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 1204  October 14 2003

Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  0771 263 9934                                   www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk
[P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                    25p 

Warmongering US hawkishness stays on course for the greatest imperialist-capitalist-system catastrophe of all time. Despite ever-increasing viciousness, Western colonial aggression remains besieged in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, etc, because the hour has arrived for the revolt of the Third World proletarian billions against the tyranny of monopoly-corporate world rule, mired deeper in economic crisis than ever before. The inadequacy of fake-'left' nonsense to understand or deal with this situation is causing a faster collapse of posturing opportunism than ever, clearing the way for the revival of REAL Marxist revolutionary science.

The current American fascist-imperialist regime is sick enough, — and demented enough — by unsolvable threats of an imminent markets crash,— that its "pre-emptive" plans to blitzkrieg the whole world rather than give-up global domination in the event of an economic collapse, have gone incandescent despite the disasters looming in the middle East (or perhaps because of them).

Yet every wretched sect of the fake-'left', — from the 'left'-Labour Socialist Party Trots, to the r-r-r-revolutionary exhibitionist Spart Trots, to the sadly misled and confused Spark–Lalkar SLP youth, — continues relentlessly trying to hide this World War III reality from the working class, or play it down via various anti-communist, moralising, or museum-Stalinist diversions, — in order to deliberately muddle the question about why a serious revolutionary party is not being built.

The proposition could not be simpler. The monopoly capitalist world of "overproduction" anarchy, leading towards the worst slump tragedy in history and total global warmongering upheaval, is clearly a situation poised for the most cataclysmic international war devastation that civilisation has ever been menaced by.

It implies the terminal REVOLUTIONARY crisis for the capitalist imperialist system which has ruled the Earth for the last 800 years, continuing the pattern of proletarian revolutions and workers states which started refashioning world history in two spurts after 1917 and 1945 following the two previous greatest inter-imperialist warmongering upheavals, World Wars I and II.

Formally speaking (regardless of their dubious Revisionist quality on both occasions), openly REVOLUTIONARY international workers movements dominated the organisation of anti-imperialist politics in those circumstances of impending blitzkrieg mayhem.

But now???? Nothing. The post-1945 combination of the "free world democracy" crap plus the Stalin-Revisionist "peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful roads to socialism" imbecility has made brain-dead all 57 varieties of fake-'left' sectarianism. (see below).

But first, the latest information for judging where capitalist crisis is leading civilisation towards, — deduced or edited from the capitalist press's own admissions, as the EPSR has always tried to do, following the Marxist tradition.

The fake-'left' is STILL insisting that America's war footing is "all about oil" (see below) deliberately to avoid having to face up to the monstrous implications of a conscious imperialist drive towards all-out global war about everything.

It is never quite "wrong" when Nellist, Lalkar, and others still persist in pretending that "Iraq's oil resources" lies at the heart of the USA's total-war preparations, — a nonsense continued with in order to conceal these fake-'left'

earlier misreadings of this Armageddon-like global situation. It is just that it only covers about 2 per cent of the total geopolitical significance of what is happening, leaving the 98 per cent still unanalysed, the crucial bit about how wide warmongering is being spread, and why. 

The big bourgeois press is less inhibited than these petty bourgeois fake-'lefts' with their class collaborating mentality of electoral opportunism. It still has to invent a lot of nonsense about "weapons of mass destruction" in order to cover up the naked NAZI "master-race" aggressiveness of America's fascist-imperialist plans to make sure that ALL OPPOSITION or resistance of any kind to the USA's global diktat is either wiped out or totally discouraged IN ADVANCE of the coming world-slump mayhem, trade-war tyranny, and inevitable revolutionary political upheavals. But its own words hardly leave any doubts that anti-imperialist stands everywhere are to be ruthlessly blitzkrieged, weapons or no weapons:

SYRIA, Libya and Cuba are to become new members of America's "axis of evil".  John Bolton, the US Under-Secretary of State, said all three were intent on developing weapons of mass destruction and were a threat to the United States and its allies.

The original so-called "axis of evil" states were named by Mr Bush in his State of the Union speech in January last year as Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Speaking at the US Embassy in London, Mr Bolton made it clear that in Washington's view the axis was expanding. "We're now turning our attention to Iran, Syria, Libya and Cuba," he said. Iraq had now been dealt with, he added. Weapons of mass destruction had not yet been found, though a clear intent and potential capability had been uncovered

Mr Bolton said, everything Mr Bush had warned about had been corroborated. North Korea was now under diplomatic pressure to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme, and Iran was dearly trying to develop the bomb and long-range ballistic missiles before the end of the decade.

Mr Bolton accused Libya of making increased efforts to purchase components for biological and chemical weapons after United Nations trade sanctions were lifted last month, but his most serious concerns centred on Syria, indicating that the high-pressure diplomatic efforts aimed at Damascus in the past two years had failed.

America already has sanctions in place against Iran, Libya and Cuba, and soon is expected to bring into force a set of punitive measures against Syria.

Mr Bolton said the level of co-operation the US was getting from Syria was "not satisfactory', and he issued a warning that the US Congress was "poised" to vote in favour of sanctions against Damascus.

On Wednesday the Syria Accountability Act was passed by the Congressional International Relations Committee after the White House signalled that it had dropped its longstanding opposition. The Act would ban the sale of dual-use equipment to Syria and give President Bush the choice of imposing two of six possible sanctions aimed at limiting diplomatic contacts, cutting off trade and halting air links.

Although trade between the two countries is limited, the political impact could have serious ramifications in the region. America has maintained close diplomatic ties with Damascus for decades. For a brief period, after the September 11 attacks on America, Damascus appeared to be co-operating with Washington in the war.

Since then, however, relations have deteriorated sharply, with Washington accusing Damascus of allowing fighters to cross the border into Iraq to attack US forces. Syria's support for militant Palestinian groups, responsible for suicide attacks in Israel has also hardened attitudes in Washington.

