Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
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No 0774 October 25th 1994                                                                                                                                10p 

More on the essential class-compromise of revisionism as the fascist slump-decadence signals multiply throughout the 'free' world.

More signs that capitalism's crisis is speeding up and deepening help to explain the strange phenomenon of the bourgeois propaganda machine giving publicity to the ex-communist philosopher Hobsbawm's view that the free-market system is collapsing anyway.

'Marxist' revisionism only evolved in the first place because the ruling class and its petty-bourgeois collaborators in the academic and media worlds realised that it was better to understand the proletarian revolutionary critique of imperialist crisis and to corrupt it, than just to denounce its 'extremist' advocates and arrest them as often as possible.

Revisionists do not need to be conscious stooges of bourgeois-imperialist know-how and domination in order to stab revolutionary proletarian ideology and organisation in the back with their endless cynicism and defeatism.

They only need a degree of several middle-class failings such as conceited arrogance and subjective complacency to 'innocently' perform the task brilliantly of misleading or undermining the anti-imperialist struggle (with the fight for clear revolutionary theory, and disciplined unity around that theory, at its heart).

Revisionist 'Marxism' has reached peaks of confusion-making in the workers movement just when the living organism called bourgeois society has needed this smokescreen most to aid its survival. The lethal treacherous bankruptcy of the vast par-
ties of the Second International, founded by Engels, at the time of the First World War and the first triumph of Leninist revolution, is an example.

The Second International had not stopped operating in order to perform its petty-bourgeois class function aiding imperialism's survival. It actively led the way into class-collaboration with all kinds of new revisionist 'understanding' of how the 'circumstances had changed' in this latest crisis, making all previous marxist strategy 'obsolete or inadequate'.

That Hobsbawm will probably end up a plain rightwing cynic is not important. At the moment, he is still being presented as 'the last marxist', and he has made a powerfully coherent analysis of the imminent collapse of the 'New World Order', justifying all the publicity he has been given. Hobsbawm is no fool, and clearly he speaks for more than just a lone academic philosophy voice. He is simply expressing best what a large section of the intelligentsia are fearing, - that the 'free world' system is falling apart, and that people who like living comfortably under it had better have their wits about them if they do not want to perish too, along with whatever else of the old order cannot be saved.

Obviously at the moment in the aftermath of the shock of soviet revisionism's collapse, few revisionist 'Marxists' bother pretending to be part of organised parties of communist revolution. But these are the same people who were doing exactly this only a few years ago in the dying days of the British CP, and in 'Official' Communist Parties all over Europe and beyond.

These treacherous revisionist tendencies are not at all unhappy to posture in middle-class and labour movement circles as 'revolutionaries', when it suits them. They, or something very much like them, will be back.

A fuller list of the exact deceptions and distortions Hobsbawm is into, will hopefully become available once his new book is actually published, but there is plenty to be going on with meanwhile (see also elsewhere this issue).

In new extracts reprinted, Hobsbawm ventures into some very murky guesswork about why the imperialist economic crisis is different from previous crises such as the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the 1930s Depression:

"The economic miracles of the Golden Age had rested on rising real incomes in the 'developed market economies': mass-consumption economies need mass consumers with enough income for hi-tech consumer durables. Most of these incomes had been earned as wages in high-wage labour markets. These were now at risk, though mass consumers were more essential to the economy than ever. But in the rich countries the mass market had been stabilised by the shift of labour from industry to tertiary occupations, which had, in general, much more stable employment, and by the vast growth in transfer incomes (mostly social security and welfare). These represented something like 30 per cent of the joint GNP of the Western developed countries in the late 1980s. In the 1920s they had probably stood at less than 4 per cent of GNP. This may well explain why the Wall Street stock exchange collapse of 1987, the largest since 1929, did not lead to a world capitalist slump like that of the 1930s.

"However, precisely these two stabilisers were now being undermined. As the Short 20th Century ended, Western governments and economic orthodoxy agreed that the cost of public social security and welfare was too high and must be reduced, and mass reduction of employment in the hitherto most stable sectors of tertiary occupations - public employment, banking and finance, office-work became common. These were not immediate dangers to the global economy, so long as the global number of those with rising real incomes grew faster than the rest.

"To put it brutally, if the global economy could discard a minority of poor countries as economically uninteresting and irrelevant, it could also do so with the very poor within the borders of all its countries, so long as the number of potentially interesting consumers was sufficiently large.

"Seen from the impersonal heights from which business economists and corporate accountants survey the scene, who needed the 10 per cent of the US population whose real hourly earnings since 1979 had fallen by up to 16 per cent?"

This is the essential subjective-idealist philosophy of revisionism, utterly hostile to dialectical materialism.

Having correctly described (but without naming it) the ever-growing process of monopolisation in the international free-market economy, with ever-greater concentration of profit centres using increasing proportions of expensive fixed capital, - resulting in more and more very poor Third World countries, fewer and fewer very rich countries, and mounting permanent mass unemployment everywhere, - Hobsbawm now sets the scene for reformist ideology to pretend to really grab misguided capitalism by the throat!

He seems to see Western governments simply 'deciding' to axe social security and welfare because its costs were too high; hand capitalist big business simply sacking hordes of workers, tertiary included, - because they were happier seeing fewer in employment provided that there were still plenty of high-paid employees left to keep the consumer boom going.

