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 Box 50. London SWl7 9NL.] [Post Office Regd.]
No 760 Tuesday July 19 1994                                                                                                                     10p

Nostalgia for Stalinist bureaucracy even, shows how communist leadership of society, replacing revisionist complacency, was the world's greatest need and remains so, the only answer to collapsing capitalist corruption and imbecile 'reformist' opportunism

As the world capitalist crisis rapidly deteriorates, increasing evidence can be found in the bourgeoisie's own press of signs of regret at the passing of the more stable order of planned workers states in the socialist camp:

IT was an irony lost in the din of battle, but as shells and rockets turned the crumbled ruins of Kabul to dust last week — in a ferocious crescendo to this city's interminable war of attrition — the one man whose reputation was rising was the former president, Mujadidi Najibullah, whose downfall was a day of rejoicing two years ago.

Afghans, many of whom hated him as a Soviet-installed puppet, now look back with nostalgia. Never more so than last week, when they cursed the private armies that have turned this ancient capital to rubble.

The tribal leaders who overthrew him and then fell out between themselves — despite remaining members of a nonexistent government — have devastated Kabul in the past six months at the cost of 2,500 lives.

Civilians are suffering from this lust for power, although none of the leaders has ever expressed more than passing concern. More than half of Kabul has been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes and belongings. Those who have not fled the capital have crammed into the west of Kabul, where the fighting has been comparatively lighter. All schools and mosques there are full of displaced people, to whom the International Committee of the Red Cross has been giving vital support.

Prices of food and essential commodities in the capital have shot up beyond the reach of many families. A sack of flour, which should last a family for one month, now costs twice the average monthly salary. Some people have been selling their belongings to make ends meet.

It is no surprise that after bouts of heavy fighting the dust-laden air is thick with curses — and sighs for the days of Najibullah.

'We have only hot water and the earth that burns our feet' says Panda Mohammed. 'This is the kingdom these political leaders have made for us, while they marry young girls and live in riches.' There is contempt for the lack of help, both from inside the country and abroad. 'The government takes all kinds of outside aid, but puts it in its own pockets.' The mourners nod in agreement. 'Why doesn't the United Nations — if there is such a thing — pay attention to what is happening? What can we decent and innocent people do?'

The answer from the international community is silence. Except for infrequent visits by 'missions of inquiry', the UN is absent from Afghanistan. If it were not for the International Committee of the Red Cross and groups such as Médecins sans Frontières, Afghanistan's war-weary civilians would be totally abandoned by the countries that once took such an active role in both military and humanitarian affairs here.

The black comedy of last week's visit to Kabul by an Islamic peace envoy underscores the pathetically inadequate international efforts to end the bloodshed. Even as Hamid Algabid,secretary-general of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, met President Rabbani, a dozen rockets — probably fired from Hekmatyar's stronghold south of the capital — blasted the presidential palace and its grounds.

It was a chilling greeting for the Conference chief, and from a self-styled Islamic fundamentalist at that. Undeterred, or perhaps terrified to deviate from his schedule, Algabid later met 'Brother Hekmatyar' to hear his side of this unending story of high-tech warfare, in which no fewer than nine factions grapple for a throne amid the pitiful debris of Kabul.

The parties have discredited themselves so thoroughly in the eyes of the people that even the old Communist regime is remembered fondly. Former President Najibullah, 'The Ox', who languishes in the confines of the UN compound here, is arguably more popular than the one-time 'holy warriors' who rid the country of the hated Soviet occupying forces.

'The people can see that none of these leaders has their interests at heart,' says Dr Saleti Ramez, the medical chief of Kabul's Karte Se hospital for war wounded. 'We can cleanse our people's wounds, but no one believes that any of these leaders — or anyone outside Afghanistan — is working to heal the nation's wounds.'

Any Afghan schoolboy could have told Boutros-Ghali that civilians here want peace, that the combat poses much more risk to innocent bystanders than to the combatants, and that the abandonment of Afghanistan by Western nations is unwise and unjust, considering the bounty of financial and military support given by the West to extremists such as Hekmatyar in the 1980s.

Ask Raz Mohammed, now 19 years old. As a schoolboy in 1989, his legs were torn off by an anti-personnel mine. From the day Red Cross doctors saved his life, I have watched his fight for survival — a painful five-year journey from suicidal depression to self-sufficiency and the young man of today, who helps his father, mother and eight brothers and sisters survive the hunger and perils of wartime Kabul. He shrugs when I tell him that the UN has not yet taken a single step towards cutting off outside aid for warlords such as Hekmatyar, who is supported by Pakistan's military, or Rashid Dostam, who arms his aircraft for their bombing runs over Kabul and Herat with help from Uzbekistan. Iran, too, which bankrolls Shia insurgents seeking to destabilise any central authority in Afghanistan, has faced no direct criticism from the UN for its role in the continuing terror.

There is no better starting-point from which to try to understand the hideous events and complex questions that have been thrown up with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia than by examining the life of Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980). It is therefore timely that there should be two new excellent biographies of Tito by Jasper Ridley and Richard West. Both authors end their books by describing a public mood which is yearning for the days of Tito and the Communists. Ridley quotes a Muslim from Bihac writing, on September 15, 1993, in the visitors' book of the house where Tito was born in Kumrovec: "When you were around I walked on two legs, and now I walk on one leg."

No wonder Ukrainians and Belorussians sacrificed dreams of independence and national glory and voted last Sunday for Presidents Leonid Kuchma and Alexander Lukashenko, who admit that their countries have made a hash of going it alone without Mother Russia.

Although quarrels still smoulder about which cow of a former Soviet republic was being milked of its riches by which other republic for those 70 years, the simple fact that 86 per cent of all the USSR's oil and gas resources are in Russia is now telling.

As Ukraine's new President, Leonid Kuchma, said of Ukraine's recent independence: 'I assess it as a period that has demonstrated the full extent of our mutual dependence.'

