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 
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[P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]   
No 1176 March 18th 2003                                                                                                            25p 

The "legality" of this sick warmongering is not the issue.

The "lost UN role" is irrelevant too, only ever being alternative forms of Western bullying.

Nor is it a simple "war for oil". Capitalism is in crisis because "overproduction" conditions are wrecking profitability everywhere.

And the "lack of democracy" in all the sordid manoeuvres is just a joke. It is the "democracy" fraud which has let imperialist bullying, a non-stop arms-race, and repeated warmongering economic crises rule the planet since the 19th century.

Brute class forces are the issue challenging the world, and the American ruling class will carry on doing exactly as it likes until it is DEFEATED.

Communist revolution in Vietnam showed the way, and Cuba's defiance shows that the right spirit is alive, and well, and universal.

This return to Nazi blitzkrieg warmongering will become the dominant pattern, as was forced up by insoluble crisis in the 1930s.

But by dragging the whole world into the worst economic slump in history and towards inter-imperialist World War III, capitalism will also produce vast new communist revolutions out of the DEFEATS and disasters in all directions.

World domination by US imperialist warmongering will be comprehensively THRASHED somewhere along the way, and then overthrown by its own exploited working class.

The Iraqi people will do what is needed to the Saddam regime in due course. Meanwhile, a beginning to DEFEATS or setbacks to imperialist warmongering arrogance and bullying, no matter how achieved, will be in the interests of the whole world and its future.

The sick pretence of a "just war" to create a "safer and more peaceful world" looks like being taken all the way to the blitzkrieg destruction of Iraq by the warmongering hysteria now favoured by the Western imperialist leadership.

But evidence continues to mount relentlessly, from capitalism's own admissions, that 

1) this belligerence is in reality a development of unstoppable inter-imperialist economic conflict;

2) that the economic crisis is itself insoluble and will drag down the whole system of the West's "freemarket" world domination;

3) that massive Third World revolts to actually DEFEAT Western warmongering, and kickstart a completely new world order, are closer than ever.

The sudden explosion of bitterness and hostile acts between the US/UK on one side, and France, Germany, Russia and the rest of the world on the other, cannot conceivable be ascribed to the minor tactical differences about how best to continue to persecute the independent-minded Iraqi regime for threatening ALL imperialist interests.

The post-1945 epoch of joint Western-imperialist neo-colonial domination of the Third World (where communist revolution did not put up resistance), - which saw more than 400 acts of invasion, major military campaigns, coups to install Western stooges, and other acts of subversion, sabotage, or blockade, committed by one or more Western powers, in collusion or with each others' tacit approval, - is FINISHED.

The economic cost of the coming world slump is now so vast and disastrous that the major powers can no longer escape most of the burdens themselves.

No longer can they all be passed on to the Third World; and the imperialist giants themselves are henceforth going to be in PERMANENT CONFLICT with each other to see who can be bullied, manoeuvred, or tricked into suffering the biggest losses of the crash.

The following Sunday Times admissions by one of the most gung-ho pro-American-imperialism voices around, - invariably full of chauvinistic cockiness that the colossal modern might of monopoly capitalism can solve any problem it wants to, by any means necessary, - don't sound quite so confident any more, and almost accept that the warmongering is a cover-up and won't solve anything:

THE FOG of almost-war seems to be obscuring the vision of many economy watchers. The dollar's decline is laid at the door of the costs of the coming war and the rebuilding of Iraq. Weak retail sales in February are said to be due to gloomy consumers' concerns about terror attacks. Faltering business investment and depressed share prices, we are told, result from uncertainty as to the economic impact of war:

Would it were so, for then a swift conclusion of the war would put things right. But there are more enduring forces at work. For one thing, the unseating of Saddam Hussein will not end the geopolitical problems the world faces.

Then there is the dollar. Despite a surge in the sale of made-in-USA goods in January, America rang up its second-largest trade deficit. In the past, the world's investors were willing to make up for the fact that America buys more from foreigners than it sells to them by cycling the dollars they earned into American assets. The deficit in America's trade account was offset by a surplus in the capital account.

But the now-shaky stock market is less attractive to overseas investors than when it was booming In the 1990s, and the sorry financial condition of many European firms has wiped out their ability and desire to acquire American companies. Vivendi and its ilk are no longer trawling the US for companies to buy. All this means that the demand for dollars is down just when American consumers are flooding the world with dollars to pay for everything from cars to T-shirts. It doesn't take an economist to figure out that when the supply of something is increasing as the demand for it drops, the price of that something will go down.

This is what is happening to the dollar -- and will continue to happen, war or no war, according to most experts. Some see the euro, now worth close to $1.10, rising to $1.20, making Europe's wares more expensive in America, and American products cheaper in Europe. That will help US exporters and cut into the trade deficit, but be devastating for German and other eurozone manufacturers who in the last two months for which we have data ran an average monthly $8.3 billion trade surplus with America.

With demand in their home markets stagnant-to-shrinking, a loss of business in America might well force the EU into a serious business downturn.

But the reduction in the American trade deficit with Europe is not likely to be repeated with China, which accounts for the largest portion of the deficit. China has tied its currency to the dollar, and so the cheaper dollar can't affect the trade balance by making Chinese goods more expensive for Americans, and US goods cheaper there.

The situation is almost the same with Japan. The Japanese authorities are determined not to allow their goods to become more expensive in America, and so have been intervening in foreign-exchange markets to prevent the yen from rising against the dollar.

All this means that the dollar will probably continue to decline, with euroland bearing the greatest share of the adjustment in trade patterns.

None of this has much to do with the coming war. Nor does the post-bubble fall in share prices. The successful conclusion of a war won't change two hard economic facts. The first is that in many industries the excess capacity deterring investment in new facilities has yet to be sopped up. The second is that profits will be hard to come by.

Competition for consumers' dollars is fierce, making it somewhere between difficult and impossible for businesses to raise prices. With healthcare costs rising, the need to shore up pension funds, payrolls already pared, and price increases out of the question, shareholders are right to take a grim view of the prospects for equity markets.

The easing of oil prices after a successful war will certainly be a help, and there will be occasional upward spurts, but even the most overwhelming victory, topped off by the capture of Osama Bin Laden, cannot change the fundamental forces Buffetting earnings (pun intended).

This probably means that consumers won't find any cheer from looking at their pension accounts and balance sheets in a post-Saddam world. And with every worker able to produce more as productivity rises, they are unlikely to see the jobs market improve very much.

And in the same gloomy issue, the legendary giant of American stock-market-investment profiteering and way-of-life, Warren Buffett, is solemnly reported as virtually announcing that the entire imperialist economic system is heading for a crash, - exactly as the EPSR has been explaining as the whole background to this outbreak of US panic warmongering in the face of a systemic collapse which must totally dwarf every previous inter-imperialist crisis in history (Franco-Prussian War; World War I; World War II; etc):

Buffett's annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders: "One of the world's largest re-insurers - a company regularly recommended to primary insurers by leading brokers - has all but ceased paying claims, including those both valid and due. This company owes many billions of dollars to hundreds of primary insurers who now face massive write-offs."

