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 0870 September 10 1996                                                                                                                               10p 
Discussion

Workers states which deteriorate into revisionism so completely that they can no longer inspire a renewed revolutionary onslaught on imperialism, eventually become historically redundant, - great pioneers which have outlived their usefulness.

The historical significance of the 70 years existence of the Soviet workers state continues to haunt the ideologists of Western imperialism, still giving rise to endless books trying to laugh off the USSR, and endless CIA-launched TV & newspaper articles hoping to imply that communism is now well and truly buried.

The reality of the colossal achievements of the Soviet Union, however, will be hard to shift, deeply embedded as they still are in the consciousness of more than half of mankind.

What usefully continues to emerge is that the perspectives for anti-imperialist struggle and the international socialist revolution are now better than ever, despite the sad shock of the inability of the world's first workers state to continue adapting and renewing itself to keep in the forefront of Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding.

It is now becoming obvious that the astonishing self-liquidation by the revisionist bureaucracy of the CPSU was 	clearly a necessary prelude to the enormous leap forward in revolutionary struggle worldwide that lies ahead for workers (now freed from the dead hand of international class-collaborative delusions, emanating from the USSR and its huge fraternity of 'Official' Communist Parties around the planet - in response to the sharpening of the inter-imperialist trade-war crisis which was a crucial part of that revisionist collapse.

For decades, the Soviet Union had been becoming an increasingly reluctant "counterbalance to imperialism". It was a role it had always played more notionally than in practice, and Western imperialist aggression and domination had been allowed to get away with more than 200 acts of colonial war, military coups, counter-revolutions, armed subversion, and the like, killing tens of millions of national-liberation fighters and communist revolutionaries in Greece, Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, the Congo, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, etc, etc, with the Soviet "counterbalance" frequently nowhere to be seen, or else too much of a background gesture or too small to be effective.

The overall historical record of the Soviet workers state, of course, remains an unparalleled achievement in the development of civilisation, - the first country ever to appear on the international stage acting not in order to exploit other peoples, but on the contrary, in order to try to help them emerge out of colonial tutelage, to industrialise, and to train and educate themselves.

Huge assistance was given to the Chinese revolution. Massive arms were given to Vietnam. Millions of doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists, etc, were trained from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the USSR at Soviet expense. Socialist-bloc trade was frequently conducted to the detriment of the Soviet Union, especially in oil and other raw materials which were invariably supplied at less than world market prices. 

Cuba, for example, was always generously subsidised by the USSR. Living standards were invariably higher in East Europe than in the Soviet Union itself; and inside the USSR, the Baltic republics, for example, always enjoyed higher living standards than Russia proper. Not one rouble of investment or trade was ever advanced by the Soviet workers state with the aim of economic exploitation of other peoples.

But the counter-balance to imperialism became more and more theoretically muddled towards the end, conducting operations or responding to events with less and less conviction about the future of the anti-imperialist struggle and the world socialist revolution.

This degeneration was a long time in the making, and cumulative. It arose from a combination of conservatism and inadequacy, both subjective and objective, over the difficult problems facing the international revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, threatened by resurgent and rearming imperialism, plus self-satisfied complacency that the Soviet workers states and the planned economy had nevertheless survived against all the odds, and by the 1950s and 1960s was achieving formidable 'super power' world status.

The triumphant bureaucracy compounded this incipient stagnation by embracing completely incorrect 'developments' of Marxist-Leninist theory.

These were Stalinism's truly great crimes. 

The colossal triumph of the Soviet workers state during the 20th century's second great inter-imperialist war in holding Japanese imperialism at bay in the Far East, and wiping out German imperialism in Europe, after the entire 'free West' had been utterly subjugated by the immense might of Nazi blitzkrieg, - a series of staggering military successes for the USSR unprecedented in all history, and a triumph of economic and political organisation to match, achievements as significant and epoch making as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution itself, - obliged US, British, and French imperialism to form a real alliance with the Soviet Union. This bred vain revisionist hopes, already inherent in the failed and misleading Popular Front policy in the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, that the 'better aspects' of 'free world' civilisation might be won to a permanent 'peaceful coexistence' with workers states of planned socialism, acting against the supposedly 'harmful and maverick elements of imperialist aggression' such as Nazi Germany and fascism in general.

This fearful nonsense, absolving the vicious imperialist system as a whole of its monstrous history of colonial exploitation crimes so as to nail the new savagery by Germany, Japan, etc, - then flowered into such permanent barminess as the 'peaceful road to socialism' illusion, the notion of perpetual peaceful coexistence internationally, and the delusion that the expanding camp of planned socialism would gradually capture the world market from imperialist exploitation, which would then begin contracting and dying (as opposed to needing to be overthrown by revolution everywhere) - [1952: Economic Problems of Socialism].

This revisionist wishful thinking was hugely popular worldwide, and in particular of course in the Soviet Union. This comfortable USSR ideological decay was in effect becoming unreformable because of the very success of the Soviet workers state. 

It can now be seen that only some farcical self-inflicted damage to the USSR itself was ever going to cut short the enormous moribund influence of the CPSU on the workers movements of the world. All the time that the Soviet Union itself was still there, a colossal triumph of history as the world's first workers state, then the grip of revisionism would remain hard-to-impossible to overcome.

The trade-war conflict of inter-imperialist crisis, sharpening steadily throughout the 1970s and 1980s, would eventually make such a break with revisionism's anti-revolutionary international class-collaborationism imperative. And it was the main motive force of 20th century history, - inter-imperialist crisis itself, - which pushed revisionism's dead hand out of the way, via Gorbachevism's amazing torrent of self-liquidating fantasies at the end of the 1980s.

Paradoxically, it was the Reagan administration, which for years had been spitting the most hair-raising fire and blood at the "evil empire" that had been heard in a long time, which was obliged (due to crippling budget deficits caused by murderous trade-war competition from Germany and Japan) to offer a new period, and a new level, of détente to the Soviet Union. The Gorbachevite bureaucracy could hardly conceal its delight at such an unexpected turnaround, seeming to fulfil all of its revisionist dreams, letting it retreat further than ever from its uncomfortable "counter-balance to imperialism" role, and making possible new gimmicks for tackling continuing Soviet economic development problems, trumpeting glasnost and perestroika.

