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 1450  15thrd August 2014                                                                                                   25p fortnightly

Palestinian fighting determination inflicting historic defeat on racist fascist Zionism despite devastating costs imposed on Gaza’s people. The Jewish land-theft occupation and its imperialist backers are the real losers, the Nazi colonialist reality of the bogus “Israel” now undeniable by all but wilfully blind opportunism. World mass revulsion at deliberate civilian slaughter and ethnic cleansing destruction, will feed the enormous growing Third World rebellion against Western imperialism and its Slump crisis collapse. But conscious revolutionary Leninism needed

The Zionist land-theft occupation of Palestine is the great loser in the latest barbaric destruction wrought on Gaza.
Standing behind it, as always with arms and money, bigger imperialism has been hammered too, its defeat already reflected in recriminations, protests and turmoil everywhere in the capitalist world.
Bourgeois intellectuals, journalists and some politicians have expressed their dismay, albeit in the most mealy-mouthed opportunist terms.
Even the ruling class establishment in Britain, which created the artificial “Israel” enclave in the beginning, has seen splits and resignations from its own Tory party as public opinion has shifted.
It is not simply revulsion at the genocidal horrors which have sent these petty bourgeoisie fluttering – such slaughter and torture is after all a routine and mostly unremarked part of capitalist world control and exploitation which has seen tens of millions of lives blown apart in wars and interventions since the end of the Second World War alone, and multiples more taken in starvation and disease.  
It is the impact of the staggering Palestinian struggle.
Such defeats for imperialism are the crucial question as the world heads towards the greatest ever crisis meltdown of its profit system and the deliberate imposition of war destruction and terror by the ruling class as its “escape route” from this unavoidable collapse (see Marx quotes below).
They open up the chance for revolutionary consciousness to be built, the only possible way to end the foul tyranny and Nazi war impositions of the imperialists order underway from Ukraine to Libya and with far more to come.  
The Palestinian’s heroic fight already a key part of the Arab and wider Third World rebellion, has now sent great waves of revolutionary sympathy and inspiration around the world, like the 1968 Tet offensive victory in Vietnam, which transformed the seemingly unwinnable Vietcong revolutionary struggle, despite huge cost in lives and material, stirring mass consciousness worldwide.
Far from being silenced by the staggering suffering and destruction imposed on the Gaza strip in a further round of the repeated and endless terrorising, its benighted and savaged people has made clear a more dogged resistance and resilience than ever.
Its defiance will not only continue no matter how foul and brutal the Nazism imposed on it, but will deepen and extend its fighting capacity and sophistication it is making clear.
Of course there is a long way to go, not least in arriving at the revolutionary Marxist understanding that alone can unite all the anti-imperialist forces in the Middle East to finally drive out imperialism and establish planned socialism. 
But existing leaderships continue to deepen their militancy and coherence, further inspiring the gigantic Third World rebellion erupting everywhere against the crisis-wracked and bankrupt imperialist order and most particularly the Arab and other Middle Eastern peoples, already thrown into a gigantic turmoil of revolt, which for all its current confusions and sometime self-defeating sectarian infighting (including Hamas and Hezbollah sadly) has sent the monopoly capitalist world tyranny reeling.
It is re-arranging the very structure of the imperialist domination imposed on this region after the  First World War plunder of the Ottoman empire (colonialist spoils being the cause and purpose of the “Great War”) and the manipulations of the post-WW2 US topdog capitalist neocolonialist “boom”.  
Everywhere the Zionist occupation, and increasingly the Jewish freemasonry diaspora that supports its existence as the so-called “state of Israel” is now rightly despised by the ordinary masses of entire planet.
Everywhere the masses are being recruited in their thousands to take up the fight as the horrors unfold.
This is nothing to do with alleged “anti-Semitism” being raised as a hue and cry by Zionism and imperialism once again.
That is a deliberate feint to cover-up justified revulsion and disgust at this latest genocidal atrocity and confuse the growing recognition that “Israel” is nothing but a monstrous colonialist implant installed by imperialist diktat with the job of keeping a permanent boot on the neck of the peoples of the Middle East, to allow non-stop domination and plunder of this strategically vital and resource rich region.
Its precarious nature means it will always be driven towards the same kind of Nazi “solution” to its problems that Jewish people themselves suffered in the last great warmongering upheaval of capitalist crisis in 1939-45, (now returning once again as “global meltdown” continues to unravel, ready at any moment to break back into world financial turmoil).    
History does not allow “Israel” to be anything else; there never was a way to found a mythical “promised land” in a world already filled with other peoples except by stealing an entire country.
“Israel” was founded in blood, terror and ethnic cleansing from the beginning and can only ever maintain its existence by permanently suppressing or eliminating the people from whom it stole by force its alleged “biblical heritage”. 
This “war” (actually one-sided terrorisation) and the constant repeated variants of blitzkrieg that came before and will come later, (with continuous low level killing, terror persecution and oppression in between, of an entire population held in concentration camp conditions), is not some “pursuit” of “inhuman Hamas terrorism”, with “unfortunate accidental” or euphemistic “collateral” damage “tragically killing civilians”, but the systematic conscious punishment of an entire population, calmly and monstrously reducing their very existence to rubble.
The cynical public relations propaganda from the Zionists of their “regret and sorrow” at the killing of women, tiny children, and even the disabled, is a deliberate and disgusting lie from the Goebbels handbook (as updated and extended by slick Western political and  media techniques).
