Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 0811 July 25th 1995                                                                                                                                10p 

Sick press hysteria fails to provoke wider NATO war against Serbia as trade-war splits in the Western camp grow broader and deeper than ever. Goebbels dies again.

The Serb nationalists' rejection of the precise shape of Western imperialism's proposed 'New World Order' in the Balkans area is only exacerbating Big Power differences but not causing them.

The splits and recriminations remain the inevitable outcome of the insoluble trade-war conflict for international monopoly-capitalist supremacy, now being driven to fever-pitch by the imminence of the greatest markets-crash and slump in history.

Serb nationalist intransigence dismays and embarrasses the West mostly because it reminds them of the far greater difficulties that probably lie ahead when the cut-throat economic competition turns into full time political and military threats and counter threats against each other.

Chirac's nervous belligerence is symbolic of what most of the ruling classes are feeling among the NATO 'allies' as they panic about how their rivals might be manoeuvring against them.

The crescendo of anti-Serb propaganda hysteria now swamping Western newspapers, radio and television is a useful smokescreen diversion from the imperialist powers' real hate targets which are each other.

The CIA-dominated international news agencies would need nothing more than their routine anti-communist agenda to keep on pumping out this sick Goebbelsian wave of anti-Serb filth, lies, and criminal provocations, - so eagerly lapped up by the petty-bourgeois journalist fraternity whose anti-communist instincts never fail.

Serbian nationalism now has very little in common with communism, but its closeness-enough to the proletarian-dictatorship traditions of the Yugoslav workers state, still retaining some of the anti-imperialist confidence and heroism in which planned socialism was born in 1945, - is sufficient to keep the CIA’s worldwide distortion machinery working overtime.

But in spite of all the vile fabrications, and grotesque attempts to mislead public opinion, it is still uncertain that the Goebbels big-lie technique, which was allowed by the West to have such an enormous and confusing influence on international politics in the 1930s, is going to have quite the same effect this time round.

The faked-up 'suicide in the woods' photographs of the young woman who is supposed to have killed herself, plus all the other idiotic stage-managed scenes of 'women prostrate with grief' (after volunteering to be bussed back into 'Muslim jurisdiction', etc, achieved no instant international political or military response. They may end up serving only to cause people to question how these images were achieved and why it is being done.

It is a strange community indeed which comes across one of its number hanging inexpertly from a tree by a rope and does not immediately rush to cut it down to see if the poor wretch is still breathing and can be revived. It is a strange community indeed which goes to summon a photographer first, and then carefully clears the scene of the presumed crowd of distraught onlookers so that no one else appears in camera view in order to enhance the supposed abject loneliness and misery of the event. 

Or perhaps they did cut her down in the normal way of humanitarian instinct, but then strung her up there again on finding she was dead, and realising it would make a good picture for Western propaganda.

As for these grieving women, sobbing their way to unconsciousness in front of the TV cameras, - just who are these cameramen? And if they are genuine Western newsmen, how many of them will keep straight faces if interviewed themselves on television about coming across so much bad acting in such peculiar circumstances.

This stage-managed ethnic displacement is a huge propaganda stunt by the sordid gangsters who run the petty-bourgeois Muslim statehood racket in Bosnia. There is not a single 'refugee' who has not been told to get out by the Izetbegovio, Salajdzic, Sacirbey mafia and their backers in the US arms-race circles and international muslim reaction. There is no problem for Mohammedans as such under Serbian rule, and many of them survive happily all over Serbia. The problem starts with the statehood ambitions of the organised Mosque which chose to try to annexe traditional Yugoslav lands for an artificial confessional statelet under reactionary international imperialist control. The Muslim 'refugees' have been used as a pawn for propaganda purposes in the subsequent territorial ebbing and flowing of the ensuing civil war between the religious factions of the Serbo-Croat-speaking South Slav nation.

And while pure hearsay 'evidence' of the weakest and most uncomfortable kind is all that the anti-Serbian rumour mills can come up with, the Western press's own admissions about these bizarre goings-on are much more interesting; they hint that the 'refugee' crisis was deliberately engineered by the Muslim reactionaries:

There was little sign of Bosnian government help.

UN officials — much criticised for their apparent lack of preparedness for the flood of refugees — said the Bosnian government had not only failed to contribute to the relief effort, but had even hindered it.

They said that earlier in the week the UNHCR had earmarked a number of schools and warehouses to be used as temporary shelter if Srebrenica fell, but they had been refused permission to use them by the regional government acting on orders from Sarajevo.

Crowds of women and teenagers brought on trucks from Tuzla by Bosnian government officials blockaded UN bases in and around the town for much of this week, UN sources said. A senior UN military officer in Tuzla said: The government saw a symbolic value in heaping them all on the UN’s lap.

"They could all have been easily dispersed to different shelters. This has created a problem," he said.

No government official was available for comment yesterday.

Imperialism's warmongering threats to impose its own 'New World Order' on the Balkans whether the local inhabitants like the arbitrary statelet-creation for chosen elements of ethnic reaction or not, - also look less than believable.

The aggressive boastful prattle of the Chirac regime, declaring challengingly:

"Nobody can tell me that Serbia is going to be allowed to govern Europe"

and likening the tiny (10 million) Serb struggle for national self-determination to a

'new fascist plague menacing Europe',

quickly temporarily toned down.

Perhaps the permanent French bourgeois Establishment reminded the crude philistine Chirac crowd that their class rule had not greatly distinguished itself in the original 'fascist plague' which had really menaced Europe, i.e. German imperialist aggression during the last great trade war. The French capitalist ruling class and 99% of the petty bourgeoisie had quickly capitulated into total collaboration with the German Nazi invasion of France in 1940, with hardly a shot being fired.

But the Chirac opportunists would be well advised to not think too cockily about taking the tiny Serb nation on either, for all the modesty of its self-determination perspectives. It was the Serbs, the majority Yugoslav community, who formed the backbone of the South Slavs national resistance to German occupation (at the same time as the French bourgeoisie were surrendering ignominiously) in a heroic communist partisan war which remained undefeated in non-stop guerrilla action against imperialist occupation throughout World War II, and ended by liberating much of the territory itself.

