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 
Subscriptions (£20 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074     [P&P Bulletin Publications PO 80X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.] 
No 1116 December 11 2001                                                                                                                                  25p                                                                                                                                        
Northwest seminar Sat. Feb 23. Pse collect receipts

Third-World guerrilla-terror fightback is no long-term historical solution to Western imperialist-tyranny but it IS what is happening, and Marxist science makes mincemeat of fake-'left' failure to relate Sept 11, etc, to world-economic crisis, and inability to do anything but join bourgeois 'moral condemnation' hypocrisy. Insoluble contradictions of monopoly-capitalist accumulation system will produce endless Bin Ladens, from which the only way forward is through conscious Bolshevik Party building, which superseded Narodnik feudal-arcadian terrorism but never condemned it. Catholic-nationalist Provo triumph over 'Northern Ireland' colonising tyranny, a victory sneered at by the 'socialist' posturing demagogues of the Alliance and the SLP, shows need for objective appraisal of all anti-imperialist movements and forces, not subjective wishful-thinking by 'left' Walter Mittys. The Western blitzkrieg on Afghanistan is far closer to fascism than is the Taleban, and crying 'Wolf' by the swamp only condemns the opportunist confusion-mongering by the fake 'left', not 3rd World anti-imperialism.

The complexities in the historical journey of class war and revolutionary nationalism towards the overthrow of the imperialist system, since the Revisionist self-destruction of the Soviet workers state and the Socialist Camp, have plunged fake-'lefts' into theoretical chaos.

Sept 11, Palestinian suicide-bombers, or anarchist street-fighting in Genoa have all been declared "the wrong struggle" variously by every Trot and Stalinist sectarianism from the Socialist Alliance to the SLP, Lalkar, and beyond, - the 'swamp'.

But they are what is happening, - caused by imperialist world repression and its insoluble 'surplus capital' economic crisis which is increasingly pushing monopoly-bourgeois ideology towards big-power warmongering fascist aggression against any resistance to Western (i.e. American) domination.

As Lenin explained in Guerrilla War (1906), it is ludicrous for the socialist revolution to "condemn" episodic terrorist turmoil. Instead, it needs to spread its own influence so as to give a believable direction and leadership to anti-Ruling-Class hatred.

In their futility and frustration, confusion and self-conceit has dragged 'left' sects beyond the disgraceful attempt to set up Black Bloc anarchists for a beating as 'police provocateurs' to even nastier bourgeois class-collaboration, cheering on the slaughter of al-Quaeda as "no great loss", and even fingering Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorism for "condemnation" too, effectively providing a 'left' cover for further imperialist blitzkrieg massacres.

This theoretical chaos needs to read Lenin, study history, and look objectively at exactly what is happening in the world to produce Sept 11 after a decade of increasing imperialist warmongering-fascist aggression.

It would be marvellous if there was a Palestinian Viet Cong to give Marxist-Communist leadership to the struggle against Zionist colonisation and tyranny, but it was precisely the Revisionism and Trotskyism which produced these arm-chair-revolutionary defeatists in Britain which also buried Leninism without trace in Palestine too,- 'swamp'.

Hamas has a reactionary religious ideology and equally backward international sponsors and will undoubtedly fail to inspire the whole Palestinian nation, Vietnam-style, to a successful national-liberation socialist revolution. 

But that the Hamas guerrilla war is leading the fight against Zionist-imperialist tyranny is also indisputable, inspiring the whole Intifada.

The socialist revolution needs its own independent propaganda in Palestine and its own fighting units, but while marching separately, they need to strike together with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and anyone else willing to topple the Zionist colonisation.

Hamas suicide bombing, for all its flaws and weaknesses both long-term and short-term from a Marxist perspective, is nevertheless WHAT IS HAPPENING on the front line against Zionist-imperialist tyranny. As Lenin explains, the socialist revolution is abandoning the fight completely by simply rejecting what Hamas is doing. The only serious critique that will deserve a hearing is one which gives alternative anti-Zionist fighting leadership from the front. All other purely academic carping should be treated with the contempt it deserves as little better than pro-imperialist, class-collaborative defeatism.

As obvious as all this is from a Leninist point of view, unbelievably some theoretical confusion on the fake-'left' has actually accepted the 'logic' of the generally confused and cowardly "condemnation" of Sept 11 and condemned Palestinian guerrilla-war terrorism as well.

This takes Revisionist degeneration into qualitatively new territory, and is already a widely-observed anti-communist phenomenon.

This is 'New World order' defeatism gone totally pro-imperialist. It is the historical equivalent of the Revisionist leaders of the Second International initially voting for war credits in their 'own' parliaments in 1914 "purely for the self-defence purposes of our 'own' country", but rapidly being transformed into open social chauvinists as World War I murderously and humiliatingly progressed, or into shamefaced ones (i.e. social pacifists, idiotically bleating 'No to war' as the Juggernauts of the imperialist economic-survival crisis clashed on).

All sorts of 'justification' is put forward, now as then, as to why such class-collaboration is 'necessary', - invariably along the racist-chauvinist lines that the enemy fighting one's 'own' imperialist state is "even MORE reactionary" than the home team, and so the "lesser of two evils" has to be sided with.

Unbelievably, fake-'lefts' like the CPGB, and others in the Socialist Alliance, are spouting this degenerate opportunism right now, denouncing the pathetic Islamic naïvety of such insubstantial lightweight sects as al-Qaeda as "dangerous reactionary anti-imperialism whose religious feudalism would drag civilisation back historically", etc, even as the only truly dominant, direction-setting force an earth, Western imperialism, was in the process of inflicting such atrocities as the two massacres of prisoners at Mazar-I-Sherif (see EPSRs 1114 & 1115), and continuing the merciless blitzkrieg brutality, bombing more than 3,000 innocent civilian casualties to death so far in Afghanistan.

It is derisible fantasy to pretend that Osama Bin Laden, or sheikh Yassin, or even Saddam Hussein, can even remotely be considered a "serious fascist threat to the world" as these weird bedfellows Bush, Blair, and the CPGB like to make out.

None want to restore feudalism against capitalist-imperialist world progress; none of them are in the slightest position even to try.