These, of course, were fairly empty gestures in the absence, almost total by now, of the one ideology always necessary to the further advance towards communism and which alone will be able to take civilisation there, - the ever deeper grasp of the world revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism, which must become the earnestly wanted and fought-for philosophy of all mankind, and without which no society will ever be reached where work becomes man's prime necessity, and where the state (force and compulsion in adult human affairs) can at last begin to wither away.

But what Gorbachevite revisionist fantasies did require in order for glasnost and perestroika to look and sound good was a measure of relaxation of the state structure of the Soviet workers state, - the dictatorship of the proletariat, centred on the CPSU as the sole and constitutional ruling party. Gorbachev abandoned it, thinking to become the greatest hero of Soviet history. Still obviously surrounded by world bourgeois-imperialist influences and bribery/subversion, the Soviet workers state and planned economy immediately began to be totally undermined. Gorbachev instead became the most despised booby in history, - the complete philistine.

The CPSU bureaucracy disintegrated completely, theoretically bankrupt; and deprived of even the pretence of Marxist-Leninist leadership any more, the Soviet workers state itself was left completely rudderless, as was bound to happen. The most wretched opportunism took over, virtually effortlessly.

Imperialist crisis, therefore, sharpening rapidly in recent years, has begun to create the need for the renewed socialist-revolutionary advance of civilisation, and has also indirectly made possible the means, - by indirectly sweeping aside the totally inadequate revisionist "counter-balance to imperialism" standing in the way of that renewed revolutionary advance.

Sharpening imperialist crisis pushed the Reagan administration first down the road of screeching,"evil empire", accelerated warmongering threats, the old tried and tested Cold War route to firmer US imperialist domination of the rest of the planet by cajoling or bullying its imperialist 'allies' to support and help pay for the hegemony of American military technology (and therefore all technology), American political influence, and thereby American commercial sway. Such had been the postwar 'anti-communist crusade' means to US imperialist world domination.

But having failed once to prevent Germany and Japan from re-emerging as renewed threats to American international economic and political leadership, the simplistic 'evil empire' rhetorical revival was only likely to saddle the USA with even more costly 'imperialist gendarme' burdens such as the Star Wars threat, but with still no end to the ruthless relentless commercial challenge from Germany and Japan to virtually undermine the US economy and its worldwide influences.

So, having first rattled Soviet bureaucratic complacency with its "evil empire" rhetoric, the Reagan administration now delighted Gorbachevism by switching to a détente-agreement approach, intending to reduce the budget-cost burdens of the USA's imperialist-world leadership, play down the 'communist threat' to it, and concentrate America's efforts much more on the real threat to US world hegemony, - the deadly economic rivalry from Germany and Japan and all its other imperialist 'allies'.

Thus imperialist crisis so shook up the old phony "counter-balance to imperialism" situation that it fell apart completely, first staggering reluctantly through the increasingly difficult war in Afghanistan which US imperialist intervention deliberately hotted up alarmingly, - and then tripping just as unconvincingly, compassless, and perspectiveless into glasnost and perestroika, and the dismantling of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the crucial revolutionary role of which was fatally not understood by revisionist theoretical bankruptcy (see EPS Review No 867).

The Soviet Union's self-destruction obviously caused huge concern to anti-imperialists all round the world, but in retrospect, the situation is much more easily grasped and digested. The USSR was a colossal triumph as the world's first workers state of planned economic development, social progress, and international friendship, demonstrating how the world can do without capitalist market anarchy and imperialist exploiters. But the combination of the Soviet internal philosophical deterioration plus the failure of the world socialist revolution to sweep forward on a wide enough basis and in such a way as to take up the banner of Marxist-Leninist science and carry it further forward, left the USSR in steadily increasing complacent stagnation, unreformable from within due to its success.

Its record of achievement will remain a service to mankind for all time. But having fallen behind the necessary philosophical world developments, and its influence still being so vast on the international working class, the incipient revolutionary circumstances were bound to arrive when the negative influences worldwide of communist party revisionism began outweighing the advantages of continued Soviet Union existence. Gorbachevism can now begin to be seen as a welcome and unsurprising end to a terminal condition of revisionist self-inflicted harm which was threatening to start doing positive damage to the anti-imperialist movement (instead of mostly negative damage by omissions hitherto) with such confused stunts as joint declarations with US imperialism against "international terrorism", etc. Seemingly unresponsive any longer to the needs of the international anti-imperialist struggle, and having abandoned Afghanistan, for example, to a brutal reactionary fate at the hands of US-inspired tribal/feudal primitivism (still going on murderously and destructively to this day), the world's first great example of workers state development was coming to the end of its useful life.

Many perceived reactionary consequences of the USSR's liquidation are in fact just a continuation of the return to ultra-rightwing fundamentalism in Western imperialism (which preceded Gorbachev) in step with deepening worries over monopoly-capitalist trade war and inter-imperialist cutthroat competition, a conservative response typified by Reagan and Thatcher. This anti-welfare cost-cutting harshness will continue as capitalist-state policy for as long as national-chauvinist envy gets away with blaming foreign competition and international bureaucratic unfairness for any particular country's poor trade-war performance, and until the catastrophic worldwide dimensions of the imperialist system's difficulties resurrect the question of is it not capitalism itself, and its destructive anarchy, which is really responsible for the growing crisis burdens on mankind in the 'free world'(?).

Many other supposed adverse international results of Soviet revisionism's demise are in fact entirely imaginary, as analysed in past Reviews exposing petty-bourgeois ultra-leftist defeatism for describing both the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa and the snail's-pace reunification process British colonialism has been forced into in Ireland as victories for imperialism instead of victories for national-liberation revolutionary struggle.

Revisionism elsewhere has admittedly shown signs of becoming even more confused and volatile as a result of the CPSU debacle, but as Moscow's influence on Cuba or North Korea was never going to push them back towards Leninism anyway, then at least the theoretical possibility is now opened up that obviously increased imperialist pressure, or renewed revolutionary advances internationally as a result of Moscow's dead hand being removed, - might just have that effect.

As for US imperialism's supposed 'new-world-order' renewed strength in dictating to the whole world now, - all past EPS Reviews have continuously exposed just the exact opposite of this, - the ever-deepening confusion, conflict, and crisis within the imperialist camp, dragging the entire imperialist system ever closer towards a renewal of warmongering, slump-ridden, fascist chaos and insoluble economic crisis, including especially the catastrophic decline and fall of Washington hegemony, with all the unprecedented consequences of disruption and dislocation that this will bring, exactly because of the overwhelmingly dominant role that the USA has previously come to play due to the incurable anarchic unevenness of development, and brutal injustice, of the 'free market' system. To describe this sordid unstable mess as an effective 'new imperialist world order' is to reveal the most naïve lack of historical awareness imaginable (see next story).

