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
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No 1519 Sep 7th 2017                                                                                                                  40p Weekly

Demented US war bluster against North Korean workers state grows ever stronger as Catastrophic crisis deepens but imperialism’s capacity to bully and intimidate the world is more and more hampered too by its desperation – blitzing North Korea raises unknown questions of Russia and China responses and South Korean collapse 

Capitalism’s Catastrophic crisis is now so deep – and on the edge of a renewed world economic implosion ten times more serious than 2008 –  that the hair-raising bluster from Washington against tiny North Korea may yet tip into horrifying devastation but it is beginning to sound like the bellowing of a mortally wounded animal.
So if Pyongyang is “begging for war” as the foul arrogant stridency of the US UN “ambassador” declared, then why is the US holding back – after all the allegedly “intolerable provocations” have been non-stop for a long period.
Could it be the US is a dog with all bark and no bite?
 No one believes for one second her absurd statement that “America does not want war” when it has done nothing but wage horrifying wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan for two decades, directly or via proxies and CIA skulduggery under the ludicrous pretext of meaningless “war against terror” (see next story). Millions have been slaughtered already.
It is the only agenda the bankrupt Empire has, to escape its historic failure and collapse, the disintegration and implosion of its entire profit making system, which is heading for far greater inter-imperialist conflict than anything seen so far. 
The “aggression” is obviously all from historically bankrupt capitalism, writhing and twisting to escape its collapse, as it did in 1914 and 1939 but on an even greater scale.
The accusation that tiny North Korea is “threatening the world” is more absurd than the demented ravings of Adolf Hitler declaring that Czechoslovakia or Poland were “attacking” Nazi Germany.
It resembles the old fascist joke of “he attacked the sole of my boot with his face.”
Endless ludicrous disinformation stories are pumped out to demonise its regime reaching heights of Goebbelsian nonsense like the recent “airport assassination of Kim Jon Un’s brother with VX nerve gas smeared on a cloth”(!!!) on which the BBC recently ran a one hour lie-propaganda “documentary” filled with nothing but CIA “witnesses” (see last issue). 
Nothing done by the revisionist workers state is remotely  suggesting it wants to “attack” anyone – only that it will do so if it is put under threat to its own existence, a very sound policy no different to the defensive moves made by any sovereign state. 
And they are defensive moves all the more vital in the light of the devastation wreaked on Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen, two of which were “persuaded” to abandon “weapons of mass destruction” developments before invasion and barbaric bloodbaths.
And vital because US anti-communism always wanted to destroy and eliminate this socialist example – killing four million in the attempt just after the Second World War, including total razing of Pyongyang and all other cities. 
The terrifying prospect of invasion has remained ever since with the deployment of tens of thousands of US troops, all thousands of miles from home, in “South Korea” (an artificial construct (and mainly puppet regime) no different to “South Vietnam” or “Israel”), and constantly carrying out highly threatening “live fire exercises”. 
It is the height of arrogance and imperialist bullying to stamp around declaring that the smaller nations of the world should not have the right to develop and deploy the kind of weapons that the rich powerful white monopoly capitalists deploy.
And it is the most monstrous stinking hypocrisy: 
a) if holding and deploying nuclear weapons is a threat then  it is the capitalist powers that threaten the world, as indeed they do, not least the United States itself, which not only has at least 7000 massive warheads permanently on standby, but which is the only country in the world to have used them, unprovoked, and which has come seriously close to deployment on multiple occasions since. And these warheads are far beyond the explosive power of the latest North Korean weapon, about which the media is whipping up hysterical levels of panic.
b) there are plenty of other countries which hold such weapons, not least Pakistan and India, both “allies” of imperialism, and above all the illegal landtheft Zionist occupation of Palestine.  But nothing is ever done about “Israel’s” massive and secret nuclear arsenal despite numerous sanctimonious UN resolutions and motions. 
To the contrary, the nazi-Zionists get massive economic and military aid from the US as they have always done, to sustain their role as smiters-in-chief  for imperialist suppression of the Middle East.    
But for all the demented accusations, there are signs of US hesitation in the face of huge consequences if it does “take action”. 
China and Russia, both on the border, have no interest in supporting the US, and if military devastation was unleashed would almost certainly be drawn into war with the US. North Korea’s revolutionary determination (despite revisionist shortcomings) is shaking Beijing’s even-more-revisionist complacency to the core.
War could break South Korea where huge near revolutionary weekly demonstrations just ousted the criminally corrupt and corruptly installed Park presidency; new demonstrations against the THAAD missile installation indicate that the population is be no means behind the pro-US establishment.  
Trump’s other needs - to wage protectionism by tearing up trade deals with Seoul add to problems, as does his sneer about South Korean “appeasement”.  Build Leninism
Don Hoskins

Condemnations of jihadism and terrorism by the swamp of fake -”left” continue to be one of the great signals of their treachery and humbug, failing to spell out the revolutionary significance of ever increasing hostility,  and playing into hands of imperialism’s war hate and scapegoating 

