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 0724 November 2nd 1993                                                                                                                           10p 

The dying British colonial regime in Ireland shares imperialism's universal crisis of confidence. It is the collapse of anti-communism which has been crucial, not the final liquidation of revisionism's anti-imperialist posturing. With the West's reformist gimmicks out of the way, a fullscale degeneration into trade war, inter-imperialist war, and civil war has been unleashed. Anti-communist lies about the USSR and its Russian aftermath by the fake-'left' swamp are bourgeois ideology's last defence.

As British imperialism edges towards a final defeat for its monstrous colonial depredation of Ireland, - ripping out bits of six of Ulster's nine counties, gerrymandering a permanent pro-UK Protestant 'majority', and inventing a nonsensical artificial 'country' called 'Northern Ireland' out of it all, - so US imperialism heads for terminal crisis on an even wider scale.

Washington's bungled interventions into the politics of Somalia, Haiti, former Yugoslavia, etc, are just the symptoms of an identity crisis, brought on paradoxically by the American ruling class's 'victory' in the Cold War.

The USA's entire world-dominant position has been dramatically challenged by inter-imperialist trade war, building up for decades, - and, oddly, it was the Reagan administration (so boastful about 'triumphing' over the 'evil empire' (the socialist camp and the Soviet workers state)) which plunged into such chronic deficits on the domestic budget and foreign trade accounts that a halt finally had to be called to some aspects of the anti-communist arms-race crusade.

This gave Moscow revisionism its long-awaited chance to liquidate the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat completely into international class-collaboration with imperialism, but the results of this 'victory' for the ''free' West have only appeared as total catastrophe for the USA's position.

The revisionist apology for 'communism' may have collapsed, but much more significant has been the collapse of anti-communism.

At the heart of anti-communism is reformism.

The fake 'liberal' petty-bourgeoisie rides the storm of international proletarian revolution for decades by being so 'reasonable' about improving the capitalist social system.

Western democracy has appeared to work so well for so long because it has been forced to make progress by the really revolutionary challenges to capitalism taking place elsewhere.

But it is the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and ruthless establishment of a proletarian-dictatorship-state of planned economic development and workings class emancipation which remains the sole real historical driving force, - the revolutionary resolution of the insoluble contradictions of the free-market forces system (slump, poverty, war, civil war, etc).

Without this constant spur from the example of the socialist camp and the Soviet workers state, now sadly in abeyance, - the 'reforming' ideals of the bourgeoisie (all parliamentary sections) will rapidly give way to the notion of 'the need for national sacrifice' as the incurable slump moves into its chauvinistic trade-war stages.

And without this phony post-1945 atmosphere in the West of constant reforming reasonableness, no longer forced on the naturally greedy and reluctant monopoly-bourgeoisie by the weight of rival communist example, - the class-war problems for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (the sole reality of western democracy) will so escalate as to totally transform the feel of life in the 'free' world.

Because of the collapse of the anti-communist cement which kept the imperialist powers from all-out cut-throat trade-war competition at a political level for so long (while all the time it continued relentlessly brewing up at the economic level), an entirely unprecedented instability is now breaking out throughout the whole capitalist world.

This anti-communist cement was much more important and much more real than the bogus 'threat of communism' which the imperialist camp liked to pretend gave the West justified cause to continue its colonial policeman role over the rest of the planet.

It was the fiction which suited US imperialist interests to wish to cash in on its post-1945 position of 'free'-world military and political dominance, - and suited all the other monopoly-bourgeois powers too who for a while were glad of American domination to help them cover-up their own reactionary resuscitation.

As a result, the complete fraud of 'reformist' capitalism had the longest, most effective, and most assiduously and subtly publicised role in its history.

But much more profoundly, it was all totally linked to the fortunes of anti-communist ideology. While the philosophy of anti-communism flourished as a negative vacuum in Western culture, the appalling confidence trick of 'reformed capitalism' could also flourish.

As soon as this temporary artificial era of anti-communist philistinism had lost most of its cultural driving force (albeit shallow) however, coinciding as it did with the first really serious difficulties for the 'free'-world's postwar inflationary boom, bourgeois ideology began to turn automatically and irresistibly towards hardline, slump-era, anti-welfare triumphalism (as exampled early on so notably by Reaganism and Thatcherism).

Far from this being any 'victory of history' for anti-communist voluntarist reaction, all that Reagan-Thatcher really represented was the same old steady decline of the older-established imperialist powers (Britain, the USA, France)in the face of continuing unstoppable competitive overshadowing on every economic and industrial-scientific front by Germany and Japan.

All that Reagan-Thatcherism meant was a despairing gamble by half-crazed imperialist reactionaries to try by any means possible to forge a way back towards Anglo-Saxon supremacism via an onslaught on welfarism at home and some equally ruthless 'defence of interests' abroad.

In practice, not one scrap of their Hayek-Friedman 'supply-side' economic gimmicks made any real difference to the steady sharpening of the cut-throat competitive edge of German-Japanese imperialist rivalry which was relatively driving down the American and British monopoly-bourgeois establishments.

But marking the onset of desperation in the Anglo-Saxon imperialist camp, it did, of course, become one of the vehicles for challenging the previous defensive-reformist imperialist response to the socialist camp, - on the grounds that 'welfare-state-feather-bedding' was undermining the West anyway, - and for adopting the more risky ploy of German imperialism towards the USSR of drawing Moscow into more and more economic deals, all in furtherance of more uninhibited inter-imperialist rivalry.

