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 (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.]  www.epsr.org  Contact@epsr.org.uk
No 1245 Aug 24 th  2004                                                                                                                  40p Weekly

Temporary Bidenist pullback from an attempted US Nazi coup is no “restoration of normality”  but a further sign of fearful panic by a world ruling class stuck in the headlights of the greatest ever economic and political collapse  in history, unable to go forwards or back. And that is before the full scale of its Catastrophic breakdown has been manifest in world bank failure, dollar implosion and the anarchic chaos it will bring, forcing a still confused working class everywhere to confront the need for revolution. The ruling class is being forced to  turn to open dictatorship but that will demolish all the “democracy” illusions still persisting, fed by fake-“left” revisionism and Trot anti-Leninist confusion. Bidenism’s half of the ruling class has cold feet on going down the Nazi path, but attempts to print yet more dollars cannot spin matters out for long – nor can ever more demented stunts against workers states like China and other anti-imperialism prevent workers seeing that collective society is the way forwards. Leninism needed

Continuing ruling class conflict in the States at near civil war levels: vicious “vaccine” jingoism (on top of ultra-reactionary Brexit Union Jack waving); non-stop demented propaganda lies against China’s workers state, Myanmar and Russia, Cuba and North Korea; ever spreading revolt in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia; all variously reflect the accelerating breakdown of the imperialist order and degeneration into chauvinist hatreds and conflict, heading for world war.
Yet the Marxist science of unsolvable crisis contradiction which alone can explain all these and much more disparate international turmoil as facets of the same monopoly capitalist breakdown and collapse, is ignored, evaded or lyingly distorted, across the board.
Only armed with such understanding (see economics box page 6, the Communist Manifesto, Marx’s Capital. Lenin’s Imperialism etc) will the working class be inspired to, and be able to, carry through the class-war overturn needed to end the sick, brutal and rapacious monopoly profit system, reaching the end of its 800-year rise and supremacy with a Catastrophic crisis plunge into trade-war, Slump and Third World war. 
Every kind of proffered “leadership” for the working class fails, or refuses, to draw out the pressingly urgent revolutionary significance of these events, understandable and achievable only by building a party of conscious daily struggle to grasp, explain, correct and extend Leninist theory.
Instead, the universal sigh of relief from liberals, reformists and fake-“lefts” alike as Donald Trump’s last White House helicopter flight departed Washington on presidential inauguration day, delivered yet another lesson to the working class in the smugness and complacency of these middle class mountebanks and charlatans, particularly those claiming Marxist and “revolutionary” credentials, Trots and revisionists alike.
Nothing they have said in the weeks since indicates that any serious conclusions have been drawn from these startling events, nor any about the rotten-ripe state of imperialism and its desperation as it plunges into unstoppable Catastrophe, with total dollar collapse and international finance breakdown once more pending and with no credit tools left to stretch things out any further.
The raw reality of outright capitalist Nazi dictatorship glimpsed through the Trumpite White House curtains (or lately its curtain fencing) and on the Capitol steps, has been seen off they suppose, or pretend to themselves and to the working class.
Even if they issue caveats about Trumpite dangers remaining, they now swallow hook, line and sinker the deliberately disarming nonsense and flannelling lies from the Biden Democrats about “rescuing democracy” and “moving forwards through cooperation to resolve our differences”. 
“Lefter” elements are more circumspect and aware of general popular distrust of the ruling class links and connections not just to the Republicans but equally to the Democrat side of the tweedledum-tweedledee presidential racket (which is obviously one of the discontents and causes picked up and manipulated by Trumpite “anti-establishment” nazi pretences in the first place). 
They therefore make appropriate noises about not trusting the corrupt, corporate-colluding “Joe” Biden and his billionaire backers, still running capitalist world domination. 
Some will even denounce the “radical” wing of the Democrats too, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, as just “left” props for the same old reactionary monopoly capitalist order, just as the Corbynites were, and are, “left” props for craven and reactionary TUC/Labourism in Britain, and as other “lefts” play such roles in Italy, in Germany, in France and all the major imperialist countries (and echoed everywhere where bourgeois “democracy” is installed).
And since 2008 made it obvious, the “revolutionary” poseurs will sometimes even throw in a few “crisis” words and a perspective of an “overthrow of capitalism”, though always so far into an indefinite future that it is not really being advocated at all. 
The overall thrust of the entire “left” is still that they can get back to business as usual, playing the usual class-collaborating game of “left pressure”, trade union activism and street “protest”, once more jostling to build their own political careers by lulling the working class back into somnolent delusions in supposed “democratic struggle”, “peace protest”, parliamentary roads, and single-issue politics (feminism, black civil rights, environmentalism, drug and crime reform, etc etc) gradually winning improvements.
No sense of the overriding and imminent nature of capitalism’s world shattering breakdown is conveyed, however, nor mostly even comprehended.
Moreover they defeatistly fail to see or understand the great stirrings of spontaneously erupting struggles everywhere which increasingly press against brutal imperialist domination worldwide, albeit still mostly in backward or even reactionary confusion, lacking the revolutionary theory and leadership they need to inspire them to organise and coordinate their struggles all the way to bringing down the whole capitalist order. 
The giant ferment of anti-imperialism and anti-US empire “rogue state” resistance across the world is ignored or actively denounced as “unacceptable terrorism” or “jihadist reaction” or “authoritarianism”; the continuing achievements of the remaining workers states are mostly denounced too, or ignored or at best belittled.
Least of all lately are the staggering examples of the workers states in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba brought to the fore, and crucial lessons drawn from their exemplary handling of the Covid pandemic through collective society discipline, their approach contrasting to, and exposing, the hopeless, callous and anarchic incompetence and profiteering of the “free world” and its bourgeois individualist “freedom” to pursue profit (and to ignore rational science at the cost of tens of thousands of lives). Decades of knee-jerk anti-communism, instilled into Western populations by non-stop saturation brainwashing in news, education, popular and high culture, is all that remains in a residue of hopeless, and mostly poisonous “left” garbage which misleads and disarms the working class, and heads them away from the only serious solution to slump and war, all-out revolution to establish proletarian dictatorships for building socialism. 
Instead there is to be yet more of the same reformist step-by-step struggle which has dismally failed, not only not winning progress towards a better world but failing even to stop the relentless worsening of conditions as “austerity” is imposed, and such reforms as were achieved (particularly post-war as concessions from a ruling class trying to head off revolutionary stirrings under the influence of Soviet victories) are dismantled and “privatised”. 
As usual “this time” things will be “more militant” and with “better leaders”, but still selling the same deadly “democratic path” delusions which have led the working class up the garden path and onto the counter-revolutionary guns over and over again, from Indonesia’s gross 1965 slaughter by Suharto and the 1973 fascist suppression of Allendeism in Chile to the toppling of newly elected president Muhamed Morsi in Egypt in 2013 (and plenty of other instances too).
The apotheosis of such endlessly repeated CIA-guided fascism, in the threatened Capitol Hill nightmare imposition of violent capitalist dictatorship in the heart of the Empire itself, was “just an aberration” they console themselves, explaining it away as the unfortunate result of a “maverick” or “loose cannon”, just as they have done variously since Trump’s advent in 2015.
Much academic tutting about “not using the “f” word” (the fascist one), or how allegedly premature or exaggerated it would be to draw parallels with Hitlerism, has filled pronouncements. 
It is the most craven irresponsibility at best; outright opportunism in most cases, cynically misleading the working class.
First the entire Trumpite period and especially its tentatively violent conclusion in a street insurrection coup attempt – albeit not even half-hearted, and ill-prepared for the moment – is the most profound lesson about the true face of capitalism, demonstrating that the ruling class is ready to turn to outright fascist methods of street intimidation, domestic terror, violent repression and censorship, combined with frenzied flagwaving international hostility, when it has to in order to stay in power.
Beyond that, it is a lesson in how paralysingly deep is the crisis facing the ruling class, such that it would be prepared to tear up the old fraudulent game of “civilised democracy”, the (alleged) “rule of law”, and all the paraphernalia of an “international community” maintaining “decent standards” in the world against the “black tyranny” of communist totalitarianism, which worked so well to bemuse and brainwash mass opinion in the imperialist countries, for nearly a century.
It has been the most valuable weapon for hoodwinking and misleading of the Western working class to keep them away from any ideas of revolt and fighting for socialism – and has remained so even though the 1991 revisionist liquidation of the Soviet Union and East European workers states proved there was no “red” bogeyman and never was.
New bogeymen have been substituted instead, Putinism, Islamism and the “jihadist threat” and Chinese communism, along with slew of lesser bogeys like the latest revived Myanmar “threat”; none are quite as primal as the old one, under the bed, but serve to keep petty bourgeois hysteria on the boil and to excuse ever tightening censorship and world blitzing disciplining.
But it is all breaking down, forcing a turn to open bourgeois dictatorship, albeit tentatively yet, answerable only by class war to finally end this vile unequal, tyrannical system.   
But none of this is drawn out and challenged by the “left” posturing. 
Typical are groups like the shallow Trotskyists of Socialist Appeal for example with much bold sounding but empty warning of the need for “working class independence”, mightily decrying other groups because “left” efforts to win over or pressurise the Democrats will not only be fruitless but see them “pulled rightwards and absorbed”.
Despite the odd correct-sounding declaration that – 
unless and until capitalism’s structures institution and parties are overthrown, things can only get worse
– they offer nothing different, just reformist nostrums larded with poisonous hostility to Soviet and communist history. 
Even the notion of “things getting worse” is actually a million miles from any Marxist understanding of the crisis as total paralysing breakdown, about to hit an historical brick wall of dollar collapse and economic meltdown far beyond 1929’s Wall Street meltdown and the 1931 Credit Anstalt bank failure which triggered domino collapse of the world bank system, both preludes to the 1930s Depression and the Second World War it inevitably turned into.   
The “independent struggle” turns out to use all the old structures and methods:

