Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. -V. I. Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation 0786 799 6074     P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW 17 9NL [Post Office Registered.)    Www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk 
No 1127 Mar 12 2002                                                                                                                            25pWeekly 

Total debacle for 'Operation Anaconda' strangles US imperialism’s phony 'New World Order' posture, not the anti-imperialist resistance. One small failure won't destroy the bloated monopoly-capitalist system, but the total fascist warmongering anachronism of the whole colonial-imperialist tyranny of economic and military bullying certainly will. Chauvinistic aggression is the only way capitalism knows to cover up the catastrophe of the coming international trade-war and slump, and the only answer to this sick Western world domination is DEFEAT, not 'No to war' marches. 'Rogue states' are not the future, but defeat there for imperialism IS the only way forward. The USA's fascist-warmongering insanity needs to choke itself with its own out-of-date hypocrisy, corruption, irrelevance, and incompetence. Its 'democracy', as everywhere else, is the biggest fraud of all.

The fake-'left' continues to waste its time and mislead the working class with social-pacifist 'No to war' marches and putting up 'socialist' reform candidates against Labourites or against other 'lefts' in various elections; but crucially the nature of the imperialist global warmongering crisis is still hopelessly misunderstood and therefore the way to topple imperialism, and the forces that will end it, are hopelessly misunderstood as well.

The 'outrage' of Washington now drawing up a 'hit list' of seven countries for nuclear destruction (including China and Russia as well as the usual suspects) does not lie in the fascist-aggressive monstrousness in the sick minds of Western leaders who are contemplating such destructive tyranny and who might presumably be dissuaded from such plans by sufficient 'No to war' marches, - but in the capitalist system of class domination which has no choice but international conflict for its very survival.

And the brutal struggles and massed forces which alone can be conceivably seen as being capable of halting the imperialist warmongering agenda in its tracks and of withstanding the suffering needed to do it (and thus eventually sparking off a long chain of events resulting ultimately in the revolutionary downfall of FAILED imperialism), - are all forces which the petty bourgeois-minded Western fake-'lefts' invariably despise, condemn, or have no sympathy with.

Until the idiocy of "condemning" Sept 11; or joining in the hysterical imperialist propaganda against Mugabe's land nationalisation; or failing to see Palestinian suicide bombers as an anti-imperialist triumph; etc, etc, - is grasped and owned up to, - then fake-"leftism" can only continue to help brainwash the working class into still lining up behind its own bourgeoisie in the international warmongering.

There is not the slightest requirement for anyone on earth to like anything about Saddam Hussein or his regime, but until it is the Big Power imperialist persecution of Iraq which is seen as the real "evil" on Earth, - and a very serious evil which is literally threatening the lives of everyone on Earth, - and not Saddam Hussein's nationalist posturing, - then the Western working class will continue to be effectively brainwashed into condoning imperialist warmongering, courtesy of the fake-'left'.

And all of the 'No to war' leaflets and protest marches in the world will not do any good, even though imperialist warmongering might be named as the 'greater evil', - if the point is missed that what is wanted in the NATO v Iraq mismatch tyranny is not just some boos against the murderous Western blitzkrieg, but an imperialist DEFEAT.

It is DEFEAT for imperialism in its incurably rotten domineering of the world (the source of all problems on Earth) which alone holds the key to any kind of progress whatever for civilisation.

And that means DEFEAT in any way, shape, or form, and by whatever agent possible, -  including Saddam, or Gaddafi, or Hamas, or Kim Jong-il, or Mugabe, or Milosevic, - no matter what 'atrocities' imperialist propaganda pretends they are responsible for.

It is a total joke that any supposed 'rogue state' within any imagined 'axis of evil' really has the slightest chance of "ruling the world" or even remotely wanting to.

All the existing anti-imperialist struggles or disagreements, without exception, are nothing to do with 'wanting to run the world in place of the Americans', but are purely an attempt, region by region, to get Western imperialism off their backs.

But it is precisely just in wanting to dominate the world, region by region, - (or to 'meet the need to give leadership', etc, etc, in the various euphemisms for economic exploitation that the 'free world' likes to present), - that the whole essence of capitalism's catastrophe for civilisation can be found, on the other hand.

For the economically dominant Western bourgeoisie, currently ruling the world must be the sweetest thing in terms of power, wealth, and influence in the whole of recorded history. There has been nothing mightier, ever, than the present US imperialist diktat over international society.

But this real global ruling-class of people (in whom the idea of giving up power could never even be grasped, understood, or contemplated, - let alone ever seriously considered) is currently running the world on an economic system which is now completely out-of-date and an absolute danger to the survival of civilisation and the planet itself.

Capitalism has totally outlived its usefulness in having, over the past 700 years, completely technologically transformed the world and all the human relationships within it, but in having now reached a stage of cut-throat competitive  'overproduction' of capital whereby only endless class and national conflict can now result, in the long term.

The potentially wonderful 'surpluses' still being generated are by a still basically selfish and antagonistic 'free market'.

Yet it never will be possible to tell that bourgeois ruling class that its time is up and that its international economic domination is no longer wanted or needed.

Only DEFEATS of various kinds, - of any kind, - can start the long process of FAILURE whereby, via a convoluted chain of events, the revolutionary OVERTHROW of the now decadent capitalist ruling class everywhere can seriously become a real and vitally important possibility.

Obviously to do this and to build socialism, brilliantly enlightened and hugely talented, big and resourceful revolutionary parties are going to have to be built everywhere.

But without exception, every fake-'left' sect is busy building a COUNTER-revolutionary party by taking the working class completely in the wrong direction from where the actual historical downfall of the imperialist system can be worked out and planned for.

'Democracy'-rebuffs and 'No-to-war' protests are the actual crucial mechanism of bourgeois RULE, not bourgeois defeat.

The fraud of the 'democratic opposition' is easily the cleverest and most creative stunt in developing the social and political superstructure that the capitalist class has ever come up with, well on a par with any of its colossal advances in science and technology, or in business and banking techniques to exploit their advantages, or in diplomacy and military alliances to protect the economic gains and guarantee their permanent world domination.

The joke that the bourgeoisie so loves ordinary mankind that it gives workers the vote enabling them to turf out the ruling class whenever they want to, allegedly, has got to be the greatest and most successful leg-pull in history.

It has never happened, it cannot happen, and it is never going to happen.

The whole point in conning workers with 'democracy', and the only point there has ever been in conning workers with 'democracy', is to divert them, to mislead them, and to disarm them from really taking the power away from the ruling class.