Few of us have any way of knowing whether this is true but we do know a few other things: that Buffett, as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway; the world's third-largest reinsurer through its General Re subsidiary, is well placed to judge; that he is also not a chap given to making things up, even if he is prone to talking his book; and that if he is right, it is potentially dynamite.

Maybe the machinations of the Iraqi crisis were enough to ensure that Buffett's words were less closely scrutinised than usual - or maybe it was the fact that the word "reinsurance" is almost guaranteed to make your eyes glaze over. But the man himself was certainly not underplaying the  significance. Further on in his letter, when warning that derivatives are "financial weapons of mass destruction", he was about as gloomy as he has been at any point in the last few years. "I believe that the macro picture is dangerous and getting more so," he said.

He pointed out that the Federal Reserve thought the collapse in 1998 of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management could have posed a threat to the stability of American markets. "'This affair, though it paralysed many parts of the fixed income market for weeks, was far from a worst-case scenario," Buffett pointed out. Is that an invitation to think of a defaulting major reinsurer as a worst case? Frankly, if Buffett's dire warning comes to pass, it would be a jolt that would easily rank up there with Enron and WorldCom.

Against that backdrop, it is hard to avoid the thought that there is a large dose of wishful thinking in the predictions of those fund managers who are now saying definitively that we have seen the bottom of the market. How do they know? They may be right, but there are simply too many huge, unknowable things out there - and not just the outcome of the Iraqi crisis. In bear markets, an old market saying has it that what can go wrong does go wrong.

With such real causes of terror going on behind the scenes, no wonder that inter-imperialist HATRED is spewing forth in an utterly astonishing instantaneous transformation of the world scene, one moment apparently all in Western imperialist harmony to humiliate and punish the Iraq regime yet again (for daring to have a nationalised oil industry and to copy (and buy from) the West to have its own modest armaments industry (for self-defence and for foreign quarrels, also just like the West)); - and the next moment at complete spitting loggerheads over exactly the same issue just because of apparently "tactical" differences over how exactly to skin the rabbit:

AMERICAN hostility to France reached new heights yesterday when the remains of US servicemen buried in Normandy were dragged into the heat of battle over Iraq.

A Florida congresswoman introduced a Bill on Capitol Hill that would allow the families of Second World War dead to dig up their bones and take them home.

Ginny Brown-Waite said that her American Heroes Repatriation Act 2003 was a response to constituents' concerns that their fathers and grandfathers were lying in "unpatriotic soil". She said: "The French don't seem to remember that if it wasn't for America, they would be speaking German."

Her melodramatic flourish was the most far-reaching effort yet to codify American anger at what politicians and the public see as a mixture of French ingratitude, arrogance and wilful obstruction of US foreign policy interests.  

In Downing Street, Mr Blair's spokesman accused France of poisoning the diplomatic well: "I don't think that anyone is under any illusion that if you inject into the diplomatic bloodstream a strategic, in-principle veto, then that's going to poison the system and present very real difficulties."

Animosity towards Paris is greater at street level in the US than in Britain. The sentiment has seen French fries renamed freedom fries and ad hoc boycotts of French wine and cheese across the country.

The denunciation of the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys",  first levelled by a character in the televised cartoon The Simpsons, has entered the public lexicon, emerging on more than 6,000 websites.

Politicians have resorted to caricature when seeking to undermine the French position. "The French remind me a little bit of an ageing actress of the 1940s who was still trying to dine out on her looks - but doesn't have the face for it," John McCain, the Republican senator and former presidential hopeful, said.

Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board and Washington's unofficial leading hawk, said France had betrayed America. "The French are given to the folie de grandeur always. With Chirac it has reached new heights," he told The Times.

Only with another perspective entirely on the world does all this mind-boggling turmoil suddenly make sense, and it is an understanding which is rapidly gaining ground throughout the planet, including in the petty bourgeoisie as this extract from the middle-class Guardian's fence-sitting academy demonstrates:

Aaronovitch suggested that, before September 11, the Bush administration was "relatively indifferent to the nature of the regimes in the Middle East". Only after America was attacked was it forced to start taking an interest in the rest of the world. If Aaronovitch believes this, he would be well-advised to examine the website of the Project for the New American Century, the pressure group established by, among others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Elliott Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad, all of whom (except the president's brother) are now senior officials in the US government. 

Its statement of principles, signed by those men on June 3, 1997, asserts that the key challenge for the US is "to shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests". This requires "a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities". 

On January 26 1998, these men wrote to President Clinton, urging him "to enunciate a new strategy"; namely "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power". If Clinton failed to act, "the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard". They acknowledged that this doctrine would be opposed, but "American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN security council".

Last year, the Sunday Herald obtained a copy of a confidential report produced by the Project in September 2000, which suggested that blatting Saddam was the beginning, not the end of its strategy. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." The wider strategic aim, it insisted, was "maintaining global US pre-eminence". 

Another document obtained by the Herald, written by Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, called upon the US to "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role".

The ostensible purpose of Bush's missile defence programme is to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. The real purpose is to provide a justification for the extraordinarily ambitious plans - contained in a Pentagon document entitled Vision for 2020 - to turn space into a new theatre of war, developing orbiting weapons systems that can instantly destroy any target anywhere on Earth. 

By creating the impression that his programme is merely defensive, Bush could justify a terrifying new means of acquiring what he calls "full spectrum dominance" over planetary security. Immediately after the attack on New York, the US government began establishing "forward bases" in Asia. As the assistant secretary of state, Elizabeth Jones, noted: "When the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this region."  

The US now has bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Georgia. Their presence has, in effect, destroyed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation which Russia and China had established in an attempt to develop a regional alternative to US power. In January, the US moved into Djibouti, ostensibly to widen its war against terror, while accidentally gaining strategic control over the Bab al-Mandab - one of the world's two most important oil shipping lanes. It already controls the other one, the straits of Hormuz. Two weeks ago, under the same pretext, it sent 3,000 soldiers to the Philippines. Last year it began negotiations to establish a military base in Sao Tome and Principe, from which it can, if it chooses, dominate West Africa's principal oilfields. By pure good fortune, the US government now exercises strategic control over almost all the world's major oil producing regions and oil transport corridors. 

It has also used its national tragedy as an excuse for developing new nuclear and biological weapons, while ripping up the global treaties designed to contain them. All this is as the project prescribed. Among other policies, it has called for the development of a new generation of biological agents, which will attack people with particular genetic characteristics.

The illusion that there ever existed a "free-world normality" - which Guardian philosophy would love to believe in, - lasting for an eternity of "democratic" give-and-take, - is close to being shattered completely.

All is brutal conflict between competing state monopolies in reality, - challenged only, eventually, by new proletarian-dictatorship class power rivalling bourgeois dictatorship class power for the chance to end the social system of mutually antagonistic exploitation rackets (the "free market") and launch a totally new world of mutually-beneficial cooperation instead, the true "national interest" of wholly publicly-owned countries, free of all private monopoly property, combining resources and ideas for working together for the equal advantage of every single person alive on Earth.

Such ideas are universally embraced and understood. The doubts and arguments have always been about "How do we get there?".

Study history and the answer is utterly clear in an instant.

