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 1512  18th May  2017                                                                                                        25p fortnightly

     
Sullen stooge Blairites still sabotage Corbynism but “leftist” manifesto falls hopelessly short anyway. Anti-Tory voting useful but not one jot of faith in Labourism whose warmed over reformism ignores capitalist crisis breakdown and falsely pretends it can be reversed. Great 2008 collapse not ended; capitalist society ever more festering under Tory “austerity” while the fatcats enriched. Once QE false-credit runs out a hurricane of economic disaster will return wiping out all reform tinkering anyway. Workers will soon face full savagery of Slump disaster with open capitalist dictatorship to impose it. Revolutionary struggle to end this system is the only way forwards but Corbynism and all fake-“left”ism disarm with continuing “democracy” illusions. Left capitulation all round on “Brexit” – for and against - is also disastrous, playing into ruling class hands, and distracting from the real question of the crisis and revolution to end it. Little Englander protectionism backward, only feeding fascist nastiness needed for crisis warmongering but “welcome all migrants”  is a useless response to real working class fears for jobs and services. Violent capitalist subversion in Venezuela and Latin America underlines need for proletarian dictatorship, but entire “left” still refuse to draw the lessons of Allende coup onwards. Leninism needed

The stooge Blairites shot themselves in the foot when these sabotaging scumbags leaked the Labour election manifesto.
The premature release almost certainly gave more publicity to the Corbynite pretence of “new, left, socialist” policies than might otherwise have come from a viciously biased and hostile capitalist media. 
Instead of these dirty dealings scuppering everything, as the treacherous rightwing Labourites wanted, dutifully serving the interests of the capitalist fatcats and bosses they have always been in thrall to, there has been a significant positive popular response.
It might even increase voting against the Tories which would usefully give a kick in the teeth to the brittle hubris of the ruling class, trying to delude popular opinion that there is “mass support” for its back-to-the-1930s Slump workhouse nastiness and Brexit chauvinism.
Bringing down the Tories – albeit seeming an unlikely outcome according to the polls - would be an even better class war blow to ruling class arrogance, just as any defeat for the ruling class and its twisted manipulations can help shake things up. 
But the hopeless reformism of even the Corbynite “leftism” in the teeth of the gigantic unfolding capitalist crisis remains totally un-inspiring for all that.
Reluctance to vote at all remains overall the long-term healthy response in the working class inasmuch as ever-declining turnouts reflect a contempt for all the hoodwinking parliamentary racket, a wariness built up through a century-plus historic experience of its sellouts and cover-up for the actual rule of big money and capital.
What is urgently needed to transform this into a real struggle is a revolutionary perspective and it is the last thing Corbynism, or the cloud of fake-“lefts” in its slipstream, are presenting. 
In fact a massive new danger would immediately emerge for the working class (making tactical anti-Tory votes) if it were trapped into believing once more that Labourism and parliamentarianism was really going to change anything, any more than it ever has done. 
Whatever “anti-austerity” measures the “left” Labourites would be able or willing to put through, they can only be very temporary relief for the working class, as the great global credit meltdown of 2008 shortly and inevitably re-emerges in some form, a hundred times worse then ever.
It will wipe out all such tinkerings even if the obvious domination and control of big money –  the reality of bourgeois “democracy” – were to allow any of them through in the first place.
Only taking everything into working class hands, seizing the means of production completely, can start to change things for good, with a planned commonly-owned socialist economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Certainly, reversing some of the more grotesque elements of endless profiteering privatisation, massive growth in the most extreme inequality, callous workhouse-style “discipline” for the working class, and soup kitchen welfare cuts, all sounds attractive.
For a very short while, depending on the progress of the Great Catastrophic inflationary collapse of the whole capitalist system, it may even alleviate some of the very worst austerity conditions and set back some further Slump impositions.
But it is not going to do much and it is not going to last, even if it is possible at all (which is questionable). 
Any illusion that the “austerity” can go into reverse and economic growth be re-established, seriously disarms the working class which needs to grasp and understand the full depth of the onrushing and intractable capitalist crisis and the need it imposes to take up the fullscale class war against this stinking rotten system.
Cuts are not being made because of wilful or arbitrary nastiness and arrogance by the capitalist boss class – though there is plenty of that in their actions, – and nor are they imposed simply from greed – and there is plenty of that too in this degenerate and ever more unequal “free market” society.
They are made because the entire world monopoly capitalist system has hit the buffers, is burnt out historically, and increasingly paralysed and bankrupted by its own contradictions as long ago analysed by Karl Marx in Capital (see page 6 box).
This latest crisis collapse unfolding beneath the surface is the deepest and most far reaching in all history, because the imperialist capitalist system has developed deeper and longer than ever, and spread its domination and brutal exploitation tentacles further and more comprehensively through the world than any time.
It is historically bankrupt and more rotten ripe for overthrow and replacement with socialism, than ever before.
It staggers on currently only because of great injections into the world finance system of money-printing Mickey Mouse dollars (Quantitative Easing paper and electronic credit, technically speaking) which have kept the monopoly capitalist economic corpse still twitching (while also pushing huge slump burdens onto smaller capitalist economies such as southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Italy), Latin America and the Middle East), and by the international boosts given by revisionist China’s workers state planned economy capacities (pouring in additional spending).
But as the capitalist press sporadically declares, this was never any real “upturn” for most and the resumption of the great catastrophic crash looms over all (whatever complacent “cocktails and latte” delusions persist in the “metropolitan” middle class population eg):
Britain, as a result of what happened between the first inklings of trouble in July 2007 and the bottoming out of a deep slump in the early part of 2009, is an utterly changed country. There has been a lost decade of living standards. Dismal productivity growth and the proliferation of low-paid, insecure jobs have made a mockery of the idea that Britain was forging ahead in the knowledge economy. A decade of investment in the public sector has been followed by a decade of cuts. 
And, to be frank, not a lot has changed in the subsequent 10 years. The economy is still over-dependent on the financial sector and on the willingness of households to load up on debt. When the housing market slows – as in 2011-12 and currently – so does the economy. Income and wealth are highly concentrated because not only has growth been slow it has also been unevenly distributed.
In the workplace, management is strong and unions are weak, which helps explain why real wages have grown more slowly since 2007 than in any decade since the 19th Century. London is rich and thriving but might as well be a separate country given how different it is from other, less prosperous, regions. Relative poverty, as the former prime minister Gordon Brown has shown, is heading for levels not experienced even under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Imperfect though it is, Labour’s draft manifesto at least tries to tackle some of these glaring weaknesses. Sure, there is a perhaps naïve belief in the ability of the state to administer top-down solutions. Certainly, the document can – and will – be criticised for being stronger on how to spend money than how to create it. No question, some of the individual measures don’t really cut it. The £8bn bung to scrap tuition fees, for example, is not especially progressive.
That said, though, there are plenty of good things in the manifesto. The employers who whinge constantly about the poor quality of school leavers and graduates will be asked to contribute more to the education budget through higher corporation tax. Labour plans to broaden stamp duty to a wider range of financial instruments, including derivatives, which will raise £5bn and help lessen volatility.
There is a recognition that macro-economic policy since the crisis has been flawed, with far too much emphasis on ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing and too little on tax and spending measures. Austerity has been tested to destruction, with both deficit reduction and growth much weaker than envisaged. There is a strong case, as the International Monetary Fund has noted, for countries to borrow to invest in infrastructure, especially when they can do so at today’s low interest rates.
Indeed, it is sign of how much ground has been ceded by the left over the last decade that these ideas are seen as dangerously radical. Germany and France have higher levels of corporation tax than Britain, but they also have better trained workforces and higher levels of productivity. A group of eurozone countries are planning a financial transactions tax. Balancing day-to-day spending while borrowing for roads, railways and superfast broadband, which is what John McDonnell is suggesting, is more Keynesian than Marxist.
What’s more, these essentially social-democratic ideas will seem even more mainstream if – as is entirely possible – there is another crisis.
Mohammed El-Erian used to run Pimco, the world’s biggest fund manager. He told the Observer this week that in 2008-09 there was a chance to construct a new growth model, but the opportunity was passed up. Financial markets have been kept happy by an unceasing diet of cheap money but the economic fundamentals are poor. Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the eclipse of both the traditional parties of government in the French presidential election are warning signs that something is seriously amiss.
El-Erian says the developed world is “either going to take a turn towards higher, more inclusive growth that will reduce political polarisation and the politics of anger. Or alternatively, low growth becomes recession, artificial financial stability becomes unsettling volatility, and the politics get a lot messier”.
Things, in other words, are back where they were in the run-up to the crash of 2007-08. Then, the series of regional financial crises in Mexico, south-east Asia, Russia, and Latin America were warnings that something bigger and much more serious was about to happen. These were akin to someone who is obese and a heavy smoker suffering a series of mini strokes and failing to change their lifestyle.
Think about this for a moment. Real incomes are falling. Inequality is rising. The NHS is kept going on a wing and a prayer. The economy is barely rising despite more than eight years of unprecedented stimulus from the Bank of England. Personal debt is heading back towards its previous record levels. International co-operation has rarely been weaker. There is a profound disconnect between the financial markets, where asset prices regularly scale new heights, and the state of the real economy.
Now ask yourself this. If any of the above rings true, what is the real fantasy: Labour’s idea that income, wealth and power should be a bit more evenly distributed or the idea that the current state of affairs can be sustained for very much longer?

