Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review

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No 956 Tuesday June 30 1998                                                                                                                    10p

An analysis of how the mere mechanical progress of the new Agreement on Ireland, won by national-liberation struggle, is driving more nails relentlessly into the coffin of failed 'No Surrender' Orange-colonial intransigence, has been held over to next week for lack of space. Sinn Fein's new Assembly elections triumph will speed up imperialism's retreat, and hasten progress towards Ireland's reunification. DB

Imperialism's mixture of having to grovel to the Chinese workers state because of its own system's economic crisis, but still trying to keep lying anti-communist hysteria alive at the same time for fear of China's continuing communist-revolutionary example to the world's impoverished masses, puts Trotskyism's counter-revolutionary defeatist cynicism, masquerading as 'Marxist philosophy' on the spot. Only full acceptance of proletarian-dictatorship philosophy, and rejection of bogus 'democracy', can possibly make historical progress when dealing with revisionist leadership mistakes. "Everything is rotten" is just a hopeless idealist approach of anarcho-Trotskyite pipe-dreams (literally).

Trotskyism's philosophical naïveté and its complete kinship with ALL bourgeois philosophy is underlined at such times as the present capitalist media blitzkrieg on China.

Clinton's visit is ignored as evidence of US imperialism's astounding vulnerability to further market crashes, to avoid which Beijing's support is being sycophantically sought via an astonishing 9-day state visit of polite back-scratching.

Instead, the 'free press' hacks completely miss the present-day political significance of the tour in order to drone on with their oldest and most sterile anti-communist stunts such as Tibet, arrested 'dissidents', the non-existent 'Tiananmen Square massacre', and the like.

The cheap philosophical trick in all this is the imbecile pretence that 'democracy' is the sole aim and essence of all Western culture, and 'tyranny' the only interest communism has.

Bourgeois ideology makes great play of 'free world' elections which are in fact always dominated by the huge press and television monopolies and by the lavishly-funded pro-capitalist parties which this brain-washing gives all the publicity to. The actual class dictatorship by bourgeois capitalism is kept hidden, as is its periodic turn to violent tyranny both at home and abroad in order to keep in control.

Trot mindlessness makes its anti-communist points by admitting that imperialism may be bad at times but that 'communist tyranny is ten times worse' and pretends that a 'proper' socialist revolution will mean complete instant 'freedom' for everybody, and that class violence of any kind would disappear completely of its own accord if 'real socialism' was only given a chance.

Marxist-Leninist science has always made completely contrary assertions.

Contradiction in the source of all development, and all the time that class-society-influences survive on earth, class CONFLICT will be the only possible way forward.

The Chinese workers state is a class dictatorship, just like every other state in the world in the present epoch. Only far into the future will social consciousness have advanced so powerfully that coercive state structures will no longer be required of any kind. In the current period of history, it is only possible to have either a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or a dictatorship of the proletariat.

The many, many volumes of Marxist-Leninist science on this subject all ridicule all past (and present) attempts to invent alternative descriptions of stable power structures.

Proletarian revolution established its dictatorship in China in 1949 under an indispensable disciplined Leninist-party leadership, exactly as the Soviet Union had been established in 1917, and exactly as the only other overthrows of bourgeois-capitalist dictatorship (the only possible alternative essential power structure) have ever been established (Cuba, Vietnam, etc).

Revisionist degeneracy opened the door to imperialist counter-revolution in the USSR by deliberately dismantling the dictatorship of the proletariat at the end of the 1980s in the insane delusion that 'democratic pluralism' (the parliamentary-fiction smokescreen for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the West)- could bring faster market-oriented economic development to the Soviet workers state.

All imperialism's counter-revolutionary forces and influences bent their entire might to unleash, in 1989, a similar revisionist liquidationism in the Chinese workers state, using petty-bourgeois-minded privileged students to spark off the proletarian dictatorship's capitulation, mobilised around a replica of the American Statue of Liberty erected on Tiananmen Square and around non-stop free concerts by the leading popular rock-and-roll stars from Hong Kong and elsewhere in the capitalist-affluent Far East.

These revisionist delusions in the complete fraud which is 'multi-party democracy' (i.e. bourgeois-capitalist dictatorship) were eventually defeated inside the party leadership of the Chinese Revolution. The Western-inspired, Western-financed, and largely Western-organised counter-revolutionary stunts, centred on Tiananmen Square sit-ins, were dispersed. Murderous assaults on state officials in an attempt to start violent riots which would require bloody state repression for the benefit of Western TV cameras and Western propaganda material, - were routed. 

It is these provocations which have been consciously fictionalised in contemporary Western history (by bourgeois reactionaries and Trots alike) as the non-existent 'Tiananmen Square massacre'.

Of the 100-or-so total death toll in these provocation-disturbances, most of whom were officers of the workers state like soldiers or policemen, - not one single fatality took place on Tiananmen Square, nor any grave injuries leading to fatalities. The few brief skirmishes leading to bloodshed took place elsewhere in Central Beijing, away from Tiananmen.

But both Trot and bourgeois-reactionary anti-communism need these lying fictions against the Chinese workers state to justify their non-Marxist philosophy. Any country's success, not achieved by the capitalist free market, must be denigrated for the peace of mind of all bourgeois reactionaries (i.e. of all bourgeois). And any socialist success achieved through Leninist leadership-discipline via the dictatorship of the proletariat must be shown to be murderously unjust and intolerable for the peace of mind of all Trotskyites.

In either case, factual reality is utterly irrelevant to both varieties of subjective-idealist dogma.

So the myth is kept going on all sides about a non-existent 'Tiananmen Square massacre', - in reality, a remarkably restrained response by the Chinese workers state to disperse an outrageous counter-revolutionary provocation, inspired from abroad-based imperialist circles.