Doubtless it was the false courage lent by France's latest nuclear-weapons development outrage which was loosening Chirac's lip, - a monstrous piece of armsrace warmongering which the 'free' capitalist press could barely bother exposing:

THE official justification for France’s decision to resume nuclear testing is that this will enable its scientists to perfect alternative simulation techniques before signing up for a comprehensive test ban next year.

But the French military establishment has its own hidden agenda — to complete the development of two new missile warheads.

None of this was mentioned when President Jacques Chirac announced a series of eight underground tests on Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls between September 1995 and May 1996.

The Elysée's official line was described as "rubbish" yesterday by Dr Frank Barnaby, a former director of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute who worked on the British atomic bomb. "They need to test a new warhead for the M-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile and probably for the ASLP stand-off missile" he said. "That is the purpose of these tests." Other sources confirm his view that the immediate military requirement is paramount.

As well as maintaining its own nuclear-weapons 'independence', French imperialism has also not given up on challenging American monopoly-capitalist world domination in politico-military matters on the stage of spy satellite and space rocket potentials too.

In this case, the trade-war implications of this Big Power rivalry become much more immediately obvious in that some of the by-products of this fundamentally weapons research are instantly saleable, at once creating a competitive market in such dubious technology which the US ruling class has speedily replied to, - as is openly conceded in the bourgeois media:

EUROPE’S first spy satellite is to be launched into orbit today from the European Space Agency site in French Guiana in an attempt to provide military intelligence independent of the United States.

The French-led project comes as France is pressing its European Union partners to invest political and economic capital in an independent European intelligence-gathering capability and wrench Britain’s GCHQ — Government Communications Headquarters — away from its close ties with the US National Security Agency.

Helios 1A will orbit 530 miles above the Earth. It will be able to send back images identifying individual tanks and small-scale troop movements during daylight and in clear weather.

It was financed mainly by France, with Spain and Italy contributing about 20 per cent of the £1.25 billion cost.

The US has responded quickly by offering to sell at commercial rates to European countries, intelligence from its own satellites.

But France is pressing the Germans to choose Helios 2 and reject an offer from the US firm, Lockheed-Martin, to buy its spy satellite system for only £314 million.

The French government was irked during the Gulf war when it was almost entirely dependent on the US for satellite intelligence. Last year, French officials accused the United States of withholding satellite data about Bosnia from its European allies despite the presence of European troops in a UN peacekeeping force supported by Washington.

Today’s launch is the first of a series aimed at giving combined European armed forces their own reconnaissance capability. Klaus Kinkel, the German foreign minister, has suggested that Bonn shares France’s concerns.

"Without its own information base, Europe’s foreign and security policy would be a fragile structure," he told a Western European Union meeting in Paris last month. "Therefore our aim must be to create a European reconnaissance satellite system."

France will decide what information from the Helios 1A satellite will be provided and at what cost. The carrot France is offering western Europe in return for contributions to future "spy in the sky" programmes is free and better intelligence without having to rely on the whims of the US or Russia, which is now also offering to sell low-level satellite intelligence.

Only the US, Russia, China, India and Israel so far have spy satellites.

The inextricable links between trade war and inter-imperialist shooting war (already twice this century as the 'solution' to previous insoluble economic crises of 'free-market' (i.e. anarchic) capital 'surpluses' which can only be overcome by wiping each other out) are readily visible in this branch of technology closely connecting advanced weapons research with useful communications equipment. Primarily, imperialism would like to think about such gear in one-upmanship 'defence' terms. But as frequently analysed in EPSR, the monopoly-sales side of the arms race has never been separable from trade-war interests in general. Appropriately for capitalism, the most throat-cutting competition eventually takes place in the goods designed specifically for cutting competitors throats with. Which sordid reality of course renders all the 'free world' talk about nuclear non-proliferation treaties as an obscene joke. A ferocious trade war is already developing in nuclear weapons gear too.

That arms-race interests and trade-war interests are mutually enriching is obvious too, - in capitalist terms, - thus making endless decades of reformist 'disarmament' ideology meaningless too, trying to convince imperialist powers that they would be stronger economically if they abandoned all weapons research in favour of purely constructive and peaceful investment technology, etc. As a subsequent article explains in better detail, British imperialism was in great potential embarrassment whichever way it eventually jumped as one of the camp followers in the latest inter-imperialist arms-race/trade-war battle on the vital military helicopter front.

Once again, there is some tragic symbolism in this story of how the weaker competitors in the inter-imperialist rat race, - almost certain losers in the future inter-imperialist shooting/war, World War III, - already get hurt badly even in the lucrative sales period of the arms race/trade-war momentum, - - as this capitalist press report nearly points out, for its own City-interest purposes:

What maybe good for Sir David Lees, the army, and Paddy Ashdown, is the least good choice for the future of Britain’s aerospace industry. Each of the main alternatives, the Eurocopter Tiger  — in which British Aerospace had an important stake — and the Cobra Venom, with a new generation of avionics from GEC-Marconi, would have been better if the UK is to maintain its leading edge in aerospace.

The Government has done its best to disguise the industrial disadvantages of effectively buying American, with the Apache. There will be a new generation of Rolls-Royce engines, and missiles built at Shorts in Belfast, together with a great deal of fabrication in the UK. But the bulk of the highly-skilled electronics and avionics, the design systems and all the hi-tech add-ons will be created in the US.

A Tory government is conceding, as it did a decade ago with the Sikorsky, that the iron links of the Anglo-American defence establishment outweigh the industrial arguments.

In the DTI’s competitiveness report, published in May, it was made clear that UK progress in this area was built on research and development and collaboration with European partners on, for instance, the Euro-fighter 2000 and Airbus. These, were sources of Britain’s competitive success.

