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 1513 1st June  2017                                                                                                        25p fortnightly

     
Capitalist blitzkrieg and torture long imposed on the Middle East, plus its “exterminate, exterminate” response to the jihadist rebellion caused, is alone responsible for pain and grief of the Manchester bombing.  Blaming suicide desperation of the alienated masses of the world who want imperialist domination off their backs is total cynicism by a barbaric system that is using the “war on terror” as an excuse and justification for the  bullying warmongering it is creating itself. The capitulation to this “condemnation” by the liberals and fake-“left” is the real cowardice. Blairite and liberal shouting down of the idea British foreign policy is to blame is as fascist minded as UKIP nationalist hate campaigning, but tepid “No to War” social pacifism undermines itself by also declaring jihadists an “abomination” instead of tackling why this terrorism is occurring at all, explaining the world is being dragged deliberately to international hostility and vicious scapegoating so capitalism can evade responsibility for its intractable and unsolvable crisis collapse.  If jihadism is the “wrong way” then revolutionaries need to offer better leadership and understanding not denunciation. Leninism needed

The really sick part of the Manchester bombing tragedy is the continuing pretence that it is “impossible to understand what drives someone to do such a terrible things”.
“Out of the blue” some “deranged” or “evil” individual – or one “brainwashed by evil people” – decides for reasons of pure irrational malice to slaughter the innocents.
They “hate our way of life” the mantra runs, as if these are goblins or demons from some other world, “dark forces” trying to break apart some otherwise virtually perfect fairy-tale society of harmony, ever-rising prosperity and “democratic peacefulness”.
Or perhaps that a mass outbreak of psychosis has inexplicably taken hold, equally ready to break up our lovely lives for no rational purpose at all.
And these terrible “distortions of humankind” somehow have come about quite suddenly in the last few years, it is implied, quite independently and disconnected from anything the monopoly capitalist West might be doing, supposedly sitting quietly minding its own business and bothering no-one.  
It is all the most monstrous mystical fascist gobshyte, cynically and deliberately pumped out by the Western intelligence agency propaganda units, into a willingly collusive political and media establishment to cover up the real and obvious cause of this increasingly destructive mayhem – the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist world itself and the turn it has made to endless international warmongering, nazi repression and blitzkrieging on top of its rapacious Third World exploitation through 300 years or more of brutal colonialist wars, non-stop barbarity, massacres, torture and terrorising, slavery and plundering.
Of course the attack’s perpetrators, and great masses of the Third World who cheer them on, really do “hate our way of life”.
“They” have good reason.
“Our” way of life of alleged “democracy” and the “free market” is built on their nonstop exploitation, humiliation, degradation and poverty at the best of times, extracting the great monopoly superprofits which alone keep the supposedly superior Western “lifestyle” going with its sick, individualist and self-centred shallow consumerism and philistine anti-communist pop and celebrity “culture”. 
And it is maintained with total terrorising repression, torture and slaughter if they should ever begin to demonstrate, rebel or resist, let alone embark on all out revolution or armed struggle, the only way that they will ever change things. 
Throughout the Middle East and further afield too in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, they see their own women and children repeatedly blasted and bombed into fragments, and their own efforts to resist with whatever primitive means they can assemble, droned and missiled and pounded into the floor. 
And these savageries and atrocities have taken place not randomly, once every decade or so, but systematically and repeatedly for nearly 20 years, with some deadly violence being imposed somewhere at least every day if not more. 
The alienation created everywhere by this barbaric Western imperialism is what leads to this anarchic devastation and all the way into the heart of the dominant powers themselves.
If for the moment it uses the crudest and most “inhuman” methods, it is because the terrorists see no other avenues open for their desperation and despair.
Of course the agonising pain of the victims of suicide attacks and their bereaved relatives is totally arbitrary, unjust and undeserved, in the Middle East as well as in Manchester, the rest of Europe, in the Beslan school massacre in Chechnya, in Kabul and in the centre of Mogadishu, in the Philippines’ Mindinao and the Bali bombing.
The sectarian targeting and brutal infighting of the jihadist forces is frequently even counter-productive, letting the real enemy, imperialist domination, off the hook, and the religious puritanism of their ideology is a long way from any scientific Marxist understanding, which alone can give the leadership and understanding finally to change the world by ending capitalism. 
But simply to ask how horrible and “inhuman” is it to blow children and young teenagers apart, (or masses of civilians in cities like Kabul, Cairo and Baghdad) and to condemn it, is to limit any possible real solution to the question to a “moral” stance that will change nothing but will continue to capitulate to the entire crisis-caused Western war drive which has forced all this struggle to the surface and massively inflamed and intensified it (and long before 9/11 happened).
It is also to completely mislead the world’s masses about what are the causes of growing mayhem and destruction.
Instead of giving the working class a clear objective view of the world class struggle and the collapse and breakdown of the capitalist system, it helps muddy the water with continuing delusions in “freedom” “democracy” and the “rule of law” ostensibly threatened by a “rising tide” of “fanatical Islam” and its plans to “dominate the world”.
But it is utter nonsense deliberately hyped by the disinformation from the Western imperialist order (which does already dominate the world).
Whatever is in the heads of the Third World revolt, it is neither capable of establishing a world Caliphate, nor of coming anywhere close to it.
If for the moment such backward religious notions have been adapted as leadership in parts of the desperate world anti-imperialist struggle it is only because there is a vacuum of clearer revolutionary understanding left by Moscow’s (and all the world CP movement’s) long, slow revisionist retreat from Leninism and its eventual liquidation of the USSR, and continuing delusions in “peaceful democratic” paths (still hampering the fight everywhere and particularly in Latin America, notably at present, where the abandoning of the central concept of Marxist understanding – the mass class war to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat – has left a string of left reformist struggles unnecessarily facing deadly counter-revolution and subversion from the continuing intact bourgeois class from Venezuela to Brazil and particularly Colombia).   
Marxism is about a material understanding of the world and the balance of class forces, and does not start from what is in people’s heads (idealism), unless it is the conscious struggle for dialectical materialist understanding which alone can coincide as best as possible with the objective reality and lead the historically necessary revolutionary ending of capitalism and subsequent building of a planned socialist world.
And that reality will eventually force (in the sense of make unavoidable) a transformation of understanding onto all such turmoil in the world, changing or displacing its leadership – and the more so that it defeats or pushes back imperialist domination, and long before any such Caliphate notions have gone very far. 
There is no “third” and reactionary rising force in the world, as some of the barmier “left” assert, and such remnants of primitive tribalist monarchy there are, in the Gulf eg, are kept going artificially only by imperialist military support.
But this has no future in the modern world and for all their “funding of Islamic schools” etc they are not the critical factor in the rise of ISIS and other movements because, once again, it is not ideas that are the motor for world history but the objective conditions and contradictions.
It is capitalism and its crisis collapse alone which is responsible for steadily wrecking the lives and livelihoods of everyone on earth and pushing the entire planet into ever increasing turmoil and hatred - including generating the anarcho-terrorist and jihadist rebellion against it (by which is not meant “CIA manipulation” posited by assorted and mostly obsessional conspiracy theories – for all that such skulduggery is attempted by imperialism in places, it is not the root cause of these spontaneous and anti-imperialist outbursts).