There is a Kautskyite hint of super-imperialism at work here: the almighty monopoly-bourgeoisies which remain in dominant control, - principally the US ruling class with a bit of help from Germany and Japan, - have sensibly stabilised consumption by transfer payments, and could, Hobsbawm seems to think, still steer clear of a major collapse if they do not get too brutally greedy and squeeze more than 10 per cent of poor countries, and 10 per cent of poor proletarians in the richer countries, off the gravy train.

Even though he admits that anarchic world economic forces could end up with no effective control over them at all, this Hobsbawm perspective is philosophically still a complete capitulation to bourgeois idealism.

Wall Street Crash mark 2 has not quite happened yet, and a 1930s Depression has not quite followed it yet, - mainly because the West has indulged in yet more insane credit creation and international debt accumulation, - the very causes of the threatened slump in the first place.

The now crippling overweight of 'surplus' finance capital threatening to topple over at any minute and crush the whole free-market world system in a holocaust of bankruptcies, - is the intrinsic cancer of capitalism's relentless monopolisation of profiteering, not a lucky windfall of 30 per cent extra stable GNP from rampaging banking industry speculative employment, and scared imperialist government 'welfare' hand-outs.

What the acceptable 'left' establishment philosopher Hobsbawm no longer wants to see, oblivious of the 'marxist' label still disgracefully attached to him, - is the insoluble antagonistic contradiction at the very heart of the free-market system.

Because technological innovation and monopoly reorganisation is irrepressible under cut-throat competition for world economic domination, the proletarian masses are eventually transformed into workers who can no longer put up with being exploited by a system which periodically breaks down into slump, war, or even worse, - ultimately holding back the development of the productive forces rather than facilitating them, capitalism's main claim to fame.

The resulting endless class conflict forces imperialist bourgeoisies into endless trade-war contradictions, eventually ending up in shooting wars, civil wars, and revolutionary wars.

Precisely how a system of total anarchy eventually breaks down is obviously unknowable, - but that it will break down completely is inevitable.

In this context of the unanswerable marxist scientific analysis of capitalist contradiction, Hobsbawm's dithering defeatist speculation about the possibility of super-imperialism surviving as a system by taking total exploitation of the poorest and most disadvantaged on earth to its ultimate murderous extreme, - is just academic misery-mongering, and avoiding the real revolutionary issue.

In the final analysis, the essence of the petty bourgeois class position of revisionism is, obviously, that the free-market system is really not that bad, all things considered, even if it is falling apart. For those with a conscience, being a 'left' is the answer, - but a comfortable left, not a revolutionary one, and with a safe reliable job. This is where Hobsbawm lurks, exposing the catastrophic failings of capitalism, but ending up concluding that there is not much can be done about it, and that it is no real tragedy that this is so.

But to sit compromising on such an uncomfortable fence, revisionists need endlessly to delude themselves that all the really monstrous barbarism capitalism has been guilty of, - such as regular fascist dictatorships of which Nazi German imperialism has always been accepted as the ultimate brutal example,
- has been by way of exception to the general rule that the world in the market-capitalist era has been a civilised place, and is steadily becoming more so. Hobsbawm says things to the contrary.

But the practice that he lives, - comfortable with life in the West and dismissing the actual history of the Soviet Union as irrelevant to what socialism should be like, - and only a partisan communist to the extent that 'communist' is limited to people or actions that Hobsbawm feels safe he can describe as perfect and blameless to his university common room friends, - implies that he does not really expect to come to much harm under capitalism.

He should think again. Singling out Nazi German imperialism as the extreme of the barbarism that the West is 'potentially' always capable of, is one of the very oldest Stalinist-revisionist stunts, - partly as a half-hearted defence of what the Soviet Union was smeared as being like among the 'free world' middle class; but really more as a defence of class-collaboration with the rest of the West.

But fascism has never been, nor could ever be, anything more than routine capitalist repression taken to theatrical extremes. The basically inhuman and arbitrary violence is inseparable from capitalism itself, - fundamental to every phase of the triumphant march of bourgeois world history for 500 years and more,- from the Italian city states to the barbaric genocide inflicted by the most 'modern' of imperialisms, - US monopoly capitalism, - at both ends of its 'more enlightened' career, - against the Indians of North America, and more recently against the peoples of Vietnam and Indo-China.

There was nothing that Hitler Germany inflicted that had not been perfected decades earlier by British imperialism, - from concentration camps and the random killing of innocent hostages as a warning to everyone else, - to civilian massacres by aerial bombardment.

And while official fascist imperialism was indeed relentlessly barbaric, a much more important question is the deliberate direct complicity of the rest of the West in setting up Hitler Germany in the first place to use as a potential armed weapon against the young Soviet workers state.

Hobsbawm's Popular Frontism is far more shameful than any unconditional defence of the Soviet Union's actions which Hobsbawm now admits he never gave or believed in. The fatal beginnings of Gorbachev' s class-collaborating liquidationism ("merging the best of capitalism with the best of socialism"), - a deluded certifiable suicide for the Soviet workers state via the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, - lay in such revisionist idiocies as the Popular Front class-collaboration with 'democratic' elements of bourgeois-imperialist society against 'fascism', wrongly regarded as being an exceptional repressive aberration to the 'normal' capitalist ruling-class domination.