And the obscene feudal relics, overthrown by socialist revolution in China's Tibet province, receive hero-worship, led by Hollywood's reactionary billionaires but backed by petty-bourgeois fake-'lefts' everywhere.

And with 1.2 billion Chinese to talk to about their country's important attitudes and responses to the present crisis-situation in the world, all that the idiot Western correspondents want to do is search desperately everywhere for just one 'repressed dissident' to interview, wherever the Clinton caravan goes, - no matter how irrelevant, obscure, unrepresentative, deluded, or even deranged and making-it-up such 'dissidents' might be.

But China remains a disciplined workers state, with the same communist aim as ever of transforming society completely to give boundless opportunities for ALL its people EQUALLY at the conclusion of the long transformation process of building a totally abundant planned economy ultimately.

There will be no revolt from below.

The 'dissidents', therefore, will remain unrepresentative isolated pockets of petty-bourgeois-minded opportunists (such as the street spivs and America-loving shallow youth mobilised by counter-revolutionary agitation in 1989), or local nationalists (such as in Tibet province) whipped up by backward religion or other feudal-chauvinist hang-ups, financed or culturally-inspired from abroad.

Clinton went propaganda-posturing to a Christian church service in Beijing, - representative of less than 0.01% of the people of China. Even in the West, God-worship now strikes most serious-minded workers as being a sign of laughable immaturity and emotional instability or else just a hypocritical pantomime, filling in the vast and terrifying blank spaces now in the attempts at a coherent bourgeois-imperialist world view.

But instead of world scorn on Clinton's stupid and devious head, the pathetic media clamour continues to be raised against the workers state for declining to capitulate to petty-bourgeois counter-revolution in 1989 as the degenerate revisionist leadership did in Moscow.

That dismantling of proletarian dictatorship was similarly relentlessly urged on the Soviet workers state by imperialist reactionaries and Trot reactionaries alike, united by various aspects of anti-communist philosophical idiocy.

Some fake-'lefts' still gloat contentedly about what their anti-communist hysteria helped achieve when the Moscow revisionist leadership self-destructed. Others just keep quiet about the catastrophic immediate consequences, pretending that their anti-Soviet cynicism has nothing to answer for.

But the unbelievably foolish disaster that anti-communism has led to is plain for all to see, - as even the capitalist press itself regularly admits nowadays:

FOR close on seven years, successive Western leaders, economists and other missionaries have been talking up the prospects of Russia's recovery. Their endorsements have collectively formed a Good News Bible for Boris Yeltsin's reforms.

When Yeltsin's first reformer Yegor Gaidar lifted state controls on prices at a stroke, inflation was predicted to last for only a couple of months. Instead it turned into hyperinflation. When the mafia took over the reins of business and local government throughout Russia, this was regarded as a regrettable but natural process inherent in the birthpangs of the market economy. Russia's robber barons would in the end need a banking system. When Yeltsin stormed his own parliament, the ends justified the means. The presidential powers that Yeltsin secured were favourably compared to that of a French president.

When the tanks rolled into Chechenia, it was not Yeltsin but his hawkish advisers, the so-called party of war who had sent the ill-fated expedition on its way. Yeltsin himself disappeared for a mysteriously urgent operation on his nose.

Each year the economy has been "just about" to turn the corner of the greatest industrial decline since European Russian was invaded by Germans. But each year the reformers plead for more time, as Gaidar did when he was sacked by Yeltsin and replaced by Viktor Chernomyrdin.

The tolerance shown to Boris Yeltsin, in sickness or in health, drunk or sober, is simply explained. He has suited what a collective of Western governments perceived as their short-term interests. Had a communist or nationalist president of Russia bombed his own parliamentary opposition, or invaded a part of his own state, it is doubtful whether the International Monetary Fund would still be funding him to the tune of $11billion.

The immediate objectives of Western foreign policy were the dismantling of the former communist state's most effective organs — the KGB, the military industrial complex, and the army —and the separation of Russia from its backyard, principally Ukraine, but also in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East. Gone was an economy that produced tanks and missile casings so cheaply that no one knew how to price them. Gone was a world power to rival Nato. Yeltsin was indeed our man in Moscow.

But gone too was an industrial economy. Each year Russia became more, not less, reliant on its exports of oil and gas. Every precious metal, every raw material that had not been screwed down, was flogged off in the desperate search for cash. The current economic crisis derived not so much from a record 57 billion roubles in unpaid wages in the private sector and seven billion in the public sector, but from the falling world price of oil. Russia is now closer to a third than it is to a first world economy.

Throughout his turbulent reign of office, Yeltsin has shown a remarkable gift for seizing the political initiative and wrong-footing the opposition. Be he the first party secretary in Sverdlovsk, who obediently bulldozes the Ipatiev House where the Romanovs were shot by the Bolsheviks, be he the populist democrat who rides on trams, campaigning against party privilege, be he the growling tsar barking at his nervous courtiers, Yeltsin has an instinctive feel for power. A man without principle, he will seize whatever wave or current maintains him in power.

To no other audience but a fundamentally disillusioned one, could Yeltsin play the good cop/bad cop routine so often. Grandfather Yeltsin is forever being deceived by his feckless and lazy political offspring. Only a year ago, the two chief movers Anatoli Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, were swept into their positions as first deputy premiers, to turn the economy round. A year later Yeltsin turns around and says they have failed. The government he sacked yesterday are, almost to a man, formed of Yeltsin's people, carefully balanced to rival and unsettle each other. After three months of debate and four readings, a budget was produced for this year, which the government may well have to sequester, because the revenue projections are unrealistically high. Fearing this, Yeltsin's mass dismissal of his government is no more than a pre-emptive strike.