The largely new GEC-Marconi cockpit and avionics in the Cobra Venom would have meant thousands of hi-tech jobs in the UK — no doubt with a great deal of civilian spin-off. Similarly, the European Tiger project would have increased co-operation among the Airbus/Eurofighter partners and created a genuine European alternative to the American heavy-armoured air tanks.

These were both choices, as Michael Heseltine once might have acknowledged, which looked over the horizon.

And as the subsequent article noted even before the result of the helicopter deal was announced, this sorry decline of British imperialism is well reflected in the pathetic deflation of Heseltine's unique bombast, reduced to becoming a spear-carrier for the bewildered ensemble around Major & Co. No repeat in the 1990s of Churchill's notable act in the 1930s of sitting in the wings with the 'great agenda' until called upon 'by the nation' in its 'hour of need'.

That agenda was a complete fraud, unexpectedly turned into something only by the totally unforeseen (by the West) defeat of German imperialism by the world's first workers state, the Soviet Union.

The only conclusion in the inter-imperialist turmoil of the 1990s is that ailing British imperialism doesn't even have any kind of agenda any more, - even a fraudulent one, - or even a repulsive opportunist prima donna cocky enough to expound one, like the reactionary oaf Churchill. Not that French imperialism is in that much better shape, in spite of all the attention which Chirac's displays of noisy aggression have attracted, - or any other imperialism, come to that.

As the bourgeois media themselves partially grasp, it is the insoluble contradictions of inter-imperialist trade war at the imminent collapse of the greatest-ever boom (leading inevitably to the greatest-ever slump subsequently) which will plunge the whole of the 'free world' into turmoil together, emphasising nothing but the back-stabbing splits and divisions which will wreck the planet (and, - obviously unstated, - lead on of course to the establishment finally of worldwide planned socialist development, thus completing the great beginnings started in 1917 and 1945 at the conclusion of imperialism's two previous great warmongering slumps):

NATO’S continued existence as the bedrock of western security is being threatened by a cascade of security, foreign policy and economic disputes which are pitting the United States against its European allies. For the first time since the alliance was launched in 1949, at the height of the cold war, questions are being raised on both sides of the Atlantic about Nato’s viability.

European governments deplore the unpredictable twists and turns of US Bosnia policy, resent Washington’s refusal to provide ground troops for the UN and are alarmed at what the French government alleges is covert US rearmament of the Bosnian government forces.

But Bosnia is only one of an ever-lengthening list of issues dividing the Europeans and the US. Nato governments decided nearly two years ago to assist the Western European Union — the emerging defence arm of the European Union — to develop its own military capacity.

The US is insisting on Nato and American command of WEU operations where alliance resources are involved. The Europeans say that while the US has urged Europe to do more for its own security and defence, the American military resents this when it happens.

FRANCE is now pressing its WEU partners to invest in European rather than American military hardware: the British government will soon have to decide whether to buy a European rather than an American attack helicopter and how much to invest in giving the WEU its own independent satellite communications infrastructure. It is an issue which could refuel Tory party faction-fighting over Europe.

If all of this were not enough, the Atlantic allies have also fallen out badly over a series of global trade and economic issues. The EU conspicuously supported the Japanese in the recent stand-off between Washington and Tokyo over car exports to Japan. Brussels has meanwhile attacked the US for its increasing tendency to use unilateral strong arm tactics in trade disputes with its international partners.

EUROPEAN governments also accuse Washington of indirect complicity in the destabilisation of the European monetary system by acting to reverse the long dollar decline. Another world recession, combined with continuing high unemployment and a renewed dollar decline triggering turbulence on the international money markets could be a scenario for trade wars.

It is possible that imperialism is too obsessed with its own internal problems to be able, at this stage, to mount any decisive action against anti-NATO defiance within Serb nationalism. The Clinton gang and the Congress are all such crooks fearing exposure, and all so paralysed at losing the trade war to Japan and Germany, that they seem to have lost all confidence. Washington's latest weird notions on Bosnia are to offer some kind of military assistance to the UN 'peacekeeping' fraud to keep imperialism's flag flying there (in a venture the USA is scarcely in sympathy with) just so that an even greater commitment of US forces (already promised) can be avoided should the UN expedition be abandoned completely (which is what the USA would really prefer to happen).

An alternative bizarre pose in the United States is to boast what military aggression might have been, and should have been, imposed on the Serbs three years ago, but would not be such a good idea now, etc.

The black propaganda onslaught vilifying the Serbs has so far failed to have the effect of justifying imperialist military aggression because the Big Power trade war splits are becoming irreconcilable. The capitalist press itself admits the divisions, even if it cannot provide the explanation:

THE allied attempt to agree on joint armed intervention to halt further Bosnian Serb attacks on United Nations safe havens was on the verge of collapse last night.

France described the key military talks as a failure as it emerged that President Bill Clinton had given Congress the right to veto limited but crucial US involvement, including a plan to use US helicopters to lift British and French troops into Gorazde.

Senior US officials judge the differences between the French and British on Bosnia to be "irreconcilable", and have told
President Clinton they are "unable to propose any agreed allied action to save the safe havens".

Paris’s apparent defeat raised the question of whether France would quit Bosnia in disgust at what it has termed allied appeasement of contemporary European Nazism.

Sunday night’s key meeting in London of British, US and French military chiefs failed to agree on French demands to send Anglo-French troops, backed by US airpower, to reinforce the east Bosnian Muslim pocket of Gorazde.

The US made its offer of helicopter gunships and air transport conditional on congressional approval, in the full knowledge that the Republican-controlled Congress is certain to oppose the intervention, diplomatic sources in Washington confirmed. The Senate leader, Robert Dole, is expected to introduce a resolution tonight to arm the Bosnian government which, if effected, would mean a UN withdrawal.

Meanwhile, the Bosnian foreign minister, Muhamed Sacirbey, said on a visit to Washington yesterday that the UN mission in Bosnia was "at an end".

He said a letter from his government to the UN saying Bosnia no longer consented to the presence of the UN Protection Force (Unprofor) "may be forthcoming very soon".