Bombing and shelling hospitals, whole villages, school playgrounds, beaches and apartment blocks, in the concrete hellhole prison of Gaza, kept under siege for a nearly a decade (and open occupation before it) is not a “just war” as the Nazi-Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu grotesquely claims but the prelude to ever greater genocide, and the reduction of a proud people to either non-existence, near slavery or rump destitution as imposed on Aborigines, Native Americans, Maoris, Incas, Aztecs and other South American peoples, South African black tribes, and many others by past colonialism. 
This is outright Nazism and it is the most craven capitulation by the fake-“lefts”, pacifists and liberals to back off from saying so. 
And it can never be anything else because this Jewish enclave was imposed and installed by the foulest of Nazi violence and colonialist tyranny from the very beginning, the total land theft of another country, occupied and inhabited for one thousand five hundred years by its indigenous population, longer than the British have been a nation, or the French or many others. 
This bogus state’s cuckoo presence will create total resistance for as long as the displaced people are alive; meaning either they must be wiped out or the occupation be ended, with the disbandment and liquidation of the “Israeli” state so-called (and the Jewish people either returning to their origins in other nations or living under the rule of a Palestinian state).
The disgusting “anti-Semitism” campaign which the Jewish lobby has pushed into the bourgeois press like the liberal Guardian to “justify” itself (only further confirming the insidious penetration of this religious freemasonry’s reactionary influence throughout Western imperialism) relies on deliberately conflating this truth with various remnants of historic Old World anti-Semitic persecution, some of which persists.
But upsurge in hostility currently is driven by the inevitable hatred which the fascist actions of the Zionist state have created.
If this hatred spills over against the Jewish diaspora then that is because their networks and connections sustain and nourish the false state of “Israel” and they benefit from it, through the “right of return” etc.
That includes all those professing to be “anti-Zionist Jews”, or declaring they want a “restrained and peaceful Israel” (an historic impossibility). 
The only Jewish people retaining any honour are the tiny few - some who have marched - who recognise that this “Israel” monstrosity has no right to exist, and cannot exist except as a racist genocidal tyranny over another people, and who call for immediate disbandment of the 1947 “state”.
Only making this clear can disentangle any backward anti-Semitism from the genuine revulsion by the world against the slaughter.
Ending any actual racist backwardness or attacks will not happen without making clear that capitalism is the source of reaction and alienated divisiveness.
It is imperialism which has supported the openly Swastika waving anti-Semitic violent Ukrainian fascists in Kiev for example, and which fosters and shelters  petty chauvinist Nazi elements throughout its system.
Zionist/Jewish “Israel” is a vital part of that imperialism – its defeat and the defeat of all capitalism is the only way to stop the degeneration into war and the fascism that imperialism is increasingly revealing is its true nature under the “democracy” lies.
Build Leninism
Brendan Jameston

Fake-“left” Palestine “Stop the Bombing” social-pacifism is not only useless and ineffectual, disarming and misleading the working class, but an opportunist cover-up for retreat from all real revolutionary perspectives. It hides a total capitulation to Western “war on terror” demonisation and condemnation that plays into the hands of imperialism’s war drive 

Big numbers turning out to march against the vile Zionist genocidal massacring attacks on the Gazans reflect growing anti-imperialist sympathies among ordinary people but the chance this offers to build wider revolutionary understanding is being utterly squandered by the fake-“left”.
A huge debate about just what is going on in the world and why so much war turmoil, open fascism, “terrorist” resistance, and domestic repression and slump “austerity”, threaten ordinary people is desperately needed.
The world is being driven into endless warmongering because capitalism needs war to escape its disastrous and epoch shattering economic crisis, the greatest catastrophe to hit mankind in 800 years, and unravelling fast despite all the lies about “the upturn is here at last”.
The only “upturn” is the demented escalation of highly unstable and unsustainable money-printing Quantitative Easing credit creation, most of which has been hoovered up by the incompetent rich financiers and City banker bailouts anyway, and which has greatly escalated the international trade and currency war conflicts – with the consequent further devaluation of the US dollar currently letting otherwise moribund American industry out-price and squeeze the other capitalist competitive powers such as the European bloc.
It is a completely false “recovery” which the ruling class knows very clearly is due to implode again at any minute (as constant new collapses like Portugal’s central bank, production stagnation in “powerhouse economy” Germany and national bankruptcies like Argentina all indicate, along with dozens of other symptoms). 
In other words grasping the real causes of the horrifying turmoil now erupting everywhere can only begin with understanding the epochal breakdown and disintegration of the monopoly capitalist order itself and the deliberate world war drive set in train by topdog US imperialism to “shock and awe” the world into continued subjugation, despite the total bankruptcy of the capitalist way of doing things (for the private profit benefit of an ever tinier minority of ultra-ultra-rich).
But the “lefts” do nothing to confront and challenge people with the urgent revolutionary perspectives that must be at the centre of a movement to overturn capitalism totally, the only way that degenerate worldwide warmongering and killing is going to be stopped.
Instead they role out the tired old peace “protest” that has never changed anything in all history, least of all prevented war (in the Middle East,  or anywhere else).
The well meaning protesters, stirred onto the London and other city streets by the impact of heroic Palestinian resistance to the grotesque Nazism of the Jewish occupation’s atrocities and ethnic cleansing (and just as importantly by the backing of world capitalist colonialist tyranny of which this is a key part) are being sold short by this ineffectual “Stop the Bombing - end the occupation” social-pacifist sloganising.
