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 1407 20th June 2012                                                                                                   25p fortnightly

Election bullying of Greek petty bourgeois to force acceptance of Slump bailout will save neither Greek capitalism,  the rest of Europe or a panicked world bourgeoisie. Neither will the “soft coup” stealing of the election by the military stooges for imperialism in Cairo save the Egyptian bourgeois and their CIA masters. Catastrophic failure of the profit making class domination of the world is unravelling faster and faster whatever props are put underneath it.  But ever worse Slump deprivations and world warmongering will continue until capitalism is totally overthrown and the world begins to build planned socialism everywhere under the control of the dictatorship of the working class. World revolutionary ferment grows mightily but vital revolutionary theory and leadership for the working class to take power is still blocked by fake-“left” opportunism and slyness.

The military “judicial coup” tearing up of any hoped for “democracy” from the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, the continuing Goebbels-lie stampeding of civil war in Syria to further intimidate Middle Eastern anti-imperialist resistance and revolt, and the “economic collapse” panic bullying used to stitch up the election in Greece are all further confirmation of the desperation of the world capitalist ruling class as its disaster ridden system slides ever further into Slump chaos.
These panicky repression measures may buy a short respite from the growing rebellions caused by spiralling cataclysmic economic failure, but they will also teach the world working class ever deeper lessons about the completely violent and warmonger repressive fraud of bourgeois “parliamentary democracy” and the torturing reality of its joke “freedom” and “rule of law” hypocrisy.
It should also teach them even more about the failures and capitulations of the fake - “left” pretend revolutionaries who have huffed and puffed about their revolutionary credentials for decades but who fall flat on their faces at the moment when the rush of the capitalist crisis is posing the sharpest questions and demanding revolution as the answer.
Even if the international bourgeois pressure on Greece may temporarily have salvaged it from instant Europe-wide bank disaster, it alters nothing about the world economic crisis which has paralysed the ruling class everywhere since 2008 and which can only continue unravelling the entire worldwide profit-based economic and political order.
The lurching downwards of the Stock Markets and bond markets almost immediately, and the switching of attention to the equally bankrupted Spanish economy driving bond values to unsustainably high levels the very next day, underlined the point.
As all the bourgeois pundits are agreed, the waves of financial panic could slurp next onto even the giant Italian economy and threaten the entire European order, and possibility the world banking system beyond that.
In other words what is happening to the Greek workers now is the same fate which awaits the working class everywhere.
This is far from being a “Greek” crisis, as the bourgeoisie deliberately tries to present it, heading attention away from the real issue, the overall capitalist systemic failure.
The Greek working class is at the forefront of general capitalist crisis - taking it on the chin because of the unevenness and unequal pace of development within capitalism, where the bigger sharks always have the greatest power and financial clout, able to accelerate away from the smaller powers in “boom” times (multiplying the effects of being larger by attracting in the best brains from the whole world, sucking in capital and investments, controlling trading currencies (US the $, German the Euro), sustaining their industries and banks with big domestic markets etc, hijacking universal ideas with claims to “intellectual property rights”, (Internet, software etc) pressuring favourable deals etc etc) and forcing the difficulties and burdens of “downturns” and crisis onto the minnows in bad times.
Not only the Athenian working class, but workers and the downtrodden everywhere, including in the heart of the richest capitalist countries and throughout the Third World, face the utmost in deprivation, pain, destruction and loss in Slump and then world war (the inevitable outcome of capitalist world monopoly “competition” for shrinking markets, and deliberately fermented by the ruling class as a scapegoating blame diversion from the real cause of the world disaster - capitalist profiteering rule).
Workers have no choice but revolutionary struggle.
There is no other way out of the greatest Slump and warmongering disaster ever to face mankind (which has only just begun) than to fight the greatest revolutionary battles of all history.
Slump deprivation, crashing bankruptcies of entire countries, and barbaric war depravities from Afghanistan and Pakistan robot-dronings to Libyan NATO blitzkriegs are by now incontrovertible proof that all prospects of slow change for the better in the “free market” are a total lie.
The promise of “rising prosperity” and a world of “peace, harmony and the ‘rule of law’” just as soon as we have “dealt with threat of communist tyranny” has proven to be the greatest and sickest joke in all the long span of civilisation.
Equally left “pressure”, democracy and moralising peace-struggle “containment of war” (still argued for by Museum-Stalinists such as Lalkar/Proletarian) have been proven to be a total delusion at best (which is being generous) and at worst a criminal deception of the working class, setting them up for demoralisation, slaughter and endless setbacks.
It was not “left pressure” and the fight for reformist gains which ever achieved anything but the presence and influence of revolutionary communism in the world.
It was fear of its huge attraction for the working class everywhere, which alone ever induced the Western ruling class to “make concessions” and give workers better conditions and “cradle to grave welfare support”.
Most of all that was done in Europe, the closest part of the bourgeois world post World War Two to the storming Red Army victories which almost single-handedly destroyed Nazism (contrary to “Longest Day” myth making etc) and left a ferment of potential revolution after the Second World War.
The gigantic wave of revolutionary feeling which swept the European working class after the disgust and horror of the Depression and World War was only headed off by the massive Marshall Plan funding of a new “welfare state” capitalism. 
Since 1989 and the disastrous revisionist inspired capitulation of the Soviet Union to western “market forces” - the ultimate consequence of Stalin inspired retreats from revolutionary philosophy into “parliamentary roads” and pacifist “peace struggle” - the “balance” with socialism no longer has to be kept and capitalism has rapidly reverted to the grotesque inequalities of the Victorian age in obscenely huge “emoluments” for the rich and cuts in welfare and social provision, wage reductions and speed up for the working class.
Even as the world finance crisis unrolls the bankers’ bonuses and company board salaries grow ever more ridiculous - the bosses last year took another 12% rise on salaries while new workhouse level conditions have been imposed on dole money, housing relief and disability.
Mass unemployment, soup kitchen hunger and housing dispossession are already the norm in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland just as in the 1930s.
Here the obscenity of the ruling class exploitation high-life is multiplied exponentially by the Slump bankruptcy and war destruction which are irrevocably intertwined in the production-for-profit class rule system and the unavoidable overproduction crisis that it will always run into.  
These interconnected crisis events are part of an epochal shift in human civilisation and class society which must take place to utterly transform the world paralysed and bankrupted by the contradictions and destructive failure of the production for private profit system.