"The UN mission will either withdraw voluntarily or at the latest by November we will look for it to be terminated," Mr Sacirbey said. Unprofor’s mandate expires in November.

At Sunday’s meeting in London, the US also offered the transport hardware provided the helicopters were flown by French or British crews. This bizarre rent-a-chopper, fly-drive plan took little account of the time needed to train pilots and ground crews in their use. "Things are moving in a discreet fashion against very evident difficulties in reaching an agreed position," a senior Western source in Washington said. In plain English: utter disarray within Nato.

And all that the American imperialist bourgeoisie really wants to do is to sell more arms to the Muslim and Croatian separatist reactionaries to fuel the civil war higher than ever.

These are embarrassing times for the imperialist system, but not because of the 'free market' debacle in ex-Yugoslavia as such, but entirely because the whole contradiction of insoluble capitalist trade war is a self-inflicted and incurable ideological time-bomb waiting to destroy the credibility of the whole 'free enterprise' game, worldwide. Build Leninism. JH

World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Extracts from Fidel Castro’s speech to the Federation of Cuban Women in March. (Continued).

Then, the dollar and the peso. Anyone with five dollars at that time could buy more than 500 pesos, because the dollar was at 140 or 150 pesos. Now it has come down, curiously. As a result of the various measures taken, the peso has been rising in value, and now one can't get as many pesos for a dollar, but at that time it was astronomical. Now, in some essential industries such as the electric industry, they are looking for ways to establish some partial payment in convertible currency — we say convertible pesos now, since now there's something circulating around called a convertible peso. If only it could be a combustible peso, then we would be great producers and exporters of oil and we could have "petro-dollars", as they are called. Now what we have are "sacri-dollars", "revolutionary-dollars" or something like that. (LAUGHTER) But already in a number of workplaces, apart from the tourism sector, where some workers receive a certain amount in convertible currency, there is a growing number of Cuban workers who receive the convertible peso and who have the right to go to these stores, and we’ll continue increasing this as much as we can.

In the end — when will this end be? — the moment could come when all the money is convertible; but this has to be in the long term, and now we need to resign ourselves to the sacrifices this means. This establishes inequality.

Joint ventures are appearing as well, and a joint venture has to take into account not only the interests of the country, but of the foreign partner as well. Before, if a work staff was inflated, it was bad, but it didn't worry anyone. Unfortunately, our administrators didn’t concern themselves too much with efficiency or the personnel, and every institution in the country has suffered from this defect, without exception. No one ever asked if there was a budget for this or that, they just asked for more. Everyone got what they asked for. Education? How much do you want? This much. There you go. And you? This much. Here you go. That’s how it was for many years. The budgets were constituted by the sum total of everyone's demands.

FROM THE START OF THE REVOLUTION ONWARDS THE STAFF ROSTERS WERE EXPANDED, AS THERE HAD BEEN WIDESPREAD UNEMPLOYMENT

However, of course, from the start of the Revolution onwards the staff rosters were expanded, as there had been widespread unemployment before: some people left and others went in, and all the posts were filled. A great many people came from the mountains and from all over. Thus a near exodus began; moreover, the Revolution took place in the countryside, fundamentally.

However, as I was saying, an exodus began, and the number of inhabitants in this city doubled. That was the cause of many of the problems the city has, with double the inhabitants. And although new aqueducts and other things were built, they were not enough, especially when the water meters disappeared, they were taken away one day because there weren’t enough, they couldn’t be repaired, they didn't work. I don’t know how many problems there were, and in the haste for rapid justice and to attain all that was just at an excessive speed, we provided water free of charge with the inevitable consequences of considerable consumption and wasting of water.

What happened in Mexico or in Brazil, or in other places, where the cities grew fivefold, hasn't happened to us. As the Revolution worked in the country's interior, it set up universities in all of the provincial capitals, in the old ones and then the new ones, and it built schools, it built everything. Then they didn’t have to come to Havana. It was worth the development that the Revolution promoted in the rest of the country, so that we don't have six million inhabitants, or who knows how many, in Havana, in the narrowest part of the country, where there are none of those big rivers that could give us 500 million, 600 million cubic meters of water, a river like the Zaza for instance.

There are other regions of the country which have far greater water resources than we do, more accessible than ours. However, these are in the countryside, and it took a long time for electricity to reach the countryside. It wasn’t only the guerrilla fighters who came down, but those who kept coming down afterwards, because who knows how many of the people who reached Havana invited someone else to come over, gave them a camp bed there in the house; a brother or sister, then another one, and they continued having large quantities of brothers and sisters out there.

A great deal of employment was created, the staff rosters were expanded, even though they were already inflated. The manager was always good natured, generous, magnanimous. Who knows how many people go out to resolve their problems and how many things are done to resolve them in this world, and the arrangements that people make; there is always a story to tell, and many times with good cause, such and such a problem and such and such a difficulty, and you can’t imagine how many good hearts there are.

Of course, in general, the state manager, as it wasn’t his pocket the money was coming from, could be even more magnanimous. And remember that even, at a specific time, when the managers were free to hire who they pleased, there were many who made their decisions based on the looks, the figure, of a woman looking for work in their center. Remember that we had to fight against that as well, as a form of discrimination, depending on whether they were younger or nature had been kinder to them, so there was another apartheid, against the women that nature hadn’t endowed with such inordinate charm — although it has to be said that nature has endowed all women with inordinate charm (APPLAUSE) — so there were those who applied subjective criteria. All of those phenomena occurred, a human being is a human being, and we fought against all of that.

But look at how the staff rosters swelled, what a struggle! Now people are beginning to understand that It is a problem that arose almost from the beginning of the Revolution. Who knows how many times I have spoken about inflated staff rosters. If they had paid me a little attention...but they really paid me absolutely no attention. Those forces that boosted, that inflated employment were much more powerful. However, the Revolution also caused this to take place in education; teachers were needed, and we wanted so much justice, and so much culture, and so much education, and rightly so, starting from that world in which there were so many children without schools, without teachers and without anything, so we set up more schools than any country, we developed education further than any country, to the extreme that we now have the highest number of teachers per capita in the world, and of doctors, and other things. There is no doubt that these are advances and many people admire them, because to develop we need to train a lot of people.