The developed world is not going produce the alternative of a “turn towards higher, more inclusive growth” of course however many “good things” in Labour’s manifesto, because it is not within capitalism’s nature, as a system built on exploitation and dog-eat-dog plundering competition.
As the piece suggests, it is teetering on the edge of disaster and cannot do other then slide into worse breakdown than before, hugely intensifying the ever more vicious competition for markets as they have become saturated with too much ever accumulating private capital, “surplus” to requirements and unable to find profitable investment opportunities.
From these the next steps are huge escalation of trade war to bankrupt the competition, and eventually to physically wipe it out, – meaning world war in some manifestation or other. 
That capitalism ever offered any reforms at all in the past was due entirely to its wish to head off revolutionary struggle, with the richest countries offering a small share of imperialist superprofits, squeezed from savage colonial exploitation, to buy off their domestic masses.
Even that was only when they could afford it or were in desperate retreat, as particularly after the great explosions of world revolutionary upheaval which began 100 years ago with the great Russian revolution, and the huge wave of anti-imperialism and communist revolt it inspired, and again after the staggering World War Two sacrifices and struggles of the USSR against the Nazi invasions (essentially a second wave of the Bolshevik revolution) and the even bigger wave of communist and anti-colonial advances that followed. 
Everything gained by the British (and other rich countries') working class post-war was gained because of ruling class fear of total revolution.
And it was possible only for a period, because of the Second World War “cleansing” which had destroyed enough past “overproduction” (and “surplus workers”) to give the clogged capitalist system a (short) breathing space to revive production (using the US victor’s capital mainly, which could make profit again in the empty investment space, creaming off the lion’s share of post-war profits). 
The Labourites will never make any of this clear to the working class.
Nor will they explain just what devastation and collapse is coming; and how it cannot be stopped except by completely ending this eight hundred year old exploitation and profit grabbing system. 
Quite consciously and deliberately these “left” pretenders head the working class away from such understanding.
In a political and economic society as old and wily as British imperialism, there are layers and layers of treachery and misleadership and “left” Labourism is one of the main ones.
The Labour Party has never been anything but a part of the whole “democracy” racket, and the B-team for capitalist rule.
It is, and continues to be even in its “left” format, 100% part of and a supporter of the capitalist system, which is driving the whole world into devastating war, barbarity, Slump and bankruptcy.
The “left” poseurs in the Labour Party, including “maverick” Jeremy Corbyn himself, “Marxist” talking (huh!) John McDonnell and the PC pretenders like Dianne Abbott, have always been part of the whole game, kept in reserve to head off the working class once the crisis really bites and discontent grows that could head towards revolutionary politics.  
So it props up the entire “democracy” fraud, just when the lies and corruption of this “voting” racket are more obvious than ever before and parliamentary trickery more threadbare.
Beyond this hoodwinking pretence is the even further “left” of the 57 varieties of pseudo-”Marxists” mostly propping up Corbynism and “Momentum”.
But no amount of the “left” infiltration and “entryism” etc by the Trotskyists and other fake-“lefts” will transform Labour into a party for the ending of capitalism by revolution, the only way the great crisis Catastrophe can be stopped.
It is a bourgeois party through and through and “left pressure” tactics only further prop up the same game. 
And everything the Corbynite movement has done since it was pushed unexpectedly to the surface by a wave of working class discontent (itself quite genuine) confirms that it will continue the old compromises.
Every “left” pose put forwards by Corbyn and McDonnell and others over the last decades of endless rounds as “guest speakers” on the circuit of assorted “solidarity” and anti-capitalist protest meetings, has been abandoned with a string of Peter-the-Apostle type “Denials”; among them support for the Irish republican struggle, the Palestinians, Cuba, anti-monarchy republicanism, rejection of the (secret state) Privy Council, pacifist “Stop the War” and opposition to Trident nuclear weaponry.
That most of these campaigns are themselves filled with fake-“leftism” anyway, always avoiding all the revolutionary anti-imperialist and communist implications of the causes they espouse, only makes the apostasy that much more craven.
Corbynism’s grovelling compromises with outrageous fascist Zionist accusations of “anti-semitism” to censor and persecute anyone supporting the genocidally persecuted Palestinians for example, (see EPSR 1510) or with maintaining “unity” with the disgusting Blairite reactionaries, and its general ideas of “toning things down”, all help deflate and kill off the movement behind this “renewal” as well.
But whatever happens next (in the election etc) the phenomenon of the “left” upsurge itself – despite a virtually united front of caustic denunciation by the entire bourgeois media (including the state run BBC - now almost indistinguishable from a division of the  Tory Party front office) – is significant.
It is this real working class discontent which lifted Corbyn to the leadership. 
Potentially it could cause all kinds of surprises, even in a supposed Tory “walkover” election with its manipulated press coverage and stitched-up “opinion polls” designed to spread defeatism and notions that everything is a fait accompli.
The demented fearfulness of the bourgeois press campaigning, reaching unprecedented levels of vile character assassination, and the scabby underhand sabotage by the disgusting Blairite careerists, who are nothing but the vilest blackleg scum, reflects a deep-seated nervousness in the ruling class at just how explosive things are becoming.
When even the relatively tame reformist measures being put forwards by Corbynism evoke such fears it shows how “unstable and weak” (to coin a phrase) the ruling class really feels.
There is no “stopping austerity” within capitalism but even posing the issue might dangerously raise questions that can only have revolutionary answers, they fear.
But even allowing for the near-Blackshirt frenzy of the Daily Mail-style press coverage and the sullen middle-class treachery of the self-seeking Blairites, the real problem with the Corbynites is their own hopeless hobbling compromises even of this attempt to give reformism a last go, reining in even the lukewarm “radicalism” that saw Corbyn elected.
Even some more rational Tory bourgeois press commentary finds it frustrating:
Let Corbyn be Corbyn. Just now, he is painful to watch. Pretending to be the next prime minister does not work, nor even pretending to be Labour leader. Watching Jeremy Corbyn as “not Theresa May” is Michael Foot for slow learners.
Two weeks ago Corbyn gave a storming opening speech to his London faithful in Church House, Westminster. It was pure Bernie Sanders. He railed against the rich, the few and an establishment who “wrote their own rules”. He derided the “rigged system”, whatever that was, and the Tory press. He invoked Keir Hardie. His performance was promise-rich and policy-free: irresponsible, wild and wholly at one with his audience.
Since then the rats have gone to work. By this week Corbyn was an echo chamber of “fully costed programmes”, “nailed” Tory lies and 10,000 police. His shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, was babbling arithmetic. His shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, was having a zero-sum moment. Corbyn was stuck between a microphone and a brick wall, having to drone support for colleagues. It was politics as trainspotting.
I doubt if voters give a damn how much a policeman costs or how much corporation tax equals how many doctors. We face the prospect of a week of party manifestos full of reckless promises unbelieved by electors yet shackling future chancellors. They should be vetted by the Office for Budget Responsibility, and carry a health warning: “as plausible as resources permit”. 
The one screaming lesson of the new politics is not that personality matters – we know that – but that it obliterates party. Professional politicians hate the idea, because it renders their election labours superfluous. The Oxford University psephologist David Butler once tried to persuade the big parties not to campaign in selected constituencies, to see whether it made any difference. None dared. Both stuck to nurse for fear of worse.
This is now reinforced by the collapse of traditional parties. The share of the vote of winning parties across Europe has plummeted. In Britain Labour and the Tories took 97% in the 1950s, and it’s barely 60% today. As Ukip and Brexit have shown, sentences beginning “I always vote … ” are virtually defunct. In the recent French election, traditional party support disintegrated. Half the vote went to explicitly anti-establishment candidates, and Emmanuel Macron has no party at all. In November, an estimated 10% of Bernie Sanders’ primary supporters switched to Donald Trump, apparently because they liked his anti-establishment stance.
This is the familiar narrative of the new politics. Voters like individuality, authenticity, directness. In British terms, they warmed (for a while) to Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Alex Salmond: politicians who seemed plain-speaking, unclichéd, sincere, funny – even if in reality they were not. As the US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, voters no longer seek a champion of their interest but a mix of qualities. One thing they do like is someone with whom they could share a barbecue or an elevator. It’s the “my kinda guy” test.
In offering Corbyn to the electorate, the Labour party members chose a rebellious leftwinger, a nuclear disarmer and antiwar campaigner. They chose a bearded, cardigan-wearing, cycling-helmeted Islingtonite with a deep hatred of money, power and privilege. He was never going to bond with his parliamentary colleagues. He was never going to unite the Labour party, a task akin to repairing the Holy Roman Empire. They still chose him.
It was just conceivable, when the snap election was declared last month, that Corbyn might have broken ranks and supported local electoral pacts against the Tories. The case for such a progressive alliance, as set out in The Alternative, by the Greens’ Caroline Lucas and others, is unanswerable. In 2015, 49% of voters went for broadly progressive parties, including Labour, the Lib Dems and nationalists. But at elections they fight each other as rivals.
As a result, 40 to 50 seats that might have gone to a single leftwing candidate went Tory. Then, as now, Westminster tribalism won. Machismo required Labour “to contest every seat in the land”. That is apparently more important than denying the Tories a strong majority – let alone winning elections.
There remained one plausible strategy for Corbyn, and that was to do a Sanders-Trump, and “let Jeremy be Jeremy”. In this vision it was an advantage that he had little hope of winning. Voters of a liberal or progressive outlook could abandon realpolitik and “vote their beliefs”. 
Corbyn should forget about what he would do in power or what it says in his manifesto. Go for broke. Invite a vote for moral outrage, nuclear disarmament and an end to neo-imperial wars. Attack chief executive salaries, crazy energy subsidies and vanity infrastructure projects. Promote universal incomes, prison reform and drug legalisation. We can all draw up our list – sensible or not – but radical ideas seldom get mentioned at elections for fear of frightening the centrist horses. We just get statistics on police and nurses and schools.
My impression is that Corbyn is passionate and sincere about things he believes in. It is the Blairite retreads in his own party that censor his passion.
I don’t care what Labour would do “if in power”, because even if it got there it would be unlikely to do it. But I would like to know what drives its leader, what he cares about, what would be his response to events. I would like him to think the unthinkable.