The full history of the most brutal fascist tyranny of British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, American, etc, colonial-imperialist domination abroad for more than a century including long campaigns of near-genocide-proportions by all of the 'stable' monopoly-capitalist Western powers, needs relentlessly ramming down every revisionist's throat.

But the Bulletin is never short of brand new material from the current output of the capitalist media themselves, always the very best proof for a Leninist critique of imperialism.

The following account of monstrous human experiments by the demented anti-communist US ruling class is the equal to anything in the mentality of German imperialist repression and anti-communist dementia under Hitler:

The Montreal Experiments, as they were later to be known, were instituted in 1953, at the start of the cold war. They were arguably the most extravagant example of the US government's widespread programme in human experimentation. Much of it is only now coming to public attention. The CIA has admitted to supporting human behaviour control research at 150 institutions, including 44 universities and various hospitals, prisons and drug companies. In the 1970s, thousands of soldiers were unwittingly given LSD. They had been told they were testing gas masks and protective gear. The army also exposed up to 3,000 soldiers to BZ, a powerful hallucinogen, under development as a chemical weapon. The drug attacks the nervous system, causing dizziness, vomiting and immobility. Thousands more participated in a Medical Volunteer programme testing nerve gas, vaccines and antidotes.

The origins of the MKUltra programme were forged in 1951, after the Soviets had apparently persuaded Hungary's Cardinal Joszef Mindszenty, an outspoken anti-communist, to confess to espionage. Allen Dulles, head of the newly-born CIA, reasoned that the Soviets had made substantial scientific breakthroughs in behavioural control. When fresh-faced American kids, released POWs from Korean prison camps, were decanted on to the streets of American cities, passing out leaflets on the joys of communism, Eisenhower demanded action. Dulles responded by initiating an entire series of programmes in mind control, with acronyms like Bluebird, Artichoke, MKUltra, MKDelta and MKNaomi.

Ewen Cameron's work for the CIA was funded through the Society for Human Ecology, a CIA front that was connected to Cornell University in New York. Cameron and Dulles believed there was a way, through drugs, shock treatment and hypnosis, to eradicate an individual's original personality and install a new, improved one. They further believed that this procedure would eventually work-on a mass scale, giving government the tools of behaviour control. A heavily edited MKUltra document of the times reads: 'The objectives were behaviour control, behaviour-anomaly production and counter measures for opposition application of similar substances.'

The ultimate goal of the MKUltra programme, it seems, was to create an army of outwardly normal operatives programmed to carry out political assassinations. In short, their very own Manchurian Candidates. Dulles and his pals, Richard Helms, scientists Sid Gottlieb and John Gittinger, and a netherworld character called George White, believed that a truth drug was the key, and they suspected that LSD was that drug. Certainly it induced massive confusion in any subject, which was, in their view, a damned good start. In order to begin testing the CIA commandeered the entire supply of LSD produced by Swiss manufacturer Sandoz in 1953, and when Eli Lilly in the US began manufacturing the drug they commandeered its production too.

At the end of November 1953, needing an 'unwitting' victim, Gottlieb, project monitor of MKUltra, slipped a dose of LSD to Frank Olson, a chemist specialising in airborne diseases. Olson, suffering from depression and paranoia, hurled himself out of a New York City hotel window two weeks later. The CIA officially, but secretly, took the position that the LSD had triggered Olson's suicide.

Undaunted, over the next 10 years the CIA financed a series of safe houses and apartments in San Francisco and New York City. Here it would throw parties for the inhabitants of the seedy underworld - prostitutes, their clients, nightclub patrons and employees - slip them LSD and other experimental drugs and watch, often through a two-way mirror, their resulting antics.

Other patients lost their families. Linda MacDonald, a 57-year-old Vancouver woman, was admitted to the Allan when she was 25, for fatigue and depression following the birth of her fifth child. She was put into a drug-induced sleep for at least 86 days. She lost all memory of her life, including the ability to read and write. After she was released, she needed toilet training, and eventually lost her husband and six children. Many more of Cameron's former patients became destitute. Still others wasted away and died.

EWEN CAMERON READ science fiction, every night before he went to sleep. In 1948, news reports of the invention of the Cerebrophone, a tape machine that taught people while they slept, caught his eye. He had one built at the Allan. He used the repeating messages, the speaker under the pillow, the subliminal approach to a supposedly defenceless human mind, to form the bedrock of the procedure he was to call 'psychic driving'. Cameron wanted to automate psychotherapy and most of all he wanted to cure schizophrenia. He also wanted to win the Nobel prize.

By 1953, he had become convinced of the efficacy of repetition. Repetition of a key phrase, uttered by the patient in taped interviews, caused, as he wrote 'discomfort, embarrassment, aversion and resentment'. In all this storm of emotion, he reasoned, must lie insight. He had a technician create a loop in tapes so that he could play back to the patient 30-second-long repetitions of significant things she or he had related to the doctor. The impact was powerful. The patient would become obsessed by the phrase, losing sleep, losing the ability to concentrate on anything else. Cameron would often have to sedate the patient.

From sedation to experimenting with psychoactive drugs was a short step. It seemed that it was now possible, through compounds found in antihistamines, a forerunner of chlorpromazine, and barbiturates to keep the patient in a controlled sleep for 65 days without serious side-effects. Since patients objected strenuously to repetition, he tried to make them more receptive through chemistry. One of the drugs used was LSD.