However, how many people left the countryside? I visited a primary school in the mountains, there was a group of sixth grade children: "And you, what are you going to be when you grow up?" "Me? A teacher." "Me? A nurse." "Me? A doctor." "Me? This, that." None of that existed there before. There was only the countryside, the mountains, the land to cultivate, the coffee to plant and to pick; but once they had been in school, they all said:

I want to be such and such.

And, of course, all revolutionary parents wanted their children to have a university education. The pressure for a university degree was tremendous, and over half a million students have graduated from university, others became Ministry of the Interior officers or Revolutionary Armed Forces officers, there were all kinds of opportunities for the young, and many of those people came here from the countryside, they left the countryside As I also said, contingents, construction crews; I always protested every time someone said to me that there weren't any builders. Builders had to be brought in to Havana from Las Tunas, from Holguín; the people of Havana weren't building anymore. To tell the truth, with the minibrigades and the houses for the work centers, we set all of those things up and we made progress. Unfortunately, at one time certain ideas prevailed, and the minibrigades, which could have built many more houses, were shut down. But then, as part of the rectification process, we set up the Construction Materials Industry, with the capacity to build up to 100,000 homes a year, and not low cost ones, but better ones all the time.

What was true was that there was widespread employment, almost full employment, but there were really many swollen staff rosters that didn't need to be swollen, and there were very limited work forces in other places, where those work forces were needed. The canecutters were replaced by machines. The canecutters began to peter out from the first years of the Revolution onwards. The mobilizations for the sugar harvest began in the first years of the Revolution, and many Havana workers went to work in the sugar harvest, thousands and thousands; up to 100,000 or more were mobilized throughout the country. The work force there was more limited all the time; on the other hand, there were a lot of people in the offices, the staff rosters filled up, in both the city and the countryside.

In better economic situations, with far more resources, the effects were less noticeable. We managed to maintain a financial equilibrium, in spite of everything; but in the circumstances that we are now facing, it wasn't possible to maintain this financial equilibrium and there were very negative consequences. We are seeking efficiency. What does efficiency mean? Efficiency means reducing expenditures, particularly expenditures on salaries, among other things; seeking more productive activities.

Before, the doors were not opened wide to self-employment like they are now. A lot of doors have been opened, and they will continue to be opened, because there is no longer a lack of workers in some places in the city; they still need a lot of people in the countryside. Although some people are going to the agricultural cooperatives, this is being discussed with the campesinos: "Don’t wait for people to always come from the city to do part of the work for you, you have to do it yourselves, you are in control of production." The UBPCs, a new creation, emerged after the beginning of special period, to link people up more with their work: Well, this production is yours, work, don’t sit waiting for them to come to the UBPC from the city, guarantee your own supplies." They are the owners of the machinery, of production, everything except the land, although they have the use of millions of hectares. People are greatly needed there, although some people have been returning to the countryside, to those cooperatives, to the UBPCs, which are more or less the same as a cooperative, only they were started up by agricultural workers, not by campesinos who had joined their land together; as in the agricultural production cooperatives. Some land which has been laying idle is being handed over to grow tobacco, for coffee, for other things, and some people are going, but it isn't like China.

In China, 80 percent of the population lives in the countryside and 20 percent in the city. The problem there is different, there are now large masses of people who want to leave the countryside and go to the city and they can't suddenly find employment for them all; however, our problem is that 80 percent of the population is in the city waiting for part of the food to be brought to them from the countryside, because the other part of the food has to be imported in any case and couldn't be grown here, there wouldn’t be the resources to produce these things, rotating the crops every year, the canefields would have to be. cleared — that would take longer to explain; but there is a lack of people.

With the fundamental objective of seeking efficiency — this efficiency drive began with cutting back on unnecessary workers — we have been rationalizing the work force, not hastily, not abruptly, but more emphasis has been put on this objective — it is a hard battle, it isn’t easy, although on the other hand, jobs have to be found. People don't go where we have more than enough jobs; on the contrary, they oblige us to use machines and everything has to be done by machine, with some help from the oxen to grow crops, to do a lot of things; however, essentially, fundamentally, it was impossible to rotate crops on large areas of land using oxen, there wouldn’t be enough oxen nor enough ox herds to do so, and there is not enough time to do it without machines.

All of the potato growing land in Havana — after sweet potato — to rotate it and then sow something else; or the hundreds of thousands of hectares of sugar cane that would have to be cleared throughout the country, that is impossible to do in a few months with oxen. But we use them in everything in which they can be used, because with machines we are obliged to look for the raw materials, such as the metals, for the repairs, the parts, the fuel, the tires. That is the cause of great anguish every year, particularly the fuel.

The largest part of the country's revenue in hard currency has to be spent on fuel, because if it isn’t, then power cuts are inevitable; they started partly as a result of the fuel shortages and partly because the production capacity dropped on there not being sufficient resources available to repair them, at a specific point in time, a problem which is being solved bit by bit, raising the production capacity in the power stations; using our oil, which is a heavy oil, with a lot of sulfur, requiring more attention and more repairs in the power stations than if they were using a lighter fuel, which we traditionally used.

Our oil production is increasing. Great efforts are being made to prospect for it and find it. If there is oil here, we will find it at any rate; however, other activities and other fields have to be developed, because we can’t put all our faith in oil.

All of these factors also affect our sugar production. It was still at nearly seven million tons the first year of special period, then it dropped to four million; we had neither the fuel for irrigation, nor the fertilizers, none of the supplies that are so important in agriculture to obtain a good level of production. Neither metals, nor raw materials for the refineries, nor tires for the carts, nor for the tractors.