This more adventurous ("we can do business with Gorbachev") jousting with communism inspired by the Anglo-Saxon (mainly US) determination - to reduce all 'unnecessary' Western imperialist military and political leadership costs in order to concentrate much more on world-domination positions which more specifically and effectively helped to carve up the trade-war competition from Germany and Japan, - unexpectedly coincided, via the Reykjavik 'disarmament' negotiations with Gorbachev, with the Soviet revisionist bureaucracy's long-held desire to finally abandon completely its uncomfortable 'anti-imperialist ' world-leadership role, (long neglected).

This further reduction of anti-communist hysteria in turn added to the possibilities for stepping up the campaign to dismantle the welfare-state 'reforms' of capitalism, the vital ingredient of most temporarily-successful anti-communism.

The stage was being set for the imperialist system to return to its full-blooded class-war savagery coinciding with its relentless economic decline into incurable slump resulting from credit-created relative 'surpluses' of investment capital worldwide which can no longer all make a viable profit at the given rate of labour exploitation and inter-imperialist domination. Trade war, inter-imperialist war, and civil war must all follow.

This reformist essence of anti-communism needed to collapse as soon as it was possible to collapse, and the final liquidation of revisionism in its long journey from Leninism to class-collaborationism with imperialism has inevitably coincided with US imperialism's emerging trade-war crisis, clearing the decks for renewed international revolutionary convulsions.

These will take history on new leaps forward where the spent force (in terms of its direct impact) of the Bolshevik Revolution was no longer able to because of revisionist decay.

The imperialist camp remains viciously anti-communist, but its worst counter-revolutionary fervours had long since ceased to be really necessary against Moscow's (and the Third International's) revisionist complacency.

And while Washington's savage vindictiveness continues against Cuba, Vietnam, etc, for example (most significantly), - the life-or-death pressures on imperialism to keep ahead of world developments with its own social 'reforms' or else face being swept away by a continuing revolutionary tidal wave - have temporarily subsided due to the capitulation to market forces by Moscow's revisionist socialist camp.

But these developments can eventually only be evaluated first and foremost as a crisis-disaster for capitalism.

Where no active 'reforming' is going on, anti-communist ideology under capitalism will quickly become totally counter-productive.

An example comparable to this effect can be seen more simply already in East Europe where the feelings are now so widespread since the arrival of market forces that 'things were better before under communism' that the successor parties to the old ruling coalition of the Polish workers state have just won office in Poland's bourgeois parliamentary elections, (which won't bring back any planned socialism (under proletarian dictatorship, its only workable form) of course, but it does show which way the historical wind is blowing really).

What this will feel like in West Europe is a matter for speculation since no remotely comparable experiences have ever been lived through of the temporary ending of a long period of workers statehood accompanied by an unprecedented anti-communist propaganda blitzkrieg lasting more than 70 years where that propaganda turns out to have been much the biggest problem facing mankind rather than the many inevitable flaws and teething troubles with the world's first sustained period of workers statehood.

In its irresponsible brainwashing, the despairing bourgeoisie has, with its anti-communism, made a rod for its own back such as has never before been seen in all history.

This may start to be felt or become apparent the moment that the bogus 'reforming' pretence of capitalism is fully seen to be being brutally abandoned in favour of the most vicious 'value-for-money' and 'no work, no pay' anti-welfare onslaught, such as is now brewing in ruling-class circles.

The folly of more than 4 million permanently out of work in Britain, tens of millions out of work across the Common Market, and hundreds of millions more unemployed around the world while thousands of millions still want for many of life's basic necessities - is already reasonably clear to most people.

The stupidity of the standard Western government response to this market-anarchy mayhem, - of each country being urged to 'become even more competitive', thereby throwing even more people out of work in rival firms in other lands, - has yet to be so fully challenged.

But with the collapse of the immediate necessity for continued anti-communist hysteria within Western imperialism, and, therefore, with the collapse of 'reformism's' respectability (anti-communism's main content), it will be increasingly impossible to hide capitalism' s devil-take-the-hindmost essence.

That destructive character of 'free'-market forces is what is now inexorably heading for the greatest philosophical examination yet in history. The 'every man for himself' rat-race basis of capitalism will be trounced by the appeal of the far-more-highly civilised and humanitarian planned socialist system under the class rule of workers (the dictatorship of the proletariat).

Thus the immeasurable historical influence of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution will still be working powerfully even long after that dramatic transformation has lost all its direct force of living example because of the revisionist degeneration of the leadership of that specific workers-state development which started things off, beginning in Russia and spreading to East Europe and then far further afield. Clearly, it is anti-communism which is in terminal crisis, not communism.

A crucial part of Western bourgeois ideology's abiding ignorant confusion spread about the real significance of 1917 and its world-shattering aftermath of Soviet workers-state development, is the role played by the middle-class 'revolutionaries' of the fake-'left'.

The recent Polish elections, as noted above, are of course bourgeois parliamentary gibberish which cannot possibly restore the proletarian-dictatorship power of a workers state to recommence the building of socialism which is clearly what the people of Poland want to happen.

But what do avowed anti-communist 'lefts' make of this so-early dramatic turn-round in the condition of Polish public opinion which only just previously was presented by the 'free'-world's lying media as being so wholeheartedly anti-communist, anti-planned socialism, and pro-Solidarnosc-opportunism and reaction?

The SWP has been typical of the whole swamp with its monstrous piece of deception:

"Poles gave a massive thumbs down to privatisation and free market capitalism in last week's elections," 

it declared.

"But people who say Poles have voted for a return to the old 'Communist' regime are wrong.

"People were voting against spiralling poverty and job losses", etc.

Well of course they were. But the obviously significant point to answer, blatantly deliberately ignored by the centrists, is why a majority of Poles, with a vast array of parties to choose from, including several different sections of its supposedly beloved Solidarnosc, actually voted for the old Communist Party in order to vote for something better than the capitalist shite they are currently being served up with?