And however 'barbaric', 'primitive', or 'reactionary' any of their actions or programmes can be labelled, it throws all reading of history into impossible confusion to see any of them as the "possible next fascist threat to civilisation".

Firstly, the description of the danger is itself phrased hopelessly misleadingly, causing people to look for fascism in entirely the wrong phenomena.

Secondly, even when correctly stated, there is no way that any regime headed by Saddam, Osama, or Yassin could play the slightest 'fascist' role in inter imperialist warmongering, which is the arena which alone has given 'fascism' its dramatic historical resonance.

It was a specific world-imperialist crisis situation which created the fascist phenomenon, as commonly understood (aggressive warmongering tyranny fuelled by manic ideological extremism of a racist, religious, or mystical flavour). It was not some self-appointed barmpot rabble which created the fascist era.

There have been plenty of would-be lunatic messiahs marching around the political scene for generations.

But there was only one fascist era, - the 1930s when difficult economic world-crisis conditions particularly put the squeeze on some major, or would-be major, imperialist powers who felt they were being denied the chance of colonial expansionist lifelines out of the international slump conditions prevailing universally.

Germany, Japan, and Italy felt especially aggrieved against the colonial-exploitation stranglehold that Britain, France, and the USA in particular had already historically established.

Their 'fascist' ranting about a 'new world order' to keep their own slump-threatened populations bemused by aggressive preparations for expansionist warmongering, set the tone for a row of smaller-power imitators, but was crucially pandered to, up to a certain extent, by the established Big Three imperialist powers who all had a mature grasp of warmongering chauvinism's great potential for keeping state-unity intact during a severe economic crisis, but who also had a huge stake in trying to create a particular imperialist-warmongering conspiracy which might strike at the Soviet workers state.

For a serious repeat of a 'fascist' threat as history knew it, Saddam, Bin Laden, and Yassin would not only need to be the partial inventions of imperialist foreign policy in the first place which then went wrong (as they all in fact are, encouraged as foils for perceived 'greater evils' at the time); but they would also need to be potential state-regimes which could in time become a worldwide military threat (which could go wrong).

For the British fake-'left' to shout 'fascist danger' in unison with imperialism at Saddam, Bin Laden, and Yassin is a) just lunatic fantasy; and b) class-collaborating treachery anyway because any military defeats which ANYONE can inflict on world-dominant imperialism should be ecstatically welcomed by all who have a serious interest in the overthrow of the imperialist system, - defeat in war being the only route well-trodden in history so far for the revolutionary socialist overthrow of a ruling class,(after its defeat and humiliation in a failed inter-imperialist war).

When imperialist powers fought each other, the science of Leninism saw only the opportunity for each working class to topple its OWN ruling class after defeat, setback, or humiliation. NEVER did Leninist science see the social-chauvinist route (of regarding the domineering warmongering aggression of the 'enemy' as "more fascist" than the home government's destructive murderous opportunism and jingoistic hysteria) - as anything but a ludicrous mistake and a catastrophic betrayal of the working class.

For the fake-'lefts' to abandon 100% concentration on looking for the next imperialist defeat, setback, or humiliation while they make utterly useless academic appraisals of how much 'fascist potential' they can see in the regimes targeted by their 'own' imperialist governments for fascist blitzkrieg, -- is such reactionary treachery to everything that serious anti-capitalism has ever been about that all pretence to some kind of 'socialist' ideology by these sects is destroyed completely.

Not a scrap of imperialist foreign policy has ever been anything less than 100% 'fascist' in being willing to blitzkrieg and repress local resistance to whatever extent necessary whenever it could be got away with.

The colonising/domineering tyranny abroad by imperialist powers (Britain, France, USA, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, etc, all the same, exactly like Germany and Italy) for more than 100 years consisted of massacres, torture, concentration camps, starvation, cultural destruction, and total murderous genocide, etc, etc, etc, long before German imperialism gained its international brutality notoriety in the 1930s.

And the butchering, poisoning, torturing, defoliating slaughter in Vietnam by the USA in the 1960s took imperialist tyranny abroad to unprecedented new depths.

The merciless savagery against innocents in Afghanistan right now shows that nothing has changed, ever will change, or ever could change. It is 'fascist' (for whatever use the word is).

For accuracy's sake and for strategy's sake, a distinction only has to be drawn about the organisational nature of imperialist domination at home.

The dictatorship of the capitalist bourgeoisie is permanent until overthrown by socialist revolution, whether the proletarian masses are hoodwinked, swindled, and repressed by 'democratic legal' means or by open dictatorship.

Anti-imperialist tactics, ideology, and means of struggle must adapt to whether the working class is being screwed by a parliament fronting a police-state, or by the police state direct. 

The great danger is in making too much of this difference whereby the catastrophic historic phenomenon of 'reformism' (plus the fake-'left') is able to prevail for ages, limiting the anti-imperialist struggle, effectively, to just "defending this democratic gain" or "winning that human rights extension", etc, etc, but all the time solely determined to limit the fight just to that single issue. 

Such delusions of 'socialist struggle' are not just utterly useless because capitalist states have for more than a century realised that it is far better to rule the working class by conning them with 'parliamentary democracy' than by direct police-state methods, if economic prosperity allows such a 'democratic' luxury.

Such delusions are also totally treacherous, gagging and binding the working class hand and foot to be dominated by bourgeois propaganda and 'representative' betrayals ad infinitum.

The socialist revolution never comes by such means, nor could it ever come by such 'democracy' means.

Such understanding, however, does not rule out the need for mass mobilisation to defend any 'democratic right' whenever appropriate. Such struggles can educate and revolutionise wider sections of workers and middle class who might not yet have seen through the fraud of capitalism and its 'democracy' yet, but might learn this in some 'rights' battle or other, (provided that the revolutionary purpose of all such reformist protest mobilisations has been well argued). 

Warnings are necessary now as the fascist warmongering tone of bourgeois ideology and imperialist aggression, terrified of the global economic crisis the system is facing, starts to spread from the foreign affairs field into imperialism's domestic politics. Even the bourgeois press is getting alarmed:

Everywhere one hears what, if taken literally, amounts to a death knell for the American Dream: rights must be tossed out the window because 'the constitution is not a suicide pact'. It appeals to our sense of helplessness: all we can do at this moment is hope against hope that this military action will indeed bring peace.