Only with humiliating DEFEAT for the old world order do serious NEW FORMS of society start to get their chance to develop, and correct their mistakes; in constructing whole new ways of domestic and international productive relationships.

The capitalist "freeworld" (over 400 repressive wars, coups, etc, since 1945) has tried, harder than anywhere, to crush the life out of the Cuban socialist revolution.

But it was the Castro movement's DEFEAT of the USA's stooge Batista dictatorship which made Cuba's brilliant social experiment possible; and then the DEFEAT of repeated American imperialist assassination attempts or invasion attempts, and the DEFEAT of the permanent economic blockade on Cuba, and non-stop attempted subversion of its economy, which alone made Cuba's flourishing possible.

The West's recent hope was that the self-destruction by Revisionist bureaucratic nonsense in Moscow would kill off Cuba by ending Socialist Camp aid; but by the Western capitalist press's own admissions, that has not happened.

Just the opposite. The DEFEATS for the "free world" by Cuba have given it the strength, determination, and wit to creatively survive even this catastrophe:

Cuba is head and shoulders above the rest of Latin America when it comes to both the quantity and quality of its education, as Unesco figures attest. Through four decades of American trade embargo - and particularly during the grim "special period" of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union when 80% of its export market disappeared - Cuba has struggled to maintain its commitment to education. Corona explains: "It is our main capital, human capital, that has allowed us to develop our economy and resist aggression from our powerful neighbour."

Economic pressures prevented the refurbishment of schools and meant that teachers' wages were pegged. (Salaries are the equivalent of $12 a month even for experienced teachers -far less than they could earn driving taxis in the parallel tourist economy.) As class sizes in Havana soared to 40 or 50 there was a "genuine vocational crisis" in the capital, Castro said.

The Cuban government's response to soaring class sizes and a shortage of people entering the profession was to declare that from September this year no class would have more than 20 children and that it would seek 20,000 extra teachers from the ranks of 16-to-18 year-olds. They teach while carrying on with the equivalent of A-levels. Starting in the capital, Havana, which faced the worst problems, the initiative has meant a huge building and refurbishment programme over the past two years as well as a recruiting effort.

In its boldness the strategy recalls the 1961 literacy campaign in which the new revolutionary government of Fidel Castle set out to eliminate illiteracy in a year, mobilising more than 200,000 volunteers, including, many school and university students, to work alongside the peasant farmers, teaching them at night.

The response seems to embody that tremendous "can do" Cuban spirit. As Castro declared in a speech in September, Havana was the first city to have only 20 pupils per class "something long dreamed of but never before achieved, not even by the world's most developed countries".

He went on: "At a rather early stage of your lives you will be taking on a prestigious and promising job. You will live off your own wages, earned with your own efforts and the creativity of your minds. All who propose to do so can, reach the greatest heights in higher education institutions, earning masters degrees and even doctorates... You will enjoy your country's gratitude and the world's admiration."

I was accompanying a group of primary teachers from Wiltshire, looking at literacy in Cuban schools under the auspices of the British Council. They were won over by the enthusiasm of teachers and students.

At a high school in the countryside outside Havana where more than 500 teenagers were training to be emergent teachers, an astonishingly confident 16 year-old, Lisandra Jimenez Diaz, explained that in December and January they would go out on teaching practice. "We have to be prepared. It is a very hard task that we have. Together with this we are studying for 11th grade. Next year we are going to work and during the weekends we will be studying for 12th grade." 

Asked if she was nervous, Lisandra replied: "I'm worried that I won't be able to answer a question. Our average age is 16 to 17 and we have to demonstrate that we can be teachers."

One of the English teachers, John Smith, said: "When I first heard about these young children becoming teachers my first reaction was 'poor things, they're so young'. But after seeing them I felt I would have loved to have done that when I was 16 or 17. It leaves me with a great sense of hope - I would love to see where they are in a year's time."

Inside the 250-pupil Seguidores de Camilo primary school, set in a large park in Havana, the maths lessons continue as the tropical sun grills the city. Del Pino seems on top of his material and the lesson moves forward crisply. The children are well behaved, but confident and lively - and of course their teacher has the advantage of a small class.

The next lesson is music, using an educational television broadcast introducing high and low sounds, including the sounds of different instruments. This doesn't go quite so well. By this time Del Pino is being observed by an education adviser. The children seem less engaged - the contrast with the class next door following the same programme with an experienced teacher is telling.

After the class files out the adviser, Nivia Hinds Acosta, talks through the lesson - and suddenly Giraldo looks very young. He confesses he was very nervous but is reasonably pleased with how things have gone. Hinds Acosta is encouraging and has various recommendations.

Del Pino says he chose to become an emergent teacher because he enjoys it and there are teachers in his family. The emergent teachers receive six months to a year's training before being put in front of a primary class. They receive mentoring support from experienced teachers and continue their own studies. Del Pino follows his 12th grade course on Thursdays and Saturdays so that he can eventually go to university.

Not surprisingly, although parents were enthusiastic about smaller classes, they were not all thrilled with the idea of their children being taught by 16-year-olds. "Some of our families were worried about the quality of these teachers but as the programme goes on these worries are diminishing," insists Dr Jorge Corona, adviser to the education minister. 

Long before "education, education, education", the Cuban revolutionaries under Fidel Castro made it their priority. Faced with an illiteracy rate of more than 20% when they overthrew the Batista regime in 1959, the members of the new government set about trying to eradicate it altogether.

On September 261960, Castro declared in the United Nations that "Cuba will be the first country in America that in a few months' time - will be able to say that it does not have a single illiterate person".

The campaign, which caught the imagination of Cubans and has since achieved mythic status, mobilised 234,000 people of all ages, from students to pensioners, to go into the countryside and teach. The scale of the operation was obviously beyond the scope of the country's existing 34,000 teachers, but Castro determined to do it in a year. By day the students worked alongside peasant farmers and fishermen and in the evenings instructed them in the rudiments of reading and writing. The symbol of the campaign was the kind of paraffin lantern used to light these basic literacy classes in village homes without electricity - China donated 100,000 of them to the cause.

The story is told in evocative photographs at the National Museum of the Literacy Campaign - not, it must be said, yet on the Havana tourist trail.

The student volunteers were typically aged only 14 to 16 when they set off on the campaign, which began on January 1 1961.

Volunteers were equipped with two booklets promoting the themes of the revolution, as well as a structured course and vocabulary. The first three vowel sounds introduced were O, E, A - initials of the Organizacion de Estados Americanos (Organisation of American States), from which, ironically, Cuba was soon to be expelled. Other sounds were identified with words such as Cuba, Fidel or Raul (his younger brother).

The final assignment of the "pupils" was to write a letter to Castro and these have been lovingly collected at the museum, including the childlike scrawl of an 86-year-old man. He wasn't the oldest though, she was 106 and her 14-year-old granddaughter was one of the teaching volunteers. One wrote: "I never felt Cuban until I learned to read and write." Castro and Che Guevara were not just teaching people to read, they were forging a nation.

And if the country is large enough, the anti-capitalist revolution can build vastly greater achievements than merely brilliantly survive all the appalling difficulties that the evil empire to the north has inflicted on Cuba.