As we’ve seen, millions of people voted “against” Trump, not “for” Biden. And for millions of others, a vote “for” Trump was really a vote “for” better jobs and wages, not necessarily “for” Trump and everything he represents. Tens of millions of others didn’t vote for either party or anyone at all. And roughly half of all Americans—including a significant majority among the youth—say they would vote for a socialist president or party. And let’s not forget that fully 10% of Americans hit the streets in the middle of a pandemic this past summer to protest the police murder of George Floyd. This was an extraordinary development full of revolutionary implications for the future.
This is the objective basis for a new majority party, a party of, by, and for the working class—a mass socialist party based on the unions. A genuine workers’ party and workers’ government, armed with policies that tackle society’s problems on a class basis, could win the support of millions who currently vote for the existing parties or don’t bother voting at all. Socialism in deeds—not liberalism masquerading as socialism—would slice across the ruling class’s divide-and-rule tactics. Out of sheer pragmatism, millions of ordinary Americans would eventually support policies that concretely benefit them and their families—whether they’re labeled socialist or not.

So, winning reforms within capitalism then, by campaigning for votes in the same old bourgeois democracy system which has hoodwinked and deluded the working class for two centuries or more and which is ever more corrupt, manipulated, bent and distorted by sophisticated advertising, non-stop media brainwashing, dirty dealing, and every kind of gerrymandering and fixing, including all the new methods through social media.
The SA even says as much a few paragraphs previously:

Biden was clearly Wall Street’s candidate. The billionaires invested big in getting their man into the White House, with small donations accounting for less than a quarter of total contributions.
As a result, the 2020 presidential election was by far the most expensive in US history. An estimated $14 billion was spent — more than the previous two presidential elections combined — and Democrats outspent Republicans by nearly double. Despite this massive spending advantage, Biden barely squeaked by with the same Electoral College margin as Trump received in 2016. Nonetheless, in the days after the former Vice President was elected, the stock market soared to record levels. 

Obviously it was not the working class spending all this money.
All this is dressed up with some revolutionary phrasemongering:

Following on the consciousness-shaking events of 2008 and 2016, 2020 marks yet another nodal point on the road to the American socialist revolution. The events of the last twelve months have been a massive stress test for the system—and even heavier stresses are yet to come. Everything eventually turns into its opposite. The most stable country in the world has become the most unstable, and at a particular stage, the most reactionary power on earth will become the most revolutionary.