Obviously, because 'things were better under communism', as more and more millions are saying across Eastern Europe.

Will the SWP admit this? It will not. It just repeats in a new way its first-off grotesque evasion:

"Many of the politicians elected are from the old regime," a Polish socialist told 'Socialist Worker'. "People know that. But the fact that people voted for them is a measure of how disgusted they are with the last four years of privatisation."

But of course. But why vote for the former Communist Party?, etc, etc, ad an infinitum of SWP evasions.

What these fake 'revolutionaries' don't want to admit, of course, is that their entire existence of contemptuous hatred for the workers states of East Europe as 'Stalinist tyrannies worse than fascism' has just been one long criminal distortion of the truth. These SWP centrist petty bourgeois have just one essence, - bitter anti-communism from a wholly middle-class political vantage point.

Such reactionary treachery, planted in the heart of the workers movement posturing as anti-imperialism but in reality the most hysterical anti-communism imaginable, is always bound to be marked by the most degenerate hypocrisy and lies.

Note the SWP total silence now in commenting on the wretched opportunism and reactionariness of the whole Solidarnosc phenomenon, financed and organised by the Vatican and the CIA to wreck the planned socialism of the Polish workers state:

THE BIGGEST losers in the election were the parties most associated with privatisation.

These include the various fragments of Solidarity, the union that led the revolt against the Stalinist regime in the early 1980s.

In Poland's first free elections in 1989 Solidarity won 260 of the 261 contested seats.

But since then its leaders have embraced all the Thatcherite rubbish coming from the West.

In return for huge loans and promises of massive investment they pursued one of the harshest programmes of spending cuts seen in the old Eastern bloc. They encouraged spectacular profiteering and have overseen grotesque levels of corruption.

But the economic crisis is also splitting Solidarity.

Some of its leaders have turned to anti-semitism and extreme Polish nationalism. Others, like the Labour Union, still stress workers' rights and argue for more state spending.

These clear signs of the most treacherous parliamentary social-democracy imaginable just get innocently reported by the SWP without a word of praise or blame, despite having filled their pages 12 years ago with nothing but ecstatic coverage of Solidarnosc's promising anti-communist achievements.

More specifically, not one word of comment do the SWP anti-communists utter about their own role in boosting Western bourgeois-ideology excitement about a 'democratic workers' reply to 'communist tyranny' always presented as being a 'constructive rank-and-file socialist response', etc, etc.

What criminal deception by these SWP middle-class degenerates, guided only by their individualist subjective conceit and an inexhaustible hatred and fear of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the heart-and-soul of Marxism which these opportunist posturers profess to believe in.

And while covering up their own contemptible anti-communist record of past treachery to workers, their main interest still lies in anti-communist deception, still wishing to blacken the whole history of the Polish workers state (and the socialist camp at large), pretending that the last thing Polish voters want is to go back to the old planned-socialism regime by voting for the old planned-socialism parties, - when that is all that the Polish voters clearly do want.

Even sicker is the SWP's coverage of events in Russia. First the sheer lying dishonesty and hypocrisy of the coverage. In different sections of one and the same page, military opponents of Yeltsin are first sneered at for opposing national independence for non-Russian republics and regions; then they are sneered at for the exact opposite reason, for wanting to 'break up' the Federation:

The core of Yeltsin's opponents was a "red-brown" alliance of admirers of Stalin, admirers of the Tsar and open fascists.

Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, who is very critical of Yeltsin, writes that the armed groups of anti-Yeltsin demonstrators were made up of "retired officers of the Soviet army", connected with "the union of officers".

They object to the non-Russian republics of the old USSR being allowed to gain national independence.

The anti-Yeltsin protesters did not in any sense constitute a movement fighting for democracy or workers' rights.

Their demonstration was only a few thousand strong, yet Moscow is a city the size of London.

Only those who preach greater independence for the particular regions or autonomous republics that made up the Russian Federation get much of a hearing.

The local authorities in Siberia, for example, declared it to be a separate republic last week.

Such moves appeal to local bosses and military chiefs who think they can improve their own position regardless of what happens elsewhere.

And local independence often seems to offer the only possible way out of a hopeless situation for large numbers of workers.

The result, however, can only be to fragment the Russian Federation still further.

But on deeper philosophical questions, the deceptions by the SWP then become really sordid and murky.

There was never any socialism in the USSR, the SWP has always pretended. It was never anything but a totalitarian capitalist tyranny worse than fascism according to these anti-communist degenerates.

They now have a problem, however; how to explain why there have been such astonishing upheavals and such staggering economic decline since free market forces were let loose, but without giving any credit at all to what went on before, and above all with out admitting that there might have been some planned socialism in the USSR after all.

To get round this difficulty, the SWP simply presents to workers a disgracefully shallow joke 'analysis' composed of nothing but idiot contradictions and prejudices which is truly reminiscent of fascism in its style and method:

Economic collapse is driving the trend towards civil war.

Russia has the means to create enormous wealth. Under the old system these were used to build up more and more heavy industry and to turn out enormous amounts of arms.

This process led to the crisis which finally brought Gorbachev down.

In its place the ordinary Russians needed genuine democratic planning to reorganise production in their own interests.

This was not possible without a complete break with the old system, the abolition of the privileges of the managerial class and the establishment of workers' control over the economy.

Instead Yeltsin, Khasbulatov and Rutskoy all agreed to leave control of industry in the same hands as before.

The market allowed bosses to reduce the output of industry, while protecting their profits with astronomic price rises.

Meanwhile the total output of the economy fell by 40 or 50 percent and living standards, plummeted to the lowest levels since the Second World War.	

The only people to gain were those who had been highly privileged under the old system - the state bosses and the black marketeers.

