Hitherto,  philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx. 

Economic & Philosophic Science Review 

No 0684 January 26th 1993

[P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                                                         10p 

West's divisions over Balkans crisis go to the heart of imperialist meddling. Clinton gang can only add more nastiness and deception. Trade war will rule. Even the BBC predicts America will fight Germany.

The scale of the imperialist crisis is being indirectly indicated by the serious splits developing over many warmongering policies and among various ruling classes.

Last week's muddle over conflicting Western ambitions in the Middle East and what to do about Saddam's aggressive nationalism in Iraq has been followed by renewed paralysis over the Balkans mess.

Meanwhile, farcical attempts continue to be made to 'talk up' business confidence everywhere, but divisions and back-stabbing within governments in London and Washington, for example, imply that bad economic news and forecasts continue to haunt those in the know.

In the midst of all this degenerate chaos, the Clinton presidency has been inaugurated in a blaze of cheap glitz and vomit-inducing sentiment, and a grotesque scandal on the first day. with the would be chief law officer caught exploiting cheap illegal immigrant labour in order to make a crafty buck.

This oafish Clinton gang seemed destined in advance to become the most obscene opportunist spectacle in all US imperialism's foul history, but this crooked start they have made so early on at the trough threatens to make even these dismal expectations look not nearly gloomy enough.

What a pillock! And what an even nastier pillock Mrs Clinton appears to be, - the epitome of 'liberal' smugness and fake reformist 'progressiveness'.  Out of such 'politically correct' self-righteousness could eventually emerge almost any degree of hardened political nastiness.  

The problem for US imperialism, however, is not going to be any lack of willingness to unleash any amount of fascist viciousness against perceived enemies of the American ruling class. Nazi blitzkrieg to wipe out the socialist revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua, and the anti-imperialist revolts in Panama and Chile, for example, all demonstrate how ruthlessly savage the 'pioneering' American bourgeois spirit can be (ask the Red Indian nation, wiped out by genocide, or the former black slave population of the USA).

The real difficulty is in preventing the US economy from capsizing completely in the stormy period of international trade war, political vilification, and shooting wars that lies ahead.

These two issues of economic weakness and fascist despair are graphically combined in the latest outburst from the three major American motorcar manufacturers, demanding an immediate punitive tariff barrier to not only Japanese imported vehicles but to those from Europe as well.

General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler anticipate being on good ground in this sensational development (which initially has been virtually ignored by the British bourgeois media) because of the Clinton gang's shallow chauvinist 'reformism' on a par with the equally jingoistic instincts of the wretched 'Rule Britannia' Labourites: in the UK.  

These cretinous stooges for monopoly-capitalism pretend that by proposing such drastic intervention as trade protectionism they are showing 'political independence' from the
crisis-ridden market forces.	 

Of course they are doing the exact opposite. By playing imperialism's trade war game even harder than the ruling-class establishment will eventually play it itself, these 'reformists' are merely playing into the hands of the entire basis of capitalism's 'free enterprise' propaganda racket, - namely cut-throat competition.

And on this utterly distorted and manipulated question of 'competition' which is being hopelessly misunderstood historically and philosophically, the whole foundation of ruling-class domination (via private ownership and 'democratic choice') totally rests.

Complete bourgeois-ideological chaos and warmongering mayhem are now inevitable world-wide because of this idiotic misunderstanding of the role of 'competition' in human society, typified by these Clintonite and Labourite 'reformist' moves towards tariff wars.

Competitive rivalry is, of course, an essential and eternal feature of all human and social development. But anyone with half a brain can see that this aspect of economic, political and personal motivation has been transformed into a grotesque threat to civilisation's survival at this late stage of the general crisis of the capitalist system (two world wars already this century arising directly out of trade-war and economic-influence big-power rivalry), and at this particular stage of the present new coming slump.

Because of their flat-earth narrow-mindedness, the 'reformists' everywhere are acting things out as though capitalism was the only conceivable economic system on earth, and deludedly adding to this blindness with such totally unfounded 'reassurances' that 'recovery' is easily available if only there was a little governmental intervention into the economy.

The laissez-faire imperialists will let the Labourites and such make the running on these issues temporarily before swooping in themselves before much longer to make all-out trade war official national policy everywhere.

The joke is that in reality none are more interventionist on economic matters, demanding the power of the state to be used to bolster trade and finances, than the laissez-faire imperialists.

Their 'free competition' approach is entirely a temporary posture to allow them maximum profiteering whilst the inflation-created international economic boom still lasts.

The moment that the world boom turns to world-wide slump, these same laissez-faire imperialists will all be serving eagerly on every state committee going for 'boosting the defence industries' or 'making the best economic use of resources',  etc., - words not heard at the moment when there may still be time for ripping a few more billions profit out of the fuel industry chaos, or the proposed plundering of the railway system for the benefit of road transport or a few privately-run gimmick lines.

The benighted 'reformists' 'are simply doing the imperialist warmongers dirty work for them in leaping in early to demand 'managed trade' but no removal of the monopoly ruling-class who will go on profiteering just as relentlessly under government economic intervention as before when 'free trade' means in theory that the sky's the limit for what profits might by made out of class exploitation.

The alternative, of course to a century of trade wars and shooting wars under capitalism, is planned economic world development under working-class power where competition is properly used for encouraging personal development and public recognition for outstanding achievement.

Despite appalling handicaps to social inspiration due to revisionist philosophy prevailing in the workers states which have been established in history so far, nevertheless the record of the socialist camp has been a remarkable one, attaining significant levels of economic, social, political and personal development in every industry and sphere of public life in spite of repeated Western military destruction and subversion.

