Hitherto, philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx.
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074   [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.] 
No 0886 January 14 1997                                                                                                                 10p

More disturbed ranting from beaten CPGB defeatists. But their police-fink photos of 'Leninists' will not save them. Vile distortions of EPSR understanding will not prevent serious socialists from seeing through Weekly Worker lies. Petty-bourgeois CPGB pessimism gets everything wrong, even the Tupac Amaru's straightforward guerrilla triumph.

The CPGB's rage of personal abuse against the Economic and Philosophic Science Review is a measure of how successfully the ideology of Trotskyite entryism has been exposed.

The slander and insults started as the anti-Leninist CPGB found itself out-argued on a correct Marxist understanding of the SLP.

This Trot biliousness coincided with their increasing hatred of the Socialist Labour Party leadership for booting out all their entryists.

The CPGB bile first tried venting itself with daft fictions implying that the EPS Review had been bribed into not supporting their SLP 'Left Opposition' nonsense.

Then followed a vindictive attempt to pretend that the EPS Review was itself trying to take over the SLP.

Now, insulting distortions and vengefulness have reached hysteria proportions by labelling EPSR as 'queer bashing', and photo-fingering SLP members as 'Leninists' for police files, just for sitting near the EPSR editor at SLP conference.

But such filthy tactics are no surprise coming from "an alliance of bourgeois intellectuals directed against the working class" as Lenin described the sectarian opportunism of Martov, Plekhanov and Trotsky, warning the Bolshevik Party in 1914 to shun any thought of 'party unity' with such subjective-idealist individualism.

This is the tradition of petty bourgeois anti-communism posing as ultra-left, but always hating the thought of any successful workers mass movement which might lead eventually to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This is the counter-revolutionary mentality of Menshevism.

Their posture to turn the Socialist Labour Party into the 'revolutionary' party by undermining all confidence in its existing leadership, and despising the SLP as 'Labour Party Mark II', is all self-indulgent fantasy.

These Trots are in fact 50 years behind the times with this daft entryist rubbish.

Their fixed-category undialectical middle-class mentality conceitedly deludes itself that whereas Trot entryism beat its head pointlessly against a brick wall inside the Labour Party for four or more generations, these modern clever-dick entryists will triumph over Scargillism.

But the SLP is not the Labour Party Mark II nor could be. There can never be another Labour Party of that old type, forever fooling the working class by its endless promise of 'socialism tomorrow' (which only worked for as long as it did because of the deluded 'lefts' who manoeuvred noisily, endlessly, and futilely inside doomed bourgeois Labour Party reformism.)

That Labour Party was the classic product of the anti-Soviet anti-communist Cold War epoch from the 1920s to the 1990s, pretending to want 'socialism' too, but simultaneously the most fanatical opponents of the workers states as well.

The maturing of the terminal world crisis of the imperialist system which set up the revisionist self-liquidation of the Soviet proletarian dictatorship (see subsequent article), also obviously made the clause IV 'reformist socialist' echo of the Soviet workers state surplus to requirements, and potentially dangerous if allowed to live on through the imperialist crisis.

The coming period will be one of all-out inter-imperialist trade conflict and warfare, - and hence a period of proletarian revolutionary upheavals too. At whatever cost, the sooner that all 'socialist' examples or hopes are extinguished around the planet, the better the imperialist bourgeoisie hope things will be for its survival.

The cost of pushing the Labour Party completely through the hoop of at last announcing that it is a totally bourgeois capitalist party and does not believe remotely in anything to do with socialism at all, - has been the birth of the SLP.

This is not the revolutionary party but the launch of a period of centrism, - talking the complete abolition of capitalism but still limiting the struggle to the organisational and ideological weapons of left reformism.

But what it certainly is NOT is the Labour Party Mark II. The period of that flourishing has gone for ever.

Equally gone for ever is the birth of Trotskyite entryism as part of the 'left' camouflage of Labour's basically anti-Soviet anti-communist crucial historical role to head off the thinking of Western workers from any revolutionary direction.  

With the anti-communist Cold War no longer quite the necessity it once was for imperialism, and no longer able to be its priority concern anyway, where inter-imperialist conflict has now taken over, - then one aspect of Trotskyism's historical counter-revolutionary role is possibly now redundant too or out of date, - the role of the fake-'left' parasite on the main workers party, under capitalism.

Because of the temporary international balance of class forces against widespread anti-imperialism, Trotskyite defeatist confusion still lingers on for a while. As the ideological struggle to understand the imperialist crisis livens up, petty-bourgeois intellectuals of 57 various persuasions will briefly become more agitated.