In this light of chronic imperialist instability, the supposed "loss of an alternative centre for non-imperialist countries and national-liberation movements to look to" in the USSR, has to be completely reversed. It is encouragement to revolutionary struggle which is now absolutely vital, not encouragement to domestic and international class-collaboration which Moscow had been ladling out for decades. Right up until Gorbachev's final self-destruction, Soviet policy was still being defended by Communist Parties worldwide. For the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism, in the long run the loss of such an anti-Leninist "alternative centre" for the national-liberation aid anti-imperialist movements will be seen as necessary.

Throughout its existence and after its demise, the great problem with how the role of the world's first workers state was received and analysed was from people looking to the USSR to demonstrate some point or other which reflected mostly on the subjective condition of the people looking and their needs, but told little of Soviet reality and its historic achievements.

Millions flocked into communist parties everywhere inspired with ideals of a Soviet Union steadily growing in perfection, and a Bolshevik leadership gaining all the time in flawless wisdom. These illusions were a tragic disaster. Millions more remained cynically sceptical, tragically neutralised by the ferocious anti-communist propaganda onslaught by bourgeois ideology from seeing any great historic triumph at all against imperialist reaction by the Soviet workers state.

A few thousand left sectarians turned savagely against the USSR, denouncing it for not being the perfect socialist revolution and the instant hammer of all imperialism immediately, worldwide. This sour subjectivism was a total disaster.

What Soviet developments needed was what they never got, - unconditional support in the face of all the bourgeois attacks of every kind which were heaped upon the USSR, but sympathetic criticism of the mistakes which began to be made, in particular the revisionist weaknesses which began to creep into the CPSU's grasp of Marxist-Leninist scientific theory.

The clever Trotsky's denunciations of Stalinist "counter-revolution" were an utter catastrophe for the international working class, from the 1920s onwards, reaching their insane peak when they resulted in widespread sectarian hostility to the Cuban socialist revolution of the 1960s (aided by the Soviet "counter-revolution"!); or soured international solidarity with the heroic Afghan revolutionary attempts to overcome US-financed tribal-feudal backwardness and barbarism in the 1980s; or when they demoralised workers everywhere by announcing imminent German imperialist victory over "Hitler's twin-star Stalin" during the second great inter-imperialist war period; etc.

The state-capitalist denunciation of the Soviet workers state as a new bureaucratic bourgeoisie, exploiting the working class in the USSR and internationally, was even worse destructive biliousness for subjective sectarian petty-bourgeois to inflict on unsuspecting workers. A halving of living standards, and appalling suffering from mass unemployment, uncontrollable crime and corruption, and a near breakdown of all welfare-state social services were inflicted on the unsuspecting Soviet public when capitalism and the exploitation of workers really was reintroduced into Soviet territory in the 1990s.

And what happened to the supposed new "state-capitalist Soviet ruling caste" (the CPSU, 18-million strong by the 1980s) after Gorbachev? Presumably, all 18 million just stuck up a sign saying "private capitalist" and carried on as before? No, 99.99% of them are now powerless victimised workers or else unemployed, and all suffering along with the rest of the Soviet people. And what happened to Gorbachev? Presumably as the top boss of state-capitalism going private, he would have ended up as the top privateer? Even as Western imperialism's greatest-ever stooge, he has ended up as a bit of an outcast, apparently backed only by free-world handouts. 

And completely unexplained is the greatest mystery of all: Why would the Soviet state-capitalist bourgeoisie want to become a private capitalist bourgeoisie anyway, even if they all made it safely onto the changed gravy-trains (instead of 99.99% of them falling off)? All of history has demonstrated that power is the real turn-on for the privileged, not an extra dacha, or an extra limousine, or an extra breakfast, which is all that changing from state-capitalist bosses to private capitalist bosses would have meant.

And power, the sweetest thing of all according to most great figures of history, is the one thing the Soviet bureaucracy was almost certain to have to give up or to compromise over if they switched from being state-capitalist bosses to private capitalist bosses under a free-market bourgeois-democracy system (as in fact has happened).

So were these the most stupid 'evil exploiting capitalist bosses' in all history?

Or just maybe, perhaps, they were not state-capitalist bosses at all, ever.

Another range of attacks on the Soviet workers state came from the semi-anarchic school of 'rank-and-file socialism', summed up in all its appalling reactionary self-delusion and treachery by the Solidarnosc racket, entirely organised and financed by the CIA and the Vatican with looted Banco Ambrosiano mafia funds, whose fictional '10 million members' were the idol of fake 'lefts' the world over, which ended up dismantling the Polish workers-state gains and installing the near-fascist Walesa as president, stooge-in-chief for Western imperialist interests. Such 'rank-and-file socialism' has never believed in a powerful state of proletarian dictatorship as the main essential teaching of all Marxist-Leninist science (see EPS Review 867) and has never done anything anywhere but play into the hands of counter-revolution.

The mass democratic involvement in the running of the state was one of the most powerful features of the Soviet Union's development, seen at its best during the German Nazi imperialist onslaught which saw virtually half the armed nation ranged in front of the Wehrmacht, and the other half armed as partisans behind the German lines.

No commissars were shot, - only imperialist exploiters, and many millions of them.

But party and soviet democracy were thwarted from any steps towards full flourishing by the wretched theoretical limitations of the CPSU leadership after Lenin. Marxism-Leninism is a practical world-revolutionary philosophy or it is nothing, vitally depending on a full grasp of the very latest front-line developments in the anti-imperialist struggle everywhere, constantly reinterpreting the changing international balance of class forces and advancing the most perceptive analysis of it, or drying up completely.

The Soviet workers state taught 'dialectical materialism' to every student, and made possible tens of thousands of solidarity groups of Soviet citizens with all those in anti-imperialist struggle the world over.