We are still working with the same tractors, not one more tractor has been brought in. Others are drawn by donkeys, they have been kept up and we have been working for some years with the same ones and not one more. However, it is not the number of tractors that limits us, but the number of tires. They have to be imported, and where do they have to be imported from? They have to be imported fundamentally from the former USSR, and at times there are serious difficulties in trading. You should have no doubt that all possible efforts are being made to find solutions to these problems. •

(To be continued).

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 164. Sunday 31st March 1996 

By the only yardstick that means anything - readiness to fight and win in the trade-war struggles ahead for world market domination, over the backs of all rivals and in the teeth of roused proletarian resistance — British capitalist rule is weaker after Major's leadership gamble, not stronger.

The same desperate problems faced by geriatric British capitalism, goading Major into his daft leadership election stunt in the first place, remain firmly in place as imperialism careers down the road to trade-war worldwide.

As the 'done deal' between the US and Japan to stave off car wars first threw a scare into European rivals (fearing that bilateral agreements will snatch away the competitive edge) and then turned out to be no deal at all (with Washington reeling off numerical quotas which Tokyo at once denied ever having agreed to), the irreconcilable competitive rivalries erupting in imperialism's overproduction crisis are ever more firmly set as the pattern dominating all bourgeois political existence henceforth, international and domestic alike.

As for the deal done with Heseltine to rent his 'loyalty' for a few more months, such feeble manoeuvring says less about any Machiavellian skill displayed by any of the cabals involved than it does about the unprecedented lack of bourgeois class confidence right across the rotten British capitalist establishment.

Major is WEAKER for having made his government's impotence the main issue in a self-inflicted leadership poll. Redwood's faction is WEAKER for having declared Major an electoral disaster waiting to happen, and then lacking the courage to carry the split to its logical conclusion.

As for Heseltine's position, even if the feverish press speculation about his magic new 'trans-govermental' powers turn out to be halfway accurate, these could only ever be powers within a government that has demonstrated itself to be POWERLESS on the only question that really matters: how to head off or deal with the unavoidable trade-war disasters ahead for the bourgeoisie. And as for the pathetic, hole-in-corner, string-pulling manner in which Heseltine's new job was secured, that only rubs in all the more what a creeping mediocrity this 'Tarzan' really is, too scared of his own opportunist shadow even to make a straight challenge for the biggest deckchair on the Titanic.

What in any case will determine how much of a serious 'coup' against Redwood's faction is represented by Heseltine's apparent elevation remains to be judged by government performance in the trade-war related turmoil ahead, not by reshuffling feints to the 'right' or 'left' eagerly picked over by capitalist scribes.

For starters, what is Heseltine's sometime corporatist enthusiasm for state intervention going to make of merger mania in the world's 'defence' industries, and Britain's role in it all? The ostensible reason for leaving the Thatcher cabinet in the first place was the Westland affair, with Heseltine supposedly making a stand on preserving the British capitalist identity of the defence industries from being swamped by US influence. Yet even from an 'overlord' position in Major's cabinet, what serious moves can Heseltine make to reverse the longterm decline which now results in Westland, British Aerospace and GEC all reduced to the humiliating position of touting for rival US or German-led consortia?

WANTED: 91 attack helicopters. Price offered: £2.5 billion-plus. It sounds straightforward enough, but when the purchaser is the UK Government and the contenders are from Europe and the United States, this is no simple shopping spree.

The competition to replace the Army’s ageing Lynx helicopters has become a war between rival contractors. The Government’s decision risks being seen as a manifesto for the entire future of the helicopter industry, and a reading of whether Britain’s political loyalties lie with Europe or America.

There are no British-designed helicopters in the race but three leading British companies are fronting rival bids on behalf of their foreign supply partners, and each is involved in producing and delivering the aircraft to the Army Air Corps towards the end of the decade.

Millions have been spent on campaigns extolling each bid’s value for money, the merits of the aircraft and benefits for British industry including job creation and export potential. The propaganda war has become ever more complex and edged closer to slander and blackmail in the last six months.

Until last week the word was that the US-designed McDonnell Douglas Apache was set to clinch the deal, giving a huge boost to GKN-owned Westland, which would assemble the helicopters in the UK.

But the sudden propulsion of Michael Heseltine to the top of the political pecking order could force a last-minute change of direction towards the all-European option — the Eurocopter Tiger, developed by Aerospatiale of France and Daimler-Benz Aerospace of Germany with the UK’s British Aerospace as a 20 per cent partner.

Heseltine resigned as defence secretary over the future of Westland in 1986 when the Cabinet refused to back his European solution to the West Country helicopter-maker’s problems.

British Aerospace sources hint darkly that if Apache is chosen, Westland would be left vulnerable, cold-shouldered by Eurocopter and fighting an uphill battle for export opportunities.

One industry observer last week lamented that it has all been seen before. Once again, Britain appears on the political and industrial defensive, caught in a bruising and bewildering tug of love between Europe and America and pleasing no one. 

Note that being "on the political and industrial defensive" is not about to stop the government forking out £2.5 billion on attack helicopters in the first place. On the contrary, the pressure to get ready to use any and every trick in the book to shore up British imperialism's eroding monopoly positions, -including (as ever) the translation of trade-war into shooting war when bourgeois survival so dictates, - will only intensify the MORE weak and threatened the degenerate ruling class feels.

As middle-class pacifism along Greenpeace lines is currently being taught by French imperialist goon squads, every last weapon in bourgeois possession, from UN small arms to atomic rocketry, is ultimately there to be USED in IMPERIALIST WAR. With the end of the Cold War, the illusion that there can ever really be such a thing as weapons 'purely for deterrence and prestige, not for use' is dying fast.

France's quaint health-and-safety rationale for resuming nuclear testing ('you need to try them out to make sure they're not getting unsafe') hardly even bothered to disguise the urgent aggressive contempt for all criticism of its warmongering preparations, even before the teargassing of Greenpeace made all clear.

