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 

No 1138    May 29   2002

Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074  
P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                    www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk                                     25p

Boundless imperialist hypocrisy on the fraudulent "stable democratic future" shaken by the slump and the obvious war upheavals as Pakistan and India square up to each other. Whether or not the nukes fly now, the imperialist system is heading for the greatest warmongering catastrophe in all history.  Straws in the wind of the devastating slump brewing are the capitalist panic over collapsing economic "boom" and the potentially world trade shattering disintegration of the Dollar currency and credit system. Fears about the future driving the bourgeoisie into a fascist frame universally but simultaneously undermining their confidence. Pentagon panick over Iraqi war posturing shows that world dominating imperialism is not getting ever stronger as it gets nastier, but exactly the opposite, is LOSING the plot as it begins to see the scale of the problems facing it.

	The sheer chutzpah of George Bush telling India and Pakistan that "war is no solution" while stomping around Europe urging his European "friends" to support the desperate "war on terrorism" would be breathtaking,  if imperialism was not built on such weasel hypocrisy,  and lies about supposed "stability and democracy". 

	India is using exactly such a "justification" for its bloodcurdling threats and aggressive posturing against Pakistan, claiming it is pursuing a "war on terrorism" against the Kashmiri separatists. 

	On the other side, the anti-democratic coup-leading General Musharraf has been boosted and given international confidence (not to mention funding and military support) by precisely the USA's barbaric but incompetent revenge incursions into Afghanistan, where the Pakistan military  dictatorship has been made a key member of the western "democratic alliance against terror".

	Imperialism's clumsy diplomatic snubs, and military and intelligence pressures over its chaotic and disastrous Afghanistan adventure have helped make the tangled mess in the region ten times worse (and solve nothing in Afghanistan). Its sheer ineptness throws further light on the profound weaknesses running through the supposedly newly invigorated  "New World Order" (which so overawes the fake-"left"), as its economic and political crisis deepens rapidly.

	The cynical inhuman hypocrisy of continuing arms sales to all and sundry, despite supposed international restrictions on selling weapons to "belligerent nations" has further underlined the shallowness and hollowness of all imperialism's claims to be the "one stable system and future for humanity - the end of history". It also inflames the situation.

	But it must be the worldwide imperialist economic and political crisis, now threatening imminently to tear apart the entire globalised imperialist order, which is the first and only place to look for the cause of potential war in India and Pakistan (and soon coming to a theatre near you). 

	Surface explanations about dealing with terrorists are no more a reason for increasing hostilities now than they were in 1914 when a "terrorist incident" -  the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand -  precipitated the years long devastation of the First World War, drawing in countries half a planet away from Serbia.  

	For the tens of millions who died in the gruesome trench warfare then, and the even greater numbers who could be destroyed and devastated by possible nuclear war now , war comes out of a 'blue sky' - one minute straw-boater Edwardian prosperity,  and the next blood and mud.

	But for anyone looking for the signals - i.e. Marxist science - the underlying contradictions of the capitalist system and its endless accumulations of capital,  seeking ever-expanding (and therefore ultimately unrealisable) chances to make a profit, were already festering during the early twentieth century in colonial skirmishes, increasingly serious militarisation and trade war conflicts. Inter-imperialist tension was reaching explosion point. Germany was even planning invasions of the USA in 1897 (see last week's EPSR).	

	The huge imbalance between already stagnant but dominant British and French imperialisms and the much faster developing German industrial and financial might, and equally growing US imperialism,  had to burst out once the pressures of economic collapse and slump meant there was no room for every bourgeois owner on the planet to export,  and sell,  and make a profit.

	The same slump chaos pressures the produced WW1 and 1939's WW2,  will soon enough once again turn the whole capitalist system from merely "competitive" into all-out destructive warmongering.
  
	Nearly sixty years of endlessly overstretched worldwide "boom",  fed by a capitalist credit system refined to new levels of sophistication and scale,  and the unprecedented expansion and penetration of capitalism into all corners of the globe, has dulled minds with a diet of consumerism and anti-communist scare stories. Even as Pakistan lobs its missiles around there are few who believe they are "really going to do it".

	The fake-'left' (all varieties from anti-communist Trotskyism to stultifying Revisionism and museum Stalinism) helps feed this complacent and dangerous illusion with its limited and slow (and impossible)  reformist  perspectives of 'struggling for a few improvements now'  and refusing even to mention the hurtling crisis and the dialectical impossibility of 'gradually transforming' capitalism.  Worse and more reactionarily,  EPSR's talk of the imminent slump, which makes even any short term gains unlikely,  is mocked as 'crisisism'. 

	But the even capitalist press is a little more aware of the towering crisis pressures for the supposedly "recession-defying" British economy than these dullards:-  

"Fears that Gordon Brown will need fresh tax increases to pay far Labour's spending plans were heightened yesterday as it was revealed that Britain's economy ground to a halt in the first three months of 2002.

With the economy at a standstill since last autumn, City analysts said the chancellor now had little hope of hitting his growth forecast for this year....