Only overturn of capitalism can stop terrorism and chaos and rescue humanity from total degeneration into destructive Third World War for which the Middle Eastern chaos is merely the opening chapter.
Ask the millions in Iraq, and Syria and Libya and Lebanon who variously see or have seen such horrors and atrocities imposed by Western imperialism day for the last five decades alongside every other kind of agonising destruction and butchering, from all out war to the slow death from chemical poisoning, hunger and the absence of medicines and medical tools, caused by the strangling imperialist blockades and sieges euphemistically imposed as “sanctions”. 
In Iraq in ten years of the 1990s between two devastating invasions this killed 2 million people or more, including half a million children. 
Ask the populations of all the Middle East in countries not just bombed and terrorised by the West but reduced to primitive backwardness (from once dignified and advanced civilisation) with the infrastructure wiped out for providing even the very most basic elements of human life like clean water, medical help, electricity and even sanitation.
Iraq was pulverised 1990 and 1998, and repeatedly since 2003, death squads ran riot (by deliberate Washington intent), corruption and degeneration was entrenched by the US-stooge “government” and city after city completely flattened.
The hatred in the region of that monstrous destruction, and the 2008 world economic collapse, triggered the gigantic anti-imperialist uprising in Egypt christened the Arab Spring which led to even greater savagery to try and contain it and the potential explosive revolt of the entire region it threatened to inspire.
Whole cities were destroyed in next door Libya by the nazi-NATO onslaught which brought down the perfectly sound and relatively equitable bourgeois nationalist society run by Colonel Gaddafi after the fizzling out of a counter-revolutionary “colour revolution” lyingly passed off as part of the Arab Spring – an invasion predicated on a complete Goebbels big lie about threatened “genocide in Benghazi” since admitted to be an utter fabrication, (just as the second Iraq war itself, which set going the entire stinking fascist mess of the laughably meaningless “war on terror” began with the Blair/Bush big lie about WMD).
Libya is now a mess of warlordist permanent civil war, a deadly real-life manifestation of some Mad Max fantasy writ large.
For the same anti-Arab revolt agenda, Syria has been torn to sectarian shreds with a civil war of almost unparalleled barbarism and depraved violence, ethnic cleansing, and brutality triggered by deliberate Western subversion and provocations from the beginning, inflamed with a massive one-sided propaganda deluge of lies and unsubstantiated allegation and fed and sustained with a lavish pipeline of arms and finance, sophisticated terror training and covert military support from the most reactionary trillionaire sheikhdoms, stoogery like Jordan and Western and Zionist “covert forces” and secret snipers.  
Even cruder devastation is now being imposed on behalf of Saudi Arabia’s backward feudalism on the millions in Yemen for their presumption after the stimulus of the Egyptian  uprising in struggling to get out from under their own Western stooge regime and to pursue a fight for democracy.
So they have suffered an endless, British armed and British run (for a lavish fee), air and proxy ground war for the last 18 months, with their historic and culturally significant cities smashed to pieces by hundreds of one tonne and half-tonne high explosive bombs any one of which is 100 times the size and explosive power of anything a suicide bomber can carry, with cluster munitions and other high technology blowing packed meetings halls apart, wedding parties, civilians in their cities and ancient streets.
This barely reported fascism was described by the Tory defence minister Michael Fallon on Radio 4 as “self-defence” against some alleged cross border raids!!!!
It is defence only against the democratic upheavals that might be stimulated in Saudi itself.
To punish such minor incidents the entire country has been flattened.  
Ports are deliberately pounded into twisted metal so that food cannot be brought to head off outright famine, now threatening seven - seven! - million lives with slow painful death by starvation. 
There are no huge headlines and pictures of bouquets piled up in Sana’a or throughout the whole of Yemen (or Sirte or Benghazi, Mosul or Raqqa for that matter), assuming they could afford bouquets in the first place. 
There is no concern and sympathy and non-stop front-page emotional reporting of the agony and grieving and pain of not just a few but tens of thousands of mothers, sisters, brothers and fathers throughout the Middle East. 
No highly publicised investigations of are made of where these weapons and bombs were obtained or the sanctimonious damning of those who dropped them.
No sanctimonious hypocrisy pours out about “cowardly” attacks.
Are the pilots, flying high and clear over the Yemeni deserts or over Mosul in Iraq when they drop their fragmentation bombs on invisible targets below, somehow more “brave” than the suicide-vest wearers who deliberately and systemically choose their own death to carry out their attacks?
Or are the drone operators guiding in the Hellfire missiles from their remote-control drone joystick consoles in faraway Florida, or on an East Anglian airbase, more “heroic”???? 
Are the big arms corporations to be celebrated as they design and manufacture ever bigger and more horrifying anti-personnel weaponry far beyond the scope of the amateurish “jihadists” and their deadly enough nuts and bolts backpacks?
This indescribable Middle Eastern non-stop horror has already killed hundreds of thousands and left an entire region wrecked.
That it generates jihadist and terrorist rebellion against the West is not only unsurprising but guaranteed.
But even the most tentative voice suggesting Western responsibility is instantly shouted down in a demented chorus of “patriotic outrage” streaming forth from all sides of the establishment spectrum, including the majority of the Labourite MPs themselves, like the populist Blairite Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and the great tail of fake-“left pretenders who long ago jumped on the “condemnation” wagon, to make clear to the ruling class that when it comes down to it, they can be relied on to be on the right side, despite all their “revolutionary” theatricalities.
So it was when “left”-Labourite leader Jeremy Corbyn ventured that Western blitzkrieging “punishment” – British foreign policy – might be part of the problem and that therefore stopping the bombing of the Middle East might be a useful move.
A few more thoughtful bourgeois commentators took it up:
Jeremy Corbyn is perfectly right to relate this week’s Manchester terrorist atrocity to British foreign policy in the Middle East. Whenever Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron struggled to explain why British blood and finance had to go on toppling regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, they were explicit: it was “to prevent terrorism in the streets of Britain”. The reason was given over and over again: to suppress militant Islam.
When that policy clearly leads to an increase in Islamist terrorism, we are entitled to agree with Corbyn that it has “simply failed”. Regimes were indeed toppled. Tens of thousands died, many of them civilians every bit as innocent as Manchester’s victims. Terrorism has not stopped.
Whenever al-Qaida or Isis seek to explain their atrocities, reference is usually made to British intervention and the military killing of innocent Muslims. It is mendacious to try to sanitise our overheated and jingoistic response to domestic terrorism by pretending that it is unrelated to British foreign policy. It was we who made the link, and before the terrorists did.
Of course this does not exonerate anyone. Yes, militant Islamists are seeking to subvert the west’s sense of security and its liberal values. Yes, the west’s continued bombing of markets, hospitals, weddings and villages is “accidental” – albeit inevitable, given the nature of modern air war.
But we used the language of “shock and awe” in bombing Baghdad in 2003. We gave the current era of Islamist terrorism a cause, a reason, an excuse, however perverted. We committed armed aggression against sovereign peoples who had not attacked us.
Where Corbyn spoils his pitch is in relating terrorism not just to foreign policy but to domestic austerity. He stoops to Theresa May’s level in seeking to make electoral capital from a tragedy. Were he not grandstanding himself, he could accuse her of peddling the politics of fear by flooding the streets of the capital with soldiers. He could plead with the Muslim community to do more to combat and expose terrorist “grooming”. But there is no evidence that the security services are impeded in their work by staff shortages. It is the one aspect of policing that has been showered with money.

