Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
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No 639 Tuesday March 10 1992                                                                                                                       10p 

'End of history' bilge plumbs new depths

Not only is Western petty-bourgeois philistinism becoming sillier than ever but it is going blatantly commercial with its stupidity as well.

Comment is almost superfluous. Listen to the confessions of an ignoramus in his own words:

I was on a European tour to promote my new book, The End of History and the Last Man, visiting five countries in three weeks. My book is about the worldwide spread of liberal democracy as a form of government, and how countries have become more similar one to another as we approach the "end of history". Nationalism, I argue, may be strong "over there" in what was once the communist world, but for Western Europe it is a spent force.

Yet everywhere I travelled during the tour I was struck by how deep were the national differences that remain in Europe, and how they are in many ways deepening. This feeling began when I read reviews of my book. One critic, an Englishman, quoted a passage and said this was something that "only a left-bank French intellectual could believe". Another critic, an American, thought he detected in the book an "aura of German profundity" which he did not trust.

In France and Germany, on the other hand, I was accused of being a "typical American" by arguing that there was such a thing as progress in history, despite the fact that my ideas are chiefly inspired by a German (Hegel), a Frenchman (Tocqueville), and a Franco-Russian (Alexandre Kojeve, a major intellectual figure in France unknown to most British and Americans).

There were plenty of other signs that in the wake of the EC Maastricht summit, Europeans are growing more different than alike. A French publicist remarked on the way to the airport that fewer and fewer contemporary German books were being published in Paris. Many Frenchmen, he said, didn't want to know anything about their neighbour across the Rhine, because they were afraid of what they would find out. A German in the publishing industry confirmed that fewer German books were being translated into French, and a Dutch publisher noted the growing insularity of the Germans, who have been thoroughly preoccupied with their problems since reunification.

Another German, a well-known television commentator, shook his head and said that despite all the new communications technologies that put people in each other's living rooms, there was a growing provincialism in each country's intellectual traditions.

Differences in intellectual traditions were reflected during my trip in political differences that were all too striking. Only in Germany did I hear environmentalists suggest that we might have to abridge democracy in order to save the earth. An Austrian journalist called me provincial: for us Europeans, she said, the "free market" was an anachronistic concept that has given way to the "social market", as if the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions had never occurred. I thought she was the provincial one, and asked her whether she had been to Budapest, Moscow, Beijing or Singapore lately.

The Gulf war was another notable point of difference. It is clear that having a militaristic tradition bombed out of you does certain things to a nation's psyche. Germany (as well as Japan) paid a lot of money for the military campaign in Kuwait, but even conservatives there had no enthusiasm for it whatsoever. One German told me that he had never felt so alien in the United States as when he visited New York a year ago and felt the jingoism. The mood could have not been more different from that in England on the eve of the fighting: I was lectured by a couple of influential British editors that if America was not ready to accept 10,000 casualties to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, it might as well give up being a great power right now.

I did not talk to a single German who thought that Germany in the end would give up the Deutschmark for the ecu. We have no national tradition, a German said, of which to be proud, and the strong mark is our only point of stability. We Germans have access to everything we want in Europe now. Why, then, do we need monetary union?

And in the back of everyone's mind was the question of immigration: was anyone in Europe really capable of handling a more integrated labour market, given today's anti-foreign sentiment?

ON THIS trip I failed to encounter one German who did not feel genuinely indignant on behalf of Croatia and insistent that the EC had to recognise that country, while I did not meet a Frenchman who felt that the Germans weren't making a sinister power play in the Balkans. What was striking was not the difference in positions (on the merits, I tend to favour the German one) but the self-perpetuating distrust of one another's motives. And, as one German said, if we are so at odds over a minor thing like Croatia, what will happen when something big is at stake?

In the end, I would not change a line of what I wrote; the fall of-communism has not returned Europe to the year 1914 and its explosive nationalisms. The gains brought about by the EC are fundamentally irreversible.

Well, perhaps not yet all the way back to 1914, Mr Fukuyama, but give it time, - and give it "something big at stake", as the man said.

All that one can make of this commercialised drivel is that before the destruction of the world of bourgeois-imperialist domination, it will first be driven totally mad.

Even a nincompoop like Fukuyama cannot help noticing that nationalism is still strong in Europe despite his juvenile predictions of its demise (to help pad out his boy-scout manual on world philosophy).

The reality which even the grubby capitalist press is able to report more accurately than Fukuyama, - is even more startling, - and worldwide:

Last spring a book called The Coming War with Japan became a best seller in Japan and has sold 40,000 copies in the U.S. The authors, Meredith LeBard and Dickinson College political scientist George Friedman, predicted a shooting war within 20 years between the U.S. and Japan. The authors wrote, "The issues are the same as they were in 1941. Japan needs to control access to its mineral supplies in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean Basin and to have an export market it can dominate politically. In order to do this, it must force the United States out of the western Pacific." As in the '30s, by this scenario, the tensions eventually lead to a hot war. "The first assumption when the book came out," says Friedman, "was that we were psychotic Japan bashers. But there's been a sea change. No one is debating anymore the question of whether we will see a massive deterioration of the relationship. What was 'preposterous' in May becomes only 'difficult to believe' in January.'' The book implausibly assumes that the U.S. could be "forced out" of markets and that the Japanese people would support a rebirth of militarism. But its hyperbole is a perfectly consistent American version of the sort of unpleasant, vaguely paranoid fantasies that a number of Japanese writers have been retailing for some time.

Despite the American alarm and anti-Japanese sentiment, a strain of ambivalence and self-criticism runs through American opinion. For one thing, anti-Japanese gestures can be very complicated in the new world. In Valley Stream, New York, Steve Verga sells Hondas, about 450,000 of which are now made in the U.S. annually. "When customers ask us, 'Where was this car made?' " says Verga, "we say, 'In Ohio, by American workers.' "

The Buy America campaign may be simple. The larger context is not. During the week that anti-Japanese protests took place in Louisville, Kentucky, Toyota announced yet another $90 million plant expansion there, which would add 200 more jobs to the local economy. Total Japanese employment in the U.S. has risen to 600,000, nearly 400,000 in the manufacturing sector, while Japanese investors continue to hold $180 billion of the U.S.'s mountain of debt paper, 30 times as much as the Germans.

Sadahei Kusomoto, the chairman and chief executive of Minolta's U.S. operations for 22 years, argues with some plausibility, "It's hard to blame Japan for the recession in the U.S. Ford, GM and Zenith are moving their plants to Mexico. American companies are giving up manufacturing in this country, while Sony, Toshiba and Mitsubishi are coming here and opening up major plants. When things go wrong, we have to find some excuse, and the Japanese are becoming some sort of scapegoat."

A corollary to nationalistic America First sentiment disturbs many Americans. The other day Kansas City lawyer Ilus W. Davis, a civic leader and former mayor, had lunch with two fellow Kansas City businessmen. One of them had won a contract to install a new sewer system in Cairo, and the other was offering fireproof grease to the Hungarian market. Says Davis: "If we took foreign trade out of Kansas City, we'd be in total depression in 48 hours. It has come over a long period of time, but we sure like it." Some Japanese believe the anti-Japanese sentiment in America is essentially racist. Kusomoto raises the question: "Most American people don't like to admit it, but racial issues have some very deep roots," he says. "Americans are seeing our successes here as Pearl Harbor II. Only this time, we win."

Are Americans racially prejudiced against the Japanese? Occasionally the accusation rings true. Would Americans be upset if, say, Canadian investors offered to buy the Seattle Mariners? Probably no more than they are that Canadians already own the Montreal Expos and the Toronto Blue Jays. Says Linda Cunningham, editor of the Rockford, Illinois, Register-Star. "There is an increasing willingness to refer to the 'Japs,' and to talk openly about things that might have been said only privately in their own living rooms. There now seems to be a respectability attached to a subtle return of racism."

