Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 0771 2639934 www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk or www.epsr.org (alternative site)
No 1347 27th March 2009                                                                                                                 25p fortnightly

“Burn the bankers” taps the G20 mood but revolutionary Leninist depth needed to end capitalist crisis and war

Conflict, trade war and rapidly escalating international hostility is the underlying reality of the G20 world economic conference in London, despite all the spin and lies about coordinated global action, international bailouts and refunding of world deficits to “pull the world out of crisis and credit crunch disaster”.
The great struggle for what remains of collapsing world markets and the bare survival of giant national industries like the huge car plants and the steel, raw materials and component sectors around them, and even for entire national economies, is underway.
It will become increasingly a no-holds-barred vicious conflict, economic and trade-war based at first and then increasingly physical, to destroy rival capitals and their production capacity.
Capitalism is a system of devastating catastrophic failure and degeneration into war, on an ever growing scale.
The two great slumps of the 20th century turned into devastation, despair, unemployment and homelessness in the turmoil and pain of the early 1900s and the great 1930s Depression, exploding ultimately into the violence and horrors of the Great World Wars in 1914 and 1939 as the huge national monopolies fought for domination and for the destruction of rival capital.
Entire cities, regions and whole countries (most of Europe and western Russia) were utterly destroyed and tens of millions killed, and hundreds of millions suffered and saw their lives ruined. 
The same general pattern is unfolding now, but worse. 
To quote the latest from Nobel prizewinning bourgeois economist Joseph Stiglitz:  

While this is a global crisis, responses are undertaken by national governments, who quite naturally look after their own citizens’ interest first. Particularly invidious are protectionist measures, such as the US “buy America” provision in its stimulus package. In fact, the World Bank reports that 17 of the group of 20 countries have engaged in protectionist measures, after making a commitment not to do so in their meeting in Washington in November. By focusing on national, as opposed to global impacts, the global stimulus will be less – and the global recovery weakened.

“Quite naturally” the national bourgeois interests will completely override Stiglitz’s nostrums about global stimulus – and the underlying logic of profit accumulation would ensure a relentless path into disaster even if the owners, bosses, bankers and financiers were all as liberal minded as he is (they are not).
Moves to “protect” the Peugot car plants in France at the expense of shutting its factories in Slovenia and unfairly subsidising it against other European makers like Volvo, the “new cars for old” subsidies in Germany, the call for “government funds” to “protect” jobs in the UK Birmingham plants (which a bankrupted Bank of England cannot afford), are all early tasters of huge bitterness to come.
So too is the dollar dilution of Obama’s US stimulus a vicious trade competition move as the dollar cheapens and bankrupt incompetent General Motors etc are supported.
It will get much worse.
The disastrous downward spiral of capitalist collapse is unstoppable whatever “suckers rally” might briefly appear on the Stock Exchange, or surge of false credit might be created dementedly printing trillions more paper dollars.
Capitalism is a system of inbuilt contractions and antagonist crisis, analysed and understood more than 150 years ago by the titanic lifetime studies of Karl Marx and on by Engels, Lenin and other great Marxists.
In modern times the technology of extended credit and international penetration of capital on an unprecedented scale has stretched the relentless cycle of ever accumulating “surplus” capital to a  fabulous  extent, compounded by the false “balance” struck with revisionist communism throughout the Cold War.
But capitalism has already used just about every “stimulus” mechanism there is to get it through the post-war “boom” period, fed by constant dollar printing, polluting the entire world trading system with an inflationary time-bomb to overcome lurch after lurch into disaster, from 1970s oil crises to the enormous currency collapses which have already devastated the East, South America and Japan (wiping out completely Argentina for example in 2002). 
Even by 1971 US President Nixon was forced to take the dollar off the Gold Standard, established in the post-war Bretton Woods agreement which was supposed to reform international finance and regulate it to “prevent ever again” the bank and Stock Exchange failures of the past.
It failed, as will all new calls now for “regulation” or “proper controls” being offered by the sly capitalists (who yesterday were trumpeting the virtues of the “free market” and “democracy”.)
Profiteering found its way round the controls and always will because collapse is built into this “overproduction” system. And the latest bout of dollar printing can only store up an explosion of imminent inflation, if it “works” at all. 
But the capitalists are desperate to hang on despite total bank meltdown (which reached pants-wetting panic  in October) so they can prepare for the massive rebellion and resistance that the disaster will produce and is already, from riots in Greece to kidnappings of French bosses at factories facing closure, and “terrorism” revolts from the exploited Third World (suffering most of all now). 
Police state surveillance, torture, war crime blitzing, increasing censorship of “subversive views” and scapegoating of minorities is all part of the real agenda of the ruling class for which its “economic stimulus” is just buying time. 
They know the economy is doomed and need to impose open dictatorship to force the world back to war – their only real answer (aided by rising Labour aristocracy and TUC  little England nationalism). 
The only real answer from the working class needs to be revolutionary overturn of the entire system, establishing its own dictatorship to fight this fascism (all capitalism) and then defend the building of (internationalist) socialism which will allow planned steady growth of world production for human needs.
Eventually the need for any state control, even by the majority working class will fade away as capitalists fade away.
There is far more to that than shallow “storm the banks” slogans even if anarchism taps working class emotional hostility better than most of the fake-“left”, (Trots and Stalinist). But anarchism no more warned of collapse (and war) than the fake-“lefts” and “anti-capitalism” flounders just as much trying to explain the disaster, because of anti-communist refusal to study Marxist experience.
The workers states began to show the way but their (revisionist) errors and liquidations need analysing. Build Leninism. Don Hoskins

Irish shootings to be condemned, not because they are “terrorism” but because they are wrong, misunderstanding Sinn Féin’s victory against British imperialism, and threatening continuing snail’s pace but steady progress to re-unification 