But major serious developments towards socialist ideology, reclaiming the confidence and allegiance of the working class, ought also to appear on the scene, as Scargillism has done, transforming the potential for the labour and trade union movement by at last breaking up the old TUC Labour Party federation which had as its golden rule that it should never be split at any price.

The CPGB hysterics complain that a non Marxist 'mechanical pre-determinism' has misled some on the left to accept the SLP, in advance, as left-reformist when the CPGB pretend it could be taken over as 'the' revolutionary party (i.e. a wider domain under their CPGB sectarian control).

But the really lifeless mechanical mental blockage lies with the Trots who have only ever seen all of history from their individualist survival point of view. Labour Party entryism has been taken away from them, - and CPGB entryism when they were bogus 'Leninist' fleas on foetid revisionism's back. So long live parasitism on the back of the SLP!

Another diatribe declared that anti-CPGB left SLP members clung to their SLP membership cards as their only lifeline. It is the other way about entirely. It is these rootless workerless petty-bourgeois Trot sects who are lost without either their entryist membership of the SLP, forever carping from within about the 'treacherousness' of the leadership, etc, - or else carping from without about how the SLP leadership has again 'betrayed' the working-class cause.

But what all workers want, and what all serious Marxists welcome, is the chance to openly agitate for a mass workers party which genuinely wants to abolish capitalism, and genuinely has supported, lifelong, the value of extra-parliamentary struggle equally to that of parliamentary struggle, - the SLP. Only the most sterile, moribund and frightened petty-bourgeois mentality could find some sort of eternally frustrated 'security' in being a permanent 'left opposition' to a workers party which such entryists believe is never going to get anywhere anyway.

Another lifetime, or even another five minutes, of being in a political party, solely in order to despise and moan about its leadership corruption, is both pointless and also an impossible historical nonsense, - just a fleeting nightmare of the 1950s revisited. 

The 'rapprochement' gimmick is just a total sectarian fraud, nervously cobbled together by some of the most incoherent and small-minded losers ever to be spawned by petty-bourgeois defeatism. It barely lasted three rounds against the EPS Review's polemics, and now just spouts defamatory bile with no dialogue and no rationality whatever. For the benefit of any half-sane remaining Weekly Worker readers, a reply to some of their latest abuse has been sent, but is printed here anyway, just for the record:

'Scissors and paste it may be, but it has wiped the floor with the CPGB in political argument, - which is why you have to resort to abuse, lies, and distortions to try to combat the EPSR Review. And by not falling for the typical petty-bourgeois 'left' delusions in the imaginary advantages of an unaffordable lavish publication, the EPS Review has never had to ask its readers to defraud workers on the street by collecting for the 'Unemployed Workers Charter' and then stealing the money for the bottomless 'Fund' requirements, - as you send your members out doing, including the 'three fucking jerks' in Manchester, - Smethurst, Harper, and Pearson, - who invited abuse by their foul slanders about why the EPSR opposed the 'Left Opposition' nonsense inside the SLP, — as you yourself agreed, Fischer, in your unbelievable 'justification' for the abuse (really just an example of slack-brained apolitical mindlessness) as having been engineered to 'smoke-out' the EPSR's backlash.

Your are a liar too about who approached who over establishing a more organised participation in the CPGB's great 'Rapprochement' fraud.

As everyone who was at your Swansea University summer school can testify, it was you people who approached me, - after hearing me 'rant' and 'fume' twice a day at great length for a week, challenging the non-Leninist CPGB on every front, - about declaring support for the 'Rapprochement' concept in the way that Open Polemic and others had done by means of 'representational entry' or whatever, space in the Weekly Worker to polemicise at length in return for agreeing publicly with the statement that "all communists should be in one communist party", and participating in joint committees and seminars, etc, giving substance to that notion.

And it was you who then "quickly backtracked" when it was insisted upon that first the sincerity of your 'rapprochement' would have to be tested by major EPSR polemics being printed in your paper in full, and the arguments heard out in full in your aggregates.

Which is how I came to attend two Manchester cell CPGB meetings and found Pearson there, - and found the debate hopelessly inadequate.

The 'rapprochement' turned out to be a sham, and the CPGB stalwarts not worth arguing with on any permanent organisational basis.

The EPSR analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy's self-liquidation, which you refused to publish, puts Bridge's anti-communist verbal diarrhoea in the shade, - as does the EPSR's understanding of what the SLP is and should be, which set off your silly personal abuse. Equally, it was you who ran away from the polemic, which you lost, about whether or not the IRA had capitulated to the non-existent US imperialist 'new world order domination' which you dismal petty-bourgeois defeatists falsely imagine everywhere.