Figures from the office for national statistics showed that the economy was even weaker in the first quarter of 2002 than the 0.1% growth previously estimated. GDP was unchanged for the second successive quarter, leaving the UK teetering on the brink of recession in the sox months following the September II. terrorist attacks.

Today's figures show a deeply unbalanced economy. Consumer spending is growing fast, but manufacturing remains in recession and growth in services has fallen to its lowest level since 1995," said Michael Howard, the shadow chancellor.

With output from the recession-hit manufacturing sector falling by 1.5% in the first quarter, yesterday's data showed that Britain's growing trade deficit acted as a drag an growth. The government's data revealed growth in construction, agriculture and services, but not enough to increase GDP overall. The service sector, despite the strength of the housing market and retail sales, expanded by just 0.2%, weaker than the ONS's original estimate,

Figures from other countries released this week have shown that the US economy grew by just over  1.1% in the first quarter, France by 0.4% and Germany by 0.2%.

Treasury spokesman sand; "Slower GDP growth far the first quarter of 2002 reflects the slowdown in the world economy and the effects of increased uncertainty following September 11. There are now dear signs of improving confidence and activity in the US and Europe and we expect UK GDP growth to accelerate through the year as the recovery in the world economy gathers pace. In the UK recent surveys show that prospects for manufacturing are improving and consumption growth remains strong:'

But Philip Shaw, economist with Investec, said: "This is a far cry from the end of last year when Britain seemed to be leading the way in terms of the growth of the major economies. Mr Brown's 2-2.5% forecast for 2002 now not only looks ambitious but unachievable."

Daniel Kaye of Capital Economics said; "This number means that reaching the chancellor's growth forecast looks extremely unlikely. Indeed, even our own bearish forecast of 1.5% is by no means certain to be achieved:'"

"Following seven cuts in the cost of borrowing by the Bank of England last year, interest rates are now at their lowest for 38 years. The Bank acted to prevent the economy sliding into recession, but with unemployment at levels not seen since 1975, the low cost of credit has helped to stoke up a feelgood factor among consumers, that has been reflected in higher borrowing, higher house prices and higher retail spending. Lending to individuals has broken new records in three of the past four months, while the cost of the average home has been increasing by around 15%, more than six times the annual inflation rate.

So, is this a return to the boom-boom Britain of the late 1980s? Then consumers embarked on a debt-fuelled frenzy of spending in 1987 and 1988 only to pay the price by losing their jobs, homes and businesses as interest rates were raised aggressively to choke off the inflation that inevitably resulted.

Inflation excluding mortgage interest payments is at 2.3%, below the government's 2.5°/a target, and yesterday's data from the office for national statistics showed that shop prices last month were 0.3°/a down on April 2001. Some analysts argue that price cutting by retailers stimulated by ferocious competition helps explain the strength of the spending boom.

"It's volume at the expense of margins," said Mr Edwards from Cribbs Causeway.

Interestingly enough, it was the same story in the mid-1980s. Then, as now, there was a benign period when it seemed possible to combine strong consumer spending with low inflation. Eventually, problems started to emerge, starting with a big deterioration in the trade deficit.

The prospects of this happening again are high. Manufacturing output is falling as rapidly as retail sales are rising, sucking in imports from the rest of the world. Mervyn King, the Bank of England's deputy governor, has noted that trade has made a negative contribution to growth in six consecutive years and were the trend to continue -- as it looks like doing - that would be unprecedented in Britain's modern economic history.

All that said, the Bank is hopeful that consumers will tighten their own belts before there is a need for the draconian sanction of sharply higher interest rates. The City believes the bank is being far too optimistic and that yesterday's figures bring forward the day of reckoning.

"What these data show is an unsatiated appetite for spending - particularly if the price is right - on the part of the UK consumer," said Mr Gabay, who now expects a rate rise in July, with a one in three chance of an increase next month. "They knock on the head any notion of the autonomous, selfcorrecting consumer."

"The news yesterday that Britain's businesses have scaled back investment for a fifth consecutive quarter dealt another blow to hopes that the economy was shrugging off the after-effects of the hi-tech slowdown. 

Where did it all go wrong? "Irrational exuberance," as US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan famously described it, sends the wrong signals to firms about what they should be making and when. 

The best-known. example of hitech hubris was the £22.5bn which five telecoms firms paid the government for a slice of Britain's 3V spectrum after a bidding frenzy in spring 2000. But hi-tech manufacturers had also responded to the market's financial vote of confidence by building up their production capacity, preparing themselves for the expected flood of demand.

'A speculative bubble inevitably leads to a misallocation of resources, because you get froth at the top of the market, and people tend to have a very high expectation of returns," says Jonathan Loynes of Capital Economics. When investors pulled the plug last year, the hitech sector led British manufacturing into a painful recession, with 144,000 workers laid off in 2001 alone. Output of telecoms equipment fell by almost 50% in the 12 months to March; production of TV, radio and other electronic equipment dropped by almost 20°%.

So far, the impact on the overall labour market has been mercifully slight. Unemployment leas remained historically low, at 353,000 in April on the claimant count measure, because service sector firms have continued expanding and hiring staff through much of the past six months. But the worst could still be to come. 