The extraordinary lengths to which both Belfast police chief Hugh Orde and the New Labourite government have gone to repeatedly insist that the recent “dissident IRA” shootings are a “police matter” underlines the enormous progress of the Sinn Féin/IRA republican movement from the days of its total censorship, “illegality” and repression by British imperialism and fascist Orange colonialist bullying, to power and participation.
Instead of bringing back the old instruments of British-linked colonialist supremacy, even under major provocation, the message is that the imperialist state will bend over backwards to keep on track the truce agreed with the IRA/Sinn Féin, and its long armed struggle, which brought British imperialism to a military and political standstill, one of the most significant and overwhelming defeats ever for monopoly capitalism worldwide and particularly for once-world-dominating British imperialism.
Westminster has long embarked on a snail’s pace withdrawal from the last, brutally partitioned, section of once colonial Ireland, leading, after much prevarication and stalling, to the St Andrew’s agreement in 2006 conceding a “normal” peaceful route for continuing republican struggle towards reunification, which had long been denied.
Far from being a “sell-out”, as the dissidents and the shallow minded British fake-”left” sourly, wrongly and defeatistly declare, Sinn Féin has been able to make consistent headway in its mature and confident leadership which is heading inexorably towards the eventual unification of Ireland and the historic ending of British rule and influence.
The constant difficulties of the process, its drawn out pace and its hiding behind cosmetic and diplomatic niceties which allow imperialism, and the shattered hubris of the Orange colonialists, to continue with the pretence that this is a purely peaceful “democratic” process, and to obscure the reality of defeat by an anti-imperialist armed struggle, change nothing about the underlying real transformation.
The agreement was to end war conditions, not a “unilateral disarming of the IRA struggle”, and watchtowers, military patrols, house searches, and the like have gone; the republican sector of the population now has a voice and a powerful say in the changes underway.
The latest events confirm that imperialism has no wish to revert to the old conditions.          
A note of almost desperation was being sounded to insist that there would be no re-introduction of  military security forces, MI5 and other mainland “security” or military, to “deal” with the shootings despite the shock impact of the attacks after a sustained period of near peaceful development. 
The Police Service of Northern Ireland, not the mainland, would be responsible insisted its head Hugh Orde. 
It is made all the more telling by the implied backing-off by Orde from recent hints about bringing back covert British Army intelligence into the province (which was protested and opposed by Sinn Féin just a week before the events) and by the stony silence into which the comments of the few die-hard reactionary Orange elements fell when they provocatively demanded “squads of the SAS” to be sent in during radio interviews on the BBC (which has long been a mouthpiece on Ireland for the now minority old-guard imperialist wing of the British ruling class, which still has trouble “letting go” of the colonies).
The mainstream establishment knows full well that unleashing rampaging squads of SAS soldiery is recipe for a disastrous unwinding of the settlement it has established with the unbeatable republican movement, and would imply a reversion to outright colonial domination war.
But even though the rapidly accelerating catastrophe of capitalist collapse is putting generalised warmongering back on the international agenda, which could yet cause all kinds of extraordinary complications even in Ireland, it has seemed more and more unlikely that British capitalism has the appetite to try and reestablish a domination that has already been fought to a standstill, and would cost it thousands of troops to impose, which it simply does not have. 
Just the opposite: with the continuing and increasing humiliations of imperialist defeat and stalemate in Afghanistan and Iraq to contend with, the unravelling of Pakistan and a dozen other potential issues boiling up, including the serious prospect of major domestic upheavals and riots against the Slump, a new occupation war in Ireland would seem like the last thing it wanted right now. It was no coincidence that the soldiers who were shot were dressed in hot desert climate uniform, ready for transfer out of Ireland to Afghanistan, and part of a continuing wind down of troop numbers and visibility in the Irish occupied zone.
Equally, the so-far quiet non-reaction from the once vicious, sectarian Orange hate gangs and killers is extremely telling, almost certainly indicating a major behind-the-scenes arm-twisting clampdown by the colonialists, who have finally accepted that their best prospects lie in a relatively privileged and undisturbed economic position until the end of the slow unwinding of the old supremacy a few decades on.
It is better than nothing and might offer some petty bourgeois comfortable niche, is the (perhaps unconscious) reasoning, despite long-term acceptance of the slow integration of north and south which is part and parcel of the Good Friday Agreement and the St Andrews settlement that finally put it into practice.
Along with all this manoeuvring is the huge popular cross-community demonstration against the killings which had a spontaneous mass character quite different to the artificially fired-up anti-IRA middle-class U-2 anthemed “peace movement” stunts which appeared in the 1980s when the republican struggle began to get somewhere.
These new developments are in themselves a refutation of the alleged Provisional IRA “sellout” and betrayal of the Irish cause which the tiny minority groups used as their justification for the attacks.
But they come on top of a clear pattern (analysed for over 30 years by the EPSR) of long slow “snail’s pace” retreat from Ireland by an imperialism which long ago lost its industrial, naval, military and economic rational for continued occupation of even the small “statelet” it had kept back, ripping it out from the Irish majority by bayonet and violence in 1921 against the express majority democratic wishes of the whole Irish people and their overwhelming vote for independence. 
It was fought to a stalemate militarily, and defeat politically, and has been agonisingly and grudgingly leaving since, culminating, despite numerous false starts and sour stalling colonialist provocations, in the eventual power sharing Irish Assembly and the unprecedented cooperation of the Orange colonialists with Sinn Féin, once declared to be “spawn of the devil, etc”.
It is also a refutation of the sour defeatism of the fake-”left” which has slyly and dishonestly carped and sniped at the determination and discipline of the IRA struggle for its entire history, and even now cannot bring itself to see the colossal defeat which has been suffered by British imperialism, instead slyly and dishonestly supporting the dissidents.
The fake-“left’s” reaction to the tragically pointless and potentially disruptive assassinations underlines completely their lack of seriousness and dilettante shallowness.    
Far from seeing that, at best, the understanding of the minority dissidents is profoundly mistaken (as Gerry Adams calmly and correctly characterised it), and the in-practice counter-revolutionary nature of the killings (as Martin McGuinness said), which aim to stall, or break completely for the moment the complex, but steady and real progress towards Irish unity being achieved by the patient, responsible, political struggle of the IRA/Sinn Féin, they imply, but will not state openly, that the dissidents are to be supported.
Take this comment from the bizarre CPGB “revisionist” crypto-Trot Weekly Worker:

‘Unlike the Provisional IRA, CIRA and RIRA do not have the mass support of working class communities in the north of Ireland. But now the Sinn Féin representatives of the Provisionals are sitting in government. Just like Fianna Fáil in 1921, they have gone from freedom fighters to constitutional nationalists. Their war is over.
But, contrary to what media and bourgeois politicians would have us believe, the north of Ireland was not some haven of harmony and prosperity shattered by these shootings. The ‘peace dividend’ has not been nearly enough and the recession is also hitting hard. There is still tremendous poverty, affecting both republicans and loyalists.
The Good Friday agreement has not brought together Protestants and Catholics. In fact divisions have worsened and tensions deepened, and new ‘peace’ walls have gone up ensuring communities are kept apart.
Northern Ireland remains an extremely fractured society.
The PSNI is largely seen as the discredited Royal Ulster Constabulary in a different uniform and many republican parts of Belfast remain ‘no go’ areas - Craigavon being a good example. Disaffected republican youth are often targeted by the police. Raids on homes as part of the recent clampdown on republican dissidents have been strongly criticised by Sinn Féin. It is possible that some of these disaffected youth have been attracted to join breakaway republican groups.
That a 17-year-old was arrested in connection with the shooting of the PSNI officer is perhaps testimony to that.’

