Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
(Subscriptions £10/3 months;   £30/p.a.) [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL]  [Post Office Regd.]
No 898 Tuesday April 8 1997                                                                                                                                 10p

New Labour nonsense continues pushing workers understanding leftwards. Old CP popular-front illusions closer to total shattering, - on the parliamentary fraud, on the historical meaning of reformism, on phony anti-monopoly posturing, and concealing the real weakness of Stalinism. The SLP, on the other hand, could open the door to progress on every crucial issue facing the working-class struggle for socialism, the only real answer to incurable capitalist corruption, in and out of Parliament.

Blair's threat to privatise everything "if it is the people's best interests" will cause more turmoil in the labour and trade-union movement.

It is the words of an utter philistine. It denies that the working class of the world has ever learned anything from its experiences. It echoes the reactionary saying that "history is bunk".

There may indeed be many ways to purely manage economic business efficiently. It would indeed be dogmatic, - and anti-Leninist, - to try to insist that only one form of economic management will do to suit the people's real socialist interests.

But what has already been learned from bitter experience is that if economic ownership stays under private control, then disaster sooner or later looms for the working masses.

The whole history of capitalism teaches this, and the history of the 20th century in particular teaches that at the imperialist stage of capitalist monopolisation and competition, then global slumps and crashes, and devastating inter-imperialist war, - is the only possible eventual outcome.

Private economic ownership as the essential driving force of society, - which is the very essence of capitalism, - is by definition, and by all accumulated knowledge, completely arbitrary and anarchic. It only works by the 'better' and the 'more efficient' driving out 'the bad' and 'the redundant', - i.e. through bankruptcies, closures, and takeovers, with all the waste, pain, and disruption of mass sackings, relocations, and chronic insecurity for all.

Blair's New Labour capitulation to ruling-class domination is now complete with his statement that everything is potentially considerable for privatisation.

It is the unreal attitude of a bourgeois who does not have to think about insecurity himself, or the social havoc it causes (being at the root of all social inadequacy or resentment such as crime, drunkenness, violence, etc).

And this confirmation of New Labour's utter treachery to the real interests of the working class will put great new strain on those in the labour & trade-union movement such as the Communist Party remnants in the CPB, for example, who have just declared for a vote for Blairism.

"Any votes that prevent a Labour victory will not be understood, or forgiven, by the people of Britain," 

they fatuously declare.

"That is why the Communist Party does not agree with the anti-Labour election strategy being put forward by some other leftwing parties and why Communist candidates will not be standing in marginal seats," 

they add, even more pointlessly.

But Blairism is now solely about different arrangements of capitalist economic management (if it is about anything at all). It is no longer remotely anything to do with working class concern about the arbitrariness, insecurity, and injustice of capitalist ownership of the economy.

So all that voting for Blairism now boils down to is choosing which team of big-business political stooges should pretend to be 'governing' while the City of London and the private international monopolies get on with their profiteering.

It is just a choice of who is better to direct a programme of prison expansion to house those with a sense of grievance against ruling-class economic injustice or social discrimination; who better to restrict taxes and public spending to a minimum and dictate which cuts should be made to such welfare programmes as survive in education, health, housing, transport, the environment, etc, which have not already been superseded by more privatisation.

The choice of such disciplinary management with which the better to force everyone to dance to the tune of the capitalist economic rat-race, - either flourish well or fester at the bottom of the social ladder, - does not seem much of a choice to get excited over, least of all for a sect who still claim to be "based upon the principles of Marxism-Leninism".

It is a strange attitude almost as unreal as Blair's mindlessness about the vital matter of economic ownership. 

What are the "people of Britain" supposed to care about whether the biased refereeing in favour of capitalism at the class-war front line over wages, conditions, promotions, and policy in the factories, offices, and institutions is hammed up by Blair and his ludicrous and revolting team of posturing, social-climbing opportunists like Harriett Harman, - or by the cynically decadent Tory mob.?

What difference will it essentially make to life under capitalism in the troubled era of ageing British imperialism coming up to a crisis of the greatest disruption and devastation in the history of free-market crashes and slumps.?

The CPB attitude is based on the most fearful timidity and ignorance imaginable.

There is nothing in it but the shallowest electoral considerations (some electoral considerations being far less worthy than others).

The one concern is that "the Tories ought to lose after all they have done", etc, etc.

This is a popular sentiment, and one that can be sympathised with, but what use is it?