But the Trots give no clues about when that stage might be, nor how it fits with the giant turmoil in the rest of the world, under what conditions and how it might be led; in fact the Trots don’t really mean a word of it - it’s back to “left” voting:

For Marxists, there is much more to politics than bourgeois elections. Voting once every few years is not enough to change society. All fundamental problems are ultimately decided in struggle, in the workplaces, streets, and barracks, not merely at the ballot box. As Lenin famously explained, politics is concentrated economics. It’s the generalized struggle for better wages and conditions, and ultimately, the struggle to change the fundamental economic relations of society.
Despite its contorted nature, the sharpening polarization is ultimately a prelude to revolution—perhaps not next week, but much sooner than most people might think. We must be prepared for sharp and sudden changes and the rise and fall of accidental events, figures, and movements. With this in mind, Trotsky once said that: “The Marxists, especially those claiming the right to leadership, must be capable not of astonishment but of foresight.”
We can see precisely what is coming if a mass working-class alternative isn’t built in the next period. We shouldn’t be shocked or surprised if Trump himself or someone even-more reactionary is back in the White House in 2024 or 2028. We must persistently explain that if you don’t build a class-independent alternative to the Democrats, the so-called greater evil will be back—greater and more evil than ever.

“More to” politics than elections? “Not enough” to vote now and then? “Not merely” the ballot box – all these weasel phrases are just a cover for dragging the workers back behind reformist parliamentary daydreaming of step-by-step progress with the overturn of the system deferred to some indefinite and indeterminate “ultimately”.
This has got as much to do with revolutionary science as the Daily Mail’s astrology column has to do with the scientific exploration of the universe.
Revolutionary politics would never rule out using “democracy” in the presidential or parliamentary or other forms it takes in capitalism, - Lenin’s book “Leftwing communism an infantile disorder” is an extended exploration of just that.
But it makes clear such participation can be valid for one purpose only, to expose bourgeois democracy for the lying racket it is, using the platform and such “free speech” the bourgeoisie is forced to provide as part of it, to explain to the working class that it is being fooled by any notions of voting for change by “peaceful means”.
Millions of them have groped for such conclusions already through hard experience over the last century, at least in the cynical form of not trusting politicians, but can get no further without conscious understanding of capitalism as a dictatorship itself and its disastrous crisis as the problem to tackle, – it is one reason why some of them are vulnerable to the “drain the swamp” fake anti-establishment schtick from Trump (and Le Pen in France, and even Brexitism in Britain). 
Most sickeningly of all, Lenin’s words (as always with such posturing fake-“leftism” quoted only in tiny phrases abstracted from their full context) are turned upside down to justify this grotesque opportunism, by suggesting that the Bolsheviks advocated such limited “wages” struggle, from which “ultimately” revolution would emerge (presumably spontaneously).
Lenin’s “concentrated economics” aphorism means just the opposite; that the whole  political and social superstructure of capitalist society and its movement and development is founded on its economic relations and its intensifying contradictions (which Marx spent 30 years teasing open in Capital) and therefore, to get out from its economic exploitation, the advanced section at least of the working class needs to understand in depth all political, economic and social questions, taking the lead eventually in building a new socialist society. 
The entire thrust of polemics and arguments made over decades in multiple volumes by Lenin against first the economist reformists (wage struggle advocates) and then more generally the petty bourgeois Menshevik reformist inheritors of that line, was the exact opposite to this slippery misrepresentation – limiting workers to trade unionism over “working conditions” was to prevent them ever attaining the broadest and deepest philosophical and historical perspectives without which there can be no successful revolution.
And it was the Marxist party’s task to fight for this understanding, taking a lead, not merely “standing alongside” the workers like some beaming benevolent uncle as the Trots patronisingly promise they will do.  
So, let’s see a fuller Lenin quote (though still short) as used against similar limitations of the Socialist Labour Party in the mid-90s eg (EPSR No856 04-06-96):   

But even the most superficial ‘Marxism’, as Scargill has proclaimed the SLP to be following, requires an internationalist revolutionary perspective and an education programme which arms workers with a complete exposure of world imperialism’s entire economic and political racket, both short-term and longterm.
The long detailed EPSR campaigns exposing the ultimate bankruptcy of dollar hegemony and international finance-capital’s postwar credit boom; the endless tyrannies by the ‘free world’ leaders in the anti-communist Cold War that went with that boom; the viciousness of Third World exploitation by the West’s ‘free market forces’; the (limited) achievements of the socialist camp in social and economic reconstruction in the teeth of imperialist Cold War disruption and undermining; the inspiring hopes of future triumphs from the properly-understood real successes of anti-imperialist struggle around the world (e.g. Ireland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, etc) at the moment of their advances; the continuous reanalysing of the setbacks to the international anti-imperialist struggle and the reasons for those failures or defeats (e.g. Chile, Grenada, the self-liquidation of CPSU revisionism, etc); - all of these issues and many more constitute the essential arena of the struggle for a full revolutionary consciousness for a workers movement which wants to build socialism.
This, of course, is the major theme of Lenin’s What is to be done:

The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the worker’s learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events, to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population.
The worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real “inner workings”; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected.
It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.

….What Lenin goes on to discuss, of course, is the essential role of a regular newspaper with which to constantly strive for the very latest (and therefore the very highest) point of revolutionary theoretical assessment of the international balance of class forces, ignorance of which or failure to understand which must obviously make it impossible for any party to lead the working class to an ultimately successful struggle for socialism.

The appallingly shallow rank-and-file-ist strategy, outlined before by ex-Militant Socialist Appeal, but shared more or less by every other variant of Trotskyism, hamstrung by petty bourgeois idealist notions of “perfect revolution”, does the exact opposite, hiding the significance of Trumpism and hiding the significance of the very temporary Biden “restoration”.   
Because it makes no serious effort to get to grips with the unfolding complexities of the world balance of class forces (and is hostile to much of the world spontaneous revolt) they have not the remotest grasp of this profound development.
Their explanation that Donald Trump’s election was some kind of anomaly – whereby a maverick element was able to tap into “raw anger with the status quo by the petty bourgeoisie and some sections of the working class” as austerity has tightened its grip is hopeless. It echoes other shallow “left” theories of Trump being a “loose cannon” (as described by the museum-Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian revisionists for example). 
Certainly, once Trump’s  “outsider/anti-establishment” playacting picked up mass support, (aided by a vacuum in working class leadership, as the Trots correctly state) it was adopted by all the Republicans, swallowing their patrician distaste for the jumped-up arriviste philistine braggart, because “it revived their fortunes” – much as the slump-paralysed and fearful German bourgeoisie swallowed its disdain for Adolf Hitler’s beerhall origins.
But that still explains nothing.
Why is the outright reactionary wing of the ruling class in such trouble that it needs this kind of demented and irrational populism to get by, and is ready to take it all the way to an outright coup??? 
Why has it allowed matters to be pushed so far into the open that its readiness to contemplate military coups, rightwing street intimidation, and non-stop international belligerence, whipped up with flag-waving jingoism and a bizarre frenzy of off-the-wall conspiracy theories is made clear to all?
But equally why has it baulked at the fence?
To suggest as the Socialist Appeal does that 