Without a bourgeois-ownership ruling class, competition ceased to be a cut-throat problem threatening the peace of the world, and became a normal human attribute once again, distorted only by all the arbitrary sickness springing from philosophical defeatism which overtook the revolutionary party leadership.

The rat-race in the West gives no such opportunity for competition to cease being a threat to mankind because of the systemic historical context. An obscene back-stabbing scandal can threaten to disrupt every walk of life at any moment, - from the heir to the throne talking dirty to his mistress, to rows over favouritism in the local Brownies.

And the potential rancorous poison from the state to the local school room is all fuelled by the rotten system of competitive capitalist greed which long since has no longer been absolutely necessary for human and social development, and for a century has been principally a source of nothing but warmongering fascist horrors such as are now disfiguring more than 50 countries world-wide, currently.

Nowhere has the contrast between the planned peacefulness of workers-state authority and the warmongering licence of capitalist 'democracy' been so evident as in the wreckage of socialist Yugoslavia, brought down by endless Western ideological subversion and economic sabotage, aided and abetted by local revisionist confusion.

Under the joke 'freedom alleged to be conferred by market forces, German imperialism's Croat fascist stooges have quietly been armed to the teeth during the last 15 months of bogus United Nations 'peacekeeping' restraint on the local Serb population which had to take up arms to prevent being 'ethnically cleansed' as the very first act in the Yugoslav tragedy.

Now the original imperialist criminality of breaking up Yugoslavia into manipulable Balkanised statelets by endlessly vilifying and economically sabotaging (via UN sanctions) the socialist Serbs has burst forth again in all its bloody tyranny around the Serb-Krajina areas of the idiotic 'state of Croatia' (as manufactured by German imperialism, with the rest of the West in uncertain dithering support).

Immediately, of course, the main concern of Western bourgeois propaganda is to stress the 'legitimacy' of armed intervention against the Serbs for daring to grab back their heavy weapons from UN arms dumps in order to fight back.

But as even the capitalist press has to report, the Western imperialist camp is far from happy or united about the way things are going in reactions attempt to eliminate all traces of Yugoslavia's workers-state socialism:

AFTER 18 months of muddle and paralysis over how to respond to the Balkan savagery, the resumption of hostilities between Serbs and Croats beyond Bosnia leaves the quest for an international consensus looking sorrier than ever.

Western diplomats here are anxious that the increasingly messy battles for the territorial spoils in former Yugoslavia will leave the international community at odds over who is the victim or villain and plague efforts to forge a concerted response.

While the United States has a new administration seeking to focus on former Yugoslavia, its old adversary, Russia, is under pressure to break ranks with the West and back its traditional Balkan ally, Serbia.

Germany, now as before, is Croatia's mightiest friend. The European Community appears incapable of drafting a coherent policy on Europe's ugliest area. Turkey, an emerging regional power, supports Bosnia's Muslims.

Seen through the prism of the Balkans - where in Bosnia the Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic plates collide - the end of the 20th century looks not dissimilar to the end of the 19th, when local tribal rivalries and nationalist aspirations sucked in the superpowers and provided the spark for the first world war.

The Serbian leadership, long viewed as the main villain of the piece in former Yugoslavia and fearing Western intervention to curb its expansionist designs, is issuing apocalyptic warnings of a third world war being kindled in the Balkans.

However, the conflict has already produced one defining moment for the big powers, when united Germany hijacked European foreign policy a year ago and forced the EC to recognise Croatia's independence.

Bonn's strong-arm tactics sent ripples of unease through the Western diplomatic establishment, signalling as it did the emergence of German political muscle to match its economic, clout.

Western diplomats now fear that the Balkan war could be the catalyst for another shift in the post-communist dispensation, with Russia unhappy with the penalties applied to Serbia by the United Nations.

Should Russia block Security Council moves to isolate Serbia further, it would be the first time it has broken with the West since the end of the cold war.

Last month the Russian Supreme Soviet urged Boris Yeltsin to use his Security Council veto to block any possible military intervention in former Yugoslavia, while senior Russian foreign ministry officials have been voicing their unhappiness with the UN trade embargo on pro-Western Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, is regularly pilloried by the conservative and nationalist caucuses who are strong in parliament.

When Mr Kozyrev shocked the West last month in Stockholm with a mock speech heralding a new cold war, he pointedly focused on former Yugoslavia and said Moscow would no longer have any truck with the West's "anti-Serbian" campaign.

Now, to compound the international dissonance, the Croats are going on the offensive against their rebel Serbs as Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, is beating a tactical retreat and suing for peace.

This confirms the Russians' view that the Serbs should not be exclusively punished. It also hardens the perception in Whitehall that the Germans have a lot to answer for and looks likely to increase US exasperation with the European failure to tackle the crisis.

Mr Milosevic, content in the knowledge that his protégés have got the better of Muslim and Croat rivals in the fight for land, now sees his aims best served by presenting himself as a peacemaker.

Simultaneously, the Croats are trying to recoup some of their losses by military force. They routinely flout the arms embargo and are believed to be regularly breaching the Bosnian no-fly zone and helping Bosnian Croat forces.

In this context, the calls are mounting for penalties to be extended from Serbia to Croatia and it is difficult to see the Russians agreeing to step up pressure on the Serbs without a quid pro quo.

The risk is that if the week-end fighting grows into a new  Serb-Croat war, the differences between the Americans, the Germans and the Russians will widen, while Britain and  France agonise over who to follow. 

These very early stages of renewed inter-imperialist warmongering preparations and strategic blocmaking are also the main discernible content of US imperialism's brutal tormenting of the wounded regime of half-hearted Arab nationalist opportunism in Iraq.

There the rival great powers are watching over their crucial oil interests in the region, keeping irons in the fire for possible use in the future when trade war escalates to the level of trying openly to undermine each other's vital natural resources supplies.