This chaos, this lack of pragmatic and effective government in Russia, the continuing collapse of the economy are in no one's interests.

And that sordid mess was a typical description of Russian chaos even before the recent new economic hammer-blows (arising from the Far East collapse and the international trade war) had made mafia-corrupt Russia even sicker and even more in precipitous industrial decline.

A new socialist revolution is obviously inevitable now in Russia, but it is yet to be proved that this is NECESSARILY how the revisionist leadership disasters of workers states can alone be overcome, – by complete collapse, then complete chaos and suffering and fascist reaction, and then a new revolution.

Degenerate revisionist political courses would be better exposed and abandoned BEFORE a workers state is liquidated or crashes into counter-revolutionary paralysis.

And the great ENEMY of this happening, past or present, is illusions in so-called 'democracy'.

The last-thing that all varieties of so-called 'democracy' are is democratic. As Marxist-Leninist science alone explains, democracy is the final form of state repression. 

Democracy is a form of state rule. Real 'freedom' cannot be said to be obviously seen to be happening until the democratic state is able to wither away, leaving vastly changed fully-socially-conscious people to always automatically ensure that CORRECT decisions are taken on everything, based on full knowledge and understanding, – everyone agreeing because the decisions are the right ones equally obvious to everyone because of their, by then, vastly advanced (compared to today's even HIGHEST standards) scientific and social understanding and experience.

The problem that all present-day forms of 'democracy' suffer from, – all equally crude, – is their participants' inevitably SERIOUS deficiencies in knowledge, understanding, and experience, – whoever they are. 

That is why Marxism-Leninism is first and foremost a question of revolutionary LEADERSHIP and not a question of revolutionary 'democracy'. It is why the actual record of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary achievement is basically one of non-stop correct leadership decisions rather than endless concentration on mere FORMS of 'democratic' decision-taking.

All past and present challenges to revisionist degeneracy in the leadership of revolutionary workers states have suffered from identification with 'democracy' challenges which fail to distinguish themselves from the essentially counter-revolutionary and petty-bourgeois nature of the modern-world 'democracy' traditions.

The following passages from Lenin still sound as if they could have been written just yesterday to rebut the ignorant insolvent mouthings of Clinton in China, (all too readily echoed by fake-'lefts' everywhere):

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

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

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

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

In explaining the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system, all socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels, namely, that the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists.175 There is not a single revolutionary, not a single Marxist among those now shouting against dictatorship and for democracy who has not sworn and vowed to the workers that he accepts this basic truth of socialism. But now, when the revolutionary proletariat is in a fighting mood and taking action to destroy this machine of oppression and to establish proletarian dictatorship, these traitors to socialism claim that the bourgeoisie have granted the working people "pure democracy",  have abandoned resistance and are prepared to yield to the majority of the working people. The bourgeoisie are compelled to be hypocritical and to describe as "popular government" or democracy in general, or pure democracy, the (bourgeois) democratic republic which is in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the exploiters over the working people. The Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners (and now, to our regret, with the help of Friedrich Adler) fall in line with this falsehood and hypocrisy. But Marxists, Communists, expose this hypocrisy, and tell the workers and the working people in general this frank and straightforward truth: the democratic republic, the Constituent Assembly, general elections, etc., are,  in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for the emancipation of labour from the yoke of capital there is no other way but to replace this dictatorship with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenging a workers-state regime to capitulate to bourgeois parliamentary democracy, as happened with the provocative student sit-ins around the US imperialist Statue of Liberty in 1989 on Tiananmen Square, is properly doomed to failure (or else to success which could only have led to Yeltsin-type chaos, and total catastrophe for the people of China).

The protests against the Chinese workers state by Tibet-fanciers would cheerfully drive the people of Tibet back to not just feudal-religious benightedness and exploitation, but to the pre-feudal tyranny which monastery-government represents.

And every 'dissident' that has come out against the Chinese revolution has either been hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat, or naïvely ignorant about the world imperialist crisis, or completely confused about 'democracy' as explained by Marxist-Leninist science above.

Genuine communist opposition to revisionist leadership-decay has needed to accept the structure of a party-led proletarian dictatorship, to accept the authority of the existing party leaders and their leadership line, and concentrate on demonstrating how the policies have proved inadequate or demonstrated they are out of touch with actual world developments. Such a difficult and rarely-accomplished course could almost certainly only be envisaged as being conducted from within the ruling party, and from well within it. It is hard to see how sniping from the outside (against a party which has successfully-carried out the revolutionary overthrow of a capitalist regime in the camp of world imperialism) could fail to be counter-revolutionary nonsense.

Nowhere do the Trotskyite denigrators of the Chinese workers state (in line with the ignorant reactionary anti-communist clamour from the hysterical bourgeois media), ever remotely approach such a genuine communist way of challenging revisionist leadership mistakes and mis-analysis of the international balance of class forces and its immediate and longterm perspectives.

The cheapest and nastiest propaganda-lies and cynical point-scoring are all that the fake-'lefts' are interested in, from positions of bourgeois philosophical confusion as crude as anything ever spewed up by anti-communism.

The humbug of this counter-revolutionary Trotskyism is boundless. The entire propaganda and disinformation might of the entire imperialist world has never ceased working flat out to fabricate images of 'humanity-hating lawless tyranny' as being the reality of life in the Chinese workers state.

Yet all this enormous muck-raking has only produced a handful of barmy 'dissidents' in a country of 1,200 million people, plus a farcical few remnants of aggrieved feudalism and religious backwardness in Tibet, plus some frustrated pro-imperialist careerists in Hong Kong (who had already taken their opportunist exile stand against Chinese workers-state longterm socialist equality and justice plans). 