The problems are intractable and unsolvable while the capitalist system continues.
There is no piecemeal progress to be made, or cuts “resistance”, or pacifist “anti-war-ing”.
Only ending for good the ludicrous, unfair and throttling “ownership” grip of the monopoly capitalist ruling class on the factories, farms, plantations and banks can change things, taking over all the means of production to establish a completely new way of running society - planned socialist production using all the resources and capacities of industry and agriculture in common ownership for the real needs of human beings (not distorted fatuous consumerism) in balance with nature.
This is not a “duty” of the working class as the more florid academic and theatrical posturing of the pretend “lefts” loves to put it, (when they are not “hailing” assorted workers struggles or revisionist workers state celebrations).
Who in the world would be motivated by some abstract “historic tasks” however high-minded it might make them feel???
Instead, as the Greek working class is being taught daily by events, (and plenty of others have learned even earlier throughout the Third World, and as is increasingly also the case in even the “richest” countries) it is an inescapable and urgent necessity for all ordinary people, facing the desperate Depression crisis created by the contradictions and antagonisms of class society.
Never mind pious semi-religious sounding and moralising notions of “lifting mankind” to a new level of peace and harmony (which, conveniently for the fake-”lefts” are always “over the horizon”, rather than immediate, demands).   
The enormous achievement of Marx, Engels and great Marxists like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, was to show that such change are driven by material contradictions which force revolutionary development through sheer desperation and need.
Necessity is the mother of revolutionary action and the recognition of necessity the key to freedom.
Bloody and violent conflict is inevitably going to erupt increasingly (as already throughout the Third World) as capitalism imposes ever worse Depression and penury everywhere, using more and more fascist and brutal means (specifically fostered like Golden Dawn Nazism or directly by the ever extending state repression, surveillance and barbarity of police and other state forces throughout capitalism).
It will only be ended by the most disciplined organised struggle of the working class to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and allow the building of socialist planned economies and true majority rule, developing eventually into rational communist society where no compulsion is required at all.
Meanwhile, who knows what was next on the agenda for Greece if the usual bribery, media manipulation, intimidation, and other behind the scenes twisting and fixing of the “democratic election process” (which 300 years of bourgeois experience has brought to a fine art) had failed to hold the line?
The record of imperialist history is clear from country after country throughout the Third World - the answer to their “democratic” aspirations and challenges to imperialist overlordship is coups, military stooge regimes, fascist intimidation, massacres, economic siege starvation blockades (euphemistically called ‘sanctions’) and torture, all manipulated by Western intelligence agencies.
Such brutality and fascist repression is the norm - over 400 such incidents carried out in the twentieth century by the MI6, the CIA, Mossad, German intelligence, including the Honduras coup, Afghanistan escalations, vigilante “justice” death squads (Bin Laden etc) and numerous drone civilian massacres and more in just the last two years, all under the “black liberal” Obama presidency.
And if that does not work there is all-out blitzkrieging destruction and war as a last resort, as in Libya (though sometimes such monstrous destruction of millions of lives has still failed to stop mass communist struggle in Vietnam and North Korea for example) and now being prepared for Iran, and other demonised victims.
Greece has already had its own taste of fascist rule, in the pre-World War Two Metaxa dictatorship (a kind of weak Mussolini figure), in the World War Two years of Nazi rule and terrible starvation, in the horrific barbarity of the 1945-49 anti-communist civil war imposed by first British imperialism (under the Attlee Labour government so beloved of the fake-”lefts”) and then by US imperialism, which took the chance to try out its newly developed napalm weapon for the first time. 
Heavily manipulated reactionary “democracy” could not hold the line and was replaced with the colonels fascist junta of the 1967-74, with its ugly anti-working class repression and torturing violence.
In subsequent years the rising wealth of the powerful German imperialism and the other European powers behind it, channelled through the European Union, has been used instead to bribe and corrupt the peripheral European bourgeoisies, allowing a taste of imperialist super profits to trickle down to the Greek working class in the same way that sections of the working class in the imperialist nations have been corrupted with “reformist” gains, to keep communism at bay with shallow glitz, consumerism and celebrity culture.
But this favoured method of imperialist control - with which the Franco-German axis hoped to build a big enough capitalist rivalry to challenge US imperialism in the unstoppable antagonistic conflicts that will always erupt in capitalism - has run into the sand of the economic disaster being forced onto Europe by the bruising impact of the American dominated “international markets” as the world crisis deepens the vicious cutthroat competition between all the major imperialist centres. 
The giant “Eurocrisis” is a result of the total collapse of ALL capitalism and its “free market” system across the whole world and the deepening intensification of inter-imperialist cutthroat rivalries.
Economic disaster has been lurching forwards decades after decade - here erupting in a Mexican credit failure, there in the currency collapses of the south-east Asian “Tiger” economies, here in the Russian bailouts in the mid-1990s or the rescue of the Long Term Capital Management Hedge Fund, there in the Enron fraud collapse, the collapse of the “dot.com” boom or the 2002 bankruptcy of the entire country of Argentina.
The gigantic Japanese economy and its regional Asian dominance has been forced into stagnation and failure for two decades.
These are all the foreshocks of the greatest failure in history.
Every partial crisis has been manipulated and forced outwards onto weaker victims by the overwhelming financial and banking firepower of the topdog US economy (backed by the implicit threat of its massive military might and increasing shock-and-awe willingness to use it in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc). 
But eventually even the mighty dominance of the US imperial economic clout has been unable to contain the crisis which erupted in full in the New York heart of Western monopoly capitalism as the “credit crunch” in 2008 and has not stopped unravelling since.
Washington has temporarily fended off the worst with the biggest “Ponzi scheme” of all history, the massive Quantitative Easing dilution of the dollar to further force the crisis outwards.
Pumping tens and tens of billions of worthless fantasy credit into the world trading system (on top of the billions and billions poured in constantly since the end of the Second World War to keep the artificial capitalist boom going) has temporarily propped up the utterly bankrupted US economy and its favoured stooges like the UK, while simultaneously forcing the disastrous meltdown of the world trading system onto the biggest capitalist rivals.
Most of all that is now on Germany, the mightiest and most efficient potential rival for capitalist world dominance (since the even bigger Japanese economy has been hamstrung at least for the moment).
