Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions - £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50. London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No 1084 Apr 10 2001                                                                                                                                          25p
'Nation of hysterics', 'Country on the verge of a nervous breakdown'?? Blairism's bourgeois political groupies are the ones who are panicking, - and with good reason. The 'free world' control of international politics and economics has never shown such signs of crisis sickness since the last great global collapse in the 1930s. The vast expansion of production by the multinational monopolies since 1945 only means that the trade-war destruction of 'surplus' capital next time round will be on an unimaginable scale, unprecedented in the whole history of imperialist slumps. The planet must be won for the philosophy of proletarian revolution, and an understanding of the essential crisis nature of the capitalist epoch, in modern times, is vital for that. Playing down imperialism’s crisis is the worst confusion to inflict on the working class, not playing it up. There is still a massive distance to go, but the facts, even as admitted by the capitalist press, show that communist revolution is already back on the agenda, despite the colossal damage done by Revisionism (and by Trot fake-'leftism')

	RACE
A pre-planned article on the uselessness of 'political correctness' and the super-reformist 'race-relations' industry will now be held over to take-in the comment and repercussions from the collapsed trial of Leeds footballers (for GBH on an Asian) which the judge stopped because of a newspaper comment alleging a racial motive for the punch-up which the court case had already rejected, - an all-round farce showing the stupidity of all capitalist society's attempts to 'morally' and 'legally' regulate any human relationships, all of which reflect only the influence (directly or indirectly, at some remove or other) of the capitalist system on how people are forced to struggle to live and make judgments about how to live. Truly rational human conduct is impossible until the competitive, exploitative, and divisive capitalist system is got rid of. Meanwhile, the only reliable 'unity' and 'brotherhood' to be guaranteed in the long term will come from uniting the whole working class, and all workers, with the perspective of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism when the imperialist bourgeois system of international crisis reaches its height.

The undoubted reality of the international imperialist system's deepening crisis is now provoking questions in all directions about just how serious it is, and how rapidly it is developing.

One strain of professional bourgeois ideological philistinism, typified by 'left' Guardian writers, is particularly prominent, loftily warning the population of Britain to stop having a collective nervous breakdown 'just because one or two small things have gone wrong'. "Hysteria is in the air", the Toynbee sneering goes, for example, formerly slavishly pro-Blair but now jeering the New Labour government for panicking, for example, over the foot-and-mouth outbreak, and over the Hatfield crash, - not big issues in her opinion.

"Calm down" is her advice. 

"This has been the most golden economic moment in living memory," 

- adding pointedly to boost Blair's political standing (or her own????):

"Clinton's woeful lack of legacy shows a golden economy is never enough without strong ideological leadership too".

But maybe it is the "nation of hysterics", and "the country on the verge of a nervous breakdown" which has got it right, and the privileged conceited Guardian propagandists for the capitalist system who have got it wrong. What if it is not really a "golden economy" at all, but just a malodorous pile of vicious and sleazy contradictions doomed to catastrophic collapse (in class war, civil war, and inter-imperialist war) which people are beginning to sense is coming; because a) the only scientific theory of society there has ever been clearly explains that such a catastrophe is inevitable; and b) because just as birds go quiet before an earthquake erupts, the existing forms of society begin to show many signs that the ruling culture is itself feeling that it is out of date and deservedly lacking confidence because it knows that so much is genuinely going wrong??

Warnings to revolutionary propagandists to not peak too soon are well in order, but the gravest warnings Leninism ever had to make were to the Bolsheviks to make sure they did not start lagging behind the fast-maturing mass proletarian willingness to see a revolutionary way forward out of Tsarism's crisis.

In all agitation for a revolutionary party, it has been crucial in Britain to stress the incurable crisis nature of capitalist development (against the lethal Revisionist poisoning of the workers movement with daydreams of a slow steady imperialist-system decline in face of relentless socialist system superior growth expectations).

A key point in communist understanding against Revisionism has precisely been that the monopoly-capitalist world dominant economy has never lost its potential for continued expansion, contrary to Stalin's ludicrous theoretical nonsense.

But it is equally important to add that all such expansion and globalisation is also only magnifying the size and depth of the catastrophe to come when choking 'surpluses' of potential investment capital worldwide can no longer all make a profit, and have to start being destroyed in a 'world slump and trade war', etc.

The constant aim of revolutionary agitation is not to seek to establish exactly how far the crisis has gone at any one moment, or how close revolutionary developments are, but to prove, from real-life events, the direction in which things are going, and endlessly remind workers of the Marxist-Leninist theoretical understanding of imperialism as a system of warmongering crisis and nothing else (as far as civilisation's 21st century requirements are concerned.) The detailed strategic and tactical analysis of the precise day-by-day advance of revolutionary crisis comes later.

Generally speaking, the big problem with 'left' traditions which doubt how deep imperialist crisis has gone, at any moment in any place, is that philosophically what is being questioned is revolutionary crisis itself as the essential driving force of history. Notoriously, the Third International's 'communist' parties in Cuba and Nicaragua initially refused to believe in the Castro and Sandinista revolutions when they occurred.

Notoriously, all the decades that Moscow still proclaimed belief in the 'final triumph of the world socialist revolution' (but urging parties everywhere not to jump the gun but to bide their time for the chances of socialist takeovers to fall into their lap, - what was really happening was a very deep subtle philosophical collapse in understanding of the character itself of epochal change in class rule as (in its very essence) a question of revolutionary upheaval (where the old class order is beginning to fall apart and the coming class forces are no longer prepared to live under the prevailing system).

Given the disintegration and self-liquidation of the world communist movement, it is surely vitally important to re-establish this philosophical understanding of historical development more urgently than ever, - especially in view of the clearest evidence that could be wanted that the fake-'left' organises all its activities and propaganda to make sure that real revolutionary struggle is the one perspective that is never mentioned, but that continued 'left reformist pressure' is all that is required.

