Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 0710 July 27th 1993                                                                                                                                   10p 

Fighting the imperialist mess not helped by daft 'left' reformism and bogus middle-class 'revolutionaries'. Fascist-racism won't stop until capitalist market forces stop. To get there, the real origins of revisionism-liquidationism must be traced and analysed first. Mindless idealism to just put the blame on Kruschev. Stalinists, Trots, and all anti-Leninists crippled by the same inability to grasp that history can never cease advancing through contradictions.

The Tory government's split, and the renewed Common Market financial crisis, are just further examples of the enormity of the upheavals about to devastate the 'free world', making the 'reform' pleas of the fake-"left" look ludicrous.

"Wake Up World" yelled Vanessa Redgrave & Co in their fatuous international advertisement against racism everywhere, and backing the Bosnian muslims in the Yugoslav civil war.

Bankrolled and signed by some pretty wealthy capitalists such as Fred Zimmerman, Sir Peter Hall, Emma Thompson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Redgrave herself, etc, this naïve philistine gibberish favourably evoked Western imperialism's Cold War aggression (mentioning only the Berlin airlift to keep undermining the East German workers state, but conveniently ignoring the identical politics of the US blitzkrieg which devastated Indo-China, massacring more than 2 million defenceless people, and 200 other acts of counter-revolutionary police-military 'anti-communist' terror since 1945 such as Pinochet's fascist coup in Chile, the Suharto barbarism in Indonesia, the Contra destruction of socialist Nicaragua, the Western-financed annihilation of revolutionary developments in Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, etc, etc, etc).

It declared: 

The UN member states (i.e. the US imperialist stooge organisation) have the means, the money, and the weapons to lift the siege of Sarajevo.

A call, in other words, for US imperialism, - fresh from its fascist blitzkriegs on defenceless Baghdad and Mogadishu (not to mention Panama City; Tripoli, and Benghazi; Grenada; etc, etc), - to now (try to bomb Serbia back to the stone age as was once secretly and 'illegally' done to Cambodia, e.g. (it was specifically forbidden by the United Nations and even by the US Congress). And this savagery is urged in the name of the fight against fascism and racism!

Why doesn't this well-heeled gang of ignorant dilettantes just read their own bourgeois media which 12 months ago was running a similar hysteria campaign to get the Serbs slaughtered, by US imperialism in the name of the 'poor defenceless Croatians' until forced to admit that the Croats were guilty of just as many 'atrocities' in their equally-determined civil-war offensives and had initiated just as many attacks and 'ethnic cleansing' drives as the Serbs.

Now the capitalist press has been having to admit recently that the Bosnian muslims are aggressing just as ferociously as the other two sides in what is quite obviously a straightforward civil war fought with equal primitive nationalist fervour by all the participants:

AS A BRITISH SOLDIER WHO HAS SERVED widely in Bosnia for seven months now, I feel I must take issue with the nature of the reporting from this region. In the case of the Muslim town of Srebrenica, your articles have been scathing in denouncing the Bosnian Serbs and their shelling of the town. However, you have failed to address the question of where the Serbian population of Srebrenica was. The Serbs made up 30% of its pre-war population. Early on in the conflict, they were forced out of their homes with whatever belongings they could carry and ordered to leave. As the Bosnian Serbs fled, Muslims fired wildly on men, women and children on the road. This story was told to British soldiers in Srebrenica by Muslims themselves and later by Bosnian Serbs. Earlier this year, Bosnian Muslims launched their offensive in eastern Bosnia, bombing Bosnian Serb villages, raping women and destroying livestock.

The media are creating a "Let's do something; let's bomb the Serbs; let's arm the Muslims" rhetoric that is very dangerous. We in Europe understand the Balkan chicanery and Balkan cunning far better than Americans do. We do not want to see ourselves further embroiled in a morass when there is no one side that is uniquely culpable. A British soldier sees the bodies of three Croat children who have had their throats cut by Muslim soldiers. Does he want to see those Muslims with bigger and better weapons? Please try to be more objective.

I. R. Thornton, Interpreter Sergeant, British Army Vitez, Bosnia

So disoriented has bourgeois propaganda become by its own hypocritical distortions and stupidity that even Time magazine, a symbol of US-imperialist reaction, has been forced to scratch its head in public:

OTHER VOICES

Radovan Karadzic's belligerent leadership of Bosnia's Serbs has seemed almost pathological to outsiders, particularly in light of his earlier career as a psychiatrist. But writing in Britain's Financial Times last week, Karadzic sounded unusually reasonable.

Root causes: "We never lived in a state called Bosnia, we lived in Yugoslav Bosnia. To take away Yugoslavia was to take away all the compromises held Bosnia together. 

Present pain: "No Serb can deny that the Muslims need a secure home in Bosnia; no thoughtful Serb imagines that there can be peace without them... Muslims are our Slav brothers...They now require not only peace, but also institutional safeguards and guarantees.

What's next: "We have survived and have not been beaten. But there have been no prizes.  Today we need a settlement as much as the Muslims and the Croats."

Why doesn't Redgrave's circus consider just for one second what is the class nature of this 'UN force' which it is so keen to unleash on impoverished Serbia just because it has far greater organised proletarian strength left from the remnants of the Yugoslav workers state than its traditionally more petty-bourgeois and Western-imperialist-oriented rivals in Bosnia and Croatia, and has far more realistic nationalist aspirations in the region.

And if these 'left' poseurs are too busy being important to work it out for themselves, then let them just read the admissions between the lines of their own trusted 'free-world' newspapers:

Somalis call it "the place with wire around it". A high wall, tipped with the shards of thousands of shattered wine bottles, protects the United Nations from the streets of Mogadishu.

Tangled waves of concertina wire provide a frill at the base of the compound wall, pocked with bullet holes and here and there daubed with anti-UN graffiti scrawled by those courageous enough to jump the wire under the gaze of sentries.

From outside all that can be seen are the helicopters coming and going. They keep the world inside functioning. They give a sense of activity.

Each morning the rush hour starts early. A white UN helicopter thunders into the compound carrying secretaries and administrators who live in UN houses a mile away. It costs around $2,000 to make a helicopter journey of a mile.

The bureaucrats are shuttled in an armed convoy from their protected homes to the airport every morning. There, the helicopter picks them up for the two-minute journey to the compound, hovering a few hundred feet above the dangerous streets. It makes the journey four times in each direction every working day.