The former republics have been too jealous of their new sovereignties, too suspicious of Russia's intentions and too stymied by their own domestic problems to set up a common market.

Regular meetings have produced about 500 CIS agreements aimed at common customs, labour, dual citizenship, taxation and crediting arrangements but have resulted in no concrete action. A lack of supranational bodies has hampered progress.

But pressure for reunion is mounting everywhere. Even in Russia, which has the least to gain in the short term by extending its commitments to what Russians call the 'near abroad', pro-reunion feeling is running high.

Russia may have assumed responsibility for 'stability', but she is increasingly concerned to serve her own interests too. Russia supported the Abkhaz separatists against the Georgians until Georgia's Eduard Shevardnadze begged to join the CIS after all and use the Russian rouble. Now there are Russian soldiers keeping the peace. Having supported the pro-Russian side in Tajikistan's civil war, Russian soldiers now defend that country's border against the Afghans.

Then Russia abruptly excluded the other republics from the rouble zone a year ago, and its oil had to be paid for at world prices — no more 'charity'.

Belorussia is finding the conditions for rejoining the rouble zone are harsh; Russia will in effect control its finances. Russia has agreed to have debts repaid in the form of property instead of cash. President Kuchina is likely to discharge Ukraine's energy debt to Russia by handing over Ukraine's half of the Black Sea fleet and perhaps a pipeline.

Last week's publication of a report by the respected Reform Economic Foundation states boldly that 'the main decision on economic union must come from Russia'.

Pointing out that Russia has twice the economic potential of all the other CIS republics put together, the report outlines the main advantages of economic union for Russia: over half of Russia's sea freight is transported from other CIS ports, a service which now has to be paid for. It is easier to keep the old USSR borders than build an 8,000 mile new Russian one. Russia wants to keep military bases in CIS states.

There remains a niggling doubt. According to a recent poll, about 40 per cent of Russians would like to choose which economies to reunite with. Belorussia and Ukraine are one thing — but Tajikistan and warring Azerbaijan and Armenia quite another. Defence considerations would seem to deny Russia the luxury of choice.

FOR THE devout, a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan's fabled city of Islam can be disconcerting. Women with plunging necklines guide visitors around its blue-domed mosques and mausoleums. Teenagers selling trinkets squat in centuries' old religious colleges.

Once the capital of a medieval empire that stretched from China to the Mediterranean, little is sacred in Samarkand today. Urbanisation is choking the city's crumbling treasures.

Local officials say they cannot match the money and staff provided by the former Soviet Union for conservation. Overseas archaeologists complain that bureaucracy is frustrating their efforts to excavate layers of civilisation.

But hopes that Samarkand, with a population of 400,000, could become the hub of an Islamic revival have evaporated. Samarkand's citizens remain staunchly secular.

Credit far this goes to Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan's former Communist Party chief and now its president. He recently advocated a Turkish-type development — a combination of capitalism and moderate Islam — for his fledgling country. But this has been abandoned for an indigenous model whose inspiration is unashamedly communist.

Lenin's statue in Samarkand has been replaced by a dome, but the monument commemorating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution is intact.

Mr Karimov's hostility to fundamentalism can be found in his latest political treatise, entitled: "Don't mow down the old house until you've built a new one."

The official fear of radical Islam is underlined by a recent decree prohibiting private schools, regarded as potential breeding grounds for fundamentalism.

I turned around to face an angry delegation of women screaming at me, thumping the car, and frightening the children. I thought I heard buried under a host of glottal stops the phrase: ''Yankee Go Home." I decided to move the car back to the car park, and do the rest on foot. Which we did. When we returned to the car, it had a flat tyre. A nail had been driven into it.

Wrestling with the jack, I couldn't help thinking the angry women were right. Why should foreigners enjoy a privilege, even one they are not aware of, that Russians can't? Two years later I would put the question differently. Why should a system of privileges exist at all? I don't think was anything more than a convenient excuse — their anger was really directed at the privilege enjoyed by the tenants of the exclusive state dachas.

It is one of the paradoxes of the arrival of the free market in Russia, that the old communist system of state privileges thrives on regardless. Capitalism has only enhanced their value. At least then, there was some element of modesty about the small four-room brick dachas, buried in a forest well away from public view which the old nomenklatura lived in. Now, if you have benefit from a perk, you flaunt it. Mr Yeltsin not only houses his entire circle of political allies and friends in the same luxury block of flats in Kryulatskoe, but he makes sure they can build their own super luxurious dachas, at a fraction of the market price, 20 minutes down the road in another swathe of territory he controls.

Every so often, the poor perkless punter gets fed up with it, and votes for a man who promises to tear down the hateful system, like Mr Yeltsin himself promised in his own election campaign. Last week, there was another sign of this periodical discontent. Komsomolskaya Pravda, not a paper known for its crusading journalism, published an amusing list of travel privileges enjoyed by the high and mighty—the fact that Ivan Rybkin, the parliamentary speaker travelled by private jet to China at a cost of $100,000, that when the prime minister travelled to China he took four pals and 175 people with him. The paper contrasted this extravagance with the recent visit of the Chinese foreign minister who arrived in Moscow on a scheduled flight.

If this system breeds cynicism with the voter, it breeds gratitude in the recipient. I remember an interview with a television mogul in which I was given a lecture about freedom of speech, the fearless right that the Russian media now enjoyed to publish and be damned, but the responsibility he, as a television chief had, to make sure they were being fair and impartial.

This interview took place just before the December election campaign in which the television channels were found by European observers to grossly favour, in terms of the allocation of airtime, the ruling party, of which its chiefs were members.

In burst a young journalist eager to curry favour with his boss. "This is the, er, little something that we talked about, I have got for you," he said with a cheeky wink, handing over a pass to an elite health clinic. My interviewee tried to feign ignorance. When the youth pressed the point, dangling the identity card, with the man's picture clearly on it, over the table, his boss caught on, snatching the card from view. "And, er, that trip to Germany..." The journalist wanted his quid pro quo, before witnesses.