A harassed German bourgeoisie, which effectively dominates the European Union institutions, has pumped out hundreds of billions of paper Euros itself in this currency trade war conflict.
But the EU is unable to contain the problems as they reach surface.
So in turn it is forcing the Euro crisis outwards and down onto the weakest sections of the European bourgeoisie, to save its own skin.
There is no honour among thieves.
The European “project” has from the beginning been a capitulation by other local bourgeoisies to the enormous and relentlessly expanding capital power of German imperialism, trading economic support and credit against opening their markets to German imports kept artificially low in price by Euro parity.
They have hoped to keep its competitiveness contained and turned outwards against the greater rivalries of Japanese and above all US imperialism.
But the German bourgeoisie has fearful long memories of the disastrous inflationary explosion when it was last forced into a corner economically by its capitalist rivals. 
It was wiped out in the wheelbarrow hyper-inflation of the mid-1920s. 
It has even longer memories of the revolutionary upheavals that such chaos would cause, and which nearly turned it over repeatedly in the same period.
For all its Nazi reputation Germany has one of the most longest records of socialist development in Europe (and it is no coincidence Karl Marx was German), with the most powerful socialist movement of the 19th century and three major revolutionary upheavals in the aftermath of the WW1 defeats for its ruling class (defeat being the critical element in opening up revolutionary opportunities).
It had the largest communist party in Europe into the early 1930s, tens of thousands strong.
Despite disastrous revisionist miscalculations and mistakes which wiped out this hugely powerful organised movement without a real fight, because of its failure to argue for revolution against Hitlerism (a deliberate bourgeois counter-revolutionary conspiracy to head off the communist working class movement with violent brutality), its historical impact continued. 
One third of the country was turned over to socialist development after the Soviet defeat of Nazism in 1945, the “Ossie” workers state legacy in the heart of German imperialism which has not entirely vanished even under the weight of massive swamping capitalist investment since the revisionist Soviet and East European liquidation of 1989. 
Additionally former workers states still surround Germany’s eastern borders from Poland and the Czech republic to Slovakia and the former Yugoslavia just south, all with a continuing historical legacy of socialism that might create all sorts of revivalist impact as the disastrous chaos of the capitalist slump intensifies and memories return to past socialist construction.
Governments are already falling like nine-pins in Hungary, Romania and elsewhere, and unannounced bailouts are being forwarded by Brussels to try and prop them up.
The hostility against Ukraine being whipped up by the European capitalist controlled media and political establishment reflects the same fears.
So the hair raising prospect of all this credit creation going wildly out of control is one of the major factors underlying the dogged Berlin refusal to pump out further worthless credit “Quantitative Easing” and bailout loans.
It is caught between a rock and a hard place, forced to gambol instead with bullying insistence on imposing near slave labour conditions on the weaker sections of the European “family”, hoping that it can force down and contain any revolutionary resistance.
The blatant bullying election interference of the major imperialist powers, and particularly powerful German imperialism, threatening to pull the plug on a panicked Greek petty bourgeoisie by sudden-death ending of all financial support, and stampeding their panicked rejection of “anti-austerity” has just about put off such draconian measures for the moment.
But all this begins to raise extraordinary further questions.  
German imperialism has already used aggressive warmongering three times to break free of its stifling central European “prison” and expand to its “rightful place in the sun” with more “lebensraum” [living space] in the 1870s Franco-Prussian War, the 1914-18 Great War, and the 1939-45 Second World War, trying to seize territory and political and economic possessions held by the other colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium, Ottoman Turkey, Russia).
Imposing its will by force is not ruled out now.
Not possible in the modern world?
But the last fifteen years has already seen a return to the world wide blitzkrieging and intimidation that signals the eventual eruption of the world into total war destruction, for the moment all justified by the label “war on terror”.
It happens that the leading “Nazi” fascist role has been taken this time by the overwhelming dominance of US imperialism, deliberately stepping up world wide war destruction with invasions and blitzkrieg virtually non-stop since the NATO destruction of the remnants of Yugoslavia (already torn apart by Western intelligence provoked and backed reactionary ‘self-determination’ movements, beginning with the Slovenian and Croatian reactionaries through to the Albanian mafia gangsters in Kosovo) and on into Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan and Libya.
Its aim is to intimidate by “shock and awe” all rising Third World rebellion and all major imperialist rivalry which might either challenge its topdog status or even simply demand repayment of the proper value of the products and resources which the overwhelming appetite of the American economy sucks in from the rest of planet, instead of increasingly valueless paper dollars as the bankrupt US reneges on its debts.
In this way the US bourgeoisie hopes to ride out the oncoming Slump disaster and war, ready to pick up the profitable remnants once the world has seen enough destruction to wipe out the “surplus” value clogging the system.
But the warmongering “solution” is no more ruled out for the other imperialist powers and ever more so as the cutthroat slump pressures bear down on them (just as aggressive US trade war squeezing of Japan in the 1930s eventually become intolerable for expansionist Tokyo capitalism, forcing it to attack the US at Pearl harbour). 
Such possibilities are only speculation at present.
The preferred option of the bourgeoisie is always to continue pulling the wool over the eyes of the masses with its parliamentary “democracy” fraud, rather than impose more obvious rule by violence and fascist diktat (which remains constantly behind the scene) because while force and intimidation might impose its rule the more sharply for a while and with less hassles it also opens eyes to the reality of capitalist dictatorship much more effectively, drumming up recruits for the revolutionary struggle. 
But the Heath Robinson assembly of a coalition of the discredited and hated Pasok and New Democracy (a sick joke name in itself) which has just pulled any Greek stimulated Euro collapse irons out of the fire for a few weeks or months, is as much of a moth-eaten pretence as the LibCon racket in the UK, held together purely out of petty bourgeois fear of the alternatives, not any positive confidence in the politicians.
Capitalist elections everywhere (and including the coming US presidential election) have become little but a contest in rejection of assorted flavours of bourgeois rule, with low turnouts and total disgust at any of the offerings.
The commonest comment from Athens was about “voting with a peg on the nose” expressing contempt and disgust but still clinging to the old order because fearful of jumping beyond the known, into complete chaos.
The big weapon the ruling class is counting on, is a total absence of revolutionary leadership and understanding to focus the struggles, compounded by the long post-war history of fake-”left” confusion mongering and capitulation to anti-communism. 