China is the obvious example to examine, where the 1949 socialist revolution was such a devastating DEFEAT for US imperialism (in spite of all America's colossal efforts to arm, finance, and train its stooges in the corrupt and useless "Nationalist Government" to repeatedly try to wipe out the Communist Party) that the USA used its veto on the Security Council for the next 22 years to prevent Red China claiming its place in the United Nations, continuing to recognise the deposed Chang Kai Shek clique (hiding out on Taiwan under US protection) as the Security Council representatives (with full power of veto) of 1.2 billion Chinese mainland people.

That DEFEAT for imperialism has been glossed over ever since by non-stop propaganda brainwashing throughout the West pretending that China was going down and down into an ever-worse hellhole of torture, tyranny, starvation, and poverty, etc.

Official Western lies have hesitated over this "Gulag nightmare" nonsense more recently because of China's remarkable GNP adaptation (using some market methods for some selected, more rapid, economic developments) which has required some relaxation of (proper) Chinese hostility and vigilance against Western subversion and ideological penetration.

As a result, the Western capitalist press itself occasionally drops its guard completely to let through remarkably favourable assessments of what life is like in the Chinese workers state, plus some indirect reflections on some of China's commendable achievements grappling with some staggering historical, social, and environmental difficulties:

We are family backpackers - we hop on a plane, train, bus and turn up somewhere like ordinary backpackers, only there are six of us. We are: grumpy father, organised mother, three female adolescents and one explosive boy of 11, spending 24/7 together. Add to that the cocktail of one-nation China and you have enough energy to defy gravity.

Beijing, our first destination, is in the grip of a beautification process in preparation for the 2008 Olympics as every square metre is being renovated. They will, of course, keep the Hutton's (the old alleyways), the temples and palaces, but the rest is being turned into a glass and metal jungle of extraordinary proportions.

What takes a year to do in Blighty would take about a week in China. Plus, the trains are fantastic (if you can get a ticket), the food is mostly excellent, fresh and healthy, and communication is easier than you would imagine for such an alien language, although it helps to have a mobile phone.

As we failed at the first attempt to get train tickets - there are, after all, more than 10 million internal Chinese tourists - we flew to Urumuqi in Xinjiang, north-west China, the land of the Muslim Uyghurs and the old Silk Road trade route. Our middle daughter, Katie, celebrated her 15th birthday in a Kazakh's yurt (half a tepee) on the banks of Tiara Chi, or Heavenly Pool, a lake halfway up a mountain in the middle of a desert. A cake of pink wafer biscuits and raisins was shared among the local villagers.

In the land of a one-child policy, sadly accepted by young and old, a four-child family is a focus of celebration, and there is no better place than on a 36-hour train journey travelling "hard sleeper" (this is a misnomer, it is actually quite a comfortable open carriage with six-berth sections). Every smile you offer is greeted with a bigger one in return and, within a few hours, the Duncans were spread around the various berths swapping food, playing games and giving impromptu English lessons. The only frightening thing about train travel in China is getting on board - when the barrier is lifted, there is a ritual stampede to find your carriage.

Our destination, Xi'an, was my son Arthur's main reason for coming to China. He wanted to see the terracotta warriors, and he was not to be disappointed. Although the Chinese are busy building for the future, the oldest civilisation in the world goes back a long way, and this surviving monument, thousands of life-size pottery soldiers whose mission was to protect an emperor in the afterlife, is quite extraordinary: We even met one of the farmers who discovered them in 1974. I told him that I was pleased that his grandfather hadn't found them because now they would be probably be in some British or European museum.

At the start of our fourth week, we were heading south through Sichuan, where giant pandas, giant Buddhas and little chillies that make your tongue tingle for hours were the focus of our entertainment. Soon after, we embarked on a very old bus for the tortuous route to Lijiang in southwest China. The torture included broken fuel pipes, avoiding landslides due to continuous rainfall and bouncing in and out of potholes for 14 hours (although in a few years it will probably be a smooth, four-lane motorway).

Bordering Tibet, in the province of Yunnan, Lijiang is home to the Naxi minority, and the old city, the only part to survive the 1996 earthquake, is the tourist Mecca that travellers descend on. Despite the large groups of Chinese tourists maniacally following their guides the place somehow manages to retain its charm. This is probably due to the warmth of the Naxi people who embrace you like you are the first foreigners they've ever met.

One such encounter led us to stay in a Naxi family home in a village below Jade Dragon mountain, which during the rainy season constantly swirled with clouds. This was a time of powerful images and sensations, the closeness of an environmentally aware community, a child never put down, handed from grandmother to uncle to cousin, 5,000 horses for sale at a rainy market, a temple with Buddhist monks blowing great horns, the taste of the fresh vegetables, the healthy animals... you get the picture. It was clear to all of us as we said goodbye that most of the world is dysfunctional and perhaps here lies the secret of true happiness.

Decisions had to be made: shall we sail the Yangtze before the Three Gorges disappear into a great lake which power the biggest dam in the world and produce 10% of China's electricity or... there was no alternative. Everywhere is a long way, and to reach the city of Chongqing to book the cruise required two days' travel.

It had been raining rather a lot and our journey up the Yangtze was to be short lived; in fact we only saw two gorges as the river was surging and the boats were unable to continue. Lakes were bursting their banks and states of emergency were declared.

We did manage to visit a waterside town called Fengdu, appropriately called "the ghost city" - which it will undoubtedly become in 2003 because it will be completely underwater. All over the town, graffiti-like information sprayed on walls marks the date and the impending level of water, and a large sign counts down the days, next to a shop displaying a model of a brand new town to be built somewhere else. The old men in the park talked, spat and played ma jong as if nothing was going to happen.

We did get to see the cause of this eerie phenomenon, a dam that will hold back the waters of the Yangtze, which have flowed fairly unhindered for tens of thousands of years. In the dusky gloom loomed a giant wall surrounded by a city of construction workers.

August 23 was a date we always had in mind to reach Shanghai because it was Arthur's 11th birthday and this was the place where he wanted to celebrate it. We all liked the idea of something familiar, so we headed for "the tallest hotel in the world", the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, and treated ourselves to a birthday breakfast which cost more than the previous week put together.

Staring out from the 54th floor over Pudong, the Manhattan of Shanghai, it is hard to believe that the sea of skyscrapers was nothing but boggy farmland only 12 years ago. Before the communists came to power, Shanghai was an international metropolis, swarming with every aspect of humanity, good and bad. Mao and the Cultural Revolution ended all that and put some equality back into the lives of the people.

With only a couple of days left before we returned to Beijing, it was time to reflect on our China odyssey. The girls were ready for home and dreaming of not being stared at, although Chinese takeaways may rate highly in their future diets. Arthur will miss not being the centre of attention from the thousands of Chinese mothers who wanted to adopt him. Annie and I will probably take a while to reassemble our minds back home, regain some personal space, wonder where all the people are and why no one is shouting, and we may go and buy a train ticket... just because you can.

Twenty-first century China is a phenomenon nothing like you would expect it to be. We often imagine countries as they were in old photos or films and not as they are now. I did not find it oppressive, and most of the Chinese we met did not feel oppressed; it seems many of those outside China have an outdated concept of this nation. They are proud, positive, industrious people, and they live firmly in the present.

