Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
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No 0829  November 21 1995                                                                                                       10p weekly
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Nutty Princess 10 Buckingham Palace 0

The posturings about 'monarchy' by the British capitalist-state's establishment suffered near-terminal eclipse from Diana's Panorama interview.

There was nothing monarchical in this seething mess of petty spite and monstrous exploitation, a picture of grotesque and laughable incompetence truly fitting for the decline of British imperialism.

Still steeped in past delusions of Empire, the establishment has carried on trying to play the 'Royal Family' card in the hope of keeping traditional mass chauvinism going based just on sentiment and soppy-mindedness.

The project crashed in ruins at 9.40 last night as the star performer in the Royal circus, its biggest draw by far, virtually declared war on Buckingham Palace.

Diana described herself as a strong woman who was causing confusion and fear to Buckingham Palace because she "would not go quietly. That's the problem. I will fight to the end."

She condemned the establishment's cruel campaign to make her life intolerable, but with astonishing bravado, she declared that she would carry on struggling "to confuse the enemy".

Diana denounced the Royal Family for being out of contact with ordinary people, and for having no depth of feeling or understanding, which was needed on a daily basis for the head of state role.

She claimed that the sufferings of the man on the street mattered more to her than anything else, and she wanted her sons (future king) to understand people's hopes and dreams better than the present Royal Family can manage.

Diana said the Palace was puzzled and worried about where she got her strength from, and likened herself to "every strong woman in history who has had her problems", and consciously added that this was why the public still supported her.

She described the public as being indifferent to or fed up with the Royal Family and its difficulties, and said the monarchy would need to change and adapt if it was to survive.

Diana put the boot into Charles very subtly for wounded vanity over her becoming the star of the Royal Couple as far as the media were concerned, implying that her incredible popularity was the beginning of her troubles with the Buckingham Palace establishment.

In effect, she was putting herself forward as a far better representative for Britain in the world than the rest of the Royal Family, and indicated that she would carry on pursuing this challenge to Buckingham Palace.

With a surprising degree of subtle cunning, Diana ended by throwing doubt on what sort of King Charles would make, or whether he even wanted the job, cleverly hinting at her son William as a better succession.

For the record (not yet complete), some of the capitalist press's first details of Diana's astonishing onslaught follow, plus a flavour of some of the public comments on the drama:

MB: Around 1986, again according to the biography written by Jonathan Dimbleby about your husband, he says that your husband renewed his relationship with Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles. Were you aware of that?

HRH: Yes I was, but I wasn't in a position to do anything about it.

MB: What evidence did you have that their relationship was continuing even though you were married?

HRH: Oh, a woman's instinct is a very good one.

MB: Is that all?

HRH: Well. I had, obviously I had knowledge of it.

MB: From staff?

HRH: Well, from people who minded and cared about our marriage, yes.

MB: What effect did that have on you?

HRH: Pretty devastating. Rampant bulimia, if you can have rampant bulimia, and just a feeling of being no good at anything and being useless and hopeless and failed in every direction.

MB: And with a husband who was having a relationship with somebody else?

HRH: With a husband who loved someone else, yes.

MB: You really thought that?

HRH: Uh,uh. I didn't think that, I knew it.

MB: How did you know it?

HRH: By the change of behavioural pattern in my husband; for all sorts of reasons that a woman's instinct produces; you just know. It was already difficult, but it became increasingly difficult.

MB: In the practical sense, how did it become difficult?

HRH: Well, people were — when I say people I mean friends, on my husband's side — were indicating that I was again unstable, sick, and I should be put in a home of some sort in order to get better. I was almost an embarrassment.

MB: Do you think he really thought that?

HRH: Well, there's no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it.

MB: So you were isolated? 

HRH: Uh,uh, very much so. 

MB: Do you think Mrs Parker Bowles was a factor in the breakdown of your marriage?

HRH: Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.

MB: Did you allow your friends, your close friends, to speak to Andrew Morton? 

HRH: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. 

MB: Why?

HRH: I was at the end of my tether. I was desperate. I think I was so fed up with being seen as someone who was a basket-case, because I am a very strong person and I know that causes complications in the system that I live in.

MB: How would a book change that?

HRH: I don't know. Maybe people have a better understanding, maybe there's a lot of women out there who suffer on the same level but in a different environment, who are unable to stand up for themselves because their self-esteem is cut into two. I don't know.

MB: What effect do you think the book had on your husband and the royal family? 

HRH: I think they were shocked and horrified and very disappointed.

MB: Moving to 1993, what happened during that period? 

HRH: People's agendas changed overnight. I was now separated wife of the Prince of Wales, I was a problem, I was a liability (seen as), and how are we going to deal with her? This hasn't happened before.

MB: Who was asking those questions?

HRH: People around me, people in this environment, and...

MB: The royal household?

HRH: People in my environment, yes, yes.

MB: And they began to see you as a problem?

HRH: Yes, very much so, uh, uh.

MB: How did that show itself?

HRH: By visits abroad being blocked, by things that had come naturally my way being stopped, letters going, that got lost, and various things.

MB: Who was behind that change?

HRH: Well, my husband's side were very busy stopping me.

MB: Have you any idea how that conversation came to be published?

HRH: No, but it was done to harm me in a serious manner, and that was the first time I'd experienced what it was like to be outside the net, so to speak, and not be in the family.

MB: What do you think the purpose was behind it?

HRH: It was to make the public change their attitude towards me. It was, you know, if we are going to divorce, my husband would hold more cards than I would — it was very much a poker game, chess game.

MB: There were also a series of telephone calls which allegedly were made by you to a Mr Oliver Hoare. Did you make what were described as nuisance phone calls?

HRH: I was reputed to have made 300 telephone calls in a very short space of time which, bearing in mind my lifestyle at that time, made me a very busy lady. No, I didn't, I didn't. But that again was a huge move to discredit me, and very nearly did me in, the injustice of it.

"The fight between Charles and Diana is now a no-holds-barred contest. What we have is the heir to the throne in a continued battle with his wife, and it has become an international laughing-stock.

"What will happen if Charles is crowned king? Will they be elbowing each other out of the way?

"The monarchy is supposed to be above the fray. It is supposed to be unifying and about family. But on every test it is failing.

"Now it is confirmed that monarchy has descended into rival camps, it will finally destroy itself.

"Politicians must realise this soon, and separate it from the state."

"It was incredibly clever PR. By being this proactive she has really controlled the communication flow and quashed the tabloid rumour mill by admitting everything they said about her.

"Because she was so honest about the bulimia, and that came first, we were made to assume she was being as honest about everything. Her voice was deeper than usual, she had rehearsed the answers. She came across as a serious person. A lot of people will have more respect for her now.

"At times she played the martyr line a bit too strong, but I was amazed she was so incredibly honest. She had nothing to lose, and in PR terms she definitely won."

"She looked very together. She maintained eye contact with the interviewer, she seemed very self-confident. She couldn't have done that kind of interview if she did not know where she was at.

"But men and women will see her confessions very differently. Men will think she is manipulative and trying to get back at Charles. But to women she is open and honest. "She was isolated and vulnerable, but really wanted to be part of a team and spoke without malice about her husband. But she also wanted to have her own life and was searching for her own role. I think all of that will ring true with a lot of people."