For a while it is working.
For all their boasted “defiance of austerity” which has attracted a wave of working class support for the moment, not one of the “lefts” anywhere raises the central revolutionary questions.
The issue is of taking over, occupying and seizing the capitalist means of production, the only way out of slump and repression, be it in Greece, the rest of Depression threatened Europe, the Middle East or the US itself.
But they all denounce such talk as “adventurist” or “premature” and continue to tie the working class to stale illusions in parliament supplemented by “extra-parliamentary pressure” and pacifist “containment of warmongering”.
What a disgusting collapse and betrayal!
When it comes to the crunch none of them will actually talk about revolution and certainly not give any perspective to the working class of the scale and nature of the upheavals now taking place which make clear the utmost inevitability of revolutionary change.
Just the opposite. The daily demonstrate their completely craven anti-revolutionism in practice, even as they pour out hollow phrases about Marxism, the crisis, and even an occasional “revolutionary situation”.
All sides of the fake-“left” spectrum offer only the old reformist and left pressure “solutions”, and the same moralising revisionist “Stop the War - Stop the Slump” protest politics that have poisoned the world class struggle for the last 70 years, destroying all confidence in what is offered as “communism” and leading to the liquidation of its greatest example, the Soviet Union.
The intractability of capitalist economic failure is crystal clear in Athens, (as it is too in Ireland, Spain, or Portugal).
It has never been more sharply posed that there is no way out.
The choice offered to the working class is this: accept desperate poverty, penury, mass unemployment, homelessness and even increasing starvation in order to “keep the economy going” or “resist austerity” and have desperate poverty, penury, and increasing starvation thrust upon you by withdrawal of “bailout” loans, or worse.
The pretence by the Trotskyist-led Syriza that the second option is all a bluff by the “greedy Brussels bureaucrats” or German imperialism is a lying joke, a gigantic fraud on a par with the “grow the way out of recession” lies of the Labourites and official trade unionists.
Even if German imperialism, could be panicked into extending loans because of fears of even greater defaults, nothing essential would be changed  - the crisis problems will simply be spread into the other weak links in Europe as the bourgeois press constantly explains.
It changes nothing in what needs to be said about the crisis.
If anything it underlines the failure of the “left” to tie all world events together in a clear overall perspective.
The great swamp of Trotskyists and the opportunist “left” Labourites they cling to (despite their alleged “revolutionary” principles) have all jumped straight in behind the Syriza bandwagon in Greece (as they did with Syria-blitz-supporting Hollande, claimed as a “step forwards”) and its parliamentary “defiance of austerity”.  
It chimes in precisely with their own “no to cuts” ineffectual posturing and half-arsed protest politics in the latest mish-mash Coalition of Resistance opportunism which was declaring firmly only in February that there “will be no revolution in Greece” – not only an anti-revolutionary “analysis” but a reactionary counter-revolutionary put down of the question after it was raised by the EPSR.
It is a smug academic petty bourgeois class position left unchallenged by all the assorted “left” parties in the CoR.
Far from feeding working class illusions in Syriza, any genuine Marxism should be exposing from top to bottom the rank opportunism and fraudulent posturing of this hodge-podge eclecticism of assorted Trots, ex-revisionists and single-issue “greens”, whose only unifying principle is rank anti-communism and hostility to all the achievements and developments of the workers states.
This suddenly elevated grouping, heavily publicised by the Western media machine in numerous interviews and analyses hyping up their supposed “left threat” credentials is about as useful as the endless failed “Socialist Alliance” rackets which are repeatedly assembled by the fake-“left” in Britain and equally as rapidly fall apart again, because they are built on sand, with a unity established only by ignoring all their profound differences (as is the Coalition too).
They coalesce only around a common hostility to the workers states and the dictatorship of the proletariat at the centre of them, and capitulate to every anti-communist “anti-terrorist” or “totalitarian dictatorship” demonisation stunt pulled by Western imperialism, notably the current foul civil war provocations against Syria and, before that, the disgusting fascist demonisation campaign against Libya’s nationalist revolution used to stimulate counter-revolutionary rebellion and the NATO Nazi blitzkrieg which backed up its otherwise pathetically inadequate fascist and racist putsch. 
The best that can be said about the Syriza surge is that the working class votes it gathered are a signal and symptom of the contempt of the working class for the old parliamentary order and its defiance of the slump deprivation being imposed upon it.
The question arises of whether Leninism should argue for supporting such a movement in the same way that the CPs of the early twentieth century were urged by Lenin to “support” the then newly arising Labour parties, doing so as Lenin put it, in same way a “rope supports a hanged man”.
The point he was making then was that conditions were not ripe for direct revolutionary upheavals and that the working class still had illusions in then untested and brand new Labourism and in other non-Bolshevik leftism (in Germany for example) as a path to socialism. It needed to go through the experience of seeing the betrayals and class colluding compromises that would follow if they were elected.
“Support” needed to be accompanied with the strongest possible warnings to the working class of both the rottenness of the social-democratic anti-revolutionary politics (which sounded a lot more radical even then than Syriza does now with Ramsay McDonald famously professing support for the dictatorship of the proletariat even), and with using the entire election opportunity only as a means to denounce the parliamentary fraud.
The purpose was to educate and convince the working class that revolutionary politics were the only possible answer to the oppression and exploitation of capitalist society. 
The lessons have come thick and fast ever since for workers throughout the 20th century with numerous examples of parliamentary “leftism” in power, to the point where not one aspect of parliamentary politics is trusted and followed positively by the working class. 
The surge of votes for Syriza is less to do with any great faith that it has any answers than with wanting to express hostility in any way possible to the crisis.
Such residual working class illusory hope there might be, would rapidly have been shattered if it had won, since the unfolding capitalist crisis cannot be stopped whether Greece “defies” the bailout or accepts its “austerity conditions” and whether it is inside the Euro facing German dominated monopoly impositions or outside it facing international market diktats.
It almost certainly suits the poseur Tsipras and his crew to have fallen short of a majority in the June election, allowing much limelight “opposition” noise to be made without needing to put anything to the test, a smugly comfortable poseurs paradise which will deliver major lessons in itself for workers.
The crucial point for Marxism to make about Syriza is to warn the working class that this “left” pretence is nothing but the same old opportunist class collaboration dressed up in “radical” clothing, a “left” version of the old parliamentary racketeering.