The unstated subtext here is the continuing defeatist sniping of these fake-“lefts” against the Sinn Féin’s astonishing republican progress, painting the entire unfolding movement of the British military and colonial control out of Ulster as nothing but IRA “capitulation” and a supposed “sell-out” settlement forced upon them by the “power of imperialism” so that the “war is over” (implying defeat).
This was expressed most forcibly by the CPGB’s ludicrous “hot spot” theory of some years ago which alleged that American imperialism was gradually bringing all world rebellions under its control – a theory little heard in subsequent years of Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan neo-colonialist disasters.
But in what way is the struggle “over” because it is no longer an agonising armed struggle? That part has been won and is no longer needed (all things being equal). 
This is a certifiable defeatist nonsense, out of line with the actual events on the ground in the Six Counties – divisions have not “worsened” as the events immediately post the shootings clearly showed for example and daily life is improving, as even a short day-trip to a transformed Belfast would confirm.
It also misses entirely the entire world context. Even the most cursory perspective of general world imperialist decline into disastrous crisis collapse, and especially the particular, long-unfolding 20th century decline of British imperialism, increasingly sharply suggests that the once mighty “Empire” is now the disastrously weakest link in an entire imperialist chain, shattered by catastrophic bank and City finance failures and on the edge of total implosion, not an all powerful imposer of anything.
Such sourness arises totally from the complete failure in reality of all the fake-“left” groups to grasp the revolutionary nature of development and most of all of the enormous historic catastrophe now unfolding, for all their talk of Marx, guru-led pontifications about the seriousness of the crisis (still undecided and failing to warn the working class of the depth of the unfolding disaster, which apparently can be countered simply with a few loud slogans about “making the bosses pay!”)  
They cannot really comprehend revolution.
Nor do they really want to comprehend revolution because their class position of armchair Islington “commentators” and long-winded ivory tower academics is one completely in thrall to imperialism and unable in practice to ever believe it will be ended or overthrown (despite the occasional formulaic repetition of revolutionary phrases).
They have their “perfect” revolution theories dreamt up in sitting-room comfort which arrogantly dismiss all real, messy, fuzzy-edged, mass struggle (especially when they not in charge) as not good enough.
So unless the IRA achieves everything overnight they offhandedly declare (as Scargill too did some years back, telling a Sinn Féin London representative he would “only have settled for full unification”, outside an SLP hearing) it constitutes nothing apparently.
What lightweight, detached, petty bourgeois arrogance and presumption!!
Of course there is continuing tension and division, to be expected after 30 years of bitter civil war, which shattered lives on both sides (and several hundred years of domination and repression before that). 
But the process is underway and huge changes are happening (see Socialist Review quotes p7 e.g).
The Fight Racism Fight Imperialism RCG is no better, as this piece from its October/November issue last year demonstrates:

On 4 September the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) reported that, although the IRA Army Council continues to exist, it poses no threat to the peace process. The report comes at a time when the activity of dissident Republicans opposed to the Good Friday Agreement is at a ten-year high, and they are facing increased harassment by state forces.
The IMC was established by the British and Irish governments to monitor the disbandment of the IRA. Its latest report deals exclusively with the status of the IRA and, in particular, the status of the IRA Army Council, the ruling body of the organisation. It states: ‘The mechanism which they [the IRA] have chosen to bring the armed conflict to a complete end has been the standing down of the structures which engaged in the armed campaign and the conscious decision to allow the Army Council to fall into disuse.’ 
...The IMC report acknowledges that the IRA remains active in gathering intelligence against Republicans still opposed to imperialism in Ireland, but says ‘we believe [intelligence gathering)... is mainly for the purpose of ascertaining the nature of any threat from dissident republicans.’ This is essential for political stability in the north of Ireland; the IRA, along with Sinn Fein, has long played a role in policing the nationalist community given the widespread opposition to British police in Ireland. Today that policing role has brought those Republicans who support the peace process into open confrontation with Republicans who do not, and who maintain continued opposition to British rule. The rebranding of the RUC as Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has done nothing to convince many working class nationalists that British rule has fundamentally changed.
Republicans point to increased instances of harassment by the PSNI and other state agencies as evidence that when faced with nationalist opposition, nothing has really changed. The PSNI along with politicians have been keen to point out that the threat from dissidents is now at its highest since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. This is the cover used by the PSNI to justify continued harassment of such Republicans. 
PSNI chief constable Hugh Orde has acknowledged for the first time that those becoming involved in Republican militancy were ‘young disenfranchised people’ representing a social stratum within the Six Counties. This is an important admission, as up until now Republicans opposed to the peace process were dismissed as unrepresentative criminal elements. No wonder graffiti has appeared declaring ‘PSNI - 17% Catholic. 100% Unionist’
With Sinn Fein leaders fully signed up to supporting police in Ireland, the IMC concludes that ‘If another paramilitary organisation were to seek to emerge in future it would have to start afresh with new leaders and a new generation of active members.’