But the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist cutting edge was largely absent from all these activities. Scientific anti-imperialist struggle was never given up-to-date polemical teaching, actively analysing every latest class-war and inter-imperialist war development with a view to advancing the most effective communist policy possible, and actively engaging the mass Soviet democracy education in all those international revolutionary struggles. Marxism-Leninism became just known as 'dia-mat', - an arid dessicated school subject about as entertaining and vital as learning Latin irregular verbs. It was still a workers state pursuing democratic socialism and mass involvement, but the theoretical blindness and smug complacency of the CPSU leadership turned all this into aimless dross by the end, a society without a driving philosophy (which had to be world socialist revolution, or nothing), - a pushover for a really determined opportunist philistine like Gorbachev.

The answer to all the pointless wishful-thinking questions of 'could it have all been better; could it have turned out differently?' is a clear No. Whatever atrocious mistakes or arbitrary crimes are eventually proven against the leadership after Lenin, the CPSU and the Soviet state always overwhelmingly went with the always clearcut party majority. Whatever character is ever assigned to the performance, achievements, and omissions of that leadership, that will be a fairly accurate reflection of the level of culture of which the Soviet revolution was capable in the period after Lenin.

Stalin easily defeated Trotsky on all the disputed matters between them, and fully deserved to. His central core of long-serving Bolsheviks was always far closer to Leninism than Trotsky had ever been. A textual comparison between Stalin's 'Foundations of Leninism', 'October Revolution and Tactics of Russian Communists', and 'Problems of Leninism', and Trotsky's rival books similarly published in the USSR between 1923 and 1926 including 'The New Course', the new Preface to 'The Year 1905' and 'The Year 1917', etc, demonstrates that it was no contest. Stalin won hands down, and it is no surprise that at the 13th Party Conference before Lenin died, and at the 13th Congress (where Lenin's 'testament' was read to the delegates) and the 5th Congress of the Comintern later (spring and summer) in 1924, Stalin's line won all the votes overwhelmingly against Trotsky's line. The Soviet workers state of planned socialism that the world got for 70 years of the mid 20th century, achieving an astonishing unprecedented impact on civilisation, was about the best the world could anticipate given the prevailing conditions and difficulties.

The tragic relapse back into revisionism by the acknowledged leadership of the international revolutionary movement was not the first time this had happened to Marxism-Leninism; and when first Bernstein, and then Kautsky, led the International into exactly these revisionist disasters, there were far less unnerving circumstances facing them than that which afflicted the Third International leadership after Lenin.

The challenge to the validity of trying to build socialism at all in Soviet Russia isolated from world revolution, is best answered by Lenin himself:

The successes scored in this respect by the Soviets have been tremendous. When, three years ago, we raised the question of the tasks and the conditions of the proletarian revolution's victory in Russia, we always stated emphatically that victory could not be permanent unless it was followed up by a proletarian revolution in the West, and that a correct appraisal of our revolution was possible only from the international point of view. For victory to be lasting, we must achieve the victory of the proletarian revolution in all, or at any rate in several, of the main capitalist countries. After three years of desperate and stubborn struggle, we can see in what respect our predictions have or have not materialised. They have not materialised in the sense that there has been no rapid or simple solution of the problem. None of us, of course, expected that such an unequal struggle as the one waged by Russia against the whole of the capitalist world could last for three years. It has emerged that neither side—the Russian Soviet Republic or the capitalist world—has gained victory or suffered defeat; at the same time it has turned out that, while our forecasts did not materialise simply, rapidly and directly, they were fulfilled insofar as we achieved the main thing— the possibility has been maintained of the existence of proletarian rule and the Soviet Republic even in the event of the world socialist revolution being delayed. In this respect it must be said that the Republic’s international position today provides the best and most precise confirmation of all our plans and all our policy.

Needless to say, there can be no question of comparing the military strength of the R.S.F.S.R. with that of all the capitalist powers. In this respect we are incomparably weaker than they are, yet, after three years of war, we have forced almost all of these states to abandon the idea of further intervention. This means that what we saw as possible three years ago, while the imperialist war was not yet over, i.e., a highly protracted situation, without any final decision one way or the other, has come about. That has been, not because we have proved militarily stronger and the Entente weaker, but because throughout this period the disintegration in the Entente countries has intensified, whereas our inner strength has grown. This has been confirmed and proved by the war. The Entente was unable to fight us with its own forces. The workers and peasants of the capitalist countries could not be forced to fight us. The bourgeois states were able to emerge from the imperialist war with their bourgeois regimes intact. They were able to stave off and delay the crisis hanging over them, but basically they so undermined their own position that, despite all their gigantic military forces, they had to acknowledge, after three years, that they were unable to crush the Soviet Republic with its almost non-existent military forces. It has thus turned out that our policy and our predictions have proved fundamentally correct in all respects and that the oppressed people in any capitalist country have indeed shown themselves our allies, for it was they who stopped the war. Without having gained an international victory, which we consider the only sure victory,  we are in a position of having won conditions enabling us to exist side by side with capitalist powers, who are now compelled to enter into trade relations with us. In the course of this struggle we have won the right to an independent existence.

Thus a glance at our international position as a whole will show that we have achieved tremendous successes and have won, not only a breathing-space but something much more significant. By a breathing-space we understand a brief period during which the imperialist powers have had many opportunities to renew in greater force the war against us. Today, too, we do not underestimate the danger and do not deny the possibility of future military intervention by the capitalist countries. It is essential for us to maintain our military preparedness. However, if we cast a glance at the conditions in which we defeated all attempts made by the Russian counter-revolutionaries and achieved a formal peace with all the Western states, it will be clear that we have something more than a breathing-space: we have entered a now period, in which we have won the right to our fundamental international existence in the network of capitalist states. Domestic conditions have not allowed a single powerful capitalist state to hurl its army against Russia; this has been due to the revolution having matured within such countries, preventing them from overcoming us as quickly as they might have done. There were British, French and Japanese armies on Russian territory for three years. There can he no doubt that the most insignificant concentration of forces by these three powers would have been quite enough to win a victory over us in a few months, if not in a few weeks. We were able to contain that attack only on account of the demoralisation among the French troops and the unrest that set in among the British and Japanese. We have made use of this divergence of imperialist interests all the time. We defeated the interventionists only because their interests divided them, thereby enhancing our strength and unity. This gave us a breathing-space and rendered impossible the complete victory of German imperialism at the time of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk.

These dissensions have become more aggravated of late, especially because of the project of an agreement on concessions with a group of American capitalist sharks, with the toughest of them, headed by a multimillionaire who expects to form a group of multimillionaires.118 We know that almost all reports from the Far East bear witness to the extreme resentment felt in Japan over the conclusion of this agreement, although so far there has been no agreement, but only the draft of one. Japanese public opinion, however, is already seething, and today I read a communication which said that Japan is accusing Soviet Russia of wanting to set Japan against America.

