Hitherto, philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx.
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
(Weekly. Subscriptions £10/3months. £30p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                                                         
No 0880 November 19 1996                                                                                                         10p

Fake-'left' attacks on SLP begin in earnest. The petty-bourgeois Trot individualists hate the thought of a disciplined mass workers party in Britain developing in sympathy with the socialist states. Many of these middle-class dilettantes disliked the raw proletarian power of the 1984-85 miners strike and tried to sabotage it, backing calls for a ballot. Anti-communism remains the greatest weakness and tragedy of the workers movement in Britain and elsewhere, fed by the disruptive Trot petty bourgeoisie. All 'left' Labour opportunists join the 'Stalinist' smears against the SLP. 'Unity' stunts against the SLP have done more harm than good.

The anti-SLP 'left' are rapidly getting back to their most disruptive and provocative anti-communist traditions with their puddled politics, their rank-and-file posturing, and their spoiling tactics.

A Trot from Militant Labour, prematurely labelling himself 'The Socialist Party' in advance of the ML conference which is supposed to 'democratically' decide on a name-change at the end of the month, is standing against the SLP which is challenging the Labour Party in another Leicester City council by-election on December 5. Militant are promising to put in a big effort at disruption, bringing down their 'star performer' Tommy Sheridan from Scotland to canvass for them.

At the same time, the Militant influenced Socialist Alliances have begun to launch snide attacks on the SLP as "Arthur Scargill's party", describing it as "the next haven for the desperate and the entryists", and pontificating that "the Left needs a broader base than to be anyone's party".

Simultaneously, the Weekly Worker publication of the anti-communist Communist Party of Great Britain has stepped up its campaign of sneering at the SLP by association, highlighting the 'Stalinist' defects (some real, some imagined) of labour movement sections which are gravitating towards the SLP.

None of these 'left' sects bear the slightest goodwill for developing the prospect that the launch of the SLP holds out for the historical fate of the working class, to rebuild a major labour movement party with the very clear aim of abolishing capitalism and fighting through extra-parliamentary struggles as well as electoral politics in order to achieve this.

All declare that they sympathise in words. But it is the sectarian deeds of their ultra-left petty-bourgeois individualist posturing which speak loudest.

This is not the chance behaviour of a few odd groups and collectives. This sniping, bogus 'rank-and-file' posturing represents an entire historic class outlook which has plagued the 'left' of the socialist movement since it began in the 19th century.

It reflects all the rotten individualism and subjectivism which bourgeois ideology (idealism as opposed to dialectical materialism) infects better-off sections of workers with as well as isolated individuals, giving them a middle-class outlook on many crucial questions of mass political struggle.

Its tell-tale signal is bogus demands for 'democratic rights' and for 'rank-and-file democracy', plus its inevitable anti-Sovietism and anti-communism once the superficial 'communist' pretences are dug beneath.

The classic exposure of these fake-'lefts' was their perpetual support throughout the 20th century of every wretched anti-communist stunt that Western imperialism's intelligence agencies could manufacture, cheering on every Soviet and East European 'dissident' and such CIA and Vatican-financed rackets as the Solidarnosc 'trade-union', a counter-revolutionary movement which ended up putting in the near-fascist Walesa as president; destroying the Polish workers state and all its tremendous social services and welfare reforms; and handing the country over to mass unemployment, capitalist exploitation, mafia- and corruption- domination, and Catholic obscurantism which has even abolished a woman's right to abortion if it is needed.

Having rubbished the socialist achievements of the USSR and East Europe nonstop since the early 1920s, these phony 'communist' Trotskyites then washed their hands of their part in Western subversion's responsibility for using the idiot Gorbachev regime for bringing down the entire achievements of the Soviet workers state.

Nothing is heard anymore about the famous 'political revolution' of Trotskyite fantasy which was supposedly going to bring 'perfect socialism' provided that the 'Stalinist' USSR was slandered, sabotaged, and ridiculed enough to bring it down.

Now this travelling circus of 'socialist' mountebanks is turning its attention against Scargill and the SLP along with sneers at the few remaining workers states on earth, significantly so because one of Scargill's most principled political achievements in his life has been his refusal to be dragged into anti-Soviet and anti-communist stunts inflated by the Western intelligence agencies, notably refusing to fall for the Solidarnosc 'trade-union' hoax, or to blackguard the Polish workers state in its difficulties.

These 'revolutionary' Trot 'perfectionists' at once see in Scargill and the SLP the potential for a mass movement which can make serious progress towards a workers state in Britain, which will be bound to have some of the same proletarian-power attributes of Cuba, Vietnam, China, the former Soviet bloc, and also of the great miners strike of 1984-85, plus the earlier struggles which brought down Heath's government.

This Trotskyite individualism really hates such a perspective, and it is no accident that a main source of anti-SLP derision, the Weekly Worker CPGB, was among the Trot groupies who gave support to the counter-revolutionary MI5 campaign in 1984-85 that "the miners should have balloted" - disliking and fearing the raw power of the proletariat which refused to fall for this bogus 'democratic' stunt.

These 'left' dilettantes see Scargill as representing now, in current British political categories, the raw power of the proletarian-dictatorship state-structure which was the backbone of all past and present workers states building socialism, which is the great hate target in history of the Trotskyite petty-bourgeoisie.

Scargill and the SLP are at once derided for their 'Stalinist' connections, for their supposed trampling of 'democratic rights of the individual', and for an alleged cult-of-the-personality around Scargill (just like Stalin), thanks to which, it is slanderously alleged, the SLP can only have a narrow (and useless) base.

The Weekly Worker report of the southeast London, Bolshevik Revolution anniversary rally was just one long sneer at Scargill's supposedly fraudulent claims to political kinship with 1917. Scargill is described as "playing to his audience - ("a whole array of British and Indian Stalinists"), as trying to "strengthen his credentials as a hardened revolutionary", and as responding to a standing ovation "with clenched fist salutes".

