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 0718 September 21st 1993                                                                                                                         10p 

The 200 years of British Empire market-building, now in crisis, have produced the racist-colonial backlash seen in the BNP vote and more widespread prejudiced backwardness. Parliamentary bourgeois politics still lives off this economic imperialism and is no barrier to it. No immigration policy of any kind touches the real issue of worldwide economic exploitation by Western injustice. Fake-'lefts' only add to the ideological confusion.

The electoral success for racist politics in Tower Hamlets is a damning indictment for capitalism's entire bourgeois parliamentary racket.

Regardless of whether Liberal, Labour, or Tory played the dirtiest game in helping fascists win the council seat for the BNP, all the major parties are equally guilty.

The sordid outcome giving formal respectability to a vote for race hatred plus divisive gang violence between workers, arose inevitably out of the all-party support for 'market forces'.

Free enterprise is the incurable source of every kind of bitter rivalry, cut-throat competition, and elitist prejudice crippling modern society.

Once exploitation and monopolisation greed has reached its ultimate expression in mass unemployment and slump degradation (once the fraudulent inflationary boom can no longer be kept going because of collapsing markets and currencies (due to indigestible 'surpluses' of profiteering capital everywhere)) then the joys of 'competition' can only take the form of national recrimination and class war.

The opportunist politics which accepts that "the case for the market-forces system is an unanswerable one" must then bear all the responsibility once that bogus "democracy of competition" is inevitably reduced to chauvinistic inter-imperialist trade war and race hatred.

The same vast forces, deep and dangerous, of historical imperialist arrogance which have been gradually producing the 'Hop off you Frogs', 'Slimy Japs', 'Treacherous Germans', 'Cowardly Italians', 'Greedy and bullying Yanks' etc, headlines, - are exactly the same unreformable and uncontrollable influences which have been leading to a steady rise in ethnic separatist sectarianism and race hatred within countries subject to 'market' culture.

It is not markets themselves, of course, which are precisely the problem. It is the aggressive profiteering philosophy of elitism which completely 'free enterprise' societies must inevitably end up with, which is the problem.

Capitalism and monopolisation tendencies are inseparable. And if the Marxist scientific proof of this fact is a bit inaccessible, then the simple evidence of history is equally unanswerable.

Powerful monopoly figures and giant monopoly corporations have come to dominate the free-market system increasingly since the private-enterprise city-states and nation-states first began to break from feudal restrictions and allegiances more than 600 years ago.

And the giants of industry and the press barons had never hitherto reached so mighty a size as they have at the end of the 20th century. A tiny handful of powerful individuals or super-wealthy families now dominates every capitalist country on earth.

And the pattern in the competition between the nations shows exactly the same monopoly-imperialist tendency. The tiny handful of most successful industrialised powers have grown ever fewer in number in the really big league, - and their degree of domination over all their rivals has become successively more total and intimidating.

Where British imperialism once just about ruled the roost and had a vast amount of say in issues all round the planet, now US imperialism has a complete domination of military might, political influence, economic power, and cultural sway which dwarfs the 19th century's misnamed 'Pax Britannica' (when 'Expeditionary Forces' and the Royal Navy implanted the Union Jack everywhere).

The universal dollar economy is the symbol of American rule, virtually the world's first common currency, yet completely serving the interests of one tiny class, the US monopoly-imperialist bourgeoisie. This relentless monopolisation trend in 600 years of world dominance by the capitalist market system is in turn inseparable from from the most gross ruling class elitism, and from arrogant inter-imperialist rivalry.

Snobbery, prejudice, and nationalist enmity are the unavoidable culture of the elitist 'private enterprise' philosophy. There is not a single optimistic cliché about "the proper rewards for virtue and hard work", and "letting the cream rise to the top" etc, which does not have its seriously negative side of the "jobs for the boys" and the "blow you jack" variety.

And it is exactly the "dog eat dog" back-stabbing stage of the economic cycle which is now being reached universally.

Internationally, the knives are out as all the countries try to stick the blame on each other for what has "gone wrong" with the worldwide market economy, causing devastating mass unemployment, bankruptcies, and currency instability everywhere.

Domestically, the knives are out inside every country as backward ideology within all groups seeks to explain incomprehensible setbacks as being someone else's fault.

Scotland, Wales, the North, and other regions put the blame on 'the South', or whatever, for their own economic misery, when really the fault is the capitalist system itself.

Even different parts of one industry, or even of one trade union, adopt the simplistic solution of blaming other parts of the same industry or trade union for their own plight, - as happened in the breakup of the Fleet Street newspaper closed shops, and in the dismantling of the coal-mining industry.

It is absolutely inevitable that even more primitive ideology is going to be at work when just general social deprivation is the issue, - e.g. housing shortages, competition for school places, unemployment generally, etc, - and the only possible scapegoats in view are those of a different ethnic, geographic, or economic background who might easily be supposed to be getting a 'better deal' when personal misery is so intense.

The bourgeois-parliamentary political system is doubly at fault in prolonging this backwardness.

In the first place, not one single group of money-grabbing opportunist MPs has ever been prepared to consistently explain that it is the market-forces system itself which alone creates the competitive philosophy and the grotesquely unjust and uneven consequences of the profiteering culture eventually when slump descends.

Just the opposite. So-called 'reformist socialism' of the Labour Party never gets further than denouncing the obviously outrageous crimes and omissions of the capitalist system which the MPs pretend could be 'overcome' by 'parliamentary legislation', etc. Only complete imbeciles will have failed to notice that despite no less than eight Labour Governments since 1924, the capitalist system remains as corrupt, unjust, predatory, and unstable as ever it was, and the culture that it imparts to British society becomes more violent and degenerate with every passing decade.

So much for 'reforms'. They merely serve to pull the wool over the eyes of ordinary people, keeping them ignorant about the really deep and incurable corrosive nature of the capitalist system, and its catastrophic slump-warmongering cycle which already twice this century has eventually replaced "You've never had it so good" booms with inter-imperialist trade-war followed by shooting wars and total devastation for hundreds of millions.

In the second place, the bourgeois parliamentary parties are never less than scandalously opportunist when it comes to actually sticking their necks out on some 'principles' question like race relations.