And how come, by the way, that 7 million Hong Kongese were so casually handed back by imperialism to Chinese communist rule if the place was such a tyranny? Was not the aim of the West's endless anti-communist provocations, – against touring groups of Soviet artists, or East European athletes, or along the Berlin Wall, – to get out every single individual possible that could be saved from such a living hell?

And for the really major anti-communist stunt against the Chinese proletarian dictatorship, the entire Tiananmen 'freedom' provocation had to be virtually created by Western subversive agencies, using the most unlikely 'sufferers from tyranny'.

But what does real tyranny look like, where is it found, and who is responsible? Look no further than around the drug and violence-riddled working-class slums of the USA, or look just over the border at its nearest economic and trading 'partner', – Mexico:

IT WAS around 2am when a dozen US-trained commandos stormed the low, breezeblock wall surrounding Victoria Lopez's dusty backyard. Led by an officer later identified as Lt Col Julian Guerrero, the hooded soldiers — who wore dark uniforms with no insignia — smashed in her bedroom door while she cowered in a corner with her three youngest children.

"I knew they were soldiers because they wore military boots," Dona Victoria said. "But they never identified themselves."

Having wrecked much of her furniture, the troops left in search of her eldest son Salvador, one of around 30 boys and young men picked up that night on suspicion of having relieved a drunken soldier of his pistol.

Twenty-nine of them later straggled back to this poor community near Guadalajara, the victims of torture which in one case required three weeks in hospital. But Salvador Jimenez Lopez never came home.

His battered corpse was recovered nearly a week later from a shallow grave a few miles away. Several months later his mother has yet to see the post mortem report But a witness said that Salvador's tongue had been torn out.

Dona Victoria's uninvited guests belonged to the Gafe (an acronym for Air-Mobile Special Forces Group). Their commando skills were acquired courtesy of the US taxpayer.

Mexican military planners created the Gafe in the aftermath of the 1994 Chiapas debacle, when a few thousand poorly-armed indigenous guerrillas showed the army was ill-equipped to fight a modern "low-intensity" war.

Under a 1996 agreement with Washington, Gafe officers are trained in "counter-narcotics" operations by the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The stated aim is to supplement the rather ineffectual efforts of Mexico's corruption-prone police.

The US defence department insists: "Counter-drug training differs in object scope and nature from counter-insurgency training." Some military experts regard the difference as minimal.

In any case, said Raul Benitez, a Mexican defence specialist "They are not just for the drug war. They are for everything. Depending on the particular threat that exists in the region, that's what they specialise in."

US official sources say Gafe training includes "a substantial human rights component". But in one three-month period last year in the state of Jalisco (where San Juan de Ocotan is located), the official state human rights commission received 16 complaints about operations apparently involving the unit.

In every case, the soldiers wore masks or face paint and no insignia. They raided hotels and restaurants without presenting search warrants, and frequently kidnapped suspects.

The complaints were given to the national human rights commission, which has yet to take any action. The commission, often criticised as ineffectual in relation to the army, will not return phone calls on the subject

The worst incident with which the Gafe has been linked is the Colonia Buenos Aires case, named after an inner-city district of Mexico City. Last September, a military-led police raid resulted in the kidnap of six youths whose tortured corpses later turned up in two different, remote locations. A report in the La Jornada newspaper cited anonymous police sources saying the killings were carried out by Gafe members illegally infiltrated into a since-disbanded, elite police unit. 

The Guardian traced one of the sources, who initially agreed to talk then backed out "If I tell you about this," he said, "they'll track you down and demand to know who gave you the information. These people are very dangerous."

Twenty-eight Gafe members, including 13 officers, are in military custody pending an investigation into the San Juan de Ocotan incident. But the victims and their relatives have little confidence in military justice.

The Pentagon admits that some of those involved had received training at Fort Bragg. Officials described the incident euphemistically as one in which, "some soldiers sought "retribution for an alleged theft of a watch".

The Buenos Aires incident is also said to have been triggered by the theft of a watch.

Victoria Lopez has refused the army's offer of compensation until Salvador's killers are brought to justice.

The Chinese Communists, with huge self-sacrifice, totally led and inspired the long-revolutionary struggle to create eventually a completely new socialist life for all China's teeming population, and it is still on course to do so. It meets with nothing but vilification from Trots and bourgeois reactionaries alike. 

But Mexico, and another 150 countries like it, the vast majority of mankind, –  just seethes, stifling in reactionary tyranny, with no prospects whatever except further suffering and exploitation from world capitalist crisis,  – and it is a non-issue except with genuine communists like the EPSR.

What is most interesting, of course, is that only communist revolution will ever offer the Mexican masses a way forward. And after the catastrophic experiences in Chile, Grenada, and Nicaragua of would-be socialist revolutions being overthrown by imperialist-inspired counter-revolution because of a failure to follow Marxist-Leninist proletarian-dictatorship science, it is likely that the Mexican revolution, or some other comparable would-be socialist revolution soon, WILL go back to Marxist-Leninist understanding in its entirety and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only serious intention of progress.

At which point all bourgeois anti-communist propaganda, especially the Trotskyite variety, will go back into counter-revolutionary overdrive, pouring out ever-renewed drivel about 'pure democracy' or some such reactionary nonsense which has one aim only, – to totally undermine revolutionary LEADERSHIP.

But the Mexican masses are on their way anyway, –  as the capitalist press itself just about lets be glimpsed reading between the lines:

Siete is one of dozens of new villages that have sprouted across Chiapas on farms abandoned by ranchers after the Zapatista rebellion. The new villages provide food to the rebel army and pay a war-tax on the occasional windfall from coffee or timber sales. Most of the young men. and some of the women, trained in the hills with the Zapatistas and form part of a reserve force ready to aid the insurgents should war restart.