The cynical “won’t do it” sting in the tail is correct but also reflects the comfortable complacency of the middle class which cannot see the hurricane of crisis collapse which is coming but nevertheless senses that the stirring in the working class cannot be satisfied with craven compromise. 
And Bernie Sanders was no more of a success anyway, equally ready to make his class-collaborating essence clear when he endorsed the monstrous warmonger and big business tool, Hilary Clinton and advancing trade war and protectionist policies for “American jobs” that were indistinguishable from those of Donald Trump.
Besides working class hostility is already surging past Corbynism. 
Its weakness is that it does not yet have any conscious idea of where it wants to go and cannot until a revolutionary movement starts to be built beginning with a far sharper and clearer grasp of the crisis - Leninism in short.
But discussion is stirring.
Far from workers universally taking reactionary xenophobic Brexit positions and turning away from socialism, as the deluges of bourgeois propaganda try to say, and defeatist petty bourgeois “lefts”, they are thinking very hard about things as some of the more interesting bourgeois press election reports, actually going out to talk to people, would suggest.
The need for leadership finds expression in unconscious ways, mostly so far in a vacuum and breakdown of old, no longer useful loyalties.
Typical were comments on a Channel Four News vox pop from workers in Redcar declaring they used to automatically vote Labour but “don’t know what anyone stands for any more and don’t want to vote”.
Similar confusions are reported in the useful “not Westminster” reports from Labourite Guardian reporter John Harris:
Can we now hail this general election as the strangest British contest in living memory? We have a prime minister who affected to go into the campaign full of vim and vigour, but now seems to recoil from the absolute basics of what electioneering entails. If your people shut journalists from a big regional website into a small room for fear they might video something as banal as a visit to a manufacturer of diving equipment – as Theresa May’s campaign apparently did in Cornwall this week – you are surely in a very odd place.
The atmosphere is rendered stranger still by the sense of a completely foregone conclusion. Not in the sense of, say, 2001, when Tony Blair’s muted second triumph reflected a quiescent country sleepwalking through a long economic boom. Rather, there’s a profound tension between an uneasy, divided national mood and a prime minister and party seemingly gliding back to power. Britain does not, contrary to what May claimed at the outset, seem like it is coming together.
Yet this week’s local election results underline the prospect of an imminent landslide, and pollsters claim that she is the most popular party leader since the late 1970s. The reality? There is a look she repeatedly throws, midway between forced politeness and cold fear, that speaks of something rather different: a classically pyrrhic victory, in a country that has no collective clue where it is heading.
Last week I followed much the same route as May traversed a few days later, driving from the western tip of Cornwall to Bristol – from Brexitland to a redoubt of Remainia. Along the way, I met the odd staunch admirer of the prime minister, and a few people who said that Jeremy Corbyn had a vision worth believing in, if only his detractors and opponents would leave him alone. But for the most part I encountered three kinds of voter: disconnected, deceived and dismayed. All were united by a sense of national bemusement.
At the food bank in the Cornish town of Camborne – whose services are expanding fast – a steady stream of people had come to get the standard emergency parcel, not for the “complex reasons” claimed by May last weekend, but because they were skint and in danger of going hungry. One thirtysomething man told me he was employed at a local plastics manufacturer on a flexible-hours contract that often left him unable to buy enough food to feed his family. He was a case study in what Corbyn says is wrong with modern Britain. But despite having voted Labour all his adult life, this man said he was so unconvinced by the party’s new leader that he now considered himself undecided.
In terms of his flickering interest in politics, he was a rarity. Everyone else I spoke to there thought the election was a distant irrelevance. Their predicament barely intruded on the election, and the election did not intrude on them. Here, with distinct echoes of politics in the US, were the very people politicians are prone to kick around: people so wearied by their day-to-day lives that the idea the noise emanating from the TV might offer any convincing change seemed faintly laughable.
Elsewhere in the town, I met people engaged with politics inasmuch as they set great store by Brexit, but who were pretty much unable to explain why they had supported the leave side last year; where they felt the process of leaving the EU was now going; or what this latest vote was all about. That isn’t to say that millions of remain supporters – me included – did not vote the way they did out of a mix of tribal affinity and emotion. But there is a difference: our side was essentially about continuity, whereas theirs now threatens unprecedented disruption, and possible national calamity.
Yes, there are plenty of voters who backed leave out of understandable fury and frustration. But, as evidenced by radio phone-ins and TV discussion shows, there are also many people who spout lines that have long since curdled into cliché, blithely saying they were sick of being bossed around by Brussels – while being unable to give a single example. And at that point, the absurdity of it all turns critical. When I was out with the Lib Dems on a handsome new-build development in Yeovil, one man answered the door and told the canvassers that he had heard there was no reason why Britain should not be out of the EU already, with or without what he kept calling “article 52”.
An hour up the A37, in Bristol, the polarities were reversed. The local pressure group Bristol for Europe – whose mission, however kamikaze-like it might seem, is to resist any kind of Brexit, hard or soft – had set up a street stall outside a Waitrose in Tory-held Bristol North West. Every five minutes or so, someone would look admiringly at their flags and banners and take a badge, or agree to be put on their mailing list.
For the most part these were people with deep liberal-left instincts, now seemingly without a political home. Labour was talked about with a kind of mournful dismay. Mention of the Lib Dems was met with noncommittal shrugs, as if you might just about bring yourself to back them, knowing it was little more than a futile protest vote. In their own way, these adrift remainers seemed almost as lost as the people at the food bank.
What’s this all about? Politics is crying out for a realignment that shows no sign of materialising. Sooner or later, perhaps, Brexit will reveal itself as being disastrous, and the country might be shaken to its senses. But more than anything, we are living through a case study in the often dire consequences of referendums that force people to swing behind simple answers to complicated questions.
Meanwhile, the crisis of political legitimacy that so spectacularly exploded last June goes on, but quietly. Turnout in this general election, I would imagine, will be not much higher than 60%, and the idea that anything has been resolved will have evaporated by the afternoon of 9 June.
In that sense, perhaps, we have a leader who suits the moment, nervously pinballing from one stop to the next, with apparently no idea of where she is going or why – and no more able to explain what is happening than anyone else.