It certainly has no clear perspectives for the working class about the civil war eruptions that would immediately be precipitated by any default financial meltdowns and break with the Euro and of the crucial question of building the dictatorship of the proletariat.
And least of all does it raise the central question of the need to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, the only way that the working class can be organised, around a unifying theory and perspective of the world hammered out and agreed by the revolutionary party in open polemical struggle. 
Stalinist posturing is not any better even though the KKE Greek CP has one of the largest and most solid mass support bases in the world relative to population.
Despite its own denunciation of Syriza as a hastily assembled bourgeois substitute for the failed social-democracy of Pasok (a New Labour equivalent in Greece) and a correct enough assertion that “socialism cannot be achieved through parliament”, the key question of revolution and the dictatorship is deliberately avoided with excuses.
Or as the Lalkar/CPGB-ML group said in the June-July issue of Proletarian:

It follows that real solutions can only be found by breaking asunder the carapace of capital.
The European masses are not yet ready to take that step, even in Greece. If elections are a gauge of the maturity of the working class, the KKE is quite correct in pointing out that in their country, the masses are still harbouring illusions in a quick and easy fix to be provided by the bourgeoisie, whether European or purely Greek, and are not ready for the upheavals of proletarian revolution. They are, nevertheless, learning fast and it’s no foregone conclusion that the Greek people will be beguiled by the mirages put before them by the bourgeoisie.
In Greece it is the KKE and the KKE alone who are putting the real socialist alternative before the people, calling for a “people’s movement that will struggle, counterattack and have the prospect of the conquest of the workers’ and people’s power and economy, for the disengagement from the EU and the unilateral cancellation of the debt, the socialisation of the means of production, the productive cooperatives of the people, the nationwide planning for the utilisation of the development potential of the country with workers’ and people’s control from the bottom up”.
Until such time as the Greek masses realise that this is indeed the only productive way forward, the KKE’s leaders feel that it would only confuse the masses if their party were to participate in any bourgeois coalition government and delay the masses coming together in such a people’s movement.
The Greek masses for the moment are certainly way ahead of the masses of the rest of Europe. We wish them well in their onward journey and we wish well to the KKE in steering their course. We all of us face a hard road ahead – let us not falter in our steps. 

Bland goodwill is nice but hardly the way to start breaking any carapaces “asunder”.
The “sensible” view of “not frightening the horses” with too much talk of revolution is the problem which has held back the working class for long decades, which has taken the core out of Leninist politics and which led to the revisionist degeneration of the entire world communist movement from Stalin’s time onwards, culminating under Gorbachev in the eventual abandonment of the entire workers state of the USSR and its then still continuing, if uninspiringly sluggish, socialist economic development (not, as Lalkar declares along with all petty bourgeois defeatism, a failure and collapse). 
Of course the workers are “not ready” because the development of Marxist-Leninst understanding has been swamped and buried for decades by revisionist stupidities and retreat from revolution, (and the even worse “left opposition” of the Trotskyists which played on the weaknesses of Stalinist analysis to declare “all is rotten”, leaving a philosophical vacuum filled by petty bourgeois hatred and hostility for the dictatorship of the proletariat and culminating in contempt and hostility for all the gigantic achievements of the workers states, aiding the West’s anti-communist constant subversion through such counter-revolutionary stunts as the Solidarnosc faux-”trade union” in Poland.)  
Why in the wake of the election (which cost it half its vote from 8% to 4%) is the KKE still burying its understanding under tortuous and obscure phrasing about “people’s movements” rather than talking of the working class, and where the only hint of revolution (which is being generous to the KKE) comes in such deliberately vague terms as “struggle, counterattack and have the prospect of the conquest of the workers’ and people’s power and economy”.
How exactly?
Do they mean revolution? They don’t make it clear.
What is “people’s power”? Why not talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat? 
Why does the Greek KKE talk of “socialisation of the means of production” instead of talking of seizing and taking the means of production into class hands and ownership without compensation?
It is a woolly vagueness that owes far less to any translation problems for the English website than to political and philosophical problems of avoiding everything that might raise the need for revolutionary grasp and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it the only way in which such calls for seizures and occupations could be a serious prospect (and not some ultra-left nonsense exposing the working class undefended to suppression and counter-revolution). 
What does this mean (from its post-election statement on the KKE website)?

The KKE struggled against the current of fear and fatalism, of the various threats (from the expulsion from the Eurozone to the fear regarding the lack of a government) and the illusions which were systematically fostered by SYRIZA. It explained to the people the character of the crisis and the pre-conditions for a way out in favour of the workers, the pre-conditions regarding the KKE’s participation in a government, which are connected to disengagement from the EU, the unilateral cancellation of the debt, and socialisation i.e. the government of working class-people’s power. It conducted this struggle taking into account the danger of the electoral cost.

Where is there any explanation in here of the need for the working class to take power by revolutionary means,?
Can it be done through parliament or not?
The working class will never be “ready” until the fight is taken up for Leninist understanding.
The purpose of the revolutionary party is to build the understanding that will allow the working class to “realise” what it must do –  put more straightforwardly, to build the “revolutionary consciousness” and leadership that Lenin’s lifetime was devoted to.
They will not “realise” anything on their own which is why it is necessary to build a revolutionary party in the first place.
What self-fulfilling opportunist evasions the Stalinists pour out!!!
All the urgent and vital questions of Marxism are being deliberately obscured and hidden.
Even more telling in the Stalinist “perspectives” is the total failure to link any of these developments to the powerful struggles of the rest of the planet.
If the Greek working class is “not ready” allegedly then what about the Egyptian and Arab masses who have been storming the most grotesquely violent and vicious dictatorship barricades for 18 months, sacrificing hundreds and hundreds of lives, suffering foul torture and police and intelligence repression.
What about the wave of Middle Eastern struggles sweeping from Tunisia to Yemen, Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, and more?
What about the gigantic upheavals of the entire Third World in one hundred and one forms, from suicide bombings and rocket attacks from the Gaza strip to multiple insurgencies, national resistance movements, “terrorism” and even “piracy” off the coast of Somalia. 
These are all signs of a complete transformation in human relations everywhere and rising determination to throw western capitalist tyrannical exploitation off their backs.