Cameron's next step was to overwhelm totally the patients' old behaviour patterns. The best way to do this was through electro-shock therapy, reinforced by drugs.

Page-Russell shock treatment, one of the forms of shock therapy used at the time, was named after the two British doctors who developed it and involved an initial shock followed by five to nine smaller shocks. Page and Russell recommended using the treatment once or twice a week. By the time Cameron's treatment was standardised in 1955, he was using the procedure two or three times a day and called it 'depatterning'. Depatterning usually lasted from 15 to 30 days. According to reports from hospital workers at the time, the screaming echoed down the halls of the hospital. When the sedatives wore thin, patients would try to escape and the staff would have to chase after them.

Once the patient was completely confused in all spheres, psychic driving began. For the first three weeks, the patient was drugged into a half- sleep, a football helmet clamped on to his or her head and the 'negative' driving message played up to 20 hours a day. The message would say something simple-minded like: 'My mother hates me, my husband wants to divorce me, my children hate me. I am a failure at everything I try,' in the patient's own voice. With some patients, Cameron intensified the negative effect by running wires to their legs and shocking them at the end of the message. After three weeks, a positive message would replace the negative, with the purpose of rebuilding a new personality on the wreckage of the old. After 10 days of this, the patient was drugged into a complete sleep for two weeks, while his or her unconscious absorbed the new dominating force and conveniently forgot everything he or she had experienced.

In 1957, Cameron received his first CIA grant and stepped up the intensity of his psychic driving procedure. He also began work on sensory deprivation, another even more extreme 'therapy' of which he and Dulles were hopeful. He had a 'box' built in the converted stable behind his hospital and left one woman in the box for 35 days. Before prescribing this treatment, Cameron had diagnosed the 52-vear-old Mary C: '... conversion reaction in a woman of the involutional age with mental anxiety: hypochondriatic.' Marv C was going through the menopause. Cameron also injected some sensory deprivation patients with curare, a paralytic, presumably to immobilise them further.

In 1957, three years after my mother's release, Cameron had stepped up his treatments under the direct encouragement of the CIA, who financed him in a behavioural control project called MKUltra. For the next six or seven years, hundreds of Canadians were experimented on, without their consent, while the psychiatric profession stood silently by, bound by the codes of its calling. From 1957 until 1963, despite the misgivings of many in government and clinical medicine, Cameron became one of the most funded, published and renowned psychiatrists in the West.

Cameron had been a friend of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, ever since Dulles had chosen him to serve as the American psychiatric representative at Nuremberg, where he was to judge whether Rudolf Hess was fit to stand trial. The Scots-born psychiatrist was a naturalised American who, though he refused to become a Canadian resident, after the war became the chief of his own hospital in Montreal, a 30-minute drive from the US border. Crucially to the CIA, this meant that the experiments they wanted Cameron to carry out could be conducted on Canadians. As CIA psychologist John Gittinger pointed out in a deposition made during the 1980s, Canadians were deemed to be of little interest to the American public.

In 1977, with the release of documents under the US Freedom of Information Act, Cameron was discovered to have run the most extreme trials in mind control, using massive amounts of shock treatments, drugs like LSD and PCP, and particularly invasive forms of therapy he had devised called 'depatterning' and 'psychic driving'.

The CIA claims that it ceased funding Cameron in 1961. Some researchers insist that the agency continued up until the end of 1963. Either way, Cameron left the Allan Memorial in 1964 after his funding evaporated. Three years later he died of a heart attack while mountain climbing near his home in Lake Placid, New York. The same year an independent study by Doctors Swartz and Termansen, commissioned by Cameron's successor, found that 50 per cent of patients relapsed within a year and of those who had reached the third stage of depatterning, 23 per cent suffered physical complications and 60 per cent persistent amnesia. Depatterning and psychic driving did not work.

By the beginning of the 1980s information about the Cameron experiments began to trickle into the press.

The newspaper reports that alerted us had been generated by a lawsuit brought against the CIA by nine of Cameron's patients in Washington in 1979. Years of discovery and pre-trial motions by lawyers Joe Rauh and Jim Turner had turned up tens of thousands of pages of documentation and depositions that outlined CIA financing of Ewen Cameron and other doctors and clinicians. Joe Rauh, a celebrated human rights advocate who had fought Senator McCarthy and represented the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in their bid for desegregated delegations to party conventions, had taken on the case partly in order to prove that 'the law is the only check on a secret agency in a democratic society'.

AFTER MORE than 10 years of depositions and ClA diversions and delay the lawsuit wound to an end. Finally, at the beginning of the Bush presidency, the CIA settled for the largest sum of money possible without the formal approval of the Attorney-General. To the nine plaintiffs and the lawyers it was a hard-won victory', but it was not enough.

In Canada, there are still some 50 lawsuits lodged against the Royal Victoria Hospital, home of the Allan Memorial Institute. Despite a $100,000 pay-off to each of 69 patients, many remain dissatisfied, claiming their lives and those of their families were ruined. There has been no apology from the Canadian government, even though it continued to fund Cameron's mind control experiments after the Americans had stopped. Moreover, there has been no admission of guilt from either the Canadian or American government.