"If pity is what she wants then, after last night, she will certainly get it. But I think that is a step backwards from the love and affection she enjoyed before. She came over as a very injured person who has been used by everyone around her. I admire her for doing it, but I never realised she was such a tragic person.

She may have said she wants to fight on but I don't think there are many intelligent people who now think she could take on the task of representing the country."

"It seems that the Prince of Wales married a very disturbed girl whom he was unable or unwilling to help. I think it was a very, very damaging broadcast for the monarchy.

'SOME speculated that it would be bland. It wasn't.

Others said it would be dynamite. It was far more powerful than that. What the Palace feared most would happen — that the Princess of Wales would let fly the pent-up grievances and frustrations she has stored for 14 years — happened last night. And it was devastating.

In just one hour, in front of a viewing public of 15 million, she destroyed the image that generations of sovereigns have strived to create for more than 100 years — of a contented, caring and united royal family. By contrast, the picture she painted of life within Buckingham Palace was of isolation, jealousy and cruel scheming.

It is now inconceivable that the muddy compromise that has been allowed to exist between the Prince and Princess of Wales since their separation three years ago can continue. Either it must be divorce, or a deal must be negotiated that clarifies her position.

The first option is likely to be difficult.

To add to the looming nightmare that hangs over the palace in the aftermath of the Panorama interview this morning, the princess made clear that she had no intention of "going quietly", and that she had no desire for divorce.

She also stated in no uncertain terms that she wanted a settlement to the problem that would give her an enlarged role in public affairs — as a carer at home and an ambassador abroad.

How Prince Charles, backed up by palace lawyers, will find a way of squaring that circle is hard to imagine. But, viewed from their perspective, they must, and fast.

With a battle instantly raging last night between supporters of the prince, attempting to discredit her testimony as paranoid, and the princess's backers, who praised her for a courageous performance, her intervention also raises large questions about the future of the heir to the throne. Whether Prince Charles can succeed having been effectively denounced by his wife, who even doubted his ability to cope with the restrictions of life as King, must be seriously in doubt.

It was known before the interview was shown that the unauthorised Panorama appearance represented the princess's greatest gamble to date. Few anticipated just how many risks she was prepared to take.

She went far beyond the barriers of previously accepted royal behaviour, coming perilously close to an open declaration of war. "I am a free spirit," she said in glorious understatement.

ROYALTY may survive, but you have to wonder whether the House of Windsor will. Constitutional monarchy is a perfectly workable system, as Japan, Spain, Holland and plenty of other countries prove.

But with this lot? Not since the House of Usher, or even the House of Atreus, fell under the spotlight of publicity has such a family been ripped apart. At the very end, all sweetness and forgiveness, Diana implied that the best thing Charles could do was step aside, make way for Prince William, and get a life.

In a finale to this extraordinary, dazzling, supremely manipulative performance, she suggested she was speaking only for his own good: "My wish is that my husband finds peace of mind."

There was no Bosworth Field. Nobody got an arrow in the brain. But you sensed that the future king had been just as effectively destroyed, by a soft-spoken single mum sitting on a chair and with a pair of eyes that seemed to be burning through the cathode ray tube. It was an e-mail message straight to every address in the kingdom.

There may be some delusion in Diana's view of herself as a 'strong woman of history', but her courage, brightness, and determination were unmistakable.

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" it is said. The open aristocratic decadence of the system of arranged marriages and favoured mistresses, out of date historically with the collapse of British imperialism, seems also to have run into insuperable problems inside its own domestic household. In more ways than one, time seems to be up for British imperialism and its bankrupt monarchical pretensions. JB

Anti-communism humiliated in Poland. 'New world order' in trouble everywhere.

In the midst of the continuing economic turmoils internationally of the 'new world order', - newly marked by the trade-war disagreements at the APEC summit in Osaka, and the farcical end to the US Government paralysis with both sides admitting that they cannot solve America's debt problems, - the most obvious political signs of what the capitalist crisis means have again come from East Europe.

What was defeated in the Polish presidential vote was anti—communism.

All attempts to explain that Walesa was simply being punished for his arrogance, or that the vote for the ex-communist party leader Kwasnievski was still a vote for free-market reforms, ignorantly and pathetically miss the point.

Walesa and the all-powerful Catholic Church, backed by the entire Western-world propaganda-agency-might, based their entire campaign on the supposed "back to discredited communism" dangers of electing Kwasnievski. The whole of Poland was being clearly warned, repeatedly, - 'do not go back to the terrible past, whatever you do', etc, etc.

There were plenty of other candidates to vote for in the first round to give Walesa a rap on the knuckles without voting the former communist party back into supreme office.

And there were plenty of other 'reform' pro-market parties on offer if any change of office from Walesa would do.

But it was the clearly identified former communist party which won the presidential election, - just as it won the parliamentary elections before that, - and a host of other comparable successes in other spheres recently.

It is, of course, a huge tragedy that this Kwasnievski gang are indeed not communists, of any description.

But the most significant thing is that they choose to trade as the former communist party when they do not have to, many former communist regime leaders having disappeared in all kinds of directions away from political appeals openly identified with the communist label.

Kwasnievski & Co have stuck with it in totally opportunist fashion precisely because they know that the sane sections of the Polish population would sooner or later pass a vote on what has been dished up to them since the workers state was sabotaged by its own revisionist leadership, and capitalist free-market mayhem brought in, - and that that vote would be saying that the past was better.

This is the huge significance of the Polish elections, which, far from being a one-off, have now duplicated the same astonishing results already seen in Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and shortly to be in Russia itself, - people identified with the former-communist system winning office left right and centre.

Tragically, none of these revisionist outfits will want to or be capable of any return to the dictatorship of the proletariat, a workers state, - the only possible basis for a planned socialist economy.

All of them intend to piddle around with opportunist or posturing little reforms which cannot possibly rescue their countries from the horrors of restored privatisation, exploitation and wholesale corruption, or the added horrors of the worldwide capitalist slump which is just beginning to get a grip of the planet.

And without Bolshevik-Leninist leadership, the suffering masses and workers will be fooled for a while by these opportunist posturers masquerading as the former Communists, meaning the values and achievements of the former workers states.

But the conditions of slump and degradation, - as admitted by the capitalist Western press itself, frequently quoting from imperialist agencies' own reports, - can only drive workers in one direction, back towards real communism in the not too distant future:

THE countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union need to make urgent mid-course changes to halt the rise in poverty, income inequality, and adult male mortality, according to the latest analysis by the United Nations Children's Fund.

Although the overall strategy is "moving in the right direction", the report says wrong policies were adopted, often on the advice of Western experts, which exacerbated the pain of transition and led to a catastrophic slump in output. It cites the emphasis on removing price subsidies in one go which led to inflation, and the rush to privatise state companies before bankruptcy and anti-monopoly laws were in place.

The report, the third such regional survey by Unicef since the collapse of communism, is probably the most detailed statistical analysis of "shock therapy" available anywhere, looking at health and income data as well as macro-economic figures. Another unexpected finding is that "paternal mortality" has risen faster than that of mothers or infants.