This man posed as a democrat. The term is meaningless. He was behaving no more no less than a sweaty bureaucrat, the type Gogol described so well — a human squirrel never sure when his supply of nuts was going to run out.

The self-liquidation of the planned economies and the dictatorship of the proletariat by bureaucratic revisionism (which increasingly dominated as the paralysing and doomed ideology of the socialist camp), remains an unpalatable fact.

Superficially, it appears to people that these planned one-party states must have been relatively disastrous or they would not have been swept away so easily.

And in terms of modern consumerism and enlightened society leadership, the Soviet bloc regimes were frequently laughably backward and wooden.

But quite unnecessarily so. And the worst crime of all by these bureaucracies was their wretched petty-bourgeois defeatism, the fact that sneakingly they were far more impressed with the glitzy achievements of the most powerful imperialist societies than they were with their own socialist state gains.

Revisionism's eternal petty-bourgeois desire for class-compromise with the West ensured that the Buggins-turn bureaucrats in charge towards the end could never hope to inspire the populations of the workers states to anything much by the way of socialist achievement.

Through complacency and small-minded fears, the ruling parties had long since lost all appetite and ability for further development of the spirit of revolutionary leadership which was the hallmark of Lenin and Leninism, and had no confidence at all in trying to arouse genuine mass enthusiasm for further triumphs of socialist construction.

This can be most simply established, now as at the time, by analysis of what the socialist camp leadership had to say about the world and their own workers state developments.

All their understanding was always fatally flawed on fundamental questions of Marxist-Leninist philosophy of how the world could complete its development towards an international society of essentially harmonious planned economic advance for the whole of mankind and the planet it lives on.

The ILWP actively agitated on these questions from birth. It totally rejected and bitterly fought the false 'communist' friends of the Soviet Union and the workers states who (like the CPGB) unprincipledly drifted from blind petty-bourgeois hero-worship of the Moscow bureaucracy to cynical indifference and eventual abandonment. It totally rejected and bitterly fought the false Trotskyite sectarians who pretended unconditional solidarity with the workers states but in practice who never missed an opportunity to stab them in the back with the latest anti-communist propaganda stunt manufactured by the international imperialist counter-revolutionary circles like the CIA.

Not a single Trot sect or ex-Stalinist grouping proved capable of genuinely defending the advance of workers-state power against imperialist world domination while at the same time genuinely criticising the crippling ideological weaknesses of those regimes, both in their domestic and international effects.

Superficial public opinion is wrong in thinking that the socialist states were swept aside easily. They were not, and the main history of the 20th century is the heroic story of how the Soviet Union, and subsequently China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc, and the whole socialist camp fought brilliantly on every front to frustrate the endless onslaught by internationally-organised imperialist counter-revolution, and economic and propaganda sabotage, from 1917 onwards.

These were real workers states at one time governing more than a quarter of the world's population, and doing it in ways (as the above capitalist press cuttings testify) which now in retrospect seem a model of restrained and civilised good order (compared to the open barbarism now rampaging across most of those territories, and across even larger swaythes of the rest of the earth now, such as in Rwanda, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, Turkey, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Burma, Egypt, Occupied Palestine, Occupied Ireland, Mexico, Colombia, etc).

The main overwhelming inadequacy of these states of the socialist camp was precisely in the inability of the leaderships to explain to society how good it was and would be that the future fate of Yugoslavia, Turkey, Mexico, Rwanda, etc, was being avoided there, - and, even more importantly, to explain what revolutionary understanding and action needed to be continued with worldwide to make sure that the socialist camp did stay free from the horrors of the capitalist system's inevitable warmongering slump ahead.

How might the tortured populations of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, etc, have appreciated it being made clear that at least the degradations of total civil-war breakdown and poverty would be avoided by sticking to the system of strong centrally-planned workers states.

The Soviet republics were always full of shallow snide remarks about 'Russian exploitation', etc, when the exact opposite was the truth, as these republics are now bitterly discovering (see above cuttings), - a cynical anti-communist ideology of petty-bourgeois nationalist pessimism which nothing fed so relentlessly as the degenerate sectarianism of the fake-'left' in the West, the Trots above all.

And it was this same academic ivory-tower illusion in the 'perfect socialist revolution' which equally fed the counter-revolutionary discontent at the bureaucratic privileges of the ruling-party regimes, minor privileges reflecting 70 years of party domination which just a couple of years of Yeltsin's 'reform' regime (which some Trots sill insist is the long-lost 'political revolution' at last bringing 'real socialism' thus justifying all their past anti-communist diatribes
and sabotage against the Soviet workers state) have completely outstripped already.

Such undeserved or unnecessary 'bureaucratic privileges' as existed were a disgusting and damaging display of crippling complacency; but what always needed focusing on was the question of what was the main fault of Soviet society and how best could it be remedied.

It must be screamingly obvious to anyone by now that the last thing that the final chief revisionist bureaucrat, Gorbachev, was after was any consolidation of privileges amounting to the complete counter-revolutionary overthrow of the Soviet workers state which the Trotskyites had never stopped accusing the CPSU of.

So clearly were Gorbachev's manoeuvres not aimed at securing his personal fortune or that of his 'ruling caste' that the most Trotskyite of all the Trot groups, - the WRP, declared (and some of its splintered factions still declare) that Gorbachev's reforms were the 'political revolution' guaranteeing the survival and renewed flourishing of Soviet socialism.

What was wrong with Gorbachevism was exactly the same as had been wrong with Stalinist revisionist leadership since Stalin, - namely the retreat from the inspirational philosophy of completing the world socialist revolution, destroyed by the demoralising nonsense of permanent class-collaboration (peaceful coexistence) with imperialism.