This does not mean that no workers should ever have been led by revolutionaries into casting a vote or taking part in elections.

It means that workers should NEVER play the bourgeoisie's electoral game other than in the full understanding that it is just for tactical political-propaganda purposes, and that the essence of living under capitalist exploitation and class-domination can NEVER change until all economic, social, and political power is physically SEIZED from the bourgeoisie by REVOLUTION.

It means that workers should realise how REFORMS are never more than what the most enlightened bourgeoisie would have wished to do, in order to keep productively competitive in the light of international developments of all kinds, AND IN THE INTERESTS OF KEEPING THE EFFECTIVE DICTATORSHIP OF THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM PERMANENT.

It means grasping that 'No to war' protest marches, etc., are just a harmless safety valve for the troubled consciences of the total hypocrisy of the 'democracy' that all who live in capitalist society profess to believe in.

It means understanding that the ONLY effective 'international solidarity' with anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist causes anywhere is to keep spreading Leninist revolutionary science everywhere.

But all that every fake-'left' sect does is fall for all the latest imperialist propaganda against 'anti-democrats', or 'terrorists', or 'rogue states', or 'evil empires', or 'totalitarian tyrannies', or 'gulag archipelagos', etc., etc., etc., and then prepare a list of 'progressive' candidates for the next local elections, thus playing totally into the hands of continued bourgeois-imperialist 'democracy' rule at every turn.

So how can the American ruling class conceivably be overthrown???

An excellent question. Its system of global economic domination is law-governed,(Marxist science) to temporarily fall apart in yet another periodic world 'overproduction' crisis of collapsing markets, international slump, lethal tradewar, disastrous desperate shooting wars, bankrupted regimes, and mass revolutionary upsurges by millions pushed beyond the limits of endurance (who will need, and will develop, conscious Marxist-Leninist leadership).

In this utterly degenerate chaos, catastrophically damaging to everyone, the ruling class in the USA will universally be more hated and held responsible for the FAILURE of 'their world' than anyone else, - including by their own working class.

Theirs will be the greatest and most deserved revolutionary comeuppance of all time.

But fake-'lefts' not only refuse to educate the working class (in this alternative revolutionary understanding of the world) in order to help the whole world to prepare for it.

Instead of the understanding of imperialist FAILURE from any and every source, they preach the exact opposite.

Instead of Sept 11 being seen, plus all its hideous warmongering aftermath, as nothing but the most obvious and humiliating FAILURE of world imperialist rule, something which even the most academically-minded and religiously-minded are prepared to kill themselves for in order to take vengeance on, - the fake-'lefts' present it as the 'failure of terrorism', or 'the damnable backwardness of reactionary fundamentalism', and smirkingly predict that 'now the imperialist New World Order will really sort them out and make them pay for their atrocities', etc.

In occupied Palestine, even the almost super-human heroism of the self-sacrificing suicide bombers against this lynchpin of imperialist domination of the Middle East are dismissed by Socialist Alliance fake-'lefts' as "reactionary failures", etc, and are told that they have no chance of full self-determination and of fully liberating their whole country from Zionist Colonisation. "Accept the Zionist imperialist presence" the entire fake-'left' tells the Palestinian nation. 

"It is a triumphant fact of imperialist history. The state of 'Israel' cannot be changed now," etc, etc. This grotesque imperialist FAILURE to genocidally wipe-out the Palestinian nation and displace them from their homeland, as was done to the Aborigines of Australia and the Red Indians of North America, just does not register with these fake-'lefts'.

And the FAILURE of imperialist propaganda hysteria and relentless subversion to force impoverished Zimbabwe to back down on its wish to reclaim its own land from colonial monopoly-capitalist control is likewise ignored by the entire fake-'left'. Instead, they all join in enthusiastically in helping imperialist subversion of the ZANU national-liberation revolution, repeating every ludicrous 'atrocity' propaganda nonsense that the West can come up with, helping imperialism to try to terrorise Mugabe to back down on land nationalisation or else face a Western-organise electoral defeat. To his great credit, Mugabe refused to back down, - but no thanks to the stinking petty-bourgeois Socialist Alliance fake-'left' in Britain.

But alongside the imperialist failure will come the fake-'left' failure too, ultimately.

Because the US imperialist world-domination project is falling apart with every day that passes.

Open trade war is the latest humiliation to condemn the insane system of 'democracy' and 'free-market' anarchy.

This lying hypocrisy is now rapidly degenerating into its snarling, cut-throat fascist-warmongering REALITY.

'Free trade' was only yesterday the greatest talisman of a 'free society'. Not any more. Just one wee irritant crops up to anger the biggest imperialist bully, and, hey presto, suddenly 'free trade' is the most stupid position to adopt as far as the entire imperialist circus is concerned.

Not even an initial rap on the knuckles for the USA of "We'll report you to the WTO (World Trade Organisation, an imperialist front) over your illegal tariffs on imported steel into America".

Immediately, all the imperialist gangsters were in on the ground floor threatening instant (and illegal) tariff retaliation in return.

And sectors of the 'high-minded' international bourgeoisie showed their real gutter hypocrisy by also instantly warning "And we will stop supporting your 'war on terror' too", simultaneously thus revealing what a ludicrous lying fraud is this whole 'war on terrorism', - just an excuse for the generalised imperialist warmongering which this deepening stage of insoluble international economic trade-war crisis now requires.

The capitalist press itself captured the whole sordid saga of these first tangible steps of crucial world imperialist FAILURE. They have been waited for a long time. They deserve to go on the fullest record possible:

Disastrous. Unacceptable. Deplorable. Regrettable. Wrong. George Bush was left in no doubt yesterday what the rest of the world thought of his decision to slap tariffs on imported steel into the United States.

And with good reason. Mr Bush has risked a global trade war, embarrassed his political allies, poisoned attempts to launch a new round of trade talks and undermined the credibility of the multilateral trading system in order to pay off political debts to big business and perhaps win a couple of key states in the November mid-term elections. He may not even achieve that.

What Mr Bush has done is expose the hypocrisy that underpins the international trading system. Ever since September 11, the talk has been about making globalisation work for the poor. We now know - if we were ever in any doubt - that the reality is about how to make globalisation work for the rich.

The ramifications of Mr Bush's ill-judged move could be immense. For a start, the economics don't stack up. It will raise costs for the rest of US industry, it will not save a single job in Pennsylvania or Ohio and it will hold back recovery from the first synchronised global downturn in more than 25 years.  

It should be obvious to the White House that the rest of the world will only be able to buy American goods if they can sell into the US market. 