This brings me to the second aspect of our Constitutional crisis - that is, the encroachment of our historical freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. The establishment of the new Office of Homeland Security and the passage of the so-called USA Patriot Act has brought into being an unprecedented merger between the functions of intelligence agencies and law enforcement. What this means might be clearer if we used the more straightforward term for intelligence; spying.

Morton Halperin, a defence expert who worked with the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger, worried that if a government intelligence agency 'thinks you're under the control of a foreign government, they can wire-tap you and never tell you, search your house and never tell you, break into your home, copy your hard drive and never tell you that they've done it.' Moreover, says Halperin, upon whose own phone Kissinger placed a tap: 'Historically, the government has often believed that anyone who is protesting government policy is doing it at the behest of a foreign government and opened counter-intelligence investigations of them.'

THE THIRD AND most distressing area of Constitutional concern has been Mr. Bush's issuance of an executive order setting up military tribunals that would deprive even long-time resident aliens of the right to due process of law. The elements of the new order are as straightforward as trains running on time. The president would have the military try non-citizens suspected of terrorism in closed tribunals - rather than courts. No requirement of public charges, adequacy of counsel, usual rules of evidence, nor proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The cases would be presented before unspecified judges, with rulings based on the accusations of unidentified witnesses. The tribunals would have the power to execute anyone so convicted with no right of appeal.

According to polls conducted by National Public Radio, the Washington, Post, and ABC News, approximately 65 per cent of Americans wholeheartedly endorse such measures.

BUSH'S NEW order bypasses not only the American constitution but the laws of most any other democratic nation. It exceeds even the accepted conventions of most military courts. Moreover, since the Anglo-American system of justice is more or less a template for international human rights generally, in bypassing it we position ourselves outside virtually all human rights treaties.

The tribunals also challenge the right to a speedy, public and impartial trial. More than 1,000 immigrants have been arrested and held, approximately 800 with no disclosure of identities or location or charges against them. 'This is frighteningly close to the practice of "disappearing" people in Latin America', according to Kate Martin, director of the Centre for National Security Studies.

Finally, there has been an ominous amount of public vilification of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Such a right is in essence a proscription against the literal arm-twisting that might otherwise be necessary to physically compel someone to testify when they do not wart to. It is perhaps a rather too subtly worded limitation of the use of torture.

While not yet the direct subject of official sanction, torture has suddenly gained remarkable legitimacy. Callers to radio programmes say that we don't always have the 'luxury of following all the rules'; that given recent events, people are 'more understanding' of the necessity for a little behind-the-scenes roughing up. The unanimity of international conventions against torture notwithstanding, one hears authoritative voices - for example, Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official, now a partner in the Washington law firm of Arnold and Porter -  arguing that while torture is not 'authorized', perhaps it could be used in 'emergencies', as long as the person who tortures then presents himself to 'take the consequences'. Most alarming of all, a recent CNN poll revealed that 45 per cent of Americans would not object to torturing someone if it would provide information about terrorism. 

AGAIN, FEW WOULD argue that we be passive in the face of 11 September, but what is shaping up now resembles the kind of secret global force that has created havoc in various parts of Africa or Latin America - where outfits like Executive Outcomes and other corporate armies have been such efficient, brutal, invisible executioners.

In such places, the devastation has been profound. People know nothing so they suspect everything. Deaths are never just accidental. Every human catastrophe is also a mystery and mysteries create ghosts, hauntings, 'blowback', and ultimately new forms of terror.

A Labour MP took the extraordinary step yesterday of writing to Tony Blair and the Speaker, Michael Martin, complaining he had been "physically and verbally attacked" by MPs of his party.

Paul Marsden,  a critic of the Afghan war who has already had a run-in with the chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, wrote after bruising exchanges over the anti-terrorism bill on Tuesday night.

Labour whips dismissed talk of violence as absurd. Liberal Democrats saw at least some exchanges and said they had been fierce. "They were angry and [resentful] of Paul because he is a maverick," said Lembit Opik, a friend of Mr Marsden.

In a three hour procedural battle over the timetable for the bill, ministers were ambushed and lost an obscure procedural vote that they had to rectify last night. Afterwards, around 5am, some MPs went to the Strangers' Bar. With government whips smarting at the setback, one Labour loyalist allegedly pushed Mr Marsden in the back. Another called him "an arsehole".

The climax came, Mr Marsden said, when a whip "put his arm across my throat and leant into my face with his face. He told me, 'If you don't stop this, the whips cannot be responsible for other MPs hurting you."

The increasingly rebellious backbench Labour MP Paul Marsden yesterday seemed to be on the verge of leaving the party after he said he would not attend a "kangaroo court" set up by the party's chief whip, Hillary Armstrong, designed to extract a loyalty pledge from him.

He also called Tony Blair a "lousy" and "God-like" leader, adding: "I'm afraid New Labour is walking away from me and from very basic democratic values".

The latest row came after Ms Armstrong summoned him to a meeting on Monday to explain why he had issued a press release branding Labour whips as thugs and claiming they had attacked him in the early hours of Tuesday in a House of Commons bar.

Mr Marsden said: "I am incensed that Hilary Armstrong and her lackeys have now said that they are not investigating my allegations of being physically and verbally abused, they are investigating me for sending out a press release.

"I find it utterly contemptible and deeply worrying. If I was in a workplace situation making allegations of bullying and I was blamed for it, as the victim, most people would say the employers were utterly appalling. That is precisely what's going on here."

He claimed that Mr Blair was "sending out one of his attack poodles to get me into some sort of kangaroo court to tell me I shouldn't be talking to the press.

The bourgeois imperialist system is showing increased fascist ideological tendencies because it is in an increasingly frightened panic about the potential revolutionary devastating effects of the system's worldwide uncontrollable economic crisis, again as the capitalist press itself is obliged to bear witness to, however unwillingly and however low-key:

Argentina's economic crisis, almost four years long, reached fever pitch last week as the International Monetary Fund appeared to be pulling the plug on the cash-strapped country,  withholding a vital $1.26 billion loan and leaving Argentina hurtling towards the biggest bankruptcy in history.