The worst disservice to the "people of Britain", one which in the long run does not deserve to "be understood or forgiven", - would be this unthinking spleen of just getting the Tories out "because they are Tories" virtually, and nothing else.

This may have worked well enough for the less class-conscious proletariat for most of this century when the Labour Party's reformist posturing did reflect working class interests to a certain extent.

But to keep on muttering this mantra now is just suicidal unthinkingness, close to causing deliberate atrophy of the brain.

Labour reformism was always a fraud, but now not even the fraud is left. A major historic moment has been reached. A great historic change is taking place. Reformism is dead, self-confessedly inadequate and irrelevant.

So these 'Marxists' reply: "Long live reformism".! It is just the sad twitch of a dying notion.

What this fake 'Marxism' will not face up to is that the epoch of successful British imperialism was the epoch of successful Labourite reformism.

The epoch of dying British imperialism (relative to rival, more triumphant imperialisms, and in a period of greatest-ever crisis for the imperialist system as a whole) is the epoch of the collapse of reformism, and the first seeds of mass revolutionary understanding to represent the working class.

The appearance is that Labour itself is killing off 'reformist socialism' because it is 'out of date and irrelevant', etc. It is this mere appearance which gives rise to the illusion that if Blairism can kill off reformist socialism, then others can revive it inside Labour as soon as they get the chance.

The reality, however, is that the history-driven movement of the bourgeois class is what is killing off 'reformist socialism'. The bourgeoisie (large and small) and bourgeois ideology, all varieties, are deep down gloomily expecting their most difficult crisis ever as their much touted 'free world system' lumbers towards its worst global crash ever, - and they know it.

Just because the ruling class in every country, plus their 'loyal opposition', keep on pretending that "all economic problems have either been solved, or are finding solution, or are soluble in due course under capitalism", - it does not mean at all that the more astute circles are not aware that in fact the greatest slump ever is fast approaching.

This is the scientific reason why the notion of "winning Labour back to reformist socialism" is impossible nonsense.

The free-enterprise society is heading in one direction only, and that is towards crisis-management.

That is why the only competition in this election is between rival Tory and Blairite plans for imposing more discipline on the working class via continued anti-union legislation; harsher sentencing and prison routines; stiffer penalties for dropping out from school, university, or employment; greater social pressure all round towards self-help and conformity via generally tighter state budgets; determined trivialisation and commercialisation of all culture to breed a more philistine atmosphere in general; etc, etc, etc.

The superficial glitz of the free-market society is being deluged on all our heads as a pre-emptive cover-up by a system which knows it is facing potentially revolutionary upheaval.

Capitalism only knows how to die by the same racket that has helped it live so long, - anti-communist brainwashing.

The 'free world' solution to mankind's problems is no solution at all. It only leads back to exactly the same warmongering slump conditions which made communist revolution necessary in the first place.

So what to do now that the greatest propaganda hoax since time began is coming crashing down in ruins? What to do now that the free-market 'flourishing stability and liberty' is about to degenerate into the most disgraceful and terrifying crash-mayhem that modern society has suffered? 

Well, of course, just tell even more lies still, about how brilliant capitalism is, and how appalling is the socialist alternative, - and then clamp down hard on the resulting tumult.

There is not the slightest possible room in this doom-laden perspective for a revival, even five minutes long let alone a century long, - of that clever old pie-in-the-sky-someday controlling philosophy of reformist socialism.

Just the opposite. Leaving an uncastrated Clause IV around in such a period of upheaval could have even been dangerous to capitalism. So not at all by accident (which is what is implied by the 'wait till Blair is gone' argument for sticking to the Labour Party), - the whole cleverly-contrived social role of reformism has been consciously destroyed.

The idea that Blairism is just a chance swing of the pendulum between 'right' and 'left' in the Labour Party, and that Blairism will soon be toppled leading to a resurgence of 'left' leadership and 'socialist' policies for Labour, - is such infantile wishful thinking that it is positively dangerous.

No phase of Labour Party history has ever been there just because some people wanted that more than other people wanted something else, or because fashions change and a right note was struck here which was not struck at some other time in some different circumstances. Labour's pattern of development closely follows the fortunes of British imperialism within its life-or-death struggle inside the cutthroat international imperialist rivalry, - but only up to the point where the imperialist racket is almost close to terminal breakdown.

