingly a compulsory read for British capitalist school education) and propaganda in general, because it is the central tool which the working class needs and will build to end capitalist rule.
These fantasies derive in fact from the actual dictatorship of capital which even in the most open “democracy” is the reality and which is becoming more and more overtly obvious as the crisis deepens (see the enormous surveillance, “private security” and military lockdown being imposed on London for example under the excuse of “Olympic security” but destined to remain in place  – one tiny part of the move to more and more open domestic repression.) 
Ever more violent and draconian policing is now almost routinely producing incidents of “unfortunate” killings of alleged “gun carriers” who turn out to be unarmed, or demonstrators who turn out to be innocent bystanders or “anti-terrorist” raids that turn out to find nothing. 
There are daily revelations of the non-stop surveillance, and secret infiltrations into every kind of even fairly innocuous environmental protest, on top of the systematic industrial spying and phone-tapping by the capitalist press. 
The disbursement by force of the Occupiers at St Paul’s – who never have gone beyond the tamest of “better and regulated capitalism” reformism demands – gives a foretaste of what will happen to the bigger scale protests that are brewing.
Daily new revelations emerge too of the utterly barbaric torture and horrific brutality (concentration camps, beheadings, castrations, killings, and foul beatings and torture) that has been a permanent feature of British colonialist intervention from the post-war suppressions of national liberation struggles such as Kenya, Malaysia, Greece, India and more, to  fascist death squad and H-block terrorising of the Irish struggle, and still continuing in the modern “anti-terrorism” of the Iraq invasion and Afghanistan, where a constant stream of killings, prison camp thuggery and abuse is revealed despite cover-ups by the “democratic” establishment.
The “democracy” illusions that at least “things are different here because this is a civilised country” are one of the greatest betrayals of all for the working class, leading them up the garden path straight into the concentration camps just as the “democratic socialist” government of Salvador Allende in Chile led the workers straight into the stadium round-ups and torture prisons of the Augustus Pinochet fascist coup.
Once the slump deepens far enough there is no bottom to how far the ruling class will be forced to try and push the working class, down into Third world levels of poverty and speed-up and with no limits to the viciousness that will be imposed to do it. 
Anyone that fails to warn them of this, is a treacherous opportunist (meaning the entire spectrum of reformist and fake-“left” politics in effect).
And if the ruling class does not take this path it will be swept away.
Internationally the all-powerful daily worshipped “markets” can bring entire countries crashing down if they are defied – as with Greece currently and various other weaker and smaller peripheral European nations threatened with sovereign debt failure, forced to tear up the pretence of choosing their own governments in favour of “market approved” bureaucrats.
The latest deliberately inflamed civil was in Syria provoked by armed demonstrations since the beginning (though still the gigantic lie is pumped out of “poor innocent freedom protestors”) is part of the continuing demonisation of alleged “terrible totalitarianism” being used to sustain the bogeyman fantasy about “terrible communism”.
(There are further complexities in the Syrian upheavals, since the Ba’athist regime is no future for the working class either, but the bogeyman Goebbels hysteria is a key feature of the carefully manipulated Western media barrage.)
The ever intensifying slump will undermine this great anti-communist ideological edifice at the foundations once the consumerist “delights” and “welfare” net are removed and the alleged upward path of capitalism is seen to have been a massive confidence trick all along. 
The pretence that “on balance” everyone would benefit from the alleged vibrancy and innovation of “private enterprise” bringing such staggering advance to the world that prosperity is guaranteed was already a hopeless joke of shallow philistinism and pointless consumerism in the “boom” and is now a burnt-out shell of increasing poverty and misery. 
The consequences for the ruling class will be profound as the ties are finally broken to the great democracy confidence trick behind which the bourgeois dictatorship has operated.
The die-hard minority of workers still sticking with Labour (and with parliamentary illusions effectively) has already become a tiny rump with the “voting” at election time reduced to a fraction of the population, and most of that only bothering for reasons of voting against the more hated figures, not out of positive enthusiasm for the almost universally derided on-the-make corrupt pocket-lining Westminster circus.
A few remnants and less than half-hearted illusions remain, partly from the sense that somehow “they” will always work things out and “get over” the Stock Market crash, or the “recession”, or bank failures, or oil price hikes, or burst of 1970s inflation or currency failures.
This continuing confusion has been sustained by the ever greater bursts of paper dollars fed into the world system by US imperialism, combined with the international currency credit and tariff manipulations which have forced the worst of ever increasing underlying crisis out onto Latin America, or south-east Asia, and most of all Japan, all taking terrible economic hits in various forms from the 1980s onwards, (still continuing in the nearly two decades of intermittent stagnation which hit Japan).
The removal of the Soviet Union from the equation by the ludicrous revisionist liquidation of its state defences to allow in the “free market” and the following predictable carpet bagging plunder of its carefully built proletarian state resources, now sitting largely in Swiss Bank accounts, also helped.
Demented credit creation in the late 1990s by the Federal Reserve and post the 2000 Crash, was also used to keep the illusion going a little longer still, aided by the increasing warmongering intimidation of anyone who might challenge the economic bullying by the mighty US first of all, and the gang of other imperialists happy to tag along behind if they got a share at least of the spoils. 
But it has been an increasingly desperate “maxing out of the credit card to pay off the debts” strategy that is destined eventually to reach breaking point.
It has got there, in the 2007-8 “credit crunch” when the world got a glimpse of the utter panic gripping the ruling establishment.
The old complacency of “upturns” and “recovery” is now totally threadbare and the ruling class knows it, even while cynically continuing the pretence that the problems are all down to a “bit of bad management by Labour”.
This is just to lull the working class while siege class war measures are put through to massively up the rate of exploitation, the desperate need for the ruling class if it is to survive the savage currency and trade wars which the crisis has intensified a hundredfold.