According to the Office for National Statistics, business investment in the fist three months of the year was 3.4% down on the same period a year ago --- suggesting battered firms are still busy correcting the over-investment.

Graham Turner of GFC Economics argues that so far production has been cut back without reducing overcapacity.  Firms had built up huge fixed costs and were unwilling to mothball new factories if they could avoid it. So for the most part, they have shut down production lines and laid off workers, but not yet reduced the over-capacity they had built up.

Capacity utilisation in the US hitech sector has collapsed, and is well below the long-term average. There is thus a danger that the moment there is any sign of recovery in demand or prices, firms will begin reusing some of that over-capacity and flood the market again, depressing prices and preventing firms from improving profit margins.

In the longer run, they are likely to have to make more fundamental decisions shutting down factories and making further redundancies.

And where the US leads we tend to follow. The worst-case scenario is that the economy could slide into a so-called 'double dip'; with growth collapsing for a second time, just as it appears to be recovering. "There is a risk of a relapse driven by poor profits and overcapacity, which could eventually eat into people's willingness to spend," says Turner. "

	Even this is only a tiny part of the story.  The Financial Times this week adds weight to daily warnings that the credit inflated house market is about to collapse; letters have gone to millions of endowment mortgage holders recently telling them their mortagaes will fall substantially short; the enormous capital investment engine of the pension funds is collapsing in all directions; and household personal debt is at historically high and unrepayable levels.

	But all that is just the national picture. Internationally the situation is much worse,  facing meltdown of the entire post-war dollar based credit and trading structure as the EPSR has tentatively explored for some years.  Again the capitalist press and academics are way ahead of the derisory fake-'lefts':

"The dollar has weakened by 5% since the start of April, and despite intervention by the Japanese last week, still has a lot further to go. 

Anybody who believes that the overdue fall in the currency means a painless rebalancing of the global economy is in for a rude awakening. Soft landings are...snow leopards: everybody has heard of them; few have encountered them.

In theory, ...the weaker dollar makes American exports more competitive, allowing the US to close its frighteningly large trade deficit.....a current account deficit that dwarfs anything in its history.

In the real world, things tend to be different. The strong dollar has been the glue that has held the core of the global economy together even as bits on the periphery have flaked off. Consumer demand in Europe and Japan is weak and the only reason there is even a semblance of growth is because exporters in Munich and Nagoya are using the weakness of the euro and the yen to feed America's spending habit. ....

US manufacturers are complaining like mad, one reason why the Bush administration has slapped tariffs on imported steel. But international investors have also grown alarmed. The dollar's real exchange rate - higher than at any time since the Plaza agreement of 1985 organised a global effort to reduce its value - is eroding corporate profitability. With official interest rates at just 1.75%, and no sign that the Federal Reserve plans to raise them soon, overseas investors believe that they are not being rewarded for the risk of a hefty dollar devaluation. So they are selling dollar assets, making devaluation more likely.

But as the American historian, Robert Brenner, points out in a new book [The Boom and the Bubble (Verso)], there has been a pattern to the performance of the big three economies since the "Golden Age" came to an end in 1973. When the dollar has been strong, Europe and Japan's export-driven economies have done well. When the dollar has been weak, as it was from 1985 to 1995, Europe and Japan struggled.

Far from being a spontaneous improvement in economic performance caused by the development of new technology, America's industrial renaissance was based on an investment boom made possible by a cheap currency, tax breaks for the corporate sector and a ferocious squeeze on real wages under Reagan, Bush senior, and Clinton. Since the 1990s, the dollar has appreciated by about 60% against a basket of currencies, putting strain on profits.

The show was only kept on the road by the scale of America's stock market bubble, underwritten by Alan Greenspan at the Fed, which encouraged consumers to run down savings and made it easy and cheap to raise funds for projects that had no chance of being profitable.

Brenner argues that the international economic expansion of 1999-2000 was like the other cyclical recoveries since the start of the long downturn almost three decades ago. "As in those previous ones, the US's main rivals and partners in western Europe - especially Germany and Italy - in east Asia and Japan thus depended as usual upon a combination of the sizzling growth of the US import market, historically unprecedented US current account deficits, and sharply reduced exchange rates vis-a-vis the dollar (notably the very low euro) to generate growth of demand not only for high-technology investment goods, but also for traditional consumption imports, like cars."

Bill Martin, chief economist at UBS global asset management, has been warning for years that this could not go on indefinitely. His research shows that the US faces a prolonged hangover from the excesses of the late 1990s, and that the rest of the world is not really in a position to compensate for the weakness in American domestic demand that is necessary to rectify the trade deficit and reduce the indebtedness of the private sector to more normal levels.

He argues that a weaker dollar would not be welcome in those parts of the world already suffering from high levels of unemployment and that resorting to protectionism merely invites retaliation. Ideally, Europe and Japan would use reflationary macroeconomic policies to boost domestic demand, but there is not much chance of this happening.