Your attempt to label the EPS Review as 'queer-bashing' because it identifies - undeterred by the 'political correctness' stupidity of petty-bourgeois reformism, - homosexual freemasonry as one occasional aspect of reactionary establishment conspiracy, - is pathetic.

The backward prejudice of capitalist society against the homosexual emotional/sexual malfunction, is not helped by PC idiots who delude themselves that a society of rational reality can be reached via idealist fantasies, - about 'Trotskyite perfect revolutions' or any other aspect of human behaviour.

The PC pretence that all homosexual behaviour is completely 'normal', and gives rise to no patterns of social or emotional behaviour which ever need be described or referred to under any circumstances whatever, - is itself just irrational and unhelpful prejudice. 

The weakness of 'mechanical pre-determined history' in approaching the SLP is all yours. You predetermined that Scargillism would be Labour Party Mark II and responded accordingly with your daft entryism, precisely trying to recreate the old Labour Party and its pointless Trotskyite entryism. 

What is the point of trying to recreate that old sterility, of Trots in permanent 'Left Opposition' hostility to the leadership? You are 50 years out of date. Centrism is now emerging, and you have failed to understand it. And because you don't like the EPSR's clear and successful analysis of this progressive new development in the struggle for socialism, you have exploded in childish personal abuse.

Stockport SLP branch voted overwhelmingly not to be dragged back to a 1950s Tom & Jerry permanent farce of the party leadership vilified by the membership as 'mendacious', 'fraudulent', 'gerrymandering', 'deceitful', 'conspiratorial', 'dictatorial', 'treacherous', 'bullying', 'venal', 'corrupt', etc.

The centrist phase of labour-movement history is the fight for the best philosophical understanding, not a constant war of constitutional attrition about the "first procedural vote at the last conference", etc, or "do the minutes confirm what the president has said", etc, to which Stockport SLP branch was being condemned. R.B.'

The EPSR analysis of Soviet revisionism's self-liquidation is printed below. It is diametrically opposed to the interminable defeatist drivel which the CPGB are currently publishing, - which is why 'rapprochement' with EPSR polemics was quickly curtailed, partly; and why any 'rapprochement' with the CPGB sect at all could only have been of any use if its denizens had become infected from exposure to more of the EPSR's revolutionary philosophical understanding of world history and the current international balance of class and national forces, and the future for the world socialist revolution.

The 'new' CPGB dirge is locked in the same old defeatist misery as before, seeing nothing but catastrophe from the 1921 Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party onwards, and falsely marooning Lenin in the pit of despair at the 'deepening bureaucratic chaos all around him', and at increasing unlikelihood of the European revolution 'coming to the rescue of the Soviet revolution'.

Just the opposite. Lenin saw building socialism in the USSR as the bright way forward towards the further defeat of imperialism, and saw the spread eventually of revolution via the Asiatic east as the sure hope for mankind's socialist future.

This CPGB anti-communist drivel, - viciously maligning the Soviet workers state's magnificent achievements over 70 years plus the further triumphs of overthrowing the capitalist ruling class and imperialist domination temporarily in more than 20 other countries or so, - simply ties this petty-bourgeois defeatist class mentality into unending factional biliousness, of absolutely no use to mankind whatever. As well as stool pigeon for the police picture gallery of Leninists, the latest Weekly Worker also directs its defeatist focus from 1921 Soviet history to contemporary revolutionary struggles, and prints the following astonishing misery:

The leader of the occupation, Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, certainly has a flair for publicity and near theatrical media 'stunts'. We are not opposed to such actions on principle. They can be effective or useful, but only under certain circumstances - i.e., when there is a mass movement behind you. 

Unfortunate though it may be, the MRTA does not find itself in this situation. It is a very small and isolated organisation, which has no base - or roots - in the masses. In this light, the seizure in Lima takes on more the appearance of a desperate suicide mission than a conscious political action. All the MRTA have done is highlight their fundamental powerlessness.

We sincerely hope the MRTA comrades do not end giving up their lives in vain.

This pessimism is incurable, - IRA, 1921 Congress, Middle East, Tupac Amaru, - because it is a class-based expression. These Trots just have to open their mouths, - and out pours the defeatist bile typical of the petty bourgeoisie, which is forever haunted by nightmares of the dictatorship of imperialist monopoly-finance capital on one side, and the dictatorship of the proletariat on the other.