As queues began to form at banks with people trying to take out as much cash as they could, the government introduced measures to limit withdrawals to $1000 a month.

The move has left many stranded in a culture in which most day-to-day transactions  are still made in cash.

'People are taking this as if the country were going to war,:' said Dr Humberto Gobbi, of the Association of Argentinean Psychiatrists.  'Nobody knows if they will have a job tomorrow or when they will be paid. People are almost paralysed by fear.' 

'There is a sense that the county is in free-fall,' Jacquie Lejbowicz, a psychologist in Buenos Aires, said.

Unemployment has risen from 16 per cent to a record 18.4 per cent in the past three months. According to the independent pollster Equis, every day another 2,000 people fall below the poverty line, living on less than $4 a day. Of the 14 million Argentines now in poverty, half belonged to the country's large middle-class only five years ago. 

A l6-year-old local authority worker, and a furniture-maker, 55,  committed suicide last week because of crippling debts. Both men said in parting messages that the economic crisis had pushed them over the edge. Last year, there were 366 more suicides than the year before, according to government figures. 

While most drugs sales have slumped 10 per cent in the past year pharmaceutical companies say Argentines have bought 13 per cent more anti-depressants and 4 per cent, more tranquillisers. Corner shops carry flyers for anti-stress massages while national newspapers feature advertisements for bankruptcy litigation and sexual impotence cures. 

ANDREA PENA is 33 and wears a brace. So does her partner.  The devices are worn with moulded gadgets provided by Argentine dentists to stop the teeth-grinding that keeps the pair awake at night.

'I am lucky this is the only physical symptom I have because of stress,'  Andrea, a graphic designer at a Buenos Aires bank, said. 'Other people have gastritis, hypertension, panic attacks, - whatever. Everyone is living in permanent fear because no one knows what the future will be.'  

Crises are something of a way of life in this once prosperous country in which no two consecutive governments have survived a full term since the first military coup in 1930. The inhabitants of Buenos Aires are a melancholy, anxious breed, partial to the films of Woody Allen, and producing more psychoanalysts per capita than any other country, But the latest crisis, which began in mid-1998, has brought the nation to its knees.

'Argentina has chronic political and economic crises every seven or eight years, '  Rosendo Fraga, a political analyst, said. 'But this is the worst social crisis we've had.'  

Most economists warned that the country would default on its debt without the IMF's help. Years of lavish public spending and reckless borrowing, have built up a colossal $132bn debt: A $2.2bn interest payment is due this month.  

With the brutal military regime of 1976-83; the humiliating defeat in the 1982 Falklands war and the crippling hyperinflation of 1989 still fresh in the collective memory, Argentines are so crisis hardy, many say, that they will weather the storm. 

But last week there were complaints that cash rationing was undemocratic and 'worse than a dictatorship'. Protesters gathered in the centre of Buenos Aires, hurling eggs at the Central Bank and accusing Cavalla of 'economic genocide'.

Public discontent has been simmering with angry piquesteros blocking roads across the country for months.  Unions are planning a national strike on Thursday. 

The leader of the General Confederation of Workers, Hugo Muyano who called for 'civil disobedience' during a recent protest, has promised the strike will be peaceful.

Most Argentines swallowed the latest pill with nothing more than verbal protest, as they have the last seven rounds of austerity measures in the past year; including 13 per cent cuts in  pensions and salaries.

Many say that President Fernando de la Rua could be a casualty of the looming financial collapse:  In October, a record 40 per cent of voters chose to cast blank or spoilt votes in elections. Eighteen years of democracy have been marred by rampant corruption and political profiteering that have left many with the sense their politicians are robbers who have sold the country.

The state of Buenos Aires, the country's economic heartland, has declared de facto bankruptcy by paying its workers in bonds. Nationally more than 300,000 public employees have been sacked and the Government is even talking about taking pension funds to try to make urgent  deficit payments.

The measures were imposed to stem a massive wave of capital flight, spurred by wealthier Argentines worried that their money was no longer safe:  So far this year $14.5 billion, as much as 17 per cent of bank deposits, has been withdrawn and sent abroad.

Those affected most are the more than 140 per cent of workers who are employed  informally and paid in cash and small businesses who rely on cash payments.  

And in stepping up the fight against such fascistic attempts at restricting democratic rights, it is vitally important to see such a struggle as a great opportunity for the working class and the socialist revolution against a panicking and WEAKENING ruling-system enemy which is no longer confident of being able to rule-on serenely, right through, using the best method of conning the masses, - parliamentary democracy and meticulously observed human rights, but is now so fearful of the outcome (once public opinion gets a real understanding of capitalism's crisis-ridden warmongering rottenness) that it feels obliged to turn to fascist-threat desperation.

Chauvinist-war diversions and police state methods are steps of retreating backwardness, implying a colossal desperation and fear of defeat by the ruling system. They are steps of an establishment which is on the way out.

The supposed "clear-cut technological blitzkrieg-crushing" of the "Afghan Taleban regime spreading reactionary destructive chaos in the world" needs careful examination too.

First, there must be colossal doubts that a "new Afghanistan" of any kind will be built at all.

Second, there must be huge suspicions that massive free United Nations handouts (new schools, hospitals, roads, housing, factories, farms, etc) are exactly what this wily backward tribal society might have been hoping would happen to Afghanistan in the first place.

Having played the West's game to destroy the sensational social, economic, and political progress Afghanistan made after its homegrown 1978 Revolution had won Soviet backing (to defend it from CIA-organised disruption), Afghan tribal society then found itself rewarded with....nothing at all.

Has the warring 'terrorist' nuisance that Afghanistan has since become, as decreed by the West since Sept 11, partly unconsciously, been done to spite the West and to force it to start taking proper concern about Afghanistan????

The Taleban regime has cleverly just melted away, leaving cousins or traditional rival tribals temporarily in charge so that UN rebuilding can begin. Is the West being taken for a massive ride???

The far bigger puncture to Western triumphalism, however, are the huge doubts that any successful 'nation-building' whatever will actually take place, leaving the international cause of bourgeois-imperialist 'democracy' looking more stupid, derided, and hated than ever. The doubts are already surfacing in the capitalist press itself:

	Amid the general rejoicing, however, western strategists should perhaps now ask themselves whether the new regime will be better than the old one. The uncomfortable answer is possibly not.