Nobody has thought of bringing the secretaries to live near their work. But then again, what exactly is their work? Ian MacLeod, the senior Unicef officer living in the Mogadishu compound, emerges from the fly-blown mess hall where 800 UN employees chatter about the latest important issues over lunch. "The question is: have you ever been to a Norwegian restaurant?" he asks. The question was allegedly raised in a meeting with the UN's undersecretary for peacekeeping, Koffi Annan, at a top-level meeting in New York last week.

"The point is that UN agencies aren't allowed to eat with Unosom staff in their facilities. This is a major dispute. It's gone very high up in New York," says Mr MacLeod. Unosom, the UN Operation in Somalia, is different from the UN agencies, so it has its own restaurant. The UN agencies are enraged about having to eat in a large mess hall run by Norway, a country not noted for its cuisine.

According to Mr MacLeod, it would take negotiations between the US defence department; its contractors, DCMC Defence Contractors; its sub contractors, Brown and Root and the UN agencies to allow him and his colleagues to eat in the nearby Unosom canteen. Instead, Norway serves them different combinations of white bread, tinned fish and potatoes.

"Which reminds me," says Mr MacLeod. "There's a major shortage of toilet paper. That's another thing the agencies are up in arms about. So Anne Wright from the UN justice department went into a management committee meeting yesterday with an empty toilet roll tied round her neck, to demonstrate her point."

To go outside the compound wall is to step out of a clinic. Now the sentries' gunsights are on our car as we drive away, and my security guard props his M-16 assault rifle in preparation for bandits.

Camels block a junction called Kamikaze crossroads as we slow down. A woman spits at the car window. Another shouts something. A group of men walk in front of the car. The driver hoots. My security man gets his M-16 ready. The men stare at me. The car is surrounded and we can't move.

For the tenth time that day I think of my journalist friends who were stoned to death nearby a week before. I wonder if it was these people who killed them. I wait for a gun to be held up to the window. There's nothing I can say to the crowd. There was nothing my dead friends could say to defend themselves as they fell.

That is the cause of the outsiders' fear in Mogadishu. At one end of the street there is security inside a fish bowl, and at the other end the crowds with stones, or worse. And every day the distance between them grows. One day, I think as I watch the snarling faces, whichever end I am heading towards will have become too far to reach.

But the real problem of this Redgraveite turn to straight forward bourgeois liberalism of the most posturing reactionary kind is not even in its simple failure to identify imperialist intervention to deliberately break up the Yugoslav socialist federation as the original cause of the civil-war strife there.

Much worse is the appalling naïveté of this "stand against racism and fascism" which is at one with all the fake-'left' in underestimating the scale and nature of the imperialist crisis, and resurrects some of the most damagingly misleading 'understanding' of reaction that workers have ever suffered from in all history.

"We can and we must remove all the growing economic and cultural barriers that feed fascism, we will allow no more walls," 

they declare like Moses parting the Red Sea.

For this to mean anything, of course, these famous people must be promising to get rid of the capitalist system because even children understand the clear historical relationship between fascist chauvinism of the 20th century and the international trade-war crises between the monopoly-imperialist giant powers which have produced an insoluble cycle of war, boom and slump to which the only 'free enterprise' answer is renewed nationalist arms-race aggression to right alleged wrongs, of which the Nazi movement within German imperialism in the 1930s is the classic expression.

Back in slump again now, inevitably so because of the incurable piling up of relatively 'surplus' capital investment by the anarchic 'free market' system, - imperialist ideology can only edge back towards warmongering chauvinist aggression again in a bid to wipe out rival bourgeois-monopoly forces.

Fascist governments will soon be proliferating once more as they did in the 1930s, and Redgrave's fake-'left' liberal appeals will be nothing but a sick memory of the damage done to workers understanding by the philistine conceited ignorance of the petty-bourgeoisie.

"We artists can assist our fellow citizens in organising a 24-hour civilian watch in all areas where the persecuted peoples' lives, homes, businesses, offices and sacred places are in danger," 

adds this moralising religious bleat.

This belt-and-braces approach somewhat undermines the promise to wipe out all causes of fascism in the economic and social system which, if effective, would no longer require any 24-hour watches by anybody.

But nevertheless, this 'watch' on its own is such a huge undertaking as to invite nothing but public ridicule. Who on earth is going to pay for, staff, and organise such a massive operation as virtual permanent civil war against backwardness and prejudice in every community in Britain? It really would be far easier with such a giant mobilisation of public spiritedness to just get rid of the capitalist system of greed, envy, and want there and then, and be done with fascist bourgeois-idealism (looking for the 'perfect' society within capitalism).

Redgrave's version of bourgeois idealism does not completely ignore reality, of course, and declares that: 

"Practical solutions for the economic questions exist. We know that the military budgets of our countries could be substantially cut to provide the finance for new jobs, for debt cancellation, for old age pensioners,", 

etc, etc.

What brain-numbing stupidity. The monopoly-bourgeois circles build up their financial might in cut-throat domestic competition and international trade war to produce the glitzy consumer world (which the Redgrave-ites so adore), and then, of course, arm themselves to the teeth to make sure that in the shooting wars which always follow trade wars as night follows day, their own imperialist states do not lose on the diplomatic, political and military battlefields what has been so ruthlessly and strenuously earned on the international market places.

But on the command of V Redgrave, the imperialists are all about to renounce all these nasty practices, supposedly. What astonishing conceit. It makes the crazy hypocrisy of the Christian religion seem almost sane by comparison.

The next stage of this ex-Trot 'revolutionary' degeneracy is likely to be an expensive attempt to at least re-enter the class-war political arena (or in this case the toilets on the outer perimeter) by trying to breathe new life into the Labour Party which has just about asphyxiated itself with its efforts to shout aggressively against some Tory and US imperialist misdemeanours but without uttering a peep against the capitalist system as such.

The 'left' Labour stars like Scargill, Benn, and Skinner, have been at it again in the past week insisting that the 'democracy' system do something about its own inherently undemocratic nature:

A KEY member of Arthur Scargill's inner circle who later made false allegations of corruption against the miners' leader was an undercover agent working for Stella Rimington, now MI5's director general, it was claimed yesterday in parliament.

Roger Windsor, chief executive of the National Union of Mineworkers during and after the miners' strike of 1984/5, was "sent in to the NUM to destabilise and sabotage the union at its most critical juncture", according to a motion signed by two Labour MPs, George Galloway and Tam Dalyell.