A higher exchange rate represents a tightening of monetary policy, while cuts in interest rates are ruled out in Europe by the central bank's paranoia about inflation and in Japan by the fact that they can go no lower than they are already. Martin says that as far as fiscal policy is concerned, Europe's stability and growth pact prevents easing, while Japan's repeated doses of pump priming mean that any further use of Keynesian remedies would be ineffective.

The difficulty is that we now have all three of the world's big trading blocs trying to do the same thing at once - use cheap currencies to export their way to growth. But this is an impossibility. If the dollar weakens, then something else strengthens.

...Two trends have developed. The first is overcapacity on a colossal scale, which has put downward pressure first on prices, then on profitability and now on stock markets. The second is that a devaluation induced expansion in one country leads to a crisis of exports and manufacturing in another.

At the same time, rising exchange rates attract capital, making imbalances worse and generating speculative asset price bubbles. Thailand was an early example of this, but only an overture to America's bubble to beat all bubbles.

Greenspan is now in a fix, although his willingness to tolerate, even encourage, the stock market bubble means he only has himself to blame. Low interest rates are needed to keep the economy growing, but higher interest rates are needed to attract an inflow of funds needed to prevent a sharp fall in the dollar and fund the current account deficit.

It is clear that interest rates would have to be raised aggressively to compensate foreign investors for holding the dollar, but as Brenner asks: "Could interest rates be simultaneously kept high enough to allow for the funding of the current account deficit and to prevent a flight of capital, and also low enough to avoid choking off growth?" 
The answer is almost certainly No."

The broad picture is that the whole world economic system is teetering over the abyss, with unknown levels of slump turmoil to come.  The middle class is already being hammered, a petty bourgeois impoverished and driven into the proletarian ranks, just as Marxist SCIENCE predicts. 

	That war and slump is due, and shortly, is already obvious.

	Whether India and Pakistan explode this time,  or when they finally will finally do so,  is not clear and nor is it yet obvious that the whole imperialist crisis is ripe enough for this to be the trigger for generalised World War Three. 

	But Marx and Engels' analysis of the system remains unchallenged and the only coherent explanation for the periodic collapses and slumps of the capitalist system (supplemented by Lenin's understanding of imperialism).

	The capitalist competitive system has stimulated innovation and invention and push technical development and human production to once unimaginable levels - though many would query whether cars with voice-operated windows are the peak of human capacity when 2 billion on the planet still have not got basic running water and sanitation.

	But its basic antagonism, aiming to drive the other fellow into bankruptcy,  must turn to destruction as the relentless expansion of capital finally clogs the system, unable to find "a margin". Only by physically destroying the "surplus" capital can this system "solve" its intractable problems. 

	The increasing crisis pressure is reflected not only in heightened tensions between imperialists and panicky economic articles but even more significantly in the general rising turmoil among the masses of the planet, increasingly squeezed and increasingly unwilling to let themselves not only continue to be exploited but be squeezed even further.

	Whether it is demonstrations in bankrupted Argentina or the escalation and growing effectiveness of the heroic struggle against the brutal and increasingly vicious ethnic cleansing Zionist occupation of Palestine, there is a clear pattern of bubbling third World  anti-imperialism across the planet.  

	Imperialism's demented and fascistically vengeful plan to stop this struggle by its "war on terrorism" will have exactly the opposite effect, particularly as the real slump war driving pressure comes to the surface.  As the inter-imperialist conflict grows the opportunity for revolutionary struggle will increase also, because of the weakness revealed in the whole imperialist system.

	The EPSR frequently underlines the growing DISASTER that the new post-11 September turn represents for imperialism; draconian clamp downs, suspended civil "rights",  right-wing escalation and the overall fascist tone of imperialism in slump - (a general phenomenon and not some SPECIAL feature of somehow different right wing groups - wearing jack-boots etc) -  are signals of its weakness and desperation. The boom time illusions of democracy and philistine consumer comfort (the "Brie and Bordeaux" so beloved by fake-"left" groups like the CPGB) area much safer way of controlling society. 

	Small wonder that the other side of belligerence by the capitalists is nervousness and incompetance. Not least the India-Pakistan shaping up is giving is senior ruling class palpitations like Malcolm Rifkind wheeled out on Newsnight this week to warn of the "near Cuba crisis" intensity of the potential conflict. 

	What worries senior Tories, as Rifkind made clear, is the potential for the conflict to spread - though why that would happen it was really just a fight between the two for regional influence and control of Kashmir - he did not explain. To spread would require other underlying causes - just as explained above.

	And that worries them because of the potential for revolutionary upheaval and turmoil to spread with it.  The desperate and poverty ridden masses of India (1.1billion) and Pakistan are a huge social explosion waiting to happen. Historically it is in war that the masses are educated in the full meaning of capitalism and driven against it, from the 1917 revolutionary ending of World War 1 to the huge Chinese communist struggle during the Japanese occupation and WW2, establishing the world's biggest workers state in 1949.

	The fear of failure and what it might open up is exercising the minds of more thoughtful elements in the US administrations too it is emerging in capitalist press reports:-

"Senior American military leaders are believed to have turned sharply against any idea of invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and have started to gain the upper hand in persuading the White House that such a mission should be postponed, preferably indefinitely.