	Afghanistan now looks pretty much like it did in 1994, when Mullah Mohammad Omar and a handful of like-minded provincial clerics decided to free the country from the excesses of mojahedin rule. Kabul may now be enjoying itself again, but Afghanistan as a whole is in danger of sliding back into the chaos that characterised the mojahedin years between 1992-1996. 

When the Taliban first swept into Kabul in September 1996 they too were initially welcomed as liberators. Some 50,000 people had died in the previous four years, as warring mojahedin factions shelled the city from the surrounding snow-covered mountains.

	Even their most grudging critics conceded that the Taliban had one major virtue: they brought peace to a country wracked by warlordism and disorder. After two months of American bombing, Afghanistan has gone back to where it was seven years ago.

	In the now frozen north, the Uzbek warlord Gen Rashid Dostum once more controls his own mini-state. Last week he rejected the Bonn agreement establishing a new interim authority for Afghanistan, an ominous development. The Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance again occupies Kabul. A Jalalabad shura or council controls the country's strategic eastern provinces. And in Herat, the ancient city's former governor, Ishmael Khan, is back. All the old warlords have returned from exile, and Afghanistan is experiencing its own deja vu.

Five years of Taliban rule had transformed Kabul into a miserable, gloomy place; everybody was fed up. With music and TV banned, and a 9pm curfew, the city's terrified population crept into bed soon after dark. But during the Taliban years it was possible to take a yellow Toyota taxi from Kabul to Jalabad through the twisting mountains and the Kabul river, without being robbed. Now the Taliban have gone, bandits have taken up residence in the hills above Sarobi. 

Even the mayor of Jalalabad now only travels with a heavily armed convoy. On the rough 420km-long road between Kabul and Kandahar it is the same story. Local villagers armed with Kalashnikovs have set up their own roadblocks; robbery has become a new cottage industry. Non-allied Pashtun militias and former Taliban soldiers have seized control of their own areas. Suddenly southern Afghanistan has become a very dangerous place indeed. 

And if American spy-planes were to hover over the eastern Nangarhar province, or the fertile southern Helmand valley, they would spot villagers planting opium seeds once again. Last year Mullah Mohammad Omar outlawed opium production in Afghanistan on the grounds that it was unIslamic. It is not clear whether his motives were genuine or cynical. But either way his edict was ruthlessly enforced. Farmers using cows and tractors ploughed up their smallholdings of poppy and planted wheat. Afghanistan, previously the world's largest exporter of heroin, produced virtually no opium last year.

With the Taliban gone, Afghanistan's farmers are going back to their old, lucrative ways. In the tribal areas of Pakistan, where most of the opium is processed, prices have plummeted in expectation of a bumper crop.

Few people feel much nostalgia for the Taliban and their totalitarian methods. But their departure has left a vacuum, which at the moment is being filled by megalomaniac warlords, local bandits, drug barons and opportunistic crooks.

But are not Western triumphalism hopes more securely founded on the long-term globalisation trickle-down benefits of world technological and economic progress???  

But if that were true, why is the gap between the richest and the poorest in the world now hundreds of times greater than it has ever been in history so far? Why has a vast state like Indonesia collapsed into squabbling misery after so much long-term US military and economic aid, - ruled over by Washington's chosen military dictator?

Why has an 'imperialist' economic giant like Japan worse than stagnated for the past 10 years? Why has a rich country like Argentina suddenly gone bankrupt (see above)??  Why has 50 years of Western and UN 'concern' for Palestinian rights plus non-stop ferocious Zionist military-repression, only produced a more massive sustained revolt by the Palestinians than ever???

Where will Afghanistan be in 10 years time? Consider what the triumphant massive input of aid, investment, and assistance agencies from the West and the UN has achieved, which poured into the former Soviet Union after 1990 to make sure none of its republics ever returned to seeing if unspectacular but steady planned socialism was not a much better way of running society, - as admitted by the Western press itself:

For many, lethal drugs are a way out of one of the worst social and economic collapses the world has seen. Since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Moldova's economy has shrunk by almost 70 per cent, making it by far the poorest nation in Europe, with an average income of £180 a year. Only in the capital, Chisinau, are there any signs of prosperity, among the gangster capitalists who have flourished on smuggling, corruption and the sale of state assets.

In the village of Mereni, an hour's drive from Chisinau, most of the population have slid back into pre-industrial times. There are no longer any cars, only donkeys and carts trundling around.

Jurig Prisagaru, 33, used to work as a truck driver when Moldova was part of the Soviet-Union but lost his job, then broke his arm, and had to give up one by one the benefits of the twentieth century.

He can no longer afford gas, electricity or to buy food from others. He lives in a scruffy mud-and-brick hut with his wife, Lyumila, and their four children. 

Their water is drawn from a well and heated by wood stolen from the forest and vegetables grown on the scrap of land around them. They haven't eaten meat, fish or sugar for six months. Their only income is the £3 a month they get from the government -  about £35 a year for a family of six.

'It was much better in Soviet times - we had factories, machine parts and tractors for the fields,' he mourned. 'Now we have nothing. I've had to take two of my children out of school because I can't afford the books.'

The UN Development Programme reckons that in this once industrialised country two-thirds of the rural economy is now based on subsistence and barter. Moldovans are worried about unemployment, failing health and rampant crime, but opinion polls show that their biggest fear is simply famine.

They are also losing their strongest asset, their high levels of education and culture. Since 1991, illiteracy among rural children has risen by 30 per cent. Even the rural rich are sliding back to the Middle Ages. Prisagaru's neighbours, Lydia and Petru Ustica, considered themselves well-off in Soviet times, with good jobs and a large house. Now his job as a watchman brings in just £8 a month to support them and their five children, and they have to grow their food. They can not pay their gas bill of £50 and are preparing to manage without electricity.

But there are lengths to which Petru Ustica will not go: unlike others in the village, he is not prepared to sell one of his kidneys for a transplant operation in the West. 'I could get $4,500 but I will never sell my health,'  he said. Ustica would like to go abroad but says: 'I don't even have the money to move.'

A quarter of the population of four and a half million are working abroad, most of them women, almost all of them illegally. What remains of the economy has become dependent on the £150 million they send back each year.

