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 1650 Ocotber 30th 2024                                                                                                                                        40p 

Depraved and gleeful onslaught on 2.3 million people in Gaza by the Jewish occupation of Palestine is now a degenerate atrocity far beyond mere “warcrime”, comparable to any horror in history, from the butchery of two world wars to imperialist slaughter and torture in Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Africa and Latin America. However barbarically it is widened,  to destroy Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq or Iran and further, it will not save the doomed Zionist occupation or ever bring stability or peace to a colonialist “Israel”. Instead it teaches the world the fraud of “democracy” and the United Nations hoodwinking pretence of “law and justice”.  Mass hostility & anti-imperialist hatred will find its way to eventual overthrow of capitalism.  Empire backing solves nothing for the capitalism whose Catastrophic economic breakdown drives all war and depravity. Neither Trump fascism nor Labour “jam tomorrow” lies can stop disaster. Only Leninist revolution will suffice

The sickening crisis barbarity of bankrupt monopoly capitalism’s brutal and degenerate genocidal warmongering grows ever more obvious in Palestine, and against Russia in Ukraine. 
The outright planet-threatening depravity of the blitzkrieg capitalist order as its economic Catastrophe deepens must now be apparent to a flatworm (though seemingly not to the turned-away “blind eyes” of the philistine and complacent “democratic” petty bourgeoisie in the West).
Yet still not one part of the “left” draws the obvious lessons of the need for Leninist revolutionary understanding as holocaust atrocities and inhuman depravity parallel, and even outdo, any of the foulest tyrannies and butchery of the last 500 years of racist capitalist colonialism and exploitation, and increasingly threaten the internal structure of every society in the ever more unequal and class-divided West too. 
The Zionist and NATO/Kiev nazi-proxy horrors (lyingly blamed on the Russians) come on top of 20 years of dementedly dangerous and foul direct imperialist wars, wiping out half a dozen countries so far; of fascism unleashed once more; of in-your-face environmental destruction; of domestic censorship and repression; of homelessness, food bank poverty, corruption, corporate profiteering cynicism and intensifying world “austerity” Slump.
It is only the start. Hair-raising nuclear war and ecological collapse loom larger and larger as real threats (rather than James Bond scare plots or computer game outcomes), and will continue to become more and more threatening until this system is ended in the only way possible, by civil war revolution.  
It is coming. These ghastly atrocities reflect the weakness, desperation and paralysis of a class domination system that is out of time and historically bankrupt, losing its once worldwide authority and control.
The world’s exploited and downtrodden masses are seething in hatred and hostility against an ever more overtly repressive Western tyranny and nowhere more than in the Middle East.
Spontaneous eruptions of anti-imperialist struggle are growing everywhere, along with multiple protests domestically against racist persecution, global warming, floods, famines and drought, disease, species extinctions, against water pollution, against ocean destruction, against crimes and drug alienation, against police repression and suppression of “free speech” and a dozen other causes from the Post Office scandal, plundering of the NHS by big Pharma, the Grenfell fire atrocity and its cynical profiteering all around, to the schooling breakdown, the Port Talbot steel shutdown and the bankruptcy of local authorities.
But the necessary revolutionary consciousness to see all this and much more as part of the same problem, the capitalist profit system, and to guide the total class war overturn of this stinking, arrogant, incompetent and vicious world ruling class and its plunge into utter disaster, is still hampered and fragmented.
Decades of retreats, failures, complacency and evasions by the fake-“left” and its siding with bourgeois anti-Soviet brainwashing, blaming scapegoats and migrants, foreign bogeymen like Putin or Xi Jinping and “terrorists” like the Middle East liberation fighters, for the disintegration caused by capitalism itself, still holds back consciousness.
And the few “left” sections who have not fully capitulated to imperialist barbarism (unlike those supporting the Ukrainians (and in some cases even the Zionists)), still refuse the gigantic debate needed by humanity over the only possible future, building communism in workers states, under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Necessarily that means recognising and educating the working class in the staggering advances made by the proletariat in its first titanic historic achievements building Soviet socialism over 70 years, and inspiring and aiding much subsequent struggle, as well as examining in depth the philosophical leadership mistakes which eventually liquidated its brilliant gains despite its continuing viability (and huge potential).
And it means exposing and countering the sour petty bourgeois hostility of the fake-“left” to that history, still misleading the working class and disarming it. 
All the constantly regenerating hydra-heads of the 57 varieties of fake-“leftism” are increasingly exposed for their complete uselessness, opportunism and treachery by the horrific unravelling of the world profit system: “labour movement” trade union leadership opportunism, revisionism and poisonous anti-communist Trotskyism still play to the hoodwinking and disarming nonsenses of reformism, “democracy” and “peaceful protest”, uselessly demanding impossible “ceasefires”. 
They succumb to Western lying psyops bogeyman stories about “terrorism”, “jihadism”, and Russian or Chinese “totalitarianism”, even as every so-called “rule of law”, “democratic principle”, or “international justice” framework is torn to shreds or trampled over, and as the “United Nations” is exposed for the toothless stooge fraud it has always been (and now even shelled and bombed in its own “peacekeeping” watchtowers and charity-bandage agencies by the contemptuous fascism of Zionist master-race arrogance and the imperialists who sustain them).
Worse still the utterly playacting dilettantism of much fake-“left” posturing and pretence is back on the table claiming to be “fighting for communism” (a word long avoided, under the craven excuse it would “put people off”) and “upholding Marxism” requiring its own exposures too.
This renewed “boldness” (often by groups like the Socialist Appeal, now RCP, which have long played the sly and cowardly “entryist” “democracy” game, hiding any revolutionary aims “for tactical reasons” and thereby neutralising hundreds of those drawn towards Marxist ideas) is suddenly emerging just when the working class is being forced to ask profound questions by crisis collapse.
Its shallow philistinism bears as much relation to necessarily serious Marxist-Leninism as the CIA anti-communist Readers Digest does to the world’s greatest literature, and aims only to mislead.
Even where fake “leftism” is not openly counter-revolutionary (eg like TUCism or the Trots who hate all manifestations of working class collective discipline) it comes nowhere near the profound and necessarily deep and complex polemical battle to study, understand and further develop the dialectical science of class and national forces and their contradiction-driven movement, building a disciplined but openly polemical party of leadership which alone can lead the fight for proletarian dictatorship-built socialism, the only way out of now already raging World War Three.
Even the very economic basics of Marxism rarely feature, for years derided as “old hat Catastrophism” or relegated to academic “theory” articles rather than made the core of all interpretation and analysis of unfolding events and development of intertwined theoretical and  practical leadership.  
Even now that crisis has become an unignorable Catastrophe, it is only mentioned in articles or speeches incidentally, as an additional factor or a final tacked-on afterthought to “militant action” or reformist demands for “fairness, justice and peace”.
And nearly always it comes with the all-purpose evasive “ultimately” caveat, deferring any revolutionary conclusions to some indeterminate future (i.e. never as far as these “lefts” are concerned) while they coral the working class in behind reformist perspectives.
But Marx, Engels and Lenin did not spend decades studying and laying open the detailed workings of the commodity system, and its transition into monopoly capitalist imperialism, for no reason – it is the great contradictions of the class-divided profit system which are the very driving engine of war and destruction, deliberately fostered by capital as a “solution” to the great collapse and plunge into antagonistic trade war slump which will always return however long “boomtimes” are stretched with insane mountains of valueless dollar credit.
The bourgeoisie’s need if it is to survive is to intensify worker exploitation, (longer hours, lower pay, worse social conditions, all just the start) all the way to de facto slavery, brutally smashing down and terrorising the inevitable revolts so engendered.
That was exactly the pattern of the 1930s, on all sides, but most obviously and extremely so in Nazi Germany which reached the point of working huge numbers literally to death (as all imperialism has done in the colonies). 
Just as much or even more imperialism needs to destroy capital itself.
Both Slump aims are the only way this bourgeois system can restore unstoppable declines in profitability built into capitalism (see page 6), while making sure that other rival powers bear the burden.
There is no room at all in this now for reformist struggles “ameliorating” the impact of the Slump, reversing austerity or achieving ceasefires or any other reforms (which have always been spin-offs from revolutionary struggle anyway).
Let such working class campaigns emerge spontaneously of course and every other kind of protest and fight, as ordinary people’s dismay and the difficulties of the great world collapse, shake up their long lulled and hoodwinked expectations and trigger their resistance. 
But let there also be the fight for the deepest understanding of what they are really up against, the most devastating world system breakdown ever seen, making all such limited demands impossible in this now rapid spiral downwards into a Depression, barbarism and horrifying war far worse than the 1930s.
Continuing demonstrations and actions like those against the vile and vicious blitzkrieging vengeance and degenerate collective punishment by the Zionists are not the problem as such and in fact show significant continuing public opinion backing, and sympathy for, the grotesquely victimised population in Gaza, in the West Bank of Palestine and now the millions being butchered and driven from their homes in Lebanon, increasingly being subjected to the same bombing and starvation, carnage and terror as the Gazans they have supported.
The rest of the capitalist world’s masses will soon be drawn in too, even in the richest countries.
But they will be held back and limited in their fight without revolutionary consciousness of how and why this alienated society is like it is, paralysed by the impasse its intractable contradictions have created and with a working class vulnerable to the vicious counter-revolutionary machinations of an always dirty-dealing ruling class and its non-stop propaganda lies and fabrications.
Economic and political Catastrophe of this bourgeois system, is the very cause of the wars now merging into all-out World War Three and on a greater scale than any yet (as great again in its deadly destructive horrors as WW2 was compared to the 1914-18 Great War, and as that was to the first inter-imperialist conflict in always developing and revolutionarily advancing history, in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871).
The Marxist understanding which explained and predicted this future is more and more the crucial perspective, more and more confirmed by events.
The cruder and more thuggishly crooked Trumpite wing of the American ruling class (all of it brutally vicious) is explicit:
Donald Trump has pledged to take jobs from Britain, Germany and China if he returns to the White House.