Already, there are signs of escalation. Europe's steelmakers were yesterday demanding instant retaliation and Moscow said the steel tariffs could affect relations between the two countries. Nor has it taken long for other sectors of US industry to wake up to the prospect that Mr Bush has taken the lid off the pork barrel. It was noteworthy that General Motors was talking yesterday of excess capacity in cars.  If the US government can protect steel, then why not the auto sector? And if Detroit is to be protected, then why not the garment industry of South Carolina?

The impact on the multilateral trading system, still in intensive care as a result of the anti-globalisation backlash of the past three years, will also be profound. Washington and Brussels acted in concert last November to launch new trade liberalisation talks in Doha, cynically called a "development" round. Many US industries - from Hollywood to the computer titans of Silicon Valley want those talks to succeed, but the chances of an agreement anytime soon have now receded drastically. Mr Bush has cut the ground from under Pascal Lamy, Europe's trade commissioner, who has done his best to be conciliatory and constructive in his dealings with the US. Washington's stock of goodwill in developing countries was already tiny. It is now non-existent.

If Mr Lamy has every reason to feel let down, then so too does Tony Blair, who has found that providing full-throated backing for the US in its fight against terrorism counts for nothing when set against the interests of powerful vested interests in America. The prime minister is like the faithful family retainer who, after years of service, asks for a day off to see a sick relative, and is greeted with utter disdain.

THIS is the worst decision George W. Bush has made. The move will prove futile in helping steelworkers, and will be positively damaging to other American jobs. It is contemptuous in its approach to foreign relations; in fact, it will fire up a new war, between the US and its closest allies. It is destructive, of attempts to liberalise world trade, to the point where it disqualifies the US from claiming leadership in that crucial domain.

Oh, and it probably won't win back the Senate for the Republicans, either.

Start with the futility. When the 175,000 steel-workers called for 40 per cent tariffs, they were basing it on what they thought they could get away with, rather than fine economic models. Well, they, got three quarters of their demand. But industry analysts say that the effect may be to raise prices by only a few percentage points.

That is not enough to save the 31 steel mills that have filed for bankruptcy in the past four years (with the loss of 20,000 jobs), two thirds in the past 14 months. They have lost out to sharper competition from "mini-mills" at home about half the industry's jobs - as well as from abroad. That is despite the fact that production volumes have been declining worldwide since the glut caused by the 1998 financial emergency.

In fact, the move is likely to cost many more jobs in steel-consuming industries than it saves for those in steel mills. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned Congress as much last Wednesday. And that is considering only the effect of higher import prices, before taking account of any retaliation from furious trading partners.

The Bush Administration cannot have deluded itself that there will be none. Yesterday Bush dismissed the last-minute appeals from Tony Blair and Romani Prodi, the European Commission President. Last night, the backlash against Washington had started.

Russia has already banned imports of poultry pieces (mainly chicken legs, known as "Bush legs", from aid parcels given by George W.'s father). That jeopardises jobs in 38 states.

The European Union is now set to press ahead with demanding compensation - it wants more than $4 billion - for a US tax on overseas companies that the World Trade Organisation has pronounced illegal. Japan is set to file a protest with the WTO. Only if Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were great steelmakers could the US manage to outrage more governments central to its War on Terror.

Even those nominally spared the brunt of the tariffs, such as Canada, a signatory to the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), are nervous about unexpected effects. The Canadian National Post, commenting on steelworkers' placards reading "Stop Economic Terrorism", observed drily that it "must be those Afghan steel mills".

The Administration is in a state we might as well call desperation about its inability to get much through the Senate or House.

Steel is big in crucial House races including Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Thursday's 5,000-strong rally in Washington of steelworkers from "swing states" is the largest since September 11.

But will the manoeuvre work? Very likely not. Many Republicans will be appalled by the desertion of free trade principles, while others will see voters in other industries hurt. The New York Times lost no time in gibing that "many corporate chieftains must be scratching their heads in amazement, wondering why they worked so hard to elect a market-loving, free-trading Republican Administration".

Trade is always a wild card in American politics, capable of splitting both Democrats and Republicans down the middle, to uncertain electoral effect. Think back to Seattle, November 1999. The decade's most photogenic riots were made - up of an odd alliance, not just environmentalists in papiermache turtle shells, but burly union workers, too.

Never mind the tear gas, the most shocking spectacle was that President Clinton found the alliance so seductive. After the Lewinsky scandal, with the promotion of free trade and Nafta by far his best claim on the history books, he still turned his back on those principles to support the crowds.

"Our weapons are made of steel," Senator Carl Levin told steelworkers last week. "We go to war with what you make." Well, Bush has done just that - nominally against the Democrats, but also against the US's closest allies. Even if it helps him in the congressional struggle, it has brought him an endless fight in the courts of the WTO and stripped him of support on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

THEY're pink, fleshy and pumped full of chemicals, but Russians devoured millions of them - until last Tuesday. Now dubbed 'Bush legs' by Muscovites, chicken drumsticks from the US were last week banned by the Russian government for failing domestic health and safety standards.

The timing, hours after President George Bush increased tariffs on steel imports into America, can only mean one thing: American chickens are the first casualty in what threatens to be one of the biggest trade wars the world has seen.

Two-way trade between the two engines of the world economy - the EU and US - generates $1.1 trillion, according to the European Commission last October. In 2000, the EU had a $55 billion trade surplus with the US, and the economic superpowers employed 3 million people in each other's territory. But this war could derail growth, spark costly lawsuits and paralyse innocent business sectors.

What started as a blatant political decision by Bush to salvage steel worker votes in swing states before the mid-term elections could now spiral out of control.

But the increased steel tariffs have met with huge - and unexpected - cynicism in America. The disapproval is led by Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan and the Washington Post, who argue that protected steel will force up manufacturing costs, making US industry even less competitive. And US workers, who have seen unemployment shoot up alarmingly in the past year, are asking why their jobs and pension rights can’t be protected, too.

International trade experts have circled 29 April as the day full-blown war could break out. That is the day the World Trade Organisation will decide the level of sanctions the EU can impose on American businesses. The sanctions will top $1 billion and could be as high as $4bn if the EU gets its way.

Stuart Eizenstat, the former US Deputy Treasury secretary, said: 'We know now with confidence that a minimum $lbn damages ruling will be 10 times bigger than anything we've seen before. There is great anxiety in the US business community.'

Until last week, January's WTO judgment that massive US government tax breaks for firms such as GE, Boeing and Microsoft amounted to illegal export subsidies, was a separate issue. It is now tied to the steel decision.

