Klein's discovered nothing. She's just got excited about the obvious. Its called class war. All the new imagery and verbiage she and others use can't hide it or dress it up as anything different.

The class war is fought on many fronts, the enemy have a battle plan (stupid as it may sometimes seem eg.the US$3 Trillion war on Iraq)which is invade, occupy, blockade, destabilse, arrest, and necessarily, kill. This is not merely some rightwing conspiracy by the institutions of the ruling class headed by the neo-cons. It is written into the DNA of capitalism.

Calling this Friedman/Klein "shock" or "fire" loses a lot of information and minimises all the other things that the ruling class does in the class war. If you don't have an understanding of the enemies tactics across all the fronts, especially the critical fronts, from Iraq to East Timor, you can't organise an international resistance to defeat them.

Proletarian class war resists, occupies, organises, defends, mobilises, and militarises to seize power. But it has to know what its up against, and what to seize.

Calling this fighting 'fire' with 'fire' impoverishes the wealth of our historic struggles and victories, as well as the lessons of our defeats. You don't win the class war by making an instant stew of all of this history and then throwing a few matches into the pot.

There are a number of critical hot spots where imperialism is confronting the advance guard of the worlds workers today. Tow of these are Iraq and Bolivia. These are two places where the class war between hegemonic US imperialism and an organised militant popular movement are critical to our future victories or defeats.

These hot spots have flared up under the impact of the US recession which means it needs to resolve its economic crisis at the expense of its rivals and the workers and can't afford to back of open fights.

So winning Iraq becomes even more important for the US to advance its challenge to China and Russia in Central Asia. So does opposing the Bolivarian bloc in Latin America which is threatening US hegemony in its own 'backyard' by doing deals with the EU and China. The secession of the Eastern part of Bolivia is the bridgehead for the US destabilising the Bolivarian bloc and re-asserting its hegemony in the hemisphere.

These two fronts of the class war are critical because it is in Iraq where the future of the popular masses in the Middle East and Central Asia will be decided, and in Bolivia, where the outcome of the class war in LA will be decided for years to come.

In both cases the armed, organised resistance of the masses following tactics of national self-determination, but breaking from the bourgeois regimes who want to coexist with imperialism like the BOlivarians, and Islamic nationaists, and moving towards socialism, is the winning strategy for the working masses.

Dave Brown