Corbyn “spoils his pitch” as does the Simon Jenkins piece itself, because this brief flash of objectivity, forced to the surface by this shattering blow inflicted on the British capitalist state, is still nothing more that the most half-hearted social-pacifism which continues itself to denounce this Third World driven upheaval as criminal or “unacceptable” or “the wrong way” or an “abomination” and all the other code words for outright “condemnation” used by the “left” of all shades.
As with every “left” feint made by the Corbynites, from support for the Irish national liberation struggle to abolition of the monarchy, it proves to be hollow fraud anyway, with an instant backing away from the position as soon as it is challenged.
However much headway its “left” pretence is making currently against the Tory arrogance, Labour remains completely a bourgeois party which will do nothing to end capitalism, the only possible way to change things, or even to seriously alter its warmongering course.
Nor will it even warn the working class about the inevitable unstoppable crisis failure of the whole system, disarming it with fantasies about “reversing” austerity. 
No attempt has been made to publicly defend even this tiny glimmer of rationality and its social pacifist notion is anyway a million miles from the only real answer to imperialist domination and warmongering, which is the class war struggle to defeat capitalism and finally bring it down completely.
Neither Corbyn nor Jenkins diverge from the overall Western demonisation of the Middle Eastern and jihadist struggle as some kind of irrational and reactionary upheaval and therefore play right into the hands of the imperialist agenda.  And Jenkins’ acceptance that Western bombing of civilians is just “inevitable” is a credulous nonsense; the terrorising, torture and blasting is a deliberate and knowing part of the Western onslaughts as it has been repeatedly revealed in leaks and whistle-blowing accounts and as it is obviously the case now in the devastation being wrought on the Sunni-ISIS strongholds in Iraq by the stooge government forces, trained, “advised”, guided and funded by Western imperialism and the thousands of “special forces”, which it has placed alongside them:
Members of an elite Iraqi unit that has been praised by the United States have been photographed torturing and executing suspected ISIS operatives in the northern city of Mosul.
The shocking footage and images taken last month by an Iraqi photojournalist show at least six separate violent incidents towards detainees by the anti-militant commandos, ABC News reported on Thursday.
Ali Arkady smuggled the images out of Iraq after he spent months embedded in combat with the Emergency Response Division, an elite cadre that operates under the authority of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.
The disturbing images show how members of the ERD detain and confine suspected ISIS militants before torturing them into making false confessions.
In some cases, they even carried out what they called ‘field executions. Arkady, 34, was working on assignment for VII, a news agency that covers warzones.
Arkady smuggled the images out of Iraq after he spent months embedded in combat with the Emergency Response Division, an elite cadre that operates under the authority of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.
Arkady says he witnessed a number of occasions in which ERD beat, tortured, and even killed Iraqis despite little to no evidence suggesting they had links to ISIS.
As an Iraqi Kurd and Sunni Muslim, he was drawn to the ERD because he was impressed by how its commanding officers were of rival Sunni and Shi’a sects that were working together to dislodge ISIS.
But Arkady got more than he bargained for when he began to get an up-close view of actual combat
The troops entered the home of a suspected ISIS militant and pulled a man out of the bed in which he slept with his family.
‘You’re scaring the children,’ the man’s wife told the soldiers, who pressed him against the wall.
Arkady began documenting the incident as Capt. Nazar punched the man in the head 15 times.
The officer then told him to recite the pledge of allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The officer then told Arkady to edit the video footage of the incident to make it appear as if the man recited the pledge without being coerced to do so.
It was clear to Arkady that Nazar knew the man he had assaulted and from whom he had extracted a forced confession had no ties to ISIS.
A man and his two sons were accused by ERD of making bombs.
After he was taken into custody, the father was hanged from the ceiling of a darkened room by a rope, which extended from a hook to his bound wrists.
The man suffered dislocated shoulders as a result of the torture technique, which is known as ‘strappado,’ a method which dates back to the Spanish Inquisition.
To inflict even more pain, a large case of several bottles of water were placed on his shoulders.
The man was then kicked and punched before he was cut down and interrogated.
An ERD officer told the father that he would kill him and his sons if they did not confess to making improvised-explosive devices for ISIS.
‘We are special forces,’ the officer warned the captive. ‘We conduct field executions. That is what I am telling you for your own sake.’
In one particularly gruesome incident, the photographer filmed as two half-brother – a used car salesman and a falafel stand operator – from the town of Bazwaia were tortured for seven hours.
ERD called upon a man who spoke perfect American-accented English, ‘Ali Mushtarakah,’ to carry out the torture.
He used live wires to shock the two men. He then ripped out the beard of one of them while threatening to cut off the ear of the other if he did not recite the ISIS pledge of allegiance.
ERD has in the past earned praise from US military officers due to their efforts to drive ISIS out of Mosul. 
When presented with Arkady’s footage, the US military reversed course, saying in a statement that it no longer provided aid to ERD.
Despite denials that the US aids ERD, the unit still uses American-supplied equipment, including Humvees and Carl Gustav anti-tank launchers,
Ali Mushtarakah told Arkady that he worked as a contractor and interpreter for US troops in Iraq for about 10 years.
While Ali Mushtarakah continued with his torture of the two men, Arkady left the house in which it was taking place.
The next morning, Arkady says he received a video clip from an ERD soldier.
The clip showed what appeared to be the two brothers lying dead on the same floor where they were tortured.
The soldier is seen in the video poking at the bodies of the two dead detainees.
He said the executions were retaliation for the targeting of a senior Shi’a militia leader.
‘We took revenge,’ said the soldier, Ahmad Abu al-Fathil.
Before ERD realized that Arkady and his family had fled Iraq, they sent him another video, this one a 14-second clip filmed by a cell phone.
It shows two ERD officers executing a handcuffed prisoner by shooting nine bullets into his back.
Despite initial denials by the ERD, Captain Nazar confirmed to ABC News that Arkady’s footage was authentic.
He was also unapologetic about his group’s tactics.
Nazar said that the execution of the handcuffed prison was justified because he ‘is not human, he is a monster.’
The footage uncovered by Arkady raises questions as to whether American forces in Iraq who are helping local ground troops in their fight to liberate Mosul from ISIS knew of the widespread human rights abuses.
In 2015, sickening pictures and videos emerged that claimed to show Iraqi soldiers from the ERD and the Golden Brigades torturing and beheading ISIS prisoners in apparent revenge attacks.
The images were posted on social media in recent days reportedly by US-trained Iraqi Special Forces who are advancing against jihadi strongholds.
One Instagram account under the name of Iraqi_lion18 contained numerous pictures of severed heads and mutilated bodies.
The account holder vowed ‘revenge’ for the massacre by ISIS of hundreds of military cadets at a base near Tikrit called Camp Speicher in June 2014.
Two months before those images emerged, however, the US military said that it was pleased with its partnership with ERD.
US Army Col. Brett Sylvia, the commander of Task Force Strike in Baghdad, told reporters that American officers had recently advised the ERD and called them ‘a very effective fighting force.’
‘The US has not provided military aid, arms or assistance to the Emergency Response Division,’ the embassy told ABC News.
When the military was told that ERD troops have been observed using US-provided equipment such as Humvee trucks and ‘Carl Gustav’ anti-tank launchers, it declined to comment further. 