The weapons which today are used against Kurds, Iraqis, anti-Zionists, East Timorese, Serbs etc, will tomorrow be used in escalating bloody efforts to sort out the irreconcilable trade-war contradictions within imperialism itself. French atom bombs are not to be tested solely as some crowd-pleasing stunt, or because some sections of the establishment 'even now' remain 'infected with militarism', but because possession of atom bombs is correctly perceived by the French bourgeoisie as being very important to the whole argument for its continued class survival in the only way it could ever demand: as winner in the cutthroat competitive battle to dominate the world market and push the overproduction crisis back down the throats of its trade-war rivals. Pacifism gets in the way of this unstoppable class necessity at its peril. Its petty bourgeois idealism has not the remotest grasp of what historical forces are really at work, and for all its pious intentions is a political obstacle to the working class winning through to a scientific class-struggle grasp of what is at stake in these contradictions and what is to be done to resolve them through communist revolution.

CND can organize boycotts of French goods if it wants, helping along the atmosphere of holier-than-thou trade-warring which is coming soon enough anyway, with Germany and Italy reportedly adding their own ominous throat-clearings to the outright condemnations from Australia and New Zealand. But why stop there? Why not boycott British goods too, if readiness to sacrifice all human decency in the scramble for nuclear warfare expertise is what counts?

In 1987 Eileen Welsome, a reporter working for the Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico, stumbled across a footnote to a document on animal experimentation at an air force laboratory. It referred to 18 people secretly injected with plutonium. It took her six years to scramble through the undergrowth of classified documents and, with the help of the US Freedom of Information Act, to discover that scientists working on the army’s Manhattan Project — which developed the nuclear bomb - had used unsuspecting, terminally ill patients to test the effect of radiation. Of the 18 injected with huge doses of plutonium — the chemical that triggers the atomic bomb — half died within 18 months.

When Welsome broke the news in spring last year, the US Department of Energy was forced to open its files on hundreds of other experiments, including tests on 130 prisoners in Oregon who had their testicles exposed to intense X-rays and, in the 1950s, the feeding of mentally retarded children in Massachusetts with porridge with radioactive milk.

Last November an investigation ordered by President Clinton into military-backed radiation tests reported that, between 1940 and 1974, hundreds of cancer patients had had high doses of total body radiation.

Watching the reports, Twenty Twenty programme-makers John Brownlow and Joe Bullman started on the nuclear trail in Britain in June 1994. They began in the Public Record Office at Kew Library with secret documents opened under the 30-year rule and then unpicked the evidence from obscure medical papers. They believe that what they found is just a fraction of the experiments that have gone on in Britain since the development of the atomic bomb. Britain has no Freedom of Information Act and they say they have been given no real co-operation from the Ministry of Defence.

In 1952 Britain had begun a series of nuclear tests and, anxious to know how the radiation produced by the atomic bomb would affect soldiers, the Government's nuclear laboratories at Harwell were given the task of investigating. In 1953 the British army began sending promising science graduates to Harwell to work on human irradiation.

At the Churchill Hospital in Oxford in 1956, 17 patients suffering from "incurable malignant disease but in good condition" were given whole-body irradiation and the radiation sickness some suffered was monitored. One of the doctors carrying out the research told Channel 4 that they had some links with Harwell, mainly sharing equipment.

Between 1960 and 1971, 88 cancer patients in Cincinnati were treated with the same technique used at the Churchill. The programme was run by Doctor Eugene L Saenger, who also worked for the Defence Atomic Support Agency. It is impossible to verify whether there were direct links between the British and American research programmes, as the US authorities have an agreement that information on British research carried out in conjunction with them will be classified.

In documents passed to the Guardian and through interviews, a disturbing picture emerges of British scientists experimenting with radiation on, among other groups, pregnant women, Asian women and psychiatric patients. 

Anglo-saxon bourgeois 'civilization' committed these monstrosities even against its own citizens (leaving aside the routine barbarism meted out to Malayans, Adenis, Greeks, Kenyans etc.) in time of relative BOOM. A glance at the history of imperialist war and fascism already this century reveals the depths to which imperialism will drag world society when that boom collapses once more into world slump.

The point is that atom bombs are for dropping and attack helicopters are for attacking. Battling for British capitalist control of its own defence industry is not just some piecemeal trade and industry dispute, or just a rather good hobby horse for pro-Europeans, Atlanticists or little Englanders to ride to an election, but goes to the heart of British monopoly capitalism's fight for survival by all means necessary, both against its out-competing monopoly rivals and (ultimately) against its own revolutionary proletariat.

On some shallow formal level the breadth of the crisis is maybe half-recognized in the instinct to merge departments (employment and education) and start roping every bureaucratic corner of government into a state of crisis-stations 'national readiness' (however ludicrously inadequate Heseltinism looks as a means to this end).

But the nettle yet to be convincingly grasped by the British ruling class is that the ONLY politics in the end worth cultivating in time of fascist slump trade-war crisis must be the politics of chauvinist aggression and naked class war. Whether behind Major's reheated 'one nation Toryism', or Heseltine's corporatism, or Redwood's 'Eurosceptic' rhetoric, or Blair's 'New Labour' cosmetics, those are the politics towards which imperialism must gravitate as the crisis worsens.

Robin Cook jumping up and down at the back of the class to demand military revenge for imperialism's continuing humiliating failures in the Balkans is a straw in that wind.

Rolling back the welfare state aspirations of 50 years in favour of class-deferential mass-sacrifice on the altar of warmongering bourgeois greed is a dangerous stunt to undertake, even for a ruling class less gaga than this.

But when every other procrastinating attempt to bribe the middle class (with nursery vouchers (so those who can afford nursery places for their four-year olds can get a subsidy, and most of those who can't will still find it beyond their means) or with tax-cuts etc.), and to keep public opinion constantly off-balance with forever a 'new' reshuffle, 'new' leaders, 'new' Labour etc.,- has finally been exhausted in face of the oncoming juggernaut of fascist warmongering slump, - it is to those openly xenophobic and class-war politics which the bourgeoisie must nerve itself to turn in earnest. It is the imperialist crisis which is challenging the bourgeoisie to 'put up or shut up', and so far the British capitalist establishment is failing to do either.