At that point, the mould must be broken, because the reformist illusion is essentially a part of the capitalist system, it is its living 'shadow' all the time that imperialism is successful enough to be able to pacify the working class with a few 'reformist' crumbs from the parliamentary 'democracy' table.

In the logic of bourgeois democracy, reformist socialism should sweep in at the point where capitalism breaks down.

But when capitalism is at last really about to break down, that 'reformist' hoax threatens to become an extremely dangerous catastrophe. What if the masses rise up and really start demanding the full implementation of Clause IV??.

So Clause IV must go, and the whole of Labour-ism must be dismantled. 

That brilliant old 'democratic' parliamentary game of capitalism forever being seriously 'shadowed' by its complete opposite, Clause IV reformist socialism, is becoming a potentially disastrous racket, and can no longer be safely played.

Thus the CPB, sitting there mesmerised by nothing more profound than the trivial ups and downs of the opinion polls, and fixated on a Labour victory this time because that is the only shallow 'reality' which this out-of-date revisionist/reformist movement has come to expect, - is not only sad but potentially lethal.

This philistine complacency would represent the working class going sleep-walking into another bout of 193Os-ism or Allendeism, - dreaming reformist dreams while failing to notice that the driven and demented spirit of the historic bourgeois-capitalist system in crisis was about to cut the throat of the whole 'democracy' game and butcher its too-trusting adherents.

Blairism is a long way from opening the door to fascism yet, - not remotely close. But it proves a very difficult task to explain what Blairism exactly does represent historically if it is not in the general direction of opening the door to fascism. What else is it? No one seems to have the faintest idea.

Some of the implications around parts of the old 'left' of the labour and trade-union movement are that Blairism is nothing much more than just an elongated bad leadership turn which will change back again fairly soon, just a rather bad day at the office which will quickly get better.

Part of the argument for sticking to the 'vote Labour' tradition is that Blairism will shortly be toppled, and the 'lefts' will start coming back into the ascendancy again.

More significantly, this line is often augmented by the "historical wisdom' that "things could get worse than Blairism, you know", etc. This tack tells it all, - chronic, flat-on-its-back defeatism and demoralisation.

It is the 'philosophy' of pure blind wishful thinking alternating with its inseparable companion, hopeless pessimism.

The working class needs neither. It is not a matter for active historical intervention, originating from a philosophy of ultimately mass revolutionary action, to sit speculating about whether some political-fashion pendulum inside the bourgeois Labour Party is about to start swinging more left than right, or vice versa.

Nor is it remotely a 'Marxist' response to examine a possible opening-of-the-door-to-fascism and declare it "at least better than what might be coming".

Blairism is here and now, and the working class needs Blairism like it needs a bullet in the head.

Blairism is for judging now, and only people long used to living their politics in a complete fantasy world could possibly make the suggestion: "Leave it alone; you never know, it might lead to something really nice eventually."

As for sticking to Blairism because things could be even worse than that, this sort of thinking represents the complete death of any notion of history for the working class, and the complete death of any notion that the proletariat is a class which above all else can fight for its own future, consciously intervening to help history to change to a better course that is open to it.

The historic pattern of capitalist crisis is either preparing some bad new developments which will make the trivial unpleasantness of Blairism an irrelevant sideshow, - or it isn't.

It is the mentality of the most monstrous fatalistic capitulation to simply say: "Oh, let's have Blairism. You never know, it could be worse".

Let's find out, and let's start crushing Blairism right now in order to be all the stronger in time to crush whatever capitalist nonsense even nastier than Blairism which might be coming up the line.

Blairism is utterly putrid, every aspect of it, and everyone knows it except complete fools. It is vicious class-collaborating treachery to workers which needs totally wiping out. It is the most degenerate fawning opportunism ever to insult the intelligence of the working class. It is the most despicable shallow philistinism and conceited posturing ever to disgrace all of society in a very long time. It is the most ignorant and dangerous stupidity to put in charge of anything, never mind the voting confidence of the working class, as the benighted CPB recommend, closely imitated by most of the equally backward Trotskyite petty-bourgeois mentalities from the CPGB to the SWP and Militant (see EPSR No.896).

In terms of 'tactical' voting, there is no case at all for 'voting Labour' at least in preference to voting Tory either directly or 'by default', as some argue. The Tories are the masters of everything vicious and corrupt in defence of capitalism. The Blairites are their apprentices, or clones, - not one jot preferable.