The assumption in this piece that “staying with Europe” would have been any better than the “disastrous Brexit”, offers no clarity either – it says nothing about the real issue that it is capitalism which is collapsing worldwide, and imposing “over-production” trade war, increasingly vicious competition, and cutbacks on workers wherever they are.
“Continuity” is just continuity with a collapsing order.
But it is also true that the focus on Brexit is a disaster for the working class, a diversionary fraud which has been used to try and fill the vacuum, to whip up backward chauvinist attitudes and Little Englander “blame the foreigner” scapegoating, legacies of a long past of imperialist corruption deep into the working class and particularly its TUC-Labourite trade privilege traditions.
Most of the desperate ruling class does not believe a word of it – including the utterly hollow Theresa May (well portrayed by cartoonist Steve Bell as a pathetically empty attempt to ape Margaret Thatcher, herself a mean-minded philistine and narrow petty bourgeois, the archetypal provincial shopkeeper’s daughter).
But they see the usefulness of whipping up chauvinism and finger-pointing as a way to head attention away from the crisis.
It plays along with the now endless and nonsensical “war on terror” and the demonisation of the great anti-Western rebellion erupting through the Third World, (also driven by the crisis and imperialist war blitzing) helping capitalism stir up ever more frenzied “kill them all” blame hatreds against supposedly “evil” jihadism and Islamism etc.  
Both feed the xenophobia and war atmosphere that capitalism needs to fuel the oncoming conflicts as they have constantly escalated over recent decades from the “mere” cutthroat commercial competition of the always viciously antagonistic international battle for monopoly profits, to trade-war and currency wars and then outright tariff blockades, and the eventual world war it is unstoppably heading for (in some form) just as in 1914 and 1939.
Dragging the working class along behind all this as the entire spectrum of the “left” has done is to play the ruling class’s game for it, since it will solve nothing.
The Brexit issue is essentially a capitalist argument and getting involved in it on either side is to identify working class interests with those of its own ruling class, the very essence of class collaboration.
The whole dispute has its origins in the desperation of the moribund British ruling class, trapped between the ever more concentrated monopoly imperialist blocs of the US, Japan, and German dominated Europe, all shaping up against each other in the cutthroat competition for markets which is far more intense and devastating in this very late tail-end period of world dominating imperialism than ever in history.
The agonising and bitter recriminations within the establishment, – and reflected in class-collaborating official TUC trade unionism and Labourism – have been over whether to remain with the economically advantageous EU trading bloc, swallowing its pride at playing second-string to powerful historic rival Germany, in order to fend off other world competition, or whether to go it alone as a freelance, hopefully as a traditional ally of the US (a risky bet given that all imperialists in the last resort are in conflict with all others and certainly that the US is completely contemptuous of the British rulers and their fond delusions of “special relationships - as likely to dump on Britain the moment crisis necessities dictate, as help it out).
Until recently the more “realistic” European wing carried the day (hoping to keep relations with the US at the same time) with mostly only the most reactionary or chinless wonder types, nostalgic for the long-gone days of British empire supremacy, taking the opposite line with the deranged fantasy that there is some kind of inherent “British superiority” able to strut the world scene with impunity and effortlessly command the intellectual, scientific and economic heights.
A pathetically parasitic economy, mostly owned by foreigners anyway, and defeat after defeat and loss of Empire, including of the oldest and nearest Irish colony, says otherwise, and it could have been even worse but for only-just-managed “wins” in two world wars (gained at the cost of mortgaging the empire to the rapacious US rivals) and outright chance luck such as in the Malvinas (“Falklands”) war, which pivoted on the failure of a couple of Argentine bombs to go off, sinking several ships.  
May’s haste to make clear to the Sinn Féin Irish republicans that a “hard border” will not be reestablished in the north as a result of Brexit (thereby tearing up the Good Friday Agreement settlement in which the British essentially conceded defeat to the long running armed national-liberation revolutionary struggle) underlines the hollow reality of this hubris.
It also makes nonsense of the posturing about “sovereignty” even in bourgeois terms, since the very point of “standing alone” with “control of our borders” requires - well, a border.
But the need to try and head off rising discontent in the working class as the endless austerity of the crisis continues has seen an extraordinary sudden jump by the pro-Europe Tories in behind Brexit.
That is not because of any “democratic will of the people” - even more than broader general elections, narrowly specified referenda are a gigantic hoodwinking and manipulated fraud, which even if they “go wrong” for the ruling class, still give the masses no say at all in the real decisions of society, all taken by the ruling class networks behind the scenes.
Instead it reflects the shallowest of desperation by a the ruling class which wants to wants to channel the rising discontents caused by the Slump into petty nationalism.
In times of desperation it will always turn to stirring up notions of the “national interest” and all the chauvinism around it, to head attention away from the class issues and the responsibility of capitalism itself for the mess being imposed on the world.
So the chance to inflame the foulest fascist backwardness, has tipped the balance for the moment even with the formerly “pro” Tories, all pretending that "Brexit means Brexit" etc.
It works to some extent obviously and has kept all political debate narrowly focused on this question for the past 12 months helping keep attention off the dismal failures and Slump impositions of the crisis.
But the voting patterns of the Referendum (with a relatively low turnout), the collapse of the UKIP vote and various accounts like the one above all indicate that much of the working class did not get swept along by it and even the positive vote last year reflected more a rejection of old politics than an embrace of reactionary hostility.
Some were taken in and as the splits with the Nottinghamshire miners indicated during the Great Strike of 1984, there will be sections of the working class taking completely reactionary stooge positions as crisis deepens all the way to eventual class based civil war.
But much of this is due to confusion and lack of any clear leadership.
Of course the answer is not to blame the foreign workers as such.
But nor is it to support them as the pro-Europeans do (and in fact all the fake-“lefts” treading water desperately to try and avoid the obvious closed border implications of their petty Little Englander positions). 
All issuing of moralising statements about the humanity of migrants and how they are just workers too, and how they contribute to the British economy etc which means there should be an open welcome for all migrants solves nothing at all about the difficulties facing the working class.
As the EPSR has previously analysed (eg EPSR 1133, 1135) dismay in the working class is inflamed by the deliberate use of migrant labour by capitalism, which under capitalist conditions, is a real problem.
The influx of opportunist economic migrants, just helps undercut wages, fragment worker organisation and use up local services and welfare provision.
It also drains the most vigorous and active of the working class from their own countries, defusing and deflating what might otherwise be growing revolutionary development there, particularly in the eastern European countries, with their enormous historic legacy of workers state achievements; remittances from migrants workers being one of the factors, along with EU subsidy funding, stopping the full impact of the counter-revolution restored, but bankrupt and crudely oppressive capitalism, being felt more sharply there.
The impact has been hugely escalated in the past decade by near universal use of cheaper labour by bankrupt British capitalism which could not survive any other way.
It is the height of hypocrisy by the Brexiters to pretend that anti-migrant attitudes will not be at the heart of the argument and the critical point.
But it is fatuous nonsense by those “left” groups wanting to remain in Europe that the problem can go away by a more open attitude to migrants. To repeat a point from EPSR 1505:
The “anti-chauvinism” arguments calling for “free movement” of labour as a “right” advanced in Proletarian and by much of the rest of the left are equally hopeless and dishonest.
As the EPSR has carefully unpicked in past argument and polemic (see last issue and Nos 1133, 1134,1135) telling the working class that migrant labour is not a problem is nonsensical – capitalism has always used it precisely as a means of undercutting wages in the destination and of heading off discontent in the countries of origin. As in (EPSR 1085 17-04-01):
“There are arguments to believe that such politically-correct-tinged striving might be counter-productive, even. If it is only the National Front that is ever prepared to argue out loud that waves of economic-opportunist migrants coming into the country and taking up scarce welfare resources, housing, good jobs and good education opportunities, etc, is not necessarily to the immediate practical advantage of already-resident proletarians struggling to get the same scarce things for themselves, and that the unfair ‘foreign monopolist’ system was to blame for all this enforced (and condoned) migratory nonsense, – then would not such ludicrous diversions be as likely to attract proletarian support as the PC anti-racist ‘left reformists’ with their “end all immigration controls” and “welcome to all asylum-seekers, the more the better” slogans, which take politically-correct subjective-idealist philosophy to new heights of absurdity???
Hammer people too ridiculously and too relentlessly for being ‘politically incorrect’ and it is as likely to create a nationalist backlash as anything else.”

