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 1150 September 03 2002

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Southwest seminar Sat Sep 21 2pm

Imperialism NEEDS warmongering adventures such as the proposed blitzkrieg on Iraq, and will continue to need them, and continue its brainwashing propaganda to cover military preparations for them, for as long as the imperialist system of global exploitation survives. But this specific warmongering 'solution' to capitalism's embarrassing insoluble economic-crisis problems is not NECESSARY at all, and all sorts of chance or opportunistic developments could delay it, or substitute some alternative warmongering adventure to better suit US imperialism's immediate requirements (for belligerent top-dog survival against all threats, - inter-imperialist trade-war; national-liberation movement; or mass socialist revolt). But far more important than whether Iraq will be scapegoated or not first,  is the need to explain how imperialist warmongering must LOSE eventually, whatever brainwashing blitzkrieg stunts it juggles with.  A long period of humiliating economic catastrophe is inevitable for the entire international 'free-market' racket, and it is mass revolutionary resistance to slump which will eventually overthrow imperialist domination, - not anyone's 'weapons of mass destruction'. US-backed militarised bullying is already failing to hold the line everywhere. DEFEAT for West 	is the real future and the whole planet's desperate need. Earth summit was a farce.

Is US imperialist warmongering inevitable? Absolutely.

Capitalist economic anarchic breakdown is not only the core of Marxist theory but is the outstanding feature of current world civilisation already.

Because capitalism is a system built ENTIRELY on class exploitation and national exploitation, then civil-war conflicts, national-liberation conflicts, and inter-imperialist trade-war conflicts are the unavoidable expressions of a competitive economic system going through one of its periodic crises of 'surplus' capital (or 'over-production') and slump, which can ONLY be 'cured' by trade-war DESTRUCTION of all the investment capital declared to be 'surplus'.

All existing lifestyles on the whole planet are totally threatened by the disruption and devastation which this NECESSARY destruction of 'surplus' capital must cause if the capitalist system is to survive, - the destabilising threat affecting everyone from the richest to even the very poorest billions at the bottom of the social pile internationally.

All are 'up in arms' and will continue to be so.

But the richest bourgeoisie have the most to lose, and also have all the real arms.

It is inconceivable that the American ruling class, who have enjoyed the sweetest and most luxurious period of TOTAL worldpower of any ruling-class in history, are going to consider even for a moment giving that power up.

But can they not bribe their way round the planet, smoothing everyone up to reduce the worst of the grievances and miseries, and avoid costly and damaging war? 

But this fake-'left' delusion is describing what WAS the system, which has already broken down. 

US imperialism has indeed largely ruled the world since 1945 via bribery and corruption, plus some major wars to keep the workers-states' expansion stalemated, plus about 400 smaller armed engagements (directly or via imperialist 'allies') to overthrow potentially dangerous nationalist regimes or to put in stooge local dictators here, there, and everywhere.

But it is the anarchic credit creation (billions of arms-and-aid dollars to every anti-communist degenerate regime available) which has been a large part of the ultimately fatal pollution of the 'free-market' system, now drowning in mountains of 'surplus' capital everywhere. 

More IMF, or World Bank, or direct US aid dollars can still tide over some regimes collapsing in anarchic economic chaos. 

But that only then adds to the build-up of global 'surplus' capital which is now imminently threatening the entire international 'free-market' economic system with collapse, which is why Washington initially has started refusing to hand-out any more emergency aid to ailing client states.

But that policy of letting the weaker countries bear the burden in local mayhem of an inevitably ultimately crisis-ridden world economic system is not a longterm solution for the USA.

It hopes communist revolution will never return to the Earth, but it can see the dangers immediately, - in Argentina, say, - and therefore at once reverses policy again and starts supplying emergency dollar-aid billions again. 

But it is the bailout bribery system which precisely PRODUCES the Argentinas in the first place. The winner-takes-all monopoly dominated international imperialist economy has never been able to function in any other way, and never will, based as it must be on exploitation and cut-throat competition to keep on delivering the goods.

And the winners (the major bourgeois-imperialist ruling classes of the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, etc) will NEVER give up this system voluntarily.

So the losers (which will eventually include everyone on Earth apart from the tiny cliques of the Western bourgeois imperialist ruling classes) will face an ever deepening and ever lengthening world-slump prospect with ever increasing anger and a willingness to fight against such chaotic and unnecessary injustice.

And the world imperialist rulers will viciously repress and fight back with every possible weapon, and for as long as they can, until overthrown.

The monopoly-imperialist US bourgeoisie are unmistakably psyching themselves up for warfare now, - in all directions or in whatever specific direction it is calculated will serve America's cause best in the coming dog-eat-dog survival times.

But why in these deliberately pre-emptive and intimidatory wars is the USA picking on Iraq fist, as seems likely from all the bourgeois press gossip?

For the plain reason given, - for fear of weapons of mass destruction getting into the hands of the Third World countries who will all want to fight back against Western imperialist bullying at some stage.

And it precisely does NOT matter whether Iraq has developed such weapons or not.

It is enough for Washington that the Saddam Hussein regime has mouthed a willingness to fight against Western imperialist bullying domination of the Middle East (and beyond) with every weapon available to create 'justification' for the preemptive destruction of Iraq as the overture to a whole epoch of imperialist warmongering.

It will undoubtedly intimidate every less well-armed Third World country from thinking of challenging America's political and economic global domination, and at the same time will make a usefully destructive dent in the 'surplus' of worldwide oil investment capital which has already begun to undermine Western oil-monopoly profitability universally (as an 'overproduction' glut comes inevitably into view, alongside all the other 'surplus' product mountains which are getting the interimperialist trade-war launched, such as steel, bananas, other foods, and general government export/manufacturing subsidies where a series of USA v European Union trade wars has already broken out).

But specifically, will it be war on Iraq next? 