Speaking in Georgia, the former president set out plans for an aggressive trade policy that would impose “very substantial” tariffs on companies that did not relocate jobs to the US.
In a pitch to “every major company and manufacturer on Earth”, Trump also said he would use America’s economic muscle to slash the corporate tax rate for businesses that moved their operations to the country.
“Not only will we stop our businesses leaving for foreign lands but under my leadership we’re going to take other countries’ jobs,” the former president told a crowd in Savannah, Georgia.
“We’re going to bring thousands and thousands of businesses and trillions of dollars in wealth back to the USA.”
“I want German car companies to become American car companies, I want them to build their plants here,” Trump continued. “I want to beat China in electronics production. And we’ll be able to do that easily.”
He said that Britain was “dying” to attract big business from the US and was using its tax incentives to do so.
“One day you’re going to read, ‘Oh gee, so-and-so, they just signed with China, they just signed with Germany, they just signed with Great Britain – it’s dying to have them, they’ll give you free tax,” he said.
Companies such as the investment giant BlackRock have sent white-collar jobs to Britain, drawn by depressed salaries and tax incentives.
Trump pledged to levy tariffs on companies that refused to move their operations to the US, while slashing the corporate tax rate from 21 per cent to 15 per cent for those that agreed to relocate.
The policy would prompt a “manufacturing boom” and cause General Electric (GE), IBM and “every other manufacturer that left us to be filled with regret and come sprinting back to our shores”, Trump said.
IBM and the three companies formed when GE split up in April are based in the US, although they are reported to have moved jobs to countries such as Mexico in recent years.
Trump cut the tax rate from 35 per cent to 21 per cent during his term in the White House in 2017.
“This is going to blow that away,” he claimed on Tuesday, saying he would bring in “the most competitive tax anywhere on the planet – but only for those who make their product in the USA.”
Trump also announced plans to reward US-based manufacturers by expanding research and development tax credits, writing off 100 per cent of the cost of heavy machinery in the first year, and allowing full expensing for new manufacturing investments.
Republicans have previously expressed wariness about the former president’s tax promises and believe he is promising more than he can deliver, Politico reported last week.
In addition to his pledges on Tuesday, Trump has also said he would eliminate or cut taxes on tips, social security benefits and overtime pay, on top of the $4.6 trillion it will cost to renew the bulk of his 2017 tax cuts.
The Republican presidential candidate claimed he would ramp up production of cars in the US, while repeating his plan to impose a 100 per cent tariff on imported Chinese cars that are manufactured in Mexico.

The subtext in such chauvinist threats is one of war belligerence against the rest of the world, a fascist isolationism implying violence against all comers who challenge the Americans’ “right” to dominate, exactly as was already being voiced by the strutting bluster of the George W Bush republicans at the time of the post 9/11 Afghan and Iraq invasions with their “either with us or against us” threats to suppress anyone challenging US hegemony (eg EPSR 1188 10-06-03), large or small.
But that did not go so well, as the brutally casual civilian blitzing and torture by US occupation drove tens of thousands into the “jihadist” rebel ranks, forcing a Washington retreat from first Iraq (at least partially) and eventually Afghanistan, failures that have left imperialism smarting.
As the full manifestation of the Great Catastrophe broke in 2009 (after the foreshocks of Asian currency meltdowns, the Enron bankruptcy and 2000 dotcom collapses) things got even worse.
Global bank failures led to huge squeezes on the poorer countries, with mass eruptions in the 2011 Arab Spring toppling US stooge regimes and threatening imperialist Middle East control completely, (and giving space to continuing revolts in Latin America and Africa) only just brought back under control with the Zionist/CIA organised General Sisi military coup (Egypt alone costing a least $1bn annually in US subsidies), the imperialist provoked bogus “more Arab Spring” civil wars in anti-imperialist Libya and Syria, backed by NATO invasions and massive covert interference, and the escalations of Zionism’s repeated and routine blitzing and bombing massacres of the Palestinians (now overtaken by the total genocide underway).
Topdog American imperialism’s ruling class has increasingly been torn in two throughout this more explicit turn to war, from the 1999 pounding of Serbia onwards, vacillating between the outright threat and domestic repression path, against further reliance on “old school” imperialist control using military intervention and worldwide garrisoning, mixed with bribery for local dictatorships, mostly installed by “democratic” subversion and coups against “rogue states” (Myanmar, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Iran, Iraq, Syria etc, Georgia, and Moldova currently and Bangladesh (see page 9 and most obviously Ukraine) and continuing “diplomatic alliances” with the rest of its bourgeois rivals.
All is masked by the great hoodwinking fraud of universal-suffrage “democracy” and its post-WW2 extension into an international “rules based order” and “United Nations”, a racket become increasingly threadbare and now being ripped up completely by the Netanyahus.
The whole system has been the greatest bamboozling fraud ever imposed on mankind and hugely effective in holding back working class understanding (though only with enormous Cold War help from Stalinist revisionist retreats from Leninism, as Soviet (and subsequent revisionists) bureaucratic leaderships abandoned revolutionary perspectives in favour of “permanent peaceful coexistence” with “non-aggressive imperialism” (!!!) post-WW2 (EPSR Book 21 Unanswered Polemics).
But buying off and arming stooges has always been fantastically and unsustainably expensive, demanding endless credit creation and the inflationary pollution of the dollar as the EPSR has never stopped warning (against allcomers) eg in 2004 (No1223):

It is not about “oil” as such.
In the light of Haïti, and Gaza, and Blair’s speech, it becomes more and more crucial to show that global imperialist economic CRISIS is the problem, and that generalised warmongering AGGRESSION is the absolutely essential traditional “solution” to which the most powerful monopoly-capitalist-colonial interests have ALWAYS turned in such moments of uncontrollable, unpredictable, revolution prone, domination-threatening CRISIS in the international economy.
Obviously, it is impossible to prove the Socialist Alliance “anti-catastrophists” wrong, or any other scepticism.
There will be no “proof” of collapse until well after it has happened, even if then.
But the evidence along the route of the Western imperialist ruling circles relentlessly preparing the world both ideologically and materially just for warmongering “solutions” and very little else, — has never stopped accumulating. 
And the precise framework of these insoluble “overproduction” difficulties does generally keep on clarifying itself, drawing attention in particular to the dollar pollution that the EPSR has long highlighted as both the basis, in endless cheap credit creation, for the “free world” trade and development boom which finally bamboozled Stalinist Revisionist idiocy (“the imperialist system can no longer resume economic expansion” — JVS, 1952) into self-liquidating the Soviet proletarian dictatorship in 1989; and thereafter as the INEVITABLE subsequent causal certainty of inter-imperialist “overproduction” trade-war conflict not long afterwards. 

Effectively now, and since the Global Credit Collapse of 2009, the proof is coming thick and fast and not least from the US itself, as at its once most prestigious companies: 

Boeing workers have rejected the US aerospace giant’s latest contract offer, extending a nearly six-week strike which has crippled the already struggling planemaker.  
Some 64% of workers voted to reject the new contract, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), the union representing 33,000 Boeing staff in Washington, Oregon and California, said on X (Twitter) on Wednesday.   
The latest deal included a 35% wage increase over the four-year contract and a restoration of incentive bonuses, but did not reinstate the pension plan sought by many employees.   
“After 10 years of sacrifices, we still have ground to make up, and we’re hopeful to do so by resuming negotiations promptly,” leaders of the union said in a statement.  
The strike has halted production of the best-selling 737 MAX and 767 and 777 wide-body models.  
Earlier this month Boeing also announced plans to cut 17,000 jobs over the coming months, representing nearly 10% of its workforce, as the aerospace giant’s losses continue to mount.   
Boeing reported a $6.2 billion third quarter loss on Wednesday, largely due to costs associated with the strike. 
Days before the workers voted to extend the strike, Boeing announced that its 777X widebody aircraft will be postponed to 2026, nearly six years after the aircraft was due to reach customers.    
The embattled aviation giant has also been under increased scrutiny in recent years due to various flaws discovered in its aircraft, leading to safety concerns and investigations.
************
Are Americans better off than they were four years ago? Pretty much every mainstream economist would say: you bet. Many go further. Growth: up. Jobs: up. Wages: rising. The value of your home: up. Share prices: booming. Inflation: falling. Borrowing rates: dropping.
In 2020, Donald Trump warned that his defeat would produce “a depression”. Today, even while Germany and Japan face recession, magazines toast the US economy’s “superstar status”. Yet ask Americans if they feel better off: no.
Under Reagan’s law, this election ought to be in the bag for Kamala Harris. As Joe Biden’s number two, she can claim co-authorship for this boom. Instead, she is neck and neck with a convicted criminal (never forget: three weeks after polling day, a judge will decide if Donald Trump should be jailed over the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels). On the economy, Trump regularly polls ahead of Harris. The issue that ought to be winning for her is instead losing.
How come? It ranks among the most consequential questions of our time, yet, however hard they scratch their heads Washington’s finest can’t give a good answer. Many on the centre left paint it as a PR problem: that Biden has failed to claim the credit or that voters are too dumb to realise how good things are. But another suggestion emerges in a new report from a progressive thinktank, the Democracy Collaborative.
The authors examine much the same economic dashboard as everyone else – growth, jobs, wages – but over a far longer timeframe. Behind each graph lies the implicit question: are you, your family, your community better off than you were not four years ago, but two, three, four decades ago? And for many people the numbers say: no.
Take the biggest: pay. For teachers, clerical workers, sales reps and the great bulk of US employees, whether white or blue collar, wages have flatlined – not for four or even 20 years – but for most of the past half century. Strip out inflation and average hourly earnings for seven out of 10 US employees have barely risen since Richard Nixon.
For the average US employee, and their families and their towns, the economy has kept on tanking whoever wins the White House, whichever judges make it to the supreme court, whether the analysts decree it to be boom or bust.
Reagan destroyed their unions, Bill Clinton threw open their trade barriers, George Bush Jr dispatched their kids to fight and die abroad, Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street and Trump ran a glorified protection racket. Only in 2020 did real wages for “production and non-supervisory employees” rise above where they were in 1973. This was not because they were unproductive: the US economy continues to do more with less almost every year. It’s just that most of the gains from that have gone to the top.
Biden has spent trillions on boosting the economy and adapting to the climate crisis. He has bolstered unions and intervened in strikes. The graphs show it has had an impact – but it is a tiny uptick at the end of a line that otherwise points remorselessly down. Americans are better off than they were four years ago, it’s just that many were in distress in 2020.
To see how that plays out, I checked in on Mike Stout. We first talked in a diner in Pittsburgh in 2012, the year Obama won re-election. Mike and his wife, Steffi, had worked in Pennsylvania’s steel industry, with good union pay and pensions. They’d gone to Washington for the first inauguration of Obama, and stood in the freezing January cold. They had hopes.
The Stouts did everything right. Worked hard and saved, and spent $50,000 to get their kids through university. In 2012, their daughter Maura was working in a downtown hotel for $14 an hour, the same as her father had earned in 1978. Even then she doubted whether she and her husband would ever enjoy the same standard of living as her parents.
She’d lost that hotel job during the pandemic, said Mike, and was working from her one-bedroom flat. Her job was chasing people for their debts, even though at $18 an hour she was only just keeping her head above water. Now in her 30s, she’d split from her husband, and Mike thought much of the blame lay in money problems. As for his son, Mike, he was looking after his wife, who has stage 4 cancer, and their kids. Mike has health insurance, which counts as good fortune in the US, but the top-up fees are eye-watering, and now he works two jobs.
“The slightest nuance – a recession or prices going up again – and they’re pushed out of the window.”