All the complacent anti-revolutionism of the reformist (Labourite), official trade unionist and fake-“left” spectrum continues, still disarming the working class by its continued pursuit of “democracy” illusions, and pacifist struggle, the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in human history. 
It all heads the working class aways from the only possible way out - revolution.
Simply giving a defensive “austerity” flavour to the “reformist gain” perspectives of the past, by demanding the working class “should not bear the burden of the crisis” changes nothing at all, however militantly it is done.
It implies that the cuts can be fought off.
Once the “upturn is reached” is the unspoken background assumption, the path towards improving overall conditions can be resumed.
But the reality of the crisis is that it is unsolvable.
The contradictions which inevitably accumulate within such a class exploitation profit-based system can only increase to breaking point as Marx first of all showed in the titanic analysis of Capital.
The world is plunging into the greatest disaster in all of history, the “biggest ever” slump crisis as described not even by Marxism but repeatedly by the bourgeoisie’s own Governor (of the Bank of England) and the highest monopoly capitalist authority of the IMF.
After decades of already artificial propping-up, the monopoly capitalist profit system hit a brick wall in 2008.
It is only being kept afloat at all now by the demented spending of hundreds of billions of utterly worthless paper dollars - so--called Quantitative Easing.
As this fantasy credit (on top of non-stop post-war “boom” inflationary dollar printing) works through the world economic system, the destabilising and inflationary impact of this pretend “money” will only bring even greater disaster than the already meltdown credit crunch three years ago, which at one point was just hours away from shutting down all the cash-machines, imposing instant utter chaos.
Routine warnings of just such repeat cataclysm appear from the capitalist analysts themselves, though without any grasp of the enormous historic scale of the problem:

A leading British banker has warned that the huge sums of money being pumped into western economies to underpin banks and promote financial stability risk “laying the seeds for the next crisis”.
As central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic played down expectations that they were poised to unleash a fresh round of money creation, Peter Sands, the chief executive of Standard Chartered bank, warned it was “going to take time for the rich West to sort itself out”.
But Sands’s main concern was that support operations by western central banks, which have seen trillions of dollars pumped into the financial system through so-called quantitative easing, could set the scene for more trouble in the years ahead.
Breaking ranks from his fellow bosses, Sands, whose bank is focused mainly in Asia, said: “Banks are still going to have to refinance their loans in three years time. It’s not clear what the exit strategy is, nor is it possible to predict what the long-term consequences will be.”
He added that the crisis and the west’s policy response had accelerated the shift in “power and dynamism” from the developed world to emerging markets.
Some economists have argued pump-priming the economy kicks the problem further down the road, while others fear an inflation time bomb has been created.
Sands said: “The risks to financial stability from this kind of intervention [by central banks and government] is unknown. But intervention on this scale will have repercussions.”

It is not the “next crisis” at all, but just the next seismic shaking of the same non-stop crisis, he should say.
Capitalism is a system of permanent crisis repeatedly re-erupting in ever greater intensity, which has not been “solved” and is completely unsolvable whatever “belt-tightening” discipline is imposed or alternative “Keynesian stimulation” is injected.
Karl Marx’s titanic “Capital” analysis of the contradictions in the system of production for private profit (with a minority ruling class appropriating the value which labour alone produces) remain fundamental whatever layers of elaborate international trade and credit have been piled on top since (see page 6).
The inevitable meltdown failure of the world economy has imploded in a disastrous breakdown of such a scale historically that it is difficult to exaggerate.
Even to say it is comparable to the breakdown of the Roman Empire or the collapse of European feudalism in the 17th and 18th century, would underestimate it.
It needs to be underlined a dozen times; the period being entered is not simply a Slump, it is the culmination of the accumulating contradictions that make it impossible for capitalism to continue its existence.
Impossible that is except by default and historical momentum – and the fact that no ruling order in the past has ever willingly given up its role and privileges (or is even capable of imagining a world without its own dominance).
The ruling class will drive, and is driving, the entire world into utterly depraved speed-up and destruction to maintain its position.
Bourgeois class rule will have to be destroyed by mass upheavals and the establishment of a new way to run the world, planned socialism under the control of the working class.
Revolution to establish the dictatorship of the working class is crucial in other words.
As the crisis is imposed deeper still, the communist understanding of the world will have to become more and more the major discussion everywhere among the masses to guide, inspire and educate the struggle in a living, openly polemical battle for scientific leadership understanding, building on the titanic achievements of Marx, Engels and Lenin to return to a perspective and understanding of a complete working class takeover of all the great public resources and means of production, to be controlled and managed by the working class itself.
None of this is some light-minded declaration of “to the barricades comrades now” as the petty bourgeois cynicism and complacency of the fake-“left” poseurs likes to mock (only recently declaring unchallenged in a “Coalition of Resistance” meeting for example that “there will be no revolution in Greece”). 
Decades of philistinism and revisionism (and Trotskyist anti-communism) has left workers ill-prepared for any such fight as yet.
But it is declaring the need for a revolutionary perspective in all the struggles of the working class however they start (which might well be in the traditional and defensive forms of demonstrations and strikes to save hospitals, schools etc).
There never was a hope of “relying on reasoned debate” to hold off the cuts savagery as McCluskey excused the last three years of TUC inaction and the supine capitulation of its Labourite political wing to the cuts and austerity speed ups.
Marxist-Leninism still alone underlines that this is not just “a crisis” as the fake-“left” parties have finally caught up with saying (after 30 years of incomprehension and mockery of “catastrophism”) but an unprecedented historic failure of an entire historical epoch.
Understanding the coming civil war conflict that is inevitably going to be imposed by an increasingly openly dictatorial ruling class is essential.
Leninist leadership needs to be built now. 
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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