For men in the 20-39 age group in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltics, "the mortality increase due to heart, digestive, and infectious diseases has taken on frightening dimensions, almost unequalled for its magnitude in peacetime".

The report shows that, even when economic recovery begins, as in Poland which has had three years of growth, poverty rates and unemployment do not show matching falls. It points to huge drops in welfare provision, even in more socially stable countries in the region, like the Baltics.

Some of the worst data come from Russia, where output fell another 15 per cent last year and the state statistical committee reports a new rise in poverty, with 34 per cent of the population below the subsistence minimum.

Hasty privatisation did not lead to management efficiency or competition but to greedy "rent-seeking" by the new entrepreneurs. The report calls for social safety nets and tax-financed restoration of public services such as health and education.

In contrast to the rapid cure suggested by "shock therapy", simultaneous price and trade liberalisation, devaluation, and privatisation do not bring quick fixes.

"Why won't I vote? Because it's stupid." said a refinery man in his 50s.

"There's nothing good any more. Everything's bad. Shares? Toilet paper!"

This is what Mikhail Bobrishov, head of the refinery's trade union, means when he says delicately that the workers of Volgograd "have no faith in the possibility of change".

Pessimism here is bleak news for the Russian government as it prepares to defend economic shock therapy at the ballot box next month. Of all the big plants on the banks of the Volga in this 50-mile industrial sprawl, the refinery has the most immediate chance of prospering.

It belongs to LUKoil, mightiest of the commercial oil companies emerging from the division of Russia's energy assets. LUKoil has vast oil reserves to provide the refinery with raw materials and no shortage of customers.

LUKoil's name is everywhere in Volgograd. The same generous brush that once smoothed away the years on giant placards of Leonid Brezhnev has painted a LUKoil girl on the road from the airport. Her face is that of a bright-eyed Soviet polytechnic graduate marching towards the communist dawn. The petrol pump in her hand, pointing to crude representations of a BMW and a Mercedes, beckons passers-by to the immediate fulfilment of the New Russian dream.

Somehow the dream has not reached the refinery's 4,500-strong workforce. The refinery is working at medium capacity when other factories are idle, but they are not grateful. They, too, look towards a communist dawn  — in elections to the local council in October, communists won 22 of 24 seats.

Although the partially-privatised LUKoil has paid dividends on the shares that some workers possess, they do not perceive that privatisation has brought benefits.

This is partly due to pay which, although from two to three times the average wage at up to £130 a month, is out of step with prices. Partly it is due to the fact that even a company of LUKoil's size and wealth is incapable of paying its workers on time.

Mr Bobrishov said: "If we're supposed to be paid between the fifth and 10th of the month, probably we'll get paid between the 25th and the 30th. It's not that the company is in such a bad financial situation as not to be able to pay wages, but there are chains of non-payment. And if federal taxes aren't paid on time, the government simply seizes the money from the company's bank account."

Things are worse at the town's other industrial giants. The tractor factory, its workforce cut from 30,000 to 15,000, still turns out its machines but the workers have not been paid since August.

Pyotr Samshkin, aged 55, an engine tester, said: "We could live well enough before on 200 roubles. We could buy things. As far as food and goods are concerned, there's lots now. But if they don't pay me, how can I buy them?"

There is nothing complicated about the forces driving the workers of Volgograd towards rejecting electoral democracy or, in limited numbers, towards the region's pragmatic communists. With their vegetable plots and their pay — when they get it — they feed and clothe themselves and their families. But there is no sense of reward at the end of the month and it is hard to respect employers and government officials who visibly prosper while wages are delayed for months on end.

Ecological disaster, economic collapse, riots, refugees, social upheavals, rotten weather. This squat little town, stuck in the middle of a grey, oil-smudged desert, has seen it all.

Half an hour's drive north of Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, across what passes for countryside on this barren stretch of the Caspian Sea's coastline, Sumgait must be one of the unluckiest towns in the former Soviet Union.

And indeed it is. During the past few years almost all of Sumgait's factories have ground to a halt To the north-east the Caucasus mountains are no longer obscured by smog.

Unfortunately, though, Sumgait's luck has not improved in other respects. Economic, not ecological pressures were responsible for the shutdown, and today an environmental crisis has simply been exchanged for a social one.

Azerbaijan's economic collapse has been as spectacular as anywhere in the former Soviet Union, a collapse made far worse by the country's protracted and financially crippling war with Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

That war left its first ugly scars on Sumgait seven years ago when ethnic tensions exploded in a riot which left several hundred local Armenians dead. Since then, the Armenians have had their revenge, capturing up to 20 per cent of Azerbaijan's territory and forcing a million people to flee their homes. 

So far, 70,000 refugees have arrived in Sumgait. Some stay with relatives, but many live in squalor, crowded into makeshift homes in basements, garages and building sites.

Sumgait, with its giant, empty factories and its ecological legacy, is low on the list of priorities for foreign companies looking for business in Azerbaijan. Most come to the country with only one interest — oil. Some 68 billion tonnes of the stuff is believed to be sitting under the Caspian Sea, waiting to be tapped.

An oil boom of sorts is already gripping the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, where dozens of new shops and restaurants are opening up to cater for Western businessmen. Last Friday, amid a swirl of publicity, Azerbaijan's president Heydar Aliyev signed a multimillion dollar contract with a Russian, American and Italian consortium to develop a new oilfield 60 miles offshore.

But oil wells are not drilled overnight. It will take five years or more before the Azerbaijani government starts to profit from its resources and years more before the benefits begin to make a lasting impact on places such as Sumgait.

Meanwhile, the circus of imperialist crisis throws up more and more political scandal, incompetence, and skulduggery.

Shell is branded as trying the most sordid bribe to save Ken Saro-Wiwa's life before his execution if he would call off the Ogoniland protests.

The West announces the most pathetic apology for non-sanctions against Nigeria's fascist dictatorship imaginable, blatantly encouraging the Ajuba butchers, after the brazen attempt to blame Mandela for non-action against Abacha & Co at the Commonwealth summit, action which clearly should have been initiated by Western imperialism.

But Mandela's own weakness in merely quietly ignoring the Western pressure, instead of denouncing it, may be getting its own comeuppance from ANC revolts against the too collaborationist leadership.

But the most dangerous problem currently for imperialism remains the crisis in the Zionist occupation of Palestine where Rabin's assassin is now admitted in the capitalist press to be closely connected to the fascist regime's own most reactionary forces:

YIGAL AMIR, the man who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, is a former security agent with the Israeli secret service.

The Observer has also established that the secret service Shabak (formerly Shin Bet) helped to finance the Jewish extremist group Eyal, to which Amir belonged, and that Eyal's founder, Avishai Raviv, is an active Shabak agent.

Shabak is facing growing criticism over the assassination and Israel's intelligence community is abuzz with rumour about how much it knew of the plot to kill Rabin and why it failed to react to the threats.

Well-placed Israeli sources say Amir worked for Shabak for three months in Latvia in 1992 and it was an identity card issued by the secret service that enabled him to penetrate the security cordon around Rabin in Tel Aviv two weeks ago. His earlier threats to kill the Prime Minister were glossed over by security chiefs. But one question that nags investigators is whether vital information about the killer, Amir, 27, was deliberately withheld from the authorities.