Imad Mustafa, the Syrian chargé d'affaires in Washington, said: "This is a blatant double standard that can rarely be met in international diplomacy." 

Syria is already greatly concerned about the presence of tens of thousands of American troops across its border in Iraq and the bombing raid by Israeli jets on Sunday against a target north of Damascus. The raid was the first in three decades and appeared to have the tacit approval of the White House.

President 	George Bush stepped up the pressure for regime change in Cuba, unveiling a top level team yesterday to plan for the downfall of Fidel Castro, and promising to tighten the existing embargo. 

Mr Bush said a new cabinet-level commission will plan "for the happy day when Castro's regime is no more and democracy comes to the island.

"Clearly, the Castro regime will not change by its own choice," Mr Bush told a gathering at the White House Rose Garden. "But Cuba must change."

Among its contingency plans, the commission, to be headed by Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, will make preparations for rushing humanitarian aid to Cuba in the event of the fall of the Havana regime. "The transition to freedom will present many challenges to the Cuban people and to America, and we will be prepared," he added.

But, announcing the new approach, the president said his administration would take a tougher approach to enforcing the US ban on tourism and doing business in Cuba.

The American government will also launch a campaign to point out to Cubans the ways they can legally enter the US if they try to flee their homeland.

"We'll increase the number of new Cuban immigrants we welcome every year," Mr Bush said. "We are free to do so, and we will for the good of those who seek freedom."

Some business groups, Democratic representatives and free-trade Republicans favour relaxing sanctions such as the travel ban, saying they have been ineffective and are depriving American companies of potential profits.

But Mr Bush said money paid by American tourists who stayed in hotels in Cuba went straight to the Cuban government.

Observers said the measures were unlikely to have much practical effect and were designed more to shore up political support among Cuban-American exiles in Florida, a state that decided the 2000 election and is likely to be important in next year's vote.

	The Bush administration damaged its good relations with the Florida Cubans in July when it returned to Havana 15 migrants caught off the coast after receiving assurances they would not be executed for hijacking a government-owned boat.

The president's brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, objected to the decision.

How long before Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, etc, etc, are added to the list? 

And to confirm that the entire "free world" Western imperialist system is involved to a greater or lesser extent in this cynical warmongering conspiracy to garrison the whole planet, ready to crush the first signs of proletarian revolution as the global economic slump-crisis relentlessly deepens, just consider how all of the US-influenced larger or wealthier capitalist powers have eventually started participating in the colonial policing of Afghanistan, first, and now Iraq, — in spite of some sly enjoyment at America's "master-race" military discomfort, and despite much hypocritical hot-air about "ultimate democratic internationalist duty to help new-nation building in Iraq", etc, etc, — pulling the USA's colonial-tyranny chestnuts out of the fire nevertheless.

The same monstrous cynicism surfaces in the capitalist press' admissions about exactly how brutal this coming hypocritical imperialist warmongering purge against ANY "weapons" is going to be. In this sickening account of another armoured massacre of virtually defenceless refugees at the weekend by the Western imperialist colonisers of Palestine, some sordid little wretch from the middle-class United Nations "world government" racket, laces his crocodile tears at the Palestinians suffering with the astonishing observation that the West's Zionist colonisers "have the right" to butcher the Palestinians to stop them fighting to try to recapture their homeland from this outrageous seizure by UN-backed imperialism to create in 1947 the "land of Israel":

Israeli tanks and bulldozers pulled out of southern Gaza yesterday after one of the most destructive raids of the intifada, leaving hundreds of Palestinians without homes and eight dead, including two children. More than 100 homes had been rocketed or flattened by bulldozers, about 1,500 people left homeless and two children killed after an Israeli helicopter fired a missile into a crowd.

The army also cut off electricity and water to the camp.

The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, accused Israel of breaching international law through "disproportionate use of force" in a civilian area. Yasser Arafat's aides called the raid a "war crime and a human tragedy".

In some places, entire rows of houses were crushed under the bulldozers. In other streets Israeli helicopters picked off two or three homes at a time with missiles.

At dawn yesterday, once it was clear the Israeli tanks were mostly gone, hundreds of people loaded up donkey carts and fled their homes amid a swirl of rumours that the army would be back.

Women stumbled down the road with doors to their homes strapped to their backs and children hauled buckets filled with cutlery.

The Israeli military said Palestinian fighters put up fierce resistance as the tanks went in, throwing hundreds of grenades and bombs. But all the casualties were among the Palestinians. Of the eight dead, four were fighters.

The two children killed by the Israeli helicopter missile were Ibrahim al-Qrainawi, eight, and Sami Salah, 12. About 60 other people in the same crowd were wounded, many of them women and children.

The army said that there had been gunmen in the crowd and that anyone on the street was presumed to be hostile.

"Where were we supposed to be?" asked Ashraf Khusa, who lived on the same street. "They were blowing up our homes. There were bulldozers crushing our houses. Where could we go but the street?"

Much of the destruction was in an area known as Block J, adjacent to the large concrete wall that divides Rafah from Egypt.

Before the latest raid, about 620 homes had been demolished in Rafah during the intifada, most of them to clear a no-man's land between the camp and the wall.

The weekend attack upped the ante significantly, with the number of houses destroyed in two days equivalent to a fifth of the total over the past three years.

"We have had very, very significant damage to the refugee camp. This is well more than twice as bad as in any previous action," said Peter Hansen, the head of the UN's Palestinian refugee agency is Gaza after visiting the camp yesterday. "There is a lot of fear, there is a lot of anger and there are a lot of people who are very desperate"

The army described the raid as successful, saying it was difficult to find one smuggling tunnel, let alone three.

"These figures for destruction are extremely exaggerated," said an Israeli military spokesman.

"About 10 houses were destroyed, all of which fell into one of three categories — they had a tunnel, were booby trapped or there was intense gunfire from them.'

The UN dismisses the army's claim. Mr Hansen said Israel had the right to curb weapons smuggling but not through widespread destruction of civilian homes.