Spending $ billions that don’t really exist is the problem:

The US is spiralling to bankruptcy and will go bust if Washington doesn’t stop spending, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has warned.
Musk was commenting on X, which highlighted skyrocketing interest payments on US government debt.
“We now pay nearly $1.2 trillion per year in interest on the debt, about 23% of all taxes, tariffs and fees collected by the US govt goes to paying interest on the debt,” he Wall Street Silver account posted.
Musk replied, that “if there is not a radical reduction of government expenditures, then, just like an individual who has taken on too much debt, America will be de facto bankrupt.”
“The interest on the debt is trending to rapidly absorb all tax revenue, leaving nothing for critical needs,” he added.
Musk previously pointed out in September that the cost of servicing the vast US federal debt has outstripped the current defense budget, which topped $840 billion this year.
The US Treasury announced in late July that the national debt had surpassed $35 trillion, soaring by a trillion in a six-month period. The current figure is $35.7 trillion, according to the US Debt Clock.
This is not the first time the tech billionaire has sounded the alarm over US debt. Earlier this year, Musk said that the current rate of government spending was putting the US in the fast lane to bankruptcy, and that government overspending was stoking inflation. 

It is no coincidence the richest man in the world Elon Musk is one of Donald Trump’s main backers, leading the more fascist/aggressive wing of the ruling class for isolationism and savage domestic Slump measures, (even while pretending to be “looking out for the common man” as the Hitlerites did in 1920s and 30s Germany) and hostile to the “print more dollars” wing in the Democrats. 
The Bidenites have been trying to spin out domestic “living standards” while maintaining the world domination through the credit-propped finance pressure (IMF, World Bank etc etc etc) that has gone alongside military interventions and covert coups to keep much of the global south in line for decades, so they can be sucked dry by the giant monopoly corporations feeding the “good life” in the West of fatuous consumerism (for the better off).
If the debt is unpayable, (it is) then eventually at some point it must be reneged on, almost certainly as a process of total dollar collapse, as the EPSR has warned (see quote above), possibly in more unnerving massive inflation or some other mechanism still unfolding. The Trump wing thinks the time has come.
A “new dollar” limited to Americans is one possibility, much as the German imperialists created a “new Mark” after Versailles war reparations had driven their economy into the 1923 wheelbarrow inflationary insanity, wiping out the savings and resources of tens of millions (while enriching a few spivs and operators.) The French too had a “new Franc” postwar.
But that puts the Empire into total conflict with the rest of the world, – who will have to whistle for the investments they have made with their giant surpluses – exactly as isolationism says. 
And that despite the deluded view of some fake-“leftism” (like the Workers Party of Britain’s leader George Galloway), that Trumpism is a slightly “safer” option than the vicious warmongering of the demented pro-Zionism of the Bidenites, because he would “at least settle” the Ukraine war with a Putin peace deal, nothing could be more nonsensical.
The only premise for an imperialist “settlement” in Ukraine would be as part of a cynical calculation by the Empire pulling in its horns and concentrating massively overstretched military and economic warmongering resources for the other major conflicts which it knows it has to have, particularly against trade rivals, as Trump is saying.
The biggest of those is clearly now China, though clearly there are many others, and particularly those in the BRICS, whose international summit at the end of October saw a further loss of control for the US Empire diplomatically and economically, as various rising competitors try to get out from under US imperialist control and endless punitive sanctions.
The rising aggression can easily be called “fascist” (for what the term is worth), as the Democrat presidential contender Kamala Harris has described election rival Trump.
But that surely raises only the playground chant of “it takes one to know one” after the 13 months of utter mass butchery supported, paid for, armed and encouraged in the Middle East by the Democrats’ total support for the nazi-Zionists, and the similar $100s billion for Ukraine’s little green croaking-toad fascist Volodymyr Zelensky and his corrupt stooge swastika-toting compatriots in Kiev, steadily destroying Europe and Russia. 
And if Trumpism is “fascist” (tick), then what is Harris (and all her celeb sponsors), doing lightmindedly maintaining the “democracy” fraud of a presidential “election” procedure at all???
Does no-one study history and the process by which the archetypal Nazi, Adolf Hitler, came to power, namely through the “democratic” electoral mechanisms of the German state, all deludedly and foolishly accepted and worked through by liberal, reformist and social-democratic (Second International) groups and parties, all the way to the concentration camps – including the Stalin-advised German CP?????: 

Because of the lack of clarity over the inescapable revolutionary perspective which alone was facing the world, in Germany the mightiest communist party outside of the Soviet Union was virtually wiped out without trace and without a fight in a matter of weeks; in a period of domestic and international capitalist debacle where a serious revolutionary attempt, entirely creditable and entirely worthwhile, could have been launched but for the universal theoretical cowardice and feebleness which bogged the communist movement down in opportunist tactical and strategic rigmaroles.
And the wrong criticism is still being made which pillories the “after Hitler our turn” nonsense.
The crucial failure lay not in mistimed tactical manoeuvres around Nazi Party activities, but in making ludicrous assumptions about the ‘worth’ and ‘stability’ of parliamentary ‘democracy’, not calling for revolt.
A similar catastrophe was inflicted in Spain three years later where the same delusions insisted that the same worthless ‘parliamentary democracy’ was what was worth fighting for against the fascist rebellion.
It was nonsense. Capitalist crisis was bent on a course of repressive reaction come what may, either through ‘parliamentary democracy’ as in Germany (where Hitler was legally voted into taking over governmental power by the MPs) or around the parliament as in Spain.(No 1135 07-05-02)

[..]a lot was stopping the Spanish anti-fascist movement from its one real hope of triumph, - and that was the policy of the CPSU, the Third international, and the Spanish CP. Their policy was not for a socialist revolution to defeat fascism, but for a Popular Front of every brand of petty-bourgeois parliamentary democracy in sight to all band together to “bar the way to fascism”; and internationally to combine to “uphold the cause of peace”. 
But the permanently confused nonsense of every brand of petty-bourgeois parliamentary democracy in the face of warmongering imperialist aggression is the very guarantee of the victory of ‘fascism’ for getting the guns and police-dictatorship out, – plus the diversion of aggressive foreign wars, – as soon as the world imperialist economic anarchy-system runs into uncontrollable international crisis. It was the weak confusion of the German parliament of petty-bourgeois democracy which actually elected Hitler to be the Chancellor and head a new coalition government. It was the weak confusion of the Spanish parliament of petty-bourgeois democracy which abysmally failed to rally Spain to defeat Franco’s fascist coup, – despite the heroic individual efforts of the communist contingents and others in the civil war (No1070 12-12-00).