But often work overseas leads to prison rather than salvation. Valentina, a pretty 23-year-old, last year allowed her neighbour to arrange a marriage to an Italian so she could find work in Italy. At night, chased by border guards, she crossed a river into Romania, where she was due to meet her future husband. The men who greeted her kept her in a mountain hut for two weeks, and she discovered she had been sold into sexual slavery.

She was forced to work as a prostitute in nightclubs in Bosnia and Macedonia. In the first nightclub, Expresso, there were 32 girls, mostly Moldovan, who had also been trafficked, most of them repeatedly beaten.

Valentina managed to phone her mother back in Moldova, who could not afford to come out and rescue her. Eventually, her mother contacted the Moldovan Centre for the Prevention of Trafficking in Women, which persuaded Interpol to get her out.  

The centre, which is investigating 600 cases of trafficking, has just launched a public awareness campaign with the slogan 'Don't let yourself be trafficked'.

The ephedrone epidemic started sweeping Moldova, Europe's most shattered nation, five years ago, offering the only escape for a people who have given up hope.

Since their first free elections in December 1991, many have seen their standard of living slip back to that of the Middle Ages.

In Moldova's second largest city, Balti, one in 10 are now injecting drug users, with many of the rest on softer drugs. Still under communist control, Balti used to make hi-tech weapons for the Soviet army but has now turned into a city of ghosts.

Sitting huddled; in her empty flat in a crumbling block filled with human faeces, Tatiana, 33, knows she has about a year left to live. She was introduced to ephedrone two years ago by her brother-in-law and has been injecting it ever since.

Her brother and sister are also addicts; all their seven severely underdeveloped children are addicted to glue. She gets no money from the state and has sold her fridge, cooker, television, carpet, lights and even the glass in the door to buy drugs.

She has no gas, electricity or water and sits all day on a bench with just a few rotting cabbages on the floor, her only decoration a crucifix. At lunchtime, she stares blankly at a bowl of cold porridge, and decides to save it for dinner, when she will have to eat in the dark.

'The ephedrone means there is no pain, then you feel active and sexy. But it destroys the body in a very short period. Even your speech suffers,' she said.

Her 14-year-old son, Igor, had been imprisoned that morning - she didn't know why - and her 15-year-old daughter, Ilyana, was in tears. She hadn't managed to get her fix of glue that afternoon. Ilyana has a sideline as a prostitute to make money for drugs and food. Prostitution has become so normal among young women, there is no longer any stigma -  it is just part of growing up.

'Prostitution is now socially acceptable,' said Gabriella Ionaschcu, head of the United Nations' Aids programme (Unaids) in Moldova. 'People taking ephedrone don't have long to live, but they don't care - they are only interested in taking the drug and getting maximum pleasure.'

THE ORGY has lasted 10 days. Fourteen gaunt addicts, cramped together in a bare flat in the shattered ruins of a Soviet tower block, repeatedly inject themselves with the drug that they have distilled over candles from cough mixture, aspirin and vinegar. The hits are sharp, highly addictive and propel everyone into a sexual frenzy.

The effects are so shortlived, everyone has to inject at 40-minute intervals -  more than 30 times a day. Veins quickly get torn and they have to inject into every accessible blood vessel in the body -  in the arms, legs, neck, genitals. A government film, shot secretly from a cupboard, shows that during the 10 days of the orgy the addicts get no sleep and eat little. They collapse for a week and the cycle starts again.

With shared needles and no condoms, almost all ephedrone addicts are HIV positive. But it doesn't matter to them. The drug is so harsh on the body that addicts invariably die within three years as their organs simply collapse.

Unaids has projects to discourage people from sharing needles and to encourage them to use condoms, but prostitution and drug use are so rampant that Moldova could end up with African levels of HIV within a decade.

A laugh will go up from the 'practical politicians' of the Socialist Alliance, SLP, etc, (while they get on with their imaginary 'party building and vote-winning'),  that Moldovans don't appear to be doing too much about their miserable fate just yet. But the revolutionary nature of class era history consists of objective necessity, not how long it takes for any pennies to drop subjectively in any given situation. 

The number of years needed before any former workers-state population decides to DO something about their universal realisation that they were all far better off under the steady if unspectacular development of planned economies is irrelevant. The INSOLUBLE contradiction between the unstoppable monopoly-accumulation pattern of the 'free market' and the ever-growing HATRED of imperialist domination by the ever-poorer (relatively) billions in the Third World, increasingly repressed (absolutely) by Western-backed bullying tyranny, - is all that matters. Bothering to tell the working class anything but this same constant basic message, using every current political vehicle as the medium, is purely careerist opportunism, always a posturing empty existence, and ultimately a total counter-revolutionary waste of time, doomed to infamy and failure.

Proof of the pricelessness of Marxist science over the imbecile blathering of SLP demagogy is already at hand anyway, over Ireland. 

The analogy is not to imply anything positive at all about Bin Ladenism but to show how lessons for the working class about the imperialist world crisis must start from the conflict of class and national forces as it unfolds in reality, and not as how it 'ought' to unfold.

Any disgrace for the Northern Ireland office of dying British colonial-imperialism in Ireland and its police chief Flanagan flowing this week from the Ombudsman' report on the Omagh bomb fiasco, springs out of the massive significance of the Good Friday Agreement defeat for imperialism which the EPSR has alone ever fully explained.

This ombudsman office has a huge budget and a large powerful staff reflecting the, dramatic historical nature of the GFA which effectively dismantles one of the oldest, best-entrenched, most viciously-minded, and most difficult-to-dislodge colonies of all, - the 'separate state', effectively, of 'Northern Ireland'.

It was brought down by Sinn Féin and the IRA via, eventually, the snail's-pace nationalist compromise of the GFA, which less-than-clearcut-'socialist victory' had the likes of the SLP and Socialist Alliance constantly sneering at the 'failed peace process' and 'Sinn Féin capitulation to a US-imposed settlement', etc, etc.

From the start, what every variety of fake-'left' ideology misled itself with was in automatically sneering at the more obviously backward Catholic nationalism of the Provisionals after they split from the more apparently 'communist' Officials in the Sinn Féin/IRA movement. The raw terror of the IRA frightened off these British labour movement traditionalists too (all hopelessly corrupted by Trot and Revisionist brainrot).