Labour generally likes to pose as the friend of the working class where the vast majority of immigrants and ethnic minorities find themselves.

But it is the Labour Party which has the most disgraceful record of all in Parliament in being the first to introduce legislation restricting immigration along easily-imposed racist lines; the first to introduce anti-union legislation setting up the 'enemy within' so skilfully exploited by Thatcherism for its reactionary purposes; the first to unleash the nuclear Cold-War hostility postwar to the Soviet Union and the anti-fascist socialist camp in East Europe; and the first to launch some of the most barbaric onslaughts in all British imperialist history on national-liberation movements in the colonies, reinforcing a thousandfold mass race-prejudice inside Britain.

Trying to decide which parliamentary party has the most devious record in back-pedalling on major issues of class and race prejudice in British imperialist history is just another smokescreen diversion, letting all these bourgeois opportunists off the hook for their slavish devotion to the market-profiteering cause of all the cutthroat competitive elitism and ruthlessness riddling capitalist society.

The 'concerned' postmortem now on the Tower Hamlets 'shame' is an utter fraud.

Not one single published 'expert' or 'fearlessly independent commentator' etc, will have the courage (or the sense) to tell the capitalist system (which is paying his capitalist press or television fee) that it alone is at root responsible for the very phenomenon of racist prejudice itself, and that it is the capitalist system itself which must be got rid of, - without which there is no possibility at all of getting rid of racism.

Not one commentator has the courage or ability to link the miserable violence and racist phenomena rampaging around the entire capitalist world (see last week's Bulletin) to its real explanation in the inter-imperialist conflict over trade and economic slump which is basically setting the agenda for all the world's behaviour (at many different levels) in the coming period.

Nor does the natural nationalist condition of the international market-competitive system ever allow any basic sense to be uttered on any aspect of the 'immigration question'. For no matter how noble, the important point is not just to persuade everyone to avoid childishly ignorant prejudices against their neighbours because of any ethnic or cultural differences, - as obviously civilised and to-be-wished-for goal as that is.

The much more vital question is to do something about whatever the appalling conditions or atrocities are which force people to flee from their homeland and family roots in the first place, often getting out under the most desperate circumstances of danger, separation, and humiliation, and all in order frequently to experience a life of continuing wretched poverty and discrimination in the country they are so desperate to move to.

It is a very, twisted, smug, and self-regarding 'civilisation' which feels so self-righteous about its 'anti-racist' stand (when forced to it by the glare of publicity in England), but has not the faintest thought of asking why conditions should at times be so intolerable in parts of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the West Indies, Africa, etc, to force millions of people annually to want to sever their links with their own homeland, language, culture, history, and family in order to risk the very uncertain life of an ethnic immigrant minority somewhere in the two dozen or so most affluent monopoly-imperialist countries around the world. Why should any human beings have to suffer this degradation and humiliation in the first place?

And the reason that the 'liberal'-minded have no interest in pursuing their 'concern' for Third World suffering any further than the odd contribution to Oxfam or the occasional gesture saying 'let us not be beastly to the immigrants', etc, is because their petty-bourgeois caution instinctively tells them that any deeper probing of why there is such grotesque injustice and unevenness in the distribution of wealth and poverty in the world would almost certainly force them to admit that communist revolution against Western imperialist exploitation (and against the falsified lifestyles of the West) is not only probably inevitable but would also have to be accepted as a 'good thing', which no middle-class soul could ever happily contemplate.

The leftist "no barriers to immigration anywhere in the world" stance in order to ostentatiously adopt a totally heroic 'anti-racist' pose, - is just as great an avoidance of the real issue.

In a fully planned rational and stable world, it will no doubt eventually be possible for everyone to live just about where they want to (assuming reasonable coordination to avoid 5 billion people turning up with their suitcases on Bali).

But just posturing in this 'principled' way is hardly even a 'transitional' demand (supposedly demanding reasonable reforms which really require a revolution to make possible).

Full 'freedom' for the entire planet to settle just where they want to in the immediate future is both economically and politically unrealistic even with the most far-reaching revolutionary perspectives in mind, and is also a potentially contradictory minefield when the case, say, of Occupied Palestine is considered where the native Arab population is only just clinging onto life as it is, overwhelmed by Zionist colonisation.

The real issue is being avoided. Not 'full immigration rights everywhere now' which is a diversion, but 'the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist market-forces system everywhere now, and its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat everywhere, now'.

But conscience-mongering 'liberals' just do not want to know about what is really going to make a difference to an increasingly nationalist-divided and racist-divided bourgeois society deep in fascist slump everywhere on earth.

That it is best described as a fascist slump will soon become much clearer.

The economic difficulties of trade war, 'surplus'-capital mountains and 'over-production', mass unemployment, and currency instability, etc, are gradually forcing bourgeois ideology everywhere to admit that the system is in crisis.

At the point where the existing capitalist parties all begin to accept that "something has gone seriously wrong", etc, and that a "major national effort will be needed to get the country out of the mess it is in", etc, etc, - then the real fascism will begin.

There is not a vast difference between there being more or fewer bigoted thugs on the streets at any one time, seeking to make their miserable selves feel better in difficult times by victimising anyone they can, and vomiting up their small-minded race-hate prejudices. There is nothing new or unusual in such outbursts of lumpen backwardness and petty-bourgeois sanctimony.

The great change comes when bourgeoisdom officially declares that there is a national emergency and that extraordinary measures are required to combat it.

That is the notable historical moment when 'new' politics begin to be called for, when Mosley's 'New Party' was born at the start of the 1930s, when the 'New Deal' followed shortly after, and when the 'New world order' has been declared in similar circumstances in the 1990s.

The 1930s saw the advance of official fascism on every front in the ever-widening and ever-deepening inter-imperialist trade war.

The 1990s will be no different. The BNP in Tower Hamlets is not the mad-dog fascism itself but just the dog-shit on the pavement. The mad-dog fascism itself is simply the slump.