We have correctly appraised the intensity of the imperialist rivalry and have told ourselves that we must make systematic use of the dissension between them so as to hamper their struggle against us. Political dissension is already apparent in the relations between Britain and France. Today we can speak, not merely of a breathing-space, but of a real chance of a new and lengthy period of development. Until now we have actually had no basis in the international sense. We now have this basis, the reason being the attitude of the smaller powers that are completely dependent on the Great Powers both in the military and in the economic sense. It now appears that, despite the pressure brought to bear by France, Poland has signed a peace with us. The Polish capitalists have a hate of Soviet power; they crush the most ordinary strikes with unparalleled ferocity. They want war with Soviet Russia more than anything else, yet they prefer to make peace with us rather than carry out the conditions set by the Entente. We see that the imperialist powers dominate the whole world although they comprise an insignificant part of the world’s population. The fact that a country has appeared that for three years has resisted world imperialism has considerably changed the international situation; the minor powers—and they form the majority of the world’s population—are therefore all inclined to make peace with us.

The entry of the socialist country into trade relations with capitalist countries is a most important factor ensuring our existence in such a complex and absolutely exceptional situation.

I have had occasion to observe a certain Spargo, an American social-chauvinist close to our Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, one of the leaders of the Second International and member of the American Socialist Party, a kind of American Alexinsky, and author of a number of anti-Bolshevik books, who has reproached us—and has quoted the fact as evidence of the complete collapse of communism—for speaking of transactions with capitalist powers. He has written that he cannot imagine better proof of the complete collapse of communism and the breakdown of its programme. I think that anybody who has given thought to the matter will say the reverse. No better proof of the Russian Soviet Republic's material and moral victory over the capitalists of the whole world can be found than the fact that the powers that took up arms against us because of our terror and our entire system have been compelled, against their will, to enter into trade relations with us in the knowledge that by so doing they are strengthening us. This might have been advanced as proof of the collapse of communism only if we had promised, with the forces of Russia alone, to transform the whole world, or had dreamed of doing so. However, we have never harboured such crazy ideas and have always said that our revolution will be victorious when it is supported by the workers of all lands. In fact, they went half-way in their support, for they weakened the hand raised against us, yet in doing so they were helping us.

1920: Our foreign and domestic position and party tasks

'We have approached the very core of the everyday problems, and that is a tremendous achievement. Socialism is no longer a matter of the distant future, or an abstract picture, or an icon. Our opinion of icons is the same—a very bad one.

We have brought socialism into everyday life and must here see how matters stand. That is the task of our day, the task of our epoch. Permit me to conclude by expressing confidence that difficult as this task may be, new as it may be compared with our previous task, and numerous as the difficulties may be that it entails, we shall all—not in a day, but in a few years—all of us together fulfil it whatever the cost, so that NEP Russia will become socialist Russia.

Nov 1922 Speech at plenary session of Moscow Soviet

Indeed, the power of the state over all large-scale means of production, political power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured proletarian leadership of the peasantry, etc.—is this not all that is necessary to build a complete Socialist society out of co-operatives, out of co-operatives alone, which we formerly ridiculed as huckstering and which from a certain aspect we have the right to treat as such now, under NEP? Is this not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society? It is still not the building of socialist society, but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for it.

On co-operation Jan 1923

The system of international relationships which has now taken shape is one in which a European state, Germany, is enslaved by the victor countries. Furthermore, owing to their victory, a number of states, the oldest states in the West, are in a position to make some insignificant concessions to their oppressed classes—concessions which, working people, reduced to the last degree of human suffering, has been forced into a position where its physical and material strength cannot possibly be compared with the physical, material and military strength of any of the much smaller West-European states.

Can we save ourselves from the impending conflict with these imperialist countries? May we hope that the internal antagonisms and conflicts between the thriving imperialist countries of the West and the thriving imperialist countries of the East will give us a second respite as they did the first time, when the campaign of the West-European counter-revolution in support of the Russian counter-revolution broke down owing to the antagonisms in the camp of the counter-revolutionaries of the West and the East, in the camp of the Eastern and Western exploiters, in the camp of Japan and the U.S.A.?

I think the reply to this question should be that the issue depends upon too many factors, and that the outcome of the struggle as a whole can be forecast only because in the long run capitalism itself is educating and training the vast majority of the population of the globe for the struggle.                                                       

In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.

But what interests us is not the inevitability of this complete victory of socialism, but the tactics which we, the Russian Communist Party, we, the Russian Soviet Government, should pursue to prevent the West-European counter-revolutionary states from crushing us. To ensure our existence until the next military conflict between the counter-revolutionary imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East, between the most civilised countries of the world and the Orientally backward countries which, however, comprise the majority, this majority must become civilised. We, too, lack enough civilisation to enable us to pass straight on to socialism, although we do have the political requisites for it. We should adopt the following tactics, or pursue the following policy, to save ourselves.

We must strive to build up a state in which the workers retain the leadership of the peasants, in which they retain the confidence of the peasants, and by exercising the greatest economy remove every trace of extravagance from our social relations.

We must reduce our state apparatus to the utmost degree of economy. We must banish from it all traces of extravagance, of which so much has been left over from tsarist Russia, from its bureaucratic capitalist state machine.

Will not this be a reign of peasant limitations?

No. If we see to it that the working class retains its leadership over the peasantry, we shall be able, by exercising the greatest possible thrift in the economic life of our state, to use every saving we make to develop our large-scale machine industry, to develop electrification, the hydraulic extraction of peat, to complete the Volkhov Power Project,162 etc.

In this, and in this alone, lies our hope. Only when we have done this shall we, speaking figuratively, be able to change horses, to change from the peasant, muzhik horse of poverty, from the horse of an economy designed for a ruined peasant country, to the horse which the proletariat is seeking and must seek—the horse of large-scale machine industry, of electrification, of the Volkhov Power Station, etc- 

Better fewer,  but better (March 1923)

And it worked to epoch-making effect. And when Russia has to repeat its socialist revolution soon, - along lines quite comparable, in some ways, to the first socialist revolution, cynics should be silenced for all time. Soviet socialism was not then, and will not be next time, a model for more civilised West European countries to imitate (borrowing Lenin's phrase) but the entire Third World will be delighted at such a resurrection, not remotely sharing the sceptical Western ultra-left poison that the USSR only ever exploited its friends and allies for its own survival: Just ignorant and lying nonsense.