And why is there such confused disagreement and splits both within the current ruling circles of US imperialism, and between all the Western imperialist warmongering 'allies' collectively???

The uncertainty raises some of the most vital and interesting historical/philosophical problems of all concerning such questions of the immediate and longer term political fate of world civilisation itself.

The difficulty is obvious and simply stated. It is IN THE VERY PROCESS of forcefully asserting its world-domination that every hegemonistic ruling class that has ever existed has become most vulnerable to defeat and overthrow.

In the class-exploitation/class-war period of human history, that is inevitable.

Economic production, via labour and territorial exploitation (capitalism and imperialism) means that a non-stop thrust from below to shake off domination is the never ending fuel of class and national-liberation war.

It is in fending off a class-war enemy or colonial-freedom revolt or when engaged in inter-imperialist trials of strength to secure the undisputed top-dog exploitation role via world political/military domination, - that the grave dangers of defeats or setbacks can put a despised ruling class's whole reign at risk.

And despite the unprecedented total world domination superiority in military power and economic industrial technological might that the present American world rulers enjoy, plus their phenomenal wealth individually and collectively, the US bourgeoisie already know plenty about humiliating defeat, and about war or economic situations which they cannot possibly win. There is enormous and justified nervousness in the American ruling-class camp.

And the root of Western imperialism's problem here is not even their loud but largely superficial fear of 'weapons of mass destruction' getting into the hands of non-club members, real as that scare is. 

But the far greater terror, - and the far less defeatable threat in the long term, is that unwittingly made public last week by the new boss of the Zionist-imperialist military tyranny over Palestine, thinking he was talking off the record. Forget Iraq, he said, just worry about the implacable REVOLUTIONARY determination now transforming the entire Palestinian people, previously crushed by the Zionist-colonial conquest of their country and its name-change to 'Israel':

The newly appointed Israeli chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, is urging a decisive victory to destroy the "cancerlike" threat posed by the Palestinians.

Gen Yaalon had been under the impression that he was making a private speech on Sunday to a conference of rabbis in Jerusalem. Journalists had been barred but an Israeli daily, Yediot Aharanot, obtained a tape of the speech, which it published yesterday.

Gen Yaalon's speech marks a significant change of tack from his predecessors. The previous tendency was to belittle the threat from the Palestinians and stress that the real danger was from the surrounding Arab countries. But Gen Yaalon said the prime risk was from the Palestinians rather than from Iraq, Iran and Syria.

He said Israel had become vulnerable because of its pullout from Lebanon in May 2000. He said the withdrawal convinced Palestinians that Israel was weak and could not stomach a high casualty rate. 

He added: "The current Palestinian leadership is not prepared to recognise Israel's right to exist as an independent Jewish state. 

"It is imperative that we win this conflict in such away that the Palestinian side will burn into its consciousness that there is no chance of achieving goals by means of terror. 

"If we don't do that, we will find ourselves on a very slippery slope that will damage our deterrence and our relations with the Arab countries and the Israeli Arabs. 

"The Palestinian threat harbours cancer-like attributes that have to be severed and fought to the bitter end." 

In the section of his speech dealing with Iraq, Gen Yaalon played down the threat from Baghdad. He predicted that Saddam Hussein would try to fire missiles at Israel if he felt threatened by the US, but said he did not believe Iraq had a nuclear missile capability. 

He added: "The Iraqi threat does not keep me awake at night. We are fully capable of defending ourselves from it and it does not constitute an existential threat to Israel"

These bourgeois press admissions inevitably fail to draw out the revolutionary lessons for the whole imperialist class-war order from these developments, or link them to the global economic crisis of the capitalist system which is beginning to foment irresistible determination to revolt everywhere.

This report also skates over the tragic leadership difficulties that the Palestinian revolt is still suffering, where the impact of the fake-'left' Revisionist epoch (all following the Stalinist delusion to disband the Third International because imperialist world domination was, allegedly, a naturally dying phenomenon which needed no more major revolutionary struggles to speed it to its death-bed) continues to push the wretched bourgeois compromiser Arafat (backed still by fake-'lefts' such as Lalkar/SLP) relentlessly towards submission deals (Oslo-type) which ACCEPT for all time the Zionist conquest and colonisation of Palestine as a fait accompli.

But regardless of these only-slowly-dying difficulties of anti-revolutionary backwardness around the Revisionist fake-'left', the Zionist general has been forced to admit the truth of the REVOLUTIONARY movement now threatening imperialism everywhere, unstoppably spontaneously pushed forward (awaiting conscious Leninist leadership) by the unalterable flow of imperialist crisis-events themselves, the real driving force towards the ultimate rational planned-socialist solutions that history is engendering. 

And all of this is also dimly grasped in Washington, creating more and more nervousness as the REVOLUTIONARY crisis of the decadent capitalist system unfolds.

Even the culturally primitive Bush political circles can put two and two together.

The difficulties they have already had with Iraq, and the even greater nightmares that the independent mindedness of, say, Iran, (or potentially worse-still of India and Pakistan, e.g.) might cause them,  on the West's wish to outlaw 'weapons of mass destruction' not in safe US hands (?!?!?), -- and with Communist China's utterly unbeatable and uncontrollable independent might looming ever larger beyond all that, --- nevertheless all pale beside the CERTAIN eventuality that the embarrassing horrors of total economic collapse, spreading relentlessly around the Western 'free-market' world, cannot possibly just end there in the utter turmoil of chaos, misery, and degeneracy.

All the counter-revolutionary warning bells will have been ringing in every department of US government for ages over the potential disaster scenario of, say, the advent of more Argentinian-style collapses coinciding with already established revolutionary foundations such as has been built by the FARC and others in Colombia (which Washington is at its wit's end to know how to tackle to start with, and has been for some time).