Even more important is the issue of whether Amir and like-minded fanatics managed to convert some senior officials inside the intelligence establishment to their cause.

When Amir shot Rabin, he shouted: 'It's only a blank, it's only a blank.' This is a stock tactic taught to hitmen in the intelligence services, partly to sow confusion and also to evade retaliation from their intended victim's bodyguards.

This same tactic was employed a week earlier when two Mossad agents gunned down Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shkaki outside his hotel in Malta. Like Amir's attack against Rabin, they used a 9mm Beretta with hollowed-out bullets to get their man.

Hints about Amir's earlier links with intelligence have filtered out to a few Israelis. One of them is Rabbi Beni Alon, the son of a widely respected Supreme Court judge, who said: 'I have heard that when Amir was abroad, he was officially hired by the secret services. I think he was hired by the Prime Minister's office — teaching was his cover.'

But Amir's experience with the intelligence world did not stop with his three months in Latvia. When he returned to Israel, where he decided to pursue a course in higher education at Bar Illan, he joined the underground group Eyal, dedicated to expelling the Palestinians from the West Bank.

Beni Alon claims Eyal was 'founded and financed' by Shabak operatives who used it to find out more about Jewish terrorism. This does not mean that Amir was acting on behalf of Shabak, even though there is growing evidence that Eyal is indeed connected to intelligence. Its head, Avishai Raviv, is expected to appear as a state witness at Amir's trial.

On Friday, security sources revealed that Raviv was a Shabak agent 'planted' among radical right-wing groups and known by the code name 'Champagne'.

This is the first time that the ostensibly non-political Shabak has been held responsible for the activities of a Jewish terror organisation. In the past few years, Eyal has claimed responsibility for several attacks, some fatal, against Palestinians.

Questions are bound to be raised about why a Labour coalition publicly committed to making peace with the Palestinians continued to back an intelligence strategy that supported a fundamentalist Jewish group determined to destroy the peace process.

Yet few Israelis are prepared to accept that it was only warped judgment that affected Shabak's perception of the threats against Rabin. The Left and the Right battle as fiercely inside the intelligence agency as they do in the rest of the country. A sizeable number of officers with left-wing sympathies believe their organisation has been hijacked by the Right.

It is certainly true that many Shabak departmental heads are strongly opposed to Israel's military withdrawal from Palestinian population centres. In private briefings these intelligence experts argue that 27 years of intelligence work in the West Bank and Gaza have been sabotaged by the government's change of policy.

One of the consequences of Rabin's peace strategy was that fewer Palestinians than ever were prepared to act as informers for Shabak. At the best of times Shabak used to boast of 18,000 Palestinians on its payroll. Now less than half remain.

Until the peace process began to roll in 1992, Shabak's Jewish department concentrated exclusively on Israeli left-wingers with Palestinian links. They were deemed to pose the greatest threat to the security of the state. One of them was Mikhail Vershuvsky, a Jewish supporter of the Palestinian cause, who was arrested in 1987 and sentenced to 20 months in prison for 'providing services to an illegal Palestinian organisation'.

Vershuvsky's crime was to provide a translation service for a banned Palestinian group. In those days even flying a Palestinian flag was a punishable offence. A year later Shabak arrested four Israeli Jews for belonging to a hostile organisation and making contact with the enemy. Their crime was to publish a newspaper in Hebrew and Arabic that supported the Marxist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Perhaps the most telling comment about Shabak's political affiliations dates back to last March when Rabin appointed a new head. Mr K, who succeeded Yaakov Perry as the head of Shabak, is an expert on right-wing Jewish terror.

To some Israelis Goldstein is a saint and a symbol of their determination to cling on to the West Bank. Goldstein had the same bigoted view of Arabs as Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir.

These two Jewish killers are popular among the hardline settlers of Kirvat Arba, outside Hebron, where Rabin's death is characterised by many as 'a blessing from God'.

The colonisation of Palestine is an outrage to history. This bastard development will plunge ever deeper into bloodshed and crisis.   JH

Drugs scare can only be answered by historical-materialist philosophy

Arguments about legalisation or stricter bans as the best way to try to ensure that not too large a section of people should end up damaging themselves through drug abuse, are all missing the point.

For good or ill, the taking of intoxicants, - and the problems associated with overdoing it, - have always been a regular feature of human society, as has the phenomenon of the younger generation always wanting to breach parental or
authoritative guidelines.

Throughout history, near-epidemics of such behaviour have caused concern from time to time, as now.

Some of the more interesting of these occasions seem to have been linked to a general upsurge of nihilistic or anarchic philosophy, - the turn of the century in Russia and the 1920s and 1930s in Germany being two such often-quoted examples.

There is some evidence of nihilism in the present drugs craze, obvious in some of the music people rave to or become fanatical about, but appearing too in widespread cynicism against political establishments worldwide, and increasing generational revolt.

Inevitably, such a period produces bogus 'philosophical' proponents of a drug culture, of various kinds, - not much different from quacks pushing religious fundamentalism, or other gurus of 'alternative lifestyles'.

Many youth might become contaminated to a small extent with some fanaticism or other.

Most kids will just defend drug-taking, or getting a buzz from whatever, or dropping out in a mild way.

More sinister than their naïve reasoning is the fact that their drug-taking makes them minor victims of mafia exploitation, and even more serious victims of big imperialist business, drug-pushing internationally, with the murky record of involvement by the CIA and other colonial agencies seeking to demoralise or control populations now or in the past.

The West controlled China in the 19th century by deliberately creating an epidemic of opium-taking, for example. The American government only kept its army in the unpopular war in Vietnam for so long by creating a total open drug-culture. Latin America is largely ruled by big-business drug manipulation masterminded by the CIA and the mafia, simultaneously keeping the US inner-cities quiescent on dope. The laundering of drug profits is now such big business that a large part of British imperialism's crucial invisible earnings through the City of London is dependent ultimately on the international drug trafficking.

Much of the pressure for legalisation of drug-taking is now coming from sections of big business who feel insecure in their important profits from such 'illegal' and corruption-ridden trade.

The clamour for prohibition is a useful stunt for would-be authoritarian political right-wingers to exploit for notions of 'discipline' in all things (as a build-up towards warmongering chauvinism as the only 'solution' for bourgeois imperialists who fear losing the international trade war, as the next great slump envelopes world capitalism).

But as the long historic crisis of capitalism once again begins lurching towards socialist revolution, ultra-right prohibitionist solutions to anything become less and less likely, and in danger of eventually falling apart discredited, as has happened to the worst excesses of Reaganism and Thatcherism now, and as happened to anti-drinking prohibition in between-wars USA. Reinforced drugs bans now are only going to add to the slight attractions of subversive revolt associated with narcotics and under-age drinking.

Even the capitalist press grasps all this; both the paralysed sterility of government attitudes, as well as the sad philosophical delusions of drug-taking itself:

Research into 'No' campaigns has shown that their message consistently fails. Young people are far more streetwise about drugs and their effects, than they are given credit for by their elders, and they cannot be frightened into rejecting drugs. One internal study conducted for the Department of Health found that the more stridently negative the anti-drugs campaign, the more young people reject its message.