The joint chiefs of staff have ... warned that such an invasion would be extremely fraught, given the resources depleted by the war in Afghanistan.

One of the factors most alarming the generals is the possibility that their troops could be drawn into street fighting in Baghdad, without support from the local population, leading to heavy US casualties. This ties in with longstanding fears that Saddam might use such a moment to unleash biological or chemical weapons.

Their instinctive caution has been strengthened by Operation Prominent Hammer, a highly secret war game recently played by senior officials, details of which have begun to leak out. It revealed that shortages of equipment could seriously hamper the operation and endanger the lives of Americans and Iraqi civilians.

The air force is the most alarmed of the services, according to analysts, because they are short of planes, trained pilots and munitions. A third of their refuelling planes are reported to be under repair.

But there are also concerns about the ability of special forces, currently being used in the Philippines and Yemen as well as Afghanistan, to operate successfully in Iraq at the same time, especially bearing in mind the intelligence successfully in Iraq at the same time, especially bearing in mind the intelligence services' need to concentrate on homeland security.

It is understood that the country's senior generals the heads of the army, navy, air forces and marines - agreed with the chairman of the joint chiefs, Richard Myers, and his deputy, Peter Pace, in their assessment.

General Tommy Franks who, as head of the army's central command, would be in charge of any invasion of Iraq, has told the president that an invasion to overthrow Saddam would require at least 200,000 troops, a number that would seriously stretch even the American military, given the near impossibility of mounting an international coalition.

At a Pentagon briefing yesterday, General Pace sounded what was, by military standards, an uncertain trumpet.

Turning to his boss, the defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he assured him: "Your military is ready today to execute whatever mission the civilian leadership of this country gives us to do." But he added: "The fact of the matter is, the more time you have to prepare for that kind of mission, whatever it is, the more elegant the solution could be:'

The head of the air force, General John Jumper, was blunter. "We never sized ourselves to have to do high force protection levels at home and overseas at the same time. We're stretched very thin in security forces," he was quoted as saying by the New York Times.

The military assessment backs up the messages pouring into the White House from elsewhere. The dangerous situation involving India and Pakistan, as well as Israel and Palestine, unnerves diplomats. World opinion ranges from the wary -in Britain - to the 'vehemently opposed.

Even Turkey, regarded by the Iraq-hawks in Washington as a crucial and loyal ally on this issue, is said by government sources there to be "very nervous indeed" about the idea, mainly because of fears of the political instability that would result. Officials are also getting bleak assessments about the quality of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein, and about the likely reaction of the Iraqi people should the Americans invade."

	In the end however it is neither the generals, "reasonable assessments" or caution which will decide the issue but the unstoppable and relentless capitalist slump pressures which will inevitatbly drive the whole sytem into a third World War. 

	Increasingly that will also mean the rising of the revolutionary forces to overturn this sclerotic and out-dated system and its burdens on humanity.   And all that is missing for that is the vital revolutionary scientific Leninist understanding without which all upheaval and turmoil will ultmately go no-where. 
Build Leninism                     Don Hoskins

Letter  Fake-"left" debate on 'terrorism' empty and reactionary leaving a middle class audience hungry for answers about the capitalist slump.

The most interesting question to ask about  the London Review of Books debate on the "war on terrorism" two weeks ago, was why more than a 1000  'very nice' middle class people would unprecedentedly turn up for a  'left' political discussion. 
It is not simply the limited and relatively small events of 11th September - and not even the question of "terrorism" which are driving so many people into such strange waters. Something much deeper is troubling them, namely the terrifying sense that the world is going horribly wrong and heading for a major disaster,  ie. capitalist slump and brewing trade and shooting war.

Since not a word was forthcoming on any such wide perspectives, the end result of the three hour discussion between fake-"lefts" Tariq Ali and Christopher Hichens primarily (though a philosophy professor and one other were present on the platform) was profound disappointment and dismay - most of those present went away philosophically hungry. 
The "nice middle class" are far too polite to boo,  but Hitchen particularly received a cold response and open hostility to his now overtly reactionary line on the September 11, pivoted around  "defending the values of civilisation and democracy" against what he called "reactionary Islam."   

As the crisis deepens more and more such supposed "lefts" will equally be driven into the reactionary open ground, and even if this audience was a million miles from being revolutionaries they could smell this capitulation to imperialism from the back of the lecture theatre.

But no robust explanation of the rapidly deepening imperialist crisis and the inevitability of the drive to war it is imposing on the increasingly panicky world bourgeoisie  - and hence the fraudulent "war on terrorism"   - was forthcoming from Tariq Ali either, during the oh-so-genteel event (a left version of TV's Question Time, heavily controlled by the organisers  rather than a proper polemic and open public discussion). Despite his continuing posturing around the "anti-war" movement his line was as reactionary as Hitchen's. He no more explained that the September attacks are part of a rising tide of anti-imperialist hostility troughout the Third World, being driven out by the slump, than Hitchen - instead he equally characterised the whole Al-Quaeda/Taliban movement (and by implication other militant Muslim fundamentalism such as Islamic Jihad) as fascistic and dangerous. 