As well as being vital to the general struggle to build a party of revolutionary theory, keeping this perspective firmly at the centre of all political analysis has been crucial for understanding correctly what has been going on in many significant anti-imperialist struggles in modern times.

Without starting from the premise that British imperialism has for decades been on a historical pathway of revolutionary collapse and defeat, the analysis of the Hunger Strikes as a defining political triumph over British imperialism, and not as a defeat (as even Sinn Féin initially concluded), would have been impossible to reach and explain in the massive political detail that the EPSR achieved (see ILWP Books vol 8). Equally, the Good Friday Agreement, which the entire fake-'left' see as a defeat for Irish national-liberation and as a sell-out by Sinn Féin and the IRA, could never have been correctly analysed (in even more massive lengthier factual detail over a series of Reviews) as the final acceptance by British Imperialism that 'Northern Ireland' was finished, if the EPSR had not remained philosophically guided solely by its longterm revolutionary understanding.

Every issue that the EPSR group has ever analysed has been equally crucially dependent on long-term revolutionary understanding for getting roughly the right picture, as always proved by subsequent developments.

Usefully, just as doubts are being raised about how far there is still to go in the world revolutionary process, the latest events have enormously reinforced some particularly hard-to-prove areas of analysis re-establishing communist revolt as the central working-class perspective.

One particular long-lasting ideological difficulty has been the slowness of East Europe to actually do anything about the endlessly-heard gripe that things were better when the supposedly 'hated communists' still ruled and before capitalism brought the delights of so-called 'freedom'. Now, - badly reported and deliberately hidden away, - the West is at last admitting that the 5 million people of Moldova (a former USSR autonomous republic) have started moves to return to where they were as a Soviet workers state:

THE LITTLE republic of Moldova, which once provided fine wines for the tables of the Soviet state has now sunk into desperate poverty. It is beset by malnutrition, mass emigration and, in an extreme case, a grisly traffic in human flesh.

Yet at the state cancer clinic, where human body parts are said to have been purloined for sale, there are even more pressing concerns. The sickly-sweet smell of sewage from leaking pipes mingles with the scent of fresh cherry blossom. Palefaced doctors and nurses hurry along dark corridors.

Dimitri, 56, a senior doctor with 30 years’ experience, emerges from a chemotherapy unit and rubs his eyes. He is only halfway through a 20 hour double shift. Even if he can keep this up for a month, he will take home little more than $30 (about £22). His wife, also a doctor, receives similar pay, and together they try to feed themselves and put their two children through university at a cost of $800 a year.

Such tales of hardship, poverty and decay are now typical in Moldova, a republic of about 4.5 million people, wedged between Romania and the Ukraine. It has been plagued by political corruption and incompetence since it became a victim of the end of the Cold War, Dimitri says.

Other voters are as sick of it as he is. So much so that the country has become the first of the 15 ex-Soviet states to return communists to power.

Its economy has shrunk by 60 per cent since 1991. Illiteracy in villages has risen threefold, life expectancy has fallen by five years.

Between 700,000 and a million Moldovans are believed to be working elsewhere, mostly illegally, mainly in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Turkey.  It is a sign of the desperation that young people even aspire to work in impoverished Moscow and Bucharest.

The World Bank says the millions of dollars sent home in hard currency is helping to hold the economy together. But the mass emigration labour drain is having devastating social consequences. At the run-down 1,000-pupil high-school in the village of Besalma in southern Moldova, headteacher Taysya Tashy has seen a third of her staff go abroad in recent years. The remaining 40 double up for each other as they take it in turns to do annual stints out of the country to earn money to survive.

'I'd love to go, but someone has to stay,' said Tashy. She and her staff were 'hungry for Soviet days', with reliable salaries and state care and a guaranteed heating system in a country where temperatures this winter fell as low at minus 15C.

The school is lobbying the World Bank for a $50,000 grant to repair its broken Soviet-made system. Children, many suffering from malnutrition, keep warm by doing exercises fully clothed.

Today the Moldovan Parliament will complete its withdrawal from a destiny in the West when it swears in as President a former baker turned Communist Party leader, Vladimir Voronin. He sees the country's future not in Europe but in the Russian-Belarus union. Meanwhile, he, has promised to double state wages and pensions.

On display in Belsama's ethnological museum are exhibits depicting life in the village a century ago. 'But this could be today,' said curator Ludmilla Mazin.

Machines virtually phased out during seven decades of communist rule - among them spinning wheels, weaving looms, butter churns, wooden grape presses and stone bread ovens -  are now back in use.

Dimitri says he and his staff are grossly ill-equipped to look after the 1,000 patients who pass through the hospital every year, mainly women with breast cancer and men with lung tumours.

In the West, doctors have 30 or more medicines to use: 'Here we have a maximum of five and last year, at one stage, only one.' Spending on each patient, no matter how seriously ill, is capped at $200. The obsolete Soviet-made equipment has long been worn out.

Dimitri can barely bring himself to talk about another shadow that fell on his clinic in the capital, Chisinau, last month. A cleaner is said to have sold body parts due for incineration to two local women, who sliced them into steak-sized portions and sold them to passers by in the town centre at $2 a kilo, half the market price for meat.

One shopper became suspicious, and tests proved the meat was human flesh. The Health Ministry has launched an investigation.

Moldovans are shocked and ashamed. One newspaper asked: 'Have we now resorted to cannibalism?' 

The scandal, it is insisted, is a one-off. There are other examples, however, of desperate times begetting desperate measures - The World Health Organisation says the sale of body parts by healthy donors has become a thriving industry.
 
Recruiters acting for agents in western Europe, Israel and Turkey buy them for as little as $3,000 apiece - eight years' salary to the average Moldovan - to be sold on to sick people for 100 times more.