The entire problem is unresolvable while the working class is getting no leadership in the complexities of the crisis, and the responsibility of the entire capitalist order for the shortages, unemployment, austerity and reduced welfare.
The working class is left vulnerable to such backward “solutions” with some succumbing to the influence of reactionary and fascist minded groups like the BNP, and the “polite” UKIP who feed the most backward scapegoating nonsense and xenophobia, opening the door to worse fascist violence and hatreds and solving nothing at all about the economic disintegration causing all the problems.
Currently some are taken in enough to vote Tory, a tragic confusion. 
Only by lifting minds to a completely new level of revolutionary struggle, can the working class rise above this Brexit question to focus on the need for the entire world system to go, waging class war against all capitalism.
But that would mean addressing the need to build a revolutionary party, and raises a million questions that have to be gone through, most of all in sorting out the great revolutionary achievements of the 20th century, alongside what mistakes and failures were made which eventually and pointlessly led to the liquidation of the USSR and East European workers states.  
None of the old traditions of Labourism, or Trot and revisionist sectarian pretend-“Marxists”, do anything but suppress the open polemic and debate needed to develop this scientific objective revolutionary grasp.
Instead the “left” all shades keep the argument trapped on one side or the other of Brexit – most taking the “Leave” position, either opportunistically hiding behind the bourgeois “democracy” sophistry that it is the “will of the people” as the Labourites do, (tailending alleged “Leave” opinion which even by the bourgeois vote’s own standards is actually a minority, with most of the population not supporting it, instead of take a lead and challenging it).
Most of the trade union, revisionist and Trotskyist “left” even positively advances all kinds of petty protectionism and “British jobs for British workers” chauvinism, tapping the very worst of past empire based class-collaboration for “superior” British workers and backward delusions that “things could be better” if trade tariffs were imposed.
Far from protecting jobs it will intensify the trade war conflicts and economic breakdown, just as it did in the 1930s.
Others like the Lalkar/Proletarian revisionists hide their Brexit collaboration behind a “theoretical” pretence that leaving Europe “strikes a blow against monopoly capitalism” as such; they identify the “detested” European Union as the main enemy entirely, leaving out the fact that it is world capitalism which is the “detestable” problem.
Workers leaving Europe are simply jumping out of the frying pan into the fire because they will be hammered by the Slump measures whether they are imposed by a “European bosses club bureaucracy” or the rapacious demands of the international market, profiteering hedge funds and American, Indian or Japanese corporations. 
And leaving all that unspoken the Brarites simply play into the hands of the very worst chauvinist and nationalist sentiments.
Worse. For all their formal distancing of themselves from calls for tariff walls and moralising “against xenophobia” the Lalkar line strongly supporting Brexit in itself, plays into the hands of the ruling class to such an extent that its latest paper implies the working class should be voting Tory.
Could revisionist stupidity plunge any further into the depths????
Certainly it could: on the question of Latin America, for example and particularly the current violent Western coordinated  anti-government provocations underway against the left-reformist Maduro government in Venezuela, and the crucial lessons it has for the working class on the dangers of counter-revolution.
This is no separate issue but intimately bound up with potential developments in Britain and everywhere else as the crisis degenerates.
Beyond warning the working class of the useless ineffectuality of “left” Labourism and all associated “left-pressure” politics, and its inevitable sellouts and “compromises”, any real revolutionary political understanding must place at the top of the list the sharpest warning about the delusion of achieving anything through parliament at all. 
If the “left” movement, or some future (likely) breakaway party, were to go beyond the usual class-collaboration and start to seriously challenge the ruling class, to put through substantial measures for the working class at the expense of the profit-makers, it will face not just the deluge of hatred and fascist propaganda currently poured out by the capitalist media, but as much violence and physical suppression as the ruling felt it needed to stop and shut things down.
Most of all the complacent delusion that it “couldn’t happen here” needs to be firmly confronted.
The gold-braided generals have already been on TV and radio several times to “warn” Corbynism away from its pacifism with open threats that a “coup would be necessary” over shutting down Trident for example. 
And that would not be the end of it: the class war underlying all capitalism will always be waged brutally and ruthlessly when the ruling class feels its control and ownership is being threatened, as the workers in Latin America have repeatedly discovered most archetypally in Chile in 1973.
The Chilean populace was assured that the country was as “civilised as Europe” and the army “loyal to its parliamentary authority” by leader Salvador Allende shortly before the CIA backed imposition of the notorious torture and massacre coup that toppled the “democratically installed” socialist government, slaughtering thousands and terrorising the masses to establish General Pinochet’s “neo-liberal” capitalist dictatorship.
And such were the revisionist guided delusions of the Allende government about “peaceful road” change, that he had even invited the generals into the cabinet to suppress the strikes and turmoil that the counter-revolutionaries had been stirring up in the first place. 
But this sharp lesson is not only totally ignored but wilfully suppressed by the posturing “solidarity” circuit of do-gooding liberals, Labourites and “lefts”, always squirming and wriggling away from the actual revolutionary necessities, and most of all the uncomfortable issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat (workers states), the only possible way in which the working class can defend against capitalist savagery and counter-revolutionary violence.
For two decades the ranks of revisionism, “left” Labourism and many of the Trots like Counterfire and anti-communist dilettante “intellectual” Tariq Ali have been singing the praises of the of the Venezuelan-led “Bolivarian Revolution”, the left reformist-nationalist movement focused initially around Hugo Chávez, and which also takes in Evo Morales' left bourgeois movement in Bolivia, reformist pro-worker movements in Brazil under first Lula and then Roussef, a left leaning government in Argentina and for a while a left reformist movement in Paraguay too.