Not even the allegedly more militant “organised peace struggle” fantasies of the slush-brained Stalinist revisionists, still astonishingly being seriously posited by the Harpal Brarites in their latest Proletarian paper, will achieve anything with their laughably impossible notions of morally persuading the working class to organise strikes and boycotts so that “the ruling class cannot make war”.
This delusion, founded in the fundamental “capitalism is fatally wounded and cannot grow again” mistakes of Stalin’s 1952 post-war Economic Problems analysis (see EPSR 1191-1193 eg for critique) and its permanent “peaceful coexistence” strategy which led on to the Third International’s disastrous revisionist illusions in democratic paths (and the ultimate liquidation of the Soviet Union through capitulation to “free market” ideas) reflects the complete abandonment of all real grasp of capitalist crisis and the unstoppability of the class-war world-war it is dragging the world towards. 
As the EPSR has many times said, if it were possible to organise coordinated blockades of arms production and transport, stop journalists producing war propaganda and halt military recruitment on such a scale, with all the political education and mass consciousness agreement and determination that would be required (which would take years to develop if it were achievable at all solely by proselytising) it would already have been possible to organise a full revolution, and with far less difficulty.
In fact only a full revolution, driven by the real crisis conditions of history, and given conscious leadership by a truly revolutionary (Leninist) party would or could produce the inspiration, unity, class coherence and sheer bravery on a mass scale, to stop war by overturning this degenerate profit system to establish planned and rational socialism.
But the very debates and polemical battles for an agreed view of the world that makes up such a Leninist struggle, are blocked off by all the swamp “left” Trotskyist and Stalinist alike.
Meanwhile capitalism, controlling all the media, education, and public outlets, and in bullying command of people’s livelihoods and living conditions, will nearly always find a way to pull public opinion along with lies and chauvinistic hysteria, at least long enough to get the war momentum going, by which time the original “cause” can be forgotten in the mayhem and chaos that follows, as the First and Second World wars demonstrated and many more since from Vietnam (begun on the shallow Gulf of Tonkin stunt), to the NATO blitz of Serbia, Afghanistan, 2003 Iraq and Libya, the last set underway merely because of a Goebbels lying fabrication that there was a “hint of a threat of genocide to Benghazi”.
It will do so over and over against all supposed rationality, tapping the mistakes and confusions of a hundred years of non-stop anti-communist, anti-“totalitarian” “democracy” brainwashing lies (which the “lefts” all go along with, essentially, or fail to expose).
No matter that the West is currently blocking a desperately needed life-saving humanitarian aid convoy from Moscow to eastern Ukraine where some 70 or so civilians are being killed now on a daily basis by terror bombardment of civilian districts in various cities with randomly targeted shelling and highly inaccurate Grad missiles landing indiscriminately on men, women and children (all with minimal capitalist media publicity) and the terrorising activities of the Right Sector and Svoboda death gangs. 
The total fatalities of workers and anti-fascist resistance already exceeds the 2000 killed in Gaza in this monstrous onslaught ordered by the openly fascist, Swastika-waving coup-installed “government” in Kiev and its American imperialist (and European) backers, to suppress working class resistance to its reactionary corporate plunder diktat and to further Western anti-Moscow provocations and NATO war build-up.
No matter too that the grotesque racist blitzkrieg ethnic cleansing imposed on the benighted and desperate Palestinians for the last four weeks by Nazi Zionist “Israel” has seen not the tiniest hint of protest or opposition by the major Western powers let alone action to stop it (despite nervous flurries, hesitant objections and even some splits in the establishment because its grotesque destruction is so glaringly deliberate and purposely genocidal).
Just the opposite, the bloodletting was kept going in all its murderous brutality by massive new supplies of ammunition to the Israeli oppressors, by the Obama presidency in Washington (supplementing the huge regular annual subventions and arms supplies without which the pretend Jewish “state” would have collapsed long ago).
No matter that Western provoked and sponsored civil war terror in Syria, which has butchered, dispossessed or turned into refugees, hundreds of thousands, has just been given another $500M by Washington on top of the constant supplies of money, arms, military training, covert interventions and blanket media lies and propaganda demonising the Assad regime poured in by the West and its stooge feudal regimes in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. 
Suddenly, the media machine is turned around and within days has convinced public opinion that “we have to do something to save the Yazidi people” and that American imperialism is a benevolent giant with nothing but the welfare of an obscure minority people at heart – and public opinion largely goes with this utter garbage BIG LIE and with the frenzied hate-campaign that the growing resistance to imperialism is nothing but “evil incarnate” and should be “bombed into the ground”.
(The equally sudden backing-off from intervention by the Obama presidency (for the moment) has more complex roots, further analysed below, reflecting deeper fears by imperialism about the problems its is running into everywhere from growing Third World revolt and the defeats those have inflicted already in Afghanistan, Iraq itself, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc., and from the desperate catastrophe of the still unravelling and unsolved financial meltdown.
Domestic turmoil from war weariness, which reflects these defeats, has already shattered the credibility of the presidency under Bush, with the entire fraudulent concept of presidential democracy itself only salvaged by Obama “liberalism” – (one of the greatest cynical “spin” frauds of all time, out-Blairing Blairism) – and its promises to withdraw from hugely costly wars, measured in both financial and bodybag terms.))