A high-level source close to EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy suggested that the EU did not want to 'press the button' on what are 'foreign sales tax' penalties. But the steel tariff makes tit-for-tat retaliation more likely. 'If you're asking me whether there is a link, you could say the [steel] move will have a bearing,' he said.

Well-placed sources have told The Observer that the EU's hit list of US industries that face sanctions once ran into double figures. But in the past few days it has been whittled down to six sectors.

If Europe were to proceed with sanctions, it would follow the tactics employed by America in the recent banana trade war. That would mean punishment would be meted out to small but politically sensitive industries. That's why in retaliation for Europe closing its markets to Latin and Central American bananas, the US refused to allow in Scottish cashmere and Austrian chandeliers.

Insiders say the EU will target the US agriculture and aerospace sectors. There have also been suggestions that the EU will go slow on allowing US linked banana producers into its markets.

But while Europe seems to hold the moral high ground following last week's steel decision, America will soon have the chance to strike back on what is probably the world's most infamous and hated protection device: the Common Agricultural Policy.

A 'peace clause' inserted into the last major world trade round, in 1993, stopped countries from referring agricultural disputes to the World Trade Organisation. Next year this gagging order lapses.  

Trade lawyers expect the OAP to come under intense pressure as an unprecedented alliance of the US, Australia and developing countries take their long-held complaints to Geneva. It is thought that the French will then argue that agriculture is vital to the Gallic way of life and so is not a trade issue but a cultural one.

In addition, the US is likely to protest bitterly about the EU's refusal to grant patents on Cuban rum and its rejection of both genetically modified products and growth hormone-injected beef.

Many observers characterise US handling of trade issues as 'sheer hypocrisy': it berates developing countries for not offering up their institutions and industries for liberalisation - and then pulls up the drawbridge itself.

This worked in the interests of US businesses until now. But the looming trade wars look set to harm many of them. Chicken farmers are only the first victims of a policy coming home to roost.

At the end of the 'free trade' nineteenth century, Britain's European neighbours and the US responded to economic problems with protectionism. In the gloomy 1870s, Germany imposed the iron-rye tariffs on industrial and agricultural imports; France and the US responded in the 1890s with, respectively, the Meline and McKenna tariffs.

These measures were moderated after World War One, but the slump of the Thirties triggered more tariffs. Even the UK slapped 10 per cent on all imports except those from its colonies. The US introduced the infamous Smoot Hawley measures, cranking tariffs up to McKenna-era levels. Protectionism was disastrous.

After World War Two a new financial order was ushered in under Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Protectionism was a dirty word and, in 1947, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade set about ending It.

Gatt included 27 countries, and grew into the World Trade Organisation, now covering more than 130 nations. Bold tariff measures such as Smoot-Hawley were replaced by negotiations in Gatt/WTO on traded goods from agricultural products to steel, cars and electronics. But barriers remained, in the form of the EU Common Agricultural Policy and Japan's tariff on rice imports. And at the same time, subsidies offered less visible protection to national markets.

In the Nineties a series of highly charged disputes erupted. First came the banana wars, with America accusing the EU of using import quotas to favour Caribbean producers over Latin American ones with US-based distributors. Then the EU blocked imports of US hormone treated beef, claiming the hormones could cause cancer.

The WM upheld US complaints in both of these. But the US came a cropper after trying to ban imports of shrimps the had not been caught using turtle-friendly nets.

The imposition of tariffs of up to 30 per cent on many categories of steel imports puts at risk decades of progress in international economic relations.

In Japan it has even evoked memories of the Hawley-Smoot tariff of June 1930, held by many to have fostered the rampant protectionism that contributed to the breakdown of international relations before World War Two.

It is almost unbelievable that the Bush administration can have been so shortsighted as to bow to industrial and Congressional pressure for tariffs on steel.

Bush has even managed to offend such arch-Republican commentators as George F Will, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who, in an unusually straightforward Congressional answer, said: 'I happen not to agree with the particular judgment.' 

The European Union, with its restructured and efficient steel industry, is especially badly hit by the tariff. As Lamy says, this is 'steel barrel' politics. An immature president who only narrowly won - or stole - the last US election is desperate for the support of certain Congressmen.  

To say that the US has lost the moral high ground in its long campaign, under several administrations, to impose 'free' trade on even the weakest of developing economies is to put it mildly. By this one act the US administration has left the great free trade 'Washington Consensus' agenda in tatters.

The 'justification' for the move is so thin, so breathtakingly hypocritical, that it is worth quoting. In the words of Zoellick: 'In order to promote free trade, the US has to manage the home front and the international front. And on the home front the only way, that we can continue to get support from-the American people for open markets and trade is to use our domestic and international laws to the fullest.'

What a paradox. In order to promote free trade we have to abolish it. How helpful of the Bush administration to have provided 'a wonderful text for the summer economics examinations!

Apart from anything else, this disturbingly profound international crisis reminds us of the naivety of much of the public discussion about free trade. 

Steel is a vital industry. For all the bunk about 'new' and 'weightless' economies, you need only look out of the window to know that so called 'old economy' steel is still Big Steel. The decline in the proportion of people employed in 'heavy' industry is not a sign of its demise. Employment in steel and other industries falls because productivity improvements are typically far greater in manufacturing than they are in service industries such as restaurants and hairdressing.

For such an advanced, hegemonic economy as the US to erect barriers to steel imports is a terrible signal to the rest of the world, a sign of weakness, not of strength. It does not augur well for the great US economic recovery, which some analysts are talking up like mad, but which rests on shaky foundations.

The US has not come to terms with the excess borrowing and rundown in savings that brought the previous boom. There is little sign of an investment recovery, and the consumer boom looks shaky. Above all, at some stage the financial markets will demand a higher price for financing the $1-billion-a-day US trade deficit.

Which brings us to the least observed point about the US tariff move - its connection with the strong dollar and the general deterioration in US trade competitiveness.

The dollar is almost back, in terms of its trade weighted value against other major currencies, to the level of the mid-1980s. This precipitated the 1985 Plaza Agreement to contrive a major devaluation of the US currency.

Some such move is now needed, although there is no sign that policymakers are working on it.

Moscow took the threat to its steel exports so seriously that Alexander Vershbow, the US Ambassador, was summoned and told by Foreign Ministry officials that tariffs could have a "serious impact in the atmosphere of Russian-American relations".

Japan, another key US ally, said that it was ready to file a protest with the WTO. Mr Bush has been agonising for weeks over a decision that cuts across global trade, domestic politics and potentially the future of the War on Terror.