The Pentagon has admitted that airstrikes it carried out on a house in western Mosul killed at least 105 civilians in one of the deadliest attacks anywhere in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.
The final toll could be as high as 141, an investigation into the 17 March attack has found, with 36 people still unaccounted for. Nearly all those killed had taken shelter in a house as a battle raged between Islamic State (Isis) forces who were in the area and Iraqi military special force units.
Searing images of bodies being dug from the pancaked ruins of the house were broadcast around the world amid allegations that the fight for Mosul’s densely packed neighbourhoods was too often being ceded to high-flying jets to avoid ground clashes with Isis.
A Pentagon investigation released on Thursday found that Isis fighters had planted explosives in the house, causing secondary explosions that caused the house to collapse.
The report said that a US jet dropped a 500lb bomb shortly after 8am, targeting two Isis fighters who had taken up positions on the roof of the house in the Jadidah neighborhood.
It says the bomb should have killed the pair, but instead caused a blast that leveled the house, which was made of reinforced concrete and considered by locals to be the sturdiest structure in the area.
Four more civilians sheltering in another home were killed by debris from the blast. US Central Command said it did not know civilians had taken shelter in the home.
US officials say they went through close to 700 hours of footage taken from jets during, before and after the attack and sent investigators to the scene in the aftermath. The investigation compared explosive residue from the type of bomb dropped by the fighter jet with residue found at the scene.
“Post-blast analysis detected residues common to explosives used by Isis, but not consistent with the explosive content of a GBU-38 munition,” US Central Command said in a statement.
The Guardian visited the scene five days after the attack and witnessed rescuers digging through heaped piles of wreckage where the house once stood. Witnesses said close to 150 people had been in the home when it was bombed. Most locals interviewed said that people had willingly taken shelter. However, several also claimed that Isis had urged fighters to use the home as a refuge.
Witnesses made no mention of secondary explosions and instead pointed to houses all around that had endured similar destruction. Airstrikes caused immense damage on the day of the battle, with bombs regularly targeting homes from 8am until late afternoon. Iraqi ground forces called in the airstrikes.
Damage to the house had been so catastrophic that only a handful of people – as few as six – survived. Many more survived the explosion itself, but died before rescuers could free them from the rubble. A full rescue effort was not launched until four days after the attack, because Iraqi ground forces said the area was too dangerous to send in search and rescue teams.
One woman, Lina Shaab Ahmad, who dug herself out of the front of the house, said she was taken to a nearby clinic by Iraqi forces who showed little concern for her or those still buried.
Other survivors said they suspected they were an embarrassment to Iraqi forces who worried that exposure of the atrocity may lead to the ground campaign being halted.
Airstrikes were indeed stopped over western Mosul for more than two weeks. And, ever since, the going has been tough through maze like streets still filled with trapped civilians.
Iraqi and US forces say that more than 90% of the city has now been freed from Isis, with only a pocket in the northwest remaining under the terror group’s control.
The Jadidah attack accounted for about one-quarter of civilian casualties in the war against Isis, the US said. “Our condolences go out to all those that were affected,” Major General Joe Martin said. “The coalition takes every feasible measure to protect civilians from harm.”