In 1946, just after World War II, the historian Allan Nevins observed. "Probably in all our history, no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese."

"No one was prepared for it, the sudden change, the extent of the criticism - nothing like it has been seen since the Community began," said Angelika Voile, an expert on German-European relations at the Foreign Affairs Institute in Bonn. So sure of itself on Europe only a short while ago, the government now appears dazed and uncertain.

Within the ruling Christian Democratic party, the mystique of Europe has rubbed off. Volker Rühe, the party's general secretary, has admitted publicly that the road to Europe is more bumpy. His colleagues are less circumspect.

"For decades we saw the EC as the solution to our troubles. Now, with everyone in Eastern Europe hanging around our necks, there is a tendency to see the Community as adding to the problem, another burden. That could become serious," one official said. 

CHANCELLOR Helmut Kohl never meant seriously his threat that Germany's interests might wander elsewhere should its partners fail to grasp the historic opportunity for European union. It was a threat designed for foreign consumption, mainly to prod the French and British into accepting a more radical deal at last December's Maastricht summit. For no one in Bonn doubted the strength of German attachment to the Community.

But suddenly German enthusiasm for things communautaire has cooled dramatically.

The latest demands from Brussels for a big increase in member state contributions, which would hit Germany hardest, have highlighted the problem.

Whereas in 1988 51 per cent of West Germans favoured increasing the pace of European integration and just 6 per cent wanted to slow things down, now only 10 per cent want acceleration, against 29 per cent who wish to put a brake on union, according to results of an Allensbach poll last month,

Money lies at the centre of the swing. Germans have woken up to the fact that Chancellor Kohl has signed an agreement to "get rid of our lovely deutschmark", as one newspaper headline put it. Only 26 per cent of Germans are prepared to see the mark exchanged for a common European currency, according to the Allensbach poll, with 49 per cent against

"The Germans have achieved little of positive note this century apart from the D-mark," said Peter Gauweiler, minister in the Bavarian state government. "To sacrifice this masterpiece on the altar of European union will be psychologically difficult."

Barely discussed during the period preceding the Maastricht summit, the EC has suddenly exploded into a controversial issue. The fact that the Bundesbank —regarded by Germans as the nearest thing to the oracle — has publicly joined this negative chorus has given popular uncertainty the stamp of authority, Warning against placing too heavy a burden on Germany, and highlighting the pitfalls of currency union, the Bundesbank president, Helmut Schlesinger, said recently that there was "a need to make people aware of the problem". He need not have worried, for awareness could hardly be higher.

Another recent poll on German attitudes, by the American Rand Corporation, found that European monetary and political union are at the bottom of people's priorities. At the top are living standards, the integration of East Europe and extending the internal market. It could have been Margaret Thatcher talking.

The same government officials who three months ago stressed the importance of "irreversibility and automatism" in the process towards monetary union are now trying to slow it down.

The demands for massive transfers of aid by poorer southern countries such as Spain — not long ago praised as one of Germany's strongest allies on European union — are now described as "scandalous".

"There is this general feeling that Germany is paying the money... so the public seems to be saying, if we are running the show anyway, then let's do things the way we see them," Ms Voile said.

Far from being the end of history, these competitive contradictions of monopoly imperialism are clearly only the start of developments far more cataclysmic than everything that has ever happened in the annals of the capitalist system so far (including two world wars already this century).

But such is the commercial philistine stranglehold on all thought in the West that no materialist dismissal of end-of-historyism was bluntly put to Fukuyama.

There were plenty of piecemeal challenges academically by rival pundits just to try to score booklist-ratings points off him, 'boldly' twitting Fukuyama about the farcical state of US democracy, or the failure of China to yet capitulate to class-collaborating Western philistinism totally, etc.

But piecemeal observations they deliberately remained. There has been a spontaneous petty-bourgeois conspiracy of silence to purposely avoid drawing the conclusion about mass unemployment, house repossessions, widespread civil-war and nationalist-war violence, etc, namely, precisely what sort of international economic and social system is it which in the age of science and reason can only continually keep reproducing these endless largescale personal tragedies?

It is disarming criminal nonsense to keep on asking about these 'blights' on the capitalist-democracy system just in the spirit of "what about this anomaly and that anomaly", etc.

The big question is: Just what contempt do all these 'experts' hold the masses of ordinary people in around the world by assuming that they will go on for ever just putting up with these periodic 'blights'.

It is totally monstrous for studio 'experts' to sit around casually discussing the civil war nightmares raging across Africa, East Europe, the Middle East, southern Asia, the Far East etc, just as some inconvenient statistic which puts a spoke into some barmy vision of a nutty headbanger.

The serious question is should not all these brazen or closet apologists for the Western imperialist system all be locked up for advocating the continuation of such a barbaric world order, and even its canonisation into some mystical eternal permanence.

But sanity will prevail in the end, - and is still doing so right now in Cuba, - in spite of all the degenerate fascist savagery which Fukuyama's Washington State Department has inflicted on that heroic island, - as even the capitalist press is forced to admit through clenched teeth:

Fidel Castro has urgent points to make to his citizens.

Those who are not happy — or at least resolute — in adversity are letting the side down: those who want to leave the country are traitors. Nationalism, his brand of nationalism, is first, last and always. The US trade embargo, which is throttling Cuba, must be fought.

To do the Comandante en Jefe justice, there are indeed millions of people leading happy, active, fulfilled lives in revolutionary Cuba, people who are as steadfast as any Londoner in the Blitz against the wiles and weapons of an implacable foreign enemy; Cubans who are as admiring of, and loyal to, Castro as ever the British were to George VI and Winston Churchill during the Second World War.	
Many houses have a portrait of Castro inside the front door as a mark of that loyalty, and as a talisman against evil and ill luck in whatever form.

Quietly, and without any apparent compulsion, thousands of citizens turned up last Sunday in Revolution Square to queue for hours to do homage to the body of a sergeant lulled last month by a group of Cubans who were seeking to quit the island illegally.

'I'm fed up with outsiders drawing parallels between Castro and Ceausescu,' said one Western diplomat last week. 'There is no parallel. In Eastern Europe, Communism and hostility to the West were generally imposed by the Red Army. In Cuba, hostility to the United States is a genuine form of nationalism.'

Cuba's palaces of culture are filled nightly with appreciative audiences for performances of supreme artistry and technique. Gonzalito Rubalcaba, surely one of the world's greatest jazz pianists, pours out a stream of notes that fall like showers of polished diamonds over his enraptured listeners at the Teatro Nacional: at the Gran Teatro, 19-year-old Xiomarai Reyes dances La Fille Mal Gardée with a grace and aplomb which, says one British balletomane, the Royal Ballet School could never match. In times of adversity, it seems, the last thing to be sacrificed in Cuba is the ballet.

Seventy-five miles away, in the seaside resort of Varadero, Francisco Camps, the young Spanish manager of the huge Melia Varadero Hotel, has nothing but praise for his Cuban workforce. On £45 a week, newly trained Cuban staff are turning the resort into one of the finest mass-market holiday spots in the Caribbean, a favourite with Canadians in the winter and Europeans in summer.

The Cubans are highly educated and eager to learn, Camps says. 'Our firm was told by the US government that we might have to choose between running our hotels in Cuba or our hotels at the Disney complex at Orlando in Florida. If that happened, we told the Americans, we'd have no hesitation in abandoning Florida... We're making a lot here. We've got great faith in this place, although the US government forbids its citizens to come here.'

It goes without saying that the average level of nutrition, education and health has, up to now, been superior to virtually everywhere in Latin America. Robert McNamara, former US Defence Secretary, until recently head of the World Bank and certainly no revolutionary, who visited Havana in December, pointed out that the infant mortality rate was a lot lower in Cuba than in Washington DC.