The hostile ridicule spewed on:

Earlier the audience was treated to speech after speech extolling the virtues of the Soviet Union and North Korea. Martin Gray of the 'Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)' reminded us how the USSR "under the leadership of Stalin held off the worse that imperialism could throw at it". Adding a new twist to the theory of 'socialism in one country', he outlined the 'benefits' of self-dependence: "We don't need foreign investment; we don't need the import and export of capital."

A speaker from Red Youth spoke of "the delight of imperialism that Nikita Khrushchev came to power". Surreally, he recalled how the 1936 Soviet constitution outlawed immigration controls and racism.

Ella Rule of the Communist Workers Association reported on her recent trip as member of a delegation to North Korea: "The Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea is a haven of common sense, calm and practicality," she informed us, explaining how socialism meant that people were always nice to each other. Harpal Brar attacked all who did not support the "Soviet experience" as "enemies of the working class", while Jim Hillier of the Communist Action Group went further: "The attack on Marxism begins with the attack on Stalin."

After two hours of such 'inspiring' rhetoric, elements in the audience began to display some impatience and one person could restrain himself no longer. As comrade Hillier spoke of "the October Revolution, led by Lenin…" he heckled "... and betrayed by Stalin". Hillier, who is renowned for his sparkling repartee, instantly retorted: "Fuck off."

Other Stalin fans to speak were Trevor Rayne of the Revolutionary Communist Group and a representative of the Communist Party of Turkey (Marxist-Leninist)'.

Now this is obviously a good laugh at the expense of the remnants of the Third International who still cannot dialectically grasp the ability to remain in unconditional solidarity with the Soviet socialist camp while correctly criticising the Stalinist theoretical mistakes which paved the way to its degeneration and ultimate self-liquidation, and to the collapse and disintegration of the Third International parties.

But it is the most grotesque hypocrisy, of course, coming from the petty-bourgeois Trotskyite mentality (of the 'new' CPGB) which historically suffered dialectical bankruptcy in an even more damaging direction, being incapable of developing any movement of sincere solidarity with the Soviet workers state in the face of endless bourgeois-imperialist subversion and provocations, bequeathing to the world only increasingly embittered and defeatist Trot sects whose whole aim in life was solely anti-Sovietism and anti-communism.

And it is anti-communist hysteria which is the real catastrophe for the working class in the 20th century, - (not the Soviet-camp states of proletarian dictatorship), - playing into the hands of imperialist counter-revolution all over the world since 1945, finally forcing the Labour Party to even ditch Clause IV and the welfare state.

But such grand epochal setbacks are naturally only the springboard for an even more successful leap forward by the forces of the socialist revolution subsequently. The SLP shows every sign of becoming a new mass socialist party in Britain better than Labour ever was or could have been because it was always a bourgeois party, fundamentally tied by its history to class-collaboration and pro-imperialism.

The SLP can take over Labour's former mass appeal, and also replace the largescale left-reformist trade-union agitation and political-propaganda organisation provided by the old Communist party.

Contempt wells up from the petty-bourgeois 'left' swamp because every posturing 'revolutionary' there basically thinks he or she should be the new Lenin or Trotsky, replacing Scargill (really regarded as reformist or Stalinist.)

The Socialist Alliance in Manchester is currently peddling the appeal of one Michael Hindley, MEP, presumably a Labour Party opportunist on the European Union parliamentary gravy train (average income, plus 'expenses', about £130,000 a year just for spouting hot air in Strasbourg to cover up for the monopoly-imperialist exploitation of the workers of Europe by German and French finance capital, etc).

This 'honourable gentleman' and 'socialist' starts off his blast against the SLP with the observation: 

"The poor showing of the Socialist Labour Party in the Hemsworth by-election".

So what is Hindley's challenge to Blairism's total and permanent betrayal of the working class worth? - better than the 5% of the votes that the SLP has started with (equal to 35 Commons seats under proportional representation)?

It takes some working out from the very cautious wording to be expected from someone used to being snug inside the Blair tent, pissing out on the working class. The Labourite says that a successor to the Labour Party "will surely come", but such a "Socialist Party will never succeed under first-past-the-post".

So the first thing about this Hindley & Co 'challenge' to Labour (which is so heroically 'superior' to the SLP's 5% at Hemsworth) is that it is not even going to get off the ground until Britain has a Proportional Representation system in place.

This piece of Socialist Alliance venom then goes on:

The circumstances of the setting up of the SLP, without wide consultation with the labour movement, have meant that it would be and will remain "Arthur Scargill's Party"; and while many have nothing but admiration for Arthur's bravery and integrity, the Left needs a broader base than to be anyone's party or the next haven for the desperate and the entryists.

Ah, so by not consulting the bold Blair-"challenger" Mr Hindley, Scargill and the SLP have apparently made a mess of things. 

"Not only is the timing wrong, but so too are the tactics and method."

Clearly, for this amazing 'Socialist' Alliance, the working class suffering under Blairite treachery, and getting more angry and frustrated by the day, are not a factor to be considered at all.

"Challenge Blairism? Of course, old chap, - as soon as it can be done comfortably under leisurely Proportional Representation," etc. And when is that likely to happen? Oh, only when Blair himself brings it in as the price of a coalition government deal with the Lib-Dems but also because Blair himself "will want and be forced to break with the remnants of 'old' Labour which are stronger still in the country than in the PLP", etc, etc. "Then there is firmer ground for making real advances", this superior 'challenger' to Blairism concludes.

So how long will all this take? Mr Hindley is not yet steeled enough to commit himself to a firm bold timetable for this never-never perspective, but five years would seem to be the minimum.

But even then, the 'challenge' to Blairist betrayal will remain very vague and tentative, just like the local Socialist Alliances around the country now:

Then, and again the situation will echo that at the time of the emergence of the Labour Party, the situation will depend very much on local conditions: some coalitions will be possible here, but not there, among these groups here and not there.

This could indeed lead to electoral challenges, but not necessarily in the name of the SLP. Any attempt to impose at this stage a national character will not suit the variety which is emerging locally throughout the country.