The MPs, supported by four other Labour MPs, say that allegations by Mr Windsor against Mr Scargill, published by the Daily Mirror which paid Mr Windsor £80,000, were made under the "guidance" of Mrs Rimington, who last week became the first head of the Security Service to appear in public. At the time of the miners' strike, Mrs Rimington was head of MI5's F2 branch, responsible for monitoring "subversion" in trade unions.

The Mirror stories led to an inquiry by Gavin Lightman, QC, and a series of legal actions which cost the union nearly £700,000. Mr Windsor's main allegation — that Mr Scargill had used £25,000 of Libyan strike aid to pay off his mortgage — was found by Mr Lightman to be "entirely untrue".

Last night's motion — also signed by Bob Litherland and three mining MPs, Mick Clapham, Dennis Skinner and Jimmy Hood — is based on two independent tip-offs from senior Whitehall sources.

It says that Mr Windsor's actions "led to serious and expensive internal disputes, notably a £100,000 libel damages settlement as a result of a letter Windsor forged in the name of David Prendergast of the UDM". The letter was circulated in the Nottinghamshire coalfield in the wake of the 1984/5 strike. In 1990, the NUM settled out of court a libel action brought by Mr Prendergast. 

The MPs accuse Mrs Rimington of running other agents provocateurs inside the NUM and say that "notwithstanding recent cosmetic changes to its image, the Security Service, including Mrs Rimington, has been responsible for the subversion of democratic liberties in Britain and should be brought to account".

But which is the more monstrous deception, - that the British imperialist dictatorship-of-the-bourgeoisie should use its secret police control system to prevent 'legal' strikes from being too successful by running a relentless black-propaganda campaign against the strike leaders; - or that the members of the 'parliamentary democracy' fraud should pretend that the 'rule of law' is worth a pile of cold manure.

Asking capitalism's legislative system to stop rigging things in favour of capitalism is even worse than asking pigs to fly, - like asking pigs to just stop being pigs.

And how did the suspected MI5 agent get into the NUM hierarchy in the first place?

Mr Windsor, 48, was hired as finance officer of the NUM in December 1982 by Mr Scargill. A member of the Labour Party, he had occupied a similar post at Public Services International, a London-based trade union international. His referees were Tony Benn MP and Rodney Bickerstaffe, leader of the National Union of Public Employees.

He was later promoted to executive officer, acting as Mr Scargill's right-hand man.

And what would any half-awake 'socialist' suspect that something as weird as the reformist 'Public Services International' might be a niche for?

No wonder the renegade Windsor now has the cheek to try prolonging NUM stupidity with this provocative 'reply' to the accusations about this treachery:

In an extraordinary open letter to Stella Rimington, the head of MI5, handed to The Observer yesterday, he says: 'Let me make it quite clear that you and I have never met, nor have I had any contact whatsoever with any member of the Security Services either prior to, during or after my employment with the National Union of Mineworkers.'

Mr Windsor now dismisses the 'great strike for jobs', arguing in his letter to the head of MI5: 'Let's face it, the NUM were never more than a bunch of amateurs trying to take on the might of the State. We lacked the cohesion, discipline and organisation to run any meaningful campaign, and were led by our Napoleon on to our battlefield of Waterloo.'

Calling for a public inquiry into the role of MI5 in the pit strike, he adds: 'Perhaps you would not welcome a public inquiry into all the events surrounding the NUM activities during and since the strike, as it might reveal that you were not as effective as you would have liked to have been, or as others would credit you. But public accountability is a fundamental premise of any free society.'

Mr Windsor also brings to MI5's notice the vexed question of Mr Scargill's continuing leadership of the union. 'He has failed to present himself for re-election as NUM president more than five years after his previous election in 1988, contrary to union rules (unless amended subsequently) and trade union law.

'No one cares, apparently, to challenge him. Most areas are too concerned in trying to save something of the industry to bother whether Scargill stays or goes. They know that the union is finished. Let Scargill sink with it, they say by their silence.'

He concludes: 'Let's restore both freedom and democracy in Britain. A public inquiry into your role during the miners' strike. I'll take part and hope you will. A full official inquiry into the affairs of the NUM as well, to clear up all those misunderstandings about the NUM secret funds. I'll take part and challenge Scargill to do the same.'

What a 'socialist'! What a fink! But the 'left' Labourites are just daft enough to go along with such a smokescreen.

This is one of the clearest examples yet of Benn and Scargill's anti-Leninism being shown up as, in effect, turkeys voting for Christmas.

"The parliamentary democracy way is the only way" - to permanent defeat for socialism, by hook or by crook.

Redgrave is now into 'democracy' in a big way, touting this week for another imperialist stooge Eduard Shevardnadze who helped the Redgrave Trots' previous hero Gorbachev to dismantle the Soviet workers state and reintroduce mafia capitalism and open house for a huge CIA network (and every other imperialist counter-revolutionary agency) to blanket the former USSR to make sure there is never a successful socialist revolution there again, - a 'restructuring' programme initially hailed by the WRP Trots as the long-awaited 'political revolution' which was supposed to bring back 'pure socialism' and justify 60 years of Trotskyite treacherous back-stabbing of the Soviet workers state.

Shevardnadze now wheedles for Western aid to help him 'defend democracy', - otherwise doomed to extinction by fascist dictatorship as the inevitable result of bringing back capitalism and its incurable warmongering-slump chauvinist degeneracy.

But the biggest fascist dictators in view, of course, are the likes of Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and Shevardnadze, - as anyone but a naïve fool can easily see, - longtime 'peaceful coexistence' class-collaborators with US imperialist world rule, and now stripped of any responsibility for running a planned socialist economy.

Once again, listen to what the Western capitalist 'free' press itself is prepared to admit about the Gorbachev generation's introduction of 'democratic market forces':

Mr Boldyrev pressed for an independent anti-monopoly committee. But it was put under Mr Chubais's state property administration. "Even then, it was not given premises to work in. Then they set up a tax police to check on non-payers. I had to argue five times for them to get a building. A year ago, a currency control inspectorate was created. It was meant to deal with illegal exports of hard currency. They were given no room, no staff, no wage fund. The government simply sabotaged it. Decrees were issued, but not fulfilled," he complains.