The economic crisis, the roots of which lie in the collapse of the Soviet Union, the consequent devastation of Cuba's foreign trade, and in particular its supply of oil, has wrought havoc with the daily life of virtually every Cuban. And as Castro himself said at the end of December, things must inevitably get worse.

Local TV transmissions have been cut back and newspapers are reduced to a minimum. Power cuts are frequent. Lacking fuel, factories are shutting or being put on short time. Surplus workers, the bulk of their usual wage assured, are being encouraged to work on the land. In the towns, city dwellers are being encouraged to plant onions and tomatoes in public gardens and in open spaces.

Cuba has been flooded with Chinese bicycles, the Forever Phoenix and Flying Pigeon brands: sadly, the Chinese machines lack gears and are therefore less popular in hillier parts of the country.

In the countryside, oxen are taking the place of tractors, which lie idle for lack of fuel.

There is loyalty to Castro but there is also grumbling. There is particular discontent at the fact that the successful tourist industry — however powerful the economic reasons for it — has generated a dual economy, which is irritating for the Cuban in the street who faces increasing austerity.

The Canadian and the European tourists can have a blissful holiday in Cuba buying whatever they like with dollars. There are an increasing number of diplotiendas, where foreign residents with dollars are able to stock up with everything from Nestle chocolate to the novels of Maeve Binchy.

Whatever the level of resentment, however, Castro has made it plain that he will brook no change to the system, no challenge to the paramountcy that he has enjoyed for more than three decades.

A tiny group of dissidents and human rights activists has been warned it can expect no mercy.

From the lowest stratum of society, Castro has organised against the increasingly less likely possibility of a new military attack mounted from the United States similar to the Bay of Pigs landing 30 years ago, and, more important, against calls for change from within.

His defences range from vigilante organisations ready to stage counter-demonstrations against any overt sign of dissidence at a moment's notice, and the well-trained National Revolutionary Police to the troops of the Interior Ministry, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and the Territorial Troops Militia, a sort of territorial army.

Amid frustration and government intransigence, few necessarily predict a rapid collapse of the Cuban revolution.

Fukuyama's barbaric world order of monopoly-imperialist market anarchy is doing just the opposite of having things all its own way.

The people of Cuba have never been in any doubt that their revolutionary re-claim of their country under Castroism from being an offshore whorehouse and gambling den for the US military and mafia has transformed all their lives beyond recognition, - nor that the difficulties and tensions Cuba is still facing are all caused entirely by the vicious US imperialist sabotage, subversion and blockade of Cuba, - without which all remaining problems or new problems could be worked out rationally and democratically to everyone's satisfaction once the constant counter-revolutionary pressure from America was no longer a factor in Cuba's life.

And least of all is there any doubt in Cuba that the only possible way that the people of Cuba could have cleaned up and reorganised their country in the brilliant way that they have, -wiping out mass illiteracy, mass ill-health, and mass unemployment all in 30 years, - was by centralised socialist planning under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Cuba had already had private capital investment and the 'free market' all its life, and there is not a Cuban who has lived this century who does not know to what depths of degradation and exploitation the 'Western way of life' had led to.

It is an insane idea that slow Third World capitalist accumulation under Western colonial and imperialist-market exploitation 'could be' different than it has been in the past, or that it is right now for 80% of mankind, still suffering civil war tyranny, fascist dictatorship, and monstrous economic dislocation, impoverishment, and exploitation throughput Africa, Asia, and Latin America, - all directly as a result of the enthronement and protection worldwide of the capitalist system by the Western imperialist domination of the planet.

It cannot be different ever, because of the very essence of the 'free market' system which precisely relies on individualism to make its ruthless progress.
In Cuba, that meant the biggest gangsters being always in power protected by, and doing the bidding of, the US mafia and US military colonialism. It is the Cuban socialist revolution, finally harnessing the collective wisdom and social
compassion of the Cuban people, which is obviously normal, and logical, and the shape of things to come.

It is the Fukuyama nonsense about the "universal appeal and triumph of capitalist democracy" which is perverse and dogmatic trouble for mankind.

It is the same story in nearby Nicaragua where US imperialism propped up the despicable Somoza dynasty for 50 years, regularly lending a military hand to help the Managua gangsters to butcher indiscriminately in order to keep on top of the pile.

The Sandinista socialist revolution was inevitable, and another gigantic achievement for the people of Latin America, only marred by the stupid tragedy of the Sandinista leaders remaining philistinely ignorant of Leninism, and allowing themselves to be bullied and sabotaged back towards a 'bourgeois parliamentary' system by a US imperialism which had helped Somoza literally murder every breath of democracy during his reign of terror.

Now behind the idiocy of 'free market capitalism', the forces of counter-revolution are on the march again in Nicaragua. Renewed fascist tyranny is inevitable before long, naturally endemic as it is throughout the exploited and forever-suffering Third World.

But neither is it just in the Third World that the philistine idiocies of Fukuyama & Co are in fact saying the complete opposite of what is really going to happen.

And to understand this, it is not necessary to look at 'merely the peripheries' of the Western world such as the record of fascist-military dictatorship in NATO-member Turkey, or in Common-Market members Greece or Spain or Italy, etc.

The rise again of aggressive national chauvinism in Germany and France, for example, has even been noted by Fukuyama above. But much more to the point, what can be guaranteed about future political and economic developments in the United States itself?

The capitalist press itself is increasingly blunt about disturbing signs of a collapse of confidence inside the USA in line with America's flagging ability to keep up with German and Japanese worldwide imperialist competition:

There is a feeling that the US may have underestimated Japan, just as it did in 1941. "American economic preeminence is dearly in question," says Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat spokesman on trade, "unless the US takes rapid action, it will fall behind Japan in the economic arena in a matter of years."

This sense of US vulnerability has triggered a debate on how to deal with, or even "contain" Japan - a politically-loaded term which suggests that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat may lie in Tokyo rather than Moscow.

From a common US perspective, the problem is that Japan has long confined its bowing to the ceremonial, preferring in practice to hide behind commercial barriers and build vast trade surpluses. Popular grievances have been compounded by a belief that Japan enjoyed a free ride in the post-war era, as the US spent billions of dollars defending East and West against communism, while Tokyo was free to pursue its brand of economic nationalism.

Much of the criticism of Japan reflects a deeper unease about the state of US competitiveness in the post-Cold War world. Looking across the Pacific, many Americans do not like what they see.

■ Since 1980, Japan's growth rate has averaged just over 4 per cent, far higher than the US.
■ In 1990, Japan invested 23.4 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product in plant and equipment, double the amount invested by the US.
■ The Japanese save 18 per cent of their income, compared with less than 4 per cent in the US.
■ Japan's trade surplus with the US, the single most important source of friction, is rising after declining for almost three years. Last year, it was $42bn, (£23.7bn) largely composed of technologically advanced industrial products.

Richard Holbrooke, a former senior US diplomat, suggests that the relative decline in US strength from its post-war peak in the 1950s underlies the current obsession with Japan. "It is a reflection of America's fear that it may have lost its own way," he writes in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs. "Japan seems to be better at the very things on which Americans once prided themselves: quality products, hard work, sacrifice, strong family structure, a sense of national unity and patriotism. In another sense, there may still be an underlying racism."

The uproar which greeted the Japanese buying spree in the 1980s suggests that US ambivalence about Japan does have a racist tinge. Cash-flush Japanese companies snapped up CBS Records, Inter-Continental Hotels, Firestone, Columbia Pictures and finally, MCA, the Hollywood film studio purchased by Matsushita for $6bn.

"Japan invades Hollywood," screamed Newsweek magazine on its front cover. Mitsubishi Estate's purchase of a 51 per cent stake in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan triggered similar outbursts.

No matter that the British were investing in the US at a similar pace, or that foreign investment was a testimony to confidence in the US economy. The Japan-bashers were in full cry.