Balkan gangs are using Moldovan women as surrogate mothers. They women are paid as little as $5,000 to have babies they will never see again,  for childless couples in Italy, Greece and Germany.

'The girls go and live in the country where their customers are, or the foreign couples come straight to the hospital in Moldova, after the birth and whisk the baby away,' one charity worker in Chisinau told The Observer.

Thousands of other women go abroad in search of menial work, and end up in the hands of human traffickers who steal their passports and force them into prostitution.

'Job offers' for women in the weekly paper Makler include almost 100 adverts that charity worker Olga Graur deems 'highly suspicious'. 

'Young, good-looking girls' are wanted to 'leave immediately' for work in 'the best casinos on Cyprus and Asian nightclubs'.

Another advert reads:  'Know English? Can you dance? We'll sort out the contracts -  $800 in two weeks.'

So desperate is the problem that charity workers now visit schools to tell girls about safe ways to find work abroad.

Better still, the capitalist press has now revealed something else that has been kept pretty quiet, an imminent communist guerrilla victory in Nepal which has 15 million people, and which, while not necessarily typical of much of the rest of Asia, is nevertheless bigger than Cuba and, if allowed to develop a planned economy for its teeming poor, could become as influential an example to neighbouring states of what can be achieved by anti-imperialist development as the Castro regime has become for Latin America (and beyond), and another constant humiliation for the monopoly capitalist way of mismanaging the world:

Across the valleys and remote mountains of rural Nepal, other police officers were last night also weighing their odds of survival. They are not good. This once-forbidden Hindu kingdom, with its serene mountains, ancient wooden temples and rugged treks, is being transformed from a backpackers' paradise into a bloody battleground.

The country is sliding inexorably into civil war. The 'enemy' are Maoists - left-wing guerrillas who have been waging a little noticed campaign over the past five years to transform Nepal into a people's republic.

Gradually, the world is waking up to the fact that they are winning. Yesterday saw yet another onslaught: this time at Naumule, in Dailekh district, 343 miles west of the capital, Kathmandu.

'They [rebels] attacked a security post late on Friday killing 27 policemen,' Nepal's Home Minister, Ram Chandra Poudel, announced yesterday.

Two years ago it would have been ridiculous to suggest that Kathmandu itself might fall to, a Maoist advance. Now the suggestion is no longer so laughable.

The success of this geographically diffuse rebellion can be explained by Nepal's overwhelming poverty - and by the feebleness and decadence of successive administrations in Kathmandu. About 80 per cent of Nepal's 23 million inhabitants are subsistence farmers. They lead medieval-style lives of appalling hardship. And they have seen no benefit from either the tourist industry or the arrival of democracy a decade ago

The Maoists, who initially took part in the democratic process only to abandon it later, are strongest in parts of the country where there has been no or little development. In the western Maoist stronghold of Rolpa, life expectancy is just 52. Per capita income is less than £70 a year.

And while the rhetoric of the Maoists' shadowy leader, Comrade Prachanda, might strike western observers as reminiscent of Monty Python ('I seriously hate revisionism,' he once said), his message of revolutionary justice has won an enthusiastic response.

He now has thousands of armed supporters from among a rural underclass with nothing to lose: from women, from peasants at the bottom of the caste heap, and from the unemployed.

'They are exploiting the communication gap between the elitist rulers in Kathmandu and the common people,' Kapil Shrestha, of Nepal's Human Rights Commission, said. 'Nepal's rulers have failed to comprehend the aspirations of the rural poor.'

Since the insurgency began in February 1996, the country's ephemeral governments have failed to get to grips with the problem. Events, meanwhile, are spinning out of control.

Nepal's current Prime Minister, Girifa Prasad Koirala, is accused of taking huge kickbacks in a bizarre deal to lease a Boeing 767 from the Austrian airline Lauda for the country's carrier, Royal Nepal Airlines. Few expect him to survive for long. Nepal's parliament has not functioned for two months because of the scandal.

The Maoists, meanwhile, are consolidating their grip: they are now active in 60 of the country's 75 provinces and have 'liberated' most of the thinly populated west of the country. Here, they have established people's banks and courts.

Driving into the hills last week, where the Maoists have several secret bases, The Observer found compelling evidence of how far their influence has spread: terrified villagers, demoralised police, a trail of selective assassination.

Three hours' drive out of Kathmandu, you reach the little-visited province of Sindhupalchowk. There are no other cars. The road rises steeply through terraces of brown and green wheat. The mountain drops hazily into the valley.

Further up, barefoot women and children cut branches and twigs along the dusty roadside. None of them, however, wants to talk about the Maoists.

At Chautara, a one-street village deep in the interior, where 3,000 people live, a few locals are more forthcoming. 'The problem is getting worse. The Maoist power is increasing. The police power is decreasing. Mentally the police have lost it,'  councillor Tulsi Shresta said.  

'These terrorists are very dedicated' Chautara's local district commander, who declined to be named, admitted. 'They are successful at psychological propaganda. We used to get information about them from the villagers. But now they are too scared to co-operate. I never thought it would be like this when I joined the police.'

The village - and thousands like it in mid-western, central and eastern Nepal - is notionally under government control. But in reality the Maoists rule. The police rarely venture out of barracks, especially at night.

'Having killed three Maoists five months ago, I'm no longer scared. They tried to ambush us but we were ready,' one constable, Bhuwan Thumpa, boasted.

The statistics suggest otherwise: 30 policemen were massacred in Rukum last week when the rebels launched a direct assault on their heavily fortified headquarters. Five more policemen were killed in an ambush at Dolakha, 90 miles east of Kathmandu, on the other side of the country.

This rural insurrection, which draws its inspiration from Peru's Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and on Mao's own writings, has scarcely affected the tens of thousands of western tourists who flood into Nepal. The Maoists have been careful not to target foreigners - and to stay away from the popular trekking routes around Annapurna and Everest.