Worst of all is the unpredictable effect on the overall imperialist world economic crisis which could lurch at any time into a scarcely-comprehensible spiral-downwards in world trade.

As even the bourgeois commentaries have noted, Washington's trade-war onslaught can only indicate the truly dire situation in the American economy, instantly making a mockery of all the propaganda regime's "recovery" talk.

And worse still, any chance of Germany or Japan acting as the 'alternative engine' to pull the world clear of a devastating international slump is acknowledged, in capitalist reports' own unique evidence, as being just a pipe dream now:

The Japanese government yesterday said the country was in its deepest recession since the second world war, as the collapse of a medium-sized bank underlined the persistent fragility of the financial. sector. Japan's problems are far more protracted. Yesterday's data showed that the world's second-biggest economy contracted by a worse-than-expected 1.2% in the final three months of last year.

This fall, equivalent to 4.5% on a yearly basis, represented the third consecutive quarter of decline - the worst nine month period that Japan has recorded since the second world war.

As well as the long-standing problems of deflation and a banking system buckling under the weight of trillions of yen of bad loans, Japan was hit by an outbreak of mad cow disease and the September 11 terrorist attacks, which hurt the tourist and aviation industries.

In response to the slide in global markets, especially the US corporations such as NEC, Hitachi and Matsushita beat a hasty retreat, cutting business investment by 12% - the steepest quarterly decline recorded.

Yet the bright spots of a cyclical upturn remain overshadowed by longer-term structural problems. Japan is the only industrial power since the 1930s to suffer deflation, which prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has declared the biggest concern for the economy. Despite repeated government attempts to get to grips with the problem, wholesale prices fell by 1.3% in February, marking the 17th consecutive month of decline.

The banking sector continued its protracted shakeout yesterday with the collapse of Chubu Bank, a second-tier regional institution. For the past year, Japan's small banks and credit unions have been failing at the rate of almost four a month.

GERMANY's army of unemployed are signing on to become "pop stars" as part of a government move to cut jobless figures. Hundreds more have been ordered to audition in a month-long training course on the art of communication.

The course is one of a number of bizarre schemes run by the Berlin government's Federal Labour Office and intended to make the long-term unemployed fit for a new career. Other schemes involve learning how to fold application forms correctly into envelopes.

Since October, German unemployment has soared. More than 750,000 people have joined the dole queues during that time. The official total out of work now stands at more than 4.3m, and the media are talking of a country "drowning in a sea of unemployment".

Attempts by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to distance himself from the crisis have failed. No matter how hard he tries to play the European statesman guiding, alongside Tony Blair, European Union enlargement, he cannot escape the political mire at home. He came badly unstuck with last week's resignation of Bernhard Jagoda, head of the Federal Labour Office. Jagoda went because his officials had been caught massaging the figures on a grand scale.

The rosy picture presented by regional offices of successful job placement programmes turned out to have been fictional. An official audit of five such offices showed that only a third of the unemployed listed as finding jobs had actually done so.

The unemployed are being trained for professions in which there is no realistic hope of success and in. specialities for which there is scant demand.

To become pop stars they are given karaoke lessons. "We had, to sing along to Abba on a karaoke machine," says Frank Rentschler from Marburg. He has completed six training courses none of which, he says, made sense. On one course he was taught team work. This involved throwing different coloured balls into the air as fast as possible.

Schröder's government has speedily promised changes in the way the Federal Labour Office is structured. In a classic delaying move it has appointed a commission to investigate the whole mess - and told it to report after the general election in September.

Since the debacle at the office, confusion reigns as to exactly how many people in Germany are out of work.

However, a study by the Centre for Economic Research puts the figure at 5.5m unemployed, against the official 4.3m. The additional 1.2m "hidden" jobless are people who have given up all hope of finding work and do not bother to sign on.

Since he came to office in 1998 Schröder has done little to prove himself "business friendly" - a newspaper description he happily adopted during his 1998 election campaign.

Instead he has gone the opposite way, strengthening the role of unions in company affairs, increasing the tax burden for part-time workers, revoking cuts in sick pay and making dismissal more difficult.

He refuses to introduce greater flexibility to the economy for fear of a union backlash and has sidestepped reform of the health service.

Jürgen Pfister, a senior economist at Commerzbank, says: "There is a complete logjam in the system. Nobody expects any significant reforms now or in the foreseeable future."

As so often with the Schröder administration, the unemployment crisis is the result of inaction and a gamble - in this case that population decline would solve the problem. He has gambled before, betting that GDP growth of 3% in 2001 would bail him out of trouble over state debt. He has lost on both counts.

The economy hit the buffers, with GDP growing at just 0.6%, and in December alone 326,000 people lost their jobs.

The latest IFO index of business confidence, which showed another upward swing in February, was seized on as evidence that the worst was over. The Bundesbank announced that the low point for the economy had been passed: This would be fine if only the facts supported such optimism.

German voters do not share their chancellor's optimism. In an Emnid Institute survey 86% said they had no confidence that unemployment would ease by the September election.

Their pessimism is reflected on the high street. Unlike their British counterparts, Germans are emphatically not spending their way out of trouble. Price rises of up to 40% on groceries and across-the-board hidden price rises averaging 2.5% after the introduction of euro notes and coins have seriously inflamed consumer resentment.

Spending on infrastructure by states and local councils has been cut sharply so that the federal government can reduce its mountain of debt.

Hans Eichel, the finance minister, has to cut the £34 billion state and federal debt to about £6 billion by 2004.

The result is that cities are shutting libraries, closing swimming baths and schools, and deferring repairs to housing and the motorway network. As the economy has contracted so the states have suffered a sudden fall in revenue, mostly from the locally imposed trade tax that has all but disappeared.

"It has been a catastrophic loss of revenue," says Jurgen Rotes, Cologne's city boss.

A year of zero-growth has forced the German states to borrow huge sums. North Rhine Westphalia, which covers the German industrial heartlands of the Rhine and the Ruhr, last year increased its debt burden by 300%, as did Schroeder home state of Lower Saxony.

Economists think the task for "Hercules Hans" - as Eichel is known - is close to impossible. Klaus Zimmermann, head of the Berlin's German Institute for Economic Research, says "We are going through a very very deep crisis." The institute forecasts that growth this yea will be no better than last year - 0.6%.

Erwin Huber, head of the Bavarian state chancellery says: "The government is guilty of giving empty promises to its European partners."

Germans are likely to have to pay a high price for their government's profligacy. The cost of returning to prudence and a balanced budget will be an accelerated decline in their once treasured infrastructure. They only have to look to Britain to see what lies ahead. The economy may boom but the country will disintegrate.