The fights are often expressed in inadequate, backward, barmy and confused religious ideology, and frequently self-defeating or filled with primitive puritanical notions, but continue to develop fighting and organisation capacities and experiences in struggle which have pushed against imperialist rule for two or more decades (notably with the Nazi-Zionist downtrodden Palestinian masses).
Now this Third World determination and hatred has climbed to a qualitatively new level of mass rebellion in Cairo and Tunis which has shattered imperialist complacency.     
How “ready” do these Egyptian masses have to be to hear about revolution as the SCAF military dictatorship tears up all the alleged “moves towards democracy”??. 
Not ready?????
They are long overdue is the answer because none of the fake- “lefts” ever do talk about revolution when it comes to it, in practice.
It is the total failure of the fake-“left” throughout world which leaves the tens of millions of Egyptians still open to the “democracy” manipulations and “promises” which have left capitalist state power intact in Egypt – twisting and manoeuvring with all the long developed trickery and bureaucratic duplicity of capitalist class rule, to head off the revolution, siphon away its energy and then eventually take the chances it can to reestablish ruling class dominance – aided and abetted by the CIA  to ensure the US imperialist interest is served.   
Worse. The wooden undialectical analysis of these struggles made by the fake-“lefts” is at best completely disconnected from all other events, and at worst allows the disgusting capitulation of the Trots and others to the ever more lurid lies, fabrications and distortions used by the Western intelligence-agency-fed campaigns to whip up the hysterical stampeding of civil war as it is in Syria now.
A context which begins with an overall understanding of world imperialist system in total is the only basis on which to fully understand the demonisations and warmongering scapegoating of country after country by imperialism and its stooges like the Zionist Nazi occupiers of Palestine.
Understood this way the artificially whipped-up nature of the preposterously bogus “Arab Spring rebellion” created in Libya last year, and the storm of violent civil war inducing attacks in Syria were immediately clear, even before their obvious fascist-minded racist pro-imperialist monarchist and reactionary nature became clear in subsequent days; the obvious fact they were in countries hated by imperialism, as opposed to the heavily Western financed or armed reactionary stooge regimes of the Gulf and Egypt was enough.
On top was their obvious geographical proximity to Egypt and the equally significant overwhelming import of the Egyptian revolt which has shaken and shocked the world bourgeoisie.
Egypt is by far the largest regional nation, with enormous historical significance and culture over centuries and a nationalist revolutionary history which is second to none in the Middle East.
The rebellion “has to be stopped” was imperialism’s calculation and intimidating the whole region with war was the means, whipped up and justified with the aid of a completely fraudulent “revolt” triggered among the petty bourgeois opportunist elements in Benghazi.   Like Syria, the Libyan events fitted nicely with the overall shock-and-awe warmongering escalations of imperialism’s general plan to hold on to its world domination.
Marxism could only want to see all these machinations come a total cropper through the deepest possible defeat for imperialism.
But analysing each of these events separately is hopeless, part of the blinkered petty bourgeois capitulation of the Trots to every absurd “human rights” or “self-determination” stunt pulled by imperialism – (in what way is the arming and funding of totally violent sectarian groupings in Syria by the Gulf Sheiks, Saudi feudalism and NATO-member Turkey anything to do with progress?) - or the equally ludicrous Stalinist defence of the Ba’athists’ backward bourgeois nationalism.
The only Marxist perspective for these things is Lenin’s policy of defeat for imperialism and all its manipulations as previously argued.
Meanwhile the strength and coherence of the struggles in Cairo, and the struggle in Athens would be far greater and more powerful if the masses in each understood their fight as part of the SAME overwhelming uprising against imperialist dominance, not simply for purposes of shallow “solidarity” (which always has undertones of patronising “charity” about it anyway) but as the deepest philosophical understanding helping the morale and strength of the struggles.
The “Greeks are not ready for revolution” is even more nonsensical when the Greeks are seen in context as only the southern European flank of a general world revolutionary upheaval which is already steamrollering forwards and held back only because of lack of understanding and scientific leadership.
Add in the working class of Italy, Spain, Portugal and more, all facing meltdown crisis collapse, and multiply the impact and the revolutionary strength of the world upheaval against imperialism can be seen to be becoming enormous.
Add in the working class in Nigeria, Kenya, India, etc etc etc or even more, the huge and sophisticated working class of the United States, increasingly hammered and harassed by homelessness, poverty, and desperation.
The world is only “not ready” because it has not got a revolutionary consciousness.  
Of course the “lefts” will argue that they talk about the “world crisis” and the “crisis of capitalism”.
But that is only a very recent development by these fake-“lefts”, now the glaring reality of the “credit crunch” meltdown has made it impossible to ignore and even the mainstream capitalists themselves, such as Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, will constantly declare the world to be in the worst crisis since the 1930s, or the Second World War or “in all history” (take your pick).
Until 2007 most of them simply ridiculed the Leninist assertion that the world was on the edge of imminent failure, meltdown and devastating trade war conflict, turning to all-out war, and that this was, as Marx Engels and Lenin had all understood, the driving force of all history.
Better late than never it could be said and the tiny numbers arguing the Marxist and Leninist position would never reject those who genuinely come over to this understanding, whatever their firmly expressed hostility, or rejection of such politics in the past.
But the “conversion” of the “lefts” to a “crisis understanding” still has nothing to do with the fight for revolutionary theory and understanding. 
It is all treated utterly woodenly and separately, barely mentioned in other analysis and least of all tied together with all the other expressions of crisis, the non-stop warmongering in Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Libya. 
All these events are still described and analysed as separate issues without a shred of the gigantic historical and worldwide perspective needed. 
What none of them come remotely near is developing a coherent and consistent overall scientific understanding of world class struggle developments which alone can inform, guide, lead and give strength to the working class.
Just such a connected, interconnected and above all correct view of world developments, a revolutionary perspective is crucial, to understand the significance of all these events.
It is one thing to say “the Greeks” are not ready in isolation, another completely to see the entire rising world rebellion of which their conflict is only a part and in which the world working class is not only ready but champing at the bit to overturn a rotten ripe festering class domination that has to be ended for good to allow humanity to go forwards.
The struggles now confronting workers everywhere demand the highest levels of organisation and coherent mobilisation, around consciously built disciplined scientific revolutionary understanding (Leninism) fought for in open polemical battles to establish the truth about the world and grasp the constantly developing and changing balance of class forces which can guide the  working class’s self-organised tactics and practical struggle.