As the imperialist crisis deepens relentlessly towards world war, led by the crude shift into openly Nazi hysteria by Donald Trump’s vile administration, the fake-“left” are more clearly exposed for the opportunist frauds they are, failing to put the vital question of revolution and workers dictatorship squarely on the table.
The need is for a cadre party of revolutionary theory to be built, hammering out, by open polemic in front of the working class, all the difficult questions, particularly of communism and the gigantic achievements of past and present workers states as well as their mistakes and the revisionist philosophical retreats (beginning with Stalin) which finally led to the unnecessary liquidation of the Soviet Union, and East Europe.
At the top of the agenda needs to be the complete ending of the monstrously unjust capitalist system teetering on the brink of an even greater economic chasm than the global credit collapse of 2008 (temporarily deferred only by insane Quantitative Easing creation of ever more utterly worthless credit). 
But the fake-“left” go in the opposite direction, piling in to support the “left” Corbynite revival of class collaborating Labourism and its false hopes of “ending austerity”, or fostering continued social pacifist delusions about “preventing capitalism’s aggression” and advocating a “step by step” progression of “advances” towards socialism.
All of them pay only token attention to the great Catastrophic collapse underway and its total breakdown and revolutionary implications.
One of the great questions to sort out is the scabby cowardliness and confusion by all the fake-“left” - Trotskyists and revisionist alike - on the difficult question of “terrorism” and their moralising “condemnations” which capitulate totally to the imperialist “war on terror” propaganda and aggression.
This is more and more a central propaganda tool for imperialism’s endless horrific warmongering which is the desperate crisis-wracked system’s only “solution” to its intractable and historic failure. 
It plays on maximising the understandable revulsion and fear around those caught in the, mostly random, attacks of the downtrodden.
The emotionality around the hapless victims is deliberately ballooned into a frenzy of “kill them all” hatred to divert attention from the sole responsibility of capitalism itself for the devastation and destruction being imposed on the world and its millions of equally tragic victims.
That includes capitalism’s sole responsibility for all the desperate attempts by the tyrannised and exploited to fight back.
If these are mostly using the crudest of methods and guiding ideologies that is because that is all that is available, often at enormous sacrificial cost through suicide or apocalyptic “martyrdom”.
What else are the downtrodden supposed to do in order to inflict blows on their tormentors? Should the Palestinians get a “proper” army to fight back in “approved ways” against the continual genocidal suppression used by Nazi-Zionism to hold them in permanent dispossession of their own land? The persecuted Filipinos? The Iraqis? 
If better ways to fight, and better leadership is needed then let it be developed and fought for by the “lefts”. 
But to blame and condemn such outbursts is to help stampede imperialism’s war drive which has hugely increased this revolt.
A depraved bloodbath has been inflicted by the West on particularly the Middle East for the last two decades, in a welter of torturing depravity and massacre which has seen millions butchered, tortured, maimed, bombed out of house and home, and relentlessly terrorised (by the 8 years of supposed “liberal” Obama administration and its “pull back”, as much as the Bush neocons and now Trump’s re-escalated aggression).
Yet more civilians are being butchered right now by US and stooge “coalition” forces in Syria’s Raqqa and other cities as imperialism’s fascist “solution” continues to raze and pulverise city after city in both Syria and Iraq, unleashing even more savagery for the “endless war” which the Pentagon promised back in 2003.
From the start this completely specious (WMD) and illegal “shock and awe” war and its fascist torture and vengeful occupation of Iraq brutally blitzed whole cities like the Sunni Falluja, notoriously drowning it in blood in an onslaught which was, until then, unprecedentedly barbaric for modern “civilised” times.
Savage blitzkrieg - direct, by stooges and proxies like Saudi Arabia, or by induced civil war, - has now utterly destroyed at least half a dozen countries, with whole cities reduced to a sea of rubble by relentless and indiscriminate bombing, missiling, shelling and droning - all the panoply of the latest high technology slaughter (including utterly illegal weaponry like bone-burning white-phosphorus).
Another horrific Saudi bombing on a hotel in Yemen has just wiped out dozens of innocents, on top of the thousands already blown apart (with British and US made bombs and missiles) over the last two years, while seven million - count them, 7 million! - face outright famine from the destruction of infrastructure, seventeen million go hungry, and many thousands more are dead or dying from war-created cholera and other diseases. 
Sixteen years of pulverising, torture and Western imposed drone and bomb terror in Afghanistan is being ramped up again by the “Mad Dog” generals who now surround Donald Trump’s desperate fascist aggression in the White House, sending in 5000 more troops to re-generate the brutal war destruction – including against the local population.
Critical to carrying through this increasingly cynical and murderous intimidation (to cow the whole world into continued acceptance of US topdog imperialist domination, and plundering “right” to the cream of the world’s wealth, despite its historic bankruptcy) has been this stampeding of public opinion behind a demonisation of a “new evil in the world which threatens our way of life” in the form of “jihadism” or “rogue states”.
But for nearly two decades since the dramatic 9/11 guerrilla war attack on the New York World Trade Centre, the “lefts” have twisted and turned to avoid challenging this lying imperialist propaganda hurricane of “kill them all” warmongering hatred and scapegoating.
Far from analysing and explaining the great jihadist uprising for what it is, one of the early expressions of a rising world wide resistance to the endless tyranny of capitalist imperialist exploitation, and its intensifying crisis, they join in with the great deluge of Western propaganda against this rebellion by declaring it “reactionary”, using “wrong”  or “impermissible” or “unacceptable” ways to fight, which are just “atrocities” and “criminal attacks”.
It is the most treacherous and contemptible cravenness imaginable which sees this entire “left” revealed in its true colours as class collaborating stooges for Western ideology, and all their blustering words about “revolution”, or “defence of socialism” to be so much hot air.
This issue is a clear demarcation line. 
On the one side is the materialist science of Leninism, which says that however reactionary and confused the ideology, and often self-defeatingly sectarian, the “jihadist” movements that have arisen in recent decades and their often gruesome methods and arbitrary “discipline”, they are an expression of a gigantic upheaval against the world imperialist system, and its tyrannical and brutal world domination and exploitation.
So too is the rise of anarcho-terrorist attacks generated within the major Western powers, carried through by individuals or small groups of alienated and discontented sections of the population.
And while these borrow their ideology from the jihadists for the moment and take their lead from those movements, neither they nor the Islamist groups are driven by “evil ideas” as capitalist propaganda would have it, but by the intensifying material contradictions of intractable worldwide crisis, forcing ever greater hatred and rebellion against its tyrannical and brutal world domination.
They are part of the historic breakdown in the 800 years of capitalist domination, being both a symptom of its devastating crisis collapse and, by the blows against it, contributing to its further disintegration as the greed ridden profit system deliberately drags the world towards World War to “solve” its collapse into Slump and economic failure.
On the other side is the entire fake-“left” circus, and its posturing “not the right way to fight” tutting and repudiations, declaring all this upheaval to be “another kind of reaction” (sometimes declared “even worse than imperialism”!).
This cravenness plays into the monopoly capitalist ruling class’s “evil people” demonisations.
But Marxism never begins with the ideas in people’s heads as an explanation for the cause of phenomena or as a guide to the impact they have and the changes they produce; its foundation is a scientific analysis of the objective material conditions in the world and particularly the international balance of class forces.
While one factor in the balance might temporarily be the effect of ideologies such as fanatical Islamism, (in the absence of scientific revolutionary theory caused by revisionist confusion and retreat) they are not the driving force and are likely to shift and change as that balance changes, not least from the impact of their own struggles.
It is imperialism itself which alone is imposing mass destruction and blitzkrieg in the same way it has done before in two world wars, as a diversion to blame “enemies out there” for the chaotic collapse its own system is causing, and as a way to wipe out rival powers and destroy the great mountains of “surplus” capital clogging everything and bringing human progress to a halt.
Everything else is the response to it, or the chaos caused by it.
Neither the anarcho-terrorism erupting in a wave of sporadic attacks on hapless random victims tragically caught in public places throughout Europe and the US (to some extent), nor the increasingly organised “jihadism” in the Middle East are anything to do with Marxist revolution as such.
There is no question of Marxism advocating such terror methods as the best way forwards in current conditions, nor of supporting all terrorism.
The need is to build a mass consciousness of the crisis in the vanguard of the working class of the need to overturn monopoly capitalism and establish the firmest dictatorship of the proletariat to build a socialist world.
But to condemn these outbursts as all the “left” do in various ways, is to take the side of imperialism as the recent Barcelona middle class “march of defiance” underlined. 
Like the “I am Charlie Hebdo” mass rally before, it was not by chance that this hollow sham with its unctuous pretence of sympathy and “sharing of the pain” with ordinary people, was ostentatiously led by a ruling establishment which could not care less about the hapless victims in Las Ramblas, but which turned out in force to help stampede public opinion behind its scapegoating and warmongering. 
It is noticeable that reactionary opportunists like the right-wing Labourite careerist Saddiq Khan were right behind this charade too (without any criticism from the rest of the Labourites):
Hundreds of thousands of people marched down Barcelona’s broad Passeig de Gràcia this afternoon behind the slogan no tinc por (I am not afraid), in a show of defiance after last week’s terror attacks that left 15 people dead and over 100 injured in Barcelona and Cambrils.