It was one of the great strengths of the Provisional IRA/Sinn Féin that its internal discipline and coherent leadership kept its movement coordinated, and now that it has committed to a negotiated peace path, there no contradiction in maintaining the same discipline against maverick disruption.
 The hypocrisy in the fake-“lefts” is breathtaking.
Where in all this, are the great “condemnations” of terrorism which the fake-“lefts” all rushed into straight after the huge 9/11 WTC attacks in New York, (lining them up with the follow-on “war on terror” Goebbels justifications for the blitzkrieging campaigns of Bush and Blair)?
The stampede to assure the bourgeoisie of their “soundness”, declaring this kind of upsurge against imperialism to be “counter-productive” and/or nothing but “criminal” terrorism, would have done the great African wildebeest migration proud.
The same was true during the long years of the national liberation movement’s nationalist guerrilla war against British imperialism when the fake-“left” constantly denounced the IRA’s armed struggle as “mistaken” or “playing into imperialism’s hands” or worse, and failed utterly to explain to the working class the total responsibility of imperialism for the uprising against it and the tragedies it encompassed.
But the fake-“left” did not support the nationalist struggle anyway in effect, despite the routine ineffectual pacifism calls for “Troops Out” and Irish unity.
Instead these ivory tower poseurs all used to suggest that Sinn Féin was “just a ‘reactionary’ petty bourgeois movement” which had to be replaced by a “proper” revolutionary socialist party – to be led of course by whichever of these non-entities was currently making the criticisms (and which in reality and constant practice had either renounced revolution like the Museum Stalinist revisionists, or which were so incurable petty bourgeois and hostile to the workers states that their self-declared “revolutionism” had never led or inspired any actual revolutions at all (the Trots) and was never going to.
Their sour hatred of the through-and-through revolutionary nature of the Sinn Féin/IRA Irish struggle has been a long term indication of just what their endless posturing about revolution amounts to (when they mention it at all, which is not that often) – a great big zero.
Ultra-purist posturing about “only socialism will do” missed mightily many things, starting with the fact that Sinn Féin was always a petty bourgeois national-liberation movement and not a Marxist group (which all these fake-”lefts” had singularly failed to build at all in the artificial “northern Ireland” despite every opportunity).
But in its Provisional IRA incarnation it was completely revolutionary and won the leadership of the progressive struggle against the last remnant of British reactionary imperialist colonialism, whose poisonous influence on the British working class has helped maintain workers’ false illusions in “British superiority” (thereby tying them to class-collaborating servitude) for centuries.
That long struggle and its dogged determination and leadership finally proved it could not be defeated by the combined force of British imperialist military domination (using the foulest methods of undercover assassinations, street intimidation, torture, secret surveillance, and concentration camp imprisonment) and random, bullying anti-Catholic sectarian violence, beatings and killing from the Orange colonialist occupation.
Despite the deliberate snail’s pace of any agreement with the nationalists, to try and disguise the victory of an armed struggle against it (to invalidate all such notions) the British Empire has fallen back, steadily, as the EPSR’s Marxist scientific analysis alone has consistently explained for the last 30 years.
It is a huge gain for the working class everywhere.
Even the Sinn Féin did not initially understand, as a retreat, the early Thatcher fall back of the post-Hunger Strike Anglo-Irish Agreement in the mid-1980s, though its growing maturity and coherence since then has carried it through multiple stages of the Good Friday Agreement and on to the 2006 St Andrew’s agreement which incontrovertibly puts the whole of Ireland on a path towards unity.
It is a colossal overwhelming defeat for imperialism despite all the difficult compromises and pride-swallowing concessions that Sinn Féin and the nationalist community (which it now overwhelmingly represents) has had to make, and cleverly has even initiated to press forwards the hesitant and historically paralysed British ruling class (and its cowardly Blairite front-men) and to tread its way delicately and diplomatically past the sore-headed irritation of the defeated “Loyalist” colonialists without unnecessarily setting-off further waves of dog-in-the-manger violence.
That it can now do all this within a peaceful framework remains based, however, on the victory its national struggle had achieved, and on the outstanding leadership it continues to give in finishing the process, as the clear and sharp responses to the dissidents have shown.
None of which huge positive achievements absolve the Sinn Féin from criticism or make it an example to follow for building socialism as such, as some of the Scargillite reformist/revisionist SLP functionaries still suggest.
Far from it. As the crisis deepens its petty bourgeois analytical weaknesses and failings are more and more sharply revealed.
Despite some efforts to discuss future possibly socialist perspectives there is very little in the Sinn Fein’s An Phoblacht newspaper, or political interventions its growing parliamentary representation makes, north and south, that remotely tells the working class what it needs to know about unfolding crisis and the need to overturn capitalism.
It is a reformist movement and while it is certainly yet, more sincere and well meaning in its demands for social improvement and exposures of the appalling poverty and conditions facing many Irish workers, and its condemnations of the excesses of the bourgeoisie, Dublin Green Tory sleaze, and international finance greed, than the degenerate cynicism of British Labour ("New” and “old” versions), it goes no further than that.
Sinn Féin is not only not a revolutionary socialist movement, which the working class desperately needs in Ireland as anywhere else, but has no understanding of, or commitment to developing such a crucial theoretical fight for Leninism.
Telling the working class that simply better and more reformist representation will solve their problems has been one of the great disasters in Britain and every other major imperialist power, diverting workers for a century and a half from the only possible means to stop the horrific plunge into slump and collapse, revolutionary overturn of the capitalist system. 
It can only be equally so in Ireland. 
Even the undoubted economic benefit of removing multiple old cross-border bureaucratic obstacles and the imperialist legislative framework, which is a major plank of Sinn Féin’s continuing unification fight, is almost certainly going to be swamped now by the hurricane disaster of the world imperialist slump collapse which will outweigh – and is already – even those real enough advances.
It is telling that the Sinn Féin Dublin Dáil representatives were suckered into voting for the Irish government bank bailout which is as much a robbery and theft on a grand scale of ordinary workers’ tax money for the benefit of the profiteers in Ireland, as it is in Britain, the US or any other part of capitalism.
There is no “rescuing” capitalism and “green shoots upturn” eventually. There is trade war downward spiralling, destruction of jobs and resources by shutdown, and eventual world war,
Internationally Sinn Féin’s lack of theory has been leading it more and more into errors, most ironically as previously pointed out (e.g EPSR 1224), over incidents like 9/11 and the Madrid bombings where it has opportunistically (and ironically given its own past) lined itself up with “condemning terror” and thereby helping imperialism get away with its monstrous Goebbels “war on terror” campaign to scapegoat the Third World and the working class for the disasters which its own crisis is causing.
It equally goes along with monstrous campaigns against figures like Robert Mugabe, swallowing every lie and failing completely to alert the working class to the cynical capitalist demonisation machine which is setting up victim after victim for future blitzing (Sudan, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, etc etc), and particularly those which continue to pose a direct challenge to its past colonial authority as Mugabe’s ZANU has, in its refusal to back down on re-appropriating white colonial (stolen) farmland among other things. 
It is a tragic blind spot for a movement like Sinn Féin which has been, and sometimes still is, victim to just such imperialist intelligence agency propaganda skulduggery.
The growing street discontent which the fake-“left” point to in Ireland is real enough, and like everywhere else will escalate rapidly as Slump disaster unravels.
The fakes’s hatred of Sinn Féin’s achievements, expressed in their sly backing for the dissidents is no answer to that; and the minority republicans themselves give even less sign of a socialist perspective than Sinn Féin, let alone revolutionary socialist theoretical understanding, without which there can be no revolution.  
They are simply wrong.
But their carping can only be fully challenged by a complete world revolutionary view of the struggle in Ireland and across the planet, increasingly merging into one giant anti-capitalist fight as the Slump deepens.
Build Leninism now.
Steven Tudy