From out of the degenerate and destructive frustrations and madness of the bourgeoisie's 'affluent order' turned into its nightmare opposite, almost any amount of vileness can and will emerge. Who will be the Mosleys, Hitlers, Mussolinis, Francos, Tojos, Horthys, etc, of the 1990s is almost irrelevant. What workers need to understand is that the slump will breed fascism irresistibly as the domestic echo of the chauvinist inter-imperialist warmongering now pushing the trade war towards all-out political hostility and military confrontation for the third time this century, which is best traced in the admissions of the capitalist media themselves:

THE captains of the European airline industry engaged in a dogfight in Brussels yesterday over how their business can be saved from chronic over-capacity and suicidal fare reductions.

Sir Colin Marshall, chairman of British Airways, said the only answer was the complete elimination of state aid. Airlines should go out of business if they could not improve their efficiency and adjust to a new role, he said.

But Bernard Attali, chairman of the loss-making Air France, attacked the shortsightedness of "champions of ultra-liberalism". Fresh from his announcement that he was cutting 4,000 jobs at the French state airline, he pleaded for "a happy medium between bureaucracy and the jungle".

Mr Attali was supported by Pierre Godfroid, chairman of Sabena, the loss-making Belgian state airline. "An ill-conceived and unsupervised deregulation is leading the industry to decline. We are going from one retreat to another, from one redundancy to another.

"Improvements in productivity have a limit. We are now compelled to infringe on the status of our employees. We are reaching a stage where it will become indecent to ask our employees again for sacrifices," he said.

Jan Carlzon, president of SAS, said: "We have to allow bankruptcies in European aviation. There can be no salvation for those who can't compete."

Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Atlantic, said customers were being made to pay "rip-off prices" because state-owned monoliths were being allowed to lumber along and bar new entrants to the business.

In a veiled reference to British Airways, he said it was not surprising some carriers got up to dirty tricks after years of lack of competition which bred arrogance. "Liberalisation will achieve nothing unless clone carriers get competition from new entrants," he said.

There was, however, a vigorous counter-attack from the continental airlines against unfair British practices. Mr Attali claimed he: would save Ffr3 billion (£348 million) a year if he could cut the social security charges paid for his employees to UK levels. Mr Godfroid said he could save Bfr2.5 billion (£144 million) or 5 per cent of his total costs.

"Our British friends call themselves apostles of liberalism . .. The reality is that, thanks to the Bermuda 2 agreement (the air traffic arrangement with the US), British carriers are the most protected in the world," Mr Attali said.

AN ALL-OUT bid in the US Congress to force Britain to scrap the Thorp plutonium reprocessing plant project at Sellafield in Cumbria gathered pace yesterday with the backing of the Pentagon, the Irish Government and environmental groups.

Proposed legislation sponsored by 25 members of the House of Representatives, including Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts, called on President Bill Clinton to initiate "high-level bilateral discussions" with the British Government with a view to halting the project.

This week the House passed an amendment to the 1994 defence bill which included a similar demand for talks with Britain on cancelling the project and halting all civilian as well as military production of plutonium.

He and his co-sponsors called for a halt to planned or current plutonium production for civil or military purposes by all countries involved: Britain, France, Russia and Japan.

Mr Clinton is due to unveil his administration's policy on halting international nuclear proliferation before the end of this month.

The State Department is urging him to exclude civilian plutonium reprocessing from anti-proliferation measures, partly out of concern for the likely diplomatic repercussions.

But the Pentagon's Non-Proliferation Office is lobbying hard against the Thorp project and others like it for reasons of national security, pointing to the proliferation risks associated with plutonium reprocessing and separation. This has placed the Defence Department in unlikely alliance with Greenpeace and other environmental groups.
The Irish Government said in a statement last February that Thorp represented an unnecessary risk to the health and safety of the Irish population.

According to Thorp's congressional opponents, continued plutonium separation in Russia and reprocessing in Britain, Japan and France will push the worldwide stockpile to over 1,000 tons, increasing the threat that some may fall into the wrong hands.

Last week, the Belgian foreign affairs minister Willy Claes voiced the widely held suspicion that the demise of the ERM was the result of an Anglo-Saxon plot aimed at keeping Europe divided and "condemned to play a secondary role in the great economic debate".

Yesterday, senior advisers of the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, accused the UK government of secretly encouraging the City and Wall Street to launch the frontal attack on the French franc that brought about the virtual collapse of the ERM last month.

Several senior members of the Chancellery have taken the side of the French authorities in blaming an Anglo-Saxon "plot" for the turbulences on the foreign exchanges and have hinted strongly that the UK acted out of revenge for "Black September" last year.

Karl Lamers, foreign policy spokesman for Mr Kohl's Christian Democrats in the Bundestag, refrained from openly accusing the UK authorities but said there were strong suggestions that the assault had been blessed "in government offices".

The attack, on the eve of the first anniversary of Black Wednesday when turbulence on the foreign exchange market first shook the ERM's foundations, was backed by the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, who coupled calls for at least partial capital controls with an onslaught on "Anglo-Saxons", whom he accused of living in a dream world over Europe.

Yesterday, Jean-Paul Cot the leader of the Socialist group of MEPs — the largest in the European Parliament — accused governments and central banks of inaction in the face of the speculators.

"Speculation has won," he said. "Speculation has broken the European Monetary System. It has paralysed progress towards economic and monetary union and it has cast doubt on our ability to achieve the aim of a single currency in the foreseeable future."

Responding to calls for controls, Mr Delors rejected the argument that, because of European capital liberalisation and increasingly international free movement of capital, nothing could be done.

"Motorists are free to drive on our roads but that does not mean that we do not have a system of speed limits," Mr Delors said. "The time has come to study ways of limiting short-term monetary movements. Monetary movements are very complex but we should have an international agreement to establish rules for the game."

Once again, we are hearing the word "veto", that other Gaullist tactic which led to the "empty chair" policy in the EC until France got its way in an earlier combat against the Anglo-Saxons. Britain, and sometimes Germany, is regarded as a spineless ally of arrogant America. An observer might be forgiven for thinking that the sight of angry farmers trying to blockade Paris was not exactly being discouraged by a French government which will go to Brussels on Monday claiming that the Gatt agreement was so detrimental for France, the world's second biggest food exporter, that rebellion was beckoning.

No French leader has ever suffered from going a little over the top on misery-me chauvinism and with a popularity rating already approaching 70 per cent, Mr Balladur is no exception. But there is a paradox in his behaviour. For all his attachment to the RPR, the republican assembly which has inherited De Gaulle's legacy, the prime minister is not so much leading this outburst of nationalism than being pushed from behind.