A majority of the US ruling class despises Trump for being such an unpredictable and destabilizing factor.

and that they backed “Joe” Biden because

Trump has “shattered the guardrails” of the presidency. Biden’s task is to relegitimize the institution and the system as a whole, on behalf of the ruling class.

not only explains nothing but also indirectly once again feeds all kinds of illusions in democracy (these Trots clearly secretly sharing the same “sigh of relief” as all the other petty bourgeoisie).
And it is plain wrong.
Half the ruling class does not back Biden – and a slew of billionaires and ruling class interests stand behind Trump (see EPSR last issue).
The state forces at the Pentagon, in the judiciary and police have been packed with Trumpite supporters because there are plenty of them.
And Trumpism has not gone away, it is “bidin’” its time, lurking beneath the surface like a Florida swamp alligator.
More of the ruling class will pitch in if the crisis gets worse.
Marxist science says it will, dramatically so, and soon.
But for the moment the more cautious bourgeois wing and the “sophisticated” middle class has cold feet about going all out for an open bourgeois dictatorship (Nazi) solution.
Trumpism (or Hitlerism, or any other variant of open fascism,) can suppress revolt for a while but it is also a lesson in the down and dirty reality of capitalist rule that will push revolutionary sentiment to the surface, as already visible in the US street demonstrations and upheaval of the summer.
The whole of twentieth century history has already taught the masses where Nazism goes and how the whole West had encouraged it throughout the 1930s.
The exposure of capitalism’s true character (made clear by Nazism’s shattering defeat by the revolutionary Red Army during 4 years of heroic struggle from 1941-5) was overcome only by developing even greater trickery post-WW2. 
Taking advantage of Moscow revisionism’s ludicrously mistaken assessment that there was a “good” or at least “non-aggressive” form of imperialism (derived from temporary imperialist alliances with the USSR against German Nazism, made for their own inter-imperialist conflict reasons – see EPSR books on Gorbachevism and Unanswered Polemics against revisionism), the US-led West built an elaborate façade of “modern” Western “democracy” as a united, international, anti-Nazi, pro-“human rights”, “anti-war-crime” and “freedom loving” “New World Order” supposedly different to the Old Order of European (and some US) empire-building and its 400+ years of colonialist genocidal plundering and slavery.
Of course it is an even bigger fraud as the entire Third World of sweatshop and plantation multinational exploitation can testify, held down by terror, torture and poverty under a slew of local Western stooge dictators from the Philippines, to Bangladesh to Haiti, and with all attempts to get out from under blitzed and tortured into the floor to whatever extent needed, from death-squad massacres and coups to the millions butchered and maimed in Vietnam and Korea. 
But for decades it has fooled the blinkered and brainwashed, (and willingly so among the comfortable petty bourgeois layers) particularly in the privileged West, aided and abetted by layers of class-collaborating trade unionists and “left” groups, the Trots foremost among them.
Such a powerful tool is not lightly thrown away but it has been losing its grip as crisis has relentlessly deepened intensifying international and domestic conflict.
The temporary suspension of Trumpism is not about “re-asserting principles” but a battle over how much mileage is left in “democracy”, reflecting how fearful and desperate the entire American ruling class has become, paralysed and split by the crisis, and fearful of where it has to go.
The working class needs to understand that this is an Empire ruling class at the end of its tether as the monopoly capitalist system runs into a brick wall of contradiction and unsolvable “overproduction” crisis, collapsing economically and facing turmoil and revolt everywhere.
And it will only grasp that with the fullest and deepest Marxist-Leninist crisis perspective on the hair-raising disintegration of all Western dominated society that is coming, and soon, which will put the austerity so far (including the intensification caused by the Covid disaster) into the shade.
As repeatedly warned in the EPSR, quoting impeccable bourgeois sources (eg issue 1589) the endless printing of credit dollars has created the greatest “bubble” in history, visible in the gobsmacking and insane increases in wealth for the tiny billionaire class (one increasing his holding by more than £10bn overnight, or the top 15 hedge fund managers paying themselves $23.3bn last year).
It must and will implode with incomprehensible consequences.
The Bidenite wing believes that the endless stretching of the credit system can continue to buy more time and is swamping the system with another mind-boggling $1.9 trillion; the Republican – now Trumpite – side that the game is up already and the preparations for war and domestic repression take priority, whipping the masses into a hate-frenzy against the rest of the world “for not giving Americans their due” (ie all the cherries and all the cream – for the ruling class), and being to blame “for the mess we are in”. 
The already bankrupt US ruling class knew exactly what it faced decades ago which is why it turned to brute force “shock and awe” intimidation with its New American Century plans, to blitz suitably demonisable victims like Iraq into the floor pour encourager les autres, intimidating Third World revolt and intimidating the biggest potential imperialist rivals, like German dominated Europe and Japan (whose rising economic challenges were shaking Washington as far back as the Reagan/Thatcher period).
Saddam Hussein was in their sights (after warming up NATO warmongering by blitzing little Serbia in 1998), long before the 9/11 jihadist attack added another excuse, transiently diverted attention onto pounding the benighted civilians in Afghanistan, “collectively punishing” them, Nazi-style.
But it didn’t work.
Relatively small as it was, the WTO attack was a sign of the great growing “terrorist and insurgency” resistance which the US torture and butchery in Iraq massively magnified, growing ever since and bogging down the Bush regime’s plans in quagmire defeat abroad and war-weariness and discontent at home, even as the ever deepening capitalist crisis burst to the surface in the heart of imperialism itself with the 2008 global bank collapses.
The black-man-in-the-White House PC card was played to rescue the presidency, (with other single issue “victories” added on, Hillary Clinton for feminism and gay rights in 2012,) all a totally cynical manipulation now repeated again with “Joe” Biden.
Despite supposedly extricating the US from the warmongering mess, Obamaism not only pursued the same imperialist world domination agenda, but in many ways more so, backing the stinking Zionist occupation’s genocidal atrocities, droning and blitzing the Middle East, running CIA coup attempts and anti-communist plots in Venezuela, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Nicaragua, and above all pumping out dollar credit QE on a gigantic scale to bolster collapsing American industry and banks against ever greater imperialist trade competition (cars, Airbus planes, electronics etc etc).
But that was not enough; the crisis-driven world revolt took a qualitative turn to gigantic street revolts with the 2011 Arab Spring, shaking Washington to the core and demanding more war, first the NATO barbarity against Muammar Gaddafi’s bourgeois nationalist Libya, (bogusly dressed up as “supporting an extension of the Arab Spring” – an obvious nonsense though swallowed by the entire fake–”left”) and then the even messier CIA/Zionist provocation of sectarian civil war in Syria (also more bogus Arab Spring) to isolate the teeming masses in Egypt from potential Arab nationalist anti-Zionist solidarity. 
Washington and Zionism then helped put through yet another coup in Cairo in 2013 to brutally keep a fascist dictatorial lid on the revolution ferment (financed with US subventions ever since). 
There has obviously not been any “support for the democratic wishes of the Arab people” in Cairo, Libya, Syria, or Iraq.
The Obama-ites also encouraged, and along with Britain, armed the gangster thug tribal sheikdom in Saudi Arabia to suppress real extensions of the Arab Spring in Bahrain and its own eastern provinces, and most of all to begin the unspeakably depraved genocidal onslaught on the Yemeni people and their upheavals, (another genuine “extension of the Arab Spring”).
That too has gone badly wrong, with the dogged Houthi struggle pushing back the arrogant and indolent feudal Arab sheikhs, who are steadily being bankrupted by the war, defeated on the ground and suffering increasing internal damage from missiles (only very occasionally reported):