The new village is one of 56 communities forming the "17th of November" autonomous district that in turn feeds into a 32-district regional autonomy project, the small liberated enclaves surrounded by 60,000 Mexican troops, police and paramilitaries.

The state governor, Roberto Albores Guillen, the third governor elected by nobody since the 1994 uprising, has described the autonomous districts as "the greatest threat to democracy" in Mexico and pledged to dismantle them one by one. He is a man of his word. Taniperlas, Tierra y Libertad and San Juan Libertad are in embers, the result of a campaign that has left a dozen people dead, more than 100 jailed, and 12 foreigners expelled.

Beyond Siete at the end of the Corralchen canyon, across a deep river, 31 families established Pancho Villa, displacing Luis Urbina, a wealthy landowner. The airstrip that used to ferry guests to his elegant hacienda is dotted with wooden shacks, while his home is the local school.

Every rebel village has a shortwave radio, operated round the clock, that feeds into a regional network tracking army movements, stray farm animals and gossip.

A cloak of mist and drizzle casts a shroud around the distant hills where Zapatista insurgents watch silently over their brothers and sisters below. Weapons, bullets and radios have been spirited into the hills during the past six months as the rebels build for peace but prepare for war.

The Mexican government has sent army reconnaissance flights and a barrage of radio propaganda. The villagers' only contact with the outside world is an occasional trip to a charity hospital in Altamirano, where they sell a few kilos of coffee or corn to pay for sugar, soap and salt

The rebels combat the government's propaganda with a mobile information unit. The local Zapatista commander set off one morning last month with a truck, television, video and generator and stopped at a prearranged spot where men and a donkey carried the gear up the hills.

The Lucio Cabanas community gathered in, the local church to watch a documentary showing women and children routing Mexican soldiers from their village. The local women strained to hear every insult, as hoots of laughter resounded in the church. Another documentary showed mass mobilisations in Mexico City after the Acteal massacre, while the last film was about women discussing their reasons for joining the Zapatistas.

The 200 peasant farmers in Lucio Cabanas never owned land before the Zapatista uprising, and still seem bewildered by the fulfilment of a centuries-old dream. Their ancestors, like themselves, worked on Pepe Castellanos's land. The day's labour is still a rough physical challenge, but at least the fruits belong to them.

Women's rights are guaranteed, no government aid is accepted, alcohol is banned and voter abstention is the policy at election time — in theory. In practice, tradition, common sense and expediency prevail. In 1996, the Morelia district rejected the rebel leadership's call for abstention and voted in a sympathetic candidate as mayor of Altamirano, a rancher stronghold that never even had an opposition candidate before 1994.

"We have our autonomous structures firing ahead here," says Commander Ramon, gesturing at Morelia's community centre equipped with soup kitchen, meeting hall, dormitory, library, vegetable garden and even a photographic darkroom. "But why not beat the government on their own territory when we can?" he adds.

The Zapatistas say they accept compromises that do not betray the original goals of the uprising — the betterment of the Chiapas Indian communities and the struggle for democracy in Mexico.

Traditional community punishment, includes flogging, carrying large stones for no apparent reason and, in extreme cases, banishment. The new villages have shifted the emphasis to "useful" punishment, such as clearing land for production.

The government insists that the Zapatistas have changed nothing since January 1994, further  impoverishing the people they claim to support. On the ground, however, there is a new confidence among the Indian people. Indian men and women used to walk with heads bowed; now they look you in the eye and discuss world politics. "Sometimes we go to bed with a sore head from thinking so much," one villager said after a lengthy discussion on the Irish peace process.

Governor Guillen got it right when he described the Zapatista autonomy project as "the greatest threat to democracy" in Mexico. The rudimentary rebels project exposes 70 years of misrule by Mexico's PRI party and inspires similar resistance around the country.

The Zapatistas' cardboard surfboards and flimsy shacks may be razed by tanks and bombs but the people say that they will rebuild somewhere else, using banana leaves for shelter and eating berries if necessary, never asking permission to govern their affairs.

The class conflict with the Mexican state, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, – is total. More 'democracy'  would, in fact, –  while useful to be taken advantage of to expand the class struggle, – only rearrange the perceptions, arenas, and strategies of the all-out non-stop war for dictatorship power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It would not change the essential class-struggle nature of all modern history.

The same is true of China, of course. But such class-struggle descriptions as the above capitalist press admissions about Mexico, could not possibly be read anywhere about China, even in the most idiotically fictional CIA inventions and distortions, peddled via every avenue of diseased petty-bourgeois philosophy, from the 'free press' joke to the Trotskyite joke.

And there is no mass revolutionary-struggle class war in China, only isolated individual 'dissident' eccentrics, plus just the occasional imperialist-organised 'mass demonstration' stunt, – because in China the dictatorship of the majority-class interests prevails, whereas in Mexico, it is the dictatorship of the minority-class interests (the bourgeoisie) which holds power.

Thus the fake-'left' hysteria for 'democracy' in China reveals the most reactionary stand against the most progressive developments in modern history that could possibly be made. And a recent rare Trot venture into serious philosophy explains the hopeless depths of their class backwardness in this crucial area of understanding.

In some knockabout abuse against a Socialist News article which analysed the campaign to 'legalise' drugs as a diversion from what the workers movement should really be fighting for, the Weekly Worker Trots declared their personal habits to be the very essential expression of 'human freedom'. Winning the right to smoke a 'legal' joint would both symbolise and add to the essence of the struggle for the socialist revolution, they seem to be saying, concluding:

Communists fight for human freedom now – we do not postpone that struggle until some abstract and refined future. Means determine ends. By fighting in the here and now against all forms of oppression and discrimination we make our own future. That makes socialism something worth fighting for –  rather than leaving it as a Utopian ideal or a bureaucratic state nightmare.