So “no more than 500 civilians butchered” this campaign, says the “protective” US intervention nearly two decades after beginning the “war on terror”. 
Some freedom and democracy it could be commented even if these very hard to believe figures are accepted at all from an imperialist power that has killed tens of thousands in Iraq and bombed tortured and rampaged all around the Middle East and still does.
And it is no “defence” for a system purporting to be bringing “the rule of law” to declare that “ISIS is beyond the pale and therefore deserves it” – in Iraq particularly this is no more than the continuing anti-occupation struggle generated by the Big Lie 2003 invasion, and one which learned all of its ghastly terror methods from imperialism itself.
The “war on terror” began with the B-52 pounding of much of Afghanistan, driving millions into refugee camps and enclaves and ripping up whatever mean and humble existence they had for scratching a living, while unleashing a warlordist civil war which continues to this day, compounded by the non-stop western intervention, still with thousands of troops on the ground who have achieved precisely nothing except to create one of the most corrupt governments on the planet and impose non-stop horror and conflict. 
Directly or indirectly it has imposed the grossest terrorising methodology throughout such as the deliberate death squad techniques imported, via US “advisers” from the horrific 1990s El Salvador massacres, to wind up the Shia-Sunni sectarian hatred in the 2005-7 period in Iraq. 
And it has continued for sixteen years in country after country, directly or by provoked and stimulated civil war and sectarian conflict or populist fascist coup, as manipulated in Egypt to re-install a Western favouring military dictatorship in a tide of civilian bloodshed and vicious continuing torture repression, two years after the mass uprising Arab Spring toppled the corrupt gangster Mubarak. 
The anti-terror mantra says this blitzkrieg destruction is the “solution” for an “evil” which has to be “wiped out” or “have the shit bombed out of it” as the crudely fascistic Donald Trump declared during his election campaign, or in the wake of Manchester more recently, to “be totally eradicated”.
Western imperialism has been trying to “eradicate” the problem of jihadism and terrorism now for some 20 years in its current forms and for decades before that.
Via its Zionist fascist occupation in Palestine above all, the entire Arab and Middle Eastern world has been routinely pummelled and smitten and blasted and devastated with the most degenerate massacres, butchery and terrorising blitzkriegs, with every tentative move it makes to fight back greeted with demented slaughter, shattering bombings raids, tank shellings, strafing, missiling and house demolition.
Repeated onslaughts on Palestine alone have massacred tens of thousands of men women and children, with the deliberate terrorising bombing of schools, playgrounds, housing blocks and beachside play areas. 
Notorious incidents like the Zionist-guided Shabra and Shatilla camp butchery in Lebanon have seen unspeakable atrocities.
Most particularly the Gaza strip has been continually subject to grotesque repression and butchery, on top of the hardships and agony of daily life anyway in the besieged and blockaded hellhole urban area which is all that is left for two million of the dispossessed Palestinian population, herded and kept in near concentration camp conditions for decades in their own land.
In between the major invasions and overrunning with the highest technology tanks, artillery, and fighter bombers dropping their 1000lb payloads, (truly terrifying in their impact) there is virtually nonstop low level killing, (including summary prisoner execution with virtual approval by the population and token “punishment”) beating arbitrary arrests, sniping, bullying and repressive imprisonment and torture, with tens of thousands of Palestinians, including multiple youth and teenagers incarcerated for years on end for trumped-up or trivial acts of resistance or revolt (stone throwing eg)  
The Washington-led “war on terror” blitzkrieging has followed the same methods killing torturing and massacring on an even greater scale.
But this Dalek-voiced “exterminate, exterminate” policy has totally failed.
Just the opposite; the devastating Manchester attack and now regular similar outbursts and tragic attacks throughout Europe demonstrates that these shattering guerrilla war onslaughts by the alienated, the dispossessed and the oppressed have not been stopped but are on the increase.
As country after country has been pulverised, “degraded” pounded into fragments, punished and terrified by the high tech onslaughts it has produced tens of thousands more rebels, jihadists, “terrorists” and insurgents, exactly as every rational commentator predicted from the very beginning.
All “condemnations” and moral injunctions will never stop this growing ferment of hatred which will not remain forever stuck at the stage of suicide terrorism. 
If their terrorist methods are not what Marxist understanding would advocate in these conditions then let there be a struggle to provide much better conscious leadership with a full revolutionary perspective as Lenin made clear.
The glaring absence in the great world turmoil is the one understanding that could make a difference, the Leninist revolutionary perspective of building a consciously led mass struggle to overthrow capitalism, the real source of their problems and oppression, 
But the sanctimonious humbug and hypocritical “concern” which has poured out over of the Manchester tragedy, from all shades of the political spectrum will solve nothing.
Not one bit of it will make anybody safer, or ease the chances of another attack.
Just the opposite; all the proffered “solutions” of intensified “security” and show-off house raids, pointlessly and fatuously blowing down front doors for maximum public effect; the threats to “step up” censorship and surveillance through Prevent etc will only make matters far worse by scapegoating and alienating even more people and whole communities.
Alongside the consciously anti-rational emotionality and hysteria, the newspapers and media are filled with ludicrous notions of “every one carrying on as usual to show that we will not be deterred from pursuing our calm and peaceful lives, going about our business to show that we will not be intimidated”.
And for good measure the bizarre notion is thrown in that suddenly the “people of Manchester” have some special historic “resilience” and human empathy that presumably the rest of Britain or Europe or America, or even the entire planet full of other human beings, are therefore lacking, including apparently the people of London who were supposedly full of this specially “dogged character” just a few weeks ago.
It is not as if most people, living desperately stressed and exploited lives would have much choice anyway about going about their normal lives, getting up and going to work, trying to make ends meet, or dealing with dole sanctions and a bureaucratic workhouse level welfare system - or ever growing food bank desperation.
What would they be doing otherwise?
All this total guff is pumped out to tap and milk perfectly normal universal human empathy and direct it into clannish and nationalist-“patriotic” channels, and to stir up fears and to make it easier to scapegoat and blame allegedly not-so-special others - any others deemed “different” - for the shattering crisis of the monopoly capitalist system, driving the entire world into ever deeper Slump and collapse mayhem and eventual world war.
It is only possible to begin making sense of such tragic developments if they are seen with such a full-on world perspective in which the greatest crisis collapse in history is unrolling.
The point is to whip up as much chauvinist and (ultimately) warmongering frenzy as possible (just like Brexit) for the oncoming escalation of trade and currency wars as Slump and crisis bites far, far deeper than yet seen (because total collapse has been temporarily held off with insane and utterly unsustainable hyper-inflationary QE credit creation).   
The ruling class knows only too well that the economic disaster of 2008 will reassert itself with a vengeance any minute now, but far worse than before, collapsing all the lying and unfulfillable election promises (from all sides) about “financial competence and economic upturn” into massively increased “austerity” (meaning outright Depression) and that its only hope is to drag the world back into war and conflict as a mass distraction and capital-destroying “solution”.
Stampeding mass hatred is crucial for this but particularly difficult when the masses have already seen two world wars and therefore are harder than ever to dragoon into blind  inter-imperialist conflict.
Hence the deranged and distorted propaganda to whip up maximum fear and hatred.
And hence the seizing of the opportunity by the ruling class to step up its surveillance by the now almost universal GCHQ computer and phone monitoring that already is well beyond the nightmare levels of the 1984 fantasy of anti-communist fink-informer George Orwell, and other police state measures such as the Tories’ promised strengthening of the “Prevent” programme of forced Big Brother snooping and capitalist chauvinist brainwashing in schools and colleges to suppress unspecified “extremism” and instil “British values” whatever they are (presumably unquestioning support for “democratically” blitzing the rest of the world and drinking tea). 
A nervous ruling class leaves it to be assumed that “extremism” means jihadist sympathy but the deliberately vague term could – and obviously does – cover equally other unspecified “extremist attitudes” clearly meaning the left revolutionary opinion which will certainly begin to find a wider audience as the crisis rapidly deepens. 
They know the working class must be forced into far deeper austerity than yet seen, especially when the false hopes of QE collapse, with all the consequent danger for the ruling class of social explosions - as seen in the city centre riots in 2012 for example, or the violent Poll Tax demonstrations, the Liverpool and Brixton riots of the Thatcher years, and more.
So Marxist revolutionism will also have to be declared a crime even when just expressed as an opinion, another step towards the Orwellian dictatorship and its notion of “thought-crime”.
Alongside there has been some further hysterical martial law preparations, putting armed soldiers on the street and increasing armed police levels - a move which was obviously completely unnecessary for such a one off and relatively limited incident, but which is a useful dress rehearsal and means to acclimatise the population to the presence of both, laying the ground for future coup moves.
So too floating the idea of internment without trial for “radicalised potential jihadists” which has also been made, by a variety of possibly planted suggestions from the police and rightwing MPs, and finally by the fascist minded UKIP through its charlatan leader Paul Nuttall.  
To help that along there has been much talk of “networks” of jihadis, and flamboyantly theatrical raids and roundups all over Manchester, Britain and into Europe - which like virtually all the endless hyped up “terror” raids which keep the population in a state of fear and panic, turn out to have been completely unnecessary, since days later it is admitted that he almost certainly acted alone.
It is not necessary at all to speculate as some of the “left” groups have done that the whole Manchester incident has been a “deliberate plot” by imperialism itself, an extension of the barmy obsession that 9/11 and almost every subsequent incident has been all part of an elaborate conspiracy to allow it to instigate further repression.
Most of these measures were in train anyway and this has merely provided the cynical ruling class with a convenient opportunity to try and slip them through.
To suggest otherwise is to miss a significant aspect of the Manchester attack which is that it has inflicted a defeat and a setback on imperialism and not, as implied by the notion of a conspiracy, that imperialism is actually very much in charge.
No support either needs to be given or remotely is implied for such terrorist methodology at this stage nor for the weird religious ideology of jihadism to nevertheless recognise the significance of these continuing if small and amateurish blows against imperialism as weakening it and causing problems; in fact denying just this aspect of the great “jihadist” surge and declaring it to be all paid for and controlled by the West has become virtually the de facto rationalisation for much of the fake-“left” to capitulate to the nonsensical “war on terror”, meaning the endless warmongering intimidation and bullying of the world led by US imperialism and its British side-kick to try and ride out the oncoming crisis. 
They slid into this pattern after 9/1l and have stayed there ever since (EPSR 1123 12-02-02):