Invading and pacifying Colombia has always been a distant US imperialist dream (which is almost to be wished-for by anti-imperialists in anticipation of a colossal American imperialist DEFEAT, possibly even comparable to that titanic epoch-making humiliation that the US ruling-class suffered in trying to bully the people of Vietnam and Indo-China into submission).

But US warmongering continues hesitating to storm into Colombia.

Now project a possibly even superior FARC-type movement onto Argentina, a far larger and far more advanced country, in a year or two. How would the insane US imperialist programme to reimpose colonial policing over all the potential revolutionary hotbeds in the world fare there????

The bourgeois press is ALREADY admitting total UNCONTROLLABLE anarchy in Argentina. Once the working masses have decided to arm themselves to take the power themselves, who will stop them????:

As Argentina's economic crisis grinds into its fourth year, the country has been seized by a frightening spiral of crime and violence. Kidnapping, once rare, is suddenly commonplace. The victims, once only the rich, can be anyone these days.

A recent poll by the justice ministry showed that 88% of the population of Buenos Aires believes they will be victims of crime. With unemployment at 22% and more than 53% of the population below the poverty line, lawlessness is rife.

"Everything these days makes me scared - the muggings, the kidnappings, the robberies - you name it," says Lilia Arellano, a 54-year-old nurse.

Juvenile delinquency has grown by 142% in the past four years. While the police will not reveal statistics for kidnappings, one gang alone is believed responsible for almost 200 this year. Many are "express kidnappings" - where criminals force their victims to go from cashpoint to cashpoint until their accounts are emptied, then release them. Last week the presidential spokesman Claudio Senen was the victim of this kind of robbery.

"Before it was just the rich who were targets of criminal activity; now, you don't have to be wealthy to become a victim of robbery or kidnapping," says Professor. Ernesto Schargrodsky, of the Torcuato, di Tella University in Buenos Aires.

Desperation has fuelled the crime surge - not to mention the belief that those who play by the rules seldom get ahead.

"The adolescent children of an unemployed father might conclude that he gained nothing by working all those years so instead they turn to crime," adds Prof Schargrodsky.

Complicity

But another significant factor is that the police are overwhelmed, underpaid and, in some cases, implicated in the crimes.

Police officers in Buenos Aires province, which has 14 million residents and much of Argentina's industry,  earn about £110 a month. Last year, according to the justice ministry, 1,800 of the 45,000-strong provincial force were suspended after being accused of irregularities or criminal acts. Three out of every 1,000 officers have been convicted of a crime.

Police officers were allegedly involved in one kidnapping that touched a nerve even among battle-scarred Argentinians. Diego Peralta, a 17-year-old student, was seized on July 5 while on his way to school in a middle-class neighbourhood, allegedly by men wearing police uniforms. 

Despite the payment of a £2,930 ransom, his corpse was found floating in a drainage canal five weeks later.

When it emerged that a man accused of involvement in the kidnapping was claiming that two active police officers formed part of the gang, Peralta's angry neighbours threw stones at the local police station and set a car ablaze during protests. 

"What causes the greatest anguish in Argentina is that people no longer know who they can trust," says Professor Mordechai Benyakar, a psychotherapist at the University of Buenos Aires.

This sense of insecurity permeates almost all conversations, from upperclass suburban housewives discussing whether tinted car windows can foil robbers to labourers who complain that the run-down trains are ideal hunting grounds for thieves.

"I've never seen anything like it in all my years; no place is safe any more," says Horacio Santas, the 52year-old co-owner of a sweet shop. "We live like prisoners in our own homes while the thieves run loose"

Meanwhile President Eduardo Duhalde is looking for a way to boost the police presence in Argentina at a time when there are twice as many private security guards at businesses as there are officers on the street.

A proposal to draft border guards into Buenos Aires to beef up security is being considered and police have set up checkpoints along the city's main roads to discourage crime.

It has also become more dangerous to be a police officer. A study by the think-tank Nueva Mayoria has revealed that every four days a police officer is shot in Buenos Aires province - a 10% increase from last year and a 59% increase over the year before.

Argentina defaulted on its $141bn debt in December and has been struggling to regain the IMFs confidence since.

The devaluation of the peso last January is making Argentinean products more competitive in world markets and an increased demand could result in more jobs. Yet there is little hope that this will bring a corresponding reduction in the crime rate.

"The economy may reactivate but part of the increased crime rate is going to stay," Prof Schargrodsky says. "These criminals already have a record and just can't go back to the normal economy besides they'd never earn the same kind of money"

But far from 'reactivating', the economy of course is only going to sink steadily further into crisis and chaos, and the whole of Argentinean state and society with it. The deepening world trade-war gloom will see to that.

Rival currency devaluations to make a country's products more competitive on the international market will throw petrol on the slump fires globally, not provide anyone with a solution.

And Washington's relenting to finally give Argentina more huge dollar-aid after two years of turmoil will solve nothing either, - but only prolong the now-unviable speculative enterprises there, and immediately WORSEN the situation for Argentina's closest market rivals, who are all also in nearly the same economic crisis boat already.

Four of Argentina's South American neighbours, including Brazil, are already suffering financial and/or governmental crises of their own.

When they all go to revolutionary turmoil, will US imperialism invade them all, 170 years after Spanish colonialism was booted out, and thirty years after the total might of US imperialism tried but failed to conquer relatively backward and relatively tiny Vietnam??????

It is effectively the long-term impossibilities facing the continuation of the imperialist colonial system which helps force dithering into current American problems now.

And immediate Middle Eastern perspectives are, if anything, an even worse scenario for US warmongering bluster to consider stepping more directly and forcefully into.

For the most dramatic revolutionary transformation of all is precisely that made by the Palestinian people.

Nowhere has the class-collaborating cowardice of the fake-'left' delusion that "imperialist might will crush them" (concerning all revolts which don't conform to the dismal SWP/Alliance anti-violence and anti-communist prejudices) been more in evidence than around the Middle East, where the 'Israel' colonisation is seen as an irreversible fait accompli, and suicidal terrorism seen as a 'condemnable' self-defeating disaster.