The politicians have been left behind by a cultural wave far greater than the one many of them remember from the Sixties, when some of them smoked the odd joint. Ever since, there has been drug-taking among the population at large — but Ecstasy is happening on a scale never before reached by any illegal drug in this country. The Home Office's own figures suggest about 1.5 million Ecstasy tablets are swallowed every week by up to a million young people, in an orgy of mass law-breaking that represents a sea-change in cultural attitudes.

And while politicians of Left and Right adopt an absolutist position against drug use, the young scoff at their efforts to inform them of the dangers. Only cigarettes and alcohol can compare with current Ecstasy use as widely available mass drugs; many E users see their tablets as no more criminal than a Marlboro. And after seven years the E revolution shows no sign of abating; indeed, it is swelling into a phenomenon on a par with the early days of rock 'n' roll.

The Ecstasy generation does know that there are risks attached, that the odd fatality is usually due to dehydration caused by non-stop dancing in hot clubs, leading to heat-stroke, blood dotting and brain haemorrhage. Increasing numbers of clubs now provide good temperature controls, soft drinks and free water as well as ‘chill-out' rooms with slower music and a cooler temperature so dancers can relax.

For some, the club and the E is a weekend routine. Others take it more occasionally to celebrate a wedding reception or — like Leah — an 18th birthday.

These users are unpersuaded by tabloid horror stories about 'demon tablets'. In their experience it is usually victimless, not addictive, and a drug which does no harm to others. To many it looks just like a short cut to Heaven itself. People take E because it feels great. Worries are cast aside, broken relationships healed, depression melts into contentment and love really does seem to make the world go round.

Only a user really knows the attractions of E. The following is a personal account of one middle-class, well-educated 24-year-old. 'I'd taken E before but these pills at a party were very pure — 'doves' — brought over from Holland. For about half an hour I didn't feel anything, then colours and lights seemed much brighter. I felt fazed and jittery, so two friends took me into the garden. Though it was dark, the street lights looked like a sunset.

'I felt incredibly affectionate towards the people I was with, smiling at them, feeling they were the people who knew and loved me best in the world. By this time dance music was booming and I felt like my body and spirit would burst or bubble over if I didn't dance. I had more energy than I've ever had in my life, felt euphoric, couldn't stop grinning.

'I knew hardly anyone, but l felt they were all my friends. Everyone was stroking and touching each other—not sexually, just relishing the pure joy of the physical sensations. You knew exactly how everyone else was feeling — we were all part of the same happy, supercharged high.'

But if users know these basic facts, there are some salient facts that many do not know— not least because those who have bad experiences with E usually quit the scene afterwards. The second part of the tale of the E user who spoke to the Observer, who knew all the above information, is anything but happy.

'In the first year or so [of regular weekly E use] I began to sense lethargy and disconnectedness for two days after a binge... and there was rattiness and depression I felt by about Wednesday every week, but it didn't seem important. Then, eventually, the gloss wore off. Five friends of mine had drug-related nervous breakdowns. The boundaries between going raving and raving mad seemed much more blurred.

'One night, at a party surrounded by friends, I took a yellow E which filled me with fear. I was paranoid. I spent five hours sitting in a car with a friend listening to the same tape over and over again, and watching the trees in front of me turn into pink flamingoes which were coming to get me. I slept for two days and felt shaky for a week. A few months later I took another one in a boiling hot club and I suddenly felt paranoid about overheating. I was convinced my temperature was rocketing and I went into the loos and poured cold water over my head. After about five minutes I was freezing cold and shivering. People kept coming in and looking at me as if I was a freak — I knew that look. I'd given it myself. It said, "Who's that sad case in the comer who's overdone it?" — I didn't care what they thought, I promised myself if I got through that night I would never take it again — and I haven't.'

Many drugs have side-effects, but there are head-on effects with Ecstasy which are rarely heard about: the reason is not hard to fathom. When a government believes it can beat a problem by simply banning a drug, it will not invest in researching the medical effects of that drug on its users. Scientists who try are accused of conniving with law-breaking.

'A small proportion of Ecstasy users quickly become depressed, suffer panic attacks and enter a permanent paranoid state,' comments Dr John Henry, of the National Poisons Unit, the leading authority on the issue. 'The question is how many more will experience these things in the long run?'

Ecstasy-related deaths in Britain are officially estimated to be between 50 and 60 in seven years — but this may be wildly off the mark. Dr Henry estimates there have been between 20 and 50 in the past three years alone. But without the support of the Government, unlike in the US or Holland — where British E users are being recruited to take part in medical tests — there has been no comprehensive monitoring of Ecstasy use in Britain.

'We are in the middle of a huge natural experiment,' says Dr Henry.

AS WELL as permitting the persistence of medical ignorance about Ecstasy, the Government's crackdown has inadvertently made things worse. Mainstream producers have fled to Europe, leaving much local E production in the hands of unscrupulous mavericks ready to turn out tablets padded out with anything handy — caffeine, cleaning powder, even rat poison — regardless of whether the resulting tablets are potential killers.

With the other mass drugs of choice, society has come to accept that cigarettes and alcohol are killers, but that informed debate and not banning is the surest route to reducing their abuse. The sale of both is heavily controlled, distribution carefully regulated, taxes levied, and quality checked.	

If the Government cannot criminalise Ecstasy out of existence, it might at least consider moving from the rhetoric of total clampdown to a position of careful regulation.

So we remain largely ignorant about E, reliant on unfunded work and overseas studies. Recent American research suggests there may be a substantial increase in the number of depressed people at large as the Ecstasy generation grows up: the drug provides surges of serotonin, the neurotransmitter that enhances feelings of love and affection, but simultaneously damages the brain's natural supply, which may run out later on.

Potential users should be made aware of this — just as smokers now know of the risks they run. Dr Karl Jasen's research at the Maudsley Hospital, south London, into the effects of long-term Ecstasy use is unfunded — the Wellcome Foundation and the Government refused to pay: 'I started out testing those who had taken over 200 tablets, but now I look at those who have taken over 1,000. Ecstasy seems to tip people into mental disorders who were at risk anyway — from family or personal history.'

In fact, Ecstasy is just the most popular drug among a selection, casually taken that includes amphetamines, LSD, cocaine and heroin. This is the pick n' mix drug generation, but Ecstasy has defined it. 

Because of the Government's refusal to conduct experiments into the effect of E, a generation cannot put the risks of what it is doing in a realistic context. The Ecstasy generation will not be stopped from undertaking the risks associated with its use, but society should at least provide it with as much information as possible. While research is ignored, information is thin and ignorance abounds.

Until proper research is conducted into Ecstasy and its results come to inform government policy, we will not even know if deaths such as Leah's could have been prevented. If research had been conducted 10 years ago into the kind of reaction Leah had to the drug, she might have been made aware of the chance she was taking. For the time being, many young people run the risk of dying of ignorance. 

Cannabis smokers may be risking long-term lung damage because of chemicals released when it is mixed with tobacco, physicians warn today.

The British Thoracic Society says a “spliff” has five times more carbon monoxide and more tar than a nicotine cigarette.

