Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
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No 0853 May 14th 1996                                                                                                                                          10p

Trot muddle on racism conceals total confusion on 'democracy', on the practicalities and priorities for socialist revolution, and on what Lenin thought he was building for 7 years until his death in the USSR. Misunderstanding the SLP phenomenon asks for trouble.

Sections of the left inside the Socialist Labour Party have accused Scargill's closest colleagues of opportunism over the question of immigration controls.

The Weekly Worker of the CPGB (resurrected) put it this way:

	An amendment had been submitted to remove a vague phrase in the 'anti-racism' document to "re-examine in the cold light of day all existing immigration controls within the framework of establishing a humane and non-racist immigration system". The amendment was to replace this with "The SLP will scrap all immigration controls and the Asylum Bill".

	Speaker after speaker rose in support of this amendment, saying that if capital can move freely, so should workers. Immigration laws were condemned for being racist but also anti-worker, as they controlled the movement of workers in order to ensure a regulated supply of cheap labour.
	
The laws were used against workers, not against the rich. Our movement is an international one and we should champion the rights of workers to live and work wherever they want. Many could not see how any socialist could argue against this right.

Basic democracy is not an abstract; it is something all workers need to champion. The liberation of humanity might be abstract to Brian Heron, but it is something that we dedicate our lives to by fighting for concrete democratic rights in the here and now. One can only presume that Brian thinks that self-determination for Ireland, 	Scotland and Wales is an abstract principle, in case the Scottish people, in some 	abstract world of Brian's, start a war against socialist England. Perhaps also a minimum wage is an abstract principle in some abstract world of Brian's, where socialism in Britain is surrounded by hostile forces and impoverished.

This is national socialism and reformism, concerned about how we create 'socialism' in Britain. Opposed to it is international socialism and revolution. This is about how workers throughout the world make revolution in their own country and make that revolution international and permanent. 

Socialism cannot be built in one country: surely the Soviet Union, should teach us that much. Socialists are internationalists with the whole of humanity as their concern, not the government of Britain. If a revolution in Britain was isolated, it would try to defend itself against a hostile siege. This is not an Immigration policy: it is about the urgency of spreading revolution or being defeated. What is important about this debate is the rank dishonesty of the ex-Socialist Outlook and Fourth International Supporters Caucus members who argued and voted against this amendment. The vote went to a count and for the first time Pat Sikorski and Carolyn Sikorski on the platform also produced their cards to vote against the amendment. Others who voted against the amendment need to be won to a revolutionary position. But these comrades are quite well aware of the principled revolutionary position, yet argued against it out of sheer opportunism - unless of course they have flipped over against revolution.

The argument over immigration controls is well known in the revolutionary movement and in the Trotskyist Fourth International from which these comrades come. Their position is not only anti-Marxist but a travesty of the great revolutionary, Trotsky, and of Trotskyism in general.

This exercise in the art of "rapprochement" for which the CPGB would like to become famous, is a bit of a muddle.

There were many good speeches against the amendment too, one of which by a comrade from the Indian sub-continent asked what lay behind the assumption that workers anywhere would ever want to be immigrants anywhere else once the injustices and despair of the international monopoly-capitalist system were resolved by revolution.

This more deeply philosophical point raises doubts about what the superficially-correct 'revolutionary internationalism' of the WW really means.

When Marx dealt with the issue of race prejudice in England against Irish immigrants in the 19th century, he produced his well-known understanding that until national oppression and exploitation is ended, then the workers of oppressor and exploiter nations will themselves never achieve their own emancipation:

Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of tenant farming, Ireland steadily supplies its own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the moral and material condition of the English working class.

And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.

But the evil does not stop here. It continues across the ocean. The antagonism between English and Irish is the hidden basis of the conflict between the United States and England. It makes any honest and serious co-operation between the working classes of the two countries impossible. It enables the governments of both countries, whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war with one another.

England, being the metropolis of capital, the power which has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the present the most important country for the workers' revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have developed up to a certain degree of maturity. Therefore to hasten the social revolution in England is the most important object of the International Workingmen's Association. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent.

Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. And it is the special task of the Central Council in London to awaken a consciousness in the English workers that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation. 

Marx to S.Meyer and A.Vogt,  April 9, 1870

The CPGB attitude is more a mixture of an abstract-idealist attack on racist prejudice as such, which is pure reformism, plus a statement in favour of international revolution as some kind of peculiar general principle. Their doubts about the FISC opportunism surrounding Scargill are widely shared. But idealist broadsides are not the answer.

The SLP has made its own curtsies towards international socialist revolution as a general principle. Its deliberate backwardness is in refusing to accept that an enormous development of Marxist-Leninist theory is required to achieve the abolition of capitalism anywhere, and make it survive against worldwide imperialist counter-revolution.

The SLP has no theory of imperialist crisis and the extraordinary conditions of economic breakdown, conflict, and upheaval which alone can possibly disrupt the control of state power by the bourgeoisie, and make its replacement only by a workers state unavoidable, - the sole way that socialism will ever replace capitalism in reality.

But the SLP's sad perspective of 'left' pressure and parliamentary reformism, backed by endless single-issue direct-action campaigns, is virtually ignored by this CPGB report on the 'revolutionary' significance of this first conference, - in favour of challenging the SLP on matters which it got basically correct.

The SLP missed pointing out that immigration and its problems are a phenomenon of capitalist crisis and imperialist exploitation, but the CPGB do not explain this either.

What should have been said is that the solution to all racist/immigration problems everywhere can only come about through the defeat everywhere of the existing imperialist finance world order. On the way towards that ultimate international triumph of the socialist revolution, individual workers states will first make breakthroughs here and there, and will immediately need to establish total strict control over all movements in and out of the country as a guard against physical or financial counter-revolutionary disruption and sabotage.