Mr Boldyrev's first run-in with Mr Yeltsin came last summer. Complaints were mounting about the way property was being privatised in Moscow. Mr Boldyrev started to prepare an investigation into the way Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor, was handling it. Mr Yeltsin told him to stop the investigation. "Did he give a reason?" "Yes," Mr Boldyrev said, "he simply said 'We support Luzhkov'."

Moscow's Olympic stadium was one of several odd deals. The mayor authorised 45 million roubles of the city's budget to be spent on new seats for the huge building, which was last modernised for the 1980 games. A few days later it was privatised at a cost of only 90 million roubles — at a time when a three-room flat in Moscow cost about 5 million roubles.

In the rush to stimulate private enterprise, the government allocated a large sum of money to a pro-Yeltsin group, the Association of Private Farmers (Akkor). Akkor could hand out cheap credits, farm machinery, and tax privileges. Unlike Western countries, there was no mandatory system of control and auditing.

"The state transfers its authority and finances to individuals and leaves them alone. We said there should be a follow-up to check on the use of the money, and whether the incentives had paid off, and what advantage was taken of the concessions." He found no interest in the idea.

Mr Boldyrev's year in office was not just a chronicle of frustrations. Even if corrupt officials were never prosecuted, they could be sacked. In one year, he had the top men removed in four of Russia's 89 regions and republics. These were the men put in charge in 1991 after the communist structures were banned. Three were pro-Yeltsin appointees.

In Pskov, the head of the regional administration was illegally exporting petrol, food, and metal to nearby Estonia without paying customs duty. In Krasnodar, Vasily Diakonov, another Yeltsin man — "initially dubbed a symbol of the New Russia", Mr Boldyrev says — put his brother-in-law in charge of a "fund" to which former Communist Party buildings were allocated.

In Lipetsk, the local boss received a new car cheap after helping the manager of the area's largest factory obtain credits from the central bank. In Voronezh, the top man and his deputy were sacked for allocating cars ordered for ordinary citizens to their friends and relatives instead.

That three of the four dismissed officials were Yeltsin men does not persuade Mr Boldyrev that the government in Moscow is even-handed. "I insisted three times that Diakonov be sacked. Only on the third occasion did they take action."

He concludes that the notion that reforms in the provinces are being subverted by officials of the old system, the so-called "communist revanchists", which is one of Mr Yeltsin's fundamental propaganda tenets, is not borne out by the facts.

"Our checks do not produce a clear link between the political views of heads of regional administrations and their behaviour. Moreover, sometimes the ones who consider themselves to be in the democratic camp feel safer and become more insolent in breaking the law."

The main way to deal with corruption, he believes, is to have a law restricting government officials' rights to engage in business. Officials should also have to declare their sources of income. President Yeltsin issued an instruction a year ago calling for such disclosure, but it remained a dead letter.

There was, of course, plenty of corruption under the socialist revisionist bureaucracy, and certainly an endless programme of renovation and reform was always needed, was always going to be needed, and always will be needed permanently under any workers state. That is the whole nature of working out how to run a completely new form of society.

But now the corruption is systemic again, incurable from capitalism, and knocking history back generations from the easily debatable and solvable failures of philosophical inspiration (springing from the revisionist backwardness and bureaucratic complacency and arbitrariness) which gradually overtook the Soviet workers state due to one-off specific historical conditions plus an insufficient grasp of the real essence of Leninism and building a party of revolutionary theory.

It will eventually emerge as one of the greatest failures ever in human understanding that petty-bourgeois anti-communist hysteria has been allowed to misrepresent Soviet defects in an all-or-nothing black-and-white idealist way, driving mass socialist political progress right back to having to repeat the 1917 Revolution again, (only to discover from bitter experience that such destruction of new cooperative and workers-state achievements was not what was needed at all).

Every fake-'left' faction on earth has contributed to this criminal middle-class 'democratic' delusion of throwing out the proletarian-dictatorship baby with the dirty Stalinist bathwater.

Most anti-Leninist sectarianism has been obviously destructive, like that of the WRP Trots. Some has been more subtle, - like that of the 'Leninist', the pro-Stalin and anti-Kruschev groupings, the RCG fence-sitters, and the Spart provocative posturers. But all have fundamentally fallen at the same petty-bourgeois philosophical hurdle in failing to hold fast together the obvious opposites in any objective analysis of the Soviet workers-state record. Instead of living with the contradiction of what was the Soviet proletarian dictatorship, these middle-class idealist poseurs have all always wanted to pursue the 'perfect' revolution in its place, something which could only ever exist in the heads of armchair socialists of every description, (from the most frenetic activists tailending every scrap of spontaneous response from workers, to the most abstract of ivory-tower gurus who can relate nothing of their bogus 'theory' to practical guidance on the current frontline anti-imperialist struggles.)

EPSR Bulletin 708 has just examined the unsubtle connections between the 'pro-Stalin' revisionism of groups like the CP of India(M) with its pretence of still being 'true to Bolshevism', - and the routine spontaneous 'modern' mass perception that imperialism really has found new tricks (with which to frustrate the 'old-fashioned' Marxist-Leninist notion of inevitable world war and inter-imperialist conflict) by developing 'new cooperative ways' to avoid 'old-fashioned' slumps, etc.

The all-out onslaughts on Kruschev as the real 'villain' of the piece now being published are no more subtle, crudely depicting Kruschev's rise up the CPSU hierarchy, just with words, as something 'sinister' without one note of attempted explanation as to why the supposed 'genius' Stalin obviously so encouraged Kruschev for nearly three decades.

There was nothing sinister about Kruschev's rise at all. He simply pursued Stalin's revisionist political line more enthusiastically than many others, - the disastrous Popular Front; the delusion that the wartime alliance with 'good' imperialism could last postwar; the wishful thinking that the capitalist world market would stagnate permanently and then peacefully capitulate to superior socialist-camp economic productivity; that the peaceful road to socialism was now open, and that anti-monopoly democracy was now the only tactic needed; etc, etc, etc.

It was Stalin's own Third International clientele who so enthusiastically embraced 'permanent peaceful coexistence' as a complete political programme, directly spawning Eurocommunism, all-out class-collaboration, and eventual total liquidationism, - a ludicrous caricature of Lenin's temporary diplomatic revolutionary tactic of peaceful coexistence to gain the young Soviet republic some breathing space before the next imperialist military onslaught. Kruschev had nothing whatever to do with the placement of such anti-Leninist stooges in the Third International party leaderships. All were Stalin's men.