Ali differed only in his more "democratic" and "popular" line that "the people of those countries should themselves deal with such monsters". This disguised, though equally reactionary garbage, interestingly produced little more in audience response than Hitchen, despite Ali's continuing and cleverly manipulated public image as a "left".
Possibly the audience sensed that "explanations" attacking Al-Quaeda and the Taliban for the world's problems on the basis that their ideology makes them as reactionary as George Bush or worse, is not only missing the point (consciously) about what is driving such struggle (the material forces pushing these things are quite another question to the bizarre notions that people might carry in their heads) but also giving people like Ali and Htichens the cover they need for their cowardly rowing in with imperialism now the crisis is getting tough.

The end result is a good one.  People came looking for much deeper answers even if they did not know that themselves, and they did not get any - seeing only the "lefts" failing to deliver. Now that is a good lesson to make.          DH

London leaflet for LRB debate on the war on terrorism May 15th:                                       Debating the "war on terrorism" as if this Goebbels propaganda should be taken seriously is just fake-"left" flak to cover over its complete capitulation to imperialist anti-communism and warmongering. The shock of the WTC attack showed the massive transformation of the imperialist grip on the planet as slump turmoil threatens the long over-stretched boom time. The fake-"left" will go down with the system that nurtures it. 

To debate "an alternative" to the "war on terrorism" being waged by western imperialism is yet another fraudulent effort by the fake-"left" and its "celebrity intellectuals" to avoid telling the working class the truth about the raging capitalist crisis and the need to end this system altogether.

Only if the question was purely rhetorical, answered with the only solution to war which is possible - the total ending of capitalism and its monstrous and rapidly degenerating system - would such a debate make any sense. But the entire fake-"left" in Britain is a million miles from either understanding, or wanting to put forward any such answer.  

What none of them have grasped or been prepared to say since the attack on the World Trade Centre brought to the surface the pivotal transformation underway in the imperialist "boomtime" world order, sliding into slump chaos, is that "war on terrorism" is a giant fraud on the world's oppressed masses.  

For an increasingly desperate ruling class, facing the biggest financial and economic collapse in all history, the "war" and the notion of "terrorism" itself are just a cynical smokescreen for the general build-up of warmongering atmosphere throughout the whole capitalist system, and particularly by the dominant bullying US power. 

The biggest, credit-fed, and massively overstretched capitalist boom in history is about to go belly up with terrifying consequences throughout the planet, most of all for the 700 year old capitalist order which is rapidly losing its grip and will do so more than ever as slump deepens.

The implications are beyond imagination.  In 1870 capitalist crisis created the first imperialist war, the "small" German-French imperialist war,  and in 1914 bigger crisis burst out as the mainly European but hugely devastating World War One..  In 1939 the now world-wide system collapsed into international war to dwarf even that Great War.

Long overdue WWWIII can only erupt with a potential for horrors and hostilities in proportion to the now globalised international capitalist finance system,  and the scale of the slump implosion hanging over it, from decades of unsustainable credit creation and paper currency printing, most of all the dollar. 

Just how big is the crisis already can be seen from the total paralysis gripping the world's second greatest financial and industrial power in Japan, which has languished in deflationary slump for 11 years despite an economy bigger than all of Europe in 1939, and all desperate efforts to pull out of it. 

Or from the total bankruptcy happening or imminent for various smaller players in the imperialist order, from currency meltdown in Indonesia to total banking collapse in Argentina.  

The same disaster now threatens all the world and most of all the both US and European imperialist blocs. Trade war hostility is erupting into the open over steel, farming, cars and planes. The internal conflicts, competitiveness and cycnicism throughout society are erupting too, as the empty philistine boomtime consumerist "certainties" gives way to fear of unemployment, hunger, social breakdown, crime and drugs - all the festering nastiness of the system coming back to the surface, in right-wing revivals,  racism and hatreds .  

It must all eventually erupt into open conflict and war.

It is this perspective which underlies the extraordinary warmongering ferment which has followed the astonishing but still relatively smallscale  (compared to 50 years of blitzkrieg, war massacres and coups by imperialism around the planet) attack on New York, by increasingly anti-imperialist Third World opinion.

But imperialism is gearing up for the conflict between the great powers themselves, the real aggression which capitalism is preparing - and the biggest one of all, the USA,  is making sure that the whole world gets the picture that it is ready to use every measure possible to hold on to its power and privileges. 

Of course imperialism has always used "the fight for legality" and the "battle for democracy" against the "dark forces of communism and anarchy" to help impose its bloody exploitational grip on the planet - the boom period of the post-Second World War has seen over 200 coups, intelligence-organised overthrows,  assassinations and overt wars, including the barbaric carpet and chemical bombing attacks on Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Cambodia and Greece and sustainance for endless stooge fascist regimes and training for their death and torture squads, from Pinochet's Chile onwards. 

The fight against "terrorism" conveniently allows all "uppity" masses, and growing national and anti-imperialist fightbacks, to be labelled "immoral" or "illegal", for the complacent comfort of the middle-class and liberals everywhere.  They can turn a blind eye as imperialism uses ever more brutal methods to try and keep control of the planet.