It was in pursuance of this defeatist gibberish about 'merging the best features of socialism with the best features of capitalism', running away from the world socialist revolution completely, finally, - that Gorbachev liquidated the dictatorship of the proletariat, the one guarantee in fact that any bureaucratic privileges that Gorbachev or other party leaders enjoyed could continue.

There is a common thread to the revisionist collapse, to the cynicism of the fake-'left' anti-communists, and to the problem now of what to do about the colossal mess human understanding has degenerated into.

Various petty-bourgeois class illusions are the problem; a correct analysis of world developments is the only solution.

The Stalinist bureaucracy plunged from Leninism to Gorbachevism step by regular step, all verifiable (see ILWP Books vols 13, 5, 4, 3). It is nonsense to suggest that everything was fine until Kruschev, or until the row with Mao, or whatever. And the essence of these retreats from Leninism was always the same, - a failure to correctly grasp what was going on in the world.

The embrace of Popular Frontism in the 1930s in Spain, etc, (echoing similar tendencies towards China in the 1920s) is one of the clearest earliest examples. Revolutionary communist struggle was deliberately subordinated to petty-bourgeois parliamentary struggle in the mistaken belief that only such ideological class confusion could stiffen the petty bourgeoisie into standing firm alongside the working class in defiance of fascist imperialist aggression as led by Germany and Italy and as surreptitiously supported by British, American, and the rest of Western monopoly-finance capital.

But what got most confused was the potential for proletarian revolution as the best answer to Hitlerism and Francoism, and such confusion in turn destroyed the only certain basis on which the middle-class could stand firm against fascism, - namely at the shoulder of successful proletarian revolution.

Trying to stand firm together in the midst of petty-bourgeois parliamentary democracy was like trying to stand firm together in the midst of a deep swamp of dog diarrhea. Individual heroism fought bravely and well for the Spanish Republic. But the Spanish Republic could itself in the end only fight as well as petty-bourgeois democracy can ever perform, - knee-deep in shite.

The anti-communist cynicism of the ultra-lefts has only deteriorated since its very low starting out point of Trotsky's 'everything is rotten' defeatism scarring the very first years of the Soviet workers state (see ILWP Books vol 5).

These middle-class academic 'revolutionaries' are just wrong about everything. One of their most spectacular recent catastrophes was jumping on the CIA's Solidarnosc bandwagon (financed by the Vatican) claiming that this was the 'rank-and-file socialist revolution' at last. It was total fascist counter-revolution (see ILWP Books vols 3,6,7,etc). Lech Walesa is now openly Western imperialism's chief East European stooge.

What the Trots could see was an academic 'rank-and-file socialist revolution', which was all these armchair socialists needed. The real destruction of the Polish workers state's planned-socialist gains of full employment, guaranteed social services, minimum housing and welfare needs, universal education opportunities, etc, etc, were just boring details to these middle-class 'revolutionaries' high on their anti-communist kicks.

Still some argue that nothing much was lost from the death of those unconvincing East European workers states.

Clearly that is not how ordinary people feel who have just voted back into office the former communists in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, etc. And it is hard to see the logic of just abandoning in total confusion the achievements of 70 years planned socialist statehood (in the Soviet case) and 40 years in the rest of East Europe. As the man says, don't mow down the old house until you have built a new one.

Trotskyism's 'political revolution' was a completely imaginary fantasy with a completely non-existent class content. The bad practices and ideology of the East European workers states could have been replaced by a more alive Marxist-Leninist understanding without any antagonistic class confrontations at all. The 'everything is rotten' cynical liquidation has now made bloody civil wars there inevitable.

The key to the workers states, - and the key to all society, - past, present, and future, - is correct leadership based on appropriate class power. All that anti-communist cynicism understood about East Europe or wanted to advocate was totally destructive, degenerating drastically even from Trotsky's personal lifelong posture of giving 'advice' to the Bolshevik Party leadership but in reality merely endlessly damning with faint praise. And from the 1921 'New Course' onwards, all the bilious defeatism was based on hopelessly incorrect estimations over how the international class struggle over the Bolshevik Revolution and its outcome would go. (See ILWP Books vol 5).

Fake-'lefts' still trying to argue that there was no special significance in the 70 years that the USSR did flourish, or the 40 years when a quarter of the planet had begun to experiment with a socialist system, - are not living in the real world. These were the most dramatic developments in all human history so far. Dismissal of them as unimportant, and not worth fighting to prolong, is based on bourgeois anti-communist hatred and fear of the dictatorship of the proletariat, plus racist-imperialist conceit about 'how civilised' life is supposed to be in 'modern Western democracies', etc.

Like France?

THIERRY Jean-Pierre's eyes rolled in frustration and anger. 'Two years ago,' he said, 'I thought political corruption existed in France, but that it was marginal. Yet the more you delve, the more you realise it's completely systematic. It is not linked to the Mafia, like it is in Italy — but it is everywhere.'

Jean-Pierre is France's most famous investigating magistrate, a man who has helped unveil a scandal that pollutes virtually every area of French public life and the whole political spectrum.

His inquiries have shown that, from the smallest local authority to the Elysee Palace, from left-wing Socialists to the ruling Right, kickbacks are regarded as normal, even commonplace.

At a local level, he has found that any company wanting to supply drinking water, build a school or incinerate rubbish is expected to make under-the-counter payments. At a national level, these firms engage in surrealist accounting to get around the strict rules on the financing of political parties.

Powerless to tackle corruption, Jean-Pierre is quitting the legal system for a career in politics, where he hopes his message will have a greater impact. 'Judges here are always blocked; they never get to the bottom of these affairs,' he said in his first interview with a British newspaper. 'That's what makes you despair. There's no way I will go back to the judiciary.'

François Chéron, a leading advocate, said: 'We live in a system of absolute corruption. Politicians have completely eliminated morality from public life. They have plunged us into a crisis.'