People proposing that the first concern of an SLP workers state should be to "scrap all immigration controls" are not living in the real world.

Instant asylum for revolutionary allies from outside the country whenever they need it is the obvious requirement, but that was ignored by both the SLP and its CPGB critics, and it is not remotely dealt with by the notion "scrap all immigration controls".

Immigration is decidedly not the aim of such political asylum. Just the opposite. Precisely what the host workers state needs more than anything else is for the revolutionaries given asylum to get back to the home territory they know as soon as possible to complete the anti-imperialist revolution there too, the only ultimate guarantee of everyone's emancipation.

The leap to a socialist world ('international revolution') in the CPGB argument (that eventually under world socialism there will be no countries or borders) amazingly leaves out the one crucial question posed in 1996, especially by the launch of the anti-theory SLP relying on vague 'left' pressure and parliamentary reformism, - which is how is the socialist revolution going to come about and how is it going to survive against international imperialist counter-revolution. Brusquely dismissing the SLP concern (that a socialist Britain might need to defend itself against a hostile siege) as "this is not an immigration policy" shows that the CPGB's concerns are even further removed from reality than are the SLP's.

But perhaps the saddest thing of all is the CPGB's shakiness on even the ABC of Marxist philosophy.

The notion of "basic democracy" has always been used by reaction precisely because it is just about the most abstract and misleading concept that could be formulated. And the idea that workers under capitalism want to go round "championing" this "basic democracy" is utterly stupefying coming from a supposedly 'Leninist' group. And the CPGB mean it too, calling for the 'free movement of workers' to be put on a par with the free movement of capital; calling on bourgeois democracy to stop biasing its immigration laws against workers; insisting on the rights of ethnic minorities against the operation of bourgeois state controls; etc.

The Marxist-Leninist approach was to use bourgeois democracy, when available, only in order to tell workers what a deliberately-conceived trap this 'democracy' was, not in order to tell them to "champion basic democracy":

It is sheer mockery of the working and exploited people to speak of pure democracy, of democracy in general, of equality, freedom and universal rights when the workers and all working people are ill-fed, ill-clad, ruined and worn out not only as a result of capitalist wage slavery, but as a consequence of four years of predatory war, while the capitalists and profiteers remain in possession of the "property" usurped by them and the "ready-made" apparatus of state power. This is tantamount to trampling on the basic truths of Marxism which has taught the workers: you must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this "democracy", its historically conditional and limited character. Never share the "superstitious belief" in the "state" and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another.

The Scheidemanns and Kautskys speak about "pure democracy" and "democracy" in general for the purpose of deceiving the people and concealing from them the bourgeois character of present-day democracy.

These words are designed to conceal the truth, to conceal the fact that the means of production and political power remain in the hands of the exploiters, and that therefore real freedom and real equality for the exploited, that is, for the vast majority of the population, are out of the question. It is profitable and indispensable for the bourgeoisie to conceal from the people the bourgeois character of modern democracy, to picture it as democracy in general or "pure democracy", and the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys, repeating this, in practice abandon the standpoint of the proletariat and side with the bourgeoisie.

Marx and Engels in their last joint preface to the Communist Manifesto (in 1872) considered it necessary specially to warn the workers that the proletariat cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made (that is, the bourgeois) state machine and wield it for its own purpose, that it must smash it, break it up. The renegade Kautsky, who has written a special pamphlet entitled The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, concealed from the workers this most important Marxist truth, utterly distorted Marxism.

Firstly, this argument employs the concepts of "democracy in general" and "dictatorship in general", without posing the question of the class concerned. This non-class or above-class presentation, which supposedly is popular, is an outright travesty of the basic tenet of socialism, namely, its theory of class struggle, which socialists who have sided with the bourgeoisie recognise in words but disregard in practice. For in no civilised capitalist country does "democracy in general" exist; all that exists is bourgeois democracy, and it is not a question of "dictatorship in general", but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain their domination.

In explaining the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system, all socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels, namely, that the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists.175 There is not a single revolutionary, not a single Marxist among those now shouting against dictatorship and for democracy who has not sworn and vowed to the workers that he accepts this basic truth of socialism. But now, when the revolutionary proletariat is in a fighting mood and taking action to destroy this machine of oppression and to establish proletarian dictatorship, these traitors to socialism claim that the bourgeoisie have granted the working people "pure democracy", have abandoned resistance and are prepared to yield to the majority of the working people.

The bourgeoisie are compelled to be hypocritical and to describe as "popular government" or democracy in general, or pure democracy, the (bourgeois) democratic republic which is, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the exploiters over the working people. The Scheidemanns and Kautsky's the Austerlitzes and Renners (and now, to our regret, with the help of Friedrich Adler) fall in line with this falsehood and hypocrisy. But Marxists, Communists, expose this hypocrisy, and tell the workers and the working people in general this frank and straightforward truth: the democratic republic, the Constituent Assembly, general elections, etc., are, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for the emancipation of labour from the yoke of capital there is no other way but to replace this dictatorship with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy - democracy for the rich - and establish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants, whereas now (even in the most democratic - bourgeois - republic) the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majority of working people.