Never, never land is rapidly receding into never, never, never land.

This pompous twat, consulting with whom would have been so 'important', and should have been the SLP's 'priority', not surprisingly concludes like something out of Pseuds Corner:

"For the time being, as Hamlet says, 'The readiness is all!'". 

In other words, just carry on posturing, exactly like a typical Labour 'left' or Trotskyite. Change nothing.

The Manchester Socialist Alliance big noise John Nicholson was even more pathetic in his introduction to Hindley MEP, revealing how childishly envious these subjectivists are of the SLP initiative, too proud to simply join in and make it a success.

Describing the SA's own tortuous developments, he declares:

the meeting agreed to develop possibilities of common newsletters and information between Alliances, to set out common campaigning, so that campaign issues can be taken up across the whole country at the same time and highlighted in the same way,  and to begin to develop a common programme for all Alliances.

They need a party! It goes on:

This meeting showed how we need a programme of our own, an agenda we set for ourselves, rather than that which may appear to be simply dissident Labour.

They need a party! It goes on:

Instead we need new ways of working, which include uniting together to take up issues regardless of who thought of them first or whose name goes on the leaflet.

They need a party! But they will wait until hell freezes over rather than admit that they need to join the SLP.

Former Militant entry-ist Dave Nellist, who managed to keep his head down (and stick strictly to his natural anti-communist political philosophy) long enough to become Labour MP for Coventry Southeast but then got expelled, pushes the same 'left' rank-and-file posturing in his explanation for giving the SLP the cold shoulder:

So I think the SAs in the areas where they have been established can be useful vehicles. I think what we need is some kind of a national coalition: a framework, a federation - something to bring people together.

This is what I hoped Arthur Scargill would do with the Socialist Labour Party at the end of last year. If he had called a conference of that character he would have filled the Albert Hall, but he didn’t. He wanted something more exclusive, organised from the top down rather than blossoming from the bottom up. That is why the SLP will only be a component, a player in negotiations for a new party, but it won’t be the important force it could have been, given its political direction.

But Militant is apparently less keen on the coalition or federation idea, to bring people together nationally, when they feel that the SLP has been encroaching onto 'their' patch in Leicester.

So the Labour MEP, the Labour councillor, and the Labour MP all sing the same chorus: "Primadonnas of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but the feeling of being 'important' little cogs in the corrupt Labour bigger wheel."

Another bogus appeal for 'unity in one party' has just been put out by the CPGB after having operated a policy of half-heartedly concealed entryism hitherto, their members having claimed to have 'left' the CPGB while continuing to push their Weekly Worker publication openly (at SLP meetings) which still maintained recruiting and party-building campaigns for the CPGB.

Much CPGB agitation towards the SLP has concerned the fight to change the SLP constitution to allow separate parties like the CPGB to affiliate to the SLP but maintain their own party structures and party propaganda.

Their new phony 'unity' stunt repeats this provocation. It tells the SLP that it should 

"facilitate the coming together of all trends and groups in the workers movement", 

demanding that affiliation to the SLP 

"must be open to every organisation committed to securing working class control over the means of production and exchange", 

and making it clear that the CPGB intends to maintain its own distinct and separate organisation within the SLP, telling the SLP it will be necessary to alter its constitution to suit the CPGB's entry on its own terms.

Pretending to remind the SLP of its "intention of becoming a federal party of the working class" when the SLP has made no such claim in its constitution, - is just deliberate antagonism, - a joke, and not serious politics. The SLP has made its attitude to parties within parties abundantly clear. They are adamantly opposed to any such structure.

It is pointless for these outsiders to keep on telling the SLP how to go about its business. The SLP has been founded now, and is already gaining 5% in general election contests. The people who launched it obviously did so when they were happy that they had consulted and organised widely enough to get the project off the ground. Thereafter, it is up to those socialists who wish to to join the SLP as genuine individual members of the SLP, not another party, to work for its development as a party in whatever direction they think would be best. After some settling down, the party is likely to reflect majority opinion inside the SLP, obviously heavily influenced by its leadership, as all parties are.

Most of the bleats so far against the SLP's constitution have been by rival 'leaderships' who would obviously like to be where Scargill and his close associates are today. In other words, the bleats are just ridiculous sour grapes. More genuine hopes that the SLP might encourage more diversity for longer in its initial inaugural moves in order to increase its own strength and experience in handling controversial political questions (rather than to allow more hostile cuckoos to become entrenched in the SLP's nest as some diversifiers intended, it is now clear) were quickly drowned out by such increasingly anti-SLP sentiments as analysed above.

In some areas, the deliberately factionalising sectarianism of some would-be SLP 'tendencies' actually contributed to more bureaucratic shortening of the inaugural activities than might otherwise have been the case.

The rebuilding of Marxist-Leninist science in Britain remains the ultimate key to the socialist emancipation of the working class. It is nonsense for the Trotskyite 'left', who never understood anything about Leninism and the workers states anyway, to pretend that the SLP's chosen development now makes the struggle for revolutionary theory impossible therein. A real grasp of Marxism-Leninism, as opposed to the Trots' distorted version, suggests that the SLP can continue to be built while the fight for scientific socialist understanding continues. 

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. V I Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colston St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No.195. Saturday 16th November 1996

Zaire: Imperialist crisis will teach Lumumba's grandchildren how to dig the grave of capitalism.

What is under way in Zaire is the collapse into murderous chaos of the Mobutu puppet state, originally imposed on the former Belgian colony by world imperialism in the 1960s to prevent the Congolese from translating their newly won measure of political independence into a real break with the continued monopoly capital super-exploitation of their country by Belgian, French, American and British multinationals.

A courageous struggle to resist this process (whereby direct rule by the clapped-out monarchical Belgian colonialist has-beens gave way to more ruthlessly efficient neocolonial exploitation under the new Pax Americana dispensation) was waged by the Congolese people behind Patrice Lumumba, encouraged in their efforts by the Soviet Union. But with the US-led world economy roaring ahead and bourgeois confidence riding high, ways were found to nip these aspirations in the bud.