The most extreme arguments emerged with the publication of Pat Choate's Agents of Influence, a book which purported to show that Japan had used its money to buy the best US brains in think tanks, universities, corporations, Washington law firms. Japan had assembled the finest political intelligence system in the US, Choate argued, allowing it to attain "effective political domination'' over the US.

In spite of (or because of) ferociously bad reviews, Choate's book sold well and made its author a minor celebrity. But it did not lead to tighter laws on influence peddling in Washington (which is by no means confined to the Japanese).

The more usual US (and European) complaint focuses on Japan's institutions, the so-called "golden triangle" made up of the government bureaucracy, the Liberal Democratic Party leadership and the huge Japanese conglomerates.

This institutional network has allowed Japan to carry out a highly effective industrial policy, focusing on high technology businesses. It is said that, using predatory pricing and protectionism, the Japanese have pursued an economic nationalism which has savaged foreign competition and seized an increasing share of crucial global markets.

Public attitudes in the US are so far from clear-cut. In the early 1980s, car workers in Detroit put up signs in the parking lots of plants that read: "If you're driving a Japanese car, don't park it here - park it in Tokyo." This week there have been plenty of interviews with military veterans, many saying, more or less, that it might be time to "do the job again on Japan." This has not prevented streams of state governors and local officials, particularly from the South, flying to Tokyo in search of Japanese investment.

The erosion of America's manufacturing base in the 1980s has made it much more difficult for the free-traders be heard. "Fairtrade" is the new slogan, and Japan more often than not finds itself in the dock for not playing by the rules. Clyde Prestowitz, a former top US trade official and author of Trading Places, argues that the friction lies in the systematic displacement of US (and European) companies from large industries and technologies by Japanese companies, all reflected in the composition of the trade deficit.

Theoretically, the US could export enough waste paper and logs to balance accounts with Japan," he wrote in the Economist, "but that would not end the friction. Until this fact is grasped, all efforts at negotiation will achieve little."

Similarly, James Fallows, a former Far East correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, argues that Japan's emphasis on production rather than consumption, its unwillingness to open key markets to foreign competition and its unrestrained pursuit of mercantilism, leaves the US no option but to find ways to "contain" Japanese power, starting with measured retaliation.

Unless Japan is contained, Fallows warned in May 1989, "America's own authority to carry out its foreign policy and advance its ideals, American citizens' future prospects within the world's most powerful business companies, and also the very system of free trade that America has helped sustain since the Second World War will be jeopardised." 

But these analyses reveal much more about how Americans view themselves and their country's place in the world than about US views on Japan. For Prestowitz, Fallows and others, nothing less is at stake than US global leadership and the triumph of US values worldwide.

These are dangerous waters. One of the chief justifications for the US military presence in the Pacific is to act as a check against regional powers, Japan included. A senior US military officer who declared recently that US forces stationed in Japan were a "cap in the bottle" may have been reprimanded, but he was echoing a widespread, if tacit presumption in Washington that Japanese military power must be contained. Most of Japan's Asian neighbours would agree.

Inevitably, a major impact on this years presidential race has now been made by this politics of envy and chauvinistic aggression - in the form of Pat Buchanan:

"Our people are hurting, and though George Bush doesn't care, I do," became his theme. The committed conservative began to condemn "vulture capitalists" and speak of the state as the engine of economic and national regeneration.

In Gulfport yesterday, standing beside a ship that plied America's inland waterways under a Cypriot flag, with a Filipino crew, Mr Buchanan heard that no American-flagged vessels used the port any more. Only one merchant ship was being built in America's once-humming shipyards.

His new policies for government regulation and protection spewed out. Investment credits for American ships; no foreign ships to be allowed to ply between American ports; US military cargoes and foreign aid and food shipments must go in American hulls.

"You can be a free marketeer in your head, but not in your heart when you see what this is doing to our people. When the theory comes up against real life, the theory falls."

His conservatism has always had a dark side, a sinister readiness to dabble in the outer fringes of the right. He condemns Congress as "Israeli-occupied territory." He defends Nazi war criminals, and queries the orthodox view of the Holocaust, saying the facts do not uphold the gassing of Jews at Treblinka.

In consequence, a lot of loose talk about fascism and anti-Semitism has been tossed around this year's political discourse, not least by Mr Bush.

This is to miss the point, to look at the symptoms rather than the underlying sickness. The point about Mr Buchanan's campaign is that he has ditched the free-market, classic conservative ideology with which he began. His appeal has now gone beyond the nakedly nationalist. The new Buchanan starts from the principle that the American Volk is hurting.

The once-despised machinery of government must be mobilised and expanded for its salvation. Forget the old taunts at the welfare state. Our people need unemployment benefits, our companies need protection and state-guided investment credits. Free markets must be closed, and free trade shut down in the over-riding national interest.

As he abandons the ideology of conservatism, he moves into territory that is eerily familiar. The last time we heard this kind of thinking was from the socialist wing of the National Socialist German Workers Party, slaughtered by Hitler in the Night of the Long Knives.

On the Buchanan campaign trail, we are watching the emergence of a distinctive American kind of fascism. And those of us on the trail with him are witnesses to the birth of what might best be called a soft Nazi. Its rhetoric is unmistakable.

"George Bush believes in his New World Order, the subordination of American sovereignty to Gatt and the World Bank and the United Nations," Mr Buchanan told us yesterday.

"I am going to defend my country with every breath in my body. Our America First threatens Bush's New World Order, my friends. If we unleash America's energies, we can beat them all. There won't be any New World Order. It will be America Number One again. These little dinky countries can't beat us. We led the world in the 20th century, and we are not gonna disappear into some gauzy New World Order."

The 'New World Order' freaks would counter that Buchanan will probably not win. Which would leave the reactionary imbecile George Bush in charge of the Western world for another four years, - or his deputy Dan Quayle, - or a Democratic hopeful like the crooked playboy Clinton. Some alternative! 

From one reactionary philosophical mess to another! Meanwhile, the only real hope of all Western philistine 'thinking' is that "the economy will revive sooner or later".

Meaning that capitalist skulduggery will be back to its inflationary, polluting, corruption-ridden boomtime worst again, - at which point with enough spare cash flowing again through the 'important' societies of the world (i.e. the Western imperialist 'democracies' and their closest fascist-stooge client states in the Third World like Zaire, Chile, Turkey, Thailand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, Kenya, Zionland, etc), it will be no longer necessary to put on any pretence of 'thinking' at all on Late Night Line-Up.

And can anything better be guaranteed about the political and economic future of the British imperialist bourgeoisie who have a revolution of sorts on their hands already because of the vicious colonial tyranny imposed by the criminal partitioning of Ireland in 1921 to retain part of that country by police-military dictatorship for the exclusive dominance of an artificially created 'majority' of British colonial inheritors in bits of six of Ulster's nine counties:

TWO weeks ago an IRA bomb exploded behind a row of houses in Catholic Ardoyne, injuring a policeman and breaking windows in surrounding houses. Immediately afterwards, Sinn Fein councillor Joe Austin called night workers at the Belfast Housing Executive to repair the damage.

On his morning walkabout the next day, he could assure local women that he would always be there to help them. As their councillor, that was only right and proper, but as the political partner of those who planted the bomb, it was an irony of a kind almost standard in Belfast's daily life.

The IRA has established an alternative 'rule of law' in Belfast's Catholic ghettos that goes far beyond the 'kneecapping' of elements it deems undesirable. From killing an informer to management of domestic disputes, the Republican movement carries an influence pervading all areas of life.

When another Sinn Fein councillor, Alex Maskey, heard complaints from a woman that her estranged husband was trying to force his way back into her home, he arranged a room in a council leisure centre for them to argue their differences.

This spared the woman getting a court order that might have drawn police into the area, but Sinn Fein insists that it operates out of wider considerations. The Provos claim to be good at settling quarrels between families, adding that the sanction they hold over people who break their rules is gentle and effective; they tell local publicans not to serve them.