The songs and poems of revolution that once echoed beneath the charming medieval architecture have faded away, replaced by the Houthi sarkha, or scream, daubed in red and green on almost every surface: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curses on the Jews, victory to Islam.”
On occasion, and always without warning, the tension is pierced by coalition airstrikes...
As the conflict grinds on, the accompanying humanitarian crisis is on the verge of a terrible new zenith, in the form of the worst famine the world has witnessed in 40 years.
Ten years ago last month, more than 10,000 people took to Sana’a’s streets in the first mass demonstration against the corruption and cruelty of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 32-year-old regime.
Saleh stepped down in early 2012, finally vacating a job he described as like “dancing on the heads of snakes”. (In 2017, he would meet his end in the same manner as Muammar Gaddafi, a bloodied corpse dragged through the streets, after he tried to switch sides in the war.)
“It was so powerful and intoxicating, that feeling that for the first time ever, people in Yemen were unified. It didn’t matter what your tribe or religious or political affiliation was, the gender dynamic, we all showed up together, week after week,” said Raja al-Thaibani, a Yemeni-American who put her university studies on hold in 2011 to participate in the uprising.
In the political and security vacuum that followed, several actors posing a threat to the fragile state’s integrity gained ground: in the northern highlands, the long-simmering Houthi insurgency; in the central deserts, al-Qaida; and in Aden, Yemen’s second city, a movement for renewed independence for south Yemen.
Full-scale conflict erupted when the Houthis, a Zaydi Shia militant group, decided to storm the capital, forcing the interim president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, to flee to neighbouring Saudi Arabia in early 2015.
With the advice and support of western allies including the UK and the US, Saudi military commanders, never before tested in fighting wars, decided on a three-week bombing campaign to drive the Houthis out of Sana’a.
Operation Decisive Storm has instead morphed into a stalemated conflict that now stretches across 47 frontlines and has claimed 233,000 lives.
Far from the gleaming palaces of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, the coalition’s military ambitions have come unstuck in the badlands of the Arabian peninsula, but it is Yemeni civilians who have paid the price.
Weddings, hospitals and a bus full of schoolchildren have all become bombing targets: in Saada province, the Houthi heartland, airstrikes have become such a mundane part of daily life that people no longer pay any attention to the whine of fighter jets overhead.
Malnutrition, cholera, dengue fever, and now coronavirus stalk the young and the frail in what the UN has called the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world”.
“The Houthis in the north, and their Iranian backers, are not going anywhere,” said Mahdi Balghaith, an analyst with the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies thinktank, during the Guardian’s last visit to Yemen in November.
In Yemen’s diverse south, the dust has not yet settled, but Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed have alienated potential allies.
[Recently] men from Shabwa’s 10 clans had gathered for a protest sit-in near a UAE military base, demanding justice for nine men and boys killed by an airstrike during an unprovoked attack by Emirati-backed forces. Sometimes, they said, an Emirati fighter jet will swoop low over the camp in an effort to scare them away.
The coalition itself has fractured since the UAE decided to back the southern separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) in 2017, and now largely hangs on the strength of the personal relationship between the two potentates, but the war shows no signs of ending yet.
Riyadh has been holding back-channel talks with the Houthi leadership since the summer of 2019, while the UAE drew down most of its forces around the same time.
As the coalition’s leaders look for exit strategies, however, clashes between the Houthis and local Yemeni forces have intensified, and after several rounds of fierce infighting, the now-mended relationship between the STC and Yemeni government is still fragile.
The newly inaugurated US president, Joe Biden, has suspended arms sales to the Saudi-led campaign for now, but his administration has so far been vague on what Yemen policy will look like.
One of Donald Trump’s last acts in the White House was to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organisation, a move he was warned would not significantly hurt the rebels but would make it much harder to deliver the aid and imports which make up 90% of Yemen’s food and fuel.
Even if Biden were to reverse Trump’s decision* [*he has], the World Food Programme projects that the sanctions are already forcing 80% of the country – about 24 million people – into severe hunger.
The UK government, meanwhile, has forged ahead with arms sales, despite a landmark 2019 court of appeal ruling that found Westminster had not sufficiently examined whether the coalition regularly breaches international humanitarian law.

It is one index of the sick hypocrisy of Biden’s “post-Trump reasonableness” that his new White House now pretends to be seeking peace for the wreckage that has been made of yet another entire country, but only because the Western stooges are losing a war he as vice-president and Barack Obama started and sustained.
Another is the decision to press on with the vengeance extradition of Julian  Assange, head of Wikileaks, already monstrously and unjustly kept in grossly inhumane conditions in Bellmarsh prison and refused bail by the craven British lapdog stoogery to US empire barbarity – reducing his physical and mental health so severely he is in mortal danger – in order to silence his journalism and the damage done by leaks and videos of gung-ho warcrime killings by the US occupation of Iraq and much else.
Everyone knows it is 100% foretold that if he is taken to the US he will be banged up in its “high security” torture and isolation prison system forever, or until his treatment kills him, pushing through American vengeance for the humiliating and damaging revelations made about the US warcrime rampaging  in the Middle East.
Some “restoration of democracy”!!!