After racist provocations from the Belgian officer caste had sparked mutinies in the army, Belgian troops illegally re-occupied "to restore order". The UN troops which came next, supposedly to assist Lumumba's democratic government to restore its lawful authority, in fact stood guard whilst the imperialist vultures descended. Belgian imperialism engineered the secession of the mineral-rich Katanga region (now Shaba) under its stooge Tshombe. French imperialism used its own Congo-Brazzaville puppet state as support base for sabotaging Lumumba's independence struggle. And finally US imperialism swooped in for the kill, with the CIA's own man, Mobutu, leading the coup which slew Lumumba and shelved far thirty years the fight of the Congolese people against imperialist domination.

Mobutu's regime never amounted to anything more than a corrupt personal fiefdom propped up by imperialism as the best available instrument for fleecing Zaireans and preserving their strategically placed central African country as a bastion of reaction. The kind of 'progress' offered to the Congolese/Zairean people was a bitter travesty, keeping the mass of ordinary people in poverty and backwardness whilst enriching the minority who owed their survival to the West.

Mobutu's fortunes rose along with the fortunes of world imperialism, organized around the Cold War and Pax Americana. But all that is changing.

The long postwar capitalist boom is dead and gone. The phony balance of the Cold War has given way to a sharpening struggle at the heart of imperialism itself for domination of all markets, under pressure of world overproduction. The authority of Pax Americana is at an all-time low, and the divided uncertainty of imperialist leadership is giving heart to anti-imperialist struggles the world over, from Mexico to Palestine.

Where once Moscow sowed popular frontist illusions with the self-same hand that gave genuine support to movements like Lumumba's, that revisionist influence has now suffered a devastating loss of prestige with the world's masses, - the more so as the class-struggle proletarian dictatorship essence of the Soviet Union's 70 years of planned socialist achievement re-asserts itself in people's minds as the important bit to remember (as opposed to the lengthy Stalin-Khruschev-Gorbachev degeneration away from Leninism which ended up handing soviet society back to imperialist anarchy).

The IMMEDIATE aftermath of this collapse of revisionism (triggered by imperialist crisis, and dragging in its wake all lesser varieties of claimed 'socialist' alternative to revolutionary class struggle for the overthrow of the capitalist state, not least Britain's own auto-destructing Labour party) is at first, predictably, more confusion all round, not less. But as the dust settles, a new level of class-struggle clarity can start to be fought for.

World bourgeois society's monstrous hangover from the West's long postwar boom-binge, now that it is forced to wake up again to the cut-throat realities of trade-war Imperialist crisis, will in the end prove terminal for imperialism itself. But on the way to that outcome, that same hangover must also be lived out and worked through politically by all the other millions of ordinary people who have come under the twin influence of anti-communism and revisionism.

What enormously accelerates this much-needed mass re-education in revolutionary anti-imperialist class-struggle, opening the way for future great leaps in popular consciousness, is the imperialist crisis itself.

The divide-and-rule tribalist mess left behind by Belgian colonialism was on the way to being dealt with through Lumumba's national movement against imperialist exploitation, before these positive efforts were wrecked by the new colonialism organized around US world rule. Far from going away, the contradictions of development which were kept unresolved under Mobutu's puppet rule turn out only to have accumulated greater suppressed force, now bursting chaotically to the surface as the shell of Mobutu's rule gets stoved in by the crisis spilling uncontrollably over the border from Rwanda:

WHEN British and American troops descend on eastern Zaire they will encounter an array of rebel groups whose leaders may claim unity but which are as fractured as those they are fighting.

On the one side is a rebel alliance which gathers up long dormant guerrilla groups with roots in post-independence nationalist and Marxist stirrings; Zairean Tutsis driven to rebellion by state-sponsored persecution; and Rwandan soldiers.

On the other are the Hutu extremists who fled Rwanda two years ago; their local counterparts; and the Zairean military, which is an army only in name.

Thrown into the mix is a bizarre group of renegades who fight naked, believe they can turn bullets to water and who show no loyalty to any cause but their own. These are the May May, who fight anyone who gets in the way of their pursuit of land.

Laurent Kabila, the guerrilla leader, draws together a jumble of uneasy partners under the umbrella of his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire. It has seized large parts of eastern Zaire, including the regional capital, Goma.

Mr Kabila’s own movement, from the southern province of Shaba, figures prominently; so do guerrillas from neighbouring Kasai, led by Andre Kissasse Ngandu who is thought to be the alliance’s military mind.

But there is little love lost between Shaba and Kasai after the ethnic cleansing of about 1 million Kasaians from Shaba three years ago. And while both men say they have no intention of breaking up Zaire, support for insurgencies in each of their provinces has largely been driven by demands for secession.

Mr Kabila says the murder and ethnic cleansing of the Banyamulenge provided the foundation for the uprising and his rebels’ astonishing success in the past month. But he has his own reason to resent Zaire’s Tutsis. Mr Kabila was a follower of the revolutionary Pierre Mulele at a time when the Banyamulenge were fighting in support of the Zairean government to crush his rebellion.

The uneasiness of the alliance can be seen in contradictory statements. Mr Kabila says he is in charge, Mr Kissasse hints otherwise.

On the roadblocks around Goma there are signs that it might be someone else, altogether. The “rebels” in the smart uniforms carrying the best equipment, often speak English. Some are Zairean Tutsis driven from their homes by Hutu militia attacks in the past two years who have been trained and turned around to invade their own country.

The English-speakers are almost certainly members of the Rwandan army who grew up as Tutsi exiles in neighbouring Uganda or Tanzania.

One young “rebel” at a roadblock insisted - in perfect Engish - he was born and bred in Goma. He did not speak a word of French, Zaire’s national language. Mr. Kabila and the Rwandan government continue to deny any collaboration. There are few in either Rwanda or Zaire who believe them. Some wonder how, after so many years of obscurity, Mr Kabila has suddenly proven so successful.