Scapegoating Saddam as an excuse for massive armed presence in the area (to prop up the degenerate oil-sheik stooges along the Gulf of Persia who are threatened with revolutionary overthrow) will not work for ever as a gimmick for keeping other shaky Arab regimes still reluctantly playing the West's imperialist game.

Anger is rising among proletarian masses who are being mercilessly crushed by the growing world-wide economic slump.

The imperialist rivals will soon fall out over how best to try to contain the incipient Arab nationalist revolt.

The Western powers are already at loggerheads over the irresistible proposal that the world's most thrusting economic monopolist bourgeoisies, the Germane and Japanese, should at last be admitted to the property-and-power-based Permanent Membership of the UN Security Council dominated by France, Britain, and America. Washington thinks it has no choice under its 'democratic' posturing but to let Germany and Japan in. Britain and France disagree, not wanting to suddenly be pushed back into minor rankings in the world capitalist bodies. All the great powers are united in resisting the idea that one single Third World power should be in there representing the vast 9/10th of humanity who at present have no say in Security Council decisions, with a veto.

Western turmoil over UN voting and finances, controlling the use of the UN fig-leaf to cover up for arbitrary blitzkrieg by the imperialist powers wherever they decide their 'interests are threatened', etc, will eventually result in messier warmongering than ever before, - in the middle East, southern Asia Africa, southern Europe, the Far East, Latin America, and elsewhere.

The chaos is inevitable, and the current tragedy in Angola resulting from imperialist subversion and intervention is typical of what to expect world-wide before much longer: 
IN THE last week, under the impotent gaze of a UN monitoring force, Jonas Savimbi's Unita movement, aided by white mercenaries and elements of the South African and Zairean armies, has seized the keys to Angola's economy - diamonds and oil - and taken the strategic airport of Cuito Cuanavale.

For Angolans it is a sickening repeat of the history which launched the country into a war which has devastated every province, brought hundreds of thousands of deaths, more amputees and mass flights of a destitute population. For President Clinton it is yet another foreign policy crisis looming under a deadline next week for the UN to admit defeat and quit, or renew its now hopeless mandate.

Nearly 20 years ago thousands of South African and Zairean soldiers, aided by a group of British and American mercenaries, fought their way across Angola on behalf of two CIA-backed movements, Unita and FNLA, in an attempt to prevent the MPLA taking power at independence from Portugal.

Today Unita is strong enough to do most of its own fighting thanks to two decades of US, Israeli, Moroccan and South African military training and equipment. But some of the movement's old patrons in South Africa are providing logistical support and supplies with trucks coming in from Namibia's Caprivi Strip, and dozens of flights have been made illegally into Unita's control areas since Savimbi's decision to reject the September election.

Confusion surrounds the Zaireans now fighting, as the Zaire army is itself split in the country's power-struggle between Savimbi's old ally President Mobutu Sese Seko and the emerging new institutions of democracy, and it is unclear whose payroll supports those now fighting in Angola.

Meanwhile the dying days of the Bush administration have provided Unita with a shameful level of moral support, including the withholding of diplomatic recognition from the elected multi-party government in Luanda. This US policy, which is largely responsible for the wholesale destruction wreaked by Unita in recent weeks, has its roots in George Bush's job as director of the CIA in 1976 when the US covert action against Angola was at a crucial stage.

An undeclared war began in Angola within days of the UN's declaration that the September election, won by the MPLA, was free and fair. Unita's generals pulled out of the new national army and went on the radio threatening to reduce the country to rubble and to turn it into another Somalia. Immediately thereafter the creeping takeover of towns and municipalities began.

In parallel came the assassination of MPLA officials ranging from well-known white intellectuals such as Fernando  Marcelino and David Bernardino, to policemen, local administrators and, this week, army  officers gunned down in two separate incidents on the streets of the capital. 

A Unita military force of tens of thousands has been unleashed. Far from having been demobilised under the watchful eye of the UN over the months ahead of the election, Unita retained its full capacity and, as its own most senior military dissidents warned publicly last February when they broke with Savimbi, in addition trained a 120,000 man secret army in Zaire.

The UN was blind to these  military preparations which allowed the current catastrophe, and Western ambassadors  in Luanda denied every report of the army in waiting over the border, though it is inconceivable that US satellite monitoring did not detect them.

In the last few weeks Unita has seized most of Angola's northern diamond mining areas, and yesterday, in a serious psychological blow to the government, took the oil town of Soyo, although the government units regrouped and fighting is still going on.

Oil accounts for 90 per cent of Angola's revenue, with one third of it coming from Soyo. Dozens of foreigners linked to three big oil companies - Texaco Elf and Fina -were evacuated to boats and offshore oil platforms in the last few days and 17 were captured by Unita. The economic and political damage is immense.

MEANWHILE a 10,000 man Unita army is on the outskirts of the Central Highlands town of Huambo where the government last week succeeded in ousting Savimbi from his headquarters known as The White House. Unita has brought up to Huambo units from the coastal towns of Benguela and Lobito where there was house-to-house fighting before Unita's attacks were repulsed, and is blasting the city with tanks and heavy artillery. Even the city's hospital has been abandoned and the population has fled.

Faced with a war on this scale, which the Secretary-General's special representative, Margaret Anstee, failed to predict and is now too discredited to diffuse, the UN is in a very awkward position. Miss Anstee has said that for the UN monitoring mission mandate to be renewed at the end of the month the two sides must have begun peace talks. This now seems impossible as the fighting escalates.

But a pull-out by the UN will mark Boutros Boutros Ghali with a stamp of unforgettable failure and will have serious repercussions for the UN role in South Africa's transformation.