First, there is no explanation of why the original 'privileged' exploiting capitalist managerial 'class' of the 'state-capitalist' Soviet Union, who had world power to boost their rotten egos with as well, would give up that system in order to use more market mechanisms in order to plunge their country into total economic crisis and poverty, and halve their own state economic power.

All it says of this astonishing lemming-like suicide is that state-capitalism without market mechanisms had "led to the crisis which finally brought Gorbachev down".

What crisis?

As even the most ill-informed imbecile could inform the SWP, there was no crisis other than the political nonsense Gorbachevism itself created by taking the Soviet revisionist bureaucracy's class-collaborationist attitude towards Western imperialism to its ultimate 'logical' contradiction of trying to import and imitate what its shallow philistinism had conceived as the 'greater success story of the free-market system'.

This meant Gorbachevism trying to graft onto the basic proletarian dictatorship of the Soviet workers state's socialist planning system, all the illusory subjective anarchy of parliamentary opportunism and true economic exploitation (by private capital) which simply did not exist in the USSR.

This has created, as the whole world has seen, nothing but the most impossible contradictions.

And the only remotely plausible explanation for this insane self-inflicted damage remains the degenerate revisionist political illusions of the Gorbachev bureaucracy in believing that they could become even more important, successful, and well-loved figures, and internationally admired too, if they pulled off the trick of 'world peace' and a 'common European home' by 'merging the best of capitalism with the best of socialism', - all in Gorbachev's own words.

But see where their philistine bureaucratic ignorance of Marxism-Leninism has got them, - hopelessly misunderstanding how the world was in fact heading towards the greatest free-market-forces economic crisis in all history just at the time when Gorbachev was opening the doors to what he thought were the 'great historical benefits of market forces', etc.

His ignorance is matched only by that of the SWP and all other anti-Leninists like him who want to conceal this revealing analysis to suit their own anti-communist purposes.

Without this fictional 'economic crisis' to explain Gorbachevism's mess, the SWP would be forced to conclude that planned socialism gave the USSR vastly more than market capitalism has done since, or will ever he able to do now, once this destructive phase of the international imperialist economic crisis really gets under way.

It is just outright lies that there has been no 'break with the old system'. It is solely because the old planned certainty and progress has been completely abandoned that the entire USSR has gone up in civil war flames, with some of the bitterest conflicts within the old Russian-dominated bureaucracy itself which the SWP pretends had been 'left in control of industry the same as before'. So why did they not have non-stop civil wars all over the USSR for the previous 75 years as well?

Economically it makes no sense for this 'managerial class' to cut Soviet output by 50%. Of course monopoly capitalism has to retrench during a slump in order to increase profitability. But the aim always remains to conserve as big an international market share of the trade or industry as possible. How does this 'managerial class' of the former USSR achieve that by wiping out half of its economic production?

And to pretend that it is just the 'same old system' which is 'gaining' in Yeltsin's Russia just defies description for its crass blind stupidity.

And even on the SWP's unchallengeable idiot myths about 'workers control' in the never-never land of zero leadership and suddenly perfect knowledge and instantly blemishless true mass democracy (etc, etc), these anti-communists cannot even stop lying.

The SWP just criminally ignores the very real temporary setbacks to some of the progress that had been made towards real proletarian emancipation by the colossal equitable economic progress made by the Soviet workers state over 70 years producing admirable justice in health care, education, popular culture, public housing, social amenities, cheap transport, virtually free public utilities, etc, etc.

And even producing genuine mass political emancipation too while doing it, in spite of the bureaucratic deformities and the tragic dictates of having to be an armed camp against relentless imperialist hostility, subversion, sabotage, and blitzkrieg invasions, making that heavy industry concentration and high arms spending so cruelly necessary, - as even the capitalist press is prepared to let slip:

In spite of the pressures, the FITU claims that union membership in Russia remains strong. Most unions have been re-registering their members since the end of the communist system. "There are about 57 million members, which is between 85 and 90 per cent of the old number," Mr Segal said.

But the SWP always insisted that the huge Soviet-trade union movement (which in reality administered, directly by workers, the massive holiday and welfare funds set aside and subsidised by the centrally-planned socialist economy) was nothing but a tyrannical bureaucratic charade, hated by workers. What does the SWP say now? More embarrassed thick-skinned silence.

And political democracy? Again, the capitalist press has some self-incriminating amazing admissions, reading between the lines:

But with Yeltsin's Moscow victory and his sacking of Mukha, the resistance of Novosibirsk's regional soviet crumbled last week at a session in one of the sprawling city's newest buildings with a hammer and sickle over the door.

The death throes made an undignified spectacle — not a hint of noble tragedy. Citizens were barely aware of the momentous happening. Twelve elderly picketers — shuttling between the soviet building, the town hall and the agricultural machinery factory with placards saying 'The power of the workers' soviets is the highest form of democracy' — attracted little interest.

To save their faces they voted not to withdraw their condemnation of Yeltsin's unconstitutional decree, but agreed to elections and the reorganisation of local power. 'What can they do?' said Yeltsin's local representative, Anatoly Manokhin, exuding quiet confidence. 'There is nothing left to argue about. They haven't changed their ideals, but there's nothing they can do at the moment.'

There was a whiff of tragedy about the swift dissolution of one of the city's 10 mini-district soviets. Tamara Ivanovna, chairwoman of a district still named Dzerzhinskaya, after Lenin's first police chief, was considering what to tell her 100 deputies at their last meeting.

'I will thank them all for their voluntary work. I will tell them that, even if the work of the soviets has been stopped, no one has relieved the deputies of their duties. I will say "Try in your own way to help the electorate".'