[..]the new Biden administration will pick up where ex-president Donald Trump left off in seeking to charge the anti-secrecy activist for his publication of classified documents.
A statement comes mere days before a February 12 deadline for the US government to submit “grounds for appeal”. American attorneys will argue against UK Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling against the move.
Calls on Washington to abandon the Assange case picked up momentum in the waning days of the Trump presidency, with activists and journalists across the political spectrum demanding he pardon the WikiLeaks publisher before his term was up. While Trump ultimately refused to grant clemency, much of the same pressure has carried over to the Biden administration, illustrated most recently in a letter from some two dozen civil liberties organizations condemning the indictments against Assange as a “grave threat to press freedom.”
“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely – and that they must engage in, in order to do the work the public needs them to do,” said Monday’s letter, organized by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and signed by the ACLU, Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists, among others.
The letter echoed a similar argument accepted by former president Barack Obama, who declined to charge Assange during his eight years in office on the grounds that WikiLeaks’ activities were too close to standard journalistic conduct. Biden, who served as vice president under Obama, is following Trump’s extradition drive.
Assange faces 17 criminal counts under the Espionage Act for publishing classified material, including hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that made up the Iraq and Afghan War Logs, as well as the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which shows a US gunship firing on a crowd of Iraqi civilians

This sick fascist business further exposes the fake-“left” nitpicking that says “you mustn’t use the “Nazi” word yet, another side of the opportunism deluding and disarming the working class with “democracy” flannel.
Another version comes from the “sophisticated”, once-revisionist and now Kautskyite (anti-Lenin’s proletarian dictatorship), Weekly Worker, CPGB (who are anything but Leninist as they initially named themselves). 
These constipated academics are not quite so vacuous as the no-explanation-at-all Trots, but their “theory” amounts to much the same thing, airily dismissing the possibility that Trumpism should be described as “fascist” because of some mechanical logic which by which fascism “only comes into existence as a counter to significant, potentially revolutionary, movement” in the working class.
Such is their relentless defeatism, allied to ponderous prescriptive formulas for how the class struggle is supposed to move forwards, that they see no such upheaval.
The shattering street protests of the anti-racism and antifa movements in the US presumably never happened; nor the huge jihadist/”terrorist” rebellions in ferment across Afghanistan, Africa and the whole Middle East in Somalia, Mali, the rest of the Sahel, Mozambique, Nigeria, Central African Republic etc etc; nor indeed the great rumbling continuations of the Arab Spring in Yemen as mentioned, and potentially in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere (just beneath the surface and requiring vicious civil war destruction or brute fascist repression to keep down); in continuing revolt in Indonesia, and the Philippines and throughout India (whose not-democratic-at-all annexation and suppression of Kashmir raises not a peep from the Western hypocritical “human rights defenders” so exercised about the Western “democracy” stunts in Myanmar, Belarus and  Hong Kong etc).
Their theoretical guide Jack Conrad writes:

What about January 6 as an attempt to install fascism? Besides garbled populist propaganda denigrating foreigners, corrupt politicians, migrants, preachy liberals, greedy capitalists, religious, ethnic and other minorities, etc, fascism launches physical force primarily against the organised working class.
Unfortunately, at the present moment in time, the working class represents no threat to the capitalist system in the United States. Trade unions are incredibly weak and there is nothing even approaching a real working class party. The growth of the Democratic Socialists of America is an encouraging development, but it still has not decisively broken with the Democrats. True, it was ‘Bernie or bust’ in 2020 ... but in the privacy of the ballot booth.
The working class threat to capitalism was palpably real in the Italy of the early 1920s, Germany in the 1920s and early 30s, France in the mid-1930s. There were hugely powerful communist and social democratic parties and it was their inability, or refusal, to deliver the final revolutionary blow that allowed, encouraged, propelled the capitalist class to turn to fascist parties and their black, brown and blue-shirted fighting squads - fascism being a terroristic variant of Bonapartism.
There were fascists and small fascist gangs involved on January 6, of course, but, to make the point again, there is no working class threat to the existing constitution or the existing socio-economic system of exploitation in the USA. If there were, then maybe the capitalist class, or at least sections of the capitalist class, might have been prepared to finance, promote and rely on a fascist movement for salvation. As things stand, though, they had no wish, no desire to even back Trump’s bid to steal the election and install himself for a second, third ... term.
There is no immediate danger of a mass fascist movement coming to power in the US. After all, there is no revolutionary situation. Of course, in the name of stopping fascism, sections of the left have formed themselves into single-issue anti-fascist organisations: eg, the Antifa. This is a diversion, because it elevates the mosaic of fascist grouplets into the main enemy. Not the capitalist class, not the capitalist state.
The same essential approach also had it that Trump was a fascist - the main enemy - and therefore it was vital to vote for Joe Biden and once again trail behind the Democratic Party. Eg, the ‘official’ Communist Party of the USA. The necessity of establishing working class political independence and the formation of a working class party is endlessly put off delayed, declared premature.

No different to the Trots’ proposal really then but with added complacency left over from these mountebanks’ revisionist background which earlier in the piece sees a touching faith expressed in bourgeois constitutionalism:

Trump’s cabinets have been ram-packed with military men from the start and at every opportunity he sought to involve the military in US domestic affairs. Trump clearly hankered after a martial law regime and a suitably restricted electorate.
Martial law, note, involves a wholesale suspension of civil liberties, so “military commanders can issue orders to civilians”, as well as “arrest and mete out punishment based on tactical needs of war rather than the civilian law on the books”.6 The only time it has been tried on a national scale was when Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus rights during the civil war. 
Nevertheless, ... Trump insiders urged him to use a declaration of martial law...
Yet, much to Trump’s obvious frustration, there was a decided unwillingness by the Pentagon to go along with his coup attempt. “There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election,” army secretary Ryan McCarthy and chief of staff general James McConville declared in a defiant statement.9
A stance backed by all 10 living previous sectaries of state for defence, including James Mattis and Mark Esper, who both served under Trump. In a joint letter published in the Washington Post they warned that: “Efforts to involve the US armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory,” They ominously concluded that civilian and military officials “who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”10
A clear enough message. The military top brass are sworn to defence of the existing constitution ... not one man, even though that one man happens to be their commander-in-chief.
If martial law had been declared, we would therefore guess that Donald Trump would have been discreetly frogmarched out of the White House by CIA operatives and then placed in a suitably secure mental hospital. A pliant medic would have read out a carefully drafted press statement: Donald J Trump has suffered a debilitating mental breakdown, etc, etc. Meanwhile Mike Pence temporarily moves in to the Oval office.
Unable to play the military card, Trump fared no better in the courts. Lawsuits in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona all failed. Nor did his bid to take matters to the Supreme Court get anywhere. So, to date, the 2000 election is the only one to have been decided by the Supreme Court. Al Gore lost by 537 votes out of a total of almost six million cast in Florida. The Supreme Court stopped the recount and ruled in favour of George W Bush. If there was a steal this was it. The simple fact of the matter is that in 2020 Biden won the popular vote by some three million and secured an unassailable majority where it really matters constitutionally: in the electoral college.