A pro-European, who was recently prepared to mortgage France's economic independence in the long-term defence of monetary union, he is now being forced to pawn his free market principles in the interests of a possible presidential career. He cannot ignore the fact that the cross-party Little France lobby and its electorate has been growing in confidence since the interior minister, Charles Pasqua, hurried through anti-immigration laws.

Since the Maastricht referendum a year ago, when only a third of the electorate voted "Yes", the rest either opposing or abstaining, the RPR leader, Jacques Chirac, who is now in direct contention with Mr Balladur for the 1995 presidential nomination, has been publicly mulling over a reinforcement of protectionism as a sure-fire vote winner.

Almost imperceptibly, opposing Gatt has developed into a national unity issue, even though few people could say exactly what the farmers would lose in real terms, while most level-headed thinkers (including Mr Balladur if he dared) would argue that what was lost on the agricultural swings will be more than made up on the industrial roundabouts.

What has been missing in the debate, though, has been a bit of true emotion. When great questions of national independence are on the line, a bag of oil-seed rape does not have the same inspirational quality as a seat on the security council nor is a hectare of set-aside land as exciting as a fly-by-wire Airbus-320.
Luckily, with the perfect timing of its belated release on the national circuit, Mr Spielberg's dinosaurs are about to colour the background of the somewhat obscure combat over tariffs and trade. It is just 99 years since les frères Lumieres opened their first cinématographe and a sudden decision to exploit an argument over film quotas as a popular excuse to attack American cultural imperialism, courtesy of the Gatt, could hardly be better timed for a twist in the plot.

This week, international stars like Gerard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert queued up in Strasbourg to condemn an agreement which would oblige the French to allow non-EC producers, including the Americans, to share in government subsidies while at the same killing off a quota system which forces French television to use at least 60 per cent European films in its programmes.

The producer Claude Berri, whose international successes include Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, said he was not going to be buggered by the American film industry which was likely to treat Europeans with the same consideration as a tribe of Redskins. US giants already control most of the French distribution circuit (the dinosaurs are booked to squat a quarter of all French picture houses) and the cultural ministry has forecast that the Gatt would cut the domestic output of marketable films from 160 to only 40 a year.

As French film stars and directors occupy the moral high ground once reserved for philosophers and writers from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, it would be ironic if a flare-up in anti-Gatt chauvinism undermined Spielberg's prehistoric zoo. After all, it was much the same over-confident pushiness of Uncle Walt's Euro-Disney that caused so many French to greet Mickey Mouse with a derisory bras d'honneur; that left hand on the right bicep gesture which is another essential ingredient in the making of a Frenchman.

THE Government last night threatened to paralyse the European Community — if necessary by withdrawing from Council of Ministers meetings — if French objections on farm trade wreck the Gatt Uruguay Round agreement.

By hinting at a partial British boycott of EC decision-making Douglas Hurd dramatically escalated the political stakes in the confrontation with France over Gatt. 

The implicit threat of a possible British boycott of EC business was made by the Foreign Secretary as EC foreign and farm ministers struggled in Brussels into the early morning to defuse a Gatt crisis. A small army of diplomats and officials was trying to find a form of words to permit a reopening of talks with the Clinton administration on sensitive farm trade issues while avoiding any formal renegotiation of last year's agreement with Washington on agricultural subsidies.

After eight hours of talks France and Germany presented their partners with a joint text which went a long way to meet the French demands. The German foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, said early this morning that ministers were close to agreement on the compromise, but it aroused bitter opposition from the British government and the commission's chief trade negotiator, Sir Leon Brittan. Any list of issues to be raised again in Washington risks a dismissive response.

Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, said failure to complete a Gatt agreement by the December 15 deadline "would not be a catastrophe for the world economy". Most other EC governments made it clear that missing the deadline would risk a series of protectionist global trade blocs and deeper recession.

"It is not the case that in coming to a crisis in Gatt we can avoid an internal EC crisis," said Mr Hurd. "I cannot conceive of how the European Community could continue with the normal conduct of business if it is seen as having caused the collapse of the Uruguay Round."

British diplomats made it clear that Mr Hurd meant by these words what one described as "calling a halt to at least part of the everyday business of the community, including new legislation". He said Britain expected support from other northern EC countries for such a tough stand if Gatt collapsed but added that "if necessary Britain will act alone to ensure that life in the community does not continue as usual".

The official explained that a British boycott of EC ministerial meetings was "one possible way" in which the object of paralysing EC decision-making could be realised.

THE EC ministerial battle over Gatt last night marked the latest stage in France's drive, to prevent the Uruguay Round of world trade talks from damaging its farming community.

Behind yesterday's discussions were efforts to accommodate France, which is under intense pressure from its powerful domestic farm lobby, without destroying hopes of a Gatt deal this year. The struggle centred on the requirement set out in the EC-US farm pact, known as the Blair House accord, that the EC cut its subsidised exports by 21 per cent over six years and reduce internal farm price supports by 20 per cent.

The French came to yesterday's meeting with a shopping list of changes to be made to Blair House aimed at watering down the 21 per cent cut in exports. Ministers last night were arguing over how far to go in requesting "clarification" of Blair House, with the German government trying to broker a deal. Britain was the strongest opponent of any renegotiation.

France has never accepted the EC-US accord, arguing that it will impose much greater sacrifices on farmers.

At the heart of French fears is that its cereal farmers will be badly hit by the requirement to cut subsidised exports and the obligation for the EC to open its markets further to imports. France, which is the EC's biggest farm exporter, views the deal as a blueprint for handing over markets to the North Americans, Australians and Latin Americans.

THE European imbroglio over farm subsidies poses a serious threat to the stability of the international financial system. At a time when global economic expansion is so fragile, the best hope for improving confidence among the larger industrial countries appears to be a successful conclusion of the eight-year-old Uruguay tariff-cutting round this year. While this is important for the amount of new trade generated — $200 billion a year is the figure normally quoted — it is seen as an equally crucial test of existing global economic institutions.