Richard Helms, in his deposition to Joe Rauh in 1985, admitted that he had destroyed most of the MKUltra documents in 1973, during the government-wide panic caused by Watergate. But MKUltra continued well into the 1970s, and many CIA observers say there is little reason to believe it does not continue today under a different set of acronyms. Credited among conspiracy theorists with triggering everything from CIA/mob assassination plots to the emergence of lethal viruses to the proliferation of the drug culture, MKUltra remains a great un-researched black hole which influences every nightmare in modern culture. For many of its victims, the nightmare will only end with death.

This bourgeois account suffers from the anti-communist cretinism that nazi repression is justified by the endless slander-rumours against the Soviet workers state by the Western propaganda machinery (e.g. over the old opportunist Mindszenty, and turned American POWs from Korea, in this case, - propaganda which in this same period was securing an entry into the Guinness Book of Records for a totally fictitious list of 30 or so supposed dead Soviet cosmonauts, all cindered by alleged faulty Soviet science, before Yuri Gagarin's sensational first earth orbit in 1961); - but the real lesson of fascism, as intrinsic to all anti-communist repression, is clear to any who want to understand it.

That nazi tyranny has never been out of favour in the West when considered necessary to keep the 'free world' safe from communism, is clear from endless capitalist press admissions that have not even bothered trying to justify the brutal barbarism on the sick excuse-lies that communism would be committing even worse crimes, - such as this latest report from the West's greatest hope for 'democratic' cosmetics within the grotesque tyranny of Latin American monopoly-capitalist exploitation, - Brazil:

BRAZIL'S president-elect, Fernando Henrique-Cardoso, has revealed plans for federal intervention into the policing of Rio de Janeiro, once he takes office in January. His statement follows this week's police raid on a Rio shanty town in which at least 13 people were killed, including three children.

During a visit to Moscow, Mr Cardoso told Brazilian reporters: "The Rio police are one of the sources of the violence. It cannot be allowed to continue".

The current president, Itamar Franco, yesterday dispatched the justice minister, Alexandre Dupeyrat, to meet the security forces in Rio. But an army operation to clean up the city has been ruled out for now, partly out of fear the soldiers might themselves become "contaminated" by contact with the drugs trade.

Families of the dead in Nova Brasilia claimed police hauled some targets out of bed before executing them, contradicting police claims that all the victims died in crossfire.

Even if their objective were simply to combat crime, the Rio police would face a thankless task in trying to control the favelas, the densely populated networks of steep alleyways which provide the traffickers with unassailable hilltop hideouts.

As it is, the police are themselves deeply involved in the cocaine business — both as traffickers and consumers — and their actions are all too frequently intended to reinforce their stake in the trade rather than to stop it.

"They do what they want," said Rubens Cesar Fernandes, the chairman of the civic reform group, Viva Rio.

And the political commentator, Carlos Heitor Cony, warned: "Little by little the population is going over to the side of the traffickers. That is how revolutions begin."

Even when fascist-gangster regimes of the most brutal and mindless violence such as the ignorant ruling-class rabble which has ruled Haïti for decades (under Washington's protection), finally force US imperialism to depose them again for a 'clean up', - it remains blindingly clear from just the innocent capitalist press reports themselves that only the same old monopoly-bourgeois dictatorship (the real rulers of every free-market economy country) is being quietly helped back into power by the American intervention forces who were plainly there to make sure communist revolution did not take over, not to guarantee that the old order really was being overthrown:

Usually the gaming tables at the El Rancho casino are covered with towers of chips, and the place is packed. But on this night the chandeliers, the plush carpet and smoked glass, are enjoyed by just a handful.

For El Rancho's regular clientele is the Haitian rich, those known in state department parlance as MREs — Morally Repugnant Elites. If the slums of Cité Soleil are the heartland of returned President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, then places like El Rancho, in the hills above Port-au-Prince, are Cedras country — home to supporters of the 1991 military coup.

Suddenly, these people are on the wrong side. Yet it is them that US policy aims to win over, believing their know-how is crucial to Haiti's survival.

"Look at business now," says El Rancho's manager, Gerald Nicolas, gesturing towards the empty blackjack tables. A mulatto who has made a handsome living from the MRE class, Mr Nicolas says he and his customers are scared of the masses' hunger for revenge against the often light-skinned elite.

Colonel Leonée Qualo, an El Rancho regular, no longer carries a gun. He gave it up when the Americans arrived. He has learned a new way of talking too. Now he sees a good side to the president. "He's a real leader. He knows how to talk to the people," says the retired officer.

Most of the punters feel the need to pay similar lip-service.

The US is keen to reassure the MREs that their lives and money are safe. This week USAID officials unveiled their economic blueprint for Haiti's recovery. Noticeably absent was an increase in the minimum wage, a cornerstone of Father Aristide's brief presidency. The elite do not want increased wages, and nor do US corporations who use the cheapest labour in the Western hemisphere. So the legal minimum will remain at its 1983 level, at around £1 a day.

Instead, the US development agency called for decentralisation of control of the economy, which would weaken President Aristide's grip on state industries. It also suggested a move away from the domination of the economy by a handful of big monopolies. But since the US military has issued juicy contracts to several of Haiti's richest families — the monopolists themselves — the elite probably do not feel too threatened.

The manager of the casino is happy. Now there are no arrogant soldiers demanding credit when they lose at roulette.