The truth is all sides of the imperialist ruling class are driving the world towards Armageddon – not “communists” or “authoritarians” or other “bogeymen” hyped up by the most sustained campaign of psyops big lies and astonishing fabrications in all history (latest against the Georgians), tailored in multi-layered long-term campaigns building one lie upon another with a sophistication that leaves Joseph Goebbels looking like a country yokel (see page 10), utilising every aspect of the cultural machinery, drawing in newspapers, films, the arts world, universities, endless “think tanks” and “experts”, the music industry, trade unionists and politicians, including the “opposition”, and even supposed Marxists and revolutionaries.
But all that is failing and capitalism is going down historically, so now its answer is to try and blast its way out just as it did in 1914 and in 1939 with war overseas and vicious censorship and police state repression at home.
War after war has been deliberately fomented, arising from already stirred up conflicts and skulduggery, like the decade-long inter-imperialist meddling and squabbling over the breakup of former workers state Yugoslavia, eventually producing the conditions for a NATO blitzing in 1999; or that cynically set up against an already demonised (and ruthlessly persecuted and blasted for a decade) victim like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; or the B52 pounding of Afghanistan made “necessary” suddenly to avenge the Third World’s surprise and shock attack on the New York twin-towers and the Pentagon, not major threats in themselves but humiliating blows.
But horrific wars have failed to change anything or solve any of the fundamental problems of the crisis (which are unsolvable).
The price has been huge in lost prestige and “respect” throughout a Global South and its replacement by ever deepening bitter hatred everywhere, exploding into the Arab Spring in 2011 and “jihadist” rebellion across Africa, left nationalist revolt in Latin America and increasing assertiveness by dozens of regimes who were supposed to be cowed by the “shock and awe” blitzing.
Instead the Empire has suffered defeats and setbacks.
The deliberately created Ukraine war to divert attention from economic disaster, has backfired too.
Set up by the dirty CIA/MI6 and National Endowment for Democracy skulduggery which had subverted the country for years after the 1991 Soviet implosion, the now nearly three year long war  was instigated by the reactionary nationalism which the West managed to install by the violent populist Maidan coup of 2014.
It turned immediately to fascist violence against the 40% Russian minority, egged on into murderous civil war against the eastern provinces by Western duplicity around “peace treaties” (buying time to train the Ukrainians) and extended into the allout war which has followed, after Russia countered a Ukrainian buildup in January 2022, its response twistingly declared an “invasion”.
Some of the West’s purpose has been achieved, particularly America’s (and Britain’s) covert sabotage of the NordStream gas pipelines, supplying cheap energy, a move aimed as much at Germany as it is Russia (again, confirming the deep inter-imperialist trade war basis of the warmongering – see recent issues).
Continuing mayhem in Europe also helps hamper general economic rivalry of the EU to the faltering US economy.
But the result has been (so far) a military disaster, along with strengthening the Russian economy and its influence, with half a dozen east European nations shifting towards it, including Georgia, where a stream of CIA subversion attempts have fallen flat on their face, the latest in the failure to scupper the recent anti-EU election result with the usual Western agency accusations of “ballot fixing” etc (again, they should know as Western elections are nothing but corruption, advertising brainwashing, media manipulation and all the other subtle twists perfected over two centuries or more).
As the recent BRICS summit made clear, worldwide it has speeded up the rejection of US imperialist dominance, with the universal international control network of the dollar no longer holding firm, a terrifying prospect for imperialism.
And US fearfulness of where this is going, and of the enormous potential expense, has seen it rein in the Kievites from the allout civilian blitzing war on Russia its Azov thug denizens want to unleash, not least because of the Iraq and Afghan debacles and, still lingering in imperialist minds even now, the impact of the West’s historic defeat in Vietnam.
The US has an aversion to the sight of Stars & Stripes draped coffins arriving back home.
So Washington is now relying on the Zionists to supply the most depraved and demented warmongering of all, on Palestine and now escalated to the entire Middle East region, against Lebanon, Iran and Yemen where the anti-Western rebellion (meaninglessly labelled “terrorism” as if there were no basis to the hostility and revolt engendered by more than a century of repression and plundering) has been growing and intensifying for decades and, most of all, since the Western invasions, blitzings and civil war provocations of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and more.
The Zionists with their own particular fanatical agenda of colonialist occupation and expulsion of the local population, (founded from its beginnings in 1930s terrorising and later Stern gang massacre intimidation), have a particularly demented capacity for brutal suppression, and necessarily so by historical circumstance, having stolen an entire country from its people (there for a minimum of 1500 years) who can never stop fighting to recover their land, property and dignity, and especially so in the post-WW2 epoch of anti-colonialism in which this particular people’s degradation and humiliation is virtually the sole exception.
The irresolvable contradiction cannot be solved except by the Palestinians winning back their land and property, all of it, or by the total elimination or “transfer” of their population, – exactly the genocidal ethnic cleansing “solution” that the Zionist monstrosity is now ruthlessly and barbarically attempting.
They are supported all the way by Washington which together with British imperialism, installed and sustains this colonial cuckoo intrusion in the Arab heartlands, precisely to serve as imperialism’s brutal policeman as it has been doing, continuously exerting Nazi-levels of domination on both the Palestinians themselves and the repeatedly blitzed and bombed surrounding countries, should any of them be pushed too far by their “Arab (or Persian) streets” towards attempting to attack or damaging Zionist/imperialist interests.
The Palestinians’ resistance has clearly drawn the greatest brutality of all, with endless persecution and slaughter for the last 70 years, daily harassed, brutalised, contemptuously pushed around and treated as subhumans to be exploited for their labour in quiet times, disciplined with arbitrary arrests, torture, beatings and killings, and the constant murderous sabotage, intimidation and vandalising of their few remaining farms and properties. 
And at longer regular intervals they are subject to all out blitzing, shelling and terrorising military destruction far more deadly than any of their own attempts to fight back with whatever means they can manage, from thrown stones to the suicide bombings of the first intifadas.
Staggeringly this occupation and its contemptuously racist violence is described as “Israel’s right to defend itself”.
It is a complete nonsense from an occupying power which the entire world knows it to be, and which is in part recognised to be by the “international community” and its “rule of law”, for at least the territories seized in 1969.
And actually that obviously applies also for those parts “generously” taken by the United Nations in 1948 and handed over to the Jews as soon as this origin story is spelt out, (which of course it never is, being an absolutely forbidden topic on pain of being designated an “anti-semite”, despite there being no connection between irrational and racist Jew hatred and hostility to the Zionist project and its barbarity).
The utter berserk depravity of the Zionist onslaught now underway is obviously far, far beyond anything to do with “defence”, even were such a concept remotely valid for a colonial occupier (which it is not, being the aggressor) which forced the expulsion of a whole people into surrounding countries and/or desperate refugee camps, (of which the Gaza strip has been the largest of all, effectively a concentration camp permanently under siege deprivation and humiliation for decades).
Staggeringly the Western media continues to leave unchallenged every interview in which the current monstrous Zionist lies are repeated that the whole horrifying business is all the fault of the Palestinian “Flood” attack of October the 7 last year – ludicrously called a “genocidal attack on the Jews” by Tel Aviv regime when it was clearly nothing of the kind, even then, and certainly not remotely to be compared with the actual genocidal suppression of the Palestinian people underway with ever more extreme fascist depravity.
And even then it had to be hyped up by the Zionist with grotesque lies about alleged “torture” “rape” and “baby killing” etc etc to maintain this gross fictional “justification”, (along with covering up the reality that at least half the casualties resulted from the actions of the Israeli military counter-attack using the “Hannibal directive” so-called under which the Zionists kill their own people if they are captured or are in the midst of “the enemy”).
 The beserker frenzy of the Zionist is now reaching even greater levels of human degradation not least because it is failing in its smiting attempts to cow and intimidate the whole region. 
So bad is the smell that one mealy-mouthed “left” paper, the Kautskyist/Trotskyist/revisionist hybrid Weekly Worker (any port in a storm as long as it is not Leninism) has gone so far as to run a lead letter debating (in the most even-handed academic tones of course) whether “we should now characterise Zionism as fascist?”.
Leaving aside the misleading revisionist formal categorisation (when all imperialism sliding into Catastrophic war and domestic repression is essentially “fascist”) had not the Jewish occupation’s bloodcurdling call for the 2.3 million hapless people in the Gaza strip to be put under a deliberate population-destroying bombardment and siege, with no food or water, already made the issue clear more than 12 months ago and a thousand times more so now it is actually, pole-axingly, putting this extermination plan into action now in Northern Gaza??
(And does it not incidentally raise the same questions about Bidenism and the British imperialist sidekicks in the Labour Party, where Keir Starmer was eagerly supporting this warcrime/crime-against-humanity from day one (backing off with totally hypocritical mouthings about “ceasefires” only because of opportunist recognition of the huge pro-Palestine movement)??
The point should be underlined with cuttings of at least some of the deluge of horror stories which emerge daily from Gaza, from the Zionist military filming of its gleeful atrocities and destruction, the tipping of bodies (dead?) from rooftops; the blockading of aid trucks, the Zionist military’s routine use of human shields, the gleeful “spectating” of the destruction, the vile “kill them all” songs and the wilful lying pretences by the army to be “targeting” Hamas in its horrifying destruction of civilian-filled schools and hospitals, clearly in fact just ethnic cleansing terror, and the systematic assassinations of journalists, now nearly 200 of them in Gaza and Lebanon, intended to shut down any reporting or clear accounts of all this.      
But space remains only to make another point which is that this frenzy is being driven partly by defeat and setback.
Far from everything being blitzed into surrender by the third month of the onslaught, the dogged Palestinian resistance has continued for 13 months and as many even bourgeios commentaries have noted, in such an uneven conflict (far from a “war” as the Western media call it, as if both sides are more or less balanced) this constitutes a defeat for the Zionists and defeat for imperialism behind it.
The same goes for the recent killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
While it has given the Zionist regime some temporary propaganda crowing it will not reverse the defeats and casualties setbacks (which are heavily downplayed by the Jewish occupiers).
The impact of pictures of the  injured fighter’s last moments released in leaflets dropped all over Gaza, will blowback.
His defiant throwing a stick at the IDF spy drone camera despite having lost a hand and with mortal leg injuries will add to a hero-martyr status for the Palestinian resistance and those supporting it, like Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis.
Hamas religiosity is not the answer ultimately to the world threatening degeneracy of imperialism and its collapse into war.
Only the redevelopment and constant extension of Leninist theoretical understanding can carry the world’s mass through to the communist future which can save humanity.   
But defeat for the Zionists, and defeat for the world imperialist system which stands behind them with its weapon supplies,  money and intelligence will open the way to the great debate needed. Don Hoskins

The CPGB-ML/Lalkar’s denunciation of the Washington-backed right-wing military coup in Bangladesh that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s bourgeois-nationalism may have fallen on the right side, but its account of the events is a confused mess that gives no clue as to what the working class should do next. Worse, it gives ground to the US-manufactured lie that new military-appointed leader, Mohammad Yunus, and his capitalist “pro-poor” banking system is in some way “progressive” and worthy of awards. The opposite is true. Socialist revolution is the only way out, but this is left unmentioned.     Part one.