The case for a major UN peace-keeping mission for Angola has not been made by any of the Western powers, though given the direct responsibility they bear, with the UN, for the daily death and horror in Angola today, it should be. 

This capitalist press report is countered by others which put a reactionary gloss on such degenerate trivia as mercenary thugs in uniform showing an 'esprit de corps' implying that the UNITA cause is not as despicable as it might seem, etc.

But poverty and Third World aimlessness in Africa is so bad that the offer of just a uniform and a guaranteed living is paradise to hundreds of millions there, regardless of the cause. Any such security, however vicious the work, is bound to create an 'esprit de corps' of some sort. Hitler's SS had more of it than any military units in history, almost.

But destroying Angola as a potential planned workers state is still not going to go anywhere near solving capitalism's root problems of insoluble inter-imperialist rivalry.

That catastrophic contradiction at the very heart of the anarchic free-market monopoly system can only eventually be tackled by all-out conflict, between the great powers themselves.

Even the bourgeois media are dusting the cobwebs off of the quite respectable science of inter-imperialist warmongering (which has already formed so much of 20th century history), as noted in this press preview of a BBC television documentary-drama:

There is a prolonged slump In the mid-1990s followed by a stock-market crash in 1996, which precipitates the formation of the single currency Euro-federation in 1997. The CIS's descent into anarchy prompts Eurofed to build another iron curtain to keep out refugees from eastern Europe.

Meanwhile a union is formed between Mexico, the US and Canada and a Hispanic President is elected. With the world divided into massive trading blocks, a war between America and Europe becomes ever  more likely and is finally precipitated by a dispute over oil reserves in the Arctic ocean.

The details of this speculation are of no great interest and are almost certainly going to prove wide of the mark when World War III breaks out in earnest.

But the fact that the middle-class hacks and entertainment groupies at the BBC think inter-imperialist World War III is a realistic perspective at all is remarkable testimony to how disastrously the capitalist crisis has deteriorated under the
surface of all this barmy 'green shoots of recovery' propaganda, as well as a compliment to the power of Leninist science which has been writing far more specifically about every new step towards inevitable inter-imperialist was for more than six years now. (See ILWP Books vol 11).	

Fight for revolutionary theory. Joe Harper

IRAN-CONTRA SCANDAL

Who will pardon Bush?

BY OSCAR FERRER (Granma International staff writer)

• CASPAR WEINBERGER, arraigned on four counts of perjury in the Iran-contra investigations,
has now been pardoned 'by President George Bush. Weinberger is also considered the greatest
booster of U.S. rearmament in peacetime, during his years as secretary of defense under the Reagan administration.

Thanks to the benevolent decision of the outgoing tread of government, Weinberger will not have to concern himself about his trial, which had been scheduled for January 5.

According to The Washington Post, Bush felt that the former head of the Pentagon could not have a fair trial under the next administration, given the Democratic dominance in Congress and the executive branch.

Weinberger was a fervent supporter of the costly Star Wars program and one of. the .strongest advocates of taking a hard line against the now disappeared Soviet Union on arms control and various foreign policy issues. He resigned as secretary of defense in November 1987. 

For years, Weinberger tried to make it seem as though he had no responsibility in the Iran-contra scandal; which involved secret arms sales to Iran in 1985-86 and the utilization of part of these profits to fund the Nicaraguan contras, at a time when the U.S. Congress was prohibited from providing aid to those groups.

In December 1986, Weinberger tried to deny his participation in those actions, saying that Ronald Reagan's approval of the arms sales to Iran had been based on very bad advice given by some of the president's aides, including Robert MacFarlane, then national security adviser.

In addition to Weinberger, Bush's pardon also covers MacFarlane; former Assistant Secretary of . State Elliot Abrams; the CIA's former head of covert operations, Clair George; and former CIA Director Alan Fiers.

Clair George, the third most important person in the CIA hierarchy at the time the Iran-contra scandal materialized, was found guilty on December 9 on two out of seven counts of perjuring himself at congressional hearings about the extent of his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran. .

Another of the main defendants in the scandal, former Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North was let off the hook on September 16,1991, when a federal judge lifted all the charges against him and completely exonerated him from responsibility.

Also exonerated at that time was John Poindexter, former national security adviser during the Reagan Administration. and Noah's immediate superior. 

After his trial was over,  North published his memoirs in a book entitled  -  Under Fire: An American Story, which states that President Reagan knew everything and that Bush, then vice-president, reviewed 200 000 pages of documents detailing the operation to aid the contras.

Another book about the Iran-contra scandal written by Retired General Richard Secord accuses Bush of lying about his participation in the notorious affair. 

More recently, a secret Israeli document released the public in October 1992 contends that in 1986, former Israeli Prime Minister Amiran Nir personally filled Bush in on all the details of. the ongoing secret negotiations which were the basis of the. actions leading to the Iran-contra scandal.

Another former official of the Reagan administration involved in the scandal, Howard Teicher, stated on one occasion that Bush was aware of what was being done and "was not clean."

Now Bush, making use of his presidential prerogative to grant pardons, has exonerated Weinberger. A White House press statement called Weinberger a true American patriot whom the president relieved of all charges not only out of compassion, but also to make it possible for the former Pentagon head to receive the honors he deserves.

On December 11, a judge had dropped one of the charges made against Weinberger which implied that Bush knew much more than he admitted about the Iran-contra scandal.

Throughout the past seven years, many of those involved. in the scandal have been exonerated, but the suspicion has always remained that Bush and Reagan were really the most responsible for the illegal manoeuvres, although they have managed to evade that responsibility.

Bush has pardoned Weinberger and the others implicated in the affairs - but the question remains, who will exonerate Bush?