But there are signs this is changing too. A Maoist general strike called two days ago was effective: shutting Kathmandu and closing the T-shirt shops, bagel stores, and e-mail kiosks in Thamel, the main tourist quarter.

Taxis and private vehicles stayed off the roads. Backpackers with flights to catch were forced to hire cycle rickshaws to get to the airport, a ludicrous £8 journey taking one hour.

Tourists are gradually realising that not all is well in Nepal - and that this charming kingdom could go the way of Afghanistan, a hippy mecca in the Seventies torn apart by war. 

Back at Chautara, meanwhile, as dusk falls, the police officers are singing Nepal's national anthem in the station's compound. Their hearts do not appear to be in it. The district commander is deciding who gets to stay in barracks and who has to man the more remote outposts where ambush is distinctly probable.

'Some posts are geographically not good,' he says. 'What do I tell my men?'

Nice belittling touch for the Observer report to sneer 'Monty Python' at Comrade Prachanda for declaring his hatred of Revisionism, (recalling the Life of Brian hilarious satire of sectarian squabbling between useless rival 'Judean Front' liberators). 

But to the living fate of the multibillion international working class, the fatal catastrophes caused by Revisionism are no joke. Linked to the earlier-discussed problem of revolutionary unreadiness, nearly 1 million Indonesian communists, for example, were butchered by the Western-backed fascist-military dictatorship coup in 1965 because of Revisionism's insistence that 'peaceful coexistence' would see off imperialism rather than any need for further revolutionary advances worldwide.

But it is Indonesia which provides the other current event development re-establishing the importance of the scientific Marxist-Leninist revolutionary perspective. Western stock exchanges totter. Theory insists on revolutionary perspectives. But the need to see on-the-ground revolutionary upheavals is hardly satisfied by such tiny examples as Nepal and Moldova. Korea, Vietnam and Cuba remain relatively too small or too backward to carry much weight as international revolutionary examples yet. And China remains impenetrably Revisionist-impaired (as far as can be deduced, in that completing the world socialist revolution is never mentioned as the most sensible and logical solution to repeated Cold-War problems with imperialist hostility, cheating, and aggressiveness.)

Revolution in Indonesia, however, - the world's fourth most populous state - and one of the world's richest in resources, would establish a significant historical trend again.

As it happens, it is still a long way off. And the full Indonesian state going socialist is in any case now unlikely because capitalist crisis is initially creating far more powerful separatist self-determination struggles than united working-class communist revolutionary struggles against Jakarta and Western exploitation tyranny, specially when the international need to rebuild worldwide the party of revolutionary theory is still little understood or accepted.

But for a picture of insoluble imperialist-system crisis, on the ground and destined to have enormous international repercussions, Indonesia remains hard to beat, in the capitalist press's own admissions:

Exxon's operations in Aceh, the northern tip of Indonesia, are being targeted in a guerrilla war waged by separatists against the Indonesian state. An Exxon plane was fired upon, wounding two local staff, company buses have been targeted with remote controlled bombs planted in the road and other vehicles have been hijacked.

There have been 28 attacks over the past month - firefights, bombings and assaults on vehicles - but the mortar attack early last month was particularly frightening.

The control unit collects natural gas from Exxon's wells and cleans it for delivery to PT Arun NGL, a liquefied natural gas plant owned by Pertamina, the Indonesian state energy company.

No one knows what might happen if an LNG plant were hit with explosives. A study on a receiving terminal in Boston suggested that the liquid fuel could spread for miles, freezing everything in its path. Only then would it vaporise and ignite.

Exxon is not hanging around to find out what really happens. On March 9 the company announced it was shutting down its operations in Aceh and pulling its staff out of the area. Last week the conflict escalated, with the army accused of murdering three human-rights workers on an official visit to the region.

It is a bitter blow for the Americans. The PT Arun NGL plant was a "company maker" for Mobil, which discovered the Arun gasfield. At its peak in the early 1990s, Arun was shipping 13 million tonnes of LNG and the plant was delivering a quarter of Mobil's profits.

Since then, production has been on the wane but last year the company loaded 117 cargoes, totalling some 6.5 million tonnes. Deutsche Bank's analysts reckon that ExxonMobil would have earned E500 million this year from its Sumatra operation, until the shooting began. '"They must be devastated [the plant] has stopped," Paul Sankey, oil analyst for Deutsche, says. "The plant is paid off. It's a money machine."

This is no local difficulty. LNG is critical to the world's energy security and Indonesia, racked by civil strife, is a big exporter. TotalfinaElf, the French oil and gas company is a big investor in Bontang, Indonesia's largest LNG plant, located on the eastern side of the island of Borneo.

Exporting 20 million tonnes of LNG per year, worth some $7 million (E4.9 million) per day in revenues, the plant is vital for Indonesia's financial security. However, the state of Kalimantan is no tropical paradise. Ethnic rivalry has led to a murderous campaign by indigenous Dayak tribal people against immigrants. So far the Bontang plant has escaped the mayhem.

East of Borneo, another troubled island is awaiting a big foreign investment. Our own BP wants to develop Tangguh, a gasfield in Irian Jaya. It is reputed to contain 18 trillion cu ft of reserves. An LNG plant will convert the gas molecules into dollar bills for BP. The market is likely to be China where BP has just won a contract to build an LNG receiving terminal in Guangdong. Unfortunately, Irian Jaya is a political and social pressure cooker.

General Suharto, the former dictator, sought to dominate the remote islands of Indonesia's archipelago by colonising them with settlers from Java. The policy has brought open warfare to East Timor, guerrilla fighting to Aceh and civil strife in Borneo.