There was a contradiction, - waiting for so many years promoting peaceful coexistence to avoid giving warmongering imperialism the slightest opportunity to repeat the anti-communist holocaust German imperialism was set up to carry out by monopoly-capitalism's 1930s fascist-political slump, but all the time encouraging the spread of world revolution wherever possible.

Several times, Stalinist revisionism got the tactics and strategy hopelessly wrong, - most notoriously in the Popular Front decision to tailend petty-bourgeois democracy as the best way to fight imperialism's warmongering fascist aggression. It was a catastrophic failure which not only undermined the anti-fascist struggle at the time but eventually led on inexorably to the complete loss of confidence by workers in the Communist Parties as serious revolutionary organisations any more, and to the CP's own internal disintegration into purely reformist 'left' fronts for Labourite class-collaboration everywhere.

This philistine petty-bourgeois mentality failed to hold fast the contradictions in the original Leninist USSR position, and eventually capitulated completely to total bourgeois-parliamentary class-collaborationism, and then in easy stages to outright anti-communist liquidationism.

This degeneration into undialectical idealism continued relentlessly in spite of the further disastrous example of the utterly disarming and confusion-creating defeatism of Popular Frontism provided by the fate of the Allende regime in Chile, slaughtered by its own naïve faith in bourgeois 'parliamentary' democracy and in the bogus 'independence' of state power (not to mention the naïve faith that US imperialism would accept the 'legality' of the 1970 election result).

And despite the infamous legacy of its humiliating eventual collapse, Third International revisionism is still gravely corrupting workers' understanding everywhere, such as in the current Sandinista insanity of helping the US imperialist stooge Chamorro to militarily put down spontaneous revolts against the capitalist counter-revolution in Nicaragua in the pretended naïve belief that Washington might cheerfully let the Sandinista revolution win power again at the next parliamentary elections.

If America's Contra-subversion ruthlessness is anything to go by, and if it can get away with it yet again, US imperialism would more closely emulate Hitler Nazi tactics to prevent a new socialist regime in Nicaragua than it even showed in its naked invasion aggression against Grenada and then Panama in recent years (and against Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and attempted, against Cuba in earlier years, and in even more instances prior to that going back to the start of the century).

The Spart Trots are another variation of anti-Leninism trying to pass themselves off as 'true Bolsheviks' despite a lifetime of cynical derision at every single achievement of the Soviet workers state.

Now the Sparts boast of their own achievements in allegedly being part of the recent Ukrainian workers strikes against IMF-dictated sevenfold price increases in the cost of some essential foods, etc, - strikes which might not necessarily get very far because of the still as yet uncleared-up confusion over what exactly was lost with the liquidation of the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat, - a confusion not at all clarified by the Sparts' own tailending opportunism and refusal to examine their own catastrophic record in all previous policies towards the former Soviet Union.)

But when did the Sparts even once sincerely and effectively commend to Western workers the achievements of Soviet workers state stable or subsidised prices for basic essentials of life when it was a workers government's own policy, unique on the planet?

The answer is never. No Trot grouping has ever had anything but a sneer on its face for every single achievement of the Soviet workers state.

Lenin famously characterised Trotsky's defeatism about collective Bolshevik government as the "everything is rotten" attitude, just months before Trotsky declared his outright hostility to the Soviet communist dictatorship in 1922 in 'The New Course' and began working henceforth to try to undermine Soviet workers' confidence in their socialist state, freely predicting its early collapse.

No Trot since has ever had anything but utter contempt for what the USSR did brilliantly manage to achieve up to 1986.

Never once could any Trot, - Sparts no exception, - sincerely and seriously support unconditional solidarity with the Soviet workers state.

That means backing the USSR and the socialist camp first and foremost whenever imperialism's anti-communist hysteria campaigns reached a crescendo, such as over the fascist Arrow-Cross/Catholic Church/CIA 'revolution' against the Hungarian workers state in 1956 (and correctly put down by Kruschev, incidentally); or over the 1968 petty-bourgeois liquidationist 'Prague Spring', or over the 1980 beginnings of the Solidarnosc fascist/Vatican/ CIA counter-revolution in Poland.

But on these and countless more examples, the petty-bourgeois Spart perfectionists could not resist an anti-communist swipe or two of their own, thus utterly destroying their own credibility for all time with any self-respecting communist workers throughout the world.

Spart and other Trot 'principled support' for the Soviet workers state was always nothing but the most treacherous and devious political fraud, - covered up by the bogus 'Marxism' of the call for 'political' revolution but not 'social' revolution.

This counter-revolutionary hostility to the one and only actual Soviet workers state, warts and all, finally helped bourgeois reaction to bring about the inevitable result in the absence of any strong worldwide Leninist movement any more, - the complete collapse of the entire Soviet workers state, the only alternative outcome to seriously supporting the sole real Soviet workers state.

The USSR did not have to collapse. A renewed world Leninist movement could have helped the revival of its original international socialist perspectives and eventually defeat the Stalinist revisionist degeneracy.

But purist idealism's pursuit of the 'perfect' revolution in the form of subverting the USSR with demands for an anti-CPSU 'political' revolution could only ever possibly encourage outright petty-bourgeois counter-revolution.

And so it inevitably proved.

But now without a single eyeblink of shame, embarrassment, or explanation, the Sparts have simply silently abandoned a 60-year diatribe for the 'political' revolution without another word on the subject. Now they casually demand another socialist revolution in Russia, just like that. How simple to be a middle-class 'revolutionary' Trot dilettante, - and how infinitely treacherous for genuine communist workers are such creatures.

The 'Leninist' opportunists, now parading as the re-born CPGB, still show no sign of coming to terms with their own Trotlike failure to hold fast the opposites in analysing and unconditionally supporting the socialist camp as was. Their tailending of 'left' trade-union and Labour militancy carries on right where the old CPGB petty-bourgeois class-collaborating sect left off, unlamented by any serious communist workers but graspingly backed by the 'Leninist' opportunists to the Stalinists' dying day, having been unable to unhook themselves from their "stay with the official world communist movement" speciousness, (a totally different question from unconditionally supporting actual workers states).

Because of its then belated and infrequent publication, the 'Leninist' posturing avoided the Sparts' initial clanger of first rushing in to back the Solidarnosc fascism, calling on the world to bitterly denounce any Soviet intervention, and falling for Walesa's 'workerist' pose. Only 12 months late did the Sparts brassily begin trumpeting their "Solidarnosc - CIA Company Union" loudmouthing, - and of course without another word about their real class posture of immediately identifying with Walesa's petty-bourgeois anti-communism, now expunged from the Spart record.