Whilst there is little sign yet that the social aspirations represented by Lunumba-ism in the 1960s are about to resume their onward march at the level at which they were forcibly abandoned (with the obvious absence now of any possible Soviet support, the renewed tribalist fragmentation of the country, and some very dubious-sounding alliances forming between veteran '60s progressives and America's new chosen people in power in Kigali), absolutely the wrong conclusion to draw would be that this populous and mineral-rich country at the heart of Africa, with its own proud history of anti-imperialist struggle, can just be left to disintegrate on the edge of modern world society, with all hope of further social progress quietly forgotten. Places like Zaire are too important to be left alone by history, one way or the other. So long as imperialism struggles to go on leading and exploiting the world, it must busy itself with Zaire.
  
But if the tradition of anti-imperialist struggle has failed to develop from the Lumumba period, indeed has fragmented and fallen back, the imperialist 'solutions' to Zaire's troubles look less convincing than anything previously attempted. Even before the imperialist troops go in, major rows are breaking out over the purpose of the military occupation, which power is to call the shots, which 'international law' figleaf the occupation should wear, who the enemy is supposed to be, how to convince the rest of Africa that France and America have 'pure motives', and how France and America are to convince each other that their war aims can be reconciled:

The White House spokesman, Mike McCurry, insisted yesterday: “The mission is not to disarm militants, nor to-conduct any forced entry into the area, nor to police refugee camps.”

But commanders wondered whether they would have to impose a local ceasefire and establish and police a humanitarian zone. Crucially, no exit strategy has yet been agreed, nor some basic aims of the mission, such as whether the troops will shepherd, refugees back into Rwanda, or deeper into Zaire.

Rwanda’s president, Pasteur Bizimungu, warned yesterday that intervention would get "messy" unless rebels in control of eastern Zaire were consulted.

US ambivalence about the UN and multinational operations means Mr Clinton’s decision carries huge political risks.

Haunted by the humanitarian mission to Somalia, which veered out of control in his first months in office, Mr Clinton was talked into the mission by Canada’s prime minister, Jean Chretien.

After a long night of negotiations in the Pentagon, General Maurice Baril, the commander of Canadian ground forces, secured a rare agreement by Washington early yesterday to put its forces under Canadian operational command. They will remain under US tactical command.

But the US insisted on “robust” rules of engagement. They will be allowed not only to defend themselves, but to patrol aggressively to ensure they are not attacked.

The deterioration of conditions in Zaire has led to chaotic military planning, with European sources insisting they would act under the Western European Union umbrella, and British sources denying that.

The mission is to be tripartite. There will be a north American contingent of some 1,500 Canadian troops and two US logistics and communications battalions, protected by US paratroops.

The European contingent will also include French and Spanish troops. France is making available its bases in west and central Africa. The WEU, still embryonic as the eventual European pillar of Nato, will undergo its first big test.	

European countries are expected to foot the bulk of the bill and provide equipment and training for the African contingent, whose participation is seen as essential politically.

Last week’s UN resolution on the Zaire crisis ruled out a UN-led force, though the multinational force will require a UN resolution spelling out its mandate.

Britain would have preferred to see the force under US command but will accept Canadian command with what a key official called “lots of Americans bolted on”. The crucial element of any operation will be the heavy transport capacity that only the US can provide.

FRANCE’S political and military record in Zaire and Rwanda means its peacekeepers will be targets of rebel fire and their presence could endanger the lives of troops from other countries, a high-ranking French military source admitted yesterday.

He conceded that France “will be blamed if there are deaths among other peacekeepers or if the operation is discredited” and added that peacekeepers from African countries which have close links with France — such as Senegal and Mali — could also become targets.

France has stronger political and industrial links with Zaire than with any other major African nation and its president, Mobutu Sese Seko, spends most of his time on the French Riviera.

Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog, believes Hutus from Rwanda were armed and trained by France while in exile in Zairean refugee camps. The French have been accused of using Operation Turquoise in the summer of 1994 as a cover for leading Hutus implicated in the Rwandan genocide to safety in Zaire.

French fears that the US wishes to undermine its Africa policy have been allayed by the decision to place the force under Canadian command — but only partially.

"There is a danger that French soldiers will be assigned to filling in pot-holes while the US base themselves at Goma and Entebbe," said one military source.

RWANDA’S president warned yesterday that foreign intervention in Zaire would be as “messy” as previous outside military operations in Africa unless the rebels were consulted.

"To the best of my knowledge the United Nations has not consulted the people controlling eastern Zaire," President Pasteur Bizimungu said.

President Bizimungu said Canada had proposed a force of 10,000 men to land in the Rwandan capital as well as in Kisangani, Kindu and Kinshasa in Zaire. Rwanda’s government believed that 5,000 troops at the most were needed.

Uganda has also said it is opposed to countries becoming involved in eastern Zaire which are "tainted in Africa", such as France and Britain.

Only the Canadians can claim innocence of a colonial record. The neo-colonial flavour of the force was strengthened yesterday when Eritrea reconsidered its offer of participation, and South Africa said it was not quite ready to join.

The UN said most of the refugees looked relatively healthy, in contrast to aid agency warnings of imminent mass starvation and the claim by the Canadian ambassador to the UN who, in pressing for an intervention force, said people were dying en masse.

The UN estimates the death toll at between 3,000 and 8,000 since the refugees began fleeing their camps three weeks ago when rebel attacks began.

The march is likely to go on for days. The most vulnerable are at the back of the line, shuffling for long hours in the baking sun or torrential rains. Hundreds of small children stared blankly ahead on the interminable walk.

The protracted negotiations and delays over the intervention force have reinforced suspicions that the US and Britain are buying time for the Zairean rebels and their Rwandan sponsors to deal a fatal blow to the Interahamwe. There is also plenty of evidence that Western governments had plenty of warning about the disaster and may have encouraged the Rwandan Tutsis to attack the Hutu camps.