One notable figure from the past who relied on a military “sworn to defence of the constitution” to “uphold democracy” was Salvador Allende, president of Chile in the 1970s’ socialist alliance government, who even invited its leading figure into his cabinet.
His Moscow revisionism-influenced faith in peaceful and parliamentary roads was brutally rewarded with the vicious 1973 Augosto Pinochet coup, (tailored by Washington’s CIA) which deposed him and butchered and tortured tens of thousands of workers, to impose  a regime favourable for international corporate plunder and exploitation.
The smugness and complacency of this WW posturing is breathtaking enough to have caused a minor “polemical” flurry subsequently in its pages, but only from a different mechanical direction, a US contributor declaring that there is a serious problem, and was a serious coup attempt – because the “American constitution is outmoded”.  
So the very slight hint of some correct class sentiment is swamped by even more academicism.    
Update the wording from the 1789 American Independence revolution’s Declaration it seems, and everything would be hunky-dory; it all boils down to the wrong ideas, not material class forces.
Still no clues here about the giant sweep of Catastrophic crisis which will turn everything upside down, and is the driving contradiction which will educate the masses once and for all about the necessity to end this ever more deadly system. 
Despite the brutality and savagery of the “austerity” already imposed and which has wrecked millions of lives, imposing a level of penury, soup-kitchen deprivation and homelessness etc, unknown in the “rich” West since at least the 1930s, the full Catastrophic implosion of the system is still pending, held off since the global collapse by the insane dollar printing of QE, huge tax breaks and massive subventions.
However much the fake-“left” wallow in their defeatist views about the supposed absence of revolutionary class movement, it is coming, as the working class everywhere is forced into the fight for its very survival.
This constitutionalism reflects the same narrow horizons which see only the workers struggle in the Western countries as really counting for anything.
The great wave of Third World upheaval is written off, along with 20 years of quagmire and defeats in the Middle East and Afghanistan, if it even registers with these petty bourgeois except as “the wrong kind of struggle” to be “condemned” (helping the “war on terror” imperialist excuse making for its crisis-driven rampaging). 
Even limiting analysis to the American working class, (which a significant pointer to the undertone of chauvinist Western arrogance which runs right through these poseurs) the perspective of “no threat to the existing socio-economic system” is breathtaking in its gloomy wet-blanket defeatism.
And it takes the biscuit for blinkered woodenness too - not only airily dismissing the entire summer of street revolt inside the US as of no account because it does not fit in with prescribed formulas for class struggle, but failing to see how the oncoming Catastrophe will completely transform even this level of discontent.
The ruling class was poleaxed by this turmoil as it is – what happens when the dollar collapse rips everything apart????
The Black Lives Matter, Antifa and assorted other anarchist or anti-capitalist movements are extremely limited in their perspectives but their weaknesses are not solved by sneering at them – even with the correct enough point that they should be focussing their attention not on the little fascist groupings like the Proud Boys etc, but on the system as a whole, which is sliding into Slump and World War crisis whichever section of the ruling class tries to ruin things.
What they and all workers need is Leninist understanding and that is not solved by simply asserting the need for “an independent party” - least of all any amount of insistence on a “mass workers party” – a fatuous demand in the first place since the question is how such a party should be created and why.
There have been plenty of notionally workers parties,  and of a “mass” character too at times but it is a completely useless ambition if it does nothing to give the working class the leadership and clarity that is vital in analysing the world and guiding revolutionary struggle.
The central obstacle remains sorting out and understanding the need for establishing workers states, as the only way to overcome bourgeois dictatorship and degeneration into crisis war.
It is the only way that the working class really will get a say in society, by taking over everything, and then building socialism under the firm control and guidance of the party led dictatorship of the proletariat.
Non-stop “communism failed” propaganda has to be constantly fought, if such leadership is to be built.  
Getting to grips with the entire history of working class struggle so far, and most of all that of the Soviet Union, both understanding its titanic achievements in building a new kind of society (as far as it managed) and how its revisionist philosophical errors led to its unnecessary liquidation is central.
The Trots, filled with hostility and hatred towards communist state discipline can provide no answers.
Neither do the “pro-Soviet” revisionist groups, Stalin worshipping and refusing to debate and polemicise the long retreat from Leninist revolutionary perspectives as the guide on all issues which began on his watch, and eventually totally undermined even the Soviets’ own firm rejection of Western “free market” anarchy and fraudulent bourgeois democracy as Gorbachevism embraced both.
The debilitating and disarming illusions in abstract “democracy” - which can only ever be a veil for bourgeois control for a long as minority class property ownership and its exploitation “rights” continues (see Lenin’s State and Revolution) – cannot be countered for as long as these historic questions remain unsorted.
Just the opposite, they constantly give the ruling class new ammunition for a deluge of hate campaigns and lying stunts which still fool and fox large swathes of the petty bourgeoisie, and the working class influenced by their attitudes and by two centuries of class collaboration laced with “great nation” chauvinism (being whipped up around the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack currently, by every kind of opportunism - like the revisionist Lalkar/Proletarian and its jingoist flagwaving popular front with populist reactionary George Galloway, the Workers Party of Britain).
Stunt follows stunt organised by the CIA, and other Western intelligence agencies stirring up the petty bourgeoisie in communist or anti-imperialist countries to mount endless “protests” against any government deemed “totalitarian” because it either resists or will not comply with the pressure to allow Western monopoly corporations full rein to exploit them.
So the middle class marches under its shallow and meaningless “freedom” placards in still revisionist state controlled Belarus (where the counter-revolutionary “opposition” has just been given a $21M subvention by the German conservatives to bolster its flagging campaign); behind the reactionary nationalist Alexei Navalny in Russia, whose history of racism and fascism is ignored by the Western media deluge and politicians’ “human rights” crocodile tears; and in Myanmar, where the non-stop Western subversion pressure on the bourgeois nationalist regime has even managed to pull off an “election victory” behind the fragrant British trained Oxford socialite Aun Sang Suu Kyi, forcing the hand of the military to carry out a coup to safeguard the country’s economy.
All this bogus and lying “concern for democratic rights” is steeped in grotesque hypocrisy by an international imperialist order, as with the layers upon layers of lying disinformation around the completely unproven allegations of “poisoning” by Putin’s Kremlin to bolster the “martyrdom” status. Even libertarian Tory Peter Hitchens finds it hard to swallow:

And now we are supposed to admire ‘opposition leader’ Alexei Navalny. Yet the very people who promote Navalny would shy away from any Western figure who had his record of militant nationalism and bigotry. 
He has appeared at rallies next to skinheads. He once took part in a video where he appeared to compare people from the Caucasian regions, often unpopular with ethnic Russians, to cockroaches. 
While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he said, for humans he recommended a pistol. His defenders dismiss this a joke. 

Even the simplest of contextual information can demolish this pretence of defending “democracy and freedom” - just point to the primitive repression by  Saudi Arabia’s monarchy for example, funded and supported by the West, or the endless genocidal landtheft tyranny of the Jewish/Zionist occupation of Palestine; the stitch up judicial or outright coups across Latin America to install fascist or near-fascist regimes like Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil, in Haiti, or Colombia’s deathsquad tyranny which continues to gun down and suppress even the tamest of community leaders, – none receive the non-stop calls for sanctions or international isolation or even invasion, constantly poured out against any and every country that attempts to get out from under imperialist domination.
Presumably if Myanmar is to be sanctioned, or internationally isolated, intimidated or punished in some other way, then ever greater punishments need to be imposed on the degenerate and grotesque wealthy and arrogant monarchy in Thailand, sitting atop a still partially feudal system that has seen at least four violent and murderous coups required since 1945 to keep it in place, the last with a military backed government still in place.
The regional correspondents and journalists writing their sanctimonious denunciations of the Myanmar generals ought to know, since they all live in and operate out of Bangkok.  
The cascade of such “colour revolutions” and “freedom” stunts has become a torrent as the crisis deepens, because it still works on the masses in the West, without any Leninist perspective of imperialism’s centuries of worldwide barbarity to expose it.
That it remains yet such a powerful tool is a major reason for the split in the US ruling over how to stay on top.
The most obvious exposure of this “democracy” pretence is being made by the Trumpite turmoil in the US itself, because once the very heart of the system has essentially torn up even the pretence of “democracy” the whole international edifice becomes unsustainable, both in fooling the masses in the Third World and domestically.
Only revolution is left.
No wonder the fake-“left” are so keen to talk down the significance of Trumpism or belittle the understanding of the essential dictatorial nature of all bourgeois rule.
The Bidenite wing is relying instead on this continuing vacuum in Marxist revolutionary leadership, and on democracy delusions filling the space.
It fears the consequences of Trumpite (or other variants) of obvious fascist takeover fatally damaging its usefulness (and as pointed out by one EPSR comrades, all the more so when the outright fascism would necessarily be such a barmy and irrational version, unable to repeat outright forever discredited 1930s Nazism).
The need for the “democracy” stunt is nowhere greater than against the relentless rise of China’s workers state, which for all its leadership’s revisionist flaws is growing in confidence and capability by the day.
Beijing’s success is another component in the loss of nerve and influence and control by American and other imperialism, alongside the internal US upheavals of the summer,  the spreading of “terrorist” rebellion in Africa and the Middle East, and the continuing resistance of regimes like Venezuela and Iran.
Unfortunately there is no room to fully explore its gigantic significance in this issue but two points are obvious.
Firstly the staggering success it has had controlling the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, demonstrating to the world the importance of a society organised collectively under the leadership of a rational and reasoned workers state authority, necessarily and able to impose a disciplined response (including suppressing hysteria and panic mongering by attention seeking - and Western provoked – “citizen journalists” etc) and but one which is obviously in the interests of all.
Its swift containment of the virus, using an efficient mass test-track and quarantine system with excellent provision for those facing isolation or temporary work suspension etc which has saved most lives and allowed a swift return to normal life, is in marked contrast to the endless prevarications, floundering, incompetence, money-grubbing croneyism and sheer callous indifference of Western capitalism, yet further enriching the grotesque wealth of its billionaires while leaving the proletarian masses to rot.
It alone is an object lesson in the historically bankrupt nature of capitalism and the enormous advance represented by communism.
Secondly is the absurd level to which the Western propaganda campaign has been forced to, in order to try and counter this staggering success – reaching absurd and surreally nonsensical levels, particularly around the ludicrous accusations of “genocide” in Xinjiang.
More needs to be explored on all of these, and the firm response Beijing has made to them, from seeing off (finally) the year-long disruption and violence of the petty bourgeois anti-communist “protestors” in Hong Kong, to banning the BBC in China in the wake of Britain’s provocation in shutting down China Global Television Network in Britain.
But for the moment consider the grossest lie and hypocrisy of all, which is the Zionist and Jewish freemasonry’s addition of China’s Xinjiang province to its Holocaust day commemorations, with pious declarations of support for the Muslim population.
Quite apart from adding to the West’s outrages big lie nonsense that China’s anti-terrorist programme in Xinjiang constitutes “genocide” - deliberately conflating the perfectly straightforward retraining camps with “concentration camps” and obviously with the “Holocaust” parallel, that that also means “death camp”, this is the greatest hypocrisy yet from the Zionists.
Like the rest of the West, how come they are suddenly supporting Islamic fundamentalism,  when the whole of imperialism has been blitzing bombing and butchering this revolt for decades (and particularly in the invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan  etc)??? 
 And more specifically, the Zionists (!!) want to declare their “sympathy” for Islamists when they have been constantly and barbarically suppressing, dispossessing  and murdering the entire Palestinian people, and many of their (Islamic) supporters in the Arab world for 70 years, including in multiple notorious invasions and outright massacres?????
If there is to be talk about camp slaughter then lets start with the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon and all the other bombed refugee camps, and then repeated terror bombing and slaughter in Gaza, an effective concentration camp.
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins

E P S R BOX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperia1ist struggles).

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