But the pressure for war will be notched up again as soon as the temporary relief of QE money-printing collapses (historically imminent) and the raw savagery of the Slump crisis has to be reimposed, ten times greater, on top of the already austerity-ridden Western economies (where even in the joke “upturn” wages fall and the dole-sanctioned unemployed are now starving to death or killing themselves over bedroom tax despair as even the bourgeois press has been reporting).  
Only making war on the warmongers, will turn things around, civil war to end capitalism. 
All this useless pacifist emptiness is no different to the last decade or more of modern “war opposition” revived as the “Stop the War” campaign against the Bush/Blair Iraq war stampeding, and which will once more be trampled all over by aggressive imperialism and its Zionist stooges.
It covers-up a complete philosophical bankruptcy and the dishonesty of endless posturing pretences to be “revolutionaries” when no such thing is ever actually talked about in practice (whatever long-winded academic debates are held and tedious article printed about the “perfect and proper” way to do revolution “eventually” i.e. never a question for now).
The “lefts” cling on to their “anti-war” slogans to let their self-righteous petty bourgeois posturing to continue while evading the real revolutionary questions.
Their gross opportunism falls short on every question; on the Gaza fight itself and its actual Hamas leadership, on the titanic upsurge of rebellion throughout the Middle East and the loss of control by imperialism in country after country to “jihadists” (to the point of total regional transformation of the 100 year old imperialist dictated boundaries under the new ISIS “Caliphate”, and on the worldwide revolt in total against increasingly open fascist imperialist tyranny.
They tell the world nothing about the actually developing revolts breaking out worldwide which are hammering imperialist control, and which for all their confusions and temporarily bizarre, mostly Muslim ideologies (but not always – as in the Stalinist reviving Ukraine or Thailand) and sometimes self-destructive sectarian infighting, are the revolution and one that is gathering pace and energy.
Just the opposite, the fake-“left”s have capitulated entirely to the ludicrous notion of a “war on terror” dreamed up by US imperialism to justify and stampede its own warmongering which has its sole cause and basis in the breakdown and collapse of capitalism itself.
From 9/11 onwards they have either “condemned” terrorist blows and incidents as “criminal” or “the wrong way to fight” or have spun ever more elaborate conspiracy theories to present such movements as “really tools of the CIA” (or occasionally of Mossad), thus letting themselves of the hook of being seen to line up too closely with imperialism’s scapegoating and war-justifying propaganda.
As a result they denounce and condemn the assorted insurgencies, or tangle themselves and everyone else in a welter of confusion and utter contradictions that compound and muddle the already highly complex and rapidly changing world struggle, and play into the hands of imperialism.
Currently for example their dismissal and condemnations of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and support for the middle class bourgeois “democracy” confusions of the “secular” (and pro-West) counter-revolt which toppled the Brotherhood’s legally elected president Muhammad Morsi last year (now in prison), has helped imperialism to ride the bogus “popular will” and re-install a barbaric military fascist government.
The General Sisi coup (which it remains whatever “legitimisation” cosmetic “election” has followed) has not only cold-bloodedly massacred thousands to suppress the huge revolt of 2011, and instigated vicious “legal” repression and death sentences, but has shut down the famous smuggling tunnels into Gaza, adding to the desperate Zionist stranglehold siege and physically hampering the Hamas rebellion.
The fake-“lefts” who made no warnings on this (and in some cases like Lalkar/Proletarian even cheered on the military restoration in their wooden brained stupidity) have all gone very silent about Egypt, even as they shout their “support” for the Gaza struggle.
The museum-Stalinists, busy with their fantasies that Stalin “was right on everything and never made mistakes” are also very quiet about the Soviet recognition of “Israel” as a state, and the armed aid it gave the Zionists, all in 1949 while Stalin was still firmly in the saddle of Soviet leadership and long before the supposed Kruschev revisionist coup.
But the leadership which has struck telling blows against Zionism, is part of this world insurgency, both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood!
But the “lefts” are not condemning them nor their “terrorist” methods, – they dare not in the face of mass world sympathy for Gaza.
So they simply keep quiet, and fill the air with pacifist platitudes about “No to the occupation”.
This dire confusion and outright hypocrisy reflects an inability of the “lefts” to focus on the real enemy and cause of war, the imperialist system, and to understand that any defeat for it advances the working class.
Calling for such defeats has not got anything to do with support for Hamas, ISIS or any of the other struggles and the methods they choose or are forced to use.
But it does recognise that these are movements which have struck telling blows against imperialism.
Some “lefts” grudgingly declare that the Palestinians have the “right to resist in any way possible”.
But this is still not quite the point – “resist” what?  
It is defeat for Zionism which is the fundamental understanding to put across before all else.
The issue is the very existence of “Israel” as a state at all (not the Western stooge UN declared 1967 “occupation” which leaves “Israel” intact), and which can never stop producing a rebellion of the dispossessed and counter-rebellion fascist ethnic cleansing which Zionism will always be driven to escalate, until the “problem” disappears, by killing all the Palestinians or dispersing them to the ends of the earth.
Merely “resisting” further onslaught, which is what is implied, is another evasion.
But even going this far is utter hypocrisy from the “lefts”, who simultaneously fill their pages with denunciations of “jihadists”. 
Marxist understanding that these are anti-imperialist movements, understands that the “jihadist” confusion has been variously used by imperialism and manipulated at times (which their sectarian and non-scientific religious ideology makes them vulnerable to). 