So, how much worse is capitalism going to feel when the economy goes bust at the same time as the country disintegrates? The still-mounting near-anarchic uproar in Argentina where the imperialist crisis of 'surplus' capital 'overproduction' has struck earlier than elsewhere, gives a flavour of the class-war desperation to which people will be driven whether they have ever even heard of communist revolution or not, never mind having originally believed imperialist propaganda that the world held no future for the ideas of planned socialism.

And ludicrously buried at the bottom of another capitalist press report (about some attempts to divert the Argentine masses with some chauvinist tomfoolery against a Colombian pop-star's links with disgraced Argentine rulers) comes this remarkable innocent confirmation that revolutionary theory and agitation first spreads spontaneously whether the existing fake-'left' counter-revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie want to disarm workers with pro-imperialist-system rubbish (as in the UK) or not:

'Antonio should never have been in politics,' said Ana Quinteros, 26, as she debated the country's problems with neighbours in a central Buenos Aires park. 'This video with Shakira is probably just a publicity stunt for her.  But it just makes me think it's even more important we find serious, honest leaders now.'

She is one of the many middle-class Argentines who gather in streets and parks to organise demonstrations and debate alternatives to the emergency government of the Peronist Eduardo Duhalde. They watched the country go through five Presidents, default on its $141 billion public debt and devalue the peso, but have also been inspired as their protests helped bring down two governments. 

Neighbourhood assemblies have developed into a network of more than 150 groups across the country, coordinated by Internet and email, with some beginning to publish simple newsletters. They have issued lists of demands for change, but few have produced concrete proposals. 

'They are being dragged into the political system. When these meetings began, all you could see were Argentine flags in the crowds. Now their meetings are full of red banners belonging to political groups and pictures of Che Guevara,' said Buenos Aires political analyst James Neilson.

To all rational minds, of course, all bourgeois ideology had long gone completely theoretically bankrupt far in advance of the now rapidly-approaching economic bankruptcy of the capitalist system. And nothing sums it up better than the idiotic argument widely circulated (and even scornfully noted above in bourgeois commentary) that the workforce in American steel (and US employees generally) must first get tariff reassurance that the capitalist system is able and willing to help them, before they can be expected to be willing to sacrifice anything in the interests of maintaining a 'free trade' global society.

Or in other words, the international propaganda about 'the glories of free trade' is admitted to be utterly worthless hypocrisy unless all workers everywhere can ALL be declared winners from such a 'free world'.

But the horrific reality now emerging, of course, is not only that the unstoppable monopoly-accumulation and cut-throat competition of 'free enterprise' cannot possibly avoid creating serious LOSERS once the iron laws of 'over-production' crisis set in; but that this fear-driven survival-of-the-fittest total anarchy in world economy can only periodically end up with EVERYONE being losers for a while, - and possibly a very long while, and possibly very big LOSERS indeed, once shooting-war bullying starts to replace plain old-fashioned tradewar bullying.

At this point, however, the fake-'lefts', - influenced by Kautsky's Revisionist theories about 'super-imperialism' eventually reducing monopoly-capitalist war-conflict to always 'manageable'  proportions, - chime in with notions that the US imperialist 'New World order' is so powerful anyway that any breaking down in degeneracy of any part of the capitalist system, anywhere, will either easily be quickly 'put right', or else any revolutionary upsurge resulting from such intolerable degeneration will quickly be 'put out of business'.

And with all of the well-known historical analogies (of past failed fascist-imperialist warmongering-aggression to avoid revolutionary crisis) declared to be "incapable of proving that next time, US imperialism and its unprecedented total world domination will not succeed in imposing universal counter-revolution", - the attempted EPSR science of precisely currently analysing and historically weighing up exactly what 'new counter-revolutionary ability' US imperialism is supposed to possess, becomes more important than ever.

It only took one small voice to observe that 'the Emperor has no clothes' to devastating effect; and the EPSR's conclusions are always 99% drawn from the bourgeois press's own admissions anyway, so it is hardly a lone voice to start with.

And as the rest of political commentary catches up to the growing realisation of imperialism's in-fact utterly bankrupt, degenerate, and crisis-ridden condition, and to the revolutionary implications of the catastrophic warmongering splits and disasters that are on their way, - so will a whole world chorus of voices grow for serious Marxist-Leninist revolutionary parties to start to be built again. As it has frequently demonstrated before, the EPSR's collective voice will remain among the loudest, and clearest, and most effective.

Meanwhile, the tracking of imperialism's precise crisis-condition goes on (see above and below), week after week without fail.

Some astonishing reports are currently in all capitalist newspapers about the sudden spectacle of ludicrous US imperialist FAILURE inside Afghanistan of all places, where 'super-imperialist' propaganda had already long-since been proclaiming 'total victory' months ago. 

"Al Qaeda are totally smashed. The Taleban have completely ceased to exist as an organisation" etc, etc, we were rapturously told by Bush, Blair, and the Socialist Alliance even before Christmas.

The latest reports from the capitalist press are all about American defeats currently in the field, however.

Too smallscale to be statistically relevant, is it argued???

That is exactly what was said about US imperialism's humiliating 'kick-arse' failure in Mogadishu several years ago.

But that 'insignificant' FAILURE has not stopped the American bourgeoisie feeling the need to finance a fullscale Hollywood epic Black Hawk Down to try to rewrite the history books and wipeout the setback.

And in reality what has the scale of any operation got to do with it? Let US warmongering please itself about what it needs to do the job in hand. It is one of the oldest colonial-imperialism's of all, and it has been at it almost the longest, after all.

No, the only issue is that whatever US imperialist smiting decides to do to impose its counter-revolutionary order on the whole planet, its record from Korea and Vietnam onwards is one long catalogue of FAILURE and near disaster, most of the time.

And just like on Sept 11, the humiliating FAILURE is precisely a reflection of the rotten hollowness of the whole rotten ruling-class and its utterly putrescent position now in history. It is the whole purpose in life of the American imperialist bourgeoisie that has become thoroughly historically decadent and corrupt. That way of world domination is now totally out-of-date with history's requirements.

It is precisely NOT the problem of ground-level logistics and heroics (or lack of them), - although that will inevitably come into it as a reflection of chaos, confusion, and wrong decisions above. Like Sept 11, it is precisely a problem of having the whole world under constant surveillance and harassment but in then not having a clue about how hated that domineering has become, or even being able to take seriously how even some put-down fleas might just be able to upset an elephant on occasions.