But has there ever been a more totally crushed and dominated people, - again, and again, and again, -  than the Palestinians, - utterly humiliated and impoverished into permanent stink-hole refugee camps since being jackbooted out of their lands by the imperialist-backed (and infamously Revisionist condoned) establishment of 'Israel' in 1948?

They live in filth, denied all movement, work, and even water, and routinely have their hovels bulldozed to the ground, or shot up by F16s and helicopter gunship rockets as collective punishment (the Nazi-imperialist speciality, copied from centuries of Western colonisation tyranny against the 'natives' of the Third World in North America, Australia, India, Africa, etc, etc) --- and yet still they fight on, and that fight is now remarkably getting stronger, and stronger, and stronger, as the new colonising chief general admits, - in spite of the new merciless Zionist-Jewish policy of brutal collective punishment massacres and assassinations against whole communities or families,  where some source of  "activist" revolt is suspected,  i.e. in effect against ALL Palestinians, at any time, whenever the chosen-race/master-race Nazi arrogance takes the colonising tyranny's fancy to vengefully put the boot in.

No wonder the degenerate 'religious' farce around the chief rabbi Sacks is feeling uncomfortable with this murderous fascist genocide against the Palestinian nation.

Short of.the total immediate slaughter of 7 million surviving Palestinians, the Zionist colonial policy to wipe out 'Palestine' and leave only 'Israel' in its place has already catastrophically failed from imperialism's point of view.

The wave of Third World revolutionary fightback and vengeance can from now on only grow relentlessly stronger and stronger.

Every part of the entire global imperialist tyranny, colonising or otherwise dominating and bullying defenceless Third World peoples,is now worriedly feeling its own collar.

Even one of the poorest and most backward countries on Earth, wretched Afghanistan, has not been a success for the insane US imperialist dream of reconquering the world with western colonial policing, - as the capitalist press itself admits:

US air strikes in Afghanistan have killed hundreds of civilians, according to a detailed on-the-ground survey that threatens to embarrass the Bush administration.

The survey into the impact of the US war on terrorism, published in the New York Times yesterday, claims that 812 Afghan civilians have died in the strikes. Conducted by Global Exchange, a respected human rights organisation, the survey warns that the number of civilian fatalities could rise as field workers reach remote villages that have been hit.

Global Exchange criticises the US strategy of using air strikes instead of ground troops, as well as the American military's heavy reliance on intelligence from locals. One of the group's field workers in Afghanistan told the newspaper that US commanders might be acting too quickly on the information received. Much of it is mistaken, according to the survey.

"Smart bombs are only as smart as the people on the ground. Before you bomb, you should be 100% certain of-who you are bombing," Maria Ruzicka said.

Over six months, Global Exchange has sent researchers to 11 sites where, according to residents and human rights groups, innocent lives have been lost.

Researchers visited the site of an attack on a wedding party which apparently took place-after celebratory gunfire was mistaken for hostile fire Global Exchange found 54 people died. Confusion still surrounds the raid, with differing accounts from the Pentagon and other ITS officials.

The Wedding party strike  is said to have added to the growing anger of Afghan authorities, who are helping the US to track down Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.

The New York Times warned of a backlash and quoted the Afghan-foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, as demanding a. greater role in deciding how the US air raids should be conducted.

Pentagon sources are said to be adamant that the strategy is changing, with a shift towards using ground forces to track-down fighters. Even so, the newspaper quoted American military commanders rejecting the criticism that too much reliance is placed on intelligence received from locals.

There is little doubt that the security situation since the collapse of the Taliban has turned increasingly fragile. The Afghan vice-president and governor of the eastern province of Nangarhar, Haji Abdul Qadir, was gunned down outside his Kabul office last month. There are still few clues to his killing, although it may have been linked to rows between drug lords.

Police also intercepted a huge car bomb in Kabul last month which was apparently linked to al-Qaida and was intended to assassinate Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. Earlier this year, the defence minister, Mohammed Fahim, escaped unhurt when a bomb exploded near his convoy in Jalalabad, killing five people.

Yesterday's blast came just after midday, a time when, on a Friday, most Afghans would have been at home or praying in the mosque.

	The road construction firm was founded as a non-governmental organisation and received funding from the US a decade ago, but it has since become a private company. 

The 	company director, known as Engineer Karim, was briefly imprisoned by the Taliban 	regime which tried to  loot his road-building equipment.  During the 1980s he was a member of the Hezb-e-Islami party, one of the largest mojahedin factions, led by the Islamic extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

AMERICAN forces may have breached human rights, and then removed evidence after the so-called wedding party airstrike that killed more than 50 Afghan civilians this month, according to a draft United Nations report seen by The Times.

A preliminary UN investigation has found no corroboration of American claims that its aircraft were fired on from the ground, and says there were discrepancies in US accounts of what happened.

A UN source said that the report was produced by a team of "experienced and reputable UN people, who have been in tie region a while and know it well". It states that there was clear evidence that human rights violations had taken place and that coalition forces had arrived on the scene very quickly after the air strikes and "cleaned the area", removing
evidence of "shrapnel, bullets and traces of blood". 

Women on the scene had their hands tied behind their backs.

If the findings are upheld by a second, more detailed, UN investigation, they will cause huge embarrassment to the Pentagon.

UN sources said that the findings pointed to an American cover-up, and suggested that American investigators were dragging their feet hoping that the issue would pass.

In a prepared statement last night a UN spokesman in Afghanistan said that the report contained judgments that were not sufficiently substantiated, and that a comprehensive report was being finalised that would provide a more detailed and accurate picture. 

However, the statement added that "the findings, on the ground bear out the paramount necessity that such incidents do not recur, both from a humanitarian and political perspective".