Thus it is the same degenerate "free world" message right through, the Third World is being warned not to fight back or resist Western imperialist domination and exploitation in any way, or else it will mean an invasion, an occupation, and a slaughtering, — with or without some UN handwringing brownnoses on hand to beg "not too rough, please".

But the really good news is that this sickening imperialist pantomime is not in any kind of healthy condition at all.

It may yet be a long way from LOSING in its skirmishes with the Third World, which is where the expectations of Marxist science ultimately want to see it.

But the warmongering is nonetheless going badly, — or at least it is by comparison with where American blitzkrieg THOUGHT it would have "progressed" to by now, and by comparison with how shattered world resistance was supposed to have been by now with the "shock and awe" of it all.

No such thing. Contempt, and a readiness to fight back with everything is GROWING RAPIDLY everywhere.

What a mess: And what a frighteningly bleak prospect for the future.

No wonder Washington has now split so badly, with Rumsfeld the "shock and awe" architect now humiliatingly demoted, complaining bitterly out loud, and the icon of black nationalist feminism Condoleeza Rice promoted into a Goering-Goebbels-Himmler role in an attempt to wow the natives everywhere.

It amounts to about the fifth or sixth hierarchy change in about as many months of the "Operation Crush Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else", and it offers no better promise of any real 'progress'.

Some bourgeois press reports are deliberately delighting in implying that the blitzkrieg programme is stalemated:

Coalition forces, possessed of a siege mentality, have erected the new walls around anything that might be considered a target by their anonymous, amorphous enemies.

In short, the international community has retreated into a series of compounds, shielded from the violence of the streets and the people they have come to help.

Locals smile at the irony: the coalition's leaders are as isolated from the Iraqis they govern as Saddam Hussein was in his heavily guarded palaces. Out of a similar instinct for self-preservation, they emerge from their compounds to meet the people as rarely as did Saddam.

For the Americans and members of the Iraqi Governing Council living in the Baghdad Hotel, the wall was a success yesterday. For the Iraqi guards who nervously manned the gates, the concrete afforded no shelter.

In a city constantly on the lookout for the next car bomb they have evolved into a Baghdad Wall of disjointed, haphazard, ugly grey slabs. Like concrete vertebrae, the 15ft-high wall units interlock their way around hotels, aid organisations, coalition offices and political parties.

The concrete slabs spill out on to streets, shut off main roads and snarl the already congested traffic. The US Army, champion of the concrete compound, has built a huge curtain around the city's two main hotels, the Palestine and the Sheraton, despite the management's objections, and erected impenetrable defences around military bases already heavily fortified by the old regime.

And yet that is almost the "good" news as far as the worsening
imperialist crisis is concerned. 

At least a static military-occupation situation still remains in America's hands to deal with as best it can, by vastly more bribery and corruption, or by even greater savagery and butchery.

No amount of brainwashing barbarism, however, will be of the slightest use in combating US imperialism's REAL enemy, — the inability to make the economic world go boom any more.

Without guaranteed ever-increasing global prosperity, the 800 years of Western capitalist-imperialist world domination is inevitably facing the most humiliating and painful end imaginable.

And it is capitalism's own optimistic-at-all-costs soothsaying voices which are saying that the system is economically and politically buggered:

My earlier confidence has been replaced with foreboding and gloom.

Risks to the two main components of the world economy — America and continental Europe — are bigger than. they have been at any time since the end of 1999.

In the past few days, the euro has shot up to $1.18, only a whisker below its all-time high, set in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and 31 per cent above the level at which it generally traded before spring 2002. This shift in global currencies, and in the flows of international capital, creates enormous risks for the world economy.

Many Europeans still see a "strong" currency as a symbol of economic strength. They think of a hard currency, such as the old German mark, as a sign of virility. But hardness can also be a precursor of disaster, as in a tumour. Which is why I believe that the euro today should not be described as "strong", but as "malignantly hard".

European politicians do not seem to understand this. Most are convinced that, after the Continent's most painful recession since the 1974 oil crisis, the worst is now over.

This is all very well. But for European leaders to congratulate themselves on the modest pension and labour market reforms — which will, at best, do no more than prevent the present oppressive business climate from getting even worse — is a classic case of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. While Europe's policymakers argue about a meaningless Stability Pact or lay out blueprints for pension reform in 2010 and beyond, they seem to be deliberately ignoring an enormous iceberg that could sink all their efforts in a matter of months.

That iceberg is the rising euro. A stronger euro and weaker dollar would normally shift jobs and economic output across the Atlantic, creating more unemployment in Europe's factories, while helping US manufacturers to create more jobs. But now, it would be endanger the entire global economy because Europe's nascent economic recovery is still extremely weak, and a blow to employment prospects and profits could snuff it out.

In theory, the damage might be compensated by benefits across the Atlantic. But in practice it won't, for three reasons that Europeans are wilfully ignoring.

There is a limit to how fast even America can grow without igniting inflation. The falling dollar will simply hasten the day when the US economy reaches this limit, either forcing the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates drastically, or causing panic in financial markets, when investors around the world conclude that the Fed has fallen behind the curve of rising inflation, as it often did in the 1960s and 1970s, with invariably disastrous results.

Secondly, Europe is uncompetitive with America, even at the present exchange rate. Largely because of the huge burden of social charges and other payroll taxes, an average factory worker costs 15 per cent more to employ in the eurozone than in the US and 50 per cent more in Germany. Despite these enormous handicaps, most European economies sell far more to America than they import. But this does not demonstrate a competitive advantage. Rather, it reflects the collapse of consumer spending in Europe and the willingness of European companies to accept lower profits than their US rivals.