It requires the deepest struggle to understand both the enormous successes of the great socialist workers states of the twentieth century (foremost the USSR’s 70 years of titanic progress beyond anything ever achieved by capitalism in every sphere of science, society, culture and technology) and the tragic failures and philosophical leadership retreats which finally liquidated Soviet Russia and still hamstring remaining revolutions such as China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam despite the heroic legacy and continuing progress of all of them.  
It requires a constantly updated theoretical fight to see the shape and form of the emerging capitalist crisis degeneration into trade war, slump, and war destruction, and to expose and illuminate all the tricks and confusions which its “democracy” and “freedom” lies constantly spread, including multiple shades of pretend “left”-ism from the Labourite and official trade union reformist poison to alleged “revolutionaries” of all types, “human rights” campaigns and 1001 other partial, single-issue “causes” constantly fostered to head attention away from the central overriding problem facing mankind, the existence of capitalism.
That is a million miles from any of the fake-”lefts”, all generated by, emerging from, or capitulating to capitalist society and its ideology.  
Whether it is in the evasions, cover-ups, and opportunism of the revisionists (still worshipping Stalin and refusing to consider and admit the disastrous philosophical errors he made) or the outright anti-communist hostilities of the Trotskyists swallowing every bourgeois lie and provocation against the workers states (and now the “horrible dictator” substitutes such as Gaddafi, Assad and Ahmadinejad), avoiding the philosophical fight for scientific truth, either by sectarian clamp-downs, closed meetings and censorship (overt and covert like the classic “blind chairman” trick in allegedly public meetings, never “seeing” the Leninist contributors), by loftily ignoring polemics from “small groups who don’t count” or by following an eclectic “open democracy” where everybody’s opinion is constantly stirred in a huge eclectic soup where fatuously “everyone is entitled to their opinion” with no conclusions fought for and clear lines established.
This requires a return to the method of Leninist polemical struggle to establish an agreed line around which communist unity can be built.
Of course the most gigantic debate is required. It has already opened up everywhere and will spread hugely as the crisis deepens.
But it needs to be a debate fighting out the issues with polemical struggle, guided and developed by the political clarity already established and represented in the leadership.
The hostility to leadership of the Occupy movement and “flat leadership” suggested even for the masses of Tahrir Square has failed completely because it does not develop the polemic .
Its pretence of “no leaders” is anyway a complete petty bourgeois fraud limiting the discussions and preventing the open expression of revolutionary perspectives.
Very often the debates are tightly controlled and censored.
The point is to allow newly emerging political and philosophical positions full expression so that their class basis and meaning can be teased out and understood. 
As the EPSR has said in the past: 

But such a never-ending programme of defensive protests and agitation for the relief of oppression is precisely the heart and soul of the whole reformist delusion,  which has existed for a century and more, solely to keep the working class permanently divided and permanently defeated.
The only possibility for working-class unity ever envisaged by Marxist science is around a highly plausibly CORRECT perspective for successful proletarian revolution to seize power, when one finally emerges. Before historical conditions and the struggle for a mass-supported party of revolutionary-theory leadership have produced such a realistic perspective, then by definition the working class is still obviously going to remain divided among a variety of fake-’left’ sectarian opportunisms, and therefore still incapable of any worthwhile unity. As Marxist science endlessly points out, it is far easier to envisage and carry out a total socialist revolution than to morally persuade or re-educate the entire working class to stop being the unfortunate victims of racist or chauvinist confusion, for example. If it is really possible to get the entire Glasgow working class to unite and say “asylum-seekers welcome”, then surely it will be 100 times easier to unite the proletariat on the slogan: “Let us take all the wealth and power away from the rich bastards who are oppressing all of us”.
It is like the social-pacifist slogan of ‘No to war’ or ‘Nuclear disarmament now’. If it was really-possible to persuade a moral majority to disarm the ruling class in this way, it would surely be 100 times easier to make out the ‘moral’ case for the total socialist revolution.
But this is all, of course, reformist pipe-dream fantasy of the nastiest fake-’left’ kind, - posturing as ‘revolutionary Marxism’, but predictably cynically condemning the working class to the further permanent diet of just defeats, demoralisation, and division, which is all that ‘reformist pressure’ can ever mean.[EPSRNo1103 11-09-01]

But no worthwhile conclusions are drawn at all. It is exactly as the EPSR explained at the very launch of the ‘Alliance’, there would be no chance at all of this opportunist lash-up ever becoming a true workers PARTY because of the founding decision to DELIBERATELY AVOID sorting out all the disputed theoretical issues which have been splitting the international anti-imperialist movement ever since 1917 (and the world’s first establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat).	
It is simply IMPOSSIBLE to build an effective revolutionary party (the only kind that will ever achieve socialism) of the Bolshevik type without CONSTANT THEORETICAL POLEMICAL STRUGGLE, - at its highest INSIDE the party,- and aggressively taking on THE ENTIRE REMAINING LABOUR MOVEMENT outside, - permanently taking them on. [EPSR No1175 11-03-03]

But how might it go next, in the immediate future?
And what preparations should workers everywhere be making?
It is impossible to see beyond the desperate need for a world party of revolutionary theory which must dwarf even the achievements of Lenin’s world party, such is the complexity of the modern class-war and national-war scene, and such is the debilitating uncleared-up confusion left behind by Stalinism (and its equally shallow and opportunist reflection, Trotskyism).
Which is what makes the refusal of “lefts” to start engaging in serious polemics totally frustrating. The great socialist cause of the working class cannot move on one millimetre until fake-”lefts” are prepared to defend their positions and win the argument, or accept that they have got some things wrong and move on.
Interpreting objective developments is the best and easiest area to concentrate on.[EPSR 1170 04-02-03]

Conflict in discussion has to be allowed free rein, not for its own sake but in order to fight out understanding to a conclusion.
There is no room for squeamishness and “taking offence” which is mostly anyway a petty bourgeois subjective posture or deliberate dissembling nonsense to evade making the arguments and seeing the issues clarified. 
Again as the EPSR argued in the past:

The key lesson for renewed communist struggle at the end of the 20th century has to be that not only must the free conflict of ideas be allowed but it must be positively encouraged as the most fertile educative source for the working class of all.