It called for "an in-depth investigation [to] be carried out to ensure that such tragedies are not repeated; and that the protection of civilian lives becomes a primary concern in the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan".

The wedding party raid was not the first US airstrike to kill Afghan civilians and it both angered President Kazai and has fuelled anti-American sentiment in the country.

A joint US-Afghan team is investigating the strike, but nothing has been disclosed and no timescale has been given on when the findings will be made public. One UN official put it: "The more it drags on, the harder, it is to prove and probably the people investigating want it to go slowly and die away."

The Pentagon declined to comment on the UN report, but said all matters arising from the incident were under consideration by US Central Command and that charges against the servicemen involved had not been ruled out. 

But the Pentagon insisted it was too early for the US to draw any conclusions because its investigative team had yet to start compiling its report. 

The attack took place early, on July 1 as American forces hunted pockets of Taleban and al-Qaeda resistance. A US helicopter gunship opened fire on targets around the village of Kakarak, and the casualties included 25 members of one family at a wedding party.

Investigators had found no weapons, "no corroboration" on the ground that the US had been fired on; and that there were discrepancies between the various American accounts of what happened.  

Pentagon officials have said that cameras fixed to the AC-130's gun turrets showed gunfire coming from the ground, but the Pentagon has not released the film, as it has on previous occasions, preventing independent analysis of whether it was anti-aircraft artillery or celebratory rifle fire.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who is a Pashtun, and the powerful Tajik foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, are said to be at odds over the US. 

Yesterday an aide to Mr Karzai said the president's bodyguards had been replaced by US troops after "serious threats" to the leader, some of them believed to be from within his own cabinet.

Concern for Mr. Karzai's safety grew after the killing earlier this month of the vice-president, Abdul Qadir.

Shortly after the July 1 attack Mr Karzai summoned US military chiefs to insist that "all necessary measures" were taken to prevent civilian deaths in future. Now, however, he appears to have tempered his anger and has defended US military tactics.

But others in the government are still furious. At the weekend Dr Abdullah said for the first time that Afghan officials wanted a say in the conduct of future raids.

"We have to be given a larger role. If things do not improve, well, I will certainly pray for the Americans and wish them success but I will no longer be able to take part in this" the foreign minister told the New York Times.

At the heart of the problem appears to be a US reliance on often faulty intelligence.  In the villages near Kakrak there were at least two engagement parties on the night of the bombing and guests fired their guns into the air in a traditional form of celebration.

US special forces in the area reported seeing anti-aircraft fire, although Afghans denied tatgeting US planes.

Among the dead were 25 relatives of Abdul Malik, a local warlord who fought alongside Mr Karzai after September 11.

The renewed production of heroin, which had ceased following edicts by the Taliban regime and last autumn's US led military action, is a blow to the British-led, multi-million-pound effort to stop drugs production in the country.  Tony Blair has given the campaign his personal backing, committing more than £20 million of British taxpayers' money to the project. That backing convinced a reluctant Afghan government to announce a ban on the growth of opium six months ago.

But the return of the refining laboratories, each capable of producing £400,000 worth of heroin a week, has revealed the failure of the programme to make a significant impact.

The production of the high value drug could further destabilise Afghanistan. In recent weeks there have been several bomb attacks and assassination attempts. Some have been blamed on elements close to al-Qaeda or former Taliban fighters, but others, such as the murder of Abdul Qadir, a Vice-President and Minister, in Kabul in, July, have been blamed on drug related feuds. The bomb that exploded in a warehouse in the eastern city of Jalalabad on Friday, killing at least 26 people, has also been linked to narcotics. 

The Observer has learnt of three heroin laboratories in the lawless hills south-east of Jalalabad, close to the border with Pakistan. There are believed to be several more. Two factories have been established in the Acheen district and one in the Adal Khel district of Nangarhar province.

One local resident, Naeem Shinwari, said the factories were working in broad daylight, producing between 70 and 100 kilos (154lb - 220lb) of refined heroin a day, with the capacity to increase production if the supply of raw poppy remains constant. Afghanistan has supplied more than two-thirds of the world's opium for nearly a decade.

So far the British-led eradication programme has led to the destruction of 16,500 hectares (41[000] acres) of poppy field, out of an estimated total of 80,000. Farmers were offered $1,750 for each hectare that was destroyed. However the programme has been marred by allegations of corruption. Huge stockpiles of opium, used as a form of credit in rural Afghanistan, have meant that the supply of raw materials for the drug has not been affected.

In the early 1990s Afghanistan produced more than 90 per cent of heroin reaching the UK. The Taliban eradicated opium production in a bid to gain recognition from the international community in 2000. Heroin is far easier to smuggle than bulky opium. Previously, 10 or more kilos of opium had to be smuggled hrough Iran or Central Asia to laboratories in Turkey to be turned into heroin. Refining the drug in Afghanistan makes it easier to smuggle high-value consignments.

Abdul Wakeel, of Ghani Khel district, told The Observer that heroin and heroin refining chemicals were being openly traded in local markets. He said the prices of heroin varied from £500 for a kilo of poor quality 'brown' heroin for smoking to more than £1,500 for pure, highly refined heroin which could be injected. Heroin for intravenous use would fetch £50,000 per kilo in Britain.

Haji Daulat Mohammad, a shopkeeper, said that prices were low because opium stocks remained high and heroin production was expected to rise sharply in coming months.

'Even if there is no cultivation of poppy next year, the existing stock is sufficient for 12 months at least,' he said. 'It may be haram (forbidden by Islam), but there is drought, unemployment and no other way to make my living.

'The West say making heroin is wrong and damages human beings, but they drop bombs on innocent civilians. We have no other way except to destroy the USA through narcotics. They shall drop bombs on us, and we shall send them this gift.'