Thirdly — and most importantly — the dollar is not just the currency of America, but also of Asia. China, for example, has pegged its renmimbi rigidly to the dollar since 1994 and is determined to stick with it for at least another year or two. So when the euro rises against the dollar, it does not transfer European jobs to the US, as it might in a world of freely floating currencies: Instead, it transfers jobs and output to China and Hong Kong, as well as to other Asian countries that informally link their currencies to the dollar and have therefore enjoyed a huge competitive advantage against Europe in the past 18 months. Japan, for example, has improved its competitiveness against the eurozone by 10 per cent since this time last year and by 30 per cent since early 2001.

Given that China, South Korea and Japan are already the world's most competitive exporters, the weakness of the dollar exposes Europe to a devastating pincer movement. At the top end of the market — in technology, high-value services and luxury goods — Europe will lose ground to America, while at the bottom end, ever-cheaper Asian exports will decimate the labour-intensive low-cost industries that still provide millions of Europeans with jobs.

This pincer movement is by far the biggest economic peril facing Europe today. If the dollar goes on falling and the euro goes on rising, Europe's tentative hopes of economic recovery will be shattered.

Then the governments of Europe may take notice. But by then, it will be too late. Another year of economic growth will have been wasted, thousands more businesses will have been ruined and the prospects of economic labour market and pension reform will have receded. In short, if the euro's malignant hardening continues, Europe will soon be back in the cancer ward.

This month the Nobel prize-winning economist returned to Britain as an acidic economic polemicist, with a more direct message about the US economy. There will not be a robust recovery, and the fault can be traced to Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's actions during the Nineties, and the policy failures of President Bush.

'More jobs have been lost under Bush than since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression,' he said in an interview. 'In the private sector more money has been wasted through misallocation of capital in the stock-market bubble than the government could ever manage.'

In a week in which US stock markets hit 16 month highs, surely there is some room for optimism? Stiglitz was having none of it. 'The huge tax cut in the US was very badly designed to stimulate the economy. And there has been a huge increase in mainly military spending. Yet what is remarkable is how little stimulus has been given. The US economy is still in a precarious state,' he said.

Rarely does the dismal science become so Prozac-inducing. But his pessimism arises from the fact that he is no believer in market infallibility. As a theorist, his work concentrated on labour market imperfections arising out of access to information. He is now extending this analysis to capital markets. Indeed his new book, Roaring Nineties, sets out what he sees as the multiple policy errors that sowed the 'seeds of destruction' in the American economy.

But surely 'destruction' is a little strong? 'Dealing with the deficit will absorb the US political economy for years to come. We're back to the Reagan era. The trade deficit has the underlying problem of what will happen when foreigners decide to stop funding the US deficit. On the private side there is a huge gap in private pension funds. Any other economy would be under water.'

The scandals over conflicts of interest in accounting and banking were predictable fruits of 'market fundamentalism', he says. 'The image is Adam Smith. The reality is Enron.' But the really bad news is to come, he argues. 'What is likely to happen is more of a languishing malaise, with very weak job recovery. China has joined the WTO and is now the manufacturing engine of the world. Manufacturing is now down to 14 per cent of the economy. Those last few per cent are going to be very painful.'

"Destruction", "Cancer", and "too late".

The word is certainly "painful" to describe all this.

But much, much, much more is at stake here.

The "shock and awe" worldrule tyranny in reality is far more dependent on US imperialism's astonishing ECONOMIC record in being able in the past to buy up half the world or bribe it to do America's bidding, rather than on the US military-domination record, which is hardly impressive at all.

The whizz-tech weaponry has ALWAYS been available, and always far in advance of what the rest of the world could posture with.

But American imperialism's vast spread of political domination starting mid-19th century but escalating dramatically after mid-20th century (post-1945) was built on the uncountably-huge and unprecedented WEALTH of the American empire.

And it is the fraud of that "endless and unlimited prosperity" which is US imperialism's true achilles heel.

Once American handouts start to bring only contempt or even dry up completely, then the "superpower" nonsense of this sick and bloated US empire will reveal all of the parasitic degeneracy of all previous world rulers whose system of development and control had outlived its usefulness.

Apart from the bourgeois press-attested slump evidence (above), the writing has been on the wall in other ways for a growing number of years already, suggesting increasingly insoluble contradictions between the diminishing startling impressiveness of American wealth when first encountered, and the changing appetites and responses of the masses in developing countries as the essential injustice, humiliation and patronising niggardliness of American largesse started to be experienced and understood.

The Middle East is a telling example of this where American or British stooge regimes have regularly been overthrown ever since 1945 (the Shah in Iran, King Farouk in Egypt, King Faisal in Iraq, the British colony in Aden, the monarchy in Afghanistan, etc, etc- , etc) and where the greatest prize of all, the oil-rich Saudi regime, has begun distancing itself from or been alienated from its American apron strings for a decade or more under growing international Arab and Muslim nationalist pressure, to the point where the al-Qaeda anti-imperialist heresy has gained widespread Saudi sympathy.

But Palestine is the most dramatic case of all, developing unbelievably heroic determination and self-sacrifice in one of the most unequal struggles in the whole history of colonial revolt against imperialist tyranny.

Effectively, the tiny and impoverished Palestinian nation has, been fighting the ENTIRE COLONIAL MIGHT OF U.S. IMPERIALISM ever since 1947 when powerful American monopoly-capitalist interests decided to put their Zionist-infiltrated unmatchable might behind Western Jewish colonisation, armed colonisation, of the land that had been the home of the Palestinian Arab people for more than 1500 years, far longer than England has belonged to the 'English'.

Occupied Palestine, effectively became AN AMERICAN COLONY, ruled by mostly Western-born armed Zionist thugs. They are still at it (see capitalist press admissions above).

But Palestinian resistance has become the wonder of the whole anti-imperialist epoch.

Relentlessly humiliated, impoverished, tortured, and butchered where they stand, and being relentlessly made genocidally homeless (and literally so too by the bulldozers), the Intifada revolts have grown steadily in intensity and effectiveness.