Take, for example, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. The Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners assure the workers that the present elections to the Constituent Assembly in Germany and Austria are "democratic". That is a lie. In practice the capitalists, the exploiters, the landowners and the profiteers own 9/10 of the best meeting halls and 9/10 of the stocks of newsprint, printing presses, etc. The urban workers and the farm hands and day labourers are, in practice, debarred from democracy by the "sacred right of property" (guarded by the Kautskys and Renners, and now, to our regret, by Friedrich Adler as well) and by the bourgeois state apparatus, that is, bourgeois officials, bourgeois judges, and so on. The present "freedom of assembly and the press" in the "democratic" (bourgeois democratic) German republic is false and hypocritical, because in fact it is freedom for the rich to buy and bribe the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with the venomous lies of the bourgeois press, freedom for the rich to keep as their "property" the landowners' mansions, the best buildings, etc. The dictatorship of the proletariat will take from the capitalists and hand over to the working people the landowners' mansions, the best buildings, printing-presses and the stocks of newsprint.

But this means replacing "universal", "pure" democracy by the "dictatorship of one class", scream the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners (together with their followers in other countries - the Gomperses, Hendersons, Renaudels, Vandervelde and Co.).

Wrong, we reply. This means replacing what in fact, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (a dictatorship hypocritically cloaked in the forms of the democratic bourgeois republic) by the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means replacing democracy for the rich by democracy for the poor. This means replacing freedom of assembly and the press for the minority, for the exploiters, by freedom of assembly and the press for the majority of the population, for the working people. This means a gigantic, world-historic extension of democracy, its transformation from falsehood into truth, the liberation of humanity from tile shackles of capital, which distorts and truncates any, even the most "democratic" and republican, bourgeois democracy. This means replacing the bourgeois state by the proletarian state, a replacement that is the sole way the state can eventually wither away altogether.

But why not reach this goal without the dictatorship of one class? Why not switch directly to "pure" democracy? So ask the hypocritical friends of the bourgeoisie or the naive petty bourgeois and philistines gulled by them.

And we reply: Because in any capitalist society the decisive say lies with either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, while the small proprietors, inevitably, remain wavering, helpless, stupid dreamers of "pure", i.e., non-class or above-class, democracy. Because from a society in which one class oppresses another there is no way out other than through the dictatorship of the oppressed class. Because the proletariat alone is capable of defeating the bourgeoisie, of overthrowing them, being the sole class which capitalism has united and "schooled", and which is capable of drawing to its side the wavering mass of the working population with a petty-bourgeois way of life, of drawing them to its side or at least "neutralising" them. Because only mealy mouthed petty bourgeois and philistines can dream - deceiving thereby both themselves and the workers - of overthrowing capitalist oppression without a long and difficult process of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters.

From the point of view of bourgeois society, once there is "democracy", and once capitalist and proletarian alike take part in the voting, this is the "popular will", this is "equality" and all expression of the people's will. We know what an abominable fraud this talk is, which only serves as a cover for butchers and murderers like Ebert and Scheidemann. In bourgeois society, the mass of the working people are governed by the bourgeoisie with the help of more or less democratic forms. They are governed by a minority, the property owners, those who have a share in capitalist property and who have turned education and science, that supreme bulwark and flower of capitalist civilisation, into an instrument of exploitation, into a monopoly,

I would respectfully remind Mr. Kautsky, who has Marx and Engels off pat, of the following appraisal of the Paris Commune given by Engels from the point of view of..."pure democracy":

"Have these gentlemen" (the anti-authoritarians) "ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon - all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?"99 

Here is your "pure democracy"! How Engels would have ridiculed the vulgar petty bourgeois, the "Social-Democrat" (in the French sense of the forties and the general European sense of 1914-18), who took it into his head to talk about "pure democracy" in a class-divided society!

To sum up: Kautsky has in a most unparalleled manner distorted the concept dictatorship of the proletariat, and has turned Marx into a common liberal; that is, he himself has sunk to the level of a liberal who utters banal phrases about "pure democracy", embellishing and glossing over the class content of bourgeois democracy, and shrinking, above all, from the use of revolutionary violence by the oppressed class. By so "interpreting" the concept "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" as to expunge the revolutionary violence of the oppressed class against its oppressors, Kautsky has beaten the world record in the liberal distortion of Marx. The renegade Bernstein has proved to be a mere puppy compared with the renegade Kautsky.

If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of "pure democracy" as long as different classes exist; we call only speak of class democracy. (Let us say in parenthesis that "pure democracy"  is not only an ignorant phrase, revealing a lack of understanding both of the class struggle and of the nature of the state, but also a thrice-empty phrase, since in communist society democracy will wither away in the process of changing and  becoming a habit, but will never be "pure" democracy.)

"Pure democracy" is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.

Kautsky takes from Marxism what is acceptable to the liberals, to the bourgeoisie (the criticism of the Middle Ages, and the progressive historical role of capitalism in general and of capitalist democracy in particular), and discards, passes over in silence, glosses over all that in Marxism which is unacceptable to the bourgeoisie (the revolutionary violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie for the latter's destruction). That is why Kautsky, by virtue of his objective position and irrespective of what his subjective convictions may be, inevitably proves to be a lackey of the bourgeoisie.

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor. It is this truth which forms a most essential part of Marx's teaching, that Kautsky the "Marxist" has failed to understand. On this - the fundamental issue - Kautsky offers "delights" for the bourgeoisie instead of a scientific criticism of those conditions which make every bourgeois democracy a democracy for the rich.

Let us first remind the most learned Mr. Kautsky of the theoretical propositions of Marx and Engels which that pedant has so disgracefully "forgotten" (to please the bourgeoisie), and then explain the matter as popularly as possible.