The protest, the largest in the city since some two million protested against the Iraq war in 2003, was called by the city council and the Catalan government. Ada Colau, the Barcelona mayor, called on people to “fill the streets to overflowing” and to show unity in the face of threats of further attacks on Spain from so-called Islamic State.
The march was led by police and members of emergency and voluntary services. Determined to present a united front in the midst of the simmering secessionist row and with Catalonia’s controversial independence referendum barely a month away, the Spanish political establishment turned out in force behind them.
Led by Felipe VI, the Spanish king, the prime minister Mariano Rajoy marched alongside an array of senior government officials, opposition leader Pedro Sánchez, the Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, leaders from several of Spain’s 17 autonomous regions, the mayor of Madrid and the heads of the two main trade unions.
However, despite pleas not to politicise the march, there were plenty of Catalan independence flags in evidence, though also a number of Spanish flags, a rare sight in Barcelona. There were also anti-government placards and many with the slogan “your wars, our dead” that called for an end to the arms trade.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere was one of warmth and solidarity and no tinc por (I am not afraid) was the only slogan chanted on the march. Many carried red, white and yellow roses, the colours of the Barcelona coat of arms – 70,000 of which were distributed by the city’s florists.
There were messages of support from mayors around the world, including London’s Sadiq Khan, Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris and New York mayor Bill de Blasio, among others.
As the march ended in Plaça de Catalunya at the top of Las Ramblas, a number of people booed the king and prime minister. Police officers had to close off the square because there was no room for more people, although thousands of marchers continued to arrive.
Comparing this capitalist-state and media corralled petty bourgeois fearfulness, desperately pretending that “We are not afraid”, with the anti-war marches of 2003 is an obvious nonsense – its purpose was thoroughly pro-war reaction to bolster class collaborating collusion with the ruling class’s meaningless “war on terror” and scapegoating.
Its sickest aspect was pretending that it is the West which is “bravely” standing firm. 
What a stinking topsy-turvy cover-up it is to present the rich West as the “victim”. 
The overblown “Churchillian” rhetoric of “defiance”, like that now routinely pumped out after all such incident, is ludicrous hyperbole built around the total lie of a calm, peaceful and “prosperous and democratic” world which has been quietly minding its own business until attacked “out of the blue” by an irrational “evil” which for wholly inexplicable reasons, “hates our way of life” and is an “existential threat”. 
But the reality is that it is the Third World that is the victim, being demonised and scapegoated for the warmongering that is the sole responsibility and result of imperialism itself.
And that comes on top of centuries of the most barbaric colonial exploitation built on genocidal conquest and domination, (with the 16th century Spanish Empire one of the first into the field with its total obliteration or enslavement of multiple indigenous peoples from the Caribs to the Incas) imposing mass torture, arbitrary and racist atrocities, maiming, slavery, rape, slaughter and humiliation on a scale far beyond anything used or alleged against even the most ruthless of the current revolts which have erupted.
Relentless and brutal tyranny is continued by all the Western powers to this day in country after country, with much of the mass population held in desperate poverty and sweatshop or plantation labour (and outright slavery) for the profiteering of the big Western corporations, (all that sustains the ‘lifestyle’ of all petty bourgeois smugness). 
There have been continual “punishment” wars, coups, blitzkrieg and savage fascist dictatorship, to keep this oppressive and inhuman exploitation in place and suppress all attempts to get out from under, with topdog US imperialism the lead “policeman” carrying through or supporting over 400 coups, massacres, assassinations, invasions, death squad repressions, and outright war, killing a minimum of 20 million, on behalf of itself and the rest of the big power exploiters.  
To demand “defiance” against this Third World revolt is like the German Nazis demanding “defiance” against the French resistance or the Russian partisans.
It is anyway pure whistling in the dark.
Far from “carrying on as normal” and “not being afraid”, the impact of this wave of attacks has been to send the capitalist world reeling as it did with 9/11 and as faintly echoed by the peace protestors’ banners against the Barcelona march, recalling the message of 2003 when the Spanish population gave two fingers to the Francoist throwback reactionary Aznar government and the “royal” establishment, blaming its participation, alongside the Americans, in the Iraq war for bringing the terrorist bombing in Madrid down on their heads and voting it out (EPSR 1224 16-03-04). 
Movements which have erupted against the West, particularly in the constantly and barbarically devastated Middle East are the result of the steady maturing of the world’s masses, increasingly finding the endless wage-slavery domination of this capitalist system (and often full-open slavery still) to be an insufferable burden, and rebelling against their humiliation and permanent domination, their anger and hatred multiplied a thousand times by the shock and awe blitzkrieging being imposed on top of their endless humiliation and savagery as the entire system decays into festering rottenness.
But even greater eruptions are coming as the working class everywhere reaches boiling point.
The ruling class knows that its Catastrophic crisis will force it to impose ever more draconian “austerity” on ordinary people in even the richest countries.
Explosive levels of discontent are building up everywhere as living standards are savaged, social provision torn to shreds and monopoly exploitation relentlessly squeezes prices and spending power ever harder.
France is a tinderbox of labour revolt as the unpopular “populist” Macron tries to tear up working conditions, Germany is banning “left-wing” websites as discontent festers beneath the surface and events like the Grenfell fire on Britain sharply expose the deep running callousness and incompetence of the ruling class and its sneaky, penny pinching behind-the-scenes dismantling of the most basic services and social conditions (like the privatising of the NHS hidden behind outright lying denials by the Tory ruling class) while wages stagnate.
All this will be ratcheted up far higher once the hype and lies about a “recovery” (from the Tory ruling class and the Labourite stooges equally (and their fake-“left” entryist outriders)) come crashing down, as they must as soon as the temporary suspension of the 2008 economic global meltdown by Quantitative Easing Mickey Mouse money-printing implodes.
The savage soup-kitchen and near-workhouse “austerity” already seen for many (and even more in weaker countries) will be as nothing compared to the Slump conditions that will then “have to be” imposed.
These will go far beyond the mass destitution of even the 1930s Depression.
It is by no means certain that all of this frustration will follow the prescribed pathways of routine Labour movement action, strikes, demonstrations and Trot “perfect revolution” formulas, though all such struggles remain valid; anarchic outbursts of all kinds are almost certain to burst out from riots and even terrorism. 
To condemn it will be as treacherous as the current disowning of the worldwide upheavals (and past sanctimonious fake-“left” fingering of Black Bloc anarchist violence).
Such moralising self-righteousness is the exact opposite of the better Marxist leadership which Lenin declared was the only way to transform such confused and sometimes counter-productive hostilities into the purposeful revolutionary fight that is needed to unite the working class and overturn capitalism.
And they will not get it from the “lefts”, grovelling to imperialism.
Most of these might make a token recognition that “imperialism is responsible” for the hatred that has grown against it and for the ever escalating recruitment into the “terrorists” ranks it has led to, but still insist that the revolt is nevertheless “reactionary” – on no scientific ground at all other than their own need to slide away from the difficult problem  of going against the tide of petty bourgeois public opinion.
Others initially realised that such unMarxist assertions were too obvious and picked up instead on the ludicrously convoluted conspiracy theories elaborated in the wake of the 9/11 guerrilla war blow delivered by al-Qaeda against the New York Trade Centre, in which the great wave of “jihadism” is deemed to be a “CIA conspiracy”.
As analysed at the time (EPSR 1123 12-02-02 eg), apart from positing an extraordinarily unnecessary, damaging, expensive, risky and fraught procedure for imperialism to “justify” its Afghan and Iraq wars, when a simple lying stunt would suffice – (as many times used by imperialism, in the lying “Gulf of Tonkin incident” for example to get the Vietnam war underway, or the fraudulent Recak “massacre” for the bombing of Serbia, or the now-admitted hysterical fantasy of “imminent Gaddafi threat of genocide against Benghazi” for the nazi-NATO destruction of Libya - not even an actual incident – and ludicrous absurdities about “Viagra swallowing rape-squads”!!!), – this hugely (and low-level racistly) underplays the capacities of the Third World to carry out such an attack, and hugely overstates the capabilities of imperialism, supposedly pulling all the strings in the world.
Subsequently the revisionists most notably putting this theory forwards, the Lalkar/Proletarian CPGB-ML have reverted to a mixture of “all run by the CIA” and “all reactionary” (using the derogatory term “headbangers”), in a kind of belt and braces condemnation that leaves them pouring out a level of bilious moralising pomposity barely distinguishable from the frothing of the bourgeois press itself:
The horrific bombing of the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena on 22 May, which claimed the lives of 22 people, a number of them children and teenagers, and which wounded dozens more, many of them critically, is a heinous crime committed against innocent people and in the service of a vile reactionary ideology that has devastated previously thriving states such as Libya and Syria and also plunged Afghanistan, which had once been on the road to a socialist future, into a living hell.
The CPGB-ML strongly condemns this terrorist atrocity and we express our sincere condolences to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives as well as to those maimed and injured.
The horror that has now been experienced by working people in Manchester is no different in nature from that experienced by millions of people as a result of the wars waged by imperialism, either directly or through their proxies, in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and other countries. The main difference is that it has been experienced in Manchester in one awful incident. In these oppressed nations it is experienced on a daily basis. 