A stream of “solidarity” meetings, support groups, and campaigns, and even the special “Chávez annual lecture” instituted after  his tragic death, has seen all the worthies from these groups make their “guest speaker” appearances to bask in the reflected glory of the supposed “socialist advances”; take solidarity trips to various countries, sometimes courtesy of the embassies, produce films, etc etc.  
All well and good but the crucial question that needed raising from the very beginning has been how these gains and advances could be consolidated and held onto against inevitable endless subversion and skulduggery both by the local  bourgeoisie and equally significantly by the plotting and disruption coordinated by imperialism, particularly through the CIA.
Far from declaring or reporting back that the Western labour movement and the proletarian masses everywhere could both “take inspiration from a new way of struggle” in Latin America and “learn lessons” particularly at a time "when the left is struggling” as they defeatistly declare, what was required was to challenge the weaknesses and flaws in the alleged new “21st century socialism”.
Chávez’ and lately his follow-on Nicolas Maduro’s, declared path of advancing through presidential “democratic” elections and parliament is not new at all, but a disastrous repeat of the same revisionist-inspired “peaceful road” delusions that left the Chilean working class wide open. 
It is certainly not a “revolution” and calling it so is to mislead, precisely on the absolutely core question of Marxism, the question of state power and which class rules.
It has not been answered or dealt with at all, - or rather it has; the bourgeoisie retains ownership of much of the economy and property, controls the major media outlets (pouring out a non-stop diet of counter-revolutionary hatred and poison) and is able to constantly subvert and sabotage the economy and state authority.
It is true that sections of the army supported Chávez and he had, and to some extent Maduro has, mass public support.
But it is insufficient and the illusions in “democracy” are potentially fatal.
But even after the warning shot of an attempted coup against Chávez in 2002 the fake-“left” has not only failed to bring up the critical workers state questions but has actively belittled or outright suppressed and censored any attempts to raise questions of the need for revolutionary understanding and theory to be developed.
It was clear then that only by advancing towards a workers state, and developing the revolutionary understanding of the working class in Chile to struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat could defend the gains that has been made.
Aiming at the dispossession of all vicious local bourgeoisie and the dismantling of the bourgeois states forces, military, judicial, police and media and their replacement with workers militias and a workers army, and above all, workers newspapers and education for Marxist-Leninist revolutionary understanding and in the perspectives of international capitalist crisis collapse were crucial.   
For all its flamboyant defiance of Yankee imperialism and re-direction of oil resources and wealth into working class areas for education, housing and other reforms, these revolutionary questions are the critical ones to deal with the deadly counter-revolutionary threat from both local and international bourgeois.
And that is not to “arrogantly tell the Venezuelans what to do” as the coordinator of the Venezuelan Solidarity group sneeringly declared in an act of breathtaking philistinism as a justification for shutting down and censoring such debate (now blocked in all support meetings) - but to develop critical world wide understanding (and it is a bit rich anyway when the Chávez path is being lauded as an example for all to follow).
And the latest developments throughout Latin America indicate that this disastrous continuing revisionist influence, even nearly three decades after its most telling refutation of all, the stupid and defeatist liquidation of the Soviet Union itself, caused not by the “failure of communism” (the USSR workers state economy was still viable) but by the abandonment of revolutionary grasp and theory, begun way back under Stalin and ripening and rotting to the point of the complacent Moscow bureaucracy simply giving up.
One after the other the “left” reformists have been subverted and toppled with a string of trumped-up “corruption scandals” or alleged “government cover-ups” to manipulate right wing elections as in Argentina or topple regimes through stitched up “judicial coups” as in Paraguay and Brazil, or even the outright coup carried through in Honduras in 2009, consolidated ever since with brutal death squad suppression of “activists” and opposition journalists and the development of massive mafia drug and extortion gang warfare (the “free market”) - as rampages throughout the much larger capitalist Mexico.
At the heart of it is endless subversion of the Venezuelan regime, a prime target for imperialism because of its oil wealth, the dogged determination of its reformism and nationalism, its links with the Cuban workers state just when the Moscow revisionist collapse had left it most vulnerable (with help and aid to and fro reciprocally) and its undoubted inspirational influence on the whole of Latin America particularly despite its reformist limitations and confusions.
But that subversion is precisely the point of the argument, continuing non-stop as the EPSR warned in 2002 (EPSR 1132 16-04-02):
If the ‘left’ ever did win enough parliamentary influence to bring in ‘socialist’ measures, the imperialist system’s world-wide power of military domination,- acting behind the local permanent bourgeois-monopoly dictatorship in economic, propaganda, social, and state-office influence, would forever relentlessly escalate its counter-revolutionary coup preparations until it eventually DID succeed in bringing down or totally undermining in one way or another the offending ‘socialist’ development.
Despite the CIA’s failure this time, the Chávez regime is now in greater danger than ever before. The most cretinous lesson of all to draw from this coup debacle would be the idiot conclusion that some fake-’lefts’ will come to that “the strength of democracy and the power of people’s democratic protests proved mightier than the CIA’s big business and military plotters”.
This was exactly the mistake made by the ‘left’ about Allende in Chile, who also survived some initial coup-attempts against him during his ‘socialist’ government of 1970-73, only to be bloodily wiped out when the CIA decided to further escalate its coup preparations regardless of the ever-greater risk of public international exposure. 