Although the entire Palestinian nation is virtually barbed-wired into one enormous concentration camp, still Western Zionism's SS camp guards cannot keep control, despite a reign of unparalleled terror now lasting more than 56 years (compared to the 12 years genocidal tyranny most recently established as the new imperialist-rule benchmark by Nazism just before Zionism took over at the spearpoint of continued monopoly-capitalist colonial domination on Earth).

But incredibly, it is the Palestinian victims of this fascist nightmare who are prevailing.

Last week's Zionist cynical brutality against Syria was meant to be a macho hiding of imperialist hurt and frustration that Palestinian resistance cannot be defeated, but it only served to highlight the Zionist demented befuddlement, — as even the Western imperialist press is itself is admitting:

Sharon had apparently backed himself into a corner. He sought to grope his way out with a response to the Haifa bomb that would silence calls for him to follow through on the threat against the Palestinian leader. Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew University, said: "The military and political leadership, which converges because they are all generals, is simply helpless in the face of terror.

"The attack [on Syria] was a kind of diversion. They realised getting Arafat would be too dangerous, and not practical. But if they are not going to get Arafat, then they thought the attack would calm the public, make it think the government is prepared to take big steps to fight terror. 

"It's a frightening attack, because it seems so influenced by the domestic political and psychological situation. They chose a target which is only symbolically related to the situation It's like Bush: he couldn't get Bin Laden so he hit Afghanistan. We cannot get Arafat and we cannot really get Mamas, so we kick Assad in the ass." 

Opinion polls show that Israelis are increasingly sceptical of Mr Sharon's claim that he can halt "the terror" by force. 

Israel's "targeted assassinations" have been less successful at curbing suicide bombings than the Palestinian leadership has been in its attempts, backed by some Arab and western governments, to persuade Hamas that it has a stake in the political process.

The Haifa bombing will also shatter a few illusions about the much-vaunted "security fence" under construction through the West Bank.

Similarly, Mr Sharon seeks to persuade the world that the suicide bombings are not about occupation, Jewish settlements or the racially driven seizure of Palestinian land. Israel, he says, is a victim of international terrorism and therefore part of a much greater struggle between western civilisation and Islamic fundamentalism. The raid on Syria fits neatly into that paradigm, particularly with the US turning up the heat on Damascus to break its ties with Palestinian and Lebanese "terrorist organisations".

Whatever the motives behind the raid — desperation or a calculated attempt to redefine the conflict — it raises a disturbing question: What will Mr Sharon do when he feels the need to escalate his response after the next suicide bombing?

Scary threats and dangerous times, of course. But so what? Armed colonisation is STILL going to be defeated in the long run, and the increased mayhem which demoralised imperialist posturing is going to inflict will only ADD to the crisis conditions bringing the US empire to its knees, ready to be defeated over a far wider scale than just in Palestine as economic disaster breeds more and more revolution everywhere.

An armed Washington disciplining of its own Zionist thugs; a civil war between rival American ruling-class factions; a fullscale inter-imperialist war between the leading "free world" powers again (like WWI and WWII); are just some of the possible implications to be speculated upon as the crisis of 800 years of Western world domination relentlessly deepens.

And all the time pushed by revolutionary developments on the ground everywhere, of course.

Although only distant, one remarkable possible tactic by the "weak" Palestinians shows how the insoluble contradictions within the imperialist "free world" posture might be exploitable to shame the Zionist tyranny even further towards its demise:

With an unbridled settlement policy now matched by a "separation wall" that merely consecrates the divide between Palestinians and Israeli settlers within the occupied West Bank, Sharon and his predecessors have all but destroyed the possibility of a viable and sustainable territorial settlement along national lines.

But there are no conceivable circumstances in which any Palestinian can concede their own history in favour of the Zionist narrative. It would mean that they would have to accept that for 1,400 years the Arab-Muslim presence in Palestine was transient and unlawful, and based on the false premise that continuity of habitation conferred rights of ownership. Furthermore, the Palestinians would have to accept that the pulverisation of Arab Palestine in 1948, and the 50-odd years of subsequent dispersal and occupation, are the rightful outcome of an illegal struggle against the real owners of the land. Simply put, Halevy wants Palestinians to become good Zionists.

Palestinians cannot confer legitimacy on the Zionist narrative and should not be asked to do so.	

But if the two-state solution is no longer physically possible, and demography is creating its own inexorable facts, what are we left with that can serve as a framework for a settlement?

One can almost hear the sheer panic in former prime minister Ehud Barak's voice as he argues that the Palestinians may demand not two states for two peoples, but one state west of the Jordan river: "But," he warns, "that single state will have to be in the spirit of the 21st century: democratic, secular, one-man, one-vote. One-man, one-vote? Remind you of something? Yes. South Africa. And that's no accident. It's precisely their intention."

Barak is not alone in not really having an answer. The best that the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman can do is caution his American Jewish readers that if they think it is hard to defend Israel on college campuses today, "imagine what it will be like when their kids have to argue against the principle of one-man; one-vote":

By positing one homeland for both sides, the one-state solution not only does away with the conflict over history and mutual legitimisation, but has practical political implications as well. Both sides can maintain their "right of return" without this being at the expense of the other.

It would be sheer illusion to pretend that this idealised vision is about to wean Israel away from Zionism. Neither can the Palestinian national impulse be easily melded into some kind of fuzzy warm-hearted version of semitic brotherhood. But if the two-state solution simply is not to be, some truly serious questions must soon be asked: What is better: no Palestinian state at all, or a single state that provides them with equal rights alongside Jews?

Obviously, the armed colonial-terrorism victors are not about to be weaned away from Zionist "master-race" dementia.

But then neither was white imperialist supremacism every really reconciled to giving up the 'white-made' South Africa or Rhodesia, and the West sat on its hands throughout decades of utterly barbaric suffering inflicted on the Black Majority, and never made more than hypocritical sympathetic sounds anyway, even by the end.

But the end did come, and Apartheid was FORCED to relinquish power, — facing certain revolution and the immediate loss of everything if it did not climb down to the bourgeois-imperialist parliamentary racket of "black majority rule", meaning continued capitalism.