And another target of demented Western propaganda attack, - (just for daring to nationalise the colonial owned (still) richest farmlands of Zimbabwe to allow the ousted black peasantry to return to.their traditional cultivation of food instead of the Western market-oriented tobacco plantations),  -  the Mugabe regime,   is also refusing to give in to imperialist bullying and economic sabotage, and can even start winning some slightly more objective coverage (as below) from capitalist Western propaganda organs where some journalists can sense dimly that anti-imperialist resistance might just be the coming thing, and not total capitulation to imperialist warmongering bullying:

Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of of the best land, many of them-grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's maize - its primary staple crop - is grown by black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.

The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world. Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security.

For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of  development.

Ten years ago, I investigated the expropriations being funded and organised in Africa by another member of the Commonwealth. Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting-with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania.

Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders in wheat technology.

The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The women were gang-raped.

For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When I raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me: "I won't shed a tear for anybody if it means development." 

The rich world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the story.

Now yet another member of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom is funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Some 20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been ignored by most of the media. 

These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.

Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent of racism and of regret that Britain ever let Rhodesia go. Some of the articles in the Telegraph may as well have been headlined "The plucky men and women holding darkest Africa at bay". Readers are led to conclude that Ian Smith was right all along: the only people who know how to run Africa, are the whites.

But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programmes, with their extraordinary conditions; the whites do run Africa, and a right hash they are making of it.

Over the past 10 years, according to the UN's latest human development report, the number of people in subSaharan Africa living on less than a dollar a day has risen from 242 million to 300 million. The more rigorously Africa's governments apply the policies demanded by the whites, the poorer their people become.

Just like Mugabe, the rich world has also been using "food aid as a political weapon". The United States has just succeeded in forcing Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, to accept GM maize as food relief.

Both nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared that the technology would grant multinational companies control over the food chain, leaving their people still more vulnerable to hunger. But the US, seizing the opportunity for its biotech firms, told them that they must either accept this consignment or starve.

Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US,  partly because of the loss of its own strategic grain reserve. In 1999, the IMF and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatise the reserve.

The private body was not capitalised, so it had to borrow from commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001 it found that it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the reserve.

The private body sold it all; and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from this catastrophe, continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidising food or stabilising prices.

The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to subsidised food from abroad, destroying their own farming industries. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform.

Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to 10 times as productive as large ones, as they tend to be cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are more likely to supply local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout.

The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies that supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform programme in Zimbabwe that created the political opportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the black population but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.

The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics of land and food. The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid.

Let us condemn Mugabe's attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war that the rich world wages against the poor.

Despite such occasional counter-balancing admissions by the capitalist press, the West will still nevertheless initially win the battle of propaganda hysteria, relentlessly winding up the imperialist metropolitan populations for warmongering slaughter against all uppitiness around the Third World. 

But for this to work, it is crucial for the West to keep on winning, - every skirmish, every argument, every battle, every conflict.

It will fail, however. The insoluble imperialist economic crisis is already a losing hand.

THE THREAT of a full-scale transatlantic trade war has increased following the World Trade Organisation's ruling allowing the European Union to impose a record $4 billion trade sanctions on US exports.

The ruling compensates for the tax scheme run by the US Foreign Sales Corporation (FSC) which the WTO deems an illegal subsidy for US multinationals such as Boeing and Microsoft.

But implementation of these 'countermeasures' could scupper any hopes of a recovery in the world economy and even the existence of the WTO itself, said senior US figures.

'Pascal Lamy [EU Trade Commissioner] realises this is a loaded gun that could explode in his face. Full imposition of the sanctions would create grave tensions in the whole Doha WTO negotiations round,' said Stuart Eizenstat who,  as President Bill Clinton's deputy treasury secretary, was architect of the FSC.  He is now a partner at law firm Covington & Burling.

But the EU is already believed to have a draft list of US goods that could be the subject of a legal tariff of 100 per cent. Books, glass, precious metals, aircraft, spacecraft and nuclear reactors are believed to be on this long list.

Trade lobbyists are already furiously trying to get various goods off the list, according to Brussels sources.

The imposition of retaliatory tariffs would result in increased prices for European consumers and businesses. But a Commission spokeswoman said: 'We would be looking to minimise the effect of sanctions on European consumers. We will look for products for which we are not dependent on the US.'

EUROPE's hesitant economic recovery is grinding to a halt, sending share prices tumbling and piling the pressure on the Continent's leaders to kick-start growth.

Fears of a "double dip" European downturn yesterday triggered one of the largest falls in London shares since September 11, while many businesses have been scrambling to cut back expansion plans in the fare of crumbling economic prospects. In the City, a rash of disappointing economic figures from across the EU sent the FTSE-100 index tumbling by more than 175 points.

The 4.1 per cent daily drop, was one of the largest since the post-September 11 collapse and matched falls triggered by the US accounting scandals earlier in the summer.

Concern yesterday focused on the sickly German economy as new figures dealt Gerhard Schröder,  the Chancellor, a fresh blow in his efforts to win re-election next month.

Disappointing data from France, Spain and Belgium added to the mounting European gloom and fears about a renewed global slowdown are likely to dominate the annual gathering of world central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this week.

Jim O'Neill, managing director at Goldman Sacks, the investment bank, said,  "Markets have fresh concerns that the recovery could peter out.  The US economy has lost the vigour from earlier this year, Europe remains mired with weak demand and structural problems while Japan shows little evidence of providing economic leadership for Asia and the world."

In Germany, fresh signs emerged that the much-vaunted recovery had been derailed. The influential Munich-based Ifo institute said that business confidence had slumped to its lowest level since February as German managers became increasingly pessimistic about future economic developments. Ifo's headline confidence gauge tumbled to 88.8 points in August from July's 89.9, substantially below market expectations.