Many believe that Irian Jaya could become the next East Timor, with the local, Christian Papuan people turning on the Muslim settlers. There have already been riots and killings and last June a tribal conference demanded West Papuan independence. Like Aceh, the resentment is about the perceived plundering by Jakarta of the region's natural resources. The focus is the US mining company Freeport McMoRan and its Grasberg mine, a massive copper and gold deposit in the highlands. BP's Tangguh LNG project is unlikely to escape notice.

Oil companies are obvious targets and BP is taking a political risk with such high-profile investment in a troubled area. Exxon people have received threats of death and extortion. The Free Aceh Movement warts Exxon to pay a tax, claiming that revenue from the gasfields, most of which accrues to the Indonesian government, is rightfully theirs.

Exxon refuses to pay "any illegal fee or taxes" or to talk to the rebels.

"Our partner is the Government of Indonesia and we don't get involved in internal politics in any of the 200 countries in which we operate."

Exxon's orthodox "no politics" policy is the typically blinkered approach taken by multinationals in unstable countries. It is the same problem that has afflicted Shell in Nigeria, Rio Tinto in Papua New Guinea and almost every oil or mineral explorer across the globe. It is spreading to new areas.

The world is changing in LNG's favour. Gas prices are rising and both China and India want to convert dirty, coal-based power stations to gas. Asia currently consumes about 72 million tonnes of LNG per year while the potential supply from Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and as far west as Qatar and Oman is 86 million tonnes. Within five years, Deutsche Bank forecasts demand to rise to 100 million tonnes.

Asia needs LNG suppliers. The shutdown of PT Arun has sent the Japanese and Koreans scurrying to Petronas, the Malaysian state energy company, to fill the gap. The summer should not be a problem, but if Arun remains shut into the winter, buyers may have to look to the Middle East for replacement tonnes.

The multinationals are not sitting idle. In addition to BP's Tangguh, Shell has plans for a $10 billion LNG plant on the Russian-occupied island of Sakhalin, a short sea voyage to Korea and northern China. Plans are also in place to expand Australia's North West Shelf LNG project.

But the gas from these projects will not be shipped until the middle of the decade. By then we can expect demand from emerging markets like China and India to have soared.

An even bigger energy customer is likely to be combing the Asia/Pacific markets in the near future. In California the price of gas has reached absurd levels as the state staggers from brownout to black-out. El Paso Corporation said last month that it would import five million tonnes of LNG from Australia in 2005.

In an attempt to avoid prohibitive Californian planning laws, El Paso will build its receiving terminal in Mexico and pipe gas into the US. "Economically, it makes sense, despite the distance," Sankey says. "The gas price in California has reached the equivalent of a $500 barrel of oil." Shell also has its eye on a Mexican beachhead to the US market.

Energy is a top priority for George W. Bush, so the State Department's eye could soon light on small places in Asia with big reserves of gas. When Aceh, Borneo, Irian Jaya or even Eastern Siberia become critical for the energy security of China, Japan and the US, the world needs to take note. The indigenous people of Aceh have already noticed.

Simultaneously, Turkey's recent financial collapse is now currently translating into revolutionary unrest; another huge and significant country:

Demonstrators took to Turkish city streets for the third day in succession yesterday in protest against government inaction and crippling economic hardship, raising the fear of social instability and prompting political leaders to call for calm.

"You're sucking our blood," banners at a rally in Istanbul read. "You're a disgrace to the country."

So far the protests have been small, but the anger seems to be growing: trade unions are planning huge protests later this month.

Union leaders say that more than 500,000 people have lost their jobs this year, most of them since the current economic crisis began in February

What must worry the government is that many of the protesters do not appear to be particularly politicised: they have simply reached the point where they can no longer earn a living.

Shopkeepers who say they have gone for several days without making a single sale have been joined on the streets by taxi drivers who can no longer afford the price of fuel.  Throughout the country there are fears of a social explosion. 

The lira has lost nearly half its value against the dollar in the past six weeks, and the price of imported goods has soared. Petrol rose a further 20% earlier this week, and there were additional rises in the prices of alcohol, sugar and tobacco yesterday.

It is not just the government that is facing angry criticism however. When the main opposition leader, Recai Kutan visited Istanbul's Covered Bazaar yesterday he, too, was heckled and jeered by irate tradesmen. Many Turks have lost confidence in the entire political class.

Jobs have been lost in all sectors of the economy. Shoe-making and textiles have been particularly affected, and nearly a quarter of the 14,000 journalists and technicians employed in the Turkish media have been sacked as companies have cut costs. 

Widespread disgust at the way politicians have reacted to the crisis has intensified as people have realised how much institutionalised corruption has contributed to their current plight. State-run banks, controlled by whichever political party is in power,  have run up losses of about £14bn, largely by handing out bad loans in return for political favours. 

"We don't trust any of them any more," an Istanbul shopkeeper, Mehmet Aktas, said as he held up a placard reading, "Government Resign -  Why should we?"

As the rumblings of social unrest have grown, so have constant rumours of a change of government. Last week the national security council felt the need to issue a formal statement rejecting speculation that an "Interim regime" of technocrats, backed by the military, might take over.

The government has been bitterly criticized for failing to respond to the crisis quickly enough, but the prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, said yesterday that he would not resign.

One small businessman, stranded with a hard currency debt he cannot pay, threw his cash register down the stairs of the prime minister's office as Mr Ecevit left the building on Wednesday.

Mr Ecevit has admitted that there is an urgent need to help ordinary people. The government is trying to put together a new economic strategy to replace the IMF-backed anti-inflation programme which collapsed in February.