She sees her task as being to explain to people what has happened. 'It wasn't a fight between Yeltsin and Khasbulatov. It is the dissolution of democracy,' said the lawyer, who has been a deputy for 13 years and chairwoman for three and who still has a portrait of Lenin hanging over her desk.

Novosibirsk's street names are unchanged and there is a giant statue of Lenin in the main square. But the people, who buy Chinese-imported coats for another Siberian winter and drive fast Japanese-imported cars, are caught between the old and new orders.

Valery Alexeevich, one of Ivanovna's deputies, belongs in the city's dusty museum — along with a reconstructed mammoth, fuzzy photos of the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway and a room entirely devoted to Lenin and his people's revolution.

He has opted for the night shift at the aeroplane factory in order to maximise the time he can spend riding the city's trams to argue with babushkas who sound as if they are buying Yeltsin's propaganda.

'I'm a deputy,' he says proudly, when a factory manager's secretary asks him who he might be. She sniffs. He has forgotten his deputy's card.

He listens, too humble to proselytise here, while the factory manager in a smart suit says: 'What I like about the new state of affairs is that there is one man in charge.' Russians have had enough of 'people's power'.

Far better when it was Leninist one-man management under the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the SWP would rather be dead than support real socialism developments. And it sits silently by as Yeltsin's real capitalist philistinism sets about killing off the political progress that had been made under Soviet workers statehood.

Yeltsin can now only prepare open fascist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to replace the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And while the SWP will keep its head in the sand, workers opinion worldwide will steadily come to the understanding that history's first experience of sustained workers statehood was basically a world-transforming success which the coming period of even greater revolutionary upheavals will return to again and again for inspiration and example, despising the fascist degeneracy which has been allowed by anti-communist philistinism of all kinds, to replace the Soviet workers state:

Many Caucasians say they have been beaten and robbed by police, but Mr Luzhkov, a key supporter of President Boris Yeltsin and an increasingly powerful figure in Russian politics, made no apology yesterday. He explicitly linked the operation in the markets to crack down against "criminals" and the Mafia. Many Caucasians are fruit and flower vendors in the city's markets.

The mayor said the markets should be filled with "honest traders" from Russian towns selling traditional Russian produce rather than "exotic fruits" from the Caucasus.

There is no doubt that the crackdown, openly racist in nature, is hugely popular with Russian residents who have eagerly heeded the mayor's calls to denounce Caucasian neighbours whom they suspect are staying in the city illegally.

Ali Achmedov (a pseudonym used by a 27-year-old Azeri living in Moscow without a propiska) spoke of his latest experience of police custody. After serving in the Soviet Army from 1984 to 1986, he spent five years in a factory building rolling stock for the metro to qualify for a residence permit.

Two years ago he submitted all his papers, including his passport, to a local police station to obtain the permit. The police promised to return them in a month. When he returned last week to ask for his passport back, he was thrown into a cell, photographed and finger-printed.

"Four of them came into my cell and began beating me. One kept hitting me on the back of the neck with a baton. Another emptied my pockets and took 64,000 roubles (about £42)," Ali said. He refused to name the police station for fear of identifying himself, but said it happened in the Pervomajsky area of Moscow.

Ali was then taken to another station in the Shchelkovskoye area. In the local market, stalls owned by Caucasians have been looted by delighted Russians. Ali was put into an underground room and told to lie down on a rough wooden floor. Six policemen extorted money from five Caucasians in the cell. One policeman threatened to unleash a dog on them. One Armenian in custody had been arrested, released and rearrested three times in a week.

"By this time I had no money, but we managed to find 250,000 roubles (about £147) before we could be released."

Ali now lives with his Russian girlfriend, a doctor, who stays outside Moscow. Mr Luzkhov said yesterday that the visa system should apply to areas outside Moscow, where many Caucasians are hiding.

Ali expected this to happen. "It is not a bad nation but there are some bad people. The police major told me that I am a 'black'.

I said: 'All right, if I am black you are red-haired so what is the difference?'

"He started beating me, because he was an officer and I was a worker who needed to be taught a lesson."

The campaign has not come out of the blue. Last year Azerbaijan's diplomatic representation in Moscow raised with the Russian foreign ministry the case of an Azeri citizen, V. Faradzaev, who was shot dead by a soldier near Byelyaevo metro station on July 17 1992.

Anti-communists like the SWP just turn a blind-eye to the reality that the Soviet Union was steadily organising and developing a large international non-racist society which, had it survived, would have made even more progress towards overcoming petty national chauvinism.

The SWP will simply tell lies to hide the fact that race relations have dramatically worsened (all the way to inter-ethnic warfare) since the demise of the multi-cultural Soviet workers state, (built, as only it could be, on a basis of planned socialism), - just as these Trot types have put out nothing but endless lying propaganda to support Croat and Bosnian fascism against the much more healthy Serbian-nationalist remnants of the Yugoslav workers state, who tried and wanted to keep many of the advantages of planned-socialist Yugoslavia together, precisely to avoid the mayhem of interethnic strife which has now broken out with the breakdown of the old proletarian dictatorship, - cheered on, of course, by the SWP and the rest of the mindless anti-communist swamp.

The slow emergence of capitalist press revelations, self-incriminating, that the Serbs were not always the villains after all, is still totally ignored by the Trot swamp, incapable of facing up to its own backwardness so helpful to fascism:

PRESIDENT Franjo Tudjman of Croatia sparked a fresh historical controversy at the weekend by proposing that the Croatian dead from the recent war with the Serbs be commemorated at an infamous second world war concentration camp, where Croatian fascists slaughtered tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

He further outraged the hostile Serb minority by saying that "all the victims of communism" in Croatia should also be honoured at, the camp in southern Croatia where some of the worst Balkan atrocities of the second world war were perpetrated — overwhelmingly against Croatia's Serbian minority.