Tacking onto the end of this counter-revolutionary diatribe that

in all these instances, the real culprit and biggest criminal is the imperialist system itself, directly and indirectly.

is of no help either, if that is taken to mean that such “terrorism” and “jihadism” is backed and coordinated by imperialism and essentially its tool.
Both aspects of this, the “vile reactionary ideology” explanation or the “mercenaries for imperialism” leave the Brarites tangled up in the most appalling contradictions, which they avoid by concentrating solely on the Syrian civil war where some attempted Western interventions have muddied the waters, and largely ignoring other places like Iraq next door.
In Syria, it is clear, the CIA and other western agencies (especially the Zionists next door), as well as the backward feudal and tribal sheikhdoms of the Gulf, have manipulated, armed, funded and trained assorted stooges and counter-revolutionary groups in an attempt to topple Bashir Assad’s bonapartist regime (a long time thorn in the side for imperialism). 
At least they have tried to do so, and though only with mixed success, it is enough to give credence to claims that some of the forces tearing the place apart have been “mercenaries”.
But as analysed further below, that neither means all the forces ranged there are tools of the West (and it has several times had to “re-tool”, as it were, by recruiting or even deliberately setting up new “moderate” pro-Western groups because the attempted manipulations have gone wrong) nor that jihadism elsewhere is “set up by the West”.
That is further analysed later, in seeing how the Brarites have got themselves into a gigantic mess of contradictions but first some of those difficulties.
To start with there is the ideology; if Islamism is really just “vile reaction” and “headbanging” then why does Lalkar/Proletarian support a whole slew of such religiously led movements beginning with the Iranian state, which has been an out and out theological regime since 1979, holding to sharia law and hostile to communism? 
How come this is declared to be part of an “axis of resistance” with no mention of its backwardness or record of persecution of proletarian movements, or its compromising with imperialism (including in backing the stooge Iraqi government and working with its US military “advisers”)?
Or why does it suggest as suitable allies for the Syrians to team up with, the Iraqi Shia (Muslim) militias, fresh from their bloody onslaught flattening the one million strong city of Mosul in alliance with the Baghdad US stooge government and thousands of US special forces troops, where at least 40,000 civilians have been butchered (EPSR 1517) and hundreds or thousands of merely suspected ISIS, their sympathisers or family, have been tortured, imprisoned in hellish camps or summarily executed, often thrown over cliffs or the side of high buildings??  
How come it supports the Hezbollah, another Islamic movement which fights for the Assad government in the Syrian war?  
How come it continues to insist on its support for the Gaza Palestinian leadership of Hamas, which is not only Islamic, but Sunni to boot?
Now, Marxists can only wish to see imperialism defeated and come a cropper in the Middle East, and all of these various elements could be part of that, which is reason to stand alongside them or welcome the fight they put up (while maintaining a separate philosophy).
But that is to be measured by seeing where these forces stand in relation to imperialism and its (truly vile) agents and collaborators like Zionism or the corrupt Baghdad government. 
The issue here is that the Brarites decry alleged “headbanging”, meaning the

 “vile reactionary ideology”

of ISIS or other “terrorists”, while claiming to uphold revolutionary theory on their publication’s masthead – so why not decry such mysticism on all sides?
Secondly and even more contradictorily, there is the alleged “imperialist conspiracy” lying behind these movements, described as “jihadist mercenaries”, supposedly created, controlled and driven by CIA-Zionist-MI6 etc manipulation and serving “reactionary” purposes for imperialism.
But how does that apply to the Al-Shabaab in Somalia for example, or Boko Haram in Nigeria, to the Islamist opposition to the French imperialist supported regime in Mali, to the decades old Islamic resistance in the Philippines’ southern islands, or to the Islamic revolt in the Sinai region of Egypt?
Were they “created by the West” too?? And if so - why???????? Why create and mount attacks against its own stooge dictators in Cairo?
Why are all these movements anti-Western (Boko Haram even meaning “no to Western education”) and a major thorn in their side constantly having to be suppressed and fought by Western forces at some cost, be it the military from imperialist orientated Kenya, and the Washington stooge regime in Ethiopia attacking Somalia (along with drones and advice from US Africom bases in Uganda etc), by the corrupt and heavily Western stooge Nigerian government, or by the reactionary Cairo dictatorship of General Sisi, installed by a CIA/Western media hyped-up populist movement in 2013, stampeding the middle class against the newly established democratic presidency of Mohamed Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood??.
Why if the ISIS is a “mercenary tool” of the West, would all these movements, which tried to affiliate to ISIS be constantly bombed and blitzed???
More questions arise too around Iraq. 
Why would imperialism “create” ISIS itself, which originated in the Sunni triangle region where the original Saddam Hussein Ba’athists were strongest and where a major anti-occupation fight began to emerge against the US invasion within months, and why would this deliberate creation “under the control of the CIA” then be directed against the Shia government in Baghdad, (which has been a US selected placement since the end of the Iraqi civil war in 2007), almost routing it and taking over?
Why would this alleged CIA-plot ISIS push so close to Baghdad two years ago, threatening to topple the US’ own stooges, that it was necessary to bring in US forces and heavy air power to bolster the Shia stooge army to push them back, and why would the Americans themselves then bring in 5000 special forces, massive matériel, French and British ally special forces, air support, and the armies from the bourgeois nationalist stooge Kurds (among others) for utter destruction of the ISIS-held cities, one after the other?? 
More contradictions follow from the great wave of disaffection and its locally generated terrorist expression in Europe, from Paris, Nice and Brussels to the UK, Finland’s Turku, Germany, and Spain.
If all this is the result of a great imperialist conspiracy, the only questions to ask are “what on earth for” and how does it benefit the imperialists??
To stir up sentiment for war? So many incidents are needed??? They already had huge rallies in France, etc. and anyway are already at war and have been for two decades.
And how do the intelligence agencies find so many recruits willing to take money etc (which is what “mercenaries” do) in order to blow themselves up.??? It seems an unlikely arrangement.
Besides which, the impact of such attacks is effectively the opposite, wearing down public confidence and morale, as the original 9/11 attack shattered US confidence and hubris, as the 2004 Madrid events demonstrated clearly and as the Obama retreat, and withdrawal “commitments” from Iraq and Afghanistan, also proved (if, secretly, just as much warmongering continued by other means), the result of war-weariness and growing anti-war sentiment as the US drained money and lives into the sand.
None of this “theory” makes sense because none of it is remotely a Marxist analysis and this entire conspiracy rigmarole reflects utterly wooden undialectical thinking by a sad bunch of museum-Stalinists who cannot see the crisis and cannot see the reality of the giant forces building up, nor want to see them, just as none of the fake-“left” want to see or understand the giant movements underway.
For all their bizarre and often self-damaging sectarian infighting these jihadisms and upheavals are one expression of huge revolutionary turmoil (alongside giant stirrings in Latin America, the east Ukrainian anti-Kiev anti-fascist struggle etc) and that is exactly what the whole spectrum of the “left” resolutely refuses to see because their “revolutionism” has never been anything other than a parlour game.
In the case of the Lalkar/Proletarian Stalinists, this blind spot is compounded and reinforced by their continuing cover-up and refusal to reanalyse the revisionist mistakes made by Moscow and which the EPSR, especially during the period of Roy Bull’s editorship, traced back to the errors and retreats of the Stalin period itself (see eg Unanswered Polemics - Against museum Stalinist Revisionism, EPSR books Vol 21 [website download available]). 
One particular aspect flows from directly from Stalin’s disastrous revision of Lenin in the 1952 Economic Problems declaring that post-WW2, imperialism was both hamstrung and hemmed in by the new workers states to such an extent that it could not expand significantly, and that therefore it needed only to have its aggressive tendencies “contained” by peace struggle while socialism grew more and more attractive, and (step-by-step) the world finally tipped into socialism. 
As the EPSR went on, in this schema, even halfway-house left-tilting bourgeois nationalist regimes would be sufficient if supported, to go the whole way into socialism (p2):