But despite all this and because it is only the tiny EPSR which collects such material together to insist that a revolutionary analysis of the world is alone in the interests of the working class, deliberately challenging the far bigger and more numerous 'left reformist' groups and parties, the philosophical objection still lurks that imperialism has survived every 'crisis' anticipation since 1945, superficially strengthening its world position all the time, and continuously creating far faster production-expansion and globalisation-spread than the international impact that any planned economies have ever had; and that no irrefutable evidence exists that world imperialist domination will not continue to be able to do so (with the right mixture of violent aggression, bullying exploitation, and cunningly degenerate sops, cheating divisiveness, and tyrannical corruption.)

Philosophically, this argument is as bent as they come. The Marxist understanding of history is that the rational organisation of society's affairs, and the power of reason, have increasingly triumphed as civilisation has progressed through druidic tribalism, to slave states, to feudalism, to capitalism, and now on the verge of a planned world socialist economy, with scientific understanding replacing all subjective-idealism and superstition. The only alternative is a never-ending nightmare of class-ruled drug-controlled tyranny as the conclusion of civilisation's progress. If the Marxist view is to be held to, then detailed rational analysis of world developments, [no?? - ed] different from the EPSR's, is needed if useless 'left reformist pressure' is not to be the pathetic alternative outcome. Merely insisting that the perspective is for imperialism to hang on much longer and much more stubbornly in contradistinction to the EPSR's collection of evidence showing the unmistakable trend of developments towards revolutionary crisis, - is not much of an argument.

This view of imperialist corruption's staying power and recovery power is also under strain from some more hard factual evidence. If imperialist power and know-how is so vast, then why has it failed for ten years to lift the increasingly deepening clouds from over Japan's frighteningly stagnant economic situation, making mocking gibberish of all monopoly-capitalism's supposed economic-expansion expertise???

Life as a "salaryman" ended for Mr Tomita in the summer of 1999. He had reached the level of section chief with a medium-size building contractor when he was made redundant and promised help in finding a new job. Most of his working life -  25 years – had been spent, with the one company, but he was philosophical. Lifetime employment was something people took for granted when he started out, but no longer. "Nobody, not even in the biggest companies, can say for sure they won't find themselves in my position tomorrow."

Disappointed in his search for another job, he left home after rows with his wife, spent some time in cheap hotels and took to sleeping rough to conserve the last of his savings.

"Some people think we live like this out of choice, because we don't want to work," he said. "But it's not like that. There's 40, 50 people after every job. I can't even get an interview any more."

In the early 1990s street sleepers were almost unknown in Japan. A decade of stagnation has brought large-scale lay-offs, as companies that once promised lifetime employment have cut their payrolls. Latest figures show unemployment at 4.7 per cent, down from January's record 4.9 per cent, but extremely high by Japanese standards.

Encampments of the homeless have sprung up, including a village of shacks lining both banks of the Sumida River, which bisects the capital. In the heart of the city, more than 100 men and a cluster of women camp out in cardboard structures across the road from the £350-a-night Imperial Hotel. According to the city authorities, Tokyo has 5,700 homeless, double the figure five years ago, out of a national total of 23,210.

Charity workers estimate that the true figure for Tokyo is closer to 16,000 and more than 100,000 nationwide. They criticise the authorities for ignoring the issue. Only in recent months have funds been allocated for temporary shelters for the homeless.

The latter, many huddled under bridges or in corners of underground passages, are different from their Western counterparts, who may have been brought low by alcoholism or drug abuse. Most of Japan's homeless have lost their jobs as the world's second-biggest economy deteriorated. Most are between 45 and 55, an age at which jobs are hard to find.

Seventy per cent of Tokyo's homeless came to be so after losing their jobs and 80 per cent want to get back to work, according to a survey by the city government last month.

In Hibiya Park, a stone's throw from the Emperor's palace, laundry hanging over branches of trees shows where the rough sleepers live. Here a community of homeless people has taken shape. They help each other out, taking turns to remove the rubbish.

A Salvation Army worker who hands out food says that there is little crime. The homeless are less rowdy and more tidy than the parties of salarymen who swig sake under the blossoms then leave litter behind. Relief groups say that the problem will not go away while unemployment is high, especially for men in late middle age.

Mr Tomita has neither given up hope nor lost his pride. Some homeless earn 1,000 to 2,000 yen (£5-£10) by "reserving" the best spots under the cherry trees. He prefers to disappear until the blossoms, and the crowds, have scattered.

Every evening crowds lugging sake, picnic boxes and even karaoke machines come to binge in the park, with hanami, Japans beloved spring ritual of blossom viewing, as the pretext.

"They won't want to see a scruffy type like me, it'll spoil their enjoyment, won't it?" Mr Tomita, 51, whose life has been destroyed by the country's worst economic slump, said.

So he preferred to melt away, packing up the cardboard kennel in which he sleeps, to join an acquaintance in a tiny shack beside the Tama River. He admits that he feels uncomfortable when the groups arrive from work, still in their dark suits, to carouse on a tarpaulin spread beneath a cherry tree.

That very latest capitalist-press admission on Japan’s formerly 'golden economy' raises the question of ideological struggle to spread Marxist scientific argument so widely that it itself becomes another one of the 'material forces' which decide the outcome of the class struggle and society's history, and a not unimportant force in the view of Marxism-Leninism itself. 

A crucial part of that spread, based on describing actual events and explaining them, has got to be, Engels insisted, a perspective on the inevitable law-governed collapse-in-crisis of every imperialist-manufactured boom, however vast and successful. Workers really do need to know, and to be constantly reminded, that these brilliant imperialist-world consumerist pyrotechnics really will explode into unbelievable warmongering disaster and slump (class war, civil war, inter-imperialist war) at some stage, and the whole system sometimes lurching quite suddenly and dramatically.

The EPSR's line is to say no more than this, and to keep supplying the latest factual evidence to back it up, - but to say no less than that, either.