Mr Tudjman made his proposals at a congress of his ruling Croatian Democratic Union in Zagreb, which ended on Saturday. The call for a common memorial at Jasenovac, which would commemorate both the victims of Croatian fascism and some of the perpetrators of those war crimes, is seen as the latest element in an attempt partially to rehabilitate the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia, the fascist Ustashe state that lasted from 1941 to 1945, and included all modem Bosnia-Herzegovina.

"It's an insult", Simon Wiesenthal, the veteran Nazi-hunter, said of Mr Tudjman's call. "He wants to put the guilty next to the victims. Tito had many of the Ustashe killers executed after the war. Now Tudjman wants them to be remembered alongside their victims."	

Slavko Goldstein, a Zagreb opposition figure and a leader of Zagreb's small Jewish community, said the suggestion could "only cause new disturbances and bad feelings".

"The families of the people killed at Jasenovac will not be satisfied that Ustashe are buried with them. This is a bad thing. It's one thing to be killed on the battlefield. It's another to be killed in a concentration camp," he said.

Mr Tudjman's statement recalls one of his first moves after being elected president in 1990, when he ordered a small Zagreb square dedicated to "the victims of fascism'' to be renamed. It is now called "the Square of Croatian Giants".

Mr Tudjman aged 71, was a young communist partisan officer in the second world war, fighting against the Ustashe.

But as a nationalist historian, he has sought for 20 years to revise Croatian history, many say by belittling the atrocities against the Serbs. 

Belgrade claims more than 1 million Serbs were slaughtered by the Ustashe. Mr Tudjman has put the figure at 60,000. The true number is not known.

In Croatia, Ustashe memorabilia are now openly traded, and streets have been renamed after Mile Budak, a deputy Ustashe leader. The Croatian parliament recently voted to rename the national currency the kuna, which was last in circulation in 1941-45.

The Croatian foreign ministry has nominated Ivo Rojnica as a foreign ambassador. As the Ustashe chief in the Dubrovnik region during the second world war, he was, according to Mr Wiesenthal, the first local Croatian leader to order an evening curfew for Jews.

Mr Tudjman said a "special place" in Jasenovac should be reserved for Croats killed in the 1991 war that United Nations officials say is on the brink of reigniting.

Mr Tudjman also paid tribute to Ante Starcevíc, a virulent 19th-century Croatian nationalist whom the president hailed as a heroic guiding spirit for today's ruling party.

Starcevic is widely regarded as the intellectual godfather of the Ustashe, whose savage policy against the Serb minority was to kill one-third, expel another third, and convert the remainder to Catholicism. The atrocities shocked even some German and Italian occupying forces in wartime Yugoslavia.

The historian Aleksa Djilas has described the Starcevic ideology as "mystical and fanatical, intolerant and violent, territorially expansionist and nationally homogeneous".

The Serbian insurgents, who seized a quarter of Croatia in the 1991 war, control the Jasenovac site, regarding it as the Serbs' Auschwitz, and are unlikely to surrender it. So Mr Tudjman's proposal has little chance of being implemented. By calling for "reconciliation" at Jasenovac, he was pitting the extremist, fascist wing in his governing party against the moderates, with their roots in the partisan movement.

And all the Trots have, of course, always got Ireland wrong too, always misunderstanding the national-liberation struggle and the crisis for British colonial-imperialism which is now closer than ever to a humiliating climb-down from its vicious savagery of counter-revolutionary partition of Ireland. DB

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 PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL]
No. 43 Friday October 29th 1993 

Irish national liberation struggle fatally undermining British capitalist ruling class. Fear of socialist revolution adds to Rule Britannia paralysis. No future for Union Jack lovers.

It is the Government's refusal to accept the reality of British imperialism's defeat at the hands of the Sinn Féin/IRA led national liberation struggle which is totally responsible for the mayhem now being unleashed in the Occupied Zone.

If the Labour Party were anything other than the most cowardly imperialist hypocrites: themselves they would be demanding the Tories' resignation right now over their criminal irresponsibility in refusing to negotiate with the Sinn Féin/IRA leadership.

As many people have asked over the past, few weeks: if Mandela and De Klerk can negotiate, if the PLO and the Zionists can negotiate, then why is it that the British Government cannot respond to the Sinn Féin/IRA offer of negotiations?!

The answer must lie in the desperate insecurity of the British ruling class who have been hammered nonstop by a century of anti-colonial struggles, and at the same time been fatally undermined by rival imperialists' economic growth, leaving Britain the 'sick man of Europe' in every sense of the word.

A major element of this insecurity must also come from a fear of the revolutionary consciousness amongst the working class which will undergo a transforming breakthrough once the British oppression of Ireland is finally ended.

The anti-Irish propaganda, using the 'IRA threat' to 'unite' the working class with the capitalist state, has always been a major weapon of the British ruling class, and has caused massive reactionary confusion.

Once it becomes clear that the centuries-long savage oppression of the Irish nation by British imperialism has finally been defeated, and defeated by the heroic armed struggle strategy of the Armalite/ballot box combination, then a major obstacle in the way of the working class getting to grips with the capitalist ruling class will be removed.

As Marx argued a hundred years ago, no nation that oppresses another can ever itself be free.

While the cowardly Dublin Government is trying to play down the steady victory of the Sinn Féin/IRA strategy, and tentatively claim success for its feeble constitutional democratic approach, which has achieved nothing, it will fail to fool the Irish working class, and everyone else, as to who defeated British imperialism, and how.

The Dublin Government must be terrified at the prospect of having to incorporate into a reunited Ireland (however vaguely constituted) the currently Occupied Zone with its heroic nationalist working class, steeled in revolutionary guerrilla warfare, having just won the longest and bitterest anti-colonial struggle in history.