The Socialist Party that governed France for most of the Eighties was among the first to become involved in this, and the first to be found out.

In the early Nineties, Jean-Pierre and another investigating judge, Renaud van Ruymbeke, uncovered documentation showing that, for the previous 20 years, almost every Socialist-run council had asked for a commission from companies awarded public works contracts. With commissions of 2-4 per cent, tens of millions of pounds found their way into party coffers.

The Socialists set up fictitious consultancies that charged companies for non-existent technical advice. Their fees would be passed on to the party.

Judicial investigations showed that the rot had spread outwards and upwards. Last year, Jean-Pierre discovered that, in 1983, President François Mitterrand's closest friend, the businessman Roger-Patrice Pelat, had secretly been given FFr25 million (nearly £3m) for acting as an intermediary between the North Korean government and a French firm wanting to build a hotel in Pyongyang. Jean-Pierre also found that, before Pelat's death during an insider-trading scandal in 1989, he had made undeclared payments to Mitterrand and Mitterrand's son, Gilbert.

These discoveries do not necessarily implicate the President in a corruption scandal, but do warrant further investigation, say French lawyers. Instead, Jean-Pierre was transferred last year, and the government has failed to replace him. As a result, the dossier is languishing in his former office in Le Mans.

That is the way of things here. Henri Emmanuelli, the former Socialist Party treasurer who was recently elected as first secretary, has been charged over his alleged role in running fictitious consultancies. But his dossier has been buried in the legal system for the past year.

Otherwise, the party's leaders have squashed any investigations which threatened them. The scandals nevertheless did immense damage to the Socialists' reputation — damage which the right-wing parties that won last year's parliamentary elections were quick to exploit.

But that was before the Pont a Mousson affair. In 1987, Nantes's right-wing council awarded the firm Pont a Mousson a multi-million-pound contract to tap the Loire for the town's drinking water. Six years later, Van Ruymbeke found the Pani Républicain (PR), which dominated the council, had received a FFr4.4m (£526,000) commission in return — exactly the sort of sting that made the Socialists rich.

Van Ruymbeke has tried unsuccessfully to find out where the FFr 4.4m was spent. He has uncovered other dubious practices within the PR, which is a member of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur's coalition government.

Like the Socialists, the PR's response is contradictory, protesting its innocence while claiming that, if it once engaged in immoral or illegal practices, it certainly no longer does so.

On both Right and Left, politicians claim recent laws have cleaned up party finances and introduced equitable criteria for awarding public contracts. Judges such as Jean-Pierre will have no truck with these arguments. Describing the laws as 'completely inefficient', he said there was still scarcely a public contract awarded without money passing under the table.

For him, the most depressing aspect of these affairs lies elsewhere, in the inability of investigating judges to bring culprits to trial. In France, such judges depend on public prosecutors, who depend on the Minister of Justice. In theory, the Minister cannot stop an investigation but, in practice, there are many ways of doing so, said Jean-Pierre. 'In France, there is hardly ever a judgment in these cases — or rarely. So there is a sense of impunity among wrongdoers.'

Like the rest of the West facing unresolvable economic crisis?

What the Bretton Woods exchange-rate regime provided was the international order which ensured that the fruits of this bargain could be seized through currency convertibility, opening markets and orderly exchange rate adjustments. The domestic bargain and the international bargain were mutually reinforcing. What wrecked both, in Eichengreen's view, was the growth of capital mobility, as capital controls were circumvented and then lowered as they became harder to police. At Bretton Woods, Keynes had correctly insisted that capital controls were essential to the effective functioning of the system. But as the 1960s wore on business exploited the loopholes to invest abroad — and undermined the effectiveness of the domestic bargain. Capitalists, Eichengreen writes, now had an exit option and did not have to bargain with governments or unions.

Equally, the growth of capital mobility made it harder to defend the fixed exchange rates set by the IMF. In the early 1970s the combination of US trade weakness and destabilising speculation wrecked the system. Then, right-wing commentators hailed the collapse as signalling a new period of growth, just as they did after the collapse of the exchange rate mechanism last year. Financial speculation would rescue the world from regulation, corporatism and government-led efforts at creating full employment Instead the world growth rate has halved and currency instability exploded, as the graphs dramatically show.

In the mid-1990s the world financial system is spinning out of control. The stock of cross-border lending now exceeds a quarter of the industrialised countries' GDP. International bank assets are double the value of world trade. The volume of business in the currency futures markets exceeds even the flows generated by daily trade, so that the tail of the futures market is wagging the dog of the spot market. Groundless fears about what may happen in two or three years' time move current spot prices and interest rates. The world has been turned on its head.

The governments of the US, Germany or Japan do not have the financial clout to take on the new volume of speculative flows — while a host of developing countries do not even have sufficient reserves to cover the purchase of eight weeks' imports. The right of exit has been converted into economic supremacy — with London's financial markets playing a catalytic and pivotal role.

Yet this has not produced the high investment of the post-war years. By allowing capital to look for the highest return, governments have raised its price and inadvertently caused investment to shrink.

Britain and the US have the freest financial systems, thus demanding and receiving the highest returns in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But as a result they have the lowest levels of investment, and consequently the lowest levels of savings. But time horizons have been foreshortened everywhere, and economies can only achieve low inflation with high unemployment The stability of the post-war era has been replaced by a new instability; good for the brokers and currency traders, bad for employment and investment.

Like the emerging 'economic tigers'' of the Pacific Rim?

IN THE annals of crime of this terrible century, Indonesia's assault against East Timor ranks high, not only because of its scale — perhaps the greatest death toll relative to the population since the Holocaust — but because it would have been so easy to prevent, and to bring to an end at any time. There is no need for threats to bomb Jakarta, or even to impose sanctions on the aggressor. It would suffice for the great powers to refrain from their eager participation in Indonesia's crimes — to stop putting guns into the hands of the killers and torturers while joining them in robbery of the offshore oil of the Timor Gap.