A paper in its journal, Thorax, says emphysema may be associated with regular cannabis smoking, Dr Malcolm Benson said: “With the increase of dope smoking in teenagers... we need greater education and studies in this area.”

A study last year suggested at least 6 per cent of the population used cannabis, with 24 per cent of 16-29-year-olds saying they were long-term users.

'I do feel guilty because it costs a lot - I get through a quarter plus [an eighth of an ounce] a week - about 45 quid's worth. The only thing I spend money on is instant gratification - food, drugs, booze.

‘I suppose on average I smoke about 10 to 15 joints a day, with about three of those during the daytime. Do I still get stoned? Yup. But not as easily as before, and I do tend to waffle a bit anyway so it sometimes makes me say absolutely anything. I still like the giggling, oh yes.

'One effect is that I don't dream anymore and on the rare occasions I go a day without a spliff I do dream a lot. My memory has never been brilliant but the short-term memory does go out of the window. This morning I stopped in mid-sentence and forgot what I was saying completely. A couple of words dripped out and then nothing - the brain was empty! It's nothing important, I don't forget important things, and I have always been crap at names anyway.

'Pot does lead to harder drugs but only because of where you go to buy it and what else is being sold there. People do think: "This is nothing, I'll try the next thing" and it's on offer. It's like going to get a pack of biscuits and ending up buying everything else in the supermarket.'

Doing Ecstasy, coming out with your friends, dancing, is the meaning of all this, nothing more. I ask her what she and her friends do for a living. “We're doctors,” she says.	

You want to know how far the use of Ecstasy has penetrated British culture? That's how far.

Inevitably, no one knows how many people have taken the drug since it first appeared in Britain 10 years ago. I've heard estimates of between 100,000 and five million. “It's astonishing how, with all the acres and acres of papers produced on drugs, there's still very little we know,” says Mike Goodman, director of the drugs and legal helpline Release. “We really don't know how many people use Ecstasy—on a regular basis or once or twice.” But while governments bluster and preach, and poke their fingers in teenagers' faces, and while parents worry themselves sick, maybe tens of thousands of people are swallowing Es every weekend.

They are not taking them because they are inadequates with low self-esteem. Or because they are addicts. Or because they have been lured by evil pushers. They take E because they see that, under its influence, their friends are more open, more friendly, have more energy and generally seem to have a good time. Desire for alcohol declines, as it does for sex. There are no fights outside clubs. No one goes on the game in order to get the money to pay for it. People take Ecstasy to enjoy themselves and go on dancing until nine o'clock in the morning; to squeeze the juice out of the weekend.

Ecstasy is the third most popular drug in Britain, behind cannabis and amphetamines. Ecstasy-driven rave culture is as British as fish and chips. Tourists come here for it. One journalist has suggested that harder drugs, like crack, have not taken off here as they have in the US because Ecstasy and raves have so saturated everyone's idea of what it means to be young in the Nineties.

The paradox of Ecstasy — and, indeed, the revelatory promise of all drugs -  is nowhere better expressed than in the Pulp song Sorted For Es And Wizz, which, predictably, the Daily Mirror and others sought to ban. It's a little narrative about a guy and his mates who get tickets for a rave. They drive around for hours looking for it, and then he loses his mates and dances all night on his own. Everyone is very open and loving, but the conversation gets no further than “Nice one, geezer”. Wouldn't it be brilliant if you never came down, seems a good idea at four in the morning. On the other hand, what if you never came down? And the final doubt: “Is this the way the future is supposed to be/or is it just 20,000 people standing in a field?”

Marek Kohn, who, in his book Dope Girls (1993), charted the origins of the first illegal drug culture in Britain during the first world war, sees Ecstasy as a symbol of consumer culture entering and colonising the youth market. “Commercialism has been developed further in rave culture than with previous drugs," he argues. “Youth see themselves as consumers of commodities both legal and illegal. The E culture is remarkable in its banality. There's very little to disturb parents other than the fact that it's a drug with known and unknown dangers. And it's illegal. The Pulp song captures the ethos very well. They've got money, and they've got vehicles, and they've got this drug, and does it make them happy? No. Still they whinge.”

A number of tests have been conducted on tablets purchased from dealers and sold as Ecstasy, priced between £12 and £20 a go. One test of seven pills, by Select magazine, found only two that contained any MDMA at all. One sample consisted of 40 per cent LSD, 30 per cent methylamphetamine, 15 per cent caffeine and 15 per cent brick dust. Another was a fish-tank oxygenating tablet (shop value 35 pence for 20). And the most wholesome of the lot was a Lemsip capsule.

"It is now the next day and I haven't stopped being sick," says Sonia. "There's been so many dodgy or fake pills where I live. It's such a matter of trial and error. I have had excellent Es only about three times since I started taking them about six months ago. They have ranged from simply not working, or a 10-minute buzz, to pure frightening. A couple have left me as if completely knocked out, sweaty and unable to speak, resorting to a kind of sign language. Another experience happened after taking a speed pill and two different halves of E. While dancing, the left-hand side of my body just flopped —I couldn't control it and lost a lot of sensitivity as well as my sense of co-ordination and direction. That really freaked me out and it took nearly a week to get back to normal.”

If we did all take pure Ecstasy all the time, would there be an end to war? There have been persistent rumours from war correspondents that, during the early stages of the bloodbath in Bosnia, Serbian paramilitaries were using Ecstasy to get themselves tanked up for battle. If we all took Ecstasy, some people, particularly epileptics, would drop dead. "We get calls from people who've had what seem to be different experiences," says Mike Goodman of Release. "Internal bleeding, women whose periods have gone to pot, passing blood in the urine, people who do stupid things like drive on E." Some people would experience unpleasant side-effects, such as numbness and paranoia. They might be told they were not getting off on it because they were not open to the experience. In other words, it would be the individual, rather than the drug, that prevented a good time. After a while, say two years, those who didn't die or experience bad effects would begin to notice that life was no longer as much fun. Everyone who knows anything about Ecstasy agrees that you're unlikely to take it over a long period without side-effects. Andrew Fyall, a volunteer for the gay and lesbian drug advice agency Project LSD, says: “I know nobody who has taken E five or six times a week for two years who has not ended up with psychiatric problems." Typically, these are feelings of paranoia and anxiety attacks.

It is already known that E causes certain nerve cells to lose many of their axions, which allow the cells to make contact with other cells in the brain. Cells can grow new axions, but research carried out at Johns Hopkins University has shown that monkey and rat cells which have been damaged grow back abnormally. However you look at it, this is known as brain damage.

The ground has shifted from a public guardianship about morals to a concern about safety. "In the past, the panic against youthful drug-taking has been against hedonism, but we now see pleasure as not immediately harmful," he argues. "The campaign on safer sex has shaped the response to rave culture." Teenagers are not going to stop taking drugs because their parents don't want them to, and parents are not going to stop worrying because someone says that 52 deaths in six years aren't that many, not compared with the 100,000 deaths a year resulting from smoking-related diseases. But the analogy is not exact. You don't drop dead after one cigarette; you need a lifetime's commitment for that. Fortunately, loyalty is what Ecstasy-users lack.