Their 'bureaucratic state nightmare' is, of course, directly out of the CIA-stooge book of anti-communist hysteria, popularised by the viciously reactionary Animal Farm nonsense of the great Trot Orwell, lately acknowledged as a full-time MI5 counter-revolutionary traitor within the workers movement all his miserable life.

Real communist revolutionaries led the proletarian masses of Tsarist Russia through a 70-year colossal triumph of workers-state planned socialist development, overcoming savage imperialist destruction and sabotage and all the attendant suffering and sacrifices, to help totally transform world history by demonstrating that the working class can overcome free-market slump tyranny (the 1930s world depression) by its own revolutionary efforts; that a workers state can defeat the very worst military barbarism (Nazi Germany) that the capitalist system can hurl against it; that imperialism can be forced to give up its empires of direct colonial occupation with the aid of direct or indirect workers-state help to national-liberation movements; and that further socialist revolutions can be helped to victory over imperialist reaction in even very poor or small countries (China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc) with assistance from a powerful workers state; etc, etc.

And all of these epoch-making achievements, which mean that history can never be the same again, are written off in 70 seconds is just a 'bureaucratic state nightmare' by this depraved armchair 'philosophy' which has the posturing petty-bourgeois gall to pose as 'communist'. 

Whose is the real 'degeneracy'? Is it the mighty successes of the Soviet workers state (and subsequently of China, Cuba, etc); or is it the Orwellian police-spy sneering of the Trotskyites?

The one certain 'bureaucratic nightmare' on view is this startling Trot version of, presumably, 'Marxist philosophy'. As Socialist News explained, the idea that people are 'free' to do anything in a world dominated by imperialist international economic monopolies and state powers is a complete illusion.

Marxism argued that human social 'freedom' could not even fully begin until even 'democratic' state power could begin to wither away, and not until the free development of each person was acknowledged as the condition announcing the free development of all in society, – envisaging a future society of knowledge, understanding, and experience vastly in advance of the superstition-ridden and subjective backwardness which stumbles on in propaganda-dominated ignorance today under capitalism, with revolutionary workers movements alone able to try to fight consistently for the triumph of rational thought.

Meanwhile, Marxist scientific philosophy stresses that mankind is 'free' to decide to make a revolution but cannot choose or control the circumstances in which that revolution must be fought for. In other words, the only 'freedom' is that which recognises the NECESSITY of what has to be done to replace bourgeois dictatorship by proletarian dictatorship.

There are all kinds of "fighting in the here and mow against all forms of oppression and discrimination" which don't remotely add up to the NECESSARY steps to the socialist revolution. Reformist fights by Benn and others, for example, might be regarded as very well-meaning and frequently as very self-sacrificing or heroic even. But they nevertheless only lead the working class into a reformist cul-de-sac, effectively disarming the working class by their usually quite conscious anti-Leninism. 

Let reformists feel as 'free' as they like inside their own heads, in fighting for what they want. But it is dubious 'Marxist philosophy' to try to convince workers that via such activities, they can "make their own future".

It is equally dubious to say that just to struggle itself is as good as getting to socialism. Surely the ill-important thing is to struggle consciously (or correctly). False or misleading (and misled) struggles can be anything but as good as winning socialism (as implied by the 'means determine ends' contrived paradox.) 

The struggle for socialism is a historical moment in the eventual victory of the rational over the irrational, and the beginning of the final emancipation of mankind thereby (in terms of thinking, evolutionary, social development). Fighting in the wrong way for the wrong perspectives could be far more of a hindrance to the triumph of reason than a help.

Nor is it very enlightening to say that just fighting for something, – regardless of whether or not with the correct tactics, strategy, programme and world perspectives, – is what "makes socialism worth fighting for".

The really dangerous oppression of capitalist society amounts to vastly more and worse things than reformism ever targets, no matter how vigorous its fighting. Part of the explanation of the potential horrors of imperialist crisis, – from world markets collapse and consequent all-out trade war and then inter-imperialist shooting war, – can only be made clear by explaining how proletarian dictatorship ALONE can be seen as the way in which the final uncontrollable savagery and destruction of bourgeois dictatorship, in the throes of incurable imperialist warmongering slump-crisis, can be overcome.

Therefore CRUCIAL to any notion of "what makes socialism something worth fighting for" must be the grasp of the VITAL historical role for civilisation's survival that must be played by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

To underline this point, it is only necessary to recall the catastrophic collapse of the ENTIRE Second International (a 'Marxist' organisation, no less) into warmongering chauvinism at the start of World War I, – the socialist parties of the entire industrialised world all forgetting (with the exception of the Bolsheviks, of course, and a couple of smaller socialist groupings) in just a week or two of jingoism what they had been loudly professing for 25 years about what made socialism "something worth fighting for". 

A bit more scientific Marxist-Leninist understanding and a bit less boastful 'human freedom' breast-beating would not have come amiss for the fate of mankind at that moment in history.

And exactly the same applies now. This Trot 'philosophy' is worse than useless. It is positively poisonous idealism, the very absolute opposite of Marxism.

And this is just a brief analysis of just one of fifteen paragraphs of equally degenerate revisionist-Trotskyite nonsense spewed out by the Weekly Worker to argue for drugs 'legalisation' as a vital step for the socialist revolutionary struggle.

Because the EPSR has far too many other nuts to crack, the other 14 paragraphs of anti-communist 'Marxist philosophy' confusion will have to lie festering, but the following letter to Weekly Worker, which they printed, provides some flavour of the other distortions, illogicalities, and idealist delusions their middle-class muddleheadedness produced:

'The Socialist News article on drugs nowhere called for their banning. It argued that the 'legalisation' campaign played into capitalism's hands since the drugs trade, the biggest on earth now, was deliberately used to pacify the masses, frequently with identifiable imperialist-state promotion around the world.