Not that the Provos have gone soft. If anything, their methods for dealing with those they call anti-social elements in Catholic communities have become more sophisticated.

IRA punishment shootings and beatings of young offenders have been commonplace but now the Provos are expelling people from the country and, if they are juveniles, arranging for them to be put into care. Statutory social services, probation officials and voluntary agencies have been reluctantly drawn into working the system for the IRA. According to social workers, one young offenders' institution in West Belfast, intended to hold youths on custodial sentences, always has a few boys 'sentenced' not by the courts but by the IRA.

St Patrick's Training School on the Glen Road overlooking Andersonstown is run by a religious order called the La Salle Brothers. It is a place of custody for young offenders, many of them from the surrounding housing estates in Ballymurphy, Lenadoon, Poleglass and Twin-brook. Young joyriders end up in St Patrick's if they are convicted in juvenile courts, but there are boys who have arrived by a less orthodox route.	

They have effectively been sent there by the IRA, nominally under threat of physical punishment.

Others are too old for young offenders' institutions and increasing numbers are being ordered out of the country instead of — or coupled with — a severe beating. The IRA policy of sentencing people to exile came into the open last autumn when two men from Newry sought sanctuary in their cathedral in defiance of the threat. They are still in hiding.

Precise numbers of people exiled, usually with 48 hours' notice, are not available. But a worker for one of the organisations that have sprung up to assist their flight said he was dealing with as many as three cases every week.

One group, Families Against Intimidation and Terror, believes in open confrontation with the IRA and invites people to go public when they are exiled or beaten.

Base Two and others observe a policy of strict media silence. They keep all their work secret, and decline even to discuss it, saying it is in the best interests of IRA punishment victims. They feel that publicity which annoys the IRA, or forces them into a defensive attitude, can only endanger the people they are trying to help.

Some of these Belfast voluntary agencies have members who deal directly with the IRA. Their work is known to the probation and social services. The agencies say they do not negotiate with the IRA, but seek clarification of punishments or request extensions to expulsion deadlines. They argue that if they did not go to the IRA, they would be never know whether they were simply being manipulated by people wanting money and free passage to England.

Some members of other agencies are even considering an independent mediation system that would acknowledge the reality of the IRA's gun law in the ghettos. Parts of Belfast have almost become 'no-go' areas to police investigating non-terrorist related crime.

A Royal Ulster Constabulary spokesman said: 'The terrorist threat has inhibited the degree and quality of contact between the police and the public.'

Sinn Fein councillor Joe Austin supports the IRA's self-appointed position as dispenser of justice. He said: 'A community holds the right to defend itself against people who they see, and who are in fact, preying on the vulnerability of the community.' He adds: 'In the absence of any alternative, it is quite understandable'.

And what economic recovery anyway? there are increasing signs, in spite of today's opportunist budget tinkering, that the competitive monopoly-imperialist system is heading for a World War III showdown over just which power deserves to be in a position of international domination, - the USA and its allies, Germany and its allies, or Japan, rather than any recovery in which they can all go back to making profits again on a rising boom.

Utter confusion over the capitalist system's long-understood insoluble contradictions (as analysed by Marxist-Leninist science) which can only end up in periodic outbreaks of warmongering conflict between the great monopoly-imperialist powers, has been greatly helped to be sown by the disgustingly degenerate dregs of the old Stalin-worshipping CPGB.

The revisionist Philistines in the CPB (the Morning Star group) for instance have performed obscene contortions over the past two years to try to keep simultaneously juggling in the air their original disastrous commitment to Gorbachev, their desperate wishful thinking that Gorbachevism's clearly liquidationist essence 'might not' necessarily lead back to capitalism, and their primitive faith in Stalinist revisionism as still being the most reliable historic defence of socialism.

To keep all these gibbering idiocies in the air at once in order to avoid the CPB having to at last face up to its own crass philistinism and stupidity over the last few decades, these middle class revisionist worms tried putting on a sophisticated pseudo-Marxist embrace of 'markets' as being not necessarily hostile to socialism at all.

The following slithering rationalisation from the CPB's March 1991 EC report captures every stinking aspect of this particular mess of revisionist philistinism:

Since this is a crucial point, it is useful to recall Lenin's brief description of capitalism as "a system of commodity production in which labour power has become a commodity". Markets for products are not unique to capitalism. Capitalist exploitation does not arise from such markets. It arises from the fact that a working class which owns nothing but its labour power is forced to sell it to the capitalist owners of the means of production, and perform surplus labour for them. Socialism is a society of collective owner-workers. There is no capitalist labour market.

Already as long ago as 1961 the new CPSU Programme had said "In the process of building communism full use must be made of commodity-money relations in keeping with the new meaning acquired by these relations during the building of socialism" (my emphasis RB). And in 1966 (two decades before perestroika!) the 23rd CPSU Congress Resolution spoke of "the extension of the independence and initiative of enterprises and their employees and the stimulation of the material interests of the latter in their work". It is not the first time that old words used "with new meaning" - profits, rate of return on "capital", even wages - have made confusion possible and given opportunities to capitalist critics to say we told you so: You are going back to capitalism". It all happened in the early 1960s. When a Soviet factory manager sees the term "free enterprise", he does not mean the freedom to exploit wage labour. He means the freedom from having to reconcile and obey scores of administrative targets, with "petty tutelage" hampering every attempt to introduce new methods and products.

Of course, there is justifiable concern about uncritical worship of markets with no apparent knowledge of their limitation, and of propositions to extend them into social provision, or into the financial field. There is even more concern about loose thinking on the central category of ownership of the means of production, especially about share ownership, stock exchanges etc. Two points need thought here. Some critics perhaps unwittingly start from an idealised picture of what socialist society ought to be like and what they were told it was like. Despite enormous achievements, that idealised picture does not correspond with what "actually existing socialism" was really like. If it had, there would be no crisis. The fact is that Soviet lathe operators in Moscow did not identify with lathes in Kiev or the Urals as "theirs".

Sate property, administered from the centre, did not generate the outlook which social property is capable of generating. There was massive alienation. It is honest recognition of such unpleasant facts which leads to creative thought about new forms of social ownership.

The most important kind of proposal is that some of the powers which belong to the social owners of the decisive means of production (i.e. control of their use and appropriation of the fruits of their use) should be delegated from: 1) Ultimate owners. Society as a whole to 2) temporary, conditional owners. Parts of society, e.g. Republics, municipalities, enterprise work-collectives, of such a size that their owners can actually identify their interests with them. If this is done markets become inevitable.

This cowardly capitulation to prevailing Western petty-bourgeois orthodoxy cannot see the wood for the trees.

The problem of Soviet paralysis was never a 'markets' question at all, essentially, but was due entirely to the abandonment of revolutionary perspectives for a planned world socialist economy, with human society at last free to be run undominated by the monstrously tyrannical financial and military control of the planet by the Western monopoly bourgeoisies.

Every remnant of the CPGB is rooted in this revisionist abandonment of the aim of world socialism and in the philistine capitulation to insane delusions of permanent 'peaceful coexistence' of nations in a planet dominated by imperialist crisis.

It is truly despicable defeatist nonsense to suggest that mankind is incapable of producing, distributing, and consuming rationally without capitulating to the uncontrollable ruthless profiteering of market-oriented individualism (which of course produces great product booms but is indisputably inseparable from catastrophic slumps as well, with their final murderous and intolerable expression in trade wars, national wars, and international wars).

This CPB drivel accepts the inevitability of more than 250 acts of military slaughter directly or indirectly inflicted on mankind by imperialist world domination since the ending of World War II ranging from major colonial counter-revolutionary onslaughts like Vietnam, Algeria, Korea, Malaya, Occupied Palestine, etc, to 'minor' fascist-aggression outrages like the US blitz on Panama two years ago, its Contra war to undermine the Nicaraguan socialist revolution, its invasion of Grenada, and its endless promotion of destructive civil wars from Afghanistan to Angola.