The return of Fr Aristide has also meant the lifting of the embargo against Haiti, and the imminent return of cheap petrol.

So the MREs will probably work with the new power in the land.

Mr Nicolas, who admits that he and his friends once talked about assassinating Fr Aristide in exile, says, "in Haiti you can't have democracy now, it's not ready." The people are too uneducated, too easily swayed. "Here," he says, "you need someone who has the power."

It is not so much the bodies that littered the streets at dawn that most articulately testified to the system the Americans helped build in Haiti, as the economic wasteland. The last time US troops moved into Haiti was in 1915; the start of a 19-year occupation that took the lives of 5,000 Haitians and set the foundations for decades of American economic domination.

Haiti is a land of economic extremes, with 95 per cent of the population living below the poverty line. From the beginning, ruling elites have monopolised trade to and from Haiti. USAid intervened in 1982 with the overt motive of eradicating this poverty, but managed only to shift the economy from subsistence agriculture to dependence on low-wage, export-orientated assembly industries.

Now the Americans are having another go and a $1.2 billion international aid programme is 'building Haiti from scratch'. To the Left, it is a refinement of the traditionally exploitative capitalist role; to the Right, it is money down the drain - 'pouring a gallon into a thimble,' said one official.

USAid plans shown to The Observer amount to a potent injection of market economics into a vicious feudal system. USAid will be offering compensation to victims of the regime in the form of shares in newly privatised ventures.

The Port Authority and the telephone company — to date the private property of Fraph and run by drug dealers — have become the heralds of the new private sector. The idea is 'to prevent increased concentration of wealth'. Quite how the population of the miserable sprawl of Port-au-Prince are to raise enough money to join a shareholders' democracy is left to the imagination.

The CIA has been at the core of American involvement in Haiti's army and paramilitaries. The agency's creature was called Sin, an intelligence service trained at enormous cost during the late 1980s to fight the drug trade and monitor internal politics.

Sin became an instrument of political terror, collaborating with Fraph. This meant the CIA, through Sin, was often working at cross-purposes to President Bill Clinton's agenda. While Congress withheld $1.5m in aid to General Raoul Cedras's regime, the CIA spent up to $1m a year on Sin.

Now the military and intelligence agendas have been hijacked by the White House. The Observer has learnt that President Clinton ordered two investigations into CIA activities in Haiti to determine whether its activities were still impeding his efforts to restore President Aristide. Sources say Clinton is satisfied the CIA's activities are now limited to 'intelligence purposes only'.

The army is to be paid off with $12.5m budgeted for demobilisation. The 7,000-strong army will be reconstructed as a 1,500-man force, supplemented by a 3,000-strong 'interim police'.

There is a saying in Haiti that 'the one who strikes out forgets, the one who is struck remembers'. In Jacmel last week nothing had been forgotten as the waves lapped against the shore and the rum was passed around.

There was Kuku, the barman, a stout supporter of Aristide. Kuku believed that 'justice must precede reconciliation, for the Fraph are still out there'.

And there was Max Church, American property developer, who is building holiday houses along a lovely stretch of coastline from which tourists have been absent since the embargo. Church was host to the American soldiers who came down to sneak in a quick off-limits beer and they were in turn extremely matey with Patrick Boucard, a gruff man with a revolver on his belt.

Patrick has no truck with Aristide or his followers: 'They are divided and incompetent.' His job is to take the Americans around, fingering the leading Fraph attachés and arranging cordial meetings between them and the troops.

'We have no problems here,' says a jovial American trooper. 'We tell everyone that we are here, and that the killing must stop. Otherwise, things here remain perfectly normal.'

The young Aristide supporters disappear into the night, upset by the optimism of it all. For things to remain 'perfectly normal' in Haiti is exactly what Bill Clinton's Operation Restore Democracy is not about.

Hobsbawm likes to pretend that he is still a Marxist but has never been a convinced Leninist. He has never been either, and he is obviously hopelessly terrified of even such a simple bit of irrefutable marxist science that every capitalist country, however 'democratic ' its 'parliamentary' pretensions, is fundamentally a bourgeois dictatorship.

If revisionists fail to keep that reality very quiet or fail to play down other related marxist analysis of the true nature of state power and what can be done about it, - then it becomes difficult to continue posing as 'lefts' and 'marxists' within a party of 'peaceful parliamentary roads to socialism', - and keep a straight face at the same time.

Revisionism's arrogant disgusting bourgeois-academic joke at the expense of the working class is once again under great pressure from the rocketing corruption scandals now swamping Britain and France as well as Italy and elsewhere.

At huge public expense to fund their farcical 'activities' as MPs to ensure that 'democratic parliamentary sovereignty' really rules Britain, these petty crooks and freeloaders then largely ignore what imaginary 'duties' they have in order to amass further fortunes, - and flout the law on disclosures, etc, to achieve it.

And if that was not crime enough, these absurd posturing figures then add insult to injury by pulling every old-boy-network string in the book in order to ensure that nothing should come out about it into the open, or at least ensure that nothing serious is done about it, - brazenly bullying or bribing BBC and other capitalist media creatures.

The whole affair stinks of malpractice worse than ever simply because the entire world of capitalist profiteering is beginning to be looked at with suspicion and hatred by ever-wider sections of the population, as long and incurable slump starts to get a real grip of the decadent British capitalist economy and its monopoly-bourgeois political tyranny.