In its September/October edition of Lalkar, the CPGB-ML correctly decries the toppling of Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government in Bangladesh on 5th August as a US imperialist-backed military coup aimed at scuppering growing relations with China.
Lalkar usefully reproduces quotes from a “progressive” petty-bourgeois media outlet backing up Hasina’s reported claim that she was brought down by the US because she refused to allow it to establish military bases in the country. These quotes point out that she had already delayed signing two military agreements since 2022, including one that would have bound Bangladesh “to closer military-to-military cooperation with Washington.”
Lalkar also provides a useful quote from a Hong Kong based publication that points to Washington’s interests in establishing a service port for mid-sized naval vessels in Bangladesh to counter China’s access to ports in neighbouring Myanmar. 
However, the article overall does not provide the working class with the clarity it needs to understand the events surrounding Hasina’s fall so it can begin to move forwards with the socialist revolution (the only way to put an end to all nonstop imperialist sabotage and intrigue), and its Stalinist-revisionist non-revolutionary perspective creates as much confusion as the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party’s bilious denunciations of Hasina, and gushing support for the middle-class student protestors who prepared the ground for the military take over [see EPSR 1647].
Like the RCP, Lalkar makes no attempt to place these events in the context of the Catastrophic capitalist crisis that has been rapidly unfolding since it burst out into the open in the 2000 dotcom crash, and then nearly brought the entire global economy down in total collapse in the 2007-08 global financial crisis; and has already driven three decades of nonstop war devastation across whole swathes of the planet in imperialism’s drive to push the burdens of the crisis onto the Third World.
Despite their competing, pompous claims to be “the Communists”, neither the Stalinist CPGB-ML nor their Trotskyist alter-ego in the RCP even begin to attempt to use an analysis of these developments to give the working class there and worldwide anything like a revolutionary socialist perspective on the crisis.
Without placing these events in a revolutionary world-historical context of a capitalist system heading to collapse and world war, the quotes Lalkar uses to suggest that Hasina’s government was  

extremely competent by the standards of bourgeois governments, both in regards to its economic policies and its foreign policy 

– misleadingly leave workers with the impression that economic disaster can be avoided for the long term without the need for a proletarian socialist revolution, if only Bangladesh was allowed to continue along an anti-imperialist nationalist path; as does this later passage:

[Hasina’s] success in improving her country’s finances is undoubtedly due to some considerable extent to her refusing to succumb to US imperialist demands.

Confusingly, Lalkar contradicts this elsewhere by suggesting that Hasina’s bourgeois nationalism cannot solve the capitalist crisis, but gives no explanation as to why (because it is obvious, they suggest!):

It goes without saying this new [military] government has no more power than did Sheikh Hasina’s to remedy the ills of capitalism for the benefit of ordinary workers, and will probably have a great deal less inclination to even try.

But the economics quotes Lalkar takes from an Indian bourgeois piece to back the statement up about Hasina’s “extreme competency” suggest she really was “remedying the ills of capitalism”!!!
Which is it to be??!!
Highlight Bangladesh as transforming into “one of the world’s fastest growing economies” under Hasina’s government, with “improved living standards”, “humming development projects”, “stability”, “tripled per capita income”, “near self-sufficiency in food” and “raised life expectancy” by all means, as it usefully counters imperialism’s hate-filled lying characterisation of Hasina’s leadership as nothing but a corrupt and nepotistic “autocracy”.
But it must also be stressed that all such “progressive development” (as far as any of this goes) can only ever be transitory at best in a crisis-ridden capitalist system that is dragging the planet unstoppably to economic and world-war disaster.
The working class needs to hear a revolutionary perspective of it taking power in a socialist revolution to build a planned cooperative socialist society, defended by its own proletarian dictatorship, as the only sustainable way to move society forwards. But this does not get look in.
The article’s use of the Indian press quote adds further confusion when discussing Hasina’s “foreign policy” by not challenging the anti-Myanmar comment embedded in this alleged “success”:

“Hasina won praise for the handling of the world’s biggest refugee crisis as over a million Rohingyas have taken shelter after fleeing for their lives in neighbouring Myanmar to evade persecution after a 2017 army crackdown at their homeland.” 

Praise her effective handling of the Rohingya refugee crisis by all means, if that is the case, but the CIA-inspired lie (and the “genocide” slanders behind it)  that the crisis was caused by Myanmar’s anti-Western nationalist Tatmadaw military needs to be exposed, which Lalkar fails to do. 
This omission is unsurprising given that, in March 2021, the CPGB-ML positively reported on “massive protests demanding the restoration of civilian government” after the Myanmar military shut down bourgeois “democracy” as part of moves to suppress a carefully coordinated civil insurrection provoked and mobilised by Western intelligence agencies, including violent attacks on state forces, by supporters of the Oxford-trained imperialist stooge Aung San Suu Kyi. The CPGB-ML then disarmingly described the firm (but perhaps crude) measures the military was compelled to take as “the generals’ stupidity.”
Typical of revisionist-Stalinist cover-ups, in November 2022, the CPGB-ML contradictorily reposted a video report from the Thailand-based bourgeois video blogger Brian Berletic on its party website, The Communists. 
While this usefully exposes some American imperialism’s attempts to stir up pro-Western petty-bourgeois elements in Myanmar society against its nationalist military government, including the massive multi-million dollar financing of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy’s campaigning, it came with no explanation or correcting of the CPGB-ML’s past sympathies.
The CPGB-ML had previously also deplored the military government’s “lamentable behaviour towards the Rohingya” without explaining that the refugees were not necessarily fleeing from the military. They fled to Bangladesh following clashes between a Rohingya insurgent group and the military after the insurgents attacked police posts and a military base in the Rakhine State, killing scores of security officials.
Local Buddhist fanatics had exacerbated the crisis by stirring up communalist attacks on the Muslim Rohingyas, but, while some of the military’s response may have been at times been undisciplined or heavy-handed, this had nothing to do with an alleged “genocide” as events were one-sidedly reported as being by the Western bourgeois press (see EPSRs 1541 05-09-18 and 1647 10-09-24).
The  Rohingya are  now at the receiving end of persecution and ethnic cleansing by separatist Buddhist forces in the Arakan Army, which is also fighting Myanmar’s army – one of the many stunted up “self-determination struggles” treated sympathetically by the West ever since Myanmar’s independence, and now revived and rebranded as part of a bogus “Gen Z youth movement” following the 2017 provocations.
It is crucial to explain this now, in the context of understanding the events leading up to the recent military coup in Bangladesh, as similar “self-determination” unrest has also been provoked since 2017 on Bangladesh’s side of the border, in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in particular, by groups that have links to CIA-backed separatist groups in Myanmar.
These provocations coincide with US imperialism’s reported attempts to bully Sheikh Hasina into allowing it to establish a military base St. Martin’s Island, just a few kilometres from Myanmar, and also may also explain why Hasina warned in May of a US “plot” to carve out a “Christian state” out of parts of Myanmar and Bangladesh (the Muslim-fundamentalist Hefazat-e-Islam had also claimed that “foreigners” were conspiring to do this eleven years earlier). 
The bourgeois piece quoted by Lalkar also states the following as a success:

“Hasina is also credited for skilfully negotiating the rival interests of India and China as Bangladesh is virtually sandwiched between the two Asian giants. She got the support of both the big neighbours and Russia ahead of the elections.”

Further clarification would have been useful here too. 
Whilst it is true that, as a leader of a small state encircled geographically by India and in close proximity to China, Hasina had to skilfully navigate the interests of both, it could also be argued that it is in the interests of the working class for Bangladesh to establish closer trading and diplomatic relations with China due to the benefits that would accrue from improved economic development and increased opportunities, and because this would also strengthen the Chinese worker’s state’s position against warmongering US imperialism.
However, restricting explanations to such a limited, non-revolutionary perspective would complacently drag workers into the revisionist delusion of thinking that further moves towards developing such close trading and diplomatic relations (via the BRICS, the Belt and Road initiative, etc.) would be enough to protect Bangladesh’s workers and poor peasants from the ravages of capitalism’s Slump and WW3 crisis.
Such developments would indicate interesting shifts in the international balance of class forces, but what is needed now in Bangladesh (and everywhere else) is a fight for a genuine Leninist revolutionary perspective to take place amongst its workers to lead them in their struggle to bring down the entire decrepit capitalist state machine and replace it with their own proletarian dictatorship (as the Chinese workers and poor peasants did in 1949).
Further exploration of Bangladesh’s relations with the Indian bourgeois-capitalist state would have been useful here too, particularly as Hasina’s Awami League has been smeared with “Indian stooge” slanders by local chauvinist stooges ever since it led Bangladesh’s liberation war against Pakistan into victory, and this smear was revived in the recent turmoil.
The Awami League’s positive relationship with India has its roots in Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War and the crucial military support given by India’s nationalists in the Congress Party government. 
Indira Gandhi’s leadership had its own anti-imperialist reasons for supporting Bangladesh, particularly to scupper US-imperialism’s bid for influence in the sub-continent via its support for Pakistan’s chauvinist Islamic nationalists. 
But it also had nationalist opportunist interests aimed at heading off any revolutionary socialist developments that could potentially have emerged out of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and spread into India (which already had its own indigenous communist struggles in the neighbouring West Bengal region), by ensuring that a ‘friendly’ bourgeois-nationalist leadership took power.
Phil Waincliffe
Part Two continues next issue

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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EPSR Archives
(edited extracts from previous issues)

Imperialism’s Arab capitalist conspiracy

In the wake of Zionism’s barbaric blitzing extension of its Palestine Gaza genocide to Lebanon we reproduce an article from 1982 and the grotesque warcrime massacres of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. Even then a Marxist analysis was able to pin down the treachery and collusion of the reactionary bourgeois-feudal Arab regimes, now repeated again as they have sat on their hands for over a year, de facto siding with the imperialist destruction and genocide far worse than those then world-shocking events 