– for the moment the conflict for agreeing on a party of revolutionary theory can continue to concentrate on just two related issues:- the undoubted fact that the Revisionist CPSU,- bequeathed by Stalin after 30 years total dominance & backed by a similarly Stalin-created world Revisionist movement, – effectively agreed to liquidate the Soviet workers state and the international communist movement after 1990 in favour of “market economics” and the “peaceful road to socialism”; – coupled with Stalin’s 1952 summation in Economic Problems of his belief that only imperialist war-provocations had to be avoided in order for the Socialist Camp to simply outperform “non-expanding” imperialism into capitalism’s total collapse in due course.
But even getting the guru-worshippers to debate these issues, let alone even consider that Stalin might have made a series of catastrophic anti-revolutionary retreats in his 30-year career, culminating in this total Revisionist disaster, - is as impossible now as it was inside the communist movement in Moscow’s hayday.
The SLP Youth delusions about Saddam Hussein’s “anti-imperialist” credentials flow directly out of this paralysed inability to discuss Stalinism’s ultimate bankruptcy.
Moscow’s weak-minded determination to discourage “revolutionary provocations”, which led the mighty German CP to sleepwalk into total annihilation in 1933 and the Indonesian CP (even bigger and even more impressive) to do the same in 1965, - never stopped pretending that anti-imperialist nationalism (e.g. the Sukarno regime pre-1965 in Indonesia) was just as good for the eventual triumph of world socialism (via the Soviet camp winning the peaceful competition with the imperialist camp) as all-the-way revolutionary socialist regimes.
In such Revisionist thinking, once Saddam had stopped being a totally tame stooge of US imperialist policy in the 1970s and had started doing arms deals with the Soviet Union, - then nothing further should be anticipated than the continued onward triumphal march of Moscow’s international “anti-imperialist” coalition of the Socialist Camp, the Non-Aligned states of national-liberation, and the world communist movement. 
The obvious total collapse of this Revisionist nonsense post-1990 still cannot register with Stalin worship sectarianism. Naturally, in the world of such long-standing gradualist delusions, such spontaneous “anti-imperialism” resistance (as Saddamism had evolved into under decaying monopoly capitalist pressure), would “inevitably go the whole hog one day into total socialist defiance and independence”; – just like it was supposed to happen the whole world over in the good old days of Stalinism. What sad rot.
Leninist science, freed from Revisionist blinkers, would surely have reached the completely different conclusion that the opportunist tyrant Saddam (admitted by SLP Youth) was first and foremost never to be identified as anything but totally unreliable, – a petty bourgeois class-treachery, anti-theory disaster just waiting to happen, – going completely rotten just like so many other Moscow Revisionism protégés of the treacherous “peaceful road/peaceful coexistence” era.
Any defeat or setback for the imperialist occupation policy, – by any means, – was the only sensible perspective to educate the world revolutionary movement’s understanding with, concentrating on the class enemy as the only fixed point in this swirling, anti-theory, anti-communist chaos that has been unleashed on the world by the ultimate failure of Stalinist Revisionism, – and encouraging no confidence whatever in any chance defiance of monopoly imperialism that opportunist nationalism might produce (but didn’t under Saddam, - but might usefully yet, under the Shias). 	
In Iraq as everywhere, an absolute necessity is a party of world revolutionary perspective, replacing the collapse into Stalinist Revisionist nonsense of the Third International from the 1920s onwards, – and only such a party can be built on and relied-upon, in Iraq or anywhere else, including Britain.