Fashions in drugs come and go. Cocaine was the dance drug of the Twenties, speed of the Mod era, marijuana and LSD of the drop-out hippie culture; glue was for skinheads, speed again for punk and the northern soul scene, cocaine again during Eighties disco, crack for rap and gangsta and jungle. According to the right-wing social commentator P J O'Rourke, himself no slouch when it came to ingesting large amounts of illegal substances during the Sixties, the "cold, selfish children" of the present "think Ecstasy will make them loved and loving". A handful of users of all these drugs went on to become heroin addicts, but most just grew out of taking anything other than a few glasses of white wine, a pint or four of beer.

"The love affair with E is 18 months of pretty constant use," says Andrew Fyall. "I think it will go out of fashion. People will become bored with it as music moves on, as club life moves on." Harry Shapiro sees all drugs as fashion items: "You grow out of wanting them like you grow out of wanting the latest Adidas trainers." The drug's profile, he argues, is roughly between the ages of 16 and 25. "Teenagers take illegal drugs for the same reason that, at 16, you are desperate to be able to walk into a pub and not get thrown out. Drugs are no big deal any more. They're a much bigger deal for journalists and parents and politicians."

Even Sonia, at 20, sees that there might be an end to the road. "I don't imagine or expect this stage in my life to last forever. I went through an alcohol stage, now I hardly touch the stuff, and just progressed from there; wanting to enjoy life instead of being a drunken wreck. I met a bloke in Ibiza who was 25, been clubbing and taking drugs for six years and had a very good job at NatWest. He says he's enjoyed himself, had the best six years but now wants to give it all up and find a new direction in life. Which is probably what happens with the club scene—you simply drift away."

Nicholas Saunders believes that in 10 years' time it will be more unusual not to take E than to take it. Shapiro thinks that Ecstasy has found a level from which it will not advance, nor will it entirely vanish. No drug has ever disappeared completely, apart from that mainstay of the Mods, Mandrax. That was withdrawn by the manufacturers and no one felt like making an illegal version.

I asked a cool 15-year-old at a north London comprehensive to describe what drugs were around in her school. "Weed is nothing," she said, "nothing. Everyone does it. There's also speed and acid but not much Ecstasy. It's more the older generation that take it." Oh, you wrinklies of 22, look what the kids are saying about you. Sooner or later a new drug will come along and after its 15 minutes of fame, Ecstasy will be eclipsed, relegated to nostalgia, to — remember the days when we used to dance all night and love each other?

The drug Ecstasy, like that other pill, the Pill, has failed to live up to its early utopian promise: the magic bullet that will solve everything for ever. Britain has come rather late to the American imperative, the pursuit of happiness. For a while, some people thought Ecstasy might fully grant that desire, but it hasn't. "E has almost become like Biro and Hoover: a ubiquitous name for a drug you take at the weekend for a dance," Shapiro says. And that's all.

You were right, Jarvis, it really is just 20,000 people standing in a field.

The administrative agencies of all countries have self-protective vested interests in maintaining the mythology of the perils of cannabis use. Customs officers, policemen, coastguards, solicitors, barristers, judges, probation officers, prison officers, and ancillary secretarial staff directly benefit from the current prohibition. Powerful industrial groups such as the tobacco, alcohol, synthetic-fibre, pharmaceutical and fuel industries are terrified of competition from a legal cannabis industry.

THE position of cannabis as a Class A scheduled substance is certainly anomalous. A clinician with a Home Office licence can prescribe heroin or cocaine, but not cannabis. It's quite disgraceful that a substance with a proven therapeutic value is denied to people.

Yet where Clare Short goes wrong is suggesting the decriminalisation of cannabis alone. First, that would give the impression that some drugs are safe and others are not. All drugs ought to be treated with caution. Second, if cannabis became legal criminals would concentrate their marketing strategies on the even more dangerous drugs, heroin and cocaine. This happened in the US. And third, it would remove the interest in what I take as the main goal: legalising all drugs. We worry quite correctly about addiction and our young people, but the real issue is the effect of illegal drug money on society at large. Legalisation would deprive criminals of maybe £10 billion a year. At the moment we're paying twice. We pay for the results of the illegal trade and we pay the cops to enforce the law, which is quite ineffective except in one respect: it pushes up the price, so people steal to pay for their drugs.

You'd have to state that legalised drugs should not be sold to young people — although we say the same about alcohol and tobacco but that doesn't work. Yet much of the glamour would be removed.

It's not a debate those in power like being aired — and it's not just in the Labour Party. When it comes to drugs, the thought police are active throughout the Conservative Party, and the Home Office. Anyone who speaks out of turn just gets clobbered.

The many 'reformists' posturing for 'at least a discussion on legalisation, or a Royal Commission', - 'if only to get impurities banned' or 'remove ignorance', or 'if only to drive out the criminal drug pushers', etc, etc, - are all hoping for some cheap popularity to bolster their own failing credibility as capitalist society plunges into crisis on so many fronts simultaneously that 'reforming' anything about the free market and monopoly imperialism just becomes a joke. Any 'reforms' will still take place anyway, largely by means of policing and legislation no longer being able to cope with or contain any 'problem' such as media pornography, prostitution, drugs, teenage drinking, etc, and then changing the law to suit.

What 'reformism' will never address is what to do about why there is a drug epidemic in the first place, - because capitalist society with its grotesque injustices, inequalities, privileges and repeated periodic universal catastrophes, - can never stop alienating ever wider sections of the population with every generation that passes. (The state medical service is the biggest pill-pusher of all, putting millions on tranquillisers.)

The 'reformists' have no answer to the drug-culture quacks (or doomsday fundamentalists of all kinds) who all seek to take advantage of youth's disaffection.

Only proletarian-dictatorship revolutionism can possibly ultimately have any appeal, and probably only after increasing nihilistic tendencies have first made some running with the generational revolt.

This would seem to be the pattern in any period of revolutionary change. It is likely to be particularly true of the present epoch of the farcical 'new world order' which has been constructed almost exclusively on the negative basis of relentless anti-communist propaganda for the past 50 years, and near-total anti-communist propaganda for the 50 years before that too.

This has bred cynical and philistine apathy as almost the state religion for the whole of the Western world. What could be more appropriate for youth culture than doping up and giggling at a blank wall, or tripping out to mindless fantasies.

If the capitalist boom lasted for ever, Orwell's soma-controlled society 1984 would be unstoppable. Some gloom about youth drug-taking largely reflects pessimism about the prospects for revolution. A quick revise course in Marxist economic theory is the only cure for such doubts.

As the imperialist system does edge closer to its ultimate trade-war warmongering catastrophe, ruling-class degeneracy on cocaine and other high-priced substances will continue and increase. Working-class befuddlement with drugs and booze will become less and less of a problem as the work of revolutionary struggle expands rapidly.

Ideally, youth, - and everyone else, - would be better off (in every sense) not wasting too much of their time remaining inebriated or intoxicated; but the attractions for doing more with one's life can only come from the struggle and its achievements themselves, - not by deprecating or disparaging what people do to feel good (or feel less bad).

Arguments that drug-taking (as opposed to controlled social drinking) is philosophically suspect in the long history of civilisation's cultural relaxation, or is dangerous potentially, seem unlikely to make much initial impact, and could become irrelevant red herrings.