Not only the ancient and feudal, but also "the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labour by capital" (Engels, in his work on the state).101 "As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist". (Engels, in his letter to Bebel, March 28, 1875). "In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy". (Engels, Introduction to The Civil War in France by Marx).  Universal suffrage is "the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state". (Engels, in his work on the state.102 Mr. Kautsky very tediously chews over the cud in the first part of this proposition, which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. But the second part, which we have italicised and which is not acceptable to the bourgeoisie, the renegade Kautsky passes over in silence!) "The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time .... Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent and suppress (ver- und zertreten) the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for workers, foremen and accountants for his business" (Marx, in his work on the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France).104

Every one of these propositions, which are excellently known to the most learned Mr. Kautsky, is a slap in his face and lays bare his apostasy. Nowhere in his pamphlet does Kautsky reveal the slightest understanding of these truths. His whole pamphlet is a sheer mockery of Marxism!

Take the fundamental laws of modern states, take their administration, take freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or "equality of all citizens before the law", and you will see at every turn evidence of the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy with which every honest and class conscious worker is familiar. There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a "violation of public order", and actually in case the exploited class "violates" its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner. Kautsky shamelessly embellishes bourgeois democracy and omits to mention, for instance, how the most democratic and republican bourgeoisie in America or Switzerland deal with workers on strike.

The wise and learned Kautsky keeps silent about these things! That learned politician does not realise that to remain silent on this matter is despicable. He prefers to tell the workers nursery tales of the kind that democracy means "protecting the minority". It is incredible, but it is a fact! In the year of our Lord 1918, in the fifth year of the world imperialist slaughter and the strangulation of internationalist minorities (i.e., those who have not despicably betrayed socialism; like the Renandels and Longuets, the Scheidermanns and Kautskys, the Hendersons and Webbs et al) in all "democracies" of the world, the learned Mr. Kautsky sweetly, very sweetly, sings the praises of "protection of the minority". Those who are interested may read this on page 15 of Kautsky's pamphlet. And on page 16 this learned ... individual tells you about the Whigs and Tories in England in the eighteenth century!

What wonderful erudition! What refilled servility to the bourgeoisie! What civilised belly-crawling before the capitalists and boot-licking! If I were Krupp or Scheidermann, or Clemenceau or Rebnaudel, I would pay Mr. Kautsky millions, reward him with Judas kisses, praise him before the workers and urge "socialist unity" with "honourable" men like him. To write pamphlets against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to talk about the Whigs and Tories in England in the eighteenth century, to assert that democracy means "protecting the minority", and remain silent about pogroms against internationalists in the "democratic" republic of America - isn't this rendering lackey service to the bourgeoisie?

The learned Mr. Kautsky has "forgotten" - accidentally forgotten, probably - a "trifle", namely, that the ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while the proletariat, on all serious, profound and fundamental issues, gets martial law or pogroms, instead of the "protection of tile minority". The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie. The learned Mr. Kautsky could have studied this "law" of bourgeois democracy in connection with the Dreyfus case105 in republican France, with the lynching of Negroes and internationalists in the democratic republic of America, with the case of Ireland and Ulster in democratic Britain,106 with the baiting of the Bolsheviks and the staging of pogroms against them in April 1917 in the democratic republic of Russia. I have purposely chosen examples not only from wartime but also from pre-war time, peacetime. But mealy-mouthed Mr. Kautsky prefers to shut his eyes to these facts of the twentieth century and instead to tell the workers wonderfully new, remarkably interesting, unusually edifying and incredibly important things about the Whigs and Tories of the eighteenth century!

Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? This does not mean that we must not make use of bourgeois parliament (the Bolsheviks made better use of it than probably any other party in the world, for in 1912-14 we won the entire workers' curia in the Fourth Duma). But it does mean that only a liberal can forget the historical limitations and conventional nature of the bourgeois parliamentary system as Kautsky does. Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the "democracy" of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution. And now that the era of revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon it and begins to extol the charms of moribund bourgeois democracy.

Democracy and dictatorship 1918:
First Congress of the Communist International, 1919
Second All-Russia trade union congress 1919 
Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky 1918 

What sort of international society is the CPGB implying is possible where workers can move as freely as capital? What sort of international society is envisaged where workers have the same immigration and emigration rights as the rich?

This confusion is made worse by muddling pre-revolutionary reformist demands with the possibilities of social development under world communism, - casually tossing in a totally-disputed one line summary of 20th century history into the bargain, without a word of justification, - contentious matters which are precisely the subject for the really big debate awaiting the SLP, the CPGB, and the entire workers movement worldwide.

So what was the Soviet Union building until 1990? What is Cuba building at the moment? What is the basis of the hostility for 50 years between North and South Korea? Why does the anti-communist vilification of China continue throughout so many 'freeworld' agencies, splitting the US imperialist ruling class over tactics, etc? The statement: 'Socialism cannot be built in one country' has been a specious cover-up for much of the most opportunist anti-communist treachery in the whole history of working-class struggle for proletarian dictatorship science.

Socialism was being built in only one country under the leadership of Lenin himself until his death in 1924, as the slightest acquaintance with the 20 volumes of his writings after 1917 will confirm, and would have gone on being built in only one country under Lenin's leadership, had he lived, for an unknown number of years after that too. The world revolution was slow to spread because of the inherited backwardness and destruction of Russia, and the continued phenomenal expansion of world imperialist economic strength. Trotsky's sneer against 'socialism in one country' was a piece of monstrous anti-Soviet opportunism based on his 'permanent revolution' ultra-leftism which Lenin comprehensively rubbished under his general dismissal of Trotsky as a Menshevik windbag from 1905 onwards when this bureaucratic schematic posturing first appeared, (see ILWP Books vol 5 for excerpts and a summary of the more than 600 pages of Lenin's writings against Trotsky).

Of course Stalinist revisionism eventually betrayed the completion of the world socialist revolution and the completion of building socialism in the USSR, but categorising this theoretical degeneration in the 1990s with some spurious posturing phrase that was immediately nonsense in the 1920s is just gibberish, especially after the massive expansion of the socialist camp after 1945, - and it just lets Stalinism off the hook, blocking the path to the important scholarship that needs doing on revisionist self-liquidation.