The same faith is now placed in the equally unreliable Assad Ba’athist regime (and even the predicted Shia nationalism in Iraq) with the same woodenness carried through, declaring total support for Damascus, instead of the only Leninist policy possible of calling for the defeat of the imperialist skulduggery against Syria but with no faith placed in Assadism (which needs to be replaced by a struggle for socialism as soon as the imperialist pressure is off).
From this outright support for Assad (cheered on by monthly “Victory!” slogans) mechanical and completely undialectical logic leads to all the forces ranged against Assad to be declared “hostile terrorists” picking up Assad’s own limited bourgeois nationalist condemnations, and all the “allies” to be deemed essentially almost as good as communism (which requires some, in itself astonishing, bending of reality eg to declare Vladimir Putin, frontman for some of the biggest and most degenerate gangster oligarchs on the planet, still dominating the Russian economy despite denials of the facts by Lalkar/Proletarian, to be a “bourgeois nationalist” anti-imperialist. He is not. He might be a Bonapartist balancing against the still important residual communist legacy of the USSR and forced into a corner by US imperialist hostility, but is also very much an anti-communist bolstering the Russian Orthodox Church reaction and the interests of the clutch of billionaire “owners” who plundered and continue to plunder the Russian working class).
Worse still this fixed categorisation of the “terrorists” (by Putin too, apeing and cooperating with the West!!!) is then extrapolated to include all the “terrorist forces” in the Middle East, or in fact the entire world.
There are so many flaws and contradictions flowing from this non-dialectical philosophy that it is hard to know where to start.
First it creates huge difficulties for the “left” posing of the Brarites when it comes to Palestine; long ago caught out supporting the monstrous Mahmoud Abbas as Palestine National Authority replacement for Arafat (initially declared a ‘master of tactics’ until revelations emerged of collusion with both the Zionists and the CIA in training and funding the PNA security forces(!!)) they switched to outright support for Hamas (again instead of a Leninist, march-separately and strike-together policy). 
But the Sunni Hamas, trapped by their own sectarian flaws, have been opposed to the Assad regime from the start. 
So that would require an abrupt about turn it might be thought; instead, mostly silence from the Brarites as usual, except on two occasions when they declared, on the thinnest of evidence, that Hamas “might be changing its mind” (but still without any explanation of their position on Hamas and why it should not be treated just like all the other “headbangers” if that was the guiding principle).
This clutching at straws obfuscation allows them to go on supporting Hamas (crucial for “left” anti-Zionist credentials). 
But a Leninist understanding, focused on defeat for the Zionists and imperialism, simply welcomes every blow that Hamas or any other anti-imperialist forces can strike and, while understanding that currently it is the de facto leadership for Gaza’s militancy, nevertheless makes clear that it has nothing in common with Hamas’ religious barminess and that the Palestinians, like everyone, need scientific Marxist understanding.
Second the CPGB-ML denounce the Sinai Sunni jihadists, Hamas allies, who attack both the Zionists and have been striking blows against the new reactionary dictatorship in Cairo, which took power in a welter of cold-blooded civilian street slaughter and now receives massive subventions from Washington, while cracking down on brutally not only on the rebels but all opposition in Egypt, including the currently majority supported Muslim Brotherhood, which while a long way from being a socialist movement, carried through some of the anti-imperialist momentum of the 2011 street rebellion of the Arab Spring.
The Brarites say nothing about this monstrosity of a Sisi regime, which even released the former gangster dictator Hosni Mubarak - they even tacitly cheered on its overturn of Morsi in 2013. 
Incredible.
Further complications arise, but first the Leninist understanding of Syria needs briefly recapping.
The civil war there was provoked by deliberate CIA and/or Zionist intervention shortly after the eruption of the Tunisian and Egyptian Arab Spring.
Those titanic mass revolutionary street movements, triggered by the deepening impact of the 2008 crash and the US defeats in Iraq were a seismic shock to imperialist domination, threatening to set the whole Arab world and even the entire region, on fire.
To head them off, every piece of latent counter-revolutionary stoogery (Western agents and sleepers etc, long in preparation) had to be hurriedly activated, ready or not, in Egypt and in the two countries on the border, Syria and Libya, both with anti-imperialist form (if somewhat confused and opportunist) that might bolster the Egyptian uprising and long on the “rogue state” target lists for the Pentagon anyway.
The Libyan “uprising” stunts using reactionary stooges and monarchists, failed hopelessly despite a demented world media onslaught and NATO was called on to rescue the bogus revolt (lyingly dressed up as an extension of the Arab Spring which was genuinely spreading into the reactionary Sheikhdoms of the Gulf), with a warcrime destruction of Libya.
But the Shia-Sunni sectarian conflicts, stirred originally in the Iraq war by deliberate US-trained deathsquad divide and rule provocations, caught fire in Syria.
Aided by a world media lie campaign and massive input of arms, vicious “rebellion” was stirred against Damascus lyingly presented as “peaceful demonstrations”, hyped out of all proportion and violent from the start, and deliberately inflamed with mysterious hidden sniper attacks, (routinely used by Western skulduggery in many stunts, such as the 2002 anti-Chávez attempted coup in Venezuela, to provoke state crackdown, then presented as “oppression” by the Western news agencies).
And certainly this used manipulated sectarian jihadist elements, just as the West has tried to make use of such groups in the past, notoriously in the CIA’s setting up of the Soviet Union’s entrapment in Afghanistan in the 1980s, drawing it into an eventually unwinnable fight against the Western supplied mujaheddin, as it tried to support the then socialist government in Kabul.
Fed with Western arms, money and training directly from Washington, or from the backward and reactionary tribalist-feudal sheikhdoms, this was all encouraged to create as much mayhem as possible, using terror and ethnic cleansing to disrupt and sabotage all progress in Syria.
It was a strategy that allowed Washington/Zionism to disrupt and weaken the huge revolt in Egypt and the Middle East, without the domestic difficulties it had run into from direct intervention like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those defeats were another straw on the back for growing contempt in the US for already threadbare “democratic” pretences in the US, as George W Bush’s presidency plunged in popularity; “democracy” was rescued only by playing the black nationalist and feminist cards in 2008, combined with the promised winding down of the disastrous military quagmires (the reason NATO’s invasion of Libya was pushed through behind the pretence it was “run by France”).
But “proxy” and manipulated subversion is a fraught way to run a war, and particularly as the world wide authority of the imperialist system has been hammered by longterm growing discontent, the crisis and the defeats already suffered.
From virtually the first moment the disruption was “blowing back” as the civil war took on a life of its own and the “jihadist” and “terrorist” movements took on a life of their own.
This a constant aspect of Western attempts to use such movements and increasingly so in crisis; the Afghanistan reactionary mujaheddin movement transformed into an anti-imperialism, first providing training camps for the al-Qaeda and then as a national liberation movement against the US blitzing and subsequent occupation post-9/11 becoming a long-term and still continuing resistance; the Iranian regime itself was a given a huge boost by the West after the great spontaneous anti-Shah revolt of 1979, the key Islamic leader Ayatollah Khomeini being deliberately flown in with his entourage from the Paris suburbs, to head off any developments towards outright communism and build up reactionary mysticism instead, a strategy that was helped by the disastrous revisionist perspectives of the local communist Tudeh which was unprepared with a revolutionary grasp, to its devastating cost subsequently.
The Lalkarites even prove the point themselves in their convoluted attempts join the condemnations of the Manchester bombing, in which the “vile ideology” denunciations are supplemented with more “proof” that these attacks are all really part of a Western conspiracy.
The July Proletarian goes on to say, that much of the Libyan exile community, from which the Manchester bomber is thought to have originated, were sponsored and encouraged by MI6.
That was part and parcel of the endless skulduggery and attempted subversion and toppling of socialist and anti-imperialist regimes, and particularly of the hated Muammar Gaddafi’s “left” orientated bourgeois nationalism, that had gone on for decades, (particularly since the Thatcher/Reagan bombing raids of the 1980s) the cynical stock-in-trade for capitalism and its anything but “democratic” and “rule of law” abiding intelligence services.
But recruiting discontents and disaffected petty bourgeois opportunists who did not like Gaddafi’s weird “Green Book” brand of egalitarianism is not the same as “creating” the subversives or being fully in charge of them. 
Thereby a point is made, and it is not the one that the Lalkar/Proletarian wants, because the Manchester incident demonstrates that for all its deviousness and cynicism, imperialism was not actually “in charge” of all this Libyan jihadism – it “blew back” against its own population as it obviously did in June.
In other words, while imperialism certainly has, and does, try to manipulate all kinds of movements, and its CIA fixed “colour revolutions” and stunted up counter-revolutionary “street revolts” are legion, the mechanical designation of all such movements as “serving imperialism’s interests” is one-sided rigid and shallow thinking, seeing no movement or dialectical development, nor anything more than the most superficial seeming appearance of things.
All these developments can only be grasped in relation to monopoly capitalist imperialism which is the major dominating influence on the planet against which all the lesser phenomenon need to seen (within the broadest and longest historical and class perspective - ie Marxist-Leninist science).
Far greater and more complicated “blowback” has been witnessed in Syria, with the US repeatedly having to cut loose from some of the assorted groups opposing Damascus as they took on a life of their own, and instead setting up all kinds of stooge groupings bizarrely named “moderate rebels” though still as nasty.
The Islamic State development was a breakaway from the US plans, blowing back and then merging (or re-merging) with its origins in the anti-occupation in Iraq, and as the journalist Seymour Hersh discovered over a year ago, (EPSR 1485 14-01-16 and 1486 05-02-16) creating major splits inside the US military and political establishment over future strategy – should the plan be to continue trying to topple Assad, or was the “blowback” now the bigger threat?
Now even the Hezbollah says the same thing according to Russia Today:

The US had to step back from its policy of regime change in Syria after multiple failures, as the jihadists they allegedly hoped to use as a proxy began posing a threat, Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General, Sheikh Naim Qassem argued in an interview with RT in a clandestine location in Beirut. 
He believes US President Donald Trump has opted for a less confrontational approach in Syria of late after previous attempts to oust the Syrian government proved futile.
“When they failed by using the military option, or by using the opposition option, or by using their cooperation with the regional Arabic countries that wanted change in Syria in favor of Israel, America adopted a new non-confrontation policy with President [Bashar] Assad because of their inability to do more, and because they know that [Islamic State] is against them as much as they are against the Syrian people,” Kassem claimed.
He noted, however, that a perceived change in political strategy does not mean that the White House has reversed its opinion of Assad, arguing that the US has been left with no better option than to fight the “monster” of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) which they helped to create in the first place but which has “now shifted against them.”