The worst condemnation of the Soviet Union from, say, the Chinese workers state was not that all Soviet help was merely economic exploitation, or political betrayal, but that Soviet policies internationally were not adventurous or revolutionary enough. The only trouble was that Mao Tse-tung & Co got their Marxism-Leninism wrong too to a certain extent, certainly failing in time on the crucial perspectives for world socialist revolution.

Far too much criticism of the USSR has been based on its supposed failures as the vehicle for progressing the completion of the world socialist revolution, which was a hazy concept at best, and was not in the forefront of Lenin's mature mind, as the above quotes indicate. Far too little estimation has been given to the Soviet Union as the world's first workers state, an actual historical place and event of real complex living millions, all coming from a most difficult background, but achieving miracles.

The more gruesome crimes of Soviet history are still a painful puzzle such as the Show Trials and the largescale purges, but the extent of German imperialist subversive agencies' penetration is still not fully revealed, and the colossal sophisticated ability of the CIA to undermine regime after regime around the world should cause hesitation in condemning the Soviet socialist baby with its contaminated political bathwater.

Many alleged Soviet 'atrocities' are just pure slander. The real tragedy for the small Caucasus Chechen nation, one of the minority of 100 Soviet nationalities which was never fully reconciled to proletarian-dictatorship rule, especially under Russian or Soviet leadership, came not from their temporary deportation during the German Nazi imperialist invasion to avoid them collaborating with the Occupation. It only became a bloody catastrophe when so-called 'freedom' was restored to Soviet lands after 1990. Then the Chechens started to suffer racial discrimination in Moscow, e.g. for the first time ever, - and to feel so seriously neglected by the new regime of petty-bourgeois wretchedness in Moscow that full independence was immediately demanded, - and naïvely expected. The Chechens got the shock of their lives, and their entire country destroyed all around them, massacring nearly 50,000 and totally wrecking their impressive Soviet capital Grozny and all their remarkable Soviet-era social advances, none of which had existed in such tribal areas pre-Bolshevism. The Chechens had always skirmished with Moscow power in the USSR, - but never had fullscale war been declared, or any major military operations been required at all to keep relations moving on slowly but surely. Only anti-communist 'freedom' brought the Chechens such untold humiliation, suffering, damage, and despair.

The same favourable comparison in the effects of the USSR versus restored capitalist 'democracy' will be observable in every aspect of state involvement in human affairs.

Identifying the theoretical degeneration in the Soviet leadership after Lenin as the real crime of Soviet history while rejecting the glib 'materialist' explanations for the decline (in too much state-capitalist profiteering; too many bureaucratic comforts; too little rank-and-file democracy; too much leadership-centralism; etc, etc,) is not being idealist, implying Stalin &  Co just 'went bad' with no material cause or in a complete vacuum of influential international conditions. There were obvious domestic and world material and ideological pressures pushing the bureaucracy towards a defeatist complacency and nervousness which then turned into revisionist self-justification.

But the workers-state philosophy required fully conscious rational leadership to deliberately take it ever further and deeper into all-round mastery of the whole of Marxist-Leninist science, - as every future socialist-state development always will require (and the remaining present ones do today), - ultimately involving the whole country in such advanced political development, - and courting stagnant redundancy if such a theoretical uninterrupted revolution was not embraced. The Soviet leadership after Lenin simply failed to grasp this understanding. The whole world of anti-communist ideology, from academic right to fake ultra-”left”, has obviously failed to grasp this even more abysmally. It is the work for the revolutionary socialist future, for which the world's first workers state was a heroic and magnificent start, well able to inspire the whole rest of history ahead. Build Leninism. RB

Misguided defeatist leadership of ultra-left sects like the CPGB is routed by deepening imperialist crisis.

The humiliation for US imperialism in Iraq has helped further expose the defeatist petty-bourgeois mentalities which dominate the anti-Leninist sectarian swamp and posture mightily with bogus ultra-leftism.

There are none more 'revolutionary' than the CPGB leaders who are currently resisting Leninist contributions to their newspaper by slandering them with every political insult possible.

But events have immediately caught out their latest diatribe which jeered at the 'official Stalinite optimism', the wishful thinking, and the ignorance of the EPSR with a macho reassertion that the whole world has been made victims of the US-dominated New World Order in which imperialism is IMPOSING settlements on every 'hot spot' on Earth, - against the EPSR analysis of profound imperialist crisis everywhere.

The previous article deals with the supposed disastrous loss of "the most powerful counterbalance to imperialism" the USSR, and repeated Reviews have dealt with the CPGB defeatism that the dismantling of apartheid and the peace process dismantling British colonial 'Northern Ireland' are in fact victories for imperialism (!).

Unwisely the CPGB's Weekly Worker Aug 29 also insists that 

"previous thorns in imperialism's flesh such as Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, etc, are gradually being brought to book. Revolutionary Cuba has been immeasurably weakened"

and "is struggling to survive", etc. as further proof that the CPGB's middle-class defeatism is a sound and smart scientific lead to the working class.

It is self-evident crap, of course, as the CPGB has been repeatedly told. But so susceptible are the leaders to bourgeois ideology that it is obviously better just to let them read the capitalist press wallowing in imperialist confusion and misery:

SOMEWHERE in the rubble of Sulaymaniyah after last night's fall of the city are the remnants of the West’s strategy on Iraq.

 American analysts slowly conceded yesterday that Iraq's victory in Kurdistan has unravelled nearly every aspect of their work over the last five years.

The strategy of containment has failed because President Saddam Hussein has not been contained. "Operation Provide Comfort" seems a cruel misnomer, for the West can now provide comfort only to Kurds loyal to Baghdad.

Events moved so quickly last night that Washington’s foreign policy apparatus barely knew how to respond. "You can’t react when stuff's moving hot and heavy like this," a state department spokeswoman said. "It’s all happening too fast and we need to look at it."

Officially, Washington insists the battle in northern Iraq is purely a Kurdish civil war between the forces of Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and that there is no proof that Baghdad is involved.

But the PUK insists its forces were overrun with Iraqi weaponry, and that Iraqi “advisers" in plain clothes remained behind in Kurdistan when President Saddam’s troops officially withdrew under United States pressure last week.