The US has for months been calling for the closure of the camp.

Vice-President and Defence Minister, Paul Kagame, went to Washington and met defence officials and members of the National Security Council.

En route, he stopped off in London where he had talks with Overseas Aid Minister Baroness Chalker. He told both countries that rebels and extremists were increasing their activities and that a solution for the chaotic refugee camps in the South had to be found by the international community - or Rwandan troops would take on the task.

At the same time, Kagame put out tentative feelers to the UN, asking for international action over an island refugee camp on the Great Lakes, which he claimed was being used for rebel infiltration into Zaire. 'He wanted to know how we would react if Rwanda took action,' said a UN diplomat in Nairobi last week.

The lack of concerned response Kagame received was described by a Kigali diplomat last week as a ‘green light’ for Rwanda to pursue its own methods to encourage and force the repatriation of Rwandan refugees from neighbouring Zaire. 

Then in September, the two-and-a-half year UN embargo on arms shipments to Rwanda was lifted without a murmur of dissent from Britain or the US.

FRENCH troops patrolled the Central African Republic’s capital, Bangui, yesterday to help put down a mutiny against President Angel Felix Patasse, away at the World Food Summit in Rome.

The threat to the regime comes amid fears that France’s allies across central Africa could be destabilised by reverberations from the rebellion in Zaire. The conflict in Kivu province has already destabilised the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko, convalescing from cancer treatment on the Riviera.

In Bangui, army dissidents mutinied for the third time this year.

As trade-war sharpness starts to inform these disagreements over war policy, exposing the splits in world imperialism and encouraging the big powers to start reciprocally blowing the gaffe on each other's greed, cowardice, incompetence and hunger for power, the scope for strengthening and educating the anti-imperialist struggle widens. And sore as is the loss of a sometimes-reliable Soviet champion of the oppressed in the Security Council, that never saved Patrice Lumumba THEN, and the potential gains in revolutionary clarity which are there to be won NOW are crucially no longer obscured by revisionist wishful thinking about indefinite 'peaceful competition between two systems' (with fantasies about the UN being pressured by progressives into acting as reluctantly neutral 'umpire').

Build Leninism. Paddy Chambers

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

The unrecorded criminal deed of imperialist terrorism which go back 100 years and taught the colonised peoples how to fight.
          
Time hasn’t been able to erase from the hearts and minds of Cubans the pain and indignation that shook our people's sensibility on learning of the terrible consequences of the sabotage of a Cubana airliner, perpetrated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Minutes after taking off from the Barbados airport on October 6, 1976, a Cubana airliner with 73 people on board exploded in midair over the Caribbean Sea. All the passengers (57 Cubans, 11 North Koreans and five Guyanese) perished. Subsequent investigations confirmed that the explosion was the result of a sabotage perpetrated by counter-revolutionary elements who placed a bomb in the aircraft.

Venezuelans Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo were charged with direct responsibility for the crime, and counter-revolutionary Cubans Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles were accused of masterminding the sabotage and providing the means for Lugo and Ricardo to carry it out.

The Venezuelans' confessions and supporting evidence stunned and angered millions of people. Photographs of more than one million people filling Revolution Square to express their repudiation, supported by condemnation of the horrific crime in every Cuban city and town, are tremendously moving.

How could some individuals’ hatred for the efforts of an entire people to develop and defend its sovereignty lead to such abominable deeds? That was the question on the lips of many sensible people who, personal beliefs and political positions aside, found such methods totally unacceptable. Clearly, the explosion wasn’t the result of some desperate act. but part of a plan and method initiated immediately following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Counter-revolutionary bands organized by the CIA and sponsored by the U.S. government, after failing in their attempts to instigate fratricidal warfare on the island, tried to unleash terror on Cuba. Prior to the explosion, Cuban counter-revolutionary elements had carried out dozens of attacks on Cuban offices and installations as well as entities related to Cuba.

Shortly after mounting attacks on the Cuban embassy and the Air Panama offices in Colombia, CORU, a CIA organization of Cuban counter-revolutionaries, claimed responsibility for those and other acts of aggression and stated: “Very soon, we're going to attack aircraft in flight."

Echoing the Cuban government’s accusations against those responsible for the crime, in October 1976 the Montreal daily La Presse recalled that Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles had both been trained by the CIA to assassinate Cuban leaders. It also revealed that they were linked to the murder of Orlando Letelier, former foreign minister of Chile's Popular Unity government.

Cuba revealed the facts surrounding the Barbados sabotage at the 5th Regional Navigation Conference, held in Lima in October 1976, and U.S. pressure was unable to deter the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) from condemning it at its general assembly. The ICAO resolution exhorted any state with the means to do so to pursue and punish with the utmost severity those criminals who carried out this act, so that the sanction would correspond to the magnitude of the crime and constitute a deterrent to future sabotage.

What did the U.S. government do? It attempted to silence the international repercussions provoked by the sabotage. Raul Roa, Cuba’s foreign minister, made this clear during a conference held in Trinidad and Tobago to discuss the steps to be taken in relation to the investigation and evidence that had come to light concerning the Barbados sabotage. The conference was attended by the host country, Cuba, Barbados, Guyana and Venezuela.

Today Orlando Bosch flaunts his impunity on the streets of Miami, protected by the U.S. authorities. Posada Carriles escaped from prison, with the aid of Venezuelan elements and the CIA, to work subsequently as one of the instigators of the U.S. dirty war against the Sandinista government. He was also linked with the Salvadoran death squads, always at the service of the CIA.

During these 20 years, the U.S. government and even the ICAO have maintained a wall of silence over the criminal sabotage of the Cuban passenger flight transporting young athletes, students and workers. They did not even recall it during the recent controversy over the downing of the two light aircraft piloted by counter-revolutionary elements that violated Cuban airspace.