US imperialism seems to be re-enacting the same mindless scenario yet again, by all accounts, in Afghanistan.

And surely for the same broad historical reasons of a lack of any really convinced resolve or purpose, precisely because the whole imperialist racket is now so blatantly corrupt, and out-of-date, and utterly useless for solving anything on Earth any more.

Against what was already dismissed as a joke of an enemy, US imperialism is now permanently going into battle with two left feet:

THE BATTLE for Shah-e-Kot, which is continuing this weekend, has changed America's understanding of the nature of war in Afghanistan. For the first time US troops have encountered real resistance from an enemy that appears to have become more, not less, fanatical. Eight Americans have died and more than 40 have been wounded in chaotic and brutal, close-quarters fighting in snowcovered mountains. Most worrying of all is evidence that hundreds of local fighters joined al-Qaeda's fight, even as the battle raged.

The picture that has emerged in particular from the 18 hours that 16th Mountain Division's troops were pinned down - has privately shocked American commanders confronted with the image of wounded soldiers being forced to run from one hiding place to the next under withering fire while enemy fighters, tucked away in the caves, were able to escape massive bombardment from American warplanes.

It had all been so carefully planned. For at least a month before, American troops had recruited, trained, armed and clothed a force of 600 Afghan men to form a new army dedicated to routing the al-Qaeda hideout at Shah-e-Kot. Each man was given $200 a month and some of the most advanced training Afghan soldiers have yet received. After an initial air bombardment, Afghan troops, led by Commander Zia Lodin with US support, would move into the village of Sirkankel and flush out al-Qaeda fighters.

Early last Saturday morning the first Toyota four-wheel drive pick-ups raced up into the mountains in the dawn light. Across villages on the valley floor lay leaflets dropped overnight by US aircraft. The message was brief and final: 'Hand over Taliban and al-Qaeda or you will be destroyed.'

But the plans quickly unravelled. Just hours after the ground force moved in, a convoy of 25 pick-ups, loaded with Afghan troops and Americans from the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne Division, struggled through a mountain path clogged in thick mud close to Shah-e-Kot. Before they could even reach their planned forward positions, dozens of mortars came raining in.

'We just ran in every direction,' said Tameen, an Afghan fighter in the convoy. 'We didn't expect anything.'

A mortar struck one of the pick-ups and a US Special Forces soldier and three Afghans were killed. The convoy tried to retreat but its path had been cut off and the Americans were forced to call in US Army Apache helicopters to chase off the al-Qaeda attackers before the convoy could escape.

It was soon clear that estimates of al-Qaeda and Taliban strength were very badly wrong. It became quickly clear at least 800 al-Qaeda were in the valley and had been tipped off about the attack.

AS FIGHTING began in earnest, the commander of the US-Afghan ground force ordered 'hunterkiller' sniper teams to be placed along the valley to the south. But to the north helicopter-borne troops of the 10th Mountain Division were already pinned down. 

AS THE FIRST Chinooks touched down, Sergeant Robert Healy hit the ground in the way he had been trained. As he took up position with his men, the first enemy firing began. The opening shots were so erratic, recalled an injured Healy later in a satellite phone interview with the US press, that they seemed more like harassment rather than a real attack.

Ten minutes later the first mortar came in, accurate and lethal, smashing into the frozen ground. It wounded six of his colleagues. A second mortar injured a similar number, despite the soldiers' body armour. 'Throughout the whole day, [it was] machine guns, mortar rounds landing just everywhere,' he said.

As Healy and his men sought cover, other US infantrymen were arriving. Robert McCleave, an Army Specialist, had barely stepped out of his helicopter when it became clear that things would not be as straightforward as they had been told in the briefing. The enemy were on the hillsides above where they had landed, entrenched on the high ground. McCleave was among the first to be hit, wounded by mortar shrapnel in his thigh and elbows.

'It was probably no more than 10ft away,' he said in hospital in Germany. 'One of the soldiers with us took the bulk of that blast. The rest of us got pretty well wounded. A fellow soldier of mine stared right at me in the eyes and started screaming.'

'We could hear them laughing,' said Specialist Wayne Stanton, who was trapped close by and also wounded. 'We could hear them laughing when we tried to shoot at them. Our small arms could not reach them up there. Every time an aircraft or a helicopter came to attack them or engage them, they just ran into the caves.'

And as the battle intensified through Sunday and Monday there was little doubt in the US commanders' minds that the al-Qaeda troops, made up of Chechens, Pakistanis and Uzbeks, were highly trained and determined to face a martyr's death.

Two days of heavy bombing by F-16 jets and AC-130 Spectre gunships brought a total of at least 270 bombs and missiles in the first two days of combat, including a thermobaric cave-busting bomb.

As American commanders continued with the same strategy, it quickly became clear that the al-Qaeda fighters' morale had barely been dented, even in the face of heavy loss of life. Despite the difficulties of helicopter operations on the previous days, commanders opted for more drops of troops by Chinook in the lower part of the Shah-e-Kot valley. But as the aircraft came in to land, it came under heavy fire from rocket propelled grenades.

US troops rushed back on board and flew out. But a head count showed one man missing. Gruesome footage from a Predator spy plane later showed Petty Officer 1st Class Neil Roberts, 32, a Navy Seal, being dragged off by three al-Qaeda fighters. For horrified officers watching live on real-time video feeds at the US command centre in Tampa, Florida, there was nothing that could be done. Minutes later he was shot dead.

Three hours later a second Chinook sent to rescue him was hit by machine-gun fire and another rocket-propelled grenade. It was forced down and dozens of troops were pinned down in a ferocious gun battle. When they emerged, six Americans were dead. The situation was creating a new problem. Impressed by the strength of the al-Qaeda resistance, Saifur Rehman Mansoor, a Taliban commander and hardline cleric, led at least 400 men into the mountains. He vowed that they would fight to the 'last breath'. 

Doubts were also emerging over whether this really was al-Qaeda's last stronghold.

In Washington, a senior military officer with knowledge of the operation said flawed intelligence and analysis put the soldiers in the vulnerable spot. 'They were supposed to be the blocking force,' he told the LA Times. 'Suddenly they found themselves at the bottom of a valley with fire raining down from these guys in entrenched positions on a mountainside. They had them pinned down for 18 hours. 

'There was also a sense that, if confronted by a ground force, these guys [al-Qaeda] would choose to bail, that if they had good escape routes they would break and run. It did not work out.'

HUNDREDS of American troops were pulled out of the ground battle with al-Qaeda forces because they failed to adapt to the guerrilla tactics required for fighting in the mountains, according to their Afghan allies.