The strengthening euro and the dislocation of east and southern Germany by floods have added to the worries about Europe's largest economy, with the Government's forecast of 1 per cent growth this year now looking hopelessly optimistic.

Unemployment figures due out next week are likely to confirm the economic malaise and again show more than four million jobless.

Order books are down on last year and domestic demand is sagging. Department stores report full warehouses of unsold goods despite long weeks of summer sales. 

It is not only the German economy that is struggling to build on the momentum of earlier this year, with new figures from Spain and Belgium raising fears about growth elsewhere on the Continent. Spain and Belgium grew more slowly than economists had been expecting in the second quarter of the year, while France's leading business group yesterday dismissed the Government's growth forecasts as  "absolutely unrealistic".

Analysts said that the UK would not escape unscathed from the slowdown on the Continent, with Cordon Brown's optimistic prediction of 2 to 2.5 per cent growth this year looking increasingly unattainable.

Evidence that US consumer optimism has fallen to its lowest level since November intensified fears of a renewed downturn in the world's largest economy yesterday.

Share prices on Wall Street slipped after the Conference Board research group said its closely watched consumer confidence index fell to a worse than expected 93.5 in August, the lowest reading for nine months, and well below the 97.4 recorded in July.

Lynne Franco, director of the Conference Board's consumer research centre, said the unhappy mood among US households was "a strong signal that business conditions have yet to turn around. It also suggests that consumer spending is not likely to gain momentum any time soon."

The downbeat signal from consumers followed a warning from chipmaker Intel that demand in the important hitech sector is likely to remain subdued until cash-strapped US firms start splashing out on new equipment.

"We haven't seen much improvement in the computing environment because companies are not investing" said Intel's chief executive Craig Barrett, speaking in Malaysia, where he was announcing plans for a new operations centre. "When it turns around will be when companies start investing. I'm not forecasting when that will happen" The firm's shares fell $0.83, to $17.30, after the remarks.

Doubts about the strength of global recovery intensified yesterday after the publication of figures showing anaemic productivity growth in the United States and a sharp widening of Britain's trade gap with the rest of the world.

By volume, the 16% decrease in exports, excluding erratic items such as aircraft, was the
largest since records began in 1980. 

The decline in exports was evident across nearly all sectors, with foreign companies importing 15% less in capital goods from Britain than a month earlier and shoppers buying 7.5% fewer cars, and spending a fifth less on other consumer goods.

Britain's surplus on services also deteriorated in June, to £800m; with both imports and exports rising as tourists at home and abroad splashed out more cash than in May.

Official data showed that US productivity growth tailed off sharply in the second quarter to an annual rate of 1.1% from 8.6% in the previous three months.

Analysts said the figures confirmed that economic recovery in the US faltered in the second quarter after making a strong start in the first three months of the year.

	On this side of the Atlantic, worse than expected trade data for June hinted that global demand may have fallen away after recovering earlier in the year. 

The deteriorating trade position raised doubts about whether some of the upturn in economic growth in the second quarter reported in early estimates will be revised away, analysts said.

Exports of goods to EU and non-EU trading partners collapsed, falling by £2.2bn during the month. The largest declines were to the US, which cut its imports of British goods by £500m, and Ireland, which spent £600m less.

"The sharp deterioration in exports to the EU and non-EU in June highlights the fragility of global demand, which poses a serious threat to UK economic growth in the remainder of the year" said Ross Walker of Royal Bank of Scotland.

As well as downbeat productivity figures for the second quarter, the US released revisions for last year which showed productivity fell for both the first and second quarters as the US plunged into recession - not just the first quarter, as previously thought.

But predicting exactly which areas the economic devastation will strike the hardest, and which warmongering adventurism may be sparked-off in connection with,  or as a cover for such disruption, -  is virtually impossible.

If whatever 'logic' holds (which is encouraging the Bush regime into a warmongering stunt against Iraq), it is less difficult to speculate about what will be giving Washington greatest concern in advance of such a monstrous adventure.

Near the top will be the very fragile condition of the regimes in other key Arab or Muslim states which have reluctantly cooperated with or turned a	blind eye to US imperialism's imbecilic 'war on terrorism'  (and the reality of its brutal devastation of Afghanistan as the only thing to show for all of this bellicose posturing)  but which are very nervous about the USA actually invading or destroying a key Arab country like Iraq.

The fear in Cairo, for example, which many in Washington are widely echoing, is that Pan Arab revolutionary tendencies could be driven to fever-pitch if Iraq gets massacred; - and possibly even higher if the NATO nazi onslaught all goes wrong and the Iraqis start fighting back or surviving successfully.

Egypt is one of the world's most explosive potential revolutionary powder-kegs even at the best of times (which is why Egypt has always been the second largest recipient of dollar-aid in the world, after the Zionist colony itself, - massive bribery to the Arab world's most populous and poorest state to hold it back from becoming a leader of middle East antiimperialism, as it was under Nasser).

If international economic disruption from the world capitalist crisis should coincide with an American assault on Iraq (especially a failed one), then revolutionary hell could break loose in Egypt, transforming the whole middle East picture in a flash.

Muslim Pakistan is in almost as vulnerable a position at the Asian end of the Middle East, with a vast discontented population which could soon be in uproar if its despised military dictatorship becomes too closely contaminated with the fall-out from yet another outrageous US military blitzkrieg on a Muslim country, especially a failed one.

Wavering Western public opinion is in the same category. Brainwashing propaganda-hysteria will still carry the day for the West if the Nazi-Nato onslaught is portrayable as a heroic success;  but none of the participating regimes might survive if the projected blitzkrieg is another imperialist military fiasco.

Which is why so many Western states and opposition political groupings are opportunistically adopting a stance against a Western invasion of Iraq before it happens.

Only a balance of sick and unstable corruption in Washington will eventually decide if Iraq would be a useful warmongering adventure to embark on specifically.