But the 'Leninist' opportunists could not prevent themselves from going one worse than the Sparts, actually admitting that they would like to sincerely support the Polish workers state unconditionally against Walesa's CIA/Vatican 'trade union' (fascist counter-revolution, in fact) but were not doing so because they could not confidently rely on Warsaw making no more embarrassing mistakes - such as had already disfigured its socialist state record since 1945!!

This could go down as a world-record example of missing the point entirely.

The very essence of unconditional solidarity is to take the socialist camp case in every single instance against counter-revolutionary bourgeois propaganda, whatever mistakes the workers states might have committed. Where it concerns imperialist hostility and subversion, the workers states are always right and the West is always wrong on principle, unconditionally.

Only when bourgeois counter-revolutionary trouble-making has been seen off can communist polemics play their necessary and correct role of forthrightly criticising any revisionist lapses from Leninism by the workers states or Third International parties. The treacherous 'Leninist' opportunists could never grasp this simple class-solidarity point so obvious to all genuine communist workers.

The RCG opportunists (who fence-sat for a record 6 months before saying anything at all about Solidarnosc while the rest of the planet was in uproar over this astonishing development) most recently betrayed their idealist petty-bourgeois inability to live with contradiction on the Yugoslav civil war:

Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia have come into existence and have effectively destroyed Bosnia. Even under the pernicious Vance-Owen Plan, Serbia and Croatia were given chunks of Bosnia and the Muslims (who were over 40% of the population) and multi-ethnic regions were tiny and unviable blots. But both the Serbs and Croats have gone further. Serbia now controls 70% of Bosnia and 30% of Croatia. Croatia has also seized parts of Bosnia and wants more. In Croatia, UN forces patrol and legitimise Serb conquests. The dreadful fate now being discussed for Muslims or for those of mixed origin in Bosnia is to be protected by the UN.

None of this was unexpected. Politicians may threaten military intervention against the Serbs or lament Serb or Croat barbarities but the plain fact, well known to them at the time, is that in 1991 Milosevic, the Serb leader, and Tudjman, the Croat leader, met and decided to carve up Bosnia. All sides were aware of this and knew it would be as bloody as it has proved to be.

This is a criminal capitulation to Western middle-class hysteria whipped up by counter-revolutionary imperialist propaganda. No nationalism in Yugoslavia should be seen as anything but a plaything of utterly degenerate Western imperialist manipulation, first and foremost.

Ironically, the RCG can provide their own evidence for this understanding but are seemingly incapable of grasping it:

EC aid was denied unless the government effectively agreed to allow secession by Croatia and Slovenia.

Croatia and Slovenia, the richest Republics, saw their future lying in the EC and German umbrella. The self-seeking actions of the imperialists prodded the giant of Serbian nationalism to its feet. As each side took a step further, the other was gripped more deeply by nationalism. The role of the imperialist powers was crucial in this process but their secret deals and diplomacy are little known. Croatia was encouraged to secede, from Yugoslavia by Germany. John Pilger quotes former US ambassador to Yugoslavia, William Zimmerman about the 1991 period:

'We discovered that [German foreign minister] Genscher, had been in daily contact with the Croatian foreign minister. He was encouraging the Croats to leave the federation and declare independence, while we and our allies, including the Germans, were trying to fashion a joint approach.

Pilger states that the EC granted recognition to Croatia and Slovenia as part of a secret and scandalous deal with Germany: the EC would recognise Croatia if Germany would agree to submerge the Deutschmark into a common European currency. So that is how the fate of nations is decided by the 'peacemakers'.

To recognise Croatian independence, without guarantees to the already frightened Serb minority, was to set a match to the bonfire built by the imperialists. The virus of nationalism was strengthened. Although used for pernicious ends by Milosevic and co, Serb fears were not groundless given the history of Croatia and the fact that President Tudjman was busy sacking Serbs from their jobs, flaunting Croatian nationalist symbols and remarking publicly that he was 'glad he wasn't married to a Serb or Jew'.

But of course, any idealist posturers who start out with 'Fight Racism' as the main programme instead of the comprehensive overthrow of 'free market forces' by the dictatorship of the proletariat (as existed in East Europe), - which is the only basis for eventually ever achieving the defeat of racist prejudice in human society, - are bound to fall for the bourgeois-imperialist propaganda stunt temporarily favouring Bosnia's muslims (for the West's own devious purposes).

All of the nationalist outrages in Yugoslavia are an abomination, no serious minded worker needs that explaining. But the prejudiced victimisation is mutual, and it only covers up and compounds the capitalist system's sole responsibility for this wretched nationalist mayhem if supposed 'anti-imperialist' groups like Redgrave and the RCG start to take sides from their 'anti-racist' ivory towers in the West.

Without falling for the slightest illusion in the dismal opportunist politics of Milosevic & Co, it is in fact a positive sign that ruthless imperialist manipulation has been defeated in its attempts to simply dictate terms to the most viable nationalist resistance in the region, that of Serbia, (which, not surprisingly, also has many other anti-imperialist battle-honours to its credit, - against Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian feudalism, and against German colonial capitalism - (a record not matched by the Croat Catholics and Bosnian Muslims, - South Slavs who switched religions to serve as imperialist petty-bourgeois stooges under feudalism and readily formed fascist-stooge states under the Nazis to help conduct German imperialist genocide against Serbian nationalist resistance).)

By the Second World War, Serbian nationalist resistance had healthily progressed to becoming the core of communist workers-state resistance, and, also not surprisingly, Serbian anti-imperialist strength now owes something to the better remnants of that Yugoslav workers statehood.

It is not the world which wants to wake up, but Redgrave and the RCG. These middle-class Trot dilettantes want to worry about their political record from 1945 to 1985 or thereabouts, - two generations in which they did nothing but stab the East European workers states in the back and sneer at their every achievement, one of which was to create the first Yugoslavia in history which ran its own affairs, maintained healthy socialist perspectives, played a not entirely discreditable anti-imperialist role internationally, and had begun to create real and remarkable unenforced ethnic harmony under the dictatorship of the proletariat. What wouldn't every Yugoslav give to get that state of affairs back now.