They will be particularly terrified, because all that they will be able to offer the victorious people is mass unemployment and poverty, in other words capitalism with an Irish rather than a British face.

Similarly the British Government must be terrified of the potential revolutionary consequences of a reunited Ireland among the British working class.

One result of years of Tory Government failure to solve mass unemployment, mass poverty, inadequate housing conditions, soaring crime rates, record levels of family breakdown, poor standards of healthcare and education, and all the other social evils arising inevitably from capitalism, is that sympathy with the 'anti-Government' IRA has grown. While the anti-Irish prejudice in Britain shouldn't be underestimated, it is nevertheless the case that IRA 'spectaculars' such as the Brighton bombing of the Tory Party, the mortar bomb attack on 10 Downing Street, and the blowing up of the City of London (twice), got at the very least a sneaking admiration from a significant proportion of the working class.

Their defeat, by the nationalist working class, so close to home and with such close historic links to the British working class in general, must be sending shivers of terror down ruling class spines.

The tragic outcome of the Shankill bomb, in missing its intended fascist targets and killing the man carrying it and civilians in the area, has led to an anti-Irish torrent from the gutter press, with the Sun declaring 

"Gerry Adams, the two filthiest words in the English language" 

etc., and an apparent 'hardening' of the Government against 'peace talks', but it is already clear that this cannot last.

It is already, to some extent at least, the case that the dead-hand, do-nothing hypocrisy of the Tories, and the hysterical anti-Irish propaganda, are having the opposite to intended effect.

As argued in EPSR No.723, it is the uptight 'outrage' reactions which now sound out of date, while it is the demand to 'do something to solve it' which is becoming dominant.

Doing nothing is not an option, however much the Tories might wish it was, or even try to, as the political pressures are far too great.

Whilst Major may have to some extent tied himself into the Loyalist fascist vote in the House of Commons, to save his discredited government by doing deals over Maastricht votes, it is also the case that the Government is tied into the Anglo-Irish Treaty, forced upon them by the heroic sacrifices of the liberation struggle, particularly the international support generated by the hunger strikes which resulted in the deaths of ten Irish nationalists, including Bobby Sands MP.

Whilst the fascist gutter press can print as many insults as it likes about Gerry Adams and the Irish people in general, the contrast between the clear political/military strategy of the entirely justified national liberation struggle, and the random sectarian killing by the fascist Loyalist death squads, is already clearly identified by millions of people internationally, and in Britain too.

The foaming at the mouth, the endless meaningless condemnations of violence, only add to the widespread view that the Government is completely incompetent, and highlights its failure to solve anything.

Boxed in on all sides, unable to withdraw satisfactorily, the Government seems stuck between a rock and a hard place, unable to move, and doing nothing more than rot alive, because it seems unable to do anything else.

The British ruling class must be very near the end of their historic road, not only in Ireland, but in Britain too.

Build the ILWP.

D.Watts

The only real anti-fascism is the movement to overthrow capitalism.

With rightwing Tory headbangers like Patten, Redwood, Lilley and their pals in the capitalist media hellbent on bouncing public opinion as fast as possible into an endless series of vicious crusades against 'welfare scroungers', 'sponging foreigners', single mothers, 'absent fathers', 'trendy teachers' etc.,etc., in line with the urgent unfulfilled political requirements of the deepening fascist slump, Bristol University students should beware of the dangerous reactionary nonsense being spouted in their name. 

With John Patten now leaning on schools to fly the Union Jack (on the ludicrously unconvincing pretence that this will 'reclaim the flag' from the BNP and the football yobs), and some other scoundrel on last Saturday's fatuous radio chatshow "Tea Junction" making the 'amusing' suggestion of a return to the medieval punishments of banishment and mutilation for criminals (on the 'humorous' pretence that only 'fascist' societies get really serious about rehabilitation, and true 'democracy' would never try to rehabilitate criminals against their own wishes, instead leaving them the 'democratic choice between reform or mutilation') it's clear what a perfect mudslide middle-class cynicism is when it's time for bourgeois society once more to lurch back into the ditch of fascist slump.

The BNP has every right to the stinking Union Jack, that banner of decaying and venomous British imperialism. That flag of brutal colonial domination and ruthless neo-colonial exploitation is the symbol of bourgeois imperialist arrogance that has been trampled underfoot by one anti-colonial struggle after another, that has been left hanging by a thread by the Irish liberation movement, and which is looking more shopsoiled and pointless than ever now that the contempt from French and German imperialist rivalry is made worse by the humiliating snub to 'national pride' handed out by the rudderless US ruling class via the feeble Clinton. The only way to 'reclaim the flag' is to run down into the fascist ditch after the BNP: like John Patten and the jumpy 'new right' of the Tory Party, and like slick-talking chatshow cynics with a finger in the wind.

And like such 'anti-fascists' as the editorial board of Bristol University's "independent" freesheet "Epigram", whose response to the police assault on the anti-BNP march in Plumstead was to row in dutifully with the bourgeois propaganda line as established in the big capitalist media - and blame the ant-fascist marchers. Under the headline "Race March Riot", the front page retails every last scrap of police misinformation as the purest gospel truth: the perennial "hard-core of serious trouble-makers, mostly masked or clad in balaclavas" who were supposed to have caused all the violence; the assorted bricks and bottles with which the "trouble makers" were allegedly armed to the teeth; even the jewel in the crown lifted straight off the front pages of the gutter tabloid press, the 'heartrending' tale of the 'decent black copper' supposedly singled out by white demonstrators.

The "Sun"-type coverage continues on page two with a picture of some demonstrators standing around with a few flimsy-looking ANL placards, some of them wearing balaclavas. Over the picture blares another headline:

"The Face of Violence in London this Weekend". 