There is no excuse for any ignorance about these matters with the appearance of the 1994 edition of John Pilger's book Distant Voices, with its powerful and revealing chapters on East Timor.

The West and Japan have been willing partners in Indonesia's conquest and annexation of the former Portuguese colony. As Pilger documents, it was well before Indonesia began its campaign of subversion and terror in 1975, followed by direct invasion on December 7, that the British Embassy in Jakarta reported. "Certainly as seen from here it is in Britain's interest that Indonesia should absorb the territory as soon as and as unobtrusively as possible: and that if it comes to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations we should keep our heads down and avoid siding against the Indonesian government.''

Australia shared this judgment. Pilger describes how in August 1975, Woolcott advised in secret cables that Australia take "a pragmatic rather than a principled stand" with regard to the forthcoming invasion because "that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about." Along with the ritual reference to "the Australian defence interest," Woolcott suggested that a favourable treaty on the Timor Gap "could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia...than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor." He recommended a preference for "Kissingerian realism" over "Wilsonian idealism" — a distinction that can perhaps be detected in actual practice, with a powerful enough microscope.

The reasons for support for Indonesia's crimes went well beyond oil and "defence interests", including control of a deep-water passage for nuclear submarines. Indonesia has been an honoured ally ever since General Suharto came to power in 1965 with a "boiling bloodbath" that was "The West's best news for years in Asia" (Time), a "staggering mass slaughter of Communists and pro-Communists", mostly landless peasants, that provided a "gleam of light in Asia" (New York Times). Euphoria knew no bounds, along with praise for the "Indonesian moderates" who prevailed (NYT) and their leader, who is "at heart benign" (Economist).

Not only did the welcome bloodbath destroy the only mass-based political party in Indonesia, but it opened the rich resources of the country to Western exploitation and even justified the American war in Vietnam, which "provided a shield for the sharp reversal of Indonesia's shift toward Communism," as Freedom House soberly explained with no reservations. Such favours are not quickly forgotten.

Woolcott offered some illustrations of "Kissingerian realism". Noting with diplomatic understatement that "The United States might have some influence on Indonesia at present", he reported that Kissinger had instructed US Ambassador David Newsom to avoid the Timor issue and cut down Embassy reporting, allowing "events to take their course". Newsom informed Woolcott that if Indonesia were to invade, the US hoped it would do so "effectively, quickly, and not use our equipment" - 90 per cent of its weapons supply.

Another lesson in realism was given by UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, celebrated for his courageous defence of international law and human rights. "The United States wished things to turn out as they did," he writes in his memoirs, "and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success." Moynihan cites figures of 60,000 killed in the first few months, "almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the second world war,'' a foretaste of still greater successes soon to come.

Western governments were fully aware of what was happening throughout, contrary to subsequent pretence. As revealed in leaked internal records, Kissinger's worst fear was that his complicity in the aggression might become public, and "used against me" by real or imagined political enemies. Cable traffic shows that after "Suharto was given the green light" the main concern of the Embassy and State Department was "about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware" of the American role, according to Philip Liechty, then a senior CIA officer in Jakarta, in an interview with Pilger.

Weapons provided by the US were limited strictly to self-defence. That posed no problem for Kissingerian realism: "And we can't construe a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self defence?" Kissinger asked with derision when the question was raised in internal discussion. An independent East Timor would be "communist" by the usual criteria: it might not follow orders in a sprightly enough manner, interfering with the "national interest". New arms were sent including counter-insurgency equipment; "everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn't have any guns," Liechty comments..

By 1977 Indonesia found itself short of weapons, an indication of the scale of its attack. The Carter Administration accelerated the arms flow. Britain joined in as atrocities peaked in 1978, while France announced that it would sell arms to Indonesia and protect it from any public "embarrassment". Others, too, sought to gain what profit they could from the slaughter and torture of Timorese.

The press added its contribution. Coverage of East Timor in the United States had been high in 1974-5, amidst concerns over the breakup of the Portuguese empire. As another "boiling bloodbath" proceeded, coverage declined, keeping largely to the lies and apologetics of the State Department and Indonesian generals. By 1978, as the slaughter reached genocidal levels, coverage reached flat zero. The same was true in Canada, another leading supporter of Indonesia. In 1990, the issue of Timor received some attention when Iraq invaded Kuwait, eliciting a response from the West rather unlike its reaction to Indonesia's vastly more bloody invasion and annexation of a small oil-rich country next door. Much ingenuity was displayed in explaining that the distinction did not lie in the locus of power and profit, but in some more subtle quality that preserves Anglo-American virtue. Similar gyrations had been undertaken a decade earlier to justify the radically different reaction to simultaneous atrocities in Cambodia and Timor; crucially different, to be sure, in that the latter could have been readily terminated.

Some commentators were forthright. Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans explained in 1990, "The world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of acquisition by force." Since "there is no binding legal obligation not to recognise the acquisition of territory that was acquired by force," Australia may proceed to share Timor's oil with the conqueror. The dispensation would presumably not have extended to a Libya-Iraq treaty on Kuwaiti oil. Meanwhile prime minister Hawke declared that "big countries cannot invade small neighbours and get away with it" (referring to Iraq and Kuwait); "would-be aggressors will think twice before invading smaller neighbours," secure in the lesson that "the rule of law must prevail over the rule of force in international relations" — at least, when the "national interest" so dictates.

The Timor issue reached threshold again in November 1991, when Indonesian troops attacked a graveyard commemoration of an earlier assassination, massacring hundreds of people and severely beating two US reporters. The tactical error called for the standard cover-up, deemed satisfactory by Western leaders. Oil exploration proceeded on course; contracts with Australian, British, Japanese, Dutch, and American companies were reported in the six months following the massacre. "To the capitalist governors," a Timorese priest wrote, "Timor's petroleum smells better than Timorese blood and tears."