How was the whole world communist movement originally educated? Via virtually nothing but polemical writings by the best leaders against other leaders’ mistaken ideas INSIDE the communist internationals (I, II, and III), and INSIDE the Bolshevik Party. 
The communist education of mankind in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin consists of virtually nothing but polemics, in book, pamphlet and article form, against other communist leaders; — against Plekhanov, Martov, Trotsky, Kautsky, Bernstein, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Lassalle, Liebknecht, etc, etc. 
But as soon as Stalin’s polemics against Trotsky, Bukharin, etc, petered out at the end of the 1920s, to be replaced by loftily ignoring alternative voices or silencing them, the inevitable deterioration in Marxist scientific understanding and ability began slowly to infect the whole world party. 
And what crucially helped drive out Marxist scientific inquiry (and the method of all-ideas-in-conflict as the only source of development, through contradiction) was this stifling human wish to belong, this stifling wish to be part of the team at all costs, this stifling complacency, the reactionary bourgeoisification of the former communist leadership of the workers movement. [EPSR No 1006 14-07-99]

Revolutionary understanding is the world’s greatest need.
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins

E P S R   BOX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Cuba’s stolen funds
 THE United States Treasury Department presented a report to Congress recently about frozen funds belonging to four countries (Iran, Sudan, Syria and Cuba) which the State Department had placed on their list of countries “sponsoring international terrorism”, as well as organizations and individuals who had been sanctioned by the U.S. government. In the case of Cuba, the amount cited as frozen at the end of 2010 was 248.1 million dollars and 245 million at the close of 2011, as a result of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of Cuba.
These funds, however, no longer remain safely stored in the ‘freezer’; they have been stolen. For some years now, allocations of these funds have been made which affect cash and property belonging to the Cuban people, Cuban citizens living here, as well as those living abroad, citizens of other countries, Cuban enterprises and those of other nations, who have all been victimized by the blockade’s laws and regulations in this economic war against Cuba.
All this began July 8, 1963, when The Treasury Department issued the so-called Cuban Assets Control regulations, that is the blockade rules, the freezing of Cuban assets in the United States. What were these assets, at that time, and what are they now? Everything from real estate to bank accounts belonging to the state, entities or individual Cubans, even transfers being made to Cuba by foreign entities or persons - even objects containing precious metals won as prizes by Cuban citizens in contests or sporting events or bequeathed as inheritances.
Although the paralyzation of these funds was illegal, beginning in the 1990’s these assets were subject to further violations: the outright theft of property belonging to the Cuban state or enterprises based on unilateral decisions made by the U.S. government; as a result of Florida court judgments against Cuba and new anti-Cuban laws approved in Congress. On four occasions between 1996 and 2000, Cuba was robbed for a total of 170 million dollars.
October 2, 1996: President William Clinton ordered the Treasury Secretary to take $1.2 million of frozen Cuban funds and turn them over to families of pilots, from the terrorist organization Brothers to the Rescue, who had been shot down for repeatedly violating Cuban airspace on February 24, 1996.
February 12, 2001: Complying with an order issued by President William Clinton on January 19, 2001, the Office of Foreign Assets Control instructed the Chase Manhattan bank to transfer $700 million from accounts belonging to the Cuban company emtelcuba, to pay indemnities to the families of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots.
This theft was facilitated by the Senator Connie Mack who, in the service of the Cuban-American mafia in South Florida, won approval of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which included a section allowing spurious court judgments to award frozen Cuban assets, encouraging these types of outlandish lawsuits against Cuba.
April 29, 2005: President Bush arranged for the. Treasury Department to hand over $198,000 of Cuba’s funds to a U.S. citizen of Cuban origin resident in Miami, Ana Margarita Martinez, who had obtained a ruling from a Miami court in her favor, based on allegations of torture and sexual aggression by a Cuban agent infiltrating anti-Cuban terrorist groups, who was married to her at the time.
This story and the previous two are Well known. Granma published an article on January 15, 2007, just five years ago, outlining how the Bush administration had, in 2003 and 2004, allowed Ana Margarita to abscond with other Cuban assets. The Treasury Department authorized her to auction off three high-jacked Cuban aircraft which had been confiscated on court order: an AN-2 from November 11, 2002; a DC-3, March 19, 2003, and an AN-24, confiscated 12 days later. The United States government allowed this theft.
November 27, 2006: In accordance with a federal judge ruling in New York, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank transferred $72,126,884 to the families of Anderson MacCarthy and Ray Weininger, to partially cover the court-ordered indemnities levied against Cuba, based on their spurious claims given the legitimate defense measures taken by the Cuban government in the face of aggressive actions committed by their family members, Thomas Willard Ray and Howard F. Anderson, in the service of the United States government during the early days of the Cuban Revolution.
Who are Willard and Anderson? Willard was a U.S. pilot and cia agent. It was said that he summarily was executed April 19, 1961, but the truth is that he died in a confrontation when his B-26 was shot down during the mercenary invasion at Playa Girón (Bay of the Pigs). For 18 years his body was preserved at the Cuban Legal Medicine Institute, since the U.S. government denied his identity and refused to recognize his nationality or accept responsibility for this aggression, or any of the many committed by another group of U.S. pilots who on orders from the cia supported the mercenary Brigade 2506.
Anderson was captured weeks before the invasion, while he was engaged in subversive activities in the service of the U.S. government. He was a member of an armed group of Batista-era military officers and was detained during the confiscation of eight tons of weaponry meant to be used in terrorist attacks and sabotage. He was the cia’s link to counterrevolutionary groups within Cuba, was prosecuted in April, 1961, and sentenced to death.
As a result of these thefts, the frozen assets belonging to the Cuban state and other entities deposited in U.S. banks have been practically exhausted. The bulk of the assets which remain frozen belong to Cuban citizens and foreign individuals or companies.
The hostile policy of the United States government toward Cuba, which includes the more than 50-year-old blockade, the arbitrary and unfounded designation of Cuba as a country which sponsors international terrorism and the manipulation of that fallacy to promote lawsuits against our country in hopes of being awarded an indemnity from the frozen funds, are just some of the machinations used by the world’s largest economy against a small country like Cuba. The complicity of U.S. executive, legislative and judicial powers has enabled this unscrupulous expropriation of Cuban property.
This is the truth about the so-called frozen funds: they were stolen.