There is a great deal of pessimism about economic co-operation. The US believes that it has not received the support it needs from its Japanese and German economic superpower counterparts for its growth and anti-unemployment strategy, despite numerous G7 communiques committing them to further action.

The effective break-up of the exchange rate mechanism has created an air of confusion and severe tensions within the European Community. The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has become a source of political anxiety for the US and its immediate neighbours. And Japan's apparent inability to shrug off stagnation, despite a fresh fiscal package almost every six months, and cuts in the discount rate has not proved inspirational.

Amid all this uncertainty, the political debate in Britain shows the first signs of undermining the confidence in the economy which appeared to be returning in July and August.

What workers must also understand, is that only a continuation of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the dictatorship of the proletariat can possibly do anything about this avalanche of outdated bourgeois-idealist rottenness about to descend on mankind, — of slump emergencies, fascist nationalism, and chauvinistic warmongering.

Only Marxist-Leninist science has ever fully grasped the crucial purpose of working-class uprising which is to seize power and utterly destroy the bourgeois state and social machinery via a centrally planned and controlled economy, and via a sustained onslaught on all subjective-idealist ideology and its international imperialist-system material base.

And the key to all that is to constantly grasp the only realistic perspective in world history which is for the eventual completion of the international socialist revolution via the international dictatorship of the proletariat on the ashes of endless and incurable inter-imperialist conflict and crisis.

The only thing that prevents workers from responding to Marxist-Leninist science is the vast swamp of fake 'lefts' who peddle every revisionist nonsense which has ever made a muddle of revolutionary theory.

The NCP has always distinguished itself with its slavish subservience to every scrap of revisionist treachery that the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy ever uttered. Its most glaring stupidity was to parrot for years that there could be no more successful revolutions on earth without peace, - to which end they totally abandoned all further pretence of building a party of revolutionary theory. 

The most shallow acquaintance with Marxist-Leninist science, of course, easily shows that the historical reality is exactly the other way about, - that without more and more successful revolutions, there can never be any chance of lasting world peace because imperialist crisis will never let it happen. (The current economic slump has produced a record number of small and medium-scale wars raging all round the planet, and is already well on the way towards producing inter-imperialist World War III).

The NCP has yet to comment on the ludicrous paradox, which has ridiculed their revisionist politics, of their abandonment of a revolutionary anti-imperialist line (in step with Moscow in order to 'preserve the USSR and the socialist camp by preventing imperialism from provoking war') achieving no secure peace for the people of the world, but losing the Soviet and East European workers states anyway, undermined by the pandemic of revisionism and liquidationism.

This same NCP has just ventured one of its very occasional forays back into the once-abandoned world of revolutionary theory and polemics. It has welcomed an 'important' article by a German communist Hans Heinz Holz which 'daringly' suggests (with NCP approval, even) that the CPSU went wrong through "a stimulation of needs and cravings oriented around a Western style of consumption" due to the party's "adventurous promises and illusory goal" of "catching up" with the West in 5 to 10 years.

"The primary task of sustaining the very real commitment of earlier years and imbuing the masses with a socialist world view was abandoned," 

the NCP goes on. 

"This, for Holz, is the definition of counter-revolution:

"The development toward a new human being with a new world outlook was turned back ('counter-revolution'). The struggle for the people's consciousness was no longer pursued, but was bureaucratically replaced by decrees on political education.'

"Dismissing revisionist ideas about global problems being solved by a world 'class peace' (he described Gorbachev's book 'Perestroika' as "superficial babble"), he argues that the opposite is true."

Sounds promising? It is, and sounds, the most disgusting hypocrisy.

First, there is not the slightest flicker of an eyelid as the NCP comes out with these damning attacks on everything that they themselves have stood for in the past, - not one mention of the fact that it was precisely the NCP which drivelled so degenerately about a world 'class peace' and which so servilely adhered to Stalin's 1952 'Economic Problems of Socialism' gibberish about the Soviet bloc eclipsing imperialism via peaceful economic competition.

Secondly, this 'daring' Holz material (which soon peters out in some anti-Leninist formalism about a 'dictatorship of the party having replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat' (See 'Leftwing Communism, an infantile disorder')), is in fact hopelessly plodding and behind-the-times compared to the far more penetrating analysis of revisionism which has appeared in ILWP Books vols 3 to 17 and in 718 issues of the ILWP Bulletin.

The NCP, however, feels relatively safe with Holz's more pedestrian 'daring' which also comes without any unpleasant polemics against the NCP's own rotten record.

Things are different with the ILWP, however. The NCP (and other swamp revisionists) have just been treated to some excellent expositions and polemics at a week-long Lalkar conference where the ILWP exposed among other things, the wretched treacherousness of the whole history of popular-frontism inside the Third International, totally destroying its original Leninist revolutionary cutting edge.

The NCP did not want to know about such a damning revolutionary indictment of Third International revisionism which was the lifeblood of the NCP, - or to know about all the other crucial issues raised by the ILWP (including correctly analysing the steadily deteriorating inter-imperialist crisis as the really decisive development of the last eight years which at last made possible revisionism's complete capitulatory liquidation when no longer kept distant from full 'class peace' class collaboration by US imperialism's need, up to that point, to keep the Cold War arms-race going giving American imperialism the perfect excuse for its world gendarme role).

Instead of taking up all these challenging questions which have gone far deeper into the CPSU's revisionist decay than Holz's shallow work has dreamed of penetrating, the NCP has just dismissed the ILWP's contribution with a couple of clumsy paragraphs in the 'New Worker', - indicating that the revisionists realise that they have just taken an uncomfortable hammering, - but trying to lightly dismiss all the issues raised as 'Trotskyism masquerading as non-Trotskyism'.

Such philistine fatuousness is, of course, a monstrous historical slander on the ILWP's outstanding record as both the foremost exposer of Trotskyite imbecilities (see ILWP Books vols 3 to 17) and also the only group ever to have mastered the art of unconditionally taking an anti-imperialist line on every single dispute in history while at the same time making constructive scientific criticism of weaknesses in the struggle due to an insufficient grasp or application of Leninism.