And throughout that remarkable period of real historical advance which will not all be lost or forgotten, what did every Trot on the planet like the Redgraveites and the RCGers do but pour as much shit and scorn on the East European workers states as they could every day of their miserable middle-class 'perfectionist' lives.

For all their imperfections, crimes, weaknesses, and mistakes, the East European workers states had an acknowledged anti-imperialist and anti-fascist stance backed by the power of proletarian dictatorship state laws which had some considerable international influence, for the good from time to time, such as in helping Cuban and Vietnamese independence from colonialist onslaught, to name but two of thousands of worthwhile interventions against the imperialist world order.

Not any more they don't. And middle-class Trot posturing is now happier traipsing around East Europe protesting futilely against the revival of open fascism because now they are 'at least able to say what we like here'. Sadly, the ludicrous conceit of this useless petty-bourgeois subjectivism will not end there. Every Trot mentality is inevitably now on the march rightwards, as Redgrave shows with her farcical 'democratic liberal' drivel. 

And as their degenerate world of 'democracy' blows up in their face in WWIII inter-imperialist warmongering, watch these Trots be the first to undermine Leninist proletarian-dictatorship internationalist understanding once again in favour of all manner of devious social chauvinism, social pacifism, and anti-theory compromising, - just like Plekhanov, Martov, and Trotsky before them. Down with idealism. Study and build Leninism. Alf Lee

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No.29 Friday July 23 1993

Maastricht farce reveals more about ruling class paralysis, degeneracy and division than any 'European Unity'. 'Recovery' is just another twist in the slump. 'Democracy' looks sicker than ever as British occupation of Ireland nears its final defeat.

Whatever the eventual outcome of the tortuously mind-numbing Maastricht farce in parliamentary terms, with or without its social chapter, it will make no difference to Britain's overall long term historical decline vis a vis its rivals.
	
The enormous hype around this European Union treaty does not disguise the underlying rivalry between the European bourgeoisies. It merely shows how deep the divisions go, both between the different camps, and within them.

Current British gloating, on the basis of some very tenuous statistics, that it is now leading Europe out of recession, is likely to prove very short-lived. Rather than the 'good economic news' showing a reversal in the long term decline of Britain, or even in the short term, it is likely to prove to be simply the precursor to another savage twist in the slump.

All the evidence shows that the slight recorded increase in exports to non-EC countries is purely a result of last September's slaughter of the pound on the foreign exchanges, making British exports cheaper.

As argued in EPSR 709, the most likely reaction from other bourgeoisies is sour resentment that the British have stolen a temporary advantage through price cutting (currency devaluation), and the pressure is fiercely on for similar measures in France and to some extent Germany. Where then will be the 'recovery' as competitive devaluation and currency wars let rip?

Nothing has changed the basic laws of capitalism, which must eventually destroy 'surplus' value in order to survive, and the momentary recovery 'blip' in the British economy has to be seen in its overall historical context. It simply adds to the crisis.

The parliamentary farce over Maastricht is just one political expression of the underlying economic turmoil, and it is not restricted to the decrepit British bourgeoisie.

The recent collapse of the Japanese government is part of the same crisis, though coming from a different direction and historical perspective, i.e. as a rising challenging bourgeoisie, rather than a sinking, losing bourgeoisie. The political structure imposed on Japan by the US after WW2 can no longer meet the needs of the powerful Japanese bourgeoisie, and whatever the final outcome of the electoral farce in Japan where the working class has displayed huge contempt for all the parties — It is sure to eventually present itself as an even bigger challenge to US imperialism.

As is already being reported in the capitalist press, the growing pressure on the politicians is to resist attempts by Washington to bounce Japan into a trade agreement to cut its huge current account surplus.

Similarly, political crises to a greater or lesser extent, but in all cases on an upward trend, are afflicting the Italian, German and French bourgeoisies as the trade war pressures relentlessly mount. No sooner is the 'G7 trade agreement' proclaimed, than it is falling apart in all directions:

France yesterday stepped up its campaign against last year's EC-US accord on farm trade, calling for a 'jumbo' meeting of EC foreign and agriculture ministers to discuss the issue. During a meeting of EC foreign ministers, the French also pressed for the EC to adopt trade sanctions against the US, if Washington goes ahead with hefty anti-dumping duties on European steel exports.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe also hinted that Paris would like to see stronger EC trade defences to counter US legislation that allows Washington to impose trade sanctions. EC officials said there was some support from other countries for a special meeting of foreign and farm ministers in September. Belgium, which currently holds the EC presidency, promised to consider the matter.

No amount of parliamentary or legal chicanery over the Maastricht treaty will alter the underlying economic tensions which are driving the imperialists towards war. Labour, by pinning its flag to the Social Chapter, will end up looking even more stupid than the Tories over the whole farce. The Social Chapter, whether it is included in the treaty or not, is almost irrelevant already. The slump is demanding that wages be cut, workers' hours increased, benefits slashed etc., and the fact that Britain is already much further down that road than its major European rivals merely testifies to its much weaker economy. Many German bourgeois are already saying they don't want the Social Chapter either, and are also implementing wage cuts, welfare state cuts etc, and whether legal, ratified, or written in tablets of stone will make no difference to the ruling class as they impose slump burdens onto
the working class. If all else fails, they'll insist on pay restraint in the 'national interest', at which point Labour will raise three cheers, or be the party proposing it anyway.

The sickest part of the whole charade is the way in which the parliamentary parties are spouting on about the 'democratic' rights of the people to decide, and the sovereignty of parliament etc. etc. This posturing will only add to the now widespread cynicism and contempt with which the whole Westminster circus is regarded, and the belief, rightly, that whatever the outcome, it's going to make no difference at all to people's lives, certainly not to the ten million people struggling to live on income support subsistence levels of existence, and the millions more a hairs breadth away from it.

Far more is revealed about the nature of capitalist 'democracy' by recent revelations widely suspected at the time — of secret police fascist activities during the heroic miners' strike:

THE allegation that a senior unelected officer of the National Union of Mineworkers was an MI5 agent is part of wider claims that the miners have been the foremost target for domestic intelligence operations since the second world war.

Sources at the Government's GCHQ electronic spying centre claimed that Margaret Thatcher ordered the mobilisation of British and United States electronic surveillance networks throughout Europe to track the movement of miners' funds and the activities of union officials during the 1980s.

They also alleged that Mrs Thatcher authorised a "Get Scargill" operation aimed at destroying the NUM leader "politically and personally". The operation continued after the 1984-85 miners' strike, and culminated in the campaign of allegations — subsequently discredited — in the Daily Mirror and Central TV's Cook Report in 1990.