Mankind has not yet had a serious chance to see how a socialist economy could be organised. All that history has known so far is a series of desperate revolutionary rearguard actions from 1917 onwards to try to overcome the difficulties of relentless imperialist counter-revolution and sabotage.

The following admissions by the capitalist press in the USA about the subversive siege inflicted on Poland and East Europe just in the time of the Solidarnosc 'trade union' stunt tells the real story of what the whole problem since 1917 has been like:

The operation was focused on Poland, the most populous of the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe and the birthplace of John Paul II. Both the Pope and the President were convinced that Poland could be broken out of the Soviet orbit if the Vatican and the U.S. committed their resources to destabilizing the Polish government and keeping the outlawed Solidarity movement alive after the declaration of martial law in 1981.

Until Solidarity's legal status was restored in 1989 it flourished underground, supplied, nurtured and advised largely by the network established under the auspices of Reagan and John Paul II. Tons of equipment—fax machines (the first in Poland), printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers, word processors —were smuggled into Poland via channels established by priests and American agents and representatives of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio) and European labor movements. Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade unions.

Lech Walesa and other leaders of Solidarity received strategic advice—often conveyed by priests or American and European labor experts working undercover in Poland—that reflected the thinking of the Vatican and the Reagan Administration. As the effectiveness of the resistance grew, the stream of information to the West about the internal decisions of the Polish government and the contents of Warsaw's communications with Moscow became a flood. The details came not only from priests but also from spies within the Polish government. During the first half of l982, - a five-part strategy emerged that was aimed at bringing about the collapse of the Soviet economy, fraying the ties that bound the USSR to its client states in the Warsaw Pact and forcing reform inside the Soviet empire. Elements of that strategy included:
The U.S. defense buildup already under way, aimed at making it too costly for the Soviets to compete militarily with the U.S. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative—Star Wars— became a centerpiece of the strategy.
► Covert operations aimed at encouraging reform movements in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
► Financial aid to Warsaw Pact nations calibrated to their willingness to protect human rights and undertake political and free-market reforms.
► Economic isolation of the Soviet Union and the withholding of Western and Japanese technology from Moscow. The Administration focused on denying the U.S.S.R. what it had hoped would be its principal source of hard currency in the 21st century: profits from a transcontinental pipeline to supply natural gas to Western Europe. The 5,800-km long pipeline, stretching from Siberia to France opened on time on Jan 1 1984, but on a far smaller scale than the Soviets had hoped.
► Increased use of Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe to transmit the U.S. Administration's messages to the peoples of Eastern Europe.
Yet in 1982 neither Reagan nor the Pope could anticipate the accession of a Soviet leader like Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of glasnost and perestroika; his efforts at reform unleashed powerful forces that spun out of his control and led to the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The Washington-Vatican alliance "didn't cause the fall of communism," observes a US official familiar with the details of the plot to keep Solidarity alive. "Like all great and lucky leaders, the Pope and the President exploited the forces of history to their own ends."

Shortly after Polish security forces moved into the streets, Reagan called the Pope for his advice. At a series of meetings over the next few days, Reagan discussed his options. "We had a massive row in the Cabinet and the National Security Council about putting together a menu of counter-actions," former Secretary of State Haig recalls. "They ranged from sanctions that would have been crushing in their impact on Poland to talking so tough that we would have risked creating another situation like Hungary in '56 or Czechoslovakia in '68."

Haig dispatched Ambassador at Large Vernon Walters, a devout Roman Catholic, to meet with John Paul II. Walters arrived in Rome soon after, and met separately with the Pope and with Cardinal Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state. Both sides agreed that Solidarity's flame must not be extinguished, that the Soviets must become the focus of an international campaign of isolation, and that the Polish government must be subjected to moral and limited economic pressure.

Because the communists had cut the direct phone lines between Poland and the Vatican, John Paul II communicated with Jozef Cardinal Glemp in Warsaw via radio. He also dispatched his envoys to Poland to report on the situation. "The Vatican's information was absolutely better and quicker than ours in every respect," says Haig. "Though we had some excellent sources of our own, our information was taking too long to filter through the intelligence bureaucracy."

In the first hours of the crisis, Reagan ordered that the Pope receive as quickly as possible relevant American intelligence, including information from a Polish Deputy Minister of Defense who was secretly reporting to the CIA. Washington also handed over to the Vatican reports and analysis from Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, a senior member of the Polish general staff, who was a CIA informant until November 1981, when he had to be smuggled out of Poland after he warned that the Soviets were prepared to invade if the Polish government did not impose martial law. Kuklinski had issued a similar warning about a Soviet military action in late 1980, which led the outgoing Carter Administration to send secret messages to Leonid Brezhnev informing him that among the costs of an invasion would be the sale of sophisticated U.S. weapons to China.

The key Administration players were all devout Roman Catholics—CIA chief William Casey, Allen, Clark, Haig, Walters and William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican. They regarded the U.S.-Vatican relationship as a holy alliance: the moral force of the Pope and the teachings of their church combined with their fierce anti-communism and their notion of American democracy. Yet the mission would have been impossible without the full support of Reagan, who believed fervently in both the benefits and the practical applications of Washington's relationship with the Vatican. One of his earliest goals as President, Reagan says, was to recognize the Vatican as a state "and make them an ally".

According to U.S. Admiral John Poindexter, the military assistant to the National Security Adviser when martial law was declared in Poland, Reagan was convinced that the communists had made a huge miscalculation allowing Solidarity to operate openly for 16 months before the crackdown.

The major decisions on funneling aid to Solidarity and responding to the Polish and Soviet governments were made by Reagan, Casey and Clark, in consultation with John Paul II. "Reagan understood these things quite well, including the covert side," says Richard Pipes, the conservative Polish-born scholar who headed the NSC's Soviet and East European desks.

People like Haig and Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige and James Baker [White House chief of staff at the time] thought it wasn't realistic. George Bush never said a word. I used to sit behind him, and I never knew what his opinions were. But Reagan really understood what was at stake."

By most accounts, Casey stepped into the vacuum in the first days after the declaration of martial law in Poland and—as he did in Central America—became the principal policy architect. Meanwhile Pipes and the NSC staff began drafting proposals for sanctions. "The object was to drain the Soviets and to lay blame for martial law at their doorstep," says Pipes. "The sanctions were coordinated with Special Operations [the CIA division in charge of covert task forces], and the first objective was to keep Solidarity alive by supplying money, communications and equipment."

"The church was trying to modulate the whole situation," explains one of the NSC officials who directed the effort to curtail the pipeline. "They [church leaders] were in effect trying to create circumstances that would head off the serious threat of Soviet intervention while allowing us to get tougher and tougher, they were part and parcel of virtually all of our deliberations in terms of how we viewed the evolution of government-sponsored repression in Poland—whether it was lessening or getting worse, and how we should proceed."

As for his conversations with Reagan about Poland, Clark says they were usually short "I don't think I ever had an in-depth, one-on-one, private conversation that existed for more than three minutes with him—on any subject That might shock you. We had our own code of communication. I knew where he wanted to go on Poland. And that was to take it to its nth possibilities. The President and Casey and I discussed the situation on the ground in Poland constantly: covert operations; who was doing what, where, why and how; and the chances of success." According to Clark, he and Casey directed that the President's daily brief—the PDB, an intelligence summary prepared by the CIA—include a special supplement on secret operations and analysis in Poland.

The Pope himself, not only his deputies, met with American officials to assess events in Poland and the effectiveness of American actions and sent back messages—sometimes by letter, sometimes orally—to Reagan. On almost all his trips to Europe and the Middle East, Casey flew first to Rome, so that he could meet with John Paul II and exchange information. But the principal emissary between Washington and Rome remained Walters, a former deputy director of the CIA who worked easily with Casey. Walters met with the Pope perhaps a dozen times, according to Vatican sources. "Walters was sent to and from the Vatican for the specific purpose of carrying messages between the Pope and the President,' says former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Wilson. "It wasn't supposed to be known that Walters was there.