More than 1,000 Afghan troops rushed to the front line yesterday to take up the slack after the withdrawal of 400 US troops from the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

The American military has described the withdrawal as a tactical reappraisal of their battleplan, but Afghan commanders told a different story of inexperienced American soldiers unable to advance through the unfamiliar mountains to track down alQaeda and Taleban foes.

"They were not trained for the kind of fighting we do in the mountains and, in these conditions, their kind of fighting is useless," Commander Allah Mohammed said. "They were weakening our morale, it was better for them to go."

As dawn broke, hundreds of Afghan fighters mounted their creaking Soviet-era tanks and set off towards the snow-covered ridge of Shahi-Kot.

It is hoped their familiarity with the Taleban's tactics will help them to succeed where American troops failed.

Shah Mahood Popal, their deputy commander, believed it was self-preservation that stopped the Americans. They should stick to bombing," he said.

As he finished, the dark shape of a warplane swept the blue sky above and a loud boom ricochetted off the mountains. Three puffs of black smoke rose up from the  snowy ridge. "They are still trying to wipe out the al-Qaeda from the air," Habib Afghan, a commander said, "but if forces don't go in, it is impossible to finish them off."

Afghan commanders believe that the US has exaggerated the number of casualties in the bombing campaign, saying that at least several hundred al-Qaeda forces are up in mountain caves ready to fight back.

"We have been very close to their positions and we have seen no dead bodies," Commander Mohammed said.

So what is this ludicrous US imperialist crusade to 'rid the world of terrorism' actually achieving, or even trying to do, in Afghanistan?

All is utter chaos. No wonder just more and more barmy warmongering plans are rushed out instead of any clear purpose or achievements. It is just like the ludicrous government of imperialist crisis-decadence in Britain under this present Labour regime.

But this terminal malaise in any case does not stop at these allegedly 'statistically insignificant' accounts of small-scale in-the-field failures by US imperialism.

Its own bourgeoisie is back on Bush's neck for his obvious inadequacy and FAILURE, - completely in the bourgeoisie's own words:

HE'S BACK. Six months after his transformation from national joke into indefatigable statesman, George W. Bush was on vintage form at a recent concert given in his honour. As Stevie Wonder took the stage, the President started waving to the blind musician, only to drop his hand when he realised his mistake. 'I know I shouldn't have, but I started laughing,' one witness said.

That story was buried deep in the diary page of the Washington Post last week but its very appearance confirms that the post-11 September moratorium on poking fun at the President's inadequacies is over. Suddenly, it's cool to be rude about Dubya again.

At the forefront of the new Zeitgeist is comedienne Sandra Bernhard, who delivered a hitherto unthinkable anti-Bush tirade at a show in Washington last weekend. 'Bush is amateurish and self-serving and, frankly, it's disgusting,' she told her audience. 'Everybody is covering their asses with the Enron scandal and it was very convenient that September 11 came along to deflect the fact that they should never have been in the White House in the first place. What happened at the [presidential] election was completely corrupt.'

The White House might brush aside Bernhard's comments as the ramblings of a well-known liberal but far more difficult to dismiss is the publication of two books and the release this weekend of a documentary which all deal with Bush's journey to the White House and the first months of his presidency.  They present a devastating portrait of a man promoted way beyond his abilities.

Attracting most attention is Ambling Through History, an account of Bush's 2000 presidential campaign written by New York Times writer Frank Bruni, which begins with an account of a memorial service Bush attended for seven people killed in a church shooting in 1999. 'As preachers preached and singers sang and a city prayed, Bush turned round from time to time to shoot us [reporters] little smiles. He scrunched up his forehead, as if to ask silently what we were doing back there. He wiggled his eyebrows, a wacky and wordless hello,'  he writes. 'It is astonishing that he wasn't more concerned that one of the television or still cameras might catch him.'

Bruni's account reveals a welter of detail about Bush's immaturity which runs counter to the White House portrayal of serious, resolute 'leader of the free world'.

'The truth is we are simply pretending that Bush showed unspeakable courage; by going to the World Series and throwing the first pitch or that he, by God, showed those terrorists by going to Salt Lake City and jumbling the first line of the Olympic opening ceremony.'

A more polemical account of Bush's rise to the presidency is given by Michael Moore in Stupid White Men... And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, which was due to be published on 11 September but was withheld by its publishers and has become widely available only within the past few weeks. Moore, who made his name with an award-winning film about the failings of corporate America, accuses Bush of usurping democracy.

'You've been a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter and a cry baby... for the sake of all that is decent and sacred take leave immediately and bring some honour to your all important family name,' he writes in a 277-page excoriation which has found a readership wide enough to carry it into the bestsellers' lists.

Gentler but, many in Washington believe, ultimately more damaging is Journeys With George, a documentary about Bush made by film-maker Alexandra Pelosi which had its première in Austin, Texas, on Friday. Pelosi followed Bush on the campaign trail for one of the American networks. Her finished version has already earned rave, though squeamish, reviews.

'I found it to be entertaining as hell - and a bit disturbing,' wrote Richard Roeper, one of America's best known film critics. 'Just imagine how much fun the evil-doers of the world are going to have when they obtain bootleg copies of this tape and manipulate all the silliest images. Bush winking, Bush goofing around, Bush chewing with his mouth open, Bush doing the cheerleader routine, Bush serving reporters drinks on a tray... there's just way too much of the overgrown fratboy on tape.'

Pelosi says the White House initially tried to rubbish her film and her methods - falsely claiming she had told the Bush team her footage was for private use only -  but changed tack when they realised the attendant publicity would serve only to increase public curiosity.

However, with polls reporting that Bush's approval ratings are no longer stratospheric and Democrats becoming increasingly critical of the President's rightwing agenda, it would appear the second honeymoon is now officially over.

It is the oldest trick in the imperialist book to just demand even more blood, guts, and sacrifice as soon as any earlier projects look like failing, hence all the hysteria now about invading Iraq and nuking SEVEN 'rogue states' if necessary.

'Bound to win' if such a US world-domination regime 'gets really serious'? Bound to lose if a return to such an out-dated world-colonial-policeman role is being seriously contemplated, is the only sane reply.

Zionist colonisation is on the rocks despite its overwhelming firepower and brutality (see previous and next EPSRs for detailed evidence). Trade war has begun. The really serious question is not can US imperialism now impose counter-revolution on the whole planet; but how long will the American bourgeois ruling class still be in power in the USA itself, once the slump and trade-war catastrophe really gets going? 

Build Leninism. EPSR