Of course there is constant meddling by the West and at various points some of the insurgencies and sectarian movements have been set going by Western provocation (set alight by the initial laughably artificial anti-Assad revolt in Syria and Libya before that for example).
But to mechanically and rigidly declare that therefore they are defined for all time as “reactionary” is shallow anti-dialectical and utterly non-Marxist.
The Taliban has been a thorn in the side of US imperialism for ten years even though its growth sprang from CIA anti-Soviet manipulation in the 1980s.
And it makes no sense to suggest that the great upsurge of rebelliousness throughout the Middle East and Africa, (and simultaneously in eastern Europe and parts of Latin America in various other forms) is all some giant carefully coordinated plan being synchronised from Langley, (or perhaps Tel Aviv). 
It takes conspiracy theory into the realms of gibberish.
The huge expense of Iraq and ten years of war in Afghanistan has already brought US imperialism to exhaustion – why would it remotely want to stir even more trouble?
And how could it?
But it is happening anyway.
The great upsurges in Africa of Al-Shabaab from Somalia, Boko Haram (“no to Western influence” it translates) in ultra-corrupt capitalist Nigeria, the northern Mali revolt, the al-Qaeda-in-the-Yemen, the Islamic takeover in Central African Republic (now being slaughtered by French imperialist backed “Christian” counter-revolutionary death squads), the Algerian Islamic revolt possibly, the northern Pakistan Taliban insurgency and even the Islamic revolt in Egypt’s Sinai, harassing both Zionism and now the newly restored fascist military dictatorship, are all expressions of the Third World’s impatience and anger at the endless nightmare of oppression, hunger, near or actual slavery, disease, abuse, lost opportunity, trampled human dignity, poverty, starvation, malnutrition, and bereavement that life has been, and continues to be, under imperialist monopoly capitalist domination, without even mentioning the periodic slaughter, massacres, torture, rape and child murder imposed in wars, coups and fascist crackdowns.
Above all it is sheet craziness and political illiteracy to suppose that the great Egyptian revolt of spring 2011 was set up by Western intelligence as some groups even suggest.
Millions of people were simultaneously and suddenly, without warning, induced by the CIA to pour onto the street against the West’s own stooge Mubarak dictatorship gangster regime (kept in place by $billions each year and Washington advice)????? Impossible.
To do what anyway??? Overturn and destabilise an entire region already in flames and virtually uncontainable???? 
No, this was the greatest shock to Western imperialism since the great spontaneous 1979 anti-Shah revolt in Iran and actually far more significant, coming as it did in the giant Egyptian nation, 80+ million strong and completely dominant in its influence in the Middle East.
After the already telling, slow unrolling defeat failures of the Iraq war, and Afghanistan, 9/11 and other growing insurgency and the world stunning credit crunch catastrophe of monopoly capitalism, it pole-axed the ruling class and “restoring normality” (meaning Western diktat) has been an urgent priority.
Desperate efforts to stir up counter revolution around Egypt, by the clearly bogus reactionary revolts against the Western hated figures of Gaddafi and Assad (at the opposite end of the spectrum to the stooge Mubarak) have only further inflamed the entire Middle East and deepened the chaos. 
Nothing like the millions on the streets were seen in Libya or Syria, despite the best Hollywood technique film cropping to present tiny stunted-up demonstrations as “popular Arab Spring rebellion”.
Their pathetic and inadequate monarchist and opportunist petty bourgeois basis virtually petered out in Libya until nazi-NATO blitzing was brought in to stiffen its spine and the sectarian hate set alight in Syria has produced the “blowback” now feared everywhere by the reactionary Arab states, and the West, most of all from the ISIS - more highly organised and ruthless than any previous insurgency thanks, most likely, in part to initial training and funding by the West but now also out of control.
Its attraction to youthful rebellion around the world, leaving their homes to go and fight, cannot be explained by the notion it is all “run by the CIA” or conversely by the usual capitalist accusations of Svengali-like radicalisers exerting a hypnotic effect.  
The revolutionary transformation that all this capitalist-induced mayhem has created in the Middle East is now breaking down 100 years of colonialism and its divisions and boundaries. 
It is this total revolt, completely surrounding the Zionist implant that can be blamed for the unprecedented openness of the racist hatred expressed by the Jewish occupation, which far from being more in control than ever is more panicked and fearful than ever as the Arab nation merges its rebellion with seventy years of Palestinian doggedness.
Such fascist viciousness has always been a sign of weakness throughout modern history most of all in Nazi Germany.
The fake-“left” will be major losers too as these rebellions are bombed, blitzed, repressed and slaughtered by assorted imperialist forces, with either their outright approval or barely a murmur of dissent, the fights variously condemned as being “not the right way to do things” or “inhuman”.
Petty bourgeois “left” ignorance of even the most basic Marxism goes so far in some cases as to call them a ”greater source of evil than capitalism” which not only is completely wrong about where the warmongering and aggressive alienation comes from in the world, but is pure idealism.
Evil????
Since when did materialist science suggest that it is the ideas in men’s heads that shape the world, instead of objective reality shaping human understanding? 
Whatever the rebellion’s shortfalls in continuing religious and cultural nonsenses, which Marxism-Leninism would stand apart from and dispute with, (while being 100% for the defeat effect of any blows inflicted on imperialism), it is this leadership and only this which has not only led a stunning, heroic and brilliantly organised fight against one of the most powerfully armed and sophisticated regimes in the world, but continues to develop and deepen its fighting skills and leadership capacities.