It is against the background of that same crisis that the colonial oppression of Ireland is finally being retreated from at a snail's pace, so eventually clearing away a major obstacle to conscious revolutionary communist development in both the British and the Irish working class.

Contrary to the nonsense spouted by the SWP and Militant (and now the RCP too, insanely claiming that the Irish national struggle has been 'defeated', with Ireland 'a nation never again'), the fact is that it was the revolutionary fight against British imperialism, waged behind the non-communist leadership of Sinn Féin/IRA, which has opened up new possibilities of class-struggle advance, not all that pretend-socialist advice from the wings.

All the time that Trot idealism was excusing itself from defending the national liberation struggle unfolding on its own doorstep by whining that the IRA were not communists (unlike the SWP fakers, they never claimed to be), that struggle continued to sacrifice and struggle heroically against everything the state could throw at it - PTA, internment, no-jury courts, torture barracks, shoot-to-kill policy - until the long retreat was forced on London.

All those simple-minded calls for 'protestants and Catholics to unite and fight for a living wage' etc. (blindly accepting the bourgeois story about 'sectarianism on both sides' and doing its best to bury the historic significance of the latter stages of the fight against national oppression under mechanical repetition of reformist formulae) only ever had one effect: to get under the feet of the anti-imperialist fight, and sow confusion amongst workers.

But the last laugh is on the Trots. Now that this great obstacle to Bolshevik progress is at last being shoved aside, it is becoming clear that it is the SUCCESS of anti-imperialism and the demoralized FAILURE of Orange politics which is opening up the opportunities for conscious class struggle.

Before the Portadown events started up, the capitalist press was already reflecting some interesting pre-marching season tensions:

In Dublin there is an expectation that the government will shortly move to soothe the crisis by transferring the remaining republican prisoners held in English jails back to Northern Ireland and by increasing remission rates to 50 per cent, which could result in the immediate release of some prisoners. The Ormeau’s Ballynafeigh is the smallest of Belfast’s Orange Lodges, with just 259 members out of a total membership in Northern Ireland of 100,000. Every Twelfth for the last 96 years it has paraded down the Ormeau Road into the city centre and joined the annual march to the Field. For the Catholic population it means being penned inside your home all day, listening to the rising beat of the drums, fearful of roused sectarian passions, enduring the annual coat-trailing spectacle of the Protestant ascendancy.

Those who can afford it go away on holiday to Spain or Donegal.

But this Twelfth the Orangemen of Ballynafeigh will find their route down the Ormeau Road blocked by RUC officers in riot gear, as it has been five times already this year during the marching season's warm-up parades.

THE ROAD glistened after the hour-long battle, broken bottles ground to powder by the wheels of police Land-Rovers, the familiar detritus of rioting. Back in Ballynafeigh Orange Hall some of the older men sat drinking whiskey in the upstairs bar where a large photograph of a young Queen Elizabeth hung, shaking their heads resignedly. "Hooligans, they messed it up for us. It wasn’t Orangemen doing that," said one. "The police over-reacted, it was no worse than your average soccer match," opined another. "What were they doing releasing Clegg this week of all weeks?" demanded one of his drinking companions. "Couldn’t they have at least waited until the Twelfth was out of the way? What would another few days have mattered?" The conversation dried up after someone concluded: "Well that’s that, there’s no way we’ll get down that road on the Twelfth now, not after that."

The showdown between unreconciled sections of Orange fascism and their fellow Orangemen in RUC uniforms is rubbing home the real extent both of that resentful whipped demoralization and of just how badly the stricken British establishment need to be done with the Irish war for good.

With the material basis of 'British-Irish' privilege eroded by slump (no more guaranteed Unionist ticket to a ship-building job for life) and fought to a standstill by armed nationalist resistance (all the way back to its roots in Downing Street and the City of London), the demoralization of all the cocky second-hand imperialist arrogance is nearing completion.

The whisky-tippler’s response to Clegg's release is instructive. So far from giving 'British Irishness' the fillip that might have been anticipated, what at once surfaces instead is the fear that London's latest blundering will only make things even worse.

And the self-destructive fury which drives some 'British Irish' blowhards into a hail of plastic bullets from the guns of their fellow bigots in the RUC can only, as the tippler's gloomy prophecy made clear, bring closer the day when such counter-revolutionary displays of colonial arrogance are banned from going down any road in Ireland at all. The hundreds of Irish in Portadown who gathered in the road at 4 o'clock this morning to block any idea of scuttling through under cover of darkness made this point very clearly. (Latest reports suggesting that the marchers will pass through today under conditions imposed by the nationalist community would make the triumphalism of this year's 'Glorious Twelfth' even more hollow.)

Orange triumphalism, long a hollow echo of a wider empire lost, can never be stood back upon its feet now that Paisley's endless 'sell-out' warnings now self-evidently correspond with simple fact.

With the unfinished national business on the way to being sorted, the deck is being cleared for Irish workers to extend their recent revolutionary anti-imperialist tradition into a profounder challenge to the class basis of all imperialist rule.

Nor can it even be guaranteed, in the absence of a confident and clear lead from the rotten bourgeois of the Orange ascendency, that even the poor bloody Orange infantry will forever let their love of 'King Billy' block out everything that the reality of their class existence within imperialist crisis keeps trying to tell them. But such developments, if and when they come, will owe everything to the ferocity with which 'British Irish' colonial pretensions have been fought to the wall, and 'nothing at all to the 'protestants and Catholics, unite and fight' disruptive cretinism of the SWP and the rest.

As for workers in Britain, it is hard to say where the richest political lesson lies: in the demise of the colonial oppression of Ireland which played such a key role in the imposition of reformist class-collaboration on British workers' political consciousness (especially after losing India, Suez etc.); or in the spectacular self-exposures of its brutality, cynicism and incompetence which the capitalist state is laying on for workers in the course of its slow-motion scramble for the colonial exit.

Fight for Leninism.

Build the ILWP.

Dominic Hull