Not the BNP thugs mind you, nor their paid police protection, but those who marched against fascism! With 'anti-fascists' like the "Epigram" editors happily fingering the hapless faces who found themselves trapped in the photographer's lens, maybe the balaclavas weren't such a stupid idea.

Meanwhile, the capitalist state attack on the march - the real, practical fascism of the slump-hit capitalist state, not fussed about waiting for the BNP to get its act together - gets off scot-free. Denouncing alleged attacks on the police, the University rag declares:

The police were attacked for 'defending' the BNP bookshop in Welling, South East London. It is easy to forget that they are the guardians of law and order, however blind and incomplete the law is and however painful the order might be to maintain. When we are being assaulted, the arrival of a policeman is always appreciated even if our politics may view them as fascist pigs.

There is a case for gladly taking the law into one's own hands when it seems that nothing is being done about grave injustice by the relevant authorities. Confronting the police head to head only gives the Government ammunition to use against those who oppose it. It is the government that needs to be taken out of service, not the people who have to uphold its law.

Britain may be a free democracy, but the Government, by giving racist groups a platform from which to speak, is actually guilty of conspiracy to incite racial hatred.

'No platform for racists', this says – but the police are beyond politics and should be supported, along with Britain's "free democracy". What rubbish. The police are there to defend the private property relations on which the bourgeois state dictatorship is reared; that state dictatorship is there to defend the monopoly imperialist exploiting interests of the ruling bourgeois class; and parliamentary democracy has been the preferred political shell within which that dictatorship has operated, plundering the 'Third World' and exploiting its own workers. What is threatening to turn all this over is not a handful of youthful muddleheads in balaclavas, as Epigram slyly pretends, nor even the BNP scum as such, but the massive contradictions once again boiling up to the surface from within monopoly capitalism itself, unleashing slump once more - a slump that is in itself necessarily anti-democratic, warmongering, and fascist. 

As the EPSR put it recently, it is the fascist slump of capitalism that is trampling all over 'democratic' niceties and fixing the class-war, chauvinist political agenda, and the BNP is just the shit on its shoes.

The attacks the rag makes on the ANL and the apparent contrasting cosiness towards the rival ARA never get beyond the most reactionary sectarian subjectivism, thus sowing further confusion in anti-fascist ranks, letting the anti-proletarian dictatorship theory uselessness of Trot leadership off the hook, and giving a sneaky leg up to the diversionary black nationalist politics of the ARA. As EPSR 722 put it last week:

"For the conceited middle class around the black-nationalist ARA who demonstrated quietly in Trafalgar Square, their reactionary hypocrisy, is as bad or worse than Grant's.

Complaining against the rival ANL's Trot groups & 'hidden political agendas' an ARA spokesman declared:

"These direct-action techniques are immature and infantile. You don't eradicate racism by having a little operation against the BNP. It's just a little adventure for a bunch of white liberals. They are not interested in letting black people take the lead - which is a not-so-well-hidden agenda if ever there was one.

It would be true, of course, to say that a ruck with the BNP might solve nothing in itself, - provided that the criticism was coming from a direction insisting on building a party of revolutionary theory to lead a fullscale proletarian-dictatorship revolution as the only real answer to ever-recurring fascism.

But that that is hardly the ARA's position is to put it mildly. These would-be leaders of the 'black agenda revolution' intend to ask the Tories to 'make racism illegal through parliament'. As even the anti-theory ANL is able to point out nearly correctly: 

"The Government is responsible for racism because they have created the conditions".

It is, of course, "the permanent domination by 'free-market' forces and the class dictatorship by the bourgeoisie which is the real point, so that not even anything as 'active' as causing the Major (or any other) government to fall is going to provide anything like a complete answer to capitalism, its fascist-slump racism, and all the rest of its degenerate warmongering problems. Only the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is ever going to even remotely begin to sort out decaying free-market society so that completely new human relations can begin.

It is to the ANL's credit that at least it has the courage of sufficient political convictions to declare: 

"You can only defeat racism by uniting black and white people and tackling the Nazis head-on". 

However, genuine revolutionary tactics might conclude that smallscale piecemeal skirmishes of an indecisive kind could just be playing into the BNP's provocatory hands, and that a prior build-up of largescale truly-convinced revolutionary cadre forces, ready and able when the time and conditions are truly ripe to deal with the fascist excrescences completely, all in one go, - is the more promising and far-reaching strategy, solving all the revolution's needs at once. Racist backwardness will be much more decisively defeated inside the working class by the advance of Bolshevik organisation and ideology than just by head-bashing alone on the fascists. Sadly, as can be seen by the former 'lefts' or Trots like Bellos and Grant, a few years around petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' activism is not much of a guarantee against all kinds of confusing and dangerous rubbish being spread around the Labour movement, including the black nationalists' own sick racism.

And for the ARA to ask the Tory government to ban racism is just a tragically sad delusion which could go on stitching workers up for years to come. The sole history of fascism is as a tool of the monopoly-imperialist bourgeoisie in desperate crisis. How an earth any set of monopoly-imperialist cabinet ministers could even think of seriously outlawing fascism is a mystery; and how any part of the bourgeoisie could hope in practice to ban its more fascist wing is even more of a mystery.

The Tory ruling-class will not legislate racism away, nor could they even if they wanted to. 

The answer to the sickening upsurge of racist attacks in Britain (and abroad) and to the BNP's infamous electoral victory in Tower Hamlets is not the utterly useless civil rights/legislative approach of all the 'reformists' and ARA black liberals, but to get rid of the capitalist system."

Fight for Leninism. Build the ILWP.

Dominic Hull.