With more than 1.3 billion people to contend with, China does have its problems: there is a great disparity of wealth, and environmental catastrophes are just waiting to happen. But you feel that the dynamic Chinese will solve these problems while the rest of us waffle on at Earth Summits and threaten war to protect our own interests.

It can only become easier to travel independently in China as time passes - many of the young generation speak some English, so you do not need to travel with expensive tour groups selling the mysteries of the Orient. Book a cheap flight and take the kids to see the future.

The whole post-1945 epoch (of still-devastating but strictly limited (to particular parts of the "freeworld" where communist-backed national-liberation struggles were not strong enough to stop the West's neo-colonialism) imperialist aggression) was created in its limitations by any number of huge humiliating DEFEATS for the Western monopoly-capitalist system.

But the question is (not unreasonably): where are the next imperialist DEFEATS seen coming, especially in the light of common assumptions that the USA has amassed "by far the greatest military and economic power, plus political worldwide influence and ideological/propaganda domination, of any globe-bossing country in all history" etc, etc, etc.

Well, - first arguing hypothetically, - it is irrefutable that a socialist revolution in, say, India, or Indonesia, or Brazil, or Nigeria, or Pakistan, or Japan, or Turkey, or Mexico, etc, etc, etc, would all a) be impossible for Western imperialism to overturn or hold back; and b) set an avalanche of copycat revolutions cascading all round the world in no time at all. Under what conditions? Under the conditions which already prevail of an economic crisis of "over-production" to which there is no "cure" at all but only an even worse disaster as a "solution", namely prolonged, devastating, inter-imperialist war (World War III).

Catastrophic DEFEATS of all kinds are unavoidable in this utterly anarchic turmoil (the confused and bitterly divided situation preceding the Iraq blitzkrieg, multiplied by 100).

In these DEFEATS, feeble "governments of national interest" which have abandoned any serious revolutionary struggle against imperialism (whatever their achievements during the national liberation era), will be replaced regularly by socialist revolutions, starting off a whole new epoch of unchallengeable workers states.

But all that is hypothetical for now. What ACTUAL signs of DEFEATS for the imperialist system are there?

Plenty. None of the countries involved are significant heavyweights to set a world trend, but that is not the issue. All that matters is that whatever the circumstances, it is a significant DEFEAT for imperialism if the efforts put in for stemming revolt (weapons, finances, arms training, specialist adviser reinforcements, etc, etc) FAIL to defeat, starve-out, or demoralise the rebellion.

Nepal is an excellent example. The Maoist-revolt's provocation to the West could not be greater, being right on the borders of Red China, and synonymous with the culture and economic conditions which apply throughout the ENTIRE Indian sub-continent of more than one quarter of mankind (and with huge communist anti-imperialist traditions already, and frustration with the present capitalist crisis and imperialist warmongering world tyranny growing by the day).

And Nepal has not been overlooked by the CIA's worldwide anti-communist "anti-terrorist" crusade, - piling in helicopters, arms, cash, training, etc, to defeat this blatant armed communist revolution in a country of nearly 30 million people.

But at the moment, imperialism is facing a humiliating DEFEAT, - even according to Western capitalism's own press reports:

SATYA Devi Bhattari stands outside the rubble of her pharmacy and home in the Himalayan village of Lumcera amid the mangled remains of furniture.

The clinic was destroyed in November by a Swat team of the Royal Nepalese Army who were dropped in from a helicopter and torched the building. The pharmacist escaped across the mountains so, for good measure, the soldiers beat up his wife.

The soldiers came two days after a massive attack by rebel Maoists on the Jumla District Headquarters, half a day's walk away. Satya Devi's husband, Jari Lal, was a 'suspected Maoist terrorist' and got what was coming to him. That is the state's version.

His wife says Jari Lal was never a 'Maobadi', just a hardworking man who sold all his belongings to study and work his way through college to become a chemist and paramedic - the closest thing to a doctor in this remote place.

His crime was giving medicine 'to anyone who came for treatment'. In an area under Maoist control inevitably some of those people - carrying guns and politely demanding cooperation were Maoists.

It is hard for most people to trust officialdom in Nepal. A state of emergency called in November 2001, giving the armed security forces unlimited powers and absolute impunity in Nepal's 'war against terror', officially ended last August. Unofficially, outside the capital, all the trappings of the state of emergency - curfews, internment, search-and-destroy operations and, according to human rights organisations, torture, disappearances and summary executions - continue.

A report by Human Rights Watch last month maintains that more than 1.300 'suspected Maoists' had reportedly been killed by government security forces within months of the declaration of emergency.

The state of emergency coincided with the bloodiest year in the insurgency: between November 2001 and October last year, 4,366 people died, compared with around 2,700 deaths over the previous five years.

Amnesty International believes that the 'vast majority of the victims were civilians targeted for their real or perceived support to the Maoists'.

Satya Devi does not know if she will see her husband again. He is in hiding in a foreign country and has taken their two eldest children with him.

She and her remaining three children have been reduced to begging, living off the charity of neighbours, moving from house to house.

There will be no compensation and no trial to investigate what happened.

'I am not expecting justice,' she said. 'I can't go to the courts because my heart is already broken. The-government has already burnt our home, how can I appeal to them.' We poor people are like insects.' Preventing the Maoists from getting their hands on medicines is a policy being enforced by police and army across the country's poorest regions. It means in practice that no one gets any medicine.

The winter nights in this region are bitterly cold. Children run around barefoot or in flip-flops. Everyone is sick. When they see a foreigner, villagers ask for worm tablets, rehydration salts or aspirin. People are dying from chest ailments that could be easily cured.

Lumcera and neighbouring villages of the Jumla district are brutal places to live. There are no roads connecting the region to the rest of Nepal. There is no electricity and the farming is at subsistence level.

You don't need to speak Nepali to recognise the words gash, bash, kapash which come up in conversation again and again - food, housing, clothing - usually in conjunction with chhaina, which means 'we don't have'.  Children start to work as soon as they can walk - tending animals, fetching water, gathering wood, and looking after the younger members of the family.

	In theory, the Maoists offer the people an alternative to the rigid Hindu caste system, which is no longer backed by law but is still a reality. The party promises equality - an attractive prospect for ethnic minorities, women, the lower castes and Dalits, or 'untouchables'. In practice, it has established its own rule by means of the gun. 

	TWO AND A HALF months after the Maoists attacked Jumla, skeletons are still being washed down the river:  On the evening of 14 November, 8,000 Maoists crawled into town through irrigation channels, destroying every government building - 28 in all - and looting a cache of police weapons. It was a classic hit-and-run Maoist tactic. Forty-six people were killed in the assault, including 34 policemen.

The next day in a counter-attack by government forces, typifying the viciousness meted out by both sides, in this war, army reinforcements were flown in by helicopter. The skeletons are the remains of the fleeing rebels. The government says that 250 of them were killed; the Maoists say 50.

The attack and counter-attack have had other consequences too. About 35,000 people (out of a population of 75,000) have left the district. According to a local journalist, Navraj Shahi, people are afraid the Maoists will attack again soon. 'It still hasn't gone back to normal,' he said.