Apart from all the naïve mistaken-analyses exposed above, however, - one of the most wretched and damning nonsenses of all about this “Sept 11 is a CIA conspiracy” stuff is its pitiful subjective defeatism. These middle-class mice of the fake-’left’ apparently want to tell the world in all seriousness that a) it is not uncontrollable contradictions that rule (and eventually bring down) the crisis-ridden imperialist system but the fiendish imperialist spies and intelligence services which totally manipulate world events, completely fooling the whole planet (with the exception of this handful of very clever ‘left’ sleuths, of course) that Sept 11 was an act of guerrilla-war terrorism by Middle East Islamic fanatics, when in reality it was the CIA who invented, dramatised, and faultlessly carried out the whole operation themselves without anyone knowing it; and b) that this was done because these world-manipulating imperialist fiends are about to impose an entire warmongering colonising perspective onto the whole of future history which will capture all the world’s oil resources, permanently militarily dominate the entire Middle East and Central Asia, and force or persuade every other imperialist power to either willingly dance to America’s tune, or else be ruthlessly crushed, just like everyone else in this Star Wars scenario, etc, etc; and c) that the only hope for mankind lies in people recognising the investigative genius of the authors of this ‘penetrative study’ and agreeing with them to...... do what, exactly?
Probably to go on a protest march outside an embassy somewhere.
This infantile rubbish is widespread from the SLP to Neue Einheit. It is a ludicrous misunderstanding of the whole content and purpose of the Marxist science of how uncontrollable contradictions endlessly tend towards imperialist-system break-up in crisis when it ceases to be able to rule on in the old way, and of how the international balance of class forces develops and changes spontaneously to create the conditions at some stage for mass proletarian revolution to consciously bring down the whole capitalist system under the dictatorship of the proletariat. 
Giving the CIA blockheads credit they do not deserve (for a spectacular triumph of guerrilla-war terrorism which was created not by American spooks but by an organised movement of conscious resistance to US imperialism based on a mass movement of spontaneous hatred of American domination), is a complete defeatist retreat from a revolutionary Marxist analysis of the contradictions which alone can explain imperialism’s economic stumbling, political splitting, and self-destructive warmongering aggression, and alone explain the spontaneous mass movement of class and national forces which alone will eventually accept and sustain a conscious Marxist revolutionary leadership, which alone is able to guide the way to world proletarian dictatorship.
These conspiracy fantasies are just a sly way for petty bourgeois Revisionist mentalities (which like posturing very ‘left’) to conform with the rest of middle-class public opinion in ‘condemning’ Sept 11 but while giving the appearance of not doing so, - or not doing so quite in the same way because what is being condemned is not a DIY anarcho-terrorist spontaneous revolt (which some fake-’lefts’ might find it embarrassing to condemn, being aware (usually because of the EPSR) of at least some of the rudimentary ABCs of Marxism-Leninism on such subjects) but yet another dastardly CIA plot.