Meanwhile, Western warmongering hysteria in general will continue to be whipped up as the economic catastrophe news turns relentlessly ever bleaker for the whole of the 'free-market' world.

Quite pointlessly, all bourgeois ideology, plus the fake-'left' naively doubt that Argentina's social breakdown (above) is relevant to anywhere but Argentina. This could not be more foolishly wrong. Life here could indeed remain 'normal', as anti-theory British impressionism and pragmatism likes to pretend now.

But such normal nonsense is no guide at all to what might be going on underneath the surface of the polite society  that the bourgeois media would love to con everybody with as just continuing 'like it usually does', etc.

Take Argentina as an example once again. The EPSR has highlighted some infrequent capitalist press objectivity about the social and economic catastrophe.

But to the Argentines themselves, the trouble they are in is astonishingly twisted round and defused in order to present it not just as a continuation of 'normality', - but even as a good-fun extravagance merely extending 'normality'.

The sick depths of bourgeois capitalismrs mass commercial 'culture' will never cease to appall:

Human Resources; broadcast live at 5pm every, weekday, is rapidly becoming the favourite  game show of a nation where jobs disappear by the day. Under the bright studio lights, two candidates tell their tearjerking life stories in a bid to win a six-month contract. Viewers vote by phone for the contestant who moves them most.

Since Argentina declared the largest sovereign debt default in history and devalued the peso in January, tens of thousands of companies have folded each month and unemployment has hit 21.5 per cent, the highest on record in a country which was among the world's 10 richest nations a century ago.

With 18 million living below the poverty line, queues snake around several  blocks from the early hours as soon as a job is advertised. Many unemployed have lost their houses, unable to pay the rent, and shanty towns are mushrooming around cities.

'People are so desperate to feed their children they go out and steal. I decided it was better to go on TV,'  said Jorge Fuentes, 31, who won a job on Human Resources as a radio operator.

'Argentina has never faced such devastating unemployment', said Graciela Romer, a Buenos Aires sociologist. 'The middle class was what always made Argentina different from the rest of Latin America. It will be very hard to salvage that now.'

Almost 60 per cent of those now existing below the poverty line have fallen from the middle classes, for decades the largest and most vibrant in Latin America. The economic collapse has been so drastic in recent months that people dressed in quality clothes beg alongside barefoot street urchins by traffic lights.

With the peso worth 70 per cent less than in the 1990s, and prices for food and fuel rising, Argentina is rumbling with discontent and a growing army of unemployed protesters continues to block roads in protest and demand food donations from supermarkets. Last week, the piqueteros (pickets) pitched tents overnight in front of the presidential palace, surrounded by ranks of riot police, and refused to return to their grimy slum dwellings until the government agreed to provide extra food parcels.

The government of interim president Eduardo Duhalde has been holding out for fresh financial aid from the International Monetary Fund since the country sank into economic turmoil amid riots in December. But the IMF, which last week provided multibillion dollar bail-outs to neighbouring Brazil and Uruguay, continued to insist that Argentina must make drastic cuts in public spending before fresh funds can be released. 

Angry Argentines, who see the IMF as partly responsible fur building up their country's crippling debts, burnt American flags and called for US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, on a whistle-stop regional tour, to leave.

Meanwhile, thousands flocked to a church in the rundown Buenos Aires suburb of Liniers, on the Roman Catholic saint's day of San Cayetano, the patron of bread and work. 'What else is there to do but pray?' said Nora Lena, 47, who camped for two days outside the church to keep a place in the queue. 

An enterprising few have resorted to their sense of humour. An unemployed actor is marketing a board game called El Corralito, the name for the banking restrictions that trapped millions of Argentines' savings last December. Players must navigate around 12 months of the year, trying not to go bust in the face of problems ranging from having their corner shop looted to losing thousands of dollars in the frozen banking system. Solutions range from calling on an influential uncle to suing the bank.

CARLOS Benitez stood in stunned silence for a moment before his ecstatic family rushed to his side when he won the prize in Argentina's most popular television game show last week; not a million pounds, or a tropical holiday or a blind date. Just a job.

'If I die, I want to die working,' the suited 52 year-old said, fighting back tears as he pitched on live television, in front of four million viewers, for a job as a waiter after four years unemployed. 

'I try to keep up hope, but it's hard to see the way out,' Benitez told the show's beaming Bob Monkhouse-like host, Nestor Ibarra. 'I've tried everything. This is my best hope,' said Hugo Andres, his 48 year-old opponent.

Benitez snapped up quiz questions like, 'On which side of the guests should you stand to remove the plates?' and 'Should you change the glasses when the guests change wine?'

Viewers watched clips of both families in their humble homes, struggling to survive without a breadwinner, before telephone voting 55 per cent for Benitez, saving his family's shattered fortunes.

As many as 600 have applied for some jobs, the show's organisers say: Candidates are filtered by a job agency and 10 are short-listed. The company providing the job selects the final two who go head-to-head in the TV contest.

As the imperialist crisis deepens, a rash of posturing Western 'literati' have rushed into print to reassure us all about 'how bad communism really was', etc, etc.

If the planned workers states were really anything but a massive historic step forward for civilisation (even while still prey to many mistakes, much rough justice, and some ongoing backwardness not yet outlived from the very deprived feudal-capitalist origins they all. sprang from) would it still really be so necessary to keep on pumping out relentless anticommunist propaganda morning, noon, and night, all over the world?

A further look at the Paglia, Amis, Hitchens, Stedman Jones, and other opportunist pro-imperialist 'left' posturing will  follow next week.

Guardian editorials welcoming such shallow trivia and anti-Marxist philistinism as "worthily ensuring that revolutionary socialism rests in an unquiet grave" betray precisely their opposite, real fear that far from dead, communist revolution is about to come roaring back into the modern reckoning, more widespread and more devastating for bourgeois class-complacency than ever. Build Leninism. EPSR