Senior Superintendent of Police Madhan Khadka admits to feeling personally like 'an open target'. It is hardly surprising when, according to Human Rights Watch, by February 2002 the, Maoists had killed more than 500 policemen.

What worries him most is that he believes that 50 to 60 Jurnla residents were involved in helping the Maoists. 'You can't trust anyone,' he said. 'There may be undercover spies anywhere. It could be the shopkeeper, the baker - you don't know.'

HALF A DAY'S walk southwest from Jumla town takes you deep into the Maoist-held villages of Tatopani, Lumcera and Rara Lili.

Hammers and sickles painted on rocks along the mountain path are the first giveaway. Then there are the graffiti painted on houses: 'We must be proud of our people's war and we must raise our flag' and 'We appeal to the Royal Nepalese Army not to kill the people.'

In Tatopani, a tiny village famous for its hot springs, out of the shadows of dusk come a dozen shapes huddled in blankets, teenage boys and girls. One of the boys wears a mask and carries a long, antiquated rifle. It is hard to believe that these children can be the fearsome fighters of the People's Liberation Army.

They provide a letter as a passport to go deeper into Maoist territory where a district committee secretary, Comrade Karma, waits for us in Rara Lill village. He is twiddling the dial on an ancient radio, tuning into the BBC Nepali service. He refuses to listen to Radio Nepal, dismissing it as a government mouthpiece that slanders the Maoists.

Karma is in despair over Tony Blair's assistance to the Nepali government: 'Tell your Government not to send arms,' he implores. 'The army will use them against the people. Tell your Government we are not terrorists.'

Karma was once a maths teacher. When he was imprisoned and tortured for his Maoist sympathies, he abandoned civilian life for fulltime struggle.

'Over the past seven years we've taught the people to question why we've become poorer and poorer. In the past we believed in Hinduism and gods, and we did not progress. Now we teach the people we are getting poorer because of state negligence and lack of opportunities. We teach the people that it is logical that we need a revolution.'

In Lumcera, I meet Comrade Hak (it means 'leading') who explains that he joined the Maoists to fight against the people's enemy, rich people and the high-caste hierarchy. 'We already have equality,' he says, pointing at his male and female comrades. 'We have only two castes now, men and women. Thanks to us, women are released from unequal marriages and the two-wife system, and to some extent from wife-beating. In the Jumla attack, we had three women martyrs and thousands of female fighters.'

Comrade Chaya is a shy 16 year-old. If she hadn't joined the Maoists, she tells me, she would probably be married by now, spending her days gathering hay for her husband's cows. She joined the party to fight for personal freedom and women's rights.

She is slender and gentle and, despite the homemade grenade in her backpack, it is hard to imagine her on a battlefield. 'I'm not afraid of being killed,' she says. 'I am fighting for the people's rights.'

But for all the talk of progress, Satya Devi Bhattari won't go indoors when she is having her period. Hindu tradition dictates that menstruating women must stay out of the home.

Even in Lumcera, where the Maoists claim to have won people's hearts and minds, old habits die hard. Satya Devi is ambivalent about the Maoists: 'The army is making Maoists because they are causing the people so much suffering. But I don't understand why they are sacrificing their lives.'

In most of the countryside only the district headquarters remain under government control. With every sign that the army is losing this war, the rebels appear determined to keep up the pressure to put themselves in the strongest possible position.

When the Government declared itself unable to hold general elections because of the Maoist threat, King Gyanendra dismissed the entire administration and seized power for himself and a royalist puppet Cabinet.

Lokendra Bahadur Chand, the King's new Prime Minister, said that with the bickering political parties out of the way, the new Government could get on with the task of restoring law and order and holding elections.

But far from helping to tackle the Maoist problem, many believe that the King's actions have played into the hands of the rebels, who are tightening the noose around the divided capital. Their real enemies, after all, are not so much the politicians as the monarchy, which they have vowed to overthrow ever since their rebellion began six years ago.

"They have been trying for a long time to drive a wedge between the political parties and the palace. Now they have got what they wanted," Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times said. Sources close to the Maoists confirm that the "royal coup" has only strengthened their resolve for a showdown. There are signs that, preparations are on for a new offensive in the countryside, despite, the royalist Government's call for peace talks.

Maoists returned to Kushadevi to explain their actions. As long as the villagers obeyed the Maoists and did not try to stop them building a power base here, they would not be harmed. That meant no political activity, no resistance, no elections and a free hand for their new masters.

Kushadevi lies on the eastern slopes of the lush Kathmandu Valley, only an hour's drive from the Nepalese capital. That the Maoists could usurp elected power here is a sign of their increasing power and daring as they tighten their grip around the shrinking islands of territory still under government control.

All this could harm the justification for the royal takeover - that the politicians failed to tackle the Maoists so the palace must have its chance but so far the King's actions have met little resistance from the people, who are weary of conflict and corrupt politicians.

But if he fails to tackle the insurgency and call elections, the honeymoon could soon be over. The monarchy may be popular in Nepal, but King Gyanendra is not.

Long seen as a political manipulator, his latest actions have done little to help to scotch the unfounded but widespread suspicions of his involvement in every disaster to befall Nepal from the beginning of the Maoist uprising to last year's massacre of almost the entire Royal Family, except himself and his immediate relations.

In Latin America, all eyes are on Venezuela, the immediate American imperialist target for a regime change to try to prevent a continent-wide movement for progressive revolt developing any further.

The EPSR has already paid tribute to the tremendous DEFEAT inflicted by Chávez on the middle-class "general strike" counter-revolution that the CIA organised to topple him with, - the second major attempt by the evil terrorist empire to the north to reinstate stooge reactionaries in every trouble-spot in South and Central America.

But it is also instructive to read Western capitalist press admissions about how the first coup attempt on Chávez was made and came to grief:

When in April the President of Venezuela sat under armed guard as a newsreader read out his forged resignation statement, he told his jailer, with no intended exaggeration: "That's it, I'm dead." Seven months on, Hugo Chávez is still President of Venezuela.

Latin-American politics turn out to be just as feverish as your least informed guess. Venezuela is a democracy but its disputes are conducted by general strikes, mass protests, hired snipers, renegade soldiers and coups that accord to strict dictionary definitions.

Chávez is a practical soldier by profession, but his rhetoric, I discover, is pure art. Through it he attempts to turn his basket-case country, whose huge oil wealth is offset by mass poverty, into a beacon for the Third World. He appeals to human rights, to internationalism and to Christ. When not clutching a cross, he fondles the little blue book containing Venezuela's latest constitution. Charisma got him elected by a landslide in 1998, and his reforms have been endorsed repeatedly in elections since.

Businessmen accuse him of scaring off investors with high taxes, of failing to use high oil prices to fuel growth and of presiding over a stagflating regime of rising inflation and high unemployment The Economist calls him "incompetent" and predicts that GDP will fall this year by 6 per cent. Newsweek has asked: "Is Hugo Chávez insane?" But in Oxford, which is where we meet, he is in greater trouble for his record on human rights. In his version, it is unimpeachable. His new constitution recognises the rights of the indigenous people whose ancestors greeted the conquering Spanish in the 16th century, guarantees the freedom of the press and even outpaces in liberalism the First World by approving single-sex marriages.