Such unthinking shallowness just plays into the hands of anti-communism and state-capitalism which are desperate to play down 'free-world' embarrassment at the astonishing economic and social deterioration in the former Soviet Union and East Europe since capitalism replaced what was being built there before without a capitalist class and a free market, and in Cold War hostility to imperialism, - that strange 73-years-long historical vacuum which apparently can be called anything but planned socialist construction, according to the CPGB now as well as the Trots.

In the light of the immense lack of seriousness and infantile sectarianism of this weird posturing then the incomprehensibility of the further remarks to 'Brian' (about a devolved Scotland's war on England; the minimum wage in impoverished and surrounded Britain; and national socialism) are perhaps not so strange.

The CPGB carry on with this muddle in their strategic manoeuvring towards the SLP. CPGBers trying to fight an incipient SLP proscription witch-hunt against them have pronounced themselves 'ex-CPGB' in order to stay within Scargill's ranks.

But their Weekly Worker paper's SLP conference report describes it as 

"a rousing one for all revolutionaries involved, and should be a call to all those who have as yet not thrown themselves into this struggle for Party. The Party inevitably is not handed to us on a plate."

If this is a call to 'all' non-CPGB 'revolutionaries' to dissolve into the SLP and is not total humbug, then it must mean that all the CPGB have already gone in. Which makes all the continued evidence all over the Weekly Worker of an ongoing CPGB slightly awkward. If it is a call to 'all' other CPGBers, it betrays a woeful lack of party discipline, and is hardly a recommendation of the CPGBers as the nucleus of a future Bolshevik Party in Britain, plus also earmarking the same aforementioned running down of CPGB activities in the Weekly Worker in the near future.

In addition, the phrase "the Party (cap P) is not handed to us on a plate" could hardly fail to alarm the people who founded the SLP.

This chaos over strategy and tactics is almost certainly not helped by basic confusion in the CPGB over historically assessing the SLP phenomenon correctly.

The chances of it being turned into 'the' revolutionary party were always very slim even when it was first unveiled, and have dwindled almost to absolute zero since then. Scargillism is a classic centrist movement, - revolution in words, reformist in deeds, - as the EPSR described it from the beginning.

But as such it is nevertheless still an enormously important development, encouragingly reflecting the ripening of imperialist crisis and the impossible strains now being put on orthodox reformism (Labour and the TUC) to still posture as the 'opposition' to decaying British imperialism while naturally not offering a glimmer of encouragement any more to a serious socialist alternative because of the highly volatile conditions that are on the way.

The SLP needs supporting and polemicising with in the spirit of a broad front movement that will find it hard to avoid serious discussion about almost every aspect of the past and present struggle for socialism and against imperialism, - to the benefit of everyone, not least the SLP itself which needs to perform reasonably intelligently and competently in order to hold down the centrist slot that history has prepared for it. A wrong approach to the SLP will only result in continued naïve disappointment.

CPGB 'rapprochement' is not helped by its continuing refusal to polemicise with, and properly reply to, EPSR criticisms of profoundly incorrect Weekly Worker positions. This humbug of ignoring the EPSR comrades has gone on for 16 years, and has been particularly egregious in recent months of sustained EPSR criticism on a wide array of issues, all of them relevant to the SLP and the 'rapprochement' question. CPGB comrades with an ounce of gumption in them should begin to query this strange silence. Build Leninism. Adam Carr

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 Colston St Bristol BS1 5BB]
No 170 Sunday 12th May 1996

It continues to be the crisis of the world imperialist economy, disorganized around the US dollar and increasingly riven into trade war factions, which dominates everything.

Washington's insolent dismissal of the UN report (on the Zionists' deliberate cold-blooded genocidal attack on the Qana refugee camp) marks the foul Clinton yuppie regime out as even bigger fascists than the preceding Bush or Reagan gangs, both of which on occasion at least went through the motions of pretending to call for 'restraint on all sides' etc. (even sometimes threatening to interrupt the unending flow of dollars and arms which is all that ever kept the bastard Israeli 'state' afloat).

Washington's arrogant disregard of what reactions such horrors provoke, whether from the stunned Fijian or Norwegian UN troops who witnessed it, or from the Lebanese whose peace and sovereignty has once more been trampled over, or from the entire Arab world, or from civilized humanity at large, shows to what extent the US has already in effect given up trying to dress up its own imperialist aggression and that of its stooges as something justified by international law and 'having the best democratic interests of the free world at heart' etc. Washington's Zionist stooges are out there to keep America's oil and arms markets in compliant reactionary hands, by any bullying means necessary.

In one sense there is nothing to stop the US doing whatever it wants. There is no mighty Soviet influence to stay Washington's hand, and no rival monopoly capitalist giant on the world stage yet ready to confront US interests head-on, at least not in a diplomatic and military sense. The one remaining 'superpower' has a free hand.

But it was under the once-only conditions prevailing at the end of WW2 that this unprecedented degree of wealth, power and authority came to be concentrated in the hands of a single imperialist nation. Throughout the reconstruction and boom period, that authority was always carefully buttressed by appeals to 'free world' solidarity (unity against Soviet Communism) and to international legitimacy (as embodied in the UN, IMF, World Bank etc.). However transparent that cover for US imperialist reaction always was for those on the sharp exploitation-and-coercion receiving end of American 'freedom and democracy', it remained an absolutely core ideological prop for the exercise of US power in the world.

Now the power remains, but that vital prop has been kicked away. The crisis of imperialism, which in passing invited the self-liquidation of Moscow's revisionist leadership, much more crucially demanded that Washington put the struggle for market domination at the top of its agenda, even at the expense of the ideological fictions which previously 'legitimized' its role as 'world policeman'.