At the very far extreme of hesitancy about how far imperialist crisis has gone, full-time petty-bourgeois defeatism eschews 'crisis-ism' to so great an extent that it ends up not just doubting the speed of developments, but effectively putting a dampener on the understanding of the very direction history is taking - towards communist revolution. In Ireland's developments against British imperialism, for example, it ends up denying their revolutionary direction completely, effectively joining the counter-revolution in defeatism's faint praise (SLP, Trots, Socialist Alliance, CP assorted remnants, etc) for the heroic achievements of Sinn Féin and the IRA.

The EPSR is aware of the difficulties in getting a response to its attempts to revive Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding and methods of revolutionary agitation, but it should never be forgotten how phenomenally successful they were when briefly finding a public platform within the first broad rallying round Scargill's SLP initiative, - or how quickly 'left' opportunism then moved to make sure that the EPSR's voice was just as quickly silenced and trashed to prevent its influence spreading even faster and further and taking a real hold.

Such outdated and reactionary sectarian control and censorship over a workers movement is boring old hat, doomed to ultimate uselessness.

But the ideas and understanding that the EPSR briefly brought to the SLP are not just very much still alive but become clearer and more illuminating all the time.

The Marxist-Leninist science of imperialist crisis is what will eventually triumph, - or civilisation is a dead issue. Philistines will jump one way, communists the other. Build Leninism.

EPSR supporters.

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

New Labour again betrays Good Friday deal through ignorant stupidity and natural British-imperialist reactionariness.

THE COMMENTS made by 	British Secretary of State John Reid are not only a portent of further difficulties, if not disaster, in the Peace Process, but they are also a sign that the British/unionist axis has been strengthened by his appointment.

Reid made his outburst in an interview with the Boston Globe. Warning that the Peace Process was entering a "critical phase", the British Minister said that progress could not be achieved while, he claimed, Sinn Féin negotiators have "guns under the table".

"Protestants know that the negotiating partner still has a gun under the table," he said. "It is a large step forward that he is not shooting at you but the next step is that he leaves the gun in the next room."

Throughout the interview Reid mentioned nothing of policing, demilitarisation, loyalist weapons, loyalist attacks or the attempts by unionism to subvert the Good Friday Agreement.

His comments were insultingly simplistic and misleading, portraying the British Government as the honest broker, the school teacher-type figure who is earnestly trying to sort it all out. If this is the false scenario of Reid's agenda, then he might as well give up and go home.

Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly reacted strongly this week. "John Reid's comments are of no assistance to the Peace Process," he said. "The fact of the matter is that it is totally unhelpful and entirely disingenuous of John Reid or anybody else to attempt to blame the problems currently dogging the Peace Process on republican weapons." Kelly said Reid would be better employed concentrating on living up to the obligations his government signed up to in the Good Friday Agreement and which they again reiterated in May of last year.

The decision of the British Government to quash warrants for the arrest of eight republican activists 'on the Tun' this week was, however, cautiously welcomed by Sinn Féin. The party's vice president, Pat Doherty, said the move represented a "step forward" in tackling the issue of outstanding warrants against republicans but urged that all outstanding cases be dealt with. 

'This is a useful step in tackling an important issue. It will come as a relief to the individuals involved and their families," he said. "We are in process of conflict resolution and this issue needs to be sorted out. There was an acknowledgement by the British Government last year that this anomaly had arisen in light of the Good Friday Agreement but it need to be addressed in its entirety."

Meanwhile,  Doherty said republicans are deeply frustrated at the recent antics of UUP leader David Trimble. "Republicans have honoured all of the commitments they made under the Good Friday Agreement. It is David Trimble and the British Government who have dishonoured the commitments they entered into.

The British Government, by its failure to challenge his actions, is encouraging unionist intransigence and inflexibility. If the crisis in the Peace Process is to be resolved then the British government has to grasp the nettle. They have to implement Patten, produce a proactive programme of demilitarisation and instruct David Trimble to stop acting unlawfully."

Implementation of the Patten Report may be fast becoming a vacant aspiration, with RUC Chief Constable, Ronnie Flanagan, unveiling a list of tacit 'reforms' to his organisation this week.  

The new RUC structures, which represent no fundamental change to the organisation, were rubbished by Sinn Féin's policing spokesperson, Gerry Kelly, this week. 'The nationalist community will not support a re-packaged RUC," Kelly said. 

"It is an unacceptable paramilitary force. The test is whether the British Government is willing to confront its system to realize the commitments they undertook on Good Friday; because the chief resistance to change on the central issue has emanated not from the unionists but from the securocrats in the British system." 

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

It is no coincidence that Johnny Adair's UDA have borrowed a modern Rangers anthem, 'Simply The Best', to strut their fascist stuff at Drumcree

There is now a regular body count of Catholics after every Old Firm game. Last season, a young man called McFadden with Donegal connections was stabbed to death - his crime was wearing a Celtic top. Another young man escaped death by the strength of his sternum - he was shot in the chest by a crossbow. He survived, to the bafflement of medics.

James Hardie was watching TV with his kids at his home in Drumchapel. A man burst into his home and stabbed him repeatedly. Drumchapel is the peripheral housing estate on the Northwest edge of Glasgow that produced George Seawright.

It has the twin social poisons of poverty and loyalism. I spent time there as a youth worker in the 1980s. I know the place well; I looked into its soul. I came away from Drumchapel with a settled view that loyalism in Scotland would, one day, be a major social problem which the Scottish nation would have to deal with.

If James Hardie's killer is ever brought to justice, then it would surprise no one if he benefits from the eloquent sophistry of Donald Findlay QC. Findlay was Vice-Chairman of Rangers until he was filmed singing sectarian loyalist party tunes. Before being outed, Findlay had represented a number of loyalists in Scottish courts. No doubt they still call on his services.

Jason Campbell, a UVF thug who slashed a young man's throat to the spine, was heading for a conviction for murder. Findlay got the charge reduced by the skill of his courtroom oratory. Campbell's victim was Mark Scott. He had made the fatal error of walking through Bridgeton in the East End of Glasgow wearing a Celtic Top.