But nevertheless, the powerful Apartheid rule did meet its demise, and South Africa will yet travel much much further down the anti-imperialist road, and before much longer too.

By its out-of-date contradictions in a changing world, Apartheid shot itself in the foot and was effectively downed by REVOLUTION. Zionism will meet the same fate.

The vision of the world according to the fake-'left' looks totally different and utterly reactionary, — by their own petty-bourgeois choice.

The ex-Labour MP Nellist of the Militant Socialist Party told a public meeting in Leicester last week that US imperialism was conducting a "war for oil".

The national demonstrations against Bush's visit on Nov 19 should "avoid anti-Americanism" however.

And "troops out" was a good enough call for the Iraq situation, not "defeat for imperialism".

The worldwide hatred of US domination, prepared to burn or blow up anything American, in its spontaneous frustration???

Hardly analysed. "Individual acts of revenge" is all that-has been noticed.

Unsurprisingly enough, this Labour-opportunist fake-'left' identified no need for "talk of revolution", believing that "wars like these cannot be stopped".

A picture emerges of the world's masses rising up to smash everything American in sight in their spontaneous hatred, but Nellist & Co objecting with "We can't have this anti-Americanism".

The SLP Youth depict little of this world revolutionary scene in the August Spark, and repeat twice that this is a "war for control of Iraq's natural resources" and "a colonial occupation to get hands on Iraqis oil", — leaving out the other 98% of the meaning of this global warmongering agenda for WWIII and all the revolutionary-party implications of that, in order to keep sucking up to the reactionary trade-union-boss rule of Scargill & Co.

As an added diversion to the "oil war" shallowness, the SLP Youth tack on two pages of utterly hypocritical platitudes by or about Stalin as a "revolutionary anti-imperialist", the Revisionist degenerate bureaucrat who agreed to the armed-fascist foundation of the imperialist colony of "Israel" in 1948, along with scores more ludicrous mistakes and anti-revolutionary retreats in a long philistine personal diktat which set up the eventual workers-state self-liquidation in the hands of the Revisionist bureaucracy, all brought up in the "important historical contribution to socialist theory by Stalin" according to this equally anti-revolutionary SLP-Lalkar garbage.

The Sparts do not even get as far as Lalkar's recent recognition that capitalist crisis is heading for inter-imperialist World War III, but protect their "Troops Out" shallowness with their own peculiar long-playing record of pretending to have been "great defenders" of the Socialist Camp and the Soviet workers state.

This total shite is sinister beyond comprehension. What lies behind this unbelievable nonsense????

A latest Vanguard (Sept 26) has columns more of this sick historical distortion (about the Sparts having been "pro-Soviet") in its incoherently rambling "Troops Out" posturing on the Iraq war, and then four whole pages of total lies in its main feature "We fought to defend the Soviet Union".

With such sinister "defenders" as these, it is a wonder that imperialism ever bothered trying to bring down the Soviet workers state.

The contradictory nonsense in all this is summed up in a nutshell.

Spartism is traditional Trotskyism which spent a lifetime demanding the "revolutionary overthrow" of all the workers states including China, Vietnam, and Cuba, while claiming that this was in order to "defend them".

When this non-existent and impossible Trotskyite fantasy of the "political revolution" (as opposed to a social revolution to change the class character of the Soviet workers state, etc) not only failed to materialise anywhere but began to be seen as playing into the hands of CIA counter-revolution which deliberately adopted a "real socialism" fake-'left' cover wherever it bribed a putsch attempt, — then most of the Trots quietly just forgot about their "political revolution" nonsense, especially in the case of Cuba where US counter-revolution has never been more than a provocation or two away from renewed attempts at fulfilment.

Bizarrely, the Sparts have never quit aiding and abetting the CIA's counter-revolutionary agitations while yet still insisting that their real aim is to "support" the workers states, claiming they would always see through any CIA attempt to muscle-in on any would-be "socialist political revolution" and would draw back from it in time to prevent it.

Thus the Sparts disaster of "timing" and "interpretation" over the CIA/Vatican Solidarnosc counter-revolutionary stunt in Poland, hiding Walesa's vicious Pilsudski-fascist reaction behind the cloak of a bogus "trade-union for rank-and-file socialism", should have been curtains for this weird Trot sect.

Walesa's provocation climb over the Gdansk shipyard wall was welcomed by the Sparts (5/9/80) with "Polish workers move".

After 8 months of worldwide anti-communist hysteria, the cowardly Sparts rowed in with the growing Reaganite anti-Soviet claque to declare: "Genuine proletarian internationalists must bitterly protest a Russian military intervention which would represent a defeat for the cause of socialism" (SB32), — throughout this period, totally ignoring the lone voice of the EPSR's weekly warnings of the catastrophic counter-revolutionary nonsense that was Solidarnosc.

Five months later (SB33), the Sparts realised that the growing counter-revolutionary stigma around Walesa's reactionariness and the Vatican's control would destroy their "pro-workers-state"  posture so they abandoned the CIA's conspiracy publicly: "Solidarity's counter-revolution must be stopped. If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal stupid way, intervene militarily to stop it, we will support this."

But never did they explain their earlier degenerate counter-revolutionary nonsense.

And never did they take up the EPSR's exposure of them.

And they have lied ever since to simply conceal their Solidarnosc fatal mistake.

And most sinisterly of all, the Sparts still pretend loudly to have been genuinely "pro-Soviet".

But their latest posturing only leaves fresh terminal contradictions of their credibility (and that of all Trotskyism).

Once more they commend themselves for having opposed Yeltsin's 1991 counter-revolution.

But they say nothing about abandoning their OWN call for "the political revolution" to bring down the Soviet state bureaucracy anyway.

This is crucial. Via Marxism-Leninism, the EPSR has always said that "political revolution" is counter-revolutionary nonsense.