And if the ideological smokescreen has thinned, the eyesight of America's trade rivals has also grown more acute, as the crisis of imperialism forces them to re-think the assumptions of the Cold War period.

The world outcry over the US-backed Zionist atrocity against the Lebanese people implies no softening of bourgeois hearts in London, Paris or Berlin, of course, but indicates that there is no longer any desire by America's erstwhile 'free world allies' to help cover up its dirty work, or try and make it smell sweet to public opinion. And this is bad news for all imperialists everywhere.

To present the postwar years, as Thatcher did, as '40 years of peace', delivered gift-wrapped thanks to the West's 'wise stewardship of the atomic bomb', could only ever have been managed on the back of a permanent barrage of insane anti-communist propaganda. Once interrupt that barrage, or introduce conflicting versions of the anti-communist theme, and the real story can't help breaking through into mass popular consciousness. 40 years of peace? No, over 200 wars of counter-insurgency, counter-revolution, imposed civil-war fratricide, CIA-rigged elections and CIA-promoted coups d'état, Bay of Pigs invasions, assassinations etc., etc., and all organised around the permanent Cold War nuclear encirclement of the Soviet socialist camp.

Sure enough, it was with the onset of imperialist crisis and consequent demise of the postwar certainties that the truth about, for example, the permanent officially funded Gladio counter-revolution centres throughout Western Europe became common knowledge, now freely available to be openly discussed e. g. in the course of debate at the SLP's inaugural do.

And now that there is only one 'superpower', and the UN takes every step with an American gun at its head,- strange to tell, it is at THIS moment that the UN starts to tell some of the truth about Zion-fascist arrogance, and the bullying arrogance of Zionism's Washington paymasters!

Under the fragmenting impact of trade war pressures, the anti-communist 'good intentions' of bourgeois of all nations start to lose unity and coherence, opening the door for whatever is civilized in public opinion to start getting a grip on what REALLY lies behind all the sanctimonious crap about 'a national home for the Jews' etc., behind which imperialism has concealed its vicious colonial domination of the Middle East.

Military force matters a great deal, but is not in the end,  on its own decisive, as America already found to its cost in Vietnam. If military force is not buttressed by economic performance and ideological conviction, and if the whole exercise is ceasing to look like any kind of 'world leadership' and instead looking like a lot of vicious bluster designed only to defend a self-serving status quo, then the 'free hand' of the 'superpower' expresses, not total power, but a wild and uncoordinated flailing.

Every time that 'free hand' sows its dragon's teeth, new enemies spring up to confront US influence. The Lebanese are reportedly united as never before. The exposure of Arafatism has been advanced by leaps and bounds. Armed resistance against Zionism has grown in experience and confidence. Places like Bahrain, long regarded as permanent safe seats for semi-feudal reaction, are turning into powder-kegs. The old Cold War trick of balancing Iran against Iraq has run out of steam, with trade-war pressures forcing Washington into the stupidity of mounting boycotts against both simultaneously, -  and Libya, and Cuba. And even the two rival Damascus and Baghdad sections of the phoney 'socialist' Ba'ath party are allegedly being forced back into wary alliance against imperialism.

Self-serving opportunism in Teheran, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad of course remains as treacherous as ever to the revolutionary anti-imperialist interests of the working masses. But the headache for imperialism is real enough, and can only get worse as it becomes clear that the revolts sparked by imperialist crisis cannot long be held back at the level of Saddam's posturing. And what hastens the political education (to take revolt beyond Saddam, Assad and Gaddafi, and soon to recapitulate and surpass even the much more serious anti-imperialism of Nasserism) is precisely the way in which imperialist aggression in time of trade war is more and more stripped of any pretence of 'international law' and is revealed in its true light as the naked pursuit of sectional monopoly capitalist advantage, all the way to war, - and all the way to revolution.

America's isolationist arrogance is not an expression of confidence but of dog-in-the-manger spite that it can no longer make the old postwar mechanisms work to its guaranteed advantage. If at one extreme this means cheering on the Zionists as they deliberately blast a UN refuge to bits, it also means equally deliberate sabotage of the WTO (son-of-GATT) when it looks like America can't get everything its own way:

negotiators failed to meet Tuesday's midnight deadline for agreeing a global pact on telecoms liberalisation and instead put off a decision until February 1997.

The decision ended two days of frantic negotiations on how to prevent the collapse of the talks, once it became clear on Monday that the US did not intend to join an emerging accord.

Washington's trading partners did not disguise their frustration that their efforts had again been undermined by a US administration seemingly more concerned with appeasing narrow domestic political and industrial interests than with securing the wider benefits of a multilateral deal.

THE European Union warned last night that it is heading for a serious diplomatic and trade confrontation with the United States over laws that would penalise European businesses trading with Cuba, Iran or Libya and bar their executives from entering the US.

EU governments, already outraged by the passing of US sanctions against Cuba which could lead to the blacklisting of thousands of European and other non-US businesses, fear that similar measures designed to hit trade with Iran and Libya could be adopted by Congress within days.

The British government has privately warned the Clinton administration that it may bar US citizens from entering Britain if British executives are prevented from travelling freely to the United States because of the anti-Cuban measures.

United States officials flew to Brussels yesterday to brief European businesses on the practical impact of the Helms-Burton anti-Cuba legislation. They warned that senior executives and shareholders in companies trading with Cuba could be refused entry to the US and businesses accused of trading with Cuba also risked being refused the right to raise capital on American money markets.

"It is too early to say exactly how many people will be affected,'' one US official said, although he admitted: "It could be in the hundreds. It could be in the thousands."