That Blairism might prevail over Toryism at the polls is irrelevant. The time to consider the CPB's ludicrously pompous-point about: 

"Any votes that prevent a Labour victory will not be understood, or forgiven, by the people of Britain" 

will not be on May 2, 1997. What historical point could such shallow electoralism possibly hope to illustrate?

The time to consider the implications of misleading the working class about Blairism is right now when clear Marxist judgements should be being made in the light of the obvious crisis projection for the capitalist system; and then again in subsequent years when the full picture of free-market 'democratic degeneracy' comes into even sharper perspective.

This CPB appeal for workers to vote Labour is so infantile, ill-thought-out, and potentially damaging that it is beyond a joke.

Then comes the related question of a vote for Socialist Labour being a "wasted vote". This reveals even greater backwardness than anything else.

The smug CPB feels it should be teaching the SLP lessons, and not vice versa. It feels it owes nothing to Scargillism whatever, and has nothing to learn in this department.

Self-importantly, the CPB will tell itself that it, too, has a bold minimum programme of immediate demands just as outspoken and fundamentally challenging to the whole capitalist system as any of the many other 'revolutionary' poles of attraction. It will claim to be just as adamantly in favour of crucial extra-parliamentary struggle by organised labour and the working class to back up a parliamentary challenge. It will say it is just as clear that Labour reformism will not bring socialism, and has always said so, more to the point. It will claim that is is as equally for the "socialist revolution" in one way or another as anyone else. It might possibly claim that the CPB had made fewer mistakes in history in leading the working class than most others.

Well, so much for historically what might have been, but is no more, and now never can be.

The CPB was, is, and will remain the sad echo of classic Stalinist revisionism which heroically took the struggle of the world socialist revolution so far, then stagnated badly, and finally collapsed and self-liquidated most horribly.

And the essence of that Stalinist revisionism was its weakness, its insufficient decisiveness and determination, its insufficient belief in the strength and correctness of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The great historical farce is that when the West European CPs (and others) started turning to Eurocommunism and 'disloyalty' to Moscow (which all the eventual CP factions did to some extent, thinking to embrace at least a bit of 'anti-Stalinism'), - they were all in fact becoming more thoroughly Stalinist (in its weak revisionist failing) than ever.

And the even sadder fact is that they are still no nearer grasping all this now than they were when things went wrong. They just sit there in the debris of their once great movement, just occasionally repeating a word or two of their former dogmatic sterility, only with even less enthusiasm and confidence than ever (see following article summarising the Soviet Revolution's meaning for world history, and how it came to grief).

Socialist Labour, by definition, is in a position to make a fresh start on these difficult questions, which history has now conclusively demonstrated was what was really needed (see following article) to overcome the dead hand of history which was stifling the living hand of communist history.

How intelligently the SLP develops subsequently remains to be seen, of course, but the early signs are very encouraging of a priceless class-combative spirit inherited from the heroic miners strike; an ability to take an honest look at past labour-movement mistakes; an instinctive and shrewd distrust of anti-communist factionalising by Trotskyite and other individualist dilettantes; an unflamboyant but deep grasp of the counter-revolutionary essence of the capitalist state; a cultured awareness of the best pro-Soviet traditions of the international labour movement; and the beginnings of some interesting thoughts on the vexed history of the struggle against imperialism and the struggle for world socialism, an area of SLP activity which needs to be strongly developed in the future.

The unique position of Arthur Scargill in the labour and trade-union movement in Britain has enabled Socialist Labour to immediately capture momentum for its greatest service to the cause of the working class and its most significant achievement, - its break with Labour.

The stuffy CPB should hold its head in shame at its own stupidity in failing to grasp this crucial point.

The break has long been thought about, and has long been coming. But it is Scargill's Socialist Labour which has finally made that all-important break. More power to his elbow.

Incredibly, the CPB's election-position statement simply refuses to address the question of what is New Labour, and why has New Labour come into being. Some 'Marxists' these!

Instead, they send an insane appeal to Blair & Go for help with getting the working class over its current supposed condition of 'fear and demoralisation'!! But Blair & Co's opportunist Yuppie viciousness, looking to discipline the working class even more vengefully than the Tories, is just about the worst 'medicine' imaginable for any workers in such a state.