In contrast, the Trots and the revisionists, including the NCP, were always losing their nerve over some issue or other (being whipped up by the West on the way to ensuring that bourgeois ideology and propaganda eventually triumphed over the grasp of Marxist-Leninist science), - over Solidarnosc, or the Prague Spring, or the KAL007 incident, or Tiananmen Square, or the Grenada fiasco, etc. The entire swamp, without exception, on one of these or thousands of other issues, capitulated fatally to the withering storm of anti-communist propaganda, thus all helping in one way or another to eventually produce Gorbachevism.

The answer to more than 3 million words of ILWP Leninist analysis of world developments over the last 14 years is to start publicly taking up some of the major issues challenged in communist history, such as the catastrophic role of the popular front, and Stalinism's and Trotskyism's retreat in general from Leninist revolutionary theory.

But the NCP prefers to remain stuck in the swamp of philistinism and ignorant name-calling.

The bourgeois domination of world society will not continue for ever to benefit effortlessly from this low current ebb in the fight to build parties of Leninism to renew the serious historical movement to overthrow imperialism, however.

Events continue to tell their own story, despite the mass of confused idealist babble which surrounds them on all sides, from 'left' and right.

'Free' world politics is turning back to its old vomit of fascism, whatever the explanations. And in East Europe, for example, voters are trying to turn back to communism because of the already clear superiority in the minds of most people of the planned-socialism workers states to the vicious and corrupt mess of the re-introduced market forces (unsuccessfully turning back as yet because the born-again revisionists are as far from grasping the scientific role of proletarian dictatorship as ever, and no parliamentary voting can ever resolve matters anyway).

Bourgeois ideology (plus its abettors in the petty-bourgeois 'left' swamp) can carry on confusing for all it is worth; but as far as mass political education is concerned, events in the end will speak much louder than words. World imperialist warmongering crisis will push the proletariat towards communist revolution.

The need to study Leninism and build parties of revolutionary theory is more urgent than ever. Spread the ILWP Bulletin.
Joe Harper

Isle of Dogs: Only revolution will see off capitalism's fascist slump.

The spectacle of official fascism getting an early taste of electoral 'legitimacy' thanks to the local 'democratic' thieves falling out is richly instructive.

The 'anti-racist' posturing of the Labourites never achieved anything for Bengali workers or anyone else. It serves only to keep alive the illusion that racism can be isolated and overcome outside of any revolutionary challenge to imperialist class rule, so long as the 'right people' carry out the racial monitoring, play at redistributing inadequate resources on 'equal opportunity' lines, push condescending 'anti-racist' sermons in the schools do anything, in fact, to make middle class consciences smell sweeter whilst leaving capitalism intact. The whole class-collaborating deal of Labour reformism with British imperialist rule rests on the super-exploitation of black and brown millions around the planet, and, nearer home, a shameful complicity in the soon-to-be-defeated colonial occupation of the industrial north of Ireland. Racism against 'thick Paddies' and 'lazy niggers' is not just a bad smell which can be got rid of by flinging open 'democratic' doors and windows in capitalism - it is right at the heart of capitalism. What's more, it's coming increasingly to the surface now in its rawest, least complicated form, as the front-runners of the imperialist world start to focus the most crucial racial hatred upon their trade rivals.

Capitalism cannot be 'democratically' ventilated to get shot of racism - it can only be demolished, alongside the race supremacist garbage which at root is inseparable from its national class existence.

With the pressure of fascist slump setting all political agendas henceforth, it was predictable that phony 'anti-racism' would find its room to posture being constrained by the rising mood of chauvinism whipped up in the main thrust of bourgeois ideology. Nor should it be too much of a surprise to see Paddy 'bomb the Serbs' Ashdown Liberal Democrat opportunists seizing the chance to play to the backward chauvinist gallery, scoring easy demagogic points about Labour being 'soft on Pakis' etc.

For some of those whom long years of political corruption by class-collaborating Labour leadership have left stupefied at the sticky end of all that empire loyalism, blaming 'the coloureds' will for the moment seem like an easier option than heaving the world the right way up again and blaming the capitalist exploiters. Such backward attitudes of hatred and resentment, an infection spread from the petit-bourgeoisie, will be eagerly fished in by all the capitalist parties, 'democratic' and fascist alike. If Ashdown got his fingers burned pulling the chestnut out of the fire for the fascists this time round, it is still an open question which particular opportunist gang will prove best placed to ride the tiger of warmongering fascist slump once it really tears loose.

One piece of traditional 'wisdom' not worth hearing is:

'If only the democratic vote had not split, then the fascists would never have won the day'. 

This kind of wishful thinking wants to pretends that there are two fundamentally different kinds of capitalism,'democratic' and 'fascist'. This ignores the reality - that the more or less bourgeois democratic main imperialist players postwar like the US, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Britain, whose relative 'democracy' has in part been an ideological defence (against the attraction to the working class of the rationally planned stability, growth and social decency of the Soviet socialist camp), and in part a reflection of their own relative capitalist economic success (Lenin long ago having explained how bourgeois democracy is in fact the political "shell" best suited to accommodate the growth of capitalist accumulation), are themselves right in the van of the world crisis of imperialism which is now tipping world society into fascist slump and war of unimaginable scope destructiveness. It is not just that Weimar liberals are a pushover for the jackboots; the point is that bourgeois democracy relentlessly breeds crisis, slump,fascism and war just as surely as capitalism breeds its own gravediggers and imperialist war breeds revolutionary opportunity.

This point is deliberately obscured in swamp discussions on 'why the left didn't stop Hitler in Germany', sliding rapidly, from making superficially correct criticism of the foolish sectarian branding by the KPD of the Social Democrats as "social fascists", into far worse misleadership of their own: 'If only the communists and social democrats had just pooled their votes, the Hitlerites would never have broken through the electoral fence' etc.

What was needed then, and what is needed now, is less illusions in the virtues of bourgeois democracy, not more. British democracy shoots Irish nationalists in cold blood with no trial, locks up political asylum seekers in jails (a young relative of Patrice Lumumba, long ago himself a victim of imperialism, died recently of a 'heart attack' after an alleged lengthy brutal assault by officials in a British jail), gags and manacles 'undesirable foreigners', suppresses the free speech of Sinn Féin and anyone vaguely sympathetic with its views, subjects even its own political establishment to surveillance and dirty tricks when it believes the interests of bourgeois class dictatorship are at stake — and all this and much, much more (remember Hilda Morell?) in what is supposed to be 'peacetime'.