Under the Helms-Burton law, any individual benefiting from investments in businesses or property confiscated by the Cuban government from American interests could be named as a "trafficker" and barred from entering the US. The officials said a special committee in Washington would identify traffickers.

European Commission officials reacted furiously yesterday to the threatened action. "This is a completely unjustified extra-territorial extension of US legislation," one said. The commission has already taken the issue to the World Trade Organisation in a step that could lead to full-scale legal action against the US.

The British government, which traditionally has sought to mediate in disputes between the US and the EU, is particularly indignant over Congress's action. Malcolm Rifkind, the Foreign Secretary, has issued a number of private and public warnings to Washington that the Helms-Burton law would create a dangerous precedent in international trade.

Although trade between the EU and Cuba is modest, European businesses are alarmed at the prospect of similar sanctions against non-US companies doing business with Iran and Libya.

It's over the question of war preparations that outbreaks of marriage-nerves even within supposed tradebloc alliances are driven to the surface:

Mr Michael Portillo, the defence secretary, yesterday urged the US to open its markets to European defence equipment in return for Britain's continued resistance to pressure for European exclusion of US equipment.

Introducing the annual defence white paper, Mr Portillo emphasised the amount of equipment Britain had bought from the US in the past two years. The UK has spent £2.5bn on 67 Apache tank-busting helicopters and almost £lbn on 25 C-130J Hercules transport aircraft. It has also bought 14 Chinook helicopters, Tomahawk cruise missiles and Paveway III laser-guided bombs.

If the UK were to continue to allow the US equal access to defence equipment competitions in future, the Pentagon must "operate a two-way street", Mr Portillo insisted.

The UK is pressing the US to buy the BAe-Hughes Asraam air-to-air missile, the GEC-Marconi Tiald laser bomb-aimer, the Shorts StarStreak missile, and field guns from Royal Ordnance or VSEL.

The Germans were furious in February when Mr Chirac took them by surprise and announced that he was scrapping conscription and embarking on a long-term defence review. He said ft would focus on rapid reaction operations in far-flung trouble spots rather than on the traditional post-war defence of central and western Europe against a menacing east.

The German defence minister warned this week that an end to French conscription could make Franco-German military cooperation "break apart". It would leave Germany with the only big conscript army in Western Europe - and Mr Kohl is firmly attached to the draft.

Given the austerity packages both leaders are seeking to impose to get their countries' public finances fit for a common European currency from 1999, Mr Chirac is believed to be proposing military spending cuts. Those could affect joint Franco-German hardware projects and farther irritate the Germans.

After the close pro-European relationship between Mr Kohl and the late François Mitterrand, Mr Chirac's year in office has frequently sent the Franco-German axis spinning slightly out of control.

Mr Chirac's penchant for surprise solo moves - in nuclear testing, military rethinks, or Middle Eastern and Balkan diplomacy - has exasperated the Germans, since defence and foreign affairs are areas Bonn is keen to see "Europeanised".

The French government has redoubled its reassurances in the wake of complaints by Mr Volker Ruhe, Germany's defence minister, that he was not adequately consulted before Mr Chirac's mid-February decision to phase out French conscription.

At the time, Mr Chirac promised that his reforms would not damage France's co-operation with Germany in their joint Eurocorps nor its involvement in the Tiger and NH-90 helicopter programmes with Bonn.

But there has been growing speculation in Paris that France will reduce its orders for Tigers and NH90s in its 1997-2002 programme. This has led to German demands for the programmes to be "re-balanced" in Germany's favour.

Mr Jean-Francois Bigay, president of Eurocopter, 70 per cent owned by Aerospatiale and 30 per cent by DaimlerBenz Aerospace (Dasa), conformed last week that the German authorities had asked for work-shares on the Tiger programme to be recalculated.

According to German press reports Germany will take 212 Tigers while France, which had planned to buy 215, will now have less than 100.

The Germans are also concerned that France has said it does not have enough money to go ahead with the so-called Future Large Aircraft, a new generation of military transport which the two allies had been planning to develop.

French officials say that while France's new professional army will be nearly 40 percent smaller than the current force, it should have almost as much firepower. But the new 1997-2002 military programme places a tighter overall cap on equipment spending.

Germany's demand to redivide the shared arms market to reflect relative national economic strengths, with no free rides for cash-strapped allies, neatly demonstrates the limits of monopoly capitalism's 'global' pretensions, even where the prize for European collaboration might be a successful challenge to US domination of the arms market worldwide. And since these weapons are made and sold for use, and a Franco-German brigade is already in practice redefining the EU's strategic centre of gravity, the pecking-orders being argued over here are not merely commercial.

It is true that globalization permits the wealthiest and most ruthless capitalism to slide over national boundaries from market to market, closing low-profit plants in one country to reopen in another where labour is cheaper, tax is lower, demand is higher etc; or simply to sell off one set of operations and use the released capital to take over some quite other set of operations somewhere else in the world.

But the rootlessness of monopoly capital is the curse and downfall of modern capitalism, not its 'super imperialist' salvation. For the tiny handful of imperialist predators who manage to stay astride the dizzying concentration of capital (as renewed overproduction crisis shrinks markets and winds competition up to screaming pitch), all the 'post-national' rootlessness of monopoly capital in the end translates into its opposite: war for redivision of the world market between the nations, fought out behind the same rotten imperialist national flags as on the previous two occasions this century, but with infinitely greater revolutionary implications this time round.

And since by definition the global concentration of capital is built on the ruins of all the third-rate contenders that DON'T scramble to the top of the heap, there is already plenty of evidence of the hopeless mess created when the global dream turns sour:

The London rules were put forward at the beginning of the decade by the Bank to cope with the growing number of corporate collapses caused by the last UK recession.