Whatever damage is being done in terms of short-term memory loss or increased cancer risks, etc, or in expanding the dangers (beyond alcohol) of discovering emotional dependency or triggering allergic responses, - the younger generations are managing, by common observation, to socialise and develop their personality every bit as successfully as their elders. Drugs are not the barrier to the development of revolutionary understanding or a good Bolshevik Party spirit.

The barrier, eminently challengeable, is, - as always, - any delay or confusion in the clarity and speed and spread of Leninist agitation to bring out the revolutionary lessons for the masses being hammered by capitalist crisis. The better the Leninists get at their work, the more influence they are bound to have. Build Leninism.

Alf Lee

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 147. Friday 17th November 1995 

Shares rocket as the economy stagnates, sterling sinks and unemployment grows. Capitalism becoming intolerable.

The hyperventilating performance of the stock exchange, goaded to new Inflationary frenzy by the expectation of interest rate and tax cuts, whilst foreign investors shun sterling and the pound sinks to record new lows in the wake of rising unemployment and the reported "biggest fall In living standards for nearly 14 years" (FT), reveals the intolerable degeneracy of British imperialism for all to see.

When the latest news about British capitalism's appalling failure to organize comprehensive social production, reflected indirectly in the weakness of the national currency, is clutched at by the whooping markets as evidence of good times ahead, then the rupture between the private appropriation needs of monopoly capitalism and the real development needs of society at large just cannot be ignored, making coherent bourgeois commentary impossible to sustain:

The pound slumped to a record low on the foreign exchanges last night as global investors took fright at the prospects of the Chancellor gambling with huge tax cuts in this month's Budget in a last-ditch effort to revive the Conservative party's fortunes.

Among the main reasons cited for the pound's slide — which began at the end of last week amid reports of a £5 billion giveaway — is concern that the Chancellor is willing to sacrifice the public finances in the short term to boost the Government's electoral fortunes.

The unprecedented speculation about the Budget has led to a feeding frenzy of rumours about the scale of the tax cuts on offer.

The pound sank to a record low on the foreign exchanges yesterday as figures showing a rise in unemployment and the biggest fall in living standards for nearly 14 years underlined the pressure on Mr Kenneth Clarke, the chancellor, to deliver a “giveaway” Budget and an interest rate cut.

Average-earnings rose by an underlying 3'/4 per cent in the year to September, according to the Central Statistical Office.

Over that period, the average household needed a 4.3 per cent rise in income simply to compensate for higher prices and taxes.

The resulting drop in “real" average earnings was the largest since March 1982, helping to explain the continued absence of a “feel-good factor”. 

Expectations of a base rate cut after this month's Budget were encouraged by an unexpected drop in the volume of goods sold in the shops last month and the first rise in the number of people without work and claiming benefits for 26 months.

Beyond the contradictory claims that anticipated tax cuts are the immediate cause of sterling's depression (Guardian) or the best cure for poor economic performance (FT), what neither piece of tail-chasing impressionism dares face up to is the background reality which alone can make any sense of all such frenzied twists and turns: longterm national decline grafted onto sharpening world imperialist crisis.

Where the terrifying implications of this world capitalist crisis are broached on the august financial pages at all, it tends to be in the form of 'worst case scenarios' designed by Keynesians to frighten monetarists, or sniffy accounts of 'unreal' political battles over the fate of the US budget.

But off the financial pages and back onto prime-time TV, a real flavour of the war-and-revolution implications of economic trade-war crisis can't help oozing through from time to time.

In particular, a jarring trade-war note of anti-Americanism has started cropping up in some of the Balkans coverage, throwing a spanner into the anti-Serb crusading which formed the main thrust of the propaganda.

A recent C4 News exposed US-assisted gun-running to Tuzla, and a subsequent Panorama criticized Washington for supposedly having sabotaged the Vance-Owen plan. And last week as if to prove that these mixed propaganda signals were more than a temporary blip, there was a repeat performance. Shortly after C4 News had uncritically showcased the UK 'war crimes' show trial against the Bosnian Serb leadership (plus a couple of token suspects from the other side, leaving the monstrous Izetbegovic and Tudjman untouched), retailing as fact the unproven allegations of 'thousands' slaughtered by the Serbs in Srebrenica, another channel ruined the Goebbels effect by weighing in to point the finger at the real war criminals: the USA.

Carlton TV used its Big Story slot to expose the wide-ranging undercover US assistance which Croatia received before, during and after its fascist occupation of the Serbs' ancient Krajina homeland, drawing attention to unmanned aerial spying operations launched with Croat assistance from an offshore island and the likely use of such shared intelligence in the invasion of Krajina. After the US-backed invasion, the documentary pointed out, the Croats confined the UK to barracks for four days whilst they got on with terrorizing and butchering the population with impunity. The programme went on to establish (complete with all the smuggled cameras and cloak-and-dagger 'daring' usually reserved for anti-communist blockbusters) that a US front-organization run by top-ranking 'ex' US military continues to organize the Croat reactionaries now, supposedly in order to instil "democratic principles". The anti-American tone of this BOURGEOIS documentary was quite blistering as it concluded, panning the camera across a swathe of white crosses marking some of the Serb war dead of Krajina, that it was experts in American 'democracy' who had egged the Croats on to do this dirty work.

Carlton TV's attack is of course upon a trade rival of imperialist Britain, never on imperialism itself. And its attacks are on the phony and violent character of American 'democracy', not the fraudulent pretensions of ALL 'democratic' covers for the permanent violence of bourgeois dictatorship, - not least Carlton's own.

But whatever its intentions, its sudden candour about the fascist essence of imperialist intervention in former Yugoslavia not only rudely interrupts the pious 'war crimes' scapegoating of the Serb
resistance to imperialism's Balkanization-diktat, but also throws a fascinating light on the levels of internecine feuding within the British ruling class over the question of just where it should position itself for the trade-war bloodletting ahead.

Perhaps the new readiness to expose US war crimes in former Yugoslavia is the by-product of the resentment felt in some corners of the ruling class that 'the wrong choice was made' in sticking postwar with a slavish dependence on America, earning Britain only condescension when the US was in the ascendant, and contempt and neglect when the boom ended.

Such feelings can be expected to be particularly lively on the eve of Clinton's arrival to help supervise Britain's snail's pace retreat from Irish empire.
	
Similar trade-war considerations might explain why it was decided after all this time to come clean on at least part of the story about the fascism of the Duke of Windsor. This could indicate a readiness in some quarters to give up on defending a thoroughly discredited monarchist tradition, preferring to dream of a clean break with the indefensible past and a republican embrace of an Eurosceptic future.

More cynical bourgeois, though, might reflect that British imperialism's Plan B Bahamas option (ditch Churchill, do a deal with Hitler and keep the Empire under the quisling leadership of "Herzog Windsor") could hardly have left British imperialism in any WORSE condition than that in which it now finds itself.

Whichever way it twists and turns historically, the geriatric British establishment is in a hole from which neither a Churchill nor a Windsor can now rescue it. It needs overthrowing by the working class.

Build the ILWP.

DH