All the techniques used against the Allende and more are on show in Venezuela, with deliberate economic strikes and sabotage by the bourgeoisie, withholding vital commodities from the market to imbalance prices, a non-stop stream of hostile propaganda, and the provocation of violent demonstrations (all originating in the hostile rich neighbourhoods), property damage and disruption and deliberate terrorising of local poor neighbourhoods including with outright fascist methods (notably stretching decapitation wires across roads to kill motor cyclists).
The difficulties for the Maduro regime have been compounded by the imperialist crisis itself, which has undermined much of the oil export income that the country relies on (and which underpinned the capacity of the Chávez regime to put through measures to benefit the working class) – another reason to first and foremost educate the working class with an international Leninist perspective, to strengthen it against the lying propaganda blaming “socialist mismanagement” as has poured out in the international bourgeois press, as in the “liberal” but in fact relentlessly anti-communist Guardian, failing to comment at all on the distinctly un-democratic and violent nature of the demonstrations, and uncritically declaring “widespread discontent”.
Only among the reactionaries it should be commented.
Of course economic conditions are tight – and Maduro could maintain mass support far better if the working class was fully educated in just why - the collapse of the world imperialist economy which has been forced onto their shoulders.
Classically, the justified and necessary state responses to these provocations are used to beat it even further: 
The demonstration began with a group of schoolboys, who gathered – still dressed in their school uniforms – in the palm-lined square outside the town hall of the prairie town of Villa del Rosario in western Venezuela.
Before long, some kind of flammable liquid was thrown at a life-sized statue of the late president Hugo Chávez and set alight. And then, to cheers from onlookers, the figurine itself – which appeared to be made of glass-fibre or plastic – was pulled down and dragged into the street.
In terms of historical significance, the incident is unlikely to rank alongside the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s 12-metre statue in Baghdad, shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
But the destruction of the statue last Friday did not go unnoticed in a country where many public buildings are still adorned with images of Chávez, four years after his death.
Over the weekend, cellphone pictures and footage of the incident went viral in Venezuela, where widespread discontent with President Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, has erupted into near-daily protests.
Since then, the gesture has been repeated elsewhere: in Ureña, a town in western Venezuela, a bust of Chávez disappeared from a public square, and in the late leader’s home state of Barinas, a mural with the leader’s face reproduced in the style of Warhol’s Marilyns was defaced.
Some argue that such incidents demonstrate that after years of economic chaos, food shortages and government repression, Venezuelans have finally reached the breaking point.
“This showed that the government is hitting rock-bottom,” said Marinelis Soto, an accountant who lives near Villa del Rosario. “This happened in a town that used to be pro-government – and now people are so angry that they are constantly blocking roads.”
But others warn that, as Maduro moves forward with plans to rewrite the country’s constitution despite six weeks of anti-government protests – talk of a tipping point still seems premature.
Hundreds of thousands have joined near-daily demonstrations, but many ordinary Venezuelans – and the country’s political and military elites – remain loyal to Chavismo, ideology following in the footsteps of Chávez. And according to Luís Vicente Leon, a leading pollster, the collapse of authoritarian regimes is more often caused by internal splits than outside pressure.
One sign of such internal divisions came in March when the country’s attorney general, Luisa Ortega, condemned an attempt by the government-stacked supreme court to strip the opposition-led congress of its power as “a rupture of the constitutional thread”.
The move was soon put on hold, but Ortega has since become more outspoken. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, she condemned the government’s mismanagement of the economy and expressed support for the protesters.
Last week, the death of a 17-year-old viola player prompted the conductor Gustavo Dudamel – who had been criticised for not speaking out – to issue a statement criticizing the government and demanding Maduro to put an end to violence.
Maduro’s decision to call for a constituent assembly has also earned him criticism from high-ranking figures on the left of his party, who see the move as an affront to Chávez’s legacy. (Chávez oversaw the drafting of a new constitution in 1999, which he declared was “perfect”.)
“The Constituent assembly is a risky step and a great historical responsibility. It opens a space through which elements that destroy our revolution could enter,” Rafael Ramírez, Venezuelan ambassador to the UN and one of Chávez’s key allies, wrote in a local newspaper over the weekend.
Although pressure on Maduro may be mounting, it is still not coming from two key areas, Leon said. “The electoral authorities validated the constituent assembly, and perhaps most important, we haven’t seen the military express dissent,” he said.
Monica Pérez, who lives close to the square where the Chávez monument once stood, said that the toppling of the statue had galvanized the opposition in the town.
“We all feel the moment is now, and we must continue in the streets until the end.”