These opportunists who now form the 'swamp' failed to observe the basic Marxist scientific requirement to actually look at what is happening (see Lenin Guerrilla Warfare).

What was clearly being built from the start was an effective national-liberation struggle which was obviously going to LEAD the anti-imperialist fight in circumstances where a 'pure socialist revolution' as such (as advocated by all the conceited swamp as "the easiest way forward" despite not only being incapable of doing the same in Britain, but of not even daring to try), - was historically not yet on the cards for a whole variety of obvious reasons.

More Marxist-Leninist understanding was required to then see what a crucial anti-imperialist victory it would be to eventually achieve the dismantling of the 'Northern Ireland' independent statelet colony as it used to be, with its own sectarian army and police.

Not a single sect in the 'left'-swamp could even see it, let alone recognise it when it arrived, deliberately concealed for additional obvious reasons within the Good Friday Agreement - which the entire fake-'left' voted a "useless compromise, which will solve nothing".

The cowardly SLP will, cautiously continue to opportunistically boast of its 'big party' relationship with Sinn Féin, which the non-Marxist Sinn Féin will naturally humour, as it does all bourgeois-liberal British politics.

But the sick philistine hollowness at the heart of such SLP opportunist posturing remains doomed to contempt and hatred from Revolutionary working-class understanding as it relentlessly grows. Build Leninism. EPSR.

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

British colonist RUC's shame indicts the imperialist input from London even more than UUP bigotry.

LIKE blood seeping through a bandage, the sordid mechanisms of crown forces' collusion with loyalist death squads are becoming increasingly obvious. Despite the British Government's best efforts, no amount of wound binding will stem the flow.

The collapse of the Finucane murder trial was predictable and the imposition of another delaying tactic characteristic. But the truth is out and behind the façade of democracy the British state engaged in the summary execution of its political opponents.

The collapse of the Finucane murder trial raises many more questions surrounding the role of the RUC Special Branch, Sinn Féin's Chief Whip Alex Maskey told a Belfast press conference

William Stobie has admitted he supplied the weapons used to kill Pat Finucane and it has been confirmed that he was an RUC Special Branch agent at the time. He also informed RUC Special Branch that the attack was going to take place and the loyalist gang involved. Despite the fact that a simple roadblock could have thwarted the killers, the RUC Special Branch did nothing.

"The role of the RUC Special Branch and British Military Intelligence in collusion and running agents within the loyalist death squads has not been explained," said Maskey, "cover up is still the order of the day. The RUC Special Branch is, in the words of the Patten Commission, a force within a force," said Maskey.

Stobie has admitted remaining in position within the UDA until at least 1990. In that time, the UDA in Stobie's area killed six people. These were: Adam Lambert in November 1987, Gerard Slane in September 1988, Pat Finucane in February 1989, Eamon Quinn in March 1990, John Judge in July 1990 and Dermot McGuinness in October 1990.

"What did the Special Branch know about these killings?" asked Maskey. "And are Stobies' handlers now members of the new policing arrangements? The reality is that the Special Branch still exists and exists as a secret police force."

Nationalists and republicans will not support policing arrangements with an unaccountable wing, a Special Branch, governed by a culture of silence and operating with no controls, accountability or scrutiny. Patten recognised this and the British Government must now move to recognise this also, the West Belfast Assembly member told the conference.

Meanwhile, solicitors acting on behalf of Maskey are to lodge court papers to force former British Army agent Brian Nelson to appear to court. Nelson, like Stobie, as a British agent infiltrated the UDA and took an active role the Finucane killing.

Nelson has already admitted that he supplied the Belfast solicitor's personal details, including a photograph, to the UDA death squad that carried out the shooting. Nelson has also been implicated in two attempts on the life of Sinn Fin's Alex Maskey.

Maskey, who survived a number of murder bids in the late 1980s and early 1990s, says that there is now overwhelming evidence to prove the state actively colluded with loyalists in the murder of nationalists and republicans.

Nelson's career as an agent for one of the British Army's most secret groups, the Force Research Unit, ended when he was arrested by the Stevens' team and was charged with his part in a series of killings.

The full facts of Nelson's role were prevented from being revealed in open court by pre-trial plea-bargaining. At the last minute, the most serious charges against Nelson were dropped. A series of lesser charges were uncontested by the defence and the trial dramatically curtailed.

The deal, which was struck at British Cabinet level, was designed to stop damaging evidence of sanctioned crown forces' collusion in what amounted to state killings by proxy.

Nelson was subsequently convicted and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. He was immediately transferred to a jail in England, where he served only five years. On release, Nelson was relocated and provided with a new identity by the British authorities.

Nelson has been implicated in two attempts on Maskey's life.

In a statement to the RUC, Nelson claimed that he was unable to contact his handlers and alert them of the murder bid because he was at home with his two sons at the time.

But evidence exposed by BBC Panorama reporter John Ware revealed that Nelson had in fact made two separate calls to his handlers that night.

"Despite Brian Nelson's admission that he was involved in a plot to kill me with other named loyalists, no one was ever arrested or questioned by the RUC," said Maskey, "It has to be asked why an agent of the state was allowed to engage in murder and was never brought to justice."

Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams is supporting the calls for a full independent inquiry into the killing of human rights solicitor Pat Finucane by the UDA. He has pointed out that that the party outlined the extent of the activities of the British agent Brian Nelson and his role in the Finucane killing in a Sinn Féin document titled Appalling Vista which was given to the British government at the time of the negotiations leading up to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

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

FTAA is an agreement to promote U.S. hegemony.  Its approval was imposed. Secret negotiations and the lack of legislative approval are unconstitutional absolute guarantees for transnationals. Creating awareness is essential.

US IMPERIALISM FLEXES ITS AGGRESSIVE DOMINATION MUSCLES TO PREPARE FOR WORLD ECONOMIC SLUMP CRISIS.

AT a meeting in Havana on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), President Fidel Castro described the analysis and commentary as profound, adding that the speeches presented were revealing of the tragedy suffered by the region's peoples and the fateful consequences that the FTAA's application would bring.