The most serious of the Daily Mirror's claims — that Arthur Scargill had paid off a £25,000 mortgage with Libyan money intended for striking miners — was based overwhelmingly on the evidence of the NUM's former chief executive Roger Windsor. 

An inquiry by Gavin Lightman QC into the allegations later showed them to be "entirely untrue". The saga, of the Libyan money went back to the miners' strike, when Mr Windsor visited Libya for the NUM, prompting a storm of controversy when he was televised embracing Colonel Gadafy. Mr Windsor had arranged the Libyan contacts through a Doncaster-based Pakistani, Altaf Abbasi, who was convicted of a bombing conspiracy in Lahore in the early 1980s and was known to have had regular contact with South Yorkshire Special Branch.

Mr Abbasi later claimed he had brought £150,000 of Libyan cash through Heathrow in the middle of the miners' strike. According to Mr Windsor, this money was used to repay mortgages of Mr Scargill, Peter Heathfield, the NUM general secretary, and himself. In the event, it transpired that the only one of the three about whom the allegation was true was Mr Windsor.

Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, first questioned the role of MI5's Stella Rimington in the strike in December 1991 when John Major announced her appointment as head of the agency. In a Commons motion he called for a Government statement, about "the role of Mrs Stella Rimington, in particular in connection with the activities of Mr David Hart, during the 1984 miners' strike".
During the dispute, Mr Hart, a property developer, was unofficial adviser to Mrs Thatcher and the National Coal Board chairman, Sir Ian MacGregor. He helped finance the "back-to-work movement" and organised legal actions against the NUM.

The 1984-85 miners' strike was the target of the security services' biggest covert telephone tapping operation. With the help of GCHQ, the NUM headquarters in Sheffield and branch officials were bugged.

Transcripts were sent to the National Reporting Centre at Scotland Yard, which was responsible for deploying police officers in the coalfields. MI5 also sent intelligence reports to the Civil Contingencies Unit in the Cabinet Office. In his recently published memoirs, Free Agent, Brian Crozier — who operated on the fringes of British intelligence — said that Mr Hart monitored the NUM's intentions through "indirect but reliable access to two members of the [NUM] executive".

MI5 is known to have placed informers and agents provocateurs into target groups it has considered subversive. In 1985, the former MI5 officer, Cathy Massiter, described how the late Harry Newton, a Workers Education Association lecturer, was asked by MI5 to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. According to Ms Massitesr, he had been recruited by MI5 in the 1950s.

In its glossy brochure published last week, MI5 describes, subversion as actions "intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial, or violent means".

Subversive groups, it adds, "by conspiratorial methods... sometimes exerted influence disproportionate, to their numbers on bona fide professional and trade union organisations and protest movements". It says that although this sort of activity was now at a "low, ebb", MI5's role was to investigate "such infiltration within, for example, a legitimate protest group".

So much for democracy. The fascist secret police remain the guardians of the bourgeois state, and rather than them becoming somehow accountable to parliament, as is now fatuously claimed, the reality is far more the other way around, and likely to become even more so as the slump pressure to rip up 'democratic rights' intensifies.

The glossy brochures and MI5 'openness' campaign undoubtedly will not be extending to a 'citizens charter' for the citizens of the occupied north of Ireland against the activities of SAS death squads, and the continual dally abuse of all of their rights by the military occupation of their country by a foreign power.

A spate of recent revelations, some around parliamentary deals for votes on Maastricht, and others from the TV programme 'First Tuesday', has revealed how the British state seeks to, and has, done deals with the Orange colonists, to undermine power-sharing agreements for short term political gains. On the face of it, such deals seem to strengthen the position of the Orange reactionaries. However, the fact that deals like that are now being openly discussed and previous British state/UVF terrorist activities are being revealed conversely opens the door in another direction, i.e. the possibility of ditching the Unionists and dealing with with Sinn Féin.

Establishment figures such as Heath are again openly advocating talks with Sinn Féin, and this, read in conjunction with other recent establishment proposals, most recently from the Labour party, suggesting new constitutional, power-sharing arrangements further confirm the ILWP's analysis of Britain's gradual withdrawal from Ireland behind the Anglo-Irish treaty — forced into retreat by the heroic Irish national liberation armed struggle:

SIR Edward Heath, the former prime minister, said yesterday that he saw no objection to the Government talking to Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, — "when the moment is right".

"I do not object to people having talks with other political people.

"During my government, Lord Whitelaw had direct talks with the IRA .. . When the moment is right, I have no objection to them telling Sinn Fein exactly what the Government's position is and trying to influence them to have much greater influence over their military counterpart, the IRA, and get them to pack it all in. Of course I think that is a sensible thing to do."

Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Sir Edward said that if people looked at Commonwealth history they would see there had always been such talks. In Kenya, the Mau Mau problem ended up with talks.
In recent years, there have been no known or admitted contacts between the Government and Sinn Fein or the IRA.

Last week in Northern Ireland, there were unconfirmed reports that secret ceasefire talks took place before Christmas between the IRA "army council" and a third party acting in league with the Government.

The reports claimed that a 52-point plan was rejected by the IRA.

Sir Edward said he regretted the recent annoyance expressed by the Government over the brief meeting in West Belfast between the Irish president, Mary Robinson, and the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams.

"There was nothing to be gained from doing that because obviously the president of the republic could not accept a rebuke."

He said any future talks on Northern Ireland should exclude Ian Paisley, the Democrat Unionist leader, as he had done during the 1974 Sunningdale talks.

The reason was that the Government "knew" Dr Paisley did not want to reach agreement.

It is symptomatic of the weakness and degeneracy of the British ruling class that they are now unable to pull out of Ireland in a 'face saving' way. They no longer even have the authority left with which to save face. The more sordid deals they make for short term gain, which beat futilely against the historical reality of their defeat by anti-colonial Irish nationalism, the more ultimately damaging it will be for their continued existence as a ruling class.

In trying to get the best of both worlds they are ending up with the worst of both, as the outraged cries of betrayal and defeat from the Orange colonists testify (see EPSR708).

The eventual complete victory of Irish nationalism against British colonialism will be of huge advantage to the working class movement in Britain -- and will be one major weapon less in the hands of the ruling class with which to divide workers.
Fight for the communist revolution.

Build the ILWP. D.Watts