Leaflet for 25th anniversary of Miners Strike:
Reformist “Plan for Coal” was not a possible outcome for the miners strike. In 1984 capitalism was already heading for the catastrophic Slump (now breaking), fighting vicious civil war ready for the turmoil it knows is coming. To win the working class needed, and needs, a revolutionary perspective to overturn imperialism 

Twenty five years after the heroic miners strike, the critical lesson its leader Arthur Scargill still refuses to put in front of the working class is that only a revolutionary struggle can offer a way out of oncoming Slump and world war disaster.
Worse than that – the 13 year long record of the Socialist Labour Party he formed in the wake of the strike has been one of manipulation and bureaucratic manoeuvrings ever since, to suppress, censor and eventually expel such arguments.
Even now as the most devastating catastrophic capitalist crisis in all history is breaking all around, and the arguments for revolution acquire both new urgency and are reinforced and proven a hundred times over, to anyone honest enough to think straight, there is not a word of genuine revolutionary theory and understanding.
A Great Slump to outdo even the devastating unemployment, poverty, homelessness and hunger of the early 1930s is unstoppably bringing conditions that have not been seen since the other great miners’ action 60 years before, with workers in every sector facing massive shutdowns, job slaughter and wage cut demands from the bosses across the board (as already at the country’s few remaining car plants).
Pay cuts and speed up (20% demanded at the Post Office), and devastation of all social and living standard “gains” of long reformist years, will rapidly outpace even the Great Depression which followed the 1926 strike and General Strike.
Whatever “boosts” or temporary relief might be achieved by “quantitative easing” (printing money) the implosion of capital and credit will quickly return to collapse and disintegration in one way or another (massive inflation likely  soon) and further financial collapses.
The insane “logic” of production for profit will take this downward spiral of collapse and trade war devastation, all the way to all-out shooting war in a not too distant future – exactly as the unstoppable pressures of monopoly bloc competition stampeded the world into the First World War and the Second World War. 
Strikes and the most organised class “pressure” in themselves are of little use when the capitalists are being devastated by the crash – and want to destroy “surplus” capacity.
Factory takeovers, occupations, and even more radical actions are the  needed now alongside a full range of strikes and other working class actions. 
There is no answer except the ending of capitalism to establish planned socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat – and eventually on a world scale, exactly as Marxist science understood a century and a half ago, and as the small number of those struggling to keep this theory alive, have argued for the last 30 years. 
That can only be considered and thought about and understood in the context of a total class fight for a complete revolutionary overturn of bankrupt capitalism and the increasingly repressive police state long prepared by the ruling class.
Their class consciousness is deeply prepared for forthcoming upheavals and turmoil that the paralysed disintegration of capitalist society will bring, exactly as the miners found out in the Great Strike.
But working class consciousness had been held back by the shallowness, hostility and anti-intellectualism of the “practical” working class leadership and the rampant opportunism and class collaborationism that it degenerates into.
It matters that someone with such a strong leadership standing in the working class not only does not understand but is hostile to the battle for this revolutionary scientific understanding.
Scargill’s powerful reputation  is almost unmatched, produced by exemplary leadership of the picketing battles of the great 1984 fight and the mobilisation of working class support, and reinforced by his well-placed warnings, (against press, establishment and Labour “aristocracy” mockery and sinister denial), of the Tory conspiracy to destroy the industry and thereby the much feared power of the working class’s finest and most solid sections.
It was a declaration of war, as he has repeated in recent articles.
But Scargill’s illusions, then, in the “Plan for Coal” reformist perspective of forcing the capitalist state to invest in the coal industry and the development of the economy around it, were always mistaken.
Even now in articles on the strike history, Scargillism is insisting that without the betrayals of senior Labourites, the mainstream TUC and the mysterious and odd reversal of the NACODS pit deputies union to support the strike, a victory could have been won with renewed investment in coal which “would have changed the political direction of the nation”.  
The NACODS reversal is as sinister as he paints it, and various other moves he describes which thwarted the strike at critical moments when it looked to have achieved victory.
But wider revolutionary perspectives say the “Plan for Coal” was an impossibility then or since.
Having seen the declaration of war on the miners he failed, and fails now, to draw out that this was a full civil war, of total class survival for the ruling class, which was already increasingly aware of the disastrous crisis path its system was on.
The small voice of revolutionary theory was capable enough to be warning of this even at that time (and long before 1984). 
Certainly by 1984 it was clear enough to Marxist-Leninist science (against all the revisionist and Trotskyist fake-”left” as well as non-theory trade unionism and reformist opportunism) that the capitalist crisis, which from 2008 has broken with full catastrophic hurricane force, was already ripening rapidly.
Growing international competition and incipient trade war from much more efficient imperialist rivals than decrepit British Empire monopoly capitalism (Germany, Japan, and the US, among others), was forcing the hand of the British ruling class into taking on working class power, built up post-war.
Huge reformist concessions had been made by the shattered and humiliated “imperial” British ruling class, to try and head off 1940s revolutionary ferment caused by the disgust of the great masses at the horrors and destruction of the 1930s Slump and the near decade of build-up and outbreak of the Second World War and its horrific destruction of entire cities and even countries, and wiping out of millions of lives.
The left mood across the world had been hugely reinforced by the stunning anti-capitalist victories of the Red Army, which almost single handed destroyed Nazism at vast cost in lives and resources.
World anti-imperialism had been on the rise ever since.
Internationally capitalism had to retreat as it had forced now dominant US imperialism to fund massive rebuilding and welfare state development throughout Europe with the Marshall Plan for example. 
Potential revolutionary development was held off by only reformist concessions, lyingly presented by Labour reformism in Britain as “won by reasonable peaceful parliamentary struggle” (rather than the underlying class pressure that threatened to turn over everything if the lid was kept on it), a disarming illusion reinforced by disastrous soft-brained Moscow-influenced revisionist “communism” declaring that capitalism could be contained, war averted by “peaceful struggle” and parliamentary progress be made all the way to socialism. 
But the driving pressures of international competition meant that this could not go on.
As the EPSR said 10 years ago:

...it was precisely Scargill’s biggest failing which then let him down, - again not an organisational or motivational problem but one of political understanding once more, - an inability to grasp that this ruling-class determination to break the power of the NUM (which weakening British imperialism could no longer afford to make concessions to), would not be countermanded by a new Labour Government coming in. A traditional ‘left’-Labour philistine indifference to theory had Scargill foolishly peddling the idea that if Labour got back in, a new Plan For Coal of state-assisted expansion of the mining industry would be bound to go ahead.
But even then in the 1980s, new conditions of sharpening international trade war were already threatening to bankrupt by a variety of means any state which tried to thwart market trends and private monopoly interests by turning on the public spending taps. Already then, what was needed to mobilise a successful working-class fight against impending privatisation speed-up and imposed self-reliance to replace welfare-state spending in health and education, etc, was sufficient revolutionary theory to foresee how the world monopoly-imperialist crisis must further evolve. 

That does not mean in the slightest that the great struggle was not worthwhile nor could not have resisted some closures at that moment. 
Or that strike struggles are not needed even more urgently now. 
But the result of the 1984 strike was to prove the limits of pure trade unionism and its power once the capitalist state was involved for total survival, using fascist police violence, illegal arrests and surveillance, dirty tricks and set ups and the full panoply of class war. Trade Unionism has been a grovelling de-natured class-collaborating farce of overpaid officials and hamstrung struggles  ever since. 
The miners reached the historic peak of “practical” struggle.
But though it produced major lessons for workers in taking their organisation and solidarity to a higher level, the point of the strike has never yet been explained. 
But with a revolutionary perspective, whatever was achievable or could not be achieved in immediate terms, the miners and the working class in general would have made valuable lessons in understanding just where capitalist crisis was already driving the entire system, preparing them for the great privatisations, cuts and cutbacks of the last two decades and for the now devastating slump onslaught which, whatever the 1984 outcome, would by now have been wreaking devastation anyway.
As the piece above, written at the time of the Rover closure at Longbridge went on:

The need for revolutionary theory now has practical immediate applications as well as the lone longterm perspective that makes any sense at all. Only on the basis of challenging outright the entire political establishment, the entire media, and the entire philosophical orthodoxy “that the capitalist free-market system will bounce back to provide even better career prospects for the West Midlands in the months and years ahead even if a mass-production car industry is finally wiped out there” (and elsewhere in Britain), -- will a permanently worthwhile struggle be unleashed.
Temporary piecemeal measures may save a few jobs here and there, and some new-industry new-starts may well flourish initially because of the still-bounding stock-exchange boom and gigantic international investment-capital conglomeration and rapid movements in and out of various parts of the world. Longbridge workers may be lucky.
But that period of capital over-production crisis is rapidly arriving which will soon start plunging not just weak individual competitor firms like Rover into bankruptcy, but also threaten whole swathes of industry with closure,- or even whole industries,- or even wipe out entire economies and currencies, (and even moderately-successful ones too, as happened quite recently in South East Asia once the speculative-boom bubble had initially burst there).
The mechanics of collapse and slump caused by ‘surplus’ capital (created by untameable private-enterprise anarchy and greed for profits without which the bourgeoisie can no longer be the bourgeoisie) are the cast-iron laws of the free-market system fully exposed and expounded by Marx and never refuted. It is the most ludicrously irresponsible and criminal lightmindedness for all so-called ‘socialist’ and labour leaders to pontificate on the car-industry debacle, or the railway privatisation fiasco, or the racketeering manipulation of the fuel and power industries, etc, etc, but to not place the calls for protests, agitation, and ‘alternative’ electoral platforms firmly into the realm of conscious revolutionary theory.

This Leninist “catastrophism” prediction – set out and warned of nine years ago (and for two decades before that) which expects “whole countries” to be wiped out, no longer sounds remotely “extreme” in the new conditions of onrushing Slump disaster which has already bankrupted Argentina and Iceland and where speculation runs rife on how stable Britain, especially, looks as unbelievable trillions of pounds of potential bad debt are bandied around.
That it was made as a routine part of analysis is a powerful demonstration of the importance of theory.
It is just this understanding which the EPSR has had to battle tooth and nail for over years against the philistine hostility and conceit of those who neither understand it, nor want to, for reasons of opportunism in the comfortable niches and positions achieved within capitalism by the petty bourgeois corrupted layers of the working class.
How much better prepared would the working class would be for the battles it will be facing in the very near future if these perspectives had been developed all along???
With an understanding of what they are up against, of their own strength and of connections to developments in the entire historical world struggle of the working class and Third World proletariat erupting throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa and South America, huge strength, motivation and grasp would dramatically reinforce class strength.
The old style philistine hostility to revolutionary theory and debate which informs the SLP, despite its initial pretensions to be encouraging a “great break” from the old strike-proven treachery of the Labour Party, has produced nothing more than a Mark Two version of Old Labour, saturated with the same attitudes.
It was initially possible to see the SLP as the political extension of the 18 months of class solidarity, bravery, determination and sacrifice that summed up the best and finest sections of the working class and its communities, and an historic shift from class-collaborating Labourism, opening up a widespread and deep discussion throughout the working class on the way forwards, drawing together disparate threads and views.
But its defining characteristic has proved to be nothing but stitch-up anti-communism of the official Trade Union and Labour Movement, saturated for 150 years with class collaboration. 
Such “purist” Clause Four Labourism was already out of time in 1984, well on the path to its great transformation in the 1990s into the Blairite mainstream party of capitalism (to replace exhausted, sleaze-ridden and discredited Toryism), a loyal warmongering stooge to the big money and reactionary interests of the ruling class.
But “old” Labour had always been reactionary anyway, demonstrated by the dole cutting of the pre-war MacDonald coalition and the imperialist serving actions of the great majority “left” 1945 Attlee Government, such as running the most brutal wars against communism in Greece, and Malaysia post-war, suppression of anti-colonial struggles like that rising in Kenya and elsewhere, the start and ramping-up of anti-Soviet Cold War and the formation of NATO, and the founding and support of Zionist “Israel”, that monstrous intrusion into the Middle East which has been a non-stop genocidal fascist horror story against both the Palestinians and the wider Arab and Iranian world ever since.
Subsequent Wilsonite and Callaghan governments only confirmed this slimy duplicity. 
So it is no surprise that layers of the TUC and Labour Establishment proved so treacherous to the miners struggle, as Scargill recalls in newly published accounts of the strike.
But rebuilding a party of the same type is no answer. 
In fact its Little Englander illusions in “leaving Europe” and its reformist perspectives, still insisting the strikes and class pressure could have “changed everything” simply play into the hands of capitalism feeding the international hostilities that capitalism now wants in order to get into warmongering to destroy surplus capital.
Revolution is the only answer.
To lead it a party struggling to understand the world built on the great achievements of the past communist theorist Marx, Engels, and Lenin and exposing the capitulations of Stalinist revisionism, which insanely led to the liquidation the giant  achievements of the  USSR, is vital.
Leninism needs to be fought for and built in a word.
Jim Wright

E P S R   BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

***********

It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

*********

"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

*******

" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

Name ............................