As the EPSR has previously said, as soon as it fails to do that, which is inevitable at some stage in the deepening world revolutionary crisis, it will be supplanted by a leadership one which is even better and clearer. 
The world must come to a conscious Marxist scientific understanding finally. 
Lenin tore the “old Bolsheviks” to shreds in 1905, and 1916-17 for sticking to their wooden “Marxist” prescriptions and notions of how Russia would turn to first bourgeois revolution against the Tsarist feudalism and then socialism later, instead of seeing what was happening in front of the their eyes in the newly emerging Soviets and the “dual power” they represented of an already emerging working class socialist challenge, which the Bolsheviks could make conscious and lead to power.  
Things need to be looked at concretely and specifically Lenin constantly declared and the same applies now.
Imperialism is being attacked on all sides, and is seeing its grip and control of world exploitation, the very basis of its power and wealth threatened on every side because of its crisis failure.
There is no current “communist” form to all this revolt, because Stalinist revisionism retreated from Leninist revolutionary understanding decades ago, to the point of complete complacent liquidationism under Gorbachev.
It left a giant vacuum because of world disillusion in “communism” both in its practical form as the “failed” USSR and Eastern European workers states and more importantly philosophically, in its revisionism.
Philosophical retreat was the real cause of “failure” not alleged “collapse” of the USRS, still growing and building on the gigantic progress of its seventy year history when its was wound up by smug Gorbachevism and idiot illusions in the “free market”. 
Revisionism failed to lead and inspire the militant revolutionism that the great mass of the world is desperate for. 
Meanwhile the world masses have had no living revolutionary ideological leadership, so they have adapted their local culture to provide one as best they can in Muslim fundamentalism, tailoring its notions of discipline, brotherhood, dismay at Western cultural degeneracy and self-sacrifice to the purpose of struggle.
Its religiosity and sectarian failings are a temporary phenomenon, which will be overcome as material circumstances force a deeper understanding to develop and eg the current pointless fight of Sunni against Shia is turned full onto the real cause of war, capitalist imperialism.
But the battle for Leninist science will necessarily grow as the crisis sharpens all the contradictions.
Until now it has remained a very tiny minority effort, sidelined and dismissed by bureaucratic fake-“left” woodenness, academicism, and opportunism, with a philistine fear of polemic or failure to see the importance of getting theory right and a deep down hostility to the dictatorship of the proletariat, which alone can establish a new peaceful society.
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
Venezuela and the western media’s double standard

WHILE the deadly violence that has plagued the country since February 2014 is the responsibility of the opposition, Western media continue to accuse the democratic government of Nicolás Maduro.
  Since 1998, the Venezuelan opposition has consistently rejected the results of the country’s democratic elections. There is a single exception: it recognized the legitimacy of its own victory in the constitutional referendum of December 2, 2007, something it won by less than a one percent margin of difference. The right has been strongly opposed to the legitimately elected governments of Hugo Chávez, in office from 1999 to 2013, and that of Nicolás Maduro, in office since April, 2013. All means have been used in attempts to overthrow them: coups, political assassinations, sabotage of oil installations, economic warfare (since 1999), calls for revolt and media smear campaigns.
  Since February 2014, Venezuela has been hit by deadly violence, violence that has killed more than 40 people, including at least five policemen and a government prosecutor. More than 600 people have been injured, including 150 police officers. Property damage exceeds $10 billion and includes buses burned, subway stations vandalized, a university - unefa - destroyed by fire, dozens of tons of food destined for government-run supermarkets burned to cinders, public buildings and government offices looted, electrical installations sabotaged, medical centers devastated, electoral institutions destroyed, etc.
  Faced with destabilization attempts that are clearly intended to provoke a breach in the constitutional order, the Venezuelan authorities mounted a vigorous response and arrested several opposition leaders who had launched appeals for anti-govemment uprisings or promoted acts of vandalism, as well as arresting nearly a thousand people who had been involved in the violence.
  Like any state governed by the rule of law, and in strict observance of constitutional guarantees, the Venezuelan justice system indicted the accused and applied sanctions provided for such acts by the penal code.
  Western media, which sides with the undemocratic and coup-prone opposition, have been content simply to denounce human rights violations. At the same time, they fail to report the murders committed by the protesters, the seizures of weapons and explosives carried out by police within groups that present themselves as peace-loving and the destruction of public and private properties.
  Western media outrage varies with the circumstances and is not applied universally. Indeed, the press maintains a surprising silence when other countries impose draconian measures for considerably less severe disorders than those that have occurred in Venezuela.
  The case of France is revealing. On October 27, 2005, following the accidental death of two teenagers pursued by the police, urban riots broke out in certain Paris suburbs and other major cities around the country. The extent of the violence - which did not result in a single death - was less than what has occurred in Venezuela in recent weeks.
  However, on November 8, 2005, President Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency throughout the country and imposed a curfew, both of which remained in force for several months. These were actions permitted under Decree 2005-1386, an April 3,1955 law that had been adopted during the war in Algeria, legislation that had not been used since 1961. The law allows for the suspension of constitutional guarantees and seriously undermines civil liberties because it “prohibit(s) the movement of people”, “establish(es) protected areas where the security and length of stay of individuals can be regulated” and, “in territorial circumscriptions or specific regions, allows for house arrest of individuals residing in an area established by the decree”.