The primary reason why Indonesia might consider "taking the shoe off' is given in the final words of Pilger's chapters on East Timor. The reason, he writes, is "the enduring heroism of the people of East Timor, who continue to resist the invaders even as the crosses multiply on the hillsides," a constant "reminder of the fallibility of brute power and of the cynicism of others".

However courageous they may be, the people of East Timor have no hope without outside support. No amount of courage and unity will prevent Indonesian transmigration, atrocities, and destruction of the indigenous culture, funded and supported by the great powers.

Though the pace has been glacial, support for Timorese rights has finally reached a significant level in the United States. The truth began to seep into the public domain, compelling the media to take some notice and raising impediments to the "pragmatic course".

A headline in the Boston Globe on the anniversary of the 1991 massacre reads: "Indonesian general, facing suit, flees Boston." Sent to study at Harvard after the massacre, the general was charged in a suit on behalf of a woman whose son was among those murdered in the graveyard (as were many more afterwards, as revealed by Pilger and the courageous Indonesian academic George Aditjondro, who released investigations based on 20 years' research that supports the most gruesome estimates of atrocities).

Popular awareness and activism have become strong enough so that favoured mass murderers can no longer find a comfortable refuge in the United States, as had been learned a year earlier by one of Guatemala's leading killers, General Hector Gramajo, in a similar manner.

Congress has imposed barriers on military aid and training, which the White House has had to evade in ever more devious ways, particularly in recent months. Sensing the opportunity, Britain moved effectively under Thatcher's guiding hand to take first place in the highly profitable enterprise of war crimes. As explained by defence procurement minister Alan Clark, "I don't really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another" when there is money to be made by arms sales. We must insist on "reserving the right to bomb niggers," as Lloyd George recognised 60 years ago.

John Pilger's recent work, including the remarkable documentary Death Of A Nation, based on his visit to East Timor, threatens to arouse the Western public to a heightened awareness of what is being perpetrated in their names. Its great significance is attested by the angry response it has evoked from high government officials. To draw aside the veils of deceit that conceal the real world is no small achievement. But it will join other failed efforts unless the public response goes beyond mere awareness, to actions to end shameful complicity in crime.

Like Italy where an exceptional handful of honest judges and lawyers have been forced into resignation, and the crooked police, politicians and other establishment figures they have been jailing for two years in a revolutionary upheaval have been let out by a new semi-fascist regime?

The 'free market' is a corrupt world with only an illusion of civilisation in a few better-off states which themselves have no real democracy for the least-achieving 40% of society, and whose general prosperity is collapsing, anyway, not to mention their cultural integrity.

And what can be done about this total ideological chaos on the planet? As much as it may resemble trying to demolish Everest with a nail file, the only answer is to fight for a correct understanding of world developments and fight to build a party of revolutionary theory around that understanding. And there are excellent historical precedents for having to begin on only the smallest scale for decades before any sizeable communist party movement developed (the period between the first and second internationals, the early stages of Bolshevism). Local single-issue activist struggles are not necessarily a contradiction to helping build a party of revolutionary theory. 

But it is the development and propagandising of the correct understanding of the world which is the crucial need. The huge task of reorganising society along rational lines is inconceivable without a strong cadre force completely united on basic philosophy. Left 'democratic' coalitions are utterly hopeless for such revolutionary leadership. Lenin's party is the classic historic example of the only successful organisations to make a revolution. With the friendliest compromising will in the world, such a party can not be built without agreement on the fundamentals of history and revolutionary theory. Agreeing a modern critique of the world is the practical way forward to clarifying all questions, building a cadre party, and agitating as widely as possible on as many issues as possible. Larger activist groups endlessly boast of their size but they have no basic agreement on fundamental philosophy. The ILWP already has far more serious united revolutionary cadres than any of them. Week by week it tackles every issue facing mankind, with endless enormous scope for improving its understanding of all matters and providing a framework for a continuous development of cadres in depth and breadth, all contributing to the steady expansion of skilled leadership which alone will make a revolution. Sectarian 'left' subjectivism and wrong historical understanding of all kinds alone gets in the way, plus the endless opportunism of 'left' reformists. Exposing these obstacles is a permanent task. Build Leninism. Alf Lee

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
 [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]    
No.78 Friday July 15 1994

The whole of capitalism is a crooked rat race which needs to be permanently ended by communist revolution.

The scalded reaction from MPs of all parties, and large sections of the media, to the exposure of the £1,000 per question scam operated by 'Honorable Members', suggests that a very raw nerve indeed has been touched.

There is nothing new about bent MPs, and most normal people already suspect that the whole parliamentary racket is run on sleazy backhanders by MPs on the make. Yet the thrust of the hysteria and venom is not directed against this, but against the journalists who had the nerve to report it.

It is becoming clear why the Birt Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has had its right to rip everyone off for an extortionate annual licence fee renewed for another ten years. Its pro-establishment biased coverage of this scandal will no doubt earn it a few more brownie points.

Just as sick as the BBC is the Labour Party, some of whose members have been jumping up and down to compete with the Tories at expressing their 'outrage' at such "journalistic entrapment". One of them has even gone so far as suggesting the possibility of criminal charges against the journalist for attempting to corrupt and bribe an MP.

This is from the same party who express moral indignation about meeting the Italian government because it has fascists in it, and protests about Berlusconi's increasing control of the Italian broadcasting machinery. Yet they would be quite happy to censor the press in this country, if that's what it takes to protect their own lucrative parliamentary careers.

Utterly predictably, the parliamentary mafia have decided to investigate themselves for another six months or so, before producing another set of guidelines which will help to cover up their money-making activities. No doubt there are quite a few bucks to be made (on expenses and research etc.) for the lucky ones who get their snouts into this particular 'enquiry' trough.