Campaigning about any 'legal' reform which does not challenge capitalism is a reformist diversion. More pressing tasks face communists than exposing 'illogical' cannabis laws. All capitalist law is crap. Pot-smoking hobbyists should declare their interest. 

Ending British colonial tyranny in Ireland was forced on Britain by revolutionary struggle and is a different type of 'reform' entirely, seriously undermining and weakening British imperialism. Anti-apartheid was a victory, not for letter-writers to the UN essentially, but for the REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE in Africa, to which imperialists was obliged to concede, weakening itself.

You get excited about "thousands of influential international bourgeois" writing to the UN to say that "the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself".

More reformist illusions. Capitalist society is NOT going to get ANYTHING right,– EVER, no matter how many bourgeois write to the UN. ALL social problems will continue to degenerate. No use 'legalising' school truancy, or football-following hooliganism. Alienation cannot be reformed away. It can only grow relentlessly.

Let some or all drugs be legalised tomorrow; the SN piece made no objection. It simply argued that the problem of escapist dropouts, via drugs or alcohol, would still remain, and imperialism would be no weaker, and possibly even more secure. Feeling free to get smashed is not an obvious revolutionary educator.

There was no call to 'persecute the alienated', whether 'losers, addicts, or alcoholics' as you imply. Nor was escapism remotely 'blamed' on those who drop out. The capitalist system ALONE is responsible for alienation, as was made perfectly clear.

You admit that drug addiction under socialism would be a bad sign of a rotten state, implying that no one should want to become a drug or alcohol addict.

But in the fight for revolutionary consciousness NOW, where the state-of-mind people are in really DOES matter, you pretend that the only thing that counts is that people should 'feel' they are 'free' to do what they like. "Human freedom now", you insist. It is a complete illusion in reply to the correct view in SN that "The 'liberty' to do something which in no way challenges capitalism's economic, political, and social controls, is a false 'freedom'".

Yours in a completely un-Marxist view. The fight for revolutionary consciousness IS all that matters. The 90% of our lives that we spend simply living, breathing, surviving, existing, – or getting smashed, – is of great interest to the individual, but of no great interest to the history of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois-capitalist system.'

This libertarian Trotskyism is the essence of anti-communist indiscipline which really regards the dictatorship of the proletariat itself as the actual terrifying evil but is too 'Marxist'-opportunist to admit it, preferring to pretend that ' anti-Stalinism' is their real target, – but that too only adds up to hatred of how the dictatorship of the proletariat has in fact been realised in the one and only actual historical process.

Until 1917, world history was only being written by bourgeois imperialism and what remnants of feudalism that still remained. Since 1917, the whole picture and pattern of world history and its future has been totally transformed by the first 81 years experience of workers states being organised on earth, undominated by the capitalist-bourgeois class and its imperialist agenda, leaving things never the same again, as is still perfectly obvious from Clinton's 9-day homage to the current Chinese workers state, even at a time of maximum clouding-over of planned proletarian dictatorship's worth by a continuing almost impenetrable fog of revisionism which could yet visit a Gorbachevite catastrophe on Beijing.

It is simply not serious to just ignore actual modern world history as nothing more than "a bureaucratic state nightmare" in order to live merely inside one's head with instant self-gratification of 'complete human freedom NOW', and 'away with all authoritarian prescriptions NOW', etc.

The anarchist petty-bourgeois spirit has been jeering at Marxism in these terms since Bakunin was first routed by Marx in the First International. Pipe-dreams for the anarchists since. And 81 years of worldwide workers-state construction for the disciplined communist-leadership struggle established by Marxist-Leninist science, based on actual victories over colonial-imperialist warmongering reaction.

While anarcho-Trotskyism has dreamed on everywhere this century, real communism has got on with the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism, and made a tremendous start with building successful workers states in the teeth of devastating imperialist war, blockade, sabotage, subversion, vilification, provocative disruption, and the like.

It is in the cynical petty-bourgeois mentality of ALL Trotskyites to just snigger at the brilliant workers-state construction achievements on Cuba, for example, in heroic defiance of that enormous weight of capitalist-imperialist reaction stifling the life out of Cuba. Another "bureaucratic state nightmare" they will sneer, – and light up some more 'instant socialist gratification'.

But their indisciplined anarchism is good for nothing, – as their farcical failure to build 'socialist alliances of all the varieties' (to rival what they see as the 'doomed SLP') have shown, – and as their failed strategy towards the SLP also demonstrated, refusing to try to build on the political strengths already given in Socialist Labour's foundation, and insisting on completely rewriting everything by committee in the absence of any leadership, – a recipe for PERMANENT swamp paralysis just like their still-born 'socialist alliances'.

Lenin famously characterised anarcho-Trotskyism as insisting that "everything is rotten", a phrase never off Trotsky's lips from 1917 onwards as he tried to worm his way into the Bolshevik Party. It was a doomed approach, and it was an even more destructive phenomenon in that it helped to make all subsequent attempts to correct revisionist failings that much more difficult, once suspicious vigilance was aroused which eventually helped create its own subjective disasters.

The "everything is rotten" approach has remained a catastrophic weakness ever since of all attempts to correct revisionist failings unless they start from a Marxist-Leninist grasp of historical development (instead of from anarchic idealist pipe-dreams of how 'perfect', and 'instantly available', and 'discipline free' a socialist paradise "really ought to be" and also the struggle to achieve that 'socialism'.)