In opening the door for the BNP, the Liberal Democrats are only living up to their name, since they are only doing what liberal democracy is always ready to do when fascist slump develops out of bourgeois democratic boom. Instead of lamenting how 'if only' the Lib Dems had been more 'principled', or 'if only' Labour had pretended less noisily that it could 'solve' racism by making endless empty 'equal opportunity' promises, then maybe the fascist vote might have been squeezed back into the woodwork by the 'democratic','decent' vote, Leninism will concentrate on learning from history and current developments, and will get on with building the party of proletarian-dictatorship theory.

It is the crisis of world imperialism which plunges mankind back into fascist slump and war. It is communist revolution alone, waged by the proletariat united around the partisan struggle for correct revolutionary understanding, that will squeeze out capitalist fascism for good, alongside its sick 'democratic' parent.

Study Leninism. Build the ILWP.
Dominic Hull

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. 37. Friday September 17 th 1993 

Imperialist ruling class losing their grip as trade war crisis undermines their confidence. Racist violence endemic to capitalism. Twenty years of 'anti-racist' reformism has done nothing except create a few middle class careers. Overthrow of capitalist ruling class the only anti-racist perspective worth having.

The slick images of calm, in-control and confident imperialist bourgeoisies, signing endless peace deals and confidently reconstructing the world in their own image having 'defeated communism', are unable to disguise the out-of-control panic and confusion which increasingly dominate their responses to the political crisis fuelled by the economic slump, which is driving them into ever more open conflict with each other.

In the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Africa, in Europe and everywhere else, trade war rivalry is rapidly driving events beyond the control of any imperialist government, however powerful. The totally monstrous and increasingly farcical performance of US imperialism in Somalia, is a testimony to this fact, and whatever little international prestige it may have left is being fatally undermined by its inability to solve any problems, anywhere: 

ELITE United States Delta force and Ranger troops arrested a staunch opponent of the Somali faction leader Mohammed Farah Aideed, believing him to be General Aideed, and have been humiliated into offering thousands of dollars in compensation to people whose property was destroyed during the bungled operation.

The US troops arrested Somalia's former head of national security, General Ahmed Jili'ow, and 25 other people on Tuesday afternoon. They believed they had captured Gen Aideed, who has been hunted by the United Nations Unosom operation since June 17.

Gen Jili'ow is a key ally of Gen Aideed's main rival, Ali Mahdi Mohammed, for whom he acts as police chief. Eyewitnesses to the arrest said 25 US helicopters descended on Gen Jili'ow's house, in the heart of Mr Ali Mahdi's area of the factionally divided Somali capital. The house's location makes it highly unlikely that Gen Aideed would have been hiding there.

Gen Jili'ow, said yesterday: "Now I understand what it means to take freedom from somebody. The Rangers asked me if I was Aideed. I said I wasn't. Then they hit me with a rifle and asked the question again. So I admitted I was Aideed and offered my hands so they could handcuff me."

A senior adviser to Mr Ali Mahdi yesterday confirmed the arrest, and said Gen Jili'ow had been released six hours later. "It did happen, but it was a mistake," he said.

The incident is an embarrassment to Mr Ali Mahdi, who has advocated tough UN action against his rival, Gen Aideed.

A senior UN official admitted yesterday that "failing to capture Aideed has become almost routine".

While US/Zionist Nazi terror has cowed Arafat into betraying the rightful claim of the Palestinian people to all their land, it in no sense represents a victory or solution for US/Zionist imperialism in the Middle East.

The whole deal looks more and more like a desperate gamble, taken from a position of deep crisis and weakness, and already opening up ten times more problems for Western imperialism than it had in the region in the first place.

No sooner is the deal signed, and 'peace' supposed to be breaking out all over the Middle East, than it is revealed that massive new arms sales to the Zionists are planned, in order to ensure that "come what may... US policy boils down to maintaining Israel's superior military edge in the region":

ISRAEL is pressing ahead with a $2 billion deal to buy up to 80 advanced US combat aircraft, despite this week's progress towards peace with its Arab neighbours. The sale has the active support of the Clinton administration.

The government of Yitzhak Rabin has also been told that the US government is ready to consider transfers to Israel of sophisticated military technology, withheld before for security reasons.

President Bill Clinton confirmed the offer of previously banned military technology during private talks with Mr Rabin at the White House immediately following the signing of Israel's peace agreement with the PLO last Monday.

Mr Clinton reportedly also assured Mr Rabin that there were no plans to curtail the annual $3.1 billion in direct US assistance to Israel, despite the apparently reduced threat of renewed Arab-Israeli conflict.  Of this, $1.8 billion is military aid.

The president also dangled the carrot of extra funds to help finance and secure the proposed Israeli military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho.

And in another, even more dramatic gesture of support, Warren Christopher, the secretary of state, floated the idea of sending US troops to police the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in the event of an Israeli-Syrian rapprochement. The political magnitude of this high-risk proposition cannot be underestimated for an administration which has refused so far to deploy peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, for example; and would like to withdraw from Somalia as soon as possible. 

Speaking on Tuesday, he again said he was determined to use US "power and influence"' to prop up the accord. In a rare interview on Israeli television, Mr Clinton said that support would partly take the form of new military hardware.

"We may wind up doing more in terms of shared technology," Mr Clinton said. "We want to do some more joint strategic thinking just to recognise the fact that military technology itself has changed the dimensions of what Israel has to do to protect its security."

Asked exactly what Mr Clinton meant, a US official said only that "there's a lot of things on the table". But US policy boiled down to maintaining Israel's superior military edge in the region, come what may, Washington sources said.

The apparent offer of US troops to police the Golan Heights in the event of an Israeli-Syrian rapprochement adds further to the evidence that the deal has everything to do with the US manoeuvring to protect its threatened interests in the region and nothing to do with justice for the Palestinians or anyone else.

US imperialism, with its bankrupt economy, and facing growing challenges in every arena to its world domination, had to do something to try and appease Arab nationalist aspirations and resentment, especially after the Gulf War disaster, and at the same time reassert its control of the region through its Zionist proxy.