The whole of parliamentary 'democracy' is a complete fraud which only limps very occasionally into action to right some outrageous wrong for fear of even louder revolutionary explosion against injustice.

The Commons corruption rackets are revealed just when the entire police establishment itself has been caught red-handed falsifying the crime statistics in order to look good as having got on top of the job and pushed the figures down, when in fact they are still rising relentlessly as the slump deepens public demoralisation and revolt, - and just at a time when the monarchy is exposed as a bunch of pampered, self-seeking, gormless aristocrats not fit to be head of a public lavatory never mind the public state.

Hobsbawm's petty-bourgeois revisionism may seem to be just a loathsome joke too, but such fake 'marxist' defeatism and class-collaborationism can never be exposed in detail well enough. 

Build Leninism better than ever. 

Tom Baxter

Hitherto philosophers have sought to explain the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (Southwest), PO BOX 50, London SVV17 9NL] 
No.92 Friday October 21 1994

The world crisis that so depresses Hobsbawm's bourgeois idealism is precisely what is driving historical development onward. Fight for proletarian dictatorship science.

No wonder the bourgeois philosopher Hobsbawm is feeling tired and gloomy. He can't make any sense of the world.

While he recognizes and analyses the huge crisis the imperialist system is in (unlike most of the so-called 'Marxist left', for whom the very phrase 'imperialist crisis' is objectionable), he has no fighting class analysis with which to make it coherent.

Unable to see the massive and insoluble contradictions in the imperialist system as ultimately the opportunity and reason for proletarian revolutionary breakthrough (to build society based on common ownership and need, not profit), he ends up simply expressing bourgeois class despair:

We live in a world captured, uprooted and transformed by the titanic economic and techno-scientific process of the development of capitalism, which has dominated the past two or three centuries. We know, or at least it is reasonable to suppose, that it cannot go on ad infinitum. The future cannot be a continuation of the past, and there arc signs that we have reached a point of historic crisis. The forces generated by the techno-scientific economy are now great enough to destroy the environment, that is to say the material foundations of human life. The structures of human societies themselves, including even some of the social foundations of the capitalist economy, are on the point of being destroyed by the erosion of what we have inherited from the human past. Our world risks both explosion and implosion. It must change.

We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognisable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure - the alternative to a changed society - is darkness.

It is the ruling class establishment and bourgeois class society which has run out of alternatives, and is increasingly thrashing around in the dark, with no idea where it's going,- or maybe some idea where it's heading but powerless to prevent it.

Just a brief glance at the current state of the British royal family and parliamentary democracy suggests a deeply sick and divided class, and the worse they get the more light is shed on the real bourgeois class dictatorship nature of democracy, which the "Golden Age" of welfare state reformism obscured, and the "crisis decades" have begun to reveal again.

What Hobsbawm is in fact describing, but cannot himself see (so far has he retreated from a Marxist class analysis of society), is a system approaching a revolutionary crisis, as described by Marx, in which the ruling class can no longer continue to rule in the old way, and the masses of the planet can no longer put up with it.

The almost routine daily exposures in the capitalist press itself of the crisis afflicting every ruling class institution, most recently in Britain around the Windsors and the Westminster racket, are providing the day to day details which, when put into a scientific Leninist class analysis, reveal how the economic crisis of imperialism has undermined bourgeois confidence to such an extent that its unashamed greedy hypocrisy is now on open display:

Neil Hamilton, now minister at the Department of Trade and Industry responsible for business probity, and Tim Smith, junior Northern Ireland minister, were both named yesterday as recipients of payments passed to Ian Greer Associates by Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods, on top of a £50,000 fee for a Parliamentary lobbying campaign.

Mr Hamilton subsequently requested and received a free week's holiday for himself and his wife, Christine, at the luxurious Ritz Hotel in Paris, owned by the Al-Fayed brothers, where he ran up a further bill of over £2,000 on such extras as chauffeur-driven cars.

The couple also went shopping free at Harrods at the invitation of Mr Al-Fayed. None of the payments or free trips were declared to Parliament.

Mr Al-Fayed said yesterday: "I felt it was now my public duty to make these facts known."

"Mr Greer said to me: 'You need to rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi.'

"I couldn't believe that in Britain, where Parliament has such a big reputation, you had to pay MPs. I was shattered by it. I asked how much and he said it would be £2,000 a question."

He went on: "Every month we got a bill for parliamentary services and it would vary from £8,000 to £10,000 depending on the number of questions. Then Mr Hamilton rang and requested to stay at the Ritz Hotel with his wife. I agreed. I am a generous man. But he ran up such a big bill, even coming back for afternoon tea.

"After he left to go on a trip around France, he even asked to stay again. I told the manager to tell him the hotel was full. There are limits to my generosity. 

The exposures of corruption and sleaze, revealing as they are, are only a symptom of the crisis of capitalism, not the cause of it. There is no hope of these institutions being reformed; the sleaze can only get worse as the insoluble economic crisis deepens.

The attempt by Berlusconi's government to reform Italian politics (which are essentially the same as British or French or German or US politics, in that they are all bourgeois class dictatorships disguised as parliamentary 'democracies') demonstrates the point perfectly.