  Similarly, “the Minister of the Interior, for the entire territory in which a state of emergency has been declared, in conjunction with the prefect of the Department, may order the temporary closure of theatres, pubs and bars, indeed of meeting places of any kind as determined by the decree provided for in Article 2.” These authorities are also empowered to “ban meetings that are deemed likely to cause or encourage disorder.”
  The law of April 3,1955 confers to the “administrative authorities referred to in Article 8 the power to order house searches by day or by night” and empowers “the same authorities to take all necessary measures to ensure control of the press and publications of any kind as well as radio broadcasts, film screenings and theatre performances.”
  This legislation also empowers military justice to replace the civil justice system. Thus, authorities “may authorize military courts to judge crimes and related offences that would have been responsibility of the Assize Court of the Department,” thereby undermining the jurisdiction of national common law.
  To justify such measures, measures that contravene the European Convention on Human Rights (echr), Paris had relied upon Article 15 of the echr, which authorizes, “in time of war or public emergency threatening the life of the nation”, the suspension of obligations to which France had subscribed.
  At no time has Venezuela - struck by far more serious violence than what occurred in France in 2005 - declared a state of emergency, suspended constitutional guarantees, infringed civil liberties or imposed military justice at the expense of civil justice.
  A more recent example is equally illustrative. Following the riots of August 14, 2012 in the city of Amiens, which caused significant property damage (a school and several public buildings were burned) and injured 17 policemen, the French justice system severely punished the perpetrators of these crimes. Six people were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five years in prison without the possibility of parole.
  The juvenile court of Amiens sentenced five teenagers, aged 14 to 17, to prison terms ranging up to 30 months.
  It would be easy to continue citing examples. When the New York police arbitrarily detained over 700 peaceful demonstrators who had been brutalized by the police, the Western media carefully avoided accusing the Obama administration of violating human rights.
  Similarly, when the Brazilian police violently cracked down on peaceful protesters in Sao Paulo, arresting some 262 people in a single day as well as assaulting several journalists, the media did not question the democratic legitimacy of President Dilma Rousseff.
  Western media are incapable of being impartial when it comes to interpreting the complex Venezuelan reality. This agenda flies in the face of the basic principles of democracy and goes against the will, expressed repeatedly at the polls, of the Venezuelan people.
(Opera Mundi) 

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Poroshenko - President of all Ukraine?

Odalys Buscarón Ochoa
THE new Ukrainian President, Piotr Poroshenko, swore an oath to the unity of a divided country, a country at war, with some inhabitants subjected to bombings and persecution by a government supported by the West.
  Poroshenko has occupied various government positions and was one of the oligarchs who financed the anti-governmental rebellion in Kiev which led to a coup d’état, and the ousting of legitimate President Viktor Yanuókovich, last February.
  Poroshenko ran as an independent candidate, but made evident his preference for the road taken by the coup junta, in close collaboration with the United States, and the complicity of fascist sectors. He has not distanced himself from the government’s violent response to discontent and rebellion in eastern regions which favor federalization.
  The popular mayor of Slavyansk, in the north of Donetsk, Vyacheslav Ponomariov, considers Poroshenko a man prone to lying, who should not be believed or trusted.
  Ponomariov responded to the new President’s promise to promote a dialogue with “peaceful representatives in Donbass,” by saying he has nothing to discuss, adding that expectations of the millionaire Poroshenko are low in this region.
  According to Forbes magazine, the President chocolate magnate’s fortune is close to 1.3 billion dollars.
  In the Popular Republic of Donetsk, Prime Minister Alexender Borodai told the press that Poroshenko “is the president of another state and his pronouncements about the future of a united Ukraine, and Ukrainian as the only official language” are of no interest in Donetsk.
  He recalled that on May 11, with overwhelming support for independence expressed in a referendum, the Popular Republic became a sovereign state.
  Kiev, like the United States and European Union, does not recognize the votes in Donetsk or Lugansk, which indicated more than 90% majority support for independence. The central government is likewise reticent to consider federalization as a solution to the conflict.
  Leaders of the rebel regions insist that any negotiations must be preceded by an end to combat operations and the withdrawal from their territory of regular armed forces, as well as repressive commando units.
  Upon claiming victory in the Presidential elections, Poroshenko called on military leaders to “clean” the regions demanding independence, before his inauguration June 7.
  The mayor of Slavyansk responded that the city would not be handed over to anyone, saying that the land is theirs, that they have a way of life with orthodox beliefs, like those of their ancestors, “The people must feel free.”
  Deputy Oleg Tsariov from the southeastern region does not believe the new President has the authority to dialogue with residents of the East.
  Tsariov commented to Russia 24 that Saturday, June 7 dawned with bombing and attacks in Slavyansk, yet in Poroshenko’s first speech as head of state, he said nothing, gave no order to halt the operation.
  Tsariov, who is being pursued by the Kiev regime and denied parliamentary immunity by the new legislative majority, emphasized that Poroshenko is now legally responsible for the consequences of military-police operations begun by the previous government in April. He should condemn these actions as criminal and investigate them, Tsariov said. Only under these conditions, can discussion about a possible dialogue be considered, according to the deputy.
  In a recent interview with the Russian newspaper Izvestia, Tsariov said that his condemnations of the fascist coup plotters irritated the powers that be. They have burned both his home and office, and are looking to arrest him, in violation of his status as an elected deputy, he said.