The rotten corruption, cowardice, and opportunism of bourgeois nationalism in the Arab capitalist states, which connived at the Zionist onslaught on the Palestinians and the Lebanese left, is continuing to condone the attempted wipe-out of all revolutionary socialist influences in Beirut, now openly under imperialist domination.
Troops from the monopoly-capitalist states of USA, France, and Italy are now holding the ring for the Lebanese fascist forces after the uproar over the “anti-terrorist” operation being conducted under direct Zionist control following the Sabra and Shatila camp massacres.
But the same brutal terror campaign against the leftist movement continues, this time with French troops directing affairs while the official Lebanese army, just as much dominated by fascist ‘Christian Phalange’ mentality as Gemayel’s Kataeb militia, get on with the arrests, interrogation, beatings, and executions.
‘Liberal concern’ in the ‘free world’ may have forced an enquiry into the genocidal barbarism at Sabra and Shatila (conducted however, by the Zionists themselves; the USA vetoed the proposal for a United Nations enquiry); but only revolutionary upheaval carried out by the Arab masses themselves is going to cancel out the reactionary suppression of West Beirut, effectively approved of by the ENTIRE capitalist Arab and Western world since nothing is being done to stop it.
With the imperialist system’s economic crisis going from bad to worse, the Arab capitalist states are terrified of being overthrown by communist revolution from their increasingly-suffering masses.
West Beirut, with its revolutionary anarchy and its vast publishing freedom, was seen as a Marxist subversive influence not only on the Palestinians and Lebanese muslim poor but on the whole of the Arab middle east.
When the Zionist tanks rolled north four months ago with the blatantly open intention of carrying out a complete invasion-occupation of the Lebanon (nominally a sovereign Arab state), an Egyptian writer was able to comment:
“Most Arab rulers enjoy watching this because the sight of an Arab woman reading an uncensored book, printed in Beirut, would upset them far more than the sight of phosphorous-burnt children in a Beirut hospital.”
No less than 42 daily Arabic newspapers were being published in West Beirut, plus countless other periodicals and books from nearly 50 publishing houses. This literature was flooding the whole Arab world, particularly those dictatorial regimes imposing strict censorship against any criticism (especially Marxist propaganda).
Every banished writer and political dissident from a dozen or more corrupt Arab dictatorships ended up in West Beirut, and got published.
Arab League autocrats like Sadat continually screamed for something to be done about West Beirut’s subversive press. Frequently the Lebanese government tried, but its authority always proved too weak.
Even the Syrian forces, sent into Lebanon by the Arab League to police the growing revolutionary movement and specifically to prevent the leftist military takeover in the civil war in the mid-1970s, could not effectively stifle all the dissident voices.
An amazing campaign to bribe the West Beirut publishing houses into conformist silence or respectability, using the fabulous billions of OPEC petrodollar money, - buying up newspapers, publishing houses, and even journalists and writers, - also failed.
An infamous strategy of terror-assassinations was launched using Arab capitalist states’ secret police and other gangsters, which led to the sickening kidnapping or murder of intellectuals like Nasser al-Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Salim al-Lousi, and Kamal Nasser. But still the questioning of Arab League policies and leading regimes continued ceaselessly.
Finally, as the imperialist economic crisis grew ever deeper, the Arab capitalist states became more terrified at communist overthrow if they did NOT take action than if they DID take action in collusion with the Arab masses’ worst imperialist enemies - the Zionists and the USA.
So the decrepit Arab nationalist reactionaries gambled everything and threw in their lot with the Zionists’ advance into the Lebanon, - lifting not a finger while the muslim Arab area was trampled into the dust.
The moment the Zionist-imperialist tanks rolled into Arab villages, destroying everything in their path, the Arab capitalist dictatorships struck simultaneously.
Jordan immediately took the opportunity to close down two of its own critical newspapers, al-Ordun and al-Ofouk al-Iktissadi as well as arresting leading dissidents.
The Saudi feudal dynasty arrested 104 oppositionists. In Qatar and other reactionary Gulf emirates, hundreds were arrested to prevent them demonstrating for action against the Zionist invasion, exposing the Arab League’s treacherous inactivity.
The capitalist Arab regimes and the rest of the ‘free world’ continued deliberately turning a blind eye when the Zionists next began the systematic destruction of West Beirut during the two-month siege. They did NOTHING to prevent the PLO from being hounded out of West Beirut, and behind the scenes everything to ENCOURAGE it.
The entire might of the Arab bourgeois nationalist world still refused to lift a finger when the Zionists bluntly tore up all the newly-signed ceasefire and withdrawal agreements by occupying West Beirut at the first flimsy excuse after the imperialist West’s own token troops had hurriedly got out of the way.
And the Arab reactionary leaders STILL refused to do anything even after the horror of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres had reverberated around the world.
Not surprising therefore that this degenerate bourgeois nationalist layer is even now STILL refusing to move a muscle despite the immediate renewal of counter-revolutionary terror, this time under the fascist-minded Lebanese Christian military and their imperialist backers.
The Arab League has agreed to the destruction of all revolutionary influences, people, and publications in West Beirut and the Lebanon generally. And having bloodied its hands and sullied its reputation for all time, it will now paradoxically feel SAFER if the job of counter-revolutionary slaughter in the Lebanon is COMPLETED, despite the growing international uproar, than if it was halted now half-way through due to the critical clamour.
Washington is involved up to its armpits in this gory barbarism. In direct command of the Sabra and Shatila slaughter was Elie Hobeika, boss of Gemayel’s militia intelligence, who just happens also to double as the chief local secret agent for the CIA as well. Just to complete the picture, Hobeika is also on the paybooks of Mossad, the Zionists own secret service.
Such is the corrupt murderous tie-up of the imperialist forces now in control of all Beirut, including US and French and Italian troops directly on the scene, that two leading American journalists investigating the refugee camp massacres, Loren Jenkins of the Washington Post and Colin Campbell of the New York Times, were forced to get out of Beirut under immediate fear and danger of being butchered too because of their inquiries.
This reality of the counter-revolutionary holocaust being launched against the lefts in the Lebanon and among the Palestinians - AND STILL CONTINUING despite all the public international outcry over Sabra and Shatila, - is in complete contrast to the stupid Fleet Street propaganda myths that all ‘will now be safe and civilised’ with the American, French and Italian troops in West Beirut.
It is also in complete contrast to the soft-headed incurable compromising with capitalism of Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership, who actually CALLED FOR the arrival of US and other imperialist-state forces in the FIRST PLACE, (who promptly left again to open the way for the Zionist-officiated Sabra and Shatila massacres); and THEN demanded these troops’ RETURN after the butchery had taken place, implying that imperialist conspiracy had no part whatever in the invasion and slaughter policy carried out by imperialism’s chief agency in the Middle East, the Zionists.
This amounts to ignorant and cowardly treachery to the real interests of the Palestinian and other Arab masses which goes way beyond mere nationalist naïvety and misplaced faith in the degenerate West.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that when the PLO leadership rejected the Soviet Union’s advice (confirmed by the PLO executive member Abu Iyad to the UAE newspaper Al Khaleej) to hold firm in West Beirut, whatever the costs, as the most important fight the Palestinians and Lebanese leftists - or any Arabs - could EVER make in the cause of their people, - Arafat KNEW that he was opening the way to the SLAUGHTER of the revolutionary movement in the Lebanon, a savage pogrom that is STILL CONTINUING.
Moscow is correctly maintaining its policy of offering a friendly hand to the Arab nationalist regimes, exploiting Arab capitalism’s inevitable contradictions with imperialist domination, to encourage more left bourgeois nationalism against the rightwing tendencies, identifying US imperialism (and Zionism) as the main enemy and trying to isolate it (and those who would collaborate with it) to achieve the broadest possible anti-imperialist alliance when the US ruling class (still materially stronger than most of the rest of the world put together) finally launches World War III to try to save its neck.
But the growing crisis and degeneration of all bourgeois nationalism in the face of the greatest capitalist crisis in history also means that the socialist camp’s links with the Arab socialist revolutionary forces (as with the world socialist revolutionary forces in general) will be growing even stronger.
The rumoured freeing of the imprisoned Iraqi Communist Party in return for Soviet agreement to complete arms delivery contracts to the crisis-ridden Saddam Hussein regime would be in line with such developments.
It is beyond doubt that in one way or another, the development of the national democratic revolution into the socialist revolution in the Middle East, a path already begun by the regimes in South Yemen and Afghanistan, will soon spread further in the Middle East as a result of the sharpening of the capitalist crisis, the increasingly aggressive domination of imperialism, and the exposure of the rottenness of bourgeois nationalism. 
Roy Bull
[from ILWP Bulletin (EPSR) No0158 07-10-82]

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperia1ist struggles).
West psyops lies the real source of “disinformation”  everyone else accused of

As a mass of ludicrous bogyeman and disinformation stories are poured into the bourgeois press to demonise Russia and keep the Ukraine warmongering on the boil,  – not least accusing Russia and China of “trying to manipulate elections etc” when it is the West which has long mastered just that, internationally and at home  – it is worth revisiting an account published in Cuba’s paper Granma International in 1983, detailing the origins of disinformation in the 1920s and its huge development by American imperialism. By the Cold War Western psyops had long outstripped Goebbels’ “Big Lie” methods 