Even after Manchester the series of serious diplomatic spats between the British and Washington over leaks to the press of investigation details from the police and MI5 security hardly suggest a ruling class in firm control; and neither does the concurrent fearfulness brought to the surface about present and future security cooperation measures with the European Union, another self-inflicted blow from the disastrous Brexit process.
There might be even more to the security spat, with British intelligence fearing further details emerging on previous attempted manipulations in which exile Libyan perpetrators were left alone because it suited British intelligence and its skulduggery alongside US imperialism to suppress the truly popular Arab Spring.
Part of what has sustained the “conspiracy” notion is that clearly it is built around some factual basis; one Western strategy certainly has been to try and manipulate and use jihadist sectarianism to head off revolution, from the anti-Soviet sabotaging Afghanistan mujaheddin movement of the 1980s onwards.
That was the case with the 2011 anti-Gaddafi “popular” uprising which was an obviously reactionary stunt from the beginning with its calls for Western intervention (as clear to all but the anti-theory Trots, so shallow and bitten with anti-communism that they will buy any “street movement” bogus revolt against any workers state or regime which even partially tilted towards Sovietism, or adopting societal forms with some resemblance to “Stalinist” workers state forms, as Gaddafi’s bizarre Green Book ideology did).
The West had been cultivating dissident reactionaries for decades after the maverick anti-imperialist Gaddafi’s overthrow of the backward western stooge monarchy, and now it emerges, was actively aiding them:

Rebels living in England have claimed the UK Government waived travel bans to let them fight Colonel Gaddafi in Libya as investigators probe the Manchester bomber’s visits to Tripoli. 
Fighters which included Libyan exiles and British-Libyan residents have described how MI5 operated an open door policy for those willing to travel to North Africa to topple the dictator. 
It comes as Home Secretary Amber Rudd admitted Salman Abedi, who killed 22 and injured at least 119 people when he blew himself up at Manchester Arena, was known to counter-terror authorities. 
Those who travelled to Libya to fight alongside Islamic rebel groups have described how, even though they were subject to counter-terror orders banning them from leaving their homes because they posed a security threat, they were allowed to travel to the hostile warzone.
When they returned to the UK, having spent months alongside groups thought by British intelligence to have links with Al-Qaeda, rebels were said to have been allowed back into the country without hesitation. 
Libyan officials have backed up the claims, saying the British government were ‘fully aware’ of young men being sent to fight, turning the North African country into an ‘exporter of terror’.  
Salman Abedi may have been part of a larger cell that included Mohamed Abrini, the ‘Man in the Hat’, with connections to the mass murders in Paris and Brussels. His father Ramadan (right) was arrested in Tripoli yesterday evening 
Abedi’s father Ramadan and younger brother Hashem were in custody in Libya last night after being arrested by counter-terror police a day after elder brother Ismail, 23, was detained in Manchester. 
Hashem was accused of having known about his brother’s murderous plans for more than a month, while it emerged his father had been a revolutionary fighter against Gaddafi who publicly voiced support for an Al Qaeda-linked group in Syria.
In the wake of Monday night’s atrocity, former rebel fighters have talked of how easily they were able to slip free from their travel bans and leap into battle.
Sources, some of whom met Abedi and described him as a hothead, told the Middle Eastern Eye claim these trips were facilitated by the British government, something the Home Office said it could not comment on when contacted by MailOnline.
One Brit who travelled to Libya despite being on house arrest over fears he would join militant groups in Iraq expressed his surprise at being given the green light. 
‘I was allowed to go, no questions asked,’ the source told MEE. 
He described how he fought alongside people from Manchester and London as well as local rebels from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which descended from a group of Islamist militants thought to have links with Al-Qaeda, according to MI5.
Another British fighter told how he was stopped entering the UK having visited Libya in 2011, but when he told them the name of the MI5 officer he had talked to about fighting in the war-torn country, he was allowed to board the plane and said the security services had ‘sorted it’.
‘The whole Libyan diaspora were out there fighting alongside the rebel groups,’ another source told MEE.

None of which demonstrates that the West is the “hidden guiding hand” firmly behind all Islamism as the conspiracists allege; just the opposite, it reflects its desperation in the teeth of the great mass outburst of anti-imperialist revolt in Egypt in 2011 and the cynicism  of their methods in trying to control it.
Furthermore all such attempted “control” has been highly fraught, with the possibility of “blowback” as the once CIA armed Taliban in Afghanistan demonstrates, now the main national liberation anti-occupation force, and as some bourgeois press comments have pointed out:

Paul Mason (G2, 27 May) is wrong to claim that the blowback theory is irrelevant in the case of the Manchester attack. Blowback theory is most definitely relevant. It is not confined to “blam[ing] Islamist terrorism directly on western expeditionary warfare”, as Mason incorrectly states. Islamic State germinated in the scorched earth left behind when we removed the regime of Saddam Hussein. If we had not invaded Iraq, the organisation that is now attacking us would not exist. That is blowback.
The plan proclaimed to stabilise Libya, after the overthrow of Gaddafi, was never going to work. There were realistic alternatives, put forward at the time, to bombing on the side of the rebels – such as setting up UN safe areas – but they were ignored. Nato turned a blind eye to shipments of weapons bound for Misrata, with the result that one big Gaddafi turned into lots of little Gaddafis. That is what has brought about the ungovernable space in Libya which Isis has exploited. That is blowback. 
Now Trump has loosened the rules of engagement for US bombing, with the result that 50 civilians in Syria were killed in the week before the attack on Westminster, and 200 in Iraq the week before that – both in raids targeting Isis, with UK involvement and support. Unlike in Manchester, the Westminster attacker apparently had no organisational links with Isis – but that does not mean there is not an indirect connection. That, too, is blowback. Violence begets violence. Jeremy Corbyn is right, we need to find alternatives.
Associate Professor Jake Lynch
Chair, Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney

Isn’t it time Theresa May was asked difficult questions about her role as home secretary when in 2011 the Home Office apparently lifted police control orders on scores of suspected Libyan terrorists living in Britain, so they could go and fight against the Libyan government of Colonel Gaddafi? These terrorists were known to belong to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Organisation, an al-Qaida affiliate. These terrorists may even have been trained by the SAS. After Gaddafi was overthrown, how many of these terrorists did the Home Office allow back into Britain?
Mark Holt  Liverpool

Paul Mason cites the September 2016 foreign affairs committee report on the intervention in Libya. In reality the FAC report, quoting Libyan experts Professor George Joffe and Alison Pargeter, concluded: “Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence.”
Ian Sinclair  London

Andy Burnham is wrong when he says: “9/11 happened before any interventions overseas” (Report, 27 May). The 9/11 attackers in 2001 came mostly from Saudi Arabia because the holy places had been “desecrated” (in their eyes) by the stationing of US (“infidel”) troops there since the Iraq crisis of 1990-91. The Iraq crisis was the first large foreign intervention in the Arab peninsula since independence and added to the region’s instability. The Islamist ideology of al-Qaida, forged by the Saudi-financed mujahideen in the proxy Nato war against communist Afghanistan and its Soviet ally, spread and became more hardline in the years after the creation of the 1990 coalition to throw Iraq out of Kuwait and the subsequent 1991 Gulf war.
Ian Bourne  London

The overriding memory that comes to mind about the atrocity in Manchester are the cheers for Hilary Benn’s speech as the vote was passed for military action in Syria. There are no excuses for the violence we have witnessed, but when will we learn that the only way to combat this violence is through peace efforts and not retaliation? Our politicians must begin to search for a peaceful solution for all of these battles we have involved ourselves in. Jeremy Corbyn is right to bring up this question now; and our representatives and the public need to consider this question and our future actions now.
Mike Swanwick   Nottingham

Why does Jonathan Freedland (It’s a delusion to think this is all about our foreign policy, 27 May) rail so strenuously against a simplistic proposition of his own invention? No one is putting forward such an argument. The actual delusion actively being promoted today is that the current state of affairs has nothing to do with our foreign policy. To expose that delusion, of course, would be to support the grown-up stance taken by Jeremy Corbyn. Perhaps that answers my initial question.   Julian Edge  Manchester

All these commentaries are still saturated in Western self-righteousness and petty bourgeois complacency and none grasp the anti-imperialist significance of the great wave of jihadist upheavals any more than the fake-“left”, universally blind to these eruptions as the stirrings of the greatest ever disintegration and collapse of class dominated exploitation society ever seen.
And worse still their failure to challenge Western demonisation of regimes like Gaddafi undermines the points they are making just as the Corbyn-Labourite and fake-“left” “No to War” pacifism is undermined.
The arguments against imperialism’s “necessary policing” by blitzkrieg sophistries are totally undercut if it is accepted that Saddam Hussein, or Gaddafi, or Assad etc is a “deadly threat to world peace” etc or equally Islamists jihadists like ISIS. 
But they do expose the wooden failure of the fake-“left”, revisionist and Trotskyist, which has been hiding for years behind the one-sided and fixed notion that the great jihadist turmoil is either “reactionary Islam” or just “paid mercenaries forces of the West” or “headbanging reaction” disrupting the alleged “steady progress” of flaky opportunist bourgeois nationalist regimes like Syria’s Assad (leading to the astonishing sight of revisionist groups lining up with the Putin’s oligarch-funded Russian counter-revolution bonapartism and its collusion with Western imperialist butchery against ISIS in Mosul etc, and even supporting the Washington funded Egyptian dictatorship while decrying Sinai-desert anti-Zionist pro-Palestinian fighters who challenge the fascist Sisi regime, in order to prop up Assad and fulfil their step-by-step and essentially reformist fantasies). 
It makes no sense at all to declare the Manchester attack as part of some great imperialist plan any more than Paris, Brussels, Nice etc. It is a blow to their pretences of stability.
And to maintain that a lone suicide bomber is a “mercenary” working for payment is just as daft.  
This tangle and much more comes about from a total failure to see the great crisis breakdown of all society now underway, and its utterly revolutionary significance – confronting all humankind with the greatest challenge in all history to turn everything over and start a new cooperative socialist society to fix the grotesque and deadly mess which imperialist profit making has created on the planet with its insane and wasteful consumption (running out of key resources), contempt for nature and human culture alike, and the brutally unfair inequality and oppression of nearly everyone save the indolent and arrogant few.
The “left” groups don’t grasp the crisis (for all their “revolutionary” declarations), or see this as revolt against it, because their petty bourgeois souls baulk at the idea of their little lives in the relatively comfortable niches they occupy in the West being turned upside down. 
And so they cling to the fixed notions of world jihadist turmoil being “just backward reaction” essentially to be ignored or even suppressed (lining up effectively with Trumpite US “eradication”) while they get on with their fixed formalised notions of how anti-capitalist struggle should proceed, looking only at the “advanced countries” and the “proper” class struggle.
But the heart of Marxist understanding is not simply the material nature of developments – half the story and one most bourgeois science is necessarily based on – but the dialectical shifting pattern of the contradictions in all things, especially class dominated society and especially as it moves from relatively stable moments like the post-WW2 boom period (achieved only through the massive destruction of the Thirties and 1939-45) into the intensifying conflicts and crisis breakdown now unrolling.
Understanding and constant assessment of movement and transformation is central in trying to grasp and assess the overall balance of class forces in the world, and that can only be done with the broadest and widest class struggle perspective, beginning with the historic crisis catastrophe of capitalism. 
A revolutionary Leninist perspective sets the capitalist crisis and decay as the central reference, and its turn towards the most desperate war destruction once more to “solve” the inexorable clogging of its system with “overproduction and “surplus” capital, against which any of the rest of the relative movement in the world must be assessed.
Defeat for imperialism is what matters not support for any of the turmoil as such.
Whatever reactionary origins the Islamic movements had, and however backward and bizarre their continuing ideology, they are no part of capitalism but part of the problem for capitalism.
They are not the answer to the world’s crisis either, and the backwardness of the ideology and mistaken methodologies often a hindrance in the confusion they cause.
But “condemning” them is to line up on the wrong side and help capitalist stampeding of war and hate, instead of taking advantage of all the blows against capitalist stability to build scientific revolutionary understanding and lead the struggle to end imperialist world domination and war.
Build Leninism 
Don Hoskins

EPSR 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

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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."

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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