The viciously repressed Indian national minority in Peru (as elsewhere in South and Central America) stages a phenomenally bold and accomplished guerrilla-war raid in the very heart of the Peruvian capital, against the very cream of world imperialism's representatives, captures the whole world's imagination by their daring and fearless sacrifice as well as by the very dignified and disciplined way they have conducted themselves, - inspiring little people to revolt everywhere, - and all the CPGB complacent petty-bourgeois in comfortable middle-class British imperialist metropolis can utter is a weary "Mission Impossible in Peru" headline.

Compare how Lenin ridiculed such bogus petty-bourgeois 'lefts' in 1916 who made a similar dismissive response to the Easter Rising for similarly being a 'theatrical stunt' with 'not much social backing':

On May 9th 1916 there appeared in Berner Tagwacht, the organ of the Zimmerwald group, including some of the Leftists, an article on the Irish rebellion entitled "Their Song Is Over" and signed with the initials K. R.111 It described the Irish rebellion as being nothing more nor less than a "putsch", for, as the author argued, "the Irish question was an agrarian one", the peasants had been pacified by reforms, and the nationalist movement remained only a "purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the sensation it caused, had not much social backing".

It is not surprising that this monstrously doctrinaire and pedantic assessment coincided with that of a Russian national-liberal Cadet, Mr. A. Kulisher (Rech112 No. 102, April 15, 1916), who also labelled the rebellion "the Dublin putsch".

The term "putsch", in its scientific sense, may be employed only when the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs, and has aroused no sympathy among the masses. Whoever calls such a rebellion a "putsch" is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.—to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, "We are for socialism", and another, somewhere else and says, "We are for imperialism", and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a "putsch".

Whoever expects a "pure" social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.

Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in it—without such participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible—and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. But objectively they will attack capital, and the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will be able to unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts which all hate (though for different reasons!), and introduce other dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism, which, however, will by no means immediately "purge" itself of petty-bourgeois slag.

The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.

We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat's great war of liberation for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against every single disaster imperialism brings in order to intensify and extend the crisis. If we were, on the one hand, to repeat in a thousand keys the declaration that we are "opposed" to all national oppression and, on the other, to describe the heroic revolt of the most mobile and enlightened section of certain classes in an oppressed nation against its oppressors as a "putsch", we should be sinking to the same level of stupidity as the Kautskyites.

Capitalism is not so harmoniously built that the various sources of rebellion can immediately merge of their own accord, without reverses and defeats. On the other hand, the very fact that revolts do break out at different times, in different places, and are of different kinds, guarantees wide scope and depth to the general movement; but it is only in premature, individual, sporadic and therefore unsuccessful, revolutionary movements that the masses gain experience, acquire knowledge, gather strength, and get to know their real leaders, the socialist proletarians, and in this way prepare for the general onslaught, just as certain strikes, demonstrations, local and national, mutinies in the army, outbreaks among the peasantry, etc., prepared the way for the general onslaught in 1905.

THE DISCUSSION ON SELF-DETERMINATION SUMMED UP 1916

Real revolutionaries, and even serious socialists, everywhere will shout "What heroic brilliance; what inspirational skill and daring" to the MRTA guerrillas. More power to their triumphant elbow, and may their 'bacillus' rapidly spread to the revolt of tens of millions more against imperialism tomorrow.

Only the most wretched finks for the defeat of the working class could publish such a misery-filled put-down of the Tupac Amaru, - just as they get everything else wrong as well, - the CPGB bogus 'revolutionaries'. Build Leninism to rout these poisonous Trotskyite frauds. JH

The dead hand of CPSU revisionism needed to be buried along with all anti-Leninist CP influence everywhere. The unique and brilliant achievements of the Soviet workers state had become too muddled a counterbalance to imperialism under Gorbachev's philistine confusion, which compounded Stalin's theoretical mistakes. Only the USSR's self-inflicted breakdown could free the world's masses for the new revolutionary challenge to imperialism that was needed. The same imperialist crisis which made the new challenge necessary, also made the revisionist breakdown possible.

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. 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, need to respond 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 counterbalance 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 state and the planned economy had nevertheless survived against all the odds, and by the 1950s and 1960s was achieving formidable 'superpower' 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 - J V Stalin].

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 "counterbalance 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.

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 polemics 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 opened up now 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.

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 and 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 bewildered Soviet public when capitalism and the exploitation of workers really was re-introduced 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 longserving 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 in his articles "Our foreign and domestic position and party tasks" (1920); Speech at plenary session of Moscow Soviet (Nov 1922); "On co-operation" (Jan 1923); "Better fewer, but better" (March 1923).

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 180 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