Often in the Reagan years, American covert operations (including those in Afghanistan. Nicaragua and Angola) involved "lethal assistance" to insurgent forces: arms, mercenaries, military advisers and explosives. In Poland the Pope, the President and Casey embarked on the opposite path: "What they had to do was let the natural forces already in place play this out and not get their fingerprints on it." explains an analyst. What emerges from the Reagan-Casey collaboration is a carefully calibrated operation whose scope was modest compared with other CIA activities. "If Casey were around now, he'd be having some smiles," observes one of his reluctant admirers. "In 1991 Reagan and Casey got the reordering of the world that they wanted."

Less than three weeks before his meeting with the Pope in 1982, the President signed a secret national-security-decision directive (NSDD 32) that authorized a range of economic, diplomatic and covert measures to "neutralize efforts of the U.S.S.R." to maintain its hold on Eastern Europe. In practical terms, the most important covert operations undertaken were those inside Poland. The primary purposes of NSDD 32 were to destabilize the Polish government through covert operations involving propaganda and organizational aid to Solidarity; the promotion of human rights, particularly those related to the right of worship and the Catholic Church; economic pressure; and diplomatic isolation of the communist regime. The document, citing the need to defend democratic reform efforts throughout the Soviet empire, also called for increasing propaganda and underground broadcasting operations in Eastern Europe, actions that Reagan's aides and dissidents in Eastern Europe believe were particularly helpful in chipping away at the notion of Soviet invincibility.

As Republican Congressman Henry Hyde, a member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee from 1985 to 1990, who was apprised of some of the Administration's covert actions, observes. "In Poland we did all of the things, that are done in countries where you want to destabilize a communist government and strengthen resistance to that. We provided the supplies and technical assistance in terms of clandestine newspapers, broadcasting, propaganda, money, organizational help and advice. And working outward from Poland, the same kind of resistance was organized in the other communist countries of Europe."

Among those who played a consulting role was Zbigniew Brzezinski. a native of Poland and President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser. "I got along very well with Casey," recalls Brzezinski. "He was very flexible and very imaginative and not very bureaucratic; if something needed to be done, it was done. To sustain an underground effort takes a lot in terms of supplies, networks, etc, and this is why Solidarity wasn't crushed."

On military questions, American intelligence was better than the Vatican's, but the church excelled in its evaluations of the political situation. And in understanding the mood of the people and communicating with the Solidarity leadership, the church was in an incomparable position. "Our information about Poland was very well founded because the bishops were in continual contact with the Holy See and Solidarnosc," explains Cardinal Silvestrini, the Vatican's deputy secretary of state at that time. "They informed us about prisoners, about the activities and needs of Solidarity groups and about the attitude and schisms in the government." All this information was communicated to the President or Casey.

"If you study the situation of Solidarity, you see they acted very cleverly, without pressing too much at the crucial moments, because they had guidance from the church," says one of the Pope's closest aides. "Yes, there were times we restrained Solidarnosc. But Poland was a bomb that could explode—in the heart of communism, bordered by the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Too much pressure, and the bomb would go off."

Meanwhile, in Washington a close relationship developed between Casey, Clark and Archbishop Laghi. "Casey and dropped into his [Laghi's] residence early mornings during critical times to gather his comments and counsel," says Clark. "We'd have breakfast and coffee and discuss what was being done in Poland. I'd speak to him frequently on the phone, and he would be in touch with the Pope." Says Laghi: "They liked good cappuccino. Occasionally we might talk about Central America or the church position on birth control. But usually the subject was Poland."

"Almost everything having to do with Poland was handled outside of normal State Department channels and would go through Casey and Clark," says Robert McFarlane, who served as a deputy to both Clark and Haig and later as National Security Adviser to the President. "I knew that they were meeting with Pio Laghi, and that Pio Laghi had been to see the President, but Clark would never tell me what the substance of the discussions was."

On at least six occasions Laghi came to the White House and met with Clark or the President; each time, he entered the White House through the southwest gate in order to avoid reporters. "By keeping in such close touch, we did not cross lines," says Laghi. "My role was primarily to facilitate meetings between Walters and the Holy Father. The Holy Father knew his people. It was a very complex situation—how to insist on human rights, on religious freedom, and keep Solidarity alive without provoking the communist authorities further. But I told Vernon, 'Listen to the Holy Father. We have 2,000 years' experience at this.' "

In Poland, Casey conducted the kind of old-style operation that he relished, something he might have done in his days at the Office of Strategic Services during World War II or in the early years of the CIA, when the democracies of Western Europe rose from the ashes of World War II. It was through Casey's contacts, his associates say, that elements of the Socialist International were organized on behalf of Solidarity—just as the Social Democratic parties of Western Europe had been used as an instrument of American policy by the CIA in helping to create anti-communist governments after the war. And this time the objective was akin to creating a Christian Democratic majority in Poland—with the church and the overwhelmingly Catholic membership of Solidarity as the dominant political force in a post-communist Poland. Through his contacts with leaders of the Socialist International, including officials of socialist governments in France and Sweden, Casey ensured that tactical assistance was available on the Continent and at sea to move goods into Poland. "This wasn't about spending huge amounts of money," says Brzezinski. "It was about getting the message out and resisting: books, communications equipment, propaganda, ink and printing presses."

In almost every city and town, underground newspapers and mimeographed bulletins appeared, challenging the state-controlled media. The church published its own newspapers. Solidarity missives, photocopied and mimeographed on American-supplied equipment, were tacked to church bulletin boards. Stenciled posters were boldly posted on police stations and government buildings and even on entrances to the state-controlled television center, where army officers broadcast the news.

The American embassy in Warsaw became the pivotal CIA station in the communist world and, by all accounts, the most effective. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, which had been the largest source of American support for Solidarity before martial law, regarded the Reagan Administration's approach as too slow and insufficiently confrontational with the Polish authorities. Nonetheless, according to intelligence sources, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland and his aide Tom Kahn consulted frequently with Poindexter, Clark and other officials at the State Department and the NSC on such matters as how and when to move goods and supplies into Poland, identifying cities where Solidarity was in particular need of organizing assistance, and examining how Solidarity and the AFL-CIO might collaborate in the preparation of propaganda materials.

"Lane Kirkland deserves special credit," observes Derwinski. "They don't like to admit [it], but they literally were in lockstep [with the Administration]. Also never forget that Bill Clark's wife is Czechoslovak, as is Lane Kirkland's wife. This is one issue where everybody was aboard: there were no turf fights or mavericks or naysayers."

But AFL-CIO officials were never aware of the extent of clandestine U.S. assistance, or the Administration's reliance on the church for guidance regarding how hard to push Polish and Soviet authorities. Casey was wary of "contaminating" the American and European labor movements by giving them too many details of the Administration's efforts. And indeed this was not strictly a CIA operation. Rather, it was a blend of covert and overt, public policy and secret alliances. Casey recognized that in many instances the AFL-CIO was more imaginative than his own operatives in providing organizational assistance to Solidarity and smuggling equipment into the country. According to former deputy CIA director Inman, Casey decided that the American labor movement's relationship with Solidarity was so good that much of what the CIA needed could be financed and obtained through AFL-CIO channels. "Financial support wasn't what they needed," says Inman. "It was organization, and that was an infinitely better way to help them than through classic covert operations."