Yesterday, President Clinton stuck to that line, appealing to the warring Kurdish factions to come to the peace table. But such rhetoric is hollow when everyone in Washington knows it is President Saddam who now runs the show in northern Iraq.

And this is the most basic US failure. Last week’s action was triggered because Baghdad was encroaching on what was supposed to be a United Nations safe haven. As of last night the Iraqi leader has done much more than encroach; he has, through his proxies, recaptured the area.

In a push by his KDP allies, he has proved that last week’s US effort achieved nothing. Far from being slapped down, his grip is tighter than it was then. By focusing its missile-fire on the south, the US has allowed the Iraqi leader to keep up the very activity in the north that provoked Washington in the first place.

More substantially, Baghdad has skewered the 1991 Gulf war coalition both militarily and diplomatically. It has exposed the gaps in the coalition between France and the US-British position on one hand, and Jordan and the Gulf states on the other.

The Western notion of “dual containment” is in serious jeopardy, too. Originally hoping to rein in both Baghdad and Tehran, Washington faces a pumped-up and freshly victorious Iraq staring down an Iran with good reason to strike out. Iran faces a refugee problem as Kurds flee President Saddam’s death squads. Iran’s proxy, the PUK, has been humbled and Tehran will want to assert itself.

The other player is Turkey, a Nato member and America’s best ally in the neighbourhood. But here too, President Saddam has created problems. An anxious Ankara wants its own “temporary" security zone in the area, a notion which threatens to destabilise the region further.

President Saddam has helpfully offered to rein in the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) — the Kurdish guerrillas Turkey regards as terrorists — thereby casting himself as the local gangster who can promise order in return for total power. If Ankara is tempted, the US will have lost a crucial ally which provided the military base for Operation Provide Comfort. The Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, said yesterday that recent events ‘‘raise questions about whether the administration’s strategy has advanced US interests”. But President Clinton has little option. Either he does nothing, and effectively admits that last week’s effort was in vain, or he strikes again — and gets drawn into an escalated conflict which could get out of hand, and endure right up to election day on November 5. He does not want that — and President Saddam knows it.

Kurdish forces backed by Iraq took almost total control of Kurdistan last night, handing President Saddam Hussein a proxy victory and the West its most serious strategic reverse in the region since the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

As President Clinton, facing humiliation before November’s elections, conceded there was little the United States could do to help guerrilla fighters of the Baghdad-backed Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) captured the key city of Sulaymaniyah from their longtime rival the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and sent thousands of refugees pouring towards the border with Iran.

The capture of Sulaymaniyah, the region's largest city, established effective Iraqi control of 80 per cent of Kurdistan. It spelled an end to the US and British-backed humanitarian Operation Provide Comfort in the northern “safe haven” set up in 1991 after the Gulf war.

The KDP, led by Massoud Barzani, said in a statement last night that it controlled the whole of northern Iraq. “The KDP is in control of all the three Kurdish provinces,” it said.

Although there were no signs of Iraqi troops or armour involved in the fighting, the swift defeat of the PUK, led by Jalal Talabani, exposed the hollowness of the Western strategy of containing President Saddam, including last week’s cruise missile attacks in the south.

With the balance of power radically changed — and Turkey establishing a security zone on its border — Ahmed Chalabi, the executive president of the Western-backed Iraqi opposition, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), warned that Iran might now respond to calls for intervention by the PUK and begin a proxy’ war.

“This is a victory for Saddam,” he said. “He has won a battle but not the war. This means that Saddam is back in effective control of the whole area."

“Saddam’s security forces will now move in after the KDP and there will be a hunt for opposition people,” Mr Chalabi said. “The stage is set for a political deal between the KDP and Saddam.”

Despite Mr Clinton’s promises “to help anybody that needs to be out of Iraq”, US officials confirmed opposition claims that 96 Iraqi defectors and INC supporters were executed in Irbil early last week, apparently on suspicion of links to the CIA.

THE Iraqi military’s takeover of Irbil, which was controlled by independent Kurdish groups, broke up a longstanding CIA-funded covert operation to destabilise the Baghdad government and led to the arrest and apparent execution of more than 100 Iraqis associated with the effort, according to United States officials and Iraqi dissident sources.

The destruction of the headquarters in Irbil of the Iraqi National Congress, which Washington had set up in 1992 as an alternative to the regime of President Saddam Hussein, has fulfilled a main ambition of the Iraqi security services, the officials said. The dissident group never posed a serious challenge to President Saddam’s power and had been in decline for the past 18 months, largely because of Kurdish feuds.

But it had repeatedly harassed the Baghdad government. The dissidents disseminated anti-Saddam leaflets, books, television programmes and radio broadcasts, employed hundreds of Iraqi defectors and collected detailed military intelligence that they passed on to Washington.

When Irbil fell, President Saddam’s security agents held house-to-house searches for National Congress leaders. They had a list of names and addresses of Congress members, according to officials of the group in Sulaymaniyah, and in Washington and London. The security agents looted the group's headquarters, seizing hi-tech communications equipment and computers, purchased with millions of dollars in covert CIA funds.

The apparent execution of more than 100 Congress members captured by the Iraqi secret police on August 31 near the town of Qushtapa has added to the CIA's loss. They had assembled in Irbil on August 28-29 as part of a police force being created at US urging to halt Kurdish in-fighting.

“We have a lot of reports that the Congress was a subject of the Iraqi effort,” a senior state department official said. Two other senior US officials said the group's reports of mass executions had been accepted by Washington as credible, although details of the episodes are scarce.

National Congress officials in Iraq and elsewhere said hundreds of others whom the Iraqi security agents suspected of involvement with the group were rounded up in the next few days and taken to Iraqi prisons in Kirkuk and Mosul Their fate is unknown, but a US defence official said at the weekend: “I don't doubt that many have been slain.”

A handful of American CIA officers who had been covertly stationed in a suburb of Irbil before the Iraqi attack were able to escape capture by leaving on August 30, reaching southern Turkey after passing through the northern town of Zakho, according to several sources.

The officers had been stationed in the town to collect intelligence and question defectors, and they lacked the capability to help evacuate others, according to one source. “This whole thing came down around them. Basically, they sat tight for as long as they could.”

The absence of US protection for Congress members in Irbil has provoked complaints from some of those associated with the group, who say Washington washed its hands of the dissidents once the Iraqi assault was under way.