President Castro, who participated in all the debates, said, "I've learned and seen the clarity and precision of the tragedy we are living through, and for this reason, I now understand that the FTAA is twice as bad as I had conceived it. It's not only a free trade agreement, but also a geo-strategic agreement for the hegemony of the United States."

After four days (November 13-16) of intense work in the plenary sessions, the close to 800 delegates from 39 countries (according to the latest figures) agreed on a final declaration entitled the Havana Consensus, and a Plan of Action for immediate mobilization against the FTAA.

The declaration calls on all the forces of the hemisphere, social movements, alternative information networks, academic groups, professionals, religious peoples, indigenous peoples, women, environmentalists, unionists, campesinos, students, political prisoners and legislators, since a common front is needed against the FTAA. The declaration describes the FTAA as "an attack against self-determination and respect for the principle of national sovereignty."

The document was written after the speeches and debates by dozens of delegates, and warns that the FTAA is "integration for disintegrating the national economies, societies and diverse cultures of the Americas, exclusively for the benefit of transnational corporations," and proposes a different type of integration which contemplates, among other aspects, not paying the foreign debt.

It also specified that the project is Washington's attempt to annex the continent and would leave it dependent and completely lacking sovereignty, "in the midst of economic and social inequalities, a concentration of wealth and social exclusion, [which are] the true causes of the current crisis."

To arrive at a consensus, everyone listened to representatives from different groups, because the fight against the FTAA is not just the prerogative of economists or experts. Argentine Beinszus Zsmukler, president of the Latin American Association of Jurists, said in his speech that the anti-FTAA battle must be fought on all fronts, including the judicial one, and in the first place, with countries using their own constitutions. The agreement was prepared and approved in secret, he continued, and "the lack of participation by legislatures is a constitutional violation."

He warned that some now consider the theme of national sovereignty to be unfashionable, as "there are other more important factors, such as eliminating borders in order to put into effect the FTAA, the Colombia Plan and the Puebla-Panama Plan, all of which hinder peoples' sovereignty."

The basic element is explaining to people what the FTAA and its consequences means, he pointed out, for when people are aware that their rights are being violated their struggle takes on another dimension.

Luis Suarez, president of the Latin American Federation of Journalists (FELAP), agreed with Zsmukler, adding that he thought it very important to break the silence on the FTAA, whose content remains a secret and was adopted behind closed doors. The establishment press has also remained silent.

"We journalists have many difficulties, but should not give up on trying to open up the theme again, in the face of prohibited information, silence and disinformation. This is a conspiracy that must be broken." .

The situation of women and indigenous peoples was also denounced.

Venezuela's Nora Castaneda, coordinator of the Continental Women's Front for a Dignified Life, stated that "a process of feminization of poverty is currently taking place." Pacha Teran an Ecuadoran Quechua, recounted a life spent living with inequality before the law and a lack of knowledge of indigenous languages, but she said we have been fighting for our identity since the Spanish arrived in 1492. 

The FTAA will augment the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement  - signed by the United States, Mexico and Canada -  stressed Mexican Alberto Arroyo. This treaty offers neither free trade nor free circulation, but creates super-rights for large capital.

Not only the South is affected. U.S. lawyer Mara Verheyden-Hillard told GI that if the NAFTA experience is anything to go by, then the FTAA is a mistake and is promoted by Washington to favor transnationals. Its equation is natural resources in exchange for profits, but human beings can't be quantified.

The economic recession is not a result of the September 11 tragedy, she pointed out, but the attack is being used by the U.S. government in various ways and there is concern about the new laws, including the so-called USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorist law giving enormous power to the executive branch. She said it is unconstitutional and repressive.

A large group from the United States participated in the event because, as the lawyer pointed out, NAFTA and the FTAA are also unconstitutional, restrict rights and allow transnationals much license to, for example, not employ women and African-Americans in certain jobs. It has already been seen how unemployment and discrimination have increased, she added, with rights being subordinated to capital.

She considered the meeting very positive because of two aspects: the discussion and clarification of the FTAA's consequences, plus the importance of increasing communication. She said that the United States has an information blockade about Afghanistan, about the FTAA, about Cuba and the blockade. This is why demonstrations like the one held in Washington on September 29 against the war and new policies, where 25,000 people took part, are so important. She pointed out that they are still in the minority, but as awareness grows people are beginning to question.

Other themes that were analyzed were the drop in employment, the breakup of the agricultural sector and farmers' bankruptcy due to the avalanche of subsidized U.S. products, along with the destruction of the environment because natural resources are being privatized.

Brazilian social fighter Pedro No Batista recalled that the logic of big capital is to transform everything into commodities, and thanks to the FTAA, "We are giving them the best of all our bio-diversity [specifically referring to Amazonia], which means the planet will die: "
	
	LATIN AMERICAN REALITY

Fidel pointed out that the FTAA has not had a negotiation process, rather one of imposition by Washington, and has advanced with the consent of Latin American governments, "ranging from enthusiasm to resignation."

He added that the FTAA must be rejected categorically because it seeks to open up Latin American economies while offering absolute guarantees to transnationals."

The Cuban president considered the alternative of developing a real Latin American and Caribbean integration process, even beyond commercial agreements.

The president's summary of the main objectives of the Hemispheric Encounter in the Struggle Against the FTAA stressed the importance of explaining and educating people on the nature of the agreement imposed by Washington and signed in Quebec by 34 Latin American governments which, behind their people's backs, agreed to put the plan into effect in 2005. The Encounter also focused on the coordination of the struggle facing the continent.

He commented that persuading and creating awareness is essential in the regional battle against the FTAA, which he warned is part of another even bigger struggle being waged against a global FTAA, plotted in the World Trade Organization (WTO) using similar methods.

President Fidel Castro summed up the debates and statements to reveal the tragedy experienced by Latin Americans, even before the FTAA has begun.

Just a few of the chilling figures: 224 million poor people; 90 million destitute; external debt of more than $700 billion USD;114 million hungry children; 17.5 million children working illegally (in coffee plantations, scavenging, fishing, the sex industry); 9%-average unemployment rate (official figures).

But the U.S. economy is also facing recession, which is why that country is applying pressure to enact the FTAA, to finally make the region the exclusive preserve of its capital and transnationals. The region will be directly controlled by the United States.