The new Italian government is already up to its neck in even more corruption and graft than the one it replaced, and the economic measures introduced in the budget (to try and stabilize the economy and prevent a financial collapse) are creating a class response. Reformist illusions, used up in the "Golden Age" and now proven to have done nothing whatever to prevent capitalism once again descending into trade war and slump chaos, are unlikely to be able to hold that class response back for very long:

HUNDREDS of thousands of Italians took to the streets yesterday to challenge Silvio Berlusconi and the policies of his rightwing government.

Marches staged during a four-hour general strike in protest at government spending cuts were on a scale rivalling those held in the troubled years of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In Milan, the crowd was too big for the huge Piazza del Duomo. Police, who put the number of demonstrators in Milan at 200,000, said another 100,000 marched through Turin.

Witnesses estimated the figures for both Rome and Genoa at around 100,000. And even in Trento up by the border with Austria some 15,000 people, according to the police, turned out to register their protest.

Yesterday's half-day stoppage was called by the three main trade union confederations after the Berlusconi government finalised its first budget. In an effort to fulfil Italy's commitments under the Maastricht treaty and shore up his administration's credibility on financial markets, Mr Berlusconi sanctioned a package that would lop 48 trillion lire (£20 billion) from the budget.

The biggest cuts are slated for the health service. But what has caught the imagination of the public, and stirred the indignation of the unions, is the attack on Italy's state pensions.

The unions would have preferred a higher percentage of the savings to have come from a renewed drive against tax evasion. As in most southern European countries, a disproportionate share of tax revenue is provided by the lower-paid who cannot dodge tax because it is deducted at source.

Protesters on the island of Sardinia's Costa Smeralda holiday coast massed outside one of Berlusconi's villas chanting slogans against the free-market prime minister.

"Berlusconi's villa: 42 rooms, sea view, but it is our pensions that are sliced in half," read one placard. A protester in Rome carried a mock coffin bearing the names of Berlusconi and Gianfranco Fini, the neo-fascist leader of the National Alliance movement that is part of the coalition.

Bourgeois confidence in the stability and survival of 'triumphant' capitalism is being seriously shaken by events in the 'defeated' former Soviet Union, where fears of a complete economic meltdown (resulting in Weimar-style hyperinflation), and the potential for enormous social explosions, are already reminding millions of proletarians exactly what the point of communist revolution was in the first place.

And even greater fears of an economic meltdown in their own financial institutions continue to haunt them as the massive instability in the international finance system becomes more apparent by the day:

WE have heard it all before. But the warning yesterday from Andrew Large, the chairman of the City's chief regulator, over increasing global systemic risk in the financial markets is well worth saying again. 

Mr Large said that since the new breed of international investment bank do not respect geographic or sectoral boundaries, neither should the thinking of financial regulators.

He emphasised that a systemic problem could be sparked by any major firm, anywhere in the world. The regulators, meanwhile, are neatly parcelled in terms of function — banking, insurance, securities — and in terms of their home state.

It is a very real problem, particularly with the massive growth of the derivatives which have effectively grown unchecked by regulators and which very few people, even in the securities industry, understand. As Mr Large pointed out, the directors of companies may not even know the risks to which their firms are exposed.

He maintained that links must be made between regulators of all types of business — minus the bureaucracy that usually goes with it — if systemic risk is to be properly assessed and guarded against.

They were strong words from the SIB chairman. If they can translate into action, so much the better. However, while derivatives are paying big rewards, the international financial community is likely to give his ideas the cold shoulder.

And while much has been written about global markets and hi-tech wizardry dissolving national boundaries, none of it in any way diminishes (as the anti-Marxist 'Marxists' would have it) the inter-imperialist trade war and shooting war essence of the capitalist system, with rival national bourgeoisies trying to destroy each other's industries and take over their markets, - as demonstrated by the very low-tech and nationalistic trade war in bananas, for example:

THE Clinton administration launched an investigation into allegations by American banana companies that their produce was being unfairly barred from European markets.

US Trade Representative Mickey Kantor announced the beginning of an inquiry that could result in punitive trade sanctions against Europe if negotiations over the next year fail to resolve the dispute.

The US banana sellers claim that unfair rules put into effect by the 12-nation European Union had the effect of cutting their market share by more than half.

"'American banana-marketing companies should be able to compete on a fair basis in the European market, just as European firms can here," Mr Kantor said in a statement announcing he had accepted the industry petition, filed by Chiquita Brands International and the Hawaii Banana Industry Association.

The move by the American government comes less than two weeks after the European Court of Justice threw out German attempts to overthrow the EU's banana import rules.

The German government had claimed that they favour producers in Europe and its former colonies over those in Latin American countries.

Following the court decision, Helmut Haussmann, European spokesman for the Free Democrats, the junior partner in Germany's coalition government, warned that the ruling would "open the floodgates to protectionism."

The EU-wide banana trade system was put into effect in July 1993. It was designed to replace separate export agreements that many EU countries had maintained in favor of banana imports from their former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

The US petition was filed under a provision of trade law, known as Section 301, that provides for a period of negotiations to remove barriers to US exports. If those talks fail, the administration can impose punitive tariffs equal to the amount of damages being suffered by American producers.

The historic crisis being reached in imperialism is the dawn of one 'new age' only: that of world proletarian revolution, and the replacement of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Build Leninism.  D. Watts