  Tsariov expressed the opinion that the current government has lost its authority and faced with impotence is attempting desperate measures. He does not believe that Poroshenko will remain in power long.
  The new President’s statements were not well-received in Lugansk either.
  The President of this Popular Republic, Valeri Bolotov, told the Russian News Service that Poroshenko’s promises are not taken seriously by local leaders or residents subjected to repeated bombings.
  An disheveled economy, social discontent, growing polarization, repression by the central government and a fratricidal war no doubt limit the chances of a prompt resolution of the crisis in Ukraine, now with its fifth President at the helm. Granma June 

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Hedge funds threaten Argentine economy

TWO U.S. Supreme Court rulings against Argentina will encourage predatory investors and complicate the restructuring of debts owed by less-privileged countries.
  On June 16, the high court rejected an appeal filed by the Argentine government challenging a lower court ruling which required the country to pay 1.5 billion dollars to hedge fund investors, who refused to accept a swap for public debt bonds. When this ruling was made in last year, Argentina said it would not comply, but has since moderated its position.
  Upon hearing the ruling, Argentine President Cristina Fernández asserted that the U.S. justices had endorsed “a form of world domination based on speculation... to put countries and populations on their knees.”
  This ruling is a dramatic setback for Argentina which has been struggling for years against two U.S. hedge funds, NML Capital and Aurelius, to establish an agreement to restructure a debt of 102 billion dollars, after the country’s 2001 default.
NML Capital, which led the legal battle against Argentina in New York, bought Argentine bonds for 48.7 million dollars and now the Supreme Court has endorsed its demand for 832 million dollars for these same bonds.
  “A profit of 1,600% in dollars over just a few years. I don’t think even organized crime gets that rate of return in such a short time,” President Fernández said in a message on national television.
  The 1.5 billion dollars Argentina was ordered to pay hedge funds represents only 10% of the bonds which were not swapped in 2001. If demands are made for payment of remaining debt, which was renegotiated in 2001, the country could face a bill of some 15 billion dollars.
  A second ruling issued by the Supreme Court, June 16, came down clearly on the side of the hedge funds, directing international banks to support their efforts to locate and appropriate Argentine assets.
  The rulings encourage predatory lenders and imply a serious defeat for poor countries looking to reduce debt, according to many organizations.
  Eric LeCompte, executive director of the religious anti-poverty organization Jubilee USA, said, “I am blown away by the decision. For heavily indebted countries trying to support extremely poor people, this is a devastating blow. These hedge funds are equipped with an instrument that forces struggling economies into submission,” mentioning Ivory Coast and Zambia.
 At issue is the strategy of a small number of high-risk investment companies, hedge funds, headquartered in the United States, which buy the debt bonds of poor countries struggling to make payments - for a fraction of their nominal value.
 These companies then file judicial complaints demanding 100% payment of the bonds, with the intention of appropriating some of the funds which have traditionally appeared from international institutions in such situations.
 These hedge funds have refused to participate in negotiated settlements, as other investors have, in what are known as debt swaps, in which creditors accept lower returns than expected, but which allow the debtor country to recuperate economically.
 The rejection of a settlement by a single hedge fund can, in fact, disrupt the entire process of restructuring a debt, since legally no such agreement can be finalized without the agreement of all bondholders.
 The current Argentine case began in 2001, when the country suspended payment on 102 billion dollars in bonds, after years of turbulence and a sinking economy. In 2005 and 2010, international bondholders were offered new bonds in exchange for the overdue ones, at a quarter of the original value.
 Some 93%’of the creditors agreed to the swap, but NML Capital and Aurelius rejected the offer and subsequently filed a civil suit in New York.
 NML issued a statement to the press after the ruling saying, “Now it is time for Argentina to honor its commitments to its creditors, which would benefit both Argentina’s economy and its international standing.
PROTECTING PROFITS
Observers of the process fear that the U.S. Supreme Court decision will not only encourage Argentina’s creditors, but also produce an increase in holdout bondholders, who reject negotiated debt swaps.
  Le Compte commented that this strategy has been highly profitable for some, and that the ruling implies even greater earnings, since litigation costs will be lower now that a precedent has been established.
  Some analysts suggest that Aurelius and NML are pursuing Argentina not so much for the sum involved, but more importantly to protect their ability to use this approach in the future.
  The court ruling could have significant repercussions. Hedge funds can now demand government funds from extremely poor countries, as well as funds these nations receive in the form of international aid.
  Debt restructuring negotiations carried out by multilateral lenders like the World Monetary Fund and the Paris Club, which facilitated debt reduction in 90 countries, for some 573 billion dollars, could also be complicated.
  Legitimate investors will most likely forego participating in these restructuring efforts, since their investments could be at risk.
  There are many international efforts underway to limit the maneuvering of predatory investors, or create a worldwide arbitration system to address the issue of national debt.
  According to Jubilee USA and the Washington-based non-governmental organization New Rules for Global Finance, a campaign is underway to limit or eliminate extremely predatory practices, which violate policies in place to alleviate the burden of debt on underdeveloped countries, to restructure it, and maintain the functioning of the financial system.
  On both the national and international level, however, any measure of this kind only offers a short to medium term solution. Argentina now has until June 30 to pay its bondholders, including NML and Aurelius, although that would require a sum of some 15 billion dollars, and could mean another default.
  (Excerpts from ips)

EPSR Archives
Selected quotes from past issues