Meanwhile in the real world, imperialist crisis increasingly threatens disaster for the whole planet, and the masses in Russia rapidly draw closer to demanding their workers state back, rejecting the ridiculous nonsense (from Trots and Revisionists alike) that their 70-year experience was anything remotely comparable to one long "bureaucratic state nightmare", but was in fact an infinitely superior and more worthy basis for a healthy society than the mafia-ridden and exploitation-ridden slump-anarchy 'freedom' they are saddled with now, with no 'democratic' chance in hell of getting rid of it because of monopoly racketeering.

Capitalist press admissions leave out the political comparisons, or else deliberately insert false ones to keep up the West's anti-communist hysteria. But they describe a vicious exploitation chaos that is simply unrecognisable in how life went on in the Soviet Union (where many Westerners worked alongside Soviets for years and have described their life there):

CLATTERING along a cratered tundra road in a company limo, Zhenya Shumeiko, head of the town's biggest miners' union, tried to explain why, with his members owed eight months' pay, he wasn't leading a revolt.

"We got tired of being the extremists," he said. "We got fed up with the continuous deceit of the other coal regions."

He laughed. He was on his way to persuade a mine boss to pay out benefits to stop the wife of a disabled miner throwing herself down a mine shaft. "The union's like a racket" he said. "Most of what we do is running around extorting money."

As President Boris Yeltsin clutches at the meagre economic gains of his seven-year rule, Vorkuta, a disintegrating industrial Arctic outpost hacked out of the brown moors ought to be a centre of worker militancy.

Vorkuta miners are camped out in front of the government White House in Moscow to demand their wages. Recently they held the general director of the coal company, Viktor Ekhardt, prisoner in his own office.

But the miners demonstrate in Moscow because they are afraid to strike against their bosses at home. Union leaders work with the bosses to drip feed miners just enough cash and food and favours to prevent starvation or uncontrolled violence.

The hostage taking, Mr Shumeiko admits, was agreed with management in advance. "It was a purely formal action, to protect the mine from the consequences of a strike," said Mr Shumeiko, whose offices are in the building of the Vorkutaugol coal company.

Like slaves, they work without pay and, like convicts, they long for release in the form of a state resettlement grant. Around 16,000 families are on the waiting list to move south.

Yet the miners go on working. Management offers the minimum — a little money, or food.

"It's humiliating to have to beg for your own money," said Zhenya Zherdyetsky, aged 35, a miner at Severny. "You earned it and yet you have to drag it out of them."

One form of payment is the tormozok, a packed lunch of bread, sausage, boiled eggs and half an onion wrapped in brown paper. A miner can take as many tomorzoks as he likes to feed his family but 60p is deducted for each from the amount the company owes him.

Outside Severny mine, Ravin, a face worker, pulled out his payslip, which showed the company owed him £2,800 for eight months work. That day the mine offered bread and milk tokens.

"I could take all the money they owe me in tokens. But I don't want that, I want to go into a proper shop and choose decent things to buy," he said.

The workers resent the company bosses who get their large salaries on time and prosper at their expense. A new grocer's opened recently in the settlement around Severny. The owner is related to the local leader of a coal union. In Vorkuta, a night-club and a new chain of shops are owned by the son of the previous company boss.

Last year the miners, working in rat-infested tunnels with ancient equipment and suffering an average death toll of more than one a week, hewed out almost 10 million tonnes of coal worth more than 10 times the company's debt to the miners. Yet the debt has not been paid off, fuelling suspicion that Vorkutaugol bosses are involved in under-the-counter deals.

"If there's any kind of leakage, it's kept to a minimum," Vyacheslav Davidoy, the company spokesman, said.

So where's the money, ask the miners, pointing to the pressure they come under from local mine managers to work extra shifts. "The company lays out a production plan for each mine, but Sunday coal doesn't count," a miner said. "And they operate full shifts on Sunday. Where does this coal go? We haven't the faintest idea."

The government in Moscow is partly at fault. The state still owns 60 per cent of Vorkutaugol's seven mines, and is responsible for its bizarre structure, where the handful of local board members enjoy the advantages of private ownership without any accountability, while shifting blame for unpaid wages on to the Kremlin.

The greatest fear of Vorkuta's coal workers and their families is not that they will never be paid what they are owed, but that the last eight mines will close without government money being made available to evacuate them from a jobless wilderness.

It is a fear mine management plays on subtly, freely admitting that the company is technically bankrupt 

The only evacuation the government funded happened in 1996, when 4,500 people were shipped out of an uneconomical mining community north of Vorkuta called Khalmer-Yu. In the native Nenets language this means "Valley of Death".

The last inhabitants on the night train out left the settlement's central heating furnaces running. They looked back to see their abandoned homes burning.

Flats were purchased for them across Russia, but since then funds for resettlement have dried up. What Vorkuta dreads is the fate of outlying villages like Mulda. The authorities have declared it unviable  and said its people should leave, but haven't offered money for new homes.

Mulda lies on the hummocky, boggy Arctic plain outside Vorkuta, where very little grows.

In the village wooden houses sag into the ground,  roofs have caved in and glassless windows stare across at each other. There is one shop left and the school has been given a year.

"They gathered all the inhabitants of the village together," Pavel Spitsin, a railway worker, said. "They said they'd buy flats for us as soon as the money came. But nothing has happened."

Mr Shumeiko voiced the miners' fear that they were written off long ago."What's the point of privatising a loss-making enterprise?" he said. "Just so as to abandon responsibility for it?"

Hopefully, the party leadership of the Chinese workers state never so succumbs to revisionist illusions in the supposed 'benefits' of uncontrolled free-market anarchy and 'democracy' to let China degenerate into similar catastrophe. Steering clear of fake 'democracy' philosophy, the mainstay of sterile Western anti-communist 'leftism', will be vital. Build Leninism. Royston Bull