But this only spells out even greater contradictions for the “condemners”. 
For if ISIS is now the major threat against imperialism in this region, why should anti-imperialism help obliterate it? 
And why support now a slew of regimes from Russia to Iran which are themselves not Marxist or even socialist orientated??
As long as imperialist plans are being frustrated, then willing defeat on their stinking subversion and deadly destructive blitzkrieging is one thing; and defeat from any source.
But the bourgeois nationalism of Damascus, the idiot Bonapartist Putin and the reactionary Ayatollahocracy are now cooperating with US imperialism!
Lalkar/Proletarian has lost sight completely of the real enemy in the world, imperialism and its crisis.
Of course the barmy and religious Caliphate ambition of ISIS is not a way forwards for the world; but neither is reestablishing a bourgeois nationalist state whose boundaries were created by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement 100 years ago, divvying up the post World War 1 imperialist spoils from the Ottoman Empire’s Middle East possessions. 
If anything surely it can be argued that the Sunni resistance’s claims on the central Iraq-Syrian area, and its historic common past, have more self-determination validity than continued imposition of those imperialist arbitrary borders cutting through local communities?  
That does not imply any support by Marxism for such a claim but it does imply that there is no reason to support the opposite either, treating ISIS as the “reactionary problem in the world”. 
Defeat for imperialism is the watchword and in Afghanistan too where it is ramping up the failed warmongering again.
Even bourgeois commentators halfway get the point:
.. Donald Trump’s...U-turn on his electoral promise to pull troops out of Afghanistan and raise levels (without specifying how much – there are currently 8,500 US service members in the region) indicates a neutering of his presidency. 
Steve Bannon, who abruptly departed his job as White House chief strategist and long advocated a non-interventionist approach said, rather ominously, that the presidency, as voted for, was now “over”.
The speech, (after) a month-long review “of all strategic options in Afghanistan and south Asia” by General James Mattis and the national security team, was a clear victory for the military-industrial complex and the generals. The script could have been written by the generals themselves, and heralds a period of escalation and never-ending war (there will no longer be emphasis on meeting temporal objectives, but instead on vague “conditions” being fulfilled). In particular, “Mad Dog” Mattis, infamous for laying waste to Falluja in 2004 (complete with the use of banned weapons and depleted uranium, which still causes birth defects to children born there) has now been told that “the gloves are off” in the Afghan war.
...Trump...has now given his generals the green light to conduct operations in any way they see fit, without “micromanagement from Washington”. This approach is ominous for the Afghan people, and will inevitably lead to further increases in civilian casualties. According to a report by the UN assistance mission in Afghanistan, deaths of Afghan women and children in the conflict reached a new high for the first six months of 2017.
Other remarks made by Trump revealed contradictions between US policy in Afghanistan and what is happening on the ground. This included inconsistency over Saudi Arabia, a key sponsor of jihadist terror groups, which Trump called a “partner”, and Pakistan, which Trump demonised for acting as a “safe haven” for US-designated terror organisations. Today, Islamic State in Afghanistan drive around in Japanese jeeps apparently the same as those issued to the Taliban by the Saudis prior to 11 September 2001, when I was based in Kandahar, working for the UN.
In comments likely to infuriate Afghans, Trump also talked of the need for them to “take ownership” of the future direction of their country (for anyone who has seen the vast military apparatus, watchtowers and “green zone” of occupied Kabul, these comments are blatantly absurd). He added disingenuously that “we will no longer use American military might to construct democracies in faraway lands or try to rebuild other countries in our own image.” 
Given what unfolded in Afghanistan from the days immediately after the 11 September 2001 attacks onwards, in my view these comments are a complete mischaracterisation.
He also talked of the need for the US to tackle criminality and corruption in Afghanistan despite the fact that from the outset the US allied itself with unindicted warlords who have since presided over the growth of the opium trade (now affecting US citizens to an unprecedented degree), and the trafficking of women, children and artefacts. They also created illegal armed groups that roam the countryside, contributing to the security problem. When Trump said that the US was not interested in nation-building, but solely in “killing terrorists”, he sounded as Manichaean as George Bush. I wonder if this script will pass muster with the American people – because Afghans are long since jaded by it.
Interestingly, Trump failed to mention the increasingly significant Silk Road project, which is championed by China and other Central Asian countries as a motor for economic development. The project would bring a vast peace dividend to the region. If he really wants peace in Afghanistan, Trump and the other Nato countries he is pressuring to put more into vast military budgets to fight endless expensive and tragic wars would do well to follow China’s lead.
When I was in Kabul in 2013 as a political adviser to the EU ambassador, an Afghan veteran of the war against the USSR, told me that the Americans were transporting “terrorists” to his region from Pakistan. Clearly, Afghans believe that the Americans have long been backing both sides in this, the US’s longest war. Trump’s speech, which invoked children, the September 11 attacks and terror in Europe as justification for a continued war in Afghanistan, will do little to change their minds.
• Lucy Morgan Edwards is author of The Afghan Solution: The inside story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and how western hubris lost Afghanistan
Whether or not the US is “backing both sides” it has no interest in reaping a “peace dividend” and particularly one benefitting China – just the opposite, keeping war on the boil is its interest everywhere.
The interest for the working class everywhere is to see it defeated, and with every setback the opportunities for revolutionary grasp and understanding to be taken up by the masses  will increase.
Small wonder the ruling class is increasingly looking to censor “left” politics everywhere with bans, Prevent programmes and the pretence it is just against “extremism”.
Communism is the real ruling class fear - and the working class will start to take up battle for clear scientific understanding as crisis deepens.
And the Middle East and other revolts will eventually find their way to clearer Marxist grasp too.
There is no other future for mankind. Build Leninism
Steven Tudy 

E P S R BOX

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

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

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

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

*********

"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."

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution. (Lenin Dec 1916: Principles involved in the war issue.)