The Solidarity office in Brussels became an international clearing house for representatives of the Vatican, for CIA operatives, for the AFL-CIO, for representatives of the Socialist International, for the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy, which also worked closely with Casey. It was the place where Solidarity told its backers—some of whose real identities were unknown to Solidarity itself —what it needed, where goods and supplies and organizers could be most useful. Priests, couriers, labor organizers and intelligence operatives moved in and out of Poland with requests for aid and with detailed information on the situation inside the government and the underground. Food and clothing and money to pay fines of Solidarity leaders who were brought before Polish courts poured into the country. Inside Poland, a network of priests carried messages back and forth between the churches where many of Solidarity's leaders were in hiding.

In the summer of 1984, when the sanctions against Poland seemed to be hurting ordinary Poles and not the communists, Laghi traveled to Santa Barbara, California, to meet with Reagan at the Western White House and urge that some of the sanctions be lifted. The Administration complied. At the same time, the White House, in close consultation with the Vatican, refused to ease its economic pressures on Moscow—denying technology, food and cultural exchanges as the price for continuing oppression in Poland.

Much of the equipment destined for Solidarity arrived in Poland by ship— often packed in mismarked containers sent from Denmark and Sweden, then unloaded at Gdansk and other ports by dockers secretly working with Solidarity. According to Administration officials, the socialist government of Sweden—and Swedish labor unions—played a crucial role in arranging the transshipment of goods to Poland. From the Polish docks, equipment moved to its destination in trucks and private cars driven by Solidarity sympathizers who often used churches and priests as their point of contact for deliveries and pickups.

"The Administration plugged into the church across the board," observes Derwinski, now U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs. "Not just through the church hierarchy but through individual churches and bishops. Monsignor Bronislaw Dabrowski, a deputy to Cardinal Glemp, came to us often to tell us what was needed: he would meet with me. with Casey, the NSC and sometimes with Walters." John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia, whose father was born in Poland, was the American churchman closest to the Pope. He frequently met with Casey to discuss support for Solidarity and covert operations, according to CIA sources and Derwinski. "Krol hit it off very well with President Reagan and was a source of constant advice and contact," says Derwinski. "Often he was the one Casey or Clark went to, the one who really understood the situation."

By 1985 it was apparent that the Polish government's campaign to suppress Solidarity had failed. According to a report by Adrian Karatnycky, who helped organize the AFL-CIO's assistance to Solidarity, there were more than 400 underground periodicals appearing in Poland, some with a circulation that exceeded 30,000. Books and pamphlets challenging the authority of the communist government were printed by the thousands. Comic books for children recast Polish fables and legends, with Jaruzelski pictured as the villain, communism as the red dragon and Walesa as the heroic knight. In church basements and homes, millions of viewers watched documentary videos produced and screened on the equipment smuggled into the country.

With clandestine broadcasting equipment supplied by the CIA and the AFL-CIO. Solidarity regularly broke into the government's radio programming, often with the message "Solidarity lives!" or "Resist!" Armed with a transmitter supplied by the CIA through church channels, Solidarity interrupted television programming with both audio and visual messages, including calls for strikes and demonstrations. "There was a great moment at the half time of the national soccer championship," says a Vatican official. "Just as the whistle sounded for the half, a Solidarity Lives! banner went up on the screen and a tape came on calling for resistance. What was particularly ingenious was waiting for the half-time break; had the interruption come during actual soccer play, it could have alienated people." As Brzezinski sums it up, "This was the first time that communist police suppression didn't succeed." "Nobody believed the collapse of communism would happen this fast or on this timetable," says a cardinal who is one of the Pope s closest aides. "But in their first meeting, the Holy Father and the President committed themselves and the institutions of the church and America to such a goal. And from that day, the focus was to bring it about in Poland."

Step by reluctant step, the Soviets and the communist government of Poland bowed to the moral, economic and political pressure imposed by the Pope and the President. Jails were emptied, Walesa's trial on charges of slandering state officials was abandoned, the Polish communist party turned fratricidal, and the country's economy collapsed in a haze of strikes and demonstrations and sanctions.

On Feb. 19, 1987, after Warsaw had pledged to open a dialogue with the church, Reagan lifted U.S. sanctions. Four months later, Pope John Paul II was cheered by millions of his countrymen as he traveled across Poland demanding human rights and praising Solidarity. In July 1988, Gorbachev visited Warsaw and signaled Moscow's recognition that the government could not rule without Solidarity's cooperation. On April 5,1989, the two sides signed agreements legalizing Solidarity and calling for open parliamentary elections in June. In December 1990, nine years after he was arrested and his labor union banned, Lech Walesa became President of Poland.	■

The entire fake 'left' in the West, including the CPB, refused to support the Polish workers state's attempts to suppress this criminal counter-revolutionary subversion (of Poland's efforts to build a socialist state and economy) which by no means just began with the financing and running of Solidarnosc but had been raging non-stop since 1945.

All this gibberish about 'markets' is just specious justification for the CPB's failure to resolutely fight imperialism's Solidarnosc counter-revolution.

It deviously capitulates to routine Western anti-communism with such dishonest sneers as promoting "the freedom from having to reconcile and obey scores of administrative targets, with 'petty' tutelage hampering every attempt to introduce new methods", etc.

What maniacal nonsense is this. It is common knowledge that the biggest capitalist monopolies are the very worst bureaucracies, riddled with 'administrative' targets (what other kind of targets are there, by the way), and particularly badly hampered with 'petty tutelage'.

And how else could a planned socialist society develop other than through one-man management aided by the most widespread discussion of targets, administration, education, etc, possible.

Bureaucratic behaviour and attitudes are a constant human problem overcome only by the slow universal development towards the highest levels possible of Marxist-Leninist philosophical thinking. All that these shallow comments suggest is the need to remove the 'petty' out of the tutelage. Capitulating to full-scale Western counter-revolution to do it is slightly unbalanced, to put it mildly.

The other disgraceful deception in this CPB rationalisation is the knowing mention of, but then blatant abandonment of, the crucial Marxist science on commodities.
It is a grotesque distortion to suggest that turning products into market commodities is only a problem when it dominates the buying and selling of human labour power. The one is inseparable from the other as night follows day.

The extent of commercial alienation which creates the peculiar and appalling social problems of capitalist countries arises from turning all products into commodities for profitable exploitation rather than organising production solely to meet human needs.

Once the world revolutionary philosophical purpose of a workers state has been abandoned, there is no purpose in then limiting the claimed 'efficiency' of profit-oriented production to just a bit of municipal or factory rivalry. If the concept of 'owning' is to be corrupted into however-limited a notion of "This is ours; let us make it as profitable as we can", then why not let this delusion go the whole hog and let such a system cover the hiring and firing of labour as well.

And as they have discovered in the ex-USSR, there is no way of stopping this privatisation process anyway once it has been unleashed (which is exactly why the Soviet Union had to move on from the temporary expedient of the NEP in the 1920s, now so lovingly and self-deceivingly recalled by the CPBers).

The revolutionary socialist mentality is entirely different. It starts from the premise that either the whole of society makes a success of things together, in everyone's interest, - or else the country falls apart again into atomised individualism, - back into capitalism where it started from.

And that collective interest, properly understood, most of course also be a universal international interest. For a planned socialist economy to save the planet from monopoly-imperialist warmongering destruction, pollution, and corruption, then no individual or group wants to think of doing anything at someone else's expense; and no country wants to think of doing anything at any other country's expense.

From the moment that Moscow, for example, decided to tell anti-Marxist lies to the Spanish people that they would be better off tail-ending the petty-bourgeois Republic capitulators because the CPSU bureaucracy feared damaging its hopes of an alliance with the imperialist West against Nazi Germany, for instance, had Moscow backed all-out proletarian revolution as the best longterm prospect for the defeat of fascism, - then the hopes for world socialism arising out of the 1917 developments were already clearly deep in jeopardy.

But this crucial world of Marxist-Leninist theory remains closed to these CPB revisionists, whose first vital step in philosophy needs to be learning how to cope with their own horrific mistakes in history.

Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin. Alf Lee