It didn’t suit their purposes to talk about the Barbados sabotage, nor about the thousands of attacks on Cubans, Cuban properties and friends of Cuba. Nevertheless, time has not erased the memory of the profound pain that shook the Cuban people when that event occurred, nor has it diminished one iota the validity of what Fidel said to the over one million Cubans who filled Revolution Square to honor the martyrs of that terrible explosion: “When an energetic and virile people weep, injustice trembles.”

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

The sick treacherous story of one petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' ultra-left Trot intellectual posturer, Debray.

THERE is no rest for heroes.  Nor for true revolutions.

They must go on fighting, day after day, because day after day they are besieged by the forces of imperialism and its instruments, who do not rest in their attempts to suffocate, discredit or obliterate the path, the alternative route that these heroes and these revolutionary experiences still lead us along.

How could it be possible, in this unipolar world, with the process of economic globalization fully underway, for imperialism to allow the full expression of the heroism the resistance, the example, the model that blaze a path in the opposite direction to that of the United States' hegemonic designs? How could they not do their utmost to annihilate what must be the only thing left standing and fighting back in a world rife with caving in and backing down?

I am referring to Cuba and to one of her most treasured sons, Ernesto Che Guevara. Both have been and will continue to be the eternal target of enemy attack, because both have fought and continue to fight tirelessly for the social justice that the empire denies the world held under its thumb.

The siege of Cuba is a consequence of the role assumed by the Cuban revolutionary process in the current circumstances. The people of Cuba continue to resist in the name of all of the world and they are proof of the fact that social change is both necessary and possible. This evidence that other routes are viable and preferable for the vast majority is a message that the empire cannot tolerate. Much less now when they are predicting the end of history.

Nor can they tolerate the person who has remains as the symbol, the figurehead of this struggle for human redemption, despite the fact that he passed away from the physical world almost 30 years ago. And so they attempt to nullify him, to discredit him, to present him as a solitary “condottiere", a man who ultimately sacrificed his life pursuing the chimerical goal of social revolution.

And to do this, they will grab on to any manner of infamy within their reach, including accusations of the most vulgar and despicable character defects.

This is the kind of derision we are witnessing as the century draws to an end, marking the end of the millennium as well.

It is an enemy operation - it wouldn’t be at all surprising to discover the participation of its special services - and it is directed against the prestige and the figure of Che, the source of inspiration for future revolutionaries.

There have been a deluge of books about - or really,  against  - this formidable revolutionary.  Some declare the bankruptcy of utopia, when in reality it is they who suffer from moral bankruptcy, and it won’t be long before events prove that injustice still prevails, and rebellion continues to beat in the hearts of those who refuse to accept the sentence imposed on them.

Others, supposed postmodernists, don't search out the solitary warrior, preferring instead to denigrate him, vulgarize him, turn him into the mediocre being he never was, all under the pretext of "desanctifying” the myth. And what a shame that some of those who write books and make films along these lines were born, by biological chance, in Cuba!

At the center of this Parnasse of vituperation is a figure well known in Cuba for quite a long time now, and the author of a recent book entitled Loués soient nos seigneurs (Praise the Lords). He is Régis Debray, a man who had the privilege of spending a brief time in Bolivia with Che, before supposedly going on to join with a network being established in Europe to provide logistical support for the guerrilla movement.

The human decay that Régis Debray has undergone; judging from the above mentioned book, is greater than what we Cubans could have ever imagined. It is obvious from the vile slander directed at Che, in reference to that bitter year, just who the "lords” are that Debray is "praising". It is equally obvious from the attacks against Fidel and the Cuban Revolution.

But Debray - or “Danton", as he was known in the Bolivian guerrilla army - has gone past all possible bounds, beginning with a shameful lack of consistency with his own nom de guerre. One needs only consider Georges Jacques Danton's immortal words regarding external enemies during the 1789 French Revolution: "We must confront them now and later, and confront them without rest.” Régis, tor his part, now embraces the enemies he once swore to struggle against.

This is a sad case of progressive moral decay which began in the Bolivian army barracks in Caimiri with the French intellectual's capture and interrogation. Following Debray's lengthy sessions with his captors, Che’s guerrilla army was forced to remain constantly on the move, with the enemy troops forever on their heels. Che reflected on the situation in his diary, noting that it seemed to him that Debray talked too much. But being a profoundly humane man, and a leader who confided in the integrity of his comrades, Che refused to consider the possibility of betrayal.

When Aleidita Guevara made this observation about Debray during a recent visit to Buenos Aires, the French author reacted virulently, attempting to discredit Che’s daughter. “This is a Cuban security operation against me,” he claimed.

In reality, Cuba has been very discreet in its handling of the information about this memorable chapter of Latin American history.  Among human beings, there is room for the coexistence of those whose conduct is heroic, and those whose conduct is somewhat less so.

The human condition encompasses all of this. It is a man's conscience that allows him to enter the annals of history through the front door, and which differentiates him from those who act like cowards. A revolutionary cannot be forced into doing anything, except perhaps dying at the hands of his executioners without breathing a word that could compromise the wellbeing of another.

Bolivian military sources present during those events will one day be able to clarify the role played by Regis Debray, but even now it is clear that Danton's commitment abruptly changed course at some point. In 1974, with Che's Guerrilla Army, he shifts his focus towards rebellious and sovereign Cuba.

He went on to full time employment in his own country, and lent his services to achieve the release from prison of the supposedly handicapped self-styled poet and genuine Batista police officer and convicted terrorist Armando Valladares. A truly shameful incident, in which Valladares got up out of his wheelchair before the foreign press in the Havana airport and Régis was exposed as the ridiculous crutch of a walking paraplegic.

Later came his support for the accused in Trial 1 of 1989, followed some time afterwards by his shelter and editorial patronage of the traitor Jorge Massetti (Junior), author of a slanderous work against the Cuban Revolution. Lastly, recreating in Paris the roles played by Vargas Llosa and Carlos Montaner in Madrid, Régis Debray used a handful of dollars to entice Dariel Alarcón — or "Benigno ", as he was known in the Bolivian guerrilla army - into deserting.