Genocidally massacring 50-year long dispossessed Palestinians on the West Bank? No problem - it's the "war on terrorism". Bombing and poisoning the proto-communist struggle in Colombia against poverty and death squad oppression? - no problem it's the "war on drugs and terrorism". Endlessly starving and bombing the Iraqi Arabs to bully the whole Middle East and allow permanent and continuing theft of their valuable oil reserves? - no problem, "it's the war on (state) terrorism".  Vengeful and futile blitzkriegs on the dirt-poor masses and civilians of Afghanistan to salve hurt imperialist pride over a single relatively small blow against them? - no problem - "the war on terrorism". Securing the diamond mines of Sierra Leone for western interests by propping up a stooge government? - no problem, "its the war on 'limb chopping' (and doubtless 'baby eating') terrorists." 

The poor organising in the Philippines?.. Maoist rebellion in Nepal?.. and almost certainly soon growing upheaval in Argentina, Venezuala, Indonesia, Africa and more?  - no problem,  all can be brutally put down by "the war on terrorism" with hardly a murmur from the "left", or in some cases, even enthusiastic support on "legal", "moral" or "juridicial" grounds. 

But the "anti-terrorist" question has a new stridently fascist tone since the  World Trade Centre attack revealed the massively deep rooted changes taking place around the planet as its entire six billion population sense the chaos and disruption underway. 

Whether or not Al Quaeda, its ideology and its fighting methods are capable of damaging imperialism, is not the point. The very stunning suddenness and strangeness of its attack, and the dozens of other struggles brewing across the planet, underlines just how imperialism is losing its grip on things.

The demented Zionist Likud vote this week to censure the Nazi-minded Ariel Sharon for being "too soft" and promising NEVER to recognise a Palestine nation shows just how the logic of imperialist rule in this new phase is driving the most fascistic behaviour to the surface.  

Zionism and equally the national struggle against it is no more separate from the overall imperialist crisis than any other part of the planet. And like all of imperialism the more threatened it is the more violent, aggressive and brutal it will become in its "smiting" of rebellion and upheaval.

All of imperialism is ready to tear up the democratic pretence (an endless fraud swallowed by complacent reformists and deluded "lefts")  - as the US has just demonstrated with its almost open and definitely cynical hands-on CIA involvement with the attempted overthrow of the Venezualan government - a move certain to be tried again, and again.

But this barbarism and lying duplicity is a sign of the weakness of the whole system not its strength. Nazi Germany survived a mere 12 years and the modern imperialism is more rotten ripe than ever for its historical downfall and disintegration. Its floundering and incompetent chaotic attempts to impose "order" in Afghanistan, despite the cold-bloodedness of its cynical blitzing,  which puts Hitler in the shade,   simply underlines the point. 

The rebellion, discontent, upheavals, riots, turmoil, destructiveness and refusal of the world's masses are now increasingly on the boil as the other side of the imperialist crisis coin. The storming of banks and supermarkets in Argentina, the massive third World hero worship for bin Ladan, the willing self-sacrifice of Palestinian and other fighters, are all signals of revolt throughout the planet which, when it becomes more coherent and organised,  will increasingly threaten the whole capitalist order.

None of this is yet a coherent struggle, let alone led by the vital communist and Leninist understanding that alone can end finally the imperialist epoch. Most still follow bizarre and oddball notions which are a million miles from the scientific socialist understanding needed to establish communist society, the only possible future for mankind. 

But the ferment of hostility and hatred for imperialism which is recognisable in virtually all these upheavals and which will often be be expressed in further destructive upheavals is a major signal that the four fifths of the planet who have NEVER had any of the benefits of modern production and human potential are no longer willing to accept their role as wage slaves and skivvies for the wealthy west.

Only one thing still holds back the capacity of the struggle - its lack of Marxism and scientific understanding, undermined by long decades of Revisionism, and outright anti-communism masquerading as "socialism" under various "Trotskyist" or reformist labels (57 varieties). 
And just when that knowledge is more urgently and crucially needed, the entire pseudo-left has lined itself up with the grotesque Goebbelesian "anti-terrorism" charade of Bush and Blair, demanding that "terrorism be condemned".just as Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld demanded the PLO "condemn" its own peoples' struggle 

Debating "an alternative" to the "war on terrorism" starts in the wrong place, already assuming that there is "a problem" to be dealt with.  But "terrorism" as a term used by imperialism is a monstrous propaganda distortion meaning "all those who erupt in anger and hostility against the capitalist order". That is a problem only for imperialism and those who feel comfortable in it, not a scientific description. 

Those who can no longer tolerate the endless oppression of imperialism may not yet be fighting the best way possible or with the  clearest understanding - but condemning them is as cowardly as the "socialists" of 1914 who lined up to vote war credits to their own governments and helped lead the masses into the trenches in "defence of the Fatherland" (i.e of whichever bourgeoisie was nearest).  