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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Statement of support for the people and government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

THE deputies of the National Assembly of People’s Power of the Republic of Cuba ratify our firmest, resolute support to the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, to her legitimate government and to the civic-military union headed by constitutional President Nicolás Maduro Moros, facing a serious escalation of domestic violence and international intervention.
Oligarchic sectors, conspiring with foreign interests, have attempted to spread chaos using terrorist methods throughout the country. In the name of false values of democracy and human rights, they have destabilized the country and left dozens of Venezuelan families in mourning.
The oligarchic and transnational media spread messages and images that cynically misrepresent reality, conceal the important achievements of Chavismo, and avoid referring to coup-plotting brutality - as was the case of youths whom opposition hordes set on fire.
These efforts are led by the discredited Organization of American States (oas) and its frenetic and interventionist Secretary General. Its selective and deeply ideological action, in the service of imperialism and the oligarchic powers of the region, seeks to besiege and overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution and make the immense natural resources of the South American nation available to transnational corporations. Its silence in the face of other serious alterations of the democratic order, the assassinations of social activists and journalists, and the use of military personnel to repress the people in other countries of the region, reflect the double standard that prevails in the OAS.
Accordingly, the deputies of the National Assembly of People’s Power of the Republic of Cuba call for the cessation of all interference in the internal affairs of the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and demand absolute respect for the sovereignty, constitutional order, and self-determination of Venezuelans.
We demand respect for the legitimate right of the Venezuelan people to continue to build the social model advanced by the Bolivarian Revolution, while recognizing the efforts of the government to ensure that understanding and peace prevail. In this regard, we welcome the constant calls for dialogue made by President Nicolás Maduro and the incorporation of several countries of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (celac) to this important effort.
We call on legislators and parliaments of the world to maintain solidarity with Venezuela, a country of Our America, with confidence that the Bolivarian revolution and people have the wisdom, capacity, and historic reason to overcome their difficulties and choose their own path. Havana, June 1,2017

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Cuba – Trump reversal of detente – revolutionary government statement 

June 16, 2017, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, in a speech replete with hostile rhetoric which recalled the era of open confrontation with our country, announced in a Miami theater his administration’s policy toward Cuba which reverses advances made these last two years, after December 17, 2014, when Presidents Raúl Castro Ruz and Barack Obama made public the decision to reestablish diplomatic relations and initiate a process toward normalization of bilateral ties.
In what constitutes a setback in relations between the two countries, Trump delivered a speech and during the same event signed a policy directive entitled, “National Security Presidential Memorandum on Strengthening the Policy of the United States Toward Cuba,” mandating the elimination of educational “people-to-people” exchanges undertaken by individuals, and greater control of U.S. travelers to Cuba, as well as the prohibition of economic, commercial, or financial transactions on the part of U.S. companies with Cuban enterprises linked to the Revolutionary Armed Forces, intelligence or security services -all of this with the intentional objective of denying us income. The U.S. President justified this policy with alleged concerns about the human rights situation in Cuba and the need to rigorously enforce blockade laws, conditioning its lifting, as well as any improvement in bilateral relations, on our country making changes elemental to our constitutional order.
Trump likewise vacated the Presidential Policy Directive, “Normalization of Relations between the United States and Cuba,” issued by President Obama on October 14, 2016, which, although it did not attempt to hide the interventionist character of U.S. policy or the objective of advancing its interest in changes in our country’s economic, political and social order, the directive recognized Cuba’s independence, sovereignty, and self-determination, and the Cuban government as a legitimate, equal interlocutor, as well as the benefits that both countries and people could gain in a relationship of civilized coexistence, within the context of the great differences which exist between our two governments. It also recognized that the blockade was an obsolete policy that should be eliminated.
Once again, the U.S. government resorts to the coercive methods of the past, adopting measures to tighten the blockade, in effect since February of 1962, which not only causes harm and deprivation to the Cuban people and constitutes an undeniable obstacle to our economy’s development, but also impacts the sovereignty and interests of other countries, generating international condemnation.
The measures announced create additional obstacles to already restricted opportunities available to U.S. businesses to trade with and invest in Cuba. 
At the same time, they further restrict the rights of U.S. citizens to visit our country, already limited given the obligation to employ discriminatory licenses, at a time when the U.S. Congress - as a reflection of the opinion of broad sectors of this society - demands not only an end to the travel ban, but also that restrictions on commerce with Cuba be eliminated.
President Trump’s announcements contradict the majority support of the U.S. public, including the Cuban émigré community in that country, for the lifting of the blockade and normal relations between Cuba and the United States.
For his part, the U.S. President, once again poorly act vised, makes decisions that favor political interests of an extremist minority of Cuban origin in the state of Florida, which for small-minded reasons do not desist in their pretensions to punish Cuba and its people, for exercising the legitimate, sovereign right to be free and take control of their own destiny.
At a later time, we will more thoroughly analyze the scope and implications of this announcement.
The government of Cuba denounces the new measures to tighten the blockade, which are destined to failure, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in the past, and which will not achieve their purpose of weakening the Revolution, or breaking the Cuban people, whose resistance to aggression of any kind or origin has been proven over almost six decades.
The government of Cuba rejects the manipulation of the issue of human rights for political purposes, and double standards in addressing it. The Cuban people enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms, and have achieved accomplishments of which they are proud, and which are only a dream for many of the world’s countries, including the United States itself, such as the right to health, education, social security, equal pay for equal work, the rights of children, the right to food, peace and development. With its modest resources, Cuba has contributed, as well, to the expansion of human rights in many places around the world, despite the limitations imposed given its condition as a blockaded country.
The United States is in no position to teach us a lesson. We have serious concerns about respect for and protection of human rights in this country, where there have been numerous cases of police murder, brutality, and abuse, in particular against the African-American population; the right to life is violated as a result of deaths caused by firearms; child labor is exploited; and serious manifestations of racial discrimination exist; threats are being made to impose more restrictions on health care services, which would leave 23 million persons without coverage; women do not receive equal pay for equal work; emigrants and refugees are marginalized, in particular those from Islamic countries; the building of walls that belittle neighbors is proposed; and international commitments to protect the environment and confront climate change are abandoned.
Likewise, also of concern are violations of human rights committed by the United States in other countries, such as the arbitrary detentions of dozens of prisoners in territory illegally occupied by the Guantanamo Naval Base in
Cuba, where torture has taken place; the extrajudicial executions and deaths of civilians caused by bombs and the use of drones; and wars unleashed against different countries like Iraq, justified with lies about the possession of weapons of mass destruction, with disastrous consequences for the security and stability of the Middle East region.
We recall that Cuba is a state party to 44 human rights international covenants, while the United States is so to only 18. Thus we have much to show, to say, and defend.
Upon confirming the decision to reestablish diplomatic relations, Cuba and the United States affirmed the intention to develop respectful, cooperative ties between the two people and governments, based on the principles and purposes enshrined in the United Nations Charter.
In the declaration issued July 1, 2015, the revolutionary government of Cuba reaffirmed, “These relations must be founded on absolute respect for our independence and sovereignty; the inalienable right of every state to choose its own political, economic, social, and cultural system, without interference of any kind; and on equality and reciprocity, which constitute irrevocable principles of international law,” as stated in the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed by heads of state and government of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (celac), during its 2nd Summit, in Havana. Cuba has not renounced these principles, and never will.
The government of Cuba reiterates its willingness to continue the respectful dialogue and cooperation in areas of mutual interest, as well as the negotiation of pending bilateral issues with the government of the United States. Over the last two years, it has been demonstrated that, as President of the Councils of State and Ministers, Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, has repeatedly stated, the two countries can cooperate and coexist in a civilized manner, respecting differences and promoting all that benefits both nations and peoples, but it cannot be expected that, in order to do so, Cuba will make concessions which compromise our independence or sovereignty, nor accept conditions of any type.
Any strategy directed toward changing the political, economic and social system in Cuba, be it one that seeks to do so through pressure and dictates, or with the use of more subtle methods, is condemned to failure.
The changes which may be needed in Cuba, like those made since 1959 and those we are undertaking now as part of the updating of our socio-economic model, will continue to be decided independently by the Cuban people.
As we have since the triumph of the Revolution, January 1, 1959, we will assume any risk, and continue firm and sure in the construction of a sovereign, independent, socialist, democratic, prosperous and sustainable nation. 
Havana, 
June 16, 2017.