All of this can only add to the already widespread contempt with which the whole political establishment is held by the working class. It is worry about the spread of this contempt which is motivating the all-party hypocrisy that wants to blame the messenger and cover up the news.

This contempt has been reflected most recently in the European elections, which (despite all the hype about how important it was supposed to be for everyone's future) produced only a 30% turn-out.

Again, in the Monklands by-election, where all the saturation crap about what a great and loved leader John Smith was might reasonably have been expected to lead to a large Labour sympathy vote, Labour nearly lost; the seat because of widespread disgust at local Labour administration corruption.

And despite the massive media campaign promoting Tony Blair as next Labour leader, poll predictions are indicating that the great OMOV system is going to produce only a 20% turn-out among eligible trade unionist voters,- and that's from the people with a supposed vested interest in it, however feeble.

All these recent examples are small but significant indications of a general decline in support for the parliamentary racket which since 1945 has seen increasingly smaller turn-outs in local and national elections.

All the 'Honorable Members' must be wondering if they'll be tolerated at all for that much longer.

The deep unease and flagging confidence at the heart of the bourgeois establishment was expressed by Chancellor of the Exchequer Clarke when he warned that "middle class, middle England needed a sense of security". Promising 50,000 civil service redundancies the very next day is unlikely to provide it. 

That is the whole problem facing the capitalist ruling class: they can no longer provide a sense of security for anyone -including themselves.

While Parliament has always been a greedy nest of opportunists lining their pockets, it was easier to get away with, and generally ignored, when everyone had a greater sense of security and was in general relatively better-off.

Over the last twenty or so years though, the post-war anti-communist reformist boom has degenerated into the increasingly low-wage insecurity which is now the lot of the majority of people. Recent statistics show that only 40% of the 'adult population now hold full-time jobs with full employment protection, and this percentage is decreasing all the time.

The crookedness of the capitalist system (which is merely reflected in the crookedness of Parliament) has always been obscene. But now it is becoming more obviously, and more intolerably obscene, for more people, as the economic crisis deepens.

The deepest fear of all at the heart of the bourgeois establishment is that it is the whole capitalist system itself which is now becoming publicly discredited and at risk.

This unspeakable fear was on display at the G7 summit, where the leading imperialists, facing the gravest economic crisis this century, addressed it - by simply ignoring it and hoping 'everything will come all right in the end'.

As foreign exchange and stock market turbulence continue to wreck the best-laid plans of the smartest players, and make fools of the idiot reformists like Blair, it is becoming clearer to everyone that there isn't a hope in hell of a 'recovery', -  that what is on the cards instead is a financial catastrophe, worse even than that of 1929, which will plunge all the imperialist powers into slump turmoil and chauvinist warmongering. The bourgeoisie know that this will inevitably lead to massive spontaneous revolt against the obscene class system, and eventual organized communist revolution against the entire capitalist system, finally completing the process whose modern period began with the Bolsheviks in 1917.

The British ruling class are being hammered from every direction, and it is showing in all its institutions, such as the Royal Family, the Church, Parliament, the Civil Service, the judiciary, - and everywhere else.

The British currency has already been humiliated in the ERM debacle of 'Black Wednesday'. British industry has been crippled by rival superior Japanese and German imperialism. And now Britain's 'special ally', US imperialism, has just delivered another kick in the groin by publicly siding with German imperialism - urging it to give leadership - at the very moment that Britain decided to insult Germany over its EU leadership choice.

The public US backing for German representation on the UN Security Council (no doubt as part of some secret trade-war deal) could well deliver another massive blow to decrepit British imperialist pretensions.

Faced with this historic decline of British imperialist power and influence, and the massive financial crisis facing the whole of mankind (as the postwar credit-fuelled boom crashes in the contradiction of its massive unrepayable debts and surplus value 'overproduction' crisis), all that the diseased minds of the British political establishment can do is try and cover up their sordid rackets, and sell useless reformist dreams, which have already failed, to people who have given up listening to them.

Build Leninism. Build the ILWP.

D.Watts

Letter

The very strange case of the 'missing' £200m at the Welsh Office — no different then the rest of British imperialism — crooked, incompetent and ready to be overthrown.

£200 million of the Welsh tax payers money has just been written off with no adequate explanation from the Welsh Office.

This appalling lack of accountability just shows how rotten the Welsh Office is, and the system behind it.

"Yesterday, the Public Accounts Committee picked out a number of accounting errors at the Welsh Office including;
- Unacceptable incorrect payments of almost £6m to Welsh Training and Enterprise Councils in 1992-93.
- The underpayment by £1.12m of allowances to people on training programmes.
- The loss of records involving £120m of spending on roads and the inability to find £37m of audited claims.
- An overpayment of almost £1m to local authorities for community-charge grants. And the overpayment of community charge grants to local authorities of £963,000 was seen to be a 'result' of miscalculations and errors by Welsh Office staff.

Wales is ruled by the Welsh Office, 2,300 civil servants spending roughly £6 billion a year with over 100 nominated bodies or what is called quangos. These quangos are headed by Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood, who appoints more then 1,500 people to these bodies.

Failed Tory Party supporters do very well, thank you, on these quangos. People such as defeated MP Ian Grist, appointed chair of South Glamorgan Health Authority (£20,000 a year for a 3-day week), Gwyn Jones head of the Welsh Development Agency, who resigned in disgrace, still chairs the BBC Council for Wales, and chief of the new Welsh Higher Education Funding Council, is another failed Tory candidate, living in Surrey.

The people of Wales must be fed up to the back teeth with these "jobs-for-the-boys", these crooks in pin-stripped suits are undemocratically elected to these posts by the extreme' right-wing Tory MP John Redwood.

True accountability will only be forthcoming when we in Wales (or for that matter, Britain as a whole) succeed in establishing a socialist system where workers themselves control and run their own affairs. Spread the Bulletin. Build the ILWP.
M.E. (Cardiff)