DURING WORLD War I the atrocity story came into its own as an instrument of foreign policy. In those simpler days, governments could turn public opinion against the enemy with tales of individual brutality: the rape of a nun, the bayonetting of a baby, or the execution of a Red Cross nurse.
This crude propaganda, however, had a temporary, war-related quality which often foundered on its own exaggerations. The idea of truth in those days had not yet been obliterated by the continuous covert manipulation of information in peacetime just as in war; nor had deception, secrecy, and lying come to be so much a part of the national menu as to be swallowed whole like the junk food that satiates the public appetite. Today there is no better example of the corrupted circumstances that now confront the consumer of news than the undercover campaign of official disinformation about Cuba.
Having failed to restore its hegemony over Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion or in the long, secret war waged under the code name ‘Operation Mongoose,’ the United States Central Intelligence Agency recently stepped up its 20-year psychological warfare operations to discredit and destroy the Cuban government and any other Latin American or Caribbean government which stands in ideological unity with them. Propaganda aimed at that small, struggling country intentionally manipulates emotions of horror, revulsion, and fear in the uninformed citizen of the Yankee Colossus. Cuba is falsely pictured by the U.S. as embracing in its foreign policy the contemporary apocalyptic trio: drugs, criminality, and terrorism — a far more terrible spectre than the individual bloodletting of the World War I propaganda. Images of corrupted American youth, gangsterism, and revolutionary violence sent from Cuba throughout Latin America are daily media fare for the American public Cuba as scapegoat and Fidel Castro as the implacable enemy of world national security to interests have become easy answers for the complex realities of hemispheric change. And the sophisticated techniques with which official information about Cuba is concealed, denied, created, regulated, shaped, and planted seem to have heightened public acceptance of the Big Lie.
While a shoot-out at credibility gap might not rescue the truth about Cuba from the hands of its abductors, a historical perspective of official U.S. deception operations against its own people might at least innoculate some against further ravages of this advancing affliction.
No one with any knowledge of governments would ever insist there was a utopian past. Governments have always monitored dissent to impose their version of events on the public consciousness, to control the circulation of hostile opinion, and to manage the news. Secrecy always had a place, as had executive privilege. But the First Amendment guarantees, as well as the separation and checking of powers, seemed designed to limit the U.S. government’s inherent tendency to manipulate information for its own interest. But as we shall see this is not the case.
During the Spanish-American War, the brutal military mop-up against the “rebels” in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba involved secret planning, undercover operations, and premeditated cover-ups in the face of public and Congressional opposition. It was the first World War, however, that led the U.S. to move beyond censorship and overt suppression into the heady realm of disinformation itself. In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson authorized the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, to take an active part in disseminating and propagandizing an official point of view. To unite public opinion behind the war, Creel’s cpi conducted “a fight for the mind of mankind.” Fake intelligence suggesting that German spies were everywhere generated waves of hatred and hysteria against the “barbaric Huns.” In disinformation coups reminiscent of today, the State Department used selective information to “prove” Germany was funding American pacifist organizations.
During two subsequent decades of peace in which the trauma of an economic collapse followed the delirium of a perilous prosperity, a subtle yet significant development shaped the future of information: the rise of public relations and its professional advocates.
Exemplified by Edward Bernays, a man who began his career as consultant to the U.S. delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference which terminated World War 1 and ended it as a hired hand for United Fruit Company in Latin America, public relations and its covert marketing strategies quickly seeped into the very core of American life. As Bernays cynically stated in a PR manual in 1928, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country... it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically.”
The New Deal Thirties witnessed further assaults on the integrity of information. In the U.S., the realities of the depression inspired a militant labor union campaign for recognition and power, one in which the Communists participated as allies. The conservative reaction to this movement was vicious, projecting an image of it as the secret “red” subversion of U.S. society — a mindless image which haunts the public consciousness even today. Imagined threats from front organizations and Fifth Columns brought further waves of tainted information. Thus the stage was set for the massive escalation of mistrust in any information not certified “pure” by the U.S. government. Since it could nave the field to itself, all competitors were labeled un-American.
On the eve of its second crusade to save the world, the U.S. was also poised on the brink of a new information era. How secret its policies would become, to what extent it would adopt the techniques of deception, and how each of these would affect democratic decision-making began to emerge as the war progressed. Where once psychological warfare had at least been balanced by careful intelligence analysis to secure and interpret information, covert operations with their deceptive components of subverting and transforming facts became the new intelligence obsession.
In sum, a watershed had been reached. Information thereafter became Bernay’s reality —-an “unseen mechanism” by which “intelligent minorities” shaped the opinions of the masses by deceiving them.
During the controversy surrounding publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Leslie Gelb, in charge of producing that voluminous and revealing report for the New York Times, commented on the continuing Cold War dedication to the philosophy of Bernays. “Most of our elected and appointed leaders in the national security establishment,” he confirmed, “felt they had the right — and beyond that the obligation— to manipulate the American public in the national interest as they defined it.” The same notion in abbreviated form slipped out in an exchange between Defense Secretary McNamara’s press spokesman and a group of reporters in 1962: “It’s inherent in the government’s right, if necessary, to lie to save itself,” the aide argued.
The right to manipulate and the right to be have had other postwar companions: the right to plausible denial; the right to a cover story; the right to conceal; and the need to know, a standard of classification that created another right, that of privileged access, with its step-child, the right to selectively leak.
In analyzing the period since the atom bombs leveled the Japanese will to resist, it is as if the intelligence agencies had not yet heard that the war was over, and are still hiding in caves on some Washington atoll. Yet the patterns which have unfolded are a logical outcome of the wartime experience, beginning with the failure to reorganize, to control, or to totally dismantle the secret coercive machinery which was created for that war. Quite the contrary, stopping international communism provided the rationale for the even broader mandate for world-wide conquest — the neocolonialism and imperialism of the new empire. And to help in those operations, the U.S. intelligence agencies had no qualms about enlisting the support of their former enemies — the Gehlen intelligence network of Nazi Germany.
Documents of some of the early proposals to set up the central Intelligence unit — the present cia — give a flavor of the crisis atmosphere with which they viewed the future struggle against the Soviet Union: “the task of detecting.., any developments which threaten the security of the world;” “to create a system in which even U.S. citizen who travels abroad...is a source of political intelligence:” “maintaining a constant check on foreign intelligence and propaganda including propagandized U.S. citizens;” and “keep...informed on political trends inside the U.S....because state legislatures are peculiarly vulnerable to outside influences and would be a logical objective of foreign intelligence services....” It is small wonder that the cia’s fears became self-fulfilling prophesies.
Early cia post-war victories over communism— such as the Italian elections of 1948, bought and paid for unwittingly by the American people— brought about unholy alliances as distasteful as those the intelligence agencies had made with the war criminals, dealings with the Mafia and the attendant corruption which comes with sharing a dirty secret with thugs.
Later the Korean War produced an equally important impact on the spy operatives’ own psychological outlook. Korea revived the atmosphere of total war, and created an “anything goes” philosophy directed against the “enemy It meant, as General Maxwell Taylor argued in 1961 with reference to Fidel Castro, there would be a policy of “no long-term living with...dangerously effective exponents of communism and anti-Americanism.” Iran (1953), Guatemala, (1954), Vietnam (1954-1973), Brazil (1962), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973) were among the targets of covert operations encouraged by this philosophy.
But the strangest outcome of all in this web of deceit and conformation was its coming tome to roost. The intelligence establishment actually began to eat its own vomit. False propaganda fed into foreign outlets came to be resorted back to the U.S. and the government began to make policy decisions based on its own lies.
In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee), in an investigation of cia wrongdoing, revealed just a tiny portion of the extent of cia penetration of world media. It was patently obvious to the investigators that only U.S. intelligence agencies could practice the art of disinformation on such a grand scale, given the extraordinary expense of manipulating, influencing, and outright purchasing of news throughout the world. The number of organizations and persons who must be paid off to place fictitious stories across the globe is staggering. Almost ten years ago the Church Committee said it had found evidence of more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines, and book publishing complexes owned outright by the cia. A 1977 New York Times exposé uncovered another 50 media outlets run by the cia, inside and outside the U.S., with more than twelve publishing houses responsible for over 1000 books, some 250 of them in English.
Beyond the wholly owned proprietaries there were countless agents and friendly insiders working in media operations around the world. These exposures are, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. The mind reels at what remained hidden from Congress and the New York Times and continues so to the present.
Estimates of the portion of the U.S. intelligence budget — kept secret from the American people and Congress — devoted to propaganda range from a few to many billions of dollars a year. An extremely conservative guess in the December 1981 Defense Electronics put the overall U.S. intelligence budget at $70 billion [these are 1980s prices - ed], of which about $10 billion, they said, went to the cia. Media specialists have estimated that at least one third of the cia’s budget is devoted each year to the spread of disinformation, conservatively placing cia covert media manipulation alone for that year at almost three and a half billion dollars. None of this takes into account the myriad of income-generating proprietaries owned by the cia, firms which make a profit which is then poured back into more covert operations: cia banks, holding companies, airlines, investment firms, and the like.
Spreading disinformation involves four levels of activity, a complex architecture that suggests how devious, costly, and important this activity has become. It currently runs from overt propaganda of the more traditional sort through covert operators and various public non-governmental disinformation peddlers to the deliberate scapegoating of the enemy as the source of documents and events which have been manufactured domestically.
The most well-known overt propaganda outlet for foreign consumption available to the U.S. is the Voice of America (voa) and other projects of the United States Information Agency (usia), Radio Free Europe (rfe) and Radio Liberty (RL), propaganda operations directed against Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, were originally covert U.S. intelligence operations. But when It became an open secret that they were financed by the cia, they were taken out of the closet for direct Congressional funding. Though the government claims they are “private corporations,” their employees must still go through extensive security clearances. Recent revelations about ex-Nazis who were absorbed into rfe/rl after World War II should invite closer scrutiny of these propaganda tools,