Social chauvinism was was bourgeois capitulation then and the chorus of "condemnation" for the WTC attack, the Palestinian suicide fighters, and all the other raw hostility to imperialism now is bourgeois capitulation too - cowardly, complacent, smug and anti-communist.
Build Leninism.
Don Hoskins. London

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

A free-enterprise heatlh market can only mean grotesque human-rights inequality for the poor, but in the USA it also means monstrous conscious profiteering out of state pittance for the sick.

The richest country in the world has just 139 public hospitals and now the only remaining institution of this type in Washington has closed its doors for lack of funds.

For almost two centuries this state capital's public hospital offered the bulk of its medical assistance to the black population, the city's poorest sector.

This news is incredible in a country where technological advances present an image of the Mecca of scientific innovation in the sector. If money is involved doctors are capable of bringing a dead man back to life, cloning a human being and concocting a pestilence bomb that can differeniate between races through characteristic odors.

The United States is a nation of huge contrasts. It holds 34th place on the world list of public health systems, but here neither the poor nor the old enjoy free medical attention, and the numbers being added to this fateful list are increasing daily.

According to a study by the U.S. Association of Retired Persons, four out of 10 U.S. citizens over 60 years of age will experience poverty due to deficiencies in the pension system.

As news of a fabulous ambulance fitted with cutting-edge technology to resuscitate heart attack victims appears on the Internet, many like Genevieve González, a 61-year-old worker from Now York, are suffering.

González, who does not have medical insurance, is unable to retire despite her poor state of health. Her story was covered by CNN.  She told them: "Sometimes my heart starts to beat faster and I say to myself: Oh my God! I'm sick. If I get sick I'll never be able to pay my bills."

LOW WAGE EARNERS EXCLUDED

Medical practice In the United States has changed a great deal since the proclamation in the country's first Declaraion of Independence. If Abraham Lincoln lived in this millennium he would be ashamed to call himself a U.S. citizen.

Recently, shady dealings in public health programs were revealed when Congress discovered, after a year-long investigation, that doctors were receiving free legal aid to obtain illicit gains from private insurance companies.

Those agencies advise doctors to give appointments during inconvenient hours to avoid having to treat patients with low-cost insurance policies like the Medicaid or Medicare programs.

According to a Reuters cable datelined Washington, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley- who requested  the investigation when he was president of the Commlttee on Aging - confirmed that there is an indutry based on obtaining benefits from public health programs.

Every dollar that has been spent on bogus bills is a dollar lost to the sick, explained Grassely during a Senate. Finance Committee meeting.

The Coalition against Insurance Company Fraud calculated that in 1997 crimes within the medical assistance system totaled $54 million USD nationwide, with $34 million USD linked to the Medicare and Medicaid federal pro,rams.

A call for honesty and the application of medical ethics in federal programs published in a Department of Health and Human Services newsletter, shows how far things have gone in this country when it comes to human beings' most basic right: medical assistance.

LARGE-SCALE MISAPPROPRIATION OF TAXES

However, possibly the biggest drain on Medicare, and Medicaid funds is the government itself. The economic slump and Bush's tax reductions are depleting the national treasury. El Nuevo Herald reported that Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan lobby opposed to the budget deficits, announced that there are "fairly solid indications that the government will have to draw on funds from the Social Security and Medicare-surplus this year and next, and again in 2003.."

As Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, president of the Senate Budget Committee charged; having promoted excessive tax reductions, the government has reverted to the old days when any available funds were raided. He added that this year it is poised to drain the Medicare funds, which he described as large-scale misappropriation.

THE MAMMOGRAPHY DILEMA

Many U.S. women have to make an appointment for a mammography four or eight weeks in advance. Some centers that specialize in this examination in New York and Florida have closed down. Others are cutting back on services due to the fixed charges in Medicare or private medicine.

Women have to have a suspicious lump in order to be seen quickly. An article in Time magazine commented that ironically this reduction in mammographies comes at a time when women over 40 are being advised to have an annual breast scan and digital technology is aiding the early detection of breast cancer.

Tom Harkin, senator for Idaho, who has lost both his sisters to that disease finds this inconceivable. He told Time magazine that women in New York have had to wait five months for a mammography, or three if they present an abnormality that needs to be checked.

The mammography dilemma is reflective of the profit motive. High-cost services do not suit the public health business. With scientific progress, a breast scan costs $100-150 USD, but the tariff fixed by Medicare only reimburses $69 USD to the diagnostic centers.

Doctor Mark Dennis, a radiographer at the Sally Jobe Breast Center in Englewood, Colorado, whose six sister organizations reported losses of over $120 million USD for 50,000 mammographies, stressed that they are doing charity work. 

SO WHO DOES BENEFIT? .

Defying the Bush administration's veto threat, to Senate recently approved an integral patients' rights bill committed to new public health protection and the possibility of proceedings against health insurance companies, according to to U.S. press. 

Republican opposition to this Democrat initiative claims that to law will be of more benefit to lawyers' protection rights than to patients themselves.

• IF you are a U.S. citizen and you feel unhealthy you'd better consult a lawyer before seeing a doctor. If you have a medical insurance policy that is. However, if you are one of the 284 million members of the population that have no access to this service because you cannot afford it, then only God can help you.