Hitherto, philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.  Karl  Marx

SOUTH WEST BULLETIN

No. 3  Friday January 22 1993

US giant drifting in confused viciousness into criminal warmongering all round the planet. Capitalist cultural degeneracy on the increase all round. 

Against a background of crippling social and economic problems the US giant is drifting in confused viciousness into criminal warmongering all around the planet. This week they are bombing Iraq, but already talking about Iran being 'the main threat' again. Next week it could be Libya's turn or somewhere else as the ruling class seeks to 'kick ass' wherever it thinks it can, to let the world know it's still the 'boss'.

Its partners in this criminal enterprise are in no better shape, particularly not the pathetic British ruling class poodles tagging along with the bully and picking up whatever loot it is allowed to have, which is not very much (see previous ILWP Bulletin articles on arms sales to the Middle East after the blitzing of Iraq).

No amount of verbal diarrhoea from President Clinton and no amount of 'reinventing' or 'renewing' America, no amount of fantasising that really 'America has no fundamental problems' can alter the crippling reality facing the leading country ' of the 'free world'. The unmanageable $300 billion budget deficit, the $9 billion loss by IBM (the biggest ever in US corporate history, and a company seen by many as a barometer of the health of the nation's economy), the growing threat to American trade dominance from rival imperialist powers such as Japan and Germany, and a society where police brutality, racism, homelessness, unemployment, crime, drug abuse and alcoholism, are the realities facing the American working class, not the sick Hollywood Blitz of Clinton's inauguration party:

Chicago: Dwayne Snyder died on the morning of  November 25th 1992, the day before Thanksgiving He was 34 years old.

Was Dwayne's death a tragic accident? Was it the inevitable result of assault or of robbery? Was it the consequence of some previously unknown illness?

Or was Dwayne the victim of police and fire department neglect?

The facts of Dwayne's death are these: Dwayne was found at 5 a.m. in front of Old St. Mary's Church in downtown Chicago. The police reported that he was lying face down with a bloody nose and swollen face with some of his belongings scattered nearby. Fire Department paramedics were called, and after a brief examination, declared Dwayne dead. Police found some identification in his wallet with a card from a nearby homeless shelter where he was once a resident.

But for two hours Dwayne was left lying uncovered on this freezing cold morning before he was taken to Cook County Hospital for a "routine" certification of death by a doctor.

Shortly after 7 a.m. Dwayne was examined by an emergency room doctor who found a heartbeat and then worked for over an hour to revive. Dwayne. It was too late, Dwayne was declared dead at 8:18 a.m.

In Chicago with its freezing cold fall and winter weather, it is standard procedure for police and paramedics to rush people found collapsed on the street to emergency medical facilities, since hypothermia (loss of body heat) very often brings on unconsciousness and the appearance of death. But, this procedure was not followed with Dwayne, he remained exposed for at least two hours after he was found.

Dwayne Snyder dedicated himself in the last three years of his life to fight against homelessness. In death, Dwayne is a banner.

How many deaths of people like Dwayne Snyder have there been in Chicago, and how many will there be? If Dwayne had not been Black, if he had not, been identified as formerly homeless and currently the resident in a public housing development would he be dead today?

Dwayne died the moment his collapsed body fell into the hands of the police and paramedics. He was judged to be just another "bum" or "unwanted homeless trash" who didn't justify following procedure.

Dwayne and what he worked  and fought to overcome lives in our hearts. The system of profit and property that sentenced him to death can never be excused.  

The lies about 'recovery' around the corner are evaporating almost as quickly as they drop out of their mouths. One day we are told - 'Happy days are here again, everyone went shopping at Christmas, consumer-led recovery' etc. etc. - only to find out the next week that in fact less people went shopping at Christmas and that retail sales are down; or that an imminent interest rate cut from the Bundesbank will 'boost the economy just as it's 'beginning to recover', and then it is revealed that in fact the German economy is sliding into a disastrous slump with incalculably dire consequences for the rest of Europe.

As the lies evaporate, companies crash, unemployment continues to soar and homelessness, along with all the other ills of capitalist society relentlessly increases. Faced with a PSBR of approaching f50 billion and a growing trade deficit, the government will shortly be forced to make savage cuts in the already diminished 'welfare state', which will further expose the realities of capitalist democracy and increase the necessity for revolutionary argument in all areas of society.

The latest statements from the government on educational standards, and the demand from Patters for a return to "common sense teaching", whatever that is, will no doubt end up in the bin with all the other 'great changes', but it once again underlines the confused degeneracy into which capitalist society is sliding. The latest report is so full of inconsistencies and contradictions it is laughable. But the biggest joke has got to be a Secretary of State for Education, secure in the conviction that the fundamental cause of lack of discipline and respect in the school is children's lack of belief in hell and damnation, calling for a return to common sense:

That aside, the latest report actually admits that the curriculum is "unmanageable and over prescriptive", but then goes on to reject "cutting back on the ten subjects required at primary level, or lengthening the school day, or number of days in a term to accommodate it".

So rather than change an unworkable curriculum, they want to change the way it is delivered, and the answer is ... "traditional methods".  The idea that standards will rise by returning to a style of teaching where from five years of age children sit in ,quiet rows whilst the teacher fills them full of facts from the blackboard is completely certifiable.

A large part of the reason for introducing 'child-centred' teaching methods, as advocated in the Plowden Report in the late 60's, 	was because the 'drilling method' was identified as 	leading to low standards.

The fact that the boom years 	reformist experiment with 'child-centredness' has also
	turned out to be a failure, should lead to some questioning as to whether the 'fundemental problem has got  anything to do with teaching methods at all. Whilst there is a huge and valid 	debate to be had about how children learn and how best to teach, it will remain a sterile and pointless debate 	unless it looks at the aims of the society in which education is taking place. The 	statement by the head teacher, which is echoed in every staffroom in the country, that, "education is about helping children to become independent learners so they can take their place in a democratic society with confidence" is pure idealist
bullshit.