What begins to emerge is that it is really the CPB itself which is demoralised and fearful, - locked into the bizarre mixture of paralysed philistinism and complacency which eventually turned world communist movement revisionism into class-collaborating defeatism almost overnight, - two sides of the same coin of retreating from Leninism down the illusory avenues of the 'British Road to Socialism' (eternally tail-ending Labourite pro-imperialist opportunism); of permanent peaceful coexistence (which lets incurable inter-imperialist warmongering completely off the hook as well as its incurable counter-revolutionary gendarmerie worldwide); and of planned socialist production for human needs eventually being able to overtake savage capitalist exploitation in productivity (a certifiable notion, completely anti-Leninist, which any 'Marxist economist' should have seen through immediately).

"Many workers, in work or out, are demoralised and fearful,"

declare the CPB. 

"They are unconvinced that anything can be changed fundamentally for the better," 

they go on.

"The labour movement, notably the TUC and Labour Party, should be instilling hope and confidence in our people," 

they conclude.         

And that is it! Just a few more tips to Blair & Co on how they should adopt the CP's ancient anti-monopoly wishful thinking of the Alternative Economic Strategy, - a popular-front pipe dream, - and then finish. 'Vote Labour; Build the CPB; pour scorn on Socialist Labour!'

As always, the trouble with the AES is that it is not just a minimum demand for agitational-propaganda purposes to show up the stubborn and inhuman irrationality of capitalism on the way to the real argument that capitalism needs abolishing or otherwise nothing can be done.

The anti-monopoly strategy has always been presented as though it really can be brought into being by a coalition of all right-thinking popular front forces.

Firstly, such a united and disciplined popular front is never going to come into existence under any historical conditions anywhere, composed as it is of such disparate class forces, and aiming as it does against one mere formally-identified aspect of imperialism, - its monopoly structure, - which will never convince enough people that it is really the essence of the problem, especially as it is completely untrue.

Anarchic inter-imperialist conflict is the essence of the problem based on uncontrollable profiteering and credit-creation which eventually results in a relative 'over-production' of capital itself (soon appearing as an 'over-production' of goods and services) which can only be resolved by rival capitals knocking each other out of business, - and out of existence altogether. This is the crucial question of capitalism as far as the dream of a truly civilised world society is concerned in the 20th century, - a question of slumps, crashes, trade-wars, and devastating inter-imperialist shooting wars, with fascist chauvinism, - the prime free-market product which always rants on about how anti-monopoly it is, - the devil in the detail.

Secondly, it should be obvious that stopping the monopolisation tendencies of capitalism is as scientifically impossible as expecting water to run uphill. It cannot be done! For logical clarity, it can be stated: It will be easier to overthrow capitalism than to get it to stop its monopolisation tendencies, which is impossible. So why do not we just get on and overthrow capitalism?

Voting Socialist Labour is in fact the only vote worth casting in this election, for only through the building of this movement is the revival of the mass struggle for socialism going to take place.

Oddly enough, even voting Martin Bell in Tatton would be a wasted vote, as good a laugh as it would provide, holding Tory sleaze up to ridicule.

Martin Bell may well be a nice chap. But the BBC that he comes from is a ruling-class institution as full of the capitalist state's most vicious counter-revolutionary corruption as any Establishment body, more crooked and sinister than the Tory Party itself.

And the most misleading nonsense of all is the idea that the man in the white suit can step into the bourgeois election process and make it wholesome again. What a crap notion to try to divert the working class from the correct understanding that the whole parliamentary game is nothing but corruption and deception on behalf of big business, cynically fooling the masses that they have 'democratic control' over what goes on under British imperialism. What an obscene fraud! They are all crooks and stooges for capitalism in the House of Commons.

Build the socialist movement. Build the SLP. Build Leninism. RB

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

This degeneration was a long time in the making, and cumulative. It arose from a combination of conservatism and inadequacy, (both subjective and objective, over the difficult problems facing the international revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, threatened by resurgent and rearming imperialism), plus self-satisfied complacency that the Soviet workers 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 "counter-balance to imperialism" standing in the way of that renewed revolutionary advance.

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

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

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

Thus imperialist crisis so shook up the old phony "counter-balance to imperialism" situation that it fell apart completely, first staggering reluctantly through the increasingly difficult war in Afghanistan which US imperialist intervention deliberately hotted up alarmingly, - and then tripping just as unconvincingly, compassless, and perspectiveless into glasnost and perestroika, and the dismantling of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the crucial revolutionary role of which was fatally not understood by revisionist theoretical bankruptcy.

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 'diamat', - 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