There is every indication that it has failed to appease most Arab nationalism, and at the same time has opened the door to increasingly determined Arab proletarian revolt.

As analysed in E&PSR 717, the Arab 'self rule' deal for Jericho and Gaza, humiliating as it is, does unwittingly acknowledge the fact that Western imperialism cannot rule the roost for ever. If, as the deal envisages, Arafat loyalist troops are to police the Palestinian intifada in place of Zionist troops it will, at the very least, provide rapid education on why bourgeois nationalist leaderships are ultimately useless to the working class, as they will always, when necessary for their survival, side with international capitalism against their own working class.

Far from having solved anything, war on many more fronts, and including civil war from the Arab proletariat against their own bourgeoisies, disgusted at their opportunism and driven into poverty by imperialist slump, looks more, rather than less, likely as a result of this deal.

The biggest difficulty facing the Arab proletariat is that, as yet, there does not seem to be the political leadership to take advantage of the imperialist division and disarray and do full justice to the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people by putting Leninist revolutionary perspectives firmly in front of the whole Arab, and international, proletariat. This leadership though must surely emerge, as the whole imperialist international order collapses into warmongering chaos, revealing Islamic opportunism to be just as useless and treacherous as Arafat-style bourgeois nationalism.

Further evidence of the depth of imperialist crisis, and the direction in which it is headed, has emerged in the last few days, with the bitter hostility to the proposed GATT deal from the French bourgeoisie significantly adding to the generally increased sense of aggrieved nationalism all over Europe:

FRANCE opened up a new front in the Gatt war yesterday by threatening to reject any agreement that included free trade in television and cinema film distribution.

While farmers gathered around Paris last night to begin their blockade as a protest against proposals, as a part of the talks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, to cut agricultural exports, the cultural minister, Jacques Toubon, said that France was determined to resist US pressure on audiovisual trade.

Rejecting US charges of European protectionism, Mr Toubon said that the Americans spoke of free enterprise but ensured dominant market positions by secret agreements. Jurassic Park had been released in 450 French cinemas, about a quarter of all French outlets, and Last Action Hero was being shown in 330.

"I am against the total occupation of our cinema screens by one cinematographic genre," the minister said. "If we are not careful only 40 of the 160 films made here each year will be properly distributed. I am fighting for a European distribution system based on a network of independent cinemas."

THE European Community yesterday struggled to prevent disarray over the Gatt world trade talks as France warned of a crisis if other EC countries didn't back its demand to renegotiate last year's EC-US farm accord.

But the French were warned that their insistence on trying to modify the Blair House agreement could kill prospects of a world trade deal. A US trade official said, when asked if Gatt was dead should France insist on changes: "It seems there is a serious risk of that."

The French agriculture minister, Jean Puech, said a meeting of EC foreign and farm ministers next Monday had to reach a "clean and clear" decision to change the so-called Blair House pact on farm subsidies reached last year between Brussels and Washington.

"The spectre of a crisis is not far off," Mr Puech said, when asked what would happen if next week's meeting didn't produce such an outcome. He said support for the French position was growing.

GERMANY'S ruling Christian Democrats and their Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union, yesterday made revived patriotism and a renewed civic contract between individual and state the heart of their campaign to regain power next year.

In an historic turning point, CDU and CSU leaders called for greater national pride among the country's 81 million citizens to heal the scars of 40 years' division and assert an international role for a united Germany.

It will be the first time that post-war German parties have, entered an election campaign with an avowedly patriotic platform. Patriotism has been associated with Nazism and militarism.

The new direction was signalled by Wolfgang Schauble, the leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group and the likely successor to Mr Kohl. In a speech which received a standing ovation, he called for a return to common values and national unity to provide stability and fulfil unification.

"We must become more secure and certain again in feeling of national belonging," he said, adding that this revival of national identity in no way contradicted European integration.

Mr Schauble linked this nationalism to a neo-Thatcherite appeal for a new relationship between individual and state based on virtues such as civic duty and community spirit.

"We must reawaken people's consciousness that one can only claim one's rights when one is also prepared to take on obligations ...Patriotism is not old-fashioned. Our fatherland could do with far more patriotism."

Kohl's weasel words, condemning racist attacks at the same time as whipping up German nationalism, should fool no one.

The German ruling class are encouraging racist violence just as as much, by trying to embrace the 'crude' Nazi street thugs into a more 'respectable' patriotism. There is no difference really, other than eventually it means wearing the state's uniform and killing 'foreigners' for the honour of Germany by going to war against its imperialist rivals.

The deeper the economic crisis of 'surplus' capital becomes, the fiercer gets the inter-imperialist rivalry, and the closer to the surface and more 'mainstream' and 'respectable' becomes fascist backward ideology, which is what bourgeois ideology ultimately is. Killing 'foreigners' by going to war is what capitalism always eventually demands of the working class, in order to protect ruling class profits.

It is in the context of vicious inter-imperialist trade war, leading to world war, that the recent racist attacks in Britain have to be seen.

The vicious beating up of a nine year old black girl in a Bristol park on a Saturday afternoon by adult white women, for daring to push one of the women's children who had been taunting the child with racial abuse, or the brutal attacks on Asians in London's East End and elsewhere, or the recent murders of black teenagers in south London by fascist gangs, are not 'unfortunate incidents' in a 'civilized society', which a bit of anti-racist education can solve, but an absolute part of the social degeneracy which accompanies capitalism's descent into fascist slump and warmongering.

The 'condemnation' of racist attacks, which always flows with such apparent ease from the lips of chiefs of police, bishops, top politicians and the reformists of the 'anti-racist', anti-communist left swamp are pure hypocrisy.

Any condemnation of racist violence which does not explain the daily violence of the capitalist system against all the working class, and the deliberate state encouragement of backward, racist views, like the nonstop hate-the-Irish propaganda, is useless.

Only the fullest explanation of the whole history of imperialist exploitation and the inevitable periodic economic crisis leading to war can begin to explain why fascist gangs are once again attacking 'immigrants' all over Europe.

Only by building the party of revolutionary theory can this explanation be made.

The only condemnation worth anything is to build the Leninist party which, as the first step towards addressing this savage backwardness, insists on the clear perspective of the overthrow of the capitalist ruling class.

Build the ILWP.
D. Watts