The 'democratic society'  on offer offers 4 million+ unemployment, privilege for the few; poverty for the majority; racism, corruption, and hypocrisy in every aspect of public life (as current scandals in Lambeth and the Hatton trial over Merseyside corruption amply demonstrate); the exploitation of the whole world and a constant diet of fascist filth and anti-communist lies from the 'democratic' press. Why should children and youth  be expected to sit in quiet rows and listen to the latest government decrees on what constitutes 'good citizenship' or anything else? Whilst it makes the best sense for all children to get as much as they can out of the educational system and to use it for their own benefit in whatever way they can, the reality of the fragmented and alienating bourgeois culture is inevitably reflected in its schools, is part of its schools, and it cannot be any other way with capitalism. 'Child-centredness' as a way of trying to hold together a fragmenting ideology, and to make education 'purposeful and relevant' was always doomed to failure because ultimately education under capitalism is 'profit-centred' and always will be whether taught in classes of four or forty, by a dedicated teacher with a genuine love for children or by a child-hating demagogue.

In laying out the foundations for a communist philosophy of education Lenin made the following observations on education under capitalism and how communist education was to be fundamentallv different.

The Tasks of the Youth Leagues - October 2nd,1920.

The old schools provided purely book knowledge; they compelled their pupils to assimilate a mass of useless, superfluous and barren knowledge, which cluttered up the brain and turned the younger generation into bureaucrats regimented according to a single pattern. But it would mean falling into a grave error for you to try to draw the conclusion that one can become a Communist without assimilating the wealth of knowledge amassed by mankind. It would be mistaken to think it sufficient to learn communist slogans and the conclusions of communist science, without acquiring that sum of knowledge of which communism itself is a result. Marxism is an example which shows how communism arose out of the sum of human knowledge.

You have read and heard that communist theory - the science of communism created in the main by Marx, this doctrine of Marxism has ceased to be the work of a single socialist of the nineteenth century, even though he was a genius, and that it has become the doctrine of millions and tens of millions of proletarians all over the world, who are applying it in their struggle against capitalism. If you were to ask why the teachings of Marx have been able to win the hearts and minds of millions and tens of millions of the most revolutionary class, you would receive only one answer:  it was because Marx based his work on the firm foundation of the human knowledge acquired under capitalism. After making a study of the laws governing the development of  human society, Marx realised the inevitability of capitalism developing towards communism. What is most important is that he proved this on the sole basis of a most precise, detailed and profound study of this capitalist society, by fully assimilating all that earlier science had produced. He critically reshaped everything that had been created by human society, without ignoring a single detail. He reconsidered, subjected to criticism, and verified on the working-class movement everything that human thinking had created, and therefrom formulated conclusions which people hemmed in by bourgeois limitations or bound by bourgeois prejudices could not draw.

We must bear this in mind when, for example, we talk about proletarian culture. We shall be unable to solve this problem unless we clearly realise that only a precise knowledge and transformation of the culture created by the entire  development of mankind will enable us to create a proletarian culture. The latter is not clutched out of thin air; it is not an invention of those who call themselves experts in proletarian culture. That is all nonsense. Proletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist, landowner and bureaucratic society. All these roads have been leading, and will continue to load up to proletarian culture, in the same way as political economy, as reshaped by Marx, has shown us what human society must arrive at, shown us the passage to the class struggle, to the beginning of the proletarian revolution.

When we so often hear representatives of the youth, as well as curtain advocates of a new system of education, attacking the old schools, claiming that they used the system of cramming, we say to them that we must take what was good in the old schools. We must not borrow the system of encumbering young people's minds with an immense amount of knowledge, nine-tenths of which was useless and one-tenth distorted. This, however, does not mean that we can restrict ourselves to communist conclusions and learn only communist slogans. You will not create communism that way. You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.

We have no need of cramming, but we do need to develop and perfect the mind of every student with a knowledge of fundamental facts. Communism will become an empty word, a mere signboard, and a Communist a mere boaster, if all the knowledge he has acquired is not digested in his mind. You should not merely assimilate this knowledge, but assimilate it critically, so as not to cram your mind with useless lumber, but enrich it with all those facts that are indispensable to the well-educated man of today. If a Communist took it into his head to boast about his communism because of the cut-and-dried conclusions ho had acquired, without putting in a great dual of serious and hard work and without understanding facts he should examine critically, he would be a deplorable Communist indeed. Such superficiality would be decidedly fatal. If I know that I know little, I shall strive to learn more; but if a man says that he is a Communist and that ho need not know anything thoroughly, he will never become anything like a Communist.

The old schools produced servants needed by the capitalist; the old schools turned men of science into men who had to write and say whatever pleased the capitalists. We must: therefore abolish them. But does the fact that we must abolish thorn, destroy thorn, mean that we should not take from thorn everything mankind has accumulated that is essential to man? Does it mean that we do not have to distinguish between what was necessary to capitalism and what is necessary to communism?

We are replacing the old drill-sergeant methods practised in bourgeois society, against the will of the majority, with the class-conscious discipline of the workers and peasants, who combine hatred of the old society with a determination, ability and readiness to unite and organise their forces for this struggle so as to forge the wills of millions and hundreds of millions of people disunited, and scattered over the territory of a huge country, into a single will, without which defeat is inevitable. Without this solidarity, without this conscious  discipline of the workers and peasants, our cause is hopeless. Without this, we shall be unable to vanquish the capitalists  and landowners of the whole world. We shall not even consolidate the foundation, let alone build a new, communist society on that foundation. Likewise, while condemning the old schools, while harbouring. an absolutely justified and necessary hatred for the old schools, and appreciating the readiness to destroy them, we must realise that we must replace the old system of instruction, the old cramming and the old drill, with an ability to acquire the sum total of human knowledge, and to acquire it in such a way that communism shall not be something to be harped by rote, but something that you yourselves have thought over, something that will embody conclusions inevitable from the standpoint of present-day education.