“From my personal point of view, no one has offered us any help on the ground,” said General Talal Al-Ubaidy, head of the Congress military forces, speaking on a satellite telephone from Sulaymaniyah. where the group is trying to re-establish headquarters.

“On the day of the attack, a lot of my people kept asking, ‘When are the Americans going to attack the Iraqi side?'," the Congress officer said. “A lot of our people feel extremely disappointed and bitter.”

Another well-placed Iraqi dissident echoed the complaint: “We got nothing, zilch, from Washington, even though everything we had built in Irbil was based on the premise that America would prevent an attack by Saddam on the city.” — Washington Post.

TWO hundred Iraqi Arabs who have connections to the CIA-backed opposition to President Saddam Hussein are holed up in the mountain resort of Saiahuddin after fleeing the city of Irbil when Iraqi troops seized it 10 days ago. They are convinced that they will be killed by Baghdad’s secret police and during our interview several of them appealed to the United States for political asylum.

The men — renegade army officers, engineers and other professionals who are members of the US-financed Iraqi National Congress — said they were running out of money. 

They were short of blankets and most were sleeping outside in the increasingly chilly late summer nights.

Over ever-mounting ashtrays, they said they felt betrayed and abandoned, and convinced that Baghdad’s secret police were lurking outside their headquarters, a former hotel on Saiahnddin’s main street.

“We cannot get to the border of Iraq, Turkey or Iran,” one man said. “We are trapped like rats.”

The Iraqi National Congress comprises a number of groups, ranging from separatist Kurds to southern Shi'ites and secular opponents of the government, who have taken refuge in the semi-autonomous Kurdish zone and were associated with the US-sponsored opposition. It is dominated by the fractious Kurds, which is one reason why it has failed to generate broad support within Iraq's Sunni Muslim-dominated political establishment and military.

The KDP has its headquarters in Saiahuddin but has formed a tactical alliance with the Iraqi government which enabled it to capture Irbil from the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

“We cannot tolerate any Iraqi secret police in Irbil, much less in Saiahuddin," a top KDP official said. He conceded, however, that in the immediate wake of the capture of Irbil the Iraqi secret police “had exploited an opportunity” before his party insisted they stop. 

The National Congress group was unconvinced. “Why did the KDP not warn us?” a committee member asked. And why, others said, had the US not honoured what they considered its pledge to use air power to thwart the Iraqi offensive?

One officer described the “ultimate nightmare” of seeing Iraqi secret police disguised in traditional Kurdish baggy trousers storm the homes and offices of the Iraqi National Congress in Irbil, with detailed lists of what and whom to look for.

A DIPLOMATIC crisis was brewing between the United States and Europe yesterday as the Clinton Administration gave Turkey the go-ahead to establish a security zone in Iraq.

The move alarmed European Union foreign Ministers meeting in Tralee, Co Kerry, and senior officials warned that the planned Turkish military operation could trigger a territorial scramble by Iran. Turkey and Iraq to control the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. Such an outcome would put paid to the dream of an autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq.

Washington’s approval of the Turkish plan added to the tensions between the US and its European allies over the latest crisis in Iraq. In a sign of Europe’s doubts about America’s attack last week, the EU foreign Ministers pointedly failed to give full backing for the action.

The Ministers also risked further upsetting the Clinton Administration by calling for the reinstatement of the United Nations deal by which Iraq will be able to sell limited amounts of oil to buy much-needed food and medicine. Britain, so far the only European country fully to support President Clinton, was last night frantically trying to establish the exact terms under which the US has conceded Turkish demands to establish its zone in Iraq. Officials warned that any incursion by Turkish forces would have serious consequences.

The cruise missile attacks on Iraq provided Ankara with an opening for its long-planned buffer zone. Turkish troops have been massing along the Iraqi border in apparent readiness to attack bases of the Turkish PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) guerrilla movement, which operates from Iraq.

The move has alarmed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose expulsion from Arbil prompted the latest cruise missile attack on Iraq. The PUK was last night seeking international help to resist further interference in the region, as it fears being squeezed between Turkish forces in the north and an attack by Saddam Hussein from the south.

The PUK’s leader, Jalal Talabani, warned that if he did not get support from the Gulf War allies he would have to turn to Tehran.

The flimsy Clinton policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq, always illogical, has been exposed. The more the US strikes to weaken Iraq, the more it strengthens the regional weight of Iran, which may in the long run be a far greater strategic menace to US allies and interests in the region.

Were it not for the noxious presence of President Saddam as Iraq's leader, the US would be counting on Iraq as a counterweight. if not an ally, against Iran.

The biggest threat to US interests is not a new Iraqi strike at the Kuwait and Saudi oilfields, which can be stopped with the US armour already in place in Kuwaiti and Qatar. It is the extension of Iranian influence through its new Kurdish allies in northern Iraq. They could give Iran direct overland access to its Syrian friends, and the ability to supply directly its Hizbullah clients in Lebanon, sharply increasing the threat to Israel.

Mr Clinton is on weak legal ground in citing United Nations Resolution 688 as his mandate.

But there is no legal constraint against Iraq moving ground troops into the declared “no-fly zone” of northern Iraq, north of the 36th parallel.

But the Guardian has learned from diplomatic sources of a serious setback for British and US diplomacy at the weekend, in the failure to gain permission from Turkey or Jordan to use their air-bases or airspace.

Britain suggested last week that the allies should expand the no-fly zone in the north — necessitating the use of Turkey’s Incirlik base and Jordan’s Azrak base.

The Saudi government also refused to extend a corridor in western Iraq, obliging the US and Britain to settle for an extended zone in the south instead of the north.

This is like Hitler being thwarted from an invasion stunt to aid the Sudetenland Germans in Czechoslovakia and deciding "I’ll invade Norway instead".

The imperialist system is incurably split from top to bottom, and facing a Third World utterly transformed from the weakness of 70 years ago, as Lenin explained would happen (see above). It takes the most astonishing petty-bourgeois class blinkers to be unable to see all this, the position of CPGB defeatism.

Saddam is no progressive revolutionary but a former reactionary stooge of US imperialism. But pressure from below is shifting the earth under all the stopgap reactionaries fronting for imperialism in the Middle East (and elsewhere), and they must all put on a show of real independence from imperialism's interests or go under to the approaching communist revolution. The point of it all is that imperialist world domination is crumbling fast, not strengthening. Build Leninism.

Joe Harper