Address.........................

Postcode........................

For a £25 annual subscription to receive EPSR by first class post
every Wednesday, write to (but send no money initially):
EPSR, PO Box 50, L0NDON, SW17 9NL

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Sinn Féin/IRA response to the dissident shootings and threat to peace 
JSPEAKING in the United States on last week’s killings of a psni officer and two British soldiers by so-called ‘dissident republican’ groups, Sinn Feín President Gerry Adams said the killings represent “a full-frontal attack on the Peace Process”.
“These attacks reflect the success of the process. The vast majority of people are opposed to what happened. The political institutions, the Peace Process and Sinn Feín are as much a target of the perpetrators of Saturday night’s attack as those they killed or injured. They have to be resisted - politically, democratically, peacefully.”
The Sinn Féin president said that the groups responsible want to destroy the hard-won progress of recent times and cannot be allowed to succeed.
“There is also an onus on the British Government and the psni  to resist any temptation or any demands for a return to the bad practices of the past. This would be equally wrong. It would also sideline the Peace Process and political leaders.”
He added: “The popular will in Ireland is for peaceful and democratic change. I’m sure that’s shared by our neighbours in Britain and further afield. So everyone has a responsibility to defend the peace. There can be no turning back. Those I have met here understand this. The Peace Process is clearly a work in progress. It is a journey we are on and have to complete.”
A Sinn Féin delegation met Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin at Government Buildings in Dublin on 12 March.
Following the meeting, Gerry Adams said: “The Taoiseach is clearly seized by the imperative of the governments and parties uniting in defence of the Peace Process.
“It is crucial that there is no breathing space given to these unrepresentative groups and that there is no sense of ambiguity about our collective opposition to their actions.
“I also stressed in our conversation the British Government must not step outside the political process. It is up to the police to deal with these matters.
“Political leaders, including the governments, must ensure that the process of positive change continues to deliver for citizens, particularly those in disadvantaged sectors.”
Speaking in the Dáil on Wednesday, 11 March, on an all-party motion on the killings, Sinn Féin Dáil Leader Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin TD unreservedly condemned them. He said Sinn Féin will not be deflected from its peace strategy that it had democratically adopted and successfully pursued.
He accused so-called ‘dissident’ groups of pursuing a militarist agenda primarily designed to justify their own existence and perpetuate their own factions.
“We have seen a process of demilitarisation in the Six Counties as a key part of the Peace Process. The British Army was taken off the streets. Numbers in the Six Counties were very significantly reduced. Barracks and posts, including those along the border, have been closed. What will these attacks achieve, apart from the grief to families and renewed fears in communities?
“They will serve only to delay the ongoing process of demilitarisation. They may lead to the deployment of more rather than fewer British troops. Remilitarisation is what these groups want. They should not get what they want. These groups will not succeed in their attempts to derail the Peace Process which has the full support of the overwhelming majority of the Irish people and of all political parties.”
Ó Caoláin commended the North’s First Minister and deputy First Minister and the Executive in the Six Counties for their leadership since the attacks and said the best response to the attacks is to carry forward with even greater determination the politics of partnership and peace.
“The actions of these factional groups have no popular support. Rather than hastening the day of Irish unity and national independence, they try to undermine the only strategy currently on offer that has the potential to deliver our republican objectives. But in any effort to undermine the republican peace strategy they will fail,” the TD said.
“We in Sinn Féin remain resolute in our commitment to achieve our stated goals by peaceful and democratic campaigning. This approach has the support, and indeed the growing support, of the Irish electorate, North and South.
“Those who want to turn back the clock would do better to turn over a new leaf and, if they are sincere in their stated wish to end the British presence in Ireland, invest their energies and talents in positively working for that objective.”
He added that the objectives of Irish unity and freedom can only be achieved by the united and concerted effort of all republicans seeking to persuade people of all opinion, “including those who have been traditionally hostile to our goals, of the good sense and the tremendous opportunities that can and will flow from the reunification of Ireland and the establishment of a truly pluralist, inclusive and democratic republic across the whole island of Ireland”.
Ó Caoláin said that there may be some who, while not supporting the groups who carried out the killings, “may baulk at the condemnation of the killings”, in particular the killings of members of the British Army.
“But,” the Sinn Féin leader in the Dáil continued, “those killings were wrong because they were in breach of a peace process entered into in good faith by Irish republicans, a process out of which came all-party negotiations and all-party agreements which, while falling short of our ultimate objectives, are respected and upheld and adhered to by Irish republicans and endorsed by the vast majority of the Irish people”.
The TD had another message for those who might support such attacks.
“The Irish Republican Army leadership and Volunteers have long since declared that the war is over. The unrepresentative factions, who do not deserve the name ‘republican’, are engaged in a futile effort to reignite conflict and resume war but they will fail.”
He said he has no doubt that there are still people within the British system who would like to turn back the clock to justify their own existence and to perpetuate their militarist organisations. This must not be allowed to happen either.
“The British Army, mi5 or any other covert force should have no role in this response and, in fact, no role in Ireland at all.” 
Meanwhile, 5,000 people joined a Belfast rally in defence of the Peace Process organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions on 11 March.
ictu Assistant General Secretary Peter Bunting said this was an opportunity for “all workers and their families to express their abhorrence at these murders and the direct threat to the Peace Process”.
Other rallies took place on the same day in Derry, Newry, Lisburn and Downpatrick.
Speaking at the rally outside Belfast City Hall, which was attended by Belfast Mayor Tom Hartley, Bunting said the killings of a PSNI officer and two British soldiers were “an assault on every citizen who supports peace”.
He added that the “show of strength from civil society” would send a clear message to those who carried out the attacks of “our determination that not a further single worker will be injured, intimidated or murdered by those who seek to derail the Peace Process”.
ICTU President Patricia McKeown said unions stand “united with our political leaders to say to those who would derail a process that we have fought so hard for, and sacrificed so long for, that there is no space in this society for you”.