Unlike earlier recessions, many of the stricken companies had a large number of bank lenders with conflicting interests, which made it immensely difficult to reach agreement on restructuring without central bank co-ordination. Where companies operate in several countries, the problem of mounting rescues has proved still more difficult.

The Bank expects the number of complex cross-border rescues to increase.

The Bank also tackled issues such as the emergence of the secondary market m corporate debt, which made it harder to agree rescues because it dispersed ownership of the debt. It is now looking at new problems posed for rescues by the rapid growth of bond finance as a replacement for bank debt in company balance sheets and this will be on the agenda of the conference. 

And so the process of concentration goes on, with industrial capital further subordinated to finance capital, banks of different nations jostling for market position ("central bank coordination"), and the banks themselves left trailing as corporate debt transforms into a speculative "secondary market" slipping beyond their control.

Lang now says he is not in favour of suppressing domestic competition in order to foster 'national champions' (a dig at his interventionist predecessor Heseltine), adding that the best way of creating companies efficient enough to make an impact on world markets is to force them to cope with highly competitive markets in the UK.

Yet that is exactly the game that was played with telecommunications, setting Mercury to snap at the heels of BT (under controlled conditions) and theoretically get it into shape to take on AT&T, Deutsche Telekom etc. in the real world. Result: BT continues to sit on vast monopoly profits, never really seriously challenged by Mercury or the cable outfits.

Fixing things so that Cable and Wireless could ditch its shares in Mercury and get hitched to BT, opening up new overseas markets for BT (China in particular), seemed to offer a 'national champion' route to international competitiveness. But now BT's merger advances have collapsed a second time, BT is left perched dangerously between two stools: neither 'national champion' nor born-again domestic competitor.

BT faces a very uncertain global future once either (a)US stalling on telecoms liberalization is overcome, exposing BT to the full rigours of an unrestrained world market, or (b) continued US special pleading sparks a retreat into bloc-protectionism, exposing BT to a trade-war waged under the uncertain patronage of whichever protectionist bloc seems least forbidding.

As for electricity, all Lang has accomplished by banning the domestic generators from 'vertically' taking over the domestic distributors is to clear the way sooner or later for stronger competition from across the water. As the shenanigans over the National Grid demonstrate, it takes more than the cardboard shield of a government 'golden share' to hold back the anarchic (and increasingly anonymous) tide of capital in search of a profit:

Hanson sold a 12.5 per cent stake in the Grid to James Capel on Tuesday. Amid market speculation about future ownership of the stake, the broker disclosed that it had "hedged the market risk" of the holding by entering into a derivatives contract with Olayan, an Athens-based group controlled by one of the world's richest men, Suliman Saleh Olayan.

Mr Uttley said the Grid was seeking information from Olayan about its intentions. He admitted the board was "baffled" about the nature of the derivatives deal, which Capel refused to clarify.

The deal led to speculation that Olayan would be the ultimate owner of the shares, but analysts said yesterday Capel still seemed to be looking for a buyer.

One derivatives expert said of the broker's situation: "I would guess they have entered into a swap arrangement with Olayan and hedged part of it . . . which gives Capel time to find the ultimate home for the shares."

National Grid said yesterday it was seeking talks with Olayan to ascertain its interest in the company. Industry sources said yesterday's fall indicated there was little institutional demand for the shares. Traders speculated that Capel was intending to place the stake and using the Saudi group to hedge the risk.

Disclosure notices were served on James Capel and Hanson on Tuesday, and on Olayan and its subsidiaries yesterday. The broker said yesterday that the stake was owned by its marketmaking arm. Hanson said it no longer had any interest in the stake.

Mr Uttley yesterday gave the Grid's seven-year forecast of demand and supply. He said plant margin - the excess of planned generation over forecast peak demand - would be close to 20 per cent as market forces brought the closure of elderly plant. '

For British imperialism, what makes all these crisis developments doubly ominous is the background of relative national decline against which they are playing:

'In 1948 manufacturing output accounted for about 36 per cent of UK gross domestic product. Now it accounts for less than a quarter.

A shrinkage in employment has also occurred. In 1959 about 8m, or 40 per cent of the total 21m workers employed in all industries and services, worked in manufacturing. By the end of last year that proportion - on a slightly different statistical definition - had shrunk to 4m, or less than 20 per cent of the total.

Manufacturing's long-term demise is linked to the UK's poor trade performance. Understandably so, since tradeable manufactured goods make up the biggest part of most developed countries' exports.

An important milestone was reached in 1979, when for the first time more manufactured goods were imported than exported, although it was not until 1983 that a long period of decline in the trade balance in manufactured goods set in.

The empty, devastated factory landscapes of the early 1980s and 1990s were testament to the last great contraction of British industry. 

Industry received a boost when the pounds departure from the ERM in 1992 left sterling at extremely competitive levels.

But manufacturing exports since have disappointed - as many exporters have taken advantage of depreciation to increase profits by raising prices, so eliminating any price advantage. Export price inflation is running at an annual rate of more than 8 per cent.

Manufacturing's latest woes - which have seen the annual output growth fall from 4 per cent last spring to about 0.5 per cent now - have been exacerbated by a large build-up in unsold stocks of finished goods and a fresh deterioration in export performance.

...official figures are today expected to show that after a period of relative buoyancy since 1992, manufacturing may again be set for contraction as it teeters on the brink of recession.

And far from Britain's deindustrialization being proportionately compensated by gains is financial services, the City of London is likewise under threat from rival centres of monopoly capital, and has increasing difficulty in even modernizing its own share-dealing institutions.

This degenerate capitalist system is beyond reform and is ripe for overthrow. Build Leninism.  Paddy Chambers