That is the way the main tasks should be presented when we speak of the aim: learn communism... 

...The old society was based on the principle: rob or be robbed; work for others or make others work for you; be a slave-owner or a slave. Naturally, people brought up in such a society assimilate with their mother's milk, one might say, the psychology, the habit, the concept which says: you are either a slave-owner or a slave, or else, a small owner, a petty employee, a petty official, or an intellectual - in short, a man  who is concerned only with himself, and does not care a rap for anybody else.

If I work this plot of land, I do not care a rap for anybody else; if others starve, all the better, I shall get the more for my grain. If I have a job as a doctor, engineer, teacher, or clerk, I do not care a rap for anybody else. If I toady to and please the powers that be, I may be able to keep my job, and even get on in life and become a bourgeois. A Communist cannot harbour such a psychology and such sentiments. When the workers and peasants proved that they were able, by their own efforts, to defend themselves and create a new society - that was the beginning of the new and communist education, education in the struggle against the exploiters, education in alliance with the proletariat against the selfseekers and petty proprietors, against the psychology and habits which say: I seek my own profit and don't care a rap for anything else.

That is the reply to the question of how the young and rising generation should learn communism.

It can learn communism only by linking up every step in its studies, training and education with the continuous struggle the proletarians and the working people are waging against the old society of exploiters. When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious maps struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose the falseness of all the fables about morality.

Morality serves the purpose of helping human society rise to a higher level and rid itself of the exploitation of labour.

No such vision is on offer from the likes of George Galloway, MP, of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, who in his semi-sarcastic piece about Cuba, no doubt another freebie, accidentally lets through yet more ammunition against the rotten corrupt capitalist system he so hypocritically and smugly represents:

TO THE outskirts of Havana, to Little Orange River, a very poor barrio which used to be a shanty town but where the "micro brigades" of volunteers have worked several miracles. Entirely led by women; houses, schools and clinics have been built and a day care centre catering for and feeding all the community's children has been set up. Free of charge. There is one teacher for every four children.

The director, Aleida Alonso, doesn't know we're coming and is concerned that, having just woken up from the siesta, the children "might not comb their hair properly". When we tell her how famous Cuba is for how it looks after its children (among the lowest pupil-teacher ratios in the world and infant mortality rates comparable with the first world) she bursts into tears saying, "We would rather die than give up these things we have built".

The Labour Party, with its entire blood-soaked history of collaborating with imperialism - and when in office, running it offers no solutions to the working class on any issues whatsoever, and is scarcely listened to apart from by demented trotskyite opportunists and others with a stake in the labour aristocracy.

Help build the struggle for Leninism. Read the ILWP Bulletin. A1 Pater

Half-baked management science' won' t save imperialism's bacon.

One telling sign of the loss of confidence by capitalist leadership in Britain and the USA is the obsession with 'management science' as a magic cure-all fore a historical decline that is now sharpening into unparalleled crisis.

Catchphrases and gimmicks dressed up as "profound knowledge" ( a favourite phrase of Dr Deming) are proselytised for with a cultlike zeal, and not just by a few eccentrics, but within major corporations and utilities like Hewlett Packard and Intercity.

Scepticism is greeted with a curious blend of 'love-bombing' (to borrow an apt phrase from the 'Jesus children' who used to drown out psychological resistance to conversion with huge doses of collective public affection - not so different from the organised clapping, mutual congratulation and fulsome heaps of easy praise lavished on willing "total quality" communicants) and paranoia (manifested in accusations of "sabotage" against any unable to stomach the allotted quota of bullshit, and suspicions of disloyalty to the company or lack of patriotism for any laggards in the fight to 'bear the competition' and 'show the Japanese' ). The talk is of statistics, science, systems - but the tone of voice is consistently evangelical, and the huge fees and unbridled adulation drawn around guru figures like Dr Deming and Tom Peters have all the hallmarks of a quasi-religious personality cult.

And through it all runs one telltale refrain: if we don't want to be eaten up by the Japanese, we must work out what on earth it is that makes them so much more successful than us.

As the DTI educational film warns British managers: "Let Quality be your  shield and armour/In the battle against Yokohama"

A rich historical irony is that the "profound wisdom" of 'scientific management'  is being most hoarsely urged in the West at the very moment when Japanese economic fortunes are crumbling under the identical slump pressures driving capitalism into crisis world wide, albeit thereby intensifying rather than diminishing the urgency of the economic and political challenge Japan is once again building up against the anglo-saxon status quo.

Well-founded as Washington's nightmares about 'Jap supremacy' undoubtedly are, the crisis-hit Tokyo economy knocks the bottom out of the argument that 'if only' we had better management schools, fewer restrictive practices, even more pliant trade unions etc., 'then we could all enjoy stable, harmonious economic growth to the benefit of all' etc. 

Domestic crisis, international cut-throat competitions for markets, and degeneration into imperialist war is the only reality for bourgeois-organised society everywhere, from the most bungling, amateurish, anti-theoretical leadership styles to the most 'scientific', ruthless, maniacally, “confident". 

No caped crusader or 'management science'
guru can save capitalism's hide.

The readiness of renascent Japanese capitalism postwar to embrace a less empirical, more theoretical approach to industrial management than was the case in the anglo-saxon world speaks volumes about the relative freshness and vitality of Japanese imperialism, along the lines brilliantly explained by Marxism in the previous century in contrasting German and British ruling philosophies of that time.