Solidarnosc proved it. August 1991 proved it in the USSR. The anti-communist Sparts "revolutionary" and "pro-Soviet" posturing just bailed out in time in Moscow, but not in Poland, nor over Tiananmen where they fell for the CIA getting its anti-communist "student" stooges to sing the Internationale.

Their line today? China is still a "workers state", —  "bureaucratically deformed", of course.

More luck for these anti-communist stooges that the Tiananmen counter-revolution did fail; but the exposure of these 'left' frauds grows brighter than ever. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

On the events surrounding the assassination of Serbia's prime minister

Smuggling of everything in the Balkans, including oil and cigarettes, gained strength after the international community imposed sanctions on the former Yugoslavia in 1992. Sanctions regimes and the black market always march hand in hand, but in this case they were also fueled by the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo which were largely fought by paramilitaries with close connections and involvement in criminal networks.

Western interests also entered into this heady brew. Both Washington and the European Union wanted their own brand of 'reform-minded' politicians to take over Yugoslavia as Communism collapsed elsewhere in the Eastern bloc.

In the late eighties, this seemed possible when federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, briefly held power. But in the late 1980s harsh IMF-imposed market reforms became deeply unpopular and led to the rise of Slobodan Milosevic, the 'makeover' of the League of Yugoslav Communists into the Socialist Party of Serbia, and Milosevic's election as president of Serbia in 1990. This was not in the plan, especially as Milosevic seemed committed to further enhancing and reviving the Yugoslav Federation.

For 10 years the West worked unceasingly to bring down Yugoslavia by instigating and promoting separatist movements that, in some cases, led to relatively painless secession (in Slovenia), unimpeded declaration of independence (in Macedonia) but bloody wars (in Croatia and Bosnia) and a contrived rebellion (in Kosovo).

Rich ex-patriots and the Ustase nazis paid for much of the war in Croatia, but the fighting in Bosnia was funded by much murkier sources, including from Iran. But the provision of tanks and weapons was only part of the problem - much hardware anyway came from former JNA units who defected to their new, independent masters.

As in Iraq, the battle for hearts and minds was 	important too. Large numbers of foreign-funded NGOs, media outlets and 	local politicians had to be paid to 	carry the anti-Yugoslav, anti-Milosevic campaign both to 	the West but also to local populations.

Some 	independent donors provided 	funding but much of it fell to 	Western governments — the Dutch and Canadians were notoriously generous.

However, so much money was needed to bribe, cajole, fund etc. that the West, at the very least, turned a blind eye to activities like tobacco smuggling that generated lavish profits and which could pay a few bills. If the allegations of Zoran Djindjic's involvement in the cigarette, smuggling are true, he won't have been the only one involved.

On 12th March 2003 as the US and UK were poised to invade Iraq, the prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated outside the government building in Belgrade. Ironically, it was almost four years since Serbia itself had been attacked by the Western alliance. A profound crisis followed Djindjic's death as the government responded by introducing a draconian state of emergency under the terms of which over 8000 people were arrested without charge,  2000 of whom were held in custody without access to lawyers or their families. Public meetings and demonstrations were also banned, 35 judges and numerous prosecutors dismissed and the press fettered. According to the Serbian government, these measures were necessary to apprehend Dr. Djindjic's killers and crack down on organized crime which, according to them, was still run by remnants of the Milosevic regime.

But were they the only people involved? And was it also justified to arrest and incarcerate numerous other people who had no apparent criminal connections? In the absence of any attempt to follow up the assassination of Dr. Djindjic with a coup d'etat or other kinds of political disruption, did the state of emergency have ulterior motives?

On 14th March 2003, the federation of Yugoslavia was formally dissolved and replaced with a new entity, the union of Serbia and Montenegro to be known in future as SCG.

On 2nd  April SCG was admitted into the Council of Europe even though the organization's spokesman admitted it was the first time a country had been accepted as a member of the CoE during a state of emergency! While the media only put out the official line, all sorts of conspiracy theories were aired in private. Some even wondered if the West had a shadowy hand in the killing.

One thing is for sure: during the past decade, many of the actions of the United States and the EU have promoted the corruption of much of the political class in the former Yugoslavia. 

However, the financial pickings for local bosses that accompanied the West's involvement in the Balkans have been shrinking recently and, with commitments looming in Iraq, they will decrease further. This means that a fight over the spoils — the aid, the loans and the proceeds from smuggling — has become even more intense.

There is a body of opinion in Serbia (and among remaining Serbs in Kosovo) that the international community was behind the killing of Zoran Djindjic. The late prime minister was lauded in the West as a democrat and 'reformer' – he received a glowing reception at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in 2002 and fulsome obituary on his death. He was also reputed to 'work for' Germany either as a enthusiastic lobbyist for its privatisation interests in Serbia or even as an agent of the BND. There was no reason to dispute his ultra-Western connections, – that is, until shortly before his death. In an interview with Der Spiegel and in a pre-recorded broadcast shown on Bavarian TV shortly after his death, Djindjic was highly critical of the West's policies in Serbia. For one thing, he complained about the international community's low level of financial support for the country's reforms. Although after his murder, the Chief Prosecutor at the Hague Tribunal, Carla del Ponte, eulogised Djindjic as a 'true friend of the Tribunal', the Serbian premier had repeatedly stated that it would provoke civil war in Serbia if he was to order the arrest and extradition of Serbian and Bosnian Serb army officers, like General Ratko Mladic, who was widely reported to live, in Belgrade. 

Extraditing Milosevic was acceptable to the hard men of Serbian nationalism who felt betrayed by his signature at Dayton and his withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo in June, 1999, but these influential men were not about to volunteer for life imprisonment at the behest of the Hague Tribunal – and Djindjic admitted that violence could follow any attempt to carry through such extraditions. 

On top of this, Djindjic demanded that the Serbian police be allowed to re-enter Kosovo, something that was agreed to in 1999 under the terms of UN resolution 1244, but never implemented. KFOR has reduced – even abandoned protection of many Serb enclaves in the province.