Venezuela is the herald of a new Latino dawn, he says, pointing to the election of President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva in Brazil last month. His record is well enough thought of by some for him to be speaking to Oxford University's international human rights seminar.

The charity Human Rights Watch warned him to ensure that the military was "subordinated to civilian control". The real controversy, however, is over the 19 killed in an anti-Chávez demonstration in the capital, Caracas, on April 11.

Was his Government responsible for killing the 19 demonstrators? "Well, that," he says through an interpreter, "was not a simple demonstration. Let me say, I am proud that as a democrat we have had hundreds of demonstrations over the past four years and there has been no repression of them whatsoever.

"In April, it was different. This was a coup d'état. An elite group, very powerful and wealthy, of old politicians who governed the country for 40 years, corrupted union leaders, leaders of the business community, the media elite and the military elite, they got together and they prepared a format to overthrow the government" The coup leaders he says, were determined to deflect a peaceful march of the disaffected middle class towards the Presidential Palace where hard-core Chávez supporters were counter-demonstrating. To ensure that in the inevitable confrontation that followed there was bloodshed, they put snipers into position.

"And at a very critical point where the two crowds are close together, one marching and the other standing by the palace, then we start to see the snipers shooting." So his National Guard did not fire shots? "No, I cannot say that. It is under investigation. There were supporters of the Government who shot back because they were shot at first and replied."

Shortly afterwards, Pedro Carmona, head of Venezuela's equivalent of the CBI, named himself interim president. Chávez's belief that the events were stage-managed are reinforced by a CNN reporter who says that at 2pm he witnessed military officers rehearse the statement they would deliver on TV. "This officer said: 'To the Venezuelan people: We do not recognise any more Mr Chávez as President. He is massacring the people using snipers. So far there have been six people dead and dozens of injured'. So the military officers knew two hours beforehand that snipers were going to kill people in Caracas. It was a plan. It was the perfect crime."

That evening, inside Miraflores Palace, Chávez, who had not slept for two nights, changed into fatigues and took up his rifle. At midnight he convened his cabinet, although he could not reach them all since the phone lines had been cut. In the early hours, the coup leaders delivered their ultimatum: he must surrender in 15 minutes or they would bomb the palace. "So we analysed the situation and decided we had to avoid more killings and a bloody clash [with his supporters outside]. So I convinced my people, and it was not an easy task, that I was willing to surrender."

Taken to a military fort, he found Carmona already there. "It was a large room filled with military officers. Two bishops were there as well. They pressed me to sign a decree prepared by the lawyers that said I was resigning."

Chávez told them: "I'm not going to resign. I'm not going to read that. So you can take it away. You have two choices. Either you put me in jail or you kill me."

'So they put me in jail and the next morning I said to the young captain who was taking care of me: 'You are aware of the fact that you are here with the President of Venezuela but that he's in jail, a prisoner?'

"He was very tense because at that time the people were starting to take to the streets and the order was out to repress the people. It was a dilemma for him. I said: 'Listen, I want a TV set. Your life, the life of your family and the future of this country could depend on what you do now.' So he went out and brought the TV set. I started watching and I started to see another huge lie that was broadcast by all the TV channels at eight o'clock in the morning. They were reading my resignation letter to the world."

The one he hadn't signed? "Never, and they knew that. When I saw that I said, 'Listen, that's it. I'm a dead man because the only way for them to get away with that is to have me killed.' So I said to the captain, 'Look at that. I have not resigned. I want you to know that I am the legal president of this country.' So he starts receiving orders from me and obeying them."

The captain lent him a mobile phone and he got through to his wife, Marisabel, to tell her he had not resigned and was still alive. He next reached his daughter. "Maria, I am in jail. I'm a prisoner. Do something, because tonight they are going to kill me." Eventually Maria managed to ring his friend and occasional baseball opponent, Fidel Castro in Cuba.

"In the end it was thanks to Fidel and Havana that we were able to break the media silence because from there she could reach the media round the world. Suddenly the voice of my daughter was saying: 'My father is in jail. He's going to be killed.' " By now Miraflores was surrounded by Chávez supporters. Carmona had suspended the constitution, dissolved the national assembly and, crucially, failed to win the backing of the Organisation of American States. The army turned on him. His coup had been foiled.

Carmona, who had been recognised as de facto president by the United States, was arrested but fled house arrest in May. After a sojourn in Miami, the US withdrew his visa and he flew to Colombia.

Yet Chávez has stuck to running the economy in the way he promised in 1999, when he announced he was "exploring the middle ground, where the invisible hand of the market joins up with the visible hand of the state: as much state as necessary, and as much market as possible". His supporters blame his difficulties on the $19 billion (£12 billion) national debt, eight billion dollars of which, they claim, is actually owed by the private sector but has been "rolled into" the government's borrowing. To go begging to the IMF, he says, would mean more debt and the imposition of an austerity package that would harm the poor the most. Venezuela would face Argentina's fate.

"The neoliberal economic model is destroying the world. It has created a privileged elite in the world and more and more poor people. We need to create new economic models and that's exactly what we are trying to do in Venezuela."

He rushes through a list of his achievements: raising the price of oil (Venezuela is the world's fourth largest oil exporter); attracting foreign investment from BP and British Gas; doubling the education budget; increasing school enrolment; reducing child mortality and malnutrition rates. Fifteen per cent more people have access to drinking water than three years ago.

In the afternoon Chávez addresses the packed seminar at the Examination Schools building.
	 
Two days later, Chávez returns to Caracas. Venezuelan life returns to abnormal. A general strike, the third in ten months, halts the country - or, if you believe the Government, fails to. Fourteen army officers take over a public square and take salutes from the passers-by: The Government uncovers a plot to blow up the presidential aircraft.

Speculation can range all the way from whether US imperialism is losing its grip in the matter of arranging reactionary coups to install its own stooges in Latin America, to whether this vast continent under neocolonial domination is starting to learn to fight better than ever against this North American tyranny.

But either way, the all important perspective is one of DEFEAT for US imperialist machinations. 

Again, it can be argued that the USA is only seriously worried at the moment about the far more dangerous situation in Colombia where an open armed communist revolutionary war has remained undefeated for more than 20 years, and where the neo-fascist warmongering tyranny of Bush is threatening total armed intervention now that its hordes of military "special advisers" have failed to turn the tide of guerrilla warfare.

But the point remains as analysed before: American reaction wanted the Chávez regime gone. The US imperialists met with DEFEAT.

And so far in Colombia anyway, they have only met with DEFEAT. 

Currently, by turning its back on United Nations diplomacy, imperialist warmongering aggression is on a roll.

And there is quiet smirking that the stock markets are at last bouncing back with such "firm leadership" (albeit neo-Nazi militarism, and akin to the German-Italian-Japanese sinking of the League of Nations via arbitrary warmongering decisions in the 1930s, in very similar efforts to get monopoly-capitalism out of its last great "overproduction" crisis).