But for anglo-saxon capitalism to turn around now, and indulge in nostalgic 'might-have-been 's and hopeless 'still-might-be's 'if only a more scientific approach were to be installed in this or that area of bourgeois activity, is one more ;strong proof that the historical decline of confidence (of century-long duration in Britain's case, of more recent Vietnam vintage in America's) is now entering the end-game phase.

Maybe the Deming groupies shave a point when they criticise the prophet's US homeland for failing to honour his attempts to introduce 'scientific' perspectives into management from the late '40's on, leaving Japanese capitalism to reap the benefit. However philosophically undermined by the subjective idealism of bourgeois ideology, however hampered in practice by the exploitative class relations and anarchy of production under capitalism, the very fact that an attempt was being made to think through from scratch, in a semi-scientific fashion, questions about motivation, leadership, the social nature of labour, the rational planning of production, the elimination of waste, the role of automation in raising productivity etc.etc., marked out the Japanese bourgeoisie, even in the midst of the total devastation of the early postwar years as a class with historically somewhere to go and something to prove.

In point of fact, 'industrial sociology' was big in the USA too, at least so far as making a big academic noise was concerned, and the American behaviorist Skinner, is an acknowledged influence on the 'Japan school'. Whether there was an initial willingness to put up with a certain amount of  'theory' if it promised to bring on the American Dream in short order, later succumbing to top-dog complacency, or whether the role of US sociology was always limited to queering the pitch for the only genuine scientific approach to analysing social development (i.e. Marxism-Leninism) and was newer seriously regarded by big business as having anything much to offer in practical questions of leadership, organisation and motivation of the labour process outside of some flashy ways of making exploitation smell sweeter and weeding out bolshie job applicants - would be worth analysing.

But the main point to insist on grasping is that the US ruling class did not just make a 'stupid mistake’ by not consistently adopting a scientific approach to management; any more than the Japanese or German ruling class 'struck lucky'; or 'made a clever choice'. The difference in perspective is rooted deep in the distinction between national bourgeois leadership with somewhere to go and something to prove historically, and national bourgeois leadership which is historically exhausted. This distinction persists - indeed sharpens, becomes decisive - as crisis bites deep everywhere, forcing the hand of challengers and incumbent alike.

If letting Deming go post-war to teach the Japanese bourgeois his tricks, for  whatever they are worth , was a symptom of poor capitalist management in the anglo-saxon world, then clawing him back for a second coming just as the 80’s boomlet was preparing to topple into the massive crisis and turmoil of the 90's is proof that poor management is rapidly becoming demented management, clutching at 'scientific' straws as if they were magic charms and repeating the sacred incantations about "'Total Quality Management", "Profound Knowledge", "Delighting the Customer", "Just in Time" and "Quality Assurance" etc. in the vain hope of thereby warding off the evil spirits of the "present economic climate" - i.e. imperialist crisis.

Meanwhile (as occurred recently), even as one "Quality at Work" seminar/ prayer-meeting was grinding on in one corner of a luxury hote1, down the marble corridor another company was organising an alternative (but entirely complementary) exercise in staff-motivation: gathering their employees together in a 'non-work' unthreatening environment to let them know in the most 'civilised' way which of them the management had decided to axe.

Not all of bourgeois management 'science' is without interest or even practical use. Lenin famously recognised this in recommending the time-and-motion studies of Taylorism to be applied in the young Soviet republic - minus the class exploitation.
 
For example, the "quality circles" imported from Japan are an interesting experiment under capitalism,  attempting to bring workers together into teams from different points in a work process characterised by a highly developed division of labour, in order to iron out production difficulties and inspire enthusiasm for the job and is sense of collective pride. The intention behind this is clearly to free up the creative intelligence and enthusiasm of the workforce and to allow the essentially social character of labour under the capitalist mode of production to be more fully expressed - all in the interests of more thorough and successful exploitation, needless to add.

But as soon as the intention is stated clearly, the impossibility of its full realisation at once arises to confront it. The deepest contradiction in capitalism is between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation; and any and every move capitalism makes to raise productivity by making conscious use of the co-operative nature of labour or by taking the brakes off the cultural-scientific development of the productive forces; reawakens that contradiction in an ever more threatening form.

Looking beyond the sick fraud that these "quality circles" are for the women building Sanyo's TV's for them, they are also striking evidence of the way in which modern society strains at the development leash, obliging the most 'advanced' bourgeois leadership to come up with a kind of mimicry of phenomena that can only make a genuine appearance once the contradiction between social production and private appropriation has been resolved through the revolutionary expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the organisation of socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Because, in a hopelessly 	self-deluding way, which could end up doing the Japanese bourgeoisie more harm than good, those "quality circles" do try to tap into that dimly perceived creative energy of the masses - the shopfloor ingenuity which Soviet "inventors clubs" long-since harnessed, the satisfaction in sharing cooperative work to a common goal which in different measure inspired Lenin's subtonics; Stalin's Stakhanovites; Mao and Castro's work brig	ades; the heroic conception of labour as another front in the class struggle; the superhuman achievements of  the workers who built up the USSR's defensive might against fascism in permafrost conditions; the Vietnamese who dismantled anti-aircraft missile launchers, carried them through jungle and swamp for miles on foot, then re-assembled them to shoot down imperialist B51's.

Seventy years of Soviet history is permanently on record to show exactly what can be built without even a smell of a bourgeois ruling-class around.

Half-baked 'management science' will not save capitalism's bacon. What is needed now is the only consistent science of social development: the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science of social transformation, behind which the working class will move to overthrow imperialism.		Dominic Hull.