Djindjic seems to have woken up late in the day to the plight of the Serb minority in Kosovo.

Serbs did not like Zoran Djindjic; his reputation would have improved if he had begun to stick up for their interests as, whatever else, he was not perceived as weak. Djindjic might even have enjoyed genuine (rather than bogus) popularity if he had confronted the international community on these issues. To prevent such an outcome, according to this thesis, his life was ended. 0

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

Reactionary British colonial imperialist culture still finding it hard to digest the GFA's "equality"

DESPITE the fact that equality and human rights were keystones of the Good Friday Agreement, with ensuing legislation and the establishment of both the Equality and Human Rights Commissions, there have been ongoing serious attempts to undermine these aspects of the Agreement both in principle and in application. 

Equality is still anathema to not only unionists but to the British Government and a wide range of civil servants and key decision makers. How often have we heard unionists and their cohorts state that equality and human rights are part of a pandering to nationalists and therefore should be opposed by unionists? How often has this offensive rhetoric been challenged by the British and Dublin Governments?

The most consistent aspect in this debate, whether it is about equality or human rights, is that despite fine words and commitments from the British Government, they never learn the lessons of the past. In this aspect, they are totally consistent. The same mistakes that have been made with the Human Rights Commission have been made with the Equality Commission, including:

•  Appointments made by the NIO;

• People appointed to the Commission do not necessarily have to have any experience in equality issues;

• The appointment of politically partisan commissioners: Chris McGimpsey of the UUP to the Human Rights Commission and Daphne Trimble to the Equality Commission;

• Political interference from the NIO and other state bodies as to how the Commissions carry out their work;

• Inadequate resources to enable the Commissions to carry out their roles effectively;

• Internal problems within the Commissions themselves that have a negative impact on the job they are required to do.

The continuing issue of religious and political discrimination is still one of the most controversial in the North of Ireland, eliciting a range of responses all with one target in mind: to deflect the agenda away from ensuring equality for nationalists and Catholics and to develop the new notion of unionist victimhood. This agenda has been pursued down a number of avenues. Five years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, we see a number of fundamental issues that are operating as barriers to the implementation of the equality agenda:

• There is no agreed political position that discrimination still exists and has to be a governmental response which is long term, strategic and addresses the fundamental issue;

• The anti discrimination legislation that has been in place for over thirty years has failed to redress the discrimination against nationalists in this state;

• There has been a failure to establish an Equality department with a Minister;

• Targeting Social Need (TSN) as a policy will not in itself deliver on equality of outcome;

• The effectiveness and powers of the Equality Commission are dubious and are not designed to be equal to the task at hand.

DOES DISCRIMINATION EXIST?

There is no agreed political position that religious and political discrimination actually exists, despite what the Good Friday Agreement might say. The Ulster Unionist Party line is that while individual cases of religious discrimination may have existed in the past, this is no longer the case and that, in a nutshell, if nationalists would only stop complaining about discrimination, then their Protestant neighbours would be able to live 'at ease' with them.

Sinn Féin's Dara O'Hagan summed up the current political situation regarding equality when she stated: "Since earliest times, the Fair Employment debate has been characterised by an inability and unwillingness on the part of unionist commentators, in both the political and academic spheres, to acknowledge that systematic and structural discrimination against Catholics and nationalists in the North of Ireland occurred. Thus, a whole body of literature and polemic, some of it quite clearly racist and sectarian in character, has been written which m essence blames the victim for their own situation.

"Thus, Catholic unemployment and social and economic disadvantage could be explained by Catholics having larger families, preferring to remain on state welfare, having an unsuitable education system, something in the Catholic psyche which mitigated against having a 'Protestant work ethic', not to mention that they were fifth columnists working to destroy the northern state so why give them jobs anyway."

The new mantra is that government policy has no role to play in addressing the existing discrimination between Catholics and Protestants in the north of Ireland. This is the same party that demanded British government intervention to the tune of over £1bn to try to save the shipyards from closure. There was no crying from that quarter then about the waste of public money. It is noted that unionists are not, therefore, against state intervention and positive discrimination per se, but they are only opposed to it when it means positively and actively tackling Catholic and nationalist disadvantage.

The British Government abdicates any responsibility for the institutionalised discrimination upon which this state was built and maintained for decades. This has led to the 'community relations' approach to the conflict i.e. that the conflict was about two warring communities that could not live together and each being equally as bad as the other. It ignores the sectarian foundations of this state and the institutionalised sectarianism which is alive and well in all levels of government today.

Many government departments and public bodies now adopt an approach of trying to find a 'balance' that will not upset anyone, i.e. if resources are to be targeted at nationalist areas then the equivalent has to go into Protestant areas. This is despite the fact that deprivation/poverty is a highly sectarianised map with almost 80% of the top 50 most deprived wards in this state being Catholic. This did not happen by accident but the geography of deprivation and poverty will remain the same unless interventions are targeted where the need is greatest. Finding balance simply maintains the status quo.

Five years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the issue of religious discrimination is being pushed off the agenda as reflected in the emphasis on community relations in the latest Joint Declaration. While government departments and the Ulster Unionist Party would have people believe that the issue is resolved, the evidence states otherwise.

The results of the 2001 Census of population shows that the unemployment rate for Catholic males is 1.8 times higher than that of their Protestant counterparts.

Catholics in this state account for a disproportionate share of total unemployment, with the Labour Forces Survey Religion report 2001 stating that Catholic men account for 63% of total male unemployment, a percentage significantly higher than those recorded for most of the 1990s. Catholics continue to be under-represented in higher occupational grades and have a disproportionately low employment share in the private sector. For instance, in 2001 Catholics accounted for 44% of the economically active but only 41 % of employment in the private sector.

The most socially disadvantaged areas in the north of Ireland, such as West Belfast and areas west of the Bann, continue to be those where there is a high percentage of Catholics and nationalists. Poverty continues to be highly related to religion. •