The operation to discredit Che and Cuba called for Alarcón to publicize his "denunciation" in a book, dictated to the author and full of historical absurdities. It doesn't really matter, since the important thing is to spread their vulgar propaganda. And Benigno doesn’t really care one way or the other, since he has already collected his 30 pieces of silver.

Régis Debray and the French-gusano mob in Paris will never succeed in changing the course of popular struggle and the ever more legendary image of Che.

During the years of the bipolar world, both superpowers tried in vain to do it: one, because of its role as the belligerent imperialist enemy; the other, because Che broke with its schematic and bureaucratized thinking, which put the interests of the status quo before those of national revolutions.

Che Guevara made an enormous theoretical contribution to socialism, which the theorists of the time could not or did not want to recognize. He grasped the deformations of the unequal trade between the socialist countries and the nations of the Third World, and was able to foresee that these societies carried within them the seeds of their own destruction.

Amidst the chauvinism of the powerful and the accommodating positions adopted by certain Third World revolutionaries, who looked upon the case of Cuba as a historical exception, the only recognition this visionary received were accusations of being adventurist, pro-China and Trotskyist, the epithets in vogue at that time.

Of those who criticized him, some are no longer around, others have renounced their ideas and even their names, and a few recognized the error of their ways after 1989.

Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution are still alive and growing stronger every day.

Régis Debray has bid a definitive "farewell to arms'' and has renounced the ideas he once claimed to defend. He has come to attack Che and the Cuban people with the vehemence typical of one who has sold his soul, and doesn't even seem to notice that he is attacking those who once welcomed him with warm hospitality, and that he is doing it precisely at a time when the empire is tightening its stranglehold on Cuba more fiercely than ever.

It is a shameful path that he has taken. But neither he, nor those proclaiming the end of history, nor the hackneyed annihilists of postmodernism, nor the natural agents of imperialism, will succeed in diminishing the breadth and depth of the examples of Che and the Cuban Revolution.

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

A troubled continent still hoping to turn the tables on US imperialism but still lacking a revolutionary perspective.

Ex-president Raul Alfonsin has described Argentina as “a colony of imperialism" where decisions, he says, “are made in the United States."

In a statement to the national press, reproduced by EFE,  Altonsin criticized the policy of “carnal relations” put into practice by President Menem since 1989 to align himself with U.S. policy, which “demands proofs of love every week.”

Apart from foreign policy, Alfonsin denounced the deterioration of the country's education system and government attempts to change the armed forces into a kind of national guard to combat drug trafficking, an element much demanded by Washington.

• Plots to kill Colombian President Ernesto Samper began on the very day he took office in 1994 and have continued until the present time. The total number of assassination attempts now stands at 52, according to official sources.

The plots that have most recently come to light were put into effect in mid-September, on the occasion of a visit by Samper to the municipalities of Malaga and Chaparral, in the departments of Santander and Tolima, respectively, according to NOTIMEX.

In the light of accusations of alleged ties with drug trafficking, aimed at forcing Samper out of office, the United States has denied Samper a visa to that country and decertified that South American country's fight against drugs. Observers do not rule out the possibility that many of the assassination attempts may have been carried out by drug traffickers, given the anti-drug efforts made there since 1994, or by U.S. agencies which have persistently rejected the leader duly elected by the Colombian people.

A total of 3.7 kilos of cocaine were discovered in Bogota, on the plane which President Samper was about to take to New York, to attend the 51st United Nations General Assembly. In accordance with the form in which the drugs were packed and the place where they were hidden, investigators indicate that the package could have been placed in a spot where it would be detected, either in Bogota or in New York.

Minister of Justice Carlos Medellin called it "a plot to muddy the image of the president,” according to IPS.

• LATIN Americans' distinctive capacity to dream is being converted into despair, individualism and a loser culture, according to an IPS survey of various sociologists in the region.

Specialists are saying that the traditional solidarity among the great popular masses is at risk of being taken over by a disloyal competitiveness, due to the invasion of their social values by an arbitrarily imposed free market and neoliberal ideology.

A Costa Rican survey uncovered that 80 percent of the population believe that its political and social situation is worsening, while 70 percent of  Venezuelans foresee a negative social future, although 60 percent consider their personal life will improve. In Panama and Argentina, with the highest unemployment rates in the region, most people hold the opinion that the future will be the same or worse than it is at present.

Those interviewed stressed that phenomena such as corruption, daily violence, unemployment or the kind of employment that covers minimum needs but cannot resolve the poverty in which almost 60 percent of Latin Americans live, combined with a neoliberal Ideology that insists that whatever their countries did in the past was negative and must be changed at all costs, is generating a dangerous collective malaise, unhappiness and loss of self-esteem.

For some of the specialists consulted, like the Venezuelan priest Arturo Sosa, one of the difficulties lies in trying to solve collective problems with individual solutions.

The recent Uruguay meeting of the Latin American Parliament (PARLATINO) dealt with relevant and highly important social and economic themes from the perspective of collective solutions, moving away from the mainstream view of sociologists.

The meeting divided into commissions to discuss contemporary issues such as the lack of public security, the increase of unauthorized urban settlements, the state of the penitentiaries and applied legislation in each of the 22 nations represented in that body, and the need for an equitable agricultural growth to reduce high rural poverty rates, “in the context of the generalized application for more than a decade of a market economy model in Latin America."

In relation to the lack of security, described as a “painful reality", the public services commission stipulated that “the state and private sector" are responsible for overcoming the situation and warned that if security isn't restored, there could be moves towards self-styled justice.

The commission discussing unauthorized urban settlements resulting from campesino migration and intermediate populational mobility, recommended the adoption of' measures designed to legalize land ownership and avoid health-threatening situations of overcrowding combined with a lack of services.

For its part, the agricultural commission decided to exhort active participation by PARLATINO member countries in the World Food Summit. It also stressed that the solution to the region's dependency levels lies in Latin American integration. Latin America "can and must" feed itself on its existing agricultural resources and contribute to food provisioning for other regions of the world less endowed with natural resources. •