But the world economy did NOT recover in the 1930s because of initial warmongering aggression. Total, catastrophic, worldwide devastation (World War II) was required before the "free-market" exploitation racket could get back to profitability.

This latest tone of arrogant warmongering aggression from the US and UK, - and the erratic bounce-back on the stock exchanges, - has not altered some weekend capitalist rags from still seeing nothing but gloom ahead, possibly on all fronts.

And it is yet to be seen what kind of mess this farcical revival of Nazi blitzkriegs might yet run into in Iraq.

And even if imperialist DEFEAT is avoided in persecuting that weak and eccentric Saddam regime in Iraq, the next Nazi blitzkriegs might not be so lucky, nor could they cope if and when communist revolution is sparked in Iraq as a result of blitzkrieg failing to solve ANY of the vast problems undermining the "free world", as the capitalist commentators themselves already admit will be the case (see above). Build Leninism. EPSR.

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

Chávez routs CIA coup attempt, and begins to hammer the middle-class "general-strike" counter-revolution.

Chávez made use of his traditional Sunday program Aló Presidente, transmitted from Puntas de Matas in Monagas state (400 kilometers southeast of Caracas) to give the good news. However, he also commented on the different obstacles used by the opposition in their two-month-long sabotage of the nation's main sector, in their attempt to bring down the current government.

He was optimistic, reports PL, although he urged everyone to keep on the alert because confrontations will continue, but not without "meeting firm resistance from the people." The Venezuelan leader likewise confirmed that the PDVSA saboteurs, responsible for the partial paralyzation of oil centers last December, will not get their jobs back, for "this is a strategic company of patriots, workers, the military and patriotic technicians.
"The Venezuelan people suffered greatly in December due to lack of fuel; many people were forced to cook with firewood. That is why those responsible for the coup, for this conspiracy, will never be forgiven, they must be punished," he stressed.

• USING supplies from oil processing plants as a base, President Hugo Chávez told Venezuela and the world that his country is now producing over 2 million barrels of crude a day (as compared to some 3 million normally produced). He placed this achievement at the doors of the people, the military and the patriotic workers who, according to his words, have carried out "an historic feat to match those of the liberators."

FIGHTING THE BATTLE ON VARIOUS FRONTS

At the same time Chávez announced that - under the designation "Year of the Revolutionary Offensive" - over the next few days a series of measures are to be enacted in order to control the situation so that it favors the majority of Venezuelans.

Given the food industry's sensitivity in satisfying the people's demands, and in anticipation of his opponents' acts of sabotage, the Venezuelan president informed that the state is willing to intervene at any given moment in the corn flour processing plants that choose not to work following a check of government-capped prices.

"If they dare to close, we will take over the plants and put them in the hands of the people," he warned.

Aware of the importance that ayaica -a traditional dish made from corn flour and the basis for the country's popular cuisine has for people, Chávez assured that the dish "will not be missing from Venezuelans' tables."

The above-mentioned corn flour price controls are among those instituted for 169 basic products, with the aim of halting the uncontrolled rise in the cost of food and other basic products indispensable for day-to-day living in the country.

Notimex and Ansa reports emphasize the presidential call for the people to organize themselves into brigades that must "defend fair prices for food 'and medicine and denounce speculators."

	Another internal measure going through a 	complex moment is the control of hard currency exchange, an issue that has not escaped Chávez. He allowed government intervention in the matter as a way of defending reserves of freely convertible currency, thus improving people's purchasing power and halting inflation and unemployment. 

He called on the Central Bank of Venezuela (BVC), in its position as issuer, to decide on "direct control" of bank interests via fixing an active interest rate of 30% maximum. Lifting exchange controls will boost oil industry recovery. The Foreign Exchange Commission (Cadivi), monitored by the executive, will be responsible for foreign exchange regulations.

REVITALIZING INDUSTRY

Minister for Labor Maria Cristina Iglesias told national press that the Venezuelan government is to sign an agreement related to revitalizing the industrial sector, greatly in debt to international suppliers. The amount of money needed is calculated at some $88 million USD.

According to a BVC report, in 2002 the economy suffered a 8.9% drop, due to a crisis in the GDP which plummeted 16.7% in the third quarter, compared to the same period in 2001.

Agreement is based on fundamentally affecting job protection and increasing consumption.

In order to do this, measures include a plan favoring small and middle-size national businesses, in order to inject much-needed funds for maintaining required production levels, explained the minister.

In keeping with this new agreement, the state will keep watch on the running of a special protection and job incentive plan proposed in 2002, plus a complementary protection plan for current posts.

Iglesias commented that five joint working groups have been created consisting of representatives from ministries and Fedeindustry, plus a specified number of workers.

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

BOLIVIA MAYHEM

The financial adjustment plan (12.5% income tax) was the final straw for a country overburdened with economic injustice and a reaffirmation that the executive is more concerned about pleasing the demands of international credit organizations than its own nation. The raised tax is an attempt to decrease the financial deficit from last year's 8.6% to a new level of 5.5%.

•THE latest demonstration in Bolivia that took place last week in protest against the imposition of new neoliberal measures gave rise to a confrontation between the army and the people; 30 died and as yet unknown number were injured. Various group are indicating that Gonzalez Sanchez de Lozada, the country's leader, is to blame for causing the popular explosion and for over reacting by giving the order to fire.

Summarizing the events, it appears that they were unleashed after a group of police agents rebelled over income tax increases. Later, their attitude was followed by many social sectors who took peacefully to the La Paz streets to demand the current president's resignation.

Lozada, urged to contain the demonstrations, did not hesitate to use snipers. The Permanent Assembly for Human Rights in Bolivia denounced him, pointing out to national press the bullet holes embedded in official buildings.

Evo Morales' Movimientos Socialismo (Socialist Movements) asserted that the violence began on Tuesday, February 11 after a self-directed coup devised by the government in order to persecute those sectors opposed to its measures and to take advantage of the old 1952 disputes between the armed forces and the police. According to the EMP (Est ado Mayor led Pueblo-People's Staff), the blow came from an unexpected quarter, for in spite of repression, those in the lower echelons have not stopped clamouring for their rights. The EMP consists of trade union members, landless campesinos, teachers, civil and coco-growers organizations; on Monday February 17th in Cochineal (403 kilometres from the capital) it called for all the country to join in their determination for a top level meeting aimed at discussing privatizations of public companies, Bolivia's participation in the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and redesigning a new government model.

Morales condemned the acts of vandalism committed in the name of the popular masses and distanced himself from the looting of shops and the fires that occurred in various locations. However, PL reports that he did acknowledge that that the country is tired of "foreign recipes" applied since 1985 and is seeking its own path via strikes, marches and blockades.

In the midst of these events, on Monday (February, 17) the Central Sombrero Bolivian (COB-Bolivian Workers Trade Union) demanded the president's resignation at a 12,000-strong demonstration in front of government headquarters.

Given the unexpected turn of events, Loaded announced he would be taking people's discontent with the salary-based measures into account and would annul them. He also plans to reduce the size of his cabinet with the aim of reducing expenditure.

Nevertheless, the country's analysts and papers such as La Paz' La Prenatal are questioning the probability of a "happy" government performance if, only six months after being elected, the president is facing so many problems.