The “Saddam statue toppling” in Iraq was later revealed to be Western organised stunt to “prove popular support” for the 2003 invasion, a slightly harder propaganda point to make in the light on non-stop anti-occupation struggle since and the great wave of anti-Western “jihadism”.
It was this upheaval, constantly growing as the Western blitzkriegs have devastated lives in the Middle East, and the subsequent mass spontaneous revolutionary upheavals in the Tunisian and Egyptian Arab Spring, which have occupied Washington and the rest of imperialist attention for the last decade, thereby allowing the Latin American movement to make some headway.   
   The temporary suppression of much of this huge anti-imperialist upheaval by the bloody and horrific blitzkrieg onslaughts in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, against the Sunni revolt in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and by the provocation of the Syrian civil war, leaving country after country in devastated war-torn destitution, with millions blown to fragments, tortured or facing a horrible death by famine, (shamefully abetted by the fake-“left”s craven capitulation across the board to the “war on terror”)  - has allowed imperialist subversion to turn its attentions back to the US’ “backyard”.
But it is going to have a hard time. Revolt and demonstration against the  corruption and austerity being reimposed is exploding in Brazil, Paraguay and elsewhere and the rest of the exploited world is increasingly in turmoil too; South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and South Asia. 
What is missing is the crucial grasp of Leninist revolutionary theory and the open polemic to advance it.
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.

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

~~~~~~~~~~~

"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.)

~~~~~~~~~~~

" 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."

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.

Name ............................

Address.........................

Postcode........................

For a £25 annual subscription to receive EPSR by firstclass post
every Wednesday, write to (but send no money initially):
EPSR, PO Box 50, L0NDON, SW17 9NL