Inflammatory broadcasts by rfe in the 1950s misled a small number of Hungarian people to rebel in 1956, believing the U.S. was ready to intervene on their behalf. The ensuing uproar forced rfe to modify its broadcasting methods, though its recent diatribes against Poland are reminiscent of the Hungarian fare — but on a more sophisticated plane. Similarly, broadcast propaganda by the cia’s Radio Swan played a part in inducing the Bay of Pigs invaders of Cuba in 1961 to believe, quite incorrectly, that the Cuban population would support them. And, as the U.S. seldom learns from its mistakes, the energy the Reagan Administration has spent attempting to blackmail Congress into establishing Radio Martí against Cuba will surely backfire again, creating another Mariel boatlift situation at best.
In addition to its broadcasts, kfe/rl openly operate the largest “private” research facility in the west which concentrates on information gathering — or spying — on Soviet and Eastern European nations, and on communist and socialist affairs.
But perhaps the most chilling “overt” propaganda project of the U.S. government to date, the newly unveiled Democracy Institute.
This $85 million-a-year panorama of intelligence collection, recruitment, and training complete with a covert operations section, rivals the cia’s most ambitious media plans. It was quietly begun in January after a classified Executive Order was signed by President Reagan. This plan is discussed more fully in the conclusion below.
The second level of media activities of the U.S. government are the covert operations in the traditional sense. In theory, these deception operations are directed at influencing foreign, not domestic, opinion. Prior to December 1981, domestic activities were theoretically forbidden by the cia’s charter and by the Executive Orders governing cia behavior. For all practical purposes, however, the charter was systematically violated. But now under President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, the cia can operate within the United States so long as what they do is not “intended” to influence public opinion domestically. Who or what determines cia “intentions” is not specified, leaving a wide open field for more blatant manipulation of U.S. public opinion.
Even operations conducted entirely abroad are liable to cause “blowback,” the situation wherein the U.S. media picks up reports from overseas, disseminating them at home, without realizing (or caring) that the reports are false and emanate from U.S. Intelligence in the first place. Blowback is verv dangerous; in Vietnam there was so much cia disinformation being spread that U.S. military intelligence reports were often unwittingly based on complete fabrications which had been produced at cia headquarters.
In other cases, the cia itself performed as an anti-intelligence agency in which the covert operators had to supply the information that the policymakers wanted. Government thus became the victim of its own disinformation line, compounding the original damage and leading officials to be twice removed from reality. (Numerous examples of this are documented in Deadly Deceits; My 25 Years in the ClA, a recent book by Ralph W. McGchee. Sheridan Square Publications, New York. 1983.)
One of the most graphic examples of an intentional blowback operation was cited by former cia officer John Stockwell in his book about Angola, In Search of Enemies. In order to discredit the Cuban troops who were aiding the mpla government forces in that country’s war with South Africa, cia propagandists in Kinshasa, Zaire came up with a story about Cuban soldiers raping Angolan women. Using an agent/stringer for a wire service, the Agency had the story passed into the world media: Subsequently it was embellished by further spurious reports of the capture of some of the Cubans by the women they had raped, of their trial, and of their execution by their own weapons. The entire series, spread out in the U.S. press over a period of several months, was a complete cia fabrication.
Some covert media operations have been run on a very grand scale. One of the largest was Forum World Features, ostensibly a global feature-news wire service based in London, but in fact a cia operation from the beginning. When its cover was blown it was forced to suspend operations. Similarly, the cia owned outright, among other papers, the Rome Daily American, for decades the only English language paper in Italy.
In the third instance of press manipulation, the U.S. disguises its handiwork by engaging in the double whammy: accusing the Soviet Union of disseminating the phony documents it has itself produced. Given the widespread coverage these charges receive, the “proof” is astonishingly contradictory. Last year, for example, a supposedly bogus letter from President Reagan to King Juan Carlos of Spain was publicly denounced by the State Department as a Soviet forgery because it had errors in language and, as one officer noted, “it fits the pattern of known Soviet behavior.”
The previous year, another document was called a Soviet forgery because it was “so good” it had to be a Soviet product. Periodically the government will call forth one of their stable “defectors” to confirm that something is a forgery and the U.S. media buy it without much question. Several shortlived triumphs of the intelligence establishment show, however, that sometimes the people are not fooled, causing the press to reexamine their proffered themes. The State Department “White Paper” on Cuban aid to El Salvador, and the incredible Libyan “hit squad” saga are two examples. The White Paper, an unsuccessful attempt to recreate a Gulf of Tonkin situation, was shown by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Philip Agee, to have been based on government forgeries and mistranslations. The hit squad rumors which made headlines for several days disappeared — from the country and from the news — when Jack Anderson finally admitted he had been duped by his intelligence sources.
Finally there are the disinformation peddlers — people who may or may not at a given moment be in the direct employ of the cia or other intelligence agencies, but who can be counted on to repeat, embellish, or pass on whatever their disinformation masters in Washington decree. Here ideologv is often as important as salary. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Accuracy in Media can be counted on to run with whatever balderdash the government wants to spread, when they are not inventing it themselves.
The greatest assistance in disinformation — especially during the current Administration — is always forthcoming from the Reader’s Digest. In 1977 the Times series exposed Digest editor John Barron as having worked hand in glove with the cia on a book about the kgb. 
Other flagrant ‘journalists’ like Robert Moss, Armaud de Borchgrave, Daniel James, Claire Sterling, and Michael Ledeen, among others, seem to pick up disinformation themes almost automatically. In fact, coordination between the development of propaganda and disinformation themes by the covert media assets, the overt propaganda machine, and the bevy of puppet journalists is quite calculated. A theme which is floated on one level — a feature item on voa about Cuba for example — will appear within record time as a lead article in Reader’s Digest, or a feature in a Heritage Foundation report, or a series of “exposés” by Moss and the Borchgrave or Daniel James in some sleazy newspaper like Human Events or the Washington Times or Inquirer. Then they will all be called to testify by Senator Denton’s Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism repeating one another’s allegations as “expert witnesses.”
After that they are given credibility by the “respectable” Cold War publications like the National Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. And finally, since they have repeated the theme so many times it must be true, they are given the opportunity to write Op Ed pieces for the New York Times or the Washington Post.
These interconnections are by no means fortuitous. There is practically a revolving door policy from organization to organization, from the government, the cia, to the “private” media. Or the reversal of that process. The new director of voa, for example, was formerly a Reader’s Digest editor, who is hosted at black-tie parties by his old friend, McCarthyite Roy Cohn. Arnaud de Borchgrave, who works actively with several governments’ security services has a difficult time keeping his “journalism” and his spying separate. The reason he was fired from Newsweek magazine was that he kept dossiers on the co-workers whom he suspected of being kgb dupes. Robert Moss has also had a long-time relationship with the cia, which financed his book on Chile. He too was “let go” from his job as editor of the London Economist’s Foreign Report because his intelligence connections gave his columns a taint which could not be ignored. The Spike, a badly written novel by these two unsavory characters, presaged the disinformation era with all its ramifications.
There are countless themes being spread with vengeance by the U.S. government at the present time. One, which was discussed in a recent Our Right to Know editorial, was the alleged Bulgarian/kgb plot to kill the Pope (this season’s Libyan hit squad story). Another is the campaign led by the President to convince the American people that the nuclear freeze movement is a kgb ploy. And yet another is the accusation that the Cuban government is a major international drug dealer, the source of the U.S. drug-ridden society.
On June 8, 1982 in an address to the British Parliament, President Reagan announced a new ideological offensive to turn the tide against Communism in the battle for the mind of the world’s population. Designed to “foster the infrastructure of democracy” in a dozen ways, it clearly enlisted information as its top recruit. Charles Wick said there would be “a new assertive propagandistic role” to “win the war of ideas.”
Elsewhere, as the democracy project unfolded, there were references to information as “a vital part of the strategic and tactical arsenal of the United States.” Wick again pictured ideas as the only useful weapons that could be shot at an enemy in the absence of hostilities — such as the Radio Martí venture aimed at Cuba. Other government officials elevated public diplomacy to the status of diplomatic and military policy in serving the needs of national security. But all spokesmen insisted that the United States at all times “must speak the truth, clearly, vigorously and persuasively.”
Since truth is the first casualty in war, whether total, limited or ideological, as Woodrow Wilson put it, how is the Reagan Administration planning to pull off this miracle? They are not planning to, in all probability. What they are doing is building a new Trojan Horse so that the covert programs of deception, fake propaganda, slanted information, and disinformation can move forward without being under the suspect auspices of the cia, dia, and others of that ilk. “Project Democracy” and public diplomacy are clearly a rehabilitation process for government propaganda, an attempt to restore information manipulation under new sponsorship. Will it work? Will you believe it? Or you ready to be fooled?
First of all, the proposal was born with original sin. Conceived in secrecy as a classified executive order, Project Democracy can hardly live up to its claim of democratic openness. A cia covert feature initially existed in the plan, but was withdrawn, or so we and the Congress are told. Still, National Security Council Decision Directive 77 placed the program under the National Security Adviser’s control where it is “to support U.S. policies and interests.” Those chairing the top four committees come from agencies with long-time commitments to secrecy and the protective cover of classification. But there are more serious problems with this deformed Reagan progeny besides the wartime psychology that gave it birth and the secrecy with which it was raised.
On its face the idea is implausible because American foreign policies and cia operations have not evidenced any connection with an infrastructure of democratic principles, except as they are manipulated to suit the purposes of the U.S. Democracies have had empires before, from Athens on. Whatever the U.S. may call its overseas political, economic, and cultural mission, its support of client regimes, its overthrow of leftist democratic governments, its toleration of “moderately authoritarian” right-wing allies, its backing of powerful multinational corporations — none of that has ever been analyzed internally for its democratic fallout. The credibility of any government information must inevitably be tested against the deeds as well as the rhetoric of a nation.
What chance would the Democracy institute have to gain access to the truth it insists it will disseminate? How will it know it is not part of the cover story, the way Adlai Stevenson was used at the UN during the Bay of Pigs? The very Administration that is increasing classification, unleashing the spy agencies, and restricting freedom of information now says it will spread the truth to the world to enhance democratic values out there. Tell that to the people of Chile.
It is time the American people took a good dose of their own history to begin to understand what ails this society. One benefit might be a revival of old-fashioned American skepticism toward authoritative pronouncements.
The most important lesson of history’s warnings, however, would be an understanding of what went wrong with information in the past to help people resist the inroads of further deception. The next time the government floats a story, demand in each instance to know why they are propagating this information, whose interests it is serving, and what is being concealed. Then perhaps this country can abandon the process of government by the misinformed.
•William Preston Jr. is President of foia, Inc. and Chair of the History Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City: Ellen Ray is editor of Our Right to Know and co-editor of the Covert Action Information Bulletin in Washington, D.C. This is an abridged version of an article that appeared in Our Right to Know. 
Granma