What shocked nice polite Scottish society was that Mark Scott could've been one of their own (i.e. not a working-class Taig). Mark Scott's dad is a leading Scottish surgeon and a Protestant. His mother is a Catholic. Nice, middle class, tolerant, they allowed Mark to support Celtic. It cost him his life.

The Scottish media, even presented with this opportunity, chose not to examine this twisted sectarian belief system. 

The culture that Rangers nurtures every match day is an open sewer that no one in Scottish society seems willing or able to address. It is no co-incidence that Johnny Adair's UDA have borrowed a modern Rangers anthem, Simply The Best, to strut their fascist stuff at Drumcree.

The badge of a Harryville protestor was a Rangers scarf worn as a mask. Rangers keeper Andy Goram was photographed in his home in a room that could only be described as a shrine to loyalism. This is no ordinary soccer club.

The club's unofficial battle hymn for generations has been The Billy Boys. It commemorates the exploits of the inter-war Glasgow gang of that name, founded by Billy Fullerton.

Fullerton was one of Mosely's Blackshirts, a member of the British Union of Fascists and a founder member of the Ku Klux Klan in Scotland. His razor-wielding gang weighed in on the side of the state during the 1926 General Strike: Many of the Billy Boys received Certificates of Commendation from the Secretary of State for Scotland for services rendered during the General Strike.

There is a rich vein of fascism in Scotland stretching back to those days. It almost always wears a Rangers shirt.

There is no nationalist equivalent. Simply none.

The British Left wrap themselves up in a comfort blanket that says 'both sides are as bad as each other'. This holds about as much water as saying that the Metropolitan Police would not have dealt with the Stephen Lawrence affair differently if Lawrence had have been a white kid who had been murdered by a group of black thugs.

No one seriously believes that anywhere. The Met are racists and the targets of that racism are the lower orders of English society. That means Black and Irish. In Glasgow it means a Catholic with, usually, an Irish surname.

An Irish surname is a major indicator in Scotland that you will be unemployed and that your dad was long-term unemployed. It is also a major indicator that you will have worse health than someone without an Irish surname - even when socio-economic factors are allowed for.

What Scottish society and the Scottish political elite -  now complete with their own legislature - cannot, it would appear, come to terms with, is that there remains problem of anti-Catholic anti-Irish discrimination in Scottish society.

That discrimination legitimises the sick heads that killed Mark Scot and James Hardie, the killing of Taigs if the Rangers defence has an off day. Because in Scotland 2000 its still OK to be down on Taigs.

This fixture list slaughter hardly raises a comment from the concerned chattering classes now flying around the Scottish parliament. This is because Catholics still predominate in the lower socio-economic orders and it is an unwritten subtext that Catholics in Scotland, because so many of them have maintained an emotional attachment to Ireland, are not really full members of Scottish society.

For many in the West of Scotland, that is an accurate picture of their mindset. It is certainly the sense of identity I grew up with. We were expatriate Irish. That identity would not be a problem in New York; in Glasgow it can be a stabbing offence.

The next Old Firm game will have more deaths. They will be Catholics. As the graffiti in Portadown says 'Any Fenian Will Do'.

At least on this island we recognise Adair's belief system as a social problem. Even that nice Fintan O'Toole said it was a Bad Thing in the Irish Times. There is a wide consensus on this island, and not just among nationalists, that those Drumcree protestors are a social problem. They have a belief system that has no place in an agreed Ireland.

Scotland is still in denial. That is why the killing will continue. 

The past month has seen an increase in attempts by the Scottish Special Branch to force people into working for them.. Several people have been approached throughout Scotland in a co-ordinated attempt to intimidate and harass republican activists.

As well as targeting republicans, the police have been using threats against members of the wider Irish community in an attempt to alienate republicans.

Within the last week, a 37 year-old from Livingston, West Lothian, was visited at his girlfriend's house early in the morning by two males who identified themselves as Special Branch officers. The man was questioned about visits to the James Connolly Bookshop in Edinburgh. He was then asked if he could get information on republican activities in Baste central Scotland. When he replied he could not and would not help them, they told him "there was plenty of money if he would help them". When he again refused they insisted on leaving their names and phone numbers and threateningly told him he lived in an area with plenty of loyalists who might think he was fund-raising for the IRA. 

The next day a younger man was visited at his home in Edinburgh by a male and female, who at first identified themselves as Drugs Squad and only once they were in his house did they say they were in fact Special Branch and "wanted to discuss his (republican) Tattoo". He was also offered "plenty of money" in return for information about "what republicans are thinking". When he also refused to help them, they also left their names and phone numbers and reminded him of a court case he has coming up.

These incidents are only the latest in a series of attempts to recruit people to spy on republicans. Recently in Glasgow, a Black Taxi driver was arrested as he ended his shift at 4am by plain clothed and uniformed police. When the man reached Aitkenhead Road police station, the plain clothed officers identified themselves as Special Branch and proceeded to show him wedding pictures showing him in the company of local republicans. They also played him tape recordings of republicans.

He was asked to pass information about several named republicans and was then shown a bag of money which they said was "£25,000, enough to buy your own taxi".

That figure was doubled when a former member of a republican flute band found himself in a court cell awaiting a hearing on an assault charge. He was told he had two visitors. He was asked by the branch to drink in the same pubs as certain named republicans. When people travelled from Ireland for Celtic matches he was to befriend them. If he agreed to help them he would receive £50,000. Like the other examples given he refused and approached local republicans to tell them what had happened.

Harassment of republicans at the ports, particularly Troon, has also increased.

These are just examples of a systematic campaign against republicans in Scotland who are working to support Sinn Féin and the Good Friday Agreement.