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Micro groups’ attacks delay a united Ireland 
No place in changed political landscape for armed actions

A seasoned republican commentator, a former internee and republican prisoner who was an adviser to the Sinn Féin team negotiating the Good Friday Agreement, says that the political landscape in which the ira fought its campaign has totally changed. The actions of the so-called ‘Continuity ira’ and ‘Real ira’ have no place in Ireland today and will only hinder the campaign for a united Ireland and an end to rule from Westminster.
Writing in his weekly Irish News column last Thursday (12 March), Jim Gibney says unequivocally “I am not a pacifist” but describes the killing of two British soldiers and a psni officer as “wrong, morally unjustifiable and indefensible” in the changed political circumstances.
“The nationalist community lives in real time. A time of peace, not conflict, where there has been real change,” Jim Gibney says.
“The partition of this island and the presence of some British garrisons are unacceptable to me.
“I am not a pacifist. I supported the ira at a time when the nationalist community was really oppressed. I have supported other armed struggles in Vietnam and South Africa, to name but a few. Armed struggle can only be legitimate when measured against the real level of oppression and suffering and must enjoy real support.”
But, Gibney argues, the North today is not the same as the one he grew up in. The North was a one-party, sectarian state. It was one where unionists dominated and discrimination, censorship, bans, curfews, internment, and murderous attacks by state forces on protesters was the order of the day. It was a place where nationalist voters and their families and aspirations did not count. It was, Jim Gibney recalls:
“A society in the grip of a powerful system of armed forces backed by repressive laws, where nationalists had no place in their own country, a society where our cultural identity, our language, was criminalised. A society where our choices were limited to sitting at the back of the bus and voting for constitutional nationalist parties that sat at the back of the benches, or fighting for our civil and national rights.
“The Peace Process and republicans changed all of that.
“Today, nationalists and republicans have significant political power and influence.”
In the first Executive, he says, Martin McGuinness and Bairbre de Brun between them controlled 70 per cent of the budget. Today Martin McGuinness is joint First Minister with the dup’s Peter Robinson and nationalists and republicans are in other ministerial positions.
“Real change is represented by the all-Ireland Ministerial Council, by nationalist mlas in the Assembly and various committees and in the strength and growth of the Irish language across the North.
“It is represented in the absence of British soldiers on our streets, in the absence of British fortresses, in the absence of a loyalist militia like the udr or rir, and in the dismantling of repressive laws.
“It is represented in the existence of the human rights and equality commissions, in the presence of republicans and nationalists on the Policing Board and in the new police service, the psni.”
The actions of armed micro groups who have usurped the name of the ira have caused “widespread shock, anger and demoralisation among nationalists and republicans in whose name these Unreal ira’s claim to be acting”, including those who fought the war.
The leaderships of the ‘Real ira’ and ‘Continuity ira’ are “contemptuous of the opinion of the vast majority of republicans, men and women who really risked their lives, who sacrificed the best years of their lives in prison for freedom and who, in their collective wisdom, believe in the Peace Process.
“Does all that really count for nothing in their minds?” the former internee asks.
Oppression cannot be contrived or manufactured, Jim Gibney says.
“It cannot be conjured up out of history books or carried forward from a deep hurt, personal or political. It cannot be a figment of one’s imagination nor can it be made real through political doggerel.
“Oppression is felt as a result of actions by state forces, as a result of unjust laws, as a result of people being deliberately forced to the margins of society.
“That form of oppression no longer exists in the Six Counties.”
Jim Gibney acknowledges there still is “a legacy of wrongs to be rectified as a result of partition and conflict” but, he adds, Sinn Féin and others are overcoming that legacy by using their political power and influence.
“The people of this island are in a new place and there is no space in that place for those who use violence in the perverse claim that by taking lives they can add to our lives.
“They will not.
“Armed struggle or armed actions have no part to play in bringing about a united Ireland. In fact, in today’s Ireland, they will delay and hinder that very objective.”

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Sinn Féin meets UDA-linked UPRG in wake of killings

A Sinn Féin delegation, including Belfast Mayor Tom Hartley and Assembly member Paul Maskey, met with representatives of the Ulster Political Reseach Group, linked to the uda, for the first time on 11 March.
Tom Hartley described the historic discussion as “constructive” in the wake of the killings of two British soldiers and a psni officer by so-called dissident republicans.
“The principles which have underpinned the Peace Process have been inclusivity and dialogue.” Tom Hartley said.
“Today we met with representatives of the Ulster Political Research Group. In recent years there has been useful work done between loyalists and republicans in the city which has contributed to a series of peaceful summers.
“The events of recent days, which have seen three people killed and a number of others injured, have clearly raised tensions across the board. But this is a time for clear heads and decisive leadership.
“There can be no return to the failures of the past. Loyalists have an important part to play in ensuring this happens and that formed part of our discussions today.”
The Belfast mayor added:
“Sinn Féin will continue to build the Peace Process. Its robustness has been demonstrated in the days since Saturday night. However, it is important that all of us in political leadership continue to redouble our efforts to maintain calm on our streets and see an end to these sorts of futile armed actions.”
Speaking to An Phoblacht this week, west Belfast Assembly member Paul Maskey said that Sinn Féin also discussed broader economic and social issues with the uprg delegation.
“The groundwork for such a meeting to take place has been laid by community activists, republican and loyalist, over the past few years through cross-community dialogue and interface work to foster respect and keep our streets calm over the summer,” he said.
“We hope to continue to build on these lines of communication and dialogue, which are so vital in periods when tensions rise.
“Dialogue between representatives of Belfast’s working-class communities can play an important role in tackling many of the common problems we face,” Maskey added.
“These include fuel poverty and economic hardship, unemployment and social issues such as suicide, community safety, health and education.
“Our common experience of social deprivation and exclusion can be the starting point for discussions about our common strategies for the way forward.”
Frankie Gallagher from the uprg viewed the meeting as positive, saying: “We made a conscious decision that we would meet Sinn Fein to demonstrate to these people [republican micro groups] they will not create any more division.”
Gallagher also said that while the uprg and Sinn Féin have political and ideological differences, “there are many social and economic issues that we can work together on”.